Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
Liturgies of Amorality
19 August 2007
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. – John 1:1
A theatre based in ritual is accompanied by its playscripts, each dramatist composing a liturgy for a world abandoned by (or divorced from, or finally liberated from) gods (both in the singular and the plural sense of the term): after Nietzsche, amoral; after Adorno and Bataille, in opposition to mass secular culture and its denigration of both body and spirit. The description of theatre that David Ian Rabey provides in his essay on Shakespearean dramaturgy also describes the sacred space:
"... any art, but particularly dramatic art, externalises inner life [what Bataille might call, in the title of one of his most evocative works, "Inner Experience"] in a way which might justly be termed pretentious, in that it bids to manifest an unusual and unconventional (if not always enviable) sensitivity to something, expanding the narrow vocabulary of being which is afforded by literal description of objectified facts."
The same can be said of the words and gestures of worship. Art is artifice, as is the ritual, not real life but a laserlike concentration of darkness (before the death of God, light) upon the artificial event in the attempt for an epiphany. (The fourth wall not a mirror but a lens for the concentration of individual consciousness upon the artificial object, the performance.) Theatre is profoundly calculated as an arena of difference. As incense and music serve as sensual opiates to prepare the worshipper for that epiphany in the church, so do costume and music prepare the spectator for the dramatic epiphany. The theatre does not reflect the street, or life, or the audience; in Rabey's construction, the deliberate aesthetic act is an act not of reflection but of consecration; in the theatre, the consecration of the speaking body. Its transfigurations are, like the transfiguration of bread into flesh, wine into blood, simultaneously literal and metaphorical, acts of metaphysical and alchemical conjuration for the spectator. The externalisation of inner life is a making-manifest of the dynamic between consciousness and the body in which that consciousness is trapped, through which that consciousness explores the world in search of autonomous freedom and awareness.
So the play is ritual, having space (the stage) and time (8:00pm Tuesday-Sunday, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) allotted for its repeated celebration. Ritual was the basis of theatre, its content sacred, in the Greek theatre. Its trivialisation into boulevard entertainment strips the theatrical event of its spiritual possibilities, indeed ridicules them, as unnecessary, spurious and ultimately irrelevant. But this is not true; it's a secular cultural prejudice that denies power and significance to the pregnant, transformative possibilities of the theatrical event.
I've been examining the texts (the liturgies) of those rituals known as Richard III and especially Oedipus recently. In his introduction to the Arden second series edition of the play, Antony Hammond makes clear the relationship of Richard III to the morality plays of the early English theatre (in the play, he notes, "the violence and treachery which had been the ruling characteristics of the country since the accession of Henry VI are expiated in ritual acts of retribution and reconciliation" [p.98]); and one sees the ritual acts of violence and expiation similarly in the Oedipus of both Sophocles and Seneca. Ultimately, despite the application of Christian and Greek theology to the original creation of these plays, time has wrested these liturgies from these desiccated dogmas to the more secular 21st-century world. But this does not strip these liturgies from their roots in spirit or ritual. They would not speak to us otherwise.
There comes the question, in relation to Rabey's conception of the Shakespearean dramatist, of space: cathedral or chapel. Ritual is conducted in both; in our small black-box theatres, we have chapels dedicated to the intensification of bodied consciousness. It is not a question of scope or size, but of practice and genre, and especially discipline and choice. "The genius of Shakespeare's drama," Rabey writes, "might aptly be said to reside in the incompleteness of its prescriptions [its disavowal of definitive meaning or interpretation]: hence its challenging power and infinitely renewing fascination. I would add: that the 'necessary choice' of the dramatist, like that of the performer, also excludes, yet somehow simultaneously illuminates, others." This choice is inclusive of the choice of gesture, of tone.
The ritual is reenactment of the dynamics of the spirit, in the Christian church the story of the crucifixion is told and retold, on the Greek stage the stories of the gods' and the fates' manipulation of well-known men and women. So Christ and God are dead, as are the gods and fates, leaving us with what? The body and consciousness, and a terrible freedom – an obligation – to explore. We are left to interiorise the dynamics of the crucifixion, of the gods and the fates, and to take responsibility for them. The stage for this interior movement can be as broad and peopled as that of the Globe, or as constrained as that of the profoundly, painfully constricted playing area of the late Beckett plays, populated by the single fragmented body or even body part (head, mouth). The first cathedral, the second chapel.
Narrative is an organisational principle for this exploration; its performance can be various, leading us to new questions, new avenues. In Richard III: how responsible was he for his evil, if fated to act as he did? This exploration colors the story, the performance of the ritual. And I am thinking of Jocasta, lately, rendering Oedipus still a detective story, but from a different perspective: What did Jocasta know; what was the nature of her physical, sensual desire for her son and husband; and when did she know it? Have we been neglecting the exploration of her role?
