Modern Performances as a tool for the Theatre Historian
David Wiles, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

We all seem interested nowadays in the stage reception of Greek drama. This group reflects an academic drift. Why has this happened? In large part, I think, it's the response to an epistemological crisis: we can no longer say with any conviction what the Oresteia 'means' or indeed what it 'meant'. We no longer have the authority to say what it means/meant because in a pluralist Einsteinian world meaning is relative to the eye of the beholder. Your view is as valid as my view. The study of stage reception allows us to document and celebrate the diversity of interpretations that a single text yields. Now we may quietly infer that this diversity is proof of the excellence of the original text, or we may see everything to be a function of power games involving cultural capital - but that's not a question that I want to beat my head against right now.

The particular area of reception that interests us in this group is stage reception. We know now that the meaning of a text apprehended on the page is not the same as the meaning of a performance, and we are content that the ephemerality of performance should not reduce its worth within our aesthetic value system. Happily, Greek plays have an important place in the international repertory, and we have many opportunities of seeing how fresh meanings are generated in performances. And many of us, in departments of classics as well as drama, have the opportunity of staging Greek plays ourselves.

The study of performance reception takes us in three main directions.

*a touchstone for the study of modern culture(s)

*a means toward creating new productions of Greek drama to animate the present

*a means of understanding the past

While I applaud all these aims without reservation, my concern here is with the third: a route back to the past. The same epistemological crisis that makes us wary of saying what the play 'itself' actually means also makes us wary of saying what 'actually happened'. History, just like literary meaning, now lies in the eye of the beholder. Sources are meaningless until they are picked and organized up by an interpreter. When we try to say what Athens was like, what Greek democracy was like, what ancient religion was like, what Greek theatre was like, we project our own utopian or paranoid imaginings. This becomes clear when we survey the extended history of scholarship in such areas. We cannot see the past as it really was. We can ponder the past and its relation to the present in ways that may be extremely constructive, but we cannot see it as it REALLY was.

The question I want to put to the seminar stems from my passion to pursue the classical past, even though I know intellectually that the goal of perfect understanding can never be reached. How does our observation of performance today, and more particularly our experimentation with performance today, help us to understand what once went on in classical Athens? My own academic niche is in drama rather than classics, and drama has always fondly regarded itself as a 'laboratory' subject. The theatre workshop is seen as a place of experimentation, where on a quasi-scientific model experiments are conducted, hypotheses are tested. So my question is this: I want to find how we can study performances, and work in the theatre laboratory, in way that helps us to know the past better.

Some performance work takes the past as an unproblematic given. E.g. we know that Aristophanic actors wore phalluses, therefore we decide to stitch leather phalluses onto the costumes, and see what happens. An act or homage is performed, fun is had by all, but as a historical exercise is this of any merit? Is anything learned? I suspect very little. The cultural distance is too great. The trouble with authenticity is that we can pick and choose our favourite authenticity off the shelf: let's all wear chitons, have a male cast, all speak ancient Greek, all dance to the sound of a reconstructed aulos. The sad fact is, the more we do such things, the more painfully English (or American or whatever) we shall appear to the sceptical onlooker.

So how is the theatre historian to proceed? I'd like to cite three pieces of work that I have undertaken and ask how they stand up as contributions to historical research.

1. When I put on Plautus' Stichus, I wanted to test the hypothesis that the play was written to exploit the Greek three-actor rule - that Plautus' gimmick or controlling structural device in this particular play was to borrow that specific unRoman convention. The plotting appears, according to Aristotelian norms, to be unstructured, with the thinnest of storylines and new characters appearing in the final act. It was found that the device emphasised the symmetry of the plotting: two wives, two husbands, two slaves. The doubling of these parts meant that the final slaves' banquet was far more than a coda. The slaves became alter egos of the citizens, and their anarchy reflected on the demure moral façade of the free men and women who have now vanished. Plautus' play became a source of aesthetic satisfaction.

But what did I demonstrate? Nothing about the Greek three-actor rule, obviously, since I take it that in Greece doubling did not call the audience's attention to the individuality of the performer. I cannot prove that Plautus wrote for three Roman actors. I was able simply to show that he may have done so, and that the play in 200 B.C. could have had a particular aesthetic logic. This helps make sense of the stylistic diversity that exists on the level of language and characterization. Some hypotheses about doubling briefly advanced by Niall Slater (1985: 115n, 135-6) could be expanded into a proposition accepted as self-evident once enough scholars had repeated it often enough.

2.In the autumn I put on - or more exactly facilitated - a version of

Aristophanes' Peace. One of my areas of intervention was to insist on masks, and another was to cast the strongest and most imaginative actors as the chorus. I shared responsibility with a Lecoq-trained movement specialist. The consequence was that the chorus improvised very creatively and organically. If the chorus of Athenian farmers could be Megarians and Boeotians, well they could also be rocks rolled out of the way. If the chorus members keep changing identity, the same logic allowed the rope to be pulled in multiple directions. And mimed ropes made the movement work much more interesting. The mask convention meant that an actor could inhabit the statue while it was on Olympus... So the historical questions which follow are questions of stagecraft. It used to be held that there was a subsidiary chorus. So, for example Russo (1994: 143). Olson in the 1998 Oxford edition is confident in his dismissal of this outmoded realist assumption (note to 508). Our project leaves me in doubt that Olson is right to insist that there is no reason for any performer to leave the orchestra. The chorus members banished for failure in pulling soon melt back into the chorus. But what of Olson's other assumptions? The ropes are really there, he assumes. The rocks must either be piled on the ekkyklema, or rendered by scene painting - his less preferred option (xlvi.n.27). Peace he takes to be a statue with a rotating head, that pivots on dowel (note to 682). Olson's staging reflects his aesthetic tastes, dressed up as logic, and his tastes are conditioned by the theatre he knows. I suspect that a new Oxford edition in 30 years time will reject the real rocks, ropes and statue with the same confidence that Olson now rejects the choral extras. Our common sense is defined by our cultural conditioning. Which obviously puts me in a very difficult situation when I decide to masquerade as a historian and postulate what REALLY happened in that place on that day. All I can do, it seems, is challenge other people's assumptions. In one way that is a very negative procedure. In another way, though, I hope it is liberating. For a performer who is trying to establish a dynamic between past and present, sensing how the past allows us to do the present differently and the present allows us to do the past differently, the debates may be productive. Not history as the uncovering of fact, but history as process, history as dialectic.

