Reading the Material Theatre (review)

While I was reading Ric Knowles' new book, two particular performances of Dreams of Princesses in Stockholm came to my mind. The first one took place the very day when the creator of this text, Elfriede Jelinek, was announced the winner of the Nobel Prize. In the intermission, champagne was served to the audience and spirits were high. Less than two months later, in the week before New Year 2005, the same production was performed in order to collect money for the victims of the earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people, among them many Swedish tourists. The same production of the same text, which recently was so full of attack and irony, had changed into a requiem, speaking of death and lament.

It is exactly such changes in meaning that Ric Knowles' book Reading the Material Theatre attempts to explain. His starting point is as convincing as it is – still – quite rare: the meaning of a performance depends on the conditions of both production and reception. In other words: performance analysis alone can never explain the meaning of a theatrical creation in a satisfying way. In his introduction, Knowles outlines a triangle consisting of three corners: "performance," "conditions of production," and "conditions of reception." The performance is thought of as the "raw theatrical event," which Knowles suggests be analysed in semiotic terms (3). Leaning towards such seminal contributors to theatre semiotics as Elaine Ashton and Marvin Carlson, Knowles does not feel the need to add much more to explain the signs of the theatre. He is, however, sufficiently influenced by French semiology to speak about "reading performances as text" (16). Personally, I would have preferred a less linguistically-oriented terminology that would have harmonized better with his approach to material conditions, which constitute the other two corners of his triangle: production and reception. Referring to Antonio Gramsci as the patron saint of cultural materialism, Knowles argues that the historical, cultural, and material contexts are decisive for how meaning is produced. It is in this particular area that Knowles' research opens up productive new perspectives. The triangular relationship among production processes, the performance as event, and the response of a particular audience in a particular environment is the focus of the book's first part, as well as of the five case studies that conclude it.

The first, theoretical chapter – the shortest one in the book – presents the terms mentioned above, giving a brief outline of how cultural materialism, cultural studies, semiotics, and audience-response perspectives will be used in what follows. The second chapter, about theatrical practices within the conditions of production and reception, points out some of the crucial circumstances to be investigated when speaking of the meaning of a performance. Knowles starts with theatrical training and how stylistic as well as ideological traditions of the theatre are established and maintained. Using internationally renowned theatre groups as examples (including Cheek by Jowl, the Wooster Group, and Robert Lepage's Ex Machina), Knowles explains how the educational backgrounds of their directors – all of these companies centre around almighty directors – as well as their designers, technicians, and (last but not least) actors inform the conditions of production, which themselves already have certain ways of meaning production inscribed in them. When discussing working conditions, Knowles illustrates his points by comparing commercial theatres to not-for-profit theatres. He also heavily emphasizes the material conditions of theatrical space: the architecture of the theatre, the space provided for production as well as for reception, the geographical location of the theatre building and its relationship to local neighbourhoods, and the "homelessness" of touring or festival-focused theatres (89).

In the first part of the book, Knowles establishes a distinction between the locally well-established theatre group that knows its own home audience and the displaced groups that work through international festival circuits. This distinction also characterizes the second part's examination of five case studies. All of these cases...