Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage

In History’s Wings

Alexander Feldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415502184
• eBook ISBN: 9781136155000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: British Drama

This book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.

1 ‘We Want Our Revolution Now’

Peter Weiss, Gunter Grass, and the Theatre of Insurrection

INTRODUCTION

Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964) is one of the defining theatre works of the 1960s, exhibiting a ‘fashionable mixture of all the best theatrical ingredients around—Brechtian—didactic—absurdist—Theatre of Cruelty.’¹ Its stylistic hybridity has prompted critics and reviewers alike to deconstruct the play’s aesthetic tensions and attribute opposing elements of Weiss’s dramatic structure to the influences of the great twentieth-century innovators. Darko Suvin’s formulation of ‘the Weissian estrangement’ as ‘an Artaudian variant on Brecht’ introduces two names with which to conjure, and Norman James’s account of ‘the fusion of Brecht and Pirandello’ introduces a third.² Peter Weiss’s success in orchestrating the convergence of these dramaturgies, regardless of whether he conceived of his task in these terms or not, is a virtuoso achievement, and a strikingly original one, and the purpose of the analysis that follows is not to dispute such readings.³ Rather, it is to examine the play’s design as the realisation of a singular dramatic phenomenon—the exploration of historical themes through the play-within-the-play—which connects Marat/Sade and Gunter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1965) to a theatrical tradition of their own.

Revolutions (the French, in particular) have prompted metatheatrical treatment more consistently than any other subject of historical or pseudohistorical drama. The tradition to which Marat/Sade and The Plebeians belong also includes Danton’s Death (perf. 1902) by Georg Buchner, Arthur Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo (1899), Jean Anouilh’s Poor Bitos (1956), Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1957), and Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1789 (1974), all of them seminal works of European theatre history.⁴ Linking the performance history of late nineteenth-century Germany to the avant-garde stages of postwar Paris, this group of plays coheres, conceptually, around a recurrent motif: the theatricality of insurrectionist politics. Whether in Schnitzler’s tavern, Genet’s brothel, or Anouilh’s Carmelite Priory, revolution is presented and re-presented as performance, as masquerade, as a series of postures and costumes, a deadly charade in which the actors take part at their peril. By virtue of their proliferation and their canonicity, self-reflexive works on revolutionary themes have received the greatest critical attention paid to any group of metatheatrical history plays to date. The critical repositioning of Marat/Sade and The Plebeians within the context of historiographic metatheatre is intended as a contribution to, and an extension of, this body of work, rather than an assault upon it.⁵

In a genre-defining article, Reinhold Grimm explains that the metatheatrical effects so frequently employed in revolutionary plays reflect those of revolutionary history itself, and he quotes Marx’s famous analysis of the Jacobins’ imitative performance in support of his argument.

At the very times when men appear engaged in revolutionising things and themselves, when they seem to be creating something perfectly new—in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they are eager to press the spirits of the past into their service, borrowing the names of the dead, reviving their war cries, dressing up in traditional costumes, that they make a braver pageant in the newly-staged scene of universal history.⁶

The resurrected Romans of the French revolution, Marx explains, engaged in this theatrical ruse in order ‘to sustain their passion at the level appropriate to a great historic tragedy.’⁷ Equating the republicanism of eighteenth-century Paris with that of Rome in the first century B.C., the members of the Convention thus conferred credibility upon their actions. Marx’s account of the historical and political significance of re-enactment provides Grimm with ‘a comprehensive rationale … [a] missing link’ between the revolutionary and the theatrical.⁸ One might add that, by paying homage to their Roman forebears, the Jacobins also fulfilled a Shakespearean prophecy. After the murder of Caesar, Cassius’s prediction of the re-enactment of the conspirators’ ‘lofty scene … /In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (III.i.112–13) preempts precisely the kind of republican role-play that Marx describes. Cassius’s awareness of both the dramatic potential of the revolutionary plot and its paradigmatic importance as a model for further insurrections positions Julius Caesar as the progenitor of a rich dramatic tradition.

My approach to Marat/Sade and The Plebeians privileges history, revolution, and metatheatre as the plays’ major hermeneutic co-ordinates, while acknowledging, also, the the cultural-historical context of the their composition. Both works were written during a crisis of German identity, amidst the reconstruction of the post-Holocaust period. The process of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) prompted artists to reflect upon Germany’s recent history and upon their own responsibilities to society. Grass does so by dramatising events in the early history of the GDR, through the lens of a play by Shakespeare. Weiss contributes to this cultural work by an even more circuitous route, via the ideological conflicts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France.

