Philosophy of the Performing Arts

108 performance and the classical paradigm
by locating the text of the play in its historical setting. It is not obvious that
we need to attend a historically authentic performance of, say, King Lear , to
understand how certain features of period practice explain features of the play.
Similarly, we do not need to attend a performance of a Shakespearean comedy
with an all-male cast in order to understand various references to cross- dressing
in the dialogue. It is sufficient that we understand that period performances
used only male actors. Indeed, what seems to bear equally on our interrogative
interest in Shakespearean drama is knowledge of the dramatist’s expectations as
to the conduct of the audience. For example, spectators tended to leave when a
favored character died, which might explain why the deaths of major characters
are grouped at the end of the play!^4 But, again, to serve our interrogative inter-
est in the play, we do not need to attend a performance in which the rest of the
audience behaves in the way that period audiences did.
I asked a few paragraphs ago whether our willingness to accept, under the
labels of particular dramatic works, performances that depart substantially
from both playscript and period performance practice can be reconciled
with the requirements of the classical paradigm. I suggested that this might
be possible if being true to the work – that at which a performer of the
work should aim – were less closely linked than in the musical case to being
faithful to the artist’s explicit or implicit instructions for the work. A looser
construal of what it is to be true to the work might, I suggested, furnish
us with guidelines enabling us to consider in a principled way whether a
performance should count as being of a given play. It is only where we have
such guidelines that the classical paradigm’s notion of a performance being
of a performable work can get any purchase. And such guidelines will also
illuminate what it is to succeed in being true to a theatrical work if this is
not to be understood in terms of the kind of authenticity sought in some
performances of classical music. We might consider two proposals as to how
truth to a theatrical work might be conceived, if not in terms of conformity
to what is explicit or implicit in the playscript. First, it can be claimed that
a performance of a performable theatrical work must aim to be true to the
story or to the fictional world of the play, in some way. Second, following up
on one suggested account of musical authenticity, authentic performance of
a dramatic work might be held accountable to the spirit of the play, in some
sense. Let us look at each of these suggestions in turn.
Woodruff furnishes us with a good example of the first approach. In line
with his claim that theater in general is “the art that makes human action
worth watching for a measured time,” he proposes that we take the essence
of a play “as a piece of theater ” to be that which, in non-contested perform-
ances of the play, makes the action most worth watching (Woodruff 2008,
50). This, he suggests, is the principal characters and the plot, which are the
reasons why we watch the play (58):