The Chemistry of the Theatre: Performativity of Time.

Anderson, Thomas P.

The Chemistry of the Theatre: Performativity of Time, by Jerzy Limon. Hound-mills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. 246. Hardback $84.00.

In The Chemistry of the Theatre: Performativity of Time, Jerzy Limon attempts to integrate cognitive studies, performance studies, and literary analysis to make an argument that theater is an artistic medium "governed by a system of multifarious rules or formulas" (3). Limon's book, then, is a spectator's guide to theater spectacle with the singular purpose to allow a discerning audience to "discover the rules" (4) or "know the rules" (5) that "explain and justify" the shape and force of theatrical spectacle. In the book's extended metaphor, these rules together comprise the chemistry of the theater--"a sequence of compound signs, heterogeneous amalgams. ... These blended amalgams create meaning through a network of relations, such as the rule of equivalence, based on similarity or contrast, and the rule of contiguity, or, a 'theatrical syntax'" (8).

What emerges in Limon's dense analysis of the rules of performance is a type of theatrical structuralism in which theater is structured like a language, possessing the same power to shock and surprise as Lacan's notion of the unconscious. Central to Limon's thesis is the education of the spectator, who actively participates in the chemistry of the theater in a "cognitive retort" (11)--a response to the theatrical experience that, according to Limon, links spectator and performance in "blended spaces" (11). Limon's performance-and cognition-based analysis of the theater is a complement to other recent studies that seek to make literary analysis responsive to the material of the theater. Jonathan Gil Harris's innovative Untimely Matter In the Time of Shakespeare (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), along with his coedited collection of essays with Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006), has established crucial links between the materiality of a play's staging and the way audiences might understand its significance. In addition, Andrew Sofer's book The Stage Life of Props (University of Michigan Press, 2003) offers a related study of the special way that the deep history of a particular stage item insinuates itself into the immediacy of a performance and affects audience reception, and Kent Cartwright's Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (Penn State University Press, 1991) uses textual and historical evidence to make the case that a play's theatricality functions contractually to wed spectators to the effect of theatrical spectacle, making the audience an active participant in a play's performance. In contextualizing the book's scientific metaphor, [a]s in chemistry, also in theatre" (47), with recent developments in cognitive studies, Limon too seeks to untangle the mystery of audience response. Limon expresses the link between cognitive science and performance studies in describing the migration of meaning of a stage prop, in this case a bowl of soup, in a staged performance: "It is not only the imagined plate of soup that is the intended meaning of the scene: what counts is how the meaning is created, what substances are used and how they are modeled. In cognitive science it is even more important how the blending process affects the body and mind of the recipient" (46).

Limon describes this process of cognitive blending as "theatrical osmosis" (60), and he resists understanding theater as a fictional mirror held up to nature; nor is the audience perception of a play simply a mirror image of what is implied on stage. The experience of the theater, for Limon, is much more complicated: indeed, it is transactional, an act of "communication in action" (64). In expressing the complexity of this communication loop between theater and audience, Limon's book takes considerable rhetorical risks. For example, in describing the function of the actor in the communication loop of the theater, Limon writes, "We, the spectators, take the input spaces of the actor and the figure signaled, and blend them in cognitive responses, creating an imagined figure, which may be treated as the resultant structure of the process. This then is related back to the stage and, again, back to the spectator, and so on, in a communication continuum" (158). Limon's analysis of the chemistry of the theater is filled with many of these moments in which his attempt at scientific clarity runs the risk of producing the opposite rhetorical effect.

The Chemistry of the Theatre is organized in three parts: the first is a three-chapter introduction of how Limon is using cognitive science and performance theory to establish a new way to understand the enduring appeal of theatrical spectacle. The second part of the book is a four-chapter exploration of how the mechanics of the stage and the process of cognitive blending in the audience coordinate to produce the force of theater. Limon offers chapters in this section on "Sculpting the Space," "Sculpting the Time," "Sculpting the Language," and "Sculpting the Body" in the performance. The book's final two chapters examine the theatrical conventions of soliloquies and asides and the play-within-the-play, followed by a brief, helpful conclusion that synthesizes the book's major claims about the force of time as the catalyst to artistic theatrical experience. For Limon, "the study of the different functions of time structures employed in theatre is fundamental in uncovering the ways in which the medium works, the complex and distinctive ways in which meaning is created" (210).

Limon's interest in arguing for time's paramount importance in a new science of the theater means that at times the specific contours of his argument are muted by the scientific discourse that he deploys to makes his case. While it is clear that the relationship between the infinite, fictional time of the staged play offers a rich contrast to the bounded time of the actors and spectators in the theater, the major implications of this relationship never fully crystallize in Limon's earnest study. This criticism of the book notwithstanding, Limon's vast experience as a teacher of theater infuses the book with its most pleasurable and informative moments. Although The Chemistry of the Theatre only minimally redresses the gap that separates current literary analysis from rigorous performance-based criticism, the examples that Limon marshals to prove his claims about theater's chemistry are fascinating accounts from years of play-going, seeing major European and American productions as well as small but remarkable local plays. Whether he is describing a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Bristol Old Vic in 1952 or Roberto Ciulli's recent production of King Lear performed at the Teatr Wybreze, Limon's readings of interesting moments in staged plays are imaginative and full of rich insights. Perhaps my own biases that privilege the theatrical imagination inform my desire for more of the rich descriptions of staged plays culled from Limon's life dedicated to the theater. At the very least, these rich descriptions anchor the book's more scientific discussions and balance Limon's interest in "chemistry" with a sense of theater's "rough magic" that resists quantitative analysis. More significantly, perhaps, Limon's book exploring the power of dramatic performance and existing alongside of text-based accounts of drama reveals how little the two approaches actually speak to one another.

Reviewer: THOMAS P. ANDERSON