Designers’ Shakespeare Edited by John Russell Brown and Stephen Di Benedetto First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 John Russell Brown and Stephen Di Benedetto for editorial material and selection; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Brown, John Russell, editor. | Di Benedetto, Stephen, editor. Title: Designers’ Shakespeare / John Russell Brown and Stephen Di Benedetto [editors]. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015042144| ISBN 9780415618007 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315850139 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Dramatic production. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Stage history—20th century. | Theaters—Stage-setting and scenery—History—20th century. | Costume—History. Classification: LCC PR3091 .D45 2016 | DDC 792.9/5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042144 ISBN: 978-0-415-61800-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-52507-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-85013-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield viii 8 Contents The form of (her) intent: Catherine Zuber’s costume design for Nicholas Hytner’s Twelfth Night (1998) 137 BRANDIN BARÓN-NUSBAUM 9 Designing sound for Shakespeare: connecting past and present 152 ADRIAN CURTIN 10 BEYOND LANGUAGE: performing “true-meant design;” “that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing… and a thing done” 170 DORITA HANNAH Afterword Index 195 198 Chapter 10 BEYOND LANGUAGE Performing “true-meant design;” 1 “that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done” 2 Dorita Hannah Visual dramaturgy… does not mean an exclusively visually organized dramaturgy but rather one that is not subordinated to the text and can therefore freely develop its own logic… In this sense the gaze in turn is a reading gaze, the scene a writing (graphy), a poem, written without the writing implements of a writer. (Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatic Theatre) Prologue… before the word Before the word there was a body gesturing in material space, and before that space was scenically written (as sceno-graphy) there was an imagination calling the immaterial (gods and ghosts) into the lived environment. This chapter, acknowledging the stage as a liminal space existing both before, through and beyond language, proffers it as a site for designing inter-textual, intercultural and interdisciplinary Shakespearean utterances liberated from the burden of an ‘original’ language.3 Interlaced with statements contributed by scenographers in Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Holland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and Venezuela, the text explores how the spatio-visual dramaturgy of scenography contributes its own language as performative (active and abstract) rather than connotative (descriptive and mimetic) utterances. This furthers J.L. Austin’s argument in How to Do Things With Words, where ‘speech acts’ expand beyond language into action itself – saying can be enacting rather than describing.4 If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done, which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of designing something is being done through constructing and crafting thought. Just as statements can be active rather than descriptive, the material, gestural and spatial elements that accompany them also contain a performative force, suggesting How To Say Things Without Words, or in the case of this chapter, How Scenography Does (With and Without Words). But first… some words Scenography, as an artistic practice, allows us designers to execute our ideas without words. However, an essay such as this specifically requires written language to BEYOND LANGUAGE 171 articulate aspects of a lived, communal experience, received via an event. Our role is to design this experience; principally through the skills, materials and artefacts we have as theatre-artists. Words are utilized before and after the event as representations of both an unrealized action and one that has passed. But during the event, design speaks for itself as a presentation. Nevertheless what follows unavoidably requires words, especially from those designers for whom English is not necessarily their first language but who fearlessly and joyfully tackle the plays of history’s greatest English playwright: claimed as “the favourite playwright and artist of the whole world”.5 In this case words help construct my argument, specifically framed through the lens of performance design as an expanded notion of scenography. Performance – as an aesthetic, strategic and operational act occurring within and without theatre – tends to be designed. Design – as creative undertaking, inventive action and aesthetic artefact – invariably performs. Performance Design – a contemporary rethinking of scenography (also referred to as theatre/scenic/stage design) – therefore provides a critical tool for negotiating and critiquing the proliferation of multiple historical, aesthetic and quotidian actions currently played out on the world stage and streamed live to us 24/7 via the screens of smart phones, televisions, computer monitors and architectural façades. The words that make up the title of this chapter on designing Shakespearean performance beyond the bard’s initial language combine his reference to design as a precise and meaningful purpose, and theorist Elin Diamond’s reference to performance itself as both reiterative act and discursive object. Performance design is therefore established as simultaneously active and activating: and, as with the many designs to which Shakespeare refers (none of which are the visual creative inventions we now associate with the word), something is always at stake. However, what this chapter focuses on is the role design plays when spoken language is no longer central: when Shakespeare’s words are translated, truncated or transferred into movement, image, environment, object, sensation, relationship and experience. Performance text The “visceral” qualities of Shakespearean drama are important to me, because the revelation of the unspeakable and unpredictable truths of human nature and the enigma of the world and the self are a very distant approach to the “heroic” aspect of tragic man and the “cathartic” role of Greek tragedy – my native theatrical culture. However, when producing a Shakespearean play in contemporary Greek, bad or outdated translations tend to “cripple” actors, directors and designers who are held back by a problematic theatrical text, which they cannot fully explore and “exploit”. Nevertheless, there are adaptations where the formal language becomes of minor importance. In these cases, theatre creators are freed from the constraints of verse or the play’s construction to focus more on its mood, atmosphere and meanings: setting forth a parallelism to actual and local situations and realities. I am interested in going beyond the visual aspects of performance in order for design to speak a “new Shakespearean language”: through, for example, aural or olfactory environments, tactile surfaces or by the use of taste. Embracing 172 Dorita Hannah the audience in a sensory theatrical experience, and not a purely intellectual process, contributes to a more in-sightful perception of Shakespearean world theory. (Athena Stourna: Scenographer: Greece) We Anglophone lovers of Shakespearean drama – as spoken poetry and narrative verse – need to recognize that many performances of his work around the world are not presented in its original language: a fact that is highly relevant in relation to the fragmented global reality of our times; dominated as they are by Westerncentric discourse and frequently presided over by English as the lingua franca. Taking Performance Design as a more contemporary practice that moves beyond serving written text and stage direction, I will assert it as the means of harnessing dynamic forces in our lived reality while providing a critical tool for reflecting, confronting and realigning