Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience Brian Singleton Neil Blackadder . Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. 228. $76.95 (Hb). The notion of modern theatre's assertion of control over the audience by silencing them and putting them in the dark is debunked by Blackadder in this detailed analysis of five major incidents that rocked the theatrical establishment [End Page 844] in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These, curiously, occurred in only three countries, two each in Germany and Ireland and one in France. They were all celebrated incidents, where audiences showed opposition at the least and engaged in physical violence at the worst. They were all protests at types and forms of representation on the stage that were considered anti-or non-realistic, or even too realistic not to be considered real: realism was the site of contestation for those who challenged the authority of representation. The productions that triggered these five performances of opposition are as follows: the Freie Bühne's 1889 naturalistic production of Gerhart Haupt-mann's Before Sunrise in Berlin, the Théâtre de L'Œuvre's 1896 production of Alfred Jarry's scatological play Ubu roi in Paris, two productions at Dub-lin's Abbey Theatre pre-and post-revolution (J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926), and a succession of first productions of Bertolt Brecht's plays during the period of the Weimar Republic. What is interesting about these already famous protests is the split between those productions where opposition was performed because of purely artistic disagreements about the form and convention of representation (such as Brecht, Hauptmann, and Jarry's plays), and the Irish plays, where opposition was performed in a society undergoing radical political change and social turmoil. In the Irish instances cited, that turmoil spilled over into the theatres in orchestrated attempts to challenge the authority of a particular representation of the real. It is really significant how much theatre actually mattered in these latter instances. It is now an accepted myth that the new nation of Ireland that was being forged in the first quarter of the twentieth century was shaped culturally from the stage of the Abbey Theatre. Each "scandal" has a chapter devoted to it, by far the longest of which focuses on Brecht's entire career in his pre-exile years. Blackadder tops and tails the five detailed studies with a rich, though far too brief, historical introduction and afterword, establishing the nineteenth-century background of the modern theatre scandal and fast-forwarding the narrative at the end through the remainder of the twentieth century. The choice of the term "scandal" is a deliberate one, even though in the Abbey Theatre's case the reception that greeted Synge's play at its first week outing is known popularly as "riots." However, it is abundantly clear that not all protest came in the form of a riot. Blackadder explains the choice of term: "By describing virtually any protest in a theatre auditorium as a riot, theatre historians depict spectators' oppositional practices as primarily disorderly. But the theatregoers who registered their disapproval of a new play did not simply create a disturbance; they devised and enacted resistance through verbal rejoinders, physical gestures, and organized group demonstrations, in addition to making noises by shouting, stamping, and playing musical instruments" (xii). He goes on to describe how these forms of protest should be considered not as some destructive [End Page 845] enactment but as part of a wider creative force that performs its energies – at the interface with those who already have the platform of the stage – to claim the right of representation. Blackadder takes us through each of his five examples, carefully matching historical detail for each text with the assumed motivations for audience response. He charts the march of high modernism on the stage through these protests and carefully cross-references them. While he is extremely clear on the political, social, and cultural contests surrounding each of the performances, what is not so clear in all instances...