W(H)ITHER THE PERFORMANCE?

EDWARD MULLALY

While the difference between a dramatic production and a literary text is obvious in theory, the distinction blurs when we attempt to enfold historical performances into theatre history. For we, lacking personal encounter with a long-past performance's signifiers or its audience reception, are left with no alternative other than to explore that event in terms of its still-extant literary text. This barrier remains to be overcome by those who would canonize any particular theatrical Performance.

En théorie, la différence entre une représentation dramatique et un texte littéraire est évidente. Toutefois, la distinction devient moins nette, si nous essayons d'intégrer l'histoire de ces représentations à l'histoire du théâtre. N'ayant aucune expérience personnelle des connotations de ces spectacles du passé ni des réactions des spectateurs d'alors, il ne nous reste qu'une seule possibilité, celle de recourir au texte littéraire. Cet obstacle présente toujours un défi pour ceux qui veulent établir des règles pour une représentation théâtrale particulière.

I am concerned with the problem represented by the existence of a literary type, namely 'drama,' which cannot be defined as a literary type without reference to the concrete extra-literary institution of the theater. For there is nothing whatever that is rhetorically or formally unique about a dramatic text; there is no characteristic or set of characteristics, or complex of 'family resemblances,' by which we would recognize a dramatic text as something different from a narrative text, if we did not know about the institution of the theater, if the theater, as an institution, were not already there to be 'meant' as the text's vehicle. Otherwise a character's name, followed by a colon and some clearly fictional words, would be an entirely transparent shorthand for the sentence, 'X said. . .' and we would immediately understand that the general literary type is narrative.¹

The discourse questioning drama's relationship to literature--evidenced in the subtitle of Benjamin Bennett's 1990 theoretical study Theatre as Problem: Modern Drama and its Place in Literature-has been echoed in the title of an even more recent collection, Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, edited by Robert Lecker.²

Lecker's collection of essays on 'literary value' contains two thoughtful studies on drama production in Canada. Denis Salter traces the attempt to develop a national theatre, from its origins in the 1800s to the present, as an investment in outdated ideas that have 'succeeded in alienating [us] from a polyvalent conception of nationalism as we tended to suppress marginalized constituencies whose artistic and political values transgressed the dominant paradigm.'³ Richard Paul Knowles's article carries on both historically and thematically from Salter's by interrogating the values shaping the contemporary Canadian dramatic canon 'in the often unconscious and usually unstated empiricist assumption that a stable, universalist dramatic canon and theatrical "mainstream" can and should be established.⁴ Knowles goes on (in part) to argue that 'courses on Canadian drama need to resist the textual, literary and universalist biases inherent in the reading of published texts, by considering performances as texts and by taking advantage of opportunities presented by local productions.'⁵ Despite the awareness of both authors that referring to particular past performances usually entails divorcing the play from its performance and siting it in some textual, literary, or ideological context, both essays are forced to reduce theatre to these thematic biases that Knowles, especially, goes out of his way to avoid, and to discuss theatrical events not in terms of performance-as-text but rather in terms of dramatic literature. His wish is to have 'regional, "ethnic," native, feminist, lesbian, gay, non-literary, or explicitly political drama' subversively widen the concept of the canon until, presumably, the idea of canon loses its exclusivity. But this is largely a wish for widening the acceptable thematic or literary boundaries of Canadian drama. While Knowles bemoans the focus in our anthologies and journals on 'theme and content at the expense of form,'⁶ he does not suggest how to break away from this literary bias when the reader's main (if not only) encounter with long-past productions is a vicarious one evoked through printed descriptions. Given the impossibility of re-viewing by means of some sort of Keatsean stasis the plays and productions of which they speak, Salter and Knowles-both involved in drama production, and both very much aware that drama exists in the non-literary interface of performer and spectator--could not do otherwise.

