1. Minetti¹
Directed by Philippe Sireuil

The Varia, a former music-hall theatre built in 1904 and subsequently used as a palais de dance and then a garage, has now become a center for innovative and experimental Belgian theatre. It is situated in a working-class district without any particular cultural pretensions and began by offering a working space to young practitioners (Sireuil, Delval, Dezoteux) before they gained official endorsement from the funding authorities. It now receives a direct subsidy from the government and provides a home for a range of performance practices that developed particularly during the 1970s. That period saw the flowering of a multi-focused exploration: so-called poor theatre, experiments inspired by the work of Grotowski, attracting a wide range of different spectator groups, and modifying the physical arrangement of the space to suit the needs of each production. In March 1985, Philippe Sireuil put on Minetti (Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man), adapted from the play by Thomas Bernhard. The dramaturgical project was intended in the first place as part of a collective exploration of the work of the actor:

Following the superproduction of Brecht’s In the Jungle of the City in which the set and staging had been very well received, the actors complained of the frustration they had felt, the physical constraints under which they had worked prevented them, they felt, from freely expressing themselves. For me this problem had to be considered in connection with the often discussed question of the role of director in my kind of theatre where the dominance of the director can make him a kind of automaton or god figure. I felt the need to pay hommage to the actors, to their work and to the risks it involves.

The Bernhard play is furthermore well known as a kind of thesis play which raises the whole question of the nature of art and role of the artist. A heavily loaded choice of play on the part of a young playwright who has on more than one occasion found himself in conflict with the cultural authorities of his country. The play is doubly significant in that it concerns the theatre itself and presents the anguish of an actor who is still alive. As Minetti himself says in his monologue: “You have to be cruel to the audience. And if they aren’t prepared to acknowledge the cruelty of life or of their own situation, then you just have to play against them, even to the extent of provoking anger. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t also, without hypocritically pandering to them, stir them erotically so that they will finally feel the emotion you are communicating.”

Both the choice of performance venue and the statements made by Sireuil indicate an intention to reinvent theatre space and desire and thus to marginalize the production in relation to the mainstream theatre of the day. The very idea of a production centered on a single actor confirms this impression for those familiar with the development to date of the work of Sireuil, hitherto preoccupied with highly visual effects and boldly experimenting even with opera production (Katia Kabanova at the Brussels Opera).

1. The lead-in

Advertising for the show placed great emphasis on its innovative features and the commitment to certain aesthetic premises. The posters brought out this somewhat didactic approach, but it was above all the press commentaries which stressed the almost narcissistic “readability” of the production: “Sireuil produces Minetti: theatre is an act of faith.”² A simple dual isotopy was apparent in the organization of space and place: in accordance with normal practice at The Varia, all the identifying markers were concerned exclusively with the production in question. On the outside of the theatre only the poster advertising the show indicated the function of the building. Once inside the door, the spectator was immediately plunged into the world of the play: pleasant interior design, display of books by Bernhard, photographs of the production, newspaper articles and reviews. The overall effect was somewhat precarious, and this was reinforced by the actual conditions of reception: once seated in the theatre the spectator was encouraged to wrap himself in a rug which had been carefully rolled up and placed under the seat. The lack of heating in the theatre was one factor, but the blankets served also as a means of drawing attention to the discomfort and the difficulties involved in obtaining modern luxuries. A further important function was as a sign of a more fundamental ambiguity: throughout the show the spectators were encouraged to immerse themselves in a universe where the real and the theatrical were continually merged. Outside The Varia, an empty street, freezing temperatures; inside, an arctic chill, a simulated snowstorm produced by gusts of wind, a set representing a deserted beach, and the rugs in which the shivering spectators wrapped themselves.

2. The performance contract

The entrance into the theatre building served as a reminder of the functionalism of the space: neutrality, initial chill evoking the mobile historicity of the piece, the operative elements constituting a kind of montage made up of the blocking of the action, the acting, the signs of the text, objects, sounds, and spectators. The major compositional features can be defined as follows:

3. Space and design

Bernhard’s didascalia are virtually ignored in this production: the play is supposed to take place in a large hotel in Ostend, and numerous visual features evoked in the play text (antique English lift, reception desk, bar) here reflect the performance locale (former garage) and are symbolic of a threadbare past which is conjured up during the time of the performance. Access to the stage necessarily involves passing through the foyer, that intermediary space where the audience, awaiting the beginning of the show, regains its narcissistic function. The intrusion of this into the performance proper is activated by signals and symbols: it is from the foyer that the classical music is played which heralds the opening of the performance; this remains audible even in the auditorium (a transition from real to theatrical space), and it incites the audience to begin to move. They must first pass through a closed chamber strewn with dead leaves, the dream connotations of this space are reinforced by the walls made of canvas painted with skyscapes, and they then pass through double doors leading into the auditorium. The somatic experience enshrined in this itinerary is repeated on stage during the production: lighting effects, sound of footsteps, music and set elements open the way and establish the necessary convention.

4. The set and staging

If, at first sight, the acting space and audience space (five tiers of twenty seats in each row) seem to be clearly separate, a number of signs function to blur the distinction: the same half-light dimly illuminates the total space, the set glimpsed in the shadows seems itself to represent an auditorium, the stage within the stage is closed by a red curtain, the prompt box is visible, the same red dominates the on-stage theatre design (seats, carpet) and the auditorium proper. A dwarf servant is silently folding up a pile of towels on the stage within the stage as the audience files in: for the actors as for the spectators the beginning of the performance is indistinct, the demarcation between performance and reality has become blurred.

Sireuil’s purpose is double: the virtual absence of stage design and the transfer of responsibility to the audience. As he explained it himself: “I wanted to work in a less restricting space, with a less intrusive set. I tried to take personal responsibility for the space (doing without a set designer) and to create an ambiguous space in which the distinction between reality and fiction would be unclear.”

The resulting staging was composed of absent references, made up of a variety of quotations: pictural (Ensor), literary (Shakespeare), mythological (Acteon and King Lear). Mimesis functioned primarily through the imagination. The unbridled fantasy that prevailed at the end marked the final lurch into the world of play; the progressive elimination of reminders of everyday reality (despite a proliferation of these at the figurative level in both set and sound effects) revealed the function of the actor in the construction of space: it was through the blocking of the actors’ movements and positions that the spatial relationships were endowed with both metaphorical and topographical power.

5. Lighting

A uniform filtered light united both stage and auditorium in a single statement. Focalization was nevertheless made possible by a row of spotlights along the front of the stage at floor level, a follow spot was focused on Minetti and two quartz halogens were recessed in the large up-stage auditorium: the three spaces thus each had their particular form of lighting.

6. The soundscape

Sound effects were used to reinforce the set. Variations in volume (the classical music, the gusts of wind), a more or less obsessive use of music (records of songs by Piaf, Delille, the Rolling Stones) rhythmically punctuated the imaginary level of the play and provided the narrative tempo.

Minetti by Thomas Bernhard at Théâtre Varia, mise en scène by Philippe Sireuil, 1985. Photos by Daniele Pierre, © Théâtre Varia

7. The use of objects

Objects were sparsely used and both in their sparsity and in their readability accentuated their rhetorical and symbolic function. Sometimes references from the text (e.g., the mask of Ensor, referred to in the story, was shown only at the end of the epilogue at the death/deliverance of Minetti); more often they functioned rather to evoke mood and atmosphere through their general connotations. A typology of props would reveal the following functions:

8. Costume

Minetti’s costume was a veritable metaphor of the text: his hat connoted Britishness, his umbrella indicated mobility, discarded clothes underscored his deterioration; most of the other costumes were social stereotypes, apart from that of the dwarf which, changing scene by scene, finally presented the figure of Harlequin leading Minetti toward his death.

9. Acting style

Performance was the center of the discourse. Nothing surprising about this in a play about an actor, one who is moreover simultaneously a fictional character and a reference to one of Germany’s finest postwar actors. The words of Minetti, through the monologue, constitute the vocal pivot of the play. The performer utilized an internalized tone of controlled mastery, and the words shine out, as in the original German, without there being any true exchanges between characters. The girl and the intoxicated older woman, images of departure and arrival, fixed signs representing purity and madness, seemed to function as witnesses rather than active participants. It is paradoxically language itself that is at the heart of this lack of communication, and this was emphasized by the way certain phrases were left in German or even translated into Dutch.

10. The production

The production was not obviously referential but focused the spectator’s attention on the work of the imagination. “We were not trying to present old age so much as the traces it leaves behind, to make this felt without overemphasizing it. The major problem posed by the play for the main actor is that he has to perform certain scenes very close to the spectators without any physical barrier or separation between them. His task is to ensure that it is all there but without drawing attention to it, making it all seem perfectly natural.”

The dominance of the aural component in no way diminished the power of the visual; on the contrary, the continual alternation of focus on linear and tabular perceptions was an indication of the homogeneity of all the means used to translate the imaginary world of this production. The objective was that of a continuous flow rhythmically structured by numerous techniques, accentuated by the lack of an interval. The production plunged the spectator into a world of illusion and never released its hold.

It should moreover be noted that in this production Sireuil reversed the normal spaces of The Varia: the stage was situated in the auditorium and vice versa. This permutation developed the reflection on illusion that is central to the work, and the end of the show provided a reminder of one of the key statements of the code: the curtains of the false theatre, constantly present at the back of the hotel lobby, opened onto a deserted beach flanked by two rows of beach cabins. Minetti, led by the servant/dwarf, now disguised as a clown, crossed over to the other side, to be swallowed up irrevocably in the world of pretence. A reminder of Lear being guided through the storm by the Fool.

11. The story

Bernhard’s play presents an allegorical fable whose constant references to King Lear are apparent from the initial dedication of the work. The basic story line is as follows: Minetti, an elderly retired actor who has not performed for thirty years, thrown out of Lübeck due to his refusal to perform the classical repertoire, has been living in exile in Dikensbühl and comes to Ostend to sign a contract with the manager of the Flensburg theatre. It is New Year’s Eve. The action takes place in a run-down hotel that has seen better days. Minetti is at last going to play Lear and finally to assume the role he has hitherto been able to play only to his reflection in the mirror. While he waits (fruitlessly) for the theatre manager to arrive, he delivers a long monologue: the old man sums up his life, tirelessly repeating the same story to uninterested characters, usually silent, disintegrating, locked in their own solitude. Only the girl listens with a degree of attention to Minetti’s soliloquy. As he becomes increasingly aware of his isolation, he moves slowly toward suicide while the noise of the storm outside becomes more and more piercing.

The monologue is also a reflection on duplicity: the separation between actor and character is progressively diminished as Minetti’s madness consists precisely in taking over the identity of his double; the ambiguous connections between Bernhard’s drama and Shakespeare’s tragedy go further: Minetti dies wearing Lear’s mask and on three occasions recites passages from Shakespeare.

It is necessary to stress the extent to which Sireuil’s adaptation transformed the dramatic text provided by Bernhard. The ideological content of the original story, for example, reflections on the oppression of the actor in Nazi Germany, was here resituated in a democratic society and took on metaphysical connotations. Similarly, the inversion of Minetti’s madness which echoes that of Lear, had a more general applicability: it was as if the death of Minetti revealed the extent to which madness affects all the “others,” those who refuse to hear, even those who led Minetti to his death.

The text was very precisely segmented into three scenes and an epilogue.

Activating the play’s content depends crucially on the work of the actor’s voice, in particular that of the actor Minetti.

Sireuil’s dramaturgical concept functioned on two levels: the “visible” and the “readable”:

The central focus of the play is the voice of the main character which not only relates the story through the monologue but physically places everything. Words set up veritable spatial matrices in the text, and movement within the space, facial expression, gesture illustrate the inner conflict presented through the story.

12. The production’s mode of readability.

The spectator was struck by the way the production harmoniously integrated redundant elements. The pleasure for the spectator was in the perception of allusions which open up reflection on the essence of theatricality and on its readable and visible modes. The dramaturgical signs were simultaneously clear and connotative to the point of raising through the fictional story the whole problematic of the reverberations of the actual place, of theatricality, of the nature of performance pleasure, and of the fate of the artist. A drama of destruction and salvation by theatre, performed in a proliferating space which emerges from historical time in order to construct a continuous present in which all periods merge.

The spectator is forced by the production to ponder this wealth of contradictions—one of the reasons, incidentally, that the actors mix with the audience after the show.

The production constitutes a mockery of totalizing visual stage art and stylized symbolic theatre; it presents a fleeting glimpse of a reading that the actors themselves encourage each spectator to continue outside the theatre.

NOTES

1. Minetti (Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man) by Thomas Bernhard was published by L’Arche, Paris, 1977. The production described was put on at the Varia Theatre in Brussels in 1985.

French translation by Claude Porcell

Director: Philippe Sireuil

Cast: François Beukelaers, Amid Chakir, Florence Madec, Janine Patrick, Louis Vervoort

Assistant director: Alexis Poelmans

Set and costume design: Philippe Sireuil

Masks: Jean-Claude De Bemels

Makeup: Jean-Pierre Finotto

2. Le Soir (7 March 1985).

2. The Seagull
Directed by Antoine Vitez¹

1. Global stage discourse

A) ALL THE FEATURES OF THE PERFORMANCE ARE “HELD TOGETHER”. . .

first and mainly by the identification of the plot—term that Vitez prefers to fable (Vitez and Copferman 1981, 168)—the possibility of following Treplev’s fate and the clarity of the story that is told, even though the exact motivations of characters (in Chekhov’s drama as well as in this production) are never given once for all. On the stage, the performance’s features are also held together by their spatial relationship in which, as in a fresco or a collage, each feature remains autonomous, without integration and reduction to a whole. Features signify by their contiguity, by their coexistence, and by echoes they create among them.

B) THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STAGE SYSTEMS . . .

is based therefore both on convergence and coexistence. For example, gestures and intonations produce the same effect of artificiality and falseness as does the cardboard scenography. Yet the various stage systems never cancel each other in a common signified, in an ultimate meaning.

C) COHERENCE OR INCOHERENCE

The staging purposefully seeks a certain incoherence as it refuses to homogenize and bring together the stage systems, and notably stresses the falseness of acting, situations, locations. It takes care not to let the various signifieds converge on a common signified and thus create a general atmosphere that would eventually give a meaning to each separate feature.

The reading of the text lays no claims to an internal dramatic coherence, all the more because Vitez does not carry out, and in fact rejects, a dramatic analysis that would clarify the meaning of characters and their projects (cf. (9)). Better, the staging almost always reveals contradictions and diverging aims of the characters; it does not reserve the part of the hero for anyone and never fully condemns an action. In that sense, the staging testifies to an extreme coherence in the choice of its forms of incoherence.

D) AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES OF STAGING

The staging not only deliberately applies incoherence as a sign that conflicts are not solved, it also avoids creating a Slavic or Russian atmosphere where silences, cultural allusions, a slow rhythm, or the historical nature of costumes and sets could play a dominant part. The historical and geographical aspects of Chekhov’s play are suggested by only a few marks (women’s costumes referring to Parisian fashion very popular in Russia at that time, the cap and boots of the intendant Chamraiev). The translation also erases overly explicit allusions to Russia. The presence of the samovar, inevitable in all Chekhov’s stagings, is played down: it is barely visible in the interior scene in Act III, appearing like an ironic quotation from the type of symbolic staging that Vitez is rejecting, though with some filial feeling of respect. As a result, giving up the easy clichés of the “Russian soul,” Vitez runs the risk of focusing on universal values and abstract human relations. The non-dit (“that which is not stated”)—which, in the so-called “atmosphere” staging, supplies the performance with an aura of mystery and potential discourse that calls for clarification—is replaced by Vitez with a trop-dit (“that which is overstated”), notably in the acting (cf. (6)). The actors indeed seem to express and show so many feelings, attitudes, and contradictory behaviors that they greatly increase their expressivity, but one can no longer see what the results of this interaction are.

The staging’s aesthetics brings together two principles usually considered to be mutually exclusive: the principle of realist representation (the sets represent trees, a house, a garden) and the principle of abstraction (sets and acting openly display their falseness, theatricality, and artificiality). The staging thus creates a new relation between realism and symbolism, representational reality and theatricality, illusion and denial, proximity and remoteness. One could claim that Vitez here frames a polemic with Stanislavsky, supports the position of Meyerhold and his theatre based on conventions, and grants the convention a similar basic function as a necessary feature of realism (see also (10b)).²

E) WHAT DISTURBS YOU IN THIS STAGING? WHAT ARE ITS STRONG,
WEAK, OR BORING FEATURES?

The disturbing feature is precisely that uncertainty concerning the fictional status of the performance: the uneasy acknowledgment that the staging, simultaneously and successively, aims at a realist illusion and/or at an illustration of artificiality and falseness. This uncertainty is very uncomfortable because the spectator is not accustomed to changing his/her system of perception in the middle of a performance. The staging oscillates between the principle of minimal atmospheric realism (and hence illusion) and the principle of maximal deconstruction of discourses, gestures, and characters. It is not always easy to understand why these changes occur at one moment rather than at another. In other terms, acting and sets/props retain many features of realism and psychology that, because of the stress on conventions, appear to be false or mishandled; and, inversely, deconstruction processes are insufficiently developed and systematized, and thus fail to prevent spectators from getting the impression of a reconstructed psychology and atmosphere that want to be credible. Vitez refuses to solve conflicts, to judge verbal debates; he is trying to convey on the stage the absence both of totality and center that marks Chekhov’s writings (Pavis 1985). He transcends the choice between a naturalist and symbolist staging. The question is whether spectators can also resist the temptation to redirect the staging so it would point only to one direction, i.e., whether they can stand to be torn apart between psychological identification and the deconstruction of lines and intonations. The malaise caused by the staging is no doubt generated by moments when the deconstruction is too overt, for example by Treplev’s or Arkadina’s crises, Trigorin’s “manifestoes,” the impact of Macha’s breaking voice, or Chamraiev’s “transgressions.” The spectator attributes to a dramatic analysis those considerable divergences between gestures and intonations of actors (cf. (6e)) that, in fact, are not contrasted at all in terms of any total conscious pattern.

