The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting

Tom Stern

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783486212
• eBook ISBN: 9781783486236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Performance Art

The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting is the ideal collection for students and scholars of aesthetics, theatre studies and the philosophy of art. Ever since the Greeks, philosophy and theatre have always enjoyed a close and often antagonistic relationship. Yet until recently relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between philosophy and theatre, drama or acting. This book offers a collection of new essays by renowned scholars on important topics. It includes a clear account of different contemporary debates and discussions from across the field, and includes coverage of significant figures in the history of philosophy (such as Schlegel, Hegel and Nietzsche) and contemporary philosophical analysis of the nature of theatre, drama and acting, as well as theatre's relation to philosophy and other arts.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Tom Stern

This book brings together a number of chapters in an area which is gaining increasing interest, namely the relationship between philosophy, on the one hand, and theatre, drama and acting, on the other. With some important exceptions, including books and papers by the contributors to this volume, philosophical investigations of theatre, drama and acting have been conspicuous in their absence from mainstream discussions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, at least until the last few years. There seems to be no particularly good reason for this. ‘Theatre’ and ‘drama’, for example, are wide-ranging terms which refer to many different practices.¹ But, however one defines them, they are not obscure or unpopular as forms of art. Nor are they evidently without philosophical interest: in the past, they did not fail to draw attention from philosophers, beginning, at least, with Plato and Aristotle and continuing, as some of these chapters indicate, long into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor, finally, can it be said that theatre and drama are not distinctive as forms of art: it is not as though a philosophical understanding of painting, poetry or film would exhaust what there is to say about theatre, drama or acting. The volume serves to highlight some of the ways in which theatre, drama and acting have provided and continue to provide material for philosophical discussion, as well as the ways in which philosophical discussion can illuminate and complicate our understanding and experience of theatre, drama and acting. The aim is not to provide an introduction or overview, whether historical or conceptual. Such volumes are already available.² Nor was it to pretend to comprehensiveness. Instead, what we find, reading through, is a series of interlocking questions and concerns based on the most recent research.

In this introduction, the aim will be to give an overview of the contents of these chapters, followed by a brief summary of the themes which emerge most prominently from the collection as a whole. The overview follows the section headings of the volume: ‘historical perspectives’; ‘acting’; ‘theatre as art’. These are intended to point the reader in the right direction. However, it will be clear, even from the titles of chapters, that many of them could happily sit beneath two or three of these section headings. The thematic discussion which follows the summaries therefore treats the collection as a whole.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the source for much of Jennifer Ann Bates’s chapter, presents its reader with a series of Aufhebungen, typically translated ‘sublations’. Since, to the average English speaker, ‘sublation’ means just as little as Aufhebung, it is easier to keep the German term, noting that it has three meanings, with Hegel often intending all three at once: lift up, destroy and preserve. To ask what the Aufhebung of some concept is is therefore, at its simplest, to ask about its next step – the next step that will in some sense preserve its features, but will also significantly transform it (i.e., to a point where the original version was ‘destroyed’) to a new and higher (‘lifted-up’) stage. Bates is using Hegel’s Phenomenology and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to ask about this next step in the case of nature and justice. Readers of Hegel who have been interested in his views of drama have naturally gravitated towards his lectures on aesthetics and on the Phenomenology’s account of Antigone which is found at the start of the chapter called ‘Spirit’. Bates focuses instead on the chapter immediately before the appearance of Antigone – ‘Reason’ – in which Hegel describes the development of the idea that the world is rational, and therefore that reason can be found in the world. The understanding of this claim develops in various directions, one early phase being the primitive scientific notion that reason can be adequately observed in bumps on the skull (phrenology). What ties these various unsatisfactory strands together and marks them as inadequate, Bates argues, is that they are merely ‘instinctive’ – that is, they show insufficient self-reflection. Eventually, Hegel’s Reason chapter describes a development towards beings who must accept certain features of their world as socially given. This social givenness forms the subject of the next chapter, ‘Spirit’, beginning with Antigone’s commitment to what appears to her to be the everlasting and ‘given’ laws of the gods. On the analysis developed by Bates, via close readings of Shakespeare’s play and Hegel’s philosophy, the relevant Aufhebungen of nature and justice would have in common a move from unconscious, instinctive coercion to a consciousness of coercion. Bates asks whether we moderns are up to this task.

