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Theatre, Body and Pleasure

Drama is a medium in which one group of bodies watches another group of

bodies. The theatre is a place that exhibits what a human body is, what it
does, what it is capable of. It requires special things of bodies, putting pres-
sure on its audience as well as its performers. It creates and manipulates plea-
sure in relation to bodies.
Part theatre history, part dramatic criticism, part theoretical tour de force, the
central argument in Theatre, Body and Pleasure is that theatre is where society
negotiates around bodily value and bodily meaning. It will therefore appeal
to those with interests not only in theatre but also in wider questions about
society, culture and pleasure.
This unique and powerful study features
• a large historical range, from medieval to postmodern
• case studies offering close readings of written texts
• examples of how to ‘read for the body’, exploring written text as a ‘disci-
pline’ of the body
• a breadth of cultural reference, from stage plays through to dance
culture
• a range of theoretical approaches, including dance analysis and phenom-
enology.
Simon Shepherd explores the interplay of bodily value, the art of bodies and
the physical responses to that art. He explains first how the body makes
meaning and carries value, and then describes the relationship between
time, space and body. From here he looks at bodies that go beyond their
apparent limits, becoming excessive, tangling with objects, dissolving into
their surroundings.
Simon Shepherd is Director of Programmes at Central School of Speech
and Drama, London.
This page intentionally left blank
Theatre, Body and
Pleasure

Simon Shepherd
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
7KLUG$YHQXH1HZ<RUN1<
5RXWOHGJHLVDQLPSULQWRIWKH7D\ORU )UDQFLV*URXSDQLQIRUPDEXVLQHVV
© 2006 Simon Shepherd
Typeset in Baskerville by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shepherd, Simon.
Theatre, body and pleasure / Simon Shepherd
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Theatre–Philosophy. 2. Acting–Psychological aspects.
3. Drama–History and criticism. 4. Body, Human, in literature.
I. Title.
PN2039.S54 2005
792'.01–dc22 2005013349

ISBN 0-415-25374-8 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-25375-6 (pbk)
For my mum
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: theatrically imagined bodies 1

PART I
Body and script 11

1 Script as a discipline of the body 14

2 Theatre and bodily value 32

3 The wrong dog (an account of significant

inaction) 55

PART II
In time and space 73

4 Just at that very moment: the organisation of body rhythm 77

5 ‘Look out behind you’ 97

PART III
Beyond integrity 113

6 Strutting, bellowing, muscles and noise 115

viii Contents
7 Lolo’s breasts and a wooden Christ 138

8 Dissipation 153

Notes 176
Bibliography 177
Index 194
Acknowledgements

I did much of the work on this book during study leave from the Drama
Department at Goldsmiths College, partly funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board. I am grateful to the Board for its support.
I would also like to thank Barbara Hodgdon and Dan Rebellato, who
read early drafts of this for Routledge. Their engagement with the material
was very useful, lively and friendly. So too, thanks to Ross Brown and Janette
Dillon, for reading and commenting on parts of this.
I realise that much of the thinking for this book was done over a period
when I used to go dancing on a Sunday night at Warriors, at Turnmills. I am
grateful to the organisers of that event for constructing a place of such bodily
pleasure. A place that danced, militantly, in the face of death.
Parts of chapters 2, 3, 7 and 8 have previously appeared in different forms:
‘“The Body”, Performance Studies, Horner, and a Dinner Party’, Textual Prac-
tice 14 (Routledge, 2000): 285–303; ‘Revels End, and the Gentle Body Starts’,
Shakespeare Survey 55, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2002):
237–56; ‘Voice, Writing, Noise … or is Herod Balinese?’, Performance Research
8.1 ‘Voices’ (Routledge, 2003): 74-82; ‘Lolo’s Breasts, Cyborgism, and a
Wooden Christ’, Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, ed. Helen Thomas and
Jamilah Ahmed (Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 170-89.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Theatrically imagined bodies

