Dramaturgy and Architecture

Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment

Cathy Turner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137317148
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Dramaturgy and Architecture approaches modern and postmodern theatre's contribution to the way we think about the buildings and spaces we inhabit. It discusses in detail ways in which theatre and performance have critiqued and intervened in everyday spaces, modelled our dreams or fears and made proposals for the future.

1

Building: Ibsen, Jugendstil and the Playwright as ‘Master Builder’

In my introduction, I referred to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s characterisation of the dramatic form as ‘a certain architecture’ (Lehmann 1997: 56). In The Secret Life of Plays, playwright Steve Waters develops a similar characterisation of the dramatic text as architecture:

It’s no accident that when Ibsen in The Master Builder or David Greig in The Architect or Howard Barker in The Castle wished to dramatise the ethical dilemmas of the playwright, they used architects for their surrogates ... A play, like a building, is made out of disarticulated elements; like a building, it needs to have carrying capacity and it needs to work; like a building, it will be put to uses by its inhabitants. (Waters 2010: 194)

It is not only playwrights and theatre critics who have suggested this analogy. Architect and artist Peter Behrens, discussed in more detail below, confirms the relationship between architecture and dramaturgy when he turns his attention to the theatre:

It is said that architecture is the basis of all art. This holds true when by the architectonic, we understand also creative, order. Among many other things, this includes the proper and balanced distribution of materials. It is on this balance – the weighing of individual factors within the plenitude of artistic fantasy to the goal of a living, organic work – that the theatrical style depends. (Behrens 1990 [1910]: 138)

Ibsen himself suggested that architecture was analogous to playwriting, responding to a question concerning his interest in the subject: ‘Yes; it is, as you know, my own trade’ (Meyer 2004 [1967]: 509). His poem of 1858, ‘Building Plans’, makes an implicit link between architecture and writing as follows:

I remember as well as if it were yesterday

The evening when, in the paper, I saw my first poem in print.

I sat there in my garret, puffing my pipe

And dreaming dreams of blest complacency.

I shall build a cloud-castle. It shall shine over the North.

Two wings shall it have; one little and one great.

The great wing shall shelter an immortal poet;

The small wing shall be a young girl’s bower.

I thought this a noble and harmonious plan.

But then confusion entered into it.

As the master grew sane, the castle went all crazy.

The great wing shrank; the small fell into ruins. (Meyer 1994: 236)

As is well recognised, this poem prefigures Ibsen’s late play, The Master Builder, in significant ways. The play reprises the theme of the successful man (the architect, Halvard Solness) who conceives a project of building a dwelling to shelter his own greatness in partnership with a ‘young girl’ (Hilde Wangel). Hilde appears unexpectedly while Solness is completing the construction of a new home for himself and his wife, Aline. Following a fire in the house Aline inherited, Solness has been able to make his name as an architect by redeveloping the land; however, the fire also led indirectly to the death of his children and the breakdown of his marriage. Hilde, arriving with a memory of his having promised her a ‘kingdom’ as a child, has come to call in that promise. For a while, this relationship seems to offer potential liberation from Solness’s marriage, his sense of guilt for having profited from tragedy and his loss of faith in his own work. Between them, they conceive of building a ‘castle in the air’, and yet when Hilde pushes Solness to climb the tower he has built, despite his vertigo, he falls to his death. Whether, as suggested in the poem, this tragedy is paralleled by a gradual coming to sanity, or whether the reverse is the case, is open to speculation.

The poem describes the ‘chronotope’ of the shining, dual-faceted ‘castle-in-the-air’ which forms the ‘organizing [centre] for the fundamental narrative events’ of the play (Bakhtin 1981: 250). The idea of partnership and ascent built into the chronotope connects it with the view of the mountains and Borkman’s final moments with Ella (John Gabriel Borkman (1896)) or Rubek and Irene’s deaths in the avalanche that ends When We Dead Awaken (1899). Bakhtin’s term for the interconnections of space and time in literature seems particularly relevant here, in a play where, as Inga-Stina Ewbank says, ‘time and space have a remarkable interdependence’ (Ewbank 1994: 141). This interdependence is demonstrated in an interweaving of architecture as theme and metaphor with the narrative of past hopes and present anxiety.

As early as 1906 William Archer identified significant parallels between Ibsen’s ‘master builder Solness’ and Ibsen the playwright. Not only do numerous biographical details suggest some correspondence between Halvard Solness and Ibsen himself, Archer suggested a correspondence between Solness’s building styles and the dramatic shifts in Ibsen’s own career: ‘The churches which Solness sets out building doubtless represent Ibsen’s early romantic plays, the “homes for human beings” his social drama.’ By the time the play begins, Solness is experimenting with a peculiar hybrid of the two, a home with a church tower on the top – which dwellings, Archer says, ‘stand for those spiritual dramas, with a wide outlook over the metaphysical environment of humanity, on which he was henceforth to be engaged’ (Archer 1906: n.p.).

