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Article Excerpt
When examining the modes in which the working relationships between actresses and playwrights have been documented, what becomes immediately apparent is the dominance of the term muse as the filter through which these collaborations are read. The association of Harriet Bose with Strindberg, Olga Knipper with Chekhov, Eleonora Duse with D'Annunzio, and more recently Billie Whitelaw with Beckett, invariably prioritizes the playwright. The problem stems from the model that has been used to analyse and document achievement in theatre: it is derived from literary studies and has consequently sought to locate creativity in the figure of the author. Although twentieth-century theatre historians have moved from the exclusive study of playwrights to take account of theatre spaces, scenography, performance styles, design, costume and, especially directing, the authorial model has not been easily replaced. Directors, designers, architects, etc. have come to be treated as auteurs in their own right, with the result that their work is now subject to as much documentation and analysis as that of playwrights. The prioritizing of authorship as a singular (habitually male) entity, however, has too often reduced collaborative relationships to the all too familiar packaging of the mentor-muse paradigm--as with George and Ludmilla Pitoeff, Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, and Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. The construction of a theatrical hierarchy that places individual authorship at its pinnacle is problematic. It negates the concerted creative work that underpins theatre-making and in so doing provides a historiographical focus where craft, endeavour and labour occupy a secondary position to the celebration of the literati and the connotations of genius that often accompany it.
In mapping out the collaborative networks that actresses have instigated in Spain this article has a dual mandate. It takes up the "archaeological" schema of feminist theatre historians who have documented the trajectories of "lost" or "forgotten" stage women whose histories offer alternative routes to comprehending the theatrical culture of their times. Crucially, however, the act of retrieval envisaged here also focuses on actresses outside the Anglo-American world. Much of the admirable work in feminist historiography over the past twenty years has focused on the practices of English-speaking performers. The reasons for this are not difficult to locate. Performance Studies, as a discipline, is firmly located within North America and the English-speaking world. Its vocabularies, concerns, memories and discourses map out histories, often located within national contexts, in a geographical sphere that reinforces the political and cultural hegemony of English. The focus here is on going beyond "the mainstream" (i.e., the Anglo world) to examine collaborations in Spain that, in discursively constituting wider demographics of feminist performance, question historical process, challenge the stereotypic and present examples of the manifold contributions of women to onstage performance.
Creator and/or Object of the Gaze
Recent years have witnessed an interrogation of the paradigm of actress as muse across archival, critical and performative idioms. Restrictions are imposed on female creativity and authority in positioning women as inspirations to male agency where they function as largely passive beings rather than creators or connoisseurs. Susan Rutherford's work on the German soprano Wilhemine Schröder-Devrient challenges the "patronising and antipathetic" views of the singer provided in previous studies of Richard Wagner by offering a contemplation of her performances that looks to how and why she made such an impact on the celebrated composer and why Hector Berlioz and H.F. Chorley may have found her performances so contrary to their tastes and to pre-eminent female voices at the time. The concern with delineating the specifics of Schröder-Devrient's acting counters the generalized terms in which the muse as sexual object and sign is so often presented (61). Robyn Asleson's collection of essays, Notorious Muse, delineating the impact of the actress on British culture of the Georgian era, also engages with a questioning of the muse as acquiescent model by chronicling some of the many roles that actresses took on in the images of the time, roles that were not possible in portraits of "respectable" women. The "pervasive presence" of actresses "beyond the stage, in addition to shaping the character of contemporary dramatic performance" saw them set "trends in fashion and deportment and fueled [sic.] a new culture of celebrity." Actresses seized "control over their own mythmaking" publishing autobiographies or assigning the penning of "their memoirs to sympathetic friends" (Asleson 1). Indeed Asleson goes on to indicate how "through collaborations with artists, female performers gained a measure of control over the construction of their public images" (2). The conclusions point to actresses as powerful patrons rather than passive sitters, with portraits fashioned as collaborative ventures between artists and sitters (7). The "starring roles" that actresses like Mary Robinson and Sarah Siddons played in works of art by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds (among others) pointed to a shift in both their cultural and social status (15). "Her greater social mobility, financial sufficiency and creative autonomy [...] began to supplant, though without entirely erasing, her time-honoured reputation as a sexual object" (15).
