Reid Gilbert
Reacting to recent comments on metafiction, this article explores the work of Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald, suggesting that their various collaborations exemplify post-modern metadrama. The Vancouver artists have collaborated in various ways with each other, and with other theatre specialists, to produce a body of work in which consistent approaches to the creation of theatrical illusion can be seen. By blurring the traditional distinctions between writer, designer, director and actor, by employing complex intertexts, and by forcing an active participation by the audience, Panych and MacDonald move beyond narrative to an essentially theatrical design.
Dans cet article, rédigé en réponse à de récentes observations sur la métafiction, l'auteur recense plusieurs collaborations de Morris Panych et Ken MacDonald, proposant leur travail comme exemple du métathéâtre post-moderne. De diverses façons ces deux artistes, situés à Vancouver, ont produit, en collaboration l'un avec l'autre comme avec d'autres spécialistes en théâtre, une oeuvre où se discernent certaines approches uniformes par rapport à la création de l'illusion théâtrale. En brouillant les démarcations traditionnelles entre dramaturge, décorateur, metteur en scène et comédien, et en introduisant des intertextes compliqués tout en contraignant l'auditoire à une participation plus active, Panych et MacDonald ont su transcendre la simple narration pour atteindre un modèle essentiellement théâtral.
In The Mask in Place: Essays on Fiction in North America, George Bowering suggests that historiographic metafictions now demand an interplay between reader and writer which does not leave the reader 'in the dark waiting for the stage lights to be lit upon the scene for you and left there for your imagined occupation.' 1 In a similar assertion, Linda Hutcheon notes that 'As in the Bakhtinian carnival, in the postmodernist novel there are no footlights separating art and audience.' 2
These comments seem to betray a significant misunderstanding of the process of drama, a failure to recognize an essential characteristic of the genre. In 'Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin's Theory of Genre,' Jennifer Wise also reacts against the application of what she calls 'the anti-literary energies of theatrical culture to the novel' while withdrawing 'them theoretically from the theatre itself.' She points out that 'it is not the absence of footlights that distinguishes novels from plays but the absence of bodies,' those of 'the actors who perform them' and of 'the spectators who ... attend them.' 3 Indeed, as Keir Elam has noted, far from separating audience and text, the theatre has always presented 'in the form of discours, a network of "pragmatic" utterances or énonciations rather than a series of abstracted énoncés.' 4 Even theatre critics have sometimes ignored the multiple sets of relationships (often momentary) among text and audience, intertext and audience, actor and audience, text and actor, intertext and actor, subtext, mode and convention which set up a complex semiotic structure among the participants in the illusion on stage. Richard Hornby contends that 'the principal fallacy in realistic dramatic theory was in its assigning a passive role to drama. The ingenuousness of this theory is the same as that of the traditional naive view of language.... Drama has an operative function similar to that of language. Rather than mirroring life passively, drama is instead a means of thinking about life, a way of organizing and categorizing it.' 5 Émile Benveniste has pointed out that an 'utterance is performative [only] in that it denominates the act performed,' not because 'it can modify the situation of the individual, but in that is by itself an act.' 6 In drama, performative language combines with action and deixis in a complex system.
In the process of organization, however, the audience - as, indeed, the playwright and designers of any production - all employ established references, literary, historiographic, religious and cultural allusions, archetypes, and a shared understanding of the process of drama itself, of the conventional devices which allow the suspension of disbelief. Modern audiences, raised on film and video, superimpose another set of referents on those implicit in the form, although contemporary viewers may often be unaware of the codes already in place. It is, of course, this complicated overlapping of physical and literary texts and the active role of the viewer which constitute metadrama, illustrating what Elam calls Benveniste's classic distinction between histoire and discours, 'the "subjective" mode geared to the present, which indicates the interlocutors and their speaking situation' (144). A subjective response to speaker and situation is not only evident, but is always demanded in the stage work of Morris Panych and his frequent collaborator, Ken MacDonald.
