Subsequent Performances

Art, Performing Arts, Theatre, Dance, Ballet

Theater and opera director, physician, TV host of The Body in Question, Miller here ruminates on the process of staging classics in the theater. Focusing on his own productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov and Mozart, he examines the resonances that a play or opera presents to later generations of theatergoersthe period of its "afterlife"and defends the controversial directorial approach that transposes Shakespeare to other periods. The author's explications of sometimes unorthodox stagings never seem arbitrary and are often brilliantly incisive. His erudition is impressiveto buttress his interpretations he draws on history, anthropology, psychoanalytic theory and art history (the 90 illustrations, color and black-and-white, include reproductions of paintings cited in the text, as well as photos from plays). Miller's advocacy for the virtues of live theater is passionate; indeed, he too easily dismisses film and TV as expressive media. Despite the number of illustrations, the book's oversize format is inappropriate: it imposes a coffee-table quality on a text that has much to say, as well as show, about the director's art.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miller, a widely experienced stage and TV director, here examines the problems inherent in performing works from a past in which the assumptions about performance and meaning may have been greatly different from ours. How does a director provide continuity for a work, but also allow it to speak in a meaningful way to a contemporary viewer? Miller argues a theory of performance based on genre, or what he calls the deep structure of relationships. He thus separates what persists from what changes in the life of a script. He illustrates this with many examples from his own work, and closes with a densely argued chapter on the impossibility of translating a novel to film. The book is beautifully illustrated. It will have its detractors, but Miller raises essential questions, and thinks about them vigorously. Thomas E. Luddy, English Dept., Salem State Coll., Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.