Declan Donnellan, *The Actor and the Target*

Placing these two epigraphs together at the start of this article, I hope to put the infused language of poetry in conversation with the lived experience of the theatrical creators, especially in relation to the sign systems that produce meaning in theatrical performance. Following theatre semioticians like Keir Elam, Patrice Pavis, and Fernando De Toro, I recognize in Cheek By Jowl's production a triadic structure which I will argue evokes the Holy Trinity (Elam 1980; Pavis 1992; de Toro 1995). Comparing Hopkins' poem to Donnellan's advice exposes a potential connection among the Trinity, triadic logic in

performance, and liveness. Hopkins' poem, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," reveals in its second stanza a theatrical and performative idea of Christ's relationship to humanity. Donnellan's advice to actors unpacks the complicated process of creating or re-creating the live experience. In Hopkins' poem, "the just man" "**Acts** in God's eye what in God's eye he is—Christ—for Christ **plays** in ten thousand places" (emphasis mine). The language of performance provides a way for Hopkins to understand the presence of Christ in humanity. When Donnellan advises actors that removing the "blocks" to human experience enhances the actor's performance and allows the mystery of life to be revealed, he describes a process that shows theatrical creation as a dance between the analytical and the mysterious. Hopkins' affinity for the language of poetry as a way to encounter Christology aligns with his desire that his poems be performed; in a letter to his brother he explains that his poetry, "must be spoken, till it is spoken, it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself" (Goss 2011, p. 86). Here Hopkins elides the performer with the text itself. If the poem itself is a performative act, then the interpretation of Christ who "plays in a thousand places,/ lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his," must be an act of transference, of movement. The very nature of performance, for Hopkins, requires a Christological worldview where the performance of God is always present, if a moving target. Deeply connected to Hopkins' idea of performance is the rhythm and rhetorical development of his poetry. Having his poems spoken fans them out to breath and to the body. Speaking and enacting his poetry allows the poem to be closer to "itself."

Declan Donnellan's advice to actors also underscores this idea of closeness. In fact, he argues that when actors are "blocked" they experience "paralysis and isolation—an inner locking and an outer locking. And, at worst, an overwhelming awareness of being alone, a creeping sense of being both responsible and powerless, unworthy and angry, too small, too big, too cautious, too ... me" (Donnellan 2013, p. 6). This feeling of being alone, being too much "me," is counter to being alive. As the epigraph above articulates, the doctor can analyze the dead, but cannot account for life. The theatrical experience depends upon liveness, which, for Hopkins, is "charged with the grandeur of God," but for performance theorists might be described another way. Andrew Quick, in "Taking Place: Encountering the Live," advances a description of Live Art that intersects with the tension between the "blocks" Donnellan describes and the electricity of experience in Hopkins' poetry:

The live troubles because it cannot be completely tied down. In order to experience its very liveness we are compelled to be open to the moment-by-moment of the live's happening before applying the rules through which we might presume to understand what is taking place around us. Consequently, 'being live' displaces, if only for an instant, the constellations that bind knowledge and representation together to fashion the narratives and structures that presume to describe and organize phenomena into concrete formations. (Quick 2004, p. 93)

Though "Live Art," which Quick is analyzing, has a particular definition of the combined practices of research and performance by artists, his formulation of the way 'liveness' forces the audience to put on hold the organizing principles that it commonly uses to understand the world corresponds to Hopkins' performative approach to poetry and Donnellan's work as a director of the company, Cheek by Jowl. I am interested in bringing together this verse of Hopkins and Donnellan's approach to theatre because it reveals to me an interest in the liveness of performance that theatre and religion share which is manifest in the triadic logic that many see supporting the system of signs in the theatre, and in the Christian understanding of God as the Holy Trinity. I will argue that theatre and Christianity are inextricably bound up in triadic logic and representations through repetition, substitution, and liberation as demonstrated in both Cheek by Jowl's production and Shakespeare's text, *Measure for Measure*.

