Throughout this book, we consider philosophical problems that arise in relation to theatre. The broad aim of this chapter is to answer the question: what is theatre? Giving an answer – and looking at answers proposed by others – helps us to understand what a broad range of activities can be associated with ‘theatre’. One way to answer our question would be to say: ‘there's no single, useful definition; it's the label for a loose, rag-tag bundle of social and cultural practices that more or less began in Ancient Greece but that had probably been going on long before in various different guises and under various different descriptions’. This is perfectly true, even if exactly the same answer, word for word, could be given for ‘What is democracy?’, ‘What is history’? and ‘What is philosophy?’, amongst other questions. The point, then, is to come up with something a little more concrete than that, but that pays attention to the enormous variety of things that have been and still are called ‘theatre’. We don't need a watertight definition, but we do need something that will carry us through the rest of the book. We'll look at the question ‘what is theatre?’ in three different ways. First, we examine the ‘typical elements’ of a theatrical performance. Second, we look at some standard definitions of theatre. Third, we look at theatre compared with other art forms. Finally, we look at the relationship between play texts and theatrical performances.
One approach is to think about the typical elements of theatre. To call these elements ‘typical’ is not to say that theatre is impossible without them. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that few, if any, of these elements are really necessary for a theatrical performance. The idea, then, is both to introduce what I take to be the typical elements of a theatrical performance and to highlight the kinds of theatre that try to do without them.
If we write a list of the most common and frequently discussed elements of a theatrical performance, it might include some of the following: a play text; characters and a plot; spoken words; a director; scenery and stage; lighting and sound; an audience; actors; finally, the building itself-the theatre. Yet theatrical performances are possible without many of these common elements. The most prominent of these is, of course, the play text, which is often held to be an important contributor to theatrical performances, but is obviously not a feature, say, of (completely) improvised theatre. Despite general agreement that plenty of theatrical performances don't use play texts at all, the relation between play texts and theatrical performances has been the subject of some philosophical debate, to which I return towards the end of the chapter. Plot and character do not feature in any conventional sense in many kinds of avant-garde theatre. Spoken words are absent, for example, from mime theatre. The director – understood as a distinct and independent artistic role – is more or less an invention of the twentieth century. Other elements, harder to dismiss, deserve a closer look: these are the theatre, the actor and the spectator.
The first element is the place itself-the theatre. The word ‘theatre’ can refer in general terms to the artistic institution, as an equivalent of ‘classical music’, ‘poetry’ or ‘dance’. That is how it is used in the title of this book, for example. But a ‘theatre’ is also a location, often enough a purpose-built construction like the Theatre of Dionysus or the Globe. As part of the theatre, we normally find the place for the spectators and the place for the actors to perform – the latter, of course being the stage with its set and scenery. It's clear, though, that theatrical performances frequently take place without theatres in this sense. In the mediaeval period, there simply were no purpose-built theatres as we understand them now; but theatrical performances took place in churches, in town squares or in processions along main streets. Modern companies use abandoned industrial complexes, parks, streets and tunnels to stage performances. As for the set and scenery, a play can take place without any of these; plenty do. In short, a theatre isn't required for theatre. In a more expanded sense, of course, one might say that in all of these cases a theatre is created by the company. The abandoned warehouse is not a purpose-built auditorium with purpose-built stage, but the performance still makes it a theatre in a sense. In all these cases, that is, the theatrical performance is located somewhere. The word ‘theatre’ comes from the Greek word theatron – a ‘place for viewing’. In all of these cases, there is a space carved out for the viewers and a space carved out for the viewed. Understood broadly, it isn't always clear which space is which, and these spaces could shift during the course of the performance, as with the medieval procession play moving through the town. Here, we find something much closer to a requirement for a theatrical performance: a certain kind of viewing space. Yet even so, it's possible to find putative examples of theatre that don't have that. The ‘radio play’, if it counts as a kind of theatre, doesn't obviously have a ‘place for viewing’, or even a dedicated or significant ‘place for listening’ (i.e. auditorium). Of course, some theatre theorists might well discount it as a species of theatre on just those grounds.
A second feature is the actor – the person on stage performing a certain role. In what I'm taking to be the typical performance, the actor is one who impersonates, pretends to be or plays the role of someone or something she is not. Laurence Olivier plays Hamlet; Nina plays The World Spirit. But one certainly finds actors – which is to say, people playing a certain role in the performance – who aren't exactly impersonating or ‘playing’ anyone or anything else. The actors might simply appear as themselves, making claims to the audience that they take to be true;1 or it might be unclear whether or not they are playing a part; members of the audience may be asked to take part in certain ways and, again, it may be unclear if these are ‘plants’ or not. If stand-up comedy counts as a kind of theatre – which for some theorists it clearly does2 – then, depending on the performer, it may or may not involve impersonation or pretence.3 Finally, some kinds of theatre don't seem to require human agents at all. Balme describes ‘the scenographic theatre of G. N. Servandoni (1695–1766) which consisted primarily of spectacular scene changes and did without performers altogether.’4 Puppet theatre uses human puppeteers, of course, but not human actors in a standard sense. Some recent experiments with ‘robot theatre’ have attempted to do away even with this human element, leaving (say) computers to chat to each other, thus forming a kind of live, evolving dialogue, which may be different at each performance.5 As with abandoning the spatial element, abandoning human performance altogether does put pressure on what we count as theatre; but there is no reason why robot or computer theatre couldn't become increasingly significant as the technology develops.
