Theatrical Performance and Interpretation

In this essay, I will address the following questions: (1) When is it appropriate to consider a theatrical production or performance an "interpretation" of a play? (2) What is required to consider a production or a performance an interpretation? (3) What advantages, and what kinds of advantages, are there to considering productions and performances interpretations of texts in the appropriate circumstances? And (4) What drawbacks are there to regarding theatrical productions and performances as interpretations of plays even in the most appropriate circumstances? I begin by sketching an account of the ontology of theatrical performance. Readers of Noel Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art1 should find it familiar, for in those pages Carroll uses this account to motivate an account, by way of contrast, of the ontology of film that can be extended, he then argues, to other kinds of mass artworks. I do not wish to hold Carroll to the story he tells about the ontology of theater in A Philosophy of Mass Art. For all I know, his use of this ontological story in A Philosophy of Mass Art is merely strategic. Moreover, I do know that he has (or has had) other views of the relation of texts to performances in theater, views reflected in his essay "Performance," to which I am considerably indebted.2 My reason for bringing in Carroll's account of the ontology of theater is to begin with an account of theatrical performance that lends initial plausibility to the idea that all theatrical performances are, or always should be, construed as interpretations of plays. It is the reasons we may have for thinking plausible what I believe (and I think Carroll believes) to be demonstrably false that interest me. Here is the account. The ontology of theater admits of four kinds of objects: plays, copies of plays, interpretations of plays, and performances. Plays and interpretations of plays are type or multiple-instance objects taking, respectively, interpretations and performances as tokens. Interpretations function as both tokens and types: With respect to plays they are tokens, and with respect to performances they are types taking particular dateable performances as tokens. In addition to interpretations, play-types may take other kinds of instances as tokens, namely, copies of plays (i.e., scripts). In laying out this account, Carroll musters a small but important array of facts about our theatrical practices. Some of these facts are offered in support of this ontology; some, he holds, are explained by it. In our traffic with theater we do identify as different or the same scripts, productions, and performances. There is Shakespeare's Hamlet, Olivier's production of Hamlet, and the performance of Olivier's production of Hamlet on the last night of the summer. And we sometimes do evaluate each of these at least quasi-independently of the others. Moreover, it is part of our practice of theater that we sometimes read plays and sometimes go see productions of them. We also sometimes evaluate plays differently when considering them as texts for reading versus considering them as scripts written for, or given in, performance. All these facts are important facts about a certain dominant tradition in western theater practice of the past couple of centuries. Concentration on only this set of facts can lead us to suppose, I think mistakenly, that theater practice is fundamentally or essentially text-centered. But we should not presume there is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that distinguishes theater from the other arts, or even a characterization of practices paradigmatic of theater as a separate art. Particularly, we should not presume such conditions, were they to exist, would indicate that theater's texts rather than, say, its conditions of performance are the most central or fundamental elements. For here is the rub. The facts we have been considering are facts typical of one tradition of theater practice among others, some of which do not fit this story very well at all.