This book proposes that theatre is, and has always been, a place which exhibits
what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of. This exhibition may
amount to an affirmation of currently held views or it may be an unsettling
challenge to assumptions. Theatre requires special things of bodies, and
makes demands on audience as much as performer. It generates and manip-
ulates pleasure in relation to bodies. Through this pleasure it engages those
values which are held personally and culturally. Theatre is a practice in
which societies negotiate around what the body is and means.
Negotiation around bodies is important, I think, because many ideas
about what is good, right, natural and possible are grounded in assumptions
about what the body is, what it needs, how it works. Social, moral and politi-
cal values attach themselves to body shape, size, colour, movement. They
also inhabit distinctions made between body and non-body, whether that be
mind, spirit, object or society.
The work of the book is to substantiate this proposition and show how it
operates. To set that up, the introduction offers a brisk overview of some of
the main thinking about the body, specifically in relation to theatre as an art
of bodies. Thereafter the book falls into three parts, each with its own
contribution to the main argument. The first part deals with the relations
between body and script, attending particularly to bodily value. The second
explores the positioning of theatre bodies in relation to time and space, and
emphasises how such positioning impacts upon the set of bodies that watches
and listens. The third part interests itself in cases where the theatre seems to
interfere with the supposed integrity of the body. This might be through
transgression of norms of bodily behaviour or through blurring of the
boundaries between body and non-body, incorporeality, flow.

