4—
Political Theater:
Staging the Spectator

Transforming the Field of Theater

Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and all's well—half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up. No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful. At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.
(87)

Recall for a moment the brilliant coda of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers (1972). The hallucinatory symposium concludes with Archie Jumper's dizzying pastiche of Waiting for Godot , a theft, really, both of Didi's bleak image of the brevity of life and of Beckett's famous Augustinian parable on the play.^[1] The allusion to Beckett here presents Archie's audience with a kind of interpretive paradox, a paradigm, perhaps, of Stoppard's vertiginous assault on the audience throughout the play. Wham, bam—just what is Sam being thanked for?

As with much else in Jumpers , this question poses a problem of theatrical hermeneutics, a theatrical analogy of the interpretive

[1] Stoppard pairs Didi's "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth . . ." with Beckett's now-familiar anecdote: "I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. 'Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume[;] one of the thieves was damned.' That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters." See Waiting for Godot 58; and "Samuel Beckett—Dramatist of the Year," McMillan and Fehsenfeld 58–59.

problems confronted by the characters in the play. The action of Jumpers turns obsessively on a series of epistemological paradoxes, confusing our ability to decide whether truth (or certainty, morality, reality) is simply a function of how we look at it or somehow transcends the means of its representation. How should we read a man who answers the door half-shaven and holding a bow and arrow and a tortoise? Is he mad, or only illustrating a problem in moral philosophy? Is it really a case of murder when the victim appears to have committed suicide neatly in a plastic bag? When is a cry for help "just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call 'a cry for help'" (66)? That is, the action of Jumpers extravagantly elaborates the anecdote that George Moore (but not the George Moore) tells us toward the end of the play:

Meeting a friend in a corridor, Wittgenstein said: "Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend said, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going round the earth." To which the philosopher replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth was rotating"? (75)

Interpretive validity—let alone "truth"—is inseparable from the system that generates it. The play forces its audience into a dazzling series of such recognitions, as our own experience is constantly revised. And as Archie reminds us, this theatrical principle is much like life: "Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?" (81).

Life is not a mystery novel, nor is it philosophical acrobatics. Jumpers lends this interpretive issue dramatic urgency by phrasing it in more pressing terms, translating the notion that moral imperatives are not absolute but only "categories of our own making" into the more passionate actions of lived experience: murder, marriage, careerist ambition, failure, love and betrayal, heroism and cowardice. Thomas R. Whitaker nicely summarizes the play's "interplay of three modes of interpreting life" as the form of our interpretive experience of the play: "an agnostic empiricism that serves the will to power; an anxious religious demand or faith that can be practically and ethically blind; and a spontaneous and compassionate ethical response that helps to guide us through the play's action.

Each mode has its own kind of jumping—amoral, anxious, or theatrical—which contributes to the kaleidoscopic whirl of performance" (Tom Stoppard 102). These paradoxes have broader consequences in the play, though, for hermeneutics necessarily come to influence the more public, political world we produce as the result of our own conduct. The consequences of Duncan McFee's position, "that moral judgements belong to the same class as aesthetic judgements," are dramatized by the fortunes of his corpse, transformed by gymnastic sleight of hand from homicide victim to tidy, aesthetic suicide (52–53). Such philosophical acrobatics seem to lie behind the menacing political upheaval taking place just offstage: the installation of a new government, jailing of newspaper editors, replacing the police with the army, frequent air force demonstrations and military parades, even the promotion of the agriculture spokesman to Archbishop of Canterbury.

How is Archie's invocation of Beckett framed by this larger context? In one sense, the rewriting of Beckett's parable of "divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia" (to use Lucky's terms) as a justification of moral and social callousness seems directed both against Archie and against the revolution he seems to support. Stoppard appears to invite us to measure the philosophical world of the play and the political world it shapes against the more urgent moral example of Beckett and Godot , in part by having that world's chief advocate convert Beckett's existential neutrality into a program of opportunistic indifference. Yet although the allusion to Beckett ironically qualifies its speaker, the fact that Beckett can be absorbed by Archie's rhetoric suggests that the irony may run in another direction as well. We might also ask whether the audience is also being criticized, much as Archie is, for seeking a kind of solace in Beckett's existential status quo. Rather than standing ironically apart from Archie, is the design of Beckett's drama too easily assimilable to the ethics of an amoral police state, of a world in which there is "nothing to be done" precisely because we have become resigned to it? Does Stoppard's invocation of Godot present Beckett as a kind of moral guide, available to the audience but not to the characters? Or is the absurd texture of moral and political life in the play partly attributable to Beckett, whose existential drama and theater provide a surprisingly pacifying rationale that justifies Archie's world?

I am not certain that Jumpers gives us the means to choose between these possibilities, though the position we choose will unavoidably implicate each of us as members and agents of a particular kind of world. The politics of this interpretive choice—and it is political: the consequences are visible in the play—arise only in part from the determinations of the text, or from the internal balance and emphasis of the drama. The politics of Stoppard's theater exceed the politics of the drama and require us to reflect on our own production in and by the theater, as its patrons, witnesses, audience. How we read Beckett's figure in the design of Jumpers may depend on where we sit.

Political theater is often described as an effect, a side effect, perhaps, of the thematic content of the drama, as though an explicitly "ideological," tendentious, thesis drama were needed for an openly political theater. Yet, like the drama, theatrical performance already occupies an ideological field, a field often independent from the claims of the texts it brings to the stage. Modern political theater is distinctive only in the degree to which it is an openly rhetorical, interested production of the drama, working against the naturalized "objectivity" of theatrical realism. The politics of political theater emerge not only in the themes of the drama but more searchingly in the disclosure of the working of ideology in the making of meaning in the theater, in the formation of the audience's experience and so, in a manner of speaking, in the formation of the audience itself. Any theatrical rhetoric provides the terms and procedures that enable us to interpret the performance; stage rhetoric implicitly "qualifies" us, attributes qualities to us as spectators that we provisionally assume in order to undertake appropriate ("qualified") participation in its entertainment.^[2] As we have

[2] I am much indebted to Göran Therborn's discussion of subjection and qualification here. "The reproduction of any social organization, be it an exploitative society or a revolutionary party, entails a basic correspondence between subjection and qualification. Those who have been subjected to a particular patterning of their capacities, to a particular discipline, qualify for the given roles and are capable of carrying them out" (17). To Therborn, ideology operates less as a fixed text than as a body of rules, habits, attitudes, and practices for determining meanings and so for determining ourselves. In and out of the theater, ideologies "function neither as bodies of thought that we possess and invest in our actions, nor as elaborate texts" but "as ongoing social processes " that continually address us andso "unceasingly constitute and reconstitute who we are" (77–78). See also Raymond Williams's discussion of ideology as "the production of meanings and ideas" in Marxism and Literature 55.

seen, the theater frames our interpretive activity and so frames "who we are" as an audience. To redirect a well-known phrase of Louis Althusser's, the material conditions of our attendance in the theater are refigured, represented in the "imaginary relationship" between actors, characters, and spectators (162). For this reason, modern political theater is only in part about innovations in dramatic style or about initiating action outside the theater. Political theater works to transform the field of theatrical relations, to dramatize the implication of actors and spectators in the social process of the theater and in the representation of the world it at once stages and reproduces.

Much as poetic theater develops by reversing the realistic theater's subordination of the word to the scene, so the rhetoric of political theater opens by subverting the "realistic" qualification of the audience and its interpretive prerogatives. Of course, stage realism itself originated in an assault on the assumptions of romantic and classical drama, and on the society that sustained it, and later drama in this mode retains more than a trace of this insurgency, still visible in plays like Death of a Salesman (1949), Look Back in Anger (1956), or Marsha Norman's Getting Out (1977). Yet while the action of such plays is often critical of the social order, in the theater such criticism is blunted by the rhetoric of realistic production, which represses the actual character of the audience's performance in order to insist on its "objective" absence from the scene it observes. Masking the "real conditions" of the audience's attention in order to claim its freedom to act, judge, and interpret objectively, the realistic theater duplicates the social structure often criticized in this drama, in which the characters' desire for freedom from their material conditions marks their deepest enslavement to them, their immersion in pipe dreams, in castles in the air, even in utopian munitions works. The modern theater regains political agency when it regains the ability to stage the activities of theatrical production (acting, action, participation) as parts of an explicitly political event, an event that produces individuals (actor, character, spec-

tator) as subjects negotiating the terms of an immediate social and cultural order—the order of the theater itself.

The Anglo-Irish-American theater has undergone several "political" phases—the Abbey at the turn of the century, workers' theater in the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Group Theater, London's angry young men and women in the late 1950s, labor theaters like El Teatro Campesino in the 1960s, the "fringe" of the 1970s, the theater of Northern Ireland today. In the contemporary theater, the production of the "spectator" in the "politics" of the theater has become a central dramatic problem. Bertolt Brecht's influence in this area is massive and undeniable, extending far beyond the superficial stylistic quirks or heavily didactic themes usually taken to signal "Brechtian" or political drama. Before turning to contemporary political drama we will need to consider the contours of this influence, particularly Brecht's placement of the audience in the theory and practice of a political stage. Brecht calls for the theater to dramatize its own rhetoricity as a social practice, to show how staging theatrical experience for the spectator necessitates the staging of a spectator or spectators, the reproduction of material individuals as an interpreting, interpretable, ideologically packed "audience." Although Brecht's use of dramatic parables and the spare theatricality of his stage style are everywhere visible in contemporary performance, it might be argued that Brecht's most decisive contribution to modern political theater is his canny assault on the complacent "invisibility" of the absent public.

Brecht's originality lies in his varied and systematic interrogation of the rhetoric of realism, of the theoretical possibility of the materials of stage production and how they might be retrained in the work they perform. Recognizing that the "bourgeois theatre emphasized the timelessness of its objects," and that its "representation of people is bound by the alleged 'eternally human,'" Brecht sought everywhere to suspend the identification between theatrical behavior and the universal, the natural, and the human qualities it claimed to represent (Brecht on Theatre 96). As a result, Brecht's stage theory earnestly unravels the body of identifications characteristic of realistic performance. Brecht's "radical separation of the elements " (Brecht on Theatre 37) unbinds the "realistic" relationship between actor and character, stage and setting, individual and spectator, and so calls into question the transparency of realistic

production, the objective interpretation it enables, and the unconstructed freedom of the audience. In Brecht's theater, "What the audience sees in fact is a battle between theatre and play" (Brecht on Theatre 22). Dialecticizing theatrical activity and dramatic action, Brecht fashions the absent, voyeuristic spectator of the realistic theater as an agent of the production. In terms of acting, this battle pits the demonstrative aspect of performance against realistic empathy, or Stanislavskian "emotion memory," as justifying the relation between the character, the actor's performance, and the spectator's attention. This model of acting also alters the relationship between stage and audience, similarly transforming the audience's activity into a kind of gest: an apparently private or individual behavior shown in its public determinants and consequences.

Brecht's theater, that is, subjects the two zones of privacy produced by the realistic theater—actor/character, individual/spectator—to a dialectical reconsideration: how is this privacy the effect of public activity, the product of theater and society? As far as acting is concerned, Brecht's most controversial prescriptions occur at just this point, at the relation between identity and expression, fictive "character" and its enactment onstage. Brecht's theater decenters reified "character" as the object of the actor's representation or of the spectator's attention. Brecht urges actors to emphasize the contradictoriness of the dramatic role, to avoid assimilating the role's patterns of action to a predigested motivational source, a "super-objective" that serves as both origin and goal of action and meaning. Although "the dramatic actor . . . has his character established from the first and simply exposes it to the inclemencies of the world and the tragedy, the epic actor lets his character grow before the spectator's eyes out of the way in which he behaves" (Brecht on Theatre 56). The political actor is not the vehicle of feigned sensibility whose labor disappears into his product (the "character"), but the demonstrator of a public, social project of making "character." This demonstration coordinates the actor's work, the character's actions, and the spectator's attention in an explicitly political event—the gest. Gestic acting constructs "character" in the context of all its conditions, not only the conditions of the drama, but in the theatrical interaction between stage and audience as well.

Gestic acting opens a fissure between actor and character. While

Stanislavski urges actors to work toward a feeling of "I am" in performance (273), Brecht's actor asserts a vigorous "I am not": the meaning of Brechtian acting arises through difference from the character/subject rather than identity with it.^[3] To accomplish this, Brecht develops a theory of performance that compromises the authority of the private "self": "Emotions, instincts, impulses are generally presented as being deeper, more eternal, less easily influenced by society than ideas, but this is in no way true" (Brecht on Theatre 101). Political theater, in Brecht's view, should interrogate the explanatory power assigned to "emotions, instincts, impulses," as part of the actor's performance of "character" or as definitive of the spectator's response. In A Short Organum , Brecht vividly places empathy within the dialectic of "alienation": "that truly rending contradiction between experience and portrayal, empathy and demonstration, justification and criticism, which is what is aimed at." Demonstration and empathy are in practice "two mutually hostile processes which fuse in the actor's work; his performance is not just composed of a bit of the one and a bit of the other. His particular effectiveness comes from the tussle and tension of the two opposites, and also from their depth" (Brecht on Theatre 277–78). While the realistic theater defines empathy as the sign of effective (enjoyable, entertaining, realistic) acting and spectating (think of the American Method's attitude toward "indicating" emotion or behavior), Brecht's theater regards both acting and spectating as dialectical procedures, in which empathy and detachment define and qualify one another. For this reason, "Neither the public nor the actor must be stopped from taking part emotionally; the representation of emotions must not be hampered, nor must the actor's use of emotions be frustrated" (Messingkauf Dialogues 57).

The demonstrated gest dramatizes the social relations between performer and spectator in the theater, mediated by the dramatic fiction they share. As Brecht suggests in his most familiar epitome

[3] Brecht does, however, tend to simplify and homogenize the kind of identification invited by realistic theatrical production: "Everyone (including every spectator) is then carried away by the momentum of the events portrayed, so that in a performance of Oedipus one has for all practical purposes an auditorium full of little Oedipuses, an auditorium full of Emperor Joneses for a performance of The Emperor Jones " (Brecht on Theatre 87).

of epic theater, "The Street Scene," the spectator's performance is also part of the gest . The demonstrative actor "behaves naturally as a demonstrator, and he lets the subject of the demonstration behave naturally too. . . . That is to say, what the audience sees is not a fusion between demonstrator and subject, not some third, independent, uncontradictory entity with isolated features of (a) demonstrator and (b) subject, such as the orthodox theatre puts before us in its productions" (Brecht on Theatre 125). Since the dramatic subject ("character") can only be seen through a performance marked as "demonstration," we can never see demonstrator and subject, actor and character, as entirely independent of one another. Realistic performance elides the difference between actor and character by privileging psychological interiority, affective identity as the sign of good, "realistic" acting. Brecht's actor builds her character in the public, social circumstances of the theater. As a result, the performer's authority is independent of the text and of the action, an independence that alters her responsibility and relation to the audience: "The actress must not make the sentence her own affair, she must hand it over for criticism, she must help us to understand its causes and protest" (Brecht on Theatre 98). Reversing the performer's relation to the role becomes the first step in Brecht's refashioning of the entire theatrical exchange: "His actors weren't waiters who must serve up the meat and have their private, personal feelings treated as gross importunities. They were servants neither of the writer nor of the audience" (Messingkauf Dialogues 71).

Much as he does for the actor, Brecht requires a public performance from his audience, one that responds both to the fictive life of the dramatic character and to the material reality of the actor's performance. The "two faces overlapping" of the actor's performance reflect those of the spectator, who attends both to the dramatic fiction and to the actor's visible labor (Messingkauf Dialogues 76). The actor uses his or her "countenance as a blank sheet, to be inscribed by the gest of the body"; so too the spectator's performance responds to the immediate and acknowledged circumstances of the theater: "The audience identifies itself with the actor as being an observer, and accordingly develops his attitude of observing or looking on" (Brecht on Theatre 92–93). The individual's functional refiguration as a spectator throws into question the inter-

pretive attitudes natural to the realistic theater: empathy, for instance, is shown to emerge as a rhetorical effect of a certain kind of theatricality, rather than as something necessarily "deeper, more eternal." Brecht dialecticizes both zones of privacy produced by the realistic theater, the mysterious inner life of the actor/character and the solitary and secret freedom of the abstract spectator. Like the character's actions and the actor's work, the spectator's activity assumes the quality of a gest , an action whose meaning lies in its public significance.^[4]

Brecht's effort to stage the spectator can be seen throughout his work, in his experimental approach to playwriting, his career as a director, and his extensive, often occasional theoretical writing about the stage. To talk about the rhetoric of political theater in postwar Britain and America is necessarily to ask how Brecht's theory and practice have been challenged, extended, and refined.^[5] In part because of the immediacy and duration of the Berliner Ensemble's impact, the British theater has developed a more critical response to Brecht, a confrontation that informs the theatrical rhetoric of its own powerfully political drama. This response, though, frequently recasts Brecht's dialectical assault on the rhetoric of realism as a polemical dichotomy, and so preempts much of Brecht's real force. In one version, Brecht's theatrical and dramatic technique is read as recapitulating traditional values, and is divorced from Brecht's theater theory, which is dismissed as doctrinaire, inartistic, dull, and incapable of being realized in practice. Harold Hobson, for example, reviewing the National Theatre's 1963 "Brechtian" production of George Farquhar's classic comedy, The Recruiting Officer , takes a representative position: "Brecht was a considerable dramatist whose value lay in the tension between his genius and his theories. I will be sad if at the National Theatre we get the theories without genius" (142). Alert to Brecht's vivid theatricality, Hobson moves to contain that potentially "instructive" vigor as "entertainment," while consigning its politics to the stuffy, nondramatic realm of an unstageworthy theory. This polarity—the "public exhibition of im-

[4] As Elizabeth Wright remarks, the spectator resembles the actor insofar as "he is forced to acknowledge his split subject-hood and shown that he too is part-object, part-subject" (57).

[5] On Brecht's reception in America, see Bathrick.

mense talent pitted against a self-defeating theory"—suffuses stage criticism of Brecht in the 1960s, echoed whenever critics praise the "lyricism," the "sense of poetry and wonder" so evident in Brecht's theater at the expense of the overtly political and theoretical claims that lyricism makes on our attention (Bornemann 147, 152).

A second strategy distinguishes between Brecht's stagecraft and Brecht's playwriting—between theater and drama, rather than theater and theory. Reviewing the Berliner Ensemble production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1956, for instance, The Times found the performance to be "a triumph of theatrical collaboration; and the impression it gives is not of earnest experiment, nor of political engagement—but of a joke as big as a thunderclap." The review distinguishes stage technique from the politics that inform it, finding that the play's theatricality has more to do with "the Marx Brothers" than with Marx. Similarly, the production of Mother Courage " affords a rare aesthetic pleasure," an instance of the "triumph of team acting. . . . However unwilling we may be to enter into the spirit of thesis drama conditioned by Marxism the compulsion of the exquisite playing is not to be resisted, and we adjust our minds to the theory on which it is based as best we can." In Trumpets and Drums , what impresses the reviewer "is not the special interpretation of life which the play tries to establish. It is the practiced team work of the Berliner Ensemble and the clearness of the speaking." The triumphs of the theater, those stagey pleasures and that exquisite playing, are what prevail with the critics. The actors' political engagement with the audience and with the politics of the dramatic text are dispensable side effects of an otherwise impressive "aesthetic" experience. Brecht's influence as the bogey of boring theory and/or pietistic Marxist drama is habitually invoked whenever a play appears to gesture toward Brecht's political agenda. T. C. Worsley, for instance, complains that John Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) is "singularly careless" in construction, "perhaps deliberately so in pursuit of some Brechtian purpose." Harold Hobson similarly lauds John Arden's The Workhouse Donkey (1963) by contrasting Brecht's tendentious theater with the "freedom" of the realistic spectator: "the freedom of thought given by Brecht is, of course, illusory. By his employment of alienation he instructs his audience to think: but he clearly indicates to them what conclusion their thought should reach. This is why he is such a reassuring

dramatist. He asks the question, and supplies the answer" (Evans and Evans 119).^[6]

As Roland Barthes suggests, "in order to 'humanize' Brecht, the theoretical part of his work is discredited or at least minimized: the plays are great despite Brecht's systematic views on epic theater, the actor, alienation, etc.: here we encounter one of the basic theorems of petit-bourgeois culture, the romantic contrast between heart and head, between intuition and reflection, between the ineffable and the rational—an opposition which ultimately masks a magical conception of art" (Critical Essays 72–73). Indeed, while the Brechtian mode provides the style of choice for many recent playwrights—bare stage, episodic structure, rapid shifts in tonality, deemphasis on naturalistic psychology—its rhetorical implications have met with the kind of resistance that Barthes outlines. The political theater's open designs on the spectator move directly against the realistic theater's fiction of a disinterested, free subject, the empowered privacy of the consuming audience. As Edward Bond argues, "Political subjects in themselves do not make political theatre . . . you can have a play dealing with racism, or sexism, or fascism, and if that subject is dealt with in, let's say, an Ibsen-like way, then the audience is left with nothing to do in working on the problem; you might just as well read about the subject in a newspaper. That is not political theatre" ("British Secret" 8). True enough; yet Bond's scrupulous regard for the complex working of ideology in the theater nonetheless recapitulates a familiar critical convention where Brecht is concerned: "I rather admire Brecht, actually. I think his

[6] This effort to depoliticize theater by reifying the politics of performance—either in a suspect "theory" or in an "ideological drama"—even informs the assimilation of a "Brecht style" to the scenic vocabulary of stage design and directing. This influence can be traced in the British theater largely to the work of influential directors like William Gaskill and designers like Jocelyn Herbert, and more pervasively to Peter Hall's institution of a cool, quasi-Brechtian house style at the Royal Shakespeare Company during the late 1960s and 1970s. Brecht's theatrical style, that is, has been transformed from a rhetorical activity into an aesthetic object, a commodified "look" rather than a process of engagement with the drama and with the audience. In so doing, the rhetorical process of performance is displaced as the site of attention or of political engagement and reflection. Like the politics of the text, the politics of performance are fixed within the inert textuality of a "Brecht style," rather than within the relation between actors, the play, and the audience.

naivety covers painful knowledge. The nearest thing to a Brecht play in English is the Victorian melodrama, with its wicked landlord and pure labourer's daughter and all the rest of it" ("Drama" 13). Bond, in a sense, recalls the stigma attached to "thesis drama" by William Archer, Brander Matthews, and others at the turn of the century, for he locates Brecht's politics in the moral structure of the drama rather than in the activity of its production. Like many of his contemporaries, Bond here seems nearly to echo the realistic theater's marginalization of political theater as "theater for instruction." as eccentric to the stage's natural purpose, to provide "theater for pleasure." Bond's ambivalence reflects, perhaps, the pervasive and ongoing influence of realistic rhetoric in the theater, an influence most powerfully felt not in terms of dramatic or production style, but at just the point contested by Brecht: its production of the audience.^[7]

To carve a place for political theater has required the most delicate negotiation of Brecht, because the private freedom of the spectator is the political theater's principal point of attack. In practice, the rhetoric of political theater has worked to stage the spectator's performance as part of the point of the spectacle. In Britain, political theater has often adopted the strategy of John Osborne's The Entertainer , juxtaposing popular performance traditions with the conventions of the legitimate stage as a way of foregrounding the audience's performance.^[8] The music hall frame of the play—each scene is given a "number" on the bill, and scenes of Archie Rice's family life are interrupted by his turns at the "local Empire"—images an allegory of imperial decline, while it enacts the process

[7] Bond's ambivalent response to Brecht is typical of a generation of political dramatists, whose dramatic and theatrical aims seem close to Brecht's. David Hare, for instance, rephrases Hobson when distinguishing his own goals from the impression he has answered before the play has begun" ("A Lecture" 63). And Howard Brenton, who adapted Brecht's Galileo for the National Theatre in 1980, nonetheless claims that Brecht's dramatic "influence is wholly to the bad" ("Petrol Bombs" 14). On Brenton's work with "the great post-war play," a "socialist classic," and on the National Theatre production, see Hiley, Theatre at Work .

[8] On the theater's use of popular and "populist" culture, see Edgar. For a reading of the dramatic use of music hall, and of the attitude toward the working-class audience it embodies, see Harrop.

of ideological formation in postwar Britain. Within the play, class interests are objectified and polarized. Archie's tatty hymns to a stripper-Britannia both denude British imperial authority and assert the pieties of a bygone nationalism for the consumption of a socially captive audience. As Kenneth Tynan remarked, "With his blue patter and jingo songs he [Archie] is a licensed pedlar of emotional dope to every audience in Britain" (Evans and Evans 59). Yet Tynan's comment betrays a desire to see the play as about music hall, rather than as using music hall as a strategy to place the Royal Court audience within the political process of performance. To see "the popular culture and theatre that Britain lost with the music halls" (Bryden) as the play's subject works to preserve the audience's distance from the spectacle of lower-class life, a freedom that the play marks as the sign of class power. Archie clearly doesn't sell "to every audience in Britain." His audiences are principally the working classes, who—like Mick, the son lost in the Suez—are both instructed and seduced by this impoverished vision of empire. Brother Bill and Graham Dodd, on the other hand—as "well dressed, assured, well educated" as the audience ("If you can't recognize [them], it's for one reason only")—would not be caught dead either in Archie's "Empire" or in the Suez fiasco. They have "an all-defying inability to associate themselves with anyone in circumstances even slightly dissimlar to their own" (Entertainer 83).

By casting the audience, even briefly, in the unfamiliar "circumstances" of the music hall public, Osborne traces the covert ideological process that is otherwise displaced by the divisions of class. The "popular culture" of the music hall is usually taken as an emblem of the unifying interests of the nation, a view represented in the play by the generation of Billy Rice and George Robey: "We had our own style, our own songs—and we were all English. What's more, we spoke English. It was different. We all knew what the rules were" (81). Perhaps it really was different. In The Entertainer , though, music hall has lost its innocent populism. By using music hall to insert the Royal Court spectator within the rhetorical design of the "local Empire," The Entertainer dramatizes the reappropriation of resistant "popular" entertainments like music hall by the ruling class: Brother Bill becomes Archie's audience, authorizing the "emotional dope" he peddles elsewhere. Brother Bill, his

class, his Empire, and his audience are all nakedly "out for good old Number One" (86).^[9]

The drama of the 1970s and 1980s follows the lead offered by The Entertainer , and the theater has worked in a variety of ways to bring the spectator into a more urgent and actual relation to the stage. Osborne's exposure of the function of class in British imperial expansion has its echo in the pervasively historical cast of political drama in the postwar era, particularly in the important series of plays that examine the war and its immediate aftermath in England. In Howard Brenton's Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play, the spectators themselves undertake a critical replaying of the drama of recent history. The most striking formal feature of The Entertainer —its use of popular music hall in a "straight" play—provides another common strategy, as playwrights investigate the power of genre to refashion the spectator's relation to the stage. The fragmentation of the apparatus of stage production also sustains a principal strategy in much feminist theater, which represents the relations of theatrical realism as themselves complicit in the politics of gender oppression; here I consider the gendering of the spectator in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine and Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends . These plays only touch on the range of subjects and strategies that the political theater currently brings to the stage, but I hope they will suggest how the theater has mapped the theoretical terrain opened by Brecht, the politicization of our performance in the theater. For it is, finally, in transforming the field of theatrical relations that the theater subjects its own rhetoric to scrutiny:

We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of

[9] The relationship between a performance of Osborne's play and music hall is dialogic rather than nostalgic. As Fredric Jameson argues, "the stress on the dialogical then allows us to reread or rewrite the hegemonic forms themselves; they also can be grasped as a process of the reappropriation and neutralization, the cooptation and class transformation, the cultural universalization, of forms which originally expressed the situation of 'popular,' subordinate, or dominated groups" (The Political Unconscious 86). This process is revealed in part by the fact that Frank's song in Number Nine, which was "both booed and cheered on the opening night," was "dropped for the west-end transfer" (Sinfield 261).

human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
(Brecht on Theatre 190)

Breaking the Frame of History:
Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play

A powerful gambit for dramatizing the spectator's share is the renegotiation of "history" on the stage. Despite the predominance of lush costume drama as the standard for historical dramatization on film and television, the standard practice of theatricalized history has become much more fragmentary, audience-directed, and disruptive. Plays as diverse as Arthur Kopit's Indians (1969), Howard Brenton's Scott of the Antarctic (1971), Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom (1976), David Hare's Plenty (1978), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), Pam Gems's Queen Christina (1977), Trevor Griffiths's Occupations (1970), Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme (1985), and Carlos Morton's Rancho Hollywood (published 1979) might be taken as instances of the range of contemporary historical dramaturgy. History is no longer disclosed to the audience as a fait accompli. In restaging history, the drama invites and often compels the audience to play its part in the reconstruction of this narrative, and of the social order it represents and sustains.

Since his early plays for the Portable Theatre, Howard Brenton has consistently turned to the problems of dramatized history, how the staging of history traces the sign of performance in the material events of the past. Christie's horrific exhumation from a pen of crumpled newspaper in Christie in Love (1969) is only one in a series of images in Brenton's scrutiny of historical process: of the function of individualism in Scott of the Antarctic and Bloody Poetry (1984); of history and class behavior in Weapons of Happiness (1976); of the relation between myth and history in The Romans in Britain (1980); of the "news" in Pravda (1985, written with David Hare); even of the possibility of utopia in Greenland (1988). Brenton's continued experimentation with sites of performance—the ice rink of Scott , for instance—and with various experimental or fringe companies suggests that staging "history" is only part of his larger effort to recharge the political interaction between stage and audience. Two

of Brenton's most direct engagements with the problem of historical dramatization, Hitler Dances (1972) and The Churchill Play (1974), resemble his more overtly "public plays" in their attempt to articulate "the space between people" that "defines the actual physical theatre, the space between the audience itself and the actors" as "an almost moral force in the writing and in the presentation" ("Petrol Bombs" 10). Replaying the war and its immediate aftermath, Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play interrogate the reenactment, consumption, and transmission of "history" as theater.

Hitler Dances is striking not so much for the formal experimentation of its dramatic design as for its use of innovative theatrical procedures. Conceived as a workshop by the Traverse Theatre of Edinburgh, Hitler Dances originated as a series of exercises in which the actors confronted their experience and recollection of wartime England. Several of the actors, however, shared Carole Hayman's limited familiarity with the war ("I know almost nothing about it," she said), and most of the actors' memories were diffuse, mere affectual traces: "'The line I say about my father having been shot down in France was certainly true. I was born three months after his death. . . . We are left with this terrible residue of our families having been twisted and decimated by events which took place before we were born.'" As the performers themselves recognized, their war exists neither as history nor as memory, but only in the imagery of popular media bent on producing a "total myth about the Second World War." Wartime events have been so fully absorbed into the images of the screen that the ordinary behavior of their parents has become "inconceivable" (Ansorge).^[10]

To confront the "seemingly dead and buried subject" of history and to present this confrontation as part of the actors' play, Brenton sought a theatrical image that would enable the actors to use their individual responses to the war as part of their performance. Brenton found this performative frame while on tour with the Portable Theatre:

I saw children in Eindhoven, which was flattened twice during the war, first by the Germans and then by the Allies, and is now the home of the world headquarters of the Philips Electrical Company. And at night in Eindhoven, the huge Philips sign, like a weird em-

[10] On Brenton's treatment of post-war Britain, see Bull.

blem, flashes everywhere in the sky. I saw a bomb-site there with children playing on it, while we were touring Fruit, and there the idea was lodged in my mind, because it was like children playing on this heap of rubble—history. And the idea of a German soldier coming out of the ground became meaningful.
("Petrol Bombs" 14)

The scene provides the play's core improvisation: a group of children unearth a dead German soldier, who comes to life and, before beginning his march back to Germany, tells the story of a brave woman's resistance activity in France, a story taken from the 1958 film Carve Her Name with Pride . Each of the roles provides a field of playful inquiry, for the actors each take the opportunity to enact several major parts—German soldier, resistance fighter, Nazi officer, modern child. The actors continually adjust the relationship between personal and public history through roleplaying, revising themselves in their relation to history through the complex engagement and disengagement offered by the mask of "character."

Hitler Dances invokes the performative rhetoric of the participatory theater of the late 1960s and 1970s as a structuring and heuristic device. The "poor theater" enabled Brenton to sidestep the standards of British Brecht—the "Bond-Gaskill-Jocelyn Herbert" tradition—and to strike a "more emotional, uncool" stance toward the audience ("Petrol Bombs" 14). This strategy may at first seem unpromising. Although the Artaud-Grotowski style of American participatory theater has an aggressively "emotional, uncool" edge, its characteristic emphasis on the "paradise now" of unmediated self-presence for actors and audiences seems at odds with the decentered character-subjects of an openly Marxist theater like Brenton's. Even though "history" of a kind appears in Spalding Gray's performance narratives, in the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 (1969), in the Living Theater's Paradise Now (1968), and in the Kennedy-King assassination sections of the Open Theater/Van Itallie The Serpent (1968), this history is either strongly colored as personal recollection or immediately rekeyed in the register of myth. Moreover, the exploratory-confessional mode of acting in this theater would seem to frustrate the goal of reinterpreting history as a public narrative formed by a powerful cultural machinery. In order to represent "history" as a collective construction but not as personal mythology, Hitler Dances modifies the rhetoric of participatory

theater, dramatizing the actors' confrontation with the materials of history while repressing the zone of personal subjectivity—actors' and characters'—as critical to the dramatic action or the audience's interpretation. The play suspends the defining moment of such participatory acting, the self-consciously charismatic identification of actor and character. Instead, the play requires acting in a variety of modes, and indeed represents a variety of performance forms, drawn from television and film as well as theater, to suggest that, even in live performance, "history" is a function of its means of representation. History is always already written, as memory, as literature, as television, and as film; in Hitler Dances, we await its investiture in the bodies of the performers.

Hitler Dances refigures the "total act" required of actors in the participatory mode by striking a dialectical relationship between actor and "character." The play opens with the actors masking and costuming the first actor to play "Hans"—Kevin Costello, in the Traverse production. The investment of Kevin in the role of "Hans" is accompanied by two frames of acting. In one, the actors recite the narrative underlying the scene: "At the end of the Second World War, the German soldiers walked home." In the second, the actors respond to the character of Kevin/"Hans." To play the death of a German soldier, on the last day of the war, the actors mask and dress Kevin as "Hans," cower back from him, and then proceed to indulge in a ritualized frenzy of "Bosch" beating. The play insists that all actors participate in characterizing Hans as the stereotypical Nazi villain that Kevin/"Hans" in fact becomes: "Hot black blood sausage! Sauerkraut, steaming! Black coffee boiling! Beer all frothy!" (3). To be addressed as a Nazi soldier fundamentally interrupts the actor's self-presence, requiring a reorientation to the body ("KEVIN, both hands to his mouth, fingers exploring inside his cheeks" 3), to the voice, and to the society on- and offstage. No one actor is responsible for the "character" of the Nazi soldier; all subsequently "in turn impose tiredness, cold" on him, and the actor modifies his performance accordingly (5). Since each of the male actors will play "Hans" and each of the women will play "Violette," characterization in Hitler Dances avoids both the calculated psychological interiority of realistic performance and the more spontaneous and charismatic possession of participatory theater. Although Hitler Dances retains the idiom of "poor theater," it shows both actor and character in their social relations.

The actors enter the field of history as a field of play. History speaks only a dead language, as Kevin stands with the "Hans" costume at his feet, speaking to it as though it could explain the significance of a once-familiar lexicon, "Blitzkrieg—Warsaw—shell shock—pattern bombing, Rotterdam Dresden Hamburg" (7). Yet the war's erasure from our language is offset by its reconstitution in other media. Much as he juxtaposes "Hans's" resurrection with a television horror show, Brenton juxtaposes the film heroine of Carve Her Name with Pride with her stage reenactment, a conflation of narrative, enacted, and film versions of the war that signals the transformation of history into the pastiche of popular images. The film, as Variety noted in 1958, "pays tribute to the real life exploits of Violette Szabo, a beautiful young woman who became a British cloak-and-dagger agent in France and won a posthumous George Cross after being tortured and executed in Ravensbruck camp." Notable for an understated "ordinariness," the film nonetheless emphasizes "the brand of courage which lifted an ordinary girl, with all her fears and her emotions, to the stars, and flecked her with glory." The film devotes a leisurely development to Violette's relation with her lover Etienne. Brenton eviscerates this motivation from the play's narrative, representing the film's action in a foreshortened, cartoon-like idiom: meeting, love at first sight (with cymbal clash), whirlwind romance, and wedding in a few brief minutes of stage time. The play further distances the film narrative by having the actresses both narrate and enact Violette's actions, and by seating a working-class couple onstage who watch and comment on Violette's progress as though it were a television program. Something like the opening sequence of Jean-Claude Van Itallie's The Serpent , in which actors mime scenes from the familiar film of the Kennedy assassination, here film "history" becomes the text of the the actors' performance.

