Performing the Unstageable

Success, Imagination, Failure

Karen Quigley

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350055469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage.

1

Stage Directions

Look Back in Anger: Tensions between text and performance

On the stage of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, time stands still for a moment. The actor Vanessa Emme pauses and stares at the actor Clare Dunne. Dunne stares back at Emme. Dunne is playing Alison in the Gate’s production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, directed by Annabelle Comyn. Emme appears in the same production, playing Helena. However, before we meet Helena in Act Two, Emme plays an actor who, sitting upstage right, reads Osborne’s stage directions into a microphone. Jimmy and Alison Porter’s flat appears in this production as a dank, grey pod, almost as if it has been dropped onto the Gate stage from another time or planet. Around and behind this pod, which includes a long, low window cut into its back wall, we can see many of the recognizable trappings of theatrical rehearsal and production, including the walls of the theatre space, costume rails, lights attached to bars, microphones on stands, trailing cables. A familiar tradition of realist acting plays out inside the Porters’ flat. Similarly, an identifiable approach to rehearsal or sound recording materializes in the offstage/onstage world around the flat, with Emme’s neck and upper torso swathed in a thick scarf against the presumably chilly recording studio, a disposable coffee cup at her feet. The actors playing Jimmy, Alison and their friend Cliff are visible in the offstage/onstage space before Osborne’s play begins, chatting with Emme, stretching, drinking water and so on. Emme’s reading of Osborne’s stage directions so far has variously set the scene, described the action taking place on stage (in the flat) or given insight into characters’ psychologies. This has become a familiar part of the production.

However, towards the end of Act One, Osborne’s stage direction reads as follows:

He puts his face against her belly. She goes on stroking his head, still on guard a little. Then he lifts his head, and they kiss passionately.¹

This direction appears during a rare moment when Alison and Jimmy are alone. After a scuffle between Jimmy and Cliff, during which Alison was injured, Cliff has gone to the local shop to buy cigarettes. Jimmy, in this private conversation, confesses that he injured Alison deliberately as an outlet for his sexual desire for her. Alison is confused by this (and in the audience, we already know that she is trying to find the words to tell Jimmy that she’s pregnant). At the Gate, Emme reads this stage direction aloud, as she has been throughout the act so far. As has also happened consistently so far, Ian Toner, playing Jimmy, has already anticipated the stage direction (or the stage direction has described an action he is already engaged in) and has his face in Dunne’s lap. Emme reaches the end of the stage direction. On stage, in the flat, Alison has not stroked Jimmy’s head, nor has there been a kiss of any kind. Dunne looks helplessly towards Emme, whose pointed pause after reading the stage direction begins to seem instructive, as if she’s silently asking Dunne to perform what she has uttered.

Dunne’s performance of inability to comply with this stage direction is intensely readable to the audience. The Porters’ relationship is dysfunctional and exhausting. Alison is pregnant, injured and ‘not sure of herself’.² While running their household, Alison also tends to Jimmy’s insecurities, absorbs his abusive comments and behaviours, and tries not to let her depression and disappointment completely overwhelm her in the meantime. In this moment, in having the stage direction read aloud and not fulfilled performatively by the actor, Comyn is indicating some sort of resistance between the text and its production.