world views. It is the enduring stories and conceptual underpinnings constructed through the poetics of Shakespeare’s antiquated language that continue to provide resource material for those who translate him into ‘other’ languages – spoken and/or gestural – expressing contemporary cultures outside of the English-speaking world.Yet the seminal productions to which I will refer have been presented to, and well received by, Anglophone audiences. Even for Anglophones Shakespearean is a foreign speech, requiring foreknowledge of the language and narrative or, at very least, a synopsis of the play’s events in order for the uninitiated to wade through an archaic vocabulary, which is rhythmically constructed to be ideally pronounced ‘trippingly on the tongue’.6 Yet, despite no longer being in anyone’s mother-tongue, Shakespearean performance has tended to focus on the ear rather than the eye, denying the fact that language, not only tongue-based, can be visual. This is in keeping with Peter Holland’s observation of “a fundamental anxiety about how Shakespeare’s plays are heard rather than watched, about the extent to which the playgoers are audience (hearers) rather than spectators (watchers).”7 By taking the written word as just one element to be materialized, incorporated, modified or interpreted, I will draw upon Marco De Marinis’ reconsideration of the ‘theatrical text’ as a ‘performance text’: “a complex network of different types of signs, expressive means, or actions, coming back to the etymology of the word ‘text’ which implies the idea of texture, of something woven together.”8 Performance, in its broadest sense – as effective and affective action – could therefore be considered an interweaving of multiple textures in order to be read as a spatiotemporal experience and, ultimately, a woven relationship between elements and among people. De Marinis’ definition of dramaturgy as “the set of techniques/theories governing the composition of the performance-as-text” and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s assertion of scenography as “visual dramaturgy”, makes room for performance design as a fluctuating and ever-emerging interdisciplinary field in which words, images, and other elements form distinctive threads entwined in the unified fabric of the event. This allows for a deconsecration of Shakespeare’s written and spoken language in order to affirm the inter-textual possibilities of his work beyond its original wording. BEYOND LANGUAGE 173 Shakespeare still carries a heavy load on his shoulders: too much respect for his written text tends to extinguish varied kinds of thinking and consequently the opportunity to see his plays differently. Things can go wrong when speaking out his profound stories as literature, because if the theatre tradition is too text-based – even when translated into different languages – artists, directors, performance designers and others can forget the essential question in all art-making: what it is that moves/thrills/interests or speaks to me in this text with respect to the present – in relation to now? In order to interest me as a designer, Shakespeare’s written contents should be treated differently: as varying landscapes seen from personal angles. If the creative team is willing to shake it up, to violate and dismember it – to take a risk and add a personal quality to the artwork – I would be keen to go on the journey. This way Shakespeare remains everlasting. (Reija Hirvikoski: Performance Designer: Finland) Borderline images beyond language Shakespeare’s stories survive their original spoken texts through reworkings into ‘other’ texts – orchestrations of music, voice, movement and fragmented language – seen in iconic works such as Giuseppe Verdi’s operas (Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff 1847–93); Prokofiev’s ballet (Romeo and Juliet, 1935); and Heiner Müller’s Hameltmachine (1990). Yet there are also interpretive ‘Shakespearean-esque’ events from which ‘a theatre of images’ is continually remembered: the collaborations of the two Peters, Zadek and Pabst, in their provocative “travesty versions”9 (Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, 1972–7); Tadashi Suzuki’s cultural crosscastings (The Tale of Lear and The Chronicle of Macbeth, 1988–92); Lindsey Kemp’s counter-culture camp caught on video (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1984); Heiner Müller’s political bricolage (Hamletmachine/Hamlet, 1990) as originally designed by Erich Wonder and subsequently staged by USA’s Robert Wilson and Argentina’s El Periférico de Objetos; Peter Greenaway’s mediated vision using cinema, collage and animation (Prospero’s Books, 1991); Needcompany’s multimodal productions (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and Storm, 1991–2001); Societas Rafaello Sanzio’s confrontation with the grotesque (Giulio Caesare, 1997), Nigel Charnock’s physical onslaught inspired by the Sonnets (Fever, 2003); Jürgen Gosch and Johannes Schütz’s award-winning abject blood-bath (Macbeth, 2005); Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s 6-hour production of The Roman Tragedies (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, 2007–); and, most recently, Punchdrunk Company’s mashup of ‘that Scottish play’ with Hitchcock film noir (Sleep No More, 2011). While Shakespeare’s poetry (both original and translated) may ring in our ears long after the event, we can also be left with enduring sensate images and confronting actions: a European Othello in blackface and dreadlock wig smearing his blackness all over the white body and gown of Desdemona; Ariel as Cupid on a swing, creating the tempest by urinating on a model ship tossed about on the surface of a pool; Mark Antony standing on a plinth and delivering his famous address sotto voce through a gaping hole in his neck; a dancer feverishly hurling his body off the stage and into the audience while reciting the Sonnets; Macbeth and 174 Dorita Hannah his bloody clan trapped naked within a black box; Cleopatra slopping champagne onto a beige couch among many beige couches occupied by spectators who gaze at her image on multiple screens; and a broken Lady Macbeth being bathed in a room full of baths surrounded by masked onlookers. In all these impressions – often creating what Dennis Kennedy refers to as “scenic dislocation and visual anarchy”10 – the very ‘real’ has infiltrated the theatre through a rejection of mimesis and text analysis, in favour of images presenting what Peter Stein disdainfully referred to as “Shakespeare with his trousers down”.11 This droll remark is echoed in a further enduring image of an empty stage on which a be-suited Lear appears after the storm wearing a magnificent Native American headdress constructed from flowers, and approaches us with his trousers around his ankles. The designer/director of this production is Jan Lauwers of Needcompany who writes: What I am looking for in my theatre work is the moment when form and content make an ‘absolute’ image that goes beyond all anecdotalism. Moments when time seems to stand still and the image carves itself into the memory. I call them borderline images. King Lear is an image that looks back at the audience, arrogant, provocative and in deathly silence. King Lear does not give any answers. It shows malevolence and suffering without comment. For that reason it is perhaps ‘too huge for the stage’. (Jan Lauwers: Director/Designer: Belgium)12 Many of the ‘borderline images’ mentioned above are re-called as signatures of the director: some (like Lauwers) are designers themselves; many utilize designers as instruments to their particular aesthetic; while others have operated in long-term fruitful collaborations with designers as a generally silent partner. Yet what makes all of these images lasting is that design speaks its own language within a multilayered performance text. The universal appeal of Shakespeare was played out during the 2012 Olympic Games when all 37 of his plays were performed in almost as many languages in London’s Globe Theatre. These