A third element is the audience. Typically, the theatre – the place for viewing – has those who are viewed (actors) and those who view (spectators). An audience needn't be the quiet, reverential, rather passive audience of conventional, contemporary theatre. Nor must spectators be cordoned off from performers so that it's always clear which are which. One difficult question, especially in the light of twentieth-century experiments with theatre, is whether the spectator must be aware that she is watching a performance. Some ‘street theatre’ performers put on plays in public places: an argument might be staged about some topical issue, the idea being to raise awareness or encourage debate, without onlookers realising that the argument is (initially) staged. Onlookers are either unwitting spectators or, if they get caught up in the argument, they become unwitting performers. It's clear that even in this non-conventional setting, there is an audience. Some forms of theatre attempt to do without the audience altogether. ‘Closet dramas’ are plays that are written to be read, not to be performed; often they are excluded, as theatre, for precisely this reason. Brecht wrote Lehrstücke – ‘teaching plays’ – which, he claimed, were designed to help the actors to learn, not for the benefit of any audience.6 Some of the ‘happenings’ organised by Allan Kaprow in the late 1960s certainly included, as part of the overall event, activities that did not have any spectators whatsoever.7
We have seen that each of these three elements – location, performer, spectator – may be dispensed with in certain non-typical forms of theatre. Nonetheless, we'll take it that all three are typically present. (When they are present [when the performer and spectator are together in the theatrical space] we also find a fourth element: something like ‘liveness’, which I discuss when comparing theatre with other art forms at the end of this chapter.) This discussion helps us when we turn to some of the better-known definitions of theatre, which we are now in a position to assess.
The earliest definitions of theatre focus on the concept of mimesis (roughly: imitation); for Plato, theatre is characterised by imitation without narration. I can describe what Agamemnon and Clytemnestra said and did; I can describe what they did and also include some of their speeches, during which I might impersonate them and others; or I can cut out the description altogether and pretend to be Agamemnon, while my friend pretends to be Clytemnestra and we talk to each other, becoming the story ourselves for the benefit of a third party. Theatre, for Plato, is the latter. Because it plays such an important role in philosophical discussions of theatre, we look at mimesis in detail in the following chapter. But as we have already seen, there are recognisable forms of theatre in which imitation or impersonation do not play a significant role. So although mimesis merits close attention, we shouldn't think that theatre is impossible without it. For similar reasons, Eric Bentley's celebrated definition of theatre – ‘A impersonates B while C looks on’ – seems unnecessarily restricted in its appeal to impersonation.8
For a definition that does not appeal to imitation or impersonation, we can turn to Peter Brook's famous claim: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’9 In this minimal set of sufficient conditions, we find the three central elements that we examined above: location, performer, spectator. One or two features of Brook's claim are importantly ambiguous and we might respond to this differently depending on how we are meant to understand him. The most important ambiguity, it seems to me, is what the ‘performer’ and the ‘spectator’ know about their situation: does the watcher know that the empty space has been called a ‘bare stage’? Does the walking man know that he is walking across the ‘bare stage’ and that he is being watched? When I first taught a class on what theatre is, we followed Brook's instructions: we designated the centre of the seminar room a bare stage; one student walked across the room; others watched. It may not have been the best theatre – but theatre it was. Looking out of the window of my office, I see plenty of students walking past, and I see others watching them; and, even if I designate the concrete path a ‘bare stage’, it doesn't seem much like theatre to me. Many theorists of theatre speak of the mutual awareness of performers and spectators as an essential component, thus of theatre as a kind of collaboration between the two. Hence, Grotowski emphasised the ‘actor-spectator relationship, a perceptual, direct living community’ irreducibly at the heart of theatre.10
Does every event that consists of a marked-out location, with performers and spectators who know about each other, amount to a piece of theatre? Most of us, I take it, would say that it does not. For one thing, plenty of non-artistic events look like they would count: sports, public ceremonies, board-room presentations, political rallies, courtroom trials and public executions all arguably contain these basic elements. These sorts of events, together with theatrical performances, may be studied under the broad, umbrella term of ‘Performance Studies’ – performance being deliberately chosen as a broader and less culturally specific category than theatre. For some, then, it's a feature of theatre – but not necessarily a feature of performance in general – that what's going on is a kind of playing (which doesn't necessarily involve impersonation, as we have seen). Hence, Balme writes that, ‘reduced to the simplest common denominator, theatre, or more generally a theatrical event, consists of a simultaneous and mutually conditioning act of playing and watching by performers and spectators gathered together in a common space’.11 There's a clear sense in which the public execution is not ‘playing’, in the way that the execution scene in Danton's Death certainly is.12 Others, though, have been drawn to the conclusion that ‘theatre’ should be used to cover all such artistic and non-artistic events. Thus, when Paul Woodruff defines theatre as ‘the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching, in a measured time and place,’ he deliberately intends to revise and redefine it, to include weddings and football matches within the category of theatre.13 Within this broad category of ‘theatre’, Woodruff identifies what he calls ‘art theatre’ (the art form commonly known as ‘theatre’) as a sub-category – one that is important in some ways and unimportant in others. The appeal of such an approach to theatre is evident, in that theatre becomes something much broader and arguably more significant. It also has some historical support: certainly, in medieval texts, the Latin term ludi is found to refer both to plays and sports, which might suggest the lack of a distinction that we now seem to find significant.14
