CASE STUDY: The crisis of representation and the authenticity of performance: Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrida

By Gary Jay Williams

Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double (first published in 1938) challenged the Western foundations of theatre. At first, many dismissed his work as that of a lunatic (he suffered from serious mental illness, and his family committed him to an asylum, where he spent nine years). However, Artaud gave a dramatic, even prophetic voice to what may be described as the crisis of representation perceived by many twentieth-century philosophers and language theorists, most especially, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). This French theorist, who was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand Saussure, and Sigmund Freud, among others, profoundly critiqued Western concepts of language. From Derrida’s theories came the influential critical operation known as “deconstruction,” a term often misunderstood and maligned. Deconstruction has been applied to plays, productions, or performances at large. This case study explains the concept and Derrida’s sympathetic but penetrating critique of Artaud’s writings, which I will loosely refer to as a deconstruction.

In order to explain what language is doing and what it does to us, theorists have had to develop some specialized semiotic terms. (For an explanation of semiotics, see the case study on Brecht’s Mother Courage on the website.) However, our everyday experiences with language prepare us to deal with terms such as “sign” and “signified” or “transcendental signified.” We know that spoken language can be slippery and ambiguous. (Written language is unstable, too, of course, but it will be useful to use examples involving speech first.) The variable meanings of spoken language multiply when the expressive means of voice, gesture, and body come into play.

Our daily conversations are filled with phrases that indicate our recognition that oral communication is often problematic: “What does she want from me?” “You know what I’m sayin’?” We even act out puzzling transactions: “And he goes, ‘I am so not here’ … and I’m like, ‘What do I do with that?’” If one of your professors says, “The variables in this drama require your scrutiny,” he/she is, consciously or not, sending some signals in his/her choice of words that convey formality and probably some intimidating academic aloofness. The underlying message is different from that of the professor who asks: “Are you getting any mixed messages here?” Our messages are always colored by the language we use – whether on the page or in speech. Actors often explore interpretive possibilities (and their own sensibilities) by experimenting with different “readings” of lines, changing meanings by altering the emphasis on words or by using different phrasing, inflection, pacing, or tone. (Try reading the opening phrase of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be, that is the question” as a meditative, philosophic inquiry. Then read it as if to say, “Big deal – what else is new? Can we move on?”)

To move to a deeper level, language is always fluid; it is never anchored in some fixed truth. A rose is not always the same rose. The meaning that is attached to it (the “signified”) can vary, depending on who is sending the rose and for what reason. The “signified” of a rose might be love, apology, or sympathy. Today we are well aware that our computers operate with different “programs” and “languages”; they work from different “platforms” that are built around the needs of certain tasks, similarly, human language always comes with ideologies – inherent beliefs, social practices, power structures – built into it. (For more on the term “ideology,” see the case study on Ibsen’s A Doll House.)

Derrida demonstrated that language is but a chain of signifiers, always in play, never stable, always disseminating an infinite number of possible meanings as each signifier operates within a dynamic chain of others. The “meaning” that a word has is produced by its difference from other signifiers. Language is a kind of dance around an absence of fixed meaning, a dance in which meaning is continually being deferred around the chain of signifiers. This led Derrida to recognize that there is no “outside” of language. The assumption that language returns us to some grounding principle outside of itself where eternal, stable truth resides, be that Plato’s perfect Forms, God, or rationalism, is a false one. It is a “logocentric” notion. That is, Western ideas of how we deal with reality have been based on the assumption that language gives access to eternal, fixed truth. Derrida challenged this fundamental notion in a landmark paper in 1965, in which he observed that “the absence of a transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (Derrida 1986: 84–5). That is, given that language is not anchored in any transcendent source of meaning, it is always, eternally, a work in process.

Artaud, writing some 20 years earlier, was also challenging Western assumptions about language. At the root of the confusion of our times, he wrote, there is “a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation” (Artaud 1958: 7). Western theatre, Artaud believed, had long been diminished by being reduced to verbal language, to the words of the playwright. Theatre, by its nature as enfleshed performance, offered the possibility of being much more than an archive of literature. Theatre as only language and Aristotelian imitation could never provide adequate representation of human experience for Artaud. Language offered a mere second-hand report. Artaud called for a primordial, visceral, nonverbal theatre that would affect the whole organism of the spectator, returning the spectator to some (ostensible) experience of the undivided self, the self before matter and materialization, to the experience of the unity of body and spirit prior to dissociation.

Artaud’s path to this vision included his founding in the 1920s of a theatre named after Alfred Jarry (1873–1907). Jarry’s Ubu Roi (Ubu the King, 1896) blows up the notions of elevated language, nobility, and humankind in general in a dark, grotesque, scatological comedy. King Ubu represents the monstrous stupidity and savagery of humankind that resurfaces throughout human history. Oversized blasphemous performance is essential to its realization. In Artaud’s ultimate vision, performance must be much more than the performance of words.

Derrida deconstructs Artaud

Derrida’s own characteristic procedure in deconstruction is to work through a sequence of close readings of an artistic work, as he does with Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double and his other sometimes ecstatic, sometimes mystical writings, interweaving passages from Artaud with his own paraphrasing and elaborations. His two essays on Artaud offer the clearest philosophical critique of Artaud available. With some necessary brevity and risking oversimplification, we now go to the heart of the matter for Derrida: the issue of representation, on which Derrida finds Artaud is sometimes of two contradictory minds.

Citing Artaud’s renunciation of “the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer,” Derrida sympathetically explains that this is a rejection of the representation of writing and of classical theatre. That is to say, it is a rejection of those “stages of representation [that] extend and liberate the play of the signifier, thus multiplying the places and moments of elusion [sic]” (Derrida 1978: 191). Derrida explains that the stage is theological – under the rule of the “author-god” – for as long as it is dominated by speech. In such a theatre, directors and actors are “enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the creator” (1978: 235). Released from the text and the author-god, Artaud claims that the theatre would be returned to its creative and founding freedom. In Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, speech is not altogether abandoned, and the stage is not given over to anarchy. Artaud writes of “speech before words,” and calls for spectacles of dance, costumes, and symbolic gestures. He writes of “spectacle acting not as reflection but force.” Derrida explains that Artaud seeks, in effect, a theatre of “pure presence,” where there is only meaning itself, with no intervening language symbols, a theatre in which writing has not erased the body, where there are no deferring signifiers, where there is only the present (1978: 237, 240, 247). Derrida compares Artaud to the metaphysical theorists who seek a fundamental unity, some “metaphysical plenitude,” as Marvin Carlson puts it, behind writing and representation, of which these are but a pale reflection (Carlson 1993: 503). Like the old romantic poets, Artaud seeks the freedom of the spirit from the body and social repression, but unlike them has no faith in language alone to do this. Only a theatre of cruelty could take us to pure presence, to “the unity prior to dissociation.” “For what Artaud’s howls promise us,” Derrida writes:

articulating themselves under the headings of existence, flesh, life, theatre, cruelty, is the meaning of an art prior to madness and the work, an art which no longer yields works [of art], an artist’s existence which is no longer a route or an experience that gives access to something other than itself; Artaud promises the existence of a speech that is a body, of a body that is a theatre, of a theatre that is a text because it is no longer enslaved to writing.

(Derrida 1978: 174)

As Derrida points out, fully understanding the crisis of representation for Artaud, “there is no theatre in the world today which fulfills Artaud’s desire.” A theatre without representation is not possible; achieving his vision would seem to mean the erasure of theatre. Director and theorist Herbert Blau also pointed to the problem in Artaud. “There is nothing more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated” (Blau 1983: 143).

Artaud himself recognized the paradox inherent in the representation of pure presence. He offered suggestions for spectacles in material, practical terms. He even speaks of creating a written record of the results of the experimental processes: “all these groupings, researches, and shocks will culminate nevertheless in a work written down [his italics], fixed in its least details, and recorded by new means of notation” (Artaud 1958: 111–12). Nevertheless, Derrida writes admiringly, Artaud worked at “the limit of theatrical possibility,” knowing “that he simultaneously wanted to produce and to annihilate the stage” (Derrida 1978: 249).

Artaud’s vision of an impossible theatre contributed to the process of a wide re-evaluation of the logocentric tradition of Western theatre and had a profound influence on directors. Artaud’s intense vision ultimately moved theatre artists to probe the issue of the source of the authenticity of a performance. He also anticipated the work of the performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, for whom the body becomes a text.

Key references

Artaud, A. (1958) The Theatre and Its Double, trans. M.C. Richards, New York: Grove Press, Inc. (originally published in French in 1938). (For selections from the large body of commentary on Artaud see our supporting website bibliography.)

Artaud, A. (1968) Collected Works, trans. V. Corti, 4 vols, London: Calder and Boyars.

Belsey, C. (1980) Critical Practice, London and New York: Routledge.

Blau, H. (1983) “Universals of performance; or, amortizing play,” Sub-stance 37–38.

Carlson, M. (1993) Theories of the Theatre, A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Case, S.-E. (1991) “The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics,” in S.-E. Case and J. Reinelt (eds), The Performance of Power, Theatrical Discourse and Politics, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Contains two essays on Artaud cited here, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” and “La Parole Soufflé.”)

Derrida, J. (1986) “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” [1966], in H. Adams and L. Searle (eds) Critical Theory Since 1965, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press.

Said, E. (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books.

Sontag, S. (ed.) (1976) Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

CASE STUDY: “Blacking up” on the U.S. stage

By Bruce McConachie

White people “blacking-up” to play street rowdies, circus clowns, and African-American characters – both on stage and off – is a long tradition in Western performance; it dates from at least the Middle Ages and perhaps before. Although often racist in intent and effect, the blackface mask served a variety of other purposes within popular entertainment in the U.S. during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At times, even African-American performers darkened their complexions to entertain commercial audiences. This case study examines instances of blackface performance in three related genres of popular entertainment on U.S. stages: the comic afterpiece, the minstrel show, and early musical comedy.

“Jump Jim Crow”

Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1806–1860), a white actor, was performing minor roles in the frontier theatres of the Mississippi valley when he invented or stole from a slave – the historical record is unclear – the song and dance that would make him famous:

Come listen all you galls and boys,

I’m just from Tuc-ky hoe;

I’m goin’ to sing a leetle song,

My name’s Jim Crow.

Weel about and turn about,

And do jis so;

Eb’ry time I weel about,

I jump Jim Crow.

(Lott 1994: 23–4)

Dressed in rags with burnt cork covering his face and neck, Rice performed several verses of the song, jumping with agility and variety on each chorus (Figure 1). When he performed his “Jim Crow” dance as a part of a comic afterpiece at the New York Bowery Theatre in 1832, the young, mostly male working-class audience gave him a tumultuous reception. Rice wrote several one-act plays that featured his Jim Crow character and his famous dance, and he performed them successfully at the end of a regular evening’s entertainment for the next twenty years. Like similar mythic characters from the Southwest, Jim Crow boasted that he could out-fight, out-eat, out-lie, and out-sex anyone else. Rice’s dance was a variation on the shuffle, a dance done by lower-class blacks and whites to lively fiddle music in the taverns, dancehalls, and brothels of northern cities.

Drawing on Jameson’s understanding of utopia and reification, we may speculate that Rice’s “Jim Crow” afterpieces animated his male spectators to dream of political and physical liberation. The verses of his song actually celebrated working-class victories over social and economic oppressors, and they were taken up by mobs destroying symbols of elite privilege during urban rioting in the 1830s and 1840s. His rough-music and violent gyrations probably reminded Rice’s spectators of their own raucous parades through town during holidays, when they blackened their faces to entertain and alarm friends and enemies with scurrilous antics and the noise of tin kettles and cow bells. This was a European tradition that dated from medieval mummers plays at Christmas time and continued into the nineteenth century. Like “Jump Jim Crow,” these cacophonous spectacles encouraged traditional male forms of merrymaking and celebrated the rights of the common man.

Applauding T.D. Rice, however, also meant cheering for the anarchy and aggressiveness of his performance. Blacking up, making noise, and dancing foolishly evoked traditional utopian notions of plebeian male solidarity. But in the 1830s, it also cut against progressive possibilities for workingmen. During this decade, when trade unions and workingmen’s parties sought collective bargaining and the ten-hour day, “Jump Jim Crow” turned workers away from productive political action and towards revelry and riot. Jameson’s theory and the historical evidence suggest that Rice’s performance encouraged a utopian dream of traditional freedom but undercut practical, progressive reform.

Happy Uncle Tom

By the 1850s, blackface performance had grown from occasional afterpieces by Rice and others into full evenings of entertainment, presented by an all-male minstrel troupe of four to ten performers. Dozens of minstrel companies played throughout the urban Northeast, paying top salaries to their headliners and composers, among them the popular songwriter Stephen Foster.  White performers borrowed much of their material from slave festivities in the South, including musical instruments (the banjo and bones), slave dances (“patting juba”), and the comic exchanges typical of corn-shucking rituals on a plantation. Minstrel shows usually featured jokes and musical numbers, specialty acts, and a concluding one-act comedy, parody, or farce. While some of the verses of Rice’s song in the “Jim Crow” afterpieces called for the abolition of slavery, most minstrel troupes of the 1850s pandered to groups of white urban males who needed to be assured of their racial superiority. In general, minstrels portrayed black characters as inept fools, grotesque animals, or sentimental victims. The mythic Old South of the minstrel stage was peopled by kindly white masters, Earth Mother mammies, boastful Zip Coons, feminized old uncles, and “yaller gals” (played by a male in drag), light-skinned slaves whose beauty and allure motivated romantic songs and incidents of victimization.

The racism of 1850s minstrelsy was especially apparent in the skits that parodied the contemporary success of performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Full-scale stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel appeared soon after its publication in 1852; some of them were nearly as abolitionist as her book. Minstrel one-acts based on the novel, however, derided or ignored Stowe’s abolitionism. One typical version, titled “Happy Uncle Tom,” depicted Stowe’s exemplar of self-sacrificing morality and vigorous spirituality as a decrepit old uncle, meant to be laughed at for his grotesque jigs and foolish dialog. Like many minstrel parodies of the 1850s, “Happy Uncle Tom” delivered its audience to a never-never land of domestic warmth, sentimental love, and easy power in which “whiteness” provided the ticket to fun. For the Irish immigrants and rural newcomers who constituted much of the audience for pre-Civil War minstrelsy, “Happy Uncle Tom” temporarily took them out of the dangerous cities of the 1850s to a plantation utopia in which they could indulge their nostalgia for a lost home.

At the same time, however, by assuring them that their “whiteness” made them superior to the fools on the minstrel stage, parodies like “Happy Uncle Tom” exacerbated the tensions between these spectators and the free blacks of northern cities. In the 1850s, the American business class exploited this split between Irish immigrants and African-American workers to the detriment of both “races.” (Most Americans racialized the Irish as well as blacks for much of the nineteenth century.) On the basis of Jameson’s theory and the history of American racism, it might be argued that the racial fragmentation of the American working class derived in part from minstrel entertainment, contributing to riots, undermining working-class solidarity, and perpetuating race-based inequities and repressions for the next 100 years.

Abyssinia

Before the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), black performers had occasionally appeared on the minstrel stage, but white minstrels, eager to distinguish their true “race” from the blackface they performed, had discriminated against free entertainers of color to avoid any confusion that might harm their reputations. After 1865, however, black minstrel troupes proliferated, as African-American performers sought entry into the flourishing entertainment industry. They needed the work, but minstrelsy was usually the only path open to them in the white-controlled business. This created a double bind for black performers. Once on the minstrel stage, African-American entertainers had to conform to white stereotypes of their “race” to please predominately white audiences. To increase their success in this highly competitive field, black troupes often advertised themselves as truthful delineators of authentic plantation life. The result was that an entire generation of black performers helped to perpetuate and confirm racist fantasies and stereotypes in mainstream American culture. Composer James Bland, for instance, elaborated the myth that African-Americans really longed to return to slavery in his song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” and Billy Kersands (c.1842–1915), a popular Jim Crow in minstrel skits, played on the belief that blacks were creatures of primitive appetites.

The rise of vaudeville in the U.S. gradually displaced minstrelsy as the dominant form of variety entertainment in the 1880s. As minstrel troupes splintered and dispersed, individual blackface acts, performed by entertainers of both “races,” enjoyed newfound popularity on the vaudeville stage. African-American Bert Williams (1874–1922) had begun in minstrelsy where he learned the necessity of blackening his light complexion to please white audiences. In vaudeville, Williams teamed up with George Walker (c.1873–1911), another American of color, who generally played a fast-talking, free-spending dandy to Williams’s slow-moving, melancholy “Jonah man,” so-called because disaster always befell him. The success of the duo (aided by Walker’s business acumen) propelled them into a series of all-black musical comedies produced in New York between 1900 and 1908.

Williams and Walker faced a social and cultural world more hostile to black equality and ambition than at any time since slavery. In New York, African Americans were excluded from most restaurants and hotels and rigidly segregated in theatres and other places of public amusement, if allowed in at all. While the traditional minstrel show had generally depicted blacks as primitive and foolish, the “coon acts” and razor songs popular in vaudeville around the turn of the century added the stereotype of the “dangerous nigger,” a marauder eager to stab and rape. Middle-class white fears of black potency and violence would soon reach their dubious acme in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s racist film celebrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as the protector of white womanhood in the South after the Civil War.

Williams and Walker had billed themselves as “Two Real Coons” in vaudeville, and their first musicals on Broadway stayed within the narrow range of American racist beliefs. With In Dahomey in 1903, however, Williams and Walker moved part of the setting of their comedy to Africa to poke gentle fun at white American ways and to locate a utopian space for black dreams (Figure 2). This idea was more fully realized in 1906 with Abyssinia, a lavish production capitalized by white businessmen, featuring music by Will Marion Cook and Alex Rogers. Their songs laughed at wealthy Americans and allowed the pair to protest their designation as “coons.” The plot for the musical has Rastus Johnson (Walker) winning the lottery and taking his family and friends, including Jasper Jenkins (Williams), to Europe and Africa. Thinking he is an American prince, the Emperor of Ethiopia invites Rastus and his friends to a feast. Comic misadventures, onstage camels and donkeys, and exotic dances and romances soon follow before the pair bid farewell to their African hosts.

Abyssinia kept Williams and Walker in their stock, minstrel-derived roles, but, by changing the locale of the show, the duo induced black spectators to imagine a place where people of color ruled and where African Americans might be treated (at least temporarily) with respect and even honor. Seated in the segregated second balcony of a Broadway theatre, black audience members might imagine a utopian space for their hopes. On the other hand, the musical did not seriously challenge white racist beliefs; to do so would have doomed it at the box office. The whites that predominated in the audience and controlled the space of the auditorium could dismiss the production’s utopian possibilities and laugh at the racial clowning. Seen through the lens of Jameson’s theory, it is likely that Abyssinia induced utopian desire for some blacks and confirmed racist beliefs for many whites.

Blackface acts continued to amuse white audiences into the 1950s, when African-American activism and cold war concerns gradually exposed the racism under the burnt cork. Until then, however, some of the premiere performers of popular entertainment on stage and screen paraded their talents in blackface – including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland.

Key references

Audio-visual resources

Please note: data and opinions on websites may not have been subject to review by experts. Material on websites should always be checked against scholarly books and articles such as those cited below.

“Stephen Foster,” American Experience Series (Public Broadcasting System, 2000): www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy.html.

“Blackface Minstrelsy, 1830–1852”: www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/mihp.html.

“The Legacy of Blackface: National Public Radio”: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1919122.

Books and articles

Boskin, J. (1986) Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester, New York: Oxford.

Cockrell, D. (1997) Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jameson, F. (1979) “Reification and utopia in mass culture,” Social Text, 1: 130–48.

Krasner, D. (1997) Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895–1910, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lott, E. (1994) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, New York: Oxford University Press.

Roediger, D. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso.

Toll, R.C. (1974) Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press.

Woll, A. (1989) Black Musical Theatre from Coontown to Dreamgirls, Baton Rouge, L.A.: Louisiana University Press.

CASE STUDY: Ibsen’s A Doll House: If Nora were a material girl

By Gary Jay Williams

Problems in Ibsen’s problem play

In the context of the many struggles for women’s rights in the West, from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, Ibsen’s A Doll House has had special interest for many directors and actors – especially for the woman playing Nora. When the play premiered in 1879, its story of a wife abandoning her husband and children shocked audiences in Scandinavia, Germany, and England. (Such “problem” plays were usually first staged for private producing societies by visionary directors such as André Antoine, Otto Brahm, and J.T. Grein.) One controversy over A Doll House even caused Ibsen to write an alternative, sentimental ending in which Nora, after looking in on her children one more time, falls to her knees, unable to leave. Ibsen despised this ending but preferred to do it himself when a German actor threatened to provide her own ending in which Nora did not leave. (Revisions that softened the ending of the play were being done as late as 1976.) In the late 1880s and early 1890s, courageous women undertook the role of Nora in commercial venues, including Janet Achurch and Elizabeth Robins in England, Minnie Maddern Fiske in New York, and Eleonora Duse in Italy. In Paris, a popular young actress, Gabrielle Réjane, played Nora with strong notes of eroticism, and, in the end, her Nora was an unbroken, rebellious woman. French male critics found her sexually indelicate and one saw in her Nora “a kind of intellectual hysteria” peculiar to Scandinavian women (Marker and Marker 1989: 62; Shepherd-Barr 1997: 30–1).

But the play has continued to present serious problems of its own making. Actors playing Nora struggle to make credible the journey of the obedient Victorian wife of the first part of the play to the independent woman at the end. In addition, the materialist critic sees a still more profound question, one that Ibsen did not really allow his audiences to dwell on: will Nora’s leaving her home result in her liberation at all in her society?

To explore this issue, we must first consider what the materialist critic describes as the myth of liberal humanism, an ideology deeply embedded in Western life.

The myth of liberal humanism

The term “liberal humanism” is used to describe the ideology in which there is the notion that every individual has the potential, unimpeded by any material barriers, to achieve self-fulfillment. For those who subscribe to this, life is a kind of divinely ordained game plan that rewards spunk. However, such an account of reality obscures or omits the material conditions that limit the scope of individual agency. Spunk may count for little if you are a female in a male-dominated business. Like television commercials, such an account comes with no label warning you that your dreams of economic autonomy may be illusory. The advertisement image of driving an SUV over a rocky mountain trail to a secluded beach is in stark contrast with the material realities of commuting in daily through urban traffic to the job that allows you to make the payments on it.

The myth of liberal humanism is inherent in Nora’s miraculous transformation from a child-like wife, imprisoned in a Victorian culture where she has long been infantilized by her father and husband, into a budding, self-reliant woman. This transformation, in Ibsen’s clock-bound realism, occurs over three days during Christmas week.

To be sure, Ibsen unfolds with sophisticated craft the material circumstances entrapping Nora. In the first scene, we see Nora as a homemaker, blissful shopper, and practiced manipulator of her husband – using the only powers and making the only choices that she has in her culture. Her responsibilities are to please her husband, buy Christmas gifts for her children, and ready the tree. Raised by her father – the absence of her mother is never explained – and by her nanny, Anne-Marie, who now tends Nora’s children, Nora still seems emotionally childlike at times, secretly eating her macaroons. Torvald refers to his wife in trivializing diminutives, as “my little squirrel,” and his “little lark” (Ibsen 1978: 125–6). Nora, however, has long since known how to play upon her sexuality and take advantage of the inconsequentiality men assign to her, as she does when she manipulates her husband to get the extra money that she will use to pay off her secret loan. She takes pride in having secretly saved Torvald’s life when his health broke from overwork. She may believe she has “worked the system,” but like many women, Nora is working around ideologies long in place that she cannot change. Her husband is sovereign in the household; on his side are the full force of tradition, state law, and scriptural passages on wifely obedience by St. Paul (Ephesians, 5: 22–33). What marginal power Nora has she derives from the ways a male-dominated culture constructs her: she is sexualized on the one hand and idealized on the other, subject in both to the pleasure and convenience of men. Male-constructed capitalist and domestic formations encircle her. The play takes place during Christmas, a traditional Christian family feast day. In the setting of the premiere production in Copenhagen in 1879, a copy of Raphael’s portrait of the Madonna and child hung over the fireplace, reinforcing the “natural” order of things (Figure 1).

Were Nora a material girl of the 1870s – by which I mean to say, were she an actual person functioning within all the social formations of the time – she would have had no access to an education or job-ladder that would have trained her to head a bank. In the male world of business, it was unthinkable to hire a woman to manage other people’s property or money. As a married woman in Norway in 1879, she could own property only jointly with her husband. Mrs. Linde observes in Act 1, “a wife can’t borrow money without her husband’s consent” (Ibsen 1978: 135), and that was typical. Ibsen’s Nora was able to provide security for the secret loan that saved her husband’s life only by forging her then-dead father’s signature.

Krogstad knows her secret and knows how to ruin Nora. Desperate in the face of his blackmail, she briefly considers suicide but has not the courage. She resorts to sexually tantalizing the dying Dr. Rank, trying to extract money from him (the silk-stocking scene in Act 2 – once omitted by some translators). Beneath the painting of the Madonna and child, the religious and social framing of woman in her acceptable role, she raises her tambourine and dances the tarantella wildly, desperate to distract Torvald from seeing Krogstad’s letter that would expose her (Figure 1).

When finally the truth is revealed that Nora forged her father’s signature for the loan to save Torvald’s life, Torvald himself shatters Nora’s last desperate illusion. So far from understanding that her subterfuge was for his sake, Torvald explodes in rage about the loss of his honor. The “miracle” Nora hoped for did not happen and never could have.

While Ibsen has revealed a great deal about Nora’s material circumstances, he also gives Nora her famous exit. He asks us to believe that Nora evolves in this crucible of three days and three acts to the point that she can sit her husband down for the famous third act discussion and begin it with three shattering insights, “I’ve been your wife-doll here, just as I was Papa’s doll-child. And in turn the children have been my dolls” (Ibsen 1978: 191) (Figure 2). This is, in effect, to do nothing less than deconstruct her social identity. For Ibsen’s Nora, and for all the real Noras at the time of Ibsen’s play, one could only grant this kind of transformation if one subscribed to the gospel of liberal humanism. True, as feminist critic Annelise Maugue writes, Ibsen’s play had important symbolic value for women: “Nora’s action, her improbable departure, symbolized this necessary change in attitude” (Maugue 1993: 523). Late nineteenth-century feminists admired the play and predicted that it would have reformative effects. However, Annelise Maugue adds the important material point that Nora’s leaving “is precisely the step that real women could not imagine, let alone take.”

Had Nora been a real woman in Victorian Norway, it would have been very difficult for her to have supported herself on the other side of Torvald’s door. Ibsen’s Nora has earned some money of her own with “odd jobs – needlework, crocheting, embroidery and such,” and with copy work, as she tells Mrs. Linde. But, as Torvald’s pet, she has had no experience with basic account-keeping; when Mrs. Linde asks her how much of the 250 pound loan she has managed to pay off, Nora replies: “These accounts, you know, aren’t easy to figure. I only know I’ve paid out all I could scrape together” (Ibsen 1978: 137). Job prospects for real Noras were very poor. Census data for four French cities at the end of the nineteenth century show that one out of every two women was single, widowed, or divorced, and therefore seeking employment. In England in 1851, 40 percent of the women who were working were domestic servants; 22 percent were textile factory operatives. The typical weekly wage for working-class women in the Victorian era was a little over 12 shillings, well below the very comfortable middle-class income to which Ibsen’s Nora is accustomed. In the cotton mills of Glasgow and Manchester, staffed largely by women and children, average wages were between 11 and 12 shillings a week. A London shirt-maker told an interviewer in 1849 that her normal hours were from five in the morning until nine at night, and in the summer she often worked “from four in the morning to nine or ten at night – as long as I can see.” Still she was barely able to support herself (Yeo and Thompson 1972: 122–3). The low wages – not the hard work – drove many such women to prostitution.

Ibsen does bring into focus briefly the material circumstances of two other women within his play. Mrs. Linde married her husband not for love (which astonishes Nora) but because her mother was bedridden, and she had two younger brothers to support. Now widowed, she seeks a clerical job, which she gets only through Nora’s strenuous intercession with Torvald. The nurse to the Helmer’s children, Anne-Marie, had to give her own illegitimate child away in order to get employment: “A girl who’s poor and who’s gotten into trouble is glad enough for that” (Ibsen 1978: 155). Nora hears this in a conversation with Anne-Marie at the point when she is glimpsing the unspeakable consequences of Krogstad’s blackmail. But when she walks out the door, she will be subject to the same employment conditions. In the late 1870s, courageous women were leading movements in Europe and the U.S. to improve women’s working conditions and change the laws, but Nora would not have benefited from them for another decade. Ibsen’s Nora has no ties to such a sisterhood, nor would she have thought to seek them.

Even for those women who had more intellectual resources than the real Noras, circumstances were not much different, as is clear in Ibsen’s own Hedda Gabler (1890). One could find no more relevant and poignant example than the real-life case of the woman on whom Ibsen based Nora. Laura Kieler (then Petersen) wrote a novel called Brand’s Daughters that was a sequel to Ibsen’s play, Brand (1866). She visited him in Dresden in 1871, and they apparently came to know each other very well. Ibsen called her his “lark” and encouraged her to write more (Meyer 1971: 443). After she married, her husband became ill with tuberculosis, and she was advised to take him to a warmer climate to save his life. To do so, she secretly obtained a loan (on the security of a friend). Her husband survived, but two years later Laura sent a manuscript to Ibsen, written hastily under the pressure of needing to pay off her loan, begging his help to get it published. Ibsen judged it a poor work and declined. Laura then burned the manuscript and forged a check to pay off the loan. When the forgery was discovered, she told her husband what she had done. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and her husband had her committed to an asylum. Ibsen biographer Michael Meyer writes: “After a month, she was discharged … and for the children’s sake, begged her husband to take her back, which he grudgingly agreed to do” (Meyer 1971: 445; see also 634–5). In his liberal humanism, Ibsen had his Nora take “precisely the step that real women could not imagine, let alone take.” Not to examine the ideology embedded in the play is to risk perpetuating it.

The very form of modern realistic tragedy perpetuates the ideology, as Raymond Williams has shown. Realism purports to be clinically life-like, providing a transparent window on events. But realism hides its craft-wise operations. With its selective focus, its exposition planted as unobtrusively as possible, its appearance of real time, its linear sequences of cause and effect action that lead (seemingly) to a third-act crisis, and its careful construction of credible character psychology, realism does everything it can to make us unaware that its representation of life is anything but “natural.” Realism in effect keeps you inside the ideology of the middle-class world that it represents. With its focus on character psychology, it is not a mode well suited to showing how social formations have been constructed or how they might be dismantled. It is not that realism would do so if it could; it cannot and still meet the requirements of the form.

Williams has shown that modern liberal tragedy as a whole, from A Doll House through Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), tracks the individual struggling toward the fulfillment of desire but ultimately defeated, a victim of social formations that are never addressed (Williams 1966: 87–105; 1969: 331–47). Such plays are rites of sympathy for the victims. For the materialist critic, it is not enough to leave the theatre having feasted on empathy and fatalism. Williams shows the inherent contradictions between all the talk of social reform in modern liberal tragedy and the invisible limitations of the form. Williams’s one-time student, Terry Eagleton, summarizes the argument:

The discourse of the play [the liberal tragedy] may be urging change, criticism, rebellion; but the dramatic forms – [that] itemize the furniture and aim for an exact “verisimilitude” – inevitably enforce upon us a sense of the unalterable solidity of this social world, all the way down to the color of the maid’s stockings.

(Eagleton 1983: 187)

Ibsen’s American translator, Rolf Fjelde, preferred the title A Doll House to the more common A Doll’s House as the translation of Ibsen’s title, Et Dukkehjem. He believed the title without the possessive points not just to Nora, as the doll, but to the entire household – husband, wife, servants, and the whole set of social formations to which all are subject (Ibsen 1978: 121) (Figure 3).

In the late 1970s, Austrian playwright and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek offered her own dark answer to the question of whether Nora will be a liberated woman once she leaves her home. Jelinek wrote a sequel to Ibsen’s play, entitled What Happened after Nora Left Her Husband, or Pillars of Society. In it, Nora works in a factory after leaving home, marries an industrialist, is eventually forced to become a high-class prostitute, and then turns to anarchism, which fails. At the end, she is back in her stifling home with Torvald, who clearly will soon become a Nazi.

Ibsen was a pioneer reformer in bringing substantive ideas to the theatre. It is not to detract from his historical achievement that the materialist critic stresses the importance of understanding the limitations of the old liberal humanism and the complicit mode of realism as we find them in A Doll House.

Key references

Audio-visual resources

A 1973 Paramount film of the play, directed by Patrick Garland with Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins, is available in a video recording. The opening scene (highly recommended) of this film is available on YouTube: search “Ibsen Hopkins Bloom.”

Books and articles

Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory, an Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1969) “What is an Author?” in H. Adams and L. Searle (eds) (1986), Critical Theory Since 1965, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press.

Ibsen, H. (1978) A Doll House, trans. R. Fjelde, in Henrik Ibsen, The Complete Major Prose Plays, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Marker, F.J. and Marker, L.L. (1989) Ibsen’s Lively Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marx, K. (1950) “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Maugue, A. (1993) “The New Eve and the Old Adam,” in G. Fraise and M. Perrot (eds) Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, Vol. 4 of G. Duby and M. Perrot (gen. eds) A History of Women in the West, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meyer, M. (1971) Ibsen, a Biography, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company.

Shepherd-Barr, K. (1997) Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890–1900, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Williams, R. (1969) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yeo, E., and Thompson, E.P. (eds) (1972) The Unknown Mayhew, New York: Schocken Books.

CASE STUDY: Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South Africa

By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Athol Fugard (1932–)is a white South African playwright, actor and director who spent the years prior to 1990 in collaborations with black theatre artists in order to “bear witness” to, and protest the system of racial separation called “apartheid.” This was internationally applauded but semi-legal; at various times Fugard was placed under government surveillance, had his passport revoked, and he and his family endured threats and police raids. Many of the black actors he worked with were arrested. In 1962, he led an international boycott of playwrights who refused to have their work produced in South Africa’s segregated theatres, but in 1968, he changed his mind and urged (unsuccessfully) that the boycott be lifted. Since the end of apartheid, he has continued to write internationally acclaimed plays, often of a more personal and sometimes autobiographical nature.

Some critics, such as Loren Kruger, have suggested that his success among white liberals throughout the world may have compromised his integrity. Many others feel that the plays reveal the political evils and personal suffering caused by apartheid. By “bearing witness,” they also focus attention on how personal traumas are embedded in (and exacerbated by) the political situation. Fugard’s plays usually focus on a few individuals who are closely tied – by blood, love or friendship – and the complex, private agonies they inflict upon each other. Before we look more closely at the plays, it will be useful to understand the social and historical background of apartheid.

Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid is a Dutch and Afrikaans word meaning “apartness.” It was imposed as a legal form of racial segregation in South Africa in 1948, although British colonizers had practiced racial discrimination in South Africa since 1795. For example, the British created a system of “pass laws” in the nineteenth century restricting the movements of black people both between designated tribal areas and into areas occupied by whites and “coloureds,” as those of mixed race were called. Blacks were required to carry a pass card at all times and were forbidden to be on the streets of white areas at night. Eventually blacks, Asian Indians, “coloureds,” and other non-Europeans were denied the right to vote, to own land, to practice certain professions, and many other basic rights. These British colonial policies were strengthened by the National Party in 1948, when it adopted the legal system of white supremacy called apartheid.

Under apartheid, people had to carry identification cards specifying their race. It was illegal to marry or have sexual relations with a person of a different race, and the races had separate public facilities such as restrooms, swimming pools, restaurants, hospitals, theatres and schools. The so-called tribal homelands had separate governing bodies, and “anti-communist” laws were passed to outlaw all political protest or opposition to the government and its policies. Through the 1980s, blacks were forcibly “resettled” in an attempt to create whites-only areas. Despite international protests, in 1955 at least 60,000 blacks were removed by armed soldiers from Johannesburg, where many had lived in an area called Sophiatown. Sophiatown was demolished and its former residents were forced to live in the newly created black suburb of Soweto, an acronym for Southwestern Townships. Where Sophiatown once stood, a new white town called Triomf (Triumph) was built. Although focused on blacks, forced resettlement was also practiced on other non-whites, such as Indians and Chinese. It has been estimated that over three and a half million people were forcibly removed.

Although international outrage over apartheid began in earnest in 1952, when 13 newly independent Asian and African states protested to the United Nations, it took the 1960 massacre of 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville (followed by the arrest of 18,000 people), and finally the shocking police brutality against the people of Soweto in 1977 to force the UN to implement an embargo on arms sales to South Africa. By the 1980s, there was virtual civil war in South Africa, and most of the world participated in political, economic, and cultural boycotts of the nation. In 1990, the National Party renounced apartheid, and in 1994 Nelson Mandela, who had been a political prisoner from 1963 to 1990, was elected the nation’s first black president. In 1995, the government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its role was both to permit victims of human rights violations to bear witness and also to consider amnesty for perpetrators. Among those who petitioned for amnesty, 5,392 cases were denied and 849 were granted. Violators of human rights included members of the pre-1994 apartheid government, as well as former soldiers of the ANC (African National Congress) who had fought against that government.

Theatre under apartheid

South African theatre is rich and varied. The experiences of apartheid, however, clearly molded the development of recent drama. As Dennis Walder perceptively notes:

Athol Fugard is South Africa’s most important and prolific playwright, and the first to enjoy an international reputation. Yet his long and celebrated career is part of a much larger achievement: he has helped create a kind of drama that has established South African theatre as an arena in which audiences around the world have seen the emergence of a unique cultural form, drawn from the multiple traditions of Africa and Europe. Works by playwrights and practitioners as varied as Zakes Mda, Gcina Mhlophe, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon, as well as groups such as the Serpent Players, Workshop ’71, Junction Avenue Theatre Company and the Handspring Puppet Company, have engaged with the immediate issues of the time through collaborative workshop techniques and a stirring mix of improvisation, mime, dance, music and document. Migrant labour, child abduction, school rebellion, police torture, illegal strikes, township removals, imprisonment without trial and, more recently, the drama of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: these have all been grist to the theatrical mill in South Africa. If there is one common impulse, it has been the urge to tell a story; and not just to tell a story, but to bear witness. The idea of witness, with its overtones of truth and sacrifice, has particular power in the face of the darkest events of our times. It is an idea that suggests the potential of art to respond to such events, and to reach across the boundaries of class, race, gender and nation, without descending into facile universalism.

(Walder 2003: 1)

Fugard’s play Blood Knot (1961, originally titled The Blood Knot) was groundbreaking. Directed by the author, it starred himself and black actor Zakes Mokae as brothers who had the same mother but different fathers. One appears white-skinned and the other appears black-skinned. Although they love each other, the realities of racial discrimination cause conflict. For example, the light-skinned brother could choose to live as a white man (although risking arrest if caught) whereas his dark-skinned brother will never have such a choice, and must always suffer. When the light-skinned brother dresses up “white” to meet a white woman, he begins to treat his brother as an inferior. In turn, the dark-skinned brother, reveals submerged fury, even hatred. Eventually, they remain together as blacks, but the brothers clearly harbor complex feelings for each other. When the play opened, a South African newspaper noted:

Theatre history was made in Johannesburg this week when a White man and a Black man acted together publicly in the same play. … Municipal by-laws purport to prohibit racially mixed performances, but … producer Leon Gluckman has taken a chance and “The Blood Knot” opened in the Y.M.C.A.’s intimate theatre on Wednesday night before a fashionable and wildly applauding (White) audience. … The authorities have taken no action (yet) to stop the performance, possibly because the legal aspect has been delicately avoided so far.

(Wertheim 2000: 18)

Productions of this play in London and New York signaled the start of Fugard’s international recognition, and helped prevent censorship at home. However, the day after The Blood Knot was broadcast on British television in 1967, Fugard’s passport was taken away, supposedly for reasons of national security. Productions created with the multiracial Serpent Players – such as Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (1972), The Island (1973), and Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (1974) – were often performed in secure locations such as garages or private homes to evade the police, and the actors did not take home written scripts in order to avoid being arrested for keeping “subversive materials.”

Fugard, like other South African artists and cultural critics, applauds South Africa’s vibrant “protest literature,” but like them, he insists that politics should not be the sole criterion for judgment. Yet his mind is often torn. In 1991, he called himself “a storyteller, not a political pamphleteer.” He stated that while he accepted the reality that South African theatre is characterized by a “direct and electrifying … relationship” between “the events on the stage and the social and political reality out in the streets,” he felt frustrated that audiences expected him to write only political works. He complained that this expectation “takes away certain freedoms from me as a writer.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged that “I can’t find any area of my living which politics has not invaded” (Fugard 1992: 71–3).

Collaborative creation and witnessing

Athol Fugard was an actor before he became a playwright. His writing is inherently performable and theatrical. Fugard has often stated that all he requires for his plays is “the actor and the stage, the actor on the stage” (cited in Walder 1987: x). He was influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of “poor theatre” that relies on the actors’ bodies and voices, not on spectacle. Fugard’s collaborative works emphasize the actors’ personal experiences. In a 1973 interview regarding the creation of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, he said, “[O]bviously, I did a hell of a lot of actual writing. But I’ve not been allowed inside a black township in South Africa for many years, so I am very dependent on the two actors for a basic image, a vitality, an assertion of life” (cited in Wertheim 2000: 80).

In 1958, he joined the interracial Union of South African artists, and soon after he helped create the African Theatre Workshop. The Blood Knot was written partly in response to the horrific Sharpeville massacre, the event that so outraged his sense of justice that he determined to return to South Africa after two years in London. In 1963, he and a group of inexperienced black actors founded the Serpent Players. The impetus for founding the troupe came from a visit by black actor/artist Norman Ntshinga, who made “the old, old request, actually it’s hunger. A desperate hunger for meaningful activity – to do something that would make the hell of their daily existence meaningful” (Fugard 1983: 81). Fugard tells what happened a few days later, when Ntshinga returned with others:

[A] knock on the front door ushered into my life a group of four black men and one woman. … This little group had read about my success in the local paper, and had come to ask me to help them start a drama group. None of them had had any previous theatre experience, and very typically, they all had the most menial of jobs: the women were domestic servants, and the men worked as very basic physical labourers. … Apart from the exhausting process of teaching these men and women who came to my door the basics of acting, there would be in addition the problems of a white man associating with black people in the South Africa of that day. The authorities would not allow me to go into the black townships, and these black men and women were running a very considerable risk of police harassment in coming into a white area at night. Because of all of this, my first impulse was to say no. I wanted to devote all my time and energy to capitalize on my success with The Blood Knot by writing a new play. A totally selfish concern with time and energy is necessary for a serious writer. My guilty white liberal conscience would, however, not allow me this indulgence. I very reluctantly agreed. … Our first performance space was scheduled to be the disused snake pit of the Port Elizabeth museum, and this gave the group its name, “The Serpent Players.” … I would like to believe that at the end of this exercise, I was no longer the patronizing white liberal that I considered myself, but I had become instead a friend of these remarkable and beautiful people. As such, they trusted me, and in our weekly sessions in the little fisherman’s shack next to the Indian Ocean, which was my home at the time, I began to learn something about their lives. What I soon realized was that theatre had a much more significant role to play in those lives than just being a source of entertainment. … The black townships in and around Port Elizabeth were the targets of very intense and very brutal police activity. Anything remotely resembling a political conscience, or awareness, could lead to the disappearance of the man or woman involved. Thanks to the presence of police informers, it was a climate of fear and suffocating silence. In our talking in that little fisherman’s shack, we began to realize that the stage offered us a chance of breaking this conspiracy of silence, and allowing us to talk, albeit in code, about the things which were happening in the daily life of the township.

(Cited in McDonald and Walton 2002: 130–2)

Their first productions were adaptations of works such as Büchner’s Woyzeck and Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, setting them in a South African township to emphasize their relevance to daily life. In late 1966, they presented their first collaborative, improvisationally developed work, Fugard’s The Coat. Fugard has said that reading Grotowski helped him realize new ways to work. He sought

techniques for releasing the creative potential of the actor. … The basic device has been that of Challenge and Response. As a writer-director I have challenged, and the actors have responded, not intellectually or merely verbally but with a totality of Being that at the risk of sounding pretentious I can only liken to a form of Zen spontaneity.

(Fugard 1974: xi–xii)

The Serpent Players created three important collaborative works. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead focuses on the daily life of poor blacks who could not leave their registered township without proper papers, even to find work. The Island deals with a production of Antigone put on by two black prisoners on Robben Island, the infamous penal colony where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The third play, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, was inspired by the image of six police photographs of a man and a woman of different races having sexual intercourse. The play recounts what happens when a neighbor denounces the lovers.

A closer look at Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

These three plays are highly theatrical – indeed, metatheatrical – with sometimes humorous aspects, offering exceptional acting opportunities for John Kani and Winston Ntshona, the black actors who, together with Fugard, devised them. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead uses photography and play-acting to consider the ways that black township residents are forced to create and perform self-images in order to survive. Unlike Statements,where photography is used as a tool of political repression, here it is a means for the poor and oppressed to retain memories, record family relationships, create fantasies or fulfill dreams. As Styles the photographer says, “People would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man …” (Fugard 1974: 13). However, as the play shows, photography can also be used by the oppressed to outwit the oppressors.

As the play opens, Styles (performed by Kani), is reading a newspaper aloud and commenting to himself (and directly to the audience) on the stories and on his own experiences. We see that he is literate and clever. This 20-minute monologue permits the actor to take on many different roles: white and black, upper class and indigent, African and foreign. It is a tour de force of acting, while demonstrating that survival in the real world of apartheid requires a black person to perform many roles. We learn how Styles made a fool of his former boss, and how he realized that he must become self-employed to have self-respect. We also learn, in comic yet heroic detail, the obstacles he had to overcome to open the shop, from bureaucrats to cockroaches. The plot of the play, however, deals with the dilemma of Sizwe Bansi. In a flashback, Styles tells the audience how Sizwe (performed by Ntshona) came to his studio, seeking a photo of himself to send to his wife. Sizwe (who is illiterate) imagines writing a letter to his wife. In a flashback within the flashback, he enacts meeting his friend Buntu (also played by Kani). We learn that Sizwe’s permit to work in Johannesburg has been revoked. He will have to return home, where there are no jobs. Buntu goes into an alley to urinate, but encounters a dead body. The friends realize that they can solve Sizwe’s problem by exchanging his identity card (and its photo) with the dead man, who had permission to remain and work in the city. Of course, Sizwe will only remain “dead” as long as he remains out of trouble – if the police check his fingerprints, the masquerade will end. The play questions the supposed truthfulness of photography and suggests the necessity of play-acting in order to survive.

Plays such as this, created in a collaborative process during apartheid, serve as examples of how “witnessing” can both create art and encourage social justice and political change. Without the participation of the white Fugard, the voices of these black actors – speaking for the oppressed peoples of South Africa – could never have been heard. They continue to be revived all over the world today, suggesting that “bearing witness” to the past may also enable audiences to more fully understand the present.

Key references

Cima, G.A. (2009) “Resurrecting Sizwe Banzi is Dead (1972–2008): John Kani, Winston Ntshona, Athol Fugard and Postapartheid South Africa,” Theatre Survey 50: 91–118.

Clark, N.L. and Worger, W.H. (2004) South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited.

Davis, G. and Fuchs, A. (eds) (1996) Theatre and Change in South Africa, Amsterdam: Harwood.

Fugard, A. (1987) Selected Plays,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

--------- (1983) Notebooks: 1960–1977,ed. Mary Benson, Johannesburg: Ad. Donker.

--------- (1992) Playland … and Other Words, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Fugard, A., Kani, J. and Ntshona, W. (1974) Statements: Three Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gray, S. (ed.) (1982) Athol Fugard, Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill.

Hauptfleish, T. (1997) Theatre and Society in South Africa, Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik.

Hutchinson, Y. and Breitinger, E. (eds) (2000) History and Theatre in Africa, Bayreuth: African Studies Series and South African Theatre Journal, Bayreuth University.

Kruger, L. (1999) The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910, London: Routledge.

McDonald, M. (n.d.) “Space, Time, and Silence: The Craft of Athol Fugard,”unpublished ms.

--------- (2006) “The Return of Myth: Athol Fugard and the Classics,” Arion 14.2: 21–47.

McDonald, M., and Walton, J.M. (eds) (2002) Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, London: Methuen.

Price, R.M. and Rosberg, C.G. (eds) (1980) The Apartheid Regime: Political Power and Racial Domination, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Walder, D. (1987) “Introduction,” in A. Fugard, Selected Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walder, D. (2003) Athol Fugard, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House.

Wertheim, A. (2000) The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.

CASE STUDY: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon: David Garrick

By Gary Jay Williams

Theatre is a transitory art that thrives in the immediacy of the cultural moment that performer and audience share, most especially, it seems, at times of dynamic cultural change. Past performances cannot be hung in a museum or replayed from a score. To appreciate performances of the past, theatre historians turn to several kinds of primary sources – among them, pictorial representations. These pose both intriguing opportunities and problems. This case study offers examples of interpretive iconological analyses of such images, here informed by cultural studies. Iconology is used here, following Erwin Panofsky (1955), rather than “iconography,” a term that is often associated with the work of documentation, such as the thematic cataloging of paintings. This study uses iconology to designate the analysis of images to understand the cultural work the image was doing in its time. Among other things such analysis considers visual vocabularies and conventions, inherited or innovative, and the culture forces surrounding the artwork. This case study discusses four pictorial representations of the famous English actor David Garrick (1717–1779), with particular emphasis on the relation between these images and two culturally important issues for eighteenth-century England: sentimentalism; and England’s reinvention of its national identity. Garrick was a significant – and richly signifying – figure in England’s construction of itself.

As a gifted actor, manager, and playwright, Garrick dominated the British stage and became a focal point in British culture across the mid-century. In his debut, he astonished London as Shakespeare’s Richard III in a small, unlicensed theatre in 1741. His first biographer, Thomas Davies, wrote: “Mr. Garrick shone forth like theatrical Newton; he threw new light on elocution and acting; he banished ranting, bombast, and grimace, and restored nature, ease, simplicity and genuine humor” (Davies 1780: I, 43). All of fashionable London turned out to see him; poet Alexander Pope went three times. Garrick became the leading actor at Drury Lane Theatre, where, within a few years, he won extraordinary acclaim for his performances in his signature roles, tragic and comic, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar (1678–1707), and Abel Drugger in Garrick’s own adaptation of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1743). As artistic manager of Drury Lane from 1747 to 1776, Garrick was especially dedicated to Shakespeare, staging 26 of the plays and playing leading roles in 14. With his 1769 Shakespeare “Jubilee,” he made Stratford-upon-Avon a site for literary pilgrimages, capping his long promotion of Shakespeare as the national poet. In effect, this dedication to Shakespeare and to Enlightenment England was framed as one and the same.

His successes derived from his genius in the performance on stage and off as the new “natural man” of reason and moral sensibility. Easy and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, Garrick offered a nimble, fluent model of the century’s ideal of the rational mind and natural sensibility in the confident governance of the self. He planned his performances meticulously, blending physical and vocal grace with the virtuous responses of the Lockean “natural man,” which is to say, the self-possessed man of vital moral sympathy, in whose bosom was the potential for the virtue and the benevolence toward others that the new social order required (see the discussion on sentimentalism). Garrick, who had been born of a relatively poor family, thus offered the persona of a gentleman by nature more than by class, a persona seen in some of the key plays of the period, such as The Beaux’ Stratagem. This made the actor an appealing figure for an England still negotiating its transition from an old social order, which had its roots in the concept of a divinely ordained, absolutist monarchy, toward a relatively democratized monarchy and a new social order based on civic and personal virtue across the middle class. The middle, merchant class saw itself as the keeper of the moral and economic foundation of a stable society.

Garrick is an ideal figure for iconological studies; portraits of him have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions. The number of engraved portraits of him in the British Museum is exceeded only by those of Queen Victoria. The painting of him as Richard III by William Hogarth (1697–1774) is probably the most famous portrait of a Western actor ever done (Figure 1). But many other major English artists painted portraits of him, in his roles or in private life, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Johann Zoffany, Benjamin Wilson, Nathaniel Dance, and Angelica Kauffmann. Louis François Roubiliac did neoclassical busts of Garrick in marble and bronze, and images of him appeared on porcelain dishes, silver tea caddies, enameled boxes, and medallions. Garrick was arguably the West’s first modern commodified celebrity.

He himself did much to bring that about. He commissioned many paintings and prints of himself in his most successful roles, the prints being intended for wide circulation. Visiting Paris in 1764 as England’s most famous actor, he wrote back urgently requesting prints for distribution to friends and fans. He also commissioned portraits of himself in his off-stage role of the natural gentleman, a role that straddled old and new ideas of class.

Moreover, he conceived his performances with a visual acuity that intersected perfectly with trends in English art (Garrick was a knowledgeable art collector) and theatre. Garrick was among the first of a younger generation of actors with a freer physical style and more appeal for the eye than had been the case in the older, declamatory school, which emphasized classical, rhetorical music for the ear. He was, as Michael Wilson has suggested, well aware of the visual lexicon of painters of the time for portraying the passions. Applying this knowledge to his acting, Garrick brought a new visual legitimacy to the stage that aligned performance with the legitimacy of art. Hogarth expert Ronald Paulson makes an acute point about Hogarth’s painting of Garrick as Richard III: “If Hogarth tended to make his painting look like a play, Garrick made his play look like a painting” (Paulson 1992: III, 250). Maria Ines Aliverti offers the accessory observation that on stage in Garrick’s era, “actors affect the art and practice of making portraits … because they create images that generate portraits” (Aliverti 1997: 243). Garrick might be described as an iconic actor in his use of visually arresting poses, which he planned carefully – his acting choices being influenced by his media consciousness, as we shall see. He then reified these images by commissioning paintings and prints of them – the visual media of his time. In so doing, he advanced his career and inscribed his performances on the national social consciousness. Today, this kind of self-conscious use of the media is familiar in almost every corner of the world. Garrick’s entrepreneurialism might be compared to that of many modern stars, such as Prince, Madonna, or Michael Jackson (d. 2009).

Thirty Garricks

One comic color print made in England in the mid-nineteenth century serves both as an amusing index to the Garrick image industry and as an insight into the long English fascination with him. Garrick and Hogarth or The Artist Puzzled (1845) by R. Evan Sly was based on an amusing anecdote about a Hogarth–Garrick skirmish that had appeared in a London newspaper several years after Garrick’s death (Figure 3). Reportedly, every time Hogarth thought he had captured Garrick’s likeness in a painting session, the actor mischievously changed his expression; by all accounts, Garrick’s expressive face was famously mobile, never at rest, even off stage. Discovering the trick, Hogarth drove Garrick from his studio in a hail of brushes (Paulson 1971: 285–6). Sly used a clever mechanical device to capture the mercurial Garrick face. He placed a rotating wheel on the back of the print so the viewer could change the face of Garrick on Hogarth’s canvas and also the face on the seated actor, bringing into view 30 different likenesses of Garrick. These likenesses are, in fact, caricatures of other artists’ portraits of him. The faces in the sketches on the floor – caricatures of other Hogarth works – also change with a turn of the wheel. (You can see all the 30 likenesses on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website by visiting www.folger.edu and searching for “Garrick.”) The dog on the left, whose knowing look at the viewer heightens the joke on Hogarth, is borrowed by Sly from a Hogarth self-portrait with his own dog, Pug (1745).

The anecdote that Sly’s print illustrates is the kind of lore about celebrity actors of which the public in any era is fond. The public often wants to get a fix on the “real” identity of the actor who so ably constructs different personas. The print also might be seen as a joke on two famous image-makers. However, its main subject is Garrick as a protean actor (after the Greek myth of Proteus, the sea god who could change shapes at will).

The tale on which this print was based was probably an embellished one; its construction and repetition (there was a Gainsborough version) suggest some complexity in the fascination with Garrick. Behind the tale and the print was a paradox: the figure who had become a national exemplar as a natural gentleman was an actor, a very adroit member of a profession that was historically suspect, morally and socially. Eighteenth-century English audiences with a hunger for outward signs of interior moral sincerity were enthralled with a talented professional who was skilled in creating meticulous semblances of sincerity. Could an actor be a natural, virtuous gentleman? The question went to both class and morality. Horace Walpole seems to have been sniping at Garrick for class jumping when he warned his friend Sir Horace Mann, the British Envoy in Florence, “Be a little on your guard, remember he is an actor” (Shawe-Taylor 2003: 11). The English had been through a war against the art and the whole theatre profession led by the 1698 book by the cleric, Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Collier had accused the theatre of threatening the moral welfare of the nation. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele had then set out the moral majority program for a national theatre of virtue in their newspapers and provided plays for it.

Appealing as Garrick was, in this moral climate the fascination with his face-changing skill betrays some anxiety about both the class and the ostensible moral center of the actor: could an actor adroit with images be a national model of the sincere, natural, virtuous man? In addition, there was not only Garrick the meticulous actor, but also Garrick the adroit manager of many media images of himself in prints and paintings. The late twentieth century offers an instructive comparison. The American public was similarly intrigued when an attractive Hollywood actor became the President of the U.S.A. and a spokesperson for the conservative right. Was Ronald Reagan acting, or was he sincere? How much of the public impression of him was the result of clever stage management of his image in the media? How much of his presidential persona was created by the public as they conflated Reagan and the heroic film roles he played? David Garrick managed to perform his roles and himself successfully. Sixty-six years after Garrick’s death, Sly’s print could still play broadly with the legend of the famous image-maker.

Four Richards III

In Hogarth’s Mr. Garrick as Richard III, there is Garrick and more. Garrick debuted in 1741 in the Shakespearean role, as compelling a protean character as any in Western drama. Plotting his ascent from Duke of Gloucester to King of England, Richard vows (in an earlier Shakespeare play that includes him) to deceive everyone like a good actor and to kill anyone between himself and the throne:

His deception and murders bring him to the throne, but they finally result in his overthrow and death in battle at the hands of the decent Earl of Richmond, Henry Tudor.

Hogarth’s painting represents the moment when, on the night before the battle, Richard wakes in his tent from a dream in which he has been visited by the ten souls of those he killed, including his king, his brother, his two young nephews, and his wife. Awaking terrified, he cries out, “Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! / Have mercy, Jesu! – Soft, I did but dream. / O coward conscience, how doest thou afflict me?” (Richard III, Act V, sc. 5: 131–3). The adaptation of the play by Colley Cibber that Garrick used stressed Richard’s villainy heavily, and, in this scene, Cibber added the ghosts’ demand that Richard “wake in all the hells of guilt,” which he does, though he goes on to fight to his death.

For a mid-eighteenth-century English audience, this anguished recognition of his sins by this, the most evil of men, would have been a critical moral turn, and Garrick turned it into a moral awakening of great visual power, meticulously arranged. Arthur Murphy, a contemporary playwright and Garrick biographer, wrote, “His soliloquy in the tent scene discovered the inward man [italics added],” a code phrase in England’s age of moral sensibility signifying the natural, inner potential for good in humankind. Hogarth renders Richard’s expression of horror in the wide eyes that stare out over the shoulder of the viewer of the portrait and in the outstretched arm and extended fingers. However, Hogarth does not render Garrick’s face with individualized particularity, nor are the figure and costume in the more natural mode of that in his earlier theatrical paintings of The Beggar’s Opera (1728–1729). Rather, the painting of Garrick as Richard III is rendering the theatrical moment in the grand manner of history painting, a genre in which Hogarth had worked in the previous decade. Hogarth took his general composition from Le Brun’s Tent of Darius; the voluminous flowing robes and other fabrics were painterly strokes to convey nobility. The painting’s huge size – over eight feet long and six feet high – is in the mode of history painting, and here it magnifies and ennobles the figure of King Richard. This Richard is, then, a combination of four Richards III: the Richard of Garrick – meticulous master of the morally iconic moment for the age of sensibility; the Richard of English history; the Richard of Shakespeare; the great national poet (whom Garrick was promoting in his playhouse); and the Richard of Hogarth, by then the great English artist. Each presence complements the other. Together they constitute a national narrative aspiring to the status of myth. The buyer, Thomas (William?) Duncombe, paid 200 pounds (sterling) for the painting, more than had ever been paid to an English painter for a portrait (Paulson 1992: 3, 256–7). The engraving that followed shortly after served the interests of both Garrick and Hogarth. Painting and print inspired a new vogue of theatrical portraiture. Analyzing the work and its cultural valences today, we can see not only a vestige of Garrick’s iconic performance but the ways in which the image was speaking from, and to the English people’s construction of their national identity in the eighteenth century.

Two rivals, two prints

Many of Garrick’s other performances resulted in images suitable for framing, including those of his Hamlet and Lear, considered briefly here (Figures 4 and 5). James McArdell did mezzotints of him in these roles. Published in 1754 and 1761, respectively, they were based on paintings (both lost) by Benjamin Wilson (1722–1788). (Zoffany also painted the same scene from Hamlet.) Both images seem to aspire to the effects of Hogarth’s hugely successful portrait of Garrick as Richard III. Both advance Garrick’s moral agenda. Collaboration among actor, painter, and printmaker on both is very probable.

The very method of these prints – the mezzotint – represented a new media technology. A special engraving tool was used to create surface texturing on the paper that allowed inking in gradations of shading and subtle chiaroscuro effects. This allowed the capturing of subtler, more emotional facial expression or more emotionally charged landscapes. Both prints also served Garrick’s media campaign. Spranger Barry, the “silver-tongued” actor who was a close competitor of Garrick, was playing these same roles at the rival theatre, Covent Garden, at about the time that these Garrick images were published – likely in order to imprint Garrick’s triumph in these roles in the public mind.

Garrick had taken special visual care with both scenes. He was proud of the scene from Hamlet, performing it in private for friends. He reportedly used a mechanical wig that he could manipulate to make his hair rise in fright, the better to capture scientifically Hamlet’s horror. The effect seems to be apparent in McArdell’s print (Figure 4). The print is corroborated by a detailed description of the scene by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who saw a performance. Garrick’s sentimentalized Lear, seen in Figure 5, is frail and vulnerable in the storm scene. Consistent with the Nahum Tate adaptation that Garrick used, his Lear is the sentimentalized father of the family whose demise is tragic in the domestic sphere, that sphere where eighteenth-century Britain had now relocated its national moral center. Tate has Cordelia live to marry Edgar, assuring succession to the throne and a stable future for kingdom and family more than Shakespeare’s play does. Both of McArdell’s prints were among those Garrick sought supplies of for distribution to friends in Paris.

In summary, this case study provides examples of theatre iconology that reads pictorial representations not only for what they might tell us as depictions of performance but for what they tell us about the social formations in which the actor and audience, and painter and viewer all participated. Garrick’s performances and the making of the theatrical images of him are parts of a large historical picture, albeit one in which his uses of the media of his time are very recognizable today.

Key References

Audio-visual resources

For many images of David Garrick from the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibit, “David Garrick (1717–1779) A Theatrical Life,” go to www.folger.edu and search for “Garrick.”

Shakespeare Illustrated. Website in progress by Harry Rusche on nineteenth-century paintings, criticism, and productions, listing and reproducing illustrations by play: http://shakespeare.emory.edu/illustrated_index.cfm.

Books and articles

Aliverti, M.I. (1997) “Major portraits and minor series in eighteenth century theatrical portraiture,” Theatre Research International 22: 234–54.

Balme, C.B. (1997) “Interpreting the pictorial record: theatre iconography and the referential dilemma,” Theatre Research International 22: 190–201. (This issue is devoted to articles exploring different possibilities and problems in pictorial analysis.)

Barthes, R. (1973; 1st edn 1957) Mythologies, London: Paladin.

Davies, T. (1780) Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. (2 vols), London: Thomas Davies.

Diderot, D. (1957) The Paradox of Acting [c.1778], trans. W.H. Pollock, New York: Hill and Wang.

Greenblatt, S. (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.

Highfill, P., Jr. and Burnim, K.A. (eds) (1978) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, Vol. 6, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (The Garrick entry includes an annotated iconography of Garrick portraits.)

Lennox-Boyd, C. and Shaw, G. (1994) Theatre: The Age of Garrick, London: Christopher Lennox-Boyd. (English mezzotints from the collection of the Hon. Christopher Lennox-Boyd, published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Courtauld Institute Galleries.)

Mander, R. and Mitchenson, J. (1980) Guide to the Maugham Collection of Theatrical Paintings, London: Heinemann and the National Theatre. (Somerset Maugham’s collection, which he gave to London’s National Theatre, includes several important Garrick paintings.)

Panofsky, E. (1955) “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York: Garden City.

Paulson, R. (1971) Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (2 vols), New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Paulson, R. (1992) Hogarth (3 vols), New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Shawe-Taylor, D. (2003) Every Look Speaks, Portraits of David Garrick, Bath: Holbourne Museum. (Catalog for the Exhibit at the Holbourne Museum of Art, Bath, England.)

Wilson, M.S. (1990) “Garrick, iconic acting, and the ideologies of theatrical portraiture,” Word and Image 6: 368–94.

CASE STUDY: Global Shakespeare

By Gary Jay Williams (2006, updated 2015)

What country, friends, is this?

(Twelfth Night 1.2)

In his 1966 comedy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard (1937–) provided not only an ironic modern view of the two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, showing them adrift and helpless amidst the power game in Denmark. Stoppard also tweaked the nose of the high-brow, establishment Shakespeare culture. But by the end of the twentieth century, the value of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) as cultural capital had reached global proportions. He had name recognition matched perhaps only by Elvis Presley or Coca-Cola™. Shakespeare had become – it should give one pause to consider – the most performed playwright on the planet. The plays have been translated into every major language. In 2015, a Google search resulted in 132 million Shakespearean entries. The scholarly World Shakespeare Bibliography Online, with coverage representing nearly every country in the world, now contains close to 144,000 annotated entries for scholarly books, articles, editions of the plays, and stage and film productions since 1961, with 5,000 new entries being added every year.

Consider a few of the Shakespearean enterprises in the last 30 years. In Tokyo, the Panasonic Globe Theatre, a rough evocation of Shakespeare’s, was built in 1988 to house the visiting Royal Shakespeare Company, touring in that decade as no company in the history of the theatre had ever toured. In 1990, 17 different productions of Hamlet were done in Tokyo, many of them at the new Globe. In China in 1986, 28 different productions of 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were done in China’s first Shakespeare Festival. (He had been banned during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.) In London in 1997, a scrupulous replica of the Globe was built on the South Bank, validated by recent excavations there of the remains of the original Globe and the nearby Rose Theatre, where some of Shakespeare’s plays were also performed. (See Figure 1.) The Rose ruins were then encased for public viewing in a dark chamber beneath a new office building, like the crypt of St. Peter.

In the United States, a replica of the Blackfriars Theatre, the indoor theatre where Shakespeare’s company served the wealthy elite of London, was built not long after in the mountains of Virginia. A replica of the Rose is planned for Massachusetts. Over 100 American theatres are currently devoted primarily to Shakespeare. Several complete plays have been performed on websites and at least one has been adapted for Twitter. At least 25 major Shakespeare films were made in these years in Brazil, Britain, India, Japan, South Africa, and the United States, all designed for major markets. They include six directed by, and starring, British actor-director, Kenneth Branagh (1960–) – including Henry V and Hamlet; Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995), in which Ian McKellen (1939–) rendered Richard as a louche Adolf Hitler; Julie Taymor’s visually extravagant Titus (1999) (Rothwell 1999: 308–40); and Josh Whedon’s 2013 modern-dress adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. This count does not include the BBC filming of the complete plays for television (1978–1984), or derivatives such as Shakespeare in Love (1998).

All of this could be claimed as evidence of Shakespeare’s universality, of the ease with which his plays (ostensibly) leap all historical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Such claims are often accompanied by the citation of the pretty line by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson: “He was not for an age, but for all time!” Jonson might be said to have been thinking rather imperially, for the two lines that precede it are: “Triumph, my Britain, thou has one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.” Of course, when Jonson wrote those lines for his eulogizing poem in the First Folio (the 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s plays), he could not have imagined a world as culturally diverse and as interlocked as it is today, nearly four centuries later. The term “universality” wants some critical reflection.

As with Jonson, the idea of Shakespeare’s universality was framed and promoted by English-speakers, with the English language in mind. It also belongs to a Western tradition of aesthetics concentrating on art’s transcendent values. Shakespeare’s presence as an international writer has been the result not only of the power of his poetry but of the wealth and military power of his sponsors. Even in the West, each age and nation has, to a considerable degree, reinvented the Shakespeare it needed. This is especially evident in the always-public sphere of the theatre, as is clear from any culturally informed performance history of any one of the plays, from Hamlet to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gary Taylor, culturally astute editor of Shakespeare’s plays, reveals the same thing in his history of the editing and literary criticism of the plays in the West (Taylor 1989: Chapters 1–6). This is not to debunk Shakespeare. To be sure, the poetry of the plays, their characters, their complex dialectics on the human condition and their ambiguities have proven irresistibly rich and malleable for reinventing. But this is to call attention to our always ongoing negotiations with his work, especially in the theatre. A facile notion of Shakespeare’s universality will not help us to fully understand the phenomenon of globalized Shakespeare.

Globalized Shakespeare is, among other things, a wide-screen version of Shakespeare’s long-standing presence as cultural capital, a readily recognized legacy with which nations, corporations, and foundations want to be associated. Globalized Shakespeare is the marketable prestige commodity, Shakespeare™, ready to be packaged and distributed by global capitalism through all its technological platforms. Global Shakespeare is Western modernity, to which developing nations aspire. Global Shakespeare is sometimes a problematic byproduct of colonialism.

Dependably, original artists in theatre and film, in their negotiations with Shakespeare, have drawn attention to these very issues in a shrinking world in which there are crossings of all kinds of boundaries and barriers – racial, national, cultural, and linguistic. As early as 1965, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s film, Shakespeare Wallah, told the story of a British theatre company touring in India with Shakespeare’s plays, validating British authority at the very time of the demise of the British Empire and the rise of the Indian film industry. To take the issue of images of commodified Shakespeare, they are seen everywhere in Baz Luhrmann’s film, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). In its hypermodern “Verona Beach,” advertisements borrow Shakespearean lines (“Out Damned Spot Cleaners”). Romeo meets his friends in a poolhall called the Globe; and there is even “product placement,” with a copy of the Yale Shakespeare resting on Juliet’s nightstand. Luhrmann renders the beginning and ending of the play in a “News at Eleven” format, showing the tragedy being thoroughly mediatized for consumption. The double suicide will be off the screen in time for the Late Night Show. Early in the film, Romeo and his friends visit a decaying seaside amusement center. There, at the edge of the sand, are the ruins of an old proscenium theatre, remnant of an older medium whose style of heroic representation is no long viable in this Verona. Romeo’s friend, the poetic Mercutio, dies there.

This case study now turns to Shakespearean translations, editions, and electronic conversions. It then examines intercultural productions of the plays and the issues these have raised. This case study concludes with a section on postcolonial approaches to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the colonial resonance of which connects it to the discussion of intercultural theatre.

Shakespeare in other words

At the outset, let it be said that any production of a Shakespearean play might be described as a “translation.” Theatrical productions speak many languages besides that of the text, including the visual languages of scenery, costumes, properties, gesture and facial expression, the languages of voices and music, and the language of the movement of the body in space. Productions in the twentieth century up to the 1960s usually sought to give the impression of seamless aesthetic harmony between the text and the scenic vocabulary. Productions thereafter, especially from the 1980s to the present, have, to varying degrees, registered dissonances and ruptures. In the more aggressively contemporary productions, this strategy reflects a suspicion of a harmonized, unified Shakespeare, impermeable to troubling contemporary questions. In a production, the language of the text is one of many the playgoer is processing.

