Postcard 2 from Adelaide Festival 2020
Dramas of Ideas in a Time of Crisis
The Doctor/Mouthpiece
It’s been a fortnight since I saw The Doctor and Mouthpiece at the Adelaide Festival. How time flies.
Back then the coronavirus was a secondary local topic of conversation and cause for concern, some way behind the Democrat primaries in the United States. Since then, the Covid-19 pandemic has engulfed the world. It’s changed everything – including the global conversation, and my perspective on both plays.
In retrospect, it now seems ironic that The Doctor – which I experienced at the time as a play about identity politics – is essentially a medical drama; and even more so that it’s an adaptation of a play by Schnitzler that deals with the ‘virus’ of anti-Semitism.
Similarly, Mouthpiece – which ostensibly deals with exploitation, appropriation and the question of ‘who has the right to tell whose stories’ – when viewed through the lens of the current crisis becomes fundamentally about economic and social precarity, physical and psychological health, the need for boundaries and ‘distancing’, and even the ethics of whether or not a public gathering (in this case a theatrical performance) should take place.
The meaning of work lies its future reception rather than its intentions, as Walter Benjamin once said.
*
British auteur-director Robert Icke has been repeatedly described in the London press as ‘the great hope of British theatre’. His sensational (indeed sensationalised) version of 1984 was co-adapted and co-directed with Duncan McMillan for Headlong Theatre, and transferred to the West End and Broadway before touring Australia last year. More recently his play and production The Doctor – ‘very freely adapted’ from Arhtur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi and starring stage and screen luminary Juliet Stevenson – was produced by the Almeida in London in 2019, and was duly presented as the big-ticket work of text-based theatre at this year’s Adelaide Festival in the Dunstan Theatre.
Schnitzler was fin de siècle Viennese-Jewish doctor, playwright and author of fiction. He’s most famous for his literary and dramatic treatment of sexual and class hypocrisy: his most widely translated and performed play Reigen (known in French as La Ronde) was adapted by David Hare as The Blue Room; and his novella Traumnovelle is the basis for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
However he also wrote about anti-Semitism – most directly in Professor Bernhardi. The play is set in Vienna in 1900, when widespread anti-Jewish sentiment was on the rise and being exploited by populist politicians, with consequences Schnitzler could not have predicted but we now know all too well. In fact the dialogue is peppered with subtle and not-so-subtle hints about the characters’ religious or racial identities, ideological allegiances and personal attitudes towards each other. However the inciting incident of the play soon breaks down the protocols of speech and conduct among medical colleagues – from formal hierarchy to informal collegiality – so that cracks apparent at the outset soon become unbridgeable chasms.
The plot deals with a Jewish doctor and director of a charity-funded hospital who prevents a Catholic priest from giving the last rites to a female patient dying of septicemia following a botched abortion. He does so in order to spare her distress because she’s delirious from the infection and unaware that she’s dying; the summoning of the priest is a routine procedure that the doctor decides to overrule.
Nevertheless he’s falsely accused of striking the priest and hounded by the press; the hospital is threatened with bankruptcy; and a law proposed in parliament banning Jews from certain positions. The doctor is betrayed or abandoned by most of his (non-Jewish) colleagues, who agree to him being charged with ‘obstructing religious observance’ (a law in Vienna at the time which has something in common with the proposed ‘freedom of religion’ legislation currently being discussed in Australia). He resigns from his position in protest, is put on trial and ultimately sent to prison.
Professor Bernhardi is as finely wrought and multi-faceted as it is open to interpretation. Alongside the issue of anti-Semitism – Bernardi is the victim of racially motivated lies, hate speech, persecution and even bribery (a colleague offers to help him if he appoints a Christian instead of a Jewish specialist to the hospital staff) – the play untangles a tightly knotted complex of related personal, professional, political, psychological and philosophical conundrums. These include the difference between professional and personal competence; righteousness and arrogance; workplace ethics and workplace politics; legal, medical and administrative ethics; moral consequentialism and deontology; ethics and politics; science and religion. In particular, one might point to the currency of debates over abortion (and the health risks associated with its illegality); the question of what constitutes a ‘good’ death; and the issue of ‘religious freedom’ already mentioned.
