Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (review)

Nicholas Ridout sets out to address seemingly marginal theatrical occurrences, such as stage fright, embarrassment, animal performance, and actor failure in rehearsal and onstage. He claims that the failure and discomfort experienced by actors and audience members in these events are actually essential components of the theatre's political role in the modern bourgeois economy: these negative affects expose and offer a means of resistance to the economy of exploitation in the modern entertainment industry.

Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (originally to have been titled Face to Face: The Actor and the Audience in the Modern Theatre) is divided into four sections, each of which deals with one type of uncomfortable encounter between audience members and actors. In chapter 1, Ridout discusses "Stage Fright: The Predicament of the Actor," which he contrasts in chapter 2 with "Embarrassment: The Predicament of the Audience." Stanislavskii, in An Actor Prepares, recalled the terrifying experience of being onstage for the first time, faced with an "awful hole" (35), the darkened auditorium. Ridout sees this awful hole as a metonymy for the modern theatrical encounter. The "obligation to entertain" terrifies the actor (38), whose fear of failure looms over him or her. The problem is compounded by the fact that the more human relations are bound by money, the more difficult it is to achieve intimacy, on or off the stage. Modern theatre, he points out, is normative, just like the modern economy. Actors in modern cities are professionals, bound by the constraints of economic production. Scientific rationality's "calculative exactness" (in the terms of urban sociologist Georg Simmel) shapes the urban marketplace (42). Observation and empathy—key qualities to be possessed by actors according to Stanislavskii—mesh poorly with the blasé attitude required of modern city life, particularly considering the low status accorded actors in a consumer-based economy. Yet, for Ridout, stage fright can be productive. The depersonalization experienced by an actor observing his or her body malfunction—for example, when it produces excessive sweat, nausea, "blocking," or other symptoms of minor trauma—enables him or her to separate the self from its surroundings and thus gain some perspective on the exploitative context of the leisure industry in which he or she labors. Ideally, the audience also gains perspective in the process.

In chapter 2, Ridout examines the flipside of this, the audience's shame. For him, this feeling arises from the naturalistic tradition in theatre dominant in Europe since the late nineteenth century. Direct address, which was common in Elizabethan theatre, is unsettling to audience members not accustomed to being brought into a performance situation by the actor's gaze. But Ridout argues that this kind of embarrassment—being looked at by an actor under bright lights—provides a perverse pleasure as well as an occasion for self-reflection. The situation compels the audience to decide either to respond to the actor's gaze or pretend not to be there—a choice they make with no little discomfort. To be reminded that these are humans performing for their pleasure undoes the fantasy that was enabling them to watch safely from a distance in a darkened space.

In chapter 3, the author discusses the presence of animals onstage, describing an amusing anecdote in which, during a performance of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker in London, Ridout, sitting in the audience, noticed a mouse make an entrance downstage left, cross, and disappear under the bed on which the actor playing Douglas Hodge was sitting. This fortuitous event produced no little excitement in the author, who proceeded to discuss the mouse's Equity status with an actor at a bar after the show. For Ridout, animals are easily exploited onstage, as they have no say in the conditions under which they are employed, nor is to perform onstage in their "best interests" (97). Animals, moreover, do not have any performance technique (a contentious claim) and so cannot know what to do; they are thus all...