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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.
Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.
1. For a formulation of these issues see in particular Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theater, translated by Jeremy, Gaines and Jones, Doris L., Bloomington and Idianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, 191–206Google Scholar; and Pavis, Patrice ‘Towards a Semiology of the ‘mise en scene’, in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, 131–61.Google Scholar
2. For discussions of entrances and exits in relation to the segmentation of the dramatic text as well as several applications of these schemes to performance analysis see several publications of Törnqvist, Egil, in particular, Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1982Google Scholar; and Bergman och Strindberg: ‘Spöksonaten’—Drama och Iscensättning, Stockholm: Dramaten 1973Google Scholar, and my own essay ‘The Representation of Death in Strindberg's Chamber Plays’, in Michael, Robinson, ed., Strindberg and Genre, Norwich: Norvik Press, 1991, 119–36.Google Scholar
3. Blau, Herbert, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. xxvi.Google Scholar
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5. Strindberg, August, ‘Preface to Miss Juhe’, Samlade Verk, 27, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1984, p. 111Google Scholar, my translation.
6. Ibsen, Henrik, The Complete Major Prose Plays, translation by Rolf, Fjelde, New York: Signet Books, 1978, p. 498.Google Scholar
7. Ibsen, Henrik, Rosmersholm, in Nutidsdramer, Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1981, p. 281Google Scholar, my translation.
8. Ibsen, The Complete Major Prose Plays, p. 497.
9. Major Prose Plays, p. 498.
10. Major Prose Plays, p. 546.
11. Major Prose Plays, p. 575.
12. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Some Character Types met with in Psychoanalytic Work’, Art and Literature, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 14, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, pp. 291–319Google Scholar. See also The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, Volume 13, No. 2, 1990Google Scholar, devoted to Rosmersholm.
