… a cult of religious veneration for the wishes of the composer now rules the musical roost. [Richard] Wagner himself played a big part in promoting this by putting out a lot of self-serving propaganda about art being pretty well the sole purpose of life and the wickedness of tampering with the work of an artist, especially a great artist such as himself. To be authentic, to do exactly what the scholars say Scarlatti, Schubert or Monteverdi would want you to do, if necessary going to the length of building a sixteenth-century ophicleide—this today is pretty well the holy grail. Never mind that the piece would sound much better played another way or that modern acoustics are different, that pitch has gone up, musical taste changed, musical marathons don’t fit into our culture—never mind anything at all, just stick a harpsichord into the Albert Hall and not on any account a Steinway. If you can’t hear it at least you know what you’re not hearing is authentic. The real obstacle to producing a sensibly revised version of The Ring is not the chorus of outrage that would go up, but the difficuly of finding a musician of genius to do it.
—Sir Denis Forman, A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide…, p. 555
How much easier we have it in theater! No one would demand seeing Shakespeare only according to 16th-century performance practices, played by men only, en plein air (though it is certainly fun to see a simulacrum of this at the Blackfriars in Staunton), with Elizabethan pronunciation. The moment the first line is read at the first read-through, something of the playwright’s original intention has been betrayed. This betrayal might be an essential quality of theater.
Does this mean that ensemble pieces like The Laramie Project or An Experiment with an Air Pump could be played with no doubling? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: the film version of Laramie worked. Or that Arthur Miller can be reset in outer space? Well…