Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 3, December  2004

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Worthen C.B. with Peter Holland (eds) Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. pp. 240. ISBN: 1-4039-0793-5 hardback, 1-4049-0794-3 paperback. £50 / $ 75 hb, £ 17.99 / $24.95pbk.

Reviewed by

Leslie Barcza

 

University of Toronto

When I examine a book such as Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History I think that it is both the best of times, and the worst of times: a Golden Age of Scholarship that is impossibly trying.  On the one hand, the current rules of the game seem to put every previous position up for grabs, a bonanza of critical updates.  Nothing can be accepted as canonical anymore, at least in the critical realm, and therefore an enormous vista opens before the prospective critic, comprised of all the works and positions in need of re-examination.  Is this in fact paradise or an unfortunate consequence of deconstruction and modern historiography?  I guess it’s both, with the only caveat being that one should recognize one’s prejudices.  As a scholar of the current generation I feel a conflict of interest, a curious ambiguity in my gratitude.  After the shock and awe of the previous generations of illustrious meta-critics—Barba,  Barthes, Benjamin, Boal and Brecht, among others, having flattened the largest critical infrastructure—there is still a great deal of house-to-house combat left for those of us working on smaller issues.  But I find myself envying that earlier generation, because there seems to be so much less at stake.   And it is not a fault of the book that its essays answer a power vacuum created by the removal of the canon, by the rethinking of disciplinarity especially as regards the relationship between literature and performance and the putting to rout of the old style of criticism.  For such an enjoyable book I feel that the field does not offer the laurels that it did when there were still dragons to be slain. 

Because one can't really know anything for certain one must proceed as though in a minefield when making assertions.  When that caution only leads to a circumscription of a topic, the author can still cut loose, as Peter Holland does in his "History of Histories", a survey of histories of theatre, or Dennis Kennedy's charming "Confessions of an Encyclopedist".  Among the best essays is Thomas Postlewait's "The Criteria for Evidence: Anecdotes in Shakespearean Biography, 1709-2000."   Postlewait not only demonstrates the flimsiness of some commonly held views, such as the assumption that Shakespeare played the Ghost in Hamlet, but suggests the process whereby legends become canonical.

I am conflicted about the concluding essay “The Imprint of Performance” by W.B. Worthen.  Although a worthwhile and witty investigation of the "imprint" in the typographical layout on the page, as an influence upon performers, I found the result disappointing.  Perhaps that reflects my own gut-level discomfort with a paper that seems to exaggerate the importance of print, a reminder of my experience with those intent on treating drama as an offshoot of English literature, and not as a discipline in its own right.  I didn't sense any willingness to engage in the circumstances of the creation of performance; Worthen instead seemed content to read playtexts as literature.  Its last paragraph touched upon the concerns I would have wanted to see addressed, namely the shift away from textual authority in the last half-century and the growing impact of the mise en scène within dramaturgy. For a book purporting to “redefine theatre history” the concluding essay by its co-editor seems to be sadly out of date in its thrust. 

Nor is Susan Leigh Foster’s “Improvising/ History” (on one of the thorniest historiographical questions, namely the methods for recording the history of improvised performance) the paper I would have expected or wanted.    Foster begins with an assertion that would be interesting if it were true:

In improvisation, the fact that performers don’t know what they are going to do next draws viewers’ attention to their decision making process.

 While there may be processes in which performers don’t truly know what they will do next, the viewer is captive of an illusion created by the performer’s rehearsal process, namely that they are composing and creating onstage.  Perhaps that sentence would work better if it read “in improvisation, the illusion that performers don’t seem to know what they will do next draws viewers’ attention to their decision making process.” 

Perhaps I am being unfair in my expectations, as a reader old enough to remember big books on big themes.  A collection of essays is even less likely to achieve “bigness” without the strength that a singular vision confers.  Call me a curmudgeon, but the title Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History stakes a bold claim, one that the book doesn’t fulfill.  This charming mosaic –each piece having been placed by a different hand—is still worthwhile reading, with some wonderful essays.  But it seems to be a happy and meandering perambulation, comprised of pet projects rather than a unified assault on the field.