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Baz Kershaw

Dramas of the Performative Society:Theatre at the End of its TetherThe emergence of new performance paradigms in the second half of the twentiethcentury is only now being recognized as a fresh phase in human history. The creationof the new discipline, or, as some would call it, the anti-discipline of performance studiesin universities is just a small chapter in a ubiquitous story. Everywhere performanceis becoming a key quality of endeavour, whether in science and technology, commerceand industry, government and civics, or humanities and the arts. We are experiencingthe creation of what Baz Kershaw here calls the 'performative society' - a society inwhich the human is crucially constituted through performance. But in such a society,what happens to the traditional notions and practices of drama and theatre? In thisinaugural lecture, Kershaw looks for signs and portents of the future of drama andtheatre in the performative society, finds mostly dissolution and deep panic, andtentatively suggests the need for a radical turn that will embrace the promiscuity ofperformance. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol,trained and worked as a design engineer before reading English and Philosophy atManchester University. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer inradical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and with the Devon-based group Medium Fair, where he founded the first reminiscence theatre companyFair Old Times. His latest book is The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999).More recently he wrote about the ecologies of performance in NTQ 62.

I begin, perhaps a little unconventionally,with my sub-title and a few straightforwardexamples of theatre at the end of its tether. Inan encyclopaedia of theatrical mishaps theywould probably go under the headings offalling scenery, broken machinery, and in-temperate audiences. Through them I hopeto show how at the limits of theatre anotherkind of performance begins.

Unexpected spectacle - such as collapsingscenery - is part of every actor's worst night-mare, so it may constitute a kind of theatricallapsus that can open unusual widows on thevista that connects theatre to the world.Consider the mishap that befell DonaldWolfit in his London production of King Learin 1953 - the date is significant. Here is PeterHay's version:

Wolfit... played the storm scene standing againstan eighteen-foot obelisk, which required holdingin position by a man standing behind it, and thushidden from the audience. Just before the corona-tion [of Elizabeth II]... the task was carried out bya patriotic stage-hand who had begun to celebrate

the forthcoming event somewhat in advance ofothers. On the line 'Strike flat the thick rotundityo' the world!' the stage-hand hiccoughed andlurched forward, causing the obelisk to strikehard the back of Wolfit's head. The actor, beingenormously strong, finished the scene supportingboth the obelisk and the patriot, by then paralytic.When Wolfit came into the wings, he was limping(the bump on his head was concealed by his wigand he did like his injuries to be seen)}

Here is the unexpected spectacle of an actorexcelling himself by calling up terrificreserves of physical prowess, presence ofmind, and imaginative power in entirelyunplanned ways. As Wolfit limps along thethin line between tragedy and farce theevent becomes a performance that stretchesbut does not break the tethers of theatre, toreap the benefits of a real if minor disaster.

We might say that Wolfit's misfortune drewunrehearsed performance into the imagina-tive frame of theatre. In contrast, my secondexample is one in which accidental decon-struction produces another type of imagi-

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native poise, as the victim steps neatly overthe invisible line dividing theatrical actionfrom other kinds of performance. Here, GilesBrandreth provides a crisp description:One night when Judi Dench was playing the titlerole in Brecht's Mother Courage with the RoyalShakespeare Company, the wheel fell off thewagon she was supposed to drag round the stagethroughout the play. The mishap brought the per-formance to a standstill. Miss Dench turned to theaudience and craved their indulgence, 'You see,unfortunately we're the RSC not the RAC.'2

Here the theatrical tethers are stretchedbeyond breaking by the wayward wheel, butJudi Dench manages to preserve somethingof the frame of theatre by performing amarvellous transformation from epic trage-dian to stand-up comedian. The bounds ofthe classic text become embarrassing tattersthrough technical failure in one of the greattheatres of the western world, but the situa-tion is rescued by a class act which performsa spectacularly transparent switch betweencontrasting theatrical genres.

