Philosophy of the Performing Arts

110 performance and the classical paradigm
will be to identify a character with Hamlet. But what makes these traits the
important ones? More generally, why are we willing to countenance a per-
formance of Hamlet in which some things are changed, but much less willing
to countenance a performance in which other things are changed, in the
characters and plot?
In deciding which departures from a playscript of a play are consistent with
a given character’s presence in a performance, we might be attracted by an
alternative strategy that would reverse Woodruff’s approach. This character
is Hamlet, or Lear, it might be said, because the play in which this character
plays a particular role is Hamlet or King Lear ,^5 where this is not itself to be
decided merely by reference to characters or plot. If it is asked what more
than plot and characters is involved in being a performance of Hamlet or King
Lear , an answer might appeal to the “spirit” of each of these plays. This is the
second strategy canvassed above that might reconcile a version of the classical
paradigm as applied to theatrical performances with the way we label such
performances in our theatrical practice. David Thacker, for example, claims
that in staging a play like Hamlet or King Lear , “the aim is to find what the play
is about and how to make that meaning clear.” The director must “attempt to
understand what the drift of the play was for Shakespeare and then search for
some close contemporary equivalent that will make the play precise, clear,
and immediate for the audience” (Thacker 1992, 23–24, cited in Rubidge
1996, 229). The idea, I take it, is that what is at least partly constitutive of
a play is its point , what we take to be a playwright’s reason for prescribing a
particular sequence of actions involving particular characters embroiled in a
particular plot. It is because we are doubtful whether Nahum Tate-like per-
formances that transform a play like King Lear from an unbearable tragedy
into something approaching a melodrama preserve the point of the play, in
this sense, that we question whether they are performances of the play, how-
ever faithful they may be in other respects to its characters and plot.
Talk here of the point of a play calls for two comments. First, we may
recall that the same term was used in Chapter 1 in discussing the nature of
our artistic interest in a performance of Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service. If our
interest in something as an artistic manifold is always in part an interrogative
interest in the ordering of that manifold, the hierarchical nature of any expla-
nation of the ordering of a manifold refers us to an overriding aim or point
that various subordinate aims subserve. This provides a reason for giving the
point of a performable work priority in determining when we have a genu-
ine performance of that work. In the theatrical case, things are slightly more
complicated. When we take an artistic interest in a sequence of actions pre-
sented on a stage, or in a set of prescriptions for such a sequence of actions,
what might be termed our “external” interrogative interest in the ordering
of this sequence usually complements our “internal” interrogative interest in