Read Martin Banham's original review, which was published in Theatre Research International, 17, 3 (1992), pp. 272–3.

When it was published in 1992, at the height of the intercultural debate within performance practice and scholarship, Patrice Pavis's Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture was a major intervention in this emerging concern in performance practice and theory – exciting and popular for some, and occasioning consternation and ire for others. Intercultural theatre was definitely a mixed bag of a phenomenon in contemporary theatre practice then (as it is now); it divided and continues to divide opinions on its benefits and the dangers to which it potentially could lead in practice. The best example of this polarization of feelings was Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière's internationally famous (or infamous) production of the Indian epic Mahabharata in 1987. Other intercultural productions of note at the time that are also relevant to Pavis's book are L'Indiade ou l'Inde de leur rêves (Indiade or the India of Their Dreams) (1987), written by Hélène Cixous and directed by Ariane Mnouchkine; Mnouchkine's Twelfth Night; and Eugenio Barba's Faust. All four productions feature in Pavis's explication of intercultural mise en scène.

Pavis's book, unlike others at the time, was significant because its focus was to understand what happens when cultures meet, what kinds of social, political, psychological and artistic manoeuvres – he calls these ‘modelizations’ and ‘concretizations’ – occur at that moment of contact between two cultures. While major books about theatre at the time were mainly concerned with identifying or articulating a purely semiotic theory of theatre – such as Keir Elam's The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980), Elaine Aston and George Savona's Theatre as a Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (1991), Erika Fischer-Lichte's The Semiotics of Theatre (1992) and Marco de Marinis's The Semiotics of Performance (1993) – Pavis uses the theatrical mise en scène to study the translations and transformations of culture into visible signs which the audience receive and interpret. For Pavis, the mise en scène is the soul of theatre; understanding how it is composed helps to explain how theatre is the best place to study the phenomenon of cultural contact and exchange, and why theatre can be seen as the crossroads where cultures meet. In doing so Pavis introduced the useful concept and metaphor of the hourglass, which he describes as

In the debate about the usefulness or danger of intercultural theatre, the major contribution of the hourglass metaphor was that it highlighted the need for a sensitive approach to cultural contacts and exchanges, especially in order to avoid the possibility of an imbalanced relationship in which one culture feels disadvantaged, as was the case with the reactions to the Mahabharata. Scholars and practitioners such as Rustom Bharucha in his essay ‘Peter Brook's Mahabharata: A View from India’ had been very critical of Brook.Footnote ¹ However, the hourglass is not without risk, for it is a mill, and there is the risk of blending or destroying the specificities of the source culture as it passes through the filters positioned at the neck of the hourglass. If it is a funnel, it permits an ‘indiscriminate absorption of the source culture without reshaping it’, thus affecting the possible readability of the received material by the target culture (pp. 4–5). Pavis manages to appear not to take sides, although, like other Western scholars, critics and practitioners, he is positive about intercultural theatre.

The book is made up of different essays covering a range of Pavis's scholarly preoccupations presented as conferences or lectures over a period of time and divided into eight chapters. Although Theatre at the Crossroads has been seen as having mainly contributed to the intercultural debate, it is, broadly speaking, about semiotics and thus its significance has to be assessed in relation to these two areas. It is important to point out that only chapters 1, 6, 7 and 8 look at intercultural theatre, while the other four cover a range of other areas of theatre, but especially theatre semiotics. In chapter 1 Pavis outlines his ‘theory of culture and mise en scène’, arguing that ‘the term interculturalism, rather than multiculturalism … seems appropriate to the task of grasping the dialectic of exchanges of civilities between cultures’ (p. 2). Pavis proposes the ‘study of intercultural theatre’ as the alternative to western performance analysis, in order to promote a new methodology of performance analysis made possible by a new model ‘with the patience and attention to minute detail of the hourglass’ (p. 3). Chapter 2, ‘From Stage to Text: A Difficult Birth’, cautions that for a ‘text to give birth to a performance is no easy matter’ as it involves creating a mise en scène, a ‘synchronic confrontation of signifying systems’ whose interactions are offered to the audience (p. 24). Pavis argues that while there is definitely a relationship between text and performance, it is not a question of a translation or replication of the former into the latter (pp. 27–8). He sees this relationship rather as ‘a transfer or a confrontation of the fictional universe structured by the text and the fictional universe produced by the stage’ (p. 28). The mise en scène is not a means of converting, translating or reducing text to performance, but rather is ‘a way of establishing effects or meaning and balance between opposing semiotic systems, ‘a gap between the auditory signs of the text and the visual signs of the stage’ (p. 29).

