Alison Burke: Interviews in classical performance research: journalistic interviews

Media logic has transformed journalistic interviewing from what was primarily a “discovering” or “information gathering” enterprise into an aspect of entertainment.  As journalistic practices and perspectives as well as entertainment formats became more widely understood, the line separating journalists from their interviewees began to fade.  One consequence was that interviews began to be set up to complement the interviewees’ own messages and emphasis.[9]

Because the director needs him for notes, I am to interview Cake separately, but before that, I’m allowed to observe the two of them being photographed for this piece.  With her quick, depreciating Irish wit, Shaw keeps up a steady flow of bantering mock-abashment at the thought of being snapped alongside this gleaming hunk. (“Jonathan is mythological in shape, isn’t he?” she said earlier.)

Having witnessed Deborah Warner’s searching production in its first incarnation, last summer, at the Abbey, Dublin, I’m aware that Shaw will be seeing me directly after having put herself through the mother and father of all mangles.  So I suddenly feel about as sensitive as someone waiting to shove a microphone in the face of a major road-accident casualty.

Taylor’s anxiety could be considered more than a rhetorical sensitivity.  In establishing the emotional impact on Shaw of performing Medea, Taylor prepares the groundwork for the fusion of Shaw with Medea in order to lend authority to her responses in the interview. Moreover, by establishing the ‘emotional truth’ of Shaw’s interpretation of the character, Taylor also promotes the production: simply, the production is worth seeing because of Shaw’s performance.

Taylor’s article is also noteworthy as it fulfils a number of functions: interview, preview and review.  Taylor’s authority to interview Shaw and Cake is derived from his prior witness of the production.  As the production transferred from the Abbey (Dublin) to the Queen’s (London), Taylor, having seen the production at the Abbey, is able to present a critical response to the production, whilst previewing, and thereby promoting, the London production.[11]  Taylor, in providing the context for the interview, establishes in the ‘hook’ paragraph that he has already seen the production in Ireland, therefore, the interview is informed by his previous critical response.  This context supports the positive review in the strap line that the production is ‘Deborah Warner’s sensational version of Euripides’.  Consequently, the production receives promotion for the London debut and affirmation as a result of the previous run, and the interviewer’s prior experience validates his role. 

The promotion of the interviewer also rests on the interviewer’s relationship with the reader.  In this instance Taylor operates as a mediator between the interviewees and the reader, filtering, analysing and contextualising the interview process.  In order to undertake this role the interviewer positions the reader by establishing a shared frame of reference, which is understood by the reader, and in so doing, defines the target audience. Taylor displays his knowledge in a series of comparisons which provide modern counterparts in order to support the assumption that Medea is a play of universal interest. The manner in which Taylor displays his knowledge further contributes to the shaping and defining of the target audience.  Taylor defines the reader through assumptions made about the reader’s geographic location, class, and literary/cultural knowledge base. With respect to geographic location, Taylor assumes that the reader is London-based and that the bank of the reader’s theatrical experience is London-centric.  This is evident when Taylor, establishing Cake’s macho credentials to play Jason, alludes to his previous performance:

Jonathan Cake, the actor who recently wowed audiences with his strapping frame and teasing sexual confidence in Tennessee Williams’s steamy, tongue-in-cheek Baby Doll at the National Theatre.[12]

In this comment Taylor establishes his own credentials, in that he displays a wider theatrical knowledge, whilst characterising his readership as being able (geographically and economically) to attend a London-based production.  also identifies the class of the readership as educated and refined.  In his physical description of Cake he implies a shared class-based knowledge:When in comes to achieving his political ambitions, Medea’s asylum-seeking husband has all the advantages of a glamorous Olympic hero, and Cake, who is a Cambridge rugby Blue, is ideally cast to project this allure.

