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Chapter Seven...........................................................................................117
Representations of Marriage and Relationships in Contemporary
Anglo-American Drama
Sonja Novak
vi Contents
working on our doctoral theses, even the youngest among us had to cope
with a noticeable shortage of books or volumes of essays on Anglo-
American drama, and we had to resort to individual papers spread across
diverse journals. Each drama scholar knows how difficult and time
consuming it is to search through a variety of journals on mostly general
topics in order to find useful drama-based papers, which is why searching
for a drama-specific book feels somewhat like hunting for pearls. This is
why we believe the book makes a genuine contribution to drama
scholarship, not only by the very value of its content but as a source of
ideas for prospective young researchers.
The volume can also be used by undergraduate and Masters students to
help with seminar and Masters papers, especially bearing in mind the
number of students represented by the English departments from which
the contributors come, some of which include drama courses as part of
their syllabi.
The South-East European perspective on Anglo-American drama also
represents a valuable addition to existing drama scholarship, since all the
contributors are from the ex-Yugoslav republics and write from a
standpoint of multiple othernesses. The book might also be of interest to
theatre and film scholars and the general non-academic readership, notably
among theatre and film enthusiasts, because of the variety of approaches
adopted in the papers.
The first chapter, as an appropriate introduction to the volume, centres
on one of the founders of modern English drama, W. B. Yeats and the
perfomative aspect of drama, while the remaining chapters explore a
variety of postmodern British and American plays and playwrights. The
second chapter dwells on social criticism in Harold Pinter and David Hare
and the third on Pinter’s American “counterpart” David Mamet and the
phenomenon of “(retro)active revenge of the other” explored in his recent
plays. The fourth chapter continues in the same vein, exploring how
American society is re-created in the tales “told” in the plays of Sam
Shepard, where both the norm and the Other are equally elusive in the
Mexican dreamland landscape. In the fifth chapter we are back in the UK,
exploring the overtly postmodernist plays by Mark Ravenhill and Sarah
Kane. The chapter centres on Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire and
follows logically from the previous chapter, as Sam Shepard and Wenders
shared postmodern(ist) artistic interests, made apparent in their
collaboration on Paris, Texas. The sixth chapter ventures on a journey
through the sinister fairy-tale land of Martin McDonagh’s Ireland,
commenting on contemporary violence, while the seventh employs a
sociological and anthropological approach to marriage and relationships in
Highlights in Anglo-American Drama 3
IGOR GRBIĆ
JURAJ DOBRILA UNIVERSITY OF PULA
1. Introduction
William Butler Yeats began writing plays very early in his career and,
to the end of his life, considered playwriting an important aspect of his
literary creation. Writing at a time when, in the theatre, realism prevailed,
he increasingly felt the need to side with the opposite camp, the one that,
over the decades, produced the anti-naturalistic theories and experiments
of Antonin Artaud and Jacques Copeau in France, of Max Reinhardt and
Bertolt Brecht in Germanyand of various alternative theatres in Moscow
and St Petersburg (later Leningrad), to name just a few. Since “[r]ealism is
created for the common people and was always their peculiar delight”
(Yeats 1916, viii), and since, in the theatre just as in anything else, Yeats
is an aristocrat believing in a primordial authenticity of the particular
human expression he is observing and undertaking, he cannot but deplore
the existence of a stage―and its consequent identification with the theatre
in general—whose guiding ideal is a thorough reproduction of the outside,
“real” world. The contemporary situation, however, was only the tip of an
iceberg: for almost three centuries, the voice and bodily gestures had been
losing their expressivity (Ibid.,ii), and it was high time we discovered
“grave and decorative” gestures and scenery, recovered the artificial
potential of the human voice, as well as “dresses of so little irrelevant
magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
much labour into the immortal people of romance” (Yeats 1903, 265-266).
All this was in order to realize a theatrical maximum, seen as a maximum
distancing from everyday, “functional” practices, as a maximum activation
of properties specific to the theatre. This naturally led Yeats to the concept
of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total theatre including and unifying all kinds of
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 5
arts. Such drama goes back to the times of yore, when the boundary
between art and religion was ill-pronounced, and very permeable. As early
as 1899, Yeats writes that he wants a drama that will be performed in
hidden temples, with its own priesthood, that will, he hopes, “make their
Art into the Art of the People” (qtd. in Ellmann 1979, 133).1 For Yeats, as
for so many others, the theatre had begun in ritual (Yeats 1903, 266, but
also in many other places), and it was the site to which it had to be
redeemed.
Much has been made of the influence of the Japanese nō drama on
Yeats – too much. Yeats's intuition, which, coupled with his artistry, made
him the profound poet he was, would have been a poor thing, indeed, had
he needed to wait for an external factor to be put in motion. Quotations
like the above from 1899, along with specific references to his plays,
could be easily multiplied to show that Yeats had been groping for
different, non-naturalistic, solutions well before the noteworthy winter of
1913/14, when he was introduced (textually rather than performatively,
alas) to the world of nō.2 The latter was only a crystallization of a growing
vision.3 In the present chapter I intend to show that virtually all
“innovations” of Yeats's maturing dramatic theory and practice (he
constantly rewrote his own plays, in search of the right form) had already
been shared by many, sometimes all, great theatrical traditions of the
world, sometimes for centuries, or at a time well over two millennia before
his own earthly existence. Yeats saw none, but intuited the primordial,
ritual, religious sensibility, common to them all. Nō is only a part of a
much wider world stage, by far the largest part of which does, true
enough, pertain to South, Southeast and East Asia. At his own home,
Yeats took the best of the traditional theatre he had at his disposal: Greek
drama (see especially his versions of Sophocles's Oedipus plays, or The
King's Threshold (1904), modelled on classical Greek drama), medieval
and Elizabethan drama (e.g., the latter's influence on the technical setup of
On Baile's Strand (1904)). Of course, by Yeats's time their performative
features had all been long dead and forgotten, unlike the bulk of dramatic
practices outside the West. A chapter-size consideration can only scrape
the surface, but it should suffice to show Yeats the playwright as
belonging to a tradition into which he was not born (the same could be
said for almost all of Yeats). I concentrate on the performative aspects of
both Yeats’s theatre and traditional theatres, and use the term traditional
in the loose meaning of pre-modern―which roughly coincides with pre-
naturalistic―but give preference to what might more properly be called
classical drama and its offshoots, rather than to the many folk forms. I am
deliberately downsizing my references to nō, though fully aware of the
6 Chapter One
true status it has in both Yeats’s and the world’s dramaturgy. A more
proper examination of a subject already sufficiently analyzed would fit ill
with the space I can afford.4 In some cases the theatrical forms examined
are not particularly old, but they can with certainty or in all likelihood be
derived from older, more “classical” forms, which derivation authenticates
their presentation of traditional practices.
2. The stage
“I call to the eye of the mind...” By the time the two musicians first
pronounced these words to open At the Hawk’s Well (1917)―which, in its
turn, opens Four Plays for Dancers, the first of an immediate nō-
inspiration―Yeats had already amply experimented with the scenery,
reducing it to suggestive essentials, and leaving the more literal,
descriptive, lacunae to be filled by the creativity of the actor and the
imagination of the audience, always supported by the text of the play
itself. Thus, in the same play, the stage can already be “any bare space
before a wall against which stands a patterned screen” (Yeats 1921, 3).
The screen (or curtain) pattern may be of mountain and sky, as in The
Dreaming of the Bones (1919). The important thing is that it should only
suggest, only create the atmosphere, the mood―which can imply
representing something that is an accompaniment to, not a reflection of the
text―and should not be a precise mimetic prop to the physical locale
(Ibid., 53). Any rich, heavily painted, ready-made scenery ridicules the
world-creating potential of the text, underrates the actor’s powers to
express it, and stifles the imagination of the audience. The setting, like the
costuming, should be symbolically decorative― colours are thus more
than welcome―which lifts it out of time and place, carrying it nearer to
faeryland (Yeats 1911, 217).
This is in perfect harmony with the aesthetics of traditional theatre. In
contrast to a cluttered and, starting with the Baroque, a perspective-ridden
Western stage, traditional scenery, including the stage background, is
always kept to a minimum. Khon, the classical dance drama of Thailand,
and the oldest still to be seen there, even goes as far as featuring simple
movements against a white screen (even though its rich plots, based as
they are on the epic Rāmāyaṇa, offer ample opportunities for visual
literalization of its ambience). Jingxi―best known as Beijing
opera―makes use of a non-representative, multicoloured backdrop owned
personally by the star actor of the troupe (Bowers 1960, 283). Ancient
Greek theatre was no exception: in its exemplary period (fifth century
BC), the only background was the façade of the skēnḗ building, possibly
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 7
folded up. As such, this element, found in all four “nō plays”, is not a nō
feature, and it remains curious as long as we do not amplify our
understanding by other theatrical traditions. I argue that it performs the
function of a curtain. The curtain is always a metaleptic threshold, i.e., a
boundary line between worlds. Although we tend to identify it with the
one belonging to the proscenium arch, this is a modern, Western
invention. Traditional theatres, if introducing a curtain, tend to have it at
the rear, or, as in nō, at the beginning of the hashigakari bridge, for
curtained entrances. The role of the curtain may become especially
dramatic. In Japanese kabuki there is a door covered by a curtain whose
metal rings hang on a metal rod. Their squeaking announces the imminent
emergence of somebody important. In the Indian rās līlā the curtain opens
to reveal Kṛṣṇa (usually spelt Krishna) and Rādhā, the highlights of this
religious performance. This is very much like revealing the golden hawk
on Yeats‘s cloth. There is more, however. Of particular interest is the use
of a loose curtain in a number of Indian theatres, starting possibly with
nāṭya itself, where a curtain―and even more than one, for a multiple
scene―might have been held by attendants and then lowered or pulled
aside to present a character. This is certainly what we find in some later
theatres. In kūṭiyāṭṭam, the Keralite form believed by many to still
preserve much of the original nāṭya, a simple red curtain is used for
special entries, while its close relative, kathakali, has gone the farthest.
The first preliminary dance is performed behind the hand-held curtain.
Very often, before a major character appears, he slowly peeps from behind
the curtain. However, when a powerful character appears for the first time,
a struggle is staged between the character and the curtain. Accompanied
by drums and cymbals, the character performs a number of dance
sequences only partly visible to the audience – until the curtain is dropped,
and the character is manifested in his full glory. This playing with the
curtain, known as tiranokku, is only the most moving elaboration of the
idea of introducing one world into another, of making them meet, an idea I
believe Yeats’s cloths also essentially shared.
Inspired by Gordon Craig’s conception of the theatre, Yeats
experimented widely with lighting, too. Actually, it was one of the trends
of the day, but also of another era into which the West had stumbled
unaware of its precedents. Methods of spotlighting different locales at a
time had been known and used in India for centuries. Among the Japanese
inventions, there were lighting techniques which bathed the actors in
sunlight or shadow, according to the needs of the moment, but we also
find long candlesticks protruding out to the actor's face as a spotlight
(Bowers 1960, 321). Nevertheless, the preferred mode (when at all
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 9
3. The players
The player is the second of Yeats's three pillars of drama (these are
treated in his essay “Play, Player and Scene”). The actor should be non-
conversational, make no irrelevant gestures, and look like a painting in a
frieze (Yeats 1962, 172 and 176-7). These are all expectations by which
traditional theatre puts much store, and I shall shortly come back to each
of them. Yeats's dramatic universe is in fact player-centered, the player
using all of his various potentials and thus becoming the foremost vitalizer
of the written germ into the full-fledged world of the play. This view of
the player as an all-round performer is a far cry from the common modern
understanding of the actor as the faithful imitator of real life. Unlike with
Yeats, in not a few traditional theatres, the text of the play is of secondary
importance and highly typified, the real event being the player (in
Southeast Asia the director is virtually replaced by a stage manager, who
10 Chapter One
chooses and rearranges scripts: he does not write the dialogue;instead, the
players improvise around the story line, using some set patterns). Though
in a much, much more sophisticated sense, even Yeats's plays could be
called typified, amplifying moments of particular states of the soul and
evoking redemption. Besides, there are certainly true archetypes among
his characters (e.g., the self-aware Old Man). General, primordial types,
not particularized and psychologically nuanced characters, have been the
true inhabitants of most traditional theatre since Greek times (even when
on the surface they might seem to be highly individualized).9 Yeats openly
and repeatedly denies the importance of the character in tragedy. All true
tragic art is passionate art, “the drowner of dykes, the confounder of
understanding”, moving us to a trance-like intensity that makes of the
persons on the stage humanity itself (Yeats 1911, ix). Yeats talks of
moods, rather than characters, autonomous realities only putting on
various masks for their drama. What happens on the stage is a gradual
intensification of a fundamental human emotion, a moment of supreme
passion unfolding the depths of the human being and his or her existence.
This is what makes David R. Clark call Yeats's theatre “a drama of
perception”: his plays move from passion to perception; they are
recognition scenes, showing heroic suffering turning into deep knowledge
(Clark 1965, 15-16). This certainly is a direct influence of nō, but, again,
features as the ultimate raison d'être of traditional theatre in general,
whether tacitly implied or elaborated upon, as in Aristotle on Greek
tragedy or Zeami Motokiyo on nō, and, with special and systematic
treatment, in Indian criticism, with its doctrine of the eight (later nine)
rasas, aesthetically spiritualized states of mind, clearly to be distinguished
from as many related bhāvas, which are merely their psychological,
natural conditions within our daily life.
Whoever feels the need for such noble theatre must of and within
himself, even without outside influences, intuit that the goal must be
achieved through some kind of distancing from what we grossly call the
real world.10 Detachment, mimetic asceticism, stylization, a ritual-like
quality evoking a world of superhuman transcendence―whatever you
name it, the dream requires an actor more accomplished than can be
provided by the tradition-emancipated performative infrastructure at
Yeats's disposal. Yeats was well-aware of the problem. Having grouped
together his plays The King's Threshold, Deirdre (1907) and On Baile's
Strand, he writes in a letter that each one of them requires “one player of
genius and that is out of reach probably henceforth for ever” (Yeats 1954,
674).
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 11
character and, basically and foremost, to dissociate the two worlds they
inhabit.
, Nō certainly makes use of masks (mostly exquisitely symbolic in their
neutral universality, which lends specific expressions to specific tilts of the
head and the voice), and before he learnt about this, Yeats, of course, also
knew of commedia dell'arte and Greek theatre, both masked. Once again,
however, make-up (including masks, to be sure) has been an integral part
of the longing within traditional theatre to remove itself from the common
world. Apart from the various folk forms of theatre and quasi-theatre, with
their omnipresent masks, I am even tempted into observing that the farther
we move eastwards, the greater the overall tendency to substitute painted
faces or facial movements for solid masks. Greek theatre, apparently the
oldest we know of, used masks in all of its dramatic forms (including the
members of the tragic chorus). Dionysus, god of tragedy, was often
present as a mask on a pole. Interestingly, Greek make-up was said to have
started as face painting―as early as Thespis, who was in general credited
as the father of Greek tragedy―soon to solidify into a cloth mask.
Moreover, even at this early stage, we find the not uncommon theatrical
practice of one actor playing more than one character, just as is the case in
The Only Jealousy of Emer (Yeats 1921, 33).12 The twenty-third chapter of
the Nāṭyaśāstra extensively treats, among other things, the actors'
ornaments, colours, painted body parts, all according to the status of the
character. The term pratiśira (23.134-135), though commonly translated
as mask, remains vague and might just as well denote only making up the
face (see 23.182-192), and special kinds of crowns and hairstyle.
Significantly, kūṭiyāṭṭam and kathakali, which are most probably nāṭya-
derived, both favour heavy make-up over a ready-made mask, preserving
the latter only for some special animal or half-animal roles―possibly
revealing a folk influence―though kṛṣṇāṭṭam, one of kūṭiyāṭṭam's
predecessors, included proper masks (Zarrilli 1984, 176).13 This, however,
is south India. The north-eastern manipuri introduces another possibility:
faces so motionless that they become masks of themselves, which is also
found in Yeats's insistence on the graveness of expression. This strategy is
anything but rare further in Southeast Asia. In Bali, a paradise of
performative arts, across its various forms we find both make-up and
masks, but also the possibility of making only one's own face and body,
such as they naturally are, so intensely expressive as to turn an old man
into a young warrior or a beautiful princess (Pronko 1974, 18). If a
theatrical tradition opts for painting faces instead of putting on masks or
something else, this, too, can be done in more than one way. Yeats's
version seems restrained when compared to the striking, sometimes even
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 13
too, known for its puppet or marionette shows (yousshim bwé or yokthe
pwé). There―to borrow a happy turn of phrase―”puppets set the standard
a good dancer must abide by” (Sein and Withey 1965, 23). The most
complex and astonishing development I know of occurred in Indonesia,
whose famous wayang kulit―shadow puppet theatre centuries old and
almost certainly of animistic origins―engendered wayang wong, a theatre
with human actors imitating the movements and stories of wayang kulit.
Wayang wong, in its turn, engendered wayang golek, in which the
puppeteer sticks his puppets in the banana tree trunk before him (serving
as the stage), and then moves their arms by means of bamboo slivers, in
the fashion of wayang kulit. In other words, the puppets imitate human
beings imitating shadow puppets (Bowers 1960, 219). Such a double
remove comes close to Craig's idea of the über-marionette: man imitates
the man-made marionette but then goes even beyond―über―a mere
reconstruction, tending to embody an equally unhuman and unthinglike
stance.
The most refined stylization of body movement is, of course, dance. It
is difficult to find a single form of traditional theatre that is not either
dance-drama or at least drama with dance elements. Dance is possibly the
greatest single influence of nō on Yeats, visible in the very title he chose
to collectively designate his four “nō plays”: Four Plays for Dancers.
Though he never saw a nō performance, he well understood that its action
culminates with a prolonged moment of sustained passion, expressed
through dance (mai).15 The climax of action is, in fact, the climax of dance
(hardly a peculiarity of nō). To take an example outside the poetics of the
Four Plays, in The Death of Cuchulain (1939) the Old Man calls for a
dance and “the tragi-comedian dancer, the tragic dancer, upon the same
neck love and loathing, life and death”. What he has around him instead
makes him “spit three times. I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas”
(Yeats 2001, 546).
In traditional theatre the dance dimension can take a great number of
different manifestations, much more elaborate than in Yeats's usage. For
the present purpose, I shall outline just a couple of essentials. There is a
common distinction between pure, abstract dance and mimetic dance
(unlike modern theatre, in which mime is by default seen as something
comic, in traditional theatre such meaning is implied only in clowns’
mime). There is also a third, intermediary possibility: gestures are used
symbolically, but the symbolism is abstract, unrealistic and utterly
conventional, not mimetic (the best-known instance is the Indian
mudrās).16 Thus, Indian tradition distinguishes three kinds of dance: the
already familiar nāṭya (with its characteristic use of mudrās), the mimetic
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 15
nṛtya, and nṛtta, pure dance, all derived from the same Sanskrit verbal
root, nṛt (or Prākrit naṭ), meaning to dance. In the case of the closely
related Southeast Asian theatre, James Brandon distinguishes three kinds
according to the way dance is employed. First come battle scenes
performed as dance; secondly it may take the form of a conventionalized
gesture language during dialogue or song passages, and, thirdly, whole
sections of the story may be represented through dance, as in ballet
(Brandon 1967, 142). Yeats's dances seem to have been of the abstract,
“pure” kind, influenced as they were by nō, where dance, mai, is typically
of that sort, although there are also more representational variants. The
island of Bali, swarming with various dance forms, offers a number of
such dances, legong being the most abstract, while tjalonarang includes
pure dance only as its interludes (Pronko 1974, 20 and 23). The latter is
also true of tillana, any of the pure dance insertions within bharatanāṭyam,
the best-known of Indian classical dances. Another dance form with no
conceptual meaning is Thai rabam (Bowers 1960, 146). Instead of listing
other examples, let me point out that, in the West, dance played an
overwhelming role in ancient Greek theatre. Actors danced as a matter of
course, and since, at least in the beginning, these were actually playwrights
themselves, the first tragedians (Thespis, Phrynichus, Pratinas) were called
dancers, not actors or authors (Arnott 1989, 56), just as “to perform nō” is
nō o mau in Japanese, literally “to dance nō” (Inoura and Kawatake 1981,
112). After all, the very word orkhḗstra, indicating the stage, is derived
from the verb orkheĩsthai, to dance. Once again, the enchanted world to
which the stage belongs requires representational means only remotely
reminiscent of the everyday world. One’s movements cannot present an
exception.
Of course, the same holds true for the auditory aspect of the actor’s
performance. It is one of the things Yeats found deteriorating in the course
of time:
When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an always
larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes than
through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words is
exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like exhausting
emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they were reading
something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art of oratory, and
gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that is content with the
sympathy of our nerves [...] verse spoken without a musical emphasis
seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said
naturally and simply in prose. (Yeats 1903, 182-183)
16 Chapter One
was all just words, words, words, and who virtually excluded from his
dramatic considerations the musical and the visual aspects, a phenomenon
which was subsequently only aggravated by post-Renaissance interpreters
of his Poetics.
I shall first present the chorus, this great extension of both the actor
and the public, a metaleptic oddity whose perspective is so protean that it
is made up of all the perspectives appearing in a play and its performance.
The chorus can be anyone―a character in the play; a personal or
impersonal public commenting, warning, advisingor predicting; a god;
destiny; of this world; of another; of no world―which makes it everyone.
