Category Archives: European drama

Books: “The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights”

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Before I retire to matters extra-theatrical and non-dramatic, a little unfinished business to be completed. I note the new publication of The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, published by Methuen late last year and edited by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz. Its 520 pages detail the work of 25 dramatists who emerged in the first decade of the 21st century, complete with a gang-written introduction by the editors which places these playwrights and their plays in an aesthetic, political, and cultural context ranging over the last thirty years of world history. The individual chapters on the playwrights themselves are written by a variety of international critics, and include a biographical headnote, an analysis of the playwrights’ major and significant minor plays, and finally a discussion of the plays’ more general characteristics and (as the back-cover copy has it) “their place in the discourses of British theatre.” Avoiding the panegyric, samples of negative reviews are included for most of these writers.

The 25 writers profiled range across the ethnic, social, and gender spectrum, and include writers like debbie tucker green, Tanika Gupta, and Kwame Kwei-Armah; critics include Sierz (on Jez Butterworth), Graham Saunders (on David Eldridge), Ken Urban (on Sarah Kane), Caridad Svich (on Mark Ravenhill), and Dan Rebellato (on Philip Ridley). As to be expected, these individual entries are a mixed bag, though always quite useful. Martin Middeke’s essay on Martin Crimp, for example, is a bit jargon-thick, perhaps inevitable in the profile of a writer fond of postmodernist form. The critics also provide important lists of both primary and secondary texts, however, making this volume an essential contribution to the assessment of European drama.

Such a volume (along with its unofficial companion, The Methuen Drama Book of 21st Century British Plays), published by a major commercial publisher which also publishes collections by many of the playwrights mentioned in the guide, remains indicative of the centrality of the arts of drama and theatre to British culture. These publications come in the wake of two other recent books about drama for the general reader — Sierz’ Rewriting the Nation and Michael Billington’s State of the Nation (this latter published by the commercial U.K. house Faber & Faber, which also maintains an extensive backlist of plays and books of drama criticism) — that take more critical and idiosyncratic views of the landscape.

Needless to say, hundreds of new U.S. dramatists emerged in the first decade of the 21st century as well. But here the possibilities for the discussion of this work via publishing are dimmer. We’ve got no similar volumes about new American dramatic writing from Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, or David Cote from U.S. publishers; I frankly doubt it’s a matter of time, for while these three are busy working journalists and reviewers, so are Billington and Sierz. Commercial U.S. publishers have not published critical work or anthologies like this for years — likely because there is no demand for it. Which underscores the marginality of the drama and theatre to a U.S. culture which has no deeply-rooted concern for the art. While smaller and university publishers continue to publish criticism and new plays, these do not have the reach or resources of major U.S. publishing houses, and remain, as they say, “niche” outlets.

It is something of a shame, because at the situation’s heart is an interesting question: could this new American work itself sustain such assiduous critical inquiry, or would it collapse under the weight of deeper examination? At least some U.S. dramatists are worthy of such treatment: Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, John Jesurun, Theresa Rebeck, Neil LaBute, and Thomas Bradshaw come to mind after only five minutes of thought. First reviews tell only part of the story; if the short newspaper or magazine review is the first draft of cultural history, volumes like the Methuen collection of essays or Sierz’ and Billington’s books are the second, enjoying the additional value of some critical distance from the plays’ original productions and the placement of these plays in a wider aesthetic and political context. And certainly The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights whets the palate for the plays under discussion. The book delightfully informs, instructs, and contemplates the plays themselves: you want to see them, or at least read them (the more likely and convenient option for the American reader). Lacking similar volumes about the U.S. scene, American drama and theatre remain off to one side, and underexamined.

The ascetic aesthetic

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Where philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the chord that opens Tristan und Isolde. It is not therefore a philologist who properly “corrects,” if that is the appropriate word, a philosophy which reaches its furthermost end, but a musician.

In this, the most Schopenhauerian of operas, Wagner repurposes eros as a means to renunciation and repudiation of the world as a means to experience the thing-in-itself, that which lies beyond the world. Below, a post from last June, in which I discuss a few associated issues. It has been slightly revised.

At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity.[1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman.[2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive.[3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

Footnotes
  1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

Samuel Beckett’s “The Vulture”

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dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:

As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)

Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:

The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)

Video: Blok/Eko

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Howard Barker’s Blok/Eko, produced last summer by the Wrestling School at the Exeter Northcott Theatre and directed by the author, “is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world.” The story:

Eko, an aging despot, seemingly on a whim, liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation — in the form of song — is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work.

Below is a short sample of the production’s visual and linguistic imagination. The text itself is available from Oberon Books here; the Wrestling School’s archival page for the production is available here. You can also read my review of Barker’s memoir A Style and Its Origins, as well as an overview of Barker’s career as seen through the perspective of critic David Ian Rabey.

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

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Vaclav Havel.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. …

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Vaclav Havel
“The Power of the Powerless” (1978)

W.L. Webb’s obituary in the Guardian is here.