Some kinds of extra-theatrical perform-ance can transform the nature of the theatreexperience itself. Consider the riot thaterupted on the fourth night of Sean O'Casey'sThe Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre,Dublin, in 1926. This was in response toO'Casey's anti-heroic version of the 1916 up-rising. Peter Hay gives the following, mildlysexist account:While part of the audience stormed the stage toattack the cast, another section waged war on therioters themselves. Lennox Robinson recalled afriend of his hurling her shoe at one of the rioters'and with unerring feminine aim, hitting one ofthe players on the stage'.3

W. B. Yeats, senior director of the theatre,came out on stage and, referring back to theriot that had greeted Synge's Playboy of theWestern World nineteen years earlier, bel-lowed: 'You have disgraced yourselves again,you are rocking the cradle of a new master-piece.' The arrival of the police restoredorder and the play resumed, but subsequentperformances could only proceed because ofthe continued presence of the police in theaisles - the pun is intended. The riot and itseffects resonated through Irish political

history for many years, in a clear case of theaudience in performance exposing the tethersof theatre and producing a direct conse-quence for the practice of power.

So when the theatre finds itself at the endof its tether, when the protocols that createthe theatrical frame begin to unravel underthe pressure of mishaps or disasters, thenperformance that in some crucial sense is notpart of the theatrical frame has to be called onto preserve it, restore it, or connect it to someother domain. In other, more melodramaticwords, theatre in extremis has to draw on per-formance beyond theatre to have any hope ofmaking any kind of difference in the world.

And if recent reports from authoritativesources are to be believed, theatre and dramain the West are indeed currently in extremis,in a state of crisis that some believe maypossibly prove to be terminal. What is thecause of this sorry state of affairs, in whichthe whole of western theatre often seemsto be at the end of its tether? Is it becauseperformance beyond theatre, performance inculture generally, has somehow usurped ordisplaced the theatre's historical or traditi-onal purposes? And is this happening becausewe are living in an historically transformedsituation, one that is marked by new types ofcultural, social, political, and economic processwhich are constituted through performance?

2 Sources of the Performative Society

The problems of performance, in any of itsmany aspects, are now so pervasive that it isdifficult to know how best to approach them.The student of drama and theatre attemptingto gain some kind of purchase on these prob-lems is in much the same predicament as theadventurer recalled by Edward Bond's Lear:'I once knew a man who was drowned on abridge in a flood.' For, in the twenty-firstcentury, performance has become to culturewhat water is to nature, an element indis-pensable to life. We are all students of per-formance now, because in the century justgone performance gradually became the sinequa non of human endeavour: think of NeilArmstrong's carefully crafted aphorism as heset foot on the moon - 'One small step for man,

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one giant leap for mankind' - and you haveit in a nutshell: the small step that is a cosmicleap performs a transformation for us all.

So it is hardly surprising that perform-ance is now a subject of studied concern.It arrives in a very personal guise throughanxieties about our own performance - incareer, life-style, love, or inaugural lecture.Or we become fascinated by the perform-ance of people we will never meet - in themedia, sport, politics. Or we are drawn tomore abstract domains of performance -FTSE, GNP, RAE - league tables everywhere.

The pervasiveness of performance, then,generates various pathologies of perception ofsocial process. A jaundiced eye sees us livingin an age of inhuman performance indicators.A healthier view focuses on the pleasures ofcreativity in performance. This ubiquity ofperformance, around us and within us, sug-gests, if not a break from the past, at least aradically transformed situation: 'one that Ihave tried to indicate in my title'.4

In saying that I slipped, probably invis-ibly, into another mode of performance, tobring a different kind of drama into this room.Twenty-seven years ago Raymond Williamsused those words in his inaugural lecture asProfessor of Drama at Cambridge University.So my title pays essential homage to his argu-ment about what he called the 'dramatizedsociety'. In his lecture he drew a cool contrastbetween drama in the history of western theatreand drama in the age of film and television.