This level of complexity, ambiguity and sophistication is matched by Schnitzler’s typically Viennese irony, lightness of touch and sense of perspective. As a social drama of ideas, it shares at least some of these qualities with Shaw. Nevertheless the writing also probes at Ibsen’s deeper vein of individual tragedy, as well as Chekhov’s all-embracing sense of collective absurdity.
Schnitzler himself was no stranger to controversy in the court of public opinion. His earlier play Reigen was banned from publication in 1904, and attacked as ‘Jewish pornography’ when it was finally performed in Vienna in 1921, with riots taking place outside the theatre. Professor Bernhardi was banned from performance in Vienna in 1912 for its realistic depiction of anti-Semitism. His works were described by Hitler as ‘Jewish filth’ and banned by the Nazis when they took power in 1933, and his books were publicly burnt (along with those of Marx, Freud, Einstein and Kafka).
The doctor-writer described his works with typically Viennese understatement and evasiveness: ‘I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?’ In fact Professor Bernhardi was originally billed as ‘a comedy’ – perhaps in the spirit of his fellow doctor-playwright Chekhov, who described his own plays in similar terms. A more obvious precursor is Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The opinionated, contrarian anti-hero Doctor Stockmann is a prototype for Professor Bernhardi; and Ibsen likewise admitted that he was unsure if his play was a comedy or a drama.
An updated English adaptation of Professor Bernhardi by Samuel Adamson that underlined the satirical aspects of the play was produced in London by the Oxford Stage Company and Dumbfounded Theatre in 2005. More recently an uncharacteristically low-key and textually faithful production directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Berlin Schaubühne in 2016 also toured to the UK.
*
The Doctor is set in a private medical institute presumably somewhere in the UK that specialises in Alzheimer’s disease. The protagonist is Doctor Ruth Wolff (Stevenson), the institute’s founder and star physician who also serves on the board of directors. She also happens to be Jewish, and a self-righteous prig.
Somewhat implausibly, she intervenes in another doctor’s case similar to that of the young woman in Schnitzler’s original play; even more implausibly, the family priest (Jamie Parker) barges into the ward without being restrained by anyone else on the staff or hospital security. Wolff refuses to admit him to the patient’s room, on the grounds that the young woman is unconscious, and has given no authorisation for him to do so. They both immediately start yelling at each other; the priest attempts to force his way in; and Wolff appears to lay a hand on his arm (though the production obfuscates what actually happens with a dramatic movement freeze, sound cue and lighting change). Meanwhile a nurse goes in to check on the young woman, and returns with the news that she’s died, presumably in fear and stress because of the commotion.
The next day the priest accuses Wolff of assault (though it’s not exactly clear why); and predicably there’s a social media pile-on. The hospital board turn on Wolff and vote for her to be dismissed from the board and the hospital staff; but not before (in another implausible scene) the young woman’s father (again played by Parker) bursts into the room (again without any intervention by security staff) and strikes Wolff in the face (another dramatic freeze-frame). Again for reasons that are unclear, especially given her ‘by the book’ character, she doesn’t subsequently charge him with assault; nor does she sue the hospital board for unfair dismissal.
The implausibilities continue to pile up after interval. For some reason Wolff agrees to appear on a Fox News-style (but unanimously ‘progressive’) chat show where she’s grilled by a panel of experts who are all caricatures of political correctness. Despite losing her job, however, the charges against her are (without explanation) dismissed. In a final scene of prolonged implausibility, the priest comes to visit her at her home; she lets him in; and they have a civilised chat about it all.
So much for the plot; the writing is even more ham-fisted. The language and tone is unvaryingly monotonous and monological. Icke seems incapable of writing in character; mostly we hear the voice of the author, or straw men and women whose arguments are easily refuted. Real dialogue or nuance are sadly lacking, and sorely needed. Perhaps that’s the point; but in reinforcing it so rigidly, the play seems part of the problem.
