Academic theatre reviewing and the imperfect present

• Published in: Shakespeare (London, England) Vol. 6; no. 3; pp. 350 - 356
• Main Author: Lopez, Jeremy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.2010
• Subjects: modern Shakespearean production; professional critical discourse
• ISSN: 1745-0918; 1745-0926
• DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2010.497858

A survey of some rhetorical conventions for representing present/contemporaneous experience in the academic theatre review. The rhetorical attitude of the reviewer towards the present moment typically suggests that the function of a theatre review is to record the timelessness, rather than the historicity, of a given production. But to record what seems timeless in a given production is to imagine a reader outside of history rather than a reader for whom - as must be the case if theatre reviews are to be considered an archive - the reviewer's present is itself historical, perhaps distantly and unfamiliarly so. To record more vividly the pressures of a reviewer's contemporary experience upon his or her experience of a production might be to communicate to a future reader the ways in which the construction and interpretation of Shakespearean staging and meaning arise out of a dialectical relation between the immediate, vanishing present and the once-contemporary past.