Drama in theatre he saw as chiefly char-acterized by the nature of occasion: annualfestivals of Dionysus in Ancient Athens,Corpus Christi in medieval Chester, after-noons (plague permitting) in ElizabethanLondon, evenings in Restoration patenthouses or the Victorian music halls. The actof gathering conferred a unique quality onthe event. But film and television, he argued,infiltrated drama into everyday life. The newmedia made drama an 'habitual experience',so that it had come to constitute a 'basicneed'. But how do we describe the con-tinuing results of this long historical processnow, in the age of Walkmans, PCs, DVDS? Isdrama now an unconscious addiction, a pro-gramme so deeply ingrained that we do not

even recognize it as a need? Has drama nowbecome a matrix of consciousness in waysthat it never was before?

Consider the question of 'life style'. Thinkof the difference between a life lived througha single career - as miner, teacher, house-wife, banker - and one that forges a kind ofshape-shifting between several mini-careers.The first collapses distinctions between age-ing and ambition to create a kind of geneticdramaturgy, while the second uncouples thepassage of time from personal trajectory tomake a dramaturgy more likely to be drivenby the fickleness of desire. The life-longcareer implies a singular agent, whereasa sequence of careers makes for multipleselves. One might even argue that the first isto natural childbirth what the second is tohuman cloning, so that a shift from one tothe other produces a different kind of world.

Or, in another register, consider the con-sumption of speciality magazines and oftelevision channels increasingly devoted to'narrow-casting'. These media are predicatedon the self-dramatizing interest of the con-sumer, who tries out the roles representedfor size: expert mountain-biker, capable do-it-your-selfer, sex god or goddess. Throughsuch identifications people become ever moreuncertain whether they are spectators orparticipants in the spectacle of reproduction.

Andy Warhol, the twentieth-century artistwho raised the question of reproduction toits ironic apogee, pictured the loominganxiety of identity in this self-referentialcycle. When the promise of three minutes offame is held out to everyone, it comes withtough ontological strings attached, for wehave to decide not only whom or what wemight represent, but also which version ofthat whom or what: not just Marilyn Monroeor Norma Jean, but one of the many alterna-tives that media reproduction has fashionedforth. Thanks, Madonna.

If drama has become a matrix of con-sciousness through such mediatization, thentheatre has become a datum of everydaysocial exchange. This has been achievedthrough an endemic theatricalization of publicand private spaces. The powerful have alwaysknown the importance of theatricalizing pub-

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lie places. Whether in Whitehall or Nurem-berg or Tienanmen Square, the theatre of stateelevates particular men (sic) through cere-monies which confirm them as world powers.Historically, the public was cast as witness tosuch proceedings.

But in the second half of the twentiethcentury a shift that had begun much earliermoved towards a transformation. The move-ment was uneven, but it can be discerned inthe small detail of events. The royal walk-about - shaking hands, accepting flowers -aims to humanize majesty, but it also admits,in however tokenist a fashion, the peopleonto the stage of history. Likewise, the poli-tician knocking on your door turns everythreshold into a platform for the citizen.

Of course, these are the peripheral trap-pings of a theatre in which the possession ofpower remains mostly unchanged. But onceallowed into the wings, the people willalways want a place on the stage. The publicshow of grief at the funeral of Diana,Princess of Wales, was an entirely logical, ifsurprising, outcome of this invitation toparticipate. So too was the Fall of the BerlinWall, the occupation of Tienanmen Square,the civic actions of Reclaim the Streets, andthe more recent protests against interna-tional capital in global cities: Seattle, Berlin,Washington, London.

This theatricalization of the public worldhas been amplified by the media, of course,but a related transformation was occurring atthe capillary level of the social. Brecht's friend,Walter Benjamin, inspired by Baudelaire,saw in the shopping arcades and departmentstores of Paris temples for the worship of thecommodity as fetish. He adopted Baudelaire'sinterest in the flaneur, the stroller who eyesthe new spectacle of consumption with adetached gaze. This potential in the newurban spaces to produce absorption anddetachment at street level reproduces themost crucial characteristic of theatre.

