Download Memory and Rememoration: Reading and Rehearsing Brian Friel

Memory and Rememoration: Reading and Rehearsing Brian Friel
David Grant, Queen’s University, Belfast
In last year’s Betwixt & Between conference I gave an
account of rehearsing a Hungarian-language production of Brian
Friel’s play, Translations, and concluded that for a director, the
practical process of working through the medium of an
unfamiliar tongue, reveals an understanding of the hidden
phonetic qualities of language. Ever since then, and particularly
over the last few days, I’ve found myself thinking about
translation in a broader context. Specifically, I want to talk
today about the necessity to translate between the author and the
actor, the artist and the academic, the theorist and the
practitioner.
Tuesday’s reading of Himmelweg has provided me with
some useful emblems. I suggest that the Commandant is the
archetype of the author/theorist/academic, while Gershen
represents the actor/artist/practitioner. But more significant was
David Johnston’s seemingly offhand comment to me yesterday
that his paper would not have been possible without the previous
evening’s reading of the play.
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One of the things that has been demonstrated at this
conference is the place of art in the dissemination of research. This
process recalls Brian Friel’s response to accusations of factual
inaccuracy in Translations, both directly and through his later play
Making History. Today, I want to explore the argument that not only
was Friel right to assert the potential of fiction and other aesthetic
constructs to access a deeper “truth” than conventional historical
fact, but that the process of rehearsal is essential to allow
participants to engage with this “truth” in a way that is not possible
through “reading” as it is ordinarily understood. Now, even as I say
that, I am of course aware that the word “reading” is a much
contested term. Ric Knowles, for instance, in his book Reading the
Material Theatre, argues [SLIDE] that “the entire theatrical
experience” needs to be seen as a “reading formation” and that
“[this] theatrical ‘reading formation’ then, becomes text – or
‘performance text’ – only as it is translated from raw event into
discourse by criticism (including the spectators’ recollected
experience) as the constructed object of analysis” and this is what in
his title he has chosen to call “reading”.
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For a theatre director, between the two extremes of
“reading” the printed play on the page and “reading” in
Knowles’ sense the performance on the stage, some a third
experiential reading process, which we conventionally call
rehearsal. Practitioners within the Academy often complain of
feeling like “fish out of water”. [SLIDE] This is, I think,
because we often feel called upon to express our ideas in a
medium other than our own. Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner
remains the best analysis of our way of thinking, but in the
realm of theatre the idea of ‘rehearsal’ as a means of critical
exploration provides the most obvious paradigm. As is clear
from the quotation, although Ric Knowles is an experienced
theatre director, when it comes to theorising his art, he conforms
to the prevailing “spectator theory of knowledge”. But as Susan
Melrose has pointed out, there needs also to be a complementary
“practitioner theory of knowledge”, and the realm of this theory
in the theatre is the rehearsal room.
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I want to invoke here, that Prince of epistemologists – I
mean of course, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
[SLIDE] As you know, Rumsfeld has spoken eloquently of the
existence of “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and
“unknown unknowns”. But a simple deconstruction of this text
reveals a Machereyan absence. What about the “unknown
knowns”!
Terry Eagleton has drawn attention to Macherey’s idea of
the “not saids”, “[t]he unconsciousness of the work, that of
which it is not and cannot be aware”. [SLIDE]1
“[T]he task of criticism” he has argued, “is not to
situate itself within the same space as the text,
allowing it to speak or completing what it necessarily
leaves unsaid. On the contrary, its function is to
install itself in the very incompleteness in order to
theorise it – to explain the ideological necessity of
these “not saids” which constitute the very principle
of its ideality”.
1
I have to confess that I got a perverse pleasure from putting Eagleton and Rumsfeld on adjacent
slides!
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As a director, I find this search for absence resonates
strongly with my own experience of the rehearsal process. It is
often said that the skill of a playwright lies in knowing what not
to say, and many absences in the written text of a play are
clearly conscious and intended by the dramatist. But what
fascinates me when I work on a new play is the extent to which
rehearsal can be a process of revelation and discovery for the
writer almost as much as it is for the actors and director. This is
what I mean by “unknown knowns”.
Sometimes these discoveries are language-based. An
example from my Hungarian-language production of
Translations comes to mind. The struggle experienced by Owen
(or Roland as he is known by his English paymasters)2 between
his native Irish and his new English world is epitomised by the
confrontation with his father [SLIDE] over the potential impact
of the new English names [SLIDE]:
2
The resonance with Gehardt and Gershon is telling and recalls the fact that Brian Friel is Bernard on
his birth certificate for similar reasons!
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Owen
Do you know where the priest lives?
Hugh
At Lis na Muc, over near...
Owen
No, he doesn't. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs,
has become Swinefort. And to get to Swinefort
you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and
Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new
school isn't at Poll na gCaorach – it’s at
Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?
The English colonisation of Irish placenames that is a central
motif in Friel’s play took two forms. Sometimes they were translated
into English equivalents so, for instance, Carraig na Ri became
Kingsrock. Sometimes they were rendered phonetically, as when
Beal Feirste, ‘Ford over the Farset’, became Belfast. Before
rehearsals began, even a close reading of the written text and the
added scrutiny of working between two languages had failed to
reveal to either actor or director that in this encounter Owen used a
translated form of the last name (Sheepsrock) rather than the
phonetic version, Poolkerry, that he had shortly before used in an
exchange with his fellow mapmaker, Lieutenant Yolland.
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In our process, this was very much an emotional, rather
than intellectual revelation, as the actor discovered in the
moment of enactment on the rehearsal room floor the
significance of a spontaneous playing of the word Sheepsrock,
drawing attention to the fact that he was altering the earlier
version to emphasise his point.
But most rehearsal room discoveries have less to do with
language, and more to do with the embodiment of the play.
(Hence my earlier demonstration.) For me the key point is that
in rehearsal the text does not reveals itself through the writing
(or even through the deconstructed “extended writing”) of the
text. It reveals itself through the collaborative mediation of the
actors. In this process, the director is principally a spectator, but
a highly privileged spectator in that there is the chance
repeatedly to revisit any given moment.
Insofar as the director is a spectator, then some spectatorbased theory can help illuminate the process. But the interactive
nature of the process also necessitates the development of a
practitioner-based theory to help round out our understanding.
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For instance, a semiotic approach can help a director
conceptualise a production. To understand that the process of
theatre making is one of encoding a production to be decoded by
an audience clarifies the director’s responsibility to have regard
to the audience’s perspective. But the urgency and immediacy of
rehearsal usually renders such analysis impractical and a
phenomenological approach seems more apt.
Bert States offers a vivid explanation of the difference
between these two modes of perception [SLIDE]:
“If we think of semiotics and phenomenology as
modes of seeing, we might say that they constitute a
kind of binocular vision: one eye enables us to see
the world phenomenally; the other eye enables us to
see significatively… Lose the sight of your
phenomenal eye and you become a Don Quixote
(everything is something else). Lose the sight of your
significative eye and you become Sartre’s Roquentin
(everything is nothing but itself)”
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In the reality of the rehearsal room, these modes of seeing are
inextricably connected.
Similarly, if we view rehearsal through the prism of
Barthes distinction between writerly and readerly approaches to
text, it quickly becomes clear that an actor on the rehearsal room
floor must constantly engage with a fusion of both. As
Kirkegaard imagined the actor to be saying to the writer
[SLIDE] – “Here is the original you were trying to copy”.
I noted at last year’s conference, that when in rehearsal, I
seldom have direct recourse to the printed text. By that point in
the process, it is no longer the material with which I am
working. The ideas it purports to represent have been devolved
to the corporeality of the actors.
Bill Worthern has recently asked [SLIDE]:
“Is it possible to understand performance through the
scripted form of dramatic texts?... Is the form of a
printed book an adequate delivery system for plays?
Is it a delivery system at all?”
Page 9
Although he has subsequently done much to increase our
understanding of the expressive capacity of typography, my
honest response to these enquiries is no, and no and no. Theatre
production demands pre-existing memory and experience of
practice, without which the printed text is illegible as drama.
Despite the concerted efforts of generations of structural
and post-structural theorists to assert the primacy of the written
word, as Marlowe’s Faustus put it, “my ghost be with the old
philosophers”. Or to quote the response of Goethe’s Faust to the
biblical “In the beginning was the word”, “In the beginning was
the deed”. I find it hard not to share Plato’s unease about writing
or to fault Aristotle’s analysis that whereas: “Spoken utterances
are ‘symbols’ of affections of the soul… writing consists of
symbols of spoken utterances”. It follows from this that plays in
printed form are ‘secondary’ material.
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If, as cultural theorists have repeatedly argued [SLIDE],
“cultural productions…produce meaning through the discursive
work of an interpretative community and through the lived, everyday
relationships of people with texts and performances”3, then the
rehearsal room provides the natural environment for this process.
My philosophy as a director is to create for the actors, by degrees, as
strong a sense as possible of the world of the play. Within this
simulated world, they are free to explore and discover the simulated
reality of the text.
Ric Knowles would charge me with liberal essentialism – that
in seeking to create a neutral space for the creativity of the actors I
am disingenuously disregarding the many predetermined influences
that are sucked in to fill the ideological vacuum. But I would argue
that this is to misunderstand the way in which the idea of the ‘world
of the play’ is constructed. Design, the written word and, above all,
casting frame the rehearsal world, and provide the actors with the
constraints necessary to liberate their creativity. But once within this
frame, I believe that trust must be placed in the integrity of their
working process.
3
As synopsised by Ric Knowles
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There has been a tendency to refer to this approach as
“intuitive” as opposed to intellectual, but it has been pointed out
to me that this implicitly devalues it. It is more helpful to think
in terms of a left-brain and right-brain division where the former
is understood to relate to the rational – analysis, logic, lists – and
the latter to the imagination – colour, music, dimension.
This is the realm of “embodied knowledge”, a world
beyond language, where even if in Wittgenstein’s maxim, as
Valentine reminded us yesterday, we must remain silent, we
need not be inert. To explain the qualitative value of this kind of
embodied process, it is only necessary to compare the
understanding of a play that flows from a full rehearsal process
with that which derives from an ordinary reading of the written
text.
Page 12
For me, ‘rehearsal’ and ‘reading’ correspond to Derrida’s
“knowledge as memory” and “non-knowledge as
rememoration”. The significance of this distinction for
translators of theatre texts is profound, since it implies that true
understanding of a play can only be acquired through a
performative process of experiential exploration, that
acknowledges the essential orality of drama and the inadequacy
of the literary medium on which it usually depends.
Furthermore, deep reading of a play requires a
collaborative process, as when a director experiences a text
through the mediation of actors. Dario Fo’s process is especially
interesting in this regard. His plays begin as enormous painted
murals which form the basis for extensive improvisation, which
only after numerous performances are reduced to the written
word. John Williams, the film composer, represents yet another
model, scoring his music directly from the roughcut of the film,
but recording his ideas with pencil and paper rather than the
latest computer technology.
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So how does Brian Friel, that most literary of playwrights,
fit into my thesis? I see his entire canon as a dialogue with
postmodernism. Philadelphia, Here I Come! is, after all, above
all else about the construction of meaning. Translations
develops this theme and Making History is all about
mercuriality of truth. As he has Lombard say: “Maybe when the
time comes, imagination will be as important as information”.
Add to this the surrender of language to movement in Dancing
at Lughnasa, and the expressive primacy of music in
Performances, and a pattern of rebellion emerges against the
inviolability of the written word.
“Betwixt and Between” – I love the sound of that title, but
I realise that I don’t really know what the word betwixt means!
Does that matter? Stucturalism asserts that the connection
between the phonic signifier and what is signified is arbitrary.
But that has not been my experience in the rehearsal room,
where the sensation of the sound of words has always been
central to their theatrical effectiveness. At the very least, the
sound of a word influences its selection by a writer.
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But it seems to me to be a necessary extension of the very
corporeality of “embodied knowledge”, that we reassess what
we understand by discourse. We need to redress the balance
away from a positivist approach in favour of phenomenological
experience. One suggestion I draw from this conclusion is that
we need to begin to consider Friel’s plays not as primary
sources to be studied in their own right, but as themselves forms
of “research output”. We hear a lot now about “knowledge
transfer” from the universities into industry. And yet invariably
practitioners in my own discipline are entirely mystified by
academic published work. But equally, their embodied discourse
is all too often beyond the reach of academics. What we need is
a unified approach – in short, a way of translating between the
living and the written word.
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