Monthly Archives: June 2010

Theatre photographs: Waiting for Godot world premiere

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World premiere production of Waiting for Godot: Pierre Latour (Estragon), Roger Blin (Pozzo), Lucien Raimbourg (Vladimir) and Jean Martin (Lucky)

The world premiere of Waiting for Godot, directed by Roger Blin, took place on 5 January 1953 at the 233-seat Théâtre de Babylone in Paris. James Knowlson describes the reaction to the premiere in Damned to Fame (pages 349-350):

Reactions to the first performances were very mixed. Josette Hayden remembered how at first numbers dropped off after the first night and how they felt they needed to drum up support for it among their friends. Josette and Henri went out to dinner with Sam and Suzanne to celebrate the thirtieth performance, but even then they did not foresee the extent of the success, which was gathering momentum. Most of the reviews were good and the play gained distinguished admirers, among them Jean Anouilh, Armand Salacrou, Jacques Audiberti, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. But its success was assured when it became controversial, for it surprised and shocked many conventional theatergoers. Beckett was told about an incident when the curtain had to be brought down after Lucky’s monologue as twenty well-dressed, but disgruntled spectators whistled and hooted derisively. During a stormy intermission, the most irate protestors came to blows with the play’s supporters, then trooped back into the theater only to stomp noisily out again as the second act opened with the same two characters still waiting for Godot as they had been at the beginning of act one. Rumor had it that the entire episode had been organized by the theater as a publicity stunt, but it was perfectly genuine. As Godot became the talk of theatrical Paris, the character of the audiences changed and it became the play that everyone simply had to see. People were regularly being turned away at the door, and new box-office records were set for the tiny Théâtre de Babylone.

A critique of tragedy 21

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The performance of this drama, whose scope of time by earthly measure would comprise about ten evenings, is intended for a theater on Mars. Theatergoers in this world would not be able to endure it. For it is blood of their blood, and its contents are from those unreal, inconceivable years, those years that no waking consciousness can apprehend, that are inaccessible to any memory and preserved only in a gory dream, those years in which operetta figures enacted the tragedy of mankind.

Karl Kraus
Preface
The Last Days of Mankind (1922)

Word made flesh: A dream of a theatre. Collectively, the entries here are not a manifesto nor a theory. What destruction is sought is a destruction of received consciousness, not a bomb thrown into a building or a classroom, and the feelings expressed are far too self-contradictory to constitute a theory that can be of any practical use to anyone, least of all its author. They describe a theatre that does not exist, that may never exist except as an imaginative possibility in the mind of the dreamer.

And if there is any urban locus here, it is a curious one. The philosophy and work under consideration are not fictive, but they are fragmented, the individual examples distant from each other in both space and time. Perhaps their work is best considered as the dim candlelight that shines through the window of a monastery, perceived from a distance in the night, and as in the Middle Ages examples of a work and toil that goes on in the dark. And they do manage to leave their mark on the night, as the ascetics of the Middle Ages left their mark on history through their manuscripts and translation, coming down to us from another era, even another world. Seen from above the world, these dim lights are just visible here and there, loose constellations on a dark continent beneath. Perhaps these ascetics work ignorant of each other, but during the day they may conduct travels, pilgrimages, and return with a new knowledge and a faith that, in their work, they are not alone in the world, however dark the night, however great the intervening physical distance. They are community in thought, if impossible in body.

At the same time, they leap across genre. Like the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose work took the form of fragment, aphorism and poem, one can’t say that a single text is drama, this poetry, this philosophy.  The lyrical beauty that courses through the pre-Socratics is the same as the beauty that courses through Beckett and Celan. So, too, it would be wrong to limit this ascetic hallucination to writers alone. Actresses and actors, designers, directors may constitute additional points in these constellations.

They constitute the quotidian fragments of which a dream of the theatre can be built. For it is a fever-dream within the skull (like the black-box theatre itself), fed like any dream by shards of the non-dreaming experience. From these dreams are constructed cathedrals, stone by experiential stone. These would eventually hold and store the manuscripts and performances, wrought with obsessional intent and discipline, for which the cities and culture does not necessarily care. The women and men of the monastery, not seeking fame or recognition, necessarily living hand-to-mouth, expecting neither payment, approval nor gratitude, have the sole desire to keep the dreams of the imagination alive, in a culture which would gladly have them criminalized or killed as a means of keeping the ideological and religious peace.

