Reading the Material Theatre (review)

Knowles's book illustrates an open-ended method of performance analysis that uses cultural materialism and semiotics to paint thick descriptions of context and modes of production while paying close attention to the semiotics of space and location. He asks what kind of cultural work each of his case studies accomplishes, looking closely at reviews, at the historical moment in which they were produced, and at the specific site of their production. Engaging cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall, performance semioticians such as Marvin Carlson, and theories of cultural materialism invoked by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Knowles knits together a proposal for analysis that contributes to David Savran's call for closer attention to the sociology of theatre.

To stake his claims, Knowles offers a useful précis of reception theories and studies of the semiotics of place to build a working method that accounts for production and reception processes that create a performance with wide and various cultural meanings. Although much of his discussion of theatre practice rehearses commonplaces about the ideological implications of staff and artistic roles, theatre environment and geography, acting practices, and publicity and marketing strategies, Knowles's careful theorizing of these prosaic details underscores how foundational they are to what he calls their "culturally affirmative" (à la Marcuse) or "culturally interventionist" social work. He traces the workings of ideology in the most minute production choices and, using examples from The Wooster Group, Theatre de la Complicite, the Canadian Opera Company, da da kamera, and others, exemplifies his theory through particular moments of practice. Knowles establishes his method in a persuasive, compelling way (his argument would read very well with Herbert Blau's foundational 1983 Theatre Journal essay on ideology and theatre), then applies it to The Stratford Festival, Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, The Wooster Group's production of House/Lights (which receives a particularly good explication here), The English Shakespeare Company, and a few select international festivals.

Knowles shares excellent close readings of various productions, but his own presumptions about theatre's political efficacy and his apparent attachment to what he considers its appropriately highbrow status go curiously uninterrogated. Knowles's tone becomes strangely cynical about theatre production's possibility for real social change; it's as if he sets impossibly high standards for the political efficacy of the work he sees. And betraying a surprising elitism, he complains that at the 1993 Stratford Festival, the "demands of Broadway-style musical theatre and the classical repertory make conflicting claims [because of the necessity of multiple castings]. The combination of Pompey in Antony and Cleopatra with Herbie in Gypsy . . . can hardly be considered to be healthy cross-fertilization" (115). Such a claim might consternate actors and spectators who enjoy seeing Shakespeare and the Golden Age of American musicals performed in repertoire. Why should their proximity become evidence of cultural contamination, rather than tell the discerning spectator something more culturally interesting about the fiscal circumstances of festivals that often leaven their high art with a dollop of the popular? Why shouldn't crossing styles and genres be seen as healthy stretching for performers, work that dismantles the ideology of the only "classically trained" actors?

The book focuses "synchronically on just over one manageable decade in the English-speaking world at the end of the second millennium . . . [which] enables analysis of specific productions and performances within their local context under controlled conditions" (202), but Knowles's examples feel remote and ahistorical; many of them are well over ten years old. He admits that his method works best for the critic/spectator who has seen a production and can chart its material context and its semiotic richness in valuable detail. His own performance archive, however, remains disappointingly out-dated and decontextualized; rarely are the politics of the moment captured in any detail to provide a bigger picture for the cultural work he considers.

In some cases, Knowles's work simply and helpfully underlines the impossibility of knowing anything certain about how theatrical...