The frames that theatre constructs create adoubled attitude to experience that placesthe audience as simultaneously a part of andapart from the spectacle of performance. Thearcades, museums, urban parks, great exhi-bitions of the century before last implanted a

theatrical paradigm in the daily lives of mil-lions. In the twentieth century this processbecame synonymous with progress. In thepublic sphere, shopping precincts and malls,shop windows and interiors, theatricalizedconsumption; museums, art galleries, heri-tage sites, theatricalized knowledge; themeparks, science parks, urban regenerations,and the myriad 'projects' of the millennium'experience' reinforced the theatricality ofour view on the world.

In the private sphere likewise: so interiordesign turns homes into sets, fashion turnsclothes into costumes, gourmandism turnsfood into edible props, tourism turns travelinto scene changes, and, in a neat trick inthe feedback loop of mediatization, com-munications turn social exchange into a self-dramatizing set of scenes and scenarios:'Hello, it's me, I'm on a train.'

A dramatized and theatricalized societyencourages an awareness of the sensoriumof culture as constructed. But the politicaland economic forces that have fostered thisare at the volatile heart of the performativesociety. For performative societies are foundparticularly where democracy and capital-ism meet. In such societies performancegains a new kind of potency because multi-party democracy continually weaves stagedcontest into the fabric of society. Especiallyin highly mediatized societies, performancebecomes the key element of negotiationsof authority and power. Moreover, late-capitalist liberal democracies reinforce per-formance by making the market central tosocio-economic organization. Although the'performance' of companies, corporations,shares, directors, employees is measured inmundane material and/or statistical ways,the notion that they are the players on acommercial or industrial stage is always im-plied, and often rhetorically explicit, in thelanguage of markets.

Equally, from this perspective, how indi-viduals fare in the competition between lifestyles or the struggle to accumulate dependscrucially on their own performance. So late-capitalist multi-party democracies producesocieties in which performance pervades allcultural processes, making it a main medium

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of human exchange in virtually all socialspheres. In performative societies perform-ance becomes a defining feature of the human.

But in a dramatized, theatricalized, andperformative society, what happens to'drama' in its conventional sense of play-scripts as the blueprints for production, to'theatre' as a set of buildings with stages,and to 'performance' as what happens onthose stages? Might the burgeoning of per-formance in the performative society drivethe drama and theatre to the end of a muchmore critical tether than those experiencedby Wolfit, Dench, and the Abbey Theatreactors in my opening examples? To grapplewith this question I turn now to two parti-cular dramas in the performative society.

3 First Drama: the Crisis of the DramaAt the start of the twentieth century, seriousdrama in the West was mostly a matter ofrooms. Audiences sat in a large darkenedroom looking through a hole in the wall intoanother room. What happened to thisonstage room during the course of the lastcentury has been used to chart the widermovements of society.

One critical line, for example, traces out aprocess of positive fragmentation, as thedrama moved from the oppressive drawingrooms of naturalism, through the shadowydistortions of expressionism and the dream-spaces of surrealism, to the sharply etchedpanoramas of constructivism and epic theatre,and so on to the wide-open, almost emptyspace in which two tramps agree to go butdo not move. In this approach, drama is seenas expanding to take on the world, even thecosmos - seeking new shapes that wouldbetter represent the very form and distortingpressures of the times. The world might begoing to pieces, but at least the drama knowshow to cope with it. Loud applause.

A more focused line can be traced throughthe dramas that featured a reproduced roomonstage. Such rooms were never entirelycomfortable, otherwise dramas would not behappening in them, and so they mutatedthrough many manifestations - from wellfurnished drawing-rooms to seedy attics with

their kitchen sinks, to the glamour of five-star hotel suites and millionaires' penthouses.Sometimes the room itself comes under pres-sure and becomes a hell rather than a haven,even, at the most interesting extreme, to thepoint of physical collapse. There are only asmall number of instances of the latter - theroom exploding or imploding - in westerndrama, but that rarity makes them all themore significant: they can be seen as an acidtest of the drama's limitations in framingevents to a familiar human scale. For in allthese cases the drama fragments under theimpact of growing uncertainty about thevalue of the human.

