Download Looking at Postdramatic Performances of Canonical Plays

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays
Bilha Blum
Seen from the specific angle of performance practice, the passage from modernism to
postmodernism seems to have widely affected the very basics of stage direction,
acting, stage design, and audience reception. When applied to text-to-stage processes,
it has generated new theatrical modes, mainly directed at dismantling the conventional
plot-character-space unity that characterizes modern drama, and also at diminishing
the role of narrative embedded in it. Hans-Thies Lehmann goes as far as defining such
postmodern performances as "postdramatic"1, i.e. as completely detached from a
written play. As such performances tend to discard certain "fictive processes"
naturally stemming from the visualization of drama, he argues that they fail to be "a
description of the world by means of mimesis,"2 as usually dictated by conventional
transferences of written plays to the stage. By further asserting that, in these
performances, it is the body of the actor rather than the dramatic character that
"becomes the centre of attention, not as a carrier of meaning but in its physicality and
gesticulation",3 thus introducing "a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of
perceiving", to replace "the linear-successive [one]", Lehmann implies that
postmodern performances, in opposition to dramatic theatre in which "the scene
stands for the world,"4 are actually presentational and self-reflexive.
The issue of presentation versus representation in postmodern theatre is also
raised by Elinor Fuchs, who describes it, following Lehmann, as the kind of theatre in
which psychologically-conceived characters, usually intended to reflect human beings
in reality, are either dead or dying.5 This rather controversial statement relies on the
intimate connection between dramatic characters in general, their relations with the
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other elements of performance and the way in which they are constructed, and the
various cultural shifts that often take place in society, especially those concerning the
perception of both the self and the external reality. As a result, in lying at the core of
depiction strategies, dramatic characters have always been a crucial element in
performance and one of its most important and influential vehicles of meaning. In
postmodern performances, however, due to what Fuchs defines as "the dispersed idea
of self […] represented in many different ways"6, the validity of dramatic characters
as the prime carrier of (modern) ideology that also determines the audience's point of
view, is severely impaired. The "death of character" thus indicates the loss of its
ability to quote rational reality, and results in the substitution of the focused
referential frame or logocentric logic offered by modern drama, either by a
multiplication of frames or the cancellation of frames altogether. Directly derived
from notions reflective of postmodern thought such as relativity, indeterminacy,
perspective, and plurality, a multifarious range of possible 'looking standpoints' is
created, from none up to infinite, leaving the spectators' expectations for integrality,
rationality, and unity of thought, utterly unfulfilled.
In other words, the visual components of postmodern performances are
seemingly presented on the stage as themselves, and are perceived as presentational
rather than as representative of extra-textual reality or as its referent. Consequently, a
critical change in what Maaike Bleeker terms "dominant modes of perception"
becomes naturally established. Because "the [postmodern] performance appears to
offer the audience more direct contact with what is present on stage",7 its focus is now
mainly physical. Therefore, such performance not only acknowledges the passage
from textuality to visuality so typical of this era, but it also attests to the supremacy of
the latter over the former – and in this specific case, its supremacy over the textuality
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of the play. Likewise, Bonnie Marranca, discussing New York contemporary
performances, calls them collectively "Theatre of Images" and suggests that, in being
devoted to creating "a visual grammar 'written' in sophisticated perceptual codes",
their significance lies mainly in the "expansion of the audience's capacity to
perceive".8
When the visualization of drama engages with established canonical plays,
however, these new theatrical principles are often challenged and defied. In fact, as
staging canonical plays presupposes not only the presence of a written text in
performance but also one that is intimately connected with the cultural and theatrical
tradition in which it was originally created, the issues of presentation versus
representation and frame-multiplication often come into conflict. On the one hand,
seen as "the true art of memory" 9 and because they are situated at the core of accepted
cultural practices and beliefs that preserve past traditions, canonical plays remain
visible behind the performance even if they are deconstructed, disguised, displaced, or
merely alluded to. They have, as it were, a kind of "aura" – a "strange tissue of space
and time" – that, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes authentic artworks and
guarantees their eternal value, and does not wither even when transferred to the
postmodern stage. Furthermore, because "[t]he way in which human perception is
organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by
history"10 and, I would add, also by philosophical streams of thought, canonical plays
are not only present in performance but they also regulate audience perception and
reception.
On the other hand, as stage realizations of canonical, almost venerated, plays
nonetheless also apply by postmodern modes of theatrical expression, they thereby
also tend to refute representation and, freed from the text, concentrate on creating a
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sense of autonomous, immediate, existence. In fact, denying canonical plays' absolute
authority in performance practice constitutes a theatrical equivalent to what JeanFrancois Lyotard calls the "incredulity toward metanarratives"11 that he believes
presided over people’s ways of thinking and behaving in past times. Indeed, as Fuchs
phrases it, plays, like Lyotard's metanarratives, are considered as "the enemy rather
than the vehicle of theatrical presence" for they are also "an element of political
oppression in the theatrical process, demanding submission to external authority". 12 In
this sense, ideology and performance practice seem to share the same aspiration;
namely, to liberate the present from the preeminence of myth and past tradition, both
in form and content, following the considerable "progress in the sciences" and "the
crisis of metaphysical philosophy"13 that have marked the rise of postmodernism.