Then again, we cannot really speak of the text of a Shakespeare play. The idea of a definitive text of each play was challenged in the late 1970s by a new generation of Shakespeare scholars, including Steven Urkowitz, Gary Taylor, Michael Warren, and Grace Ioppolo. They stressed the differences among the earliest editions of some of the plays (half of which were published in two or more versions between the 1590s and the 1620s). Previous editors had taken it as an imperative to use one early version of a play as a master text and take “variants” from any other version(s) to compile a conflated edition for modern readers, one that ostensibly best represented the master’s voice. But the earliest texts of King Lear, the 1608 “quarto” edition of the play (a small, inexpensive paperback at the time) and the version in the 1623 folio (an expensive large-format, deluxe collection of 36 of the plays), are different in substantive ways. For example, the 1608 edition has 300 lines (including one whole scene) that are not in the 1623 version, and the 1623 version has 100 lines not in the 1608 edition. Both versions have virtues; both are Shakespeare’s. It was not that Shakespeare could not make up his mind, as one younger scholar remarked, but that he made it up twice. (The existence of multiple versions of a play text is not an uncommon result of modern theatre practice; see the discussion of Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, in Gaskell 1978: 245–62, or of Terayama Shūji’s La Marie-Vison in Sorgenfrei, 2005: 88–94 and 127–33.) Editions and productions of King Lear customarily have conflated the two versions of the play, offering in effect a version of it that no audience in Shakespeare’s time ever read or saw performed. There are also substantive differences between the early surviving texts of other Shakespeare plays. Any idea of an unstable text was very disturbing to those who required one true text of the one true Shakespeare. The new views were disseminated in the 1980s in the prestigious new Oxford Shakespeare editions, under the leadership of eminent Shakespearean Stanley Wells. Shortly after, the Oxford principles were packaged into W.W. Norton’s widely used textbook edition of the complete works. This included three versions of King Lear – quarto, first folio, and a modern conflation, a do-it-yourself King Lear kit for college backpacks.

Destabilized Shakespeare in print is only a part of a larger story. As film directors exploited the visual vocabularies of film more imaginatively, Shakespeare’s words were, in effect, decentered; images were, at the very least, as important. (It could be argued that this begins in nineteenth-century theatre’s romantic pictorialism.) Filmed Shakespeare, on videotape and compact discs, became widely available. By the turn of the century, it was possible to access the play texts from multiple online sources. (See our website bibliography.) Hypertext versions, on compact discs and online, allowed users to construct their own textual experience, to compare quartos and folios, to read a play while listening to music inspired by it, or to put scenes from past productions alongside the text. (See the websites Internet Shakespeare Editions at http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/index.html and The Interactive Shakespeare Project at http://college.holycross.edu/projects/isp/). In these environments, Shakespeare’s texts have become as electronically fluid as any other text in the cybersphere, at once ever accessible, ever permeable, ever malleable. In these media, Shakespeare has become not only disseminated more widely than ever but more democratically – horizontally, rather than from the top down.

Shakespeare’s translation into foreign languages always involves cultural adaptation. As Dennis Kennedy points out in his Foreign Shakespeare, Shakespeare in translation is always at a cultural remove from the Shakespeare that the Anglophone world claims is “universal” (Kennedy 1993: 2). Kennedy also makes the point that the linguistic remove of foreign Shakespeare, together with the absence of literary protectionism that has surrounded Shakespeare in English, may account in part for the interpretive freedoms of foreign directors (1993: 4–6).

For German-speaking peoples, the voice of Shakespeare from the early nineteenth century to the present, with a few exceptions, has been the voice of their German romantic poets, August W. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. Their combined translations (1839–1840) acquired the status of an original, “der deutsche Shakespeare” (Hortmann 1998: 86). Few translations of any classic have had so long a shelf life. (The conventional wisdom is that new translations of the classics are necessary with every new generation.) In communist East Germany in the 1970s, where Marxist readings of Shakespeare prevailed, Maik Hamburger’s modern German translations were, Wilhelm Hortmann writes, “direct, dramatic, precise,” designed for actors and for “the immediacy of actional impact,” in the spirit of Brecht (1998: 248). In 1990, director and playwright Heiner Müller staged a seven-hour Hamlet/maschine at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, a hybrid of Shakespeare’s play and Müller’s own Hamletmachine (1977). Müller’s production came amid the fall of communism and presented an ineffectual Hamlet who was facing a worn-out Europe, more irrevocably in ruins than it had been at the end of World War II (Hamburger 1998: 428–434). The opening lines of Müller’s own play, now inserted into Shakespeare’s, are: “I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me” (Müller 1984: 53).

Directors of Shakespeare in France, Japan, and Russia have sought out new translations congenial to their approaches. In 1946, French director Jean-Louis Barrault was using André Gide’s translation of Hamlet in search of some rapport between Shakespearean language and classical French taste. By 1974, classical French would have been wholly inappropriate for Peter Brook’s approach to Timon of Athens. Producing Timon in Paris for his International Center for Theatre Research, Brook directed Shakespeare’s play as a contemporary fable of a modern, young affluent liberal whose world has collapsed. He staged it simply and in the barren shell of an abandoned Victorian theatre, itself a symbol of the decline of the West. Brook commissioned film writer Jean-Claude Carrière to prepare a text in modern French, with the aim of making Shakespeare’s play as accessible to a contemporary French audience as a contemporary French play would be. The translation was clear and economical to the point of being prosaic, with a few select passages in verse (Williams 1979: 182–4).

Brook saw his French project as a corrective to the Anglocentric view of universal Shakespeare. In a foreign translation, some poetry will be lost. But the fact is that Shakespeare translated into a modern foreign language is more accessible to its audience than it is in King James English for modern English-speaking audiences. Dennis Kennedy makes this point about the Schlegel-Tieck translations, noting that they are still “infinitely closer to the language spoken on the street in Berlin or Zurich or Vienna than Shakespeare’s language is to that of London or Los Angeles or Melbourne” (Kennedy 1993: 5). Hearing Boris Pasternak’s idiomatic Russian translation of Hamlet (1939), another translator said: “We have never been so intimately acquainted with the real persons of great tragedy. We had not even known that it was possible to be so closely acquainted with them” (Golub 1993: 159). (Pasternak’s translation was also used by Grigory Kozintsev in his 1964 film of the play.)

When Yury Lyubimov staged Hamlet in 1971 at Moscow’s Taganka Theatre in the post-Stalin era (it played over a nine-year period, 1971–1980), he, too, used Boris Pasternak’s translation. Inherent in this translation is Pasternak’s concept of a suffering, Christ-like Hamlet, called to a fate beyond his control but enduring it with dignity. In Lyubimov’s production, Pasternak’s translation took on a localized, contemporary dimension. Hamlet was played by Vladimir Vysotsky, who had been chronicling the difficulties of life in the Soviet Union since the 1960s in his songs and poems. This Hamlet, writes Spencer Golub, “recognized that in this life of struggle, the prisoner is punished for acting independently and for speaking his thoughts aloud” (Golub 1993: 162).

Japan’s long interest in Shakespeare is tied in some part to the anxious formation of its national identity vis à vis the West. Shakespeare was imported in the Meiji era in the last half of the nineteenth century, when Japan was opening to Western influences. The first versions were shimpa adaptations meant to glorify Japan’s new colonial enterprise. For example, a version of Othello dealt with the annexation of Taiwan. These adaptations were based not on Shakespeare’s texts, but on Charles Lamb’s story summaries. Translations of Shakespeare began to appear early in the twentieth century, concurrent with the growth of the shingeki companies who were attempting to establish a modern, Western-influenced Japanese theatre, distinct from the traditions of nō and kabuki. Tsubouchi Shōyō’s translations, the last volumes of which were published in 1928, were widely used. James R. Brandon points out that Japanese translations were valorized by claims of being faithful to Shakespeare, bringing Western text-centered thinking to Japan, where the kabuki tradition, by contrast, allowed the actor considerable freedom (Brandon 2001: 43). At Waseda University, the Tsoubouchi Shōyō Memorial Library was built in 1928 featuring a façade based on an Elizabethan theatre; ironically, tucked behind the stage of this Western icon was, and still is a museum of various Japanese traditional and modern performance genres, including kabuki. After World War II, interest in Shakespeare grew, cultivated by the universities. Assimilating Shakespeare was seen as important to Japan’s cultural profile as a Western, modernized culture. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Japan saw a mounting wave of important Shakespearean productions, mainstream and then experimental.

Translating Shakespeare’s language into Japanese is difficult by any account. In the 1970s, after the youth movements of the 1960s and as Japan’s little theatre movement was developing, Odashima Yūshi (1930–) translated the plays into modern Japanese, treating them as though they were contemporary Japanese dramas (Senda 1998a: 18–19). Even opponents of this modernizing, such as translator and scholar Anzai Tetsuo, acknowledged the difficulties of translating Shakespeare. To take one example, while Japanese can be powerful for emotionally expressive passages, the delivery of such passages in Japanese requires a deliberate stress on words and many pauses (which kabuki theatre capitalizes on), and this requires more time than their delivery in English (Anzai 1998: 124–6).

It was probably in part to compensate for the translation dilemma that by the 1980s some Japanese directors were turning more to the theatre’s visual resources for staging Shakespeare. Kurosawa Akira’s films were the prelude to this, especially his internationally admired version of Macbeth, under the title (in English), The Throne of Blood (1957). The most notable stage examples were the visually complex productions of Ninagawa Yukio (1935–), a major figure in experimental and political theatre of the 1960s and early 1970s, who thereafter had many commercial successes. He set what he called the Ninagawa Macbeth (1980) in the Japan of the late sixteenth century, the era of samurai warriors, using scrupulously historical costumes, as had Kurosawa (Figure 2). He also used Odashima’s modern translation. Ninagawa’s setting was a full-stage version of the small Buddhist altar (butsudan) used in Japanese homes for prayers for the dead. The play took place inside of the oversize altar. Lady Macbeth was played by a female, but male impersonators in the kabuki tradition (onnagata) played the three witches, lending them sexual ambiguity. The porter was played as a laughable kabuki figure. Cherry petals fell in the scene when Burnam Wood advanced on Dunsinane. Critic Senda Akihiko notes that the altar, the blossoms (symbolizing both beauty and ephemerality for the Japanese), and the characterization of Macbeth as a sullen revolutionary who comes to power in a period of social upheaval signaled a contemporary political motif in Ninagawa’s staging. The nation and Ninagawa in particular had been horrified to learn, when the New Left youth movement collapsed in a military confrontation in 1972, that Japan’s young, idealistic revolutionaries had lynched eleven of their own. The Ninagawa Macbeth was, Senda writes, “a requiem for the dead of his generation, who had failed in their struggle against the system” (Senda 1998a: 233; Senda 1998b: 23–5). Ninagawa’s visual vocabulary was a key part of his attempt to render the Shakespearean play about a Scottish king in a traditional Japanese world, albeit with contemporary Japanese overtones. There was some disagreement over whether Ninagawa’s staging was simply a beautiful “Japanning” of Shakespeare, made for international export. Ninagawa’s production was exported to the Edinburgh Festival in 1985 and the Royal National Theatre in London in 1987, where surely some of the appeal to Western audiences was seeing Shakespeare in the exotic images of samurai Japan.

Shakespeare in other worlds

Intercultural productions of Shakespeare – the Ninagawa Macbeth is one example – have presented wonders and dilemmas amid globalization. Intercultural theatre may be defined as the practice in which theatre artists use the texts, acting styles, music, costumes, masks, dance, or scenic vocabularies of one culture – the “source culture” – and adapt and modify them to be accessible to audiences of another culture – the “target culture.” For some, this has offered prospects of artistic exploration and improved understanding across cultural borders. For others, when a Western director adapts for Western audiences a text that is outside of the European or American traditions or appropriates non-European/American performance modes for the staging of Western classics, this raises the specter of colonialist exploitation. Such “appropriations” may seriously misrepresent both the theatre and the culture of the source culture, rendering the source culture as the exotic “Other” (explained further below). Peter Brook’s staging of an adaptation of the Indian epic the Mahabharata (1985), which toured the world, incurred this type of criticism. Intercultural productions of other kinds, like Ninagawa’s, have raised other kinds of questions, as we shall see. Among other prominent Western directors of intercultural productions in the 1980s and 1990s were Ariane Mnouchkine (1940–) and Eugenio Barba (1936–).

In the 1980s, Ariane Mnouchkine borrowed, impressionistically, from the various traditional Asian theatres, including kabuki and nō theatre, for her staging of three of Shakespeare’s history plays. She set her Twelfth Night in India and drew impressionistically from Balinese and kathakali performance traditions. Her productions, then and now, evolve in lengthy collaborative company processes with her resident company, the Théâtre du Soleil, which in the 1980s enjoyed large endowments from France’s socialist government. They are done on a vast stage created in an old cartridge factory on the outskirts of Paris.

Mnouchkine believes that Shakespeare’s plays have been poorly served by Western realist traditions, from Shakespeare’s time forward. For her, Asian theatre forms offered vocabularies for doing theatre’s work of transforming reality into metaphor and achieving an intensity of effect that she believes impossible in Western realism. Her aim has been to vivify the Elizabethan plays with ceremonial size, stylized acting, dance, and music. In her productions of Shakespeare’s history plays, the courtiers were dressed in rich costumes that combined features of both Elizabeth and seventeenth-century Japanese court dress. Their faces were whitened or masked in styles influenced by kabuki or nō theatre. In the opening scenes of both Henry IV and Richard II, these courtiers entered running on to the kabuki-like stage from ramps – somewhat like the kabuki hanamichi – and they circled the large stage, samurai swords held high. In Richard II, when the court received the news of old John of Gaunt’s death (2.1.149–151), King Richard, dressed in an elegant white costume reminiscent of the heron in the famous nō play Sagi, did a ritualized high leap of power amid his flanking lords (Figure 3). When the king intervened in the scene of the trial by combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke (1.3) to banish both lords, they lay prostrate on the ground at his feet. The text, in Mnouchkine’s own translation, was, Adrian Kiernander notes, “declaimed rhythmically and at high volume rather than just spoken,” and more often than not it was delivered directly to the audience (Kiernander 1993: 113). In these ways, Mnouchkine hoped to avoid the usual absorption in individual psychology. Characters were to be defined in clear, precise visual strokes, the better to convey an archetypal world. Rendering Shakespeare as “our contemporary,” in any explicit way has not been Mnouchkine’s goal.

The Ninagawa Macbeth and Suzuki’s The Tale of Lear (1988 and after) present very different Japanese uses of Shakespeare. Suzuki’s best known version cut King Lear to about 100 minutes of playing time and, in effect, set the play in two intersecting/conflicting frames. One frame was the fantasy of an old man in a hospital or perhaps a nursing home, perhaps placed there by his daughters. Having read the play, he now identifies with Lear and acts out the play. As Takahashi Yasunari recounts the production, a nurse, picking up the playbook from the floor, begins to read it silently. The old man enacts the play, she reads, sometimes in tandem, mostly not. She often cackles at what normally would be grim or tragic moments. Music from Handel and Tchaikovsky is sometimes heard. For the famous Dover scene, in which Lear is seen to be mad (“Let me have a surgeon, I am cut to the brains”), the nurse, functioning like Lear’s fool, wheels this Lear figure on stage in a hospital trash cart. From there he delivers his lines, “When we are born we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (4.5.172–173). When Lear dies, the nurse finishes her book at the same time, bursting into unstoppable laughter (Takahashi 2001: 113–18).

This is a landscape reminiscent of Beckett, or of Jan Kott’s Beckettian reading of King Lear, which compares it to Beckett’s Endgame for its description of the suffering of humanity in a world without hope of meaning and redemption(Kott 1964: 87–124). In Suzuki’s contrasting frames of the old man’s enactment and the nurse’s laughter, Takahashi found “a dramaturgy that can both move us towards a tragic emotion and at the same time, cast a cold eye on it” (2001: 116). In the Ninagawa Macbeth, the Japanese director would seem to have used the Western text to seek a unifying, archetypal tragic resonance. But in The Tale of Lear, Suzuki sought a Western tragic resonance in order to bring audiences to question its premises. Both productions toured internationally, Ninagawa’s with a Japanese cast, performing in Edinburgh and London. One version of Suzuki’s adaptation toured North America with an American cast performing in English. The version performed in London was played by a Japanese cast in Japanese.

Let us review the issues that intercultural Shakespearean productions raise. The debate over these has been extensive. (See, for example, Phillip B. Zarrilli’s discussion of a kathakali King Lear – Zarrilli 1992: 16–40.) Many Western Shakespeareans believe that the human complexities of Shakespeare’s plays, available through their poetic language, are being lost amid the emphasis on borrowed visual vocabularies from various Eastern theatres. Critics from the cultures being borrowed from suggest that when the appropriated elements from the source culture are modified to be accessible to the target culture, these elements become distorted, and cultural differences, so far from being available, are actually erased. This makes it questionable to describe such productions as improving cross-cultural understandings. Are these productions more than the global marketing of the exotic? What meanings are available (or not) to the target audiences? For a Western audience in Paris or Los Angeles in the late twentieth century, what is the signified behind the signifiers borrowed by Mnouchkine from nō and kabuki? And how do such audiences relate these to the worlds in which Shakespeare’s plays are set? Doesn’t all theatre have to be local? Some critics believe the West’s mining of the East is a symptom of Western exhaustion. To take one final issue, Ninagawa’s Japanese Macbeth seems to have sought a unifying, archetypal tragic resonance while Suzuki’s The Tale of Lear was clearly calling into question the possibility of the classical Western tragic vision. But both were played for international audiences. This suggests that very different kinds of intercultural experience are available and points to the danger of generalizations about the reception of such productions.

Given the increasing cross-cultural contact that globalization is likely to continue to bring, the debate over intercultural Shakespeare is likely to continue.

The Tempest and colonialism

In writing The Tempest (1610–1611), was Shakespeare bringing echoes of British imperialism to the Globe? It is possible that his imagination was nourished, in some part, by a contemporary account by William Strachey of a hurricane striking a British fleet headed for the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1609, leaving one ship wrecked on an island in the Bermudas and its survivors struggling to govern themselves. Did Jacobean audiences see Prospero’s slave, Caliban, as a native of America? The answer is probably not. While Shakespeare may well have read Strachey’s account, the imaginary geography of Prospero’s island seems to be somewhere between Milan (from which the play tells us that Prospero was exiled) and Algiers (from which, Prospero says, Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, was banished). What can be said is that this play is charged with a consciousness of England’s move under James I from nation toward empire in the early 1600s and questions about power. Certainly from the perspective of the last half century, The Tempest seems to prefigure the painful issues of colonization.

This resonance came to the forefront for modern critics, poets, and directors as the hold of European nations over many colonies worldwide was rapidly dissolving in the 1960s when these colonies were seeking self-governance. Postcolonial criticism has had much interest in Prospero, the aristocrat who rules by coercive magic, and in Prospero’s enforced servants: Ariel, the fabulous “airy spirit” who earns his freedom from Prospero, and Caliban, the disturbing, unruly creature of the cave, in rebellion against Prospero. Whoever Caliban was to Jacobeans, he has long intrigued artists, poets, directors, playwrights, and critics, as Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan have shown in their study of him (Vaughan and Vaughan 1991).

Postcolonial critics would agree with Walter Cohen’s assessment that “The Tempest uncovers, perhaps despite itself, the racist and imperial bases of English nationalism” (Cohen 1985: 401). But the play has had symbolic relevance for postcolonialism in general. Ariel and Caliban were used as metaphors for oppressed peoples of the world in Octave Mannoi’s 1964 study of colonization and revolt in Madagascar. In Latin America, where Shakespeare has not been much present, “Arielism” has been an important anticolonialist concept, a dream of self-realization referring, of course, to Ariel, the bright native spirit of the island who yearns for his liberty from Prospero and who is the antithesis of the earth-bound Caliban. Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), poet, playwright, essayist, and politician born in Martinique in the Caribbean, reworked The Tempest in 1969 as “an adaptation for a black theatre.” Césaire was a progenitor of Negritude, a diasporic black pride movement, and internationally known for his anticolonialism. His Ariel is a mulatto slave and his Caliban a black slave whose sentiments are much like those of a radical black intelligentsia educated under colonialism: “Prospero, you’re a great magician: / you’re an old hand at deception. / … Underdeveloped, in your words, undercompetent / that’s how you made me see myself” (Césaire 2002: 61–2). In Césaire’s ending, Prospero remains on the island with Caliban.

Shakespeare’s Caliban has been played as black, although he probably was not so conceived. Prospero’s line “This thing of darkness / I acknowledge mine” (5.1.278–279), goes deeper than pigmentation. To the postcolonial critic, this line might suggest colonialism’s production of the Other. African-American actor, Canada Lee, played Caliban in Margaret Webster’s 1945 Theatre Guild production in New York, and African-Americans Earle Hyman and James Earl Jones did the role in 1960 and 1962, respectively. If the casting of these productions suggested anything about black-white power relations, it remained subtle, with little else reinforcing it. There have been more explicit stagings, such as Jonathan Miller’s in England in 1970, in which Prospero was colonial governor, Ariel his mulatto house slave, and Caliban his darker field slave. In a more general, heavy indictment, Liviu Ciulei’s staging at the Guthrie Center in Minneapolis in 1981 surrounded Prospero’s island with the decaying detritus of Western civilization. The Caliban in Giorgio Strehler’s 1978 production was an African noble savage, reduced to slavery. Strehler’s production did not aim at single-minded political critique, however; it was known more for its spirited theatricality and optimism.

We close, appropriately, on two important intercultural productions of The Tempest late in the twentieth century – those of Ninagawa Yukio (1987) and Peter Brook (1990). Ninagawa’s production was a rehearsal of a no¯ theatre version of the play, with a small nō theatre on the proscenium stage, and Prospero was its director. It was set on the remote Sado island, to which Zeami, founder of nō theatre, had once been banished. The play’s masque was done in nō costumes and masks, its comic scenes in something like kyōgen style. Caliban wore kabuki-like makeup. But the language was contemporary, colloquial Japanese in the translation of Odashima Yūshi. The general modality of Brook’s production was African, with his customary international cast. Prospero, Ariel, and Antonio were portrayed by Africans and Caliban by a white German actor. All theatrical virtuosity was eschewed for spontaneity and simplicity in the acting. Neither of these intercultural stagings showed any interest in the resonance of colonialism in the play. Ninagawa’s seemed to have been a meditation on the nature of theatre, although it puzzled both Kishi Tetsuo, a Japanese scholar steeped in nō and kabuki, and Robert Hapgood, an American scholar steeped in Shakespeare in Western theatre (Sasayama et al. 1998: 110–15, 251). The French scholar Patrice Pavis, known for largely aesthetic theoretical adjudications of intercultural theatre, approved of Brook’s “intercultural aesthetic” (Pavis 1992: 281). Any explicit critique of colonialism was apparently put aside for the universalism and the interest in global harmony that has characterized Brook’s work at his International Center for Theatre Research.

Dennis Kennedy has speculated thoughtfully that theatre has been moving in recent decades from words and ideologies to images, and in this rapid development Ninagawa, Brook, and Mnouchkine turn to Shakespeare because his status is useful and his work a stable referent (Kennedy 1995: 62–3). With all the codes in play in these intercultural productions, especially the visual ones saturated with cultural meanings, we are bound to be as challenged as Viola is in Twelfth Night as she emerges from her shipwreck on the coast of Illyria to ask, “What country, friends, is this?”

Key References

Audio-visual resources

Shakespeare’s plays: The University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center provides e-texts of all the play texts from the 1623 folio and early quartos (limitations on access to modern texts): http://etext.virginia.edu/shakespeare/.

World Shakespeare Bibliography Online 1961–2009. Available to subscribers only, but available to students at many university and college libraries. The is the most extensive, scholarly bibliography of works on and by Shakespeare, edited by James L. Harner and published by the Folger Shakespeare Library: www.worldshakesbib.org/.

Tsoubouchi Theatre Museum: Website on this museum modeled generally on the Elizabethan Fortune Theatre. Kabuki prints, notes on exhibits on all forms of Japanese theatre, traditional and modern. Text in English, French, Japanese, traditional and simple Chinese, and Korean: www.waseda.jp/enpaku/.

Shakespeare Performance in Asia: An open-access online archive created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Shakespeare Electronic Archive, this resource offers video clips of contemporary Asian Shakespeare productions with English subtitles, photos, texts, essays, glossaries and essays. Collaborators: Peter S. Donaldson, Alexander C.Y. Huang, Kobayashi Kaori, Robin Loon, and Young Li Lan: http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/about/.

Books and articles

Anzai, T. (1998) “Directing King Lear in Japanese Translation,” in T. Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne, and M. Shewring (eds) Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, New York and London: Routledge.

Bhatia, N. (2004) Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Brandon, J.R. (2001) “Shakespeare in Kabuki,” in M. Rutua, I. Carruthers and J. Gillies (eds) Performing Shakespeare in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, P. (1985) “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds) Political Shakespeare, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Césaire, A. (2002) A Tempest, trans. R. Miller, New York: TCG Translations. (Based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, an adaptation for a black theatre.)

Cohen, W. (1985) Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in England and Spain, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Dawson, A.B. (1995) Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Gaskell, P. (1978) From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Golub, S. (1993) “Between the Curtain and the Grave: The Taganka in the Hamlet Gulag,” in D. Kennedy (ed.) Foreign Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hamburger, M. (1998) “Shakespeare on the Stages of the German Democratic Republic,” in Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage, the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hortmann, W. (1998) Shakespeare on the German Stage, the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, D. (ed.) (1993) Foreign Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, D. (1995) “Shakespeare and the global spectator,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 131: 51–64.

Kiernander, A. (1993) Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil, Cambridge: Cambridge Cambridge University Press.

Kleber, P. (1993) “Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest,” in D. Kennedy (ed.) Foreign Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kott, J. (1964) Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. B. Taborski, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Müller, H. (1984) Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, trans. C. Weber (ed.), New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Mulryne, J.R. (1998) “The Perils and Profits of Interculturalism and the Theatre Art of Tadashi Suzuki,” in T. Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne, and M. Shewring (eds) Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pavis, P. (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. L. Kruger, London and New York: Routledge.

Rothwell, K.S. (1999) Shakespeare on Screen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Said, E. (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books.

Sasayama, T., Mulryne, J.R. and Shewring, M. (eds) (1998) Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Senda, A. (1998a) “The Rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan,” in T. Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne, and M. Shewring (eds) Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Senda, A. (1998b) Entry on Japan, The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Vol. 5: Asia/Pacific, London and New York: Routledge.

Shakespeare, W. (1999) The Tempest, V.M. Vaughn and A.T. Vaughan (eds), The Arden Shakespeare, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd.

Sorgenfrei, Carol (2005) Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Sponsler, C. and Chen, X. (eds) (2000) East of West, Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference, New York: Palgrave.

Takahashi, Y. (2001) “Suzuki Tadashi’s The Tale of Lear,” in M. Rutua, I. Carruthers and J. Gillies (eds) Performing Shakespeare in Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, G. (1989) The Reinvention of Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present, New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Tyson, L. (1999) Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Vaughan, V.M. and Vaughan, A.T. (1991) Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, G.J. (1979) “Timon of Athens: Stage History 1816–1978,” in R. Soellner, Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s Pessimistic Tragedy, Columbus: Ohio State University.

Williams, G.J. (1997) Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Zarrilli, P.B. (1992) “For Whom is the King a King? Issues of Intercultural Production, Perception, and Reception in a Kathkali King Lear,” in J.G. Reinelt and J.R. Roach (eds) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

CASE STUDY: Kathakali dance-drama: Divine “play” and human suffering on stage

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

This case study illustrates and discusses issues of ethnographic research into performance. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork on kathakali dance-drama. The fieldwork was conducted in Kerala, India where the author lived for approximately seven years between 1976 and 1983. In order to understand kathakali training and performance from the actor-dancer’s perspective, the author underwent intensive training eight hours a day at the Kerala State Arts School, traveled with touring companies, and attended numerous performances. The author conducted interviews with actors, students, administrators, and audience members.

Kathakali – an overview

Kathakali dance-drama is a distinctive genre of South Asian performance closely related in many ways to the earlier form of staging Sanskrit dramas in Kerala, kutiyattam. The term kathakali combines “story” (katha) and “dance” or “play” (kali). The vast majority of the plays performed in this style of Indian dance-drama are adaptations of episodes from the Indian epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana) or stories from the puranas-encyclopedic collections of traditional stories and knowledge. Like other regional genres that developed in India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kathakali developed in response to the growth of religious devotionalism to Vishnu, one of the three primary Hindu deities. Some of the puranas contain collections of stories about Lord Krishna, one of the main incarnations of Vishnu. The play on which this case study focuses, The Progeny of Krishna (Santanagopalam) by Mandavapalli Ittiraricha Menon (c.1747–1794), is based on one of the stories about Krishna. The active repertory includes approx­imately 60 plays of the 500 authored over the years.

Traditionally, performances took place either at the courts of Kerala’s rulers, in the grounds of wealthy land-holding families, or as part of Hindu temple festivals. In the context of Hindu temple festivals, a simple playing space was cleared outside the temple compound in a public space with open access to the general public. The main “season” lasted from January through April/May and might have been attended by several thousand people. Today, performances are also held throughout the year, inside theatres in towns and cities, and under the sponsorship of cultural organizations, with as few as 50, mostly male, connoisseurs attending.

On a bare stage using only a few stools and properties, three groups of performers collectively create kathakali performances: the traditionally all-male companies of actor-dancers who enact each character in a story and the percussionists and the vocalists who accompany them. The actor-dancers use a highly physicalized style of performance based on traditional martial arts to play a variety of roles including kings, heroines, demons, demonesses, gods, animals, and priests. A few characters, such as the Midwife in The Progeny of Krishna, are drawn from everyday life. The local audience – traditionally including both learned connoisseurs as well as a general audience from a broad spectrum of the public – can easily identify each character type, having learned to read the basic make-up and costume codes. The actor-dancers create their roles using a repertory of dance steps, choreography, a complete gesture language for literally “speaking” their character’s lines, and expressive use of the face and eyes to communicate the internal states (bhava) of the characters.

The percussion orchestra consists of three different types of drums, each with its own distinctive sound and role in the ensemble. The singers vocalize the entire text, including third-person narration as well as first-person dialog. They also keep the basic rhythms with hand-held brass cymbals.

Performances traditionally begin at dusk, and it requires an entire night to perform a 30-page drama. Texts are composed in the local language of Malayalam, but they make extensive use of Sanskrit. While unique, kathakali developed its conventions and aesthetics of performance from many sources, especially kutiyattam.

Since the 1960s, kathakali has become known through many international cultural exchanges. While there is a long history of experimentation with content and technique in kathakali, recent performances have prompted new arguments about change. Controversial experiments have included adaptations on the subject of Adolf Hitler at the end of World War II and leftist kathakali dramas such as People’s Victory (1987). A kathakali King Lear was performed throughout Europe and at international theatre festivals such as Edinburgh, Scotland in 1989 and at Shakespeare’s Globe (London) in 1999.

The pleasures of The Progeny of Krishna

In 1993, the author was working as a performance ethnographer with V.R. Prabodhachandran Nayar, a life-long appreciator of kathakali and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kerala. The first collaborative project was a translation of The Progeny of Krishna. The author had selected The Progeny of Krishna as the first play for this translation project for all the “wrong” reasons, that is to say for literary reasons. Prabodhachandran Nayar explained as both a linguist and appreciator of good Sanskrit and Malayalam poetry that The Progeny of Krishna simply “isn’t great poetry. There’s too much repetition, and the vocabulary is meagre. It’s just not rich!” What connoisseurs of kathakali appreciate most are passages with rich poetic imagery for performers to interpret. In this respect, as a text on the page, The Progeny of Krishna cannot compare to the four plays authored by the Raja of Kottayam (c.1645–1716): The Killing of Baka, The Killing of Kirmira , The Flower of Good Fortune, and The Killing of Kalakeya. These are considered formative in the history of kathakali, as is Unnayi Variyar’s (c.1675–1716) much heralded King Nala’s Victory. These plays are included in the required syllabi of Malayalam literature courses, but The Progeny of Krishna is considered such “bad” poetry that Prabodhachandran Nayar had never read the text.

Prabodhachandran Nayar, however, knew the text-in-performance by heart, and might be heard humming the well-loved, if simple language set to appropriate musical modes (ragas). Moreover, he cherished a life-long set of memories of The Progeny of Krishna in performance (Figure 1). He had seen performances in family house compounds and local temples, sponsored by childless couples hoping in this way to secure future progeny and he had seen performances earlier in the century of the renowned actor-dancer, Krishnan Nayar, whose genius (along with Kunju Nayar) left its stamp on the way today’s actors perform the main role of the Brahmin.

At performances of The Progeny of Krishna at village temples that the author observed in 1993, many levels of appreciation and pleasure were clearly experienced by audiences. Among those with the most nuanced level of appreciation was the 78-year-old Ganesha Iyer, who explained to the author:

Known as “kathakali mad,” connoisseurs like Ganesha Iyer used to travel far and wide during the festival season to attend as many performances as possible by their favorite actor-dancers. The ideal connoisseur is knowledgeable in Sanskrit, culturally sophisticated in the nuances of each poetic text, able to read kathakali’s gesture language through which the actor’s “speak” their lines, and able to appreciate and appraise each performer’s style and approach to performing particular roles. Today a connoisseur is known as a rasika, “taster of rasa,” or sahrdaya, one whose heart/mind (hrdaya) is able to respond intuitively to a performance.

The most accessible aspect of kathakali performances is its popular epic/mythic stories. Kathakali performances traditionally served as a pleasurable form of education, not just for connoisseurs but for people from all walks of life, inasmuch as “Myths are not written by gods and demons, nor for them; but they are by, for, and about men. Gods and demons serve as metaphors for human situations” (O’Flaherty 1976: 8). Therefore, performances may also be appreciated by those who have little or no education in kathakali’s nuances. It does not require a specialist’s knowledge to be interested in The Progeny of Krishna’s drama of a couple’s love and loss of their children in order to have empathy for the main character of the Brahmin or to enjoy the beautiful musical modes to which the text is sung. Audiences laugh raucously at the Brahmin’s all-too-human foibles, they experience a sense of devotion for Krishna, and they feel a sense of affirmation knowing that human suffering is subsumed within the workings of Lord Vishnu’s cosmic “play.” If from a literary and poetic point of view The Progeny of Krishna was the “wrong” play to translate, from the perspective of the author as a performance ethnographer, The Progeny of Krishna was a good play to translate because it allowed the author-observer to explore the wide popular appeal this play has in performance.

Introduction to The Progeny of Krishna and its playwright

Kathakali owes its birth to the powerful, wealthy ruling lineages of Kerala who were interested in the performing arts and had sufficient resources to patronize a company, all of whose members were traditionally from castes serving the ruler. Following the ancient tradition of royal authorship (such as King Mahendravarman’s The Hermit/Harlot), kathakali’s first dramas were written by the ruler of Kottayam in northern Kerala. Other authors were court poets, like Mandavapalli Ittiraricha Menon, who served the court of Kartikatirunal Maharaja, ruler of the large southern kingdom of Travancore. Born to a poor family, Ittiraricha Menon received a traditional education in Sanskrit literature. He came to the ruler’s attention in 1763. At court in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, now Kerala’s capital, he composed his two kathakali plays, The Progeny of Krishna and King Rugmamgada’s Law. He was so successful that the ruler awarded him the highest honor possible – a gift of a gold bracelet.

Both plays were probably first performed either within the palace compound or as one of many performances given annually as part of a festival at the nearby main Hindu temple, Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple. The main deity in this temple is Lord Vishnu in his reclining form, known as Padmanabha. Vishnu is considered the “preserver.” Vishnu, “the preserver,” is one of the trinity of Hindu deities, along with Brahma, “the creator” and Siva, “the destroyer.” Lord Krishna is one of the ten incarnations of Vishnu. As reflected in The Progeny of Krishna, there was a very close relationship between rulers and the main local temple. Kings were held responsible for upholding the cosmic order of the universe by protecting and preserving the social order. This responsibility is reinforced in the ritual calendar of the temple when the reigning monarch carries the sword representing the deity’s power in annual processions to the nearby Arabian Sea where Lord Vishnu’s image is bathed.