Nonetheless, this book looks at theatre as a form of art that sits alongside others, like film, painting or poetry. It is true that non-artistic, public events such as football matches and political rallies may be described as ‘theatrical’ and that they involve performance; but that doesn't mean that they are instances of theatre. In fact, the term ‘theatrical’ is often used pejoratively in such cases, to mean insubstantial, just for show, pre-planned in a way that such a thing ought not to be, and so on. And in sport, for example, there's clearly a difference between the effectiveness of the spectacle and the demands of the game: it is frequent enough to hear a commentator at a football match remark, of the winning team, that, although the game wasn't that good to watch, ‘they had a job to do and they did it’. It's not clear that the same could be said of a company performing Hamlet. When we speak of a theatrical performance, I take it we typically mean something much narrower: an artistic event that takes place in a particular location, with mutually aware performers and spectators engaged in some kind of play. But notice that this is not intended to be a watertight definition – just something to work with for the purposes of this discussion.
A final word on definitions. Philosophers, now and in the past, have taken very different views about what a definition is and what it's useful for. Defining something can be two different kinds of activity: a backwards-looking one, describing what it is; a forwards-looking one, saying what it ought to be (‘define X as … ’). Definitions often combine these elements, including enough common sense to account for the descriptive element, but enough normative grip to get at what the definer wants. Approaching something as historically complex as theatre – a multi-faceted and relatively continuous, but ever-changing tradition stretching back at least to the Greeks – one is unlikely to come up with a satisfactory descriptive definition that captures just exactly what it is that makes something ‘theatre’. Looking at the varied activities that might count as theatre even in this brief discussion, we can already see why that would be. So those who offer a definition of theatre often aren't really trying to include everything that could be counted as theatre; often, they have a particular aesthetic or philosophical goal in mind – a certain view of what theatre ought to be, rather than a descriptive account of what it is. Thus, for example, Brook's set of sufficient conditions, in the context of his book, is the launch platform for an aesthetic manifesto; Eric Bentley is offering an imagined prehistory of theatre, in order to emphasise certain elements of performance; Woodruff has a broader project, to connect theatre with the ethics of everyday life.15 Creating a definition with a particular aesthetic or philosophical goal in mind is not a crime. But nor should these definitions be conceived of as neutral descriptions of a cultural practice. Debates about definitions of theatre are, often enough, really debates about what matters and what ought to matter.
The focus on typical theatrical elements serves well to explain why certain art forms do not count as theatre. Paintings, sculptures and architectural constructions do not feature performers and spectators. The same typically holds for novels and poems, when read silently.16 Although many playwrights are counted as major literary figures, they have less creative control than their equivalents in other literary arts. Novels and poems do not typically make use of staging, lighting, scenery and so on. They are not collaborative in the same way. Nor do they require collaboration on the part of a group of spectators. This reliance on others to complete the artwork contributes to a further distinctive feature of theatre (in the broad sense). Compared with films, novels and poems, theatrical performances change and develop over time, both within a production (as ideas are explored) and across different productions. The modern reader of an old novel may not have exactly the same experience of that novel as a contemporary reader would have had (amongst other things, because of cultural changes, lost references, historical ironies); but at least she knows that she is making contact with more or less the same object that an original reader would have consumed. The same is true for the modern-day viewer of an old film. The spectator at a modern Shakespeare performance – even one that attempts to recreate renaissance practices – can hardly say the equivalent: think of the different accents, performance rituals, crowd behaviours and so on. This is not to deny that editions of novels or cinematic projection techniques differ over time – but this is nothing like the changing experience of the theatregoer. The changing nature of theatrical performance over time means that particularly well-known plays like Hamlet have a kind of life of their own: there are always new ways to adapt or develop the play and it's never going to be possible to exhaust it; this contrasts it with the equivalent film or novel. Indeed, the theatregoer knows that the performance she sees is, in an important sense, a one-off. This is evident in the case of those improvised or immersive performances that develop based on direct interaction with an audience; but generally, no matter how much a performance has been rehearsed and planned, it could go much better than the previous night, or much worse.
