Forgetting the Text: Derrida and the ‘Liberation’ of the Actor

Abstract

Challenging contemporary orthodoxies, notably Derrida's perception of the actor as an ‘interpretive slave’, Richard Hornby here suggests that so far from exerting a tyranny, the fixed text provides a lifeline which the actor, having grasped, then makes his or her own. If a tyranny exists, it is that of the auteur-director who denies the actor the creative freedom that can be claimed from the text on the page. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of six books and over a hundred articles on theatre, the most recent being The End of Acting, published by Applause Books in 1992, and Mad about Theatre, a collection of his theatre reviews published by Applause in 1996. His well-known Script into Performance has gone through many editions, most recently in 1996, and his latest work, Theatre in Crisis, is due out next year. This essay is an adaptation of a paper he delivered in Amsterdam for the ‘Theatre and Cultural Memory’ conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research, held in July 2002.