lunes, 30 de enero de 2023
domingo, 29 de enero de 2023
Una de expectativas autocumplidas
Retropost, 2013:
Veo que aparece en una de las revistas electrónicas del SSRN, llamada Rhetorical Theory eJournal, mi artículo sobre Erving Goffman subtitulado "La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad." Que
versa sobre la aplicación de la teoría de marcos a la construcción del
mundo exterior, y del interior también. El título aparece en inglés,
"Goffman: Reality as Self-Fulfilling Expectation and the Theatre of
Interiority"—pero está en español. También apareció el artículo en otra
revista, Literary Theory and Criticism eJournal. Esta
perspectiva sobre lo que llamo "el teatro de la interioridad" puede
completarse con la que presento en otro artículo sobre Goffman,"Somos teatreros: El sujeto, la interacción dialéctica y la estrategia de la representación según Goffman."
El
tema de las expectativas autocumplidas quizá lo siga desarrollando, en
relación con la teoría de la narración, en un proyecto de investigación
sobre hermenéutica en el que tengo pensado participar. Venciendo mi
pereza y mi alergia a los proyectistas.
O quizá no, porque es bastante previsible que no se van a conceder
muchos proyectos de investigación este año que viene, a tenor de las
últimas noticias. Ni muchos, ni pocos tan siquiera—en cuyo caso
investigaremos sólo por aquí y en nuestro teatro interior, crowded & cold.
viernes, 27 de enero de 2023
domingo, 22 de enero de 2023
jueves, 19 de enero de 2023
El modo del género narrativo
El modo del género narrativ... by José Angel García Landa
Un artículo que escribí en los años 80 y que he encontrado por Scribd. Como se ve pequeño, pulsar en la esquina inferior derecha.
—oOo—
Too Much Attention to Fictional Violence
—says Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal, arguing that fictional violence is not what leads to real violence. And I agree in part, but
There's an issue still
miércoles, 18 de enero de 2023
martes, 17 de enero de 2023
Everyone's an Actor
Idris Elba tells #wef23 to “stay on course”. Everyone’s an actor. pic.twitter.com/F9Zaj3ua3x
— Right Said Fred (@TheFreds) January 17, 2023
On ne naît pas femme, on le devient
On ne naît pas femme, on le devient: https://garciala.blogia.com/2007/052601-on-ne-na-t-pas-femme-on-le-devient.php
Coros trágicos a Adrasto
Un pasaje sobre un origen no dionisíaco de la tragedia griega, que figura en Heródoto (Historias, V, 67-68):
Clístenes hizo trasladar a Sición los restos de Melanipo (pues este punto requiere también una explicación), pues, en su opinión, era el peor enemigo de Adrasto, dado que había matado a su hermano Mecisteo y a su yerno Tideo. Y, tras haberle dedicado el citado recintol, privó a Adrasto de sacrificios y de fiestas, y se los adjudicó a Melanipo. Por cierto que los sicionios solían venerar a Adrasto con gran boato, ya que esa región había pertenecido a Pólibo, y Adrasto era nieto de Pólibo por parte de madre; además, al morir sin descendencia masculina, Pólibo entregó el poder a Adrasto (320). Pues bien, los habitantes de Sición veneraban a Adrasto con diversas ceremonias, entre las que, principalmente, destacaba la conmemoración de sus desventuras (321) mediante coros trágicos (con ellos no veneraban a Dioniso, sino a Adrasto). Clístenes, por su parte, asignó (322) los coros a Dioniso y el resto del ritual a Melanipo.
Éstas fueron las medidas que había tomado con respecto a Adrasto. Por lo que se refiere a las tribus dorias, para evitar que los sicionios tuviesen exactamente las mismas que los argivos, les cambió los nombres (323) por otros nuevos. Y, con tal motivo, se mofó descaradamente de los sicionios, pues permutó las denominaciones de las tribus por las palabras "cerdo", "asno" (y "lechón"), a las que simplemente añadió las desinencias (324); sólo exceptuó a su propia tribu, ya que el nombre que le impuso aludía al cargo que ocupaba. A partir de entonces los miembros de su tribu se llamaron Arquelaos (325), mientras que los de las demás recibieron, respectivamente, los nombres de Hiatas, Oneatas y Quereatas (326). Los sicionios utilizaron esos nombres para designar a sus tribus no sólo durante el mandato de Clístenes, sino también a su muerte, por espacio de sesenta años más (327).
Notas de Carlos Schrader:
(320). Pólibo (que en otras versiones de la leyenda aparece como padre adoptivo de Edipo) había sido rey de Sición, legando, al morir, su reino a Adrasto, ya que su única hija se había casado con Tálao, el padre de Adrasto. Cf. A. Ruiz de Elvira, Mitología clásica... pág. 142.
(321) Pues el héroe había conocido el exilio en su juventud y, sobre todo, había sufrido, en las dos expediciones contra Tebas, la pérdida de varios parientes y amigos, muriendo finalmente de tristeza (cf. Pausanias, 1 43, 1). La reforma religiosa de Clístenes de Sición tenía una clara significación política, ya que, de un lado, pretendía romper los vínculos religiosos que, a nivel aristocrático, unían a Sición con Argos mediante el culto a Adrasto, suplantándolos por vínculos religiosos ligados a Grecia central (el culto a Melanipo, héroe tebano). Y, por otra parte, en política interior, el tirano se granjeaba la simpatía de las clases populares potenciando el culto a Dioniso. Cf. A. Gitti, "Clistene di Sicione e le suie riforme. Studi sulla storia arcaica di Sicione", Mem. Accad. Naz. 2 (1929), 601 y sigs.
(322) Este pasaje, de los más importantes que, para la historia del teatro griego, nos han transmitido los autores antiguos (hasta el punto de que se ha convertido en una crux philologica para la crítica moderna, dado que no hay uniformidad en la interpretación de la expresión "coros trágicos", así como en el significado que hay que dar al verbo "asignar"; para toda esta cuestión, cf. F. r. Adrados, Fiesta, comedia y tragedia. Sobre los orígenes griegos del teatro, Barcelona, 1972, especialmente págs. 19-77), indica la existencia en Sición, a comienzos del siglo VI a.C., de una forma dramática en el culto a un héroe. Clístenes, que no podía suprimir estas ceremonias y diversiones sin desagradar al pueblo, las asignó al culto a Dioniso, celebrándose mediante coros trágicos, con cantos, danzas y diálogos para exponer un tema mítico.
(323) Los nombres de las tres tribus dorias eran Hileos, Panfilos y Dimanatas (cf. el final del capítulo), pues sus epónimos habían sido, respectivamente, Hilo, Panfilo y Dimante, hijos del dorio Egimio, un aliado de los Heráclidas en su conquista del Peloponeso. Esta reforma de Clístenes (los Ortagóricdas pertenecían a la población no doria de Sición) tenía una finalidad antiargiva y, sobre todo, antiaristocrática. Y quizá en este punto sea donde la semejanza con las medidas de su nieto ateniense sean mayores, ya que, a partir de Aristóteles, Política VI 4, 23, 1319b, cabe pensar que el tirano de Sición sustituyó las tres tribus gentilicias de Sición por cuatro tribus territoriales, aumentando además el número de las fratrías, con lo que ls nuevas tribus habrían tenido una doble división, en circunscripcioines locales y en fratrías. Cf. C. Mossé, la tyrannie dans la Grèce antique, París, 1969, págs. 38-47.