By way of making a contrast with film in particular, much has been made of the ‘liveness’ of theatre, which we have already mentioned. A theatrical performance can go wrong in a way that a film can't: actors can get put off, forget lines, corpse; equally, actors may put on a better or more inspired performance one night than they do the next. Improvisations or fortuitous slips can frequently be adopted in later performances. The performance of the film actor is mediated by the camera and by the editor in a way that the performance of the stage actor cannot be; hence, Walter Benjamin writes that, in the case of film (not theatre), ‘the audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera’.17 ‘Liveness’ also entails that the theatre audience can have more of an effect on the artwork than can, say, viewers of paintings or films. Actors respond to audiences differently on different nights. Even conventional, passive audiences have a role to play in creating the artwork. Many spectators identify the excitement of theatre with its liveness – the sense that their cooperation is required, that the experience is shared. Similarly, others describe a feeling of awkwardness or an acute awareness of the pretence of theatre, which they do not associate with film. In my experience, bad theatre produces an embarrassment on the part of the spectator that does not find its equivalent in bad film: you mustn't look too bored or too distracted, because they can see you.18 It's a peculiar feature of theatre, then, that you can offend the artwork.19
We have seen why some art forms should not count as theatre. Notice, though, that if a piece of ‘theatre’ is an artistic event that takes place in a particular location, with mutually aware performers and spectators engaged in some kind of play, then theatre, as defined, includes opera, dance and performance art. There is a sense in which this is absolutely right; I'll call this category of artistic performance ‘theatre in the broad sense’. Much of what we said about theatre, compared with films and novels, also applies, say, to dance: one can offend dancers; dance performances change from one evening to another; dance is live. But clearly, ‘theatre’ also has a narrower sense – one that has the function of distinguishing a theatrical performance (the performance of a play) from an opera, a dance performance or a piece of performance art. Pinning down just what it is that distinguishes theatre in the narrow sense is particularly difficult and may well be best described in cultural and historical terms, rather than in the abstract. Plenty of instances of theatre in the broad sense could fit under a number of different categories, including performance art, theatre (in the narrow sense) or dance.
However, there are some general trends. Opera suggests an emphasis on music; dance, of course, on dance. As for theatre in the narrow sense, a ‘play’ typically suggests more of an emphasis on the spoken word than do the other kinds of performance under consideration (but, then again, the spoken word is often a feature of other kinds of artistic performance – and plenty of plays do not have words). One way to back up this intuition is to think about who tends to be identified as the ‘artist’. In the case of opera, for example, it is the composer whose name tends to be attached to the artwork; in the case of dance, depending on the context, it may be the company, composer or choreographer.20 When we broaden this to television and film – which obviously are not kinds of theatre, but which make use of many of the same artistic techniques – we find a similar disparity: the name associated with film tends to be that of the director or actor, with television perhaps the channel, production company or main actor. So although I might go to a Tarantino film or watch a BBC costume drama or see an early Wagner opera, I would be more likely to describe myself as seeing an Ibsen play or the new play by Butterworth or Churchill.21 Similarly, theatre directors are often described as giving ‘interpretations’ of play texts, whereas it is rare to find film directors described as doing so in relation to film scripts.22 Indeed, scriptwriters for film and television are frequently unknown to millions who see their films, unless they happen to be directors or playwrights as well.
To be clear: there are plenty of exceptions in all of these cases; what's more, the fact that these cultural trends exist doesn't show that they are particularly deep or important; they might merely be convenient labels for artworks that are clearly collaborative and for which no single ‘artist’ could be found – and we’ve already seen that playwrights aren't necessary for theatre; the texts they write can be used in all sorts of ways and, as we shall see, the relationship between a text and a performance is by no means clear. In as much as the association between the playwright and the performance does represent a tendency, it suggests a greater respect for the artistry of the writer of the words than for equivalents in related art forms like film, television and opera.
The philosophical discussions in this book explicitly relate to theatre in the narrow sense, about which there is plenty to say. When I use the term ‘theatre’, that is what I have in mind unless otherwise stated. Often, though not always, the issues raised could apply to theatre in the broad sense, too. Furthermore, given the range of performances covered by the notion of ‘theatre’ (even in the narrow sense), some of the issues under discussion simply will not arise for certain kinds of theatrical performance.23
We should end the discussion of theatre in relation to other art forms by noting that part of the interest in theatre comes not from its distinctiveness as such, but from the way that it incorporates and interacts with the other arts. It would not be unusual for a theatrical production to make use of painting, sculpture, design, music, dance, fashion, film or poetry, while architects have played their part in creating beautiful or unusual theatre buildings.24 Plays are adapted as films and vice versa, used as the basis for operas, as inspiration for dance performances. We don't need to think of theatre as separate and completely independent from all of these things.
At this point, it may be helpful to say something about ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ – two words that are frequently used interchangeably. ‘Drama’, like ‘theatre’, comes from the Greek (an ‘action’ or ‘doing’). Like theatre, the range of things that may be referred to by drama is enormous. This means that aggressively policing some purportedly unique distinction between the two of them would probably be a waste of time. Nonetheless, some differences should be addressed; we'll look at three related but different ways of drawing the distinction.
