Diderot and the Lap dancer Chapter 2: Advice to a Comedian

And so, she sighed, her voice soft and entreating. 

In my cubicle, curtained away from nature – a perfect symbol, if you like, of the secret place deep inside your mind where you battle your own thoughts... in this cubicle, I shall explain to you why my performance conforms to your idea of the finest acting.

Diderot shifted uneasily. My dear, I would not reject your charms and yet: the content of your performance surely could not be regarded as a bourgeois tragedy.

She fixed her eyes on his. When he was silent, she continued.

Content is a later matter. At this time, we are concerned only with matters of form. Remind me again, of your very own paradox.
It concerns the actor. His skill is not that of transmitting those emotions that he feels, but remaining detached from his performance. He is at his most skilled when he is least engaged with the passions he displays. On stage.

And the example you gave – it was Garrick, if I remember aright...

And also the actress Clarion, but I took it further. I quote myself: ‘the actor’s whole talent consists not in feeling, but in recreating the external signs of feeling with such scrupulous accuracy that you are taken in by them’.

My dear Diderot, the touch of my hand tells me that you are indeed taken in by my performance: yet for all my moans and pretty sighs, the moistness of my eyes and the presentation of my body in display to you, am I feeling the passions that evoke such passions in you. Are you not deceived by my external signs?

When I leave, once my dress and shoes have been pulled back on, I am tired but I am left with no desire, no agitation, no arousal. It is you who takes away all those impressions with you.

‘The dancer is tired, and I am excited, because you have been writhing around inside the cubicle without feeling a thing, and I have been feeling the emotions without moving my seat.’

Mr Diderot, how to love to quote yourself: and you realise, of course, that it is your words that give power to my argument. The lapdance is removed from the character they perform. How many men ask me for my number, how many of them are convinced that, despite the folded money slipped into my purse, that my glances and poses are real, that my desire is for them.

You are the reason why Plato would have banished actors from his ideal state. You deceive... you are not yourself but another... you show the symptoms of a soul without feeling them, you deceive by the imitation of these signs.

‘Plato knew exactly very well what he was doing.’  Your reputation for complexity, M. Diderot, is ill-earned.

Paradoxe sur Le Comedien 312 pg 277 (ID)
Discours sur la poesie dramatique
AT X.185
https://tomsoares22.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/diderots-the-paradox-of-acting/
http://doc.gold.ac.uk/aisb50/AISB50-S09/AISB50-S9-Jackson-extabs.pdf

Three Kinds of Critic

The Four Qualities of the Critic

Okay, let me play fair.

Ultimately, this is all a justification of my life as a critic. There is no absolute distinction between reviewer and critic. And there are no rules about who can be a critic. If someone wants to call themselves a critic, or get a job reviewing, my rambles are only relevant if they care what I think. Fortunately, that doesn't matter.

It's a matter of pride, and turf war. I try to keep the idea of the critic clean so that I can claim some kind of status, and stop other writers wandering onto my patch. Keeping actors out of criticism is a selfish occupation. 

That isn't to say that makers writing about theatre is bad, just that it needs to be put in context. 

Having said all of that, I am going to tell you what I think a critic is - and when I have failed to be one. Then I am going to divide the critic into three categories (sorry, I'll probably be doing that stupid thing where I pretend to have summoned Aristotle back from the dead, again).

Chapter One: The Primary Qualities of a Critic

Of these. there are four. They may be said to be technical and emotional in nature. 

The Technical Qualities

Mr Dusc did this

An advanced literacy may be said to be the most essential of all skills possessed by the critic. Putting together a sentence in a manner coherent and charming, understanding the length of a paragraph for maximum readability: these are the foundation of all writing. 

Knowledge of context is a further necessity, although this is the least of all qualities. Being able to recognise the difference between a scripted play and a devised choreography is helpful. It enables authority and trust, and leaves not the author open to accusations of not knowing what they are watching.








The Emotional Qualities
Generosity is at the heart of a critical process: the generosity that

does not single out individuals and blame them for the failure of a work, recognising that all art is a collaboration. Generosity knows that it is subjectivity, and that what is seen is a function of the way it is seen. No artist makes bad work on purpose, and the bravery of artistic effort is to be respected. And generosity tries to understand what the piece is trying to achieve, and begin the critique from this understanding.

Yet honesty stands between generosity and lack of critique: the critic says what they see and what they feel (not what they wished for, or what might makes things 'better'). This is the only authority that the critic can claim: that they said what they felt - even if they have to apologise for it later. Like I have had to, on many occasions.

Religious Theatre

I wonder whether I have substituted theatre for God. In Nicholas

Cook's A Very Short Introduction to Music, he observes that, in the nineteenth century, when science was eroding traditional Christian beliefs, art became an alternative religion, smuggling in ideas of spirituality through the emphasis on the artist as a genius, channelling their music from an exterior source. 

Although this is most evidence in the cult of Beethoven - which endured through much of the twentieth century - it is reflected in the romantic poets (my beloved Blake, for example, was engaged in the writing of new scripture), and accounts for the ongoing sanctification of Shakespeare, Brecht, even Artaud. The vogue for branding a company or writer (it's Rob Drummond's Wrestling, or Dominic Hill's Hamlet, or the RSC's Macbeth) is a product of both consumerism and this religious veneration of the creator. Cook recognises that the impulse towards religiosity emerged with the rise of industrialisation, in Europe, and the model of capitalism that has come to dominate Western culture. 

Those political worries aside, which will make for another post in the future, the idea that theatre is now my religion is deeply worrying. Having been bought up in the last days of a society which cherished religion, the grand theologies of the west still echo in my consciousness, and shape my thought. Yet the onslaught of intelligent atheist commentary - and the bellowing of its propagandists - make it difficult to accept Christianity without qualification.

And so, in the search for the transcendent, have I turned to theatre? Have I become a writer of exegesis for a contemporary metaphysics, one that contains the idea of the genius in place of God? Have the hierarchies of angels been replaced by the structures of a venue's employment policies? Am I seeking a connection with the divine, the absolute Truth, by attending a performance?

The impact of this possible substitute on criticism is another problem. The traditional answer of the religious critic to ideas that challenge their belief is to call it heresy. The stakes become higher. Tynan's famous, and inane, comment that a negative review of a play is like a letter from a disappointed lover, sets theatre on the level of a sexual relationship - and anyone familiar with Othello knows that this is an especially fraught scenario. When it becomes a matter of religion, the dangers are greater. 

Equally, it asks theatre to perform a task that it may never have been equipped to fulfil: shedding light on the dark maze of human experience. The ambitions of Beckett, in Waiting for Godot, undeniably are towards explicating existence, but this kind of existential aspiration is another product of the past century, exactly the period in which, according to Cook, art-as-religion took hold. For all the pretty poetry, do Shakespeare's plays intend to cast such wisdom into the audience? 

The author Alan Moore describes the artistic process in terms of a shamanistic journey into a reality that imitates Plato's world of forms - or, more exactly, the cabalistic mythologies that he studies. It's the religious view of art par excellence, presenting the artist as a traveller into the beyond. That only theological language can be used to describe his vision - no 'sitting on your arse and typing' for him, or detailed research - exposes the extent to which some artists see their work as sacred. 

A theologian is not necessarily a good critic: the appreciation of art, taught in schools as English literature, musicology and appraisal, begins with an  a priori truth that the object of study is 'good' (worthy of analysis, and offering a message to be decoded in a recognisable style). The theologian, at least in the Christian tradition, has the same foundation: God is good, worthy of veneration. Any study that suggests the opposite, like Gnostic dualism, gets dumped into the category of heresy.

And so the critic who examines theatre as a theologian is forced into a dualism. Either the work reveals the 'truth' - in which case it is good and gets four stars - or it is falsehood, and gets two stars and is a heresy. It's not just that theatre is a bad substitute for God - it makes no moral demands, no applicable commandments for behaviour outside of the auditorium. God is a bad model for theatre.

An excuse for the repeats

The sudden appearance of old articles on this blog isn't just a sardonic response to the number of performances that seem to come around again and again during the Fringe. It is also an expression of my laziness, and coasting on work that I completed years ago.

It is also interesting to look back on my predictions. I am gearing up to write a piece about cabaret again, reflecting on how it has changed - or not - in the last three years. This has been prompted by Ben Walters' comments on how cabaret might cope as it goes mainstream. My first feeling on reading his provocation was that he had made it three years too late: the high water mark of the cabaret revival was just before it received its own section in the Fringe brochure.

Then I remembered, Walters works in London, and I probably ought to shut my mouth and check out what is happening down there before I make fatuous comments.

My last week of the Fringe was supposed to be all about checking out cabaret acts (and youth theatre, but that's the other article I need to write). Perhaps some anti-burlesque protester attacked my knee as I slept - I didn't get around to seeing as much as I would have liked. But a post-match survey of the Fringe brochure, and a great many of the names that I mentioned in 2011 are still doing shows, at about the same scale. A few names had a year off (Des O'Connor is very low profile these days, given that he was doing three shows a day a few years back). But I don't get the impression that a great deal has changed since I was an enthusiast for cabaret.

Anyway - here's to the joy of being a critic: if my article is ill-informed, we'll call it a provocation.

Quiet in Bowhill (Chapter 1.4)

Sitting in front of the Bowhill Giants, I notice something that will become evident at all of the sites. Although the surrounding area is full of motion – the longer I wait, the more dynamic nature appears – the Giants themselves are static. Everything else is swaying in the wind, or being ruffled by the activity of the fauna hidden behind the blossoms. But the Giant heads are still.

Their edges – in particular, one of the heads has a spectacular branch protruding like a single horn to the left – are occasionally shifting while their bulk remains solid. Being the only man-made object in the scene, they become a focus, a point around which nature can rotate. Their stillness enhances the vibrancy of the surrounding flora.

The Giants have taken on a quality of architecture. They are far more discreet – it did take me some time to spot them, and in photographs they blend into the background – but have a different quality to their context.

Ironically, they draw attention to nature’s wildness, to its energy.

Back at the House, I am lucky enough to meet with my Bowhill contact, Helen Currie. I had not expected to see her. As important as my visit undoubtedly is, she had a prior engagement with the queen.

This had been the talk of the Selkirk visitor centre. I hoped that my schedule might bump into the monarch’s route. I was content to chat to Helen over tea in the House’s refectory instead.

Her enthusiasm for both the Borders and Bowhill is infectious – she isn’t native to the area, but has lived there for long enough to recognise its beauty. She is the first person to say that it is ‘underrated,’ which I can only use as my epithet for the area.

She tells me about the estate – it has the oldest theatre in the Borders (still active) and there are two shows arriving during the summer. She also points out that there are residents in the house, and the Estate is very much a going concern, and not just a tourist destination. Between the plays and the adventure playground – and the various walks around the tended grounds, Bowhill estate is a hub of all-age activity.

Helen also describes how the Giant heads were made: local school children added the detail to the framework that Vision Mechanics provided. She offers me a few clues about the Dark Forest event – storytelling will be involved – and remembers the previous year’s show with evident pleasure.

Since these are my first set of heads, I can’t quite take it all in, or understand how they work. A few ideas – they provide a reason to visit a beautiful location, get children out into nature and making. But I am ready to learn more.