2
FROM PAGE TO STAGE: A
DIFFICULT BIRTH1
Translated by Jilly Daugherty
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
For a text to give birth to a performance is no easy matter. What the
first-night audience sees is already an end-product, for it is too late to
observe the preparatory work of the director: the spectators are
presented with a gurgling or howling infant, in other words they see a
performance which is more or less successful, more or less
comprehensible, in which the text is only one of several components,
others being the actors, the space, the tempo. It is not possible to deduce
from the performance the work that led up to it; mise en scne, as we
understand it, is the synchronic confrontation of signifying systems, and
it is their interaction, not their history, that is offered to the spectator
and that produces meaning.
We shall therefore not speak of the director, a private individual
instructed by a theatrical institution to put his or her name to an artistic
product, but of mise en scne, defined as the bringing together or
confrontation, in a given space and time, of different signifying
systems, for an audience. Mise en scne is here taken to be a structural
entity, a theoretical subject or object of knowledge. Since the director,
the `unknown father,' is not directly relevant to us here, he will be
replaced (with apologies to practitioners) by the structural notion of
mise en scne.
It is important to distinguish between:
The dramatic text: the verbal script which is read or heard in
performance (a difference in status which we shall examine later); we
are concerned here solely with texts written prior to performance, not
those written or rewritten after rehearsals, improvisations or
performances (see Margin 1)
The performance: all that is made visible or audible on stage, but not
yet perceived or described as a system of meaning or as a pertinent
relationship of signifying stage systems.
Finally, the mise en scne, the confrontation of all signifying
systems, in particular the utterance of the dramatic text in performance.
Mise en scne is not an empirical object, the haphazard assembling of
materials, the ill-defined activity of the director and stage team prior to
performance. It is an object of knowledge, a network of associations or
relationships uniting the different stage materials into signifying
systems, created both by production (the actors, the director, the stage in
general) and reception (the spectators).
The distinction made between performance as an empirical object and
mise en scne as an object of knowledge allows one to reconcile the
aesthetics of production and reception (cf. Pavis 1985).
Indeed, mise en scne as a structural system exists only when
received and reconstructed by a spectator from the production. To
decipher the mise en scne is to receive and interpret the system created
by an artistic team. The aim is not one of reconstructing the intentions
of the director, but of understanding, as a spectator, the system
elaborated by those responsible for the production.
In what follows, we aim to establish a theory of mise en scne, valid
at least for our western tradition, being the enactment-- supposedly
aesthetic and subjective--of a pre-existing dramatic text. Western mise
en scne can reveal how the creation of meaning is conceived by our
civilization, notably as a relationship of meanings when several sign
systems coexist.
DENIALS
We shall refrain from linking the semiotics of the dramatic text and of
the performance, taking care to distinguish between their methodologies
and fields of study so as not to place them on the same level or in the
same theoretical space, to the detriment of either. Unless the distinction
between them is kept in mind, one is tempted to equate the text/
performance relationship with other traditional relationships such as
signifier/signified, body/soul, content/form, literary/theatrical, etc.
In the study of a dramatic text, we shall always specify whether it is
being examined before or apart from a stage production, or whether it is
being analysed as a constituent part of a particular production, with due
account being taken of the enunciation and color lent to it by the stage.
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 25
The two semiotics must keep their autonomy because text and
performance adhere to different semiotic systems. Mise en scne is not
the reduction or the transformation of text into performance, but rather
their confrontation. Before defining the delicate relationship that exists
between text and performance, it is necessary to affirm what mise en
scne is not, and therefore to challenge some incorrect definitions that
still persist. Instead of stating what mise en scne should not be (this
being too normative a vision), we should like to determine what the
theory of mise en scne cannot or is no longer able to affirm. We realize
that in wanting to establish an abstract theory of mise en scne we run
the risk of including, in our description of its principal operations,
several normative judgments on their roles and functions, particularly as
regards the resultant construction of meaning. Let us nevertheless
formulate a series of denials or warnings.
1 Mise en scne is not the staging of a supposed textual `potential.' It
does not consist in finding stage signifieds which would amount to no
more than a repetition, inevitably superfluous (see Corvin 1985), of the
text itself. That would entail disregarding the signifying materiality of
verbal and stage signs and positing theatrical signifieds capable of
setting aside their signifying matter and eliminating any difference
between the verbal and non-verbal (see Margin 2).
Any theatrical semiotics which presupposes that the dramatic text has
an innate theatricality, a matrix for production or even a score, which
must be extracted at all costs and expressed on the stage, thus implying
that the dramatic text exists only when it is produced, seems to be
begging the question. Those who hold that position would contend that
every play has only one good mise en scne already present in the text
(see Margin 3).