The chorus was a truly ingenious entity that could not leave Yeats’s
voracious imagination indifferent. One of the things he looked for in Asian
theatre, considered to be more authentic, was precisely a chorus “that has
no part in the action” (Yeats 1916, vii). A passage in his essay “Emotion
of Multitude” expresses very well both his appreciation of the chorus and,
to further qualify Sharp’s accusation, his own repulsion at any wrong use
of words in drama:
The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which
called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-enduring Odysseus,
and all the gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some well-ordered fable,
some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play
delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has
created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of far-off
multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than the mere
will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a
little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the
imagination. (Yeats 1903, 339-340)
I HAVE written the little songs of the chorus to please myself, confident
that singer and composer, when the time came for performance, would
certainly make it impossible for the audience to know what the words
were. (Yeats 1921, 135)
would be audible and expressive, and of a music “that shall mean nothing,
or next to nothing, apart from the words” (Yeats 1923, 129-130).20 In time,
however, he gave up on finding a musician submissive enough, or an
audience capable of hearing properly the words accompanied by music
(Ure 1963, 116).21
5. Conclusion
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Yeats took his dramatic
activity seriously, but this was certainly a domain in which his self-
confidence and clarity of vision were inferior to his range in the field of
poetry or even fiction. What he was clear about was that the Western
theatre of his day was a “theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians,
grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals”. These are Artaud’s
words (Artaud 1958, 41), but I cannot envisage Yeats hesitating whether
to subscribe to them. However, how to change such a dismal situation was
an altogether different question. He constantly rewrote his plays, often
more than once, testing them on the stage and then repairing the faulty
parts (always to the benefit of the male element, as Yeats put it, to achieve
“an increase of strength in the bony structure” (Yeats 1923, 186-187)). For
some plays there even existed a “stage version” and a “reading version”
(Ure 1963, 23-24). However, I feel his growing suspicion of any
opportunity to properly stage his plays was not occasioned so much by his
lack of any specific vision, as by the abundance of his general vision. He
felt only too well what an astonishingly grand artistic and spiritual entity
the theatre is, but lacked the concrete knowledge to reveal it. This may be
what James Flannery (1976) means when he argues that Yeats’s theatrical
ideas are of greater significance than the plays themselves. Yeats was
possibly right when he wrote to T. S. Moore that, “I always feel that my
work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith” (Yeats and Moore 1953,
156).22 Still, there is also a conspicuously general note to Yeats’s
suspiciousness:
he never saw one, Western or Eastern, but was only carried along by the
contemporary wave of general discontent with modern theatre. Being part
of that discontent―only several decades removed―I cannot but assert
that, any specific evaluations of his merits and demerits apart, he thus
resuscitated, in stage and all of its flesh, much of what the theatre,
primordially and authentically, means. True theatre, the one being a
genuinely spiritual experience, cannot live away from ritual, however
interpreted and however staged. Yeats frequently mentions this core part
of the theatre, and many traditional theatres were, or still are, performed
within or before temples and shrines, by priests, in connection to a
religious festivity, or at least they can be traced to some form of spiritual
engagement. My choice of traditional forms has aimed at
representativeness, but it must be kept in mind that traditional theatre is by
no means limited to the Eurasian continent.23 I have limited myself mostly
to the performative aspects, though there would be much to say about the
others as well (composition, plot and characters).
To repeatedly tax Yeats with having misunderstood and deformed both
the form and spirit of nō― to the point of asserting that he was
diametrically opposed to all its levels (Stucki 1966, 106)―is to repeatedly
read into his “nō-plays” and their underlying inspiration a purpose of the
critics in question, not of Yeats. Yeats was certainly not trying to write a
nō play of his own, but his own version of a traditional play―with
inevitable colourings of his own time, place and self. Neither need his
unhappy statement that “[i]t is an advantage of this noble form [nō] that it
need absorb no one’s life” (Yeats 1916, ii) be taken as a sign of his
superficiality, but rather of using such a “noble form” according to his own
needs, in order to ennoble his own plays, to create something of a
traditional theatre of his own. Because he, too, felt that a “noble form” is
what theatre is about, after all. And this is also what, for over a century
now, some have been feeling in the West when claiming―so
preposterously, on the surface―that by using some of the techniques
characteristic of Eastern theatre, many dramatic masterpieces of the West
would come much closer to their original productions. Like anything else
that is sacred, a sacred theatre tends to be essentially one.
References
Abrams, Tevia. “Tamāshā”. In Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance,
ed. Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli (New
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993): 275-304.
24 Chapter One
Notes
1
Note that here, too, any democratization worth its salt has to proceed from above;
otherwise, it is mere barbarization.
2
His early miracle plays, as he himself called them―with no historical
implications from Christian theatre, but rather expressing their supernatural,
epiphanic character―are an obvious case in point. Yeats also saw some of the
experiments of the symbolist Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris (staging even Sanskrit
plays) which influenced his Abbey Theatre. Finally, the impact of E. Gordon Craig
will be mentioned more than once in this chapter.
3
Among the various reductive interpretations of Yeats's interest in nō, the most
pronounced is possibly the one claiming the spiritist in him was simply attracted to
the many ghosts of (some of) its plays.
4
I can refer in the matter especially to Qamber 1974 and Taylor 1976.
5
True enough, in nō we also find the matsubame, the painted pine backdrop, but
besides its being the only regular stage decoration, its function is probably highly
emblematic, standing in fact for the famous Yogo pine tree at the Kasuga shrine in
Nara, under which the god of the shrine was seen dancing in the form of an old
man (Ortolani 1990, 138).
6
This is very much like nō, where a number of planks assembled in a particular
way stands for a boat, but if put together differently, they become a chariot, or else
a porch, if combined in yet a third way.
7
Nāṭyaśāstra, Chapter 17.
8
An instance of shared stage conventions is the way to indicate a long journey. For
traditional theatre we can take the Nāṭyaśāstra (14.17), which instructs the actor to
walk excessively within a given area. Compare, in Yeats, going around the stage to
represent a (continuation of the) journey (e.g., The Dreaming of the Bones).
9
This is so even when a play deals with a historical or quasi-historical subject, as
happens in nāṭya, kabuki and part of Southeast Asia theatre. A good example in
Yeats is The Dreaming of the Bones, where characters are in fact symbolical
embodiments of directions in the history of Ireland and modern civilization (Clark
1965, 56). Other examples include The King and the Great Clock Tower (1934)
and A Full Moon in March (1935), where, as noted by Ure (1963, 163), the
personages function as projections of the fable's meanings, simulacra of human
forms, with no individuality and no names, except ritual ones.
10
The outside influence, in Yeatsʾs case, would have been nō. However, not only,
as already stressed, do his experiments antedate his first contact with the Japanese
form, but they even, once contact had occurred, remained of a very textual nature.
The Japanese dancer Michio Ito was the closest Yeats came to experience for a
visual reconstruction, while he had none of the auditive dimension of nō.
11
Yeats probably spent more time re-writing than writing his plays, always in
search of a more accomplished expression of his growing dramatic vision.
12
In The Cat and the Moon (1917) the First Musician also plays the saint. Greek
theatre (Arnott 1989, 166) was also familiar―and Indian kūṭiyāṭṭam still is―with
Yeats’s Plays and Traditional Theatre 27
the less common practice of, conversely, having several actors playing one
character. In either case, it is always the character that matters.
13
An opposite instance is Thai khon, where the heavy make-up was in time
formalized into masks.
14
Ever since R. Pischel's work, there has been an undying, however generally
disqualified, minority of scholars advocating the hypothesis that classical Sanskrit
theatre (nāṭya) sprang from puppet theatre.
15
Compare Yeats: “I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the
actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are
holding down violence or madness – 'down Hysterica passio'. All depends on the
completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath” (Yeats
1940, 86).
16
Occasionally, the mudrās can be used in an obviously mimetic way, as in South
Indian ayyappan tiyatta.
17
In the case of verse plays, a major contributor to a strikingly non-realistic diction
is certainly the meter. Both Greek and Sanskrit drama made use of various metrical
patterns to express different moods. In his “nō-plays”, in particular, Yeats, too,
used a variety of meters to give word to, as classified by L. Nathan, three basic
states of being: the choric, the heroic, and the supernatural (Nathan 1965, 229-
231). Besides, Yeats's rhythmic dialogues (e.g., in The Cat and the Moon) often
echo the stychomythic tradition of Greek theatre.
18
As for the audience's reactions, suffice it to mention that At the Hawk's Well did
not fail to impress, for its stylizations, even the highbrow Eliot, present at the 1916
premiere.
19
Here too, as we repeatedly find in traditional theatre―as well as in Yeats and
Craig's theories―during the performance of one actor the others stand still. This
convention of concentration and intensification exists in nō, too, and it cannot be
accidental that the stylization is also present in Japanese cartoons, unlike the
realistic, Western Disney tradition, where everybody moves all the time.
20
This “textualization” of songs stands in sharp contrast to the traditional
possibility of using them for their musical quality alone, sometimes to a complete
annihilation of word meaning (e.g., the dhruvā songs in Indian nāṭya).
21
Unlike in word-centered Yeats, we have just seen this (has) presented no
problem to traditional theatre. We have good reason to believe that even in the
logocentric Greek theatre, understanding the words might have been obstructed by
the music, including the actor's way of reciting/chanting the lines.
22
Note again the keywords to Yeats's conception of the theatre: ritual, faith.
23
Rabinal Archi, for instance, is still performed in Mexico and has generally been
accepted as a form offering some hints of what Mayan drama might have been like
before the Spanish. The audience watches from all four sides (in some other
traditional forms the audience takes three sides―also at the premiere of At the
Hawk's Well (see Yeats 1921, 87)―or two―as in today's nō). There are lengthy
solo speeches, no realistic dialogue, and never in a conversational tone; the main
characters narrate past events rather than re-enacting them in the dramatic present
28 Chapter One
(also a nō feature), a stage assistant brings and carries away the propsand there is
plenty of stylization (Zarrilli 2006, 70).
CHAPTER TWO
IGOR PETROVIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF NIŠ
1. Introduction
The careers of Harold Pinter and David Hare are related in a peculiar
way. In his book Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, the seventeen years
younger Hare mentions that he admired Pinter’s works as a school boy,
and remembers the letter he wrote to Pinter at the time, expressing the love
he cherished for his plays (Hare 2005, 172-3). The respect remained and
grew, and in the following decades became mutual. Hare wrote the
introduction to Pinter’s last play Celebration and, on the evening of 7
December 2005, he had the honour to introduce the Channel 4 television
broadcast of Pinter’s Nobel Lecture “Art, Truth and Politics”, which has
rapidly become a “manifesto” for numerous politically and socially
engaged artists in the first years of the new millennium. In 2011, Hare was
awarded the PEN Pinter Prize as a “British writer who casts an
‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world” (BBC News 2011),
something Pinter had been praised for as well. It is, however, important to
note that, despite close personal contacts, in terms of style, form and
language, Pinter and Hare evolved as writers of distinctly dissimilar plays.
Hare has been typically interested in topical social and political issues and
events, sometimes resorting to the use of documentary techniques in his
plays. On the other hand, Pinter’s works are enigmatic, ambiguous, and
full of symbols, archetypal depths and idiosyncratic linguistic
complexities. They are not limited to any specific location and time, and
as such are open to a broader range of interpretations. These differences
30 Chapter Two
Hare’s works. It is, however, not easy to determine which plays would be
meaningful to compare, not only because of their different stylistic
features and idiosyncrasies. For instance, their chronologically close plays
are thematically very distant. In the 1980s, at the time when Hare’s plays
could hardly be seen as politically engaged and when he was the least
productive, judging by the number of plays and screenplays written
between 1980 and 1990, Pinter entered his so-called “openly political”
phase. It coincided with his intensified social and political activism, and in
that period he wrote some of his best known engaged plays. On the other
hand, in the post 9/11 era, when Hare’s interest expanded from local to
international affairs, and when he wrote some of his most frequently
performed and internationally recognized works, Pinter had already
decided to end his playwriting career and dedicate his efforts solely to
political activism. Nevertheless, in spite of these divergences, it is possible
to examine and compare plays by Pinter and Hare that reflect their
responses to the same political issues and events that concerned them,
such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
interesting” (Hare 1999, xi) (the expansion of Hare’s interest from local
concerns to international topics and affairs), Hare decided to publish his
experiences, impressions and reflections related to the production of Via
Dolorosa in a book called Acting Up: A Diary.
It is unfortunate that he did not meet the expectations of the project.
Instead of giving an objective account of the role that Great Britain played
in the creation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hare wrote a play which,
in view of its content and the author’s attitude towards the subject,
strongly resembles a travelogue. Hare places his observations of the
Middle East in the context of earlier literary accounts of journeys to Israel,
quoting Herman Melville’s and Arthur Koestler’s impressions of
Jerusalem. Melville, he reminds us, wrote that “[T]he air over Jerusalem is
saturated with prayers and dreams” (Hare 1998, 8), while Koestler
observed that the rocks of Jerusalem “have seen more holy murder, rape
and plunder than any other place on earth.” Hare, on his part, describes it
as a dirty and gloomy city. However, the tone is very different when it
comes to the state of Israel. Hare compares it with the United States and
says that entering Tel Aviv, he had a feeling he was in California, while
travelling from Israel to the Gaza Strip was like “moving from California
into Bangladesh” (Ibid, 24-5).” Hare describes the members of the two
nations in a similarly slanted manner. For instance, he reports the words of
a British humanitarian worker in Gaza who said that Palestinians are
people who always want things to fail and are happy when it happens. By
contrast, in Acting Up, Hare does not conceal the fact that he was careful
not to insult the Jewish community in Britain and the United States with
Via Dolorosa. He states that he is aware of the influence the Jewish people
have in theatre2, and that it is, for example, very risky to book a play on
Friday, the day when Jewish audiences do not go to the theatre. In short,
Hare openly says that he is afraid that the success of his play largely relies
on the Jewish theatre-going community, in both Great Britain and the
United States. This may also be why he approaches the Israeli-Palestinian
issue as a topic most people are tired of, since it has been in focus of
global public debate for decades, although he never mentions the roots of
the conflict, i.e. the question of sovereignty over the land he is visiting.
Also, he avoids comparing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to similar issues
in other parts of the world, except for occasionally referring to the
deteriorating situation in Serbia, at the time, which culminated in the
bombing of the country by NATO. He, for instance, fails to draw a parallel
between the situation in the Middle East and that in Northern Ireland,
which is a topic he should be familiar with. The greatest weakness of Via
Dolorosa, however, is the author’s silence about the role of Great Britain
Strategies of Social Criticism in the Plays of Pinter and Hare 33
Harold Pinter, on the other hand, never wrote a play dealing directly
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, unlike Hare, he was a
committed activist for the rights of the Palestinian people, although he
came from a Jewish family himself. He was a prominent member of the
interest group Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which opposes Israel’s
current policy towards Palestine, especially the occupied regions of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He was also involved with the association
Independent Jewish Voices, among whose signatories was David Hare’s
wife, and was the patron of the Russell Tribunal, which presented its
report on Palestine to the UN in 2012. But although none of Pinter’s plays
directly addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this does not mean that
none of them can be related to this decades-long problem. For example,
Mountain Language can easily be interpreted in terms of the treatment of
Palestinian civilians by the Israeli forces. Although it is commonly
speculated that Pinter wrote the play as a response to his visit to Turkey in
the 1980s, where he witnessed the mistreatment of the Kurdish minority
and the destruction of their culture and language, the plot of Mountain
Language is not limited to this particular subject. Pinter himself confirmed
this in a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1988:
[T]his play is not about the Turks and the Kurds. I mean, throughout
history, many languages have been banned—the Irish have suffered, the
Welsh have suffered and Urdu and the Estonians’ language banned; the
Basques’ language was banned, you know, at various times. (Pinter 1988)
The lack of explicitly stated place and time in the play makes it
applicable to many similar situations, in both the present and the past. In
Mountain Language, Pinter managed to depict the essence of the
relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, which makes this
play quite relevant for understanding the division of roles in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. So, the comparison of Hare’s plays about Israel and
Palestine to Pinter’s Mountain Language reveals a paradox. Instead of
giving a valid, documented account of the actual circumstances in the
Middle East, Hare was silent on a number of crucial points, not only on
the role his country played in the area, but also on the issues of cultural
repression and bureaucratic torture. This is where Pinter’s play is far more
informative, revealing and critical. For instance, Pinter’s image of women
standing in line in front of a prison where their sons and husbands are held
without trial or valid explanation can be seen today not only in Turkey and
Palestine, but also in numerous other areas of conflict in different parts of
the world.
Strategies of Social Criticism in the Plays of Pinter and Hare 35
unnamed prisoner is tied to the chair while two tormentors, Des and
Lionel, identified only by their names and nothing else, describe the ways
they are going to torture him. Unlike in One for the Road, in which the
identity of the prisoner is explicitly stated (Victor is an intellectual
imprisoned for political reasons), the identity of the victim in The New
World Order is deliberately left unclear:
LIONEL Who is this cunt anyway? What is he, some kind of peasant—
or a lecturer in theology?
DES He’s a lecturer in fucking peasant theology4. (Pinter 2005, 273)
It is not only the prisoner’s identity that Pinter concealed. Unlike in the
former play, where it was clear that Victor was imprisoned by the
members of the establishment military forces, it is unknown who Des and
Lionel are and for whom they work. This is Pinter’s way of adding
archetypal depth to his plays, because the two torturers might be members
of the official state structures, but also representatives of a paramilitary
formation or a foreign interventionist army, because it is even unknown
whether the victim and his tormentors speak the same language, since he is
tied, hooded and completely silent throughout the play. This image of the
tied and hooded prisoner is the most striking structural element of the play
precisely because of its shocking similarity to the real life photographs
leaked from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, where the
members of the US army and CIA officials tortured and sodomized Iraqi
prisoners. Another hint that Pinter might have had the American
interventionist policy in mind while writing The New World Order occurs
in the closing lines of the play:
Language are also ordinary people “simply doing their jobs” in order to
feed the family, but what they do and what they say in Pinter’s plays
makes it clear that he does not want the audience to develop a
compassionate attitude towards them. The outcome of his strategy is quite
the opposite: the more routinely they do their job (Goldberg, Nicolas,
Sergeant), the more shocked the audience should be. Pinter’s typical
executors are people whose conscience is dead and who lack moral and
emotional intelligence. They arouse loathing but also raise a question:
what unexamined processes in our culture produce such inhumanity? In
that respect, Pinter’s strategy has more in common with Edward Bond and
Caryl Churchill than with Hare.5 Charles Grimes makes similar
observations, calling Pinter’s aesthetics “an assault on his audience”,
undertaken in order to “break through [the] protective buffer” (Grimes
2005, 31) that shields them from reality. Grimes explains that Pinter
wanted to bring his audience to a state of shock for a good reason, because
he considered them to be “complicit in current deployments of power and
unwilling to confront that complicity” (Ibid, 34). He assumes that Pinter
was aware that the importance of reason and common sense, as defined in
the Age of Enlightenment, was exaggerated. Therefore, in Pinter’s view,
didactic plays can hardly have a long-term effect on contemporary
audiences. For that reason, Grimes writes that “Pinter follows Bernard
Shaw in using political theatre to address the audience’s need for a new
moral self-definition”, to be achieved by “shock[ing] audiences into an
altered awareness of their true moral condition by exposing the violence
done in their name” (Ibid, 27-8). Dr Elizabeth Sakellaridou, a professor of
drama and theatre studies in the Department of English at Aristotle
University, Thessaloniki, Greece, goes one step further by claiming that
the physiological reaction of the audience is an aspect of Pinter’s
calculated strategy. Namely, she observes that each Pinter play is “a
sensory (visual) presentation of an emotional state rather than a rational
statement of an ideological position” (Sakellaridou 1989, 44). In that
sense, she finds Pinter’s strategy, based on sensual experiences and
powerful emotions, far more effective than the traditional strategies of
political theatre based on the appeal to the common sense of the
spectators.
Pinter’s strategy of shocking the audience should be compared to
David Hare’s strategy of humanizing and even reprieving the same corrupt
institutions through the character traits of some of their representatives.
This aspect of Hare’s playwriting is probably most easily visible in the
plays that are commonly called the State of the Nation trilogy: Racing
Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War
40 Chapter Two
5. Conclusion
To conclude, if David Hare’s critical strategy is compared to Harold
Pinter’s, it can be said that the political goals they seek to achieve by
discussing burning social and political issues are completely opposed.
While Pinter’s aim was to raise political awareness among the members of
his audience in order to make them resistant to manipulation and the
negative influence of the media and official institutions, it appears that
Hare points out the weaknesses and corruption of the system not in order
to abolish it or reform it, but to consolidate it. Although it can be claimed
that Hare is a playwright who raises complex questions about society,
instead of providing simplified answers as the authors of agitprop plays
used to do, a close examination of his plays reveals that he is mostly
satisfied with the current state of affairs and the social order of the western
world, and that his attitude towards raising the political awareness of people
and the scope of civic activism is rather conservative and pessimistic.
The roots of this opposition, however, can be found as far back as in
Ancient Greece. It can be said that Pinter’s and Hare’s critical strategies
belong to two opposed paradigms of critical thought discernible already in
Greek Philosophy. The tradition Pinter belongs to can be called Socratic6.
In the history of European philosophy, Socrates is known as a thinker who
encouraged and treasured personal ethical development, rather than loyalty
to the polis. It is commonly known that personal contribution to
community by each individual had a special place in the Ancient Greek
ethos. Judging by the available knowledge on Socrates and his philosophy,
his teaching was based on principles different from the official ones: for
him, the ultimate virtue was not blind patriotism, but loyalty to one’s own
ethics and moral principles, and the ultimate crime, in his view, was for an
individual to betray those principles. He believed that the constitution of
one’s moral integrity was rooted in the universal ethical laws that were
inscribed in every person’s being, but that because of the negative
influence of external factors, such as the official system of education, or
the official social order, these laws were often suppressed and forgotten.
Socrates’ teaching was based on the revival of those laws. However, as is
well known, his teaching was interpreted as subversive because of its
alleged negative influence on young people, and Socrates was sentenced to
death. David Hare, on the other hand, can be associated with the Platonic
tradition. Since Plato’s legacy is more often idealized than objectively
interpreted, it is first of all necessary to point to critical studies of Plato’s
philosophy which challenge the dominant perception. For example, in her
essay “Plato’s Legacy: A Revision”, Dr Lena Petrović, a professor of
42 Chapter Two
References
Billington, Michael. Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.
Bradshaw, Peter. “The Reader (film review)”. The Guardian, Friday 2
January 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jan/02/the-reader-
kate-winslet-film.
Grimes, Charles. Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence beyond Echo. New
Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.
Bogoeva Sedlar, Ljiljana. “Charcoals or Diamonds? On Destruction of
Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in Shakespeare’s
Plays”. Facta Universitatis Vol. 3, No. 1, University of Niš, 2004: 57-
72.
Hare, David. Acting Up: A Diary. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
Strategies of Social Criticism in the Plays of Pinter and Hare 43
Notes
1
Pinter’s involvement with theatre began when he toured Ireland and the English
countryside as an actor in Shakespeare’s plays in the early 1950s. This early first-
hand experience with Shakespeare strongly influenced his later work.
2
My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on the diaries and emails of Rachel
Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, was “postponed indefinitely”
in New York and Canada because of content that Jewish communities found
disturbing.
3
It is interesting that Pinter's close friend Ariel Dorfman wrote a poem, "Pablo
Picasso has Words for Colin Powell from the Other Side of Death," in which he
directly addresses the former Secretary, accusing him of actively advocating the
Iraq war.
4
The phrase “peasant theology” may refer to “liberation theology”. It is well
known that Pinter criticized the assassination of liberation theology priests in
Nicaragua and El Salvador between 1964 and 1985, dedicating a large part of his
Nobel Lecture to that issue.
