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From Text to Stage

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Taxidou, O 2010, From Text to Stage. in The Edinburgh Introduction to the Study of English Literature.
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 171-179.

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Text and Performance

The complex and interdependent relationships between play-text, stage and

performance have always been an integral part of theatre history and theatre criticism.
From Aristotle’s Poetics (c.335), through the anti-theatrical debates during the early
modern period to the modernist and postmodernist concepts of performance as an
autonomous aesthetic activity, theatre has always been understood and experienced as
an event; an event that is defined both by historical contingencies (i.e. specific socio-
historical contexts, precise staging conventions) and a sense of ‘liveness’, immediacy
and ephemerality that seems impossible to re-create let alone systemise into a
methodology or critical theory. For all these reasons the study of theatrical play-texts,
has tended to focus on their literary dimension, as if they were already completed
works of art that simply need to be staged in the imagination of the reader. However,
this literary aspect of theatre is always dynamic, a blue-print for performance that at
once acknowledges the staging conventions within which it was written and offers the
possibility of creating a new, original event every time a play-text is performed. And
this dynamic relationship between text, staging and performance is where, as
contemporary theatre anthropologists and performance theorist claim, the uniqueness
of theatre lies as a literary genre and aesthetic phenomenon. Furthermore, in order to
be fully realized, theatre needs an audience. All this makes for an aesthetic experience
that extends way beyond the act of reading and imagining a world proposed by a play-
text. This power of the performance event to engage us physically, intellectually and
emotionally, individually and collectively, has at times throughout its history
accorded theatre a privileged position in society (as in the case of classical Athenian
drama, or the uses of theatre in political propaganda). At other times, however, it has
made it a target of censorship and persecution; all testament to the sometimes
overwhelming sensation and impact that a theatrical event may have on its audience.
This impact that theatre potentially has on its audience derives from the fact that it is
not simply written, but also made, staged and performed.

Text and Stage

Historically every period of literary theatrical achievement (especially what

we understand as the classics; Athenian drama of the fifth century BCE, Elizabethan

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drama, French and German neo-classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries), has created its mechanics of production, a set of discourses that facilitate
the transition from text to stage. Although the term mise en scène is relatively
modern, coined during the nineteenth century, every performance requires stages of
preparation, casting, setting the play to scenery and usually music, laborious
rehearsals, that also demand systems of funding. In classical Athens this process of
production was supported by the polis itself (funded by a wealthy Athenian) as
performances of tragedies took place within the greatest civic festival of the time, the
Great Dionysia. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were not simply dramatic poets
but prototype directors as well as they were responsible not only for the writing of the
script but for the training of the chorus (chorodidaskaloi) and the actors, training that
involved singing, dancing as well as acting. In creating these performances these great
tragedians also relied, but crucially modified and in turn helped to formulate a set of
dramatic conventions. Archaeologists, classicists and theatre historians have helped to
recover and define the function of some of these: the use of masks, the function of the
chorus, the use of music, the stylised setting, the use of stylised gesture, the function
of myth, the all-male hypocrites (the Greek term for actors) and the all-male audience
(probably). The use of the adverb probably is indicative here, as while we are certain
about some of these conventions others are still matters open to debate. The crucial
issue, however, is that the classical Athenian tragedies were written with these
conventions in mind and the three tragedians that helped to define tragic form at once
worked within these conventions and helped to modify them, for the process was not
simply mechanical but imaginative and creative. And, of course, these conventions
were not simply formal devices but also reflected contemporary philosophical,
aesthetic and socio-political attitudes and sensibilities about the role of women, the
relationship to myth and the Gods, the function of representation and enactment, as
theatre functioned in the words of Pericles as the great school of Athenian democracy.
This early precursor of the mise en scène, like its modern and especially modernist
reincarnation, refers to a set of formal devices that help to materialise the process
from text to stage, a creative process that generates presence and projects a world-
view, an image of itself back to the audience.
When approaching a play-text as a piece of literature is it vital, therefore, to be
aware of these historical conventions. They help us to realise that the play we are
reading is part of an intricate set of relationships and cannot really exist outside these.

