A Sense of Theatre: The Theatre Historian’s Perspective

Abstract

A Sense of Theatre: The Theatre Historian’s Perspective1 J. Michael Walton (bio) Now that we have entered an age when respect for the plays of classical Greece has been reduced to treating them as an excuse for showing how much cleverer are “versions” by contemporary adaptors / dramatists than those of their long-dead forebears, and I have entered an age when respect for those architects and pioneers of their new genre of theatre two and a half thousand years ago has itself an aura of the antiquated, I would like here to revisit, for the last time, reasons why a theatrical understanding of the 46 plays that have survived is not always the same as a dramatic one, but should take priority over any theoretical or literary approach. In the more than thousand English translations of the plays published from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, translators have tended to recreate the Greeks in the forms and fashions of the drama of their own time, or to have invented formats which reflect contemporary notions, often deluded, of cultural sensibilities in the classical world. After all, it is not until the twentieth century that these multiple translations begin to reveal any awareness of the plays as performance pieces, either originally or since. By then the plays had been largely appropriated by a multitude of extraneous vested interests which came to dominate scholarship. The worst disservice has been done to the Greeks by the arrogation of a performance discipline by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and various generations of cultural jugglers, often claiming a pedigree that goes back to Aristotle, and even Plato. Enthusiasm for the theatre from Socrates and Plato went no further than to exclude it from the ideal state as too dangerous, while Aristotle’s defense of the drama in the Poetics, some insights notwithstanding, was written seventy years after the death of Sophocles and Euripides and never reads like the work of a theatre-goer. [End Page 15] With notable exceptions, some peripherally, whose work I need not record here, the major critical perceptions of the Greek tragedies since the nineteenth century continue to be dominated by all manner of theorists from Nietzsche and Freud to Derrida and Eco. Those who were unable to understand how, and why, the theatre functioned as a means to understanding our lives, latched onto plays and the characters in plays, distorting them to fit into their own closet vocabularies of living. This is not to deny that many plays do revolve around issues that might be of interest to any of these methodologies, but the theatre offers something more which is no less disciplined, and certainly not simple. It remains a complication that this word, “theatricality,” offers different meanings to different people, often critically hostile to it because appreciation is harder than it looks. There is a scene in, I think, Duck Soup, where Harpo Marx is tearing up a book and when Groucho asks why, Chico replies “He gets mad because he can’t read.” Too many classical critics still get “mad” about “theatricality” as applied to Greek drama because they can’t “read” it. Herein lies the strongest of arguments for the priority of the theatre historian, where a sense of theatre becomes more significant than simply depth analysis of a written text. Playwright Tom Stoppard, whose grasp of the theatrical is both ingenious and comprehensive, once said in an interview, “I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself.” Playwrights ask questions or reveal contradictions. Philosophers offer paradoxes or solutions. And if philosophy is full of possibilities, ideas, and systems, however arcane and tortuous, theatre is also about impossibilities, mystery and illusion, enigmas and wonder, and, of course, deception. As Stoppard amply shows, the “how” is as important as the “what”: no coincidence, perhaps, that the plays in which philosophers are central characters, from Aristophanes’ Clouds to Stoppard’s Jumpers, tend to treat them as some kind of charlatan or buffoon. If the encroachment of other disciplines would appear to have done the greatest disservice to the appreciation of Greek tragedy, it has been certainly augmented by the assumption that the analysis of...