Mamet's films, for me, tend to be stagey. I actually liked House Of
Cards but still no cigar, and it looked like a TV production.
Artaud, in Theatre of Cruelty, thinks that theatre "*requires*
expression in space (the only real expression, in fact)" and goes on
to demand an "end to the subjugation of the theatre to the text, and
to recover the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between
gesture and thought". He wants to forefront the Body in theatre,
revealed in a validated space, a magic circle (cue the usual quote
from Henry V).
In contrast to Artaud, riffling through Bernstein's Close Listening,
the essays therein pay little attention to the Body, to space. This
restriction may be articficial, but I'm still not convinced about
there being a contiuum between poetry and drama. For a start, poetry
doesn't *require expression in space. The expression of a collection
of poems as a book may be a performance, with bits dribbling
everywhere, but it isn't a drama. In fact, if it becomes a drama, the
morals of the piece are skewed, and it's one that has illegitimacy
attached. The act of writing is a moral performance wherein the author
rarely lets in a third-party to observe the action, but it is still
not a drama. Live performance poetry borrows props from the lexicon of
drama, may become a drama in it's own right, but it doesn't require
them. Drama can invoke poetry but it doesn't require it.
The notion that plays should be good literature sounds European to me.
Are film-scripts good literature? In Artauds world, the script is just
a set of directions on which the actors and directors play around.
When I've read drama reviews, I usually mark the ones which insist on
the text being paramount as hatchet jobs. You can treat drama as
literatures, but it seems to me to drawing yourself into the same
minimalist trap as poetry. As poets we tend to treat the text as
paramount - it's our vocation after all - our calling - words are
first, last and second to us. That's why we're poets. Artaud chafes
against this notion. All because drama involves mere words, does not
make it readily amenable to us, and even the best poet can make the
mistake of thinking themselves a dramatist. Eliots plays are rubbish
as plays, hence their continual revival. I wonder if anyone has sat
down to write a poem but ended up with a play? I bet Alison has...
As I think of this, I can see parallels across all the arts. Painting
and drawing, for example, are performances. I'm conscious of this as I
study my model. It's a performance we are both engaged in, an exchange
of some kind. I can also think of contradictions to what I've said. To
read a poem don't you yourself create a magic space within which to
withdraw yourself to read the poem, the "good book"? However it's not
the same space as the *speicial ground on which drama is performed. I
keep trying to veer away from the sacred origins of drama, but it
seems to that it cannot be denied; what I can say is that it's come a
long way since then.
Another counter-argument I keep thinking of is the Mechanical Turk.
When the reader reads the poem and the final content is delivered, is
this not the poet performing at a distance? Yes, but the Body required
to instantiate the art, hasn't intervened between the two, something
which is essential. Could the reader be this Body? So the reader is
both performer and receptor? I guess that's closer to the dramatic,
but it's still not the live random magic of the stage, the
grease-paint, the closeness of others watching the same performance.
The meeting of crowds, buying of tickets, the close urban thrill. No
wonder plays were kept under the watchful eye of the Lord Chancellor
until recently. To be a play words have to undergo this
transformation. To be a poem, no.
I've run out of words.
Roger
P.S went to a display of Medeival manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam
yestery. Kept reminding me of websites.
On 12/10/05, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ...interestingly, David Mamet, bless his heart, has a trenchant critique of
> Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana in today's Guardian which circles
> around precisely these questions of theatre and the poetic. Personally, I
> find Mamet's argument like much of Mamet (ie, good, even perhaps brilliant,
> on its own terms but more broadly speaking woefully limited - like, ahem,
> Mamet's own poems, available in a book called The Hero Pony). But fwiw, here
> it is -
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1663920,00.html
>
> Southern discomfort
>
> The Night of the Iguana may be full of poetry, but that doesn't make it any
> good as a play, argues David Mamet
>
> Saturday December 10, 2005
> The Guardian
>
>
> We have the simple human belief in God and we have propositional theology.
> At the end of the first is the unmediated communion with the Divine; of the
> second, ecclesiastical authority. For our purposes we will substitute for
> ecclesiastical authority the constituency of the educationally overburdened
> - that is, academics and drama critics. These have given us the
> beatification of Tennessee Williams, among others; their opinions, as they
> are by profession old fogies, must always lag behind the times.
>
> Playwriting is a young man's - and, of late, a young woman's - game. It
> requires the courage of youth still inspired by rejection and as yet
> unperverted by success. Most playwrights' best work is probably their
> earliest. Those prejudices of anger, outrage and heartbreak the writer
> brings to his early work will be fuelled by a passionate sense of injustice.
> In the later work, this will in the main have been transformed by the desire
> for retribution.
>
> The Night of the Iguana is not a very good play. You may ask by what
> standard I judge.
>
> First: plays are written to be performed. This may seem a tautology, but
> consider: description of the character's eye colour, hair colour, history
> and rationale cannot be performed. An actor can perform only a physical
> action. Any stage description more abstract than "she takes out a revolver"
> cannot be performed. Try it.
>
> Second: in a good play, the character's intentions are conveyed to the
> actor, through him to his antagonist, and through them, to the audience,
> through the words he speaks. Any dialogue that is not calculated to advance
> the intentions of the character (in the case of Othello, for instance, to
> find out if his wife is cheating on him) is pointless. If the dialogue does
> not advance the objective of the character, then why would he say it?
>
> The character in the play wants something from someone else on stage; in
> this, he is like the appliance salesman. The prospect comes into the
> appliance store, and the salesman has a severely limited amount of time in
> which to convince him to make a purchase. Any dialogue on the salesman's
> part that does not tend clearly toward closing the sale is worse than
> wasted: it is destructive. The prospect, just like the audience, once
> allowed to revert to his previous state of inattention, is lost for ever.
>
> What of dramatic poetry? Well and good. It is my contention that drama is
> essentially a poetic form - that the dramatic line should be written to
> convince primarily through its rhyme and rhythm and only secondarily, if at
> all, through an appeal to reason. Note that the truly determined individual
> - swain, salesman, discovered adulterer etc - confects spontaneous poetry.
> All sounds he utters are directed towards winning his point; and his speech,
> should reason desert him, will devolve to a pre-literate poetry of pure
> intention.
>
> The suggestion that a drama is "poetic", then, should not be a post-facto
> apology for the soporific, but rather an accolade to the mechanical purity
> of the dialogue. The announcer's call of the horse race is poetic, as is the
> dispatcher's report to the cops on the scene. The poetic is the
> straightforward, the essential, the life and death, where the addition or
> excision of any one syllable would be unthinkable.
>
> To praise drama as primarily poetic is to engage in propositional theology;
> ie to enjoy the sense of probity and status conferred by the announcement of
> an elevated and approved opinion. This, though, is the province of the
> cleric and has nothing whatever to do with the performance or the enjoyment
> of real drama.
>
> The Night of the Iguana's main characters are all failures. Here we find the
> discredited, the defrocked, the broken, the senile, the faded. All well and
> good and no harm done, save that nothing happens in the play. Folks show up,
> declare their particular brand of unhappiness, and life goes on. We are
> shown, and we are told and retold of the impossibility of connection, and
> the language in which we are told is sterile in direct proportion - as it
> must be - to the sterility of the language's intent. As no character truly
> needs anything from any other, none needs speak with any purpose and indeed,
> none does. Without intention, vehement intention, there is no drama, in life
> or on the stage. And so, even if the speech were poetry, to what purpose?
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
--
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
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