ARTicles vol. 1 i.4: Not for All Time

The past hundred years will go down in theater history as the age of the director. Although the twentieth century also produced great playwrights, the emergence of the auteur director sets modern drama apart from all previous ages of theater. In many respects, the evolution of twentieth-century theater has been driven by auteur directors, directors who have contributed much to what is distinctive about modern theater. The term “auteur director” was borrowed from French film criticism and means that the director is the author of the theatrical event.

During the past century, directors as much as playwrights have created the new forms that characterize the restlessness of modern drama: Realism, Symbolism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and the Theatre of Images. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Artaud and Brecht (as director), Peter Brook and Robert Wilson–these artists gave as much to the rich variety of our theatrical traditions as did playwrights. Some scholars, in fact, consider Brecht as director more influential than Brecht as playwright. One cannot write the history of our theater without acknowledging that the modern director is an artist in his or her own right.

Whereas students of film accept as dogma the auteur director, in theater his emergence has sparked squabbles and lawsuits. Whose play is it anyway? Much ink has been spilled in classrooms and courtrooms over this issue. In one of the notorious controversies of contemporary theater, Samuel Beckett tried to shut down the A.R.T.’s production of Endgame. The playwright damned the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis as heresy. Beckett objected to a racially mixed cast and to the set design, both of which he felt distracted the audience from his text.

Beckett’s dismay raises serious questions about interpretation, artistic collaboration, and the complex relationship between text and performance. Behind all these concerns, and often unacknowledged, lies the great conflict: which is more important, word or image, ear or eye? A play does not exist in a book one reads in a library. As the British director Jonathan Miller notes, performance is a constitutive part of the identity of a play. A play exists only in performance, and performances that rethink a text with strong visual images provoke debate.

Nowhere does this controversy come into sharper focus than in the plays of Shakespeare, the most canonical playwright of the canon and Armageddon of the word-image war. Shakespeare, in fact, has attracted auteur directors like moths to a flame. To be writ large in the history of theater, one must climb Mt. Everest, and many of the landmark productions that prompted shifts in performance styles have originated with Shakespeare.

These productions have also altered how we understand Shakespeare’s plays. In Changing Styles in Shakespeare Ralph Berry asserts that in the last generation, “The most interesting and influential reappraisals of certain plays have been launched by performances.” Peter Brook’s King Lear, for example, brought that play into the absurd universe of Beckett. The stage has assumed a higher intellectual profile with the rise to power of the director who reinterprets classics from a forceful stance. “Wrestling physically with a great dramatic text – working out the problems of how to do it–is a form of sustained, detailed literary critcism,” declares Jonathan Miller, who produced two years of the Shakespeare plays on PBS and directed Sheridan’s The School for Scandal at the A.R.T.

Not everyone, however, approves of this need to reinterpret the past. “Young man, how dare you meddle with Our Shakespeare?” snarled a distraught dowager at Nigel Playfair’s 1920 futurist As You Like It. The indignation continues, and so does the “meddling,” undaunted. Even if we had enough information (we do not) to reconstruct a performance of Shakespeare exactly as done in his day, it would not work.

When applied to theater, Roman Jakobson’s model of verbal communication helps explain how theater functions. In “Linguistics and Poetics,” Jakobson lists six factors in any speech event: addresser, addressee, message, shared code, context and contact (“a physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.”)

In terms of Shakespeare and a contemporary audience, all six factors present problems that militate against communication. Code, context, and contact have obviously suffered a sea change. But the question of addresser, message, and addressee is not as simple as first appears. We are not the addressees of Shakespeare’s message.

In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco notes that each text postulates a Model Reader. The Model Spectator postulated by Shakespeare’s plays does not correspond to anyone alive, well, and living in Cambridge. But the patrons of the Globe were not the addressees either. The addressee of Shakespeare’s texts was the company of actors he wrote for. Shakespeare conceived of his plays as a script to perform. His “foul papers” were a cluster of instructions for a specific group of actors to act. Thus, he showed no interest in having the plays published. Shakespeare did not write his texts for us. We have them by chance and happenstance, and we will never have them in a completely reliable state.

My purpose is to illustrate the difficulty of trying to think of Shakespeare as the addresser of the message and us as the addressee. We are eavesdropping on a message sent to someone else. Many problems fall into place if we conceive of the cycle of communication that Shakespeare initiated as having ended once the troupe of actors he wrote for got his manuscript. The message in the bottle is sent to actors, not audience. After the actors receive the playwright’s message, they set in motion a new cycle of communication in which they, the actors, are the addressers and the audience the addressee.

These two cycles are closely related and one is dependent on the other, but they remain two distinct cycles of communication. Unlike readers of a novel, the theater audience can never be the addressee of the playwright. The point of contact for communication in theater is the theater. Put differently, the playwright’s message must be performed, and performance is interpretation, representation, mediation. For this reason, Shakespeare speaks not for an age, but for all time. Only through fresh interpretations can he remain alive for succeeding generations. His plays are not just a historical document. They are a challenge to every great director to breathe new theatrical life into them so that they can live in the minds and hearts of new audiences.

Starting in the late ’80s, a series of revolutionary stagings put Andrei Serban in the forefront of Shakespeare directors. His reinterpretation of Shylock, for instance, changed the way we think about that character. Rather than a tragic victim, Serban gave us a Borscht Belt comic. Similarly, his The Taming of the Shrew convinced many that a play often dismissed as a bagatelle is a richly rewarding text.

Twelfth Night (A.R.T., 1989); Cymbeline (NYSF, Central Park, 1998); The Taming of the Shrew (A.R.T., 1998); The Merchant of Venice (A.R.T., 1998; Comédie Française, 2001); Hamlet (NYSF, 1999); Richard III (La MaMa, 2001)–all Serban’s Shakespeares had radically different styles. The French mounting of Merchant, for example, looked totally different from that at the A.R.T., and Will LeBow’s Shylock was worlds away from the interpretation of Andrzej Seweryn in Paris.

“I confuse critics because my productions differ radically one from the other,” muses Serban. “Directing a play, I lose myself. I search for its essence, so I, Andrei Serban, have no signature.”

No matter how “radically different” one Serban production may be from another, the director always begins by immersing himself in the text, trying to understand what the playwright intended. Then Serban establishes a dialogue between past and present. Of all avant-garde directors, Serban has been the most scrupulous reader of classical texts, and this assiduous attention to language has produced dazzling stage images that illuminate rather than illustrate the script. With Serban, both word and image triumph.

Arthur Holmberg is the A.R.T.’s Literary Director and Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis.