The articles in this issue are concerned with the analysis and theory of theatre performance. Little more than a generation ago, theatrical performance scholarship was an oxymoron and theatre history was concerned only with the description and chronology of performance rather than its theory or analysis. Theories of performance by directors and other artists occupied a nebulous territory between the aesthetics of genre and the anecdotal. Meanwhile books on theatre craft existed alongside theatre histories and anthologies of ‘drama’, with each treated as if it were an independent realm. Anthologies introduced plays as literary texts to be interpreted and contextualized, and the printed play alone was recognized as a legitimate object of inquiry. Performance was too ephemeral to be a proper artefact, much less a proper text. Yet for traditional literary scholars, even the printed play was not a truly primary text; instead, the source of the play was always located elsewhere, in a more authoritative and more academically institutionalized discourse. The play was only an example or concretization of another discourse: biographical, philosophical, theological, psychological, or historical. To be sure, performance descriptions were sometimes given in anthologies, and in the case of canonized writers like Shakespeare or Ibsen, even performance histories could be found. But performance analysis and theory only appeared if the playwright had also published it, as did Strindberg or Brecht, or if a recognized movement had claimed the playwright as one of its own, as with naturalism, expressionism or Theatre of the Absurd.

This situation was understandable considering that theatre studies had once been housed within departments of literature.

Les articles dans ce numéro sont consacrés à l'analyse et la théorie de la représentation théâtrale. Jusqu'à ces dernières années la notion d'études théâtrales était un oxymore et, dans le meilleur des cas, l'histoire du théâtre se contentait de décrire et d'établir la chronologie des représentations. La théorie de la mise en scène occupait une place incertaine entre le discours esthétique et l'anecdote. Les études sur l'art du théâtre côtoyaient livres d'histoire et anthologies de théâtre sur les rayons des bibliothèques, sans qu'il y ait dialogue entre eux. Les anthologies présentaient les pièces de théâtre comme des textes littéraires à interpréter et à replacer dans leur contexte historico-littéraire; et seule l'œuvre imprimée était considérée digne d'étude. On considérait que la représentation théâtrale était trop éphémère pour constituer une véritable œuvre d'art, encore moins un texte authentique. Même la pièce imprimée ne constituait pas le véritable texte primaire, le discours académique en situant toujours la source ailleurs. Une pièce n'était en définitive qu'une illustration ou une concrétisation d'un autre discours: biographique, philosophique, théologique, psychologique ou historique. Il y avait bien des descriptions de représentations dans certaines anthologies et, pour des auteurs canonisés tels Shakespeare ou Ibsen, il existait même une histoire des représentations les plus importantes. Mais, en général, il n'y avait théorie ou analyse de la représentation que si l'auteur en avait publié une, tels Strindberg ou Brecht, ou si le dramaturge faisait partie d'un mouvement esthétique tel que le naturalisme, l'expressionisme, le Théâtre de l'Absurde, etc…

Cet état de fait s'explique aisément puisque les Etudes Universitaires Théâtrales furent longtemps rattachées aux départements de littérature.

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.

Antoine Vitez

Two years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.

In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.

The analysis of theatrical performance has always provided a problem of particular difficulty to semiotic theory, for a variety of reasons—the ephemerality of the event, the complexity of the interrelationships of so many communicative channels, the almost infinite variety of physical realizations that may be generated from a single written script, the phenomenological concerns generated by the physical presence of the event, and the effects upon interpretation of changing historical and social reception strategies. Historical placement is of course a concern involved in analysing the interpretive process of any work of art, but it is particularly obvious and important in theatre, where an institutional collective process at a particular historical moment is always involved both in the specific realization and in the specific reception of the work.

Certain aspects of this complex problem have received useful attention, others have been very little considered. The Prague circle provided some useful distinctions in dealing with, for example, the various operations of the actor in the semiotic process.

More recently, theorists with a phenomeno-logical orientation or with an interest in reception aesthetics have further enriched our understanding of what is involved in the theatre event. Clearly much remains to be explored. One area is the effect on theatrical reception of the re-use of the same performance elements or combinations of elements in physical realizations of what might be quite different written scripts.