performances were generally premised on the long-standing idea that Shakespeare’s verbal scenography entails minimal design input and that his universality requires only the standardized Elizabethan stage. However, in order to construct an argument for inter-textuality through performance design, specific to Shakespeare’s global significance, this chapter will consider how design performs as a leading element in postdramatic theatre and how nonAnglophone designers approach the task, particularly Dutch scenographer Jan Versweyveld of Toneelgroep Amsterdam whose contribution to The Roman Tragedies attends to the complexities of our time. We cannot address contemporary designs of Shakespeare without referring to Punchdrunk’s wordless Sleep No More, which has extended its reach to those who would never consider attending a Shakespearean play. Design, liberated from the burden of Shakespearean language, becomes a sensory script for critiquing our contemporary times, saturated with media overload and ghosts in the machinery as well as the ever-present and problematic threat BEYOND LANGUAGE 175 of annihilation. The productions mentioned above reconfigure the bard as a theatre artist whose textual thinking remains contemporary when rethought through context as well as scenography (spatial inscription): demonstrating what William B. Worthen advocates as interpretive participation rather than interpretation.13 Although the focus here is on high-profile European productions, many of the statements peppering the text (indented and italicized) come from a range of fellow scenographers who responded to my query: “What is the importance of Shakespeare’s work to you and how can design speak a new Shakespearean language?” Shakespeare provides a foundation for poetic language in the English-speaking world. As such his texts are more than just theatrical scripts, but exist as a common vocabulary of archetypal characters, dramatic devices and poetic strategies that a wide range of creative practices make use of. Performance design expands on the limits of spoken language using the holistic treatment of performance through design and fine art strategies to engage with the underlying spatial constructions in Shakespearean text and his intricate poetic worlds. Thus, the equally ‘multivocal’ and poetic languages of design practice can make use of vocabularies that are visual, aural, material, experiential, and social to construct alternative languages for performance beyond the didactic and logocentric worlds of traditional dramatic performance. (Sam Trubridge: Performance Designer: New Zealand) Performance design As an interdisciplinary model performance design considers how design artefacts – whether objects, materials, images, gestures, garments or environments – are inextricably bound to performance through notions of embodiment, action and the event in which stories are told, forces are harnessed and roles are played out. In considering the participatory role of a co-creative audience, this fluid and emerging field provides a critical tool for reflecting and challenging worldviews. (Hannah/Harsløf: Introduction to Performance Design) While the Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare focused on platforming the singular heroic director, we know that designers in theatrical productions are multiple, playing with various materialities and media. We are also mindful that, since this 2008 directors’ cut, a proliferation of artistic ensembles (avoiding the word theatre) have confounded a clear definition of creative roles. The conventional hierarchy of the theatre company has been troubled by more horizontal playing fields in which the players mix it up: swapping the various parts to complicate authorship and keep the live action fresh and in-the-moment. Designers (who variously orchestrate sound, light, costumes, setting and image) now have greater opportunities to move beyond the traditionally staged theatrical scene emerging from the shadows that bound them to serving director and script, and into the light where they can be actively present theatre-artists; instigators of and collaborators in 176 Dorita Hannah the event. This new role is more appropriate in a world that, as theorist Jon McKenzie states, “has become a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold”.14 McKenzie proposes that the complexity of our contemporary condition, in which grand narratives, theatricality and the everyday fold into each other, could be understood through the discursive tool of ‘performance design’.15 In order to advocate an expanded approach to scenography or theatre design – in which theatre-artists design performance (rather than for performance) and design itself performs alongside live actors – it is necessary to further elucidate what design is and does. Design today is broadly understood as the conception, development and execution of a plan or convention for generating objects, environments, materials and systems. As a relatively recent, cultural and professional practice encompassing many fields – from fashion to architecture, from installation to communication – design tends to focus on the creative process undertaken towards a constructed product by utilizing aesthetic and technological principles. It also involves a tactical approach, conscious decisions and multiple varying philosophies through an integration of the scientific (rational) and the artistic (intuitive): the pragmatic and the poetic; matter and thought. However, going back to the fourteenth century, the term design (from designare: de+signare) enters the lexicon as an act of marking, signing or distinguishing, in which actions and things are contrived, devised and appointed; binding artistic thinking with tactical strategies through invention. For Shakespeare, design – as a scheme, plot, plan and enterprise – tends to be political and strategic, and therefore far from an aesthetic creation. Lucio’s claim in Measure for Measure that Duke Vincentio’s “givings out were an infinite distance from his true-meant design” reveals the ever-present gap between the saying and the doing: between language and its reception; between idea and its ultimate realization. We now speak of designing campaigns, curricula, crimes and even war. As a form of invention, design is a carefully conceived strategy that, not always achieved, is capable of falling short of affect and effect. Both verb (a doing) and noun (a thing done), it is a potentially energetic and galvanizing force. In conventional theatre, design is a projective strategy – initially represented through descriptions, drawings and models – and a complex artefact that orchestrates the material and immaterial elements comprising what Arnold Aronson calls “the allencompassing and transformative visio-spatial field of the stage”.16 However, Performance Studies, with its interdisciplinary focus – or even its claim to be a “post-discipline of inclusions”17 – has provided a more open discursive field that works between theatricality’s overtly orchestrated artifice and the dynamic, fluctuating forces of performativity, whereby the lived world is regarded as a complex construction of manifold macro – and micro-performances capable of being isolated, framed and manipulated. This opens up a new interdisciplinary design field within which to practise and theorize aesthetic, cultural and everyday experiences, where cultural artefacts are recognized for their performative charge. BEYOND LANGUAGE 177 Scenography has its roots in ancient Greek drama and, by the Renaissance, Continental theatre integrated perspectival stage scenery and performers with the existing architecture occupied by an audience arranged before an ideal view. As ‘spatial scripting’ it strongly influenced urban, rural and domestic planning, rendering the designed world theatrical as exemplified in Sebastiano Serlio’s Architecttura (1545) where scenografia incorporated the spectators, scenery and building in perspectival constructions, influencing architectural constructions outside the theatre. However, over