Hitler Dances invokes the romantic heroine of the film but displaces her personal motivation as the focus of our response. Brenton underplays character and emphasizes the action by having all the women of the cast play "Violette," and by foregrounding their performance as openly theatrical play, rather than as possession. Throughout the play, the actress uses third-person narration to disperse the "subject" of characterization ("And these were the thoughts of Violette, and she became a heroine" 41), an interruption

conveyed in her performance as well. In scene 13, for example, Carole and Amaryllis discuss the random violence of contemporary life, the prospect of sudden rape, the suicide of friends, the prominence of grotesque mutilation in recent films. Suddenly, "A bright spot slams on ," and while Amaryllis narrates, Carole performs "Violette": "I wanna kill a German!" (43). Here, the attempt to translate the inconceivable behavior of a previous generation into a conceivable modern equivalent is undertaken in social rather than personal terms. "Violette" is not given an internalized motive; the performance of the actress is keyed to the external context of contemporary social life.

The relationship between history, film, and the stage is dramatized in the play's final scenes, in which the torture scenes of Carve Her Name with Pride are replayed as black Nazi farce ("Ja wohl donnerundblitzen zieg heil. . . . Ludwig Van Beethoven Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" 67). The play suggests that our knowledge of historical events is inevitably interceded by the images with which we identify the past, images continually appropriated to new purposes. As Sabin/"Keiffer," Violette's guard, remarks, "Nazi Gestapo Torturer Victim. After the War, torturer and victim will be seen as something sexy" (73). Keiffer's interrogation of Violette points up the inadequacy of a history that fails to acknowledge its basis in ideology, and reveals how the film transforms the history it claims to represent:

Please hear why the Gestapo never tortured you, in the Avenue Foch. Why that scene in the film, never took place. Because . . . Of administrative confusion. They lost your papers, Violette. That is why you were never sent for again, by Hans Josef Keiffer. A small bow.
(74)

Hitler Dances dramatizes the relationship between history and its representation: "Oh Vi, there's no 'magnificent gesture' that can't be defiled. Mucked. Messed. Believe me" (74). Irving Wardle, reviewing the play for The Times , remarks that Brenton's refiguration of history is at once brilliant and inchoate: Brenton seems to "fall into the trap of being engulfed in the myths he is trying to manipulate," to the degree that the interinvolving of parody, play, history, myth, horror show, and kitsch becomes "too intricate and unrestrained." The point of Hitler Dances , though, is not so much to parody or defile the magnificent gestures of the war but to open

those gestures—and the gestures that recreate them onstage—to our inspection. This is the question posed by the play's theatrical rhetoric and by its unresolved, open, inconclusive dramatic structure: does the juxtaposition of performative modes enable a revision of history by dramatizing the variety of ways—live acting, film, television—in which it has been encoded, or does it more simply provide what Fredric Jameson terms a pastiche , a history subordinated to the signifiers of style?

To Jameson, pastiche locates the postmodern aesthetic firmly in the moment of consumer capitalism: the "transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents" illustrates "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve" ("Postmodernism" 125). Hitler Dances exhumes the past as theater, as parody, play, myth, horror show, TV show, and as kitsch, but as pastiche the performance provides no frame of value or reference, no means of ordering those images, of assimilating them to a mode of access to the past. This may be in part the result of the play's performance rhetoric, its brittle conjunction of the mode of Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theater"—which casts the audience as a present witness—and a more traditionally realistic notion of the spectator as voyeur. Hitler Dances invites the audience to consider the process of history and the complicity of entertainment in the representation of historical "fact." Oddly enough, though, the audience's play—unlike the actors'—remains largely vicarious; our own relation to the actors' exposure remains outside the process of history onstage, a notable departure from the environmental aesthetic of the Performance Group, Grotowski, and so on. Hitler Dances casts the spectator outside the frame of performance, and so outside the frame of history. We stand before or above the materials of culture rather than making cultural history even in our performance as audience, as perhaps the actors themselves have done. In this sense the proscenium operates as a "moral force," but largely by intervening between the drama of history, the stage of its production, and the audience in the theater.

The Churchill Play undertakes a more direct examination of the

work of political theater in a society where theater is marginalized as "recreation" and made within an explicit hierarchy of power relations—that is, in a society something like our own. By creating a dramatic frame for the rewriting of history in the prisoners' "Churchill play," Brenton addresses not so much the acting of political theater but its function in a specific social context, one that embraces the performers, the onstage audience, and the theatrical audience they come to represent. The Churchill Play provides an exemplary critique of historical drama as political theater.

The Churchill Play opens "Back 'ere! Inna nineteen-bloody-six-ties," at the funeral of Winston Churchill, the catafalque flanked by an army private, a marine, an airman, and a seaman. After some bitter discussion of Churchill, a knocking is heard, the bier shudders, and Churchill bursts out, cigar at the ready "Onto . . . Mah History's stage," raving about "England! Y' stupid old woman. Clapped out. Undeserving. Unthankful. After all I did for you" (9–13).^[11] This crude, fiercely funny scene is suddenly interrupted when Churchill begins to flirt with the sailor ("Give us a kiss, Jolly Jack Tar"), at which point the lights come up on the flanks of the stage, to reveal that we are not the play's immediate audience. The players are surrounded by armed guards and are performing before the officers of a concentration camp, Camp Churchill, somewhere in England.

This is a stunning moment, a condensed vignette of how history—and its theater—encodes a structure of political power in the relationship between stage and audience. The play opens in much the way that we expect of political theater, with a rewriting of the myths of the past in an apparently Brechtian style. Within moments, the apparent freedom of that activity is sharply circumscribed by its audience, its patrons and captors. The Churchill Play represents the "moral force" of the relationship between stage and audience, dramatizing the function of political theater in a society where theatrical performance is at once an act of submission and of transgression. Those who live to please must please to

[11] Page references are to the 1974 edition, but readers should consult the version of The Churchill Play collected in Brenton's Plays: One for several revisions made in the text for its 1978 RSC revival. On the 1988 revival, see Lustig.

live: in the economy of the contemporary theater, the gesture of instruction must be contained as pleasure. "The men put the play together themselves. It is recreation," claims the liberal physician Captain Thompson, defending the play to the camp's commander, Colonel Ball (18). As "recreation" the play falls under Thompson's purview, as part of his mission to care for the physical and mental health of the inmates. Like all their activities, the prisoners' recreation works to legitimate their captors, for the play is being rehearsed before the camp's officers to preview it for its real audience, a Select Committee of the House of Commons, which is looking into the recreational facilities of the camp. As Ball suggests, the play serves to empower its invisible audience, not its players: "Water it down, cut it about. . . . Put a few . . . patriotic remarks . . . About England . . . In it. That is an order" (19). The performance necessarily defines a "moral force" between stage and audience, for the prisoners' performance is figured as the sign of their "moral" and righteous subjection: "I mean what are we? Performing bears? To stand up in our chains?" (36). Contained as pleasure, theater is identified as submission, regardless of its revisionary instructive content.

As an allegory of the function of political theater in the wider theatrical economy, The Churchill Play implies that the performance environment inevitably invests the drama with its own ideological pressure. Whether political theater can reshape the dynamics of the realistic stage is the principal challenge offered by the prisoners' production of their "Churchill play" in act 4. First, in a strategy reminiscent of Genet's The Blacks , the play's production becomes a diversion, a part of the prisoners' insurrection. Moreover, the prisoner-players foreground the fact that the materials of theater—words in particular—are already marked with the sign of their subjection. The captor-audience determines the significance and consequences of any verbal act; the audience has the power to render any word as the sign of dissent, a punishable offense. As a result, the political stage must avail itself of means of expression marginal to the codes of the "legitimate" stage, even if they seem—as perhaps they must—to be inarticulate or incomprehensible. As Furry announces to the audience, when "there's a dirty word, in play . . . Stead of yer gerrin' dirty word in yer face, I hit my gong. . . . So (He hits the dustbin lid ) to you all" (67).

The audience deprives the political stage of its language; as the prisoners' "Churchill play" demonstrates, the audience erases the politics of history as well. The "Churchill play" repudiates postwar history in order to dramatize the use of history to enforce the privileges of class. When, for example, the "Churchill" character recalls being "dazzled" by his reception in Glasgow in 1945, his recollections are immediately offset by the prisoners' account of the city, which details the extent of the devastation and the scope of their suffering. "Of twelve thousand dwellings, seven only hit. Of forty-seven thousand souls, thirty-five thousand homeless. From that time on, for many months, but for a few, the whole population went to the moor at night" (72).^[12] Ronald Hayman complains that Brenton's "war never eclipsed the class war," but this is really only half the truth (British Theatre 97). As the earlier scenes between Thompson and Sergeant Baxter suggest, the class war continues but has been concealed from public view by Churchill's rhetorical integration of class interests in a national mythology. Churchill's image of a unified "Island Race" urges a common national interest, but in practice this myth reduces the working classes to minstrel-show puppets, acted on by historical forces that they cannot presume to change. The "cloth caps and waving flags" that define the working classes from Churchill's perspective are as much a prison as Camp Churchill itself: their experience, too, is unseen, trivial, and forgotten.

"Historical truth. In all 'er vulnerability" (47) is less at issue here than the process by which history is made. Furry lowers a white sheet with the legend "We can take it, Guv. Give it 'em back." On the screen, the prisoners project scenes taking us "Back through England"—Churchill's funeral, the first Wilson government, Eden, Suez, Potsdam, Yalta, and so on—to December 29, 1940, the night of the second great fire. The central scene of their play concerns one of Churchill's many visits to the East End. Mike's "Uncle Ern and Annie," working-class Londoners left homeless by the bombing, are visited by Churchill, who narrates

[12] Like that of many of his contemporaries, Brenton's view of the war has been shaped by Angus Calder's The People's War . Here, for instance, Brenton transcribes two passages from Calder's study; see 579–80, and 210. See also Johnstone, and Sinfield chapter 2.

the scene: "And I saw these good people, at the side of the crater. And they cried out to me":

ANNIE: Look. He's crying for us.

ERNIE: Good old Winnie.

ANNIE: We thought you'd come and see us.

ERNIE: We can take it.

ANNIE: Give it 'em back.
(79)

Acts of sacrifice and solidarity among otherwise competing class interests were critical to British survival, but official history transforms the working classes into "doll-like " figures, subjected by the perspective that was privileged and qualified for historical narrative: Churchill's. When the prisoners restage the scene, Ern and Annie are shown attempting to salvage a life from the rubble, but this time it is Churchill who appears to them as unreal, like a "myth. Standing there. Like he'd come down from a cinema screen, out of a film show." Ernie also recalls making a different speech to Churchill: "And I said, I swear to this day I said . . . We can take it. . . . But we just might give it back to you one day" (80).

"And in his book on war he wrote it down as . . . Give it 'em back ": much as Churchillian history embodies a gesture of legitimation, so the prisoners' play both revises history and stages an act of social aggression. The Union Jack curtain rises to reveal the play's finale: the sergeant bound and the Select Committee captive under the watchful eyes of machine-gun–bearing prisoners ready to break out. To present revised images of history is not enough. A political theater must wrest the stage from the physical and ideological control of the social audience. Yet despite seizing the stage, the prisoners finally have "Nowhere to break out to," since the world beyond the camp is itself a prison (89). In a play whose most brilliant device is the parodic restaging of recent history, this static ending seems anticlimactic. The Churchill Play appears to suggest that political theater itself has "nowhere to break out to": the best that it can offer is to open a narrow fissure in the machinery of social control. The play invites the audience to consider the process of history and the complicity of drama, entertainment, and theatrical production in its representation. Finally to alter the process of historical drama, as Brecht suggests, will require a transformation of "the field itself." Something like Brenton's prisoners, political drama will have to stage the

spectators, as a means of disarming them and of altering the field of social relations inside and outside the theater.