A good way into thinking about the first difference comes from considering the corresponding adjectives, ‘theatrical’ and ‘dramatic’, both of which can be applied to real-world incidents but with different meanings. Suppose there is a fire in my neighbour's house and the emergency services are called in to rescue her: if I call the rescue operation ‘dramatic’, I might mean it was tense or daring; but if I call it ‘theatrical’, I probably mean that the rescuers were showing off or unnecessarily making a spectacle of it. Following this, one might think that ‘drama’ suggests something to do with a plot or the internal development of an action: a dramatic incident is one in which events unfold over time in a particular way. ‘Theatre’, on the other hand, puts the emphasis on the combination of location, performer and spectator discussed above – for theatre, then, one doesn't need a coherent narrative or the unfolding of events in a particular way. One example of the latter might be Peter Brook's suggestion (quoted above) that the man walking across the ‘bare stage’ would be an act of theatre; it's not clear that this would necessarily count as ‘dramatic’ in the sense that we are discussing.
If ‘drama’ suggests something about the narrative or unfolding of events, then it might also emphasise the creator or ‘dramatist’ of the narrative more than it emphasises the performers; whereas if theatre emphasises the spectacle, then it might place more emphasis on the performers. This explains why theatre historians often refer to the ‘drama’ of a certain period to mean those plays that were written (or, generally, created) during that time; the ‘theatre’ of the period would refer to what was performed – including, of course, plays from a much earlier period. So, if a theatre historian speaks of ‘post-war British drama’, she may be speaking of playwrights like John Osborne, John Arden and Harold Pinter, whereas ‘post-war British theatre’ might suggest a focus on theatres and companies like the Old Vic or the Stratford Festival Company.25 The Old Vic's 1960 production of Romeo and Juliet would, on this understanding, be renaissance drama and post-war theatre. We can see why this way of drawing the distinction is related to the previous one: in both cases, drama emphasises formal elements such as plot and character, whereas theatre emphasises performance. But what makes a performance ‘dramatic’ in the first sense goes well beyond the ‘dramatist’ in the second: whereas the performers in The Old Vic's Romeo and Juliet are not a necessary condition for the ‘drama’ in the second sense, they certainly are for the ‘drama’ in the first.
A third and related difference is that ‘drama’ has traditionally been used to indicate a certain literary genre (along with ‘epic’ or ‘lyric’). There is a sense, then, that describing a play text or a performance as ‘drama’ appeals to (primarily Western) literary norms and expectations – perhaps, following the second distinction, with a concomitant emphasis on the written word – which do not necessarily apply to theatre. Hence it isn't unusual, in academic discussions, to read of ‘non-dramatic’ or ‘postdramatic’ theatre; and for this reason, many contemporary theatre theorists and practitioners are keen to distance themselves from what they take to be the traditional restrictions of ‘drama’, compared with the relative openness of the term ‘theatre’. But note that the term ‘drama’ can, in some cases, be broader than the term ‘theatre’. For our purposes, one important example is that ‘drama’ also indicates a genre for television and radio programming, typically denoting something both fictional and serious; ‘theatre’, on the other hand, can include performances which may be neither fictional nor serious, but excludes television programming. So we can see that theatre and drama frequently overlap, but they do not have to: a typical performance of Hamlet may be both theatre and drama; television ‘dramas’ are not theatrical performances; and some theatrical performances do not count as ‘dramas’, on this understanding. On the terms set out by any of these three overlapping distinctions, this book is about philosophy and theatre; but much of the discussion also relates to drama.
Plenty of theatrical performances, such as plays that are completely improvised, don't have corresponding play texts at all. Conversely, some works of dramatic literature are not written to be performed (so-called ‘closet dramas’, like those of Seneca), even if they may be adapted for the stage. So nobody would claim that every theatrical performance must necessarily stand in some relation to a play text or vice versa. As we saw in the discussion of the terms ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’, many writers on theatre (and performance) seek to distance themselves from the association between theatre and the ‘play text’ – partly because that association lends itself to a narrow, traditional focus on a Western literary canon, to the exclusion of other, marginalised forms of theatre that do not make use of such a text. There is thought to be, then, a political agenda (broadly speaking) to what counts as theatre, or what ‘deserves’ to be studied and taken seriously. Even when there is a well-known play text, there's no aesthetic law saying it must be used in a conventional manner – by which I mean: each character assigned to an actor, each actor uttering the words assigned to his or her character, stage directions diligently followed, and so on.26 There are many non-conventional ways of using play texts to create performances, and even within the conventional model, there is a huge variety, depending on artistic goals as well as on budget and location.27 So there's no reason to think that there is one text/performance relationship or that there ought to be such a thing. Nonetheless, for right or for wrong, most of the plays discussed in the course of this book do have corresponding play texts and that is the model I take as typical – partly because that is the model assumed by most of the philosophers whom I discuss and partly because that is still, to my mind, the dominant model on contemporary stages. What's more, the question of how to characterise the relationship between play texts and performances has been subject to some debate and it deserves a place in our discussion. These debates sometimes attempt to use philosophical approaches to say what sort of a thing a play or a theatrical performance is (ontology or, broadly, metaphysics) and then move from there to discuss the role of the text. Such discussions, it seems to me, are broadly motivated by two concerns: the first is a philosophical puzzle about what constitutes ‘the work of art’ in the case of theatre; the second is an aesthetic debate about the significance of the play text in relation to the performance. We'll look at each in turn.
