By choosing to attend a theatre performance, the spectator volun- tarily sets up the circumstances in which communication can take place. In other words, it is the spectator who initiates the theatrical event, not the performer. There are two problems which follow from this which need to be unravelled. First, what is it that the spectator sets out willingly to receive? And second, how does she deal with what is received?
To return to the concept of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (see Chapter 1), theatre may be seen as a system of ‘signs’ whose significance is tacitly accepted by a specific community. The theatre community (which may be very wide and consist of everyone involved with theatre whether maker or spectator, though it could also be taken as only the actors, technicians and audience at a particular performance) agrees tacitly at least for the duration of this performance to accept the coherence of certain signs with cer- tain concepts. The signs may be sound images (received by an ‘audience’) or visual images (received by ‘spectators’), but they will convey particular concepts implicitly agreed with the perfor- mers. The stage is a particularly potent means for according com- municative power to bodies, things, sounds, shapes – a red nose signals a drunk, a patched jacket a servant and a top hat a boss, sounds such as twitterings and croaks signify the countryside, three or four trees signify a forest, a pale yellow circular light
projected onto a darker cyclorama signifies the moon. The unspo- ken contract between stage and auditorium is made by the shared acceptance of such signs.
In the performance, the signs may be categorised as of two sorts: the actors, and what they say and do; and the settings, lights, props, etc. The spectator reads these and tries to construct a world out of them. The problem for the spectator is that she receives many signs simultaneously, and must constantly adjust her under- standing according to the new information which she is constantly gleaning. How does the spectator process and decode the various different signs, especially because they are so many? She compares the signs she is receiving with similar real or fictitious signs previously received. The process is ‘intertextual’ (see Chapter 1).
In other words, no spectator ever comes to the theatre with absolutely no knowledge of how the performance will operate. She brings with her preconceptions which form what Hans Robert Jauss called the ‘horizon of expectations’. (See the section ‘Drama and Society’ in Chapter 4 above.) The production history of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov illustrates this. First produced as part of a popular evening of farces and light comedies at the Alexan- drinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1896, it was thoroughly mis- understood and seemed likely to sink without trace. But in 1898 the Moscow Art Theatre gained permission to stage it as a piece of serious naturalism for their intellectual and educated audience – and it was now received as a highly original drama. And today The Seagull is acknowledged as a masterpiece, and approached as such. What is significant is just that – how the potential audience per- ceives the play. If the audience’s horizon of expectation suggests that they are going to see a trivial farce, they do not know how to cope with a play like The Seagull. If the think it will be a serious (which does not mean not comic) drama, their expectations will be different. And if they know it is a masterpiece, their expectations are different again. It is the horizon of their expectations which gives the audience the first clues with which to decode what hap- pens on stage.
There are, however, two kinds of horizons of expectation for the theatregoer. Plays are evaluated against productions of other plays, and perhaps against other productions of the same play; they are also evaluated against the spectator’s own personal and social
experience. If either of these horizons is exceeded, the spectator is delighted – so long as it is not exceeded by too much, at which point the play begins to become obscure, even indecipherable. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is a clear example of this: when first produced, it aroused utter bafflement in most of its audience. Only later did it come to be seen as a masterpiece and ‘ahead of its time’.
Jauss also pointed out that over time, expectations change. A history of Shakespearean production over 400 years shows that while audiences in the nineteenth century, for example, expected to revel in Shakespeare’s ‘characters’, the early twentieth-century theatregoers concentrated their attention on the ‘poetry’, and later audiences expected insights from Shakespeare’s understanding of political and social processes. Jacques Derrida pointed out tirelessly that there is no correct interpretation of any work, and indeed different audiences, and especially different kinds of audience (distinguished by, for instance, class or gender, a supportive or a resisting predisposition, etc.), with different kinds of horizons of expectation will respond differently. The power of the audience is seen in the fact that any author will be at least partly conditioned in her playmaking by her understanding of her probable audi- ence’s horizon of expectation.
From this it begins to be clear that any performance is com- pleted, and validated, by the spectator. To adapt the provocative phrase of Roland Barthes, with the death of the playwright, the director and the actor comes the liberation of the spectator.