Production and reception in the theatre

Patrice Pavis

pp. 25-71

in: Julian Hilton (ed), New directions in theatre, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstract

There is nothing original in the observation that we can approach text and performance both from the point of view of their production and of their reception: we can study text sources, the literary context, influence on the author, the refining of the mise-en-scène in the rehearsal process,¹ the material conditions of performance, and so on. Communication theory, applied somewhat mechanically to literary works, has led to the imposition of the idea that art is a one-way communication process between emitter and receiver (author/poet/dramatist, on the one hand, and reader/spectator, and so on, on the other), both of which sets of terms can be rapidly assimilated into the economist's model of producer and consumer.²