1. L'Acteur is published by Gallimard, Paris, and Les Ombres by Presses Universitaires de France (used here in the second edition).

2. This is not to say that Duvignaud commits the error of wiping Marxism out of Brecht's writings on the theatre – an operation that occurs often enough, and turns them into formal statements different only in content, though not in character (militant) or intention (socially revolutionary) from traditional, ‘apolitical’ aesthetics. While Duvignaud does not ‘aestheticize’ Brecht, he simply does not come to terms with the profound interaction between Brecht's views on society and history and his work in and on theatre.

3. Enlightened anthropologists describe them, these days, as ‘stateless societies’, which is not only more appropriate but intends to remove from earlier appelations their imperialist, and even racist, coloration. The fact that Duvignaud places such words as ‘primitive’ in inverted commas shows that he is citing a standard vocabulary with which he is not altogether comfortable. This notwithstanding, terminology adopted fairly recently dates that of Duvignaud, locating it in a pre-Second World War anthropology still current in the 1950s and early 1960s which, though now widely discredited, does not mean that the assumptions about such societies have entirely disappeared. (They are generally presumed to be simple, harmonious, and hierarchical, where each activity and each person or group responsible for it hold a place in the order that is established and well-defined in strict observance of the codes and rules set out by and for the collectivity as a whole.)

4. It is useful to return to Note 3 and Duvignaud's critique of assumptions about ‘static’ societies which he believes are linked to romantic ideologies of the purity of ‘the dawn of time’, the ‘noble savage’, and the like (Les Ombres, p. 41). These suppositions are prevalent in the not ‘romantic’ but ‘scientific’ (in my view, ‘scientistic’) structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, which deals exclusively with small, pre-industrial societies characterized similarly as ‘primitive’ in quotation marks by Lévi-Strauss who, too, wishes to avoid racist overtones. See, especially, Anthropologie structurale, Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958), and La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1962). Duvignaud does not criticize structural anthropology openly, but, given Lévi-Strauss' enormous impact on all areas of thought at the time Duvignaud elaborates the sociology of theatre, he is most certainly familiar with it and includes it in his strictures on ‘timeless’ anthropologists.

The full-scale relationship between structural anthropology and all other structuralisms, including their combined pertinence to structuralist and semiotic studies of theatre, need not be rehearsed here. See, for the first, such well-known expositions as Hawkes, Terence, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977)Google Scholar and Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar; for the second, Elam's, Keir thoroughgoing, lucid The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980)Google Scholar; for a critical account of the first, which, by extrapolation, is also relevant for the second, see Jameson, Fredric, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. However, it is important here to mark at least the fact that the structuralist principles of Lévi-Strauss, while concerned with throwing into relief the neat organization (‘structure’) of ‘primitive’ societies, accentuate over and above anything else their exemplary value as varieties of one basic structure wherein a delimited number of elements combine, permutate and recombine, this ‘package’ or safe-like combination (combinatoire in Lévi-Strauss) giving a structural model of theoretical value as a model per se. (See Anthropologie structurale, p. 305, for a statement on the overriding importance of ‘structure’ as model, which Lévi-Strauss insists is distinct from the social ‘structure’ to be found in reality and to which the model is not obliged to refer.)

5. Duvignaud takes the idea of don from Marcel Mauss, disciple of Durkheim, who argues that a gift must necessarily be received because the exchange implied by giving and receiving is a means of creating law and, therefore, social unity. Thus not only do the partners of the transaction symbolically articulate the forces binding them, but, in doing so, they symbolize the social law binding the whole community. The same obtains, Mauss argues, in the case of gifts offered to the gods. Furthermore, the apparently magic quality with which gifts are endowed signifies the community's will to make the divine figure pay attention to its human predicaments.

Magic, then, is not conceived in supernatural terms (error of anthropologists vis-à-vis ‘primitive’ societies), but is a collectively created phenomenon expressing the primary role of social agency in matters concerning the community (‘Essai sur le don’, in Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), p. 147–279).Google Scholar Duvignaud, following Mauss, uses the idea of ‘gift’ to socialize medieval theatre's purported ‘magic’ or deistic character, indicating, at the same time, that the ‘gift’ accepted by the people is an active rather than passive acknowledgement of its obedience to the sovereign, and, by extension, through him to social law (les Ombres, p. 116–20).

