The first act of acting

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Sara Bernhardt plays Hamlet in 1880

Actors — on the big and small screens as well as in theatre — have shaped popular culture for so long that it seems difficult to think back to a time when they weren’t even around.

But most histories of acting agree that its roots can be traced back to ancient Greece, and the practise of singing hymns and performing dances for the god of wine and fertility, Dionysus. Called the “Dithyrambic chorus”, the song-and-dance routine was once interrupted by a participant called Thespis, who hailed from Icara. While the practise until then for members of the chorus had always been to narrate things in the third person (Dionysus did this or that), Thespis spoke as if he was Dionysus himself, and sang his lines as “I”. And so the form of assuming a character began. Today, a veteran actor is called a “thespian”, in honour of Thespis.