The sound of a door slamming as Noramakes her decisive break from the doll'shouse reverberates down through the cen-tury following Ibsen's play, shaking the wallsof every domestic and eventually of everyhuman certainty, gaining intensity especiallyfollowing the Second World War. In HuisClos (1946) Sartre makes the Second Empiredrawing-room an antechamber to hell. InEndgame (1957) Beckett calls for a bareinterior devoid of hope. In Harold Pinter'sfirst play, The Room (premiered by Bristolstudents in 1957), the room frames a menacethat comes with every knock at the door. InIonesco's Antedee (1953) the room is stretchedto breaking point by a dead body grownhuge and flying out of the window.

In Sam Shepard's Fourteen Hundred Thous-and, from the late 'sixties, the charactersfinally dismantle the walls of the room theyhave been decorating, leaving the audiencegazing at the theatre's bare walls, while apair of downstage figures read out a des-cription of a world that has become a seriesof cities with no space between them. But itis in Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) that this linereaches its high point, as the expensive hotelroom of the opening - so expensive it couldbe anywhere, say the stage directions - isreduced by a mortar bomb to a rubble thatbecomes a playground for extreme atrocity.Dramatic form and then, it seems, societyitself fall apart as the room implodes.

But there is more than just an onstagecrisis in this collapse, because the dramatisthas to find a perspective on the drama of a

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reduced, or even lost, humanity that it pro-duces. The great master of dramatic reduc-tion, Samuel Beckett, secured a serenely coolangle on his creatures through pathos: weare pitifully suspended by the fact that thetwo tramps stay still even though they havesaid they are going to go. Harold Pinter tooka similar tack with Stanley in The BirthdayParty. Both playwrights are great humanistsin their work, precisely because they will notlet go of humanity even when there seemslittle or no reason to hang on to it.

Not so Sarah Kane, who is pitiless in herportrayal of humans reduced to utter degra-dation, as if surveying them with an especi-ally detached gaze. It is not so much theevents of the drama - rape, murder, baby-eating, and all - but rather this attitude thatis truly shocking. In the final moments ofBlasted a simple technique to show the pass-ing of days gives us a clue as to why thisshould be so. The stage flicks back and forth,back and forth, from darkness to light in away reminiscent of a slide show, or of pro-jected film. This is the playwright as camera;this is theatre for the post-human digital age.

The tabloid critics found such ethicalhonesty unbearable and demonized the play-wright, conceivably contributing to her sui-cide in 1999. But equally they could haveattacked some of her contemporaries - say,Mark Ravenhill or Jez Butterworth - who,with Kane, have been celebrated for creatingsomething of a renaissance in late twentieth-century British drama. But if this was arenaissance it was cold-eyed, gazing at theend of humanity with an absence at its heart.

These are major 'hot spots' in the historyof the room in the twentieth-century drama.They encourage us to review a central con-vention - the room as sign for civilization,however troubled - forcefully reminding us,as Raymond Williams argued, that whenyou can see a convention it is already start-ing to break down. They suggest that thegreat traditions of western drama are gener-ally failing, falling apart, as the world getsintolerably risky and its future more gloomy.For there can be no dominant dramaturgy inan era when belief itself is relativized, whenwhole systems of belief can be translated

into mere representations of difference, andwhen some even argue that there is nothingleft for us but representations of represen-tations in a hyper-reality that makes evenhistory itself inaccessible.

So the drama becomes prone to acute andcontinual crisis as the distinctions betweenimage and belief, illusion and reality, stageand society begin to collapse. The traditionaldrama - play-scripts staged in a theatre -hangs on by the skin of its cobbled-togetherillusion, but only a decreasing minority ofthe population are under the illusion that ithas the kinds of relevance it once had. Thereis more than enough drama on radio, video,and television, in the computer games, at themultiplex cinemas, in the shopping malls,heritage centres, and theme parks, and onthe streets - so that drama as the staging of aplay-script in a theatre may now be comingto seem, despite its sometimes still evidentpower, hopelessly quaint and inadequate.

This is my first drama in the performativesociety.

