Performing silence as political resistance: Audience interaction and spatial politics in Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III

This article examines one specific moment of actor/audience interaction that occurred in the concluding third of a production of William Shakespeare’s Richard III directed by Thomas Ostermeier, the Artistic Director of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. This infamous production inaugurated the opening of the Schaubühne Globe in 2015: a quasi-reconstruction of the Globe Theatre (1599), and one of the three venues in the Schaubühne theatrical complex in Berlin, Germany. The performance discussed in this article, however, took place on 17 February 2017, when Ostermeier’s production was on tour at London’s Barbican Theatre. During an instance of actor/audience interaction, one audience member refused to engage with the action onstage by obstinately remaining silent when asked a direct, misogynistic question by Richard (Lars Eidinger). I will reflect on how this incident might be understood in relation to the performative effects (and the emerging political implications of those effects) that Ostermeier and his long-term collaborator Jan Pappelbaum – the principal stage designer for the Schaubühne – sought to invoke through this production’s architectural citation of the early modern theatre’s material conditions of performance and reception. I will subsequently consider how the audience member’s refusal to engage with Eidinger on the production’s terms presented a potential method of theatrical and political resistance against a cooperative model of actor/audience interaction. This discussion is framed within the context of the broader critical and theoretical understandings of audience participation in conventional theatrical performance, particularly as it pertains to the recent performance history of Richard III.

Ostermeier’s Richard III is, on the one hand, a production that sought to leverage the site-specific features of the Schaubühne’s Saal C in order to ‘recreat[e] the immediacy of Elizabethan theatre’: a semicircular structure with a claustrophobic spatial arrangement that enabled actors to perform in close proximity to audience members, as though the actors were ‘enclosed by a wall of spectators’. ¹ On the other hand, the production was designed with the expectation that it – like most of the Schaubühne’s larger productions – would go on tour. ² The first performance of Richard III to take place beyond the concrete walls of the Schaubühne Globe was at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2015; the Schaubühne received permission to build the production’s semicircular thrust stage, extending the theatre’s proscenium stage and in effect ‘transform[ing]’ the baroque venue of the Opéra Grand Avignon into a touring version of the Schaubühne Globe. ³ This spatial strategy was also utilised for the Barbican performance. For the purposes of my argument, I adopt the premise that the production’s invocation of the spatial dynamics of the early modern theatre remained legible in venues other than the Schaubühne, and that the spatial politics and performative effects that Ostermeier and Pappelbaum sought to achieve through this invocation were maintained in the different venues where Richard III was performed. I make this assertion while acknowledging that, if circumstances permitted, a longer version of this article would more fully interrogate the implications of the material conditions of theatrical touring on this production. ⁴

In Marius von Mayenburg’s German-language translation of Richard III, the exchange in question took place after Buckingham (Moritz Gottwald) reminds the recently crowned king of his unfulfilled promises of political advancement. In Ostermeier’s production, Richard (who is seated at his dinner) rejected Buckingham’s request by pushing his meal of potatoes and quark into the face of his one-time political ally. Richard compounded Buckingham’s embarrassment by gathering a plateful of the dirt-and-clay covering the semicircular thrust stage and smearing it onto the latter’s face and suit. As Richard began to exit, he turned back to Buckingham and, with a light-hearted delivery, said to him, ‘You look like shit. Did you not bathe today?’ Just before Eidinger reached his stage-right exit, he singled out a man sitting in the front row. This man was sitting next to a woman who was directly implicated in the subsequent exchange. Eidinger, bearing a mischievous grin, pointed first at the man then at the woman as he asked (in English): ‘Did you eat her pussy this morning?’

Both the Barbican and the Schaubühne have stated that no recording of this performance exists. Given that, as Peggy Phelan has famously argued, ‘[t]heatre continually marks the perpetual disappearance of its own enactment’, ⁵ my analysis relies upon the following imperfect remains of this unscripted moment in performance: my personal recollections, my conversations with colleagues also in attendance, ⁶ and a hastily composed entry in my performance diary. I have edited and reproduced this entry in the space below. The following, therefore, should at best be understood as documenting my personal witnessing of the performance event rather than as a perfect record of what took place:

