Publisher’s Opening words

Yun-Cheol Kim
President, the IATC

It is my great joy finally to launch Critical Stages, the IATC Webjournal. Ever since being elected to the presidency of the International Association of Theatre Critics at the 2008 Sofia congress, I have been preoccupied with creating this online journal. There are abundant reasons and motivations for creating the journal, among which two are the most important. First, the theatre is in a real crisis. There is no time in history when the theatre has lost its social function as much as it has in our time. In Europe, people have already begun even to speak of the death, not the crisis, of the theatre. In response, a journal on theatre criticism can help make theatre matter in society. Second, theatre criticism itself is in critical condition. With its print space and airtime severely reduced around the world, it has lost its power to impact society—that is, not only the theatre artists but the theater-goers, as well. A journal such as this one may help theatre criticism to recover its vitality, so it can serve the theatre arts and the society.

Critical Stages will reach out to theatre practitioners, audiences, and general readers, whom we critics have somewhat isolated from our inner circles of critical discourse with a communication-unfriendly writing style, particularly since we were inundated with, and fascinated by, post-modern or post-dramatic theories of theatre. I firmly believe that the most important function of theatre criticism is—and should remain—to generate interest in the theatre arts in society. And that interest cannot be generated by our inaccessibly esoteric, equivocating critical language. Interest can be aroused only through interesting writing—and by “interesting” I mean: 1) the criticism that is practiced is accessible--or even journalistic, if you will; 2) the criticism has academic depth in its analysis and reading; 3) the criticism has literary value in itself, in both style and creativity; and 4) the criticism conveys our whole theatre experience and connects it to our daily lives. With all these in mind, Critical Stages will seek more and more ways to ensure that theatre and theatre criticism thrive to their fullest extents by reaching out to the world and generating social interest in the theatre.

On behalf of the International Association of Theatre Critics, I offer my deep gratitude to the Seoul Foundation for Arts & Culture and its president, Mr. Ahn Ho-sang, for kindly sponsoring the publication and operations of the journal. By their sponsorship of the journal, the Foundation demonstrates eloquently its understanding of the importance of the theatre arts, and of theatre criticism, in our violent, anti-intellectual world.

I would also like to express my deepest thanks to all the members of the editorial board of Critical Stages, especially its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Maria Helena Serodio. Without her enormous commitment, sacrifices, and editorial competence, Critical Stages would never have been born. I would also like to extend special thanks to those who have participated in the editorial work from outside IATC, such as Dr. Patrice Pavis, internationally known French theorist, and Dr. Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths College, U.K. Last but certainly not least, my gratitude is cordially offered to Dr. Lissa Tyler Renaud, master teacher of directing and acting, and Dr. Michel Vaïs, Secretary General of IATC, who have tended to the authenticity of the journal’s official languages, English and French, in those texts written by non-native speakers. I want to give my personal thanks to Myoung-Jae “Andrew” Yim, Webmaster, and Assistants Yu-jin Kim, and Ji-soo Nam, who have worked so hard to launch the journal on time. 

Finally, I would like to express my special thanks to all the contributors to this inaugural issue for their insightful critical articles.

Norén's diary gives critics a lesson or two

Le journal de Norén donne une leçon (ou deux) aux critiques

Matti Linnavuori¹

Resumé

L'auteur suédois Lars Norén (né en 1944) a publié son journal de cinq ans sous le titre En dramatikers dagbok (Bonniers, 2008). L'ouvrage d'environ 1700 pages couvre la période d'août 2000 à l'été de 2005.

Norén y traite davantage de ses repas et de ses vêtements que de ses créations. Pendant la période couverte par son journal, il a terminé plusieurs pièces et en a dirigé non seulement en Suède, mais aussi en Norvège, en Allemagne et en Suisse-France.

Norén préfère les acteurs qui « se surprennent  eux-mêmes. Je veux qu'ils soient attentifs aux choses qu'ils ne savent pas sur eux-mêmes. » (18 sept. 2003).

On trouve dans ce livre plusieurs attaques verbales contre les médias suédois, certains critiques et l'establishment théâtral.

Who is Lars Norén?

The Swedish playwright Lars Norén (born 1944) published his first book of poetry at the age of nineteen. In 1973 came his first stage play. A prolific playwright, he is now widely translated and performed in Europe and the United States.
From 1999 to 2007 Norén was the artistic director of Swedish Riksteatern, a touring company. Since summer of 2009 he is the artistic director of Folkteatern in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Swedish playwright Lars Norén published his diary of five years (En dramatikers dagbok, Bonniers 2008).

The book is a heavy volume with unnumbered pages. Even his native Swedes have made varying counts, but ca 1700 pages is a fairly reliable figure.

Norén kept a diary from August 2000 to summer 2005 and not only that, he then retyped it, apparently with only very light editing. He writes with a typewriter, not a computer.

All that time Norén was busy directing, and writing his own plays. He sometimes mentions an idea for a new play, but seldom goes into detail. By reading the diary one cannot gain an insight into how Norén treats or solves his artistic problems, only that he rewrites and revises continuously. Instead, the diary paints an accurate picture of the conditions, the landscape in which he does his creative work.

Norén seems to be more interested in designer clothes, furniture and music than any other art form. He buys a lot of books but hardly mentions reading them. Well, The Castle by Franz Kafka he finds the most erotic book ever.

Norén rarely goes to the theatre to see the work of other directors, but is always delighted to hear from his trusted friends that such-and-such a production was bad.

The diary is very outspoken; e.g. Norén feels free to attack the highest theatrical authority in the country, namely Ingmar Bergman, by noting that "Bergman's productions of the last ten years have been like hospital food, already eaten up and shitted out when it is served" (September 9, 2002, my translations from Swedish).

Meals and roses

Looking for potentially scandalous outspokenness is, however, not the only or even the best reward one gets from this giant. Besides, the sheer mass of the book will dishearten any trivial reader, but at the same time, no one could be as trivial as Norén himself.

He registers the content of his meals so carefully that the repetition makes a nauseating read. He buys expensive designer clothes and complains he cannot afford them. He regularly falls in love with the most beautiful actress in his production and makes his presence felt in her life. He toils in the garden of his summer house, where "the roses are unheard-of" (July 7, 2002).

Early on Norén decides to publish the diary. From then on he also keeps repeating that he will have no friends after publication date. He writes down hearsay, because after all, this is a private diary. He did not directly witness a critic fall asleep during a performance, but when Norén published his name, this was received as an accusation.

The relationship between Norén and the media was strained to begin with. In 1999, escaped neo-Nazi inmates from his prison production 7:3 killed two policemen in the village of Malexander, and the media suggested Norén should publicly admit at least partial guilt.

No wonder then that hell according to Norén is the news desk of the tabloid paper Expressen (Apr 27, 2004). Norén declares one Swedish critic "a vulgar alcoholic" (May 27, 2001) and another one "a dog with lipstick" (Sep 20, 2001).

A journalistic responsibility

Norén seems to feel that the media by its sheer presence may endanger one's artistic integrity. "I feel proud to have Dagens Nyheter (a Swedish daily) as my enemy. I don't want to see how a flattering cautiousness would creep into my language and into my understanding of the world" (Nov 2000).

This does not mean that Norén would categorically reject journalism as such and individual journalists. Someone from Dagens Nyheter sat in the rehearsals of The Seagull and offered his article for Norén to read prior to publication. "Actually I think it is wrong. One should not sanction something others write about one. A journalist should be free in his opinions and points of view. If he wishes to check facts it is naturally another thing. But for his points of view he should be responsible himself" (May 12, 2001).

Tired of theatre

From a geographical distance it is possible to overlook the offensiveness and to read the diary as a lesson in understanding acting. Norén is a playwright, who first took to directing at the age of 49, but he discerns nuances and meanings in acting that a critic also should be able to perceive.

