Putting it on the Floor: Naturalism and the Verfremdungseffekt in The Tempest and The Witch of Edmonton

Abstract

This essay considers the floor of the stage or set in productions of The Tempest and The Witch of Edmonton , in order to explore the juxtaposition of post-Stanislavskian acting techniques and Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte in the production of early modern drama today. Whilst students often come to our undergraduate programs having learned a theater history that opposes Brecht and Staniskavsky aesthetically and ideologically, current performance practice draws upon both cultural heritages. Escolme explores the ways in which scenography has recently endeavored to include the audience in the playworld, on the one hand, producing emotional engagement and empathy, while on the other foregrounding the dramatic fiction as theatrical. Her final case study is a workshop exploration of The Witch of Edmonton by Chris Goode and Wendy Hubbard that took place at the National Theatre Studio, London, in 2013. Goode’s practice used little by way of “table work”: the process initiated by Stanislavsky where a theater company discusses a text in detail before “putting it on the floor” and thereby often reaches consensus about the universal meanings inherent in a historic text. Goode’s approach exposed and theatricalized the processes by which we come to “understand” historical drama by staging discussion, rehearsal materials and the processes of putting on costumes, and making up Morris dances, alongside moments from the The Witch of Edmonton . Exploring and evaluating a range of theater practices, Escolme interrogates the value judgments inherent in metaphors of depth and surface as they pertain to character psychology and subtext, scenography and theatricality.