Marat/Sade is concerned with the members of a marginalised community, who, rather than taking centre stage in the Napoleonic era, perform their play, as they live their lives, in the wings of history. Though much of the play’s extant criticism focuses on its metatheatrical elements as metaphors for the exercise of political power—and the inmates’ opposition to it—the following argument supplements these ideas with reference to the play’s engagement with the principle of the theatrum mundi. Weiss’s play dramatises the confrontation of political authority with the impersonal forces of history, in a theatre environment that registers both the reality of tyranny and the possibility of resistance. The resulting tension between the desire for containment and the threat of subversion within the context of theatrical performance, is a paradigm that recurs throughout historiographic metatheatre’s major works.

THE DIRECTION OF EVENTS

Marat/Sade is set in the asylum at Charenton, where the Marquis de Sade was incarcerated for the last fifteen years of his life. The institution’s director, Monsieur Coulmier, allowed Sade to stage a number of his own dramatic works for the therapeutic benefit of the inmates. As Weiss explains in the historical notes to the play, these performances became fashionable haunts for Parisian sophisticates, who came to experience a ‘rare pleasure … in the hiding-place’ of society’s ‘moral rejects’ (110). The work’s full title, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade, reveals that the audience’s attention will be held not by the suspense of the plot, but by the mode of presentation. While the title cannot be said to contain the totality of the play’s events, there is little of diegetic significance yet to be revealed. Instead, the spectator’s attention is focused on aspects of performance and direction, which include numerous songs, a dance of death, the mimed execution of a corpulent priest, and the ritualised flagellation of the Divine Marquis himself. Marat’s persecution and assassination are thus presented as dramatic effects, to be viewed through the self-reflexive idioms of the theatre.

Though the play’s central dialectical dispute is forced to compete with the flamboyant theatrical spectacle of Sade’s play, Weiss insists that he is ‘primarily interested in representing a never-ending dialogue.’⁹ The two historical protagonists never met, but ‘the single fact that it was Sade who spoke the memorial address at Marat’s funeral’ (111) prompted the playwright to consider the ideological conflict between them and to stage their confrontation. Marat’s philosophy is one of engagement. ‘I use action,’ he explains, ‘I invent a meaning/ … I intervene/ and say this and this are wrong/ … and I work to … improve them’ (35). The Marquis repudiates Marat’s radicalism and the absolutes to which he adheres. For Sade, ‘the only truths we can point to/ are the ever-changing truths of our own experience’ (40). ‘I believe only in myself’ (49), Sade announces. ‘I believe in the Revolution,’ Marat responds. And yet Sade is also concerned with the liberation of minds and bodies from the social constraints imposed upon them. Indeed, in the final scene of the play, an insurrection breaks out in the asylum, inspired by the interior play, and Sade ‘laughs triumphantly’ (107) as chaos ensues.

Sade has composed the script that the inmates perform and distributed the main parts among the more sentient of the inmates, each of whom is afflicted by a specified complaint. Marat is played by a ‘lucky paranoiac,’ who has made ‘unprecedented strides’ (15) since being introduced to hydrotherapy. Charlotte Corday is portrayed by a somnambulist, who suffers also from ‘melancholia’ (15), and the part of the Girondin deputy, Duperret, belongs to an erotomaniac, who ‘needs more watching than the rest’ (16). Propelled around the stage by the orderlies and directed to and fro by the Herald in order to meet the demands of the script, the inmates are confined by the dramatic mechanism. Duperret dreams of a society in which ‘each individual/ although united with all the others [putting a hand under CORDAY’s dress …] only obeys himself and so stays free’ (61), a fantasy which is ironised by the inmates’ treatment. It is for the delectation of the interior audience that the Corday actress must be roused from the serenity of her somnambulism, and for the sake of propriety that the orderlies restrain the erotomaniacal frenzy of the satyriast playing Duperret. Coulmier and his wife and daughter circumscribe the inmates’ freedom to behave as they please, and the dramatic mechanism, both script and performance, places restraints upon their liberty.

