Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century

By D. Radosavljevic and Kenneth A. Loparo

Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781137367884

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Theatre-Making

Also by Duška Radosavljević

THE CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE: Interviews with Theatre-Makers

Theatre-Making

Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century

Duška Radosavljević

© Duška Radosavljević 2013

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First published 2013 by

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Text and performance

‘The performative turn’

Pedagogies of theatre and performance

From the performative turn to postdramatic theatre

Summary

1   Staging a Play: The Problem of Page and Stage

The relationship between page and stage

An approach to text: Yuri Butusov’s Richard III

Another approach to text: Shakespeare and the RSC community

Summary

2   Devising and Adaptation: Redefining ‘Faithfulness’

Devising in the United Kingdom

Devising outside the United Kingdom

Devising as a historical category

Problems of adaptation

Kneehigh’s vocabulary

Three other approaches to text

Final remarks on fidelity

Summary

3   New Writing: Moving into the Twenty-First Century

New writing in the United Kingdom

New writing in other contexts

Writing for performance

Dramaturgy in practice

The ensemble way of working and playwrighting

Summary: The case of Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms

4   Verbatim Theatre: Engaging the Audience

Rereading Brecht

Documentary theatre

Documentary theatre and realism

Deep Cut

Summary

5   Relational New Works: Authoring Together

Tim Crouch’s ‘dramaturgy of liberating constrictions’

Relational aesthetics

Ontroerend Goed

Shadow Casters

Summary: Porous dramaturgies

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Simon Stephens – Interview

Appendix 2: Philip Ralph – Interview

Appendix 3: Tim Crouch – Interview

Appendix 4: Ontroerend Goed Internal – Script

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

1     Konstantin Raikin as Richard III, directed by Yuri Butusov

2     A scene from Richard III, directed by Yuri Butusov

3     A scene from Richard III, directed by Yuri Butusov

4     Cicely Berry in a workshop

5     Cicely Berry in rehearsal

6     Michael Boyd in rehearsal

7     A scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), directed by Dmitry Krymov

8     Mike Shepherd as Joan in Kneehigh’s Cymbeline

9     Carl Grose as Posthumus in Kneehigh’s Cymbeline

10   A publicity shot from Three Kingdoms by Simon Stephens, directed by Sebastian Nübling

11   A publicity shot from Three Kingdoms by Simon Stephens, directed by Sebastian Nübling

12   A scene from Deep Cut by Philip Ralph, directed by Mick Gordon

13   A scene from Deep Cut by Philip Ralph, directed by Mick Gordon

14   Seating layout for The Author, on tour in Budapest

15   Tim Crouch and Andy Smith in An Oak Tree

16   Tim Crouch and Hannah Ringham in ENGLAND

17   Alexander Devriendt in The Smile Off Your Face by Ontroerend Goed

18   A scene from Internal by Ontroerend Goed

19   Scenes from Audience by Ontroerend Goed

20   Scenes from Explicit Contents by Shadow Casters

21   Scenes from (R)evolution: Masterclass by Shadow Casters

Preface

There is an aspect of personal experience which has influenced – consciously or unconsciously – my methodology in the writing of this book:

I am a displaced person. Furthermore, the place I consider myself to be originally from is fragmented, and technically non-existent, but still powerful in determining my identity. Rather than seeking to carefully delineate and define, this project therefore seeks to view the landscape laterally; rather than fragmenting, it seeks to integrate various aspects of my experience; rather than taking things on face value, it always asks: where do you come from?

This book is called Theatre-Making partly because I have grown tired of defining what dramaturgy means. I did not set out to become a dramaturg. I did a drama degree in a British university that did not explicitly equip me for the profession of an actor, or a playwright, or a director, although it gave me skills in all of those forms of theatre creation. I happened to get the job of a dramaturg; but being a dramaturg has honed my ability to look at a bigger picture in search of patterns and stimulated my interest in how things work, how they are made, how they relate themselves to a reader/viewer. Or maybe I became a dramaturg because those traits were already there…

My position, although rooted in the UK context for the last 20 years, is inevitably informed by an Eastern European perspective by virtue of where I come from, and by the US perspective, by virtue of where we all end up going these days in pursuit of cultural validation.