4 Second Drama: Crises in the TheatreThe British theatres that staged many ofthese dramas were themselves also in crisisduring the final two decades of the twentiethcentury. And if recent reports by artists,producers, and academics are accurate, thecrisis is now nicely maturing into a full-scalecalamity. Even the Arts Council of England,normally very cautious in making suchclaims for fear of losing face, on publishingthe 1999 Boyden Report on the condition ofEnglish theatre, solemnly warned that:

At the start of a new century, a number of theatresare slipping towards financial, managerial, andartistic crisis. The process continues to turn toomany working lives into a day-to-day recurringcrisis. . . . The 1986 Cork Report concluded that'theatre in England has reached a critical pointwhich must not be allowed to become a crisis'.Ten years later, ACE's 1996 'Policy for Drama ofthe English Arts Funding System' raised broadlysimilar issues. In many cases the crisis is eitherhere or just over the horizon.5

The culprit usually accused of causing thisimpending disaster is the state and its

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economic policies, particularly those of theConservative Government between 1979 and1997. A measure of the seriousness of thecurrent situation, and not just for theatre, canbe gauged from the announcement in August2000 of an extra £100 million of state fundingfor the arts spread over the following threeyears. This produces a cumulative increaseof 78 per cent in total grant for the arts inEngland between 1998 and 2004, from £189.6million to £337.3 million.6 Surely as this isfiltered through the Arts Council's newNational Policy for Theatre in England, pub-lished in July 2000, the crises in our theatreswill start to abate?

I genuinely hope that this will prove tobe the case, but also I suspect that the prob-lems of theatre today run deeper than thestrata in which investment is secured andbudgets are balanced. For there have beenqualities in the complaints of the Jeremiahsthat point to much more than a temporarypanic about making ends meet. SinceGoldsmiths' College called a conference onthe "Theatre in Crisis' in 1988 (of which theproceedings were reported in NTQ18,1989),there has been a steady series of publicationssuggesting that much more is at risk than theinfrastructure of the theatre industry.

Peter Ansorge, with many years experi-ence producing television scripts by the likesof Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, isacutely concerned about British playwriting.He ends a long list of reasons to be cheerfulabout the theatre of the 1990s with: 'Much ofthis bravura is based on false perception.Our drama is in fact less confident andadventurous than twenty years ago.' Andthis is just one reason why there is a 'strugglefor survival in our theatres'.7 Peter Hall, in achapter titled "Theatre Under Threat' in abook called Theatre in a Cool Climate, writes"The theatre of the 'nineties reveals a failureto respond to society's actual needs.' Hebelieves that 'the creative madness of theBritish will ensure that theatre will continuein some shape or form. But this will only beafter huge convulsions.'8 His antidote tosuch spectacular disease is hardly convinc-ing: a little more subsidy, please, especiallyfor regional theatre.

Michael Kustow, ex-director of the ICAand first arts commissioning editor forChannel Four television, as well as producerfor Peter Hall and other leading writers anddirectors in the theatre, claims that theatre'may be undergoing life-threatening muta-tions. . . . I am therefore warning againstendangered theatre, theatre subsumed bywebs and networks.'9 And this in a book hetitles Theatre@Risk.

Sir Richard Eyre, in his recent history ofBritish theatre in the twentieth century,echoes Kustow's anxieties with: 'What is atstake today is the survival of theatre itself.'But he seems caught on the horns of an acutedilemma when after nearly 400 pages ofarguing for the value of theatre he writes:'The case for the survival of theatre can onlybe made by the art itself.'10 False perception,creative madness, convulsions, webs and net-works, a dying theatre having to save itself:these heated phrases suggest a threat that isbeyond the purview of quangos or the state.

These are the considered views of thepowerful in British theatre, and throughoutthese recent writings you can sense extremedespair hovering over their hearts. Whereare the defences? What will save the theatre?The consensus that emerges from these high-profile prophets is that the essential qualityof theatre is its liveness, the lived exchangebetween co-present actors and audiences.This is the theatre's strength and its glory,the source of its unique persistence and itsguarantee of survival in the future. Butalways at the moment of celebrating thepower of the live event to capture hearts andto change nations, there looms a shadow, ormore precisely a chimera.

