performance–a time-consuming and expensive procedure–isn’t guar-
anteed to pick up on what a large audience would respond to. Nor is
there any guarantee, of course, that what the censor sees at the dress
rehearsal will in fact be repeated at each performance, or that what he
chooses to censor will in fact be left out. Compared with a print run, in
which each copy is identical, the performances that make up a theatrical
production show much more internal variation.^28
Event
Afinal, but by no means less important consideration is that theatrical
performances are themselves events and, as such, they can and frequently
are locations for activity that would otherwise be illegal or impossible.
This can be a feature of themimesis: it has often been noted that the
Theatre of Dionysus, in notable contrast to the Greek Assembly, gave a
public‘voice’ both to female characters and to slave characters, whose
real-life counterparts would not in fact have had a chance to speak to an
assembled audience of Greek citizens. Because the words uttered by these
characters were written by male citizens and the actors who played these
characters were male citizens, there is a question about how much of an
anomaly or a liberation this really was.^29 Certainly, the traditional cries of
mourning found in tragedies would not have been heard in any public
setting other than the theatre.^30 Leaving the mimetic elements aside,
though, theatre has often been the venue for public actions that, if not
legitimised by the institution of theatre, would be illegal or at least
highly provocative. We have already mentioned cases of spectators pub-
lically expressing political opinions in response to particular lines, taken
out of context (as in theThree Sisters anecdote). In Shakespeare’s time,
dressing up like a king or a nobleman would have been a highly ques-
tionable, perhaps illegal act; actors, though, were exempt from such
restrictions.^31 On contemporary public stages, it’s often permissible for
actors to smoke cigarettes, even though this would be banned in almost
any equivalent public indoor gathering.^32 A more significant instance of
this kind was the staging ofOthelloin apartheid South Africa, with a
black actor playing Othello and a white actor playing Desdemona. A kiss
between Othello and Desdemona–fully warranted in the text of the
play–was also a kiss, in public, shared between a black man and a white
woman. Certainly, outside the theatrical context, a public kiss between a
black man and a white woman would have been provocative. It was
recognised as such by spectators at the time, some of whom walked out at
that moment.^33 Perhaps the most extreme example comes from the realm
of performance art: in his performance piece,Shoot, Chris Burden was shot
in the arm.
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