#### **1. Triads, Liveness,** *Measure for Measure***, and Cheek by Jowl**

My first-hand experience as an audience member of *Measure for Measure* at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2019 transformed my interpretation of the play because it made me ask these questions:

What happens in performance to the logic of substitution in the play? How does performance interfere with the fulfillment of the sign? Why does *Measure for Measure* (CBJ, 2019) seem to stage an absent presence that is then over-filled? Why would a production that seems so political and secular feel overdetermined in its representation of the Trinity and Christ? Why does this production feel deeply spiritual in a play that has so long been read as a debate among religious factions or about Kingship in a religio-political moment?<sup>1</sup> As an audience member, I felt the "liveness" of performance described by Andrew Quick, in that a "constellation of narratives and structures" were constantly circulating, and my expectations as an audience-member kept changing. Donnellan's techniques for producing a live event, one that always feels new for the actors and for the audience, reside in an attentiveness to the immediacy of Shakespeare's language and to the actor's bodies on the stage. Movement and stillness are balanced in equal measure in the production staging, but every moment is engaged and resonant. Both the actors and the text feel fully present and their concentration demands the audience's concentration.<sup>2</sup> My theatre-going experience, as well as my survey of criticism around the problem of substitution in *Measure for Measure*, spur me to question how the representation of the Trinity through triadic structures could be shaping the theatrical experience. A description of Donnellan's relationship to religion points to this possibility: "Donnellan is no longer religious in the denominational sense of the word, but there is something of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's 'Holy Theatre' cult about him, the idea of theatre being a sacramental art where the collusion of actor and audience will spark an event that, rooted in a celebration of shared humanity, might always carry the potential of divinity" (Coveney 2006). The tension in this description between concepts that feel static ("idea of theatre," "sacramental art") with the terminology of combustion—"collusion," "spark," "potential"—points to the very danger that Donnellan works hard to avoid—a dead, empty or disconnected performance. Shakespeare trades on this tension throughout *Measure for Measure*, and Cheek by Jowl capitalizes on this tension in performance.

Images of three appear throughout the performance in a provocative and ostentatious way. Three red boxes dominate the stage, variously opaque, transparent, closed and open. (All photographs are by Johann Persson, and can be located at the CBJ site) https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measurefor-measure/#imageGallery-216-21. <sup>3</sup> Before turning to the consideration of how the production coalesces around triads and suggests the Trinity, a consideration of the way in which the system of signs in the theatre hinges on triadic logic is important. As Patrice Pavis describes in "Performing Texts," "Performance is the synchronic confrontation of signifying systems, and it is their interaction, not their history, that is offered to the spectator and that produces meaning" (Pavis 1988, p. 86). The interaction of signifying systems in a theatrical production is difficult to capture and re-envision for a reading. Instantly, those who write about performances run the risk of flattening out the experience and disembodying it. Also, retaining the details of an audience member is subject to the unreliability of memory, and the uniqueness of each performance cannot fully be articulated. In the case of CBJ, the effort to write about and analyze the performances of *Measure for Measure* is even more wide-ranging, as the production run spanned six years, 24 venues, and over 11 countries. The production is also in Russian with English subtitles, with a very pared-down script. Fortunately, the company created a professional, theatrical film of the production for educational purposes; however, like many recorded theatrical performances the frisson with the audience is absent. Nevertheless, the recording, coupled

<sup>1</sup> See, for example, (Beckwith 2011; Besteman 2019; Goossen 2012; Smith 2018; Shuger 2001; Schleiner 1982; Knight 2001; Whalen 2014; Bradizza 2018; Rust 2019).

<sup>2</sup> I recognize that the description of the theatrical experience above is subjective; however, whether each individual felt the 'engagement' of the performance, does not undermine that the intent of the design and staging was to engage the audience. This was especially true because the house lights were frequently turned on during the production so that the audience was aware of itself as an audience, and the actors stared directly at the audience, as if they were another character in the performance.

<sup>3</sup> (Birksted-Breen) Birksted-Breen notes, as do others, that there are five boxes on the stage, but in the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as the theatrical film of the production, only three are really visible. The two side boxes are effectively used as walls.

with theatrical photography, and many reviews and critical analyses, allows the researcher to present a fuller picture of the stage interactions.

