Drama/Theatre/Performance

Simon Shepherd, Mick Wallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134565283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

What is implied when we refer to the study of performing arts as 'drama', 'theatre' or 'performance'? Each term identifies a different tradition of thought and offers different possibilities to the student or practitioner. This book examines the history and use of the terms and investigates the different philosophies, politics, languages and institutions with which they are associated. Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis:

• analyze attitudes to drama, theatre and performance at different historical junctures
• trace a range of political interventions into the field(s)
• explore and contextualise the institutionalisation of drama and theatre as university subjects, then the emergence of 'performance' as practice, theory and academic disciplines
• guide readers through major approaches to drama, theatre and performance, from theatre history, through theories of ritual or play, to the idea of performance as paradigm for a postmodern age
• discuss crucial terms such as action, alienation, catharsis, character, empathy, interculturalism, mimesis, presence or representation in a substantial 'keywords' section.

Continually linking their analysis to wider cultural concerns, the authors here offer the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide available to a vibrant, fast-moving field and vigorous debates about its nature, purpose and place in the academy.

PART ONE
A GENEALOGY

1
DRAMA AND THEATRE AS UNIVERSITY SUBJECTS

The first drama degree programme in the United States was established in 1914. The first English university drama department was founded in 1947. Why was there such a long gap? In exploring the answer to that question, we shall encounter not only different attitudes to university drama as an institution, but also different conceptions of the subject itself.
This will begin our book-length process of mapping out a range of understandings of drama and theatre.

Let us start with the founding moment in England, and then return to the United States. That first department was established at Bristol. It had two main aims: ‘to study drama as a living projection of a text and to tackle social problems created by rapid developments in popular dramatic entertainment’. There was no intention to train students for the theatre.
They were, however, to study the subject ‘not only as literature but also in terms of the arts, architecture and social conditions, of the theatre’ (Wickham in James 1952: 106–7).

In large part these aims followed from the conditions which made possible the formation of the department. Internally Bristol already had enthusiasts and experts in drama in its departments of modern and ancient languages. Externally there was the presence in the city both of the Old Vic, at the Theatre Royal, with its theatre school, and the BBC; Bristol’s Vice-Chancellor was involved with both organisations. The focus on text was a development from the sort of work done in language departments; the interest in developments in ‘dramatic entertainment’ was more the province of the BBC. But it went beyond that. Looking back from the moment of his inauguration in 1961 as the first professor, Glynne Wickham said that, in bringing the department into existence, Bristol ‘happened to give form and substance to something which in a multitude of vague, unexplored, and unexpressed ways was becoming of interest to people too numerous and too widespread to count’ (1962: 44). There was a sense that, in the mid-1940s, drama was something on a larger social agenda, and the formation of a university department was meeting a social need.

As the first such department, however, there was nevertheless uncertainty about its role and remit. It had to define itself, and did so by positioning itself in relation to three points of reference. We shall look at each of these, and argue that university drama’s habitual range of concerns and debates flows from its institutional positioning and history, much as the curriculum aims of the Bristol department more locally flowed from the interests of those who supported it.

The first point of reference for British university drama in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the USA (see Jackson (2004) for an account of the emergence of Theatre Studies in the context of the changing social mission of the universities). In 1912 George Pierce Baker had introduced play-writing into his English class at Harvard, and established a venue in which to perform the plays. The first drama programme leading to a degree was, however, established at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1914. In 1926 the first professional graduate programme was started at Yale. But although it was longer established American university drama was perceived as being rather different from what the British were trying. It was seen as more practice-oriented.

The matter had come up at a Colston symposium at the University of Bristol in April 1951. The topic was ‘the Responsibility of the Universities to the Theatre’, significantly explained as ‘less a venture in pure scholarship than the previous symposia’ (James 1952: v). One of the contributors, Sawyer Falk, described the American system. He stressed that drama was regarded as a respectable academic subject and that American departments were concerned with educating ‘complete men and women’ rather than producing graduates ‘merely fitted for jobs’. But, while a theatre vocation was not the principal aim, he argued that it is ‘no more unreasonable for drama departments to turn out practising theatre artists than for a medical school to turn out practising doctors’. Where curricula contained courses in both ‘content’ and ‘performance’, he noted a snobbery with respect to the latter. At the same time he was careful to define which crafts are proper to university study and which are not: stage design and costume but not carpentry and make-up (in James 1952: 8–11).

Now although in Falk’s statement the principle of a humane education was uppermost, Tyrone Guthrie, in his introduction to the volume of seminar papers, says ‘some of us were loud in disapproval of what was considered Falk’s over-emphasis on practical work. . . . Dramatic technique, we maintained, is a specialist occupational study and such a study belongs not to the university, but in its elementary stages to a technical school, or, in more specialised form, to the dramatic academies.’ After further discussion of the relationship of university drama to professional practice, which mainly consists of students watching it, Guthrie concludes: ‘The function of the university in relation to drama, then, seems to me to be to supply a theory of drama. . . . We want from the universities a theoretic, philosophic basis to which practical activity may be related’ (in James 1952: 2). Here, four years after its establishment as a university discipline, the subject is displaying the anxieties around the proper role of practice which were to remain with it. The ‘loud’ disapproval of Falk seems to suggest a nervousness, in the context of text-based university humanities departments, about both craft and vocational training.

