Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Monday, 21 December 2009 A Critique of Tragedy 1
Tragedy, both as genre and as consciousness, requires a metaphysics. Comedy has not attracted the same philosophical attention (from Aristotle to Eagleton) because comedy is essentially of the empirical world: the material world is the banana peel, man as machine, rising above his station only to be slapped down by the limitations that objecthood, fate and coincidence place in front of him. We don't require a rationalization for comedy. It appeals, it reminds us of our earthbound condition and reconciles us to its whimsical ironies. There is, even in the greatest comedic achievements such as Twelfth Night or The Producers, a warning to know our place and portion: taking on a pretense of sexual otherness is a hindrance to happy matrimony; the conman is caught upon his own cleverness, in courting failure achieving unwanted success. But those are lessons for this world, not something beyond it. This is not to say that tragedy requires a system of philosophy any more than comedy does, but in trying to explain the attraction of tragedy — the witnessing of almost unendurable earthly suffering — appeals to reconciliation, levelling lampoon or necessary amusement will not do. The necessity for tragedy will not be found in the same world as comedy, but somewhere beyond, behind. We have few treatises on comedy or the philosophy of comedy, but of tragedy these are legion. And many, interestingly, are not the product of dramatists but of philosophers. Neither Aristotle, Nietzsche, Hegel, Steiner, Kaufmann nor Eagleton, to name only six who have written at considerable length on the form, is a playwright himself. But all are in one way or another philosophers who found in the tragic consciousness an avenue to metaphysics. Any radical reconsideration of tragedy may begin even from the
expression of a single thought, as complex as that thought might be:
The World as Will and Representation, its author said, was spun
from a single thought; Rudolf Malter has said that it might be posed as:
"The world is the self- The nature of this will, in the tragic consideration, is beyond moral valuations such as optimism and pessimism; these two terms are useless indicators and forecasts of an unknown and unknowable future, which may be welcomed or feared, and they do not speak to the present; in any event, they reek of determinism; and it is the present condition of humanity which is under tragedy's examination. If we live anywhere in time, it is not in the future, but the morphing present, under the shadow of the past. Comedy (like some progressive politics) attempts to slip from this shadow into a sunny meadow, but is this possible, or is this mere illusion as well? The first great tragic work, the Oresteia, suggests that with the establishment of earthly justice we live in sunny brilliance and have broken with our bloody pasts. But even the Oresteia does not convince, and in any event, the Libation Bearers may have been a bone tossed to the elders of Athens in hopes of the annual prize rather than an honest reconciliation. In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner argues that the genre
of classic tragedy in its ancient and Elizabethan forms became untenable
in the Enlightenment that followed the 1660 restoration of Charles II, but
it took less than three centuries for that Enlightenment to begin
devouring itself. Or to finish: the will through its male and female human
agents turned against the world in a subatomic form at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, in an administrative form in the camps of Germany and Russia;
but certainly, terms of physical and social science, this was a science
determined by Enlightenment values. If one wanted proof of Enlightenment's
failure, what more proof could one ask for? Surely this should be enough.
(Which renders any talk of "futures" additionally absurd; how many futures
were eradicated in Europe and Asia in the years between 1939 and 1945; and
as a species we are complicitous in this eradication, for it wasn't Nazis
or Manhattan Project scientists in whom the guilt inheres but in the human
animal himself, in all of us. How we would like to forget this and blame
it on some nation- The single thought, however, continued to live, and it lived most in
theatre, because theatre, the unique speaking, bodied self- But they have begun, some years later, to do so. Completing the circle, some dramatists have begun to create a philosophical theatre once again, a theatre that is rooted in the metaphysics of tragedy. Some notes here in the spirit of Adorno: evidence of the necessity for tragedy in the 21st century. And perhaps the irrelevance and blindness of unthinking comedy. Posted in /Tragedy Monday, 21 December 2009 Upcoming: At the OHT Incubator and a New Blog
And what productions they are. Starting on 6 January, Kevin Doyle's Sponsored by Nobody company revives Behind the Bullseye, an examination of American consumerism centering on the Target superstore at Atlantic Terminal Mall in Brooklyn. Bringing together questions of class, gentification and globalization, Behind the Bullseye "looks like one of Reverend Billy's nightmares staged by Robert Wilson on a budget," Jason Zinoman said in the New York Times. The next night, 7 January, The Debate Society's A Thought About Raya, a meditation on the work of Leningrad artist Daniil Kharms, returns to the OHT. "Complex themes of love, sex, violence, and death pepper this simple story of the search for a voice in the midst of chaos," goes the press material. The Debate Society's usual suspects — director Oliver Butler and performers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen — participate. Later that same night, 31 Down's The Assember Dilator, "a sonic meltdown of science fiction and human desperation focused on the development of x-ray vision and its consequences, obvious and unknown," will be remounted. The chronicle of a bizarre hallucinogenic medical trial, The Assember Dilator was originally produced earlier this year at PS122. The three productions will run in repertory through 16 January. A full
schedule and ticket information can be found here.
Not a group to rest on their laurels, the Incubator team will then present
The Theater of a
Two- Finally, take note of A Piece of Monologue, an interesting blog from Rhys Tranter, a postgraduate student living in Penarth, Wales. The site offers an ongoing critique of Modernist texts, continental philosophy and Samuel Beckett, all subjects dear to our heart. Photo from The Assember Dilator by Paula Court. Posted in /Upcoming |
The Ontological-