When interpreting the play, *Measure for Measure*, many critics rely on the moral, religious, or political stances of the characters, but the lived experience of the characters moment-to-moment is elusive. If we consider the way a very fine critic like Anthony Dawson writes about the characters in the play, we can see that there would not be a lot of air in the room for an actor's interpretation. Dawson writes, for example, "Isabella and Angelo are both moral tyrants; both are rigid and cold" (Dawson 1978, p. 110) and later: "The tendency [to abstraction] is reflected in the language of the play, when a recurrent use of the concrete creates a sense of disembodiment, of dissociation of mind and body, feeling and action" (p. 111). In such an appraisal, the characters are flattened out; there is no friction between Isabella and Angelo if they are disembodied. Perhaps part of the problem is what Joshua Daniel describes, in an essay entitled, "The Human Body and the Humility of Christian Ethics," "our bodies are more humble than our narratives" (Daniel 2014, p. 190). The actors' work has to then be incredibly specific and truthful to fill the imaginative space of our stories. Simon Shepherd writes about bodies in the theatre: "theatre is not simply an art of bodies, but an art of bodily possibility" (Shepherd 2006, p. 10). In approaching the work of a theatre company like Cheek by Jowl, it is important to foreground this idea of bodily possibility. However, as Anna Kamaralli brilliantly explains in her essay on performance/criticism of Isabella, there is also a history of bodily and critical violence towards the character of Isabella because she "has the audacity to behave as if she owns her own body" (p. 397). There is a long history of violent stagings of *Measure for Measure* that Kamaralli interrogates, and which Cheek by Jowl's production participates in, and readers should be aware that some of the links to images included in this text depict violent scenes.<sup>4</sup> Kamaralli wonders whether these violent scenes really elicit audience empathy or rather feed into a desire for spectacular violence toward women. This observation is an important critique of this production and is also one of the reasons that reviews of the production called attention to the span of time in which it has been performed. The era between 2013 and 2019 witnessed an incredible shift in America, at least, from a nation that was poised to have its first female president to the #metoo movement. Laura Kolb argues in "The Very Modern Anger of Shakespeare's Women" that *Measure for Measure's* reception in our culture has shifted in just those few years in the rise of productions, and the changing nature of way she teaches and writes about the play (Kolb 2019). For Cheek by Jowl, the performance of the play over this time could leave traces of these political controversies with its audiences. The lived experiences of CBJ as a company inform its performances; the voices, gender, race, identity, and languages inform its performances; its *mise en scene* inform its performances; its varied audiences inform its performances; and the change in historical moments during the company tour inform its performances. Above all the company is actor-focused, while driven by the vision of Declan Donnellan, director, and Nick Ormerod, designer. CBJ tours more than most theatre companies, and they often collaborate with the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow. Declan Donnellan claims that Russian actors who are trained to be more comfortable with movement, provides a different experience than working with their "text-reared British counterparts" (Prescott 2008, p. 192).

The idea that Russian actors have a greater comfort with movement and gesture than actors who focus more on text may be part of the reason that this production drew so heavily on triadic structures that theatre semioticians have long acknowledged as underpinning the theatrical experience. C.S. Peirce's triadic logic has greatly influenced the study of theatrical semiotics. For Peirce, the world is a system of signs in three parts, which he explains as the object, the representamen, and the interpretant, and the sign of the object itself has three modes: the index, the icon, and the symbol. Peirce argues that signs and the creation of meaning are triadic, not binary (Chapman and Routledge 2009, p. 207). Peirce's complex and recursive descriptions of triadic relationships in language and thought are fertile

<sup>4</sup> See also (Aebischer 2008).

