The Radical in Performance

Between Brecht and Baudrillard

Baz Kershaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136284717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Radical in Performance investigates the crisis in contemporary theatre, and celebrates the subversive in performance. It is the first full-length study to explore the link between a western theatre which, says Kershaw, is largely outdated and the blossoming of postmodern performance, much of which has a genuinely radical edge. In staying focused on the period between Brecht and Baudrillard, modernity and postmodernism, Baz Kershaw identifies crucial resources for the revitalisation of the radical across a wide spectrum of cultural practices.
This is a timely, necessary and rigorous book. It will be a compelling read for anyone searching for a critical catalyst for new ways of viewing and practising cultural politics.

Part I

Theatre and performance

On the cusp of a paradigm shift

Chapter 1

The limits of theatre

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

Ionesco

An afternoon at the theatre

I was nineteen and a budding internal exile when I first went to a proper theatre. Four years of working in a Manchester factory as an engineering apprentice had become intolerable, so I’d followed my friend Alex the civil servant to the south coast where he’d got a new post and rented a caravan on a cliff-top overlooking the wide blue stretch of the English Channel. Once there, I attached myself to a bit of genteel glamour, I thought, by getting a job as a waiter in the poshest hotel, reading the ‘quality’ Sunday newspapers, and finding myself a German girlfriend. Going to a real theatre seemed like another logical step in putting a distance between myself and the drab worthiness of Northern engineering.

As I was working evenings I had to go to a matinée performance, and alone because my chambermaid partner Ingrid was on the afternoon shift. I think it was a mid-week afternoon, but certainly it was bright sunshine and hot as hell on the promenade, which was probably why the theatre was packed. I remember lots of bright floral dresses and brass-buttoned blazers with white open-necked shirts, and the grey and silver hair of age, a whole sea of it surrounding me as I sat in the middle of the dimly-lit stalls – I’d been determined to get a ‘good’ seat – feeling brazenly under-dressed and embarrassingly under-age. The accents around matched those of the people who, usually with hardly a glance at me, ordered wines I’d never heard of from the posh hotel’s dreary cellars. I literally crossed my fingers in the hope that if any of them were waiting in this audience they wouldn’t recognise me out of my waiter’s uniform. Such disjunctions of region, generation and class confirmed me uncomfortably as an exile in the making, an impostor bluffing his way into an alien scene. So the show, which I knew nothing about except the title, came as a revelation and a devastating spur. It was Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Billy Liar.

Only two things about the production itself stick like fresh burrs in my memory now. I have a vague sense of the setting as Northern working class that focuses indistinctly around a dark-wood, double-fronted side-board against flowery wallpaper. That sideboard and wallpaper merge with those in my paternal grandmother’s front parlour, which became her dying-room when I was four. I would stand by her high bed, chin lightly brushing the candlewick counterpane, her barky hand tendrilled gently round mine, amazed at the map of her old, old face. A silent falling away of working-class history in the proud but mean two-up two-down terraced house, repeated millions of times in the industrial towns and cities of Northern England. Her kind of dying was the beginning of the end for the class that forged the industrial revolution, whose labour built the British Empire, and into which I was born.

The irony that a flimsy wood and canvas theatrical set could carry such a charge emerges only in retrospect from that summer seaside show at the beginning of the 1960s – at the time I was too busy empathising with Billy the liar. But now the personal and political loss it signals hovers in bleak contrast to the hopes that sustained my class and generation then. Was it some lie we were beginning to live? Was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous claim that ‘you’ve never had it so good’ just one of the early signs ushering in the age of consumerism and the commodity, the hyper-real, and the loss of history: the whole glitzy cultural gamut of post-modernity itself? Or was the kernel of hope anyway buried deep in the ephemeral?

