Key Concepts in Drama and Performance

Kenneth Pickering

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780230241473
• eBook ISBN: 9781350314818
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

An invaluable companion which enables the reader to acquire and understand a vocabulary for discussion and critical thinking on all aspects of the subject. The clear explanations of the concepts support students in their practical and theoretical explorations of the subjects and offer insights for research and reflective writing.

1 Textual Concepts

This chapter focuses largely on the written playtext because that is where the vast majority of people begin their encounter with the study of drama. It would be helpful to read this introduction in conjunction with the entry on Postmodernism in Chapter 5.

One of the most famous photographs in the history of Western theatre shows a group of actors from the Moscow Art Theatre together with their director, Stanislavsky, gathered round the playwright Anton Chekhov as he reads from his play The Seagull. The ‘first reading’ of a play is a familiar event to anyone involved in the creation of performances and this celebrated photograph reminds us that it was the process engaged in by Stanislavsky and his actors that transformed the written text of The Seagull into an event widely acknowledged as an artistic landmark.

The term ‘playwright’ implies a maker rather than a writer of plays but the written text occupies a unique position in the practice of drama. As I hope to demonstrate, the text is far more than words for speaking – a playwright’s text encapsulates an entire image of a potential performance and many playwrights remain adamant that their suggestions are integral to the future life of their play. In a television interview, the distinguished American playwright Edward Albee drew attention to the detailed stage directions in his most recent play The Goat (2003) and insisted that these were as important as the words themselves. Of course, the word ‘text’ is now also a verb and even this transition has been acknowledged by at least one playwright, Patrick Marber. In his play Closer (1998) he has an option for some scenes to be presented as text messages.

The written text shapes the form, content and discourse of a play: there are other ways of arriving at these but those processes remain experimental and frequently transient. Until recently, the written text remained the sole recognised means of preserving a play for future performance and there are still thousands of playtexts written and hundreds published every year. The use of DVD recording techniques has, however, enabled the devising process to be documented and preserved and can include elements of written as well as performed text. This may indicate the way forward for both the generation and the study of drama but, for the time being, it is difficult to see any diminution in the importance of the published play as the only means of access to the works that constitute the rich resources of Theatre.

It is frequently said, particularly in academic circles, that the primacy of the written text has now been challenged and that we may have to let go of our dependence on it. Let’s think for a moment about the reasons that underpin this kind of assertion. I have already alluded to the growth of Performance Studies – a discipline that takes a largely postmodernist stance both in its attitude to the whole concept of a text and in its refusal to place any work of art on a higher level than another. Drawing also on structuralist critics, postmodernist scholars and theatre directors have insisted that all performances have to be ‘read’ and that therefore the various elements of a theatrical performance (words, action, lighting, costume etc.) are all part of a text. For this reason, they prefer to refer to the original piece as ‘the work’. They also claim that, once a ‘work’ has been created, the author or playwright abdicates all rights over what happens in the process of translation into a performed text. This has led to some notorious disputes with playwrights like Arthur Miller or Edward Albee who assert that their intentions as communicated in the written text must be respected.

However, the unease with the reliability of the written text stems from deeper concerns, articulated by such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, because it is argued that the essential discourse is between the text and the ‘reader’ and that the text is not a conduit linking the writer to the reader or spectator. I shall be exploring many of these ideas at intervals throughout this book but, for the moment, it is important to be aware of one further set of ideas that have changed attitudes towards the written text.

Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies have successfully struggled to throw off the shackles of English Literature. There are still situations where a play is simply another ‘set book’ and it is also possible to meet writers who create plays without any concept of how these plays might be realised in performance. However, this does not devalue the written text as an integral part of the study of drama. There most certainly has been a perceptible shift in the approaches to generating performance in the theatre. Actors and directors now search avidly for the physicality of a character or situation even in established stage classics, sometimes to the detriment of the spoken text. What one colleague described as ‘through the teeth naturalism’ has, to some extent, also replaced projected and articulated speech. In a conscious reaction against the ‘stage voice’ and what was sometimes thought of as a ‘proper handling of the text’, the spoken word may have been relegated to a point where little if any meaning is communicated. This is not to deny the intense excitement and creativity of much recent physical theatre but such theatre pieces can rarely be re-created, and remain firmly embedded in the conditions of their creation.

