Fragment Toward Bourgeois Theatre Number 1: Carlson on 'Minor Theatres and the End of Romanticism'

In his chapter on The Age of Romanticism, Marvin Carlson describes the architectural changes around the 'boulevard theatres'. These theatres were the poor relations of the state-supported institutions, usually populist and featuring long programmes that had a bit of everything on the bill. Connected to the carnival's informal performances, they struggled to capture the official approval that has made the national theatres the focus of critical attention.

After the revolution of 1789, Carlson observes that the surrounding area of the boulevard theatres had an atmosphere of 'the carnival', until Charles X got rid of the fair booths and 'rough paving was smoothed, wooden barriers were erected... marquees offered protection from the rain, the humble dwellings... had been replaced by elegant town houses and cafes' (pg 103). This set of improvements are recognisable in contemporary terms as gentrification, such as in the recent attempts in Glasgow to make The Merchant City a more upmarket destination.

Inside the theatres, the audience might have mixed and matched social classes, but the old 'pit' (audience members who stood on the ground floor and joined in with the performance) was increasingly replaced by the claque. While the pit tended to whistle if the actors weren't up to scratch, or laugh at bits that accidentally referenced contemporary events, the claque was employed by the theatre to big up the play. It's a bit like press nights at certain theatres in Scotland, when the critics are hemmed in by members of the cast's family.

Even in  the brief period of the Romantic blossoming in French theatre, the boulevard was putting on the dram, plays about bourgeois concerns with a level of 'realism' or 'naturalism'. Plots abour domestic life came into fashion and, when Antony Beraud became the director of one boulevard venue, the Ambigu, attention was paid to the accurate detail of the set. (pg 105).

Gautier comments: 'we bourgeois of 1840 have rather lazier

imaginations'. 

He was talking about the need for sumptuous sets, but given the move towards more familiar stories and situations, his complaint could be leveled at the bourgeois inability to empathise with themes and concerns from worlds other than their own.


Random on image (from Wikipedia): Plans of the Ambigu-Comique (left) and the Théâtre de Nicolet (Théâtre de la Gaîté (boulevard du Temple), right), on the boulevard du Temple.

The Ambigu-Comique and the Gaîté had a smaller number of boxes for privileged clientele than other Parisian theatres. These were separated by only half partitions that were more steeply angled toward the stage. 

The boxes usually found at the rear of a theatre were replaced with galleries of benches which seated more people. These arrangements provided more patrons with a better view of the stage, rather than a view of the other members of the audience.

Howerd and Horace Go Live

When Carlson talks about Roman theories of theatre, he gets into comedy. Since I don't like comedy theatre that much, the work of an unknown fan of Aristotle, which delineates the structure and characters of comedy drama, was bound to drive me frantic. Carlson is probably looking at comedy because Latin only really produced any worthwhile playwrights in this genre and, as he notes, both Terence and Plautus would use their prologues to make a few points about the nature of the art.

Later, Frankie Howerd would use the prologue for a weekly laugh on his acclaimed hist-com, Up Pompeii. And in the same way that Howerd made a living out of ripping Plautus for undemanding 1970s TV audiences, Carlson is quick to remind the reader that Rome owed a great deal to the Greeks. Even when he gets onto Cicero (who had a few opinions on comedy, in the context of how to give a good speech), he suggests that Cicero's deft summing up of the genre - 'an imitation of life, a mirror of custom and an image of truth' - probably has a Greek source.

I doubt that. The meaninglessness of the words, which could apply to any performance, even the Live Art Happenings that passed for rhetoric in Cicero's time and the use of a tricolon makes this sound very much like the sort of thing a Roman would say. Especially one who was a master of the smoke and mirrors school of legal speech like The Big C.

When Carlson gets onto Horace, he observes that it is unlikely that the early Romans had read Aristotle. I envy them that, and wonder how it reflects on the works of Seneca. But there are bigger problems using Horace and Cicero as sources:  they are talking broadly about poetry. The idea of the text is being foregrounded. The actual performance, the theatricality, is being ignored.

I am also a little bit of a snob about comedy, too.

One of Aristotle's Lot Liked Jim Davidson

I'm jumping past Aristotle in Theories of the Theatre. I have had enough of The Unities and All That Jazz for the moment. When I taught Classics, it was assumed that Aristotle would be taught before the students were even allowed to look at an actual play. Never mind that his theories fail to hold up to the closest inspection. It's like being nagged until you admit that you love Oedipus more than he loved his mother.