Furthermore, the production was performed in Dublin in the Gate Theatre in January 2018. In October 2017, Dublin-based theatre-maker and activist Grace Dyas posted on her blog about the former artistic director of the Gate, Michael Colgan. In this piece, she accused him of sexually harassing and bullying her, showing screenshots of text messages between her and Colgan as part of her evidence.³ Dyas’s sharing of her story, which was picked up by Irish national media outlets including The Irish Times and RTÉ, empowered a number of other women to speak about Colgan’s similar behaviour towards them.⁴ In March 2018, the Gate (under the artistic directorship of Selina Cartmell since Colgan’s retirement in April 2017) released an independent investigative report into abuse of power at the theatre, including fourteen recommendations for future work at the theatre.⁵ Comyn’s production of Look Back in Anger was the first production to open at the Gate since the commissioning of the report in November 2017 and, as a play that revolves around an abusive relationship between a man and a woman, was loaded with additional freight of contextual meaning. The resistance demonstrated between Emme and Dunne in this moment could extend to a consideration of Osborne’s play more broadly, particularly in relation to its status within the dramatic canon. The allegations about Colgan revealed multiple stories of women being silenced by power, forced to do things they didn’t want to do, to be touched in ways they didn’t want to be touched. Osborne’s 1956 play sits at the heart of the twentieth-century Anglophone canon. It is considered to be a groundbreaking intervention into postwar British theatre and a catalyst for fundamental changes to how language, anger, politics and class were staged in the UK. The moment shared between Emme and Dunne, then, can arguably be read as an opposition to the word of men, or to the patriarchal (and in this country’s case, Catholic) status quo to which Ireland has so long been in thrall. In short, Dunne’s refusal to represent this stage direction encapsulates a turning of the tide in Irish theatre in 2017 and 2018, chiming with other recent national and international anti-harassment and empowerment movements and campaigns in the entertainment industries, including Waking The Feminists, Time’s Up and #MeToo.

The above moment from Look Back in Anger thinks towards some of the key concerns of this chapter in three ways, although it is important to note that it is an unusual example to consider: stage directions are not normally read out to the audience. As Anne Ubersfeld observes, stage directions ‘determine a pragmatics’, and their realization in performance does not involve their utterance.⁶ Thus, if an audience member has not read a play in detail before attending a production (which is extremely unlikely for most theatregoers), they will have no idea which stage directions are being fulfilled or otherwise, and to what purpose. Nevertheless, the example from Comyn’s production allows for a departure point for further discussion. Firstly, it questions the relationship between text and performance, and shows how this relationship is productively problematized when written stage directions seem impossible to stage. Secondly, it reminds us that an unstageable stage direction does not have to be impossible on technical or conventional grounds (e.g. impossible to achieve due to budget constraints, theatre’s technological capabilities, a perception of the audience’s social mores). Thirdly, this example also advances a connection between stage directions and the political power of theatre production. As this chapter will illustrate, using a range of stage directions from the contemporary Anglophone theatre, stage directions represent a particular locus of unstageability. The resistance between the playtext and its production can be an ideological as well as an aesthetic or practical one. Furthermore, the status of the stage direction is fragmentary and hybrid. Even from a legal perspective, there is confusion about the extent to which copyright extends to stage directions in some context, particularly in relation to their staging for production.⁷ Stage directions occupy liminal space and uncertain status on the page and are positioned in different font styles to dialogue, with different indentation and formatting. Even taking into account the British theatrical tradition of deference to the writer, including their presence in rehearsals (especially for premieres), stage directions still seem more optional, more movable than dialogue. Patrice Pavis asserts that they ‘are not the ultimate truth of the text’ and notes that Edward Gordon Craig considered stage directions to be ‘an insult to his freedom’.⁸

With this in mind, the chapter will discuss the writing of unstageable stage directions as a form of creative resistance, a challenge from the playwright to the director, designer, production team and cast. Such moments of unstageability in playwriting create the opportunity for a dialogue to unfold, sometimes through huge swathes of time and space in the case of productions of extant plays, between playwrights and theatre-makers. This dialogue shows the relationship between text and performance to be a fluid spectrum. It both reinforces and challenges the centrality of the writer to the British/Anglophone theatre tradition. Understood in this light, the playtext is shown to be not just a blueprint or an instruction manual for putting a production of a play together but a provocative document of challenge. Ella Hickson makes the challenge inherent in this offer absolutely explicit in The Writer when she writes before Writer’s delivery of the first three stanzas of ‘Quarantine’ by Eavan Boland: ‘No pressure, but just in terms of defending the whole of art, this should be totally magic’.⁹ I suggest that any writer, in the creation of unstageable stage directions, is asking the production team not to replicate her image or idea, but to use it as a spur or an inspiration. Thinking diagrammatically, if the writer has travelled from (a) to (b) in their creative process towards writing the unstageable stage direction, it is my contention that the writer is suggesting to the production team that they do not pause at (b) and try to represent or replicate it, but that they travel onwards from (c) to (d), a further distance covered, but in a different capacity.

