In our article ‘Neglected evidence about the actor Michel Baron (1653–1729)’, which appeared in Theatre Research International, 18, 3 (1993), 173–76, we quoted a letter from Madame to Baron Von Hading (foot of p. 174). Madame refers to the actress Mlle Desmares, a prominent member of the French company in the early eighteenth century. The first part of the quotation was as follows:

He did not think of it after the death of the king, but la Desmares [an actress of the Comédie-Française], perceiving that no one was going to see them any more, came to the conclusion that they would fare better if Baron were back in the company, and she persuaded him.

The king died in 1715, and the incident described occurred in, or shortly before, 1720.

After the proofs were corrected and returned, an error crept in which dismayed us greatly. Our parenthesis, ‘an actress of the Comedie-Française’ was replaced by another: ‘better known as la Champmesle’. We did not sanction this amendment, and it is wrong. So much so, in fact, that it looks like carelessness and ignorance on our part, the apprehension of which may tell against acceptance of our findings and objective critical appreciation of our conclusions. We are therefore most grateful to the Editor for allowing us to insert this correction, which we believe to be important.

The actress known as La Champmeslé, Marie Desmares, died in 1698. She was the wife of the actor Champmeslé, whose name she took, and she was probably the greatest actress of her generation; she was also the celebrated mistress of Racine.

In the last century it has become commonplace that faithfulness to the playwright, and the play, is not necessarily a commendable quality. The play is currently viewed as raw material for a production, a pre-text for a more complex and final text, which reflects the universe of the director rather than that of the playwright. The performance is a work of art in which dialogue is only one component among others, although usually of crucial importance. Similarly, the playwright is viewed as merely the designer of the verbal aspects of the final text, among other designers. The director, in contrast, is viewed as the actual sender of the message and accountable to audience and critics for the results of his decisions: whether he or she has impoverished or enriched the play, whether or not he or she succeeded in conveying some new insight. Without elaborating on a justification of this view, there is no doubt that the production of Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Rina Yerushalmi at the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1990, is a clear instance of such an approach.

Perhaps the most striking decision of Yerushalmi was to get rid of any deviation from consistent characterization, although prescribed by the playwright in the stage directions of the play. Following Martin Esslin, with regard to plays within the style of the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, such deviations are among the features which are held responsible for the sense of absurdity and/or grotesque that such texts produce in the audience.

When analysing drama performances in the widest sense of the word, it seems sensible to distribute the large number of signifiers (signifiants) transmitted to the recipient (the spectator and/or the listener) over five codes: (1) language, (2) culture, (3) medium, (4) directorial and (5) actorial signals.