“Simply put”, Paul A. Kottman writes in A Politics of the Scene, “the world is
not like a stage, it is a stage; the relationship between the theatre and
the world is one of ontological parity.” The theatricality of the public
realm is a staple of political philosophy from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt.
The very idea is well-nigh pre-philosophical: the public space as a space of
appearances, in which moral and political greatness, heroism and
pre-eminence are revealed, displayed and shared. Historically, power was
exercised and experienced theatrically, as Stephen Greenblatt has said of
Elizabethan power: “As in a theatre, the audience must be powerfully engaged
by this visible presence and at the same time held at a respectful distance
from it”.
Elizabeth I herself understood this only too well. “We princes”, she told a
deputation of Lords and Commons in 1586, “are set on stages in the sight and
view of the world.” Monarchy is a performance, in other words. The
theatrical trope is almost axiomatic: strutting and fretting on the stage is
what politicians do. George W. Bush, soon to be heard no more, is probably
the most unfit for office of any recent President of the United States. Yet,
when it came to getting elected, and re-elected, he succeeded. Leaving aside
dumb luck and unscrupulousness, he has mastered the same trick as Ronald
Reagan before him. An American commentator has put it exactly: he doesn’t
seem phoney.
In the theatre, this is the essence of the exercise: play-acting is
professional seeming. In the world, it is at once expected and deplored. If
politics is performance, then surely seeming is rife; yet greatness,
heroism, pre-eminence, etc, demand integrity, transparency, congruency. For
the unimpeachable reputation, authenticity is all. Authenticity is an
enigma, but seeming authenticity sounds like a contradiction in terms. On
the world stage, seeming is cause for suspicion. So it goes, as Kurt
Vonnegut used to say, in Shakespeare. “I am not merry”, confesses Othello,
“but I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise.” “Give him heedful
note”, Hamlet adjures Horatio, of the King of Denmark: “For I mine eyes will
rivet to his face; / And, after, we will both our judgements join in censure
of his seeming.”
Alan Bennett sports knowingly with the Shakespearean tradition in The Madness
of George III (1991), described by the playwright as a play in which “part
of the King’s illness consists in his growing inability to sustain [the]
performance [of monarchy]”:
When the King is on the road to recovery Chancellor Thurlow discovers him
reading King Lear and congratulates him on seeming more himself. “Yes,” says
the King, “I have always been myself but now I seem myself. I have
remembered how to seem.”
The consummate performer on the political scene of recent years is Tony Blair.
Blair is famously a pretty straight sort of guy. He said so himself. As
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher signalled in her speech acts “I am right”
(“They are weak, the Europeans. Weak”); Blair’s signalled “I am good” (“I
honestly believe it was the right thing to do”). There is no “aw shucks”
folksiness about Blair, no buddy-buddy, which may be why he always looked so
ill at ease in Bush’s company. The rhetorical keynote is purported sincerity
– “frank-seeming”, as Bennett has remarked. Time’s correspondent at the
Hutton Inquiry made a similar observation: “In two and a half hours of
apparently frank testimony – always thoughtful and reasoned, passionate when
passion was called for – Blair gave a masterful performance”.
Blair’s rise and fall may have something to recommend it as a morality tale,
but the truth about lesser politicians, his performing contemporaries, is
perhaps a little tawdry. (Think of John Prescott’s affair with his diary
secretary, for example, who, with commendable reflexivity but bathetic
effect, kept a diary of her own: “I did give him sex in the office a couple
of times. He would usually be going through his ministerial box – maybe
things to do with regeneration, or the environment”. All of which was
dramatized, as they say, for television.) Aristotle finds that greatness is
a prerequisite of the dramatic plot, because the drama imitates the acting –
not play-acting but acting for real – and acting is judged by greatness, by
its distinction from the commonplace. Thus even “Prezza” finds his place in
the scheme of things. It is difficult to imagine anything more commonplace
than Confessions of a Diary Secretary (2007).
Bertolt Brecht asked sceptically, “Can the present-day world be represented by
the theatre?”. Do these authors offer any answer to that fundamental
question? Do they address it? Some more directly than others: George Steiner
more resoundingly than most. In a contribution to Rita Felski’s stimulating
symposium Rethinking Tragedy, Steiner confirms the suspicion he first voiced
in 1961, that the twentieth century saw “the death of tragedy”. In his
mandarin summation:
It is virtually indecent to envisage high tragedy engaging recent and current
events as Greek tragedy engaged the Persian wars or the massacre at Miletus.
