Arguments about text and its relation to performance are well rehearsed regarding English speaking theatre, and have found a foothold in Shakespeare scholarship since
the rise of “stage-centred criticism” in the 1970s.186 The position of “Shakespeare” at the
intersection of literary and performance studies – what W. B. Worthen describes as “reading and the criticism of texts” and “performance and the staging of scripts” (1997: 2-3) – has provoked border wars, prompting scholars to divine, defend or traduce the boundaries that separate literary and performative perspectives on Shakespeare. Whilst some claim Shakespeare for one exclusive realm, others have sought to position his texts at the interface of both. As a fresh intervention amid these complex historical layers of negotiation, Ostermeier’s work on Shakespeare reveals the fundamental flaw in arguments founded on perceived ontological distinctions that are oblivious to theatre’s material textuality.
Worthen’s extensive explorations of this terrain have sought to “restore the contributory force of the discourse of drama to performance theory” (2008a: 13), and his project needs to be contextualised in relation to the persistent literary bias that scholars of Shakespeare in performance in the mid-to-late twentieth century had to overcome. His desire to contribute a “corrective” to the “New Critical obsession with close readings that turned plays into poems” (2011: 316) has seen Worthen position dramatic writing as a distinct literary form that, unlike others, cannot be wholly digested by definitions of textuality, and impels affective and forceful performance that escapes semiotic and hermeneutic constraints.
186 See Hodgdon (2005) for a succinct overview of the tussle between performance and literary
minded scholars that has followed in the wake of “stage-centred criticism”, introduced into the field by J L Styan in the 1970s. See also Erne (2003: 21). It should also be mentioned that the 1970s witnessed the explosion of theoretical criticism in Performance studies, led by Richard Schechner, which invoked similar binaries between text and performance in order to distinguish its approach.
Indeed, Worthen has made reference to theorists of drama who derive its force from the “mutually constitutive commerce” (Michael Goldman, cited in Worthen 2008a: 17) it registers between text and performance. Worthen builds on Goldman’s insistence that literature cannot overdetermine performance in theatre, because drama triggers an “element in excess of what can be semiotically extracted” (ibid: 17). Benjamin Bennett makes the same claim when he stresses that the actor’s body is a “semiotic explosive” (2005: 180), poised to blast through the “there and then” of the text by arbitrarily asserting its “emphatic materiality” in the “here and now” (2005: 211) of performance. These dramatic theorists thus set textuality and sensuality in opposition, claiming that
although performance invites us to view it as an interpretation of a “governing text”187,
theatre’s sensual materiality sabotages the smooth running of that textual (what Bennett
calls “hermeneutic”) activity. 188 Live theatre, in contrast, exposes textuality’s
hermeneutic impulse as a brutal limitation, as it refuses to let its sensual and corporeal abundance be contained within the horizons of language and clearly defined meanings.
These arguments are alluring. They are often true. However, the same can be said of their inverse; as Bulman’s comments on translation reveal, the “extra-linguistic” work of an English language Shakespeare production can easily serve to fix ideological, cultural, and/or ethnographical interpretations that limit the spoken words they accompany. Words themselves can perform far more than hermeneutics, a point the RSC voice coach Cicely Berry makes regarding Ophelia’s “O what a noble mind” speech: “It is the openness of the vowels here that is so revealing – how those vowels are coming from the dark of her soul” (Berry 2001: 233). The force of Shakespeare’s words, as Berry’s exercises reveal, often emerges from their stitching together of sense and sensuality. Semiotics and affect, or hermeneusis and sensuality, are in constant crossfade,
187 Whether a script produced by a playwright, or even just a set of rules structuring an improvisation.
Bennett thus argues that sensuality punctures text – or, more precisely, the conceptual, creative, imaginative effort evoked by that text, when it is read or spoken, as it conjures into being objects and people and situations (2005: 210) – an argument that Shakespeare immediately complicates as the multiple versions of his plays (in folio, in quarto, in diverse states of revision or “corruption”) challenge the very stability of a “governing text”. On this matter see Bulman (1996); Stern (2004).
188 That is why Bennett argues, as his title provocatively states, that All Theatre Is Revolutionary Theatre,
and neither are the privileged or exclusive domain of textuality or performance. As we have seen, Ostermeier and Mitchell ignore divisions between literary forms (the novel, drama, poetry, the manifesto), subverting the status of dramatic literature as a unique
form.189 Indeed, poststructuralists showed, in the 1960s and 70s, how different notions of
“textuality” might release all kinds of written works from their “literary” and representational fetters to do other performative and presentational forms of labour,
gathering the work up as “play, activity, production, practice” (Barthes 1977: 162).190
Lada Čale-Feldman relates this point explicitly to Worthen’s work, in which she finds
that “‘literarity’ and ‘textuality’ are here conceived in strict connection to ‘forms of literary representation’, as if poststructuralist theories of the text […] which severely criticised the notion of literature as representation, never existed” (2011: 99).
