Academic theatre reviewing and the imperfect present

摘要

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.View full textDownload full textKeywordsmodern Shakespearean production, professional critical discourseRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2010.497858