Superfluities Redux
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Home > Dramatists > Edward_Albee Monday, 30 November 2009 New blood and old fogeysLeonard Jacobs today discusses a blog post by Laura Parker on a recent public interview in Australia with American dramatist Edward Albee. Parker drags up from the depths the usual arguments with Albee's insistence on the integrity of his written drama and his dismay with directorial interference with it. To quote Parker:
And the usual entirely predictable references to Beckett ensue as well
("Following Beckett's death, the playwright's licenses and rights to
perform his plays fell into the hands of his nephew, Edward Beckett, who
has maintained an iron- This aside, as Jacobs also notes, this is not an argument that anybody is going to win. In part, much of this is dependent on the way in which the dramatist sees his or her own work: as the springboard for a more collaborative production, or, among fewer dramatists, as something more in the nature of a musical score. All the words and notes are there, but there is more to a musical composition than that: there are also the dynamic markings, notes on timbre, rests and precise silences. This, too, is music, as the written stage direction is a part of the drama. It takes no great exercise of negative capability to realize that playwrights can lie in one camp or the other. The written dramatic text is not simply prey for the target of any director, designer or performer who comes along to revision it. If a director is true to the spirit of collaboration, they will recognize the author, living or dead, as a collaborator and honor such wishes as the author of that text expresses. The death of a dramatist does not entail the death of his or her stage directions as well. Only a simple mind will conclude that such an approach will lead to identical stagings of an individual play; they may be similar, but there is room enough for the live performer and director to draw from the text individual nuances, as conductors and musical performers continually find new dimensions to the work of great composers. Perhaps it would be best for those directors who chafe against authorial integrity to avoid staging these plays altogether; surely there are other texts, other dramatists, to which they can bring their own idiosyncratic vision. Of course, this would mean that they wouldn't be able to attach their names to a work commonly attributed as being "by" Samuel Beckett or "by" Edward Albee, and thereby bask in an unearned, opportunistic glory. And that would be too bad. But better that, perhaps, than to engage in pointless wrangling and possible court action; both dramatists and directors have better ways to spend their time. I didn't mention that Ms. Parker provides her own punch line to her original post; it's here. Posted in /Dramatists/Edward_Albee |