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Naming the Frame: the Role of the Pre-Interpretive in Theatrical Reception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Ian Watson
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Abstract

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production of Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter's London production of Circe and Bravo, and an instance of Augusto Boal's ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 50 , May 1997 , pp. 161 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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