The exception is in the scenes between Wolff and Sami (Liv Hill), a young neighbour in the same block of flats. Despite their plot-redundancy, and the unexplained reason for this unlikely relationship, these scenes are surprisingly well written, and demonstrate genuine complexity. A monologue about having sex in the school toilets was the best piece of writing in the show, and certainly the funniest. It almost seemed to be written by someone else – indeed it seemed to come from another play. In a similar though slightly more sentimental vein, the final scene between doctor and priest was at least a relief in that they finally emerged from behind their masks as three-dimensional human beings: dialogue and nuance at last.
These scenes remind us that drama of ideas does not necessarily involve an endless hurling of brickbats. Among contemporary Australian playwrights working in a similar genre, I found myself thinking almost fondly of David Williamson’s cheerful sense of satire, or the caustic wit of Joanna Murray-Smith. In comparison, The Doctor is closer to the sledgehammer approach of Stephen Sewell. However the latter offers a more penetrating analysis of political psychology, while Icke remains on the more superficial level of cultural politics, which sees everything in terms of ideas rather than material reality. At best one has the sensation of watching an ‘issue-based’ ABC TV drama series onstage, or at worst, reading an opinion piece in The Australian.
In terms of ‘issues’, the complexity of Professor Bernardi is reduced to the overriding theme of ‘identity politics’ – a catch-all that extends from race, culture and religion to gender, sexuality and even gender-identity – with the predictable if somewhat gratuitous inclusion of transgender rights thrown into the mix. This results in a false equivalence (especially dear to cultural conservatives) between all forms of identity politics (other than their own) that assimilates ‘political correctness’ with totalitarianism, ‘radical’ left-wing protest with far-right violence, and (even more preposterously and offensively) uses the ‘slippery slope’ argument to compare accusations of discrimination or hate-speech with ‘witch-hunts’ or the Holocaust. In the climactic scene of Act One, for example, The Crucible is openly cited, along with the extermination of the Jews; in one rhetorical howler Wolff is even described as being ‘crucified’.
At the risk of stating the obvious: privileged white middle-class doctors, academics or journalists (even Jewish ones) are not actually being crucified, burnt at the stake or exterminated; whereas racial and other minorities are still being oppressed by physical persecution and material injustice based on racism and other forms of prejudice. Underlying this false equivalence is a confusion between the symbolic and the real that is arguably symptomatic of contemporary cultural politics in general (on the left as well as on the right). Perhaps it’s even a part of what Icke is railing against. The problem is that in railing against it, he becomes its mirror-image.
This is amplified by the production, albeit in an interesting way (here a spoiler alert is in order, so skip the rest of this paragraph if you’re ever likely to see the show). I’m referring to the use of reverse-colour and reverse-gender casting, such that virtually every actor except Stevenson is progressively revealed to be playing a character whose racial or gender identity is other than it appears at first sight.
Personally I’ve no argument with inverting racial or gender-based casting. Caryl Churchill does it brilliantly in Cloud Nine, as Genet did before her in The Blacks and (at least potentially and perhaps even implicitly) The Maids. Shakespeare did the same thing, albeit in a more theatrically traditional but all the more subversive way. The same is arguably true of the Greeks, especially Euripides. In all these cases the inversion or subversion of norms is the point of the play.
In the case of The Doctor however I found the device confusing and distracting. Perhaps it was meant to be an ironic reflection on the politics of identity; or perhaps it was intended as an act of (symbolic) colour or gender ‘blindness’ (a metaphor which is indeed ‘blind’ to social and material reality). Whatever the intention, it seemed to commit precisely the sin of political correctness that the play itself condemns.
On a more visceral level, it also gave Stevenson and her character an unfair advantage over everyone else in terms of theatrical and moral integrity, almost as if she were being presented as the only ‘real’ person onstage. Once again, Schnitzler is far more nuanced in his portrayal of the humanly flawed but genuinely persecuted Bernhardi (as was Miller in his characterisation of John Proctor). In contrast, Icke makes Wolff an emotional cripple, and then tacks on a back-story about a lover who killed themselves after developing Alzheimer’s that supposedly explains her surface coldness and underlying rage, as well as her over-identification with a patient’s right to a peaceful death.
This lack of subtlety extends to the acting, which (like the writing) is mostly one-note and hysterical. There’s a lot of shouting, banging of fists and over-emotionalising. Once again, the exceptions are the scenes mentioned above between Wolffe and Sami, and the final scene between doctor and priest.
Stevenson herself is a riveting actor in terms of razor-sharp intelligence, emotional force, technical precision and sheer stage presence. She also possesses great comic timing, even in otherwise humourless scenes. However even she resorted to shouting from the first scene of the play onwards.
The rest of the performances – with the exception of Hill and Parker (at least in his final scene) – were woefully under-par, wooden and two-dimensional. Admittedly this was partly due to the writing and the cross-casting, which many in the cast appeared to be struggling with.
Things weren’t helped by the design. Hildegard Bechtier’s streamlined IKEA-style set featured a concave blond wood-panelled back wall, a long functional table surrounded by benches in matching tones, and a white floor that revolved slowly during various dramatic ‘turning points’. These were accompanied by heavy-handed underscoring (sound design and composition by Tom Gibbons) from a live drummer (Hannah Ledwidge) seated on a platform above the back wall.
All these elements – the curved back wall, the furniture and blocking (with the actors seated around the table in crucial scenes), the use of the revolve, and the live percussion – made it difficult to hear the dialogue, despite the use of radio-mics (it was hard to tell from where I was sitting if the actors were wearing these or if they were hidden on the set – possibly both). The curved back wall in particular seemed to create echo-points within the set that were compounded by the mics, so that the acoustic surrounding the actor’s voices constantly changed as they moved around.
As a result even Stevenson’s remarkable anchoring performance never quite landed for me because I couldn’t always understand what she was saying, even (and perhaps especially) when she was shouting; and the situation was even worse for some of the other actors.
In a sense, this flaw in the design goes to the heart of the problem. In a Guardian interview in 2015 Icke described his philosophy of adaptation as being ‘like using a foreign plug…you have to find the adaptor that will let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function’. This analogy betrays the crudity of his approach to adaptation, theatre, and the drama of ideas.
In comparison with Schnitzler’s original play, The Doctor is simplistic, one-sided, heavy-handed and hysterical. Ultimately it fails – not just as an adaptation of Professor Bernhardi, but on its own terms – because for all its sound and fury it never leaves the echo chamber of ideas to become a convincing or compelling drama.
*
Scottish playwright Kieran Hurley’s new play Mouthpiece – produced by Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre Company and directed by the company’s previous Artistic Director Orla O’Loughlin – is a much more tightly woven play than The Doctor. It also deals with a more focused clash of ideas on the battlefield of cultural and identity politics – this time over class rather than race or religion. However once again it ultimately came across as overwrought in conception and overcooked in performance.
Like Educating Rita, it’s essentially a two-hander about a man and a woman of different ages and class backgrounds who establish a mentor-relationship that becomes a love story – and which founders because of the contradictions between all of these factors, especially class. The obvious precursor to both plays in terms of the drama of ideas is Shaw’s Pygmalion.
The play is set in Edinburgh (as opposed to London or Liverpool in those two plays), and the city is almost a third character, with its own landscape, personality and contradictions. Scenes take place in inner-city cafes, art galleries and theatres, as well as a suburban housing-estate flat and – most memorably – the edge of a crag on a hilltop overlooking the city. All these settings feel convincing, and have the quality of lived experience – like the hospital setting in Professor Bernhardi (as opposed to that of The Doctor).
Libby (Shauna Macdonald) is a playwright in her forties who has hit a period of artistic and personal crisis and come back to Edinburgh from London after a promising early start to her career hit the doldrums. At the start of the play she appears to be contemplating suicide on the hilltop, but is rescued by Declan (Angus Taylor), an angry young unemployed teenager fresh out of juvenile detention who is also a gifted amateur artist and hangs out on the crag to sketch the view.
