Theresa Smalec

University of Western Ontario
tsmalec@julian.uwo.ca

 

Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

 

To say that Susan Bennett merely extends the questions that prevalent scholarship asks about postmodern culture’s obsession with re-presenting the past is to neglect the keen conceptual shifts that her new book performs. Her opening chapter reveals more than a bid to contest standard definitions of nostalgia as a longing for the mythical past, as a desire to keep things intact. Rather, “New Ways To Play Old Texts” refigures this conservative praxis of longing as radically linked to political change. Nostalgia becomes “the inflicted territory where claims for authenticity (and this is a displacement of the articulation of power) are staged” (7). This term provides the pivotal foundation for Bennett’s exploration of “how particular vested interests project their desires for the present through a multiplicity of representations” (3) of Renaissance texts.

 

To reconceptualize how Shakespeare’s authority both figures and fails to appear in postmodern experience, Performing Nostalgia unsettles the power that literary culture ascribes to the written word. Bennett insists that the collisions between genre, gender, race, and nation which incite debate among textual scholars have generative counterparts in contemporary performance. Aptly titled “Performance and Proliferation,” her second chapter aligns historical power with the realm of corporeal ritual; it surveys a decade of those “verbal and gestural repetitions which activate remembering” (9). Specifically, this chapter traces the production methodologies and reception economies of twelve different stagings of King Lear that occurred in Britain between 1980 and 1990.

 

Initially, Bennett probes the possibility of (dis)articulating Lear’s overarching “greatness” within the parameters of British public television and mainstream (commercial) theatre. Within the bounds of the Royal National Theatre Company, the Renaissance Theatre Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the BBC, she attends to those specific combinations of factors and agents that “suggest the potential for an innovative and perhaps radical reading of this canonical text” (40). And yet, to complicate the lens through which a notable range of postmodern criticism identifies and champions transgression, Bennett takes up the Royal National Theatre Company’s 1990 production of King Lear. She summons this re-presentation for two interrelated reasons: first, to assess the extent to which an orthodox British stage may serve as the site on which individual directors’ and actors’ revisionary idiosyncrasies are actualized; second, to locate and to explicate the “matrix of material conditions” (41) through which politically engaged renditions of Shakespeare are necessarily produced and received.

 

Bennett begins with Deborah Warner’s direction of the Royal National Theatre Company’s 1990 version of Lear. Mindful again of the too-hasty suppositions that accompany our contemporary appetite for subversion, she notes that Warner might easily be marked as “challenging tradition by virtue of her biological coding” (40). After all, she is not only a woman directing Shakespeare, “but one doing it at a particularly prestigious theatre” (40). Moreover, there is Warner’s resolve to put red plastic noses on King Lear, King Lear’s Fool, and even on the dead Cordelia. As anticipated, scholarly accounts of this staging promptly align emancipatory change with the visible surface of things. One example is Anthony Leggatt’s Shakespeare in Performance, a text which endorses the view of Anthony Sher, who played Lear’s Fool: “We began with the red noses and…it was immediately successful. There is something very liberating about wearing a red nose, both externally and internally” (40). ¹

 

To problematize this faith in a singular agent’s power to unfetter the bodies that act out a text as prescriptive as King Lear, Performing Nostalgia confronts the multiple, interrelated forces that sway not only the production but the reception of this particular play. On one hand, it is clear that certain personal, bodily gestures bear the power to fill in the “gaps of the Shakespeare corpus” (2). The details that an individual director cites as missing from the script can be made to return through an embodied representation. In this sense, the highly visible yet unsanctioned red noses worn by Lear and Cordelia “become the text” (2) to supplant the locus of power traditionally bestowed upon the word. Deborah Warner’s desire to disrupt King Lear’s status as a standard of solemnity is suddenly manifest. Or, from another perspective, the shocking crimson that marks Cordelia’s corpse signals a potent strategy through which feminist translators of Shakespeare may avow the brutality toward women that male directors regularly efface.

 

On the other hand, Bennett observes that transformative agency is never “the sole or unique possession of director, actor, spectator or critic” (41). Rather, modification relies on the mesh of circumstances out of which verbal and bodily forms of transgression emanate. To curtail the intervention intended by Warner is the fact that a “specific viewing community” (46) recognizes her revision and interprets it as merely mimicking one that has gone before. While the novelty of red noses may liberate a younger generation of eyes, Bennett’s archival research shows that London’s premier theatre critics saw the “innovation” as “something rather less new” (40). Precisely because of its lasting impression as “the first mainstream red nose King Lear of the decade” (41), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1982-3 production appears both in memory and in published reviews as Warner’s source text, as an influence that perversely subsumes both her own authority and that of the Bard.

