Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
The September 2008 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, online and on newsstands now, features my introduction to this gallery of working papers and photographs from a few of Richard Foreman's recent productions.
But the issue itself is introduced by Robert Brustein's somewhat petulant and cranky essay "More Masterpieces," in which Brustein takes to task what he calls a "radical theatre" trend to trivialise classic dramatic literature: "I am now ready to concede," says the author of The Theatre of Revolt, "that the postmodern movement may have gone too far, and that instead of helping to illuminate classical plays, the auteur director is often obfuscating and obscuring them." Brustein then discusses two recent productions, The Wooster Group's Hamlet and Ivo van Hove's The Misanthrope, and concludes that the directorial imperatives brought to these productions "do not allow us to enter the play[s]," using a first person plural in which I certainly wouldn't include myself, who happily entered into van Hove's Misanthrope in a way that I hadn't been able to enter (funny use of the word, that) a Moliere play before. But the world is a big place; to each his own.
Brustein's discussion is limited to directorial approaches to classical texts, and I do wonder what his response would have been to contemporary dramaturgical responses to classical texts, such as John Jesurun's Philoctetes or Howard Barker's (Uncle) Vanya; on these, Brustein is unfortunately silent, for his comment would be most interesting, given his dismay at what directors, let alone dramatists, have done to similarly canonical works. He is not silent, however, about his fear that these directorial approaches are "more evidence of our growing indifference to the written word," citing (once again) that Richard Nelson speech to ART/NY last year about the lack of production opportunities available to new American playwrights.
Mind you, I live in a city in which there has just concluded a massive
Fringe festival:
over 200 productions – not readings or workshops, but productions,
however simple they were – of plays and performances of one sort or
another, over ninety percent of them quite new, within a 16-
And beware, Mr. Brustein – at the end of my article, Foreman warns that one of his next productions will be a staging of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca. He doesn't plan to deconstruct then reconstruct the text as he would for one of his own plays, but "it will be my own version of Lorca," he told me. Will the horror never end?
Posted at 1.24 pm in /Publications
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Tuesday, 26 August 2008
From Wales, Simon Harris writes Perfect Way, a theatre blog started in January 2008 and to which we come for the first time, with thanks for his link to Superfluities Redux. Simon is a playwright and the founder of Sgript Cymru, for which he was artistic director up until last year (it is now active under the name Sherman Cymru), and his plays include Badfinger (which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 1997), Wales>Alaska, and Garageland. A belated welcome; a new link for the blogroll, a new feed for the aggregator.
In June, Simon wrote this thoughtful post about excellence, peer review and funding for the arts; though specific to the UK, it has larger implications (about, for example, definitions of "excellence" and the risks of attaching this word to funding decisions) as well.
Posted at 10.06 am in /Miscellaneous
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Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Cross-
Two forms of spectacle. The first: that which is revelatory when
the dramatist writes his self, the performer gestures hers, creating and
unveiling body and spirit in word, speech and movement. In the study and
the rehearsal room (the sites of discipline) following exploration, the
dramatist un-
The second: that which hides, which draws new curtains over the self and the world. Curtains of flashing light and loud noise, concealing torture and lusts for power even as it welcomes laughter and cheap wonder. A blanket that drowns the self and world. A light that blinds, a noise that deafens, the self. This is the condition of the contemporary drama. A spectacle that hides, rather than reveals, and rewards only our infantile or animal attraction to sound and light. In its pretense to human warmth, it commodifies emotion, our sense of wonder, manipulates it, cold and sterile: no life comes from it. It lies. Entertainment for dull children who desire deception and distraction, who fear the mature body's possibilities and inevitable tragedy ...
Of the second spectacle we have the contemporary manifestations of industrialised television, film, sport, politics. All well suited to the second. Is that not enough, or must the art of theatre operate under its subsumation, instead of in conflict with it? As if the screens, from those above Times Square to those we carry in our pockets on our iPods, were not numerous enough. If the theatre is uniquely suited for the first kind of spectacle, its most significant arena, why pursue or praise the second? The suspicion that there is not enough time in these years of ours (of mine) for both. ...
Posted at 9.33 am in /Organum
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