Taking an interest in the body

Several stories can be told about the causes of the contemporary interest in
the body.
2 Introduction
One of the most important of these in the field of performance and theatre
studies is that of the impact of feminism. In the 1960s feminist performance
challenged dominant assumptions about gender roles, and it frequently did
so by means of so-called ‘body art’. The body of the woman was used and
shown in a way that stressed its actuality as against the cultural and social
meanings that had been imposed upon it. When the modern feminist move-
ment cohered in the late 1960s it generated, among many other things, a
considerable amount of work that explored the development of concepts
about the woman’s body and the ways in which it was represented. This
work was necessary in part because assumptions about the capacity, func-
tions and value of the woman’s body underlay and justified ideas about her
social role. It was also necessary because dominant (masculine) ways of
thinking assumed that the body was separate from, and irrelevant to, the
activities of the reason. It thus issued a challenge to men to write about their
bodies. (For an overview of the body art emergence, see Shepherd and Wallis
2004; see also, for example, Jones 1998 and Schneider 1997. For a male
response to feminism see, for example, Ihde 2002.)
The feminist engagement made the body into a key topic, politically and
theoretically. But no coherent position or set of values followed. In her
overview of this feminist work Elizabeth Grosz identifies three different
positions. ‘Egalitarian feminism’ tends to see the woman’s body as a limita-
tion on her ‘capacity for equality’ while also giving her ‘special insight’.
‘Social constructionism’ makes a distinction between biology and the way it
is represented, having as its project the insistence that ‘different cultural
meanings and values’ be given to the biology. ‘Sexual difference’ refuses to
see the body as a biological given, but instead as something that is as it is
lived. It is a place where nature and culture are interwoven. It is never
neutral; the differences between bodies are both ineradicable and important.
Thus, as Grosz says, ‘Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural and
ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of
contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual strug-
gles’ (Grosz 1994: 19). Those struggles are ongoing.
Woven into this story of the impact of feminism are two other narratives
that also make claims about the causes of a modern interest in the body. One
of these features the emergence of body art itself. Within the counter-culture
of the 1960s the body was given value on the basis of its naturalness, the thing
humanity had in common, in a society increasingly mechanised, mediated
and repressive. In the theatre this led to a valuing of the actor as against the
supposedly imposed text of author or director. And it led to the prioritising of
performance as a place where people could experience liberation from the
everyday repressions which constrained and distorted their bodies (see, for
example, Chaikin 1972 on actors; Ansorge 1975 on performances; and an
overview in Vanden Heuvel 1991).
 Introduction 3
The other narrative tells of resistance to the assumed (masculinist) separa-
tion of mind from body. Thus alongside the work of feminists should be
placed that of, for example, Lakoff and Johnson who claim that ‘Our
conceptual system is grounded in, neurally makes use of, and is crucially
shaped by our perceptual and motor systems’. From here they argue towards
a position that suggests that ‘Because our ideas are framed in terms of our
unconscious embodied conceptual systems, truth and knowledge depend on
embodied understanding’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 555; see also Johnson
1987 and Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Lakoff and Johnson approach their
‘philosophy in the flesh’ as a linguist and a philospher. A century before,
however, medical scientists had begun to insist on the imbrication of body
and mind. In 1880 H. C. Bastian published a book called The Brain as an
Organ of Mind. In 1915 Walter Cannon argued that emotion has a bodily
basis in his book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.
A particular inflection to this mind–body interconnection leads into
another story of the causes of a modern interest. In the opening decades of
the twentieth century F. Matthias Alexander embarked on a project to re-
educate his body in order to recover its potential. His body, and in particular
his voice, had become debilitated by learnt behaviours. What the mind
learns has a physical effect, and vice versa. And as Alexander saw it, it was
through this learning process that modern civilisation impacted negatively
on the body, it ‘contaminated man’s biological and sensory equipment, with
a resultant crippling in the responses of the whole organism’ (Maisel 1974:
xxix). While Alexander was developing his theories, much of the cultural
interest in bodies of the 1920s and 1930s was taken up with a concept of the
body as an appropriate complement to a world felt to be modern, machinic,
efficient and fast, where the productive worker or the well-drilled army or
chorus were paradigms (Schwartz 1992; Franko 1995; McNeill 1995; Segel
1998).
In the 1940s, the decade that saw modernist efficiency caught up into
world conflict, Alexander’s therapeutic interests were restated. In a series
of lectures in 1943–4 Moshe Feldenkrais argued that human problems
derived from people’s adjustment to prevailing economic and marital
conditions. The state of the body relates to the state of society, or, as Walter
Cannon’s 1940 lecture put it, the body is a ‘guide to politics’. Like Alexander,
Feldenkrais suggested that a person could be made to ‘adjust’ through a re-
education of the body. So too in 1948 Rudolph Laban suggested that the
alienation produced by modern industrial life could be countered through a
training in movement, which would recentre the body (Feldenkrais 1949;
Cannon 1942; Laban 1988). From this sort of thinking emerges the shape of