‘Did you eat her pussy this morning?’    Silence. Eidinger again, insistent: ‘Did you eat her pussy this morning?’    Silence. ‘I asked you a question’, explained Eidinger, ‘and you are supposed to answer my question. That is how this is supposed to work’.    Silence. ‘So did you eat pussy this morning?’    Lengthy silence. Nervous laughter. ‘Okay, that’s fine. We can wait. I will sit’.    He doesn’t sit. Silence. Whispers from the audience. ‘I ask the question, you answer. It is nice, it’s fun’.    Eidinger makes some gesture, presumably to the person sitting next to the audience member. ‘Did you eat her pussy this morning?’    Silence. More nervous laughter. More whispers. ‘Okay we’ll wait. I have nowhere else to be’.    Eidinger moves to sit down on the stage, but he is interrupted.    A man’s voice from the back of the Stalls, or perhaps the Circle, saying something like: ‘Well, maybe you can wait but I cannot, and with what you have been doing, it isn’t worth it at all’.    Eidinger shakes his hands in the direction of the voice in mock fear. ‘Ooohhhhhhhhhh’.    Eidinger begins to chuckle. Eidinger makes a further response – as the man exits the theatre, to mixed applause and laughter – the specifics of which have been lost to the recesses of my memory.    The man seems to have walked out.    Silence.    Eidinger sits on the stage, and then says matter-of-factly to no one in particular: ‘No, we will wait. He is making us wait’.    Returning his focus to the first audience member, and gesturing towards the man in the front row: ‘You see what you are doing? It’s okay, we wait’.    Eidinger mutters something inaudible.    Laughter. Silence.    Eidinger points to the actor playing Buckingham (still covered in food and dirt, still standing in his tableaux as his cue to speak is Eidinger’s exit), and says: ‘Look at him, what you are doing to him, standing there, he really looks like shit’.    Laughter and clapping. Silence. ‘Did you eat her pussy this morning?’    Silence.    A man’s voice from the middle of the Stalls. ‘Just answer and get on with it’.    Shorter silence.    A woman’s voice near to Eidinger and the first audience member: ‘Isn’t anyone going to tell him to fuck off?’    A man’s voice responds to the call. His tone is playful, as though involved in a game of ‘yes, and’:    ‘Fuuuuck offfff’.    Laughing from Eidinger, who begins to rise. ‘This is fun, right? I think maybe you didn’t, that’s okay!’    Silence.    A man’s voice from the Upper Circle, house-right: ‘Sic semper tyrannis’.    Silence, apart from the sound of the audience around me turning or half-turning. Silence. Then the same voice: ‘Thus always to tyrants’.    Me, audibly, but to nobody in particular: ‘Yeah thanks, we got it mate’.    No reaction from Eidinger, who has now risen and is still addressing the man in the front row: ‘No? You don’t want to answer? It’s okay. I don’t have to win. But the play won’t work. It’s okay, but it is a shame’.    Eidinger moves to walk off. ‘I will go, but maybe I won’t come back. We will see’.    Silence followed by mixed applause.    Finally, Buckingham: ‘I can’t believe you people laugh at this shit’.    Laughter, applause.    The play continues.

One possible way of understanding this moment of actor/audience interaction is within the performative effects that Ostermeier and Pappelbaum sought to invoke through their architectural citation of the Elizabethan theatre. According to Pappelbaum, what fascinated him and Ostermeier about reconstructions of the Globe Theatre was their ‘direct impact on actors’ play’. ⁷ Regarding the phenomenology of performance engendered by the material conditions of Globe-style theatres, Pappelbaum writes the following:

It becomes impossible to ignore the presence of the audience; the actors are particularly exposed and entirely at the mercy of the spectators. The spaces of the auditorium and stage coalesce in a common space, and a common time, where every single moment becomes a unique joint experience. ⁸

Similarly, Pauline Kiernan, writing about her experience of working with Shakespeare’s Globe during the theatre’s inaugural season, posits that the ‘circle’ of Shakespeare’s Globe is ‘inclusive by its nature’ when compared to the proscenium-arch theatre. ⁹ There is a recurrent discourse among practitioners working in reconstructed (or quasi-reconstructed) Shakespearean playhouses who understand the spatial arrangement of the early modern theatre as productively disrupting what is characterised as the rigid division between actors and audiences in proscenium-arch theatres. It is then posited that this notional erasure of spatial divisions between actors and audiences engenders different spatial behaviours from audience members. Kiernan, for instance, reports that the material conditions of Shakespeare’s Globe encourage a ‘liberated’, ‘highly visible’ and ‘energised’ audience who feel ‘empowered’ to participate in the performance event by reacting to the action unfolding on the stage. ¹⁰ Likewise, couched in Pappelbaum’s understanding that actors are ‘exposed’ and ‘at the mercy’ of the audience, who can have a ‘direct impact’ on how actors perform, is the notion that audience members, as participants in the performance event, are able to (in some sense) keep actors accountable for what happens onstage. These emergent spatial behaviours are seen as part of a re-ordering of the spatial politics inside the theatre. The Globe model is routinely conceived of as a more ‘collaborative’, ¹¹ ‘classless’, ¹² ‘populist’, ¹³ ‘communal’ ¹⁴ and ‘democratic’ ¹⁵ counter-point to proscenium-arch spaces.

