LOST IN THE FATHERLAND; NATURALISM, THEATRE AND THE BODY Andrew Murphie ‘And who is the man among us who has not now and then felt and acknowledged within him- self a contradiction between word and action, between will and task, between life and teach- ing on the whole?...a poet by nature belongs to the far-sighted. Never before have I seen the fatherland and the actual life ofthe fatherland so fully, so clearly, and at a closer range than just from afar and during my absence...(1) Henrik Ibsen Fears the mother of violence Neither the fantasmatic resolution of differences in the imaginary, nor the fleshless, joyless assumption of the fact of one’s lack of unity in the symbolic, but an ‘other bisexuality, one that purstes, loves and accepts both the imaginary and the symbolic, both theory and flesh.(2) Jane Gallop Language is everything(3). It speaks, but only of itself. There is no contact between it and the flesh, lost to us forever somewhere behind the many veils which language places between our con- sciousness and the real. So runs the present argument in some circles, In this context statements such as Gallop’s seem quite remarkable, And there are more of them, Perhaps the conflict is always between body - as the inadequate name of some uncom- manded diversity of drives and contradictions - and Power, between body and Law, be- tween body and Phallus, even between body and Body. The second term in each pair is Ginished, fixed representation. The first that which falls short of that representation.(p121) Even more remarkable is her account of Irigarary - Irigaray’s reading of Froud seeks that ‘relation between the sexes’. Her aggresion is not ‘oppressor. She eness and touch merely some man-hating, penis-envying urge to destroy the phallocent lays fiery siege to the Phallus, out of a yearing to get beyond its prokil some masculine body. (p66) 10It would be easy to dismiss such statements as mistakin ‘ment towards the body, or merely to read them as an expression of nostalgia - for an impossible return to the imaginary, when in the pre-oedipal stages of the child the boundaries between body and language, body and body, were not so irrevocably fixed. Perhaps one could label such state- ‘ments as Gallop’s as "stupefying’. This would be to ignore two things. Firstly, within language the body has, of course, no defence against language except its refusal to speak. The body, unlike the Tinguist or psychoanalyst, is no great meta-physician, Secondly, the body is stupefying Beyond the study of language, which Lacan recommends, "to the letter” is the study of the Paper on which the inscription takes place. It may be true that language creates a history as it would have been, inscribes this history and its constructs of desire onto the body, effacing its own operations in the process, but in order to cover over a surface there must be surface to cover over. When language palimpsests an event in order to record it there is not only the surface of the writ. ing of this erasure, but also the surface on which that event has been written; its materiality. The {wo surfaces are il-ftting, antagonistic and dynamic, as attested to by even the simplest symptom of the use of language; nourosis, Events written by language as they "would have been’have only a tangential relation to the physical event itself, the action that existed before it was objectfied by Janguage in order to provide grounding within the symbolic order for its subject. leap into metaphysics for a move- Not only is there nostalgia for the conditions of the imaginary unity with the mother, There is also the attendant fear that a recovery of these conditions will not be possible, This fear, very literally marks out the borders, (shall we say, theatrically, curtains them off), between language and the body. Its @ fear which, with language and the body, forms a tripartite contemporary cosmology which serves the interests of power. In part, my thesis is that this fear promotes a retreat into the symbolic, and into metaphysics, ‘This is even true of those whose theories oppose such a retreat. Both Lacan and Derrida, despite their somewhat similar wish to deal with the agency of the materiality of "the letter’, are always, through the agency of this letter, this speech within a language one step removed from the ‘materiality they inscribe. They are dealing in metaphoric relations to a materiality for which they hhave no accessible final terms in language. The material is something language can pass onto but not through. It can describe its inscription on the surface of bodies, but never the resistance of bodies and materials to this inscription, Power and language are effective organisers of bodies and materials, but they are effective only through the constant arbitration of a realm of metaphysics beyond which no further appeal is possible. They organise a history and economy of materiality which survives moment to moment on that materiality’ lack of presence, or lack of intervention. At ‘most we see a shimmering as materiality and the history which is created to substitute for it inter- act Gallop’s statements do not discredit theory, but they do point to a fundamental axis of patriarchal power relations as being constituted by a denial of the body. The stability of such rela- tions is very threatened by the possibility of the resistance of the body. Gallop points this out Sincorthe imaginary embodies, fleshes out the skeletal symbolic, it is possible to see the Lacanian devaluation of the imaginary as related to a hatred of the flesh, of woman, of pleasure. (p149) R"Fear is the mother of violence” is a statement in which all the signfiers slide through one another very quickly. "Fear", "mother" and "violence" substitute for each other in an explosion Which produces the triple protection of power, knowledge and language as generated in the cedipus complex.