(324) Es decir, las desinencias propias de los gentilicios.
(325) "Los caudillos del pueblo" (de arché, "mando", y laós, "pueblo"). Posiblemente la noticia que transmite Heródoto se basa en esa etimología, pero no se atiene a la realidad, ya que Arquelao debió de ser algún antiguo héroe sicionio, no dorio, que fue tomado como epónimo para la cuarta tribu que creó Clístenes (las poblaciones dorias se caracterizaban por estar divididas en tres tribus; frente a los jonios, que por lo regular lo estaban en cuatro).
(326) Es decir, "los cerdos", "los asnos" y "los lechones". Es inverosímil que Clístenes hubiera tomado semejante medida. Estos nombres podrían ser de origen totémico, reflejo de antiguos cultos predóricos. Cf. Ed. Will, Doriesn et Ioniens, París, 1956, págs., 396 y sigs.
(327) De acuerdo con la cronología atribuida a la tiranía de Clístenes (cf. D. M. Leahy, "The dating of the Orthagorid dynasty", Historia 17 (1968), 1-23), hasta el año 510 a.C., aproximadamente, con lo cual coincidiría con la fecha que el Papiro Rylands 18 (F. Jacoby, F. Gr. Hist. 105, fr. 1) atribuye a la caída del tirano Esquines de Sición, el último de los Ortagóridas. Con todo, la historia de Sición en esos sesenta años a que alude Heródoto es escasísimamente conocida.
lunes, 16 de enero de 2023
sábado, 14 de enero de 2023
Kate Bush 1979 Christmas Special
Ya sé que se han pasado las navidades.... pues anda que las de 1979. Y sin embargo siempre se puede ver a Kate Bush en su programa especial de aquel año:
—Y aquí otra música invernal, "Snowflake," más reciente:
—oOo—
The New Theatre
It was assumed at the time, and it continues to be assumed, that John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 8 May 1956, marked either a 'revolution' or a 'watershed' in the history of the modern British theatre. The play certainly shocked its first audiences, as well as some of its more perceptive critics, into responsive attention. It is also sometimes claimed that the play single-handedly provoked theatre managers and theatre companies out of their complacent faith in the middle-class virtues of 'the well-made play' and into a response to a new kind of drama which grappled with 'the issues of the day'. Osborne's play was revolutionary neither in its form nor in its politics; it was, however, by the standards of its time, alarming in its rancour, its language, and its setting. After Look Back in Anger, out went the country drawing-room with its platitudes and its sherry; in came the provincial bed-sitter with its noisy abuse and its ironing-board. The accepted theatrical illusion of a neat, stratified, and deferential society was superseded by dramatic representations of untidy, antagonistic, and disenchanted groups of characters grating on one another's, and on society's, nerves. The social class of these characters may not have changed, but their social assumptions and their conversation had.
The transformation of the English theatre in the late 1950s and early 1960s was both more gradual and more truly radical than can be explained by focusing on a single production or on the work of a single playwright. Before 1956 British drama, and the London stage in particular, had been far more open to new influences, both from home and abroad, than is often supposed. The theatre could, and did, fall back on its inherited tradition of plays and acting styles, notably in its rethinking of Shakespeare and in its revivals of more recent English, Irish, and European dramas. Although the record-breaking run of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap at the Ambassadors Theatre may tell us something about the resilience of certain theatrical conventions and styles (the play opened in November 1952 and is still going strong in the 1990s), it does little to illustrate the real challenges that a discriminating theatre-goer might have discovered in the London theatres of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The repertoires of West End theatres and their provincial counterparts may, for the most part, have been selected so as not to offend the sensibilities of audiences happy with a pattern of light-hearted banter divided into three acts by two generous bar-intervals, but that does not tell the whole story. The work of two native playwrights, Christopher Fry (b. 1907 [d. 2005]) and Terence Rattigan (1911-77), belies the accusation of theatrical blandness with which some literary historians have damned the immediate post-war period. Since the 1960s, however, the dramatic achievement of both writers has been commonly belittled as irredeemably genteel. Fry's attempts to revive the fortunes of poetic drama both derived from, and was contemporary with, T. S. Eliot's later experiments in the same genre. Like Eliot, Fry saw poetry as the vehicle for a re-exploration of religious mystery in the theatre; unlike him, he never quite found a voice or a subject which satisfactorily echoed the esentially agnostic prosiness of modern life and thought. He put his considerably international success in the early 1950s down to what he saw as a reaction against 'surface realism' in the theatre, with its 'sparse, spare, cut-and-dried language', and to a post-war world which longed again for a poetry of 'richness and reaffirmation'. With hindsight, it now seems that his hopes of re-creating an Elizabethan ambience, in which 'the accent of the living' was placed firmly on 'the adventuring soul', proved as ephemeral as his once inflated reputation. Nevertheless, the original commercial success of the comedies A Phoenix too Frequent (1946), The Lady's Not for Burning (1948), and Venus Observed (1950) and of the church pageant A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) (performed throughout England as part of the Festival of Britain), cannot be put down solely to the excellence of their original casts. At its worst, Fry's verse can seem mannered, arch, and effete; at its best, it enables him to distance his dramatic discourse from 'surface realism' in order to play with the effects of alienation, of the unexpected, and of metaphysical oddity.
Rattigan is a far more impressive dramatist. He was neither an innovator nor a particularly cerebral writer, but he was a profound sympathizer with the cause of the victims of what he saw as the tyrannous hypocrisies, the double standards, and the emotional coldness of 'respectable' British society. Although his first theatrical success, French Without Tears (which ran for 1,039 performances in 1936), made few real demands on either the emotions or the intellect, his equally 'well-made' post-war plays took up the themes of vulnerability and victimization. The upper-class Rattigan's sympathy with the wounded outsider, and with the insider compromised by his or her emotional choices, can certainly be related to his own discreet homosexuality (discreet in the sense that he made no parade of it, though he later acted as an appreciative and generous champion of Joe Orton). In The Winslow Boy (1946), a middle-class father determines to play by constitutional rules in battling against he oppressive weight of the British Establishment. In The Deep Blue Sea (1952), however, an equally middle-class character, the wife of a judge, determinedly breaks social rules by having a passionate affair with a bluff, down-at-heel RAF officer and by desperately attempting suicide. If this is not quite the world of Look Back in Anger, the play is set in a furnished flat which has 'an air of dinginess, even of squalor, heightened by the fact that it has, like its immediately blitzed neighbourhood, so obviously "come down into the world"'. People and places which have come down in the world also figure in the pair of one-act plays, Separate Tables (1954), set in the ironically named Beauregard Private Hotel near Bournemouth. The second pair of the two, 'Table Number Seven', highlights the complementary emotions of two of the Beauregard's 'guests', a repressed girl and a bogus major who has been found guilty of molesting women in a local cinema. It exposes a communal pretence to 'virtue' which is far more damaging to society than the major's assumption of respectability, but it also affirms the possibility of a new strength emerging from the dismantling of protective illusions.
In the early 1950s Christopher Fry enhanced his already considerable reputation by translating into English two plays by Jean Anouilh (Invitation au château in 1950 and L'Alouette in 1955) and one by Jean Giraudoux (La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu also in 1955). The London staging of all three translations bears witness to the fact that the British theatre was not as insular as it is sometimes made out to be. The new French drama, which so impressed post-war visitors to Paris by its energy, sophistication, and political directness, had a sustained impact on supposedly unreconstructed British audiences (Anouilh's Antigone and Sartre's Huis Clos had been performed in 1946 and Camus's Caligula in 1948). Even though the influential critic, John Lehmann (1907-87), had wondered in 1946 whether or not 'a vigorous theatre can exist on the cerebral subtleties of Huis Clos and Caligula alone', the much vaunted intellectuality of Paris did not prove completely alien to London. Nor did the sometimes shocking vitality of the new American drama. Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945) was produced in 1948 and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) in 1949 (with Vivien Leigh as Blanche du Bois). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), having been refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain in 1958, had, however, to be privately performed under the auspices of a 'theatre club'. Less controversially, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) appeared at the Phoenix Theatre in 1949. His The Crucible (1952) at the Bristol Old Vic in 1954, and his A View from the Bridge (1955) at the Comedy Theatre in London in October 1956. Perhaps the most striking theatrical event of all was the visit to London of the Berliner Ensemble in august 1956, some two weeks after the death of its founder, Bertolt Brecht. The company brought with them their celebrated productions (in German) of Brecht's Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and his lessr-known adaptation of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer—Pauken und Trompeten. Brecht's work, which proved so influential over a new generation of British playwrights, was, up to that time, little known to British theatre audiences (though there had been an amateur production of Galileo in Birmingham in 1947 and a professional staging of Mother Courage in Barnstaple in 1955).
With benefit of hindsight, it is arguable that by far the most significant 'foreign' novelty to be performed in London in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Look Back in Anger was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The play opened to largely dismayed reviews at the small Arts Theatre in August 1955, but reports of the sensation it had caused in Paris two years earlier, coupled with a real enough and discriminating curiosity, allowed it to transfer for a longer run at the Criterion Theatre a month later. The success of Waiting for Godot in London cannot be simply put down to a yearning for innovation on the part of a theatre-going intelligentsia; the play also contained distinct echoes of a truly 'alternative', but often despised, British theatrical tradition, that of music-hall comedy. In Beckett's hands, however, that tradition had been transformed by a sparse, but none the less definitive, musicality and by a dialogue rich in literary resonance. Beckett (1906-89), born near Dublin, educated (like Wilde before him) at Portora Royal School and at Trinity College, and since 1937 permanently resident in Paris, cannot be slickly or imperially fitted into a narrowly 'English' tradition of English writing and English theatre. He was an English-speaking, Protestant Irishman, and, as the full range of his work demonstrates, his highly literate, cricket-playing, Bible-reading, Irish background had a profound bearing on what and how he wrote. Having worked closely with James Joyce and his international circle in Paris in the late 1920s, Beckett also remained part of a polyglot and polyphonic world of literary innovation. His earliest publications (which, apart from his work as a translator and a novelist, include an essay on Joyce and a study of Proust) also testify to his espousal of a Modernism which transcended frontiers and what were often presumed to be the impassible barriers between languages. Beckett continued to work in both English and French, with French often taking precedence over his native tongue. His work, however, ceased to be tied to a monoglot environment once it had undergone the scrupulous linguistic metamorphosis which marks his own acts of translation (his puns, for example, are often exclusively and inspiredly English).
Although his trilogy of novels, Molloy and Malone meurt (1951) and L'Innommable (1953) had established Beckett as amongst the most discussed and respected of the avant-garde Parisian writers in the early 1950s, it was Godot (also originally written in French) that gave him a wide international reputation. That reputation was cemented by his later work for the theatre, notably the plays known by their English titles as Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1960), and Happy Days (1962). He also wrote innovatively for the radio (All that Fall of 1957, Embers of 1959, Words and Music of 1962, and Cascando of 1963) and for BBC television (Eh, Joe of 1965 and Ghost Trio of 1977). His one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex 'script' designed as a tribute to Buster Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying 'sssh'.
Beckett was consistent in his use of drama as an extension of his wider interest in the gaps, the jumps, and the lurches which characterize the functioning and the malfunctioning of the human mind. In his plays—as much as in his novels—ideas, phrases, images, and minds overlap; voices both interrupt and inherit trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere and separate consciousnesses both impede and impress themselves on one another. Beckett's dialogue, for which Waiting for Godot is particularly remarkable, is the most energetic, densely layered, and supple written by any twentieth-century playwright; his comedy, whether visual, verbal, ritual, or even, at times, slapstick is amongst the most subtle and surprising. The set of Waiting for Godot may, for example, require simply the suggestion of 'a country road' and 'a tree'; Endgame may take place in a 'bare interior' and the designer of Happy Days may be instructed to aim for a 'maximum of simplicity and symmetry' in the representation of an 'expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound' but the static baldness of Beckett's visual statements serves both to counterpoise and complement the animation of his verbal ones. When Beckett uses blindness, as he does with Hamm in Endgame, he suggests that one kind of deprivation may alert audiences to the force of alternative ways of perceiving. When, by contrast, he uses silence, as in Film and the mime play Act without Words II (1967), he seems to be directing his audiences to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. Beckett never plays with minimalism and reductionism simply for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve. In parallel to the work of certain Modernist architects and composers, if without their Puritan frugality, he was exploring the radical potential of the idea that 'less is more'.
Time-present, as when Beckett represents it in his plays, is broken, inconsistent, and inconsequential. Nevertheless, in each play he allows for the intrusion of a past which is oppressively rich in the larger inconsistencies of private and public history. Krapp's Last Tape and the two far sparser later plays, Footfalls and That Time (both 1976), make much out of the involuntary, untidy, quirky, and even ghost-haunted memories of the old. These memories negate linear concepts of time and of ageing as much as they disturb old assumptions about 'plot'. The structural principles on which he built both his plays and his novels can be related back to the pattern of ideas explored in 1931 in the dense critical essay on Proust. When, for example, he insists on Proust's 'contempt for a literature that "describes"', or when he affirms that 'there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us', or when he describes 'the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible' as 'merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic', it is possible to recognize the extent to which his theatrical innovation was rooted both in a literary precedent and in a coherent Modernist philosophical statement. Beckett continued to be fascinated by what he saw as Proust's concern with the protective significance of habit: 'Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.' His own dramatic repetitions and iterations, his persistent echoes and footfalls, emerge not from a negative view of human existence, but from an acceptance of 'dull inviolability' as a positive, if minimally progressive, force. As his inviolable and unsentimental Krapp also seems to have discovered, a path forward lay in exploring the resonances of the circumambient darkness.
Although Beckett gradually came to be recognized as the most important dramatist writing in English in the latter half of the twentieth century, his work initially struck many early critics as emerging from a largely foreign tradition of symbolic and philosophically based drama. If the purely British shock waves radiating from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 need to be accounted for, it was because Osborne's work was more obviously a response to, as much as a reaction against, an established native theatrical tradition. His was the rebellion of an insider. Osborne (b. 1929) had served his apprenticeship as an actor in provincial touring companies and his plays show an appreciation both of the craftsmanship that went into the making of the respectable 'well-made play' and of the art that allows a Wilde, a Shaw, a Coward, and a Rattigan to transcend conventions while exploiting them. Osborne's sometimes painful witticisms can be as carefully and devastatingly placed as are those of Wilde and Coward, his confrontations and surprises can be as telling as those of Rattigan, his invectives and monologues can be as provocative as Shaw's. However, the origins of Osborne's style do not lie exclusively in what was once known as 'the legitimate theatre' but are also found in the noisier, often impromptu and far more various world of vaudeville. Where Beckett's debts to an inherited tradition of music-hall lie in his appreciation of dead-pan humour and careful timing, Osborne's are revealed in his love of the outrageous, of the suggestive and, above all, of loud-mouthed repartee. It was a debt acknowledged in his forceful juxtaposition of a shabby and increasingly outdated type of theatre with a faded and redundant British imperialism in The Entertainer (1957).
