Anti-War Theatre After Brecht

Dialectical Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century

Lara Stevens

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349711659
  9781137538871
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137538888
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the 'War on Terror', this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The plays are written by some of the most significant writers of this century and the last including Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous and Tony Kushner.

Anti-war Theatre After Brecht grapples with the problem of how to make theatre that protests the policies of democratically elected Western governments in a post-Marxist era. It shows how the Internet has become a key tool for disseminating anti-war play texts and how online social media forums are changing traditional dramatic aesthetics and broadening opportunities for spectator access, engagement and interaction with a work and the political alternatives it puts forward. 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Lara StevensAnti-War Theatre After Brecht10.1057/978-1-137-53888-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lara Stevens¹

(1)

University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

End Abstract

This book attempts to map out how contemporary anti-war plays work to influence spectator responses to the violence of war after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The plays I examine are written and devised in precarious times – in times of violent conflict in the Middle East, what President George W. Bush called the ‘War on Terror’, as well as the escalating conditions of the Global Financial Crisis, new revolutionary landscapes in the Middle East and North Africa and the global Occupy Movement. In light of these historical processes of change, we require not only new political strategies and new dramatic aesthetics but also new ways to talk about them. The anti-war plays considered in this book are created by renowned playwrights and theatremakers from a range of Western nations. The plays include: Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy (2003–4), Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (2005), Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland (2004) and Caryl Churchill’s Iraq.doc (2003) and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009).

This book developed out of wanting to know how, as a Western subject from an allied nation that signed onto Bush’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’, I should or could respond to the violence of the wars being carried out in my name. I wanted to understand how deeply I was implicated in these conflicts and what alternative spaces were available beyond tacit complicity. The anti-war plays examined herein are engaged artists’ responses to the injustices of invasion and its resulting brutality and perpetuation of ‘terror’. The artists’ rejoinders to conflict range from anger, frustration, helplessness and cynicism to hope, determination and compassion. The selected playwrights and theatremakers share a common and self-conscious interest in how we as Western spectators respond to remote conflict as we watch it being played out on our television sets, in newspapers and online. By staging the real-life spectacle of the ‘War on Terror’ outside the normative and highly controlled frames of the mainstream media, these plays not only express dissatisfaction with the Western governments that wage war, they also imagine new and alternative possibilities to violent conflict.

In looking at drama that aims to politicize spectators, I turn to the modernist theoretician and theatremaker Bertolt Brecht for his insistence on the development of dramatic aesthetics that reveal social conditions as contingent and impermanent. Brecht has had such a pervasive influence on theatre that I wonder whether it is possible to make politically engaged theatre without his spectre haunting some aspects of the work, even for theatremakers who have never read or seen a play by Brecht or don’t like or agree with his ideas for revolutionizing theatre. Brecht’s plays and his dramaturgical innovations for making political theatre were equally influenced by important writers, philosophers and artists in the generations that preceded him. The ghosts that haunted Brecht were those identified by political economist Karl Marx, the possibility of imminent revolution and the spectre of Marx himself in his influential critiques of capitalism.

To understand how Brecht thought historical processes of transformation could be both represented on stage and transformed into real-life civic action, the influence of the writings of Marx – in particular his engagement with dialectics – cannot be underestimated. To conceive of Brecht’s world view and theatrical techniques as dialectical means seeing the contradictions in mainstream ideology or the status quo as part of the dynamism and ever-changing nature of social relations. For theatrical representations of the world to be dialectical requires techniques that show how time progresses without a predetermined teleological motor or ‘inevitable’ outcomes. Rather, dialectical representations reveal the antagonistic conditions that make up reality, history and the future as unfixed and potentially alterable.

To apply the Marxist-Brechtian concept of dialectics to the so-called post-Marxist present – which turns its back on the hope of a future Communist utopia and takes into account forms of oppression other than class (such as race, gender, sexuality, etc.)—is fraught with difficulties. Yet, to limit Brecht to the time in which he lived is to miss what his theories can offer to the present moment. In thinking through the legacy of Brecht, I suggest that contemporary plays don’t have to look like one of Brecht’s plays in order to share his desire to make spectators discerning towards the ubiquity of ideology. By engaging with Brecht’s theoretical ideas, I shape new understandings of what Brechtian theatre is now. In this book I imagine the ways in which the dialectical strategies of Brecht’s dramaturgy are adaptable to the economic, political and technological conditions of the twenty-first century and, in particular, what they can bring to better understanding how dramatists today approach the contradictions of the ‘War on Terror’.

