Theatre iconography systematically attempts to integrate the pictorial representation of theatre as a vital source of information in researching the history of theatre. Given the primacy of the written word (lógos) in western culture, the status of the illustration as a source of historical research has remained low in the West where it is the norm to give the text priority over illustrations, which serve merely as decorations, to support a conclusion or confirm a statement made in the text. Theatre iconography, however, involves the search for a new dialectical relationship between the written word and the theatre illustration, one in which the illustration is not immediately interpreted as an appendage to a text. It involves an autonomous ‘reading’ of the image in which the use of other documents, preferably from other sign systems, cannot and may not be discounted. The aim here is to study theatre history with the help of tools that are more effective than those used previously.

In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said lays to rest my fears of political incorrectness and of being orientalist in my teaching and research of Asian as well as European theatre practices and proto-theatrical forms. Said empowers me by locating my nationality (Irish) and the locus of my vision of the Orient in the very realm of the Orient: amongst the colonized peoples of the world. Theatre historians in recent years have embraced Said's modernist dichotomies of Orientalism, and mistakenly divided the theatrical manifestation of culture into West/East, first world/third world, bad/good, colonizers/colonized. The simplicity of such binary opposites consequently denounces and sanctifies. The politics of culture, however, is a much more complex affair. Modern Irish theatre, for example, contemporaneous with social struggle and revolution, is lauded by Said as a strategy of resistance against cultural imperialism. In Asia the resurrection of pre-colonial dance forms and folk traditions is similarly seen as a cultural assertion of independence. Conversely fin de siècle European theatre divorced from its formalist, societal and religious origins has looked to the oriental theatres for inspiration. In the same mistaken paradigm à la Said, this is branded as eclectic purloining of the surface of foreign cultures of the third world, a colonial plundering disguised as aesthetic pursuit.

It is well known that theatre semiotics follows the metamorphoses of theories of semiotics in general and, like them, draws on Charles Peirce and American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics and the linguistics of the Prague Circle, Russian formalism and French structuralism. These currents converge in the theatre semiotics of the 70s, producing a methodology that is highly scientist, technical, self-reflexive and abstract. This type of theatre semiotics may no longer be an up-markettopic, nor is it stone-dead. Its fundamental principle of ‘abstract objectivism’, as Bakhtin/Voloshinov describe it, survives despite the greater flexibility provided by its attention to such areas as reception theory and theories of cultural systems. Its inclusion of reception theory acknowledged of the fact that spectators exist in the construction of semiosis. Ideas concerning cultural systems and, thus, primarily those concerning codes were used to indicate the importance of cultural contexts in the processes of signification.

The criticism of ‘intercultural’ theatre in general, and Peter Brook's Mahabharata in particular, that was spearheaded by Rustom Bharucha in Theatre and the World, has taken firm hold in the Anglo-American academy and especially in Britain. Bharucha's critique of Eurocentric appropriation of non-western cultures (although the word ‘plundering’ might be more precise for his argument) is the mainstay of his attack on interculturalism, whether theorized by Richard Schechner or, in Bharucha's view, epitomized in performance by Brook's production. Schechner is understandably Bharucha's central reference, for he essentially gave the concept of interculturalism its particular twist in the early 1980s and has continued his crusade for it ever since. Scheduler's concept involves generic mixing within an anthropological framework, as occurs, for instance, when ‘western’ text-based theatre, usually situated in the domain of art and letters, merges with non-western ritual, one of the main areas of anthropological study.

In 1926 the German theatre critic and scholar Julius Bab compared the endeavour of the theatre historian engaged in reconstructing past performances with that of the art historian required to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions. The analogy serves as a justification for Bab's own study of contemporary theatre based on personal observations: only the privileged status of the eye-witness account can do justice to the transitory nature of theatrical performance, he argues. What today may seem like a self-evident truth was in the 1920s by no means so. German Theater-wissenschaft of the time was very much a historical discipline, focusing on the theatrical past and utilizing historiographical tools borrowed from neighbouring disciplines. Contemporary theatre was not in its field of vision.

The earliest Dutch illustrations of indoor theatrical performances date from the seventeenth century, and portray the activities of itinerant professional actors or plays performed in fixed areas, in chambers of rhetoric (Het Wit Lavendel in Amsterdam) and in what may be classed as their successors: the Nederduytsche Academie (1617–37) and Jacob van Campen's Theatre (1637–65). There are also between thirty and forty illustrations of open-air theatre performances given by non-professional actors (mostly rhetoricians), in paintings and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sometimes one cannot be entirely sure as to whether the illustrated scene contains a theatrical performance or even a stage. These are the ‘doubtful images’ of my title.

The avant-garde theatre director Anne Bogart has made her name in the U.S. theatre community through her deconstructions of modern classics such as the musical South Pacific (1984), Cinderella/Cendrillon (1988) after Massenet's opera, Büchner's Danton's Death (1986), Gorki's Summerfolk (1989), William Inge's Picnic (1992), as well as through her idiosyncratic and original dance/theatre ‘compositions’ developed collabortively with her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI). Prominent among such compositions have been 1951 (1986) on art and politics during the McCarthy era, No Plays, No Poetry (1988) on Brecht's theoretical writings, American Vaudeville (1991), and The Medium (1993) on the writings of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Bogart has been acclaimed for her astute directing of the work by contemporary playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, Charles Mee Jr. and Eduardo Machado.

In her analysis of interculturalist theatre practice, Erika Fischer-Lichte has developed a theory of productive reception, in which the subsuming of a source culture's codes and conventions into a target culture's production has a telos of solving problems (political, aesthetic, cultural) and/or of filling gaps. In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Fischer-Lichte sites the practice's operation: ‘An intercultural performance productively receives the elements taken from the foreign theatre traditions and cultures according to the problematic which lies at the point of departure’. The theory also extends to the act of reception by the spectator in that it implies a reading which is non-oppositional between source and target cultures, which demands the interculturalist performance be read as a monoculturalist product. The Théâtre du Soleil's Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990–3), directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is an example of intercultural performance with which one can engage Fischer-Lichte's theory in relation to the reading and classification of signs.

The theory of mise en scène we are trying to establish allows us to eschew impressionistic discourse on the style, inventiveness and originality of the director who adds his so-called personal touch to a precious text regarded as closed and inviolate.

On 23 February 1653 the 15-year old Louis XIV performed in the court ballet La Nuit (Plate 21), at the Petit-Bourbon in Paris. A political allegory with clear allusions to recent events, it represented the suppressed rebellion of the Fronde, with a promise of a glorious future for the realm. The dénouement featured the monarch in an apotheosis, in the shape of Le Roy Soleil (Sun King), who dispels the dark forces of the night. This was certainly Louis's first appearance in the role, but definitely not the last.

In his introduction to Orientalism, Edward Said defines the West's conceptualization of the East as a European invention which had been ‘since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’. He further posits that this conceptualization has formed a basis on which western civilizations build self-definition. The Orient, therefore, has shifted from the imaginary to the actual. This creation of a culture in opposition has enabled Europeans to construct an impression of their collective ‘Self’ as reflected by the oriental ‘Other’. In this regard, Said formulates the notion of the orientalization of the Orient. Europe, in creating the demarcation of the world into East and West, has sought to locate its own proper topological and cultural place within a global scheme. While setting up the parameters of ‘western civilization’, the West defines the East. Since the known world at the time of this demarcation consisted of Europe, Asia, and the northern extremities of Africa, everything outside these designated parameters becomes the ‘Other’. Philosophies and concepts disorienting to western thought become the Orient.

In the heart of the forest, Makak and his companions endeavour to come to terms with their blackness/Africanness before they can return to their Caribbean island purged of their sense of exile and alienation. The scene captures the psycho-physical pull which Africa exerts on most Caribbean peoples of African descent, an attraction which has coloured both the way of life and forms of cultural expression in the Caribbean. But more significantly, this play (and scene in particular) was my first contact with African-Caribbean theatre which I recognized as familiar, but also one mixed with a certain strangeness and foreignness. Here was a group of characters—black, of course—who spoke in a dialect of English that was very close to the pidgin of my Nigerian society, but who were very different from the Nigerian man in the street. Their racial anguish—the subject of much Caribbean literature and theatre—struck a responsive chord in me, but it definitely was not my anguish because the experience which had produced these characters was totally alien to me. However, beyond this mixture of strangeness and familiarity, was the strange familiarity of the form which Walcott employs in articulating this peculiar experience of slavery. Makak has embarked upon a journey home, albeit in his dream, with a group of other people to Africa. Symbolically, it is a rite of passage and a return to his origins and it is here that the curious mixture of foreignness and familiarity throws up a dramatic structure that is both African and Caribbean and which has led me on a search for the ‘own’ in the ‘foreign’.

In recent years, eighteenth-century actors' portraits have deservedly received growing attention from both art and theatre historians. For its extent, variety and quality, for its social and aesthetic implications, eighteenth-century theatrical portraiture demands a refined theoretical approach: it has helped to create an interdisciplinary field where new methods in dealing with theatre iconography have been profitably deployed. English and American scholars have contributed to develop this field in a specific way, devoting single studies and monographs to portraits of actors. In spite of the importance of French theatrical portraiture, French contributions are less significant. In most cases theatrical portraits are considered exclusively by art historians, and in the context of catalogues or monographs on a single painter. In France the stage portrait is often undervalued: it is relegated to a pictorial genre considered as inferior (tableaux de théâtre), or it is thought to derive from a disreputable theatricalization of history painting; in any case there has been a real difficulty in submitting these images to critical and specific investigation. In short, even if a new approach to theatrical iconography prevails over the strict utilitarianism of the theatre historians, who—in the best cases—sought in actors' portraits only documentary evidence of acting practice, costume or set design, more work has to be done by art historians, to accord theatrical images the independent status of an iconographic text.