Billy Liar stands excited in front of the sideboard, carried by a full flight of words into a vision of his own making. He was a mad dreamer in a chequered sleeveless pullover, failing completely to put one over on his real auditors, those of the white and silver hair, and so becoming a figure of pity and fun. I remember deeply resenting the audience’s patronising sniggers, because I was enthralled by the dancing pyrotechnics of the language and the choreography of energy and the sheer love of fantasy that tumbled out of that actor’s ecstatic delivery. Here was a glimpse into a world of the imaginary unfettered, a creative hands-on promise of Oz, and the best response my elderly neighbours could manage was a cynical snobbery. Well, they were not going to stop me from crossing into the kingdom of youthful imagination. It would be my generation that flew past the old constraints to make a new kind of world and a new kind of art, and, unlike Billy, we would do it without lying. In the sticky heat of a middle-class and ageing theatre, in a country of impossible contrasts, there seemed everything to play for.

Theatre, power and authority

My lonely initiation into theatre on that sweltering afternoon confirmed me as an imagination addict, but also marked my psychic card, possibly forever, against the pretensions of Western theatre culture. Since then I have never felt entirely at home in theatre buildings, even when I had every ‘right’, as a bona fide professional theatre worker or a tenured academic researcher, to be there. One explanation for this can be found in Henri Lefebvre’s idea of abstract space, which frames theatre largely as a ‘space of domination’, shaped by the ruling ideologies of society, made for purposes of power and control that too often work against the interests of the majority (Lefebvre 1991: 49–52; Nield 1996: 208). In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu sees theatre as producing ‘a miracle of predestination’, through which different groups – playwrights, actors, critics, audiences – are constructed according to hierarchical principles (1984: 234). From these perspectives a theatre building is not so much the empty space of the creative artist, nor a democratic institution of free speech, but rather a kind of social engine that helps to drive an unfair system of privilege. The theatre achieves this through ensnaring every kind of audience in a web of mostly unacknowledged values, tacit commitments to forces that are beyond their control, and mechanisms of exclusion that ensure that most people stay away. Hence, performances in theatre buildings are deeply embedded in theatre as a disciplinary system. This chapter explores that idea through an investigation of the new disciplines of theatre that have developed in the late twentieth century.

My analysis will concentrate on three main aspects of contemporary theatre as a disciplinary system. Firstly, I will consider theatre as a process of audience training that strives to echo and reinforce shifts in modes of perception and reception happening in the wider cultural economy: my focus here will be on the ways that increasingly theatre has participated in consumerism and commodifìcation. Secondly, I will analyse theatre as a system of cultural production that aims to shape the formations of society, such as class, gender, generation, race and so on: here I will investigate how British cultural policy has influenced the construction and constitution of theatre audiences. And thirdly, I will explore theatre as a method of spatial indoctrination that aims to embed normative social values in the behaviour of its participants: for this I will draw on performance theory to anatomise the pleasurable submission produced by theatre buildings. These aspects of theatre, of course, always tend to be mutually reinforcing, holistically modelling changes in the distribution and circulation of power in the wider socio-political order.

I shall argue that, during the past forty years or so, the networks of theatre buildings in post-industrial societies have participated in the generation of a powerfully seductive nightmare that conforms to Michel Foucault’s idea of the social disciplines:

…the disciplines characterise, classify, specialise; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchise individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.

(1977: 223)

This claim may seem paradoxical, given that the global ‘success’ of late capitalism has created a much wider variety of theatres, arts emporia and entertainment centres. The public can now choose from a greater range of types of theatre than ever before. But this new pluralism, as we shall see, masks a deadening cultural conformity. So while the onset of the post-modern seems to have enhanced the available pleasures of performance, it has also blurred the disciplinary functions of theatre, submerging its similarities to other systems of control in society. And the disciplinary nature of these wider systems itself remains relatively invisible, even though they spectacularly promote new normative values through the way they shape the ideological modalities of the social. Hence, the developing theatre estate is integral to the disciplines of late capitalist consumerism, paralleling the spread of shopping malls, heritage sites and other tourist venues. All this and much more in contemporary society is geared to the production of what Foucault resonantly calls ‘insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities’, great chasms of economic or cultural or social inequality, which prevent people from recognising the full extent of their common ground.

