I have a bit of bother with this whole ‘suspension of disbelief’ malarkey. I know Coleridge
came up with it, and he wasn’t adverse to a bit of puff. Suggests his
relationship to reality was probably tangential. But I’ve seen a few plays, like
that Forced Entertainment one when I was right off my chump, and I didn’t
feel the need to scream that there was a real gorilla on the stage. It was that
sexy bird in a monkey suit. I knew that.
Mind you, I still reckon that Bloody Mess was the
closest I’ve ever come to feeling the dramatic illusion old Diderot bangs on
about. The way that they had these characters
doing their own thing, ignoring
each other pretty much, just trying to tell their own story – and the way that
this overlapped so that each personal story reflected on the others – this series
of unconnected episodes that somehow connected to each other.
Yeah, that’s the
closest I’ve seen to real life on stage. Plus no-one knew whether they were a
tragedy or a comedy: couple of clowns trying to split up, only they couldn’t; a
sexy lady talking dirty in that gorilla clobber; two dirty long-hairs
pretending they were romantic heroes.
That time Forced Entertainment was good – unlike their
follow-up, which tried the same trick only explaining history and failed – that
was text-book dramatic illusion. See, they kept piling it on, scene after
scene. The sort who wanted to pass away, the geezer doing his impersonations of
various bombs, the clown trying to tell a story about the universe… the end of
the Universe, as it happens, which suggests that they might have had a bit of a
destructive theme going on.
The emotions got higher and higher, until the whole
thing was a bloody mess. Just what it says on the tin – and there was no way
reason was able to cope with the amount of information they were chucking at
the audience. The constant interruptions, the bickering, bloke getting his nads
out at one point… it was so much that reason was proper overwhelmed. And so,
yeah, I might never have forgotten that it was a play – they were quick to chat
straight at the audience – but I was right in and about it.
Diderot was never much cop at fiction: his novel gets
distracted by big ideas and
wanders off to explore them. One thing, which
Lessing sampled in his Hamburger Cook-Book, was this thing, where a bloke is
told about this intrigue – which is really a play – then gets taken to the theatre
to see it. The punch-line is, even though the bloke’s been told the intrigue is
all real, as soon as he sees the play, in a theatre (natch), he’s like: oh
right, it’s a play.
Now I mention this because Diderot is explaining why plays
can never have suspension of disbelief. In his time, they had the knobs sitting
on the stage and all, so you got these gawkers right up in the action. Diderot
did mention that he wanted the impediments to realism out of the way, but this
problem – of explaining the dramatic illusion through reason (it’s supposed to
be a thing of emotional overload, so quite why he thinks he’ll manage that is
another point) – is made a lot more difficult when the play as a play is being
made clear by all the stage business and the way that the actors speak their
words.
Suspension of disbelief? Skin us up another one, Coleridge,
eh?
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