This recognition of the difficulties of attempting to address directly the performance that is central to a discussion of any dramatic event, especially one undocumented in any aural or visual manner, reflects a universal quandary for theatre historians, researchers, and anthologizers.⁷ Granted, theatre archives hold performance descriptions, visual aids and production properties of some Canadian productions mounted before living memory, and these allow researchers to create in their mind's eye a particular vision of what they think might have transpired on a particular night. Yet, despite their awareness of the obvious fact that the script is not the play, theatre historians, like the shipwrecked sailor rowing for the horizon 'because it's better than nothing,' constantly return to the literary text. Performances survive largely in subjective memories and conjectures that become more blurry the further the particular theatrical event has receded. The written text remains the main path to a convenient and stable entrance into theatrical experiences long past.

While even a contemporary production is quickly reduced to its literary, printed text, modem technologies can recreate at least some sense of how a particular performance engaged a particular audience. Historical productions usually predate video, sound recordings, and photography, and thus must be viewed largely in the theatre of the mind. While general knowledge of an actor's technique can be imposed onto any particular performance, such a recreation deals less with history than with conjecture. And where the knowledge of actors' performance techniques is minimal-as is the case with all but the brightest talents of theatrical history-the main window on theatre production remains the literary script.

The winter season of 1844-45 in Fredericton, as outlined in the province's newspapers, offers a paradigm of the difficulties associated with the interpretation of performance data. Fredericton had been bereft of theatre through the early half of the decade. But by December 1844 the 33rd Regiment had fitted up 'the Theatre' in an effort to 'afford amusement to the people of this place.'⁸ The same paper also noted that Henry W Preston, an itinerant actor-manager who rather grandly described himself as a 'Manager of the Provincial Theatres,' was passing through town from Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island with a small company of professionals and would present an evening of varied entertainment. Preston stayed to work with the Histrionic Association in providing 'several dramatic entertainments in a neat little Theatre fitted up in Mr March's building.'⁹ Buoyed by a modicum of success, Preston rented and transformed the Histrionic Association Hall into 'The People's New Olympic Theatre,' and he and his company performed there until the end of February. Fredericton's second theatrical venue that winter, the garrison theatre, was used off and on for productions and lectures. Preston's season of readings and performances included Hamlet, The School for Scandal, The Stranger, Douglas, Richard III, George Barnwell, Pizarro, Venice Preserved, Jane Shore, and The Provincial Association. The garrison mounted productions of The Country Squire, The Disagreeable Surprise, Luke the Labourer, The Castle Spectre, and Ambrose Gwinett. As these lists suggest, Preston was offering a respectable bill of fare that anyone with a season ticket to Sadler's Wells might have seen a decade earlier, and the garrison amateurs were actively producing melodramatic potboilers of the Romantic persuasion.

Supposing for the moment that we wish to assess these performances as to their suitability for inclusion into some Canadian dramatic canon, what can actually be said about the dynamics of these theatrical events? To begin with, we are left with little knowledge concerning what, to the researcher, are obvious questions concerning performance text. How was School for Scandal actually compressed? Did The Stranger use Benjamin Thompson's translation from the German, which was the standard at Drury Lane? Was Richard III based, with due regard for Preston's meagre resources, on Shakespeare's script, or was it some version of Cibber's truncated version, which cut out characters, added lines, and excised scenes in which Richard does not appear? George Barnwell existed in a couple of possible performance texts.¹⁰ Jane Shore existed in at least two versions.¹¹ Cherry's The Soldier's Daughter was a three-act comedy; there was a burletta text of the script as well. ¹² The Honey Moon could have been performed in the three act version, or in the more popular five. ¹³ Who knows what text of Hamlet was placed before the Fredericton audience? Only one copy of Thomas Hill's satire on New Brunswick politics The Provincial Association has surfaced recently, and its possessor refuses to let anyone see it. Any exploration of the Fredericton audience's relationship with these plays is surely made difficult by the absence of precise script information.

Problems of script aside, a listing of performances furnishes little information about performance. Ranger points out, for instance, that early portrayals of Lady Randolph in Douglas ¹⁴ by Peg Woffington, Mrs Crawford, Mrs Jackson, and Sarah Siddons ranged from the pathetic to the insane. The Fredericton characterization of Lady Randolph would depend on the (not considerable) tragic skills of Preston's leading actress, Miss Hildreth. Ranger also details the choices in costume for the evil Glenalvon in various productions: a highland kilt, a more traditional black outfit, and (for Francis Aickin) a costume suggestive of 'the soft service of Venus.' The Fredericton production undoubtedly availed itself of whatever costumes were at hand. Nothing more definite can be said. As to the stage business, Lady Randolph's exit to throw herself from the cliff comes after she learns of her husband's and son's deaths:

A little while
Was I a wife! a mother not so long!
What am I now? -I know.- But I shall be
That only whilst I please; for such a son
And such a husband drive me to my fate. [Runs out.] ¹⁵

The stage direction is simple and straightforward. But was it simply and straightforwardly followed? Thomas Dibdin describes his staging of this ending at the Surrey:

I had a representative of Lady Randolph in the person of a very clever boy, by whose good acting and fearless agility, the northern dame, at the conclusion of the tragedy, was seen to throw herself from a distant precipice into a boiling ocean, in a style which literally brought down the house.¹⁶

While such a spectacular ending was presumably beyond the resources of the impecunious Preston, and really uncalled for by the script, there is no evidence of what final exit Miss Hildreth was able to offer the citizens of Fredericton.

The ending of The Stranger offers a more complex ambiguity. The repentant adulteress Mrs Haller meets with her spurned husband and begs his forgiveness:

When my penance shall have broken my heart,-
When we again meet in a better world
[Husband]: There, Adelaide, you may be mine again.
Mrs.H.
[Husband]: Oh! Oh! [Parting.]
[But as they are going, she encounters the BOY, and he the GIRL]
Children: Dear father! Dear mother!
[They press the CHILDREN in their arms with speechless affection; then tear them-selves away-gaze at each other-spread their arms, and rush into an embrace.The CHILDREN run, and cling round their Parents. The curtain falls. ¹⁷

The ending of this popular domestic melodrama had great moral implications (some critics would say immoral implications because Mrs Haller had deserted her loving and faithful husband).¹⁸ Is the husband's 'There, Adelaide, you may be mine again' a statement of forgiveness and comfort (as if he were saying 'There, there, all is forgiven')? Or would his tone make it obvious that 'There,' is picking up his wife's reference to 'a better world,' which would suggest he is not about to forgive her this side of the grave? Was it more prudent in Fredericton to play the ending as an affirmation of the marriage bond? Or was the more delicate spectator to conceive that following 'an agonizing, though an affectionate embrace, (the only proof of reconciliation given, for the play ends here), [no] farther endearments will ensue, than those of participated sadness, mutual care of their joint offspring, and to smooth each other's passage to the grave'?¹⁹ In simpler terms, was the ending happy or sad? A student of cultural anthropology would want to know whether the local audience demanded to see Mrs Haller's immorality forgiven, or punished further. Might Preston have been inspired to play the scene's ambiguities, and to leave questions of interpretation (moral or otherwise) to the individual patrons of his playhouse? Once more, the shaping of the performance cannot be determined by the text alone. One would have to see the final tableau to appreciate whether or not the husband played the embrace with pity and understanding and forgiveness.

Historical sources seldom tell exactly what text was used on the stage, nor the interpretation given the text. Another difficulty in exploring the performant function of theatre comes from a natural tendency to view these plays in the mind's eye as modem productions. When Preston opened his New Olympic Theatre in that same Histrionic Association space, his advertisement emphasized that his theatre was now improved by the addition of a 'raised stage,' 'appropriate scenery' and separate entry and seating for the gently. These changes would be scarcely worth advertising if the earlier theatre had enjoyed them; likely the first half of the Fredericton season was performed on a low platform or on floor level, in a hall where all but those in the front rows probably had obstructed sightlines, and where certainly the softness of the oil lighting (gas in Fredericton was still years away) would illumine both the audience and the actors. ²⁰ Were the actors compelled to block their scenes across the pale footlights in order to make the best of inefficient footlights? How would they play death scenes during the first half of the season if the lack of a raised stage meant the audience could not see a supine actor? How did the limits of Preston's theatre and technology impinge on the actual performances? Looking more broadly at the possibility of canonizing any performance, as this Fredericton example shows, there remain few elements of performance dynamic on which to build a case for canonizing a long-past performance.

