This dissertation argues that final lines by no means constitute the end of a production.
The narrative carries on through images, sounds, or even elaborate jigs. However, the
final lines still hold a particular resonance. When modified, they mark the end of the
narrative in a way that separates the words of the playwright from the goals and
objectives of the director. The words are the link to the storyteller, while the production
holds the key to the story. The relationship between the lines in the text and the end of a
production’s narrative is nuanced. It speaks to a production’s power to control its own
ending to attain a particular social or political reading. However, it also speaks to the fact
that textual endings may retain a measure of influence over the interpretation of the
production. This is especially true for these productions — Doran’s Titus Andronicus,
Nunn’s Troilus and Cressida, and Berger’s The Taming of the Shrew — which did not
remove, so much as relocate, the textual ending. For a privileged audience member aware
of the more usual Shakespearean ending, this creates a moment of tension where the play
In Doran’s Titus Andronicus, the message of unity on which the production
focused by moving Marcus’s lines to the end is in direct conflict with the revenge motif
found in Lucius’s lines that usually end the play. In Doran’s production, Shakespeare’s
original ending was delivered just before the new ending. The old ending therefore still
holds the potential to act as an end marker for spectators who recognize these lines as
Shakespeare’s closing lines. Its themes of revenge thus remain present in the modified
ending even as Marcus attempts to focus on healing and the idea of re-forging Rome.
Original endings, in these circumstances, have the potential to complicate modified
endings.
A similar occurrence of haunting might potentially transpire in the other two
productions. Underneath the encounter that ends Nunn’s Troilus and Cressida is an echo
of another Cressida — one might call her Shakespeare’s Cressida — whose sexual acts
are unknown to the audience. Cressida’s lines, particularly in Nunn’s new theatrical
moment, are subject to a kind of doubling for certain audience members: one eye looks
on this exchange while the other eye views a ghosting of this exchange in which
Cressida’s guilt remains a potentiality, not a certainty.
Finally, in Berger’s The Taming of the Shrew, the lines that end Shakespeare’s
play are also present and unaltered. The “interruption” of that ending, with Fletcher’s
epilogue, attempts to amend the controversy of Kate’s final speech, but ultimately this
character’s insistence on inequality just moments before has the potential to cast a
shadow upon the new finale. For some audience members, Shakespeare’s ending may
linger in this newly created space. The program for Berger’s Shrew hints at this initiative
by pointing out that “Using the title of a play as an anagram, the result is The woman’s
through textual rearrangement can open the play to new ideas. However, an anagram —
like the textual arrangements found in these three productions — is limited to the text out
of which it is formed, and the rearranged words and lines still have the potential to snap
back into their original formation. Thus, because these particular productions do not cut,
but overwrite, the ending, they open the possibility for multiple endings to occur at once,
both the production’s and the text’s.
The directors of each of these plays reordered, adapted, and supplemented
Shakespeare’s text. In resketching these endings, each director attempted to support
meaningful and relevant themes for their particular audiences. Regardless of the outcome
of each production, which, I argue, potentially reinforced the racial tensions and
patriarchal viewpoints espoused in the plays themselves, these modifications may
instigate a kind of rumination on the whole production. In essence, changing the ending
changed something about the play as a whole. As Susan Bennett succinctly states,
Unlike the printed text, a theatrical performance is available for its audience only
in a fixed time period. Furthermore, the event is not a finished product in the same
way as a novel or poem. It is an interactive process, which relies on the presence
of spectators to achieve its effects. A performance is, of course, unlike a printed
work, always open to immediate and public acceptance, modification, or rejection
by those people it addresses. (67–8)
Thus, as the audience engages with the performance, it changes, and in turn any
modifications made to the performance change an audience’s reception of the
performance. It is a relationship that exists in a state of constant flux.
