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The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (review)

Dennis Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle is ambiguous with respect to genre: it is neither a collection of essays nor a through-written book, but something in between. Kennedy uses this approach to his advantage as he examines the relationship between performances and audiences in a wide variety of cultural practices that includes theatre, tourism, sport, festivals, gambling, television game shows, and religious ritual from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The book’s structure allows him to suggest significant connections among these disparate events without forcing them to conform to a single theoretical model. Kennedy is well known for his work on Shakespeare, which often focuses on contemporary production, and this work forms the basis for the book’s four central chapters. In this section, Kennedy first examines the political valences of Shakespearean production in Europe and Britain during the Cold War, contrasting the often Brechtian political critique of Continental directors with the existentialist approach, influenced by Jan Kott’s now seldom-mentioned Shakespeare Our Contemporary, that is more prevalent in the United Kingdom. The next chapter begins with a discussion of “The Tourist as Spectator” and weaves a subtle analogy between the historical distance that characterizes our relationship to Shakespeare and the interplay of self and other in tourism. This analogy becomes literal when Kennedy turns to the reconstructed Globe Theatre, which is both an historical reconstruction and a tourist attraction. Kennedy extends the notion of touristic appropriation in his next chapter, on intercultural Shakespeare, where he suggests that inter cultural theatre, in its quest for universals, ends up distancing itself from its audiences by drawing on cultural referents of which they have no significant experience, thus turning them into cultural tourists. The chapter on tourism presents one of the book’s main themes: to put it simply, spectators ultimately decide what the spectacle means, and their understanding of it is often at odds with what those in control wish them to see, feel, and think. At the restored Globe, for example, spectators “refuse to take the heritage business solemnly, refuse to stand quietly and listen REVIEWS