The second chapter of this book begins with the context of the ‘War on Terror’ and the ways in which this period of history has altered how we understand and read the relationship between politics and performance. I draw upon the ideas of philosopher Jacques Rancière to consider how politics and aesthetics intersect today and what it means to make ‘political theatre’ or ‘engaged art’ under post-Marxist conditions. I pay particular attention to Rancière’s praise and critique of Brecht in order to emphasize their common concern with art’s potential to change spectator perceptions and dislodge fixed attitudes. I argue that Rancière’s desire for ‘emancipated’ spectatorship and non-dogmatic art owes a large debt to Brecht’s dialectical thinking and theories for the theatre but also updates Brecht’s ideas to speak to the circumstances of the ‘War on Terror’.

Bringing the legacies of Marx and Brecht together, Chapter 3 turns to earlier models of polititicized or ‘engaged’ art by surveying the historical relation between Marxist dialectics and Brechtian dramatic aesthetics. I look at critical responses to the influence of historical materialist thought on Brecht’s theory for the theatre. Taking into account the challenges of thinking about Brechtian dialectics in a so-called post-Marxist and post-political context, I establish a definition of a ‘Brechtian dialectical aesthetic’. In the following chapters I will draw on this definition as a basis for considering how a Brechtian-style use of dialectics is present in contemporary dramatic texts and their performances. In Chapter 3 I ask: what aspects of the Brechtian interpretation of Marxist dialectics remain useful for understanding the complex relationship between politics and theatrical aesthetics in the economic, political, social, ideological and technological conditions of an age of ‘terror’ and what aspects need revision? I look at the problem of estrangement in the context of late capitalism and consider why dialectical thinking is pertinent to the political climate in the West following the coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on key sites of American power on 11 September 2001. By drawing out the uses and limitations of Brechtian theories in a twenty-first-century context, I suggest that Brechtian concepts continue to provide amenable and practical tools for future generations of anti-war playwrights and theatremakers.

Chapter 4 investigates the influence of Brechtian dialectical theatre theory on the work of American playwright Tony Kushner in the plays Homebody/Kabul (2001) and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy (Only We) (2003–4). This chapter investigates the ways in which the aesthetics of Homebody/Kabul and Only We critique Western imperialism and the West’s culpability, ignorance or indifference towards the complex political and humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. I draw particular attention to the ways in which the Brechtian technique of historicization is developed by non-linear depictions of time in Kushner’s plays. The chapter also takes into account the implications of the dissemination of Only We through an online news magazine, The Nation, and the play’s performance within the context of anti-war and anti-Republican protests prior to the 2004 American Presidential elections.

Chapter 5 focuses on the play Le Dernier Caravansérail (2003) by French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine with text by feminist philosopher playwright and dramaturg Hélène Cixous. Le Dernier Caravansérail was a theatrical response to the French and Australian governments’ treatment of asylum seekers fleeing persecution, conflict and hardship during the ‘War on Terror’. I investigate the play’s politico-aesthetic practices, including self-reflexivity, episodic structure and gestic scenery. I argue that the play and its performance context use Brechtian dialectical techniques to estrange the notion of ‘hospitality’ as constructed in the national rhetoric of the liberal democratic nations of France and Australia. I demonstrate how the Théâtre du Soleil develop new ways to estrange habitual mainstream-media representations of refugees. The chapter documents how the company creates a theatrical environment that brings together politics, learning, community and imagination as a means to impel spectators to view the Australian and French governments’ ‘solutions’ to asylum-seeker arrivals with scepticism and curiosity. Chapter 5 concludes that Le Dernier Caravansérail updates Brechtian dramaturgical self-consciousness in order to challenge Western attitudes of hostility and fear towards the refugee other.