Given the close ties between temple and state, it is not surprising that both of Ittiraricha Menon’s plays focus on devotion to Lord Vishnu. In King Rugmamgada’s Law, this takes the form of a test of the king’s devotion, while in The Progeny of Krishna the devotion of a simple brahmin is tested. Brahmins were learned in Sanskrit, serving as priests, scholars, and grammarians. They are considered “priests” and therefore “highest” among the categories into which people are born. Plays based on the life of Krishna are adapted from stories in The Bhagavata-Purana, the source of the story dramatized in The Progeny of Krishna, dating between the fifth and tenth century. The story was originally told to illustrate how Vishnu is the greatest deity in the Hindu pantheon, especially in his incarnation as Krishna.

Both of Ittiraricha Menon’s plays stage the notion of “divine play,” or lila. A fundamental concept in a Hindu understanding of the world, “divine play” means that when god wants to act in the world by taking one of many forms (incarnations), such as Rama or Krishna, he does not do so out of any need or lack, but “by a free and joyous creativity that is integral to his own nature. He acts in a state of rapt absorption comparable to that of an artist possessed by his creative vision or that of a child caught up in the delight of a game played for its own sake” (Hein cited in Sax 1995: 13). The child-like nature of “divine play” is reflected in the character of the Brahmin in The Progeny of Krishna.

The Progeny of Krishna – the play

Kathakali actor, Margi Vijayan, told the author that he thought The Progeny of Krishna was accessible and popular not only because its language was relatively simple, but also because it was “a very simple play.” Connoisseur G.S. Varyar echoed this, saying the play “has an everyday (lōkadharmi) aspect.” The Progeny of Krishna enacts the very human dilemma faced by a simple Brahmin householder and his wife. They have suffered the loss of all nine sons born to them. The original play is composed in twelve scenes, each of which is briefly summarized below:

Lord Krishna, the object of the Brahmin’s anger, not only turns a deaf ear, but literally walks away, exiting the stage. Arjuna is moved by the Brahmin’s tale, and rushes forward to offer his help. He promises that he will protect his next child. The Brahmin is skeptical of Arjuna’s brash promise:

To convince the Brahmin, Arjuna vows that he will throw himself into a pit of fire if he does not protect the baby.

Scene 5: The Brahmin rushes to tell Arjuna, who builds a delivery house of arrows to protect them. The Midwife and Brahmin’s Wife enter. Arjuna guards the entrance as the Brahmin paces nervously outside. When the Wife delivers a ninth son, it immediately vanishes! At first the Brahmin faints. When he revives, he turns his fury on Arjuna, taunting him:

Finally, he commands him to leave, “Go! Go! Go!”

*Scene 6: Arjuna travels to the abode of the god of death, Yama, and angrily demands the return of the Brahmin’s son. Yama says he has not taken any of the sons, and sends him in search of Krishna.

*Scene 7: Arjuna next goes to the god of thunder and rain, Indra’s heavenly world, to demand the return of the Brahmin’s sons. He too tells him to seek out Krishna.

Scene 8: Arjuna searches all the worlds, but does not find the missing sons. Acting on his vow, he is about to jump into the fire pit when Krishna saves him, humbling Arjuna’s pride.

*Scene 9: Krishna and Arjuna set out for Vaikuntha, the heavenly abode, but along the way they encounter the darkness of Mount Lokaloka. Krishna releases his great weapon to dispel the darkness so they may continue their journey.

*Scene 10: Krishna and Arjuna arrive in Vaikuntha where they encounter the wonders of the heavenly abode.

*Scene 11: Mahavishnu greets Krishna and Arjuna, expresses his delight with their presence, and reveals the following:

Only to make you come here itself, did I bring that

best among Brahmin’s children here with delight.

Vishnu entrusts all nine sons to them to return to the Brahmin and his wife.

Scene 12: Arjuna and Krishna arrive at the Brahmin’s house where he and his wife are still in mourning. After recounting his journey through the heavens, Arjuna requests the parents to receive “with delight” all their sons being returned “by the compassion of the Lord [Vishnu]!” Overjoyed, the couple receive each of the nine children (Figure 4), and give their blessings to Krishna and Arjuna.

When a drama like The Progeny of Krishna has been performed for over 200 years, the performance ethnologist may ask a number of questions about changing texts, changing audience tastes and expectations, and changing performance conditions.

Text and performance, past and present

Over the past 40 to 50 years, most kathakali texts, including The Progeny of Krishna, have been edited and shortened from what was once an all-night performance to a now more typical three-and-a-half to four-hour performance. There are several practical reasons for this change.

• For town audiences at performances sponsored by cultural clubs made up of connoisseurs, performances are often shortened to allow people to return home by the last available modes of public transportation.
• Full productions are expensive to mount, and with the waning of court patronage, costs must be reduced. The Progeny of Krishna is much more expensive to mount because it requires five additional actors playing divine roles, each with elaborate make-up and costumes. The edited version only requires four actors, plus village children.
• Throughout the twentieth century, there was an increasing emphasis on featuring star performers in roles popular with connoisseurs. Rather than performing a single play in its entirety, all-night programs often feature three shortened plays with three different star performers. The edited version keeps the focus much more on the star actor playing the role of the Brahmin – a character who does not appear in any of the scenes cut from the full-length version.

As exemplified in The Progeny of Krishna, what is edited from a performance both reflects and shapes audience taste and expectations in a changing sociocultural landscape. Of the original twelve scenes, the five cut (marked * above) are Arjuna’s search for the children (Scenes 6 and 7), and his journey with Krishna to Vishnu’s heavenly abode (Scenes 9–11). These five scenes emphasize the overarching point of view of the original story: that Vishnu is “the greatest” of all the gods and that his own inscrutable, capricious divine play, lila, is manifest not only in his incarnation in Lord Krishna, but in his own “play.” (He brings the Brahmin’s children to Vaikuntha in order to necessitate a visit by Krishna and Arjuna.) As described by Krishna in Scene 10, these scenes reveal the wonder and glory of Vishnu’s abode:

Please look with delight at Vishnu’s home.

… all eyes have begun to swim and play

in the immense waves of this

ocean of ambrosia!

In the center of this ocean of milk is a

wonderful world called Vaikuntha …

[It is] the prosperous Goddess Lakshmi’s

playhouse where there is no grief,

and where all people are immersed in pleasures!

With these scenes cut, the dramatic narrative does not focus nearly as much on the cosmic dimensions of Vishnu’s “divine play,” but more specifically on the Brahmin’s “everyday” human dilemma: Arjuna’s prideful attempt to resolve that dilemma, and the joy and devotion that comes with Krishna’s gracious return of the children. Because the five scenes cut are all briefly summarized by Arjuna at the beginning of Scene 12 when he reports to the Brahmin, the narrative continuity of the story is not broken. Indeed, in its shortened version, the pace of The Progeny of Krishna is decidedly up-tempo in keeping with the Brahmin’s sense of urgency about his very human situation. As we shall see below, in the hands of the great twentieth-century actor, Kunju Nayar, the style of playing the lead role of the Brahmin came to emphasize his endearing humor, popularizing a shortened production’s focus on the Brahmin’s human dilemma. The focus on star performers like Kunju Nayar developing the human side of this role reflects a major historical shift from an earlier emphasis on the larger cosmological drama of Vishnu’s “divine play.”

Everyday concerns: male progeny and the suffering of the pious and innocent

Childlessness and, in particular, lack of male progeny, bursts upon the stage with the Brahmin’s dramatic entrance in Scene 2. This is perhaps the worst dilemma that can befall traditional Hindu males. As kathakali actor, Vasu Pisharoti, explained, “the greatest loss one can suffer is to lose a child.” Children “are the only form of physical permanence. They are the links of the eternal chain of rebirths … in contrast with (and often at the sacrifice of) the setting free or Release (moksa) of the eternal soul” (O’Flaherty 1988: 73).

The point of view assumed in The Progeny of Krishna is that inherent in a set of Sanskrit texts, Dharma Sastras, which provide an idealized model of how society should be organized and one’s duties within that order. According to this religious and social ideal, the [male] brahmin passes through at least the first two of the four “stages of life” open to him – student, householder, forest-dwelling hermit, and renunciant. In the play, the Brahmin is attempting to fulfill the two most essential duties of householder through which society is preserved – offering sacrifices and raising sons. Although release from the cycle of rebirths is the ultimate goal, “for most people, householder life was the limit of their present existence: they married, raised a family, carried out their social duties, performed their prescribed rituals, and ended life as householders, hoping that they had prepared the way for a better future birth” (Hopkins 1971: 81). Of these, the householder role was considered most important because, of the four stages,

it alone leads to the production of offspring and the support of society. … Every Brahmin was said to be born with a triple indebtedness: to the sages, to the gods, and to his ancestors. He became free of these only when he had satisfied the sages with celibacy, the gods with sacrifices, and his ancestors with a son.

(Hopkins 1971: 82, 77)

The tragedy that befalls the Brahmin and his Wife is exacerbated by the apparent injustice of their situation since they are faultless. The Brahmin is described as “pious,” “noble,” “good,” and “best among Brahmins.” The Progeny of Krishna dramatically raises the question that confronts all families: Why do the pious and innocent suffer?

In a study of how Malayalis interpret such a situation, villagers shared thoughts that echo the Brahmin’s Wife’s view that their suffering is divinely ordained, that is, it is their fate (vidhi):

Sometimes really good people suffer. … What is to happen will happen. One cannot prevent it. It is called [fate] vidhi. … Vidhi means the happenings in life which are beyond one’s control, e.g., the sudden death of a young person.

(Ayroohuzhiel 1983: 123, 126–7)

For pious, upright individuals like the Brahmin and his Wife, they suffer not from some sin committed in the past, but from a present fate over which they have no control. Innocent people also suffer. It cannot be that they have done something wrong. It may be “what is written on their foreheads” (1983: 129). The everyday concerns with childlessness and suffering in The Progeny of Krishna are part of the play’s popular appeal to kathakali’s broad-based audiences.

Everyday characters

Another reason for the popular appeal of the play is its everyday characters. Connoisseur G.S. Varyar explained that the Brahmin in The Progeny of Krishna is “more everyday” than most major kathakali characters. In part this is due to the Brahmin’s costume and make-up, which is relatively close to how Brahmins traditionally dressed in Kerala with a grey beard, simple wrapped cloth, sacred thread, and beads. It is also because of the way the role of the Brahmin is enacted today.

One way senior actors develop roles is to create a mini-scene not in the original dramatic text that allows the actor to elaborate some aspect of the drama – the mood of a scene, a character’s state of mind, or a story that provides further information on the situation. Toward the conclusion of Scene 2, actor Kunju Nayar developed a small scene that elaborated the Brahmin’s mistrust of Arjuna’s vow that he will throw himself into the fire. This interpolation helped crystalize Kunju Nayar’s style of acting the Brahmin, and made the character popular.

Kathakali actor Vasu Pisharoti explained that in the Kunju Nayar tradition of playing the role, the Brahmin is “typical” of his social type because “he’s very, very innocent. Because of his innocence, he lashes out, terribly angry, against the ruler and loses control.” His innocence comes from qualities traditionally understood to be determined at birth, which leave him uncorrupted. When he enters the scene, he is filled with the anguish of sorrow over the loss of his eighth son. But his sorrow (the dominant emotional state) is tinged with anger over the death of yet another son. He moves back and forth between expressing pathos and anger. But immediately after becoming angry, he regrets it. Another actor, Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiripad, explained that “Since the Brahmin is so innocent, he shows everything in the extreme. If he is happy, he will be extremely happy. … So at last, when he sees all his children together, he is very happy, and he can’t control his happiness! It’s like a person winning the lottery!”

The Kunju Nayar tradition of playing the role also involves an important element of endearing humor. When Pisharoti’s Brahmin reacts to the thunderous sound of Arjuna’s first arrow shot, he shouts, “My ears are broken!” Improvising, he adds, “I’m only familiar with the sounds of worship – the ringing of the bell.” The Brahmin’s innocent piety creates humor. As G.S. Varyar explains, “the enjoyment of a really good performance … is seeing the wide gamut of emotions through which [the Brahmin] passes. [It] is what makes the play unusual … [and] popular.”

Although the Brahmin is a familiar character, by no means is he a caricature. M.P. Sankaran Namboodiri explains how the actor must keep within the bounds of “what is appropriate” (aucityambodham) to the type – a fundamental concept guiding the acting of all major roles. In contrast is the minor role of the Midwife, which is intentionally played as a caricature; she is one of the most “everyday” (lokadharmi) roles in the repertory. Like other caricatures, kathakali’s are created by carefully copying easily identifiable stereotypical behaviors of particular groups of people within the society at large. The Midwife is played as a buck-toothed, hunchbacked old village woman. Her portrayal never fails to elicit a good-humored response from the audience.

Responding to The Progeny of Krishna

Kathakali actor Vasu Pisharoti recollected how, at the age of 13 or 14, “tears fell unconsciously from [my] eyes” while watching Kunju Nayar play the Brahmin in a performance of The Progeny of Krishna. Although he knew the story and had seen it performed before, on this particular night the performance “touched and pierced my heart/mind. It is a special feeling. … I cried and so did many other people in the audience.” Such an overtly empathetic response is unusual, and is occasioned either by the Brahmin’s moments of pathos, and/or by the occasion of overwhelming joy that concludes a good performance – a moment when joy, wonder, grace, and devotion are melded as parents and children are united and the Brahmin’s suffering is ended.

In productions of The Progeny of Krishna today, the roles of the Brahmin’s eight oldest children are not played by young kathakali actors, but rather by children from the community where the performance is being held. Ideally, the organizers of the performance gather eight volunteer children, male or female, from families attending the performance, ideally of different heights and ranging from four-year-olds to 15-year-olds. They are then arranged on the stage from oldest/tallest to youngest/smallest. This ideal casting reflects the fact that Vishnu had taken all of the children to his heavenly abode where they had been living fully and joyfully with their heavenly father (Vishnu) and mothers (Lakshmi and Bhuumi Devi) until they were taken by Arjuna and Krishna to rejoin their parents of birth.

Naturally, the spectator/actor relationship is altered with village children rather than young kathakali actors playing these roles. The audience is usually abuzz with conversation and commentary throughout the opening of the final scene as Krishna serves as an on stage stage-manager for the children, arranging them from tallest to shortest, prompting them about how to hold their hands to pay proper respects to their parents, and when to go forward to Arjuna to be given to their parents. Much of this is improvised by the actors playing Arjuna and the Brahmin. Once the children have been brought forward, given the predominant mood of the Brahmin’s abundant joy, the improvisations are often uproariously funny.

The author-ethnographer was unable to determine precisely when it became common for village children to play these roles instead of young kathakali actors, but this convention brings the larger religious context of the play into the performance text. Krishna’s grace is not an abstract theological/cosmological construct, but becomes part of the village’s progeny here and now. In The Progeny of Krishna, the “everyday” has the potential to take on the sense of being this particular day for these particular people. This phenomenon reflects an increasing emphasis in popular Hinduism today on the immediacy of devotion to Krishna, rather than on the larger cosmology of “divine play.”

Among connoisseurs, the same performative moments that brought tears to Pisharoti’s then young eyes are often experienced and interpreted as a subtler internal resonation or “vibration” “within the mind” – signs of actualizing an aesthetic experience of “tasting” known as rasa. As Ganesha Iyer explained,

When the actor enacts certain states (rasas), they are able to create a sympathetic motion in my heart. When he enacts a sorrowful aspect, I do not experience sorrow, but appreciate his expression of sorrow. … I experience sympathetic vibration. But in some people, they may experience this as a real emotion. … When a very sorrowful scene is enacted, some may weep. … This difference may be due to having a more intellectual appreciation, and not emotional.

The aesthetic experience Ganesha Iyer describes is part of an Indian cultural understanding of what happens when one’s sensibilities are developed through education, whether as a spectator or practitioner learning yoga or a martial art. According to this paradigm, one’s sensibilities begin at the grossest, physical, most external level, and through a gradual process of education and disciplined training one moves toward a subtler, more refined internal mode of appreciation and action.

How has the West read and interpreted non-Western performance?

Discussions of kathakali have often described it as a “classical” art, and privileged the educated point of view of the connoisseur and his “theatre of the mind.” This point of view suggests that kathakali is an art of the elite to the exclusion of the everyday and the mundane. Although kathakali was traditionally, and still is, of greatest interest to those castes/classes involved as performers and patrons, whose view of the world is best reflected on stage, it has never been a dance-drama appealing only to an elite. When kathakali is discussed exclusively as a “theatre of the mind,” the discourse disparages the simpler pleasures and broad popular appeal of a play like The Progeny of Krishna, which, at least when Kunju Nayar performed the Brahmin, was able to bring tears to the eyes of some among his audiences. Kathakali performances traditionally were open to a general public – a marketplace for commerce and social interaction.

When kathakali is classified, as some in the West have, as “classical,” or “traditional,” these labels imply that kathakali is relatively fixed and unchanging, rather than a dynamic reflection of socio-cultural and political/economic processes. Such labels also say something disturbing about the West. In 1976, Edward Said identified this kind of ahistorical process of projecting onto cultures of the Middle East and Asia what the West desires them to be as “orientalizing” the “Other.” In the nineteenth century, German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), represented Europe as open to change and development, but Asia as more or less static and unchangeable. The view of India in particular as unchangeable and absolutely different allowed the British to justify their colonization of India: they could provide the rules of reason and bureaucracy that Indians (ostensibly) could not provide for themselves. This legacy of India as the “absolute Other” is discernable still in the West’s continuing romance with India as the “mystical” or “spiritual Other” [see the website case study, “Global Shakespeare,” for a further discussion of “Orientalism” and postcolonial criticism]. The degree to which such mystification has affected traditional Indian performance, especially performances designed for Western tourists, is witnessed in P.K. Devan’s tourist kathakali performances in the port city of Kochi-Ernakulam in central Kerala. Devan touts kathakali as a 2,000 year-old “ritual art.” This representation of kathakali reflects a Western desire to encounter India as that “other” magical place of antique “ritual” spirituality, rather than to see kathakali, as we have here, as a genre that continued to change, responsive to dynamics in culture, including that of the late twentieth century. To give one more example of this, contemporary experiments involving kathakali have included Iyyemgode Sreeddharan’s 1987 play, People’s Victory, where Karl Marx meets imperialism on the kathakali stage, a play that reflects the fact that Kerala State, when formed in 1957, had the first democratically elected communist government in the world (Zarrilli 2000: Chapter 10).

Key references

Audio-visual resources

Introduction to Kathakali Dance-Drama: 20-minute color videotape introducing kathakali in context. London: Routledge, 2000.

The Progeny of Krishna:210-minute documentary of complete performance in Kerala, India. For rental (only) from: Centre for Performance Research, 8H Science Park, Aberystwyth, Wales, SY23 3AH, United Kingdom, or Centre for South Asia, Film Distribution Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ingraham Hall, Madison, W.I. 53706

The Killing of Kirmira: 210-minute documentary of complete performance in Kerala, India. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kathakali performances, training: www.keralatourism.org/video-clips. Search for the following videos on this website: Kathakali, Kathakali training, Kathakali make-up, Kathi Vesham. See kalarippayattu for clips on the martial art training from which kathakali training and massage developed.

For types of traditional ritual performances which influenced the development of kathakali, see The Dance of the Gods (teyyam), Perumkaliyattam (teyyam), Kaalitheeyatu (ritual invoking the goddess Kali), Kalamezhuthu Pattu.

Books and articles

Ayroohuzhiel, A.M.A. (1983) The Sacred in Popular Hinduism: An Empirical Study in Chiralla, North Malabar, Madras: The Christian Literature Society.

Bolland, D. (1996; 1st edn 1980) A Guide to Kathakali, 3rd edn, New Delhi: Sterling Paperbacks.

Hopkins, T.J. (1971) The Hindu Religious Tradition, Encino, C.A.: Dickenson Publishing Co.

Inden, R. (1986) “Orientalist constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies, 20: 401–46.

Jones, C.R. and Jones, B.T. (1970) Kathakali: An Introduction to the Dance-Drama of Kerala, New York: Theatre Arts Books.

Nair, D.A. and Paniker, K.A. (eds) (1993) Kathakali: The Art of the Non-Worldly, Bombay: Marg.

O’Flaherty, W.D. (1976) The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, Berkeley: University of California Press.

O’Flaherty, W.D. (1988) Other People’s Myths, New York: Macmillan.

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Pantheon.

Sax, W.S. (ed.) (1995) The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia, New York: Oxford University Press, citing Norvin Hein (1972) The Miracle Plays at Matuurā, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Zarrilli, P.B. (1984) The Kathakali Complex: Actor, Performance, Structure. New Delhi: Abhinav.

Zarrilli, P.B. (2000) Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play, New York and London: Routledge. (Includes translations of The Progeny of Krishna, King Rugmamgada’s Law, The Flower of Good Fortune, and The Killing of Kirmira by V.R. Prabodhachandran Nayar, M.P. Sankaran Namboodiri, and Phillip B. Zarrilli.)

CASE STUDY: Korean shamanism and the power of speech

By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

Korean shamanistic performance can be analyzed from various perspectives that emphasize its aesthetics, its cultural functions, or its linguistic place in Korean society. For many people today, the term “shaman” may suggest a masked dancer from a long-vanished tribe, or a grass-skirted “witch-doctor,” offering dubious cures to those deprived of modern medicine. However, in industrialized, twenty-first century South Korea, “[t]he rituals of the shamans are very much in demand because many people consider them an effective way to cope with the material and spiritual needs of modern society” (Bruno 2002: 1).

We begin by looking at Korean shamanistic performance in light of the contested theory of ritual origins. As noted below and in the main text, many scholars dispute the concept that theatre derived from religious rituals. Next, we consider the formal structure of kut and offer an interpretive approach to its performance, that of speech act theory.

Shamanism, ritual, and theories of the origins of theatre

The term “shaman” originally derived from Siberian (Tungus), referring to religious specialists able to mediate between the human world and the spirit world by means of an altered state of consciousness described as trance, spirit possession, or ecstasy. The shaman’s goal is to control the spirits in order to heal the sick and protect society from evil. Shamans are, or have been active in every continent inhabited by humans.

Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) is considered the classic work on shamanism from the perspective of comparative religious study. Eliade noted that all shamans share a number of traits, including the experience of a complex, sometimes psychologically painful initiation. All shamans embark on spirit journeys to the realms of gods or demons; they are trained in song, dance, and the skills of impersonation; they serve as priests and personal advisors; they cure the sick and exorcise malignant spirits; and they aid the dead to find peace. In some societies, the shaman’s journey or initiation involves imbibing hallucinogenic plants.

Despite his insights, Eliade has been criticized for failing to make sociological distinctions between cultures and for overgeneralization in terminology. Nevertheless, performance scholars such as Richard Schechner and Eugenio Barba, inspired by anthropologist Victor Turner, embrace shamanism as a possible root of theatre. They note that both shamans and actors are “liminal” beings who mediate between the everyday world of the audience (or believer) and another realm that only these beings can enter. Both willfully “become” or “call down” another persona (a spiritual being or a character); both use “ritually repeated” special words, movements, gestures, costumes, objects, and spaces, differently than in everyday life. In both cases, audiences are aware of the performer’s or ritual practitioner’s “doubleness”; that is, audiences know who the enactor is in real life and who she is impersonating or becoming in the ritual or play. This theory suggests that the shaman or religious practitioner performs rituals to change reality (for example, to purify a sinner, answer prayers, cure the sick, talk to the dead, or bring rain), while the goal of the actor is primarily to entertain and/or enlighten.

Recently, such comparisons have been challenged. Eli Rozik (2002) cites the lack of empirical historical evidence of connections between shamanism and theatre, and questions why the idea of ritual origin should be reserved exclusively for theatre, when other arts share elements with ritual (music, song, dance, art, or architecture). He suggests instead that “theatre is a specific imagistic medium (that is, a method of representation or rather an instrument of thinking and communication), and as such its roots lie in the spontaneous image-making faculty of the human psyche” (Rozik 2002: xi). He maintains that theatre and ritual are different types of human activity:

Theatre is a medium that can serve different intentions and purposes; and ritual is a particular mode of action, with definite intentions and purposes, which can use any medium. Ritual and theatre do not constitute a binary opposition: they operate on different ontological levels.

(Rozik 2002: 337)

Rozik proposes that theatre exists at the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, “an arena where culture confronts and subdues nature” (2002: 347). Theatre comes into being when “the human psyche spontaneously formulates thoughts in the shape of fictional worlds (i.e. worlds populated by characters and their actions). … Theatre … affords an imagistic medium for imagistic thinking” (2002: 343–4). In this view, spectators at theatrical performances confront their own consciousness and subconsciousness, rather than observing a staged world with which they may or may not identify. Korean kut poses an interesting problem, employing as it does both ritual and theatre, sometimes making a clear distinction between the two and sometimes blurring the boundaries.

Performing Korean kut

Kut is a type of Korean ritual performed by shamans (mostly female), called mudang. The “mu” (shaman) in mudang is written with the Chinese character formed by two horizontal lines at the top and bottom, symbolizing heaven and earth, with a central vertical line uniting them; on either side is a human being. According to Hogarth, this suggests dancing in the air (Hogarth 1999: 2); thus, the very character describes a mudang as one whose dance links the material and spiritual realms. In anthropologist Victor Turner’s term, she is a “liminal being” (Figures 1 and 2).

Kut may be performed to let the dead vent anger, regrets, or desires in order to rest in peace; to heal the sick and control epidemics; or to obtain good luck. A kut can last for several days. It may include choosing a colored flag to determine the mood of a spirit, consuming ritual wine and food, playing music, singing, reciting long tales, chanting Buddhist sutras, performing spirit-possession dances (both by the mudang who is inhabited by the spirit, and by non-possessed audience/participants who impersonate the mudang), and performing dances purely for fun. Separate (non-ritual) theatrical pieces are usually performed at the end of the kut.

The most famous of such independent plays is the masked dance drama of Hahoe village. It contains not only an invocation to the spirits but also crude and obscene elements, which in former days served as a social “safety valve,” allowing the oppressed to poke fun at their masters. For example, a servant boy sits on the head of a nobleman, a girl urinating in public sexually excites a monk, and a butcher tries to convince a pair of hypocritical aristocrats to buy a bull’s testicles and heart to increase sexual potency. Such comic reversals, obscenity, and the incongruous are parts of life often suppressed in “official” or “classical” art, as well as in many religions. Nevertheless, such elements appear in traditional belief systems throughout the world. They are found in spring festivals marking fertility and rebirth, and sometimes serve as a means of releasing aggression against the ruling class in stratified or unjust societies.

In addition, the entire kut has a dramatic structure. It includes an opening invitation to the spirits, a central portion in which the shaman and her clients entertain and supplicate the visiting spirits, and a conclusion in which the spirits are sent back to their own realm. During the kut, the possessed mudang enacts various spirit-characters, while the audience/participants take on roles as they speak with, coax, plead with, or even try to bribe the spirit-characters with food, wine, entertainment, and money. If the kut is successful, the audience/participants experience deep emotional satisfaction or a sense of release.

Some mudang have been invited to international festivals to perform kut. While some members of the audience may be seeking a genuine spiritual experience, others want exotic secular entertainment. Similarly, the financial backers may be believers, promoters of cross-cultural understanding, or people out to make money. Generally, shamanistic performances at non-religious venues require significant changes in the rituals. Holledge and Tompkins note, in analyzing the 1994 Australian tour by the Korean mudang, Kim Kum hwa, that “The packaging of spirituality as a commodity – and particularly the spirituality of an indigenous culture defined by the West as primitive, mythic, and irrational – presents peculiar problems for the marketplace” (Holledge and Tompkins 2000: 60). They suggest that “the future of intercultural work is more likely to be tied to patterns of consumption than to idealistic notions of cultural exchange” (2000: 182). Not all scholars and artists agree with this assessment, and many controversies regarding the ethics and other aspects of cross-cultural performance remain.

Anthropologist Choi Chungmoo has employed performance analysis (including the methods used by Schechner) in her study of kut. The shaman’s language communicates her liminal status, which must be real for the ritual to be effective (unlike theatre, where liminality is symbolic or suggested). For example, when invoking and impersonating the spirit of her client’s dead son, the shaman shifts between the third person and first person. Using “he” to refer to the spirit of the son emphasizes the distance between this world and the realm of the dead; using “I” in impersonating the son’s spirit emphasizes the presence of the spirit in the material world. The shaman is simultaneously “I” and “Not I.” In Richard Schechner’s terms, she is a “between persona” (Schechner 1981: 88). In Rozik’s terms, however, the shaman’s impersonation and doubleness stimulate the brain’s imagistic capabilities.

By skillful impersonation and transformation, the shaman creates an emotionally and aesthetically satisfying dialog between herself and her characters, and between each of these and the audience. The solo performer/shaman consciously shifts roles between narrator (herself) and character (the dead spirit) in a manner similar to that of contemporary “one-person shows.” This shifting also may be compared to that in traditional Korean p’ansori (solo story-telling to music). In addition, the shaman must sense the desires and tastes of her audience. She must be able to vary the length of a song, dance, dialog, and all other elements to give the audience/participants the greatest emotional satisfaction. Although performing ritual actions, she must be willing to improvise and “break the rules.” Choi concludes that the shaman balances “ritual efficacy and aesthetic felicity to come up with a convincing dramatic performance” (Choi 1989: 236). Her conclusion also accords with Rozik’s analysis of theatre as the creation of an “imagistic” world of the mind, peopled by fictional characters and situations.

Using speech act theory to interpret Korean kut

Antonetta Lucia Bruno agrees that the shaman’s language choices are crucial, while emphasizing the importance of non-written communication. Her methodology is inspired by “speech act theory,” originally defined by philosopher John L. Austin.

In her insightful The Gate of Words: Language in the Rituals of Korean Shamans, Bruno employs variations of Austin’s theory that emphasize performance. She defines speech as dialog rather than as monologue. That is, the speaker (shaman, character, invoked spirit, or actor) does not merely speak to a passive listener. She has a social and physical relationship with the world; communication goes both ways – that is, the audience (and/or the spirit who is being addressed) can also affect her performance. Bruno writes that during a kut,

the speaker, whether human (shaman) or supernatural (ancestor or divinity), possesses a special authority or power to perform speech acts. These acts consist of utterances (including chanting or singing) of a particular nature and are accompanied by particular actions (ritual action, including dance and music) performed at specific moments of the kut. The meanings of speech acts are created and recreated during the entire kut by all the participants.

(Bruno 2002: 13)

Since words and gestures mean different things depending on the context, “speech act theory [must be] reinterpreted, focusing on a continuous transformation of meaning according to the speech event, which is constituted by both linguistic forms and social norms” (2002: 11).

To analyze a specific ritual using speech act theory, one must focus on the effective combination of ritual speech (magic spells and incantations) with ritual actions (the manipulation of objects). For example, when performing a divination, the mudang takes bits and pieces of her client’s casual conversations and re-contextualizes them, so that she is able to use them in a new text when she speaks in the voice of the spirit. This re-contextualization of remembered dialog does not mean that the mudang is “faking”; rather, she is in control, making the ritual emotionally effective for the audience. Similarly, her choice of words and style of performance will help the audience “see” and “hear” a god or ancestor rather than the mudang herself, who is a person her audience knows in daily life. The differences between daily and “extra-daily” activities and words, performed by a special person in a special setting with special ritual objects, mark the kut as a powerful event for her audiences.

Speech act theory, here modified for ritual analysis, is a valuable tool that can help us understand all types of theatrical as well as social performance.

Key references

Audio-visual resources

YouTube

Search “Mudang”; see specifically: “Trailer of Mudang,” “Shaman of Korea” and “Korean Shaman – Possession by the Spirit of Changun”.

DVD-video

Mudang: Reconciliation between the Living and the Dead (“Yeoungmae: San jawa jugeun ja-ui hwahae”). 100 min, 35mm, color/b&w. Directed by Park Ki-bok. Produced by Cho Sung-woo. International Sales by Music & Film Creation Company, 2003. (See YouTube, “Mudang”, “Trailer of Mudang”.)

Books and articles

Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, London: Oxford University Press.

Barba, E. (1982) “Theatre anthropology,” The Drama Review, 26: 5–32.

Bruno, A.L. (2002) The Gate of Words: Language in the Rituals of Korean Shamans, Leiden, The Netherlands: Research School CNWS, Leiden University.

Choi, C. (1989) “The artistry and ritual aesthetics of urban Korean shamans,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 3: 235–50.

Eliade, M. (1964: 1st edn 1951) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hogarth, H.K. (1999) Korean Shamanism and Cultural Nationalism, Seoul, Korea: Jimoondang Publishing Co.

Holledge, J. and Tompkins, J. (2000) Women’s Intercultural Performance, London and New York: Routledge.

Kim, Tae-kon (1998) Korean Shamanism – Muism, Seoul: Jimoondang Publishing Company.

Rozik, E. (2002) The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Schechner, R. (1981) “Performers and spectators transported and transformed,” American Ethnologist, 12: 707–27.

Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Turner, V. (1986) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Turner, V. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

CASE STUDY: Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre of India: Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory and the question of taste

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

Sometime in the fifteenth century, a highly educated local connoisseur/scholar, writing in Sanskrit, attacked the “unfounded foul practices” of a specialized community of male and female actors (cakyars and nangyars) in Kerala, India. In his “Goad on the Actors,” the unknown author wrote:

Our only point is this – the sacred drama (natya), by the force of ill-fate, now stands defiled. The ambrosial moon and the sacred drama – both are sweet and great. A black spot mars the beauty of the former; unrestrained movements that of the latter. “What should we do then [to correct these defilements]?”

Listen. The performance should strictly adhere to the precepts of Bharata [author of the Natyasastra]. Keep out the interruption of the story. Remove things unconnected. Stop your elaboration. … Reject the regional tongue. Discard the reluctance to present the characters.

… Always keep the self of the assumed character. This is the essence of acting. One follows the principles of drama if things are presented in this way.

(Paulose 1993: 158–9)

Today the Kerala actors still perform Sanskrit dramas in their distinct regional style, known as kutiyattam. The fifteenth-century author was attacking the kutiyattam actors for their “blasphemous” and “illogical” deviations from precepts for staging Sanskrit dramas found in the Natyasastra, written at least 1,200 years earlier, which he considered definitive. The “defects” were obstacles in the path by which he expected to come to a proper aesthetic experience of Sanskrit drama. From this learned critic’s perspective, the kutiyattam style of staging Sanskrit dramas did not allow him as an audience member to enjoy an uninterrupted flow of dramatic action and characterization.

In this case study we use reception theory to interrogate how and why there could have been such a negative reaction to the unique regional style of staging Sanskrit drama known as kutiyattam. We will analyze the content and kutiyattam way of staging of a one-act Sanskrit farce, The Hermit/Harlot, authored by King Mahendravarman in the seventh century.

The Hermit/Harlot as an example of Sanskrit drama

Along with The Drunken Monk, The Hermit/Harlot is one of two one-act farces written by King Mahendravarman in the seventh century. Both have “invented” storylines – that is to say, unlike most Sanskrit dramas they were not based on the epics or other traditional stories. They draw on situations and characters common to the historical period in which the plays were written.

All Sanskrit dramas follow certain conventions of composition and use of language. The Hermit/Harlot begins with a prolog that establishes both the structure and comedic tone of the farce to follow. The Sutradhara, leader of the troupe and main actor (later playing the role of the Bhagavan), announces to the Vidusaka (played by the actor who later plays Shandilya) that their acting company will soon be invited to perform a play “at the royal palace,” and that they must be pleasing to the King.

