Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

8 Fans of Chekhov Re-Approaching “High Culture”

8 Fans of Chekhov Re-Approaching “High Culture” John Tulloch The academic literature on fandom is both extensive and central within popular cultural studies. Yet there is little comparable analysis of fans of high-culture entertainment forms like theater. Superficially, this may be due to an old-fashioned cultural studies rejection of high culture, even though some of the founding fathers of the field, like Raymond Williams, worked comfortably in both television and theater studies (see Roberta Pearson’s polemic—with which I agree—on behalf of the return to discussion of cultural value in the previous chapter). But nor has there been much help from within theater studies. Despite a powerful theorization of performance in recent years, audience studies within theater/performance analysis have tended to remain a marginal activity, and where these have existed (as in Susan Bennett’s work, 1997), they have not engaged with theories of fandom. However, a sociological version of performative analysis, in Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences (1998), has focused on fandom as part of a consumer-to-enthusiast spectrum. Their specification of differentiated identities (of consumption and production) among consumers, fans, cultists, and enthusiasts is part of a broader “audiencing” move beyond the “resistant reading” tradition in audience research (see also Alasuutari 1999b). In turn, though, Abercrombie and Longhurst’s underpinning postmodernist emphasis on “the play and the pleasure that is involved in fandom” (1998: 155) is itself being superseded after 9/11 and the 7/7 London bombings by an extension of “risk society,” “risk culture,” and “risk governmen110 tality” debates. These re-emphasize the interplay of reflexive individualization linked to Foucauldian surveillance that Abercrombie and Longhurst seek to downplay. Symptomatically, Abercrombie and Longhurst draw signi ficantly on Beck’s and Giddens’s “risk society” thinking about the reflexive project of the self, but only by lifting the notion of the individualized ordering of self-narratives without any reference to the “risk society” and “risk governmentality” debate it depends on. Risk theorists argue that audiences, wherever they are in the spectrum from consumers to enthusiasts, are living in a darker context than Abercrombie and Longhurst’s more ludic preference for performativity and pleasure. Rather, in a world hegemonically defined as part of the “war against terror,” risk thinking—from leading international power brokers and globalizing sections of the media, as well as in parts of academia—has increasing discursive salience among publics, and has political outcomes in mounting governmental threats to civil liberties. Further, de Zengotita refers to the profound tension between, on one hand, Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Western world of postmodern, reflexive performativity, in which the possibilities of choice seem endless and, on the other hand, the world of millions of others “dominated by our interests” (2005: 291). This, even in Western societies, is “part of the unrepresentable mood that eludes mediation at the dawn of the age of terror” (2005: 287). This is the broader framework within which my piece on Chekhov fans needs to be positioned. But it has not yet been fully worked through. I was myself seriously injured by a suicide bomber three feet from me in a London underground train on July 7, 2005, an event that terminated my writing for an extended period. However, preliminary work (Tulloch 2004: 29–36) had been done in bringing together performance, risk, and audience theory in theater production and reception, and my brief excursion into Chekhov fandom in this chapter should be seen in this context. It remains part of my own “reflexive project of the self” (Tulloch 2006), to which I’ll return at the end. Chekhov Fans: A Local Study As part of an Australian Research Council funded project, “Chekhov: In Performance, Criticism, and Reading,” I designed one study to focus more closely on theater fandom, while also opening up the possibility of risk analysis. I chose one particular theater, the Theatre Royal, Bath (TRB), one Fans of Chekhov: Re-Approaching “High Culture” 111 country (England), in one season, playing one particular author (Chekhov) in three different productions. Chekhov is the second most popular “classic” playwright (after Shakespeare) on the British stage—and probably first among actors. So popularity and fandom were central to my choice of research subject. The three productions studied at the TRB were the English Touring Theatre’s Cherry Orchard, starring Prunella Scales and Frank Middlemas; the Royal Shakespeare Company...