6. These terms are pejorative in Gramsci, when they denote what he calls a ‘fossilized’ conception of the world held by subaltern classes, to their detriment socially and politically speaking, vis-à-vis the conception of the ruling classes which includes their refined, ‘aesthetic’ culture and ‘high’ religion. Folklore is a positive phenomenon for Gramsci when it can no longer be relegated to oddity, eccentricity, or what is deemed picturesque. Thus it is positive when it feeds into a culture elaborated by the popular masses that is not antiquated with respect to modern culture. This elaboration of their own progressive culture also testifies to how the popular classes endeavour to overcome their subordinate position in society. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. Forgacs, David and Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 188–95.Google Scholar

7. While the concept of ‘national–popular’ culture requires detailed examination (and is developed by Gramsci first and foremost in relation to Italy), it may be outlined like this: a national–popular culture is possible in non-socialist countries only when an alliance is forged between the bourgeoisie and the popular classes; here the common people consider themselves to be an indispensable element of the nation ‘founded’ (as in the case of revolutionary France) by the bourgeoisie, who, though on top, also considers them as such; the culture emerging from these conditions may well be predominantly middle class, but, insofar as the people are not invisible, nor, therefore, excluded from the scene of history, they are not thrown back upon a regressive, ‘picturesque’ culture defined negatively, as ‘folklore’ in Note 6, above.

In addition to Gramsci, see, for a sharp contrast with Duvignaud (especially on processions, carnivals, market-square theatre, soties, and farces), Bakhtin's, Mikhaïl study of popular culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Hélène (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984Google Scholar; first trans. from Russian 1968); see also, from another point of view, Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978).Google Scholar

8. See Brown, Frederick, Theater and Revolution: the Culture of the French Stage (New York: Viking Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Hamiche, Daniel, Le Théâtre et la Révolution (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1973).Google Scholar

9. Culture, for Gramsci (and especially theatre because of its immediate relationship with audiences), is where social-political pressures and stresses (and also rewards for some) continue to be played out, undeniably in his eyes, between social classes whose interests and self-interest do not coincide. This argument appears very clearly (both in his reviews in Avanti! and in the Prison Notebooks) when he discusses early twentieth-century theatre in Italy. This theatre, whether it be strictly for purposes of entertainment or ‘high’ art (Pirandello frequently cited), reiterates and thus reinstates the values (social, moral, artistic, etc.) by which the Italian ruling elite is able to maintain its political sway, politics being the area where all manner and kind of power (cultural, educational, economic, bureaucratic) is condensed and crystallized.

Political dominance requires cultural dominance by the same class or classes for their survival as a ruling elite: hence the crucial role played by culture in society (notwithstanding its pleasure, emotional impact, ‘civilizing’ power, and life to the imagination on which Gramsci also insists). Here, too, lies the main social function of theatre, as Gramsci understands it, in early twentieth-century Italy.

All this, of course, directly concerns the ruling classes. However, we must keep in mind that, for Gramsci, these principles could/should operate in favour of the working and peasant classes, the goal now being socialism, ‘a new culture on a new social base’, where old elites and their culture are replaced by true democracy and by a classless ‘popular’ culture in a people's state. A ‘popular’ theatre thus founded must be, Gramsci argues, of high artistic quality – that is, not confused with low-ranking ‘entertainment’ theatre. (There is some overlap between Gramsci on ‘entertainment’ and Brecht on ‘culinary’ theatre, although Gramsci stresses more than Brecht the role of market forces and economics on the whole organization of theatre, his ‘theatre industry’ incorporating how business investments are calculated, theatres run, tickets sold, performances reviewed by newspapers, actors applauded, and more besides.)

10. Les Ombres, p. 167–228. As should be clear, the concept of anomie leads Duvignaud to imagine how theatre can break away from consensus. Consensus is also Griswold's, Wendy parameter in Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576–1980 (University of Chicago Press, 1986Google Scholar; cf. Part One of this essay), not coupled, however, with ‘anomie’ or any other alternative for theatre's challenge to ‘universal values’ (Griswold) alias the status quo. Revenge tragedy, the example suitable for comparison with Duvignaud, is, in her view, the product of social tension generated when nationalism, protestantism, and royal authority combine forces and are counteracted by an upsurge of individualism. Consequently, individuals attempt to surmount state hierarchy and legality by taking power and justice into their own hands. Nevertheless, despite its ‘blood and sex’, revenge tragedy does not seriously entertain the idea that upper-class aspirations can be unsettled: its underlying aim, from the point of view of both dramatists and spectators, is to reaffirm the norms and ‘universally’ shared practices to which it seems antagonistic.

