The Natural Place for the Play’
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‘The natural place for the play’: outdoor Shakespeares, environment, and an ethnography of audience experience Submitted by Evelyn Mary O’Malley, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama in January 2016. by Evelyn Mary O’Malley This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 for Mom, and the glaciers 2 ABSTRACT This thesis asks, in what ways do audience members perceive the environment to be contributing to outdoor Shakespeares, even when the performance-makers are not attempting site-specificity in their practice? It seeks to consider where practice, research, and theory arising in connection with site-specific and ecological theatre and performance-making might illuminate the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in outdoor settings, and whether there is potential for the audience responses to be put into a dialogue with some of the claims made for self-consciously site-specific and ecological performance forms in turn. How might audience responses productively challenge the ways we think about place and environment at these performances? And what, if anything, might be at stake for nature, environment, and ecology in the reception of this very particular kind of cultural event? Working with ethnographic observations and with the records of conversations gathered through one hundred and fifty-six semi-structured interviews conducted face-to-face with two hundred and seventy-three participants during summers 2013 and 2014, the four chapters analyse these encounters with audiences, environment, and Shakespeare. The ethnographic methodology aspires to allow previously unheard audience members to account for their own experiences, despite the ethnographer’s role in crafting of the final chapters, and despite the acknowledgement that ‘experience’ in the positivist sense cannot be captured and served up as writing. The written ethnography puts themes identified in the interviews into conversation with theoretical discourses around place and environment, shifting carefully between ecophenomenological and broadly materialist approaches. Extracts of audience interviews form the core and the through- line of the chapters. The research subsequently contributes to the fields of Shakespearean ecocriticism, site-specific theatre, ecology and performance, and audience research. Throughout, the argument is that turning our attention towards the nonhuman world, and to how it is perceived and framed by audience members at these performance events, urges us to consider outdoor Shakespeares as united by their happening outdoors, in weather, and contingent upon their (culturally contingent) outdoor contexts, prior to classifying them by other spatial configurations or aesthetic arrangements. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful for funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has enabled me to undertake this research. Heartfelt thanks to Cathy Turner at the University of Exeter, for generous, opening supervision; for weathering this too. I am also thankful to Adrian Curtin, Jerri Daboo, Sarah Goldingay, Jane Milling, Kerrie Schaefer, Kate Newey, Fiona Macbeth, and Kara Reilly, for academic mentoring and moral support at Exeter. For encouragement starting out, thank you Chris McCullough, Peter Thomson, and Mick Mangan. Thanks also to friends, peers, and colleagues in Drama, in the College of Humanities, and in the ECLIPSE reading group— for conversations that have mattered. Outside of Exeter, I am grateful to Penelope Woods at Royal Holloway, Lisa Woynarski at Central School of Speech and Drama, Eoin Price at Swansea, and to colleagues at ASTR 2014, SAA 2015, and TaPRA 2015—for feedback, great questions, and for sharing. So many theatre people enabled this project, inviting me into their communities, sharing time and thoughts: Phil Jackson, Anne Curnow, and the Minack Theatre; Elise Davison, Beth House, and Taking Flight; Sophie Austin and Teatro Vivo; Sue Best, Phil Bowen, and the Willow Globe; Chris Chambers and Another Way; Maddy Kerr and Heartbreak; Hester and Liam Evans-Ford and Sprite; Emma Gersch and Moving Stories. Thank you to the audiences who shared stories and all kinds of summer weather—for constantly taking me by surprise and challenging me; there is no work without any of you. I am also thankful to Mark Nesbitt, Conor O’Malley, Mike Rose-Steel, and Wei-Hsien Wan, for helping with interviews and for great car company. Thanks Esther, for getting us there. Thanks to all the friends for chats, tea, and much more: Akkas, Bec, Becca, Danielle, the Dunns, Eda, Helen, I-Lien, Izzy, Jacqui, Joe, Jon, Jules, Karen, Kate, Kelly, Pop, Rose, Richard, Sabina, Swati, and Will. Mostly, thank you Sharanya and Nora—for flailing, breathing, dreaming, joy; and Mark—for quiet logistics and bringing me outside; and Mom, Dad, Eoghan, Clare—grá always, home. 4 CONTENTS List of figures………………………………………………………………………………...6 Introduction……………………………………………………...………………………….7 Literature Review………………………………………………….…..……………………44 Methodology……………………………...………………………………………………...66 Part One: Places Chapter One: Shakespeare inspired nature-theatres: the Minack Theatre and the Willow Globe………………………………………………………………………………………89 Chapter Two: Taking Shakespeare for a walk in the park: forests, fairy tales, and three promenade performances……….………………………………………………………....121 Part Two: Environment Chapter Three: Nature playing (along, sometimes): affective atmospheres, wildlife, light and darkness………………………………………………….…………….………………….156 Chapter Four: Talking about the weather/ Staring at the scenery: ecophobia and enchantment, green pleasure, and alternative hedonism…………………………………...180 Conclusion Weathering Outdoor Performance...…………………………………………………….....201 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………205 Appendix One…………………………………………………………………………….231 Appendix Two………………………………….…………………………………………233 Appendix Three………………………………………………………………………........234 Appendix Four………………………………………………….………...……………......237 5 LIST OF FIGURES 1. Taking Flight’s As You Like It, Thompson’s Park (2014)………………………………......7 1.1. The Minack Theatre, photograph courtesy of The Minack Theatre Trust (2015)……….91 1.2. Moving Stories’ The Tempest, The Minack, photograph by Bardo Creative (2014)……….99 1.3. The Willow Globe exterior, photograph by Mark Nesbitt (2013)……………………...104 1.4. The Willow Globe interior, photograph by Mark Nesbitt (2013)……....……………....112 2.1. Titania’s bower, Sprite Productions’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)……………….128 2.2. Rocking Reindeer, Sprite Productions’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)………...…..136 2.3. Alison Halstead as Rosalind and Connor Allen as Orlando, Taking Flight’s As You Like It, photograph by Jorge Lizalde Cano (2014)…………………………………………………137 2.4. Josephine Wilson as Audrey, Ben Owen Jones as Duke Frederick, and Connor Allen as Orlando, Taking Flight’s As You Like It, photograph by Jorge Lizalde Cano (2014)……….144 2.5. Chalk prints on the footpath at Barking Park, leading to Teatro Vivo’s After the Tempest (2013)……………………………………………………………………………………..146 2.6 Natasha Magigi as Miranda and Tom Ross Williams as Ferdinand, Teatro Vivo’s After the Tempest, photograph by Sophie Austin (2013)……...…………………...………………….152 Unless otherwise stated, photographs are by the author. 6 INTRODUCTION Fig. 1 Taking Flight’s As You Like It, Thompson’s Park (2014) The climate never influences our work anymore. […] the essentials take place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things. (Serres 1995: 28-29) People in industrialized countries spend an average of 93% of their time inside and thus are largely disconnected from the weather outside. (Keller et al. 2005: 725) To inhabit the open world, then, is to be immersed in the fluxes of the medium: in sunshine, rain and wind. This immersion, in turn, underwrites our capacities – respectively – to see, hear, and touch. (Ingold 2007: 30) I remember waiting for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to begin, crouched behind a tree and listening to the curator of Dublin’s Botanic Gardens introduce the play. Expecting to hear a usual preamble comparing the touring company to a merry Elizabethan troupe, I was surprised instead to hear him note the audience’s opportunity to observe the gardens’ specialist plants at night time. Trees and plants look, smell and behave differently in the evening, he explained, and the audience should make the most of their after-hours 7 access. They would, of course, see a funny play by Shakespeare too. I spent most of that performance newly alert to the gardens in the changing light and dropping temperature, preoccupied by the shapes, smells, textures, colours, and shadows; as alive and present as any actor, audience member, Athenian lover, fairy, or mechanical. I found out later that the tree I had been waiting behind was a Sorbus mougeotii or Mougeot’s Whitebeam, native to the Alps and as out of place in Glasnevin as a four-hundred-year-old play by an English playwright.1 This thesis looks at audiences for plays by Shakespeare, performed outdoors in parks and green spaces. It takes the form of an ethnography, using evidence from observations and interviews conducted with audience