Category Archives: Archives

Friday video/From the archives: Beckett/Wagner

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Waltrud Meier as Isolde in the Heiner Müller production of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.

A few years ago (in 2008 to be precise) I wrote the below essay after seeing Dieter Dorn’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. A much shorter version of this essay appeared on 1 April 2008 at the Guardian theatre blog.

I’ve appended two videos to the essay — the Liebestod from the 1993 Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, sung by the extraordinary Waltrud Meier, and the first part of Samuel Beckett’s Play, as directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project — to offer an interesting comparison and contrast.

On the face of it, there couldn’t be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett — the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays — often quiet, approaching silence — that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert’s songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation — the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett’s own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there’s just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. “Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre,” said the editors of an anthology of Wagner’s prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music’s abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.

There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner’s production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-accurate sets and costumes as exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. (It’s still done, as Sir Peter Hall demonstrated in his Ring cycle of several years back.) As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn’t seem to come into its own until Appia’s theory — which was heavily indebted to Wagner’s more metaphysical operas – became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and color became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre just as much as on the canvas.

In the post-war era, Bayreuth’s directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett’s first plays were being performed in Paris — plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett’s 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett’s later work, until 1972′s Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.

Dorn’s production for the Met marries Beckett’s stage practice to Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett’s conception of colorless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three pure-white cycloramas that are gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center, a vanishing point that suggests the unity and nothingness for which the two lovers yearn. (This is not unlike the “very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance” that Beckett specifies in the stage directions for Happy Days.)

In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear — the words and the music — that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. “[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form,” Wagner wrote in “The Music of the Future.” “… I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner’s final operas, Beckett’s dramas from 1962′s Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.

Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.

For more about Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer and philosophy in general, I guide you towards Bryan Magee’s excellent The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

Via YouTube: Waltrud Meier sings the Liebestod at the end of Act III of Tristan und Isolde, from the Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, filmed in 1995:

And, again from YouTube, the first half of Anthony Minghella’s film of Samuel Beckett’s Play:

From the archives: Knowledge and the art of theatre

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Originally posted on 22 November 2010 and slightly revised.

The end of the experiential and moral speculation in the art of theatre is knowledge. Because the aim of the art of theatre is not to educate, enlighten or entertain, it is worth examining for just a moment the nature of this knowledge — but not its utility; there is no utility inherent in knowledge itself.

The art of theatre permits and encourages the play of imagination; this play leads to both pain and pleasure, but more precisely it leads to a realization of alternative cognitions — cognitions of experience and the world. The experience and expression that are circumscribed by the culture industry render this knowledge, and especially the people who possess this knowledge, abject: it remains too great a threat to the security of the industry itself. It is uncertain what more we can reasonably expect from theatre; but isn’t this knowledge enough? Especially if it is gained through the stress that accompanies the alternation of rejection and compassion, the tension producing new conscious energies with and through which the characters and the spectators can remake themselves (for the industry will not permit itself to be remade). This is not a knowledge for those who insist that they already know themselves beyond any shadow of doubt, those who have a faith in themselves as the religious have a faith in an inerrant God, but only for those who remain open to the possibilities of experiential and moral speculation, who know that they are not God, and that there is no God anywhere else.

From the archives: Gordon Ramsay at the London

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In today’s New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes about the restaurant experience as theatre, from the very privileged and expensive perspective of the chef’s table. Now that the second season of Master Chef has run its course (to me, Adrian was robbed — Marilyn was rooting for Christian, but that’s what makes a marriage interesting), I look back at a similar essay I wrote late last year. True, I had to do so from the restaurant itself rather than from the other side of the kitchen door. But it remains of interest. (To be fair, Arnold Wesker was way ahead of us in 1957. The Kitchen will be revived at London’s National Theatre beginning on 31 August.)

If contemporary theatre criticism looks for performance outside the four walls of the studio space or auditorium, it may be worthwhile to consider dining as performance. The restaurant is a unique site of artifice and, in better restaurants, elegance; if we are now to think of ourselves as “consumers” of an aesthetic experience, then why can’t gustatory consumption provide aesthetic experience as well? Certainly as theatre takes the quotidian elements of experience to render them something unique and meditative, the restaurant serves the necessary food to quell the inescapable appetite.

