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Theatre

"Should you suit the actions to words, or words to actions? That is the question!"

                                                                   - Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Since Peter Stein had 'Orestie' perform in Athens when it was the first ECoC in 1985, there have been staged significant plays when European Capitals of Culture hosted theatre. Since Ancient Greek tragedy, it can be a way to take measure and to show how to get out of vicious cycles of mere revenge ending only in tragedy.

One amazing thing about Ancient Greek theatres was how they were spread out throughout the Mediterranean. It shows that back then they knew already how to disseminate cultural and human values through theatre.

Likewise Antigone by Sophocles is full of tragedy but also about human dignity when it comes to burial rites. The punishment Antigone suffered is most telling. For she ends up in a no man's land where one is neither alive but also not yet dead. She is imprisoned in a cave walled in so that she cannot get out and there she has to await her fate of turning to dust just as she wanted to cover the body of her brother with dust to give him a dignified burial. Klaus Heinrich calls rightly so 'dust' the most powerful metaphor for thinking.

Unfortunately this 'no man's land' continues to exist in real life. All kinds of tight borders are drawn more often out of indifference to the plight of others. If theatre can alter this, then surely by developing on stage another kind of publicness: “why you men do not speak out?”

Until Shakespeare, theatre was played under normal daylight conditions but once theatre moved indoors, the manipulation of light added another dimension to drama. Unfortunately it meant as well no longer informing fully the audience as to what was going on not only on stage, but behind the scene.

No wonder then that it became a standard phrase that people do not wish to know what is happening behind the scene for then they cannot live with that. However, this truism opened up the theatre to use of 'mendacity' already advocated by Machiavelli but perfected in Goethe's Faust performed by Gründgens. This actor was described by Klaus Mann as capable to convince politicians that they can act in an evil way and still get away with it. That too became a general saying, and was applied even to Strauss Kahn, insofar as 'you can get away with everything, provided you don't get caught'.

Naturally theatre without a director is inconceivable. There is the remarkable staging of Hölderlin's Empedocles by Michael Grüber of the Schaubühne. He used a stage set which showed the deep schism in the world. The stage set had two parts with people waiting on the one side for the leader to show up again and on the other side the leader or Empedocles trying to free himself in vain from his slave who had given up everything to serve him.

As this master-slave model translates easily in modern times to the use of slave language, it is worthwhile to research which other theatrical plays touch upon this. It is a theme examined by the philosopher Ernst Bloch and means people talk in a masked i.e. coded way especially when facing higher up authority. It means a curse means praise and vice versa. ¹

An ethnologist doing research into gang culture in Liverpool during the ECoC 2008 year discovered very much the use of this language. Interestingly enough, Liverpool did open a museum on slave history in 2007, that is the year before being European Capital of Culture. It would have been interesting to connect this with the topic of slave language as this has limited until now human emancipation not only in the colonies but perpetuates an unjust class society in Britain.

All the more reason to wonder why Liverpool 2008 did not include theatre in its official programme. The story by John Bennett about the theatrical performances he staged in the Royal Court Theatre of Liverpool is all the more amazing since it was a real creation of not only theatrical plays but of an active audience. ²

It has to be observed that Samuel Beckett is much loved these days. One reason given for that popularity is that he seems best to address times marked by a third kind of war, namely an economic one.

Interestingly enough, theatre changed once the Berlin Wall came down since contradictions in West and East have now to be shown differently.

If one follows alone the traces left behind by the Polish director Grotowski, then the impetus to do theatre is related to a wish to interact with the audience along ethnological lines reminding of old rituals giving the human voice prime importance.

In Vilnius 2009, they put on a 24 hour play about one citizen spending the time in a Russian bunker. It was a play intended to overcome nostalgia for the Russian past with its Totalitarian rule. ³

Hatto Fischer

Athens July 2014

Footnotes:

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