Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive

Barbara Hodgdon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781136503238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of 'leftovers', it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance.

In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour – and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative – that is, they serve as sites of re-performance.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new.

Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

1

MATERIAL REMAINS AT PLAY¹

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors . . . /Are melted into air, into thin air; . . . /And like this insubstantial pageant faded,/Leave not a rack behind.” The point at which Prospero, anticipating Peggy Phelan by centuries, imagines the disappearance of performance gestures toward the birth of the theatrical archive. Although performance itself may exist merely as memory, dream, mis-recollection, the archives are jam-packed with the shells and shards left behind once actors evacuate the space and time of performance: costumes, properties, set models, sketches and drawings, sound recordings, photographs and documents—everything from rehearsal notes and call sheets to promptbooks and stage managers’ reports. Seated in the archive, an open box before me, I am looking at folders filled with tattered, rumple-edged pages not intended for my eyes² holding secrets that extend well beyond the familiar pre-planned territory of the backstage tour, its visit to costume and property shops promising an insider’s look at theatre-in-the-making. I hear voices: the deputy stage manager who records actors’ moves and occasionally talks back (writing “Give us a break, boss” beside Lysander’s plea to Theseus in the promptbook for Midsummer Night’s Dream’s first scene); the dresser detailing personal items and props to be set backstage for Ian McKellen’s Romeo (“tissues, Eau-de-cologne, gold spot, honey and spoon, brown packet with sugar in, money, letter, small dagger, large dagger, sword”); the stage manager’s report wearily noting that the front-of-house manager’s cat (once again) had walked across stage during a Coriolanus performance.³

Listening to these echoes resembles eavesdropping on one side of a conversation, fragments of performance process, intimations of a theatrical unconscious. These remains—traces endowed with agency—have a staying power in the promptbook as well as in other documents, tracking how written words link to performers’ bodies, gestures, behaviors. Rather than using them to reconstruct the performance, my interest lies in mapping the roles such remains play in performance culture.⁴ Taking a cue from Philip Auslander, I view the promptbook neither as giving indexical access to a theatrical past and thus bound up with ontology, nor as archival or documentary, but as a site of re-performance.⁵

In the archive with Antony and Cleopatra

On a close summer morning, stillness promising afternoon heat, I am sitting in the Shakespeare Centre Library, the promptbook for Peter Brook’s 1978 Antony and Cleopatra on the table before me. Weighing a bit over four pounds and showing signs of wear, it is an original: Trevor Williamson, the deputy stage manager (whose name appears on the book’s opening pages), constructed it. Used at Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre and also when the production transferred to London’s Aldwych Theatre, its pages have been hole-punched and put in a red plastic binder. The New Penguin Shakespeare’s front cover has been stuck on the binder’s cover; verso pages contain text pages; recto pages contain moves and choreography, written in pen and pencil, with occasional sketches of stage position.⁶ When I opened this promptbook, a single unbound sheet, written in a different hand than Williamson’s—a post-rehearsal addition?—fell out. It diagrammed positions and noted moves for an initial entry—“As houselights fade, whole company (not Octavia) enter UR and UL led by A + C”—that recalled and repeated the opening of Brook’s 1970 Midsummer Night’s Dream, where (with working lights still up) actors burst through two upstage doors, making the white box suddenly come alive, splashed with a rainbow of arcing colors. If, as Marvin Carlson suggests, live performances are already embodied ghosts, hostage to prior material exigencies, performances and also performance memories,⁷ then the material remains surviving performance are ghosts ghosting ghosts—theatre as palimpsest, eternally borrowing, rewriting, re-animating a past performance. As I reached the end of these working papers, I came across the Clown—played by Richard Griffiths, who doubled as the Messenger (another form of ghosting?). Even in this meticulously annotated promptbook, nothing elsewhere offers such a full choreography as Griffiths’ extended “asp dance,” comprising twenty numbered moves, ending with a fort-da game where looks, gestures and responses for both players receive a descriptive phrase or sentence—“Clown takes lid off basket; Cleopatra takes basket, looks in it, turns it upside down, there is nothing in it. Clown takes R shoe off his hand + produces a snake, puts it in basket; produces last snake from within his costume.” Although all the stage manager running the show needs to know is that a pattern of delays, false exits and returns marks and slows the scene, Williamson had an extraordinary sense of the rhythms and timing of this sequence. Why did he so fully document this comic business? Were directorial authority, Williamson’s eye for detail or both responsible for recording work that so enhances the performers’ authority, saving their invention? Whatever the case, this map of actors’ work, a way of telling that captures the orality of rehearsal practice in which words become keys, clues and provocations to action, is so densely detailed that, with a little help from costume, props (basket and snakes), proper shoes and red nose, I could stand in Griffiths’ footprints and re-perform his performance. (By putting myself into his traces, what once belonged to a particular player and performance now belongs (partially) to me: “Me—to play.”⁸ Archive, then, masquerading as theatre: evoking theatrical metaphors, Jacques Derrida writes, “The question of the archive is not . . . a question of the past. . . . It is a question of the future . . . the question of a response.”⁹

