My theme being the writing of plays and not the staging of plays, I shall not develop further what really would lead me into discussing the psychology of acting. I am merely concerned, let me repeat, with settling the problem of one convention, so as to fiercely criticize and demolish all the other minor ones that infect plays. I will prove, I hope, that continuously yielding to them is slowly but surely killing playwriting as an art, and that there is no real difficulty in getting rid of them forever, even if it entails inventing new means, which in their turn will become traditional conventions with time, to be dismissed again when they stiffen and hamper and imperil dramatic art. A play limited by my major formula may be compared to a clock; but when it comes out hobnobbing with the audience, it becomes a wound-up top, which bumps into something, screeches, rolls on its side and is dead. Please note, too, that the formula holds not only when you see a play performed, but also when you read it in a book. And here I come to a very important point. There exists an old fallacy according to which some plays are meant to be seen, others to be read. True, there are two sorts of plays: verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization—but apart from such a classification being merely a superficial convenience, a fine play of either type is equally delightful on the stage and at home. The only thing is that a type of play where poetry, symbolism, description, lengthy monologues tend to hamper its dramatic action ceases in its extreme form to be a play at all, becoming a long poem or full-dress speech—so that the question whether it is better read than seen does not arise, because it is simply not a play. But, within certain limits, an adjective play is no worse on the stage than a verb play, though the best plays are generally a combination of both action and poetry. For the time being, pending further explanation, we may assume that a play can be anything it likes, static or tit-for-tatic, round or fancy-shaped, nimble or stately, provided it is a good play.
We must draw a definite line between the author’s gift and the theatre’s contribution. I am speaking only of the former and refer to the latter insofar as the author has imagined it. It is quite clear that as bad direction or a bad cast may ruin the best play, the theatre may turn everything into a couple of hours of fugitive glamour. A nonsense rhyme may be staged by a director or actor of genius and a mere pun may be turned into a splendid show owing to the sets of a gifted painter. But all this has nothing to do with the dramatist’s task; it may clarify and bring to life his suggestions, it can even make a bad play look—and only look—like a good one; but the merits of the play as disclosed by the printed word are what they are, not more, not less. In fact, I cannot think of a single fine drama that is not a pleasure both to see and read, though, to be sure, a certain part of footlight-pleasure is not the same as the corresponding part of reading-lamp pleasure, the one being in that part sensual (good show, fine acting), the other being in the corresponding part purely imaginative (which is compensated by the fact that any definite incarnation is always a limitation of possibilities). But the main and most important part of the pleasure is exactly the same in both cases. It is the delight in harmony, artistic truth, fascinating surprises, and the deep satisfaction at being surprised—and, mind you, the surprise is always there even if you have seen the play and read the book many times. For perfect pleasure the stage must not be too bookish and the book not too stagy. You will note that complicated setting is generally described (with very minute details and at great length) in the pages of the worst plays (Shaw’s excepted) and, vice versa, that very good plays are rather indifferent to the setting. Such ponderous descriptions of paraphernalia, generally allied with a prefaced description of the characters and with a whole string of qualifying adverbs in italics directing every speech in the play, are, more often than not, the result of an author’s feeling that his play does not contain all it is meant to contain—and so off he goes in a pathetic and long-winded attempt to strengthen matters by decorative addition. More rarely, such superfluous ornamentation is dictated by the strong-willed author’s desire to have the play staged and acted exactly as he intended—but even in this case the method is highly irritating.
We are now ready, as we see the curtain rise, or as we open the book, to examine the structure of a play itself. But we must be quite clear on one point. Henceforth, once the initial convention is accepted—spiritual awareness and physical non-intervention on our side, physical nonawareness and significant intervention on the part of the play—all others will be ruled out.
In conclusion, let me repeat in slightly different words—now that I have defined the general idea—repeat the primary axiom of drama. If, as I believe it to be, the only acceptable dualism is the unbridgeable division between ego and non-ego, then we can say that the theatre is a good illustration of this philosophical fatality. My initial formula referring to the spectators and the drama onstage may be expressed thus: the first is aware of the second but has no power over it; the second is unaware of the first, but has the power of moving it. Broadly speaking, this is very near to what happens in the mutual relations between myself and the world I see, and this too is not merely a formula of existence, but also a necessary convention without which neither I nor the world could exist. I have then examined certain consequences of the formula convention of the theatre and found that neither the stage overflowing into the audience nor the audience dictating its will to the stage can break this convention without destroying the essential idea of the drama. And here again the concept can be likened, on a higher level, to the philosophy of existence by saying that in life, too, any attempt at tampering with the world or any attempt by the world to tamper with me is extremely risky business even if in both cases the best intentions are implied. And finally I have spoken of how reading a play and seeing a play correspond to living one’s life and dreaming of one’s life, of how both experiences afford the same pleasure, if in somewhat different ways.
