ABSTRACT
Nothing is more ephemeral than theatre. Last night’s show has vanished almost as if it had never been. True, the costumes are gathering dust in the wardrobe, there are a few photographs in ageing scrapbooks and a yellowing poster or two with their corners curling over. But not much else beyond memories. Yet if our present is to mean anything to us, we must know
about how we arrived here. If you don’t understand what happened yesterday, you will not be able to understand today. And in living, as someone has pointed out, we all operate as historians all the time: we try to understand what has happened in our own lives so that we can make sensible choices about the present and the future for ourselves. The same holds good for the theatre. We need to make sense of the past. Theatre history therefore first and foremost explains what
theatre is at the moment. It is worth studying in order to understand better how theatre speaks. Theatre interprets and images human experience: the theatre historian scrutinises how it does this so that not only will old plays be adequately appreciated, but – more importantly – so we can learn from our forbears and thereby make better theatre ourselves. More than that, theatre history
attempts to stimulate appreciation of the special qualities of the theatrical event, and illuminates the relationship between that event and the wider world within which it happens. Michel Foucault (1926-84) urged that we should describe the
present by analysing the forces which have created it. Following Nietzsche, he called this the ‘genealogy’ of our time. The questions such an approach would seem to demand of theatre include, What is theatre for? How does it intervene in reality? What is dependent on it, or what does it depend on? Though questions like these can hardly be answered in a chapter – or a book – like the present one, nevertheless some of the things said below may begin to address such problems. Perhaps the first thing to say about history is that it is usually
recorded through narrative. Narrative seems to be a way of thinking which is inherent in the way the human mind works. We explain things through narrative (X annoyed Y, so Y got angry and threw a stone which went through the window. The home owner appeared and chased X and Y down the road . . . ), which is why history is usually presented in such a mode. The problem is that a historical event, or even what happened between X, Y and the home owner, is not in fact a story: we tell it as if it was in order to be able to grasp it. The historian is on one level a teller of tales, like a dramatist. Narrative gives meaning to events, but there are dangers in this, as will become apparent later in this chapter. For now the comparison between historian and dramatist is worth pursuing, for both create narratives to explain cultural, political, even psychological realities. But how they tell the story is central to each of their projects, as a glance at a historical drama such as King Johan by John Bale (1495-1563) will demonstrate.