On the face of it, we all know what Hamlet is: a play, written by William Shakespeare at the start of the seventeenth century. But what exactly is the play? It can't just be the written text, because there are three different extant versions, with significant differences; and there is no simple or uncontroversial way of choosing which one should be the standard version or uniting all three into one definitive edition. In any case, quite apart from these texts, Hamlet is often something people think they can go to see at a performance: I can ‘see Hamlet’ in way that I can't ‘see War and Peace’. But when I see a performance of Hamlet, it is rare to see any one of the three surviving texts performed without any editing or alterations to the words; and there's plenty on the stage that has not been specified or implied by the text (examples might be scenery, staging, casting, costumes). Nonetheless, I want to maintain that the performance I see is a performance of Hamlet: I have seen Hamlet, not merely an adaptation of Hamlet or a performance of something else, which happens to be inspired by Hamlet. So could Hamlet just be the performance I am going to see? Not really: this performance differs considerably from another performance I have seen; but they are both Hamlet; so this performance isn't all there is to Hamlet any more than the written text is all there is to Hamlet. As ‘art objects’, then, plays are harder to pinpoint than other kinds of art: it's pretty clear, in contrast, what the Bayeux Tapestry is and where to find it; but Hamlet seems to hover somewhere between a set of unchanging texts (albeit open to changes in the editing process) and an open-ended series of performances and productions stretching back to Shakespeare's time and on into the future. Reflections on our different attitudes to text and performance have led some to suggest that Hamlet the text and Hamlet the performance should be thought of as different works of art. David Saltz, for example, writes that ‘“to read Hamlet” and “to see Hamlet” denote such different experiences that we might well ask whether the word Hamlet has the same reference in the two expressions’. He continues: ‘If I have seen a play twice, and read it three times, is there some single “thing” that I have encountered five times?’28 Plenty of people, myself included, think the answer to this question is obviously ‘yes’: namely, Hamlet. But, it must be said, if Hamlet is a thing, then it's an odd one: one can encounter Hamlet in the texts or in the performances, but in neither case has one completely exhausted its possibilities. These are the sorts of considerations that might lead to further investigation on the part of philosophers and theorists about the relationship between the play text and the performance. But, of course, there's no reason to think that Hamlet needs to be identical with the text or with the performance (which it isn't), or that it needs to be an object like the Bayeux Tapestry (which it obviously isn't); it could just be a kind of imagined, abstract construction out of texts and performances – or a useful label that nonetheless doesn't pick out any one unique thing in the world. The question of exactly what Hamlet is may never be answered in the way that a similar question about the Bayeux Tapestry could be. And why would anybody expect such an answer or seek to find it?
There is, as I suggested, a second, aesthetic motivation for discussion of the text-performance relationship. This is an aesthetic conflict about where the artistic value of theatre lies. Put in extreme form, one side views play texts – primarily works of dramatic literature – as the central aesthetic focus. They are to be revered as literary constructions: words on a page, like poems and novels; unfortunately, sitting on top of works of dramatic literature, and threatening to obliterate them, there has developed a sort of glamorous, unsightly mould comprising actors, directors, critics and theatregoers, not to mention lighting technicians, sound engineers, costume designers and so on. The other side treats theatrical performances as the locus of artistic merit: theatre is basically akin to music and dance, for reasons we have discussed; techniques of literary analysis are mostly irrelevant; any attempt to tell performers what to do, based on the words of some playwright (dead or alive), is an unwelcome trespass into the realm of artistic freedom.
Perhaps nobody holds these views to these extremes. But moderate versions of some of them can certainly be found. Historically, Aristotle, as we shall see, shows himself to be far more interested in the written elements of the tragedy – the plot and the characters – than the elements relating to the performance alone, which he considers peripheral. Lessing, although writing on behalf of a theatre, gives Aristotle's claim a qualified endorsement.29 Some scholars, notably the Victorian essayist Charles Lamb, have argued that Shakespeare's plays in particular are better read than performed. Nietzsche's account of ancient tragedy in many ways takes the opposite view to Aristotle: to look primarily at the play texts associated with Attic tragedy is to miss its significance.