2. Scenography

A) SPATIAL FORMS: URBAN, ARCHITECTURAL, AND STAGE SPACES,
MOVEMENTS, ETC.

The T.N.P. is located on the Trocadero Square in one of the vast buildings that housed the League of Nations, then NATO, but it occupies its basement, cut in the Chaillot hill, “a territory that Jean Vilar separated from the XVIth arrondissement” (Vitez 1981, 11). On the Trocadero esplanade, sort of a roof over this bunker-theatre, children skateboard and rollerskate, unaware that they are playing on the roof of a Parisian intellectual center. Appointed director of the Chaillot National Theatre in 1981, Vitez wanted to draw to it a larger number of theatre spectators: “Beyond the professional public, beyond the four thousand people who make up the public of a show that fails, there are at Chaillot eight thousand people who form the public of a semi-succès d’estime. Then, without any transition, thirty thousand people show up: these are spectators who materialize when a performance really works well” (Vitez and Copferman 1981, 21) (cf. (11a)).

The space of the auditorium has been rebuilt. The public faces the stage, sitting in rows of comfortable seats set along a rather steep and long gradient. The stage has a frontal line, in the Italian style. The stage space is very large, especially very long. The huge stage floor is structured in depth by parallel panels that represent, on each side, rows of trees with the sky behind them. The back of the stage represents a vast sky with a setting sun and the façade of Sorin’s house. In Act II, the house seems to have moved forward, and in Act III the façade and the terrace are now quite close to the footlights. Act IV takes place inside the house which is perceived from the reverse perspective as a very vast space with a relatively short depth. In order to animate the large stage space, especially during the first two acts, actors must move around quite a bit and draw harmonious patterns on the floor. The space properly devoted to movements—changes in positions, mutual spatial relations, and voice projections—fulfills thus an indispensable function in filling out the oversized architectural space of the stage.

The sequence of set arrangements, which first brings nearer and then inverts the vision of the central panel representing the house’s façade, suggests a zoomlike movement, a close-up view of the inner existence of characters, an investigation of a life’s itinerary, a spatial and temporal trap where Treplev is boxed in.

The space of the lake is not shown on the stage. One realizes that it corresponds exactly to the space of the public since the stage of Treplev’s little theatre is tied to the footlights, like a landing stage, and that actors look at the public when they are located on the lake or on the small theatre. This space inversion (that Meyerhold might have called a paradoxical composition) turns the Chaillot public into a double voyeur who simultaneously watches the actors/characters, their observation of the little theatre, and the latter’s backstage (where Nina gets dressed up and ready for the show). This strategy calls for a response from the contemporary public, associated in this manner with the symbolic and enigmatic function of the lake, the space of all desires and all questioning. The relation to Chekhov’s stage directions and the dramatic space he suggests is marked by a move back to representation, but a representation of reality (house, trees, garden) that displays its own falseness and theatricality, as if Vitez were once again presenting a polemic with Stanislavsky, who “in theatre, hated the ‘theatre,’ i.e., the theatrical effects, the cardboard sets and the cardboard feelings” (Vitez and Copferman 1981, 44). The lines of trees on both sides of the stage, the house seen at a distance, everything indeed is made out of cardboard which, by contrast, increases the reality of actors and the rare objects. The only truly spatial effect occurs after Treplev’s gunshots, when the wall panel is lifted and the lake becomes visible in the back. Most of the time, actors take charge of a large part of the huge stage space. Sometimes they generate a focusing effect, for example when they move to the foreground of the stage, as Macha and Dorn do at the end of the first act.

C) RELATION BETWEEN AUDIENCE AND PERFORMANCE SPACES

A heavy red velvet curtain separates the stage from the audience. It moves sideways with a very theatrical noise of its rings, breaking up the illusion of a realistic tableau (an illusion has just been created) and thus, especially at the end of an act, bringing back to mind the great days of theatricality—the very naïve theatricality enjoyed by the people, notably in plays staged for the young—and achieving an ironic contrast with the sophistication of the tableau.

D) SYSTEM OF COLORS AND THEIR CONNOTATIONS

The dominant colors of trees (brown, black) and the façade (grey spots), their texture (pointillist effect, impression of a rather dirty “camouflage,” without clear lines or hues), their relative immobility, all that creates a rather gloomy and heavy climate that the representation of spaces and objects never dissolves into a definite feeling or atmosphere. Scenography operates like a mainly inflexible constraint, precluding both aesthetic plays on colors and the already mentioned naturalist realism; no relation to Strehler’s style (as in his use of white in The Cherry Orchard) or to Stanislavsky’s (as in his evocation of a heavy and homogeneous milieu by the means of real objects). This scenography refers to a dominant prosaic reality, which however cannot sustain its illusion and rapidly reveals its falseness and theatricality. Thus it does not even try to give the impression that the stage is extending backstage into a space beyond the stage, that the stage is an integral part of a larger reality. Everything that is shown on the stage always conceals something else, without ever providing a definite explanation for the motivations, gestures, and symbols (the lake, the seagull). That which is concealed is buried at the “heart” of the stage, “behind” that which is shown; it is never made definitely explicit.

3. Lighting system

Light constitutes a capital feature of the story because the action takes place at sundown (Act I), at noon (Act II), in daylight (Act III), in the evening (Act IV). The movement of the sun, visible in the sky shown in the back of the stage by the means of a cyclorama, marks the passage of time. Variations in light intensity illuminate the stage “from within,” providing each tableau with a specific emotional coloring: contrasted, romantic, and agitated in Act I, sensual in Act II, humdrum and tragic in Act III, uncanny and morbid in Act IV. Light projects color on the tree panels and the ground; it fully animates a scenography that would not come alive without its constant variations.

4. Objects: nature, function, relation to space and body

Objects seem to be lost in the vast stage space. They basically are furniture pieces: wicker chairs (I) and a bench, croquet hoops (II), a table set for breakfast, suitcases (III), a sofa-bed, a card table, a desk (IV). In a rather vague and artificial scenographic environment, they appear to be the only real objects inserted in the story; however, the scenography does not attempt to turn them into realistic manifestations of a specific society. Instead, they are used as acting aids, supporting the actors’ performance; their function rarely deviates from their normal utilitarian role. They always retain their realistic character, even when they serve, concurrently, as potential starting points for a symbolic reading (see, for example, the seagull which looks like a stuffed bird, the theatre stage that is imperfectly tied to the lake shore, the croquet game that Nina transforms into a slalom and a balancing act, etc.). In the last act, the space surrounding Treplev is considerably reduced; the routine of his existence inside the house during the bad season is heavily weighing upon him but, in contrast with Nina, he doesn’t manage to “escape through the glass door.” At the beginning of the play, the curtain of Treplev’s little theatre is lowered all the way down, inverting the perspective (one sees Nina backstage, getting ready to get on the stage). The curtain operates like a wall that prevents any communication between Nina and Treplev, located on the opposite sides of this artificial separation.

5. Costumes: system and relation to body

Among all the stage systems displayed in this performance, the costume system best relates the play to a historical context that could be nineteenth century Russia. But Yannis Kokkos, the costume designer, limits references to Russian fashion to only a few details: the cap and boots of the intendant Chamraiev. The “handyman” Iakov does not wear the traditional muzhik blouse. Women—Arkadina, Paulina, Macha—wear long, elegant black or white dresses. Their colors are clear and contrasted on the basis of a rather simple characterization: a simple white dress for Nina (I, II) and a dressier black dress for Arkadina. Dorn wears a white jacket that refers to him as an “experienced man,” the vacationer and the traveler rather than the physician.

6. Performance of actors

A) INDIVIDUALIZED OR TYPE ACTING

Whereas most actors are “Vitez actors”—his former students or actors accustomed to acting for him—there is no typical Vitez acting style, or rather that style consists of preserving the individual contribution of each actor (personal accent, delivery, gestures, image), exploiting the performers’ diversity and heterogeneity. Each one has a special personality that is stressed in acting: the quavering intonations and always-changing body tension of Edith Scob (Arkadina), the deep and solemn voice of Jean-Marie Winling (Medvedenko) and Bruno Sermonne (Dorn), the ability to move from dejection to overexcitement displayed by Jean-Yves Dubois (Treplev) and Dominique Reymond (Nina).

B) RELATION BETWEEN AN ACTOR AND THE GROUP

The space is animated by the entire set of actors. No attempts are made to highlight one or several characters, but a classical technique is used to focus on those who hold the central role in the dialogue. Movements follow the logic of the situation, without stressing any moves, pauses, or glances.