History and the Frame of Genre:
Laughter! and Poppy

The Churchill Play offers a parable of the theater in a politically repressive society, a parable that allegorizes the more indistinct means by which our own theater is governed. Much of the argument of The Churchill Play is, in this sense, also directed against the hegemony of realistic theater and the social order it represents: the prisoners' play not only invokes the disruptive discontinuities of Brechtian drama, it provides the weapon that discloses the captor-audience and, for a moment at least, delivers it from the darkness into the prisoners' hands. Representing the techniques of Brechtian theater onstage, The Churchill Play illustrates a staple gambit in the rhetoric of political theater. For in plays like The Entertainer , Theatre Workshop's Oh, What a Lovely War (1963), Trevor Griffiths's Comedians (1975), Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979)—and two plays I want to discuss here, Peter Barnes's Laughter! (1978) and Peter Nichols's Poppy (1982)—the drama begins by refashioning a familiar stage genre and the rhetoric it embodies, as a way to dramatize the audience's performance.

"Like Brecht's Galileo, Jonson was an intellectual sensualist": writing of a playwright he has admired, imitated, and adapted for the stage, Peter Barnes might easily be speaking of his own work in the theater ("Still standing" 206). Like Jonson's drama, Barnes's plays—The Ruling Class (1968), The Bewitched (1974), Red Noses (1985)—burst with a stagey vitality, a baroque delight in extravagant language and incident, a shrewd skepticism, and a ferocious moral and sensuous intelligence. I want to pause here, though, over only part of one play, Barnes's most problematic restaging of history, the "Auschwitz" section of Laughter! Barnes's depiction of the bureaucracy of genocide in Laughter! has been rightly criticized for "setting out to wring humour from a subject like Auschwitz" (Hiley, "Liberating" 16). We might ask, though, whether the subject of Laughter! is Auschwitz, or something else, the audience it provokes to laughter. To read Laughter! as about Auschwitz alone is crucially to misread the play's theatrical design, which depends in

large measure on the way that popular performance genres inscribe a kind of activity for the audience in the performance itself. Unlike plays working within the realistic stage/audience division, Laughter! stages the spectator's performance as part of its critique of history. Laughter! places the audience before the spectacle of the holocaust, and identifies our performance as its theatrical—and historical—cause.

It may be useful to compare Laughter! with more widely disseminated treatments of "comical" Nazis, such as Chaplin's The Great Dictator , the "Springtime for Hitler" spoof in The Producers , or the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes . Recall the TV series for a moment: the easygoing and omnicompetent GIs continually outwit their captors, apparently remaining in prison from week to week only for the purpose of humiliating the Reich. The series rewrites the war as farce, a matter of much irritation in the mid-1960s to many veterans of the war, the POW camps, and the death camps. The sitcom genre articulates a powerful postwar ideology, one that replaces historical and political causality with an ethical motive, the effortless success of the American "character": those casual and clever, regular guys somehow overcome all obstacles, not least the series's troubling setting and subject matter, mostly by making us laugh—"I see NUTTINK," indeed.

This is some remove from Barnes's savage farce, which works to expose the conventions of comedy as a politically neutralizing device, complicit in the construction—literally, since the play takes place in a requisitions office—of an Auschwitz, a Dachau, a Buchenwald. In the prologue of the play, the Author delivers an impassioned tirade against laughter as the "ally of tyrants" but is defeated, in his efforts to "root it out," by the machinery of vaudeville—his whirling bowtie, squirting flower, and elusive pants provoke a laughter that his lecture can't stifle. In the "Auschwitz" section, Barnes extends this dissonance by characterizing the Nazis through a range of familiar comic devices and stereotypes. The Nazis' pratfalls, their Hitler jokes, their mania for "heiling," and so forth, become a kind of schtick. Barnes broadens his critique of laughter by repeatedly associating it with other kinds of conventionalized response. The bureaucrats, for example, speak in a kind of officialese—the play opens with Cranach's dictation: "WVHA Amt C1 (Building) to WVHA Amt D1/1. Your reference ADS/MNO our

reference EZ 14/102/01. Copies WVHA Amt D IV/2, Amt D IV/4: RSHA OMIII: Reich Ministry PRV 24/6D" (48). Barnes's Nazis are compulsively orderly and neat, and in their concern for propriety they most seem to rival Wilde's Cecily and Gwendolen, and generally to recall comedy of manners:

GOTTLEB: According to Hoflich of the "Schwarzes Korps" it is customary when Heiling Hitler to raise the right arm at an angle so the palm of the hand is visible.

CRANACH: Hoflich also wrote "if one encounters a person socially inferior, when Heiling Hitler, then the right arm is raised only to eye-level, so the palm of the hand is hidden."
(377)

A familiar situation, a familiar slur, a familiar laugh; as in Hogan's Heroes, such comic obsessions work to displace the more troublesome facts of anti-Semitism and genocide.

If laughter—our laughter—is the ally of tyrants, Barnes must dramatize the social consequences of laughter in the events of the stage. To accomplish this, Barnes juxtaposes the evasions of laughter against the confrontational seeing of theater. First, Gottleb identifies the evasive language of the bureaucracy: "CP3(m) described in regulation E(5) is the new concrete flue for the crematoriums" (401). He then opens the eyes of the bureaucrats, and of the audience, "to the sights, sounds, smells of Auschwitz." The filing cabinets lining the upstage area part, bodies spill forward onto the stage, and two horrific figures step out of the smoke, wearing gas masks and rubber suits: "As they clump forward, they hit the dummies with thick wooden clubs. Each time they do so there is the splintering sound of a skull being smashed " (405).

This is no laughing matter, but the play's bureaucrats desperately attempt to transform it into one, in order once again to "hide behind the words and symbols" of their self-protective administrative jargon. Indeed, Cranach leads Stroop and Else in a bureaucratic chant, the ritual effacement of the dead, "Future cases of death shall be given consecutive Roman numbers with subsidiary Arabic numbers. The first case Roman numeral I/1 the second the Roman numeral I/2 . . ." (407). As he does so, the files are closed, and all four characters return to the comic business of the play's opening: Gottleb (having been thrown from the office) "pops his head in " and "deliberately sticks his Hitler moustache back on his upper lip  . . .—HAAA.

Top that!" (408–09). Barnes restores the brittle vaudeville of the opening of the scene, but the consequences of the audience's laughter have been brought into view. Laughter at the comic Nazis is reconstituted as a sign of complicity with their project, an acceptance of conventional "words and symbols"—the comic conventions of the stage—and so of the work they do. The bureaucrats' language, the manipulative devices of comedy, and the audience's theatrical response lead to a common, final solution: the gas chamber.

Cranach proceeds to consider how centuries to come will explain the ruins at Auschwitz: "They'll find it hard to believe they weren't heroic visionaries, mighty rulers, but ordinary people, people who liked people, people like them, you, me, us." People like you, me, us. With Cranach's final word, the circle of laughter is complete. "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser 162); only when our "imaginary" absence from the dramatic spectacle has been reconstituted as an authorizing complicity are we prepared for Barnes's epilogue: the vaudeville routine of "the Boffo Boys of Birkenau, Abe Bimko and Hymie Bierberstein," played while they expire under the gas. Barnes wants to root out the laughter that allows "anything" to be "possible," and the obscene fantasy of a vaudeville routine in the gas chamber is Barnes's attempt to "dramatize" both cause and effect, action and consequence. It might plausibly be said that Barnes shows the Jews going happily to their fate, responsible for their own victimization; such a reading, I think, misconceives how the interpretive relations of performance structure the meaning of this event.^[13] For in the epilogue, the comedians

[13] Barnes has suggested that the play questions "the old cliché that runs if we can laugh at our miseries and at the injustices that afflict us, somehow laughing alleviates those injustices and those miseries and makes it bearable." He continues, "One of the reasons the second part of Laughter is about Auschwitz is because the Jews have a great reputation of being able to laugh and make the most marvelous one-line jokes about their situation. I wonder if one of the reasons they have been persecuted (not the only reason of course) and haven't done anything about it is because of their ability to laugh at it, laugh at the terrors that have afflicted them" (Bly and Wager 46). I want to be very clear about this: I have no desire to salvage the scene that Barnes describes here, in which the Jews' laughter, rather than the Nazis' brutality or the Allies' indifference, is said to cause the holocaust. The issue is whether the dramatic scene that Barnes describes is the scene that is produced in the theater.

don't laugh. Onstage, Laughter! shows the Boffo Boys performing for our entertainment, not to soothe their own fears. Surely it's not funny; yet the scene presents us with the essential situation of stand-up comedy—comic, joke, audience. The Boffo Boys don't "slay" us, "kill" us with their routine. We execute them by assenting to the role of comic audience; the final cause of the scene is less their joking than the audience's potential for laughter. Representing the idiom of the comic, Laughter! stages our laughter as a gest, an action figured in a social and historical framework. Subject to the performance, we become the subject of the drama, and of the history it brings to the stage. The passive audience becomes the author of the spectacle of genocide.

Laughter! stages the spectator as captor, dramatizes the ideological work performed by the conventions of comedy and the laughter they channel. Peter Nichols's Poppy stages the spectator by examining how the working of a theatrical genre duplicates and extends the genres of social action. Poppy concerns the economy of the Opium Wars, England's promotion of Indian opium in China as a means of securing the tea trade and reversing a damaging trade imbalance. In the play, an impoverished young aristocrat, Dick, contracts to marry into a wealthy mercantile family. To prove his business sense he takes a trading assignment in the Far East, accompanied by his faithful servant Jack and his lovelorn ward Sally. When he arrives in India, he finds out that he has engaged to trade opium, and that he must open the China market as well. Dick swallows his scruples, and we see him pursuing dangerous expeditions, negotiating trade agreements in the splendid Manchu court, and getting caught up in the fighting as the British brutally quell Chinese resistance and sack the Summer Palace. His moral compromise eventually exacts its price, for Sally—without a fortune, an unthinkable match for Dick—becomes an addict and must be married off to rustic Jack before both are sent off to America. For his pains, Dick is rewarded by the queen and finally marries the merchant's daughter.

The foreign setting, the class tension suffusing personal relations the ritual snobbery of the Chinese aristocrats and the British traders, the background of actual events: as an episode in Victorian colonial expansion, the Opium Wars invite the plush, cultivated soap-opera treatment of Masterpiece Theatre . Nichols, though, designs the play's political substance more directly in the relations of

performance, for Poppy examines the imperial economy in the rhetoric of the quintessential Victorian theatrical genre, the English pantomime. Queen Victoria—who, as the panto "good fairy," assumes a variety of guises in the play—appropriately defines the conventions of English pantomime, explaining them to her principal adversary in Poppy, the Chinese Emperor:

  I fear I must detain
You yet a minute longer to explain
That regular immortal intervention
's a vital part of pantomime convention.
Another is a superfluity
Of blatant sexual ambiguity.
A man, for instance, always plays a Dame—
Yet he may have a son who by the same
Perverse tradition struts on high-heeled shoes
And flaunts an ample bosom . . .
(31)

Dick is of course Dick Whittington, "principal boy" of the classic Christmas panto, now the decayed descendant of the famous Lord Mayor. Played by a woman, he is paired with the panto "dame," the dowager Lady Whittington (Dodo), played by a man, and accompanied by his faithful servant Jack Idle, his ward Sally, and their blue panto ponies.^[14] Along with Aladdin, Cinderella, The Babes

[14] For details see Coveney. The traditional legend, which dates from the sixteenth century, is a parable of capitalist investment. Dick Whittington leaves rural poverty for service in London. He comes into the employ of the merchant Fitzwarren, and his happiness is clouded only by regular beatings from the cook, and by the mice and rats that infest his bedroom. For a penny, he buys a cat, which rids him of the vermin. The merchant, preparing an argosy, invites each of his servants to invest some property. Since Whittington has only the cat to invest, he does so; the vermin return, the cook's beatings worsen, and Dick sadly leaves London. Meanwhile, the ship lands in Barbary to trade. The captain and crew are feasted by the Barbary king, but before they can eat, hordes of mice and rats swarm over the feast and consume it. The captain strikes a deal with the king, and when Dick's cat drives away the vermin, the king buys the cat and all the goods on the ship as well, paying "ten times as much money as the ship's whole cargo." When Dick changes his mind and returns to London, he discovers that his investment has produced a huge return, and that he is wealthy. With such good fortune, Dick grows up to become the renowned Lord Mayor, knighted by Henry V, and known for his public munificence. For illustration, I quote from The History of Dick Whittington [c. 1814].

in the Woods, Puss-in-Boots, and Robin Hood, Dick Whittington and His Cat provides one of the perennial pantomime plots, and in its bawdy couplets and horrific puns, music and dance numbers, special effects and "transformation scenes," dramatic structure and tone, Poppy everywhere deploys the traditional devices of Boxing Day fare.^[15] "Deciphering the British pantomime" is the critical activity of the play, for Poppy invites us to see panto as representative of the ideological process sustaining both the Victorian and the contemporary social order: "Good honest folk subliminally know / That romance helps maintain the status quo" (31).