the centuries, this ‘Italianate model’ tended to focus on a constructed scene created solely within the controlled environment of a prescribed (and therefore pre-scripted) stage, burdened by regulations and expectations for which scenographers design. This pervasive proscenium stage continues to dominate, despite radical spatial revolutions from last century’s avant-garde. Nevertheless, through continuing developments from representation to presentation – from the mimetic to the authentic, from stagecraft to artistry – the most interesting and relevant contemporary scenography has become interdisciplinary, intercultural and interactive: thereby occupying a productive place in-between the conventional theatre and life’s multiple stages where perceptual and imaginative shifts can occur. Over the past century theatre design discourse has broken through the traditional conception of ‘scenography’, as the framed perspectival scene, in order to proffer a more contemporary notion of ‘performance design’ as the interplay of shifting perceptual dynamisms in which the designer takes on a more constructive, dramaturgical and directorial role. As previously mentioned, rather than design things – sets, costumes, lighting, sound and projection – the role is to orchestrate material and immaterial elements at play within the performance field in order to design the event itself as a shared spatiotemporal experience. This addresses Marvin Carlson’s bracketed remark in Performance: A Critical Introduction: “(even in the theatre we do not speak of how well the scenery or costumes performed)”.18 As I have written elsewhere, this exclusion of designed elements reinforces a general denial of the performativity of places and things, and their ability not only actively to extend the performing body, but also to perform without and in spite of the human body. Jiři Veltrusky counters this bias when he writes, “even a lifeless object may be perceived as the performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element completely without will”.19 Rather than standing in for scenography, performance design expands its definition and reach. By adopting a performative approach, scenographers are aware of the dynamic role their work plays within the event: transforming ‘scenery’ into an environment that expands beyond any physical or virtual frame. Operating as a performance field this environment is a symbiosis between the varying onstage elements (including performers and spectators) that fluctuate in their powers but unite in their effect. Through an aesthetic ‘acting out’, performance design recognizes that space precedes action – as action – and is therefore culturally and politically loaded. I am consequently positing performance designers as active agents: artists, provocateurs, collaborators, activists and socio-political commentators, whose ‘designs’ – as marks and a marking out – are inter-textual orchestrations in time and space. 178 Dorita Hannah Having explicated the historic trajectory of scenography, it could be said that this legacy bears little relevance to the Elizabethan stage, since English theatre stood apart from the baroque exemplar that developed into the enduring Italianate stage. And yet, if we were to ignore the perspectival construction of the image and look at Serlio’s scenografia principally as the amalgamation of architecture, stage and audience, then the Shakespearean model, which wraps its vertically layered public around the universal landscape of a raised platform, provides an ideal (and idealized) model. Working with Shakespeare is an artistic privilege in every way. I have been blasted by the power and beauty of his poetry and the profoundness of his language, which I am able to enjoy in English but have also worked and experienced it through translations into other languages. Having designed seven Shakespeare plays so far – Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, (twice), The Tempest (twice), Othello, and Lear – I consider him to be one of the finest architects of words. However I deeply believe that his unique power is more about action, emotion and space-time fluidity. Since I was a student I became aware of the relationship between the Elizabethan stage and the structure of its plays. I apprehended how Elizabethan playwrights understood the potentiality of that stage and wrote for peculiar spatial conventions. The action works malleably through doors and traps, entrances and exits. Simultaneous events in different locations may be easily staged without worrying about the audience de-coding fluctuations in space and time. Shakespearean texts work, even in translation, because they are not only about words and diction but mainly concern the perfect combination of human actions and emotions in a spatiotemporal journey. They therefore flow well in foreign languages, with characters becoming real and present even if they are dressed in silk kimonos or saris. Shakespeare is not about words; he is about the World. (Monica Raya: Scenographer: Mexico) Going global Perhaps Shakespeare is treated with more artistic freedom in non-Anglo cultures because the translation to another language becomes the first stage of textual interpretation. So often a rather loose artistic interpretation is the only way to convey the true essence and spirit of the original text. Some English-speaking Bulgarian directors intermingle Shakespeare’s original text and its translation, while others create postmodern collages from several of his plays. As far as design is concerned, realistic and illustrative approaches are long forgotten. I have therefore never perceived Shakespearean language as a burden or a limitation in my practice. On the contrary – it is a most powerful and delightful source of inspiration and much more important than the plot itself. Since Shakespeare’s stories focus on human nature they still move people deeply and allow for design to constantly reinvent itself and speak a language that is true to its time – contemporary, sincere and live. (Marina Raytchinova: Scenographer: Bulgaria) BEYOND LANGUAGE 179 Elizabethan theatre is indigenous to England along with its wooden O – the iconic Globe Theatre – fittingly described in the prologue to Henry V as capable of cramming many worlds within its embrace.20 This concept of a universal realm has been notably outlined by Francis Yates who referred to the Globe as ‘a cosmic theatre’ for acting out “the drama of life within the theatre of the world… the pattern of the universe, the idea of a Macrocosm, the world stage on which the microcosm acted its parts”.21 However, rather than the simplistic notion of a simple stage, relying solely on “imaginary forces” to conjure up manifold worlds through words, this architectural model established a complex spatiality for horizontal and vertical movement and three-dimensional placement during the performance, this was afforded by multiple entrances onto a platform with floor trap and posts supporting a roof with a descent machine, as well as the overlooking balconies that extended the audience’s galleries into the stage fabric. As Nicholas Till maintains in his essay ‘Oh to make boardes to speak!’, “we are deceiving ourselves if we believe that minimalist performances of this kind lack a scenographic dimension”.22 The Globe is what Edward Gordon Craig would have referred to as a ‘simplified stage’,23 something the English designer sought to create throughout his career. Rather than the representational Pictorial Scene, Craig focused on the presentational Architectonic Scene, which was more fixed in form with shifts of location and atmosphere defined by discretely moving constructed elements, large iconic properties, groupings of performers and coloured lighting.24 Emphasizing ‘place’ Craig wished to render scenography a “genuine thing. A work of architecture. Unalterable except for trifling pieces here and there.”25 Searching for essential form he distilled common and persisting features in historic and international architecture into theatrical archetypes, which