caa a22 4500 386344523 CHVBK 20180307111806.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198910 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0017383500029740 doi S0017383500029740 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0017383500029740 Goldhill Simon Reading Performance Criticism [Elektronische Daten] [Simon Goldhill] Fred Astaire once remarked of performing in London that he knew when the end of a play's run was approaching when he saw the first black tie in the audience. Perhaps this is an American's ironic representation of the snobbishness of pre-War London (though he was the American who sang the top-hat, white tie and tails into a part of his personal image). Perhaps it is merely an accurate (or nostalgic) picture of the dress code of the audiences of the period. The very appeal to such a dress code, however - in whatever way we choose to read the anecdote - inevitably relies on a whole network of cultural ideas and norms to make its point. It implies tacitly what is easily recoverable from other sources about the theatre of the period: the expected class of the audience; the sense of ‘an evening's entertainment' - attending the fashionable play of the season, with all the implications of the theatre as a place not merely for seeing but also for being seen; the range of subjects and characters portrayed on the London stage of the period; the role of London as a European capital of a world empire (with a particular self-awareness of itself as a capital); the expected types of narrative, events, and language, that for many modern readers could be evoked with the phrase ‘a Fred Astaire story'. If we want to understand the impact of the plays of Ibsen or Brecht or Osborne or Beckett, it cannot be merely through ‘dramatic techniques', but must also take into account the social performance that is theatre. Ibsen's commitment to a realist aesthetic is no doubt instrumental to the impact of his plays, but it is because his (socially committed) dramas challenged the proprieties of the social event of theatre that his first reviewers were so hostile. Copyright © The Classical Association 1989 Greece and Rome Cambridge University Press 36/2(1989-10), 172-182 0017-3835 36:2<172 1989 36 GAR https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500029740 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383500029740 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Goldhill Simon NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Greece and Rome Cambridge University Press 36/2(1989-10), 172-182 0017-3835 36:2<172 1989 36 GAR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge