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  • Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems
  • Sara L. Warner
Nicholas Ridout . Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Theatre and Performance Theory Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 206. $32.99 (Pb).

Racing heart, dry mouth, sweaty palms, trembling lips, nausea, short-term memory loss, paralysis. No, this is not a list of the possible side effects of the newest pink pill by Big Pharma X that you should ask your doctor about, though it certainly could be. These afflictions are the side affects of the generalized nervous condition known as performance anxiety. There are as many cures for the dis-ease of stage fright as there are for the hiccups, and most are as ineffective. A topic of enormous concern for actors, musicians, and public speakers, stage fright is not a subject in which performance theorists have demonstrated much interest, despite the fact that it raises a host of interesting questions about embodiment, subjectivity, and the transmission of affect.

In his Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Nicholas Ridout tackles the issue of performance anxiety and what he calls the "mutually reinforcing relationship" between stage fright, theatrical shame, animality, and death in modern drama. These four seemingly unrelated problems are not simply obstacles to a successful performance but are historically determined symptoms of modernity, that period of urbanization ushered in by the Industrial Revolution and fuelled by technological innovation and the development of commodity capitalism. As a result of new modes of economic production that reorganized the conditions of employment in every sector, including the entertainment industry, the modern bourgeois theatre has become a contact zone, where labouring actors and leisured audiences meet face-to-face as producers and consumers in ambivalent, highly compromised, and uncomfortable encounters. It is "the place we go to feel what we feel about work and about the constraints it places upon our freedom, and certainly not the place we go to experience some ahistorical freedom from work" (167). [End Page 156]

Embedded as it is in capitalist leisure, theatre will inevitably fail in any attempt to evade or transcend commodification. These failures, Ridout argues, are not anomalous to the art form but constitutive of it. The modern theatre is by definition a "masochistic formation," an economic enterprise that

necessarily, even deliberately, provokes and exploits a psychological condition in which the actor experiences himself as forgetful, stupid, less-than-human, helpless, frightened, prone to unmotivated giggling, all of which induces in him an enduring shame, lived out under the gaze of a public constructed as an austere and unforgiving authority.

(138)

Rather than rushing to cure these ills or abandoning drama altogether by jumping ship to performance studies, Ridout urges us to stick with theatre and all its failings, for it is in the profound unease fostered by this "decrepit, marginal, artificial, and commodified institution" that we experience our imbricated relationship to the economic and political conditions of modern capital (4). The theatre "invites us perversely to enjoy our ethical discomfort and to think politically about the sources of such enjoyment" through the production of an affective surplus that exceeds representation (31). This surplus manifests itself in "side affects," four of which Ridout explores in detail. Stage fright is a minor abjection; embarrassment is a minor shame; animals are minor beings that experience minor exploitations; and corpsing is minor laughter. Indicative of the minoritization of affects under capitalism, these side affects reveal the source of theatre's pleasure and discomfort, which is to say, the source of its own undoing.

In chapter one, Ridout argues that stage fright is not "the experience of abjection in the theatre," as psychoanalysis might have us believe but "the experience of the abjection of theatre" (68). More than the failure to inhabit a role, stage fright is a form of alienation in the economy of theatrical representation, the result of failed reciprocity in the encounter between labouring actors and leisured audiences. In the modern theatre, entertainment, like production, is industrialized. The actor is transformed into a specialist whose expertise is her emotions. As an affect machine who dances to the beat of the factory's time clock, regulating the hours of labour and...

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