The Sutradhara’s conclusion that he should put on a farce because it is the “most important rasa” is amusing because farce is a “minor” dramatic form. In the more important full-length dramas, comedy always takes secondary place to the heroic and erotic sentiments. A meta-theatrical layer of humor is created by the fact that the company of actors is, at the moment, performing a farce written by the King himself.

Following the prolog, the play proper begins: a young man, Shandilya, has become a wandering mendicant who also “must learn” at the feet of a supposedly learned teacher/practitioner, Bhagavan, who belongs to a severe Hindu Saivite sect that practices yoga and austerities. The opening passage of the play proper illustrates the difference between the highly florid Sanskrit verse and its simple, straightforward prose. The ill-tempered Bhagavan enters looking for his wayward student, and calls out:

The Sanskrit verse (italics) provides the actor with numerous images rich for psycho-physical elaboration.

On his entry, Shandilya explains how he “was born in a family which flourished on the remains of the food of crows … [with] tongues untouched by learning. … [With] no food in our house, I became a convert to Buddhism. But because those bastards eat only once a day … I gave up that religion too [to follow the Bhagavan].” As mendicants, the Bhagavan and his wayward disciple begin their daily round to beg alms from households with their skull-bowls. Along the way, the Bhagavan attempts to teach Shandilya certain precepts of correct yogic practice. But he can never learn correctly. When they stop for repose and meditation in a garden, the Bhagavan begins his meditation, but Shandilya spots a young courtesan awaiting her lover, falls in love with her, and therefore meditates on “wine, women, and song.” The play title derives from the subsequent exchange of souls between the courtesan, whose soul has been mistakenly taken by the servant of the god of death (Yama), disguised as a serpent, and the Bhagavan himself, who uses his powers to inject his soul into the body of the courtesan in order to teach his recalcitrant student, Shandilya, a lesson. The plot turns on farcical mistaken identities with a distinctly yogic twist.

King Mahendravarman’s farce is an entertaining as well as trenchant send-up of the religious orders of seventh-century South India. The Bhagavan is a “teacher” who becomes caught in the (il)logic of his own philosophical speculations. The “student” is one who, like the Vidushaka in the prolog, ought to be learning but cannot.

The stage was conventionally assumed by audience and actors to be divided into zones. Actors moving from one part of the stage to another indicated a shift in locale. This convention also allowed the action to shift back and forth between two groups of actors on the stage. In The Hermit/Harlot the comedic exchange of souls between the Bhagavan and the courtesan takes place in two locales – the part of the garden where the Bhagavan is undergoing his meditation and the part where the courtesan awaits her lover.

Rasa-bhava aesthetic theory in practice

The Natyasastra clearly establishes the rasa-bhava aesthetic as the central theoretical and practical organizational concept for theatre when it states, “nothing has meaning in drama except through rasa.” Rasa is so called “because it is capable of being tasted” (Bharata 1967: 105). The analogy of rasa as the tasting or savoring of a meal is offered to explain the process by which a theatrical performance of a play attains its coherence. “The ‘taste’ of the various ingredients of a meal is both their common-ground and organizes them as its end” (Gerow 1981: 230). What the actors offer as the “meal” to be tasted is each character’s state of being/doing (bhava), which is specific to the ever-shifting context of the drama in performance. The accompanying rasas are made available to the audience to “taste” as each bhava is embodied and elaborated in performance.

The Natyasastra identified eight permanent states of being/doing (sthayibhava), each with its accompanying rasa (see diagram). These basic states are enhanced by many other transitory and involuntary states.

Rasa theory operates simultaneously on two levels: (1) the audience’s experience of the various states or moods arising from the actor’s embodiment of the character; and (2) the process of aesthetic perception of the whole. Playwrights and composers structure their work around those modes most useful for elaboration. In this sense, the “seed” of the rasa experience is implicit in a drama and made explicit by the actors as they perform. In the rather simple one-act farce, The Hermit/Harlot, the prolog as well as the play proper elaborates the comic (hasya rasa), although the forms that this takes can vary with the performance circumstances. Here is what the Natyasastra has to say about the physical expression of the comic (hasya):

This is created by … showing unseemly dress or ornament, impudence, greediness, quarrel, defective limb, use of irrelevant words, mentioning different faults, [etc.; the result is represented] … by consequents [sic] like the throbbing of lips, the nose and the cheek, opening the eyes wide or contracting them, perspiration, color of the face, and taking hold of the sides.

(Bharata 1967: 172)

In The Hermit/Harlot, the gamut of comedic situations ranging from obvious physical humor and byplay to the subtler play of philosophical ideas would have given rise to an equally wide range of audience responses.

Although the basis of the permanent states of being/doing embodied by actors are the emotions we experience in everyday situations (becoming angry or guffawing with laughter), these everyday emotions are not the same as the ultimate aesthetic experience of rasa. To understand this dimension of rasa aesthetic theory, we must go beyond Bharata’s Natyasastra, which focuses pragmatically on the means for evoking rasa. It is the later commentators who explicate this aesthetic dimension of rasa, each reflecting on the nature of aesthetic experience from their own particular historical and philosophical perspectives, creating a dynamic history of Indian aesthetics.

The most influential among them is the philosopher, Abhinavagupta (tenth to eleventh centuries), from Kashmir. His Abhinavabharatı sought to define the nature of the rasa experience. The Natyasastra clearly expected an audience to be educated into the sensibilities needed to appreciate the subtleties of an actor’s performance, of course, but Abhinavagupta refined this, defining the ideal spectator and audience member as a sahrdaya – one whose heart/mind is “attuned” to appreciate the performance.

The artistic creation is the direct or unconventionalized expression of a feeling of passion “generalized,” that is, freed from distinctions in time or space and therefore from individual relationships and practical interests, through an inner force of the artistic or creative intuition within the artist. This state of consciousness (rasa) embodied in the poem is transferred to the actor, the dancer, the reciter and to the spectator. Born in the heart of the poet, it flowers as it were in the actor and bears fruit in the spectator.

If the artist or poet has the inner force of the creative intuition, the spectator is the man of cultivated emotion, in whom lies dormant the different states of being, and when he sees them manifested, revealed on the stage through movement, sound and decor, he is lifted to that ultimate state of bliss, known as ananda.

(Vatsyayan 1968: 155)

Kutiyattam and its distinctive style of performing Sanskrit dramas like The Hermit/Harlot

Just as Sanskrit theatre was reaching its zenith in most of India and becoming the subject of commentators such as Abhinavagupta, a distinctive style of staging Sanskrit dramas known as kutiyattam (“combined acting”) emerged in Kerala. Kutiyattam was initially developed with the patronage and direct involvement of King Kulasekhara Varman, around 900 c.e. The king himself authored two dramas still staged today in this style: Subhadradhananjaya and Tapatısamvarana. Assisted by a well-known high-caste brahmin scholar, Tolan, King Kulasekhara is credited with the introduction of a number of innovations in the way that Sanskrit dramas had previously been staged. These innovations are the controversial hall-marks of this distinctive style of performance: (1) the use of the local language, Malayalam, by the main comic character (Vidusaka) to explain key passages of the Sanskrit and Prakrit dramas; (2) the introduction of each character of a play with a brief narration of his past; (3) allowance for deviation from a script in performance to provide elaboration on the meaning and/or the state of mind/being of a character; and (4) the development of stage manuals for staging dramas in this emergent style and acting manuals on how actors should elaborate passages in a play. One practical reason for the introduction of Malayalam into performances was that Sanskrit was ceasing to be an everyday spoken language. After the tenth century, it was used only by certain educated communities.

Perhaps the most crucial feature of the development of kutiyattam during this period was its exclusive performance within particular high-caste temples of Kerala as a “visual sacrifice” to the deities of these temples. Theatres of the kind prescribed by Bharata for Sanskrit drama were built within compounds of a few wealthy, high-caste temples in Kerala (Figures 1 and 2). Other changes ensued, still to be seen today. In kutiyattam, Sanskrit dramas are not performed in full. Rather, sections of the drama become dramas in and of themselves, with lengthy preliminaries and elaborations of the story featuring one of the main characters on each night. On the final nights (one to three), there is the “combined acting,” kutiyattam, the term from which the style takes its name, which brings all the actors to the stage to perform the act or scene being staged. Still today, enacting a single scene of a drama in the kutiyattam style can take from five nights to as many as 41.

One of the oldest plays in the kutiyattam repertory is the one-act farce, The Hermit/Harlot (Figures 3 and 4). One traditional stage-manual for The Hermit/Harlot gives instructions on how to stage the play over 35 nights, including the nights of “combined acting.” For seven of these nights, the Vidusaka explains and comments in the local language on the philosophical issues raised by the play (Raja 1964: 17). Only certain sections are enacted on specific nights. Indeed, when a portion of the scene between the Bhagavan and Shandilya is enacted in this tradition, the evening becomes less about the farcical humor than about a serious allegory on the “interaction between God and the human soul” (Lockwood and Bhat 1995 [Part II]:  9). The scene with the courtesan and her attendant in the garden before the exchange of souls becomes an opportunity for the two women performers (nangyars) to elaborate the erotic pleasures associated with the poetic images of the garden, emphasized through dance and facial expression.

For the fifteenth-century anonymous author of The Goad on Actors, with whose account we began this case study, it was the very different experience and meaning of kutiyattam’s way of staging King Mahendravarman’s farce that he thought necessary to attack as “blasphemous” and “illogical.” As an audience member, he decried the fact that the actors of the kutiyattam tradition were depriving him of an experience of The Hermit/Harlot as the farce he expected. Looking back at least 1,200 years to Bharata, he demanded a return to a staging of the drama in its entirety, uninterrupted by the actors’ lengthy elaborations. His displeasure notwithstanding, the kutiyattam tradition of staging Sanskrit dramas, with all its “faults” and “defilements,” persisted down to the present. For centuries, kutiyattam has been appreciated within its high-caste interpretive community of educated connoisseurs for its unique delights, including the Vidusaka’s lengthy seven nights of humorous, philosophical elaborations. Today, the audience base for kutiyattam is considerably smaller than it once was.

Reception theory, with its emphasis on the agency of the audience/reader in the process of making meaning from the experience of a work, opens opportunities for understanding Sanskrit theatre. This theatre’s practitioners were not logocentric but concentrated on the means by which performance itself should evoke the proper aesthetic pleasures. The distinctive style of staging Sanskrit drama in the kutiyattam tradition still was guided by the rasa-bhava aesthetic – ubiquitous in India even where the Natyasastra itself is unknown. But kutiyattam was developed within Kerala’s culturally distinctive, regional interpretive community and reflected a major language change – the decline of Sanskrit itself. Audience and theatre artists were cultural partners in this development. The connoisseur’s trenchant negative criticism of the kutiyattam actors in Kerala with which we began this case study is evidence of an aesthetic shift; the record of his negative response helps the historian to further understand the modified aesthetic of kutiyattam. This development was not unique. As we saw in Chapter 3, in the commemorative devotional dramas dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, rasa theory and practice were reinvented to accommodate an aesthetic experience of deep devotion known as bhakti, which became a new rasa. This is especially evident in several genres of North Indian devotional drama including Ramlila which, as discussed earlier, celebrates the life of Ram, and the genre known as raslila which celebrates the life of Lord Krishna. As the case study of kathakali that follows reveals, it is also evident in some plays in the kathakali dance-drama repertory based on the life of Krishna.

Key References

Audio-visual resources

Kutiyattam temple/theatre tradition

The following videos are available at: www.keralatourism.org/video-clips. See the following videos on the kutiyattam temple-theatre tradition; enter the site and look for the complete list of clips.

1. Kutiyattam
2. Koothiyattam (a variant spelling of kutiyattam)
3. Chakyarkoothu (solo performance of the vidusaka or clown-like comic figure), and
4. Nangyarkoothu (solo performance of the Nangyars or women who perform the female roles).

Kutiyattam

Kailasodharanam (Ravanna: The lifting of Mount Kailasa). On YouTube, search kuttiyattam and then scroll for this title. This is a famous kutiyattam scene in which the actor playing the ten-headed demon-king, Ravanna mimetically enacts his tremendous power by “lifting” Mount Kailasa.

Kutiyattam performance and training

Richmond, F. (1999) Kutiyattam: Sanskrit Theater of Kerala, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (CD-ROM). Audio and video clips. (See the University of Michigan Press listing online for computer requirements.)

Books and articles

Baumer, R. Van M. and Brandon, J.R. (eds) (1981) Sanskrit Drama in Performance, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Bennett, S. (1990) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, London: Routledge.

Bharata (1961, 1967) Natyasastra, 2nd edn, trans. and ed. M. Ghosh, Vol. I, Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1967; Vol. II, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1961.

Byrski, M.C. (1974) Concept of Ancient Indian Theatre, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Coulson, M. (1981) Three Sanskrit Plays, New York: Penguin.

Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fish, S. (1980) Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fortier, M. (1997) Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Gerow, E. (1977) “Indian Poetics,” in J. Gonda (ed.) A History of Indian Literature, Vol. V, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 217–301.

Gerow, E. (1981) “Rasa as a Category of Literary Criticism,” in R. van M. Baumer and J.R. Brandon (eds), Sanskrit Drama in Performance, Honolulu: University of Hawaii.

Haksar, A.N.D. (1993) The Shattered Thigh and the Other Mahabharata Plays, New Delhi: Penguin.

Holub, R.C. (1984) Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction, London: Methuen.

Jones, C.R. (1984) The Wondrous Crest-Jewel in Performance, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Kale, P. (1974) The Theatric Universe, Bombay: Popular Prakashan.

Lockwood, M. and Bhat, A.V. (1994) Metatheatre and Sanskrit Drama, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.

Miller, B.S. (ed.) (1984) Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa, New York: Columbia University Press.

Panchal, G. (1984) Kuttampalam and Kutiyattam, New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Paulose, K.G. (ed.) (1993) Natankusa: A Critique on Dramaturgy, Tripunithura: Government Sanskrit College Committee [Ravivarma Samskrta Grathavali–26].

Raghavan, V. (1993) Sanskrit Drama: Its Aesthetics and Production, Madras: Paprinpack.

Raja, K.K. (1964) Kutiyattam: An Introduction, New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Richmond, F., Swann, D. and Zarrilli, P. (1990) Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Vatsyayan, K. (1996) Bharata: Natyasastra, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Vatsyayan, K. (1968) Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi.

CASE STUDY: Backstage/frontstage: Ethnic tourist performances and identity in “America’s Little Switzerland”

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

Ladies and Gentlemen, with the Wilhelm Tell Overture serving as an introduction, we are about to begin the … annual presentation of Schiller’s classic drama, Wilhelm Tell. Welcome again to historic and picturesque New Glarus, named after Glarus, Switzerland. New Glarus is the home of Wilhelm Tell, and this drama depicts the story of the famous Swiss struggle for the God-given rights of independence and freedom. It contains a message which is relevant for our times. The Wilhelm Tell Guild would like to request that you do not leave the seating sections with your cameras. All members of the cast will be happy to pose for your pictures at the close of today’s performance. Thank you.

(Opening announcement: New Glarus community performance of Wilhelm Tell, 1981)

Each Labor Day weekend in September, one mile from the small town of New Glarus, Wisconsin (population 1,800) on Green Country Road W, at the crest of a hill overlooking the village, members of the American Legion, Fire Department, and Lion’s Club direct cars and buses toward a grass parking lot. They are arriving for the annual outdoor community performance of Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Wilhelm Tell – English performances on Saturday and Monday, and the original German on Sunday.

The walk to the outdoor Tell grounds takes visitors down a long shaded pathway through a thick forest. Toward the bottom of the hill, to the left through the trees, parts of the “backstage” area can be seen: horses are saddled and ready, waiting to take their places. Spectators are greeted by teenage ushers dressed in “authentic” hand-sewn reproductions of thirteenth-century Swiss costumes. A lush green field opens up at the bottom of the hill. A row of loudspeakers separates the main aisle from the huge performance area. The boundaries of the playing space are irregularly formed by the thick forest – a backstage area with eight entrance pathways (Figure 1).

As the audience is seated – numbering between the hundreds (German performance) and several thousand (English performance) – pre-play entertainment begins with the Swiss Miss Folk Dancers. After the announcement above and Gioachini Rossini’s famous Overture, alpenhorn players with their 15-foot-long horns emerge from backstage to call home the herds of brown Swiss cattle and goats from the mountains before winter. In response to the plaintive calls of the alpenhorns, young boys and men appear herding raucous, often unmanageable goats and cows (Figure 2). Peasant women, children, and elders from the “village” gather to welcome the herders home. Traditional Swiss songs and yodeling intermingle with the lowing of the cattle, their clanging bells, and the bleating of goats. As the songs conclude, the cast of over 100 disappears into the forest. The audience applauds the opening spectacle. Thus begins the annual performance of Wilhelm Tell as it builds toward the climax when Tell shoots the apple off his son’s head. What the audience has witnessed is a literal realization of the pastoral scene described in Schiller’s text:

… high rocky shore of Lake Lucerne. … Across the lake one sees the green meadows, villages, and farms of Schwyz, lying in the bright sunshine … one hears the cowherd’s tune and the harmonious ringing of the herd-bells.

(Schiller 1954: 7)

Since the play’s first performance in German in 1938, this small mid-western community annually garners its collective human resources (over 200 people) to stage Wilhelm Tell. Before and after the production, the swell of visitors nearly overwhelms the village. Some will order Swiss specialties such as Kaesecheuchle (baked cheese pie) in local restaurants such as the Glarnerstube (Glarner is the original Swiss-German dialect of the village), order a Glarnerbier, dance a polka, browse the gift shops stocked with Swiss cuckoo-clocks and cassettes featuring local Swiss music, or visit one or more of its tourist attractions – the Chalet of the Golden Fleece (1937), or the Swiss Historical (pioneer) Village. Overt trappings of “Swiss-ness” dress the town: “Swiss Miss Lace Factory,” “Swiss Lanes,” Swiss-style architecture, the Wilhelm Tell crest, colorful Swiss family shields on lampposts, and the omnipresent red and white Swiss flag on menus, wallpaper, outside buildings, or as a swizzle stick. New Glarus represents itself today as “America’s Little Switzerland.” This case study considers how New Glarus provides one site for considering the historical interaction between performance, tourism, ethnicity, and identity. The study is based in methods of ethnography and sociological theories of tourism. (For an explanation of ethnography, see the online case study on kathakali). This case study on Little Switzerland is based on original research undertaken by the author in collaboration with Deborah Neff between 1981 and 1984.

Frontstage at Plimoth Plantation and in New Glarus

Some tourist attractions, such as Colonial Williamsburg (1930s) and Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts (1959) self-consciously constructed their “fronts” as recreated historical villages. Plimoth Plantation became a “living museum” in 1969 when it attempted to replicate as seamlessly as possible the actual life of the pilgrims of the Plimoth of 1627 by having full-time professional first-person interpreters role-play, in character, scenes from everyday life, as if they were the actual pilgrims (Snow 1993). Tourists today encounter a variety of pilgrim characters throughout the village in semi-improvised everyday life and activities – from marriages to a “Court Day,” where culprits are brought before the Magistrate.

New Glarus is not a living museum of Swiss or Swiss-American life, but performs its ethnicity while remaining what it is – an economically and increasingly diverse, primarily middle-class, semi-rural small town. Its “Swiss” “front” is not seamless and has been built piecemeal over the years. Residents know that their self-conscious performance of the village’s Swiss origins and “identity” has some basis in historical fact, but that it is also a collective (re)invention intended to attract tourists. Local historian Millard Tschudy explains without a trace of irony that New Glarus is a “for-real community” in that it developed its early performances for itself rather than for outsiders, but once outsiders started coming to see “the Swiss” in great numbers in the 1960s, the community “naturally” provided them with all the signs of Swissness that outsiders wanted to see.

New Glarus before Tell: Early celebrations for itself and others

New Glarus’s self-conscious ethnic identification as “America’s Little Switzerland” has its basis in historical fact. The original immigrants – 193 men, women, and children – those most affected by a failed local economy – left their native canton (state) of Glarus, Switzerland, on April 16, 1845, to make the arduous journey to the New World. Organized by the Glarus Emigration Association, they were preceded by advance scouts who procured 1,280 acres of land by the Little Sugar River in Wisconsin. On August 17, 108 of the original group arrived and divided the land by communal lot. After a difficult first winter and within four years, the community thrived by growing wheat. When wheat prices plunged in the 1860s, the community diversified, turning to dairy farming and cheese-making – quintessentially Swiss occupations. After 1910, the single most important non-agricultural employer was a milk-condensing company (originally Helvetia, later Pet Milk), employing 80–140 workers and serving 300 local farms.

Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe, crop failures and unemployment caused by rapid industrialization brought immigrants to the U.S. in unprecedented numbers. Throughout the upper midwest, new communities formed a patchwork ethnic quilt juxtaposing Germans, Norwegians, Irish, Swiss, and Dutch. Customs and traditions from “home” were maintained through dance, music, language, and key symbols – markers of identity to insiders and a curiosity to outsiders. An Irish woman residing in “Irish Hollow” recorded how she and her family decided to go and “look at the Swiss” on July 4, 1853:

The two families had decided to spend the Fourth … at Belleville. … However, on the morning of the Fourth, Uncle’s horses could not be located … It was noon before we [found them and] had them hitched to the wagon … Then someone remembered it was a long drive – eight miles – to Belleville.

“Let’s stay home like sensible folk,” suggested Mary.

“No, do let us go someplace,” said Aunt. “It is only five miles to New Glarus; we can look at the Swiss, if we can’t understand them.”

“I hate to be beat,” acknowledged Uncle Alex. “Let us take a look at the Dutch.”

Eventually deciding on “the Swiss” rather than “the Dutch,” the diarist describes the celebration:

New Glarus was celebrating the Fourth of July, but it was a Swiss celebration. Gessler was there and William Tell, to shoot the apple from his son’s head. There were Swiss wrestlers and Swiss dancers in the dining room of the hotel, where a Swiss music box with weights was wound up … Round and round the couples would glide while at certain intervals in the music the men would stamp their feet and emit wild whoops.

(Wallace and Maynard 1925)

The Swiss immigrants readily associated the celebration of American independence with the commemoration of a battle that delivered their ancestors from the tyranny of their Austrian oppressors on April 9, 1388. As early as eight years after the founding of the community, Tell was already a key symbol mediating Swiss and American identities, and providing entertainment for others.

A variety of local accounts confirm how key symbols of Swiss identity remained integral to local celebrations. An 1891 newspaper report on the 600th anniversary celebration of the birth of Switzerland notes that over 6,000 visitors traveled by special train to New Glarus for speeches, eating, dancing, and the parade with living-picture tableaux featuring Wilhelm Tell, Lincoln freeing the slaves, and Helvetia and Columbia – the “Swiss and American goddesses of liberty” (Neff and Zarrilli 1987: 6). In 1928, the Men’s Choir (Maennerchor) sponsored the first annual celebration of Swiss independence – the Volksfest – with song, dance, competitions, and food.

For the 90th anniversary celebration in 1935, the grandest community-wide celebration of its history and identity saw a fully mounted production of an historical drama authored by prominent local citizen, Dr. Schindler (Wallace and Maynard 1925: 6). A dramatic commemoration of the village’s settlement, it was translated into the Glarner dialect for performances in English and Glarnerdeutsch. The cast included the first settlers and their families, dancers, yodelers, Civil War veterans, Helvetia, and Uncle Sam. Thematically, the play emphasized the courage, endurance, and cooperation of the early community, admonished the audience to be proud to be Swiss while enduring the hardships of life, and emphasized the virtues of strength, courageousness, unity, freedom, love, and industriousness. The text contrasted the settlers and heroes with the Italian Blackshirts, the German Brownshirts, and the Russian Redshirts. It urged caution against “dictatorship, fascism, and Communism in our own land.” In contrast, the “truly American shirt was the Buckskin – standing for steadfastness of purpose, firmness of action, and clarity of union.” The play concluded with the entrance of Helvetia and Uncle Sam from separate ends of the stage. The three-day celebration was presided over by Governor P.F. LaFollette.

Tell comes to New Glarus

The festivals and commemorations described above were celebrations of the community’s dual Swiss-ethnic and American identities, undertaken in and of themselves. The first steps toward a more self-conscious (re)construction of the community as “Swiss” for outsiders were prompted by an “inside–outsider” – Mr. Edwin Barlow (1885–1957). Although related to the community by birth (his mother was Madelena Streiff), Barlow was raised after the death of his parents in nearby Monticello by his aunt and uncle (Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Figi). He attended college in Washington D.C., served in World War I, and lived in New York where he was involved in minor theatrical activities. After being adopted by a New York socialite and distant relative, he traveled Europe and spent nine years in Lausanne, Switzerland.

During the 1930s, Barlow visited New Glarus and Monticello where he experienced the Volksfest, and perhaps the 1935 commemorative drama. Inspired by his residence in Switzerland, Barlow decided to build an authentic Swiss chalet for his aunt – an architectural anomaly at the time. When Mrs. Figi died before the “Chalet of the Golden Fleece” was completed in 1937, Barlow made it his home.

Remembered by community members as being “different,” “highly dramatic and theatrical” (Neff and Zarrilli 1987: 9), Barlow introduced his plan early in 1938 for the community to stage its own outdoor pageant production of Schiller’s Tell. Barlow was inspired to do so by his experience of the Swiss festival-productions of Tell at Altdorf (bi-annually from 1899) and Interlaken (annually outdoors from 1912) – the productions which immortalized Tell as the Swiss national hero. Barlow was persuasive. Key community leaders were convinced, and the town was mobilized. On September 4/5, 1938, with a cast and crew of between 120 and 140, the first two performances in German played to audiences of approximately 1,500 on the 4th, and “several hundred” on the 5th, who braved cold, drizzly conditions. With a profit of US$535.44, the Tell pageant became, as hoped, “one of the traditions of New Glarus” (1938 program). By 1941, the numbers directly involved in the productions (then German and English) had grown from approximately 140 to 290, plus crew. The Tell Festival had quickly become an integral part of the community’s social and institutional fabric; the “Tell Guild” was formed to manage the production, invest proceeds in community projects, and interact with other community organizations like the Chamber of Commerce.

Barlow directed the productions between 1938 and 1945/6 when he turned direction over to his assistant, Mrs. Fred Streiff. In 1954 Barlow gifted the Chalet and its contents to the village “with the stipulation that it be maintained as a museum.” Barlow died in 1957.

We know from as early as the 1853 Irish diarist that at least some outsiders always attended New Glarus’s festivals, but the annual Tell productions attracted a steady stream of tourists. With the closing of the major local non-agricultural employer (Pet Milk) in 1962, village leaders and entrepreneurs saw tourism as a possible year-round economic boon – and a self-conscious, if gradual village remake began. In 1965, the New Glarus Hotel (built 1853) was renovated into “an authentic Swiss-style restaurant,” with “pure basic … Bernese-style architecture.” Swiss-style store-fronts (Glarnerstube) were erected. Additional “authentic” Swiss architecture (Chalet Landhaus Hotel; Schoco-Laden) followed later. To the traditional Maennerchor were added numerous new folk-dance and music groups – Roger Bright and his Orchestra, the Edelweiss Stars, the Swiss Miss Dancers, and others. New annual festivals – the Heidi Festival (June 1965) and Little Switzerland Festival (winter 1985) – were added to Volksfest (August) and Tell (September), attracting tourists year-round.

Backstage

In Goffman’s terms, what has a “frontstage” always has a “backstage.” Both New Glarus and Plimoth Plantation “stage” their authenticity, but do so in different ways and with a very different relationship between “front” and “back.” At Plimoth Plantation, there is a formal division of front and back as the actor/historians clock in and out, and/or take breaks where they step “backstage” into the “goathouse” to have a cigarette. It is transgressive for both when a tourist accidentally wanders backstage and sees a performer out of role. Plimoth Plantation reportedly “works” best when there is a constant sense of “playful deceit” between the actor/historians and their visitors (Snow 1993: 172).

In New Glarus there is no “seamless” front, no “authentic” historical roles to play, and front and back constantly bleed into one another. There is still a sense of “playful deceit” at work, but the deceit is the tourist’s conceit – whether he wishes to see, acknowledge, or document the unhidden “back.” It is tourists who stage New Glarus’s authentic “Swissness” when their cameras focus selectively on Swiss-style buildings, performances, and costumes and leave out of the frame the ranch-style home next to the Chalet.

Within the community’s “backstage,” enthusiasm over Tell and Swissness is not universal. Some “don’t want to be Swiss.” But for many, the annual experience resonates with what Francis Hsu calls the “intimate layer” of social and cultural life – those places, people, things, or activities by means of which a person develops “strong feelings of attachment” (1985: 29). For the New Glarus residents and their families who participate in the Tell play, it is a family affair – literally a picnic, and therefore a time when status and interpersonal differences are suspended to a much greater degree than usual while the community plays at making Swiss “history.” As one resident said:

It’s something people grow up with here. They need you to be there. That’s a part of it. Then you get new people into town and they get involved. There is a spirit there.

(Neff and Zarrilli 1987: 34)

Once involved, families commit themselves to the production year-in-year-out. Paul Grossenbacher played the original Gessler in 1938 and continued in the role for 24 years before taking over direction of the German production. Gilbert Ott, who with Ed Vollenweider created the first Tell, took the role in the 1941 English version and continued until 1961. He died several weeks after his final performance. Many adults began their involvement as children progressing through such non-speaking roles as choirboys, goatherders, dancers, soldiers, townspeople, and then to speaking roles. Their children, in turn, are playing roles they once played. From this “backstage” perspective, involvement allows residents to experience and (re)fashion their individual, familial, and/or collective identities; explore their relationship to “real” or “imagined” Swiss and middle-American sentiments and values embedded in their performances; stimulate the local economy; and serve their community by raising funds. Tourism, identity, and ethnicity meet and are constantly (re)imagined as New Glarus performs its Swiss/American “cultural heritage.”

But there is a second, more problematic “backstage” to New Glarus’s performance. In the construction of itself through this representation as the quintessential little Switzerland in the United States, the residents and the tourists are co-creating an illusion of New Glarus’s Swissness as a unified/unifying experience, much like that which Dean MacCannell has described. The invitation to “become Swiss for a day” is as much a fantasy as those offered at Disneyland. The celebration of the Tell festival is equally a moment of remembering for some in the community, as well as of collective forgetting.

KEY REFERENCES

Audio-visual resources

“Backstage Frontstage”: Wilhelm Tell in America’s “Little Switzerland,” DVD-video (50 minutes). Documentary of the Wilhelm Tell play and its production in New Glarus. Deborah Neff and Phillip Zarrilli, research; edited by Sharon Grady. Produced by the Folklore Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Available from: University of Wisconsin-Madison Folklore Program, Ingraham Hall, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures: http://csumc.wisc.edu/.

Books

Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City: Doubleday.

Hochschild, A.R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley: University of California Press.  

Hsu, F. (1985) “The Self in Cross-cultural Perspective,” in A.J. Marsela, G. De Vos and F.L.K. Hsu (eds) Culture and Self, New York: Tavistock.

MacCannell, D. (1976) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Schochken Books.

MacCannell, D. (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, London: Routledge.

Neff, D. and Zarrilli, P.B. (1987) Wilhelm Tell in America’s “Little Switzerland,” Onalaska: Crescent Printing Company.

Schelbert, L. (1970) New Glarus 1845–1970: The Makings of a Swiss American Town, Glarus: Kommissionsverlag.

Schiller, F. (1954) William Tell, Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series Inc.

Smith, V.L. (ed.) (1989) Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, 2nd edn, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Snow, S.E. (1993) Performing the Pilgrims, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage.

CASE STUDY: Whose Mahabharata is it, anyway? The ethics and aesthetics of intercultural performance

By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

On July 7, 1985, the international theatre world witnessed the debut of one of the most theatrically brilliant yet controversial productions of the late twentieth century: director Peter Brook’s nine-hour, three-play adaptation of the Hindu epic, Mahabharata (Figure 1). That first performance (in French) in an abandoned stone quarry as part of the 29th Avignon Festival was followed by an English language world tour in 1987–1988. A 330-minute English language film was released (and broadcast on television) in 1989. According to director Brook, he and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière were “not presuming to present the symbolism of Hindu philosophy” but trying to “suggest the flavor of India without pretending to be what we are not.” They were “trying to celebrate a work which only India could have created but which carries echoes for all mankind” (Carrière 1987: xvi).

In addition to adapting a sacred Hindu text said to be 15 times longer than the Bible, the authors borrowed and adapted a wide variety of spectacular performance styles, exotic music, and visual aesthetics, derived from India and other non-European cultures. Supported by a huge budget, the international, multi-racial, and multi-lingual cast spent several years in research and rehearsal (including travel to India). The resulting piece, coming in the midst of increasing awareness of colonialism’s injustices, provoked both extreme praise and extreme condemnation.

Here, chosen from among many, are examples of the opposing views, offered by respected theatre scholars. First, a criticism from Indian critic, Rustom Bharucha:

Peter Brook’s Mahabharata exemplifies one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations of Indian culture in recent years. Very different in tone from the Raj revivals, it nonetheless suggests the bad old days of the British Raj … through the very enterprise of the work itself [and] its appropriation and reordering of non-western material within an Orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market. … [Brook] does not merely take our commodities and textiles and transform them into costumes and props. He has taken one of our most significant texts and decontextualized it from its history in order to “sell” it to audiences in the West.

(Bharucha 1993 (1990): 68)

In contrast, a specialist in international theatre and performance, Maria Shevtsova, praises the work:

[U]niversal theatre [is] represented as never before by Brook’s Mahabharata … Its aesthetic is driven by a vision set on eroding hierarchies between nationals, races, castes or classes, or any other socially determined privileges [sic]. In this respect, too, Brook creates in The Mahabharata a totally new theatrical genre for which existing names are inadequate. By modeling its own features, this genre both anticipates coeval audiences and presupposes it can help create them … [T]he notion of “world community” underpinning Brook’s work is [close] to the spirit of synthesis and, for that matter, to the humanist perspective … not to mention its humanitarian and even utopian impulse.

(Shevtsova 1991: 221–2)

Two decades after its premiere, Brook’s Mahabharata continues to be a touchstone for heated debates regarding the ethics and aesthetics of a genre variously termed “intercultural,” “cross-cultural,” “transcultural,” “multicultural,” or “syncretic.” For the sake of simplicity, this case study will use the term “intercultural” theatre. (For discussions of alternative terms, see Lo and Gilbert [2002] and Pavis [1996].)

Before analyzing Brook’s Mahabharata, it will be useful to consider how this production fits into Brook’s work at the International Center of Theatre Research in Paris.

Peter Brook and the International Center of Theatre Research

Brook has been one of the most visible practitioners of “intercultural” theatre at least since 1970, when he helped found (with financial backing from the Ford Foundation, UNESCO and other sources) the International Center of Theatre Research in Paris (as of 1974, the International Center for Theatre Creations (CICT)). With actors, dancers, mimes, musicians, acrobats and other artistic collaborators from around the world, the Center attempts theatrical creation and experimentation that transcends national boundaries and commercial considerations. Plays are often rehearsed for over a year; productions occur only when (and if) they are ready. The Paris theatre that is home to the Center is the Bouffes du Nord.

The history of CICT suggests the path that led to the Mahabharata. Brook sought to create “performance texts” by emphasizing those elements traditionally considered secondary (gesture, movement, vocal tone, spatial relationships, etc.) and de-emphasizing the written text, traditionally elevated to greatest importance. In its first three years, the company undertook extensive “fieldwork” research in such places as Iran, Africa, and America. The goal was to provide a collective experience that would bind the company together, open them up as artists, and transform them by confronting the unknown. They did not attempt to learn new techniques, but to unlearn old ones, to reveal intuitive or “authentic” responses in the actor’s body, and to rediscover a kind of imagined purity or innocence. This idea is similar to the via negativa advocated by Jerzy Grotowski.

