The elusiveness of the true theatrical experience to those who seek to capture it in text is nothing new to the contemporary period, but many playwrights have done more to experiment with this shortfall. This is part of a postmodern attitude of encouraging readers and audiences to question the authority of the text and the imposition of a single narrative view and interpretation. It is also connected to more general anxieties in contemporary writers about the possibility of representation. In this essay I will look at Beckett’s Endgame, first performed in 1957, and Stoppard’s Arcadia and Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches from the 1990s. What becomes apparent is the difference that must exist between reading the scripts and watching the plays and the much greater possibilities for postmodern theory that exist in performance.

One must begin by stressing that plays are not written for study; they are written for an audience who will experience them simultaneously with the action. The theatrical audience cannot skim through long stage directions, or close the script for a moment; any break that does is exist is afforded them by an interval written into the work. Their understanding of the play is controlled in many ways by the choices of the director, actors and designers as well as the playwright, and so to a much greater extent than that of the reader, who has time to consider the text as he or she reads it, and can visualise for him- or herself. The effect of this is that the audience of a play with a straightforward narrative will tend to come to a consensus of interpretation – usually the one they are being steered towards by the play’s producers – much more readily than a community of readers.

This division between readers or students of the text and viewers of the performance is made manifest in relation to Endgame. Many critics have reacted to it as a piece of nihilist theatre, or at the very least a work that suggests meaning is unattainable; Brian Finney suggests that all Beckett’s work is a struggle again signification: ‘In a world deprived of meaning how can the linguistic artist express this meaninglessness with words that necessarily convey meaning?’ There have been works studying Endgame’s dialogue and vocabulary, its themes major and minor, and the intertextual and mythical references within it. Though interesting, they do not have much bearing on the way an audience experiences the play. For instance, speculation as to whether ‘easy going’ means ‘going easily’ or ‘easy-going’ is useless, as a watching audience will not be aware of the missing hyphen and, unless a special effort is made in the production, take it to mean the latter. What would have much more impact is the more obvious wordplay and absurdism, which combine to create a humorous effect. When reading the script it is easy to forget about the downstage presence of the dustbins and their bizarre inhabitants; for the audience they are a highly visible distraction and Nagg and Nell provide some of the funniest moments of the play:

However, they are also rather pathetic characters, and sympathy as well as laughter is frequently provoked in the audience. The sadness at their death towards the end of the play is increased because they have previously ‘joined’ the audience; this is just one way in which Endgame foregrounds its theatricality.

Meta-theatricality is inevitable for all plays to some extent: no audience will ever become so absorbed they will forget they are watching a performance. However, many contemporary works and productions strive to increase this awareness, since a postmodern work of art is often in part about its own coming into being, and a reciprocally aware audience can take part in this act of creation. Therefore, this extra level of self-consciousness interposed between the work and its audience usually does not have the effect of distancing the viewers but rather gets them more involved as the play gets more ‘playful’. This is particularly obvious in Endgame when Beckett has Clov turn the telescope on the auditorium and declares that he sees ‘a multitude...in transports...of joy’ which, even though the audience is enjoying the play, is unlikely to be the case! Nonetheless, the fact that they are being observed makes them no longer merely observers but participants, and so more concerned with the play and its progress. As mentioned above, a similar effect is created by the times when Nagg and Nell turn upstage to watch and listen to Hamm and Clov, thereby becoming part of the audience.

The characters’ use of the word ‘play’ also becomes more complex and meta-theatrical as the play progresses. Thus Hamm remarks, in his closing speech, ‘Me to play’, and, ‘Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing’. These seem to hark back the chess metaphor of the title, and indicate that this endgame has been planned in advance – which it has, as it is part of the play – and so is merely the culmination of a game the substance of which has already been played and lost – which it has, as most of the play has passed. Hamm’s final words in the play also pun on that word: ‘Since that’s the way we’re playing...let’s play it that way...and speak no more about it...speak no more... Old stancher!... You...remain’. This is significant because, while it has meaning in terms of the content of the play, it also reveals a consciousness that it is a play. Whether it is ‘only’ play or whether play is more fundamental to the human experience is left for the audience to decide, but the very circumstances of going to a theatre to watch a performance indicates strongly that it is the latter. Hamm also proves the power of speech by uttering a speech act: the exhortative ‘let’s...speak no more about it’. Whether it is felicitous is again in the hands of the audience: the characters will speak no more about it – and barely speak much more at all – for that performance, but the spectators of the play may well discuss ‘it’ afterwards. Finally, though ‘You...remain’ is ostensibly addressed to the ‘stancher’, presumably the handkerchief, it in fact operates as an imperative (another speech act) to the audience, who must remain in their seats for Act without Words which follows. Such meta-theatrical moments are contained within the text, but are not truly realised until it is performed.

Another difference between a play text and its performance are all the visual aspects which, during the reading of the text, may alter or recede into the background of the reader’s imagination, but which remain constant and important to an audience. Props such as the picture turned to the wall and toy dog that lies forlornly on the floor for most of the play are integral to its overall tone; Clov’s strange sequence of actions at the start of the play is bewildering to read about but amusing to watch; the revelation for the audience that a man has been sitting onstage under a sheet has a much greater impact that it does for someone reading about it.

Visual impact and meta-theatricality is also important in Angels in America. Tony Kushner actually includes a note on the staging which makes this clear:

This advice suggests that the gap between reading and seeing Angels in America might operate the other way from Endgame: with the latter the reader tends to imagine it as less lively than it really is, whereas the reader of Angels in America is in danger of visualising it with all elements of theatrical artifice removed. The important thing is Kushner’s insistence that it must be spectacular and fake at the same time – this is symptomatic of postmodern writers’ emphasis on performance: presentation rather than representation. The most visual, and therefore most striking, aspect of this is the use of traditional theatrical trickery, such as wires, mirrors and puffs of smoke, but the play experiments with the notion in many ways.

One type of meta-theatricality in Angels on America is the leanings of some of its characters towards performance. Belize is a former drag queen, so engulfed in his/her showbusiness persona that no other name remains. Prior is also seen applying make-up in Act One, Scene Seven, and even ‘mimes slashing his throat with his lipstick and dies, fabulously tragic’ so that make-up becomes an emblematic tool of drama. Other characters, including as Roy and Joe, are behind-the-scenes members of the courtroom dramas that are obliquely referred to throughout the play. Finally, Harper’s dramatised hallucinations and pretence of pregnancy also mark her out as a character prone to theatricality. This creates multiple layers of acting for the audience to try and decipher and forces them to confront the reality of the play – or lack of it.

The doubling of parts required by Angels in America is hardly a new device, but it used to be done out of expediency whereas Kushner employs it to play with the audience’s perceptions. The dual or triple roles given to one actor make the audience consider the links or similarities between these characters. The answer is by no means clear, and so the doubling of actors can result in a multiplicity of interpretations, a condition encouraged by postmodern writing. Though some of the minor characters (the Eskimo, for example) do not speak and are heavily costumed, the audience will still notice that it is the same actor who is playing at least one other role, and become disorientated. This again challenges them to consider the artifice of theatre, an effect that cannot be felt when reading the play, even if one takes into account the doubling of parts. The split scenes are similarly ineffable to the reader, as the interplay or lack of it between characters is complex and open to a variety of interpretations by the director and cast. They are also meta-theatrical because, although the two sets of participants are not aware of one another, the two parts of the scene are always thematically related in some way; each comments on the other, just as the play as a whole comments on late-twentieth century life.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was first performed in 1993 and quickly became established as a contemporary canonical text, providing much for students and academics to ponder in its themes of sex, physics, literature and the Romantic and Classical temperaments. However, in performance the most remarkable feature of the play is that two sets of characters, separated by nearly 200 years, share the stage without a change of set and, towards the end, even appear onstage simultaneously. The surprise for the audience is considerable when, at the beginning of Scene Two, Hannah Jarvis enters in twentieth-century clothes; as if to underline the anachronism, one (amateur) production I saw had her in jodhpurs and wellies! Similar surprises occur at the start of each of the fast-moving scenes, as there is no need of a curtain or blackout to change the set.

At the end of Scene Seven, when Septimus and Thomasina are joined in a waltz by Hannah and Gus (in Regency costume), the visual impact is huge and, as the closing image of the play, it leaves the audience wondering about the nature of time – is it circular, like the waltz, or linear? Either way, the events of the play prove that it is not easily overcome, and truth, especially truth through time, is hard to determine. This may be evident to readers of Arcadia, but it is the performative presence of the play that illustrates the proposition. This is effected through several visual cues specified by Stoppard. At the beginning of Scene Two he give stage directions regard the use of props: ‘During the course of the play the table collects this and that, and where an object from one scene would be an anachronism in another (say a coffee mug) it is simply deemed to have become invisible.’ In this way items from both time periods accrue onstage, becoming a constant physical reminder to the audience of the theatrical nature of the action going on around the props; this is bound not to be true to the same extent for the reader. In the final scene, Septimus and Valentine both study Thomasina’s diagram simultaneously, or, as the stage direction puts it, ‘doubled by time’. While a reader can understand the importance of this moment, the visual impact of two characters who, up until that point, had inhabited entirely different times and spaces, joining in the same activity, apparently at the same time, is only available to a theatre audience. It could be reasoned that the roles of Gus and Augustus Coverly are played by one actor to create a ‘family resemblance’ and provide continuity between the two periods. However, the fact that Gus does not speak suggest that if he refuses to signify verbally he must signify something else. This indicates that the two roles serve the same meta-theatrical purpose as the doubled parts in Angels in America, that is, to disrupt the audience’s perception of reality as presented by the play, and force them to confront the artifice of theatre.

An earlier Stoppard play, The Real Inspector Hound from 1968, experiments with meta-theatricality in an very overt way. Two theatre critics watch an Agatha Christie-style crime drama, and gradually get drawn into it, blurring the boundary between ‘real’ life and art. The set encourages the audience to confront this unstable boundary in relation to themselves: ‘The first thing is that the audience appear to be confronted by their own reflection in a huge mirror. Impossible. However, back there in the gloom – not at the footlights – a bank of plush seats and pale smudges of faces’. Clearly, to a reader such an illusion would not have any relevance, but to a theatre audience it is a powerfully meta-theatrical. It encourages the viewer to interpolate themselves into the drama, and makes them part of a postmodern play’s plurality of subjects.

Postmodern concerns about the potential of art to recreate the world, or even part of it, are frequently reflected in the plays of the late twentieth century. The many meta-theatrical devices in contemporary theatre put more distance between the plays and their audiences, making it clear that this play – and any play – can never be a representation of reality, only a presentation, a show. In fact, the overtly theatrical devices employed make the experience more enjoyable, since they are an explicit admission of artifice – and therefore art – and free the audience to join in with the ‘playfulness’ of plays. This aspect of a play is denied to those who only read its script; for them it remains an unfulfilled entity, as its complex and contemporary presence is only created through performance.

Beckett, Samuel, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber) 1958

Finney, Brian, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Postmodern Fictions’ at http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/beckett.html

Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (London: Nick Hern Books) 1992

Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia (London: Faber & Faber) 1993

Stoppard, Tom, The Real Inspector Hound in MH Abrams (ed.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2, 7^th edition (London: WW Norton & Co) 1962, pp.2785-815

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