Hi Alison and everybody,

So far as Beckett goes, so go most dramatic texts, at least according to 
Eric Bentley: good drama is almost always good literature, bad drama 
never, and so far as the reader's experience goes it probably is more 
similar to reading a fictional prose text than a poem. Beckett's a 
special case (he always is), and his plays can exist as "objects" for a 
reader, as Alison says: but no more or less stable than any other text.

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:

    And, you know, Andrew, I dream of it sometimes. I do. I dream that
    I’m living in Berlin in 1925, maybe, just before it all ended but
    nobody knew that then, but I could sense it, standing on a traffic
    island, the streetcars rumbling past. And I’m wearing a … it must be
    summer, because I’m wearing a pale green, very light dress. And a
    scarf through my hair, and shoes to match. I’m peering between the
    streetcars, waiting. As the streetcars pass I feel the skirt blow
    against my legs.

    So I stand there on the traffic island, anxious. I’m looking for a
    pair of eyes, a pair that will meet mine. That can read mine, hear
    what I’m incapable of saying. I stand on my toes, in my lovely green
    dress, and search as the hem of my dress brushes along my ankles.

    I’ve had this dream a few times, a lot of times. Sometimes it’s so
    real I think it’s really happening. Sometimes I think it’s a dream,
    I know it’s a dream, and I worry that I’ll never get back here, to
    waking life. Maybe worry isn’t the right word. No, worry isn’t the
    right word at all.

With this the stakes become somewhat higher, for her and for her 
colleague. About twenty minutes later, she's talking to her husband, 
describing an evening at home alone as she was waiting for him:

    I got home around two. I was a little tipsy. But I wanted some wine.
    I poured myself a glass of wine. I put on my pale green nightgown
    and I went to the CD player and put the music on. And I sat, with
    one light on in the kitchen, the rest of the place dark, the light
    fell into the living room a bit, and I sipped at my wine and I let
    my mind wander. Then I thought I’d like to fall asleep to the music
    and set the CD to repeat and crawled under the comfortable warm down
    comforter and I drifted off to sleep with the music.

That "pale green nightgown" gets the audience every time, and it gets 
them in a very curious, theatrical way: the character herself may or may 
not be aware of that repetition (depending on how she plays it), 
certainly her husband doesn't get it (what he does get depends on his 
reaction), but the audience has traced a pattern; there's an audible 
gasp at that recognition of the sensual recall. But for that reason it 
ratchets up the psychic tension of the language and the plot to a point 
which may not have been so acute if it were being read privately. (And I 
sense that, because these phrases are spoken by the same actress within 
a 15 or 20 minute period, the pattern is more recognizable, even if it's 
only those words "pale green," which comes to represent a reawakening of 
sexual fecundity in both the woman and her colleague.)

I tried something else in the first play of the evening, "In Private," 
which closed with this:

    ... what’s important is that whatever I have to tell you I have done
    so through my eyes, when we were together, my voice when we were
    together, through my body’s entire gaze on you, when we were
    together, and so I cannot clarify, I can only write you these words,
    let the sentences wrap themselves around you as you read them
    hearing my voice ...


This is a letter to a former lover, but as a theatrical conceit--read 
out loud by a quite physical, unquestionable woman--it's a different 
sort of experience than a private, silent reading would have, especially 
as the voice runs on and the sentences do, indeed, wrap themselves 
around the space in which the performance is being given.

I don't know how clear this is, but there you have it, at least in my 
own very simple, uncomplicated plays.

Best,
George


Alison Croggon wrote:
> Hi Roger, all
>
>   
>> Yet it
>> seems even now that drama and poetry performance are 2 separate
>> identities, that the Play, even in it's form as a monologue, attaches
>> itself to a wider context than the poem, which seems to force it's own
>> shape onto the performance partially because the poetry isn't normally
>> written as drama, with the dynamic of the stage in mind (which is
>> where Alison & George come in). Maybe drama is written as a set of
>> clothes waiting to be inhabited by a person and can't be an object
>> unless the words are inhabited, whilst poetry is it's own object.
>>     
>
> I suppose I have always thought of texts for performance as unstable and
> incomplete texts, and it is certainly true that the completion of the art
> doesn't begin to happen until that first communication, which is, as George
> says, the reading and response of actors, prior to other readings and
> interpretations - directors, designers, musicians perhaps, and of course
> audiences... And this seems to imply that, in contrast, a poem or, perhaps,
> a work of fiction, is a stable and complete text. But the longer I have
> written and read in both forms, the more these possible distinctions seem to
> have broken down. How is it possible to say, reading something as
> exquisitely achieved, for example, as Not I or Footfalls, that the text is
> not "its own object"? And are poems or fictional texts really as stable as
> they appear to be, or is that some kind of illusion? They too require the
> "completion" of a reader, of someone who brings their imaginative and
> emotional resources to their understanding and interpretation of the writing
> - and this too occurs in time, and is contingent and fragile.  Even
> something like the fantasy novels - straightforward, even 19C narrative
> prose - which I had thought was about as stable as text could be, has turned
> out to be far less stable than I had realised; and the books themselves are
> a collaborative exercise, meeting, rather than actors, directors and so on,
> a process which involves editors, copy editors, designers, and so on before
> they reach their readers, who then fill them out with their own imaginative
> lives.  
>
> If I sound like I'm contradicting myself, well, then, I contradict myself...
>
> All the best
>
> A
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
>   

-- 

George Hunka
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http://www.ghunka.com