Thinking Through Theatre and Performance

Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Heike Roms

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781472579621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is over? And how can theatre and performance intervene in social, political and environmental structures and frameworks? Written by leading international scholars, each chapter of this volume is built around a key performance example, and detailed discussions introduce the methodologies and theories that help us understand how these performances are practices of enquiry into the world. Thinking through Theatre and Performance is essential for those involved in making, enjoying, critiquing and studying theatre, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the questions that theatre and performance ask of themselves and of us.

Part 1 Watching

1Why Study Drama?

Joe Kelleher

Approaching the Questions

It is a spring evening in 2017 and I am at the theatre with a group of students. We are there to watch a play. We aren’t the only ones. London’s Old Vic, a nineteenth-century proscenium arch playhouse and a venerable and thriving theatre institution, just south of the River Thames in the centre of the city (it was the National Theatre of Great Britain’s first home through the 1960s and much of the 1970s, and remains an important producing theatre), is packed this evening with student groups of all ages. There is something of a festive, anticipatory feeling to the evening, perhaps because it is the last week of term for many of us, just a couple of days before the Easter break. I imagine, though, the excitement also involves the fact that one of the lead actors in the production is Daniel Radcliffe, the star of the Harry Potter film series, and many people are looking forward to seeing him perform, as it were, in person. Anyway, here we all are – students, teachers and everyone else holding a ticket – to follow a play and to enjoy our time. And this suits me fine because I have recently been considering how to approach this essay you are now reading, about ways in which theatre and performance think through writing for the stage. I have been coming around to the view that it is not just the writing (so to speak, words on the page and words on the stage) I should be concerned with, but also the ‘thinking through’, as such. Or, if you will, the studying: its modes, and how it involves us. And what it is that it involves us in. On this score, the evening’s programme looks like it might be instructive.

Irrespective of the famous actor in the cast, the play we are attending is well-known, having been popular on stage over the past half century (this production happens to be its fiftieth-anniversary revival), and – judging by the number of study-guides thrown up by an online search – a regular set text in recent decades in school and university classrooms. From that, via Harry Potter’s school days, to the prominent student audience attending this evening, the ‘study’ theme is already growing on me, but there is more. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was given its debut professional production by the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1967, but was first performed in a shorter version by the student company Oxford Theatre Group a year earlier at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. And, although Stoppard himself was not a university student – he finished formal education in his teens to work as a trainee journalist (Nadel 2004: 52–3) – I find myself thinking of the work as a ‘student play’, of sorts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is, after all, a kind of experimental study of another, earlier and altogether canonical drama – one of the most-studied dramas in the Western tradition – William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And the theme goes further. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a couple of minor characters, acquaintances of the eponymous prince, maybe fellow students of his at university in Germany (Hamlet calls them ‘my two schoolfellows’). In Stoppard’s drama, as in Shakespeare’s, they arrive at the Danish court to spy on the prince, who apparently has been behaving oddly, and to report on him to his mother and stepfather, the king and queen of Denmark. In short, there is a purpose, a project to their studies. Something they can feel called upon to do. However, they are not particularly successful spies. They hover and dither at the edge of events, clinging onto things as best they can, speaking modern English between themselves, but then running into fragments of scenes from Hamlet whenever the reality of the important people at court coincides – which it appears to do rather randomly – with their own. Things, then, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are rather vague and confusing. Nevertheless, in contrast to their come-and-go peripheral status in Shakespeare’s drama, they remain determinedly in place on Stoppard’s stage. It is there, in the course of events, that they encounter a travelling theatre group who are also on their way to court (the same group of tragedians who appear in Shakespeare’s play, although in Stoppard’s version, the economic insecurity of the Elizabethan players is rendered more explicit). It is also from the stage that they, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, make their claim on our (the audience’s) attention, as they think through their predicament. Which is to say, as they attempt to interpret an ongoing drama that may – or may not – have something to do with them; or some part that they themselves can play in it. If ever they could work out what that is.

And how do they pursue this study? By doing the sorts of things that the students who are accompanying me to the theatre this evening are themselves already expert in. That is to say, Stoppard’s protagonists take up positions – often near the stage curtains at the edge of the proscenium – from which to view the action, and they pay careful attention to what is happening. They ask questions, of the situation and of each other (they even have a competitive question-asking game that they use to pass the time, with which they hone their question-asking technique). They discuss matters between themselves (their dialogue really is one long study group). They revise their hypotheses, adjust their presumptions somewhat. They sometimes, when called upon – but also on their own initiative – get ‘practically’ involved, they dirty their hands, they devise scenarios and try them out, they experiment with action. Sometimes they get somewhere, or seem to; sometimes not. And then they return to their primary method: asking questions, all sorts of questions.

These include the fundamental, orienting questions. Where are we? What’s going on? What does the situation want from me? What is to be done? But alongside more disinterested enquiry, there are also questions of self-interest, such as we might ask ourselves. What are we in it for? What do we want from it? Employment? Enjoyment? Wisdom? Knowledge? Are we here to change the situation, or try to? Will the situation change us? Money is involved, of course, from the very first scene, which they spend tossing a coin, again and again, betting which side it will land on, heads or tails. Famously, it keeps landing on the same side. As if the result were already written, rather than happening, well, as things happen, predictably, by seeming random chance. They attempt a theoretic-analytic-logical study of the matter (‘If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces, the probability is that … ’ [Stoppard 1968: 12]). This does not get them very far, although it chimes from the off with accumulating intuitions about power and survival and responsibility, and action both of thought and deed; and about whose thoughts and deeds count for something, and whose do not; and about whose lines are already written for them and who – if anyone – gets to write their own. Meanwhile, there are a lot of jokes (Stoppard’s play is a comedy), just as there are in Shakespeare’s play (which is supposed to be a tragedy), some of which may be designed to deflect attention from more difficult reckonings, and some of which crack right into those reckonings, although it isn’t always clear which type of joke is which, or if indeed there really is a difference. What does seem to be the case is that many of the most telling jokes (we may share an example later) have to do with being in – or attending upon – a drama, at the theatre, on one side of the stage–audience divide or another. Which, departing from the premise that what a good joke does is operate a switch between different perspectives or understandings, pulling up the roots of something to repair that same something with different roots altogether, might fashion us with a blunt methodological procedure for taking our thinking a little further ‘through’.