According to Norén, one Swedish critic is tired and disgusted because she must see so much theatre, and to get a reaction out of her the stage grammar needs to become more and more brutal (Sept 22, 2002). I share her experience, which is all the more reason to turn to Norén's observations. I suppose many critics can also identify with Norén's self-description: "I am never calm, happy and relaxed. Not at the same time" (Aug 15, 2002).

The sentences are so open and beautiful that I am becoming a reluctant fan, and then this: "I have been sorrowful for the last two weeks, or more precisely, my entire life" (July 10, 2001). Be it self-pity or disarming frankness, nevertheless it is excellent writing.

About acting

Norén values no-nonsense acting. I want to have an actor who is not deformed by the skill of acting, he writes, someone who does not continuously observe himself and his position on the stage (Oct 31, 2000).

Norén offers an example of how not to act. Instead of respecting the memory of a recently deceased Swedish star actor, Norén blames the star for making his co-actors look bad. Not because he was so damn much better, Norén writes, but because he stole life from them. He stole their reaction by not reacting to them (Feb 7, 2004).

When directing, Norén says, I am interested only in what the actors don't know about themselves. "All else, the hidden, the injuries, the shortcomings, what must be compensated for, they have learnt to live with" (Feb 17, 2001).

When in the audience, Norén keeps his eyes on the actor who is being spoken to, not the one who is speaking (May 9, 2001).

Actors have a habit, which is perhaps intellectual laziness. They like to say that the actor must defend or even idealize his character to be able to play him, particularly when the character makes himself guilty of unforgivable crimes. Norén dismisses this, because actors don't usually go to that much trouble. "They often play themselves without any form of idealizing or even defending" (June 25, 2003).

The Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) is the most prestigious theatre in Sweden. Apparently the actors who have made it in Dramaten feel a social pressure to be coy about it. Norén is not amused: "I am sick and tired of spoiled actors who want nothing more than be with Dramaten, even though they brag how awful it is in there. How they long to get away from Dramaten, how they long after something meaningful. No one wants to be there, but they are there anyway. No one wants to be there, but it is extremely cool to be there" (March19, 2001).

About directing

During the writing of the diary Norén directed not only for Riksteatern in Sweden, but also in Norway, many and Switzerland-France.

Norén compares his own directing to playing a musical instrument. "I listened to Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt in concert at Olympia in 1960. One knows which phrase Sonny Stitt will play next. With Miles one does not. One knows it with most actors. But there are some who surprise me almost every time. I want those with whom I work now to surprise themselves. I want them to pay attention to things they don't know about themselves (Sept 18, 2003).

Norén does not value the fashionable way of directing. "Our era looks for directors who have a command of the visual, but totally lack knowledge of the actors' work. They are clever at making pictures and at throwing in music that others have created, but there is nothing behind all that" (Feb 18, 2003).

As a guest director in Berlin Norén is acutely aware that the local audiences have seen it all. He plans to have long silences within his the dialogue in his piece and warns himself: "The Berlin audience has seen it all, and if a pause is one second too long, they will say Now we know what this is all about" (June 19, 2001).

And the Berlin critics are very predictable. "The German critics become irritated if one describes problems with people in their own age and situation. They don't like to think about how they're doing. That is something they want to forget when they go to the theatre. They want to see how much more miserably and disgustingly others live (Dec 3, 2001).

About writing

Directing the Seagull Norén makes a comment about the ending, where characters long for a better future two hundred years from now. "We are those people and we long back in time to Chekhov's days. We long for the hope they had. We no longer believe, except individually and when we are still young, that the world can become a better place" (Feb 17, 2001).

Norén refrains from interpreting the characters from his own typewriter. "I try to write in such a way that the characters are just as mysterious and anonymous at the end of the play as they were at the beginning. Not because they are mysterious, irrational, incomprehensible – which they are – but because it is fundamentally impossible to gain knowledge or understanding about what a human being is and why she acts the way she does" (Nov 5, 2003).

“War” Over The Persians

Savas Patsalidis[1]

Author: Aeschylus. Direction: Dimiter Gotcheff. Stage Design and Costumes: Mark Lummert. Production: The National Theatre of Greece. Theatre Venue: Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. Framework: The Hellenic Festival 2009.

Ever since its official opening some 56 years ago, the Festival held at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus has been the cause of numerous and quite often loud debates about its “proper” role: to whom should it cater and to what extent should the audience’s horizon of expectations be allowed to determine the kind of plays approved for production there? Should Epidaurus be open to all artistic trends and traditions (anything goes?) or should it be limited only to the revival of Greco-Roman theatre?

For the vast majority of theatregoers, Epidaurus is a “haunted” site, part of the collective memory and, as such, it has certain limits. It cannot be turned into a supermarket or a spectacular “shopping mall.” Nor, on the other hand, can it be switched into an exclusive, elitist site of innovations, which would be quite contrary to its original inception. When a theatre hosts a maximum of 11,500 viewers, it leaves not much room for experimentation, which by definition is anti-popular (or non-popular). Epidaurus, the argument goes, should be the meeting point of only outstanding Greco-Roman works—in other words, a meeting point of history and collective memory.

Lest

there be no doubt: Of course there were landmark productions all these decades in this milieu de memoire, quality productions that garnered critical and (inter)national acclaim, establishing the Festival’s legacy as the leader in the field of classical drama. The problem is that the people in charge failed to keep up with the changes taking place inside the theatre itself and in the world in general. Thus, instead of maturing with the passing of time, they allowed the Festival to get older, more wrinkled and thus less inviting. It is only in the last few years that there has been a radical shift of priorities and perspective. The new administration that took over in 2005 felt that the Festival was in reality divorced from what was going on in the world, and that it mostly operated as if its sole responsibility was to prove again and again the grandeur of the classics through productions that were, at least most of them, re-stagings of “remembered” recipes. In the mind of the new administrators (under the artistic leadership of Yiorgos Loukos), what was needed was a new way to exploit the site’s potential to invigorate a re-examination of national (and theatre) identity and memory in relation to the global context without creating any kind of chauvinism. So the first thing they did was to introduce less rigid patterns with the hope of opening up the history/collective memory binary and thus make the Festival more hospitable to the new, the poly-vocal and the unexpected and thus a better player in the new European culture that is in the making. The decision was clear early enough: With the exception of the National and State Theatres, no one else would have access to the ancient site unless s/he had something original and fresh to propose. This bold move inevitably left out many artists and ensembles that for many years had showed up there irrespective of the quality of their current work. In the last three years, new names from the local and foreign scene have come to re-vitalize in their own way the prospects of the Festival with more cheeky, unpredictable and rowdy stage works that have met the warm approval of the young but also the scepticism or disapproval of the old-timers. Last year, Vasiliev’s deconstructive reading of Iphighenia caused an uproar; and so did Peter Stein’s production of Electra the year before. This year it was the The Persians, directed by Dimiter Gotscheff, the famous Bulgarian director now living in Germany, who first staged the play for the Deutsches Theater in 2006 and won first prize as best production of the year. Not this time, though, with the production of the National Theatre of Greece.

The Persians (472 B.C) is set in Susa, immediately before and after word of the defeat at Salamis is carried to the ruling family. Its protagonists are King Xerxes, his mother Atossa, and the ghost of his father Darius (the first appearance of a ghost in extant drama). There is also a chorus of old men and a messenger (who has the privilege of delivering the first long messenger speech in extant tragedy, a thrilling and brilliant piece of work). Critical debate over the play has traditionally focused on whether it is truly a tragedy and whether it is sympathetic to the Persians or self-congratulating to the Athenians. This aside, it is the sort of play whose politics, although very difficult to re-construct, can still accommodate a lot of recent, familiar facts; and that explains its popularity among contemporary directors who usually turn to the play during or near a time of war. In 1993, Peter Sellars and his translator/adaptor, Robert Auletta, produced the play in order to criticize the Americans’ involvement in the war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet their decision to identify the victorious Athenians with the victorious Americans drew negative response, for it inverted, according to critics, the David-and-Goliath relationship of the original. Also, the imposition of a simplistic anti-Americanism onto a multi-layered classic found many critics very sceptical. As for the equation of the United States with fifth-century Greece trying to escape the vice of the vast Persian Empire, this also met general critical disapproval.

