Download The Hierarchy of Theatrical Devices Jindřich Honzl It has frequently

The Hierarchy of Theatrical Devices
Jindřich Honzl
It has frequently happened – and this will continue to be the case – that Classical plays appear on
the stage of the modern theatre stripped of their essence, distorted in terms of the principal device
through which this was expressed: the relationship between the Classical theatre and the poet’s
words. The test of how well the essential nature of Classical drama is reflected at the level of
staging is the way in which the hierarchy of the means of expression in the theatre is composed.
Every accommodation of the language of Classical plays to the patterns and practices that shape
dialogue in the contemporary play inevitably destroys their integrity and balance. What is termed
action in the modern play, what today’s directors consider stage action, has changed substantially: in
the modern play and modern theatre the means of expression are different (song, music, and dance
have acquired a different function, the chorus has been abandoned, the acting style has been
transformed) and this also holds true for their mutual relationships. Every handbook on the art of
drama, following Aristotle, says that Greek tragedy emerged from the Dionysian dithyramb and the
innovation made by Aeschylus when he added a second reciter (a second actor) to the chorus and
single reciter. Aeschylus “diminished the importance of the chorus and assigned the leading part to
the dialogue” (Aristotle, Poetics). The introduction of new devices (for example, the second actor)
did not in itself transform the dithyramb into drama. These new devices paved the way to drama,
but the dithyramb only set out along this path when the forefather of tragedy assigned the leading
part to dialogue. The supremacy of dialogue over narration meant the supremacy of action over
reported information and it meant directing the original and familiar devices towards a new end.
But with this new end the traditional devices also acquired a new meaning. Although the poetic
devices taken over by drama from the dithyramb appeared to remain unchanged, they altered their
nature by assuming new functions. And even though Aeschylus had to shift the emphasis from the
chorus (the choral chant) to dialogue in order to establish the foundations for the development of
dramatic poetry, the chorus still remained an indispensable component of Classical plays. And it
was the chorus that preserved most clearly the traces of drama’s dithyrambic origin. But even
though we recognize the dithyramb in choral passages, the shift in emphasis to action is a
fundamental shift of function.
My stave the faltering tread of leaden feet sustains;
My voice is plaintive like the aged swan’s.
What am I but the merest murmuring of feeble lips,
The sheerest phantom of a dream?
(Euripides: Heracles Mad)
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This lyrical sigh of the chorus, which both informs and describes (“My stave the faltering tread
of leaden feet sustains”), is a component of the play by virtue of its function. The tragic dramatist
uses this choral dithyrambic part, which is incorporated into the story-line and conforms to the
specific practice of staging tragedy in Athens, as a device for indicating the action being carried out
by the actors. In choosing his devices, the Greek dramatist enjoyed a degree of freedom similar to
that exercised by modern dramatists, who are unwilling to let anything on the stage go unnoticed
and who make everything perceptible to the audience a vehicle for their thoughts and ideas. Though
for the Greek poet the verbal expression of the dithyramb was fixed and predetermined by the
dithyrambic tradition, this did not preclude the option of other functions and applications. A modern
dramatist would wonder whether it is necessary to verbally express the “faltering tread of leaden
feet” of old men walking with the support of staves, when this is in fact an action being carried out
by the actors that the audience can see on the stage. In the specific context of the Classical stage and
acting style, and owing to the particular compositional demands of tragedy, it was necessary to
provide the audience with an auditory percept of what was in essence a visual percept. But the
modern dramatist, too, is quite willing to employ auditory deixis (for this is all we are talking about
here) for a visual percept when he considers it necessary – and so on the modern stage an actress is
a “devastating beauty” only because the dramatist indicates this in the dialogue, and we observe “an
enigmatic quality in the way she walks” only because the dramatic text states that this is so. It is
equally true of both the Classical and the modern stage that for the audience the only things that
exist on the stage are those that are indicated by the action of the dramatist or the action of the
agents of the staging. Moreover, only those things exist that the audience’s interpretative activity
apprehends under the influence of the dramatic action. Everything else that might be seen on the
stage or heard from there remains “below the threshold” of the audience’s awareness. It isn’t there,
it doesn’t exist! The audience’s mental capacity to focus its attention on some particular thing also
means the possibility of not becoming aware of anything that lies beyond it – of being blind to the
cheap costume of an actress whose neck is looped round with gaudy strands glittering gold, red and
blue on her young bosom and conjuring up the figure of Semiramis or Cleopatra; of being blind to
the reality of a torn peasant shirt and focusing all one’s visual capacities instead on its dazzling
whiteness, which transforms anyone attired in it into a messenger from heaven, into the Archangel
Gabriel or any other equally benign and powerful member of the heavenly host. Being blind in this
way is not due to some deficiency in the common spectator or a sign of naiveté, but a mark of
mental concentration, of an intense focusing of attention, along lines determined by the play and by
the spectator’s own imaginative capacity for interpretation. We must therefore regard the ability to
concentrate one’s attention and the ability to exclude elements from it as polar attributes of a single
perceptual capacity on the part of the spectator. From the standpoint of the theatre and the dramatist,
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this particular state of attention and perception is normal and necessary: it is implied in all the basic
types of performance and play, whether in an ancient amphitheatre on the stage of a village theatre.
