The dramatic text is full of holes.1 If we wish to continue to approach theatre from this perspective — tradition is here, even if contemporary analysis of discourse, of theatre as social practice, suggests a necessary break with a priori notions of the dramatic then I believe that we can only do so by reconceptualizing drama as partial, as elliptical, as fragmented; a written mode-in-waiting oriented to performance/s. When we approach it as pro-theatrical — and how else can we investigate its meaning potential, today? — we perceive that the types of ellipsis that so strongly mark dramatic discourse are functional: they invoke, they let 'worlds' in. Or rather, all those factors of communication — and the communication of pleasure — are elided, that evade capture in the written, that mock a traditional linguistics of the pageable — (as such mockery has led the swerve, in linguistics, to pragmatics). Dramatic discourse ellides the body of the actor, the body of the spectator, and the ways in which these bodies confront themselves and each other in the oppositional spaces of theatre. Through the simple convention of naming, dramatic discourse invokes these bodies: there is no Hamlet's body but that of the actor; there is no Hamlet's actorly body but for that of the spectator. Dramatic discourse goes further, it elides a social practice of the body as major communicative means. Dramatic discourse can be so constituted because our shared [extra-textual] knowledge, is such that we agree to bring precisely what dramatic discourse agrees to elide. Unlike the verbal discourse of the body locatable in other modes of writing, the bodies in question, in theatre and in the expectant drama, are real; as are the other signifiying systems exploited in theatre, anticipated in drama. Hence the widely prevailing view that 'the drama can be read just like a novel' is a nonsense, and worse: it is a willing occultation of the social practices of 'hole-filling' that stagers and spectators (and readers for stages) undertake in any constitution of meaning. So that, to return to the drama in question, a programme announcement that proclaims the impossible 'Antigone by Sophocles'2 — which is a perfectly acceptable programme-cover practice, in non-European contexts in particular, is nonetheless problematic. Because the programme cover here names performance and 'performer' — of dramatic discourse — in place of the here-and-now bodies performing in other names, in theatre's set of voices, and for a quite specific set of spectators.
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Theatre, February/March, 1986, played to sell-out audiences of high school students 'doing drama.'3 The context here is the struggle for the right to utter and for the means to dissimulate utterance in the theatre. Stagers and spectators alike are encouraged to attribute to Sophocles, or at least to the Director, Ray Omodei, rather than to their own processing and constitution, the 'message' or 'reading' of Antigone. The globalizing aspirations of the metteur-en-scene in the late 20th Century make it important to establish a framework that might permit us to locate contemporary theatre in the given socio-cultural context, and to separate out its constituent practices. This in turn might permit spectators and students and analysts alike to perceive the diverse and often contradictory discourse types that can be in play when drama as a theatre event becomes part of social practice. Because the state of theatre attendance here and now combined with the ready attributing of meanings to a 'dramatic author' or at least to the metteur-en-scene as primary or sole sources of meanings4 is such that these spectators may never possess the means of comparing the sorts of meanings produced, by locating them in their own socio-cultural context and its practices, that is, in themselves as constituted by that context and those practices. The confrontation of bodies, enabled by the context in which it occurs, will be overlooked in favour of (un-)' dramatic' knowns.
Although the theoretical bases for the elaboration of such a framework are complex, I believe that we can offer, as an interim model, a set of wh- questions which are focussed around the bodily confrontations I have outlined above. Which bodies (of the staging) — this entails the produceable/consumable actor, demanded/supplied by the training institutions, in terms of prevailing body aesthetics. Chosen by whom — the metteur-en-scene as historical function emerging at the end of the 19th Century, aspiring to a global control in proportion to the perceived 'uncontrollables' of the theatre events, rather than as auteur — a focus of selection. For whom, where, and to what effect/s and through what means. What (contradictory) precepts of the socio-cultural context produce what effects? The play — playing-Antigone!! — is here, rather than located between the covers of the book, a transaction, a negotiation of meaning, between intricately constituted participants, whose enabling factors might better be sought in the society of practice, than simply in what we conveniently name 'Greek tragedy.' Our bodies demand, the metteur-en-scene supplies, that which is enabled by the socio-cultural context's contradictions, through the ostension of nameable bodies. This perspective should, I think, prevent too easy an assimilation of constituted meanings to any single individual — which is not to say that individuals within the theatrical process might not struggle precisely to permit the spectator to perceive traits of enunciation of a dominant speaking subject from
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which to constitute an 'identity’ for it. For example, the metteur-en-scene, choosing as mode of public utterance this oblique articulation from behind, but through, the mask of the stage; the actor craving stardom by a struggle to exceed attributed and equilibrated theatrical roles. Each of these, however, is engaged in a possible struggle of contemporary notions of mise-en-scene and acting in their relations to the spectator.
