Conclusion

In this study I have concentrated almost entirely on productions of Shakespeare I have seen live. This is a highly assailable position from which to write about theatre. To acknowledge it is to confess that one’s choices have been contingent upon the limitations of time, place and economics. ‘And so I begin by being unforgivably arbitrary’, ¹ says Gary Taylor of his choice to begin a chapter on recent Shakespeare production, in his ‘cultural history from the Restoration to the present’, with the Berliner Ensemble’s Troilus und Cressida. ‘The chapter might just as easily have begun with the Beijing-Shanghai Shakespeare festival of April 1986…but in April 1986 I was in Germany, not China.’ ² What Taylor’s whole project, Reinventing Shakespeare, suggests, however, is that many of the choices that have led to Shakespeare’s dramatic canonisation have been arbitrary, or at least culturally contingent as opposed to entirely predicated upon the genius of one man. If, as performance critics, we acknowledge contingency in this way, then, is it appropriate to privilege the live theatre performance over its more permanent, and thus more permanently readable, traces? By writing on performances at which I was present, do I fail to acknowledge the contingency and constructed nature of presence itself, sentimentally suggesting that ‘you had to be there’, in the live presence of the actor, soaking up the Magic of Theatre, experiencing a sacred encounter between performer and audience? To the extent that I am examining moments where theatrical illusion, the illusion of presence, appears to be at its strongest then yes, I am privileging the live moment. Central to these case studies and these live illusions are a series of moments where the theatre succeeds by failing, even in productions well received by traditional arbiters of theatrical taste: moments where it fails to transform the actor/Hamlet into the perfect revenge hero, where Sue Wilmington’s white box set fails to make the space outside the Other Place anything but a car park or where an audience member refuses Bolingbroke’s signal to stand, where voice, plus voice box, plus body don’t quite add up to what we recognise as human. Moments of live performance are what have enabled these speculations as to how far the foregrounding of actorly effort, the performance objective and the failed results of that effort might be integral to the meanings produced by the plays examined here. Moments of live performance are what have provoked me to think about how far the actor and his work are encoded in the literary results of early performance, and so moments of live performance are what I have offered the reader.