were later cohered into his proposal for St Matthew Passion (1918) – represented in a large wooden model archived in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Like the Globe, Craig’s monumental architecture, with its levels, stairs, bridges and receding arches, suggested a complex performative setting constructed of multiple spatialities that worked with an audience’s imagination to complete the places it evoked. This abstract, performative environment is akin to that which Fabrizio Crisafulli calls for when eschewing historic reconstructions of the Globe in favour of more contemporary “non-referential” settings: Trying to reconstruct the original architectural conditions of the Elizabethan theatre to perform Shakespeare’s plays, as with the various “reconstructions” of the Globe Theatre, doesn’t make sense. The social context and public expectations in which such theatres were conceived and operated no longer exist and cannot be rebuilt. Rebuilding the physical structures only creates simulacra: just empty forms. In representations of Shakespeare’s plays now, we should work on the universal characters and themes that continue to survive in our time, which we must necessarily face with a contemporary look. Regarding design, places in Elizabethan plays were evoked primarily through the word (the so-called “verbal scenography”). It would therefore be consistent now to translate the evocative power of the word into that of a non-referential setting with 180 Dorita Hannah abstract character: enabling free associations and avoiding connotative elements with respect to place and time. Abstract scenic elements, motivated by our present world, are capable of giving space to the fantasy and allowing the spectator a wide range for imagination, as with Shakespeare’s “verbal scenography”, but in a new way. (Fabrizio Crisafulli: Theatre Director and Visual Artist: Italy) Before the late twentieth-century project to create literal reconstructions of the Globe around the world, its universal landscape became the architectonic scene of the symbolist avant-garde and eventually influenced later scenographers as an abstracted performance landscape. What is most valuable about the original Shakespearean stage is its intention to provide a utopian global model, which is not only spatial but also conceptual: a phenomenon that speaks across boundaries, languages and epochs. For over 500 years, academia has tended to focus on Shakespeare as a literary dramatist rather than a commentator who captured the breadth and details of the human condition and its multiple, on-going performances: in war, in love, in play and in power. As Henry Turner points out, Shakespeare’s plays provide the means to explore and question contemporary humanity, through their manifold historical, social, political and ethical circumstances.26 The notion of the playhouse as the site where Shakespeare explored identity through difference – allowing us to question ‘outsiders’ in modern society – was taken up through the Globe to Globe project during London’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012. Running concurrently with the Olympic Games, the World Shakespeare Festival co-opted England’s indigenous stage as a universal landscape for universal issues by staging “37 plays in 37 languages” – including Maori, Italian, Arabic, Lithuanian, Greek and British Sign Language – all in the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames. Michael Boyd, artistic director of England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, claimed, “Shakespeare is no longer English property. He is the favourite playwright and artist of the whole world, and studied at school by half the world’s children”, while the Globe’s director, Dominic Dromgoole asserted, “Shakespeare is the language which brings us together better than any other.” Although proclaiming the bard as ‘the world’s playwright’ may have played into the ubiquitous nationalism of Olympiad hosts, the event also sought to celebrate the “vast array of ethnic communities that make up London’s vibrant multicultural landscape” with each of Shakespeare’s plays performed in the language of varying companies from around the world.27 Having significantly contributed to the gentrification and tourism within its neighbourhood of Southwark, the Globe Theatre has come to represent a cosmic universality and the myth of a united world. This is in keeping with Lehmann’s description of Shakespeare’s theatre as giving the “impression of an open world without borders”, reaching across varied spaces and genres, realities, and fictions. The Globe to Globe project was unique in globalizing the local and localizing the global, all within that ‘girdle’ of its wooden walls. BEYOND LANGUAGE 181 Designing for Shakespeare is like drawing a continent anchored to a territory situated between the firmness of literary excellence and the exasperating fragility of the civilization that produced it, which remains fragile today. The tenuousness of human relations in their power struggles – the main theme of so many historical dramas, tragedies and even some comedies – was materialized, as a metaphor, in the economic poverty that I always faced when I embraced the dream of young theatre groups in Brazil, constantly eager for “new things”. Thus, the Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Othello, produced by “Centro de Demolição e Construção do Espetáculo” (“Centre of Demolition and Construction of the scene”), were staged in a small architectural structure of Elizabethan inspiration, which I constructed out of fruit crate boards obtained at street market grounds in Rio de Janeiro – the same material used to build the poorest houses of the favelas at that time. Despite being so fragile, this modest theatre setting was able to travel, withstand rain and storms, and survived. Shakespeare has never frightened or overwhelmed me and I have never intended to produce any “new” image through my various experiences with his work. What I did was take advantage of his spirit of poetic adventure in order to find a poetic language in tune with the world around me, organically, based on what he offers as symbolic material, with total creative freedom and without any embarrassment. (Lidia Kosovski: Theatre Design: Brazil) Corrupt images Chiara Guidi of Societas Raffaello Sanzio maintains in today’s theatre it is absurd to take a piece of Shakespeare and put it on stage... If the text is the fulcrum of the production, it is not possible to invent upon this text and stay true to the text at the same time.28 As Guidi’s Italian company has also shown, truth to text is no longer relevant because the real has become stranger than fiction: witnessed in productions where the stage fiction is constantly interrupted by an “alien reality” that disturbs the clarity of the spectator’s vision by summoning the real into reality.29 In Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s 1997 production of Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar), Shakespeare’s text was hacked apart and performed in Italian while bodies that do not comply with any ‘true-meant design’ confront the spectator. Mighty Caesar is a feeble geriatric, Cicero morbidly obese and both Brutus and Cassius are played by anorexics. Live and stuffed animals provide an unsettling stage presence, as do the projected vocal cords of an actor with an endoscope inserted in his throat. Some speeches are made in squeals after inhaling helium and Mark Antony’s celebrated “Friends, Romans, countrymen” is croaked out by a man lacking vocal cords, baring the hole from a laryngectomy in his neck (Figure 10.1). Here the field of symbolically constructed representations is exceeded, exposing the Real, which Lacan described as an impossible condition associated with the preverbal and thereby transcending language. The power of words is deliberately withheld in this production that focused on the manipulation and misuse of rhetoric inherent to Shakespeare’s play. 182 Dorita Hannah Figure 10.1 Giulio Cesare, Dalmazio