In similar fashion, Gotscheff on a bare stage with only a blueish wall at the back dismembered history to remember modern Iran/Persia and thus invite the sort of introspection on otherness, loss, theocracy, tyranny, citizenship and nationhood Aeschylus might have wished to encourage. He changed the all male chorus of the original with an all female chorus (seven in total) to show that women are those who suffer the most by the deeds of men—a reading that most critics turned down on the grounds that it could not be supported by the text, where the chorus (of wise old men) is not just a collective body that participates in the telling of the story or laments personal loss, but is also a collective body that participates in a game of power that excludes women. Also, virtually all disapproved of the director’s dramaturgical option to replace the Messenger by seven young actors in T-shirts, recalling Muslim rebels, and through them (and the female narrator) create a soundspace of words spoken as an independent unit (a technique inspired by Brecht and Heiner Müller) that slowed down the action’s tempo and re-inforced the play’s alienating effect (Sellars in his own production also attempted to create a similar effect by using an oud player). Their argument was that by veering off into territory almost alien to the text itself, the director stripped it bare of its inner rhythms and transformed it into a soulless, static mass. Some critics even went as far as to argue that Epidaurus is harmed by artists who, unaware of the history of performing the classics, show up with readings that are either obsolete, unfounded or too narcissistic to move a big crowd, let alone contribute to the ongoing dialogue between ancients and moderns.

The Persians is a very special play. It is not only the least dramatic play of all Greek tragedies but also the most difficult to mount. There is no basic conflict, no action at all; just information about a lost war by those who are defeated. The plot, in other words, is one of tragic discovery rather than tragic decision. To make his critique of contemporary theocratic fundamentalisms and imperialist wars more effective, Gotscheff overwrote the play’s version of history onto contemporary memories of war, tyranny and abuse of power. He shuttled back and forth between irony and tragedy, melodrama and farce in a recreated, clunky dramatic environment stripped off its elegiac tones, its swift and soaring poetry, a choice which in the mind of many viewers did not work because it took away the beauty of the play’s verse, weakened the power of its shifts from trochaic to iambic meter and dissolved its deliberate ambiguity, thus condemning it to a colorless and emotionless re-reading of the modern world.

Through the years, Gotscheff has repeatedly presented highly challenging and imaginative theatre and these reservations, sound as they are, at least some of them, do not erase the artistic value of his venture at Epidaurus. By re-inventing (and re-investing) the past in living memories, he showed how the interplay of history, memory and the present can take on many meanings and thus cause different reactions. Theatre has the ability to connect an audience with its present and its forbears; and I think Gotscheff’s reading deserves credit for trying to achieve just that without spoon-feeding its context to us; he deserves credit for provoking our imagination and personal associations; for trying to make us re-evaluate our position as audience members, to dig deeper into our own experiences, to remember and to relate. He deserves credit for exhibiting postmodernity’s inability to escape a history of wars and violence; in brief, for showing us once again that Aeschylus’ play is painfully contemporary even close to 25 centuries after its premiere.

As for the cast (a very talented group of mostly young people), they believed in their director’s thought-provoking vision and did their best to live up to it. They succeeded nobly.

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[1] SAVAS PATSALIDIS is Professor of Theatre Theory and History at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece) and also a theatre reviewer. He is on the board of the Greek Association of Theatre Critics and is a member of the National Endowment for the Arts committee. He is the author of ten books on drama. His latest work is a two-volume study of American Theatre (University Studio Press).

Le plaisir de jouer avec virtuosité: Leichtes Spiel. Neun Personen einer Frau

Patrice Pavis[1]

Auteur: Botho Strauss. Dramaturgie: Rolf Schröder et Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle. Mise en scène: Dieter Dorn. Scénographie et costumes: Jürgen Bosse. Théâtre: Residenztheater, Munich, 2009

Dans sa dernière pièce, créée au Residenztheater de Munich en mai 2009, Leichtes Spiel. Neun Personen einer Frau, Botho Strauss reste fidèle à son écriture. Il ose écrire « poétiquement », métaphoriquement, sans que le lecteur puisse facilement transposer les situations en une interprétation assurée. Le lecteur comme le metteur en scène ne devrait donc pas tenter de traduire cette série de symboles ou d’images en un discours lisible et rassurant. Grâce à cette légèreté et cette élégance du trait, Botho Strauss donne au metteur en scène et aux acteurs la possibilité de trouver des situations de jeu certes inspirées par le texte, mais aussi originales dans l’invention scénique.

Dans sa récente mise en scène, Dieter Dorn trouve les moyens de servir cette écriture en scènes autonomes, seulement reliées par la présence d’une femme, que l’on perçoit à chaque fois derrière un masque ou sous une facette différents. Il souligne ou établit une cohérence dans le fil thématique de l’âge, du vieillissement, de l’itinéraire d’une femme, la « spätes Mädchen », la vieille fille, qui, comme Strauss, contemple sa vie passée et son parcours depuis le « jardin d’Eden jusqu’à la pièce verte » (p.108), cette « green room » des acteurs juste avant l’entrée en scène. Du rouge au vert : de la passion éprouvée pour ces neuf femmes tout de rouge vêtues et qui réapparaissent avec un élément de costume rouge, à la préparation vers la scène. Tout finit en théâtre, nous dit la dernière femme : « ipse mihi theatrum » (p.107) et la vie est une suite d’entrées en scène, qu’il s’agisse des sept âges de l’homme selon Shakespeare, ou des huit tomes d’une œuvre que l’artiste en rouge, mélange de jeune fille et de vieux briscard de la scène, énumère une dernière fois ou bien encore des neuf femmes dont l’existence a filtré depuis le vert paradis jusque sur la scène du théâtre (p.108), et dont nous percevons l’essentiel.

Dieter Dorn, pas plus que Botho Strauss, n’affiche évidemment cette symbolique. Il donne à ses acteurs « ein leichtes Spiel », un jeu léger qui n’alourdit pas les différentes scènes par de grandes images esthétisantes et explicatives. Grâce à quelques éléments de dispositif scénique, et surtout en faisant jouer ses acteurs à la fois rapidement et avec une caractérisation précise, il propose autant d’esquisses de la pièce, il encourage le spectateur à patienter, à ne pas se précipiter vers une interprétation trop rapide et définitive. Sa mise en scène sert admirablement l’écriture de Strauss, en préservant l’énigme de la fable, en n’en donnant pas une lecture nécessairement simplifiée, mais en fournissant les repères nécessaires pour identifier et s’identifier à ces âges et ces potentialités de la vie que nous transmettent les neuf femmes. La scénographie et les costumes de Jürgen Bosse, en filigrane la dramaturgie impeccable de Rolf Schröder et Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle confèrent à la pièce la même grâce juvénile, le même plaisir de jouer avec virtuosité mais sans prétention, et pour le spectateur patient la même intelligence inespérée des étapes de la vie et des visages de l’autre femme.

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[1] Patrice Pavis was professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Paris (1976-2007). He is currently professor in the department of Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Educated in the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud (1968-1972), where he studied German and French literature, he has published a Dictionary of theatre (translated in thirty languages), and books on Performance analysis, Contemporary French dramatists and Contemporary mise en scène. He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of London (Queen Mary), Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Bratislava. His most recent publication is: La Mise en scène contemporaine, Armand Colin, 2007.

