Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (review)

The notion of what constitutes "citizenship," especially within a socioeconomic and cultural realm, remains ambiguous. This is exemplified in the current debate in the United States and some European countries regarding immigration and citizenship, and indirectly, in the persistent questioning of Barack Obama's origin of birth. "Citizenship" remains a contested term that straddles the concept of individual rights, collective democracy, and local, state, national, and global communities. In Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice, David Wiles uses the historicity of theatre to examine the political and social functions of "makers of theatre"—the contributions of artists and spectators to the prominent debate between individual rights and collective will, and their functions both in the public and private spheres. Through an extensive introduction and subsequent seven chapters, he makes the argument that theatre, manifested in the public sphere, functions historically as a political and social event that effectively promotes citizenship, albeit in different incarnations. Wiles supports his discussion by selecting prominent political/ cultural icons—Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Heywood, Voltaire, and Rousseau—to address the thesis, "What is this thing 'art' that like food we have the right to consume? And is theatre primarily a mimetic representation, or is it a social event?" (2). Theatre and Citizenship builds on and further addresses issues touched on by Susan Bennett in her seminal text Theatre Audiences, and engages with the same context (although on a much larger scale) as S. E. Wilmer's Theatre, Society and the Nation.

In the introduction to this intriguing text, Wiles first examines the concept of citizenship—often in the context of public performances—and then in following chapters demonstrates the mercurial manifestations of what it is to be a "citizen" throughout history. He starts out by tackling the plurality of definitions attributed to the concept of citizenship. He recounts the diversity of citizenship as a concept in its various incarnations throughout history, noting that national, cultural, and ethnic differences often lead—and still do to this day—to contradictory understandings. His initial proposition is to view citizenship through the lens of an "ideal republic" body politic as created by the Romans: "Citizenship is a function of the spatial unit to which the citizen belongs, and that unit can take different forms. . . . Of all these, it is the 'republic' that has been tied most strongly to the moral ideal of the 'citizen'" (7). According to Wiles, the republic "implies ownership of the res publica or 'public thing'" (8). He makes the argument that we are part of a social and cultural fabric via the language we use, the religion we practice, and the arts we engage in, and, as such, "it follows that our moral choices are rooted in cultural norms, and theatre must engage us not as individuals but as members of a community" (18). Wiles asserts that the citizen is indeterminate, which he bases on Étienne Balibar's contention that "the citizen is unthinkable as an 'isolated' individual, for it is his active participation in politics that makes him exist, but he cannot on that account be merged into a 'total' collectivity" (ibid.). Wiles proposes that it is this indeterminacy that warrants an examination of the public sphere, which is a "prerequisite of both theatre and citizenship" (208).

In the proceeding chapters, Wiles explores the history of the public sphere and consequently the tension between the theatre spectator/practitioner as an individual citizen versus the citizen being part of and obligated to a collective citizenship. He discusses the contradicting perspectives of Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle regarding the function of the Chorus as representatives of a body politic, and observes that "fifth-century tragedy was a performance practice that built community, with shared pleasure in discussion comprising but one aspect of communal polis life" (47). In his discussion of the public sphere and citizenship in Renaissance London, Wiles identifies playwright Thomas Heywood, not Shakespeare, as actively engaging the working-class spectator. While "Shakespeare placed his spectators as citizens of a nation-state...