Theatre Studies: The Basics

Robert Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135021054
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Now in a second edition, Theatre Studies: The Basics is a fully updated guide to the wonderful world of theatre. The practical and theoretical dimensions of theatre – from acting to audience – are woven together throughout to provide an integrated introduction to the study of drama, theatre and performance. Topics covered include:

• 
  
  

• dramatic genres, from tragedy to political documentary

• 
  
  

• theories of performance

• 
  
  

• the history of the theatre in the West

• 
  
  

• acting, directing and scenography

With a glossary, chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading throughout, Theatre Studies: the Basics remains the ideal starting point for anyone new to the subject.

1

Performance

Playing

Peter Brook (b. 1925) ends his well-known book, The Empty Space, with the enigmatic sentence: ‘A play is play.’ And ‘play’ is a good place to begin (as well as end) any consideration of performance, for play is something we have all experienced, and it has surprising affinities with drama and theatre.

Perhaps the first thing to say about play is that it is the opposite of work. Whereas work takes place at specified times, in a particular place, and the worker’s identity is fixed – she or he is a plumber, a librarian, a politician – play takes place at any time, anywhere, and enables the person playing to be whoever they want to be – a fireman, a footballer, a beggar or a queen. Their identity is not fixed. Moreover, at work, one has tools – a computer, a screwdriver, a notebook and pencil – whereas one can play with anything – mud, a saucepan lid, mummy’s shoes. Indeed, one may ask: are toys really necessary?

Play has been divided into three ‘types’ – active play (running about, tumbling over, etc.), playing with things (mud, saucepan lids, etc.), and playing with others (chasing, playing schools or hospitals, etc.). Each of these is a kind of performance because each involves a measure of pretending, a ‘magic if’ which enables the player to enter a world of make-believe. And though she is only ‘play-acting’ here, the play-acting is still absorbing enough to arouse genuine emotions. Children playing in a playground may be seen laughing ‘for real’, crying ‘for real’, really losing their tempers – in play.

Play opens up possibilities, and enables us to explore situations of difficulty, without any ‘real life’ consequences. It is perhaps a training for the imagination. When we have to cope with cops and robbers, or mummies and daddies, in play, we are practising life, learning how to survive. We experience deep emotions and the reality of relationships in play, but at the back of our minds, we know we are safe. We can escape – stop the game – when we want to.

We don’t play ‘in order to’ do anything, such as increase our productivity, impress our bank manager, placate our parent. We play ‘for fun’. And therein lies the problem of play, for many in authority see playing as frivolous, a waste of time and energy, even wicked. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ says the old saw. Plato (427–347 BCE) wanted to ban play – and the theatre – from his ideal Republic. The seventeenth-century Puritans cancelled Christmas and closed the theatres. But people – of all ages, and through all times – have wanted to play, so that authorities have been forced to set aside times when play is ‘licensed’ – bank holidays, festivals, Carnival – and places to play – fairgrounds, football pitches, nurseries, and so on. Those who have persisted in playing at the ‘wrong’ time and in the ‘wrong’ place have often been cast outside the law, as actors were for centuries castigated as ‘rogues and vagabonds’. They played; play-acted; performed.

Performance, Performative, Performativity

It is clear even from the foregoing that any definition of performance cannot confine it to theatres, or similar places of licensed entertainment. Children playing mummies and daddies ‘perform’; lecturers on their podiums ‘perform’; hip-hop dancers perform in nightclubs; clergymen or registrars perform marriage ceremonies.

Perhaps we might go so far as to propose that any piece of behaviour/doing/action which is in some way marked off, or framed, is a performance. The framing enables us to comprehend it as an entity, and we can think about it in clear terms, such as where it happens, who is present, how the performance unfolds, and perhaps what is its purpose, or indeed whether it has any purpose. If we examine segments of life as discrete performances, we can extend the notion of performance to include virtually any social interaction – buying a meal in a restaurant, walking to your room with a friend, catching the bus – and even to ‘solo’ events, such as eating an ice cream or surfing the internet.

If we see pieces of behaviour as performances, we can analyse them particularly interestingly. It is soon apparent that we ‘perform’ different roles in different situations. Thus, we perform the role of interviewee when going for an interview – respectful, inquiring, eager to learn; but we perform the ‘cool dude’ in the nightclub – laid back, all-knowing, chilled out. We even dress up for these roles, but the costume for each is very different because they are different ‘parts’. We can take this further, and consider many different roles which we play: for our parents, we play the child, even when we are long past childhood; for the bank manager, we play the innocent; for our beloved, we play the saucy, the sensitive or the seductive. In fact, given that we perform so many identities, we may ask: Is there a real me?

We shall return to the conundrum of identity. First we need to notice that the problem of performance is further complicated by the fact that to ‘perform’ means not only to do something, to act, to achieve or produce (‘The factory performed well’); it also means to pretend to do something. ‘What a performance!’ we say, when a footballer lies on the ground writhing in fake agony. ‘It’s not real, it’s only a performance.’ Where does doing something for real end, and pretending begin? Or, is there indeed, as we may suspect, no real difference between them?

To consider this problem, we must first consider how we understand things which happen, that is, how we construct meaning. ‘Construct’ is perhaps the key word here. Nothing has any meaning until we give it one. We see something, but it has no intrinsic meaning until we make one for it. We construct the meaning.

The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), first showed how meaning is made. He examined how language uses sounds, or written marks, to convey ideas. Language, de Saussure showed, consists of two parts, first, the signifier (the sound or mark, the word) and, second, the signified (the idea, image or meaning). These two separate entities comprise the sign, and are as tightly bonded together as the two sides of a piece of paper. It is also clear, however, that the relationship between sound (or mark) and idea is arbitrary, that is, though they are indivisible, there is no reason why one relates to the other. If the signified is a slippery silvery thing with fins swimming through water, we tend to call it a fish; but there is no reason why it should not be called a poisson, as people in France do; or a ryba, as people in Russia do. It is therefore clear that people who agree to call the slippery silvery swimming thing by the same name form a sort of community – one based in language. The word in the language is itself purely arbitrary.

Language, then, is a kind of social contract between members of a defined community. But it is not a neutral entity which exists simply in the form of sounds (or marks). It is a vital tool in our living social experience. It is in fact the prime means whereby we construct our reality. And, since it is a social contract, it is clear that it can only do this when there exists a society, that is, not only a speaker (or writer), but also a listener (or reader).

How can the listener (or reader) construct the meaning? By using her pre-existing experience of manipulating language. The words and phrases of the speaker (or writer) must each be within the experience of the listener (or reader), and so must the manner in which these are linked together by the speaker. The listener’s experience can only come from what she has heard, and said, herself before this interchange. This is what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) meant when he said that all language is citational – any speech act only succeeds in conveying meaning by the way it ‘cites’ previous usages of the terms it employs.

This concept of ‘citation’ may be applied to performance as we have observed it in social life: when children play ‘mummies and daddies’ they are citing their own parents, or other parents they have observed. A wedding achieves meaning precisely because it has been performed a million times before; and its performance ‘cites’ those million other weddings. The bride, the priest, the member of the congregation all really only know how to play their part in this performance because they have been to weddings before. They ‘cite’ earlier behaviour. Someone who has never been to a wedding before is likely to be somewhat puzzled by the proceedings, and, having nothing themselves to cite, may only manage to behave appropriately by observing others who have that experience.

So performance, like language, only acquires meaning through the earlier experience of the participants, and because of their ability to cite other similar performances.

We can now access a keener understanding of the two kinds of performance – the genuine and the fake, reality and fiction. We can see that they are not so different after all. When an actor plays a role in a drama, we can all agree that she is creating a fiction. But what about when a child plays a doctor in a game of hospitals? What about the lecturer giving a lecture?

The question was posed urgently by the film Zidane, in which more than twenty cameras were placed all round a football arena, and all were trained on one player, Zinedine Zidane (b. 1972), who was playing in a real match for Real Madrid. The film lasted for the ninety minutes of the match. In it, Zidane sweated profusely. The sweat was surely real. The pass with which he made the goal was also real, was it not? But these things happened – were performed – before a huge, roaring crowd. Did this make them part of a performance? And the ending, when Zidane became embroiled in a mêlée, and was sent off by the referee, highlighted the problem. He had to leave the field, that was clearly real, yet as he trudged lonely away, and the camera drew back and away from him, he seemed to be lonelier and lonelier till he finally disappeared into the dressing room – an ending which almost uncannily echoed (or cited, perhaps) a thousand old Hollywood movies. So was it fiction? Or reality?

And we may pose the same question about many other features of contemporary life: is ‘reality’ TV really reality? What about the news – or sporting events – on television? In what sense do surveillance cameras in city centres turn anyone who hurries past them into a performer? Is Disneyland real or fake? This leads to a reconsideration of the Romantic concept of ‘originality’. How do we explain a photocopy which is ‘better’ than the original? Is Dolly the sheep’s clone really Dolly, or is it an individual sheep in its own right? The questions could be multiplied. They indicate how art and life seem to have collapsed into each other, and reality and fiction have become one. This is the postmodern condition.

Moreover, it has been noticed that, in some senses, words and actions are also one. This notion is behind the concept of the performative. In the 1950s an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin (1911–60), noticed that certain kinds of speech formulations were in fact acts in themselves. ‘I take thee for my lawful wedded wife’ is spoken and the act is done. ‘This country hereby declares war on Germany.’ Once the words are out, the new situation prevails. Such utterances are what Austin called ‘performatives’.

The performative seems to elide what is, with what appears, fact and fiction. It is also a performance in its own right. The relationship between a performative and a performance is, therefore, particularly hard to disentangle. For instance, it might be said that a performative is an act; in which case a performance might be considered as a showing of an act. I get married: this is a performative; when, later, I show a video of myself getting married, that may be regarded as a performance. But the marriage itself, as we have already seen, is a performance. The performative is also a performance. Perhaps it may be opined that to view an act as a performative emphasises the significance of the engagement between the parties involved, whereas to view it as a performance emphasises the act as one between performers and spectators. Such distinctions may not always hold, however.

The whole is further complicated when we add the term ‘performativity’ to the mix. Though the meaning of this, too, is contested, it may be suggested that it refers to something which has the potential to be a performative, or perhaps a performance, or even both.

Performance, the performative and performativity have probably been most convincingly theorised by the German scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte (b. 1943). She argues that performance, and the performative, are able to effect a ‘re-enchantment of the world’. She proposes an ‘aesthetic of performance’ which will cover not only conventional performance but equally non-theatrical art forms which have often tended to find their most urgent expression in the performance mode. So she includes fashion, design, cosmetics and advertising which, because they require some form of staging, are inherently performative. Street festivals, carnivals, sports events and political gatherings are other examples of performatives, and these transform public spaces and, for a time at least, create their own communities. Artistic and non-artistic performances thus become difficult to tell apart: both are performative, both offer liminal experiences, and both encourage people to enter into new relationships with themselves and beyond themselves. The living performance is thereby made an inclusive rather than exclusive experience, which implicitly nudges everyone to act in life as in performance. And this is the re-enchantment of the world.

Box 1.1: Performance studies

Performance studies is a new academic discipline, developed largely out of university departments of drama or of theatre studies, and driven mostly in USA, especially by Richard Schechner (b. 1934). Schechner was something of a polymath: theatre director with his own Performance Group in New York, editor of the influential Drama Review, professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, writer and theorist. But his energetic championing of this new way of looking at a traditional area of the academic curriculum was also fuelled by a dissatisfaction with the practice of theatre in the West, at a time when other cultures seemed to many Western practitioners to offer new and greater potential for the performing arts. In the 1970s and 1980s, many began to see the theatre as a privileged space for privileged people: ‘performance’ seemed to offer something more democratic, more egalitarian. Traditional models of theatre seemed to regard the spectator merely as a customer, the traditional arrangement of the space for theatre seemed incorrigibly hierarchic, and above all it seemed to exclude local communities, black people, the avant-garde, and indeed virtually anyone who might make it exciting.

Performance was – or seemed to be – opposed to traditional text-based drama. It offered ways to mediate between performance practice and performance theory. It focused on process, suggesting that the conclusion was perhaps less important than the creative process. Moreover, it expanded beyond the walls of the traditional theatre and concerned itself with anything that was, or could be, framed or presented or highlighted or displayed. These categories were Schechner’s touchstones for defining performance. Following Erving Goffman (1922–82) and others, he also saw performance as a way of understanding behaviour. He argued that the new discipline should therefore cover performance in its broadest sense, and should be potentially a tool of cultural intervention. He also believed that it was a crucial site for the collision of cultures, able to broaden academic and aesthetic concerns from the stultifying white, Western tradition. Least important for Schechner was the investigation of theatrical performance. Others saw performance studies as a way of foregrounding theories of the performative so that they would acquire a central place in the ongoing movement of theory. At the same time, it was acknowledged that performativity was (and is) an elusive, unstable and fragmented concept.

University departments, especially in the USA, changed their names to include performance studies, and broadened their curricula into some of the areas mentioned above. Performance studies now often includes at least some of the elements of s...