Where Hegel’s Phenomenology is one of the most widely read and analysed works in the history of philosophy, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s extensive lectures on dramatic art have received surprisingly little critical attention. Delivered in 1808, the year after the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology, they were subsequently collected and published under the title of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. By this time Schlegel, one of the key figures in German Romanticism, had already begun translating Shakespeare. His translations would go on to play a central role in the integration of Shakespeare into German culture which, thus helped Shakespeare become a figure of global significance. It is surprising, therefore, that these influential lectures by a leading theorist and translator have not really received critical attention. Kristin Gjesdal’s chapter offers a thorough and critical analysis. Schlegel, on her account, gave neither a grand-scale philosophical system nor a series of fragments, but rather a unique combination of general reflection on the artform and sensitive appreciation of the detail of individual works. Schlegel’s reflections are further characterized by attention to the role of the critic, who understands the play in relation to theoretical and historical considerations, but who also knows himself or herself to be situated within a particular historical moment. For example, my criticism of Shakespeare cannot ignore Shakespeare’s status in my own time, any more than it can ignore historical facts about Shakespeare. In Schlegel’s work, we also find an attempt to bind philosophy and drama together: modern drama (as opposed to its ancient relative) invites a kind of philosophical reflection, so that, as Gjesdal puts it, ‘modern drama can find itself through philosophy’.

ACTING

My chapter, ‘Nietzsche, the mask and the problem of the actor’, operates in two different directions. First, it gives an account of Nietzsche’s claims about acting. Nietzsche, I suggest, has different models of acting in mind, which can usefully be separated out and described under three headings: ‘immersive acting’, in which the actor experiences what the character would experience; ‘gymnastic acting’, in which the actor experiences something very different from what the character feels; ‘marionette acting’, in which what the actor experiences approaches nothing at all. Second, it uses Nietzsche’s claims about acting and theatre to understand his approach to philosophy itself. We begin with an apparent contradiction. Nietzsche liked to describe himself as ‘anti-theatrical’, and he did indeed put forward various criticisms of theatre and acting. But he is also known as an advocate of using the mask, a theatrical device, in philosophical communication. The chapter therefore tries to explain how Nietzsche can appear to oppose and endorse acting. The answer to this question is that Nietzsche’s concerns about acting are quite specific: he worries, I argue, that playing to a crowd has various corrupting features and masking helps to prevent this corruption; hence masking is what prevents the pitfalls associated with acting. But this corruption also threatens the expression of philosophical ideas, which can also be taken to be ‘performed’ to an audience of a kind. Hence Nietzsche appears to advocate a masked philosophy. While the initial tension between Nietzsche’s anti-theatricalism and his mask-advocacy can be resolved, a further tension emerges through the discussion: Nietzsche seems to think that his philosophical task is to describe us as we really are (to use his phrase, to ‘translate man back into nature’); but, in order to carry out this task, we have to undermine the very preconditions for its completion. Philosophy therefore looks self-undermining. This, I argue, is the deeper problem in Nietzsche’s philosophy that is revealed from an analysis of his account of acting.

Action in general, Lior Levy argues in chapter 5, lies at the heart of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. But our understanding of action in general is illuminated by a better understanding of Sartre’s analysis of stage acting. Sartre finds a particular significance in the fact that, in theatre alone, actions are (or at least can be) represented by other actions, not by poetic descriptions or paintings. The artistic medium and the kind of represented object are one and the same: action. Of course, one could paint a representation of a painting or use music to represent other sounds, such as birdsong: in these cases, as in theatrical actions, the way of representing (painting, music) is the same kind of thing as what is represented (another painting, birdsong). But Sartre places action at the heart of human existence, in a way which cannot be said for paintings or music. As Levy puts it, theatrical actions are (for Sartre) intended to enable spectators ‘to rediscover their own actions or rediscover themselves as agents’. How so? In theatrical action, properly understood, the actor reveals the ‘project’ of the character, where this technical term can be provisionally understood as the framework which gives a person’s life a meaning, and which is itself a kind of freedom, but which is really completed only with the completion of his or her life. An agent’s project therefore cannot be grasped entirely by the agent himself or herself. However, an actor can grasp his or her character’s project, because actors have an outsider’s perspective on the character they play: the actor playing Antigone really can grasp Antigone’s (fictional) project. On Levy’s account, the Sartrean theatrical actor conjures the image of the absent character, and this aiming at the ungraspable on the part of the stage actor mirrors our necessary but necessarily incomplete attempts to grasp our own projects. Thus, from the spectator’s point of view, an actor is not merely restricted or hemmed in by being told what to say or where to stand: instead, the actor can aid the spectator in understanding his or her own situation, including the freedom which underlies all agency.

