SECTION VI
The Gigli Concert
The Gigli Concert (1983) tells the story of an Englishman JPW.
King, a washed up dynamatologist, a new age quack healer dealing in philosophical
mumbo jumbo who is approached by an Irish Man a wealthy property developer who
is suffering from depression and whose one desire is to sing like Gigli. The whole
play takes place in JPW's office. The only other character to appear on stage is Mona,
JPW's lover who apparently picked him up in a supermarket. The play has been
greeted enthusiastically and positively by critics, reviewers, and academics. Murray
identifies the play's 'yearning for purity in a context of squalor' as a metaphor for
Ireland in the eighties (Murray, 1997: 226). The play not only 'charts the spiritual
impasse reached but also, by sidestepping orthodox religious teaching, establishes a
new mode of relating to experience: through a combination of compassion and an
ethic derived from music.' (Murray, 1997: 226).
The unrelentingly positive tones of many of these writings (perhaps best
exemplified by the special edition of The Irish University Review in 1987)
make it difficult to decide how one might approach a feminist critique of the same
play. Undoubtedly it affirms the patriarchal imagination that is at the heart of the
cultural process and this may in part explain its popularity. The trajectory of the male
protagonists, even if split and mirroring each other's journeys is nonetheless a typical
realist narrative that moves towards closure at the expense of the women in the play.
They are simply adjuncts to the male narrative, sites that the males pass through on
their hero-journey, whether we read the play in the light of the Faust myth or not.
How as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the
sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family
structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim?
(Cixous, 1984: 546).
Cixous's words could have been written about many plays. Most recently in
Dublin they provided a useful lens through which to view Gary Mitchell's new play
In a Little World of Our Own. In this play the men make meaning and
culture. The women are absent, silent, silenced or abused. This narrative asserts its
place by silencing and excluding the female and specifically eliminating the body of
the woman. The brutal rape and murder of the young woman Susan around which the
plot revolves leaves us in no doubt that we are watching a patriarchal narrative unfold:
It is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin. Only
when she has disappeared can the curtain go up; she is relegated to repression, to the
grave, the asylum, oblivion and silence. When she does make an appearance, she is
doomed, ostracized or in a waiting room. She is loved only when absent or abused, a
phantom or a fascinating abyss (Cixous, 1984: p. 546).
As The Gigli Concert opens JPW is on the phone to Helen, a
disembodied woman whom he idealises and abuses through annoying phone-calls. As
he tells the Man his story of his childhood the Mama is associated with 'the inner
world, and a little poetry' (p.5). The Man has not spoken to his wife in a month and
when he does it is only to roar obscenities at her. He cannot say aloud that he loves
her and instead repeatedly roars out 'Fuck you'(p.13), knowing she is standing at the
other side of the door. The mirroring of this scene occurs later for JPW prior to his
attempts to sing like Gigli. As Mona leaves he shouts both I love you and fuck
you.(p. 36) This has been interpreted as 'the desire to possess is opposed by the desire
to relinquish' (Roche, 1994: 187) It is more likely that it expresses the male
ambivalence towards the female. The awesome powers associated with the female as
life giver and nurturer are both admired and feared and are expressed either in
misogynistic denial and rejection or idealisation. In Ireland with our history of Sheela
na Gigs we need not be surprised at such ambivalence. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
expresses it this way:
You would not accept me when I came
a queen, like a tree be-garlanded.
My womanness overwhelmed you
as you admitted after to a friend
over a mutual drink.
Fear, certainly of castration
fear of false teeth in my cunt
fear my jaws would grind you
like oats in a mill. (Ni Dhomnaill, 1986: 68)
It is interesting to ask the question that Henderson asks 'What do women know?'
(Henderson, 1996: 99) What is it that is feared and wanted? What subliminal fears are
triggered? Why are women denied access to the Shaman journey in Murphy's plays.
What are women to make of the closure of The Gigli Concert? Mona's
baby haunts the play. The baby she had when she was sixteen, the god-child she
invents and the child she wants to conceive with JPW. Murphy usually sees a child in
Jungian terms as symbolising the future and creativity, but also admits to loving to be
around pregnant women. The life -force in the woman's natural journey is awe-
inspiring. But in this play woman is constantly objectified. The men talk about
women as tits and breasts and Murphy gives Mona similar lines to say. The men see
sex as performance which they can either achieve or fail to. It usually seems to leave
them feeling unsure of their masculinity, whether it is with the older girl Maisie who
feeds him sweets as encouragement to have sex (which incidentally Murphy admitted
was autobiographical (Jackson, 1991, 19) or the woman that JPW talks about. Gayle
Austin, in a fascinating article on women as objects of exchange within a patriarchal
economy, identifies how women can also be property of a dangerous sort. (Austin,
1989: 63) Women who are whores or prostitutes in classic realism texts are seen as
ultimately without power and are simply objects to be traded between men. In her
reading of the classic of American Drama, Arthur Miller's Death of a
Salesman she concludes (having drawn attention to the absence of any daughter
in the narrative):
The play leaves the overpowering impression that, for men, sex with women is
empty, mothers and wives are necessary but ineffectual, and the most important thing
is to bond successfully with other men (ibid.).
This could have been written about The Gigli
Concert.
Swann writes about the play: 'The riotous spill of language, the humour and the absurdity ... show life as it is in the distracted search for the myth of meaning' (Swann, 1991: 152). Does this myth of meaning reinforce a traditional patriarchal structure or does it undermine and question it? Roche interprets Mona's line 'I'm a subject' (The Gigli Concert 16) as a line that 'resonates and declares the extent to which the play is concerned with 'woman' as enabling subject of male- centred discourse' and the 'construction of male identity through the vehicle of 'woman' as subject' (Roche, 1994: 181). He sees triangular rather than doubled relations at work in the play, with Gigli as the shifting object of identification between the Irishman and the Englishman and another triangular structure as JPW, Mona and the imaginary Helen. JPW must work out his identity , caught between the ideal and the real, the idealised unattainable Helen and the very real presence of Mona whom he can ignore. But Lanters would argue that the crisis for JPW and the Man are 'defined solely in terms of the mind', that JPW seeks a 'way out of mental sterility' into 'self- awareness.' (Lanters 1992: 280) Lanters feels that the physical aspect of the play is represented by Mona, and her counterpart Helen (albeit disembodied). Her argument stresses how male experience of the play 'is given a female counterpart in parallel terms of sterility and creativity, sickness and healing.' (ibid. 278) That there is no 'rebirth' possible for Mona is all too obvious as she leaves to face a life threatening illness and surgery. (Lanters claims she has been neutralised in the play or denied an existence in her own right) Where Roche interprets the final primal cry which precedes JPW's singing 'Mama! Mama! Don't leave me in the dark!' as an ultimate court of appeal to the female 'a plea that abandons the myth of male sufficiency and creation' (Roche, 1994: 188) Lanters sees it differently. She suggests that the King who emerges still needs completion. Too often the woman is simply the projection of male desires and fantasies. Lanters, following Herr's argument on the erotics of Irishness, (Herr, 1990) identifies the body as the missing link in Irish identity:
However since King's former, false self-image was largely sustained and reinforced by female characters who themselves existed for King only as imagined projections of his own mind, the realisation of a true self that would be capable of healthy relationships entails not only the destruction of the false self but also of woman as myth. The play implies the duality of the physical void, which is both symptom and cure of King's disease, by stressing the absence and neglect of the body through images of denial, infertility, sickness and death (Lanters, 1992: 281).
So often within a patriarchal narrative woman has so many meanings attributed to
her that she cannot simply be granted existence as a subject in her own right. Grene
writes about Mona that 'she is there to represent the bodily reality of love and
relationship which both men in their urge towards transcendence ignore of fail to
recognise' (Grene, 1992b: 217). She cannot simply be there like the two male
characters. She must represent something that they are failing to recognise. The
bearer not the maker of meaning. The ambivalent attitude towards women is also
seen in the many ways that female characters are seen as either too good (The Man
about his wife) or promiscuous (Mona) To suggest an equality because Mona uses
JPW as much as he uses her is to buy uncritically into the patriarchal symbolic.
Depicting women as prostitutes is typical of a patriarchal aesthetic, barely masking
the hidden desires about the potential availability of all women. Having women
supposedly actively choose these positions is the ultimate validation of the same
aesthetic. Women are usually only given sexual choices in these realist plays. The
exercise of these choices reinforces the patriarchal ideal and does not propose any
kind of alternative vision. Roche claims that the two men find different solutions to
the question of identity. The Man returns to 'the wife', thus continuing to subscribe to
the patriarchal ideal. JPW no longer believes in 'woman being exchanged as a
somatic token.' (Roche, p.187) I would like to believe that this is true, that woman is
no longer simply seen as an object of exchange within a patriarchal hegemony. But I
believe that this comment misses the point of the play which Lanters has stressed.
JPW ignores Mona, hardly notices that she has gone. She has enabled his journey of
the mind. He is oblivious to the needs of an embodied subjectivity and spirituality
either his own or Mona's. Reconsidering the final moments of the play in which JPW
supposedly possibilises the possible by singing like Gigli one must question how
satisfactory this really is, after all he has just consumed a cocktail of mandrax and
vodka. However some academics have been very positive. O'Toole sees it as a form
of magic a 'theatrical ritualisation of optimism' (O'Toole, 1994: 209), White as a
'movement towards the ineffable' (White, 1990: 560) when speech breaks down, and
music becomes not just indispensable but inevitable. When Roche states that at the
end of the play 'the symbolic order readmits the female and a theatre of the
impossible' (Roche, 1994: 188) he is certainly not talking the same language as that of
ecriture feminine even though he uses similar words. For the female is what is
sacrificed in the patriarchal symbolic and her reinstatement would demand an
embodied particular subjectivity with attention to female jouissance, laughter, and
play. And the men have already 'tried, laughing, and crying and philosophy.'
(Gigli, p.37) Perhaps it is time for the women to take the stage and tell a
different story that is playful, and centred in laughter and history.
SECTION VII
Bailegangaire
Without mythology, our hopes and memories are homeless; we capitulate to the
mindless conformism of fact. But if revered for its own abstract sake, if totally
divorced from the challenge of reality, mythology becomes another kind of death. We
must never cease to keep mythological images in dialogue with history; because once
we do we fossilise. That is why we will go on telling stories, inventing and
reinventing myths
(Kearney, 1984: 24).
Female critics of Murphy's earlier work told him that he did not understand
women, that his plays were about male identity and their tribal rituals of belonging,
that modern Irish women would not recognise themselves in his female characters.
His answer at one level was to write Bailegangaire. In 1961 he had
written A Whistle in The Dark, a dark bleak tragedy of
displaced men, driven to violence, brutal competition, self-loathing and domination.
To answer the male dominated world of the Carney family, in 1984 he wrote
Bailegangaire, a play with an all female cast, Mommo and her two
granddaughters Mary and Dolly. Mommo tells the story of how the town came by its
appellation, a story of a laughing competition that had taken place thirty years earlier.
It is a kind of:
female King Lear, its monstrous Mother figure, enthroned centre
stage in her double bed, scorning the 'good' granddaughter while playing up to the
'bad' one (Roche, 1994: 144).
It is interesting to note the reference back to the patriarchal symbolic in that it is a
female King Lear.
A senile, crotchety, incontinent demanding old woman, tells her story as she has
done for years. It is a story that the granddaughters know parts of by heart. It is a
search for a myth of origins, and is also as Swann puts it an expiatory myth. (Swann,
1991: 153).
Where the earlier plays explode the context of reality to show the forces which
construct it, Bailegangaire presents a reality contained and activated by
myth, and a myth born of the need for reality
(Swann, ibid. 152).
A people without myths become a rootless people, a people without a home.
When the myths on offer are perceived as 'borrowed images' or 'neon -shadows'
(Conversations) or 'a whole poxy con' (The Sanctuary
Lamp) then something must be done to restore spirits that have become mean
and broken. A new myth making is needed that restores links with history. It will
need to provide release from the unending narratives of the past, offering healing and
forgiveness, and promise of a new future. Cairns and Richards see
Bailegangaire as doing this more powerfully than any other play, because
it is a play that expresses the possibility of 'resurrection from the unending narratives
of the past' (Cairns and Richards, 1988: 150). The use of a language of resurrection
with roots so firmly in the Christian tradition also reinforces the patrriarchal symbolic.
A particular story must be told. This is Mommo's task and increasingly as the
play progresses it becomes obvious that it is also vital for Mary that she finish it. But
if it is a particular story of identity and belonging it is also a story of Irish Identity in
the broader cultural sense:
Beyond that is the memory of her frozen marriage, her tyrannical treatment of her
children which drove them to fight or to emigrate, the psychic wasteland of
deprivation, horror, and loss over which her imagination broods and which her story
animates. It is a grotesque vision of the whole country which Mommo voices in the
climactic description of the laughing-contest (Grene, 1991b: 222).
There are two narratives at work in the play - Mommo's narrative of the
laughing-competition and the children waiting at home for their grandparents to return
and Mary and Dolly waiting in the present as their own story unfolds and their past is
more fully revealed to them. The final resolution is only achieved when the story that
is told and the story that it is telling unity (Swann, 1991: 153). The characters are
searching for home, want to come home, to the truth about themselves and their
world. Mary has come home from England to her childhood home but she is still
searching for a sense of recognition and belonging. Home is both physical and
metaphysical. Mommo's story avoids her coming home because she will have to face
the tragedy of her life as a result of the time spent at the laughing-competition. When
she does return home we learn that Tom the young grandson had been burned to death
because he threw paraffin on the fire that had gone out while the children were
waiting for the grandparents to return home. We learn that Dolly has all the modern
appliances, and the rubber backed lino in the bedrooms but is still afraid of home. Her
violent husband returns periodically from England to beat her up. Meanwhile she
meets men in ditches for casual sex and seems unable to come home to herself. The
play has an almost hypnotic effect on the audience. Mommo's story sounds like an
unfinished symphony that has been playing for ever.
Storytelling, thus, in Bailegangaire takes on the full expressiveness reserved in
The Gigli Concert for the operatic aria. Mommo's story, like the singing
of Gigli, plays on insistently, repetitively, hypnotically
(Grene, 1991b: 222).
Kristeva's sense of women's time interrupting and backtracking and weaving an
altogether new story is echoed in Mommo's story-telling. At the core of the play and
of the two stories is laughter. The movement in the play from the original
predominantly male environment of the laughing-competition and the tragedies that
ensued to the three women sharing Mommo's bed, and laughing at their misfortunes
as they plan together to embrace Dolly's unborn child as a promise of a better future.
How as feminists can we read this play? We have already considered
Henderson's critique.. For her no matter how much the play plumbs the complex
realities of life and suffering, some of which are by gender out of the male arena the
play does not offer its characters access to the level of the spiritual, mystical or
metaphorical (Henderson, 1996: 92). And yet it is not strictly true to say that Mommo
in particular does not enter the realm of meaning maker with her eventual
reconciliation to the painful; truths of her past history. In her attempts to recreate a
myth of origins and to link that myth with the reality of her own particular history she
performs a very meaningful task. Eavan Boland has written extensively in her poetry
and in her autobiography Object Lessons on the need for women to move
from beings objects of history and discourse to being subjects. And in a sense this is
what Mommo begins in her story. From being the idealised woman of Irish myth
whether Irish Mother or Mother Ireland, imaged and defined in her various
representations by men and made to be the carrier of all kinds of meanings not her
own, she moves in an approach to her own subjectivity. While the stories she tells are
in large measure the result of a patriarchal ordering of history there are tentative steps
towards a new type of consciousness where laughter is not part of a dominating
competitive, destructive and violent myth but shared by women in solidarity facing a
new future. Whether it can offer the experience of jouissance is not so
clear. Is this specifically the prerogative of women's writing? Is there a difference
when the same space is hinted at by men?
However the new space that the women try to embrace is really no more an
embodied space than that of JPW in Gigli. Throughout all Murphy's
work one would find it difficult to identify one healthy sexual relationship, even in
Bailegangaire Mommo has had a cold, loveless marriage where her
husband had not spoken her name in years. (This is very poignantly stressed in
Brigit, the Television play that is part of the Bailegangaire
cycle). Mary has had an affair with Dolly's husband Stephen whom we later discover
to be a violent thug. What this does to the relationship between the two sisters is not
discussed but presumably it would work like the old tactics of the coloniser to divide
and conquer. Dolly throws herself into casual sex in ditches to answer some kind of
longing. One interpretation offered is that she is engaged in prostitution for economic
reasons.(Cave, 1993: 96) A healthy relationship with the body and with one's own
sexuality would seem to be a definite missing link in Murphy's work. The sexual
relationship between Michael and Betty in A Whistle in the Dark
is totally threatened and inhibited when the family come over to visit. In a
scene between Liam and Maeve in Famine the young woman eats an
apple that gradually begins to transform her and as the couple kiss and cuddle the
moon comes out to reveal a family of corpses.(Famine, p. 44-47) As
Cheryl Herr has written on the erotics of Irishness:
Ireland has literally eroded, in the sphere of representations that constitute social
identity, a comfortable sense of the body (Lanters, 1992: 279).
The traditional severing of head and body in the ancient Celtic warrior tradition
is continued in our representations where the 'source of spiritual potency' is
represented as male and is dominant while the body - the physical is represented as
female and is repressed. Further reconciliation is needed than Mommo's achieved
level: the reconciliation between spirit and body for the individual characters
themselves and the reconciliation between male and female sexuality and spirituality.
Such a movement towards wholeness in Murphy's characters might also disclose the
holiness that he craves.
CONCLUSION
Braidotti in her work in philosophy has stated that the feminine is the question of
modernity (Braidotti, 1991: 136). The feminine (as Kelleher noted) is the symptom of
crisis in our culture. The problematisation of the feminine is a site of projection for
masculine fears and desires. Maugue has claimed that 'men's inability to raise the
question of their own identity leads them to metaphorize their crisis and to 'cross-
dress it' in the guise of discourses about the feminine'. (Braidotti, 1991: 135)
Braidotti claims that it only remains for women to accept the fundamental dissonance
between the discourse produced by feminists and the discourse which a certain
philosophy of crisis can produce on the feminine.(ibid. 146) Traditional Western
philosophy which stressed the primacy of reason and a dualistic understanding of the
person was structured along lines of difference and domination. The traditional
structure of such a philosophy is to stress a construction of the world that sees
everything in terms of binaries. The feminine put into any kind of discourse whether
philosophical or artistic is simply an allegorical figuration for a new aesthetics that
aims at dislocating, blurring and making redundant the boundaries between dualistic
oppositions, first and foremost sexual difference. Feminists are not happy with this
desexualised feminine from Medusa to the androgyne or The Angel (think of Tony
Kushner's Angels in America). They claim that such a desexualised
feminine 'arises as excess, as a movement which deconstructs frontiers as what can
efface the limits between representation and the unrepresentable' (Braidotti, 1991:
136). There are new forms of feminism emerging in thought, and politics whose chief
objective is not reform but rather 'the radical and structural change of social life,
systems of knowledge and subjectivity' (Braidotti, 1991: 161).
Feminist theatre critics would urge women to challenge the oppressive systems
of symbolic closure which are characteristic of the dominant theatrical tradition of
staging realism. What is needed are interrogative texts, that unfix subject positions
and that represent the contest for meanings that is part of our contemporary culture.
We are urged to see beyond the tyranny of lucidity so characteristic of realist theatre
and to understand our role as audience as makers of meaning. We can as audience be
simply invited to collude with the dominant way of naming and making meaning,
itself inherently patriarchal, and dualistic and involving the sacrifice of the female. Or
we can as audience contest those meanings. We can choose not to go to the theatre
(this was Cixous' choice as she felt that going to theatre was like going to her own
funeral and she refused to continue to collude with the meanings offered to her). Or
we train directors to present more traditional plays in innovative ways offering
different vantage points for the making of meaning . Or we can demand different
texts written out of women's experience and reflecting another way of knowing.
What kind of text would meet up with feminist expectations and stand up to its
criticisms? Jeanie Forte in her critique of realism offers the following suggestion:
A subversive text would not provide the detached viewpoint, the illusion of
seamlessness, the narrative closure, but would open up the negotiation of meaning to
contradictions, circularity, multiple viewpoints; for feminists this would relate
particularly to gender, but also to issues of class, race, age, sexuality and the
insistence on an alternative articulation of female subjectivity (Forte, 1989: 117).
In numerous interviews that Murphy has done he talks about the creative process.
He often writes out of a mood which is something to do 'with a messed up spirit, or
being lost or trying to make some sort of sense out of it all.' (Clarke, 1992) His
characters in their searching settle into the realist genre, but one that has a
counterstrain. There are fissures in his texts which themselves are spaces of
possibility. Images like The Sanctuary Lamp itself, a silent reminder of
the presence of the divine, the haunting presence of the child in The Gigli
Concert, or misfortunes of Bailegangaire. But it is his language
itself that opens so often to the poetic that pushes the texts beyond their realist frames,
moving at times into music itself to find a 'sound to clothe our emotion and
aspiration.' (Maxwell, 1990: 65) In his myth making and storytelling Murphy is
engaged in what Ricoeur called the recreation of language:
Poetry and myth are not just nostalgia for some forgotten world. They constitute
a disclosure of new and unprecedented worlds, an opening onto other possible
worlds" (Kearney, 1982: 265-266).
Perhaps Mommo's storytelling does fulfill a shamanic role.
Berry, Cicely. The Actor and the Text. London, Virgin, 1993.
Bourke, Angela. "Caoineadh na Marbh: Siceoilfhiliocht". [Laments of the
Dead:Psychopoetry] In: Oghma 4.
Bourke, Angela. "The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process". In:
Women's Studies Int. Forum. Vol. 11, No. 4.
Calderwood, James L. and Toliver, Harold E. Perspectives on Drama. Oxford
University Press, 1968.
Croker, Thomas Croften. Researches in the South of Ireland. Shannon, Irish
University Press, 1969.
Cummings-Wing, Julia. Speak for Yourself. Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1989.
Delargy, J.H. The Gaelic Storyteller. Chicago, 1969.
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Gielgud, John "King Lear". BBC Radio 3 Drama, In: King Lear, Random
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Hederman, Mark Patrick. "The Playboy versus the Western World". In: The
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1976.
Macintosh, Fiona. Dying Acts. Cork University Press, 1994.
Maxwell, D.E.S. Modern Irish Drama. Cambridge University Press, 1984.
McCann, Sean. The Story of the Abbey Theatre. London, The New English Library
Limited, 1967.
McGarry, Kevin. Literacy, Communication and Libraries. London, Library
Association Publishing, 1991.
Newham, Paul. The Singing Cure. London, Rider, 1993.
Newham, Paul. "The Psychology of Voice and the Founding of the Roy Hart Theatre"
In: New Theatre Quarterly Volume IX Number 33, Cambridge University Press, February
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O'Madagain, Brendan. "Irish Vocal Music of Lament and Syllabic Verse". In:
The Celtic Consciousness, ed. Robert O'Driscoll, Portlaoise, The Dolmen
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Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London and New York, Routledge, 1995..
Richards Thomas. At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions. London and New
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Rodenburg, Patsy. The Actor Speaks. London, Methuen, 1997.
Rodenburg, Patsy. The Need for Words. London, Methuen, 1994.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London, Routledge, 1994.
Stanford, W.B. Greek Tragedy and the Emotions. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
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Synge, J.M. The Aran Islands. Penguin, 1992.
Synge, J.M. Plays. London, Oxford University Press, 1980.
Williams, Raymond. Drama in Performance. Buckingham, Open University Press,
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Withers-Wilson, Nan. Vocal Direction for the Theatre. New York, Drama Book
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Yeats, W.B. Essays and Introductions. London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1974.
P. Newham, "The Psychology of Voice and the Founding of the Roy Hart Theatre"
New Theatre Quarterly Vol IX No.33 Feb. 1993, p.64
Speak for Yourself, p. 1
R. Schechner, Performance Theory, p. 223
F. Macintosh, Dying Acts, p. 33
Lord Mayor Alderman Michael Keating, Introductory address to the Dublin Theatre Seminar,
1984
Thomas Richards, At Work with Grotowski, p. 66
Orality and Literacy, pp. 67-68
Gaelic Storyteller, p. 16
Essays and Introductions, p. 185
M.P. Hederman, "The Playboy of the Western World", The Crane Bag,
pp. 60, 61
The Aran Islands, p. 31
A. Bourke, "The Irish Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process", Women's
Studies Int. Forum, Vol. 11, No. 4 pp. 287-288
"Poetry and Violence", In: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish
Literature, p.5
A. Bourke, "Caoineadh na Marbh:Siceoilfhiliocht" [Laments of the
Dead:Psychopoetry], Oghma 4 , p.3 [my translation]
"Irish Vocal Music of Lament and Syllabic Verse", The Celtic
Consciousness, p.312
"The Irish traditional lament and the grieving process", Women's Studies
International Forum 11, No.4, p.289
"The Four Theatres of Grotowski", New Theatre Quarterly, Vol 1 No. 2 May 1985,
p.174
T. Croften Croker, Researches in the South of Ireland, pp. 173,174
N. Withers-Wilson, Vocal Direction for the Theatre, p. 6
ibid., p. 14
The Need for Words, p. 29
The Actor Speaks, p. 170
The Need for Words, p. 241
The Singing Cure, p. 39
Drama in Performance, p. 32
The Actor and the Text, p. 47
Freeing the Natural Voice, p. 190
Greek Tragedy and the Emotions, p. 57
J.Gielgud on King Lear for The Renaissance Theatre Company in association with BBC Radio 3
S. McCann, The Story of the Abbey Theatre, p. 118
J.M. Synge, Plays, p. 12
Modern Irish Drama, p.56
Calderwood and Toliver, Perspectives on Drama, p. 31
Literacy, Communication and Libraries, p. 14
Dying Acts, p. 108
Essays and Introductions, p. 239
Freeing the Natural Voice, p. 186
'Those few we call rebels, heretics or reformers of the theatre (Stanislavski and Meyerhold, Craig,
Copeau, Artaud, Brecht and Grotowski) are the creators of a theatre of transition. Their productions
have shattered the ways of seeing and doing theatre and have obliged us to reflect on the past and
present with an entirely different awareness...For this reason, their successors can only emulate them if
they themselves live in transition'1.
One cannot penetrate the secrets of the Kathakali actor, much less copy his training or technique
because to be a Kathakali actor is not a choice but a calling.9
'The Third Theatre suggests ways of shaping our 'whys'. It is not a theatrical style, nor an alliance
of groups, still less a movement or an international association; nor is it a school, an aesthetic, or a set
of techniques'.10
'Barba's Odin incorporates aspects from all these avant-garde and experimental tendencies.13 The
result is what Barba terms the "third theatre".14
'...Stanislavski failed to accept himself as an actor, Artaud17 did not succeed in giving material
form to his visions; Brecht could not do without an orthodoxy, nor was he able to come to terms with it
in his artistic practise, saturated with individualism and anarchy.'18
'The difficulty in understanding what the Third Theatre is depends on the search for a unitary
definition which fixes in one mould the meaning of a theatre reality which is different. But the third
theatre may be defined precisely by the lack of a common unitary meaning. It is the sum of all those
theatres which are, each in its own way, constructors of meaning. ...the personal meaning of their doing
theatre: what Jouvet19 called 'the legacy from us to ourselves'. But, and this is what is important, each
defines its meaning and legacy by embodying them in a precise activity and through a distinct
professional identity.'20
'Theatre anthropology postulates that the pre-expressive level is at the root of various performing
techniques and that there exists, independently of traditional culture a transcultural 'physiology'.27
The Concept of 'pre-expressive' is useful only when in relationship to the performer, someone
who uses an extra-daily body technique in a situation of organized representation. The techniques of
levitation, the martial arts, ping-pong and tai-chi are all extra-daily techniques but have nothing to do
with the pre-expressive.29
'In this deconstruction/reconstruction approach to dramaturgy, the script is a mere catalyst for the
performance text rather than a detailed map it must follow... The performance text is thus neither a
staged version of the original dramatic text nor a piece created entirely from improvisation without
regard to the writer's original script. It is a product of the meeting between the dramatic text, the
director, and the actors.'32
'When you've seen one Van Gogh canvas...It's the same thing. If that's the kind of criterion you
use, there is no need to read the novels of James Joyce or Dostoyevsky, or to look at Cezanne's
paintings. All you do is choose one book and you can burn the rest. In my opinion, this so-called
"weakness" is actually the artist's very mode of expression.' (Hagested, 1969:56)36
'The production is bilingual and Brecht, who speaks German, is translated by Mackie Messer into
the language of the country where the production is taking place. Both are
observers of 'history' but whereas Brecht is portrayed as the passionate scientist, Mackie Messer is
the pragmatist, without feeling and devoid of hope. In the scene where Kattrin is raped and condemned
to death, the Brecht character shows an emotional engagement as well as a necessary and painful
distance, while Mackie Messer curiously follows the action in order to 'measure' coldly and clinically
the degree of suffering.'43
'Brecht's departure from Berlin in 1993, for example, was prompted by the Cook from
Mother Courage who, in an obvious reference to the Nazis' book-burning rituals, set fire to a
book in her frying pan and danced around the stage to a cacophonous mixture of classical music and
march tunes as the pages were consumed in flames. In a similar vein, it was Arturo Ui, the incarnation
of Nazi brutality in Barba's production, who murdered Walter Benjamin. And Mackie Messer stuffed a
copy of the Soviet newspaper Pravda (which means "truth") down Kattrin's
throat, almost choking her, as they danced in celebration of Brecht's triumphant return to East Berlin in
1948.
'As produced by this Danish-based troupe, the evening is a provocative crossbreeding of theater,
politics and biography, and it is also a demonstration of collective performance art.
In common with his former colleague, Jerzy Grotowski, Mr. Barba takes a laboratory approach to
the interrelationship of cultures and myths. Drawing freely on his work with Grotowski, Mr. Barba
offers an evening of kinesthetic theater, in the double sense of the word - art in action ... as author and
director, Mr. Barba bears the firebrand of Brecht. Potential didacticism is avoided by the fierce
collaborative determination of the nine-man cast, alternatively speaking English and German and
undertaking a regiment of roles. The actors have been well-schooled in mime, dance and the martial
arts; they are also adept at playing various musical instruments.
The precision in performance also carries one past the elliptical sections of the script. After a
visceral 90 minutes, we are left with a portrait of Brecht as an artist harassed but unyielding.'45
'The main point about Eugenio Barba is that his images are alive, and stick in mind, which means
that a piece like Brecht's Ashes 2 can be enjoyed even if you're apathetic to its materials or
dubious about its intellectual premises. The work is image-work first and last, owing something
(predictably) to Grotowski, to Kantor and other Eastern European directors, perhaps most of all to
Brecht himself, who really began for Europe the disassembling of the naturalistic stage.
