Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 07 April 2008
The below essay appeared in a shorter (by half) form in the Guardian last week. This version fills out a few of the ideas left necessarily thin in the first.
On the face of it, there couldn't be two more different theatre artists
than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett – the first the egomaniacal,
nineteenth-
Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert's songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation – the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett's own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there's just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.
Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. "Everything he did was
determined by his need to create theatre," said the editors of an
anthology
of Wagner's prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett,
found it necessary to direct his own music-
For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music's abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.
There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the
theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see
the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands
of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner's
production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic
theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-
In the post-war era, Bayreuth's directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett's first plays were being performed in Paris – plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett's 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett's later work, until 1972's Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.
Dorn's production for the Met marries Beckett's stage practice to
Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett's conception of colorless
existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three
pure-
In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in
much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The
Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is
performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into
one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly
impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed
in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night
which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear – the
words and the music – that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic
event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk
for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely
beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a
century of Tristan performances and half-
Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. "[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form," Wagner wrote in "The Music of the Future." "... I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner's final operas, Beckett's dramas from 1962's Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.
Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.
Posted at 2.19 pm in /Music
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Monday, 07 April 2008
Back in the day (more precisely 1976), I was led to think of the theatre as a career when I saw John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson on Broadway in Peter Hall's production of No Man's Land by Harold Pinter. That was 32 years ago now. Perhaps sentimentally I continue to think of it as one of Pinter's most meditative, elegaic plays. And you certainly can't beat that cast.
Theatre is ephemeral and over the years the memory has faded somewhat, though the power of the work continued to claw. Fortunately memory can get a poke in the side too. Below is a video of the 90-minute BBC television version of the play, recorded in 1976 with the original cast. The image and sound are a little hazy, but no more so than my memory:
Over the weekend I updated my own Web site, with new material on the biography and news pages.
Posted at 8.28 am in /Videos
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