Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 113
for its correct performance? If so, then, unless Shakespeare endorsed both
text-based and point-based construals of what his plays prescribe, at most
one of our two conceptions of truth to a performed work will itself be true
to Shakespeare’s works – true, that is, to the playwright’s sense – or the
playwright’s culture’s sense – of what his or her works prescribe for their
correct performance. I say “at most one” for reasons that will become clearer
in Chapter 8, where we shall return to these questions.
What concerns us here, however, is that many productions that sail under
the flags of well-known performable works seem to have no interest in being
true to these works however construed. In his “existentialist” interpretation
of King Lear , for example, Peter Brook had no qualms either about changing
aspects of the characters and plot of the play as standardly understood, or
about the possibility that his production was not true to the spirit of the play.
He had no such qualms because he had no desire that his production should
be true to Shakespeare’s play in any of the senses just discussed. Rather, he
saw himself as doing something quite different. But what is this “something
quite different” that calls itself King Lear yet is not constrained by the require-
ment of being true to Shakespeare’s play in any of our senses?
Brook’s conception of what he was doing owed much to the ideas of Jerzy
Grotowski, one of the most influential theorists of theater in the second half
of the twentieth century. James Hamilton has written about the influence
of Grotowski and other twentieth-century theorists such as Bertolt Brecht
and Antonin Artaud on developments in theatrical performance (2007,
ch. 1). Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” calls for a theater that employs distinc-
tively theatrical means to achieve its ends. Such a call arises out of reflection
on the nature of theater as an art form, and from the application to theater
of the modernist idea that art forms should pursue artistic ends through the
use of their distinctive media. Theater, Artaud maintained, should not be
viewed as the handmaid of literature, and theatrical performances should
not be thought of as accountable to independent literary works. Rather, the
essential elements of theatrical performance are the performative capaci-
ties of the actors as they bear upon an audience, and a performance should
aim at the articulation of a particular artistic content through the manipula-
tion and deployment of these elements. In Grotowski, this finds its expres-
sion in the idea of a “poor theater” that takes as its resources only what the
performer brings to the stage, eschewing the use of props and drawing the
audience into a “therapeutic” engagement with the actors (see Grotowski
1988, 211–218). Where a performance takes place under the label of a per-
formable work, as with Grotowski’s 1964 production of The Tragical History
of Doctor Faustus , Marlowe’s play functions as a resource in the pursuit of
these essentially theatrical goals, but there is no obligation to be true to the
play in any of the ways just discussed.