Chapter 3 is different from the rest as it concentrates on the relationship between classical theatre, modern theatre and postmodern theatre, arguing that the three constitute ‘three paradigms that are often confused and often difficult to define’, with the criterion separating them being ‘theatrical usage and mise en scène rather than the staged text’ (p. 47). However, like the other chapters, the central role of mise en scène in differentiating between genres is explored. The same can also be said of chapter 4, ‘On Theory as One of the Fine Arts’; however, as with chapter 2, Pavis brings performance into the discussion by arguing that the separation of theory from practice is a false one as both are unified in the person of the director, who is the architect of the mise en scène. Pavis argues that theory is present at every stage of the theatre activity and process (p. 86), thus it contributes to the composition of the mise en scène by the director and the performers, as well as by the spectators and critics in their reception and interpretation of it. Chapter 5, ‘Theatre and the Media: Specificity and “Influences”’, seems most removed from interculturalism, as it focuses on the difficulty of ‘inserting theatre within a theory of media’ because although they share common features and exercise reciprocal influences, theatre, which is mainly artistic, is not like film, television, radio or video, which are artistic and technological (p. 96). In chapter 6, ‘Towards Specifying Theatre Translation’, Pavis circles back to interculturalism through the art of translation. For him, understanding the art of theatre translation must include the work of the literary translator, as well as that of the director and the actor as their actions produce the ultimate translation, which is ‘the mise en scène of the dramatic text’ (p. 131). The chapter introduces the reader to the five stages of textual concretizations passed through in the process of translation that takes text T ₀ through T ₁, T ₂ and T ₃ to T ₄ (the final text which the audience receive/interpret).

Chapter 7, ‘Dancing with Faust’, returns to intercultural theatre, asserting that every translation ‘is an appropriation of the source culture by the target culture’ (p. 156). Pavis looks at Eugenio Barba's experimental production of Faust with an Indian Odissi dancer and a Japanese buyo dancer – an exercise that involved a Western text passing through two Eastern traditions/interpretations via a reworking by a Western director to create a distinctly Western mise en scène (p. 171). Pavis presents a benign image of intercultural theatre in these productions, taking issues with dissenting voices (such as Bharucha, 1984Footnote ²) who warn about the possibility of intercultural directors ‘exploiting “donor” countries by appropriating their cultural substances like cunning vampires, when these artists make the effort not to reduce one culture to another’ (p. 173). The final chapter of the book, ‘Interculturalism in Contemporary Mise en Scène’, re-engages with the hourglass, this time using four high-profile productions – Mahabharata, L'Indiade, Twelfth Night and Faust – to illustrate the workings of the filters positioned at the neck of the hourglass first identified in chapter 1.

Most of the chapters are about theatre translation, the process of transforming one text into another (whether it is a literary text or a cultural text), or one culture into another. Intercultural theatre is precisely that: both a translation and an appropriation of one culture into or by another. Pavis's Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture introduced a way of understanding this process through the theory of the hourglass, which, by outlining the stage-by-stage process through which this transfer is achieved, highlights the necessity for those involved to be aware of feelings and sensitivities on both sides: the source culture who can feel exploited by former Western colonizers who continue the process of cultural imperialism by stealing cultural material from the colonized, and the target culture who needs to know how to deal with the strange material that is being offered by the interculturalists. In doing so Pavis's book made and continues to make a major contribution to theatre history, performance theory, cultural theory and interculturalism.