Dobson, Review of The Bridge Project As You Like It

Review of The Bridge Project As You Like It

Michael Dobson, Birkbeck College – University of London

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Comments on this article are now closed. To read the comments left during the open review period, click either on the speech bubble to the left of each paragraph below or on the links in the gray sidebar to the right.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 13 [Editor’s note: Original plans for this special issue included a cluster of reviews of a single production; our hopes were to use this cluster as a way to explore the variations of individual responses to a show and the nature of reviewing theatrical productions. Although we were not able to put into place a cluster of reviews, we are hoping that Michael Dobson’s review of the production can serve as a springboard for a conversation about this specific production and about the larger practice of academic theatre reviewing. Comments responding to both of these issues are welcome here. This conversation will be archived on this site. We might also choose to print excerpts from it in Shakespeare Quarterly, though should we do so, individual commenters will be contacted for permission prior to appearing in print.]

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 6 It is extraordinarily difficult to represent any live performance adequately: any night at the theatre is not just a multi-media artistic event but a social one too. When it comes to a great revival of a Shakespeare play, it is hard to bear even fragmentary witness to the myriad interpretative possibilities and affective nuances opened up by every gesture, every phrase, every fleeting theatrical image. But it can be just as difficult to do justice to a much more common experience of live Shakespeare, that of mediocrity, indifference, the disappointingly familiar sense that one is watching a cast going through the motions of a run-of-the-mill production which seems to have fired nobody’s imagination at all, not even that of its director. Such, alas, was my experience of seeing Sam Mendes’ As You Like It: six months on, were it not for the notes and sketches and the copy of the programme which now lie in front of me, I might have forgotten the show entirely.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 8 Of the unprompted impressions which remain, those concerning the audience are for the most part more vivid and less generalized than those concerning the production. Having booked a cheap seat in the gallery, I was surprised to be upgraded to the rear stalls: three weeks into its run, this show was doing such poor business that the management preferred to concentrate its meagre audiences downstairs rather than having them spread thinly around the whole house. Many of those around me had also been transferred from other seating areas, and some were actively puzzled about it: I overheard a French couple to my left wondering whether this happened often, then settling into the red plush and making desultory conversation about the auditorium and the advertisements in the programme. It was a while since I had been to a mainstream London theatre in July, and I was struck by how large a percentage of the audience were clearly new to the Old Vic and perhaps to Britain as a destination, so many tourists who had decided that since they were in London they ought to spend at least one night dutifully sitting in a famous theatre in front of a famous play. Evidently there had been plenty of tickets available for this particular opportunity to do so, and I had a sudden vision of the queue at the half-price last-minute ticket booth in Leicester Square, its members making and re-making arbitrary decisions, as they neared the counter, between As You Like It, The Mousetrap, The Woman in Black and Dirty Dancing. But there were one or two regulars present too, who had presumably booked their own places further in advance: not long before the house lights dimmed, for instance, I saw Russ McDonald[1] filing into a seat elsewhere in the stalls, and I remember basely wondering, like an economy airline passenger unexpectedly placed in club class, whether he had paid full price for his ticket.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 7 Things to record about the show itself. The previous year’s Bridge Project production of The Winter’s Tale had tried to make the transatlantic make-up of its company part of the thematic content of the show by casting Britons as Sicilians and Americans as Bohemians, which if scarcely invited by the script at least provided critics and publicists with a convenient talking-point. As You Like It does not readily lend itself to this treatment, and didn’t receive it. Its opening scenes instead presented a world – in this respect not unlike central London – in which one was always as likely to hear an American accent as an English one. Just for once you could tell that Oliver (Edward Bennett) had enjoyed a different education to Orlando (Christian Camargo), since he had audibly been to RADA[2] while his younger brother had been forced to make do with Julliard. (This may or may not have explained why this Orlando seemed so catastrophically uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s syntax, apparently unable to look straight at anything except the floor in embarrassment at his own continual mis-stressing for much of the evening). The princesses were similarly differentiated, this time with Juliet Rylance’s Rosalind the fruity RADA alumna and Michelle Beck’s Celia a nasal-vowelled East Coast girl who pronounced ‘Aliena’ as ‘Ayley-eena.’ Perhaps more surprisingly, this inconsequent mixture of North American and English pronunciations was as prevalent in the unfrequented provinces as it was around the ducal court: in the forest Aaron Krohn’s Silvius was a goofy hayseed with the brim of his hat turned up at the front (reminiscent of a younger version of Joe E. Brown as Jack Lemmon’s admirer in Some Like It Hot), while Anthony O’Donnell’s benignly self-satisfied Corin would have been as much at home in Ambridge[3] as he was in Arden. Only Stephen Dillane’s genteel, absent-mindedly drunk-looking Jaques – who resembled less an exiled cynic than a failed antiquarian bookseller – briefly traversed this unacknowledged phonetic Atlantic, when he sang his new verse to ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ as a caricature of the young Bob Dylan (‘If it should come to pass…’. 2.5.47-54). Fifty years ago this gag would have been just as beside the point, but it would at least have been topical.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 Despite all this, the general impression I retain from the first half of the play is less auditory than visual, one of unmitigated gloom. Modern productions of As You Like It have frequently decided to treat the opening two acts as taking place during winter and the remainder in the spring (a choice unmandated by the text but with a history that might be traced all the way back to eighteenth-century producers’ habit of transplanting the song of the owl and the cuckoo into this play from the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost). Mendes simply decided to redouble this ploy by setting much of the first half of the play not just in winter but at night: time and time again, scenes normally assumed to take place in natural light featured actors stumbling onto a dim stage carrying flaming torches. (In whichever miscellaneously transatlantic parallel universe this story was supposed to be taking place, incidentally, modern clothing had been invented, but not electric lighting). Am I right in remembering that even the exiled Duke’s picnic in the forest in 2.7 was a nocturnal affair? I definitely remember that its elaborate preparations had been set up all over the stage by Amiens and his associates during 2.5, and that they largely obscured Adam’s upstage faint from hunger in the succeeding scene, as well as making Orlando look very stupid for not seeing this ample potential food supply at once. But as things turned out, his efforts in that direction went for nothing anyway, since as in Stephen Pimlott’s RSC production back in 1996 this Adam, though solicitously fed by Duke Senior’s courtiers, died at the end of the banquet scene. Amazingly, nobody on stage at the time said anything about this. I think I can just about imagine a social situation in which a guest at a dinner party might peg out without anyone else present feeling that they ought to comment on the fact, but that certainly isn’t how things are usually done in Shakespeare.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 3 As Coriolanus knew, one should never flaunt one’s stoicism in public, but in justice to myself I should record the fact that I did not leave during the interval, even though my notes, as if in outraged solidarity with Adam, peter out at this point in the play. I was rewarded for staying by Ashlie Atkinson’s performance as Phoebe, a character whose vanity here seemed a likeable foible rather than a symptom of incurable arrogance, perhaps because she was the one member of this cast who clearly possessed a sense of humour rather than just a penchant for smiling with unnatural emphasis from time to time. I also remember thinking, unusually, that in this production Phoebe was certainly better off with Silvius at the end of the play than she would have been with Ganymede; because I definitely remember being very, very tired by Juliet Rylance’s Rosalind. Sounding throughout like the pluckily optimistic heroine of a British wartime propaganda film, Rylance seemed determined to compensate not just for her Orlando’s sullen, inattentive awkwardness but for all the sorrow in the world. Her sole idea about how to play Rosalind consisted of behaving as though the poor girl were in a permanent state of generalized, breathless, would-be infectious joy, and even Shakespeare’s text occasionally had to bow to this reading. At the start of 2.4, for instance, this Rosalind, instead of complaining about how weary her spirits were, bounced into Arden like a demented Pollyanna shouting ‘O Jupiter, how merry are my spirits!’ (an emendation which makes nonsense of Touchstone’s response). The near-parodic Home Counties quality of this relentlessly upbeat voice was underlined by the strategic addition of an extra word to the princess’s dialogue about her pronunciation at 3.2.330-2:

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Orlando: Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Rosalind: I have actually [pronounced ecktually] been told so of many…

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 5 In my notes I find the words ‘Is Juliet Rylance the poor man’s Honeysuckle Weeks?’[4] I do think that any performance in this role ought to prompt larger questions than that.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 5 Were I attempting to describe all the Shakespearean productions I saw during 2010 instead of just Mendes’ As You Like It, I would try to make most of the points I have tried to raise above simply by devoting no more than two or three sentences to it. Perhaps the best way to indicate that a show was a harmless but completely unriveting non-event is not to dwell on the thing at any length but to turn one’s attention elsewhere, just as one was continually tempted to do at the time. In my experience, an exceptional production of Shakespeare in London can feel as though it is happening at the very centre of its cultural moment: above and beyond the sort of buzz that can be manufactured by effective PR, great shows make their own sense of occasion, making their audiences feel that not just their consciousness but that of the entire city is focussed on what is taking place on the stage. During Sam Mendes’ As You Like It at the Old Vic I instead experienced an overwhelming sense that all over London that night thousands of people were talking and thinking about other things entirely, and probably more interesting things at that. It wasn’t an unprofessional or incompetent production, and it wasn’t noticeably less stimulating or cogent than at least seventy percent of the Shakespeares which English audiences have been routinely offered for years. But Mendes’ show was to a really good As You Like It as a decaffeinated espresso is to a real one: it looked roughly similar, it even reminded you, faintly, of how the real thing might taste, but it never at any point threatened to quicken the heartbeat.

