Revision lecture
EN302: European Theatre
European Theatre
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Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre:
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‘For centuries a paradigm has dominated European theatre that clearly
distinguishes it from non-European theatre traditions. For example,
Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely
differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly
stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in
Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ of speeches
and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. Bertolt Brecht chose
the term ‘dramatic theatre’ to designate the tradition that his epic ‘theatre
of the scientific age’ intended to put an end to. In a more comprehensive
sense (and also including the majority of Brecht’s own work), however,
this term can be used to designate the core of European theatre tradition
in modern times. (2006: 21)
Plot
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Aristotle’s hamartia, anagnorisis, and peripeteia
Aristotle described structure as the ‘most important of
all’ dramatic elements:
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‘A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by
causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or
comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself
naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a
rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which
follows something as some other thing follows it. A well
constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at
haphazard, but conform to these principles.’
Importance of causality (Oresteia, Miss Julie, Galileo)
Conflict
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Agon / thesis and antithesis:
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Antigone and Creon are forced to choose between family and
state.
Pentheus must choose between order and chaos: ‘When I
come out, I’ll either be fighting, or I’ll put myself in your
hands.’ (p. 405)
Phèdre is torn between passion and reason. Her mother and
father symbolise two different drives: sexuality and moral
judgement. ‘Reason reigns no longer over me… I have lost
my self-dominion’ (p. 180-1).
Melchior is offered an ambiguous choice at the end of Spring
Awakening; in choosing the Masked Man, perhaps he makes
the opposite choice to the ones made by the protagonists at
the ends of both Hedda Gabler and Yerma.
Recognition
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Pursuit of ‘truth’ in Oedipus:
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‘light’ (p. 187), ‘stubborn’ (p. 188), ‘terror’ (p. 196), ‘both parent and
murderer’ (p. 201), ‘no comfort’ (p. 202)
‘Seeing’ and Teiresias
Think about the endings of, for example, The Spanish Tragedy,
Phèdre, Yerma, or The Skriker.
Catharsis:
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‘…the bringing about of affective recognition and solidarity by means of
the drama and the affects represented and transmitted to the audience
within its frame’ (Lehmann 2006: 21).
Virtue
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‘Playwright’ was synonymous with ‘teacher’ in Ancient Greek.
In his Preface to Phèdre, Racine described classical tragedy as ‘a
school in which virtue was taught not less well than in the
schools of the philosophers’:
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It would be greatly to be desired that modern writings were as sound and
full of useful precepts as the works of these poets. This might perhaps
provide a means of reconciling to tragedy a host of people famous for
their piety and their doctrine who have recently condemned it and who
would no doubt pass a more favourable judgement on it if writers were as
keen to edify their spectators as to amuse them, thereby complying with
the real purpose of tragedy.
Racine’s view of tragedy is founded upon reason, decorum and
moral utility.
Virtue
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Aristotle on comedy:
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Henri Bergson (‘Laughter’, 1900):
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‘Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type, not, however, in the full sense of the word bad; for the ludicrous is
merely a subdivision of the ugly. It may be defined as a defect or ugliness
which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example, the comic mask is
ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain.’
‘Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed,
laughter is really and truly a kind of social “ragging”. … In laughter we
always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently correct
our neighbour.’ (1900: 148)
Moral of Tartuffe:
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‘Learn to distinguish between virtue, / Real and feigned.’ (p. 72)
Virtue
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Molière’s ‘Preface’ to Tartuffe (23 March 1669) describes
the play as ‘a skilful poem which, by agreeable lessons,
reprimands men’s defects’:
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‘If the mission of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I fail to
see why some should be privileged. In the State, this one is of
an importance much more dangerous than all the others; and
we have seen that the theatre is a great force for correction.’
‘It is a great blow to vice to expose it to everyone’s laughter.
We can easily stand being reprehended, but we cannot stand
being mocked. We are willing to be wicked, but we will not
be ridiculous.’
Imitation
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Mimesis contrasted with diegesis in classical thought
Central to the project of Naturalism
Role of symbolism (Hedda Gabler, Spring Awakening,
Yerma)
Both Zola and Brecht proposed a ‘theatre for the
scientific age’ – what did this mean in each case?
Impact of photography? Film? TV? Internet?
Unseen forces
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Do dramatic characters have agency, or are they driven
by unseen forces?
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Conflict between gods in classical tragedy;
Revenge / classical gods / Christian God in The Spanish
Tragedy;
God-as-audience and power of prophecy vs. freedom to
‘overcome the stars’ (p. 36) in Life Is A Dream;
Gods and guilt in Phèdre:
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‘Heaven lit in my heart an ill-omened fire’ (p. 213);
‘I know my baseness, and do not belong / To those bold wretches
who with brazen front / Can revel in their crimes unblushingly.’ (p.
184).
Determinism and entrapment: society, heredity, physiology
and psychology in Naturalism and beyond.
‘Naturalism on the Stage’
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Zola published his manifesto on this subject in 1881, in an essay
titled ‘Naturalism on the Stage’.
He claimed to be reflecting the scientific and rational spirit of the
age in which he lived; ‘the impulse of the century,’ he argued, ‘is
toward naturalism’ (1881: 5):
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‘I am waiting for someone to put a man of flesh and bones on the stage,
taken from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie.
… I am waiting for environment to determine the characters and the
characters to act according to the logic of facts combined with logic of
their own disposition. … I am waiting, finally, until the development of
naturalism already achieved in the novel takes over the stage, until the
playwrights return to the source of science and modem arts, to the study
of nature, to the anatomy of man. (1881: 6)
‘Naturalism on the Stage’
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Zola proposed that naturalistic drama should
focus on ‘natural man’:
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‘…put him in his proper surroundings, and analyze
all the physical and social causes which make him
what he is… he is a thinking animal, who forms part
of nature, and who is subject to the multiple
influences of the soil in which he grows and where
he lives. That is why a climate, a country, a horizon,
are often decisively important.’ (1881: 10)
Modern tragedy
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Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy (1966)
analyses some of the ways in which various
modern plays might be conceived as having
adapted the conventions of classical tragedy.
Williams defines tragedy as ‘the conflict between
an individual and the forces that destroy him’
(2006: 113).
Liberal Tragedy
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For example, Williams describes Ibsen’s drama
as ‘Liberal Tragedy’:
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‘…the hero defines an opposing world, full of lies
and compromises and dead positions, only to find,
as he struggles against it, that as a man he belongs to
this world, and has its destructive inheritance in
himself.’ (2006: 124)
In this view, society is at fault: it is seen as false
and oppressive, a trap from which it is
impossible to escape.
Liberal Tragedy
General Gabler’s memory
Regional location
Oppressive environment
Social class /
expectations
HEDDA
GABLER
Tesman /
identity as ‘wife’
Intellectual boredom
Impending motherhood
Judge Brack’s ‘leverage’
Threat of scandal
Patriarchy
Private Tragedy
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Strindberg’s drama, on the other hand, belongs to a
category that Williams calls ‘Private Tragedy’, a form
which ‘begins with bare and unaccommodated man’:
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‘All primary energy is centred in this isolated creature, who
desires and eats and fights alone. Society is at best an arbitrary
institution, to prevent this horde of creatures destroying each
other. And when these isolated persons meet, in what are
called relationships, their exchanges are forms of struggle,
inevitably. Tragedy, in this view, is inherent.’ (2006: 133)
The association between love and destruction is ‘so deep that
it is not, as the liberal writers [like Ibsen] assumed, the
product of a particular history: it is, rather, general and
natural, in all relationships.’ (2006: 134)
Private Tragedy
Environment,
heredity, body,
psyche, etc.
Environment,
heredity, body,
psyche, etc.
MISS JULIE
JEAN
CHRISTINE
[Clip from Mike Figgis
version, 1999 – track 4]
Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.
Private Tragedy
JEAN
MISS JULIE
Jean’s heredity,
body, psyche,
etc. are better
equipped for
survival…
Private Tragedy
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Strindberg himself was ambivalent about Miss
Julie’s credentials as a modern tragedy:
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‘…the time may come when we shall have become
so developed and enlightened that we shall be able
to observe with indifference the harsh, cynical and
heartless drama that life presents – when we shall
have discarded those inferior and unreliable thoughtmechanisms called feelings, which will become
superfluous and harmful once our powers of
judgment reach maturity.’ (1888: 92)
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
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Williams describes the ‘deadlock’ of liberal tragedy:
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He argues that this deadlock, ‘familiar to us from Ibsen’, is
‘transformed by Chekhov into a new condition: that of stalemate’:
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The hero ‘sees what has to be done, and tries to do it. He is left to
struggle alone, is misunderstood and is broken. He also breaks others, in
his own fall.’ (2006: 172)
‘In a deadlock, there is still effort and struggle, but no possibility of
winning: the wrestler with life dies as he gives his last strength. In a
stalemate, there is no possibility of movement or even the effort at
movement; every willed action is self-cancelling.’ (2006: 172)
Williams on Three Sisters: ‘The breakdown of meaning is now so
complete that even the aspiration to meaning seems comic.’ (2006:
174)
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that’s a good one!
HAMM: I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be
liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long
enough.
(Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now
I understand what they’re at! (Beckett, p. 108)
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
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Peter Brook on Beckett:
 ‘Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forges his merciless
‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative
from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn. …When we
attack Beckett for pessimism it is we who are the Beckett
characters trapped in a Beckett scene. When we accept Beckett’s
statement as it is, then suddenly all is transformed. There is after all
quite another audience, Beckett’s audience; those in every country
who do not set up intellectual barriers, who do not try too hard to
analyse the message. This audience laughs and cries out – and in
the end celebrates with Beckett; this audience leaves his plays, his
black plays, nourished and enriched, with a lighter heart, full of a
strange irrational joy.’ (1990: 66)
Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
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Brecht:
We ask you expressly to discover
That what happens all the time is not natural.
For to say that something is natural
In such times of bloody confusion
Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness
Of inhuman humanity is to
Regard it as unchangeable. (The Exception and the Rule, p. 37)
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‘For art to be “un-political” means only to ally itself
with the “ruling” group.’ (1977: 196).
Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
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As Brecht argued in his Short Organum for the Theatre:
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The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society
(represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by
society (in the auditorium). … Shakespeare’s great solitary
figures, bearing on their breast the star of their fate, carry
through with irresistible force their futile and deadly
outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death,
becomes obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond
criticism. (1977: 189)
Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
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According to Brecht, it was the role of the theatre to
debunk such notions. As ‘the Philosopher’, Brecht’s
spokesperson in The Messingkauf Dialogues, puts it:
THE PHILOSOPHER.
The causes of a lot of tragedies lie
outside the power of those who suffer them, so it seems.
THE DRAMATURG. So it seems?
THE PHILOSOPHER. Of course it only seems. Nothing
human can possibly lie outside the powers of humanity,
and such tragedies have human causes. (Brecht 1965: 32)
Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
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‘The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that
too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The
sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable –
That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world
– I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.’
‘The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it –
That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s
got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they
are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh
when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’ (1977: 71)
Playing with form
SKRIKER. … May day, she cries, may pole axed me to
help her. So I spin the sheaves shoves shivers into
golden guild and geld and if she can’t guessing game
and safety match my name then I’ll take her no miss no
me no. Is it William Gwylliam Guillaume? Is it John
Jack the ladder in your stocking is it Joke? Is it
Alexander Sandro Andrew Drewsteignton?
Mephistopheles Toffeenose Tiffany’s Timpany
Timothy Mossycoat? No ’t ain’t, says I, no tainted meat
me after the show me what you’ve got. (Churchill, p. 9)
Playing with form
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Mary Luckhurst:
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‘Attempts on her Life … matches Beckett in its interrogation of
theatre as a practice, and drives Brechtian concepts of
alienation to an extreme.’ (2003: 59)
Interestingly, Martin Crimp once named Caryl Churchill
as his favourite living playwright – in part, for her
recognition of the ‘playfulness of play’ (‘The
Playwright’s Playwright’, Guardian, 21 September 1998).
Postdramatic theatre
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The absence of dramatic characters in Attempts on her
Life means there is no ‘agon’ in the traditional sense –
but we do hear conflict in the simultaneous
construction of competing narratives.
The absence of plot allows Crimp to avoid making any
assertions about causality (though he certainly plays
with ideas about what has ‘caused’ Anne’s reported
actions).
References
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Brecht, Bertolt (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willett, Chatham: W.
& J. Mackay & Co.
Brecht, Bertolt (1977) Brecht on Theatre, trans. J. Willett, London: Eyre
Methuen
Brook, Peter (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Abingdon: Routledge.
Luckhurst, Mary (2003) ‘Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on
her Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13:1, 47-60.
Strindberg, August (1888) ‘Preface to Miss Julie’, in Meyer, M. [trans.] (2000)
Strindberg, Plays: One, London: Methuen Drama, pp. 91-103.
Williams, Raymond (2006) Modern Tragedy, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview
Press.
Zola, Emile (1881) ‘Naturalism on the Stage’, in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001)
Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper Square Press,
pp. 5-14.