 

While this turn of events is far from promising, Performing Nostalgia does not forsake King Lear and other Shakespearean plays as “visible and thus significant sites for the contestation of cultural power” (48). Consistently cutting-edge in terms of the dramatic topographies that it surveys, this valuable work looks beyond mainstream theatres and beyond theatre itself to those other spaces where reconstructions of the present by way of the Renaissance past can and do occur. One fascinating example is Bennett’s account of the public works company Welfare State and its seven-year residency in the northern English town of Barrow-in-Furness; amongst other things, the working-class town’s single employer produces nuclear submarines. It is at this improbable locus that Welfare State initiates a site-specific performance and filming; since the idea is to create work for and with the local population, Barrow-in-Furness’s economic climate directly informs the project’s concerns. Significantly, Welfare State facilitates the community’s oppositional political engagement through a nuclear age King Lear. Here, as in her analysis of Barrie Keeffe’s racially and socio-economically inflected King of England and in her reading of Women’s Theatre Group’s Lear’s Daughters, Bennett underscores the potential for micropolitical change. In these noteworthy contexts, the act of restaging “takes up a global awareness of Shakespeare’s plays and resituates it in the specific experience of a community audience” (55). A pivotal inference can be derived from this attention to the often-neglected role of communal reception; precisely through a production’s focus on the possibility of dialogue and interaction with its target audience, the point of proliferation shifts from “what have we done to Shakespeare’s play” to “how can this material be useful to us?” (56).

 

Performing Nostalgia’s third and fourth sections move Shakespeare out of straightforward performance studies to assess more disturbing histories of influence alongside the concerns that currently haunt the discourses of popular culture and post-colonialism. Chapter Three, “Not-Shakespeare, Our Contemporary,” examines the discord between the idealized authority of Shakespeare’s texts and those other, less than perfect Renaissance city comedies and revenge plots that we recycle in order to justify our own post-modern obsessions with sex, violence, and power. Brad Fraser’s 1993 production, The Ugly Man, figures as a potent example of Bennett’s determination to “situate the desire for desire,” to ask “for whom” such chilling nostalgia is “spoken, embodied and subsequently read” (7).

 

Fraser models his play after Thomas Middleton’s classic drama, The Changeling. As portended by this antecedent text, The Ugly Man charts the devastating repercussions of an outsider’s entry into a small, sequestered community. Crucial, however, is Bennett’s scrutiny of why the gay, Edmonton-born playwright conflates Middleton’s unmerciful legacy with the seemingly innocuous heterosexual love plot of pop culture’s Archie comics. The initial effect of this unlikely combination is a medley of horrid laughter. Forrest, a hideously disfigured and newly-hired farm hand, becomes obsessed with the beautiful virgin Veronica, the daughter of his multimillionaire employer. Although Veronica is engaged to wed a respectable young man, her inability to find meaning or pleasure in the monogamous, matrimonial relationships that society sanctions incites her to acts of deviance. After coaxing Forrest to help enact her unlawful deeds, she finds herself sexually indebted to the ugly man upon whom she cannot bear to look. As the action progresses, the tension intensifies between Forrest’s and Veronica’s sadomasochistic desires and the heteronormative laws imposed by a rural community; despite his brute strength and her physical allure, their socially unviable yearning culminates in a spectacle of gore. By the end of the play, virtually every character is mutilated or murdered in the most depraved of ways.

 

Bennett aptly notes that on the surface of things, Fraser’s fixation with scenes of gratuitous violence and sexual degradation does little more than restate the morally numbing message of a range of postmodern spectacles. In short, he locates the impact of his production in a “surfeit of images, rather than articulating any content or analysis of those images” (84). However, her analysis of The Ugly Man’s historical echoes does not end on this note of dismissal, nor in a homogenization of the play as merely another exhibit in popular culture’s parade of radical chic. Rather, she reviews its too-evident purchase on Jacobean apathy by undertaking an “activity of radical reading that might defamiliarize our own desires and dissatisfactions in the present tense” (94). This is to say that she recognizes and brings to the foreground the anti-heterosexist agenda that haunts the unspeakable subtext of Fraser’s visual excess. She discerns the conspicuous consumption and seizures of power from which Forrest and Veronica derive their fulfillment as fraught with desire for political change. Once it is situated in the right-wing, neo-conservative, and homophobic context of Alberta (the province where Fraser grew up and came out as a gay man), the meaning of his spectacle changes. For a specific community of viewers, The Ugly Man can be perceived as an articulation of presence forged in resistance to heteronormative tyranny.

