Blog Two: Playing Tricks
Dan Rebellato, September 2013
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Two of the central problems faced by anyone studying the mind are privacy and introspection. The problem of privacy is that no one else can directly observe your mental experience and a science of the mind demands observations be verified and can be replicated; the introspection problem is that when you think about your thoughts, you change your thoughts. Try it: whenever someone mentions their first school, it’s likely that, in the background, a rough mental image of your own school may pop up. But what is that background image like? How sharp and detailed is it? The problem we have in answering that question is that it’s very hard to call up that image for examination without making it sharper and more detailed, thus changing the image we’re trying to examine.
These dilemmas have seemed very acute as we designed and launched our research project on Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution. The project has two aspects, captures in the two halves of the title. The second half asks how people come to assign value to the theatre that they see and the role that value plays in their lives. If we have a hypothesis that we’re testing, it is that theatregoing is not merely a matter of attending cultural events, making more or less subtle aesthetic judgments of them, and filing that memory away; theatre comes to have a value because of the experience of going to the theatre, the place it occupies in a life, its relation to the things you are not doing, the conversations you might have about it, the things it might say about you being a theatregoer, the way in which a particular performance might be irresistibly called to mind, perhaps at a distance from the original theatre visit, by some event in our personal, work, or public lives, which it informs, complicates, echoes, or otherwise illuminates. Our project, of course, may give us compelling evidence that this isn’t the case.
The first half of the title is, in a sense, the bedrock of this research. What is theatre spectatorship? How do we watch theatre? What do we notice? What stays with us? What kind of attention do we pay? What do we actually think about the theatre we see? Such an enquiry is fully prey to the methodological problems that I have mentioned.
To this we might add the Hawthorne Effect, the well-documented phenomenon whereby subjects whose behaviour is being studied change their behaviour because they are being studied. This is additionally complicated by the fact that the theatre – like many other objects with cultural capital – may encourage people to gather and interpret their experiences and present them, unconsciously, in a flattering light. We may think it makes us look good to offer sophisticated views of theatre experiences, when that is actually a secondary revision of our spectatorship, produced in anticipation of being asked questions about it.
These concerns are familiar to anyone who has experienced the unreliability of memory: surely everyone? There are countless experiences from my past that I’ve thought of so often that I am not sure if I am remembering the event or remembering remembering the event: the original masked behind a carapace of reordered impressions, selected sensations, studded with insertions from other people’s memories, details unknowingly borrowed from other quite different events.
In April 1979, as part of the ITV Playhouse strand, Clive Exton adapted M. R. James’s short horror story ‘Casting the Runes’ (the same story that is the basis for Jacques Tourneur’s superb Night of the Demon [1957]). The story centres on Mr Karswell, an advocate of witchcraft, who has been taking revenge on his enemies by slyly passing on runes which bring destruction to their recipients. I watched the adaptation, aged 11, and one scene particularly struck me: the moment when the wizard Mr Karswell conjures a monstrously huge spider to appear in his enemy’s bed. I remember the scene vividly. Pillow at the right of the screen, blanket, foot of the bed to the left, and the man getting into bed and the scream of horror and the ghastly thing’s legs jabbing out the side. I was so scared, I took a torch to bed and checked in it to ensure there were no spiders. Any stray feeling at my feet made me jump with fear. The scene has stayed with me; I can remember it as vividly as if I were still in front of our small portable black & white TV in April 1979.
But here’s the thing. When a DVD of the programme was released a couple of years ago, I got it, for nostalgic reasons. And, yes, the scene was exactly as I remembered it – with one small difference: the bed was the other way around. The pillow at the left, the foot at the right of the screen. I had reversed the image in my memory. And why? Because that was the position of my bed. My bed was against the wall, with the pillow on the right and the foot on the left. In other words, my memory had taken the television image and fused it with my traumatic night in my own bed worrying about giant spiders; in fact, that’s pretty much exactly what I had been doing that night: taking the television image and morbidly applying it to my own position.
As a playwright, I know that the selectiveness of memory is rather valuable. In particular, when I’ve done adaptations, I’ve developed a habit of not re-reading the book immediately. Instead, what I try to do is write down the plot, without forcing it, just retelling the story as I remember it. Very often, when I go back to the original, I find that my memory has excluded the interesting but unnecessary curlicues in the narrative, sometimes combined characters, made connections that were inexplicit. It’s organized the material in a way that is tremendously helpful for me as a writer.
A more extreme version of this happened a couple of years ago with an old movie, Midnight Lace, a 1960s British thriller. Doris Day plays a newly-married heiress living in London with her industrialist husband (Rex Harrison) and she’s being plagued by increasingly threatening phone calls in a sinister voice. No one else seems to hear them, which leads her to feel panicked and isolated. Her husband promises to help and between them they hatch a plan to trap the killer – but this doesn’t work, because (SPOILER ALERT) the sinister stalker is her husband. In a climactic scene, we discover that he’s planned to kill her making it look that she threw herself from the balcony when the balance of her mind was disturbed.
It’s a pretty decent thriller, a period piece but effective. I first saw it when I was 12 or so. I vividly remember the moment when Doris Day is alone and terrified in the dark; there are billowing curtains; she is sure the killer is coming to do his worst; a figure is seen in the French window... and it’s her husband. With relief she grasps him, sobbing into his shoulder. But he begins to speak, and is doing so in the thin, metallic voice on the phone, thus revealing it’s him. It’s a brilliant moment, misdirection, reversal, shock, imminent threat: the perfect twist.
Except, of course, when it came on TV a few months ago, I discovered that it doesn’t happen like that. In fact there’s another intruder who breaks in, then Rex appears and struggles with him. A shot rings out. We don’t know who is hit. We see a tape recorder on the floor and a man stands and picks it up; he presses play and that eerie voice echoes in the room. Doris Day sees that it’s her husband and is overjoyed. She embraces him and then runs to the phone to call the police. Rex Harrison puts his finger down on the buttons, cutting her off, and so begins his explanation.
What’s weird is that my memory’s version is better. It’s certainly a more economical twist, done through a moment of horror and, to be Aristotelian for a moment, anagnorisis and peripateia, rather than through the rather leaden exposition of talking his victim through his plan like a Bond villain.
It’s easy to despair: the unreliability of memory, the problems of verifiability and introspection, the distorting effects of cultural capital, the Hawthorne Effect… Can we ever get reliable information about people’s experience of anything? Well, it’s important not to set the bar too high. It’s not the Large Hadron Collider we’re running here. There are a number of straightforward ways that you try not to trigger the worst of these distortions and in our design of the questionnaires, we’ve framed our enquiries in ways that should solicit reasonably uncluttered accounts of spectatorship. But, perhaps more reassuringly, the distortions are part of the study. The kind of things people say about theatre when asked are, we suspect, part of the process whereby we come to attribute value (or disvalue!) to our theatergoing experiences.
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