The Administrative Theatre of Silence

What one missing byline taught me about communication in cultural institutions.

For years, without knowing it, I had been present on the website of Moscow’s Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in a slightly spectral form. 

A substantial passage from my review of Konstantin Bogomolov’sThe Magic Mountain, published inThe Theatre Times, appeared on the production page. The publication was credited. The author was not. I knew nothing about this. Then, recently,The Magic Mountain resurfaced in the news and I was asked for a comment. Looking for my old review, I found its second life on the theatre’s website – recognisably mine, properly attributed toThe Theatre Times, and apparently written by no one. There was a certain accidental elegance to the discovery.

My review was about a production that radically reduces conventional theatrical language. Thomas Mann’s text is not reproduced literally. Language retreats. Coughing becomes an almost continuous score. Silence, duration, bodies, space and the audience’s own discomfort are made to do the communicative work.

At the time, I wrote about the audience’s difficulty with this proposition. We admire an actor who knows how to hold a pause, but a performance that insists on silence for too long may produce irritation. We become anxious when nothing apparently answers us. Years later, I discovered that I was about to participate in a sequel. 

On September 4, I emailed the theatre’s press office and pointed out the missing attribution. Silence. I tried to establish whom I should actually contact. I wrote to people connected with the theatre. A former employee – the only person in this small chain who immediately engaged in what might be called conventional dialogue – kindly gave me the contact details of a current member of staff. I wrote to her. Silence. I contacted another member of the theatre. Silence.

On September 11, I sent another formal email, this time explaining explicitly that when a text is quoted, naming the publication is not the same thing as naming its author. There was still no reply. The next morning I looked at the page. My name was there. The messages had therefore reached their destination. Their meaning had been understood. An action had been taken. Only the reply was missing. 

I had accidentally entered a rather accomplished piece of immersive administrative theatre. The participant sends a signal into the institutional space. The space offers no visible response. The participant tries again. The silence acquires duration and therefore, naturally, meaning. Eventually the participant notices that the scenery has changed. No one says a word.

ForThe Magic Mountain, this was almost aesthetically perfect. A production built around pauses, coughing and the erosion of conventional dramatic speech had somehow exported its artistic language into the theatre’s external communications. But this is where the joke stops being merely a joke.

Onstage, silence can be an artistic decision. In professional communication, silence is also a decision – although usually a less interesting one. Theatre organisations speak constantly about dialogue. They speak of audience engagement, accessibility, community, artists’ voices, participation and exchange. Communications departments produce extraordinary quantities of communication: announcements, newsletters, trailers, posts, interviews, invitations, press releases. But much of what institutions call communication is actually transmission.The institution speaks. Others receive. A genuine communication system has to work in the opposite direction as well. Someone writes back. 

This distinction becomes particularly revealing when an institution uses the work of people outside itself: critics, photographers, translators, designers, researchers, freelancers, independent artists. These people are not merely content suppliers orbiting the institution. Attribution and acknowledgement are part of the professional relationship.

The original problem in my case was tiny. It required no crisis meeting, legal department or communications strategy. A name had been omitted beneath a quotation. Adding it probably required less time than reading my first email.

And mistakes happen. Websites are large organisms accumulated over years. Credits disappear. Links break. Old pages survive several generations of staff. None of that particularly troubles me. What interests me is what happened after the mistake had been identified. A three-word answer – “Thank you, fixed” – would have transformed the entire exchange. Those three words perform several functions. They acknowledge that another person exists. They confirm that a message has reached a human being rather than an institutional void. They establish responsibility. And, perhaps most importantly, they complete the exchange. Without them, something peculiar happens: the institution acts but refuses to acknowledge the person whose intervention produced the action.

In theatre, we know perfectly well that acknowledgement matters. We name directors, performers, designers, composers, dramaturgs, technicians. We argue – rightly – about invisible labour. We increasingly insist on crediting translators and movement directors and assistants whose contributions were once casually absorbed into the larger theatrical machine. A credit is not decoration. It describes a relationship between a person and a piece of work.

Which is why it is strange when cultural institutions, whose internal ecosystems depend so intensely on named creative labour, become oddly casual about attribution once they step outside the rehearsal room.

There is another irony peculiar toThe Magic Mountain. The passage the theatre chose from my review concerned precisely the relationship between a text and its authorial identity. I argued that Bogomolov’s production does not reproduce Mann’s novel literally and yet remains deeply faithful to it: the words may disappear, while the structure, rhythm and thought survive. Apparently the author can disappear too. 

I do not think this is primarily a story about one theatre. Nor is it really a story about my byline. The byline is simply what made a larger, familiar phenomenon visible. Arts organisations are often remarkably sophisticated when communicating an artistic idea and surprisingly primitive when communicating with an actual person. Perhaps this happens because “communications” has gradually become synonymous with visibility: getting the message out, increasing reach, maintaining the brand, shaping the narrative.

But communication is not visibility, it is reciprocity. And reciprocity does not require an engagement strategy, a consultant or a new digital platform. Sometimes it requires nothing more technologically advanced than answering an email.

My small administrative performance eventually reached a happy ending. The name appeared. The rights of authorship were restored without further drama. The dialogue, however, remained experimental. There are places where radical silence is beautiful. The stage is one of them. The inbox probably isn’t.

Main image: Photo by Yiran Ding on Unsplash

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