Nichols's scrupulous attention to the rhetoric of pantomime implies that the politics of Poppy arise from the way that English panto traditionally addresses its audience. Despite its fantastic spectacle and audience of children, pantomime has always verged on "good Aristophanic satire," as Leigh Hunt put it (qtd. in Booth 5: 46). What distinguishes pantomime from other theatrical genres is not its topicality but its rhetorical elasticity in performance. Pantomime's mishmash of spectacle, song and dance, ballet, slapstick, and cross-dressing tends to interrupt the fictive surface of the drama, and of the fourth wall separating the actors from their audience. Rather than assigning a fixed performance style to the production, and so fixing a relationship between stage and spectator, pantomime constantly alters its strategy of address, as when the Cook was played as a "New Woman" in an 1894 Dick Whittington, or when Jack Idle joked about the Barbican's air-conditioning and parking facilities during Poppy 's run with the Royal Shakespeare Company.^[16] Not only is the audience acknowledged, it is often invited to play a part in the drama. At one moment in Fred Locke's Dick Whittington (Edinburgh, 1893), Dick asks, "Is it a crime to have an empty purse?" to which Jack, encouraging the audience

[15] On pantomime, see Booth 5: 46. Booth's introduction provides an informative account both of the development of pantomime in the nineteenth century and of its relation to other spectacular genres such as burlesque and extravaganza.

[16] Since such topical remarks must arise from current events, they are, naturally, not to be found in the published text of Poppy; Jack Idle's comments on the Barbican are reported by Michael Coveney in his review. On the "New Woman," see the photograph of Herbert Campbell and Dan Leno in the 1894 Drury Lane Dick Whittington in Mander and Mitchenson plate 135.

to join him, replies, "A crime! Society knows nothing worse." Brecht recognized that such "radical separation of the elements  . . . always brings up the question 'which is the pretext for what'" (Brecht on Theatre 37). By decentering the dramatic representation as the motive "pretext" for the performance, pantomime builds an active and actual relationship between the spectator, the drama, and its performance.

The pantomime audience authorizes the spectacle, and often quite literally enables it to proceed. Panto frankly addresses us as spectators, and it implicitly addresses us as paying spectators, since the holiday pantomime has traditionally offset the expenses of the "legitimate" drama. W. S. Gilbert noted that the theater manager "looks upon the pantomime he is about to produce as the only source of important profit that the year will bring him. Its duty is to recoup him for the losses attendant upon two or three trashy sensation plays, a feeble comedy, and a heavy Shakespearian revival" (qtd. in Booth 5: 55). Although for some theaters the pantomime subsidy has been replaced by one from the government, panto remains popular in London—Dick Whittington was staged there during the Christmas season prior to the opening of Poppy, as were Aladdin and Cinderella —and in the provinces, and becomes profitable in the traditional manner: by widening the class composition of the audience.^[17] Panto is usually recalled with nostalgia, as "ideal family entertainment because it combines a children's story with a great deal of sexual innuendo which the parents can enjoy while it remains unnoticed by the children" ("Pantomime").^[18] Yet the fairy world of panto is firmly rooted in the economics of theatrical survival. Pantomime author John Morley remarks that the "only time working-class people go to the theatre is in the Christmas season," which lends panto its populist flavor. Even though the "real national theatre is not on the South Bank at all. It's in the provinces, at pantomime time," panto is widely regarded as a genre "mounted with cynicism, and executed without art," offered each Christmas to the "more conservative proclivities" of a dramatically naive audi-

[17] On the continued popularity of panto in the provinces and in London, see "Dame for a laugh."

[18] Yet as Stanley Baxter—a pantomime pro—describes them, the children watching his Cinderella hardly seem so innocent: "They scream obscenities their parents never imagined they knew!"; see Hiley, "Revolution" 15.

ence.^[19] While panto identifies its children as "innocent," it identifies its adult audience as childish, easily seduced into financing the "legitimate" theater that largely eludes or excludes them—"What signify Dick's riches, fame, and glory, / If they—our patrons—relish not our story?" (Locke). Although pantomime claims to serve its public, it witholds "patron" status from the audience that underwrites the theater's more artistic endeavors. Drama and entertainment, patron and consumer: pantomime conceals its patronizing innuendo within the "popular" and profitable gusto of good dirty fun.

Poppy relates the performance conventions of pantomime to Victorian imperialism, in order to identify our performance in the audience with our conduct outside the theater. The conventions of panto include the audience in the dramatic action, much as when Obadiah Upward gleefully explains the opium economy to us, the "boys and girls" in the house:

Your cuppa's what it's all about. Your English cuppa China tea. We needed that but they never wanted anything of ours. Not Derbyshire porcelain nor the latest mousetraps nor cotton drawers from Manchester. So all the time we paid for tea with hard cash it was a drain on our currency reserves. We had to discover something they wanted as urgently as we wanted their tea. Are you with me so far?
(45)

Rolling a huge crate of opium balls onstage, pulling down a chart from the flies, surrounded by calculating clerks, Upward transforms the traditional Dick Whittington scene in Fitzwarren's countinghouse into an illustration of how the English instigated and monopolized the opium trade: "John Chinaman is already paying more for his pipe than John Bull's paying for his cuppa. We've achieved a balance of payments!" (47).

Poppy shrewdly identifies us as—economically speaking—chil-

[19] Hiley, "Revolution" 15, 12. In their 1969 survey of the audience of the subsidized Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow, Roy Wilkie and David Bradley imply the extent to which the pantomime audience differs from the usual audience of subsidy theaters. The Glasgow audience identified itself as largely composed of students and professionals: 68% identified themselves as either students, professionals, or teachers. Of this audience, 32% had attended the opera during the previous year, while only 16% had seen a pantomime (39, 56).

dren, needing a graphic illustration of the coercive principles of free trade. Although Poppy assigns us a childish grasp of the ways of the world economy, it refuses to allow us to hide behind childlike sentiment. The play reverses the usual disjunction between panto's "innocence" and the economic calculation it conceals. Much as in Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), the audience's "belief" is put to the test, but in a way that casts theatrical participation as social complicity. Late in the play, for instance, Upward and Lady Dodo sing a rousing song about the sacking of the Summer Palace. Since the "finale's not ready yet," the song must be repeated, and, as Upward complains, "Well, if we're going to sing it again, we're going to need some help from the boys and girls." Upward and Dodo divide the house in two, pull lyrics down from the flies, and lead the audience in a song, miming a machine-gun accompaniment: "The sound you hear's the fusiliers / Shooting the crystal chandeliers" (108). As John Russell Taylor reported, "It is a sight to behold": "'Rat-tat-tat-tat! Ker-pow, ker-splat!' cry the bejewelled women and dinner-jacketed men enthusiastically, aiming with a will their imaginary gatling guns and hand-grenades at one another."^[20]

Audience participation of this kind is a traditional part of pantomime "fun," one that explicitly characterizes the audience's performance as part of the dramatic action. William Archer reports that "Miss Ada Blanche made a very popular Robinson Crusoe" in Sir Augustus Harris's 1894 panto, ministering "to that patriotism which is one of the holiest feelings of our nature, by exterminating a huddled crowd of savages with a machine-gun" (1894 7). Raising the house lights always alters the spectators' sense of the spectacle, momentarily revealing an intimacy both enabled and structured by the performance we have shared. Here, Nichols decisively qualifies that intimacy. We applaud the theatrical spectacle, confirming its success. Our performance also authorizes, and literally advances, both the plot of the drama and its theatrical presentation. Our activity strips away the layers of "innuendo" that are the real subject of Poppy , dramatizing our ongoing addiction to the rhetoric of empire. Poppy invites us to play out both a political act and its inscription as ideology, to sing for ourselves the song of domination.

[20] John Russell Taylor, rev. of Poppy, Plays and Players (December 1982).

In the theater, Poppy dramatizes both the process of imperial expansion, and its "transformation" to entertainment. In this regard, the stage illusions of pantomime are also shown to have an ideological function. The Chinese play the part of the panto primitives in the Whittington genre. In Poppy , though, the Chinese also provide most of the play's best special effects.^[21] In the opening scene, the Chinese Emperor appears to the sound of a gong, flying in a throne suspended high above a mist-swirled stage, chastising Victoria before he disappears in a burst of flame, smoke, and music. Throughout the play, the Emperor relies on his magnificent stage magic; at the moment of Canton's final collapse, the Emperor performs "a series of impressive illusions, conjuring WARRIORS in antique garb from traps and flies. . . . invoking DEMONS, SPIDERS and FIGURES from Chinese classical theatre. Smoke and drums " (98–99). As the Emperor discovers, "Such gestures aren't to be relied upon" (67). The imperial pantomime constitutes Chinese power as illusion, mere mystification. In defeat, the Emperor's magic is defeated, too: after his fall, the Emperor slowly rises from the trap, "No flash, no smoke. He juggles with three cigar boxes, drops one and throws them in disgust down the hole " (105). To the English, and to the audience, the Chinese are not barbaric; their culture and society are simply unreal, an "illusion" within the codes of theater and power shared by the English characters and their audience. Of all of the theater's participants, only the Chinese are unable to decipher the British pantomime. Only for them is Dick's gender subject to an unreadable code—is he a man, woman, or "Foreign Devil Eunuch" (62–63)?

In its thorough refiguration of the rhetoric of pantomime, Poppy dramatizes the continuity between the fictions of the stage and our own. To suggest the historical progress of colonization, Nichols occasionally interrupts the panto mode, intercalating moments of Savoyard light opera, Broadway musical, and the officious narra-

[21] The cultural misunderstandings typical of the English encounter with the inhabitants of Barbary are transformed in Poppy into a misunderstanding of the basis of opium economy—the Emperor argues, "Without our tea and rhubarb your whole nation / Will die in agonies of constipation" (3). Nichols, in fine panto manner, works the rhubarb/opium "shit" joke for all it is worth and more. In Locke's Whittington , a similar situation develops when the native king Rustifustican develops an ambiguous passion for the Cook: "She's not half bad-looking. I'll mash her, and if she's a failure as a wife, she'll always come in handy for the larder" (42).

tive voice of 1940s newsreels ("To the likes of you and me it may look like nothing more than a common wild flower but to old Abdul and his hardpressed family it means full stomachs and a safe future" 33). This sequence comes to a climax in the panto's finale, the transformation scene:

DICK and LUCY are twentieth century City-of-London people: he in dark suit, bowler, rolled umbrella, Financial Times. She a City man's wife in dowdy dress.

They all turn upstage and above, VICTORIA appears as ELIZABETH the SECOND, waving in the royal way.
(115)

Instead of the traditional harlequinade, the play trains its panto magic on the audience once again. Dick and his rapacious contemporaries are transformed into staid moderns, the play argues, precisely because nothing is really changed: the Victorian adventurer and the modern banker are convertible within the imperial "romance" that maintains the status quo. When Dick is transformed into one of us, and the cast turns upstage to wave to Victoria/Elizabeth, Poppy enacts another, more subtle change. The "characters" are transformed into modern "spectators," while we—as our playing has implied throughout—are explicitly converted to "characters," an extension of the onstage audience waving at the queen. Like the transformation of the Victorians into moderns, this conversion also urges a substantial likeness between characters and spectators, by claiming the "spectator" as a kind of character, a site of performance grounded within the procedures of the theater and its society. Our activity, our wave of acknowledgment, provides the play's concluding harlequinade.

Or at least Poppy might stage us in this way. Nichols has inscribed the politics of Poppy in the rhetoric of its staging; changing that rhetoric unavoidably alters our performance, and the political process of the play. This problem was illustrated by the RSC's 1982 production. Perhaps because of the size of the Barbican, which seemed to thwart the intimacy needed for pantomime, director Terry Hands inflated, polished, and smoothed out the play's style, rephrasing the homely dialect of English panto in the brassy idiom of Broadway musical. This compromise between Broadway and the London Palladium reversed the play's theatrical politics: "The Royal Shakespeare Company's spirited and well-drilled perfor-

mance allows almost no time for any intrusion by sombre realities. . . . if you can forget what [Poppy ] is actually supposed to be about you will find this jolly romp quite suitable—give or take a few blasphemies and four-letter words—to bring all the family to for a Boxing Day treat" (Hayter). Rather than capturing the spectator within the politics of pantomime, Nichols's Aristophanic panto became a complacent "celebration of Britishness," just some "jolly good fun"; if that fun could make enough money to subsidize all that dreary Shakespeare, so much the better.^[22] Small wonder that Nichols vowed to leave the stage: Poppy was transformed into a "jolly romp," brilliant technique emptied of social implication, a golden haze through which we might see, faintly, the trace of politics. Theater for pleasure or theater for instruction: both the direction and the critical reception of Poppy reveal a desire to resume the privileged, invisible power assigned to the audience of the realistic theater. In this production, at least, the spectators' "jolly good fun" remained distinct from the field of human relations constructed by the performance. The patrons were encouraged to believe in their child-like privilege, their freedom above and beyond the spectacle of exploitation.

Framing Gender:
Cloud Nine and Fefu and Her Friends

I want to conclude this outline of the rhetoric of contemporary political theater by turning to the production of women onstage. We have examined political theater in terms of its rhetoric of production, its ways of resituating the spectator vis-à-vis the stage. What renders this reorientation political is the sense that the spectator is so placed in order to question received wisdom, how things are, the "dominant ideology." It would be as absurd to deny a complicity between the rhetoric and experienced "content" of political theater as it would be to deny such a complicity on the "apolitical" stage. This complicity is particularly and necessarily evident in                                          feminist theater, for the production of gender on the stage has been so fully naturalized to partriarchal norms that a critical staging of gender politics has needed to disrupt the theater's ways of produc-

[22] Quotations are from reviews by Christy and by Mervyn Jones.

ing gendered performers, on the stage and in the audience. This disruption has, not surprisingly, confronted the practice of theatrical realism. Elin Diamond rightly argues that exposing the covert gender bias of stage realism must operate on two fronts: both suspending the structure of identifications that relate the dramatic fiction to its offstage reality and inspecting how realism "produces 'reality' by positioning its spectator to recognize and verify its truths" ("Mimesis" 60). In playwriting, production, and theoretical practice, feminist theater has recognized the mutually sustaining relation between the rhetoric of the realistic stage and more general strategies of gender subjection in the surrounding culture. Feminist theater is rightly taken to oppose "the patriarchal encodings in the dominant system of representation," a system in which realism still, in all areas of dramatic production, exerts a kind of hegemony (Case, Feminism 121).

The critical controversy surrounding Marsha Norman's plays, for example, arises in part from this sense that the rhetoric of realistic production, its assumption of "universality" and of a genderless (i.e., male, heterosexual) spectator, too easily compromises the critical or subversive dimensions of the plays it stages.^[23] The unspoken rhetoric of realism works like the male loudspeaker voice in Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others (1977)—the voice that recites the rules of the college catalogue—to enforce the rules of our conduct in the theater, the forms of our representation and so of our interpretation. As Sue-Ellen Case argues, "symbolic systems" like realistic theater implicitly "masculinize" the audience-subject and reciprocally "masculinize the content" of the women they objectify onstage.^[24] Apart from 'night, Mother, Norman's plays can be numbered with those of Tina Howe, Pam Gems, Caryl Churchill, Corinne Jacker, Sarah Daniels, and of several other playwrights, as

[23] For a fine overview of the politics of reception in the case of Norman's 'night, Mother, see Dolan chapter 2. As Dolan argues, "Norman's play can be considered for canonical membership because Norman is still writing for male spectators under the guise of universality" (39).

[24] Case remarks, "As symbolic systems masculinize the subject (perhaps most simply demonstrated by the use of the 'universal' pronoun 'he' for the subject of action), structuralizing male dominance in systems of thought, so do male images of the subject and female images of the object masculinize the content" ("From Split Subject to Split Britches" 129).

realistic plays which attempt to avoid this duplication of patriarchial subjection in the theater by searching out ways of infiltrating the narrative order of realism, the mystified external order (the environment), and the internal zone (the spirit or psyche) that it emphasizes as the drama's cause. This critical realism works to expose the rhetoric of realistic production and the spectatorial detachment on which it depends for its realization.

Not surprisingly, a number of feminist theater companies—Monstrous Regiment, Split Britches, and many others—have redesigned the performance conventions of the popular theater, using cabaret, stand-up comedy, and variety-show routines to evoke a collusion between stage and audience (see Wandor). One of the most influential examples of such work is Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979), which deploys a spectacular pastiche of melodrama, Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and contemporary realistic dramaturgy in the mode of Pinter or Daniels to examine the construction of gender in the theater and its society. Cloud Nine presents a "parallel between colonial and sexual oppression" by examining the political formation of individual subjects in both spheres: the first act of the play takes place in Victorian colonial Africa; the second takes place twenty-five years later (anachronistically in the 1970s), and concerns the children of act 1, who are now young adults. The play implies that gender is both a biological and an ideological effect, by framing a continuity between the farcical hypocrisy of its light-opera Victorians and the more subtle deceptions of contemporary sexual politics. The most striking feature of the play is its performance design, for Churchill specifies that several roles are to be systematically cross-dressed, and that all of the roles of act 2 are to be doubled with actors from act 1.^[25]

The play's cross-dressing and doubling of parts suspends the realistic assimilation of actor to character, stage presence to dra-

[25] On devising Cloud Nine , see Keyssar chapter 4. Although the "doubling can be done in any way that seems right" (Introduction 247), Churchill prefers the paradigm of the original Joint Stock production; although the Joint Stock/Royal Court revival (1980) and the New York production (1981) altered this doubling plan, all productions retain Churchill's direction that Betty be played by a man in act 1, Joshua by a white man, Edward by a woman, and Cathy by an adult man. See Caryl Churchill, Cloud 9 (New York: Methuen, 1984) v–viii. On the "ideological nature of the seeable" in Churchill, see Diamond, "(In) Visible Bodies."

matic representation, by staging both the race or gender of the fictive character and the race or gender of the performer as signifiers within the drama and within the discourse of Victorian, and contemporary, imperialism. As Elin Diamond rightly points out, Churchill historicizes the actor's body, showing how it enters history and representation: "In its conventional iconicity, theatre laminates body to character, but the body in historicization stands visibly and palpably separate from the 'role' of the actor as well as the role of the character; it is always insufficient and open" ("Brechtian Theory" 89). Rather than naturalizing the signs of "character" to the performer's bodily presence, Churchill's strategy converts the performer's body into a signifier that stands apart from "character" and enters into a dialectical relation with the dramatic fiction and its theatrical representation.

To be more exact, Churchill forces us to recognize that the body is always already a signifier, ideologically traced and textualized. In the case of Joshua, for example, the character's subservient behavior is what realizes him as a black man in the white society of the play, while the actor's white skin signifies the degree to which Joshua has been subjected to the colonial perspective, the sign of Joshua's desire "to be what whites want him to be" (245). The characters see a black man who is literally invisible, nonexistent; his race is assigned to the ideological register where it can be colonized and erased. But the actor's race isn't only a sign of Joshua's internalization of white attitudes, a sign, that is, of the character's subjection. The theater audience also reads Joshua as a white man, in exactly the way that Clive and the characters onstage do. In this theater—both the Savoyard pastiche and the modern theater in which Cloud Nine is performed—the other remains unseen, imaginable but invisible to the colonial eye/"I."

The ideological contouring of the visible body is surely one of Churchill's most important theatrical subjects, and provides the central problem of Cloud Nine in performance. In Cloud Nine , both the actor's self-presentation and the representation of a fictive character are suspended as points of self-present identity. Both are seen to be ideological texts within the frame of social performance. A related kind of unpacking takes place with regard to the staging of gender in the play. Playing Betty, the male performer's realization of a female character again takes place in an ideological register, as

the re-presentation of the "real conditions" of his gender in an "imaginary" key: "We see a man representing a woman, mouthing her inanities, making typically female fluttering gestures with distinctly male arms. . . . The point is not that the male is feminized but that the female is absent," much as blackness is absent from the staging of Joshua (Diamond, "Refusing" 277–78).

While the white actor's playing of Joshua and the male actor's playing of Betty work to assert the subjection of racial and gender                    difference to imperial and patriarchal ideology, the enactment of Edward claims a different relationship between actor and character as signifiers, and so articulates the performer's body in another fashion. Played by a woman, Edward's difference from gender and sexual norms is signaled rather than concealed by the actress's presentation onstage. The actress's gender doesn't signify an unmediated feminine "identity" beneath "Edward's" masculine exterior: the play is hardly claiming that gay men are somehow women in disguise. Churchill suggests in her introduction to the play that "Edward, Clive's son, is played by a woman for a different reason—partly to do with the stage convention of having boys played by women (Peter Pan, radio plays, etc.) and partly with highlighting the way Clive tries to impose traditional male behavior on him. Clive struggles throughout the act to maintain the world he wants to see—a faithful wife, a manly son" (245). The bodies of the performers of "Joshua" and "Betty" are like "Clive's" body, signaling the extent to which Clive's culture maps all others onto the paradigm of white, male, European experience, a mapping that claims the other as a kind of fiction at the same time that it enforces its submission. Unlike "Joshua" and "Betty," though, "Edward's" difference is registered by the gender of the performer: Edward's sexuality is not convertible, it seems, to Clive's paradigm.

This ordering of the representation of gender and sexuality is confirmed by the performance of "Harry Bagley," where the white, male actor's performance is also denaturalized. When Bagley is misled into seducing Clive, both he and Clive agree that Bagley's sexuality is disgusting, shameful, that Bagley is "like a man born crippled" (283). Whereas Edward's actions—here and in act 2—stand apart from patriarchal ideology, Bagley's efforts are continually to become like Clive, an effort which he carries too far for

Clive's taste. After the acting of "Joshua," "Edward," and "Betty," we can hardly read "Bagley's" performance innocently. Played by a white man, Bagley is finally complicit in the colonial and sexual order that Clive represents. In this sense, it's not surprising that he reinforces Clive's notions of order by offering to marry Mrs. Saunders, nor that the casting plan calls for this actor to play Martin in act 2, the superficially "liberated man."

The play's political assault lies to an unusual degree not in the content of the text, but in the contours of performance and, as in Poppy , performance style can radically change the play's politics. How does the dialectic between identity and ideology that informs the staging of "Joshua," "Betty," "Edward," and "Bagley" shape the audience's engagements with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality? The spirited comedy of act 1 often draws productions into a kind of parody, in which Joshua is played in minstrel-show style and Betty is played in travesty, somewhere between Milton Berle and a campy drag queen. This kind of performance works counter to the process of the play's inception, in which Churchill and a selected group of actors "talked, read texts on sexual politics and worked through exercises exploring gender and sexuality" in order to "educate each other about the diversity of sexual possibilities and to unfix these categories and their own identifications with them" (Keyssar 93). A parodic production, of course, tends to confirm these categories, as the audience's laughter dramatizes the continued power of Clive's perspective in our culture: the threat to patriarchal hegemony posed by black, female, gay male, and lesbian experience is both denied and neutralized by rendering that experience laughable, inferior, trivial, and finally invisible. Travestying Edward and Betty—in the Bagley-Edward and Ellen-Betty seduction scenes of act 1, for instance—denigrates the reality of gay and lesbian sexuality, in part by using gestural reference to the actors' bodies to recuperate the transaction between the characters for the imperial/patriarchal/heterosexual audience. Parody, that is, "legitimates" homoeroticism by showing it to be "substantially" heterosexual: it's really a man and a woman, after all. In so doing, "essential" difference is wrongly made to underwrite homosexual activity in the audience's experience of the play, to render it invisible in much the way that race and gender are erased in the enactment of "Joshua" and "Betty."

