Read David Ian Rabey's original review which was published in Theatre Research International, 16, 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 282–3.

I owe my career to Susan Bennett's book Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (first published in 1990 and then republished as a second edition in 1997). More than any other single work of scholarship, this is the book that defined my scholarly identity – as a theatre audience researcher. Adopting an unusually personal tone, this review takes this opportunity to reflect on my changing relationship with Theatre Audiences over the years: initially as a theatre studies undergraduate, enthusiastically embracing Bennett's call to consider the multiplicitous nature of audience reception; then later, as a PhD student, reconsidering Bennett as someone to argue against, positioning my own empirical methods in opposition to her spectatorship theorization. Fifteen years after my first reading, beginning now to forge my own career as a lecturer in theatre, this has therefore been the ideal occasion to ask – what do I make of Bennett's book today?

With Google Scholar logging almost 1,500 distinct citations to date, Theatre Audiences is now widely considered to be one of the ‘seminal’ texts focused specifically on audiences of live performance.Footnote ¹ And yet at the time of its first publication it was not universally well received. For example, Nancy Copeland's 1992 Modern Drama review suggested that Bennett's limited cultural reach blurred together audiences across the UK, the USA and Canada (a criticism which likely led to the second-edition addition of a new chapter problematizing Western reactions to intercultural theatre).Footnote ² Meanwhile, David Ian Rabey in this journal prophesized that the book would be better suited to ‘the bright undergraduate’ than to advanced scholarship, working ‘best as a checklist to the reader's awareness of theoretical initiatives’.Footnote ³

As an undergraduate myself, it is no exaggeration to say that encountering Theatre Audiences in the mid-2000s opened up a whole new perceptive realm – my first in-depth invitation to direct the scholarly gaze away from the stage and onto the auditorium. Self-defined as ‘a study of theatre audiences as cultural phenomenon’ (p. 1), Theatre Audiences offered a blueprint for conceptualizing the divergent processes of interpretation that might be going on under the surface of a seemingly singular spectatorship. Rereading old essays, my two key takeaways were: (1) Bennett's urge to consider how the ‘horizon of cultural and ideological expectations’ that different audiences bring with them to the theatre will necessarily shape how they receive a performance, and (2) her theorizing of the reception process within two frames. These are the ‘outer frame’ of all those surrounding ‘cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event’, and the ‘inner frame’, which ‘contains the dramatic production in a particular playing space’ (p. 139). It is at the intersection of these two frames that meaning is made. For somebody just taking her first steps into a field that often talks about ‘the audience’ as an idealized homogeneity, the predetermined end point of production decisions, Bennett's call to consider the potential ‘diversity of publics’ (p. 94) that may be lurking in even the most uniform of audience demographics seemed nothing short of revolutionary.

In the years that followed, though, as I navigated the move from undergraduate to PhD, my relationship with Theatre Audiences shifted. In fact my entire relationship with audiences changed completely, thanks to a catalytic meeting with Prof. Martin Barker, an audience research expert at Aberystwyth University. Gaining Barker as my supervisor was to have my perception of audiences turned on its head once again: this time by destabilizing my reflexive belief – following Bennett – that more could be known about audience interpretations through increasingly nuanced and complexified theoretical frameworks than by actually talking to audiences about their viewing practices.Footnote ⁴

Hence, reading my thesis and subsequent book – Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (2016) – is to recall my growing disillusionment with Bennett's work during that time. This frustration was first to do with her tendency to ‘offer alternative explanations’ for common assumptions about how audiences respond to particular performance texts/techniques, whilst at the same time ‘proffer[ing] theories that are arguably as abstract as those she critiques’;Footnote ⁵ and second to do with what I felt by then to be a hazily incomplete consideration of the epistemological potentials for – and challenges of – evidencing claims about reception through actual audience case-study analysis.Footnote ⁶ Limited to spectatorial speculation, Theatre Audiences seems at times caught between the understanding that theatrical productions have power to shape audiences’ reactions and her simultaneous belief that audiences have agency over their own reception. For example, on page 48, Bennett wavers between recognition of a number of possible responses – with audience members free to refuse to play the game, or to take up the performers’ challenge – and the contradictory certainty on the very same page that these plays ‘are surely satisfying [to audiences] as theatrical art’.