CICT’s first production was Orghast, performed in 1971 at the Shiraz/Persepolis Festival in Iran. It was an experiment in non-representational, abstract music and poetry inspired by the myth of Prometheus. It was performed in an invented language composed of over 2,000 word-sounds derived from musical phonemes, ancient Greek, Latin and Avestan. Playwright Ted Hughes described his goal: “If you imagine music buried in the earth for a few thousand years, decayed back to its sources, not the perfectly structured thing we know as music, that is what we tried to unearth” (Williams 1991: 5). Orghast attempted to communicate on a pre-rational level; it presumed and sought to reach some common emotional core in the audience without social, linguistic or cultural barriers.

Orghast was followed by other experiments, such as The Conference of the Birds (1972–1973). Based on the twelfth-century Sufi poem by the Persian Farid Uddin ‘Attar of Nishapur, the play was developed through improvisation during a three-month trek in jeeps across the Sahara desert and northwest Africa, and later during residencies in California with Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, at a Chippewa reservation in Minnesota and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Analyzing Brook’s Mahabharata as intercultural performance

Brook’s goals and methods have been both praised and criticized, as we have seen. In regard to The Conference of the Birds, David Williams reported that “the lack of any verifiable evidence that the group’s foray into African culture involved a real exchange enraged [some people], who immediately wrote off the entire exercise as symptomatic of a radical utopianism, even of a neo-colonial ethos” (Williams 1991: 7). While Williams acknowledges that such criticism may result from taking the work out of context, he also emphasizes that:

[T]he Centre’s initial work was structured around a series of questions that intrigued Brook. They are avowedly essentialist and humanist – idealist in formulation and concern, signaling Brook’s intuitive sympathy with Jung’s foregrounding of a mythopoeic sensibility, to the detriment of a rationalist or materialist discourse.

(Williams 1991: 4)

By “essentialist,” Williams means that Brook (like psychologist Carl Jung) believes that all people share a common, unchanging core or essence. “Humanism” is a set of values that has been embedded in Western thought since the Renaissance. In general, it placed the emphasis on human potential, putting life more at the center of human concerns than the Christian afterlife (although still Christian). Both concepts have been challenged in recent years as the creations of an elite class of European males. Critics of these terms consider the ways in which such concepts are the constructions of historical conditions flowing from such material factors as class, race, ethnicity, and gender (“rationalist and materialist discourse”).

Said suggests that one method of evaluating an artistic work is to examine its narrative structure. In their Mahabharata, Brook and Carrière transformed a cyclical, digressive, religious narrative into a linear, secular one. Cyclical narratives tend to distribute their focus across disparate tales and characters and to spread out philosophical considerations rather than zeroing in on a singular topic or issue. They are typically lyrical, dream-like, non-logical and ambiguous. In contrast, a linear, forward-moving narrative emphasizes an orderly or logical progression, for example from ignorance to knowledge. Linear progression is deeply embedded in Judeo-Christian philosophy and forms the rationale for traditional European dramatic structure, beginning with the ancient Greeks. For the Mahabharata, Brook and Carrière wanted to shorten and concentrate their work, so they eliminated aspects they thought unrelated to a main action. They divided the rest into three parts, creating a trilogy reminiscent of Greek tragedies or the three-act play structure, and, in effect, seemed to follow the linear concept of Aristotle’s definition that a tragedy must have a “beginning, middle, and end.” They created a framing device by having the tale told to an Indian child. Did such choices suggest an incoherent or incomprehensible original? Did they imply that the audience was like a child who needed difficult ideas explained in familiar ways? As Said noted: “… if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient” (Said 1978: 21).

Similarly, if we look at the episodes they chose for inclusion, we notice many that emphasize bizarre or supernatural sex. Examples include 100 brothers born from a giant iron ball that only emerges from their mother’s womb after her stomach is beaten, and two wives who summon various gods to impregnate them because their joint husband has been cursed to die if he has intercourse. The adapters selected the stories of five brothers married to a single wife and the sexual encounter of a human with a demon. All of these elements exist in the original but with stories of different kinds. Were these selected primarily for exotic appeal, or did they help audiences discover the original narrative’s “interior” meaning?

Such questions require us to examine any particular performance in detail, aesthetically and ethically. We must assess that elastic pull between aesthetic pleasure and social value and between the source and target cultures. There is no simple “score card” with which to assess the extent to which a work is a troubling, Orientalist appropriation. One must assess one’s own sensibilities together with an awareness of the possible moral implications of the work. Some may find this comment of Peter Brook’s helpful (he was speaking to actors, but his words are relevant to audiences).

The only thing I can say that may be of some use is that there are two ways of making theatre. One can make theatre … to create things that improve on life. … The other possibility is to use one’s contact with theatre to live in a better way. … All one can do is pursue the kind of work that opens one up and makes one available. … One can say that theatre is good or bad. And how does one feel that? By tasting it. The proof is in the pudding.

(Williams 1991: 278)

Ultimately, it is up to the individual spectator – and the historian – to determine, which careful reading and viewing can help.

Key references

Audio-visual resources

Brook, P. (director) (1989) The Mahabharata (Part 1: The Game of Dice; Part II: Exile in the Forest; Part III: The War). A 312-minute film made in 1989, on two DVDs, a reworking of the stage production. Available for purchase from Parabola Video Lab or Insight Media. Clips available on YouTube:search “Peter Brook” then the title.

Books and articles

Bharucha, R. (1993, 1990) Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London and N.Y.: Routledge.

Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Carrière, J.-C. (1987) The Mahabharata: A Play Based Upon the Indian Classic Epic, trans. P. Brook, New York: Harper and Row.

Lo, J. and Gilbert, H. (2002) “Toward a topography of cross-cultural theatre praxis,” The Drama Review, 46(3): 31–53.

Pavis, P. (1992) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. L. Kruger, London and New York: Routledge.

Pavis, P. (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London and New York: Routledge.

Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Random House.

Shevtsova, M. (1991) “Interaction-Interpretation: The Mahabharata from a Socio-Cultural Perspective,” in D. Williams (ed.) Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge.

Sorgenfrei, C.F. (1995) “Intercultural Directing: Revitalizing Force or Spiritual Rape?” in M. Maufort (ed.) Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, New York: Peter Lang.

Williams, D. (ed.) (1988) Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook, London: Methuen.

Williams, D. (ed.) (1991) Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge.

CASE STUDY: Theatre and cultural hegemony: Comparing popular melodramas

By Bruce McConachie

Melodrama in history

The Titanic sinks, the police arrest a murderer, and aliens threaten to conquer the earth! These are three examples of stories that make good melodrama, a popular dramatic form during many historical eras that continues to terrify, reassure, and propagandize audiences today. Briefly defined, melodrama allows spectators to imaginatively experience an evil force outside of themselves, such as a greedy person, a rapacious criminal, or a vast conspiracy. Consequently, melodrama dramatizes social morality; it names the “good guys” and “bad guys” in our lives and helps us to negotiate such problems as political power, economic justice, and racial inequality. It may also point audiences beyond their present circumstances to transcendental sources of good and evil.

Because melodrama can help audiences to identify new types of virtue and vice, it is often in demand during periods of rapid historical change. Melodramatic plays flourished, for example, in fifth-century b.c.e. Athens, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century Japan. Melodrama rose to prominence again in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, first in response to the American and French Revolutions (1776, 1789) and later as a means of coping with the vast economic and social changes caused by the Industrial Revolution. As we will see, two very different kinds of melodrama spoke to people’s need for a new social morality in the wake of each of these transformations. By comparing these types of plays, we can trace significant changes in the practical ethics of Western societies during the course of the nineteenth century.

Comparing popular melodramas

To compare the social morality of two kinds of melodrama using only one play of each type, the historian needs to be sure that she or he is comparing dramas that were popular in their time and broadly representative of many similar plays. Both Coelina, Or the Child of Mystery (1800) by Guilbert de Pixérécourt and The Poor of New York (1857) by Dion Boucicault fit these criteria. Coelina achieved nearly 1,500 performances in France during the first 30 years of the century. English, German, Dutch, and Italian adaptations also flourished. In 1857, Boucicault adapted Les Pauvres de Paris, already a popular melodrama in Paris, as The Poor of New York. Following the play’s success in New York, Boucicault re-tooled the melodrama for theatres in other cities by keeping its basic plot but altering local references. Over the next 15 years, the drama resurfaced as The Poor of Liverpool, The Poor of the London Streets, The Streets of Dublin, and similar titles for other industrial cities in the British Empire and the United States. Both Coelina and Poor, then, enjoyed international success for a significant period of time.

Both dramas are also broadly representative of two types of nineteenth-century melodrama. The success of Coelina and other plays by Pixérécourt spawned dozens of melodramas with similar plots and characters. Likewise, other playwrights at mid-century repeated the formula of Boucicault’s melodramas to gain success. Like writers and producers of television melodrama today, theatre people in the nineteenth century strove to reproduce plot situations, character types, and significant themes that had worked in the past. The results were two distinct types of melodramatic entertainment, each involving more than 100 plays: providential melodrama, popular from roughly 1800 to 1825, and materialist melodrama, successful from around 1855 to 1880.

Providential melodrama

Coelina is a typical providential melodrama. The setting for these kinds of plays is usually timeless and universal, as in a fairy tale. Coelina occurs before the Revolution of 1789 in a village in rural France that has changed very little since the Middle Ages. Like other providential melodramas, the agent of evil in Coelina is a single villain, alienated from the social institutions that provide order in this society of hardworking peasants and small shopkeepers. Truguelin, the “monstre” of Coelina, scorns the Catholic faith, flees from the king’s law, and attempts to use his family to advance his greedy ambitions. When Coelina, the heroine of the play, refuses to marry his son, Truguelin has her driven from her home and persecutes her and her true father to gain her inheritance.

Providential melodramas, however, always assure the audience that God watches over innocent goodness and His power will ensure a happy ending. In Coelina, nature works in conjunction with the Almighty, causing Truguelin to crumble in fear at a thunderstorm, a symbol of the Final Judgment that awaits him. Unlike the villain, the natural innocence of Coelina and her father, whose identity is unknown to her, gives them insight into Truguelin’s machinations and draws them together to protect each other. Like other providential melodramas, the play ends with the villain banished from the stage and the good characters returned to the rural utopia from which they started (Figure 1). No original sin stains the virtue of good characters in providential melodrama; eliminate persecuting villainy, Coelina promises, and Paradise can be regained.

Materialist melodrama

The Poor of New York by Boucicault differs significantly from Coelina and its providential spin-offs. Instead of a fairy-tale-like setting, materialist melodrama places the action within time-bound, historical realities – the streets, mansions, and tenement rooms of a depression-wracked New York in The Poor of New York. In this materialist world, the institutions of liberal, bourgeois government and society provide order and justice. The villain of Poor, Gideon Bloodgood, violates their codes when he ignores legislated laws, breaks with sound business practices, and attempts to use his money to gain social respectability. The financial “panics” of 1837 and 1857 and the economic depressions that follow frame the plot of Boucicault’s play. When a rich depositor dies in his bank in 1837, Bloodgood steals the money rightfully due to the Fairweather family, and the plot of the melodrama examines the consequences of this theft, its discovery, and the eventual restitution of the money 20 years later. As in a well-made play, the plot of Poor hinges on a secret known to the audience but not to most of the characters (who stole the money?), which is finally revealed at the end of the play. The social world of Coelina ensured worldly justice through idealized hierarchical institutions – the Church, the autocratic state, and the patriarchal family. In Poor, the actual, historical institutions of the United States in the 1850s have taken their place.

Gone from productions of The Poor of New York were appeals to Providence and the expectation that the Almighty would restore a utopian paradise to characters of virtue. Where natural instincts, heroic action, and God’s grace could reveal the “mysteries” of Coelina, the characters of Boucicault’s play inhabit a denser, more impenetrable world. For much of the play, the Fairweathers do not know that Bloodgood is the primary cause of their distress; it takes a detective-like figure, Badger, to reveal his villainy. (Indeed, the detective, a figure with specialized knowledge of the mysteries of the industrial city, first gains prominence as a dramatic character in materialist melodramas.) In addition to man-made villainy, chance causes much of the evil in materialist melodrama. Characters in Poor may be wealthy one day and poor the next, as happens to one of the heroes as a result of the “panic” of 1857. While the ending of providential melodrama banished evil from the stage to rejoice in the return of a traditional utopia, materialist melodrama, more fatalistic than utopian, typically allows villains to reform and rejoin society. Thus, the Fairweathers forgive Bloodgood and his daughter, both of whom also suffered from mistakes and accidents, and the ending celebrates the reconciliation of these two families. Chance, not providential design, structures much of the action of materialist melodrama (Figure 2).

The code of bourgeois respectability regulates class relations in this type of play. Although the Fairweathers are middle-class, they have less money during the 1857 depression than the Puffys, a working-class family characterized as Irish-American. Nonetheless, the Puffys, temporary landlords of the Fairweathers, treat the middle-class family as their “betters,” even sacrificing their own welfare to feed and house them. Bloodgood and his daughter have the wealth to claim upper-class status in the play, but lack sentimental affection. Because the respectable bourgeoisie looked askance at rich people whose pretentiousness led them to believe they deserved special privileges, the action of Poor snubs the Bloodgoods’ social ambitions. By the final curtain, the Bloodgoods and Fairweathers are on the same social plateau, while the Puffys are placed below them in social status. The social hierarchy of Poor is less steep and has fewer gradations than that of Coelina, which began at the top with the Church and the King, descended to landed gentry, made a place for royal officers, and bottomed out with tradesmen and peasants.

Two Major Types of Nineteenth-Century Melodrama
Providential (popular 1800–1825) Timeless, universal setting Autocratic institutions ensure order Natural innocence glorified God ensures happy ending Return to utopian paradise	Materialist (popular 1855–1880) Time-bound historical setting Liberal, bourgeois institutions ensure order Social respectability honored Chance puts happy ending at risk Acceptance of material status quo

Why did the successful formula for melodramatic entertainment change so radically between the 1820s and the 1850s? Where popular theatre is concerned, the answer can never be limited to the changing intentions of playwrights and other artists in the theatre. Certainly Boucicault and those working with him after 1855 wanted to write and produce different kinds of plays than had Pixérécourt and his fellow artists, but both groups of theatre-makers, eager for popular success, were primarily responding to their audience. Why, then, did audience tastes for melodramatic theatre change in this thirty-year period from an embrace of providential plays to materialist ones? Contrary to popular belief, matters of taste are primarily social and historical in origin, not individual. People enjoy certain types of melodramas (and melodramatic films, songs, and DVDs today) because their performances represent their hopes, fears, and beliefs about social morality. These enjoyable feelings and ideas – present in both the content and form of any theatrical performance – are shaped by social and historical experience. Certain kinds of plays attain popularity because they appeal to the values and emotions of specific social groups, often groups able to exercise significant power in their historical societies.

One way for historians to understand the changing popularity of types of melodramatic plays in the nineteenth century is to use the concept of cultural hegemony. From this point of view, the popular formula for melodramatic theatre changed from providential to materialist because the 1850s audience sought different definitions and assurances about social morality than had previous spectators in 1800.

Melodrama and cultural hegemony

During the first decade of the 1800s, the social groups with the most power in France applauded the rise of Napoleon and his restoration of political and social order after a decade of revolutionary turmoil. These reactionaries also renewed their faith in Christianity and the traditional authority of the Catholic Church, which began to recoup much of the power it had lost in the 1790s. At the same time, these powerful groups, especially significant factions of the bourgeoisie and many in the military, had come to accept the sentimental and utopian promises of the Revolution. That is, they believed that natural intuition was a better guide to morality than reason and continued to hope for a society in which evil could be banished from the world. And no wonder – these plays induced nostalgia for the authoritarian order of the ancien régime, the old aristocratic, monarchical rule in France in the centuries before the Revolution. They also complimented their audiences on their inherent innocence and spiritual wisdom. Although many working-class groups in Europe and the United States also applauded providential melodrama, the genre undercut values supporting the kinds of reforms that might have benefited them.

By the 1850s, the capitalist revolution in Western Europe and the United States had created an international middle class with very different desires and anxieties than the post-revolutionary groups of the early 1800s. Like the earlier social groups, however, many Americans and Europeans responded to the economic revolution of the nineteenth century in contradictory ways. Many embraced the apparent efficiency of the contracts, train schedules, and increasingly complex manufacturing processes of industrial capitalism. The belief that man’s rational mind could control the material world for the betterment of all undercut the need for religion and undermined traditional, hierarchical forms of authority. The new bourgeoisie, however, also attempted to brake the steam-powered forces of nineteenth-century capitalism through the code of respectability. Respectability taught that profits alone were no guarantee of social status; the respectable also needed sentimental affection and correct manners, behavior that could get in the way of simply making money. Consequently, just as providential melodramas helped powerful social groups early in the century to craft a new morality in the wake of the French Revolution, so did materialist melodramas assist the new bourgeoisie in forging a social morality that would benefit their class in the 1850s. Arguably, this kind of melodrama was even more antithetical to working-class interests than the providential kind because it rendered fundamental reform unthinkable in a chance-ridden world.

Melodrama continued to change after the 1880s, when the materialist plays written by Boucicault and his imitators went out of fashion. And the concept of cultural hegemony continues to be a useful way of understanding the effects of their popularity. Which social groups benefit from current conceptions of “good guys” and “bad guys” in detective stories on television today? What is the social morality behind the popular genre of disaster films? By understanding how these dramas help to legitimate or undercut the values of powerful social groups, we can begin to answer these questions.

Key References

Books

Brooks, P. (1984) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Q. Hoave and G. Nowell-Smith (eds), New York: International Publishers.

Heilman, R. (1968) Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, W. Moore and P. Cammack (trans.), London: Verso Press.

McConachie, B. (1992) Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

McConachie, B. (1989) “Using the Concept of Cultural Hegemony to Write Theatre History,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, T. Postlewait and B. McConachie (eds), Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Pao, A.C. (1998) The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and the Nineteenth-Century French Theater, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Williams, R. (1980) Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London: Verso Press.

CASE STUDY: Modernism in Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett

By Gary Jay Williams

“Finita la commedia.”

Uncle Vanya, Act 4

Modernism was history by the end of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the term postmodernism was in use to capture the growing reaction to the closed boundaries of modernism. Modernism in drama and theatre belongs to a cultural landscape between approximately 1870 and 1970. To illustrate some fundamentals of the modern drama’s view of the human condition, this case study briefly compares three landmark plays in that landscape: Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1899), Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957).

“Modern drama” is the conventional marker for works by those major Western playwrights who, beginning in the late nineteenth century, departed sharply from what they regarded as the theatre forms of an exhausted past, from classical verse drama to melodrama. They rejected the traditional notions of a compassionate creator at the center of the universe, giving human life order and significance. Modern dramatists consider the results of the apparent absence in the universe of “a divinity that shapes our ends,” to use Hamlet’s phrase (Hamlet 5.2.10). This development came against a background of the political revolutions across Europe by the disenfranchised of the Industrial Revolution, and it came in concert with new ideas in science and philosophy. In Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of the evolution of species, including humankind, there was more evidence of the process of natural selection than there was of the intervening hand of God. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticized the oppressive nature of Christianity and capitalism, and Friedrich Nietzsche found no creditability in Christianity as a basis for moral values. Sigmund Freud located human identity within the conscious mind and unconscious primitive desires and repressed memories. By the mid-twentieth century, the works of many modern dramatists were reflecting the cumulative effects of the assault on human life and dignity of two wars of massive scale, both waged with ever-improving machine-age efficiency, and the second ended with atomic age weaponry. With all this and the Holocaust – the slaughter of six million Jews by Nazi Germany, done with industrialized efficiency – there seemed little likelihood of some divine overseer with a plan that made sense of human suffering.

The scrutiny of modern drama continued down through Samuel Beckett’s works in which finally there is only suffering amid faded remnants of meaning. With Beckett’s inexorable refining down to this vision, the age of modernism may be said to draw to a close. This case study offers close descriptions of the language and theatrical imagery of the plays, and these are in the service of comparisons among these particular plays to illustrate the modernist vision. The approach is sufficiently self-evident that no further explanation of the method is necessary. Comparisons among other plays would be possible for this purpose. Very different critical approaches to these particular plays are possible. For example, one could argue that the self-conscious theatrical allusions and devices in these plays anticipate postmodern strategies. Also, in the comparisons drawn, no “influence” of one author on another is suggested. The ground these plays share is much larger. The study begins with an analysis of Chekhov’s play that provides a base for the comparisons to follow.

Uncle Vanya

From the beginning of Chekhov’s play to the end, nothing of consequence happens to alter the conditions of the unfulfilled lives of the characters. Nothing happens again and again. That axiom was originally designed to distinguish the cyclical patterns of plays of the so-called “theatre of the absurd,” but it is applicable here. Chekhov weaves this pattern in the delicately shaped emotional rhythms of scenes of longing and disappointment, and he gives us a lightly ironic, comic perspective on the anguish of his characters. By these means and his subtle, symbolic language and stage images, Chekhov brings his realistic play to a level of a poetic meditation on the modern human condition.

In the play, a celebrated and self-absorbed professor of fine arts in the capital city of St. Petersburg, Alexandr Serebryakov, has recently retired to live on the country estate of his deceased first wife. With him is his wife of twenty-seven, the beautiful, laconic Yelena (as in the Helen of Greek mythology). Living there are Sonja, his daughter by his first wife (now the legal owner of the estate), the mother of his first wife, Maria Voynitskaya, a widow, and her son, Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky – Vanya. Dr. Astrov is visiting the family, as he has often for eleven years. He is a physician, affected by his helplessness in the face of the death of his patients, and a bachelor past midlife. Now on the downhill side of idealism, he sometimes drinks to numb the pain.

Sonja and Vanya have long given themselves to the diligent managing of the country estate. Vanya at 47 has finally awakened from his idolizing of the professor. He describes him early in the play as a fraud, the default benefactor of his first wife’s estate, writing for 25 years on realism and naturalism, understanding nothing about art and borrowing on the ideas of others, “for 25 years pouring from one empty vessel into another” (Chekhov 1996: 96–7). Vanya, endearing but ineffectual, reaches out in rumpled desperation for the affection of the beautiful Yelena, who finds him foolish. When he enters bringing her a bouquet of roses and finds her in the arms of Dr. Astrov, he wilts completely. The moment is one out of an old stock comedy, made poignant. Chekhov allows us to see that Astrov’s idealizing of Yelena’s beauty would hardly be a liberating alternative for her, any more than would Vanya’s infatuation. Ultimately, Yelena resists the persistent Astrov, not without regret. Her conscience troubles her some. She once thought she loved the aging professor, she confides to Sonja. But beneath her regret and conscience lie her fatalism, resignation. She tells Sonja: “Everywhere all I’ve ever played is a minor role. As a matter of fact, Sonja, I am very, very unhappy! There’s no happiness for me on this earth” (1996: 116). The innocent Sonja, aware that she is not pretty like Yelena, still floats the desperate hope that Astrov might find a wife in her.

Professor Serebryakov, realizing that he cannot bear living in the country, calls the family together to announce that he is returning to the city and to propose that the estate be sold. This would finance his future. He delivers the proposal oblivious to his selfishness. The devastated Vanya sees his own life wasted and with no straws left to grasp, fires two wild shots at the professor, comically missing both. In the end, the professor and Yelena depart, leaving the estate as it was and all as they were. Indeed Vanya promises the professor, “Everything will be as it was” (1996: 137). In the goodbyes between Astrov and Yelena, Astrov ironically applies an old theatrical phrase to the end of their relationship: Finita la commedia (the comedy ends) (1996: 137). Astrov, too, leaves, first retrieving the morphine Vanya stole from his medical bag. He bundles up his maps that he has brooded over. They show a degenerating ecological system in the countryside. The forests are not being re-seeded; life is not being renewed. From outside, we hear the departures of the Professor and Yelena, and then Astrov; inside they are softly noted: “They’re gone … He’s gone.”

Marina, the old nurse in the corner, winds up her yarn as the play winds down. A candle is lit against the coming dusk. Sonja tries to comforts the tearful Vanya as they return to doing bills and invoices (Figure 1). Her famous final speech includes these passages:

What can we do, we must live! We shall live, Uncle Vanya. We will live through the endless, endless row of days and the long evenings, we shall patiently bear the ordeals that fate has in store for us … and when our hour comes, we shall die humbly … God will take pity on us … And we shall rest! We shall hear the angels and see the heavens sparkling with diamonds …

(Chekhov 1996: 141)

Nothing has changed for these characters. They find no fulfillment in their lives, not in the fame of the professor, the beauty of Yelena, the physician’s idealism, or the rounds of daily work on the estate. Sonja’s resort to the rewards of heaven will not deliver them. Some spectators may admire the spirit and faith of Sonja. But in the end, the candle burns against the coming dusk. Finita la commedia.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

In Pirandello’s play, subtitled “A comedy in the making,” we are in a theatre, where a stock acting company rehearses a Pirandello comedy called Mixing It Up. Six Characters is part of a trilogy of Pirandello’s plays that take place in theatres. In these and other plays, he moves the spectator back and forth across the blurry boundaries between appearance and reality, casting doubt on any attempt to distinguish between them by his characters or us and also casting light on our constructions of truth.

As the company begins its rehearsals, a strange family of six appears, entering from a door at the rear of the stage: “A tenuous light surrounds them, almost as if irradiated by them – the faint breath of their fantastic reality,” says Pirandello’s stage direction (Pirandello 1952: 214). In the family are the Father, the Mother, the Step-daughter, the Son, the Boy and the Child (a girl) (Figure 2). Compelled and compelling, they come seeking an author to write a play of their lives. They come in desperation, expecting that a work of art will give some order and meaning to their troubled, shapeless lives. Their proper names are never (or scarcely) given; they are incomplete, undefined. They are, we learn, fictive characters, abandoned by their author and left to roam the world like lost souls. Orphaned at birth and adrift, the family suffers in what the Father describes as their “mortal desolation” (1952: 234). Relationships within the family are hopelessly broken. The theatre company they look to for help is rehearsing a play that it cannot make sense of, let alone understand the quest of the six characters now in their midst.

The play is several steps removed from Chekhov’s psychological realism. We probably are aware of the fictive family as emblematic more often than we are drawn to them as individualized characters. Pirandello’s strategy, which includes much philosophical discussion by the Father, requires us to be intellectually pro-active, moving from the surfaces of the action to their larger implications, to the level of metaphor. At this level, the condition of the six characters seeking an author to give meaning to their lives is like that of the family in Uncle Vanya. Their lives on the old estate revolve around the self-absorbed professor-author, who at the end of the play abandons them (all except Yelena). The professor exits on a note of breathtaking vanity: “I could write an entire treatise for the edification of posterity on how one should live” (Chekhov 1956: 130). It is the baldest irony in Chekhov’s play that this is said by the character most oblivious to suffering in the lives of others.

Pirandello’s play is more stark; the six characters have not come from a humane, gently ironizing Chekhov, nor do they find one to write their play. In the “family” there are only complex, broken kinship relations, difficult for them to endure (and requiring effort of the spectator to follow). The Father had deliberately abandoned his wife (the Mother), and their son. She is now widowed after a second marriage (which the Father virtually arranged), out of which were born the other three children here, including the beautiful Step-daughter who, like her mother, is dressed in mourning for her real father. The family has been “reunited” by a cruel coincidence. The Father, going to a brothel, found that the young woman in clothes of mourning, which he had begun to remove, was his step-daughter. It is the scene of this encounter that the bedeviled Father and Step-daughter especially want a new playwright to write, he because any human “wants to get at the cause of his sufferings” (Pirandello 1952: 267), and she for the revenge of public shame on the Father. Pirandello puts a powerful taboo into play here. Incest, in this case near-incest, is repugnant in almost all human cultures. It violates our sense of the most basic and trusted of natural relationships. The encounter of a father and daughter in a brothel, she in mourning clothes, mocks the idea of the dignity of human life. The coincidence is evidence of a universe indifferent to our humanity. Madam Pace, the fat, rouged brothel-keeper with dyed blond hair, mysteriously materializes just when she is needed for this scene. Madame enters wearing a pair of scissors hanging on a chain from her waist. She is a lurid parody of the sisters of fate of classical mythology who supposedly spun, wove, and then cut from the loom the completed thread of human life and destiny.

The play ends with the theatre manager arranging another scene, set in a garden – usually a promise of life – with a fake stage fountain at center stage. The family argues heatedly over playing the scene at all, while the stage manager wants to know how it all turns out. Suddenly all turns to horror. The Child is found dead, drowned in the fountain, the cause unclear. The Young Boy was seen nearby, “with eyes like a madman” (1952: 276). Then a shot rings out, and the Young Boy is found dead, having killed himself with a revolver. The play ends in confusion over whether these things have actually happened or are make-believe. Amid the chaos, the Father cries “Pretence? Reality, sir, reality!” (1952: 276).

With the ghastly, simultaneous death of the two children, new life is cut off and with it, any possibility of creating a new play that could make sense of the lives of the six characters. Reality or theatrical representation, it makes little difference; in neither is there redemptive meaning. The family might search eternally. An indifferent universe will remain indifferent.

Endgame

The chief characters in Beckett’s play, the blind Hamm and attending Clov, are acutely aware of the indifferent universe from the beginning of the play. They are on no journey of discovery. They know they have been sentenced to live and suffer the purposeless of existence each day, from beginning to end. Beckett defines them in austere, minimal terms (his plays have been compared to contemporary “minimalist” art). They speak mostly in short, sparse sentences and phrases. They occupy a cell-like “bare interior,” and in its grey light they endure an existence not unlike that which Sonja describes at the end of Uncle Vanya, “the endless, endless row of days and the long evenings.” But Hamm and Clov conjure no ultimate meaning to their suffering, have no expectations of salvation, nor do they search for an author.

They recycle routines they have long since devised to “keep it going” in the void. “Me to play,” says Hamm in his first line. They go through these labors wearily, sometimes wryly, necessarily. Clov climbs the ladder to look out at the high window with his telescope, first the right window and then the left, sometimes forgetting to move the ladder or take the telescope with him, chuckling at his own rote repetitions of a fruitless operation. Out the window, there is no end in sight. Every morning he has confirmed this. There is only gray, “GRRAY. … Light black. From pole to pole,” he reports to Hamm (Beckett 1958: 32). Clov, in slave-like obedience to the blind Hamm’s commands, pushes Hamm in his wheeled chair around the room so he can feel the wall, “old Wall!” the same confining wall, beyond which is the “other hell”) (Figure 3). Clov then returns him back to his place “in the center,” laboring at the blind man’s bidding to center the chair, “Bang in the center,” adjusting it to the left, then right, forward and then back, as if there were a center (1958: 25–32). Hamm cannot stand, and Clov cannot sit; Clov walks stooped, with great pain in his legs. The possibility of complete immobility looms in this room; we sense its immanence viscerally. Life will let them die in its own good time. The elderly parents, Nagg and Nell, are immobile in their ashcans waiting for death, emerging for a biscuit, to try to kiss, or for Nagg to tell again the story of the tailor. When an enraged customer complains that the tailor has taken three months to do his striped trousers while God made the world in six days, the tailor replies, “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look – (disdainful gesture, disgustedly) – at the world (pause) and look (loving gesture, proudly) – at my TROUSERS!” (1958: 22–3). Like many of the characters’ labors, Nagg’s story (“I never told it worse”) is like a tired vaudeville routine, a dying act, except it won’t. These characters, like the remaining pieces in a stale-mated endgame of chess, are trapped; no move they can make will advance them.

The world’s history has never been different; life in this room is a microcosm of it. (Beckett assailed the attempt of the American Repertory Theatre to locate the play in a subway after a nuclear holocaust.) “The end is in the beginning …” says Hamm late in the play (1958: 69). The line is reminiscent of Pozzo’s famous protest in Beckett’s Waiting For Godot:“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, and then it is night once more” (Beckett 1954: 58). “And yet you go on,” Hamm continues, echoing the closing line of Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Beckett 1955: 414). When Clov finds he has a flea on him, Hamm is very perturbed: “But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him for the love of God!” (Beckett 1958: 33). Clov is unnerved when, in his last look out the window with his telescope, he spies a little boy on the horizon, “a potential procreator?” (1958: 78). In the last scene, Clov stands at the door with his coat and his suitcase as if to leave, not acknowledging Hamm’s calls. Hamm goes through a ritual of putting a handkerchief over his eyes, returning to the state he was in at the beginning of the play. Clov, we know, will not leave, and their cycle of suffering will continue. Clov’s first line in the play is: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished” (1958: 1). This, of course, is a frustrated iteration of the last words of Christ as he suffered on the cross (John 19: 28). But the suffering is not finished, will never finish.

Conclusion

In these three modernist plays, the authors scrutinize, using different methods, the desolation of humankind abandoned by its creator. From Chekhov through Beckett, we see a darkening of the vision and changes in dramatic form. Among other things, we see the realist’s interest in individualized character portraits, as in Chekhov’s play, being undercut in Pirandello’s Six Characters, and its premise is fully exposed in Beckett’s work, where the dehumanizing effects of this modern desolation and despair are bared.

Modernist drama, especially in its realist mode, remains a staple of our theatres. The plays of Chekhov, as Laurence Senelick has noted, have become second only to Shakespeare’s in frequency of production (Senelick 1997: 1). Between October 2008 and July 2009, New York saw his The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, two productions of Uncle Vanya, and his early Ivanov. Critics in recent years, notably Richard Gilman (1995), have been drawing the lines connecting Chekhov and Beckett.

Pirandello’s Six Characters, whichcaused a riot in the theatre in its first production in Rome in 1921, soon had the status of a modern classic. Although a 1963 London production played 288 performances, the play’s status is largely a literary one. In the U.S., both Six Characters and Endgame are left to the rare revival by Off-Broadway theatres or by the braver of the resident theatres.

Key references

Audio-visual resources

Samuel Beckett

The Samuel Beckett “Official Site” (2009), extensive website with essays, interview, photos: www.samuel-beckett.net.

Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (2003), DVD-Video of 1980 New York production with Irene Worth. Regrettably, there is no available film or clip of Endgame of artistic quality that we can recommend.

Anton Chekhov

The Anton Chekhov Collection (2008), DVD-Video, 6 discs (Chekhov’s four major plays with Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench, and others).

Luigi Pirandello

Website with biography and bibliography: www.pirandelloweb.com/english/pirandelloweb_in_english.htm.

Books

Bair, Deirdre (1978). Samuel Beckett, a Biography, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Beckett, S.(1954) Waiting for Godot,New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, S. (1955) The Unnamable, trans.Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, S. (1958) Endgame, a Play in One Act, followed by Act Without Words, New York: Grove Press.

Beckett. S. (1984) The Collected Shorter Plays,New York: Grove Press.

Beckett, S. (1986) Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber.

Chekhov, A.P. (1956) Best Plays by Chekhov, trans. Stark Young, New York: Random House: Modern Library.

Chekhov, A.P. (1996) Chekhov, Four Plays, trans. Carol Rocamora, Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus.

Chekhov, A.P (2002) Anton Chekhov, Plays, trans. Peter Carson, with an introduction by R. Gilman, London and New York: Penguin Books.

Clyman, T.W. (1985) A Chekhov Companion, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

Esslin, M. (1961) The Theatre of the Absurd, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Gilman, R. (1995) Uncle Vanya, in Chekhov’s Plays, an Opening into Eternity, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Giudice, G. (1975) Pirandello, a Biography, trans. Alastair Hamilton, London and New York: Oxford University Press.

Kalb, J. (1989) Beckett in Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pirandello, L. (1952) Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Edward Storer, in Naked Masks, Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello, Eric Bentley(ed.), New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

Senelick, L. (1985) Anton Chekhov, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Senelick, L. (1997) The Chekhov Theatre, a Century of the Plays in Performance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

CASE STUDY: Brecht directs Mother Courage

By Bruce McConachie

In the fall of 1948, Bertolt Brecht returned with his wife and entourage to the Russian-occupied section of war-torn Berlin, where he hoped to establish a theatre. Formerly working as a major writer and director in the Weimar Republic, Brecht had been forced to flee Germany in 1933, when Hitler came to power. Returning from exile after 15 years, he could not be sure of his reception by the Soviet and German communists who now controlled the institutions of culture in what would soon become East Berlin. Although a Marxist, Brecht favored a kind of theatre that was very different from the socialist realism promoted by Stalin’s commissars of culture.