2 Mise en scne does not have to be faithful to a dramatic text. The
notion of faithfulness, a cliché of critical discourse, is pointless and
stems in fact from confusion. Faithfulness to what? (Cf. Fischer-Lichte
1984; Jacquot and Veinstein 1957) If to an acting tradition (often
obscure in the case of French classicism), the criterion is irrelevant to
modern productions. Different things are understood by faithfulness:
faithfulness to the `ideas' of the `author' (two very volatile concepts),
faithfulness to an acting tradition, faithfulness to `form or meaning' by
virtue of `aesthetic or ideological principles' (see Jacquot, quoted in
Corvin 1985) and, above all, the very illusive faithfulness of the
performance to what the text has already clearly stated. If producing a
faithful mise en scne means repeating, or believing one can repeat, by
26 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
theatrical means what the text has already said, what would be the point
of mise en scne (see Margin 4)?
3 On the other hand, mise en scne does not annihilate or dissolve the
dramatic text, which keeps its status as a verbal text even once it is
uttered on stage, i.e. enunciated in accordance with a given situation and
directed towards a much more specific meaning. Once a text is uttered
on stage, it is no longer possible for the spectator to imagine the time
span between text and performance, since both are presented
simultaneously, even if the rhythm of each is peculiar to its own
signifying system. The argument is valid both ways, and the question
whether the mise en scne is faithful to the text is posed as seldom as its
opposite, namely whether the dramatic text is faithful to its mise en
scne, whether it corresponds to what is seen on stage, whether
Molire's text is faithful to a mise en scne by Vitez (see Margin 5).
4 Different mises en scne of a common text, particularly those
produced at very different moments in history, do not provide readings
of the same text. The letter of the text remains of course unchanged, but
the spirit varies considerably. Text is here understood to mean the result
of a process that we shall call, with Ingarden (1931) and Vodi ka
(1975), its concretization. Nevertheless the text is not a non-structured
reservoir of signifieds, a Baumaterial (building material), as Brecht
would say; it is indeed the very reverse: the result of a historically
determined process of concretization: signifier (literary work as thing),
signified (aesthetic object) and Social Context (shorthand) for what
Muka ovský calls the "total context of social phenomena, science,
philosophy, religion, politics, economics, etc. of the given milieu"
(1979:391) are variables which modify the concretization of the text and
which can be more or less reconstructed.
5 Mise en scne is not the stage representation of the textual referent.
Moreover, the textual referent is inaccessible: what we have is at most a
simulation (illusion) of this referent by means of signs which
conventionally denote it. Nor is mise en scne the visual concretization
of the `holes' in the text which need a performance in order to take on
meaning. All texts, not just dramatic texts, have holes; in other respects,
however, they can be `too full' or overloaded.
Rather than try to find these empty or overloaded areas, one should
try to understand the processes of determination and indetermination
performed in/by the text and the performance: mise en scne highlights
the function of `emptying' or `filling' structural ambiguities (cf. Pavis
1985:255­60).
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 27
6 Mise en scne is not the fusion of two referents (textual and stage),
nor does it strive to find their common denominator. Instead of a fusion
of referents, one should imagine a theory of fiction--capable of
comparing text and performance in their peculiar processes of
fictionalization--made manifest for an audience by mise en scne.
Fiction can be seen as the middle term, as the mediation between what
is narrated by the dramatic text and what is represented on the stage, as
if mediation could be achieved by the textual and visual representation
of a possible fictional world, constructed initially by dramaturgical
analysis and reading, and subsequently represented by staging. This
hypothesis is not false if one is careful not to reintroduce surreptitiously
the theory of the actualized referent. There is an undeniable relationship
between text and performance, but it does not take the form of a
translation or a reduplication of the former by the latter, but rather of a
transfer or a confrontation of the fictional universe structured by the
text and the fictional universe produced by the stage. The modalities of
this confrontation need further investigation.
7 Mise en scne is not the performative realization of the text.
Contrary to what Searle (1982:101­19) believes, the actors do not have
to carry out the instructions of the text and the stage directions as if
these had the illocutionary force of a `cake recipe', in order to produce a
stage performance. Stage directions form a `frame' around a text, giving
instructions for uttering the text in such a way that the dialogue will take
on a meaning more or less `envisaged' by the author. Mise en scne is,
however, free to put into practice only some, or even none, of these stage
directions. It is not obliged to carry out stage directions to the letter,
reconstructing a situation of utterance identical in every aspect to the
one prescribed. Stage directions are not the ultimate truth of the text, or
a formal command to produce the text in such a manner, or even an
indispensable shifter between text and performance. Their textual status
is uncertain. Do they constitute an optional extra-text? a metatext that
determines the dramatic text? or a pretext that suggests one solution
before the director decides on another? The evaluation of their status
cannot be divorced from history; although one should not forget that
they form part of authorial speech, it should be remembered that the
director has the choice of either using them or not, as in the case of
Gordon Craig who considered stage directions an insult to his freedom.
To conclude, it would seem inappropriate to accept stage directions,
within the framework of a theory of mise en scne, as absolute
directives and as discourse to be incorporated without fail into
performance.
28 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
After all these denials regarding the nature of the relationship
between text and performance (see Margin 6), let us now be more
positive and formulate a few hypotheses about how mise en scne can
establish links between text and stage.