In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by stating, ‘I'm really interested in being a medium.’ It is with this simple remark that she illuminates the most compelling aspect of her work as a performance artist. Finley's work is both frustrating and enlightening, and it is the conflicting tensions her performance style evokes within me as male spectator that I find so engaging. I am drawn into the performance via the bodily exhibitionism that permeates so much of her work, only to be pushed away by the tone and subject matter of her narration. At the end of her performance I am left with no easy answers, only disturbingly caustic questions.

As brochures for the January 1996 Sydney Festival blare out ‘Feel the Beat. Feel the Heat!’ to draw the crowds of summering Sydney folk to performances of the National Dance Company of Guinea (already appropriated and stamped with approval by reviewers in San Francisco and London, who are quoted on the same flyer), the chairman and former artistic director of Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, Carrillo Gartner, worries about the strength of popular Australian opposition to Australia's expanding links with Asia. In an article on the holding of the 14th annual Federation for Asian Cultural Promotion in Melbourne, Gartner fears that ‘there are people in this community […] thinking that […] it is the demise of all they believe in their British heritage’. The focus of the article, though, is not the promotion of Asian culture but how to overcome Asian indifference to Australia and the problem of bringing Australian artists to the notice of Asian impresarios and audiences. Australian cultural cringe wins out over Australian Asia-literate political correctness. In another corner of the continent the director and playwright Peter Copeman has been attempting to replace ‘the Euro-American hand-me-downs and imitations’ of mainstream Australian theatre with a theatre project which explores ‘attitudes of the dominant Anglo-Celtic and the Vietnamese minority cultures towards each other, using the intercultural dialectic as the basis of dramatic conflict’.

In a recent issue of New Theatre Quarterly an article on the visual documentation of performance notes that theatre has proved to be resistant to ‘mechanical reproduction’ and that theatre practitioners are unconvinced of its value. The author goes on, however, to argue for the ‘urgent need’ for full archives of video recordings of performances. She even quotes Eugenio Barba to the effect that what really matters in performance is not the immediate effect on the spectators, but a kind of afterglow and the impression to be made on future generations.

Actors typically create characters and thereby appropriate the time of the performance and the space of the stage. As a common denominator to the words spoken and actions performed, the character correlates dramatic time with real performance time. When Kant says of the human subject ‘the “I think” must be able to accompany all its representations‘, the actor might say of the character ‘it must be able to accompany all my presentations’. Similarly, the stage as a hostile, indeterminate, and empty space makes room for the character, it is appropriated as a necessary platform for the realization of the character or as the medium for the production of its history: in the name of the character the actor can step into this space as into a costume; it clothes, contours or profiles, and physically projects the character.

When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.

Omri Nitzan's direction of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1993 was one of the most ingenious and locally-bound contemporizations of a classical play that I have ever seen, as well as one of the most dependent on a correlatively attuned recipient. Nitzan sets out from the viewpoint that Goldoni's comedy of errors, derived from the commedia dell'arte and negating it, is not a stylized refined and exclusively theatrical pastime, set in the never-never locus of a glamorous stage Venice, as implied by Strehler's famous precedent, but is rather a kind of socially critical and realistically inclined play, ‘dealing with crime, class-distinctions and the capitalist structure of society’. ‘As I repeatedly read the play’–maintains Nitzan–‘I felt myself attracted to its human tale. I have seen suffering, miserable characters, relentlessly striving for unattainable happiness. There are three suicide attempts in the play […], which sometimes seems like a nightmare.’ Nitzan's production is set in a derelict square, a cross between a contemporary shabby Italian piazza and the backyard of a ramshackle, old Bauhaus building in a Tel Aviv suburban slum. The set of enclosing walls, lit by harsh Mediterranean lighting, and its multiple doors including a revolving one, vaguely alludes to the traditional setting of a farce. However, this impression is contradicted by the very theatrical and yet lifelike signs of depravity, instability and aggression: the thin paper walls, which are punctured and vandalized throughout the performance, are smeared with hostile graffiti expressing the pent-up feelings of its emotionally mute inhabitants. Heaps of trash lie scattered. The performance does not start with Clarice's engagement to Silvio, but with an invented mimed scene of Federigo Rasponi's murder by his sister Beatrice's lover, Florindo Artusi, performed to flickering disco lighting and accompanied by the shrill music of a Gothic horror melodrama. The actors speak a brilliantly processed vulgar slang; their body language is erratic and violent, including in the love scenes; these are lovers who swiftly resort to blows or pull out knives with long blades resembling shabarias, the weapon of Palestinian terrorists in 1993. Truffaldino wears the stained blue overall of a delivery boy, with an empty money pouch, typical of many such lads seen driving third-hand scooters in the streets of Tel Aviv. He is no smart comedy servant, but a hungry, humiliated and bitter unemployed youngster, although some remnants of the traditionally stooped posture are still vaguely in evidence. The archetypal attributes of the commedia masks are also belied by the performance of other characters such as Pantalone, who appears here as a small-time Levantine merchant, clad in a cheap suit, an unlit cigarette butt between his lips, bragging with his car keys in the typical macho gesture of working-class Israeli males.