Back in 2012, Howard Barker, in an interview with Maddy Costa promoting his play, Scenes From An Execution, stated that he makes theatre for himself, and that he doesn’t ‘care if you [the audience] listen or not.’[1] This posed a debate on the relationship between audience and performance. In the use of ‘you’ and ‘listen’, Barker signals that an audience is present in the creation of performance; he is discussing how an audience interprets his work. He implies that his performances have what semiotician Stuart Hall coined a ‘preferred reading’[2] – an intention for the audience. Barker claims to reject anyone who does not interpret his ‘preferred reading’. In this essay, I will explore how an audience perceives the signs of a performance and how this affects its creation. I will illustrate how the ‘preferred reading’ is a redundant term, for the author cannot be certain of an audience’s reading. Firstly, I will define “performance”. Using Richard Schechner’s framing devices of ‘Make Believe’ and ‘Make Belief’ from Performance Studies: An Introduction[3], I will distinguish between “real-life” performance (e.g. conversation) and “conventional” performance (e.g. the theatre.) I will then draw on Susan Bennett in Theatre Audiences[4] to define how an audience is an interpellator of signs (how the audience interprets the signifiers that construct a performance.) I will suggest that performance (both ‘Make Believe’ and ‘Make Belief’) cannot exist without an audience because there is always an audience: the interpellation of signifiers is a constant process. Let’s begin by defining performance.

 

In his book, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Richard Schechner defines performance as any actions that fulfil and denote a particular “role”[5]. A “role” is how someone interacts and behaves with the world around them. It is context bound; changes based on scenario. Schechner suggests that people are constantly performing “roles” (e.g. boyfriend or postman) and that people construct these “roles” through appropriating different actions that signify that “role” – these are performative acts. Performative acts are defined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble[6]. She suggests that gender ‘must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’[7]. These ‘bodily gestures, movements, and styles’ are the appropriation of acts that signify a gender. These acts are ritualised and become read as part of that subject’s identity. Schechner is suggesting that these performative acts can ritualise “roles” other than gender. So, performance is the enactment of performative acts. These performative acts are signifiers, whilst the performance is the signified – what we perceive as a result of the signifiers[8]; I will illustrate that the audience interpellates signifiers. By interpellate, I am reappropriating a term used by Louis Althusser[9] to define the process of an audience interpreting signifiers, thereby shaping the creation of the performance through their reading of it. Performance cannot exist without interpellation, as one must recognise and position themself against it.

 

Theatre scholar Martin Esslin, however, in The Field of Drama[10], prewarns us of perceiving everything as performance (Schechner’s theory.) He suggests that if everything is performance, performance studies itself becomes redundant. Schechner, writing fifteen years later, acknowledges this complication; he devised two terms to distinguish between “real-life” performance (ritualised performances like gender, as Judith Butler illustrates) and “conventional” performances (e.g. that you watch in the theatre.) He calls these ‘Make Believe’ and ‘Make Belief’. ‘Make Believe’ are those performances that ‘maintain a clearly marked boundary between the world of the performance and everyday reality.’[11] They are performances that have framed themselves as performances; the audience can recognise it as such: when we go to the theatre, we expect a ‘Make Believe’ performance because the signifiers of the theatre building, the stage, the lights dimming, communicate to us that this is a performance. ‘Make Believe’ performances, therefore, are marked (created) by their audience, who interpellate the aforementioned signifiers as signifying a performance (the signified.) Meanwhile, the divide between stage and auditorium also marks the audience. Antithetically, ‘Make Belief performances intentionally blur or sabotage that boundary.’[12] A ‘Make Belief’ performance does not foreground its boundaries, and its performative acts have been naturalised. This renders the performance “invisible” to the audience. Nevertheless, an audience still interpellates the signifiers of the performance (e.g. I see a woman and perceive her as such), they just aren’t aware that they are doing so.

 

Prior to Schechner’s work, Erving Goffman suggested in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life[13] that ‘a “performance” may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.’[14] Like Schechner, Goffman suggests that ‘all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion’ is a performance. However, Goffman asserts that performance must exist in relation to an audience – ‘to influence […] the other participants.’ This asserts that performance influences audience. Whilst I agree, I suggest that it is a mutual relationship, where both performance and audience are simultaneously influencing each-other: the performance shares signifiers, which influence the audience’s interpellation; this interpellation is influenced by the dominant ideology, which has predetermined the signifieds. By dominant ideology, I mean the shared sign system of the subjects (the audience.)

 

Writing at the same time as Schechner, Gay McAuley attempts to uncomplicate this relationship by suggesting that ‘for an activity to be regarded as a performance, it must involve the live presence of the performers and those witnessing it, that there must be some intentionality on the part of the performer or witness or both.’[15] Again, performance cannot exist without a “witness” – the audience. Nevertheless, this hardly has its desired effect because both ‘Make Believe’ and ‘Make Belief’ performances have a “witness” – someone interpellating the signifiers of their performances. McAuley’s use of ‘intentionality’ is also a slippery one. He is suggesting, like Howard Barker, that there is a ‘preferred reading’, a meaning that the author wants conveyed. However, as Roland Barthes argues in The Death of the Author[16], the author merely presents the signifiers – it is the audience who interpellates them; the audience can decode their own meaning. Likewise, Schechner illustrates how all performance has an “intention” because we are constantly performing “roles” for a desired effect in society (even if subconsciously.) Therefore, performance cannot be divided by “intention”. I will return to this later when discussing Chaim Perelman’s definition of an audience[17]. First, I will illustrate further the audience as interpellator.

 

Theatre scholar Susan Bennett argues that ‘it is the interactive relations between audience and stage, spectator and spectator which constitute production and reception, […] for the creation of a particular experience.’[18] Bennett, like Goffman, is stating that performance exists when an audience receives and decodes the signifiers of a subject, and then converges them ‘for the creation of a particular experience.’ She suggests that the ‘Make Believe’ framing of “conventional” performance excuses the ‘interpretation of the stage sign […] beyond its immediate signified, often utilising several connotative possibilities.’[19] During a ‘Make Believe’ performance, the audience enters the world of metaphor, where the signifier becomes more flexible. Even then, however, the signified is still context bound and fixed. For example, during Wise Children’s adaptation of North by Northwest at York Theatre Royal, the actors used suitcases to represent vehicles in a car chase. Whilst the signifier of a suitcase does not immediately equal the signified of a lorry, the movement (steering the suitcase) and sound (the actors made engine noises) used with the suitcases did. Also, placards were stuck to the suitcases to denote “Petrol Tanker”. The accompanying signifiers aided the audience in perceiving the suitcase beyond its conventional signified to signify a Petrol tanker. If the audience had perceived the suitcases as just suitcases, the performance would change, even if the actions enacted were the same. It is, therefore, the theatrical team’s task to bridge the gap between signifier and signified.

 

Philosopher Christopher W. Tindale poses opposition to this theory by suggesting that an audience must always be marked[20]. By marked, he means that the audience must be called the audience and recognised as such. Tindale suggests that an unmarked audience (as I have been describing for ‘Make Belief’ performances) isn’t an audience but just an interpellator of signs. I conflate the two because (as Schechner theorises) performance is constant. If an audience is associated with a performance, then all performance has an audience. This audience isn’t recognised in the ‘Make Belief’ because the performative acts are naturalised, whereas in ‘Make Believe’ they are foregrounded. Nevertheless, using Chaim Perelman’s theory of New Rhetoric, Tindale suggests that ‘the audience is not necessarily comprised of those directly addressed, but the gathering of those whom the speaker wants to influence.’[21] This is similar to Goffman’s definition. Perelman and Tindale suggest that an audience is defined by the speaker’s intention (‘to influence’.) The audience becomes marked when the author chooses to mark them. As stated earlier, however, intention is slippery because an author has little control over how an audience reacts. Some authors try to combat the bridge between signifier and intended signified through signalling (as with the placards in North by Northwest), but it cannot always be done. North by Northwest is the only play I have watched that used placards, a Brechtian verfremdung that reflects back to the audience its own process of interpellation[22]. The audience becomes aware of its own role. Productions without placards relinquish power to the audience to interpellate meaning. Meanwhile, other audiences may listen.

 

As Tindale acknowledges, there can be “accidental” audiences – people who interpellate the performance but weren’t “supposed to”. Jurgen Habermas notes this differentiation by suggesting that there is an ‘immediate audience; they are engaged in an interactive dialogue […] But behind this is a further audience to the communication’[23]. The ‘immediate audience’ are those marked by the performer (as Perelman suggests); the ‘further audience’ are those unmarked who still interpellate the performers. This supports the assertion that there is always an audience (both marked and unmarked; both in ‘Make Believe’ and ‘Make Belief’.)