In just such a manner, the 'death of the (dramatic) author,' pro- claimed in the theatre space of the Theatre de l’Odeon in Paris in 1968, left a gap that the metteur-en-scene was able to fill (hypocritically) some years later, declaring 'I am the author of the writing of the stage.' Thus we permit — and constrain — Omodei's writing of self in his mises-en-scene, in his Oedipus cycle5 and its internal repetitions of self-intertextualizing. But equally given the tendency towards the uncontrollable of the actor as 'wild,' and given the spectator's ability to play according to rules that Omodei may not have activated or be party to, we can also see the struggle, and Omodei's contribution to and role in it, as the offering of tokens for play, with which we do what we can within the socio-cultural context in which we are equally players.
What are the tokens, indices both of his selection process itself, and of his meta-discourse on Sophocles' Antigone, and on us? What, in turn, can we do with them? And in the context of this article, what dare I write about an ephemeral collective event which no longer exists to supply a control, to offer the means of re-reading? If I have acted upon Omodei with my physical presence as spectator, and through government subsidies, to elicit his stage direction, his acting on actor, designer, and myself, how now can I demonstrate modes of acting upon that theatre process itself, to explore its meaning potential, within the analytical framework of the body outlined above? In the theatre of Omodei, the body of the metteur-en-scene enters play, in the auditorium, intruding itself into the theatre process, to flout the convention of the absent presence of the oblique articulator of the stage. This is not unknown elsewhere: Tadeusz Kantor intrudes into the stage space itself, to coax, arrange, contemplate and read, the elements working the fictional 'world:' the frame penetrates its contents, indexically, the oblique becomes direct. Omodei controls the spectators, removing rustling sweets from school children; but more interesting is the controlling force of his physical presence, on the mind and body of 'his' actors.
We are looking then for the indices of several types of discourse field. Each takes as its unitary expression the body of the actor, in the relations it establishes — and which we establish with it —
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within the fictional 'world,' within the stage space of the actors' relations and their relations with the objects of the stage, its architextual spaces; within the theatre, the relations — the means of their establishment — with the body and mind of the spectators —- and Omodei; within the socio-cultural context, its precepts and contradictions, its own discourses of the body and mind, within and without the special context of theatre.
The body is thus itself a certain plasticity, focus of our pleasure, displeasure, indifference, but also a mere constituent in a larger composite of bodies in space, with a participatory role in a global aesthetics; it is/has a range of movements, actions, it is done-to/doer within that relational set wherein body masses meet and separate in a range of proxemic options within and constrained by the spatial construct. It is flesh and signifier, and it is flesh-as-signifier, as we shall see. It is someone else's choice, and it is its own choice, its own desire to display, that make* that body exhibit itself before us. It is, potentially, then, both actor and victim of others' actions.
Thus, the corporal plasticity of Helen O'Connor-on-stage (Anti-gone — this is not that of Helen O'Connor offstage, for just the reasons I have outlined above — is her offering to and use of us; and it is a token-for-play in Omodei's exchange with us; and it is an indice of Omodei's position with regard to possible-Antigones in Perth, in 1986 — 'possible' in terms of supply and demand, of the production of the actor, as well. The designer Tampalini works on that plasticity, through a costume that outlines or does not the curves of the body, exposing or not neck, arm, leg, and so on; whether the dressing of the long hair is constrained or 'free;' thereafter the gestures that O'Connor and Omodei and Tampalini and the spatial set make possible, and whose amplitude and direction will draw, or not, the spectator's eye to the body's plasticity; facial expression and eye-play, and their direction and interpersonal force — each of these choices made is meaningful in a number of discursive fields, on Antigone, on the female body in social contexts and onstage, on Omodei's and on the spectator's expectations and desires. So that if the holed dramatic text might be seen to invoke and to propose, if we can see an inviolable dramatic set established, for example, in this opening frame between Antigone and Ismene, that drama nonetheless elides the opening frame which conjoins Antigone, Ismene and the spectator; and further, it does not predetermine (as does the socio-cultural context) the choice of metteur-en-scene, and the latter's choice of designer and actors to construct that textual set.
