Glen McGillivray

This book offers an innovative account of how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by two of its stars: David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it uses practice theory to challenge the view that emotional interactions between actors and audiences were governed by empathy. It carefully works through how actors communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences appraised these performances, and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. Crucially, this book reveals how theatre spaces mediated the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike. It examines how their public and frequently political interactions were enabled by these spaces.

In the mediatised twenty-first century we have all become audiences to world events and to political players who "strut their brief hour upon the stage and then are gone"; the postmodern condition, so it seems, collapses our perception of actual people and events into their representations. Through repetition, presidents and prime ministers become caricatures of themselves while the carefully cast and scripted scenarios of Big Brother and Survivor are presented to us as reality. One of the great overarching metaphors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – theatrum mundi – is enjoying a resurgence in our own age. Like our Renaissance predecessors, we have found that the terminology of actor and role, reality and imitation, audience and stage is useful in describing our complex interactions with this mediatised world. But what happens when an event with the magnitude and sheer spectacularity of September 11 is described in similar terms? Does using the theatrical metaphor in this instance, as my epigraph suggest, "transfigure" or "soften" the "horror" of these events

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a  “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly…

The author studies the play, Food Court to explain the various ways in which the beliefs and disbeliefs of a person lead to him liking or disliking a particular scene or act. The pleasure and satisfaction derived by the audience from the suffering of someone else on stage are also being talked about.

A discussion on the works of the two authors, in particular, about Jack Hibberd's misanthropic Monk O'Neill, and Josephine Wilson's Miss Discovery, is presented. The way both works, despite their different historical contexts, enact a critique of Australian identity against a background of significant political change within the country, is analysed.

In the 2004 movie Stage Beauty, Edward Kynaston (Billy Crudup), a Res- toration actor renowned for playing females roles, is coaching a fictional actress, Maria Hughes (Claire Danes), on how to play Desdemona in the murder scene from Othello (1603). It is a role that Kynaston made famous but now that Charles II has allowed women on stage, Kynaston has been made redundant. The two actors' rehearsal is familiar to anyone who has had any acting training and, indeed, conforms to what most viewers would understand such rehearsal entails. To be a "good" actress, Maria must not act in various ways: she must not pose, must not adopt an attitude nor deliver her lines in a sing-song manner. Instead she must draw her models from life rather than from convention (Kynaston musses up her hair and makeup and demands that she change out of her elaborate costume and wear a shift) and her emotional responses must arise spontaneously, on impulse, from the moment. Maria finally "gets...

Glen McGillivray is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. His current research explores the relationship between conventions of acting and emotions in the eighteenth-century English theatre. He has published previously in Restoration and eighteenth-Century theatre Research, tdR, Performance Research, and his edited collection Scrapbooks, Snapshots, and Memorabilia: hidden archives of Performance was published in 2011 by Peter Lang.

When Horace wrote in Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi”), he expressed the ancient world's view that, in order to emotionally affect his audience, an orator needed to feel the emotion himself. This idea was widely subscribed to in the eighteenth century. In the modern era Konstantin Stanislavsky engaged in a sustained investigation of emotion and acting, stressing that the actor needed to experience “real feeling” in order for the audience to experience authentic emotions also. As a theory of emotional transmission, it seems like common sense. Yet, when Denis Diderot witnessed in Baron d'Holbach's salon David Garrick's parlor trick of sticking his head out between two screens, and cycling through a range of passions with his face, the great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, including Baron Grimm, evidently did. “Can his soul ha...

This collection of interviews of actors who have played ‘real people’ on stage and screen, edited by Tom Cantrell and Mary Luckhurst, comes out of some preliminary research for a larger project which Luckhurst is currently undertaking. One feels that, keeping in mind a continuing public interest in actors and acting, the opportunity to present the words of internationally known actors such as Ian McKellen, Simon Callow and Jeremy Irons, was a publishing opportunity too good to miss and, as such, this book should find its audience amongst a general readership and undergraduate students. Cantrell and Luckhurst, perhaps in deference to their ongoing work, have allowed this collection to wear its theory lightly choosing instead to ‘let the interviews stand because we would have needed to conduct many more interviews to make informed theoretical assertions’. Nonetheless, they do use three rubrics to organise their approach to the subject – “Researching the part”, “Acting strategies” and ...

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting an...

Spectatorship in the theatre is a complex business—particularly when a star is involved. So how does one separate the star from her aura and the actor from her role? When Cate Blanchett was cast as Richard II, her film-star aura concatenated with the mystery of kingly presence through the operation of the Stage Figure.

Glen McGillivray's paper analyses theatre as a metaphor for understanding the events of September 11, 2001. He orients "theatricality" in its Greek root, theatron or "looking place." Theatricality links knowing to seeing, installing a metaphor that produces the globe as coherent object that is seen. Even prior to its extraordinarily visible destruction, the World Trade Center participated in such a regime of visibility, one that McGillivray details in terms of its history of cartography and trade.

The metaphor of theatricality has, in recent years, been recuperated as a key term in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies. This scholarly “re-valuing” of the term arises, in part, as a reaction to performativity, a term that has achieved a certain discursive dominance in the field. Rather than taking sides in favour of one or the other, in this essay I argue that theatricality is critically formed by this struggle. Historically, theatrical metaphors have been employed in anti-theatricalist discourses to suggest ideas of inauthenticity and deception; most famously, in art critic Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1998). Yet, for the European avantgarde, theatricality was the “essence” of theatre. What appears to be a contradiction seems less so when it is understood that “truth” in these instances lies not in what is claimed for theatricality, but in the juxtaposition of it and another term. This essay analyses how the metaphor of theatricality is flexibly applied in the...

A discussion on the works of the two authors, in particular, about Jack Hibberd's misanthropic Monk O'Neill, and Josephine Wilson's Miss Discovery, is presented. The way both works, despite their different historical contexts, enact a critique of Australian identity against a background of significant political change within the country, is analysed.

Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia : Hidden Archives of Performance asks the questions : What constitutes an archive ? What is worthy of being archived ? And who decides ? Performances are ephemeral, so archival questions of selection and appraisal determine which performances will be remembered by history and which will not. The essays in this collection each explore a different facet of the ephemerality of performance, and the traces it leaves behind : from photographic stills of actors or sets ; draft scripts and production notes, theatre programs and reviews ; the language used to evoke the experience of watching a dance ; to the memories contained within a site which has been used for a site-specific performance. Each of the contributors to Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia employs pertinent case studies to reveal performances that are so often ‘hidden’ from the authoritative archival view ; for example, those by women, indigenous people, amateurs and working people, and those outside metropolitan centres. In this way, they build a powerful argument for reconsidering – or at the very least, broadening – notions of what the performance archive can be.

The author studies the play, Food Court to explain the various ways in which the beliefs and disbeliefs of a person lead to him liking or disliking a particular scene or act. The pleasure and satisfaction derived by the audience from the suffering of someone else on stage are also being talked about.

Glen McGillivray discusses the production by Back to Back Theatre, an Australian company, of "Food Court," which depicts a taunting that begins in a food court and then turns to violence when two "mall princesses" coerce another girl to accompany them into the woods. Using "Food Court" as his case study, McGillivray uses a psychoanalytical paradigm to explore how the processes of belief and disbelief operate for the spectator in the theater using Freudian concepts of disavowal and fetishism. He outlines in the first part of this essay Sigmund Freud's theories of disavowal and fetishism particularly as they relate to ego's capacity to believe and disbelieve at the same time. In the two sections that follow, orienting around the first and second acts of "Food Court," McGillivray explores how belief/disbelief operates and the negotiation of material reality by the spectator in performance. Finally, he returns to the theme of pleasure out of suffering to suggest that it is how spectators negotiate the material fact of the performance itself, and their desire to do so, that ultimately decides whether a performance pleases them or not.

This essay speaks back to John Wilson's 1955 article of the same name in which he argued that ranting, canting and toning were vocal aberrations of Restoration tragedy that gradually disappeared as the new century progressed and the theatre evolved.  Rather than being aberrant, this article argues that rant, cant and tone need to be understood more broadly in relation to the rhetorical conventions of tragic acting from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Contrary to the conventional "Whig" view of theatrical history, in which the rhetorical conventions of tragic acting are transformed in the middle of the eighteenth century by Charles Macklin and David Garrick, I argue after Paul Menzer (2004) that a "natural" performance is one that is considered "good" by its audience; in Menzer's words, performances do not get "better" they get "different". Before nearly anything else, it was an actor's voice that demonstrated his or her skill as a performer, and audiences were alert to when actors used their voices well or used them badly. As rhetorical conventions define the relationship of stage to auditorium, my argument opens out through the case of Sarah Siddons to examine the relationship of voice to emotion and the phenomenology of listening of an early modern audience.

BREAKING NEWS: this article was recently Highly Commended for the Marlis Thiersch Prize for research excellence in English-language articles anywhere in the world in the broad field of drama, theatre and performance studies, at the 2018 ADSA conference. The citation reads as follows:
“Rant, Cant and Tone,” is a rigorous piece of scholarship that is remarkably evocative of its subject: the actor’s voice.  With great care, McGillivray challenges historical assumptions about acting styles in order to tell a more nuanced story about what constituted ‘good’ performance in the 18th century.  The article is especially striking for the level of detail it offers in its analysis of a particularly difficult theatre history subject: what the actor sounded liked, and what affective responses his or her voice produced in their audience.  Through carefully building an account of Sarah Siddons voice and performance style, McGillivray is able to effectively deliver on proposition made at the outset, which is that historical performance styles need to be understood on their own terms, rather than in relation to later prevailing paradigms: that is, as he argues, actors haven’t gotten better over time, they have just become different.  The article has great scope for helping scholars understand how audiences appreciate acting both in the particular case of Siddons and her contemporaries, but by extension throughout history and today​."

The European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.