 

The audience is complicated further by Caroline Heim’s suggestion in Audience as Performer that the audience is a performance[24]. She draws on Schechner to suggest that the audience ‘play the role of the audience.’[25] The audience is a pre-defined role constructed from a series of performative acts (i.e. silence when the lights go down, watch the show, clap, laugh.) Anyone watching a performance are appropriating the role of audience. This “role” is what fellow theatre scholar Helen Freshwater calls the ‘collective audience’[26]. The ‘individual audience’ are those who perform the “role”. I agree that audience is a performative role: the question is whether the audience is aware that they are performing (‘Make Believe’) or not (‘Make Belief’.) I suggest that the audience isn’t aware because the performative acts of the theatre have been naturalised over hundreds of years of etiquette; we obey them without question. However, this illusion can be broken.

 

As an audience member, I become aware of anyone not performing the role of audience correctly: during a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?[27] at the York Drama Barn, a couple behind me kept whispering rather loudly about how much they loved the script. Whilst I agreed with them, I felt resentment at their talking. I was playing the role of the audience (silence, laughing, clapping), whilst becoming hostile to those breaking that role. The ‘Make Belief’ of the audience (in playing the role without question) became ‘Make Believe’, as I became conscious that I was performing a “role” and they were destroying it. This interruption affected my interpellation of the performance; I began to resent the actor playing George, as the ‘Make Believe’ was broken; I perceived the performance as a sham. The ‘Make Believe’, therefore, only sustains when the audience believes it is performing its “role” (is unaware of its performance as the audience.) If the audience’s perception of its “role” changes (as mine did), so too does its perception of the performance.

 

This is complicated further when the audience becomes an active participant in the performance – whether that be in dialogue (‘Make Belief’ performance) or audience participation (‘Make Believe’ performance.) Returning to North by Northwest, the narrator broke the fourth wall throughout the performance; at one point, they asked a man in the audience whether they liked their shoes. There was a pause as the man chuckled, unsure of whether he was allowed to speak or not. To speak would usually constitute a breaking of the performance of the audience “role”; the man became conscious of his performance. Eventually, he said “yeah”. In this utterance, he became an active participant in the performance, which affected the creation of the performance.

 

Similarly, Heim suggests that the audience affects the performance through ‘the cues that the actor receives from the audience’[28]. These cues are laughter, clapping, booing etc. The performance is affected by this feedback. As an actor myself, my performance has been affected by these cues: during a performance of It Runs in the Family[29], where I played Dr David Mortimore, the audience laughed every night at the part where I revealed to Hubert Bonney that the son running around the hospital was his (when it was actually mine.) I would put my arm round the actor playing Hubert and delay the delivery of my line, “The boy’s father… is you.”[30] Each night, I would give a longer pause to increase the audience’s laughter. Their laughter was like an invitation; it affected my performance. Likewise, in the ‘Make Belief’, the audience will speak, ignore, make a gesture etc. and this affects the performance of the subject who responds in-kind. Therefore, the audience can not only create performance through interpellation but also through participation.

 

Even when alone, the audience still creates and shapes the performance. Writing more recently, theatre scholar Kelly Jordan argues that ‘we judge our own behaviour in the guise of an imaginary spectator.’[31] Even when alone, we are performing to an ‘imaginary spectator’. This ‘imaginary spectator’ is society - the ideological framework that our behaviour (“roles”) is shaped by and must act within. We can never perform something that has not already been defined. Also, as Louis Althusser expresses, the “self” interpellates its own signifiers. We become our own audience. For example, when I am rehearsing Mosca’s monologue in Act 3 Scene 1 of Ben Jonson’s Volpone at home, I am reading and responding to my own signifiers – my voice, my facial expressions, and gestures. I interpellate these performative acts to create a ‘Make Believe’ performance. The line ‘your parasite is a most precious thing’[32] is directed at the audience. Alone, I must imagine an audience and attempt to persuade them. If I deliver the line to myself, it becomes more ponderous. Nevertheless, I am still responding to the performance and its signification. Whether I am reacting to myself or an ‘imaginary spectator’, the performance is still shaped by the audience.

