Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production by Richard Hornby (review)

274 Comparative Drama Richard Hornby. Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. Pp. xi + 215. $11.95. It seems only common sense to assume that a thorough critical read­ ing of the text of a play, resulting in an interpretive concept for perform­ ance, would precede any other step taken by a theatrical director in preparing a production. But anyone who regularly attends the theater, whether professional, community, or collegiate, has suffered through many performances in which the director has obviously disregarded common sense. Richard Hornby confronts this problem aggressively in Script into Performance, and he offers to any director willing to acknow­ ledge its necessity a method for “dramaturgical criticism” based on structuralist principles. Hornby identifies two misconceptions about playscripts (his term for the written text of a drama) that lead to wrong-headed productions: the “Symphony” and “Cinema” models. The symphony model assumes that a playscript, like a musical score, contains all the information needed for successful performance. This concept results in unimaginative, lifeless, traditionalist productions. By contrast, the cinema model, whose influence Hornby is much more involved in combatting, posits the idea that a playscript need be taken as no more definitive than a screenplay, which a director must expand upon, re-edit, and alter at will. When applied to classic playscripts, this cinema model often creates one of those updated “concept” productions, all too familiar in recent years, which Hornby, only slightly exaggerating, illustrates with the “nude country-western version [of Macbeth] on the moon.” He makes this particular misuse of playscripts his target throughout the book. Its first chapter bears the title “A Polemic on Contemporary American Theatre,” and a polemical vein characterizes his entire argument. Hornby, a professor of drama at the University of Calgary and a theatre scholar, has obviously waged this battle often, with considerable frustration, during his professional life. A sense of personal mission pervades his writing. And he in fact illustrates the application of his structuralist performance theories with descriptions of three plays he himself staged at Calgary. Hornby’s theories are not allied to the works of any particular struc­ turalist critic or school. They rather comprise a series of approaches to be applied to playscripts in order to discover patterns of meaning beneath their surface significance. Stressing these discovered patterns in the design of a performance subsequently leads to a valid dramatic interpretation inherent in the text rather than one imposed from without that violates the text. For Hornby “a Structuralist method of interpretation is one that 1. Reveals something hidden 2. Is intrinsic 3. Incorporates com­ plexity and ambiguity 4. Suspends judgment 5. Is wholistic.” It is not a fixed formula for use on all playscripts but a way of analyzing each one individually, an act and not a thing. To avoid the “reification” of his technique, Hornby defines it in mathematical terms as a function of each separate play. While this is a useful concept, his actual mathematical notations of these functions seem extraneous and confusing, obscuring rather than elucidating a perfectly comprehensible thesis. Reviews 275 On the whole, however, Hornby describes his methods thoroughly and clearly, convincing the reader of their worth and practicality. The last section of the book provides a rare example of theoretical and practical dramatic criticism joined in a single volume. Unlike the theory, though, the results of the practical criticism are uneven. Hornby’s approach to Shelley’s The Cenci according to its inversion of the traditional signifi­ cances of its dominant image patterns provides many stimulating insights and led, I imagine, to an impressive production. But the use of a Kierkegaardian model to explain the abrupt about-faces of characters in Ibsen’s A Doll House, while ingenious, appears to me too schematic and not wholly justified by the text itself. On the other hand, the analysis of Pinter’s Homecoming is not ingenious enough, Hornby’s interpretation, while valid, having been for the most part put into practice in the original London production. Of course the author admits that struc­ turalism is only a method of interpretation, not a formula which guaran­ tees sure-fire brilliance every time. However, since...