Being concerned with modes of interplay between text and performance, this book identifies a distinct approach to text in anglophone theatre of the early twentieth century as opposed to some continental theatre traditions. The comparative lack of institutional support for directing – as an art – in the English-speaking world at the time could be seen to have generated conditions for significant changes in theatre-making practices during the period known as the ‘neo-avant-garde’ in the 1960s. This period is marked by an increase in collaborative ways of working, the dismantling of old hierarchies and blurring of boundaries between individual professions and individual art forms. Such profound changes, however, did not take place in Eastern Europe where theatre experiment was thriving in any case, driven by other kinds of political necessity.

The anglophone text-bias can therefore be seen to have dialectically produced such pioneering working methods as performance art, devising and verbatim theatre, as well as reinventing the existing notions of writing for performance. In the context of this book, these working methods are seen as techniques of making, capable of informing each other rather than as mutually exclusive genres in themselves.

The paradigm shift towards performance has foregrounded the importance of non-verbal epistemologies so crucial for our full appreciation of theatre. Encouraged by some continental European thinkers such as Hans-Thies Lehmann, I opt for a renewed focus on ‘theatre’ rather than ‘performance’ per se in this volume. Our conception of theatre-making – a deprofessionalized, collaborative activity that takes an active and integrated intellectual and embodied approach to the notion of theatre authorship (whether or not it is based on text) – is, nevertheless, to some extent indebted to the achievements of Performance Studies as a discipline.

Although primarily concerned with working methods rather than conditions of production, this book is, however, aware that work is contingent on its context. It is concerned with the ways in which particular theatre-making strategies have evolved in response to their own contexts and genealogies in a distinct way. This seems to be particularly important in the twenty-first-century age of globalization and increased artist mobility, where notions of cross-cultural communication and understanding require careful consideration. In addition to how theatre is made, the twenty-first century increasingly raises the question of how it relates to its audience. Examples drawn from both mainstream and non-mainstream theatre-making practices in various cultural contexts are brought into the book’s focus as a means of examining the changing notions of authorship, authority and the mainstream itself. The book begins with an account, in the Introduction, of some intriguing theatre experiences I had in 2009, and returns to them in Chapter 5. The journey through Chapters 1–4 is designed to facilitate a deeper contextual and dramaturgical understanding of those examples by the end of the book.

Covering such a vast landscape, this journey has not been without its struggles, and those struggles have not necessarily been concealed from the reader. Running themes have emerged in the process of writing, requiring redefinition and re-elaboration throughout. These themes have included the relations between authorship and theatre criticism, performance and cognition, the East and the West, and the notion of translation as transformation.

That said, it is worth noting that I have not attempted to transform my own or many other people’s names into their potential Anglicized versions, opting for the original spelling instead. If I were to do that, my name would have to read something like this: DUSH-ka ra-dos-SAV-lyev-ich. But, as I said, we can never quite escape where we come from.

Duška Radosavljević

Canterbury

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and suggestions on elements of this work in its various incarnations, my thanks are due to: Gareth White, Maria Delgado, Paul Allain, Nicki Shaughnessy, Patrice Pavis, Miloš Jakovljević, Jonathan Meth, George Rodosthenous and Nick Awde.

For help with sources and for providing key information: Lyn Gardner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Patrice Pavis, Baz Kershaw, Tony Coult, Kathleen McCreery, Paul Kleiman, Michael Boyd, Emma Rice, Yuri Butusov, Gabor Tompa, Mike Alfreds, Adriano Shaplin, Simon Stephens, Jackie Bolton, Philip Ralph, Elly Hopkins, Tim Crouch, Peter Boenisch, Katharina Keim, Maja Milatović-Ovadia, Boris Bakal, Katarina Pejović, Višnja Rogošić, Steve Tanner, Igor Vasiljev, Dušan Djordjević (Metaklinika); Sodja Lotker (PQ), Jane Tassell, Nada Zakula and Dean Asker (RSC), Chloe Rickard (Kneehigh), David Bauwens and Alexander Devriendt (Ontroerend Goed), Simon Thompson (Lyric Hammersmith), Anastasia Razumovskaya (MHAT School), Evgeniy Hudyakov (School of Dramatic Art), John Britton (Duende) and special thanks to Tom Colley for his transcription services.

I was very lucky to have been able to gain access to various performances discussed in this volume with thanks to: MHAT, Kneehigh Press Office, Gabor Tompa, Patrice Pavis, Suzanne Worthington, The Fence, Ontroerend Goed, Shadow Casters, and The Stage Newspaper for the privilege of bearing its press accreditation.

For collegiality and support: staff and students (School of Arts, University of Kent), Emma Harlen, Brian Attwood, Catherine Comerford, Nick Awde, Jerry Berkowitz, Natasha Tripney, Lauren Paxman, Thom Dibdin, Bill McEvoy (The Stage Newspaper), Katja Krebs and Richard Hand (Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance), and, last but not least, Paula Kennedy and her editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan – specifically Sacha Lake for her painstaking work on the cover and Penny Simmons for her cheerful and helpful emails through the last phase of editing.

Elements of this work have been supported by research funding at the University of Kent, Professor Paul Allain’s Leverhulme-funded ‘Tradition and Innovation: Britain/Russia Training for Performance’ project, and, crucially, by an AHRC Fellowship, for which I am also indebted to various anonymous readers and panellists whose enthusiasm has made this possible.

Finally, thank you to all my close friends and relatives, and especially to Tobi and the ‘Dragons’, for their understanding when I took this work with me on holidays.

Abbreviations

Introduction

In the year 2009, I had three profoundly memorable theatre-going experiences. This succession arrived, like long-awaited buses, after many years of average-to-satisfying Edinburghs and all too similar theatre trips to London and the regions throughout the 2000s: an array of verbatim plays, brave revisionings of the classics and exciting site-specific experiments. Perhaps other buses had passed me by without my noticing – I by no means claim that the three experiences I had were definitive of new trends – but there was something symptomatic about seeing them one after the other, and they are worth describing here in some detail.

The first was Silviu Purcărete’s Faust,¹ shown at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2009. Originally created in a disused factory in Sibiu to mark the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s play as part of the Sibiu European City of Culture programme, this piece transferred to a deserted aircraft hanger near Edinburgh Airport – requiring the festival audience to venture a long way out of the city (if they could get one of the highly coveted tickets for the show, that is). The first third of the two-hour spectacle takes place in a proscenium arch. We are introduced to the protagonists – an aging Faust played by Ilie Gheorghe, and the shape-shifting, utterly mesmerizing Mephistopheles, played by the petite Ofelia Popeii. They are joined on stage by a 100-strong chorus consisting of the Sibiu National Theatre ‘Radu Stanca’ resident ensemble. In a stroke of directorial inspiration, Purcărete portrays Gretchen using a chorus within the chorus, consisting of a dozen seemingly prepubescent girls – which will serve to heighten the juxtaposition between archetypal innocence and evil. What the designer Helmut Stürmer had by then established as an oversized dilapidated schoolroom – a barren, clinical and ghostly landscape of academic knowledge – suddenly opens up to literally draw us into the more exciting world beyond the back wall. The middle part of the show, corresponding to the play’s Walpurgisnacht scene, thus acquires the form of a fittingly carnivalesque pageant. We are ushered across the stage into the vast backstage area and positioned around the proceeding action, and even though we remain mere eye-witnesses throughout, one local theatregoer standing next to me proclaims by the end that this was far better than any rave he had attended at the same venue over the previous years. For the final, somewhat anti-climactic and vaguely moralizing finale, we are returned to our seats – entirely transformed as viewers, however, by the possibilities of stagecraft experienced in the preceding section.

It was not just the sheer scale and visual power of this piece that contributed to its overall effect. The List’s journalist Neil Cooper – who saw this long-running production in Romania – comes close to pinpointing what in fact happens in our experience of Purcărete’s Faust:

Nothing is hidden from view, not the live band aloft a steel platform, not the harnesses that allow some of the performers to hang down above us, and not the banks of TV monitors flashing images of Mephistopheles. Like Faust, who stands enraptured on the lip of a proscenium arch that suggests the workings of a stage behind it, the audience goes willingly, buying into every illusion.²

One implication of this observation is that realistic representation is not necessary for the audience to ‘buy into’ the illusion. Another, more interesting insight is that, in rereading this classic for a contemporary audience, the director has cast us alongside the experience-hungry, disillusioned, gullible hero of the piece, meanwhile casting himself and his colleagues as theatre-makers alongside the illusion-wielding magician Mephistopheles.