the modern notion that bodily re-education is the key to a healthy and
fulfilled life (the only problem, of course, being the choice of regime – Alex-
ander technique, yoga, martial arts of various sorts, knitting).
4 Introduction
Now if you are a sociologist reading this, you’ll know that there is yet
another story to be told. This one, fortunately, has also already been
written, and is well documented. It begins as the story of an absence. In his
overview of writings on the body, Arthur Frank notes the silence in soci-
ology about the body. When he wrote his first overview of the field in 1990
the major initiatives seemed to be coming from ‘social history, clinical
practice in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, anthropology, and cognitive
science and philosophy’ (Frank 1996: 37). In his subsequent overview he
attempts to specify the origin of the mid-1990s interest in the body, and he
attributes it to modernism, postmodernism and feminism … which is a bit
like saying that it comes out of the history of western culture. Modernism,
he suggests, saw the body both as ‘constant in a world of flux’ and ‘as the
epitome of that flux’. Postmodernism is presented as a division between
high theory (in work by such as Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault,
and Baudrillard) and deliberately minimal, closely focused studies such as
those contained in Feher’s Fragments for a History of the Human Body (1989).
Feminism’s impact has already been touched on above. From here Frank
then goes on to describe a general model of the relationship between body
and society.
Frank’s initial overview was limited to the previous decade, so that he did
not attend to the work of such figures as Marcel Mauss, Norbert Elias,
Erving Goffman and Mary Douglas. All of this work has an anthropological
inflection, and while in 1990 its influence on sociology still seemed minimal,
it had found a productive afterlife in theatre and performance studies. For
my purposes here, the dissemination of anthropological work on the body
into another discipline, that of performance studies, is another strand in the
story of the origins of a modern interest in the body. The major figure here is
Goffman. His Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, published in 1956, used a
vocabulary of dramatic terms to describe human behaviours in everyday life.
Picking up on this, Richard Schechner opened up the category of what
constituted performance. So too Mary Douglas’s work made it possible to
articulate the relationships between the specific performing bodies and the
‘social body’ of the community (in for example the work on medieval
mystery plays done by James (1983)). To these should be added Victor
Turner, whose anthropological method gained a heightened consciousness
of performance from the work of Richard Schechner, even while Schechner
thought he was being influenced by Turner (for brief accounts of all these
elements within performance theory, see Shepherd and Wallis 2004; see also
Schechner 2002).
Less influential within theatre and performance studies hitherto are
Mauss and Elias. In 1934 the French ethnologist Marcel Mauss, describing
‘techniques’ of the body, observed that British soldiers used spades differ-
ently from French ones and that styles of swimming changed from one
 Introduction 5
generation to another (Mauss 1992). Four years later Norbert Elias devel-
oped his thesis on the ‘civilizing process’ whereby societies learn, and natu-
ralise, different manners at table, different ways of managing human waste.
This work has potential relevance here in that theatre is an artform in which
bodily techniques and behaviours are not only employed but also specifically
exhibited, for instance in the jokes about social awkwardness in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, The Man of Mode, Caste and Absent Friends (to take a random
sample across the centuries). Theatre seen in this way is one of the mecha-
nisms of ‘civilisation’. And as such could become the target of, say, that femi-
nist body art which challenged assumptions about the body, turning theatre
into an explicit site of negotiation around bodily meaning and value.
And about that body art one more thing needs to be said. A considerable
amount of it, whether feminist or not, deliberately put the biological body
under pressure, marking it, piercing it, cutting it. This foregrounds a point
that can be forgotten where the focus is entirely on learnt techniques of body,
bodily behaviours, therapeutic methods: that culture and way of life, in
training a body for society, have their impact on the biological thing itself.
For centuries upper-class children have been trained to carry themselves in
appropriate ways – decorous, upright, deliberate, indeed authoritative (see
Chapter 2). Body shape has been constrained, if not permanently altered,
by corsets or foot-binding. But upper-class children might also be materi-
ally different, in that their better resourced and more plentiful diet makes
them taller. The biological body changes within both short- and long-term
timescales: the body-builder’s body and the classical ballet dancer’s legs;
counter-tenors singing a wider range than fifty years ago, athletes running
faster than ever before.
And now there is a widespread notion that the biological thing is open to as
many consumer choices as any other lifestyle accessory. Recipes for fitness and
attractiveness allow for a sense of control over size: smaller through slimming
and larger through body-building. Fitness and attractiveness are cultural
concepts, bear social and emotional value. They also change from one society
to another, whether in the recalibration of medical measures of obesity and
high blood pressure or in the value placed on pumped muscles and tanned
skin. As a lifestyle accessory the body changes. But these learnt cultural values
in turn have material effects on bodies, effects which include killing them. As a
site of representation of bodily appropriateness, therefore, the theatre may be
said to contribute to a process which not only does things physically to the
bodies of its performers, but also physically bears upon its audience.