The final lines in a Shakespearean play are structured to anticipate and announce
with additional text, such as those I have discussed above, create a moment which signals
that the play is both over and not over. These productions provide an opportunity for an
audience to look deeper into the play’s new ending and interpret this moment back across
the rest of the production to understand how these new or misplaced lines affect the entire
narrative. In essence, this moment provides a space where new interpretations are
possible. Resketched endings allow productions to comment on particular themes or
messages, political or social, simply by allowing the audience to hear the text in a
different order or with another author’s (or director’s) added dialogue and interpretation.
The effects of this, as I have shown above, exponentially influence how audiences may
interpret the rest of the production. This is especially true for audience members who are
aware that modifications have been made. Experiments in film and psychology have
shown that film clips shown to a viewer in different sequences will produce different
sensations, emotions, and even a different understanding of the narrative. Cutting and
pasting Shakespeare — and Fletcher’s sequel — provides a similar result. But it is, of
course, only when we reach the end that we can fully understand, criticize, and
internalize the order of events. It is only when we reach the end, no matter where it is
4
Affective Audiences: Ending Images in Three of Des
McAnuff’s Shakespearean Productions at the Stratford
Festival
From cheering to jeering, the curtain call is a designated forum for audience members to
expressly state their judgement of a performance. Indeed, it is deemed the audience’s responsibility to applaud at the end of the performance, as long as they felt the production
was worth recognizing. Scholars tracing the history of applause, such as Baz Kershaw,
have remarked on a distinct trend which has emerged in regards to the curtain call.
Kershaw specifically yearns for the return of unruly audiences, having noticed that the
modern, better-behaved audiences are losing some element of their own authority by
silencing their voices and clapping politely (Kershaw 143; 150). Kershaw observes that
on some level the audience is merely applauding themselves: the “standing ovation becomes an orgasm of self-congratulation for money so brilliantly spent; the desultory
clap becomes an increasingly rare event, as it is an admission of income wasted”
(Kershaw 144). Applauding the purchaser (i.e. the spectator) rather than the product,
according to Kershaw, disconnects the audience from the experience.
Despite Kershaw’s cynicism regarding an audience’s response to a performance’s closing minutes, the emotional resonance of the final moment is intrinsically important to
the audience’s sense of closure. Furthermore, applauding, cheering, or giving a standing
ovation marks the event. The continuation of applause, either because the audience
refuses to give up their own role in the performance or are simply extending the curtain
call, indicates a refusal to let the performance die. It is within the power of the audience
to determine when the production actually ends; the longer the applause, the longer the
still progressing or at least lingering. Generally, the actors and audience take cues from
one another. The audience will often provide applause for the length of the set
choreography until every actor has bowed at least once individually and (often) all
together as a company.
Modern curtain calls have set blocking. The choreography is designed to focus on
both individual performance and to recognize the company as a whole while, one would
imagine, prolonging accolades from the audience. Since there is a connection between the
actor and character, the audience’s applause continues the narrative of the play. As Kershaw states, “Applause thus celebrates the loss — the lack — that it tries, impossibly, to mark; for it can never, of course, recover the events it appreciates, except perhaps as an
encore that itself intensifies the immediate irrecoverability of the rest of the show”
(Kershaw 135). However, even marking the moment continues the narrative that the
action of applause cannot quite recover. It paradoxically maintains that which has already
ended. And while something is continuing, it can provide new information, disrupt old
material, or simply enhance what has just been seen. Thus, the ending moments,
including what occurs during or after the curtain call, provide an affective experience for
the audience and enable (or disrupt) a sense of closure.
There are three particular productions from The Stratford Festival in Stratford,
Ontario that I want to discuss. These three productions, The Tempest (2010), Twelfth
Night (2011), and Henry V (2012), each create affective experiences in and around the
curtain call. These shows were the final three Shakespearean works directed by Des
McAnuff during his tenure as the Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director from 2008–2012.
In each closing moment, these Shakespearean productions attempt to induce an emotional
images/sounds endeavour to stimulate the audience’s senses and evoke an auditory
reaction (gasp, sigh, laughter) to the final image/sound, threading that emotion into the
curtain call dynamic; they provide an affective experience which is specifically designed
to “move” the audience, to shock or surprise them. Erin Hurley, in Theatre & Feeling, suggests that, “doing things with feeling is the primary reason for theatre’s existence. Furthermore, feeling carries theatre’s communicated meanings and informs its
significance to theatre-goers” (4). Certainly, this seems to have been a priority for
McAnuff.
The sort of emotional stimulation McAnuff’s productions provided might be linked to the larger purpose of growing the Festival’s audience attendance. Adrian Kear
suggests that “The language of theatre operates … as a metonymic extension of the
rhetoric of seduction — a formalised system for the generation of affect and the
circulation of emotion” (106). McAnuff’s productions are not merely a way to ensure that
the audience enjoys that particular play, but function as a means of creating a relationship
between an audience member and that particular theatre, director, or style. Indeed, Kear
further argues that
To be ‘moved’ by a piece, to be shocked, stimulated, exhilarated, amused or
horrified is, in effect, to have a ‘gut reaction’ to it: a visceral as well as intellectual experience … Although such experiences are infrequent — and intermittent — they serve to reacquaint the spectator with the phenomenal possibilities of theatre,
to renew our belief in its enduring matter and import, to reignite our love affair
with it. (106–7)
Of course, these are not irregular reactions. Directors want to connect emotionally with
are fed experiences which in turn prompt their continued patronage of the theatre.
However, the Shakespeare plays which McAnuff chooses to direct contain weighty
material. These particular Shakespearean plays have controversial elements which might
detract from any straightforward staging of “feel-good” theatre.17 Thus, these works
cannot simply be labelled as “popular” theatre. McAnuff’s productions betray a tension between a desire to trigger powerful audience reactions and a desire for political and
cultural engagements with Shakespeare’s drama that are perhaps less readily accessible, emotionally. It is possible that McAnuff chose these plays in order to demonstrate his
ability to experiment with politically edgy material. A 2010 interview with Macleans
suggests that being “typecast” might have been a concern and consideration for him as Artistic Director:
His Stratford post may save him from being typecast by the popularity of Jersey
Boys: “When you do a successful musical … suddenly it’s like that’s the only thing you’ve done.” And since big Broadway shows — including McAnuff’s own short-lived revival of Guys and Dolls — haven’t done well lately, the real future
in theatre might be in what he calls “setting the bar high on classical work.” (Weinman, “Can He Get Stratford to New York?)
Indeed, the struggle for “cultural achievement rather than commercial success” is something that McAnuff was quite aware of:
McAnuff himself says the struggle for all Stratford artistic directors has been to
maintain creativity inside an institution that relies so heavily on ticket sales. …“It
17 While all Shakespeare plays present unique challenges, some are more prone to the elements which McAnuff is relying on – especially Midsummer Night’s Dream.
is very hard to be earning 70 to 80 per cent at the box office as an arts institution,”
McAnuff says. “... That is the real struggle at Stratford: to find imaginative ways to take chances while earning the money at the box office.”
The tension between serious art and serious business has always existed at
Stratford. (Posner and Taylor “Applause (mostly) for Stratford artistic director
Des McAnuff”)
It was notably important for McAnuff’s shows to be commercially successful, while also achieving political or cultural significance. This tension perhaps sheds light on his
shaping of the production endings discussed in this chapter.
As already argued in this dissertation, endings and their affective qualities are not
isolated events, but must be laid back across the rest of the production in order to fully
interrogate their effect. Each production’s ending also comments — whether deliberately
or not — on the social and political questions that are relevant to both the audience’s
present perception of each play and to the larger questions important to each play’s
history. These lingering moments, and the stimulus they provide, tend to culminate in
what feels like an “answer” to the challenges presented by each play. As I will show,
McAnuff’s stagings could either deflect, or tackle head-on, these challenges.