5
A scene from Bond’s play Coffee (1994) shows a German Nazi soldier who sits
down for a cup of coffee after having murdered an enormous number of Jewish
44 Chapter Two
prisoners in Babi Yar. His break is interrupted by a truck full of new prisoners that
he urgently needs to kill, which makes him mad because he has not finished his
coffee yet.
6
Professor Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar’s paper “Charcoals or Diamonds? On
Destruction of Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in
Shakespeare’s Plays” points to a similar tradition, mentioning Shakespeare,
Nietzsche and Howard Barker as its prominent followers. (Bogoeva-Sedlar 2004,
57-72)
CHAPTER THREE
VESNA BRATIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF MONTENEGRO
1. Introduction
David Mamet once said that as a boy he felt his peers and the whole of
society were sending one message to him, one containing the magic words
opening the world to all the “newcomers”: “Everything will be okay if
you’ll be like me” (Kane in Bigsby 2004, 11). His second-generation
Ashkenazi parents—non-practicing secular Jews—would definitely have
agreed. It seems that their son does not: he feels a strong call of the old
religion, which is very much reflected in his books (both fiction and non-
fiction from 1997 onwards).1 Mamet rose to fame with plays featuring all
male casts in the 1970s and 1980s and is often grouped with Sam Shepard
and David Rabe because of the open misogyny and sexism of his plays. In
his Lakeboat women are notoriously called “Soft things with a hole in the
middle” (Mamet 1996a, 208). Seemingly, Mamet’s creative boat has
changed its course recently by accepting some non-male crew,2 or has it?
Mamet’s business communities are undoubtedly phallocracies. If alpha
males are ever dethroned, then it is only a case of one phallic incarnation
being replaced by another, not about jeopardizing the phallic hierarchy
itself. Order is, in fact, the only constant in a world that mercilessly
challenges and/or destroys all the old myths. So, the phallocracy itself as a
system is never questioned, but rather the inability of those who should
support it and meet its demands. Mamet “losers” have sinned against the
system and tried to question or challenge the structures, and the timeless
laws of phallic power.
46 Chapter Three
DEL:...I was born a city boy. (Pause.) (He displays knife) And now I’m a
Forester. (Pause.) I’m a Ranger...did you know there’s a Fraternal Group
called the Catholic Order of Foresters?
not the result of conscious choice and so do not bear on the character of
the individual. They are not the fit subject of drama, as they do not deal
with the human capacity for choice. Rather than uniting the audience in a
universal experience, they are invidious. (Ibid.)
48 Chapter Three
You tell me that equally, you might not exploit being black? Or that any
human being whatever might not, when pressed, exploit whatever
momentary advantage he or she possessed (Ibid., 47).
Jack champions the same view earlier, this time breaking the gender,
age and status stereotypes:
I’ll tell you what I think. I think that women. Just like men. In the main,
being self-interested, will exploit every advantage they may have. Chief
among theirs, youth and beauty. Just as will men, who possess the
advantages of being old and rich (Ibid., 18).
The play seems to point to a shift in the public perception of race. It is,
however, still tainted by hypocrisy and prejudice. Henry and Jack reflect
on popular attitudes and fears and reconstruct the possible outcome of the
case. Prejudices about prejudice have become the hypocritical basis of the
order itself. In such an atmosphere, truth loses its function and meaning—
it is important how things might appear or how they can be presented and
understood, not what the things really are. Truth and humaneness lose.
Justice is a matter of “the calendar” as is articulated by Henry, Jack’s
(African American) partner in their law firm:
Fifty years ago. You’re white? Same case. Same facts. You’re innocent
(Ibid., 9).
Susan feels the need for revenge and the affirmation of her own belief
that structural racism remains in supposedly prejudice-free transactions
(Ibid., 59). Her private war will destroy an innocent man. Gender and
racial “others” take over the active (subject) role and destroy a
representative of the privileged norm. By introducing a difference between
feeling shame as a psychological (and somewhat metaphysical) category
and guilt, which is a legal concept, Mamet tries to transcend the “petty”
issues of gender and race and speak about humans in general and his
newly acquired understanding of how pitiably corrupt we all are.
Despite the insight which the play offers (“all people want to confess”,
Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet 51
“all people feel shame” (Ibid., 46)) the dialogue is still “intransitive” and
the communication thwarted, while the gap between law and justice is
menacingly huge. The play seems to be hermetically enclosed between
Henry’s (African-American male) elaboration of the prejudice of the
whites against the blacks at the beginning and Susan’s simple (African-
American female) prejudice-verdict at the end (“Because the white man,
he was guilty” (Ibid., 64)). Two white men (Jack and Charles) are victims
here: Jack’s trust is betrayed, and Charles is convicted of raping a black
prostitute for whom he professes love and who extorts money from him.
His guilt was “proved” by digging up some dirt on him (a politically
incorrect discourse on a postcard from his student days) and a racially
inadequate “statement” from a hotel room spoken in a climax of passion,
conveniently complemented by planted evidence—sequins from the
woman’s dress left in the hotel room. In earlier Mamet plays, language
manipulated the truth in half-criminogenic and criminogenic
environments; Mamet has recently discovered that language is more
successfully and bitterly manipulated within higher social structures and
discourses—notably academic and, in particular, legal.
Each of Mamet’s losers overlooks (to their own detriment) the fact that
it is possible to underestimate an enemy positioned lower in the phallic
hierarchy. Any attempt at an “initiation” of the “other” into one’s own
ranks, through any form of empowerment (be that of knowledge, trust or
position) is endangering the order itself—it means opening Pandora’s box.
John does this with Carol more out of boastful self-confidence than
altruism or pedagogical ambitions, and Jack with Susan out of the need to
affirm his own impartiality and openness to differences. Henry, his
African-American partner, is well aware of this and highlights the
diversity of human beings, perhaps at a higher level than race:
HENRY: I don’t think we are brothers beneath the skin, over the skin, or in
any way associated with the skin (Race 37).
EDMOND: It’s more comfortable to accept a law than question it and live
your life [...] We’ve bred the life out of ourselves. And we live in a fog.
We live in a dream (272).
52 Chapter Three
Edmond’s hatred is learned, but long suppressed. Just like the blacks,
the whites obey the imposed stereotypes of behavior, so that a black man
is capable of anything because
[...] he’s underpaid, and he can’t get a job, he’s bigger than me...he’s a
killer, he don’t care about his life, you understand, so he’ll do anything...
(Ibid.)
The white man is, at the same time, expected to “in a mess of
intellectuality wet [his] pants” (Ibid.) while suffering a (non-symbolic)
castration by a violent black man3. Jack in Race promotes both female and
African-American otherness, arguing that they both are in possession of
knowledge that white men do not possess: women know men’s intentions
just as blacks know things that no white man does (Mamet 2004, 20). This
relationship resembles that of predator-prey: black people know that the
whites will “fuck them whenever they see a chance” (Ibid.); the white
people do it because they know about African-American hatred, and the
vicious circle spins on and on. Blacks know whites and women know men
as the prey knows the hunter; the conflicts between them are perpetually
renewed through self-generating hatred, feeding on itself and growing all
the stronger.
...And take those fuckers in the concentration camps. You think they went
in there by choice? [...] They were dragged in there [...] Kicking and
screaming (Mamet 1994, 73).
USA) which deprives men and women of choice and control over their
lives and deaths alike:
What the inmates of the concentration camps were deprived of was the
very possibility of having control of their own deaths, of playing, even
gambling with their own deaths, making their deaths a sacrifice: they were
robbed of power over their own deaths. And this is what is happening to all
of us, in slow, homeopathic doses, by virtue of the very development of
our systems (Baudrillard 2010, 44).
The development of “our systems”, i.e. the (social and value) systems
of Western civilization, is still based on binary oppositions; the only thing
that has changed is a certain “mobility” within property based social
classes, which is praised by Mamet. Such mobility, in his case, is proof of
the feasibility of the American Dream, but in many other cases it also
proves quite the opposite: existential instability and anxiety, compulsive
acquisition, security and safeguarding. The society that Baudrillard called
“anorexic”, “obsessive”, and “phobic” (Ibid., 40-41) developed to the
extreme and idolized the concept of private property. Private property, not
the Jeffersonian concept of the right of every individual to seek personal
happiness is what the Constitution, the Government and the Military
protect; the categories which have recently grown close(r) to the
playwright’s heart, together with ideas around Friedman’s economy and
large corporations. Mamet shows the enthusiasm surrounding the
especially mystified and glorified third member of the “trinity” in the
television series The Unit, which is a panegyric in episodes to the Delta
Special Forces of the U.S. Army. It is clear that Mamet knows his film
audience and that commercial entertainment for the masses is no stranger
to him.
Although America and Americanness have recently become more
inclusive, and minorities protected to the point that defense turns into
attack and retroactive revenge (Race), one thing has not changed: the
society is based on the concept of oppressor-oppressed, which is basically
phallocratic. Human nature, judging by Mamet’s characters, has not
reached the point that goes beyond revenge and the abuse of newly
acquired power. When the oppressed person comes into power, they
mimic the patterns of behavior of their oppressors. This is what Carol does
in Oleanna. Suddenly gaining both eloquence and self-confidence, she
takes over John’s own “weapons”: she recognizes to whom he is in a
subordinate position in the phallic order, (the Tenure Committee) and
relentlessly attacks all his weak points until the Professor is robbed of all
the prerogatives of the patriarchal suburban paradise—a secure job, a new
54 Chapter Three
house in the suburbs and a docile wife. Carol’s gender otherness here is
just one form of her multiple “subjugation” to the Professor, which
enables her transformation into a radical feminist and makes her rape
allegations seem more valid, but the main conflict in this case concerns the
negotiation of power and influence over another human being. Carol’s
pedagogy is “repressive” (Skloot 2001, 99), as is John’s; she does not
liberate John the oppressor, but is instead herself transformed into an
advocate of the same oppressive structures, appearing in strict male
clothing, and invoking the power of the Tenure Committee, a higher
instance of male power. Although Skloot likes to read Mamet’s pedagogy
in line with Frier’s and bell hooks’ as a “liberating” pedagogy of “love”
(Ibid.), Oleanna gives absolutely no indication that such a development in
Mamet’s “teaching” is possible. It is more likely that Mamet still supports
Teach’s axiom that the only way to teach “them” (others) is to destroy
them, indeed to actually kill them.
On the other hand, there is an articulated need, never realized
successfully or on a long-term basis, for reaching out towards the Other,
for recognizing the need for and possibilities of overcoming their own
individual self and selfishness. This need is first recognized by Karen in
the corrupt film magnate Gould (Speed the Plough), then by Del (The
Cryptogram):
The faces. Lining the streets. [...] This man or that woman. Enemies, perhaps,
certainly no more than strangers. Reaching out (Mamet 2007, 6).
Mamet’s plays of the 1990s (Edmond, The Cryptogram, even The Old
Neighborhood) have something of tragedy within them, as does the
timeless play Faust (2004), while Boston Marriage (2002) and Romance
(2007) function as a Wildean play and a hilarious farce, respectively.
Provocation has been David Mamet’s trademark ever since Oleanna, and
political correctness his inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a kind of
travesty of his Lakeboat where the all-male cast of characters tries to hide
their vulnerability and existential loneliness behind an arsenal of curses
and insults against various forms of otherness, Romance, with all-male but
mostly homosexual characters, affirms and/or breaks stereotypes.
Homosexuals, Jews and heterosexual men are all objects, but also the
Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet 55
I guess what I’m trying to say is this; We got caught up in the “form”, the
law, religion, nationality...uh...skin color. And then, and then miraculously,
miraculously, now and then, and by the grace of God, we are free, And see,
that, underneath. We love each other (Mamet 2007, 8).
JUDGE: The white race is unsuited [...] to labour in that equatorial heat.
God, in His Mercy. God in His mercy, assigned this people to rule and that
Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet 57
to work. The darkies, in the field, bent over, singing, swinging their hips in
that rhythmic…that…that (Ibid., 37).
JUDGE: Look, look, look, if you cut me, do I not bleed? (Romance 2007, 38)
JUDGE: The question is: Was Shakespeare a Jew? [...] Or was he a normal
human being? (Ibid., 45)
And that illustrates my point. That people [...] are fuckin’ basically good
(Ibid., 35).
latest trends among the American jet set, Mamet “sends” Ms Bernstein,
the President’s personal secretary, to China to adopt a child for her and her
same-sex partner. As is usual with Mamet, otherness is often multiple.
Ruth (American Buffalo) is a Jewish lesbian, Bernstein is a lesbian, and,
judging by her last name, probably Jewish as well. Charles’ insults derive
from racial, cultural and class stereotypes; they are an attack on political
correctness and the multiculturalism of America from the highest position
of authority.
CHARLES: Fucking chinks. They got all the time in the world...and they
don’t mind working themselves to death...Sell you the ground they walk
on, sell the various offspring of their wombs. [...] What in the world, do
you think, all these cute lil Chinese baby girls gonna do, when they grow
up, having eaten our food, learned to play the cello, bested all the white
children at math, and slurped up all the jobs, under affirmative action.
(Ibid., 17).
[...] you’ve got to give them something to like better than the things they
like, OR something to HATE better than the things they like...You can tell
them a good IDEA, but that only works, if it lets them DO something,
which, they couldn’t, course of events, do. Like Free Love or something.
(Ibid., 42).
Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about my wife. We count for nothing.
We’re not human. We’re not homosexual. Or black. Or Palestinian, or deaf
[...] All we are is normal. Fuckin normal guy...(Ibid., 50)
is possible in this case to rise above the narrow concepts of local and
national) which is, essentially and exemplarily tragic:
CAROL: What has led you to this place? Not your sex. Not your race. Not
your class. YOUR OWN ACTIONS. (Mamet 1993, 63).
References
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London and New York: Verso, 2010.
Bean, Kellie. “A Few Good Men: Collusion and Violence in Oleanna.” In
Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet, Eds. Christopher C.
Hudgins and Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 109-23.
Bigsby, C. W. E. Modern American Drama, 1945-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Mamet, David. Plays: 1 (Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago,
Squirrels, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness).
London: Methuen Drama, 1994.
—. American Buffalo. New York: Grove Press; 1994.
—. November. New York: Samuel French, 2007.
—. Oleanna. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
—. Plays 2. London: Methuen Drama, 1996.
—. Plays 3. London: Methuen Drama, 1996.
—. Race, New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2011.
—. Romance. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2007.
—. The Cryptogram. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Man and Other Poems. Dover: Courier
Dover Publications, 1994.
Quin, Michael. “Anti-Theatricality and American Ideology: Mamet’s
Performative Realism.” In Modern American Drama. Ed. Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea Publishing House, 2004): 191-209.
Skloot, Robert. “Oleanna, or, The Play of Pedagogy.” In Gender and
Genre: Essays on David Mamet, Eds. Christopher C. Hudgins and
Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 95-107.
Walsh, David. “Writer David Mamet: Man overboard.” 31 March 2008
World Socialist Web Site 6 May 2011.
<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/03/mame-m31.html
Affirmative Action Plays of David Mamet 61
Notes
1
Since the 1990s Mamet has increasingly been interested in Hebrew issues. The
Old Religion published in 1997 was followed by Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly
Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), and
The Wicked Son (2006), all exploring different conflicting facets of American
“Jewishness”.
2
Non-male here refers not only to women but to everyone other than heterosexual
Anglo-Saxon males
3
Edmond’s prison mate/rapist/lover at the end of the play is also black.
CHAPTER FOUR
RADMILA NASTIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF KRAGUJEVAC
1. Introduction
Sam Shepard tells many stories about America in his plays, and some
of them involve Mexico. Mexico is the setting of such early plays as La
Tourista (1967) and Seduced (1978), but reappears in his later plays, Eyes
for Consuela (1998) and The Late Henry Moss (2000), though in the last
play with a slight modification: the setting is New Mexico, the symbolic
geographical and metaphysical borderland. In these plays Mexico figures
as the topos of the unrealistic desire for escape from America, as a natural
world radically different from and opposed to the technological world of
the United States. For Americans, the possibility of escape proves to be
illusory. “You thought Mexico could hide you – from yourself...Mexico is
very harsh on liars,” (Ibid) says Amado, a character in Shepard’s Eyes for
Consuela (1998), to the self-exiled American, Henry. This sentence sums
up the theme of the play but also outlines the way Shepard constructs
Mexico as a kind of test for his insecure American protagonists.
Sam Shepard has been recognised as the all-American playwright and
public figure, the chronicler and critic of the American way of life, both
fascinated and repelled by its customs and extremities. His early interest in
anthropology has been productive for the comprehensive picture of
America emerging from his diverse opus. Apart from his knowledge of
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 63
and interest in the various aspects of modern and traditional American life,
Shepard shows a remarkable knowledge of ethnology, especially of Indian
and Mexican peoples, some of it evident in the plays dealt with in this
chapter. The correspondence between Shepard and Joseph Chaikin
between 1972-1984 reveals that Shepard owes his initial interest in the
subject to an acquaintance with Carlos Castaneda’s books, especially
concerning the way he comes to terms with death as the ultimate test of
life, his identification of the seeker for knowledge and the one who
possesses knowledge, and the insistence on the internal causes of emotions
and events (Chaikin and Shepard 1989, 8).
Castaneda was preoccupied with metaphorical journeys and the
sharpening of ways of seeing beyond physical reality. In several of his
books he described what he claimed were his own adventures with Juan
Matus, the alleged shaman who based his knowledge on ancient Mexican
wisdom and ritual. Castaneda’s experiences are summed up in the last
book he wrote before his death, his spiritual autobiography, The Active
Side of Infinity (1998). In this book he recounts his initiatory preparations,
surveyed by Juan, leading to the achievement of that inner silence required
to reach the breaking point where the person rejects everything that is not
his authentic self but is imposed from the outside. Castaneda’s Juan calls it
“foreign installation.” When the person manages to get free from this
imposition, he becomes capable of using his own dormant energies and
living a full life (Castaneda 1998, 7, 9, 103, 104, 105).
Shepard acts as a kind of shaman in his plays imagined as journeys,
obviously partly dramatizing his own experiences. His plot-lines resemble
initiation rites, and their Mexican settings are not incidental. He was called
the playwright-shaman by his colleague Jack Gelber, who described
Shepard’s plays as trips. “Not only are the characters in them on trips, for
they tell us as much, but also the shapes of the plays themselves are in the
form of trips, quests, adventures,” wrote Gelber (Gelber 1981, 46). Like a
shaman, Shepard confronts his characters with supernatural experiences
which are supposed to provide cures for their various diseases. His
technique was appropriately called by some critics “shaman dramaturgy”
(Nordman and Wickert 1998, 45). Laura J. Graham compares the rites in
Shepard’s plays with Joseph Campbell’s depiction of the rituals related to
the hero myth. She observes that in his earlier plays Shepard repeatedly
uses surrealistic elements to describe a complete journey which is
metaphorically enacted on stage, while in his later plays only the final
phase of the journey is depicted. The journey is actually an inward one, as
the protagonist moves within his inner landscapes. Shepard frequently
inverts the ultimate effects of the rites of passage so that, instead of growth
64 Chapter Four
and maturity, they end in the refusal to grow and the resulting frustration.
Though the protagonist in Shepard’s plays attempts a transition to
adulthood, it is the family and the society who thwart him, because they
are too stultified to allow change and transformation (Graham 1995,
115,116). Campbell referred to this phenomenon as characteristic of the
United States, where the frequent aim of people is to remain young and
not to grow old (Campbell 1949, 11).
now, while facing both the beauty and the brutality of life, embodied in
Mexico. “In America,” proceeds Amado, “everything is easy,” “until one
day ... you discover you are swimming alone at night in a deep black sea.
There is no shore. No light. No sound. You are worse than alone. You are
removed from life itself” (Ibid, 149). The problem that Amado diagnoses
is that the body and the heart have been split apart and are crying to be
reunited. That is the reason Amado himself returned to Mexico, and that is
the reason Henry has come to Mexico—to gain insight, to learn not only
how to look, but more importantly how to see. Act One of the play ends
with Henry’s assertion that this might be possible, addressed to his
invisible wife.
Act Two appears to be Henry’s exorcism, his redemption and
reconciliation through the progress he makes towards seeing and accepting
the full truth of his heart. Amado, however, instead of being only the
shaman in this ceremony, becomes himself the subject of initiation as well.
Consuela is a ghost of a dead woman and a female guide. The act begins
with Amado’s instructions to Henry how to open his eyes wide enough so
that he can gouge them and ends with Viejo presiding over Henry’s
liberation. In the meantime, Amado is shown questioning the apparently
fixed notions of “America“and “home”, while Henry narrates his dreams,
which ultimately reveal the unpleasant truth he was trying to repress. He
thought he loved his wife so much that he tried to imprison and possess
her. He cut her off from all other human contacts, removed her deep into
the country. But, unlike him, his wife knew who she was: “she belonged to
herself”, and therefore she rebelled (Ibid, 161). In response to that, Amado
maintains that the dreams are based on a lie of the past and is sorry for
Henry and his whole country, because they do not realise the basic thing
about love. “Love needs a sacrifice... Without sacrifice there is no love”
(Ibid, 165). “But I am here to deliver you”, continues Amado. “I have been
sent to you and you to me”. When Henry responds that this was not his
reason for coming to Mexico, Amado tells him that “[t]here are forces
beyond reason” (Ibid, 166). Amado picks up the passport Henry dropped,
and sees that in the photo of some years ago Henry did have blue eyes, but
now they are brown. Not being able to persuade Amado that his eyes are
not blue, Henry tries to escape from the jungle, but he only runs in a circle,
while silent Consuela watches. Henry finally turns to Consuela for help,
though her father informs him that she is just a sombra, fantasma—a
ghost. Henry’s panicky rationalism, insisting upon returning to the “known
world” of an ordinary American, the “real world” free from madness,
ghosts and sacrifice, superstitions and visions, on the eve of a millennium,
globalisation and the explosion of information, is countered by Amado’s
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 67
3. La Turista
A ritual similar to that in Eyes for Consuela, is described in Shepard’s
play La Turista. This strange play, one of Shepard’s earliest, has an
unusual form and unusual history. When it was premiered in the American
Place Theatre in New York City in 1967, Shepard did not allow critics to
attend. It has remained a critical controversy ever since, and one of the
author’s most puzzling plays. In this play Shepard reversed the order of
the two acts so that the second act chronologically precedes the first. This
second act ends with the male protagonist Kent opting out of his
unsatisfactory American life by symbolically leaping off the stage and
onto the ramp running behind the audience right through the set wall,
leaving “a cut-out silhouette of his body in the wall” (Shepard, 1981, 298).