That the sheer scale of the event could be a lesser factor in creating a powerful experience was proven by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, who were performing their one-to-one piece Internal at exactly the same time at the Edinburgh Fringe. This was my second most profoundly memorable theatre-going experience of 2009. Consisting of five performers engaged in a speed-dating event with five audience members, this piece lasted for less than 30 minutes. Almost by default, the five audience members involved in any particular showing of the piece would often end up staying behind for longer, in an attempt to work out what had just happened to them. Sometimes these conversations would continue for days later when the fellow-audience members bumped into each other in another show’s queue; or they would seek out other acquaintances and Facebook friends who had seen the piece in order to discuss their experience. And just when they thought they left the whole experience behind in Edinburgh, on their arrival home, they will have found a handwritten letter posted to them by their ‘date’. Many wrote back, in a hopeful attempt of continuing the ‘relationship’.

This was by no means an all-round happy theatre-going experience. Critic and blogger Matt Trueman wrote twice about the piece on his blog, only to conclude again that the piece is ethically and experientially ‘problematic’.³ Some of my many interlocutors in Edinburgh, especially those of the older generation, dismissed Internal on the grounds that the piece had basically been done before, in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, the critic Mark Fisher, who had an entirely positive experience of the piece, was led by it to declare that ‘this is the Fringe when performance art went mainstream’.⁴

In my own response to the piece,⁵ I have argued that despite its performance art-like appearance (the fact that it was set in a gallery-like space and that the actors/performers made no obvious attempt at assuming dramatic characters), Internal had also upheld certain theatrical conventions that might be seen as Aristotelian. The piece was scripted, although this also anticipated the actors’ licence to extemporize in the interest of personalizing it to each audience member. There was evidence of a clear three-act structure, the conventions of a curtain rising and falling to signify beginning and end, as well as a foregrounding of the usually hidden elements of the theatrical machinery – such as the make-up mirrors and desks being exhibited in the ‘foyer’ area. However, the way in which the piece transcended both theatrical and performance art conventions was, once again, by drawing the audience into the inner dramaturgy of the piece in such a way as to turn them into co-protagonists. Or as Matt Trueman observed, we had ‘only ourselves to blame’.⁶ One thing is certain, Internal made itself felt for a long time afterwards in a way unprecedented by any theatre-going experience I ever had before. However, a month later, my thoughts turned to another piece of theatre.

In September 2009, the Royal Court premiered The Author by the British writer/performer Tim Crouch. This piece, described by its author as being about ‘what it is to be a spectator and about our responsibilities as spectators’,⁷ quite literally set out to divide the audience. The performance space consisted of two mutually facing sets of raked seats with four performers dotted around the auditorium. There was about a metre’s distance between the two rostra, and the only physical action that took place within this space was a succession of audience walkouts. This usually undesirable part of the theatrical experience was turned into The Author’s objective (justified by the main theme of the piece spelled out above), and Crouch signified this by using a plant to instigate the first walkout of the evening and therefore set up the convention.⁸ A further frame of significance was added by the fact that this was a Royal Court-commissioned play, and it therefore responded to the commission with a silent acknowledgement of its history being threaded through the piece – the central dramatic event of the piece involves an act of cruelty towards a baby, not unlike this theatre’s iconic productions of Edward Bond’s Saved and Sarah Kane’s Blasted. The variation on the theme is provided by the fact that while Bond’s baby is hidden inside the pram which is stoned and Kane’s baby is blatantly cannibalized, Crouch’s baby, which is subjected to an act of sexual abuse, is only rendered by spoken text in complete darkness and therefore only exists in the audience’s imagination – if they stay long enough and allow this to happen.

Even though Internal managed to elicit an emotional response by very subtle and potentially manipulative means, The Author used the tried and tested technique of violence in theatrical storytelling (as in the work of Bond and Kane, for example) to provoke a gut reaction that would hopefully fuel reflection. Both pieces succeeded in provoking a discussion among audience members. Both of them appear to have borrowed the kind of conceptual framing strategies developed by performance artists (by changing the usual performance space configuration for example, or the relationship between the audience and the performers), and subjugated these to the services of theatre and the audience experience. The latter feature is also shared by Purcărete’s Faust, although this work had stemmed from within a very conventional theatre tradition.