In the night air one might hear from these monestaries the catch in the throat of a woman’s orgasmic cry, smell the sweat of the male body, experienced then inscribed within the dramatic text and by the dramatic body — both of which arise from the bodies and imaginations which the words of the manuscript render viable, visible as the performed drama. It is a dream of theatre that we will not see in our lifetime, that our sons and daughters will likely not see in theirs, given the direction in which history seems to be moving: deeper into industry, administration, puritanism and materialism, producing the real, bright exposure of the catastrophes that have introduced a post-human age.

To put the names of individual artists to the candlelights would be presumptive here, not only because they may be inferred by the material already presented, but also because the list would be incomplete: they define themselves in their work and intent, and they may desire to remain in the night, the more easily to conduct their work. Dreamwork is private and secret, even the description of the dream is intimate, shared only among those whom one feels secure and safe in communicating — there are dire risks involved, revelations and intimacies. But the description of the dream in drama remains necessary. Among the most important legacies that parents can leave to their children is the continuation of that dream, that such investigations are of enormous value in the dark world: a dream is a parent’s gift of love to a child, who may, after all, make further careful, personal steps to its realization.

Notes on eros and performance

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“Notes on Eros and Performance in Contemporary American Drama,” my contribution to the latest issue of Routledge’s Contemporary Performance Review, is available now. In brief:

Erotic desire, which began to play a significant role in modern drama in the plays of Büchner, Ibsen and Strindberg, has formed one of the central dynamics of European theatre. On the English-language stage alone, desire courses through the dramatic work of Pinter, and through Kane, Barker and Crimp. In their plays, erotic desire, like a river, limns structure, plot and character. …

With the exception of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, American dramatists have foregone this content to an impressive degree. While sexual identity has in more recent years formed a significant concern of dramatists like Tony Kushner, this identity has seemed less fluid, and the issues such self-definition raises remain entangled within more politically ideological projects. The threat posed to identity and self through sexuality is a political and cultural threat, and is often inextricably bound with fear: a fear for one’s safety (The Laramie Project), one’s livelihood or one’s cultural status (Angels in America). It is rarely considered a topic for spiritual concern, whatever ersatz angels may comically crash through ceilings. …

Perhaps it is a question of the role of language itself in the American theatre: instrumental not exploratory, prosaic not poetic, utilitarian not speculative. The challenge, then, to the American dramatist is to write the sexual and erotically exploratory body, to make the first inroads into an American dramaturgy that can finally contain this body and present it to American audiences, to urge the exploration of the possibilities inherent in their own sexualities and bodies. This, too, has profound political and cultural consequences. If there is at least one project for American drama in the early twenty-first century that remains to be energetically explored, it may well be this.

In the full version, I also offer notes on Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Martin Crimp’s The City. It’s not available online, but available for purchase here.

Perspectives: The spoken body

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Let us now address the subject of the body, once a secret and no longer one. Let us observe the process of the decay of the body in Utopian society, its disappearance through the process of revelation, and remark the paradox that the unrelenting gaze results in the decomposition of the subject, and let us admit this process is paradigmatical for all that is hidden in Utopia, a despotism which, because it is humanist, exercises its violence in the name of liberty and love. Let us assert without fear of contradiction, that the body has forfeited its authority on-stage and off, and that the spiritual injury of nakedness can be restored by one thing only — the quality of the spoken word applied to it, for a public immune now even to the most exotic manifestations of the flesh can be lent the privilege of anxiety only by an attitude to nakedness and not nakedness itself. …

… [In] order to seize back the injury of nakedness from the benign and supervisory Utopian regard, we recognize the body must be mediated through the distinctly theatrical mechanism of characterization. The anxiety created by the actor naked – in contradistinction to the bathos of the actor undressed – is substantially the creation of text delivered by performers with whom she shares the stage, a condition shaped by longing, contempt, the entire repertoire of erotic disorder, a condition which serve to disobjectify the flesh such that beauty or its converse is ascribable from the application of speech to the surface of the body and not discernible in the body itself. The Utopian gaze, annihilating from principle the possibility of shame, renders flesh transparent, a hygienic substance, neither hierarchical nor individualized, in essence no more than a mobile accumulation of the facts. The tragic text restores to its public the privilege of suffering the opacity of the flesh, its impenetrability, the focus of an ecstatic ignorance. The war fought over the meaning of the body in contemporary theatre is no less desperate than the battles waged in Homer over the hero’s corpse. Dead or alive, the body drives us mad, and — without straining the paradox remarked upon above — only the word can shield our gaze from Utopia’s dazzling and obliterating light.

