Theatre Audiences

by Susan Bennett

Book Overview

Susan Bennett's highly successful Theatre Audiences is a unique full-length study of the audience as cultural phenomenon, which looks at both theories of spectatorship and the practice of different theatres and their audiences.
Published here in a brand new updated edition, Theatre Audiences now includes:
nBL a new preface by the author
- a stunning extra chapter on intercultural theatre
- a revised up-to-date bibliography
Theatre...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415157234
• ISBN13: 9780415157230
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A good study of the most important aspect of theater

Ms. Bennett has written a fairly lengthy book about reception in theater. It is a rarely visited but extremely important aspect of this art form. It is quite possible to claim that all failures in theater are due to misjudgements and miscalculations by the producers and performers about the receivers of the production. All forms of theater communicate and to be understood, just like in any linguistic utterance, one has to be aware of the "languages" known by one's audience. Ms. Bennett brings this fact to light through a comprehensive scanning of the history of performer-audience relationship in modern theater and refers to major theories about her subject matter. My criticism: First, I think the book could be organized in a better way. She could have followed some thread, either chronological or conceptual. Second, the author has excessively referred to marginal avant-garde experiments which (unfortunately) haven't had any major impact on the broader theatrical scene. Third, I expected to find much more about the phenomena of communication, perception, interpretation (i.e. semiotics, pragmatics, decoding, sociological frames, etc) but she travels mostly on the surface regarding such matters. Fourth, the role and treatment of audience in modern theater is applicable to almost all forms of performing arts, including dance and music, but she confines her analysis strictly to modern theater.