Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance by Campbell Edinborough (review)

Campbell Edinborough’s book takes seriously the embodied spectator, embedded in space, and the role she plays in constructing the theatrical experience. Theatre is a medium that has both material and imagined realities and Edinborough argues that it is the “interrelationship between different forms of space that enables the creative possibilities associated with theatrical performance” (10). Theatrical Reality integrates the work and theory of theatre artists Adolphe Appia, Constantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski into his analysis of contemporary performances that he has seen, such as Pep Bou’s Clar de Llunes (2008), Steve Paxton’s Magnesium, Marlon Brando’s performance in On the Waterfront (1954), Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (1978), his own The History of Water (2013), Mammalian Diving Reflex’s Haircuts by Children (2006), and Michael Winterbottom’s film A Cock and Bull Story (2005), starring Steven Coogan. This strategy brings theory and practice together in some strong and weak ways, though Edinborough does, as he sets out to in the introduction, provoke me “into reconsidering how performers, spectators and spaces come together to establish theatrical realities” (5).

In chapter 2 and 3 he highlights the role Adolphe Appia played in the “cultural emergence of subjectivity” and how bodies generate empathy onstage. Appia’s work staged the relationship between the performer and space, requiring the spectator to co-construct the theatrical reality:

I contend that the foregrounding of the performer’s subjectivity, made possible in a particular historical moment, shaped new ways of understanding scenic space. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed an increasing theatrical focus on the interiority of the characters that peopled dramatic worlds, which in turn highlighted the importance of the performer’s embodied experience during rehearsal and performance.

(27)

His argument about interiority borrows from psychology as well as novels and rightly, I think, places Appia in this important historical moment where spectators were invited to perceive depth on the surface of characters. Although he mentions work done by Stanton Garner and Bert States, he sets them aside too quickly, arguing that their work is not sufficiently focused on performance. It would be helpful to know how he sees his work in conversation with phenomenology or others in theatre and performance scholarship integrating psychology, phenomenology, cognitive science, or affect theory into similar questions about reception and spectatorship.

Chapter 4, “Authentic Fictions: Truthful Behavior in Given Circumstances,” places the spectator front and center in his assessment of naturalistic acting, because of “the audience’s role as a co-constitutor of theatrical space” (61). Edinborough sees Stanislavski’s adage that there are no small parts, only small players as a requirement that each actor bring his “three-dimensional truth to his character” which will create a “cumulative empathetic potential for the spectator” (63). I do not question the power of a strong group of naturalistic actors living truthfully onstage, as Stanislavski demanded, but I do not know what exactly three-dimensional truth is or whether or not there is such a thing as cumulative empathy. Despite its inclusion in the subtitle and a brief mention of mirror neurons and work by Susan Leigh Foster, I remain unclear how Edinborough can be so sure how truthful behavior leads to greater empathy than fiction (or even what that means). “Authentic fictions” refers to his claim that “within Stanislavski’s method, the actor’s body becomes a site for the shared experience of authentic feeling” (64), and thus “authentic fictions” are when real bodies feel “authentically” onstage, creating an “empathetic bridge” between spectator and performer which allows the spectator to “reach towards the boundaries of the human imagination” (72). I am seduced and sympathetic to this claim and yet the book makes me hungry for a clearer explanation of exactly how this happens and how we know. Why do we think we empathize more with that which is “real” or “authentic” than the fictional or phony? I hesitate to reference text, but Hamlet’s emotional reaction to the player...