It had been just an ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. In a sunlit grove at the foot of the Acropolis, Plato was showing Aristotle something he’d found on the web:

I am one of them, the early adopters. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto since the beginning… Grand Theft Auto III brought a level of immersion, a depth of play never before seen in videogames. Other games allow you to play God or a hero but GTA III came the closest to letting you play something far more basic and far more strange. It let you, in a way, play a person — an aberrant criminal killer of a person but a person nevertheless… You wanted to spend weeks building up a business or collecting a dandy wardrobe or raking in millions through gambling and robbery? Go for it.

What makes the GTA games so deliriously fun and so successful (beyond the genius of their mechanics and execution) is that you’re not playing reluctant heroes — you’re playing some straight-up thugs. No Name (aka Claude) from GTA III starts out a bank robber and all around amoral dude, and his quest for vengeance doesn’t exactly reform his character. And what about Tommy Vercetti? Tommy is a cold-blooded hitman coke dealer and you win the game by slaying your enemies and taking over Vice City’s underworld, not by recanting your evil ways.

CJ in San Andreas, the first black lead, starts the game out trying to put his gang back on top before being sucked into the machinations of a crooked cop. In other words, these were not your mom and dad’s action heroes. These dudes were straight bad. With Tommy or CJ as your moral compass, running folks over and robbing prostitutes (sometimes killing them in order to scoop their money) didn’t seem like too big a stretch… [Novelist Junot Diaz reviewing Grand Theft Auto IV last June in the Wall Street Journal.]

Fear not, it’s just Showbiz

Aristotle

Aristotle looked concerned but not alarmed. He was an early adopter himself, he told Plato, adding that his well-known remarks about theatre were not meant to legitimate coke dealing or running folks over or robbing vulnerable women. Nothing nasty like that. Theatre had a noble heritage, and would doubtless survive the deliriously fun straight-up thugs of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Plato said nothing — but his face said “told you so”. It was now more than 2,300 years since he warned about the likely effects of Showbiz Athenian style; by 2009, with millions of youngsters playing straight bad dudes as virtual criminals in a world of virtual crime, the new entertainment confirmed his prediction; this could be long-range forecasting’s greatest coup.

And perhaps he’s right, or partly right anyway: but to come to the point of our argument, do Plato’s views in The Republic have anything to tell us about Showbiz today? About games like Grand Theft Auto IV, or movies like The Dark Knight, and the moral universe these puerile pyrotechnic shoot-’em-ups endlessly come from? Or perhaps more immediately the movie Anti-Christ and its director Lars Von Trier, a man (if Charlotte Gainsbourg is to be believed, and I think she should be) who is plainly deeply disturbed. Who first identified theatrical outrageousness as the classical artistic faiblesse?

Plato’s teaching

Plato

Used judiciously and with a suitably grim humour I think Plato can be a help. On the one hand he suggests that the issues raised by the relation of Showbiz to the rest of society have changed little over more than two thousand years. On the other, that the myriad effects of high-tech modern illusionism, both social and political, should not be too casually brushed aside.

Plato’s disquiet starts with the idea of ‘mimesis’. Is it a good thing or a bad? The term translates as copying, imitation, mimicry, and impersonation — things known or done indirectly and at second hand — with overtones of dishonesty and inauthenticity. And for Plato (unlike Aristotle later) those moral overtones were more important than anything else.

He had come to believe that in the hands of the Showbiz set, given their priorities, the effects of mimesis were generally bad. Trust and truth are the foundations of what we today call civil society; they require stable identities from week to week and year to year; but if actors are professionally required to be all things to all men, how can one believe what they say? And how could anyone think that thespians (from the figures onstage at Epidaurus to Lars Von Trier’s cast today), were appropriate guides to things that really count?

He tackled this issue in three places in The Republic, Books Two, Three, and Ten, where his subject is the training of moral character — especially the education of a trustworthy, truthful, and responsible governing class. But the emphasis differs in each place. In the earlier parts of The Republic his concern is mainly with the message being imparted in the schools; in Book Ten it is more the ignorance and superficial character of the typical messenger (painter, poet, or actor) that arouses his indignation.

In ancient Greece dramatic recitation was an essential part of Greek education, and this involved acting roles and representing characters before other children. Moreover, if some of Eric A. Havelock’s argument in Preface to Plato is accepted, in those days most Greeks were still semi-literate at best, and in an oral culture continual recitation was how information was remembered and passed on: the works of Hesiod and Homer amounted to encyclopaedias, in poetic form, of all that the Hellenic peoples had learnt and known and done. Such recitations were quasi-theatrical performances, rhetorically embellished, for audiences who listened because most of them could not read.

Imitation and the moral life

Plato thought the characters presented should be exemplary, and that boys should model themselves on “men of courage, self-control, independence, and religious principle.” And because first impressions are important, he believed that dramatic impersonations of rogues and scoundrels could be dangerous for both actors and audiences.

Schoolchildren “must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of a man, affecting not only the mind but physical poise and intonation.” (Book Three, 395, H.D.P. Lee translation)

This being the case, the curriculum in Athenian schools was downright scandalous. Those with little more than a gift for the gab had undue influence. Myths were being treated as matters of fact; drunken and violent gods were held up for emulation; all educational discourse was cast in poetic and histrionic forms. This was pernicious because “Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn’t, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is important that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect.” (Book Two, 378).

The theory of ideas

Things get more complicated in Book Ten. Metaphysics looms, along with his celebrated Theory of Ideas. This is hardly the place to summarise Plato’s philosophy, but to see where mimesis fits into the picture at least three elements should be understood. Ultimate reality resided in the “forms” — invisible, impenetrable except to God and largely unknowable by man, yet primary and fundamental. Second came visible life and tangible artefacts, copies of the forms. Third and finally came artistic representations — copies of copies.

This trinity can also be seen as a moral continuum from truth to falsehood (or, more theologically, from divinity to damnation), with thespian mimicry coming last. As Plato’s alter-ego Socrates puts it, “the artist’s representation stands at a third remove from reality.” And for those dedicated to truth that was not good enough. (Book Ten, 597)

Added to this was the importance of calm and reason — not unhinged romantic emotion — in public affairs. Our aggressive drives and sexual longings belong to the animal level of human existence: their restraint and management is the foundation of civilized life. But the arts invariably appeal to the less rational part of human nature, and working oneself up into an emotional state over nothing was something actors did every day. Furthermore (and think now of the lonely player of video games or the solitary surfer on the web) it is when a man is without the social constraint of company that he is most likely to give way to his worst impulses, and in these circumstances he may “say or do things he would be ashamed to let other people hear or see.” (Book Ten, 604)

Outrageousness and audiences

Again, Plato shows a keen understanding of why the arts favour outrageousness — and comes up with a Showbiz perennial. It had not escaped his notice that playwrights avoid mundane scenes showing ordinary people and ordinary life. For who would come to watch them? The trouble being that calm reasonableness is not dramatic.

What the box office needed at Epidaurus, as it needs in movies today, are characters that are unstable, impulsive, and violent. Thus Oedipus. Thus Hamlet. Thus the figures in Anti-Christ. But not your local butcher or baker or candlestick-maker working away at his trade. “If a playwright wants to build a popular reputation”, wrote Plato, (Book Ten, 605) “he will consciously devise dramas with characters that are unstable and irritable.” That way lies fame and fortune.

So what about Aristotle? Didn’t he also give mimesis a central place? He did, but with a very different emphasis. Aristotle was a critic rather than a moralist; an observer, not an advocate; a man who saw his scientific task as finding out how the devices, forms, structures, and mechanisms of poetry, music, and theatre work — without dwelling too much on political ideals, social effects, or moral consequences.

The imitative instinct

He was pretty laid back about mimesis. In Chapter Four of On the Art of Poetry he writes that “The instinct for imitation is inherent in man from his earliest days; he differs from other animals in that he is the most imitative of creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by imitation. Also inborn is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation.”

That audiences might model their conduct on what they saw in the theater, or find pleasure in the vicarious company of madmen and ruffians, left Aristotle unfazed. He didn’t think in pedagogic terms. He didn’t ask that impersonations be exemplary. The characters to be found on the stage came in all sizes, shapes, and moral condition — good, bad, and indifferent — and by and large he was content that this was so.

Or anyway that’s how Aristotle felt until Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite appearances it had left him a bit rattled. Plato noticed this and teased him about the golden mean. As they strolled together through the dusk he remarked that his young friend was inclined to think “moderation in all things” would take care of evil. But it wouldn’t. Not with unbridled hedonism wrecking the lives of young and old.

Are some actions evil in themselves?

Aristotle calmly responded that he had covered this in The Nicomachean Ethics where, in Book Two, Chapter Six, he wrote that “the choice of a mean is not possible in every action; some actions are evil in themselves” — and as for the pleasure principle, in human affairs it was always necessary to take happiness (eudaimonia) into account.

That is why the pleasures of mimesis on the stage should be accepted. Of course theatrical mimicry involved lots of clever deception. But, he added, lightly touching the Master’s elbow, accepting the pleasure principle in art was one thing — justifying ‘noble lies’ to deceive the public was something else. Think where that had led!

Sometimes their disagreements, however intellectually fertile, were wearying: it occurred to Aristotle that Plato had become a bit of a killjoy and he wondered what the old man would be demanding next. Universal surveillance? Better to remember Pericles’ speech to the Athenians in 431 BC:

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.

But here we shall leave them, debating long into the Athenian night an issue that is still with us today — is Showbiz a cause or an effect of the decline of civility in private and public life, and who should we blame, and what should we do?

Comment

Mimesis and Grand Theft Auto

We are all familiar enough with the perennial debate about whether identifying with nasty characters in literature (a) encourages nasty behaviour or (b) discourages it by providing sufficient outlet for impulses which are otherwise likely to result in nasty behaviour. GTA (and the technology associated with it) takes mimesis and empathetic identification a step further, which, paradoxically, might seem to strengthen both sides of the debate.

Much of course depends on the psyche of the person doing the identifying. While Plato had an exaggerated fear of the first possibility, Aristotle was (as Roger mentions) much more relaxed about mimesis as such, though his discussions of it relate to highly socialised genres such as tragedy and comedy. Thus the tragic effect requires the mimesis of suitable people; the spectator of tragedy could not identify with a thoroughly evil person. But would Aristotle have approved of the genre (rather than the technology as such) to which GTA belongs? It is scarcely conceivable that he would have, though we have no ancient approximations to such a genre. The mimesis of which he approved in tragedy was designed to stimulate very basic emotions (pity and fear), but to stimulate them in very sophisticated and controlled ways.

Perhaps the shows in the Roman amphitheatre provide an interesting kind of contrasting parallel to GTA. We might see them as taking modern reality TV a step further (as in The Running Man). Instead of merely humiliating people, why not kill them? The Roman shows and reality TV however approach the mimesis from, as it were, the opposite end. In GTA the ‘art work’ itself remains securely in the realm of the aesthetic or the virtual, but the spectator moves from the more imaginatively detached, though still empathetic, attitude one brings to conventional art to enter, as it were, the art work itself as its hero, though only in an imaginative, aesthetic or virtual sense.

But in the Roman arena the spectator retains the conventional distinctness or separation from the ‘art work’ (though of course ready and able to identify imaginatively and sadomasochistically with the performers), while the ‘art work’ itself shifts so that it no longer merely imitates reality; the slaughter really occurs. The relevant ancient philosopher here is the Stoic Seneca who, like Plato, was anxious about the effects of bad examples taken from art or from being in bad company about which, having been Nero’s tutor, he was something of an expert. He warns against attending the games because of the sort of people you rub shoulders with and the demoralising effects of the spectacle itself:

Nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games; for it is then that vice steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure….I mean that I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman – because I have been among human beings.
(Seneca, Letter 7, Loeb translation).

Stuart Lawrence, Classical Studies, Massey University

In November 2011 the sociological journal Society held a symposium on Chapter Thirteen of Robin Fox’s book The Tribal Imagination — “The Old Adam and the Last Man, Taming the Savage Mind.” My contribution (RS) dealt with some issues arising from the writings of Victor Turner, Durkheim, and Van Gennep. This short excerpt toward the end of the article takes up the question of the origins of theatre.

From Ritual to Theatre

In From Ritual to Theatre Turner reminds us on page 114 that the etymological meaning of entertainment is “held-in-between”. In agricultural societies in historic times it was a “liminal or liminoid phenomenon” held in between bouts of plowing, harvesting, eating, house-building, and so on. In the introduction to his book he says that its essays “chart my personal voyage of discovery from traditional anthropological studies of ritual performance to a lively interest in modern theatre, particularly experimental theatre.” However, the claimed historical connection between ritual and theatre is not uncontroversial. A severely semiological work by Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin, (University of Iowa Press, 2002) argues uncompromisingly that “The medium of theatre could not have originated in ritual, since these are ontologically different entities.” The claim that they “could not have originated in ritual” sounds a bit extreme, but that they “need not” is surely defensible. As a one-time film-maker who recorded a number of the Australian Aboriginal ceremonies that figure in both Durkheim’s and Van Gennep’s writings about religion, it may not be inappropriate here for me to simply describe what I saw — suspending judgment and ignoring definitional fuss for the time being: e.g., Is it ritual? Or drama? Or theatre? Or communitas? Or what?

Anyway let’s clear the decks. For the sake of evolutionary argument let us agree that story-telling must be roughly as old as language, and that hunting adventures and the haps and mishaps of gathering roots and berries must have been recited around camp fires for countless millennia. Any storyteller of imagination will “act out” certain scenes to make them more interesting; he at first does this solo before an audience of varying size; and the larger the role of the histrionic the more a division is recognized between the “as is” descriptive world of everyday and the “as if” imaginative world of fiction and myth. We thus have a suite of four elements: story, mimesis, actor and audience, and an emergent awareness that in the “as if” world depicted in drama, which soon goes far beyond merely describing events to the telling of some very tall tales indeed, everyday reality is not to be expected.

Australia appears to have had a largely isolated hunter-gatherer population for 40,000 to 50,000 years before European settlement. I suggest that throughout this period the above suite of theatrical elements may well have existed, and that there are no strong reasons for believing that it did not. All traditional Aboriginal ceremonies told a story; actors personifying totemic figures acted scenes from the story; the performance space separated them from an audience; this spatial separation might be seen as gradually strengthening a cognitive separation between different orders of human social reality, the “players” belonging to one and the audience to another. It is true that the roles of such totemic characters as “kangaroo-men” and “emu-men” are conventional and their actions relatively unvarying. We might say there is an element of ritualization. Nevertheless audiences appreciate the predictable action as much as any modern audience appreciates the predictable death of Claudius or the fate of villains in general. The classic ethnography of Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) describes a ceremony in which actors playing a series of sinister “Kurdaitcha men” (or witches) are violently killed by an old man who is their would-be victim. The authors write that:

A mock fight took place in which the Kurdaitcha was always worsted and tumbled down, the old man each time giving him a final tap with his club, which particularly pleased the audience, for in these performances there are certain conventional actions which must be observed by the actors. One after another the Kurdaitcha men came up, and each was worsted in his turn.

When apparently all had been killed the old man still went wandering about, and the same performance was again gone through. After about fifteen minutes had been spent in this way the old man leisurely walked back to the group of spectators, once more killing each of the men before he got there.

When close to home a combined attack was made upon him, but with no success, as he killed them all and the performance ended with him standing, brandishing his club over their dead bodies, which were heaped together in front of him. The actions of the old man and of the Kurdaitcha men might have been copied from a stage fight. (My emphasis, RS)

In the 1970 film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru a scene showing a man and boy ambushed at night followed a similar scenario. But were not Aboriginal “increase ceremonies” solemn religious events rather than enactments of violent affrays? In most cases they were — or they were in large part. At these, the Durkheimean boundary between the sacred and the profane was very clear. In the late 1960s our film production team provided transport for the Aboriginal participants, all of them male since women were excluded from such events, back to sacred sites in the desert where the action took place. These were waterholes and rocky outcrops often associated with caves, where totemic spirits dwelled, and they were sometimes many miles from where the men were living at the time. Coming closer, bumping along the dusty desert tracks, we passed both territorially and psychologically from the profane to the sacred, a change signalled conversationally as talk became more constrained, sotto voce, and whispered. Upon our arrival a hush descended, followed by the weeping of men whose failure to visit the site in recent years, because they resided far away, made them feel a guilty regret for neglecting the spirits of their ancestors. (Sandall, see Endnote about films.)

At this introductory stage initiates might be shown the churinga. These long boards carved with totemic designs were described by the Australian anthropologist L. R. Hiatt as “the religious property of one clan… conceived as a tangible relic of the clan’s totemic ancestry.” (Hiatt 1996: 107) Stored well hidden at normal times in obscure crevices and caves, their recovery and display preceded the main ceremonial action. A dramatic example of this occurs at the beginning of the film Pintubi Revisit Yumari. At dusk the six-foot tall churinga were held erect by a line of ten men of seniority, while smoke swirled about them from blazing spinifex fires. Young men and juvenile initiates then raced across 100 yards of desert to embrace the totemic relics, while fearsome guttural rumblings rising and falling — the baleful admonitions of neglected spirits? — were flung at the initiates as darkness fell. The intimidating nature of the occasion exemplified the universal teen-taming and team-building aspects of male initiation; in earlier years the rite of subincision would probably have accompanied the event. (See Appendix for film links.)

Now, in terms of Arnold van Gennep’s three major stages as set out in The Rites of Passage (separation, transition, incorporation; or séparation, marge, aggrégation in French), the long drive to the sacred site of Yumari in Western Australia involved an unmistakable spatial separation. And by the time the initiates were being frightened into submission by the display of totemic relics we were well into the transitional stage. At another site, shown in the film Emu Ritual at Ruguri, the mood of awed respect for the ancestral shrine lasted through a period in which neophytes were introduced to the painted designs on the walls and ceilings of a cave. These designs had been restored by men senior in the hierarchy of sacred knowledge, and men who belonged to one of two moieties (or ‘phratries’ in Durkheim). Plainly, Turner’s “structure” was ever-present. By the same token, however, the communitas-creating music never stopped. It accompanied all ground painting, cave painting, and body painting, along with the building of the wood and hair-string emblems called wanigi; hour after hour its hypnotic and intriguing melody and rhythm served to transport listeners into another realm. Durkheim, drawing on the accounts in Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, describes how even if the music momentarily stopped and “the singing died away”, it would suddenly be taken up again. (Durkheim 1965: 249)

Neurobiology and the matter of rhythm

The neurobiological interest of all this may be obvious, as also its relevance to Fox’s discussion of “savage rhythms and civilized rhymes” in Chapter Nine of The Tribal Imagination. Likewise the matter of neural disinhibition. From Aboriginal songs beaten out with a heavy stone on the cave floor in the film Emu Ritual, to Gregorian chant, to the contemporary mosh pit with its writhing ecstatics, one can see why Oliver Sacks says “the primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together.” Truistic, if not trite, the point is nevertheless worth reiterating. He goes on to write that “people sing together and dance together in every culture… and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago.” In the documentary films I am describing, however, one does not have to imagine it: they vividly show an artistic union of music, dance, and mimetic theatre that appears to be of immense human antiquity. Regarding the collective excitement and social bonding of music Sacks continues: (Emu Ritual)

…there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or ‘marriage’ of nervous systems, a ‘neurogamy’ (to use a word the early mesmerists favored). The binding is accomplished by rhythm — not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds (and since emotion is always intertwined with music, the ‘hearts’) of all who participate. (Sacks 2008: 266)

This “synchronizing” of brains and minds may also be thought of as aiding the experiential fusion of past and present where the Aboriginal “Dreamtime” was actualized, its totemic heroes materialized, and they became prepared to enact their legendary travels and adventures once again. Dramatically, we have a story often filled with blood and violence and rapine; we have scenes of action drawn from mythology; we have mimetic impersonations of definite characters; we have allowance made in these impersonations for a degree of individual interpretation. On other matters theatrical, was there during these totemic re-enactments some sort of physical boundary line dividing audience and actors? No: neither a line nor a proscenium. Audience and actors faced each other on level ground. But a clear space marked the performance region of the two or three actors, on the one hand, and the thirty-odd men of the audience/chorus on the other. This loosely corresponded to the contrasting social realities of the “as if” world, where anything is possible, and the “as is” world where men cannot usually fly or travel underground. Next, carrying the emblems of the rite, the men representing the dreamtime heroes moved away to take up their positions — positions perhaps 100 yards distant across the desert.

Then the action began, each actor dancing out from the heat-hazy horizon toward the audience/chorus accompanied by continual cries and exhortation, until, at the climax, his approach brought him close to the others — so near that it was time to return from the Dreamtime to the world of everyday. While it is true that the sacred site was initially treated with hushed respect, it would be wrong to imagine that solemnity always prevailed. In the film Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari the most eagerly awaited performance involved the totemic hero Wadaingula, a kind of subterranean sexual predator who travelled underground, emerging periodically to rape and pillage, rape evidently being his preferred mode of insemination. The man playing Wadaingula carried before him a six-foot artificial phallus. While he danced, accompanied by prodigious choral uproar and clattering boomerangs, this emblem — it was just a long bundle of straw tied with string — began to detumesce (the Birth of Tragedy perhaps?) to the hilarity of everyone who was there. And a good time was had by all.

So what exactly was this? Ritual? Drama? Comedy or tragedy? Who shall say? Whatever, it was assuredly, as Turner writes commenting on rituals in Central Africa (Turner 1982: 109) “an orchestration of symbolic actions and objects in all the sensory codes — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory — full of music and dancing and with interludes of play and entertainment.” And the fidelity of Durkheim’s now 100-year-old account in The Elementary Forms was striking. A dance included in the film Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru shows a snaking line of men, one behind the other, rising from a kneeling position with their hands on each other’s waists and swaying from side to side in unison. Here is Durkheim, drawing on Spencer and Gillen:

With fires lighted on all sides, making the whiteness of the gum-trees stand out sharply against the surrounding darkness, the Uluuru knelt down one behind the other beside the mound, then rising from the ground they went around it, with a movement in unison, their two hands resting upon their thighs, then a little farther on they knelt down again, and so on. At the same time they swayed their bodies, now to the right and now to the left, while uttering at each movement a piercing cry, a veritable yell, “Yrrsh! Yrrsh! Yrrsh!” … One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer… Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression that he is no longer himself. (Durkheim 1965: 249)

And of course the dancer “is not himself.” Or not his hunting/killing/eating material self. For the duration of the dance he dwells in the imaginary “as if” world of myths and totems along with Wadaingula and kindred spirits. Whilst there his condition is transformed, exalted, liminal, betwixt and between. The dance recorded by Spencer and Gillen was performed among the Warramunga. The territory of the Pintubi tribe whose ceremonies we filmed was further west, and the Pintubi dance ended less boisterously than the Warramunga version as I recall. At the finale the line of men were kneeling down again, their heads lowered and their bodies locked closely behind each other.

Silently, dust hanging in the windless air, an elder who might well be called a master of ceremonies, acting with priestly deliberation and gesturing with the delicacy of someone awaking sleepers from a dream, went slowly down the line touching each man in turn. Released from the world of the Dreaming, they rose to resume their ordinary lives. Subdued conversation began again. Had Durkheim been able to see this action first-hand he would have been pleased to note that each man in the line formed an identical segment like the parts of a centipede — the very model of mechanical solidarity. And, indeed, much more than that. Central Australian increase ceremonies, held annually, were intended to encourage the growth and proliferation of animals and vegetation, and of the fertility of the totemically associated clans. As such, the theory behind them, enlarged on in a broadly religious context by Van Gennep at the conclusion of his book, is “a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great rhythms of the universe.” (Van Gennep 1960: 194)

Note re documentary films

The various ethnographic documentary films mentioned in the text were all produced between 1967 and 1972 by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies). They have been rarely seen for forty years, and I am reliably informed that insuperable obstacles prevent their research use at the Institute. The reasons are various. Firstly, in the early 1970s the elders of the communities concerned were anxious to preserve the secrecy of the rites. Secondly, the matter of exclusivity became a political issue. Thirdly, however, it must be recognized that nudity, the copious blood-letting some ceremonial activities entailed (human blood from opened arm veins was spilled on various sacra, was spurted as an elixir into the mouths of elderly participants, and was also widely used as a fixative for building emblems), along with the overtly sexual nature of some scenes, all made such records discomfiting for those who want a sanitized, euphemized, and romantically falsified version of the Australian Aboriginal past, and who find such records deeply embarrassing. For others they offer a unique glimpse of old-time ceremonial realities.

Appendix

Selected video sequences are available for the following ethnographic documentary films:

Emu Ritual

Pintubi Revisit Yumari

Yaru-Yaru

Mulga Seed Ceremony

References

Durkheim, Emile. (1965) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Free Press: New York [Original French edition 1912]Neurobiology
Hiatt, L. R. (1996) Arguments about Aborigines. Cambridge University Press: UK
Rozik, Eli. (2002) The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and other Theories of Origin. University of Iowa Press: Iowa City
Turner, Victor. (1969) The Ritual Process. Aldine: Chicago
Turner, Victor. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre. PAJ Publications: New York
Sacks, Oliver. (2008) Musicophilia. Vintage, New York
Sandall, R. Documentary films. Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru, Pintubi Revisit Yumari, Emu Ritual at Ruguri, Walbiri Ritual at Gunadjari, The Mulga Seed Ceremony. All titles directed by Roger Sandall and produced by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, Canberra.
Spencer, Baldwin, and Gillen, F. J. (1968) The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Dover: New York [Originally published 1899]
Van Gennep, Arnold. (1960) The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [Originally published 1909]

In The Independent last September Paul Taylor wrote that Lepage has long been regarded as a wunderkind, “but as he coasts into his second half-century, ‘the marvellous boy’ has developed into a deeply mature adult.”

This alas is nonsense. It’s been a long time since a deeply mature adult was last seen anywhere near a theatre. Upstage, downstage, or simply hanging around. Great shows are almost never made by deeply mature adults and Lepage certainly isn’t one of them. For which we can be ambivalently grateful. (This is something we’ll return to later: the immaturity of the incorrigibly outré entails a very shifty moral perspective.)

The reason this nine-hour-long show carries us unresistingly along is because there’s a brilliant showman in charge. It has nothing to do with his political or social gestures. As for the latter, Lepage’s moral vision appears to reflect a damaged soul that may have lost a parent or guardian along the way, and who moreover (since that’s what his audience seemingly wants to hear) must inevitably have been abused as a child. But the fact is it’s not important. With Lepage the show’s the thing.

Momentary fits of sympathy for the world’s neglected end up as mere floats in a passing parade. In the course of this riveting nine-hour variety show sentimentalism is followed by violence; violence segues into brilliant comedy; comedy dissolves into musical sequences of exceptional emotional power thanks to the gifted singer Frédérike Bédard; and barely will her last note have died away than you’ll be offered a virtuoso display of stagecraft so dazzling it’s hard to believe your eyes. The laughs per minute in the Spanish funeral episode alone were worth the price of admission.

*     *     *

Try sitting through a nine-hour modern movie. It wouldn’t be possible. No matter how wide the screen is, or how hard the director works to pack its empty spaces with eye-catching business, the fact is nine hours would be absolute torture. Intellectual vacuity plus high-decibel FX plus actors celebrated for juvenile mindlessness cannot and will not serious drama make. (By the way, if Tom Stoppard thinks he can pull this sort of thing off a close friend should tell him the awful truth.)

Anyway Robert Lepage is something else. Like in the movies, he too employs wide-screen for his effects — or wide-stage to be more precise — and there’s a stunning example right at the start. We’re inside an aircraft 30,000 feet up. It’s night-time. The lights are low. The few passengers lie back slumbering. But what little action there is will raise the hair on your neck.