Libby cultivates a relationship with Declan and encourages his art. She reveals that she has a vested interest in doing so, as she hopes to reinvigorate her career by writing a play based on him called – you guessed it – Mouthpiece. The title is stolen from a drawing of his, depicting his little sister standing on the edge of the cliff with her arms outstretched and her mouth wide open – a drawing which is in turn inspired by seeing one of Bacon’s ‘Screaming Popes’ at the Scottish National Gallery when Libby takes him there on an excursion.
Things get out of hand when Declan’s own life spirals into crisis; Libby attempts to comfort him and an awkward sexual encounter ensues. When she attempts to continue their ‘professional’ relationship while enforcing some kind of emotional distance, and then shows him the ending of the play (which we don’t at this stage get to hear) for approval, he flies into a rage, and abuses her for exploiting him and appropriating his material to write a piece of poverty-porn.
In the final (and most theatrically intriguing) act of the play, Declan shows up at the opening night of Mouthpiece at the Traverse Theatre, and confronts Libby (from a seat in the actual audience) during the post-show Q&A. (For me this was where a more interesting version of play began, and could have unfolded in its entirety.) Eventually he storms the stage and threatens her at knife-point in an outburst of toxic aggression. (This was a bit of a stretch for me, and reminded me of similar moments in The Doctor when the playwright’s own hysterical desire for drama seemed to outstrip psychological plausibility on the part of the characters – notwithstanding slightly generic back-stories about anger management or unresolved grief.) A police chase ensues (the play having well and truly jumped the shark for me by this point), culminating in a cliff-hanging final scene. One more draft, please.
Mouthpiece is a more intimate play than The Doctor, and was performed in the relatively small black box of the Odeon Theatre (although a larger venue or more open stage – perhaps more like the Traverse itself – would have been exciting, especially for the final act). Kai Fischer’s basic black two-level set and occasional furniture provided for upstage and downstage scene changes between hill-top, café, flat, art gallery and theatre, although a bare stage would arguably have been even more effective. Lighting (also by Fischer) and sound (designed and composed by Kim Moore) were appropriately minimal.
Unfortunately (as with The Doctor) the performances were unnecessarily ‘big’ (especially for the venue) and involved a lot of shouting, which was understandable on a windswept hilltop but seemed redundant elsewhere (even in the final act). Macdonald frequently got stuck in a register of fragile self-pity, especially in her long monologue in the café about being a hard-done-by and misunderstood playwright. Personally I felt that the play worked best as a satire on well-intentioned but self-absorbed middle-class writers who are unable to relinquish their power and privilege; and there was a lot of comedy in the writing that wasn’t realized onstage.
Taylor’s performance was much more robust and self-mocking, assisted by Declan’s sometimes hilariously incomprehensible ‘Embra’ dialect. Nevertheless the character’s sense of social isolation was deeply moving; and his outrage totally understandable (even if his final outburst of rage was unconvincing).
In the end – again like The Doctor - despite a fine central performance, Mouthpiece remained trapped by its own ideas, rather than taking flight as a living, breathing organism.
As the coronavirus is teaching us: all our ideas are ultimately as insubstantial as gossamer when torn asunder by the impact of material reality.
*
The Doctor was at the Dunstan Playhouse from 27 February to 1 March.
Mouthpiece was at the Odeon Theatre from 6 to 14 March.
*
Postscript: on the drama of ideas, naturalism and the current crisis
Both The Doctor and Mouthpiece arguably belong to a tradition known as ‘the drama of ideas’: a phrase that resonates strongly in an era of political, economic, social, cultural, ecological and now epidemiological crisis such as the one we’re currently living through. This sense of crisis is heightened by the current pandemic, which has in turn been amplified by the economic reality of globalisation – as well as an ideology of neo-liberalism that has left the world so unprepared to handle realities like the coronavirus (or climate change) because it prioritises individual prosperity over collective needs.
This atmosphere of global ‘crisis’ (the word itself refers in a medical context to the ‘decisive point’ in an illness) also prevailed during the era in which the drama of ideas emerged – along with the literary and dramatic movement called Naturalism with which it’s more or less co-extensive.
