Department of English Publications
Review of To Watch Theatre: Essays on Genre and Corporeality by Rachel Fensham
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
8-18-2011
Volume
21
Issue
3
Journal
Contemporary Theatre Review
First Page
344
Last Page
345
URL with Digital Object Identifier
https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2011.586220
Abstract
Rachel's Fensham's To Watch Theatre claims at its outset to be ‘about watching, specifically about watching theatre as an embodied activity’ (p. 11). This line – the book's first – sets the tone for the pages that follow, in which Fensham elaborates readings of four very different theatrical performances through the lenses of a number of cultural theories. Fensham's goal is an ethics of spectatorial engagement: ‘To watch theatre,’ she posits, ‘implies a responsibility not to the text, nor to the institution, but to the observance of what matters in the human subject and their [sic] relations with the world’ (p. 11). It is this focus on the ethics of performance – on her own ethical engagements with the productions under scrutiny here; on the ethics of the theatre-makers whose work she analyses; and on the ethics of the performance, cultural and psychoanalytic theories with which she works – that best characterizes Fensham's book. Both watching in a more literal sense – that is, in the sense of audience theory or spectator-response criticism – and genre studies (also promised in Fensham's title) ultimately take a back seat to questions of what performance does and does not demand of human witnesses in the so-called global age.
Publication Status
1