So, onto the Romans: I love Latin literature, but they don't have any great playwrights. The consensus is that they basked in the Glory that was Greece. I reckon they had a choice - lions eating Christians or theatre. And lions eating Christians had more bang for the buck. It's the same problem for contemporary theatre when it comes up against Iron Man III.

My opposition to Aristotle is such that I was on the side of the bad guys in The Name of The Rose (they were trying to destroy Aristotle's lost work on comedy). Now it turns out that a late manuscript called the Tractatus Coislinuianus comes from the Roman era, and might even be that very text - more likely to have been a fanzine, though.

Aristotle's ponderous analysis is totally evident, alas: poetry is divided into the mimetic and the non-mimetic. The mimetic into narrative and dramatic... and so on. Comedy gets the definition it really needed.

Comedy is an imitation of an action that is imperfect and ludicrous... through pleasure and laughter effecting the purgation of the like emotions.

If that isn't the best justification for a Jim Davidson marathon, I am not sure I'll ever find a reason to buy the complete series of Big Break. And I mean it: Jimbo is certainly ludicrous and imperfect, and by laughing at his jokes, I am purging the emotions that they appeal to. It's obvious: all those jokes about Chalky were cleansing the United Kingdom of racism.

Notes from Carlson (Theories of Theatre - the bit about the Greeks)

So - the earliest theories of theatre appear to be found in Aristophanes. It's not the best start: nice and early (the Big Three of Athenian tragedy have already done their thing, but it is close enough to the beginning to make it a prime source), but from the pen of a comedian. Sure, Aristophanes wrote plays, but I don't trust him. Look at the hatchet job he did on Socrates in The Clouds.

There are a few places where Aristophanes explores the idea of theatre: The Acharnians, Peace, The Frogs... most of the time, he is having a crack at his contemporary, Euripides. He is more sympathetic to Aeschylus, an earlier, now dead, author (in The Frogs, he wins what Carlson claims to be the most serious discussion debate about the function of drama). It fits in with Aristophanes' socially conservative attitude. Aeschylus had a genuine vision of Athens as a the locus of an inclusive, just society (The Oresteia is like an advert for Athenian jury duty) and was part of the generation who kicked the Persians out of Greece in a moment of panhellenic enthusiasm.

Marner goes on to connect Aristophanes' critique of Euripides to Plato's notorious joke in The Republic (when he says that he's kick actors out of his ideal city. Notice he is going to kick them out after they have done the performance...). Both Plato and Aristophanes express concern at the impact of 'poetry' (that is roughly equivalent to drama, at least as far as this study goes) on the moral character of the city. For Aristophanes, this means liking Aeschylus better than Euripides - prescribing the correct sort of theatre. For Plato, it means watching the plays, thanking the actors, then sending them off to another city.

Sorry, I can't take either of these critiques seriously. First of all, Aristophanes is chiefly known in the twenty-first century as the author of a bunch of plays about sex. There have been attempts to claim that his Lysistrata is some kind of feminist classic, but the main scene involves a striptease routine outside a temple. It is a bit like Benny Hill pausing as he chases his Angels around a park in their skids, turning to the camera, and reminding the audience that they better not cheat on their wives.

As for Plato - didn't he start his career as a playwright? Then a wrestler (or vice-versa)... and have you noticed the format of his dialogues? Very familiar to anyone who has read a play. While there is a more serious explanation for Plato's fundamental dishonesty that invokes his concept of the Noble Lie, the nature of dialectic and the form of The Republic itself, I'm happy enough to say that the quality of Plato's prose, as well as his persistent use of allegory, would get him kicked out of his ideal state.

To be honest, although I am a big fan of Plato, I don't have much interest in his aesthetics, such as they are. He is subsuming a genuine discussion about the nature of poetry to his broader agenda - and slips in critiques of contemporary pagan religion to bolster his attempt to get a rise out of the reader. The same for Aristophanes - he is playing to the crowd.

Like everyone else, I have to start with Aristotle. But, as Carlin points out, that's a pain too. The text we have is a mess (all those books of Aristotle are pretty much notes by his students - and looking at the way I take notes, we are lucky that he doesn't have a few more chapters that repeat 'I am so bored' in different font sizes). I also think that Aristotle was just trying to argue with Plato, and make a case for the 'morality' of drama.

It's not that I don't think the Greeks are worth reading (well, Aristophanes and Plato are)... it is more that I don't think these are serious attempts to grapple with theatre. But I shall recite the Aristotle theories in my next post, for the sake of form...