Performing Writing: Inscribing Theatre

Perfonning Writing: Inscribing Theatre MICHAEL 1. SIDNELL Vigorously contesting the Romantic, and especially Gennan, notion that drama was an essentially literary mode, independent of the theatre, Hegel argued that "inner dramatic value" was provided by the very "treatment which makes a drama excellent on the stage." He admitted that this "inner dramatic value" did not, of itself, constitute the poetic, but he averred that even plays no longer perfonned were capable of giving "perfect satisfaction" precisely because, in their time, they had been "written purely for the stage.'" But, not even Hegel himself was thoroughly convinced about the value of reading even once-theatrical plays, since he also held that it would be better not to print plays at all (1184). Hegel's notion of "inner dramatic value" is partly congruent with the Aristotelian conception of a tragic genre which, though it is devised and structured according to the requirements of theatrical perfonnance. is nevertheless not only accessible, in its essentials, to the reader but textually protected from the vagaries of particular perfonnances.2 On the one hand (in Hegel) closet drama is discountenanced, but on the other (in both Hegel and Aristotle) the essential perfonnance (or "inner dramatic") values must be inscribed. That is to say, there is both a recognition of theatrical values and a literary appropriation of them. As to what might constitute the ~nscribed "inner dramatic value" - the literary treatment that "makes a drama excellent on the stage" - Hegel insists on qualities of dialogue and action that lend themselves to, and require, the full theatrical presentation which is the touchstone of the dramatic. That theatrical values can be textually inscribed is a dogma so deeply embedded in western notions of theatre and drama that it may appear selfevident that - the deviances of closet-dramatists notwithstanding - the dramatic genre is constituted by the intentions of stage perfonnance and may be judged by the criteria of stage-worthiness. Goethe somewhat modifies this view when he observes that "a good play can be in fact only half transmitted Modern Drama, 39 (19<)6) 547 MICHAEL J, SIDNELL in writing, a great part of its effect depending on the scene, the personal qualities of the actor, the powers of his voice, the peculiarities of his gestures, and even the spirit and favourable humour of the spectators ...."3 Such an understanding of the necessary incompleteness of a dramatic text that will nevertheless be, as writing, more or less suitable for the stage, probably remains the dominant theoretical view of the relation between writing and the theatre. There is a whole critical genre, to which some editors of classical plays are affiliated, that views playscripts as virtual pop-up performance books' And, in the early decades of this century, "Acting Editions," addressed largely to amateur theatre groups, were based on similar convictions about the inscription of drama, offering to would-be producers hypothetical productions, complete with lighting plots, lists of properties, costume designs, floor plans, and breakdowns of dramatis personae by age and gender. Some of the gross fallacies of this inscriptive genre - and some of the less obvious ones, too - were anticipated in Shakespeare's representation of Peter Quince and his company of Athenian rude mechanicals, who produce documeniation-not dissimilar to the acting editions of such publishers as Samuel French and Company. Much of their theatrical ambition would have to do with what Hegel calls "mere externals of ... 'stagecraft'" (I 183), but his very distinction between the essentially and the externally dramatic begs the question about the relations between writing and performance. Athenian - or, rather, neo-Aristotelian and neoclassical - convictions about _ theatrical inscription, along with practices based on them, have lately been put to the question in some interesting ways. Indeed, the dramatic genre itself would appear to have been shelved, in some theatricalquarters,as anoverweeningly inscriptive and too-closed kind of writing for contemporary performance. Much ofthe work of theatrical auteurs like Gilles Maheu or Robert Lepage both resists overall pre-inscription and is likely to be recorded as video after the event. But, their theatrical practice is by no means averse to writing. for literature often figures in it. Indeed, the contemporary theatre often chooses ncit merely to do without a dramatic text as the basis of performance, but to substitute for it one of the other literary genres. I am not referring to the kind of adaptation that attempts to transform anovel, say, into aconventional stage play but to such productions as the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, which deliberately retained novelistic features