The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (Routledge Revivals)

Austin E. Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317619642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.

Part I A critical framework

1 Theatres and worlds

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752976-1

The theatre motif

One of the more obvious characteristics of modern drama is the sheer diversity of the plays that have earned an important place in the field. Any category that must prominently include Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Shaw’s Man and Superman, Pirandello’s Henry IV, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Genet’s The Balcony, Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is indisputably heterogeneous. The question is whether one can fruitfully generalize across such diversity.¹ Is there, we might ask, a way of thinking about modern drama in general that materially assists our understanding and enjoyment of individual plays? An evident danger is that a general framework can become counter-productive if it draws excessive attention to common features among plays that otherwise differ significantly. An impression of substantial similarity is likely to be substituted for the reality of extensive diversity, and this can be seriously misleading. Criticism within such a framework is also incipiently reductive if it focuses attention on features that seem, on balance, more important to the framework than to the individual plays. Yet generalizations in the context of diverse material seem always likely to produce precisely this result.²

Though the problem of diversity is peculiarly acute for those interested in modern drama, the study of this field is otherwise similar to the study of any other heterogeneous field. We need some generalizations that will give us an adequate grasp of the types of things we are studying and we need some detailed descriptions of particular instances which exemplify the types. This will then enable us to approach other instances, as audiences, readers, or critics, with some sense of the important things to look for. Such a procedure is not a once-and-for-all event, nor is it a one-way movement (e.g. from type to particular instance). Rather, it is a recurring back-and-forth movement in which we constantly discover more adequate general statements about the field by matching them against more adequate particular statements about individual plays. These more adequate general statements then provide an improved framework for studying particular plays, and the cycle renews itself indefinitely. Such a cycle of discovery seems at best intermittently operative, however, in criticism addressed to modern drama. Though there are many fine studies of the works of individual dramatists and of local movements in the drama, larger generalizations have not always been so persuasively presented nor so enthusiastically received.

The questions posed by this situation are twofold. Is there something not quite right about the ways in which critical activity has been pursued, or is there something about this field that is peculiarly resistant to some traditional features of our critical activity? We have already noted some complementary problems in the two domains. On the one hand, our modes of generalization seem to depend on, but fail to locate, important common ground, and, on the other, the drama seems to display more variety than homogeneity. But the situation is further complicated by long-standing disagreements among drama critics themselves about the appropriate basis for critical work on the drama.

For many years there has been a troublesome disagreement between those who see a play primarily as a literary text to be interpreted, and those who regard it primarily as a theatre script to be performed. Each side has tended to characterize the other’s position as limited and limiting. The danger of the ‘literary’ approach is that it seems to explore the thematic implications of a text as if theme were not in part a product of performance, while the danger of the ‘theatrical’ approach is that it seems to limit discussion of a play to actual productions of it, productions which may or may not do demonstrable justice to the possibilities of the text. The ‘literary’ approach can claim generality of implication by rejecting the limiting particularity of actual performances, and the ‘theatrical’ approach can claim concrete support for the status of a performed interpretation while questioning the viability of the other side’s untested conclusions. Like most simplifications, these versions of the two positions are not entirely accurate, but they are not without the support of actual instances. In recent years, however, the bulk of good drama criticism has tried to treat the two approaches as complementary rather than contrasting, and also to take some deliberate steps towards reconciling them.³

The need for such reconciliation has become increasingly urgent in the modern era, for one dramatist after another has advocated the renewal of the theatrical environment as an integral part of the process of renewing the drama. Whatever justification might once have been claimed for separating literary and theatrical approaches, it is not easily maintained in the face of so widespread a concern among dramatists of so many kinds for linking reform in the structure of the drama with reform in the structure of the performance environment. We see this persistent concern in Zola’s call for a new dramatic talent capable of ‘remaking the stage until it is continuous with the auditorium’,⁴ one who can ‘scour the boards, create a world whose elements he would lift from life, from outside our traditions’.⁵ We see it in Strindberg’s famous preface to Miss Julie in which he offers a programme for theatrical reform which concludes with the wry comment that ‘while waiting for such a theatre it is as well for us to go on writing so as to stock that repertory of the future’.⁶ We see it in Ibsen’s complaint that ‘the artistic reforms that I might wish to introduce would be impossible in the present theatre … if theatrical art in our country is not to perish altogether, we must have an up-to-date playhouse’.⁷ We see it in Ghelderode’s desire ‘to break the conventional frame of the theatre’.⁸ We see it in Brecht’s comment that ‘any theatre that makes a serious attempt to stage one of the new plays risks being radically transformed’.⁹ We see it in Artaud’s advocating ‘a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and the auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators’.¹⁰ We see its influence, too, in many comments of critics and directors. Paolucci, for example, suggests that central to Pirandello’s work is the fact that ‘he saw the stage as something to be shaped anew with each new play’,¹¹ and such a view is also shared by Peter Brook who argues that the theatre should ‘redefine itself each time it occurs’.¹² There is thus clearly more than a morsel of persisting truth in Lukács’s argument (summarized by Bentley) that

in the great ages, the drama flowed ‘naturally’ from the existing theatre, while, from Goethe on, the poet-dramatist rejects the theatre, writes plays which are ‘too good for it’, and then calls for the creation of the kind of theatre which will be good enough for the plays.¹³

Though the specific aims of the dramatists may vary when they advocate the creation of new theatres, their shared concern for linking renewal of the drama with renewal of the theatre is evident enough. The unfortunate result of the process of theatre-following-upon-play would be, however, the thoroughly impractical situation in which a new theatre had to be built for every new play, and every production would be unique. Whatever the artistic desirability of such a situation, the more practical consequence of these calls for reform has been a movement towards increased flexibility in each theatre’s use of space. In a flexible performance environment the appropriate type of performance arena can quickly be constructed for a specific type of play. But to speak of types of arenas and types of plays (rather than of particular arenas and particular plays) is immediately to provide one means of reconciling the seemingly opposed ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ approaches to interpretation. The choice between an unperformed general interpretation and an ungeneralizable particular production is not one we need to force upon ourselves. The emerging choice is not between a non-performance and an actual performance but between more and less persuasive versions of possible performances in possible types of theatrical space. The persuasiveness of an interpretation, from whatever source, derives not from its basis in a single production, nor from its ability to transcend production, but from its capacity to locate potential thematic values in the context of potential theatrical values.