Panych and MacDonald have produced a varied body of work, appearing together as writers and actors, and working individually (but often on the same production) as director, production designer and musical director. At times, they have shared the creative process with other writers and directors; at other times, they have created the entire production themselves. These artistic activities are usually seen as distinct, but, in this continuing partnership, mutual approaches consistently surface, even when the team is working with others. Because they work on different aspects of the design and production of their shows but with a common vision, their collaborations present a rich source for the study of the necessary interplay among production specialists. But, more important, their work also demonstrates the intricate relationship between the illusion created and the act of creation. Their work shows a conscious manipulation of dramatic text and stage effect to produce an array 'of pragmatic utterances,' to create what Elam calls a 'dramatological approach' rather than one 'dedicated to sjuzet and fabula alone' (144).
Through their work, from their early collaborative writing and acting in Last Call: A Post Nuclear Cabaret to their involvement in the Tamahnous Haunted House Hamlet, to their popular Arts Club (summer 1989) production of 7 Stories (which opened at Tarragon Theatre in February 1991) to their partnership in the design, textual emendation, and direction of the Arts Club's 1989 production of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, to their adaptation of The Beggar's Opera at Studio 58, Panych and MacDonald have consistently played with the barriers of illusion and have superimposed upon the narratives they present the palpable presence of themselves as agents of creation and of the stage as a metadramatic process.
In Last Call, 7 the audience is required to work with Panych both as writer and as highly physical actor to create a number of different personae and two contradictory endings. The last two survivors of the nuclear holocaust find one another and stumble into a theatre where the victimizer Bartholomew Gross (himself dying of radiation sickness) forces the weaker Eddie Morose (blinded by the blast) to play the piano in a grotesque cabaret. Thus a device which shapes the action also allowed MacDonald (who played Morose in the original productions) to sing his own songs and direct the music while highlighting Panych as performer. It also instructs the audience to anticipate both the form of the 'two-hander' (which is faithfully observed) and of the lounge act (which is satirized). The theatrical form grows out of the inciting action, then, in a way it does not, for example, in John Gray's Billy Bishop Goes to War where the audience must immediately recognize the one-man convention and move imaginatively beyond it. In Last Call, the audience does not move beyond the form but is always reminded of it, so that the form itself becomes a metaphor and the audience comes to understand the anti-nuclear message intellectually long after it has perceived the implications of the theme in the convention itself, in the desperate pun of a one-man show - and a tacky one, at that - starring the one dying man left on the planet.
More interesting, however, is the duping of the audience by a double ending. The audience has been instructed to respond within two theatrical conventions it understands and which Panych develops in a parallel design. Gross is able to dominate Morose because he has found a gun, a grim symbol of the aggression which has led the world to this disaster. As Gross sings, 'The man with the word may have otherwise heard/ but the one with the gun is GOD.' Beyond this rather obvious symbolism, however, the gun also prompts the audience's familiarity with the conventions of the Western and Gangster movie. As Hornby has observed, American 'nuclear policy is shaped by the archetype of the Western gunfight, in which the hero must allow the villain to draw his gun first, but must then draw his own gun quickly enough to kill the villain before he can effectively fire' (26). To protect himself, Morose sings Gross to sleep and then steals the gun, hiding the bullets. But this 'first-strike' allows Gross to counterfeit betrayal ('Trying to kill me, Morose? ... I'm aware of your potential violence'), permitting him to retaliate and kill his companion, halving the world's population and sealing the fate of humankind.