Theatre as an art of bodies

As an artform theatre consciously exhibits the body. A body that is exhibited
to others is almost always prepared for it, however informally. This might
6 Introduction
amount to a few moments of private mental reflection, which alerts the
nerves and muscles, or to a lifetime’s dedication to a technique. When a body
is prepared for the theatre, this is a specific instance, and operates within the
context, of the general process whereby a culture produces the body.
Many regimes of training for performance seek not only to refine and
develop bodily skills but also to disseminate particular understandings, or philos-
ophies, of performance. Stanislavsky’s training system offers performers the
tools for developing complex imitations of the real world even while it carries
assumptions about how plays work and what stage characters are. It also
defines the performer who undertakes it. For Stanislavsky the performer had
an inner resource of emotional memory which could be drawn upon. For
Suzuki, in contrast, the actor is taken over by the machinery of muscular exer-
tion like a puppet becoming possessed. A body may be trained either to display
its technique or to conceal it; to show that it has moved beyond the everyday or
to be able to produce a recognisable copy of the everyday (Hodge 2000; also
Barba and Saverese 1991; Roach 1993; Dennis 1995; Allain 2002).
Many methods of preparation for performance explicitly seek to depart
from what their culture defines as everyday physicality. The precise nature
and direction of that departure change according to the methods and their
ideologies. I noted above that Alexander, Feldenkrais and Laban all devel-
oped techniques that were designed to compensate for, if not liberate bodies
from, the physical distortion and alienation induced by modern life. In the
1970s performers might have begun their work by playing games. Play was
seen as a tool for releasing body and mind from learnt inhibitions. Similarly
in the 1970s, and with a similar notion of getting back to basics, various prac-
titioners experimented with ways of ritualising the performing body, espe-
cially as a route to uncovering a primal spirituality. The quest for renewal of
performance through renewal of bodily behaviour led in the 1980s to a
greater concentration, not on that which is supposedly within but rather on
the plurality of that which is without. Performers prepared by encountering
modes from diverse cultures and traditions. This then was a form of departure
from the superficially everyday, but now focused as a cultural enrichment
through mingling, through the ‘inter-corporeal’ (the word is from Pavis 1996:
15) and through a display of skill for its own sake (Barba and Saverese 1991).
Common to all these techniques is their raw material, the human body.
While that is obvious enough, different methods define, value and maintain
awareness of the body in different ways. It may be the casing for an
emotional inner life; it may be the substance to be purged; it may become
transcendent through disorderly sensualities; it may work as mechanically as
a puppet. What remains common is that it is a living entity that occupies a
finite amount of space and has its own mass, energy and motor capacity. It is
a material presence. As such it produces knowledge of itself and impacts
upon the senses of others.
 Introduction 7
This aspect of material bodiliness was given force in the late 1980s and
1990s when what had been a somewhat discredited strand of philosophical
work entered performance theory. In his introduction to Bodied Spaces,
Stanton Garner claims that the ‘phenomenological approach’ can attend
to both aspects of the stage – as ‘scenic space … spectacle to be processed
and consumed by the perceiving eye, objectified as field of vision’ and
‘environmental space, “subjectified” (and intersubjectified) by the physical
actors who body forth the space they inhabit’. He then quotes from the
phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty: ‘To be a body, is to be tied
to a certain world … our body is not primarily in space: it is of it.’ And in the
same space as the performance, notes Garner, is the audience (Garner 1994:
3, 4; see also States 1985 and 1992; Merleau-Ponty 1996: 148).
Theatre is an art of body and an art grounded in body.

And an art for a bodied audience

The phenomenological approach underlines the interpenetration of body and
mind that was described near the start of this Introduction. For a phenom-
enologist, seeing is always ‘bodied’ seeing, mediated and affected by the physical
mechanisms with which it is done. Thus one might say that ‘Visual perception
… is inseparable from the muscular movements of the eye and the physical
effort involved in focusing on an object or in simply holding one’s eyelids open’
(Crary 2001: 72). Indeed, some argue that one’s whole body is affected by
seeing: ‘Without our knowing it, all that we see projects itself instantaneously
into our musculature’ (Verriest in Jousse 1990). Speaking and hearing are even
more obviously ‘bodied’. Speaking requires muscular activity while sound, in its
pitch and rhythm, reverberates inside the body (Walser 1993). Within the theatre
event there are two groups of people who might be seeing, speaking and hearing –
the performers and the audience. Each group is a group of bodies.
I shall return in Part II to the bodily response of audiences, but we should
note here that commentators on early film were firmly convinced that it had
a bodily effect on its audience. In 1939 Walter Benjamin noted:

technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of

training. … In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as
a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on
a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in a film.
(Benjamin 1973: 177)

Similarly, just over a decade before, in 1927, Donald Laird concluded that
loud noises have a ‘profound effect on involuntary activities of the stomach’ –
and therefore that noise impairs productivity because its effects use up
energy (quoted in Thompson 2002).
8 Introduction
Those two observations are not only close in date, but they share conscious-
ness of ‘modern’ living and a reference point in manual labour (Laird was
observing typists). They are of their time, then, and as a consequence their
concepts of bodily response are also of their time. In his history of perception,
Jonathan Crary insists that different cultures have different models of the
perceiving body. While in the eighteenth century a sense of touch was a
component of theories of vision, in the nineteenth century sight became
more autonomous, which contributed to the refashioning of an observer
‘fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption’ (Crary 2001: 19). While
vision as touch is viable in a world which has its contents in stable positions,
‘in the nineteenth century such a notion became incompatible with a field
organised around exchange and flux’ (2001: 62). So too, while the model of
the camera obscura ‘defines an observer as isolated, enclosed and autono-
mous’ (2001: 39), cut off from the external world, a sort of disembodied
mind, in the nineteenth century there developed theories of the bodiedness
of looking. That position is summarised in the earlier quotation on visual
perception by Crary: it is equally of its time.
Similarly Thompson argues that through the 1920s auditors were intro-
duced to ‘new ways of listening’. After 1927 motion picture auditoriums
were wired for sound: ‘the evolution of acoustical technologies in theaters
and studios demonstrates how architectural acoustics and electroacoustics
gradually merged’. The telephone and phonograph, by contrast, ‘intro-
duced people to sounds that had been severed from architectural space’ and
‘taught them to distinguish between desired sound signals and unwanted
sounds or noises’ (Thompson 2002: 234, 236). For a different historical
moment, Bruce Smith attempts to describe a ‘cultural poetics of listening’ in
the early modern period. This involves not just describing the specific mate-
rial circumstances of listening – the shape and textures of theatres, the
soundscape of the city – but also the ‘protocols of listening’, for example a
decorum around sound connected to social status (Smith 1999: 8).
Listening, like speaking and seeing, happens in specific physical situa-
tions, happens as part of a whole bodily experience. But this bodily experi-
ence is thought about in different ways, and its physical techniques may alter,
in different societies. There are cultures of listening and seeing. That said,
one further point about the bodiliness of the spectators and audience needs
noting.
This point, in brief, is that bodily effects emerge from two of the classic
mechanisms by which theatre functions. In his discussion of empathy Ber-
nard Beckerman notes the pose of a deeply engaged audience:

leaning forward in one’s seat … mirrors the forward thrust of the

dramatic action. … Imaginatively we follow a path that runs parallel,
not to the events themselves, but to the shifts of tension either between
 Introduction 9
characters or between ourselves and the performers. This process may
be called empathic parallelism.
(Beckerman 1970: 149)