The next two chapters mark the shift away from figures in the history of philosophy towards contemporary philosophical analysis. Paul Woodruff’s chapter starts out with an apparently simple feature of the spectator’s experience: that when we are being moved by theatrical performances, we typically don’t pay all that much attention to the techniques used by actors. Following the definition he defended in his book, Woodruff understands ‘theatre’ to be a combination of two ‘arts’: first, performers make some human action worth watching; second, spectators find some human action worth watching. This definition reaches beyond conventional art theatre to include musical performances and sporting events, where the question of technique also arises. The central move, on Woodruff’s terms, is the claim that the thing that is made worth watching (typically, the action in the play) cannot be the means by which it is made worth watching (i.e., the performers’ abilities). One might imagine that paying attention to the impressive technique of an actor would be a reasonable way to appreciate a performance. But Woodruff claims that, at a typical theatrical performance, we have to choose what we find worth watching: often, though not always, we will have to choose between watching for technique and watching for the actions which that technique is employed to depict: for example, between Olivier’s skilful acting and Lear’s anguish at his betrayal. Which ought we to choose? Woodruff argues that theatre operates best when there is no mismatch between what the performer is trying to make worth watching and what the spectator finds worth watching: going to the theatre to appreciate technique rather than action suggests such a mismatch, because, for example, Olivier is trying to make Lear worth watching, not himself. This way of dividing things up will not apply to all forms of theatre, but the thrust of Woodruff’s argument is that technique, while it can be, is typically not the proper object of regard for the spectators. This has some interesting consequences. For one thing, the professional critic, if he or she is understood to be the one who must watch for technique, is a ‘bad watcher’, which is to say that he or she is not fulfilling his or her part of the bargain as a spectator. Another consequence is that theatrical design can be too clever or brilliant, by drawing our attention away from the action. Finally, there is the question of expertise: if concentrating on technique makes you a bad watcher, and if expertise in theatre makes us better able to notice technique, then aren’t we better off not being experts? Woodruff suggests that one test for ‘greatness in theatre’ is that it can make even expert watchers stop paying attention to technique.

Attention, or ‘focus’, is also the topic of the final chapter in this section. No student of theatre could fail to be familiar with the stereotype of the actor as selfish, self-absorbed or attention-seeking.³ But this may reflect our tendency to concentrate on the big names or the lead roles. This tendency is not accidental, as Tzachi Zamir points out. ‘Giving focus’ – the name of Zamir’s chapter – is also the name of an actor’s technique, typically used to describe those who are not in the lead roles: it is a way of drawing attention to someone else, of ‘lessening one’s visibility while heightening another’s’. Zamir’s chapter offers an analysis of this practice and makes the case for its significance. Giving focus not only sits at odds with our idea of the actor as attention-seeker. It also sits at odds both with the Western ideal of the artist (as creative, assertive and individual) and with the Nietzschean ideal of the self as an artist, who takes this artistic attitude to his or her own life. If acting is an art, and art requires this creative, assertive individuality, then how can we make sense of the actor who ‘gives focus’ to someone else? Zamir argues that the Nietzschean artistic ideal does not take into account the ‘delicate aesthetic work of the performing artist’: the ideal is therefore at fault. It would be tempting to suppose, from the way in which the term is typically used, that ‘giving focus’ is just one more tool in the actor’s toolkit, to be used when one plays a minor role and to be put away when one takes the lead. But Zamir’s argument is that all actors are always giving focus. Actors are not merely seen, they are seen-as-showing: even the lead actor is ‘showing’ the central character. Consequently, acting can be understood as a kind of generosity, an other-oriented activity.

THEATRE AS ART

The chapters in the last section of the volume ask about theatre as a form of art. A common feature of all of the chapters thus far is that they are typically thinking in terms of quite conventional, European, mimetic theatre: theatre which involves a literary play text as the source, with performers playing characters described in this text, from which they take their words and at least some of their direction. Even Woodruff, for whom the term ‘theatre’ is more broadly applied, pays close attention to mimesis. One could hardly fault philosophers like Schlegel or Nietzsche for not writing about forms of art they could never have seen. But a contemporary reader would be entitled to ask about the relationship between traditional European theatre and contemporary theatrical practices. James R. Hamilton’s work always finds a central place for non-traditional theatre, and in this chapter his central theme is the relation between ‘observed’ and ‘participatory’ theatre. ‘Observed’ theatre can initially be understood as theatre in which the spectators’ role is merely to watch the performance. ‘Participatory’ theatre performances are those in which the spectators play a more active role of some kind, and this role is an integral part of the performance itself. For this reason, ‘spectator’ does not seem like quite the right term for those who attend participatory theatre, and terms like ‘spect-actor’ (Augusto Boal’s phrase) and ‘spectator-participant’ have sometimes been preferred. Based on these brief distinctions, one might expect the difference between participatory and observed theatre to be fairly self-evident: in the former, spectator-participants are active, whereas in the latter, spectators are passive. But this, Hamilton argues, cannot do: on any reasonable account of ‘observing’ spectators, they are also active. Another way of drawing the distinction might be to describe participatory theatre as ‘interactive’. Here again, Hamilton argues, it would not be right to say that observed theatre is not interactive. A better understanding of the difference would be to present interactivity as a matter of degree, according to which all spectators must be interactive and, to understand a performance at all, must have an appropriate degree of awareness of the amount of interactivity that is demanded by the performance. One consequence which Hamilton draws out from this analysis relates to moral concerns about participatory theatre. These arise for cases in which the spectator-participants do not fully understand what is going on and could perhaps better be described as the victims of a certain kind of trick than as spectator-participants in a theatrical performance. Hamilton deploys the notion of varying degrees of interactivity, as developed in the chapter, to locate the problem in such cases.

David Z. Saltz offers an analysis of the nature of theatre in which key elements are brought out by a contrast with live-action film. Since theatrical performances and live-action films employ ‘distinct modes of representation’, it is a mistake to view theatre and film as being basically the same kind of thing: ‘Film is not merely photographed theatre with close-ups and editing’. Of course, in one sense, the mode of representation is the same: human actors. But the difference lies in what, in each case, a spectator can infer, from the actor and scenery, about the fictional world that is being conjured up. Representation in theatre is ‘ludic’, a kind of play, whereas representation in film is better understood as pictorial. Saltz claims that film is ‘pictorially replete’: within the relevant parts of the film (typically what is contained within the picture frame, as opposed to the music or subtitles giving the location of date of the scene), any element present in the film is to be taken as present in the fictional world created by the film. Hence, in one of his examples: a cockroach crawling up the wall behind the actors in a film would have to be taken to be part of the imagined, fictional world of the film (or else it is a mistake, an error in the film); on the other hand, a cockroach crawling up the wall behind the actors in a play could not necessarily be taken as part of the fictional world invoked by the play. The difference is further illustrated by a comparison between watching a play and watching a film of the performance of the play. The latter, for Saltz, however it is edited, becomes a documentary of the play, a film documenting the event that was the play. We might say: a cockroach on the wall in the play might or might not be part of the fictional world depicted by the play; but when that same cockroach is shown on the wall in the film of the play, it is certainly part of the world represented by the film. Saltz is making a claim about the general conventions at work in theatre and film, and the chapter ends with a consideration of exceptions and mixed modes: a play which is pictorially replete; a film which is ‘ludic’. Musicals, especially filmed musicals, provide a notable case in which what happens within the picture cannot be taken to be going on in the fictional world created by the film: ‘The audience needs to compartmentalize the actors’ musical performances and treat that one aspect of the film differently from everything else it sees’.

Finally, Paul Thom’s category of ‘theatrical idealists’ treats those who both reject theatre as it currently is and yet dream of a glorious possible future theatre. There are different ways to be a theatrical idealist. One idealist might envisage a radical reform of theatrical practice. Another might set out rules for the choices that spectators make in theatrical performances, offering an account of which kinds of choices are sound and which are not. Yet another might propose a new way of accounting for the way we grasp performances, indicating which ways of thinking about spectator experience are appropriate and which are misleading. Thom treats cases of ea...

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
• PART I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
• PART II: ACTING
• PART III: THEATRE AS ART
• Index
• About the Editor and Contributors