 

To close this cutting reappraisal of the past in performance, Bennett’s chapter on “The Post-Colonial Body” probes the long-neglected anti-colonial uses to which Shakespeare’s The Tempest might yet be put. To do so, she draws on recent feminist extrapolations of the Same/Other antagonism that is habitually staged through the figures of Prospero and Caliban. In response to the oversimplified view that “‘we’ now participate in a historical moment which is not only postmodern but post-colonial” (119), she insists that closer attention must be paid to those other bodies which are elided in our wary scrutiny of traditional polarities. In her words, “The potency of the Prospero/Caliban tropology has served to mask the sites in The Tempest of patriarchal colonization” (125). Moreover, “the play’s women (Miranda and the textually absent/silent Sycorax) have not been much read for their participation in (and destabilization of) what otherwise becomes a hegemonically male contest” (125).

 

As an overdue complication and corrective to the androcentric discord of The Tempest’s Same/Other paradigm, Bennett summons Laura Donaldson’s 1992 study, Race, Gender and Empire-Building. Her subsequent analysis reconsiders Donaldson’s assertion that “the crucial question raised by the coupling of Miranda with Caliban…is why these two victims of colonialist Prosperity cannot ‘see’ each other.” Pivotally, the answer she offers is one that almost all Cultural Materialist and New Historicist writings on The Tempest omit: “the intervention of the performing body” (129). While it is undeniable that these modes of criticism attend diligently to discursive performance, Bennett underscores the very real deficiency posed by “almost always ignoring, and so explicitly or implicitly negating the implications of an intervented presentation” (129). As demonstrated by her interdisciplinary reading of how Miranda’s feminine body is regulated in both Shakespeare’s script and in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film, Prospero’s Books, “the relationship between discursive performance and physical mode of presentation is not only complex but crucial” (130).

 

“The Post-Colonial Body” ends in an effort to think about both The Tempest and its colonial bodies as texts that were in fact conceived as performance. As Bennett rightly observes, this requires careful reference to “ideas about the body in circulation at the time of its original realization” (130). Ironically, however, she undermines her determination to historicize the seventeenth-century body by invoking Michel Foucault’s 1978 text, The History of Sexuality, as a principal source of authority. My critique of this maneuver is not meant to denounce Foucault’s confident account of the Jacobean period as “a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse and open transgression.” Nevertheless, it strikes me that any endeavor to assess the degree to which performing bodies of this era “made a display of themselves” ² requires a more rigorous look at temporally specific commentaries on the productions that rivetted Early Modern audiences. To make up for this fissure in what is otherwise a solid analysis, Bennett effects a close and provocative reading of The Tempest’s opening scene between father and daughter. Mindful again of the radical difference between reading Miranda on the page and viewing her body on the living stage, she charts (from the perspective of production) why it is so important that “the language used by Prospero draws constant attention to the body he addresses” (130). Not only does his repeated reference to Miranda’s heart, hand, eyes, and ears provide for the actors “a code of gestural and physical representation”; it also “supplies the spectator with an itinerary for the gaze” (131). Most significantly, the combination of Prospero’s rhetoric and Miranda’s visible body alerts us (the ostensibly post-colonial audience) to the status of spectacle that still marks the feminine body. In a white, masculine, Western political and sexual economy, feminine corporeality retains its troubling legacy as “the battlefield on which quite other struggles than women’s have been staged.” ³ And yet, the enabling power of performance lies in its ability to show that the woman’s body, which is often presented as passive, is not naturally so. Enacting a particular subject position self-consciously can restore agency to those who lack it. Within such enactments lies the potential for social and political change.

 

Acutely vigilant of the multiple and often conflicting political investments that subjects of the present make in re-presenting the past, Performing Nostalgia does a remarkable job of speaking across the gaps that riddle our postmodern tense. Time and again, readers will be struck by the book’s topographical, conceptual, and disciplinary versatility. From Britain’s famed commercial theatres to the steel towns of the working-class, from Jacobean decadence to the struggles for reform that tread our contemporary stages, from literature to theatre, from theory to praxis, Performing Nostalgia is relentlessly hopeful reading for students, professors, viewers, and performers alike.

 

Works Cited

 

• Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991).
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
• Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (London: Routledge, 1990).