Taylor assumes that his audience are familiar with the colours awarded to the Cambridge University rugby team when they play Oxford University, which assumes and displays a class-based knowledge and re-inscribes the prejudice that the ‘body beautiful’, class and a glorified view of the classical past are all interrelated.  Taylor’s observation works on an assumption of shared values related to privilege and belief in the pursuit of excellence (physical and intellectual) that finds its counterpart in the mythologised view of the classical past.  Moreover, Taylorre-figures Jason as an Olympic hero which is reductive of the complexity of Euripides’ characterisation. Taylor does this in order to link the vision of the Olympic hero with his implied definition of ideal masculinity and the ‘British elite’, which, by association, according to Taylor, are those who participate in the Oxford/Cambridge sporting/intellectual culture.Taylor also displays his literary knowledge and invites his audience to participate in a self-congratulatory game of understand the literary comparison.  Shaw becomes a  ‘bony and brainily beautiful Virginia Woolf’, Cake is a ‘fresh Steve Redgrave’, Medea and Jason become ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’, and, in order to show an awareness of contemporary figures, Barbara and Boris Becker are presented as a modern comparison. This process of comparisons develops the tripartite relationship of intent: the publication is promoted by flattering the literary/cultural knowledge of the target audience, the interviewer is promoted through a display of belonging and the production is promoted by being associated with the ‘glitterati’ of the literary/theatrical/celebrity worlds.  

The purpose of this string of comparisons to literary and public figures supports the assumption that Euripides’Medea is relevant to the modern world.  In the interview, celebrity culture is considered to be an appropriate modern referent for the relationship between Medea and Jason. The position is not argued critically by Taylor, but is presented as an assumption to be accepted. The interview schema begins with the question ‘why now?’ Taylor reports Shaw’s answer in the following terms:

Partly, reveals Shaw, because our current fame-obsessed culture makes the world of drama peculiarly accessible to a modern audience.

And in order to develop this observation Taylor quotes Shaw’s analysis of Jason and Medea’s relationship: ‘This kind of admiring, immodest love affair is what Hello! Magazine is built on.’ What is not clear is whether or not the production sought to utilise public interest in those in the public eye uncritically as justification for the character-based focus of the production’s interpretation.  It is also possible, however, that the production and interview aim at challenging the way in which the media plays to and promotes voyeurism.  In support of this, the reference to Hello! in The Independent, because of the tabloid/broadsheet polarity, could be considered as an attempt to challenge what is presented in the strap-line as celebrity obsession.  If this is the case, then there is a significant irony to the marketing of the production and the justification and presentation of the interview.  The production was marketed as Fiona Shaw’s Medea, which established the production as a star vehicle and thereby promoted the concept of the celebrity rather than challenging it.[13]  Furthermore, the presentation of the interview, prioritising Shaw in the title and photograph, and merging the actor with the character in order to validate the interview, promotes and utilises the principle of the celebrity.  Ultimately, whether or not it was the intention of the interviewer or interviewees, a wider awareness of the production and a critical response to the interview results in the conclusion that the production and the interview, in effect, re-inscribe the very position that they seek to deconstruct.  The lack of clarity in the interview, which leads to this conclusion, arises from the fact that celebrity culture as a modern referent is accepted as an assumption rather than being justified through critical argument, therefore, the appropriateness of the referent is unclear. 

In the interview, celebrity obsession prepares for the discussion of gender and the production’s interpretation of Medea and Jason’s relationship. Shaw and Taylor assert the modern relevance of Euripides’ play by claiming that, in the present ‘post-feminist society’, there exists the capability to appreciate that the faults in the relationship, which precipitate the tragedy, are two-sided.  Medea’s role in the relationship is considered by Shaw to operate as a trap for Jason:

“A woman marries a man and does such favours for him that he can never in good conscience leave her.  I think already that is a subconscious trap.” Shaw argues.  And this new capacity to appreciate the pressures on Jason is the other key reason why now is the right moment forMedea.

Taylor’s willingness to accept this interpretation could be considered as predicated on the flawed premise that prevailing gender politics provide a more appropriate understanding of the gender relations in the text than previous production environments.  The premise is flawed as it collapses history: the article does not give consideration to the vastly different political/social environment into which Medea was originally received.  In contrast, because Taylor’s article operates as a positive review (Abbey production) and preview (London production), the desire to validate the modernising impetus of the performance in effect ignores variant readings of the text.Taylor’s acceptance and promotion of the gender interpretation proffered by Shaw and Cake suggests a specific reading of Euripides’ intentions, but what is presented, however, constitutes a specific thematic interpretation that need not be accepted by the reader uncritically.  

Although Taylor does acknowledge that ‘Medea has been co-opted for many causes’, this critical position is not invoked as an analytical premise for Warner’s interpretation.  Indeed, although Taylor notes the long-standing performance tradition, he does not then consider this production’s interpretation in relation to that performance tradition.  In contrast, Warner’s interpretation is ‘legitimised’ by Taylor through presenting her directorial strategy as coming closer to the ‘spirit’ of the play:

Deborah Warner is renowned for blasting through the encrusted gunk of performance tradition and for being true to the spirit of a classic play by holding the drama to the consequences of its own deepest insights.   