Howard Barker
“The Spoken Body and the Utopian Regard”
Gramma: The Text Strikes Back: The Dynamics of Performativity, 2009

Where privacy ends

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UPDATE: Other responses from Matthew Freeman and J. Holtham. Holtham appears to believe that I’m missing the point somewhat; but I don’t believe I am. As I wrote in the comments section there:

I don’t think whether or not the anonymous blogger should have held back for fear of “hurting ‘the community’s’ feelings” has anything to do with it, nor does it have anything to do with critique or review or the Voice‘s status as a newspaper “which positions itself as one of the last bastions of support for off and off-off-broadway theatre,” as Melanie Joseph says. It’s irresponsible sensation- and scandal-mongering, pure and simple, and the Voice‘s motives in posting the email were questionable at the very least, unethical at most.

If we’re going to judge every one of these issues and approve of these miscarriages according to their publicity or amusement value … well, it’s up to you. But that’s not a community — a theatre community or a broader community — to which I would care to belong. “Suck it up and deal” is not an adequate response — it’s your own privacy, too, that’s at issue. If you don’t want it, fine. But that gives no one any right to take it from somebody else.

There is a minor to-do currently blowing through the blogosphere regarding a Village Voice blog post on an email written by an actor in a current PS122 production to his friends and acquaintances, savaging the show and expressing considerable vitriol towards some of its personnel. Because I do not know well the actor who sent the email, and haven’t seen the show, I am not in a position to comment on either the actor’s intentions in sending this e-mail (or his wisdom in doing so) nor to say whether his criticisms were justified. Both Helen Shaw at Time Out New York and Isaac Butler at Parabasis have offered some comments.

Blogosphere controversies have all the longevity of mayflies and I do try to stay away from the trivial, although the Village Voice post in particular, added to the Voice blog by a “Village Voice contributor” (it has apparently been posted, then de-posted, then re-posted again), has engendered some discussion about the privacy of written communication in the Internet age. Given that the post seems to remain live and will possibly continue to do so, it’s worth questioning the broader distribution of this email attributed to Karl Allen through a blog maintained by a mainstream-media editor.

Privacy in the Internet age is a vexed question, but a few notes should be made. First, whatever may become of an email once it’s sent by an individual, it remains a private communication and should be granted that right of respect. If the actor wished to make his thoughts public, he could have done so in a variety of places: at a Web site, on a blog, in a letter to the editor composed with public consumption in mind. Admittedly, this right to privacy is often abused on the Internet, but it does not for that reason make its publication by a third party justified, whether the author’s name is attached or not. If the Voice contributor wished to post the email on the blog, a simple request to the author of the email asking for permission would suffice. This is called simple common courtesy and decency, especially when the email could be controversial or critical to others.

Neither the anonymous “Village Voice contributor” nor Shaw suggests that this was a mass e-mail to everyone on the author’s mailing list. Isaac assumes that it was “sent out to a wide address book and forwarded to an even wider set of people,” but we have no way of knowing just how many were sent the message; the assumption must be, because it was an email as I mentioned in the paragraph above, that it was meant for a rather smaller circle than the entire downtown New York theatre community. Even so, what’s a mass e-mail? One that goes to 1,000 people? 500? Ten? And if it is forwarded to others, wisely or unwisely, the privacy that attaches to the original email remains appropriate. There is no reason to think that a written communication sent through the U.S. mail would not be entitled to that same privacy. Though the Internet obviates the need for stamps and envelopes these days, and makes it much easier to thoughtlessly and without deliberation forward on other people’s words, that does not mean it’s right to do so.

Especially to publish these words in a public arena such as the Village Voice blog, which seems to me a gross violation of journalistic and personal ethics, whatever the editor’s intent (to stir up controversy, perhaps, and to do so in the shoddiest method imaginable).

I am with Vallejo Gantner, Maria Goyanes and Melanie Joseph on this one. Perhaps the actor who wrote the email will think twice about sending anything similar, but he was entitled to the privacy that surrounds any personal communication. It’s not as if his email dealt with a threat to national security or a stream of government corruption — there was no public necessity attached to its publication.

It is a blow to the actor; a blow to The Octoroon, which has now attracted attention which in no way has anything to do with the production itself; and especially a blow to standards of privacy on the Internet. While those who decide to belong to Facebook or publish blogs like this one give up some of their privacy, it is a voluntary decision; that does not give others the right to take it away in the interests of some vague transparency.