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In turn this ‘toolkit’ of production that almost every play-text comes with, reflects the
systems of belief and ideology of the society it is helping to represent. The huge and
varied cast of actors, choragoi, chorodidaskaloi, impresarios, movement and voice
coaches, dramaturges, stage and actor managers (all precursors of the modernist
director – more on that later), also gives us an indication of the history of the theatre
professions – the appearance of the first English actresses, for example, in the period
of Restoration drama - and the socio-political position that these professionals
occupied in their society. However, while all these factors are crucial as matters of
scholarly research and debate, how important are they when we approach historical
play-texts for performance today? Can we ignore all these conventions according to
which the plays were written and simply approach them for the ideas and issues they
raise about human nature? On the other hand, are we in danger of producing a
‘museum’ performance if we adhere too strictly to the historical conventions of a
piece? And are these ever fully recoverable? All these questions became particularly
pertinent after 1910 and during the modernist period in English literature; a period
characterised by the urge to ‘make it new’ in the words of Ezra Pound, which in the
field of theatre heralded the complete ‘emancipation’ of the notion of performance
from the ‘tyranny’ of the literary text.
It might be helpful at this stage, in order to tease out some of these concerns
(and not necessarily to resolve them) to glimpse briefly into the performance history
of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, King Lear, written within the conventions
of Elizabethan drama. Like Greek drama, Elizabethan drama was not realistic but
highly conventional. These conventions included: the use of poetry, asides,
soliloquies, boys playing the roles of women, conventions of time and space, little
scenery and elaborate costumes. The performances themselves were framed by
dancing before after the play. These dances were known as jigs and offered a
vaudeville-style commentary on contemporary events. The most famous jig was
performed by Will Kemp, the re-known clown in Shakespeare’s company and lasted
for 9 days, as long as it took him to travel from London to Norwich (published in
1600 as Kemps nine daies wonder). All these factors have informed the making of the
play but also its reception by audiences throughout its staging history. Notoriously,
King Lear is also burdened with a reputation of being unperformable due to its
philosophical, somewhat apocalyptic and bombastic language and its bleak,

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relentlessly pessimistic ending. Famously Charles Lamb, Leon Tolstoy and Henry
James, all believed it was impossible to stage.
The first problem we encounter is that of the two versions of the play-text. It is
more or less accepted today that the text of King Lear changed drastically over the
years. These changes probably result from the work of editors and crucially theatre
makers. Interestingly there are two versions of the text even from its own historical
period. Although the first version, the Quarto of 1608, appears in Shakespeare’s time,
most scholars agree that the playwright was not involved with the editions of the
Quarto. While the Folio of 1623, created after Shakespeare’s death, is said to be the
result of the collaboration between printers and two members of Shakespeare’s
company interested in preserving a version that was believed to be more appropriate
for the purposes of performance. Indeed, it is the Folio version that is mostly used for
performances today. Christie Carson1 claims that the textual differences between the
Quarto and the Folio versions of the play result from audience responses during
Shakespeare’s lifetime. However, it is not certain whether Shakespeare would have
approved or even been aware of these. This is a very radical claim and one that
endows the audience with extraordinary power (a precursor to the re-writing of
Hollywood film endings, taking on board initial audience response?). Furthermore, as
Christie claims, the Folio audience-informed version dramatically re-writes the ending
of the play, giving an optimistic tone to what appears as a bleak ending in the Quarto.
This is significant in a play that has been read as post-apocalyptic (probably written
after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603), relentlessly nihilistic in its study of
masculine power and lineage, and deeply troubling about the ‘nature’ of women.
The quest for a ‘happy ending’ seems to haunt the reception history of this
play in production for as early as 1681 the Irish playwright Nahum Tate wrote a
version striking many of Shakespeare’s lines, getting rid of the Fool altogether and
creating a love interest for Cordelia in the role of Edgar. In 1742 David Garrick
reinstated some of Shakespeare’s lines but kept Tate’s uplifting ending. Edmund Kean
tried to go back to Shakespeare’s full text but this performance only lasted for three
nights as again it was deemed ‘unbearable’ for the audience. It wasn’t until the mid-
nineteenth century that Shakespeare’s text was performed more or less in full by
Macready (1838). Yet again the question remains whether this ‘full’ text was the
Quarto version or the Folio.