Lorsque le Québec et la Martinique se croisent : Le Collier d’Hélène

Alvina Ruprecht[1]

Auteur : Carole Fréchette. Mise en scène : Lucette Salibur. Musique : Alfred Fantone. Scénographie, accessoires, costumes, graphisme : Ludwin Lopez. Distribution : Daniely Francisque (Hélène), Patrice Le Namouric (Nabil), Ruddy Sylaire (plusieurs personnages dans la ville), Lucette Salibur (la femme qui cherche son fils). Production : Théâtre du Flamboyant, 2009.

Le Collier d’Hélène (2000) a été traduit dans de nombreuses langues et joué à travers le monde. Créée en 2002 par Nabil El Azan et sa compagnie la Barraca composée de comédiens arabophones, puis reprise au Théâtre du Rond-point en 2003, la pièce vient d'être reprise encore une fois par El Azan avec une distribution palestinienne (voir la critique de Philippe Duvignal)[2]*. En juillet à Avignon, à la Chapelle du verbe incarné, nous avons pu voir une nouvelle mise en scène du Collier créée en 2007 à Fort-de-France par la martiniquaise Lucette Salibur : comédienne, metteuse en scène, fondateur du Now Théâtre en 1989, devenu le théâtre du Flamboyant en 1997. Lors de sa sortie en Martinique, le critique Roland Sabra qui dirige le site culturel Madinin-art, 

http://www.carleton.ca/francotheatres/spectacles_Le_Collier_Helene.html) a fait un compte rendu intéressant du spectacle, La compagnie de Salibur est important puisque cette comédienne est issue de la première formation professionnelle des acteurs, assurée par un stage organisé par Aimé Césaire en 1982. À la suite de cette formation, Césaire a créé sa troupe le Théâtre de la Soif nouvelle qui a marqué le théâtre de toute la région pendant 20 ans. Mais d’autres héritiers ont pris la relève et ils continuent à marquer l’activité théâtrale en Martinique.

Le Théâtre du Flamboyant est connu pour la diversité de son répertoire : des contes pour jeune public, et du théâtre des marionnettes à l’intention de tous publics, et des textes plus murs tels que Traversée d’après le récit d’ Xavier Orville ou La Ka espéré Godo, une version en créole de l’œuvre de Beckett traduite et adaptée par le poète martiniquais Monchoachi, jouée à la scène nationale de l’Atrium, à Fort-de-France et au Centre des Arts et de la Culture à Pointe –à-Pitre, en Guadeloupe.

Cette production du Collier est une réalisation extrêmement intéressante car elle resitue le texte québécois, dans une dynamique nouvelle. Le travail très dépouillé d’El Azan a eu recours aux films projetés sur un grand écran au fond du tréteau, évoquant une ville, ( peut-être Beyrouth) détruite par la guerre, mais mettant en valeur le personnage principal, Hélène, une française de passage dans le pays pour assister a un colloque universitaire. Très blonde, cette Européenne blanche est le symbole d’un premier monde arrogant, riche et indifférent aux souffrances des autres. Vision devenue sans doute assez stéréotypée de nos jours puisque les populations se déplacent, la richesse se distribue et que l’ethnie n’est plus du tout une indication des catégories politico-économiques associées à un individu.

Voici donc Daniely Francisque (comédienne martiniquaise très populaire actuellement), jeune bourgeoise antillaise (les références à la conférence universitaire ont été effacées) qui se retrouve dans un pays islamique et arabophone déchiré par la guerre. Certains y ont vu la Palestine, d’autres non, mais l’absence de précision est intentionnelle. Entourée de gens dont elle n’est même pas consciente de l’existence (c’est à peine si elle remarque qu’ils parlent une autre langue), elle cherche désespérément un collier de perles perdu quelque part dans cette ville où les habitants errent dans la détresse, la colère et la folie. Ces personnages victimes qui défilent dans les décombres, évoquées de manière très délicate par la scénographie, ne comprennent pas son affolement à cause d’un collier perdu, alors qu’ils ont perdu leurs familles, leurs maisons, leur vie entière. La rupture culturelle et économique entre Hélène et son entourage est totale et cette aliénation arrive à son comble au moment où Ruddy Sylaire, un pauvre qui erre dans la ville, saisit Hélène et la soulève en hurlant « on ne peut plus vivre comme ça ».

Hélène se déplace dans le taxi de ‘Nabil’, une voiture représentée par un pneu que l’acteur fait avancer par deux bâtons comme un jeu d’enfant. Mais ceci n’est pas du tout un jeu d’enfant lorsque cet homme calme, imperturbable, accompagne la femme dans sa quête de son objet fétiche, l’accumulation de tous les manques attribués à la société de consommation : la compassion, l’amour de l’autre et toutes les manifestations de la solidarité humaine. La pièce évolue au hasard des rencontres qui peu à peu, transforment Hélène. Elle peut enfin « voir » les autres, et elle peut enfin entendre le refrain « on ne peut plus vivre comme ça » et se reconnecter avec le monde.

Cette mise en scène, très physique, élimine les manifestations filmiques et situe les corps au centre du jeu. Parfois, l’énergie corporelle nous paraît très juste et nous engage à fond ; d’autres fois cet excès de mouvement perturbe, sans pour autant enlever de l’ensemble une impression de grande humanité, surtout lors de la scène finale entre le chauffeur de taxi Nabil (un chaleureux, sensuel et séduisant Patrice Le Namouric) et une Hélène épanouie (bien cernée par Daniely Francisque) , enfin libérée de sa quête névrotique. Ici, Francisque et Le Namouric se fondent l’un dans l’autre, fusionnés dans un élan de tendresse et de sensualité presque brûlante. En effet, Salibur met en évidence par les rythmes corporels l’intensité des émotions et les bruitages, pour insister sur la confusion et l’activité chaotique de cette ville étrange qui emporte la femme dans son tourbillon d’intensité. Une fois de plus, elle inscrit ce corps assaillis dans une chorégraphie inspirée des mouvements circulaires d’un Islam mystique, les rituels liturgiques soufistes des derviches tourneurs.

En revanche, au départ, Daniely Francisque, à la recherche de son bijou, est frappée par une hyperactivité névrotique qui, à mon avis, aurait pu se ralentir plus tôt, surtout puisque nous comprenons rapidement ce que cette frénésie corporelle signifie. L’arrivée de Ruddy Sylaire (un excellent Othello dans une mise en scène récente de Denis Marleau à Montréal) qui étale ses chiffons devenus des cadavres gisant dans la rue, se livre à des moments quasi burlesques qui me semblaient déplacés. Il est vrai que la présence de Sylaire est si forte que le moindre effort de cet acteur à la voix superbe prend des proportions énormes. Il faut ménager cet acteur, une force de la nature, ce que Denis Marleau et José Exélis (metteur en scène martiniquais et fondateur du « Théâtre des enfants de la mer») ont bien compris. De toute manière, une Hélène moins frénétique au début, aurait mieux mis en évidence l’explosion de colère de Sylaire qui arrive plus tard, lorsqu’il soulève une Hélène terrifiée dans un geste de violence qui annonce des vengeances meurtrières possibles. Un moment intéressant qui frôle une réflexion politique tout à fait à sa place. Ce moment cathartique selon la lecture de Salibur se retrouve aussi (mais marquée par un rythme plus hiératique) dans la rencontre tragique avec la mère à la recherche d’un fils disparu qu’elle savait déjà mort. Salibur, qui joue cette mère frappée par la folie, les larmes aux yeux, cerne avec une finesse extraordinaire, toutes les nuances de la situation tragique. Sa gestuelle d’une lenteur gracieuse lorsqu’elle manipule les tissus qui recouvrent sa tête, révélait un jeu discret et délicat qui donnait à sa douleur une délicatesse lumineuse. Une douceur presque maladive devant une telle horreur, qui a rendu le jeu de Salibur profondément émouvant. Ce sont dans ces moments qu’elle cerne l’essence affective que l’auteure Fréchette aurait souhaité capter.