Now, Tampalini dresses O'Connor/Antigone in a little-black-dress-and-heels-and chignon; and Omodei chooses Rod Hall
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as Ismene. Questioned after the performance he justifies this choice bv a reference to predominance of male characters in the fiction, in terms of economic constraints: thus Rod Hall can play both Ismene and Tiresias, with O'Connor playing both Antigone and Eurydice. The argument is hardly persuasive: there is equally the possibility that the androgynous Ismene and Tiresias Hall gives us could have been undertaken by a female actor. As it is, O'Connor is the sole female actor in a company of five men and four male Mucky Ducks.6
The performance begins with O'Connor/A, and Hall/I. moving, slowly, and interruptedly, into the central space, separated, the two of them, by a few paces, and by the direction of their gaze. These options of action and proxemics and eye-direction are framed in a set constructed on two planes (rear and left) with diagonally cut grey panels, the left wall fronted with hanging vertical slats creating an entry/exit passage with a wire gate topped by barbed wire at the point closest to the spectators in the left wing of seats. The Mucky Duck Band is set at the right-hand limit of the rear stage space. The floor space is divided into 'room-space' and an outer edge strewn with red dust and two or three large 'objects of the past.7 Thus the stylized moves of entry and division are themselves framed by the stylized set with its slashes and divisions. O'Connor/A, moves, pauses, erect, face in hand, sobs, in alternance to the movement and stillness and silence, and then the typing, seated at the 'baroque' table, of Hall/I, whose face is immobile, 'her' gaze direct but non-connecting,' 'her' bodily movements minimal. The one weeps. The other types. These details are less interesting in themselves, however, than in the way in which they invite us to condemn Antigone, from the outset. Thereafter, any fictional world condemnation will be authorized by the spectator. And O'Connor will have to make, as a consequence, immense and unsuccessful attempts, after Antigone's capture, to activate our interest.
This condemnation comes much less from O'Connor's work — from inadequacy in terms of what any young actor has to bring to a production — than from the oppositional relations that Omodei and Tampalini establish between her and Hall's Ismene, between 'before' and 'after' images of Antigone herself within the frame of the stylized setting, and within the sequential framing that the stylized entry and alternations inaugurate. Because within these stylized frames and in opposition to the choice of the costuming and the work of Rod Hall's Ismene, O'Connor's Antigone is a weary and dated naturalistic construct, the tired myth of the nice-girl, the after-image of another era's cliches. O'Connor's Antigone is a known-in-advance, a stereotype, the stuff not of an eternal but on the contrary a passe consumerist and sexist myth: the provocative-but-careful 'timeless elegance' of the
107 A ust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:7 (1986)
Melrose
little-black-dress. Myth here is mediocrity. Even the symbolism of mourning and death is so facilely trite that it invites our reception of it as the stylization of meta-myth — but a naturalized acting mode slips in which makes the premise untenable. Now, Tampalini opposes to O'Connor's 'norm,' in this liminal scene, Hall in sculpted cropped head, androgynously slender body, high-necked tailored blouse, sour grey flannels, and men's shoes. If this is equally the stuff of a jaded 'dyke'-myth, again a known, what is more interesting is the way in which our eyes are drawn and caught by the improbably interesting 'woman' it produces. Avid for the deviate, the marginal, the new, what we see here is a real 'role,' a challenge to the actor, a constraint — of ready disbelief, easy mockery, from the devouring eye of the spectator — which imposes on Hall's play a certain rigour. Whereas in Antigone/O'Connor, Omodei merely exploits the plasticity of the form, imposes tired conventional naturalism — after the stylized entry — as stylistic outline, and leaves the actor untried. Untried, that is, except by the spectator's lack of interest, (it is not without significance that the programme cover offers a plausibly Ismene/Hall, and not an Antigone, head.) It is Hall/I. who draws the eye, and not Antigone. Hall's presence and play reassert the frame, the artifice, and thus, in 1986, the pleasure of our post-Aristotelian, post-television, theatre, of our desire for a display which uses the present menace of the human body. When O'Connor/A. weeps, and Hall/I. does not, we do not ask why the latter does not do so, but rather, why the former does, since it is she, the action-planning character (note the uses of 'I', of the future tense, the initiation of speech, versus the other's response, indices of dramatic focus) who, to our eyes and expectations, need not thus submit to a cliche of 'womanly grief.'
Hereafter, O'Connor's Antigone — and thus O'Connor — will be worse used — in part by a hesitancy visible in after-performance discussions, useful con-texts with which to read the performance. The initial 'before' composite that is Antigone will take as its 'after' image the soiling and the undoing, of that which is impeccable and intact at first: the constrained of the chignon is replaced by hanging hair, still retaining the initial form undone; bare feet reactivate the scarcely perceived hem of the 'before' version, underlining it as means of access (bare 4 + clothed denudes the latter by stressing the bodiness in place of its violated wrapper); the weeping, hand to mouth gestures, and the quick naturalized movement options of the first unit give way to hanging arm and hand, slumped shoulder, as the indices of possible future action at first give way to the physical sag of the acted-upon. The smeared little-black-dress is index of violation more than of brother-burying, an apres-provocation, a male response to the careful provocation of the little-black-dress? We could easily lift out, or replace, O'Connor's construct here, the 'before' and 'after' textual se-
108 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
quence, into that other exploiter of clichés, the television detective series. Omodei exploits this image of violation proxemically. He has/lets O'Connor play from the prison of that space in the centre front of the stage, captured there in close-up by the spectators' eyes. The 'access' of the slumped body, hair and hem is multiplied by the spatial almost-access of the frontal theatre relation. The avidity of the spectators' eyes, trained by television's close-ups, television's invasions, grantings of access to intimacies once untapped, pins O'Connor's appeal, the moist face-to-face confrontation with her eyes. Moist, moving, turned directly on these central rows of spectators, here access is achieved without the threat of touch. O'Connor's body appeals, is offered and pinned there, in its sullied accessible nice-girl-violated state, to the desire to do it again, to wipe-clean-and-violate-again, of the spectator. The body provokes, not pity or compassion, but aggression after indifference, in the spectator. The Hole in the Wall trades in O'Connor's unresistant body.
Hall, too, plays the eye-game; but in his case, to insistently offer and simultaneously refuse access — the marginalized is inviolate. There is a before/after here, too, but Ismene, the focus of our avid interest, is a plot-discard, and is replaced by Tiresias: the same head, the same eyes, more outlined, but equally staring, immobile. Access-refused here initially permits us to infer a dramatic-text 'blindness' which the carefully placed feet underline; but this is minor in comparison again with the marginalization that the body activates. Hall/T. wears the costume of myth, intertextual allusion to the Greek carvings we see in the Hole's bar area; and in this intertextual image-set, Tiresias is stressed not as living prophet but as dream function, a stylized 'collective unconscious' of ancient myth and law ... Hall works the front central rows equally, but to quite the opposite effect achieved by O'Connor, and to create an intratextual cohesion with Ismene: these 'marginalized' eyes are insistently accessible, in the gaze turned to the auditorium, but precisely in order therein to refuse access, by the tilt of the head, the immobility of head and pupil, their denial of our quest for signs of life. The marginalized, in both instances, is inviolate, intact. Antigone/O'C. has gone, in this dyptich, and our attention can be focussed elsewhere.
The choices made here cannot be simply read as sexism, the overwhelming of an inexperienced actor by another, more experienced. There is an intratextual cohesion here, as well, with other sign sets and their ability to project into pre-established extra-textual textuality: the Kreon/Davis set which changes from battle fatigues that give off dust when slapped (dust, as itself, as icon of desert sand, as index of desert war) to diaphanous robes over trousers, the slightly bouffant curls, the arms spread wide to embrace faithful son — these
109 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
all insert readily into a trivialising media-myth of Gaddafi. Add the 'Aussie digger' messenger, Gaddafi's advisor in bulging cream summer suit, sunglasses and endlessly proferred and lit cigarettes; the use of the Mucky Duck, again an extra-textual textualized image, and further an intertextual cohesive link with other Omodei productions. The Greek myth used in Sophocles' own socio-cultural context, surely reworked and welded instances of the known, channelled, we might hypothesize, as social practice of pleasure through theatre, to a certain socio-functional end. The trivialized media-myth here, the play on the appeal of norm/deviancy, played out between stage and spectator via the offered bodies, across the divided and opposed spaces through eye-contact made/eye-con-tact refused so touch does not threaten us any more than it does (and as much as it does) via the invasive television screen — these might be our possible-Antigones of 1986 in Australia.
However, the question/answer session performed after the show one evening, with actors and director and designer clinging around the edge of the stage, spectators back in their spectatorial seats, demonstrated that the outline of a reading I have sketched above was not necessarily that which prevailed. Questions asked about the disparate assemblage of the known demonstrated the anxiety produced when long-taught criteria of 'unity' and 'wholeness' meet the contradictions, the fragmentations and the confusion of disparate shreds of a multitude of disparate discourse traces. For the most part, the spectators read in terms of taught criteria; in terms next of dramatic-text preconceptions obtained from a readerly hermeneutics, attributed to a mythical 'Sophocles.' They failed to acknowledge the powerful binding effect of the single time and place that is theatre itself, the unification that our processing eyes and mind impose on the disparate, is arguably both the only possible staging in 1986 — ('unity' is dead) — and a reasonable re-presentation of the concept of myths-of-our-time reworked by the Greek dramaturge. And further, they failed to pose the questions that concerned the stage's discourse of today, what it has to say about today's possible Antigones. One perceptive student asked Omodei why in his rewrite he had chosen 'man,' 'mankind' rather than 'human,' 'humankind.' Omedei brushed aside the question, saying that it was obvious that the Greeks were obsessed with women; so many of their texts focussed on them that sexism could hardly be entertained. He neglected to consider the socio-functional use made of women in those texts, the suppression of the adherence to an older, cyclical, earth-bound cult by the patriarchal, growing city state. Any unmodalized assertions made by Omodei in terms of T were carefully coupled with 'Greek tragedy,' 'Sophocles,' 'he,' demonstrating a conception of mise-
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en-scene as an act a deux, in which Omodei believes he defers to that absent, and equally mythical construct that is 'Sophocles-ness.'
I began this article by suggesting that the dramatic text is full of holes. It would be unfortunate if it were then supposed that all theatre does is 'fill' those holes, and that theatrical difference is limited to the possibilities of insertion into a rigidly prescribed colander-like pattern of presence/absence, fixed throughout time. Because, indeed, perception of holes and our ability to fill them is itself a socio-culturally specific practice; absence being perceived in terms of what we can/can't know, can/can't see, say, or show in a given time and place, as are so determined the range of possible can-bring, can-use, of 'theatricality.' The given and the brought are thus a matter of a dynamic relation, necessarily contextualized, in which the brought is determinate, precisely because it restores to a possible communicative situation all of those (currently possible) elements that the written dramatic mode can only encode cryptically and indexically. Those elements are potentially 'wild' in the sense that although we can constrain them with supposedly 'textually generated' inferences, with actorly allusions to theatricality in a supposed context of origin (again a matter of myth), with a self-deceiving philosophy of servitude to a pre-existing textual authority and intent, we can equally do precisely the opposite, in 1986: we can use the text's propositions less as 'words to act on' in a surfeit of logical processing (such as that offered in Elam's The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama)8 than as 'words to dream on'9 (such as is practised by a text analyst, ideologue, but also, by a Conservatoire teacher and director of the Theatre de chail-lot10 in Paris like Antoine Vitez). We can make explicit, in the high schools, the types of processing and practice available in 1986, the ways in which the stage speaks the present as much as a past, hoping thereby to foster a better means of communication of pleasure in the name of play.
Susan Melrose teaches at Murdoch University
Notes
1. This is Anne Ubersfeld's observation in Lire le theatre, Editions
Sociolates, Paris, 1982 (2nd ed.).
2. See the Programme Cover.
3. Box office records indicate that 3,000 students attended in par
ties.
111 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
4. This position is untenable now, even if reception studies have
not yet reached the high schools.
5. According to programme notes, Omodei has staged eight produc
tions of Greek tragedy, staged Oedipus the King during the 1983
Festival of Perth, and hopes to stage Oedipus at Colonus within a
year.
6. Mucky Duck Bush Band was started as the W.A. Folk Federation
dance band in 1973. They have been working in theatre since
1982.
7. Specifically the 'debris' of earlier Greek tragedy productions:
Omodei 'writes' his own/The Hole's history.
8. Elam, K., (1980) The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Methuen,
London. In recent writings Elam attempts to assimilate perlocu-
tionary force and effect to Aristotelian pathos, in order to overcome
the problems of a Formalist and basically cognitive, rather than
affective, approach to reception.
9. Melrose, S., (forthcoming 1987) A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text,
Macmillan.
10. Theatre de Chaillot: a major subsidized French theatre in Paris XVI.
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