The father of the avant-garde? Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen

In her post “Avant-garde theatre: Britain has lost what little nerve it had” on 28 February, British theatre artist Hannah Silva reviews some of the current controversy over the health of the avant-garde, or experimental, drama in Great Britain, referencing a recent essay by Vanessa Thorpe and comments from David Hare and Mark Ravenhill. Silva writes:

There’s something appealing about the term “avant-garde.” Perhaps because it doesn’t evoke a particular form of work. In spite of the clichés mentioned here, for me it doesn’t conjure up eyeball munching, nude dancing or a preoccupation with insulting the audience. It’s more about pushing a form to its limits, making the work you want to make and not caring what anyone else thinks. And it’s a bit retro, it conjures up different times, writers such as Antonin Artaud, Tristan Tzara, Alfred Jarry — performance that is obsessive and uncompromising and hard. Avant-garde theatre has sharp elbows. Ironically, the term conjures up the old, not the new. But it’s definitely better than “experimental.”

The term “experimental” applied to any art is a recent development and reflects the arts’ relationship to the philosophical positivism and utilitarianism of the contemporary culture. “Experiment” is a word drawn from science and applied to aesthetics, but like the word “Darwinism” applied to the social sciences rather than biology, it is freighted with danger. The scientific experiment is based in a specific theoretical prediction — if A happens, then B should result — and the assumption that, to be regarded as valid science, the experiment is repeatable under similar laboratory conditions. Its inapplicability to the aesthetic project should be immediately recognizable, not to mention the fact that no artist to my knowledge, whether conventional, experimental, or avant-garde, works that way; more often, the theory emerges from the instinctive creative process, rather than the other way around.

What’s more, experiments can fail. If the arts were genuinely appropriate to such a perspective, then only that art regarded as “experimental” could be said to achieve a quantitative success or failure, and that art that conformed to the existing paradigm, which could not be called “experimental,” should regularly achieve quantitative success of some kind; but of course individual works of traditional art fail as well, and more often than not. The main difference here is that, if a play that operates from within the controlling aesthetic paradigm of the time (in our time, this might be said to be realism or naturalism) fails, the paradigm itself is not called into question, whereas the epithet “experimental” is dragged out as the Scarlet A to be stamped upon the avant-garde play.

We have short memories. Stage realism and naturalism itself is, in the grand history of drama and theatre, a relatively new development. It was Georg II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century introduced a new realism to the stage, insisting upon historical and scenic exactitude and naturalistic performance; this, he considered, was a more “authentic” art than the romantic and baroque styles which came before. Less than a generation later, the great modern dramatists and directors emerged from Saxe-Meiningen’s influence, including playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, and directors like Stanislavsky. We still look to Strindberg and Stanislavsky as particularly modern theatre artists — as avant-garde experimentalists — though we forget that early on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov were already attempting to move past Saxe-Meiningen’s innovations into something that could be called a less realistic, naturalistic paradigm.

As Silva points out, the avant-garde is a tradition more than anything else, and its elbows are necessarily sharp because they challenge the existing aesthetic paradigm for both audiences and critics, and change is the bane of the aesthetic conservative, who finds comfort in what is rather than what could be. In discussing recent dramatists who are regarded as avant-garde or experimental, we should remember that they too emerge from a tradition. One of the most central texts of the contemporary British avant-garde theatre, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, did not emerge sui generis from the writer’s individual perspective, but, as Kane herself acknowledged, was profoundly influenced by Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, produced in 1997, two years before Kane wrote her play. Biographical criticism suggests that Kane’s play was a form of a suicide note, but it’s clear that, aesthetically and intellectually, Kane brought her recognition of her place in an avant-garde tradition to the composition of the text. It can only be considered a suicide note if we engage in that biographical fallacy. The text itself may reflect the fragmentation of the self, of the soul, and the biographical critic will regard the formal innovations of the play as evidence of psychological pathology. But for anyone familiar with other avant-garde theatre texts of the twentieth century — not only Crimp’s play, but plays by Handke, Müller, Stein, Foreman, and Wellman as well — the form of the play itself operates within a long tradition of avant-garde dramatic writing and can’t be conceived as a symptom of psychological dysfunction.

In discussing the character “Anne,” two characters in Attempts on Her Life offer a provisional definition of the theatrical and dramatic avant-garde. My own position is that it is wise not to regard these new plays as experimental or even avant-garde, but to admit them under the simple rubrics of theatre and drama, certainly all the rubrics one might need, with the necessary exceptions, perhaps, of telling the “good” from the “bad,” a process to which each of us brings our own prejudices. Crimp’s dialogue is haunting, but underscores the necessity for the avant-garde to bring us closer to ourselves. (And while I quote this passage in the context of Kane’s career, I must warn you: the necessarily haunting overtone of Kane’s own suicide is the product, too, of our biographical/critical prejudice.)

If she really is — as it appears — trying to kill herself, then surely our presence here makes us mere voyeurs in Bedlam …

But why not? Why shouldn’t it be / ‘a performance’?

Exactly — it becomes a kind / of theatre.

It’s theatre — that’s right — for a world in which theatre itself has died. Instead of the outmoded conventions of dialogue and so-called characters lumbering towards the embarrassing dénouements of the theatre, Anne is offering us a pure dialogue of objects: of leather and glass, of Vaseline and steel; of blood, saliva and chocolate. She’s offering us no less than the spectacle of her own existence, the radical pornography — if I may use that overrated word — of her own broken and abused — almost Christ-like body.

If one must continue to have theatre and drama, let us have that one.