C) TEXT/BODY

The staging does not try to suggest any identity between a character, his/ her psychology, voice, or gestures; it stresses contrasting impressions created by these features. Arkadina, who looks fragile and unsure of herself, has exceptionally violent intonations and outcries. When he comforts Macha at the end of Act I, Dorn uses an intonation which has little reference to the situation at hand. His words “O enchanted lake! But what can I do my child? What? What?” are said with a detachment that might seem to imply a separation between the words and the body. It does not simply express the coldness, intellectual outlook, and remoteness of the character; it also demonstrates that Vitez wants to carry out a rhetorical deconstruction of Chekhov’s text, to lay bare its mechanism, to underline its alarming strangeness.

The actor remains at a distance from the role, but without a real effect of alienation. Several actors have character roles and almost seem miscast: Jean-Claude Jay plays an ill and irritable old man, Bruno Sermonne seems too young and vigorous for his part as a fifty-five year old physician. Both adjust to their roles (through makeup and body posture), but only up to a point: they do not attempt to have the audience believe in the age or situation of their characters.

D) GESTURES, MIMICRY, MAKEUP

Body, voice, and text are never harmonized or synchronized. No one seems to have a well-integrated personality, except perhaps for Dorn, despite his resigned slowness. One sees how time wears out the body (Macha deteriorates from act to act, but so does Arkadina, who, trying to show that she remains young, gets winded when she dances and has trouble reading without glasses). The malaise of bodies is general and shown with comical effects (Sorin who gesticulates in his wheelchair) or through allusions (missed “meeting” of Nina and Trigorin: Nina waits for a kiss that does not materialize, etc.). In contrast, the friendship betwen Treplev and his uncle is conveyed through a complicity of bodies: they are both similarly juvenile, awkward, clumsy. They understand each other through the language of eyes and attitudes.

Makeup is used mainly to age the actors. In the last act, one barely recognizes Treplev because his face has become extremely pale and his hair has been plastered down. The daily gloom, routine, and sacrifices have marked his face. He offers the only example of a very marked use of makeup.

7. Function of music, noise, and silence

Music has a diegetic function, i.e., it originates and is produced on the stage, and is justified by the situation. In Act IV, Treplev is heard playing the piano in another room: it is a melancholy tune that corresponds to the twilight atmosphere and the character’s despair. The insistent noise of the wind howling from the lake doubles the feeling of strangeness—a disturbing strangeness (the Freudian Unheimlich) and weirdness that seem to invade the living room and the house; but this effect is limited to only a few occurrences and never lasts very long.

Dialogue relies a lot on silences, when what is not said weighs heavily on the characters (Nina and Treplev in Act II, Nina and Trigorin at the end of Act III). Each character has a different attitude toward the “holes” in the dialogue: Nina uses them as means of expression, Arkadina cannot stand them, Trigorin does not dare to “hear” them or to create them; he fills them with small talk (“It’s nice here”). After Treplev’s gunshots in the wings, the play ends with a general silence underlined by the futile moves of lotto tokens that clatter on their board and pace the time as if nothing happened, as if everything would keep going on. Music, noise, and silence form the stage systems that best contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of anxiety and mystery, even though other stage signs, such as intonation and gestures, immediately undermine that atmosphere and disturb its droning harmony.

8. Rhythm of the performance

A) RHYTHM OF SOME SEMIOTIC SYSTEMS

B) GLOBAL RHYTHM

Some systems follow a regular and continuous rhythm: for instance, variations in light intensity. Others, such as gestures or intonations, testify to broken rhythms and extreme variations. As a result, systems are markedly desynchronized, so that no global rhythm can unify their totality (cf. above, (1c)).

Vitez intended neither to slow down the delivery of lines, which would have produced a melodramatic and depressing tonality, nor to speed up their tempo, which would have evoked a tragi-comical vaudeville. He created a series of strong and weak measures, successive accelerations and braking. Thus when Nina gives the locket to Trigorin (Act III), she recites her text at full speed: “I beg you to accept. . .”. And Treplev moves without transition from tenderness to physical aggression when dealing with Arkadina. (For the problem of rhythm in performances of Chekhov’s plays, see Pavis 1985).

9. How this staging reads the fable

A) WHAT STORY IS TOLD?

It is not easy to reduce a staging to a linear story, i.e., to a series of actions that bring about a single result. It is impossible to read this performance as the story of Treplev’s tragedy or Nina’s agony, etc. Besides, Vitez is known to be suspicious of the fable: “I rejected this notion of the fable such as it had been used, and now I have come to question the very word itself. I no longer feel like fighting against the fable, but I wonder what that term really means. I am afraid the use of this type of vocabulary (which Brecht took over from Aristotle) traps us in an obligation to move in one or another direction” (1981, 168). This Seagull can neither be summed up nor reduced to a story, a thesis, a moral.

B) WHAT DRAMATIC CHOICES?

The rejection of the fable as the organizing narrative structure explains the absence of choices intended to clarify actions and motivations of characters. However, some “choices” have been made concerning major temperamental determinations of characters: Arkadina’s hysteria, Treplev’s cyclothymia, etc.

C) WHAT ARE THE STORY’S AMBIGUITIES, WHAT CLARIFICATIONS ARE
OFFERED BY THE STAGING?

The ambiguity of motivations, action, and conclusion of the play is as high as possible. Yet a certain number of major temperamental and unconscious figures seem to be outlined: Oedipal relation between Treplev and his mother, connection between neurosis and Hamlet’s situation (cf “The Daily Life and Mythical Figures” in Pavis 1985).

Obviously, the determination not to conclude does not preclude some rather clear judgments: Treplev is portrayed like a temperamental juvenile who is both ridiculous and moving. Nina delivers the monologue in a very modern style, almost like words in a contemporary musical piece. Vitez thus seems to offer the parody of “fashionable” art. In fact, it is almost a self-parody, when related to the way in which he used to direct his actors in the cast.

D) E) NOT APPLICABLE: cf (9a)

F) WHAT GENRE OF DRAMATIC TEXT DOES THIS STAGING IMPLY?

A black comedy rather than a vaudeville or a melodrama. The method of “ups and downs,” alternating comic and tragic moments, slow and fervent moods, deviated and hidden meanings, makes it difficult to propose a homogeneous reading that would follow the canon of a particular genre. The staging suggests several possible readings, favoring none of them and thus promoting a generic uncertainty.

10. The text in the staging

A) ASPECTS OF THE TRANSLATION

Vitez had the special opportunity of himself translating the text from Russian (a language he knows well, having studied it and translated from it for many years) and then doing its staging. Thus, at the time he is producing the French text, he is already thinking like a director, very much aware of the syntactical rhythm, stylistic impacts of words grouped together, modern tonalities of certain expressions (“Please!”). His translation does not try to simplify the Russian text or to remove its ambiguities, neither does it attempt to convey a “Russian flavor” by a forced reproduction of diminutive forms or verbal plays on names. However, it retains the Russian terms for units of measure (poud, kopeck, verste). Its rhythmic scheme is close to the scheme in the original version, readily sacrificing the “gallicization” of the text in order to preserve the rhythmic rhetoric of the Russian text.

B) HOW DOES THE STAGING TREAT THE DRAMATIC TEXT?

The text and the fable (at least as it can be reconstituted) are not “forced” or “buried” by an omnipotent visual display (as Chéreau does, for example). They remain autonomous and are marked by a “visualization” of their phonic, rhythmic, and rhetorical architecture. Voice, intonation, and silence remain the essential “structuring” systems. The text is raised to the level of high tension in its verbal expression: it is, so to speak, “forced up to its breaking point,” as if it were to generate a super-text instead of a sub-text à la Stanislavsky. Here again Vitez clearly shows his preference for Meyerhold over Stanislavsky. He writes about the latter: “His [Stanislavsky’s] famous ‘system,’ which owes much to the encounter between Moscow’s Art Theatre and Chekhov, is based on the notion that the actor’s work is as creative as that of the composer and the designer, and that the actor must discover, beneath the author’s text, an underground flow, the sub-text, which accounts for the real life of the character and is only imperfectly manifested in the text” (1981, 45). Nothing testifies to that sub-text in the staging of The Seagull. Vitez is much more concerned with artificiality and conventions, as Meyerhold was in his time: “We must acknowledge that everything in theatre is a convention, that everything is conventional in theatre. Using the same word to refer to a good and a bad convention is quite legitimate. The bad convention is the routine convention, which has become normal to the point that it is no longer noticed. Meyerhold tells us that we must reject that type of convention; instead, he promotes a conscious convention: the artist must create his own convention, i.e., his own system of signs, and have the public understand it” (1981, 45).

C) RELATION BETWEEN TEXT AND IMAGE

Since the image plays no role, or very seldom, as a support or justification of the staging, the actor must continuously draw everything from his/her own resources. S/he is thrown into an empty space, difficult to fill out, and uncomfortable. The actor’s voice, gestures, and movements insert him/her within the performance.

11.

A) WITHIN WHAT THEATRE INSTITUTION DOES THIS STAGING TAKE PLACE?

The Théâtre National de Chaillot is an institution that, under Vitez, has become known as a quality theatre for the people, an institution that manages, in a critical spirit, the theatrical heritage. This theatre is subsidized by the State, and it appeals to a middle-class public, students, professors, and theatre enthusiasts who follow all Vitez productions (cf. (2a)).

B) WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM THIS PERFORMANCE?

Finding out how Vitez would reconcile Chekhov’s atmosphere and his own experimental style, sober, hyper-intellectual, overall distrustful of sensuality. This contradiction has been neither resolved nor highlighted in the staging. Hence the impression of a middle-of-the-road direction, contradictory and disappointing on all accounts. Such is both the wager of that staging and the source of its predictable failure, for its aesthetic principles are totally antithetical.

C) HOW DID THE PUBLIC REACT?

The show was followed with sustained attention. No overwhelming enthusiasm, no romantic emotion. It seemed that people were saying: “This is not the usual Chekhov, nor the experimental Vitez.”

The spectator’s role is fundamental because s/he must complete and reconstitute the puzzle of diverging signs, rhythms out of phase, unresolved contradictions, and closely follow all sorts of echoes, intonations, and quotes during the entire performance. Vitez states that he is “against the illusion that one first has an idea and then illustrates it” (1981, 173). He sees no point in trying to reorder the signs on the basis of a preconceived idea (i.e., conceived before the contribution of actors). Instead of reordering perceptions on the basis of a fable or a dramatic analysis, one should read the performance in its horizontal pattern, its “mythological system”: “One must not rely on the fable but show the succession of associations of ideas developed by the director and the team of actors. Staging is the assembly or collage of all these associations of ideas one after another. This collage leads to a global reading of the work, even to a meaning, but a global meaning. This meaning seemed to me to be richer than the meaning one gets by simply following the fable” (1981, 2).

12. How to record (or photograph or film) this performance

A) HOW TO RECORD

It might be important to record the movements of actors, to keep track of their movements as traces of stage business. And, at the same time, one ought to mark “explosions” of gestures and intonations, as well as their ties to the text and to the global system of such marks. There is an original relation between continuity and breaks that occurs only in this type of staging and hence should be grasped.

A film (for example the video made by the T.N.C. for its archives³) does not convey successfully the impact of an empty stage or abrupt changes. Also lost, almost totally, are the strange locations of Arkadina’s and Nina’s voices, the original relation between the concrete scenography and the abstract acting, especially evidenced by intonations and movements.

B) WHAT IMAGES DO YOU REMEMBER?

• The cyclorama and the setting sun;

• The landing stage in the foreground;

• The line of trees against the sky;

• The house wall panel that is lifted up and discloses the view of the lake already used in the staging of The Heron.

13. What cannot be semiotized

A) B) WHAT PART OF YOUR READING OF THE STAGING IS LEFT WITHOUT
A MEANING? WHAT CANNOT BE REDUCED TO SIGNS AND MEANING?

Some outbursts of gestures or voices occur at unexpected times. As a general rule, any sequence of signs seems to have at least a fragmentary meaning, an incomplete meaning, as if the staging rejected a final and unequivocal solution. “Theatre,” Vitez states, “is the very flow of time. It is inequality, imperfection, incompletion” (1981, 139).

14.

A) WHAT SPECIAL PROBLEMS SHOULD BE EXAMINED?

How this staging relates to his other stagings, notably that of Hamlet (produced the previous year with many of the same actors) and especially that of Axionov’s The Heron? Thus one would see that Vitez’s directing activity always keeps very close intertextual relations with other productions performed by the same actors.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Patrice Pavis, 1985, “Commentaires à l’édition au Livre de Poche de La Mouette de Tchékov.”

Anton Tchekov, 1985, La Mouette, Paris, Le Livre de Poche.

Antoine Vitez and George Banu, 1980, “Entretien,” Silex, 16.

Antoine Vitez and Emile Copferman, 1981, De Chaillot à Chaillot, Paris, Hachette.

NOTES

1. The Seagull, translated into French by Antoine Vitez (La Mouette), was published by Actes Sud in 1984, and by Livre de Poche in 1985. The production described was put on at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris the 9th February 1984.

Director: Antoine Vitez

Set and costume design: Yannis Kokkos

Music: Bernard Cavanna

Choreography: Milko Sparemblek

Lighting system: Patrice Trottier

Director Assistant: Kasia Skansberg

Set and costume design assistant: Nicolas Sire

Cast: Jean Allain, Joël Denicourt, Jean-Yves Dubois, Jean-Claude Jay, Patrice Kerbrat, Dominique Reymond, Edith Scob, Bruno Sermonne, Boguslawa Schubert, Claudia Stavisky, Dominique Valadié, Agnès Van Molder, Pierre Vial, Jean-Marie Winling.

2. Vitez points out his relationship with Meyerhold and insists upon the fact that every theatrical fact belongs to conventions; rejecting the bad usual convention, Meyerhold prefers the intentional convention and the realistic genre is only one of the conventional games theatre provides (p. 45).

3. T.N.C. document. Thanks to Jacques Roulet and Françoise Peyronnet who gave me the opportunity to see it.

3. As You Like It:
A dramaturgic analysis of Shakespeare’s As You Like It

1. Prologue

Whether we regard the old Duke’s, Rosalind’s, or Orlando’s story as being the play’s principal line of action, the result will be exactly the same: the former intrigue in its intertwinement with the two others is, from a dramatic point of view, absolutely hopeless. It is not playable. The Duke’s banishment is a fact from the outset but any potential action which might have otherwise been extracted from it (through his brother’s attempt to do away with him in the forest of Arden) is substituted by a brief communiqué telling that he has repented, will live as a hermit and place his brother in the position of which he has robbed him! And Rosalind’s story is just as unlikely: well arrived (despite sore feet) to Arden, she meets not only her father but her lover as well, only to retain her disguise to the great confusion of both, duping them until she guilefully acts dea ex machina, shifting from masculine into feminine clothing in order to marry someone whose betrothal she could have secured without all the fuss! Actually, most of the action lies in Orlando’s story, but this is the stuff of which folk tales or Dostoevsky novels are made: Old Sir Rowland de Boys has three sons when he dies. . . . The folk tale structure is in fact identifiable in the very trials he undergoes: (1) the confrontation with the brother: qualification test; (2) the vanquishing of the usurping duke’s wrestler: principal trial; (3) the overcoming of himself in helping the brother with the snake and the lionness: the glorifying test.

Despite this absolutely impossible scenario, As You Like It (AYLI) is one of the most often-staged comedies and—just like the bumblebee who will not heed wizened opinions telling that its flight runs contrary to natural law—it challenges dramaturgs and literary scholars to identify the sustaining force clearly keeping the piece alive. The problem is in itself quite simple: all the provisory consequences of the intrigue are retired at the conclusion of the first act, none of which again come into play until the fifth act. This means that AYLI’s incontestable power of fascination must derive from sources outside of the intrigues and, seen negatively, that every staging which necessarily builds upon an accentuation of the drama’s narrative core is foredoomed to miscarry.

2. All the world’s a stage

The Hymen masque is but one aspect of AYLI’s formal and stylized ending: first Hymen, then a dance, and finally Rosalind’s epilogue. But why now this plural construction? What does this say about the play as a whole?

A refined dialectic finale serving which aim? Or rather, of which necessity? Indeed, by necessity of the fact that up until then the play has as a whole been unsuccessful in convincing us of its essential kernel of reality. The obvious staging of the final scene as a play accentuates the rest of the piece’s constructional and play-making character. That which is left in the public consciousness is perhaps the feelings, the experiences, the possibilities which are only presentable via the interaction between framing and patterning which might receive existential meaning when given the chance to live on in the memory freed from the cool logic of experience:

Corin has interrupted a conversation between Celia and Rosalind, and has promised them “a pageant truly played.” The actors are here Phebe and Silvius who together constitute the parodic pair. At first, Rosalind and Celia keep hidden from these two who, through the voyeurs, are revealed to us as they behave when they are—or when they believe they are—alone. The voyeurs allow us the possibility of looking into the private sphere as private sphere. Not as something which must be pretended as a private universe (like that imposed upon us in illusionism by naturalistic theatre, where we must abstract from the fourth wall), but as a first-hand reportage from the play revealing the delusions of private life and reality set in opposition to each other. At a certain point Rosalind breaks in and gives instructions, becomes the active actor and transforms the scene. Now the play has lost its character of genuine play, of being an extension of the actors’ sincere and insincere feelings and strategies. They must from now on meet a public demand: they must bring those standing outside into their play. In this scene, then, we must have observed the significance which the existence of outsiders has for our perspective on the stage, namely as a visualized reference point for the action’s premises: the actors are alone, are understood as being alone precisely through the presence of hidden observers visible only to the public. Shakespeare uses the soliloquy in the tragedies and the historic plays in order to communicate the characters’ inner thoughts. In the fundamental dialogic form of the comedy, however, other roads must be found leading to the center of the contrapuntal structure of mistaken identity, transformation, role-play, satire, irony, and even ambiguity, which gives anchorage for uprightness, harmony, intention, that is, for situations where the mask has fallen away and the character is revealed. The hidden observer of this genuine masque is the audience’s touchstone. Here we can be assured that what happens is what the centrifugal force on stage wishes to happen through his or her artistic means. Thus the structure of AYLI can be seen as alternating between the theatre and theatre-within-theatre. It is only through a melding of the two forms of presentation that a comprehensive picture of the play’s action and characters can be formulated.

There is no theatre-within-theatre in the somber universe of the first act. Role play here is something envisaged self-consciously: “what think you of falling in love?” (I, ii, 23) or a pretentious mask of loyalty (as exemplified in the courtesan Le Beau), concealing critical attitudes and somber feelings.

It is not until the second act, where Rosalind dons the essential mask in her shift of gender, that the scenes increase in which the public, through a hidden observer, has the possibility of receiving edited information about the characters who are otherwise seen only on their own conditions.

Jacques is the primary observer, but even he is spied upon. We meet him through a second-hand account of his encounter with a wounded deer. A story in which no embarrassing detail is spared for the delivery of the sentimental kitsch in the melancholic’s response (II, i, 30f.). But, as noted, Jacques is otherwise basically a looker-on. He serves as our on-the-spot commentator (II, ii, 290ff) for Touchstone and Audrey’s “mock-marriage,” allowing us a peek into the lifestyle and aspirations of the more congenial folk.

But we are also given audience to the principal character, Rosalind, from an outsider’s point of view, though perhaps on different conditions: Ros.: “I will speak to him like a saucy lackey and under that habit play the knave with him—Do you hear, forester?” In Rosalind’s reply to Celia, the framework of Rosalind and Orlando’s meeting is determined simultaneously for the public, even though Celia is on stage during the entire meeting (III, ii, 422: “Come sister will you go?”) and the director must stage her presence while sufficiently distancing her from Orlando. Thus it is by way of Rosalind’s ceremonial-like introduction to the anticipated content of the scene that we are forewarned that even if it appears to be a peek into the relationship between two lovers, it is actually no more than a consciously governed role-play.

Nor can Rosalind be closely observed in this kind of scene: she is imbued with a role-consciousness here as well. Nor does Shakespeare allow her to perform on the slackrope for a third party in a sort of involuntary peep-show. Our sole formal point of view is the confidante Celia. This is again the case in IV, i, 35f., where Rosalind puts on the second “mock-marriage” with Celia being the implicated, unwilling procuress (Celia: “You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate”). Celia’s presence has only formal significance—she constitutes the fourth wall—in a conscientious role-acting on the part of Rosalind: “By this hand, it will not kill a fly. But come, now I will be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition; and ask me what you will, I will grant it.”

The final and absolute proof of Rosalind’s true love for Orlando—if ever we doubted—evinces in Act IV, iii, where, maintaining her Ganymed identity, she must endure the impassioned story of Orlando and the lioness, and where—even though it is out of role—she topples over at the sight of the blood-spot, whereby she must affirm for the stage’s doubting public—Oliver and Celia—and the audience, that she merely acted. Oliver: “This was not counterfeit, there is too great testimony in your complexion that it was a passion of earnest.” In this way, the true director of the theatre-within-theatre must in the last instance function as a simple element in the company and allow itself to be espied from the outside.

The public, directly and indirectly, has received a glimpse into the characters’ natures: Jacques, who despite social possibilities to the contrary, has been bound to one special line, the eternal voyeur. Touchstone who, because of his social status, can only play out his vision of the world in the form of verbal word-play. Silvius, in an emotionally stiffened, period-specific role of “the sad shepherd” plays a predictable sado-masochistic role in relation to Phebe who, due to social constraints, cannot realize her dreams of another love relationship. This lies in contrast to the happy-go-lucky Rosalind, who acquires everything through her role and through Celia who receives her wages for faith’s servitude as a by-product of her friend’s efficient organization. All the world may be a stage, but even in the forest social status forces a distinction between the star players and the water boys.

However, what is common to the assembly in the forest is the possibility of feigned insanity without fatal consequences. The action and the forms of dialogue are endowed with the freedom of experimental and non-commitant action. The meeting as such between people in the forest is a play where normal—sometimes fatal—consequences are suspended.

The formal manifestation of the conclusion and the inserted “genuine scenes” with the built-in witness guarantee all serve to shed a glimmer of reality over the life in the forest. But why are such occasions at all necessary? This necessity stems from the structure and thematic of the piece itself.

3. A motley coat

The general structure of the play is quite clear and simple. The first act presents an infernal civilization under an omnipotent and fear-inspiring sovereign along with the victims of an arbitrary and inexplicable oppression. The silent and tacit acceptance of injustice is by no means a guarantee against sudden attack and menace of destruction. Orlando’s activeness and Rosalind’s passiveness are equally life threatening.

Life conditions in the forest are diametrically opposed. Despite the rigid framework dictating the development of the action, nature’s meteorological caprices, and the animals’ demonic behavior being potential adjuvants, we can still speak of a free stage for everyone who must be content with playing a part in the ordinary development of human feelings and aspirations. And naturally there are differences between people here as well: we cannot refer to a paradisic frame where civilization’s social and economic ranks do not come into play. Even a mechanized tick-tocking clock accompanies the forest sojourners. Yet it is not these structural forms so restrictive in civilization that are the essential factors determining the interaction in the forest of Arden. It is rather the diverse forms of emotional life and sex roles which dominate in the intrigues of high and low plot.

The differences of rank and order are quickly resolved as the forest sojourn concludes and the return to civilization commences. Through happenstance everything falls into place so that the social foundations of the emotionally based alliances are also held intact. Here the realist in Shakespeare manifests itself in a couple of brief lines. However, without allowing these conditions (evident to any spectator with just a trace of common cynicism) to destroy the overall joy which, as we know, we receive in spite of everything. For even though Jacques will not return home with the others, preferring to hold on to his role as the hermit, and even though Phebe will not accept another offering, and even though we can anticipate difficult communication problems between Audrey and Touchstone, when we abstract from the carnal intercourse, the general impression we get—at least from the principal actors carrying the main action—is that one goes on to meet better times ahead, understood as better conditions for those people who receive their due (the Duke, Rosalind, Orlando), and for those who find one another (Oliver and Celia). At a lower level the situation is more confused.

Life in the forest is more vegetative. There is time to escape. Indeed, the structure of the play is at its initial stage purely escapist. The plot is extremely unmarked. The moments of tension are practically non-existent. This is why the interest in a possible reconciliation of Ganymed’s true identity in the relationship to Orlando and the aged Duke serves as the focal point of the audience’s attention. Nor is it this which is at question. Rosalind’s shift in gender on the other hand provides the centrifugal force, the actor, the possibility of becoming a woman, with the added advantage for the dramatist that language can be placed at the center, in opposition to the stone-faced tragic hero who does not use the language master’s lapidary linguistic forms and who adheres to the action-marked approach to existence: Rosalind: “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak” (III, ii, 249). But, in the forest, the men themselves become speakers. Touchstone continues right where he left off. Silvius can simply not resist a page-by-page recitation from the poetry book. Jacques has personally affirmed his message and the old Duke in his exile has become a bit of a bittersweet commentator. Together they comprise a complete orchestra of voices crying for admission on stage to present a little number. And this they are granted!

The design of the forest scenes resembles a patchwork quilt—or the Harlequin’s suit sewn from patches which harmonize or oppose, deepen, prolong, contrast, or neutralize each other. When one pageant is rolled out with a team of actors, another is rolled in. Just as in a series of skits from a variety show. The forest is a supermarket of attitudes. A therapy forum for the needy. A theatre piece for us—about us.

The danger of completely distancing the public from the events on stage has already been identified as a structural element: nonetheless Shakespeare tests our ability to effect a participatory synthesis of, and identification with, the general fable (the love story of Orlando and Rosalind, including the subsequent family activity) to the utmost in Orlando’s poetics in the form of love poems tottering on poesy’s unsteady feet. The pastiche of adventurous romance recounting the virtuous brother’s selfless struggle with snakes and lionesses. Touchstone’s and Audrey’s marriage by the preacher Oliver Martext. Touchstone’s underdog status and repetitive, vain, and unsuccessful tirades. Jacques’s melancholic lectures. The authentic ritual as contrasting actions.

4. Music and dialogue

During the time in which Four Quartets was written, T. S. Eliot wrote an essay, “The Music of Poetry” (1942), in which he describes the relationship between poetry and music thus:

The use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. It is in the concert room rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened.

This description of course corresponds precisely to Eliot’s undertaking in his writing of the Four Quartets, but what he presents in this essay are general principles for a gestaltization of poetic texts, and this could just as well be a description of the construction of AYLI.