Not that sources are everything: Barba's images are original in their combination of simplicity and
simultaneity. He's a collagist and satirical cartoonist with theatrical passion, in this piece pulling a
character from one Brecht work, a prop from another, an action from a third, then setting the three off
in a distorted dance down one end of the stage while he starts up a similar combination with
antithetical elements at the other. ...
Like his subject, Barba's achievement is paradoxical and divided against itself. His images are rich
and arresting enough to interest any audience, but the intellectual matter they bear is schematic and
unfulfilling. The piece lives to revel in Brecht's contradictions as if he were a dissertation instead of a
human being; it stages a theoretical argument in image form as if the function of the theater were
literary criticism.'46
'by living in other worlds, the anthropologist becomes a part of and participates in 'otherness'.
...By sharing the life of a community, she acquires knowledge of another world. This means that her
culturally conditioned way of thinking and judging is partially suspended. Only when this happens can
she gain access to the reality of the 'others'. (Hastrup, 1988)47
'A heavy, disturbing silence replaces the traditional curtain call. As a spectator, one is left with an
overwhelming sense of loss, of isolation, of despair in the face of the unmitigated pessimism of the
final image: the relics of our western culture buried under the 'blood' of our children, and all of it
consumed in the flames of the apocalypse'.
'Red twine, masks, shells and a silk scarf are some of the more elemental means used by the
Danish theatre company Odin to weave together striking images in the show Talabot.
...With music played on accordians, harps and guitars, these objects link together a woman
anthropologist's life story with the history of her post-war generation.
Scattered like leaves are portraits of figures like the revolutionary Che Guevara, theatre pioneer
Artaud and Chairman Mao, whose ghostly presence's inform Odin's interpretation of the
anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup's life. Other ghosts have a more physical manifestation and enter into
scenes played out between Kirsten and her father. ...But that's as far as the facts take you - the rest
requires keeping a sharp eye out for the recurring motifs (the shells and the scarf) which propel you
into a maze of images, that bring into explosive contact diverse figures from the past and present.'55
'In the production, a lot of importance is given to singing, the voice, and to sound effects. These
sound landscapes, which are a testimony to the wonderful skills of the performers, bewitch the
spectators. But the essential component of the production is visual. The costumes are beautiful, the
objects are often handled as if they were amulets, the masks create an imaginative world, and the mise-
en-scene surprises and continually forces the attention from one corner of the stage to the other.'55
'Our stay here is built upon the idea of barter. Imagine two very different tribes, each on their own
side of the river. Each tribe can live for itself, talk about the other, praise or slander it. But every time
one of them rows over to the other shore it is to exchange something. One does not row over to carry
on ethnographic research, to observe the other's way of life, but rather to give and take: a handful of
salt for a scrap of cloth, a bow for a fistful of beads.
The goods we trade are cultural.'58
'...I raise precisely those questions which were not confronted by the American avant-garde in
relation to their 'celebratory' use of other cultures. This 'use' amounts, in my view, to a naive and
unexamined ethnocentricity. Quite simply, I would like to show that borrowing, stealing and
exchanging from other cultures is not necessarily an 'enriching' experience for the cultures themselves.
Interculturalism can be liberating, but it can also be a 'continuation of colonialism, a further
exploitation of other cultures'.
'It is often stressed that any attempt to use the conventions, devices and practices of the traditional
theatre for expressing modern experience, would either dilute the intensity and immediacy of the
experience, or distort the traditional forms themselves, or possibly do both.'70
'...The body is re-built for the scenic fiction. This 'art body' - and therefore, 'unnatural body'- is
neither male nor female. At the pre-expressive level, sex is of little import. Typical male energy and
typical female energy do not exist. There exists only an energy specific to a given individual.'77
'The participants' frustration was caused not only by the monolithic, controlled way ISTA ran the
conference, but by its failure to show, or even discuss, major Western theatre work and relevant
traditions...There were no modern Asian theatres...Barba seemed to be using this huge event - 175
participants and surely a sizeable budget - to continue his personal research. He was accused, by
Asians, of cultural imperialism, and by Europeans of indulging in "the post-colonial
anthropological romance." I saw institutional egocentricity and insularism.'79
'Eugenio Barba and the ISTA meeting appeared to be starting from the utopian position of an
asexual idea of energy, whereas many of the women present, particularly theatre practitioners, argued
that it was impossible to ignore an actor's sex and that any theoretical position on performing must
take into account sexual differences'.80
'What I criticise Barba for is becoming unreflexive in particular contexts. One such context is
where the Asian Other is a voiceless part of one's discourse. A second is where Barba presents his
work as if it were part of a grand empirical and scientific enterprise through which all the professional
problems of the performer will be solved'85
BARBA, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe, London, Routledge, 1995.
The production that Barba went to see was Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
the French Romantic dramatist.
'For years, as an immigrant, I experienced every single day the wearing seesaw of being accepted
or rejected on the basis of 'pre-expressive' communication.BARBA, Eugenio, The Paper
Canoe, (London, Routledge, 1995). P.4.
The Warsaw Theatre school at that time was very prestigious and included as tutors some of
Poland's leading theatre people. 'Warsaw was still in ruins...Rebuilding was a slow process...There
seemed to be an irreconcilable conflict between the quality of the theatre in Poland and the daily reality
of most people's lives. This conflict led Barba to question the theatre's worth and his belief in its
political value'. WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre (London , Routledge, 1995)
Jerzy Grotowski, the polish theatre practitioner, was at the beginning of his career at this time. He
had founded the Polish Theatre Laboratory and was working on his theories surrounding what he
called 'Poor Theatre'. Grotowski's work can be divided into four sections; Theatre of Performance to
1969, Theatre of Participation to 1975, Theatre of Sources to 1982 and Objective Drama from 1983.
FOWLER, Richard, The Four Theatres of Jerzy Grotowski, In, New Theatre
Quarterly (hereafter NTQ), Vol 1, No. 2, May 1985.
Forefather's Eve was written by Adam Mickiewicz the acclaimed Polish Poet and
founder of the Romantic Movement in Polish literature. The play was written in separate sections and
was not intended for the stage.
It was after Barba established the Odin that he arranged the first tour of the West from February
to March 1966. Barba also arranged a series of workshops in Holstebro each July for three years from
1966. The workshops were conducted by Grotowski and his leading actor Ryszard Cieslak.
Barba visited the Kalamandalam training school in Kerala, India, in 1963. Kathakali is an Indian
form of theatre that is based on an ancient martial art form known as kalarippayatt.
CHRISTOFFERSEN, Erik, Exe, The Actor's Way, (London, Routledge, 1993).
BARBA, Eugenio, The Third Theatre: a Legacy from Us to Ourselves, NTQ, Vol
VIII, No.29, February 1992.
Richard Schechner is University Professor, New York University. He is editor of The
Drama Review and artistic director of East Coast Artists. His books include The Future of
Ritual, Performance Theory and Between Theatre and Anthropology.
WATSON, Ian - Towards a Third Theatre; (London, Routledge, 1993).
'Barba actually mediates several Western avant-garde traditions. He is not directly in the line that
leads from Alfred Jarry through Dada and Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd, Happenings, and
environmental theatre to post-modern dance and performance art. Nor is he directly in the line that
leads from symbolism, expressionism, epic theatre, and performances with a deep social purpose to
street and guerrilla theatre. Nor is he directly in the line of group theatres and theatres of alternative
lifestyles and communities.' Schechner, Ibid, Forward xvii.
Ibid, Forward - xvii.
15 Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) Russian actor, director, teacher of acting and
performance theorist.
Stanislavsky's theories have been absorbed into Western theatre mainly as a result of the work of
Lee Strasberg at the actors' studio in New York. Stanislavsky's theories on acting are now commonly
referred to as 'the method'.
Bertolt Brecht, (1898-1956) was a German poet and dramatist. Brecht is known as a great
(Marxist) playwright and is particularly renowned for his theories on 'alienation'.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French actor, director, poet and theorist. Artaud is
remembered for his theories on theatre of cruelty which he outlines in his book The Theatre and
it's Double.
BARBA, Eugenio, In, NTQ, Vol V111, No 29, Feb 1992.
Louis Jouvet, (1887-1951) French actor and director, was an important figure in French theatre
before the second world war. He was appointed director of the Comedie Francaise in 1940.
BARBA, Eugenio, In, NTQ, Vol 111, No 29, Feb 1992. P.7.
Nicola Savarese teaches History of Theatre and Performance at the University of Lecce. Savarese
has travelled widely in the East, particularly Japan. He has published two works on the relationship
between Oriental and Occidental theatre, Il teatro al di la del mare (The Theatre Beyond
the Sea - Turin 1980) and Teatro e spettacolo fra Oriente e Occidente (Theatre and
Performance between East and West - Bari 1989).
WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre, P.151
BARBA, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe, (London, Routledge, 1993) P.6.
'Jean-Louis Barrault, who helped Decroux formulate the principles of Corporeal Mime in the
1920's called him a puritan revolutionary...a legend circulated about how Decroux used to stop
performances to repeat a passage until he got it perfect...Concerned less with entertainment than with
purity of execution ...His ultimate concern has been pedagogic rather than performative, his goal has
been to train actors to be in perfect control of their bodies.' SKLAR, Deirdre, Etienne Decroux's
Promethean Mime, In, The Drama Review, Vol 29, No. 4, 1985.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, (1874-1940/3) was a Russian actor and director and is now famous for his
theories on acting called Biomechanics. His theories are based on the notion that the director has
complete control over the actor, similar to E. Gordon Craig's notion of the Uber Marionette. For
further information on Meyerhold see, Braun, Edward, Meyerhold on Theatre (London,
Methuen 1991)
Rysard Cieslak, (1937-1990) is principally remembered for his outstanding performance in
Grotowski's production of The Constant Prince based on the play by Calderon. Cieslak,
besides being an actor of remarkable skill, also accompanied Grotowski in his work with theatre
groups and acted as a tutor on numerous workshops. He also performed for Peter Brook's company in
The Mahabharata.
BARBA, Eugenio, SAVARESE, Nicola, The Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, The
Secret Art of the Performer. (London, Routledge, 1991).
See, BARBA, Eugenio, The Way of Refusal, the Theatre's Body-In-Life, (NTQ, Vol,
14, No 16, Nov 1988).
Ibid, P.108.
See, BARBA, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe, (London, Routledge, 1995) pp 104-108
Ibid, P.107.
Watson, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre, (London, Routledge, 1993) P.76.
Ibid,
P.81.
For further information on the productions see CHRISTOFFERSEN, Erik Exe, The Actor's
Way, (London, Routledge, 1993), and WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre,
(London, Routledge 1993).
Ibid, pp 104, 105.
Quote from Towards a Third Theatre, P107.
See WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre, Chapter 5, Productions,
(London, Routledge, 1995) and CHRISTOFFERSEN, Erik Exe, The Actor's Way,
(London, Routledge, 1993).
The relationship between actor and spectator is an important element for Barba in the Odin
productions. This is clearly noticeable from the diagrams of the stage plans. See inserts for plans of
these two plays and others in the repertoire.
Bertolt Brecht the German poet and dramatist, went into exile when Hitler came to power in
1933. He first went to Switzerland, then to Denmark and Finland and then to the USA. During these
years he wrote Mother Courage and Her Children, The Life of Galileo,
The Good Person of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Walter Benjamin, philosopher, critic and scholar was a close friend of Brecht's. He took his life
on the Spanish border while fleeing the Nazis.
Helen Weigel, Brecht's wife accompanied him during his period of exile. She helped him found
and run their theatre company The Berliner Ensemble and is particularly noted for her performance in
Brecht's Mother Courage.
See Brecht on Theatre, by John Willet,
CHRISTOFFERSEN, Erik Exe, The Actors Way, chapter 4, The Open
Room, (London, Routledge, 1993).
La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York was formed in 1961. La Mama produced and
housed such groups as Mabou Mines and Joe Chaiken's, Open Theatre.
Gussow, Mel "Brecht's Ashes 2: A Man's Art," New York
Times, 2 May 1984: C21.
FEINGOLD, Michael (1984) "Die neue Brechtlichkeit," In, Village
Voice 29, 1979.
From, SHOEMAKER, David, Report from Holstebro: Odin Theatret's
'Talabot'. NTQ, Vol V1, No 24, November 1990.
'Talabot was the name of the Norwegian cargo ship on which Barba embarked on his first voyage
as a merchant seaman in 1956. It is also the name of the French engineer Paulin-Francois Talabot, who
was involved in the planning of the Suez Canal. And in the Mayan language of the Yucatan, 'Talabot'
means 'to reach the sea shore (Tal'bot), or 'to come to agitate the body'(Talah bot)'. Shoemaker,
David, Report from Holstebro: Odin Teatret's 'Talabot'. Ibid NTQ
Ibid, P309.
Ibid P310.
Knud Rasmussen travelled by dog-sled for three years along the length of the Arctic coast
gathering Eskimo myths and songs.
Antonin Artaud is considered to be the father of modern Avant Garde Theatre. His book,
The Theatre and Its Double, outlines his theories.
Che Guevara was an Argentine revolutionary who was also a medical doctor and director of the
National Bank of Cuba.
SHOEMAKER, David. NTQ Vol V1, No 24, Nov 1990.
SIMPSON, Penny, "Weaving Striking Images," South Wales
Echo, 4th September 1990.
ZAHND, Rene, "La farce de la tragedie humaine," Gazette de Lausanne, 21 October
1989.
BARBA, Eugenio, The Floating Islands, Ed. Ferdinado Taviani, (Holstebro, 1979)
pp 93-147.
WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre, P.23. Excerpt from television interview
with E. Barba.
See, BOVIN, Mette, Provocation Anthropology, Bartering Performance in Africa, in,
The Drama Review, Vol. 32, No.1. 1988.
CHRISTOFFERSEN, Erik Exe, The Actor's Way, P64.
WATSON, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre, P. 112.
Ibid footnotes 37 and 38.
Useful references on Schechner's work and theories are: Performance Theory,
(Routledge, 1994), Between Theatre and Anthropology, (University of Pennsylvania Press
1985), and By Means of Performance, ed. Schechner and Willa Appel, (Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
See, The Theatre and Its Double, Antonin Artaud, and Artaud on Theatre, edited by
Claude Shumacher.
The Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth, Wales, has an extensive library of
documents, film and video covering a wide range of performance traditions, both East and West. The
library also contains records of conferences and workshops related to performance and performance
theory.
See, Thinking About Interculturalism, Bonnie Marranca, in Interculturalism
and Performance, ed. Maranca and Dasgupta. (New York, Performing Arts Publications, 1991).
BHARUCHA, Rustom, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
(London, Routledge, 1990).
Peter Brook is an English director who after an illustrious career in mainstream theatre left
England for Paris in 1971. Under the influence of Grotowski and Jean Louis Barrault he opened his
International Centre of Theatre Research to which he has devoted the rest of his career.
See, Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interface of Tradition and Modernity, by Nemi
Chandra Jain from The Dramatic Touch of Difference.
See, FISCHER-LICHTE, Erika, RILEY, Josephine, GISSENWEHRER, Michael, Ed's. The
Dramatic Touch of Difference, (Pub: Gunter Naar Verlag Tubingen, 1990), P.207.
For a brief introduction to the history of theatrical interculturalism see, Theatre Own and
Foreign, The Intercultural Trend in Contemporary Theatre, by Erika Fisher-Lichte (Ibid, P.11)
Patrice Pavis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris 8.
PAVIS, Patrice, ed, Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre? in The
Intercultural Performance Reader, (London, Routledge,1996).
The Theatre of Migrants, from Theatre and the World, by Rustom Bharucha. P.56.
Ibid P.57.
Ibid P61.
BARBA, Eugenio, SAVARESE, Nicola, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology; The Secret
Art of the Performer (London, Routledge, 1991), P.81.
See The Actor's Energy: Male/Female versus Animus/Anima, Barba Eugenio, NTQ,
Vol 111, No 11, Aug 1987.
MUNK, Erica, The Rites of Women, article in the Performing Arts
Journal, Vol X, No 2, 1986.
BASSNET, Susan, Magdalena; International Women's Experimental Theatre,
(Oxford, Berg Publishers, 1989) P.123.
The Magdalena Project...is a complex network of ongoing research initiatives into that most
understudied and underdeveloped area: women's theatre.
ZARRILLI, Philip, For Whom is the "Invisible" Not Visible? Reflections on
Representation in the Work of Eugenio Barba, The Drama Review, Vol 32, No, 1,
1988.
Ibid P.96.
Ibid, P.101.
Eugenio Barba to Philip Zarrilli, About the Visible and the Invisible in the Theatre and
About the ISTA in Particular. The Drama Review, Vol. 32, No.3, 1988.
TOM MURPHY: THE PLAYS
Murphy, T. 1961. A Whistle in the Dark
1962. On the Outside
1968. Famine
1968. The Orphans
1969. A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant
1971. The Morning After Optimism
1972. The White House
1974. On the Inside
1974. The Vicar of Wakefield (adaptation)
1976. The Sanctuary Lamp
1976. The J. Arthur Maginnis Story
1979. Epitaph under Ether (compilation from Synge)
1980. The Blue Macushla
1981. The Informer (adaptation)
1982. She Stoops to Conquer
1983. The Gigli Concert
1985. Conversations on a Homecoming
1985. Brigid (Television Play)
1985. Bailegangaire
1985. A Thief of a Christmas
1989. Too late for Logic
1991. The Patriot Game
1997. She Stoops to Folly
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Belsey, C. 1985b. The Subject of Tragedy. London: Routledge.
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Braidotti, R. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance. UK: Polity Press.
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Case, S.E. 1988. 'From Split Subject to Split Britches', Feminine
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Diamond, E. 1989. 'Mimesis, Mimicry, and the "True-Real"',
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Diamond, E. 1990. 'Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative
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Diamond, E. 1996. 'Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic
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Etherton, M. 1989. Contemporary Irish Dramatists. London:
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Fitzgibbon, T. G. 1987. 'Thomas Murphy's Dramatic Vocabulary', Irish
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Forte, J. 1989. 'Realism, Narrative and the Feminist Playwright - A Problem of
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Friel, B. 1980. Faith Healer. London: Faber & Faber.
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Vocal Expression in Oral Traditions and Theatrical Performance with particular reference to the 'Caoineadh'
Betty Cahill
Man has....... failed to appreciate his voice; he has underestimated it and neglected it and
allowed it to waste away; he has virtually strangled it, chained it up and confined it in a straitjacket; as
he has so often done before, man has once again turned his sinning against nature into dogma: the
dogma of tightly restricted, neatly labelled categories- male and female voices, high and low voices,
children's voices and adult voices; the dogma that maintains that every human being has been assigned
a particular register from birth.......The truth is that the natural human voice, freed from all artificial
restrictions, is able to embrace all these categories and registers- indeed, it is able to go much
further.
Alfred Wolfsohn1
Voice is an extension of the self, and as Cummings-Wing states, it is the leading edge of
individual identity- the audible expression of the personality.2 It is not surprising, therefore, that the
sound of the human voice is one of the theatre's most powerful attributes and its importance can not be
underestimated on the stage today. It is essential to breathe life and energy into both verbal and non-
verbal performance. However, vocal control, characteristic of Western society, is being practised on
the stage, therefore the possibilities of the voice are not being fully realized. The minimalist approach
to voice work in acting is predominant and the theatre has suffered as a result.
The restrictive use of the voice in our society is in marked contrast to oral societies where vocal
expressiveness was essential for its survival. Its function also included the acknowledgement of the life
cycles, birth, marriage, death, as part of the process of living. A high value is placed upon emotional
control in rationalized Western culture, and as societal beings we coexist through mutually accepted
codes of behaviour. Theatre, however, is not real life, therefore, its function is not to confirm the
mainstream values of life, but to represent all aspects and extremities of life. Because it is a communal
forum, it can create that special atmosphere to provoke deep, often subconscious emotions and to
embody those drives and forces in the human mind which affect both the individual and society. It is
not surprising that the new theoreticians in the theatre this century, Artaud, Brook and Grotowski
rejected the supremacy of the 'word', associated with the rational, and looked to the East, to recapture
for the theatre that sense of spontaneity and expressiveness characteristic of oral societies, before
primordial individuation took place. They were searching for a new performance language, which
would give equal status to both the verbal and non-verbal. The voice was no longer to be just the
medium of communicating texts, its role was to express all the sounds of the body from repetitive
gibberish to excruciating screams.
The fascination which the theoreticians had with the predominately oral cultures of the East
prompted me to consider our own oral heritage, and what it could offer to the stage. The focus of this
paper is to explore one aspect of our culture, 'the caoineadh' [keening] which contains both verbal and
non-verbal elements. Even though keening is universal and usually associated with death, in certain
cultures it can also be a part of a prenuptial ceremony. This is evident from anthropologist, Kenneth E.
Reed's account of a prenuptial ceremony of the Gahuku's of Papua, New Guinea in 1965:
.....The songs followed one another without a perceptible break, a single shrill and keening
voice lifting now and then to point the way to a new set 3.
However, in Irish culture keening was exclusively associated with death. Keening usually
suggests a sort of high pitched moaning- a sound without words, even an animal like sound, but the
'caoineadh' was not inarticulate. As well as the stylised sobs and wails, it contained a whole tradition
of poetic utterance, praise of the dead and anger at his enemies or at the natural forces which caused his
death 4.
Plays have a cultural context which must be acknowledged in performance. Many of the classics
originated from oral traditions which used both verbal and non-verbal elements and incorporated all
styles of performance. The very soul of these plays, which includes Greek, Shakespearean and the
poetic dramas of Yeats and Synge, could not be communicated to an audience in a purely realistic way
as it would ignore their charm, power and language.
The appeal of art is to the imagination and few things quell the imagination more than a copy of
the material world; this has been the product of naturalism for the last hundred years. Representational
theatre disappoints because of the inadequacy of speech to human feeling. In contrast, the speech of
ritual, which includes the 'caoineadh', is rhythmical, ordering the emotions through balance and
repetition. This paper will discuss the stage performance of the 'caoineadh' in Synge's 'Deirdre of the
Sorrows' in this context. The 'caoineadh' as a public, ritualistic vocalization of death, had a cathartic
affect on the community. In performance, this cathartic affect could extend to the audience. The
elevated style of the 'caoineadh' is enhanced by its poetic language whose meaning is often made clear
by the rhythm. The actor should have the vocal capacity to express its heightened emotion and tap into
people's innate response to sound and language. The theatre should not fear this intensity by being
entrenched in a particular style of performance. The passion, heightened emotion and vocal capacity,
associated with the 'caoineadh' should be experienced in the theatre. Some interesting parallels
between the lead keener and the Grotowskian actor will be explored, which highlights its timelessness
and relevance for today.
The Irish oral tradition: the 'caoineadh'
This country has a strong oral tradition and still preserves a lot of residual orality. Vocally we are
also an expressive nation associated with the euphemism 'the gift of the gab'. But this sense of
expressiveness, innate in our culture is not reflected in our theatre. It was admitted at a Theatre
Seminar, organised at the Mansion House in May, 1984, that theatre in Ireland is "in a sort
of doldrum.........waiting for some new thing to bring it to life again"5 . The same
observation could be made today as theatre has become peripheral to the majority of people's lives.
Instead of waiting for something 'new' to happen, the mind, body, voice unity, which is natural to the
oral medium, should be rediscovered and brought back into the theatre. Grotowski defines this as
"organicity" i.e. where there is no discursive mind to block immediate organic
reactions 6. This sense of unity and non-division extended to the oral word, where, Ong maintains,
never exists in a simply verbal context. He points out that spoken words are modifications of a total,
existential situation, which always engages the body in a natural and inevitable way 7. This can be seen
in a description, illustrated by Delargy, on the art of a storyteller.
His piercing eyes are on my face, his limbs are trembling, as, immersed in his story, and
forgetful of all else, he puts his very soul into the telling. Obviously much affected by his
narrative.....he raises his voice at certain passages, atother times it becomes almost a whisper. He
speaks fairly fast, but his enunciation is at all times clear...Once he became so exhausted that he gave
up in the middle of a tale, but I coaxed him to continue8 .
The aim of the Irish Renaissance Period, at the turn of the century, was, according to Yeats, to
bring the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland to an audience "trained to listen by its
passion for oratory". In his 'Essays and Introduction' Yeats says that
"literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies, and
passionless meditations unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient
times"9 . Synge turned to the people in the Aran Islands, who were in contact with real life
and lived in what Yeats described as "the orgiastic moment when life outleaps its
limits". Synge's plays are about people in contact with the mystery of life, love and death,
before any of the idealists or the philosophers stepped in to modify or insulate the shock 10. This is
particularly evident, when these people come in contact with the real and palpitating mystery of death.
Synge gives an account of witnessing a funeral in the Aran Islands.
While the grave was being opened the women sat down among the tombstones.....and began
the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative,
seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending
her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant
of sobs11 .
The 'caoineadh' is also referred to as 'caoine' or keening in English. The 'caoineadh' is defined as
a loud public lament which takes place at funerals. It is found world-wide, though it has gradually
disappeared from most European societies as the values of the literate, urban, industrialised world have
spread. Laments, according to Angela Bourke, may consist simply of ritualised wailing and groaning,
but they may be elaborate compositions of poetry and music 12. 'Caoineadh Airt O'Laoghaire' [The
Cry of Art O'Leary], is the longest surviving example, consisting of four hundred lines, and was sung
or chanted by his wife, Eileen. The 'caoineadh' also contains non-verbal elements because it was
accompanied by stylised gestures and the swaying movement of the body. Brendan Kennelly
recognises the power of this lament because "the woman's passion is fiercely
real"; he also claims that the fierce, passionate, violent reality creates both the poem's
momentum and its primal, driving rhythms. But it is above all "a cry- a violent cry,
beyond words, put into words"[his italics]. 'Caoineadh Airt O'
Laoghaire' for him is a cry which is dragged down into language, elevated by it and transfigured in it
13.
Bourke recognises the dramatic qualities inherent in the lament, a point acknowledged, though not
developed in her article 'Caoineadh na Marbh' [The Cry of the Dead]. Her opening sentence
recognises it as a native ritual, which horrified travellers and the priests, but she also poses the
possibility of the lament as a dramatic piece 14. Taking an objective view, it does have all the
hallmarks of a dramatic performance, for example, there are many similarities between the lamenter
and the Grotowskian actor. Grotowski, in the first place, did not see the division between actor and
man, because, for him the actor did not have a function outside himself; the actor's self was the logos
of performance. In the same way the lamenter gave of herself in the performance of the death ritual.
There were professional keeners hired to wail and cry over the dead as the relatives of the dead person
were not satisfied that their own keening properly filled the demands of the sad occasion. O'Madagain
points out that there were usually only two or three women in any neighbourhood that were skilled
beyond all others in keening. These also had the gift of poetry and they would pour forth over the dead
person a lament in Irish, partly extempore, partly prepared, delivered in a kind of plaintive recitative; at
the conclusion of which they would lead a choral cry15 .
Secondly, through rigorous physical training, Grotowski's aim was to bring the actor to such a
point of heightened awareness, that, as in a trance, he was able to offer himself as a sacrifice to the
audience and to affect some kind of transformation in the spectator. The lead keener, too, had the
ability to affect the mourners. Bourke refers to her as a tragic actor, whose voice, appearance and
behaviour all contributed to her authority and whose willingness to experience distressing emotions to
the full made a catharsis available to all who joined her16 .
A third similarity is that Grotowski wanted the actor's body and voice to be able to achieve those
physical extremes that usually occur in conditions of emotional excess. Fowler claims that Grotowski's
work was based upon the idea that the actor must be able to perform physical and vocal feats
absolutely beyond the ability of the spectator 17. Referring to a keening woman, Croker remarks on
her extraordinary memory, her energy, her vocal ability, which proved her perfect comprehension of
the subject 18. It was also usual for the keeners to close their eyes, as if in a trance, to ensure that they
were not distracted from their task. The intensity of both the Grotowskian actor and the lamenter is also
evident. It is portrayed in Eileen's passionate rage against Abraham Morris whom she criticizes and
curses for killing her husband, Art O'Laoghaire. The intensity of the Grotowskian actor is depicted by
Ryszard Cieslak's portrayal of the title role in 'The Constant Prince'. Finally, both the lamenter and the
Grotowskian actor used verbal and non-verbal utterance, the lamenter repeated 'och-ochone' [alas] at
the conclusion of each verse. Certain phrases in Grotowski's 'Akropolis' such as "our
Akropolis" or "the cemetery of the tribes" were also repeated.
Performance in the theatre today: overview of plays from the oral tradition:
the 'caoineadh' in 'Deirdre of the Sorrows'
Extensive vocal training is needed in the theatre today so that actors' voices can achieve the range
and heightened power of people in oral societies. The minimalist approach to acting for all types of
plays is characteristic of the stage today. This has its roots in the plays of the naturalistic and realistic
period where characters' identities were more effectively revealed on the stage through well motivated
and true-to-life speech and action 19. It may also suit characters in certain plays of the latter part of this
century, born out of an era when language and the discursive mind were under suspicion. S.B in Friel's
'Philadelphia Here I Come' is one such example. But, not even the smallest theatres of stage realism
are as intimate as the television screen where actors, with close up camera shots and recorded on
microphone, attain the ultimate in quiet subtlety and casual expression. As the most pervasive medium
of public entertainment, the vocal techniques of television production influences young, aspiring
actors, who tend to be ignorant and unappreciative of the heightened technical demands and artistic
versatility of the stage actor 20. Western society, with its high value placed on emotional control, also
leads an actor to distrust extravagant, brave and passionate speaking, believing it to be 'ham' and 'over
the top'. The majority of actors seem to have the notion that, "being small is more truthful
than being large" to use Rodenburg's critical terminology, this only serves to
"cultivate the stunted voice rather than an expressive one"21 . Finally,
in today's fast moving society, most of us tend to speak in shorter thoughts with a fractured rhythm
using faster and shorter breaths 22. Blocks in breathing and in speaking prevent an actor from realising
the intensity, rhythm and pace of a text. The challenge for him in the theatre today is to learn the vocal
skills necessary to reach the level of expressiveness which came natural to our ancestors.