Where the relationship between a performance and a play text is relatively conventional, it's clear that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Viewing play texts as the aesthetic focus ignores or downplays the artistry of performance; crucially, it also, more often than not, downplays the artistry of the playwright: playwrights have often been active participants in theatrical performances – as actors, producers, directors – and wrote with them in mind.30 You miss something if you read their work and ignore the theatre; and, in fact, good literary criticism of play texts rarely ignores the theatre. The difference between reading a scene and watching it performed well can be striking. To give just two brief examples: the significance of Nora's dance in A Doll's House is easy to miss on paper and very difficult to miss if you see it happening in front of you. Another oft-cited example is that of silence: to the solitary reader, the word ‘silence’ on the page means very little and may be skipped over; but silence in a packed auditorium means a great deal. (Teachers will know the difference between peaceful, solitary silence and the awkward silence of a classroom.) One can always imagine such things, but actively imagining something and actually witnessing it are different. On the other hand, ignoring the literary elements of a text – when that text is being used in a traditional way as the basis for a performance – can lead to disappointing performances, and the line between artistic freedom and the vanity project of a director trying to make a splash is not always easy to draw.31 Performances are subject to various market pressures: theatres need to draw in crowds, they are subject to fads and fashions, they use famous but not necessarily talented actors to gain publicity. Productions of very well-known plays must often be seen to do something new for the sake of novelty alone. Lessing, although an admirer of the stage, suggests that well-known actors tend to favour mediocre plays, which give them more of a chance to shine as individuals than they would in a well-crafted work.32 None of these pressures obviously applies to play texts as works of dramatic literature – so one can see why reading a play text might be thought to offer a purer experience.
This conflict, implicitly or otherwise, plays its part in discussions by philosophers and others about the relationship between play texts and performances. Such discussions are often presented as though they might settle the aesthetic dispute alluded to above, or at least contribute in some way. They tend to compare the text-performance relation with some other kind of relation in order, supposedly, to clarify it. The text-performance relation has thus been compared with the relation between a mould and sculpture, a musical score and performance, a recipe and meal, an ingredient and a completed meal, an original text and its translation into another language, an artwork and its interpretation.33 The relationship between a play text and a performance is, of course, identical with none of these relationships; but they may be helpful in drawing out what appeals to one side of the conflict or the other. The idea that the play text is like a mould clearly places too little weight on the artistry of performance; more than that, it misunderstands what a play text is: no matter how carefully two independent companies tried to perform Hamlet according to the text of the play (of which in any case there are a number of versions), they would be forced to make choices – about, say, casting or costume – that aren't specified in the text and that would inevitably alter the resulting performances. Conversely, one might think that viewing the text merely as a recipe for the performance undermines something central or significant about the artistry of many play texts: often, reading a tragedy does have many of the same effects as watching a performance – for Aristotle, reading a tragedy has all of the significant emotional effects; but nobody gets full or gets nourished from reading recipe books – indeed, they tend to make us hungrier.34
Such discussions and comparisons are doubtless helpful in thinking about the ways that play texts and performances interact; we cannot give each position the attention that it deserves. The debate is understandable, as I have suggested, in the light of the deeper aesthetic concern about the artistry of theatre. Sometimes, indeed, a clear attempt is made to link philosophical arguments to the aesthetic debate: both Saltz and Hamilton suggest, for example, that their analyses are intended to combat what they call the ‘hegemony of the text’35 – the prominent role that the text plays in the minds of theorists, critics and spectators when thinking about theatrical performance. One of Saltz's claims, then, is that ‘only in performance do we actually encounter an instance of the play proper’36 – the text alone can never offer full access to what Saltz calls ‘the play’.
I would like to sound one note of caution. The aesthetic debate is, it seems to me, just that – a debate about aesthetics. Nobody denies that directors and theatre companies can make all sorts of creative decisions about how to use the text of Hamlet, including using it in traditional performances and creatively adapting it in unconventional ways, such that the performance is radically distinctive. Perhaps, on extreme occasions, a critic may object that ‘That isn't Hamlet!’ More often than not, though, the objection will be: ‘That's a bad Hamlet!’ or just ‘That's a bad play!’ In the former case, the critic evidently acknowledges that she has seen a production of Hamlet, and in the latter case, the relation to the Hamlet play texts doesn't seem significant. Where objections are made, it is often to the particular way in which it has been done, rather than as part of a universal view of what the text-performance relationship must be or what the ‘play’ necessarily is. Where there is a suggestion that performances ought to be faithful to play texts like a translation is faithful to the original or interpret the text in some way, this is probably best understood not as a descriptive claim about what the text-performance relationship necessarily is, but rather as an aesthetic claim about what the relationship ought to be, whether generally or in this particular instance. In other words: it is an open question whether philosophical discussions of the text-performance relationship can add to the aesthetic debate outlined above, or whether they merely mirror it in more complicated prose. And if questions about the deep nature of the text-performance relationship do not help us on with the aesthetic debate, then one may wonder what, if anything, is really at stake here.37
We have explored the question ‘what is theatre?’ by looking at typical theatrical elements, by analysing proposed definitions and by comparing theatre with other kinds of art. We also looked at the peculiar ways that a play text can interact with a theatrical performance. It can be no surprise that no single, clear, unambiguous, universal definition of theatre has emerged. A final way to answer the question is just to explore theatre's variety exactly as we have done, to remind ourselves of its flexibility and its resistance to strict or final limitations.