The visual image grabs you first. Sliced open so you can see inside it, the long fuselage of the plane runs left to right all the way across the stage. The audience viewpoint is from outside the aircraft — somewhere on the left wingtip maybe. That the cabin is raised above a shadowy stage and placed well back is important: it provides a deliberately distancing effect. It also ensures that the mystery of the darkened interior is sustained and that the passenger who is dead, sitting toward the rear of the cabin holding her baby, cannot be clearly seen.

The novelty of this is striking. Movie realism always puts you inside the body of an aircraft — which means more or less claustrophobically inside — and the story usually exploits this situation. Its incidents have to do with the embarrassments of unwanted intimacy, with bodily discomfort, with the frustrations of flight service and the longueurs of travel.

But Lepage wants none of that. He gives us instead the relaxed spaciousness of an “out of body” experience (with clouds drifting slowly by), the mood only gradually changing when a female passenger is discovered to be a corpse.

Before the evening ends we find the dead woman’s an escapee from a Hamburg brothel; her child will be adopted; and the subsequent career of this foundling provides whatever frail thread joins an exciting variety of people and places around the world. In contrast to the lurid sex-slave scenes that come toward the end, the acting in this opening episode is low-keyed naturalism, with a flight attendant discreetly going about her business in the aisle. It couldn’t be better done.

In his review Paul Taylor usefully summarises a significant theme:

As the title suggests, the show uses as a metaphor the multifarious aspects of sound technology: dubbing into a foreign language; miming; lip-reading; created multi-layered tracks; doing voice-overs; being the tones associated with a particular product; speech therapy for the neurologically damaged; even (though this is given a black twist that strangles the hilarity) the voice that intones, from permutations of many prerecorded possibilities, the reasons why a British Rail train (“object on the line”) has been cancelled.

I’m not quite sure what Taylor means here by a “metaphor”: but any story that draws on the commercially engineered misrepresentations of life we’re surrounded by today unavoidably points to the alienation of those who make a living, by choice or by circumstance, in showbiz, in the media, or in celebrity politics, all of which are becoming orchestrally combined. The inhabitants of this faux world have a weakening hold on reality. As do millions of ordinary citizens, who are deluged night and day by absurd scenarios and unreal characters, who take it all far too seriously and often end up damaged themselves.

*     *     *

So what’s next for Robert Lepage? His virtuosity is dazzling. Can any other showman do what he does? But then again, is mere virtuosity enough? That question necessarily takes us back to Paul Taylor with his talk about the new deeply mature and adult wunderkind.

About eight hours into Lipsynch we get the Big Flashback that explains it all: the dead woman on the plane at the beginning had been all that was left of a demure Nicaraguan teenager tricked into big city vice (“Innocent country girl ends up on Reeperbahn“). It’s villainous — but mere villainy no longer makes people gasp. So after being sold into sex slavery by her Nicaraguan uncle our deeply mature director rams the point home by having the girl serially raped with blaring music and blazing lighting to the max. As you might imagine, that does make people gasp.

But what’s Lepage’s real attitude? Where does he stand? Is he genuinely concerned about trafficking third world women? Is he sincerely disgusted by what he finds on the Reeperbahn? Or does he delight in sensationalism for its own sake?

The fact is that deep maturity is radically excluded from the seedy underworld of Lepage’s sociological comfort zone. It is noticeable that among the various characters to be seen in a typical cast one is unlikely to find a sympathetic father. Fathers and responsible fatherhood are out. Come to think of it, roughly half of mankind — the half involved not in abusing children but in supporting, raising, and educating them — barely makes an appearance.

But that’s showbiz I guess.

In fact Le Guillerm’s whole impression is medieval. The acoustic lions roaring in his tent at the outset suggest the circus; but the shoes and their crashing rhythm and the darkness of the stage and the mad intensity of the man himself—jongleur, sword swallower, prestigidator, constructor, athlete, acrobat, escape artist, (whose repertoire of vocal utterances includes only a reptilian hissing “kaaaaaaaaa” from the back of the throat) more strongly suggest a deranged dungeon-keeper in Transylvania. A bullwhip with a hook on the handle helped.

There was derangement in the eyes. They shone with obsession. “Stand back,” they said, “inside this apparently innocuous canvas tent life is not what it seems.” The punk torture-chamber look of chainmail and bondage was vaguely Bashtchelik, a creature from a Serbian folk tale. In the story, Bashtchelik is confined like Prometheus, and once released will do dreadful things… “a man bound by all the bonds of the universe, his legs encircled with rusted bands of iron, his hips and loins bound with lead, with a copper girdle at his breast and a silver band enthralling his tongue and hands.” (The image at left shows Bashtchelik as imagined by Edmund Dulac.)

But to the matter of meter. Or sound in the ear. In the opening scenes Le Guillerm’s steel shoes had a distinctive thunderous rhythm. It was not an accidental effect. But were the deliberate striding crashes about the wooden stage iambic trimeters, anapaests, or what? If anapaests then there should have been two milder thumping footsteps followed by a crash; if iambic a single softer footfall and then the sound of the whole metal shoe uncoiling down to the lash of steel on the floor. Heavy cracks of the whip added menace. Once heard—never forgotten. His whip differed from the usual lion tamer’s weapon where the agon is between man and beast. Here the agon was between man and audience. The whip was meant for us. Lissen up, it said, and we did.

In Sydney recently for the 2008 Sydney Festival, Le Guillerm’s remarkable one-man circus show called “Secret” is an ensemble of astonishing pieces, and how they’re done is certainly mysterious—from the punctuative crashing of his opening act, to the gravely measured drama of the balancing books, to the spellbinding ingenuity of a massive plank and rope spiral tower at the end, this last being something that would impress Buckminster Fuller: “tensegrity” is partly what it’s about. As theatre, Le Guillerm’s performance travels intellectually from the physical to the mental; from the sensationally ominous to the cerebral muscularity of the close. Not to be overlooked is the music of Mathieu Werchowski and Guy Ajaguin. It’s as sharply original as everything else, and deepens the mad-punk-medieval mystery. Go. Catch Le Guillerm wherever he is. Even in Transylvania.

Don’t go to the theatre. Don’t even go out. Just find a chair, stop the music, and read Chekhov. For some reason he’s better on the page than on the stage—probably because the Russian playwright was greatly gifted, while most directors and actors are not. So don’t go out: stay home where Chekhov belongs.

In town not long ago there was a Russian production of Uncle Vanya with a haystack hanging in midair. The director was evidently of the Why Not? theatrical school.

A: Do you think we could have a flying haystack?
B: Where?
A: Up there in the sky!
B: Sure—why not?

After which the director suspended a bundle of straw over the stage, the sort of thing donkeys would go for if donkeys could fly, where it floated above Serebryakov and Vanya et al to let us know we were out in the country. Where of course straw dirigibles are everywhere.

Then there was Vanya himself. A man expected to deliver his lines soberly in the shadow of a flying haystack may be forgiven many things. Even so, it’s a mistake to play him as permanently tipsy. My point being that Vanya sober is no dummy, and his critique of Serebryakov, the elderly academic despot who plans to sell the estate they all depend on for their existence, offers more than the insight of a lachrymosiacal lush.

Actors and directors

Are most actors and directors uncomprehending dolts? Surely not. Yet even the great Stanislavsky himself couldn’t get Chekhov right. In My Life in Art he described how his company prepared an actor for the role of Vanya, a man who manages the estate and is a member of the landed gentry of the day. To Stanislavsky the role seemed clearly a matter of status and dress: “The costume and the general appearance of a landed gentleman are known to all, high boots, a cap, sometimes a horse-whip…. That’s how we painted him to ourselves. But Chekhov was terribly indignant.

‘Listen,’ he said in great excitement, ‘everything is said there. You didn’t read the play… Here it is, written down!’

Chekhov tried to persuade us. We were amazed. ‘What is written down? A silk tie?’

‘Of course’, he replied, ‘Listen, he has a wonderful tie; he is an elegant, cultured man…’”

Fair enough. If in fact that’s all there was, just an allusion to an elegant tie (the relevant passage in Act 1 doesn’t provide much more to work with) and Stanislavsky was being asked to deduce an entire intellectual configuration from one singular piece of neckwear, perhaps the playwright was asking a lot. But it isn’t all there was, and Chekhov was only asking that his director think a bit harder about the character. In the stagnant isolation of the estate Vanya has grown desperate with the passing years, and drinks; in his cups he talks grandly about being “a Schopenhauer, a Dostoievski” manqué; but he nonetheless talks like an educated man, and in the final act there’s an explicit statement by Astroff, a doctor, that “in the whole district there were only two decent, cultured men: you and I.”

So, pace Stanislavsky, a costumed cliché with high boots and a horsewhip obviously isn’t enough.

Yet even Chekhov’s companion and very belated wife-to-be, the actress Olga Knipper, couldn’t grasp what the playwright wanted. There’s a scene of parting in the final act: playing Yelena in the original Moscow Arts Theater production of Uncle Vanya in 1899 Knipper had written to Chekhov for advice about the character. Young, attractive, and naturally flirtatious, inseparably yoked to an ageing and gouty professor, but at the same time comfortable with the marital trade-off involved while enjoying the attentions of younger, poorer, men, Yelena breaks with the sentimental Astroff, a provincial doctor who had entertained idle hopes. But it seems Ms Knipper understood things no better than Stanislavsky. Chekhov’s letter in reply to her inquiry reads:

You write that Astrov behaves towards Yelena in this scene like the most passionate lover ‘clutching at feeling like a drowning man at a straw’. But this is absolutely and totally wrong! Astrov loves Yelena, she captivates him with her beauty, but in the last act he already knows that nothing will come of this, that Yelena is disappearing for ever as far as he is concerned—and he talks to her in this scene in the same tone as he speaks of the heat in Africa, and kisses her quite simply for want of anything better to do. If Astrov conducts this scene in a violent fashion then the whole quiet and listless mood of Act 4 will be lost.

The Cherry Orchard

It was even worse with the original production of The Cherry Orchard in 1904. The two co-directors were the same—Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and in a telegram to the latter Chekhov remonstrates:

Anya doesn’t cry once and never speaks in a tearful voice. She has tears in her eyes in Act 2 but her tone is happy and lively. Why do you talk in your telegram of all the crybabies in the play? Where are they? There’s only one—Varya—and she is tearful by nature but her tears mustn’t arouse a depressing feeling in the spectator. You’ll come across the indication ‘through tears’ in my stage directions but this is only an indication of the character’s mood not one of tearfulness.

When the play was in rehearsal he could still control Stanislavsky, who also played Gayev (“He wants to bring in a train in Act 2, but I think it would be better to restrain him”) but once The Cherry Orchard had opened, the full realisation of what had been done to his work came home. In a letter to Olga Knipper, who was playing Ranevskaya, he wrote that two of her relations had seen the production, and

both say that Stanislavsky acts revoltingly in Act 4, that he drags everything out painfully. How terrible! An act which should last a maximum of twelve minutes lasts forty in your production. I can only say one thing: Stanislavsky has ruined my play.

How much crying really is there in The Cherry Orchard? For the sake of Chekhov’s veracity and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s honour this needs to be cleared up, so let’s set the record straight. A 1997 biography of Chekhov by Donald Rayfield (Anton Chekhov: a Life), one that Michael Frayn calls “definitive” and that Arthur Miller suggested might never be surpassed, blandly repeats Chekhov’s claim that there’s only one crybaby in the play. Rayfield’s full-length 1994 study of the play throws no more light on the matter. On page 16 of The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy, he writes of “an extravagant telegram” from Nemirovich-Danchenko claiming that the playwright had “overdone the tears”, but says nothing more. Looking into the play, however, one soon finds a good deal more lachrymosity than the author admits to.

Chekhov’s tears

As Chekhov says, Varya’s a real weeper who regularly “sobs quietly” or “is crying softly.” But the notion that she’s the only one wiping her eyes is nonsense, and Nemirovich-Danchenko was more than justified in raising the matter. The plain fact is that in Stark Young’s 1950 translation, right at the start of Act 1, the feckless heroine of the play, Mme Ranevskaya, who returns from Paris to find her estate about to be auctioned and her cherry trees about to be axed, no sooner appears than she breaks down. It’s seeing the nursery in the old family home that does it:

The nursery, my dear beautiful room—I slept here when I was little (Crying)—and now I am like a child…

Let’s be fair. We shall accommodate Chekhov’s request not to count words and phrases like “tearfully”,  “through tears”, and “with tears in her eyes”. In all such cases, and there are many, charity requires that both the author and Mme Ranevskaya be given the benefit of the doubt, so let us accept that Chekhov was only indicating the character’s mood—not actual tears. Though I do feel if Mme Ranevskaya reports some crying episode, even if she’s not actually weeping when she talks about it, this should be treated as a legitimate tear-stat entry. For example, in Act 1 she recalls the train journey home and says “I couldn’t look out of the car window, I just kept crying. (Tearfully) However, I must drink my coffee. Thank you, Fiers, thank you, my dear old friend. I’m so glad you’re still alive.”

But Fiers, alas, is only just alive, for the ancient servant expires on stage at the final curtain. As loyal retainers supposedly once did, the old man cries appreciatively when Mme Ranevksaya reappears from Paris—he is said to be “crying for joy”—but Chekhov spares us the ordeal of hearing him cry as he dies, something Fiers might well have done after being abandoned alone and sick in an empty house.

That said, what are the other occasions on which Mme Ranevskaya cries? There’s another scene in Act 1 (the Act with the highest tear-count) where she meets again the young man who tutored her boy before he was drowned. Petya Trofimov is an eternally unemployed “student”, but he has changed since Mme Ranevskaya went away and she no longer recognises him. They’re both mortified, so this too becomes an occasion for tears:

Trofimov:       Have I changed so? (she embraces
him, crying softly)
Gayev:           There, there.
Varya:            (Crying) Petya, I told you to wait
till tomorrow.
Trofimov:        (In a low voice, tearfully) There, there.
Ranevskaya:    (Weeping softly) My boy was lost,
drowned — Why? Why, my friend?