of the novel,' or the many stagings of Michael Ondaatje's suite of poems, The Collected Works a/Billy t"e Kid, which comes without benefit of designated speakers,6 or Steve Petch's Arabian Nights, which transferred so readily from page to radio to theatre,' or Denis Marleau's production of Les Maftres anciens,S Marleau might have chosen to stage one of Thomas Bernhard's plays rather than this novel, but he specifically prefers, he says, to produce the non-dramatic writings even of playwrights : "I think ofrnyselfas apasseur [ferryman]. [load the actors and a piece of writing on board the boat, and we try to get to t)Ie other side."9 Perfonning Writing 549 In the perfonnance of "non-dramatic" vis avis "dramatic" writings two main departures from traditional practice are evident: first the exploitation of modes of expression not found in, or inhibited by, dramatic texts; and secondly , the enablement of the performativity of the writing itself, by which I mean (to use a borrowed tenn that will shortly be defined) its poeticity. These new departures arise, it seems, from a set of assumptions about the relations between writing and performance different from those that prevailed under the neo-classical conception of the dramatic-cum-lheatrical literary genre. It is necessary to take up, briefly, some of these basic assumptions about a writingperformance dichotomy in order to relate them to the more specific dramatheatre pair. We are often obliged to assume radical distinctions between writing and performance and are generally less willing than Hedvig, in The Wild Duck, to take the menu for the meal. The non-observance of a conventional relation between writing and performance usually constitutes a more or less serious breach of good faith or a proof of incompetence - as when contractual obligations are not met; or Qlc fine-print misleads; or actors deviate from a script; or the parking ticket is misdated; or when the pudding proves the inadequacy of either the recipe or the cook. But, though our cullural productions depend on certain understandings about performance vis avis writing, the predicated relations between them are dubious. And, when it comes to occidental theatrical practices (some of which appear to have originated in a writingperformance nexus) this very dubiety has been a source of energy. For the traditional theatre blurs distinctions between what is - has already been written and what is performed and, at best, makes of the conjunction profound and resonant encounters of human consciousness with somatic being. But, if the theatre has implicitly denied a radical distinction between writing and performance and exploited this denial, that theatrical practice has become, in the late twentieth century, quite transparent. This is thanks largely to the acceptance of certain linguistic and semiotic theories (and their associated analytical practices) which have destabilized the writing-performance distinctions that prevail in the ordinary commerce of the world. These new theoretical discourses, incidentally, have often borrowed from the arts of perfonnance their terminologies, concepts, and models. Poets have long known that both writing and speech have to deal with language that can only with effort, temporarily and approximately convey the desired meanings. that Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the·tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in play. Will nOI stay still.10 550 MICHAEL J. SIDNELL The general, if belated, application of this principle by linguistic philosophers has heightened awareness of the inherent instability and, therefore, the immanent performativeness of all texts: the awareness that their meanings and effects will depend, more or less, on the quality and context of a specific usage, or utterance. On the other hand, close attention to signifiers offers to disclose the ineluctable textuality of phenomena. Clothing becomes costume to be "read," "body-language" a consciously practised mode of communication , and stage productions are understood as "performance texts." That such "readings" may over-privilege signification is not, at the moment, the issue. From a third theoretical comer comes the Austinian demonstration that words, however slippery they may be as signifiers, actually do things. So, despite their incompatibilities, Deconstruction, Semiotics and Speech Act Theory tend to confirm Ralph Waldo Emerson's adage that "words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words."" That is to say, these various ways of dealing with language conspire to disclose the performativeness of writing and the textuality of performance. What is especially material to the present discussion is that performed texts and textual perfonnances are often in the medium of speech, which is more or less sharply differentiated from writing, however ultimately