Brecht brought with him a script of Mother Courage and Her Children, which he had written in 1939, and photographs from a Zurich production of the play in 1941, staged when he was living in Finland. He and his wife, Helene Weigel (1900–1971), decided to gamble their theatrical future in Soviet-occupied Berlin on a production of Mother Courage. If the show were successful with Berlin spectators and the critics, Brecht and Weigel might gain enough leverage with the communists to wrench a subsidy from the new government and start their theatre. If not, they knew they would have to continue their travels to find another theatrical home.

A chronology of Brecht’s career

1898    Born in Augsburg, Germany, to a middle-class family.

1918    Serves briefly in the German army as a medical orderly.

1922–1928      Establishes himself as a director and writer in Berlin with several productions, including productions of his own A Man’s a Man and The Threepenny Opera.

1928–1933      Broadens his work to include radio and film, joins the Communist Party, writes several short didactic plays, including The Measures Taken.

1933–1938      Flees Germany with his entourage to live and work in Scandinavia.

1938–1941      Threatened by the Nazis, Brecht works in Finland, then travels across the Soviet Union to the United States. Brecht completes drafts of several major plays, including Mother Courage and Her Children and The Good Person of Setzuan.

1941–1947      Works in Hollywood on several plays, including The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Co-directs an English-language version of his The Life of Galileo. Lies about his communist connections in the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and hastily flees to Europe.

1948–1949      Premiere of Mother Courage in Berlin (11 January 1949). Brecht and Weigel found the Berliner Ensemble.

1950–1956      Directs and adapts his and others’ plays at the Berliner Ensemble. Ensemble tours to Paris and London. Brecht dies and Weigel continues to lead the Ensemble (until her death in 1971).

As the timeline of Brecht’s career suggests, the playwright-director was caught up in most of the major political crises of the twentieth century – the Great War, the German response to the Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the cold war. To help theatre spectators to navigate such dangerous waters, Brecht developed a kind of socialist theatre that engaged them in a careful reading of their political options. Aware firsthand of the persuasive charisma of politicians, the dangerous emotions of patriotism, and the callous manipulations of economic power, Brecht sought to educate, entertain, and empower his audiences with dramatic lessons in social, political, and economic relationships.

When the Berliner Ensemble appeared in Paris in 1955, the French critic Roland Barthes commented:

Whatever our final evaluation of Brecht, we must at least indicate the coincidence of his thought with the great progressive themes of our time: that the evils that men suffer are in their own hands – in other words, that the world can be changed; that art can and must intervene in history; … that, finally, there is no such thing as an ‘essence’ of eternal art, but that each society must invent the art which will be responsible for its own deliverance.

(Barthes 1972: 38)

Barthes is well known for his work in semiotics, a method of analysis that critics and academics were beginning to use in the mid-1950s for insights into many fields across the humanities and social sciences. Since that time, some critics have used semiotic analysis to understand theatrical performances.

When Brecht began rehearsals for Mother Courage and Her Children in 1948, he had a poorly equipped theatre, insufficient funds, and many actors and designers with whom he had never worked before. The audience, Brecht knew, would be struggling to survive a cold winter in a postwar Berlin that remained mostly a pile of rubble. How is the theatre historian to understand the effectiveness and success of the production that emerged from this inauspicious beginning? Most historians will likely start their research with the critical reviews of the production, biographies of the major artists involved, and contextual evidence concerning the demographics and desires of the audience. To understand the probable semiotics of the performance, the historian can also examine Brecht’s working script and his directorial choices, as they were recorded in the production book and rehearsal photos.

Mother Courage on stage

As a playwright, Brecht set Mother Courage and Her Children during the Thirty Year’s War (1618–1648) that ravaged Germany, destroying whole cities and killing nearly half of the German population during the historical era of the Protestant Reformation. Between 1624 and 1636, the years encompassed by the play, Mother Courage struggles to support herself and her three adult children by selling supplies to both Protestant and Catholic armies from a wagon that she and her children haul behind them. The drama focuses on the conflict between war profiteering and maintaining a family, between capitalist economics and family survival. As Mother Courage pursues business as usual, the war pulls each of her children into the ongoing conflict and eventually it kills them. For more than 12 years, Mother Courage haggles while her children die. Although Courage learns nothing from her struggle, Brecht wanted the audience to understand that capitalistic wars must be abolished if families are to survive.

As a director, Brecht tried to induce spectators both to grapple with the historical specifics of early capitalism during the Reformation era and to apply what they learned to their present situation in 1949 Berlin. In this regard, he deployed scenography and lighting primarily to point to his universal themes, not to literally depict the historical situation of seventeenth-century Europe. On either side of the stage were large frames illustrating the general implements of warfare, such as muskets, tenting, and broadswords, while upstage was an enormous, semicircular cyclorama that covered the entire back wall of the theatre. Into this mostly open stage space, Brecht placed occasional three-dimensional scenic units as necessary for the action, such as a cannon, a half-ruined parsonage, and other set pieces, plus Mother Courage’s wagon.

Three sign systems for the production

From the success of the Zurich production, Brecht decided that Courage’s wagon, the chief symbol of her business enterprise, would constitute the main scenic unit for nearly all of the 12 scenes in the play. The stage was fitted with a revolve, a rotating circular platform, on which the wagon could move when pulled by Courage and her children. This occurs frequently in the play to indicate that they are traveling as they follow various armies across Europe. When pulled in the opposite direction from the rotating stage, of course, the characters and the wagon simply move in place; for 12 years, in effect, Courage and her business appear stuck on a treadmill. In addition to using white light to illuminate the actors, Brecht worked with his designers to create images on the cyclorama that would indicate the carnage caused by war. Through scenery and lighting, then, Brecht and his designers created a non-realist sign system to indicate the Universal History that underlined the general horror of war – stage images as relevant to his 1949 audience as to the historical situation of the play.

In contrast, the costumes and props used by the actors were historically specific. Photographs of the production show costumes that suggest the actual dress of seventeenth-century Germans, ranging from different military uniforms to regional varieties of peasant work clothes. In addition, the designer distressed the costumes appropriately to suggest their wear and tear over the 12 years of the play’s duration. This meant that occasional new clothes, such as a colorful hat and red boots given by an aging colonel to his prostitute-mistress, stuck out on stage in comparison to the drab grays and earth-tones of most of the other clothing. Brecht instructed his property master to keep in mind the hand-crafted nature of the properties used by the characters, such as eating implements, washing buckets, and cookware. The sign systems of these naturalist costumes and props for Mother Courage and Her Children were designed to pull the audience into a realist illusion of Specific History.

But never for long. Brecht continually reminded his spectators that they were in a theatre. At the beginning of each scene, a sign suspended from the flies told the audience in large block letters where, in Europe, the scene was set. Each scene began and ended with an actor, in full view of the audience, drawing a half curtain across the proscenium opening. Throughout, the spectators could see the lighting instruments, which were not masked from view. Whenever the small orchestra in a side box on the stage played some of Paul Dessau’s music for the production, a musical emblem was lowered from the flies. Unlike the conventions of most musical comedy, where the music seems to arise out of the emotional situation, Brecht used music to break the dramatic illusion. Dessau’s difficult, often atonal and haunting music reminded spectators of their present circumstances, sitting in a theatre and watching a play that had something to tell them about rebuilding their society and culture. Brecht intended this sign system of music and stage machinery to evoke the Theatrical Present, where the actual work of the stage production might suggest the work to be done beyond the playhouse.

The semiotics of Brechtian acting

Brecht involved his actors in all three of his major sign systems – those of the illusion of Specific History, non-realist Universal History, and the Theatrical Present. Simply standing on stage in their naturalist costumes made the actors signs of the social reality of seventeenth-century Europe. Much of the speech uttered by the actor-characters also placed them realistically in the sign system of Specific History. Some of Brecht’s dialog and many of his songs, however, point to generalizations about social and economic behavior that indicate truths about all history. Several major characters in the play speak in parables that display the hard-bitten wisdom of peasant life, for instance, and the songs often contrast foolish religious faith to the material demands of survival. In enunciating these truths, the actors either spoke or sang within the signs of Universal History or worked directly with spectators in the auditorium. An actor might even begin a line of dialog within the sign system of Universal History and then throw the end of it to the Berlin audience, shifting abruptly into the sign system of the Theatrical Present.

The actors’ gestures and movements also played out across the three sign systems. Brecht coined the term “gestus” to denote an actor’s ability to present a way of standing or moving that signified the social position of her or his character in Universal History. In the production of Mother Courage, actors could even separate themselves momentarily from the character they were playing to indicate to the audience Brecht’s understanding of the social position and action of their characters. That is, the actors could create the persona of “the Brechtian actor” to comment directly, within the signs of the Theatrical Present, on the usefulness and morality of the social role of their characters.

Semiotics in action

From a semiotic point of view, Brecht deployed the three sign systems of his production with ingenuity and fluidity in directing Mother Courage. Further, he used spatiality and rhythm, the theatrical tools unique to the director’s art, to underline significant turning points in the story of the play. In the first scene of the drama, two army recruiters lure Eilif, Courage’s oldest son, away from the family and bribe him to enlist. For the start of this scene, Brecht placed the family in a tight knot center stage and close to the wagon to emphasize their unified stand against the recruiters’ threat. As the recruiters chipped away at the family’s unity, Brecht dispersed the family members across the stage. Eventually, one recruiter lured Eilif some distance from Courage, whose back was turned as she bargained with the other recruiter over the price of a belt. While this was happening, the recruiter was filling Eilif with thoughts of military heroics, and Eilif was making the decision to join the army and abandon his family. Brecht found a way to spatially isolate Eilif from his family and then speeded up the action at the end as the recruiters closed in on their prey.

Mother Courage’s loss of her third child, Katrin, is the emotional climax of the play. To warn the townspeople and save their children from an imminent and deadly secret attack, Katrin climbs onto the roof of a peasant’s house near the town and begins beating a drum (Figure 1). The attacking soldiers, who cannot reach her (she pulls her ladder up after her), try to bribe her to stop. They even begin destroying her mother’s wagon, left in Katrin’s care, but she continues drumming to alert the town to defend its battlements. Finally, the soldiers bring a large musket, set it up on its forked holder, and shoot her. As Katrin is dying on the roof, the sounds of cannons and alarm bells from the town indicate that she has succeeded and that the children of the town will survive. Brecht’s use of rhythm and spatiality made this a powerful scene for his Berlin audience. Katrin’s intermittent but progressively louder and longer drumming was the primary rhythmic element, while her vertical isolation on the rooftop gave the sign of her resistance spatial focus and dominance in the scene.

Semiotic critics like Barthes praised the clarity and unifying effects of Brecht’s direction of Mother Courage and Her Children. In his organization of the sign systems and his deployment of specific signs at significant moments in the production, Brecht encouraged his 1949 audience to apply Courage’s Specific History to their own Theatrical (and socio-political) Present. The link uniting past and present was through Universal History, Brecht’s Marxist understanding of the ongoing dynamics of economics and power. Brecht used the signs of Universal History to provide some distance and insight for his spectators, rendering their past and present worlds strange and unusual for them, thus preparing them to accept his own vision of events. The term Brecht used to describe this effect on spectators was Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht’s German neologism (sometimes mistranslated as “alienation effect”) for a Russian phrase first used by the Meyerhold aesthetician, Victor Shklovsky.

Conclusion

Whether Brecht’s Berlin audience read his signs and sign systems for Mother Courage as the director-playwright seems to have intended them cannot, of course, be known. For Brecht and Weigel, however, their gamble had paid off; the success of the production led to the founding of the Berliner Ensemble in 1949, a company that soon emerged as a leader in postwar Europe on both sides of the “Iron Curtain” of the cold war.

While this analysis of the 1949 production suggests that Brecht involved his spectators in interpreting meanings within three distinct sign systems during performances, and used rhythm and spatiality to focus audience attention on meaningful signs at climactic moments, other analyses might come to different conclusions about Brecht’s semiotic direction of the play. No semiotician-historian, however, would deny that Brecht’s complex yet coherent use of signs helped to ensure the success of Mother Courage and Her Children in 1949.

Key references

Books

Aston, E. and George, S. (1991) Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance, London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1972) Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern.

Brecht, B. (1972) Mother Courage and her Children, in R. Manheim and J. Willett (eds) Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 5, New York: Random House.

Elam, K. (1980) The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London: Routledge.

Fuegi, J. (1987) Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan, Directors in Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomson, P. (1997) Mother Courage and Her Children, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Willett, J. (1964) Brecht on Theatre, London: Methuen.

CASE STUDY: Discoursing on desire: Desire Under the Elms in the 1920s

By Bruce McConachie

“Amazing New Discoveries About Love,” trumpeted a magazine advertisement for a 1922 book, Psychoanalysis and Love, by Andrè Tridon. According to the ad, “[Tridon] shows part of what love is, why there are so many different kinds of love; just what characteristics about certain types of people attract others and why; why love sometimes expresses itself in abnormal ways; what is behind the mask of modesty.” As a bonus, Tridon’s book supposedly explained “why love often drives people to the most extreme acts, why it sometimes leads to sensational crimes” (Pfister 1995: 91). To underline the primitive nature of sexual desire, the ad printed an illustration of a bare-chested cave man with a club approaching a frightened but aroused cave woman. Popular culture had discovered Freud! Tridon’s titillating book was one of thousands of films, articles, photographs, stories, novels, and purported explanations that circulated the new revelations of pop psychology in American culture during the 1920s.

Two years later, the Experimental Theater in New York produced a play with striking affinities to Tridon’s book. Like Psychoanalysis and Love, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms explored “why certain types of people attract others,” why this love often expresses itself “in abnormal ways,” and how such love might lead “to sensational crimes” (Figure 1). In O’Neill’s play, a son is attracted to his father’s young wife, the two of them begin an affair in a room haunted by the memory of the son’s mother, and the young wife ends up killing the child produced by their love. Although the play is not set among cave dwellers, O’Neill does suggest that primitive sexual passions on a New England farm in the 1850s drew the two lovers together – desires just as natural, potent, and irresistible as in prehistoric times. In retrospect, Psychoanalysis and Love might have been written as an advertisement for Desire Under the Elms.

How is the theatre historian to explain the many similarities between this piece of pop psychology and one of the best plays of a celebrated American playwright? Did O’Neill read Psychoanalysis and Love before writing Desire? This is unlikely, and there is no evidence that he did. Was he influenced directly by Freud or one of his several disciples? Here the evidence is stronger, but not conclusive. On the one hand, O’Neill had personal contact with three psychoanalysts, he professed adherence to Carl Jung’s notion of a “collective unconscious,” and admitted to reading two of Freud’s books, Totem and Taboo and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In a 1926 interview about the success of Desire Under the Elms, O’Neill stated that he wanted the play’s dialog “to express what [the characters] felt subconsciously” (Pfister 1995: 61). On the other hand, O’Neill always objected when his contemporaries suggested that he had simply transferred the findings of psychoanalysis to the stage. Subsequent critics have rightly noted that many factors may have influenced the playwright. Greek mythology, the works of Nietzsche, and O’Neill’s family history as well as psychoanalysis are likely influences on Desire, for example. But such personal influences will not fully account for the form and content of any drama. Further, the influences on an author’s product probably play a very small role (if any) in shaping the effect of a drama among audiences when it is staged. Most of the thousands of spectators who applauded Desire in New York and on tour in the 1920s knew no psychoanalysts and had not read Freud.

Rather than chasing down the evidence of various influences on a playwright’s work, some critics and historians have turned to discourse theory to understand the relationship between a popular play and the culture of its time. As we will see, discourse theory understands historical causality differently than conventional notions of influence allow. Instead of trying to explain the text of Desire as the end product of many personal experiences in the background of the author, discourse theory places all cultural texts on the same level of analysis and inquires into the larger historical reasons for their creation and success. To answer why Tridon’s Psychoanalysis and Love and O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms gained popularity in the 1920s, the critic-historian using discourse theory must look for the common assumptions about truth and knowledge embedded in both of these texts. In explaining popular texts, discourse theory privileges the assumptions and rules that generate shared knowledge in a specific historical era, not the individual experiences or beliefs of an author.

Psychoanalysis and Desire

From what has been discussed so far, it is evident that a generally Freudian orientation to human identity and sexuality is the major discourse of Desire Under the Elms. Psychoanalysis understands human identity as divided into a conscious mind and the more powerful realm of the unconscious, where primitive drives and desires can overcome conscious control. This discourse maintains that culture and civilization impose restraints and taboos that encourage individuals to repress their unconscious desires and stifle their emotional fulfillment. To counter repression and attain mental health, popular advocates of these Freudian notions urge people to delve into their past to reveal unconscious motives, confess their past problems and deep desires, and find ways to act with greater freedom in the future. From a Foucauldian point of view, it does not matter whether psychoanalytic ideas are true or not. Freud’s notions of the unconscious, of the cultural demand for repression, and of the possible benefits of therapy may actually be invalid. What matters for Foucault, a relativist when it comes to truth, is that people in the 1920s believed this Freudian discourse and acted on the basis of this orientation. Further, if this discourse prompted belief and action at the time, Foucault would insist that it was a controlling factor in the production and reception of Desire.

As in many advice columns, popular films, and other examples of psychoanalytic discourse in the 1920s, Desire Under the Elms suggests that unconscious passions and complexes can easily overtake conscious control. What Freud termed an Oedipal complex – in popular terms, the desire to kill the father and sleep with the mother – stalks the younger male characters in Desire. All three of old Cabot’s sons hate their father and play out variations on copulating with their “mother.” In an early scene, his two older sons, who have visited the same prostitute in town as their father, plot to get out from under Cabot’s repressive control. When they finally gain their psychological release from the power of the father, they dance around him like wild Indians, performing a symbolic killing of the old farmer. From the start, Abbie, Cabot’s new wife, is attracted to Eben, the youngest son, but he scorns her for taking the place of his mother, whose loss continues to obsess him. Abbie meets Eben in the front parlor of the farmhouse, where the ghost of his mother continues to haunt him. There, Abbie effectively takes the place of Eben’s “Maw,” and the two of them consummate their passion.

Popular Freudianism also shapes the gender roles of Desire. The males of Desire are the prime movers of the plot, and this accords with Freud’s own generally Victorian understanding of men being naturally more active and aggressive than women. Old Cabot brings home a new wife, the two older sons rebel and leave, Eben impregnates Abbie, and Cabot throws a party to celebrate the birth of what he believes is his son. But Abbie is far from passive; she takes an active role in seducing Eben and eventually kills their baby when she (wrongly) believes that he is planning to abandon her. In the Freudian discourse of the play, however, Abbie, because she is a woman, is closer to nature and less aware of her actions than the men in the play. Abbie, in fact, is much like the elms that “bend their trailing branches down over the roof” of the Cabot farmhouse, as O’Neill states in his stage directions. “[The elms] appear to protect and at the same time subdue. There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing jealous absorption” (O’Neill 1973: 2) (Figure 2). When she first appears, Abbie’s “sinister” qualities are paramount; her possessiveness about the farm and “absorption” with her sexuality drive her initial intentions. From a popular psychoanalytic point of view, her id (unconscious desire) dominates her superego (conscience). Only after she experiences the mutuality of love with Eben does she begin to break free from what O’Neill understands as her natural, unconscious impulses.

Abbie and Eben effect this cure in good psychoanalytic fashion through mutual confession. Despite their fears and anxieties, Abbie and Eben play patient and therapist for each other, gradually building a relationship of trust and love out of their initial lust. Abbie temporarily relapses into unconscious jealously when she kills their baby without asking Eben, but she confesses her act and Eben forgives her. By the end of the play, both are more conscious of their past lives and have accepted responsibility for their actions. They know they are going to jail and determine to wait for each other until their release. In contrast, Desire pities those who refuse to confess, to let go of past repressions. Even at the end of the play, Old Cabot takes pride in the repressive life he has led and the possessions, especially the farm, that his repressions have helped him to acquire. And Cabot suffers – justly, according to the discourse of the play – for the repressions that drive this possessiveness. For Abbie and Eben, however, Desire ends on a note of affirmation, despite a past of adultery and murder. They have worked through their psychological problems and found love through confession. For them, the play acts like a long therapeutic session: complexes, repressions, and neuroses are recognized and exorcised through a dramatic version of the “talking cure,” as Freudian psychoanalysis has been called.

Competing discursive formations

The historian using Foucauldian discourse theory, then, may conclude that Desire Under the Elms operates within the discursive formation of popular psychoanalysis common in the U.S. during the 1920s. That accounts for the similarities among the play and such pop psychology treatises as Psychoanalysis and Love. But was this discursive formation dominant in the 1920s? Was it part of the culture’s episteme? In this regard, the historical evidence of the censorship of the play suggests that the Freudian construction of sexuality evident in the play was not yet dominant in the national culture.

O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan (1888–1963), and Robert Edmund Jones produced Desire in 1924 as a part of their Experimental Theater, Inc., which had evolved out of the Provincetown Players. Under Jones’s direction and design, the play scored an initial success with audiences and critics. When the producers moved the show from the Greenwich Village Theater to a Broadway playhouse in 1925, however, a local district attorney, responding to spectator complaints, found the play obscene and ordered it closed. Opposing voices in the press and from prominent citizens, however, helped to convince a grand jury that there was nothing objectionable in O’Neill’s drama, and the production continued. Desire had less luck in Boston. There, a censor’s demand for numerous revisions led to the banning of the play and the closing of the production. In Los Angeles, the police initially arrested the entire cast of the road company production, but soon allowed them to continue performing while the trial took place. The production eventually closed before the completion of the court case.

In contrast, productions of the play in New York in the 1950s and 1960s met with no calls for censorship. Harold Clurman (1901–1980) directed the 1952 revival, which starred Karl Malden as Old Cabot. George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst riveted audiences in the 1963 production, directed at the Circle-in-the-Square Playhouse by Jose Quintero (1924–1999). Why was Desire banned in Boston and attacked elsewhere in the 1920s, but met with respect and enthusiasm by audiences after mid-century? Part of the answer to this complex question has to do with anxieties about respectability in Boston and elsewhere, with different productions with different actors that emphasized different aspects of the play, and with the weakening of local censorship in the U.S. during the twentieth century.

Discourse theory also suggests another response to this question about audience reception. It may be that the discursive formation that gave knowledge and power to O’Neill’s reliance on a Freudian construction of sexuality was not yet a dominant formation in the U.S. in the 1920s. Artists, critics, and bohemians in Greenwich Village might embrace Freudian ideas for the freedom they seemed to give them over Victorian strictures. Advertisers and others could use Freudian notions to suggest that consumption of the right products provided a ticket to sexual excitement and emotional fulfillment. But when the apparent license of Freudian sexuality ran directly into Christian tradition and Victorian respectability, many Americans in the 1920s may have balked.

There is little doubt that the discourse of Desire privileges psychoanalytic release over traditional morality. While it is true that Abbie and Eben will pay for their crimes at the end of the play, O’Neill arranges the rhetoric of his drama to induce the audience to pity the old father for his continuing repressions and to rejoice in the emotional release that confession has brought to the lovers. The ending reverses the conventional rhetoric of poetic justice, in which audiences could feel good when some characters were rewarded for upholding morality and others were damned for committing crimes. No wonder some spectators in the 1920s were confused and a few called for censorship.

Why, then, did the play succeed with audiences in the 1950s and 1960s? Again, several explanations are possible, but Foucauldian theory suggests another approach to this question. Perhaps the Freudian construction of sexuality, a significant but not yet dominant discourse in U.S. culture in the 1920s, increased in power to become part of the culture’s episteme by the 1950s. To explore this hunch, the historian would need to investigate many more primary and secondary sources in cultural history than this case study can accommodate. However, there is suggestive evidence to support this explanation. In the 1950s and 1960s, more Freudian psychoanalysts were practicing in the U.S. than ever before (or since), and Freudian explanations for human behavior were embedded in a range of powerful discourses and institutions, from business management to the operations of the CIA. Given the dominance of this discursive formation, U.S. audiences during the early cold war may have had little difficulty embracing the truths that O’Neill’s dramatic Freudianism had to offer.

Key references

Books

Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality, Volume One, New York: Vintage.

Herman, E. (1995) The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Manheim, M. (ed.) (1998) The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McConachie, B. (2003) American Theater in Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.

O’Neill, E. (1973) Three Plays: Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, New York: Random House.

Pfister, J. (1995) Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

CASE STUDY: British pantomime: How “bad” theatre remains popular

By Phillip B. Zarrilli

An overview of “panto”

In early December of every year, commercial production companies, repertory theatres, and amateur dramatic societies in the United Kingdom are rehearsing their annual contributions to a unique British form of popular theatre – pantomime. “Pantos” account for up to 20 percent of all live performance in the United Kingdom annually. Pantomime has existed on the British stage since the early eighteenth century. During the 1870s, the basic content (fairy tales and folk legends) and the formulaic set of conventions that characterize today’s “pantos” crystallized. They have remained flexible enough to be quickly adapted to current public tastes, fashions, and events. Each Christmas season over 200 pantomimes run concurrently throughout the United Kingdom. In a given year you might attend commercial productions of Jack and the Beanstalk at the King’s Theatre (Edinburgh) or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Birmingham Hippodrome, repertory productions of Mother Goose at the Oldham Coliseum or Peter Pan at the Wimbledon Theatre (greater London), or an amateur cast in Cinderella at the village hall in New Quay, Wales.

Pantomime defies political correctness, good taste, literary merit, and critical disdain. Like the evil villain such as the wicked witch in Snow White or Captain Hook in Peter Pan who, by tradition, make the very first entrance of any character from the “dark” (evil) left side of the stage to the discordant tones of the orchestra and the resounding “boos” of the audience, pantomime productions return each year to “haunt” theatre critics who ignore, decry, or simply tolerate this annual national popular entertainment. Writing for the Independent in 1999, Dominic Cavendish admitted:

It’s hard for an adult – let alone a reviewer – to admit that they have actually enjoyed an example of this maligned art form. And not at the arm’s-length distance of ironic approval, or vicariously, through the gurgling delight of other people’s children … but closely involved, experiencing a state of wonder. It’s a shock to say it, but Peter Pan at Wimbledon Theatre induced such a state.

Pantomime today thrives on caricature, “bad” jokes, slapstick comedy, and pratfalls. It includes cross-dressing, with a woman playing the heroic “principal boy” role and a male comedian in skirts playing the “dame.” Other conventions are its sentimental romance, easily recognizable popular songs, and incidental music supporting the visual action throughout the performance. Depending on the size of the budget, they often feature sumptuous costumes with spectacular scenic transformations and as large a dance chorus as possible. Pantomime embraces its diverse popular audience, occasionally retains its old satirical edge, and ignores the proscenium arch by using the entire theatre as its performance space. It engages the audience in occasional shouting matches and often takes time out from the dramatic story to bring some children on stage for a sing-along, cheap gags, and prizes of candy for them to take home as a Christmas treat.

To help convey some of the flavor of the “panto,” we offer the following excerpt from scene 5 of Aladdin, by Derek Dwyer and Merlin Price. The setting is Widow Twanky’s cottage. As the curtain opens, the Dame is washing the laundry while impersonating Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

There are two types of modern “pantos”: those produced by commercial companies; and those done by the subsidized theatres. Commercial pantomimes are mass-produced by large production companies, each running between five and fifteen pantomimes each season. Commercial pantomimes tend to stay with established, conventional practices, and are most likely to feature television and entertainment personalities in key roles to attract large audiences. In order to recoup the huge initial costs of a production, a new production will be recycled for performances in different regional theatres – running up to ten years. To keep costs down, the rehearsal period is usually only one week, plus a production week. Given the minimal rehearsal period, actors, musicians, and dancers must rely on their experience with the received conventions of pantomime.

In contrast, repertory pantomimes are produced by subsidized companies, such as the Oldham Coliseum or Theatre Royal Stratford East (London). Depending for their success more on the strength of the actors, their scripts are specially written for their own local/regional audiences and therefore may have more satire relevant to current issues than commercial pantos. Because pantomime is so much a part of the Christmas holiday season, most regional theatres depend on their pantomime income to subsidize much of the remainder of their year’s repertory season.

Whatever the critics think of pantomime, it is to popular entertainment what Shakespeare is to today’s literary theatre – an inescapable part of the British national cultural landscape. It brings into the theatre a more inclusive audience than any other form of theatre today, with three generations of a family often attending a performance together. For the overwhelming majority of children, it is their first, and perhaps only experience of live theatre, and for the majority of people, it will be their only annual visit to the theatre.

The early history of British pantomime

Since its first introduction on the London stage as “night scenes” or “Italian night scenes” in the early eighteenth century, what came to be known as British pantomime has been a theatrical chameleon, its performers and producers constantly changing its form, content, and conventions as necessary for its survival and continued popularity.  Initially a form of serious entertainment, it soon came to be dominated by spectacle, fantasy, and comic scenes called harlequinades featuring Harlequin and other characters from commedia dell’arte.

By the 1780s and 1790s, the content of the harlequinade began to change as folk and nursery tales were enacted during the first part of the entertainment. In 1789, in a production of Robinson Crusoe loosely based on Daniel Defoe’s novel, harlequinade characters appeared, including the clown, Pantaloon, as well as Harlequin and Columbine. Whatever the tale, as it was concluding the Fairy would transform the characters, whether Robinson Crusoe or Jack the Giant Killer, into well-known harlequinade characters. By 1800, a pantomime was part of an evening of theatre, and, by the mid-1800s, the elaborate and spectacular scenic changes and tableaux – such as the revelation of Cinderella’s coach, often complete with a team of live ponies, became the most important part of these early pantomimes. Before photography and film were invented, pantomime’s spectacles offered some in urban audiences their first glimpse of the countryside, Scottish moors, or foreign temples.

Beginning with his Jack and the Beanstalk (1844), E.L. Blanchard began to give increasing importance to the fairy tales and folk legends in pantomime. Between 1852 and 1888, Blanchard authored all of Drury Lane’s pantomimes, establishing the style of rhyming verse and topical wit that came to characterize the genre in the late nineteenth century.

Other conventions still found in today’s pantomime were also introduced. In 1852, Miss Ellington became one of the first “principal boys” playing the Prince in The Good Woman in the Wood at the Lyceum Theatre. By the 1860s, both the “principal boy” and “dame” roles were becoming well established, further eroding the appearance of Harlequin and the Clown.

By the 1870s the introduction of music hall stars on the pantomime stage brought changes to pantomime plots and dialogs as the music hall artists brought along their own material. One of the earliest music hall stars appearing on the pantomime stage was G.H. MacDermott in the 1870 production of Herne the Hunter at the Grecian Theatre. Female music hall stars began to monopolize the playing of “principal boy” roles as they titillated Victorian audiences with their displays of thigh as well as ankle, and the public wanted to see its favorite comedian playing the dame role.

Between 1879 and 1895, Augustus Harris (1851–1896) produced the most spectacular full-length pantomimes ever staged, making use of the newest scenic inventions, and discovering the great comic genius of the music hall stage, Dan Leno (Figure 1). The role of Mother Goose was created for Leno at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1902.

With the demise of music hall, other variety stages produced pantomime stars, only to be replaced by the stars of new twentieth-century media as each developed – radio, television, and then film stars have all found their way onto the pantomime stage.

Pantomime and its audiences

In order to remain popular, British pantomime has been chameleon-like in changing to communicate with its audiences. Using phenomenology, we will explore how pantomime simultaneously communicates through several performance modes or registers in order to entertain its multiple audiences.

In pantomime, each actor plays a character in the unfolding drama of the adapted fairy tale so that the actor is always operating, at least nominally, within the representational mode through which the dramatic story is conveyed to the audience. For young children, the tale may be both dramatic and “magical.” Whoever plays a character is usually accepted at face value as that character. The collaborative mode comes directly into the foreground when the entire audience is called upon to become part of the action by shouting, “he’s behind you” whenever the evil “baddie” is about to capture his innocent prey in a chase scene.

For adults in the audience, the well-known story is simply a pretext for the enjoyment of some of the self-expressive and collaborative modes of acting “invisible” to younger children. When popular stars of the entertainment world play a particular role, they are intentionally cast by the director, not to disappear into the role as would a dramatic actor, but to play the role as/through their public persona, underscoring the importance of the self-expressive mode. When fly-by-night, untrained personalities from Britain’s many current television reality shows perform in a panto, they often do no more than re-present their public personalities in the panto role. Like a hungry fairy that must be satisfied each year, pantomime consumes popular cultural icons and fashions only to spit them out as soon as they are no longer the flavor of the month. In the years when the Spice Girls were the most popular girl band in the U.K., they were conspicuously present as the Ugly Sisters in productions of Cinderella, only to be jettisoned in favor of Britney Spears’s Ugly Sister in another year.

But when a seasoned professional actress and entertainer such as Barbara Windsor appears in a panto, something much more complex can take place. Barbara Windsor is best known for playing highly sexualized, dumb-blonde roles in the hugely popular “Carry On” films of the 1960s and 1970s (Figure 2), and more recently was institutionalized as the pub-bar matron in the long-running U.K. television soap, EastEnders. But early in her career, she gained valuable onstage acting experience with Joan Littlewood’s famous experimental Theatre Workshop. As a well-known star, when she appears in a version of Cinderella as the Fairy-godmother, at the level of representation for the children, she creates “magic” as she transforms the pumpkin into a coach or transforms her ashen-covered servant, “Cinders,” into the beautiful young girl with whom the Prince falls in love. But for the parents and grandparents in the audience, who are old enough to have experienced Windsor during her youthful film career, she is simultaneously debunking the myth of female beauty and youth represented by Cinderella by simply being herself – a gracefully aging, feisty woman with a sharp, self-deprecating, satirical sense of humor about her past as a sexualized object. The appearance of major and minor stars and personalities exemplifies the important role that the self-expressive mode plays among the three modes that we have examined as British pantomime constantly refashions itself.

Key References

Audio-visual resources

Many pantos are posted on YouTube. For a major traditional panto with well-known British actors see: YouTube, Jack and the Beanstalk, Parts 1–8. Author: Simon Nye. Cast includes: Paul Merton, Julian Clary, Julie Walters, Neil Morrissey, and Griff Rhys Jones.

Books

States, B.O. (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkeley: University of California Press.

States, B.O. (1995) “The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes,” in P.B. Zarrilli (ed.) Acting ReConsidered, London: Routledge.

Taylor, M. (2007) British Pantomime Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books.

CASE STUDY: Plautus’s plays: What’s so funny?

By Gary Jay Williams

Comedy has been more important to the human race than the history of Western dramatic criticism would suggest. Tragedy dominated that history for over two thousand years. Aristotle (384–322 bce) devoted his famous Poetics (c.330 bce) to Greek tragedy, only glancing at comedy. If his promised book on comedy was ever written, it has never been recovered (Janko 1984: Parts I, IV). In Western theory since, comedy has played second fiddle to tragedy because of tragedy’s high-born characters, its elevated language, the moral weight of its issues of human suffering, and its ultimate idealism about human potential under duress. Yet the early Greek philosophers did recognize that the theatre’s rendering of human experience would be incomplete without a comic vision. Socrates, while drinking with friends, once made the fruitful suggestion that the genius of comedy is the same as that for tragedy (Plato 1942: 215–16). The Greeks and Romans kept the two separate, however, unlike Shakespeare, who mingled kings and clowns in his tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth – a sore point for the neoclassical critics who came after him. This case study looks at selected plays of the Roman comic playwright, Titus Maccius Plautus (254–184 bce) in the light of the comic theory of French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose book on laughter in 1900 took comedy seriously.

