“Drama as an essentially dialectical genre is at the same time the exquisite place of the tragic,” Hans-Thies Lehmann writes. “Theatre after drama, we might thus suspect, would be a theatre without the tragic.”[1] Lehmann goes on to discuss the self-contradictions inherent in the Hegelian concept of tragedy that has determined discussion of the genre for the past 150 years or so, but we need not go that far.
If the postdramatic theatre, or devised theatre, removes the deliberately-written word from the center of the theatrical event, it does not do so to move another element of theatre into its place. Postdramatic theatre permits the circulation of these other elements to weave with the circulation of the spoken text, but does not shove it off to the side. In this, postdramatic theatre engages with modernity rather than postmodernity. The Modern has always had to contend with the conception of the tragic, the Postmodern considers the tragic irrelevant (and indeed Lehmann notes that the postdramatic theatre is not necessarily, or even primarily, a postmodern phenomenon).[2] Theatre continues to bear with it, in either its dramatic or postdramatic forms, the expression of the tragic consciousness as its highest ambition. He goes on:
From postclassical times to the present, theatre has gone through a series of transformations that assert the right of the disparate, partial, absurd and ugly against the postulates of unity, wholeness, reconciliation and sense. In content and form, theatre has increasingly incorporated all that which — filled with disgust — one did not want to “take on” before. Rethinking the internal ambiguity … of the classical tradition itself makes it clear, however, that this “other” of classical theatre was already present in its own most thorough-going philosophical interrogation, namely as a hidden possibility of rupture within the frame of the work of reconciliation strained to its maximum. [Emphasis added.] Thus, postdramatic theatre, again and most definitely, does not mean a theatre that exists “beyond” drama, without any relation to it. It should rather be understood as the unfolding and blossoming of a potential of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction within drama itself. [3]
This is clearly, however, a consciousness of tragedy that is broken from both the Aristotelian and Hegelian conceptions of cathexis, reconciliation and synthesis. The tragedies of Barker, Beckett and Müller all reflect not only the attempt to stage this “rupture,” but to leave the spectator as well in a state of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction — to rebuild again, from within, the status of the imagination as a cultural force for personal and social change. (And to accept the abject as an inevitable consequence of existence, not only of the world but also of the self — those things “one did not want to ‘take on’ before,” including erotic transgression and death.) What renders the work of these writers postdramatic is their distrust of the word to provide ultimate meaning, to in essence deconstruct itself and free the word from conventional denotations and connotations, to turn the lyrical against itself. In order to do so, these writers all eventually turned to elements beyond the word, as their own directors and designers, weaving those scenographic and performative threads around their original texts.
Both Barker and Müller (and to a lesser extent Beckett) are also battling the teleological and deterministic histories of the world, always written by the winners; Barker conceives one of his genres as the “anti-history.” This is a potentially liberating approach and welcomes a postdramatic conception of theatre, for words always carry ideologies that the body itself strains against. It is not merely replacing one history with another, but undermining the deterministic telos of history itself — a statement that the past may not necessarily dictate the imagination of the present individual. For this, dramatic form must be undermined as well:
To view history as drama, however, almost inevitably introduces teleology, pointing towards a finally meaningful perspective — reconciliation in idealist aesthetics, historical progress in Marxist historiography. Drama promises dialectic. Some scholars were so carried away by this aesthetic meaningfulness of history that they went so far as to say that history itself had an objective dramatic beauty. Conversely, authors like Samuel Beckett and Heiner Müller avoided the dramatic form not least of all because of its implied teleology of history.[4]
Footnotes
- Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre. Translated and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 42. [↩]
- “Postdramatic theatre knows not only the ‘empty’ space but also the overcrowded space. It can indeed by ‘nihilistic’ and ‘grotesque’ — but so is King Lear. Process, heterogeneity or pluralism in turn are true for all theatre — the classical, modern and ‘postmodern.’ When Peter Sellars staged Ajax in 1986 and The Persians in 1993, his productions, like his original stagings of Mozart operas, were called ‘postmodern’ merely because he rigorously and irreverently brought classical material into the contemporary, everyday world.” Lehmann, op cit., p. 25. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 44. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 39. [↩]
Lehmann’s characterization of ‘the dramatic’ in his book always strikes me as highly selective; the plays of Shakespeare, as well as more recent formally experimental dramas (Barker, Rudkin, Motton, Ed Thomas, Ann Jellicoe’s 1958 play ‘The Sport of My Mad Mother’), do not accord with the restrictions he associates with ‘the dramatic’ – but Shakespeare can hardly be called ‘postdramatic’. Hence my provocation in THEATRE OF CATASTROPHE that we might begin to think of Barker’s work in terms of ‘post-theatrical drama’ (if we distinguish between ‘The Theatre’ and what Barker terms ‘The Art of Theatre’ – which might arguably be closer to Drama?). Interestingly, in his Introduction to Helen Nicholson’s recent book THEATRE AND EDUCATION, Edward Bond is also concerned to reclaim the term and form ‘drama’ from the more conventional effects of anodyne closure associated with ‘theatre’.
I’m not sure that Lehmann is calling Shakespeare “postdramatic,” only that what he would call “postdramatic tragedy” shares many qualities with what I suppose he would have to call “dramatic tragedy.” This is, anyway, what I take “Process, heterogeneity or pluralism are true for all theatre” to mean.
That said, yes, I think that Lehmann’s criticism applies more appropriately to Tadeusz Kantor and perhaps Heiner Muller than it does to Barker, whose dramatic texts are closer to Shakespeare than Muller. I like the idea of reclaiming the term and form of drama from the more extreme exponents of Lehmann’s theory, who would dismiss it as a valorization of the individual dramatist in what we’re now calling theatre, rather than the Art of Theatre, nowadays. (Although it’s also true that some of Lehmann’s examples of postdramatic theatre, Kantor being a perfect case, are just as individual and idiosyncratic rather than communitarian in their scenographic imagination as a dramatist is in language.)