[1] An eminent Shakespearean scholar.

[2] The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a prestigious acting school in Bloomsbury, London.

[3] Fictitious rural village in fictitious ‘Borsetshire’ in the English Midlands, setting of the longest-running radio soap opera in the world, the BBC’s The Archers.

[4] Honeysuckle Weeks: patrician English actress best-known for her performance as a plucky upper-class girl in uniform in the television series Foyle’s War, though she also played a plucky upper-class Viola in a touring Twelfth Night in 2005.

Notes

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 [1] An eminent Shakespearean scholar.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 [2] The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a prestigious acting school in Bloomsbury, London.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 [3] Fictitious rural village in fictitious ‘Borsetshire’ in the English Midlands, setting of the longest-running radio soap opera in the world, the BBC’s The Archers.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 [4] Honeysuckle Weeks: patrician English actress best-known for her performance as a plucky upper-class girl in uniform in the television series Foyle’s War, though she also played a plucky upper-class Viola in a touring Twelfth Night in 2005.

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carolyn sale March 30, 2011 at 11:15 pm

I am in complete sympathy with Michael Dobson’s response to Sam Mendes’ As You Like It as it was performed in the summer of 2010 at the Old Vic theatre in London. I saw the production twice, for I had purchased two pairs of tickets to the show, well in advance, with an eye to responding to Sarah Werner’s “call” for contributions to this special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly. It was, however, clear to me, a mere half-an-hour in to my first viewing, that it was unlikely that, in an already packed writing schedule for the 2010-2011 academic year, I would be sufficiently inspired to pen a word about it. But given that Sarah has reiterated, in her preface here, that she is hoping Dobson’s review will furnish a “springboard” for discussion not only about the production but also the practice of academic reviewing, I would like, after all, to contribute something.

I especially wish to weigh in now (on the afternoon of March 31st) for I do not agree with the distinctions that Christian Billing has drawn, in the most recent contributions to the discussion, between the “academic” review (which is produced by “amateurs”) and the “journalistic” review (which is produced by “professionals”). Nor do I agree with the idea that those who write reviews of Shakespeare-in-performance inflict a “judgment” upon the work of “theatre makers” that they have neither the critical tools nor the proper authority to render. Surely thoughtful directors do care what Shakespeareans have to say about Shakespeare-in-performance, and read the views of Shakespeareans with an eye, as Billing notes, to “future practice.” To that end, let me contribute something to the conversation as it has been unfolding here, as a form of sociability that extends the sociability of play-going. If I’d had the pleasure of trotting, with Dobson, along the street to a pub in The Cut for a post-show pint, we could have commiserated over having had to watch a production of the play that deprived it of vitality, but I would then have wanted to push Dobson (perhaps when we were on to our second) on whether there were not something about the play he thought worth chewing over. For I think there was. Two things, actually, the first of which is a problem that no mainstream review is going to resolve.

The problem is not, as Billing suggests, that “familiarity with Shakespeare breeds contempt.” Many productions of Shakespeare bore — even hyped productions such as this one — because its director and actors do not rise to the challenge of imagining for themselves the heady mixture of entertainment, poetry, and politics that they might offer through bodies-on-stage when working with one of Shakespeare’s play texts. Mainstream reviews not only allow for generic reiterations of a given play, they often encourage them, as Michael Billington does, in his review of this production for The Guardian, when he writes that “[e]ven [Stephen] Dillane’s actorish Jaques cannot undermine a production . . . that is true to the spirit of the play” without in any way indicating what that “spirit” is. Too many “theater makers” operate from a lethal sense of duty not only to the play’s “spirit,” but to the dominant conventions that have emerged in relation to the play-in-performance, which make certain ways of handling it de rigueur.

As You Like It is particularly prone to this trap, not simply because, as Billington writes, the “play stands or falls by its Rosalind,” but because the performance tradition requires a very particular Rosalind: one who must do her damnedest to charm us. When I reviewed Michael Boyd’s thoughtful production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 2009 for Shakespeare Bulletin last year, I noted the anxiety that Boyd’s Rosalind, Katy Stephens, exhibited in her remarks in the program, where she claimed that she feared she might not be a “great Rosalind.” What she meant (I think) is that she could not be Rosalind on the terms usually available to a contemporary actress in the role because Boyd, who wrested much sense from the text’s many references to violent acts and objects, needed his Rosalind to work against the performance tradition. Stephens needed, in short, to be a little violent, and a little nasty. The problem with Mendes’ directorial approach, which saw him, by his own declaration, aiming to “unlock” the play for the “vast” audiences around the globe for whom the play might be entirely new, lay in its contentment to trot out a hackneyed idea of the play — and most particularly a hackneyed idea of Rosalind — and limiting his work as director to thinking through what he wanted from the set and lighting designers. Rylance’s Rosalind, as Dobson has already noted, overwhelmed audiences with an ebullience that was downright exhausting. This helped to make the production a bore, for me as well as Michael, not because we are predisposed, as “academics,” to be bored by Shakespeare-in-performance — quite the opposite, I dare to aver, on both our parts — but rather because there isn’t much excitement, intellectual or otherwise, in a production that is the equivalent of a “first read” assisted by Cole’s notes. “Make sure your Rosalind is a font of rollicking energy, and that your Touchstone comes across as amiable. And be sure to deprive Jaques of all political edge, cutting the text where necessary to do so.”

I could go on at length about the larger problem to which this is tied. To do that, I would need to speak about the constituency with which Billing declares he has no interest, audiences. Billing’s critical approach is as ironic as Mendes’ directorial approach, given that the title of the play suggests that it was, in its first performances, engaged in a negotiation with its audience about its theatrical taste, and what kind of theatrical fare it would or would not “like.” It is thus of some interest to me that my companion for the first viewing — someone who had never seen the play before — was as bored with its Rosalind as I was, and unimpressed by the whole, for the production involved a dumbing-down of the play that totally eviscerated its politics. Audiences, no matter how unfamiliar they may be with the text, sense when they are being sold something whose character has been diminished or toned down for them. The dumbing-down of this production is captured in part by the terms in which the Bridge Project’s other production, The Tempest, was advertised, at least in Singapore: “The Oscar-winning director of American Beauty turns Shakespeare’s Tempest into blockbuster theatre.” Blockbuster theatre? C’mon! But the attempt to create that took the production in a direction that meant that neither Rylance’s Rosalind nor the production as a whole could “unlock” anything of serious substance about the play. There was nevertheless a distinct point of interest in the production for me and my companion — the same point, as we discovered in our post-show chat. Both of us were drawn to a performance that ran against the grain of the performance tradition.

The performance in question came not, as one might expect, from Stephen Dillane, who was purportedly a respectable Hamlet earlier in the decade, though it is hard to see from this performance how he could have been so. It came, rather, from Christian Camargo, for whom (not having seen The Hurt Locker or watched any episodes of Dexter) I had no context. Clearly Dobson and I disagree on this. In my view, Camargo gave us an Orlando wrenched into a certain frame of mind by the death of Adam, which was, as Dobson has noted, staged as part of the feasting scene that closed the first half. In the second half, this Orlando agreed, wistfully it seemed, to take part in the boy Ganymede’s games, as if half-pained, half-pleased that there were still boys in the world who could be as carefree and imaginative as Ganymede. He, then, however, exhibited a declining interest in Ganymede’s games, displaying a distraction in relation to them that made him resemble the figure that Viola describes when she speaks of Patience on a monument smiling at grief. Sure, we could argue how wrong this is: Orlando should not present himself as a wannabe Hamlet. But I, for one, liked it: liked that Camargo contributed a fresh perspective on the dramatic fiction Shakespeare scripted by giving us an Orlando who resisted the overwhelming force that Rosalind-as-Ganymede was bringing to bear upon others, especially Phoebe. If Camargo happened to give us his mildly tortured Orlando because he was trapped in a production dominated by a female actor pitching her performance too high, all the better; in his performance, something new broke free from the old, and I saw his handling of the language as part of that. (Dobson writes that “Orlando seemed . . . catastrophically uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s syntax.”)

Perhaps Camargo reached his idea of Orlando because he was also playing a haunted Ariel almost entirely deprived of personality and spirituality in the Bridge Project’s companion play. A review that did justice to Mendes’ work last summer would want to think about the relationship between the two productions. Amongst other things, Mendes’ Tempest, though it was not as well received by the “professional” reviewers, possessed a collective energy that his As You Like It lacked. I can’t help but attribute this to Ron Cephas Jones (Caliban), whose talents were wasted in As You Like It, where he was cast only as Charles and one of the lords. In The Tempest, Thomas Sadoski (as Stephano) and Anthony O’Donnell (as Trinculo) joined Cephas Jones in creating a carnivalesque energy, most notably by singing and stomping their way through a rendition of “Ban, Ban, Ca-Caliban / Has a new master, get a new man.” There might be some pleasure in thinking through the pairing that this Bridge Project gave us as it yoked a gloomy As You Like It to a Tempest brewing up subversion. But no mainstream review, in all its purported “professionalism,” is ever going to have the space or time, never mind the interest, in a sustained consideration of such an “impressionistic” observation. For that, you have to turn to “amateurs.”
Amateurs, Billing may want to recall, have one pretty important thing going for them, especially in our capitalistic world: they do what they do not for money, but for love. Sometimes that love makes you go see even a lousy production twice. And in this case I’m glad I did, for on a second viewing of As You Like It (and after having seen The Tempest), I found myself much more charitably inclined to Rylance — at least she was working hard! This made her quite the contrast to Dillane, who was so obviously letting down the ensemble in the case of both productions: he was a Jaques so jaded one couldn’t imagine that his Jaques had ever cared about anything, and as Prospero he made even his opening action of creating a magic circle by scattering handfuls of dirt seem like a daily chore. From his performance I have learned something that I suppose every actor knows: any production stands or falls on the commitment of all of its players. At any rate, let’s all raise an imaginary pint, shall we, to Michael Dobson, for spawning this discussion? To amateurs!