The audience is aware of (and is actively synthesizing) two sets of theatrical conventions. It recognizes the expectations of this attitude to war, and is, therefore, trapped between anticipating the proper ending for the Western shootout (which it realizes must also end the species) and hoping for an ending more in keeping with the protocols of the lounge act which run alongside. This desire is even stronger in the television audience trained, as it is, to expect happy resolutions in variety shows. In the play, the action seems to end with the strongly coded lullaby, and an apparent reconciliation between the two men; in the TV version, the cabaret resolution is exaggerated into singing and dancing with balloons falling from the ceiling. But the lullaby has a Western theme ('Close your eyes, rest your head - /And the coyotes will sing of the dead' [52]) which prompts the audience to recall the Western intertext and its set of expectations which have not been satisfied. And in the TV razzmatazz, the audience lacks a sense of theatrical completion even while it is elated; it knows that the froth of a cabaret is artificial and too insubstantial for the issues in discussion. Therefore, it is prepared for Gross's abrupt cancellation of the euphoria - 'On the other hand, I think we've managed to simplify things just a bit.... I think it's just a bit naive. A bit contrived.' - and for the second, dark ending in which Gross does kill his partner. The ending now reveals a second, cynical theme, suggesting that the audience's own expectations, born not of reasoned analysis, but of allegiance to theatrical forms, may necessitate the end of the human race: the historiographic implications are striking. The audience has not simply witnessed a prophetic histoire, but has assimilated units of text and action which, all taken together, constitute the play and the fate of the world.
In the CBC television version of Last Call this 'network of "pragmatic" utterances' continues, but is overlaid with another set of intertexts in which the contemporary audience's familiarity with video technique creates a further segmentation of the action and a continual shift in and out of illusion. 8 Gross drags around cameras, filming himself, so that the audience watches the play being created in a high-tech 'play-within-a-play,' one of the traditional properties of metadrama. Indeed, in order to act out the second ending, Gross rewinds the video tape to the juncture point, revealing that the action we have been watching is recorded - that it is not real life and can be reprocessed at will. In this revelation, the double ending takes on an even more sinister importance. After the shooting, Morose is dead and Gross vanishes from the monitors as the frame freezes; the audience and electronic machinery, however, are still present, sharing a theatrical world devoid of humanity. As long as the tape runs, the world continues, but if it should stop, what will be the fate of the audience watching? Here, dialogue does not merely refer deictically to the action (to borrow Honzl) nor even entirely constitute it, 9 the only action and the dramatic reality is reduced to an electronic one, a robotic world peopled only by the audience which has outlived the last two humans and which will continue to exist within this context only as long as the video tape runs. In this version of the play, discourse has become electronic, and visual rather than vocal, and has also come to be all that there is. At the instant the programme goes off the air, the audience experiences not the end of an histoire, but the process of its own annihilation; stripped of any proairetic value, the final énonciation is a horrifying vision of an entirely theatrical apocalypse.
The Tamanhous Theatre production of Haunted House Hamlet, written by Peter Elliot Weiss during Morris Panych's tenure as Artistic Director of the company and starring Panych as Hamlet in its original production in 1986 and in the one which travelled to Montreal's Festival of the Americas in 1987, is an entirely metadramatic adaptation of Shakespeare's play. A new Prologue presents a young burglar breaking into a haunted house where he finds the corpses of Shakespeare's characters. These come to life and begin to act out Shakespeare's play while, simultaneously, the story of the young man unfolds as he interacts with the plot of Hamlet. 10
As with John Krizanc's Tamara, the performance takes place not in one auditorium but throughout a large, multi-roomed production space (Tamahnous House in Vancouver, Le Monument National in Montréal). After the Prologue, audience members move at their own volition, following characters from scene to scene and, depending on their choices, watch the Shakespearean play, or the discovery of the Shakespearean plot by the young burglar, or an entirely different play of their own devising. Random selection, of course, dictates that no two theatre-goers see the same play, although the whole audience is drawn together at the end of the first half and at the conclusion. These collective moments resolve the new drama while remaining true to the Shakespearean plot. Nonetheless, the effect is to deconstruct the Shakespearean play and, despite many spectators' best attempts to follow Hamlet and the main story line, the simultaneous arrangement of scenes prevents a strictly chronological viewing. It is amusing to watch some audience members running from scene to scene, synopsis in hand, trying to 'catch' the big set speeches they remember from traditional productions, trying to piece together a traditional plot in the face of this production's aggressive segmentation of the text into myriad semiotic units arranged along endless axes and in dozens of indexical directions.