inextricable the two may be. When people say they "want it in writing" - whether it be a purchase order. a complaint, or a resignation - they reinforce a common distinction between writing and mere speech. Speech is generally - but not without exceplions that tend to prove the rule - characterized as relatively unreliable, because it is highly contextual, socially-conscious, and performalive." It may even be scandalously performative. as in "Darling, you were wonderful" or, as in Shoshana Felman's analysis of Moliere's Don Juan, ou Ie Jestin de pierre, in which she generalizes the Don's false promises into an inherent characteristic of language. ' 3 Theseus, in the Hippolytos of Euripides, anticipates Felman 's argument when he desperately wishes that human voices had two distinct tones one voice that would register, exactly, the timbre of truthful feeling and a second more casual voice, to carry whatever else we happen to say ... Deception would die out14 Theseus privileges dead letters over living speech and he is mistaken in accepting his wife's posthumous accusation rather than his son's eloquent testimony . Contrary to Theseus's prejUdice, the tendency of the play in which he appears is to make credible that which was written to be heard. We believe his son because the play is so written, not because the actor is eloquent. Speech is the critical mediation between writing and performance, and I shall return to Perfonning Writing SSt it For the moment, though, I shall concentrate on the supposed antinomies of perfonnance and writing. Though what constitutes "writing" is, at bottom, a far from simple matter, the tenn has the advantage of avoiding, at the OUlsel, the questions begged by more obviously loaded terms such as "poetry," "literature," "script" and "text." As to the tenn "perfonnance," it is so promiscuously invoked that it might even be better to avoid it - if one could. '5 "Perfonnance" is everywhere in demand, its indicators closely watched. It is expected equally of Alfa Romeos and of Romeos; corporations demand it from their employees and investment managers promise it; even academe has invented ingenious ways of seeming to measure perfonnance. Often, the tenn signifies little more than approbation of a supposed pragmatic effectiveness, and it implicitly contrasts with mere "profession." Performers arc supposed to instantiate what is merely uttered by professors. Professor Hillis Miller asserts that perfonnativeness is a fundamental criterion for the evaluation of all discourse: Only discourse that is effectively performative as opposed to merely descriptive will make anything happen, institutionally and politically, as opposed to inadvertently supporting the status quo. It makes something happen because it is itself a happening.16 Miller is here singling out writing in particular as a performative mode of discourse ; but.not everyone would agree that all kinds of writing can or should make things happen, politically and institutionally. A non-interventionist performativeness that does not disturb the status quo has been considered a virtue of certain kinds of writing. As W.H. Auden rather notoriously said, poetry "makes nothing happen: it survives I In the valley of its making where executives I Would never want to tamper ...."'7 It is not that Auden is denying the intrinsic pelformativeness of poetry, rather that he insists that its performances do not, outside the linguistic realm, cause anything or anybody to be executed. But, what Miller and Auden agree on is that writing may constitute a perfonnance. So, if perfonnance may be conceived both as doing things and as text, and writing as inscriptive of perfonnance, as well as perfonnance in itself, they are not simply antithetical. But, they are almost inextricable, and the complex relations between them have been the source of much anxiety and immense productivity. And, nowhere more so that in the context of occidental theatre, which is a pre-eminent site of interaction between them. This interaction is largely in tenns of the rendering of writing as speech, though some of the writing is, of course, not meant to be spoken. but to serve only as directions for staging. The dialogue and stage directions are usually kept separate and thought of as inscribing theatre in different ways though, again, the distinction is not hard and fast. A rather extreme but wellefounded demonstration of their 552 MICHAEL J. SIDNELL common textuality was made by Robert Wilson's production of Heiner MUlier's Hamletmaschine, in which the incorporation of the stage directions into the dialogue conveyed their imagery in a way that seemed to some inimical to theatrical representation. ,8 Taking this conventional view, Peter Quince complains that his Thisbe speaks all his "part at once, cues and all" (A Midsummer-Night's Dream, III, i, 102)" but, he himself