Contextualising Ostermeier’s work on Shakespeare in relation to these debates adds depth to a discussion of his approach to artistic creation and to the reappraisal of the director-text relationship at the heart of this thesis. Although, as Barbara Hodgdon explains, Worthen’s intervention in the field showed how “fidelity to a textual Shakespeare […] constrains the work of performance” (2005: 5) – a response to the tenacity of literary critical frameworks in Shakespeare scholarship – Ostermeier’s (and, indeed, Mitchell’s) lack of anxiety about this issue reflects the fact that, in their practice,
deference to and respect for a textual authority serves to generate forceful performance,
rather than hamper it. They don’t share in Worthen’s sense of a “cultural anxiety about the persistent incommensurability of writing and theatre” (2011: 338). Instead they develop creative methods that construe innovative forms of “fidelity” to text for, as we have begun to see, Ostermeier talks of his work on Shakespeare in terms of its close
189 See also Erne (2003), in which he attempts to distinguish between Shakespeare’s literary and
theatrical writing. But as literary and theatrical modes alter so too do valuations of how text registers the imprint of its intended use. These are not ontological or transhistorical properties.
190 Barthes repeatedly asserted that texts, even when maintaining stable materiality, alter when you
read them—see “The Death of the Author”, 1967; “From Work to Text”, 1977. In this respect, texts self-modify as much as bodies do, whereas Bennett argues this condition as a unique property of the human body, and thus of the actor—able to ‘stick in the craw’ of hermeneutic space/textuality (2005: 181).
affiliation with its source text and author. His is a far gentler, more consensual attitude to Shakespeare’s “authority” than many of his iconoclast forebears.
The scholarly analysis of “authority” (see Worthen 1997) carried out in Shakespeare studies in the late twentieth century proves useful in making sense of the these directors’ insistence that their work engages with text, and critics’ perceptions that
they displace an “authorised” text with a heavily “authored” directorial event.191
Unmasking “authority” as contingent and laden with ideological baggage helps us
subvert the logic of Krug’s assertion that Ostermeier’s Hamlet shows the results of a tussle
between director and playwright in which the director triumphs. It cracks wide open the assumption that identifying a production’s authority in relation to its textual raw material is a straightforward and transparent act, quickly recognisable according to the self-evident standards that govern “fidelity”. As Abigail Rokison recently illustrated, “Claims to authenticity, have pervaded the sphere of Shakespearean performance since the late 1600s. A proximity to the Shakespearean text, the Shakespearean stage or even the man himself has been cited as a measure of authority and seen as providing a stamp of validation” (2014: 359). This sheer historical variety of measures of “authority” exposes their protean responsiveness to the ideological pressures of the day. Although this knowledge prompted Worthen to reject “authority” completely, seeking to liberate performance from the fetters of a restrictive textuality (see Worthen 2003), Ostermeier and Mitchell continuously invoke it, maintaining strong links to the texts and the authors that impel their performance work.
Indeed, both Ostermeier and Mitchell ground their processes in textual authority, tracing their innovations back to firmly established roots in the texts themselves, and as such complicate the notion of an “auteur”. An “auteur” logic relies on a stable standard of “authority” whose contingency has yet to be unmasked. Embracing its contingency, however, allows limitless forms of authority to be devised,
191 Such criticisms are frequently leveled at Mitchell (for a representative sample see Billington
2007; Kettle 2006), and, as we have seen, have also surfaced in German reviews of Ostermeier’s work on Shakespeare.
and new links between text and practice to be forged. Ostermeier’s work on Shakespeare shows that having an actor speak a playwright’s words is but one among many of the ways in which text might author(ise) performance. For those of us interested in text, the new ways Ostermeier and Mitchell discover of relating to it are vital and urgent. In Bulman’s sense of the word, they are revitalising, and blast right through persistent definitions of textuality as a limiting agency tied tightly to hermeneusis. Turning from this discussion, we can now examine the concrete ways in which Ostermeier achieves this in his work, showing how the sensual and performative force of his “director’s theatre” is grounded in a careful engagement with the literary material on which it is founded, rather than being predicated on its break from the written word.