Chapter 6 updates Brecht’s strategies for present-day social realities dominated as they are by digital interfaces and social media. This chapter analyses two plays by British playwright Caryl Churchill, Iraq.doc (unpublished but first performed in 2003) and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). Both plays are direct responses to military operations by Western powers. Iraq.doc reflects on the Iraq War and Seven Jewish Children responds to the Israeli Defence Force’s attack on the Gaza Strip in December 2008. In considering the online chat-room aesthetic of Iraq.doc as well as The Guardian online and YouTube performances of Seven Jewish Children, this chapter explores the use of new media to critique nationalistic discourses or state-sanctioned views of the Iraq War and the Israel–Palestine conflict. In addressing the multiple performance contexts of Seven Jewish Children I argue that the mass dissemination of the work via the Internet and its free licensing enables theatre to intervene in and contribute to public debate on a contemporary human rights issue in a timely manner. I suggest that online performances and the public platforms that respond to artistic representations open up new avenues for dialectical debate and interactive possibilities for ‘spectators’ in ways that update Brechtian aesthetics for the digital age.

Finally, in Chapter 7 I advance the model of the Brechtian dialectical aesthetic through analysis of the play Bambiland (2004) by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. In this play, Jelinek critiques the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Western coalition forces through a dense and ironic layering of intertextual references to images, novels, films, product advertisements and ancient Greek plays associated with the violence, exploitation, commercialization and suffering of war. Jelinek selects the found texts and ironically positions them so as to defamiliarize the state-sanctioned rhetoric around the Iraq War in the mainstream media. Jelinek modifies Brecht’s ironic techniques and Verfremdungseffekte through her insertion of a self-conscious and cynical authorial-narratorial voice that asserts itself among the familiar dominant male Western voices of war reporting. Bambiland invites spectators to critically reflect upon the ‘self-evident’ or ‘inevitable’ effects of war frequently employed in the language of the media and American political rhetoric. Unlike the work of Tony Kushner or the Théâtre du Soleil – plays that offer suggestions or practical models for real-life political engagement outside the theatre – Bambiland lays bare the mechanisms of power behind the everyday political rhetoric of the Iraq War media coverage without providing any closure or suggestions as to what shape resistance might take.

The plays examined in this book are brought together for the variety of ways in which they respond to the pervasive threat of ‘terror’ in the twenty-first century. I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive catalogue of the overwhelming number of plays and playwrights that have engaged with the ‘War on Terror’ in their work. Instead, I focus on select canonical writers and theatremakers to provide in-depth analysis of pioneering plays that are representative of broader trends in the field of politically engaged theatre and performance post-9/11. My choice of playwrights and theatremakers is also influenced by a history of engagement with Brecht’s plays or his aesthetic theory at some point during their long careers while developing their own politically committed artistic aesthetics.

The playwrights and theatremakers examined in this book differ vastly in their cultural contexts: Tony Kushner (America), Ariane Mnouchkine/Hélène Cixous/Théâtre du Soleil (France), Caryl Churchill (Britain), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria). Yet, they broadly share a historical moment in that they are politicized during the events of the 1960s and 1970s in Western Europe and America. They all have an established public history of socialist political engagement in their particular national contexts. This overt socialist commitment in a post-Marxist moment provides an ideal entry point for considering how this political agenda plays out in contemporary theatrical works as compared to Brecht’s plays. Writing from privileged first-world positions, the selected playwrights and theatremakers share a common disaffection with the ‘finality’ of late capitalism, the institutionalization of the mainstream media and the ideology that underpins the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

The playwrights and theatremakers considered in the following chapters wrote and produced plays prolifically over the latter half of the twentieth century. Each has won numerous prestigious awards that have earned them national and international reputations. They are all public figures that today occupy positions of influence in the arts as well as in mainstream-media commentary and draw consistently large audiences to their plays. The case studies examined in the following chapters are a small part of much larger bodies of work. The shorter works by Churchill and Kushner in particular are considered minor ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Performing the ‘War on Terror’
• 3. From Epic to Dialectical Theatre
• 4. Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy
• 5. The Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail
• 6. Caryl Churchill’s Iraq.doc and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza
• 7. Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter