Modern Drama

This is possibly the most ambitious attempt to date to insist on the live performance rather than its textual traces as the primary object of investigation. But, to begin, while I try not to be part of that interpretative community that judges books by their covers, enmeshed as so many of us are in an ongoing debate about evaluating research quality rather than research per se, I inevitably found my horizon of expectation partly determined by that contextual frame, as I fought to convince directors of research that book chapters are more important and widely cited in the humanities than journal articles and that the known tendency of presses like Rodopi, publishers of this volume, to require publication subsidies does not mean that what appears between their covers should be dismissed as mere vanity.

A superficial glance at Theatrical Eventsdoes not help the case. The cover is fine, but there is no index, running heads don't always refer to the chapter below, and I suspect 1993 was the two hundredth, not twentieth, anniversary of Goldoni's death (317). Other factual and typographical errors abound, suggesting that there has been no peer review process and minimal editing. A book has to be more than a cover around a group of seminar discussion papers, however fine those individual contributions may be. Many chapters begin with their authors' contributions to an in-group debate about the key concepts established at the beginning by Willmar Sauter; thus Sauter's concepts are glossed by Henri Schoenmakers, John Tulloch, Vicki Ann Cremona, Peter Eversmann, Hans van Maanen, and others. This is admirably rigorous but wearyingly repetitive, so that, while the volume is more than its parts for those who read it in its entirety, it is, for others, rather less than a collection of thematically linked but otherwise discrete papers.

The working party from which the book emerged took as a starting point [End Page 852]Sauter's idea that all human societies in all ages constitute "playing cultures," displaying skill and style in representation, rather than "evolving" from naïve representation towards aesthetics, and that we can best begin to analyse the essential "eventness" of theatre through a three-way division of the process of communication: sensory (the real experience of attending a performed event), artistic (defined most simply as recognising and responding to the "non-every-dayness" of performance), and symbolic (the imaginative reconceptualisation of real performance behaviour as a sign of something else). Inevitably, but not always helpfully, there is slippage, as other contributors adopt and adapt these concepts: Jacqueline Martin's preface replaces "symbolic" with "fictional," a narrower term, marginalising ritualised and religious meanings, which Sauter himself specifically includes. John Tulloch points out, in the preamble to his excellent chapter on the reception of three Chekhov productions in the British regional city of Bath, that Eversmann's introduction to, and first chapter in, section two ("Dynamics") offers a different analytical map than Sauter's – four dimensions rather than three levels – with less emphasis on issues of theory and methodology that, for a social scientist like Tulloch, are crucial. This intra-textual debate backgrounds other key work and leads to gear changes as the volume progresses: Bourdieu doesn't make an appearance until page 256 but is much cited from then on. The metaphors, notably the ubiquitous "framing," are all very deterministic; personally I prefer the idea of "interpretative repertoires" (Potter and Wetherell), to which we might add "performance repertoires," allowing actors and audiences a number of conscious or instinctive choices both in behaviour and understanding.

That said, the editors have managed to bring to the book some excellent contributions, with a wide geographical and historical spread. Tulloch charts the programming coincidence that allowed him to interview artists and audiences from three very different productions in a short space of time: a "straight" Cherry Orchardwith a...