It might be argued that the audience’s rejoinders to Richard/Eidinger’s misogynistic interrogation were consonant with the spatial politics that Ostermeier and Pappelbaum imagined would be engendered by a production inspired by Elizabethan-style performance spaces. If nothing else, Eidinger might certainly be said to have been ‘particularly exposed and entirely at the mercy of the spectators’ in at least one instance on the evening of 17 February 2017. In a post-show dialogue hosted by the Barbican Centre, Eidinger is said to have described the interaction as one of the worst theatrical encounters he had experienced. ¹⁶

However, the production’s particular adoption of an Elizabethan-style spatial organisation should not necessarily be understood as inherently producing emancipatory or democratic politics. To illustrate this, I want to briefly consider Tim Carroll’s production of Richard III (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2012). In the third act of Carroll’s production, the Globe audience is encouraged by actors to cheer for Richard as the soon-to-be King (farcically dressed up as a pious monk) is offered the crown by the Mayor of London. ¹⁷ In this production, Stephen Purcell argues that the audience is thrice-cast: first, as the ‘ignorant citizens of London, crying for Richard when we are manipulated to do so’; second, as pawns used by Buckingham to promote the rouse of Richard’s populism; and, third, as the ‘amused and probably sceptical audience members’ who, though aware of the political deception taking place, participate all the same. ¹⁸ To these three participatory roles that Purcell argues are assumed by the Globe audience, I would add the following provision: the model of audience engagement (in productions such as Carroll’s) defines the rules of actor/audience engagement in a unidirectional manner, from the stage onto the auditorium. The audience may be ‘amused and probably sceptical’ but they nonetheless are expected (perhaps ‘manipulated’) to participate in that interaction. Indeed, Purcell describes several other productions of Richard III that have included elements of audience interaction (for instance, using the technique of direct address) as a way for actors performing the role of the king to engender theatrical favour from audience members. ¹⁹ For example, Purcell reads David Troughton’s Richard in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard III (dir. Bill Alexander, 1984) as making the audience ‘not only a confident and an accomplice’. ²⁰ Troughton is quoted by Purcell as understanding the audience to be ‘a character which had the power to influence and affect the direction that Richard takes during his murderous assault on the English crown’. ²¹ These productions by Carroll and Alexander encourage their often more-than-willing audience members to interact with the actor playing the titular role on the terms dictated by the production, and this engagement can produce a problematic blurring of audience participation with political assent for Richard’s tyranny. These examples are both useful in establishing the potential political implications for audience engagement (including in Elizabethan-inspired performance spaces) and contextualising the deployment of actor/audience interaction in Ostermeier’s production within the recent performative history of Richard III.

Similarly, it would be reductive to ascribe the Barbican audience’s resistive and confrontational responses as an emancipatory or democratising effect that is inevitably produced by a more participatory aspect of theatre. Scholars like Baz Kershaw have expressed scepticism regarding the promise of a radical, emancipatory politics in participatory theatre, a mode of theatre in which the entire performance event is structured around the very premise of semi-scripted interactions between actors and audience members. In his consideration of Living Theatre’s Paradise Now! (Avignon Festival, 1968), Kershaw describes the desire in participatory theatre to ‘free the spectator from spectatorship’ as having ‘produced a theatrical pathology that played fast and loose with the virus of brute oppression’. ²² Helen Freshwater, in her book Theatre & Audience, similarly problematises the notion that participatory elements in theatre and performance art are necessarily empowering for audiences. Freshwater describes the ways in which audiences have variously reacted to actor/audience interactions with mistrust, unease, anxiety, apprehension, frustration and resistance in a divergent range of performative contexts and spatial configurations. ²³ Although not immediately concerned with participatory theatre, Jacques Rancière in his essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ expresses scepticism about forms of theatrical performance that are premised upon the notion that an emancipatory politics of spectatorship can emerge either through the transcendence of the separation between stage and auditorium or the abolition of the difference between spectator and performance. ²⁴ These theatrical tendencies, which Rancière terms the ‘redistribution of places’, ²⁵ echo Pappelbaum’s description of the spatial and performative goals of Richard III. Moreover, while Alan Read has reversed Rancière’s conception of the ‘emancipated spectator’ with his own ‘emaciated spectator’, Read does share Rancière’s scepticism of ‘the self-defeating trajectory of a century-long attempt to transcend the separation of stage and auditorium’. ²⁶ Read goes on to note that ‘the theatrical invitation to participate, to “join in”, has very little to say about, or do with, emancipation proper’. ²⁷