(4) Through the ocdipus the entry into the symbolic is made, precisely away from the mother’s body. No wonder the direction of the gaze is always, for Thsen’s "man among us’, away from the possibilty of the femimine, towards the “fatherland” of Ibsen as quoted above. How, then, does one account for stich phenomenon as Ibsen’s A Doll's House? Why docs it so carefully carefully recover for the stage the problem of women, and of their bodies to the rela- tively new context of naturalist objectivity and knowledge? Why is Tbser positioned at this historical ‘moment both as a great founder of naturalism and a paradoxically male champion of the women's ‘movement? The play ends with Nora leaving her doll's house and entering a "real" world which is of- fstage. Itis never seen. The bodies of both Nora and the actress playing her are relegated to a kind of void; Nora to the Norwegian cold, and the actress playing her to offstage. The audience is left only with the ideas- Nora's metaphysical realisations about herself, (no Lacanian splitting of the subject here),firmly grounded in the same clear-sightedness with which Ibsen can sce the father- land. It is this clear-sightedness which constitutes the movement towards naturalism and away from. the melodramatic, the gothic or the romantic, all of which have dangerous tendencies away from self-consciousness and towards physicality. In melodrama there is more emphasis on the visual and. the fantasti, the matcriality of the staging and the obvious materiality of the voice, (that is, it seems, over-acted), The movement towards naturalism, the theatrical marriage of the Cartesian logic of the self and power’s reliance upon the dominance of metaphysics over the body, has overwhelmed. the theatre this century in the western world. Other theatrical forms exist, but, like rebellious children, they are so often defined according to their relation to patriarchal forms, that is, the forms of naturalism, ‘That these alternate forms have failed to present any popular or lasting challenge to naturalism this century is indicative of the fact that they have often becn flying in the face of both modernism and postmodernism, Even in reaction to the naturalism which forms part of their project both have, whilst at times denying the naturalist ideology of the correspondence of self- consciousness and the real,retreated further into language, form and metaphysics through which this correspondence was supposed to take place. This is a retreat along the same route first marked out by naturalism. It has been left to voices such as Foucault's to object to the direction of this retreat, and {o attempt to speak that which cannot be spoken - resistance to language, its constructions of sexuality and its articulations of the body through power. Paradoxically the undeniable presence of bodies on stage begins to explain the decline of the theatre. Its liminality and resistance to language through the presence of the body is precisely what constitutes it as theatre/threat to power/knowledge. This threat is contained most by naturalism, where theatre seems to signify at the borders of Tanguage - at the point of its transgression into the body - the fact that there is only recovery back into language. The physical collapses into the metaphysical. The femimine collapses back into the logic of the fatherland. Nora triumphs when she learns to speak Ibsenese. This recovery constructs historical "fact’, and then effaces its own operation. The thoughts and acts of Nora, the thoughts and acts of Ibsen become those of all mankind. There appears to be no operation at all because naturalism claims no less than the natural 4IV Is this recovery complete? Of course, to maintain objectivity and language as power it is necessary to have given the illusion of a complete taxonomy, to have "sai it all, To have said it all in the face of the impossibitiy of the task is more the aim of Literature than theatre, of the narrative than the drama, but this aim has been incorporated into the theatrical through naturalism. It is, however impossible ever to have established a complete taxonomy, to have "said it all, or finished the story. Subsequently the appearance of completion, or ofa teleology in which language and knowledge define the end of material space asthe completion of knowledge and the last word of language