3.In order to undertake this project, I need a methodology that allows me to experiment with masks in the present, and then make historical inferences on the basis of what I have discovered. As a historiographic strategy, is this legitimate? And what are its pitfalls? Are modern actors and audiences so different from classical Greeks that any experimental results are invalid? Or are there human constants? I spent a week last summer working with a mask-maker called Michael Chase (and I have some spare copies of the video record if anyone is interested in following this up). We were exploring the hypothesis that masks functioned as acoustical resonators. This does seem to me to be testable - it's a matter of physics in the first instance. But the questions rapidly move into other domains: how does a mask invite an actor to move, how does it make them feel? Physiological constants are bound up with cultural premises. Do practical experiments allow me to discover anything, or do they simply deliver the answers that I was determined to receive?

I hope my line of questioning is clear. To end with an analogy: one of the most interesting historical experiments in London at the moment is the new Shakespeare's Globe. For some, this is Disney, not authenticity but kitsch. For others (and I incline to that view despite doubts) it is an important historical experiment. I'm not aware than any Oxford or Cambridge or Arden editors have attributed new readings and interpretations to discoveries made on that stage, but it's early days and I shall keep watch. Students find working on the Globe stage a significant learning experience, and somewhere that learning has to be translated into some sort of historian's discourse. How can our own empirical findings make that same journey?

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RESPONSE

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, UK

David has raised so many important points. The one I would like to take up concerns the nature of action research. However, first I need to query something he said at the beginning of his paper about pluralism and relativism. It seems to me that there is an important distinction between on the one hand, acceptance that there is more than one possible meaning attached to a text/performance, and on the other hand the statement that 'your view is as valid as my view'. David's view might indeed be more valid than mine (e.g. if it was based on a greater knowledge of the text, on experience of performance, on a more careful reading of the play, on greater insight and sensitivity etc. Or it might just be more convincing because it was more clearly and logically expressed). The notion of validity is of course a construction and its constituent parts and their weighting in relation to one another in particular situations and debates are subject to ongoing discussion. This, I think, is one area in which action research is important in keeping such issues constantly in front of us.

If, as David suggests, the theatre workshop is like a laboratory then it is also a place in which the researchers undergo some kind of learning experience. And one aspect of that experience is surely an increased awareness of what the present brings to the past (e.g. through the questions framed by the researcher, the methods used and through the analysis of the disjunctions which may arise when past and present collide). It’s important, I think, to be clear about the limitations of any scientific method. Experiment usually involves testing a hypothesis  by showing that if x is done then y follows - very different from saying that z was what happened in the past (because z also depends on all sorts of variables which it would probably be impossible to incorporate in the experiment; an example would be what it felt like to be a member of the audience at an ancient festival, but there are less complex physical aspects of the ancient situation, too, which it is difficult to reconstruct let alone recreate).So it seems likely that action research is more likely to suggest further hypotheses than to yield answers.

Perhaps the gap could be narrowed by the development of more comparative studies. For instance, a performance of a play (or episode) could be created  and then compared with a performance created with one key feature altered (e.g. Masks, nature of acting space, indoors or outdoors etc). This would make it possible to track the knock on effects of particular aspects of performance and thus assist in relating physiological constants to cultural diversities. Leaving aside the question of resources and time scale, my guess is that such experiments would be intuitive as well as 'scientific'' in their methodology but they would almost certainly assist in mapping and clarifying the processes involved in the past, the present and most revealing of all in the mutual questioning between past and present. To expect more in the way of 'certainty' might actually undermine the project by minimising or excluding the impact of the theatrical 'moment'?

Final Response from Topic Leader David Wiles

Thanks to Lorna for her thought-provoking response.

2. Yes, certainly we shall come up with hypotheses, not answers - just like Isaac Newton when he 'discovered' gravity. So do we need to set ourselves apart from scientists, who also rely on lots of intuition?

3. I absolutely agree that isolating and juggling variables is the most productive way forward.

1. This is the difficult one. I'd be wary of the Orwellian view that all positions are relative, but some more relative than others. My statement 'your view is as valid as my view' was carefully positioned after a reference to Einstein: there is no objectively correct view of how the object moves in space. I'm not sure if you are seeking to argue that some views have more cultural authority than others - certainly they do, and as you say that authority is constantly being renegotiated - or whether you want to argue that some views are closer to THE TRUTH - although the truth is forever unknowable. This to me is the dilemma... If we fix our sights on the 'best available hypothesis' rather than 'how it really was', then I believe we produce a history that is more provisional, more challenging and more useful.