Following the performance of Faust, I had the opportunity to meet the creative team of the piece. Generationally, they extend the range of the artists represented in this chapter. Unlike Ontroerend Goed who were born in the 1970s, or Tim Crouch born in the 1960s, Purcărete was born in 1950, and the designer Helmut Stürmer and composer Vasile Şirli in the 1940s. The trio started collaborating together in communist Romania and continue to do so, despite the fact that since 1989 Purcărete and Şirli have settled in France, and Stürmer in Germany. Crucially, there was nothing unusual for them in the way they made this production of Faust as they had always made theatre in the same vein, although perhaps not always on such a large scale. However, Stürmer did remark that nowadays one could only find interesting set designers in the world of fine arts, pointing to the comparative significance of conceptual thinking in that context.

Despite generational, genealogical and cultural differences, all of these artists seem to have arrived at the idea that what was necessary in the first decade of the twenty-first century was for the proscenium arch to be removed and for the audience to be drawn into the inner workings of a theatre experience. They arrived at this conclusion via different routes and with different theatre-making tools, and they ultimately forced upon us the necessity to observe and rethink how theatre works: one took a classic play as a point of departure into an immersive experience, another devised a script in which the audience was to play an active part, and the third wrote a play which anticipated the audience as its only mise-en-scène. All three examples seem to require a study of the changing role of the audience in contemporary theatrical performance, and indeed academic interest in the spectator and spectatorial processes in theatre has grown recently too – see Rancière (2007), McConachie (2008), Grehan (2009), Kennedy (2009), Fensham (2009).

Nevertheless, in drawing our attention to an account by Max Herrmann from 1918, Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) suggests that there is nothing new about the emphasis on the audience experience within live performance. What is more, Herrmann’s conception of theatre as ‘social play’ seems to be evocative of the kind of works described above:

The spectators are involved as co-players. In this sense the audience is the creator of the theatre. So many different participants constitute the theatrical event that its social nature cannot be lost. Theatre always produces a social community.

(quoted in Fischer-Lichte 2008: 32)

In order to properly understand the role of the audience as co-creators of a theatre experience, my aim in this volume is first of all to consider the changing relationship between text and performance in contemporary theatre-making processes and the ways in which the changing role of the audience in the early twenty-first century has been forged by the ever-(r)evolving dramaturgical processes and practices. Each of the three examples above epitomizes one of the key theatre-making processes of the preceding century – staging a classic, devising a non-text-based performance, new writing – but each of the examples appears to resist neat categorization within those respective traditions by blurring the distinctions between them.

The three examples therefore provide a useful range of contexts to consider in comparison to each other, and an opportunity to transcend previously held binaries not only between the audience and the stage, but also between dramatic text and performance – as well as the East and the West, as the case might be – and ultimately to argue that contemporary theatre-making strategies are a useful consolidation of the previously developed ones.

Through a range of additional examples, this book will examine the relationship between text and performance within the practices of staging a classic, devising and adaptation, new writing, verbatim theatre and ‘new works’,⁹ focusing primarily on the UK context (but not excluding the United States and continental Europe as points of reference). Eventually it will return to some of the examples cited at this departure point in order to recontextualize them within the heritage of those practices.

The main part of this chapter will proceed to examine, side by side, several key sources on the subject of text and performance in the twentieth century, including amongst others W. B. Worthen (1997, 2011), Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) and Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999/2006), in order to map out some key similarities and differences in the genealogies of theatre and performance-making strategies in the distinct cultural contexts of Europe and the United States. This examination will serve to define the scope of the book by positioning the theatre-making practices in the United Kingdom in relation to their own specific genealogies, and in relation to the mechanisms of influence operating between continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the rest of the anglophone world. In addition, the development of various pedagogical models regarding drama, theatre and performance will be brought into the picture as a means of acknowledging potential conceptual and methodological routes of theatre-makers into the professional field. The Introduction will conclude with a definition of the main scope of this study, its underlying thesis and key terminology.

Text and performance

Up until the late nineteenth century, various manifestations of the performing arts – dramatic theatre, dance, music, circus, popular entertainment, pageants, street performance – could be seen to have been dependent on two major factors for their survival: economic and ethical. Theatre may have come under threat by the Church authorities, and a law passed during the English Civil War in 1642, for example, led to a closure of the playhouses that lasted until 1660. Even as aesthetic considerations of drama evolved with the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, they were initially confined to philosophical discussions. It was only in the nineteenth century that the popularization of the printing press brought about the phenomenon of a newspaper theatre critic being able to make or break a show.

