Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
Mark Fisher recently accused me of confusing the romantic and modernist strands of theatre. He is quite right - although I conflate them rather than confuse them, because they are both vessels for the bourgeois theatre that has dominated for the past three hundred years. After that provocation, here's an assumption to get up your nose.
I am afraid so. Because it is created within that culture, its hidden assumptions are all based on the dominant culture. Words like 'art', 'genius', 'dramaturgy', 'architecture': notions like 'playwright', 'actor', 'theatre' are all defined within a conversation developed by Diderot and the philosophes, and they were all about using art as a weapon against the power of the monarchical state and the church. Even those performances that think they are presenting protest or an alternative perspective are doomed to remain within the dominant culture. Patriarchy, for example, lurks in the margins of feminist theatre. The state infects anarchist theatre. Those who speak of community are adopting a consumerist narrative. To put it another way...
stone images of the old temples... a rather degenerate form of a god... the last echo of some noble and beautiful art... it will not compete with life - it will go beyond it. Craig sounds rather pompous and melodramatic here - but everyone was writing like that in 1907. His rejection of the 'emotionalism' of actors suggests that, unlike Wordsworth, who said something about art being the recollection of emotion in tranquility, Craig was not interested in art that reflected on the human, but a spiritual art that transcends the physical. Unsurprisingly, he dedicated his collection of writings to Blake. He was a romantic, but one who flew on the wings of imagination to invent metaphysical entities. Craig would claim that he wasn't literally trying to replace actors with bits of wood, and that he was describing a method of performance - a return to an abstract theatre that refuses to get bogged down in the reality of the actors' experiences on stage, but rejects the trappings of ornamentation for a theatre that pointed to deeper truths. Yeah, then Brecht said the same sort of thing - all that 'fourth wall' and revealing the mechanics of performance. He used to do puppet shows when he was a kid, too.