Those humanities departments themselves provided a second point of reference for the newly emerging university drama. At Bristol, as we have noted, they played a part in the forming of the new department, but the link was also more generally acknowledged. One of those at the Colston seminar in 1951 was Neville Coghill, who taught English at Oxford University and was active in student theatrical production (Bentley 1948: preface). He suggested university drama could be compared both with History and with the more recently established Modern Languages and English Language and Literature. In making this comparison Coghill was trying to define the quality of mind necessary for, and developed by, study of drama at university.

He contrasts the proportions of ‘rational knowledge’ with ‘intuitive perception’ in different disciplines. In historical studies the intuitive is subordinated to the rational, which ‘gives toughness and teaches accuracy and patience to the student’. The balance differs in English Literature where the proper object of study is the imaginative work of the poet rather than historical fact. Nonetheless, the study of literatures encourages ‘the pursuit of an exact and detailed factual knowledge’. The meaning of a play, however, can only be discovered in rehearsal and production. Thus, ‘unless a reader is endowed with a faultless three-dimensional imagination he cannot read the real style of a play off a printed page’. When he uses the word ‘style’ Coghill is trying to put his finger on something that marks the difference between arts and sciences. It is a slippery word, and its definition depends on something equally slippery. Style is primarily concerned with ‘quality’, thus ‘To understand style . . . is to perceive the quality of a proposition over and above the proposition itself.’ Coghill is suggesting something that is separate from the division between the factual and the imaginative: ‘style’ (in James 1952: 41–3).

He concludes that the study of drama must ‘involve a greater number of subjective judgements not amenable to the discipline of thought in any convincing way’. It provides ‘a less rigorous training than literature’. At Oxford, for example, the teaching of Medieval and Old English literatures is partly designed to guarantee ‘toughness’. What detracts from this is ‘pleasure’, and pleasure is especially associated with drama, which is ‘aimed at entertainment more whole-heartedly than non-dramatic literature’. That said, drama has ‘a particular contribution to make within the field of literature’ and needs to be understood in production. While literature in general reflects the ‘perpetual flow’ of human thought and history, however, dramatic literature of any excellence is ‘discontinuous’. Its students can only attain ‘a very patchy acquaintance with human development’ (in James 1952: 45–7).

The intellectual distinctions identified by Coghill seemed to be institutionalised in the early years of the Bristol department. Looking back on those years from 1961, Wickham described how the department’s syllabus moved from the study of plays and dramatists to places, scenes and machines, and then to audiences. Those who were hostile said that their objects of enquiry belonged more properly with architects, scientists, economists and social historians. ‘Drama, in short, was not a subject; simply a collection of fragments, more or less interesting’, but all ‘peripheral’ to already existing disciplines (Wickham 1962: 46). In a later account of the development of the discipline Rose suggests that this attitude to drama led into another area of worry, namely that the more ‘intuitive’ engagement with performed drama was not properly academically assessable, which in turn led to imbalances in the teaching (1979: 13). Just as we observed, in the references to American departments, the apparent formation of a persisting anxiety in the discipline around practice, so again we need to observe the roots of another persisting feature. This is not so much Rose’s point about assessment, though that remains important: it is instead the fixation on an apparently clear distinction between facts (textual, historical) and feeling (intuited, subjective). This connects with the idea that drama, when it is trying to be intellectually ‘respectable’ (Wickham’s word), ceases to be a discipline. It borrows from the domains of literature, architecture, sociology, etc. without observing their intellectual protocols. It is a ‘collection of fragments’. Although it has been flipped on its head, this sort of observation has persisted into the 1990s: some proponents of Performance Studies argue that the discipline’s strength lies precisely in its eclectic nature.

Wickham, back in 1961, had a different answer. Describing the hostility of other disciplines he said: ‘we were meeting face to face that fragmentation of knowledge, that artificial divorcing of one aspect of a subject from another, implicit in specialization, that division of a society against itself that results in anarchy’. Specialisation ignores everything a student should be interested in: ‘instead of preparing himself to understand his own society, its traditions and its prospects, he is systematically isolated from it, insidiously dragooned into becoming, as a graduate, part of a governing class . . . and cut off from the larger part of society whose dreams and struggles propelled him into a university in the first place’ (Wickham 1962: 48). One of the reasons for having drama on an undergraduate curriculum is that it escapes this damaging specialisation. In fact it can do, but even better, everything Coghill had claimed for literature ten years before: ‘drama can treat of Western civilization as a single homogeneous tradition, not like English literature beginning more than halfway through, not artificially divided on a geographical basis like modern languages, not split in two like the self-contained worlds of modern and ancient history’ (p. 50). This homogeneity, this access to wholeness through study, has a beneficial effect on the person doing the studying: ‘within an arts discipline the hands can be reunited with the heart and with the head; the whole human personality working as a coordinated entity. It is no coincidence that modern psychiatry has discovered a therapeutic value in dramatic activity’ (p. 51). And there is another value attached to drama study at university which is even more important – for this is welfare-state Britain in post-war reconstruction: drama ‘offers a forum for the study and discussion of moral values – one of the few surviving forums left to us where the duke’s interest and the dustman’s can be discussed, not individually and separately, but as mutually related within the framework of society – a commonweal’ (p. 53).

