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Thursday, 04 March 2010
 The Guardian brings
news of the passing of Barbara Bray in late February.
Bray was a unique behind-the-scenes champion of twentieth
century theatre, sharing a close personal relationship with Samuel Beckett
for three decades as she tirelessly worked to bring his work, as well as
that of Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht and others, to public notice. Notes
Andrew Todd:
Strikingly beautiful, opinionated and headstrong, Bray
had run the course of her career at the BBC by 1961. At the age of 36, she
moved to Paris with her daughters, partly to be closer to Beckett (who was
55) and partly to pursue a freelance career as a translator and critic.
Besides writing for the Observer and appearing regularly on the
BBC programme The Critics, she translated almost all of Duras's
work; Anouilh's Antigone; Pinget's Clope; Genet's
Prisoner of Love; Michel Tournier's The Ogre; works by
Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Quint, Frederic Richaud and Amin
Maalouf; Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand; and Elisabeth
Roudinesco's biography of Jacques Lacan. She won the Scott Moncrieff prize
for translation four times.
An extraordinary woman by any measure, Bray's final years were marked
by the same fierce independence as the rest of her life: "A stroke in 2003
limited her activity, and left her using a wheelchair. She remained
doggedly independent in a studio flat in the Rue Seguier, proudly reciting
swathes of Shakespeare, Donne and the King James Bible from memory. After
a steady decline in her health, she moved last December to Edinburgh to a
nursing home near her daughter Francesca's house. Resolutely rational and
atheist to the last, Bray eschewed a funeral and donated her body to
science." The full obituary, well worth reading, is here.
Wednesday, 03 March 2010
I do these things
Oh how I persist I am at least persistent
And I ask
Does anybody want them?
The answer comes back
Nobody at all
So I go on.
Howard Barker
The Forty
I never felt, for example, that I was remaking society, but
I felt that my work demonstrated a kind of intellectual atmosphere of the
most formulative, creative part of my life, my early twenties. I was in a
society of painters and writers, that were absolutely free, but for
another reason, [had] nothing to do with politics. They were free, I was
free, because nobody cared. And maybe that not caring is the best type of
freedom possible, either for society or composer. Nobody cared. My father
cared, because he didn't want me to be a composer, but no one else cared.
I gave performances, people really didn't care. They didn't have the
energy even to hiss or boo, that's how disinterested they were. And I
always felt that that was the best type of environment to be an artist
— indifference — I don't mind indifference.
Morton Feldman
In conversation, 1972
Tonight, Wednesday, 3 March, at 8.00pm, Marilyn Nonken
performs the 95-minute Morton Feldman piano solo Triadic
Memories at the Players Theatre, 115 Macdougal Street. Tickets are
$20.00 and available online here.
Wednesday, 03 March 2010
An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre.
Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is:
"Write what you know." All too often, this leads to a paralysis of
imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class,
the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic
work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that
of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative
experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of
immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom
conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a
reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages.
The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the
theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger
world.
Sarah Kane's statement "I am quite happy to aim at the smallest
audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is
definitely going to see this play anyway. That's why I try to please
myself" is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility.
It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of
imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a
fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a
middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds
hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone,
any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available
through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member,
should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry
to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not
through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach
inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world
beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal
imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective
that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The
Culture Industry's corporations through the media (its music, its
newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly
suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education
and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation
(room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides
of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer's conception of
the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary
American dramatists apparently "know" best.
David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a
perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well,
rather than being limited to Barker's individual body of work:
Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art,
different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no
point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a
reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand
association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a
different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic
enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all
contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience.
Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition
to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from
prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant
to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces
and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of
pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement,
has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their
considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this
theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it
encountered a theatre ... which offered something more than what is
currently conventionally associated with "theatre." This is a theatre that
proposes that nothing is impossible.
"Raising Hell: Introduction"
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard
Barker (pp 13-14)
Emphasis my own.
Other "Critique of Tragedy" posts here.
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