Conclusion

Above all, what the staging and our consideration of it demonstrates is the flexibility of the Shakespearean text, its adaptability to new or unusual performative readings, and the crucial way that the bodies of actors affect the meaning of that text. Furthermore, the performance shows the way that an intensely personal approach to the characters (one which treats them as real people with personal histories) is by no means incompatible with a response which is more abstractly analytical. Indeed, the personal here seems to actively produce the analytical.

Some critics would argue that this kind of analysis, one which extracts meaning from the performance as if it were a literary text, is contrary to the spirit of theatrical practice, and makes the mistake of seeing play-going as the kind of reading done by "armchair critics." While certainly the way an audience reads a performance is different from the way a critic reads a text, a crucial aspect of theatrical communication is, ideally, the way it demands that an audience build a sense of mood and meaning not passively but actively. The theatre-goer responds intellectually, emotionally, perhaps even spiritually, to what he or she experiences and, consciously or otherwise, makes meaning out of those experiences. These "meanings" may be complex and may not all be compatible with each other, but that in no way takes away from their validity. This study is simply an attempt to explore the way audiences might respond (consciously or unconsciously, analytically or emotionally) and thus construct a sense of meaning from their experience of one particular approach to the play.