Links:
For Billington’s review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jun/24/review-tempest-as-you-like-it
For the theatrical trailer advertising The Bridge Project’s Tempest at the Singapore Repertory Theatre, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx5kqCQGn8s
For video footage in which Mendes describes his aims:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN7x4dUxDOI&feature=related
For my review of Boyd’s 2009 As You Like It, see Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1 (2010): 145-150.
1. Katherine Rowe April 1, 2011 at 10:55 am
  
  See some follow on thoughts to these postings (which I am finding illuminating and valuable) in the next comment set. I’ve located them down there just to keep the thread of exchanges (however long!) more intact.
carolyn sale April 1, 2011 at 12:31 pm

Dear Katherine,
I for one would love to hear your further thoughts, but for the life of me I can’t locate them . . . . Are April Fool’s Day gremlins at work?
Best wishes,
Carolyn
1. Sarah Werner April 1, 2011 at 3:21 pm
  
  Katherine’s response is below, or you can go directly to it here: http://mcpress.media-commons.org/shakespearequarterlyperformance/dobson/#comment-162

0 Comments on paragraph 1

13 Comments on paragraph 2

Katherine Rowe March 14, 2011 at 6:23 pm

This review and some of the comments below tempt me to open a question that I (as a non-performance type) have puzzled about:
So: what is an academic review for and who are its imagined audiences?
I’ll confess that I rarely feel addressed by academic reviews; I rarely see my own interests in a performance, (or boredom in a performance), addressed by them. This review is a welcome exception to that rule, but perhaps precisely for the ways in which it violates unspoken conventions.
So, from those who do have a really strong sense of what an academic review should be for, some further riffs would be very welcome here.
pholland March 22, 2011 at 10:17 am

I don’t think I quite see Kathy’s problem. I know, e.g., when I read a piece exploring, say, a psychoanalytic approach to King Lear that it is intended for those working in that (sub-)field. So academic theatre reviews are directed to others working on Shakespeare and perfromance. In the same way that Kathy has brilliantly shown that most writing about Shakespeare and film would be laughed at by people in film studies (I overstate but only slightly), so our analysis of theatre performance is often amateurish to those in theatre studies. Too much reviewing still has a coziness of its own (see other comments on the significance of the ‘cozy’ in relation to this piece). What Dobson valuably opens up is a new way of engaging with the normative rather than the lure of the exceptional.
1. Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 6:12 pm
  
  Point taken, Peter. Oh the hazards of being permanently archived asking dumb questions…
Sarah Werner March 24, 2011 at 12:35 pm

I do think you’re right, Peter, that academic theatre reviews are directed to others working on Shakespeare and performance (although I’m pretty sure that they’re read by people who do not think of themselves as falling into that category). But I also think it’s worthwhile lingering on Kathy’s question. That group of people who work on Shakespeare and performance is, as you know, a widely diverse group, with a range of interests and motives: there are folks interested in Shk & perf primarily for tracking a play’s performance history; others might be interested in studying performative languages; and there are some who still want to think about productions in terms of whether they adhere to a particular interpretation of a play. I don’t think academic theatre reviews speak to all of them the same way. Indeed I sometimes read reviews with that same nagging question that Kathy feels, wondering what’s in it for me: why am I supposed to find this interesting? I suppose that might have something to do with my occasional impatience as a reader and as a theatre viewer–an impatience that is wonderfully illuminated in this review–but I do think more reviews could tackle head-on why they should be read.
pholland March 24, 2011 at 1:45 pm

So let’s imagine a future collection in which not the me of reviewing but the you of readership is formally addressed. I could imagine, for instance, writing a review three times over as if for different audiences. Certainly I require my students to define in their reviews what kind of outlet they are imagining (online blog, NYTimes, theatre magazine, campus newspaper, etc). So perhaps this is a good example of my not doing what I ask others to do…
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 7:36 am

Thanks to Michael for his thought-provoking review and to everyone who has already contributed comments to this discussion. The conversation that has taken place raises a number of important issues concerning the purpose of the academic theatre review, including: target audience(s), the significance of the archival imperative (as a resource for both scholars and theatre practitioners of the future), the relevance of personal judgement and evaluation (is it a kind of appellation d’origine controlee, or quality assurance mark, for the theatre profession – to be awarded or withheld by Shakespearean scholars via complimentary or condemnatory academic reviews, and, if so, who is qualified to bestow it, and on what grounds?), the role of the mundane in performance history (I am amused and bemused here in equal measure!), the technical competences of individual reviewers (a thorny issue), and, lastly, some possible alternative formats for informed scholarly responses to Shakespeare in performance, including the response cluster (which I think we can and should explore more).

I preface my general response to this discussion (which will touch on some of the points above, but not all of them) with one caveat and two confessions:

Caveat: My first posting is rather long and constitutes a synthesised response to what I consider to be the most important issues raised by Michael’s article and the comments on it (as of 30/03/11). Shorter responses, more directly addressed to specific points in his review, follow below. They are nothing like as detailed as this first posting, nor are there that many. Skip to those if you wish.

Confession one: I did not see the production that acted as the stimulus for Michael’s piece (which would normally stop me from responding to a review article). However, as the conversation surrounding this piece is much more to be about the practice of reviewing than it is a response to a review of a particular production, and because theatre reviews are a type of academic writing with which I do engage as both a researcher and an author (and I often find them inadequate) I want to comment.

Confession two: the comments in this initial response are heartfelt, but generic and theoretical. They are not addressed ad hominem to Michael. Many of the faults I perceive in reviewing I am probably guilty of myself (that’s the second confession), Michael is most probably not so guilty. I am speaking here about a general issue, and my observations are more prompted by Michael’s piece than caused by it.

General comments:
I am afraid that this piece and the responses to it have reminded me just how uncomfortable I am with the use of the word ‘academic’ in conjunction with the phrase ‘theatre review’ – largely because it seems to me that the combined term claims (or in certain constituencies is perceived as claiming) a degree of authority for judgemental evaluations of performance that many reviews of this type quite simply do not have (the authority, not the judgementalism, which they have in spades…). Sadly, this fact has a detrimental effect not only on the quality of our archive of performance reviews (which often constitute ill-informed value judgements, rather than sustained analysis of theatrical events), but also, when the former of these two types is offered, on potential inter-disciplinary collaboration between Shakespearean performance scholars and theatre professionals (who very often do not trust ‘us’ because of the way ‘we’ have responded to what they have produced, and do not understand from whence Shakespearean academics derive authority when talking about theatrical production).

As Peter Holland observes in this discussion thread with regards to Shakespeare on Film Scholars (versus Film Scholars), and Shakespeare in Performance Scholars (versus Performance Scholars), often the addition of the word ‘Shakespeare’ to the job title appears to dilute the quality of the work. Might I suggest that this is because scholars who are not trained in performance studies or film studies think that they are qualified to publish in these areas because ‘above all, it’s Shakespeare’? and that this fact is even more the case with scholars’ willingness to undertake theatre and film reviewing? The material realities of what’s going on in a theatre performance, or in a film (as well as the aesthetic, technical, social and economic processes that have led up to either product existing) are complex, and if one is to write about these meaningfully (in a review or elsewhere) one needs to have the tools so to do. Such tools are, I would argue, better learned through performance studies than literary or historical studies; yet many academics who publish theatre reviews in scholarly journals do not also publish elsewhere in the field of performance. There is a lot of very good work in Shakespeare in Performance studies, particularly in focussed theoretical articles, monographs and collections of essays (which are thoroughly peer reviewed); but the authors who are doing this excellent work do not always write theatre reviews (which are generally seen as much more low status affairs and not always subject to appropriate academic scrutiny). Consequently, reviews often lack the critical vocabularies and conceptual frameworks required by good theatre criticism. I understand that this will be a contentious point, but I believe it to be true – and the problem is a very serious one because to those outside the academy (including theatre makers) there is little way of discerning those who know what they are talking about in performative terms from those who don’t – and yet we all appear to have the same status and authority when commenting on Shakespeare. As Barbara Hodgdon once put it: ‘We are all looking. The question is who can see?’

Because reviews are quite prominent, often short, and are easy to digest, and because they appear to offer an informed opinion regarding current theatre practice, they carry a lot of weight with the profession; however so-called ‘academic’ reviews of Shakespeare in performance are often not objective analyses of a theatrical event set in a discursive context of relevant theatre practice, but rather subjective personal statements regarding one individual’s intellectual and emotional engagement with a single night in the theatre. This is perhaps why so many of us have difficulty in working out why we should engage with them afterwards. The writing is seldom in tune with theoretical models of how theatre functions (using semiotic, phenomenological, structural or technical analyses, amongst other approaches) and they even less frequently offer thick and detailed description of what has been seen, heard or felt to have taken place, which might be of use to subsequent scholars trying to consider past performances as part of more wide-ranging theoretical projects (relating to the performance history of a particular play, or the work of a particular director, scenographer, actor etc.). Instead, academic reviews most frequently offer a solipsistic evaluation of whether or not a particular mise-en-scene (briefly described and more often than not thought to be related to a unified directorial concept) has aligned the play with one of a number of established literary readings (known to the particular scholar writing the review), together with an account of how well the particular production has performed against that reviewer’s personal top 5 performances of the text – based either on personal experience (unlikely), much-quoted examples from the play’s production-history (such as Brook’s MND, Jessner’s RIII etc., which the reviewer has learned about from an Arden III or Cambridge edition) or ‘recent trends’ in production, whatever they might be. Reviews of this sort are much more about what a particular scholar thinks about a particular play (and whether or not the production in question confirmed this reading) than they are a detailed and accurate record of what actually happened in a particular theatre on a particular night. More’s the pity.

