1. Revision lecture
EN302: European Theatre

2. European Theatre Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre:
‘For centuries a paradigm has dominated European theatre that clearly distinguishes it from non-European theatre traditions. For example, Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. Bertolt Brecht chose the term ‘dramatic theatre’ to designate the tradition that his epic ‘theatre of the scientific age’ intended to put an end to. In a more comprehensive sense (and also including the majority of Brecht’s own work), however, this term can be used to designate the core of European theatre tradition in modern times. (2006: 21)

3. Plot Aristotle’s hamartia, anagnorisis, and peripeteia
Aristotle described structure as the ‘most important of all’ dramatic elements:
‘A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.’
Importance of causality (Oresteia, Miss Julie, Galileo)

4. Recognition Pursuit of ‘truth’ in Oedipus: ‘Seeing’ and Teiresias
‘light’ (p. 187), ‘stubborn’ (p. 188), ‘terror’ (p. 196), ‘both parent and murderer’ (p. 201), ‘no comfort’ (p. 202)
‘Seeing’ and Teiresias
Think about the endings of, for example, The Spanish Tragedy, Phèdre, Yerma, or The Skriker.
Catharsis:
‘…the bringing about of affective recognition and solidarity by means of the drama and the affects represented and transmitted to the audience within its frame’ (Lehmann 2006: 21).

5. Virtue
‘Playwright’ was synonymous with ‘teacher’ in Ancient Greek (didaskalos).
In his Preface to Phèdre, Racine described classical tragedy as ‘a school in which virtue was taught not less well than in the schools of the philosophers’:
It would be greatly to be desired that modern writings were as sound and full of useful precepts as the works of these poets. This might perhaps provide a means of reconciling to tragedy a host of people famous for their piety and their doctrine who have recently condemned it and who would no doubt pass a more favourable judgement on it if writers were as keen to edify their spectators as to amuse them, thereby complying with the real purpose of tragedy.
Racine’s view of tragedy is founded upon reason, decorum and moral utility.

6. Virtue Aristotle on comedy: Henri Bergson (‘Laughter’, 1900):
‘Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type, - not, however, in the full sense of the word bad; for the ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. It may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain.’
Henri Bergson (‘Laughter’, 1900):
‘Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is really and truly a kind of social “ragging”. … In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently correct our neighbour.’ (1900: 148)
Moral of Tartuffe:
‘Learn to distinguish between virtue, / Real and feigned.’ (p. 72)

7. Virtue
Molière’s ‘Preface’ to Tartuffe (23 March 1669) describes the play as ‘a skilful poem which, by agreeable lessons, reprimands men’s defects’:
‘If the mission of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I fail to see why some should be privileged. In the State, this one is of an importance much more dangerous than all the others; and we have seen that the theatre is a great force for correction.’
‘It is a great blow to vice to expose it to everyone’s laughter. We can easily stand being reprehended, but we cannot stand being mocked. We are willing to be wicked, but we will not be ridiculous.’

8. Imitation Mimesis contrasted with diegesis in classical thought
Central to the project of Naturalism
Role of symbolism (Hedda Gabler, Spring Awakening, Yerma)
Both Zola and Brecht proposed a ‘theatre for the scientific age’ – what did this mean in each case?
Impact of photography? Film? TV? Internet?

9. Drama and agency
Do dramatic characters have agency, or are they driven by unseen forces?
Conflict between gods in classical tragedy;
Revenge / classical gods / Christian God in The Spanish Tragedy;
God-as-audience and power of prophecy vs. freedom to ‘overcome the stars’ (p. 36) in Life Is A Dream;
Gods and guilt in Phèdre:
‘Heaven lit in my heart an ill-omened fire’ (p. 213);
‘I know my baseness, and do not belong / To those bold wretches who with brazen front / Can revel in their crimes unblushingly.’ (p. 184).
Determinism and entrapment: society, heredity, physiology and psychology in Naturalism and beyond.

10. Drama and agency
Zola published his manifesto on this subject in 1881, in an essay titled ‘Naturalism on the Stage’.
He claimed to be reflecting the scientific and rational spirit of the age in which he lived; ‘the impulse of the century,’ he argued, ‘is toward naturalism’ (1881: 5):
‘I am waiting for someone to put a man of flesh and bones on the stage, taken from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie. … I am waiting for environment to determine the characters and the characters to act according to the logic of facts combined with logic of their own disposition. … I am waiting, finally, until the development of naturalism already achieved in the novel takes over the stage, until the playwrights return to the source of science and modem arts, to the study of nature, to the anatomy of man. (1881: 6)

11. Conflict Agon / thesis and antithesis:
Antigone and Creon are forced to choose between family and state.
Pentheus must choose between order and chaos: ‘When I come out, I’ll either be fighting, or I’ll put myself in your hands.’ (p. 405)
Phèdre is torn between passion and reason. Her mother and father symbolise two different drives: sexuality and moral judgement. ‘Reason reigns no longer over me… I have lost my self-dominion’ (p ).
Melchior is offered an ambiguous choice at the end of Spring Awakening; in choosing the Masked Man, perhaps he makes the opposite choice to the ones made by the protagonists at the ends of both Hedda Gabler and Yerma.

12. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy
“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” (Part VI)
“Every Tragedy […] must have six parts, which parts determine its quality – namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. …most important of all is the structure of the incidents.” (Part VI)

13. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy
Aristotle valued a “structural union of the parts […] such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed” (Part VIII).
“Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.” (Part IX)
“… the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy – Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes [Anagnorisis] – are parts of the plot.” (Part VI)

14. Modern tragedy
Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy (1966) analyses some of the ways in which various modern plays might be conceived as having adapted the conventions of classical tragedy.
Williams defines tragedy as ‘the conflict between an individual and the forces that destroy him’ (2006: 113).

15. Liberal Tragedy
For example, Williams describes Ibsen’s drama as ‘Liberal Tragedy’:
‘…the hero defies an opposing world, full of lies and compromises and dead positions, only to find, as he struggles against it, that as a man he belongs to this world, and has its destructive inheritance in himself.’ (2006: 124)
In this view, society is at fault: it is seen as false and oppressive, a trap from which it is impossible to escape.

16. Oppressive environment Judge Brack’s ‘leverage’
Liberal Tragedy
General Gabler’s memory
Regional location
Oppressive environment
Social class /
expectations
HEDDA
GABLER
Tesman /
identity as ‘wife’
Judge Brack’s ‘leverage’
Threat of scandal
Intellectual boredom
Impending motherhood
Patriarchy

17. Private Tragedy
Strindberg’s drama, on the other hand, belongs to a category that Williams calls ‘Private Tragedy’, a form which ‘begins with bare and unaccommodated man’:
‘All primary energy is centred in this isolated creature, who desires and eats and fights alone. Society is at best an arbitrary institution, to prevent this horde of creatures destroying each other. And when these isolated persons meet, in what are called relationships, their exchanges are forms of struggle, inevitably. Tragedy, in this view, is inherent.’ (2006: 133)
The association between love and destruction is ‘so deep that it is not, as the liberal writers [like Ibsen] assumed, the product of a particular history: it is, rather, general and natural, in all relationships.’ (2006: 134)

18. Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.
Private Tragedy
Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.
Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.
MISS JULIE
JEAN
CHRISTINE
Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.

19. Private Tragedy
Jean’s heredity, body, psyche, etc. (suggests Strindberg) are better equipped for survival… or are they?
JEAN
MISS JULIE

20. Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
Williams describes the ‘deadlock’ of liberal tragedy:
The hero ‘sees what has to be done, and tries to do it. He is left to struggle alone, is misunderstood and is broken. He also breaks others, in his own fall.’ (2006: 172)
He argues that this deadlock, ‘familiar to us from Ibsen’, is ‘transformed by Chekhov into a new condition: that of stalemate’:
‘In a deadlock, there is still effort and struggle, but no possibility of winning: the wrestler with life dies as he gives his last strength. In a stalemate, there is no possibility of movement or even the effort at movement; every willed action is self-cancelling.’ (2006: 172)
Williams on Three Sisters: ‘The breakdown of meaning is now so complete that even the aspiration to meaning seems comic.’ (2006: 174)

21. Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that’s a good one!
HAMM: I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at! (Beckett, p. 108)

22. Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
Peter Brook on Beckett:
‘Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn. …When we attack Beckett for pessimism it is we who are the Beckett characters trapped in a Beckett scene. When we accept Beckett’s statement as it is, then suddenly all is transformed. There is after all quite another audience, Beckett’s audience; those in every country who do not set up intellectual barriers, who do not try too hard to analyse the message. This audience laughs and cries out – and in the end celebrates with Beckett; this audience leaves his plays, his black plays, nourished and enriched, with a lighter heart, full of a strange irrational joy.’ (1990: 66)

23. Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’
We ask you expressly to discover
That what happens all the time is not natural.
For to say that something is natural
In such times of bloody confusion
Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness
Of inhuman humanity is to
Regard it as unchangeable. (The Exception and the Rule, p. 37)
‘For art to be “un-political” means only to ally itself with the “ruling” group.’ (1977: 196).

24. Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’
As Brecht argued in his Short Organum for the Theatre:
The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium). … Shakespeare’s great solitary figures, bearing on their breast the star of their fate, carry through with irresistible force their futile and deadly outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death, becomes obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond criticism. (1977: 189)

25. Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’
According to Brecht, it was the role of the theatre to debunk such notions. As ‘the Philosopher’, Brecht’s spokesperson in The Messingkauf Dialogues, puts it:
the philosopher. The causes of a lot of tragedies lie outside the power of those who suffer them, so it seems.
the dramaturg. So it seems?
the philosopher. Of course it only seems. Nothing human can possibly lie outside the powers of humanity, and such tragedies have human causes. (Brecht 1965: 32)

26. Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’
‘The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable – That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.’
‘The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’ (1977: 71)

27. Playing with form
SKRIKER. … May day, she cries, may pole axed me to help her. So I spin the sheaves shoves shivers into golden guild and geld and if she can’t guessing game and safety match my name then I’ll take her no miss no me no. Is it William Gwylliam Guillaume? Is it John Jack the ladder in your stocking is it Joke? Is it Alexander Sandro Andrew Drewsteignton? Mephistopheles Toffeenose Tiffany’s Timpany Timothy Mossycoat? No ’t ain’t, says I, no tainted meat me after the show me what you’ve got. (Churchill, p. 9)

28. Playing with form Mary Luckhurst:
‘Attempts on her Life … matches Beckett in its interrogation of theatre as a practice, and drives Brechtian concepts of alienation to an extreme.’ (2003: 59)
Interestingly, Martin Crimp once named Caryl Churchill as his favourite living playwright – in part, for her recognition of the ‘playfulness of play’ (‘The Playwright’s Playwright’, Guardian, 21 September 1998).

29. Drama and postmodernism
Some of the plays we studied towards the end of the module might be read as being radically sceptical of drama’s ability to ‘tell the truth’ about the world.
Note the epigraph to Attempts on Her Life, from postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard:
‘No one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them.’ (p. 198)

30. Drama and postmodernism
Scenario 11, ‘Untitled (100 Words)’, is often misinterpreted as Crimp’s explanation of how to read his play:
‘With respect to you I think she’d find the whole concept of ‘making a point’ ludicrously outmoded. If any point is being made at all it’s surely the point that the point that’s being made is not the point and never has in fact been the point. It’s surely the point that the search for a point is pointless and that the whole point of the exercise – i.e. these attempts on her own life – points to that.’ (p )

31. Drama and postmodernism
Are we meant to agree on the critic’s definition of our own context?
‘… the context of a post-radical, of a post-human world where the gestures of radicalism take on new meaning in a society where the radical gesture is simply one more form of entertainment i.e. one more product – in this case an artwork – to be consumed.’ (p. 256)
Paul Taylor seemed to think so, asking: ‘Is it, for all its extraordinary flights of eloquent writing, a play that is just cleverly knowing and darkly comic about its own ingenious futility?’ (Independent, 14 March 1997)
Is this right? Is Crimp, as he has described himself, ‘anti-ideological’?
How do playwrights like Beckett and Churchill compare?

32. Postdramatic theatre
The absence of dramatic characters in Attempts on her Life means there is no ‘agon’ in the traditional sense – but we do hear conflict in the simultaneous construction of competing narratives.
The absence of plot allows Crimp to avoid making any assertions about causality (though he certainly plays with ideas about what has ‘caused’ Anne’s reported actions).

33. Stop press!
Some forthcoming adaptations of course texts you might be interested in:
Michael Mayer’s screen adaptation of The Seagull will open in cinemas on 11 May
Musical Theatre Warwick’s Spring Awakening, Wed 16 – Sat 19 May 2018
Rambert’s Life is a Dream, Sadler’s Wells, London, Tue 22 – Sat 26 May 2018
Polly Stenham’s Julie, an adaptation of Miss Julie, opens at the National Theatre, London, on 31 May

34. References
Brecht, Bertolt (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willett, Chatham: W. & J. Mackay & Co.
Brecht, Bertolt (1977) Brecht on Theatre, trans. J. Willett, London: Eyre Methuen
Brook, Peter (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Abingdon: Routledge.
Luckhurst, Mary (2003) ‘Political Point-Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13:1,
Strindberg, August (1888) ‘Preface to Miss Julie’, in Meyer, M. [trans.] (2000) Strindberg, Plays: One, London: Methuen Drama, pp
Williams, Raymond (2006) Modern Tragedy, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
Zola, Emile (1881) ‘Naturalism on the Stage’, in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001) Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper Square Press, pp