The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France by Pannill Camp (review)

Whereas theatre history tends to treat artistic activities, social practices, and ideas as distinct realms, Pannill Camp's ambitious study takes a more interdisciplinary approach, drawing on dramatic theory, architecture, and philosophy to offer a convincing account of a complex shift in the ideological transformation of theatre space in the long eighteenth century in France. Camp defines this space as 'a synthetic social product whose realization involves architects, theatre artists (dramatists, performers, scenic artists), and spectators in implicit collaboration' (p. 9), and although he rather brushes over resistance to or refusal of such collaboration, he nonetheless harnesses an immense amount of scholarship from disparate fields to produce a compelling analysis of the evolving ideology that underpinned this profound change in theatrical aesthetics. His premise is that as empiricism took hold in French thought during that period, notions of the audience's encounter with the stage came to approximate the way that natural philosophy framed objects in the natural world. The excellent first two chapters are the book's highlight, and here the author offers a nuanced reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatic theory within broader philosophical debates. Camp carefully plots how the staged worlds conceptualized by d'Aubignac (a figure about whom he is especially persuasive) are founded on 'abstractions analogous to those that defined the natural world for Cartesian philosophers' (p. 62). But as Lockean empiricism and Newtonian experimental philosophy began to challenge rationalism, the intellectual framework that had distinguished between the real and represented worlds began to creak, with the result that the spectator's sensory encounter with the representation on stage became increasingly aligned with the individual's encounter with discrete things in the world. In short, the theatre no longer produces 'entire imaginary worlds, but instead forges copies of the sense impressions that real objects produce' (p. 80). Focusing on the drame bourgeois by playwrights such as Diderot and Mercier, the third chapter traces how new performance protocols served to constitute objects of experimental enquiry, and thus made theatre space more than just a medium that provided the audience with sensory access to preformed knowledge; epistemological and moral concerns start to map onto each other as the spectator perceives the inner truths of human nature and behaviour. Chapter 4 offers a satisfying account of the spectator-centred architectural reforms in the second half of the century; Camp brings figures including Élie-Catherine Fréron, the chevalier de Chaumont, and Pierre Patte into fruitful dialogue, showing how the reformers' turn to contemporary experimental physics underscored the theatre as a space of knowledge production. Chapter 5 pursues an investigation into late-eighteenth-century epistemology and optics to analyse changes in perspectival stage decoration, and the study ends with a richly suggestive meditation (by way of Husserl) on the formation of the modern spectator-subject. The volume features numerous illustrations, and, although Camp's prose can be somewhat dense at times, his innovative approach and finely marshalled erudition make this sophisticated study of great value to those interested in European theatre history.