New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia.(Review)

John Russell Brown. New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. x + 211. $40.00 casebound; $12.99 paperback.

When, a decade ago, I brought out a collection of interviews with Shakespearean directors, the most penetrating assessment came from Charles Marowitz. I had, he writes:

 
   given us an authoritative and entertaining tour around the public monuments 
   and main piazzas, but, because he has avoided the ghettos, back-alleys and 
   red-light district, we have seen only a small part of the city (Sunday 
   Times, 3 December 1989). 

That was and remains the issue. Does one seek Shakespeare in the piazzas--the National and RSC, Broadway and the West End--or turn to the back streets and its "alternative" Shakespeares? John Russell Brown knows his piazzas intimately, having spent years as Associate Director of the National Theatre. He has acquired great understanding of the needs and processes of the established theater. But his instincts and travels have taken him on another path. New Sites for Shakespeare is primarily the record of his theatrical experiences in Asia, and the light they shed for him upon our ways of playing Shakespeare.

Brown has made repeated visits to Asia, particularly for theater productions in Japan, Korea, China, Bali, and India. He has experienced forms of performance that were new to him, which he found exciting and revelatory. The reaction of audiences and their interaction with the actors were crucial, and they offered analogies with Elizabethan practices that are lost or attenuated on today's Western stages. For example, the Marathi theatre--which flourishes in Bombay, the center of India's film industry--depends on close rapport between actors and audience. When Brown next read a Shakespeare text, it seemed to him that many "short speeches could be said to the audience and, at times,for the audience" (98). If nothing else, Brown's book should encourage editors to review their handling of the aside. The active relationship between actor and audience is the thing.

I'll focus on a couple of key chapters, beginning with "Ceremony: Behaviour and Reception" "In Europe and North America," says Brown, "[ceremony] governs very few relationships between people, either in public or private and we commonly pride ourselves on that freedom" (53). He contrasts this state of affairs with Asian societies, a difference, in his experience, most noticeable in Japan, where ceremony is used constantly. The impact of social practices upon drama is profound and all-pervasive. The role of ceremony in drama is therefore underrated and underplayed in the West; the theatrical juices of ceremony flow more freely in the East.

Now this is broadly true, of course. But one can overdo the picture of a freer, less constrained West. Old ceremonies may be dying. They are not dead. New ones are spawning all the time. And the past, if a foreign country, still has to be revisited regularly.