We might define the former as plays in which a conflict of ideas, opinions and values (rather than interests, needs or desires) becomes the substance of the dramatic action, usually in the form of prolonged debate (although arguably these interests, needs or desires underlie the ideas, opinions or values in question). As such it’s a tradition that goes back to Greek Tragedy.
Naturalism on the other hand refers to a certain historically determined and circumscribed idea of ‘nature’ – and more specifically ‘human nature’ – which in turn owes something to the ideas of Darwin, heredity and evolution, as well as their various social, political, psychological and philosophical offshoots. It too has ancient origins (going back at least to Lucretius).
Nevertheless Naturalism and the drama of ideas in their modern form took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As is well known, the period in question led to two world wars, as well as genocides and other crimes against humanity. It’s also worth noting in the current context that this sense of crisis was intensified by viral epidemics; the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu, for example, infected more than 500 million people between 1918 and 1920, and killed somewhere between 30 and 100 million (far more than the combined military and civilian casualties resulting from the First World War).
Needless to say I’m not suggesting that the drama of ideas or Naturalism caused or contributed to those deaths. Nevertheless these historical movements – and the works that sprang from them – reflect something about their times, and perhaps we can learn something from them.
Perhaps we can also learn something from the way that the drama of ideas and Naturalism have been misunderstood, in a way that illuminates our current situation.
*
As historical repertoire, both the drama of ideas and Naturalism are now looked on somewhat askance, notwithstanding their persistence as contemporary genres and styles on the stage and screen (large and small). The plays of Bernard Shaw for example are now rarely performed; and the work of his precursor Ibsen has been left like road-kill not far behind, at least on English-speaking stages – with the signal exception of adaptations by contemporary ‘auteur-directors’.
In part this is due to a characteristically tendentious interpretation and appropriation of Ibsen on the part of Shaw himself (in terms of Shaw’s social realism as opposed to Ibsen’s fundamentally romantic individualism). This strong misreading in turn influenced the reception of both playwrights, as well as the entire subsequent history of English-language theatre, especially in terms of acting that favoured the intellect and the voice over the emotions and the rest of the body (Shaw’s philosophy of ‘vitalism’ – which to some extent he shared with Ibsen – notwithstanding).
A similar misreading is also true of Naturalism. Admittedly the plays of Strindberg (or at least an early work like Miss Julie) and especially Chekhov have fared somewhat better on the English-language stage than those of Ibsen (or even Shaw). This prevalence is however due to two fundamental misconceptions. The first is a simplistic reduction of Naturalism considered as a historical movement – which had philosophical implications in terms of content as well as form – to ‘naturalism’ considered as a genre of writing or style of acting that is purely formal and equated with verisimilitude. This reduction leads to a notion of being convincing or life-like which is fundamentally different from – and even opposed to – being truthful or real.
The second and more technical but no less reductive misconception of naturalism – which relates to acting in particular – is an English-language interpretation of Stanislavsky that is just as tendentious as the Shavian reading of Ibsen. This interpretation focuses primarily on textual ‘units’, ‘bits’ or ‘beats’, verbal ‘actions’ and psychological ‘objectives’ rather than more primal and fundamentally non-verbal forms of behaviour and motivation. For example ‘task’ is a more accurate translation than ‘objective’ of the Russian word zadacha; and Stanislavsky himself soon abandoned the term kusok (‘bit’ – as in a slice of bread or a piece of meat) in favour of the more clearly material ‘facts’, ‘events’ or ‘episodes’. Needless to say this misreading of Stanislavsky has had a huge impact on the subsequent understanding of Ibsen and Chekhov – the two playwrights (along with Shakespeare) whose works Stanislavsky most frequently wrote about, acted in, taught and directed (though Chekhov famously disagreed with Stanislavsky about the latter’s productions of the former’s plays).