Look Back in Anger introduced the noisiest of what contemporary journalists dubbed the 'angry young men' to theatre audiences. Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, is 25 and 'a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freeboting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike'. He was for the 1950s what the restless, idealistic, public-school misfits had been to the 1930s (Porter's father, we learn, had fought in Spain, but Porter himself is neither an idealist nor an ex-public schoolboy). He is, and his wife's friend Alison recognizes, 'born out of his time.' He is a revolutionary without a revolution, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause. He fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment values; his wife's middle-class and ex-Indian army parents; his Sandhurst-educated, Member of Parliament brother-in-law (characterized as 'the platitude from outer space'); bishops and church bells; the intellectually pretentious Sunday newspapers; English music (Vaughan Williams) and English literature (Shakespeare, Eliot, 'Auntie Wordsworth'). Nevertheless, Jimmy Porter is the protagonist in an otherwise affirmative play, one in which love and loyalty are tested and are found, despite the strains, not to be wanting. He may be a new type of character, classless, restless, and aimless, but his dramatic context was largely conventional. When a middle-aged Jimmy Porter returned to the stage in Osborne's play Déjà Vu in 1992, the force of those dramatic and philosophical conventions became self-evident.
In many ways Osborne's most impressive 'angry young man' is the title character in his historical play Luther (1961). When Martin utters his clasic avowal of personal integrity—'Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more. Amen'—we sense that it has been refined by his latent anger: anger with his parents, his Church, and even with the demands of his God. Osborne's Martin may periodically clutch his bowels in agonies of constipation, and he may have flashes of theological insight in the latrine, but he is the quintessential Protestant, the lonely rebel whom God has graced with a cause. In Inadmissible Evidence (1964) Osborne asked for a location 'where a dream takes place . . . a site of helplessness, of oppression and polemic', in essence an office-cum-courtroom in which an angry, sex-obsessed, middle-aged solicitor lurches rhetorically towards a private and professional breakdown. In the first volume of his pungently observant, and equally pungently spiteful, autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), Osborne observed of himself as a schoolboy that he already had a gift for smoking out 'the prigs, hedgers and dissemblers' and that he had a complementary talent to vex rather than to entertain, a talent 'not to amuse but to dissent, although I possibly thought I could do both'. The anger, the dissent, the vexatiousness, the protest, and the theatricality of Osborne's characters has always been an extension of his perception of himself.
The Ape and the Lady
A Darwinian song from Princess Ida (1884), by Gilbert & Sullivan, a comic version of Tennyson's The Princess, about a feminist academy. Man (though not woman, apparently) descends from an ape, and is therefore ape-hearted.
—That's rather strong!
—The truth is always strong.
answers Ida:
The Ape and the Lady
A LADY fair, of lineage high,
Was loved by an Ape, in the days gone by -
The Maid was radiant as the sun,
The Ape was a most unsightly one -
So it would not do -
His scheme fell through;
For the Maid, when his love took formal shape,
Expressed such terror
At his monstrous error,
That he stammered an apology and made his 'scape,
The picture of a disconcerted Ape.
With a view to rise in the social scale,
He shaved his bristles, and he docked his tail,
He grew moustachios, and he took his tub,
And he paid a guinea to a toilet club.
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through -
For the Maid was Beauty's fairest Queen,
With golden tresses,
Like a real princess's,
While the Ape, despite his razor keen,
Was the apiest Ape that ever was seen!
He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots,
And to start his life on a brand-new plan,
He christened himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do,
The scheme fell through -
For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved,
Was a radiant Being,
With a brain far-seeing -
While a Man, however well-behaved,
At best is only a monkey shaved!
Krapp's Last Tape
jueves, 12 de enero de 2023
Love Is a Plaintive Song
Y aquí el principio de otra producción, también australiana, "Twenty Love-sick Maidens":
miércoles, 11 de enero de 2023
El Teatro Universo
De Baltasar Gracián ("Lorenzo Gracián"), El Héroe (Huesca, 1637), p 36:
"Aquel Marte Castellano, por quien se dixo Castilla Capitanes, si Aragón Reyes, Don Diego Perez de Vargas, con mas hazañas que dias, retirose a acabarlos en Xerez de la frontera. Retirose el, mas no su fama, que cada dia se estendia mas por el teatro uniuerso."
Drama since the 1950s
After more than sixty years of proposals, high hopes, and false starts, Britain finally got its National Theatre in July 1962. More precisely, it got an official announcement that a National Theatre was to come into being. A Board was established and in October 1963 a National Theatre Company presented its inaugural production of Hamlet in the cramped, but venerable, surroundings of the Old Vic (the Company was not able to move the relatively short distance to its partially completed new building on the south bank of the Thames until March 1976). Since its inception, the National Theatre (from 1988, the Royal National Theatre) has always had serious rivals, in terms of both prestige and innovation. In the 1960s and 1970s Britain's other subsidized 'national' theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, established an enviable record of experiment (though it has since largely concentrated on the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries). For a remarkable, if relatively brief, period, which began with the formation of the English Stage Company in 1956, one commercial theatre, the Royal Court, also seemed to lead the way in encouraging, commissioning, and presenting the work of new dramatists, both native and foreign. In their different ways, all three companies engineered a London-based theatrical revolution.
Although the National Theatre had called on the services of the unconventional Kenneth Tynan as its literary adviser, its choice of plays and directors was initially somewhat cautious. The Royal Shakespeare Company, by contrast, startled oudiences out of any sense of stability and complacency with four particularly celebrated productions by the director, Peter Brook (b. 1925): a much admired and starkly Beckettian King Lear in 1962; a version of the German dramatist, Peter Weiss's, play known colloquially as the Marat/Sade in 1964; and, following Brook's exploratory 'Theatre of Cruelty Season', the experimental Artaudian commentary on the Vietnam war, US, in 1966. Perhaps most stunning and provocative of all was his complete rethinking of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970, a rethinking which swept away fairyland glades and gauzes and boldly substituted dazzling light, erotic gestures, and perilous acrobatics. When Brook declared that his production of the Marat/Sade had been designed to 'crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelligently what has happened to him, then give him a kick in the balls, then bring him back to his senses again', he was stating an extremist principle of what has come to be known as 'director's theatre' (though it was a principle which could be said to have determined many of the effects of the 'political theatre' of the 1970s). It was not a principle on which the Royal Court generally worked. Its intellectual assaults were of a different, though not necessarily more subtle, order.
John Arden (b. 1930) was in many ways typical of a new generation of playwrights launched at the Royal Court: provocative, argumentative, brusque, and Anglo-Brechtian. Arden's Live Like Pigs (1958), a play about the resettlement of gypsies in a housing-estate, explores anti-social behaviour. It leaves the firm impression that 'respectability' and its official guardians, the police, were ultimately far more damaging to society than the unconventional mores of the play's gypsies. Arden's most celebrated and punchy play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), addresses its anti-militaristic theme with a combination of Brechtian exposition and music-hall routines (dance, song, and monologue). Although the play grew out of contemporary circumstances (army conscripts, recruited under the system known euphemistically as 'National Service', had recently suffered casualties in the campaing of Cyprus), its setting is loosely Victorian. Its red military tunics, its black bibles, its narrow logic, and its unresolved social tensions are all designed to disconcert audiences and to raise questions about the principles of duty, rigidity, and order. When Arden reworked his play in 1972 as Serjeant Musgrave Dances On he gave it a far more overt and direct political message, one focused on the engagement of British troops in Ulster. Serjeant Musgrave Dances On may have grown out of Arden's steady questioning of British political, legal, military, and imperial traditions in plays such as Left-Handed Liberty (1965), The Hero Rises Up (1968), and The Island of the Mighty (1972), but it seems like a crude piece of agitprop in comparison to the rigorious skepticism of his earlier work.
Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything, performed at the Royal Court in 1962, is also concerned with National Service, though in this instance with a fictional expansion on Wesker's own experience in the RAF. The play contains remarkable moments of concerted physical action by the group of recruits (notably a raid on a coke store), but it ultimately suggests that, despite official pretensions to the contrary, conscription was no leveller and no social panacea. Wesker (b. 1932) had earlier shown himself capable of creating a virtuoso visual theatre in his representation of alternating periods of action and inaction in a restaurant in The Kitchen (1959). Both kitchen and camp serve as metaphors for an unfair and hierarchical society in which the disadvantaged are forced to fall back on their chief resource, their proletarian vitality and their innate capacity for feeling. In his most substantial work, the so-called 'Trilogy' (Chicken Soup with Barley of 1958, Roots of 1959, and I'm Talking about Jerusalem of 1960), Wesker manages to to relate his intense respect for working-class community to a social, historical, and political perspective, stretching from the anti-Fascist protests of the Jewish East End in 1936 to the failure of a project to establish a new Jerusalem and a new idealist-socialist lifestyle in the Norfolk of the late 1950s. In all three plays, Wesker conveys an acute sense of place by capturing distinctive ways of speaking (both London Jewish and rural East Anglian) and representing the distinctive rhythms of urban and rural domesticity. In 1958 he announced that he would like to write plays not simply 'for the class of people who acknowledge plays to be a legitimate form of expression, but also for 'the bus driver, the housewife, the miner and the Teddy Boy [the type of adolescent who in the 1950s affected a fashion for vaguely Edwardian clothes]'. With this aim in mind, and with the high-minded hope of forging links between the arts, socialist action, and society at large, Wesker founded Centre 42 in 1960-1. The substantial Trade Union invovement that Wesker required was not forthcoming, but the project failed largely because popular taste proved to be more resistant to his ideals than he had expected. Centre 42 aimed at creating the conditions in which old-fahioned sweetness and light could filter down. It was checked by an upsurge of a new 'alternative' and genuinely popular culture and it foundered. With it, sank the urgency of Wesker's dramatic enterprise.
By far the most original, flexible, and challenging of the new dramatists of the late 1950s, Harold Pinter (b. 1930), was, like Wesker, the son of an East End Jewish tailor. Unlike him, however, he was an actor by training and profession. All Pinter's plays suggest a sure sense of the dramatic effect of pacing, pausing, and timing. Despite his determined protest against National Service as an 18-year-old, and despite his two brushes with the law as a conscientious objector, his early plays generally eschew direct political engagement and commment. They open up instead a world of seeming inconsequentiality, tangential communication, dislocated relationships, and undefined threats. Many of the dramatic non sequiturs of Pinter's first four plays—The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party (all written in 1957) and The Caretaker (written in 1959 and performed in the following year)—indicate how positive was his response to the impact of Waiting for Godot; their distinctive air of menace, however, suggests the influence of Kafka and the patterning of their dialogue a debt to the poetry and early drama of Eliot. In all four plays Pinter also reveals himself to be a master of a colloquial, vapidly repetitive, London English, one adept at varying the idioms of his characters' speech to striking and sometimes disturbing effect. In the most polyphonic of the early plays, The Birthday Party, he intrudes seemingly incongruous clichés about cricket and Sunday School teachers into Godlbert's volubly Jewish dialogue and he softens McCann's edgy bitterness with Irish sentimentality. Both characters threaten, and finally break, the inarticulate Stanley with a monstrous, staccato barrage of unanswerable questions and half-associated ideas: 'You need a long convalescence.' / 'A change of air' / 'Somewhere over the rainbow.' / 'Where angels fear to tread.' / 'Exactly.' / You're in a rut.' / 'You look anaemic.' / 'Rheumatic.' / 'Myopic.' / 'Epileptic.' 'You're on the verge.' / 'You're a dead duck.' / 'But we can save you.' / 'From a worse state.'
The Homecoming, first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964, marks something of a turning-point in his career. Though the play opens familiarly enough in an undistinguished room in a north London house and with a one-sided conversation, an indifferent exchange of insults, and an ostensibly comic reference to an advertisement for flannel vests, it steadily veers away from comedy. Everything in the play is unspecific. The rhythms of Max's speech ('One of the loves of my life, Epsom?') suggest that the family may be Jewish, but nothing definite is made of the fact. More significantly, there appears to be a family tradition of unfaithful women, for parallels are loosely established between the dead but adulterous mother and her living daughter-in-law, Ruth, who the male members of the family treat as if she where a whore. There are also often inexplicit frictions between generations and between the uneducated stop-at-homes and the homecoming son, Teddy, a professsor at an American university.
The Homecoming leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity. Its most notable successors, Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal
(1978), all extend its calculated uncertainty and its (now gentrified)
hints of menace and ominousness. All of them are distinguished by their
teasing play with the disjunctions of memory and with unstable human
relationships. Old Times presents
its audience with an open triangle, defined not only by its characters,
two women and a man, but also by silences, indeterminacies, and
receding planes of telling and listening. In No Man's Land, two
elderly men, and two younger ones, seem to shift in relationship to one
another; they know and do not know; they remember and obliterate
memory. Betrayal, cleverly
based on a series of retrogressions, deals, ostensibly realistically,
with middle-class adultery in literary London (though its reiterated
ideas, words, and phrases reveal how artificially it is patterned).
Since One for the Road (1984),
Pinter's plays have shifted away from developed representations of
uncertainty towards a far more terse and more overtly political drama.
Both One for the Road and Mountain Language (1988) are insistingly concerned with language and with acts of interrogation. As in The Birthday Party, language
is seen as the means by which power can be exercised and as something
that can be defined and manipulated to suit the ends of those who
actually hold power. Nevertheless, the two plays focus on individuals
threatened no longer by an unspecified menace, as Stanley was, but by
the palpable oppression of (unnamed) modern states. Where Pinter's
earlier work had allowed for indeterminacy, his latest work seems to
have surrendered to an insistent demand for moral definition. The ideas of 'them' and 'us', which were once open, subtle, fluid categories, have been replaced by a rigid partisanship.
'If
I ever hear you accuse the police of using violence on a prisoner in
custody again," Inspector Truscott announces in Joe Orton's Loot (1966)
'I'll take you down to the station and beat the eyes out of your head.'
As all his plays suggest, Orton (1933-67) has quite as refined a sense
of the potential of the state, its institutions, and its human
instruments to oppress the citizen as has Pinter. He has good reason to
distrust the political system under which he lived, and, by extension,
all systems of authority and control. He was an active, not to say
promiscuous, homosexual in a period when homosexual acts between
consenting males were still regarded as a criminal offence. He was
himself brutally murdered by his long-term companion and erstwhile
collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell.
In 1962 Orton and Halliwell had been prosecuted on the relatively
trivial charge of stealing and defacing library books and sent to prison
by a particularly authoritarian magistrate. Orton the artist fought
back against authority with the two weapons he wielded most eficiently:
anarchic comedy and priapic energy.
The five major comedies that Orton completed before his untimely death—Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1966, published 1967), The Ruffian on the Stair, The Erpingham Camp (both 1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969) were calculated to outrage. When, in whimsical mood, he took to writing to the press and to theatre managers under the nom de plume of
Edna Welthrope (Mrs), he was parodying the kind of bourgeois
respectability against which he had long defined himself. But what Edna
described as his 'nauseating work' and his 'enlessly parade of mental
and physical perversion' were not just sympomatic expressions of the
liberal 1960s, but gestures of protest extrapolated from a long and
perfectly respectable comic tradition. Orton never simply hid behind
jokes. His comedy served not only to expose the folly of the fool, the
double standards of the hypocrite, or the unbalanced humours of
everyman, but to disrupt the very status quo. Pompous asses though they
may be, Orton's villains, such as Erpingham, are no fools. Caught out
though they may be, Orton's fools, such as Drs Rance and Prentice, are
no innocents. Exploited, abused, and tormented thought they may be,
Orton's innocents, such as McLeavy, are no wronged paragons. In The Erpingham Camp, the
camp's owner may dream a vulgarian's dream of a future England
sprouting 'Entertainment Centres' from coast to coast, but, as the play
makes clear, Erpingham is as much in the business of social control as
are the posturing psychiatrists, Rance and Prentice, and his sordid camp
is as much a metaphor for an over-organized and explosively
revolutionary state as is the private clinic of What the Butler Saw. Revolutions
may be waylaid by guile and incompetence, but in no sense can the meek
inherit Orton's earth. As McLeavy is dragged away by the police in Loot, he
first protests his innocence and then wildly exclaims: 'Oh, what a
terrible thing to happen to a man who's been kissed by the Pope.' In
none of Orton's plays can innocence ever be a defence. For a man to be
obliged to exit in the arms of police officers while recalling another
man's kiss sounds more like carelessness than pathos.
Orton does
not simply exploit the traditional forms of comedy and farce, but also
dangerously transforms them. He takes an anarchist's delight in
fostering disorder, but none at all in seeing why order can or ought to
reassert itself. When he gestures to a Pinterian inconsequentiality at
the opening of The Ruffian on the Stair he adds a double entendre of
his own by giving Mike an appointment with a man in the toilet at
King's Cross Station. Even when he uses the conventional embarrassments
of farce—its undressings, its incongruous dressings, and its
cross-dressings—he manages to render them not merely suggestive but
distinctly suspicious. Kath's removal of Sloane's trousers in Entertaining Mr Sloane is
accompanied by the knowing declaration: 'I've been doing my washing
today and I haven't a stitch on . . . I'm in the rude under this dress. I
tell you because you're bound to have noticed. . . '. Alternatively,
when Mrs Prentice finds her husband holding a woman's dress in What the Butler Saw, she
first asks whether he had taken up transvestism and then adds: 'I'd no
idea our marriage teetered on the edge of fashion.' Orton is at his most
consistently risqué in the topsy-turvey world of Loot, a
play in which the Oedipal jostles with the necrophilic and in which the
old buttresses of social order—love, medicine, religion, and law—are
systematically sapped. Here, as in all Orton's work, moral floors
dissolve leaving a space which is both amoral and, by extension,
apolitical. If some of his critics po-facedly condemn him for never
exploiting the consequences of the social questions he raises, it should
be allowed that the very velocity of his verbal comedy never really
allows him to stay for answers.
Where Orton's comedy is
explosive, untidy, and unresolved, that of Top Stoppard (born in
Czechoslovakia in 1937) is implosive, symmetrical, and logical. Where
Orton disorders the traditional elements of farce, Stoppard takes a
fresh delight in the kind of theatrical clockwork that was perfected by
Feydeau. Unlike Orton or Feydeau, however, Stoppard seems to take a deep
intellectual pleasure in parallels, coincidences, and convergences that
extends beyond a purely theatrical relish. In an age which has
exhibited a fascination with the often extraordinary patternings of
mathematical and metaphysical theory, he has emerged as an almost
exemplary artist, one with an appeal to the pragmatic and the
speculative alike. At their most brilliant, his plays are carefully
plotted, logical mystery tours which systematically find their ends in
their beginnings. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which
opened at the National Theatre in April 1967 (the year following its
first, amateur, presentation at the Edinburgh Festival), begins,
according to its stage direction, with 'two ELIZABETHANS passing the
time in a place without any visible character'. This is Hamlet playfully
reread according to Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian
principles. Everything is renedered relative. The perspective is
changed, time is fragmented, the Prince is marginalized, and two
coin-spinning attendant lords are obliged to take on the weight of a
tragedy which they neither understand nor dignify. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead de-heroizes,
but, despite its frantically comic surfaces, it never expels the
impending sense of death implied in its title. Shakespeare's toadying
gentlemen are transformed into two prosy commoners endowed with
twentieth-century sensibilities, men trapped by their costumes, their
language, and their characterless setting. Their tragedy, if tragedy it
is, lies in their awareness of convergence, concurrence, and
consequence: 'Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own
pace, to which we are condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous
one—that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just
be a shambles. . .'. However arbitrary life might appear to be, logic
is relentless and the pre-existent and inescapable pattern of Hamlet determines that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's strutting and fretting must end, like real life, with death.
Much
of Stoppard's subsequent drama introduces characters who are as much
out of their intellectual and social depths as are Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. In the short radio play, If You're Glad I'll be Frank (1966), a bemused husband desperately tries to reclaim his wife who has become subsumed into a speaking clock. In The Real Inspector Hound (1968),
a superbly poised parody of an English detective story, two theatre
critics find themselves absorbed into a play and a murder which they
assumed they had come to observe. In Jumpers (produced
by the National Theatre in 1972) a moral philosopher preparing a
lecture on the existence of God, and on the related problem of the
objectivity of good and evil, is confronted by the murder of an acrobat
at a party in his own home. As its title so succintly and riddlingly
suggests, Jumpers is
about intellectual gymnastics, the making of mental and moral jumps and
the construction of an unsteady philosophical architecture; it is also a tour de force of
plotting. Henry Carr, the somewhat dim-witted central figure of what is
perhaps Stoppard most sustainedly witty and inventive play, Travesties (1974),
is equally overwhelmed by the events in which he becomes involved. The
play begins with a historical footnote (the real Carr, British Consul in
Zurich, had taken James Joyce to court, claiming reimbursement for the
cost of a pair of trousers worn in an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest performed
in Zurich in March 1918), and a historical coincidence (Joyce, Lenin,
and the Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara, all used Zurich as a refuge from
the First World War), but it develops into a complex, totally
speculative, extrapolation of political and literary history. Stoppard
shapes his own play around echoes, parodies, and inversions of Wilde's
comedy, and, to a lesser extent, of Joyce's Ulysses. None
of his later plays has quite the same confident verve. His excursions
into explicitly political drama—with the unwieldy script for actors and
symphony orchestra, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), and the clever television play, Professional Foul (1978)—demonstrate
an (at the time) unfashionable concern with persecution of
intellectuals by the thuggishly illiberal Communist regimes of Eastern
Europe. Hapgood (1988),
with its carefully deployed twins, its double-takes, and its spies who
explain the particle theory of light, does, however, suggest something
of a return to his old whimsy, albeit a singularly menacing whimsy.
Whimsy,
intellectual gymnastics, and symmetry, are not qualities that most
audiences would readily associate with the work of Edward Bond (b.
1934). Bond has always rigurously cultivated plainness in both
expression and design.
It
is, however, as a patron of new drama that British television has
performed an invaluable service to working writers and to their
prospective audiences. Although at one stage the BBC prudishly decided
that Osborne's Look Back in Anger was
'not suitable for a television audience' (the play was, however,
transmitted by Granada), it later made honourable amends by
commissioning new work by Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard. Nevertheless,
television's most solid contribution to artistic innovation has been
through the evolution of a specific kind of drama shaped by the special
resources of the medium. This innovation has been especially associated
with Alan Bennett
(b. 1934) and Dennis Potter (b. 1935 [d. 1994]). Bennett, who has also
maintained an active involvement with the theatre (his play The Madness of George III was produced by the National Theatre in 1991), has been adept at working with particular actors and particular themes.
'May 1968 was crucial', Howard Brenton wrote in an article published in 1975, 'It was a great watershed and directly affected me. . . [it] disinherited my generation in two ways. First it destroyed any remaining affection for official culture . . . it also destroyed the notions of personal freedom, anarchist political action.' For Brenton (b. 1942) the generation which matured in 1968, a generation 'dreaming of a beautiful utopia' was kicked, 'kicked awake and not dead'. The new, radical drama of the 1970s and 1980s, with which Brenton, Trevor Griffiths (b. 1935), David Hare (b. 1947), and David Edgar (b. 1948) were prominently associated, was essentially the product of the assimilated political and cultural lessons of the Parisian événements of May 1967. For Edgar, writing in 1979, the implications of what had happened in Paris were just as plain: 'Revolutionary politics was seen as being much less about the organisation of the working class at the point of production, and much more about the disruption of bourgeois ideology at the point of consumption.' Despite largely token attempts to take a new type of polemic drama to the factory floor, and despite the development of small, experimental theatre-groups and workshops, much of the new dramatic energy of the Left was specifically, but no less provocatively, addresed to a relatively élite, bourgeois audience and performed in relatively conventional theatre buildings. In 1976, when Brenton had begun to establish himself at the National Theatre, he proclaimed that he would rather have his plays presented to 900 people 'who may hate what I'm saying than to fifty of the converted'. Bourgeois ideology was indeed being challenged at its 'point of consumption', but, given the generally imperturbable quality of London audiences in the period, it was only minimally disrupted. Much of the political drama of the 1970s and 1980s was founded on the assumptions that rotten capitalist society was on the brink of collapse and that there was a widening division between 'them' (the surprisingly elastic ruling class which hung on to its inherited power with increasing cynicism) and 'us' (the ruled, for whom proper enlightenement preceded liberation). This perception of a deeply divided society was accentuated in the spring of 1979 by the Conservative victory in the General Election and by the twelve-year Prime Ministerial regime of Margaret Thatcher. The early Thatcher years were remarkable for the uniformity of theatrical protest against Government policies, philosophies, and philistinism (albeit a protest often voiced in state subsidised theatres). As Hare's The Great Exhibition (1972) and Griffiths's The Party (1973) had already suggested, resistance to 'Thatcherism' went hand in hand with a sense of disillusion with the earlier compromises of the Labour Party and with the tendency to bickering and in-fighting amongst the British political Left.
Generally, the political drama of the period worked from a basis of Marxist theory informed by the example of 1968, but it rarely addressed problems beyond those of the local difficulties which beset post-imperial little-England. Much of it now seems distinctly time-locked. References to Ireland and to the troubles of Ulster were legion, but neither subtle nor especially direct (Brenton's The Romans in Britain of 1980 is a case in point). The world at large, and Europe in particular, tended to be glimpsed through carefully angled binoculars (as the somewhat conventional assumptions about the nature of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe in plays such as Edgar's Maydays of 1983 suggest). The implicit parallel between the manipulation of information in the Soviet Union and the corrupt control of the British press by an ambitious and unscrupulous newspaper tycoon in Hare and Brenton's collaborative play Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (produced at the National Theatre in 1985) is ultimately as slick as its criticism of capitalism is melodramatic. Hare's subtlety as a dramatist and a political analyst is more evident in Plenty (also produced at the National Theatre in 1978). Plenty (which was filmed in 1985) is a study of an intelligent and corrupted woman, a former undercover agent in wartime France who has pursued a career in advertising in post-war Britain ('In France . . . I told such glittering lies. But where's the fun in lying for a living? . . . Sold out. Is that the phrase?'). His interest in character, and in how characters shape and are shaped by the institutions to which they give their loyalty, also determined the often elusive texture of Racing Demon, an amused, almost Trollopian, study of how power is manipulated by the smug hierarchy of the Church of England. Trevor Griffiths, always adept at articulating debate, if rarely given to comedy, made one supremely successful and ambitious stab at exploring the political nature of humour in the play Comedians (1975). Although the play ingeniously outlines a socio-political thesis, it also allows for singular variety of demonstration and exemplification. The retired comic, who has taught a class of aspiring comedians at a Manchester night school, devoutly insists that a true joke 'has more to do than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation', but his tuition is effectively subverted by the theatrical agent who favours those who support the status quo by retaining old racial and sexual stereotypes. The strength of Griffiths's play lies in its creative tensions and in its representation of a battle of wits in which no holds are barred.
Caryl Churchill's work has been equally rooted in opposition to a social system based on exploitation. Unlike her male counterparts, howerver, Churchill (b. 1938) has recognized an equation between the traditional power exercised by capitalists and the universal subjection of women. Her woman characters emerge as the victims of a culture which has regarded them merely as commodities or which has conditioned them to submit to masculine social rules. Her plays have systematically thrown down challenges either by reversing conventional representations of male and female behaviour (as in the Ortonian Owners of 1972) or by drawing disconcerting parallels between colonial and sexual oppression (as in Cloud Nine of 1979, with its ostensibly farcical shifts of gender and racial roles). In the multilayered Top Girls (1982) Churchill explores the superficial 'liberation' of women in the Thatcherite 1980s by contrasting the lifestyle of Marlene, a pushy, urban, woman executive, with that of her articulate, rural, stay-at-home sister. More pointedly, the first act of the play puts Marlene's supposed success in the context of the career of other 'top girls', historical women who either became famous by usurping male roles (Pope Joan, and the Victorian explorer, Isabella Bird) or remained obedient to male-imposed stereotypes (the Japanese courtesan, Lady Nijo, and Patient Griselda). All except Dull Gret, a figure taken from a painting by Brueghel whom Brecht had apotheosized as the representative of a peasant rebellion, have ultimately submitted and been sacrificed. The women rarely seem to understand how much their circumstances and experience overlap, though Gret, the uneducated rebel who later appears as Marlene's rejected daughter, seems to offer an angrier, vaguer, but more genuinely radical kind of liberation. Churchill's cultivated talent for documentary pièces d'occasion achieved considerable commercial success with the apocalyptic and, at the time highly topical, study of the effects of stock market deregulation in the City of London, Serious Money (1987). More remarkable was Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (1990), the outcome of her work with a group of British drama students in Bucharest in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian revolution. It is a powerful and demanding study of competing truths and half-truths, perspectives and distortions, aspirations and disillusionments.
Probably the most intelligent, challenging, and humane of the political playwrights who established a reputation in the 1970s and 1980s is the most senior, Brian Friel (b. 1929), an Irishman who has written almost exclusively about and for Ireland. Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), written after he had abandoned his chosen career as a schoolmaster, deals with a young man's decision to escape fro mthe frustrations of village life in County Donegal by emigrating to America, but it does so by presenting a would-be emigrant's dilemma thorugh two actors who separately represent his public and private consciousnesses. The Freedom of the City (produced in 1973) is set in a dangerous Londonderry in 1970 as British troops attempt to disperse Catholic civil-rights marchers, three of whom take temporary refuge in the assertively Unionist mayor's parlour in the Guildhall. This same Guildhall has figured prominently in Friel's subsequent career as the prime venue for the productions of Field Day, a small touring theatre company which has had the distinction not only of transferring productions to London theatres but, far more importantly, of winning financial and popular support from both sides of the Irish border. The Field Day company has premièred two of Friel's most remarkably revisionist plays, Translations (its première production in 1980) and Making History in 1988. Translations opens in a hedge-school in an Irish-speaking community in the 1830s. Although the play's medium is English, it is built around an implied clash of languages (English, Irish, Latin, Greek), around attempts to find a common means of communication, and around juxtapositions of cultures. On one level, the British Army surveyors, working on the Ordnance Survey map of Ireland, are intruders who impose their fudged and alien nomenclature on pre-existent ways of seeing and naming; on another, they are the representatives of disinterested scientific advance, jumping the West of Ireland into European conformity. The play's ramifications are relevant to virtually every territory over which tribes, aspirant colonizers, and recalcitrant natives have disputed and claimed as their unique possession. Making History, by contrast, explores how the writing of history imposes ordered arguments, narrative patterns, and convenient interpretation on essentially disordered and inconclusive material. Friel's questioning of assumptions, manners, and inherited prejudices is also evident in his sublest and densest play, Dancing at Lughnasa (premièred at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990, and presented at the National Theatre in London later in the same year). The play's narrator, an adult looking back on and re-enacting his boyhood in a Donegal cottage, is faced with a series of confusions and half-truths, but Dancing at Lughnasa as a whole deals with far more than the altered perceptions of maturity. Its supposed date, 1936, removes it from simply nationalist preoccupations, but places it squarely on the margins of other conflicts: a Spanish civil war which causes Irish catholics to lean instinctively towards Franco, and Irish involvement in Catholic missionary work in Africa. The play does not simply question the inward-looking, self-protecting values of a tightly knit family, it also exposes the ostensibly Catholicized culture of rural Ireland to direct parallels with despised 'pagan' Africa. Its delicacy, sympathy, and lexical richness render it comparable to the plays of Synge. Its multiple layers of reference, its political tensions, and its open-endedness render recent English attempts to writer either about Ireland or about the rural working class patronizingly crude by comparison.
Broad as has been the theatrical appeal of most of the dramatists discussed so far, none has been able to match the popular success and the prolific output of Alan Ayckbourn (b. 1939), who in 1976 managed to have five plays running simultaneously in London. Ayckbourn's success has been based not simply on his sure ear for ordinary conversation or on his sharp observation of the whims, vices, irrationalities, and snobberies of precisely the kind of people who come to see his plays, but on his ability to amuse and provoke without giving offence. He has few ideological axes to grind. Some of his rapport with the public at large can also be put down to the fact that his plays have become central to the repertoires of the numerous middle-brow, amateur theatrical companies which operate in a long and honourable (if generally non-innovative) English tradition.
Despite Ayckbourn's prominence on both professional and amateur stages, his work, like that of many other living and dead dramatists, has reached a mass audience only through the medium of television. Though it has often been despised as a vulgar and largely commonplace form of entertainment and though it has sometimes been disparaged as a mere popularizer, British television has consistently attracted creative talent. Whereas the London stage was remarkable in the 1980s for adaptations of classic novels—notably Edgar's dramatization of Nicholas Nickleby, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980, and the extraordinarily effective version of Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, adapted for the same company by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946) in 1987—the tradition of high quality adaptation had been kept vigorously alive in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s both by the BBC and by commercial television companies. Though some critics have always deplored the idea of translating prose fiction into drama, it ought to be conceded that modern television companies were only continuing practices actively espoused by the theatrical contemporaries of Scott and Dickens. New serialized versions of novels by Dickens (originally a serial novelist, of course) and Jane Austen were the classic staples of early television, their evident appeal to viewers encouraging now celebrated, sometimes lushly visualized, adaptations of works by Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga, BBC 1969), Trollope, Graves, and Waugh. These versions have had an extraordinary success outside Britain, notably so in America and when they were shown on Soviet and Eastern European state television. Both the BBC and Independent television have proved entreprising patrons of more run-of-the-mill, but none the less thoughtful and socially responsive, serials in the form of vastly popular, long-running soap-operas, the most established of which is Granada Television's Coronation Street (which began in December 1960).
It is, however, as a patron of new drama that British television has
performed an invaluable service to working writers and to their
prospective audiences. Although at one stage the BBC prudishly decided
that Oborne's Look Back in Anger was 'not suitable for a
television audience' (the play was, however, transmitted by Granada), it
later made honourable amends by commissioning new work by Beckett,
Pinter, and Stoppard. Nevertheless, television's most solid contribution
to artistic innovation has been through the evolution of a specific
kind of drama shaped by the special resources of the medium. This
innovation has been especially associated with Alan Bennett (b. 1934)
and Dennis Potter (b. 1935). Bennett, who has also maintained an active
involvement with the theatre (his play The Madness of George III was produced by the National Theatre in 1991), has been adept at working with particular actors and particular themes. His An Englishman Abroad (BBC
1983), a piquant re-creation of the brief encounter in Moscow of the
British spy, Guy Burgess, with the actress Coral Browne (who appeared in
the production), uses both small and large spaces, cramped rooms and
suggestions of Moscow theatres, streets, and churches. His series of
monologues, Talking Heads (BBC
1990), however, concentrated on intimacy, on suggestive camera angles,
and, above all, on physiognomies, glances, and revelatory turns of
phrase. Potter is far more exclusively associated with television. His Alice, a
version of Lewis Carroll's stories, was the first of a series of
relatively shocking 'Wesnesday Plays' broadcast by the BBC from December
1962, and his paired dramas about the career of an upwardly mobile
Member of Parliament (Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton and Stand Up for Nigel Barton, both
1965) suggested a quite new, far from deferential response to
Establishment politics. Potter's later works—notably the six-part drama Pennies from Heaven (1978), and the supremely ingenious intermixture of music, fantasy, sex, crime, and physical disease, The Singing Detective (1989)—suggest how profoundly television has been able to contribute to a still developing dramatic literature.
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Retropost, 2014: Leyendo estos días tanto los Ensayos de Montaigne como La Construcción Social de la Realidad, de Berger y Luckmann, he o...