In this statement Taylor aims to promote Warner’s production and endorse her interpretation by distancing her production of Medea from previous ones: the implicit assumption being that Warner’s interpretation and Shaw and Cake’s responses are closer to the intentions of Euripides.  The sub-text of Euripides’ play is then assumed to be concerned with presenting Medea and Jason as eternally locked together in mutual recrimination: both culpable and at fault for the tragic events.  The problem with this interpretation is the ending of the play.  Medea’s exit in her grandfather Helios’ chariot is problematic for the mutually culpable theory, so much so that Warner excised Medea’s divinely assisted exit to Athens.  Consequently, what is considered to be getting back to the ‘spirit’ of the play, actually means changing the play.  It is possible to argue that changing the ending of the play in order to privilege the production’s interpretation is not problematic in itself.  What is problematic, however, is the assertion that to do so is more true to the ‘spirit’ of the play, rather than the ‘spirit’ of the production. In his analysis, Taylor ignores the issues around adapting a text to fit a theoretical interpretation, and side steps the question of whether or not it is our modern fear that the ending justifies the action that causes difficulty with Euripides’ ending. Justification of an ending on the basis that it is more appropriate to the ‘spirit’ of Euripides than the ending Euripides did write exposes the problems in collapsing history and eroding cultural difference.  Forcing Euripides into the mould of modern gender politics in order to appropriate his work for the present does not distinguish Warner’s interpretation, but actually places it firmly in the performance tradition of appropriation and adaptation.  

Taylor’s critical stance ultimately accepts the production’s thematic interpretation and as a consequence he does not maintain a critical distance in order to evaluate the interviewees’ responses, but provides a context in order to promote the production and in the process the publication and himself.  For the purposes of performance research, however, the interview does have value as the interviewees’ responses provide corroborative evidence for the psychological realism and modernising approach of Warner’s production.  Given that information about theatrical productions is ephemeral, the interview provides more concrete evidence of the production’s approach.  In this interview, the fusing of the actor with the role by the interviewer, and the interviewees’ internalising of characters’ motives, augments the process of character inhabitation undertaken in the production.  Furthermore, in the assertion that Euripides’ play is relevant to the modern world, the interview points towards the reason why a modern staging interpretation was utilised.  Although the critical position of the interview may not present it as such, the definition of the sub-text of the play in terms of the lengths to which obsessive desire can lead (in which both parties are culpable), locates the play within a modern frame of reference.  The interview’s focus on Medea and Jason’s relationship, to the exclusion of cultural and historical influences, results from and evidences the production’s interpretation of the play in light of prevailing gender politics, modern presentational modes and a psychological interpretation of character.  In simple terms, the interview provides supporting textual evidence, albeit uncritically, for the transitory theatrical event. 

Example 2: Al Senter ‘Playing God’, What’s On in London, 1^st May 2001, p.51.

Al Senter’s interview with the actor Greg Hicks (Dionysus, Teiresias, Servant, in Sir Peter Hall’s production of the Bacchai at the Royal National Theatre, London, 2002) is radically different from Taylor’s interview with the protagonists of Warner’s Medea.  Senter’s interview is presented as a monologue, with the role of the interviewer expunged in order to present Hick’s responses as an uninterrupted speech.  For the purposes of performance research, however, the interview can be examined with reference to the relationship of intent established above.

In this interview, the relationship of intent promotes the production through providing what appears as unmediated access to the practitioner, thereby promoting Hicks as an actor and, consequently, Hall’s production of the Bacchai. Indeed, the primary strength of this interview as a source for theatre research lies in the manner in which the interview allows for the promotion of the production.  Senter’s interview schema begins with asking what attracts Hicks to Greek tragedy and to masked acting.  In the opening ‘hook’ paragraph and subsequent paragraph, Hicks establishes that his attraction to Greek tragedy is,

- because it is a world that never ceases to fascinate and expand me.  Doing these plays takes you into the deepest recesses of your psyche and, from the start, I’ve always felt comfortable in a mask – somehow you become more selfless and this helps you grasp these cosmic emotions.

Here Hicks establishes his personal view that Greek tragedy explores issues of consciousness, whilst implicitly linking the performance of Greek tragedy with masked acting.  He undertakes a similar connection in the second paragraph:

I like the formality of Greek drama.  Yet when I put on a mask, it is not only a piece of formal ritual – my self is diminished and I love the anonymity which a mask brings me.

