Rehearsal as Critical Method: Pinter’s Old Times

Abstract

If the performance of a play may be considered an act of criticism,¹ then rehearsal is analogous to critical method. We talk about play productions as “interpretations” of texts; we become animated over a director’s “approach” to a play; we admire an actor’s “analysis” of his role. Implicit in the vocabulary of such responses is the recognition that performance is “interpretive,” that it does articulate an “approach,” and is thus the same sort of activity as criticism. If criticism is centrally an analytical process rather than a descriptive or an evaluative one,² then Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as viable a piece of criticism of that comedy as any essay in a scholarly journal. The production is simply less easily published, which is to say less easily recovered or disseminated. Yet if a production or a performance may be appreciated, in one sense, as criticism of a play, then the rehearsals for that production encompass the critical methods by which the interpreters (actor, director, designer) arrive at their conclusion (the production itself).