He then goes on to define his term: ‘a kinesthetic, isomorphic response to

dramatic action, by means of which the patterns and rhythms of tension find
their immediate echo in the imaginative response of the audience’. The audi-
ence, however, ‘need not recognise the structural patterns of an action, but
they do experience the form isomorphically in a sympathetic pattern within
their bodies’ (1970: 151). The suggestion, then, is that empathy is a response
of the whole physical person. Where body and brain are interconnected, this
would seem a logical inference.
For commentary on the other mechanism we go much further back. In
his account of the work done by theatrical performance Philip Sidney
observed that tragedy ‘maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest
their tyrannical humours’ (Sidney 1975: 45). He is in effect talking about
mimesis, but it is a mimesis not of actors so much as the audience. In
response to the show they are led into imitation by what they watch. In 1934
Marcel Mauss seems to have observed a similar response to movies. He
noted that young Parisian women were starting to walk like the girls depicted
in American movies. This sort of imitation is, in turn, widely obvious in
modern culture’s response to its celebrities. Hair across the land has been
chopped, teased and stuck in place in response to, say, Princess Diana or
David Beckham. So too with clothes, so too with personal lifestyles. The star
does a mimesis of celebrity, behaving as celebrities behave, and the audience
does an imitation of the star. As well as the activity of actors in relation to the
‘real’ world, mimesis seems to describe the physical behaviour of an audi-
ence in relation to an acted world.

The interplay of bodily value, the art of bodies and physical responses to that
art will occupy us in what follows. I track this through case studies of stage
practices, principally within scripted drama, in the western European tradi-
tion. My method is to use ‘close reading’ of the sort I would do in preparing a
text for rehearsal and production and situate it within a historical and theo-
retical context. In establishing that context, especially theoretically, I have
borrowed models that sometimes put pressure on the material rather than
naturally, so to speak, connect with it. But this process enables me to say
things which I couldn’t otherwise get to, and to invite the reader to think
about whether the models and methods could be applied elsewhere.
The historical range is deliberately wide because I wanted examples
that would best facilitate discussion of my various propositions. These
examples are taken from canonical scripted texts from the main ‘periods’ of
10 Introduction
English drama. My principles in selecting them were based on them being
both generally famous and yet pleasurable for me to work on. The key
thing was to model a way of dealing with staged bodies so that the reader
can take the model away and apply it in other places. In each case I have
tried to be specific about the material circumstances of a practice, while
also trying to learn from contrasts and comparisons. This does not aim to
be a history book, although there is quite a lot of history in it. Nor is it a
book about actor training, directors’ techniques, theatre anthropology or
performance ethnography, though all of these come into it at times. It is a
book, as I said at the start, about theatre as a practice in which societies
negotiate around bodily value and bodily order. In that negotiation theatre
is not simply an art of bodies but an art of bodily possibility, an event where
the limits of body are negotiated, fetishised, imagined somehow else.
Part I

Body and script

As an art of bodies, theatrical performance both depends on and presents

‘body work’. In the Introduction we saw how the body work of performance
consists of two main elements. First, the body is prepared for performance,
worked up to it by formal or informal regimes. Second, the preparation of
the performing body is undertaken within a context of assumptions about
‘body’ in society and thus has a relationship – conscious or not, critical or not
– with what are perceived to be dominant norms. Thus, by way of summary,
the body work done by theatre consists of the construction of a particular sort
of body which inevitably promotes a particular scheme of value.
In the case of preparation for performance of a written script there is a
specific additional agency that contributes to shaping the body. This is the
text itself. It has its effects at various levels. In the most general terms, a
performer’s awareness of the genre of the play will begin the process of
preparing the body: it expects, for example, to hold itself differently in
tragedy from farce, to have a different rhythm (see Chapter 4). In more
specific terms, it organises what the body does on stage, whether it walks,
jumps through hoops, giggles. In its speaking of a text the body is worked on
in two ways. Most literally, that text controls breathing patterns and the way
in which the body must hold itself in order to sustain vocal delivery. Less
obviously it links voice into gesture. As Paul Zumthor puts it:

Like the voice, gesture projects the body into the space of the perfor-
mance, attempts to conquer this and to saturate it with its movement.
The spoken word does not exist, like the written, simply in a verbal
context. It necessarily belongs in the course of an existential situation …
whose totality is brought into play by the bodies of the participants.
(Zumthor 1994: 224–5)

The written text of a play usually survives where evidence of physical

preparation methods does not. While the written text will always have an
effect on the bodies which deliver it, it has a varying relationship with the
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