That his parallel with music is fruitful and particularly amendable to the dramatic piece can be seen in a remarkable instance from the fifth act, where Phebe asks Silvius to explain to Ganymed (Rosalind) what love is. This is developed in the following exchange:

This dialogue, which continues a little further in the same vein, closely resembles a song with a chorus and individualized voices in a sort of refrain; at the same time, it illustrates what Roman Jakobson would call language’s metalinguistic and poetic function and their concrete interlacing in the textual process. We have discussed themes and their orchestration, and the play contains many themes. An example of this can be noted in the developments in the traditional pastoral conflict between agricultural and city life (especially among the older Duke, Jacques, and Touchstone). AYLI however, is characterized by one principal theme, love between man and woman, and through this very specific orchestration the play must—and can—be held in sway. The above quotation from the fifth act is also illustrative of the classical method of theatre where counterparts, a series of independent voices, are often bound pair-wise in an attempt to define the nature of love: they advance hypotheses, give examples, raise questions seriously and in jest, mischievously or in despair. The voices enter into a dialogue with one another. They argue, quarrel, tease, entrap, supplicate, refuse, confess, etc., and out of this polyphony emerges a kaleidoscope vision of love and particularly that of being in love. This multiplicity and rupture and reflection of the main theme in the individual dialogue situations almost always possesses the autonomy of the sketch and is so to say the centrifugal principle of the drama which orders the voices in relation to one another, assigning them different importance and meaning and finishes by establishing a hierarchy, an order of precedence between them.

5. Your if is the only peacemaker: much virtue in if

Without generalizing on the dramatic piece as such, we will contend that there is a marked difference in the way in which the discourse functions in Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies. Often, the major difference between tragedy and comedy is defined as the difference between alienation and integration, so that at the end of the play the tragedy’s hero stands alone, isolated from society, a society which in some cases is itself disintegrated, whereas the protagonist or protagonists in the comedy are integrated in the society, most often recognized in a celebration having an affinity to a fertility rite (e.g., wedding, as contrasted to the tragedy’s traditional execution or another form of the body’s destruction).

It is in relation to this decisive difference in the fable’s peripety and dénouement that the function of discourse must be understood. It is characteristic of Shakespearian tragedy that discourse is fatal. King Lear is a good example because the drama’s point of departure is Lear’s wish that his daughters, through utterance, give a formal, almost ritualized expression of their love for him. He subsequently regards the discourse as an action and bondable, and this is the arbiter of his fate.

Another trait of the tragedy’s discourse is its monologic and declamatory nature. Although Shakespeare’s tragedies are naturally comprised of dialogues, it is characteristic that these do not lead to understanding or agreement; discourse serves neither to create a common existential conception nor an agreement on the justification for social norms. It is often true that in the tragedy the action or deliberation is central, but the modalities of discourse themselves prohibit a reconciliation, either because it is declamatory (e.g., imperative utterance) or strategic, i.e., because they pursue their own ends without regard to truth or ethical validity. This affects the relation between discourse, identity, and self-recognition: the declamatory nature of the discourse is a rigid confrontation of an identity where the force of this confirmation and the spectacular demonstration of this identity are frequently proportional to a lack of self understanding. This does not mean that the tragedy cannot result in a process of consciousness, for example, in Lear’s wandering through the countryside toward Dover he worked a way through insanity to consciousness; but, in tragedy, recognition (anagnorisis), whether the manifest change in destiny (peripety) happens before, after, or simultaneously; it always occurs too late, because the powers which initiate the destruction of the tragic hero have worked silently and unrecognized.

The experimental action (action as play) is the representation or the delimitation of a situation and a series of actions (Freud for example defines thought as a sort of experimental action in the mind). In characterizing the tragedy, we have spoken of the restrictive relation between discourse and action and not of the experimental action for the good reason that it is practically non-existent since the cards have already been laid on the table. Even when theatre-within-theatre is utilized in the tragedy as, for example, in the staging of Gonzago’s murder in Hamlet, we speak of an irreversible event, a fatal revelation, whereas the simple gestural indication, the role-play, on the contrary, is reversible. This is why, in the tragedy, discourse is identical with binding and consequential action. However, the discourse may only incite the action; it cannot govern it. Thus tragedy’s discourse is characterized by a duality of omnipotence and impotence, command confronting supplication, proclamation confronting doubt’s plaintive dirge.

The relation between discourse and body differs in the two genres as well. This of course has to do with thematization of the body where, at the mythical level, the opposition is between the broken body expressed emblematically by Lear when the blinded Glouster would kiss his hand:

and between the comedy’s double body, that of man and woman unified in the act of love:

Although Celia’s and Rosalind’s brazen indecencies (which here almost elude Touchstone) thematize sexuality, a performance will also demonstrate that in Shakespearian comedy, discourse as an action is eroticized to such a point that often (as above) it takes on the character of a pleasurable physical blossoming. Hence discourse becomes the physical manifestation of a mental excess. Tragedy’s discourse, on the contrary, is correlated with the statuary or martyred body, so that the material realization of the linguistic expression becomes either an indicator of social worth and power or of tragic isolation; the pompous or laconic voice of the author on the one hand and the eruption or oppression and inhibition in the intonation on the other. In both cases, the language’s concrete materiality is semanticized and refers to something stringent, to a non-freedom.

By sole virtue of its being a comedy, AYLI’s s discourse is diametrically opposed to that which has been said about the tragedy’s and, what’s more, Touchstone, near the end of the play, delivers a digression on the rules for the duel and his own quasi-duel, a discourse which at first glance appears irrelevant filler material but which upon closer inspection appears to embody the poetic of the Shakespearian comedy:

The consequences of an utterance can be avoided six times and the seventh can be shuffled off by rendering it hypothetical; hence, a form of fictionizing it. Confronted with the irreversibility of the tragedy’s discourse, Touchstone advocates the reversibility, or better, perhaps, in biblical terminology, the reconciliation which characterizes the comedy’s discourse. Touchstone’s reply also gives notice of the fact that the comedy contains the possibility of true dialogue; discourse is of course used strategically in the comedy as well and deception and trickery are employed almost willfully, but in the final instance, this does not keep its dénouement from resting on an accepted consensus on what is considered pleasurable, reasonable, and allowable.

6. This is the Forest of Arden

In the preceding we have been occupied primarily with the role-play and staging of the thematization of theatre-within-theatre and what seems to be the essential characteristic of the Shakespearian comedy as an extension of these reflections:

As we have noted, this is a good example of the will to stage existence as a play, and this play has the character of self-dramatizing an arrangement of the outside world in such a way as to contribute to the protagonists’ con amore presentation. In the dialogues between Rosalind and Celia, particularly in the first act, this self-made reality is primarily linguistic, the young women create a conversation space into which only Touchstone gains entrance, and which becomes an imaginary refuge in the oppressive reality of the nobility. But what happens? Rosalind has barely suggested infatuation as a pastime in their common, exclusively discursive universe before Orlando makes his physical entrance on stage and she falls hopelessly in love (just as Phebe has barely refuted love, before she becomes its prisoner). This points to a magical relationship between imagination and reality, between the discursive universe and the action universe. This magic is a well-known psychological and anthropological phenomenon: thought’s omnipotence. A humoristic-realistic version of this is found in the folk tale in which the realization of three wishes leaves the protagonist exactly where s/he started. From this point of view, AYLI can be seen as the representation of a wish-fulfilment, where the stage’s fictive, but simultaneously physically present space, serves as a material base for Rosalind’s performance.

Thus, in connection to its mythical function as a natural regenerative space, Arden also becomes a landscape of consciousness, a foil for the playing out of a wish fulfilment. Shakespeare, however, is far too great a poet simply to make do with this, and complicates and orchestrates love’s thematic as it is described above. However, the concrete passage from the imagination to concretion contains two aspects which lie latent in the answer to the question of why Rosalind does not immediately reveal herself to her father and her lover. For, at first glance, this seems unreasonable: in revealing her identity she could enjoy both her father’s loving protection and the betrothal of her noble lover, but chooses instead vulnerability under another identity, indeed, under another sex. The explanation of this can be attempted in a few key words, namely the concepts of liberation and individuation. Because of their status as nubile virgins, Rosalind and Celia find themselves in a biologically and socially determined phase of transition, marked by departure from—and often revolt against—the family and particularly the father figure (authority). This phase concludes with the establishing of an individual, personal, sexual, and social identity. In the comedy of intrigue having its roots in neo-Attic comedy, the son’s revolt against and refusal of the father figure is the fable’s central element. This is why Frye, among others, can define the comedy as a comic resolving of the Oedipal conflict. In AYLI, there are traces of this tendency in the girl’s flight from the Duke Frederic; a flight that frees them from the evil father image (so say the psychoanalysts), and this relationship, seen in connection with the phase in which Rosalind and Celia find themselves, makes their actions logical, something which Rosalind also expresses quite clearly: “But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando?” (III, iv, 34-35).