Plays have cultural connections, therefore, the language of plays, which derive from an oral
society, is heightened, rich with imagery, similes and metaphors, as opposed to being naturalistic and
unadorned, and are usually written in prose and verse. Greek theatre and Shakespearean drama were
products of the oral tradition, because at that time, the majority of the people were not literate, and
relied on verbal communication. Greek theatre was born out of the great festivals of Dionysus. The aim
of Greek theatre was to arouse the passions of the audience to a high degree of excitation in order that
they would experience a catharsis. Rodenburg recognises the "raw and brutal"
language of Greek theatre23 . The most important tool which the actors and chorus used to convey
feelings and stir the passions of an audience was the human voice. The use of the voice was, Newham
maintains, "acrobatic and extensive, serving to communicate emotions of extreme
magnitude" 24. This is further enforced by Williams' view that in
'Antigone', it is the words that are the whole situation, for they contain and compel the intense
physical realization 25. It could also be applied to Shakespearean drama where the words are not only
adequate to serve the character's outward purpose but they can also reveal and portray the psychology
of the character. The rhetorical style of expression was accompanied by gesture. Shakespearean
language is often denied its rough and anarchic possibilities which, according to Berry, "is
always explicit", so in performance the thought and feeling must seem instinctive and
must be let go unambiguously with the words 26. This is in contrast to the dramas of realism where the
need for subtext highlights the inadequacy of the word. Linklater advises that actors playing
Shakespeare must be brave enough to let their reality expand to fill the largeness of his people and the
heightened speech of the poetic plane of their existence and not try to make them familiar and 'true' to
some notion of twentieth century reality. She cautions that this sort of domestication plays against the
textual quality that the speaking becomes increasingly false the closer it gets to contemporary rhythms
and a strange, obverse melodrama emerges. Linklater rejects a generalized approach to acting because
it ignores the play's language in favour of "aridity which passes in today's theatre for
honest, unadorned speaking" 27.
This also applies to the non-verbal elements of these plays, which are nearly always ignored for
naturalistic considerations. Stanford describes how in Greek drama every play has its 'nexus' of
inarticulate sounds of emotions, which although using the process of phonation are not quite verbal;
they are the most primitive of all human sounds, more like animal cries than speech. They are,
however, "of supreme importance for the emotional effects of Greek tragedy, setting up
physical and emotional vibrations that no articulate words could" 28
. Yet, in performance, the actor is inclined to gloss over the 'oh', 'ah' and 'alas' in a
naturalistic tone that sounds contrived, imposed and even artificial. This is also applicable to
Shakespearean drama. Even though Sir John Gielgud recognises that the part of King Lear requires
"considerable staying power and a great variety and strength of voice"29 , his
rendition of Lear's "alack/alack" [Act iv, Scene vii] lacked the raw, torturous emotion
characteristic of its primitive sources.
Yeats is quoted as saying in 1903 "that Greek acting was great because it did all but
everything with the voice, and modern acting may be great when it does everything with voice and
movement"30 . This is particularly relevant to Synge's plays 'Deirdre of the Sorrows' and
'Riders to the Sea' because both contain powerful elements of the 'caoineadh' which are often
subsumed and even totally ignored in a realistic rendition of the play. The assumption can be made that
the experience of witnessing displays of grief in the Aran Islands inspired Synge to include the
'caoineadh' in his plays. In one production of 'Riders to the Sea' by Trinity players [Dublin, April
1997], for example, the heightened emotion inherent in Maurya's speech was underplayed because it
was delivered in a realistic tone. The stage directions which states that "the women are
keening softly and swaying themselves with a slow movement"31 , were practically
ignored. The production failed to ignite because the voices of the cast did not go beyond a certain
level, the level being so low that the energy and rhythms of the language were not communicated to the
audience. Synge was a dramatist of passion, not of will, who wanted to give nourishment to the
imagination and who recognised that the essential appeal of the theatre is an emotional one, directed
towards the heart rather than to the head. He was not a slice of life artist, his play 'Deirdre', for
example, was inspired by a heroic myth; but because it acquires, as Maxwell puts it, "a
body of words which familiarise" 32 that are realistic and recognisable, it is usually
performed in a naturalistic way. The power and potential of this heroic tragedy is therefore rarely
enacted on stage. One would be inclined to agree with Calderwood and Toliver when they posit that
the classics often are not interpreted but executed, and the curtain falls upon a mutilated corpse 33.
In approaching a play like 'Deirdre of the Sorrows' one must recognise that it was born out of the
folk imagination of a people steeped in an oral tradition. Synge went back to the source of the tale in
oral and manuscript versions, which contained a unique blend of sentiment and brutality. He would
also have heard many oral renditions of the story during his visits to Connemara and Aran, particularly
while working on a translation of 'Oidhe Chloinne Uisnigh' in 1901. Like the folk storytellers, Synge
grasped the relationship between the heroic world of the ancient legend and peasant Ireland in which
the story still lingered. Conchubor and the other leaders of the Ulster Cycle were euhemerised gods
who had been reduced by the storytellers to the status of mortals. Synge humanized his characters and
allowed them to act of their own free will. This may well give a realistic tone to the play, but the play
also contains many styles, which enhances its power and charm. The actors must have a range of vocal
techniques to perform the realistic, heroical, lyrical, pastoral, mythical, dramatic elements in the play.
The texture of the first act is dramatic; the excitement, the hurry, the dread, culminates in the
elopement of Deirdre and Naisi. The first part of the play is characterized by a linear structure.
However, when Naisi and Deirdre see the open grave and realize that Conchubor has betrayed them,
Deirdre recognises that in fact it is their grave. At this point she follows the stages of grief, denial and
bitterness as Eileen Dubh did on the death of Art, even though Naisi is still alive. She denies the battle
and Ainnle's cry to Naisi that they are betrayed and broken.
Deirdre [clinging to Naisi] : There is no battle........Do not leave me,
Naisi. [p.205]
The brutality of human existence is depicted in the harsh words between Naisi and Deirdre as
Deirdre dismisses the seven years spent together as a "dream". The savagery
of their quarrel, is necessary to divide the two intense lovers:
Deirdre : Let you go where they are calling! [She looks at him for an instant
coldly.] Have you no shame loitering and talking and a cruel death facing Ainnle and Ardan
in the woods? [p.205]
Her final words to him are bitter and full of scorn.
Deirdre [bitterly] : I'm well pleased there's no one this place to make a story that Naisi
was a laughing-stock the night he died. [p.206]
But there is the possibility of transcendence and the language of her lamentations take on a lyrical
quality, beyond the reality of the world. Deirdre becomes a mythical figure and her courage is revealed
by the acceptance of and acquiescence in her preordained fate. Her resignation to her fate comes with
the belief that she will be envied because she was "chosen by Conchubor, who was wise,
and Naisi had no match for bravery" and she did not have to endure the "grey
hairs and the loosening of the teeth", [p.211] which is associated with old age. She adopts
the role of a tragic actress who knows her fate. The poignancy of the play is heightened, however,
because we are witnessing Deirdre's own life on stage. From the beginning of the play she is conscious
of herself as "Deirdre of the Sorrows", and this is echoed again in the third
act. She in a sense objectifies herself by referring to herself in the third person, but is also acutely
aware that her story will live forever by saying to Naisi:
Deirdre : Do many know what is foretold, that Deirdre will be the ruin of the Sons of
Usna, and have a little grave by herself, and a story will be told forever? [p.182]
She ends her 'caoineadh' and her life on a triumphant note confident in the knowledge that her
story will be a "joy and triumph to the ends of life and time". [p.212]
McGarry states that redundancy and repetition characterized oral thought and speech.
He defines redundancy as "repeating yourself and saying more than you have to in
order to get your message across"34 . These oral devices are used in 'Deirdre'. Deirdre
emphasis her loyalty to Naisi as follows:
......it is not I will quit your head when it's many a dark night among the snipe and plover
that you and I were whispering together. It is not I will quit your head Naisi, when it's many a night we
saw the stars among the clear trees of Glen da Ruadh, or the moon pausing on the edge of the hills.
[p.209]
The use of repetition, personification, descriptive language enhances the poetic, lyrical, musical,
rhythmic quality and gives the language of the 'caoineadh' a force of its own quite apart from its
meaning, which appeals to the senses and imagination. These poetic, linguistic images have the
potency to produce vibrations in the uncontrollable depths of the mind only if the lines are executed,
through the voice, in a non naturalistic way. Synge seems to idealize a pastoral type of existence,
because there is an intimate connection between heroic passion and the natural scene. There is a sense
of animation as Deirdre remembers Naisi and herself whispering together in the natural environment of
Glen da Ruadh. This is in marked contrast to Conchubor's relentless pursuit of Deirdre; he, an old man
offers her a place in the confined, artificial world of Eamain, with its "red gold upon the
walls, and ceilings that are set with bronze". [p.207]
Placenames are very special in Irish oral tradition, Deirdre's lament in the original is a litany of
them. Glen da Ruadh should be evoked in an almost reverent way so that the very essence of our oral
heritage and our consciousness can be communicated.
When Deirdre realises that Naisi and her brothers are dead, Macintosh posits that the linear logic
of the dramatic present is subsumed by a rhythmical ebb and flow of the syntax, whose circularity is
reinforced by the swaying of her body 35. In this play the verbal patterns harmonize with formal
movement and gesture. She crouches down and begins swaying herself backwards and forwards
keening softly. At first her words are not heard, then they become clear.
It's you three will not see age or death coming, you that were my company when the fires
on the hill-tops were put out and the stars were our friends only. I'll turn my thoughts back from this
night -that's pitiful for want of pity- to the time it was your rods and cloaks made a little tent for me
where there'd be a birch tree making shelter, and a dry stone: though from this day my own fingers
will be making a tent for me, spreading out my hairs and they knotted with the rain. [p.208]
A production of the play must incorporate both the verbal and non-verbal elements of the
'caoineadh' in order to create the atmosphere of the tragedy. Deirdre's sorrow is so great that at first
words are inadequate as she reverses back to pre-expressiveness and reacts like a wounded animal. As
the words become articulate they tend to be monosyllabic and intense and the actor's voice must
respond to the intensity created as the tragedy reaches its climax. Yeats claims that Deirdre's cry at the
outset of a reverie of passion mounts and mounts "till grief itself has carried her beyond
grief into pure contemplation". The actor must ascend into "that tragic ecstasy
which is the best that art-perhaps that life-can give"36 .
As Deirdre continues her lyrical outpourings, she becomes alienated from the world. This is
evident when Lavarcham says:
She doesn't heed us at all. We'll be hard set to rouse her. [p.209]
Her sense of power is cemented when Conchubor makes two movements towards her. She stops
him with her tone of voice the first time and the second time she says:
Deirdre : Do not raise a hand to touch me.
Conchubor retreats with a weak reply:
Conchubor : There are other hands to touch you. My fighters are set round in among
the trees. [p.210]
Deirdre, a tragic personage, transcends our common actions and speech and is a figure set apart in
her sorrow. She is human, because she epitomises all sorrow, yet she is a mythical figure because her
life is fated. The rocking of her body, associated with the 'caoineadh' and the use of repetition and
echo in her speech combine to evoke an almost dazed, trance-like state in Deirdre as she lives out her
own story. It is similar to the trance-like state of Delargy's storyteller, who was so affected by the story
he was telling. This heightened emotion defies the rationalistic paradigm and has the ability to produce
the strongest purification of the audience's senses and imaginations. The greatest dramatic intensity
can be achieved when the mimesis is not in the least 'life-like' but is very stylised. This can be
achieved through the movements of the body and especially through the voice. The voice must feed
organically into the text, to use Linklater's terminology, it is only if the thought/ feeling/ breathing
apparatus is unified and centred that the text can be released from within and not imposed from the
outside 37. But there must also be an awareness of the cultural context of the 'caoineadh'. Through the
voice the visual, aural and tactile images in the play can be received creatively by our imaginations.
The actor must have the vocal capacity to respond to all styles of performance in 'Deirdre'. The
play reaches its climax in the 'caoineadh' and the actor must not fear the heightened emotion of its
language. It is only then that the death ritual of the 'caoineadh', enacted on stage, with the passion and
intensity of its origins, has the power to evoke that which is pagan but sacred and divine, the mythical
and heroic. The 'caoineadh' also has the power to tap into racial and universal memory.
Finally, this paper makes the case that theatrical performance should have the expressiveness and
vocal capacity associated with oral societies. It is difficult for actors in the Western world to realise the
full potential of their voices as they are products of a society which does not encourage the vocal
expansiveness of the oral traditions. The actor's voice represents a major contribution to the aural
impact of theatrical production, therefore, continuous vocal work should be an integral part of every
actor's training and career. In order to create a vibrant and living theatre actors should aim to have at
their disposal vocal resources that will permit them to execute all styles, including the most elevated.
Elizabeth Cahill M.A.
Works Consulted
Th' Whole Whorl's in a Terrible State of Chassis'
The Comic Despair in O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy
Rebecca Wilson
The Comic Despair in O'Casey's Dublin TrilogyThe admixture of tragedy and comedy that has mushroomed in much modern drama frequently evinces a humour that neither serves as comic relief nor abets a life-affirming vitality but rather heightens the pathos. This phenomenon occurred of course, in much drama prior to 'modern' drama, as can be perceived, for example, in some Shakespearean tragedy, but it is particularly virulent in the work of modern dramatists such as Pirandello, Chekhov, O'Casey, Beckett etc.
Orr astutely comments on this when he refers to "the coexistence of amusement and pity,
terror and laughter', 1 and states that "the sudden switch from darkness to laughter, or vice versa,
come together in a twofold challenge". 2 The following is a look at this phenomenon in
O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy.In the Dublin Plays O'Casey demythologizes three sacrosanct episodes of
Irish history: (1) the Easter Rising of 1916 (The Plough and the Stars); (2) the Black and
Tan 'Troubles' (The Shadow of a Gunman); the Civil War between the Staters and the
Diehards (Juno and the Paycock). He particularly demythologizes the revered hero-martyr.
As Watt puts it, "he strikes a formidable blow against the dominant ideologies of Irish
society, religion and nationalisms".3 He strikes this blow with both the bludgeon of what Styan
somewhat pejoratively calls "unsubtlety of tone" 4 and with the rapier of comedy.Styan
castigates O'Casey for "final reliance on the melodramatic situation to justify itself", 5 a
statement which itself calls for some 'deconstruction'.
O'Casey wanted to write for the people - his was a 'popular' theatre, not Yeatsian poetic, mythic
drama.
He puts his theatrical ideology into the mouth of Seamus Shields:I don't profess to know much
about poetry - about poetry - I don't know much about the pearly glint of the morning dew, or the
damask sweetness of the rare wild rose, or the subtle greenness of the serpent's eye - but I think a poet's
claim to greatness depends upon his power to put passion in the common people. (The Shadow of
a Gunman, pp.106-7)Thus he logically drew on the methodology of Irish domestic melodrama
as derived from Boucicault.
Watt explicates this strand of melodrama as operating by way of identification with bourgeois morality: with the ownership of private property, with religious institutions and ideologies and most especially with marriage… Irish comic melodrama asserts the power of humanity to topple political, social and economic barriers.6The conventional melodramatic code of values insists that Melodrama typically not only employs virtue persecuted as a source of its dramaturgy, but also tends to become the dramaturgy of virtue misprized and eventually recognized.
It is about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of recognition.Above all, the
nationalist hero is an irreproachable icon of "veracity and courage". 7O'Casey, while
ostensibly utilising the armature of Irish domestic melodrama, in fact subverts it as ruthlessly as he
deconstructs the two dominant myths.
The homestead is not saved: in Juno it is stripped bare by creditors; in the Plough it is taken over by British Tommies; in the Gunman it is invaded by Black and Tans.
The virtuous maiden is not acknowledged and rewarded: in Juno she is seduced and
abandoned; in the Plough one heroine is a prostitute championed by a drunken clown in a
pub, the other is abused and abandoned by her husband, loses her baby and goes mad; in the
Gunman she is killed protecting two cowardly clowns.
There are no 'nationalist heroes', marriage is not portrayed as a noble institution and religion is
either a desperate recourse of the guilty (Juno) or a ludicrous superstition
(Gunman).
In all three plays the "political, social and economic barriers" prove insurmountable and much "humanity" is venal and/or deluded.
To cite Watt: As O'Casey assaults the dominant ideology, he also overturns the very devices
which, on the popular stage, conveyed it.8
By so undermining the conventional moral code of Irish popular melodrama, O'Casey transcends
it.If one accords with Styan that "the commonplace world can have its relative nobility too, and
can be equally fearful and pitiful",9 then the Dublin Plays fall within the parameters of tragedy.
O'Casey called these plays tragedies and if one accepts (as I do) that betrayal, destitution and
senseless death are components of modern tragedy, then they are tragedies.
At the same time the plays are very funny, infusing a grim drama of real events with an
irrepressible Irish humour and mixing comic and tragic elements in new ways to catch the full flavour
of Irish life as he knew it.10 This "irrepressible humour" is, in fact, "the comic
framework of tragic enactment". 11
THE PLOUGH AND THE STARSThe Plough and the Stars is the darkest play of the
Dublin Trilogy, containing more death then the other two plays. At the beginning of the play, the
garrulous Mrs. Gogan, gossiping about the ridiculous feud between old Peter and the young Covey,
remarks, 'There'll be blood dhrawn one of these days".
Though said in a comic context about two clowns who will lose no blood, the gossipy quip is in fact a presentiment that there will be much "blood dhrawn" during the course of the play.
Thus at the outset we have a tragic forecast in comic guise. From there, with Fluther's cough, the play moves to veritable 'gallows humour', the hilarious, death-centred dialogue between Mrs. Gogan and Fluther.
Fluther "carelessly" remarks that his cold is "only a little one", but Mrs.
Gogan immediately slides into her role as Job's comforter, jabbering on about "a big lump of a
woman" who died two days after having "a tickle in the throat an' a little cough".
Fluther, nervous now, protests that "there's nothing derogatory wrong" with him, but
Mrs. Gogan is not to be deflected in her litany of inevitable doom.The scene's macabre hilarity
increases as Fluther starts gasping for breath, getting hot and cold and hoping that "there's
nothing derogatory wrong" with him while Mrs. Gogan examines the frilly white shirt that Peter
will wear to the political rally.
When Mrs. Gogan holds Peter's shirt out towards him, Fluther, by now "fermentin' with
fear", sees "a thing that looks like a shinin' shroud".
With that line O'Casey inserts into the 'gallows humour' a prognostic, ironic twist - for many of those fervently attending Pearse's meeting will end up in a shroud.
This scene introduces us to "the blend of the tragic and pathetic with the wildly
comic" 1 which forms the matrix of the play and whereby the tragic will stand out the clearer for
being viewed through a comic lens. Nowhere is this last more clearly illustrated than in that ultimate
"comic desecration of Ireland's household gods", 2 the riot-provoking scene wherein the
call to the hallowed, venerated Easter Rebellion of 1916 is seen as an ominous shadow through the
window of a tavern.
The scene opens with Rosie Redmond, a prostitute, bemoaning the lack of clients while, through a
window, can be seen the silhouette of a tall man addressinG a crowd.
As Waters observes, "the equation is obvious.
Each is a seducer of men". 3 Each is soliciting clients with the lure of a sham romance.Again O'Casey employs layered irony, since the name 'Rosie' surely evokes the 'Dark Rosaleen' personification of Ireland and the real-life Redmond was a political moderate in favour of parliamentary reform and thus the antithesis of the nationalistic firebrand (Pearse) preaching rebellion and heroic sacrifice.
While the silhouetted figure is known only as "the Speaker" or the "Voice of the Man", the allusion to Pearse is unmistakeable since the Voice's fervent call to action incorporates sections from Pearse's The Coming Revolution (1914) and Peace and the Gael (1915).
These treatises put the Nationalist cause on a sacred plane and equated dying for it with religious
martyrdom, even implying an affinity with the sacrifice of Christ.
Against the awesome, rousing words of the Speaker summoning men to "rejoice" in a
terrible war" are juxtaposed the comical, mundane 'battles' of the pub denizens: old Peter and the
Covey squabbling as usual, Fluther brawling with the Covey and threatening; I'd beat the two o' you
before me breakfast ... You're tempting Providence when you're temptin' Fluther. (p. l76)and the Covey
responding with "You're startin' to take a little risk when you commence to paw the Covey." (p. l76)The quarrel culminates with the delightful, comic pantomime of Fluther flinging
off coat and hat and "pawing the air" while the Covey struggles with the Barman and
pleads, "One minute with him is all I ask ..." (p. l77).
Fluther's discarding his hat and coat has its comic feminine counterpoint in Mrs. Gogan discarding
her baby into the reluctant care of old Peter, who dumps it on the floor, as she prepares to do battle
with Bessie Burgess.
Behind them the Voice passionately declaims that "When war comes to Ireland she must
welcome it as she would welcome the Angel of God". (p. l69)While the pub brawlers may
suggest "the worst variety of Stage Irishmen" 4 in the Irish comic-melodramatic tradition,
they are nonetheless full of life, a comic counterpoint to the Speaker's terrible polemic glorifying
death; they concretize the dialectic between vibrant life and 'heroic' death and, while demythologizing
the 'sacredness' of the latter, they accentuate its grim futility. This point is comically brought out by
Mrs. Gogan's second display of 'gallows humour'.
While the Speaker calls on men to... be ready to pour out the same red wine in the same glorious
sacrifice, for without the shedding of blood there is no redemption ... (pl64)
Mrs. Gogan, admiring Peter's gaudy Foresters' costume, articulates the grim reality as she
compares the "wavin' an' noddin' an' waggin" of Peter's "osthriches plume" to
"legs twistin' an jerkin' ... while yous are thryin' to die for Ireland."(p167) Not the
Speaker's "red wine" warming "the old heart of the earth" but cold corpses
grotesquely dancing on a gibbet.
By comically undercutting the Speaker's noble, passionate rhetoric, Mrs. Gogan brings us face to
face with the unglamorous, grim reality while O'Casey reduces Pearse's call to arms to a pub brawl.Into
the comic mock-battles come the real warriors, Capt. Brennan, Lieut. Langon and Commandant Clitheroe, each with their declarations of patriotism ironically foretelling their fates.
Darkness has intruded upon the fun of the mock-battles, dragging the shadow of the real battle
with it.And the Speaker, the Voice summoning men to their death, is a shadow.
Theatre is a system of signs more then a literary medium.
We must read the signs.
What do we see and hear?
A disembodied voice and a shadow - an abstract symbol, but more than that.
Shadows are both insubstantial and threatening, and this symbol, an ominous shadow, is calling
men to die, and die they will, for a shadow, just as Minnie Powell will die for the shadow of a
gunman.The three warriors leave and the mood picks up with the entrance of Rosie and Fluther,
"in a merry mood" (pl78).
As the volunteers go off to make war, Fluther and Rosie go off to make love and Rosie sings her
comic song, a song that foreshadows tragedy:I once had a lover, a tailor, but he could do nothin' for
me,An' then I fell in with a sailor as strong an' as wild as the sea.We cuddled an' kissed with devotion,
till th' night from th' mornin' had fled; An' there, to our joy, a bright bouncin' boyWas dancin' a jig in
th' bed!Dancin' a jig in th' bed, an' bawlin' for butther and bread.
An' there, to our joy, a bright bouncin' boyWas dancin' a jig in th' bed! (pl79)Jack and Nora
Clitheroe are no longer "cuddling and kissing with devotion" as they did at the beginning
of the play, and there will be no joy, no "bright bouncin' boy", only a slaughtered husband,
a dead baby, a mad wife.
The rollicking jollity of Rosie's song, of what-might-have-been, makes the Clitheroe tragedy all
the more poignant.Fluther and Rosie exit with their arms around each other as Clitheroe's voice gives
the command: "Dublin Battalion of the Irish Citizen Army, by th' right, quick march"
(p179).
Life versus death; the demarcation is made all the sharper by their juxtaposition.
Clitheroe should rather have been "unlacin' his wife's bodice than standin' at a
barricade" (Bessie: p194).The play ends with the ironic scene of the British Tommies singing
"keep the 'owme fires burning" while outside Dublin is literally burning.
The initial irony is obvious but, as often with O'Casey, there is a pentimento of comedy and
pathos and an additional, ironic, bitter twist - Clitheroe has not kept his home fires burning.
Unlike the aggressors in the other two plays (e.g., the Mobilizer, the Irregulars, the Auxiliary) the
Tommies, though they have few lines, are given names: Corporal Stoddart, Sergeant Tinley, and they
are the only aggressors who are seen doing something that is not aggressive or brutal; they are drinking
tea and singing.
This imbues them with a humanity and we see not killers but simply lonely men far from home
who, like the Dublin slum-dwellers, are caught up in an historical inferno.
They are, in Krause's words- "a comically detached cockney couple" 5 and the
incongruity of the scene gives it a comic patina which intensifies the pathos.Throughout the play
comedy and tragedy are interlinked; sometimes they are juxtaposed, at other times one follows upon
the heels of the other. Always the tragic is made more poignant by the comic.
For example, Nora's hysterical distress is followed by the hilarious looting scene, a scene
abounding with physical and visual comedy.
Then the comedy is shattered by Brennan, Clitheroe and the mortally wounded Langon.
Darkness has intruded upon the humour.
This is a terrible scene, with the bleeding Langon and Clitheroe's brutal rejection of Nora
comically punctuated by Bessie's, "choke the chicken, choke the chicken" (pl95).
The comedy, sandwiched between Nora's despair and the dying Langon, makes the tragedy more
heart-wrenching.
Comedy leading to tragedy makes the tragedy more poignant because we see the darkness of the
latter extinguishing the vibrancy of the former.
Also, such counterpoint keeps an audience alert; it re-orientates the attention.It must be added that
the comic looting has a bitter undertone.
The tenement dwellers are neither criminals nor looking for 'kicks'; they are desperately
impoverished people grabbing for 'the finer things of life' that they have never had.
Witness Mrs. Gogan's earlier envious trying on of Nora's new hat that "cost more than a
penny ... Oh, swank, what!" (pl37); now she has 'swank' things of her own.
It seems to have become a critical cliché to place O'Casey's clowns within categories.
For example, Krause lumps Shields, Fluther, Boyle, Bessie Burgess and others under the
catchphrase, "wise fools". 6 Waters claims that Fluther is as unreliable as Jack Boyle, both
being 'paycocks'. 7 Watt, on the other hand, while tracing their origins to the typical Comic Irishman
of the English and Irish stage, extrapolates how O'Casey in fact deconstructs that characterisation and
refers to the paradoxical element in O'Casey's clowns.
O'Casey's clowns, particularly in the Plough, are too complex to be comfortably filed
under a catchy label, and it is their paradoxical complexity, the mixture of funny and unfunny, which
makes them emotionally moving and adds to the plays' singular, tragicomic quality.
Fluther may be a 'paycock' in his bragging and drinking, but he is no Capt.
Jack Boyle.
For a start, he works.
We first see him repairing the doorlock of the Clitheroe home, a sort of working-class Lares and
Penates constructing a safe domestic bulwark against invasion by hostile forces.
That the lock does not hold is not the fault of the clownish household god but of the 'heroic'
householder.
Also, Fluther has courage, firstly attested to by his battered face and lastly by his verbal stance
against the British soldiers: Jasus, you and your guns!
Leave them down, and I'd beat th' two o' yous without sweatin'. (p213)
Nor is he totally unreliable.
His rolling in incapably drunk towards the end of the play does not negate the fact that he braved
bullets to look for Nora.
As Nora says,I don't know what I'd have done, only for Fluther.
I'd have been lyin' in th' streets, only for him. (pl86)True, he avoids helping the middle-class
woman but this, I suggest, touches the class issue and that she is not 'one of them'. Fluther may be a
clown, a drunk and a braggart but he is not a .'monarch of make-believe' nor a 'miles gloriosus' in the
mould of Capt.
Boyle nor a cowardly, callous solipsist in the mould of Seumas Shields.
He faces reality and he is brave; he has, to borrow a phrase from Styan, "two or more sides
towards the spectator". 8
Figures such as Fluther and Bessie Burgess challenge Calderwood and Toliver's assertion that
comic characters do not develop, that "comedy specializes in twodimensional, flat or surface
characterization". 9 True, the plays are not 'comedies', but the characters are comic. While they
may lack the grandeur of traditional tragic heroes, they possess a "profound individuality",
an attribute which Calderwood add Toliver int. al., attach to tragic figures. Bessie is both clown and
tragic figure; she, in particular, embodies both tragic and comic elements and this makes her death all
the more poignant. She starts out as a shrewish, loud-mouthed clown, priggish, pugilistic,
chauvinistically pro-British, addicted to drink and hymn-singing. And she ends up braving the
machine-guns to find a doctor for the dying Mollser and caring for the deranged Nora. Her care of
Nora costs her her life for, as she pushes Nora away from the danger of the window, she is shot herself.
Unlike the 'hero-martyrs' she wants to live; her anger at Nora is human and understandable and her last
hymn-singing is no longer.funny, it is heartbreaking. Bessie also has "two or more sides towards
the spectator" and her death is all the more tragic for the comic figure she cut earlier. We expect
a Clytemnestra or a Lady Macbeth, a Hedda Gabler or a Miss Julie to come to grief; their drive to their
own destruction has been laid down at the outset. That is why, as Anouilh said, "Tragedy is
clean, it is restful, it is flawless ... In tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That
makes for tranquility". 10There is no tranquility with tragicomic characters, only turbulence.
We do not expect a comic, vibrant, belligerent shrew to die violently, she is to be laughed at - and
so her death is the more heartwrenching.The tenement dwellers bicker and gossip and quarrel and
laugh; despite their poverty they bubble over with 'life-force' and it is always painful to see life-force
depleted. O'Casey gives us bright comedy, then plunges it into darkness, the deaths made more vivid
by the preceding comedy. The tragic is highlighted because it was preceded by the comic; contrast
always marks strikingly that which is contrasted. Death preceded by a comic vibrancy of life is always
more poignant for the comedy which preceded it, since it forecloses that re-affirmation of
life.Benstock's comments on O'Casey's "blend of the tragic and pathetic with the wildly
comic" are worth repeating. Styan claims that "the dramatist who can swing between the
extremes of tragedy and farce within the same framework is today the man to sting us". 11
O'Casey is still the man to sting us.THE SHADOW OF A GUNMANAyling, discussing The
Shadow of a Gunman, comments on the "still impressive interweaving of farcical elements
with more serious and at times potentially tragic experience", 1 and indeed the play opens with a
scene of pure farce. The clown-poet, Dònal Davoren, a comic-pathetic 'monarch of make-believe', 2
comic because he takes his poet's mask so seriously, is composing his pretentious, flowery verse and
the slovenly, devious clown-rogue, Seumas Shields, is in bed grumbling at being roused from
"the arms of Morpheus". Into this innocent, comic tableau, on the very first page, O'Casey
sows seemingly innocuous seeds that are, in fact, dragon's teeth:SEUMAS:... the Irish people... If they
could they'd throw a bomb at you.DAVOREN:A landmine exploding under the bed is the only thing
that would lift you out of it. (p80)Explosives precipitate the tragedy.
