Reviewed by:

• Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief by Lindsay Brandon Hunter
• Nick Salvato

Reading Lindsay Brandon Hunter's brilliant book Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief makes me want—mischievously—to misremember and rehear the infamous tagline for MTV's The Real World as a series that discloses what happens "when people stop playing nice and start playing real." The difference between getting (or simply being) real and playing real, as well as the generatively mischievous if fraught possibilities that playing real may afford, stand at the center of Hunter's argument. That argument, laid out clearly and compellingly in the book's introduction, turns on two interrelated claims: that "the representational actions of theater and media, when operating in tandem, are predisposed to playfully shaking things up—most notably by destabilizing easy oppositions between live and recorded, real and fake, and the thing itself and its representation"; and that the sites of these playful shakings up are poised to do cultural work, including the "reconfiguring of audience and participant relationships to qualities like sincerity, honesty, and genuineness" and the interrogation of received or common "notions of identity and performed character, authenticity and artifice, and spontaneity and scriptedness" (xv).

Making good on these claims, which move freshly and refreshingly past the so-called liveness debates that helped to define performance studies as an (anti)discipline, Hunter explores, in six ensuing chapters, a suite of phenomena that have interestingly related but also crucially different relationships to theatricality's intertwining with mediatization: recorded exhibitions and live transmissions of theatre productions, experiments in intermedial theatre, reality television, and alternative-reality games (ARGs). The ambition to cover such cross-medially diverse terrain is one to which Hunter lives up impressively as a thinker who evidently knows a great deal, historically and theoretically, about each of these forms, yet in a welcome way wears that erudition lightly.

Charming if goofy mid-twentieth-century neologisms populate chapter 1, which begins with [End Page 121] Hunter's carefully researched account of the ways in which Electronovision brought a Theatrofilm version of a 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, to cinema attendees—but only for four screenings. That distribution decision, alongside artistic choices and technical innovations (and constraints), worked in the service of an ideological attempt "to mimic the ephemerality of the theater" (5), as well as the theatre's, or an ideation of theatre's, public-facing and contingent operations. Yet, as Hunter demonstrates, what properly unites this somewhat anomalous effort with recent projects like the National Theatre's NT Live Series and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Live from Stratford-upon-Avon series is their shared investment in loaded ideas of heritage and education. Pedagogically bringing the "best" (read as: best of the "West") to mass audiences is, as Hunter demonstrates with nuance, a simultaneously changeable and durable project.

Alighting on the Electronovision Hamlet effectively tees up Hunter for the work of chapter 2, where she examines the Wooster Group's "resolutely inter-medial" Hamlet of 2007, for which the 1964 recording provides rich source material (25). In the course of that examination, Hunter pays wonderfully dense and detailed attention to the performance of Wooster Group member Scott Shepherd in his role as Hamlet—or Burton? or Burton-as-Hamlet? or Burton/ Hamlet? or some other one(s) beside(s)—with the takeaway that his effort, "a serious mischief," acknowledges but also "complicates theatrical performance's preoccupation with likeness, (a)liveness, and the imaginary of inspiration" (33).

Like chapters 1 and 2, chapters 3 and 4 work in similarly cogent lockstep, although through a narrower engagement with the subset of reality television focused on putative "true love." Taking up, with advisement, that troubled and troubling notion, I will aver that I truly love Hunter's emphasis on the perhaps surprising cinematic slickness of The Hills and the perhaps equally surprising, super-savvy fan responses to the series' complex construction of the (artificed, artificial) real. At the same time, and even as I appreciate Hunter's helpfully contextualizing references to series...

审核人：

• 玩真实：模仿、媒体和恶作剧林赛·布兰登·亨特
• 尼克萨尔瓦托

阅读 Lindsay Brandon Hunter 的精彩著作Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief让我想——淘气地——记错并重听 MTV 的The Real World的臭名昭著的标语，它揭示了“当人们停止玩得好并开始玩时会发生什么”真实的。”获得（或简单地成为）真实和玩真实之间的区别，以及玩真实可能带来的恶作剧的可能性，是亨特论点的核心。这一论点在本书的引言开启了两个相互关联的主张：“戏剧和媒体的代表性行为，在协同运作时，倾向于开玩笑地改变事物——最明显的是通过破坏现场与录制、真实与虚假以及事物之间的简单对立。本身及其代表”；并且这些有趣的震动的网站准备进行文化工作，包括“将观众和参与者的关系重新配置为真诚、诚实和真诚等品质”以及对公认的或常见的“身份和表演特征、真实性和技巧、自发性和脚本性的概念”的审问（xv）。

亨特在随后的六章中探讨了一系列有趣的相关但也至关重要的现象，这些主张令人耳目一新。戏剧性与媒介化交织的不同关系：戏剧作品的录制展览和现场传输、媒介剧院的实验、真人秀和另类现实游戏（ARG）。涵盖这种跨媒体多样化领域的雄心是亨特作为一名思想家令人印象深刻的雄心壮志，他显然在历史和理论上对这些形式中的每一种都有很多了解，但以一种受欢迎的方式轻描淡写地佩戴了这种博学。

如果愚蠢的 20 世纪中叶新词出现在第 1 章中，则很迷人，该章以[End Page 121 ]开始由约翰·吉尔古德（John Gielgud）执导，理查德·伯顿（Richard Burton）主演，面向电影观众——但仅放映四场。这种分配决定，连同艺术选择和技术创新（和限制），为“模仿剧院的短暂性”（5）以及剧院的或剧院的观念，公众的意识形态尝试服务。面对和或有业务。然而，正如亨特所展示的那样，将这种有点反常的努力与最近的项目（如国家剧院的 NT 现场直播系列和皇家莎士比亚公司的埃文河畔斯特拉特福现场直播系列）恰当地结合起来的是他们对遗产和教育理念的共同投资。正如亨特用细微差别展示的那样，将“最好的”（读作：“西方之最”）带给大众观众的教学方法是，

登上 Electronovision哈姆雷特有效地为亨特准备了第 2 章的工作，在那里她检查了伍斯特集团 2007 年的“坚决中间”哈姆雷特，1964 年的录音提供了丰富的源材料 (25)。在那次考试的过程中，亨特对伍斯特集团成员斯科特·谢泼德在扮演哈姆雷特或伯顿的角色时的表现给予了极其密集和细致的关注。还是伯顿作为哈姆雷特？还是伯顿/哈姆雷特？或除此之外的其他一些人——他的努力，“一个严重的恶作剧”承认但也“使戏剧表演对相似性、（a）活力和灵感的想象的关注变得复杂”（33） .

与第 1 章和第 2 章一样，第 3 章和第 4 章以同样令人信服的步调工作，尽管通过与专注于假定的“真爱”的真人秀电视子集进行更窄的接触。考虑到这个令人不安和令人不安的概念，我敢肯定，我真的很喜欢亨特对《山丘》可能令人惊讶的电影流畅性的强调，以及也许同样令人惊讶、超级精明的粉丝对该系列复杂结构的反应（人工的，人工的）真实的。与此同时，即使我很欣赏 Hunter 对系列的有用语境参考……