Masini as Marco Antonio, Societas Raffaello Sanzio Source: Photo courtesy of Societas Raffaello Sanzio As Lehmann articulates in Postdramatic Theatre, our contemporary theatre no longer constructs a “purely fictive cosmos”, having lost faith in the dramatic “formation of illusion” when faced with the very ‘real’.30 The dystopic environment that folds audience into an inter-textual scene has replaced Modernism’s vision, which prescribed the poetics of a universal spatiality. The revolutions of the avant-garde have finally led to a ‘theatre of images’ in which visuals, freed from serving the text, develop their own logic as presentation rather than representation. Karen JürsMunby states in the introduction to her English translation of Lehmann’s book that the world is no longer represented as a surveyable whole and the text has “become just one element in the scenography and general ‘performance writing’ of theatre”.31 Although the fractured visual landscape of contemporary scenography – withholding a dramatic unification of time, place and action – becomes another form of writing and the performance a text(ile): the philosophical and political become foregrounded in productions that talk about living in the contested and corrupted realities of our own times. For the imaginative practice of scenography, Shakespeare’s plays always already contain corrupt images that undermine the unified structure of their narrative universe. This is relevant to his tragedies and his comedies alike. In these corrupt images, the corrupt figures inhabit corrupt scenes in corrupt sites of action, structuring the spectator’s BEYOND LANGUAGE 183 consciousness by evoking new images that are equally corrupt. For a scenographer working with images, these corrupt imaginings become central while generating the scenographic concept. (Lilja Blumenfeld:, Scenographer: Estonia) Streaming multiple texts While Lehmann was composing his influential treatise, director-designers such as Robert Wilson, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Jan Lauwers and Robert Le Page created universally celebrated Shakespearean adaptations coming out of North America and Europe. However, this section focuses on a long-standing collaboration between Netherlands-based Belgian director, Ivo Van Hove, and Dutch designer, Jan Versweyveld, who have tackled many of the bard’s classics since the founding of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 1987. Their production of The Roman Tragedies (Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), which has been playing since 2007, situates the audience in the middle of a theatrical, political, and mediated arena where a continual flow of virtual and visceral performances is played out for almost six hours. Why Shakespeare? You can only answer with clichés. For instance, in the Roman Tragedies I am struck time and time again by how contemporary it is, how it’s about us, right now! It’s very mirroring and universal. Other than the dramatic power of the language I cannot see the world without Shakespeare. He has been translated into Dutch by numerous great writers and we can compare translations and see the richness of the language which is fantastic in contemporary Dutch. In the Roman Tragedies we used a spare translation which still retained a sense of verse. However, the show is full of text not only spoken in Dutch, but also subtitles on the monitors and projections of the performance with newsreels, and information streamed above the stage with live newsfeed as well as the spectators’ SMS messages, tweets, and comments taken from Facebook and the show’s blog. The production is still playing and being adapted around the world. It’s a living organism that is still very much alive with our company. Over the last eight years media has changed and the public themselves are modernizing it. (Jan Versweyveld: Scenographer: Holland) As a demanding touring show, which requires the entire company of 55 performers and technicians, Roman Tragedies is staged in a classical proscenium theatre (Figures 10.2–10.8). However, the audience is invited to move around the auditorium and to occupy the stage, which has a bar for purchasing food and drinks, and an accessible internet station, as well as makeup and props tables situated in its wings. Scattered throughout is a proliferation of beige couches, potted plants, and video monitors showing live action subtitled in the language of the host country. Technicians hover and camera operators move discreetly about, following the action of performers embedded within the onstage audience who eat, drink, and Figure 10.2 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photo Jan Versweyveld Figure 10.3 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photo Jan Versweyveld BEYOND LANGUAGE 185 use their phones to record the show or communicate to friends and social media (some of their texts returning as streaming data on the news ticker above). While a series of clocks shows the current time in various world centres, cameras and microphones are being constantly mobilized to record the highs and lows of politics and romance being played out by the leaders, politicians and lovers whose actions are as relevant today as they were in ancient Rome or Elizabethan London. Pre-recorded footage and streaming LED texts intermix with dramatic action while real-time world events enter the auditorium. The intermedial stage then spills out onto the street when Caesar is chased from the theatre pursued by his rivals and cameramen: exposing an unsuspecting public to violent action, which is difficult to differentiate as real or staged. Evoking a featureless lobby co-opted for a political convention, the stage setting is deliberately and excessively bland, resembling the predictable décor of a globally distributed hotel chain that can be found in any of the cities where the show is performed. Implanted centrally are two glass walls – war room screens written and overwritten in white marker with battle strategies until completely smeared – between which a platform moves like a mortuary slab carrying the body of each dead character photographed from above and projected to the audience like a crime victim from a tabloid newspaper (their names and dates blazoned above in red LED diodes). The fragmented, multimodal production refers directly to ubiquitous live-streamed news channels – such as BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera – that beam political conventions, global politics, neoliberal agendas and celebrity affairs into our homes, hotel rooms, airport waiting rooms and urban sites. Here design ‘acts out’ on an ever-shifting trajectory between conventionally staged scenography and provocative events in public space. Versweyveld, who designed setting, costumes and lighting, states: What interests me is to create a new stage reality that is not an illusion or illustration… I am trying to make whatever happens on stage real and for its own purpose. Everything you see on stage is real and present… you see bars, TVs, cables and the technology. We use light to create a dynamic and to subtly lead the public around, but never to make you believe you are somewhere else. We are here together, now, not in Rome or Alexandria. (Jan Versweyveld) As a “living organism” the streaming text from world news and social media is absolutely specific to the time and place of each performance. Interweaving the play’s events with current affairs and audience responses, the harsh reality of continual conflict and political struggles is brought directly into the theatre. Over its eight-year run (and still counting) geopolitical clashes have come and gone in the world, while some are still being played out on the global stage in the never-ending theatre of war. The spectators who move on and off the stage are as at home as one would be in the anonymous space of a hotel conference centre: in-transit they become part of the performance and therefore complicit as history’s bystanders. 