We distrust the truths of eloquence. Who now shares T. S. Eliot’s melancholy
conviction that verse drama is the natural, legitimate format of conflict
and concentrated sensibility? The aesthetics of conceptual art, the semen on
the bedsheet, the creed of the happening, of Merz (the nonsense word used by
Kurt Schwitters to describe his collages or assemblages based on scavenged
scrap materials) or the ready-made – reflecting as they do the collapse of
agreed values and developing the parodistic genius of Surrealism – are
antithetical to high tragedy. Our immediacies are those of derision, of
black farce, of the multimedia circus. At some moments of political \[and\]
social crisis, tragedy in its classical mask still provides a shorthand: as
the Trojan Women did during the Vietnam war, as the Bacchae served during
the turmoil of the drug culture and flower children. But these are loans
from the museum.
Whether we swallow this whole or attend to other, more meliorist perspectives
– offered by Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone in another timely
collection of essays, Tragedy in Transition (or is it remission?) – Steiner
in his stonking fashion has captured something of the spirit of the age.
Greek tragedy is not what it used to be. It is no longer “Howl, howl, howl,
howl”, Lear’s anguished response to the death of Cordelia. Sometimes it is
hardly howl at all. Tragedy has been trivialized. Blair’s former bag man,
Jonathan Powell, is supposed to have pulled up on his bike next to Boris
Johnson at the traffic lights and observed, as one Oxford man to another,
that Gordon Brown’s situation was a Greek tragedy – consumed by ambition, he
would never be Prime Minister. Since Brown succeeded to that office,
needless to say, there has been no shortage of commentators eager to cast
his fate in the familiar frame. In common parlance, at least, the scale and
moral force of the genre have been devalued. Pain and grief and rage dwindle
into mere misfortune. Tragedy is in jeopardy.
In agreement with Brecht’s scepticism, Martin Meisel recognizes in How Plays
Work that a certain shrinkage has taken place, “from public space to private
space, from outside to inside, and from general to specific”. On Meisel’s
reading, the tragic, the comic, and the pastoral have been diminished and
domesticated; he adduces the kitchen-sink drama, the drawing room comedy and
the bedroom farce. Given the current craze for the redesign and the
makeover, it may not be long before the conservatory Coriolanus or the
loft-extension Lysistrata.
Not only the world, moreover, but the words themselves have shrunk. One of
Samuel Beckett’s favourite actors, Billie Whitelaw, tells of doing
Rockaby (1981), where she has only one word to say (apart from the sound of
her own recorded voice): “More”, which starts and restarts the rocker and
the tape. Rockaby is late Beckett. Late Beckett is nearly mute. There are
stirrings still, but the dialogue has dried up; on stage, Whitelaw has
divulged, she talks to herself, in silence. As well as the defiant “more”,
she repeats to herself all the words on the tape, as an interior monologue:
I put the tape in my head. And I sort of look in a particular way, but not at
the audience. Sometimes as a director Beckett comes out with absolute gems
and I use them a lot in other areas. We were doing Happy Days and I just did
not know where in the theatre to look during this particular section. And I
asked, and he thought for a bit and then said, “Inward”.
For all the shifts of sense and sensibility, there may be a greater continuity
with the theatrical-political past than at first appears. A celebrated
anecdote in Herodotus concerns the staging in Athens in 493 BC of one of the
very first works of Greek tragedy, The Fall of Miletus, by Phrynichus, an
elder contemporary of Aeschylus, only two years after the historical events
it describes – what we have learned to call the ethnic cleansing of the
Milesians by the Persians. “So Miletus was left empty of Milesians”,
according to Herodotus. The Fall of Miletus had a profound effect on the
Athenian audience: they burst into tears. Not only that, they fined
Phrynichus a thousand drachmas “for reminding them of a disaster that was so
close to home”, and banned the play in perpetuity.
This episode is analysed afresh by Kottman in A Politics of the Scene, for
whom the crying of the Athenians arises from a shared recollection of
suffering that was their own (“that was so close to home”). The Fall of
Miletus reminded them of what they already remembered, as he puts it. In
other words their response is not attributable to catharsis or mimesis, but
to anamnesis. (“Good art is anamnesis”, argues Iris Murdoch, following
Plato, “‘memory’ of what we did not know we knew.”) In the case of the
Athenians, the “memory” is not an individual memory of a personal injury,
but a shared memory of a public catastrophe. It is not strictly speaking a
collective memory, transmitted and embedded and memorialized, for it is
mortal, says Kottman; it is, precisely, a living memory. It comes into being
through live action – direct affirmation: shared tears.