MISE EN SCNE AS A MEANS OF MODULATING
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEXT AND
PERFORMANCE
Instead of defining the relationship between text and performance as
one of conversion, translation or reduction of the one to the other, we
prefer to describe it as a way of establishing effects or meaning and
balance between opposing semiotic systems (such as verbal and nonverbal,
symbolic and iconic), and as the gap, both spatial and temporal,
between the auditory signs of the text and the visual signs of the stage.
It is no longer possible to see performance (stage signs) as the logical
and chronological consequence of textual signs (even if, in the majority
of cases, they are actually derived from the mise en scne of a preexisting
text). Text and stage are perceived at the same time and in the
same place, making it impossible to declare that the one precedes the
other (see Margin 7).
Stage enunciation and the concretization circuit
Mise en scne tries to provide the dramatic text with a situation that will
give meaning to the statements (énoncés) of the text. Dramatic dialogue
therefore seems to be the product of (stage) utterance and at the same
time the text used by the wise en scne to envisage a context of
utterance in which the text acquires a meaning. Mise en scne is not a
transformation of text into performance, but rather a theoretical `fitting'
which consists in putting the text under dramatic and stage tension, in
order to test how stage utterance challenges the text and initiates a
hermeneutic circle between the text and its enunciation (between
énoncés and énonciation), thus opening up the text to several possible
interpretations.
The change in context of utterance goes hand in hand with renewed
concretization of the dramatic text; a two-way relationship is established
between the dramatic text and the Social Context. With every new mise
en scne, the text is placed in a situation, of enunciation according to the
new Social Context of its reception, which allows or facilitates a new
analysis of the text and so on, ad infinitum. This theoretical `fitting,'
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 29
this discrepancy between text and stage, the disparity between the
reading of yesterday's Social Context and that of today, constitute the
mise en scne. Mise en scne is a possibility for a stage enunciation,
leading to a fresh text; it is always in a state of becoming, since it does
no more than point the way, preparing the text for utterance while
adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Therefore, not only does
concretization-fictionalization take place, as is the case with any reading
of a written text, but there is also a search for stage enunciators. The
latter, gathered together by the mise en scne, produce a global
performance text incorporating the dramatic text which takes on a very
specific meaning. In no way does mise en scne resemble a piling up of
visual systems on top of the text; it is, writes Alain Rey, neither
"addition, nor an onion; it is (it should be) a collective project built
around a language constraint, a structure made for communication"
(1980:188).
The concretization process is not only determined by the historical
changes; it is also a result of the individual readings of the same text by
different persons.
Verbal and non-verbal: Reading actualized
Mise en scne is reading actualized: the dramatic text does not have an
individual reader, but a possible collective reading, proposed by the
mise en scne. Philology and literary criticism use words to explain
texts, whereas mise en scne uses stage actions to `question' the
dramatic text. Mise en scne is always a parable on the impossible
exchange between the verbal and non-verbal: the non-verbal (i.e.
staging and the choice of a situation of enunciation) makes the verbal
text speak, reduplicating its utterance, as if the dramatic text, by being
uttered on stage, were able to comment on itself, without the help of
another text, by giving prominence to what is said and what is shown.
Thus mise en scne speaks by showing, not by speaking, with the result
that irony and denial (Freud's Verneinung) are its usual mode of
existence. It always implicitly invites a comparison of the textual
discourse and the staging chosen to accompany (follow or precede) the
text. By speaking without speaking, mise en scne (more specifically
the performance) introduces denial: it speaks without words, talks about
the text thanks to a completely different semiotic system which is not
verbal but `iconic.' However, this does not imply that the stage image
or picture (the visual and auditory signifiers of the stage) cannot be
translated into a signified. The two alternatives proposed by Michel
30 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
Corvin (1985:256) therefore seems to us theoretically distorted from the
outset:
Our relationship with the stage image therefore remains
ambiguous: if it is read in all its ideological fullness, it no longer
exists as an image; if one is content to receive it ingenuously, and
thank goodness nobody is obliged to be a semiotician, it remains a
sterile shimmer of forms and colours.
The image can be transformed into a signified without losing its value
as an image; conversely, it cannot remain a pure "shimmer of forms and
colours" for very long, because even the most ingenuous theatre-goer
ends up by transforming this pure signifier into a signified (in
semiotizing the image). Michel Corvin is, however, right when he
emphasizes the polysemy of the stage image which tends to produce
ambiguous and polysemous semiotizations.
Stage representation--which is comparable to dream representation --
and the image parallel to the text enrich and give a reading to the text
that is sometimes unexpected. Mise en scne, even at its simplest and
most explicit, `displaces' the text and makes it say what a critical
commentary, spoken or written, could not say: it expresses, one could
almost say, the inexpressible!
Although little is know at present about non-verbal processes of
communication (kinesics, proxemics, perception of rhythm and voice
quality), they can throw some light on the work of the actor, whose nonverbal
behavior has so great an influence on the spectator's
understanding of the accompanying text. Mise en scne and its reception
by the spectator depend on the perception of the different rhythms of
visual and stage discourse and the auditory and textual flow. As Michel
Corvin correctly states (1985: 12), the spectator
is submitted to a curious effect of strabismus: the text develops at
its own rhythm with its meanderings and secrets, while the visual
discourse of mise en scne accentuates, belies or anticipates it,
introducing a direct dialogue between the director and the
spectator without having to pass through the character or the
words that compose the text.
