Costume: Readings in Theatre Practice

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Compilation, original and editorial matter © Ali Maclaurin and Aoife Monks 2015 For copyright information on individual readings see the acknowledgements on page vii All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE Palgrave in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is a global imprint of the above companies and is represented throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–02949–2 hardback ISBN 978–1–137–02948–5 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited Chennai, India. Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii Series Preface ix Introduction 1 Aoife Monks 1 Writing about Costume 7 Ali Maclaurin An interview with Jenny Tiramani 19 An interview with Mark Thomson 28 2 The Stage Picture 36 Ali Maclaurin An interview with Simon Annand 55 An interview with Alex Rigg 61 3 Virtuosity, Craft and Technique in the Work of Costume 69 Aoife Monks An interview with Lois Weaver 92 An interview with Lez Brotherston 99 4 Playing the Body: Costume, Stereotypes and Modernity in Performance 104 Aoife Monks An interview with Tina Bicat 128 An interview with Stewart Laing 133 5 Artists and the ‘Scenic Body’ 141 Ali Maclaurin Bibliography 162 Index 170 v Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Introduction Aoife Monks On 8 January 2013, the UK’s Grazia magazine ran a story entitled ‘[…] The Dos and Don’ts of Stage Door Chic’. Referring to the post-show appearances of actors like Katie Holmes and Jessica Chastain, the magazine offered its readers ‘a list of easy-to-follow rules for successful stage door dressing’. With advice like ‘DO get noticed in bright red’ and ‘DON’T wear sunglasses at night’ (Grazia, 2013), the magazine failed to notice that what they termed the ‘the vintage hipster look’ of the British actor Anna Friel was in fact a clear reference to her leading role in the West End (London) production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, from which she emerged nightly to the frenzy of the paparazzi. Friel, wearing heavily embroidered dresses, fake fur wraps and Cossack-style boots matched her backstage appearances with her onstage persona while ensuring that, according to the Daily Mail newspaper, she looked: ‘every inch the star’ (Daily Mail Reporter, 2012). Attention to the backstage appearance of actors is nothing new. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the mass media, reports of the fashion worn by actors at the stage door, or on the street, began to emerge as a companion narrative to descriptions of actors in costume onstage. For Friel to dress herself in contemporary fashion backstage with resonance for the period costume she wears onstage is to maintain the cultural status of the actress as a ‘trendsetter and role model’ (Schweitzer, 2009, p. 8). We might ask, however, what the relationship is between Friel’s street clothes and her costume, and what exactly it is we are looking at when we see an actor dressing up at the theatre. This photograph of Friel raises some interesting questions about the peculiar work that costume does at the theatre. Often overlooked by scholars and critics as an important aspect of both acting practice and scenography, costume works as a bridge between the actor’s body, the environment of the stage and the spectator in the auditorium. Costume most obviously forms the interchange between actors and the fictional characters they play, but, as we’ve seen with Friel, it may work simultaneously to frame and reinforce the actor’s own star persona or association with previous roles. At the same time, the costume also works as a link between the actor and the scenographical environment of the stage, situating performers within a series of aesthetic and spatial structures. These scenographical choices may also function to place the actor’s body within a particular historical milieu, 1 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 2 COSTUME or position the actor’s body within a broader set of ideas about the nature of the ‘body’ and embodiment more generally. Finally, the costume may also work as a bridge between the actor and the audience in how it situates the actor within systems of fashion, categories of social identity (such as gen- der or class) or social relations of power. By focusing on costume for this Reader, we are really probing how the various languages of the stage and the systems of belief and value in the auditorium meet within the object of costume. Examining costume, then, means understanding the interchange between the work of the performer, the design and craft of the costume designer, and the experience of the audience at the theatre. It’s important to emphasize, however, that these various aspects of costume don’t present themselves sequentially onstage. Rather, a single stage costume is capable of enabling all of these exchanges between actor and character, actor and scenography, and scenography and audience. Returning to Anna Friel in Uncle Vanya can help us to trace out the multiple ways in which costume works at the theatre. In an onstage photograph of Friel in role, we see her wearing a long white lace dress and gloves in the style of the 1890s, with her hair up, holding a cream parasol and the ropes of a swing. The image suggests that Friel is in character, playing the role of Yelena, the young second wife of Aleksandr, a professor, and the object of love and desire for the other male characters in the play. We also see her wearing a costume that is claiming a certain kind of historical authentic- ity, positioning Friel’s body within the milieu that the play is set in, and providing a visual pleasure that may retain an autonomy from the fictional narrative – we may enjoy looking not only at Yelena in her everyday dress but also enjoy looking at Friel dressed up in an appealing costume that has been designed based on 1890s fashion, playing into forms of nostalgia and longing for the past, emphasizing the role that costume plays in providing visual pleasures at the theatre, pleasures that are often tied to nostalgic longing for other times. If we look at a photograph of Friel leaving the stage door after the show has ended, we see a kind of ‘negative’ image of her onstage costume, with Friel now dressed in a heavily embroidered short black dress, with a fur collar and her hair down. While the dress is clearly contemporary it also makes reference to a generalized ‘Russian’ aesthetic of embroidery and fur. Here we see the actor using clothes to present her ‘real self’ after the show has ended. But the fact that her modern clothes are ghosted by the period costume that she wore onstage and the fact that she is being photographed by paparazzi after the end of the performance make reading her appearance more complicated. It’s clear that her star persona is being formed through her choice of clothing – she becomes the means to stage the clothes, while at the same time the clothes stage her celebrity status as an icon that forms its own sort of spectacle. The ‘Russian’ styling of her clothing also suggest that Friel might want us to see her as infected by her costume and character, rendering her body decorative and appealing through its connection back Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–02948–5 INTRODUCTION 3 to the pictorial qualities of her stage role. Friel’s ‘real’ clothes turn out not to be ‘real’ at all, but are in fact working as an extension of the logic of costume by organizing the actor’s body within hierarchies of celebrity and past performance. The poster publicizing the show demonstrates another function of costume, in how it organizes Friel as a member of an ensemble of actors. With the headline of the poster describing the show as ‘the theatrical event of the season’, Friel is shown from the shoulders up, with long straight hair in black modern dress, surrounded by her fellow actors.

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