The rules of audience engagement in conventional, scripted drama are always set within narrow and highly sanctioned confines. These moments can sometimes be scripted to allow for a considerable amount of ‘disruption’ on the part of audience members, ²⁸ but even productions that actively seek to challenge the conventions of the actor/audience relationship nevertheless place strict controls upon that interaction so as not to unsettle the narrative presentation altogether. The show, as it were, must eventually go on, and more or less as the director(s) and actor(s) intend. Instances of audience engagement rely upon (and often work because of) a presumed understanding that, whether enthusiastically or begrudgingly, audience members will give their consent, will accept the theatrical invitation to ‘join in’ on the performance event. Among the multitude of reasons why this might be so, audience members are financially invested (in the form of a purchased ticket) in the prospect of a ‘successful’ performance of such interactions – or, at least, successful insofar as a production’s vision is more or less carried to fruition in performance.

In this highly constructed and theatricalised exchange, the narrative stakes of Eidinger’s invasive inquiry might be viewed as an examination of Richard’s power to compel an audience member to publicly reveal intimate details both about themselves and (by implication) those individuals with whom they are connected. In the three other instances in which I was able to attend a performance or view a recording of Ostermeier’s Richard III, the singled-out audience members appeared perfectly content to give direct (and, as it happens, affirmative) answers to Eidinger’s question. To be clear, it matters little whether the spectator provides an answer in the affirmative or negative, with humour or with outrage; any direct engagement on the part of the audience member will always be enfolded into the diegesis such as to reinforce the power of the ascendant Richard. Rather, as the interaction at the Barbican unravels, it increasingly becomes apparent that the political stakes of this moment seem more immediately to hinge upon Eidinger’s ability to elicit any response from the audience member that the actor has chosen to interrogate. The audience member’s initial refusal to respond to Eidinger’s probing, misogynistic form of actor/audience interaction unsettled the conventional expectation that audience members will ‘join in’ when they are told to do so, and their sustained, performative silence served to rebuff Eidinger’s repeated attempts to reassert the authority of the actor to dictate the terms of spectatorship onto the audience. This is what Eidinger seemed to be implying when he said that he (Eidinger/Richard) did not have to ‘win’ the exchange (i.e. receive a response) but warned that if he did not receive a response then ‘the play won’t work’. The allure of actor/audience interaction in a production like Richard III is, in part, the appearance of emancipation: the promise reflected in Pappelbaum’s claim that the audience can become something more than spectators and have a direct impact on actors’ play. However, to participate in actor/audience interaction is to confirm rather than dislodge the asymmetrical politics that underpins theatrical spectatorship. In this way, the audience member’s performative silence revealed actor/audience interaction to be, as Read puts it, an emaciated force that masquerades as a democratic power. ²⁹ It is perhaps ironic that this disruption of the conventions of actor/audience interaction emerged precisely because the audience member insisted upon performing another rule of spectatorship that is conventional to performance in proscenium-arch theatres: to remain silent while actors undertake the work of performance.

The audience member’s silent response made untenable the uneasy conflation between Eidinger-as-Actor and Richard-as-Tyrant (and, in both cases, audience members as supporters) that has been identified in the critical discourse as a performative effect that recent productions of Richard III have actively sought to achieve through the use of direct address. If Richard’s political power originates from the actor’s ability to compel or otherwise manipulate the audience into support through means of direct engagement, then the audience member’s disengagement created a veritable power vacuum within the theatre that Eidinger/Richard could not fully seize. In this sense, the performance event was subjected to a productive experience of ‘theatrical failure’. ³⁰ The failure of Eidinger to elicit any response from the audience member was productive in the sense that their disengagement disrupted the ability of the actor to enfold the audience’s theatrical engagement into the diegesis to become political consent. It was also productive in that one audience member’s performative silence created a void in theatrical and political power – a void from which other possibilities for theatrical and/or political resistance began to emerge. To be sure, one audience member sought to draw this disruption to the actor/audience dynamic back towards the tenuous agreement that audiences should behave as is demanded by the stage: ‘Just answer and get on with it’. Still others took the opportunity presented by this vacuum to express their opposition to the production, albeit within the conceptual paradigm that understands theatrical ‘success’ as a measure of customer satisfaction; the man who walks out of the production does not do so out of some performative opposition to the misogyny of the interaction, nor the co-opting of theatrical engagement to underpin Richard’s tyranny, but rather because he perceived the production not to be ‘worth it’. Nonetheless, the possibility of an emancipatory theatrical politics might be seen to emerge when some audience members seized the temporary disruption to theatre’s hierarchical power dynamics and gave voice to their opposition and resistance: ‘Isn’t somebody going to tell him to fuck off?’ and ‘Thus always to tyrants’.