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 Modern productions of the play do not shy away from its bleak, apocalyptic
atmosphere, but rather revel in it, as did Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of
1962. Despite the charges of unperformability and anti-theatricality King Lear has
proved to be one of Shakespeare’s most adapted and adaptable plays on the stage and
on the screen (notably the Russian version of 1970 directed by Grigori Kozintsev with
music by Dmitri Shostakovich and the Japanese version Ran, directed by Akira
Kurosawa in 1985).
In a sense every contemporary or future performance of the play is in dialogue
with its staging history and forms part of this on-going negotiation between play-text
and reception. The historical conventions of production, the material conditions that
helped to create Shakespeare’s own performances are not simply a matter of empirical
historical fact, but exist in the ways the plays themselves are written; they help give
shape to the world of the play. And this world is primarily expressed/embodied
through the function of the actor. This is all the more the case when it comes to
Elizabethan acting, which was not psychological and character based, the modes we
are familiar with today through Naturalism and film. Rather than express the inner
world of the role or character the acting was partly stylised, exaggerated, external
(some may say even melodramatic) as it had to express highly poetic language (and
not every day language) and was partly responsible through language and dialogue of
creating the world of play, as scenery was basic and schematised and not
representational. Hence the emphasis on costumes, which were detailed and highly
codified denoting the class, rank and even character of the role portrayed. How is
then a contemporary actor approaching the role of Lear to engage with these
conventions, taking on board that most actor-training today is psychologically based
and does not only rely on external conventions?
It might be helpful at this point to introduce a set of terms used by
contemporary performance theorists when attempting to describe the function of the
actor, keeping in mind that this function is primarily based on the physicality of the
performing body. There is a distinction between the actor’s phenomenal body, her/his
physical bodily being-in-the-world and the actor’s semiotic body, what the performer
is representing or attempting to embody. Throughout the history of acting it is only
really in the tradition of Naturalism where the two converge, where the actor is asked
to physically and significantly psychologically ‘be’ the role. In most acting traditions
from the Greek theatre to Elizabethan this relationship between the phenomenal body

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of the performer and the semiotic body is a conventional one, delineated by rules and
forms that the actor acquires and importantly the audience is able to decode. In this
sense the actor performing Lear is not asked to ‘be’ Lear, but to portray, exhibit,
demonstrate him (and his world), through a mode of acting that celebrates its
artificiality, its theatricality and does not try to hide it. Significantly it also clearly
portrays the interpretation of Lear that the particular actor brings to the role in the
process of demonstrating it to the audience. This mode of acting also allows the actor
to perform asides, to directly address the audience and step in and out of the world of
the play, something that was common in the Elizabethan playhouse, the architecture
of which, an apron stage, facilitated this. The reconstruction of The Globe2 in London
has provided performers, directors and scholars with very useful insights into how
Shakespeare’s theatre worked in performance; in turn these insights have informed
contemporary stagings of the plays.
In the 1997 production of King Lear directed by Richard Eye with Ian Holm in
the leading role there was one of those electrifying, epiphanic theatrical moments
where an actor creates ‘presence’. In the words of Patrice Pavis:

‘To have presence’ in theatrical parlance, is to know how to capture the

attention of the public and make an impression; it is also to be endowed with a
je ne sais quoi which triggers an immediate feeling of identification in the
spectator, communicating a sense of living elsewhere and in an eternal
present.3

This was the scene in the heath towards the end of the play where actor and director
decided to literally enact Shakespeare’s words ‘Off, off you lendings’ and present a
naked Ian Holm, stumbling about extremely vulnerable, like a ‘bare forked animal’ on
the bleak stage. The nakedness of Lear/ Holm appears shocking but at the same time
can be read as a sophisticated way of at once nodding towards historical performance
conventions and creating an ultimately modern reading of the play, bringing out its
existential bleakness (although Eyre used the Folio). The total absence of costume and
the seeming conflation of the phenomenal and semiotic body, could be said to pay
homage to the Elizabethan emphasis on costume; here, however, the costume has
become the naked body of the actor, where now lacking meaning and reason becomes
itself a mask that enacts the word ‘nothing’, so emblematic in this play. The actor’s

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nakedness enacts the lines uttered by the Fool in Act 1: ‘thou art an 0 without a figure:
I am better than thou art now; I am fool thou art nothing’ (1, iv, 211ff). And it is this
non-figure of 0 that we see enacted on the stage. In a sense, this contemporary
performance still remains faithful to Shakespeare’s poetry, brining to the stage a
version of the actor’s phenomenal/semiotic body that would have been inconceivable
even blasphemous for the Elizabethan audience. It also addresses the Elizabethan
concept of the double body of the King, interestingly echoing the double body of the
actor. To see a King naked or in rags – as is also the case with Xerxes at the end of
Aeshylus’ The Persians- is to witness the total and absolute destruction of state
power. In the words of Pavis, this moment communicates to the audience a sense of
both ‘living elsewhere and in an eternal present’; an awareness of the languages of
staging helps the performer to create this double movement. In turn this unique
moment of presence has now become part of the reception history of King Lear; the
2007 production also has a naked Ian McKellen as Lear.
Another instance of an incongruous relationship between the performers
phenomenal and semiotic body is cross-gender casting. This, of course, will always
refer to the Elizabethan convention of boys playing women, but crucially as
contemporary scholars claim was the case with this historical convention itself, it
serves as a vehicle to examine, portray and sometimes critically analyse gender
relations, the position of women and the absence of actresses. In the last ten years we
have had Adrian Lester as Rosalind, Mark Rylance as Cleopatra, Vanessa Redgrave
as Prospero and Kathryn Hunter as Lear. Casting a female performer as Lear may
initially appear at odds for a play so concerned with Kingship, fatherhood and
masculinity. On the other hand, the particular gendered perspective that the female
performer brings also helps highlight and scrutinize what has been read as a complex
and somewhat difficult position that the feminine occupies in this play. The
incongruity between the actor’s female body and that of the role functions as a gestus
(as Brecht coins the term) that nods to the absent mother in this play and to the absent
Queen in the historical context of the original performance.
All these casting and staging decisions are not solely the domain of the actor
but derive from a creative encounter between actor and director. Although we tend to
take the figure of the director for granted today (mainly due to his/her prominence in
film) and although there has always been a mediating figure between play-text and
stage throughout theatre history, it is within Modernism, as an aesthetic, socio-

7
political movement, that this role is clearly defined, acquires independent artistic
status and bears almost sole responsibility for the creation of a performance.

Text and Performance

The main staging relationship that is scrutinised, problematised and becomes

the subject of many essays and manifestos of theatrical modernism and the historical
avant-garde is that between the playwright and the in-between, mediating figure that
was soon to be termed: director. The battle was one of authorship, not of the play-text,
for that incontestably belonged to the playwright, but of the performance. In 1911
Edward Gordon Craig - the son of Ellen Terry, the famous Victorian actress and the
acting pupil of Henry Irving, the equally famous actor-manager of the Lyceum theatre
in London – published his manifesto-style book, On the Art of the Theatre, heralding
a new concept of theatre, making a strong and impassioned claim for the total
independence of performance. In it he wrote:

… the Art of the Theatre is neither acting nor the play, it is not scene nor
dance, but it consists of all the elements of which these things are composed:
action, which is the very spirit if acting; words, which are the body of the play;
line and colour, which are the very heart of the scene; rhythm, which is the
very essence of dance.4

And this ‘new’ art demands a new ‘artist of the theatre’, to use Craig’s phrase. This
figure was the director who, ‘when he will have mastered the uses of action, words,
line, colour and rhythm, then … may become an artist’.5 Out of this agon between the
playwright and the director, performance itself emerges as an independent artistic
activity, no longer compelled to remain ‘faithful’ in any way to the play-text or to its
historical staging conventions.
Within all the experiments of theatrical modernism it is as if the whole notion
of stage conventions is re-addressed and the job of the mediating figure, which may
have been simply to stage a play-text, becomes the job of the director and is elevated
into a creative activity in its own right. Much of this experiment is facilitated by new
stage technologies of the period (the introduction of electricity, new concepts of
scenic space etc.) and new methods of actor training. Many of the modernists we

8
study in English Literature, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Auden and Isherwood, D.H.
Lawrence, Joseph Conrad all wrote plays, but significantly most also wrote essays
about the relationships between plays and performance. In a sense they wrote their
plays not only as playwrights but also, as if they were directors. They were concerned
both with ‘the poetry in the theatre’ and ‘the poetry of the theatre’, to borrow
Cocteau’s phrase.6
Samuel Beckett, who in many ways continues the experiments in poetic drama
and the stage, can also be said to merge the roles of playwright and director as all his
plays come with detailed staging directions. These, however, are not interpretive, they
don’t serve to explain the roles or the play, but enact these roles. Endgame (1957)
opens establishing the only mise en scéne of the play with Clov drawing the curtains
on two windows (the sea window and the earth window), uncovering two dustbins
(containing the ‘accursed progenitors’, Nagg and Nell) and then uttering the first
lines, ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished’. He is the
‘carer’ of Hamm seated, blind covered in a blanket – a figure that could itself be seen
as a reading of Lear after the apocalypse. Although the first productions (directed by
Roger Blin in Paris and George Divine at the Royal Court, 1957) were unsuccessful,
the play has come to occupy a privileged position in the history of twentieth century
theatre, both as a completed performance piece (for the relationships it establishes
between playwright, director and actor) and for the nightmarish, post-apocalyptic
world it evokes. This image of the Beckettian stage has almost invariably been
interpreted as resulting from the devastation and horror of the post WWII period.
Throughout his life, however, Beckett had always objected to literal and
interpretive visualisations and stagings of his plays, when they diverge from his own
directions. ‘Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by it’ was
the phrase he insisted be added to the programme notes of JoAnne Akalaitis’
production (with the American Repertory Theatre) of Endgame in 1984 set in a New
York subway tunnel after a nuclear war. It is as if the most experimental
playwright/philosopher of the twentieth century was denying the director his/her
creative autonomy, an autonomy fought for and mostly achieved throughout the first
decades of the same century. For in order for plays to survive they have to be
performed, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The concept of performance also
should allow for the concept of failure. At the same, Beckett himself was inconsistent
in his attitudes towards directors. Alan Schneider, the director he met in 1950s Paris

9
and who is known for faithfully ‘serving’ him throughout his life, had almost total
freedom to do what he wished with his plays. For what mattered for Beckett was that
Schneider (born in 1917 during the October Revolution, the son of Russian Jews,
whose aunt died in Auschwitz) shared the same sensibility towards the horrors of his
age. Beckett was equally generous towards many actors and directors he worked with
and he himself would change the play-texts numerous times during the rehearsal
process. As many contemporary scholars claim, the works of Beckett will survive
through to the twenty first century, not necessarily through meticulous reconstruction,
but through creative re-imaginings that will be always be contingent upon the
historical contexts of their audiences, whether this is intentional or not.
On the one hand the so-called ‘emancipation’ of performance from the literary
text, heralded by modernism and the avant-garde, allows for the total freedom of the
performance event. On the other, this event always takes place within a historical
context and always relies on audience reception. The success or failure of a
performance might be measured not to the degree it remains faithful to a play-text
(which is some postmodern performances is discarded altogether), but possibly to the
degree it re-imagines that text within its contemporary historical context, providing
through an embodied, live experience insight and pleasure for its audience. The study
of play-texts as dynamic performance events, informed by their history of production
and reception may offer us a similar experience of insight and pleasure.

1
Christie Carson, www.British Library/Treasures in Full/Shakespeare in Quarto. Also see Christie
Carson and Jackie Bratton, eds., The Cambridge King Lear, CD-ROM Text and Performance Archive
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2
See Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008)
3
Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire de Théâtre (Paris: Messidor, 1987), trans., Christine Shantz, (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), 301.
4
Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1911), 138.
5
Ibid., 148.
6
Jean Cocteau, ‘Preface’ (1922) to The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (1921), trans. Michael Benedikt,
in Modern French Plays: An Anthology from Jarry to Ionesco (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 96-7.

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