In these statements, Hicks connects the emotional content of Greek tragedy and the form of the genre with masked acting: his implicit assumption is that performance of Greek tragedy is correctly expressed through masked acting.  Although there is no interviewer’s voice to contextualise and analyse this position, the information cannot be accepted uncritically by the theatre researcher.  Hicks’ interpretation of Greek tragedy is informed by his long-standing involvement with Hall and corresponds to the production style developed by Hall as a consequence of directing the Oresteia, The Oedipus Plays, Tantalus and the Bacchai.[14] Hicks’ assumption that acting in Greek tragedy requires masking could be considered derived from Hall’s thesis that the emotion and form of Greek tragedy demand the wearing of masks.[15]  Furthermore, their shared theoretical position may have emerged as a consequence of the fact that all the mask work that Hicks has undertaken has been under Hall’s direction and Hall has cast him repeatedly in all his productions of Greek tragedy.[16]

Hick’s assumption that performing Greek tragedy automatically requires a masked interpretation is, therefore, a personal preference for Hall’s directorial approach and serves to ‘legitimise’ Hall’s direction of the Bacchai, thereby promoting the production. The view that Greek tragedy should automatically be masked is, however, a controversial position.  As there is no interviewer’s voice to provide a critical context to Hicks’ assumption, the theatre researcher needs to place the interview in a wider context.  Hall’s use of masks may now be accepted as his directorial style, but his first masked venture (the Oresteia) polarised reviewers’ responses.  In what became known as ‘the war of the masks’,[17] without exception the reviewers of the Oresteiaapplauded or railed against the use of masks.[18]  Moreover, in more recent times, the gulf that emerged between Barton and Hall in the rehearsals of Tantalus was reportedly a consequence of Hall’s decision to mask an essentially modern dramatic text, albeit a text derived from the extant tragedies, fragments and Epic Cycle. Therefore, what Hicks presents in the interview as the method of performance required by the content and form Greek tragedy, constitutes a personal opinion which results from a collaborative process informed by Hall’s directorial predilection for utilising ancient stage conventions.

Although Hicks’ position in the interview supports Hall’s direction, Hicks also discusses his own interpretation of movement and choreography: 

I’m also passionate about working on stage and going right to the limits of what my body can do.  I study Japanese movement and Brazilian martial art and that has helped me use my body as a means of expression.  A mere hand gesture can convey a mile of meaning – even the tips of the fingers can be extraordinarily eloquent.

As the interview operates on one level as a preview, Hicks’ discussion of movement provides the readership with a tantalising glimpse into what the audience can expect at the production.  The ‘exoticness’ of Hicks’ physical influences could be considered provocative of the readership (and potential audience members’) curiosity, so Hicks implicitly ‘sells’ the production.  He also privileges the potential audience by providing them with information with which they can decode his performance.  There is, however, the implicit assumption that the potential audience will understand and respond to the meaning of gesture derived from another performance culture, and that the minutiae of meaning can be discerned.  This assumption establishes Hicks’ authority over his own performance (he determines his own influences) and his authority in the interview (his explanation informs the reader).  Furthermore, to place Hicks’ movement in a wider context, Hall’s directorial style could be described as presenting the text to the audience; stage choreography and interpretation through physical movement have presented a challenge to Hall’s direction.  Indeed, Hall has been somewhat suspicious of physically based interpretations, considering that movement detracts from the text.[19]   Consequently, Hick’s discussion of movement evidences his personal contribution as an actor and the reader would be better positioned to appreciate this if he/she had a wider knowledge of Hall and Hicks' performance history.

The promotion of the production in the interview is also achieved through the promotion of the practitioner in a wider theatrical context. Senter’s interview schema progresses from discussing Hicks’ response to Greek tragedy to his approach to acting as a profession.   The interview schema affords Hicks the opportunity to display his dedication to the profession through his process of preparation[20] and his commitment to performing classical texts through privileging plays that have a classical subject matter.[21] The element of disclosure and revelation augments the sense of authority in the interview: Hicks, by stressing his dedication to the genre and the profession, establishes himself as specialised in the field, therefore, his testament gains credibility. Furthermore, as the interview operates as a preview to Hall’s Bacchai, Hicks’ credibility as an actor further promotes the production: the very seriousness with which he takes his roles, and his experience and preference of the genre, adds legitimacy and kudos to the production. The unspoken subtext of the interview, however, could be considered contradictory.  The element of revelation assumes that the actor’s psyche is of importance and value in understanding the performance.  The position is contradictory in that Hicks also establishes that the attraction of masked acting is the anonymity the mask affords.  The contradiction lies in the fact that the interview presents the practitioner as key to understanding meaning, yet the performance style aims at subverting individual psychological expression in order to achieve Hall’s aim to present the text to the audience. 

