Performing History, Re-Making History: Representing the Past on Stage
Public history has always been concerned with the sites in which the public engages with
the past. Scholars have devoted much attention to museums and galleries, historic
buildings and heritage parks, television programs and feature films, popular history books
and novels, archives and history on the web. However, one site of historical production
has been largely ignored: historical performances in the theatre. This proposal takes the
first steps towards addressing this much neglected but very important way in which the
public experiences the past in Canada.
My project also aims to uncover the making of the history that is received by the
public when it attends an historical performance in the theatre. Many public history
practitioners - notably those working in museums, archives and historic sites - have
offered critical assessments of the histories they produce. Academic historians, on the
other hand, have only rarely been able to fully engage with the making of history in such
sites. Rather, they write as critics external to the actual process of history-making. The
most significant achievement of this project will be to develop research strategies
designed to explore how theatrical historical performances are made. It will do so in a
highly original manner: by my full engagement as a participant observer to the creative
process during all of it stages. Not only will this enable an analysis from the inside out,
but it will facilitate a significant knowledge transfer between me as an academic historian
on the one hand and theatre professionals engaged in producing history on stage on the
other.
Theatre: A Neglected Site in Public History
Public historians have been very much concerned with the ways in which the public receives
history, which sites they feel most trustworthy and what activities allow them to encounter
the past. These were the questions asked by Roy Rosensweig and David Thelen when they
conducted a ground-breaking survey reported in The Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of
History in American Life (1998). They asked Americans what historically-related activities
they did (such as looking at photographs, doing family history, reading books or watching
television shows about the past) and which sites of history (such as museums, television,
books) they most trusted. Their work inspired a similar survey in Australia which was
reported in 2003. In Canada the SSHRC-funded CURA Grant, Canadians and Their Pasts, is
ongoing, with some results already known through conference presentations. However, none
of these surveys asked whether the public had experienced the past by attending a live theatre
performance. This absence is surprising given the frequency and popularity of historical
performances on stage. Dozens of performances of Shakespeare’s English, Roman and Italian
history plays are seen across Canada in any given year, in closed theatres and open air
summer stages. Plays about other times and events feature in most seasons of any one
particular theatre. To take only Ottawa’s English Theatre at the National Arts Centre as an
example, audiences have seen Frida K, Macbeth, The Death of a Chief, Falstaff, The
Penelopiad, The Great Frost of 1608 and And All for Love in just the past two seasons.
I’d argue that the surveys omitted theatre because they chose to ask the public about
the sites of public history most studied by academic historians and with which academic
historians are most comfortable. Sites such as museum exhibitions, re-enactments, books and
television programs are forms of historical production which often involve historians as
expert consultants or even as ‘talking heads’. Often their work is used and cited by those
producing these sorts of public history, for example by writers of historical fiction or popular
‘trade’ histories. Indeed, many of these histories – exhibitions, films, performances at historic
sites, leaflets and guide books - are produced by academic historians who happen to find
themselves employed in a museum, an historic site, a government department, public body or
commercial enterprise rather than in a university. These sites featured in the surveys because
they were known and because much had been written about them. By contrast, very few
historians have served as consultants in theatrical performances or researched theatre as a site
where history is produced. Much of what has been written has come not from historians but
from scholars working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. Historians have not
thought of theatre as a place in which the public engages with the past and my project will
take steps to redressing this neglect.
Making History in the Theatre
When historians have paid attention to history on stage it has been as outsiders looking in
with their role limited to analyzing and criticizing the final product on opening night as
members of the audience. Inevitably their responses have tended to be negative.
Historians are very suspicious of fictionalizing the past for immediate gratification
(whether in a live performance or on screen in a feature film). The need to inspire the
imagination and stimulate the senses, the need to entrance and transport an audience to a
new place and time necessarily involves exaggerations, compressions, even distortions all
of which offend the historians’ predilection for accuracy. Moreover, what happens on
stage is often determined as much by the theatre’s own infrastructures and technologies
as by solid historical research or attention to what historians have to say. Furthermore,
putting history on stage involves processes from conception to final production that are
unfamiliar to historians and to which they rarely have access.
My project grows from my experience as an historian working with the English
Theatre at the National Arts Centre over the past two years, as indicated in the attached
testimony from the Artistic Director, Peter Hinton from the final program of the 20072008 season. In November and December 2006 I participated in a three week workshop,
The Ark, which brought together some thirty directors, stage managers, dramaturges,
writers, actors and students from the National Theatre School to explore the theatre of
Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration England. My role was to provide historical
background and context; in return I observed the coming together of many different
theatrical talents in a dramatic reading of the plays. My experience was transformative,
for not only was my understanding of the plays deepened (and sometimes challenged),
but more significant questions emerged about the way historically grounded texts are
performed on stage and how the stage conveys past events to an audience. I was invited
back to The Ark in the fall of 2007, when the focus was on medieval drama and the
company also worked through re-writings of Paula Wing’s Vox Lumina. During the
English Theatre’s 2007-2008 season, I worked for short periods with the companies
engaged in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Snow Show: The Great Frost of 1608
(inspired by a pamphlet by Thomas Dekker). My involvement extended to Stratford
where I contributed to a workshop which led to the Festival’s Shakespeare’s Universe
and to the rehearsals of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, both in the 2007-8 season.
These experiences have opened up an entirely new area of research for me. I
entered the rehearsal room as an academic historian, with an expertise in late-medieval
and early-modern history. I left with many new questions and new possibilities for the
historian concerned with public performances of the past. For example, witnessing the reformations and re-writings of Vox Lumina taught me that once the text is let loose in the
rehearsal room, the different personae of the individual actors and how they work
together led to new histories being created, grounded on, but also transforming what the
playwright had initiated and perhaps intended. In The Great Frost I had the opportunity
to watch an idea grow into a script, witnessed its development in rehearsal and its final
realization on stage. Being involved at almost every level of the production drew me to
an understanding of the many ways concerns about design and staging could alter,
reshape and reform the initial approach as conceived by playwright, director and
dramaturg. I became very aware, and very respectful, of the extraordinary degree theatre
professionals researched a period, their designs and their characters before constructing
their own conceptualizations of the past. I also came to understand that the production
process has the power to change, deepen, reinforce and even challenge the historical
vision that started it all.
This was a profoundly reciprocal experience. I offered the companies my
expertise as an historian and in return my historian’s view of what it means for the public
to experience the past in the theatre was challenged and transformed. For example, Peter
Hinton, who directed Macbeth, chose to set the play in the 1930s and 1940s. This
troubled me greatly as an historian of the period because of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies
Macbeth is very rooted in its own time. It is an early seventeenth century play that
addresses the arrival of new Scottish King of England, which references both the
religious wars (the Catholic Gunpowder Plot to blow up the English establishment) and
changing beliefs (magic and witchcraft), yet was itself situated (safely from
Shakespeare’s point of view) in medieval Scotland. The repositioning necessitated a few
character changes and some scenes had to be cut, for logistical as well as intellectual
reasons. A passage about the King’s power to cure by touch, for example, would make
little sense in the new time period and so out it went. Yet, as the play was transported into
the twentieth century I watched as meanings changed. This led to my challenging a key
assumption by historians that accuracy and authenticity are one and the same thing; this
staging of Macbeth taught me that one can be inaccurate (taking a play out of its time) yet
deeply authentic (conveying ideas inherent to the text by re-situating them in time and
space). I was moved to write a short piece on my experience for the Bulletin of the
Canadian Historical Association, a first attempt at articulating the sorts of questions I
wish to pursue in this project.