The sharing is crucial. This is where theatre, in particular tragedy, has an
ongoing role. Theatre is a form of moral witness. “No one can bear witness
alone”, Kottman insists; “to be what it is, action requires that another
affirms its having been seen.” It has been suggested that in their crying
the Athenians were also lamenting their withdrawal from the Ionian cause,
leaving the Milesians to their fate. A felt sense of responsibility for the
other is perhaps the supreme test of strong relations – something we agonize
over today as “the responsibility to protect”. Was there a glimmering of
that among the Athenians, pricked by Phrynichus? Can the theatre help to
foster a self-conscious international community?
In 1993, there was enacted another unlikely political scene: the staging in
Sarajevo of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by the late Susan Sontag.
Even George Steiner nods to Godot, an imperishable and unclassifiable piece
of theatre, and, in one obvious sense, pure, stripped-bare tragedy: there is
always waiting, and Godot never comes.
The Sarajevans knew something of waiting – Sarajevo was a city under siege.
(“Nothing to be done”, sighs Estragon, exhausted, in the opening line, after
trying and failing to take off his boot.) “People in Sarajevo live harrowing
lives”, Sontag wrote afterwards; “this was a harrowing Godot.” The
production was mounted in a ruined theatre, by candlelight, with a
half-starved multi-ethnic cast. The candles themselves were in short supply;
the props were hard to come by. Bowler hats had to be hunted out. Food was
stolen. The carrot that Estragon munches slowly, rapturously, took on an
almost spiritual significance. There were only matinees. Going out after
dark was more than one’s life was worth. In spite of all, many people were
turned away. The audience sat, jammed together, on six rows of seats made
from wooden planks, right at the front of the stage, so that they could see.
Sontag wondered if it could ever be made to work. On the third day, it did.
During the long silence that follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr
Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, she felt her eyes
sting with tears. One of the actors was crying, too. “No one in the audience
made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theatre: a
UN armoured personnel carrier thundering down the street and the crack of
sniper fire.”
Godot in Sarajevo summons Peter Brook’s manifesto, The Empty Space (1968),
excerpted in David Krasner’s capacious and cosmopolitan anthology, Theatre
in Theory (2008): “I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man
walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him, and this is
all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged”. The cool effrontery
and profound simplicity of that “act of theatre” is a difficult act to
follow. Brook’s work was at heart a personal credo; a handbook that became a
bible. None of these recent works can match its insight or its inspiration.
They tend more towards the textbook than the handbook. They are made for
teaching; they invite raiding rather than reading. Krasner’s anthology comes
complete with “clustered units” for teaching purposes (“Avant-Garde and
Happenings”, “Feminism and Queer Theory”, and many more); James R.
Hamilton’s indigestible argument for “the independence of theatrical
performance”, The Art of Theatre, is equipped with numbered sub-sections,
some of which descend into something perilously close to the classroom farce
(“Cross-Performance Re-Identification”, “Added Benefits of the Demonstrative
and Recognition-Based Approach to Identification and Re-Identification”).
Martin Meisel’s How Plays Work is a kind of vade mecum, learned and
jargon-free. The two meditations on tragedy are complementary; they could
profitably be raided together. Rethinking Tragedy has the benefit of the
bigger names and the bruiser side-swipes. In his concluding “Commentary”,
Terry Eagleton writes: “In a characteristically burnished, commanding piece
of rhetoric, George Steiner rehearses his familiar case (now broadcast in no
less than seventeen languages) that the mildest whiff of hope is fatal to
tragedy. Even the author of the last act of Lear fails to qualify for kosher
tragic status”.
At once the most original and the most searching of these books is A Politics
of the Scene. If Paul Kottman’s prose is sometimes a little clotted, his
passion is refreshing and his purpose admirable. He wants to make the
dramatic scene a fundamental category for thinking about political life. His
lodestar is Hannah Arendt. In her magnificent account of the polis, we catch
the echo of Beckett, of Brook, of the timeless power of the theatre, and the
borderless lure of the stage. “The polis, properly speaking, is not the
city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as
it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies
between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen
to be. ‘Wherever you go, you will be a polis.’”
Paul A. Kottman
A POLITICS OF THE SCENE
260pp. Stanford University Press. $60; distributed in the UK by Eurospan.
£52.95.
978 0 8047 5834 5
Rita Felski, editor
RETHINKING TRAGEDY
368pp. Johns Hopkins University Press.
$65 (paperback, $24.95); distributed in the UK by NBN. £43.50 (paperback,
£16).
978 0 8018 8739 0
Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone, editors
TRAGEDY IN TRANSITION
315pp. Blackwell. £55 (US $99.95).
978 1 4051 3546 7
Martin Meisel
HOW PLAYS WORK
276pp. Oxford University Press. £20 (US $45).
978 0 19 921549 2
Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at the University
of Nottingham. His latest book is Picasso Furioso, 2008. He is working on a
collection of essays, On Art and War and Terror.