The first act, set in Mexico, ends with Kent’s death under the supervision
of a witchdoctor, brought about by a severe case of dysentery known
among the locals as la turista, but also, significantly, as “Montezuma’s
revenge”. It is “the colloquial term for any cases of traveller’s diarrhoea
contracted by tourists visiting Mexico. The name refers to Monctezuma II
(1466–1520), the Tlatoani (ruler) of the Aztec civilization, who was
defeated by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador”,3 and implies
revenge of the native culture against the foreign invader. At the opening of
the act we see the married couple, Salem and Kent in a Mexican hotel
discussing Mexico and Mexicans, (their dark skin etc.), in a disparaging
way. Kent has come there to “relax and disappear” (La Turista, 257) like
so many of Shepard’s Americans in various plays, but is affected by the
unpleasant disease instead, a sign that Mexico rejects him.
Characteristically for Shepard’s dramaturgy, which frequently uses the
figure of the cowboy to represent the false image of American identity,
Kent is first shown coming out of the toilet carrying a pistol on his hip.
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 69
into the bed of the Americans, he symbolically occupies his own country.
In Part II of the play, claims Easton, we are in the US, where the American
Man has the sleeping sickness: “he doesn’t want to stay awake”. This
scene reflects the general state of a nation that did not want to see the real
truth behind its humanitarian wars (Easton 1967).4 There is also, in the
names Kent and Salem, an obvious allusion to the popular cigarette
brands, signalling the influence of popular culture on the formation of
what was supposed to be American identity. In spite of differences, all the
interpretations underline the presence in the plays of an individual and
collective quest for identity rituals, Shepard’s favourite theme.
4. Seduced
In Seduced, a later play, there is a similar situation, as well. There is a
dying (or already dead) American tycoon, Henry (Hackamore), paranoidly
self-confined in Mexico, though this time in a simulated Mexican
environment in a tall building, his own penthouse. Critics have observed
the similarity to the well-known American billionaire, Howard Hughes.
Henry is hysterically trying to clean his emaciated body of invisible dirt.
He is served by a loyal Mexican man, Raul, who is, nevertheless,
distrusted and humiliated as a member of the race in Henry’s eyes inferior
to the Americans (Shepard 2006, 235). The declining man has a last wish:
to see the fabulous women with whom he has had affairs. So Miami and
Luna appear, young as they once used to be. There is no sign of mutual
recognition or of any closer communication between them and the man.
Seduced as a young boy by the American Dream, Henry reinvented
himself to fit it, only to realise, ultimately, that his dream has become a
nightmare: he was “taken by the dream”, while all the time thinking he
was taking it. He has turned into “the nightmare of the nation,” the demon
they invented (Ibid, 274, 275). He has become bloodless, quite in the
power of his servant Raul, who makes him finally sign his life over to him.
Raul shoots at Henry while Henry is singing “I’m dead to the world but I
never been born”, in a parodic Christ-like attitude (Ibid, 276).
Seduced has certain affinities with one of Shepard’s major plays, Curse
of the Starving Class, first performed in 1978 (written the year before), the
same year that Seduced was written. In this play Shepard uses the term
“escape artists” (Shepard 1981, 194) for those who try to escape from their
problematic US lives to Mexico. In this play almost all the characters,
members of the same family, see Mexico as just such an escape route. The
girl Emma dreams of disappearing in Mexico like the author of The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The father of the family, Weston, wishes to
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 71
buy land in Mexico, believing that his past sins cannot touch him “down
there”. Emma imagines that her mother Ella and the lawyer Taylor “are
half way to Mexico” and has a fantasy of meeting up with them there.
Only the son, Wesley, the most emotionally starved of them all, but also
the only one who has a vision of how to transform his life for the better,
has a different wish–to go north to Alaska, the undiscovered country, the
frontier, full of possibilities. The root of the escapist fantasy lies in the
“poison” that has infected the family, referred to several times, with slight
modifications by all its members. Weston claims he is full of poison, Ella
calls it a “a curse”; it is also called “a creeping disease”. The family
disease is alienation, resulting from the refusal of its members to face their
own personal demons and then each other. It ends the moment the father,
Weston, decides to quit running away from home and stay and embrace
his family. Because his past misdemeanours do not allow him to carry out
his decision, his role is ultimately taken over by his son, who puts on his
father’s clothes and continues to act in his name (Ibid, 149-193).
In these two 1978 plays, as in the majority of his other plays, Shepard
exposes as an illusion the concept of “American identity”, represented by
the images of the cowboy, the pioneer, the farmer and the self-made man
(Madachy 2003). In Seduced, he deconstructs this image of the self-made
man, showing the American hero to be “the nightmare of the nation”.
Shepard even wrote a piece entitled “The Self-Made Man” (1996), in
which he described this type of character in more detail. He defined him as
one who has “a long-cherished notion of himself as a distinct individual;
an American entity... “The image rests on an archetype going back to the
Civil War, and even further back to nineteenth-century concepts of
Manifest Destiny and beyond that to the founding fathers (Shepard 1996,
3). In the interview with Roudané, Shepard criticised the negative role of
advertising campaigns in the formation and propagation of such false
identity images. “So we’ve always been seduced by advertising [...] We’ve
fallen into that thing, you know. So the American Dream is always this
fantasy that’s promoted through advertising. We always prefer the fantasy
over the reality” (Roudane 2002, 27). In Seduced we have Henry
Hackamore, one such character seduced by the false dream. He is
supposed to be a modern version of a founding father, but is in fact a ruin,
a pornographer and a racist, plagued by fear and full of spiritual and
emotional poison.
72 Chapter Four
is not to bring Henry back to life, but to make his physical death easier.
The ritual she performs on him is similar to that described by Castaneda in
The Eagle’s Gift, where the women warriors teach initiates how to die for
the material world (Castaneda, 1981).
6. Conclusion
In his interview with Sam Shepard, published in The Cambridge
Companion to this author, one of the questions Michael Roudané asked
Shepard concerned the fact that “Mexico as place, as metaphor for the
mind, seems to play an important role in [his] dramas”, quoting La
Turista, Seduced, and Eyes for Consuela. “‘What is it about Mexico”,
wondered Roudané, “the air, the colours, the land, the culture, the history
– that engages you?’” Shepard’s reply gives a valuable insight into the use
of the symbolism of Mexico in his plays:
Mexico is what America should have been. Mexico still has heart. It still
has extraordinary passion; it still has a sense of family and culture, of deep,
deep roots. Some of it is awful – the poverty level, the oppression’s awful,
and stuff like that – but there are places you go in Mexico that just make
you feel like a human being. The Indian culture is what I think does it for
me. We just got back from Tulum. It really is paradise (Roudane 77).
Nobody has actually ever succinctly defined “the myth of the American
Dream.” What is the American Dream? Is it what Thomas Jefferson
proposed? Was that the American Dream? Was it what George
Washington proposed? Was it what Lincoln proposed? Was it what Martin
Luther King proposed? I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do
know that it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the
American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our
demise (Ibid, 69-70).
References
Bottoms J., Stephen, The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (New York: Abacus,
1949).
Castaneda, Carlos, The Eagle’s Gift, (London: Penguin Books, 1982).
—. The Active Side of Infinity, (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
Easton, Helen, “In response to ‘Word of Mouth’ from the April 6, 1967
issue,” New York Review of Books, June 1, 1967.
Gelber, Jack, “The Playwright as Shaman” in Maraca, Bonnie, ed.,
American Dreams,
The Imagination of Sam Shepard, (New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications, 1981), 45-48.
Graham, Laura J., Sam Shepard, Theme, Image and the Director, (New
York: Peter Lang, 1995).
Chaikin, Joseph and Sam Shepard, Letters and Texts, 1972-1984, ed.
Barry Daniels, (New York: Nal Books, New American Library, 1989).
Madachy, Paul Seamus, “The Nightmare of the Nation:” Sam Shepard and
the Paradox of American Identity, a dissertation, (The University of
Maryland, English Department, 2003),
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/323
Maranca, Bonnie, ed., American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam
Shepard, (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1981).
Nordman, Alfred and Hartmut Wiekert, “Shamanism Vilified and
Redeemed: Sam Shepard’s States of Shock,” Contemporary Theatre
Review, Volume 8, Issue 4, 1998, 41-54.
The Tales Sam Shepard Tells About America: Mexico 75
Notes
1
http://www.behindthename.com/name/henry
2
Octavio Paz, “The Blue Bouquet,”
http://lisabloomfield.net/occ/193/weekly_html/bluebouquet.pdf
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler%27s_diarrhea
4
Easton responded to the article by Elizabeth Hardwicke, the first enthusiastic
critic of the play’s formal qualities, NYR, April 6, 1967.
CHAPTER FIVE
WINGS OF DESIRE:
PLEAS FOR HUMANITY IN MARK RAVENHILL’S
FAUST IS DEAD AND SARAH KANE’S CLEANSED
TIJANA MATOVIĆ
UNIVERSITY OF KRAGUJEVAC
1. Introduction
In his international message on World Theatre Day in 2009, Augusto
Boal expounded his views on the significance of playwriting in the
contemporary age: “What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre
throws light on the stage of daily life” (Boal 2009). As in the argument by
John Berger, who in his seminal work Ways of Seeing stated that “[t]he
way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe”
(Berger 2008, 8), Boal reminded us of the ideological coffins that entrap
our perception and conceptualisation. The task of providing the means for
re-envisioning the hidden aspects of the intricate reality we share Boal
placed within the domain of human creativity which constitutes (dramatic)
art. His call to action runs parallel with Naomi Wallace’s idea of
playwriting being an “act of transgression” (Wallace 2008).
In this chapter, two late 20th-century plays by Mark Ravenhill and
Sarah Kane will be examined within the framework of postmodernist
thought and trauma theory, alongside Wim Wenders’s unique cinematic
and literary encapsulation of contemporary issues which coincide with the
warlike, totalitarian, and media-populated scenarios of the plays. Within
their work, the act of seeing with new eyes becomes inextricably woven
into bringing to the fore the violence, at times unbearably brutal, which
has saturated our realities, but which remains outside the acceptable levels
of artistic representation. Their work also centres on questioning the
groundwork of humanity and humanism in an environment of post-
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 77
Highly influenced by Edward Bond, whose play Saved (1965) was for
a time banned from the British stage on account of its provocative
depiction of the social causes of violence, Kane and Ravenhill, each in
their own manner, explored the potentials for justice and love afforded to
humankind in the contemporary world. On one occasion, Kane shared
with Ravenhill that you could “learn everything you need to know about
playwriting […] by studying Saved,” while Ravenhill admitted to
recognising and identifying with Bond’s artistically shaped “world of
listless, rootless youth, casual acts of sex and random acts of violence”
(Ravenhill 2006a). Bond’s outspoken views on the injustice permeating
the economic network of capitalist societies and its consequences found
their way into both Ravenhill’s and Kane’s oeuvres. In his study The
Hidden Plot: Notes on Theatre and the State, Bond claimed that the core
issue of all drama ought to be justice, in itself a paradoxical notion, given
that, as is the case with all human behaviour, it “is not derived from
mechanical whats but from existential whys” (Bond 2000, 66). For a
playwright, imagination should aim to be limitless in its creation of a
home for a lost humanity, which is why plays must seek to provide the
setting for the exploration of radical innocence (Bond 2000: 122). In its
pure form, radical innocence can only belong to a pre-self-conscious child
78 Chapter Five
that considers its well-being to be the well-being of the entire world, but to
tackle its representation is required if a vocabulary suitable for dealing with
the phenomena of justice and love is to be established. Mark Ravenhill’s
Faust (Faust is Dead) (1997) and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998) make
attempts at the embodiment of this notion of radical innocence, which
emerges as the only possible voice of sense-making in realities structured
as intentionally fragmented, alienating and without valid storytellers.
Moving away from the image of the all-seeing angel, Wenders takes us
through the unified totality of a child’s perception of the world and its
place in it. The child’s innocence, which does not divide, but envisions
spiritual wholeness in humankind, forms a prelude to the black-and-white
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 79
reality of the two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, who inhabit Berlin alongside
other angels, taking note of people’s actions and thoughts, placing
importance on sometimes unexpected parts of human existence. The
children are the only ones who can see them, though they pay no
significant attention to them, preoccupied with their own grand projects.
The two groups share an all-encompassing perception of reality, although
with angels the perception is rational, while the children grasp it in a
synesthesia of senses and emotions.
The reality in question is contemporary Berlin, a locus burdened by its
history, which we glimpse through the angels’ insight into introspective
narratives of its residents. Another locus integrated into the chaotic
crossroads Berlin had become is the circus, populated by those without
roots, whose history is never situated, and therefore provides a contrasting
paradigm to the human urge to define oneself through constancy. Marion,
a circus trapeze artist, is disenchanted with the rootless life and desires to
be tied to a place, to be at home in the world, although she realises that it
is the all-too-human fear that prevents her from immersing herself
completely in fluidity—which is reality. Her job is dangerous in its toying
with mortality and the human dread of it for the sake of entertainment,
purposefully so created by Wenders, so that “she would charm Damiel,
who was never himself in any danger of falling” (Wenders 1991: 111).
Some angels, one of them being Damiel, though safe within the Babylon
Tower of pervading comprehension, form a desire to abandon their
omniscient roles for the fleeting, yet unbearably tempting, experience of
being human. For an angel, the consequences of the transition into a
human being entail new visual and sensory spectres of existing in the
world. To see colours, to taste blood and coffee, to feel the cold and the
fearful uncertainty of not knowing but only guessing, to never again be a
self-sufficient entity—it all comes to be worthwhile. The basic premise of
Wings of Desire is that pure consciousness, an overarching rational
comprehension devoid of sensation and feeling, which bring the previous
into a chaotic state of indecipherable paradoxes, is ultimately undesirable
and worthless. Perfect salvation produces a stoppage—forever excludes
the now, and therefore everything that is life. Damiel confides in Cassiel
that he desires the “now and now and no longer forever and for eternity”
(Wings of Desire 1987). The privileges of mortality outweigh its cost,
while the symbiosis Damiel and Marion achieve in the end, which is
indefinitely deferred with the credits “to be continued…”, is also marked
by a remainder of the self—one is alone as well as together,
simultaneously rootless and rooted.
80 Chapter Five
more. / It’s only dreamt out loud / by the advertising industry” (Wenders
2001: 149). Such a spectacle is not a mere illusion, not something easily
unmasked, for it has exchanged roles with reality. “The spectacle cannot
be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a
product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images” (Debord
1994, 12-13), emphasised Guy Debord. “It is far better viewed as a
weltanschauung that has been actualised, translated into the material
realm—a world view transformed into an objective force” (Debord 1994,
13). It is a paradigm of interacting with the world and seeing oneself in
it—precisely the point of interest for both Ravenhill and Kane, although in
somewhat different modes.
For me, and for so many children of this twentieth century, it is only in
America that we really believe that we are alive, that we are living within
our own century. In Europe, we are ghosts, trapped in a museum, with the
lights out and the last visitor long gone. (Ravenhill 1997, 5)
boundaries between the self and others, and therefore cares for the other as
it does for the self, the voice of the Chorus which introduces the action of
Ravenhill’s play is the voice of a child who cries itself to sleep every
night, “crying for the world, because the world is such a bad place”
(Ravenhill 1997, 1). The child with its radical innocence retains an
incorrupt emotional intelligence that does not allow it to dismiss the pain
of others as irrelevant. However, the consolation which the mother offers
is seen through as empty and the parent as incompetent and insufficient.
The child does not believe the world is going to get better; it just learns to
“cry in a special way” (Ravenhill 1997, 1) so that it is not heard.
Throughout the play, the child from the Chorus matures and so does
humanity with it. It participates in violent looting and steals a VCR instead
of necessary food, already showing an inclination toward simulation
instead of reality. “Momma, what is the point of food in the house when
you have nothing to watch while you’re eating it?” (Ravenhill 1997, 11), it
argues. Even the Church pushes the children into a software-engineered
virtual reality. Then the Chorus assumes the voice of Donny, a young man
who cuts himself in order to feel alive. His mother worked night shifts in a
store to support them, where Donny spent his childhood drinking cherry
slushies, which coloured his tongue and earned him the nickname Red.
When the slushie machine, as a mechanical surrogate-mother, present
throughout his childhood and symbolically affording him a name, gets
taken away, Donny begins experiencing outbursts of violence. “I wasn’t a
kid anymore” (Ravenhill 1997, 29), he admits. And when his actual
mother dies too, of cancer, Donny begins cutting himself, partly because
he admires Jesus and his sacrifice. Corporal pain becomes the only
confirmation of existence in a world of simulated hyperreality. Ontology is
inscribed into the body as into the body of Jesus, which is a theme present
in Kane’s Cleansed, as well. Donny cannot accept that his life is a series
of coincidences and believes there must be some purpose to his suffering,
while his identification with Jesus ascribes him the role of a potential
redeemer of humankind’s sins.
Also a subscriber on Pete’s website, which gathers young people who
perform self-mutilation, Donny enters a quarrel with Pete over the
credibility of his wounds. And given that, for these young people, cutting
oneself is not only an escape from simulation, but the only imaginable
reality, this is the worst insult Donny could have been exposed to.
Therefore, he decides to prove himself by performing the ultimate act—
cutting his jugular vein. The audience never gets to actually see Donny
when he performs his final cut in Pete’s kitchen, but only to witness Pete
showing the video of Donny’s death to Alain in the middle of Alain’s
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 87
sermon on how reality is dead and how somewhere in 1987 “we began to
live this dream, this lie, this new simulated existence” (Ravenhill 1997,
30). Pete’s prelude to the video is to respond to Alain with, “Reality just
arrived” (Ravenhill 1997, 30). Donny’s “totally real” is the only real left—
to end, to cease, to die. But even that is mediated by technology and then
“turned into a marketable commodity” (Kostić 2011, 170) when his death
is exploited as a televised fad. Even dying is simulated to the point of the
actual death being left out. The final address of the Chorus is of the child
grown up, the adult disappointed by the status quo of a world not getting
better, but not collapsing either—”It’s just going on, on and on and on”
(Ravenhill 1997, 35). The child who felt the weight of the world’s pain,
now, as an adult, does not “feel a thing” (Ravenhill 1997, 35). Innocence
has been destroyed.
Pete’s fate is somewhat less bleak. He rejects Alain’s indoctrination
and shoots him when Alain refuses to hand over the disc to Pete and
continue their road trip. Alain ends up in a hospital, while his verbal
participation in the final scene, when Pete comes to visit, is reduced to a
minimum. During the visit, Pete informs Alain that he has reconnected
with his father and that he does not believe in Alain’s philosophy. He
elaborates: “See, I can do the whole Death of Man speech thing, you
know? But where’d it get us? It got us Donny. And I don’t want that
anymore” (Ravenhill 1997, 37). Postmodernism fails because it has
reached its limits—it no longer needs humanity, and, therefore, humanity
can only reject it.
America in Faust is Dead appears to be populated by those who would
gladly exchange their souls for what the media-produced or academia-
produced hype may offer. The entire country, along with the rest of the
Western world, provides a suitable setting for differently oriented Fausts
who are allowed to enjoy its hyperreal experiences and dispose of a sense
of ethical ambiguity, which is replaced by an ambiguity of pre-emptied
discourse units. In an ironic twist, Alain’s fate is ultimately left
ambiguous, as was his philosophy, given that we are not sure whether he
dies or not. As Hadley noticed, “Alain in Faust is Dead misses his
moment. He does not find redemption, only the blind folly of that final
fatal strategy, the gift of Donny’s eyes” (Hadley 2008, 272), which are
given to him by Pete in a material reclaiming of Alain’s metaphorical
seduction narratives. It is left unclear whether the rising beeping sound
which closes the play, reminding Alain to take his pills, is meant to be
taken as his confrontation with the unresolved contradictory basis and
superciliousness of his proclamations, or as his refusal to respond to the
world if that world is not one he could explain and accept. On the other
88 Chapter Five
return: I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I
am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost,
forever” (Barthes 2002, 49). In Cleansed, the extremity of being in love is
portrayed through forms of non-institutionalised relationships—an
incestuous bond between Grace and Graham, two siblings with overlapping
identities; a homosexual couple, Rod and Carl, who make up the classical
dyad, the rational and the idealistic; tyrannical Tinker who falls in love
with a prostitute; and a boy, Robin, whose capacity for love seems
immense, although he used to be tortured by thoughts of suicide, which he
eventually does commit.
The setting of Cleansed is ironically a university campus—another
locus which implies, or should imply, instability and fluidity of what
constitutes one’s perceived identity. Not just a nuclear unit of civilisation,
not just an institution, but a place of learning, of producing established
mindsets and computing schemata, is the setting for acts of cruelty
inconceivable (and yet, somehow designed to be staged), toward both the
corporal and the psychological. Meštrović located “the origins of
postemotionalism in the most other-directed geographical locations of the
United States […] and to university campuses” (Meštrović 1997, 123).
Therefore, it is not surprising that in Faust is Dead the university setting is
likewise the original source of Alain’s loss of faith in the progress of
humanity and its capacity to do good, which, within a postmodernist
framework, becomes a category interchangeable with evil. Alain
sanctimoniously advises Pete: “We must be cruel, we must follow our
desires and be cruel to others, yes, but also we must be cruel to ourselves.
We must embrace suffering, we must embrace cruelty” (Ravenhill 1997,
24). Eagleton strongly criticised this academia-induced ambivalence,
given that “this—the final identity between the system and its negation—
is so cynical a suggestion that it is remarkably hard to picture” (Eagleton
1996, 19). But it is with a different kind of cruelty that Kane attempts to
disturb the status quo. Ken Urban pointed out that cruelty has a
transformative potential, unlike violence, because the former does not
imply senselessness and futility: “Cruelty is the force that violently
awakens consciousness to a horror that has remained unseen and
unspoken, or wilfully repressed” (Urban 2004, 363). Kane wrote Cleansed
to help her audience confront the systemic annihilation of nonconformity
and unlearn the lessons which are taught in the language of power, in the
manner proposed by Ursula K. Le Guin to graduates of Bryn Mawr
College, when she advocated a return to what had been systematically
squeezed out of them—the innocence of the true mother tongue (Le Guin
1986).
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 91
betrays his lover Julia when confronted with his most pronounced fear by
the ironically entitled Ministry of Love. The betrayal of everything aside
from the system in power is Tinker’s goal as well, in order to ensure
complete visibility, a god-like projection of control. Winston Smith is
addressed with these words prior to his betrayal, words which are
symptomatic of the atmosphere in Cleansed:
vulnerable and, when it comes to Graham, all too human. Her influence on
young Robin is both positive and detrimental. Once they exchange clothes,
Robin becomes attached to Grace as both a motherly and an amorous
figure. At first looking forward to getting out of Tinker’s confinement,
Robin ends by not wanting to leave the prison-like campus because he has
fallen in love. The torture of being held in captivity is no longer an
obstacle to happiness because happiness is present in the form of Grace.