The white hangings and shrouds of Ken MacDonald's set reflect the decomposition of the moldering Shakespearean characters, but also instantly cue the audience to the patterns of the horror movie, as does the title. The effect is to decentre the Hamlet story by foregrounding the conventions of gothic horror. And yet, because of its familiarity, the Shakespearean play continues to intrude, causing very complex, binary oppositions. One is reminded of Levi-Strauss's model of myth; to the degree that Shakespeare's 'sweet prince' has become a literary myth, he lives in this production, but the Hamlet one knows at its conclusion is a new myth with new allusions and a different numinosity. Terry Eagleton's summary of Levi-Strauss fits this production exactly: 'Myths have a quasi-objective collective existence, unfold their own "concrete logic" with supreme disregard for the vagaries of individual thought, and reduce any particular consciousness to a mere function of themselves.' 11
The set also deconstructs the original story and establishes the multiple vantage points from which the audience hears the new discours. As the audience arranges itself around rooms, stairways and landings, each viewer sees the play from her own perspective; for each, certain characters become important because of proximity or lose some of their credibility because contact destroys the theatrical illusion. Because the audience moves, the etiquette of the playhouse is suspended. As a result, audience members come and go, and look around as well as at the performers, so that other spectators may enter the dramatic unit with which a viewer is interacting at any moment. If another Hamlet character moving to his next scene also strays into the frame, the sjuzet becomes extraordinarily complex and, at times, bewildering to a viewer intent on sifting out the fabula she remembers as Shakespeare's story-line: the conception reminds its viewers at all times that they are watching a play abstracted from a play - not simply a play, nor real life, nor a historical event from Elsinore or Elizabethan London - and that they are engaged in a dramatological process.
In production, the most striking aspect of Panych's highly popular play, 7 Stories, 12 is MacDonald's set. It grew from a collaborative planning stage in the writing and from purely practical restrictions of the venue, at the Arts Club Seymour Street stage. Faced with a need to erect an apartment building at least eight stories high on a stage with an eighteen-foot ceiling, MacDonald found a solution inspired by Magritte13 which also perfectly concretizes the point of the play. The surrealistic style invites the juxtaposition of incongruous vignettes, suggesting on a visual level the inner poetic meaning which resonates through a collection of stories which, on the surface, seem like individual satires of contemporary manners.
As in Last Call, the set of 7 Stories provides the dramatic device needed to bring on and off the stories and, because of both its naturalistic representation of a tall building, and its simultaneous lack of realism as it blends into sky, allows the suggestive ending in which reality fuses into fantasy.
At the opening, a Chaplinesque Man dressed in suit, bowler and umbrella is revealed on the seventh-floor ledge of a building, apparently contemplating suicide. Just as he seems to 'come to . . . a resolution [to jump] . . . the window next to him flies open' and a woman leans out, screaming 'Let GO of me!!! Let GO!!'(5). Hers is the first of the seven stories, each presented by characters speaking through the seven windows arranged across the set. The characters each interact with the Man, and sometimes with each other from window to window in a series of separate enunciations each establishing particular deixis. Each reveals the essential self-centredness of these modern lives: a couple who sham violence to enliven their stale marriage, a hilariously paranoid psychiatrist, a con man, a religious fanatic, party goers who have hundreds of friends but prefer their sweaters, an impossibly sensitive decorator who sums up the shallowness of these lives: 'Consensus? A thousand people all shouting "beige! beige!"? And who asks the all-important question, "Which beige?"'(64).
