There is a longstanding debate about Seneca's practice & intentions with
his plays. I believe more advanced theories support full-scale
theatrical production during Nero's reign. Certainly the "progeny" of
his drama, meaning Elizabethan tragedy, was generally meant for
performance. The renewal of Senecan tragedy in English in the last
century began with the very successful Peter Brook/Ted Hughes production
with Gielgud & Worth - a great loss that it was never filmed. If Peer
Gynt was only meant for reading, why did Ibsen then bother to get Grieg
to compose the music for theatrical production? He understood that
poetry and music go together well in the theatre - and reading can never
supply that frisson. Flecker's The Golden Road to Samarkand, to cite a
similar example, perhaps Britain's reply to the Theatre of Cruelty avant
la lettre, had a very successful production in 1923 with the
unforgettable music of Delius. As for Faust, it was, has been and is
performed quite regularly in German-speaking countries (as is Madach's
Tragedy of Man in Hungary & elsewhere). Try to see Peter Stein's amazing
production (there must be a video, I taped it off the TV) with Bruno
Ganz et al (two Fausts, two Mephistos).
mj
Knut Mork Skagen wrote:
>> There is a dimension of the theatrical performance of a text, though,
>> that creates a third consciousness (that is, one besides the
>> audience-as-audience and the performer-as-performer), even in fairly
>> traditional dramatic texts like my own, which are constructed with
>> plot and character and all that stuff we've come to expect from a
>> night out at the local playhouse. If I can be permitted an example
>> from my recent play "In Public": a character in the second scene is
>> sitting at a bar, flirting casually with a colleague, when she comes
>> up with this monologue:
>>
>
> I immediately think of two things when I read your examples and your
> explanation of this extra dimension. The one of them you describe with
> "spoken by the same actress within a 15 or 20 minute period" --
> stating the obvious, drama, unlike poetry, is a time-based artform.
> Lyric poetry is perhaps the least time-based form of literature, which
> strengthens its role as object-on-the-page. It exists, in a sense,
> without a proper beginning, end, or sense of time having passed.
>
> I also think of how a dramatic text is meant to be inhabited and
> embodied by a performer -- mentioned earlier in this thread -- and it
> seems to me critical to that the performer is not performing his or
> her own words but those of a "character." (Character, of course, in
> the broadest possible sense, given that less traditional drama won't
> have such precise divisions). But still, the performative context of
> a text is automatically a fictitious context. Even in performance art
> where the performer is the writer is the character, the act of staging
> produces an artificiality which enhances the impact of portions of the
> text while reducing others.
>
> Contemporary lyric poetry isn't anywhere close to being staged, on the
> contrary, it's often passed off as the opposite, some kind of "direct
> communication." This may well be illusory, but is often an underlying
> assumption on the part of the reader.
>
> There is a crossing somewhere. As drama approaches the purely literary
> is enters the unperformable realm. Norway's own "national play" Peer
> Gynt is meant to be read rather than staged; Goethe's Faustus;
> Seneca's plays. And on the poetry end of things there is the point
> where lyric crosses over into epic.
>
> --Knut
>
--
M.J.Walker - no blog - no webpage - no idea
Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. - Montaigne
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