Mise en scne always initiates a dialogue between what is said and what
is shown and, Vitez adds, "theatrical pleasure, for the spectator, resides
in the difference between what is said and what is shown...what seems
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 31
exciting to the spectator springs from the idea that one does not show
what is said" (1974:42).
Change in perspective
Research into mise en scne and the theories thus evolved indicate a
clear change in perspective, a desire to get away from a logocentric
notion of theatre, with the text as the central and stable element and
mise en scne necessarily an incidental transcription, representation and
explanation of the text.
Until certain postmodernist experiments in which the text was
considered to be asemantic material to be manipulated by such
processes as ready-mades, collages, quotation and concrete poetry, both
fiction and mise en scne seemed to pivot around the dramatic text. The
most recent experiments in postmodernism (see chapter 3) on the nonverbal
element and the new status these have accorded the text--that of
a sound pattern and a signifying rhythmic structure--have not been
without repercussions on the conception of the classical dramatic text
and its mise en scne, which no longer always turns on the semantic
pivot of the text. But is it so simple to escape from the text and
logocentrism? Has the text at least been freed, now that it has made a
timid reappearance on stage, from a relation of authority or vassalage
vis--vis performance? According to Jean-Marie Piemme (1984:42)
the text has indeed returned, but during its exile it lost any
pretensions it had of being a fetish, a sacred or royal object. It
questions us today without the burden of its old ghosts; our
approach to the text is no longer dictated by that double-headed
monster, faithfulness and betrayal.
The text resists any attempt to make it banal or to reduce it to
"meaningless music" in the mise en scne. It continues to question the
rest of the performance and to make its presence felt (Piemme 1984:
43). It is indeed a force to be reckoned with: reading a dramatic text is
no longer regarded as an effortless pastime. Mise en scne makes it
difficult, but essential, to distinguish between three kinds of reading:
the reading of the text as carried out by an ordinary reader, the kind
of thing a spectator might do before going to see a performance; the
problem here is to ignore the context of the text as a stage utterance, for
any reading of a dramatic text calls for a concretization/representation
which is a kind of imaginary pre-mise en scne
32 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
the reading (by listening) of the spoken or enunciated text as uttered
in the performance; the text is here concretized, actualized in a specific
context which confers on it a certain viewpoint and meaning. In actual
fact, this reading is not possible without taking into consideration the
third kind of reading, that of the performance text
the reading (`decoding') of the performance text, especially all the
various stage systems, including the dramatic text. The reading of the
performance text implies a perception of the way in which the text has
been read by the mise en scne, for the reading of the text has preceded
the mise en scne and the performance text is thus a stage actualization
(an actualization by stage means) of this reading. This third reading is
the result of the first two readings, and is the one peculiar to mise en
scne.
Metatext or discourse of the mise en scne
In order to understand the concretization of the dramatic text by the
mise en scne, we must look for the metatext of the mise en scne, i.e.
its commentary on the text or the stage rewriting it offers of the text.
The problem lies in locating this metatext (or discourse) of the mise en
scne. One must be especially careful not to confuse this metatext (or
unwritten text of the mise en scne) with the series of commentaries
written on a dramatic work, particularly a classical work, which
sometimes `attach themselves' to the original text, even becoming an
integral or obligatory part of it (see Margin 8). Nowhere does the
metatext exist as a separate and complete text; it is disseminated in the
choice of acting style, scenography, rhythm, in the series of
relationships (redundancies, discrepancies) between the various
signifying systems. It exists, moreover, according to our conception of
mise en scne, as the vital link in the production/reception chain only
when it is recognized and, in part, shared by an audience. More than a
(stage) text existing side by side with the dramatic text, a metatext is
what organizes, from within, the scenic concretization; thus it is not
parallel to the dramatic text, but, as it were, inside it, being the result of
the concretization circuit (circuit involving signifier, Social Context and
signified of the text).
A normative, and even political, question arises: must this metatext
be easy to recognize and formalize, `laying its cards on the table',
offering a battery of explicit options and theses? Or should it rather be
discreet and even secret, being mainly produced-- completed and
`rewritten' --by the spectator? Whatever the answer is to this question,
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 33
mise en scne as redefined here exists only when the spectator
appropriates it, when it becomes the creative projection of the spectator
(see Margin 9).
In order to conclude our examination of the text-performance
modulation, a modulation carried out anew by every mise en scne, let
us ask three related questions in an attempt to determine the circuit
formed by the dramatic text and the Social Context:
1 What concretization is made of the dramatic text with every new
reading or mise en scne and what circuit of concretization is
established between the work-as-thing, the Social Context and the
aesthetic object?
2 What fictionalization, or production of fiction from text and stage,
results from the combined effects of the text and the reader, the stage
and the spectator? In what way is the interaction of the two fictions,
textual and stage, essential to theatrical fictionalization? This question
develops the first one by specifying the effects of fiction: the pretense
of a referent, the construction of a possible world, etc.
3 What ideologization is applied to the dramatic text and the
performance? The text, whether the dramatic or the performance text,
can only be understood intertextually, when confronted with the
discursive and ideological structures of a period in time or a corpus of
texts. The dramatic and the performance texts must be considered in
relation to the Social Context, i.e. other texts and discourses about
reality produced by a society. This relationship being the most fragile
and variable imaginable, the same dramatic text readily produces an
infinite number of readings. This last question adds to our perspective
the social inscription of the text, its link with history via the unbroken
chain of other texts. Mise en scne can thus also be understood as a
social practice, as an ideological mechanism capable of deciphering as
much as reflecting historical reality (even if fiction claims precisely to
negate reality).
Mise en scne as discourse on emptiness and
ambiguity: Imaginary solution and parodic
discourse
The confrontation of the two fictions (textual and stage) not only
establishes links between texts and utterance, absence and presence, it
also compares areas of indetermination in the text and in the
performance. These areas do not necessarily coincide. Sometimes the
performance can resolve a textual contradiction or, indeterminacy,
34 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
Similarly, the dramatic text is able to eliminate ambiguities in the
performance, or, conversely, to introduce new ones.
To make opaque on stage what was clear in the text or to clarify what
was opaque: such operations of determinacy/interdeterminacy are
typical of mise en scne. Usually, mise en scne is an interpretation, an
explication de texte, bringing about a mediation between the original
receiver and the present-day receiver. Sometimes, however, it is a
complication de texte, a deliberate effort to prevent any communication
between the Social Contexts of the two receptions.
In certain productions (particularly, but not exclusively, those
inspired by a Brechtian dramaturgical analysis), mise en scne can show
how the dramatic text is itself an imaginary solution to real ideological
contradictions that existed at the time the fiction was invented. Mise en
scne then has the task of making it possible to imagine and stage the
textual contradiction. In productions concerned with the revelation of a
Stanislavskian kind of subtext, the unconscious element of the text is
supposed to accompany, in a parallel text, the continuous--and in itself
pertinent--flow of the text actually spoken by the characters.
Whatever the reason, overt or otherwise, for wanting to show the
contradiction in the fable or the profound truth of the text through the
revelation of its subtext, mise en scne `displaces' the text, it is always a
discourse parallel to the text, a text which would remain `unuttered,' in
other words neutral and without meaning. It is therefore always
marginal and parodic, in the etymological sense of the word.
A TYPOLOGY OF MISES EN SCNE?
The theory of mise en scne we are trying to establish allows us to
eschew impressionistic discourse on the style, inventiveness and
originality of the director who adds his so-called personal touch to a
precious text regarded as closed and inviolate. However, the same
theory is more or less incapable of answering two very frequent
questions:
Is the mise en scne faithful?
What mises en scne could be given to a dramatic text?
The first of these questions is meaningless, as we have seen, for it is
based on the presupposition that the text has an ideal and fixed
meaning, free from any historical variations. In order to answer the
second question, and to avoid resorting to the navities of the first, the
semiotician must examine how mise en scne is determined according to
the following modes: autotextual, intertextual and ideological (or,
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 35
preferably, ideotextual). These three dimensions, which we have
defined elsewhere (Pavis 1985, 1986b) as the three components or
levels of any text, coexist in any mise en scne. The sole purpose of the
proposed typology is to examine the effect of emphasizing one of these
three dimensions (but not to the exclusion of the other two).
1 Autotextual mise en scne tries to understand the textual
mechanisms and the structure of the plot according to an internal logic,
with no reference to anything beyond the text to confirm or contradict
it. In this category we find productions that try--in vain moreover--to
reconstruct archeologically the historical context of the performance
without opening up the text and the performance to the new Social
Context, as well as productions hermetically sealed around a personal
idea or thesis of the director and purportedly total re-creations with their
own aesthetic principles. This was the case with Symbolist mise en scne
as well as that of the `founder directors' (such as Craig or Appia) who
invented a coherent stage universe closed upon itself, concentrating
their aesthetic options in a very readable and rigorous discourse of mise
en scne.
2 Ideotextual mise en scne is the exact opposite. It is not so much the
text itself that is staged, but the political, social and especially
psychological subtext, almost as if the metatext--i.e. the analysis of the
work--sought to take the place of the actual text. The dramatic text is
regarded as nothing more than a `dead weight,' tolerated as an
indeterminate signifying mass, placed indiscriminately either before or
after the mise en scne. Staging a text therefore means being open to the
outside world, even molding the textual object according to this world
and the new circumstances of reception. The text mimes its referent,
pretending to be substituted by it. The text loses its texture, having
preconceived, extraneous knowledge and discourse added to it, and
takes its place in a global explanation of the world, a victim of what
Michel Vinaver (1982) has called the tyranny of ideologies. This kind
of mise en scne completely assumes the role of mediator between the
Social Context of the text produced in the past and the Social Context of
the text received in the present by a given audience; it fulfills the
"communication function" (Muka ovský 1970:391) for the work of art,
making it possible for a new audience to read an old text. It is this kind
of mise en scne that is being singled out for criticism nowadays, for the
director is blamed for setting himself up as a `little god' of ideology.
3 Intertextual mise en scne provides the necessary mediation
between autotextuality and ideological reference. It relativizes every
new production as one possibility among others, placing it within a
36 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
series of interpretations, every new solution trying to dissociate itself
polemically from the others. Particularly as far as French classical
theatre is concerned, a mise en scne cannot help but declare its position
in relation to past metatexts. This `interlucidity' applies to all
compartments of the production: only by quoting can a stand be taken,
mise en scne being, as Vitez (1974) said, the art of variation.
(PROVISIONAL) CONCLUSIONS
Taking a new structural definition of mise en scne as a starting point,
we have been able to describe certain mechanisms of its reception. The
theory of fiction with its two facets, concretization and ideologization,
is the indispensable link in the production of meaning. It has not seemed
feasible to extract from this theory any idea of what happens to dramatic
texts when they are reread and produced once more; it is clearly
impossible to foresee, for a given text, the complete range of potential
mises en scne. The fault does not lie with an impressionistic theory,
but with the large number of variables, especially as far as the Social
Context is concerned. The necessity of linking the textual and stage
concretizations to the Social Context of the audience--and therefore of
relativizing any concretization/interpretation--has become apparent.
The difficulty at present seems to be that of expressing in theoretical
terms the manner in which a text experiments with several possible
utterances. Utterance and the overall rhythm of a performance are still
inadequately defined, for it has only just been realized that these are not
restricted to gestural and visual changes, but are germane to the whole
mise en scne. It has now been understood and accepted that staging is
not the mere physical uttering of a text with the appropriate intonation
and `seasoning' so that all can grasp the correct meaning; it is creating
contexts of utterance in which the exchanges between verbal and nonverbal
elements can take place. The utterance is always intended for an
audience, with the result that mise en scne can no longer ignore the
spectators and must even include them as the receptive pole in the
circuit comprising the mise en scne produced by the artists and the
mise en scne produced by the spectators.
Theatre--the dramatic text as well as mise en scne--has become a
performance text, a spectacle of discourse as well as a discourse of
spectacle (Issacharoff 1985). Theatrical production has become
impregnated with theorization. Mise en scne is becoming the selfreflexive
discourse of the work of art, as well as the audience's desire to
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 37
theorize. They want to know just how the work of art functions: "no
more secrets" is today's watchword.
The modern work of art, in particular the theatrical mise en scne,
does not exist until we have explicitly extracted the system, traced the
performance text, experienced the pleasure of deconstruction and
uncovered the management of the whole stage operation (see Margin 10).
`Le charme discret de la bonne régie' (`the discreet charm of good
staging'): such is the name of the practico-theoretical play we treat
ourselves to when we go and see Planchon's Tartuffe, Strehler's Lear or
Vitez' Hamlet (see Margin 11).
Who would still dare speak of the `birth' of a performance from a
text, thanks to the more or less artistic `forceps' of an all-powerful
director? `What a childish business,' thinks the semiotics of mise en
scne. `Structural I was born, structural I remain!'
MARGINS
Margin 1
We have no intention of entering the debate on the status of the
dramatic text, the question of whether a play can exist independently as
a text or whether it can exist only in performance. We merely wish to
point out that one can certainly read a dramatic text in book form, but
that the reader is always encouraged to imagine the manner in which it
could/should be uttered, to envisage therefore a possible mise en scne.
Cf. Michel Vinaver's survey of seventy-three French authors who were
divided into autonomists (of the text: 13 percent), fusionists (of text and
performance: 22 percent), radicals (a play exists only in performance:
11 percent), and the vast majority, being the cohabitationists (a play is
not reading matter per se, but may nevertheless be read: 43 percent)
(Vinaver 1987:83­8).
Margin 2
A point of view, to our way of thinking erroneous and idealistic, to
which Danile Sallenave (1987:22) has reverted:
The same text can give rise to productions of varying quality.
These can be compared according to whether the text had been
more, or less, actualized. ...Mise en scne has to do with trueness
38 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
to the text, with what Gadamer calls actualization as a
manifestation of truth (this was already in Aristotle's Poetics).
Margin 3
This position is best represented, and with a great deal of rigor, by
Michael Issacharoff in Le Spectacle du discours (1985) and in an article
`Inscribed performance' (1986): he considers the performance to be
more or less, but always to some extent inscribed in the dramatic text,
very little in the case of Racine, very much so in the case of Beckett or
Shaw. It is undeniable that elements of the didascalia or the text suggest
a possible performance, but nothing, absolutely nothing (not even the
Society of Authors), can oblige the director to conform to it. Usually the
director produces the mise en scne that he or she wants; whenever
reading and mise en scne take place, the process of mise en scne is
extraneous to the text and not inscribed in it, at least not necessarily. To
talk about performance (or mise en scne) implies that theatre is seen as
the enactment of the text, not as a reading inherent to the text. In order
to perform (or stage) a text, one has to approach it from the outside and
`break down the (textual) house' by having it enunciated in a specific
period and place and by physical bodies.