No one would deny the aphorism 'the script is not the play.' Performance is absolutely central to theatre and, by implication, to theatre history. The quandary presented when acknowledgement of this centrality is coupled with the absence of the historical event's performance dynamic leaves us in a position similar to that endured by Iolanthe's Lord Chancellor: 'Ah, my Lords, it is indeed painful to have to sit upon a woolsack which is stuffed with such thorns as these! ²¹ These thorns grow sharper as we question the assumptions with which a modem researcher attempts to go beyond the literary text to recreate a performance of a previous century, and the information which such a recreation can yield. For instance, a modem scholar mentally views historical productions with a mind's eye accustomed to bright lighting and clean sight lines. Less generally considered, because it is much less a part of the modem theatrical experience, is the effect of the early-19th century practice of keeping rehearsals few in number, and generally optional. Kemble and Macready railed against the cavalier attitude that saw rehearsals largely as a means of establishing stage traffic patterns for 'the night.' (Actors, in turn, nicknamed Macready 'the sergeant' for his attempts to impose a unified interpretation of the play on his entire cast.)²²The more that is known about past theatre practices, the less confidently presumptions can be made about a particular performance. While all copies of a single printed page are equally intelligible, all performances are meaningful only to the extent of our contact with each particular performance. But the passage of time has obviously removed the possibility of personal encounter with the performance's signifiers.

A final interrogation of the performant function concerns the quality of the performance. In the Fredericton season being used as a paradigm, between the middle of December and the middle of January Preston rehearsed and mounted seven challenging productions (as well as the farces and other entertainments surrounding them). Even when one allows for the manager's years of theatrical experience and for those of his professional companions Miss Hildreth and Mr James, lack of rehearsal time must have justified newspaper observations that not all characters were perfect in their roles. The Drury Lane production of Pizarro in 1799 demanded the talents both of Mrs Siddons as Elvira and Mrs Jordan as Cora; ²³ in the Fredericton production Miss Hildreth played both roles. Her feat is all the more remarkable because, until two days before this double performance, the schedule called for her to play Belvidera. in Venice Preserved on that night.²⁴ (Her acting, rarely praised throughout her whole career, was here commended as 'much above mediocrity.)²⁵ Modern critics, drawing on their own experience of professional and amateur productions, do not have a paradigm for the acting quality of these Fredericton productions offered at the rate of two a week.

The problems explored so far all focus on the performance offered from the stage. An equally important area of questioning involves the manner in which the audience received the performance. How is it possible to explore the dynamics of a nineteenth-century performance on a particular audience when both the referentiality of those particular individuals and the actual dramatic experience are wanting? An example makes this abstract question more concrete: what message or ideology did the Fredericton audience take from Preston's production of the well-known George Barnwell?

Lillo's George Barnwell, or The London Merchant, read from a white, middle class, patriarchial perspective, chronicles the tragedy of poor George Barnwell, a London apprentice who, though trusted by his employer uncle, falls victim to his lower passions ('O conscience! feeble guide to virtue'[318]), ²⁶slays his beloved uncle at the instigation of the immoral seductress Millwood ('To call thee woman were to wrong thy sex, thou devil!'[328]), and goes to the gallows taking religious peace and comfort from the thought that 'To sin's like man, and to forgive like heaven' (339). Millwood goes to the gallows refusing to become part of this moral (and male) lesson:

Women, by whom you are, the source of joy,
With cruel arts you labour to destroy;
A thousand ways our ruin you pursue,
Yet blame in us those arts first taught by you. (329)

With this indictment of the patriarchal social order, she faces death unrepentant and self-justified. Millwood can easily be seen by a modern critic as a woman far ahead of her time.

On what basis can a particular reading of this performance be made? It was necessary to shift theatrical sensibilities back a hundred and fifty years when discussing the play's performant function; must the same be done before discussing its referrant function? Is it even possible to block out, by an act of will, the intellectual baggage of 20th century theatrical experience, insight and ideology so that the production could be seen on its own terms?

Is it fair to read Preston's production of Lillo's play as some sort of political statement, which Augusto Boal would have us believe all plays are?²⁷ If so, a 20th-century Marxist would want to view poor George's plight in terms of social ideology, in a play whose rhetoric influenced the oppressed citizens of Fredericton-from political outsiders to apprentice boys- to participate in their own victimization. A feminist might see in the patriarchy's response to Millwood another example of cultural silencing by the dominant Fredericton ideology. Through Freudian glasses, the Fredericton audience might see the play as an experience in role-playing foregrounding performance rather than content, and intended as such by the hard-working Preston and his faithful assistantant Miss Hildreth as they continued to fight for survival in an artistically and financially inhospitable world; whereas a Jungian might view in the melodrama not stereotypes but archetypes. A Freudian-feminist might well focus on Barnwell as still another example of the dominant culture's misplaced sympathy for the fallen male; a Jungian-feminist could see Millwood as the archetype of all oppressed women. A serniotician exploring the process of signification would question whether Fredericton's sign receptors (i.e. the individuals in the audience) would all receive the iconography of this particular sign system as closed or open text. To this question Umberto Eco would caution that 'theatrical messages are shaped also by the feedback produced from their destination point,'²⁸ Jean Alter would warn that we live in a decentred world where 'the very notion of signs has been undermined by deconstruction theories,'²⁹ and Malcolm Bradbury would point out, 'It is proving beyond doubt that we find ourselves in the age of the floating signifier, when word no longer attaches properly to thing, and no highbonding glues can help us.'³⁰

Similarly, to view the Romantic offerings of the garrison as anything more than an entertaining way to pass an evening would be presumptuous. The Gothic terror of the London production of The Castle Spectre had been undercut by Mrs Jordan's rimed Epilogue, which summed up the villain's demise in two lines:

I drew my knife, and in his bosom stuck it;
He fell, you clapp'd---and then he kick'd the bucket!³¹

Buckstone's domestic melodrama Luke the Labourer similarly has few spiritual insights to share with its audience. (Luke's death at the play's dénoument goes unremarked even by the other characters on stage.) It is difficult to know how the regiment's audience would relate to the author of Ambrose Gwinett, Douglas Jerrold. In his own day he was known by London theatregoers as the 'Surrey Shakespeare'; ³² more recently, he has been described asthe 'author of many worthless comedies but a force in his own time.' ³³The most that might be said of these regimental scripts is that, in their lack of mental challenge, or in their link to the British cultural tradition, they might express the tastes or interests of their audience. Yet who can say for sure that these plays were not chosen simply because sufficient scripts were at hand, or because they were the Commander's favorites?

To add still more opacity to this general cloud of unknowing, some members of the audience in this garrison town might not be concerned with a play's content at all, but rather with its extra-literariness. For such people, the semiotically signified might be anchored in the notion that attendance at any play would, of itself, enhance their social image as persons of culture and sophistication or (since this is British theatre) lovers of the homeland. Benjamin Bennett points out the obvious truth that much can be signified without being meant. ³⁴

These are but some aspects of interpretation over which a reader might pause in the attempt to wring from the record of a performance not only theatrical information but historical ideology or cultural anthropology. A listing of Fredericton's performances proffers the warm and comforting knowledge that in a particular town on a particular night a theatrical event occurred. The number of plays listed suggests the intensity of interest, at least by the amateurs of the town, in theatre. In the pattern of play choice, the cultural historian might read Fredericton's clear links with the British tradition rather than with much newer American tastes-although Preston's many seasons in America were also heavily weighted with British plays. The pattern of the 1845 season as a whole might outline Preston's sense of the town's theatrical interests; but his precipitous leaving of Fredericton at the end of February only one step ahead of the bailiff suggests that his reading-whether in terms of play choice, quality of production, ticket prices, or other factors-was not as accurate as he would have wished. The longer the individual performances or Preston's seasonal patterns are analyzed, the less information they provide about the dynamic of presence so central to any theatrical event.

