‘Only a play… with music?’ Performances of Spectatorship in Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon

Abstract

The Baby of Mâcon is the title of Greenaway’s 1993 film and of the morality play represented therein. This is one instance of the constant blurring of boundaries between cinema and theater in the film through which Greenaway shows the narrow line dividing reality and representation. Set in the 17th-century, the film represents a performance of a play based on a miraculous birth in a town damned with barren women and famine. The performance departs from script at several points, transforming acts into actuality. Among the members of the audience, only Cosimo di Medici seems to realize about the reality of the onstage representation, whereas the rest of the audience considers it to be “only a play… with music.” The prevalent visual analyses of this film have mostly addressed its theatricality and the mobility of the camera in creating the illusion of a three-dimensional space. This paper focuses instead on Greenaway’s musical selection—17th-century dances, operatic and sacred music—and analyzes music’s relevant role in the representational process. The different frames and embedded performances displayed throughout the film make explicit that it is not the play, but the complexity of the process of signification that the film brings to the fore. Music emerges as a mediating element for the film audience since it delineates the characters’ relationships, frames and punctuates the dramatic performance, and points to the reality of the represented events on stage—and on screen, as Greenaway’s final twist during the curtain call makes clear.