The final window discloses a cynical personal nurse who 'hates old people' (82) and a marvellously otherwordly old lady who sums up her philosophy of life in a timely story about trying to stop a similar suicide in Paris:
We hadn't walked halfway across [le Pont Neuf] when he started to climb over the side of the bridge. I didn't know what to say. So I blurted out the only thing in French that I'd ever learned: 'Le pamplemousse est sur la table.' I don't even know what it means. But he responded very positively. He thought about it for a moment, and then smiled.... Whatever it was I said, it seemed to be something for him to hang his hat onto. (95)
Armed with this new credo which, the
old lady points out, 'has a certain - preciseness,' the Man is moved by
her call for him simply to surrender, to 'fly away.' He leaps into space
not to suicide, but to flow into his own imaginings, into the irrational
world of Magritte. Panych says the play is an attempt for him to come to
grips with his major problem as a writer: his inability to free himself
from intellectual questions and 'just fly away.' 14
It is also another example of the way Panych-MacDonald collaborations segment
action into separate stories and strip theatrical illusion even as they
use it.
The ending in which the Man flies, his umbrella open to the wind, depends on the audience's accepting the two possibilities of the set with its architectural solidity and its airy transparency; it also depends on intertexts of the Charlie Chaplin tramp and even, perhaps, on an allusion to Mary Poppins. Lighting effects assist the illusion that the Man is flying into space and landing on the building opposite. There, windows open to reveal four new characters.
The audience must accept that the set now represents the other building, and must participate, as Kripke suggests is possible in theatre, by accepting the verbal 'stipulation' of a possible world which cannot be 'discovered.' 15 But this suspension of disbelief is immediately attacked by the next segment of dialogue in which the four commentators attempt to figure out the 'message' of the play:
2: We saw you talk to that old lady.
4: To all those people.
2: We saw the whole thing from beginning to end.
3: And then we saw you fly over here and land!
4: There's just one thing ...
2: We don't get it.
1: What's the flying supposed to represent? Is it an existential statement or what?
2: It's a Jungian thing, isn't it?
3: I don't agree. I think it's political....
---
3: There's a suggestion of mass revolt.
---
1: I detect strong religious overtones.
---
4: I think it's just weird. (98-99)
These speeches are strongly metadramatic
examples of what Hornby calls 'self-reference,' where the play directly
calls attention to itself as a play (103). These four characters exist
within the main play as neighbours, exist within a separate play-within-the
play, and simultaneously pull the audience out of the illusion both by
becoming its representatives in asking questions and by satirizing the
whole play in mock literary analysis.
The man ignores this interrogation and returns to the main play, flying back to the first ledge. But, surely, the inner play to which the man returns is not the same as it was before he flew away. Hornby says that in 'the theatre ... the world of dramatic illusion stays put. The stage itself provides it with a frame of coherence [and it is] unified by the very nature of its relationship to [the audience]' (111), but in 7 Stories the imagination of the audience is stretched to accommodate more than one relationship to the Man and to the fiction. Hornby goes on to suggest that 'a play may lack rational coherence, but, if it engages us, it always has an intuitive coherence.' This 'intuitive coherence' is essentially dramatological and it is the only explanation of the ending of 7 Stories. The Man realizes 'I have to forget ... try ... to forget everything ... and wait ... just wait for the wind again. . . .' (102), and the audience also realizes that it understands this wind and that it can come to us all, but that an understanding of the wind is non-rational, theatrical, intuitive.
Immediately this is perceived, voices of the police arrive in a blackout to break up the crowd gathered to witness the suicide, a crowd which now includes the audience, for unlike the neighbours it has, of course, entered the dramatic world by surrendering its need for rational explanation. 'Alright, Ladies and Gentlemen - break it up.... Everything will be fine ... so let's just disperse ... and go home. Show's over' (102).
What is important is that the audience has come to this understanding not by believing the fiction into which it has moved, but by seeing it as fiction, by seeing the show as a show which is now 'over,' by engaging in the process of drama which is 'a means of thinking about life, a way of organizing and categorizing it.'
Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald continue to adapt classic text in complex, metadramatic productions. Their treatment of The Beggar's Opera condensed the original, but also filled the stage with fantastic machines interpreting eighteenth-century occupations in electronic terms and added new layers to Gay's already tangled mise en scène. It further displayed the interwoven enunciations which made so intriguing their adaptation of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors for the Arts Club Main Stage. The Shakespearean production will serve to illustrate the dramaturgy of both.
In it, Panych and MacDonald work together to create a very complex visual and histrionic segmentation of the original play, employing intertexts of the American cowboy myth, the Hollywood western movie, TV versions of the western film, and the audience's own contemporary preconceptions about Shakespearean drama.
The adaptation - which entails the new setting, appropriate bits of local dialogue, new business and an added song - is situated in a frontier town, à la Dodge City. The two Antipholus brothers become a cowboy hero imitating John Wayne's walk and speech pattern, and a filmic western bully. The two Dromio brothers become cliché frontier sidekicks. Aegeon, the merchant, easily became a travelling drummer; the Courtesan, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke. This sounds contrived and, indeed, the audience approached the show with some trepidation. But in production the conception worked brilliantly - and with considerable popular success. It works because the audience is immediately confronted with the theatricality of a two-level set and is immediately engaged in recognizing and sorting out an array of sometimes complementary and sometimes opposing semiotic units in accent, costume, characterization, added songs, and set.
The rustic main street is faithfully reproduced, but at stage rear a clearly artificial moon rises and lowers on visible ropes; cutout cactuses are moved in and out of position; a row of steer skulls form footlights.16 The Abbey of Ephesus is replaced by an Oprey House Theatre, centre stage, whose playbill announces a travelling production of Comedy of Errors and establishes that the magic in this world is not religious but theatrical. As we shall see, this emendation of the text becomes pivotal.
More important than these somewhat Brechtian touches which seek to distance the viewer is the overall treatment of stage and auditorium that both distances and lures. The thrust stage is given an artificial proscenium and, outside it, a loge, stage left. At the opening, the figure of Aemelia appears in the box not as Abbess of Ephesus, but as an Elizabethan theatre-goer, wearing the traditional costume the audience expects in Shakespeare and carrying an enormous folio. Opening the book, she blows out a great cloud of dust; the audience laughs, exposing its secret opinion that Shakespeare is, after all, somewhat musty, and setting in motion the central hermeneutic code by revealing that this is, after all, a story, that it will now unfold and that some resolution will occur. The audience is invited to participate by watching the drama progress even as the stage Theatre-goer herself watches from her loge.
A very particular deixis is established among this character, the audience and the actors on stage. Of course this use of audience on the stage is, itself, an Elizabethan technique, but few in the popular audience know it. What they see is a play-within-a-play unfolding with their collective permission that it be set in the West, that it be funny, and that it not be sacred text from the Bard of Avon.
At the conclusion of the play, however, Panych catches the audience which has come to accept the Theatre-goer as mediator between its world and that of the stage action. At the resolution, the Theatre-goer comes on from inside the Oprey Theatre, becoming, at once, the audience's representative on stage, the wife of Aegeon and the Director of the Theatre qua Abbess. She leads the sets of twins and the women off through the Oprey Theatre door. A curtain falls (for the first time) and suddenly the audience finds itself inside this Oprey Theatre; the loge becomes correctly placed and historically correct for a nineteenth century auditorium and the revelation of identity becomes a scene in The Comedy of Errors advertised for that Oprey Theatre that night. More: the twins who have emerged onto this stage in dim lighting are suddenly revealed as a surprise pair of actors when the 'real' twins enter from the rear of the auditorium and come forward, mount the stage and greet their doubles, now seen as the 'actors' in the Oprey production: the audience is thoroughly tricked.17
The conclusion arrives but in a complex layering of perception: the play the audience thought to be a game of Western icons laid over Shakespeare becomes a real Western in that its characters are no longer dramatis personae but fellow audience members. In contrast, the Theatre-goer and her fellow spectators are suddenly seen as the real actors in the Road Show production - which makes the audience also into actors. Inside the Shakespearean play, the hermeneutic code discloses itself in a traditional comic revelation and, as audience, the spectators experience the pleasant sense of closure which audiences of this play have enjoyed since 1594.
