Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer
Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Reimagining the Fourth Wall Through Metatheatrical Direct Address in the Stratford Festival’s 2022 Hamlet
J.L. Styan wrote of the contemporary theatre’s refusal to commit to either a proscenium or in-the-round space as the dominant performance venue: “Playing in a frame or in a circle affects the whole discipline of the actor and the choice of play he makes, but the decision will radically determine the kind of experience that audiences expect of their theatre-going.” (138) The structure of performance spaces have shaped not only audience expectations and experience but theoretical language, with “breaking the fourth wall” becoming the common descriptor for the effects of metatheatrical moments onstage. However, such language is insufficient for the conventions of Early Modern drama and for the plays of Shakespeare, written initially for in-the-round performance spaces such as the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, in which no “fourth wall” exists. In this paper, I examine how the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Hamlet combines the effects of the proscenium and in-the-round theatres to allow for a playing space that enhances metatheatrical bisociation (Purcell 26), thereby reimagining the idea of the fourth wall as boundary between isolated actor and audience domains. I analyze this delineation as both a form of separation and a provocation into the relationship, suggesting that Shakespeare’s metatheatrical language allows for a co-creative making of drama that unites the two spaces of the theatre and their inhabitants. I demonstrate that direct address in Hamlet acknowledges explicitly and embraces the spatial conceits of performance, rewriting the boundaries of performed fiction to encompass the audience’s creative presence in theatrical time and space.
Marie Trotter, McGill University
Bio: Marie Trotter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at McGill University, working on metatheatre and audience reception in the plays of Shakespeare. She writes poetry, plays, and arts criticism and is published in Broadview, Plough, Ekstasis, and Intermission, among others.
The Consequences of Totalitarianism: The Disappearance of Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream During the Third Reich
The conference theme of “Shores of Performance” is a perfect metaphor for
describing the precarious situation of theatre programmers during the Nazi period.
Increasing political pressures from the Nazi regime rapidly affected the number of performances of repertoire deemed “unsupportable.” A particularly interesting test case relates to the programming of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Until 1933, the comedy’s performances were usually accompanied by the tremendously popular incidental music of Jewish-born Felix Mendelssohn. Nazi ideologues created the “shifting sands, ” making such programming risky and ultimately impossible.
The paper addresses the question: who was the last theatre director
programming such “unsupportable” repertoire during the Third Reich?
Programming unwanted repertoire exposed theatre directors to considerable professional or even existential risk. My research traces the disappearing Mendelssohn music to a last set of performances in 1935 in a provincial town in eastern Germany with a long and significant theatre history. It describes how it affected the theatre director’s career path.
The paper draws on archival research and developing a performance statistics database. It offers insights into the complex circumstances under which theatre directors operated within the Nazi dictatorship and reveals some of the mechanisms of cultural decision-making under the regime.
Helmut Reichenbächer, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD University)
Twice the Sea Took Him and Once Gave Him Back’: An Examination of the ‘Sea Change’ of the Littoral in Scottish Maritime Plays
The space between land and the depths is known as the littoral zone. The saltwater littoral as a space of interrelationship is one worth considering when studying the performance of the sea, shorelines, and islands. This paper analyzes the littoral as it manifests in two Scottish plays, George Mackay Brown’s The Storm Watchers and Donald Campbell’s The Widows of Clyth. This paper considers the effects of the littoral on performance via techniques employed by Steve Mentz, who uses Ariel’s song in The Tempest to examine the materially transformative power of the ocean. In Campbell and Brown’s Scottish coastal dramas, Ariel’s song “sea change” (1.2.404) is simultaneously at work upon the bodies of fishermen who died at sea and the women who survived them and must work together as a community to rebuild their lives. In the physical and meteorological realities of daily life in a coastal environment, the characters who inhabit them are physically and emotionally eroded by wind and salt. I argue that the “sea change” of the littoral is evident in how the plays scenographically evoke the margin between land and sea, in the knowledge that is held by those who live there, in the physical transformation of the bodies of the drowned, and the hopeful narrative future that the women perform for the audience despite their grief.
Morgan Martin, University of Guelph, School of English and Theatre Studies
Bio: Morgan Martin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Guelph’s School of English and Theatre Studies. She recently completed her MA thesis at Guelph entitled “Oxygen, Orkney, Ozone: The Oceanic Works of Margaret Tait” and is continuing to focus her research on Scottish island literature.