Theatricality as an Interdisciplinary Problem

Abstract

This essay argues that interdisciplinary scholarship on politics and performance underestimates the complexity of social performances, particularly in the realm of politics. By reducing performance to performativity, current scholarship fails to appreciate how the specifically theatrical quality of social and political life affects people’s experience of politics. In moving beyond the designation of politicians’ showmanship as straightforwardly ‘theatrical’, this essay proposes that a more conceptual reading of theatricality illuminates both how political representation works through performance and the urgent and widespread problem of political distrust. Because theatrical situations that occur outside of theatre settings still depend on the highly contingent, tenuous connection of suspended disbelief between a performance and its audience’s reception, it is important to account for the specifically theatrical qualities of social and political performances. It is therefore vital to introduce theatricality as an analytical concept into fields beyond theatre and performance studies.

Notes

1 For an overview of Clinton’s campaign style, see Herbert (2016, 134–140).

2 Ted Sorensen was John F. Kennedy’s most well-known speechwriter, reportedly referred to by Kennedy as ‘my intellectual blood bank’ (cited in Schlesinger 2008: 104).

3 Wilson’s rhetorical innovations dovetailed with developments in media technology that allowed the electorate greater access to presidential performances: Wilson’s successor Warden Harding was the first president to be heard on the radio in 1922, and in 1939 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was the first president to be televised, although an elaborate media strategy was in place to downplay and divert attention away from FDR’s disability (see Pressman 2013).