This book invites you to take the study of the written text and the canon of dramatic literature past and present seriously. It is not a question of if the text or work is studied but of how to study it. Directors and actors continue to find their most satisfying moments in the theatre by delving into the text. Repeatedly, in rehearsal, I have watched directors urging actors to return to the text. Harold Pinter as playwright, director or actor always insisted that the text was non-negotiable and that it states no more nor less than is set down. What emerges from considering and working with a playtext is invariably surprising and rewarding.

Absurdism/Theatre of the Absurd

The term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was first used in 1961 as the title of a book by the critic and one-time head of BBC radio drama, Martin Esslin. In this work he considers the plays of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arabal, Arthur Adamov, N. F. Simpson, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee (whose very recent play The Goat provoked considerable anger and protest), all of whom came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, and to which list it is reasonable to add the name of the frequently overlooked but widely performed David Campton. It is extremely dangerous to assign playwrights to a category and expect their work to conform to certain characteristics and some critics would argue that the more recent plays of Pinter or Albee are not of the ‘absurdist’ kind. However, Esslin identified a movement in the theatre that appeared to respond to a view that any belief in a rational universe is an illusion and that humanity is out of harmony with its surroundings in such a way as to suggest a lack of meaning. We might now recognise in this the language of Postmodernism, which was not being widely used to discuss theatre when such plays as Ionesco’s The Lesson or Pinter’s The Room were premiered by drama students. However, we can trace the concept of the Absurd to movements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century atheist and Christian existentialist philosophy and theology and to such artistic concepts as surrealism, Dada, or the work of Alfred Jarry whose play Ubu Roi (originally written in 1896) became popular with those seeking an alternative to realism after the Second World War.

The influential Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) had already laid the foundations for the later work of the French philosophers and writers Sartre and Camus when he said ‘Credo quia absurdum est’ (I believe because it is absurd). Stunned by the horror of the Second World War, and particularly its impact on their native France, Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1945) and Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) reflected a feeling of total abandonment by God, of uncertainty, anxiety, purposelessness, and of mankind’s inexplicable relationship with the universe, which was reflected in their later plays and novels. It was in this intellectual and spiritual climate that, what has become the emblematic play for the Theatre of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, was written. It was first produced in England by Peter Hall in 1955.

More has probably been written about Waiting for Godot and its impact on the post-war theatre than about almost any other modern play and it would be beneficial to become acquainted with both the play and the many subsequent critical reactions to it; it is constantly revived and revisited and remains one of the most uncomfortable, provocative, bleak yet sometimes comic stage metaphors ever created. Decoding its meanings and creating their own may well lead students to seeing the play as depicting the nobility of the human spirit or the hopelessness of existence; or they may see it as exposing the fallacy of any divine dimension to the universe or the futility and difficulty of communication in language. Audiences may well continue to be struck by the fact that, in performance, the play can be comic and touching. Whatever the response, the effect of this single play on the shape of subsequent plays and modes of production has been profound: Peter Brook, for example, when directing Shakespeare’s King Lear in 1962, described that play as ‘the prime example of the Theatre of the Absurd’. Although the influence of Beckett may have been subconscious, his work released a creative energy in a number of playwrights about whose work we can make some useful collective observations.

Theatre of the Absurd works by cheating and frustrating the expectations of its audience. In performance the laws of logic and of cause and effect appear to have deserted the language and action. Characters inhabit a world in which there are few explanations: a crowd awaits the arrival of a headless leader; two tramps await the coming of a mysterious figure who never appears; the stage slowly fills with furniture; a huge corpse or a ‘dumb waiter’ from another room intrudes into the space occupied by the characters; actors may be almost buried in dustbins or have paper bags over their heads for the entire play. In place of conversation that moves a story forward there may be huge passages of silence in which characters carry out repetitive actions; there may equally be prodigiously long speeches or shorter speeches that seem to have no reference to what has been said before – indeed, whole passages of dialogue may employ the non sequitur (a speech that does not follow in meaning) so as to give the impression that neither character is listening to the other. However, language may equally be used to intimidate, confuse, fill the void of silence or time, or to indicate the presence of some unspecified external threat. It has often been said that the Theatre of the Absurd is about the breakdown of communication, but Pinter, by far the most impressive and influential British writer in this mode, frequently asserted in interviews that his characters are communicating only too well; it is what and how they communicate that is explored in his plays. Most plays of the ‘absurd’ are written in forms that were certainly unexpected in the 1950s and 1960s: whereas a few may be ‘full length’, others may be of no more than a few moments’ duration; some end as unexpectedly as they begin, others have no obvious shape or climax, no denouement, no exposition, and provide no sense of development. Characters reveal little or nothing about themselves and may either behave in strange ways or spend large parts of the play in total stillness. Action may be punctuated by comic routines and, to use an expression of David Campton’s, there is an uneasy blend of ‘laughter and fear’.

