Its not JUST acting

A while back I walked out of a live performance of the Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2003 because its graphic violence cannot be good for the psyches of the cast and I refused to participate in that kind of abuse of the performers, let alone the audience.

Its nice to get s9ome backing for that position, even if I've had to wait 6 years for it. Actors search for the light after dark roles

WITHIN a few weeks last year, Toby Schmitz went from playing an advertising executive whose life disintegrates through alcoholism to an Irish psychopath who takes off his father's head with a shotgun.

The Sydney academic Mark Cariston Seton believes actors who play such troubled characters are candidates for what he calls ''post-dramatic stress'' - a little-discussed consequence of the emotional rollercoaster of performing.

Examples of actors whose roles seep into their lives abound in film and theatre, including Heath Ledger struggling with mental exhaustion while playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, a sobbing Daniel Day-Lewis quitting a production of Hamlet after seeing the ghost of his own father on stage and Robert Downey jnr admitting that playing a cocaine addict in Less Than Zero contributed to his own addiction.

''In a performance run there's the high of performing but the aftermath of performance I believe we're not very good at managing,'' Dr Seton said.

Imagination is a powerful tool; it can take us places we could not reach otherwise. But just as some sportspeople improve their real-world performance by imagining themselves achieving at a higher level, those of us who venture into dangerous emotional and psychological spaces risk the real-world consequences of that as well.

Right now there is a suspicion that some actors are paying a price too high for entertaining us. And I'm fairly sure that the audiences are having their realities modified as well in uncontrolled experiments.