At 10:44 PM +0000 1/24/03, Árni Ibsen wrote:
>"A play on stage is like the body of Christ; it's gone from the grave after
>the crucifiction and the artist has muttered something like, "It is
>finished", when the Maria Magdalenas of every season are about to perform
>the last rites and anoint it so as to preserve it intact for a time. The
>work of art rises out of its grave, it is somewhere about, sans body, around
>us who created it and the others who enjoyed it with us. Nothing but the
>epitaph is left behind, composed for the most part by the critics of that
>particular time, shaped by various degrees of insight. It is they, mostly,
>who have the last word - and that word can be costly."
An inherent problem for temporal performance. Writers don't have it
so bad - after all, the writing is still there as a counter argument
- so the critics didn't have the last word on Ibsen, say. Luckily.
I feel a certain ambivalence here, in that I do think critics are not
as powerful as they are made out to be. But the real issue of
historical documentation is a woeful problem in theatre.
Theatre critics talk about theatre (here anyway) as if it is not
directed, performed or designed, or at least as if these are
secondary characteristics of the experience. I remember Peter
Craven, a general literary pundit and then theatre critic for the
Australian, telling me that he never read plays because they weren't
proper literature. I was amazed - quite apart from the breathtaking
dismissal of the theatrical ouevres of Beckett, Shakespeare, &c and
so on, how could he work out what the director &c had done if he
didn't know the text? - but then I realised, he wasn't really
interested. I started writing certain private responses at around
that time, with this feeling that something had to be chronicled.
The lack of critical variety, curiosity and intelligence, and some
consequently sadly inadequate histories, has had a dreadful effect on
theatre here in many ways. The arena for discourse, in terms of
breadth of ideas, is miniscule - you only have to move an inch
off-centre to find yourself in the wilderness; and the wheel is
constantly being reinvented by enthusiastic young performers who have
no idea what happened 20 years ago. It's not their fault, you need
to be (a) lucky and (b) persistent to find out. But it means the
"Australian theatre tradition" (there is one, and some of it's quite
fine) is much more beggared than it need be.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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