Theatricality (review)

A volume in the Theatre and Performance Theory series from Cambridge, this collection of essays offers six case studies, investigating the protean notion of theatricality from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. As pointed out by the book's editors, Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, "the idea of theatricality has achieved an extraordinary range of meanings, making it everything from an act to an attitude, a style to a semiotic system, a medium to a message." To combat its many "contending meanings," Davis and Postlewait propose to address "the history of the idea of theatricality." In following this approach, the book aims "to show how the history of theatre and the history of the idea of theatricality are related yet sometimes distinct developments." While it resists privileging any single definition, Theatricality hopes "to challenge the ahistorical and laissez-faire uses of the concept in critical usage today."

In their thorough Introduction, Davis and Postlewait discuss several distinct concepts, among them mimesis, antitheatricalism, theatrum mundi, and ritual, that help to understand the meaning of theatricality. They maintain that while clearly connected to it, these concepts still fail to define the idea of theatricality. Nor does the idea of theatricality appear to lend itself to being approached in any systematic way. With regard to theatre semiotics, the editors ask, "if all signs within the process of communication are perceived potentially as illustrations of theatricality, how can we specify a domain of theatricality?" While pointing to important contributions of the Prague School, Roland Barthes, Patrice Pavis, and others, Davis and Postlewait question "our theoretical celebration of theatricality" that concerns largely "one ideal spectator," rather than accounting for "the idiosyncratic manner" in which each spectator perceives a performance.

Davis and Postlewait complete their critical survey with looking into the connection between theatricality and performance art. They state that like that of theatricality, the concept of performance art has "consistently attempted to escape the control of recognizable semiotic codes," and that instead it expanded to embrace a broad variety of regions, including theatre, myth, carnival, ritual, and ceremony. As with theatricality, Davis and Postlewait also question "the global reach of the idea of performativity." In taking a more cautious approach, they suggest that researchers "should recognize that all human thought and behavior cannot be usefully explained by the single idea of performativity" and that, moreover, the desire to view performance in this all-embracing manner fails to account for the "complicated history of the concept," as well as demonstrating "disregard for its capacity to be rather imprecise."

The six essays that follow address the concept of theatricality as it operates today, exploring its historical and theoretical dimensions "within the context of a specific time and place." In the first instalment, Jody Enders argues that in the late medieval passion play at Valenciennes in 1547, "a question of theological performance was indistinguishable from a question of theatrical performance." Having examined the audience response, Enders points provocatively to the presence of "something profoundly theatrical about the ways in which individuals construct truth." The following essay by Haiping Yan discusses ways in which Chinese music drama has been perceived and misconstrued by Western observers (Berthold Brecht among them), who overlooked the importance of Confucian philosophy, as well as the active emotional involvement associated with it, for the Chinese repertoire. Thomas Postlewait's contribution examines the use of the concepts of antitheatricality and theatricality in Renaissance London, specifically in E.K. Chambers's The Elizabethan Stage, and considers the implications of this work for the contemporary theatre research. For her part, Tracy C. Davis focuses on Thomas Carlyle's notion of theatricality and examines political and social dimensions of theatricality in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In the next instalment, Jon Erickson applies the works of Foucault and Habermas to the study of theatre and advocates, together with Habermas, a dialogical, rather than a monological, approach to representing politics on stage. The final essay by Shannon Jackson uses gender studies, as represented by among others Judith Butler...