1. The argument concerning abstract objectivism vis-à-vis linguistic signs is to be found in Volosinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I. R. (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. The slash Bakhtin/Voloshinov in my text indicates that I take this work to have been co-authored by the two men, Bakhtin writing most of it himself. For this reason, all my subsequent references are only to Bakhtin. For my summary of the debate concerning this authorship issue and my own position on it, see ‘Dialogism and the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of Culture’, New Literary History, 23.2 (Summer 1992), pp. 747–63. Other texts by Bakhtin that underpin my argument concerning semiotic processes are ‘Discourse in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422Google Scholar, and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, trans. McGee, Vem. W. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)Google Scholar. For further discussion of my concept of the sociocultural sign in respect of performances, and which I develop from Bakhtin's theses on the social sign, see my ‘Minority/Dominant Culture in the Theatre (With Special Reference to Bakhtin and Bourdieu)’ in Theatre and Cultural Interaction (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1993), pp. 3–20.

2. While quite a large literature now exists on the uses of reception theory for the theatre, on the one hand, and on cultural coding, on the other, I here cite only a few influential texts. Thus, Patrice, Pavis, , Voix et images de la scène: vers une sémiologie de la réception (Lille: Presses Univer-sitaires de Lille, 1985)Google Scholar. (Pavis draws principally on the models of Jauss and Iser); Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar. Theories of cultural systems and coding that have arguably been borrowed most for theatre studies are those of Umberto Eco and Yuri Lotman. See, for example, Eco, 's A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984); Lotman, 's The Structure of Aesthetic Texts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977)Google Scholar and his essays in Soviet Semiotics, ed. and trans. Lucid, Daniel P. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Eco and, to a lesser extent, Lotman's influence are to be seen in de Marinis Semiotica del teatro, Marco. L'analisi testuale dello spettacolo (Milan: Bompiani, 1982)Google Scholar. In my view, the most important book to draw on concepts of cultural systems and codes and which is the least mechanistic in its formulation of them for the theatre is Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3. Given the enormous applicability of Bakhtin's many interrelated concepts regarding dialogism through signs in society—a profoundly performative framework of analysis—to the processes of the theatre, it seems curious that he so woefully ignored the theatre and, especially, production and performance. My theory on this subject is that Bakhtin thought of the theatre as being dramatic literature and, moreover, that he must have taken as his ideas of the latter some of the least dialogical examples of it (i.e. didactic plays, agit-prop, and the like). As a consequence, he considered dramatic literature principally to be a monological form and, therefore, to be monovocal, in contrast with the novel, which he took to be the most dialogical and most multivocal form in existence. Since the novel had these characteristics it was, in his view, the genre that was closest to the dynamics of culture in its myriad forms of expression in society. Bakhtin's rather anomalous omissions—or hearing impairment, to stay in keeping with his own vocabulary regarding voices in discourse!— need by no means deafen us to the phenomenal richness of his work for studies of performance and the theatre in general.

4. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope envisages time and place/space as one meaningful unit, since agents act on something with someone on space somewhere, and in a temporal dimension. Hence my hyphenated time-place throughout this text. It must be remembered that, for Bakhtin, time is always social time, that is, time in history and which is contingent on specific historical conditions. This makes time concrete and relative. It can neither be abstract nor eternal, which is a form of abstraction. See his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, op. cit. As should be clear in the course of my discussion above, Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope is extremely important for understanding how images of time in the work of the theatre, including images of well-defined historical periods, are projected through the way performers fill and organize space, and play with and in it during a performance. Apart from helping us to pinpoint such difficult concepts in the theatre as situation and context, Bakhtin's chronotope enables us to embrace the idea of spectators as interlocutors who are identifiable in time and space and who, by being synchronized with the latter in some way, are also synchronized with the act of theatre, the actions performed in it and the actions it performs. This last includes the effects it has on this or that group of people in this or that sector of society.

5. Jean-Louis Rivière, editor of the Cahiers de la Comédie-Française believes that Lassalle's production is essentially about the theatre. This idea is the subject of his discussion with Lassalle, which appears in the above journal, No. 9 (Autumn 1993), pp. 7–11.

6. Communicated orally in an unpublished interview with Doutreligne.

7. Communicated orally in an unpublished interview with Kossenkova.