The restaurant meal as aesthetic experience, then, is as capable of providing a meditative and contemplative experience as theatre. I often mention elegance as a necessary component of the powerful theatre production, and certainly this is as valid in the restaurant experience. My wife Marilyn Nonken and I recently paid our second visit in as many years to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, Gordon Ramsay at the London, and it too provided considerable food for thought. Ramsay is probably best known as the foul-mouthed, violently demanding ex-footballer on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and this is how most of his audience sees him. But most of this audience, I’m sure, does not have the opportunity to enter a Gordon Ramsay restaurant themselves (even though his restaurants may be found around the world — there’s even a “Gordon Ramsay Plane Food” restaurant in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5). It is only there that the true theme of Ramsay’s television shows, and where they differ from Top Chef and Iron Chef, becomes apparent — they are not about Ramsay’s personality (however overpowering that is), but about the discipline, skill, collaboration and talent required to render the dining experience itself an aesthetic product. The dining experience is Ramsay’s true calling — and he is as much an artist here as Giacometti in painting, Howard Barker or Richard Foreman in theatre, and Morton Feldman in music.

Like theatre, there is the playing space (the restaurant itself) and backstage (the kitchen); a fine meal requires a clocklike efficiency between the two arenas. Gordon Ramsay at the London, under the supervision of chef de cuisine Markus Glocker and designed by David Collins in emerald and timber panels, presents a quiet spacious area for relaxation. The waitstaff, attentive but unobtrusive, performs on a thin tightrope between formality and the casual, wearing dark suits but not tuxedoes (the restaurant notes that the dress code for patrons is “smart, with jackets preferred for gentlemen, but not required”). They are personable and friendly, but not familiar, and there is much to be said about the elegance in their gestures themselves: wine is poured and dishes are served with quiet efficiency but a great deal of attention to the angle of the bottle and the way the wrist is turned, the precise ease with which the dishes are placed before the diner. (I know of theatre directors and performers who pay far less attention to the appearance and grace of their bodies as they perform.) It is also interesting to note that, during both my visits to the restaurant, not one cellphone or pager was heard to beep through the entire meal.

Indeed, at Gordon Ramsay at the London, the dining experience is one of intimacy within the high-ceilinged arena; despite the relatively small room, it is arranged so that each table continues to possess a quiet privacy. This is unlike Daniel Boulud’s Daniel, which with its multiple levels and dining areas renders the diners both spectators and spectacle, part of the scenery rather than a private individual (appropriate in a restaurant in which it may be important to see-and-be-seen), or Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, which offers a more casual, diner-like Lower East Side atmosphere (appropriate for a Lower East Side restaurant).

Dining at a restaurant like Gordon Ramsay at the London is a leisurely experience; serving the seven-course tasting menu takes a little less than three hours. The role of time and rhythm in taking a meal is akin to the role they play in music: nothing rushed or fast, time enough to linger over the taste of a dish (or a sound or sequence of notes), to relish and contemplate it. Time and rhythm in another sense is key to the menu itself and the sequence of dishes and wines. For there is a rhythm to the tasting menu, make no mistake about that: beginning with a light amuse bouche (and a glass of champagne or sparkling wine), the meal progresses from lighter to heavier dishes, and similarly at Gordon Ramsay at the London these are accompanied by wines that progress from lighter whites to fuller reds. A tenderly sauteed slice of fois gras, its creaming density leavened with the provision of a brightly-sliced plum,  is followed by a single scallop accompanied by curried cauliflower, pressed mango and spiced chickpeas, and only then do the main dishes arrive: a turbot (amusingly presented; slicing into the center of the turbot, one is surprised by the right yellow of an organic egg yolk that pours from the fish) and, for me, lamb cooked to the precise definition of “medium,” pink in the center and growing progressively more done as towards the edges. (And here the reds are served.)  And a decrescendo follows in the form of first a pre-dessert in the form of a light lime sorbet and then a final dessert, for me of a light Concord grape cream and yogurt sorbet.

It is essential to note that Ramsay’s form of French cooking partakes of that most generous trait of any good host: entertainment just to the point of satiety and not beyond. There are times at even the best restaurants when you can have too much of a good thing (this was my experience at Daniel and, more especially, at WD-50). What is most poetic about Ramsay’s cooking is its restraint, not only in flavor (which engages and tempts the palate but does not excite it to excess) but in portion servings as well. On both occasions I’ve dined at Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, I wasn’t left wanting more, but on the other hand I didn’t have a feeling of overindulgence either. The key to Ramsay’s sensitivity is in his measure of quiet, modest excellence. Similarly, because eating is as much a visual as gustatory experience, the minimalist plating, with a careful eye to color, space and placement, provides just enough for the eye to see and doesn’t overwhelm the visual sense.