Why should we accept this sort of response? Is it because academic reviews are ever-so-slightly longer than the same sort of evaluative and judgemental response by a Billington, an Isherwood or a Brantley? Or is it because the knowledge of Shakespeare as dramatic text (and source of multiple critical interpretations) that lies behind them is deeper from an academic (read amateur) theatre reviewer than it is a journalistic (read lacking-in-up-to-date-scholarship) professional? Perhaps it is true that academic reviewers have a greater understanding of the wider field of current Shakespearean studies than professional theatre reviewers, but I do not think that this is how or why accounts of productions written by scholars should be of use to us. In fact I think that this is probably why so many of us don’t like them. Ultimately, I don’t care what you thought of the production, no matter who you are. If I can’t get to see it, what I want to know is what the production did with the play, and how: specifically and technically.

Evaluative, judgemental responses to professional theatre practice based on personal opinion (T was good as U, V’s accent was grating, W’s costumes hinted at X, but didn’t have his depth, Y’s scenography quoted the Czech tradition of Z but didn’t develop it… for a fuller list of the stereotypes see the conclusion to Hodgdon, B., ‘Viewing Acts’ Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 25, Number 3 and Armstrong, A., ‘Romeo and Juliet Academic Theatre Review Kit’ SB Volume 26, Number 1) run the risk of falling between two stools: if they are snooty and dismissive of a production’s inability to bring vitality or a valid interpretation to a literary text that the academic reviewer thinks they know inside out (having read numerous essays on it and having seen, or more likely read about, a number of ‘great’ productions) there is resentment from the theatre industry because the reviewer assumes great performative possibilities without an understanding of any of the factors that may have militated against their emergence during process. There is also often, and this is key, little account given of the production on its own terms, or any acknowledgement that no production can ever do (or ever attempts to do) everything, no matter how good it is (and we often forget the omissions and failings of the better productions, especially once they have become canonised: those by Stein, Strehler, Taymor, Warner etc.). As an academic reader of academic reviews, I often wonder why the reviewer has bothered to write; because I am learning so very little about the production. There is all too often so little evidence presented – most frequently because the academic reviewer gets so caught up in providing a laundry list of things that were, in their opinion, ‘bad’ in the production or didn’t ‘work’ that there is little space to unpack the reasons why it was supposedly so awful, or (more importantly, I would argue) no room to provide detailed description of what was happening materially in such moments of failure or in other, more successful, theatrical events. Sometimes it even seems that the obviously disengaged response of the reviewer is simply due to ennui with Shakespeare per se: ‘Oh, I’m so bored of this! Did I really have to come? I’ve seen much better. It’s always better on the page. Why can’t you be as good as Brook, or Ninagawa? Haven’t you read Adelman? Why isn’t your reading of Lear as good as mine? Oh well, at least the students are getting something from it. Disturbingly, there is some evidence of this attitude of resigned and condescending dismissal in both Michael’s piece and in the discussion thread surrounding it.

Conversely, of course, if a personally-inflected review is unflaggingly positive and effusive in its praise, the response can seem down to the inexperience or naiveté of the reviewer, especially when a generation of scholars who actually saw the truly great productions (and whose old nostalgia is much less toxic than the ill-conceived New Nostalgia of the youngsters) compare the evidence of this poor production to their imaginative re-memberings of the ghosts of performances past. So it’s difficult to win when one gets personal.

In my experience of reading academic reviews, the slightly negative review is more common than the flattering one (which is possibly one reason why there has been so much interest in the concept of mundanity in relation to this posting). It seems that familiarity with Shakespeare breeds contempt of performances that do not hit every note they could (no production can). Yet this only helps to shore up an extremely unhelpful distinction between those of us whose primary engagement with Shakespeare is professional (but within the academy) and those of us whose work is equally professional (but as makers of Shakespeare in performance). Here’s a secret: Shakespeare makers also realise that the good only get it nearly right about once in every ten attempts, but they still think it’s worth trying and that the events that transpire along the way are both interesting and useful to future practice.

As I have hinted above, the mistrust (fear?) of academics on the part of theatre makers that is caused by poorly thought out academic appraisals of professional productions is a very real issue when it comes to other academics obtaining access to professional production processes that could greatly increase our understanding of Shakespeare in production and performance (including access to such events as pre-production meetings, auditions, rehearsals, scenographic meetings, directorial and technical note-giving sessions etc.). Some directors, actors and designers of Shakespeare have now become so uncomfortable with the idea of sharing with Shakespearean academics anything other than the ‘final’ product of their production (i.e. the play at a stage of its creative life in which they are happy also to let in paying members of the public) that they only let us in in the safely controlled reference-encyclopaedic roles of the literary dramaturge or historical expert. This is because certain other academics have made theatre professionals think that we know everything about the Shakespearean canon (including how, where and when it has best been performed) and now they (theatre makers) are unwilling to allow us (the academy per se) into the more creative and exploratory, risk-taking phases of performative meaning making, for fear of our supercilious derision. This is a great pity, as we might well have interesting things to say to each other. This is not true of all companies, of course, but it applies to some of the big ones, such as, increasingly, the RSC. We need to reverse this trend and finding a different way of reviewing will help this. Shakespeare Bulletin are proposing for the Spring issue of their 2012 issue: ‘reviews of the BEST and the WORST productions of Shakespeare and other early modern drama in the first decade of the twenty-first century’. Is this really helpful?

So, to cut to the chase, for me the primary duty of the scholarly reviewer is to record a production in as much detail as one can, rather than to judge or evaluate it. It is then up to those who come after us to use our well-written-up documentary records to write more theoretical responses to the work (these latter pieces may be synchronic or diachronic investigations of particular trends in performance, analyses of the work a particular actor, director, scenographer or company, or a whole host of other analytical projects – we do not yet know). It seems to me that this issue is very well summed up by Katherine Rowe’s comment in this discussion in relation to paragraph 9 (regarding Robert Hamilton Ball’s jottings on the first screening of Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet at the Paris theater in NYC). Including her finding of the notes ‘tremendously illuminating’ and her confession that she has ‘never known exactly what to do with this material but [is] very glad it’s there to be consulted when someone figures that out.’

What I think we need is a wider archive of production material, in which properly informed description-rich and technically astute reviews form a key part. Academic journals can and should provide a forum for this type of writing. Increasingly also the web is a good place to do this (the ISE Performance Chronicle is one model: http://isechronicle.uvic.ca/). Scholars of Cinematic and Televisual Shakespeare have access to film prints, Video and DVD and, increasingly, online media. Whilst these are all products that imply different forms of mediation that need adequately to be theorised by the scholars attempting to use them as one of many forms of primary research material, they are unquestionably much more available than the notoriously ephemeral theatrical performance is to the performance scholar.

So how do we build a reliable historical record of Shakespeare theatre performances that is of use to other scholars? I don’t think I think that we should digitise individual notes scribbled on academic’s theatre programmes and make them available via the world wide web in some scholarly Review-Tube of navel gazing that is as much about the scribbler as the production; in fact I don’t think that we should write on theatre programmes at all, but rather that those of us who are adept at writing about performance should take (reasonably sized) notebooks into theatres and write essential aide memoire notes during performances, as well as making quick sketches and technical illustrations of sets, blocking, LX configurations etc. — things we might (would) otherwise forget (for a hint of this practice and its difficulties see the opening of Shaughnessy, R., ‘One Piece at a Time’ Shakespeare Bulletin Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2007). But we should then take the time afterwards, using our skills as scholars of performance who happen to work in the field of Shakespearean drama, to unpack our more-extensive-than-mere-programme-graffiti-scribbles in order to provide a structured account of what we noticed taking place on stage, with a particular emphasis on the things that made it theatre rather than text: i.e. proxemics, kinaesthetics, acting analysis, scenography and the dramaturgy of the performance script (directing is more problematic as, without proper and sustained access to rehearsal it is much less apparent from whence the ideas of a particular mise en scene are derived). I will also concede at this point that some performance scholars would also want to take account of the auditorium, and the interplay between spectators and stage — although I am not personally all that interested in audiences.

All of this work takes time and space (in both the note taking and the writing up), and there are many reasons why it doesn’t often happen: the low status of theatre reviews as a form of academic output, the word counts implied by thick description of events lasting several hours, the costs to journals of the reproduction of production stills and other visual documents relating to the performance (such as set and lighting designs, costume renderings and other visualisations). However, all of this, taken together, would certainly provide a very useful repository of the kind that I hope one-day people will figure out how to use.