But since ordinary readers without a clinical interest in psychopathology will have had more than enough by now, I rest my case, feeling that it was not unreasonable for Nemirovich-Danchenko to raise this matter with the author on the eve of production. And also, perhaps, not unreasonable for today’s players to be unsure where the emotional emphasis should fall.

Comedy, satire, or farce?

Tragedy or comedy, satire or farce? In 1911 Arnold Bennett wrote that The Cherry Orchard was “one of the most savage and convincing satires on a whole society that was ever seen in the theatre.” Satire—yes.  Savage? Hardly. There’s too much nostalgia for a world Chekhov does not despise, too much sympathy for human frailty, too much sense of fate. Graham Greene praised a production by Tyrone Guthrie in 1941, again using the word “savage” and warning that:

Too much nostalgia is the danger that threatens every producer of The Cherry Orchard if the savage critical core of Chekhov’s work is ignored: between the lovely opening when Mme Ranevskya and her daughter Anya return just before dawn to the old family house after their long railway journey… and the last departure with the dust-sheets on the furniture, the shrouded rocking-horse, the old servant forgotten, and the sound of the cherry trees falling under the axe… Chekhov’s work is not for the young: it is as old as the strange land from which it emerged: it is bleached with the doctor’s memory of cholera, of interminably suffering peasants…

But Bennett and Greene show little feeling for the peculiarities of language and narrative that make Chekhov a test for players and directors alike. Greene tells us that in The Cherry Orchard he wrote a play that has a lovely opening, a savage critical core, and that closes when a melancholy final curtain shrouds a strange and stricken land. That’s it. A play like many others. Virginia Woolf on the other hand (writing in the New Statesman in 1920) is hearing something else—

The strange dislocated sentences, each so erratic and yet cutting out the shape so firmly, of the realism, of the humour, of the artistic unity… Chekhov has contrived to shed over us a luminous vapour in which life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths… “I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young”—how the whole play resounds with such sentences, which reverberate, melt into each other, and pass far away out beyond everything!

Introspection and soliloquy

A trifle ecstatic, perhaps, with the luminous fading into the numinous. But she’s onto something. There are passages that exist uncertainly between dialogue and soliloquy and disembodied thoughts floating free in the air. Observations are made—about life, about fate—and they require no response since the speaker is self-absorbed, is privately ruminating in a confessional way, is beached on the sands of time and knows it will be for ever. Woolf quotes Charlotta’s utterance at the beginning of Act 2; and there are others.

Some, like Gayev’s appeal to Nature, are on the borderline of prayer: “Oh, Nature, wonderful, you gleam with eternal radiance, beautiful and indifferent, you whom we call Mother, combine in yourself both life and death…” Some are mystically poetic, as Trofimov’s “Yes, the moon is rising. (Pause) Here is happiness, here it comes, comes always nearer and nearer, I hear its footsteps now. And if we shall not see it, shall not come to know it, what does that matter? Others will see it!”

In a number of places in The Cherry Orchard character does not emerge in action—it is remembered, described, regretted, mourned. Lopahin: “This life of ours is idiotic. (Pause) My father was a peasant, an idiot, he understood nothing, he taught me nothing, he just beat me in his drunken fits and always with a stick.” Fiers: “I’ve lived a long time. When the serfs were freed I was already the head footman. I didn’t want to be freed then, I stayed with the masters… (Pause) And I remember everybody was happy, but what they were happy about they didn’t know themselves.” Mme Ranevskaya: “Oh, my sins—I’ve always thrown money around like mad, recklessly, and I married a man who accumulated nothing but debts and died of drink… I fell in love again and we went abroad—went away for good, never to return… In Paris he robbed me of everything and took up with another woman; I tried to poison myself… Lord, Lord, have mercy…”

Like circles formed by raindrops on a pool, these utterances stand alone, largely untouched by the world around them, taking you into the speaker’s heart. The pattern of autographic miniatures is more mosaic than linear and it might not matter very much in what order they appeared. As with the “strange dislocated sentences” Woolf refers to, these introspective sketches create scenes where “life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths.” It is in one of the longer pauses between them that “a distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, like the sound of a snapped string, dying away, mournful.” Both this and the monologue-like reminiscences require complete and utter silence — and silence in the theatre is something increasingly rare.

Note In Chekhov’s “A Dreary Story” the narrator, a hypochondriac widely regarded as autobiographical, has this to say about plays, actors, and the theatre: “I never shared Katya’s enthusiasm for the theatre. If a play’s any good, one can gain a true impression without troubling actors, I think—one only needs to read it. And if the play’s bad, no acting will make it good.” As for the suggestion that Chekhov may often be better on the page than the stage, I find that the third sentence of Michael Frayn’s Introduction to his translation of eight plays in 1988 reads as follows: “The page, not the stage, was his element.”

When did you last see a straight production of a classic? One that respects rather than twists the author’s meaning? They’re getting rare. There is currently a travelling version of Strindberg’s Dance of Death which is described as an “adaptation” by the man who altered it, American playwright Richard Greenberg—a production which started out in 2001 with Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren in the roles of the artillery captain Edgar and Alice his wife. Like much else in Strindberg it shows that life is impossible and marriage is hell. This might be called the standard actor’s view of matrimony, a satirical slant plainly relished by McKellen.

But the black comedy is not just pushed to the limit—it goes far beyond. It‘s all very well for Michael Billington to write complacently in the Guardian that this production “goes further than any I have seen in suggesting that the only possible response to emotional vampirism on this scale is laughter”. What he doesn’t say is that this laughter is largely at the expense of Strindberg’s intention, and even makes nonsense of the title of the play itself.

Not only does the adapter emphasise the comedy of the “dance” rather than the misery of the “death”—he eliminates the captain’s death entirely. In Strindberg’s original play Edgar has attempted to drown his wife, Alice audibly wants her husband dead, and when the tyrannical army captain is dying from a stroke at its conclusion she cries “Oh God, on my behalf and that of all mankind, I thank Thee for having freed us from this evil!” But in Greenberg, as opposed to Strindberg, it’s more like Darby and Joan at the end. All passion spent, Edgar and Alice sit comfortably reconciled on either side of the stage as the curtain falls. This neutralises the deadly thrust of the play, falsifies the characters, and puzzles the audience. It’s as odd as Colley Cibber’s happy endings for King Lear.

But who cares about Strindberg? He’s lucky to be revived at all. Why should his ghost be vexed if both Part Two — that’s just about half the play — and an entire subplot with two characters is cut? A paranoid 19^th-century Swede whose work is out of copyright and whose art rarely transcends his own neurosis may safely be regarded as fair game for plundering adapters and directors. You might even say he had it coming. In any case, really ambitious theatre men want a bigger and more famous target, a larger reputation to abuse and exploit and add to their notoriety — and that of course means Shakespeare.

* * *

“Not long ago”, writes Terry McCabe, “a celebrated production of Hamlet featured, at the play’s most famous moment, Hamlet spray-painting on a wall TO BE / NOT TO BE and then turning out to the audience and saying, ‘That is the question.’ The director seems to have been immensely pleased with himself for this innovation. Talking later to an interviewer he explained how ‘It exploded the play in this wonderful way: everybody just laughed and got over it in a perfect symbiotic relationship.” But does Hamlet need exploding? Are its disturbing thoughts something only symbiotic mirth will cure?

The argument of McCabe’s excellent little book (Misdirecting the Play: an Argument Against Contemporary Theater, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001) is that “directing that seeks to control the text, instead of subordinating itself to the text, is bad directing. I believe the director’s job is to tell the playwright’s story as clearly and as interestingly as possible. Period.”

In his old-fashioned way McCabe evidently believes that the playwright’s story—Sophocles’ story, Shakespeare’s story, Chekhov’s story—should be paramount. And if the tragic intention of a work has long been recognised by judicious critics then it should not be played for comedy. Regarding the spray-painting episode described above, he says that while it is healthy for directors to bring to the stage a vision of Hamlet which has some originality and does not merely echo a stale or stagnant tradition, “one thing seems sure: a tragic hero contemplating suicide should not get a laugh.”

An odd feature of Hamlet productions is that they so often illustrate the very faults Shakespeare pointed to in his advice to the players. Deaf to his drift (and he could hardly have made himself more clear) they again and again provide what philosophers call an “ostensive definition” of the very failings Hamlet warns against: “O, it offends me to the soul” he cries, “to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise”, later going on to rebuke those clowns who add material of their own “to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh . . .  though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”

Alas, much of this was ignored in a recent Sydney production. There can seldom have been such an obstreperous Polonius, shouting his final lines as if his fellow players were deaf. Since Claudius was played as an inveterate alcoholic, never without glass or bottle, I suppose it may have been difficult to get the king’s attention. Perhaps this had something to do with all the shouting.

But the actor playing Polonius also seemed to think there was something funny in madness itself: he heavily accentuated everything in Act II having to do with Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind—“. . . that hath made him mad! . . I have found the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy! . . “, concluding with the “declension into the madness where now he raves, and all we mourn for!”. This punctuated the play with exactly the kind of gratuitous noise meant to split the ears of the groundlings and set on some barren spectators to laugh—those near me snickered on cue. And although this might seem hard to believe, almost incredible, Hamlet’s advice to the actors had been entirely deleted from the text.

And not only this had been lost. To speed things up for modern audiences lots of treasured lines were cut. Laertes’ warning to Ophelia—“the canker galls the infants of the spring”—went missing, and those who looked forward to hearing how young Fortinbras “sharked up a list of lawless resolutes” were disappointed to find neither sharks nor sharking here. Hamlet’s words to the Ghost, asking what it can mean “that thou, dread corse, again in complete steel, revisitst thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous”, does make life rather hard for the people in the wardrobe department. They are then obliged to dress the Ghost metallically in armour: attiring him in fur (perhaps because it was winter in Australia) meant all reference to his being helmeted and “armed at all points” had to be removed. But a furry ghost is not the same as one “in complete steel”, and never will be.

“Costume designs are metaphors for characters” writes Terry McCabe. “You are what you wear. This is why . . . productions of Hamlet that wish to emphasize Hamlet’s melancholy nature costume him in black, and it is why, to help convey the suggestion of a moth in Blanche DuBois’s manner, Tennessee Williams specifies that her costume be white.” Indeed. Prophetically foreseeing the waywardness of modern directors, Shakespeare wisely put into Hamlet’s mouth that phrase about “my suits of inky black”—and what a great pity he didn’t suggest something for Ophelia too. A single line about “my gowns of pearly white” might have prevented her being rigged in a red figure-hugging provocation looking like something from the wardrobe of Heidi Fliess. Scarlett O’Hara sounds right. But Scarlet Ophelia is hard to get one’s head around. Jaunty hips and a knowing carnality are difficult to reconcile with her father’s view that she is a “green girl”, and entirely incompatible with Laertes’ concern that his sister’s “chaste treasures” be preserved intact.

Few of us want to go back to the Ophelia of Sir Laurence Olivier’s film: Jean Simmons now seems decidedly insipid. But must we go to the other extreme with scarlet dresses and a whorish personality too? Whatever one thinks of the knowing rhymes Ophelia recites when mad, there are indications of a prevailing reserve, and if her brother describes her flesh as “fair and unpolluted” we shouldn’t disregard his testimony. According to Hamlet she spends at least some of her time at prayer (“nymph, in thy orisons… “) and also doing needlework, and when Ophelia reports that she was accosted by Hamlet “as I was sewing in my chamber”, this is more than just a line of dialogue. It sets a scene and denotes a character. Unlike the wild and distraught prince, her own life is one of order—orderly dress, the mental order of mens sana in corpore sano, the domestic order to be found in a Book of Hours, the social order of a court in which conduct is observed, constrained, and commented on—and Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing when he conjured up that image of a young lady embroidering in her chamber.

“Even moderately competent acting can mesmerize an audience with Ophelia’s madness” writes R. M. Frye, and the young woman who played Ophelia in Sydney demonstrated the truth of this. By then, in a cream slip, she succeeded in winning a tear with that magical scene of rosemary and rue, fennel and columbines, violets and daisies. But the clash between the brazen identity projected at the outset, and the broken figure struggling to hold her mind together at the end, means that a wholly unnecessary contradiction is introduced—a confusion which merely obstructs our understanding.

* * *

Then there’s the matter of removing “To be or not to be” out of Act III and placing it in Act II. The second act is indeed where the speech comes in the much shorter First Quarto, and I gather that by removing it from the more familiar Folio and Second Quarto position in Act III this provides a not uncommon variation. One might think it would have serious repercussions, and there have been arguments pro and con.

Those opposed to the earlier position point out that the prince approaches most nearly to a serious consideration of suicide in this speech, and that it is logically the climax of a series of increasingly agonised self-questionings, moving from mere disenchantment with a weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable world (I:2), through the self-accusations of a muddy-mettled rascal who exclaims “What an ass am I!” (2:2) all the way down to the crisis in which, acknowledging that “conscience does make cowards of us all”, his own inability to act is both explained and excused (3:1).

The comments of Muriel St Clare Byrne broadly favour this argument when she contrasts the gradual to-and-fro developmental rhythm of Hamlet with Macbeth and Othello.

“I am more than doubtful about the wisdom of following the order from the First Quarto, though I can well believe that this is how the play may originally have been acted (but not, therefore, constructed). Hamlet does not drive ahead like Macbeth or Othello: it is a play which needs space as well as speed, expansion as well as progression—a movement like the waves of an incoming tide, which fall back after each surge forward, and spread more widely the next time. The scenic order upon which the Second Quarto and the Folio agree makes this the characteristic movement of the play as a whole, and the tension thus created is subtler and more dramatic, with the alternations of depression and exaltation, inertia and energy.”

