Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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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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