Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Tuesday, 17 November 2009 OrganumO'Neill's radicalism. With his late plays O'Neill burrows
through realism and the Expressionist stage to come out upon a darker
landscape: significance and meaning are shattered. The drunks in the back
room of Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh are exaggerations
of the audience as collective: sharers not in individual pipedreams but
within the cultural construct of ameliorist and personal illusion
(literally so in the character of anarchist Hugo Kalmar). Hickey the
dramatist/ Retreat is denied to the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night, the great dream play that anatomizes the cancer at the center of the Tyrone family and at the center of the theatre. Tyrone, an actor, offers Mary a theatre of family and affection as much an anaesthetic of experience as her morphine dreams. Her own sexuality has produced three children; the two who survive shore up the house as the decay continues within. At the final curtain, in her wedding dress, she denies the experience that began with Tyrone's love, seeking virginity again. It is unrecoverable, of course, but her illusion holds her husband and children wrapped, and rapt, in her dream, even as they remain torn, bleeding and dying. Duration is the avenue of revelation: these are high masses that
require
more than three hours (more than four hours, in the case of The Iceman
Cometh) for their uncut production; three times the length of most
contemporary American plays. But these are surgeries that can't be
performed sloppily: language and performance as scalpel, not machete. As
if O'Neill wanted to send the audience not into the late evening for a
drink or dinner or the post- Below, Jason Robards delivers the opening of the long monologue in Act IV of The Iceman Cometh, from Sidney Lumet's 1960 television production:
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