Who is the tyrant? Who should be told to fuck off? Richard? Eidinger? The initial audience member’s disengagement reset the locus of theatrical power to some undefined point that tipped more towards the auditorium than the stage. A popular, theatrical and political resistance was given a brief existence within the microcosm of that moment in performance. I have expressed in this article a few of the many possible important consequences of this incident at the Barbican Theatre. I have suggested that the audience member’s deliberate, performative disengagement upset the stage-centred power dynamics that conventionally underwrite such moments of audience/actor interaction. I have also suggested that the spatial politics that are often associated with Elizabethan-style spatial configurations are, perhaps, less democratic or emancipatory than some commentators or practitioners might wish. Ostermeier’s Richard III sought to leverage an understanding of the performative possibilities of audience engagement that enfolds an audience’s theatrical engagement into the diegesis to become political consent. It (perhaps inadvertently) intervened in our understanding of the Globe-style material conditions of performance and reception, as well as the performance histories of Richard III, to offer an alternative model of theatrical and political resistance in moments of audience/actor interaction.

By way of conclusion, let me temper my enthusiasm for the performative possibilities of this moment with a few words of caution. When Eidinger/Richard slinks off the stage, he limply threatens not to return for the rest of the performance. Again, who will fail to return? Richard? Eidinger? This is the double-edged sword of a production that attempts to harness an audience’s theatrical engagement for narratological purposes; the refusal of the audience to engage with the stage on the terms set from the stage becomes a rebuke of the stage and its theatrical/political agenda. Yet it is implausible to suggest that the performance of audience disengagement, of the sort that I witnessed at the Barbican, would ever change the course of scripted drama in conventional theatrical contexts. As I have said, such modes of engagement (and/or disengagement) would always remain within the prescribed limitations sanctioned within a performance. Eidinger (and, therefore, Richard) was always going to return to the stage. The audience remained a group of emaciated rather than emancipated spectators: the performance continued, and Richard’s dead body was strung up at the play’s conclusion without any particularly direct action from audience members. It is also worth acknowledging the ephemeral nature of this experience. In my four encounters with the production, only on one occasion could it be said that the actor/audience relationship was disrupted in a way that might begin to be considered an act of theatrical and/or political resistance. Eidinger’s post-show remarks seem to acknowledge the uniqueness of this moment. Despite the provocative nature of Eidinger’s question, most audiences would appear to be content to allow the terms of actor/audience interaction to be dictated from the stage. Could an effective model of political resistance be built off so meagre a sample size? In the process of writing this article, I find myself reflecting on my own positionality during this exchange. My personal, in situ failure to recognise the potential for individual or collective intervention leaps off the pages of my performance diary. I made a sarcastic remark. It was audible, ‘but to nobody in particular’. Can this model of political resistance be enacted if the opportunity for action, seemingly rare in its occurrence, is not recognised in the moment of its appearance? Nor do I wish to valorise the audience member’s disengagement as an effective form of political resistance anywhere but within the distinctly bourgeois context of the Barbican Theatre. It was a brief, limited and vanishing moment of productive theatrical resistance, but also one that ultimately decentred the woman in the audience who became the unwitting subject of misogyny. But even amidst my hesitations and qualifications I return to the radical potential that might be found even in the microcosm of a moment: an ability to strip Eidinger and/or Richard of the power to coerce others (including the audience) into doing their bidding and underpinning their political ascendancy. Within the prescribed limitations sanctioned by scripted performance, such disengagement may nevertheless offer an experience of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (or estrangement effect): something that ‘enables the spectators to perceive things in a new way so that the social rules governing our actions can be revealed and so that we (the spectators) can see how events could have turned out differently’. ³¹ Even in the tenuous, momentary and limited way engendered by the direct action of refusing to engage on his terms, Richard the Tyrant has been defeated once. It follows that he can be defeated again.