Early on, Davoren declaims his self-indulgent, self-dramatising refrain: "Ah, me! Alas,
pain, pain, ever forever" and, in time-tested farcical cliché, Shields' braces ("they'd do
Cuchullian, they're so strong") break when lie bends down. From this farcical beginning the play
hurtles, via comedy, towards tragedy.
The engine of the play, Davoren's accepting the persona, a second mask, of a 'gunman', partly
because he enjoys the adulation of his neighbours, partly because he is attracted to Minnie Powell, who
is attracted to the idea of a 'gunman', is a comical casing enveloping a tragic nucleus; again we have
Orr's "comic framework of tragic enactment". The myth of the 'gunman' is a dangerous lie.
Davoren asks himself, "And what danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman"?
(p104) Great danger, as he and we will discover.Throughout the play we are aware of what Styan calls
"the frivolous pulling against the serious".3 Mrs. Henderson bringing a trivial complaint
against the neighbours to the IRA is an "expenditure that is too large"4, and we laugh, but
we are made aware of the power and awe exercised by the gunmen over ordinary people, even if those
people seek to use that power for selfish, trivial purposes. Throughout, O'Casey couches the oncoming
tragedy in the accoutrements of comedy.Minnie Powell's entrance, seemingly the harbinger of a Mills
and Boone romance, will lead to her death. (This, incidentally, is a graphic example of Watt's
'misleading signals'.) Millie, who likes to dress up and dance and flirt, falls in love with a myth,
"the shadow of a gunman", (though to her he is real enough) the action-man of popular,
pulp romance and the hero of the Irish nationalist myth. (This is surely a metaphor for Ireland, in
O'Casey's eyes, being in love with gunmen and its myths.) Shadows are insubstantial but threatening
and, as we have seen, O'Casey used this metaphor in another form in the Plough.Minnie
would "love to be able to write a poem - a lovely poem on Ireland and the men of '98". To
which Davoren, in a rare awareness of reality, replies, "Oh, we've had enough of poems, Minnie,
about '98 and of Ireland too". And Minnie responds with "... But I know what you mean.
It's time to give up the writing and take up the gun". (p90)
Minnie glorifies the gun and the gun will kill her. Her infatuation with a shadow, a twofold
shadow since Davoren is neither poet nor gunman, is comic in its banal, romantic, hearts-and-flowers
hero worship. (Yes, the flowers are there too, on Davoren's table, a lovely touch by O'Casey to
heighten false sentimentality.) The comic hero-worship will destroy her.The climax of the play, when
Davoren and Shields discover that the bag they thought contained "spoons and hairpins" is
full of Mills bombs, is sheer pantomimic, knockabout comedy with strong elements of farce. Davoren
jumps about and shakes, the superstitious Shields is apoplectic with panic, berating himself for having
missed Mass and appealing to St. Antony and the Mother o' God. Both assail each other in the circular,
'comic-of-repetition' doubletalk of music-hall:DAVOREN: ... besides it's your fault; you knew the sort
of man he was, and you should have been on your guard.SHIELDS: Did I know he was a gunman, did
I know he was a gunman, did I know he was a gunman? Did...DAVOREN: Do you mean to tell me
that ...SHIELDS: Just a moment ...DAVOREN: You didn't know ...SHIELDS:
Just a moment ... (p121)Pandemonium reigns until Minnie enters to announce that the Black and
Tans are surrounding the house, at which "Davoren reclines almost fainting on the bed and
Shields sits up in an attitude of agonized prayerfulness" (p121) then Davoren, the cool 'gunman',
becomes more distraught than ever and Shields prays even more fervently.As Bentley states,
"Farce is notorious for its love of violent images" 5 and "without aggression farce
cannot function".6 Davoren and Shields are hilariously aggressive to each other, the unfunny
aggressive threat without overshadows the comedy and, in the midst of the comic chaos - a terrible still
centre - sits the ultimate image of aggression and violence, the bag full of bombs. O'Casey captivates
the audience with farcical devices, but keeps it always aware of the terror in the midst.Benstock et. al.,
consider that the death of Minnie Powell has made some dent in Davoren's solipsistic self-delusion,
that his last speech shows that "Donal is capable of a moment of self-awareness".7 The
text indicates otherwise. O'Casey does not allow Minnie's death to have any meaning, not even the
minor one of momentarily bringing Davoren face to face with reality: she has died for a 'shadow'.
Early in the play Davoren self-dramatically declaims, "Ah, me! Alas, pain, pain ever,
forever", a refrain he repeats throughout the play, not even his own words but, as Shields
mockingly informs him, taken from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Davoren's grief
expresses itself in the same, self-dramatising rhetoric, the very same words: "Ah me, alas! Pain,
pain, pain ever, forever!" The rest of the speech is in the same elevated, flowery, 'poetic' rhetoric
he has used as a 'suffering poet' throughout the play. (No poetical turn of phrase leaves his lips when he
finds the bombs.)It's terrible to think that little Minnie is dead, but it's still more terrible to think that
Davoren and Shields are alive! Oh, Donal
Davoren, shame is your portion now till the silver chord is loosened and the golden bowl be
broken. Oh Davoren, Donal Davoren, poet and poltroon, poltroon and poet. (p130)Minnie's death has
changed nothing, it merely provides another channel for his self-dramatisation.
In that sense he accords with Calderwood and Toliver's conviction that stock comic characters do
not develop but retain their "constricted, repetitive style of mind and action".8 According
to Calderwood and Toliver, "comedy's manoeuvring us into a state of emotional detachment can
be seen as an enabling of intellectual engagement"9 here it seems that, by deflecting an overly
empathetic response to the tragedy of Minnie's death with the comedy of Davoren's last ridiculous,
overblown speech, O'Casey has, again in accordance with Calderwood and Toliver, led us to "an
intellectual overview analogous to that of the playwright",10 i.e., an awareness of the futility of
dying for a myth.
As Styan states, "burlesque gains some of its peculiar force by being grand with the words
when ... the character explicitly lacks grandeur".11 Davoren's last speech is not an epiphany, it is
a burlesque.Seumas Shields is a comic figure who elicits our laughter, counting his spoons, peddling
cheap braces, slovenly and cowardly yet quick of tongue, praying in panic, but in a Pirandellian
reflection, we see him as a solipsistic survivor.
He is willing to let Minnie Powell hide the Mills bombs, willing to let her go to her death.
With his callous, "she did it off her own bat - we didn't ask her to" (p129) he is
ultimately reprehensible and our laughter chokes, bearing out Freud's insight that we can laugh at a
clown one moment and detest him the next.In The Shadow of a Gunman the comic is used
to reveal human silliness, pettiness, selfishness, vanity, delusion, as the play climaxes in brutality and
the horror of armed conflict.
As in The Plough and the Stars, O'Casey also shows us (as does history) that some
myths, once believed, can be very harmful and uses comedy to expose their destructive
attraction.JUNO AND THE PAYCOCKIn support of his thesis of "the victory of comic
defeat",1 Krause argues that the pathos and dignity of Juno's final speech, wherein she mourns
her son and recognizes the universal despair of all grieving mothers: Ah, why didn't I remember that
then he wasn't a Diehard or a Stater, but only a poor dead son! (p71)and makes her poignant prayer
totake away our hearts o' stone and give us hearts of flesh. (p72)is "cut" in a "violent
counterpoint of opposites"2 by the abruptly following comic duet of the drunken Boyle and
Joxer.
Thence he surmises that Boyle and Joxer have achieved some perverse "victory of comic
defeat", although, somewhat weakly. He qualifies this by adding that, "Perhaps the ironic
conclusion is less a victory in defeat than a mock triumph of comic bravura over tragic reality".3
However, he persists in maintaining that O'Casey's clowns are "inexhaustible".4 This is
patently not so; Bessie Burgess is not only exhausted but dead at the end of The Plough
and I would argue that Boyle is utterly exhausted at the end of Juno, despite his drunken
posturing.
Waters claims that the final burlesque offers "a kind of relief".5 While there is
certainly "a violent counterpoint of opposites", it is doubtful that this suggests a mock
victory in defeat, nor does it provide relief.
Kerr's statement that, "Comedy is not a relief, it is the rest of the bitter truth"6 applies
exactly to this scene.Again, we must read the signs.
What do we see and hear?
The two reprobates roll into a barren room containing one battered, old chair, itself a sign of utter
desolation. (The furniture movers have taken all the good furniture.) Then Boyle drops even "the
wan single, solitary tanner left out of all I borreyed" (p72).
He has lost everything.
Despite the drunken bravado to which he briefly, vainly clings, as he has had to all his life, he
knows that "the blinds is down, Joxer, the blinds is down" (p72).Here is no victory in
comic defeat, only defeat and a sharpening of the sense of loss.
Boyle's "blinds is down" recalls Beckett's "let down the blind" of
Rockabye and "in the dark that window - window gone - light gone" of
Piece of Monologue, and carries the same resultant sensibility of hopeless void that ties a
bitter knot in the throat.
Like Beckett's clowns, Boyle and Joxer "go on" but not in triumph, merely stumbling
in the dark.Nor does Boyle's brief relapse into his habitual, protective fantasizing offer an illusion of
'triumph'.
After his bragodoccio of false heroics "in Easther Week" and Joxer's maudlin
reminiscence of "a daarlin' story, Boyle faces the terrible reality that "th' whole whorl's ...
in a terr ... ible state of ... chassis" (p73) - and so is he.
The burlesque does not allow us the relief or spiritual solace of Juno's powerful lament, it is more
heart-wrenching than Juno's evocative prayers. (Juno's departure, after all, carries with it, despite
Johnny's death, the promise of new life in Mary's unborn child; there is no such emblematic hope for
Boyle.) The sudden comic turn of mood does not "cut" but reinforces the despair.
It serves as a "re-orientation of the audience"7 lest we indulge in the spiritual balm of
Juno's eloquent lament.
What Wilson Knight says of the 'comedy' in King Lear applies here: "the pathos
has not been minimized: it is redoubled".8 O'Casey uses black comedy to heighten black
despair.Just as O'Casey uses comedy to accentuate tragedy, he uses tragedy to undermine comedy.
The 'hooley', with its festive social gathering and courtship of Mary and Bentham constituting a
'fertility rite', is in line with some traditional scholarly thought regarding comedy deriving from Kômos
- in its root sense of celebration of life - and stemming from the procession which celebrated life.
Into the middle of this 'celebration of life' comes Mrs. Tancred on her way to her son's funeral 'in
the midst of life we are in death'.
Soon after Mrs. Tancred's departure the merriment, the 'celebration of life', rekindles, complete
with song, poetry and much-admired (and envied) gramophone, only to be interrupted by the minor
clown-figure, Needle Nugent, charging in with, "Have none of you's any respect for the Irish
people's National regard for the dead?" (p49)The phrase seems concerned more with Ireland's
veneration of dead heroes than with the individual heartbroken mother and her dead son and illustrates
how, even in a very short episode, O'Casey "strikes a formidable blow against the dominant
ideologies of Irish society, religion and nationalism".
However, O'Casey doesn't seem to entirely trust his audience to get his message, since he has Mrs.
Madgan declare outright:Maybe, Needle Nugent, it's nearly time we had a little less respect for the
dead, and a little more for the living. (p.49)Hard upon the heels of the comic death's head comes the
sinister one in the figure of the Mobilizer and Johnny's terrified reaction to him.
We see here the 'misleading signals' designed to keep the audience alert, abrogating a comfortable
mindset.
Here indeed is 'comedy', in both its colloquial and literary senses, and 'tragedy' transposed.
Styan accuses Juno of suffering from a "creaking mechanism"9 but does not
substantiate his remark.
Here is no "creaking mechanism" but a masterful, wellcrafted, well-oiled
'enchainement'- as a scene which promises 'comedy', liberally laced with the 'comic', develops into
impending doom.Nowhere is comedy and tragedy more transposed, or terror more heightened, than in
the critically neglected scene of the "fella in a thrench coat".
Boyle is singing away merrily while cooking a "sassige" when, after the earlier comic
interruption by the sewing-machine vendor, "a thundering knock is heard at the door"
(p20).
We startle, but expect another comic tradesman.
Joxer, after the time-tested comic gesture of poking his head in at the door to enquire about the
"tatheraraa", enters and he and Boyle do their double-act bickering while Johnny trembles.
Joxer, the quintessential comic survivor, refuses to look out of the window:An mebbe get a bullet
in the kisser?
Ah, none ol them thricks for Joxer.
It's betther to be a coward than a corpse. (p20) and Johnny, knowing (though we do not) that
"a bullet in the kisser" is waiting for him, is suffused with terror.
Boyle does look out and, with the innocence of a Freudian 'naif', remarks that, "It's a fella
in a thrench coat".
Johnny's terror mounts: "Holy Mary, Mother o' God, I ..." and Boyle, oblivious to
Johnny's panic, casually remarks that, "He's goin' away.
He must ha' got tired knockin."
The desperate Johnny hides in his room while Boyle unconcernedly goes back to make tea as the
scene develops into the hilarious "sassige" episode.
Boyle's casual "fella in a thrench-coat" is Johnny's executioner.
This is a brilliant example of a comic messenger (Boyle) unwittingly bearing tragic tidings; of
the.comic used, in Leyburn's words, "exactly to sharpen the terror".10The first instance of
comedy sparking off terror occurs in the scene where the Boyles are entertaining Charles Bentham and
Bentham's pedantic pontification on Theosophy (Could O'Casey be having a not-so-sly dig at Yeats'
adherence to Mme.
Blavatsky's teachings?
A private joke within the theatrical joke?) drives Johnny into a paroxysm of fear and guilt.
We chuckle at Bentham's pompous exposition of the mystic, esoteric movement, delightfully
punctuated by Boyle's comments on the "Prawna" while blowing through his lips.
Then Bentham's declaration on the viability of ghosts, particularly in cases of
violence:"Scientists are beginning to think that what we call ghosts are sometimes seen by person
of a certain nature.
They say that sensational actions, such as the killing of a person, demand great energy, and that
energy lingers in the place where the action occurred"…(p37) sends Johnny, terrified, from the
room.
Shortly after we hear his frightened scream as he 'sees' the ghost of the comrade he betrayed.
O'Casey has used the comic to unleash terror.O'Casey again uses the comic "exactly to
sharpen the terror" in the scene where the unpaid-for furniture is taken away.
In the midst of the sad bustle the votive candle suddenly goes out.
For Johnny, the extinguishing of the candle is a terrible omen, for the movers simply a matter of
the oil being gone.
Johnny's agonized cries of dread are criss-crossed with the movers' bewilderment at his behaviour
and we are torn between laughter at the movers' dialogue and the incongruity of the situation and
fearful tears for Johnny.
Thence follows the arrival of the avenging Irregulars and the comedy is doused as abruptly as the
votive candle.
In the blink of an eye O'Casey has used the comic to unleash terror."Juno and the
Paycock is as much a tragedy as Macbeth, but it is a tragedy taking place in the
porter's family"11 and, just as the Porter's speech does in Macbeth, the comic serves
to heighten the tragedy.
The play as a whole, and emphatically the last burlesque, encapsulates that axiom of 'broken
humour' as articulated by Freud, "the expectation that has turned to nothing".12Play
edition used: Sean O'Casey, Three Plays. (London: Papermac 85, Macmillan, 1970)Notes
to the Introduction1. John Orr, Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture. (London,
Macmillan, 1991) p.20.2. Ibid. p.1.3. Stephen Watt, Joyce, O'Casey and the Irish Popular
Theatre. (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1964) p.149.4. J. L. Styan, The Dark
Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. (Cambridge University Press, 1968)
p.132.5. Ibid. p.132.6. Stephen Watt (o.c.), p.163.7. Ibid. p.157.8. Ibid. p.149.9. J. L. Styan, The
Dark Comedy. pp.32-3.10. J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 1: Realism
and Naturalism. (Cambridge University Press, 1981; repr. 1995) p.104.11. John Orr (o.c.),
p.15.Notes to The Plough and the Stars1. Bernard Benstock, Sean O'Casey.
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1970) p.28.2. David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish
Comedy. (London: Cornell University Press,1982) p.245.3. Maureen Waters, The Comic
Irishman. (Albany: State University of New York Press,1984) p.154.4. Stephen Watt,
Joyce, O'Casey and the Irish Popular Theatre. p.168.5. David Krause (o.c.), p.236.6. Ibid.
p.99.7. Maureen Waters (o.c.), p.152.8. J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy. p.270.9. James L.
Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver, 'Introduction to Comedy' in: Perspectives on Drama,
ed. by Calderwood and Toliver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) pp.163-176 (pp.172-3).10.
Jean Anouilh, Antigone.
Translated by Lewis Galantière. (London: Methuen, 1960) p.34.11. J. L. Styan, The Dark
Comedy. p.282.Notes to The Shadow of a Gunman1. Ronald Ayling, Introduction to
Seven Plays by Sean O'Casey. (London: Macmillan,1985) pp.xi-xxix (p.xviii).2. This
phrase is used by Robert M. Torrance in his noteworthy-'treatise on the comic figure, The Comic
Hero. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).3. J.L. Styan, The Dark
Comedy. p.18.4. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.
(Complete Psychological Works, Vol.VIII, 1905).
Translated under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud
assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964) p.194.5. Eric Bentley,
The Life of the Drama. (New York: Applause, 1991) p.219.6. Ibid. p.240.7. Bernard
Benstock, Sean O'Casey. p.34.8. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver,
Perpectives on Drama. p.174.9. Ibid.10. Ibid.11. J. L. Styan, The Dark
Comedy. p.32.Notes to Juno and the Paycock1. David Krause, 'The Victory of
Comic Defeat' in The Profane Book of Irish Comedy. pp.224-283.2. Ibid. p.236.3. Ibid.4.
Ibid. p.183.5. Maureen Waters, The Comic Irishman. p.159.6. Walter Kerr, Tragedy
and Comedy. (a Da Capo Paperback) (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967) p.28.7. J. L.
Styan, The Dark Comedy. p.262.8. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire.
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1949) p.175.9. J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy. p.133.10.
Ellen Douglass Leyburn, 'Comedy and Tragedy Transposed' in Perspectives on Drama.
Ed. by James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver. pp. 177-185. (p.183)11. David Krause quoting
James Agate in The Profane Book of Irish Comedy. p.259.12. Sigmund Freud, Jokes
and their Relation to the Unconscious. p.199.
Reading a Play
Eamonn Jordan
FORM:
Can we establish the genre of the play? Comic, Tragic, Tragic-comic?
What are the dramatic conventions in operation? How are they signalled?
Is the play's form divided into acts, scenes or more fluid units?
Dramatic form varies and we must distinguish between the well-made form, linear construction,
episodic form or a more fluid, elliptical construction.
How are the scene changes indicated?
What has happened in the play, how and why?
What story is being told? How is it being told? Could you tell it in a different way? Could you
construct or order the scenes in a different order?
What are the scenes the writer chose not to write?
The best plays are often about what you leave out?
What are the assumptions we make about a situation?
Attend to patterns of repetition and difference?
How is information disseminated?
What myths and what rituals underline the dramatic structures?
How the past is accommodated?
Watch for multiple plots, especially the differences and similarities between them?
Does the play ignore unities of time, space, and action?
Is there evidence of melodramatic, theatrical and ritualistic excesses?
Do the uses of humour, irony, parody or a self-referential style of playing call attention to
something else?
What is the purpose of a play-within-a-play, e.g., characters as performers, enacting scenes?
Note uses of monologues, dreams, flashbacks and memories. What purposes do they serve?
Private scenes/public exchanges, how they are placed and structured?
Watch for the use of metaphor, metonymy, symbolism and codification? The drama is about x or
it may be about something else altogether?
What is the significance of off stage activities and off stage sounds?
What are we to make of information revealed about activities elsewhere or in the past?
During each and every moment of performance, so many things are happening. Does each of
these moments relate to all other moments? Is this a complex web of interconnection? Overall we must
be aware of the relationship between simultaneous and successive moments in performance, especially
when reading a text.
Be aware of how aural and visual reinforcements are deployed?
Distinguish between real time, the illusion of real time, performance time, symbolic time and
ritualistic time?
ACTION:
The structural pattern of the classical model depended on initiation, then added difficulty or
additional complications, reversals, discoveries, revelations and resolutions. (Aristotle)
Danger is one of the keys to a play, as is excess, celebration, confrontation and the embracement
of difference?
How does the play build towards crisis?
What are the inciting incidents?
How is the conflict dramatised?
What are the odds of victory?
Is adversity an imperative?
Keep on the look out for recognition scenes?
Conflict, freedom, limitation, fate and entrapment all blend for what purpose?
What are the pivotal scenes or primal scenes?
Is there a journey forward towards the articulation of the unknown?
Pay detailed attention to climatic moments or points of transition.
Are there transformations between beginning and end?
Aristotle talked about the movement "from ignorance to knowledge"? What does this
mean in relation to the play's characters?
Notice the position of recognition scenes and moments of clarity in the midst of confusion.
Sometimes the individual or collective unit (society) is faced with choices or more accurately
limited choices. Are the characters stuck or trapped in patterns of behaviour over which they have no
control or over which they can exert no control?
Do the characters confront the forces of oppression or do they imitate those forces?
Is there a search for justice?
What the characters say, is it reliable?
Note the use of minor characters to establish tensions? Note the weightings and positioning of
these interactions?
Does the naming of character have any significance?
How is defiance accommodated, dismissed, eradicated, brushed over and/or absorbed within a
play?
Often plays are set in confined spaces? What is the effect of this?
Where is laughter placed and what is the purpose?
"Resolution is strangulation." (Sam Shepard) Do you agree?
Are solutions found or does the play end in stalemate?
Is the end result demanded by the dramatic action or demanded by the society from which the text
is written? (R.O'Hanlon)
How are decay, loss and transition handled?
Do endings bring coherence, clarity, impossibility or confusion?
Is theatre about the opening up, the closing down or even the eradication of possibilities?
A play's energy depends on character, action, danger and on its capacity to incite emotions from
pity, through anxiety, resistance and fear to celebration, pleasure and excitement before the presence of
justice.
THEATRE AND SOCIETY:
The functions of theatre are to educate, entertain and/or inspire?
Note the connection between theatre and ritual?
What are the differences between theatre and sport?
Is the connection between dramatic and real world at best tangential?
Can a play attempt to be the authentication of reality? What problems ensue?
What is the status of the stage reality? Is it a mirror, illusion, or like a hall of mirrors, where the
image is refracted and distorted?
Does the play confirm a known world?
What is going on beneath the surface of a play?
What values are promoted or privileged? What values are undermined?
What is named, acknowledged and identified in a positive or in a negative light.
Is irony brought to bear on any of the relationships?
What is not articulated, what is hinted at and what is denied either implicitly or explicitly?
Dramatic form may emphasise breaks and ruptures and it may espouse discontinuities.
How are the awkward, unaccommodating moments realised?
With dramas as with conversations, what is often interesting are the gaps, absences,
contradictions, denials or what is rushed over?
Be alert to gender issues. In some texts, women do not make choices (typical Hollywood scenario;
woman as hostage). Races or social classes may be positioned in a similar negative fashion? Is a sense
of subjectivity permissible for some but not all of the characters?
What are the specific gender and racial expectations we bring to a text? Are they confirmed or are
they dismantled to some degree?
Be alert to the tensions between universal man/woman versus historic man/woman? In other
words can we claim eternal values across historic periods or are we shaped by the cultural and
historical times we live in? Do values change over time?
Does a social critique emerge and if so, how?
What prejudices are vindicated?
Can the environment, class and society conspire to insist on a tragic inevitability?
The history play option demarcates issues of identity, nation, authority, power, anxiety, decay,
and transition? Can it be nostalgic, a justification for inaction, a re-repression of fact or does factuality
come in to play at all?
Texts are always in dialogue with other texts, dramatic, political, national, gender or racial. So
many things are scripted and textualised. Why is this the case?
STAGING:
A script is yet to be completed?
Writer, director, performer, designer and the spectator all conspired to make a play?
A play needs performance to be fully alive?
Why, as spectators/readers, do we invest in a text?
Distinguish between culture from which a text emerges and the present day culture, which might
be called the target culture? The assumptions we make as we read back can be interesting in
themselves?
Stage illusion. What is the relationship between stage life and real life? Collaborative, turbulent,
orbital, replica and ornamented realities?
Watch for the connection between the stage illusion and real life? There are no simplistic
connections? What is on stage is shaped, manipulated, heightened and theatrical? Is it the case that the
pace, motivation, hesitation and the contradictions of real live incidents can not be fully observed?
If we are to compare drama and real life some observations need to be made. In theatre what
shortcuts are taken to get to key moments of crisis? Do we get the best dramatic moments? Is all
incidental detail pared away? (Writing exercise: write some of the scenes that are left unwritten.) Often
as Chekhov has stated we do not get the beginning or the end, just the middle. Do you agree with this
point of view?
What meanings, especially dominant meanings are to be stressed in performance? In the case of
O'Casey it is easy to envisage the fact that the tragedy or the comedy can be overplayed.
What is the importance of the stage illusion, particularly the concept of the fourth wall, whereby
the actors do not recognise the presence of an audience? In other forms of theatre, Brechtian or
pantomime, the illusion is broken, as the actors recognise the presence of an audience? What are the
implications of this?
Design, lighting, set and location of the theatre are all vital to the theatrical experience and shape
some of our responses to the performance text?
Pay attention to movement possibilities, stage images or stage pictures?
Why are sign systems interactive?
How is the text paced?
Does the use of space and time, fulfil our expectations or breach our expectations?
Watch out for issues of scale? Often small incidents relate to large ones. In O'Casey's The
Plough and the Stars the battle for the pram contrasts with the warfare and bloodshed on streets.
Every item on stage bears a huge significance?
Why is the blocking of the actors, i.e. the stage positions they take of great importance? It can tell
you about the relationships between characters, it captures some of the tensions between characters and
it can hint at information later to be revealed? Can the body language of the performer be decoded?
If we are close or distant to the actors, what impact might this have? Does this change the
meaning of a play?
The type of stage used can determine significantly the meaning of a play. Picture frame stage,
thrust stage and a performance in the round or other types of variations all generate very different
exchanges.
What perceptions or assumptions may be made, say if during intimate moments characters are in
close proximity, whereas, as a contrast, they state the same dialogue from different sides of the stage?
What is the significance of the overall stage image an audience receives at any moment in time?
Can these visual images be in dialogue with each other over the length of a play?
How are key moments emphasised, through lighting, movement, dialogue or stage image?
Dominant stage images are the ones that stay with you over time. How might these be
emphasised? Are these the key moments in the play? Do they require silence or pauses? Can they be
hurried moments or moments of insistent even chaotic action?
Notice the way characters use the space?
Both the timing and placing in writing terms, of exits and entrances are vital? Why?
Where is there evidence of collective movements?
Tempo? Do the characters cross the space in a manner and within a time span that we associate
with reality?
The status of stage directions is very significant? Some people suggest that they should be ignored
completely, especially cues as to how a line may be spoken by an actor or directions as to how the
character might leave the stage. A character can exit the stage n a number of ways. Other stage
directions seem to be fundamental to the text such as the sound of a breaking string in Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard.
How is the theatricality of a text substantiated?
Visually colour is vital, particularly the repetition or the sequence of colours.
What is the connection between costume and character?
How can an actor's individual style contribute, enhance and/or depreciate a performance?
Be aware of the significance of symbolism.
How are props handled, exchanged and/or utilised? How are they given added significance
through symbolic connotations?
Note the relationship between chronological time, stage time and real time?
How are parallel scenes handled?
The pacing and placing of scenes are always an issue, especially if one is cutting a substantially
long (older) text?
Is the length of scenes important?
As lighting creates moods, be on the look out for the tone, intensity and source of the lighting.
Within the stage space there may be different levels to suggest changing locations or more
substantially hierarchical relationships between spaces?
Where are sound effects used and what are their significances?
How are light and space used to foreground certain relationships?
CHARACTER:
Can characters act on their environments?
Is character action?
What is the relationship between characters and individuals? Is it dangerous to read a character as
an individual?
Given the presence of the actor, can we establish a relationship between character, the individual
and society? (Fish in the water or water in the fish. (A. Miller))?
Do characters concede to internal/ external pressures? What is inevitable?
Do circumstances and situations determine characters?
What choices are available to the characters?
What is the relationship between character and psychology?
Is there an idea of a fixed human nature or a changing one?
In myth and ritual character is functionally rather than psychologically motivated? What types of
functions come to mind? Hero/ Villain/ Buddy/ Guide/ Assistant/ Blocker/ Confidante /Supporter /Sage
/Visionary / Silent characters/Absent characters/ Outsiders/ etc.
Is the character in control of what he/she is doing? What is the motivation given by playwright? Is
this justified?
Is there space for morality? Or is a moral ambiguity essential?
Is character just language?
What is the relationship between character and language?
If you have six lines of dialogue, does that constitute a character?
Subtext is essential to dramatic tensions for beneath what is said something else is going on
altogether?
Tone/ volume/ rhythm of speech/ posture/ movement/ entrances/ gestures/ reactions to others all
signal something?
What roles might the character take on during the play? Is he/she conscious of these roles?
Is the play subverting or replicating gender stereotyping?
Is there a use for stereotype in drama?
Key quotes? What the characters say about themselves, what others say about them? What do we
believe?
Can we establish a character's biography? Is this appropriate?
Characters may be driven by certain dominant characteristics, how are these signalled? How can
expectation be breached in terms of what we assume someone will do?
Is it necessary to keep major characters apart for a long time?
Watch for doubling of roles or correspondences, which challenge the overall impression of the
drama?
LANGUAGE:
Is there a consistent tone throughout, i.e. tragic, comic or ironic? Can this be altered across
different productions of the same play?
In theatre language is always a physical one and if so, why?
Language can be many things, exaggerated, suggestive, ambiguous, etc.
Language can offer clues to deception or motive?
Is language used to breach expectations?
Is language made strange?
Monologue or dialogue? Are the characters listening to each other?
For how long can argumentative exchanges be maintained?
Most good plays incorporate multiple voices, which ensures a layered text and this can at times
lead to an accommodation of difference.
Can characters articulate what they think, feel or know? Or is it the case that they cannot say it or
indeed that they say something substantially different to what they intended to say?
Language can make visible the location of authority, power and censorial forces?
What is the connection between language and identity?
Silences, pauses and repetitions can be utilised for specific effects.
