Title:
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Eye to eye : the persuasive potential of direct address in the theatre
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This thesis explores the functional dynamic of a theatrical phenomenon
which has for a long time been treated as a given, a convention or a device: direct
address to the audience. It is frequently mentioned by scholars and critics, but en
passant; its matter, though not its manner, is sometimes dealt with at length. Until
recently, however, the significance of direct address has received surprisingly little
attention. My MPhil thesis unpicked the strategies of The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne using rhetoric as its principle
analytical tool. It concluded that this apparently chaotic work of narrative fiction
reveals the straight lines of its intent when it is seen as organized by the act of
communication between Shandy and his readers rather than by the story it might
seem to be trying to tell. Teaching at the Guildford School of Acting, combined
professional and academic interests and provided a context in which to investigate
the effect which direct address might have in the theatre, where it is both more
possible and less surprising than in a work like Tristram Shandy. The research
represented in this thesis is founded in my professional practice as well as in the
literature. Examined through English Renaissance theatre and its secular and sacred
roots, direct address reveals itself as not merely incidental or coincidental: it signals
a fundamental interest in communication which is intimately bound up with the
persuasive enterprise of rhetoric. It founds a relationship between action and
audience which enables a rich and varied play and interplay of idea and story, of
suppose and reality, involving audience in the act of theatre both as collaborator
and as objective. Though the conventions of naturalism erected a fourth wall,
rendering the audience voyeurs rather than participants, Meyerhold and Brecht are
shown to have stepped backwards to re-member the self-conscious reflexivity
which direct address signals, and recent theatre practice is considered for its
exploitation of this key element of theatre.
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