Griswold cites the genre's ‘topicality’ or ‘relevance’ so as to explain its popularity in its time and why revenge plays are revived. The revival rate, comparatively high in the twentieth century, corresponds with the degree of ‘topicality’ perceived in revenge plays during analogous ‘dark’ periods (for instance, 1960–69, when Britain's declining prestige and events such as the Profumo scandal and the strikes of the period made revenge tragedy's threat to order especially ‘topical’; its revival rate peaked). In short, Griswold accentuates the restoration of order, giving little scope for the notion that revenge tragedy might be a violent effort (by and for whom?) to question what ‘is’ for the cause of an alternative, viable or not, firstly in Renaissance England and then during periods of significant revival.

For a marked difference in approach from Griswold, on one hand, and Duvignaud, on the other, see Cohen, Walter, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater hi Renaissance England and Spain (Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Cohen takes full account of how the radicalization alluded to just now was indeed envisaged in the theatre and society. See, for further commentary, my review of Cohen, in Theatre journal, XXXIX, No. 2 (05 1987), p. 266–7.Google Scholar

11. The remainder of the section, revealingly entitled Le Théâtre en liberté (op. cit., p. 457–572), offers brief comments on the international character of repertoires of the 1950s and 1960s, audiences recently recruited through the theatre ‘market’, and contemporary critics whom Duvignaud considers information-banks for audiences (not harbingers of ‘taste’, edification, and the like). Audiences, he believes, no matter when or where, are always behind artistic creation, this being the condition for the development of all arts (op. cit., p. 535).

12. ‘Permanent revolution’ (op. cit., p. 561), by which Duvignaud means the theatre is constantly in a process of social confrontation and renewal, is presumably borrowed from the Living Theatre's Paradise Now, rather than directly from Trotsky. A similar conception of ‘permanent revolution’ appears in Mango, Achille, Verso una sociologia del teatro (Celebes Editore, 1978, p. 37)Google Scholar. However, Mango is sceptical about the supposedly beneficial impact of capitalism on the theatre, arguing that contemporary capitalism breeds consumerism, from which most theatre does not escape. ‘Liberated’ theatre such as the Living Theatre is sociologically rather than politically motivated (i.e., it seeks changes in individuals' behaviour rather than in the political organization of society) and, in the end, falls prey to commercial consumption: the Living Theatre reduces the public to simple onlookers, thereby failing to create a dialectic of give and take between performance and audience which is essential if theatre is to break with consumerism (op. cit., p. 75, 186).

Mango on audience participation (‘participants’ distinguished from ‘spectators’) and the actual as well as potential role of actors as catalysts of theatrical/social change (op. cit., p. 173–217 and p. 130–73 respectively) is generally critical of Duvignaud's anthropological touchstones (‘magic’, ‘ritual’, don, etc.). He refers, instead, to Artaud's idea (Le Théâtre el son double, Paris: Gallimard, 1964) that actors reach the deep recesses of the human psyche through their bodies, thus communicating not with the minds but with the nerves and ‘soul’ of spectators, making them veritable participants in the theatrical process. Artaud is indeed Mango's point of departure throughout, as is especially apparent in his stress on the ‘lived experience’ (vissuto) of individuals.

13. Lukács, Georg, ‘The Sociology of Modern Drama’, in Bentley, Eric, ed., The Theory of the Modern Stage (Penguin Books, 1978), p. 425–50Google Scholar (completed in Hungarian in 1909, then revised and published in German in 1914); Szondi, Peter, Theory of the Modern Drama, ed. and trans.Hays, Michael (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Hauser, Arnold, ‘The Origins of Domestic Drama’, in The Social History of Art, Vol. II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 77–92Google Scholar (reprinted in Bentley, op. cit., p. 403–19), and The Social History of Art, Vol. IV, p. 83–91 and p. 196–206 on the ‘well-made play’ (Scribe, Augier, Dumas fils, Sardou) and Chekhov, Ibsen and Shaw, respectively; Plekhanov, George, ‘Henrik Ibsen’, in Esletika i sotsiologia iskusstva (Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art), Vol. II (Moscow, 1978), p. 399–453Google Scholar; Lunacharsky, Anatoly, Henrik Ibsen (New York: Critics Group, 1937)Google Scholar, and Théâtre et révolution (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1971; Goldmann, Lucien, Le Dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1959)Google Scholar, and ‘Problèmes philosophiques et politiques dans le théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre’, ‘Le théâtre de Genet – essai d'étude sociologique’ and ‘Micro-structures dans les vingt-cinq premieres répliques des Nègres de Jean Genet’, in Structures mentales et création culturelle (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1970), p. 193–238, p. 267–302 and p. 303–26 respectively. For an anarchist-feminist point of view, though without any attempt to formulate a theory, see Goldman, Emma, The Social Significance of Modern Drama (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987Google Scholar, a reprint of her original 1914 text).

14. Since naturalism is evoked in these pages (through Lukács' references to milieu, as well as Hauser), we cannot neglect Zola's, EmileLe Naturalisme au théâtre (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1893)Google Scholar, and Nos Auteurs dramatiaues (Paris: Francois Bernouard, 1928). Zola's method is consciously sociological and is probably the first attempt at a sociology of theatre as such, albeit a positivist one. His principles of value-free observation, detachment (on the part of the observer-artist), and experimentation as in a laboratory (all this making for scientific knowledge) time well with Durkheim's setting up sociology as an independent discipline and concur with the rules of sociological method set out by Durkheim. These principles are the basis of Zola's theory of naturalism which he wished to transfer to the theatre so that theatre could portray ‘social life as it really is’

15. Apart from discussing dramatic forms and specific texts in the terms here indicated in Théâtre et revolution, a collection of twenty-two essays published between 1908 and 1933, Lunacharsky is singularly interested in stage productions – for example, Vakhtangov, Tairov and especially Meyerhold (discussed in the same terms). For further details on performance groups, particularly ephemeral groups with clear-cut aesthetic-political objectives who devised occasional texts since lost to posterity, see Rudnitsky, Konstantin, Russian and Soviet Theatre, trans. Permar, Roxane, ed. Milne, Lesley (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).Google Scholar

16. Of course, Brecht's distinction between dramatic theatre and epic theatre should be kept in mind for this summary. See Brecht on Theatre, trans. Willett, John (London: Methuen, 1964)Google Scholar, especially p. 37 for the well-known table dividing epic from dramatic theatre.

17. For questions related to Goldmann's account of Genet and notably to the issue of world view–social group from which even an iconoclast and voluntary exile (in multiple senses of the word) like Genet need not be excluded, see Shevtsova, Maria, ‘Social Actors/Stage Actors: Jean Genet and the Sociology of Theatre’, Revue Internationale de Sociologie, Second Series, XVII, No. 2–3 (08–121981), p. 276–309.Google Scholar This article also attempts to read Genet's dramatic texts theatrically, i.e. as texts written with a view to being performed, whose in-built performance markers or signs (space, kinesics, proxemics, etc.) are part and parcel of their social perspective. See also my ‘The Consumption of Empty Signs: Jean Genet's The Balcony’, Modern Drama, XXX, No. 1 (March 1987), p. 35–45, for a critique of asocial theories of representation with regard to Genet (i.e., his theatre is only about theatre).

18. Take, especially. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), andEncounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961).

19. Of the many works written by Turner, perhaps the most useful for this context are The Forest of Symbols: Aspects ofNdembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

20. ‘Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought’, American Scholar (Spring 1980), p. 165–79. All quotations are from p. 175–6.

21. Burns, Elizabeth, Theatricality: a Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life (London: Longman, 1972)Google Scholar; Schechner, Richard, Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976 (New York; Drama Book Specialists, 1977)Google Scholar, and Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

22. Burns describes the differences in this way: ‘First there is the matter of the special double occasion (see above). The performance is bounded in time and in consequences, so that what happens on the stage may affect the audience at the time but cannot otherwise have any effective connection with their lives. Secondly, there is the acceptance in the theatre and the rejection outside of composed behaviour as normal. Thirdly, the performance in the theatre displays paradigmatic values which cannot be distinguished in the midst of action in ordinary life, where too much or too little is known about motives, intentions or consequences. These differences keep the fictive world distinct from the socially real world and enable us to accept the deception of playacting without the encumbrance of moral judgement’ (op. cit., p. 39).