Similarly, there is no satisfaction for those theatrical critics and ideologues bedeviled by near-Humean scepticism in their attempts to enfold historical performances (along with literary text) more centrally into the Canadian canon. Bennett's argument that 'what happens in the theater, for all its unrepeatable physical particularity, is after all always a literary event'³⁵ seems correct only as long as no one asks just what that literary event actually is. Yet Bennett does enunciate a useful position because, in most instances, if past productions are not explored as literary events, there remains no alternative dramatic text by which to explore them. The ephemerality of historical performance plagues both the researcher attempting to assess a particular event in either critical or ideological terms, and the theatre historian vexed by the subjective relationship of an event and its interpreter. For both, viewing past performance in terms of literary script remains a popular method of avoiding a descent into the destablizing interrogation of meaning and subjectivity. Salter's and Knowles's arguments in favor of moving beyond solely literary values to include performances in the Canadian canon-arguments made subversively in an essay collection subtitled Essays in Literary Value-lead us toward this most steep and beckoning descent.

NOTES

W(H)ITHER THE PERFORMANCE?

EDWARD MULLALY

1 BENJAMIN BENNETT, Theater as Problem (Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press 1990) p 2
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2 ROBERT LECKER ed (Toronto: Univ of Toronto Press 1991)
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3 'The Idea of a National Theatre' 90
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4 'Voices (Off); Deconstructing the Modern English-Canadian Dramatic Canon' 91
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5 KNOWLES 110
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6 KNOWLES 110
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7 Such problems have recently been explored from a number of ideological perspectives in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, ed THOMAS POSTLEWAIT and BRUCE A McCONACHIE (Iowa City: Univ of Iowa 1989)
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8 Head Quarters 11 Dec 1844
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9 Head Quarters 1 Jan 1845
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10 ALLARDYCE NICOLL, A History of English Drama 1660-1900, vol IV (Cambridge Univ Press 1960)p 430
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11 NICOLL p 485 lists an 1833 version by an unknown author
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12 NICOLL p 536
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13 SHIRLEY S ALLEN, Samuel Phelps and Sadler's Wells Theatre (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan Univ Press 1971) p 270
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14 JOHN HOME's Douglas during its initial season in Edinburgh (1756) inspired that immortal shout from the pits, 'Weel, lads; what think you of Wully Shakespeare now? Quoted in PAUL RANGER, Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast (London: The Society for Theatre Research 1991) p 115. A century later THACKERAY in The Virginians ridicules Douglas as 'Mr Home's dreary tragic masterpiece' (New York: F M Lupton, n d) p 288. General information on these early productions of Douglas is taken from RANGER pp 106-16
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15 JOHN HOME, Douglas p 55, collected in British Theatre: Eighteenth-Century English Drama, selected by NATASCHA WURZBACK (Frankfurt: Minerva GMBH 1969), vol 20
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16 Quoted MICHAEL BOOTH, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Manchester: Univ Press n d) pp 26-27
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17 AUGUST VON KOTZEBUE, The Stranger p 72, trans BENJAMIN THOMPSON in WURZBACH vol 17
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18 See ALLEN p 272
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19 MRS INCHBALD, 'Remarks' in The Stranger p 5, WURZBACH vol 17
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20 MICHAEL BOOTH ed, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century I (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1969) 'Introduction' p 2
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21 GILBERT and SULLIVAN, lolanthe p 248 in The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Random House n d)
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22 J 0 BAILEY, British Plays of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Odyssey Press 1966) p 3
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23 G G S, The Dramatic World of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Henry G Bohn 1852) p 521
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24 Head Quarters 8 Jan 1845
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25 Loyalist 16 Jan 1845
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26 In Eighteenth-Century Plays, intro by RICARDO QUINTANA (New York: Random House 1952)
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27 Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group 1985) p ix
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28 'Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,' TDR 21 (Mar 1977) 117
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29 A Socio-semiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: Univ of Penna Press 1990) p 21
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30 Quoted in BRYAN D PALMER, Descent into Discourse (Philadelphia: Temple Univ Press 1990) p 4
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31 M G LEWIS, The Castle Spectre p 72, in WURZBACH vol 19
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32 ERNEST REYNOLDS, Early Victorian Drama (New York: Benjamin Blom reissued 1965)p 131
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33 NICOLL p 185
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34 BENNETT p 260
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35 BENNETT p 16
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