is an illusion. This illusion comes about not through the reality of a teleology, but through the closure and containment of a circle of signifers which are brought into the speech of the subject by language. The subject, in the theatre the audience, identifies this circle of signfiers as the sell. ‘In naturalism the audience is positioned quite perfectly for the enhancement of ths illusion. Seeming to present the real objectively, the naturalist theatre pays its audience a contiawal textual compliment by seeming to allow each member their own space to work out their relation to the events on the stage. Need it be pointed out that this is always a relation of mental consciousness - ion. The audience of A Doll's House becomes aware of what needs to be said a is actually said on stage. In fact, the stage has already signified it through lence in which, for example Nora and the audience understand what is going on without speaking of it when she and Rank are flirting. No wonder Rank is rebulfed when he blurts out his love. "Working it out” objectively, without it being spoken, without being told, is an affirmation of the self-control of the consciousness. Direct speech, such as Rank’s declaration of love, interupts. the illusion of this self-control - the illusion of the containment of the chain of signfiers which can. be labelled as the self. Rank’s directness brings with it the immediacy of the threat of the body, desire, and finally the intervention by something other in a seemingly closed subjectivity. This inter- vention, if not checked, could fold out into a horrifying recognition of the power of language over this illusory subjectivity. Of course, this folding out never occurs in A Doll’s House. There is. even a certain morality of the text, that morality which tends towards valuing individualism and the necessity of subjects thinking things out for themselves. Rank’s rebuttal is a textual compliment not, just to Nora’s mind, but to those of the audience. It isto the audience in naturalism that things should not be spoken directly, but in subtleties, affects, and silences. The audience is not forced into the position of having its signifiers revealed, and therefore taken out of the play of discourse, as Rank is, or as they might be in psychoanalysis or any form of confrontational theatre. Instead, the chains of signfiers which define the audience’s subjectivities as solid and unchangeable is tightened. They are alienated from their subjectivity in history, their true speech’. Ibsen’s play constructs true speech as that which contacts the inner truth of subjectivity, not as Lacan does. For him, true speech is that which perpetually recognises its mistake in its attempts to identify the subject as anything other than subject to outer forces(5). For Ibsen, ultimately when the truth is known the play, and the theatre itself, constructs the subjectivity of the audience by not speaking it, It maintains it silence on the very subject upon which it pours the steady stream of its discourse, and thereby constructs its own very useful version of it - what actually is an emancipated woman? Vv ‘The focus on talk, on discourse and its construction as subjectivity, perpetuated through a refusal of the revelation of the subject’s signifier, also suppresses the body. Discourse exists here 16as the fetish which is necesssary to the advent of modernism, Lacan and Dertida’s theories and. naturalist theatre conventions ‘The centring of the body/text relation in the construction of subjectivity away from thc body and towards a primacy of consciousness and a controlling intellect, reflets a shift in bourgeois problematies as regards culture, This, simply put, is the shift undergone when the bourgeois framework denies materiality through metaphysies in order to assume control over materiality. This is similar to the Lacanian reading of Freud where man, not able to live with being the phallus, constructs relations s0 as to appear to have it(6). These are operations which need to be continual- ly applied if bourgeois culture is to continue to recover the material back into discourse. Central to the operations of naturalism is the question of how to go on repeating this recovery, Ina performance text, the success of such a recovery is amplified through its very ep Each repetition signifies a closure of escape in one direction, that of the body, and the trans- ‘gression of a limit in the other, that of language. Each successful transgression of the limits of lan- ‘guage into itself is immediately subsumed by a repetition of limits one step further removed from the palimpsest, the body. By locating both limits and transgressions within language the body is completely ignored, ‘The dynamic behind this repetition is the actor-as-subject’s captivity within the impossibility of both being and acting. In naturalist theatre this is the impossibility of conflating character and action, divorced by the observing consciousness, Divorced from action and aligned to character in static state the actor-as-subject nevertheless carries ont actions. Each action is a venture into the territory of the body, and must therefore be recovered into the observing consciousness’s building of a character. The acknowledgement of the body and its events as spaces producing differences. and contradictions within the character, revealed through actions, would be threatening to the in- tegrty of the bourgeois concept of the oneness and uniqueness of the controlling self. ‘These differences and contradictions only surface disguised as a movement towards in- creased self-knowledge and agnorisis. That they are otherwise hidden is fundamental to bourgeois notions of history and identity. For Nora to discover who she is, there has to be a self to find - a self in the play which seems to consist far more of an essential consciousness of self than that which she has turned her back upon, namely a history of actions. ‘This is at the heart of naturalism of any kind. Vi Just below the surface of this spectacle, however, we find another surface with another depth = the surface and depth of the body, which through the total coincidence of character and action within it presents a political threat to the discreteness of identity and history so well mapped out within the naturalist play. In naturalism’s next major development, the plays of Strindberg, the whole process of recovering the body becomes a little unhinged. For example The Father revolves around uncertain- ties around paternity which push the central character to violence, madness, and death. That such breakdown in the symbolic order can be caused by uncertainties in regard to procreation is not surprising. It is a fundamental crisis the crisis engendered in the male consciousness about the meaning of his contact with the female body. This possibly points to a fundamental opening and vulnerability within the patriarchal mode of producing subjectivity precisely at that point where transgression occurs on the surface of the body. The same transgression which allows the subject to occur is also the point at which, as it in- scribes itself upon a body, that body's materiality is brought up to the surface of discourse so that there is a meeting of two complete surfaces; the surface of language and the surface of the body. This is, of course, a semiotic crisis, calling for a covering over of one of those surfaces. Who could say at that point where surfaces conjoin in the actions which ground history but also rupture it, that the surface of language will always do the covering, that the body will remain modest and covered? 18Physical actions onstage can operate as a kind of theatrical return of the repressed. They can be scen as the fulerum at which the body mects language, and through ingestion threatens to devour it. In A Doll's House Nora is interrogated about her macaroons precisely because such corality is threatening. "The physical basis of The Father is revealed through its violence and the faltering ofits dis- course. The concern is precisely with the law of language, the name ofthe father which here fails to ‘guarantee the stability ofthe patriarchal world in a very literal sense. ‘This fundamental relation between language and the body in the theatre, not possible in the narrative or the poem, underlies nearly every aspect of performance. tis not a happy relation, but one which is characterised by a complex interaction between fiers mentioned at the beginning of this section, namely fear, violence, and the Vil A if naturalism exists! As if it were possible for the body of a text to ingest a material body and reproduce itself as naturalistic truth! As if there could be more than a covering over! ‘The text is in a constant state of strugale with its materiality, and this struggle is not only the essence of the act, but it carves up representation from within. Like so many of the characters in Ibsen's play, the audience in a naturalist play can have come in from the cold for a while - atleast from the psychic cold of the uncontrollable material world. With each mention of warmth, (or alternatively the joys and comforts of individual self-discovery within language), does it look with more fear at the outside, feel the more embittered on going out into it at the end of the performance - nagged by its bodies as the cold hits its skins. Or at least, not nagged because in these instances its bodies refuse to speak, playing a cat and mouse game with language about which the body could not care Tess. VIII Lacan has pointed out that there is an affinity presently for grounding our concept of time in the falling of bodies due to equigravitation(7). These fallings are events which in their observation by Galileo significantly alienated man from time. To separate oneself from gravity through one’s conscious observations of its effects seems to have grave consequences. Science so often divorces us from its material. am speaking here of a nostalgia for that time before Galileo's observations, not for a time before the fall, but for a time which was not conscious of itself, when it was possible not to be con- scious of falling, and subsequently less occupied with keeping one’s feet on the ground. This is a