His entire worldview acquires meaning on account of her, which diverges
from Tinker’s imposed pattern of thought. Therefore, Robin is tortured
and his innocence stifled: when he draws a flower, Tinker burns the paper,
and when he gets Grace a box of chocolates, Tinker makes him eat all of
them until Robin throws up and wets himself, which he is forced to clean
up with the books used by Grace to teach him how to read; later he is
made to burn them. Robin slowly matures, learning how to write and
count, discarding his child-like perception of the world, and after seeing
the dancing prostitute Tinker usually goes to visit, he “cries his heart out”
(Kane 1998, 28), disturbed by the sight. Like the child in the Chorus in
Faust is Dead, Robin becomes sufficiently familiar with the ways of the
world to turn to utter disillusionment. Once he realises how long 30 years
is—the time he has left in Tinker’s prison—Robin commits suicide by
hanging himself by Grace’s tights. Grace cannot help him, since she is too
numb from the electrocution Tinker has applied to her, too numb from
trying not to feel, so that she would not get hurt in a world which has
already killed her brother and is likely to kill everyone who dares diverge
from the conventional.
In Cleansed, identity is represented as fluid, in need of detachment
from the established modes of expression. Tinker’s relationship with the
erotic dancer in the peepshow shows that Grace has not left him
indifferent. He maps her identity onto the dancer, who might only be a
product of his imagination, his last chance to prove himself human. He
says to Grace, “I am here to save you” (Kane 1998, 27), before he
lobotomises her, preparing her for a sex-change operation which will
finally turn her into Graham. The electrocution transfers even to the
setting, which lights up, purifying its inhabitants. Graham is reborn
through Grace/grace, who is given Carl’s penis and is thus completely
transgendered. Tinker, on the other hand, makes a final visit to the erotic
dancer, whose name also turns out to be Grace, and to whom he makes
love, though it turns into vulgarity and partial disappointment, which
marks Tinker’s inability to imagine pure love. But he does cry and he does
smile, which signify the beginning of change.
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 95
Felt it.
Here. Inside. Here.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we have analysed two plays by renowned playwrights of
the 1990s British scene, incorporating such analysis into the framework of
Wim Wenders’s creative output, as well as postmodernist thought and
criticism, and trauma theory. Mark Ravenhill’s and Sarah Kane’s shock
tactics proved to exceed their surface value and to pierce profoundly into
the systemic injustice that plagues contemporary existence. The simulated
hyperreality of technologically grounded civilisations combined with the
institutionalised violence of an off-the-scale capitalist, consumerist, and
deeply desensitised society in the plays Faust is Dead and Cleansed are
brought to the front and deconstructed via a cruelty-infused testing ground
for love, empathy and innocence. The plays abound in provocation, which
is why their methods of dealing with the issues they set out to tackle are
powerfully audience-oriented. Both Kane and Ravenhill plead for humanity
to be restored or reborn by reconnecting with itself, with the human core it
has thrown away or misplaced. It is no longer a question of how intelligent
or rationally capable we are. What is lost is our ability to relate to each
other, our emotional intelligence—we have forgotten how to feel.
Sometimes it takes representation, as opposed to simulation, to re-evoke
such basic human instincts—those of radical innocence—and that
representation which helps us see the unseen is what makes art. As
Edward Bond so effectively putit, “Theatre has to confront us with our
innocence. It can do it only by making us responsible for our crimes.
Tragedy is the search for innocence” (Bond 2000, 191). And so is all art.
References
Balaev, Michelle. “Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered.” In Contemporary
Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, ed. by Michelle Balaev (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 1-14.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Vintage
Books, 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean. America. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
—. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2001.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 2008.
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 97
Notes
1
Sierz’s most quoted definition of in-yer-face theatre from his eponymous study is
that it comprises “any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and
shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors
and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking
alarm” (Sierz 2001: 4).
Pleas for Humanity in Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead and Kane’s Cleansed 99
2
The poem was originally written in German, but was subsequently translated into
English and entitled “Song of Childhood”.
3
In her study Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler claimed that the body is “bound up
with signification from the start” (Butler 1993: 30). However, she distanced herself
from one-sided criticism of the primacy of the material, by stating that to think of
the body as discursively marked “is not to say that the materiality of bodies is
simply and only a linguistic effect which is reducible to a set of signifiers” (Butler
1993: 30). What she did was to emphasize that “to think through the indissolubility
of materiality and signification is no easy matter” (Butler 1993: 30) and that
materiality is only perceptible via discourse, though not subordinate to it.
4
Pete lists examples of his version of “totally real experiences” as “I’m gonna
work alongside Mother Theresa. I’m gonna take Saddam Hussein out for a pizza.
I’m gonna shoot pool with the Pope and have Boris Yeltsin show me his collection
of baseball stickers” (Ravenhill 1997, 16).
CHAPTER SIX
1. Introduction
“The critic’s first duty is to admit, with absolute respect,
the right of every man to his own style.”
—G. Bernard Shaw
(Shaw 1985, 460-461)
McDonagh’s plays owe their freshness to his being unconcerned with the
strict demands of the dramatic profession, which enabled him to write
quickly and with ease just by “copying down a conversation between two
people” in his head (Hemming 1996). It comes as no particular surprise
that this conversation should be written down in an English that aspires to
reflect the authentic Connemara speech, since McDonagh used to spend
his holidays in the West of Ireland, where his parents come from. The
crude Hiberno-English of the plays is not without its inconsistencies and
“somewhat contrived linguistic constructions” (McDonagh 2006, 227), but
it perfectly serves the function of depicting the sinister side of everyday
lives in Leenane’s fictional world. Although McDonagh’s speech patterns
and ghoulish sentiment will inevitably remind one of Synge’s Playboy of
the Western World (226), they are at the same time infinitely different
from it, because McDonagh’s Ireland can be found in other corners of the
world as well, if interpreted on a larger scale as the study of human
behavior and the everlasting struggle between good and evil within Man.
With this notion in mind, the chapter offers a reading of Martin
McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy as the author’s comment on the
transformation and stagnation of contemporary Ireland and the Irish way
of life, and shows that they reflect the status quo in the rest of the world.
Other Island, which he wrote for the newly-founded Abbey Theatre at the
invitation of William Butler Yeats (Holroyd 1998, 303). Yeats
congratulated Shaw on having said “things in this play which are entirely
true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before” (306), but
eventually refused to stage the play, allegedly because of its length. Shaw,
on the other hand, recognized the real problem—his play was
“uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is
bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a
very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland” (Shaw 1908, v).
Other notable examples of the new theatrical representation of Ireland
include the plays of John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, which
paved the way for writers like Martin McDonagh, who “subverts and
unsettles the very foundational principles of Irish nationalism, starting
with the nuclear family” (310). Theatre continues to be “the location for
debating the meaning of the Irish nation” (Wilson 2011, 1), as it has long
been, but with a conspicuous change pertaining to the new postcolonial
status of Ireland. The economic boost of Ireland in the 1990s, known as
the Celtic Tiger, despite being “a sure sign of postcolonial success”, was
not enough to build “an equitable and liberated society”, leaving Ireland
““poor” in all the ways that really matter” (Ibid). This is McDonagh’s
Ireland from The Leenane Trilogy, as it comes close to showing that the
rest of the world also remains poor despite all its material wealth.
boost in Ireland, along with the outlandish setting of the mythical Irish
West, the plays incite modern audiences to dismantle mythologies and
reassess the real, old Ireland from their new, postcolonial point of view2.
Following in the footsteps of Synge and O’Casey, who “turned Ireland
into the land of violent farmers and drunken peasants” (Puebla 2012, 309),
McDonagh relies much upon the setting itself to justify the outbursts of
violent impulses in a claustrophobic environment. Incessant rain and bleak
weather emphasize the extreme dullness of life in Ireland, as Ray Dooley
observes in BQL: “Who wants to see Ireland on telly? … All you have to
do is look out your window to see Ireland. And it’s soon bored you’d be.
‘There goes a calf.’ (Pause) I be bored anyway. I be continually bored”
(McDonagh 2013, 53). It is in an atmosphere of such continual boredom
that we meet Mag and Maureen Folan, a mother and daughter whose
strained relationship is apparent right from the onset of BQL. At the
beginning of the play, Mag, a stout seventy-year-old woman, is portrayed
as a demanding matriarch, looked after by her forty-year-old daughter
Maureen, who finds it difficult to cope with the role of caretaker while
leading the solitary existence of a spinster. The tension between Maureen
and Mag is complemented by the embroidered tea-towel hanging along the
back wall of the stage, bearing the inscription ‘May you be half an hour in
Heaven afore the Devil knows you’re dead’, as well as the heavy black
poker hanging next to it, which like Chekhov’s gun waits to smash
somebody’s head in.
Maureen is a typical example of McDonagh’s habit of portraying
characters as “victims of their own oppression … unable to achieve their
goals, for their circumstances are usually suffocating” (Puebla 2012, 310).
But although Maureen is at first seen as the victim, the victor-victim
relationship is reversed several times during the play. Emotionally
unstable and fragile, Maureen finds a much needed outlet for her
frustration in the constant surges of anger at and physical abuse of her
mother. During such moments, the audience may sympathize with Mag,
only to be reminded, as the dialogue continues, of her selfish and cruel
treatment of Maureen. Their bickering over everyday annoyances, such as
Mag’s urinating in the kitchen sink, Maureen leaving lumps in Mag’s
Complan3, or the dispute over whether they should speak English or Irish
in Ireland, takes a turn for the worse after Maureen reunites with her old
acquaintance, Pato Dooley, at a farewell party for his American uncle.
Following her unsuccessful attempt to prevent Maureen from going to the
party, Mag is dumbfounded when she encounters the half-naked Pato in
her house the following morning. For Maureen, the nascent relationship is
a way out of her present misery, but her excitement is short-lived as Mag
106 Chapter Six
ordinary cultural spaces … a space that is however connected with all the
sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each
family has relatives in the cemetery … where each family possesses its
dark resting place”. Located on the outskirts of cities since the nineteenth
century, cemeteries have become heterotopias, places that are “outside of
all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in
reality” (Ibid). In this “other city”, Mick scrapes the dirt from the coffin,
but to his astonishment, Oona’s bones are nowhere to be found. Enraged,
he brings the exhumed skulls into the “heart of the city”—his house, to
exact a little revenge of his own. In the following scene, three skulls and
their sets of bones lie on Mick’s table, as he prepares to do some skull-
battering with the overexcited Mairtin, in a scene which has shocked and
sometimes literally injured audience members:
Not only does Mick kill the dead a second time, but he destroys them
“in such a way that they are not afforded a dignified re-location, but
scattered unceremoniously in a slurry pit, along with the waste from
farmyard animals” (72). The skull-battering scene foreshadows subsequent
violent scenes between the characters, triggered at first by Mairtin, who
blurts out the truth about Oona’s missing bones:
Mairtin Maybe a favour it was they did you so, the fellas went and stole
her on you?
Mick No favour was it to me, and if I had the feckers here, then you’d be
seeing some fancy skull-battering. I’ll tell you that. Battered to dust they
would be!
Mairtin Good enough for them, the morbid oul fecks. And not only
stealing your missus then, if that weren’t enough, but to go pinching the
locket that lay round her neck too, a locket that wouldn’t fetch you a pound
in the Galway pawn, I’d bet.
The Sinister Faces of Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy 109
Mick has stopped hammering on the locket’s first mention and stepped
back a pace, staring at Mairtin whose hammering continues unabated,
entirely unaware of his faux-pas.
Mick The rose locket, was it?
Mairtin The rose locket, aye, with the picture of you.
The last we see of Mick in Scene Three is him picking up a mallet and
rolling it around in his hand for a while, while drunk Mairtin is heard
laughing in the background and starting the car, on his way to get rid of
the smashed bones.
When Mick appears next, his shirt is covered in blood, but neither
Maryjohhny nor Thomas takes any notice of that. Determined to get a
confession out of Mick, Thomas “takes a skull with a large forehead-
crack out of his bag” (115), claiming it to be Oona’s battered skull. Mick
agrees to write his confession, but remains adamant: “I didn’t butcher my
wife. Just like for seven long years I’ve been saying I didn’t butcher my
wife. I never butchered anybody till tonight” (118). However, in a
tragicomic twist, Mairtin enters the stage, “somewhat concussed, a big
bloody crack down the centre of his forehead, dripping onto his shirt”
(Ibid). McDonagh skillfully resolves the plot, with Mairtin confessing he
caught his own brother “carving a hole in Mick’s missus’s skull” (120),
which only prompts more violence as Thomas “smashes Mairtin twice
across the head with the mallet” (121).
The enormous amount of violence and many ambiguities in the play
make one question the veracity of anybody’s claims, especially those of
Mick, who maintains that “tonight was the first night ever that hammering
happened” (125), and that he never touched Oona (126). Left alone with
Oona’s cracked skull, he “stares at it a while, feeling the forehead crack”,
then “rubs the skull against his cheek”, caresses it, and “kisses the cranium
gently” (Ibid) as lights fade to black. Unlike BQL, no actual murder takes
place in A Skull in Connemara, but the audience is left with a growing
sense of unease, though the reason for it is difficult to pinpoint. As
opposed to BQL, the action is transferred from a feminized kitchen space
to the graveyard, which is “the Irish omphalos”, “the centre of continuity
and the meeting place between the worlds” (quoted in Jordan 2012, 69).
This brings a certain metaphysical note into the play, making it engaging
to worldwide audiences, while at the same time exhibiting one of the main
features of the Irish theatre—”obsession with death and dying, more than
with living” (64).
110 Chapter Six
which is slowly revealed during the play. The action begins right after
their father’s funeral, and the tension between Valene and Coleman is
immediately sensed. At first, Valene is portrayed as the selfish and spiteful
brother: a long row of dusty, plastic Catholic figurines, each marked with
a black ‘V’ to indicate that they belong to Valene, can be seen lining a
shelf on the back wall; Valene forbids Coleman to read his magazines, eat
his crisps, drink his poteen or use his new stove, stressing that everything
in the Connor household belongs to him, not Coleman. But very soon the
audience’s sympathy for Coleman slowly begins to fade as his true nature,
much more vicious than Valene’s, is revealed. He is seen secretly drinking
his brother’s poteen, eating his crisps, and throwing all his treasured
figurines into the heated stove. These acts are not a simple matter of petty
revenge for which Coleman should be applauded, but acts of a callous and
psychopathic mind, which the theatregoers realize when Valene reveals
the truth about their father’s death: “A pure accident me arse! … Didn’t
dad make a jibe about Coleman’s hairstyle, and didn’t Coleman dash out,
pull him back be the hair and blow the poor skullen out his head…” (157).
Feeling no remorse whatsoever, like a true sociopath, Coleman answers:
“Of course I shot me dad on purpose … I don’t take criticizing from
nobody. ‘Me hair’s like a drunken child’s.’ I’d only just combed me hair
and there was nothing wrong with it! And I know well shooting your dad
in the head is against God, but there’s some insults that can never be
excused” (157-158). For Coleman, the inexcusable insult was his father’s
negative remark about his hairstyle. But Coleman’s murderous act is not
the most absurd act in the play. The most ludicrous point is reached when
we find out that Valene, “with his dad’s brain dripping down him” (158),
promised Coleman not to tell anybody about the murder, so long as there
and then Coleman signed over to Valene everything that their father left to
Coleman in his will. With this, one finally understands the context of the
power play between Valene and Coleman.
Ironically, Father Welsh’s Catholic medicine backfires: instead of
repenting and changing his ruthless behavior, Coleman realizes that “[i]t’s
always the best ones go to hell. Me, probably straight to heaven I’ll go,
even though I blew the head off poor dad. So long as I go confessing to it
anyways. That’s the good thing about being Catholic. You can shoot your
dad in the head and it doesn’t even matter at all” (181-182). Thus, the act
of killing another human being is transposed from being a gruesome act to
being insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The fact that
Catholicism offers one salvation even after murder on condition that one
repents, has a reverse effect, and killing somebody becomes a much easier
and more tolerable act to commit. Eventually, with three murders and a
112 Chapter Six
suicide in his parish, Father Welsh realizes that his ineffectiveness in the
small town of Leenane derives from the fact that he is not a killer himself:
“Maybe that’s why I don’t fit into this town. Although I’d have to have
killed half me fecking relatives to fit into this town. I thought Leenane was
a nice place when first I turned up here, but no. Turns out it’s the murder
capital of fecking Europe” (162).
As his last effort to fit in, Father Welsh assumes a Christ-like role, and
commits suicide so that he can save Valene and Coleman’s souls. His last
wish is simple:
Couldn’t the both of ye, now, go stepping back and be making a listen of
all the things about the other that do get on yere nervs, and the wrongs the
other has done all down through the years that you still hold against him,
and be reading them lists out, and be discussing them openly, and be taking
a deep breath then and be forgiving each other them wrongs, no matter
what they may be? (170).
4. Conclusion
McDonagh thus leaves us with “no moral alternative to the violence
and chaos” that his three plays “so bitingly capture” (Pocock 2007, 61).
Apart from the specific Irish dialect of English used in the plays, all the
other occurrences can be seen as having a universal value. Even the
references to the Irish national food and drink products, such as Complan,
Tayto crisps and poteen, could easily be replaced in another setting with
different national products. Above all, in all three plays “violence appears
as a common frame to understand the world today” (Puebla 2012, 317).
By depicting the sinister faces of rural Ireland, and by focusing on nuclear
families that can be found anywhere—mother-daughter, husband-wife,
brother-brother—McDonagh conveys a more global message. If we are to
accept Turney’s claim that “McDonagh’s Ireland is a violent revival of
The Sinister Faces of Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy 113
References
Castleberry, Marion. “Comedy and Violence in The Beauty Queen of
Leenane.” In Martin McDonagh: A Casebook, ed. by Richard Rankin
Russell (New York: Routledge, 2007): 41—60.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Architecture,
Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46—49. Accessed January 17, 2015.
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html.
114 Chapter Six
Gahan, Peter. “Things Irish, The Matter with Ireland, second edition by
Bernard Shaw; Dan H. Laurence; David H. Greene, Review by Peter
Gahan.” In Shaw, 22 (2002): 200—208.
Gahan, Peter. “Introduction: Bernard Shaw and the Irish Literary
Tradition.” In SHAW, The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 30 (2010):
1—26.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Ignorance of the Learned.” Table Talk, Essays
on Men and Manners (1822). Accessed February 3, 2015.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/hazlittw/ignrnc.htm.
Hemming, Sarah. “ARTS: Gift of the gab.” The Independent, December 2
(1996). Accessed January 15, 2015.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/arts--gift-of-the-gab-
1312654.html.
Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw, The One-Volume Definitive Edition.
London: Vintage, 1998.
Jordan, Eamonn. “Heterotopic and Funerary Spaces: Martin McDonagh’s
A Skull in Connemara.” In Focus, Papers in English Literary and
Cultural Studies, Issue on Interfaces between Irish and European
Theatre, ed. by Mária Kurdi (Pécs: Institute of English Studies,
Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Pécs,
2012): 63—76.
Lacan, Jacques. “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” (1949) Accessed January 11,
2015.
http://faculty.wiu.edu/D-Banash/eng299/LacanMirrorPhase.pdf.
McDonagh, John. “‘When it’s there I am, it’s here I wish I was’: Martin
McDonagh and the Construction of Connemara.” In The Theatre of
Martin McDonagh, A World of Savage Stories, ed. by Chambers, L. &
Jordon, E. (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006): 224—236.
McDonagh, Martin. Plays: 1, The Leenane Trilogy: The Beauty Queen of
Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West. London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013.
O’Byrne, Deirdre. ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ Programme. Leicester:
Curve Theatre, 2013.
O’Hagan, Sean. “The wild west.” The Guardian, March 24 (2001).
Accessed February 3, 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/mar/24/weekend.seano
hagan.
Pocock, Stephanie. 2007. “The “ineffectual Father Welsh/Walsh”?: Anti-
Catholicism in Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy.” In Martin
The Sinister Faces of Ireland in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy 115
Notes
1
In his essay “On the Ignorance of the Learned”, William Hazlitt claims that
“[u]neducated people have most exuberance of invention and the greatest freedom
from prejudice. Shakespeare's was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the
freshness of his imagination and the variety of his views; as Milton's was
scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare had not
been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To
116 Chapter Six
this we owe the unaffected but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to
know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the
insignificance of human learning we may only study his commentators” (Hazlitt
1822).
2
BQL was first performed in February, 1996, and SC and LW in June, 1997.
3
A powdered milk energy drink.
4
Lacan stated that human identity is decentred and exemplified this by the
‘jubilant activity’ of infants the moment they recognize their own image in the
mirror: that is the first anticipation of oneself as a unified and separate individual.
Lacan further claimed that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an
identification, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes
an image” (1949: 503).
5
England
6
Ireland
7
John McDonagh is quoting Declan Kiberd’s article “The Real Ireland, Some
Think”, from The New York Times, 25 April 1999.
CHAPTER SEVEN
REPRESENTATIONS OF MARRIAGE
AND RELATIONSHIPS IN CONTEMPORARY
ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA
SONJA NOVAK
UNIVERSITY OF JOSIP JURAJ STROSSMAYER IN OSIJEK
1. Of marriage: An introduction
In general, marriage is viewed as a formalized union of two people
functioning as partners in a relationship. Any further attempts to precisely
define marriage make one’s head spin, since there have been many
different notions and definitions of this union in terms of what it is based
on (love, economic reasons, political reasons, etc.), whether the partners
are of the same sex or not or whether the union is formalized in legal or
religious terms. Each of the definitions is open for debate in a certain part
of the world at a certain time in history.
The chapter discusses marriage and relationships in Anglo-American
drama after the 1950s, based on historical, sociological, anthropological
and psychological research and arguing that the social changes the
institution of marriage has undergone over the years are shadowed by
changes in dramatic representations of marriage and relationships on stage.
The analysis focuses on American plays by Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? 1962), Christopher Durang (The Marriage of Bette and
Boo, 1976), Paula Vogel (Desdemona. A Play about a Handkerchief,
1993) and David Mamet (Boston Marriage, 1999), and British plays by
Harold Pinter (Betrayal, 1978), Peter Nichols (Passion Play, 1981),
Alexander Kelly et. al (Presumption, 2007) and Enda Walsh (Penelope,
2010).
The research first addresses the issue of how and why the myth of the
male breadwinner and female homemaker marriage model was shattered;
118 Chapter Seven
[f]rom the perspective of Fevre and other authors (Lasch 1977; Sennett
1998) the economic rationality of late capitalism has pervaded the
domestic sphere and corrupted the way in which intimate social relations
are experienced. Trust and social cohesion are identified as the casualties
of this cultural shift. (11)
In 2007, for the first time the number of births to unmarried couples
exceeded those to married ones. If the traditional family was dead, the new
extended families developed in eye-wateringly complex ways, with a
plethora of relationships, from single motherhood to multiple varieties of
step-parenthood. … Old divisions take new forms: boys, with their toys,
were kidults. Girls were loud, or cheeky, had one-track minds, and
wouldn’t be held down. Women enjoy their middle youth. Female bloggers
such as Bitchy Jones and Belle de Jour developed clit lit with online sex
stories. Speed dating became popular. But despite the bootie calls, what
120 Chapter Seven
most people were looking for is love, actually. In the sex war, both women
and men claimed victim status. Desire continued to diversify. So
metrosexuals, transgendered queens, gays, queers and post-gays partied on,
and many were now in civil partnerships. (Sierz 2011, 163)
Sierz (2011) states that family plays made a comeback on British stages,
but the plays focusing on couples in crisis still remained of interest both to
the playwrights and to the audience. “The idea of crisis-struck couples
took many different shapes” (175), claims Sierz (2011) and goes on to list
a number of plays focusing on love, marriage and relationship problems,
such as mid-life crises of one of the spouses, unsuitable couples, desperate
women and worried men, anxieties of failed marriages, lies and deception,
infidelity, lack of communication, well-kept secrets suddenly emerging
and seeping out of dinner conversations “like a bad smell” (176), even
incest.
Christopher Durang’s play The Marriage of Bette and Boo was written
in 1985, at a time when both male and female spouses showed open
resentment towards the roles imposed on them by the ideal marriage
model . Coontz (2005) stresses that the adoption of a “traditional” division
of gender roles often causes much discontent (25); in fact, “the more
traditional the role, the more dissatisfaction” (296) in the relationship. This
is quite visible in Durang’s play. This sarcastic black comedy begins with
the wedding of young Bette and Boo and depicts their marriage and life as
well as the life of their families, as narrated from the perspective of their
first and only son Matt, nicknamed Skippy. The main issues addressed are
the collapse of a marriage in the midst of unfulfilled expectations, both
inside and outside of the marriage. Namely, Bette wants a big family, but
after their first son Matt, they have only stillbirths (the multiple births of
stillborn babies serve as running gags in the play, contributing to the
darkness of the comedy). Boo takes to drinking and towards the end, they
divorce, but the play ends on an affirmative note, since Boo continues to
care for Bette and visits her in the hospital. Bette’s biggest problem seems
to be the fact that she is unable to fulfil her role as female homemaker, and
Boo’s drinking stops him from fulfilling his role of a caring and loving
122 Chapter Seven
The spouses Robert and Emma, are quite a young couple (in their thirties
or forties), married with children, and Robert’s friend Jerry, in his forties,
is a friend of the family and Robert’s colleague. Interestingly enough,
Pinter does not build his dramatic conflict on the moment in which Robert
finds out about the affair, but begins the play with scenes among the
adulterers after their affair had ended and provides no clear explanation or
reasons for the affair.
On the other hand, Peter Nichols’s Passion Play depicts events in the
life of middle-aged married James having an affair with the recently
widowed Kate, who is half his age and offers him casual sex with no
strings attached. James’ wife Eleanor also admits having had an affair with
Kate’s late husband and James’s friend only after finding out about
James’s fling, bringing their 25-year marriage to the verge of collapse. In
addition to marital infidelity, the play addresses problems such as male
midlife crisis and betrayal among friends, female victims of adultery etc.
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 123
[b]ecause the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted
than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were
common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual
connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of
affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. (Coontz 2005, 184)
Why that ‘new woman’ kind o’ fing’s all hogwash. [...] all women want t’
get a smug, it’s wot we’re made for, ain’t it. We may pretend different, but
inside very born one o’ us want smugs an’ babies, smugs wot are man
enow t’ keep us in our place. (Vogel, 1994, 38)
Coontz (2005) calls the period after the golden era of marriage, i.e. the
1950s, “uncharted territory” and all of us “pioneers” in search of the
perfect relationship, since the old rules no longer apply and there are no
more “reliable guides to work out modern gender roles and build a secure
foundation for marriage” (283). In addition to this, it is perfectly normal at
the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century to make
individual decisions on becoming a partner and/or a parent, which makes
marriage, cohabitation or relationship even more optional and fragile.
Gillies (2003) adds that “de-traditionalisation and the concomitant process
of individualisation have undermined the values and identities associated
with family life, thereby weakening social ties and damaging societal
cohesion more generally” (15). This seems to have happened to Vogel’s
Desdemona—she has broken the chains of her traditional role as faithful
wife and homemaker and embarks on a search for sexual liberation equal
126 Chapter Seven
to what men had at the time, but this endangers not only her marriage but
her life as well.
On the other hand, Gillies (2003) notes that this democratisation can be
viewed in a positive light, as it creates room for unions that are more equal
for both partners, freeing
people from the fixed, constrained social roles of the past, allowing them to
create new, more fulfilling relationships based on mutual satisfaction rather
than contractual obligation. …Thus increases in divorce and separation
reflect the rise of the ‘pure relationship’, with people striving for new
associations based on democratic values of respect and negotiation. (15)
With roles and identities no longer fixed, individuals generate their own
relationship rules, leading to a wide diversity in the way intimate
associations are expressed and lived.... ‘Pure’ or ‘confluent’ relationships
are seen as having transcended the instrumental, interdependent
characteristic of previous, traditional social ties. (15)
Their love is not bursting with passion; she is not a stay-at-home wife
waiting for her husband to bring home the bacon every night. She works
and goes out with friends and colleagues. He annoys her sometimes and
she irritates him, but they exist together; their relationship functions on
mutual negotiation and a sort of acquired comfortable intimacy. At the
same time, their union is fragile because they are both aware that things
have changed between them, but they are still not sure whether for better
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 127
judged any marriage that did not end in divorce to be a success, and they
urged couples to strive for this goal. For white, middle-class women, in
particular, getting and staying married was an important achievement.
Indeed, the pressure to remain married was so intense that some wives
clearly sacrificed their personal happiness in order to keep their husbands.
In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists would begin to question
the validity of the assumption that marriage should be solely a wife’s job.
(Cellelo 2009, 101)
The plays under analysis will show that, in most cases, partners at least try
to work out their marital issues with or without the help of outsiders, that
women are mostly the initiators when problems are addressed and solved
and that the key to problem solving is communication.
Cellelo (2009) admits that, in referring to marriage counsellors as
experts, she uses the term broadly and loosely, because they have been
widely accepted by the American population as experts on marriage and
relationships even though they do not have standard credentials in
psychology, sociology or anthropology. In the plays, the helpers are also
not experts but often friends, other members of the immediate family or
people with leading roles within a certain social group (e.g., priests).
In most of these plays, attempts to save the marriage are visible.
Albee’s George and Martha are making their marriage work. They fight
intensely, but in fighting, they finally succeed in communicating more
efficiently and, in the end, they tend to resolve their conflict and forgive
each other, allowing themselves another chance. Nick and Honey function
as triggers or facilitators in the process, in a form of passive negotiation
needed to bring into the open the problems between Martha and George so
these can finally be addressed and solved. Coontz (2005) explains that
“[w]omen are more likely to bring up marital issues for discussion because
they have more to gain from changing these traditional dynamics of
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 129
marriage” (312) so, not surprisingly, it is Martha who dominates the action
throughout the play, and by provoking George, she initiates problem
solving, but in the end it is George who, by “killing” their son, allows the
emotional closeness that is still present to reassert itself. Mathew Roudane
(2006) explains,
Even though Durang’s Bette and Boo in the end get divorced, his play
also ends on a positive note, as Boo continues to see Bette in the hospital
towards the end of her life. In this play, it is also the female character
Bette that initiates problem solving by seeking help from outside their
marriage. Although there are no licensed marriage counsellors present in
the play, the priest, Father Donnally assumes the role of marriage expert
when he is called in, or rather, when he is visited by the spouses and their
whole family seeking help. Ironically, instead of helping, he performs an
act of imitating sizzling bacon in a frying pan, adding to the comic effects
and gags and making a mockery of the whole thing:
Young marrieds have many problems to get used to. For some of them
this is the first person of the opposite sex the other has ever known. The
husband may not be used to having a woman in his bathroom. The wife
may not be used to a strong masculine odor in her boudoir. Or then the
wife may not cook well enough. How many marriages have floundered on
the rocks of ill-cooked bacon? (Pause.) I used to amuse friends by
imitating bacon in a saucepan. Would anyone like to see that? (Durang
1985, 64)
Bette tries several times to get Boo to swear in front of Father Donnally to
stop drinking, to try to make his wife and son happy and to stand up to his
verbally abusive father, but unsuccessfully, and she files for divorce in an
attempt to reclaim her right to pursue happiness with someone else.
130 Chapter Seven
Olson (2000) concludes that there are different types of families: disengaged
(very low cohesion), separated (low to moderate), connected (moderate to
high) and enmeshed (very high cohesion). The best of the four systems are
the separated and connected systems, since these are balanced and allow
both time apart and time together but also include emotional closeness and
loyalty. Disengaged as exhibiting emotional separateness, and enmeshed
relationships where complete emotional loyalty and closeness is demanded,
are extreme and thus unbalanced systems and prove problematic in the long
run.
In terms of relationship flexibility, Olson (2000) observes the amount
and role of leadership and rules in the relationships and identifies four
levels: rigid, structured, flexible and chaotic. Structured and flexible
marriages, being the moderate levels and thus balanced, are more likely to
succeed and overcome difficulties, while extremes such as rigid and
chaotic systems are unable to function.
When it comes to communication, Olson (2000) treats this as a
facilitating dimension and concludes that a balanced system has good
communication, since its members function well with regard to their
speaking skills (speaking for self and not for others) and listening skills
(empathy and attentive listening), self-disclosure (sharing feelings),
clarity, continuity tracking (staying on topic), respect and regard.
In addition to the circumplex model of family and marital systems,
Olson and Fowers (1993) identified five types of marriages: vitalized
couples, harmonious couples, traditional couples, conflicted and devitalized
couples.
According to this research, the largest group are the devitalized couples,
who seemed pervasively dissatisfied with their marriage, and many of
these couples took the survey as part of marital therapy they attended
(Olson and Fowers 1993). The research also describes individual partners
in couples in terms of their income, level of education, (the importance of)
religion, age, time spent in marriage, time of acquaintance prior to
marriage, in order to depict all the factors that play important roles in the
success of a marriage.
132 Chapter Seven
Olson and Fowers (1993) describe the groups in more detail. The
devitalized and conflicted couples seemed to be younger and married more
recently, had a lower income and a lower level of education. The
traditional couples were also younger, but married longer and having
more children than the other types, had more education and income than
the less satisfied couple types, and the wives were less frequently
employed. Harmonious couples tended to be older, married for a shorter
period of time, and having the fewest children of any group; the
individuals were mostly more educated and had higher status jobs, and the
women worked full-time, even earned more money, while many men
worked only part-time. The vitalized couples had the highest level of
satisfaction with their marriage overall and stated that they were quite
satisfied with their spouse’s personality and habits and were happy with
their communication and problem solving. The members of this group
were mainly older, were married longer, were more educated and had
higher incomes. Olson and Fowers (1993) stress that “[a]ll of these
indicators are typically associated with higher marital satisfaction and less
stress on the relationship” (203). It can be concluded that better overall
living and social conditions such as higher income and job status play an
important part in marriage satisfaction, but it must be emphasized that this
study has limitations. The current sample is not representative since it
consists of about 6,000 couples who attended marriage therapy, and a
subset of couples was taken from a separate study of nonclinical couples
(Olson and Fowers 1993). Yet, this data can be indicative of several
things: Americans still consider marriage as work and resort to counselling
before divorce; the business of marriage counselling is still alive, and
marriage/relationship is still an important aspect of an individual’s pursuit
of happiness. Moreover, some of the problems identified in marriages in
Olson and Fowers’s (1993) research are communication and resolving
conflicts, which are largely the problems identified in these plays.
If applied to the analysis of the plays, it can be noted that the plays
depict several of these models and types of marriages, often shown at a
moment of breakthrough or progress/regress from one model to the other.
In Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha are
trying to maintain the façade towards the public that their marriage is
harmonious in Olson’s terms. They have been married for some time,
George has a high income and high job status, and they are both well-
educated. Such couples frequently have only one child (Olson and Fowers
1993), the same as Martha and George, at least at first sight. But this
façade soon collapses and their marriage goes through a storm. Over the
course of the play, their marriage system turns from an unbalanced system,
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 133
5. Conclusion
No matter how one regulates marriage–as a private contract or as a
union recognized by the state or church–unpredictable situations will
occur. “Married life is not only deeply relational but also unpredictable.
Not all of what spouses may properly expect of one another can be
stipulated in advance” (Shanley 2004, 16), as we have seen in the plays,
especially in cases of marital infidelity or at moments of overall personal
dissatisfaction with the relationship.
The echo the plays have had with the audiences proves that we are still
interested in addressing the problems of marriage and relationships, even
though the notion of marriage has become fragile and has changed to a
significant extent in the twenty-first century. Cellelo (2009) asserts that
“[t]he project of working at marriage, together with the public’s
fascination with what makes marriage work, thus remains alive and well in
the early twenty-first century” (163). The most famous of all these plays is
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At the same time it is the oldest
and longest running of all the plays. It won the Tony Award and the New
York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play in 1962. Furthermore,
Durang’s play won a number of Obie awards and is still often staged and
popular, owing to its dark comedy and irony. Mamet’s play and Vogel’s
play are still being staged, as well as Pinter’s Betrayal, which received the
Lawrence Olivier Best New Play Award in 1979. Albee’s and Pinter’s
plays were also adapted for the screen and are still being performed on
stage. Recently, Nichols’s play was revived at the Duke of York’s Theatre
in London and received nothing but praise from critics of The Guardian
and The Telegraph. Third Angel’s collaboration on Kelly, Thorpe and
Walton’s Presumption has toured half of Europe (Florence, Lisbon,
Mannheim, Clonmel, Barcelona, Yerevan and Brussels) since its first
staging in May of 2006. Enda Walsh’s play Penelope won the Fringe First
Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and toured Helsinki, New York
and London. The awards, numerous stagings, revivals and tours prove that
the audience is still very much interested in the institution of marriage and
marital and relationship issues.
In terms of genre, the plays can be labelled as serious drama or drama
in the narrow sense (Albee, Pinter, Nichols and the joint work of Kelly,
Thorpe and Walton), (black) comedies (Durang, Mamet, Vogel) and
136 Chapter Seven
References
Adler, Thomas P. “Albee’s 3 1/2: The Pulitzer Plays.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006): 75-90.
Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Atheneum,
1984.
Kelly, Alexander, Chris Thorpe and Rachael Walton. Presumption. Full
performance text. Sheffield: Third Angel, 2008.
Bigsby, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Cellelo, Kristin. Making Marriage Work: a History of Marriage and
Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. University of North
Carolina Press, 2009.
Clurman, Harold. The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre.
New York: Macmillan Co, 1966.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Representations of Marriage and Relationships 137
Durang, Christopher. The Marriage of Bette and Boo. New York: Grove
Press, 1985.
Gillies, Val. Family and Intimate Relationships: A Review of the
Sociological Research. London: South Bank University, 2003.
Mamet, David. Boston Marriage. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service
Inc., 2000.
Nichols, Peter. Passion Play. London: Nick Hern Books, 2000.
Olson, David H. “Circumplex Model of Marital and Family Systems.”
Journal of Family Therapy 22 (2) (2000): 144-167.
Olson, David H., and Blaine J. Fowers. “Five Types of Marriage: An
Empirical Typology Based on ENRICH.” The Family Journal 1 (3)
(1993): 196-207.
Raby, Peter. The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Roudane, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Toward the
Marrow.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, ed. Stephen
Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 39-58.
Saddik, Annette J. Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. “Just Marriage. On the Public Importance of
Private Unions.” In Just Marriage, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 3-30.
Sierz, Aleks. Rewriting the Nation. British Theatre Today. London:
Methuen Drama, 2011.
Vogel, Paula. 1994. Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief. New
York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1994.
Wakefield, Thaddeus. The Family in Twentieth-Century American Drama.
New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Walsh, Enda. Penelope. London: Nick Hern Books, 2010.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Introduction
When I began my doctoral dissertation in 2007, I was frequently asked
about the subject of my research. The response—which included the
postmodern/ists and drama, as well as British dramatist Tom Stoppard—
Is There Such a Thing as a Postmodern/ist (Anglo-American) Drama? 139
... though the intervention of the actor complicates the act of reception, the
process remains the same in that every ‘reading’, ‘contemplation’, or
‘enjoyment’ of a work of art represents a tacit form of ‘performance’: and
every performance a reading. That reader may, of course, be in the theatre.
He or she may be on their own, confronted with the printed word. ... But of
course the theatre’s attraction lies in its power to transcend the written
word. That is the key. It is physical, three-dimensional, immediate, and
perhaps that very fact itself intimidated the critic. It should instead have
challenged him [sic]. (Bigsby 2000, 2).
Or, more simply, critics have shied away from the pluralism and multi-
faceted nature of theatre and drama innate to the literary-scenic genre.
Bigsby continues, “On the whole, theatre has commanded very little
interest from the major theorists or those who have taken up their theories.
Not even the question of authorship seems to have stirred much interest,
...” (Bigsby 2000, 11), explicating that it is exactly because of the great
number of individual artists involved in the transposition of dramatic texts
from paper to stage that categories such as “authorship” and “ownership”
are frequently subjected to debate7 (Bigsby 2000, 11-12). Schmidt agrees,
adding that,
[t]he diffusion of the text by ‘outside’ forces and the complication of the
concept of a single author-creator figure result in a ‘worrying instability’
and the necessary incompletion of any dramatic work. ... The context of a
particular performance, the physical space on stage, and the event of the
individual show further complicate the issue. (Schmidt 2005, 10-11).
“Play as Stylistic Dominant”, however, is not the first, nor the only
critical commentary in which the author raises the term “postmodern/ist
drama”, or correlates dramatic and theatre arts with postmodern theory. In
her book Lingvistička stilistika, first published as an e-book in 1999, then
as the enhanced and edited print volume Stilistika in 2001, Katnić-
Bakaršić pays due attention to the elements of dramatic style in “podstil
drame” (Katnić-Bakaršić 1991, 54-58). The author does not include a
discussion on postmodern(ist) drama in that subchapter, but later, in the
subchapter on the topic of “intertextuality, metatext, self-referentiality”/
“intertekstualnost, metatekst, autoreferencijalnost”26 (Katnić-Bakaršić
1991, 104-109), she refers to specimens of and excerpts from the dramatic
genre to explain and exemplify the dominantly postmodernist elements of
style. Likewise, in her article “Postmoderna i preokret u stilistici”/”
Postmodernism and Turn in Stylistics” (Katnić-Bakaršić 1998, 30-33),
Katnić-Bakaršić expounds on techniques employed to switch register,
illustrated by excerpts from novels by Borges and David Lodge, and from
David Newby’s dramatic text Love and Other Media. This suggests the
direction the author will take in her next publication, which is of particular
significance to this research.
The book Stilistika dramskog diskursa is of utmost relevance for those
interested in research on drama in general, and postmodern(ist) drama in
particular. Among other related issues, Stilistika dramskog diskursa turns
the reader’s attention first to the ‘ludic dialogue’, whose primary function
is a game (“čija je primarna funkcija igra”) (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 155),
then to the interculturalism in theatre (“interkulturalnu teatarsku praksu”)
(Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 191-195), and the intertextuality and self-
referentiality of the dramatic discourse (“intertekstualnost i
autoreferencijalnost dramskog diskursa”) (Katnić-Bakaršić 2003, 204-
213). The author straightforwardly states the following:
spend much time on the specifics of each author mentioned. For this
reason, a whole series of analyses and critical commentaries ought to be
issued.
5. Conclusion
As outlined in this chapter, Bosnian and Herzegovinian researchers on
Anglo-American drama will find their work toilsome and challenging,
partly because few studies on the subject of English, British and/or US
drama and theatre are published in the languages of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Bigsby’s previously cited verdict haunts the field; it appears
as if dramatic literature is indeed banished from the world of academic
discourse, especially regarding plays created in the last three or four
decades of the previous century. Even though this situation corresponds to
the global condition of (postmodern/ist) Anglo-American drama, the
question remains why this is so, and whether the current state of affairs
will improve. Accessing original works is still difficult, especially for
potential non-English-speaking researchers, since not a single anthology of
dramatic works from Britain or the USA has been translated in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Furthermore, there is a need for more systematic studies on
the subject of (postmodern/ist) Anglo-American drama in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, whether they be monographs, historical surveys or
textbooks. Even though more recent works by American and British
dramatic authors are rarely promoted, there is a rising interest in them,
judging by the quantity of articles in those periodicals that focus on
postmodern/ist drama and/or Anglo-American plays. Novels still hold
primacy in the number of works published, analyses and critical
commentaries, yet this intricate and captivating literary-scenic genre has
its place and should be acknowledged accordingly. The author hopes that
this and other chapters in Highlights in Anglo-American Drama:
Viewpoints from Southeast Europe provide such recognition, and that the
volume is one of many to come.
References
Abel, Lionel. 1963. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New
York: Hill and Wang.
Afarini, Yousef. 2012. “The Non-hero of Postmodern Drama (i. e.
absurd)”. Nature and Science 10/7: 74-77.
http://www.sciencepub.net/nature.10. Last accessed January 2013.
Is There Such a Thing as a Postmodern/ist (Anglo-American) Drama? 159
Databases
www.centarnirsa.ba
www.cobiss.ba/scripts/cobiss?command=CONNECT&base=10400
Notes
1
Both of whom centre exclusively on L. S. D. performed by the Wooster Group
ensemble.
2
Jernigan also wrote the introduction, and a chapter titled “Tom Stoppard’s
Regressive Postmodernity: Tracking the Major Plays from Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead to Indian Ink” (Jernigan 2008, 157-182).
3
In the introduction to his Postmodern/ drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage
(1998), Watt states, while discussing the “problematics of a phrase”—the title of
the chapter—that “[E]ven though the phrase postmodern drama appears routinely
in textbooks to distinguish, say the work of Robert Wilson or Richard Foreman –
or, as we shall see, the plays of Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard – from that of
Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, drama is not always welcome (or safe) in
contemporary theoretical discourse” (Watt 1998, 3).
4
Dating from the post-war period, especially the decades in which postmodernist
philosophy starts to be formulated (1970s onwards).
5
Made by the aforementioned Bigsby, Watt, Woods, Schmidt, Jernigan, and
Saddik (as well as many others who are not tackled in this analysis).
6
Out of a total 12 articles, over 270 pages of proceedings.
7
It can be added that this is a particular issue in those examples of contemporary
theatre and postmodern(ist) drama that propose and promote open structures and
various staging formats for (even ‘classical’) dramatic pieces.
8
In this phrase, the element “readers” refers not only to lay readers and the
uninformed theatrical audience but also (and more so) to informed, “expert”
readers.
9
Taking place in the 1970s and 1980s (Auslander 2004, 98).
10
This is, in itself, a problematic attitude, considering the ceaseless debates on
whether postmodernism is a reaction to or a continuation (and part) of modernism.
164 Chapter Eight
11
A concept derived by Alan Wilde (see Biti 1997, 286).
12
Data on doctoral dissertations defended include the period from the Faculty's
establishment in 1954 until the composition of this article, whereas data on
master’s theses date from 1971 (accessed from the Faculty Library’s online
catalogue, and the website of the Nirsa Centre for academic research, on or before,
June 20, 2015). It should be noted that these catalogues provide information on
doctoral and master’s research carried out in all disciplines offered at the Faculty
of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, as follows: philosophy, linguistics,
literature, cultural studies, history, psychology, and education.
13
These are: Dijalog/Dialogue (covering the period from 1977 to 2012); Dialogue-
International Edition (editions from 1995, 1997, and 1998); Hijatus (publications
from 1995, 1996, and 1997); Hum (2006–2014); Novi Izraz/New Expression
(1998–2013); Odjek (2005–2013); Pregled (2003–2014); Pismo/Letter (2003–
2013); Survey-Special Edition (2008 and 2009); and Zeničke sveske/Zenica
Notebook (2005–2012) (www.ceeol.com, last accessed June 20 2015).
14
Except in the case of special editions of Dijalog-International Edition, and
Survey-Special Edition, both published in English.
15
Of a total of 42, discussing drama or exploring dramatic pieces as their
analytical corpus.
16
Titled “Poigravanja ništavila virtualne stvarnosti”/“Playing Blank with Virtual
Reality” (Kodrić 2005).
17
“Metatekstualni postupak u drami Klempajevi Pava Marinkovića”/“Meta-textual
Proceedings in the Play The Klempajs by Pavo Marinković” (Šemsović 2005).
18
“Fenomen laži u teatru—dva prikaza porodičnog rasula”/“The Phenomenon of
the Lie in Theatre – Two Views of a Family Decline” (Pupić 2010), “Provokativni
teatarski tekst”/“A Provocative Theatre Text” (Pupić 42, 2008), “Otklon od
tradicionalnog zapadnog pozorišta”/“Decline from Traditional Western Theatre”
(Pupić 39, 2008) and “Pozorište kao užitak za sva čula”/“Theatre as a Joy for All
Senses” (Pupić 37-38, 2007).
19
See “Gavranove igre teatrom/tekstom”/“Gavran’s Play with Theatre and Text”
(Muzaferija 2004), and “Kreontova Antigona Mire Gavrana”/“Creont’s Antigone
by Miro Gavran” (Muzaferija 2001).
20
I refer here to “Postmodernistička tekstualnost Toma Stopparda”/“The
Postmodernist Textuality of Tom Stoppard” (Čirić 2007), and “Social
Constructivism and The Other in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Indian Ink” (Čirić-
Fazlija, 2011).
21
The book in question is Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana, published in 2005 in
Zagreb (Muzaferija, 2005). A chapter from this book had previously been
published in 2004, as the article “Glumac u središtu igre (Dio iz studije Kazališne
igre Mire Gavrana)”/“The Actor at the Centre of the Play (part of a study entitled
Kazališne igre Mire Gavrana)” in the Faculty of Philosophy Works, tome XIII
(Muzaferija XIII, 2004).
22
It can be established that the first series of texts discussing postmodernist theory
in Europe and the USA were published in the late 1970s and early 80s, whereas in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small number of such texts appear in the late 1980s and
Is There Such a Thing as a Postmodern/ist (Anglo-American) Drama? 165
early 90s, with a greater number in circulation post-2000. The implication of this is
that it took about two decades for the Bosnian and Herzegovinian academic and
theoretical community to gain momentum on this issue. A comparable difference is
detected with regard to discourse on postmodernism in theatre and the dramatic
arts, which in Europe and the USA appears regularly from 1991 onwards, with
more comprehensive texts on the topic being released in the 21st century (see Watt,
1998; Woods, 1999; Connor, 2004; Schmidt, 2005, Saddik, 2007; Jernigan, 2008).
23
This play was composed in 1965, yet it premiered in 1971, the same year it was
first published (Zuppa “Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja/redatelj: Vinko
Brešan – O predstavi”).
24
The late professor Gordana Muzaferija (1948–2008) was a prolific author with
an extensive body of academic texts of all formats and purposes that focused on
the dramatic genre and theatre arts, including an anthology of Bosniak drama, and
an anthology of Bosnian and Herzegovinian drama in the 20th century.
25
This may refer to any type of game, or a play, alluding to and evoking a theatre
performance.
26
This is the chapter’s subtitle.
27
Such as Almir Imširević’s Kad bi ovo bila predstava... Balkanski đavo Sram
(2001), Dževad Karahasan’s play Kralju ipak ne sviđa se gluma (1986) and dramas
by Miroslav Krleža, Miro Gavran, and Ivo Brešan.
28
Including Shakespeare, Ionesco, Beckett, Chekhov, Hare, and other similar
writers.
29
This involves not only generic hybridisation, but the crossing of borders between
high and popular literature, and the erasure of distinctions between imaginative and
real, simulation and reality, and literary theory and practice.
30
Although she does not specify that the text in question is not a stage play.
31
To become an opera by James MacMillan, in 1996.
32
In the subchapter “Cognitive Context in Drama and Schemes” (Katnić-Bakaršić
2003, 119-121), the author mentions J. J. Weber's discussion of power models in
Oleanna by Mamet.
33
In his bibliography Professor Srebren Dizdar has as many as 40 works in
different formats and on diverse topics, ranging from British and American
literature (predominantly the lyrical and narrative genres), to postcolonial
literature, ELT and higher education, to an anthology of English romantic poetry
and translations of general public literature.
34
This workshop was organised by the PEN Centre Bosnia and Herzegovina, the
Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Novi Izraz. It was held on February 25 2006 (Novi
Izraz 31 2006, 3).
35
See References.
CHAPTER NINE
TOMAŽ ONIČ
UNIVERSITY OF MARIBOR
by Vito Taufer. Finally, the most recent production was again produced at
the AGRFT in 2004 and was directed by Vida Cerkvenik Bren.
Even though Pinter’s plays in general came to the Slovene audience
rather late – the first one about a decade after its original production and
the following two within the following decade – Pinter has been present
on Slovene stages ever since and remains one of the British playwrights
most frequently translated into Slovene.
Such use of camera exposes a notable difference from the stage presentation:
on stage, there is a limit to the viewer’s angle of vision; the capacity to
expand that would normally be considered an advantage of film. However,
when there is the need to control the viewer’s reactions so precisely, the
camera’s ubiquity is not necessarily a benefit. These camera effects in
such cases are used not to create the usual naturalistic illusion, but to
defamiliarize the ordinary and thus to destabilize visual certainties.
Viewer’s focus in the situations described is thus closely guided to
particular details of interest, while extreme close-ups of characters’ faces
additionally introduce an air of menace, which is a well-known characteristic
of Pinter.
Another technique for guiding the viewer’s attention that is frequently
employed in this film is the inclusion of two faces in the same close up
camera shot. This allows the viewer to observe both facial expressions (or
the lack thereof) at the same time. The sharpening and blurring of the
picture sometimes provides additional cues to the part of the screen where
the director wants the viewers’ attention.
The camera in Lapajne’s film also seems to suggest the intensity of
action by moving closer to or farther from the locus of action. He usually
reserves long and medium shots for neutral and slow-moving action, while
energetic or violent scenes are pulled closer to the viewer with the use of
mid shots, close ups or over-the-shoulder shots. To these features, Lapajne
successfully adds a Pinteresque flavour by choosing a mid shot or a close
up and focusing it away from the viewer’s point of interest. For example,
when Stanley comes downstairs in the first act, the camera focuses on his
hand sliding down the banister rail, showing only the middle part of his
torso in the background of the shot. Since this is the first time Stanley
appears on stage in person, while much has been said about him, it is
natural that the audience is eager to see him. The suspense and mystery are
additionally underlined by a single background tone—a menacing strike
on a low piano key—so this draws the viewer’s attention and increases
curiosity, but Stanley’s face is still not revealed. This film technique
recalls the visual manifestation of this aspect of the Pinteresque, since this
is a visual equivalent to what Pinter does with language: he seems to lure
the audience to build certain expectations regarding the play and then
declines to fulfil them.
2002. The same translation served as the basis for the film version;
however, there are considerable differences between the 2002 unpublished
translation text of the play and its 2003 film production script. In 2006, a
revised translation of the play was published in book form, together with a
selection of Pinter’s short prose.
One of the first things the viewer notices about the Slovene translation
in the film version is its strong dialectal colouring. Most noticeable are the
non-standard language elements from the Upper Carniola dialect, as well
as those from the speech of the Slovene Central region. It must be
acknowledged that the original play text is not in Standard English either;
however, the English colloquialisms, which are not bound to any
particular locality in the geographical sense, are considerably fewer and
carefully infused into the language of particular characters. Apart from the
mere fact that the inclusion of these elements in the Slovene translation
often has little or no ground in the original, introducing dialect in Pinter
also seems problematic from the macrostructural interpretive aspect:
geographically bound language tends to suggest a geographically bound
character. If the language and consequently location are (easily)
recognizable by the audience, the character is intuitively, even subconsciously,
placed into that region. This, however, is in diametrical opposition with
Pinter’s concepts of the unknown and the mysterious, with which he
invests his characters, as well as background information referring to
them. Save from what is directly visible on stage and scattered misleading
hints, no socially locating context that guides our normative interpretations
of speech and behaviour of the characters is revealed to the audience.
Moreover, Meg and Petey’s boarding house, where the play is set, is
located “in a seaside town” (Pinter 1993, 39); this is another confusing
element in the film, since Upper Carniola is an Alpine region and is in no
geographical connection with the sea, nor is Ljubljana and its
surroundings. The same type of problem has been identified and
problematized in the Slovene translation of Pinter’s The Caretaker (see
Onič 2008, 140-142), where the tramp can be traced back to the same
Slovenian region as the characters from The Birthday Party.
Unjustified introduction of dialectal elements into dramatic texts,
particularly those from the speech of the Capital region, is not an
unprecedented case in Slovene translation for the theatre. The domination
of the Ljubljana speech on Slovene stages was criticized in the early 1980s
by the Slovene linguist Breda Pogorelec, who concluded that this was
unacceptable for Slovene speakers from other regions (see Tomše 1983,
114). She continues, however, to acknowledge the existence of regional
language variants and suggests that these should be allowed and accepted
The Slovene Birthday Party on Film 171
Similar “correction” into dialectal use took place in the case of lexical
register shifts, which also appear in the written translation. For example, in
the utterance Si se fejst nagaral davi? (Engl. Have you been working hard
this morning?), fejst is a strong dialectal expression, while davi (this
morning) is a standard and a very formal expression. The same applies, for
example, to Sem mu povedala, naj se podviza, ali pa bo ostal brez zajtrka.
(Engl. I told him if he didn’t hurry up he’d get no breakfast.), where the
phrase podvizati se is very formal, almost literary, while there is no
grounds for that in the translation, where the level of language is lower but
consistent. Both these examples, too, are mended in the film version; the
davi was changed into zjutraj, which is less formal non-standard, and the
podvizati se was turned into zmigati se, a considerably lower register verb.
In a similar case, a very formal verb in the phrase Sem ga primorala. (I
made him [drink tea].) is left out in the film version, most likely because
of the register clash. These changes, obviously, improved the internal
consistency of the film; however, according to Podbevšek 1998, 83–4),
any major changes in the written text should always be done with the
translator’s permission. She further explains the authority of the language
editor.
Another point, connected to the use of non-standard language in The
Birthday Party, has to do with characterization of Goldberg, the senior of
the two men who come to the house and eventually drag the
psychologically and emotionally ruined Stanley away, apparently for
treatment. Goldberg’s language is mostly calm and elevated, almost
solemn at certain moments. It contains many formal stylistic elements,
with which he achieves an impression of rationality, even though, the
content of his statements is sometimes so vague that it becomes trivial:
Goldberg /…/ At all events, McCann, I can assure you that the assignment
will be carried out and the mission accomplished with no excessive
aggravation to you or myself. Satisfied? (Pinter 1993, 60)
Vrbovšek (2013, 39) claims that in the Slovene film version the
linguistic aspect of Goldberg’s character is distorted to a large extent
because of the use of dialect, since this places him, as she concludes, on
the same common level as the other characters, such as Petey.
Dialect on stage as well as on the screen is a phenomenon that will
always hold its place in the world of drama and film. Therefore, dealing
with this issue is as permanent as translating itself. Speaking from film
making practice, Naberšnik (2013, 81) claims that there is no generalized
rule for dealing with dialectal issues. Each case is separate and requires an
174 Chapter Nine
Meg They must have heard this was a very good boarding house. It is. This
house is on the list. (Pinter 1993, 42)
translation of The Birthday Party by Janez Žmavc and its three variants,
adapted by various theatre practitioners, finds that, except for the one
stored by the Slovene Theatre Museum, all other variants contain the same
shift, i.e., they change when into if. It is unclear why this particular variant
changed ko (when) “back” into če (if), thus bringing it closer to Pinter’s
original; Hribar (ibid.) believes that this was done unwittingly and,
therefore, without a particular purpose.
Similar characterization issues can also result from more substantial
translation or adaptation shifts, like deleting, adding or reshaping
utterances. This can be illustrated with a deletion of Meg’s utterance in the
follow-up of Act I when Petey talks to Meg about a show coming to town:
Again, Petey’s answer is brief and displays minimum effort on his part.
His choice of word shows his low interest because of the repetition – he
repeats Meg’s word nice, but also because of the word itself, which is
vague and weak in terms of semantic strength. On top of this, the audience
cannot fail to acknowledge the pointlessness of Meg’s asking about the
taste of cornflakes that come from the same box every morning, and
whose taste cannot vary all that much. In the Slovene translation, Meg’s
question So ti pasal? (Engl. Were they agreeable to you? / Did you like
them?) is not asking about the taste of cornflakes as in the original, but
refers to Petey’s feelings while eating the cereal. Therefore, the Slovene
dialogue between the spouses makes more sense than that in the original
language, since asking for her husband’s appreciation of the food is, in
fact, asking for a piece of information Meg does not possess – as opposed
to the dialogue in the original. So, it is not only that increasing the level of
information flow in a dialogue must be considered a serious translation
shift, but this shift is intensified by the directorial decision, according to
which Petey smiles at Meg while delivering his reply Zlo pasal. (I liked
them very much.). Such emotional participation in the interaction with his
wife at the breakfast table is beyond what Petey’s character can
accommodate.
The final observation in this section addresses the issue of the outdoor
scene(s) in the Slovene film version of the play. One typically Pinteresque
characteristic that can be applied to practically all of Pinter’s plays is their
rigorous restriction to closed space. The plays are almost always set in
windowless rooms. If there are any windows, these either crowd up
against the ceiling or look onto some neglected enclosed garden. Pinter’s
characters never leave the rooms they inhabit; the same is true for The
Birthday Party. Stanley’s inability to leave the house is the main reason
that he cannot escape the two men, even though Petey has announced their
arrival a day before. With this in mind, the directorial decision to include
an outdoor scene is a surprising one. After the first scene with Lulu,
Stanley leaves the house and walks along a moderately descending park
path to a lakeshore. Apart from this outdoor scene, there are also instances
178 Chapter Nine
when the camera shows the house from outside, as is usually done in TV
series in order to inform the viewer about the location of the scene that
follows. Here, however, providing the location of the events seems
unnecessary, since Pinter’s whole play happens in one indoor location, and
the playwright seemed uninterested in providing information about its
locality to the audience.
It is true that the possibilities of a theatre performance are in this sense
more limited, so a director is less easily tempted to move the scenes
outside in a stage production (i.e., change of scene) than in a televised
play, but the question of its interpretive dimension remains open. The
question of moving the set to an outdoor location is, obviously, not an
issue of possibility but of interpretive potential. The Slovene film
production is, however, not the only film version of The Birthday Party
that includes outside scenes. The 1968 British film, directed by William
Friedkin, opens with a long shot of a beach in a British-looking seaside
town, then the camera is set at the windscreen of an obviously expensive
car and travels through the town streets, seemingly towards the boarding
house. Unlike Stanley’s stroll into the outdoors, however, no characters
are shown in Friedkin’s film before Petey enters the room. This directorial
decision can thus be reconciled with the original script, since it can be
claimed that Friedkin made good use of the possibilities offered by the
television medium to convey to the viewer the information that the play is
set in a seaside town, which Pinter provides in the didascalia.
6. Conclusion
As this paper has attempted to demonstrate, the Slovene 2003 film
version of The Birthday Party contains many stylistic and linguistic
elements as well as directorial decisions that both intensify its Pinteresque
features and weaken its compact dramatic structure. These do not
necessarily come as a direct consequence of the changed medium, i.e.,
from the theatre stage to television screen, although some do.
The use of dialect probably falls in the former category, since this
feature is not inseparably connected to the film medium; it could also
happen in a non-televised performance; such was the case in the 2002
stage production of The Birthday Party on which the film version is based.
Moreover, this is far from being the only case of a stage production where
dialect is introduced, most of the time without grounds for it in the original
text. Several directorial decisions regarding camera angles and various
kinds of shots, however, are good representatives of the latter category,
since these are the features that a theatre director does not have at his/her
The Slovene Birthday Party on Film 179
References
Billington, Michael. “Fighting Talk” The Guardian. 3 May (2008).
—. “The Birthday Party”, review. The Guardian, 19 March (1994).
Hribar, Darja Darinka. Sestavine sloga Harolda Pinterja v slovenskih
prevodih: vpliv slogovnih posebnosti na sprejemanje na Slovenskem,
unpublished doctoral dissertation. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta,
1999.
—. “Harold Pinter in Slovene translations” ELOPE 1(1/2) (2004): 195–
208.
Logar, Tine. Slovenska narečja. Besedila. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga,
1993.
Naberšnik, Marko. “Narečje kot filmski govor.” In Govor med znanostjo
in umetnostjo, ed. by Katarina Podbevšek and Nina Žavbi Milojević
(Maribor and Ljubljana: Aristej and AGRFT, 2013): 77–82.
Onič, Tomaž. A telephone conversation to Vito Taufer, 26 August 2015.
—. “Pogovorni in narečni izrazi – soočanje s prevajalskimi zagatami”
Jezikoslovni zapiski 14(1) (2008): 139–150.
—. “Alliteration as a means of characterization of dramatic personae: a
translation issue” ELOPE 3(1/2) (2006): 247–255.
Pinter, Harold. Zabava za rojstni dan, translated by Zdravko Duša.
Radovljica: Didakta, 2006.
—. Zabava za rojstni dan, film. Ljubljana: National Radio and Television,
2003.
—. Zabava za rojstni dan, translated by Zdravko Duša, unpublished
translation. Kranj: Prešeren Theatre, 2002.
—. The Birthday Party. London, Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993.
—. Complete Works: One. New York: Grove Press, 1976.
Podbevšek, Katja. “Lektoriranje govorjenega (gledališkega) besedila”
Jezik in slovstvo XLIII(3) (1998): 79–88.
Pulko, Simona, and Melita Zemljak Jontes. “Raba zemljepisnih različkov
slovenskega jezika glede na stopnjo izobraževanja in različne govorne
položaje.” In Slovenska narečja med sistemom in rabo: povzetki
predavanj, ed. by Vera Smole (Ljubljana: Center za slovenščino kot
drugi/tuji jezik pri Oddelku za slovenistiko Filozofske fakultete, 2007):
n. pag.
180 Chapter Nine
1. Introduction
In his preface to the monograph Harold Pinter on International Stages,
Tomaž Onič points out that the extent of Harold Pinter’s literary, cultural
and political impact has stretched far beyond the borders of the United
Kingdom. The various responses received have depended on a multitude
of factors, such as where, when and under what political regime the
productions or translations took place (Onič 2014, 9). Pinter’s Croatian
reception could possibly serve as a good example of Onič’s remarks. The
Croatian reception of Harold Pinter’s dramas occurred relatively early,
only five years after the first UK production of one of his plays.1 This
reception underwent an accelerated development, which declined in
intensity after the end of the 1970s. A detailed overview of Pinter’s
reception and criticism in Croatia was recently undertaken by Acija
Alfirević (2014, 89-102). Hence, the aim of this paper is to determine
whether, and in what way, labels such as Martin Esslin’s label of the
Theatre of the Absurd, facilitated, directed and regulated the reception of
Pinter in Croatia. The second aim of this paper is to provide a historical
and cultural background for the reception and to highlight the turning
points in the critical and theatrical reception of Pinter’s drama in Croatia
in the context of the various labels associated with his name.
182 Chapter Ten
The Landscape too artificial and more suitable for performance on radio
(1971, 17). She described Old Times as a play in which nothing happened
(1973, 5). Vukov Colić valued Pinter’s play in terms of the Theatre of the
Absurd, and he even considered Pinter to be an epigone of Samuel
Beckett. Nikola Batušić was especially critical toward Pinter’s work. He
had no high regard for Pinter’s plays and believed they were performed on
Croatian stages not because of their literary value but because of Pinter’s
fame in England (1976, 926-928). Batušić’s opinion was that Pinter’s
plays appealed to the public because they exhibited scenes from everyday
life on stage and because Pinter refused to provide a definitive explanation
of his plays, thus giving the public the opportunity to interpret them freely
(1973, 952-954). Batušić compared Pinter to Chekov and described
Pinter’s theatre as a ‘theatre of silence’. The localization of No Man’s
Land was welcomed by reviewers with the location considered as largely
contributing to the play’s appeal and success (Batušić, 1976).9
After their success on avant-garde theatre scenes in Zagreb and on the
main national stages, Pinter’s plays found their way to the stages of
provincial towns. In 1975, The Birthday Party was performed in the
Croatian National Theatre in Split (directed by Vlatko Perković). Anatolij
Kudrjavcev’s review of the performance in the local newspaper Slobodna
Dalmacija demonstrated that Croatian theatre critics still experienced
difficulty in trying to describe and define Pinter’s work (1975, 6).
Furthermore, Kudrjavcev’s article revealed that the Theatre of the Absurd
remained the main focal point in reading and interpreting Pinter.
Kudrjavcev read Pinter as a confrontation with Beckett and Ionesco and
endeavored to find ways in which his work was different from the other
two.
Somewhere after the mid-1970s, Croatian theatres seemed to lose
interest in Pinter. His plays were staged less frequently. The independent
theatre company “Teatar u gostima” staged The Betrayal in 1980, which
was a big success.10 The director of the performance was again Georgij
Paro, the most active promoter of Pinter’s work in Croatia.11 Prominent
theatre critics Dalibor Foretić (1979, 5) and Nikola Batušić (1980, 153-
155) both deemed that the play failed to surpass Pinter’s earlier plays, as it
was missing elements that Croatian critics considered typical of Pinter’s
work: silence and a demonstration of despair and coldness in everyday
life. The most evident change in Foretić and Batušić’s review was that
they no longer associated Pinter with Beckett or Ionesco but presented
Pinter as an author belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. They analysed
The Betrayal with reference to Pinter’s work and struggled to recognize
the main characteristics of Pinter’s style.
Harold Pinter in Croatia 185
label by borrowing the term from Albert Camus, thus providing a familiar
context for viewing the new type of drama. Finally, he presented the new
theatrical trend as continuing an already recognized literary tradition
(Georg Büchner, Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud etc.). During that time,
Esslin had a substantial impact on the careers of playwrights he considered
as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. He provided the initial
‘legitimacy’ for playwrights whose acceptance into the theatrical canon
had not yet been decided. Playwrights such as Eugène Ionesco, Harold
Pinter, John Arden, Samuel Beckett, Fernando Arrabal, Friedrich
Durrenmatt, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Sławomir Mrożek, Joe Orton, Sam
Shepard and Boris Vian were recognized not only by theatre critics and
reviewers but also by publishing houses, for example by Grove Press
based in New York (Glass 2011). Consequently, numerous critics
identified Pinter as one of the dominant figures of the Theatre of the
Absurd. Critique on Pinter abounds in discussion of whether Pinter’s work
differs from that of other playwrights considered as belonging to the
Theatre of the Absurd.
The fact that Harold Pinter is so often compared to Samuel Beckett and
read and perceived as a playwright belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd
in Croatia is not surprising, considering the extent to which his Croatian
reception was associated with and facilitated and directed by the theatrical
trend as canonized by Esslin. Pinter’s plays began to be performed in
Croatian theatres at the time when the works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet,
Mrożek and other avant-garde dramatists were at the peak of their
popularity. Pinter’s work attracted the attention of Croatian directors and
translators immediately after Ionesco and Beckett conquered the Croatian
theatrical scene, and after the literary value of their works was no longer in
doubt. The Croatian reception of Beckett and Ionesco, the leading
exponents of European post-war avant-garde theatre, began at the same
time as in other European countries and much earlier than in some Eastern
European countries.19 The first articles on Beckett and Ionesco were
published in Croatian newspapers in 1954, immediately after the first
performance of Waiting for Godot in Paris.20 At the beginning of the
1950s, after the break with Stalin, the arts scene was quietly encouraged to
open up to western influences and to make (politically controlled)
exchanges with the western cultural scene. The Socialist Federative
Republic of Yugoslavia was accused of seditionist politics and excluded
from the alliance of communist countries in 1948. Western forces helped
Yugoslavia economically at that time, hoping that the country would serve
as an example to other communist countries who sought independence
from Moscow and, in that way, they would weaken the monolithic
188 Chapter Ten
communist bloc. Tito wanted to prove to the West that Yugoslavia was
more democratic and more open to the West than other communist
countries and was eager to present the country in a better light, permitting
the country’s cultural opening to the West.21 The texts of William
Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, T. S. Eliot, André Breton, André Malraux, Virginia Woolf, John
Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide and many
others were translated into Croatian and published in Croatia. The growth
of interest in Anglo-American literature was especially evident. During the
second half of the 20th century, far more works were translated from
Anglo-American literature than any other national literature (Dragojević
1991). A deliberate policy of creating abroad the impression of artistic
freedom in Croatia included the activities of theatres. Theatres in Zagreb,
and later in other Croatian cities, produced plays by Federico García
Lorca, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, Dario Fo, Ugo Betti, Friedrich
Dürrenmatt and numerous Anglo-American playwrights (such as Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, John Osborne etc.), instead of the Croatian
classics and Russian plays that had dominated the repertoire from 1945
until the first half of the 1950s (Matković 1988). By the end of the 1950s,
Anglo-American plays were no longer praised or critiqued solely from
ideological positions. However, during the initial years of its Croatian
reception, the polemical debate focused on Beckett’s work and extended
from those who still held a position close to Marxism and socialist realism,
to those who accepted modernism, i.e. those desiring a wider field of
artistic production and the introduction of aesthetic pluralism. A
prescriptive, ideological criticism did persist in Croatia for some time.
Theatres abandoned the political orbit, but the criticism did not, especially
in newspapers, which continued to be responsible for educating the masses
and promoting official ideology. During the 1950s, Beckett was perceived
as either an existentialist or a nihilist, appreciated and celebrated as a
central figure of modern literature, while, on the other hand, his works
were considered devoid of any artistic value. Beckett’s works were viewed
in existentialist terms and at the same time read and understood in Marxist
terms and regarded as a symptom of the decline of western contemporary
society. These two currents are evident in Beckett’s early Croatian
reception and reflect the position of the country—a communist country
that was quite open to Western cultural influences (Sindičić Sabljo 2013).
Pinter’s plays were staged in Croatia more often in the 1960s and the
first half of the 1970s, in a period that coincided with the peak in
popularity of the Theatre of the Absurd, judging by the number of
performances, translations and critical texts published on the authors in
Harold Pinter in Croatia 189
question during this period. Pinter’s Croatian reception dates from the
1960s, in a period when ideological criteria in criticism were no longer
present; hence, his works were never declared as nihilistic, gloomy and
superfluous by Croatian audiences, as were, for example, Beckett’s
(Sindičić Sabljo, 2013). The only exception was Jozo Puljizević’s review
of the production of The Collection and The Lover, published in Vjesnik in
1964. He describes Pinter’s characters as grotesque caricatures of
contemporary human beings living in a world they failed to understand.
Puljizević’s identification of Pinter’s characters as symbols of the
bourgeois man, who becomes alienated and decadent in Western capitalist
society, relies on the premises of Marxist literary criticism.
The beginning of Pinter’s reception corresponds to the period when
Beckett and Ionesco acquired the status of contemporary drama classics in
Croatia, and the period when Croatian literary and theatre critics became
acquainted with Esslin’s work and his label the Theatre of the Absurd.22
Their success directed the attention of Croatian theatre directors,
translators and critics toward works of other playwrights that were
considered part of the same theatrical trend, such as Michel de
Ghelderode, Georges Schéhadé, Roland Dubillard, René de Obaldia,
Fernando Arrabal and Robert Pinget. Croatian theatres were interested in
the works of all playwrights considered as belonging to the Theatre of the
Absurd, not only the French or those residing in Paris: for example,
Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and Sławomir Mrożek.23 The reception of all
other authors considered as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd was
somehow related to the reception of Beckett and Ionesco. Beckett and
Ionesco undoubtedly drew attention to the work of other dramatists of the
Absurd and facilitated their reception. Nevertheless, the works of Beckett
and Ionesco remained a focal point through which the works of all other
playwrights were read, interpreted and valued. Between 1965 and 1975,
authors who were recognized as avant-garde and contemporary captured
the attention of Croatian theatres and were subsequently presented to the
public; however, by the mid-1970s, the number of their works being
performed began to decline.
In Croatia, Pinter’s plays were performed in the same theatres that
earlier or coincidently produced plays written by Beckett, Ionesco,
Obaldia, Arrabal, Dubillard, Kopit, Albee and many others. These theatres
included the Zagrebačko dramsko kazalište24, Mala Scena (Small Scene)
of the Croatian National Theatre25 and the Theatre &TD in Zagreb. During
the 1950s and 1960s, their plays were performed in small, independent and
experimental theatres. After success and affirmation on these smaller
stages, the plays were staged in the main national theatres and subsequently
190 Chapter Ten
4. Conclusion
A comprehensive insight into the Croatian reception of Pinter clearly
shows that his work became well known to the Croatian public as early as
1962, soon after his work had crossed the UK borders. Occasionally,
Pinter’s plays were produced in Croatia immediately after their première
Harold Pinter in Croatia 191
in the UK. For example, Old Times was performed in Zagreb only two
years after the world première and No Man’s Land only a year later. There
were approximately thirty repeat performances for each production.29
Nonetheless, Pinter wrote twenty-nine plays, only twelve of which were
staged in Croatia, meaning that a significant proportion of his plays are
still awaiting their first performance in Croatia. Judging by critical
acclaim, Pinter is now considered a classic playwright in Croatia and is
generally perceived as a contemporary British dramatist who pays
considerable attention to the various modes of linguistic expression.
Pinter’s critical reception in Croatia shares similarities with his critical
reception in the UK and elsewhere. Initially, his work faced some
unfavourable responses, in the UK after the production of The Birthday
Party in 1958 and in Croatia after the production of The Collection and
The Lover in 1964, which bewildered critics (Puljizević 1964, Grgičević
1964, Batušić 1965). The principal reaction of critics to the play was a
sense of perplexity, given that they found it difficult to interpret what the
play was about. The critics compared Pinter to other playwrights,
contextualized his work into a theatrical tradition, struggled to find terms
to describe his plays, and characterized his dramaturgy as being unusual
and difficult to fit into any conceivable model (Gotovac 1967). In general,
the critics most often praised the acting and the performance but
occasionally questioned the quality of the written work. A range of critical
perceptions emerged in the UK between 1959 and 1964, especially after
the success of the production of The Caretaker in 1960, and in Croatia
after the performance of The Homecoming in 1967. The last phase of his
reception in the UK occurred in 1964 and 1965, culminating in Pinter’s
admission into the theatrical canon. That phase corresponds to his critical
reception in Croatia during the 1970s.
Pinter’s work in Croatia is usually placed within a theatrical trend
known as the Theatre of the Absurd. Croatian critics insist that the main
characteristic of his plays is a presentation of the human condition, while
they remain devoid of logically constructed plot or traditional
characterization. Though there did exist some acknowledgement that
Pinter exhibited his own unique style and that he made use of traditional as
well as absurdist dramatic techniques, Pinter’s name in Croatia until the
mid-1970s was predominantly associated with the label of the Theatre of
the Absurd. The articles on Pinter written by Batušić (1973, 1976, 1980),
Foretić (1979), Cuculić (2004) and Alfirević (2001) represent a step
forward in critical appreciation of Pinter’s work, given that they tend to
appreciate Pinter’s work without placing it in the context of the Theatre of
the Absurd.
192 Chapter Ten
References
Alfirević, Acija. “Haroldu Pinteru za 70. rođendan.” Kazalište 5-6 (2001):
228-233.
—. “Harold Pinter’s Reception in Croatia.” In Harold Pinter on
International Stages, ed. Tomaž Onič (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,
2014): 89-102.
Batušić, Nikola. “Tri premijere: Sartre, Pinter, Molière.” Repulika 2-3
(1965): 11-16.
—. « Hrvatsko glumište: Harold Pinter, Stara vremena.” Republika 9
(1973): 952-954.
—. “Hrvatsko glumište: Harold Pinter, Ničija zemlja.” Republika 7-8
(1976): 926-928.
—. “Hrvatsko glumište: Harold Pinter, Prijevara.” Republika 1-2 (1980):
153-155.
Batty, Mark. About Pinter. The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber
and Faber, 2005.
Bennett, Michael Y. Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd. Camus,
Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Dragojević, Nataša. “Prevođenje svjetske književnosti na hrvatski jezik
1945-1985.” Republika 1-2 (1991): 120-140.
Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd.” The Tulane Drama Review 4
(1960): 3-15.
—. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City N. Y.: Doubleday, 1961.
Foretić, Dalibor. “Pinterov pogled unatrag.” Vjesnik, October 31st 1979: 5.
Glass, Loren. “Absurd Imprint: Grove Press and the Canonization of the
Theatrical Avant-Garde.” Modern Drama 4 (2011): 534-561.
Gotovac, Mani. “Između šutnje i govora, između igre i zbilje.” Telegram,
February 24th 1967: 6.
Grgičević, Marija. “U zatvorenom krugu. Uz premijeru jednočinki
“Kolekcija” i “Ljubavnik” u Zagrebačkom dramskom kazalištu.”
Večernji list, November 7th 1964: 10.
—. “Mimoilazni dijalozi. ‘Krajolik’ Harolda Pintera u režiji Mira
Marottija.” Večernji list, February 19th 1971: 17.
—. “Premijera pod ‘zabranom’. Javna generalka ‘Starih vremena’ Harolda
Pintera u Teatru &TD.” Večernji list, May 18th 1973: 5.
Ivanjek, Željko. “Pinter je bio u Zagrebu i pisao za ‘Gorgonu’.” Jutarnji
list, December 27th 2008: 76.
—. “Pinterova pisma Georgiju Paru.” Jutarnji list, December 29th 2008:
37.
194 Chapter Ten
Notes
1
Pinter’s first play (The Room) was written and produced in 1957 at the University
of Bristol.
2
The Room was performed in 1962 in Zagreb by the Leeds University Union
Theatre Group, during the International Festival of the Student Theatre. During the
1960s, that festival was exceptionally important for Croatian theatre, as it gave
theatre audiences and practitioners the opportunity to see for the first time not only
Pinter’s plays on stage, but also those of numerous avant-garde writers such as
Michel de Ghelderode, Fernando Arrabal, Alfred Jarry, Sławomir Mrożek, Jean
Cocteau, Eugène Ionesco, Edward Bond, Peter Weiss and many others. On the
International Festival of the Student Theatre, see also Cvitan, Grozdana. “IFSK i
Dani mladog kazališta: Repertoar i sudionici.” In Krležini dani u Osijeku 1997.
Hrvatska dramska književnost i kazalište u europskom kontekstu, Book One, ed. B.
Hećimović (Zagreb/Osijek: Zavod za povijest hrvatske književnosti, kazališta i
glazbe HAZU, Pedagoški fakultet u Osijeku, HNK Osijek, 1999), 234-238.
3
The Collection and The Lover were directed by Georgij Paro.
4
A. R. “Pjesnik šutnje na zagrebačkoj pozornici. Premijera u ZDK.” Večernji list,
November 3rd 1964; Z. Z. “Kolekcija i Ljubavnik Harolda Pintera. Prva premijera
Zagrebačkog dramskog kazališta. Borba, November 5th 1964: 7; D. F.
“Dvosmislenost govora. Premijera u ZDK.” Vjesnik, February 4th 1964: 5.
5
Between 1945 and 1992, Croatia was one of the former Yugoslav Republics.
Books translated and published in Belgrade (Serbia), such as Slobodan Selenić’s
anthology of the avant-garde drama, were also read in Croatia.
6
For example: Bernard Dukore. “The Theatre of Harold Pinter.” The Tulane
Drama Review 3 (1962): 43-54; Ruby Cohn. “The World of Harold Pinter.” The
Tulane Drama Review 3 (1962): 55-68.
7
The Dumb Waiter was directed by Vanča Kljaković, The Landscape by Miro
Marotti, Old Times by Relja Bašić and No Man’s Land by Tomislav Radić.
8
Between 1965 and 1977, performances were conducted of plays written by Jean
Genet, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Albert Camus, Michel de Ghelderode, Raymond
Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre, René de Obaldia, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Dubillard,
Jean Vauthier, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Vaclav Havel, Peter Handke,
Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond and many others. On the repertoire and artistic
politics of the Theatre &TD, see also: Selem, Petar. “Prvo razdoblje Teatra ITD.”
Scena 2-3 (1974): 64-81.
9
The translator of No Man's Land (Antun Šoljan) converted English personal
names and names of places into Croatian. Pinter’s characters in his translation
speak in one of the Croatian dialects. For a further discussion on this subject, see:
Giga Gračan. “O Šoljanovu Pinteru.” Prolog 28 (1976): 87-89, or, in Giga Gračan.
“Lokalizacija kao prevodilačka metoda. Ničija zemlja Harolda Pintera u prijevodu
Antuna Šoljana.” Kolo 3 (1998): 343-348.
10
The Betrayal was performed on the small stage of Vatroslav Lisinski concert
hall in Zagreb.
196 Chapter Ten
11
Željko Ivanjek's articles published in Jutarnji list in 2008 revealed that Georgij
Paro maintained a correspondence with Pinter at the time he was staging his plays.
12
The Dumb Waiter was put on stage by the student’s theatre company Ivan Goran
Kovačić (1963) and later by the theatre company Coccolemocco (1982). The
Caretaker (1969 and 1989), The Lover (1969, 1975, 1979 and 1985), The Dumb
Waiter (1980 and 1985), Old Times (1989) and The Betrayal (1989) were
performed on stage by students of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb.
13
Two of Pinter's interviews were translated and published in Croatian magazines
in 2006: “Još uvijek imam neku vjeru u kazalište (interview with Michael
Billington)”, translated by Sanja Lovrenčić, Kazalište 25-26 (2006): 23-29; “Neće
me ušutkati (interview with Matthew Tempestu)”, translated by Katarina Moržan,
Književna revija, 1-2 (2006): 6-11.
14
Genet's The Screens was performed onstage in 2003 and The Maids in 2001,
2009 and 2010. Ionesco's The Chairs was staged in 2003, The Lesson in 2003 and
2004, The Bald Soprano in 2004 and 2007 and Exit the King in 2004.
15
After the London premiere of The Birthday Party, a bewildered critic wrote,
“Harold Pinter’s first play comes in the school of random dottiness deriving from
Beckett and Ionesco and before the flourishing continuance of which one quails in
slack-jawed dismay. The interest of such pieces as an accepted genre is hardly
more than that of some ill-repressed young dauber who feels he can outdo the
école de Paris by throwing his paint on with a trowel and a bathmat; and indeed—
to come back to the terms of playmaking — as good, if not a better result might
have been achieved by summoning a get-together of the critics circle of the
vegetarians unions, offering each member a notebook and pencil and launching
thereafter on an orgiastic bout of ‘Consequences’, with the winning line to be
performed by a star-cast midnight matinee at Drury Lane […]. (Granger, D.
Financial Times, May 20th 1958, reprinted in Lloyd Evans, G. and B, eds. Plays in
Review, 1956–1980. London: Batsford, 1985)
16
Sunday Times, June 15th 1958, p. 11 (Cf. Batty 2005, 224).
17
The first two editions of Martin Esslin’s book titled The Theatre of the Absurd,
discussed Pinter’s work in the chapter ‘Parallels and proselytes’, while the 3rd
edition of the same book discussed his work in a separate chapter. Esslin also
published a book on Pinter in 1970, titled The People Wound: The Plays of Harold
Pinter. In its third, expanded edition, the title was changed to Pinter. A Study of
His Plays (Methuen, London, 1977).
18
In his Introduction to Absurd Drama (Penguin books, 1965, 7-23), Esslin
expressed his regret because the Theatre of the Absurd had become a catchphrase,
frequently used and abused. Esslin argued that critical concepts of this kind are
useful when new modes of expression and new conventions of art arise. According
to him, a label of this kind is an aid to understanding and valid only insofar as it
helps in providing an insight into a work of art. It is neither a binding
classification, nor all-embracing and exclusive.
19
Waiting for Godot had its first performance in Romania in 1980, in GDR in
1985 and in Bulgaria in 1988. For a further discussion on this subject, see: Saiu,
Octavian. “Samuel Beckett behind the Iron Curtain: The Reception in Eastern
Harold Pinter in Croatia 197
however, not been published and exist only in the form of theatrical scripts. Only
the translations of his shorter plays and a single short story have been published in
prestigious Croatian literary magazines. The translation of The Dumb Waiter has
been published in the Croatian literary magazine Mogućnosti, which played a
significant role in the Croatian reception of post-war avant-garde drama.
31
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Acija Alfirević, the Research
Library in Zadar and to the Institute for the History of Croatian Literature, Theatre
and Music for the help they have provided during my research.
INDEX
postmodern, 2, 53, 81, 100, 113, simulacra, 26, 80, 83, 88, See
138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, simulation, hyperreality,
148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, Baudrillard, 78, 80, 83, 85, 86,
157, 158, 163, See 88, 96, 155, 165, See simulacra
postmodernism Skylight, 40
postmodernism, 78, 83, 84, 140, Socrates, 41
142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, Stoppard, Tom 122, 138, 142, 143,
149, 151, 153, 164, 165, See 144, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163,
postmodern, postmodernist 164, 195, 196
postmodernist, 2, 76, 81, 84, 89, 90, Strindberg, August 184
96, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, Stuff Happens, 35, 43
147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, suspense, 170
155, 156, 163, 165, See Teeth’n’Smiles, 40
postmodern, postmodernism Theatre of the Absurd, 182, 184,
Presumption, 117, 126, 134, 135, 185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192,
136 194, 195
production, 3, 32, 108, 167, 168, Thai Theatre, 6, 7, 15, 20, 20, 27
169, 170, 172, 179, 182, 183, trauma, 76, 88, 96, See trauma
184, 186, 189, 190, 192 theory, trauma criticism
Race, 47, 51, 52, 57, 58 Vertical Hour, 35
Racing Demon, 40 Via Dolorosa, 31, 32, 33, 38, 43
Ravenhill, Mark 2, 76, 77, 78, 80, Vogel, Paula 117, 123, 124, 125,
81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 95, 130, 133, 135, 137, 144
96, 97, 98, 99, 103, 144 Walsh, Enda 117, 127, 135, 136,
Reader, the 40 137
Reinhardt, Max 4 Watt, Stephen 141, 144, 145, 146,
Romance, 47, 52, 54 163, 165
Room, the 167, 183 Wenders, Wim 2, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82,
Roudane, Matthew 71, 73, 129, 137 83, 85, 96, 98
Saddik, Annette J, 118, 121, 137, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
138, 143, 154, 162, 163, 165 120, 132, 135, 136, 137
Seduced, 62, 70, 71, 73, 75 Yeats, W. B, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
self-referentiality, 145, 152, 153, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
155 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
shaman dramaturgy, 63 104
Shepard, Sam 2, 45, 62, 63, 64, 65,
68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
142, 144, 163, 188