It is just barely submerged in the title ofPeter Ansorge's book, From Liverpool to LosAngeles, which transparently translates into'from gritty reality to tinsel town'. It is inPeter Hall's: 'The theatre in America isvirtually dead Most of their dramatists -Mamet, Sam Shepard - are off in film. Film isthe art of this century.'11 It is in MichaelKustow's marginally less depressing viewthat 'In a prefigured response to impendingdigital culture, arresting visual pieces... havebegun to appear in the theatre. . . . Theatre

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cannot ignore the perceptual changes of thenew technology.'12 The choice of words istelling: the theatre is ahead - prefigures theimpending digital culture, and might evenmanage to arrest its effects. For believers inthe live event, such digital developmentsseem to generate deep anxieties. Perhaps thisis because the chimera of reproduction - infilm, in television, and now on CDs and DVDS -is much more threatening to theatre thanthey really care to admit.

It may be that these eminent addicts of thelive event, finely tuned to movements thattransform the pulse of a culture's life, sensethat an impending generic revolution is wellunder way in today's culture - one that mayindeed deliver the end of theatre as we haveknown it since the Greeks. The new muta-tion of representation promised by the endof the analogue age is already changing thenature of the 'live' itself. If so, it will not bejust that theatre as an institution is threat-ened with extinction, but also that theatricalperformance as an aesthetic form may betransformed beyond recognition. Such, per-haps, will be one outcome of the increasingpressures of de-centred performance in thetheatricalized society.

This is my second drama in the perform-ative society.

5 Further Dramas of Performative Society

Were there time I would speak of furtherdramas in the performative society. I wouldoutline the exciting challenges to the disci-plines of drama, theatre, film, and televisionstudies offered by the onset of performancestudies. I would explore the interface bet-ween live performance and the new digitalmedia for signs of a productive symbiosis.I would discuss the precarious status of thebody in performance in an age of post-human uncertainties. And I would discourseanxiously about the uncanny qualities of per-formance between avatars in the reaches ofcyberspace. But whichever theme I chose, Iwould surely end up having to deal with thenew interactions between digital technologyand live performance. For there has been, Ithink, a paradigm shift under way in the

exchange between technology and perform-ance during the past quarter century.

Of course, technology has always playeda part in the history of performance - therope tricks of the shaman, the mask that wasa megaphone in ancient Athens, the flameand fireworks of hell's mouth in medievalmystery cycles, and on through gas andelectric lighting effects in the Victorian andEdwardian eras. But, in this history, techno-logy was always geared to the human actor.Even when the effects were spectacular theywere scaled to the human form.

At the advent of the reproductive visualmedia - of photography, film, television -this still largely held true. But then a differ-ence emerged in the last century, identifiedmost sharply by Walter Benjamin, in whichreproduction by mechanical media signalledthe beginning of the end of the special quali-ties of art. Its 'aura' was lost in the inhumangaze of technical devices. The liveness of theactor was replaced by flickering shadows;but also the image of the moving figure in aninstant could be massively magnified byclose-ups or shrunk to less than a speck incosmic infinity. The scale of the human, andby implication any values we might attach toit, was no longer a determining factor inrepresentation and its technologies.

The panic of theatre artists that informedmy second drama in the performative societysignals, I think, a new phase in this long his-tory. The phase is characterized by a singlefactor - the shift from analogue to digitalsystems - but its ramifications for culture areinnumerable. One key distinction betweenanalogue and digital methods of reproduc-tion is that analogue recording suffers froman inevitable progressive degradation of theoriginal - each time a copy is made somequality is lost - whereas digital reproductionis not significantly subject to such corruption.

But digital media have a further immenseadvantage over analogue forms, becausetheir contents seem to be infinitely mani-pulable. As Anthony Smith says in Softwarefor the Self, they can be 'reorganized, remade,enhanced, distorted, and presented again ondemand'.13 Moreover, as those contents areat root just strings of numbers they 'require

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no inspiring or originating reality' - considerthe dinosaurs in Jurrassic Park, which ulti-mately are based on archaeological surmise.

