“categories” previously rendered invisible. Such a radical revisioning of history creates “a particularly engaging moment for the ‘post’ of going back, to bring to centre stage the gaps and omissions of History’s performance calendar” (Bennett, Performing 153).
Performing Histories: Stage One
The history of performative theatre, like feminist history, like the actual event of a theatre performance, is inextricably implicated in and by the politics of representation. Any study of (past) performance must immediately confront issues of textual representation (not just the literary, but visual and aural “texts” as well) in the very materials by which the study is made possible. Performance, by its very definition, is an ephemeral phenomenon, a transaction that occurs in a specific place and time and passes immediately into memory—and, sometimes, into the textual residues through which we attempt to capture or record it. It is only through this residual textuality that past performances become a matter of public record, making any attempt to study them at least as much about the politics of representation as it is about recovering any particular performance event. The focus, in effect, must be less on “history” and more on “historiography,” less on the event, and more on how that event is recorded and constructed for subsequent reading audiences.
Theatre historians in general have been relatively slow to recognize and accept the implications of mediated textuality for the study of past performance, a result of the traditional—and contemporary—scholarly construction of dramatic genre along a text / performance axis. The traditional definition of the genre divides “the experience of drama into two separate modalities: either as a system of graphical notations written down or printed, or as an action realized in a particular space and at a particular time” (Pistotnik 677) and the study of drama into two different camps, where “one is based on the belief that drama is literature awaiting performance, the other is related to theories which emphasize the importance of the performance aspect” (Pistotnik 677–78). Recent theories of dramatic scholarship have actually exacerbated the problem by stressing the importance of performance in terms that reinforce its essential difference from the text: “[P]erformance is all that which is not text” (Pistotnik 679). Using this definition gave rise to a study of past performance based on
the archaeology of theatrical forms and the assessment of how they have been used to serve the needs of the dramatic text on stage. Its methodology began and has remained within the tradition of nineteenth-century positivism: the empirical gathering of facts and evidence is followed by presentations of material which aim to establish “what really happened.” While this sort of unquestioned bid for “objectivity” is considered stage history’s main virtue, value judgements and the stage historian’s explicit personal comments are expected to be minimal, or, in some views, avoided if possible. (Pistotnik 681–82)
Even though the academic theory of performance historiography has, in the main, responded to the types of suggestions Pistotnik makes to “focus on and problematize established notions of ‘facts,’ ‘objectivity,’ terminology, and the writing of stage history” (683) and pay attention to “the gaps which a stage historian cannot ignore by pretending that his or her descriptions represent stage reality” (683), this performance-based scholarship merely inverts the hierarchy, while reinforcing the binary terms on which it is based. The text/performance axis remains intact, and with it the assumption that “a dramatic text is ‘incomplete’ unless it reaches the stage” (Pistotnik 678). This assumption resonates through the writing of even criticially astute contemporary theatre historiographers, whose theories are sometimes haunted by the implicit desire to evoke the “reality” of an original performance event.1 Again, current academic practice sometimes colludes with this implicit desire to erase the effects of “historiography” and get back to “history”: Aston (33) supports the methodology proposed by Stokes, Booth, and Bassnett for recovering the reality of past performances through a visual reconstruction based on cues offered by set and costume designs, promptbooks, and rehearsal copies—materials not traditionally taken into account in the standard scholarship of theatre history. Widening the range of texts that can and should be considered sometimes fuels the implicit hope that if we can only gather enough texts, we can somehow transcend the textual to rematerialize the real.2
Such academic alchemy is, alas, ultimately destined to fail. As long as drama continues to be figured along the terms of the text/performance axis, especially with performance as the privileged term, theatre historiographers will continue to be confronted with the “quandary presented when acknowledgement of this centrality is coupled with the absence of the historical event’s performance dynamic” (Mullaly 39). According to Tracy Davis, this absent performance dynamic has serious implications for feminist theatre histories:
If it were possible to ‘score’ a theatrical performance the way music is scored, and to account for all the components of stage expression . . . the experience of reading the mise-en-scène would be the same experience as being in the audience. But this is not possible, for however complete the score is, it is only a partial rendering of a real and immediate experience. Inseparable from the mise-en-scène (and essential to the reality/unreality of a performance) are the elaborate encodings of gender. As something that is readable according to social conventions, gender is infinitely subject to redefinition. (73)
The performance dynamic, in other words, owes its absence to the same social construction that has kept women from taking historical place; coming to terms with the politics of representation in theatre historiography means coming to terms with the politics of representation as they have affected women.
In specific theatrical terms, the representation of women on stage has belonged as firmly within patriarchal ideology as it has off stage, based originally on the same separation between the “public” and “private” spheres. In the Greek and Renaissance eras of “classical” theatre, the “public” status of the stage meant that women’s roles were represented by male actors in what Sue-Ellen Case has termed “classic drag”: “This practice reveals the fictionality of the patriarchy’s representation of the gender. Classical plays and theatrical conventions can now be regarded as allies in the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production” (Case, Feminism 7). The history on which theatre has been built, like the tradition that constructed narrative, has developed at the expense of women’s presence, by defining the stage as a site where “real” women could not take place. By the time female actors did appear “in the flesh,” their roles had already been structured and codified in/by their absence. Constructed as “Other” in the male-centred system of theatrical representation, the female actor steps into the role of “cultural courtesan” for the fulfillment of male desire, “she also becomes an ‘Other’ to herself.. . . There is no real woman under the requirements of costume, make-up and body language” (Case, Feminism 120–21). Even when they appear corporeally on stage, Case argues, the spectre of “Woman” evacuates the presence of their bodies into the absence of their representation.
Furthermore, as Gay Gibson Cima documents, at the historical moment when women threatened to become dramatically visible, the male-dominated theatrical institution changed its historiographic rules, making sure men remained centre stage. The advent of the “modern” theatre and the decline of the actor-manager tradition in the nineteenth century opened unprecedented opportunities for women. Buoyed by plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, which offered central, unconventional roles for female actors, women gained more prominence in the theatre; some, like Janet Achurch, Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Eleanora Duse, and Ellen Terry, attained a remarkable degree of autonomy and control in the shaping and running of theatre companies. In the eighteenth century, actors such as David Garrick and Charles Macklin who achieved similar prominence had entire performance traditions named after them. In the late nineteenth century, however, theatre history undergoes a shift in attributing performance agency from actors to playwrights. Instead of a “Terry style,” theatre history gives us “Ibsen actors”: the “genderless” professionals who animated the characters of the brilliant, modern—and male—playwright. This shift towards the primacy of the playwright and his vision continues