The Theatrical Public Sphere by Christopher B. Balme (review)

The cultural and philosophic debates over the term public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) gained traction during the 1970s and ’80s as a result of Jürgen Habermas’s support of European Enlightenment’s liberalism against critiques from postmodernism’s anti-rationalist skepticism. He defended “the liberal-bourgeois public sphere” as eighteenth-century sites of interactive discourse, rational engagement, and democratic debate worth emulating despite post-structural criticism of its so-called elitist, Westernized discursive methods. As the concept of public sphere expanded beyond Habermas’s narrowly construed Anglo-European venues during the 1990s (notably in the works of Nancy Fraser and others) it incorporated diverse, multicultural discourses and broader inclusivity of public opinions. The Theatrical Pubic Sphere, Christopher Balme’s deeply thoughtful and copiously researched book, follows these themes as they reveal “how a specific theatrical public sphere can be defined and in what way performance and theatre theory can contribute to the debate” (5). Balme examines case studies of ramifications emerging from controversial productions throughout theatre history—not the theatrical events themselves, but rather the reactions, spillages, fallouts, and pro-and-con debates occurring in pamphlets, journals, newspapers, legal decrees, protests, and the internet. Throughout the book Balme defines these public exchanges either as agonistic (rational, confrontational, and overt) or ludic, deploying postmodern irony, covert humor, and the creative usage of social media.

The book encourages theatre research to shift its focus from what Balme calls the modernist and postmodernist “fixation on the evenemential temporality of the aesthetic dimension of theatre—the event—and a return to and realignment with questions of social and political imbrication, which transcend any one particular performative occasion” (13–14). This realignment requires examining historical evidence on the periphery, from early playbills to the cybersphere. Balme encourages researchers to think “out of the black box” (pun intended) and onto the slippages and ramifications of theatrical productions as the discourse about the event maneuvers intricately through the public sphere. Chapter 1 sets the tone by comparing two Greek concepts of theatre’s raison d’être: agōn and parrhêsia, the former construed as competition, assembly, action, debate, or confrontation and has been assumed in theatre theory to be the stimulus for the ancient productions. By contrast, Balme proposes that the latter, parrhêsia—the ludic means to criticize and ensure freedom of opinion, howsoever quirky and unconventional the method of criticism—was antiquity’s real underlying inspiration to create performances.

Chapter 2 draws from examples of playbills and blogs as both informative bearers of the internal theatrical event and incipient manifestations of external consequences surrounding the production. Balme is interested in the latter: how the playbill and blog become tools in the mediatization process of disseminating information and fostering debate in the public sphere. Playbills are at their most basic a means of information (who, what, when, where), but they also provoke discourse possibly unrelated to the production, serving as stand-alone artifacts and “complex texts” (58) requiring careful scrutiny. This concept is picked up in social media, adding to the discourse by challenging the “unidirectional mode” (63) of critics solely promoting or demoting the shows to the audience; instead, social media creates multidirectional modes aimed in several directions, even some engaging one another without reference to the production. As Balme reiterates throughout the book, the essential point about the public sphere, whether an Enlightenment playbill replete with lugubrious information or the brevity of a contemporary tweet, is “the ability to shift discussion of theatre outside the black box and the carefully demarcated feedback loop between performance, critical response and public reaction” (69).

The focus of the next chapter is the London-based Puritan debates of the seventeenth century, which for Balme are “perhaps the first instance of a genuine theatrical public sphere, understood as an arena of debate conducted in countless pamphlets and tracts, on the stage and off, in courthouses and churches” (75). The blasts, rebuttals, sermons, and retorts elevated the era as something more than mere Puritanical anti-theatricalism: it ushered in theatre as the nodal...