Image, Stage, & Text

Last week in summing up the differences in dramatic genres for Introduction to Theatre, the discussion turned to the absence of tragedy in the modern world. Though Death of a Salesman purports to fill the bill as a tragic work for the modern times it points out many of the problems that Tragedy has in gaining resonance today. Part of the trouble of Miller’s play is the way it attempts to place the blame of Willie Lowman on the “Capitalist System” and the false promise of the American Dream. Lowman’s Suicide at the end of the play is not born of his personal choice but a last effort to find some kind of dignity, something akin to a samurai performing sepukku, but where the insurmountable humiliation of failure is really no fault of his own but that of the system. Miller disputed in the preface to his play that one of the key ingredients to Tragedy is the fall of a great heroic man, hence Lowman or Everyman can become tragic if only they face an insurmountable force. What is truly missing in Miller’s play is not the dignity of the leading role but the responsibility of that character to take account of their actions and act with understanding with a pursuit toward greater knowledge. Actions can only rise to the level of Tragedy if characters take responsibility for the actions. Without responsibility, the chief results of tragedy are pity alone. We are not prompted to fear the fate of the protagonist who does not take responsibility because they are not as self aware of their problem than we are of theirs. To fear the tragic consequences of heroic action is to see ourselves in the hero, self aware of the implications of action and inaction. The Modern world lacks the certainty to attribute responsibility because, in many ways, we are more aware of the complexity of actions, layers of motives and influences that exist outside anyone’s full knowledge. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable cowardice in the way leaders use that ambiguity to their advantage to deny any culpability. The consequences of our Tragedy-free world is not that terrible events are reduced in scope to accidents, but by avoiding responsibility for failure we have lost the genuine pursuit of self-knowledge.

Mr. Puntilla and his Man Matti is one of the few comedies Brecht wrote and it contains many ideas in fun that are explored elsewhere in dead earnestness. For example, in one choice scene the four jilted fiancées of the landowner Puntila complain about how easy it is to be duped by wealthy landowners and accept their promises at face value. The Telephonist among them reflects, “we’re too stupid for their jokes and tricks and we fall for them every time. Know why? Cause they look the same as our sort, and that’s what fools us. If they looked more like bears and rattlesnakes people might be more on their guard” (scene 8). Throughout his career Brecht expressed his hostility to realism and realistic acting and here he has once again reiterated the reason for his aversion: it is too easy to be duped in to believing and accepting the real as an extension of ourselves and indiscriminately direct our sympathies toward real acting and real characters. Brecht would rather have us see bears and rattlesnakes acting as human beings, to keep us on our guard and not allow ourselves to be duped by what we see.

Much is made of Pere Ubu’s first line in Ubu Roi, “merdre,” and while it did indeed start a riot, the scatalogical reference was not the most startling aspect of the performance. Ubu Roi was envisioned by Alfred Jarry as a puppet/human show were people performed as innanimate objects and puppets stood in for people. The original production in 1896 was a unqualified fiasco, but it frightfully set the stage for a new kind of theatre that took the theatrical condition, actors on stage speaking lines from a play, and made that the subject of the play. By reinforcing the artificial conditions of theatre rather than the illusion, Jarry made the audience uncomfortably aware of the shalllow stupidity and empty artifice that constitutes the basis of theatre. For his efforts in “laying bare the device” (obnazenie priema), Alfred Jarry can be seen as the first modern theatre artist to see theatre concretely, that is he saw theatre as “theatre,” where the devices and conventions of the stage were not the given circumstances of the performance, but that they communicated as conventions and the illusion of the theatre was made evident in their appearance. From this point on the modern theatre became the theatre of “Theatre.”

Nora’s home figures large in Ibsen’s drama as it represents the promise of luxury and the bondage of her servile condition. It also has at its core the modern idea that the environment conditions the individual and shapes their being much like Darwin saw evolution among disperate ecologies in the Galapagos. The presumption is forcibly brought home at the end of the play when Torvald rejects Nora because she is implicated in the loan forgery. It is then that Torvald expresses his concern that such an unscrupulous mother might be a terrible influence upon their children; that her mere presence in the house would taint their morality. This seems extreem especially since we have moved much further along in the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate. Today people are less inclined to assume the environment would be so absolutely critical without some genetic disposition or more obvious social conditions. But Nora does not argue with Torvald’s logic at this point and accepts her banishment. It is only after Torvald learns that the threat of being exposed is over that he accepts Nora back. At this point Nora sees his hypocrasy and refuses his offer of reconciliation. Torvald revealed the hypocracy of his argument because it was not about the objective truth of the mater, that Nora was potentially a bad influence, but that she was a bad influence only because others may see her has being a bad influence.

Yesterday in Intro to Theatre class we reviewed the quote by David Garrick that too few were able to decipher last Monday. Garrick was a middle-class man who knew how to flatter his audience, So when he wrote, “we who live to please must please to live,” there was no small amount of self deprecation, but also a certain repositioning of the audience to see itself as the moral authority able to dictate taste. The middle-class at this time were filling up the ever growing theatre buildings and it was a sober realization by Garrick in his entertainment economy that he needed to position the audience as central to his theatre of taste and refinement.

Garrick’s view is in contrast to Jeremy Collier’s tract a century earlier where he lambasted the theatre for not achieving the lofty goals of Neoclassicsm set down by Horace and Aristotle. Garrick did not end Neoclassicism with his celebration of the middle-class taste. His position was that the audience had already internalized the Neoclassical ideas and that they already were civil and good people who did not need to be taught how to “recommend virtue [and] discountenance vice.” It is an opening in the changes that would slowly introduce the idea that ordinary people were the arbiters of taste. By doing this he also introduced the idea that the Neoclassical ideals were not immutable rules set down for all posterity and that they were possibly open to change. These were the very ideas that would eventually support the rebellion called Romaticism, which would bring an end to the Neoclassical traditions.