Plato Performance Problem Part Two

Let's apply Plato's objection to two particular plays: Euripides' Bacchae  and Spoiling. One's a classic, the other a recent Fringe First winner from The Traverse.


There's is plenty of mimesis in both of these: actors pretend to be a king and a god, a government minister and a sinister civil servant respectively (the themes of power and corruption are big in both). 

The Bacchae goes into a mythical past - a reality not like the one its audience knows, in which a wine god can get everyone pissed up by magic and soldiers spring from sown teeth: Spoiling is  a mythical future in which Scotland is about to become an independent state (yes, that is still possible...). 

But these are both alternate realities and not the mundane reality of any audience (fifth century Athenians might have had some religious fundamentalists, but we can assume that they knew that they were watching a play).

Okay, that last bit gets close to a tangle. But there is lots of mimesis to spare...

Where Plato is most bold is in saying that the authors do not understand the characters that they represent on stage. Euripides does not know about kings, or gods. Writer John McCann has not ever been a pregnant foreign minister of a fledgling state. The mimesis of these characters must be inaccurate.

That is a tough standard to get past, and worse for a critic. The critic, who might complain that Pentheus doesn't act like a monarch is likely to get hit by the same objection. But even two thousand years after his death, Plato has a point. 

Given that Spoiling  also made a bunch of predictions about the triumph of the YES campaign and the subsequent rise of a woman into power from nowhere, its mimesis is flawed. It is this flaw that makes it less vital after the vote than on the night before, when I saw it.

The Bacchae fares a little better - with no corresponding reality, it is not exposed by history. Plato's more general objection to mythological art - that it represents the gods as a bit naughty - now comes into play. Efforts to the contrary by contemporary directors, The Bacchae has no clear moral... there is the suggestion that Pentheus deserves his punishment, and that it is all about how repressing natural instincts is bad. That's fine, but Dionysus is cruel. Justice is one thing, but wiping out a family is not exactly a moral victory.

To defend both works on this grounds needs something more than an attack on the forms. Plato's statement that art is deceitful wins.

My career is over...

Great Men...

Although it lacks the comedy of a vicar calling the archbishop a wanker (Anglicanism at its best -

the Vatican needs to have a systemic problem to get controversial, the Church of England just has to swear), the current woes of the SWP lend plenty of fuel to my own anti-Marxist bias. Of course, I am being unfair: this situation is not the intrinsic consequence of a socialist analysis of economics but yet another example of how hierarchy breeds corruption. It's the same sorry story: power corrupts, and the emphasis on the importance of Great Men allows all manner of nonsense. 

From the headlines involving Coronation Street worthies through to the ability of Boris Johnson to get elected to any post apart from court jester, celebrity causes more trouble than any other single thing I can mention off the top of my head. Yes, there are faceless drones adding to the sum total of evil, able to use corporate structures to hide their mischief. But through a sleight of hand, I can claim that brands are another form of celebrity, and that ought to cover everything.

It goes back into the past: Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships because she was the Jordan of the archaic era: Agamemnon whipped up a pan-hellenic alliance through his own media presence. A close look at the original texts make it pretty clear that Agamemnon's power was not based on his intelligence, and his dynasty did its best to provide the Iron Age with the kind of plot that gets rejected by River City for being over the top. 

Galileo sold everyone on the idea that he was a scientific genius (when he stole his best ideas and gave them publicity by slotting them into a book that insulted a sensitive Pope). And Richard Dawkins says he's a scientist, but he hasn't done much in the way of experimenting lately. 

It also explains why I fell for an email titled 'An Audience with Jeff Goldblum.' Goldblum is not coming to the Fringe - a comedian called Benjamin Partridge pretends to be him. 

I don't even like Jeff Goldblum. But I immediately thought - maybe I'll get to interview him. I didn't get excited by Partridge's CV (like most Fringe comedians, he has a past in BBC Radio 4). I wasn't woken up by director Catherine Paskell's association with National Theatre Wales - her new writing company, Dirty Protest, does get my attention for the name alone. It's the aura of celebrity. I can't resist.

Benjamin Partridge: An Audience With Jeff Goldblum
 3th-24th August 2013 (no show 6th, 13th, 20th)
 8.30pm (50 mins)
Banshee Labyrinth Cinema, PBH's Free Fringe
Free

Of course, this isn't the only 'great man' who is getting represented at the Fringe. Given how it depends on a team of creatives (writers, directors, actors, front of house), theatre ought to immune to the cult of celebrity. Yet here we have a Bacchae  that reflects the social impact of a disobedient monarch (worth a look for making Holyrood Park into a venue) and Fringe veteran Pip Utton returning with his solo show of the totalitarian monorchid (Assembly). 

The myth of the artist as unique individual found its philosophy in nineteenth century Romanticism, and since science, nationalism and aesthetics exploded around that time, it's unsurprising that the taint of the Exceptional Talent has tucked itself into the soft fur of human endeavour. But for much the same reason I am not that excited by either Philip Glass or Patti Smith these days (their iconic status, or aura, replaces the vitality that originally made them great), I can't help shout pointlessly for a return to a more collective understanding of value and progress. 

Mind you, I did get a bit over-excited when I interviewed Michael Gira.