concepts to apply to theatrical representation. Ann Berthoff, in a chapter called "Triadic Remedies," explains Peirce's further articulation of triadic logic as "Firstness is Quality, Secondness is Event, and Thirdness is Mediation" (Berthoff 1999, p. 66). Berthoff explains that for Peirce thirdness is "the bridge" to meaning making, the method of interpretation, the idea that other meanings can make meaning (Berthoff 1999, p. 60). Fernando de Toro explains the significance of Peirce's triadic logic, arguing that binary models are an insufficient way to think about the theatre: "in theatre, unlike literary discourse, objects do have a real existence, a real presence, although in the end it only takes the form of the presence of the voice and body of the actor" (de Toro 1995, p. 65). As soon as de Toro articulates the idea of a real presence, however, he replaces it with the "form of the presence," and Umberto Eco also beautifully reveals the ephemeral nature of the sign, describing it in a reading of Peirce as akin to a "dynamic object," and that "Semiosis dies at every moment. But as soon as it dies it arises again like the Phoenix" (Eco 1976, p. 1467). Eco's revelation that the sign and its interpretation are constantly in flux corresponds to the way he interprets Peirce as being "interested in objects, not so much as ontological properties of being, but as occasions and results of active experience" (Eco 1976, p. 1465). The activity and energy present in Peirce's triadic structures is perfectly suited to Cheek by Jowl's performance of *Measure for Measure*. <sup>5</sup> The constant shifting of meaning, the use of one sign in relation to another to create meaning, the necessary absent presence of the dynamic object on the stage, and the critical role of the audience as interpretant coalesce in this production.

Reviewers of the production mainly conceived of it as a response to authoritarian rule and oppressive regimes. Russian critics saw the production as "a shattering portrait of contemporary Russia" *(Novaya Gazeta)*. Most UK reviewers mentioned the topical reference to Putin's government, but according to Noah Birksted-Breen, the Russian reviewers did not make direct reference to Putin (Birksted-Breen 2016, p. 88). By the time this production alighted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2018, the #MeToo movement association was relevant. Laura Collins-Hughes' review in the *New York Times* recognizes the association: "this production had its premiere in Moscow in 2013, long before the #MeToo movement emerged as a cultural force. But in a play that examines the vicious abuse of power that people commit when they think nobody's watching, the timeless impossibility of Isabella's position could hardly be more sympathetic, or more central" (Collins-Hughes 2018). The unusually long touring cycle for this production, allows for the permeability of meaning. Like Eco's phoenix of semiotics, the production's resonance with a Russian government "with a regressive law on treason, censorship which bans swearing in the arts, anti-LGBT laws and so on" (Birksted-Breen 2016, p. 90) gained momentum in the wake of its tour during the #MeToo movement and Brett Kavanaugh's senate confirmation hearing. Keir Elam masterfully describes how this transaction occurs in the theatre, "The performance text, to summarize, is characterized by its semiotic thickness or density, by its heterogeneity and by the spatial and temporal discontinuity of its levels" (Elam 1980, p. 41). Elam describes how spectators come into the theatre in tacit agreement with a number of different codes, theatrical and interpretive, but audience members also bring a system of signs derived from their own experiences and context to apply to the performance (Elam 1980, p. 47).

The political and cultural backdrop of the CBJ production skews in a decidedly secular way, from critiques of oppressive regimes to highlights of a violent patriarchal culture. Donnellan's own statement on the play, while indicating the heterogeneity of meaning that Elam discusses, nevertheless marries personal and political themes: "*Measure for Measure* is about many different things; it always strikes me as a very modern play. It's a play about control and how one of the ways that we are controlled, by not only governments, but by churches and other institutions that seek to control us, is shame. We are controlled by shame. It starts with parents and it develops, and it is an extremely good way of controlling people" (https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/). Donnellan sees a larger emotional mechanism driving the play that is wielded by institutions and

<sup>5</sup> See also (Burkhardt 1995) for Peirce's triadic logic in a reading of *Measure for Measure*.

interpersonal relations, as well. However, the design of the production, the performances of the actors, the *mise en scene* (which for Cheek by Jowl usually involves the audience directly), coupled with Shakespeare's text, which revolves around religious questions of sin, forgiveness, and redemption, uses triads in a way that insistently evokes the Trinity.