186 Dorita Hannah Figure 10.4 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photo Jan Versweyveld The inclusion of social media commentary was initiated by the audience itself during the London run (2009) and became an incorporated feature. Versweyveld – acknowledging his collaborative role in the core creative team of director, designer, dramaturge and video-artist (incorporated within a larger team of composers, translators and technicians) – successfully established “a universal forum and a space for debate where the public could share experiences with the players/politicians”. He has co-created a performance landscape in which many intersecting texts (visual, aural, written and spoken) combine to emphasize Shakespeare’s proposition that the most critical and complex stage is the global one we occupy here and now. As a framed scene viewed from the auditorium, Roman Tragedies includes a constantly shifting onstage audience within its unstable borders. It therefore operates between conventional and immersive theatre practices. The vanguard of contemporary immersive theatre is the UK-based Punchdrunk Theatre, which has been creating celebrated productions in disused buildings since 2000, the most renowned being Sleep No More: a 1930s riff on Macbeth staged within a highly atmospheric and labyrinthine environment. In the McKittrick Hotel (established in London 2003, Boston 2009 and New York City 2011), words have been replaced by choreographed movement and a warren of gloomy spaces filled with objects that we are invited to explore and touch.32 Figures 10.5 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photos Jan Versweyveld Figures 10.6 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photos Jan Versweyveld Figures 10.7 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photos Jan Versweyveld Figures 10.8 Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam Source: Photos Jan Versweyveld BEYOND LANGUAGE 189 Designing experience While text is, of course, pivotal and central to Shakespeare and its adaptation, there are other ways of underscoring narrative, and poetry that can be as potent or more potent, compelling, and affective. Dance and physical theatre spring to mind here. The physical narrative of these métiers can be devastatingly powerful in reaching out to spectators who are not born to Shakespearean iambic pentameter but who can understand when the right gesture, the right spatial relationship grabs their gut and turns it. (Kathleen Irwin: Scenographer: Canada) The design of Sleep No More, as a complex spatiotemporal strategy rather than a standalone scenography, advances my earlier claim that space precedes action – as action. Focusing on the third and longest running iteration, housed in an abandoned warehouse within NYC’s Chelsea neighbourhood, this section articulates the work of ‘artistic director’ Felix Barrett and his ‘design associates’, Livi Vaughan and Bea Minns, who led a design team of over 200 people to create and furnish 93 rooms that lie in wait for a disparate and mobile audience. Meticulously detailed, each installation (Figures 10.9–10.10) enacts its own characters and texts, even before spectators engage with them through their particular actions and inter-actions. Describing the environment as a “cinematic wonderland”, Barrett explains that all of Shakespeare’s lines were taken apart “with a fine tooth comb… and woven back into the space”.33 From 7:30–8:30pm every night audience members arrive at 15-minute intervals, leaving the contemporary city behind to walk a dark and winding passage that leads to a noisy speakeasy bar before moving beyond the heavy red velvet drapes to don a hollow-eyed carnival mask and step inside an elevator operated by a cheerful bellhop (he whispered in my ear “I think you will be lucky tonight”). They disembark on any one of five floors and experience an unfurling vertical and horizontal labyrinth of evocative locations tinged with the patina of a bygone era. These include a hospital ward, asylum cell, apothecary’s chamber, detective’s office, taxidermist’s shop, a maze of ruined brick walls and one of wintry trees as well as a forested ballroom – all discovered in the haze of flickering candle light, accompanied by varying aromas and moody music from Hitchcock films. Wandering randomly through the seemingly endless sites spectators can tangibly explore the macabre details (piles of ceramic bedpans, hanging wet clothes, animal bones and false teeth, faded books with sliced pages, jars of dusty curios and baths with bloodstained water). For three hours this community of masked observers drifts, lingers, or races from room to room following unmasked enigmatic characters who occasionally inhabit the shadowy spaces, performing ambiguous actions, snatches of dramatic intrigue and wistful dances. Occasionally a performer unmasks a spectator in an intimate yet uncomfortable private moment (a nurse pulled me into a small room, wrapped me in a blanket on a medical table and stared into my face before inaudibly whispering in my ear). Anonymized spectators become random phantasmatic elements of the scenes as Figure 10.9 Sleep No More, Punchdrunk and Emursive Source: Photo Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux Figure 10.10 Sleep No More, Punchdrunk and Emursive Source: Photo Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux BEYOND LANGUAGE 191 they watch from couches and corners or lean over the shoulders of performers. This sensorial design-led production evokes the spatial emballage of Tadeusz Kantor where ordinary rooms and objects are rendered dynamic by the multiple meanings in which they are wrapped. Yet Shakespeare’s Macbeth can only be recognized by the cognoscenti: principally referenced in its obsession with “superstition, and witchcraft and folklore”34 as well as the more referential appearances of the lead character and his wife who have separate scenes of bathing the blood off their bodies, a banquet scene of repeated gestures visited by a bloody Banquo, and in the final assembly within the ballroom when the forest of rolling trees gathers and disperses leaving a man hanging above the parting audience as it returns to the reality of New York’s night-time city. Of Sleep No More’s wordlessness, the New Yorker critic wrote: Because language is abandoned … we’re forced to imagine it, or to make narrative cohesion of events that are unfolding right before our eyes … We cannot connect with the characters through the thing that we share: language. We can only watch as the performers reduce theatre to its rudiments: bodies moving in space … Stripped of what we usually expect of a theatrical performance, we’re drawn more and more to the panic the piece incites, and the anxiety that keeps us moving from floor to floor and from room to room, like shuddering inmates.35 This sense of entrapment and powerlessness counters the company’s claim of freedom, a point emphasized by Worthen who refers to the “depoliticized” masked spectators as “constructed within the spectacle as realist voyeurs, watchers and readers, not agents”. While Roman Tragedies’ onstage audience (always aware of being on a stage) are present as individuals, capable of moving around and contributing to the performance through their smart phones, the masked spectators in Sleep No More who are instructed to switch their phones off are presided over by blackmasked stewards in the shadows, reducing a so-called free choice “of what to watch and where to go”. Combining promenade, environmental, site-specific, and interactive characteristics, works such as Sleep No More prompt us to consider the active forces inherent to the natural, constructed and virtual world in relation to scenography. Its cinematic qualities extend the audience reach: appealing to a generation brought up on reality television, film, and gaming who are much more proficient with visual texts and simulacra than the archaic language of Shakespeare. However, the more mediatized approach of Toneelgroep Amsterdam allows the lived world to cohere with that of The Roman Tragedies, encouraging us to immerse