What we eat, and how we choose to eat it, tells us a great deal about our culture — as much as the plays it chooses to see and the music it chooses to listen to. Artists like Gordon Ramsay also can tell us through their creations about the world that presents itself to us: we are inclined and encouraged to be more demanding of our everyday experiences, not to take for granted the pleasures of eating and appetite. They provide, like dramatists, painters, poets and musicians, a new way of looking at the environment around us — and remind us that we cannot take that, either, for granted.

All photos from the Gordon Ramsay Web site here.

From the archives: The death of Agamemnon

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I wrote the below essay for the original Superfluities journal in May 2006, just before I began to write the material contained in Word Made Flesh. At the time I gave it the title “The Terror of the Wound” — a little spectacular, perhaps, and I would probably choose a less sensational title for it today. Nonetheless, it is an ur-text for Word Made Flesh and other writings since.

The first stage death to resonate is Agamemnon’s, at the hands of Clytemnestra. Though it transpires in the time during which we watch the events of the Agamemnon unfold, it is, in terms of the House of Atreus, not the first murder but only the most recent: and these are humans, not the gods or semi-gods of the Iliad with which the audience was familiar.

And before us, the spectator, they are fleshed: the Homeric storyteller described events, Aeschylus’ tragedy embodied them in the performer. We have to take care to realize that the power of the tragedy lies not in mere death but in the manner of that death, the disposition of the body, the deaths to which these bodies’ living behavior, moving and speaking before us, has led. We are aware, or made aware if coming to the story for the first time, of the gross history of murder and cannibalism (Thyestes’ children fed to their father, a perverse reversal of eating as healthful sustenance, Thyestes feeding on his own flesh and blood; the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father as if she were an animal rather than his daughter) in the pasts of the personages before our eyes; and always, everywhere, there is desire and sex.

The immediate causes of Clytemnestra’s murderous rage are her lust for power, the unending burden of grief at her daughter Iphigenia’s death at the hands of her husband, and her jealousy over Cassandra (though she herself has spent years bedding Aegisthus). Clytemnestra can’t be blamed, though Aeschylus (a protector of the paternalistic state, rationalizing its institutions rather unconvincingly in the Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy) tries to blame her for overreaching her status as a woman in this Athenian culture (the play is set in Argos, but it is performed in the Greek capital, before Athenians). In a sense Clytemnestra acts with justice: she is redressing a balance.

But how does she go about redressing this balance, what is the nature of the violence she does to her husband? Interestingly, it is an entrapment in binding robes, a trap of the wrappings of the body and the self. Clytemnestra describes it in lines 1569-1587 of the Shapiro/Burian translation:

… I have been brooding for a long time
over this strife bred from an ancient feud,
and now at long last it’s come; and here I stand,
here where I cut him down, my aim achieved.
My aim was so exact – I won’t deny it –
that he could not outrun death, or fend it off
once I ensnared him in a deadly wealth
of robes, escapeless as a fishing net;
I struck him twice, and while he cried two cries,
his legs gave way. Then soon as he was down,
I struck him yet again, and the third stroke fell
as a votive offering for the Zeus
below the ground, the savior of the dead.
And so he fell, and panted his life away,
and breathing out a last sharp gale of blood
he drenched me in the dark red showering gore,
and I rejoiced in it, rejoiced no less
than all the plants rejoice in Zeus-given
rainfalls at the birthtime of the buds.

The murder is in two most sensual and sensuous motions: ensnarement and release, especially in the imagery of the gore that, in Clytemnestra’s description, becomes lifegiving rain upon the plants and flowers of the field (among which she places herself), rather than violent drainage of the red liquor that pulses through the living body, finally vomited through Agamemnon’s mouth – a terrible flood of blood on the lips, rather than the expected tender and passionate kiss. Agamemnon has every reason to believe that his bondage in that “deadly wealth of robes” would lead to tender homecoming affections from his consort; instead, she strikes with a violence that she has no reluctance in justifying to the chorus as meet retribution for the violence of the past.

