Theatricality from the Performative Perspective

...These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless fabric of this vision,... the great globe itself... shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

- The Tempest, IV, 1.

Theatricality versus Reality

For a number of theater critics and scholars, the term "theatrical" still bears the imprint of Diderot's Paradox. ¹ Consequently, criticism and research grounded in the French philosopher's conception of theater contribute to further widen the chasm between theory and practice, for Diderot's view implies disregarding the process-oriented nature of performance while emphasizing the duality between concepts such as the real and the fictitious, spontaneity and structure, the concrete and the abstract. Such a view is based on the premise that there is an unbridgeable division between body and mind, instinct and intellect, emotion and reason, and it therefore necessarily excludes the performer's perspective, which reconciles in practice what seems paradoxical in theory.

Hence, paradox-derived approaches build upon Diderot's assumptions about performance, which oppose living and acting by pitting the spectator's presumed honesty and vulnerability against the actor's alleged powers of deception and dissimulation. Ironically, although they are founded on the conviction that head and heart can function separately, such approaches tend to generate passionate and emotional academic interpretations which, in turn, endow theater studies with a whimsical subjectivity, ranging from fantasy to superstition. In his Dictionnaire Encyclopédique du Théâtre, Michel Corvin evokes a fascination for theatricality in which delight and anxiety seem inextricably intertwined :

Endowed with demiurge-like and even demoniacal dimensions, theater, which hinges on the primary mechanism of identity-swapping as the chief principle of acting, opens onto all types of personality splits, metamorphoses, role-playing. [...] Theater becomes a great game that cannot possibly be stalled in its frenzied inventiveness; the imaginary gets out of hand, being all the more irrepressible in that it is backed by its material reality and bound to trap the "innocent" spectator [...] (1991, 821) ²

The fact that words such as "demiurge" and "demoniacal," which usually beling to the semantic field of religion, can be applied to stage acting, shows the extent to which European cultural representations of the performer are still imbued with an ancient conception of life based on a dialectic between sacred and profane. Within our scientifically and technologically advanced secular society, this translates into a dichotomy between what is "true" and what is "false." In Joel Trapido's International Dictionary of Theater Language, the theatrical is defined in English as a term that "is often complimentary but can also be used in a derogatory sense, indicating something affected or extravagant" (1985, 871). Likewise, its French counterpart asserts that:

In Western theater history, theatricality is both a value which one must aspire to and a pitfall of which one must beware. Indeed, this word encompasses equally loaded positive and negative connotations. The positive use of this notion becomes manifest each time theater is threatened to be confused with "life:" it is then judicious to remind oneself that all representation is simulacra, a form, and that theatricality does not pertain to the thing represented but to the written dramatic movement through which it is represented; the negative use of this notion appears, on the other hand, each time theater disregards the real and indulges in the celebration of its own codes, closing in onto itself through the means of its own conventions: theatricality is then nothing more than the undeniable sign of its falsifying and deluding nature. (Corvin, 820)

In the West, the power of theatricality is thus both acknowledged and condemned, for theater is constantly subjected to a moral, ethical, and philosophical set of values. Once exclusively religious, theater has become a secular art form which, no longer in the service of the divine, should logically be deprived...