Are these literary rather than dramatic considerations? Doesn’t the meditative detachment of the famous soliloquy make it unique? In which case couldn’t you put it anywhere? Such has been the argument of those favoring the earlier location. R. M. Frye in his The Renaissance Hamlet is characteristically judicious. Yes: the poetry allows the soliloquy to stand alone and it could indeed by located earlier. But to treat it in this way is to ignore not just its role in increasing suspense, but in deepening the philosophical treatment of life and death. Regarding “To be or not to be” he writes:

“ … its ultimate importance to the tragedy arises just as much from the exciting clash of ideas stunningly expressed as from the increase of an audience’s suspense and uncertainty. Act two had closed with signals pointing forward to the play-within-a-play as a catalyst for resolving uncertainty about the alleged murder of Hamlet’s father. In this first soliloquy of act three, the audience sees that the Prince is undecided about even more basic matters than his uncle’s guilt.”

The theatrical case for a fuller text allowing a more gradual pace of development was also put by Kenneth Branagh recently. Under Adrian Noble in the 1992 Royal Shakespeare Company production he played Hamlet in the “eternity version” of the text (all of the First Folio plus additions from the Second Quarto) and reports as follows: “The performance matured as it had not before, and continued to surprise me, not least by the way in which the full text offered a much more comfortable playing experience for the actor. It was more imaginatively paced. One could take advantage of the ‘breaths’ that Shakespeare had given the actor. Paradoxically, it was much less physically exhausting to play, and the cumulative weight of the longer evening made for an immensely powerful finale.”

* * *

“A set design is more than just an environment for the action,” writes McCabe. “The physical world of a play is a metaphor for its theme.” So how did the physical world of this Hamlet illustrate its theme? We saw a simple black box, with a couple of doors either side for the actors to come and go—“very contained and quite claustrophobic” as the director put it at a pre-production public discussion. Where had this come from? Well, he continued, Hamlet’s remark that “’Denmark’s a prison’ is a line that has resonated with us in working out the design”. Above the platform, he explained, were three highly visible TV monitors, and surveillance cameras feeding these screens were on throughout the play.

The director then went on to tell us that this is what you see in every bank nowadays. It appears therefore that a closely watched bank or some other other institution guarded by an all-seeing electronic Argus is his model of Elsinore. “There’s a sense of always being spied on, eavesdropping is happening all the time, everyone is being pried into throughout the play” said Bell. So this was the ruling concept for the physical and social environment of the production.

So far, so penitentiary. But does this concept of Elsinore as a continuous surveillance area seriously derive from Shakespeare’s play? Or does it largely reflect the current obsessions of the Left? It seems to me that people in the arts are becoming needlessly paranoid nowadays (or perhaps justifiably paranoid, in view of the widespread cynicism regarding the suicidal extremes of contemporary modernism) and surely it is this cultural paranoia which is expressed in the stage design more than anything else.

Granted, Hamlet’s depressed mental state does transfigure the world with its “brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire” into a dank and claustrophobic cell; but the environment of the play is a hundred times larger than this brief and constricting figure of speech. The haunting sense of being minutely and critically observed derives more from the anxieties of the theatrical fraternity themselves who suspect, correctly, that they are under inspection by the world at large, and that their radicalism is more and more judged to be symptomatic of political and artistic delusions.

Hamlet itself abounds with delusional states, so perhaps it isn‘t surprising that theatre folk should find in its hero’s discontent disturbing reflections of their own hysteria. This in turn confirms something which many of us have long suspected—that the leading character displays manic-depressive tendencies of a tiresome kind. Horatio’s mourning comments at the close about great promise unfulfilled must be respectfully listened to, and then set aside. It is exceedingly unlikely that Hamlet, “had he been put on, would have proved most royal”. By the time the curtain falls it is fairly obvious he didn’t have the right stuff. Plenty up top, but not much “bottom” in the 18^th century sense. Not only is he overimaginative and prone to hearing voices in the dark, not only is there a tinge of misanthropy, he’s something of a moral hysteric capable of finding fault anywhere, anytime, with anyone, a psychological type so disturbing and dangerous, so unforgiving of human frailty, that in the world’s opinion such people are usually considered unfit to rule.

Hamlet’s social bonds are weak and conditional. He appears to dislike his own country Denmark. His conduct toward both Ophelia and Gertrude is hateful—breathtakingly callous. Instead of Polonius, the most conspicuous “wretched, rash, intruding fool” in Gertrude’s boudoir is the impulsively violent Hamlet himself. “I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable practice of the same.”

The words are not of course Shakespeare’s; they are those of Henry James; but in some of the prince’s moods they could be Hamlet’s too. The fiercely pure intolerance of such a character can easily veer into mania. Whatever Horatio might say or think it’s hard to believe he had much of a political future. But the play most certainly does, and that it still grips one despite the many directorial eccentricities described above shows that even after 400 years the tragedy of Hamlet the Dane is just about bulletproof.

Twelfth Night

Wasn’t this Illyria? Don’t they speak English there? At first the Russian dialog was puzzling, but soon it didn’t seem to matter: we all knew we were watching the performances of a decade. Malvolio’s tangled self-love and self-deception—in a creamy linen summer suit, the garters only discreetly showing—was a quiet study by Dmitri Shcherbina. Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s unmanageable bluster, explosively played by Dmitry Dyuzhev, never seemed more dangerous to himself. But the night belonged to Alexander Feklistov as Sir Toby. This was clowning as only great clowns can do it. The full comic kaleidoscope.

Presented at this year’s Sydney Festival, all delicacy, lightness, and high style, the production allowed three-dimensional characters to come alive, a fresh and attractive feature in a play often insufferably buffooned. Mr Declan Donnellan had his name plastered all over the place, but we know whose theatrical gifts really made it a success: first of all the gifted Russian players; then whoever made the adaptation; then Shakespeare himself.

Saturday

There are novels you wish you had written. Pure wishful thinking of course, but even non-fiction people like myself can feel when reading William Trevor that, well, perhaps… with a bit of luck and encouragement I could have done that. Anyway a page or two… or a sentence. I almost felt like that reading Tobias Wolff’s Old School, a gift at Christmas. And then there are novels you know you couldn’t write in your wildest dreams—couldn’t even think of writing, for the entire performance lies right outside the dim imaginative domain of one’s own experience and will forever.

One such book is Ian McEwan’s Saturday, 24 hours in the life of a London neurosurgeon and a tour de force by any standards. However, some controversy surrounds the novel, as indicated by the notice by Craig Raine that appeared in the TLS “Books of the Year” for December 2^nd 2005. Since Raine’s comments throw light on both the book and its critics they may be worth quoting in full:

“Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Cape) should have won this year’s Booker Prize. It was harmed by two things – envy and envy. After the novel’s catastrophic Royal Flush of laudatory reviews, John Banville’s notice in the New York Review of Books spoke to, and for, every disconcerted rival pained by mention of the Nobel Prize.

“It was an extra irony that Banville’s novel should carry off the discredited prize. McEwan’s novel isn’t perfect, but it has bravura evocations (perhaps a couple too many) of surgical operations that are unrivalled in fiction. The happy family of the surgeon is a little too implausibly gifted, but the meticulous formal organization of the novel around the theme of brain damage is elegant and Euclidean.

“Banville’s damaging review was a coarse caricature that couldn’t even get the result of the squash game right. It centred on two ‘implausibilities’: first, the idea that a husband might kiss his wife on waking in the morning, regardless of ‘morning breath’. Mightn’t love outweigh squeamishness? Ignore it, even? I daresay Banville’s morning breath is a thing of legend – capable of bringing up bubbles on varnish.

“The other summary criticism can be summarized as a joke: why bother with a burglar alarm when you can screw a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Poems to the side of your house as a prophylactic against psychopathology?

“Readers will remember that the murderously violent Baxter is deflected by a recitation of ‘Dover Beach’. This is neither a surprise nor a contrivance to the careful reader: Baxter experiences violent mood swings because he suffers from Huntington’s Disease. Arnold’s poem occasions one of them – an unpredictability that is predictable enough.”

Virtuosity is an unqualified merit in music and in dance. And as a critical term of approval that’s where it most naturally belongs. The more virtuoso the performance the more breathtaking, whether in ballet or playing a violin. In neither can there be virtuosity to excess—and the more risky the successful performance the more an audience cheers.

But Raine’s mention of “bravura excess” in Saturday reminds one of the ambiguousness of virtuosity in the world of words. The novelist’s main task is to create believable characters and tell a believable tale. Words are the means: they cannot be an end in themselves. When you feel—as you do sometimes in Saturday—that the writing is showy and the vocabulary provocatively esoteric, attention drifts from the central issues, the characters and the story fade, and you become more aware of words and sentences than you should be. [Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ is reprinted at the end of McEwan’s novel and has a place in the plot. That it was used here a month ago is an odd coincidence.]

Excerpt

He takes his keys and phone and garage remote from a silver dish by the recipe books. His wallet is in an overcoat hanging in a room behind the kitchen, outside the wine vaults. His squash racket is upstairs on the ground floor, in a cupboard in the laundry. He puts on an old hiking fleece, and is about to set the burglar alarm when he remembers Theo inside. As he steps outside and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of seagulls come inland for the city’s pickings. The sun is low and only one half of the square—his half—is in full sunlight. He walks away from the square along blinding moist pavement, surprised by the freshness of the day. The air tastes almost clean. He has an impression of striding along a natural surface, along some coastal wilderness, on a smooth slab of basalt causeway he vaguely recalls from a childhood holiday. It must be the cry of the gulls bringing it back. He can remember the taste of spray off a turbulent blue-green sea, and as he reaches Warren Street he reminds himself that he mustn’t forget the fishmonger’s. Lifted by the coffee, and by movement at last, as well as the prospect of the game and the comfortable fit of the sheathed racket in his hand, he increases his pace.

Robert Lepage

Sydney has hundreds of miles of sunny beaches. Montreal has a choked and muddy river. Sydney has weather to die for, while most seasons most of the year Montreal is where you’d least like to be. Sydney’s Opera House is one of the wonders of the world. Montreal has… what? A mouldering 30-year-old Olympic complex that has yet to be paid for. Australia has so many advantages over Canada the comparison is downright absurd—so how come we have Edna Everedge when Canada has Robert Lepage?

It’s amazing how few people are aware that anthropology has taken over their lives. Stoppard’s 1972 play Jumpers is all about the evils of relativism, and why it is that the old values we once believed in—standards of goodness, beauty, or truth—have been swept away. Sir Tom thought it was largely done by bent philosophers in universities.

He was right about the doctrine, but dead wrong about the source. Philosophical relativism—the sort he worried about in 1972—is above all intellectual relativism, a somewhat anaemic two-dimensional form of the disorder found mainly in the heads of academics. The latter are not numerous. As a social group or potential constituency, philosophical relativists consist of a few hundred lecturers, students, and books, and even if you throw in the writers and journalists who subsequently became infected, it is hard to see them having the political weight to capsize a whole nation.

Anthropological relativism on the other hand is the three-dimensional doctrine of large and muscular groups of people, millions strong, who have arrived in Britain over the last fifty years. They couldn’t care less about logic or ethics or epistemology. What they care about is promoting their own interests, and what their political guides and mentors in the UK employ to do this is multiculturalism. Aided by enthusiastic members of the host society keen to see the demise of the West, they get elected to public office, form institutions for their own advancement, and employ the huge political leverage to be obtained by combining ever-expanding “rights” with the view that tribal views are the only views that count, and that establishing the supremacy of tribal notions of the good, the true, and beautiful (which the enlightened describe as multicultural notions) is what the whole world needs.

After The Coast of Utopia, the recent revival at the National Theatre of Jumpers reminded us vividly of what Tom Stoppard does best. Simon Russell Beale was splendid in the demanding role of philosopher George Moore, and the supporting cast was more than adequate—though it’s unclear what is gained by having a supposedly faded musical comedy star named Dotty Moore played by an exceptionally nubile recruit from the Sydney stage. She appears half naked much of the time and this certainly keeps the men in the theatre awake. But casting Essie Davis in the role of Dotty made nonsense of the character and equal nonsense of many of her lines. Overall, however, this was a minor blemish. And what a joy it was, as waves of laughter washed over a delighted audience, to hear again the gaiety of yesteryear when puns flowed trippingly off the tongue, ideas sparked wit, and the wit seemed neverending.

In his historical pageant The Coast of Utopia Sir Tom offered High Seriousness, along with a nine-hour production that gave a new meaning to longueurs. In my view this betrayed his own gifts. What he always did best in the past was Low Seriousness, something nobody else ever did so well before. He had learnt from both Shaw and Wilde. From the example of Shaw he learnt cunning: it was plainly not advisable to let everyone see the moral coming at you from miles away. Nor was it enough to be merely clever or known as a wit, like Wilde. A deceptive obliqueness is needed by those bearing unwelcome news—so Stoppard mixed it up, combining songs, striptease, gymnastics, magical wordplay and mysterious murders, in ways which only those who have seen productions of Jumpers or Travesties can ever know.

Asked what a nude lady on a trapeze had to do with moral philosophy, Stoppard once replied that it was an “isolated image I wanted to drag in. I love the idea. It’s very theatrical. The only way I really work is to assemble a strange pig’s breakfast of visual images and thoughts and try and shake them into some kind of coherent pattern.” The effect of shaking up a “pig’s breakfast” of thoughts and images is to divert and distract the audience so it never knows what to expect. The curse of Shavian instructional drama is that the entirely predictable pedagoguery never lets up. But in successful didactic art unpredictability is all. With classic Stoppard you’ve no idea what will be next, and digression is raised to the level of high art. The technique is insidious. Low seriousness gets under our guard—the armour we wear against didacticism—and operating behind a screen of laughter it knocks us out.