In fact Ibsen, Chekhov, Stanislavsky and perhaps even Shaw himself are long overdue for a re-evaluation (at least in the Anglosphere) that focuses more on the body (and especially sexuality) rather than being typically performed by actors who appear to be dead from the neck down. This tendency is especially prevalent on the English-speaking stage, as well as in British, Anglophile and more generally White culture –including Australia and to a much lesser extent the United States (partly because of the pervasive influence of African-American culture there).
However the tendency ultimately springs from an elevation of ideas over reality, the mind over the body, the abstract over the concrete, language over other forms of action, and the symbolic over the real, which goes back at least as far as Plato. As a way of thinking and being, this habit is not merely theoretical or aesthetic, but has practical and political implications: for example when it comes to prioritising ‘the economy’ over society (or nature), profits over people, debt-reduction over risk-reduction, or financial over physical and environmental health. This has become glaringly obvious in the current period of crisis, especially with regard to the cornovirus and climate change.
To return to the drama of ideas: in the case of contemporary English-speaking playwrights (not to mention screenwriters), what might be called the ‘idealist’ version of this tradition is still very much alive (or at least on life-support). Think of the regular and popular programming of plays by Tom Stoppard or David Hare in the UK, or David Williamson and Joanna Murray-Smith in Australia. In the United States, the genre took a more heightened and visceral turn – in part due to the influence of Arthur Miller, and more recently Angels in America – for underlying reasons which have to do with a very different relationship to language, class, ideology, and the heritage of European as well as African-American culture.
In film and TV (in both English and non-English speaking countries) the drama of ideas and naturalism have taken root and thrived, with feedback effects on theatre itself. In part this has to do with the displacement of theatre by the large and small screen for the purposes of mass entertainment in the course of the 20th century. More specifically, dramatic writers interested in communicating with a mass audience have increasingly migrated to a mass medium (TV) for reasons of ongoing employment and artisic influence in a much more writer-driven industry than theatre or film. In terms of scale, format and attention-span the small screen is also better suited than the stage (or the big screen) to genres like the drama of ideas or naturalism that typically favour dialogue (or more precisely talk) over action; workplace or domestic situations over large-scale settings like cities or landscapes (which are more easily rendered in novels or films); and long-term character development (or the lack thereof) over the exigencies of a well-crafted classical three-act plot.
More recently – and partly in response to the flocking of audiences and writers to film and TV in particular – within theatre itself one might point to the dethronement of the playwright by the ‘auteur-director’ (in this case aping the medium of film, where the director has always been the leading creative artist and principal ‘author’ of the work). This has its own set of problems, as the writing and acting tend to suffer as a result, unless the director has a background in acting and writing as well directing, a preternatural gift for all three, or a generous capacity for collaboration.
There’s also been a tendency for theatre acting to become more and more ‘naturalistic’ or ‘filmic’ – a tendency reinforced by the ubiquitous use of radio-mics. The latter is partly necessitated by the similarly ‘filmic’ use of ‘sound’, which means that the actors’ voices have to become part of the ‘mix’ in order to be heard. One of the consequences of this (especially the use of head and body mics) is that the acting becomes less fully embodied and more ‘head’ related. The increasing use of live-feed video (typically involved big-screen close-ups and ‘head shots’) compounds this tendency even further.
On European as opposed to English-language stages, the drama of ideas and Naturalism have always been interpreted in more physical and heightened terms. Productions of Ibsen or Chekhov in Europe are typically staged and performed in ways that reflect the content and form of the plays themselves, not only by setting them in a contemporary and local context but also by using a more physical and heightened acting-style. Both these strategies are truer to the radical spirit of the original texts than the museum-like staging, acting and diction still predominant in the Anglosphere.
Recent attempts to adopt this more ‘European’ approach on the part of English-speaking auteur-directors have typically imposed ‘anti-naturalistic’ staging (in terms of concept and design) onto writing (often their own) and performances that remain resolutely and even banally ‘naturalistic’ or ‘filmic’ in style. Once again, a lopsided approach to the drama of ideas and naturalism is apparent here.
Perhaps this distortion in theory and practice is not confined to the sphere of theatre, but also applies to the political, economic, social, cultural, ecological and epidemiological crisis we’re currently living through.