Despite execellent scholarship on how emotions were represented on stage in the 17th and 18th centuries, many commentators still betray a Stanislavskian realist bias because it is too difficult to comprehend today how a rhetorical acting style could possibly emotionally affect an audience. This paper focuses on English theater in the mid-18th century, and claims that audiences were emotionally affected by the actors' performances and that actors used vocal and gestural techniques to represent emotions. I examine George Christoph Lichtenberg's description of David Garrick's Hamlet encountering his father's ghost, an account that demonstrates how closely Garrick adhered to existing theatrical convention but also how he was still able to affect his audience powerfully.

Spectatorship in the theatre is a complex business—particularly when a star is involved. So how does one separate the star from her aura and the actor from her role? When Cate Blanchett was cast as Richard II, her film-star aura concatenated with the mystery of kingly presence through the operation of the Stage Figure.

Glen McGillivray discusses the production by Back to Back Theatre, an Australian company, of "Food Court," which depicts a taunting that begins in a food court and then turns to violence when two "mall princesses" coerce another girl to accompany them into the woods. Using "Food Court" as his case study, McGillivray uses a psychoanalytical paradigm to explore how the processes of belief and disbelief operate for the spectator in the theater using Freudian concepts of disavowal and fetishism. He outlines in the first part of this essay Sigmund Freud's theories of disavowal and fetishism particularly as they relate to ego's capacity to believe and disbelieve at the same time. In the two sections that follow, orienting around the first and second acts of "Food Court," McGillivray explores how belief/disbelief operates and the negotiation of material reality by the spectator in performance. Finally, he returns to the theme of pleasure out of suffering to suggest that it is how spectators negotiate the material fact of the performance itself, and their desire to do so, that ultimately decides whether a performance pleases them or not.

This article provides a valuable and comprehensive report which considers previous research on the metaphorical concept of ‘theatricality’ implicitly referring to a central problem addressed in the special issue on the ‘theatrum-metaphor’ in metaphorik.de 14/2008.

The authors discuss AusStage, a facility for electronic research in the performing arts in Australia. AusStage, in its third phase of development, unites a diverse range of partners, including university researchers, industry organizations, government agencies, and postgraduate students, by providing network infrastructure for storing and exchanging research information. The authors report on a panel session on the topic at the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference in Melbourne, Victoria, summarize the development of AusStage; and explore new e-research methodologies and their application to performing arts research through three case studies.

Glen McGillivray's paper analyses theatre as a metaphor for understanding the events of September 11, 2001. He orients "theatricality" in its Greek root, theatron or "looking place." Theatricality links knowing to seeing, installing a metaphor that produces the globe as coherent object that is seen. Even prior to its extraordinarily visible destruction, the World Trade Center participated in such a regime of visibility, one that McGillivray details in terms of its history of cartography and trade.

Glen McGillivray traces the eighteenth-century construction of the
picturesque landscape and its dependence on theatrical staging to produce aesthetic effect. The ‘framing of the world’ produced within this quintessential manipulation of scenographic
compositional processes serves to ensure the world ‘appears to be’ as it is presented within the logic of the theatrical mise-en-scène.

Two single figures, and two voices separated by twenty-five years, speak to an 'Australian identity' that has become increasingly conflicted over the years. Jack Hibberd's misanthropic Monk O'Neill - old, spent, twisted embodies a series of Australian archetypes that are grotesquely subverted by the context of their enunciation. Similarly, Josephine Wilson's Miss Discovery articulates national discourses of the body, of ownership and legitimacy and the anxieties of Anglo-Celtic Australia. In this article Glen McGillivray analyses how both works, despite their different historical contexts, enact a critique of Australian identity against a background of significant political change within the country. Although seemingly quite different, these works adopt similar dramaturgical strategies and their significance lies in their genealogical connection. By this] am not suggesting a direct line-of-descent. Through the congruency of certain ideas of national identity, expressed in these works, that genealogy becomes apparent.

This book offers an innovative account of how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by two of its stars: David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it uses practice theory to challenge the view that emotional interactions between actors and audiences were governed by empathy. It carefully works through how actors communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences appraised these performances, and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. Crucially, this book reveals how theatre spaces mediated the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike. It examines how their public and frequently political interactions were enabled by these spaces.

Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia : Hidden Archives of Performance asks the questions : What constitutes an archive ? What is worthy of being archived ? And who decides ? Performances are ephemeral, so archival questions of selection and appraisal determine which performances will be remembered by history and which will not. The essays in this collection each explore a different facet of the ephemerality of performance, and the traces it leaves behind : from photographic stills of actors or sets ; draft scripts and production notes, theatre programs and
reviews ; the language used to evoke the experience of watching a dance ; to the memories contained within a site which has been used for a site-specific performance. Each of the contributors to Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia employs pertinent case studies to reveal performances that are so often ‘hidden’ from
the authoritative archival view ; for example, those by women, indigenous people, amateurs and working people, and those outside metropolitan centres. In this way, they build a powerful argument for reconsidering – or at the very least, broadening – notions of what the performance archive can be.