La relation théâtrale ed. by Regis Durand, and: Études littéraires ed. by Jeannette Laillou Savona (review)

Book Reviews de Rais to the same extent, although this reviewer thinks it may well be Planchon's masterpiece. One cannot disagree, however, with Daoust's conclusion: "Planchon's plays show an ever deeper and more mature social and human analysis" (p. 220). Fine photographs illustrate the text, and the Chronology and Notes are very helpful. This book is a must for anyone interested in contemporary theatre. In a few years, however, it will have to be revised and updated. since even today we are eager to hear about Planchon's irnmensely successful Don Juan and Athalie. Such are the dangers of dealing with one's own epoch. ROSETTE C. LAMONT, QUEENS COLLEGE AND THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, CUNY REGIS DURAND, ed. La relation theatrale. Villeneuve·d'Ascq: Presses universitaires de Lille n.d. pp. 166. JEANNETTE LAILLOU SAVONA, ed. ''Theatre ct theatralit6: essais d'ctudes scmiotiques," Etudes Lilleraires, XU], 3 (December 1980). Quebec: Les presses de l'universitc Laval. pp. 188. ]n each of those areas of enquiry sometimes optimistically grouped under the rubric of the sC,iences of language - linguistics, philosophy of language, semiotics, and literary theory and analysis - there has been of late a marked shift in the governing theoretical paradigm. This change can be characterized, in tenns of the object of study, as a movement from structure to context, and in terms of methodology, as an abandoning of syntactic models in favour of the pragmatic. ]n linguistics and in the philosophy of language, such a change in focus has involved an opening out from the fonnal make-up of grammar to social and situational constraints on utterances (Searle, Grice, Lakoff, etc,); in literary theory, it appears as a new concern with reading and reception rather than the fonnal properties of texts (Fish, Culler, ]ser, etc.); and in semiotic theory, it is manifested as an increasing preoccupation with the enonciation or context-oriented functions of communication instead of the enonce or message as structure (Eco). The semiotics of drama and theatre - insofar as it can be considered in any sense a united enterprise - has similarly undergone recently such a shift in methodological direction. ]ften years ago the reigning issues in the field, under the influence ofTadeusz Kowzan and of the rediscovered Prague School structuralists, concerned the contributory sign systems of the perfonnance and their articulation, the possibility of defining minimal signifying units on-stage, or the identification of a specific theatrical or dramatic langue, today, as the two collections ofessays under review suggest, attention is focused on the stage-audience transaction, the conditions and processes of audience decodification, and above all, the performance ofcommunicative acts on-stage or within dramatic texts. If the earlier set of questions - those arising in the "structuralist" moment of theatre semiotics - has been discarded without being adequately posed,let a10ne exhausted, this is probably because they represented false problems. The search for semiotic units presupposed a stable and well-defined structure, analogous to that of the sentence, that might be broken down into "morphemic" or "phonemic" components. In practice, a theatrical perfonnance, even when viewed as a text, is subject to adynamic interplay of communicational factors between perfonners and spectators that effectively rules out- Book Reviews 449 as a series of would-be analysts have unwittingly demonstrated - any form of fixing or reification for the purposes of some surgical decol4page. It is on these grounds that a "relational" conception of theatre is proposed in La relation thedtrale (Rn and in Ross Chambers's contribution to Etudes Litteraires (EL). "The theatrical text," observes Chambers, ... .. appears within the framework of a communicational situation. as an act destined to produce an effect on one or more spectators; and this is why the theatre should constitute the object of a relational theory that attempts to take into account the relationship between stage and auditorium"; and Durand, in his preface to, RT, promises; "here the emphasis is placed not so much on the different elements [of the representation] (text, author, director, actor, auditorium, d6cor, audience, etc.), as on the complex system of relations that unites them (and transforms them)." The essays in RTadopt, by and large, a sociological or socio-historical framework for the examination of the theatrical...