Although Patrice Pavis takes the seventeenth century as a key moment in the emergence, via Rotrou and Corneille, of text as a ‘preexistent and fixed element that is the stage’s task to serve or illustrate’ (2003: 202), this became more of a political problem within the capitalist model of professionalization of theatre artists some 200 years later. Until the late nineteenth century, different forms of the division of labour would commonly have actors writing plays to be performed (e.g., William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jean-Baptiste Molière) or actors running companies (e.g. Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, Henry Irving, Konstantin Stanislavsky). Crucially, according to W. B. Worthen’s research, the measure of success of a play’s production at the time was audience approval rather than its perceived relation to the written script (1997: 28). The key changes that ensued in the late nineteenth century with regard to the processes and reception of theatre-making, according to Worthen, are best encapsulated through the growth of the publishing industry, an increased marketing of plays to readers and a subsequent professionalization of the playwright: ‘Once an artisan, the nineteenth-century playwright is an artist, an Author’ (Worthen 1997: 31). Worthen adds that this development had a retroactive effect on various historical plays and playwrights too, and specifically in the English-speaking world – on Shakespeare, who was thus bestowed the elevated, though otherwise ‘oxymoronic’, status of a ‘dramatic poet’ (1997: 29). In such a context, the emerging profession of a director in the nineteenth century is seen as both a result of ‘the newly unstable relations between texts and performances’ (1997: 32) and as deeply problematic within the world where ‘the verbal text of Shakespearean drama is prized so highly’ (1997: 33).

The emergence of new professions – such as the playwright, director and drama critic – lead to further problems in the legal as well as the political realm. Martin Puchner points out that the emergence of the mise-en-scène as an art form, which accompanied the emergence of the director, encountered the problem of not being able to be ‘integrated into the legal regime governing copyright’ in the same ways that the dramatic text or other art forms were. Subsequently:

In order for actors, set designers, and directors to attain the status of artists, they felt they had to fight for recognition at the expense of the dramatic text: theater was able to become art only by downgrading drama.

(2011: 293, original emphasis).

Meanwhile, the emergence of a drama critic is seen by Worthen as compounding the split between text and performance further and amplifying the hierarchy of text over performance, as the critic’s bias leaned heavily towards the written word. Eminent Victorian critic William Archer is given as an example by Jeffrey Richards of a proponent of the ‘theatre of ideas’ (2005: 20), which reifies the split between the writer’s intellectual theatre and the English actor/actor-manager’s widely popular ‘theatre of feelings and emotions, theatre of performance and dramatic devices, a Romantic theatre’ (2005: 21). Nonetheless, Archer’s work must also be understood in the context of the ‘hegemony of the actor-manager’ in Britain, which had evolved since the seventeenth century and reached its peak by the late 1800s (Luckhurst, 2006: 46). Due to their liberal attitude towards the plays and dismissiveness towards playwrights, actor-managers in nineteenth-century England were, according to Mary Luckhurst, increasingly criticized as being ‘responsible for […] the divorce between theatre and literature’ (2006: 48). In this context, it is not surprising that Archer’s seminal 1882 work English Dramatists of Today, did, amongst other things, call for ‘rectifying the culturally deprivileged status of drama’ and ‘elevating plays to the standing of literature’ (2006: 68).

Erika Fischer-Lichte claims that this was not just an Anglo-American phenomenon as she traces the dignified status of dramatic literature in Germany back to eighteenth-century cultural elitism:

At least from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, [theatre] was generally considered to be part of the elite culture, the culture of the educated middle classes, which greatly contributed to the shaping and stabilization of this culture. Accordingly theatre was thought of and defined as textual art.

(1999: 170)

In her 2008 volume, Fischer-Lichte notes that, despite the efforts of Goethe and Wagner to redress the balance between text and performance, ‘the majority of their nineteenth-century contemporaries based their assessments of a performance’s artistic value on the staged text’ (2008: 29).