For Archer then, as for Waters, the architect is a ‘surrogate’ for the playwright. Given its innovative blend of symbolism and naturalism, or perhaps its ‘symbolic naturalism’, as Quigley puts it (Quigley 1985: 120), the play has often been discussed in terms of its dramaturgical innovations and implications, sometimes through a discussion of Solness as creative artist. It has also been discussed, though less frequently, in terms of its commentary on architecture. I shall, however, attempt to identify architecture and dramaturgy as both separate and overlapping aspects of this play, where Ibsen thematises and makes a metaphor of architecture, but where the distinction between dramaturgical structure and thematic content is eventually blurred. This involves a consideration of the ways in which both architects and dramatists reached towards a new vision for the twentieth century, at the beginning of modernism.

To return, for instance, to Ibsen’s statement that architecture is ‘as you know, my own trade’, we might take note of the fact that these were words spoken to the painter Erik Werenskiold. Werenskiold, known to Ibsen from his years in Munich, became part of the Fleskum artists’ colony in Norway in the 1880s and founded the Lysaker circle of artists in the 1890s, where he built his own villa, ‘Gilje’ (1896).¹ Lysaker, in particular, represented a holistic endeavour, in which all the arts were essentially architectural, combining in a constructed vision of Norwegian identity and lifestyle. Despite being remote from such enterprises, in that first note of confidence, ‘as you know ...’, Ibsen seems to infer some shared understanding of the interrelationship of architecture with the other arts.

While later chapters concern works that have a more direct connection with architecture, in the sense that they are positioned within and as part of concrete architectural developments, Ibsen anticipates the architectural turn in modernist art. In its final moments, the conflation of architecture with performance is also anticipatory of conceptions of architecture as event. Thus, The Master Builder evokes, somewhat sceptically, those utopian turn-of-the-century developments that sought a transformation of life through art, where architecture might be only the most self-evidently transformative art form among others. The play does not seem to model such transformation (or if it does, that model has obvious limitations), but it takes utopian longing as its theme, developed through the metaphor and practice of architecture.

Architecture and drama in the 1890s

In some respects, late nineteenth-century playwriting and architecture were alike in facing challenges to the structures that had previously dominated. The realities of the machine age questioned the very logic of their construction, indeed questioned the very legitimacy of architecture or drama.

Ibsen’s play was written at a time of rapid change for European architecture. Katherine Romba refers to the building of such major iron constructions as the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the Forth Bridge (1888–89) and suggests that around 1890 the architectural profession:

began to recognize not only that iron’s standardized engineered forms would transform the field structurally and artistically, but that iron engineering was a factor in the larger schism developing between the humanist subject of traditional culture and objective modes of thought and activity, as found in modern science, engineering, technology and industry. (Romba 2008: 42)

Romba highlights the fact that nineteenth-century architects were torn between twin poles of rationality, industry, function on the one hand and art, culture, emotion on the other. Tafuri identifies this moment as a ‘crisis of values’ that has its origin in the emergence of the industrial city, characterised by ‘multiple, disintegrative stimuli’: ‘The city had become an open structure, within which it was utopian to seek points of equilibrium’ (Tafuri 1976 [1973]: 42).

The international Arts and Crafts movement, initially led by the English artist and architect William Morris, resisted industrialisation by prioritising handmade goods and the work of the artist, and was characterised by a romantic tendency to celebrate national histories; in Norway, the Lysaker circle emerged out of this tradition. Realist approaches in nineteenth-century architecture placed a new emphasis on function and purpose, and suggested that a new style would be born, though not necessarily without reference to the past. Both of these streams, though seemingly contradictory, were paving the way for Jugendstil architecture (termed art nouveau in France and related to the secessionist movement in Austria), which attempted to draw on the artist’s creative power to transcend and transform industrial processes and the use of iron technology.

Jugendstil, which flowered at the turn of the century, can be seen as a final resistance to industrial transformation, which seemed to undermine the foundational significance of the artist/architect. On the other hand, social critic Walter Benjamin comments that both realism and Jugendstil can be considered as consecutive attempts to recognise industrialisation and come to terms with it. According to Benjamin:

Jugendstil represents an advance, insofar as the bourgeoisie gains access to the technological bases of its control over nature; a regression insofar as it loses the power of looking the everyday in the face. (That can be done only with the security of the saving lie.) – The bourgeoisie senses that its days are numbered; all the more it wishes to stay young. Thus, it deludes itself with the prospect of a longer life or, at the least, a death in beauty. (Benjamin 1999: 559)

Benjamin explicitly links Ibsen, and in particular The Master Builder, with this current in art and architecture. Indeed the above quotation implies this link, referencing Ibsen’s term, the ‘saving lie’, or ‘livsligge’ (used by Relling in The Wild Duck), and using the phrase ‘death in beauty’, which he elsewhere identifies as characteristic of Ibsen’s late plays (Benjamin 1999: 556).

