ABSTRACT
For a text to give birth to a performance is no easy matter. What the first-night audience sees is already an end-product, for it is too late to observe the preparatory work of the director: the spectators are presented with a gurgling or howling infant, in other words they see a performance which is more or less successful, more or less comprehensible, in which the text is only one of several components, others being the actors, the space, the tempo. It is not possible to deduce from the performance the work that led up to it; mise en scène, as we understand it, is the synchronic confrontation of signifying systems, and it is their interaction, not their history, that is offered to the spectator and that produces meaning.
