| Chapter 1: | Spatial Ambiguity and the Early Modern/Postmodern in King Lear |
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that replicates Gloucester’s perceptual uncertainty and causes a parallel disorientation for the audience. The effect of this doubling is a structural reflection on the usual theatricalizing work undertaken by audiences in the creation of fictional worlds. In this pronounced moment of ontological uncertainty, a metatheatrical reading of the episode serves to underscore the innate performative situation pertaining to the cognitive organization of theatrical space. My second aim is to take up the implications of such a metatheatrical preoccupation with the characteristic indeterminate ontology of theatrical space and show how a persistent self-reflexive interest in contingent and competing fictional worlds finds kinship with the poetics of postmodernism.
Peter Brook writes, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (11). By saying “I,” Brook appropriates to himself the power to enact an arbitrary naming that transforms ordinary space, endowing it with theatrical potential. Josette Féral likewise sees the “reallocation of the quotidian space” (97) as central to the activation of theatricality. However, significantly, she shifts the nominative power away from the foreign but seemingly omnipotent speaker “I” and reassigns it to someone else who is a contributing and included participant in the theatrical process, specifically to the “someone else” who is watching. According to this view, theatricality arises out of the perceptual dynamic between the watcher and the watched. It cannot be summarily mandated from outside this communicative pairing. A theatrical intention expressed by the performer is one part of the theatrical equation. The second and dominant role is that of the audience who takes up this invitation to understand what is shown as theatre. Privileging the audience perspective, “theatricality seems to be a process that has to do with a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge” (Féral 97). Through this specifically theatrical postulating gaze, the spectator purposely carves out an “other” space separate from that of the quotidian, effectively setting apart the fictional world from the actual world. Thus, theatricality is the