is inclined to do the same thing in his Prologue, which is so defectively used by him, as an inscription of speech, and so effectively by his author as a satire on a theatrical incompetence that is firmly based on false principles. That poor Peter Quince should acquit himself so ill on Theseus's stage is no wonder, since he has so naively undertaken the complex task of performing in two media, creating and delivering what Yeats calls "written speech": the written and spoken perfonnances that use the same words. Elsewhere'9 I have suggested how it comes about that - registering certain notable exceptions - even accomplished actors are prone to be inept public readers, as Thomas de Quincey also observed: . Actors are the worst readers of all. John Kemble is not effective as a reader. though he has the great advantage of malOTe scholarship; and his sisler, the immorlai Siddons, with all her superiority to him in voice, reads even less effectively. She reads nothing well but dramatic works. In the Paradise Lost '" her failure was distressing ......20 De Quincey, it must be conceded, also finds certain poets and other people deficient as readers. But, why might actors be "the worst readers of all," and Mrs. Siddons read only dramatic works well? I propose that it is largely because, in the dominant western tradition, actors are expected. and trained, to assume roles; and that this acting tradition has been largely sustained by the literary genre we still, quite unreflectively, privilege in relation to theatre. It may well be this training, this genre and their attendant expectations, that tend to make bad readers of actors. Suppose Mrs. Siddons had been asked - though she would have been somewhat beyond her prime - to read the poem by her younger contemporary that begins: My heart aches, and adrowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards haeJ, sunk[.]21 She might have played a suicidal or a drugge9 young man, or an inspired birder, or a tubercular poet in a fever. Such a dramatization would have constituted an invented and defined speaking subject. It might even, in performance, have robbed the writing of its very being if, as Roland Barthes says. that being Performing Writing 553 consists In preventing the question "who is speaking?" from ever being answered. As to who, or what, the "I" of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" might be, it is more pronoun than person, less pronoun than syllable: a feature of what Roman Jakobson calls "poeticity." But how does poelicity manifest itself? Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion , when words and their composition, their meaning, their eternal and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.z:l This principle can be - and often is - applied to speeches from plays for, even though they may represent a more or less defined character as a speaking subject , forward a plot, or describe a scene, they will also, like other forms of writing, exhibit an impersonal poeticity of more or less interest and weight. Poeticity, or literary performativeness, is widely recognised and respected as an attribute of "classical" plays, while skill in the rendition of the metres, rhythms, and diction of written dialogue would seem to be a key feature of "classical" acting. Such acting involves a degree of impersonality with respect to the actor and, even more so, perhaps, with respect to the character - an impersonality that allows the complex performativeness of the writing to emerge. Robert Wilson's production of Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Light is a somewhat different kind of example. In this production, the insistent poeticity of Stein's text was rendered by actors who had the advantage of being unfamiliar with English and were, therefore, able to approach the speaking of their roles phonetically.'3 Cyrano's speech about noses and Enobarbus's description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus are set pieces in which the performativeness of the writing is emphatic; and, while both are exhibitions of poeticity, Cyrano's speech is also highly self-reflexive in tenns of characterization and situation, since the display of rhetorical skills is Rostrand's plotted incident. In Enobarbus's speech, however, attention is directed towards a character other than the speaker and another incident in the narrative. The realization of ·Cleopatra as a character depends, in fact, a great deal on what is said about her - a feature of Shakes-peare 's writing of the role that presents a particular challenge for the player and heightens the theatrical dialogism of writing and playing. In the theatre, the management of prosopoeia - the bringing of an absent person into presence - is always critical, as Auden and Isherwood discovered. In his love poems, Auden could conveniently leave gender indeterminate