In my opinion, such an archive would be certainly much more valuable to the scholars and theatre makers of the future than my opinion. Or, to put it another way, I’m not all that interested in what Dudley Carlton, Thomas Platter or even the Venetian Ambassador thought of (and interpolated in) any of the performances they saw – I just wish that they had better known how to describe them.
1. Sarah Werner April 3, 2011 at 5:27 pm
  
  One quick point: You suggest that theatre practitioners are reluctant to allow Shakespeare scholars access to their creative processes because scholars have written so thoughtlessly about productions, subjecting them to academic expectations rather than responding to the terms of the performances themselves. I don’t doubt that practitioners are reluctant to allow outsiders access to the process of creating a production. But what scholars like to share publicly the rough processes of making our work? Think about everything that goes into thinking about an issue and that gets discarded along the way. This is true even of conference papers: who really gives papers trying out a new idea that they aren’t yet sure they want to stand behind? (This is one of the things I find remarkable about this open review–the willingness of all the authors, including Michael Dobson, to share publicly what are still necessarily rough works and to reveal the processes that go into making them polished.)
  1. Christian Billing April 6, 2011 at 6:03 pm
    
    Good point, Sarah, but I think that one of the key differences comes as a result of the fact that theatre making is a thoroughly collaborative process, whereas it’s relatively rare for scholars to collaborate with more than (at most) one or two other scholars on major projects. Theatre makers never make their cultural interventions in such relative isolation. Moreover, the modality of the rehearsal room is one much less insistent on what we might conceive of as the rigour or thought-through-ness of conventional academic inquiry. When one makes a fool of oneself in an academic context, one contemplates retiring and finding something else to do with one’s life (it’s devastating); when one makes a fool of oneself in a rehearsal room, everybody laughs and acknowledges ‘well, that didn’t work then, did it.’ It’s all about the cultural acceptance of risk taking and the understanding that (in the theatre at least) there’s no gain without putting oneself on the line in ways that, in other contexts, might prompt career-destroying derision or condemnation. I think that theatre practitioners should know that scholars can accommodate such ways of working and that they are able to participate in them, or at least observe them without being judgemental. Our hyper-critical, often cynical dismissal of our own work and that of others (often in the name of academic rigour) poses problems in this regard.
Katherine Rowe April 1, 2011 at 12:34 pm

Thanks to all for a cogent and deeply engaging set of posts. As these exchanges have progressed I’ve been struck by how heterogeneous the interests seem to be, of the different groups who are described here as having stakes in academic theater reviewing (performance scholars, theater historians, theater historians of the future, directors and players in the productions in question,…). I think it’s important not to allow the concepts of amateur and professional to reduce this heterogeneity to two polar positions. What those terms register is precisely the different (divergent?) interests and expertise that converge on a performance of Shakespeare.

In this context, what I hear in Christian’s post is a call for two commitments in reviewing: first, to what the art historian Mary Ann Caws terms “complex viewing” (in this context, technically specific, concrete, detailed observations of theatrical undertakings); second to the performance of complex viewing as a way of recording those undertakings for others (now and in the future). I can’t speak to how valuable this vision of the genre is to those inside Shakespeare performance studies. For this outsider, reviews in this mode are the ones I find most compelling: because they provide rich information about a performance and because they teach me how and what to look for, helping me become modestly more complex as a viewer/auditor.
carolyn sale April 2, 2011 at 1:02 pm

I agree, Katherine, and should perhaps have been clearer about my chief objection to Billing’s contribution, which is to his request that “academic” or “scholarly” reviewers offer “thick description” unadulterated by judgment or critical reflection: “Ultimately, I don’t care what you thought of the production, no matter who you are,” he writes, for “the primary duty of the scholarly reviewer is to record a production in as much detail as one can, rather than to judge or evaluate it.”

This demand involves a positivist fantasy which works against “complex viewing,” for any such review would simply provide facts with which others will later work; Billing wants the (future) reader, rather than the (current) reviewer, to be the person who filters a production through her consciousness. If we wrote such texts, we would be writing memoranda of performances, not reviews. The call for these memoranda worries me because such accounts or “documentation” erase the audience in two ways: not only, as Billing notes, because he has no interest in audiences, and therefore has no need for us to write any details about them, but because our critical reflections manifest the audience, or one constituency within it, at any rate.

Do I want reviews that include details about a production that help me envision, in my mind’s eye, performances that I did not get to see for myself? Of course I do. But let us consider what Billing would have us discard, or throw away, if we were to produce simply memoranda or “well-written-up documentary records” that would enable others, later “to write more theoretical responses to the work.” We lose, with the critical perspective and contextual details about the experience, evidence about the culture in and for whom the performance took place, especially where the reviewer’s rendering of his or her response carries information about other cultural practices and phenomena.

Let me offer a concrete example.

I, for one, love, and find much value in, this kind of detail from Jeremy Lopez’s review, in the Fall 2009 issue of SQ, of the RSC’s Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran and starring David Tennant:

Colleagues were quick to snarl at me when I suggested that watching this Hamlet was like watching television. At the surface level, the snarling arose, undoubtedly, in response to the deliberately controversialist way in which I presented the point, but I was always quick to add—as I will here—that in many cases I really like television, and I have irrational, deeply affective connections to television characters and plots that are entirely comparable to my irrational, deeply affective connections to characters and plots in early modern drama.

These two sentences point us outwards from the production itself, asking us to consider television as a cultural phenomenon in relation to (and potential tension with) play-going at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and contain much that Billing would find utterly irrelevant, including a confession about affective attachment to characters in both television and the theatre.

Consider too the two paragraphs that appear on page 358 of that review, the first of which gives us a description of the dumb show so effective that I won’t be surprised if twenty years my memory deceives me and I believe I saw it for myself, and the second of which sees Lopez wrestling with the implications of “a bare-chested black actor” wearing “tight red pants, the crotch festooned with a large heart” descending on a wire, as the poisoner. In the detailed wrestling with the implications of this choice in the next paragraph, Lopez asks, amongst other things, “Was this yet another example of ham-fisted racialized casting at the RSC?” Or was the RSC “sending up its own history of problems with racialized casting?”

Compelled to choose between these paragraphs, I would choose the latter. The choice is an artificial one, but Billing comes down so heavily on the side of a review that provides “technical detail” without analysis that it seems as if it’s a choice he’s asking us to make. It’s a choice he himself should not want to make, given his own emphasis on the practice of reviewing’s duty to the “archive.” To write reviews that give the future only the technical details of production and not critical wrestling with its implications would not enrich the archive. It would impoverish it.

One final note. The difference in our perspectives on the process of reviewing is reflected in our different responses to the “call” from Shakespeare Bulletin for a special 2012 issue on the “best” and “worst” productions of the last decade. Billing refers to the call dismissively. But before dismissing its aims, we should consider a line from the call after the one he quotes, that in which the editors write that they “encourage reviewers to find exciting ways of conveying the one or two things that made a given production linger in the memory.” When we are reviewing, are we not all contributing to an enterprise that no one of us could pull off on our own, that of assisting productions to “linger” in collective “memory”? And don’t we do that by demonstrating why certain aspects of a production meant so much to a particular consciousness at the time — or in the case of the review that has set off this discussion, why a production didn’t mean much? And don’t we want as many traces as possible of precisely this, the effects, both negative and positive, dull and inspiring, of such performances upon us? This is why Sarah Werner’s original call, which was for multiple perspectives on a single production, was so intriguing. It’s a shame that the particular production in question did not prove sufficiently exciting to enough critical imaginations for that to come to pass, but it may be an experiment worth repeating.
1. Katherine Rowe April 4, 2011 at 9:39 am
  
  Carolyn, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I share your interest in cross-media reception (and television) — as well as your conviction that all acts of reception including scholarly ones are culturally situated. I’m interested in the kind of meta-reviewerly reflection Jeremy pursued, in which the sensibility of the scholar highlights some element of a production that non-scholarly auditors might miss.
  
  Here I suppose some might stake out the boundaries of genre? I.e., the more critical reflection, the more the writing in question begins to look like a critical essay about a performance dynamic, rather than a review? I’m not invested in that distinction as such but observe that it does seem to be live in certain writerly practices among academic theater reviewers, at least in the general tendency not to cite other critics or theorists, in a review — as opposed to a critical essay. (I am at a loss to make that separation — I watched the Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies in a way that was entirely inflected by not only my own televisual practices but Philip Auslander’s and Dana Polan’s analysis of them.)
  
  If one accepts Sarah’s thought (below) that there are simply very divergent interests in academic theater reviews now, and that the generic landscape of the academic theater review is less well-defined and more expansive — then I’m curious as to whether this changes the choices of scholars (to review or not) and journals (to publish reviews or not). Is reviewing different than blogging, if one is writing the kind of review one wants to read, for a niche audience of Shxns who share ones same predilections (techno pomo theater / media history)? Please know that I’m not meaning to diss/trivialize either blogging or reviewing by asking this. Just trying to get at how a changing vision of reviewing (already a genre pursued out of love or obligation rather than gain, as several posters here observe) sits in the (also changing) economy of scholarly publishing in Shakespeare studies.
Sarah Werner April 3, 2011 at 5:20 pm

Reading Christian’s comment, and Kathy’s response, I’m struck by until Christian’s post, how little the discussion around reviewing had to do with a sense of obligation to future theatre historians. Especially in comparison to the special issue that Shakespeare Quarterly did in 1985 (vol. 36 no. 5) on theatre reviewing, in which there is repeated attention to the idea of “reviewing for the record”, there had not been much concern with that here. I’ve never been convinced that we can, in fact, knowingly meet the needs of future (even near-future) theatre scholars. How can we anticipate what they will want from us? Surely it is the things that seem most unremarkable to us that will be the most perplexing to them, because we never remarked on them. I don’t mean that we should try to objectively account for all possible details of how a production works in order to correct this. Rather, I would take this as freeing us from the obligation to the future and instead to write reviews that are of interest to us now.