In line with this, I will argue that increasingly theatre has become a social institution from which equality and mutual exchange – the practice of citizenship through common critique, say – is all but banished. Far from showing us the shape of new freedoms, the theatre estate in Britain and elsewhere has transformed itself into a disciplinary market-place devoted to the systematic evacuation or diffusion of disruptive agencies, oppositional voices and radical programmes for progressive social change. This has been part of a paradoxical global trend in which the appearance of new freedoms in the expression of difference is fostered under a cross-cultural flag of encroaching conformism. To illustrate this paradox I will briefly analyse one of the prime aesthetic movers in this historical shift: the international musical.

An ‘innocent conspiracy’

The olive skin undulates seductively under the pulsing multicoloured lighting as the girls gyrate in Dreamland. The costumes are simply maximum-exposure bikini, high-cut over the hips and low-cut between the breasts, but the hair-dos are exotic-elaborate and the strappy shoes have stacked heels that throw the body into a provocative pose. The music pounds to a Western beat that quickly has the audience in the plush auditorium tapping their feet and clapping their hands in happy syncopation. But the girls mostly dance with their backs to them, because there is another audience upstage which is freer in its reaction, leering and whooping and urging the dancers into ever more erotic shimmies and shakes. This second audience is fully clad, for the most part in heavy boots, battle fatigues, dog-tags and holstered guns, clutching tubes of beer and grooving with the action. The soldiers are high on the women. The Western men are consuming the ‘Oriental’ chicks.

Figure 2 The bar-girls dance in Dreamland, Miss Saigon, 1989

Note: The GI audience faces the real audience and the dancing women are surrounded by an ambivalent gaze

Source: Photograph by Michael Le Poer Trench. Reproduced by kind permission of Cameron Mackintosh and Michael Le Poer Trench

This is the scene in the Vietnamese night-club that opens one of the most successful musicals of the twentieth century: Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s Miss Saigon. The show was premiered at the Drury Lane Theatre in London in September 1989, but advance sales ensured that it had already grossed £5 million before the first audience witnessed the Dreamland dance. The London production celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1999 and the new millennium will probably see it enjoying many more. There are no statistics available for the show alone, but it certainly played a significant part in the phenomenal economic success of the musical on the metropolitan stage in the early 1990s. For example, between 1989 and 1993 the modern musical’s percentage share of total box office takings for London theatre rose from 35 per cent to 50 per cent (£53.9 million to £107.3 million in cash terms). In 1993 this represented a 42 per cent share of total attendance at the city’s theatres, or about 5.5 million people. One in three of these, or 1.8 million people, were tourists from overseas (Dunlop and Eckstein 1994). Given this, plus productions of the show staged in many capital cities of the world, and Miss Saigon – together with other so-called mega-musicals such as Les Miserables, Cats and Phantom of the Opera – can justifiably be called a global phenomenon, a crucial cosmopolitan part of the international cultural industries in a late capitalist, post-modern world.

The show is global in a number of other senses, too. First, it is set during the first war that figured on the international tourist map. In 1967 Mary McCarthy described the spectacle as starting even before her plane landed at Saigon airport: ‘the tourists, bound for Tokyo or Manila, were able to watch a South Vietnamese hillside burning while consuming a “cool drink” served by the hostess’ (1968: 12). Second, its story deals with the cross-cultural fate of a bui doi, or ‘dust of life’ as they are called in Vietnam, one of the many thousands of Vietnamese children fathered by American GIs: will he be left to the chances of war or flown out to a safe and opulent future in the United States? Third, successful casting of the show depends on the recruitment of an international troupe: for the first production performers were drawn from the USA, England, the Philippines, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan and Holland (Behr and Steyn 1991: 141). From the outset Miss Saigon was designed by its producer for global distribution:‘…Cameron Mackintosh is internationalising the musical, looking for collaborators beyond the West End to Europe, North America, the Philippines even…’ (Behr and Steyn 1991: 132 – their emphasis).