The authority of the interview rests on the assumption that the interview process informs the potential audience, and, through presenting the interview as instructive, the publication is promoted.  The decision to present the interview as a monologue could be considered as a rhetorical technique aimed at persuading the reader of the authority of the interview.  The effacing of the interviewer’s voice suggests to the reader that he/she is gaining unmediated access to the practitioner, therefore, the assumption that the practitioner is key to understanding the production is augmented.  The selling point of the interview is that, by presenting the interview as an ‘interior monologue’, the publication provides the readership with a ‘truth’ that they would not otherwise have access to, which places the potential audience member in a greater position of knowledge.  To put it simply, the readership of What’s on in London are privileged as potential audience members above those who have not read the publication, as they can approach the production from a position of superior knowledge.  The concept of superior knowledge, however, works on a set of assumptions.  There is no critical voice in the interview, so the information is assumed to be authoritative without question, and the justification of authority rests on the implicit assumption that the psychological processes of the actor are key to understanding his performance.  That the interview is of value positions the readership as a potential audience drawn from a hermeneutic world (London-centric and theatrically aware) in which the name of the practitioner, his performance history and current undertaking has meaning.  For the interview to be of value beyond London’s theatre world and over and above the uncritical acceptance of the reader, the content of the interview needs to be placed in a wider critical context of performance analysis in which the production as a whole is examined in light of the style to which it subscribes and in relation to other possible performance methods.

Conclusions

Classical scholars’ developing interest in modern performance of classical texts requires debate and research into new methodological approaches.  Traditional methods of research, rigorous study of the original text and secondary criticism juxtaposed with performance analysis based on personal witness, do not constitute an embracing methodology.  The position of this article is that an appreciation of the intentions of the practitioners is needed in order to understand the performance aims of the production.  To this end, interviews with practitioners provide insight in to the motivation, justification, and reasoning that underpin the approach taken by the theatrical event.  However, given that interviews with practitioners can provide primary evidence for the theatrical event as well as secondary evidence in the form of reviewers’ evaluation, a revised critical apparatus needs to be put in place in order to analyse the reliability of information generated by the interview process. 

What has been seen in this paper, is that any critical apparatus needs to take account of the process of mutual validation that takes place between the publication, interviewer, theatrical production and interviewee.  Positively, what the above examples show is that journalistic interviews are a useful but problematic source for production analysis.  The interviews are useful in that they do provide evidence for the respective productions’ general interpretation.  This information can then be used as a basis for understanding the rationale behind the presentational modes, and, placed within a wider theatrical context, can evidence approaches to the different performance styles to which respective productions subscribe (for example, naturalistic character inhabitation or distance and abstraction from character).   The interviews are also useful as evidence of the critical tradition in the media; in particular Taylor’s interview provides clear evidence for media critics’ continuing validation of the performance of Greek tragedy predicated on a premise of universal interest. 

The interviews are problematic, however, as the requirement of mutual promotion on behalf of the publication and interviewer, and production and practitioner, coupled with the use of an interactionalist method, result in collusion rather than investigation.  In the above interviews, because there is no critical voice the interviewers do not analyse the information.  For this information to be used in support of performance analysis, the researcher needs to consider the extent to which the information is formed in response to the need to promote, and distinguish the data from the advertisement.  Furthermore, as is evident in both examples, the increasing tendency to promote interest in the celebrity figure and to collide the celebrity with his/her role (or the interpretation of the production) implies that the interviewee has an authoritative knowledge that is to be accepted rather than challenged.  Therefore, for the information generated from the newspaper interview to be of value, it has to be treated as the presentation of a production’s ‘party line’ and, consequently, not an authoritative interpretation of the original text as a performance text.  In sum, in order to use information from newspaper interviews, it is important for the researcher to maintain a critical distance and not to acquiesce in the closed loop of meaning created by interviewers and interviewees as a consequence of the mutual need for promotion. 

Alison Burke
August 2003

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