Kathy here lists some of the categories of performance scholars that I mentioned above. We’re a big group, we’re interested in lots of different things. Maybe we should each focus on writing the types of reviews we’d like to read, rather than writing reviews we imagine other people would like to read. This isn’t an exercise in solipsism, though it might sound like it. It should free us from the expectation that we can all somehow produce a single form of reviews that will offer everything we need. Carolyn will write reviews of the type that she has outlined here; Christian will write reviews of the type he gestures toward here. I will probably continue to avoid writing reviews altogether, and I will continue to be grateful for the reviews that I read that I enjoy and I’ll continue to skip the ones that don’t speak to me.

(I do hope that SQ will be able to successfully do a cluster of reviews of a single show at some point. And I’d love to see the other types of experimental reviewing suggested here, too, such as Peter Holland’s thought of a group of scholars deliberately seeing and writing about a show they expect to be ordinary. Print space will, as Christian admits, always be at a premium, as will our time. But as we continue to explore new platforms for publication, SQ might find new ways of accommodating these experiments.)
Christian Billing April 6, 2011 at 5:49 pm

Thanks to Katherine, Sarah and Carolyn for their comments in relation to my original posting. Carolyn’s comments, in particular, draw attention to the value of the academic elite viewer as one small, but potentially important, constituency of theatre audiences. The examples she gives of academic reviewers’ foregrounding of their own cognitive and emotional responses to a particular moment of theatre do indeed demonstrate some genuine thoughtfulness and insight on the part of those individuals; particularly Jeremy Lopez’ comments with regards to racial casting at the RSC (prompted by a moment in Gregory Doran’s ‘Hamlet’). I don’t have a problem with Jeremy’s (typically insightful) observations at all, and there are plenty of other moments in the back catalogue of Shakespearean theatre reviews in which reviewers say smart things about what the production has made them think as individuals. So please allow me to reiterate the point that I made towards the end of my original posting: although I am not personally interested in (or motivated by) work on audiences (and in particular by individual audience-member reactions) I do acknowledge that many other scholars are and that such engagement with the individualised point of reception occasionally produces interesting results. My one caveat in relation to this sort of personally-inflected reviewerly intervention is that such articulations always depend on the luck of who’s reviewing and, even then, they do not always appear to have moved us all that far from the problems of early Rezeptionsästhetik, with all of its neglect of the ideological plurality of the audience.

My major bone of contention is not instances of the sort that Carolyn cites (in which a piece of stage action is presented in detail and reflected upon by an individual reviewer), but rather instances in which precisely the kind of analytical detail of performance that Jeremy provides (detailed description of costuming prior to personal comments about racial casting) is lacking. In this regard, I think that it is very interesting to note that the moment to which Jeremy refers in Carolyn’s example is from the dumb show section of the play, during which, of necessity, even the most logocentric viewer’s attention is focussed on non-verbal elements of production. If more analysis of this sort (by which I mean re-presentation of and reflection upon details of performance that relate to the wider semiotic field of theatre, rather than an incessant focus on the words of the Shakespearean text and how it is delivered) went on in more reviews, then I think the discipline of the academic theatre review would improve greatly. For it’s precisely the set of spectatorial tools that Jeremy deploys (rather than logocentric, literary-critical, and essentially auditory ones of listening to the Shakespearean text and judging how it is delivered) that I see as lacking in many academic theatre reviews, which brings to the main point of this posting:

I want as actively as I can to suppress the notion that I am proposing a ‘positivist fantasy’ in which reviewers (merely) relate facts about a production for others to interpret at a later stage. And I see no tension at all between rejecting such a notion (as Carolyn does) and still wanting reviews that record meaningfully what a production was all about and how it worked, specifically and technically (as I want). As a researcher and a teacher who himself needs access to and frequently asks students to find out about particular productions I DO think, very strongly, that the best theatre reviews are those that contain substantial elements of thick description that elucidates a number of the key material realities of the production in question. I do, however, also acknowledge that providing what I can only think of in the light of Carolyn’s understanding of my initial posting as a ‘comprehensive forensic account’ of a production is an impossibility that we should neither attempt, nor expect.

All accounts are personal and subjective (even in actual forensic discourse, in which a witness might be lying, or have convinced themselves of a truth that does not exist, or simply not have seen what they might have had they occupied a different physical or subjective position). The problems surrounding this issue are very well expounded in Brecht’s ’Die Strassenszene, Grundmodell eines epischen Theaters’ (Versuche 10, 1950) known in English as the ‘Street Scene’ argument. More recently, the multiple strategies for and the difficulties inherent in re-presenting complex theatrical events with some useful degree of objectivity are outlined in Patrice Pavis’ accounts of the development of Perfomance Analysis as a discipline — particularly the differences between what Pavis terms ‘Reportage Analysis’ and ‘Reconstitution Analysis’ (the latter of which he describes as activity that: ‘restores the performance post festum with the help of all possible and imaginable documents, based on a systematic desire for studium [including the accumulation of] indexes, relics and documents, without always knowing how to use them or how to take them to clear and simple conclusions as to staging options and organizing principles…’).

Rather than attempting to defend a position that I don’t think I actually articulated (a pseudo-empirical fantasy of Formalist absolutism in which the totality of a past performance can be exhumed for the benefit of future scholars), I want to emphasise what I thought was my original call for the type of spectatorship (and performance analysis) that Pavis outlines and which is is typical in theatre and performance studies: a mode of experiencing and writing about theatre that draws on multiple ways of seeing and the pluralistic deployment of appropriate theoretical frameworks for analysis. Such instances (of what Katherine Rowe in this discussion rightly points to as ‘complex viewing’) regularly employ the theoretical perspectives of semiotics; structural analysis; frame analysis; gestic analysis; identity politics; proxemics and kinaesthetics; reception studies; reflexivity (and mise-en-abime); dramaturgical analysis; embodiment (including presence and absence); biomechanical analysis; ideological analysis; historical analysis and narratological analysis in accounts of productions that try to re-present performances without pinning them down to a rigid set of easily understandable signs and systems. In drawing from the various approaches listed above (and others) on a need-to-use basis (as prompted by the performance event), individual performance analysts do not try to reconstruct an entire event in a clinical or forensic manner (which activity would not only be impossible, but stultifyingly boring in the attempt) but rather they try to convey, through the use of concrete examples, the major principles of the performance event in question. Thus, whilst acknowledging (most often tacitly) the individual subjectivity of the reviewer or critic (which subjectivity cannot be avoided) they attempt to achieve a certain objectivity of analysis using clearly defined evidence mediated through particular theoretical approaches.

Whilst such attempts implicitly acknowledge that simply outlining the list of signs that were at play in the performance is a meaningless task, they accordingly still make use of those signs as part of a wider theoretical communication of what the production was trying to achieve. The use of evidence of this sort does not accordingly lead de facto to the kind of pseudo-scientific dismemberment of the theatrical event that post-Structuralist philosophers such as de Certeau and Merleau Ponty criticized from the phenomenological perspective of the primordial spectatorial experience (a point taken up admirably in Bert O. States’ ‘Great Reckonings in Little Rooms’); but, rather, it enables scholars to deploy evidence of what they see as constituting the essence of a production, re-presented from a variety of useful analytical perspectives.

The major points of my original posting were thus not about positivism, or formalism or Structuralism, but rather that: (i) it’s the evidence of performance that’s key to determining what a production is about (i.e. what a production has done in performative terms with the Shakespearean source text); (ii) that such evidence needs to come from somewhere other than quotations of the literary text (supposedly) being staged, or personal responses to generalized aspects of the production on behalf of individual audience members; (iii) that without a sound evidence base and adequately theorized modes of analysis, academic reviewers manifestly lack the authority to speak about Shakespeare as Performance and that (iv) this unfortunate fact can have significant detrimental effects on the potential collaboration of other scholars and theatre makers.

I really do think that one of the possible ways out of the difficulty that academic theatre reviewers have with writing about Shakespeare in performance could well be to cease seeing it as the staging of a play (and a canonical one at that), populated by known characters and divided into pre-determined scenes, speeches and thought impulses; but rather to consider the dramaturgy of the performance event as a radically different proposition to anything they have hitherto encountered bearing the name ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’ etc. If the production is any good, it will have radically different rhythms, repetitions, structures, divisions and linguistic and metaphorical registers than the source text it’s mediating — and we need to look for evidence of these interpretations in a variety of performative contexts. To turn to Pavis once again: ‘In analyzing the staging [of a classic text] we should think of it as an autonomous preserve that has no need to concretize, carry out or invalidate a pre-existing dramatic text or project of meaning’. To do this, to take the new performance text on its own terms and adequately to re-present it to others via a review, I think we really do need to watch in very different ways, and then give in our readers clear examples of the material practices of the performance in question, rather than what is so often done: the quoting of the literary source text and a glib remarking of how this textual relic was ‘interpreted’ as a version of ‘Shakespeare’.

I hope that this clarifies my point somewhat.