Margin 4
Here one recognizes the self-effacing attitude of mise en scne: the
director puts on a show of modesty, saying "I serve the author, not
myself" and "I don't stage myself". In point of fact, such talk is
sometimes a mixture of navety and cunning, sometimes indicative of an
authentic search to induce in the actor and the spectator a `wavering
attention' (Freud). Two examples:
1 J.P.Vincent (1982:20): "In the sense in which one generally uses
the word, there was no mise-en-scne in Peines d'amour perdues... I
tried to bring out the stage reality inherent in the text." This attitude of
non-interpretation is often demanded by the authors themselves:
according to them, directors should let the authors' texts speak for
themselves. Thus H.Müller praises Bob Wilson's directing: "He never
interprets a text, contrary to the practice of directors in Europe. A good
text does not have to be `interpreted' by a director or by an actor".
2 Now two examples of productive self-effacement: C.Régy:
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 39
The principle of mise en scne that I try to put into practice is not
to do a mise en scne; my work is rather like that of a midwife; I
do not obstruct, I open up the inner walls so that the deep
subconscious thoughts of the author and the actors can flow freely
and reach, without having to surmount any barriers, the
subconscious of the audience.
Quoted in Pasquier 1987:62)
Lassalle and what he calls `toneless theatre' offer another example of
self-effacement as a creative process laying bare the subconscious:
"Seghers' text (Remagen), itself an incandescent, condensed and
essential material...passes through the bodies of the narrating actresses
and provokes a kind of shock by the very force of its utterance" (quoted
in Déprats, 1987:27).
Margin 5
Except of course in the case of well-known classical texts of which the
spectator is seeing the nth production. Nor is it impossible for a very
experienced producer to try to reconstruct the original text. Michael
Langham (1983) recounts how the British director Sir Barry Jackson,
when he saw a play on stage, always tried to imagine what the text was
like. He adds, however, that Jackson was rather eccentric.
Margin 6
In a recent article, Marvin Carlson (1983) uses, in order to criticize them,
some of our own categories that he calls illustration, translation and
fulfillment, the theory of illustration wrongly presents mise en scne as a
visual illustration for those who do not know how to read (or who read
badly and want illustrations)(cf. p. 26§2). The theory of translation is
based on the incorrect assumption that the text is translated into visual
signs (cf. p.28§6). The theory of fulfillment, presented as the opposite
of the theory of illustration, explains performance as the realization or
fulfillment of the text (cf. p.28§7), rather like Anne Ubersfeld who talks
about the text with holes in it which is filled up or made complete by
mise en scne 1977:24). M.Carlson (1983:10) proposes to describe the
relationship between text and performance in the manner of Derrida in
Of Grammatology, i.e. the one is seen as a supplement to the other and
vice versa:
40 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
A play on stage will inevitably reveal elements which are lacking
in the written text, which probably do not seem a great loss before
the performance takes place, but which are subsequently revealed
as meaningful and important. At the same time the performance,
by revealing this lack, reveals also an infinite series of future
performances, adding new supplements.
For Carlson this theory is an adequate explanation of the infinite
potential richness of the dramatic text and the incompleteness of any
mise en scne. This Derridean vision seems to us related to the idea of
Vitez who sees mise en scne as an art of variation. In our opinion, this
notion could lead to a relativism of readings and an unending game of
mirrors, distracting the reader from research based more on history and
explicable, after all, by the complex variety of the parameters of
reception and of any particular concretization. It is true that Vitez has
recently revised his theory of variation:
I find this art of variation all the more exhilarating for having
recently discovered that in actual fact, in theatre, there cannot be
many more than three or four `families' of interpretation of the
character Célimne. The number of possible interpretations is of
course infinite, but they can be classified under three headings at
the most. Likewise there are only a few basic ways to produce
Chekhov's plays and not, contrary to what I myself believed
formerly, an infinite variety of productions.... The pleasure of
mise en scne or of theatre itself is to be found in this variation; it
is what is inscribed in people's memories. When one sees a
performance of Le Misanthrope, one can compare it with another
performance one remembers, and this affords pleasure. This is the
pleasure of theatre. It seems to me that the same is true for
translation. Translation must of necessity be redone.
(Vitez 1985:115­16)
Mesguich seems to share this `Derridean' vision:
Appropriation--if it takes place at all--is always momentary;
restitution is already present in it; in the very act of appropriation
lies the act of cession, and, instead of `Planchon has taken
possession of Tartuffe', could one not just as well say, this is how
he gave him back?
Le Symposium (1985:245)
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 41
Margin 7
B.Dort (1985:234­41) comes close to sharing this vision of a
confrontation between text and stage, except for one important detail:
One must now try to see theatrical performance as a game
between two distinct albeit related practices, as the moment when
these two practices, confront and question each other, as their
mutual combat of which the spectator is, in the final analysis, both
the judge and what is at stake. The text, all texts have their place.
Neither the first, nor the last, but the place of the written or
permanent aspect of a concrete and ephemeral event. This
confrontation, at least, is nowhere near complete.