In one sense, this seems no more than a truism. Yet, like many another truism, it can offer more subtle and more complex implications than those that most readily catch the eye. The dramatists’ concern for linking renewal of the drama with renewal of the theatre not only compels a convergence of ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ approaches to the drama, but also offers, in that convergence, a not yet fully exploited ground for linking the varied creative activities of the dramatists themselves. The potential power of this basis for linking the otherwise diverse activities of the dramatists has not gone unnoticed. Some evidence of its emerging importance is registered in the recent popularity of attempts to generalize about modern plays, locally or at large, in terms of ‘theatre’ metaphors. From playwrights interested in reforming theatres as part of the process of reforming plays, such use of the metaphor should come as no surprise. Thus Artaud coined the phrase ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ to describe his programme for reform of the drama, and Brecht advanced the case for an ‘Epic Theatre’ consisting largely of his own plays. Drama critics then followed suit. Extensive cases have been made for the existence of a Theatre of Revolt, a Theatre of the Absurd, a Theatre of Protest and Paradox, a Theatre of the Marvellous, a Theatre of Commitment, and a Theatre of War.¹⁴ From time to time, others have suggested such critical categories as the Theatre of Panic, the Theatre of Silence, the Theatre of Communion, the Theatre of Event, and the Theatre of Joy. But if we leave to one side Artaud’s and Brecht’s categories, most of the others seem rather inappropriate. The metaphor of a ‘theatre’ sits uneasily upon groups of plays which do not seem necessarily tied to any specific kind of use of performance space. What holds many of these ‘Theatre of X’ categories together is not some notion of a common performance environment but of common textural, structural and thematic concerns.

This difference is important, for it suggests a not yet fully developed recognition of the potential value of generalizing about plays in terms of their use of theatre space. For Artaud and Brecht, on the other hand, the ‘theatre’ metaphor is earned by the range of issues linked by this mode of generalization. Their ‘theatre’ categories are based upon a comprehensive notion of how the local detail of a play (its texture) relates to its overall thematic shape (its structure), to its use of performance space (its theatrical function), and to its role in the social structure outside the theatre (its social function). The critics’ ‘Theatre of X’ categories are only metaphorically about theatres, for they consist primarily of generalizations about the texture and structure of the plays they embrace. Consequently, such critics deal largely with the relationships of various parts of various plays to each other, and only intermittently include modes of performance when assessing larger social function. This, I would suggest, radically undermines such attempts to use ‘theatre’ metaphors as a persuasive means of generalizing about the diverse field of modern drama.

The word ‘theatre’, we should also note, does not offer an obviously appropriate basis for metaphors that seek to establish categories in terms of ‘common-core’ descriptions of local features of plays. A theatre is an arena, a circumscribed domain, and what goes on within it is not fixed and unvarying, but changeable and often surprising. What is fixed or fixable in a theatre (and particularly a modern theatre) is not the structure at its centre, but the lines of its circumference, the edges of the domain, whether marked by a moat, a hillside, a circle of onlookers, a set of seats, or an arrangement of walls. Peter Brook aptly called his book on theatre The Empty Space,¹⁵ and if one wishes to develop the word ‘theatre’ into a metaphor about plays, it will seem most appropriate to do so in terms of the types of ways in which plays fill the empty space by organizing, controlling and rendering meaningful the various portions of that space. The appropriate metaphoric use of the word ‘theatre’ is thus, as the writings of Artaud and Brecht suggest, a use that links texture, structure and theme to the mode of performance that is characteristic of a particular kind of play in a particular kind of theatrical space.¹⁶

The ‘world' motif

When we look for further examples of Artaud’s and Brecht’s use of the ‘theatre’ metaphor, however, its popularity as a motif begins to become subordinate to one that serves a similar, significantly related, but somewhat different function: the motif of a ‘world’ or ‘worlds’. The popularity of this motif is everywhere in evidence, and when directors, playwrights and critics link reform in the drama with reform in the theatre, they resort to this metaphor with remarkable regularity. Zola, we noted, talks of creating a new kind of world on-stage, and Artaud talks of the way in which established theatres make the stage and the auditorium into two closed worlds. Pirandello, elsewhere, talks of art creating in the theatre its own ‘little world’,¹⁷ Ionesco describes the theatre as a place where the ‘two antagonistic worlds’ of the real and the imaginary collide,¹⁸ and Adamov claims that ‘a stage play ought to be the point of inters...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I A critical framework
• 1 Theatres and worlds
• 2 Marking and merging horizons
• 3 Reconciling worlds
• 4 Generalizing about worlds
• Part II The plays
• 5 Pinero: The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
• 6 Ibsen: A Doll's House
• 7 Strindberg: A Dream Play
• 8 Brecht: Life of Galileo
• 9 Ionesco: The Chairs
• 10 Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape
• 11 Pinter Betrayal
• 12 Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index