While other critics are sensibly engaging with serious issues or trying to provide support for important theatre that sits outside the mainstream, I have increasingly retreated into recondite and abstract discussions of Enlightenment Dramaturgy. It's a bit like that time the guitarist from REM decided to replace stadium rock riffs with mandolin and minor chords - just before the band broke up, as I remember. Instead of relating theatrical events to the turmoil of political activism, I've gone obscure and cod-academic.
My obsession with dramaturgy as a product of eighteenth century thinking is either a cowardly response to a world that doesn't share my values, or a by-product of access to a University library. And by dramaturgy, I am not exploring the strategies used by theatre-makers to get the show on the road, and I haven't reached the bit about Brecht and its revival in 1950s Berlin. I'm fooling about with fragments of Diderot and Lessing, and collating their opinions into a system. It's like an Ur-dramaturgy, a foundation for critical analysis.
Diderot and Lessing did not show much interest in opera: for Diderot, it was probably an Italian upstart of a medium, a distraction from the proper business of plays about middle-class merchants; Lessing was too busy trying to beat off the neo-classical fanatics who'd been shaping German theatre into a pale imitation of the French. As it goes, the Enlightenment dramaturgy disappeared pretty quickly - I think the French Revolution and the Romantic did for it around the turn of the century - before coming back a century later, through naturalism.
However, they did sketch out some key areas of concern: time/space, the tableau, narrative content, script and emotional content. There are plenty of other areas, but I'll stick to these five today. Lessing, in particular, saw dramaturgy as a way to account for quality: he published The Hamburg Dramaturgy as a kind of educational handbook for audiences. And Scottish Opera's production of Pelleas and Melisande is ripe for some dramaturgical analysis.
...in which the critic excuses his decision to critique Pelleas and Melisande through the filter of eighteenth century dramaturgy...
Maurice Maeterlinck's script of Pelleas and Melisande was written well after Lessing and Diderot departed this veil of tears that is best understood through reason and not faith: Debussy's operatic adaptation arrived in 1902. Besides, the Diderot-Lessing dramaturgy itself is a compilation of their thoughts that I've been collating in my ivory tower. It's a safe bet that nobody, from playwright to director, was sitting about with open copies of the Hamburg Dramaturgy when the show was being developed. However, the innovation of Enlightenment Dramaturgy was to focus on the production of a performance rather than the script. As far as I'm concerned: if it happens live, it's fair game.
Using those five areas, I'm going to work out whether Diderot and Lessing would have enjoyed Scottish Opera's Pelleas and Melisande. It's like reviewing a performance without taking responsibility for my opinions. Maybe now my obtuse approach become clearer...
...the importance of time and place is revealed...
One of Diderot's biggest bug-bears was the dominance of neo-classical rules, especially the Aristotelian unities of time and place. Lessing went further, I suppose, when he wrote his classic Nathan the Wise, having a plot that played out over several days and happening in different locations around Jerusalem during the Crusades. Pelleas and Melisande wins big in this round. Maeterlinck's source script is a bit mysterious in the first place: Melisande meets her husband in a big forest, then they wander about in a big castle, with extra scenes at a magic well, the vaults beneath the castle and a cave.
As for time... Debussy's melancholic and allusive score reinforces the passage of time, enveloping the action in a dreamy, surreal haze so that when, in the last scene, it turns out that Melisande has been in (what might have been) a coma for nine months, it's hardly jarring.
While it might not be the word Diderot would use, Rae Smith's design is really cool: the forest is represented by branch-less trees, and these sometimes turn up inside the castle: other times, the furniture of the castle ends up in the forest. Apart from the dream-like atmosphere, this dislocates the action, making each scene reflect the others. And time, rather than be lineal (as per Aristotle and his 'make it all happen in a single day') flows and deceives. And the overlap between forest and bedroom enables one of the most striking aspects of the production...
...in which the virtue of getting people to stand about like paintings is revealed...
I know that Diderot would love the start and end of Sir David McVicar's direction. They are the same visual aim: the husband with his back to the audience and his wife on a bed, probably snoozing. He's in the woods, and he's lost (both times). It's like a painting, representing the dynamic tension between the pair that drives the plot and... it's like a painting. Diderot called out for tableau as a regular feature of a play.
It's partially because he liked visiting the gallery, but also because he thought it was a sweet way to express the relationship between the characters on stage. And McVicar uses this technique time and time again. Sometimes it is just the husband by himself, looking all uncomfortable (his brother's been boffing his missus). Then there are family scenes, with the generations arrayed around in symbolic positions. Or that one where the naughty brother is playing with Melisande's hair, which she dangles out of the window. Check it out, seriously...I think we get the idea of what is going through their minds at that moment. If I could pan out from the photograph, the sense of scale adds to its visual qualities. There are dwarfed by the castle wall, there's a forest on one side (which by this point is becoming a symbol of the wild passions erupting out the window).
The use of tableau is what makes this production 'full of dramaturgy'. Although Debussy's score does have shades of Wagner, it doesn't tend to get too over-excited: it is subdued. The sexual sublimation of the hair-stroking session (before it descends into a representation of Pelleas' fetish) suits the muted tones of the orchestra. So far, that's two thumbs up from the Lessing-Diderot dramaturgy.
...lest we spend all day here, the cut to the chase: emotional and narrative content, with the script, in one go...
I actually don't think Diderot and Lessing would like the plot, though. It all hinges on the mysterious power of sexual desire. Basically, Golaud picks up Melisande in a forest, marries her, brings her home, and she decides she likes his brother Pelleas better.
Diderot reckoned that scripts ought to be about the conditions of the characters, not the characters themselves. Maybe Pelleas and Melisande could pass as an exploration of the role of the husband, but it's really about the problems of adultery. Maeterlinck's script never seems to condemn Pelleas, so it's not that kind of moral tragedy, but sex causes all sorts of problems for the characters.
Now, I'm guessing, but Diderot seemed the type not to get hung up about this stuff. He wrote a naughty book as a youngster - so naughty that Lessing references it while refusing to mention its main conceit. I'm just going to say that the closest thing I've seen to this conceit was performed by Betty Grumble at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016. Meanwhile, in Nathan the Wise, the young crusader thinks he fancies a girl, but it turns out he's her sister so gets over it quicker than Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strike Back. The kind of intense passion that the romantics love, and that ruined my twenties, is not part of the dramaturgical plan.
Add into this that the opera is a bit of a fairy-tale... kinda. It's all kings and castles and mysterious maidens but then again, the magic well doesn't work anymore and the analysis of Goulard's jealousy is pretty naturalistic... maybe it subverts the fairy-tale setting... actually... totally.
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