Creating/creative Actresses
It is not merely within the confines of academic scholarship that revisionist readings of actresses have been proffered. Rather ah extensive range of plays have sought to demonstrate the ways in which women sought to assert their rights in a profession where they have habitually been denied agency and where their worth has been defined solely through their physical body and its potential for exhibitionism. While the best known of these are those that have been written and presented in English (e.g., Stephen Sondheim's Follies (1971), Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban's A Chorus Line (1975), Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star has to Star in Black and White (1976), Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations (1980), Ronald Hayman's Playing the Wife (1995), and Terrence McNally's Master Class (1996)), it is probably those whose point of origin lies outside the English-speaking world that have proved the most potent interrogations of assumptions around authorship, the act of reading, interpretation, criticism, ideology and meaning. These have often revolved around modes of encountering a classic text as with María Irene Fornes's The Summer in Gossensass (1998), a dramatization of the attempts by American actresses Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea to stage Hedda Gabler while living in London at the end of the nineteenth century. The actresses are shown grappling with textual intricacies, making measured guesses, careful deductions and investigative leaps in preparing their production. This is the actress as analyst and inquirer, translator and interpreter, breaking away from established suppositions in providing interpretations that recognize the weight of past readings without slavishly adhering to their vocabularies.
Another canonical actress's relationship within the dramatic output of a turn-of-the-century playwright has also been subject to dramatic re-assessment in Peter Brook's staging of Carol Rocamora's adaptation of the letters of Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, Ta Main dans la mienne [I Take Your Hand in Mine] (2003). The ninety-minute two-hander created for Brook's wife Natasha Parry and veteran French actor Michel Piccoli provides astute observations on the Knipper-Chekhov working partnership. Much taken with her Arkadina in The Seagull (1899) and Elena in Uncle Vanya (1899), he went on, following the commencement of their personal relationship that same year, to write Masha in The Three Sisters (1901) and Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1904) for her. What Ta Main dans la mienne demonstrates is that this convenient positioning of Knipper as pliant muse to the "active" writer occludes her considerable input into the process of realizing his works in stage terms. Tuberculosis led Chekhov to spend extensive periods of the year in the warmer climate of Yalta. As such he was not able to travel to rehearsals in the capital and only saw one of the four openings of his works at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Isolated from the process of production he desperately relied on her to inform him of what was happening in the rehearsal room. As such, her comments serve as valuable observations on Stanislavski's methodologies and the particulars of his work with actors. Crucially also the production demonstrates that more than ah intermediary between the dramatist and the director, Knipper's anecdotes wove their way into the plays--as with the cure for baldness that is recycled from a letter into The Three Sisters. As Piccoli/Chekhov's final question "What does it all mean?" suggests, the production knowingly positions itself as ah investigation of the "sealing-off" of the Chekhov-Knipper relationship into a fixed past tense where the latter's hedonism and late-night drinking with friends and associates led to all too familiar associations with immorality and impropriety--the familiar actress/whore trope--that threatened to override her substantial artistic contributions.
It is perhaps not insignificant that this production was premiered and co-produced by the Fundación de la Comunidad Valenciana Ciudad de las Artes Escénicas, opening at Valencia's Micalet theatre on 25 June 2003. The end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship in 1975 has witnessed ah extraordinary growth in Spain's cultural production with its effects felt across the artistic spectrum. Crucially, however, it has also been matched by a process of historical reconstruction that has generated the rehabilitation of cultural figures whose work did not fit into Franco's homogenous vision of Spain that "tried to unify the nation by projecting difference outside its borders, or confining it to internal...
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