What sort of a thing is a play or drama? Let us take the question back a step and ask: what sort of object is a ‘thing’? It may sound a rather abstruse enquiry, although perhaps not if we are talking about Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which we shall continue to do a little while longer. To borrow a thought from outside the field of drama – but useful to our purpose, I hope – contemporary philosopher Tristan Garcia proposes that there are ‘two senses of things: that which is in a thing and that in which a thing is, or that which it comprehends and that which comprehends it’ (Garcia 2014: 11). As he argues, a thing ‘is nothing other than the difference between being-inside and being-outside’. What could that mean for us? I warned that my own procedure would (unlike Garcia’s, or Stoppard’s) be pretty blunt, but consider a typical theatre situation – a performance of a famous play at London’s Old Vic, for instance – and the ways in which that situation appears to be divided between everything that is in the drama, and everything that the drama is in. And yes, I am partly thinking of the divide between stage and auditorium, between those who act, or pretend to act, and those who study them doing so; a relation, of sorts, that can also feel like a structure of exclusion, even as it includes us in what is going on. Or so it appears when the divide is replicated in Stoppard’s meta-theatrical drama (and Shakespeare’s), and fatally so: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, remember, ‘are dead’, and have been since we first learnt their names. So, what then does the drama ‘comprehend’, of itself or anything else? I would suggest our answer to this is, firstly, anything that we are capable of observing or interpreting of it: its sense of its own accomplishment, its dramaturgical strategies, its jokes, its pathos, its cleverness and – no less – its play with bewilderment and vulnerability. It’s another thing that the jokes do: they tell it how it is before we have a chance to. ‘At least we can still count on self-interest as a predictable factor … I suppose it’s the last to go’ (Stoppard 1968: 9). Which is to say, the play comprehends us as well, and comprehends the redundancy of everything we might say that it already says about itself.

As for grasping ‘that in which this thing is’ (Garcia 2014: 13), we might look to the casting of Daniel Radcliffe as a kind of prospective reaching, on the part of the production, towards other relations, other forces, that would enter the theatre in unforeseeable ways: in this instance, to do with personal and collective associations on the part of audience members outside the world of the play – memories of seeing or reading those Harry Potter stories, as much as with a complex global entertainment economy that ‘comprehends’ this performance taking place in a 1,000-seater London theatre without, as it were, giving it too much of a second thought. As it is, though, I had a different instance in mind. The twenty-ninth of March 2017, the date I went to the Old Vic theatre with the students to see the revival of Stoppard’s play, also happened to be the day on which British Prime Minister Theresa May, in the wake of a national referendum on the matter, triggered Article 50 – actually, Article 50(2) – of the Treaty on European Union, giving formal notification of the United Kingdom’s intention to leave the European Union. Suffice it to say, in the country where myself and many friends, family members, colleagues and students live and work, this macropolitical situation – commonly referred to by the shorthand term ‘Brexit’ – has been a cause of much debate and concern: over questions of citizenship, economics, the exercise of democracy and structures – and fantasies – of social and cultural identity; let alone questions of violence and exclusion and our capacities for communal sympathy, and the seeming limits of those capacities, and of historical and futural imagining in twenty-first-century Britain.

All of this, of course, has little enough to do with a fiftieth-anniversary revival of Tom Stoppard’s first play. Even so, as I watched the Old Vic production, I found myself remembering the period in my life when Stoppard’s work was most important to me – he may even have been the first playwright I read – which was when I was still at school, in my early teens, maybe younger; an eager student, in the early to mid-1970s, around the time (1973) that Britain joined the European Community. Which – I suspect – was before the time when I would have been able to recognize Stoppard as a ‘European’ playwright, to spot the debts owed to the mid-twentieth-century ‘Absurdist’ playwrights (Esslin 1980), or the tribute implicitly paid to works such as Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot (of which, more later). As I say, the one has nothing to do with the other. How could it indeed? But now I find myself thinking through, again, the sort of questions being raised by Stoppard’s hapless heroes: What time is it? Where are we? What is going on? How does this involve us? What are we supposed to be doing? What is to be done? And I wonder what questions my students might want to ask tomorrow.

A Contemporary Example: Nothing, Much

How might these sorts of questions arise from – and inform the study of – a contemporary drama? We go from one debut work to another, keeping the student theme with us for a while. Barrel Organ Theatre’s first show, Nothing, was performed in 2014 at Warwick University in the UK where the company members were students, and then at the UK National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough, with professional runs later that same year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at Camden People’s Theatre in North London, which is where I saw the work. The script for Nothing, authored by one of Barrel Organ Theatre’s founder members, Lulu Raczka (‘with additional material by the Company’), is published by Oberon Modern Plays (Raczka 2014: 3). It is, then, a drama, for sure, although the work in performance – a collection of spoken monologues woven together rhy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Thinking Through
• Part 1 Watching
• Part 2 Performing
• Part 3 Traces
• Part 4 Interventions
• Subject Index
• Names Index
• Copyright