Post-Colonial Drama

Theory, Practice, Politics

Helen Gilbert, Joanne Tompkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134876990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Post-Colonial Drama is the first full-length study to address the ways in which performance has been instrumental in resisting the continuing effects of imperialism. It brings to bear the latest theoretical approaches from post-colonial and performance studies to a range of plays from Australia, Africa, Canada, New Zealand, the Caribbean and other former colonial regions. Some of the major topics discussed in Post-Colonial Drama include:
* the interactions of post-colonial and performance theories
* the post-colonial re-stagings of language and history
* the specific enactments of ritual and carnival
* the theatrical citations of the post-colonial body
Post-Colonial Drama combines a rich intersection of theoretical approaches with close attention to a wide range of performance texts.

1
RE-CITING THE CLASSICS: CANONICAL COUNTER-DISCOURSE

CONSTANCE: Have you known God to be called Shakespeare?

DESDEMONA: Shake Spear? He might be a pagan god of war.

(Ann-Marie MacDonald, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990:36))

____________________

COUNTER-DISCOURSE AND THE CANON

For generations during (and often after) imperial rule, the formal education of colonial subjects was circumscribed by the concerns and canons of a distant European centre. Because of its supposed humanistic functions, ‘English Literature’ occupied a privileged position in the colonial classroom, where its study was designed to ‘civilise’ native students by inculcating in them British tastes and values, regardless of the exigencies of the local context. ¹ Accordingly, William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, was taught to uncomprehending West Indians, Kenyans, and Indians who had never seen a daffodil. George Ryga takes up this particular example in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967)² when the native Canadian girl, Rita Joe, cannot remember the poetry from her teacher’s syllabus. The lines the teacher quotes and expects to hear in echo blur into meaninglessness as the poetry and social studies lessons intermingle when Rita Joe perceives the teacher to order, ‘Say after me! “I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills…when all at once I saw a crowd… a melting pot”’ (1971:90). This outdated and ethnocentric model of literary education was abolished several decades ago in most former colonies around the world where educational systems now strive to reflect local histories and cultures. The hegemony of the imperial canon is, nevertheless, still in evidence in many postcolonial societies, as manifest not only in the choice of curricula material and the relative worth assigned to European texts but also through the ways in which such texts are taught—usually without serious consideration of their ideological biases.

Given the legacy of a colonialist education which perpetuates, through literature, very specific socio-cultural values in the guise of universal truth, it is not surprising that a prominent endeavour among colonised writers/artists has been to rework the European ‘classics’ in order to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity. Helen Tiffin terms this project ‘canonical counter-discourse’ (1987a:22), a process whereby the post-colonial writer unveils and dismantles the basic assumptions of a specific canonical text by developing a ‘counter’ text that preserves many of the identifying signifiers of the original while altering, often allegorically, its structures of power. The staging of the ‘intact’ canonical play offers one kind of counter-discourse which might, through a revisionist performance, articulate tensions between the Anglo script and its localised enunciation. Rewriting the characters, the narrative, the context, and/or the genre of the canonical script provides another means of interrogating the cultural legacy of imperialism and offers renewed opportunities for performative intervention. These are not, however, strategies of replacement: there is no attempt to merely substitute a canonical text with its oppositional reworking. Counter-discourse seeks to deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text, to release its stranglehold on representation and, by implication, to intervene in social conditioning. This chapter addresses various forms of canonical counter-discourse in post-colonial theatre and outlines the ways in which performance itself can be counter-discursive.

Not all texts that refer to canonical models are counterdiscursive. Intertextuality-where one text makes explicit or implicit reference to other texts or textual systems—does not necessarily entail a rewriting project. While all counter-discourse is intertextual, not all intertextuality is counter-discursive. By definition, counterdiscourse actively works to destabilise the power structures of the originary text rather than simply to acknowledge its influence. Such discourse tends to target imposed canonical traditions rather than pre-existing master narratives which ‘belong’ to the colonised culture. Hence, when Vijay Mishra comments that ‘we may indeed claim that all Indian literary, filmic and theatrical texts endlessly rewrite The Mahabharata’ (1991:195), he is using ‘rewriting’ less as a marker of counter-discourse than of intertextuality: all other narratives in India have as context and influence The Mahabharata but the master text itself is not particularly targeted for strategic reform. A specific example of this kind of rewriting occurs in Stella Kon’s The Bridge (1980) which is self-consciously shaped by another influential Indian epic, The Ramayana. Kon’s Singaporean drama, with its additional intertextual references to Peter Weiss’s Marat/ Sade, uses The Ramayana as a play-within-a-play for the patients of a Help Service Centre who are trying to overcome drug dependence. Kon maintains the traditional (pre-contact) structures of the epic, dramatising it as part of the contemporary play so that the two levels of narrative can comment on each other. Excerpts from The Ramayana, in which Rama searches for the kidnapped Sita who has been captured by a demon, are performed in full traditional costume and music, as Rama ‘mimes hunting, with stylised dance movements’ (1981:7) while the Cantor sings the story for the boys who watch on stage; the audience, meanwhile, watches both sets of action. As the boys succeed in beating their drug habits, they are allowed to participate in the building of a human bridge that will enable Rama to cross the sea to rescue Sita. Thus The Bridge’s use of The Ramayana facilitates a greater (contemporary) understanding of the epic and elicits its continued relevance to the society as a dramatic archive and a point of cultural reference. The play holds up to question not only the western preference for naturalism as the dominant theatrical mode but also the hegemony of positivist approaches to rehabilitation and social control. The post-coloniality of The Bridge and many other works that employ The Ramayana or The Mahabharata rests not on a rewriting of the originary narrative but on the juxtaposition of a local ‘classic’ to its imperial counterpart, a tactic that avoids the reifying inscription of European texts and their performance conventions. While this demonstrates the need to differentiate between the influence of imposed and inherited canons, it is also important to recognise that some traditional narratives simultaneously work in ways that uphold the imperial agenda because of class, caste, race, and/or gender bias.

Some plays simply contemporise classical texts and therefore fail to fit the definition of canonical counter-discourse. Two examples of contemporary versions of Euripides’ The Bacchae include Mr. O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party (1968) by the New Zealand poet and playwright, James K.Baxter, and A Refined Look at Existence (1966) by the Australian, Rodney Milgate. Both these plays localise the temporal and spatial setting of Euripides’ drama, but their updating of the plot overshadows any attempt to decentre imperial hegemonies; rather, these two texts merely make the British Empire more accessible to the former colonies in the twentieth century. Although Milgate casts Pentheus as an Aborigine, he misses a significant opportunity to use him to centralise the issue of race relations in Australian society of the 1960s. Instead, the portrayal of ‘Penthouse’, the Aboriginal Pentheus, becomes racist, and ‘Donny’s’ (Dionysus’) attempts to seek revenge on his family reveal a protagonist even more self-absorbed than Euripides’ original. Similarly, Baxter’s play, which focuses on boredom in a number of 1960s marriages in Remuera, New Zealand, is not a strategic postcolonial reworking of a canonical text but merely a somewhat misogynist updating. As contemporary versions of a Greek play with Australian and New Zealand reference points, A Refined Look at Existence and Mr. O’Dwyer’s Dancing Party are only moderately successful, and certainly dated.

Those plays which do articulate oppositional reworkings of the European canon almost always incorporate performative elements as part of their anti-imperial arsenal. As a genre, drama is particularly suited to counter-discursive intervention and equally useful for its expression, since performance itself replays an originary moment. In other words, the rehearsal/production of a play is a continued reacting—which may or may not be interventionary—of and to an originary script. Thus counter-discourse is always possible in the theatrical presentation of a canonical text, and even expected in some cases: for instance, it is rare to see a contemporary production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest that does not refigure Caliban in ways which demonstrate how the racial paradigms characteristic of Renaissance thought are no longer acceptable to most late twentieth-century audiences, especially in non-western societies. The numerous layers of meaning and coded information that a performance communicates (information which cannot be expressed in the same way by fiction or poetry) are each themselves, singly or combined with others, capable of acting counter-discursively. Among these semiotic codes are costume, set design, theatre design (or the design of the space co-opted as a theatre), lighting, music, choreography, verbal and gestural languages (including accent and inflection), casting choices, and a number of extra-textual factors such as historical contexts, how the stars are billed, and the economics of ticket prices. ³ Hence the staging of a scene, for example, or the costuming of a character can immediately provide additional layers of signification that call the assumptions of the canonical text into question, whether by subverting its usual codes, as in parody, or by appropriating those representational signs normally reserved for the dominant group/ culture. Even in the face of fixed dialogue and/or plot closure, manipulation of a play’s performative codes and contexts can productively shift the power structures that seem predetermined in the originary script.

SHAKESPEARE’S LEGACY

Among the many post-colonial reworkings of canonical texts, Shakespeare’s plays figure prominently as targets of counterdiscourse. The circulation of ‘Shakespeare’s Books’ within educational and cultural spheres has been a powerful hegemonic force throughout the history of the British Empire,⁴ and is one which continues to operate in virtually all former colonies of England. In India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the West Indies, Shakespeare was for generations the most popular playwright, indeed the only playwright deemed worthy of attention. The Shakespeare ‘industry’—as it impacts on the educational systems, the critical discourses, and the theatrical culture of a society—often operates in ways that sustain ideas, values, and even epistemologies which are foreign to the receivers and therefore of limited relevance, except in maintaining the interests of imperialism. As Jyotsna Singh has argued in reference to India, ‘Shakespeare kept alive the myth of English cultural refinement and superiority—a myth that was crucial to the rulers’s [sic] political interests’ (1989:446).⁵ Martin Orkin points to a similar situation in South Africa:

Students have been and still are taught Shakespeare and examined on him in ways that entail the assumption of an idealised past; the focus is upon character and interiority, obsession with the ‘timeless’ and the transcendental, all of which, it may be argued, encourage in students a particular view of the subject and attitudes of withdrawal and submission to existing hierarchies.

(1991:240)

Shakespeare, then, becomes complicit in justifying apartheid. Not just a symptom of imperialism in South Africa, such approaches to ‘The Bard’—whose nickname attests to his function as a cultural shibboleth—have been endemic everywhere that the Shakespeare myth has taken hold, affecting the critical examination of the man, the plays, and the performances.

Not surprisingly, the ideological weight of Shakespeare’s legacy is nowhere felt more strongly than in the theatre, where his work is still widely seen as the measure of all dramatic art, the ultimate test for the would-be actor or director, the mark of audience sophistication, and the uncontested sign of ‘Culture’ itself. Within this regulatory system, the meaning of any particular Shakespearian play tends to be fixed so that non-canonical productions are even today criticised for not being true to ‘authorial intent’. In 1992, for example, the Australian-based Bell Shakespeare Company lost school bookings after receiving several negative reviews for its frank portrayal of homosexuality in The Merchant of Venice. The homophobia expressed by such responses is only part of the discomfort with a production judged, apparently, to misread Shakespeare. The tendency to deem Shakespeare’s worth ‘selfevident’ and his application ‘universal’ not only naturalises a particular Eurocentric (and patriarchal) world view but also paralyses the development of local theatrical traditions. The Australian critic, Penny Gay, alludes to this problem when she asks the rhetorical question: ‘How can one aspire to write plays when Shakespeare has already, incontrovertibly, written the greatest dramas in the English language?’ (1992:204). For the post-colonial dramatist/critic, this is a politically charged question because the ‘univocal and monolithic significance’ of Shakespeare (Campbell 1993:2) perpetuates notions of a theatre which is always already constituted within imperial epistemology, and thus closed to other(ed) knowledges. Decolonising that theatre must involve the reopening of such closures and the dismantling of Shakespeare as a transcendental signifier for theatre practice and criticism alike.

The proliferation of the Shakespeare industry has had a major impact not only on the theatrical repertoires of colonised countries but also on approaches to acting, directing, and other aspects of performance. In theatre training, as in the colonial education system, pupils were until recently invariably exhorted to master ‘The Master’ in order to prove their talents.⁶This practice had significant implications for the (re)formation of the voice, stance, expressions, and gestures of the non-Anglo actor, especially in societies with strong indigenous performance cultures. As Tiffin argues in reference to school and public eisteddfod recitations, performative reproductions of the English script functioned to discipline the body of the colonial subject while suppressing signifiers of alterity:

The ‘local’ body was erased not just by script and performance, but by the necessary assumption on the part of both audience and performer that speakers and listeners were themselves ‘English’. Recitation performance is thus itself metonymic of the wider processes of colonialist interpellation, in the reproduction, at the colonial site, of the locally embodied yet paradoxically disembodied imperial ‘voice’, in a classic act of obedience.

(1993a:914)

As our reference to Ryga’s Rita Joe has already demonstrated, however, recitation also implies a gap between the canonical text and its distant reproduction. While this gap often becomes a site of subversion in performative counter-discourse, historically it has served to make the shortcomings of colonial theatre acutely visible. In particular, the use of Shakespeare as the gold standard of dramatic art was instrumental in constructing the inferiority of the non-European actor since his/her rendition of the Shakespearian text could never be ‘authentic’. As Homi Bhabha observes, ‘to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English’ (1984:128).

This shaping of the theatre practices of colonised countries according to an imposed foreign standard can be seen as one manifestation of what Gayatri Spivak has termed the ‘epistemic violence’ of imperialism: its attack on other cultures’ ways of knowing and representing themselves (1985:251). In attempting to redress the situation, post-colonial performance texts often violate the canon, setting up an agonistic encounter between local and received traditions. A case in point is the theatre of Utpal Dutt, the noted Bengali actor, director, and playwright who revolutionised theatrical approaches to Shakespeare in India during the 1950s. In an attempt to undermine both the elitism and the Anglocentrism associated with the Shakespearian theatre of the time, Dutt took translations of such plays as Macbeth to the rural masses, dispensing with the conventions of the proscenium stage and infusing his productions with the ritual traditions of jatra, the folk theatre of Bengal (see Bharucha 1983:61–3). By using Shakespearian texts in this manner, Dutt’s work presented a way not only of indigenising the imperial canon but also of disrupting its cultural clout.

A more pointed violation of canonical authority occurs in the Apotheosis scene of Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) where Shakespeare, along with other chief promulgators of white western culture, is tried and hanged for crimes against humanity. Despite the vehemence of this particular attack, however, Walcott is not suggesting that colonised cultures should never perform canonical texts. As he argues in his essay, ‘Meanings’, postcolonial performance praxis requires a fusion of influences to form a distinctive theatrical style which does not privilege the Eurocentric model—in his case, ‘a theatre where someone can do Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction’ (1973:306). Walcott’s later play, A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), which dramatises efforts to forge such a theatre in Trinidad, stages performers who are acutely aware of how they have been positioned by Shakespeare’s pervasive influence over dramatic representation. In preparing for a production of Antony and Cleopatra, Sheila, who is to play Cleopatra, feels unequal to the part because her skin is too dark to pass as Mediterranean. The ‘ambitious black woman’, she learns, has no place on Shakespeare’s stage, or at least not in the role of his great queen: ‘Caroni isn’t a branch of the river Nile, and Trinidad isn’t Egypt, except at Carnival, so the world sniggers when I speak her lines’ (1986:285). Although the relationship between Sheila and Chris (who plays Antony) develops in ways which rework the story of Shakespeare’s famous lovers, the real counter-discursivity of A Branch of the Blue Nile lies in its questioning of received performance conventions, a project enhanced by the use of multiple metatheatrical frameworks and an ongoing dialogue about the function of theatre in the society. Among the other group members, Gavin articulates most clearly the dilemma of the colonial actor who must validate his craft by mastering Shakespeare in a major metropolitan centre: ‘I went up there [New York] to be an actor and found out that I was a nigger, so I could have spared myself the airfare’ (ibid.: 249). As he has learnt only too well, the universality of theatre is a myth; its governing force is ‘economics, and economics means race’ (ibid.: 224). Eventually, the text fulfils Walcott’s formula for an indigenous theatre when the actors (with Marilyn having taken over Sheila’s role) present a comic new ‘dialectical’ version of Antony and Cleopatra by hybridising Shakespearian forms with local ones:

MARILYN/CLEOPATRA: ‘Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there, That kills and pains not?’

GAVIN/CLOWN: ‘Madam, I have him, but ’tain’t go be me who go ask you handle him, because one nip from this small fellow and basil is your husband; the little person will make the marriage, in poison and in person, but the brides who go to that bed don’t ever get up.’

(ibid.: 262)

This dialogue not only questions the presumed immortality of The Bard’s famous heroine but also goes some way towards the larger task of dismantling what the Indian critic, Leela Gandhi, has termed ‘the imperishability of Shakespeare’s empire’ (1993:81)....