6 Comments on paragraph 3

Sarah Werner February 21, 2011 at 11:43 am

I think you’ve hit on one of the odder things about reviewing, especially in academic journals (publications that can really pick and choose what gets reviewed): the highlights get covered, not the ordinary. I can of course understand why this happens. Do we really want to read about the mediocre? And why wouldn’t we want to know about the extraordinary? But it certainly doesn’t reflect the more common experience of the run-of-the-mill. Maybe we should be writing about the ordinary more often, though maybe the genre of reviews is a hard place to accommodate that. But your question makes me wonder what the field of performance scholarship would look like if we wrote more often about the average middle. I’d love to hear others thoughts on what we might gain from that attention–or whether there’s anything to be gained!
1. Daniel Keegan March 1, 2011 at 4:27 pm
  
  A few thoughts:
  – We could push the taxonomy of mediocrity further. Sam Mendes’ Old Vic production of As You Like It isn’t just “average middle.” It’s average middle … on hallowed ground … by a world-famous director … as part of a “transatlantic partnership” (as the Bridge Project website says). It is self-consciously an event. In a sense, the event of this review is the non-event-ness of a potential, wished-for theatrical and critical event.
  – Another entry in the taxonomy, then, might be the production-you-can’t-not-review. I’m thinking of Stephen Greenblatt’s NYRB review of the Pacino Shylock. No fan of the performance, Greenblatt quickly dismissed it an pivoted to readings of Merchant and Othello. Granted: the NYRB is a different review economy from academic journals.
  – What would it feel like to focus one’s attention on the banal? The review mentions a blank second page of notes and the mind wandering to other theaters and other conversations. When I find myself watching another MND In The Park, I find myself visited with intimations of mortality, thinking how many more MND’s I will see before I die.
  Which is not to oppose writing about the ordinary. Rather to say that it seems like a different genre (both of experience and writing). More about the reviewer’s experience of reviewing, as this review is, and less about the event.
  (Of course, that’s only if I’m trying to make the review interesting . . . which is exactly missing the point!)
pholland March 22, 2011 at 10:12 am

Michael’s whole article seems to me to open an extremely important area of work that we have undervalued. Most analysis is devoted to the exceptional, the innovative, the brilliant. But for most regular Shakespeare performance scholars, most performances are dull. So how do we work on the normative? It can’t just be by sharply critical comments. It must be through a recognition of our own perceptions of the context of mediocrity. (As Somerset Maugham once said, ‘Only the mediocre are always at their best’.) Dobson’s point about the shifting of the audience is important – compared with, say, the scramble for tickets for Jude Law as Hamlet or Kevin Spacey as R3 or Tennant and Tate as Ben and Bea, the fact that Mendes’ show led the management to close the gallery for the night is a sign of poor business.

There are many ways we could extend D’s analysis, e.g. by taking that common case (for me at any rate) of going to a show with students, being totally bored but finding them thrilled by the experience – and then trying to make discussion in class helpfully critical without patronising them for their inexperience – ‘Tis new to them… I wonder what would happen if a bunch of us went to a production expecting it to be poor (e.g. my experience pretty much every time at the Globe) but committed to writing about it. What might we learn?
Jeremy Lopez March 24, 2011 at 9:48 am

This is not really an answer to, so much as “inspired by” Peter’s questions…I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the *majority* of my Shx viewing and reviewing–and, I would guess, the majority of that of most N. American academics (maybe British too? I assume circumstances are a bit different with London in reach)–takes place with, or in connection with, students. One thing that might drive what sometimes seems (to me) like the compulsion to record, in printed-review form, Shx productions great & small is our awareness that most people who read these reviews are, like us, involved in a kind of contest with the theatre for the minds (probably only a small part of the minds) of our students. If a production seems (for example), in seeking a certain kind of emotional & theatrical effect by making the play unrelentingly gloomy, to get a number of things vitally *wrong*, indeed to manifest a kind of obtuse method of reading, our first & best recourse is perhaps simply to write about it. One effect of the writing is surely wholly self-serving: we explain to ourselves a way of explaining, dialectically, something to our students the next time we teach AYL’s act 2. There might be a longer-range effect as well: perhaps one function of the review of the “ordinary” production is to provide an example of creative & productive methods of intervention at points where theatrical experience might encourage obtuse habits of reading. (If theatre reviews do/can have this effect, my view is that, where AYL is concerned, they have not been intervening enough in recent years–bumping off old Adam is now so conventional, and accepted as conventional, that one could be forgiven for imagining that Shx provided a stage direction for it.)
michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 7:55 am

The way in which certain pieces of stage business, even when they aren’t any good, seem to become mandatory, with successive directors adopting them even without having seen one another’s productions, is something which fascinates me. There was a time when you couldn’t stage As You Like It without Audrey being given a turnip to hold, and we still live in the era of the onstage execution of Bardolph in Henry V. I hope Adam’s chances of survival will improve from the current mortality figures; if it’s any comfort, he was fine in Stephen Unwin’s recent production at the Rose in Kingston, which was in every respect more memorable (for the right reasons too) than Mendes’.

Very puzzled by the idea that you only see Shakespeare in the company of students; that certainly wasn’t my experience when I worked in the US. An anxiety about whether any given production is going to be something I am seeing for pleasure or another dreary day at the office, however, is very familiar.
michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 8:02 am

By the way, the genuinely invisible normative productions of Shakespeare, the ones which *really* represent how most people understand the plays and what pleasures and duties they offer, but which very few academics ever write about, are of course the amateur ones. Now there’s an important field of inquiry — somebody should publish a book about it, which all readers of Shakespeare Quarterly should buy.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6222211/?site_locale=en_GB

8 Comments on paragraph 4

karlsteel March 1, 2011 at 12:31 pm

I’m not entirely convinced by this impressionistic account of bad business. How were other comparable shows doing that evening? How have shows been doing at the Old Vic of late? What evening were you there?
1. michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 7:34 am
  
  July 2nd. I didn’t conduct in-depth research into the theatre’s accounts; I just went to see a production and described what I found.
2. jamirogers April 3, 2011 at 6:43 pm
  
  I saw AYLI on July 10th, a week after Michael Dobson apparently did. It was thus a week further into the run (and from its press night and subsequent reviews) and I, too, was moved from the immense height of the cheap seats to a very nice seat in the stalls. The Old Vic was practically empty, which has not been its natural state as it has been on an extremely decent run of form the past two or three years (After a few false starts and some catastrophic choices that had the British press crooning in their discouragement, Kevin Spacey’s tenure as artistic director has revitalized the theatre.) When I saw The Tempest a few weeks later, I was not moved from the nosebleed section. To try to put this into perspective, the previous year when I attended The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic on multiple occasions, they did not close the gallery once – there was no need, it was basically full. The show that was running prior to AYLI, a revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” was virtually sold out, as was the show the Old Vic put on after the Mendes Shakespeares had closed. Out of the other 21 shows I saw in London in July 2010, no other performance had closed its uppermost auditorium level and many of the plays I saw were sold out and the other early modern plays in the capital have been doing very nice business indeed last year – at least on the nights I have been to the theatre. For AYLI, London’s theatre audiences were voting with their feet and appear to have gone elsewhere.
Sarah Werner March 7, 2011 at 12:32 pm

One of the things I value about reviews, and particularly this review, is that the format allows for a more personal, impressionistic response to a performance than, for example, an article about a production. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to this, and were I writing an article about this production, I would be reluctant to take one reviewer’s description of how well a show sold. But I think this paragraph contributes to the strength of this review as a whole: it conveys one viewer’s response to one viewing.
(I should add that the review did originally include information on when Michael saw the show: July 2, 2010. I’m sorry that information got dropped out when we put it online.)
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 7:50 am

‘were it not for the notes and sketches and the copy of the programme which now lie in front of me, I might have forgotten the show entirely.’ Why are you compelled to write a review if the performance had so little impact on you? and how does this relate to the artificiality of many of our agendas for writing about performance? do we write more about what we can actually get to see, or have committed ourselves to seeing, or what we think relates to our professional research interests, rather that what we find genuinely arresting and worthwhile theatre (which we are more likely to stumble upon and may not happen to be Shakespeare)?
1. Sarah Werner April 3, 2011 at 4:49 pm
  
  This isn’t quite a fair question to ask of this review. I imagine that Michael wrote this up because I asked him to: as part of the CFP I solicited reviews of this particular production, and since he is a member of SQ’s Editorial Board, it’s possible that Michael felt a particular obligation to try to make the imagined review cluster happen. As he indicates, if it weren’t for that exercise, he wouldn’t have written this up. It was a risky move, I think, and I’m glad he did, as it’s given us a chance to look directly at what we might normally skirt: what types of shows get reviewed in our journals and what do we hope for those reviews to do?
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 7:56 am

As I said in my long response. In general, I am not a fan of excessive dwelling on the audience, particularly by way of personal speculations from reviewers that are not backed up by evidence. You are very up-front about your suppositions and wonderings about the audiences, which stray into the realm of day-dreaming (or fantasy) with regards to the Leicester Square ticket booth or your Club Class upgrade. Had you had more to say about the production itself, would there be less of this writerly padding? and what’s at stake in that fact?
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 8:07 am

With regards to your comments about seeing Russ. I worry about the potentially distancing esoterism of comments like this. I have also been guilty of doing this when I see a collection of the great and the good in Shakespearean studies at a particular event. But what does it do to our wider readership? I am prompted to think of a potential headline in The Onion: ‘One London-based Professor of Shakespeare sees another London-based Shakespearean Academic at London Shakespeare Production.’ Why should anyone care?