Interrogations can be indirect, subtle, playful and sinister?
Is the spoken text attempting to be natural? Does it have rhythm?
Are end-stopped lines, rhyme, broken lines, alliteration and/or assonance used for some purpose?
(Barton)
Are competing versions of events revealed? What purpose does this serve?
Are the jokes aggressive?
AUTHOR and THE STATUS OF THE TEXT:
Does the writer consciously shape a text? Could the unconscious, culture or politics be the main
creative source?
Do we believe what a writer says about a text?
Is the author in control of all meanings, no meaning or some meaning?
The writer is not in control of what s/he says according to the intentional fallacy? What do you
think?
The author makes some choices, undertakes revisions and re-writes etc. How do we view these?
Can you take the author from the text?
What do you do with autobiographical details?
What unconscious forces, biases, hegemonic practices, gender repression and assumptions are in
operation?
Who owns the text? Should the distortion of the text be seen as a copyright transgression? How do
you define distortion?
Is there just one meaning or many meanings to a text?
Is the written text a temporary text, scaffold or blueprint?
A script not animated literature?
Why is a theatre text always incomplete?
Is there a true line or spine of the play? What is the through action of the play? Is it possible to
name this?
What is the status of stage directions in terms of performance? Do we ignore them?
Every production brings new and different interpretations?
In performance, what sense do we make of the multiplicity of texts in operation; those of the
director, designer, actor and lighting operator; lots of texts within texts that coalesce, contradict,
collude, conspire, reinforce and undermine one another? Why is the end result a very complicated
product?
What is validated by the stage illusion?
How are the irrational, non-logical elements handled?
Be aware of the synchronic and diachronic sign systems in operation?
What are the imperatives, codifications, and denials within a text?
Can we name motivations of either writer or character with any clear-cut precision or are they
always inaccurate guesses or our own projections?
When re-interpreting classics, is there a huge onus to be contemporary or should we make some
leap of the imagination back in time?
Identify binary opposites in text? How are they maintained, how are they disturbed?
Are plays normally set in fantasy, wish-fulfilling spaces, or in a borderland consciousness?
What are the images of succession and continuity and what, if anything, do they reinforce?
Be alert as to how ideology enters text, e.g. the American dream, Misogyny or Nationalism?
Can we identify the power relationships within a text?
As an audience member do we see and hear what we want to?
Of what we read, see and hear, how much do we retain? Soon after, long after?
What are the shared meanings between world of stage and that of its audience, both when written
and when produced?
How can audiences mediate and regulate texts?
Is it possible to question the production values in operation?
Watch for ways the performance text can highlight, undermine or subvert the dominant energies
of a play or an audience's expectations.
REVIEWS:Shopping and Fucking, Srebrenica, Electra, Melonfarmer
Titi Repetto
Signs of the times or slaves of the times?
When money is civilisation and civilisation is money.
Shopping and Fucking
Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin
22nd Sept.- 4 Oct. 1997
Mark Ravenhill's first play Shopping and Fucking (1996), directed
by Max Stafford - Clark, former Artistic Director at the Royal Court Theatre, is one of
the last productions coming from the prolific and innovative London-based Theatre
Company Out of Joint. The play, extremely successful in England and touring
internationally, has now opened at the Andrews Lane Theatre, just before the Fringe
Festival.
In the best tradition of mutant subhuman beings and Blade Runner-
like-figures popular on the screens, four young characters, well-trained in the E
generation style and fashionably dressed, practice "transactions" among
them, a by-product for human relationships ruled by money and requiring no
emotional involvement. Their behaviours are mastered by a terrific character, Brian, a
well-off English business man, whose presence is undoubtedly successful in creating a
sharp balance between violence and politeness.
"Transacting" is a guarantee of survival in the free market economy
of the global village, a way to save one's own personality by being impersonal when
one's personal integrity is menaced both from the outside and the inside world. The
issues involved are dangerous contaminations among people who are deprived from
their physicality and emotions, emptied bodied left to their surviving games, floating
between fiction and reality.
In contrast to the predictable expectations in Shopping and Fucking
people do not fight to possess each others but to be possessed, to belong to someone
in order to achieve some sort of identity. "You see that guy over there? Trash,
pure trash, do you want him? I owe him and I don't want him, it's yours". This
is almost a refrain for the transaction act, and a narrative link among the stories told
by the characters throughout the play.
Although Shopping and Fucking is divided in 14 scenes which are
juxtaposed like cinematic sequences, the play succeeds in creating narratives; each
scene is framed in a set which is labelled with lighted writings: "the
kitchen", "the bedsit", the "disco", etc., changing every
time in accordance to the different spaces where characters are positioned.
The plot is quite simple: Mark, a young gay, E addicted, recognising his state of
crisis and his total lack of control over his life, decides to leave the house where he is
staying in order to try to put himself together. In the act of leaving he also separates
from his two friends, Robbie and Lucy, a bisexual couple of trash people whom he
has bought in a supermarket and has taken care according to the 'shopping story',
which opens the play. Mark goes out to search for an impersonal love relationship and
meets a fourteen years old male prostitute who having been raped by his stepfather is
now looking for someone as strong as him to re-enact that brutal experience and
hopefully recover from it. While Mark is away, Robbie and Lulu in an attempt to
survive by themselves, get involved in a ecstasy deal and set up a hot line successful
company called 'The Heaven'. Mark's returns with Gary provokes the jealousy of
Robbie, his boyfriend. Gary gets involved in a violent sexual game, during which he
is possessed by his two male friends; as a result the former menage a trois among the
couple and Mark is re-established. In their fantasy game, they get rid of Gary selling
him to someone else in another planet. Once the real character has been eliminated
abused and sent off the three story makers go back to their life as it appeared to be in
the first scene: Mark has found an ending for his story and he is now able to restore
himself in the original triangular situation.
According to the play, our lives can be fictionalised as they do not belong to us
anymore. Indeed we are totally unable to exert control over them as we are no longer
the active subjects. What the characters suggest instead is that we are object to be
looked at, to be talked about, to be made stories with, to be sold and bought. The
distinction between fiction and reality is vague in the characters' lives, in such a way
that Mark, Robbie and Lulu believe to the stories they made up out of it. So it can
happen that someone tries to kill you in an attack of rage but he does not succeed
because his act is a fiction: he has a plastic fork in his hand and of course the scene is
realistic in the artificial universe of a Mac Donald fast food.
Since the very beginning the audience realises that reality itself is a by-product
chemically obtained. The characters live in a plastic world and are depending on
disgusting boxes of food individually packed, concentrated samples of all the cultures
of the world. Tastes are labelled according to bizarre marketing strategies; life tonight
can be "Nice and Spicy" or simply "Beefy" and I love you so
much. Do I?
Besides FOOD, VIOLENCE and SEX are the primary ingredients for the
Shopping and Fucking recipe. In spite of the strong presence of 'exciting
issues', one should not look for excitement, as the pleasure principle is constantly
negated: eating and having sex are compulsory acts which do not bring about any
pleasure. The latter is also completely absent for the audience as well; violence has
not a cathartic effect.
If you have ever asked yourself why theatre does not show so often sex on stage
as cinema does, you may find an answer on the Andrews stage. Male homosexuality
as it is presented in this performance, may offend your sensibility and disturb
whatever feeling of intimacy you may have with your body but, 'are any feelings left
at all?' However, the play tries to push the issue further (even if it is hard to think you
can go further than that!).
Violence is constrained in a language that keeps the banality of the everyday
speech and is brutal and direct at the same time. Brian, "the master",
brilliantly synthesizes this frozen frame. He is a cruel character whose aggressive
violent attitudes are hidden beneath the outline of an expensive suite. Because of his
financial position he can afford socially accepted behaviours, in a word he is a
civilised man.
For all of them, and for us, there's no way out, and no attempt to change, but a
need to stay alive or do not die, because the dying act still would mean something.
Politics has failed, family is a Christmas reunion, life is a story the evidence of which
must be proved. Characters are terrified by the sight of blood as it is a scaring natural
"something" coming out from an artificial body, and remembering them
its living existence.
Certainly we didn't need Shopping and Fucking to realise that the
only hell we can believe in is in this world and that the notion of Paradise could well
be a hot line giving voice to our silent desires. However, Mark Ravenhill looks at all
that with a total lack of nostalgia and great irony: "has beauty gone for
ever?" Brian will answer your question, keeping emotions at bay. You can still
watch the most moving instants on your life recorded on a videotape. You may watch
them over again to teach other people what human emotions are about. You can weep
a real teardrop, put it in a box and sell it to the Museum of Mankind.
Authority intimidates today's young people even if recognised as corrupted.
Lulu and Robbie go to Brian's lessons to learn how to survive, ironically, he teaches
them emotions with a capital E; he is in fact the pusher, involved in the dealing as
much as they are, but at a higher uncompromising level. Which are the borders of
civilisation? At the same time the play tests the audience sexual attitudes towards
male homosexual relationships and attractions with innocent questions like
"what does a black hole in a lavatory mean to you ?" The answers may
not be so obvious.
The suspension of disbelief that theatre requires from the audience is
progressively disturbed throughout the play by the depressing awareness that the
world presented on stage looks so much like the present reality we try to keep away
from our lives. Our private world which we think we are in control of and in which we
are the main thinking subject, may come out to be just a fiction we have decided to
believe in.
When you are ready.
M. A. in Modern Drama Studies
REVIEW
Good morning Bosnia!
Srebrenica
BT Waterfront Studio, Belfast
22nd November 1997
Srebrenica is an interesting political play, part of a rich programme
offered by the 35th Belfast Art Festival. The play, presented by The Tricycle Theatre,
deals with an issue currently on debate: the Nato`s "hands off" approach
towards the international warrants of arrests for Bosnia war criminals.
One entering the magnificent Waterfront Hall and expecting to see horrifying
images of brutal violence could only be impressed by the coldness and the
impersonality of the stage. Srebrenica is staged in a Tribunal Hall,
precisely the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal, The Hague, and presents the real
evidence given during the Rule 61 Hearings against Radovan Karadzic and General
Mladic. Both of them are retained responsible for massive war crimes like the
genocide of the Muslim population occurred during the Bosnia War in the Serb town
of Srebrenica. The evidence that you hear on stage has been transcribed from audio
recordings of the proceedings in The Hague, which took place in July 1996.
Nicolas Kent, who directed the play and defines it "a piece of
propaganda", takes the assumption that the West's reluctance is morally
unacceptable and it has not been purposely taken on board by the British media. In
fact, despite the international arrest warrant issued for Karadzic and Mladic, and
various sightings since then, none of them has been arrested.
In the play, four characters in turn give evidences of what they witnessed in
Srebrenica: the court and the audience listen to Jean Rene Ruez, Chief Investigating
Officer, Colonel Karremans, Officer of the Dutch peace-keeping Force in Srebrenica,
Corporal Groenewegen, Member of the same Force, Drazen Erdemovic, ex- soldier in
the Bosnian Serb Army. Either judges and witnesses belong to different nationalities,
consequently evidences are supposed to be delivered in four different languages.
Although English is used as a lingua franca, the actors speak with different accent that
brilliantly define their nationalities.
The play makes use of a great amount of technical equipment for the
reproduction and translation of voices and images: headphones, microphones,
monitors. In this way the play highlights the easiness with which any message giving
information about the Bosnia war can be manipulated by media, while giving at the
same time an international dimension to the war and to the Belfast production itself.
Moreover, and may be this is one of the most striking effect in the play, with this
device the director has found an extremely powerful way to show how violence can be
contained in a form that is morally acceptable. Nevertheless, if in
Srebrenica murders and ethnic cleaning find their space in a linear
discourse hold together by the ordered sequence of evidences, emotions break the
lines out of the official public speeches, like in the last evidence given by the young
man from the army. During his performance, Jean Rene Ruez produces filmed images
of the murders, that are displayed on the two TV screens set in the audience area. It is
precisely through this clinical presentation of the facts that the audience create for
itself its own picture of a war probably experienced just on the TV. The contrast
between the cold and technical preciseness with which speeches are delivered (the
form), and the unbearable atrocity of the crimes committed (the content), works
extremely well on stage, in such a way that detachment seems to be the only possible
way to deal with the subject. Because of the almost complete lack of movement and
gestures and the stillness of the scenes, there is a great demand from the stage for the
audience involvement. Spectators are asked to take actively part in the process of
judgement, with all its political implications. The credibility of the Tribunal itself is a
measure of the audience response.
A remarkable performance is given by Jay Simpson as Drazen Erdemovic. He
virtually brings on stage thousand of people waiting to be killed. The number of the
victims is sharply calculated in front of the audience by multiplying the number of
buses on which the captives arrived at the time of the executions per all the times the
room with the dead people was emptied...... While the audience visualises all those
corpses and find itself involved in the making of a macabre mathematical operation,
one may also ask himself if she/he is being entertained or simply shocked or merely
informed. As the actors at the end of the play did not come out for the bow one's
speculations could go further, "Is Srebrenica a piece of theatre at
all?" Once the witnesses leave the stage, and judges walk off stage too, the
audience is left alone in white full light. For a few minutes there's no comfortable
clap. This short but intense moment of silence or bewilderment and possibly reflection
is certainly part of the play itself. Probably it is the most effective moment which fills
the gap between reality and the stage, though it could also be interpreted as a sign of
total indifference.
REVIEW
A Mask of Blood
Electra
Donmar Warehouse Theatre, London.
21st Oct.- 6th Dec. 1997
To confirm the appraisal that Greek tragedies have had on Contemporary Irish
playwrights, a great opportunity for London theatre goers comes from a new version
of Sophocles' Electra, by the Northern Irish Frank McGuiness. His name
is not new to the 'London`s Irish Stage', if not only for the recent opening of his new
play, Mutabilities, currently on at the Royal National Theatre.
Electra, directed by David Leveaux, has been especially commissioned
by the Donmar for this co-production with Chichester Theatre.
The two thousand years old tragedy of passions and power becomes in this new
version an extremely modern and moving piece of theatre. Different elements have
contributed to make the miracle work. The impressive beauty of stage design, the
dynamic composition of scenes, the terrific skilled acting, however, what brilliantly
succeed in making the play so accessible to our eyes and ears is undoubtedly Mc
Guiness`s translation.
English language finds here a way to adapt and express the Greek verse for a
contemporary audience, both in gravity and lyricism. The linguistic medium makes
possible the journey through different cultures and sensibilities. The heightened text
through which the dramatis persona invokes the help of Gods, succeeds conveying
ideas about morale and feelings in a simple, dry but effective form, as well as
speeding the tragic action to its end.
The Chorus is made up of three actresses dressed in black. In the scenes where
Electra alone cries out her desperation, the three women follow her gestures and
speeches. They listen to her miserable view of the world, picking up from the ground
the terrible words she scatters around in a fury, and caressing them with compassion.
Nevertheless the Chorus is not used in order to give a comment about the action, or
expose the morale of the times, instead, even silently, the three black women exist by
themselves out of the chorus'traditional function. In their simplicity and fierceness,
they vaguely resemble to peasant women from Eastern Europe.
Stage design deserves to be mentioned. Basically two contrasting elements have
been chosen. The action takes place outside Clytemnestra 's house.Two stone walls
erected along the two perpendicular sides of the stage contrast with the floor covered
with soil. Such a space looks like a prison where exploding passions have been
confined, but they are explored and expressed in accordance with primitive feelings.
Without losing contact with the earth and ultimately the secrets of human nature,
characters walk on the ground in their bare feet. A white board lies across the stage
obliquely, supported from one side by a piece of a Doric capital. The curved lines
engraved on the ancient stone creating an elegant contrast with the rectangular shape
and flat surface of the board. A white folded sheet lies across the board, it will be a
cloak for the living, as well as a shroud for the dead. Around the border, three
eighteen century worn-out green velvet armchairs remind of some dusty living room.
The set doesn't change during the play. Despite the sense of severity emanating from
it, "There's nothing holy anymore- says Electra- nothing sane or sensible. The
world`s turned bad, and so have I". Zoe Wanamaker as Electra, comes to the
stage from inside the wall, through a little window; with feline movements she gets
down to the ground with an iron ladder. She wears a white mask and an old coat, her
body is perfectly athletic, she looks like a gymnast dressed in rags. As soon as she
comes to the ground she puts the mask off her face and buries it . At the end of her
performance she will put the mask on again while the drop of rain falling from the
ceiling during the performance turns red. Zoe Wanamaker, acts her tragedy unmasked
as a modern character, but she keeps in her voice the vocal passion that thundered
trough the mouths of Greek masks.
Electra gives prominently a female point of view about the tragedy.
After the first two scenes the play shifts gracefully from a male set with the dialogues
between the Servant and Orestes, into a set dominated by women coming on stage one
after the other: Electra, the Chorus, Chrysothemis, her sister, and Clytemnestra, her
mother. After Agamennon`s murder by hand of her wife Clytemnestra, Aegistus is
going to take his place, in bed and in power. Electra, in love with her father can't find
a reason for such a deed; deeply sorrowful and pitiful for the present state of things
and careless of her sister's ammunitions, she rejected her mother, and is led by her
pain to the desire of vengeance and death. She is helped by her brother Orestes who
comes back from Delphy to bring justice. He kills his mother whose body is brought
on stage, wrapped in a blanket and discovered by her lover, and then he pushes
Aegistus inside the house, offstage. A deaf sound is heard while the men do the awful
job, Wanamaker's face disappears beneath Electra's silent mask of blood.
Dealing with universal passions and sorrows, character addresses their speeches
not to a particular audience but to the whole world, this is the sense of the tragedy, a
crisis of an entire society. How could we find an equivalent tragic sense in our
contemporary context? The McGuiness`s version of Electra, a splendid
production indeed, could be possibly understood as a psychological tragedy exploring
the relationship between mother and daughter. The tragedy of a young investigating
soul, living her feelings and believes to death, revolting against those who are grown
up with certainties, who have already taken decisions and sure of the ground they
stand up, have stopped asking questions.
Jimmy, what's your target?
Melonfarmer
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
15 Oct.- 1997
Mostly unexpectedly the Peacock has decided to produce a new play by a young
author facing his first experience as an author in playwright. Despite his family
connections with the National Theatre to exploit, he is the grandson of the late Dennis
Johnston, Alex Johnston thinks that this is not the case, as no-one he was working
with in the Fringe Theatre had ever heard of his grandfather. Melonfarmer
is directed by Jimmy Fayan, talented member of Bedrock Theatre Company. If on one
side one should argue that beginners are always to be encouraged, on the other side
after the play you may ask yourself why this particular production should be
encouraged at all. In other words the play seems to raise expectations that is unable to
keep, in its assumption to create a vision of the 90's Dublin generation.
Melonfarmer presents 'slices of lives', but fails to tell entertaining stories.
Sean, the main carachter, a twenty something aspirant rock guitarist is worried about
the absence of love relationship in his life. Eventually he meets a girl at the bus stop
and becomes friendly with her to discover that she is a lesbian. His cousin comes to
visit him from Canada and on a wild night the two get drunk and play with a gun. By
accident Sean shoots his foot and is brought to the hospital. Other couples meet and
split up during the play. The last scene in the hospital give them the opportunity to
meet once again. When Sean's friends are gone he is left talking nonsense to the girl
he likes. If the style is that of the soap opera, the play does not create any suspence,
the audience left alone in comfortable armchairs listening to fine music hits, is not
eager to know what happens in the next episode, as the different scenes find some
difficulties in connecting one another. The problem with this play seem to be its use
of the space, not only because sometimes it's hard to understand where the scenes are
happening, but also because of the acting and the dialogues that seem to loose energy
in such a big space. However, not everything is lost: Melonformer is
about young people, and the subject must be interesting by definition. Sex, this is
what the characters want to talk about! Liz Kuti, as Martina gives an unprobable sex
performance, in which she tattoes a David star on her partner's body, while female
homosexuality comes in the play from the back door .The two pretty girls court each
other in a disco, but on their first appointment one of the partner seems to have
changed her mind, eventually they express their urgent need to make love and
disappear into the next scene. Nevertheless in Melonfarmer there are
some funny scenes. The openinig scene where Sean is awaken by a dj, who wants him
to answer to a radio competition is remarkable not only for its comic effect but for the
interesting use of the voice off satge. And you will probably laugh at him again when
he is masturbating in an "orgasmic odissey in the space" scene, but lying
in bed is boring, twenty-something, wake up! What could have been a 'revolutionary
take-over' of the National Theatre by the interesting Bedrock Theatre Company, turns
out to be a well sold light comedy, harmless and accessible to everybody. May be this
is its merit.
REVIEW
Plastic Gangsters
Twenty Grand
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
Feb.1998
From the opening scene, the audience realises that both Conall Morrison, the
director, and Declan Hughes the author of Twenty Grand have played
with a collage technique, transposing cliche images from their original context to
create a fictional environment that gives the impression of a reproducible reality.
The play is set in a smoky night club in Dublin disguised as New York City
where distorted outlines of the characters are reflected and multiplied on the dark
glasses of the windows. Three vivid red armchairs face the audience and the feeling of
an imminent murder just about to happen is overtly obvious. Through the blinds
pulled down on one of the windows, one glances with surprise not a corner of Little
Italy, but a slide of O`Connell Bridge at night-time projected on a screen.
To narrow down the story of Joey Gallo and his New York gangsters to a local
reality, Frank `Sinatra` Hackett (Liam Carney) and "the lads", speak
humorously with a strong Dublin working class accent, and they scheme to make a
robbery in a bank in Bray. The author has recognised that the Joey Gallo saga could
be staged in any city with "an active criminal fraternity", but according to
him, the slang of the criminal classes seems to be one of the essential feature to make
the play effective, and to this regard he maintains that Dublin shares with New York
the same attribute of "talking city".
Instead that device contributes to achieve a farcical style which seems to me the
predominant mood of the play. The style of the detective story is sustained to a certain
degree by the plot: someone has betrayed the gang, stealing "twenty
grand" from the common account, and causing trouble among them, but the
guilty person turns out to be stupid Dino who took the money for silly reasons.
Beautiful women and broken dreams should be part of the same scenario.
A panel of wooden bars is pulled down on the front stage from the ceiling,
creating the indoors of a studio where Karen, (Amelia Crowley), daughter of the boss,
is drawing her black and white plates in a Dick Tracy style. The studio, which gives
room for an offensive love scene in terms of female subjectivity, would provide a
counterpoint with the tacky and rough style of the night club, partly still visible
through the wooden bars.
But it`s the medium of the theatre itself that is used in order to play a farce of a
gangster story. In the last scene when Tommy Dalton , the boss` right-hand man, takes
revenge of his comrades and shoot them down, three predictable shots upset the
audience more because of the noise they produce than for their surprising effect.
Dying acts on stage are not taken seriously as the audience can see the actors still
breathing and the blood hidden in plastic bags behind their shirts is undoubtedly
delicious tomato sauce! Tension is confined to very few moments in the play, possibly
in the torture scene, which becomes a gag when it is repeated by Tommy who has
taken over once he has learned all the tricks from Sinatra. It seems to me that the use
of violence on stage is sanitised quite soon in the play, as the audience discovers that
violence is controlled and kept at a distance by an ironical use of the language.
In the beginning of Twenty Grand there is a quite interesting role
play of the "Guess who is the boss?" type, between the two antagonists
Tommy and Sinatra. The game sets up a competition in a male world ruled by false
aspirations, however the tension it could have generated remains an hint in the play
and is not further developed. At the end Tommy, who has killed everybody else
changes his suit and dress himself up like the boss fulfilling his meaningless rise to
the power.
The gang proved to be totally ineffective and unprofessional in their criminal
job, and their ambitions "to move on" in society through criminal
activities appear totally hopeless.
If any serious issues was meant in Twenty Grand I am afraid the
performance totally miss it; instead it can offer some moments of entertainment
without any pretensions to kill or wound anybody if not by mistake! To be
remembered besides the actual wounding of an actor during the previews, the
outstanding performance of Karl Shiels, playing Dean Hackett "Dino", a
"caricature character" wearing a yellow suit, cheap showy necklace and
baseball bat, who proposes a less naturalistic acting style.
REVIEW
Listening to Unheard Voices
Philadelphia Here I Come!
Druid Lane Theatre, Galway
25th March 1998
In staging Friel`s plays, the parallel between orchestrating a symphony and
performing evokes familiar echoes for Friel`s followers. As Friel`s freaks will know,
it is not only a matter concerning the role of music and songs in his work, but rather a
question of following the playwright`s stage directions very precisely in order to find
the right tune which will provide the key to the play. Rightly enough, Joe Dowling
himself staging Friel spoke about "textual orthodoxy" through which the
actors must find their own freedom. All of the characters would obviously work out a
different way in the delivering styles of their speeches but a lot amount of work
should be done on the overall sound and the accordance of all its different nuances.
If one thing strikes about the general perfection of the Druid production of
Philadelphia Here I Come! is its intense sense of harmony. The performance
succeeded in melting together private and public voices from either the past or the
present, which are haunting the stage. "Internal" and
"external" discourse works its way through the play towards a mutual
understanding: in term of sound this conflict is able to carry a lot of tension in itself,
generating a search for a common note between "our public and private
selves".
This is a way to say something without being embarrassed and alienated from our
own sounds by the effect that language exerts on us. Indeed the audience is facing an
intriguing relation with language that Friel has explored continuously in his work: are
we masters of language or rather its servants? To which extent we submit to language,
to which degree language is able to talk about us without generating contradiction in
itself?
The play, successfully received in Ireland and all over the world since its first
production in 1964, has become a "classic" in Irish Theatre. However,
thirty years later, an audience might see it as a piece of "history", perhaps
outdated. The play broke with the traditional notion of the unity of the character and
unexpectedly introduced the bedroom space subverting the safe setting of the Kitchen
Comedy. Though quite innovative and experimental at the time, the device of the two
actors playing the same character a well as the use of space may result obvious to a
present audience. Nevertheless it seems that Druid Company relying on a first class
acting and exploiting the huge possibilities offered by the play itself, has avoided that
risk. Most remarkable in the amazing cast the terribly histrionic performance by
David Wilmot, playing Private Gar.
The production refuses easy sentimentality that could arise from some scenes,
especially those regarding Gar`s recollection of his childhood as well as the
flashbacks set in Kate`s house and the visit of Auntie Lizzy. Instead, Paddy Cuneen
who directed the play and his actors have chosen a dry, dignified style which suit
Gar`s tragic condition, without giving allowance for self-indulgence. As a result of the
interplay with his alter ego, Gar is not a pathetic figure, victim of a repressive culture
which hopefully does not exist anymore in Ireland today. His creative mind is able to
provoke in the audience a deep reflection on human life, when decisions must be
taken and hopes eventually faced. The extraordinary mutual understanding, as well as
the contrast and compenetration, even in musical term, between the two actors playing
Private and Public Gar creates an engaging multifaceted image of a dissonant inner
self striving to find his voice.
According to the fiction of the play, the eternal dialogue between the two selves
is condensed in the space of few hours that separate Gar from his leaving for the
States. Its pace being marked by the obsessive sound of the hands of the clock
sovrasting the kitchen space. The dynamic Private and Public Gar`s performances
contrast with the powerful stillness of "archetypal figures" in Irish culture
that, like tame puppets, enact on stage the same old jokes: "white for the doves
and black for the crows" is all the priest can say during his draught game with
Screwball. Gar asks for more, - `because you could translate all this loneliness, this
groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life
bearable for us all. And yet you don`t say a word. Why Canon ? Why arid Canon?
Isn`t this your job? - to translate?`- Here is Friel who is accusing the conservatism of
the Catholic Church and its formulas which has failed in creating a new sensibility of
language. Both Screwball and Canon can`t hear him, nor they can listen to the notes
from Mendelssohn`s violin concerto coming from Gar`s room, which Canon acutely
perceives as "a noise of some sort".
Gar`s performances exert pressure against the fading figures of the Father, the
Master and the Priest, belonging to a different world which there is no more
possibility to communicate with. However, traditional Irish characters result to be
equally tormented in their own way, by the confrontation with the new generation, as
well as by their inability to articulate their feelings. Their stillness on stage as
expression of their grieve, is not less passionate than the dynamic actions of Public
and Private Gar. Screwball`s afternoon tea and his reading of the papers, do not look
like harmless routine habits but crystallised rituals of loneliness, painful to watch for
the audience.
With Gar`s last lines `Why do I have to leave, I don`t know, I don`t know` , the
plot rewinds to the conflict situations which opened the play, the linear denouement
being abandoned in favour of a circular structure. As a film camera, Gar`s detached
eye watches for the last time the images of his memory now "fixed" on
stage.
Watching Druid production of Philadelphia here I Come! I forgot
to be in Ireland during the Sixties as the present of the theatrical representation
enlarged and offered to the audience the perception of a wider and not linear sense of
time and space. Drown in the times of my conscience, trying to build up new images
from my past, and for my future, listening to my private and public Gar debating with
the figures of authority in my life, I forgot to be in Ireland at all.
REVIEW
Playing with film
Baby Jane
Project @ The Mint, Dublin
6-21 March 1998
Certainly interesting the choice made by The Corn Exchange for their last
production, adapting for the stage Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
(USA 1962). Most spectators will probably remember it as a thriller-camp classic,
signed by Robert Aldrich who was a master of the psycho horror genre.
The Corn Exchange, an innovative Theatre Company based in Dublin and
directed by Annie Ryan, was set up in 1995 with the aim of focusing on structured
performance styles. Their work may not sound new to Irish audiences as they
distinguished themselves during the last Dublin Theatre Festivals, with
Streetcar, their first Commedia dell`Arte play that won Sexiest Show of
the Fringe `96, and Big Bad Wolf, an adaptation from Albee`s Who
is Afraid of Virginia Woolf, nominated Best Production for Fringe `97.
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, is today a common
reference and often parodied and imitated film especially in the campy
world of gay men. It became famous not for the mediocre
story contained in it, but for the interpretations of two of Hollywood`s greatest screen
legends, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. A grotesque Baby Jane Hudson (Bette
Davis), a former child star and paralysed invalid sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), also
a former movie star, live together in a gloomy mansion. Jane, whose career faded long
ago, is now a deranged alcoholic. The film includes many stunning scenes and
excessive performances, particularly Jane`s relentless torment of her sister to whom
she serves special meals involving roasted rats and birds for her "din-din".
The two duelling divas were actually playing themselves and their mutual aversion, at
the decline of their own career, creating a style which is pathetic and yet slightly
horrific. As glamorous Davis declared, "the only time I liked Joan Crawford on
the set, was when I kicked her down the stairs!"
In its day the movie was probably disturbing for its savage beating and mental
illness, however The Corn Exchange`s adaptation seems hilarious. Perhaps audiences
have been treated to so much worse since 1962 that watching Bette Davis kicking
Joan Crawford in her ribs, or Crawford screaming with disgust in front of a dead rat is
a day at the beach; nevertheless the distance in time is definitely not the only reason
responsible for the comic effect of the play.
The relation between fiction and reality as well as the masks imposed on the
Hollywood actresses by society, become part of the game in The Corn Exchange`s
Baby Jane. As the movie is so intermingled with the lives of its
interpreters, Cyndy Cummings and Annie Ryan could not have played Baby Jane and
Blanche Hudson, without avoiding to present terrific caricatures of the two
Hollywood film stars, as they did. The style itself, an experimental approach to
Commedia dell`Arte, seems to adapt very well to such an interpretation of the
character in terms of caricature of recognisable types.
One of the areas "opened up" by the play in relation to its source is
the popular theatre of variety, or vaudeville which can be identified by its series of
attractions, turns or numbers, unconnected to any theme. Its influence seems evident
in the episodic structure of Baby Jane. The Corn Exchange exploits the
popularity of the story and its melodramatic style to its advantage. So Baby
Jane does not feel obliged to tell a story and give logical cohesion to the
sequence of colourful gags it presents. If the plot is well known, the audience
concentrate on the theatrical aspects of the performance. When eclectic Pat Kinevane,
as the presenter, has introduced to the audience the stereotype child star Baby Jane
Hudson, spectators experience a different kind of theatre where they might be
encouraged to eat drink and smoke during the performance.
The notion of breaking down each scene into shorter units by means of repeated
entrances and exits is extended to the actors`body language. Each part of their body
works separately in a `staccato style`; actors` movement follows the frenzy rhythm of
the drums on stage. Speeches are delivered independently from gesture, actors never
speak while they move, and when they do, freezing their gestures, they face the
audience; the alternate use of movement and voice creating a comic tension between
the two languages.
The synchronism among actors and musicians is a remarkable feature in The
Corn Exchange`s performance. Their relation is worked out to such a precise degree
that it would be difficult to say whether the drum gives the signal and rhythm to the
physical actions or viceversa.
In Baby Jane The Corn Exchange has used masks for the first time.
While Cindy Cummings and Annie Ryan wear heavy make up, Pat Kinevane uses
three different masks in order to impersonate different roles. Instead of leather masks
who are used by some contemporary performers of Commedia, Kinevane has made
for this production rubber masks, which are very uncomfortable to wear, as they
prevent the actor`s skin from perspiring.
However it is probably the extensive study of the character`s behaviours and
physical movements that links the work of The Corn Exchange to Commedia
dell`Arte. Once the actor has established a pattern of movement for a character, the
comic effect is repeated every time the audience recognise her/his main features.
Kinevane `s hilarious walk playing the cleaning woman with false big heaps and wig
is just an example of a character and in this case a mask, who "work".
Undoubtedly worth to mention is the film sequence projected on a sheet- which
is part of the stage props- after the introduction of Baby Jane Hudson and at the end of
the play. Stylistically the film sequence absorbs and incorporates the play, together
with its audience into the screen itself, exciting the spectators with bewilderment and
surprise, as in a similar way it happens in Woody Allen`s The Red Rose of
Cairo. A clever work of editing pastes together sequences from
Greystokes, King Kong and Gone With the Wind, where the
heroines have been substituted with images of Annie Ryan and Cyndy Cummings
playing Jane and Blanche. Actors are off stage for the duration of the film (about15`)
and one could argue that having them playing at the same time could have been even
more challenging in term of the overlapping between the two different media.
The play ends with a suggestive image of Jane Hudson`s silouhette dancing
behind the sheet, on which closing credits of the play are projected immediately after.
Best luck to this young talented group, we are looking forward to their next
work.
REVIEW: Twenty Grand
Elizabeth Di Britta
Review
As a child, my image of gangsters was completely informed by the film version
of Guys & Dolls. As far as I was concerned that was an acceptable
characterisation of members of the New York underworld; I certainly had no
opportunity to see the reality of that world. I figured gangsters really didn't sing and
dance all over Manhattan, but that they were probably incredibly suave and
charismatic. I eventually grew up and realised there was probably nothing farther
from the truth - the Gotti family is not half as magnetic as Marlon Brando, Frank
Sinatra and their friends. Declan Hughes seems to have as warped and childish a view
of gangsters as I once did. Because if Dublin's real gangsters are anything like Frank
and company they could not have lasted. A bigger bunch of fools I've never seen.
And yet their foolishness and stupidity were not comedic enough or exaggerated
enough to be seen as a parody. They certainly didn't have the intelligence or cunning
to warrant anyone's fear. In the somewhat overly long opening scene, Frank offers
John a few options for punishment and John chooses to be beaten. After he's left
Frank tells Tommy that no one has ever taken the glass, which turns out to not be
poisoned. Consider the options: obviously no one in their right mind will choose to
have their tongue cut out or eyes gouged out. That leaves being beaten - either to
death or to a point at which you'd prefer to be dead - or drinking something which
may or may not be poisoned. If the drink is not poisoned you're safe and if it is it
promises to be a much quicker and much less painful death than Dean's beating. And
yet none of Frank's goons are smart enough to take it. How can we expected to fear
such a bunch of idiots; and if you've never had anyone in your organisation who is
smart enough to take the glass, how had the organisation managed to survive?
Perhaps this is why Karen's fear, as presented by Amelia Crowley, was never
believable. Karen has tried to overcome her fear and hatred of her gangster father
through her drawings. In her introduction to Art History 101, she likens herself to the
prehistoric cave painters, who, it seems, were learning to confront their fears through
their art. And so, Karen draws dark comic book images of gangsters -- black and
white, both in colour scheme and in the crisp sterility of the images. Karen's
apartment is dominated by one of these images, which stands in for the back wall.
The only other things in that space are a chair and her easel with more drawings. It's
impossible to avoid them and the audience is obviously expected to make some
connection between the images and the people seen on stage. But Hughes' characters
are caught somewhere between these comic book figures and the violent, foul-
mouthed, wise-cracking hitmen now flooding Hollywood movies. They lack the crisp
one-dimensionality of the comics and the brutal wit and gruesome juxtapositions of
the sort one gets from Pulp Fiction. If we cringe at Twenty
Grand it is not at this juxtaposition of comedy and blood, but at the stupidity of
the group and at the clichéd crime boss.
Hughes teases his audience with a more sinister subplot in the possible abuse of
Karen by Frank - or at the very least a father's improper desire for his daughter. A
huge deal is made of the dress he has bought for her and she is obviously
uncomfortable around him, and for more than the fact that he's a mobster. But about
a third of the way into the show, Frank denies ever having touched Karen and the
entire subject is dropped. Karen turns out to be just a whiny, paranoid child -- an
impression reinforced by a strikingly limpid performance. Dean Hackett in his
outlandish garb and with his violent one-track mind is the only character who has any
relation to Karen's cartoon creations. And Karl Shiel's performance pushes him well
outside of reality. On the other hand, the character Ken is firmly rooted in reality. He
may not be very bright, but he knows how things operate and he knows how to follow
orders. Again, this was reflected in and reinforced by Mick Nolan's portrayal. The
other three members of the organisation fall somewhere in between these two
extremes, forcing the entire production into confusion. It is impossible to figure out
how one is meant to read all of the separate parts and to discern how they are meant to
work together.
Because the comic view of the gangsters is never properly explored, the gigantic
image in Karen's apartment becomes worthless and invalidates that part of the set and
the script. The set for Frank's office, on the other hand, was fabulous with its air of
seedy seductiveness. It was cohesive, it looked good, and it had a strange power of
attraction, despite the sheen of slime and corruption. The one disturbing factor was
the neon lights. One bar of neon appeared in the lower right hand corner of the back
window. It's origins were unclear and it's presence inexplicable, so that it only served
as a distraction to the rest of the scene. The neon arrow pointing into Frank's office,
though more understandable, seemed to be quite silly. Certainly, if I were a crime
boss, I wouldn't want to advertise the entrance to my private office. But then again,
I'd hope to have a little more intelligence and strength.
The Origins of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, 1897-1904
Rachel Rubin Ladutke
The Abbey Theatre of Dublin opened its doors in December of 1904. It was the
first national theatre to open in Ireland, but it was also the culmination of a long line
of Irish theatrical tradition. Ireland had spawned many great and/or prolific dramatists
over the centuries: Goldsmith, Wycherly, Shaw, and Boucicault, to name a few.
However, most of these playwrights had relocated to London and become absorbed
into the fabric of the English theatrical scene.
More immediately, the Abbey was a direct result of seven years of long, hard
work by a multitude of playwrights, actors, and producers.1 Chief among them were
producer/actors William and Frank Fay, an aristocratic widow named Lady Augusta
Gregory, a wealthy English spinster named Anne Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, and
the poet William Butler Yeats.
In 1897 Yeats was an expatriate Irishman living in London, and harboring
dreams of establishing an Irish national theatre. Seeking financial support for his
venture, he paid a visit to Edward Martyn, an acquaintance who had become
interested in writing plays. Martyn's neighbor, Lady Augusta Gregory, happened also
to be visiting that same day. These three diverse individuals discovered a common
desire for Irish plays and for a venue to present them.
Of that fateful first meeting, Lady Gregory wrote,
We sat there through that wet afternoon, and though I had never been at all
interested in theatres, our talk turned on plays...I said it was a pity we had no Irish
theatre...Mr. Yeats said that had always been a dream of his, but he had of late thought
it an impossible one, for it could not at first pay its way, and there was no money to be
found for such a thing in Ireland. We went on talking about it, and things seemed to
grow possible as we talked, and before the end of the afternoon we had made our
plan.2
The 'plan' was to present an evening of plays once a year, in the spring, ideally
new plays written by Irish authors. The productions would be guaranteed through
small donations from multiple benefactors. Martyn agreed to help finance the
productions if his plays were included in the programmes. This was precisely what
Yeats had had in mind when including him. Lady Gregory herself put up the first
£25, and drafted many letters to friends and acquaintances asking for support. The
group named itself the Irish Literary Theatre.3
Naturally, this bold action was not without its foes. As the Irish Literary Theatre
prepared for its first performances, an ongoing debate raged in the press. Some
rejected the very idea of an Irish literary theatre as elitist. Some claimed that a theatre
created by the upper classes, and non-Catholics to boot, could not be called an Irish
literary theatre. Others objected to the plays on its inaugural programme.
These plays, presented in May of 1899, were Martyn's comedy, The
Heather Field, and Yeats' The Countess Cathleen. The Martyn
play was a trifle, pleasant to watch and soon forgotten. The Yeats play, however,
caused an uproar even before its performance. Audiences took offense at the
depiction of the peasant class as blasphemous, thieving, and promiscuous. The title
character saves the peasants on her land by selling her soul to the devil. Ultimately
she is redeemed because God himself finds her too valuable to lose.
Nationalists protested because they perceived the Countess as representing
England, which alone could save the Irish from their own folly. Clergy protested
because a sacrilegious act was rewarded. A pamphlet entitled Souls For Gold was
circulated, which denounced the play on religious grounds. Martyn, a deeply
religious man, threatened to withdraw his financial support. Yeats managed to placate
him by convincing a clergyman to commend the play.
On the evening of its premiere, newspapers called upon the citizens to attend the
play and protest its message. Yeats' response was to summon the (British) police
force to the theatre to ensure the actors' safety, an act which did little to endear him to
the angry public. Nevertheless, the evening proceeded with only verbal dispute.
Critical response from both Dublin papers and the visiting London reviewers was
mostly positive.
The Countess Cathleen was repeatedly revised throughout Yeats'
life. It was far from a great play, but it did introduce new, specifically Irish, elements
to the Dublin stage. This in itself was controversial. It source material was an Irish
myth, "The Countess Kathleen O'Shea," which can be found in a
collection of folk tales Yeats had edited.4 It is central to the plot of the play, even
more so than the story, that the peasants are starving and the Countess alone can save
them. Barely fifty years had passed since the Great Famine, and hunger was still a
sensitive topic in Ireland. Yeats denied consciously basing his interpretation on the
Famine, but it is possible he was not always aware of the factors which influenced his
writing.
Lady Gregory and Yeats wrote the following in the formal declaration of purpose
for the Irish Literary Theatre: "We will show that Ireland is not the home of
buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it had been represented, but the home of ancient
idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of
misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that
divide us."5 The form of theatrical literature Yeats championed came to be
called the 'peasant play' because it used characters and stories from the lower classes.
It is clear that Yeats believed it was possible to separate theatre from politics.
This was a naïve assumption. Frazier [examining the roots of the I.L.T. and its early
goals] writes,
The howls in the gallery when The Countess Cathleen was staged showed just
how little representation was outside the political questions that divided loyalist and
nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, aristocrat and democrat. The advertisement by
the founders was, in fact, likely to divide them more, because it makes contradictory
promises: the authors will show the real Ireland and the ideal Ireland. The Countess
Cathleen certainly disappoints one of these expectations: an ideal Ireland would not be
so richly populated with sinners 6.
Perhaps Yeats was gratified, however, that at least people were attending the
plays and responding to them, rather than ignoring the I.L.T.'s existence.
Yeats' focus on establishing a playwright-centered theatre would often put him
into direct conflict with his audiences, and even with his colleagues. He was hyper-
sensitive to the threat of censorship, and he did not permit himself or any playwright
who worked with his theatre to be forced into self-editing. Nor would he permit his
audiences to dictate what was offered.
It was unusual for a theatre to be organized around a playwright, but Yeats was
an unusual man. He had a strong vision and he developed the contacts and ability to
see it through. Most "fringe" (i.e., non-commercial) theatres of the time
were run by a producer and placed great emphasis on text in their productions. These
smaller theatres lacked the resources to create large, elaborate sets and costumes, and
in any case, the new drama demanded a new stagecraft. Therefore, European
audiences were becoming accustomed to spare production values and text-centered
performances. The I.L.T. was able to capitalize on this trend.
The second evening of plays, in February of 1900, caused more friction between
Yeats and Martyn. The program consisted of Maeve written by
Martyn, The Last Feast of the Fianna by Alice Milligan, and The
Bending of the Bough by George Moore, who was also the company's
producer. This last play had been adapted by Moore to salvage a poor play of
Martyn's, originally called The Tale of a Town. Yeats and Moore had
agreed the original version was unplayable, so Moore rewrote and renamed the piece.
Martyn was quite angered by this; though the play was well-received, he interpreted
Moore's act as a sign of disrespect.
Although Martyn's financial generosity had helped make the I.L.T. a reality,
Yeats had begun to think him expendable. Lady Gregory and Yeats now possessed
other resources, contacts, and theatre experience. Yeats gradually grew more open in
expressing his dislike for Martyn. After a trip to London to gather a company of
actors for the second production, Martyn was left behind to escort the actors to Dublin
and see to their baggage. Meanwhile, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George Moore
enjoyed a pleasant, comfortable return voyage.
The I.L.T.'s second series of plays were pleasantly received by the audiences and
critics. Now it was clear that the I.L.T. was not about to disappear. Suddenly
everyone seemed to have an opinion about its purpose. The nationalists thought it
should present the case for an independent Ireland. Yeats was striving to make the
theatre into a place of magic and poetry, not a venue for political propaganda. Rather,
"[i]t was to be a "Celtic" theatre. Its inspiration would come from
pre-Christian Ireland -- a period rich in mythical heroes and romantic tales. This was
the Ireland beloved by the tellers of folk tales."7
The Gaelic League, meanwhile, argued "that no theatre which used the
English language could be truly Irish. Yeats partly agreed with this idea"8 but
had great difficulty locating plays written in Gaelic. After centuries of English rule,
few Irish citizens even spoke or understood their original tongue. Eventually Yeats
located a man named Douglas Hyde, who had been writing a short Gaelic play,
The Twisting of the Rope (Casadh an t-Sugain), and agreed to produce it.
In planning the third evening of plays, Yeats and Moore chose Diarmuid and
Grainne, their collaboration based on an Irish myth, to accompany Hyde's play.
When Martyn learned he was to be excluded from the programme, he refused to
provide financial support. Yeats had no qualms about Martyn's departure. Around
the same time, however, Moore and Yeats also began quarreling, and Moore departed
for England.
The third evening of plays was thus produced by R.A. Benson, manager of an
English acting troupe. More controversy ensued during this October, 1901 series.
Diarmuid and Grainne aroused protest from nationalists because it
reduced Irish heroes to mere mortal status. Hyde's play, however, was
enthusiastically received. Members of the Gaelic League packed the house, eager to
hear their native tongue spoken in a real theatre for the first time.
Casadh an t-Sugain was notable for one other reason: its casting. All of the other
I.L.T. plays had been performed by English actors, brought up from London for the
engagement. This yielded mixed results: the British, while highly trained
professionals, had difficulty speaking the rhythms of the Irish dialects. Moreover, the
nationalists who looked on the Irish Literary Theatre as their theatre had also been
frustrated by the lack of Irish actors on its stage. Casadh an t-Sugain, however, was
performed by a local amateur group and produced by William Fay.
This group was rather grandly titled the Irish National Dramatic Company. Its
leaders were William Fay and his brother Frank, dramatic critic for the United
Irishman. The Fays were to play a major role in the next stage of development of an
Irish national theatre. By 1901, they had been presenting plays for ten years,
performing in coffeehouses and meeting halls around Dublin.
In recent articles concerning the drama Frank Fay had expressed interest, as had
Yeats, in encouraging the development of a native Irish drama and the use of Gaelic
on the stage.
In 1901 he wrote several important articles on 'An Irish National Theatre,' and in
one of them he said: "My notion of an Irish National Theatre is that it ought to
be the nursery of an Irish dramatic literature which, while making a world-wide
appeal, would see life through Irish eyes. For myself, I must say that I cannot
conceive it possible to achieve this except through the medium of the Irish
language."9
Ironically, Frank was assigned to review the final Irish Literary Theatre
performance. He had high praise for his brother's production, and also commended
the writing of Diarmuid and Grainne. However, he was less than enthusiastic about
the (English) cast. He wrote, "The actors did not act the play as if they believed
in it…I do not therefore intend to say anything about the interpretation, because the
play was simply not interpreted at all."10
Shortly after this, Frank Fay read the script for Deirdre, a new play
written by George Russell (called AE), which had been published in the All Ireland
Review. Thrilled by the script's use of poetic language and native myth, he arranged
to meet AE and offered to produce the play. He was so enthusiastic about the piece
that he put it into rehearsal in December of 1901, before it had even been completed.
Yeats had been duly impressed with Casadh an-t Sugain and he had
learned of Frank's reputation as a meticulous, skilled producer. Following his break
with George Moore, Yeats decided to dissolve the I.L.T. as a producing organization.
After consulting with Lady Gregory, Yeats offered the Fays his play, Kathleen ni
Houlihan, to accompany Deirdre. He also convinced the actress Maud Gonne, for
whom he had an unrequited love, to play the title role.
At this stage, and for many years to come, Yeats would consult Lady Gregory
about most decisions concerning the Abbey Theatre. Unlike Martyn, she was a true
partner to Yeats, rather than just a source of capital. She was also an able playwright,
primarily of shorter plays. Many of her plays were well-received by audiences. She
was a presence in Yeats' life and in the Dublin theatrical scene from the founding of
the I.L.T. until her death in 1933.
This production was a milestone for the Fays. Having been given new plays by
Yeats and AE, the Fays were now associated with some of the most prestigious names
in the Irish theatre movement. Unfortunately, the financial circumstances were no
more generous than usual. The plays were put into rehearsal at a local coffeehouse,
and the entire evening was presented on a budget of £10. The performances were held
in a donated room at St. Teresa's Temperance Hall, where the audience sat on folding
chairs among the billiard tables.
The Fays were accustomed to producing in adverse circumstances, and they were
not daunted. Over the years, they had performed in many different spaces.
Sometimes they rented halls for a night or two. Once they had ventured to sign a
year's lease on a space that quickly proved unusable. After mounting one production
there, they designated it as a rehearsal hall and were again searching for suitable
space.
Both William and Frank Fay performed and produced the plays. Willie was at
his best in tragic roles, while Frank was a gifted comedian. Frank was also the
company's primary acting teacher, and he trained his amateur actors with a great
intensity. Over several years, he had succeeded in building a dedicated, skilled
company of native Irish actors. This achievement greatly impressed Yeats and Lady
Gregory. In presenting new Irish plays, Fay faced some of the same difficulties that
Yeats had encountered in locating actors who were capable of performing in Gaelic.
Fay focused on diction and physical flexibility, and allowed his actors freedom to
interpret their roles. He was far from casual, however; he would rehearse his plays for
months, and never announced an opening performance until he felt the play was ready
for an audience.
Frank expected his actors to study their parts at home and come into rehearsals
with their lines memorized. He himself learned all the roles in a play, in case he was
needed to substitute at the last minute. Some company members were less dedicated
and did not take the work seriously; they usually left the company fairly quickly.
Those who remained were truly committed to the craft. These actors were not highly
trained and polished, like their English counterparts. However, they possessed a
genuine quality, which appealed to their audiences, and they learned quickly; they
were a credit to Fay's instruction. Yeats himself often praised Frank Fay as 'teaching
me everything I know about the theatre.'
The performances of Deirdre and Kathleen ni Houlihan were held on April 2, 3
and 4, 1902. They were well received, and the Fays had gained new credibility
through their association with Yeats. They moved quickly to rename themselves the
Irish National Dramatic Company and elected Yeats their president. Maud Gonne,
Douglas Hyde, AE, William Fay and Fred Ryan became officers of the Company, and
each contributed to a production fund. Though not an official member, Lady Gregory
also gladly contributed £20.
It had become a matter of course for the London papers to send critics up to
Dublin when new plays were performed. This in itself would have seemed
unthinkable five years earlier. Yeats' growing influence and frequent visits to London
and even to America had lent great credibility to his theatrical endeavors. Other
theatre professionals often attended as well. This eventually yielded an invitation to
the company to perform in London, in May of 1903. The sponsor for these
performances was Stephen Gwynn, an English producer who had been impressed by
their work during a visit to Dublin.
A variety of logistical problems arose. The company were still performing
without salary. Most of them had full-time jobs (five and a half days per week) and
had to go to great lengths to arrange a Saturday morning off. With great excitement
and trepidation, they headed for London on the evening of Friday, May 1. Two
performances were held the following day, and the luminaries of Ireland and London
packed the audiences. The matinee consisted of Yeats' The Hour Glass, Lady
Gregory's debut play, Twenty Five, and Yeats' Kathleen ni Houlihan. The evening's
bill included Fred Ryan's The Laying of the Foundations, Yeats' A Pot of Broth, and
a reprise of Kathleen ni Houlihan.
Many critics attended the performances, primarily at the matinee as there were to
be openings in the West End that evening. Also present were curious spectators and
the elite of Dublin and London. Shaw was unable to attend, being out of town that
week, and later expressed great regret over this. Some of those present had already
seen performances in Dublin and been duly impressed.
The notices for these first London performances of the Irish National Theatre
Society ranged from kind objectiveness to qualified praise. Many critics
acknowledged the company's enthusiasm and praised the effort. Even the less
delighted reviewers treated the company's efforts with seriousness and respect. The
influential William Archer, a mentor of George Bernard Shaw, even reviewed the
plays in two separate papers, the Manchester Guardian and The World. He wrote,
"Mr. W.G. Fay showed extraordinary accomplishment in his part of the
Beggarman in 'A Pot of Broth'. This was a perfect piece of acting –
perfect no less in its sobriety than in its humour."11
Other especially positive notices came from Walkley in the Times and Chambers
in The Academy and Literature.The company's years of hard work and the ridicule
they had endured from their own countrymen had begun to pay off. When the
company returned to Ireland, they were suddenly treated more seriously by the Dublin
papers. Word seemed to get quickly around the newspaper offices that the Society had
better be looked at more carefully. But the extreme nationalists were not to be won
over by praise from English lackeys of imperialism. They became more suspicious
than ever, and suspicion soon broke out into hostility. And just around the corner was
a man on whom their hostility could be vented successfully – John Millington
Synge.12
Synge was an Irish poet who had been living in France until Yeats convinced
him to return to Ireland and write for the Irish National Theatre Society. Upon his
return to Ireland he chose to live in the wild Western region, on the Aran Islands off
the coast of Galway. Many of Synge's plays were written in the dialects spoken by
these hardy islanders. He shared Yeats' distaste for censorship. Though his
characters' actions were often criticized, he refused to change a word. He claimed he
was writing the truth as he saw it. This often put him at odds with his audiences.
Among the group of new playwrights who came to be known as the "Irish
Renaissance," Synge is especially notable for his inventive use of language.
Riders To The Sea is a prime example of his poetic, allegorical
playwriting. Its protagonist, Maura, stands for Ireland itself. Having lost all six of her
sons to the sea, she finds a new strength in the depths of despair. She can no longer
be beaten because she has nothing left to fear.
In many respects, 1903 was a milestone year for the young company. Yeats'
beloved Maud Gonne departed the group, along with several other actors who cited
political objections to the plays being presented. The Irish National Theatre
Society,13 as the company now called itself, gained a talented young actress named
Sara Allgood. Synge joined forces with the company. Finally, the company gained a
patroness in the person of Miss Anne Horniman.
Miss Horniman had previously helped finance a production of Yeats' The Land
of Heart's Desire in London. She had also contributed to the I.N.T.S. production of
The King's Threshold and promised to design and purchase the costumes for a
planned production of The Shadowy Waters. Yeats viewed her as he had Martyn, as
an untalented dabbler who was useful for the moment and could be dispensed with
when the time came. Certainly Yeats never had qualms about severing ties with
people who had outlived their usefulness to his purpose. This was not one of his more
appealing traits.
Miss Horniman was enthusiastic about Yeats' plays and impressed by the work
of the I.N.T.S. She promised to provide the company with a permanent performance
space. The fledgling group faced two more major obstacles: the lack of a permanent
theatre space, and the absence of the patent which would designate the I.N.T.S. as a
professional theatre. In Dublin, as in England, only companies which held patents
were permitted to operate as a professional theatre. The I.N.T.S. continued
performing on an amateur level while Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Annie Horniman
began pulling strings to get a special permission passed in the Irish Parliament.
With the patent wending its slow way through the legal system, the directors
began searching for a suitable theatre. Eventually they settled on the old Mechanics'
Institute, on Abbey Street in central Dublin. Unfortunately, another theatre company
known as the Mechanics already performed there. Miss Horniman leased the adjacent
building, which had once been the city morgue. This drew a stream of amused
remarks from the public.
Conveniently for the I.N.T.S., the Mechanics' Hall resident company was evicted
around this time for the violation of fire codes. (It is suspected, though it has never
been proven, that Yeats exerted some influence to arrange this.) However it
happened, the Mechanics' was leased and plans were drawn up to combine the two
buildings.
Miss Horniman spent a great deal of time and money remodeling the Mechanics
Institute on Abbey Street. The agreement was that the I.N.T.S. would have the use of
the building, rent-free, whenever they wished, in order to present plays. Even before
the patent was issued, construction had begun on what was to be a 562-seat theatre.
The Abbey Theatre would be intimate in size and grand in scope, a model for future
non-profit theatres.
The I.N.T.S. returned to London twice more before work was completed on what
would be called the Abbey Theatre. These performances, along with continued
productions of new plays by Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and others, continued to
build their reputation and improve their skills. While Miss Horniman was interested in
advancing this new Irish theatre, she demanded there be no political slant to their
work. She did not want to seem traitorous to her own country. Irish nationalists,
meanwhile, were only too willing to accuse Yeats of selling his soul: he was taking
money from an English woman to produce Irish plays in an Irish theatre. Yeats paid
them little heed; he seized upon this opportunity to sustain his dream of an Irish
theatre. It must have seemed that keeping silent about his political beliefs was a small
price to pay. He also knew this would not be a permanent situation. Once the Abbey
was established, he was sure, Miss Horniman could be edged out as Martyn had been.
The Abbey Theatre opened its doors to the public on Tuesday evening,
December 27, 1904. The main entrance on Marlborough Street led directly to the
orchestra seats, stalls, and balcony. From the side entrance on Abbey Street, a small
flight of stairs for the first time led to the pit. Unlike other theatres of its period, the
Abbey Theatre had no boxes; instead, the seats were placed in a horseshoe
configuration. Rather than the customary luxurious upholstery, the seats were
covered in red leather. The stage was only about fifteen feet deep; behind it lay an
alley which led to the dressing rooms and manager's office.14
The curtain was black with gold stripes, and there was no barrier between the
orchestra's pit and the lower seats. The original walls, gallery, and high ceiling had
been retained. The lighting system provided soft illumination, suitable for the poetic,
dreamlike quality of the plays. The audience filled the house, eager to witness the
historic event. When the plays were about to start, a deep gong rang three times,
echoing off the dull red walls.15
Kathleen ni Houlihan led off the evening. It was supplemented with
Yeats' On Baile's Strand, Lady Gregory's Spreading the
News and Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen. The company that
night included Sara Allgood and Arthur Sinclair, actors who would later become the
first two famous Abbey members. At the end of Kathleen ni Houlihan,
writes Dermot Byrne, who was among the audience that night:
These last words brought forth thunderous applause that could be heard far away
like the shouts of the young men when the French landed at Killala. It stirred up the
blood of the young Irishmen, so that I thought they would never cease cheering. The
sight was inspiring and thrilling, and one felt carried away as if marching along the
road with troops of Irish volunteers while they sang to the music of their band, which
played "God Save Ireland."16
Sadly, of the three playwrights performed that evening, only Yeats was present to
witness this triumphant debut. Synge had fallen ill, and Lady Gregory was out of
town. Synge died only five years later, in 1909, at the age of 37. Had he lived longer,
he might have overshadowed Yeats as a playwright. As it is, he left behind an
impressive body of plays, which continue to be performed to this day. If Yeats had
the ideas for a native Irish drama, Synge was the man who made these ideas into
concrete reality. Miss Horniman had provided financial support, while the Fays had
established an acting troupe capable of performing this new drama. The Abbey
Theatre was truly a group triumph, shared in by the appreciative audience that first
night and ever since.
As the Abbey Theatre had been Yeats' dream, it was to become his life's work.
Ultimately, however, it surpassed him and took on a life of its own. The Abbey
Theatre's continued operation for nearly a century (and counting) is a remarkable fact.
Certainly there were many who predicted its demise from the moment the Irish
Literary Theatre came into being. Had the Abbey remained entirely dependent upon
Annie Horniman, or Lady Gregory, or Yeats himself, it could not have survived
beyond their lifetimes.