Jusqu’à présent je connais le travail de Lucette Salibur par ses spectacles pour jeune public. Il est évident cependant qu’elle est une comédienne accomplie qui devrait élargir son répertoire et jouer plus souvent les rôles plus difficiles comme celui-ci. D’ailleurs, dans la mouvance de l’esthétique scénique actuelle, sa formation à la technique des marionnettes à Charleville-Mézières avec François Lazaro (1993), ce qui explique sans doute son approche si physique avec l’acteur, pourrait l’amener à inscrire ces figures symboliques dans des mises en scènes pour « adultes » et par la même occasion, réalise en collaboration avec le scénographe Ludwin Lopez (artiste formé au conservatoire de la Havane et cofondateur de la troupe martiniquaise Les Corps beaux), une collaboration qui pourrait renouveler les traditions de mise en scène en Martinique.

Cette production du Collier d’Hélène fera l’objet d’une table ronde en présence de la metteuse en scène et de l’auteur lors d’un colloque à Montréal au mois d’octobre (Les Théâtres francophones en Amérique), organisé par Gilbert David, professeur à l’université de Montréal.

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[1] Alvina Ruprecht est professeur émérite de l'Université Carleton (Études françaises et francophones) et actuellement professeur adjoint au programme d'études théâtrales de l'Université d'Ottawa. Elle est critique de théâtre a la Radio nationale du Canada (Ottawa Morning CBC), Vice-présidente de l'Association canadienne des critiques de théâtre et co-fondateur de l'Association des critiques de théâtre de la Caraïbe. À part ses  recherches et ses nombreuses publications universitaires, elle contribue à différents sites de critique théâtrale dont  www.madinin-art.net (Martinique) et www.theatredublog.unblog.fr  (Paris)

[2] http://theatredublog.unblog.fr/2009/03/07/le-collier-dhelene/

Disturbing silence (and outcries) over memories of a colonial war (1961-1974)

 

Maria Helena Serôdio[1] (Portugal)

 

À propos de trois pièces de théâtre portugaises mises en scène à Lisbonne – de Fernando Dacosta (Une jeep d'occasion, 1979), Mário de Carvalho (Le sens de l'épopée, 1989) et João Santos Lopes (Parfois il neige en avril, 1998) –, voici une tentative de digression théorique autour de la problématique de la guerre coloniale dans les années 1960 et 1970. On y souligne la place de cette question sur la politique du régime Salazar & Caetano – à la défense de l'empire – et ses conséquences dramatiques sur la vie sociale et psychologique des Portugais.

 

When I published The Judas Kiss / South of Nowhere (Os cus de

Judas) (…) it was a big scandal here in 1979, because after the

Revolution everybody wanted to forget.

Conversas com António Lobo Antunes (2002)

 

Evidence of a prevailing fear was the softness of the

“revolutionary process”, its complacence regarding the

dignitaries and henchmen of the former regime, the way it

obliterated the colonial war…

José Gil, Portugal Today: The Fear of Existing (2005: 123)

 

For a long period of time we have been brought up in the illusion of a specific Portuguese identity as an elected people that “opened worlds to the world” through the sea saga in the 16^th century, and was - for that matter - a long standing legitimate coloniser. Some of the most important arguments (besides the sea discoveries) were sought in literary texts and spiritual beliefs, as was the case of the great epic poem by Camões in the 16^th century – Os Lusíadas (1572) – and its modernist reconfiguration by Fernando Pessoa in the 20^th century - Mensagem (1934). The latter poem integrated also and amplified 17th century messianic belief by Padre António Vieira[2] in a 5^th Empire as being Portuguese (after the Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman ones).

As we can se in the map, “drawn” by Henrique Galvão in 1934 for the “Colonial Exhibition in Oporto” [slide 1], Portugal and its colonies seem to match the size of Europe, therefore the claim that “Portugal is not a small country” seemed to host and legitimate the possession of a colonial empire.

That was conveniently explored by the regime imposed by Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano (1926-1974) through an ideological framework that has silenced internal discordance and denied the existence of a colonial war. There were three main reasons for this denial: 1. Portugal was considered “unified and indivisible” from 1953 (June 27^th) onwards; 2. Had no longer colonies, rather, overseas provinces; and 3. Everyone being born in Portugal or in these provinces was equally considered a Portuguese citizen[3].

As Salazar once wrote: “There are no Portuguese possessions, rather pieces of Portugal disseminated throughout the world” (in Ribeiro 1999: 13).

Therefore, when in 1961 the first signs of an armed conflict erupted in Angola, that was regarded as a “terrorist insurrection” from alien forces allegedly incited and funded by Soviet communism. So, in the official version, it was not a movement for national liberation that resorted to anti-colonial guerrilla warfare. Evidence of that can be found in the comments of censors:

“’Casualties of the Armed Forces in Angola’: Cut everything. There were no casualties” (10.12.1971, Lieutenant Teixeira.

“’Massacre in Mozambique’: Totally banned” (03.09.1973)

(in Ribeiro 1999: 7)

During this Salazar and Caetano’s regime, a tough censorship was indeed imposed on newspapers, books, films and theatre, and there was a total control of radio and TV. Formation of political parties was strictly forbidden and there was a political police (PIDE that with Marcelo Caetano changed its name to DGS, but not its nature nor its methods) and special courts and prisons for democrats. Even after having served a sentence, these democrats could arbitrarily be subjected to administrative “security measures” that could retain them incarcerated indefinitely. This situation was, however, distorted by misapplying an image of a Disneyland (Lourenço 2000; 33, 34) and of the acclaimed “soft habits” (“brandos costumes”) of the Portuguese.

But, obviously, social movements, clandestine political forces, the stirring up of ideas and subversive art forms were paving the way for political transformations. The acute contradictions in this political situation gained a new force with the colonial wars, which mobilised thousands of young men annually (in fact, it mounted up to more than a million and a half along the 13 years it has lasted). However, many young men chose desertion, exile or a clandestine life to skip that destiny. Indeed that war proved to be an anachronism, showing no perspective as how to get out of it. And also: quite from its outcome it began undermining the cohesion of the regime and contributed to its international isolation. And that is why – against much of what was happening in the wide world by that time – it was the army (through the MFA - Movement of the Armed Forces that assembled the younger officials) that ignited the Revolution itself, although supported and immediately amplified by a broad social and political movement.

Still, essayist Eduardo Lourenço, on writing a preface to a play by José Cardoso Pires (1925-1998) – Corpo-delito na casa de espelhos (Body-delict in the house of mirrors), 1980 (2^nd edition: 1999) – that focused the action of the political police (PIDE - DGS), commented how the play could be read as a brutal revelation of a general connivance of the country with the repression. This kind of implied consent could, in his opinion, be spotted not only in the silent acceptance of the situation before the democratic and progressive “Carnations revolution” was set off (April 25^th, 1974), but also in the euphoria after the revolution that, in his words, seemed to forget (if not to forgive) the ignominious action of those “forces of the law”.

On a single day the kindness of our habits had extinguished the strangled outcries of half a century, the snatched corpses, nights without lids, the shame of having a human face in a landscape deserted of eyes to accept the naturalness of the sunrise and the light of the day” (1999: 15)

In order to explain this bewildering behaviour, philosopher and essayist José Gil, in Portugal, Today: The Fear of Existing (2004), ascertains that indeed the long-term fear, that determined the non inscription of those 50 years of authoritarianism in our reality zone has prevented mourning, therefore the dead and death itself will/would persistently haunt the living (p. 16). In line with Sandor Ferenczi (1932: 78), Gil argues that trauma, brought about by that engraved fear, produced a kind of “psychic blank”, a pain with no content of representation, thereby excluding the perception of its causes (p. 118), and, consequently, its possible healing.