Further, digital media can create forms ofreproduction which are highly immersiveand interactive - computer games, trainingsimulators, virtual reality systems. So thepotential for creativity in the digital ageis enormous. But that age also threatens toup the ante in the society of the spectacle,reinforcing the threat of the hyper-real, mov-ing us closer to the era of the post-human. Inthis scenario, live performance in theatresmay seem like the last bastion of the trulyhuman, which must be protected from repre-sentation and reproduction at all costs.

But what if we were to imagine this theother way around: the digital age not as athreat to the live but as a possible source ofits rebirth and enhancement in a new kindof sensorium? What kind of digital theatremight place the live centre stage in everysense? In the twentieth century the Bauhausartist Walter Gropius envisioned a 'totaltheatre' which had auditoria and stages thatcould be radically reconfigured, and whichwere surrounded by a wall of screens ontowhich scenery could be projected. Unfortun-ately his design was never realized, thoughits influence can be detected even in recentlybuilt theatres such as the West YorkshirePlayhouse or the Lowry in Salford. Theseplaces are still scaled to the human figure,but even more fundamentally their designparticipates in the cultural binary that separ-ates houses for projection - cinemas, IMAX -from houses for live performance.

Here I am not talking about a practicalbinary - films are shown in theatres, thoughcinemas are rarely used for live performance -but about an imaginative one. So how mightwe imagine a collapse of that binary, tofigure forth a space that equally honours thenew digital media and the living presence ofthe performer, while carrying through prin-ciples of immersion and interactivity with aninfinite flexibility in its treatment of scale?

Such a space, if it could be imagined andmade to work, would most likely make ourexisting theatre buildings - even the newestones - seem, like much of the drama that

takes place in them, rather quaint and inade-quate, if not entirely obsolete. And it mighteven have this effect for cinema, too. Andhow might we best react to this potentialdisaster for the cinema and theatre as weknow them, and to the possibility that thespectacle of the hyper-real in the perfor-mative society will not be a threat to thehuman, but be crucially productive of it?

One of the best-known disaster storiesabout the theatre may be especially instruc-tive for the new situation I am suggesting wetry to imagine. Forgive me for repeating it,but perhaps we may find in it a new resonancefor the future. The story concerns RichardBrinsley Sheridan, who for thirty years hadmade London's Drury Lane Theatre a show-case for his extraordinary talents. Then, on24 February 1809, it fuelled a blaze that couldbe seen for miles. Sheridan was sitting inthe Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden,watching the fire over a bottle of wine. Whenhe was complimented for his amazing com-posure in the face of calamity he replied,'May not a man be allowed to drink a glassof wine by his own fireside?'

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the Univer-sity has kindly supplied some wine. I shouldbe delighted if you joined me for a glass.

Notes and References1. Peter Hay, Theatrical Anecdotes (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1972), p. 342-3.2. Brandreth, Giles, Great Theatrical Disasters

(London: Grafton Books, 1986), p. 20.3. Hay, op. cit., p. 263-4.4. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London:

Verso, 1991), p. 11.5. Arts Council of England, Boyden Report (London:

Arts Council, 1999), p. 10.6. Arts Council of England, '£100 Million More for

Arts', Arts Council News, August 2000, p. 1.7. Peter Ansorge, From Liverpool to Los Angeles: on

Writing for Theatre, Film, and Television (London: Faberand Faber, 1997), p. x, 134.

8. Vera Gottlieb and Colin Chambers, ed., Theatre ina Cool Climate (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1999), p. 109.

9. Michael Kustow, Theatre@Risk (London: Methuen,2000), p. xiii.

10. Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, ChangingStages: a View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century(London: Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 378.

11. Gottlieb and Chambers, op. cit., p. 109-10.12. Kustow, op. cit., p. 206.13. Anthony Smith, Software for the Self: Culture and

Technology (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 96.

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