Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (review)

In the wake of the emphasis in recent Shakespeare productions on conventions of direct address, Escolme's engaging, appropriately subjective, and admittedly "humanist" monograph seeks to answer questions which, although obvious, have not yet received enough attention: what happens when an actor/character addresses the audience directly? How does the moment of direct address, in which performer, fictional character, and spectator are brought into direct communication, create the subjectivity of the fictional character? How does direct address challenge and/or help create the subjectivity of the spectator?

Escolme begins by tackling the problem of what one may mean when talking about "naturalistic acting," "illusion," or "character"—a problem that has become increasingly difficult because the terminology has been contaminated for decades by post-Stanislavskian and Brechtian usages. Escolme suggests that early modern playtexts "are dependent for their effects of subjectivity upon the potential for direct encounter between performer and spectator within a continually foregrounded theatre building" (8). This part of the book, in which Escolme discusses the work of Stanislavski, Zola, and Brecht, as well as that of cultural materialists, in order to reclaim and redefine the terms "illusionism" and "performance objective," may well be the one which will be the most useful to performance critics struggling with a bewildering variety of ill-defined terminology.

It is in the core of the book, however, in the chapters dealing with Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Richard II, and two productions by the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio that Escolme's argument comes to life. She begins by contrasting two stagings of Troilus and Cressida in 1999–2000: Michael Boyd's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, which worked within naturalistic conventions, and Trevor Nunn's National Theatre production, which was self-consciously theatrical but did not let Cressida speak for herself. Dissatisfied with both productions because of their attempt to "motivate—or explain away—Cressida's betrayal of Troilus" (34), Escolme fascinatingly speculates "about the meanings that might be produced by a Cressida who makes eyes at us, who directly elicits the audience's approval for her actions or defies their disapproval of them, rather than demonstrating her motivations for those actions through the fiction. This is a Cressida whose intentions make no sense in the naturalistic theatre" (39). Escolme's Cressida, aware of being a performer, consciously plays with her audience; her inexplicable decision to betray Troilus is thrown at the spectator as a challenge, creating a strong effect of subjectivity precisely because she does not "explain away" her inconsistencies. Escolme's account of the potential for direct address in the portrayal of Cressida will, I hope, influence future performers.

Escolme's next chapter juxtaposes analyses of four different productions of Hamlet in different textual forms: Red Shift's Hamlet: First Cut, a staging of the Q1 text; Rylance's Folio-based Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in 2000; and the "timeless" and textually cut and transposed Hamlets staged by Theatre de la Jeune Lune and Peter Brook's Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Escolme's argument here is that "subjectivity is constructed in the relationship between Hamlet and his audience. His gestures towards the agency of the modern subject become gestures to the audience" (54). This joint construction of subjectivity, Escolme suggests, was most effectively produced in the Globe Theatre production, in which Rylance openly engaged his audience, blurring the distinction between performer and character in order to engage the spectators. This tactic, it is implied, is partly an effect of the theater space at the Globe reconstruction, which invites the performers to consider the audience as part of their world. What Escolme acknowledges only in passing is that Rylance's 2000 performance was, to an extraordinary extent, a reprise of his 1989 Royal Shakespeare Theatre performance (directed by Ron Daniels), where, despite a proscenium arch, Rylance nevertheless achieved a relationship with his audience that involved them in the creation of Hamlet's character. Escolme's point about...