Category Archives: Australian drama

Art matters

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Following the Adornonian nightmare that emerged on the Guardian theatre blog earlier this week, it is something of a pleasure to read Alison Croggon’s “A matter of art,” an essay-cum-report on two recent speeches by Australian artists at her Theatre Notes blog. In the midst of another Australian election cycle (and these days election cycles everywhere seem endless), Alison considers the place of language itself in relating artistic expression to culture, marks the territory of the status of art’s discourse in post-capitalism, and questions whether or not there is any more a place in the culture industry for considerations of art in the public sphere:

[Bill] Henson’s lecture was mostly reported as an unapologetic speech that merely defended his right to photograph nude children. [Jonathan] Mills’s lecture fared rather better: it was run in full in the SMH and the Age printed an edited extract. Yet I don’t know how these important assertions of meaning will resonate, how they can be translated meaningfully to those who most need to hear. I don’t know how they will mitigate the wider hostility to art that exists in Australia, a hostility motivated by fear and ignorance, and fanned by the attack dogs and the plain apathy of both the right and the left. The very utilitarian language criticised by both Henson and Mills makes it impossible to communicate widely the substance of what they say.

There is much here to argue with: I’m not sure that what Henson and Mills are suggesting is only another form of political and ideological instrumentalism for art, one that suits their own cultural uses for aesthetics, especially when it comes to education and social discourse. I have sympathy for Mills’ attempt to replace the word “multiculturalism” with “cosmopolitanism” in social discourse, but worry that this is just the replacement of one label with another (and labels are what social discourse appears to be all about in an age of identity politics, which invariably seems to lead to facile over-simplification and aggressive rhetoric).  Mills quotes sociologist Ulrich Bech on the word: “Cosmopolitanism, then, absolutely does not mean uniformity or homogenisation. Individuals, groups, communities, political organisations, cultures and civilisations wish to and should remain diverse, perhaps even unique. But to put it metaphorically: the walls between them must be replaced by bridges.” But then, if art is to become another means of bridge building, how different from this is Rena De Sisto’s note that art should be the “foundation of cultural understanding and tolerance to progress towards solutions”? If it’s a question of language it’s not enough to say that Bech and Mills are sincere, and De Sisto a corporate shill, both of which anyway imply several assumptions about the speakers themselves that may or may not be valid. Good intentions may be necessary, but they are clearly not sufficient. And the road to hell, which is seeing many traffic jams these days, is always in need of repaving.

Alison’s essay is a lengthy but provocative piece, the kind of arts journalism that may contribute to the dialogue and broader range of discourse that she advocates: but given the nature of contemporary journalism and criticism about theatre in the culture industry — which largely consists of short reviews, snarky gossip, superficial interviews and occasional essays that give off the embarrassing scent of small minds trying to think big ideas — that remains to be seen. For now, though, thought-provoking and elegant weekend reading.

The Last Room in the World: Notes on Daniel Keene

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Something disastrous has already happened before any of Daniel Keene’s plays has begun: a stonecutter has been laid off, a workman has fallen from a great height and died, nuclear war has run its course. The eight plays collected in Terminus and Other Plays, then, are meditations on how to survive, how to think and how to find redemption in a world not merely fallen but, in some sense, already destroyed. They’re spare and lyrical plays, profoundly moral in the ambivalent, shifting conclusions about personal responsibility, even in the face of a burning, charred landscape, that they reach.

These are plays meant just as much for the page as for the stage. In texts like Scissors, Paper, Rock, in which a stonecutter and his family must contend with a sense of purposelessness and emptiness that unemployment has thrust upon them, character assignments to individual lines are not identified so that the reader has to make his own way through the bleak but affecting language of the text (much as the spectator would need to find meaning in this same language and the stage pictures they suggest); some of the monologues in the book work just as well as poems as they do as drama. This attention to the everyday language of the workers and drifters on the margins of society draws them linguistically to the center of Keene’s experience of the world, for so many of these plays have to do with basic human relationships: man and woman, parent and child, family (perhaps most importantly). The relationships, like the language, are elemental, set in landscapes that have been stripped of traditional cultural anchors like work, art, media, church and community.

There are exceptions: these are also politically-aware, violent works. The highly stylized monologue The Fire Testament is the story of a bloodied destroyed body wandering through a burning landscape littered with death, in search of other living survivors, and Terminus itself begins with the senseless strangulation of a young boy on a train. There is a sense in which this guilt cannot be expiated, and the struggle becomes that of internalizing this guilt in the individual, so that the generations who come after will be untouched by it. Keene doesn’t offer any suggestion that this is even possible, and indeed perhaps the only major fault of these plays is that we fail to see by what means the innocent child becomes the guilty adult; is it that we grow into the evil that we each carry within us? Do we inevitably teach evil to the young despite our desperate attempts not to? Is the question ultimately unanswerable?

Of the plays in this volume I find the most recent work the most affecting: Scissors, Paper, Rock, the extended father-son dialogue River and The Fire Testament. Terminus, with its contemporary, homeless, wandering Richard III spreading death and evil through a countryside, partakes a little too much of Woyzeck‘s sensationalism, perhaps, to match the evocative spareness of these later plays, though is still highly effective for all that.

Keene’s work is better known in his native Australia and in Europe than here in the US; let’s hope this changes, and that a daring company will soon take up perhaps a pair of monologues or another of these haunting contemporary tragedies; although his work has been done in New York, it should be done more. Companies looking for politically-aware but linguistically imaginative work are especially directed to these plays. Keene’s essay on theater, “An empty church,” appeared in the second issue of Masthead.