Comment

Scholarship in the field of theatre studies has, in recent years, expanded both in the range of materials it takes as its various subjects and in its approaches to those materials through time. Recent revisionist theatre histories have brought into view a much stronger sense of the cultural context of playwriting and production as well as a more inclusive understanding of what constitutes performance at any particular historical moment. And, of course, this is not simply a motivation in looking at plays and other entertainments from some remote century, but this kind of attentiveness to social and political specificities brings us a much keener sense of what gets produced on contemporary stages (and elsewhere) and under what conditions. The very business of performance has implications that reach far beyond the actor-spectator interaction.

“The Tangled Flora of Goat Island: Rhizome, Repetition, Reality” examines the complex strategies of performativity that performance troupe Goat Island bring to their often quintessentially postmodern work. Stephen Bottoms provocatively examines the actors’ constructions of performance roles and the very nature of the witness that the spectator is asked to be. As Bottoms indicates, the frame of reference for Goat Island’s work is profoundly theatrical and yet thoroughly interlarded with the icons and effects of popular culture in the late twentieth century. Connecting Goat Island’s How Dear to Me the Hour when Daylight Dies to the holy theatre of Jerzy Grotowski (refracted through a Derridean post-structuralism which self-consciously performs the skepticism of the 1990s), Bottoms suggests the possibilities for reception which bring together a kind of religious intensity with a recognizably skeptical and critical eye.

Sharon Feldman’s essay on the work of La Fura dels Baus raises related issues of truth and authenticity in contemporary performance work. She draws our attention to the very fraught history of post-Franco Spain which produced certain developments within “alternative” theatre in the country in general and within La Fura’s work in particular. The trajectory of avant-garde art in Spain (and in Europe more broadly) is seen as providing an important political aesthetic for La Fura’s performances, and Feldman argues that the company’s extension and explosion of the mise en scène troubles the expectations and conventions of the spectatorial relation. Her account of La Fura’s repertory since 1983 provides an important background to the group’s current extraordinary success in many geographical settings around the world.

In “Impassive Bodies: Hrotsvit Stages Martyrdom,” Marla Carlson takes us back far from the contemporary moment to the tenth century; as she reminds us, Hrotsvit is not nearly as “modern” as we would often believe—she is not of the generic “Middle Ages” but is specifically writing in an Ottonian imperial context. Cognizant of the importance of feminist scholarship in revising and expanding the field of theatre studies over the last thirty years, Carlson nonetheless reminds us that we must be attentive to the particular belief systems in which individual works came into being. Like both Bottoms’s account of Goat Island and Feldman’s of La Fura dels Baus, Carlson’s essay is engaged by the “acts of communicative exchange” (474) that take place in drama. This leads her to look carefully at the configuration of martyrdom as a species of ordeal.

John O’Brien writes of the cultural work performed by the pantomime in eighteenth-century Britain. He turns to pantomime’s reliance on scenery, stage effects and the performers’ bodies to examine cultural anxieties about the materiality of the stage. Further, he looks at pantomime’s mixing of serious and comic, the spectacular and the mundane, high culture and low. In a finely detailed reading of key texts, O’Brien shows, among other things, pantomime’s pointed relation to British imperialism.

If these four articles give us a splendid sense of the richness of our field at this juncture, then so too do our collections of book and performance reviews. These sections, I think, provide an extraordinary service to those of us researching in the area of theatre, at a time when it is less and less easy to stay abreast of the ever-increasing...