But a production of Jumpers in 2003 sounds unmistakably a bit passé. The relativism which 30 years ago may have been confined to a handful of university departments and their staff is now a dogma imposed at every educational level. What this means is that in important ways the argument presented by Tom Stoppard in Jumpers needs to be brought up to date, redirected, and expressed in a way reflecting the passion for ethnic tribalism in our time. Let us therefore see how the anthropological apocalypse affects the arguments presented by Stoppard in Jumpers, in the specific cases of the astronauts on the moon, the donkey’s bray, appointments in the Church of England, murder, and the philosophical justification for the existence of God.

The astronauts

In Jumpers Dotty Moore is a retired musical-comedy queen who in the course of a mental breakdown sings a medley of songs about the moon: when television shows Astronaut Scott pushing Astronaut Oates off the steps of a damaged lunar lander so that he can make it home by himself (“I am going up now. I may be gone for some time” says Scott to Oates from his departing space-ship) she falls into a downward spiral of despair. In 1972 it being assumed that both astronauts inhabit the same ethical universe, one where they recognise shared rights and duties, and for Dotty these are cruelly ignored by Scott at the expense of Oates.

By 2003, fair employment rules ensure that men of different ethnic background (and neither of them European) are sent together into space. When a representative of Tribe X is pushed off the steps of the lander, his counterpart from Tribe Y explains blandly through an interpreter that in his culture that’s what they always do, that a UN edict on cultural autonomy gives him the right to do so, and that there cannot be any such thing as an “ethical universe” because Tribal Rights Rule. No punitive action is taken against the Astronaut belonging to Tribe X by the Multicultural Space Agency which employs him, but soon after his return to earth a court at the Hague initiates vilification proceedings against those who accused the member of Tribe Y of homicide.

The donkey’s bray

In Jumpers Professor Duncan McFee denies the universality of euphony, while his adversary George Moore argues against musical relativism on the grounds that there is a world of difference between the sound of Beethoven, the sound (say) of a donkey braying, and the sound of a brass trumpet falling down a flight of stairs. The first is music, the second and third are noise. But this of course assumes a hierarchy of musical forms and harmonies from the natural up to the most artificial, climaxing in those we regard as civilised, in contrast to those that are not.

By 2003 it has become clear how absurd it was to imagine an aesthetic measure distinguishing a donkey’s bray from a Beethoven quartet. The doctrine of cultural equivalence requires a frank and sincere admission that in donkey culture brays are considered melodious, while the doctrine of equal respect demands that we ask what donkeys themselves think of the matter. Don’t they have rights? And surely it’s unfair to rank donkeys last? Any traveller will tell you that there are much more limited musical examples than the bray of an ass. An outburst of hees and haws testifies to the joys and sorrows of asinine existence: it has its own eloquence. In contrast, in the year 2003, there are places where men solemnly blow through hollow logs making whoofling noises—logs with no stops, no keys, no possibility of scales or arpeggios, nothing expressing either thought or feeling, nothing but whoofling on a single note—and bemused citizens listen respectfully to this curious example of ethnic art.

The Archbishop of Canterbury

In Jumpers the political spokesman for agriculture, Samuel Clegthorpe, is made Archbishop of Canterbury. This is presented as an act of political ‘rationalization’ in the play, and stuns George Moore, who protests that Clegthorpe is an agnostic. Dotty agrees with George: because Clegthorpe doesn’t believe in God “nobody is going to have any confidence in him. It’s like the Chairman of the Electricity Board believing in gas.” George concludes: “Archbishop Clegthorpe! That must be the high point of scientism; from here on the Darwinian revolution declines to its own origins. Man has gone ape and God is in the ascendant, and it will end as it began . . .”

In 2003, Stoppard’s artillery falls way short of target. Rationalization has been a very minor factor in the destruction of the Church of England, an institution which tribalistic absurdities—ethnic, religious, literary, and sexual—long ago brought to its knees. But since in church affairs reality has outstripped both satire and farce, all one can do is quote from Yes, Prime Minister.

In one episode Canon Stanford is being proposed for a bishopric, his credentials including a church in South London which dispenses orange juice, family planning pamphlets, and information about organizing demos, but has no place for holy communion. Asked about God, Canon Stanford considers Him an “optional extra”, and affirms his own preference for Islam. “When some smart aleck asked him on television if he knew what the Bible was, he said it was a Christian version of the Koran”. Yet even this barely approaches the unresisting lunacy described by Peter Mullen in the Summer 2003 issue of SR, where Shere Hite and Foucault are proposed as our religious mentors and guides.

The existence of God

Not surprisingly, in Jumpers this is the most important question discussed. In contrast to primitive religions with all their nebulous forces and inexplicable effects, we are told that Christian scholasticism was analytically concerned with the nature of Being, Essence, Cause, and End. The growth of logical analysis within a theological context is said to have led to the growth of rational enquiry in the sciences too. Stoppard’s mouthpiece George Moore reviews the arguments pro and con the existence of God, and the ultimate source of moral values, summarizing over two millennia of ingenious and highly productive western thought.

In 2003 the mere framing of the question in a public theatre invites a sense of the ridiculous. This does not mean, however, that the deep issues with which western minds have struggled for so long have gone away. When religions decline, cults proliferate—and today the Culture Cult, with its admiration for the pre-logical and the socially primitive, proliferates in all directions. The effect has been to sweep the entire intellectual tradition from Aristotle through Aquinas to the present day into the dustbin, replacing it with a Californian mudslide of sentimentalism about “spirituality”. This legitimates a reversion to animism, astrology, and entrail reading.

Murder

There are two murders in Jumpers and a discussion of the cannibalistic eating of aged parents. Informed that his colleague Professor Duncan McFee has been shot, Vice-Chancellor Archie adopts a tone of jesting pragmatism. He cautions Dotty that “There’s no need to get it out of proportion. Death is always a great pity of course but it’s not as though the alternative were immortality.” Before his death McFee himself had argued that moral rules are indistinguishable from the rules of tennis—merely a social convenience without which life would be shambles: you’d be fishing headless bodies out of the Thames every day. Dotty (who is mad) and Inspector Bones (who is dull) are the only characters in Jumpers who think murder unequivocally wrong.

Again the year 2003 has brought large changes, mostly because of the multicultural apocalypse. Yet there are also passages in Jumpers which now ring all too true. When McPhee cites “the tribe which eats its aged parents” as justifying a relativistic view of murder, Moore objects that this ignores the different circumstances prevailing in the Brazilian rain forest on the one hand, and the Home Counties on the other—peoples in contrasting “climes and cultures”.

But what happens when the inhabitants of the tropical rain forests move into the Home Counties, occupy them, and ensure the passing of laws that protect their right to carry on their own unsalubrious practises? Including the importation for mysterious purposes of children, and the consequent fishing of headless bodies out of the Thames? It is in these circumstances that Dotty’s vision of a morally deracinated world, its values in disarray, drifting directionless in a directionless universe, has become reality. After seeing one astronaut condemn his own shipmate to die, left behind on the moon, she cries:

Well, it’s all over now. Not only are we no longer the still centre of God’s universe, we’re not even uniquely graced by his footprint in man’s image … Man is on the moon, his feet on solid ground, and he has seen us whole, all in one go, little—local … and all our absolutes, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots that seemed to be the very condition of our existence … are like the local customs of another place. When that thought drips through to the bottom, people won’t just carry on.

There is going to be such … breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such coveting of neighbour’s oxen and knowing of neighbours’ wives, such dishonourings of mothers and fathers, and bowings and scraping to images graven and incarnate …

(The Salisbury Review, Spring 2003)

Should we despise actors? Or is it enough to treat them with measured contempt? It’s hard to see why their views on matters of public concern deserve more attention than the views of the average bus driver, yet Hollywood has been a factor in American politics for some time; while in March this year, in the electronic media, it was easier to find out who was winning the Oscars than who was winning the war in Afghanistan. The prominence given to celebrities and their ideas on numerous interview programmes are grotesque. In these circumstances, can one be blamed for feeling (adapting Diderot’s figure) that we will not be safe until the last actor has been strangled with the entrails of the last talk show host?

Dr Johnson’s views were notorious. He once dismissed the typical actor as “a fellow who claps a hump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries ‘I am Richard the Third’”. In the several rather anxious pages Joseph Wood Krutch gives to this matter in his biography, Johnson also speaks of them as “less than ballad-singers”, and as “no better than creatures set upon tables and joint-stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs”; while he even said scornfully of his good friend David Garrick that he “exhibits himself for a shilling”—though one wonders if it would have made much difference if Garrick had charged more.

Mr Krutch felt this aspect of Johnson displayed a “vehement unreasonableness”, an irrational “prejudice” which must somehow be explained—as due to his envy of the successful and highly paid Garrick perhaps. Envy may have influenced him to some degree. But others might see his view of actors as all of a piece with the bluff stone-kicking realism of Johnson’s philosophy as a whole. From Plato on, the moral implications of those who glibly imitate life at its worst (pretending vices they appear to admire; pretending obligations they will never keep; pretending virtues they do not possess) have troubled thoughtful men and women. In Book Three of The Republic, the severe opinion of actors and drama to be found in Socrates’ dialogue with Adeimantus typifies this point of view. There we are warned that the Guardians

Must no more act a mean part than do a mean action or any other kind of wrong. For we soon reap the fruits of literature in life, and prolonged indulgence in any form of literature leaves its mark on the moral nature of man.

Johnson wholly concurred. The moralist who censured Shakespeare for not labelling his heroes and villains unequivocally good or bad, went on to say that this was a fault which the barbarity of the Elizabethan age “cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer’s duty to make the world better.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau took up the same theme in his Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, claiming that if theatrical entertainment were allowed in Geneva the city’s virtue would be destroyed. In Plato, Johnson, and Rousseau, all this is part of a continuous argument about truth, falsehood, and the social value of literature and the arts, in which the stage is seen as a decidedly twilight area, and actors as avatars of insincerity.

* * *

Seems, Madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems—in these words Hamlet stands aloof from the world of Claudius, Gertrude, and the ceremonious appearances of the Danish court, making a mournfully defiant claim for the inner self. Black clothes and windy suspirations and forced tears (says Hamlet) are all seemings “that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe”.

The needs of some deeper and more intractable identity than “what a man might play” were brought to our attention thirty years ago by Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity, a book which combines high seriousness and deep reading. “The sixteenth century”, Trilling writes on page thirteen, “was preoccupied to an extreme degree with dissimulation, feigning, and pretence”, none of them according to the social manners of the time necessarily bad things. In some circumstances they might be good. Trilling emphasised that a broad interest in the social and dramatic possibilities allowed by the claim “I am not what I am” applied to “a multitude of Shakespeare’s virtuous characters at some point in their careers”: Hamlet is not a madman, Rosalind is not a boy, Portia is not a doctor of law, Juliet is not a corpse, the Duke Vicentio is not a friar, Edgar is not Tom o’ Bedlam, etc. That they are all impersonations of some kind helps to add fresh twists to the tale:

But although innocent feigning has its own very great interest (he goes on), it is dissimulation in the service of evil that most commands the moral attention. The word ‘villain’ as used in drama carries no necessary meaning of dissembling . . . Yet the fact that in the lists of dramatis personae in the First Folio Iago alone is denominated ‘a villain’ suggests that, in his typical existence, a villain is a dissembler, his evil nature apparent to the audience but concealed from those with whom he treads the boards. (Trilling, 13-14)

This statement makes it all the more surprising that Trilling nowhere mentions Richard III; though perhaps he assumes it belongs with Titus Andronicus in a class of ghoulish early horrors that discriminating Shakespeare-lovers properly disdain. This is the sort of mistake literary people (rather than theatrical entrepreneurs) tend to make; yet it is odd even so since the dissembling central to Trilling’s argument is nowhere more self-consciously embodied than in Richard’s character:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions. . .
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

* * *

Admittedly these lines are not from The Tragedy of King Richard III as the playwright wrote it. Any search for them as a coherent specimen of Shakespeare’s verse will be in vain. The lines are indeed spoken by Richard, but they come from a different speech in a different play—Henry VI, Part 3. Along with another revealing fragment from the same play (“I have no brother; I am like no brother”) they were cleverly stitched into Richard of Gloucester’s great opening soliloquy in a recent Australian production of Richard III. Purists might object to having “Now is the winter of our discontent” textually molested, and there were doubtless cries that the ghost of Colley Cibber rides again; but the fact is that this highly professional cut-and-paste job produced an unsentimental self-analysis which Shakespeare himself, I dare say, would have warmly approved.

And he might have falteringly clapped much else—certainly the actor John Bell’s interpretation of the role of Richard was both original and satisfying—and it satisfied mainly because it was so attractively humorous and relaxed. No high-key diabolism. Few Prince of Darkness effects. Not even much shouting until the royal need for a horse produced some desperate bellowing at the end.

Instead we saw a shrewd soft-spoken charmer, with an unnerving laugh, whose power derived more from a hypnotic ability to tie his victims in mental knots than from any visible ropes or chains. He smiled, and murdered as he smiled. It was as if Bell had read and taken to heart Lamb’s warning against melodrama: “Shakespeare has not made Richard so black a monster as is supposed. Wherever he is monstrous, it was to conform to vulgar opinion. But he is generally a Man.” Interestingly, a parallel production of the play was on stage in England earlier this year, with Kenneth Branagh exhibiting similar qualities in his own interpretation.

A low keyed approach is exactly what was needed for the sinister wooing of Lady Anne over her dead father-in-law’s bleeding corpse; though when the time came for Clarence to be dispatched, and two sinister intruders entered his room, it was strange to find the Second Murderer’s thoughts about conscience omitted—especially in a production emphasising the play’s comic possibilities. Because what the Second Murderer says is a whole lot funnier than what Hamlet says on the same subject, and deserved inclusion for variety’s sake alone. Instead of moaning poetically on about enterprises of great pith and moment being sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, the Second Murderer’s view is that morality is a luxury plain men must do without. Conscience—

Makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal but it accuseth him. A man cannot swear but it checks him. A man cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife but it detects him. ‘Tis a blushing, shamefaced spirit, that mutinies in a man’s bosom. It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself and live without it.

