...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