The foundation of Bennett's model is her review of two major bodies of spectatorship theory, which rose to prominence between the 1960s and the 1980s. These are (1) the reader-response work of scholars such as Umberto Eco, Hans Robert Jauss and Roland Barthes, and (2) the related field of post-structuralist semiotics. Where Bennett stops short, though, is in acknowledging that these were only one strand of a wider enquiry. Absent from Bennett's analysis is the work of media-studies scholars such as those in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), whose members worked between 1964 and 2002 to reshape academia's understanding of audience engagement through ethnographic studies of discrete spectatorial communities. While cultural studies as a field had by then dedicated decades to detailed explorations of the complex production–reception process in action, Theatre Audiences – whose subtitle overtly names this relationship – seemingly prefers the idea of the audience to these situated politico-cultural explorations, and the questions they raised about the tug of war between producer power and audience agency. For an author intending to redress dramatic theory's neglect of ‘the process of an audience's interpretation’ by drawing attention to ‘the act and nature of viewing’ itself,Footnote ⁷ it seems strange to completely ignore the influential scholarship of CCCS members (and their successors), such as Stuart Hall or Janice Radway. From the countercultural activities of punks, goths and other (primarily working-class) subcultures, to the ‘resistant readers’ of romance novels and women's magazines – the research produced by these two figures alone had potential to add significantly to Bennett's musings about what it might mean for audiences to read ‘against the grain’.

Reading the entire book again from cover to cover, after so many years, was to feel the impact of this lacuna once again. Having these pioneering audience studies in media and mass communications bypassed by the major book on theatre audiences is one reason why, in 2009, two decades after Theatre Audiences’ publication, Helen Freshwater could still identify cultural studies as a fruitful yet largely forgotten avenue for performance scholars.Footnote ⁸ What might I have learned as an undergraduate, had Bennett placed alongside reception theory those fascinating empirical studies investigating how communities of audiences, embedded within particular social contexts, actually go about the process of interpreting cultural texts?Footnote ⁹

Thus theatre studies is only now reclaiming audience scholarship from its disciplinary ‘hasty dismissal’.Footnote ¹⁰ In a recent article for Theatre Research International,Footnote ¹¹ I surveyed the underacknowledged pioneers of this field, who themselves have built on cultural studies foundations: beginning with the early Theatre Talks projects of Willmar Sauter (1986) and his northern European colleagues, followed by a steady spread of publications by researchers based in the UK (e.g. Stephanie Pitts, Matthew Reason, John Tulloch, Ben Walmsley), Australia (e.g. Hilary Glow, Katya Johanson, Caroline Heim, Jennifer Radbourne, Rebecca Scollen), and North America (e.g. Lynne Conner, Matt Omasta, Dani Snyder-Young). More recently, the launches in 2016 and 2017 respectively of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (CSAR) at the University of Toronto and of the Leeds–Melbourne-based international Network for Audience Research in the Performing Arts (iNARPA) have forged connections between these established audience scholars and a host of early-career researchers. Alongside the 2019 launch of Routledge's dedicated Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research, these initiatives are collectively establishing live-performance audience research as a field committed to ‘critically analysing the strength and generalisability of any claims’ made about audiences’ experiences by considering the ‘strengths and limitations’ of varying empirical methodologies, rather than ‘theorising potential audience reception or producing spectatorship frameworks from critical (scholarly and/or practitioner) perspectives alone’.Footnote ¹²

Early in Theatre Audiences Bennett calls reader-response theory ‘both liberating and frustrating’ (p. 20). This is an apt description of my own feelings about this book – frustrating for its refusal to acknowledge vibrant scholarship on audiences’ reception processes in action, yet liberating nonetheless for opening up that important early space, helping generations of theatre scholars to reimagine audiences’ responses as plural, heterogenous, and socially formed.