Sydney would have liked that. But when a four hour play is cut to two hours and no interval something has to go, and anyway the most conspicuous problem really lay elsewhere. It was that the director had defined the style of the production as black comedy, a kind of medieval horror show, and the modern parallels we were asked to consider were drawn either from Edgar Allen Poe or from recent films: Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween were inspirations mentioned in the program notes. Anna Volska’s worry, voiced at an eve-of-production discussion, on just how and how much to play Queen Elizabeth’s scenes for comedy was revealing. No doubt consistency is a bugaboo of little minds, on the stage and off. But too much inconsistency can be a mistake. When Ms Volska camped it up with a chalky grand guignol face and caricature expressions of shock-horror—a kind of wider-eyed Morticia from the Addams Family—predictably easy laughs were her reward.

But how then was she to handle the death of her two young sons after they had been murdered in the Tower?  “Ah, my poor princes!” she exclaims, “Ah, my tender babes! My unblown flowers, new-appearing sweets! If yet your gentle souls fly in the air . . . Hover about me with your airy wings, And hear your mother’s lamentation.” Lines like these cannot possibly be delivered in tones of mocking unseriousness. Grief has a purity of direct expression which belongs in a different universe from irony. In Hegelian terms, grief is the unmediated expression of the “honest soul”, while irony is the idiom par excellence of the “unhappy consciousness”.

* * *

Hegelian? What forced conjunction is this? And who ever said that Hegel had much to do with the stage? Well, Lionel Trilling did for one—but instead of excoriating actors and acting in the manner of Dr Johnson, and pointing to the semantic gulf between “acting” and “doing”, there seems to have been something about the kaleidoscopic and fractured identity of the compulsive impersonator which Hegel found strangely liberating.

From one point of view it could be seen as a new development in the History of Spirit. It was as if the histrionic inspired the free consciousness to break both earthly bonds and social obligations, establishing a new frontier for the autonomous will. Hegel had come across Diderot’s dialogue-as-novel, Rameau’s Nephew, and subsequently, in the pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit (I am following Trilling here), he “enshrined it as a work of exceptional significance, the paradigm of the modern cultural and spiritual situation.”

How so? Because the hero of Diderot’s novel—a human chameleon—is riddled with contradictions, and Hegel sees this contradictory mixture of creativity, destructiveness, and compulsive impersonation as illustrating the dilemmas of the “disintegrated consciousness” which supersedes the “honest soul” of the traditional social order. Honest souls are what you find in the Chaucerian world with its secure and unchanging identities—nun and priest, lord and villein, butcher and baker and candlestick-maker. Fixed and safely predictable social units in a fixed and predictable social world, where the identity encountered on Monday morning will still be recognisably there on Friday night. But under modern conditions men and women are often forced to play uncomfortable and alienating vocational roles—“seemings” as incompatible with their sense of inner identity as those Hamlet complained about.

Partly this is a result of the way modern society provides an ever-increasing variety of parts “a man might play”, and the widening range of avocational possibilities modern existence offers. Partly it is because vocation and character themselves have become less and less secure in time and place. Where Nietzsche could write censoriously a hundred years ago that no father hesitates to subject his child to “his own ideas and notions of worth”, we now live at a time when instead of one domestic source of advice and instruction there are at least a hundred noisy channels, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, providing characters to emulate and scenarios to enact from the most saintly to the most unspeakable. Dad hardly gets a look in. And the warning “Parental Guidance Recommended” is smilingly fixed over the gate to purgatory by media commissars confident that the very notion of effective parental guidance is becoming a thing of the past.

As you may know, the semi-fictional hero of Rameau’s Nephew is based on the real-life nephew of the famous 18^th-century composer, and his highest aspiration is to be recognised as a composer and musician. But he’s no genius, and his disappointments and frustrations culminate in a spiteful destructiveness, a determination to make the world suffer for the indignities he himself has had to endure. Trilling writes that the Nephew “is preoccupied, we might say obsessed, with society and with the desire for place and power in society. . .  His talents “are by no means negligible”, but despite this he is “reduced to a bare subsistence as a parasite at the tables of the rich”. As a result he is filled with “a scornful nihilism which overwhelms every prudential consideration.” A practised flatterer with a hundred more or less false identities, the Nephew tells a hundred lies, provokes with a hundred paradoxes, and pursues a hundred unachievable goals—all in order to survive in French society under the ancien régime.

Only continuous and known identities can be relied on to be the same on Friday night as they were on Monday morning, and not turn out to be enemy aliases come disguisedly amongst us with malign intent. When Shakespeare uses the words ‘true’ or ‘false’ of a man they have of course little reference to either logic or epistemology. They are used in the antique sense of the phrases “to remain true” or “to prove false”—in other words, they refer to someone who exhibits a discontinuous identity which cannot be relied on, whose behavior cannot be predicted, and whose word cannot possibly be his bond. If a man is false this means that he is, like Antony Blunt, capable of betrayal. If true, it means he can be trusted. Seems, Madam? Nay, it is. Hamlet knew.

* * *

But we are not yet done with the “unhappy consciousness”. Another equally important feature of the Nephew in Diderot’s dialogue is his ruling animus. When Trilling’s tells us “he is obsessed with society and with the desire for place and power in society . . . tortured by envy of his famous uncle, and bitter at having to live in his shadow” we should recognise clearly enough what we have before us. The Nephew, in brief, is yet another aggrieved example of Ressentiment Man. And when we turn back to Shakespeare, and to Richard III, we see that it is the fatal destructiveness of Ressentiment Man that Richard embodies too.

Though in order to fully understand this point one has first to ignore all that distracting stuff about crowns and thrones. And also forget about the whole world of dukes and duchesses, of kings and queens. They are required by the historical narrative, of course, and the overarching scheme of a tetralogy which includes the three plays about Henry VI, but for the analysis of Richard’s character adopted here the status and titles of a hereditary aristocracy are merely adventitious.

Instead it is essential to see Richard of Gloucester and his will to power as one version of a psychological type found again and again in Shakespeare’s plays. This is a man obsessed by his undeservedly low status in the scheme of things, and by the denial of a position he feels is his by right, someone variously galled by ” the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” and often much else besides. Royal brothers banish brothers, excluding them both from lawful succession and from their patrimony, and this prepares the ground for plots involving revenge. Or in the world of commoners the grievance may be that someone-or-other “lacks advancement”. A soldier in the service of Othello applies confidently for a lieutenancy, only to see it bestowed on an unworthy substitute. “I know my price; I am worth no worse a place” cries a bitter Iago after being fobbed off with the lowly job of flag-bearer. Here and elsewhere ressentiment brings disastrous results.

In both Ancient Rome and Ancient Britain it’s the same story. Cassius resents the life of underlings. Caesar “doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about, to find ourselves dishonorable graves.” Death and revenge will come with the Ides of March. The special ressentiment of bastards is a common theme, and never more eloquently expressed than by Edmund in King Lear. Why, he asks, should he be disowned, dishonoured, and deprived “For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?” He decides that this ridiculous misfortune will not exclude him from the estates of his brother, the legitimate Edgar: “Well then, legitimate Edgar, I must have your land … ” And so on. In all these cases the resentment of those robbed of a birthright, especially when denied the proper recognition of personal qualities by social customs, conventions, or laws, is central to the plot.

But in Richard III there’s still more—there is anatomical fate. And Shakespeare places it plumb in the middle of Richard’s opening soliloquy. That way no-one can have the slightest doubt that his resentment is not merely that of a Plantangenet displaced by the opportunistic Woodville clan, it is the deep and incurable resentment of deformity. In the Age of Compassion this human motive is so undiscussable that it takes some directorial courage to give it the prominence Shakespeare unhesitatingly did. Anyway there it unblinkingly is (and there it was in the recent Sydney production)—a fixed innate exclusion beyond all external questions of merit, authority, or rank. It is also what makes the play’s leading character a classic exemplification of Ressentiment Man:

Of course the general and overt subject of the play is the political evil of the Wars of the Roses (“Civil dissension is a viperous worm, That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth”), just as Richard’s overt motive is to foil the Woodville usurpation (“Had I not reason, think ye, To seek their ruin that usurped our right?”). But there can be little doubt that what Shakespeare found interesting for a study in character was the link between the psychological wound of disfigurement and a desire to be revenged on the world—a fearful determination to turn its conventions, its social expectations, and even its constitutional arrangements, upside down. Hatred as a direct response to cosmic misfortune appears in his famous opening soliloquy where he says that because he is deformed, unfinished, curtailed of fair proportion and deprived of love, “I am determined to prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Even more illuminating are two statements he makes in Henry VI Part 3. The first, from the same speech in which he boasts of his ability to smile, and murder while he smiles, reveals the characteristic drive of Ressentiment Man to crush and destroy his betters: unloved and disregarded, he says his only remaining joy is to “command, to check, to o’erbear such, as are of better person than myself.” The second speech is striking in its individualistic radicalism and hostility to the entire established order of things. This relates to the Hegelian ‘unhappy consciousness’ which opposes the world of the ‘honest soul’, and Shakespeare’s understanding of this state of mind is acute:

Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it.
I had no father, I am like no father;
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word, ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me—I am myself alone.

* * *

“Let Hell make crooked my mind” is a terrible threat with terrible implications, but it remained for Nietzsche to fully explore the sickly ethical influence of people as twisted as this. This went far beyond mere personal vindictiveness and revenge. A crooked mind might sourly devise an entire code of crooked values to justify its own place in the scheme of things, inverting, transvaluing, replacing what is light and healthy and natural and strong with what is dark, unhealthy, and profoundly unnatural. After which this crooked code is subversively promoted by those who gain from the inversion until it finally prevails, newly defining virtue and vice in its own terms.

Nietzsche undoubtedly went too far in his repudiation of Judeo-Christian moral understandings: Freud, who saw the repression of our violent and aggressive drives as essential to the rise of civilization itself, is a better guide on these matters. But the insight Nietzsche offered into the inversion of values of our time by those who reject high standards, whether in art or life, is something we ignore at our peril. It explains much that is going on in the “culture wars” of our time.

Is there any connection between Ressentiment Man and the vocation of acting? Not at the deepest strategic level perhaps. The man of inchoate and incurable resentment does sometimes use deception to subvert the moral order; but he may just as well attack it frontally, and indeed the frontal assault is likely to be more emotionally satisfying. He may, like Iago, frame his action in terms of sustained impersonation (“I am not what I am”), or he may with grim and sullen candour devote his life openly to a political cause.

Nevertheless, as an instrument of his purposes, deception and false seeming is something Ressentiment Man resorts to tactically again and again. The false identity which enables Richard to smile, and murder while he smiles, is typical. The crocodile tears he is prepared to shed are the resort of those who find themselves unable to strike now and directly, but who are obliged to wait and pretend and emotionally mislead—until revenge’s dish can be eaten cold. As for the dissimulative histrionics of the nephew in Diderot’s dialogue, here is Diderot’s own comment (speaking as ‘moi’ within the narrative of his novel):

“I listened to him, and while he was acting … his soul divided between opposite motives, I hardly knew whether to burst with laughter or with indignation, I was in pain … I was overcome by so much cunning and baseness, by notions so exact and at the same time so false, by so complete a perversion of feeling, by such turpitude and such frankness, both equally uncommon.”

One might easily be at a loss to find anything to equal this combination—such perverted feeling, such theatrical cunning and moral baseness, such wanton falsehood, such candour and turpitude and mirth …  Except of course in the scene where Richard III emotionally seduces the widow of the prince he has murdered, over the corpse of the king he has also stabbed to death, and when she has left the stage turns to us gleefully and crows: Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won? After which he goes gloating, chortling, and capering on his way.

Picture this if you can: a great captain of the ancient world awakes from an intoxicating night in the arms of Cleopatra—an Egyptian “dish for the gods”, a “lass unparallelled”—and finds himself face to face with Glenda Jackson. This isn’t mere speculation: it was an event observed by bemused playgoers and wondering critics at the time. There have even been British Cleopatras whose hauteur sounds only a starched syllable away from Lady Bracknell. Long on royal command, and short on allure, they illustrate the challenges which men playing Antony have faced on the London stage.

Nothing like this faced William Zappa in Sydney recently. What he saw before him was the attractive and youthful Paula Arundell. Tawny-fronted and bold as brass, Arundell brought plenty of noise and energy to Cleopatra as Queen of Tarts, yet also managed to wring a tear or two from the audience by the marble stillness of her death scene, asp to breast. Despite the famous reference to her supposedly infinite variety, Cleopatra as we actually see and hear her on the stage is more a wrangling, mocking tease than anything else, so there’s little call for royal dignity, andMiss Arundell was more than able to fulfil the promise of the opening lines:

Look, where they come!
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool.

Which brings us to Antony. As the triple pillar of the world Mr William Zappa did what he could in the peculiar circumstances dictated by his clothes. Described by Cleopatra as “the demi-Atlas of this earth” Antony first appears wearing a nice little sleeveless number in pink satin, the hem cut short in front but with a train behind, a sort of boudoirised wedding gown. It may well be that this is what Romans of distinction wore in their more playful moments. I don’t know. It looked encumbering.

Quite early in Act I Octavius Caesar looks down his nose contemptuously and tells us that Antony in Alexandria “is no: more man-like than Cleopatra; nor the queen of Ptolemy more womanly than he”, and presumably this was the costumier’s cue. It’s true that Mark Antony seems to have liked dressing up (he once appeared as Bacchus at an event in Ephesus), and the program note also informs us that according to one report he “indulged in masquerades dressed as a woman”.

Perhaps he did. But anecdotes culled from 2000-year old commentaries are of no real interest. What properly concerns us is what Shakespeare wrote—the opening scene which introduces Antony to the audience as it came from the playwright’s pen. If Shakespeare had wanted Antony to be cross-dressing as a woman in a pink leftover from the Mardi Gras in Act I, Scene I, we must  assume he would have said so. But all he says is that Scene I is “a room in Cleopatra’s palace”.

After this we waited hopefully for a more soldierly presence to appear. This is a play with “a happy valiancy” about it and lots of battles and battle talk. But in John Bell’s modern dress version Antony mostly wore the casual attire of a man fetching milk from the corner deli, while the more fierce fighting men in the cast wore hoodlum gear like small-time mafiosi or Harley-Davidson thugs. These were intended to contrast as grossly as possible with the representatives of imperial power in Italy, the austere Octavius and his lofty Roman set wearing the formal evening dress of high rollers playing baccarat at Monte Carlo in the 1930s, white scarves falling elegantly from their necks.

What is all this supposed to mean? Bell’s metaphor for his new adaptation of the play is the world of the casino: hence the gambling theme. When Antony cries “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the rang’d empire fall!” Bell is thinking of financial empires and the gambling losses of what used to be called tycoons; and when one of Shakespeare’s Romans circa 35 BC refers to the fortunes of war, or playing with fate, or chancing one’s destiny, this for some reason reminds Bell of Las Vegas and gaming houses and roulette.

He imposes this interpretation on the play most audaciously in the Battle of Actium. Like other military actions in Antony and Cleopatra it was originally invisible: according to Shakespeare’s stage advice “the noise of a sea-fight” is heard off-stage. It is of course at Actium (in Greece) where a naval showdown between Octavius Caesar and the combined fleets of Antony and Cleopatra takes place, the outcome being the key reversal in the play. When Cleopatra turns tail and flees with all her ships followed by Antony, the day is Caesar’s and the triumph Rome’s.

Bell brings Shakespeare’s unseen offstage battle onstage, inserting it into the play as a creative invention of his own. He choreographs it as a visible and highly obtrusive card game between rival teams of gamblers, silently mimed, and when the knaves and kings and queens have been played, and the final ace is shown, Cleopatra strides from the casino in disarray. Back in Alexandria outbursts of tears and rage suggest the end is nigh; before long Antony falls awkwardly on his sword; and Cleopatra prepares for her own departure with unexpected dignity: “Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me.”

As already noted Ms Arundell very capably managed the snakes. Her Egyptian death scene had a rare poignancy, intensified as it should be by the preceding light relief of an unstoppably talkative countryman who brings them hidden in a basket of figs, and finds this an appropriate rime to explain the care, handling, diet and habits of serpents, and she finds him hard to get rid of. It was tense and funny and the audience hung on every word, while the rustic was played by a professional comic whose timing was impeccable—yet this may not be the only reason it succeeded. As with other scenes where messengers arrive bearing bad news, and find themselves scolded or whipped, the mundane business of plainly dressed ordinary folk who are instantly recognisable, doing and saying recognisable things, worked far better than more pretentious scenes elsewhere.

At a public discussion of his ideas John Bell said that he had origin-ally thought of an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra using the Gulf War. America was a modern Rome, he told us, while US hegemony parallelled the Roman imperium, and the Gulf War was a clear case of the West versus the East. Apparently he toyed with this idea and then discarded it. No doubt there was an appealing equivalence between the triumvirate of Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, and the three main Gulf War allies of the USA, Britain and France. I suppose by some painful stretch of the imagination Antony could have been played by Mitterrand (the Frenchman does seem to have been romantically inclined), but there would have been trouble finding a parallel for Cleopatra—even in a pink shift Saddam Hussein would hardly do. Anyway that idea was scrapped.

Then in a blinding flash he had a vision of the world as one big casino—perhaps during a visit to Las Vegas. In antiquity great military aristocrats gambled with the fate of nations. In the modern world great plutocrats gamble and win or lose huge fortunes in monumental gambling palaces. It’s really all the same thing when you come to think of it—or anyway that’s what John Bell thinks. And the unsavoury figures at the social foundations of the gambling world made it all the more appealing.

According to Bell, legitimate political power and military and financial might are scarcely distinguishable from the world of thugs and enforcers and shakedown artists (they all trade in something called “violence”), and for this reason it is appropriate to portray political and military leaders from every time and place as little more than grandiose mafiosi.

Such is the parlour radicalism of thespian thought. Four whole pages of the program notes were given to excerpts from books and documents about the mafia as an international phenomenon, and the connection between globalisation and the evil empire of the USA was underlined in a passage from a book by Frank Viviano:

In the empire of crime, the US mafia is just a supporting actor. But the deeper causes have to do with business acumen, pure and simple: the European, Latin American, and Asian crime machines have been far quicker to recognise—and exploit—the possibilities of the global economy. Like the chief executives of many US corporations, America’s godfathers have been absorbed in domestic business, leaving the vastly larger profits of multinational commerce to more imaginative entrepreneurs overseas.

It all seems a long way from Shakespeare. And a long way from Greece and Rome. And very confusing. Not only was Mr Bell blinded by a bright idea about casinos, he seems to have mixed this up with a lot of other undigested political notions too, before trying to impose them on both the luckless Bard and his even more luckless Australian audiences.

What is the rationale for doing the classics in modern dress? It is to help bridge the gap between other times and other forms of language and our own. In Shakespeare’s case there are strange words, strange meanings for familiar words, strange constructions compelled by the verse, all of which are hard for the untrained ear to catch.

But the last thing you need is further confusion, and my simple point is this. If you start with inherent difficulties of language, and then add further obstacles by way of weird clothing, or incomprehensible persons and motives which make no sense, instead of helping your audience you leave them totally mystified. They are invited to solve an intellectual puzzle along the following lines. In any given scene, A doesn’t really mean A, it means B; though B may also mean C. So that a series of translation procedures must be undergone. Pompey is not a Roman general but a mafia boss; and as a mafia boss he is reduced to something much more amoral, a secondary step which often makes Shakespeare’s dialogue, as embodied in his characters, implausible or absurd. This is not a moral or even an aesthetic issue (though it certainly has aesthetic consequences). It is a practical theatrical matter applying to the smallest things.

Take the words of the Roman general Enobarbus as he’s about to describe the marvel of Cleopatra’s barge, when he says to the awaiting Maecenas and Agrippa “I will tell you” about it. Hearing those four words the natural thing is to listen silently to a wise and experienced soldier and let him tell his tale. This trust comes naturally when the internal and external coherence of the Shakespearean character (speech and appearance) are visibly presented together on the stage. But who would trust a bleached blond coke-sniffing brute in bovver boots who seems a complete stranger to articulate thought? I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the time; why should I trust him with one of the most treasured passages in English literature?

It would be ridiculous to be doctrinaire. There have been countless experiments with Shakespearean dress and location and there will continue to be. Some of them have been very successful—Branagh’s setting of Hamlet at Blenheim Palace was an example. Though one might quarrel with details, overall it struck me as enthralling for most of its four hours on the screen. Again, when the literary matter has an interior and reflective poetic quality other considerations apply: in Hamlet’s soliloquies almost any strong visual element can be distracting, and it might even be argued that they are best appreciated as tape recordings, or radio drama, or with the stage in nearly complete darkness.

But where a clear stage identity is essential to the meaning of the verse, the sense and credibility of Shakespeare are fatally undermined by grossly eccentric conceptions and dress. They drive a disastrous wedge between the figures we see on stage and the speeches Shakespeare gives his characters. If the result is a visible contradiction between wilful and arbitrary appearance (for example, as mafiosi or gamblers), and the entirely recognisable figures clearly implied by Shakespeare’s dialogue (a general or a queen), why should we care about Antony or Cleopatra or anyone else?

After Bell’s Battle of the Casino the losers at the card game take flight. Psychologically and morally, how is this comparable with losing a battle at sea? When Scarus declares, “I never saw an action of such shame; experience, manhood, honour; ne’er before did violate so itself,” puzzled audiences might reasonably think he protests too much. It all sounds over the top, since manhood and honour and shame have little to do with those who inhabit gambling dens. When the defeated Antony cries, “Hark! the land bids me tread no more upon’t; it is ashamed to bear me” he is described as being “unqualified by very shame” and goes on to say of himself “I have offended reputation, a most unnoble swerving”. How are we to equate these visions of moral apocalypse with losing one’s chips?

Bell’s radical chic tends to reduce all male and soldierly virtues to the same level of moral squalor. This makes a mockery of Shakespeare at every turn. The ethical universe of the pirate Menas who allies himself with Pompey’s forces is not the same as Pompey’s, and the playwright is at some pains to make this clear (Act II, scene vii). When Menas suggests cutting the throats of the triumvirs who are in Pompey’s grasp aboard his galley, the general replies:

Ah, this thou shouldst have done,
And not spoke on’t! In me ’tis villainy;
In thee’t had been good service. Thou must know
‘Tis not my profit that does lead mine honour;
Mine honour, it.

It is clear that Pompey finds Menas’ scheme not unappealing. The murder of Octavius, Lepidus and Antony would greatly simplify his plans. But Roman honour forbids it: “in me ’tis villainy”. If however two actors, reduced to the same amoral identity and similarly dressed in swashbuckling leather and silver gear connivingly have this same exchange, the moral point of the scene is lost, its dramatic effect cancelled, and its original meaning destroyed. If both men are portrayed as indiscriminately villainous, Pompey’s objection makes him seem merely a hypocrite and coward.

Scholars may argue whether Antony and Cleopatra is truly a tragedy or not, but one thing is clear: if you play it as a kind of socio-political burlesque the chance of achieving tragic effects goes out the window. Trivialisation has an inevitable price. In order to care about the death of Antony we have to take the character seriously. Yet right from the very first scene Bell makes this impossible. In Shakespeare the death of Enobarbus is not without pathos. But who could care about the freaky oaf with the bleached blond hair Bell puts before us? We want him off—and the sooner the better. By contrast the female roles are treated more respectfully throughout. The reward for Paula Arundell being that despite her youth and limited emotional range, the house is properly still and attentive when Cleopatra dies.

As for the overarching notion that Rome = the USA = power and violence = the mafia = the world as a casino … what can one say? The Roman empire left us a heritage of law, literature, architecture and engineering which has endured 2000 years. If the mafia sank beneath the waves tomorrow it would leave nothing—nothing that is except tales of brutality and terror. As Stravinsky said in another context, “of unresisting imbecility no criticism is possible”. Bell’s radical chic is imbecility on stilts.

The Bell Shakespeare Company makes much of its educational endeavours and is proud of the theatre workshops it provides in schools. But if you want to keep Shakespeare alive and enjoyable for modern audiences, then the Saturday matinee shouldn’t be interrupted with questions like these:

Jane: Which is Mark Antony, Daddy? The one on the left or the one on the right?

Dad: The one in the pink dress.

or

Jimmy: Who is the man in the middle holding a briefcase like yours?

Dad: That is a Roman general named Lepidus.

Jimmy: Did Roman generals carry briefcases?

Dad: Not usually.

Jimmy: Then why is Lepidus carrying one?

Dad: Because the director wants us to think that Lepidus is a poor, weak, fussy, ineffective fellow, who is not really up to it, and that if he is portrayed as a kind of obsequious insurance salesman, a pathetic representative of the business world which supports Mr Bell’s theatre but which Mr Bell affects to despise, and which he caricatures in his productions, then we will somehow get the point.

The business world is much involved in the Bell Shakespeare Company’s activities. The Bell Magazine, a newsletter, “sincerely thanks” Volvo, Fujitsu, Orange, AGL, SalomonSmithBarney, Ericsson, the NAB, Austar Communications, Wesfarmers Arts, Australia Post, BHP, Sydney Water, and Edison Mission Energy, along with a number of lesser sponsors. It is hard to know what to make of the two-faced attitude toward the businesses of the “corporate sector” revealed in this publication, sincerely thanked on one page and ridiculed on another (presumably they are seen as the “useful idiots” of yesteryear), but as a guide to the thinking of the Bell Shakespeare Company’s present director the magazine is invaluable. Some anonymous copy on page two for Antony and Cleopatra reads as follows:

The excesses of the high and mighty drip blood on underlings. A corporate collapse in the new millennium? A besotted and hedonistic leader in the Roman Empire? Antony and Cleopatra are willing to gamble everything in a world that’s willing to take them for everything. As gangsters struggle for underworld power and high rollers risk the lot in a glamorous world where time is lost, Shakespeare’s brilliant gritty, human story of love and betrayal plays out to its devastating conclusion … Director John Bell’s production of Shakespeare’s great adult love story is set in a decadent and violent high-stake world where spirituality is lost to sexual jealousy, hero worship and deception.

The treatment of John Bell himself in the Bell Magazine is comically sycophantic. Hardly a page is without a glowing tribute, and the elision of his name with that of Shakespeare’s (bellshakespeare) in both the company’s email address and its website indicates an ominous confusion. Other grandiose associations are enthusiastically seized on too. One page of the magazine announces that “Bell hangs out with Picasso”, this introducing the topic of the 2001 Archibald Prize. We are told that Nicholas Harding’s “portrait of Bell—or King Lear as played by John Bell—now hangs alongside works by Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud, after being sold for $20,000 through art dealer Rex Irwin to a major collector from Singapore”. Bell is quoted as saying of Harding’s portrait, “I’m not sure how much of me is there. But I think he’s caught the character I was playing very well.” To which the copywriter has ingratiatingly added, “Every inch a king, no doubt.”

It might be argued that only those who have had to raise the money to keep Shakespeare on the boards in a commercial environment can fairly judge the strategy of the Bell Shakespeare Company today. No doubt Bell sees himself as a player in “a decadent and violent high-stake world”, given to rock videos and the crassest of movies for entertainment, who must do whatever it takes to fight his corner. For his work and energy over many years we must all be grateful.

But in the eyes of this occasional member of the audience there are alarming symptoms of his company’s intellectual decadence and decline. Anyone interested in Shakespeare might now be advised to avoid bellshakespeare and look to smaller groups, less narcissistic, pretentious, and perverse, for productions genuinely honouring our greatest poet.