Balme (2008: 1–62) and Lennard & Luckhurst (2002) both offer a helpful starting point for those who have not thought about the variety of activities that go by the name ‘theatre’; readers should also consult ‘Further Reading: General’, above. Those interested in pursuing philosophical discussions of the nature of theatre should look at Saltz (1995) and (2001a); Hamilton (2007); Woodruff (2008: Ch. 1).
1 For a sample case, see Hamilton (2007: 47), who describes a scenario developed from Handke's Offending the Audience. Certain forms of Asian theatre are often cited as featuring actors who do not impersonate.
2 Balme (2008: 4).
3 For a helpful discussion of performing with and without acting, see Kirby (1995).
4 Balme (2008: 55).
5 Annie Dorsen's Hello Hi There (2010) does this, taking as its starting point a conversation between Chomsky and Foucault.
6 See e.g. Brecht (1964: 79–80). One might wish to say, in such cases, that the actors are the audience.
7 See Sandford (1995).
8 Bentley (1964: 150).
9 Brook (2008: 11).
10 Grotowski (1969: 15).
11 Balme (2008: 2); see also Lennard and Luckhurst (2002: 2)
12 This is obviously not to deny that there are elements of ‘show’ or ‘performance’ in the public execution – which evidently there frequently are.
13 Woodruff (2008: 18).
14 Wiles (1995: 66). Though obviously ludiwould not cover all that Woodruff intends with ‘theatre’.
15 I discuss Woodruffs project in more detail in Stern (2013).
16 When performed to an audience, of course, they may count as theatre of a sort; note that tragedy and comedy were originally categorised as types of poetry.
17 Benjamin (2007: 228).
18 On theatre and embarrassment, see Ridout (2006: 70–95).
19 The notion of ‘liveness’ is more complicated than it may seem: after all, many theatrical performances are highly scripted, pre-planned, rehearsed and so on, which, in one sense, makes them less ‘live’ than ‘live TV; so-called ‘live’ concerts are often pre-recorded. For critical discussion of the concept of ‘liveness’ see Auslander (1999).
20 Performance art is a more general term covering all sorts of performances, of course, but the ‘artist’ associated with the performance is often a combination of writer, performer, producer and director.
21 See Balme (2008: 148).
22 Saltz (2001a: 302). The context of Saltz's remark is a challenge to the idea that giving interpretations of play texts is a central function of theatrical performances.
23 To give some obvious cases: Chapter 2 discusses mimesis, although some theatre is not mimetic; Chapter 5 looks at the ethics of acting, although not all performers are ‘actors’ in this sense.
24 Another historical interaction between theatre and painting was the deliberate recreation of famous paintings by freezing the actors in the appropriate poses. I have only seen this once: at a Globe Theatre production of The Mysteries, in which Jesus and his disciples posed to recreate Da Vinci's The Last Supper.
25 This is standard practice, for example, in Brockett and Hildy (2010), in which one finds separate accounts of the drama and theatre in most given historical periods. Note that even so, the choice as to under which heading to place some person or play can still seem more or less arbitrary and the two are frequently merged.
26 There are, of course, certain actual laws applying to performances of plays that are still under copyright, but that is another matter. It is not uncommon for theatrical performances to count as ‘derivative works’, the ‘original’ being the play text. Permission for directorial decisions such as cuts, alterations to staging directions, switching the genders of the characters and so on must often be sought in writing before performance.
27 See Hamilton (2007:41–50) for an extremely helpful set of examples, using the text of Hedda Gabler.
28 Saltz (1995: 267). Saltz goes on to put forward a theory of what Hamlet the play is; play texts have only a small role, according to him, in identifying which play is being performed on a given occasion.
29 Lessing (1962: Section 80)
30 Loosely (i.e. anachronistically) speaking, this is certainly true of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Brecht, Beckett, Pinter.
31 For a polemic against directorial freedom (and directors trying to make a splash), for example, Ziolkowski (2009).
32 Lessing (1962: Section 25, p. 67).
33 See, for example, Saltz (1995); Saltz (2001a); Hamilton (2007); Woodruff (2008) Ch. 1; see also Lennard and Luckhurst (2002: 9–21).
34 Nobody, I take it, would extend Aristotle's claim to every play text.
35 Saltz (1995: 273)
36 Saltz (1995: 267). I simply note that this has odd consequences. Even ignoring the peculiarly artificial ring of ‘encountering the play proper’, it would be odd, upon asking someone if she had ‘encountered’ Hamlet, to be told: ‘No, I haven't; I have only read it.’
37 In the broadly analogous field of ‘musical ontology’ – philosophical discussion of what musical performances ‘really’ are – Ridley (2003) argues that philosophical arguments offer nothing at all to the realm of aesthetic appreciation and understanding. My instinct is that much the same may turn out to be true for philosophical discussions of what theatre ‘really is’ or what the text-performance relationship ‘really is’. Your aesthetic view of whether an experimental performance of Hamlet is refreshingly creative or a distasteful abomination has nothing to do with a deep view about theatrical ontology. Of course, I do not take myself to have established this – I merely report an intuition. In the absence of an equivalent piece on theatre, Ridley's piece is highly recommended.