merely by suppressing names and pronouns, but the conventional gendering of visible stage personae presented problems for the gay playwrights. The most ingenious solution that they devised was to disguise a man as a dog for most of a play, keep him quiet, and let his relationship with his human com- 554 MICHAEL J. SIDNELL panion develop under the cover of the dogskin. Every role-player is a bit of a dialogic dog beneath a verbal skin. The actor's body cannot be fully integrated with the verbal poeticity because they are not of the same stuff. Of course, the actor playing Enobarbus will express Enobarbus as he utters the familiar words, "The barge she sat in, like a bumish'd throne, / Bum'd on the water. ..." (Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 196)," but it would require a tremendous and counter-productive effort to lower th.e audience's consciousness of the highly-wrought, premeditated writtenness of the speech, which must almost 'of necessity be heard in the performance of it. And, this is one technique by which a playwright may secure an attentive hearing for a written performance - by putting it in the mouth of an actor playing an orator, rhetorician, poet, chorus, or an actor. In such cases, we hear the performativeness in the writing rather in the way that we may be made conscious of the camerawork in a film. In certain performances of writing, we allow a particular interest and authority to readings by authors themselves of their work. When Alice Munro reads her stories we hear their speaking subject defined acoustically by the accents, intonations, and rhythms of a reader who is intimately familiar with that speaking subject - though there is no guarantee, of course, that an author will have the vocal means to achieve what she aims to convey to an audience; and it is certain that she will not seek precisely the same effects for her readers and her auditors." Writers' readings are a well-established mode of performance as the Toronto Harbourfront Authors' Festival proves and, like performance art, in which the author is also present, they may be brought to bear on our understanding and practice of dramatic theatre, from which writers are usually absent, whether by reason of their mortality or otherwise." In the absence of the writer, the actual performer has four main, but not mutually exclusive, possibilities of presentation. The first - rather specialized - is to attempt, as Emlyn Williams did with Charles Dickens, an impersonation of the writer. The second is to playa fictional-speaking subject, or character , as in the performance of drama. This will involve, as Anne Ubersfeld observes, a continuous negotiation between the textual definition of the character and the attributes, understandings, and skills of the actor." The third possibility is for the performer to do what most writers reading do, which is to present the self - a not undemanding exercise. Fourthly and lastly, the performer may do what singers must partly do - though often against the opposition of stage directors who want more "acting" from them, alas - and this is to suppress impersonation in favour of an impersonal presentation of the sound and sensc of the verbal structurc. It is common enough for the actors to play several roles each in a theatrical production, but the number of roles tends to increase if the staging of a novel is involved, since the fictional economy of novels lends itself to more characters than are commonly found in plays; and the more characters an actor is Perfonning Writing 555 playing the less the possibility of immersion in them. Much more tellingly, it is not uncommon in contemporary productions for two or more actors to play a single character, as in Gilles Maheu's production of Heiner MUller's Hamletmaschine . This was the case in Marleau's Les Mallres anciens, as also in JoAnne Alealaitis's production based on writings of and about Jack Kerouac." Such instances dislocate the convention by which the contributions of actor and writing are conflated into a single, undialogic mystified entity - a slage character. The use of "non-dramatic" literary genres in the theatre is analogous, perhaps , with the use of found spaces for perfonnance. Whatever the reasons for it, the effects of turning warehouses, arenas, ice-houses, or railway stations into theatres are not merely economic. The preferred way to design a new theatre might even be to build an engine shed and then convert it, putting up with the shed's limitations in order to escape from the even more limiting architectural detenninism of a purpose-built theatre. Scripts constructed specially for the theatre are also, in intention at least, limiting in a way that more theatrically open, "non-dramatic," genres are nol. All of which is not to suggest that a theatre liberated from neoclassical prejudices about genre and dramatic inscription would discover in the staging, even of plays, the dialogic potentialities of writing and perfonnance that are released in its encounters with other genres of literature. NOTES I O.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arc, vol. II, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 1183. Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Poetics I450b. Michael J. Sidnell et al., ed., Sources ofDramatic Theory, Vol. 1: Plato to Congreve (Cambridge: (991) 43- 4. 3 Quoted in Sources a/Dramatic Theory, Vol. 2 : Voltaire to Hugo, ed. Michael J. Sidnell et al. (Cambridge, (994),4. 4 As in the nafvely assured complaint lhal "drama is still rarely acknowledged as primarilya [sic] 'texl for perfonnance, and analysed from that basis.II Dawn Lewcock, review of Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice by Frank H. Ellis, Theatre Notebook 57 (1993), 119· 5 Leon Rubin, The Nicholas Nicklehy Story: The Making of the Historic Royal Shakespeare Company Production (London, (981),26. 6 See The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, ed. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly (Toronto, 1989), 163. 7 The Arabian Nights, adapted by Steve Petch, directed by William Lane, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, Seplember, 1995, was first presented as an eighteen-part series fC?r CBC Radio. The Director's NOles printed in the program for the stage production are pertinent: 556 MICHAEL J. SIDNELL ... in this phase of the project. we have only been able to scratch the surface of this classic collection. However, the open-ended format of our salon production, with different actors joining the cast each week, is an accurate reflection of the nalure of The Arabian Nights itself - a text without boundaries, constantly in a pr~cess of transformation. 8 A production of Theatre Ubu in collaboration with the National Arts Cenlr~ and Festival de theatre des Ameriques, Usine C, Montreal, 24-27 May 1995. 9 Ray Conlogue, interview with Denis Marleau. "Quebec's Theatre of the Avantgarde ," The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 28 October 1995, C18. 10 T.S. Eliot, Col/ected Poems 1909- 1g62 (London, 1963), 194. II The Collected Works ofRalph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series, vol. 3. ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge, MA 1983,6. 12 The trustworthiness of the word of an Englishman appears to have been assertion of the realities of imperialist po.wer and presence, while today a stockbroker's word is her bond. 13 The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with fL. Austin, or Seduction in Two languages , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, 1993). Rather surprisingly, Felman does nollake account of the code of honour, which binds the Don to his promise to tum up for dinner with the Commander. This patriarchal code transcends the scandal of the speaking body, the full force of which is felt only by women. 14 Euripides. Hippolytos, trans. Robert Bagg (London, 1973),61. 15 One recent coinage is the "perfonnance suit," which refers to a gannent, made from teflon-coated fabric, which will repel coffee stains and the like. Unlike the "power-suits" of yesteryear, which were supposed to enhance the perfonnance of the wearer, it is the suit itself that "perfonns," according to the Montreal manufacturer ("As It Happens,"CBC Radio, 26 Seplember 1995). 16 l. Hillis Miller, "Return,Dissenter," Times LiterarySupplemem, 15 August 1994, 10. I? "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," W.H. Auden, Co1lected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 1976), 197. 18 Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and his Collaborators (New York, 1989), 130. 19 In "Yeats's 'Written Speech'; Writing, Hearing and Performance," Yeats Annual t I, ed. Warwick Gould (London, 1995), 3-2S. 20 The Confessions ofan English Opium-Eater. (1907; reprint, London, 1930), 228. 2 1 lohn Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," The New Oxford Book ofEnglish Verse 12501950 , chosen and ediled by Helen GaIdner (Oxford, 1972), 60S. 22 "What is Poetry?" in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Slephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 378. 23 David Savran, "Whistling in the Dark," Peiforming Arts Journal, 15 Number 43 (January 1993), 2S-7· 24 The Progress o/Love (audio cassette) read by Munro (Toronto, 1990). 25 The presence on stage of Athenian playwrights may account for the relatively uncomplicated view of the relation between poet and actor in Plato and Aristotle. Performing Writing 557 26 Anne Ubersfeld, L'Ecole du spectateur: lire Ie thedtre 2 (Paris, 198 r), 165-237. 27 A public rehearsal of this work in progress was given on I November 1995 ar the conference Why Theatre: Choicesfor the New Century, University of Toronto. ...