Just as a play script remains ripe for repetition—in Richard Schechner’s famous claim, “Performance means . . . twice-behaved behavior”¹⁰—for a potential future staging, the promptbook, its archival avatar, gestures toward a future reenactment. Imagining that possibility sparks a different though also surprisingly similar connection to what I saw from front of house. Now, seeing what makes up that performance and how it is being made, moving backward as well as forward, I am dancing on a different field of play. As I attempt to discern performance’s “walking shadows,” its subjects and subjectivities, I work toward a performative re-wrighting, re-imagining, replaying, the force of performance processes.

Prompting

Constructed during rehearsals and written in pencil, marked, remarked and over-marked—in the archive I also use a pencil, cross out, begin again, mimicking theatrical practice—the promptbook records rehearsal-room thinking. Even if such information may not appear overtly in performance, as gesture, behavior or speech, it is not only woven into and behind the thickness of what audiences see and hear but also enables retrieving what has been stored. A theatrical analogue to Freud’s mystic writing pad, wherein a palimpsestic past is overlaid by present time and timings, it combines essential aspects of memory.¹¹ This sense of the promptbook as always under reconstruction—fluent, unstable, impermanent, becoming itself through serial disappearances—makes it partially analogous to performance itself. Although more properly called the stage manager’s book,¹² since she or he is its end user, there is some advantage to retaining “prompt”—defined as inciting to action, to inspire, giving rise to thought, with connotations of being prompt, ordered and orderly—on time and up to speed. Even better, to my mind is promptscript, where “script” signals neither writing nor performance alone . . . neither archive nor repertoire alone, neither object nor performer alone, but moves between and among these ways of thinking through theatre, enacting a kind of joinery.¹³ Whereas reading a play allows one to linger, go back, skip ahead, a promptscript’s annotations impose a state of being-in-time (and also of being-in-space) onto the writing. Straddling time, existing in interim time, mean-time, exploratory time between rehearsal and live event, the promptscript sutures rehearsal time to performance time, tracks the afterlife of the written words that haunt all Shakespearean performances at the interface of theatrical process. As the promptscript takes on material form, it sculpts time not just through words but also through the various technologies of performance—acting as voice and movement, sound effects, music and light.¹⁴ And just as psychoanalysis has to do with remembering, repeating and working through, so too does the promptscript. Echoing the absent actors, evidence of their bodies is everywhere apparent, marked by trace movements of flesh, muscle, bone, blood and breath. Hot-wired to the actor’s performing body, the promptscript rewrites and so controls it,¹⁵ constituting the point of reference for the body’s work, which can be measured by as well as against it.

“In good time”: Richard III

Turning to the promptscript for Richard Eyre’s 1990 National Theatre production of Richard III, which resituated the play in a “what-if” 1930s Britain under Oswald Mosley’s rule¹⁶ and featured Ian McKellen as Richard, I read—again, with a difference—what once happened as re-happening: revival as reenactment or revenant.¹⁷ Just as Carolyn Steedman, reading Derrida, marks the grammatical tense of the archive as the future perfect—“when it will have been”¹⁸—that sense of time is endemic to Richard III, sound-bound to the verse and locked into the play’s structure, which moves from Richard’s “Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace./Have no delight to pass away the time/Unless to spy my shadow in the sun/And descant on mine own deformity” toward an ending that, exceeding closure, invokes the future, with Richmond’s vow to “Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,/With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days.” Within that continuum are multiple frames of time—historical time or, in this case, pseudo-historical time, the rhythms of actors’ movements in relation to the spatial architecture of the performance space and to other actors, the pulse and force of speech rhythms—all available for remarking at any one moment.¹⁹

In addition, how spectators sense time and perceive it as a mnemonic engages another sense of time: as Matthew Reason writes, “the performance wasn’t really what was happening on stage but what is happening in the minds and subsequently the memories of the audience.”²⁰ As Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience insists

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Lure of Leftovers
• 1 Material Remains at Play
• 2 Rehearsal Remains or Reading from the Margins: Actors’ Scripts
• 3 Storytelling, Anecdotes, Ethnography: The ESC’s Wars of the Roses
• 4 Dreaming in the Archives
• Looking Forward: an Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index