A conceivable hauntology is indeed referred to by Jacques Derrida (in Labanyi 2003:61) when he mentions “the state of debt, the work of mourning” and argues that spectres are produced when, for some reason, mourning was not done properly, as was the case of King Hamlet himself. And Labanyi stresses the argument that spectres are the defeated of History, those who have a potential that was tragically interrupted (Ibidem) and are for evermore “revenants”. They exist in the virtual space of “spectrality” and theirs is the elusive and incomprehensible visibility of invisibility”, which means that it totally evades empirical evidence (Derrida, apud Labanyi 2003:66).

This haunting condition is used by Paulo de Medeiros (2006) for the great metaphor he advances for all imperial nations as haunting houses filled with ghosts, as, incidentally, several Portuguese novelists have used in order to write about our colonial war[4]. In fact, more than 200 novels have been written after 1974 around that major theme, most of them expressing guilt and adopting an anti-heroic attitude. It should, however, be emphasized the importance of some of the books published by writers of those former colonies, especially Luuanda, by Luandino Vieira, in 1963. It attracted much attention not only because the author was - at the date of its release - in prison, for terrorist activities (serving a sentence of 14 years), but also because it was awarded the prize by the Portuguese Writers Society in 1965, a fact that caused the immediate ransack and illegalisation of that society and the persecution of the members of the jury.

Writers – like psychiatrist and novelist António Lobo Antunes – as well as historians keep complaining that the colonial wars have not been studied, discussed and evaluated as deeply as they should. They denounce the open wound in the amnesia of that traumatic action and write about the “conspiracy of silence” (quoted by Ferraz 1994: 13), a “war kept off the stage” (therefore obscene), simply because it was fought far away in the “Judas’s arse”, the literal translation for Antunes’s first novel (that, apparently, has received two different titles in English: The Judas Kiss, and South of Nowhere).

Therefore, writing about colonial wars turned to be left to the veterans, who had lived through that horror, and should try to exorcize their “painful apprentice of agony” by themselves, in a most uncomfortable role of both a victim and an image of the former regime they so desperately want(ed) to forget (Ribeiro 2004: 44).

Sociologist Boaventura Sousa Santos explains why only 30 years after those wars had been fought (and lost) it is possible to speak more openly on that, stressing the fact that the Portuguese soldiers were not Prospero, rather Caliban of the Calibans in that empire, that, incidentally, has been for historian Charles Boxer “one of the greatest riddles of history” (1977: 17), when comparing it to the size of the metropolis itself.

Or, using Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of the Angelus Novus, it may point out to a future that is not wanted and a present full of ruins, scraps of a past devoid of any functionality for the present.

 

§§

 

The three plays I will be mentioning share some common traits:

(1) The authors did not take part in the colonial war directly as army officers (but, in a way, share that guilt and elaborate on it from their specific social involvement);

(2) The action takes place in Portugal, after the return from Africa, focusing on the spiritual and social consequences of that traumatic experience;

(3) The style is broadly realistic, but there is a hint of hallucination exploding at a certain moment in each of the plays.

A Second Hand Jeep (1979), by journalist and novelist Fernando Dacosta, The sense of an epopee (1989) by novelist Mário de Carvalho, and Sometimes it Snows in April (1998) by sociologist João Santos Lopes.

Mário de Carvalho, in The sense of an epopee, starting from that worn out label of an epic action, focuses on two women (one is economist and the other one is a novelist in her spare time) who during their University years (back in the sixties) had been involved in students’ rebellions, together with Octavio, whom they both admired and loved. They both know he came from the colonial war terribly depressed and deranged, and that he is now an alcoholic, living with his sister in the southern part of Portugal (Alentejo). As many others who came from that war, he keeps apart from society, mesmerising on a terrible massacre and the murder of a small child he engaged with, and that haunting nightmare leaves him no second of relief. The two women had decided to leave Lisbon and take a week off precisely in Alentejo. So, they drive near Octavio’s house, but don’t stop, heading to a modest boarding house in a small town nearby. There they engage in exchanging memories of their youth, they repeatedly promise to call Octavio and visit him, but are taken by surprise on the 3^rd day of their stay there by a telephone call informing them of his suicide.

When director João Brites, with his theatre company O Bando, staged this play he resorted to his favourite kind of scenic device by building a gripping set with an obvious symbolic functioning that was also a challenge for the actors involved in the performance: the two women were set on a kind of small island full of telephones (but no cables), with splinters of glass around, and a man was hanging from the ceiling with his head down. While the women engaged in their dialogue, the man was slowly coming down until he reached the floor when the telephone brought the news of his death [slide 2].

Fernando Dacosta’s play (indeed a TV script that was also staged) focuses on four ex-combatants who had met and became friends in the colonial war: of different social backgrounds, but having lived through difficult experiences, they had become partners, sharing fears, memories and deep regrets. Several years after the 25^th of April, they decide to spend a weekend together in a derelict shelter - that belongs to one of them - in the outskirts of Lisbon, in a rural and abandoned place. They exchange memories, they comment on their lives after the return (one of them had lost a leg), but as night falls, laughter mingles with recollections of the dangerous and merciless events they had lived through. Around the fire and while they grill chicken and pork, they drink heavily and smoke grass, and little by little are driven to that haunting memory and believe they are back in the war zone in Africa. A blazing hallucination drive them to a frantic excitement, one of them jumps onto a jeep and starts shooting at a group of gipsies (with a child) that are camping not far from there. Some hours before they had met and even helped the gipsies, now, totally encapsulated in that frantic suggestion, they take the gipsies as “terrorists” and only when the shooting is over they realise the monstrosity they had done. Theatre company Teatro Maizum staged the play, with a spacious and impressive set design by José Manuel Castanheira, and with fine actors built up a moving performance around those desperate and painful remains of a guilty past [slide 3].

João Santos Lopes focuses on the consequences of a colonial past in a broader and more updated frame: in the suburbs of Lisbon, a gang of four white young men decide to kidnap an African young woman and bring her to an abandoned railway station, apparently to use her as a lamb to be sacrificed as a form of historical revenge. The leader of the gang – Gabriel - uses his rhetoric to convince the others of their personal reasons to be against the blacks and accept being “soldiers” of that secret organisation: Rafael’s father was wounded in Africa and has a deep trauma associated with terrible pains, Peter’s sister was molested on a train by a black gang, and Paul’s girlfriend had dated a black. This aggressive imposition is associated to violent discussions and fights, and they all end up by raping the girl who keeps a bewildering silence all through the action. The play ends with two baffling revelations: (1) this action – as so many other episodic acts in today’s society – was presided over by a powerful and secret organisation based on racist grounds, that works in the shade and has ramifications in the mass media, corporations, police and political right wing parties; and (2) only in the end the young woman – with a sober but awe-inspiring dignity - reveals she is infected with AIDS [slide 4].

The play was awarded an important prize by the Portuguese Authors’ Society in 1997 and the next year it was staged by director João Lourenço (New Group / Open Theatre). He invested the scene with a realistic set and costumes, and directed the actors in a most energetic and disturbing performance. It turned out to be an impressive declaration on our present day society, still struggling with its identity.