Inside Panych and MacDonald's play, however, the spectators find no closure because they are now actors in an avowedly artificial production which will move on. The 'real' twins have not actually found their brothers because they have found only other actors. But in the Temple of the Theatre (and now the substitution of a Theatre for an Abbey becomes powerful) the brothers are reunited, since all are actors (as are the spectators) and all is theatrical. The music, the set, the emendations to the text, the acting styles, and the concluding peripeteia all rely on the collaboration - indeed, the complicity - of the audience with the design team: the audience must radically alter all indexical relationships including its own most personal sense of the I, the here and the now. To view this production is to participate in the active deconstruction and reconstruction for which Barthes argues in S/Z. 18
Panych and Macdonald appear to have succeeded in creating a dramatic text which escapes closure even as it leaves its audience comfortably satisfied with Shakespeare's denouement. If this is true, then Panych and Macdonald are working in a truly postmodern drama, one which escapes the narratological forms of fiction to exist purely as theatre.
Notes
METADRAMATIC DESIGN IN THE STAGE WORK OF MORRIS PANYCH AND KEN MACDONALD
Reid Gilbert
1 GEORGE BOWERING The
Mask in Place: Essays on Fiction in North America (Winnipeg: Turnstone
Press 1982) p 30
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2 LINDA HUTCHEON The
Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press 1988) p 63
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3 JENNIFER WISE "Marginalizing
Drama: Bakhtin's Theory of Genre' Essays in Theatre vol 8 no 1 (Nov
1989) p 19
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4 KEIR ELAM The Semiotics
of Theatre and Drama New Accents series (London: Methuen 1980) p 144
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5 RICHARD HORNBY Drama,
Metadrama, and Perception (Lewisburg: Buchnell University Press 1986)
pp 25-6
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6 ÉMILE BENVENISTE
Problems of General Linguistics 1966 Trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek,
Miami Linguistic Series 8 (Coral Gables, FA: University of Miami Press
1971) p 237
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7 MORRIS PANYCH Last
Call: A Post-Nuclear Cabaret (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour 1983). Further
references to the play appear parenthetically in the text
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8 For further discussion
of the TV version, see also MARY JANE MILLER Turn Up the Contrast (Vancouver:
CBC and University of British Columbia Press 1987) pp 340-43
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9 See ELAM, 157
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10 For additional commentary
on the adaptation, see PETER ELIOT WEISS 'Rewriting Hamlet'
Canadian
Theatre Review no 54 (Spring 1988) 18-23
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11 TERRY EAGLETON Literary
Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
1983) p 104
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12 MORRIS PANYCH 7
Stories (Vancouver: Talonbooks 1990). Further references to the play
appear parenthetically in the text.
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13 Personal interview
with the designer, 6 April 1990
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14 Personal interview
with the author, 6 April 1990
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15 SAUL KRIPKE 'Naming
and Necessity' In Semantics of Natural Language, ed Davidson and
Harman (Dordrecht: Reidel 1972) pp 266-7
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16 Interestingly, all
recent sets by MacDonald feature obvious footlights - an unconscious reply
to Bakhtin, perhaps
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17 In a remounted, travelling
production which toured through fall 1990, the proscenium, curtain and
loge were eliminated. The Shakespearean theatre-goer/Director/Abbess walked
mysteriously onto the stage to blow away the dust from the folio and wandered
across the stage to mark Act divisions and to enter the action at the end.
This staging, made necessary by tour conditions, significantly reduced
the effect of the ending, making less powerful the layering I discuss
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18 ROLAND BARTHES S/Z
trans Richard Miller (New York: Hill, 1974) passim
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