The most obvious example of this is the individual actor, who in the course of a career will be seen by the public in many different roles.

Representation carries a promise of a performative act. As Mark Taylor observes, in contrast to the so-called constative utterances which describe facts, a promise realizes ‘a state of affairs that did not exist prior to the language event’ or, as is the case here, prior to the events unfolding in a theatrical or any other space. Such an act signifies that the ‘I’ or ‘we’ making a promise understands or knows the problem or the text, plays the part of the agent authorized by a convention or its systems to execute a promise, and the act requires that representation assumes the function of reality maker that produces the real by simulating verisimilitude. For this process to be complete, the mode of operation needs to be clearly delineated by cultural or social practices and institutional structures that safeguard the promise, its execution, and its use.

Even though the general tenets are still dominant in everyday practice, the concept of representation has been championed and problematized ever since the fragmentation and the split within the subject became evident in the twentieth century. The ‘I’ and ‘we’ ceased to be valued as universally defined nouns. As a corollary, the promise of representation was no longer able to express the subject's desire to impose linear transfer and ideological order upon both human beings and the objects of their creation (theatre and drama). Once the subject was undone, the order of representation disseminated into pieces scattered throughout space. It became dispersed in contradictory meanings, which now could be assigned to objects that had been kept outside of its boundaries.

Künstler ist nur einer, der aus einer Lösung ein Rätsel machen kann. (Karl Kraus)

Only that person is an artist who can turn a solution into a riddle. (Karl Kraus)

The aphorism by Karl Kraus captures the intuition that an artwork is an intentional structure, that it represents the response to a question or the solution to a problem, if only a problem of self-expression. Even when, for example, a theatrical performance is riddled with accidental omissions of text and other mishaps, we find ourselves watching and appreciating it as if everything in it was meant to be as we see it. It has therefore been said that in the presence of art we ‘suspend disbelief’, we suspend the sceptical suspicion according to which the arrangement of internal relations within the artwork might be less than perfectly meaningful: in the presence of art we begin as absolute believers in the integrity of the artwork.

But there is another dimension to Kraus's remark: what appears to be the solution to a problem or a coherent response to some situation becomes a riddle of its own. The apparent integrity of the work may result from interpretation rather than through the deliberate intentionality of the artwork itself. Moreover, it is the exception for a work of art to be reducible to providing a solution to a particular problem. Indeed, we would tend to deny that artworks are governed by instrumental reason. This is true even in the case of theatrical performances: a performance is bound to provide more than a solution to the problem of how to stage a particular play; it cannot be regarded merely as an instrumental means of conveying a drama.

Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.

Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.

In the last century it has become commonplace that faithfulness to the playwright, and the play, is not necessarily a commendable quality. The play is currently viewed as raw material for a production, a pre-text for a more complex and final text, which reflects the universe of the director rather than that of the playwright. The performance is a work of art in which dialogue is only one component among others, although usually of crucial importance. Similarly, the playwright is viewed as merely the designer of the verbal aspects of the final text, among other designers. The director, in contrast, is viewed as the actual sender of the message and accountable to audience and critics for the results of his decisions: whether he or she has impoverished or enriched the play, whether or not he or she succeeded in conveying some new insight. Without elaborating on a justification of this view, there is no doubt that the production of Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Rina Yerushalmi at the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1990, is a clear instance of such an approach.

Perhaps the most striking decision of Yerushalmi was to get rid of any deviation from consistent characterization, although prescribed by the playwright in the stage directions of the play. Following Martin Esslin, with regard to plays within the style of the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, such deviations are among the features which are held responsible for the sense of absurdity and/or grotesque that such texts produce in the audience.

When analysing drama performances in the widest sense of the word, it seems sensible to distribute the large number of signifiers (signifiants) transmitted to the recipient (the spectator and/or the listener) over five codes: (1) language, (2) culture, (3) medium, (4) directorial and (5) actorial signals.