The global positioning of Miss Saigon, like other international musicals, is crucial to how it operates as a commodity and as a key indicator of the relentless drive to commodification in Western theatre. But commodification, as we shall see in more detail shortly, always aims to disguise its central purpose, to produce a product with invisible ideological seams. It follows that one of the best ways to discover how commodification works in theatre is to identify faults in the way the fabric of a show has been put together. In the case of Miss Saigon this means an investigation of the cross-cultural controversies raised by Cameron Mackintosh’s production. This in turn will shed a little initial light on the show’s participation in the paradigms of both modernism and post-modernism.

Significantly, it was not its treatment of the Vietnam War as fit setting for a musical that caused a furore when Miss Saigon was planned to open on Broadway in 1991, but the casting of the character of the Engineer, the part-French, part-Vietnamese owner of the Dreamland night-club that supplies prostitutes for the GIs. In London the Engineer was played with great success by Jonathan Pryce, who to achieve the requisite Eurasian appearance initially used prosthetic eyepieces and bronzing lotion. When Cameron Mackintosh proposed that Pryce play the part in New York, Asian and other members of the actors’ union AEA (American Equity Association) protested against the granting of a visa to Pryce, arguing that it raised an ‘issue of racism’ and that ‘It is time for…the Asian American community to stand in the way of yellowface…and…such an abomination of casting naively’ (Behr and Steyn 1991: 182). Here was a dispute about the rights of the minority to protect the interests of their difference – a central theme of post-modernism – apparently based on an appeal to a racial authenticity that was essentialist – a central aspect of modernism. But what triggered the dispute was the way in which racial thresholds, in the AEA’s view, had been unacceptably transgressed by the commodification of the actor. For Cameron Mackintosh it was essential that Jonathan Pryce should play the part in New York because he had been a major factor in the highly profitable commercial success of the show in London. Again, key aspects of post-modernism – that appearance has taken the place of the real, that many subject positions are available to the individual – were placed in acute tension with modernist principles – such as the integrity of the artist and the inviolability of art.

It is not surprising that a commercial show that was so crucially dependent on cross-cultural exchange between East and West, ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds, should run into these types of problem at the end of the twentieth century. By inevitably engaging with issues of colonialism in a context so dependent on commodification it risked producing ironic ethical turbulence at every turn. Hence, the video of the making of the first production, available for sale in theatres and some audio stores, shows auditions for the bar-girls in New York, Los Angeles, Hawaii and Manila, in which a row of white men gaze on a series of conventionally beautiful young Oriental women. Ironically, the film dwells on an image of the patriarchal colonial power that had created the setting of the show, the war in Vietnam, in the first place. But when it emerges that one of these young women had been a Vietnamese ‘boat person’, the editing tactfully cuts to another topic, as if the film-maker cannot bear too much reality.

When the Filipino women who were to play the bar-girls were brought to London for the original production, the collusion of commodification and oppression was thrown into exceptionally high relief by the way in which they were inveigled into semi-nudity on stage. In the authorised account of the show, its director, Nicholas Hytner, is reported as follows:

‘Here were young people from a chaste and pious Roman Catholic culture coming to late twentieth-century London for the first time where the idea of living through a sensual relationship on stage is no problem,’ says Hytner. An innocent conspiracy took place, with the co-operation of all the production team concerned. The costumes for the opening bar scene…were ‘not ready’ until the very last minute, just before the dress rehearsal. Even so, ‘they came as a real shock to them,’ said Hytner, and it took a good deal of eloquence on his part to persuade them to wear them. In the process, he lectured them on the art of the theatre. ‘I tried to explain that you don’t necessarily have to have three daughters in order to play King Lear.’

(Behr and Steyn 1991: 156–7 – my emphasis)

The recourse to Shakespeare to justify a deception alerts us to a monumental conflict. The women are considered so constrained by their culture that, apparently, they must be tricked into freedom. The resulting cross-cultural transition can be seen as a post-modern liberation, the dead hand of history and tradition lifted to release them into sensual pleasure and joy in appearance. ‘Once they realised they looked good, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: radical in Performance
• Introduction: pathologies of hope
• Part I Theatre and performance; on the cusp of a paradigm shift
• Part II Performance, participation, power
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index