The Search For Truth

At the end of the first chapter, it might be argued that I was I promoting a case for the artistic ownership of any play to belong solely to the playwright; where the term ‘ownership’ equates to the direct transference of meaning from the playwright to the audience - where the ‘encoded' meaning is the province of the playwright and it is the task of the actor to ‘decode’ that meaning.

Now, I am aware that such a statement constrains the actor to simply being a cipher,  an interface between the playwright and the audience and chooses to ignore, almost entirely, the creative function of the actor in the theatre-making process. 

In this chapter I intend to address this omission and reinstate the actor into the equation and, in order to do this, I think it’s important to review  current trends in literary and performance theory in order to reconfigure that relationship. 

To that end, in an analysis of the way in which theatre imposes itself on the consciousness of an audience, I am drawn to the thoughts of Mark Fortier. Fortier in his chapter, ‘Subjectivity and Theatre’ in his book ‘Theory/Theatre – An Introduction’ where he writes about the importance of reader response and reception theory when considering the generation of meaning in theatre.

An interest in the effect of art on the observer goes as far back as classical Greece to Aristotle’s Poetics, which identifies the way tragedy excites pity and fear in the audience 5)

Now the importance of this quote for me lies in the way in which Aristotle makes reference to the quality of ‘feeling’ generated in theatre audiences; for it is ‘feeling’ or as we might otherwise describe it, ‘subjective meaning’ or ‘affective understanding’, that seems to me to be fundamental to unlocking the way in which audiences relate to and make sense of any unfolding drama in the theatre.

For me, like Elliot Eisner - the American educationalist and philosopher -  ‘subjective meaning’  or ‘affective understanding’ always precedes cognition, and I believe people make intellectual sense of a play, ie. construct ‘objective meaning’, through reflecting on the experience of participating in the performance as a member of that audience - ie. They have an emotional response to the work and reflect on the reasons for their response on their way home, or in the bar afterwards.

And central to such a concept lies the work of the actor. For it is actors who provide the conduit between the playwright and the audience with regard to the meaning of the play, and that conduit, I believe, is provided by the realisation of the playwright’s intentions through the actors' action in the space. 

I believe that action is of paramount importance in this equation and that it is ‘action’ that identifies the key link between the playwright’s intention and the audience’s understanding of the meaning of the play; the reasons for this assertion I hope to make clearer as this chapter develops.

 Roland Barthes in his work makes a distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, where ‘readerly’ text leads the audience by limiting and imposing its meaning, whereas ‘writerly’ text encourages the audience to recreate and develop an open-ended, playful reading of the text.

Now it can't be ignored that the actor is the primary reader of the playwright’s text, and therefore according to Barthes, if it’s also true that play text is writerly text by definition, then the actor has complete licence to reinvent the meaning of any text.  Such a conclusion is reinforced by the theorist, Jacques Derrida, when he writes about the concept of     ''iterability' , whereby the meaning and significance of text is constantly changed by the context in which it appears.  So much so that it may in fact cease to signify what the writer intended in the original circumstances of its writing.

Derrida’s argument is that the author and reader should not be considered to be in a hierarchical relationship, where the author imparts meaning to the reader, but rather the relationship is one where the reader brings as much to the reading of the text as the author does in writing the piece.

Derrida observes in his book, ‘The Ear of the Other’ that,

“But it would be necessary to analyse very closely the experience of hearing someone else read a text you have allegedly written or signed. All of a sudden someone puts a text in front of you again in another context, with an intention that is both somewhat yours but not simply yours... It can reconcile you with what you’ve done, make you love it or hate it. There are a thousand possibilities. Yet one thing is certain in all this diversity, and that is that it’s never the same.” 6)

Now adopting such a radical view as Derrida’s turns the tables completely on the playwright and transfers artistic ownership in performance to the actor. Such a point of view is reflected in the work of Gerald Rabkin who writes about two approaches to the work of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller in his book, ‘Is There A Text on This Stage?’  Mark Fortier, writing about these experiments observes...

“Gerald Rabkin... uses reader-response theory as well as ideas from Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, to undermine the traditional importance of the author/playwright and the written text he or she creates, and to stress the importance of open and radical interpretation often at odds with the author’s intentions. Rabkin discusses the Wooster Group’s L.S.D., which appropriated and rewrote Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’

In many ways, such an approach is repeated by Repertory Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Endgame’, which resituated the play in an abandoned subway station. Both productions provoked lawsuits... Rabkin writes,

‘The playwright’s intentionality is then not irrelevant, but this intentionality is perceived within a complex matrix of interpretation, and we have in theatre two sets of readers – the theatre artists who traditionally “read” and interpret the written text, and the audience who read the new theatrical text created by the mediated reading.” 7)

So a simplistic application of the views of Barthes and Derrida in the context of theatre, I would argue, misses as much as it hits in explaining the nature of this creative and artistic relationship. However, what does seem important to my thesis is the assertion by Rabkin that... “The playwright’s intentionality is not irrelevant”. But in order to better articulate the nature of the relationship between the playwright and the actor I think it might be useful here to examine the work of Sigmund Freud.

Whilst the work of Derrida and Barthes helps to explain the way in which our reading of a play such as Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ has changed with society’s developing view about race, I believe the real key to finding a way forward in this study lies in the work of Sigmund Freud and in a better definition of ‘meaning’ in theatre. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the task of the analyst is to read beyond the manifest content of the dream or work of art to the latent content below. 

