ABSTRACT
Drama was once studied simply as a branch of literature. Mary and Charles Lamb (1765-1847 and 1775-1834) even suggested that plays were preferable when thought of as stories, and published their Tales from Shakespeare to illustrate their opinion. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) argued that the reading of a play should be as rewarding as seeing it in the theatre. Chapter 1 of this book has perhaps shown something of how this attitude has been dispelled. Rightly or wrongly, the traditional playtext is no longer seen as the primary carrier of meaning in the theatre. But the primacy of the text was not easily destroyed, and the battle in the 1960s and 1970s to ‘save’ the theatre from irrelevance by downgrading the script as such, also led some members of the self-proclaimed avant-garde to suggest that a text was not needed at all. Nevertheless it is still true that the vast majority of play pro-
ductions begin with the text. It is also true that after the performance is over, all that is left is the text. The text is often a spur to production, and always a record of words spoken on the stage. However, we should enquire what we mean by ‘text’ in the context
of performance. It is no longer enough to suggest that ‘word’ refers simply to ‘words on the page’. A structuralist or semiotic definition
might urge that we should refer to a distinct theatre text that is the articulation in time and space of the multiplicity of signs produced. There are of course a huge number and variety of these, and they give theatre performance its unique density, not simplified by unexpected but typical discontinuities within it. Not all the sign systems operate all the time, and during any performance they are likely to start and stop, restart, slow down and so on without warning. The theatre text is therefore notably unstable. This chimes with the post-Derrida argument that the ‘uncer-
tainty principle’ of Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) may also be applied to text, that there is no stable centre when a text flows, that there is only discourse. Derrida argued that the ‘centre’ is a function, not a ‘place’. This is a profoundly subversive idea, because power and authority can only be exercised from some sort of centre, and it legitimises chance, uncertainty and fluidity in performance. In turn, such factors – or, better, practices – destabilise notions of text as a fixed entity, as is demonstrated in the work of, for example, John Cage, the Fluxus Group or most manifestations of live art. Thus, meaning is ‘played’, or ‘performed’, and is different at each playing. Each performance – each text – offers new meanings. ‘Text’ in this sense is a word for anything which is ‘inscribed’: an ‘inscription’ being a way of ordering or packaging pieces of experience. It covers ritual, tradition, the law, the military hierarchy, the political process and much more. It connotes the urge to authority, and substitutes for the ‘centre’, the focus of authority. We note that the word ‘author’ is included in ‘authority’. Creating text is in this argument a bid for power. However, Roland Barthes (1915-80) showed that the text was ‘a
multi-dimensional space’. Creating text may be a bid for authority, but meaning only happens in the process of communicating, the series of images produced by the text only acquire significance when the spectator reacts to them. This process is at its most complicated in the theatre, because there the communication is not simply between a writer and a reader, the performer intervenes between these two. That is why it is legitimate to talk of the performance as the text. Or rather, to say that the dramatic text exists in two forms – the written text and the performance – whose relationship is unpredictable, unstable and subject to the processes of production. The playwright then is perhaps the provider of
starting-points. Her initial text is what makes the actor get up and begin work; what the actor does is to create a second text, related to the first, but different in kind. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) described how beyond the words of the most moving Greek drama, was also the tone of voice, ‘the uplifted hand or tense muscle’ of the actor, and so on. This and the following chapter of this book concentrate on the
first kind of text, the written text, the playwright’s text; Chapters 5, 6 and 7 on the creation of the second, performance text.
