Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences

5. The Theatrical Event: Inner and Outer Audience Frames

This chapter returns to the live stage. It moves from the macroto the micro-audience, following Susan Bennett’s point that the symptomatic theatre audience consists of small groups of family and friends. It also moves from the “mediated” to the “live” audience. At this point, the “Reading Chekhov”project laid aside its larger-scale focus group and survey approaches for a more fine grained processual approach. This was for a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at a consciously (and reflexively) “anti-state theatre”company,the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney.Belvoir Street was chosen as a“postcolonial”Australian theatre site to examine the converging of Bennett’s inner and outer frames, both in production and amongaudiencemembers. Whatnotionsof Chekhov,Australianness,and modernity would be embodied,via acting,set design,costuming,lighting, and sound, at Belvoir Street, and how would these be perceived by audience members who came from country New South Wales to see it? Theatre professionals who were involved in this Australian Chekhov production were not interested in some eternal essence of Australianness .Thiswasnot,asoneof theactorsemphasized,anAustralianChekhov in the sense of being set in deep-country New South Wales, near Wagga Wagga, with “To Sydney” in the place of “To Moscow.” It was Australian the theatrical event inner and outer audience frames The outer frame contains all those cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event. The inner frame contains the dramatic production in a particular playing space. . . . It is the interactive relations between audience and stage, spectator and spectator which constitute production and reception, and which cause the inner and outer frames to converge for the creation of a particular experience. —Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences 5 in an important way in its translation, specially prepared by director Neil Armfield’s Russian partner with particular Australian actors’ idiosyncrasies in mind.It was also explicitly postcolonial in itsAustralian accents and speech rhythms, deliberately avoiding what both its actors and our audience group called the British “plumminess” of language that for so long had been a sign of Australian colonial status in the theatre. There were also many other signs of the Australian in the production: in the weather-board walls of the set; in the props (e.g., the large box in lieu of Arkadina’s traveling trunk,with“Enmore,Australia,”an inner-city suburb of Sydney, boldly painted on it); in trivial aspects of the language (Yakov’s“g’day,”etc.).Sorin’s actor,Don Reid,also pointed to deliberately Australian aspects of the costuming, for example, the “brown cardigan with old check dressing gown that so many old Australians in their eighties wear, Nina’s pretty little dress . . . you saw heaps of them when I was younger in that Australian period of the 1950s / early 1960s” (personal interview, 1997). But, importantly, these signifiers of the Australian were all embedded in a specific Australian theatre’s engagement with constructing an audience via its very particular leisure time and space.As the production team put it, “This is Chekhov, Belvoir Street, Surrey Hills in Sydney, 1997.” Points of Theory, Method, and Substance The focus here is on a particular theatrical institution’s embedding of an“AustralianChekhov”inaspectsof language,costume,design,place,and time within specific audiencing practices. The chapter will examine the issue of audience construction in production and reception as a series of overlapping histories: of the theatre itself; of its sequencing of plays; of the Belvoir Street Theatre’s acting space and its set design around that space;of the director’s signature; of casting, acting, use of props, and so on. My primary focus here is from Bennett’s external frame inward. Consequently, I physically approached the theatre with my audience group:Jennie (an employment officer),her partner, Wayne (a prison officer ), Anne (a part-time secretary and gardener), and her partner, Paul (a businessman), all from country New South Wales. And, successively, I accompaniedthemfromsittingoutsidethetheatrethroughthefoyer into the auditorium, and I watched the production with them, discussing it with them in process, including during the interval and at dinner afterward . Postperformance discussion is often an important opportunity to The Theatrical Event 155 reshapeinitialdecodingof theproductionamongsmallgroupsof theatre audience members. Consequently, an important “ethnographic” part of my audience study was this sitting over dinner at a local restaurant with these four theatregoing friends after the matinee performance of The Seagull, discussing as an audience member with them the production we...