nostalgia, accompanied by a fear, (fear of not falling, of the possibilty of falling up2), which carries over into the theatre, through the split of consciousness into “1c and body. This split of consciousness into observer and performer provides the theatre witn much of its ‘momentum, but also much of its inertia, Inertia presently isthe victor - the audience is seated s0 passively inthe theatre that they may not even be aware of their ear of fying’ As Kleist has written in his essay on the marionette theatre(8), there is a price to pay for this arrangement. It is the sacrifice of a natural relation with the grace of the body, spoken of in the cssay as the disturbance of the relationship whereby the soul sts at "the gravitational centre of the ‘movement’ (p198). As Erich Heller points out in his article on the Kleist essay - 20‘This can never happen to the marionette: is has no soul except the animation it receives from its mover, who, on his part, is limited in his actions by the laws of mechanics, and the marionette, lacking soul and therefore consciousness, is immune from the most damaging cffects of self- consciousness, affectation. This is the reason why no human being will ever equal the puppets’ gracefulness, and reason enough for the dancer to watch them so intent- ly. (p198) Relations here are those between gravity and consciousness. Self-consciousness leads to af- fectation, the kind of affectation against which there is no defence. It isa process whereby language does move "in and through man’(9), making cvery signature false and splitting being into body as palimpsest and consciousness as writing and crasure. And we need net frown at Klcist's use of the word “soul. Tt is the same word that Foucault uses when referring to the constitution of in- dividuats(10).. Once soul is split from movement, subject to an objectified gravity and a struggle with that gravity, power can make good use of the affectation with which the now self-conscious sou! must carry its movements through the world, A Dol’s House, standing as it does at such a pivotal histori cal point in the formation of new attitudes to gravity, (in both senses of the word), in the theatre, is ‘good example of the relations between soul, affectation and power. Thore is a further similarity between Kleist’s work and Lacan’s in the story Kleist gives of the youth whose natural charm is destroyed upon his viewing of himself in a certain pose in the mirror. He consciously tries to imitate it. Consciously he was unable to accomplish what had occurred unintentionally, His move- ments became more and more awkward and even comical. Still worse, this scene was only the first in a steady process of deterioration. He began to spend hours in front of the mirror, and within a year he had sadly lost all his charm. (p199) This sadness is repeated and celebrated in the all theatre, but especially, and most deaden- ingly in naturalist theatre, which seems to have perpetuated this inertia to the point of a dead stop, «with soul totally subsumed in the prevailing winds of power. Lacan and Kleist, of course, would have different conceptions of where exactly this sould might be located. For Lacan the return to grace takes place within or beyond the imaginary, Kleist sees it occurring in the movement towards an “existence partaking of infinite Mind’(11). In the im- aginary babies could fly, or at least, before the "mirror stage" that Lacan defines(12) their con- sciousness and bodies remain gravitationally attuned. Puppets, as we already know, can fly, for through necessity they are propelled by a far less finite consciousness than that bounded by self consciousness. Actors in the theatre, particularly when attached to wires, have been known to fly, but never in naturalism. Flying is anathema to it, for if there is flying in naturalism the textual wall built o keep out the undefined plenitude of the body, a wall built up to defy the immanent invasion of an ocean of sensations, begins to break down Its fll threatens the delivery ofa flood of sensa- s centred within themselves, an experience of the body merging with language, and at times ‘overwhelming it. This is the one thing that a text such as A Doll's House works to avoid, disparaging as it does the very notion of puppetry as it repeats it. Itis a reflection of a power which, through reflection, will do away with everything but itself, and the language through which it is articulated. For if power stands behind language, binds it into strategies, so does language speak through power to deny the body frce falling, Power and language end up two objects in equigravitation speaking of the necessity of their fall and the observation of that fall, unaware of the lack of grace which con- Linues to drop them, without dignity but with supreme self-consciousness, out of a window. Notes 1.Quoted in Clark, B.H. European Theories of the Drama, Crown, NY, p320. 2Gallop,t. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction Macmillan, London, 1982, p150.3.Lacan, Eerits; A Selection, Tavistock, London, 1977, p124 4.1 am obviously conflating Lacan and Foucault here - the constitution of an individual's subjec tivity through the splitting of the subject in language with the constitution of the individual by power. 5.1 am, of course, using Lacan’ analysis of language whilst denying its inevitability or finality, 6.Lacan, p289. “TLLacan, p74, S.All references to the Kleist story come from Heller, E. "The dismantling cf a marionctte theatre; or, psychology and the misinterpretation of literature’ in Heller, E. In the Age of Prose, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp193-213. 9.Lacan, p24. 10. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish, Vintage, NY, 1979, pp29- 3 11.Heller, p201. 12.Lacan, ppl-7. hat DANGER 49, BE PREPARED TO. igsn, MAN WITH GUN, DFFEND YOURSELE BAD DOG:LOST IN THE AUDIENCE Representation, acting and the body Andrew Charker ‘And where is the actor among us who has not now and then felt and acknowledged within himself a contradiction between word and action, between will and task, between life and acting on the whole?..an actor by nature belongs to the near-sighted, Never before have I ‘seen the ego and the potential for the ego so fully, so clearly, and at a closer range than just from the dress-circle and during my curtain-call ‘Thespian (anon) ‘Acting is everywhere. It performs, but only of itself. There is continual interference with the body experienced repeatedly somewhere amongst the many veils which acting creates between our ‘consciousness and the real.eyond the study of acting which Stanislavsky recommends "by the method” is the study of the actor in whom the characterisation takes place. It may be true that an actor imagines a history as it ‘would have been, inscribes this history and its constructs of motivation onto the character, effacing his own presence in the process, but in order to cover over a surface there must be a surface to cover over, When theatre palimpsests an event in order to prescat it there is not only the perfor- tance of this re-presentation but also the body with which that event is performed: its eorporeality. ‘The two surfaces are ill-fiting, antagonistic and dynamic, as attested to by even the simplest symptom of the abuse of theatre; egoism. Performers of texts as they could have been have only a tangential relation to the physical event itself, thc action that existed before it was objectified by theatre in order to provide grounding within that symbolic order for its interpretation. Not only is there nostalgia for the conditions of the imaginary empathy of the audience, there is also the attendant fear that a recovery of these conditions will not be possible. This fear very Tierally marks out the borders (shall we say, theatrically curtains them off) between character and factor. 1's fear which, with character and actor forms a tripartite dramatic tradition which serves the interests of facade. ‘In part my thesis i that this fear promotes a retreat into the gestural, and into melodramatics, ‘This is even true of those who oppose such a retreat. Both Stanislavski and Grotowski despite their somewhat similiar wish to deal with the agency of the corporeality of the actor are always, through the agency of this body, this form within the actor, one step removed from the corporcality they in- scribe. They are dealing in metaphoric relations to a corporeality for which they have no accessible final terms on stage. The body is something theatre can pass onto but not through, It can enact its inscription on the surface of actors but never the resistance of bodies and objects to this inscrip- tion Illusion and Theatre are effective organisers of bodies and events, but they are effective only through the constant arbitration of a realm of semiology beyond which no further appeal is pos: sible. ‘They organise a history and economy of corporeality which survives moment to momeat on that corporealty’s lack of presence or lack of intervention, At most we see a shimmering as the ‘body, and the history which is created to substitute for it, interact. u“Memory is the father of character is a statement in which all the signifiers slide through one another very quickly. "Memory’, "father" and "character" substitute for each other in an explosion ‘which produces the triple protection of facade, actor and acclaim as generated in the Ol plex. Through the proscenium the entry into the representative is made, precisely away from the body of the audience. No wonder the direction of the gaze is always for the “actor among us" away from the possibilty of the submissive and towards the performance ego. In performance art there is more emphasis on the visual and the critical, the contrivance of stag ing and the disaffected objectification of the voice, (that is, it seems under-acted). The movement towards formalism, the public fornication of the post-modern logic of the subject and facade’s reliance upon the dominance of semiosis over the soul has overwhelmed performance in the ex- perimental arena. Even in reaction to the act of performance, when it forms part of their projects, artists have, whilst at times denying the performance ideology of the correspondence of slf-consciousness and the illusion, retreated further into the one language, form and metatheatries through which this correspondence was supposed to take place. This is a retreat along the same route first marked ut by the Bauhaus. It has been left to all too few voices to object to the direction of this retreat and to attempt to perform that which cannot be performed - self-conscious interpretation, its con- structions of textuality and its articulations of the image and context Paradoxically the undeniable presence of bodies on stage begins to explain the decline of the actor. His liminality and resistance to character through the presence of the body is precisely what constitutes him as actorithreat to facade/empathy. ‘his threat is contained most by the soliloquy, where the actor seems to signify at the borders of the text - at the point of utterance from the body - the fact that there is only recovery back onto the stage. The text collapses into the context. The soul collapses back into the logic of the perfor- mance ego. An actor succeeds when he learns to speak audience-casc. This recovery constructs, stage history and then effaces its own operation. The thoughts and acts of the character, the thoughts and acts of the author become those of the audience. There appears to be no operation at all because the soliloquy claims no less than solitude. BIsthis recovery complete? Of course, to maintain representationéempathy as facade it is neces- sary to have given the illusion of complete spontaneity, to have "given Co li “To give it ife in the face of the impossibility of the task is more the aim of improvisation tham the rehearsed, of the instant than the timed, but this aim has been incorporated into the stage with characterisation, Itis however impossible ever to have established a complete spontaneity, "to give it life or "be" a character. Consequently the appearance of resolution, or of a teleology in which facade and empathy define the end of theatrical space as the completion of facade and the final empathic reaction is itself an illusion. In a soliloquy the audience is positioned quite perfectly for the destruction of this illusion. Seeming to present the inncr thoughts of the character the scripted play delivers the audience a continual contextual insult by presuming each member has no control over their own reaction to the events on stage, Need it be pointed out that this may be a mental reaction as well as an emo- tional one. NUREYEV VALENTINO SHEIK ‘An actor’s performance constructs truth as that which communicates the inner turmoil of the role. True voice however is that which perpetually recognises its flaw in its attempt to identify the character as anything other than subject to (textual) events, For a director, ulti ‘meaning itself is known the actor and the play construct the subjectivity of the audience by knowledging them. A performance maintains its silence on the very subject upon which it pours the steady stream of its discourse and thereby constructs its own very useful version if it~ what ac- tually s an actor offstage?ust below the surface of a performance, however, we find another surface with another depth - the surface and depth of the actor, which through the total coincidence of character and action ‘within him/her presents a personal threat to the presentation of identity and history as well mapped out within the author's text. In theatre's major recent development, the focus on the actor, the whole process of recovering the body becomes a litle unhinged, For example Ritualistic Theatre revolves around reconstr ‘of rituals which push the actor to extremes of strength, concentration and endurance, ‘That a breakdown in the proscenium effect instigated by secking to re-integrate cross-cultural influences is not surprising, It is an elemental crisis: the crisis engendered in the thespian consciousness about the meaning of his/her contact with the audience. This possibly points to a fundamental opening and vulnerability within the empathetic modé of producing identification precisely at that point where transgression occurs on the surface of the body. ‘The same transgression which allows the actor to perform is also the point, at which, ast in- seribes itself on a body, that body's corporcality is brought up to the level of performance so that there is a mecting of two complete surfaces: the surface of the “acted” and the surface of the actor. ‘This is of course a semiotic crisis, calling for a covering over of one of those surfaces. Who could say at that point where surfaces conjoin inthe actions which ground theatre but also rupture it that the surface ofthe acted will always do the covering, that the body will remain modest and covered?For if facade stands before theatre, binds it into strategies, so does theatre speak through facade to deny the body free falling. Facade and theatre end up two objects in equigravitation speaking of the necessity of their fall and the observation of that fall, unaware of the audience respect which continues to drop them without dignity but with misplaced trust, out of a window. au