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Tuesday, 09 December 2008
Violet is the one with the brown hair
I must admit I was intrigued by Ben Ellis' mention on 8 December of an August: Osage
County game on the National Theatre UK's microsite for the production. This is, perhaps,
another way that the Internet can be used to get those younger "tushies"
in seats, as David Mamet might have it (though Pacman is
of a vintage circa 1980, so just how young, or how
middle-aged-sagging, these tushies will be is open to question).
With these notices on that most 21st-century of media, the theatre
blog, however, I'm sure there's a huzzah going up in a marketing
director's office somewhere.
Whether this does Tracy Letts' play any kind of a service or
disservice is beyond my ken. Rather than dourly grouse or rag on about
what this means for theatre marketing or theatre and drama itself, I'll
post instead a letter from Edward Bond to his agent Tom Erhardt at the
Casarotto Ramsay agency, dated 3 November 1998, when the same National
Theatre tried to gain the rights for a new production of Saved to
mark the end of the 20th century. Bond was discussing the plays themselves
that the National Theatre was choosing to produce, rather than the means
of marketing them, but that's not going to make anyone feel any
better:
Dear Tom
Thanks for sending me the list of plays the Royal National Theatre
intend to use to mark the end of the century. Saved is on the list.
Do not give them a licence to use the play.
If today Saved were offered to the Royal National Theatre as a
new play it would refuse it as certainly as it refused Coffee and
The Crime of the Twenty-First Century. I am content that these
plays should be performed abroad in other languages. This is not to spare
myself complicity in hypocrisy. My motive is more serious.
We are made not by our ability to reason but by our need to dramatize
ourselves and our situations. In drama reason and imagination elucidate
each other. This enables us to understand ourselves and what we do.
Dramatization in all its forms is the one means we have of creating this
knowledge and constantly recreating our humanness. The Royal National
Theatre trivializes drama and – with a consequence that is so
inevitable it is almost the punishment inflicted on error by history
– has made itself incompetent to deal with the problems of being
human. It is a consequence that is the lesson of drama itself. I am not
surprised that the Royal National Theatre has not learnt it.
The dead cannot defend themselves or their works. But no living writer
should allow his or her work to be used to celebrate drama in a place
which damages it so irresponsibly.
Best wishes
Edward
Bond thus spares us a "Stone the Baby" game based on "Space
Invaders."
Bond's letter appears in his 2001 book The Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the
State.
Tuesday, 09 December 2008
 There is online criticism (recently a
subject of discussion here), and then there is online criticism.
The latest issue of the Nietzsche Circle's online-only magazine Hyperion includes new essays about sculptors Ronald Bladen and Raoul Hague, an interview with Hermann Nitsch of the Orgien-Mysterien Theater, new
translations of five poems by Georges Bataille, and much much more. Also this month,
Hyperion introduces a beautifully designed, fully illustrated .pdf
file of the entire issue, suitable for printing and reading far away
from the glow of the digital pixel.
While Hyperion's level of criticism reaches far beyond the
ambition of most blogs (and its purview includes far more than theatre and
drama), it may stand as a sample of just the kind of criticism that
contemporary theatre needs: elegant, provocative, sometimes prophetic, and
pitched far from both academia and the marketplace – in the realm of
the intensely-focused mind and spirit, rather than just an ancillary
offshoot of Entertainment Weekly's graded reviews (as if art were
an assignment that the teacher sets his or her approval upon, or a
restaurant worthy of little more than Zagat-like
trivialization) or editorial
filler to go between the display ads in the arts section of the newspaper.
Hyperion assumes that theatre and art are far more central to our
lives than their current status in the minds of most people as career or
feel-good diversion. I try to provide the same criticism here, and
it's good to see
that I've got company.
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