Rush 5: The Non-Diegetic Soliloquy and the Performer's Relationship to the Audience

Chief among the pantheon of techniques of artifice which signal that we are in the realm of the theatrical is the soliloquy. Outside of the theater, speaking one's thoughts aloud is generally considered to be a sign of flagging mental well being; to talk to oneself is a sign of agitation or altered social mores. Yet this speaking aloud otherwise private thoughts is extraordinarily present in our theatrical tradition.

Though the Greek tragedy, "Antigone" does not have the same soliloquy's of "Hamlet," or "Oedipus Rex" it is replete with long didactic speeches and a chorus who speaks to the audience in very plain terms about the stakes and themes of the play. These theatrical methods of direct addressed survived and evolved for thousands of years. But how has direct address translated to film, a theatrical medium wherein the actor is nowhere near the audience being directly addressed? One example to consider is Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Hamlet. Hamlet's first soliloquy (Act 1 Scene 2 "O that this too too solid flesh would melt [...]") is spoken partially aloud, and partially as non-diagetic narration heard by the audience, but not spoken by the actor on screen. During the long stretches of non-diegetic soliloquy, we the audience are left only to contemplate Olivier's facial expressions.

If we are to naively speculate on reasons why Olivier may have chosen the non-diegetic or intra-diaegetic over-narration  for this section of the film, we can consider many possibilities:

• The prevalence of psychology and notions of the subconscious in the 20th century made the idea of an "internal monologue" a compelling one for audiences, and something which could be explored more easily using recorded sound on film than in spoken theater
• Silence and suffering are interesting correlatives which are not explored very effectively in theatrical tragedy: What is a Hamlet like when he bemoans less loudly and more internally?
• The relationship between the audience and the actor is fundamentally changed when a play is filmed versus when a play is performed. Would Olivier's soliloquy be somehow 'worse' if it was performed as though for stage? 
• Audiences themselves changed: Suppose that the long speeches of 'Antigone' seemed naturalistic or realistic to Greek audiences? We can easily imagine that people spoke in a longer, more considered way in ancient Greece than they do today; or in 1948. This presentation of the soliloquy as internal could seem equally 'real' to the 1948 audience as the wholly spoken soliloquy did to Hamlet's original audience.