Throughout the twentieth century, theatre scholars and historians tended to view the turn of the century split between text and performance through the mutually opposed categories of text-based theatre and the avant-garde. The origins and the usage of the term ‘avant-garde’ are highly contested, but appear to have had more currency in critical writing than in the actual practice of early Modernist artists to whom the term is ascribed. Christopher Innes (1993) traces its first usage back to 1878 and the philosopher Mikhail Bakunin’s short-lived Swiss-based anarchist journal L’Avant-Garde. Ideologically, Innes highlights as influential the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, the philosopher associated with the Russian Formalist school, and his essays ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art’ (1929) and ‘Rabelais and His World’ (1941/1965) which introduced the ideas of ‘dialogism’ as a challenge to Aristotelian poetics, and the ‘carnivalesque’ as a challenge to ‘high’ or ‘bourgeois’ conceptions of art. One of the first recorded uses of the term ‘avant-garde’ to characterize an artistic trend is Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, which appeared in 1939 in Partisan Review. In this essay Greenberg defined the avant-garde art and artists by opposition, not only to ‘high’ or traditional art, but also to ‘kitsch’ – or what members of the Frankfurt School would call ‘mass culture’. Clearly, these theoreticians of the avant-garde often appear to be aligned with left-wing ideologies, although Innes notes that for some Marxists like George Lukács, it became synonymous with ‘decadence’ (1993: 1). Nevertheless, Innes (1993), Lehmann (1999/2006) and Fischer-Lichte (2008) tend to agree about notable representatives of this ‘historical avant-garde’ (to borrow the term coined by Peter Bürger in 1984 as a means of distinction from the ‘neo-avant-garde’ of the 1960s). They included Edward Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealism and the Bauhaus. Despite the text vs. avant-garde split, some playwrights are featured in the list too: Lehmann includes Pirandello, and Innes extends it back to the late nineteenth century to include Alfred Jarry. Often noting that they operated under similar principles without knowledge of each other (e.g., Jarry and Barrault’s respective tackling of Rabelais without knowledge of Bakhtin’s work, or Grotowski’s emphasis on ritual without knowledge of Artaud’s work), Innes travels forward in time too. Ultimately, he connects the heritage of the Modernist artists to postmodern 1960s and 1970s practitioners such as Richard Schechner and the Living Theatre as well as Eugene Ionesco, Heiner Müller and Robert Wilson, some of whom did indeed seek explicit association with the notion of avant-garde art.

‘The performative turn’

Fischer-Lichte resorts to the turn of the twentieth century in order to find the genealogy of the ubiquitous ‘performative turn’ of the 1960s, which saw an emphasis on performance in the Western art world as a whole. She examines some of the parallel efforts of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European scholars (such as Scottish classicist William Robertson Smith and German philologist Max Herrmann) to move the focus of academia from myth and literary text onto ritual and theatre performance respectively (2008: 30–31). The theatre experiments of Max Reinhardt are seen as particularly influential on Herrmann in developing his theory of theatrical performance as a corporeal community ritual, even though the theatre critics of the time ‘deplored the unabashed use of the actors’ bodies that accentuated their physicality, distracting the audience from the fictional characters they were meant to portray’ (2008: 34). This prompted Herrmann to move away from the body as a ‘carrier of signs’ towards embracing the ‘real body’, and to conceive of the audience as having ‘creative’ agency through ‘physical participation’ (2008: 35–6). Thus, Fischer-Lichte argues, Herrmann anticipated the ‘performative turn’ of the 1960s, long before J. L. Austin coined the term.

In the interest of acknowledging the more complex nature of these developments than the binaries of text/performance, traditional/avant-garde, playwright/director might suggest, it is worth noting that even though his work was seen as epoch-defining in many ways, Reinhardt was not seen as radical in the way that his older contemporaries Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia might have been – or even the way that the pioneer of naturalist dramatic theatre André Antoine had been in the late 1880s. It appears that he was the early twentieth century’s equivalent of Robert Lepage – a theatrical and cinematic visionary whose work was a continuation of the previously established traditions, but hugely inspirational in its spectacular effect and entirely refreshing as part of the theatrical mainstream and, eventually, of Hollywood itself. However, what Reinhardt as well as theatre directors Antoine, Stanislavsky, Craig, Appia, Meyerhold and later Artaud brought to the fore was the kind of theatrical authorship that was not literature-oriented but performance-oriented.

In the words of Hans-Thies Lehmann, this ‘autonomization’ of theatre occurred as the natural result of a ‘crisis of drama’ of the 1880s onwards:

The autonomization of theatre is not the result of the self-importance of (post)modern directors craving recognition, as which it is often dismissed. The emergence of a director’s theatre was, rather, potentially established in the aesthetic dialectics of dramatic theatre itself, which