However, precisely because both canonical plays, whose inherent structural and
thematic relevancy to their own and other social contexts elevates them to the status
of masterpieces, and Lyotard's rather dictatorial metanarratives, are still equally
recognized as an organic part of a consensual cultural tradition, they have the power
to bring the past into the present and therefore retain their representational capacities.
Indeed, as confirmed by actual postmodern realizations of canonical plays,
although these function as a concretization of an homogeneous, unifying ideological
force held responsible for narrowing the spectrum of looking standpoints that selfreflexive, presentational, modes of performance aim to widen, they are not,
paradoxically, antagonistic entities. As the following examples of realistic plays'
realizations indicate, they are able to create a unique kind of semiosis and meaningconstructing referentiality based on the performances' clearly presentational visual
signs (as dictated by postmodern theatre modes), being closely intertwined with the
representational attributes originating from the aura of canonical plays.
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In DollHouse, Lee Breuer's version of Ibsen's well-known play, the question
of textual authority in terms of the opposition between presentation and representation
seems to be at the very center of directorial intentionality and visualization strategy.14
At its starting point, in stark opposition to the aesthetics of realism embedded in the
original play, the spectators are confronted with an almost empty stage, framed by
velvet curtains, and with several large brown cardboard boxes scattered around. After
these are unpacked, an authentic, prettily decorated dolls’ house, together with
matching miniature furniture and a variety of toys, are revealed. With the addition of
one over-sized piano and another minute one placed on top of it, a tiny bed, a rocking
horse and a small Christmas tree, this comprises the only scenery for the entire
performance, with the exception of the last scene. When the first characters appear –
Nora, Kristine, and Helene, played by exceptionally tall actresses who are
continuously bending and crawling to accommodate to the size of the miniature props
– it is already clear that size, scale, and proportions are one of this performance's main
visual motives. This is later confirmed by the three male roles – Torvald, Dr. Rank,
and Krogstadt – played by very short men, actually dwarfs. Judging from the
characters' flat, two-dimensional appearance, which includes fluffy corset-dresses for
the women and Victorian three-piece suits for the men, they are all evidently meant to
perform as "icons or images"15 rather than as life-size characters.
Contrasting binaries, such as big and small, tall and short, childish and mature,
men and women – encounter each other to form an awkward, totally mismatched
world picture – giving the stage the appearance of an illusory playground, strangely
inhabited by adults of different sizes. Most peculiar of all is the unconventional
manner in which these binaries are characterized: for example, the oversized women
seem childish, weak, and subordinated, whereas the very short men are depicted as
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powerful, self-confident, and authoritative, despite their size. Nora in particular, with
her high-pitched voice, hesitant disposition, and constant crawling posture, appears
completely overpowered by her small husband who, figuratively speaking, seems
absolutely determined to reduce her to a doll-like status with which he can entertain
himself.
Despite the mismatched proportions displayed on the stage and Breuer's own
declaration that in this performance "we deconstructed modernism",16 it is clear that
his DollHouse is nonetheless a literal reading of Ibsen's (modern) play – indeed, a
visualization of its inner conflicts that deal with social transgression and repression;
or, in sum, a concretization of the play's sub-text in terms of visual signs. Moreover,
even though the basically frontal acting, distressed poses, and extravagant gestures,
accompanied by a live piano score, associate it with melodramatic silent movies and
render the performance a somewhat comic, out-of-date style, quite distant from the
grave realism of the original play, it is clear that the situation depicted, as in Ibsen's
play, is meant to prove first and foremost how unfit, and unfair, this world is for
women. However, while in Ibsen's play this is made evident through the text, the plot,
and
in
particular,
through
the
characters'
actions
–
all
serving
as
representational/referential signs pointing to the play's social milieu – Breuer, a true
postmodernist artist, apparently chose self-referentiality (or indeed presentationality)
visually materialized as his main strategic tool. Even so, he does not estrange the
performance from its original version. By visualizing Ibsen's subtext or intentional
representation of reality in a crudely literal manner, he actually reveals the play's
intrinsic referential relation to its surrounding context and deciphers, or rather
decodes, the major metaphor imbued in the text. In addition, as a result of the
canonical status of the play and its wide popularity, it is the play and the illusory
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world it contains, and not reality, which become at this stage the primary object of the
referential attributes of the visual signs on the stage.
A similar rather ambiguous attitude towards the canonical text is also evident
in Thomas Ostermeier's version of Hedda Gabler, although his visualization strategy
is quite different from that of Breuer.17 In this production, the sophisticated, up-todate, and yet austere set design features an art-deco style sofa and table, placed in a
semi-transparent setting, with a concrete wall on one side and a glass one in the rear,
forming a T-shaped structure. The addition of a rotating stage as well as an overhead
mirror replacing the ceiling ensures that the characters are constantly on display,
while occasional projections of live film disclose their actions even when they are offstage. Substituting a laptop computer (which she violently destroys using a hammer)
for the pages of Lövborg's thought-provoking manuscript, which in the play-text
Hedda sets on fire just before committing suicide, serves as a final visual touch,
determining that the events of the performance are taking place in the present, right
here and now.
Although Ibsen's famous living-room, which originally functioned as a
microcosm of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, serves as the sole dramatic space
in this performance too, due to its transparency and the simultaneity of action
achieved by the various visual devices on stage, it engenders a different, multiperspectival way of looking, in perfect accordance with postmodern terms. With each
turn of the stage or each reflection in the mirror, with each film projection or each
visual invasion of the characters' privacy, the spectators are actually "granted more
direct access to the things as they are in themselves";18 and thus, they are drawn closer
to the visual components of the room and its inhabitants. Precisely because the
evocative power of the play's canonical aura is enhanced by the performance's multi-
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perspectivity, whose "function", says Bleeker, "is not specular or passive but
constitutive within the register of representation, of the order and meaning of
things",19 the room retains its referential yet updated capacity and becomes a renewed
microcosm of the synchronic reality.
The final scenes in both DollHouse and Hedda Gabler offer a further critical
approach to society, parallel to promoting the perception of the two performances'
presentational visual signs as representational. In this sense, they both challenge
postmodern modes of performance practice. In Breuer's production, the theatrical
illusion rendered by the stage is defied in the end by a new and surprising theatrical
situation in which Nora and Torvald sing, rather than speak, their final dialogue, while
surrounded by a multi-level panel of mini-opera boxes with a pair of Victorian
puppets in each. Instead of the iconic slamming of the door, Nora takes off her clothes
and her blond wig and, naked and bold, standing up straight on her feet for the first
time, she exhibits her true proportions and real identity as a freed contemporary
woman. As her voice becomes the voice of social protest, her body becomes
representational of the reality in which she lives.
Likewise, the final scene in Hedda Gabler demonstrates the production's
social concern, as the plurality of looking standpoints on which Ostermeier leans
reveals Hedda's inability to control her own destiny even in a post-feminist era in
which women are not supposed to feel entrapped. As the stage spins for the last time,
the busy lives of the other characters and Hedda's bloodied body (left offstage in
Ibsen's play-text) are juxtaposed, thus echoing a multilayered, estranged, transparent,
society, for whom death, entangled with boredom, has lost its emotional effect. While
enhanced by the spectators' collective memory of the play, it is the latent danger
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contained in the interminable, constant, exposure derived from contemporary visual
culture, that is emphasized here.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility" in Selected
Writings Volume 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bleeker, Maaike, "Look who's Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic
Subjectivity" in Theatre Research International, vol. 29, No. 1, 2004.
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt
Brace and Co., 1994
Fuchs, Elinor, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Lehmann, Hans Thies: Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London and
New York: Routledge, 2006.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press,
1984.
Marranca, Bonnie, The Theatre of Images, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
1
Hans-Thies Lehmann chose this term to define postmodern theatre. See: Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby.
London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
2
Ibid, p. 69.
3
Ibid, p. 95.
4
Ibid, p.16.
5
See: Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1996. Though Fuchs parallels Lehmann concerning the depiction of characters in postmodern
performances, in her survey of his book, she seriously objects to his use of the term "postdramatic". See: The Dramatic
Review, vol. 53, No. 2, 2008, pp. 178-183.
6
Ibid, p. 9.
7
Maaike Bleeker, "Look who's Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity" in Theatre Research
International, vol. 29, No. 1, 2004, p. 29.
8
Bonnie Marranca, The Theatre of Images, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. XIV-XV.
9
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994, p. 35.
10
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility" in Selected Writings Volume 3, trans. Edmund
Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 104.
11
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984, p. XXIV.
12
The Death of Character, p. 70.
13
Ibid.
14
DollHouse. Mabou Mines, New York, 2003. Directed by Lee Breuer. Set Design: Narelle Sissons. Maude Mitchell as
Nora; Mark Povinelli as Torvald.
15
The Theatre of Images, pp. X-XI.
16
Lee Breuer in an interview held by Tom LeGoff, on February 27, 2009, published on the internet:
http://gothamist.com/2009/02/27/director_lee_breuer_mabou_mines_dol.php
17
Hedda Gabler. Shaubhüne, Berlin, 2005. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, Set Design: Jan Pappelbaum. Katharina
Schüttler as Hedda, Lars Eidinger as Tesman, Kay Barthölomans Schulze as Lövborg.
18
"Look who's looking", p.30.
19
Ibid.