The Tragedy of Tragedy
Discussion of the technique of modern tragedy means to me a grim examination of something which may be termed the tragedy of the art of tragedy. The bitterness with which I view the plight of playwriting does not really imply that all is lost and that the contemporary theatre may be dismissed with that rather primitive gesture—a shrug of the shoulders. But what I do mean is that unless something is done by somebody, and done soon, playwriting will cease to be the subject of any discussion dealing with literary values. The drama will be completely taken over by showmanship, completely absorbed by that other art, the art of staging and acting, a great art to be sure which I love ardently but which is as remote from the writer’s essential business as any other art: painting, or music, or dancing. Thus, a play will be created by the management, the actors, the stagehands—and a couple of meek scriptwriters whom nobody heeds; it will be based on collaboration, and collaboration will certainly never produce anything as permanent as can be the work of one man because however much talent the collaborators may individually possess the final result will unavoidably be a compromise between talents, a certain average, a trimming and clipping, a rational number distilled out of the fusion of irrational ones. This complete transferring of everything connected with the drama into hands which, according to my firm belief, are meant to receive the ripe fruit (the final result of one man’s labor), is a rather dismal prospect, but it may be the logical outcome of the conflict which has been tearing the drama, and especially tragedy, for several centuries.
First of all let us attempt to define what we mean by “tragedy.” As used in everyday speech, the term is so closely allied to the idea of destiny as to be almost synonymous with it—at least when the presupposed destiny is not one that we would be inclined to relish. In this sense, tragedy without a background of fate is hardly perceptible to the ordinary observer. If, say, a person goes out and kills another person, of more or less the same sex, just because he happened to be that day in a more or less killing mood, there is no tragedy or, more exactly, the murderer in this case is not a t
ragic character. He will tell the police that everything went sort of black and experts will be invited to measure his sanity—that will be all. But if a perfectly respectable man is slowly but inexorably (and by the way the “slowly” and the “inexorably” are so used to being together that the “but” between them ought to be replaced by the wedding ring of an “and”) driven to murder by the creep and crawl of circumstance, or by a long-repressed passion, or by anything that has long been working at undermining his will, by things, in short, against which he has been hopelessly and perhaps nobly struggling—then, whatever his crime, we see in him a tragic figure. Or again: you happen to meet socially a person of perfectly normal aspect, good-natured although a little seedy, pleasant though something of a bore, a trifle foolish, perhaps, but not more so than anybody else, a character to whom you would never dream of applying the adjective “tragic”; then you learn that this person several years ago had been placed by force of circumstance at the head of some great revolution in a remote, almost legendary country, and that a new force of circumstance had soon banished him to your part of the world where he lingers on as the mere ghost of his past glory. Immediately, the very things about the man that had just seemed to you humdrum (indeed, the very normality of his aspect) now strike you as the very features of tragedy. King Lear, Nuncle Lear, is even more tragic when he potters about the place than when he actually kills the prison guard who was a-hanging his daughter.
So what is the result of our little inquest into the popular meaning of “tragedy”? The result is that we find the term “tragedy” not only synonymous with fate, but also synonymous with our knowledge of another man’s slow and inexorable fate. Our next step must be to find what is meant by “fate.”
From the two intentionally vague examples that I have selected, one thing, however, may be clearly deduced. What we learn of another man’s fate is far more than he knows himself. In fact, if he knows himself to be a tragic figure and acts accordingly, we cease to be interested in him. Our knowledge of his fate is not objective knowledge. Our imagination breeds monsters which the subject of our sympathy may never have seen. He may have been confronted with other terrors, other sleepless nights, other heartbreaking incidents of which we know nothing. The line of destiny which ex post facto seems so clear to us may have been in reality a wild scallop interwoven with other wild scallops of fate or fates. This or that social or economic background which, if we are Marxist-minded, seems to have played such an imporant part in the subject’s life may have had nothing to do with it in this or that particular case, although it does seem to explain everything so neatly. Consequently, all we possess in regard to our own judgment of another man’s tragic fate is a handful of facts most of which the man would repudiate; but to this is added what our imagination supplies, and this imagination of ours is regulated by a sound logic, and this sound logic of ours is so hypnotized by the conventionally accepted rules of cause and effect that it will invent a cause and modify an effect rather than have none at all.
And now observe what has happened. Gossiping around a man’s fate has automatically led us to construct a stage tragedy, partly because we have seen so many of them at the theatre or at the other place of entertainment, but mainly because we cling to the same old iron bars of determinism which have imprisoned the spirit of playwriting for years and years. And this is where lies the tragedy of tragedy.
Consider the following curious position: on one hand a written tragedy belongs to creative literature although at the same time it clings to old rules, to dead traditions which other forms of literature enjoy breaking, finding in this process perfect liberty, a liberty without which no art can thrive; and, on the other hand, a written tragedy belongs also to the stage—and here too the theatre positively revels in the freedom of fanciful sets and in the genius of individual acting. The highest achievements in poetry, prose, painting, showmanship are characterized by the irrational and illogical, by that spirit of free will that snaps its rainbow fingers in the face of smug causality. But where is the corresponding development in drama? What masterpieces can we name except a few dream-tragedies resplendent with genius, such as King Lear or Hamlet, Gogol’s Inspector, and perhaps one or two Ibsen plays (these last with reservations), what masterpieces can we name that might be compared to the numberless glories of novels and short stories and verse produced during these last three or four centuries? What plays, to put it bluntly, are ever re-read?