The Abbey would undergo many changes in leadership and in its focus, even
during Yeats' lifetime. Its very existence sparked a new pride in the use of Irish
dialogue and the representation of Ireland's rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this was
Yeats' greatest gift to his country. The Abbey endures today as a tribute to his vision,
and as a monument to Irish resourcefulness and determination. Thus it may truly be
called an Irish national theatre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Byrne, Dawson, M.A. The Story of Ireland's National Theatre: The Abbey
Theatre In Dublin. (1929). New York: Haskell House Publishers, Inc.
Corrigan, Robert W., Editor. Masterpieces of the Modern Irish Theatre. (1967).
New York: The Macmillan Company.
Fay, Gerard. The Abbey Theatre, Cradle of Genius. (1958). New York: The
Macmillan Company.
Flannery, James W. W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey
Theatre in Theory and Practice. (1976). New Haven and London: Yale University
Press.
Frazier, Adrian. Behind The Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the
Abbey Theatre. (1990). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press.
Gregory, Lady Augusta. Our Irish Theatre.
Kavanagh, Peter. The Story of the Abbey Theatre, from its Origins in 1899 to
the Present. (1950). New York: The Devin-Adair Company.
Mikhail, E.H., Editor. The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections.
(1988). Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Press.
Yeats, W.B., Lady Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge. Theatre Business: The
Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady
Gregory and J.M. Synge. (1982). Saddlemyer, Ann, Editor. University Park and
London: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
1. "Producer" was the contemporary term for a director, and will be
used throughout the paper.
2. Lady Gregory, p. 19.
3. Hereinafter to be abbreviated as I.L.T.
4. Frazier, Adrian. Behind The Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for
the Abbey Theatre. (1990). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, p. 14.
5. Lady Gregory, p. 20.
6. Frazier, p. 7.
7. Kavanagh, Peter. The Story of the Abbey Theatre, from its Origins in 1899 to
the Present. (1950). New York: The Devin-Adair Company, p. 6.
8. Kavanagh, p. 17.
9. Fay, Gerard. The Abbey Theatre, Cradle of Genius. (1958). New York: The
Macmillan Company, p. 21.
10. Fay, p. 25.
11 Fay, p. 57.
12 Fay, p. 59.
13 Hereinafter to be abbreviated as I.N.T.S.
14. Byrne, Dawson, M.A. The Story of Ireland's National Theatre: The Abbey
Theatre In Dublin. (1929). New York: Haskell House Publishers, Inc., p. 45-46.
15. Byrne, p. 46.
16. Byrne, p. 49.
Rachel Rubin Ladutke
30-27 41st Street, #2R
Astoria, NY 11103-3423 U.S.A.
(718) 721-6083
HYPERLINK "arubin@hejira.hunter.cuny.edu"
arubin@hejira.hunter.cuny.edu
Eugenio Barba: Practitioner And Theorist
Antoinette Duffy
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Eugenio Barba: A Brief History
The Third Theatre
The International School of Theatre Anthropology
Theatre Anthropology
CHAPTER TWO
Actor Training
Daily and Extra Daily Behaviour
Pre-Expressivity
Dramaturgy
Rehearsals
Montage
Productions
Barter
CHAPTER THREE
Barba and Interculturalism
ISTA 1986 - The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures
CHAPTER FOUR
Conclusion
APPENDIX
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
Academic and practical research into theatre has been carried on by an ever expanding number of
directors, practitioners and theorists in the twentieth century. The literary study of the playwright and
the playwright's text, the study of ritual and of anthropology, the semiotics of the text, the semiotics of
the performance space and the performer within that space, and the studies of performance training,
styles and genres are all separate areas of research. These areas of theatre research can also overlap
with other disciplines such as cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy, religion, psychology and
history.
Eugenio Barba, the subject of my study, has spent over thirty years conducting research into the
art of the performer. This research has led him to formulate a theory based on the notion that all
performers have similar pre-expressive gestures irrespective of culture. Barba's theories do not have a
base in any of the above mentioned areas of study and his writings are particularly lacking in reference
to or acknowledgement of areas of study in which his work might be located.
In writing about his work Barba relies heavily on the use of metaphor to explain his theories. His
explanations are not objective (in my opinion) and create for the reader the sense of a mystical journey.
This journey was like a maze that led me down a number of paths that all interlinked but had no end or
conclusion.
There are many forms of theatre and performance styles in the West, but the theatre of the
establishment tends to follow a hierarchical pattern which starts with the writer. The emphasis is on the
interpretation of a playtext through an intellectual and psychological understanding.
Barba totally rejects this approach to theatre. In this rejection of Western ideals of theatre and
performance, Barba has researched many indigenous forms of theatre, mainly Indian. He has used the
knowledge gained from his research in his work with the actors of the Odin Theatret. Through this
work he has developed his theories of theatre and performance.
Barba's work falls into two distinct but not separate areas. He is a director and teacher who has
almost total control over the productions and work of the Odin. He is also a theorist who has written
extensively on his research and findings.
My study is an attempt to outline the theories of Eugenio Barba, and to trace their origins and to
discuss their validity. I will try to do this by describing Barba's early experiences of theatre, the
formation of the Odin Theatret and the formation of the International School of Theatre Anthropology.
I will also discuss the training, rehearsals, and productions of the Odin, which is the work that has led
to the theories behind Barba's notion of theatre anthropology.
The main criticisms of Barba's work surround his notion of pre-expressivity which does not
differentiate between culture or gender. In Chapter Three I will use the book by Rustom Bharucha,
Theatre and the World; Performance and the Politics of Culture, as a point of departure to
discuss Barba's use and appropriation of theatre forms and styles from other cultures.
A good example of Barba's lack of reference to other disciplines of study occurred during the
1986 ISTA conference. This conference which was titled 'The Female Role as Represented on
the Stage in Various Cultures' generated a great deal of controversy. I will use this conference
as a reference to show how Barba does indeed live on a 'Floating Island' dislocating himself from the
history of Western theatre.
CHAPTER ONE
Eugenio Barba - A Brief History
Eugenio Barba was born in Southern Italy in 1936 and at the age of fifteen was sent to the Naples
military college. During his three years at the college he went to the theatre for the first time in his
life.2 What impressed him most in the production, was the appearance of a horse on the stage that
broke 'the uniform veil of the stage'. He searched on his subsequent visits to the theatre for the same
effect, but did not find it until he went to Opole in Poland to work with Jerzi Grotowski.
After he graduated from the military college in 1954 Barba travelled to Norway. He took a job as
a welder and after a year he joined the merchant marine. He did this in order to join a ship that was to
travel through the Orient. He had become interested in Indian religions and his work provided a cheap
way to travel and further his interest. His job took him on journeys through the Middle East, Africa,
Lapland, and parts of Scandinavia. Before he left for sea he enrolled, and from time to time studied, in
the University of Oslo, and graduated in 1965 with a Master of Arts in French and Norwegian literature
and the history of religion.
Barba's early years as a migrant in Norway formed his approach as a director, or as he puts it, as a
'maitre du regard'. As a migrant he felt that one of his senses had been mutilated (not being part of the
culture in which he was living) and that as a consequence of not understanding the language, he
interpreted meaning through the physical gestures of the people he met. He became an observer not
only of the gesture but of the possible meaning behind the gesture.3
In 1960 Barba won a UNESCO scholarship which enabled him to travel to Poland and study
theatre. He enrolled in the Warsaw theatre school but became disillusioned because of the contrast
between what was being produced in the theatre, and the reality of a post war Poland.4 He travelled
through Poland whenever he could and on one of these trips he came across the Teatr 13 Rzedow
(Theatre of the Thirteen Rows) in Opole.
The Theatre of the Thirteen Rows was directed by Jerzi Grotowski.5 At the time of Barba's visit
Grotowski's work had not yet been seen outside of Poland. Barba was unimpressed by
Forefather's Eve,6 the production he saw in Opole, and he returned to Warsaw. However,
during a subsequent chance meeting with Grotowski, Barba decided to join the Theatre Laboratory.
The discovery that he shared with Grotowski a common interest in Asian religions and philosophies,
prompted Barba to accept the invitation to travel to Opole and observe the work of Grotowski's
company.
Barba remained with the Polish Laboratory Theatre for three years. During that time he did not
join in the work of the performers but observed from a distance. Barba felt that the work of the
Laboratory had significant implications for world theatre and was intrumental in promoting the work
of the Laboratory abroad. He wrote numerous articles and invited influential people from the world of
Western theatre to see the work. Barba's promotional work eventually led to the group being invited to
perform in Europe,7 and Grotowski was invited to the West to lecture and talk about his work.
In 1963, Barba made a study trip to India and on hearing of a form of theatre called Kathakali8 he
decided to investigate. He was one of the first people from the West to write a technical description of
this form of theatre. Barba's experience in India was to have a profound influence on how his own
company the Odin would develop.
Barba was not allowed to re-enter Poland after his sojourn in India and decided to return to
Norway. He tried to join the mainstream theatre world in Norway, to no avail, and decided to form his
own theatre company. He gathered a group of young people who had been denied access to the
established theatre schools and so began the work of the Odin Theatret.
Barba calls his time with Grotowski's Laboratory his 'period of apprenticeship'. His initial
approach to his own work was inspired by Grotowski's notion of a theatre laboratory and the emphasis
on performance research. How the actors worked and lived together was to become more important
than the performance. Barba rejected realism in favour of a theatre of 'transition'. He does not believe
that it is possible to take the teachings of any one practitioner or performance theorist and copy it. It is
only possible to take the teachings and then to work at inventing a personal theatre. This, in Barba's
terms, is a search for the 'unknown'.
Barba conducts his research systematically in a laboratory situation. Each step of the process has
been documented both in writings and on video. His is not a random search for the 'unknown' but is a
process of determining the common factors between performers world-wide.
Barba defines his work under various headings. It would be a mistake, however, to see these areas
as totally separate. Each area of work and theory has been born as the result of the work in another
area. There are four main areas of study: the Odin Theatret, Third Theatre, Theatre Anthropology and
the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Each one of these headings has a multitude of
subheadings; for example, if one looks at the work of the Odin, there is the training process (which is
constantly developing), the actors (who play a major role within the company), the rehearsal process,
and the productions.
The Third Theatre
The first thing to note about Third Theatre is that it is almost impossible to define because as soon
as one tries to categorise it, it is no longer Third Theatre. Barba coined the title to describe certain
groupings of people who create their own theatre. These are groups who work outside of the
institutional theatre and outside of the boundaries assigned by the surrounding culture. Richard
Schechner11 in his introduction to 'Towards a Third Theatre'12 says that:
Schechner in this statement recognises the indefinable qualities of Barba's work but seems to view
Third Theatre as only belonging to the Odin whereas Barba sees it as being global. When I came across
the notion of Third Theatre some years ago, I wanted to know what the second theatre was! Barba says
that if we accept established theatre as the first, and the avant-garde as the second, then what Barba and
his colleagues in theatre produce is the third.
In my opinion, Barba's definition appears to be limited. In trying to define a form of theatre that is
not first or second he succeeds in creating a non-definition. There are numerous group theatres now in
existence whose productions are born from intense physical work and are not dependent on a playtext.
What seems to be common in so called avant-garde groups is that they are constantly searching for the
essence of theatricality and of the performer.
Those who practise Third Theatre do not follow any particular style. A third theatre company
would not be 'Stanislavskian',15 or 'Brechtian',16 nor would it slavishly follow the work of any single
practitioner or theorist. Barba says that the original theorists of the theatre, due to a personal 'longing',
constructed an 'autonomous meaning for their action of doing theatre'.
It seems that Third Theatre can be defined by that to which it does not adhere or belong. What
therefore, are the factors common to groups who fall into this category?
In Third Theatre, it is the search for meaning and how theatre is made that takes precedence. Its
focus is on the relationships within a group and their relationship to the audience. For the participants
of these groups there is no difference between a personal and a professional life.
ISTA (International School of Theatre Anthropology)
In 1979 Barba founded the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). The centre is
dedicated to the study of the performer, specifically to pinpoint recurring principles in performance.
The ISTA is an unconventional school in that it is not housed in a building, the participants meet
periodically, it does not have a geographical location and does not have any graduates.
The administrative centre is in Holstebro in Denmark and Barba is the director of the school, but
the work of the school takes place in different centres around the world. Participants of the ISTA
sessions are from diverse backgrounds. Actors, musicians, theorists, anthropologists, dancers,
semioticians have all influenced the outcome of the ISTA sessions.
Barba's investigations in the ISTA are based on observation and experiment unlike performance
studies that focus on styles, genres and theories. His studies are concerned with locating common
principles that might be useful to both Occidental and Oriental performers and not with defining the
rules of behaviour in particular theatre styles.
The following comprises a list of ISTA sessions that have taken place to 1996 with the title of the
theme:
1. 1980 - Bonn, Germany, 'Interculturalism'.
2. 1981 - Volterra, Italy, 'Improvisation'.
3. 1985 - Blois and Malakoff, France, 'Narration'.
4. 1986 - Holstebro, Denmark, 'The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Different
Cultures'.
5. 1987 - Salento, Italy, 'Theatre Dialogue: The Actor's Tradition and the Spectator's Identity'.
6. 1990 - Bologna, Italy, 'The University of Eurasian Theatre'.
7. 1992 - Cardiff and Brecon, Wales, 'Working on Performance East and West'.
8. 1994 - Londrina, Brazil, 'Traditions and Founders of Traditions'.
9. 1995 - Umea, Sweden, 'Form and Information - the Apprenticeship of the Actor in a
Multicultural Dimension'.
10. 1996 - Copenhagen, Denmark, 'The Performer's Bio'.
The elements that influence the ISTA sessions are very much a result of Barba's concerns. A
product of the ISTA sessions is the book compiled by Barba and Nicola Savarese21, A
Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. It is interesting to note
that this book does not discuss any of the ISTA sessions or the contributions made by the participants.
The schedules of the ISTA sessions generally consist of three elements. 'A private
workshop/research session for invited participants; a forum open to theatre practitioners, scholars and
scientists unable to take part in the private work; and a series of performances for the general public'.
There are, however, no strict rules as to the format of the sessions. The first session in Bonn
occurred as a result of two Third Theatre gatherings in Belgrade and Bergamo. Barba wanted to gather
together young directors and actors to work in an intercultural setting. Problems arose during the Bonn
session because of the differing levels of experience among the participants. The participants during
this session moved from one tutor to another. It was difficult, therefore, for the participants to find
relevance for the work, as the focus became the learning of skills. This session, despite the problems,
was very successful in that it was the first time that Asian masters and Western practitioners and
performers had come together in an intercultural learning environment.
The ISTA which Barba describes as an 'itinerant university' is led and controlled by Barba. It is a
vehicle for his investigations into the common elements to all performers. There have been numerous
criticisms, mainly surrounding the lack of opportunity to discuss the work, which generally takes the
form of demonstrations and observations. There is not usually a forum to discuss the findings or for the
generation of argument regarding the theories. I will refer further to the criticisms in Chapter Three.
Theatre Anthropology
Barba's theories of theatre anthropology stem from the results of the work at the ISTA sessions,
and from his observation of the work of the performers at the Odin Theatret. In 1978 the actors from
the Odin left for a period of three months to study a performance or dance style of their own choosing
and in order to share their acquired knowledge on their return. One couple studied at a school of
ballroom dancing, another actor went to India and studied Kathakali, two who went to Brazil studied
capoera and candomble dances, and the actors who went to Bali studied baris and legong.
What Barba found disconcerting when they returned was that they had all acquired styles; they
had learned other people's techniques. During the demonstrations of these newly acquired skills he
noticed that the actors 'put on another skeleton/skin which conditioned the way of standing, moving
and becoming expressive.'23 It was in the transition from, for example, Balinese dance and the actor's
return to being an Odin actor, that he noticed that they applied similar principles. These observations
by Barba were the germs which would later develop into his theories of
pre-expressivity and Theatre Anthropology.
Barba has studied and observed both Western and Eastern performers at work and in performance.
He says that the Occidental actor does not have a tradition of performance but only has as a point of
departure a written text or a director's instructions. He claims that the Oriental performer has a
tradition of codes of actions to which performers must conform. He is critical of the Western tradition
of having the spectator as the ultimate focus and so ignoring the actor's craft, and critical of the
Oriental for not allowing or exposing its performers to other traditions, styles and genres.
Theatre Anthropology should not be confused with the anthropology of performance which is the
study of performance genres. According to Barba, theatre anthropology is a field of investigation into
the pre-expressive behaviour of the human being in a performance situation. Theatre Anthropology
does not seek to define in a scientific sense. It is a search for 'bits of advice', 'information', that can be
followed or ignored.
It is curious that in this search for 'bits of advice' and a non willingness to define Barba has
arrived at numerous definitions. To the uninitiated, these definitions can be very confusing. It is partly
to do with how Barba writes. His writings are couched in metaphor and the telling of myths. Perhaps
this is deliberate. One has to peel away many layers to find any understanding of his theories. Is his
way of writing deliberately non-linear to force the reader to think differently? I think so.
CHAPTER TWO
Actor Training
The training of actors in Western theatre has, in general, focused on psycho-technique. The actor
searches for the reasons why the character might be and behave in a certain way. This approach, with
its emphasis on emotions, feelings and identification with the character encourages an intellectual
approach rather than a physical approach to character development.
Theatre in the Orient, that is those forms that are not influenced by the Occidental, operate under
strict forms of codification. Codification is relatively unknown in the Occident except for certain forms
of mime and dance, namely the form of mime practised by Etienne Decroux known as Corporeal
Mime24 and in ballet.
In the Occident the emphasis is on the interpretation of a previously written text. The actor's
performance is therefore based on discovering the meaning of the text and transmitting that meaning to
the audience. According to Barba, it is important to distinguish between 'a theatre based on the mise-
en-scene of a previously written text, and a theatre based on a performance text'. Barba's theatre
company the Odin create performance texts based on the work of the actors with agreed research
elements.
Inevitably we ask ourselves how did Barba arrive at his definitions describing the performer at
various stages. We know that he studied Eastern forms of theatre and that he incorporated some of the
exercises into his work, but the most significant 'importation' was what he perceived as being 'the
work'. It was the notion that in order for an actor to become a performer the process of training should
be intense, lengthy and should never end. We are all familiar with the Western performer who, having
reached a certain stage, no longer feels the necessity to train. Yet it would be unheard of for a musician
or a dancer to survive at all without practicing their craft each day.
When Barba set up the Odin he had a group of actors with little or no training. He had only
worked with Grotowski for three and a half years and had spent some time in India studying kathakali.
He started with
what he knew. Neither Barba nor the actors could afford to pay outside tutors and therefore they
had to rely on sharing their own experiences. Barba established what was eventually to become the
company's practice by inviting the actors to share their own particular skills with each other.
One of his actors who had studied jazz ballet and gymnastics and another who had studied
pantomime became the first teachers. Barba introduced acrobatic exercises based on the work of
Grotowksi. Barba was also greatly influenced by the work of Stanislavski and Meyerhold25 and
encouraged his actors to read their work. Meyerhold's theories of biomechanics were to form an
integral part of the training in the early days.
Through their work based on Meyerhold's theories, the company developed a series of 'etudes'.
These 'etudes' were short, non-verbal, movement pieces which the actors developed through
improvisation. After a period of two years these 'etudes' were abandoned. This period of work was
critical in the development of the group in that it established their training philosophy.
Training at the Odin is not only about acquiring skills. The skills are important in that they
provide the basis for exploration. The training is essentially about research; the personal research of the
actor. In the early stages of the company the group trained together and they all did the same exercises.
However, after a visit, in 1966, by Grotowski and his leading actor Rysard Cieslak26 to the Odin, the
training evolved and became individual.
During this vistit Grotowski and Cieslak communicated to the group the findings of their recent
research. This was what they called a process of 'psycho physicalisation'. At Grotowski's laboratory in
Poland, they had begun to investigate the link between the performer's physical action and the inner
process. This manifested itself in the linking together of exercises. Through this process the exercises
ceased to be only a test of the performer's agility.
These experiments led to investigations into other stimuli that might cause an action. Sound,
interpersonal interaction, and the inner process were all combined, and the result was the discovery that
each performer had individual rhythm. For the actors of the Odin this led to the beginnings of
individual work. Each performer chose how they would use the exercises for themselves and
developed their own physical montages.
Iben Nigel Rasmussen, an actor who had been with Barba since the beginning, began gradually to
experiment with her voice. She had felt that the exercises were not developing her vocal potential
sufficiently. After a period of time, through observing Rasmussen, Barba realised the importance of the
individual work of the performer and the focus gradually changed from group to individual training.
This focus on individual training eventually led to Barba's exit from training; for the first ten years of
the group he had attended every training session. Barba then became the advisor to the performers, but
they also took advice from each other.
There was a short break in training between 1976 and 1977. This occurred for a number of
reasons. Barba, when the group were performing in Italy, decided that he had a committed group of
actors and that he would not recruit any new members. Rasmussen and Larsen disagreed with Barba's
decision and decided to take on apprentices. These apprentices trained directly under Rasmussen and
Larsen and eventually were invited to join the group. Another reason for the break was that the Odin
began to diversify. Barba organised two eight month training sessions for what he termed the
'International Brigade'. These were performers who trained with the Odin with the express purpose of
returning to their own country to share their acquired knowledge and experience.
In 1977 training resumed and again there was a shift in focus. This shift was towards what the
group felt was 'the source of all physical and vocal expression, energy'. This was the point of
discovery of the balance of oppositions. The actors worked on balancing opposing tensions in the
body, they worked on using different centres of gravity and using different alignments of the spine.
The most important element to arise from this was the repetition of actions. This repetition of actions is
quite an alien concept to Occidental performers who are again only used to repeating words and for
whom the emphasis is on the character who repeats the words and not on the actor who performs the
character.
Training at the Odin is an ongoing process of discovery for the performers and for Barba.Through
observing the training, and through his personal research, Barba has developed his theories of pre-
expressivity, the dilated body and mind, extra daily technique and the balance of oppositions.
Daily and Extra Daily
Barba's research into the life of the performer is not based on the difference between Occidental
and Oriental performance traditions, but on the similarities that he has found in both. Neither are his
theories based on a notion that one form is better than the other, or that one form is right and the other
wrong.
His theories are based on what he terms as being the 'recurrent principles' common to all
performers from all cultures and traditions. These principles begin with daily behaviour. Daily
behaviour or patterns are the incultured patterns that begin from the time we are born. We learn to
stand, walk and move in particular ways depending on the culture we come from. Daily body
techniques operate on the principle of obtaining the maximum result with a minimum expenditure of
energy.
Extra-daily body techniques are based on using the maximum amount of energy for a minimum
result. Extra-daily body techniques do not respect the incultured conditionings for the use of the body.
It is the replacement of daily body technique with extra-daily body technique that creates the
performer's 'scenic bios', or the performer's life. Barba, however, differentiates between the extra-
daily techniques of a performer and, for example, an acrobat. This differentiation is based on the
notion that an acrobat uses extra-daily techniques which have no relationship to daily techniques.
The extra-daily techniques of the performer have as their basis the daily techniques of the actor.
These extra-daily techniques then determine the pre-expressivity of the performer. This extra-daily use
of the body and the mind is called technique.
Pre-Expressivity
One of the first things to note about Barba's use of the term pre-expresivity is that it permeates all
of his writing. It seems to be the centre point to which all of his other theories contribute. I use 'it
seems' because I found pre-expresivity the most elusive and difficult of Barba's theories to condense
and define. At the start of my research I explained it as the 'moment before the actor becomes
expressive'. But, where does this moment begin and end? I think, pre-expressivity must therefore be
everything that occurs for the performer before he/she becomes expressive. That should include
training, culture and daily behaviour.
The study of the pre-expressivity of the performer is the basis of Barba's theories surrounding his
notion of theatre anthropology.
The development of the theory leading to the notion of pre-expressivity has as a further basis, the
hypothesis of inculturation and acculturation.28 Anthropologists define inculturation as the absorption
of the daily behaviour of a person's culture. Performers bring their incultured patterns to performance.
Through a process of observation during the training process they absorb other patterns of
inculturation. Inculturation is therefore the technique of the performer. The actors absorb each others
daily behaviour and as such each others culture.
However, Barba differentiates between performers who come from different backgrounds. He
says that in some cultures, performers use body techniques that are entirely different to those used in
daily life. This denial of naturalness, which is often called stylisation is defined by Barba as
acculturation. The accultured performer develops a repertoire of physical, vocal and facial gesture
where the body is trained to reject the incultured patterns.
What Barba emphasises is that, whether a performer uses incultured or accultured techniques, on a
physical level, both give life to a performance. He differentiates between the Occidental being
incultured and the Oriental being accultured but maintains that both activate the pre-expressive that is
'presence ready to re-present'.
Pre-expressivity, being of a performer, must therefore have a relationship to the expressive.
However, according to Barba it is important that the pre-expressive is thought of as a separate entity.
The pre-expressive becomes expressive when a performer appears before an audience. It is then that
meaning is produced. Barba maintains that there is no meaning at the pre-expressive level and that is
why he says that it is important to analyse at this level.30 This analysis takes the form of what Barba
terms as 'the logic of the process' that is, developing an understanding of how the result (the
expressive) is achieved.31
Without the practical work that leads to the performer's pre-expressivity, he/she as a performer
will only be donning a costume, saying the words and using accumulated gestures. The performer must
'be as a performer' and so must develop practically and mentally prior to any notion of performance.
The pre-expressive is the work that prepares the performer for the creative process of the performance.
To a greater or lesser degree, all performers prepare, they learn lines, and train mentally and
physically. Barba, however, is mainly concerned with and biased in favour of those performers whose
training is a 'way of life'.
For Barba the importance of the pre-expressive lies in the autonomy of the performer as an artist.
It is also the separation of the work from the performance. In other words that the training and
workshop process should be seen as being of equal importance to the performance, and that sometimes
in a workshop situation performance occurs.
If we accept Barba's notion of pre-expressivity, how then do we locate the performer who does
not train? Western performance tradition confines training to a three or four year period in a drama
school or a period of apprenticeship with a theatre company. Performers are trained for a specific type
of theatre, the theatre of the writer. Their 'pre-expressivity' is to become adept at delivering and
interpreting the words of the writer.
It appears to me that Barba's theory of pre-expressivity is selective. His research is confined to the
masters of various forms both East and West, but he does not include the majority of actors in the West
who make their living from performance. Barba's theatre is physical, he is not concerned with
psychological meaning. The pre-expressivity of his performers and those who participate in the ISTA
sessions is born of extreme physical training. The actors of the Odin create the text with their bodies.
In his book 'A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology' Barba discusses various performance and
training methods which support his theories. He supports these theories with many images of
performers from different performance styles. These images show that performers from different
disciplines have what Barba terms 'similar pre-expressive gestures'. Pre-expressivity according to
Barba is not only concerned with training but is also an analysis of a performer's use of the body.
Dramaturgy
Because of the nature of the Odin's productions it is important to understand the process before
discussing the productions themselves. Barba produces, as do many other companies around the world
(particularly in North America), what are known as performance texts. This process of working firstly
manifests itself in a rejection of realism and the normally accepted ways of rehearsing for a
performance. A common misunderstanding regarding performance texts is that a pre-written text is not
required or used. Barba, in the early years of the Odin, used existing literary texts as a basis for the
productions. It is, however, the process and not the result that is primary.
Barba's first three productions, Ornitofilene, Kaspariana and
Ferai, were all based on written works by living authors. As the training and rehearsal
methods developed and as the thrust of the training became more individual, Barba ceased to use a
single pre-written text, and instead used the results of improvisations based on set themes.
With either starting point, however, the text or theme was and is only the beginning. Barba never
knows how a production will manifest itself because it is an organic process and decisions are taken as
the process evolves. In fact, no one in the company accepts that a production is ever finished. There are
usually changes made long after the production has gone into performance.
To those of us who are used to six or eight week rehearsal periods in groups where everyone
usually has a very defined role and where boundaries are seldom crossed, Barba's and the Odin's
approach to rehearsing a production can seem like a very exciting journey or an absolute nightmare. To
me, it is a very exciting journey; but it is a journey that is only possible with groups like the Odin
because of the training process and because of the fact that the actors have worked together for a long
time.
Rehearsals
For the actors of the Odin, the beginning of a rehearsal is where the notion of the pre-expressive
becomes important. The actors' dilated bodies and minds are ready to begin the journey of discovery.
Barba presents a theme and the actors begin to improvise. The initial improvisations are physical, and
in the early productions these improvisations were collective, while in later productions they became
individual. It is important to note that the physical and vocal improvisations are always separate and
are only combined at a much later stage in the rehearsal process.
In 'Towards a Third Theatre' Ian Watson commented on the early rehearsals based
on text as follows:
In 1971 Barba began work on a production called Min Fars Hus (My Father's
House). The work on this production marked the group's departure from pre-written text and from this
point on they worked totally from improvisation to create performance texts.
Surprisingly, there are no rules attached to the process of developing a performance text! There
are, however, procedures that have evolved from the training work. Before Barba begins rehearsals on
a production, he collects together material based on a theme that he wishes to investigate. This material
can be in the form of stories, poems, songs, photographs, illustrations, items from magazines or
newspapers, or anything that will act as a catalyst for an improvisation. Essentially, Barba researches
his theme thoroughly before beginning rehearsals.
The first step in the rehearsal process is a physical one. The actors work individually on physical
improvisations based on a theme suggested by Barba. His reasoning behind the individual work at this
stage is that he believes that in collective improvisations actors become concerned more with
interaction than the theme. The actors, observed by Barba, create short physical pieces based on the
theme and Barba suggests changes and refines from the outside. The actors continually refine these
individual improvisations until they can repeat them exactly without variation.
Barba calls this refining of the improvisations 'registering'. After a period of time, which could be
weeks, each actor has a repertoire of improvisations which is called his/her physical score. The route
towards the physical score is such that the original impulse for each improvisation has been
temporarily set aside and must be relocated. There are three stages in the development of the physical
improvisations:
1. Creating the initial composition improvisation.
2. Rote learning the improvisation 'coldly'...without regard to the thematic associations...
3. Repeating the composition improvisation precisely while focusing mentally on the associations
that produced the improvisation in the first place, in order to reactivate the 'warmth'.33
During this period, which can last for months, of developing the composition improvisations other
areas of the performance text begin to be developed. Character, music and vocal material are also
researched and improvised. Contrary to what one might perceive, Odin actors do develop characters.
The characters however, emerge from the physical and vocal improvisation work and do not have a
psychological background. Consequently the characters are usually larger than life and do not have a
basis in realism.
