“[T]he interpolation of stage business which is not indicated by the words is the chief weapon of modern reinterpretations of old plays[.]”

—Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action

I referred to these previously as “embellishments,” as good a word as any to describe the non-necessary activities and geegaws appearing on stage, particularly (as with Barbara Gaines in Chicago) in the staging of old chestnuts.

I vowed last year to be less negative (see my last post of the year), but it is hard to restrain oneself, especially after seeing such a piece of work as National Theatre Live’s Anthony and Cleopatra shown yesterday near me. The acting was bad, especially of Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, though you have the impression that they were directed to play everything so camp.

It was impossible to escape the impression that the play itself is ridiculous. Surely the real historical persons were more substantial—Octavian referred to in the play as Caesar, Cleopatra portrayed not as a queen but a diva; and Mark Antony whom Shakespeare tries to work out as some kind of Othello. It felt like a grab bag of leftovers or recycled items from other Shakespearean plays: there’s the madness of Lear, the mistaken belief that the beloved has committed suicide, and so on. The action of a tragedy in which every character dies by suicide leaves something to be desired—maybe the Greeks done it but Shakespeare failed to make it plausible. (One line by Cleopatra about not wanting to be paraded in the streets of Rome hit the mark; but the “star-crossed lovers” motif failed especially when the supposed great love between the two protagonists was hardly supported until the post-mortem soliloquies.)

It would be fair to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt: how would a well-acted, less campy and more restrained production come off? Besides, the script was disjointed with elements being presented out of sequence, such that the dramatic line felt broken, and everything drawn out too long. (I regret in my playwriting career that I followed Shakespeare’s model as to length and verbosity—at the time I began writing two-acts were in vogue, whereas now all is 70-90 minutes sans interval—when the model of Plautus or Terence might have served me better.) Alas, my life remaining does not have an extra 3.5 hours to spare for Anthony and Cleopatra no matter how good the next production is reputed to be.

My copy of Greek Tragedy in Action by Oliver Taplin has come, a book eagerly expected since last year. In his first chapter, Taplin mentions: “[I]t is not until Aristotle’s Poetics… that we first encounter the notion that plays might be best read. Though he is ambivalent on this—and he is unbalanced by his reaction against Plato who fiercely criticized the theatre—Aristotle sows the suggestion that the performance is a distracting encumbrance, a province of rude mechanicals; and since then his view has been widespread (especially in the nineteenth century). But these days all but a lunatic fringe of students of Greek drama would accept the primacy of performance, and I take it as read without laboring the argument.” My familiarity with Greek plays is slim—partly because I seldom read them and wait for a production. Court Theatre’s “Greek cycle” was eye-opening to me (Iphigenia in Aulis, Agamemnon, and Electra), and a rarity (I have never seen the classical comedies).

A corollary to his “claim… that it is the action which takes place on stage which is important, and is part of what the play is about” which I quoted approvingly, might be his examination of staging—what you might call the necessary staging as opposed to embellishment:

This is what Charles Newell did so well in his Agamemnon, less well but not without effect in the other two of his triad. One wishes Chicago theater had a place for the exclusive staging of “classical” drama, as the purely literary approach leaves much to be desired.

Taplin concludes: “[A]ncient Greek culture was in many ways the archetype of European culture. Moreover it constantly attempted to look behind or through life to human universals, or, rather, seize on the universals within the multifariousness of life—Eliot’s ‘unity of Greek’. Greek tragedy is not all foreign; much is very close to home, often too close for comfort.”

The “Eliot” referred to is T.S. Eliot in what Taplin calls an “extraordinarily succinct and perceptive passage” (from “Seneca in Elizabethan Translations”):

Granted I went almost too far, earlier, when I opined: “Newell’s tenure [at Court Theatre]... collapsed almost immediately into unvarying dullness and disappointment unbroken until Agamemnon.” A bit egregious maybe? Let me learn to be temperate and moderate in my artistic judgements!

As a “broad stroke” it covers the truth of my opinion well enough. But my enthusiasm, when I first heard that Court’s new director would be transforming the company to a repertory model was perhaps over-the-top, so when the idea was scrapped almost immediately the enthusiasm dropped twice as hard. (Then there is also the “sour grapes” of Court Theatre’s casual dismissal of any would-be submissions from me.)

An Agamemnon like Newell’s may redeem a career, or ought to in my opinion. For almost as long as I’ve been dissing Newell at Court I’ve been expressing as much about Michael Halberstam at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. Same unvarying diet of mediocre pablum. Even without the grapes (I never sought to submit on the North Shore) my opinion was harsh—much harsher even than of Newell.

Then suddenly this season seemingly out of nowhere Halberstam himself directs a solid version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Blindsided me. It was not to the level of Agamemnon, but it was certainly as good as if not better than Richard Monette’s staging twenty years ago at the Stratford Festival, the last I saw. (The ending sticks out in my memory but I have forgotten the show; Monette’s "anything-for-a-joke style" was not a favorite either.)

Theater being a business, allowance must be made for the crude panderings of a Newell or Halberstam. I may not like it very much; but when either of these entrepreneurial mavericks asserts “we’ll strive to please you every day” let me recall they are speaking not to me but to season subscribers.

Let that be my New Year’s resolution: temperance and moderation!

One of the greatest moments of my playgoing career, as I have posted, was seeing a staging of Agamemnon by Aeschylus directed by Charles Newell at Court Theatre in Chicago. I’ve lamented my little understanding of tragedy, but, if I didn’t understand the mechanics behind what I was seeing nevertheless I felt the power. (Newell’s tenure, initially much promising, with plays by Molière and Stoppard running in repertory, collapsed almost immediately into unvarying dullness and disappointment unbroken until Agamemnon.)

While I was shuffling stacks around the other day, I found Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy which I had purchased from the dollar bin then promptly forgot about. It is a compilation of some nearly thirty essays edited by Erich Segal. Persons of my generation tend to know Segal as the author behind the film Love Story and its book; his career as a classical scholar was unknown to me. So I peeked into it, figuring I might educate myself a little. The first essay is by Oliver Taplin and titled “Emotion and Meaning in Greek Tragedy”. It is an excerpted chapter from his book Greek Tragedy in Action (I believe), which I have not seen but intend to order.

A lot of what we think we know about Greek tragedy is wrong, writes Taplin, so he explains that he must disabuse popular misconceptions:

“My working assumption throughout has been that the tragedians were free in their use of theatrical techniques, that they chose to convey their meaning by certain actions and sequences of action rather than others, and that this artistic choice directs us to their purpose. But most critics have written not of freedom but of constraints, limitations, rules. In some ways Aristotle’s Poetics sets the example for this approach, though at least Aristotle was being prescriptive, not descriptive. But in his wake more petty and more authoritarian critics have so extended and rigidly codified the ‘rules’ of Greek tragedy as to obscure and even deny its lively freedom. Overgeneralizations and simplifications have become common text-book doctrine; and instead of illuminating tragedy these clichés have mortified and alienated it. Some will have to be cleared out of the way in order both to justify the claims of this book and to approach finally the experience of the audience of a Greek tragedy. This negative progress will, I hope, constantly be bringing our positive goal nearer. To react against the imposition of rules by critics is not for a moment to deny that the Athenian theatre was in many respects highly conventional. Innumerable conventions governing diction, tone and propriety defined the genre and sustained its elevation. Others regulated, and at the same time made familiar, the technical medium. Some may strike us as awkwardly restrictive (e.g., those governing the handling of the chorus or stichomythia); others are still dramatic common sense and seem too obvious to notice (e.g., only one character speaks at a time, characters normally speak on entry). Very few of these ‘laws’ are unbreakable. Two conventions, for instance—both with sound practical justification—are that the chorus should not go off in the middle of the play, and that wounds and death should not be presented on stage. Yet there are counter-examples to both within the nine plays taken in this book, the former in Eum and Ajax, the latter in Ajax, OT and Hipp. These unwritten laws are not really restrictions or limitations, they are rather the familiar framework which supports any great cultural florescence. When the artist has accepted forms and his audience shares a complex of expectations, then, since the audience is more sensitive and receptive, the art form can be accordingly more highly developed. So the circumscriptions are liberating (most, if not all, worthwhile human activities need rules). It is only after the flowering is over that the rules become a bondage and the art tends either towards lifeless imitation (like the tragedy of later antiquity) or towards an indiscriminate formlessness (like today?). These flexible defining rules of the game are not like the stiffly distorting overgeneralizations I am complaining of.

“Take this, for instance: ‘all the important action in Greek tragedy takes place off stage: on stage it is merely spoken and sung about.’ If this book has not scotched that common misconception then it has achieved nothing. My claim is, on the contrary, that it is the action which takes place on stage which is important, and is part of what the play is about: the action off-stage is only of interest in so far as it is given attention on stage. The error comes about from a simple-minded preconception of what constitutes action; it only counts the huge violent events of narrative history—battles, riots, miracles, natural disasters and so forth. This is to miss the point that the stuff of tragedy is the individual response to such events; not the blood, but the tears. It is the life-sized actions of this personal dimension which are the dramatist’s concern, and which he puts on stage. (It is above all the film which, for better or for worse, has obscured this distinction.)”

I could not have explained better dramatic “action” than Taplin does here. Making an online comment at an Ibsen review on Witness Performance website this past summer, I stumbled over the thought that “[i]n Chicago, our audiences have not been trained to look for drama.” When I say “drama” or “the dramatic line” in essence what I am thinking about is “action.” But I have never known how to define it or precisely indicate what I mean. The “simple-minded preconception of what constitutes action” had perplexed me, even though—as a playwright—I felt I knew what I meant; but I could not say it. Taplin provides a text I can point to.

Some of his insights appear rudimentary (or basic) and yet supremely well stated:

“But even if the myths were much more rigidly laid down than my argument claims, this would still be of minimal consequence for the literary criticism of tragedy, since the mere story, such as may be excerpted in a collection of ‘Greek Myths’, has no significant bearing on the quality of the play. The mere story is shared by good and bad dramatists alike—it may be indistinguishable in Sophocles and in a fifth-rate hack. What matters, for the dramatist and his audience, is the way he has shaped the story, the way he has turned it into drama. The constraint is minimal: the scope for artistry enormous.”

This also harks back to my somewhat inept comment in which I express disdain for “story,” that ubiquitous catchphrase in theatrical “Mission Statements” across Chicagoland at least. (The “story” is not the thing!) Taplin also discusses “anachronism” in Greek Tragedy:

“[R]elatively few critics” fall into “what might be called the ‘propaganda fallacy’. This is the supposition that a Greek tragedy was primarily or significantly shaped by the desire to promote a certain line on a specific contemporary issue (in politics or philosophy or whatever). The advocates of such a view will have for a start to allow that such propaganda is cryptic, if it is true that there is not one single specific allusion to a contemporary person or event in all of Greek tragedy. So far as I can see this is in fact the case. There is not one anachronism to be noted as such, no overt rupture of the dramatic illusion of the remote heroic world. To avert misunderstanding, I hasten to grant that in a sense—in the most important sense—Greek tragedy is entirely topical and the mirror of its own times. It was composed for the audience of fifth-century Athenians, not for a Bronze Age audience; and its general preoccupations, moral, social and emotional, are those of its age. Thus, it is a tissue of technical anachronisms in the strictest historical sense: my point is that they are not to be noticed as such, they are admitted only as long as they are congruous with the heroic world of the far past in which the play is set.”

Taplin discusses the nature of tragedy:

“[T]he following passage, which comes from [Gorgias’] virtuoso apologia for Helen, surely has tragedy in mind. ‘All poetry I consider and define as discourse in metre. There comes over the audience of poetry a fearful horror and tearful pity and doleful yearning. By means of the discourse their spirit feels a personal emotion on account of the good and bad fortune of others.’ This passage alone should be enough to rescue Gorgias from the common slander that he was merely a word-juggler. Above all he sees that emotions are at the heart of tragic poetry. And what is more he has put his finger on one of the most vital and remarkable features of this experience: that the emotions are generous—altruistic almost—that we feel disturbed personally for other people, for people who have no direct connection with us and indeed belong to another world from ours.”

This is a useful pointer for me should I one day attempt to write tragedy; the prospect is unlikely, but, should occasion arise, I will need all the help I can get. (Taplin also takes the moment to get in a swipe at a famous German philosopher and cultural critic of note: “[H]ow deluded Nietzsche was in claiming the Greeks as his authority for denouncing pity”!)

No deconstruction of the tragic form is on offer; yet Taplin again points to the distinguishing features of the drama:

“The characteristic tragic emotions—pity, horror, fascination, indignation, and so forth—are felt in many other situations besides in the theatre. Above all we suffer them in the face of the misfortunes of real life, of course. What distinguishes the experience of a great tragedy? For one thing, as already remarked, we feel for the fortunes of people who have no direct personal relation to us: while this does not decrease the intensity of the emotion, it affords us some distance and perspective. We can feel and at the same time observe from outside. But does this distinguish tragedy from other ‘contrived’ emotional experiences (most of them tending to the anti-intellectual) for example an animal hunt, a football match, an encounter group, reading a thriller, or watching a horror movie? Well, the experience of tragedy is by no means a random series of sensations. Our emotional involvement has perspective and context at the same time, and not just in retrospect. Thus the events of the tragedy are in an ordered sequence, a sequence which gives shape and comprehensibility to what we feel. And, most important of all, the affairs of the characters which move us are given a moral setting which is argued and explored in the play. They act and suffer within situations of moral conflict, of social, intellectual and theological conflict. The quality of the tragedy depends both on its power to arouse our emotions and on the setting of those emotions in a sequence of moral and intellectual complications which is set out and examined. Tragedy evokes our feelings for others, like much else; but it is distinguished by the order and significance it imparts to suffering. So if the audience is not moved, then the tragedy, however intellectual, is a total failure: if its passions are aroused, but in a thoughtless, amorphous way, then it is merely a bad tragedy, sensational, melodramatic.”

This being one essay of nearly thirty, I look forward to “peeking” in further. Also, as I say, I intend to get a look at Taplin’s original book—it having achieved the status as a “classic” according to its blurb. Other of Taplin’s books look intriguing; particularly as regarding theatrics as portrayed on Greek vases—but those lie outside of my price range at this time.

I may or may not charge ahead further into the Oxford book; but for now this gives me plenty to think on.

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We tore the children from their parents
    And babies nursing at the breast,
Believing cruelties make deterrents,
    Lest threats be misperceived a jest.

We stationed sentries at the border
    And gave them weaponry to shoot
At innocents—it was an order— 
    Lest poor folk be inclined to loot.

We claimed a conscience lily-white,
    Yet all the world hypocrisy
Perceived as clear as day from night,
    Ourselves blind who refused to see.

By sleight of hand invoking Jesus
    Yet we proclaimed gross murder good,
For profit sublimates, appeases
    The gods of justice understood.

Blood on our hands, yet we impugned
    The innocent and wounded, killed
Our heritage, and killing, swooned,
    So lies some subterfuge might build.

Blood on my hands, I will not say
    That I approve this course of action,
So, dying, let me bleed that way,
    A member of the losing faction.

Since I’ve had Adam Kirsch’s essay on “What Artists Can Do to Oppose Trump” opened recently, I’ve thought about different passages, with varying degrees of assent or disagreement. One paragraph—which begins with a premise I’m unsure about—leads to a quote from an American poet (the source of which I haven’t identified) that seems wise:

“The most difficult thing for any human being to accept is powerlessness. It is such a terrifying condition that we will resort to all kinds of magical thinking and conspiratorial fantasy in order to imagine we possess some kind of control over events. But in the words of the poet John Berryman, ‘We must travel in the direction of our fear.’”

Kirsch’s essay makes the point that art—and artists in their capacity as such—have no power to alter or influence the political landscape hardly at all, especially in a time as ours which pays so little heed to artists and philosophers; however that each of us holds such power in our individual and collective capacity as conscientious citizens.

How much sway any of us holds in any given situation may be hard to measure, however I am reminded from a book on negotiating which once fell into my possession, that it is always more than we think we hold. The example given by the author was of an adult spanking a child: the adult holds superior force in that situation, but the child can make the encounter so difficult and uncomfortable to the adult that he is loathe to rely on the method.

Something similar sounds in Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” or in Lysistrata’s suggestion to her cronies that their men will not enjoy it (the sexual act) if they have to resort to rape.
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Berryman speaks of something different: the internal conditions which hamstring and debilitate individual effort.

If this is not the right time to be concerned about the fate of one’s country, I don’t know when is.

Early on in this national crisis Adam Kirsch made a statement at Slate that I keep going back to. I recognized it at first, but it has continued to be a monument or reference point in these not entirely uncharted waters. He wrote:

“One of the definitions of a time of political crisis is that the public usurps the private; it becomes impossible to control what we think about, what dominates our minds and emotions.”

However in retrospect the article feels brilliant and prescient in ways I couldn’t understand at the time. (I left a comment that in retrospect—though I stand by it—feels narrow and limited: “The message art speaks to power is unchanged: You have the power to kill me, but not to define me.” Yet the fear and incredulity of some of the comments is palpable: “There is so much willful ignorance throughout this article I am embarrassed for the author” and so forth.)

Election of the so-called “conservative” movement’s current figurehead was catalyst for Kirsch’s article, published nearly a month later on December 6, 2016. He wrote: “If we are to oppose Trump and the policies and crimes that are likely to emerge from his administration, we will have to do so as citizens, not as artists.” This remains as true today as it was then, now that those predicted crimes have begun to manifest.

The full article is linked here.