Is it possible to avoid this kind of recuperation, the containment of Churchill's disruptive politics by the conventions of stage performance? Perhaps not, or not entirely. Loren Kruger has argued that even the most scrupulous production can hardly avoid invoking the machinery of gender and sexual oppression inscribed in conventional uses of cross-playing. As result, stage production solicits "the audience's assent to this spectacle rather than its criticism of gender stereotyping outside the theater," titillating the audience "with the display of a 'concern for gender' rather than offering a dramatic interaction of these concerns that might challenge the audience to think about them differently" (34). Yet this reading seems to foreclose the possibility that stage conventions can change in the work they can perform, and in the meanings they are capable of generating, as their place, function, and use in culture itself changes. The cross-playing in Cloud Nine ought to challenge the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality by challenging the means of their production as theatrical behavior (as is often currently done in gay and lesbian performance): this would mean challenging both a superficially "Brechtian" form of enactment as well as more traditional versions of cross-playing. Churchill has committed the politics of Cloud Nine to the arena of its stage production to an extraordinary degree. The politics of the play may well become clear only when the possibilities of the stage and its audiences have been more searchingly explored.

In Cloud Nine, Top Girls (1982), and other plays, Churchill carefully crafts strategies for disturbing the privilege and power assigned to the realistic theater audience. Despite the possibility of misappropriation, the use of performance to disrupt the assimilation of actor to character has become something of a staple in feminist theater. This exploration of the ideological working of the mise-en-scène is especially characteristic of Maria Irene Fornes's plays. Tango Palace (1963) parodies the traditional authority of the dramatic text, as a clown tosses off witty repartee, while tossing away the cards on which his lines are written; in The Danube (1983), the charismatic presence of the performers is suspended, when a love scene is played first by actors, and then by puppets they manipulate; and in a stunning scene from Fefu and Her Friends (1977), the audience sits in a semicircle around a woman desperately negotiating with invisible tormentors, becoming themselves the woman's unseen, sadistic

judges. Despite their variety, Fornes's experiments share a common impulse: to explore the operation of the mise-en-scène on the audience's representation in the theater.

Fornes's most assured play, Fefu and Her Friends , brings the gendering of the realistic spectator fully into view, revealing "his" covert control of the women of the stage. The play opens at a country house in 1935. Fefu has invited a group of women to her home to rehearse a brief series of skits for a charity benefit to raise money for a newly founded organization. In the first scene, the women arrive and are introduced. Many seem to have been college friends, two seem to be lovers, or ex-lovers. Much of the action of the scene centers on Julia, who is confined to a wheelchair as the result of a mysterious hunting accident: although the bullet missed her, she is paralyzed from the waist down. In part 2, Fornes breaks the audience into four groups, who tour Fefu's home—garden, study, bedroom, and kitchen: "These scenes are performed simultaneously. When the scenes are completed the audience moves to the next space and the scenes are performed again. This is repeated four times until each group has seen all four scenes" (Fefu 6). In part 3, the audience is returned to the auditorium. The women rehearse and decide the order of their program, Fefu goes outside to clean her gun, and suddenly a shot rings out; Julia falls dead, bleeding, though again the bullet seems to have gone elsewhere.

The play examines the theatrical poetics of the feminine not only as theme, but in the visible protocols of the spectacle as well, by unseating the invisible spectator of realism and by dramatizing "his" authority over the construction of stage gender. Early in the play, for instance, Fefu looks offstage and sees her husband approaching: "FEFU reaches for the gun, aims and shoots. CHRISTINA hides behind the couch. She and CINDY scream. . . . FEFU smiles proudly. She blows on the mouth of the barrel. She puts down the gun and looks out again " (9). As Fefu explains once Phillip has regained his feet, "It's a game we play. I shoot and he falls. Whenever he hears the blast he falls. No matter where he is, he falls." Although Phillip is never seen in the play, his attitudes constantly intrude on the action—"My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are" (7)—and mark the presence of a powerful, masculine, destructive authority lurking just offstage. The shells may be live or only blanks ("I'm never sure," says Fefu), but it

hardly matters. The exchange of power takes place through the "sighting" of the other.^[26]

The power of the absent male is everywhere evident in Fefu , and particularly imaged in Julia's paralysis. As Cindy suggests when she describes the accident, Julia's malady is a version of Fefu's "game": "I thought the bullet hit her, but it didn't . . . the hunter aimed . . . at the deer. He shot":

Julia and the deer fell. . . . I screamed for help and the hunter came and examined Julia. He said, "She is not hurt." Julia's forehead was bleeding. He said, "It is a surface wound. I didn't hurt her." I know it wasn't he who hurt her. It was someone else. . . . Apparently there was a spinal nerve injury but the doctors are puzzled because it doesn't seem her spine was hurt when she fell. She hit her head and she suffered a concussion but that would not affect the spinal nerve. So there seems to be no reason for the paralysis. She blanks out and that is caused by the blow on the head. It's a scar in the brain.
(14–15)

The women of Fefu and Her Friends share Julia's invisible "scar," the mark of their paralyzing subjection to a patriarchy that operates on the "imaginary," ideological plane. The hunter is kin to Julia's hallucinatory "voices" in part 2, the "judges" who enforce her psychic dismemberment: "They clubbed me. They broke my head. They broke my will. They broke my hands. They tore my eyes out. They took away my voice." Julia's bodily identification is broken down and reordered according to the "aesthetic" canons prescribed by the male voice, the silent voice that characterizes women as "loathsome." This internalized "guardian" rewrites Julia's identity at the interface of the body itself, where the masculine voice materializes itself in the woman's flesh. The subliminal voice infiltrates the

[26] The gun business derives from a joke, as Fornes reports in "Notes": "There are two Mexicans in sombreros sitting at a bullfight and one says to the other, 'Isn't she beautiful, the one in yellow?' and he points to a woman on the other side of the arena crowded with people. The other one says, 'Which one?' and the first takes his gun and shoots her and says, 'The one that falls.' In the first draft of the play Fefu explains that she started playing this game with her husband as a joke. But in rewriting the play I took out this explanation." It's notable that the gun business dates from Fornes's original work on the play in 1964, as Fornes suggests in "Interview." For a fuller reading of Fornes's theater, see Worthen, "Still playing games ."

deepest levels of psychological and physiological identification, enforcing a crippling gesture of submission:

(Her head moves as if slapped. )

Julia: Don't hit me. Didn't I just say my prayer?

(A smaller slap. )

Julia: I believe it.
(25)

As Fornes remarked to Gayle Austin, "Julia is really not mad at all. She's telling the truth. The only madness is, instead of saying her experience was 'as if' there was a court that condemned her, she says that they did" (Austin 80).

Fornes suggests that "Julia is the mind of the play," and Julia's scene articulates the shaping vision of Fefu as a whole, as well as organizing the dramatic structure of part 2 ("Notes"). The action of Fefu and Her Friends takes place under watchful eyes of Phillip, of the hunter, of Julia's "guardians," a gaze that constructs, enables, and thwarts the women of the stage: "Our sight is a form they take. That is why we take pleasure in seeing things" (35). In the theater, of course, there is another invisible voyeur, whose performance is both powerful and "imaginary." Fefu and Her Friends extends the function of the spectator beyond the metaphorical register, by decentering "his" implicit ordering of the theatricality of the feminine. First performed by the New York Theater Strategy in a SoHo loft, the play originally invited the spectators to explore the space of Fefu's home. In the American Place Theater production, the spectators were invited, row by row, to different areas of the theater—a backstage kitchen, an upstairs bedroom, the garden and the study sets—before being returned to the auditorium, but not to their original seats. At first glance, Fornes's staging may seem simply a gimmick, a formalist exercise in multiple perspective something like Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests (1973). yet Ayckbourn's trilogy—each play takes a different set of soundings from the events of a single weekend—implies that there could be, in some mammoth play, a single ordering of events, one "drama" expressed by a single plot and visible from a single perspective. Fefu and Her Friends , though, bears little confidence in the adequacy or authority of the single viewing subject characteristic of both film and of fourth-wall realism, and more closely approximates the de-

centering disorientation of environmental theater.^[27] Different spectators see the drama in a different sequence and in fact see different plays, as variations invariably enter into the actors' performances. Fornes not only draws the audience into the performance space, violating the privacy of the stage, she actively challenges and suspends the epistemological priorities of realistic vision and its privileged, private subject: the invisible, singular, motionless, masculine "I." By reordering the audience's function in the theatrical process, Fefu reorders its relation to, and interpretation of, the dramatic process it shapes.

As Cecilia says at the opening of part 3, after we have returned to the living room, "we each have our own system of receiving information, placing it, responding to it. That system can function with such a bias that it could take any situation and translate it into one formula" (29). In performance, Fefu and Her Friends dramatizes and displaces the theatrical system that renders woman visible: the predication of feminine identity on the sight of the spectator, a "judge" multiplied from the singular "he" into an audience of "them." In this sense, Fornes's theatrical strategy works to replace the "objective" and objectifying relations of realistic vision with the more "fluid boundaries" sometimes said to describe women's experience of themselves and others. Writing the play, Fornes sought to avoid "writing in a linear manner, moving forward," and instead undertook a series of centrifugal experiments, exploring characterization by writing a series of improvisational, extraneous scenes (Cummings 53).^[28] Perhaps as a result, the staging of Fefu challenge

[27] Stanley Kauffman's reading of the play's filmic texture is at once shrewd and, in this sense, misapplied: "I doubt very much that Fornes thought of this four-part walk-around as a gimmick. Probably it signified for her an explanation of simultaneity (since all four scenes are done simultaneously four times for the four groups), a union of play and audience through kinetics, some adoption by the theater of cinematic flexibility and montage. But since the small content in these scenes would in no way be damaged by traditional serial construction, since this insistence on reminding us that people actually have related/unrelated conversations simultaneously in different rooms of the same house is banal, we are left with the feeling of gimmick."

[28] It should be noted that Fornes also remarks, "I don't mean linear in terms of what the feminists claim about the way the male mind works." For the phrase, "fluid boundaries," and for much of my understanding of feminist psychoanalytic theory, I am indebted to my late colleague JoanLidoff. Patrocinio Schweickart argues, referring to the work of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, that "men define themselves through individuation and separation from others, while women have more flexible ego boundaries and define and experience themselves in terms of their affiliations and relationships with others" (54–55).

the institutional "objectivity," the controlling partitions of realistic vision. The play not only realizes Julia's absent voices, it reshapes the audience's relation to the drama, requiring an interpretive activity that subordinates "plot" to "atmosphere" or "environment," one that refuses recourse to a single, external point of view.

In Fefu and Her Friends , vision is achieved only through displacement, by standing outside the theatrical formula of realism. The play undertakes to dramatize both the results of realistic bias—in the various deformations suffered by Julia, Fefu, and their friends—and to enact the "other" formula that has been suppressed, the formula that becomes the audience's mode of vision in the theater. To see Fefu is not to imagine an ideal order, a single, causal "plot" constituted specifically by our absence from the performance; not only are there several "plots," but we have shared the space in which they have been enacted. Fefu sharply illustrates how a "subversive text" can open up theatrical rhetoric, exposing "the negotiation of meanings to contradictions, circularity, multiple viewpoints" (Forte 117). Fefu and Her Friends decenters the absent "spectator" as the site of authentic interpretation, replacing "him" with a self-evidently theatricalized body, an "audience," a community sharing irreconcilable yet interdependent experiences. In Fefu , Fornes provides what Glaspell could not discover in Trifles: a means of politicizing our interpretive activity as spectators. The environmental design of the play invokes the realistic ideal of verisimilitude even as it renders any sense of spectatorial "objectivity" impossible. The perspective offered by the realistic box appears to construct a community of witnesses but is in fact grounded in the sight of a single observer: the realistic audience sees with a single eye. Fefu challenges the "theory" of realistic theater at its source, by dramatizing—and displacing—the covert authority of the constitutive theoros of realism and the social order it reproduces: the offstage man.^[29] In this regard,

[29] See Jane Gallop's description of the oculocentrism of theory "from the Greek theoria , from theoros , 'spectator,' from thea , 'a viewing'" (36–37). It should be noted that theater of this kind is, in the careful sense developed by Benjamin Bennett, anti-Fascist, in that it not only opposes theimagined uniformity of response latent in the single perspective of realism and the single "personality" produced by poetic theater, but it also forces the audience to negotiate its own variety of responses as part of the play's condition of meaning. See Theater as Problem chapter 4, esp. 159–63.

Fornes's theater shares its rhetoric with the theater of Brenton, Barnes, Churchill, Osborne, Kennedy, and many others who work to stage our performance as a political act. The genius of Fefu and Her Friends lies in the way that Fornes renders the relations of visibility palpable, dramatizing their coercive force and the gender bias they inscribe within our own performance of the play.