As with the training, the work on the vocal text is separate from the work on the physical text. The
actors choose pieces of text from the material collected by Barba and sometimes introduce their own
pieces of text relevant to the theme. The actors' work on the text is not based on discovering its logic, it
is however, a process of discovering its harmonious and rhythmic qualities. Besides the work on the
vocal text, the actors work with their musical instruments and with songs. Music and song play a big
role in most of the productions.
Montage
Up to this point, as I have already stated, the actors are working individually. The next phase in
the rehearsal is the combining of the individual physical, vocal and musical improvisations. This is
known as 'The Montage'.
The montage phase begins with the combining together of the physical improvisations. Having
linked the physical scores; Barba then matches the vocal scores to different scenes. The vocal scores
are not linked to the scenes because of their textual content, but are linked because of their musical
relationship with the theme. Barba's reasoning behind the separation of the physical and vocal in
training and rehearsal has its result at this stage. In creating the montage neither the physical nor the
vocal has dominance over the other.
Again after a considerable amount of time, the physical, vocal and musical scores have been
formed together into what has become the performance text. At this stage it is still considered to be
work in progress and is shown as such to an audience. Comments from spectators are noted at this
stage, and together with Barba's and other observations more changes are made.
It is Barba's rejection of realism, a linear narrative and the dominance of a pre-written text that
has led him to this style of production. It is his rejection of what he terms the 'artificiality and denial of
organic life' that dominates Western theatre that has led him to create performance texts based on
action rather than psychological motivation.
Barba's motivation for this, as opposed to his reasons for doing it, lie in the fact that he wants to
create performance texts that mirror the 'dynamics of the creative process'. A spectator at a production
of one of Barba's performance texts has to choose what he/she will watch. Each spectator will take
something different from the production depending on what he/she brings to the production.
Productions 34
The performance texts of the Odin productions are born from the work of the actors. The
productions are non realistic and there is very little investigation into the psychological aspects of the
characters. Some of the characters once developed reappear in later productions. The style of the
productions is one of high physical energy, with characters who are larger than life and are more
representational than realistic. The use of live music with a wide variety of instruments is an integral
part of the performance text as is the style of choreographed movement that is close in form to
dance.35
One of the main criticisms surrounding Barba's productions is that they are all fundamentally the
same. Barba's response to this is:
As a defense this statement is weak, but Barba seems to be saying that like all artists his
productions have a certain style.
The Odin Theatret has created a large number of productions during its lifetime. These
productions have a wide variety of sources as their starting point and it would be impossible within the
limits of this thesis to discuss them all. I have therefore chosen to discuss two in some detail,
Brecht's Ashes 2 37 and Talabot 38 .
Brecht's Ashes 2 consists of a dialogue with Brecht. It is a biographical piece based
on Brecht's travels in exile from Germany during the second world war.39 The production montage
shows Brecht's journey in exile and is interwoven with characters and situations from his plays. The
character of Brecht, played by Torgeir Wethal, walks around the playing area connecting the various
situations.
The characters included, Brecht, Walter Benjamin,40 Helene Weigel 41 and fictional characters
from different plays, such as; Arturo Ui from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Kattrin
from Mother Courage; Mackie Messer from The Threepenny Opera and
Galileo Galilei from The Life of Galileo.
Some of the spectators sat at coffee tables and were allowed to drink and smoke if they wished.
This created an atmosphere reminiscent of cabaret that was helped further by the use of German songs
and a Jazz score. The piece was loyal to Brecht's theory of alienation42 and was constructed in such a
way that the audience were aware that they were watching actors playing roles. The cast introduced
themselves at the beginning of the production and announced the characters that they would play.
Members of the cast played more than one character and used only minor costume changes which were
done in front of the audience.
The preceding and following quotes from The Actor's Way and Towards a
Third Theatre, are examples of how in Brecht's Ashes 2 the themes and characters
from Brecht's plays combine with Brecht's political ideology and events from his life.
Brecht's Ashes 2 was performed in La Mama ETC 44 in New York in 1984. Mel
Gussow of the New York Times praised the production;
In contrast, Michael Feingold of the Village Voice, felt that the production was 'cold
and unfulfilling:
Talabot premiered in Holtsbro in 1988. The point of departure for this production was
a book The Challenge of The Unreal written by Kirstin Hastrup, a Danish anthropologist.
The book describes Hastrup's experiences as a fieldworker in Iceland where she claims that she met a
huldamadur a character from Icelandic mythology.
As with almost all of Barba's productions there were a number of starting points for the
production. A page from an essay by Edward Gordon Craig on commedia dell'arte, a psalm,
Confession, by the Danish poet B.S. Ingemann, and the name 'Talabot'. The name itself
has a number of references.48
It is in the notion of 'dualism', 'the dislocation of reality',49 and the destruction of culture that
concerned Barba in this production. The characters 'including Kirsten Hastrup, have lived their lives
split between conflicting realities and have suffered the mental and physical toll which accompanies
their attempts to translate/transfer experience from one reality to another.'50 The characters included
Knud Rasmussen a Danish polar explorer51, Antonin Artaud52 the theatrical theorist, actor and
director, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara53 and a Trickster who was a grotesque, shamanic figure with magical
powers. In addition, there is the character of Hastrup and her father and mother.
The actors play multiple roles and use several different languages. The text is mainly drawn from
Hastrup's biography and the narrative is interrupted by excerpts from the biographies of Artaud,
Guevara and Knud Rasmussen. The influence of commedia is seen in the use of masks that the actors
put on from time to time. The masks were all broken in several places and crudely mended so that the
mends were visible.
As with Brecht's Ashes 2, the action is non linear and the characters' stories overlap
and interact. Shoemaker describes the action as being 'characterised by unexpected changes of
direction, breaks in the text's linear development, and a composition based on montage and the
interweaving of two or more simultaneous actions.' 54
The character of Guevara is shown in scenes that represent him as an asthmatic teenager and a
revolutionary. In his death scene he wears a traditional 'Capitano' costume from commedia. The scene
ends with him coming to life, to the accompaniment of sound and music, and dancing to "El
Condor Pasa". The masked character of Artaud presents the famous speech "The
Theatre and the Plague" at one end of the stage while the character of Hastrup sits at the
other end trying to vocalise her distress. The entire production is orchestrated by the character of the
Trickster who also functions as a commentator.
Shoemaker, in describing the curtain call, says:
According to Ian Watson, Talabot was generally well received, but, as is usual with
the Odin's productions, the critics had difficulty in finding a category in which to place the work. He
quotes Penny Simpson of the South Wales Echo:
Barter
The concept of barter within the Odin tradition was more the result of an accident than deliberate
policy.
In May 1974 the Odin moved to Carpignano in Italy. They stayed there for six months and the
intention was to concentrate on the further development of their training. One evening the entire group,
wearing their colourful costumes used during their training and carrying their musical instruments,
went to visit some friends. As they walked through the streets of the village local people began to
follow them. The locals asked them to play some music and when they had finished playing the locals
responded by offering their own songs in return.
From this situation was born the notion of barter. Some months previously the group had
performed their production Min Fars Hus in the mountains of Sardinia. The audience
comprised local shepherds and farmers who were unused to theatrical performance. Equally, the Odin
were used to performing to a select and small appreciative audience. The audience responded by
contributing their songs and dances.
Rumour quickly spread and the group were asked to perform in a number of villages in the area.
The criterion established was that the Odin would perform, not for financial reward, but for an
exchange of stories, songs and dances. What resulted from these exchanges was that the local
communities came together, and young and old communicated, in order to rediscover their own culture
so that they could participate in the exchange.
On one occasion a group of young people approached the group to help them stock a library they
were trying to establish. The criteria for the performance in this instance were that the members of the
audience would bring a book to the performance. At the end of this particular performance the group
and the audience went to the room designated as the library and deposited the books.57
Barters have taken place mainly in Europe but also in South America and Africa. Once the
concept was developed, barters were no longer incidental but were planned, and included one
programme which lasted a week during the 1987 ISTA conference. By their nature, barters take place
in unorganised performance spaces. These performance areas are usually the streets and squares of
towns and villages, there is usually no seating and quite often the proceedings begin with a parade.
Barters can also be conducted by individual performers, and Mette Bovin a Danish anthropologist
conducted a barter in Africa with Roberta Carreri one of the Odin actors.59
Various productions emerged as a result of the barters. Before the street performances and the
barters, the group were used to working alone in very isolated surroundings. As I have said previously,
productions took a long time to develop and even then were only shown to a very small and select
audience. The Book of Dances was a street performance that grew from the idea that 'a
society is partly characterised by the way its members dance'.60
The Book of Dances was a biographical piece about the Odin which took the form of
a montage of dances, movement and exercises that had been developed by the group during training.
Two characters, developed in this production became stock characters and were seen in nearly every
street performance since then.61 In the next street production Anabasis, another character
was developed, a tall demon figure which began to appear in subsequent productions.
The theme of Anabasis was that of a group of people travelling through a strange land
and reflects the notion of the immigrant and the 'floating island' metaphor which Barba uses to
describe the fact that he and most of his actors do not live in their country of origin. The theme of
journey recurs in the street productions; The Million was based on the travels of Marco
Polo. This production was performed both as a street/ barter production and indoors.62
Barter has become a part of the culture of the Odin. It is the idea of cultural exchange, not only in
the street performances but also in the ISTA conferences where performers from different cultures
show and share their songs, dances and performance techniques. Barter in Odin terms, is an exchange
of culture. The emphasis being on exchange, the normal performer/spectator relationship does not
exist. The spectator is involved in the barter and is no longer passive.
CHAPTER 3
Barba and Interculturalism
There can be no doubt that Eugenio Barba's theories on performance have been formed by his
investigations into Eastern forms of theatre, and also as a result of his use of the techniques of these
forms in his work with his actors. Barba is not alone as a Western theatre practitioner/theorist in his
'borrowing' from other cultures. Richard Schechner, who is University Professor at New York
University and
editor of The Drama Review has written numerous books and articles on
performance, ritual, anthropology and interculturalism.63 This major trend towards investigations into
non-western forms of theatre, although generally acknowledged to have started with Antonin
Artaud,64 in reality began to gain momentum in the early 1960's.
The genesis of these researches into performance lies in a dissatisfaction with a Western theatre
that has its basis in the interpretation of a pre-written text. This dissatisfaction has led to the production
of 'performance texts' which originate in the work of a director with a group of actors through various
forms of improvisation. While it seems that most companies keep both written and visual records of
their work (video and photographs)65, it is ironic that we mainly learn about the productions, work and
theories. through the written word.
As a direct consequence of the research into, firstly but not exclusively, Eastern forms of theatre, a
trend has developed which posits the notion of a theatre without cultural boundaries, an 'intercultural'
theatre. This notion is fraught with difficulties because the theories surrounding the idea of
interculturalism in theatre are mainly proposed by Western theorists. The idea is also problematic in
that it presupposes definite cultural boundaries. Where does the East begin and the West end? How are
the North and South included in the definitions? Are cultural divisions created by history or
economics? It is certainly true that in the latter half of this century there have been many changes in the
geographical boundaries between countries.66
Rustom Bharucha in his book Theatre and the World; Performance and the Politics of
Culture67, questions the assumptions underlying the theatrical visions of some of the twentieth
century's most prominent theatre practitioners and theorists, including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy
Grotowski, Peter Brook68 and Eugenio Barba'. Bharucha confines himself in this book to criticisms
related to what he perceives as a Euro/American use and appropriation of Indian theatre without due
concern to the history of these various forms.
In the first chapter of his book Bharucha says in response to Schechner;
Contemporary Indian theatre is a hybrid of traditional and Western. India is a large country
divided into many regions each with its own traditions of theatre. In the cities theatre tends to be quite
Westernised, as a result of colonisation, while in rural areas theatre tends to favour traditional forms.
Since the 1960's there has been a focus on combining traditional and Western forms of theatre in order
to create a specifically Indian theatrical language. My point in raising this is that Bharucha does not
discuss in any depth the fact that Shakespeare, Brecht and a great number of the classics are constantly
performed in Indian theatres. Surely this must be considered a borrowing from other cultures.69
This quote from an article written by Nemi Chandra Jain summarises the fears that surround
notions of interculturalism. This fear is legitimate in that it stems from the notion that there can be a
universal language of theatre that has no cultural boundaries. There is a distinct difference, for example
in how Japanese, Chinese, African and Indian theatrical forms have developed as a result of Western
influence. It is however, the borrowings from these cultures to the West that are seen as problematic.71
If there is a possibility of a universal language of theatre, who decides the composition of that
language? Those who adopt elements from another culture by choice (which is mainly Western
practitioners) decide how they will incorporate what they have adopted into their own work. The point
is that what is adopted becomes part of the work and aesthetic of the target culture. The notion of
interculturalism becomes inherently political because the target culture adopts the stance of a coloniser,
ignoring the culture and history surrounding the elements that are adopted.
It is in the area of intercultural exchange that a more positive view of how global theatre is
developing. Patrice Pavis72 suggests definitions that are helpful in allaying some of the confusion
surrounding the notions of culture and interculturalism. These definitions combine multiculturalism,
interculturalism, cultural collage, syncretic theatre, post-colonial theatre and theatre of the fourth
world.73
It is important in view of Barba's studies of Eastern theatre that we are aware of the criticisms
surrounding the notions of interculturalism. As I have already stated Barba has studied many forms of
Eastern theatre and is particularly concerned with Indian forms. Barba has used only the physical
techniques that he has observed with his actors. He is not concerned with the historical, social or
cultural background to these forms.
Rustom Bharucha is critical of Barba for what he considers the reduction to the physical. Barba
has condensed theatre to the performer and within that to his theories of pre-expressivity and extra-
daily behaviour. It is Barba's theory of pre-expressivity that Bharucha finds problematic. Bharucha's
argument is that Barba is less concerned with 'conventions or performance styles than with what lies
beneath their luminous and seductive epidermises' the 'organs' which keep them alive'74
Bharucha argues that it is debatable whether the 'physical conditions' in differing performance
traditions can be reduced to the principles that Barba suggests. He also argues that in a transcultural
sense, Barba 'diffuses the potentialities of the body' and as a consequence 'the possibilities of
rendering multiple meanings'.75 Bharucha disputes the possibility of the notion of extra-daily
behaviour. He maintains that extra-daily is a 'magnification' of daily techniques.
I don't think that Barba would argue with that. My understanding of Barba's notion of extra-daily
is that it is common to all performers. The very notion of performing constitutes extra-daily practice
whether one is talking about an Eastern or a Western performer. It does however seem, if I can refer
back to the Barba's training methods and rehearsal process, that there is a certain sense of
mechanisation in the repetition of gestures by the performers.
Bharucha's arguments however, seem to be based on an understanding of the terms that Barba
uses to describe his theories on the performer. He accuses Barba of having a fear of 'expressing or
eliciting emotions'. I have not personally had the pleasure of seeing a live Odin performance but I have
viewed some on video. Certainly, the physical virtuosity and energy of the performers', even on video,
is disconcerting at first. But I did feel that there was an emotional content and particularly remember
Roberta Carreiri's performance of Judith.
Certainly, there is an element of clinicism in how Barba defines his theories and in my opinion
Bharucha is correct when he criticises Barba for his rejection of a great number of elements that
constitute the theatrical process. The proscenium arch, realism, the writer, and the text are all an
integral part of modern theatre. As Bharucha says there are 'possibilities contained within them that
Barba has assumed and rejected'.76
ISTA 1V - Holstebro - 1986
The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Different Cultures was the theme of
the fourth ISTA conference that took place in Holstebro in September 1986. Barba invited Asian
performers from various traditions including Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Odissi, Kathakali and Balinese
dance drama, among others. In addition he invited a number of Western actresses from different
traditions of performance. Only two of the invitees could attend, Sonja Kehler, a graduate of the
Teaterhochschule Leipzig, and Iben Nigel Rasmussen of the Odin. The event, led by the Asian and
European pedagogues, also attracted 137 participants from twenty-one countries.
The event consisted of lecture/demonstrations during which the pedagogues talked about their
training and gave short performances. There was very little time given to discussion between the
participants and questions of representation and the female role were not addressed.
This quotation relates to what Barba terms as Animus/Anima. Barba says that both male and
female energies exist in everyone and that the energy of the performer has nothing to do with the
gender of the performer.78
In a particularly vehement criticism of the conference, Erika Munk articulates the frustration that
many of the participants experienced during the conference.
Susan Bassnet was a participant in the first Magdalena conference which took place in 1986 a few
months before the ISTA conference. In relation to the ISTA conference she stated:
In addition, Bassnett criticises the notion of pre-expressivity as being desexualised. Equally, she
argues that the male and female body undergo different biological changes throughout life, and that the
female is constantly aware of her physical changes relating to her biology. Essentially, many of the
participants found fault with the congress on an historic, social and political level.
Philip Zarrilli put the problem into context when he said 'he (Barba) obviously thought
representation meant how performers (male or female) enact the female role.'81
Zarrilli further explained the difficulties during the congress as being partly that Barba did not
state what he meant by 'representation', and partly that the participants all came with differing, and
multiple assumptions about representation and the female role. He further stated that the crisis was
'precipitated by a congress whose structure precluded free exchange among these varying viewpoints
regarding what is enacted.'82
Zarrilli goes on to suggest that Barba's main concern is the performers 'presence' or 'energy'. He
criticises Barba's use of 'poetically suggestive terms' in his written dedication to Mei Lanfang, one of
the pedagogues, and further says that 'for Barba, Oriental acting is "an extreme example"
of theatre "well done"...Barba's vision of the "Oriental" actor is a composite
devoid of sociocultural or historical contexts.'83
In his article, Zarrilli uses the ISTA congress as a starting point to discuss Barba's theories
retrospectively. He rightfully says that 'Barba has yet to reconcile in writing or practical work his
particular definition of theatre anthropology with the existing discipline of academic anthropology.' He
also criticises Barba's lack of reflexivity in his workshops and writings and says; 'instead of getting a
portrait of "performance," what we get is Barba's construction of his own view of
performance through the Others he studies.'
Barba's response in The Drama Review, Vol. 32, is emotional and defensive. In
response to the criticism that the ISTA congress focused on the 'practical to the exclusion of the
historical and processual' he says that the focus of the ISTA is on the 'practical exploration' of
theatrical work. Barba mentions that a number of forums for discussion took place, but they seem to
have been spontaneous and he does not discuss the findings of these forums. What Barba does in this
article, in my opinion, is to respond subjectively to, what seems to me, an objective critical argument
by Zarrilli.84
Zarrilli responded to the editor and in the final section of his response he says:
It appears that Barba's reluctance to become involved in an academic dialectic, both in his
writings and his workshops, ensures criticism at all levels. Most definitely, in Barba's writing there is
very little reference to anything other than his own thoughts and theories. His references are to
performance methods only and certainly do not include historical, political or sociological comment.
CONCLUSION
Eugenio Barba is a theatre practitioner, and his theories have developed as a result of his practical
work. Because Barba limits himself to certain areas of practice and performance styles, the basis of
his theories is equally limited. Barba is not concerned with theatre that has a pre-written text as its
starting point. As this form of theatre is widespread, particularly in the West, we can surmise that
Barba's theories surrounding the performer do not apply to performers of text based theatre.
I have found Barba's arguments facinating and intriguing but ultimately problematic to
consolidate. His arguments are based on his personal experience, albeit extensive, and he does not
relate in his writing's to any other theorist. While his notion of pre-expressivity excludes many
performers, his notion of Theatre Anthropology does not have a link with the accepted understanding
of Theatre Anthropology. There is also an odd dichotomy between Barba's borrowings from other
cultures and the intercultural exchange through the organised barters.
For me, however, it is the fact that Barba continues to challenge our accepted understanding of
theatre and performance that is exciting. Why should we always expect to interpret a text? If we
consider theatre to be an art form we should not limit ourselves but should constantly challenge and
explore. Barba's practical work is an invaluable reference point for all performers regardless of culture.
In my opinion Western theatre practitioners could benefit by adopting the attitudes of Barba and his
actors to training and work. Theatre that is born of the performer is energetic and alive, unfortunately
theatre that has a basis in the psychological interpretation of a text has become stagnant.
Appendix
Odin Theatret Productions directed by Eugenio Barba
Ornitofilene (The Bird Lovers), (1965-66)
Based on a text by Jens Bjorneboe
Performed 51 times in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden.
Kaspariana (1967-8)
Based on a scenario by Ole Sarvig
Performed 74 times in Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden.
Ferai (1969-70)
Based on a text by Peter Seeberg
Performed 220 times in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Holland, Iceland, Italy, Norway,
Sweden, Switzerland, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Min Fars Hus (1972-4)
My Father's House
Dedicated to Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Performed 322 times in Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland,
West Germany, Yugolslavia
Dansenes Bog (1974-80)
The Book of Dances
Performed 350 times in Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Japan, Italy, Norway, Peru, Poland,
Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Come! And the day will be ours (1976-84)
Scenario by Eugenio Barba
Performed 180 times in Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Norway, Peru, Poland, Spain,
Sweden, Venezuela, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Anabasis (1977-84)
Ascent to the Sea
Performed 180 times in Columbia, Denmark, France, French Antilles, Italy, Japan, Mexico,
Norway, Spain, Sweden, Wales, West Germany
The Million - First Journey (1978-84)
Dedicated to Marco Polo
Performed 223 times in Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, France, French Antilles, Israel, Italy,
Japan, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, USA, Wales, West Germany.
Brechts Aske (1980-2), Brechts Aske 2 (1982-4)
Brecht's Ashes
Dedicated to Jens Bjorneboe
Text by Eugenio Barba
Performed 166 times in Colombia, Denmark, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Poland,
Spain, Sweden, USA, West Germany.
Oxyrhincus Evangeliet (1985-7)
The Gospel according to Oxyrhincus
Text by Eugenio Barba
Performed 214 times in Argentina, Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Norway,
Sweden, Uruguay, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Judith (1987-)
Dedicated to Renee Saurel, Natsu and the woman in Mei Lan-Fan Club.
Text by Eugenio Barba and Roberta Carreri
Performed 200 times in Canada, Chile, Cuba, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy,
Norway, Peru, Poland, Spain, Sweden, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Talabot (1988-91)
Dedicated to Christian Ludvigsen and Hans Martin Berg
Text by Eugenio Barba
Autobiographical and anthropological material: Kirsten Hastrup
Performed 280 times in Austria, Chile, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Peru, Sweden,
Switzerland, West Germany, Yugoslavia.
Rum I kejserens palads (1985-)
Rooms in the Emperor's Palace
Performed 25 times in Chile, Denmark, Mexico, Peru.
Traces in the Snow(1989-)
An actor's professional autobiography
Actor: Roberta Carreri
Memoria (1990-)
Text/Montage by Else Marie Laukvik and Eugenio Barba
Performed about 74 times.
The Castle of Holstbro (1990-)
Text/Montage by Julia Varley and Eugenio Barba
Actor: Julia Varley
The Ecco of Silence (1991-)
Dedicated to Eik Skalo
Text/Montage by Iben Nagel Rasmussen and Eugenio Barba
Waterways/Klanbauterpeople (Holstebro, September 1991)
Assistant director: Leo Sykes
Itsi-Bitsi, (1991-)
Text by Iben Nagel Rasmussen. Text Montage by Eugenio Barba.
Performed 185 times.
Kaosmos, (1993-1996)
Dramaturgy and direction by Eugenio Barba. Performed 216 times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Barba, Eugenio, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, London,
Routledge, 1995.
Barba, Eugenio, Savarese, Nicola, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of
the Performer, London, Routledge, 1991.
Barba, Eugenio, Taviani, Ferdinando, ed, The Floating Islands, Holstebro, Denmark:
Odin Teatret Forlag, 1979.
Christoffersen, Erik Exe, The Actor's Way, London, Routledge, 1993.
Watson, Ian, Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, London,
Routledge, 1993.
Secondary Sources
Bassnett, Susan, Magdalena: International Women's Experimental Theatre, Oxford,
Berg Publishers Ltd, 1989.
Bharucha, Rustom, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
London, Routledge, 1990.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Riley Josephine, Tubingen Gissenwehrer, Michael, editors, The
Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own, and Foreign, Germany, Gunter Naar Verlag,
1990.
Maranca, Bonnie, Dasgupta, Gautam, editors, Interculturalism and Performance: Writings
from PAJ, New York, Performing Arts Publications, 1991.
Pavis, Patrice, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London, Routledge, 1992.
Pavis, Patrice, ed., The Intercultural Performance Reader, London, Routledge, 1996.
Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory, London, Routledge, 1977.
Schechner, Richard, Between Theatre and Anthropology, University of Pensylvania
Press, 1985.
Articles, Journals and Periodicals
Barba, Eugenio, The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work, New
Theatre Quarterly, 1:1, (1985), pp. 75-78.
Barba, Eugenio, The Dilated Body: on the Engergies of Acting, New Theatre
Quarterly, 1:4, (1985), pp. 369-382.
Barba, Eugenio, The Genesis of Theatre Anthropology, New Theatre Quarterly,
10:38, (1994), pp. 167-173.
Barba, Eugenio, Theatre Anthropology, The Drama Review, 26:2, (1982), pp. 5-32.
Barba, Eugenio, The Third Theatre: a Legacy from Us to Ourselves, New Theatre
Quarterly, 8:29, (1992), pp. 3-9.
Barba, Eugenio, Eurasian Theatre, The Drama View, 32:3, (1988), pp. 126-130.
Barba, Eugenio, The Steps on the River Bank, The Drama Review, 38:4, (1994), pp.
107-119.
Barba, Eugenio, A Letter from Barba, The Drama Review, 19:4, (1975), pp. 48-57.
Barba, Eugenio, Eugenio Barba to Phillip Zarrilli: About the Visible and the Invisible in the
Theatre and About ISTA in Particular, The Drama Review, 32:3, (1988), pp. 7-14.
Barba, Eugenio, International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA): Congress on The
Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures, The Drama Review, 30:2, (1986),
pp. 171-172.
Barba, Eugenio, The Actor's Energy: Male/Female versus Animus/Anima, New
Theatre Quarterly, 3:11, (1987), pp. 237-240.
Barba, Eugenio, The Way of Refusal: the Theatre's Body-in-Life, New Theatre
Quarterly, 14:16, (1988), pp. 291-299.
Barba, Eugenio, The Fiction of Duality, New Theatre Quarterly, 5:20, (1989), pp.
311-314.
Barba, Eugenio, The Etymological Intellectual, New Theatre Quarterly, 3:10, (1987),
pp. 188-191.
Barba, Eugenio, Four Spectators, The Drama Review, 34:1, (1990), pp. 96-101.
Bassnett, Susan, Odin Teatret: a Twentieth Birthday Celebration, 1:3, (1985), pp.
313-317.
Bassnett, Susan, Women Experiment with Theatre: Magdalena 86, New Theatre
Quarterly, 3:11, (1987), pp. 224-236.
Beeman, William. O, Brecht's Ashes 2, The Million: La Mama E.T.C. (New York),
Performing Arts Journal, 8:2, (1984), pp. 64-69.
Bharucha, Rustom, Under the Sign of the Onion: Intracultural Negotiations in
Theatre, New Theatre Quarterly, 12:46, (1996), pp. 116-126.
Bovin, Mette, Provocation Anthropology, Bartering Performance in Africa, The
Drama Review, 32:1, (1988), pp. 21-41.
Dasgupta, Gautam, Eugenio Barba: Interview, Performing Arts Journal, 3:2, (1984),
pp. 8-18.
Fowler, Richard, The Four Theatres of Jerzy Grotowski: an Introductory
Assessment, New Theatre Quarterly, 1:2, (1985), pp. 173-178.
Fumaroli, Mark, Eugenio Barba's Kaspariana, The Drama Review, 13:1, (1968), pp.
46-56.
Fumaroli, Mark, Eugenio Barba's Ferai, The Drama Review, 14:1, (1969), pp. 46-54.
Hagested, Bent, A Sectarian Theatre, An Interview with Eugenio Barba, The Drama
Reveiw, 14:1, (1969), pp. 55-59.
Lutgendorf, Philip, Indian Theatre and the Inside-Outsider, The Drama Review, 36:4,
(1992), pp. 162-171.
Worthen, W.B, Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance, The Drama Review,
39:1, (1995), pp. 13-44.
Munk, Erika, The Rites of Women, Performing Arts Journal, Vol X, No 2, (1986), pp.
35-42.
Pavis, Patrice, Dancing with Faust: A Semiotician's Reflection on Barba's Intercultural
Mise-en-scene, The Drama Review, 33:3, (1989), pp. 37-57.
Phelan, Peggy, Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance, The Drama
Reveiw, 32:1, (1985), pp. 107-127.
Shoemaker, David, Report from Holstebro: Odin Teatret's 'Talabot', New Theatre
Quarterly, 6:24, (1990), pp. 307-317.
Sklar, Deidre, Etienne Decroux's Promethean Mime, The Drama Review, 29:4,
(1985), pp. 64-75.
Stewart, Nigel, Actor as Refusenik: Semiotics, Theatre Anthropology, and the Work of the
Body, New Theatre Quarterly, 9:36, (1993), pp. 379-386.
Taviani, Ferdinando, A Theatre of Ice and Warmth: on the Thirtieth Anniversary of
Odin, New Theatre Quarterly, 11:42, (1995), pp. 158-165.
Varley, Julia, 'Subscore': a Word that is Useful - but Wrong, New Theatre Quarterly,
11:42, (1995), pp. 166-174.
Walker, Ethel Pitts, The Dilemma of Multiculturalism in the Theatre, The Drama
Review, 38:3, (1994), pp. 7-10.
Watson, Ian, Eugenio Barba: the Latin American Connection, New Theatre
Quarterly, 5:17, (1989), pp. 67-72.
Watson, Ian, Odin Teatret: The Million, The Drama Review, 29:2, (1985), pp. 131-
137.
Zarrilli, Phillip, For Whom is the "Invisible" Not Visible? Reflections on
Representation in the Work of Eugenio Barba, The Drama Review, 32:1, (1988), pp. 95-106.
Zarrilli, Phillip, Zarrilli Responds, The Drama Review, 32:3, (1988), pp. 15-16.
Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and Its Double, London, John Calder, 1977.
Brecht, Bertolt, trans. Willet, John, Brecht on Theatre, New York, Hill & Wang,
1964.
Grotowski, Jerzi, Towards a Poor Theatre, London, Methuen, `975.
Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory, London, Routledge, 1994.
Schechner, Richard, Between Theatre and Anthropology, University of Pensylvania
Press, 1985.
Schechner, Richard, Appel, Willa, editors, By Means of Performance, Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Schumacher, Claude, ed. Artaud on Theatre, London, Methuen, 1989.
NOTES:
Ibid P.15.