I’ve come to assume the following important historical exchanges between theory and praxis that I find lacking in both the commentary and practice of performance today.

Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear

(a) New forms of dramatic writing and performance often provide models of perception that criticism re-represents and appropriates within the methodologies that direct its own argument.

(b) Both new modes of writing and performance encourage theatrical and scholarly re-interpretations of “classics” that appropriate analytic structures that developed in response to such avant-garde work.  Yet, such crtiques/interpretations become more fully articulated and valued when applied to documents within the established canon.

(c) Certain modes of experimental performance extend and develop the critical strategies in which they are discussed in a dialogic relationship that informs both a continuation of new writing and a development of theory.

I recognize the inherent difficulties in identifying these interactions within a clear sequential scheme of history.  Each of these activities is subject to conflicting influences and sometimes responds to antithetical stimuli simultaneously.  For example, in the early 1960s productions at the newly re-titled Royal Shakespeare Company used selected visual techniques of Brecht’s epic theater–especially an elegant sparseness of scene in combination with properties that invoked the materialism of the objective world.

At the same time, the company used this simplified aesthetic to develop self-consciously Beckettian images of an isolated subject.  Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and John Bury, for example, responded to both the visual stimuli of the productions of the Berliner Ensemble that arrived in London in the late 1950s and, as well, reacted to a growing interest in both Brechtian and Beckettian dramaturgy stimulated by and reflected in the publication of Martin Esslin’s critical biography, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, (1959), and The Theatre of the Absurd (1961); as well as  the influence of Jan Kott’s conflation of King Lear and Endgame upon Brook’s production and film of the Shakespearean tragedy is emblematized in theater history.  While the absurd and the epic seemed to mark antithetical directions in the contemporary theater, Shakespearean production assimilated aspects of each as the RSC marked out its aesthetic course in the 1960s and 1970s.