Michael Feingold is worried...

There's definitely a strange fixation with being real and natural right now. People I know in theatre have suddenly become obsessed with it. I love naturalism and realistic performances, but you can't forget that it is, in fact, a performance.

It reminds me Sacha Baron Cohen's and Helena Bonham Carter's strangely understated performances in Les Miserables. It simply wasn't funny because those characters should never be played so realistically. They must be caricatures otherwise they are not comic relief. On the contrary, they would just be a sad story of abuse and cruelty. However, their defenders just harped on and on about how "real" they were.

(Didn't mean to make this about Les Mis, it's just a very current example most people have seen)