The most popular plays of yesterday are on the level of the worst novels of yesterday. The best plays of today are on the level of magazine stories and fat best-sellers. And the highest form of the dramatic art—tragedy—is at its best a clockwork toy made in Greece that little children wind up on the carpet and then follow on all fours.
I referred to Shakespeare’s two greatest plays as dream-tragedies, and in the same sense I would have called Gogol’s Revizor a dream-play, or Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet a dream-novel. My definition has certainly nothing to do with that special brand of pretentious “dream-play” which was at one time popular, and which was really regulated by the most wide-awake causality, if not by worse things such as Freudianism. I call King Lear or Hamlet dream-tragedies because dream-logic, or perhaps better say nightmare-logic, replaces here the elements of dramatic determinism. Incidentally, I want to stress the point that the way Shakespeare is produced in all countries is not Shakespeare at all, but a garbled version flavored with this or that fad which is sometimes amusing as in the Russian theatre and sometimes nauseating as, for instance, in Piscator’s trashy concoctions. There is something I am very positive about and that is that Shakespeare must be produced in toto, without a single syllable missing, or not at all. But from the logical, causal, point of view, that is, from the point of view of modern producers, both Lear and Hamlet are impossibly bad plays, and I dare any contemporary popular theatre to stage them strictly according to the text.
Better scholars than I have discussed the influence of Greek tragedy on Shakespeare. In my time I have read the Greeks in English translation and found them very much weaker than Shakespeare though disclosing his influence here and there. The relays of fire in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus o’erleaping the plain, flashing across the lake, rambling up the mountainside, or Iphigenia shedding her crocus-tinctured tunic—these excite me because they remind me of Shakespeare. But I refuse to be touched by the abstract passions and vague emotions of those characters, as eyeless and as armless as that statue which for some reason or other is considered ideally beautiful; and moreover I do not quite see how a direct contact with our emotion can be established by Aeschylus when the profoundest scholars themselves cannot say for sure in what way this or that context points, what exactly we are to guess here and what there, and then wind up saying that the removal of the article from this or that word obscures and has in fact made unintelligible the connection and construction of the sentence. Indeed, the main drama seems to take place in these minute and copious footnotes. However, the excitements of inspired grammar are not exactly the emotions which the theatre can greet, and on the other hand what passes muster as Greek tragedy on our stage is so far removed from the original, so influenced by this or that stage version and stage invention, and these in turn are so influenced by the secondary conventions which the primary ones of Greek tragedy had engendered, that it is hard to say what we mean when we praise Aeschylus.
One thing is, however, certain: the idea of logical fate which, unfortunately, we inherited from the ancients has, ever since, been keeping the drama in a kind of concentration camp. Now and then a genius would escape as Shakespeare did more often than not; Ibsen has half-escaped in Doll’s House, while in his Borkman the drama actually leaves the stage and goes up a winding road, up a remote hill—a curious symbol of that urge which genius feels to be free from the shackles of convention. But Ibsen has sinned too: he had spent many years in Scribia, and in this respect the incredibly absurd results to which the conventions of causality can lead are well disp
layed in the Pillars of Society. The plot, as you remember, turns on the idea of two ships, one good and the other bad. One of them, the Gypsy, is now in beautiful shape as it lies all ready to sail for America in the shipyard of which the main character is master. The other ship, the Indian Girl, is blessed with all the ills that can befall a ship. It is old and rickety, manned by a wild drunken crew, and it is not repaired before its return voyage to America—just carelessly patched up by the overseer (an act of sabotage against the new kinds of machinery which lessen the earnings of workers). The main character’s brother is supposed to sail to America, and the main character has reasons to wish his brother at the bottom of the sea. Simultaneously, the main character’s little son is secretly preparing to run away to sea. Given these circumstances, the author was forced by the goblins of cause and effect to subject everything concerning the ships to the different emotional and physical moves of the characters with a view to achieving the maximum of effect when, simultaneously, both brother and son put out to sea—the brother sailing on the good ship instead of the bad one which, against all rules, knowing it was rotten, the villain allows to sail, and his adored son heading for the bad one, so that he will perish through his father’s fault. The moves of the play are exceedingly complicated, and the weather—now stormy, now fair, now again dirty—is adjusted to these various moves, always in such a manner as to give the maximum of suspense without bothering about likelihood. When one follows this “shipyard line” throughout the play, one notices that it forms a pattern which in a very comical way turns out to be specially, and solely, adapted to the needs of the author. The weather is forced to resort to the most eerie dialectical tricks, and, when at the happy ending the ships do sail (without the boy who has been retrieved just in time, and with the brother who at the last moment proved to be not worth killing), the weather suddenly becomes not only fair, but supematurally fair—and this leads me to one of the most important points in the dismal technique of modern drama.
Man From the USSR & Other Plays Page 23