 

§§

 

We may draw some conclusions from these theatrical events (both in print and on stage) that are so strongly linked to the traumatic memory of a long and painful colonial war:

Each of these authors is elaborating on the theme of colonial war from his personal experience and expertise:

(1) Novelist Mário de Carvalho, politically engaged in a partisan resistance during the fascist regime, speaks about the students’ rebellions in the sixties and early seventies and questions how much of that utopianism and its ideals of solidarity are still operating in those that were formerly so much committed to them;

(2) Fernando Dacosta, himself an anti-fascist too and born in Angola (although coming very young to Portugal), is writing as a journalist, who, not incidentally, has been a war correspondent to report on Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam and other war zones;

(3) João Santos Lopes writes as a sociologist, belonging to the second generation and aware of present day suburban racial conflicts.

But perhaps, besides this personal commitment, we could elaborate on a second argument that has to do with theatre specificity.

Indeed, while novels on the colonial wars are prone to revive actions that took place far away and may be brought to light as memories that voice events in the past, theatre demands a more committed approach. It is the present day; it is the proximity of those actions that spurs the imagination and emotional involvement of the audience; it is something that at the same time that it is haunting us from the past, it also infects the atmosphere of our present-day life. Its consequence is, therefore, more abiding and more frightening because it proves it is still among us and can be set off anytime.

Quoting Richard Schechner’s “restored behaviour”, Elin Diamond’s “negotiations with memory”, or Herbert Blau’s images of “ghostliness” and “uncanny” when referring to theatre, Marvin Carlson in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine confirms that “Theatre, as a simulacrum of the cultural and historical process itself, seeking to depict the full range of human actions within their physical context, has always provided society with the most tangible records of its attempts to understand its own operations” (Carlson 2006: 2).

 

Bibliographical references

Plays

CARVALHO, Mário de. 1989. O sentido da epopeia (in Água em pena de pato: Teatro do quotidiano). Lisboa: Caminho.

DACOSTA; Fernando. 1979. Um jipe em segunda mão. Lisboa.

LOPES, João Santos. 1998. Às vezes neva em Abril. Lisboa: D. Quixote & SPA.

Criricism

BOXER, Charles.1977. O império colonial português (1415-1825). [The Portuguese Seaborne Empire]. Lisboa: Edições 70 (1.ª ed. 1969).

BLANCO, Maria Luísa (Org.).2002. Conversas com António Lobo Antunes. Trad. do original Conversaciones com António Lobo Antunes. Lisboa: D. Quixote.

CARLSON, Marvin .2006. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

FERENCZI, Sandor .1932. Journal Clinique, Jan-Oct, Payot.

FERRAZ, Carlos Vale.1994. “Guerra colonial e expressão literária: Falta de memória? Falta de talento? Ou nós somos mesmo assim?”, in Vértice, II série, n.º 58, Janeiro-Fevreiro, pp.13-16.

LABANYI, Jo.2003. “O reconhecimento dos fantasmas no passado: História, ética e representação”, in Fantasmas e fantasias imperiais no imaginário português (Org. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro / Ana Paula Ferreira). Porto: Campo das Letras, pp. 59-81.

LOURENÇO, Eduardo.2000. O labirinto da saudade: Psicanálise mítica do destino português. Lisboa: Gradiva (1.ª ed. 1978)

MEDEIROS, Paulo de.2006. “Apontamentos para conceptualizar uma Europa pós-colonial”, in Portugal não é um país pequeno: contar o “Império” na pós-colonialidade. Org. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches. Lisboa: Cotovia.

MATA, Inocência.2006. “Estranhos em permanência: A negociação da identidade portuguesa na pós-colonialidade”, Portugal não é um país pequeno: contar o “Império” na pós-colonialidade (Org. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches), Lisboa: Cotovia, pp. 285-316.

RIBEIRO, Jorge.1999. Marcas da guerra colonial. Porto: Campo das Letras.

RIBEIRO, Margarida Calafate.2004. Uma história de regressos: Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-Colonialismo. Porto: Afrontamento.

SANTOS, Boaventura Sousa.2001. “Entre Próspero e Caliban: Colonialismo, pós-colonialismo e inter-identidade” in Entre ser e estar: Raízes, percursos e discursos da identidade. Org. Maria Irene Ramalho/ António Sousa Ribeiro (Eds.) Porto: Afrontamento.

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[1] Maria Helena Serodio is Professor at the University of Lisbon (UL), Director of the Postgraduate Program in Theatre Studies in that University, and responsible for two research projects at the Centre for Theatre Studies: a database on theatre in Portugal –http://www.fl.ul.pt/CETbase/default.htm and HTP- online - Transcription of 18^th century documents on theatre in Portugal. She is the President of the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics and of the theatre journal Sinais de Cena. Among the books she published are: William Shakespeare: A sedução dos sentidos (Wiiliam Shakespeare: Seducing the Senses, Lisboa: Cosmos, 1996), and Questionar apaixonadamente: O teatro na vida de Luís Miguel Cintra (Passionately questioning: The theatre in Luis Miguel Cintra’s Life, Lisboa: Cotovia, 2001).

[2] In Vieira’s opinion the other four were: Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman. The Fifth would be the Portuguese. The sequence by Pessoa would be slightly different: Greek, Roman, Christian and European.

[3] It would be, however, illuminating to question the consequence of this acknowledgement in post-colonial Portugal (cf. Inocência Mata 2006).

[4] Cf. Lídia Jorge (Costa dos murmúrios), Wanda Ramos (Percursos: de Luachimo ao Luena), António Lobo Antunes (O esplendor de Portugal, 1997).

Domestic silences exposed: Learner Husband

 

By Robert Greig[1] (South Africa)

Author (and Actor): Stuart Taylor. Director: Heinrich Reisenhofer. Venue: Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, 2009.

 

The Coloured people, the majority population group of the Western Cape and 10 percent of the national population, have multiple origins. They are descendants of the native inhabitants; slaves imported from the Far East in the 17^th and 18^th centuries; and of miscegenation involving Whites, Blacks and Indians.

For decades, they have been in the double bind of being, in their words: “Too white to be treated as black and too brown to be treated as white.”

Before apartheid, especially in Cape Town, they were more integrated into white society that non-white[2] people elsewhere in the country. Apartheid in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, saw them forcibly removed from Cape Town and its suburbs to barren, distant wasteland townships.

This, inter alia, terminated their access and contribution to urban theatre-based performing arts, though their strong and varied performance tradition continued. In the late 1970s racial bars to racially mixed theatre audiences were lifted – replaced by a permit system. But only now in the Cape is the majority population becoming a majority theatre audience.

Though formal barriers had been removed, the barriers of distance, cost, education and ready access had remained. Democracy brought economic boom which has translated into greater access to education, jobs and more mobility. Descendants of those exiled to the townships are, as part of upward mobility, returning to the city and its suburbs: the logistical barriers to formal theatre-going are falling and now, in the Western Cape at least and at national festivals, Coloured attendances are rising. And the experiences and conventions they bring to theatre are changing it too.

 

LEANER HUSBAND

Learner Husband is a one-person work about marriage created and staged by Stuart Taylor, a science graduate of the former icon of Afrikaner Nationalism, Stellenbosch University, some 50 kilometers from Cape Town.  Mainly Coloured Cape Town audiences have greeted it rapturously; it is now touring nationally; a “How to” Leaner Husband manual is extending the reach of the theatre work.

Learner Husband itself does not allude directly to any social contexts of gender relations; but the work’s very existence is, in a sense, an oblique allusion. One contextual element is a country with one of the highest rates of domestic violence[3] in the world. Marriages tend to be characterized by male absenteeism leaving women responsible for maintaining a family. Broadly, the violence is a symptom and effect of long-standing social dislocation. Alcohol and drugs contribute to the syndrome of abuse – the Cape is a wine-growing region with a high incidence of rape: one side-effect is a high rate of HIV-Aids infection. Precise national or regional figures of the violence are unavailable; official figures perforce show only reported cases.

