The Performer: Art, Life, Politics
Richard Sennet
Allen Lane, £25

“WHEN I started to write this essay on society and the performing arts, a cluster of demagogues had come to dominate the public realm. Donald Trump in America and Boris Johnson in Britain are skilled performers. Malign performances of this sort draw on the same materials of expression, though, as other kinds of expression.”

This is a promising start to leading US sociologist Richard Sennett’s entertaining and provocatively informative examination of the place and the nature of performance both on stage and in society at large.

This is no academic thesis broached in a coterie language. Sennett’s style could be described as conversationalist. He leaves the readers feeling that they have enjoyed an extended session with someone with wide and varied experiences and a determination to present his understanding of key aspects of the human condition for our consideration.

As a classical musician in early life Sennett is well aware of the role performance plays in human communication, while his later sociological interests have ranged over history, philosophy, architecture and literature, areas he moves between with consummate ease. 

He uses personal experience to make telling comparisons. In the chapter on Acting and Ritual he compares the Jewish ceremonial Kaddish prayer at funerals with a performance of As You Like It he saw in an Aids ward as alternate ways of facing death, the former an acceptance, the latter as one of defiance.

Commenting on how modern politicians employ consultants to advise them on how to most effectively present themselves, he stresses the difference between their variations in role playing. Unlike Machiavelli’s Prince, who changes role at will, demagogues like Trump cannot rightly be described as Machiavellian, as they believe in their own fantasies and are deeply invested in a single role.

Sennet recognises the moral ambiguity involved in performance whether that of the orchestral instrumentalist, essentially responsive to the conductor’s baton, or the actor under the control of the method director. The performer must retain his or her independent identity to “feel that your way is the way it should be done” and avoid the danger of puppet perfection.

He warns too of the modern tendency to eroticise the dramatisation of violence using the examples of Abu Ghraib and the mob attack on the US Capitol. While accepting that violence is something we have to live with, Sennett believes that: “The ‘spaces of performing’ may suggest how we might transcend this ‘unfortunate’ human characteristic.”

The three performance spaces, open, closed and hidden: “Shape how performers perform, and how spectators spectate.” The argument goes that the history of theatrical development from the ancient Greeks to the present has resulted in the narrowing of the spectator’s “freely imagining” of the dramatic experience. As with the other aspects of performance, Sennett sees this control over the spectator reflected in the political world outside, creating an aesthetic of inequality: “The actor/politician proves stronger than the spectator.”

Similarly the stage-history of the use of masks, firstly indicating a tragic, comic or neutral role, leading today to the signalling of a deception (what lies behind the mask?) reflects the politics of today.   

Sennett’s multifaceted evaluation of performance covers many more aspects of how it operates in the relatively safe area of theatre but plays a vital role in the political power-play in the world outside.

After all, Shakespeare knew that “all the world’s a stage” and, as possibly his greatest successor Bertold Brecht understood and Sennett’s inciteful book demonstrates: “Spectate and submit has become the guiding principle of modern politics.”