Always, in the Oresteia, there is a question as to whether any of the violence of the past and present was escapable. Iphigenia’s sacrifice was the fulfillment of a god’s demand, an echo of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, but at the last minute God stayed Abraham’s hand. Iphigenia was not as lucky as Isaac; and once the violence at Aulis was accomplished, the Greek fleet could sail on to victory at Troy, as ordained by the gods.

Gods do not appear, however, in the Agamemnon; they aren’t personified on-stage, we see only the results of the burden of the past and the intentions of the gods. Unlike Abraham’s God, Greece’s gods remain silent. In the theater this burden is uniquely fleshed; Clytemnestra fleshes Agamemnon a second time, costuming him, before the knife penetrates, rather than the tender hand caresses, skin. Willing vulnerability is wrenchingly and horrifically betrayed by hatred, rather than recompensed with love. The terror of the image of Agamemnon’s death, intensely cried aloud in howls of deepest pain and fear that scream to us from off stage, lies in its intimacy, three violent wounds that emerge from expected pleasure of flesh on flesh. It is human, all-too-human. And it is the first indication of the terror, and the fantasized image of expectant desire cut short and destroyed by the bloodied wound, that penetrates to the core of the theatrical and human experience.

From the archives

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I am spending most of my reading and writing time these days with David E. Cartwright’s Schopenhauer: A Biography from Cambridge University Press, which I hope to write about here in the next few weeks. This is not a bad year for biography; it has also brought the paperback reprint of Michel Surya’s Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Given that both of these philosophers believed that true philosophy emerges from individual experience, rather than academic conceptual abstractions, they are, if not necessary to an understanding of their thought, not without considerable interest.

Cartwright’s book is 575 pages, Surya’s 33 more, so I may be forgiven light posting here for just a bit. In the meantime, from the archives, this 1 July 2009 entry regarding Modernism.

***

Being modern. However postmodernism may be defined, it is clearly considered by its theorists to be subsequent to the Modernist period at least in time. But more than that, it is a reaction (a progressive reaction, according to its enthusiasts) against the tenets of the Modernist movement, tenets that arose from the need for a radical individualism, mythic, tragic and urban, recognized from within the conditions existing in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sociologist Georg Simmel noted, “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” It also self-consciously married form to content, and, through this metaphor, individual body to spirit, as inseparable. While Modernism suffered its greatest challenges through the two world wars of the early twentieth century, these wars also lent validity to Modernism’s central assumptions: that the comprehensive worldview offered by the Enlightenment could not forestall catastrophe, a conclusion that the Modernists had suspected for years. In response the postmodern mind turned from this conclusion and posited the body (shorn of spirit, which was either non-existent or as irrelevant as a personal god) as merely another image in a world of mass-produced images: postmodernism as a cowardly escape, howevermuch fun it might be. Here the individual was a mere construct of social forces and the images that surrounded him, lacking autonomy and discouraging imagination. The self and the art product was a culturally-produced palimpsest, nothing more nor less. In this sense postmodernism exhibited an even more dulling pessimism than it charged Modernism with: the “nothing to be done” that kept Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, for if the individual was a mere construct, why not surrender to the Culture Industry and the institutions comprising it? (Beckett himself did “do something,” writing plays, prose and poetry that examined and critiqued this condition.)

Though Modernism as a literary movement may be considered anachronistic, it is not for that reason invalid, and it may continue to give courage. In the theatre, some are seizing the Modernist perspective again in response to the postmodern mashup, the latter relevant to culture perhaps but irrelevant to the autonomous self, a warm and comforting blanket in which to wrap fear and trembling. At next week’s Howard Barker conference in Wales, Elisabeth Angel-Perez’s keynote speech is titled “Reinventing Grand Narratives: Barker’s Challenge to Postmodernism,” intimating that the broad historical and philosophical canvases of the Modernist project continue to be an antagonistic response to postmodernism. This is not to suggest that Barker considers himself a Modernist; this I don’t know; but his favorite philosopher, Theodor Adorno, has the reputation of defending Modernism against the encroachment of the postmodernist Culture Industry. A Modernist theatre may partake of the formal explosions of musical modernists Schoenberg and Webern early in the twentieth century. In 1938, Adorno wrote, “The terror which Schoenberg and Webern spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing. They are called individualists, and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers which destroy individuality – powers whose ‘formless shadows’ fall gigantically on their music. In music, too, [and just as much in contemporary theatre – GH] collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.” This was prior to Hiroshima and Auschwitz, which still loomed as formless shadows over Asia, Europe and the modern world. The world remains just as modern.