In our opinion, the text has nothing permanent about it: it is of course
materialized and fixed in writing and in book form, but it has to be
constantly reread, and therefore concretized anew again and again,
being therefore eminently unstable: it is impossible to count on it as
something unchanging and durable.
For this reason, we should understand the staging of a text as a way
of putting the text to work. The production, by enunciating the text in a
certain manner, constitutes a possible text: "The character of the text
will determine the nature of the production but conversely the
production will determine the character of the text, will by a process of
selection, organization and exclusion, define which text is actually
being put to work" (Eagleton 1978).
Margin 8
Cf. the metaphor of dust, created by Vitez, which is very popular in
modern critical discourse. For instance Mesguich (1985:245) says: "A
text is enlarged by being worked on, displaced, contaminated, reevaluated
by a director; it is `swollen' by the affluents of its readers, its
mise en scne. They are its dust, its blood, its history, its value, the
course it takes."
Margin 9
This explains why we agree in this instance with Danile Sallenave who,
while giving the director his due, stresses quite rightly the activity of the
spectator who plays the game:
42 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
We can add here another reference to Gadamer's work [Vérité et
méthode]: his notion that, in theatre, the real actor is the
spectator. The actor plays his role in the play, but the spectator
plays the game. In order for the spectator to play the game,
somebody had to set up the game: this somebody is the director.
But when the spectator plays the game, he does not play with the
director, or even with the actor, but with the text, with the idea of
the text. The director has to be suppressed and even the actor has
somehow to be `forgotten' so that the idea of the text can be
generated.
(1987:18)
This `game with the text' is what we call the perception of the mise en
scne as a structural system, in complete isolation from the person of
the director.
The notion of the author of the mise en scne disappears, just as did
the idea of the author of the text; it is `replaced' by the concept of the
structure or discourse of the mise en scne. It is the notion of the
author, "invisible yet ever present" according to Flaubert, that Sallenave
cites further on (p. 23).
The same metaphor of the absent author is used by Mesguich (1985:
244):
The main characteristic of this offspring who is not allowed to be
nave, this child-born grown up, is never to find out his name, never
to permit himself a single word. The strategy of this illegal
immigrant, this unlawful worker, this gipsy in the kingdom of
theatre, is to move on tirelessly as soon as he has spoken, never to
be where one thinks he is, to cross and recross the frontiers, taking
them with him. His behaviour is one of ruse.
Margin 10
G.Banu (1986:50) wonders if the present-day director can still claim to
be an artist, the author of a work:
Does the director's desire to create a work still have a raison
d'tre? Yes, but he has changed his tone, for he is less aggressive,
less obvious.... The presence of the director is acceptable only if
it is mediatized, perceptible through the presence of others.
THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE 43
Nowadays the director no longer wishes to impose his reading of the
text: "The director only wants the text to be heard in all its ambiguity,
he watches over this. He no longer wants to treat it violently, imposing
strong readings on it. Instead he slips into it gently, making its secret
organization his own."
We cannot but agree with this account of the director's
disengagement: he does indeed try to preserve textual ambiguities.
However, this is the exact opposite of neutrality and his method does not
consist in letting the text speak. It is definitely not a case of textual
literalness, as is claimed by J.M.Piemme (1987). Piemme sees mise en
scne oscillating "constantly between two poles, both dramaturgically
based: the pole of deciphering and that of readability" (p. 76). He
suggests that mise en scne can "produce for the spectator a mediation
space where he will find displayed, not one specific interpretation, but
the text in all its literalness" (pp. 76­7). We contest this display of the
text's literalness. One cannot avoid interpretation; it is impossible not to
breathe into the text an interpretation from the outside. Textual
literalness does not exist, or else there are as many literal texts as there
are readers. A text does not speak on its own, it has to be made to
speak. But this presents no problem to the director, who, like the
torturer, has the means to make it talk.
Watchwords often heard today-- `one must let the text be heard,' `one
should not interfere' etc. --seem to us either very nave or dishonest. It
is not possible to neutralize the stage so that the text can speak on its own,
or be heard without mediation or without distortion. Because mise en
scne is repudiating itself does not mean that it is suddenly going to
disappear, as if by magic, and let the text be heard.
Margin 11
What we call `the discreet charm of good staging' is a delicate balance
between what is and what is not visible in mise en scne as a system of
meaning. Régis Durand correctly describes this phenomenon as
follows:
In order for a mise en scne to be perceived, the concept which
inspires it must be grasped by the audience. This concept must be
made visible in some way or other; if the spectator does not
perceive it, he will get the impression that he has not seen a mise
en scne, that he has seen things happening without any
coherence or unity. On the other hand, if the concept is made too
44 FROM PAGE TO STAGE
visible because simplistic, rudimentary or over obvious, the work
will be systematic, giving the impression that once the system has
been understood, all the rest follows as a matter of course.
(1987:19)
NOTE
1. I have borrowed the title `From page to stage' from Gay McAuley's
projects, in which she observes the work of professional actors during
rehearsals as part of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.
A first version of this article appeared in Michael Issacharoff and
Robin Jones (eds)(1988) Performing Texts, University of Pennsylvania
Press, pp. 86­100.
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