BA CPP

ASSESSMENT FEEDBACK FORM

Student Details:
Surname:
First Name:

Date:

Unit and Assessment Details:

Unit Title: Thinking Performance
Assessment task/ 500 Word Critical Reflection / Essay
element:

General Comments (referring to unit learning outcomes and assessment criteria)

First Marker:

In order to improve your work further, I would encourage you:

Name of first marker:

Agreed Provisional Mark:

This is a pass/fail unit, so the
numerical mark is only indicative:
 This essay is honours weighted:

Note:

 this mark is provisional and could be changed following moderation by the

Board of Examiners.
 This mark does not reflect any capping or mark reduction that may be applied
for late submission, retrieving a failed assessment or academic misconduct.
 A difference between theatre and performance

In „Theatre Craft: A Director’s Practical Companion from A to Z”, John Caird argues that a convention
that most theatre has is that the audience doesn’t see the actor as the person who’s acting, they
rather see the fictional character doing the actions (2010, pp 122-124). I am gonna argue that while
theatre has this the convention, in performance the public is seeing the actual performer performing,
not a fictional persona of him. I am gonna search for this difference between the works of the more
traditional german director Thomas Ostermeier and the Italian director Romeo Castellucci witch is an
avant-garde theatre-maker whose work bends traditional conventions

In 2008’s Hamlet, Thomas Ostermeier opens the show with a burying scene (Hamlet, 2008). The
audience knows that they are in a theatre event, thus they do not worry that in the building there is a
real dead person. The same applies when the character of Ofelia dies. They do not think that the
actual actress died and that she did it because she was crazy because of the actor that plays Hamlet.
Ostermeier chooses to get the actress that plays Hamlet’s mother to play Ofelia as well. The audience
does not think that she has two different personalities. More so, they know that the actress is not
Ofelia and that the actress is not Hamlet’s mother. They understand that it is an artistic choice and
this is not stopping them to get the story. Moreso, they understand that the duel with the shovel
from the end is not true and no one is in danger.

In 2008’s Inferno, Romeo Castellucci opens the show by being in the center of the stage and saying
„My name is Romeo Castellucci”, thus reminding the audience that he is not playing any character
(Inferno, 2008). He is representing himself. After that, a group of five dogs starts biting his suit while
Romeo is down, struggling. The physicality and the violence of the scene don’t let the audience
process any conventions, rather than that it makes them think of if he is really in danger or not. The
same happens shortly after this scene when a performer climbs the castle that it’s in the background.
When he is 100 feet up on a wall he is clearly in danger and the scene turns from a theatre-like
performance to a circus-like moment. For the audience, it doesn’t matter at this point who the
performer identifies with. If he happens to fall, he falls either way.

As we can see above, one of the key conventions that the theatre has and performance does not is
that the audience recognizes that the person on the stage is not who he says he is. This is used by
traditional theatre-makers to better emerge the public into the stories which they tell and this
convention is also used by avant-garde theatre makers to explore the border between theatre and
performance, to redefine what we understand as theatre and to change our perspective on
performance.

Bibliography:

Caird, J. (2010) Theatre Craft: A Director’s Practical Companion from A to Z.

London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (2008) Directed by Thomas Ostermeier [Schaubuhne, Berlin. 17

september]

Inferno by Romeo Castellucci (2008) Directed by Romeo Castellucci [ Societas Raffaello Sanzio,
Avignon. 17 april]