But if AYLI is not a comedy of intrigue with the revolt against authority as its central theme, then what is it and why does Rosalind not reveal her identity to Orlando? One possible answer which contains a grain of truth is that she will be certain of his love before allowing herself to be recognized, but this explanation does not go very far, for in fact she has no reason whatsoever to doubt this. The real reason is that she enjoys the freedom which role play gives her. Early in the piece Rosalind and Celia distinguish between working-day world and holiday foolery (I, iii, 12 and 14), and the transition to a holiday world occurs in the flight to Arden, to a world in which young women are not bound to a socially restrictive identity. Even though Rosalind is truly and deeply in love with Orlando (“O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!”, IV, i, 195-96), she grants herself the few days’ liberty where the world is exactly As You Like It. This transitional phase in which Rosalind and Celia find themselves is characterized by a search for self-identity and a search and waiting for the beloved but, in the play’s magical world, the partner is present as soon as the possibility of being in love is mentioned, and Arden’s function therefore becomes not primarily that of a hunting ground or mating place for Rosalind (but just that for the others); its function is another, that of a space of freedom where Rosalind’s individuation takes place.

7. According to the measure of their states

With Rosalind’s final choice of a personal, sexual, and social identity, Arden has fulfilled its intended purpose of a play-ground yet, in compliance with the piece’s phantasmal logic, proves its magical uniqueness to the very end as, entering into the forest, the Duke Frederic is converted. The forest of Arden, however, both as a regenerative natural space and as a landscape of the consciousness, is a transformation space and not a static place, both because it is an unreal, imaginary universe and because the pastoral idyll is not Shakespeare’s ideal. The transformation does not, as mentioned above, consist in change but in evolution, insofar as the reality is brought into harmony through the protagonist’s nature and desires—except for Phebe, who serves to remind us that this is not possible all the time.

8. As You Like It

Rosalind’s epilogue, in spite of its being unfortunately excluded in many productions, is absolutely essential for the piece. In the first place, it echoes Touchstone’s If, an if that first appears in Rosalind’s and Celia’s oath: “By our beards, if we had them. . .” (I, ii, 68), in the mouths of the young male actors it becomes “If I were a Woman” (V, iv, 214-15), and the fiction of the entire piece is characterized by this. This thematization of the redoubling of the problem of sexual identity, of a young boy playing a woman playing a young man, but who, masked as a woman, remarks that “she” is a boy is important too because the freedom to assume another (sexual) identity, something that is an utopie extension of the individual’s potential within the euphoric universe of Arden, is again revealed, but which at the same time shows that this is possible only in the world of theatre. The presentation of this difference between fiction and reality indicates that the universe of the play is an illusion sectioned off from the public’s reality. The epilogue, however, contains at the same time an opening between fiction and public; consider Rosalind’s formulation of the traditional plaudite, the applause:

My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please. (V, iv, 208-14)

The adjuration of Rosalind / the boy actor which accords perfectly with the magical spirit at work throughout the drama, places the play’s fate in the public’s hands. The epilogue is in this respect quite traditional; but the essential is that the fate of the piece is determined by the love which the actual women in the audience show for the men and vice versa. Something is thereby said about which conditions the drama can satisfy, on the condition that the public feels attracted by, is in love with persons of the opposite sex. The fictive concretization of wish-fulfillment in this way takes on a psychic reality, as long as it is not accepted as a true rendition of reality but as a convincing interpretation of ordinary dreams of the realization of love between man and woman.

We have postulated that whereas the tragic discourse was monologic and fatal, the comic discourse was a dialogue and discussion on the conditions of desire. AYLI’s epilogue correlates three different dialogues: the mutual dialogue between fictive characters, the dialogue between stage and audience, and the dialogue among the public. In all three, dialogue’s pleasure and happiness is the order of the day. When Rosalind conjures the men “that between you and the women the play may you please,” she makes the play an object of common desire and for a mediation of that desire which men and women feel for one another, and in doing so relates the telos of the piece and that of our own existence, or at least the telos for a decisive part of it.

9. Epilogue

The insightful and creative reading of a dramatic piece evokes an immense wealth of nuanced experiences and detailed images. Every possible variant can be tested, possible interpretations weighed against each other. In respect to the reader’s inner world, the play is limitless if the conditions for the interaction with the text are otherwise present. And perhaps it is precisely in relation to a dramatic piece that the freedom is particularly greatest, especially when we meet a playwright such as Shakespeare, who has no desire to produce excessive stage instruction. Thus, the reader is his/her own director in a way that the director of the theatre can never be, indeed the reader is an enviable person. The director must choose one interpretation in order to tell his/her story to a public which cannot be expected to have the same predispositions as those which the director has judged fitting for the piece. Understood in this way, a concrete realization of a Shakespearian work is in principle always a limited realization, from which other possible interpretations had to be excluded for the concrete interpretation which s/he has chosen to present to the public.

A literary approach to the dramatic text can assume different forms. These may extend from the philological, word-by-word unraveling of the partial variants with their possible consequences for the texts as a totality, to theory-governed analyses issuing from a holistic view of man, language, period, and which choose to accentuate fundamentally different elements in the text. The footnotes will interpret hard-to-understand lines. The basic analyses will be possible conceptual sketches, even if more often than not they will prove too abstract for their realization.

A proficient dramaturgic analysis must combine the competence of literary analysis with the faculty of scenic representation founded in part on an attentiveness to direct and indirect scenic instructions in the dramatic text, in part on a synthesis between the plan and the fundamental texture of the realization (fable, play, universe). The dramaturgical analysis surpasses the literary analysis without in any way rendering the latter superfluous. One might instead speak of the dramaturgic analysis which is partially preoccupied with concrete interests: How to play this scene? Which stage props? What shall they do when speaking? Why are three people on stage when only two are in dialogue?—i.e., with establishing some relevant criteria for the literary analyses’s wealth of inspiration which can result in revision, development, or simply in a new insight into the text’s potential that might escape literary analysis, which so often is fixed on the meaning of a written text.

From the literary and dramaturgical intercourse with the dramatic text one must hazard an approach, a concept, or, quite simply, a good idea; but mark well, an idea which is more a form than it is a content. This is created ideally in a rehearsal where everyone—the dramatist, director, actor, scenographer—offers suggestions, discusses, and executes trial runs. The essential function of this basic sketch consists, in the first instance, in an eventual translation and elaboration of the scenography and the costumes, and at this stage much is already set in motion. A circumstance whose effect is that theatre often opts for the certain, i.e., the traditional (a known director with the performance of the concrete piece behind him), or an anti-traditional representation which can be foreseen as a general opposition against the tradition but which often will eschew its cultural-political objectives in relation to a public who cannot be expected to have any knowledge of the tradition; the best result in these instances is a sort of backstairs revolution within the limits of the cultural institutions.

Perhaps Schaubühne’s version of AYLI from 1977 (which the authors of this essay have seen only in a truncated version on video) suffers this pitfall in that the director, Peter Stein, in an anti-romantic zealousness, succeeds in giving more an anti-traditional AYLI than a coherent and convincing interpretation in its entirety or even a good story based on its own premises.

In allowing the life in the forest to appear as a sort of junkyard adventure land for alien interaction and communication among the fragments of citations from culture and nature (cf. Eliot’s “heap of broken images”) where decadence and artifice dominate, he can only tell his story to an initiated audience who, remembering singular, earlier, perhaps too idyllic romanticizings of nature in Arden, are capable of establishing an intertextual meta-play consciously based on the different versions of AYLI. In this way the theatre becomes something of an intellectual enterprise. Stein’s version is exciting but one-eyed. Provoking but unsuccessful as spontaneous comedy for a so-called ordinary public.

The televised BBC version is the exact contrary to Schaubühne’s. It is common and servile, naturalistic and anti-theatrical. True to the genre in its dominant tone of gaiety but fundamentally rigid in its incompetence of nuance and contrast. The sketch, the theme, the dynamic, and the contrast, that is, all the pertinent and provocative modernity of the fable disappears in lyrical musical flights and the blooming frivolities of the English park.

Where Schaubühne kills Shakespeare’s fundamental story in his attempt at a new rendition, the BBC loses its audience—except for the true-blue subscribers—by recounting a story so that the words exist in the localities which correspond with the stage instruction. Neither expressionism nor naturalism, originality nor conventionality ought to account for a lucky result in an encounter with AYLI. The originality must be grounded as much in the text as in the demands of the genre.

A possible theatrical version, in continuance of the above reflections, must maintain two facets of the story: on the one hand, the fairy-tale quality of the plot and the imaginary nature of time and places and, on the other, the fable’s reality and the will to strive for and realize these Utopias.

In the initial scenography, it ought only to be minor changes creating a new world before our eyes. It is in the middle of a whirlwind of delayed excess that the fable should unfold both as the point of identification and as the dynamic element. In spite of visible evidence of the pollution in the pastoral’s idyllic environment, the vision of a more beautiful life should shine through. The re-establishment of the initial scenography’s civilized development must not resemble that of the first act. Also the second version of civilization is an imaginary product of the character’s aspiration, not a cold reality existing outside the theatre.