Nineteenth-century theatre, like architecture, was shaken and transformed by scientific and industrial changes, which threw suspicion on the ethics of theatrical illusion and artifice. In the last quarter of the century, theatre attempted to resolve the tensions between scientific objectivity and Romantic subjectivity through naturalism. Esslin points out that, in theatre, the essential approach ‘was an existential, value-free, scientific and experimental exploration of reality in its widest possible sense (including the subjective reality of the artist’s temperament through which he perceives external reality)’ (Esslin 1968: 72). However, he also admits that although ‘this approach logically led to the rejection of all ready-made formal conventions and implied the acceptance of organic form dictated by the nature of the subject matter’, naturalism was formally conservative in its early years, retaining the structure of the well-made play, itself based on Aristotelian principles (Esslin 1968: 72). Though innovative, naturalism made common cause between the realist impulse and Aristotelian concepts of plausibility, causality and the analysis of reality through fiction, while its determinist elements replaced classical notions of fate.

Despite this formal conservatism, Esslin suggests that naturalism’s really ‘decisive break’ with tradition was the ‘recognition of the subjective nature of all perception’, which logically implied an expansion of dramaturgical possibilities to express this diversity (Esslin 1968: 71); thus it can be argued that rather than becoming replaced by symbolism, neo-romanticism and expressionism, it necessarily developed in these directions as gradually it attempted to ‘objectivise the subjective (the exteriorisation of the Idea) instead of subjectivising the objective (nature seen through an individual’s temperament)’ (Gustave Khan [1886], cited in Fuchs 1996: 29). Ibsen’s play, The Master Builder, shows a development in this direction. As Esslin writes, Ibsen’s use of symbolic elements is ‘the direct and logical development of his determination to explore his own inner, as well as objective external, reality’ (Esslin 1968: 72).

Observing the development in Ibsen’s work, Theoharis proposes that writing ‘in the aftermath of the romantic rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism’ Ibsen had no ultimate allegiance to either, but dramatised ‘problems taken up by both cultural movements’ (Theoharis 1999: 69), as he assigns these to different dimensions of his drama. According to Theoharis, there is a shift that occurs with The Master Builder. Ibsen dramatises, in previous plays such as Ghosts (1881), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886) and Hedda Gabler (1890): ‘people struggling out of a wrecked worldly action into an equally damaging and unmastered mental action’ and in so doing ‘dramatizes the deadlock to which Enlightenment and romantic understanding both lead’. Theoharis suggests that, by allowing a dissonance between mental and worldly action: ‘He broke the deadlock in his last four plays ... The well-made play evaporates ... giving way to spiritual transformations’ (Theoharis 1999: 71–4).

On the other hand, Toril Moi, who presents this struggle as a concern with idealism in opposition to quotidian social life, suggests that middle to late Ibsen is essentially anti-idealist. Given this view, Moi is considerably less sanguine about the ambiguous ‘transformations’ dramatised in the later plays, though recognising that Ibsen also demonstrates the perils of the ‘bad everyday’, where life has become static and without transcendence of any kind (Moi 2006: 316–24).

The oppositions identified by Theoharis and Moi as essential to Ibsen’s work could be read as a negotiation across the division between naturalism and symbolism, though Moi challenges this distinction.² Ibsen’s plays, from Emperor and Galilean onwards, are now considered among the key texts of naturalism and the first stirrings of theatrical modernism. Hostile to naturalism, in the early 1890s Symbolists decried it as ‘the opposite of theatre’, at once mendacious ‘trickery’ and a denial of theatre’s true function as ‘a chance to dream’ (Quillard 2010 [1891]: 164–5). In Christiania, Ibsen attended lectures given by Knut Hamsun in which his own work was disparaged for being concerned only with social issues, and for its inadequate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 Building: Ibsen, Jugendstil and the Playwright as ‘Master Builder’
• Chapter: 2 Chronotope and Rhythmic Production: Garden Cities, Narratives of Order and Spaces of Hope
• Chapter: 3 Construction: The Convergence of City and Stage in Russian Constructivism
• Chapter: 4 Gestalt: From the Bauhaus to Robert Wilson
• Chapter: 5 Situation: (Un)building the Hacienda
• Chapter: 6 Architecture and Deep Map: Cliff McLucas’s Placeevents
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index