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Scorpion451
(Edited uphill both ways)
28th Feb, 2019 12:47:46 PM
Rule of Perception for the many ways to indicate this sort of thing for the audience
In several media, but especially the theatre, you have to establish how we're supposed to view people in suits.
In The Wizard of Oz, they quickly make it clear that in the context of the movie, the Cowardly Lion is an actual lion. But if the exact same person in the exact same outfit showed up in a serious drama set in the real world, it¨s be obvious to the audience that he's meant to be regarded as a man in a suit, and not the lion The Wizard of Oz.
Another example: In A Midsummer Night's Dream one of the characters, Snug, dresses up as a lion for a play. In an earlier scene, Snug asks that he be given the role of the lion, and the reason Shakespeare has him say that isn't just for the humorous dialogue in that scene. If not for that early dialogue about dressing up as a lion, the audience would be confused—we wouldn't know if it was meant to be the character now dressed up as a lion, or if the actor playing the role of Snug was now instead playing the role of an actual lion. Shakespeare also has Snug talk when he plays the lion, and proclaim that he's actually just Snug dressed up in a lion suit.
In short: Do we have a trope for the problem of how you make it clear to the audience whether the actor dressed up as an animal (or a monster or whatever) is meant to be portraying an animal or a person in a suit? (To say nothing of the problems you get when one actor is playing, say, a bear and another actor is playing a person dressed up as a bear, and the other characters in the play are meant to mistake the dressed-up person for an actual bear!)