ourselves while remaining cognizant of the political dimension and continuing relevance of 500-year-old texts. Epilogue… to say more José Ignacio Cabrujas’ interpretation of Othello – Sonny, Diferencias sobre Otelo, El Moro de Venecia – poeticized colloquial Venezuelan language while sustaining the 192 Dorita Hannah tragic dimension of Shakespeare’s characters. Cabrujas used the same language in his stage directions to describe places and actions: atmospheres suggested with poetic turns that had to be interpreted to create in both actors and spectators the perception of a passionate coastal town imprisoned between mountain and sea; light’s radiance on the beach, sweating stevedores and a salty stickiness on the skin. I felt plastic on my skin, and I married it. Freed from the constraints of Elizabethan language, I created stairs and levels, small pathways and labyrinths, which I later lined with wrinkled plastic stained with rust; labyrinths that allowed one to be seen and to hide. The result was a rough masculine set – where the feminine felt out of place – in which design, as an essential part of the total experience, contributed to a different understanding of the play without betraying Shakespeare’s original intent. (Fernando Calzadilla: Set/Lighting/Costume Designer: Venezuela) While postdramatic theatre abjures slavish attention to a single text and purely mimetic representation, it retrieves theatricality in relation to Barthe’s notion of “theatre-minus-text”, in which the original script becomes submerged in an external language of “sensuous artifice – gesture, time, distance, substance, light”. Referring to Shakespeare among others, Barthes advocates “a devouring theatricality” in which “the written text is from the first carried along by the externality of bodies, of objects, of situations; the utterance immediately explodes into substances”.36 The designers to which this chapter refers are aware of how we perform in our daily lives and how their design practices perform as a bridge between onstage scenography and the reality of socio-political strategies in the lived world. Their borderline images exceed the text just as the devouring theatricality of our lived world exceeds the stage. Therefore if we were to consider a designers’ Shakespeare then the true-meant designer is Shakespeare himself – the strategist behind the work: devising his multiple and enduring texts for our conscience and imaginations: as generals do war, as presidents do their own campaigns, as terrorists do the perfect attack, leading us into new territories beyond language. Shakespeare-inspired productions that I have designed for Theatreworks in Singapore (directed by Ong Keng Sen) have used only the bones of the original Shakespearean plot as a framework, replanting them in South Asian scenarios and more contemporary spaces. Spoken word was simplified and re-written, sometimes into the indigenous languages of the cast, and traditional Asian performance cultures were introduced into the mix: Noh, Beijing Opera, Thai classical dance and Indonesian Gamelan as well as contemporary indie rock. This extensive re-thinking allowed me great freedom in design, concocting an almost arbitrary locale for the stage settings. To work on new Shakespearean-inspired productions was a great privilege and the original story’s quality remained beguiling, intriguing, and surprisingly accurate when applied with skill to another place, time, or culture. And what fun I had going on these epic design journeys, no longer constrained by an enclosing European architecture or landscape, but free to devise and be liberated in the process. This led me into new territories where oblique cultural references inspired elements to support the main spaces; in Lear enormous faded BEYOND LANGUAGE 193 Indonesian batik curtains and Burmese carpets hinted at a decay in court, and a giant crushed paper screen became a distant and elusive wall of cloud; while in Desdemona (derived from Othello) a hidden gold-leafed bed within the rough Indian stage served as a kind of gleaming throne of precious metal, and also as a place for madness to unfold. (Justin Hill: Scenographer: Singapore) Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 William Shakespeare. Measure for Measure. Lucio: Act 1, Scene 4, line 59. Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 5. I am indebted to Christopher Balme, who at the ADSA (Australasian Drama Studies Association) conference in 2004 (Wellington, New Zealand) suggested that perhaps more discursive and critical performances eventuate when stagings of Shakespeare are not performed in the original written and spoken language. J.L. Austin: How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5–8. www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/updates/world-shakespeare-festival-launch.aspx (accessed 17 April 2014, but since removed from the RSC website). This statement by Michael Boyd, Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, proliferated in the publicity and press for the World Shakespeare Festival discussed later in this chapter. William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3, Scene 2, 1–4. Peter Holland: “Shakespeare in the Twentieth-Century Theatre”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 208. ‘Dramaturgy of the Spectator’, in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Auslander (London: Routledge, 2003), 219–35, 209). Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of 20th Century Performance, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 267. Ibid., 270. Ibid. Stein cited by Kennedy. www.needcompany.org/EN/king-lear (accessed 11 February 2016). William B. Worthen, “Intoxicating Rhythms: Or, Shakespeare, Literary Drama and Performance Studies”, Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (3), Fall 2011, 309–39, 333. Jon McKenzie, “Global Feeling”, in Performance Design (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), 128. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), 176. Arnold Aronson, Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 7. Note that I refer, myself to the spatio-visual field, placing the spatial first and thereby privileging a more immersive and sensory approach. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Performance Studies”, in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 43. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. Jiri Veltrusky, “Man and Object in the Theatre”, 84. William Shakespeare, Henry V (Act 1, Prologue, l 10–15). Frances Yates, Theatre of the World, London, 1987, 189. Nicholas Till, “Oh to Make Boards to Speak!” in Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, eds., Jane Collins and Andrew Nesbitt (London: Routledge, 2010), 154–161, 160. Craig, Scene (New York: B. Blom, 2006), 15. Craig wrote of “Place” and “Scene”: “It is a Place if it Seem Real – it is a Scene if it Seem False”, 1n.1. 194 Dorita Hannah 24 Ibid., 22. 25 Ibid., 5. 26 Henry S. Turner, “Generalization”, in Early Modern Theatricality, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9. 27 www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14790154 (accessed 11 February 2016). 28 From “A Conversation about the Future”, in The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Joe Kelleher, Nicholas Ridout, Claudia Castellucci, Chiara Guidi (Taormina: Comitato Taormina Arte, Romeo Castellucci), 25. 29 Alenka Zupanc̆ic̆, “A Perfect Place to Die: Theater in Hitchcock’s films,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 79. 30 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 22. 31 Ibid.,12 and 4. 32 The production is a collaboration between Punchdrunk and Emursive. 33 Video for Interior Design: Designers’ Interviews, 10 November 2011, www.interiordesign.net/idtv/detail/571/ (accessed 17 April 2014). 34 Ibid. 35 “Shadow and Act: Shakespeare without Words”, Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2 May 2011, 86–87, 87. 36 Roland Barthes, from “Baudelaire’s Theatre”, in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 26.