7 Comments on paragraph 5

Sarah Werner February 21, 2011 at 11:47 am

I’ll have to look up my notes to see what struck me at the time about the production. But I wonder if the Bob Dylan gag played differently in Brooklyn, where I saw it. There was a lot of laughter, and I laughed too. I’m not sure what it had to do with the rest of the production–it didn’t seem sustained at all–but it didn’t feel irrelevant to me in the way that you describe here. Dylan might not be as omnipresent as he used to be, but he’s still pretty strongly visible and audible here, and there’s been a steady stream of releases that are regularly discussed.
1. karlsteel March 1, 2011 at 12:34 pm
  
  FWIW, I remember the Dylan gag went over very well in Brooklyn, no doubt because it was playing to an audience of 60-somethings or a set of slightly younger folk who’d been wowed recently by I’m Not There. I couldn’t tell you the Dylan gag’s thematic point though.
michaeldobson February 21, 2011 at 12:50 pm

I didn’t mean to imply that nobody in London remembers who Bob Dylan is or recognized what this Jaques was doing (Dylan’s concerts here sell out even more rapidly now than they did in the days when people shouted ‘Judas’ when he switched on an electric guitar); my point is just that a Dylan gag now is a very different thing to what a Dylan gag might have been in 1964 or so. Rather cosier, for one thing.
ps and I *do* know that the cry of ‘Judas’ in 1965 was taped in Manchester, not London, despite the misleading title of the bootleg LP, before anyone writes in…
1. Sarah Werner February 21, 2011 at 1:19 pm
  
  Gotcha. The “cozier” point is a good one. And it was a cozy production, wasn’t it? All about love and getting along. Not so Dylanesque in all of his prickly glory.
karlsteel March 1, 2011 at 12:29 pm

Given that you’ve earlier said ” any night at the theatre is not just a multi-media artistic event but a social one too” you shouldn’t be able to sharply differentiate here (“the show itself”) between the size of the audience and the show on stage.
1. michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 7:36 am
  
  No, that’s true; though I suspect that at least 98% of what happened on the stage would have been exactly the same regardless of who did or did not turn up in the auditorium or in what quantities — it was that sort of show.
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 8:20 am

I like this paragraph of performance analysis and contextual information about the company. And I also like the way that the trans-Atlantic cultural differences you map out (summed up by the RADA versus Julliard divide) are also played out in the responses, by you and by those who saw it in Brooklyn, to the Dylan caricature. Perhaps there is more that could be said about the different cultural registers that are appropriate to playing the ‘country’ characters in England and the USA. Is the trans-Atlantic casting and economic context of this production causing a retreat into stereotyping of this sort? and is this to the detriment of the production? You range quickly in your geographical comparisons from the imagined Floridian beachfront of a Billy Wilder film to the imagined location of an esoteric and quintessentially British Radio 4 drama. Can everyone do this? How are they expected to read the characters if they can’t? Is this common in productions of AYLI? Were there any instances when it was avoided?

1 Comment on paragraph 6

Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 8:32 am

Good points about the darkness, which might be explored with regards to its effect on, amongst other things, the emotive ambiance of the scenographic environment and how this related to a conceptual understanding of the emotional trajectory of the play (sophisticated or otherwise); but I think that your annoyance with the production is prompting you to criticise the lack of a unified picture of historical and technological reality (with regards to a world that had invented new fashion but not electric light etc.). Would you object in a production you thought less bad to a mixed historical period, because it did not provide a coherent and logical imagined world in this way? Would you apply such criticisms to, say, Taymor’s eclecrtic Rome in ‘Titus’? or does aesthetic beauty and directorial skill trump logical coherence and historical truth?

3 Comments on paragraph 7

Jeremy Lopez March 24, 2011 at 9:30 am

Re. “how merry are my spirits” – the F reading actually is “merry.” The Arden editions give “weary” and note that their emendation comes from Theobald. The Pelican gives “merry” and has a note about how it’s often emended, and might be meant ironically. So what’s being described here might be a problem of acting more than text.
michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 8:09 am

Oops. I wonder if anyone involved in the show had been to one of those ‘First Folio acting classes’, where actors are told that in order to be truly authentic they should only ever learn Shakespearean roles from xeroxes of the Norton facsimile and should pronounce every last misprint?
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 8:48 am

Is your alignment of yourself with Coriolanus here another instance of the foregrounding of the reviewer over the work? I’m not condemning this, particularly as it is obviously a joke; but would you be so inclined to do this (bring yourself in so visibly) if you had deemed the production to be better? As you observe, your stoicism WAS rewarded with a good performance. It seems that your identification with Phoebe was driven by something that characterises you both (and this review): your sense of humour. Moreover, the strength of Atkinson’s performance led you to reject the multiple longing for Orlando that characterises the end of many productions (and thereby potentially to question a recuperative and normative closure that expects us to accept our station, but still desire and admire our social betters). Isn’t that a good thing? and if you acknowledge that the production achieved this, isn’t that to be foregrounded. I guess I’m just sad that you note this fact, but do not explore in more detail how it was achieved but rather switch so quickly into a condemnation of Rylance’s inadequacies as Rosalind.

pholland March 22, 2011 at 10:19 am

I have wondered for a while whether we ought to publish the jottings some of us make in the dark – I recall Robert Shaughnessy using them in a conference paper a year or three ago. Why do we write what we write? And what aide-memoire function are we achieving?
Katherine Rowe March 22, 2011 at 5:33 pm

Peter, I spent some very happy hours with Robert Hamilton Ball’s jottings (collected now at the Folger) on the first screening of Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet at the Paris theater in NYC. I find the notes tremendously illuminating of the moment to moment experience of audition before DVD and spent some time working out the patterns of things he observes (including other audience members). I’ve never known exactly what to do with this material but I’m very glad it’s there to be consulted when someone figures that out.
Sarah Werner March 24, 2011 at 12:45 pm

Robert did write a wonderful piece about the type of notes we take when we watch a performance–his conference talk was published in an issue of Shakespeare Bulletin and you can find it in the collection I edited, New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies. (There’s also a relevant piece in there from Jeremy Lopez about academic theatre reviewing and what he sees as its proselytizing impulse.) I find my notes from productions full of those odd asides, before they often trail off into silence either because I’ve gotten bored or because I’ve become so absorbed I forget to write. It’d be great to reveal what we do actually do when we watch shows. There’s so much labor and revision and thought process that goes into the reviews and articles we publish, and all this interesting by-product that gets left out.

This reminds me of the end-of-year book review that Sam Anderson did that consisted of photos of his marginalia. It’s such an evocative trace of reading that we don’t often get to glimpse. (You can see it at http://www.themillions.com/2010/12/a-year-in-marginalia-sam-anderson.html) Maybe we need a project like that for watching performances.
1. pholland March 24, 2011 at 1:43 pm
  
  One of the books I most covet (and this has nothing to do with Shakespeare) is Tom Phillips’ book of agendas from meetings of the Royal Academy’s Executive Committee – needless to say, his doodling on the agendas is breathtaking.
michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 8:10 am

I fear that any attempt at publishing *all* the jottings that are just about legible from the period when I was reviewing for Shakespeare Survey would fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act.

5 Comments on paragraph 11

karlsteel March 1, 2011 at 12:39 pm

I wonder if you can say here or earlier what you thought Mendes was trying to accomplish. It may be that you’ve decided that he didn’t have a vision of the whole production, which is fine, but I think it’s more likely that Mendes thought he was up to something. Regardless of its awfulness, what do you suppose it was?
1. michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 7:43 am
  
  I have written elsewhere about my increasing distrust of productions which harness a play to a single definitive vision — as though the audience were supposed to come out at the end all knowing the Right Answer, ‘Ah, this director thinks this play is all about X!’. If Mendes was trying to impose an interpretation or even an agenda of particular questions on As You Like It, I can I only say that I didn’t feel inspired to do his job for him by spending any time guessing what he might have thought they were. The question of how conscious audiences are or should be of directors as opposed to actors, playwrights, fellow audience members or whoever else is of course a familiar one.
  1. michaeldobson March 25, 2011 at 7:44 am
    
    Something quite disastrous happened to some of the syntax in that comment and I can’t find a way of revising it — so sorry.
Christian Billing March 30, 2011 at 9:04 am

I wonder about the value of any account of a Shakespeare production that is only two or three sentences long, but I do understand the desire NOT to write about a production at all. I did, on one occasion, inform an editor that subsequent to seeing a show I was unwilling to review it. The reason was that it was a much celebrated show from an internationally-reputed director whose production had made me very angry and I did not feel that I could adequately distance my anger from my response, which would not in my opinion have been helpful. That was a personal decision. Total lack of engagement with a production might be another reason not to say anything. The question of reviewing mediocrity that has emerged in the discussion thread connected to this review article is an interesting one, because to be a useful resource to future scholars of performance, a review archive needs to be as complete as possible. But I worry that engaging with what we perceive as mediocrity can sometimes lead us into the esoteric, ironic, self-referential ‘game’ of theatre reviewing rather than inspire us to communicate in detail what we saw as new, vital and interesting about a production.
Sarah Werner April 3, 2011 at 4:53 pm

As the one who first brought up the question of whether it would be valuable to write about the mediocre, I obviously do think there’s something there we could explore. I don’t worry about such an engagement would lead reviewers to an ironic distance from reviewing. To the converse, I worry that if we don’t engage with the experience of the ordinary then we might miss something about the effect of the extraordinary, both in the moment of watching it and in the effort of writing about it.

Shakespeare Quarterly

Review of The Bridge Project As You Like It

Michael Dobson, Birkbeck College – University of London

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