Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical ProblemsWhy do actors get stage fright? What is so embarrassing about joining in? Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard not to collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to answer these questions - usually ignored by theatre scholarship but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike - Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social and political meanings of the modern theatre. This book focuses on the theatrical encounter - those events in which actor and audience come face to face in a strangely compromised and alienated intimacy - arguing that the modern theatre has become a place where we entertain ourselves by experimenting with our feelings about work, social relations and about feelings themselves. |
Contents
| 34 | |
| 35 | |
| 40 | |
first blowback | 62 |
the predicament | 70 |
The nature of this difficulty may become clearer if the | 81 |
3 The animal on stage | 96 |
properly informed consent to their own participation and | 100 |
entire edifice of appearance and representation is either an | 151 |
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Common terms and phrases
action actor actual affect Agamben animal on stage appears audience awful hole become Berger blase blunder body Branagh Castellucci’s Cathy Naden clearly consciousness corpsing course curtain darkened auditorium depersonalisation division of labour economic embarrassment experience exploitation eyes face fact feeling fiasco function Gabbard Gambon gaze Giulio Cesare helpless hic et nunc historical horse human imagine inside intense intimacy involve Kielblock kind Kleist’s Kostya laugh laughter least libidinal band light look Lyotard magic and mimesis means Michael Gambon mise en sce`ne modern theatre mouse object offer one’s oneself Oresteia particular performance perhaps phenomenology phenomenon physical play pleasure political possible pre-tragic theatre present production Protagoras psychoanalytic psychological Raffaello Sanzio relations representation Richard II role sacrifice Samuel West scene seeking seems semiotics sense shame Silvan Tomkins simply social Socı`etas specific spectator stage fright Stanislavski suggests technique theatrical thing thought experiment tion uncanny Warburg