Philosophy of the Performing Arts

106 performance and the classical paradigm
of a theatrical work, and do such performances have an artistic value that
should lead us to seek them out?
Let me elaborate on these questions. First, if King Lear , for example, is a
performable work, what kinds of features does it prescribe for its right per-
formances? If we adopt the same general approach here as in the case of classi-
cal music, two things will bear upon how we answer this question: (1) explicit
prescriptions by playwrights, presumably contained in playscripts – the latter
will play a parallel role to scores in the case of scored classical works, and
(2) understandings, in the performative communities to whom playscripts are
addressed, as to what these prescriptions actually prescribe. There is an appar-
ent tension, however, between this answer to our first question and a natural
answer to our second question: when should we count something as a per-
formance – correct or not – of a particular performable theatrical work? We
saw that a necessary condition for an event to count as a performance of a par-
ticular scored musical work is that the performers aim to satisfy the explicit
and implicit prescriptions embodied in the work’s score. In classifying theatri-
cal performances, however, it seems that we are quite willing to accommodate
intentional departures from the explicit prescriptions in a playscript. Indeed,
we seem willing to accommodate a wide range of such departures in different
performances that we identify as being of the same play. This is most obvious
in the case of “classic” dramas such as King Lear and Hamlet. These are almost
always presented in an abridged or amended form of some kind, and in a
manner that departs radically from the performative practice of Shakespeare’s
time.^1 Indeed, the director Peter Brook not only holds that Shakespeare’s plays
retain their identity through many different interpretations (Brook 1988, 78),^2
but also takes this to be consistent with making striking changes to the explicit
prescriptions of the plays. We can see this in his own directorial practice. His
1962 production of King Lear , for example, not only excised substantial por-
tions of the original text but also, in the interests of a broadly existential inter-
pretation of the play, reallocated some speeches between characters.^3 Even
where we have greater compliance with the text of a period play, it is very
common to reset a performance bearing the name of that play in a different
cultural or historical context. For example, directors see nothing wrong in
setting a performance bearing the label Measure for Measure in Prohibition era
Chicago. Something similar applies even to contemporary dramas, which fre-
quently undergo considerable modification by the director in rehearsal, gen-
erally with the blessing of the playwright.
Can we reconcile these features of our theatrical practice with the
requirements of the classical paradigm? One option would be to say that
such features merely testify to a freer conception of what is permissible
in a performance of a work, and are consistent with a conception of what
is required in a correct performance of the work closely resembling the one