There is, however, more in what Wickham was saying than the enthusiasm of welfare-state democracy. There was the third of our points of reference against which new university drama was positioning itself. Wickham’s argument for a curriculum that makes a psychically whole person who then recognises their social duty is an argument derived from pre-war educationalists.

In 1921, the Board of Education had set up an Adult Education Committee. Adult Education had grown from the 1880s university ‘extension’ movement, which sought to extend the benefits of university education to, for instance, those members of the working class interested in their self-improvement. From the Committee it commissioned a report on The Drama in Adult Education (1926). Representing the Board in these discussions was the amateur theatre historian, Sir Edmund Chambers. One of the witnesses, playwright and director Harley Granville Barker, said he believed the present interest was ‘an endeavour not merely after self-expression, but after the far more complex co-operative expression that drama provides’. Other witnesses said that ‘class work only develops one faculty, the intellectual, while the production of a play necessitates the training of the whole man’ (in Rose 1979: 5). The Committee recommended to universities and local education authorities ‘the promotion of classes in the literature of the drama’: ‘In the union of serious study under class conditions with the subsequent production of the plays studied we find drama at its highest as an instrument of education’ (in Rose 1979: 5). While welcoming the School of Dramatic Study and Research at East London College (where Allardyce Nicoll worked) and the University of London Diploma in Dramatic Art, its main recommendation was that lectureships in the Art of the Theatre be established in the extra-mural departments of universities (Rose 1979: 5).

The strange status of drama – official but always external – is demonstrated at Oxford. The University had contained within itself, since the 1880s, a strong tradition of student drama (as had Cambridge), for which there was support from lecturers. But this work was, crucially, extra-curricular. Like much of the drama work nationally, the driving force came from, and was associated with, amateurs. When the University explored the viability of introducing theatre studies into the undergraduate curriculum, the Report of the Oxford Drama Commission (1945) concluded that it was unsuitable (Granville Barker had given the cue, by distinguishing between actors who immerse themselves and students who remain ‘detached’ and ‘critical’). On the other hand, Oxford was very happy for drama to remain a part of its Adult Education work.

While training of the ‘whole man’ was the province of Adult Education, the defining qualities of undergraduate education were a focus on critical ability and specialism. The assumption about drama’s suitability for the first but not the second was precisely what Wickham felt he was facing at Bristol. His move, in his inaugural address in 1961, was to turn this on its head. As we have seen he caught the spirit of his times by arguing that university education in a civilised ‘commonweal’ should actually be about wholeness, and the vehicle for that was drama. It set the path for departments to come. The programme for the Manchester department, founded in 1961, said that ‘the drama student’s education is pursued as much through the heart and the body as it is through the head’; and similarly the Hull department, 1963, said that their formal teaching was reinforced by practical work, so that ‘head, heart, and hand are engaged at one and the same time’ (in Rose 1979: 20, 21).

For the drama departments the Adult Education focus on the ‘whole man’ may have been a useful way of defining themselves within university culture. Adult Education itself still remained an outsider, however. At Leeds University there was, again, a strong amateur tradition of drama, but the initiative towards a drama department came in 1960 from George Hauger from Adult Education and Arthur Wise from Education. Their proposed syllabus put alongside work on performer, audience and genres consideration of sociology, psychology and philosophy. The University decided the time was not right for a separate department, though it compromised by funding a new fellowship in Drama. Significantly the unashamedly unliterary department envisaged by Hauger and Wise never came into being; Leeds drama became part of the English department (Kane nd: 8–12).

The Leeds case brings back to the surface something which was neatly masked by Wickham’s hands-and-head rhetoric. It is the anxiety around the place within university drama of education and social commitment versus analysis of drama’s art. This anxiety can manifest itself in arguments as to what the institutional place of history and textual analysis should be; and whether or not the proper study of drama should be focused on that which is both contemporary and of social ‘relevance’ (to use a favoured word).

The re-uniting of hands and head, the experience of wholeness, has a major attraction within the discourses of drama, because it offers to reconcile with one another the other potential oppositions we have noted: theory versus practice, distinction between facts and feeling, drama as both eclectic and collection of fragments. Yet not long after it appeared on the scene, the grounds for its credibility began to crumble. The rhetoric of wholeness came out of a long liberal Adult Education tradition, reaching back to the mission of 1880s reformist Anglicanism and its ideology of the ‘whole’ person. It gathered urgency to itself in the days of post-war reconstruction of a new democratic Britain. But by the early 1970s such ideas appeared to be sentiment. By the...