 

Interpellation (or performance making) is also to judge a performance. As Tindale suggests, a performance is ‘judged against community standards of rationality themselves instantiated in an audience that necessarily has an output of the “ideal” about it whilst remaining concrete in the relevant social context.’[33] The audience has preconceived expectations of a performance; its signifiers also have fixed meaning, as defined by the ‘community standards of rationality’ – a shared ideology. These fixed signifieds are the ‘“ideal”’ (‘preferred’) reading of the performance. Further expectations are created by ‘the relevant social context’ – the frame of the performance. The audience wants the performance to align with these expectations. If not, the performance will be deemed inauthentic. Authenticity is when the performance aligns with the audience’s expectations.

 

This was in action when I watched a feminist re-imagining of Frankenstein at York Theatre Royal. The moment The Monster came to life was contentious for me because unfortunately for the actor portraying The Monster, I had also watched Benedict Cumberbatch’s rendition in the National Theatre. This meant I had a clear expectation of how The Monster should be portrayed. Sadly, the ease to which the actor playing The Monster in the York Theatre Royal version woke, rose, and walked out of the lab did not align with this expectation. Subsequently, I despised the performance as an inauthentic portrayal of The Monster. This inauthenticity meant that I perceived the performance as fake. This affected my creation (interpretation) of the performance. It also suggests that (contrary to Barker and Hall) the audience decides the ‘preferred reading’ of a performance through its expectations. Also, signifiers have expected signifieds, as their meaning has been predetermined and naturalised by the dominant ideology. So, an audience creates performance by interpellating its signifiers in relation to the predetermined signifieds.

 

In this essay, I have suggested that we cannot create performance without an audience because the audience shapes performance by interpellating its signifiers. Interpellation is a constant process, so the audience is constant. These audiences can be both marked and unmarked; this is fluent regardless of whether the performance is ‘Make Believe’ or ‘Make Belief’. I have also suggested that authorial intent (‘preferred reading’) is redundant, contrary to Howard Barker, because meaning is conceived by the interpellating audience. I have also drawn on Caroline Heim to outline how the audience itself is a performance. This shapes the performance through participation. In further research, I would explore ‘intentionality’ further; to do so would require analysis of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory, which I touched upon in my theorising that the audience can resist the ‘preferred reading’. In this, I have explored the complex relationship between performance and audience, and outlined why both are constant in the creation of each-other.

 

[1] Maddy Costa, ‘Howard Barker: Interview with Maddy Costa’, The Guardian, 1st October 2012

[2] Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, Culture, Media, Language, (London: Routledge, 1980) p51-61 (p57)

[3] Richard Schechner, ‘What is Performance?’, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2020) p1-24

[4] Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997) p1-20

[5] Schechner, p1

[6] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990)

[7] Butler, p140

[8] Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, 3rd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library Inc, 1959)

[9] Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, (1971)

[10] Martin Esslin, ‘Introduction’, The Field of Drama, (London: Methuen Drama, 1987)

[11] Schechner, p16

[12] Ibid

[13] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, (New York: Penguin, 1959)

[14] Goffman, p15-16

[15] Gay McAuley, ‘Interdisciplinary Field or Emerging Discipline?: Performance Studies at the University of Sydney’, Contesting Performance, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) p45

[16] Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, trans. Richard Howard, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986)

[17] Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, (Paris: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969)

[18] Bennett, p139

[19] Ibid, p69

[20] Christopher W. Tindale, The Philosophy of Argument and Audience Reception, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

[21] Tindale, p58

[22] David Barnett, ‘Verfremdung’, Brecht in Practice, Available at: https://www.brechtinpractice.net/theory/verfremdung (Accessed: 13/11/25)

[23] Jurgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Volumes, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) in Tindale, ‘Habermas and the Ideal Audience’, p96

[24] Caroline Heim, ‘Introduction’, Audience as Performer, (London: Routledge, 2015) p1-16

[25] Heim, p2

[26] Helen Freshwater, ‘Difficulties of Definition’, Theatre and Audience, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) p5-11

[27] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, (New York: Berkely Books, 2006)

[28] Heim, p152

[29] Ray Cooney, It Runs in the Family, (London: Samuel French Ltd., 2002)

[30] Cooney, p49

[31] Kelly Jordan, ‘The Ethics of Participation and Participation Gone Wrong’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 7:2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019) p187-209 (p198)

[32] Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’, The Alchemist and Other Plays, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 3.1, 7, p50

[33] Tindale, p98