On the contrary, the quality assumed in the spectator by the realistic theatre of the nineteenth
century – an incapacity to see and interpret reality through the prism of the imagination, an
incapacity whose implication for production was the need to create stark reality – only reality,
whole and complete (a need that was doomed to fail inasmuch as it was a task beyond human
capacity and the capabilities of the stage) – this quality is one of non-theatrical perception. The
dramatist’s verbal deixis – employed and cultivated in particular by the Classical play, whose
dithyrambic origin led to the lyrical and narrative word becoming a device of dramatic action – is a
semantic filter that enables the dramatist to create an image of the world and of people based on the
limited repertoire of things and the few artificial phenomena that the ancient actor and ancient stage
technology were able to offer. The actor’s motionless mask of tragic grief and the unchanging
structure of the royal palace on stage are changed dramatically by the word, which – like a sun at
the centre of the poet’s universe – either illuminates the stage, actors and events or hides them in the
shadows of darkness. This semantic filter, which blocks the emergence of images the dramatist
considers undesirable, transforms the contours of the reality that creates the image of the individual
and his deeds in the play. Action and behaviour only become visible on the Classical stage through
verbal reference to them.
Do not let your limbs grow weary,
Like an overburdened horse, climbing a rocky hill,
Trying to pull some heavy cart!
Whose foot is feeble, let him hold
Another by the robe or by the hand.
Let the old give help to the old.
(Heracles Mad)
This second excerpt from Heracles Mad offers an example of the bidirectional alternation of the
dithyramb and the drama. If the first excerpt, in and of itself, can be considered a lyrico-narrative
dithyramb transformed into dramatic action through functional incorporation into the entirety of the
tragedy, the second excerpt – again, in and of itself – takes the shape of a dramatic apostrophe, i.e.
part of the stage dialogue, but one that plays the role of narrative deixis in the drama. Were it not for
the use of the imperative, the entire excerpt would belong within parentheses as part of the “stage
directions” or form part of the description of an action ascribed to the actor by the dramatist. But
even without parentheses, the words of the chorus remain reported information on the actor’s
action. But within the entirety of the Classical play, which also means within the entirety of its
production on stage, the words acquire dramatic justification through verbal deixis with reference to
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action on the stage, a type of deixis that served as the basic means of composition for Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides.
It was not action itself that was dramatic for the Greek dramatist. A turn of events or action on
stage only becomes dramatic through the poet’s verbal reference; in the Classical play this was an
essential prerequisite for awareness and interpretation on the part of the audience.
Behold him: see how at the start he tosses his head about wildly,
And rolls his frenzied eyes without a word.
Nor can he control his panting breath, but like a bull about to charge
He bellows fearfully, calling on the deathly spirits of Tartarus.
(Heracles Mad)
This is how Euripides has the goddess Lyssa describe Heracles as he leaves his home in a state of
madness.
If this passage in Euripides’ play were staged in the manner that has now become customary
here, every effort would be exerted to ensure that the actor playing Heracles exhibited the changes
that the author ascribes to him. An attempt would be made to enable the audience to see the tossing
of the head, the fiercely rolling eyes, the laboured breathing and snorting – the actor might even try
to produce a fearful bellow that would rock the stage and the whole theatre.
We have witnessed stagings here that have interpreted the function of the verbal expression of
the Classical dramatist by actually having the actor act out on the stage reported information about
events, changes, and actions by actors in such a way that they completely disrupted the unity of the
text, chopping it up with the shouts, roars, hisses, and facial expressions of the realistic and
expressionistic styles of acting, or by the use of stage machinery and lighting and sound effects.
Such stagings were clear proof that the hierarchical order of dramatic devices in the Classical play
remained a mystery and that the difference between Classical and contemporary drama and theatre
in this respect had not been understood. The poem (which is what Classical tragedy always
remained) was transformed from dithyramb into drama through a focusing on what Aristotle
characterised as “action, not [mere] narration.” But the devices of this “action” remained within the
domain of the dithyramb, and the word retained its dominance within the hierarchy of devices. It
was through the word that the dramatic action unfolded and changes of situations occurred. In this
way, it was possible for the word in the Classical play to become a device we in some cases regard
as action on the part of the actor and at other times as a change of scenery. It is precisely this
flexibility of the sign in the theatre that enables the word to become actor or setting, to assume the
functions of other poetic theatrical devices.
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The Greek poet’s words did not refer to what was being performed or what was visible on the
stage. He did not describe stage action – that is, he did not duplicate it in words. The deixes we have
spoken about were not meant to draw a parallel between reality and reported information about it.
Duplicating that seeks to achieve as close a parallel as possible in fact diminishes the impression
precisely because it never achieves an exact parallel. Imperfections in parallelism are more
disturbing than complete disagreement or total contrast. Reality on its own would have a more
forceful impact on the audience than it would if accompanied by some incomplete or imperfectly
parallel verbal element – just as the word itself evokes a mental impression more intensively than
reality related in a distorted way to the word. Greek theatre did not deal in parallels, but in a polarity
of impressions. Hence the Classical actor’s immobile mask with its unchanging face was a fitting
accompaniment for Euripides’ text, with its description of rolling eyes, a frenzied expression,
laboured breathing and changes in the facial expression as manifestations of Heracles’ murderous
frenzy. The pleasure of theatrical perception is always based on the discrepancy between a mental
impression and reality. This discrepancy is a prerequisite. It is not a result, but rather a synthesis of
the opposition. Theatrical perception occurs when the discrepancy is overcome, when the
opposition of the mental impression and reality is synthesized in the spectator’s act of
interpretation, which transforms both the reality and the mental impression in a flash of emotive
vision.* Just as Euripides refers to what is not there in the actor, Aeschylus, for example, refers to
what is not there on the stage but nevertheless present in the mental impressions of the audience,
mesmerized by the poet’s words:
The time has passed for words: now deeds.
Ah! The earth trembles.
A rumble of thunder resounds from the sea
And fiery flashes leap throughout the sky.
Dust swirls in the raging tempests.
Winds battle winds.
Sea and sky have merged together
And all this terror, sent by Zeus, comes upon me
O holy Mother, O holy Ether,
Who sends light into the world,
See how I am wronged!
(Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound)
The poet’s reference to what is not on the stage can be called phantasma-oriented deixis, since it
refers to a stage action that is realized solely in the audience’s imagination.
That this phantasma-oriented deixis is one of the fundamental features of the Greek drama can be
seen from the fact that deeds of supreme horror in tragedy do not, as a rule, take place on the stage
but are evoked by deixis or represented by auditory signs (calling offstage). Agamemnon’s murder
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and the slaying of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra (in Aeschylus’s Oresteia) are “hidden” in this
manner from the view of the audience. Sophocles’ self-blinding Oedipus (Oedipus Tyrannus) and
Haemon (Antigone), Euripides’ Heracles, slaying his own children, and Phaedra (Hippolytus) – all
of them, too, “act” through the word, through the lamentations of the chorus telling us of their
deaths. This of course accords with Greek attitudes and morals, but that is not the only point here.
Actions realised on stage before the audience have a multiplicity of meanings. The tragedy,
comedy or meaningless indifference of a particular deed, no matter how horrible or pointless, is not
an inherent aspect of its existence, an objective and fixed quality, but rather a matter of subjective
interpretation. The audience witnessing Shylock as he sharpens a knife on the sole of his shoe in
order to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio’s body nearest the heart, bursts out laughing at the sight
of Shylock’s bloodthirsty preparations and Antonio’s anxiety. Shakespeare’s characters did not
exclude contradictory interpretations on the part of the audience. Greek drama did. All classicising
periods in the evolution of the theatre have concurred with ancient Greek drama in this respect.
When a tragedy was performed, nothing but a tragic interpretation of stage reality was acceptable.
In a tragedy like this, the action does not matter: the author sites the action outside what can be seen
on the stage or in such a way as to be hidden from the audience. Action is replaced by verbal
commentary, for this, like all acts of naming, is no longer a polysemantic reality but part of a
domain of semantic fields and evaluative systems rigorously differentiated according to a set of
poetic, ethical, and aesthetic norms.
Acting – and in all likelihood acting in the ancient Greek theatre in particular – is a composition
made up of artificial vocal and gestural signs. No doubt the actors’ techniques were was also
differentiated depending on whether they were used in tragedy or comedy. But the fact that the
Greek dramatist prioritizes the word over other devices in connection with some stage action or
another is evidence of the hierarchical superiority of the word, which is employed because it directs
the mental impression more strictly and more explicitly to the sphere of tragedy.
It might seem that the aim of our explication has been to do away with the conceptual distinction
between “action” and “narration”, and that we are trying to construe something that is a narrative
report as being an action-focused dramatic element. Not at all. We know that in Greek drama, and in
Euripedes’ plays in particular, plain narration is a frequent compositional device. But that is not the
point here. Our aim is to demonstrate that reported information – while still remaining reported
information – may become dramatic action when we view it from within the play, from the point of
view of the play as a whole, when we keep in mind the specific hierarchy of theatrical devices, both
those relating to language and those relating to the stage. It is this flexibility of the theatrical sign
that enables the dramatic text to be connected with the stage realization (in both the positive and the
negative sense) in Classical tragedy and causes our faulty apprehension of the function of verbal
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and stage devices, when we forcibly separate into two structures what originally formed a single
structure. If we do not wish to find ourselves caught up in meaningless theoretical schemes and if
we do not wish to use words stripped of reality by abstract deductions, we must link Aristotle with
the Greek dramatists in order to grasp the real meaning of what they considered “action, not [mere]
narration.” A terminological schema of the theory of drama and theatre is not a reality on its own in
and of itself lacks reality; theory and practice mutually influence and determine each other.
Definitions can only be instructive when we have in mind a particular instance of artistic practice.
We wish to conclude this critical analysis by pointing to the fact that contemporary stagings of
Classical plays will not be more effective or achieve a higher dramatic quality through forcible
destruction of the given hierarchy of the devices of stage action or by its replacement with today’s
hierarchy. This will only be achieved by striving to grasp the point of the original hierarchy in such
a way that the poem – which is what the Greek tragedy will always remain – is the primary
consideration of every staging.
„Hierarchie divadelních prostředků,“ Slovo a Slovesnost, 9 (1943), pp. 187-93. Translated by Susan Larson.
* Limiting our critical inquiry to examples from Greek tragedy does not imply that different laws of theatrical
creation and perception are to be found in other periods during the course of the development of theatre. On the
contrary, we are aware that our proposition could be demonstrated equally well by medieval plays (for example mystery
plays), by the Symbolist theatre at the turn of the twentieth century or by the theatre of other periods and other theatre
movements.
To prove that the medieval actor did not seek parallelism of the verbal message and his expression, it is enough to
quote from an essay by W. Golther (included in the collection Der Schauspieler, ed. by E. Geisler, Berlin: 1926): “Every
player steps to the center [of the stage], turns to all sides, even to the rear of the stage where Christ stands. … [During
the course of the play] the movements are unconstrained and measured and they occur during the pauses, whereas the
actor stands still when singing and speaking (author’s italics).
There is no need to offer examples of the Symbolist theatre. They are, I trust, sufficiently familiar. Indeed the very
designation of the Symbolist theater as “static theatre” substantiates the thesis of a conscious deployment of theatrical
devices involving the deliberate restriction of movement and facial expression on the part of the actor.
And lastly, to prove that even theater based on the unity and integrity of the actor’s style achieved its best results
from the dazzling polarity of the opposition between the mental impression evoked by the text and the actor’s
performance, one can invoke the work of the best director of the Realistic theatre and his method. The specific term he
coined for describing the disparity between the verbal message and the actor’s performance – to act out the subtext –
shows that this disparity was viewed as one of the bases of the method of expression of the Realistic theatre. Thus our
findings about the essence of theatrical perception, which we view as a synthesis of the opposition between the mental
impression evoked by the word and the stage reality as expressed by the actor or the stage scenery, are a constant law of
theatrical creativity and perception.
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