Central to Freud’s work is the concept that the manifest content hides or masks the real meaning of the dream or work of art which lies within the latent content. 

Now here, I believe, is the possibility of a break-through in the argument I am seeking to construct and this arises from a common thread with all the actors I interviewed: the search for ‘truth’ in the work they undertake. Whilst Derrida argues the case for an infinitesimal number of readings of text, in theatre I believe such a view ignores the job that most actors feel they are employed to do as the primary reader, and that is to serve the text and to present that to the audience in the clearest way they can. 

Kim Tiddy, who plays PC Honey Harman at present, in the television Drama series ‘The Bill’ spoke quite clearly about this when I interviewed her in July 2006.

“The most important part of what I do is to try to find the truth in the character I play. I think that, particularly in television, if what you are doing does not seem to be truthful then the audience will find you out, and they certainly won’t believe in your character or the drama.” 8)     

When questioned about how she arrived at this sense of truth for the character she answered...

“For me, what works best is when I read, re-read and then re-read again the script for the scenes I’m playing until a sense of what I need to play emerges. I think you can dwell on a lot of theories and ways of working, but for me what works best is reading the text again and again until I reach an understanding of what is going on for the character in the scene; somehow you get to what is buried for your character underneath the text. With what I’m doing at the moment that is not always the most interesting of things to do, but it does work for me. The script contains all the clues I need, but it’s only through reading it again and again that I can make a true connection with the moment I’m trying to play” 8)

Now this for me is an interesting observation in that the process described by this actress is clearly one that seems to draw inspiration from Stanislavsky’s notion of ‘Given Circumstances’ . However, such a sense of repetition also seems to make a connection with Peter Brook’s use of the French term ‘repetition’ rather than 'rehearsal' in his chapter on ‘Immediate Theatre’ in his seminal work, ‘The Empty Space’. 

“Repetition, representation and assistance. The words work just as well in English. We normally speak of a rehearsal: repetition say the French, and their word conjures up the mechanical side of the process. Week after week, day after day, hour after hour, practice makes perfect. It is a drudge, a grind, a discipline; it is a dull action that leads to a good result. As every athlete knows, repetition eventually brings about change: harnessed to an aim, driven by a will, repetition is creative.” 9)

I believe that this approach, employed by Kim Tiddy and endorsed by Peter Brook, identifies a process that reaches deep into the psychological seed-bed of the drama. For this actor, such an approach clearly yields the material that goes to form the basis of her performance as the character in this TV drama, but, more importantly for me, it leads me to the thought that where, up to this point in my argument I have used the term ‘meaning’, actors are using the term ‘truth’. 

What interests me most about this is that the difference between the terms ‘truth’  and ‘meaning’ as used by these actors is infinitesimally small. As, I believe, is the difference between the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ meaning when  considering the intention of the playwright in writing a script.  

In 2024 I might wish to clarify matters at this point by stating that, for the playwright, it is the playwright's intention to arrive at 'objective meaning' for any play through the interplay of the various characters' subjective understanding of the context. However, this may not be evident when the writing process begins, and only emerges as the work evolves. However, it is important for the playwright to identify a ‘direction of travel’ for the play at the start of the process, even though this might prove not to be the final destination when the play is finished. It is, though, through a summation of the various subjective meanings, that an objective meaning is arrived at for the playwright, and, hopefully, for the director, if they’ve engaged with the process ‘authentically’.

In 2024, what I realise is that what this interview with Kim Tiddy has enabled me to realise, almost inadvertently, is  that, as a playwright, I need to appreciate the similarity between these terms; for it is only when the process of writing the play is almost complete that I move into any mode that might be described as objective. Up until that point I am working almost entirely from a subjective point of view because it is only through engaging this part of my ‘creative self’ that I can generate the imaginative chemistry that gives rise to the play. That is, feeling always needs to come first! Hence the importance of the ‘craft’ element of the writing process, where the key meanings can be clarified both for the actor and the audience. 

In 2024 I might argue that there seems to be an even more important connection between the work and intention of the playwright and the actor seeking ‘truth’ in their performance, and that seems to be about the transmission of ‘subjective meaning’ to the audience. If the play does not engage the audience on a 'feeling' level, they will never be able to reflect on the experience and  arrive, through reflection, at any sort of objective understanding.

‘Objective meaning’ emerges out of reflection on the content, structure and form of the play, and articulates concepts about the context: the society in which we live, politics and philosophy etc.  But it is ‘subjective meaning’ that provides the key connection, I believe, between the artistic work of the actor and the playwright at its most fundamental level.

Returning to Freud’s psychoanalytical model, we can begin to articulate a case for ‘subjective meaning’ in theatre equating to, something which approximates to, Freud’s notion of ‘latent content’.  

And in the light of ‘subjective’ meaning’ assuming such importance, it becomes the key to the ‘truth’ of the play. This is of  paramount importance when considering ‘artistic ownership’ in the theatre as it is ‘subjective meaning’ that forms the key link between the processes of the playwright and actor . 

But how does the actor make a connection with this ‘latent’ content in the playwright’s work, and how is this then transmitted to the audience in performance?

In the light of such a proposition it seems important to begin to look at the theory that underpins naturalistic acting to see if there are further clues to be found here about the  relationship between the playwright and the actor; clues that will help us unpick still further this question about artistic ownership.