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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) 1 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, 2 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 3 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. 4 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 5 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 6 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. 7