(a) Initial idea for stage direction

(b) Writing of stage direction

(c) Reading of stage direction

(d) Staging of stage direction

In this chapter, and as Performing the Unstageable attempts to make clear throughout, there is no suggestion that the writing of unstageable stage directions necessitates that such stage directions will be (or must be) impossible to stage, paradoxical as this may seem. In the example above, Alison’s inability to kiss Jimmy or stroke his head did not stem from technical unstageability, but from a psychological and contextual impossibility stemming from the actor’s refusal to carry out the instruction. In what follows, I draw attention to impossibility as it reveals itself through stage directions, with a view to problematizing previously clear lines between what is stageable and what is unstageable, and thus to acknowledge the value of the impossible for theatre writing and making.

Stage directions: A history

Moving swiftly through the history of stage directions (or didascalia) at the theatre reveals an evolution of function as well as of form and content. In the ancient Greek theatre, stage directions were largely implicit and were not written down in the way that we would recognize them today. Much of the didascalic text was written into the commentary of the chorus, explaining the action taking place and suggesting its motivations. Thus, implicit stage directions formed a crucial part of the dialogue, with all necessary staging information included therein, including references to setting, what Gay McAuley refers to as ‘textual space’.¹⁰ For example, in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the title character is chained to a rock at a cliff-edge of the Caucasus Mountains, as a punishment from the god Hephaestus for stealing fire. The action of the play (which consists of Prometheus’s conversations with a Chorus of Ocean’s daughters, Ocean himself, Io and finally Hermes) takes place at the cliff-edge and around it. Midway through the play, Io, a former priestess of Hera, enters. Io has been sexually pursued by Zeus, turned into a cow by his jealous wife Hera and condemned to wander the earth alone being constantly stung by a gadfly. In relation to the text, we understand that Io must have, at some stage between her entrance at line 561 and line 747, been on the rock with Prometheus and the Chorus and then come down from it, because at line 748 she announces that she ‘could climb to the lip of the precipice, dash myself down/And be quit of all my troubles’.¹¹ Aeschylus only mentions this implicitly, and we understand retrospectively that the movement must have taken place. However, explicit clues to or hints at production also begin to appear in the ancient Greek plays. Peter Arnott finds fourteen marginal stage directions or notes (not intended to be spoken by the actors) across the extant plays which would conform to our definition of a stage direction today, mostly describing setting or set dressing (e.g. ‘high-encircling walls … doors wrought in bronze’ in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis).¹²

By the Middle Ages, stage directions were referred to as ‘rubrics’ (from the Latin rubeus meaning red) and were written in red ink, with a clear separation from the dialogic text. In the mystery and morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the need to explain the separation between the different spheres of sky, earth, heaven and hell meant that precise description became increasingly necessary, and explanation more important. This emphasis on clarity of didascalic text led to opposition and conflict about how such text should appear on the page. A particularly heightened case of this appears in French theatre of the seventeenth century. As the discourse around stage directions became typographical and positional, different playwrights adopted different perspectives. Corneille wrote stage directions in the margins of the dialogue, but Racine and Molière favoured integration into the text (in the manner of the ancient Greek examples above). By the following century, Diderot’s discussion of the theatre and its apparatuses had moved the conversation towards an articulation of ‘pantomime’. For Diderot, ‘pantomime’ (far from its Anglophone meaning today) referred to a more natural gestural language for actors than the stylized and exaggerated gestural approach of conventional theatre at the time, and was the writer’s responsibility to write into a playtext before it was realized on stage. Essentially, Diderot suggests that stage directions should include a description of how the actor’s body and emotional landscape should perform, in a way that had not previously arisen in relation to stage directions. As he notes,

pantomime is part of the play … the author must seriously attend to it … if it isn’t familiar to him, he will neither be able to start, to carry out, nor to end his play convincingly … Stage directions are the simplest means by which the audience can learn what it can expect from its actors. The poet tells you: Compare this play with the one of your actors, then judge.¹³

Diderot’s words suggest a hierarchical relationship between the text on the page and in performance, almost as though the playtext and its stage dire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Performing the Unstageable
• 1 Stage Directions
• 2 Adaptation
• 3 Violence and Blood
• 4 Ghosts
• Conclusion: Success, Imagination, Failure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint