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...

Why I fear Cultural Studies

My fantastic life is torn between two (wonderful) worlds: the academic flurry of Glasgow University and the dynamic energy of the CCA. Behind me sits Sha Nazir, from Black Hearted Press, a constant source of enthusiasm and inspiration: on my desk are a selection of books on semiotics. It doesn't take much to make me happy.
As a student of Dramaturgy, I've noticed that theatre is approached, sometimes, through the prism of 'cultural studies,' an intriguing hotch-potch of quasi-scientific and sociological analyses. Much as I love the books and essays (as long as I understand the jargon), I worry that it misses something essential about the theatre experience - and it is the very part that the critic wants to discuss.

Cultural Studies can be all about the context: the careful study of texts to reveal the social assumptions that they carry, hidden deep in the weft of the words. In the old days, art tended to be examined in terms of quality - and the theatre critics still carry a torch for this romantic vision of creativity. Cultural Studies doesn't always worry too much about the quality. It's all about the significance of the art within the wider society.
I love semiotics (pending comprehension), but I don't want to see theatre - or comic books - reduced to mere aspects of a culture system. Examining a performance in terms of the political meaning subtracts the core experience - the one when the audience member engages with the art and finds meaning. There's a sense of flattening out the art to explain social values, ignoring the creative process (although that too can express a social value) and the emotional experience.

For comics, the danger is that the real advances made in format, style and content might be ignored. Instead they become objects, and the difference between Laptop Guy and The Beano is reduced to a series of jargon-heavy observations about cultural capital. The impact for theatre is equally worrying: a lived event is boiled down to a series of themes and ideas, with no recognition of the skills needed in the production, or the production's ability to perform the functions of entertainment and education (whatever that may mean).

I love me some Debord, some Phelan, some Deleuze and Guattari. But more than that, I love talking about the way Miss Julie or School of the Damned made me feel. Does that make me hopelessly conservative?

Come on then, dad...

It's pretty clear that Tynan's time at the National Theatre did for him. Those sad later years spent in sexual exhibitionism as an exile in the USA were the result of the thorough beating he received as 'literary manager' (or whatever title he had, week to week) as Sir Larry Olivier's wingman.

I haven't investigated whether Tynan was a top or a bottom, but he did manage to bring most of those beatings on himself. My litany of hate is matched by Tynan's litany of idiocies during his tenure at the NT. They ranged from championing a play, Soldiers, that insisted Churchill was complicit in the death of an allied leader to shouting abuse at the performances of a rival company. Most people would notice that a three month contract was a sign of a shoogly peg. Tynan imagined low-wages, over-work and being avoided in corridors represented job security.

The only mystery behind Tynan's time at the National is - what made him think it was a good idea? He obviously wanted an ensemble that imitated the one Brecht had developed in East Germany, but forgot that the English (and yes, this is about England, not Britain) aren't wild on authoritarian leadership, and prefer having the bitter argument to excellent theatre. It also removed him from criticism at a time when, over in the USA, other radical writers were reconsidering the nature of journalism.

A Tynan inspired by Hunter S is a considerably more intriguing possibility than the Tynan bickering with dusty old men about being allowed to put on libelous plays. Thanks to his lack of faith in criticism as a necessary process for artist development, he sunk his own career and abandoned the review at the very time it could have been changed for the better.

Fortunately, Tynan makes the case for the critic not moving into producing art - or at least trail-blazes the path that leads to failure. Taking a bit of time off from the NT, he was involved in Oh Calcutta! An early sign that sexual revolutionaries were as capable of making bad propaganda art as political activists, Oh Calcutta! provoked so much face-palming in the audience, the cast thought they received a standing ovation.

When he came back after one leave of absence, he found that he had been (effectively) demoted. Olivier's heir at the National, Peter Hall, couldn't kick him out quickly enough. In fact, he made Tynan's departure a condition of his accepting the post. It's possible to look at Tynan's work during this period and discover some good intentions undermined by lack of institutional support. But Hall's bold insistence implies that, in some quarters, he was less an asset than an ass.