One of the many notable distinctions of Dennis Kennedy's outstanding work, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, is its broad but focused ambition. Kennedy's astute reflection on historical and theoretical problems related to spectatorship traverses vast territory, including theatre, tourism, museums, festivals, sporting contests, gambling, film, reality television, game shows, and religious rituals. He does not gather these diverse modes of performance around a central thesis; rather, he draws upon a wide range of performance types, styles, and contexts to explore philosophies of spectatorship and the ways in which spectators, by virtue of their corporeal presence and participation (or lack thereof), create meaning(s) in the theatre, at the sporting arena or theme park, and, generally speaking, in life.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, “The Problem of the Spectator,” explores audience composition and behavior. Kennedy challenges Peter Brook's assertion, articulated in The Empty Space (Touchstone Books, 1968), that an act of theatre is engaged when one person simply walks across an empty space while another person watches. Drawing on the work of media sociologists Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, whose theory that “‘everyone becomes an audience all the time’” (7) inspires much of his analysis, Kennedy refutes the premise that a solitary spectator constitutes an audience. For an audience to exist, he contends, a gathering of individuals is necessary because there is a “universal” in the gathering itself. That universal is located “in the simple act of being present, as simultaneous witnesses or participating observers, at an event offered for display precisely for this group” (14; italics his). The tension inherent in this conceptualization—and a thread that runs through the fabric of the book—is that spectators' behavior is “regulated and commodified” by such elements as the performance text, the physical environment, and social conditioning (20). Consequently, no performance can mean the same for single spectators, as individual audience members' observations and interpretations necessarily will vary. Kennedy identifies the modernist rise of the autonomous director as an important contributing factor to audience regulation and commodification. The director complicates notions of spectatorship because spectators frequently do not know (or care) who the director is or what he or she does, yet in rehearsal the director aspires to be the ideal spectator, or someone who will identify meaning and experience the performance as the director intends. This enterprise is paradoxical, however, as the ideal spectator is “a creature who cannot exist outside the director's imagination” (48).
In Part II, “Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectation,” Kennedy examines performance after World War II. Rather than focusing on individual spectators, he considers “how the audience was conceived and constructed by producers and directors in the throes of the Cold War” (75). The hallmark of this period is the modernist inclination to enlarge the theatrical canon by recovering supposedly inferior works. Kennedy cites Brook's 1955 staging at the Old Vic of Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier, as evidence of how critics both discovered newfound respect for a previously ignored play (some compared Titus to King Lear), and paid attention to how audiences responded to specific moments or scenes. The production, which toured to half a dozen European cities, became a lens through which the violent and politically unstable world of that moment in history could be viewed. Brook's recovery of an “inferior” play allowed postwar audiences to decipher sociopolitical and cultural relevance in the production. The modernist fascination with recovery united Brook and Peter Hall and, ultimately, became the founding principle of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Kennedy also pays considerable attention to the late twentieth-century reconstruction of the Globe Theatre and the idea that “[m]odernity and tourism are intertwined” (99). The Globe, with its “manufactured authenticity” (113), makes tourists of its spectators, in the sense that these spectators become “recreational travellers who construct themselves as outsiders for the sake of gaining playful entrance into another world” (95). Whether or not Globe patrons regard the building itself or the performances it houses to be accurate reconstructions is irrelevant. Of greater importance are the challenges the Globe faces in creating meaning for visitors while negotiating the demands of being, at once, a Disneyesque tourist attraction, a commercial theatre, and an educational institution. The Globe has made the spectator, not the actor, the center of attention by virtue of embracing the spectator-as-tourist model. The result is a decisive shift away from the modernist idea of controlled, focused performance espoused by Brook, Hall, and other postwar directors.
In “Subjectivity and the Spectator,” the book's third and final part, Kennedy examines multifarious performance modes (including, for example, sports, game shows, museums, and religious rituals) to highlight the relationship between spectating and subjectivity. Spectators of sporting events, who have historically been predominantly male, possess considerable agency because of the nature of their relationship to the event. They have greater freedom to “assist at the spectacle” (155) by more diverse means, including rioting or participating in other violent acts, than theatre spectators do. Game shows such as The Price Is Right spark “aroused” spectatorship because they invite audience members to become “characters” and take part in the performance itself. Museums, by virtue of their collection, arrangement, and presentation of objects, are “public performances of the past” (202) that facilitate personal and cultural memory. They raise problematic questions, however, about what we as spectators can actually remember and know.
Kennedy concludes his text by comparing two religious rituals. He describes in detail the Teyyam, a Hindu ritual which he observed and in which he participated during a visit to Kerala (in southwestern India) in 2004, and the Mass, which—having been raised Catholic—he experienced from an early age. He considers the role of belief and the differences between participation and spectatorship in a ritual performance. Appropriately, he borrows from Richard Schechner, as his reflection turns anthropological and personal. Questioning his own intimate experiences of spectatorship, Kennedy ends his book by rearticulating its abiding questions: What is an audience, what is a performance, and what/how does it mean to negotiate the relationship between the two?
