Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems [Hardcover]

This study looks into the things which go wrong on the theatre stage.Things nearly always go wrong in the theatre. This study looks at the things that shouldn't happen: stage fright, embarrassment, animals on stage, getting the giggles and bumping into the furniture. All these turn out to be neither anomalies nor accidents, but are instead what makes theatre, theatre.Things nearly always go wrong in the theatre. This study looks at the things that shouldn't happen: stage fright, embarrassment, animals on stage, getting the giggles and bumping into the furniture. All these turn out to be neither anomalies nor accidents, but are instead what makes theatre, theatre.Why do actors get stage fright? What is so embarrassing about joining in? Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard not to collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to answer these questions - usually ignored by theatre scholarship but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike - Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social and political meanings of the modern theatre. This book focuses on the theatrical encounter - those events in which actor and audience come face to face in a strangely compromised and alienated intimacy - arguing that the modern theatre has become a place where we entertain ourselves by experimenting with our feelings about work, social relations and about feelings themselves.Part I: 1. From the promise of performance to the return of theatre; 2. Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater; 3. From an ethics of performance to an affective politics of theatre; Part II. Stage Fright: The Predicament of the Actor: 1. In an 'awful hole'; 2. A very 'modern' hole; 3. Into the hole and out: diagnosis and cure; 4. Abject hole: first 'blowback'; 5. Face your fear; Part III. Embarrassment: The Predicament of the Audience: 1. Please don't look at me; 2. WhalS.