Although the main energy of the ‘absurd’ may now be spent, audiences continue to be fascinated by the plays of Beckett and Ionesco. It is the inner landscapes of the mind that remain so potent in their work and how those psychological maps spill out into relationships, politics and codes of communication remains the central concern of the concept of the ‘absurd’.

Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) and John Russell Taylor’s Anger and After (1962), along with Changing Stages (2000) by Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, remain the best introduction to this topic. Kenneth Pickering’s Studying Modern Drama (2003) places the absurd in the context of other modern plays, and there are now many important studies of the individual playwrights.

See also the Introduction and comedy.

Act

The division of plays into sections known as ‘Acts’ has both a practical and an artistic purpose. An Act is a manageable unit for a two- or three-hour rehearsal and has a shape that enables a director to work towards its climax. For the seventeenth-century French dramatist Molière, an Act lasted as long as one of the large candles used for lighting the stage, and the space between the Acts was used to refurbish the relatively crude form of artificial lighting. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in plays, operas and ballets, an Act provided an opportunity to cater for the growing demand for elaborate spectacle, so that each of four or five Acts might represent a different location and the curtain would be dropped between each of them. The complex scene changes might take place to the accompaniment of music: the ‘entr’acte’ (see incidental music). The curtain would then rise to reveal more wonders; indeed, the habit of applauding the new setting has not entirely vanished today. The writers and producers of melodrama became adept at building the climax of the action to the drop of the curtain and this technique was absorbed by the exponents of the well-made play and writers of the naturalistic school, such as Ibsen (1828–1906), who used three-, four- and five-Act structures, and Chekhov (1860–1904), who preferred four Acts, although he also wrote a number of one-Act plays. For Ibsen or Chekhov the change of Act is not necessarily a change of location: it is a change of rhythm and almost like a musical structure, provides opportunities to break or suspend the tension during the theatre ‘interval’. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard resembles a symphony with ‘movements’: an early morning opening movement of excitement juxtaposed with weariness; a ‘slow’ movement set in a late summer afternoon, when characters make unhurried movements and desultory conversation; a third movement of increased agitation and tension, full of dancing; and a final movement mingling despair, hope and a sense of finality. The play moves from May to October, each Act enabling that passage of time to be accomplished to shifting rhythms and counterpoints.

Such crafting of a play into Acts and sometimes into component ‘scenes’ appears to have derived from the division of Ancient Greek tragedies into epeisodia interspersed by five choruses. The Roman poet Horace insisted on the use of such divisions, in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry), which, along with Aristotle’s Poetics and illustrated editions of the plays of the Roman comic dramatist Terence (190–159 BC), became the principal sources for those neo-classical theorists who were attempting to establish rules for drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. These ideas were brought to England by Ben Jonson (1572–1637), the first English playwright to have his ‘complete works’ published in his own lifetime. Therefore, the familiar division of Shakespeare’s and other Jacobean plays into five Acts was often the work of later editors and does not always serve the plays’ structures well. However, this can still be a useful mode of reference when studying or rehearsing a play.

Many modern dramatists have abandoned the Act in favour of a more episodic structure of short scenes, or of an entirely different form (as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd). We would probably no longer feel the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Textual Concepts
• 2. Performance Concepts
• 3. Production Concepts
• 4. Staging Concepts
• 5. Critical Concepts
• Bibliography
• Index