First, it will be useful to consider some of the major Western notions about the formal characteristics of comedy as a genre, including Aristotle’s brief comments. Aristotle’s critical method was inductive, reasoning from a number of specific Athenian examples toward what he believed to be universal laws for the drama. Distinguishing between tragedy and comedy, he reasoned that comedy “tends naturally to imitate men worse, [tragedy] to imitate men better, than the average.” Comedy will be populated by “characters of a lower type,” he observed, while tragedy’s chief characters will be from great and “illustrious” families (nobility or ruling families) (Aristotle 1957: 376; Aristotle 1984: 2319, 2325). Comedy’s home, it follows, is not the court but the domestic household or neighborhood street. Comedy’s affairs being on a domestic scale, it may be added, comedy’s plots almost invariably involve food, money, sex, or social status. Also, as the principal character in a tragedy will, according to Aristotle, have a flaw leading to his/her fall, so too, it may be inferred from Aristotle, will the chief character in comedy. The chief humor of comedy, Aristotle says, will derive from a defect that is neither painful nor destructive (Aristotle 1957: 183).

Following Aristotle’s mode of formal analysis, later theorists made distinctions between high and low comedy. In high comedy, much of the humor derives from ideas and witty language. (The more socially oriented critic would point out that these are the prerogatives of an economically privileged class.) In low comedy, the humor derives less from refined reflection than from fast-developing events and physical action, with the body being a major player. The erect phallus is a standing joke in the oldest of Western comic forms – built into the costumes of the characters in the Greek satyr plays. To these major ideas about Western comedy may be added Northrop Frye’s fruitful observation in his archetypal theory of comedy that comedies usually end with some festive ritual, such as dinner or a wedding, signaling the formation of a new society (Frye 1957: 163–8).

Plautus wrote some 130 plays according to contemporary reports, sometime between 205 and 184 bce. The 21 extant plays show the work of an experienced theatrical craftsman. They are characterized by inventive fast-moving plots in domestic Roman settings, with efficiently-defined characters, clever language, and broad physical business (Figure 1). Parts of the texts are in a meter designed to be sung. In their overflow of comic energies, they stand in contrast to the comedies of Terence (c.195–159 bce), which are built around relatively more complex characters and ideas and are somewhat more rational and constrained. In Plautus’s comedies, there are many examples of the operation of Henri Bergson’s principles of the comic.

Vanity, in Bergson’s opinion, is one of the best fuels for the mechanized comic character, who is usually comic in proportion to his ignorance of his own faults (Bergson 1956: 71, 171–3). The central character of Plautus’s The Braggart Soldier (Miles Gloriosus, 205 bce) is wholly infatuated with himself, bragging about his victories, his strength (he says he killed an elephant with his fist), and his sexual prowess. His slave, who struggles to carry his master’s oversized shield, feeds his ridiculous appetite for flattery, once describing his master as “Destiny’s dashing dauntless debonair darling” (Plautus 1963: 9). Late in the play, sure that every woman wants him, the vain soldier flatters himself preposterously, confiding that he was born only one day after Jove and is the grandson of Venus (1963: 80). His servant’s scheme, and the play’s whole purpose, is to wind him up to strut like this. When a collaborating servant girl greets him with “Hail, you gorgeous creature! / Oh, man of every hour, beyond all other men / Beloved of two gods –” he interrupts her to ask, “Which two?” (1963: 90). In Plautus’s The Pot of Gold, the miserly old Euclio is Bergson’s automaton. Euclio is obsessed with money and so fears that someone will steal the pot of gold he has hidden that he suspects everyone, including the rooster he finds scratching near it, which he instantly kills. The foxy slave of his daughter’s suitor does steal Euclio’s gold, and when Euclio ultimately gives the suitor permission to marry his daughter, he does so only because that will get him his pot of gold back.

Bergson’s idea of the mechanization of the human as a source of humor extends to plot situations and sequences. We laugh when “the history of a person or of a group … sometimes appears like a game worked by strings, or gearings, or springs” (Bergson 1956: 116). So it is in Plautus’s The Menaechmi, which features identical twin brothers (a happily practical idea for a theatre in which all characters wore masks). Long lost to each other by misfortune, the twins are reunited by fate in the city of Epidamnum, but only after a chain of events in which each brother is repeatedly mistaken for the other. In twins, there is the momentary suggestion that life’s reproducing machine was inadvertently left turned on. Twins pose the disconcerting possibility that people are but an arithmetic of interchangeable features, destabilizing our assumptions about individual identity. In The Menaechmi, the plot is a calculus of complications set off by the presence of the twins. Menaechmus II, from Syracuse, searching the world for his brother, arrives in Epidamnum where his brother, Menaechmus I, lives. The mistress of Menaechmus I, Erotium, mistakenly invites Menaechmus II into her house, supposing him to be her lover. So, too, the angry wife of Menaechmus I and all the household servants of MI mistake MII for MI. Each twin concludes that the world around him has gone mad. Everyone else believes the twins to be mad, including the doctor who is called in by Erotium’s father. In exasperation at one point, Menaechmus II feigns madness to be rid of them all. Plautus multiplies the confusions by repeatedly having one twin exit by one door just as the other enters by another. All the characters revolve in and out of the doors of the houses of Erotium and Menaechmus I like figures on a mechanical clock gone haywire. (The Roman stage consisted of a platform backed by a façade with two or more doorways representing the houses.) The audience is always in on the joke because Plautus is always careful to have the entering twin identify himself clearly. At the play’s climax, the twins finally meet at center stage, mirroring one another, and to the relief of everyone, they sort out the confusion.

Bergson’s mechanization principle can also be seen operating in portions of Plautus’s dialog. Near the end of The Rope, Daemones and the slave, Trachalio, who serves the suitor of Daemones’s daughter, have a rapid-fire exchange of lines in which the response “All right” is repeated seventeen times. After Trachalio exits, Plautus caps the sequence:

A moment later, Trachalio has a series of exchanges with his young master, Plesidippus, who is in love with Daemones’s daughter:

In both cases, the robotic responses of the slave, Trachalio, produce a comic momentum that threatens to unravel language itself (see Figure 1). (Compare Abbot and Costello’s famous skit “Who’s on First?” in which the two men are using simple words and names to mean very different things, producing comic frustration over a simple baseball game.)

Bergson offers other ideas about what is funny, such as inversion (the robber robbed or the parent being lectured by the child) and the snowball effect (something sets off a chain reaction of events that accelerates toward total collapse) (Bergson 1956: 112, 121–2). To Bergson’s ideas we may add a final source of humor: the theatre mocking its own conventions. Consider the following lines in Plautus’s prolog to Amphitryo, which is delivered by the god Mercury in disguise as a lowly servant.

But I still haven’t told you

About this favor I came to ask of you –

Not to mention explaining the plot of this tragedy.

I must get on …

What’s that? Are you disappointed

To find it’s a tragedy? Well, I can easily change it.

I’m a god after all. I can easily make it a comedy …

(Plautus 1964: 230)

The passage is amusing not only because Mercury is treated with irreverent familiarity, but also because Plautus is mocking theatrical conventions here, including prologs. Overall, this prolog suggests Plautus’s familiarity with comic performance, a fact that would support the speculation that Plautus was himself a comic actor. The middle name that he took, Maccius, may be derivative of Maccus, the name of a clown figure in the ancient Atellan farces who was greedy and gluttonous, the type of character that Plautus might have played (Plautus 1964: 8–9).

Plautus was apparently happy entertaining a relatively broad-based audience. In The Rope, he mocks comedies that pretend to aspire higher. After the character Daemones gives a pretentious speech about how wonderful it is to be as moral as he is, his slave comments: “Huh! I’ve heard actors in comedies spouting that sort of stuff, telling people how to behave, and getting applause for it. But I never heard of any of the audience behaving any the better for it, after they got home” (1964: 147).

Plautus’s plays have had staying power. One century after his death the critic M. Terentius Varro put together a collection of 20 of his 21 plays that have survived. They may well have been performed – or variations on them – down through the early years of the Roman Empire. Plautus brought over some of his stock characters and plots from the prolific Greek comic playwright, Menander (342–291 bce), but only one of Menander’s plays survives – Dyskolos, translated as The Grouch. So, it is through Plautus that many classical prototypes – characters and plots – survived down through the early modern period and beyond. Among the many descendants of Plautus’s miles gloriosus – the braggart soldier – are the Capitano and Scaramouche of the commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 (1598). Plautus’s The Menaechmi is the source of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1598), to which Shakespeare added a second set of identical twin slaves from Plautus’s Amphitryon. The Comedy of Errors was the source for Rodgers and Hart’s musical comedy The Boys from Syracuse (1938), adapted by George Abbot. Amphitryon was the source for no fewer than 38 versions down to Jean Giradoux’s Amphitryon 38 (1929), and Plautus’s The Pot of Gold was the source of Molière’s The Miser (1668). The 1962 American musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (book by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, and music by Steven Sondheim) was a long-running concoction derived from Plautus (a 1966 film version is a tiresomecatalog of unfunny mugging).

Key references

Audio-visual references

For the Abbot and Costello skit, watch the YouTube versions available, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M.

Books

Aristotle (1957) Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument, trans. G.F. Else, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Aristotle (1984) Poetics, trans. I. Bywater in The Complete Works of Aristotle, rev. edn, J. Barnes (ed.), Vol. 2, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bergson, H. (1956) “Laughter,” in Comedy, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Duckworth, G.E. (1942) The Complete Roman Drama, Vol. 1, New York: Random House.

Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Janko, R. (1984) Aristotle on Comedy, Toward a Reconstruction of Poetics II, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Plato (1942) Symposium, in Plato, Five Great Dialogues, trans. B. Jowett, Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black.

Plautus, T.M. (1958) The Pot of Gold, trans. Peter Arnott, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Plautus, T.M. (1963) The Braggart Soldier, trans. Erich Segal, New York: Samuel French.

Plautus, T.M. (1964) Amphityro, in The Rope and Other Plays, trans. E.F. Watling, Baltimore: Penguin Books.

Plautus, T.M. (1974) The Twin Menaechmi, trans. Edward C. Wiest and Richard W. Hyde in O.G. Brockett and L. Brockett (eds), Plays for the Theatre, 2nd edn, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Slater, N.W. (1985) Plautus in Performance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CASE STUDY: The Playboy riots: Nationalism in the Irish theatre

By Bruce McConachie

Background to the riots

In 1900, many factions in Dublin had conflicting views on the future of Ireland, which had been a part of the British Empire for over 300 years. Some groups hoped that the colonial status of Ireland could be improved with no major changes to the status quo. Others urged a political union with Great Britain, in which the Irish might share in the limited democracy of English subjects. A small minority argued for an immediate revolution against British rule. Several groups looked to a revival of one or several aspects of Irish culture – its mythic heroes, hardy peasants, Catholic tradition, or its Gaelic language – as the key to eventual national independence. Catholic and Protestant groups favoring cultural nationalism often disagreed on strategies and goals. Many Catholics among the nationalists elevated peasant tradition and strict Catholic morality as the essence of Irishness. Cultural nationalists of Protestant descent, whose families had typically emigrated from England to acquire land and rule the country, also wanted eventual independence. Many of them, however, looked to Ireland’s pagan past, before Catholic conversions and English invasions, as a tradition that might unite all Irish people.

Despite their historical and political differences, several groups of cultural nationalists helped to launch the Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) in Dublin. Under the management of actors Frank and W.G. Fay (1870–1931 and 1872–1947), the company opened with a 1902 performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932). The National Theatre moved into a refurbished theatre (courtesy of an English heiress) on Abbey Street in Dublin in 1904. As the first President of the INTS, Yeats, whose family was Anglo-Irish, initially fostered plays that sought to bridge the differences among the cultural nationalists. In the Shadow of the Glen, a one-act play by John Millington Synge, however, riled the anger of many Catholic patriots in 1903. Synge’s play features a peasant heroine who leaves a loveless marriage to gain freedom with a poetic tramp. From Synge’s point of view, his protagonist, named Nora to point up her similarity to Ibsen’s heroine in A Doll House, was justified in sacrificing bourgeois respectability and Catholic morality to embrace a Celtic spirit that will lead to her true liberation.

By the time the Abbey announced its upcoming production of The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats had already presented a second Synge play at the theatre, and Catholic nationalists were losing patience with the INTS. Backed by English money, Yeats had altered the governance of the INTS, making it less democratic and concentrating power in the hands of Anglo-Irish writer-directors. A few disaffected members had left the Abbey to form their own theatre, which sought to produce more Gaelic plays. Now Yeats, who was always suspect among the Catholics for his Anglo-Irish roots, was trumpeting another play by Synge, a dramatist known by the nationalists to harbor anti-Catholic sympathies. Catholic nationalists who went to the opening of The Playboy at the Abbey Theatre in January of 1907 expected the worst.

The Playboy riots

The first two acts of Synge’s comedy proceeded without incident, although the action probably aroused some nationalist anger. On stage Synge’s protagonist, Christy Mahon, arrived at a “shebeen” (a small tavern) in County Mayo in western Ireland and told the group of villagers that he had hit his father over the head with a shovel and killed him. Instead of turning him in to the “peelers” (the English police), the villagers celebrated his act of rebellion against an oppressor and praised Christy as a hero. Their adoration transformed the young man, who changed from a shy and fearful peasant into “the playboy of the Western world” in the villagers’ estimation. By the end of Act 2, Christy had won prizes at a local fair and the heart of Pegeen Mike, daughter of the local publican. In addition, however, Synge’s two acts had revealed another male character, a pious Catholic peasant, as a coward. He also characterized an Irish peasant woman, the Widow Quinn, with a lustiness that affronted respectable nationalists. The comedy of the situation may have kept nationalist anger temporarily in check.

For some in the audience, comedy turned to grotesquerie at the start of Act 3. The elder Mahon, supposedly dead, wandered into the shebeen with a bloody bandage on his head. Christy’s heroic killing of his father, his youthful rebellion against authoritarian tradition, abruptly lost its glamor. Synge rubbed salt in this nationalist wound by having Christy pursue his father and kill him “again” to win back Pegeen’s affections. Several of the spectators groaned, hissed, or shouted. Then Synge exposed the hypocrisy of the peasants, who had initially praised the patricide. They turned on Christy, tied him up, and vengefully tortured him, which resulted in more hisses and jeers from the nationalists. When Old Mahon returned “from the dead” a second time, bloodier than before, a full-scale riot broke out. Scattered audience members cheered for the play in order to counter the catcalls from the nationalist patriots. This led to more noise and occasional fights among the spectators. Although Synge’s play ended in a comic reconciliation between father and son, the ending was mostly lost on the patriotic spectators, who continued their tumult.

The Playboy riots, initially spontaneous, hardened into organized protests and continued for a week in the theatre. As one eyewitness later recalled, “The first-night demonstration had set up prejudices and currents of feeling.” In the course of the week, “Some, hearing that the peasant was maligned in the play, came to hiss; others came in order to support, to protect, as they thought, the challenged freedom of the theatre. Still others, hearing the peasant was maligned, came to applaud the maligners” (Levitas 2002: 127). To quiet the house, co-manager W.G. Fay called in police protection, which eventually reached 50 English officers. Synge and Gregory dismissed them for fear of exacerbating the riot, and, although the uproar subsided, Irish patriots from several factions condemned the theatre for resorting to British imperial power to shield the INTS. Newspaper coverage of the nationalist rioters and the theatre’s response ran the gamut of political opinion, with a number of editorialists finding much to blame on both sides (Figure 1).

Explaining the riots

Any explanation for the riots and the responses they provoked must put these events in the context of British colonial power and Irish aspirations for independence. Historians agree that while Yeats, Synge, and the nationalist rioters at the Abbey all opposed imperialism, they and the groups they represented had had diverse experiences with British oppression and sought very different solutions to the problem of Irish nationhood. It is clear that conservative, Catholic patriots and their allies in the press initiated and sustained the rioting. But historians differ as to the relative importance of the factors in the performance that set them off.

In his book The Politics of Irish Drama, Nicholas Grene examines four causes of the rioting without taking a position on their relative importance. First, he notes that portions of Synge’s dialog (Acts 2 and 3) referring to a woman’s undergarment, known then as a “shift” (a chemise), scandalized conservative members of the audience. In tandem with the suspiciously loose sexual morality of some of the female characters in the play, this affront to the purity of Irish Catholic womanhood roused the anger of the patriots. Second, Grene points to Synge’s indictment of his peasants’ casual acceptance of crime. The English had long condemned the Irish as a lawless people, and Synge’s comedy, which showed peasants glorifying a patricide, seemed to confirm this negative stereotype. Third was the locale of the play. Synge had set The Playboy in western Ireland, an area celebrated by the nationalists for its pure Irish peasant culture, uncontaminated by British rule. Yet Synge’s western peasants seemed to be more immodest, murderous, and vengeful than the typical Irish lackey of English power. Finally, Grene notes that the comedy parodied and profaned Catholic belief. With sympathetic characters denouncing piety, deriding priests, and asking blessings for murderers, The Playboy seemed to turn Catholicism upside down.

Most critics agree that each of Grene’s four causal factors played some role in sparking the rioting that occurred. But historians are usually uncomfortable with a simple listing of several causes. They generally attempt to find one fundamental reason that can explain an event or at least an explanation that relates the chief causal factors to each other. What was the most important reason for the Playboy riots? Might this reason enable the historian to fold other causes, including the four mentioned by Grene, into a broader explanation?

The search for an overarching cause often sends the historian back to the primary documents of the event for clues. In this case, two comments from contemporaries offer suggestive evidence. According to W.G. Fay, the actor who played Christy at the Abbey in 1907, Synge’s play angered the nationalists because it mounted “a deliberate attack on the national character” (Ayling 1992: 144). In a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Dublin, a spectator who had attended The Playboy during the week of rioting wrote: “Sir, if Mr. Synge wishes to turn the ‘Sinn Fein’ howlers [that is, the Catholic nationalists] into an applauding claque, he need only write a play portraying the Irish peasant as a flawless demi-god …” (Kilroy 1971: 54). Together, these comments imply that “the national character” of Ireland, an idealized image of a male Irish peasant, was at stake for the Catholic patriots who rioted. If these clues to the puzzle of causality are to yield an understanding of a fundamental cause of the rioting, however, the historian needs a valid approach to the abstraction, “national character.”

Recall that Grene noted four major causes of the riots. From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, each of these explanations may be linked to a prototype effect that would have annoyed, embarrassed, and/or angered nationalist spectators. Two of Grene’s causes are tied to The Playboy’s attack on Irish Catholicism. A close reading of the play reveals that Synge set up several male and female Catholic characters as typical examples of the Irish nation. All of them have character flaws arguably related to their Catholicism – cowardice and blaspheming for the men and confusion about healthy sexuality for the women. Christy’s love interest, Pegeen Mike, for example, first rejects Catholic strictures about romance and then furiously embraces them when torturing Christy. Grene also pointed to Synge’s satire on Irish peasant culture. While the nationalists glorified the prototype of the heroic peasant of western Ireland, The Playboy revealed these paragons of Irishness as lawless avengers. If the peasants of Synge’s County Mayo were typical examples and submodels of a heroic, Catholic nation, the cognitive logic of the prototype effect reduced all of the nationalists in the audience to immoral, worthless fools.

The ripple effects of Christy Mahon’s unmasking as the ideal representative of young Ireland must have been especially galling for the nationalists. Having gradually inflated his heroic balloon over two acts, Synge pinched it to make it squeal for much of Act 3, and then popped it at the end. All that Christy’s slaying of his father had come to represent – righteous youth against repressive age, the present breaking free from the past, even Ireland refusing submission to English imperialism – all of this idealism petered away with the appearance of Old Mahon and Christy’s comic attempt to kill him “again.” When, toward the end of Act 3, Pegeen told Christy that “there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed” (Synge 1964: 129), few amid the increasingly boisterous audiences probably heard the words spoken by the actress. Nevertheless, Pegeen’s memorable line underscored the prototype effect that upset the Catholic patriots. Within The Playboy, the speech reduced Christy’s attempt on his father’s life from an adventurous tale to a murderous attack. On the national political scene, Synge had exposed the Catholics’ heroic image of themselves as a dangerous fraud. In the end, Christy and his father simply return to their narrow, repressive life together. Christy is neither a “playboy” nor a Christ figure (as his name implies) for the salvation of Ireland.

Key references

Books

Ayling, R. (ed.) (1992) J.M. Synge: Four Plays, Casebook Series, London: Macmillan.

Grene, N. (1999) The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kilroy, J. (1971) The “Playboy” Riots, Dublin: Dolmen Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind in Western Thought, New York: Basic Books.

Levitas, B. (2002) The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890–1916, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Swettenham, N. (2006) “Categories and Catcalls: Cognitive Dissonance in The Playboy of the Western World,” in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, London and New York: Routledge.

Synge, J.M. (1964) The Playboy of the Western World, in W.A. Armstrong (ed.) Classic Irish Drama, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

The “bright lights of Broadway” have been a major draw to performers and spectators throughout Times Square’s history, referring both to the footlights and stars inside the theatres and to the dazzling electric signs outside in the streets.  Indeed, as Bruce McConachie explores near the end of this Case Study, these signs are what give Broadway the nickname “the Great White Way.” When this Case Study appeared in the first edition of this textbook in 2006, advertisers were just beginning to explore the new opportunities offered by digital and interactive media. In 2010, Forever 21 added a new twist to this development, with a large-screen interactive video that invited passers-by to stop and take Polaroid pictures with one of three models who playfully interacted with individuals and groups in the Times Square crowds, whose photos then appear to be held in the hands of these models (“Digital Signage Universe”). Today, a Google billboard covers the length of a city block, and other sponsors are experimenting with sidewalk level video games. While tourists in Times Square have always taken advantage of the many photo ops the signage of the Great White Way has offered, today their interactions with the surrounding context (or vortex, as the Case Study explores), is more multiply layered. As passersby see their own images writ large in one of the new interactive screens, and those images are also being captured and live-streamed by a growing number of webcams posted throughout the area, distinctions between performers and spectators become increasingly blurred. Meanwhile, the connection between theatre district and commercial district explored in this Case Study is only strengthened by these blurrings:  the same technology that makes them possible is also able to capture data about pedestrian counts and demographics that feature into marketing strategies—both of stores located along the Times Squares “bow tie,” and by purveyors of goods all over the world.  – Tamara Underiner, 2015.

CASE STUDY: The vortex of Times Square

By Bruce McConachie

Shopping on Broadway

On every Saturday night in 2002, tourists to New York City who had attended the musical 42nd Street at the Ford Center emerged from the darkness of the auditorium into the crowd to blink at the bright lights of the real 42nd Street. Instead of the “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty” 42nd Street of the musical, those tourists soon encountered stores in the Broadway–42nd Street area with the brand names of American mass culture – The Gap, McDonald’s, and Toys “R” Us, among many others. Where the musical is overtly nostalgic, appealing to the desperate hope for show-biz fame celebrated in Busby Berkeley’s 1933 musical film (on which the stage musical is based), the Times Square district today pulsates with contemporary culture. The hope for commercial success still remains, of course; in 2002, crowds gathered around a Turkish master of spray painting, a young black man breakdancing, and a few Chinese calligraphers who printed your name for a price. Other salesmen inside the stores offered Coke, Kellogg, Samsung, Proctor and Gamble, General Electric, Sprint, and Nike products (to name a few). Times Square has meant many things to many people in the past hundred years, but now it is principally about shopping. Indeed, squeezing through the crowds along Broadway or 7th Avenue between 42nd and 48th Streets at 11pm on a Saturday night, tourists may soon get the feeling that they are careening inside an enormous reflecting bowl of American pop culture and celebrating their identities as consumers of all those familiar products that are dressed up and dancing in the computer-controlled megawatts of more than 500 illuminated signs above their heads (Figure 1).

The meeting of actors and spectators in a space dedicated to performance is only one part of theatre-going. In all historical eras, spectators have traveled to the sites of performances and re-emerged into the environment in which their theatres were located. The ecology of theatre districts has directly shaped spectators’ expectations and memories of performance events. Throughout history, buildings or places set aside for public performances have often been sited at important crossroads, near centers of power, sometimes overlooking a central city square. (At other times, as in Elizabethan London and Tokugawa Tokyo, significant theatres were located at the margins of power.) The location of a state-supported playhouse or of a commercial theatre district within a city can tell the historian much about the role of the theatre in that society and culture.

The Broadway vortex, 1904–1960

Times Square got its name in 1904. The owner of the New York Times newspaper, Adolph Ochs, pulled some strings at City Hall and asked that the old Longacre Square be re-named Times Square in honor of his newspaper, which had just relocated there. In 1904, Times Square was one of the fastest-growing areas in metropolitan New York. The subways had opened that year and the station at 42nd and Broadway, a major junction in the new system, was soon pouring thousands of New Yorkers into the district every day. The moguls of the commercial stage, who had concentrated their theatres ten blocks south in Herald Square, saw the opportunities of the new district and began to open new playhouses. By 1910, there were 40 first-class theatres and nearly as many vaudeville and burlesque houses in and around Times Square. Restaurateurs also took advantage of the increased traffic and soon several “lobster palaces” were catering to the pre-show and post-show trade. Led by such tunesmiths as Irving Berlin and dance celebrities Vernon and Irene Castle, popular ragtime music was rousing New Yorkers out of sedentary spectating and swirling them into the new “dance craze.” To feed the craze, entrepreneurs opened dozens of dance halls and nightclubs in the Times Square area before 1914. Not all was top hats and ball gowns, however. Saloons, cheap hotels, and whorehouses jammed the side streets east and west of Broadway for the gamblers, chorus girls, longshoremen, waiters, and newspapermen who lived in the district, and the tourists and elite who came to play.

Perhaps the most important condensational event of this historical period, and one that would epitomize the vortex of Times Square for the next hundred years, was the instant success of the spectacular sign. Advertising billboards had long been popular, but it was only after 1890 that they began to be powered by electricity. O.J. Gude, already a leading adman in New York at the turn of the century, perfected the first generation of electric signs. The first of Gude’s “spectaculars,” as the new signs were called, depicted the Heatherbloom Girl in a short, illuminated drama that showed a rainstorm whipping at the dress and petticoats of the lightbulb-outlined giantess and revealing a glimpse of her stockinged calf. Gawkers gathered for hours on the street below in 1905 to watch the recurring scene. Condensed versions of this potent mix of product placement, sexual titillation, and electricity would continue to circulate through American culture and come to dominate the advertising pitches of global culture by the end of the century.

While Gude’s spectaculars illuminated Broadway as “The Great White Way,” the image of the chorus girl led to “white” condensational events of another kind. Florenz Ziegfeld began producing his annual Follies in 1907. By 1920 he and his designers, with the help of hundreds of “girls,” had perfected the Follies fashion model of haute couture. Sexy, sophisticated, but wholesome and always white, this image gained cultural dominance. The chorus girl and her imitators paraded into fashion runways, beauty pageants, car shows, and football half-time events for the next 50 years (Figure 2).

Although the ambience of the Times Square vortex in the early days validated most of the theatrical activity on Broadway, there were exceptions. Before 1914, even serious dramatic offerings at high-priced theatres rarely taxed the mind or criticized the status quo. This began to change in the 1920s, however, as the productions of the modern American theatre mixed it up with the revues, musicals, murder melodramas, and sex farces on Broadway. The theatre of Robert Edmond Jones, Elmer Rice, and Eugene O’Neill had little in common with the froth and fun of Times Square in the “roaring” ’20s. Nineteen of O’Neill’s plays gained production on Broadway between 1920 and 1934. At the same time, the Theatre Guild was staging many of the playwrights of European modernism, including Shaw, Kaiser, and Pirandello. By most terms of comparison, Ziegfeld’s Broadway was incompatible with Desire Under the Elms.

In contrast, the plays of George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) and others who practiced deflating farce and witty repartee fit right in to the ambience of 1920s Times Square. This was the era of The Smart Set, The New Yorker, and the wits of the Algonquin Round Table. The image of Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, and others sitting around their reserved table at the Algonquin Hotel and trading wisecracks emerged as a condensational event that put Times Square on the map as the home of quick wit, backbiting innuendo, and modern irony and aplomb. Kaufman’s early plays, including Dulcy (1921), Merton of the Movies (1922), and Beggar on Horseback (1924) – all co-authored with Marc Connelly (1890–1980) – recycled the sparkle and snap of the Algonquins for middle-class distribution. This brand of wisecracking irreverence also made it into many movies, most memorably the early films of the Marx Brothers – Chico (Leonard) (1887–1961), Harpo (Adolph Arthur) (1888–1964), and Groucho (Julius Henry) (1890–1977). Their Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers succeeded first as stage productions (1925 and 1928) and later joined Monkey Business (1931) and Duck Soup (1933) as films to parody the powerful, send up sexual propriety, and celebrate release from middle-class restraints.

The rise of film viewing, the decline of live entertainment, and the Depression of the 1930s led to a major shift in the environment of Times Square. By the late 1930s, the Broadway vortex still boasted opulent signs, black-tie openings, and glamorous nightclubs, but dime museums, peep shows, and flea circuses had also moved in. Sleaze and eccentricity were replacing the swank and style of the 1920s, as the elite found other playgrounds in the city. Mr. and Mrs. Middle-Class America had decided that they would rather pay to watch films than live theatre, and the growth of film production led to the transformation of numerous Broadway playhouses into movie theatres. It also brought many of the delights of the Coney Island amusement park into downtown Manhattan. Film audiences, however, still liked to see their stars live, and the Hollywood moguls accommodated this profitable desire by creating film premiere nights at the movie palaces of the nation – on Broadway. The event of the opening night, no longer restricted to the elite and condensed for radio and newsreel consumption by the masses, circulated widely in the culture of the 1930s and 1940s.

On August 14, 1945, the date that Japan surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, Times Square became the center of the nation’s joyful celebration. All the media of the day broadcast sounds and images of strangers hugging, kissing, and sobbing. By 10pm on that evening, two million people had flocked to the Broadway district, the largest gathering in the history of Times Square. A Life magazine reporter shot the photo that would condense and memorialize this event for the nation. In it, a sailor in his dress blues and round white hat scoops an unsuspecting nurse off her feet and plants a joyful kiss on her lips. This image of Times Square as the center of national celebration underwrote the ecology of the district from 1945 through the early 1960s. This image was at odds with the serious plays of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and others who continued and enhanced U.S. theatrical modernism. But it was congenial to the upbeat musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, and Lerner and Loewe. As in the musical Guys and Dolls (1950), set in a half-mythical Times Square of night clubs, gambling dens, and Salvation Army shelters, the Great White Way of the post-war era seemed to be the home of benevolent eccentricity. Its seedy but romantic urbanity continued to buoy the nation’s spirits through the anxious era of the early cold war. The electrified signs of the times, now mostly designed by Douglas Leigh, were bigger and more inviting than ever. Perhaps his most successful “spectacular” was an enormous image of a satisfied Camel smoker who blew perfect smoke rings (made of steam) out of his mouth every four seconds.

Times Square goes global

By the 1970s, the Broadway district had sunk into sleaze and crime. Pornography, drugs, and prostitution had been a part of the area since its beginnings, but these problems began to drive out legitimate businesses in the early 1960s even as the clientele for these activities remained largely middle-class. Worse, the crime rate rose to one of the highest in the city – not just victimless crimes but frequent muggings, rapes, and murders. Several national images and condensational events emerged from Times-Square-as-hell-hole during the 1960s and 1970s. These were perhaps best captured with the release of the film Taxi Driver in 1976, in which Robert De Niro plays a deranged taxi driver who goes on a killing rampage against the hookers, hustlers, and assorted crazies in this urban heart of darkness.

The businessmen and politicians who ran New York understood that the Broadway district could not be allowed to rot forever. It was too centrally located and still generated millions of tourist dollars. But they dithered until the 1990s over plans for its renewal. Luckily for them, the crime rate declined, and New York City gradually dug itself out of its fiscal hole. Promoters floated several plans for the area in the 1980s, one involving an indoor mall with aerial walkways and another the erection of four enormous office towers straddling Times Square. In the 1990s, local investors, city bureaucrats, and global conglomerates, aided by a change in the ideology of urbanity, gradually overcame these earlier schemes. A 1978 epic-marking manifesto by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas celebrated “Delirious New York” for the surfaces of its neon signage and pop glamour. New zoning laws honored this altered ideology and began to require the signs of the Broadway district to continue to burn brightly. Each sign facing the Square now had to produce a minimum LUTS (Light Unit Times Square) reading. The real estate moguls of New York who owned much of the land in the Broadway district soon found global corporations, including Disney and Clear Channel Communications, to rent, renovate, and rebuild their properties.

By 2000, Disney and Clear Channel controlled much of Broadway. Not only had Disney renovated its own theatre and begun producing shows, but also, as the owners of ABC and ESPN, it rented space and employed thousands of others in the area. Clear Channel funded productions for its national subscription series of mega-musicals. Viacom, the owner of MTV, many of the Times Square “spectaculars,” and its Viacom Building at 45th and Broadway, was also a player. The actual investment in live theatre by these three global conglomerates was only a small percentage of their total revenue. Most of Clear Channel’s money came from radio stations, for instance; its Theatrical and Family Division generated less than 10 percent of its revenues.

The future of Broadway theatre(?)

Will these and other global corporations continue to be interested in supporting live theatre on Broadway? While no one can say, the Times Square vortex will likely remain an important launching pad for world entertainment. Its smile-button commercialism is no longer particularly friendly to live theatre that does not conform to the mega-musical formula, however. In December of 2004, only one non-musical drama was playing on Broadway – Gem of the Ocean, by August Wilson (1945–). The reduction of straight plays in Times Square to two or three per season has been common.

More significantly, perhaps, the ambience of Times Square forcefully reminds all theatre-goers that theatrical spectating is itself old fashioned and may soon be outmoded. Traveling to a separate place for entertainment, sitting in a seat for most of the time, and responding with laughter and polite applause may still have its pleasures, but how much longer can it compete with the delights of direct participation in the newer media of communication? In 2003, Total Request Live, MTV’s version of the old American Bandstand, was broadcast every afternoon from a second story studio overlooking Times Square. People gathered in the street below to look through the glass wall, wave at the bands in the studio, and occasionally provide cheering backup on television when a rock star waved back. Like reality TV, these are the kinds of condensational events that the vortex of Times Square is now producing. Of course, Total Request Live appealed mostly to teens, but will they become theatre-goers when they reach 40? Although the materiality of Times Square is not about to disappear into virtual space, the chance of participating in its mediated image may be becoming more important for many than the physical reality of being there.

Broadway has always been a vortex of contrasts, however, and live theatre is a necessary part of the mix for many. In 1980, roughly 60 percent of spectators for Broadway shows came from the New York metropolitan area. By 2000, most spectators, around 56 percent, came from elsewhere, and the total theatre-going population had increased by nearly two million people in 20 years. Approximately twelve million audience members came to a Broadway show in the 2000–2001 season. During that year, theatre in the Times Square area generated about US$4.4 billion for the city’s economy, including production costs, theatre expenses, and estimated visitor spending. Apparently, the Broadway mega-musical has found a new and expanding niche that even the thrills of direct participation in new media cannot touch.

Key References

Atkinson, B. (1974) Broadway, New York:  Macmillan.

Carlson, M. (1989) Places of Performance:  The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, Ithaca and London:  Cornell University Press.

“Digital Signage Universe: Place-based Digital Out-of-Home Networks and Digital Signage Installations” (24 Nov. 2010) http://digitalsignageuniverse.typepad.com/digital_signage_universe/2010/11/forever-21-goes-interactive-in-times-square-.html#sthash.3zOTF6s8.ep5Ibq0Y.dpuf, accessed 3 August 2015.

Roach, J. (1996) Cities of the Dead:  Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York:  Columbia University Press.

Sagalyn, L.B. (2001) Times Square Roulette:  Remaking the City Icon, Cambridge M.A.:  MIT Press.

Taylor, W.R., ed. (1991) Inventing Times Square:  Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, New York:  Russell Sage Foundation.

Traub, J. (2004) The Devil’s Playground:  A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square, New York:  Random House.

Weiss, G. (24 Nov. 2014) “Google Launches Interactive Games on Times Square's Biggest Billboard Ever,” Economist,http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240193, accessed 3 August 2015.