Coulmier hopes that a French Revolutionary piece will support the status quo by glorifying the events leading to Napoleon’s assumption of power—‘We’re citizens of a new enlightened age,’ he claims, ‘We’re all revolutionaries nowadays’ (51)—but, in fact, the interior play exposes the injustices of the present regime and the grievances of those oppressed by it. Marat’s denunciation of the Girondins’ utopianism—‘[t]hese lies they tell about the ideal state’ (62)—reflects ironically upon the bourgeois complacency of Napoleonic France, which Jacques Roux, defrocked priest and ‘chief apostle/ of Jean-Paul Marat’ (52), seeks to expose. Passionately exhorting the underclass to ‘[f]ight for their rights’ (51), Roux’s ‘First Rabble-Rousing’ (50) provokes Coulmier’s censure. He goes on to ‘demand/ the opening of the granaries to feed the poor’ (52) and as Coulmier ‘wrings his hands and signifies protest’ the disturbed cleric continues to harangue the assembled company.

Roux’s denunciation of the French Revolutionary Wars, ‘which [are] run for the benefit of profiteers/ and lead only to more wars’ (52), makes explicit the metatheatrical implications of Sade’s play. Interpreting the speech as a critique of the current regime, Coulmier condemns Roux’s words as treasonous declarations of ‘outright pacifism’ and reminds Sade that ‘this scene was cut’ (53). Sade shows his appreciation for the inmate’s performance ‘without concerning himself with COULMIER’s protest’ (53) and this becomes a recurrent pattern. Coulmier frequently ‘runs across to SADE and speaks to him, while Sade ‘does not react’ (53). The Marquis has clearly written the play with the intention of provoking Coulmier’s censure, which he consistently disregards.

What is more, the interior play generates its own revolutionary energy, fuelled by the impassioned speeches of Marat and Roux, and the songs of the Four Singers. These are sung in the first person plural, which identifies both the dramatic characters of the interior play and their performers as well. The singers’ desperate refrain, ‘We want our rights and we don’t care how/ We want our Revolution NOW’ (20, 44, 78) becomes more urgent with each repetition and equates the inmates’ grievances with those of Revolutionary France. Most of the patients play ‘extras, voices, mimes and chorus,’ and although those who participate in the play do wear ‘primitive costumes with strong colour contrasts’ (10), it is easy to forget that they represent anyone other than themselves. Clamouring for their rights, the inmates gradually align themselves with the vanguard of the revolutionary malcontents whom they represent, much to the consternation of the asylum’s director.

The inmates’ entrapment within the asylum constitutes the primary level of their confinement, the secondary level being that of their privation as the sansculottes of the interior play. Weiss does not use the asylum merely symbolically here: ‘Charenton … was an institution which catered for all whose behaviour had made them socially impossible, whether they were lunatics or not’ (110) and, as Weiss goes on to explain, this included the politically undesirable as well as those whose public trial would embarrass the authorities. The questions of the incarcerated—‘Who keeps us prisoner/ Who locks us in’—and their plea—‘We’re all normal and we want our freedom’ (21)-resonate throughout the play and transcend the multidimensional structure of the work, from 1793 (the date of Marat’s assassination) to 1808 (the date of the interior play’s performance) and beyond.

Marat/Sade, in a manner typical of post-Brechtian drama, ‘stages the spectator,’ implicating the audience in the power structure described earlier. Critic Leslie Fielder compares Marat/Sade with Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959), in which the audience is racially constructed by the dramatist, cast as white, before the play begins and explains that these two works ‘are plays in which the audience is made an actor in the play.’¹⁰ Peter Brook’s production clarified this point by allowing the director of the asylum and his family to circulate among the theatre-goers before the start of the performance.

At the very beginning of the Marat/Sade, as Monsieur and Madame Coulmier move through the audience, we are cast as invited friends of these good bourgeois, with liberal ideas.¹¹

As sophisticated Parisians in league with the asylum’s director, the spectators become part of both the social and the theatrical structures which circumscribe the freedom of the inmates. Complicit in the incarceration of the cast at all levels, the audience enacts not only the part of the ruling elite of the Napoleonic establishment in 1808 but also, retroactively, the part of the bourgeoisie in 1793, and becomes a convenient surrogate for all the forces of oppression to which the interior play refers. Meanwhile, the inmates suffer the plight of the deprived and the confined throughout history.

In addition to the power structures of Coulmier’s asylum and Sade’s thea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘We Want Our Revolution Now’: Peter Weiss, Gunter Grass, and the Theatre of Insurrection
• 2 All Wilde on the Western Front: Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, and the Theatre of War
• 3 ‘God Rot Great Men’: Rolf Hochhuth, Howard Brenton, and the Anti-heroic Drama
• 4 ‘Better Mimics Than Our London Actors’: Timberlake Wertenbaker and the Colonial Theatre
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index