The work was staged in the large theatre in a Baxter theatre complex, part of the University of Cape Town set on a mountain aside about the suburbs to which many Coloured people are now returning from the townships, their lights visible from outside the theatre.

This particular theatre tends to be used for concerts and dance: it has a proscenium arch and broad and deep stage.

The overall aim of the production is to empower married men and women through better understanding of the dynamics between them. The social purpose is to encourage men to assume responsibility – and assert authority.

Learner Husband exhibits many demotic and other performance conventions; it fuses those of formal Western theatre-based performance with the performance conventions  related to theatrical events in schools, churches and community halls and, of course, on TV. It includes elements of stand-up comedy; the lecture, the sermon, the seminar and the how-to guide. Finally it uses the convention of autobiographical testimony – a point of departure is Taylor’s testimony about his own marriage.

On the night I attended, the audience of some 700 seemed made up of male and female couples and was, I estimated, 95 percent Coloured. Taylor addressed the male members of the audience; female members “overheard”: their experience of performance included their partners’ reactions.  Anecdotes and jokes both surfaced gender differences and became binding mechanisms for the audience generally and individual partners specifically.

The set – a series of large, primary coloured building blocks, like a child’s enlarged - bisects the stage reducing depth. The blocks are storage facilities for props and form a screen behind which Taylor changes costume thus maintaining a continuous stage presence: his disappearances act as a phrasing to sustain expectancy. The building blocks also allude to one of his themes – the importance of balance and acceptance of difference in marriage. Their allusion to play parallels Taylor’s initial tone and the event itself.

His script begins with autobiographical descriptions of his adolescence in the densely populated townships of the Cape Flats. The description is suffused with references to the townships’ notorious gangster gangs; to patterns of lengthy commuting to work; to neighbourhood communities, their friendships and rivalries; and thence to adolescent dating rituals. Language and anecdotes – in a rich, jeering patois of mingled English and Afrikaans – encourage audience identification with the familiar and the typical; the language helps create acceptance and understanding between audience and performer of: a consensus. This is the basis for didacticism that follows. 

Taylor’s comedy relaxes the audience and established his credentials. It also helps counteract the top-down performer-audience relationship of the theatre’s configuration.

Taylor’s character ages as the work moves from performance (Taylor performing Taylor as an adolescent) to lecture.  His use of the Cape Coloured argot diminishes – during, for example, the account of his wedding ceremony – as his character moves from adolescent male bonding to marriage.  Loss of argot becomes associated with gaining of maturity, marital responsibility and then upward social mobility. Being adult involves dispensing with the language and styles of the ghetto gang.

Taylor also alludes to marriage involving a geographical shift based on the formation of a new economic unit, independent of the family and community. This represents a break with the past where marriage did not alter existing family units.  In Taylor’s work, married children do not simply move away from their parents because they are married; they move because they can and because, being better educated and with greater access to opportunity and riches, they can.

At the same time, Taylor depicts marriage as replacing community networks with individual interdependence: the many voices of the extended family and community become the two of the couple. In this context, Taylor shows, outsiders tend to be female friends of the wife – regarded by the husband with some unease and suspicion.

In Taylor’s depiction, especially for the wife marriage involves isolation; he identifies reducing this as part of a husband’s responsibilities.  He urges sensitivity to the social effects of gender difference: women with children may be more isolated from the work than men.

Implicit in Taylor’s work is the suggestion that women, not men, understand and can cope with differences. Men have formal physical and economic power; women the power and influence of interpersonal sensitivity. Much of the humour – its jibes at male emotional myopia and male misconceptions – rests on this traditional gender stereotype. Taylor, as a man, uses ruefulness – the air of experience emerging from an acceptance of past mistakes. This tone positions him as a credible, honest and experienced veteran of struggle; a convert who has seen – and shares – the light; and as a trusted witness and guide. Jokiness extends the egalitarian relationship with the audience established earlier in narratives about adolescence.

For example, Taylor refers to the loaded silence of the wife. “What’s wrong?”

He enacts the heavy sigh of his wife followed by “Nothing!” – a defeated, dying but suggestive fall. The audience laughs. The advice: Hang in; stay with her; explore.

In early sections, anecdotes of typicality are stacked like bricks of laughter to build trust. Later the edifice becomes a platform for admonition and instruction. A performance of self-revelation – of witness (“This is what I do”) – leads to exhortations addressed to men: “When your wife does this, this is what you must do: keep in touch, don’t leave her, don’t back away into separate corners.” Stand by your woman.

As sermon and exhortation, tip or injunction predominate, so Taylor’s ranging movements settle and become fixed. Performer becomes witness becomes authority; movement becomes immobility. Authority over the audience replaces collegiality with.

The final section becomes interactive but in a context of command and common task. Men are asked to complete a questionnaire – a bureaucratic equivalent of religious call and response. The responses impel further direct appeals and instruction to men to participate in their marriages and attend to their wives.

This shift from the performance conventions and styles – from egalitarian to hierarchical – causes a rebellious interregnum among some men in the audience. They try to assert power with interjections, heckling and in one case with aggression and subversion.

One heckler referred to “sex from behind” as a marital problem solver: sex is absent from Taylor’s script. The interjection challenged the parameters of the stage discourse from the stage; it undermined Taylor’s performance and authority. It drew attention to sex as an arena of marital behaviour, and from the social roles in marriage.

The audience reaction was mixed. Some – mainly women – booed but full-throated laugher came from men and women alike. It is impossible to analyse audience response accurately: laughter may have indicated mature acknowledgement of common experience or covered embarrassment or at the private being made public. The laughter did not suggest outrage; there were no walk outs.

Nevertheless, at this point the audience seemed united in an experience of transgression which shifted their focus from performer to the commons of the auditorium. The shift was also of emphasis – to the private from the public; it highlighted the limitations of the performer’s authority and credibility. And the reference asserted the existence of male power and force that Taylor had only alluded to as a factor that should be ignored. Cumulatively, the interjection highlighted the gulf between artifice and life while also pointing at context issues of sexual abuse of women by men.

Taylor’s show does not directly allude to social context or sexuality; the interjection thus revealed the show’s limitations. It thus also indicated the complicity of “just entertainment” by paying customers with social silences  about abuse.

The interjection also has the effect of suggesting the inelasticity of the Taylor’s theatrical conventions and the degree to which they cue the audience to expect the familiar. At the same time, the audience member’s profanity recalled Lovburg’s double entendre to Hedda in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler about “using the back entrance”. The echo suggests that a conventional stage play may have the scope and latitude to at least touch on issues and contexts that Taylor’s demotic forms exclude.

Taylor faced the interjection with an indrawn breath, a helpless shrug, laugh and with lifted eyebrows and arms appealing to the audience.  His physical mechanisms acknowledged interruption but he remained outside the terrain revealed.  He neither used performance styles nor stepped out of them to accommodate experience excluded from a crafted performance about marital relations. His silence was consistent with the wider society’s.

The production remained rooted in the familiar and polite.  Still, what distinguished it was that it had taken a step towards making public the private marital experience. Taylor “creates the possibilities for others”[4].

In a context where the civil institution of marriage is also considered by a society to be private and thus exempt from social scrutiny – except after the commission of a criminal offence involving assault – Taylor’s theatre breaks ground.

Learner Husband would have been unlikely during or immediately after apartheid. In a sense, it represents a process of post-apartheid normalization. It represents a shift of theatrical focus from the “big issues” of racial discrimination and political power to the domestic realm and to personal choice, responsibility and accountability. Learner Husband’s treats social and political change as givens; the terra incognita that it enters is individual relationships, formerly considered incidental in times of dramatic change, and the topic regarded as an evasion of political responsibility. Learner Husband asserts the primacy and power of the individual, rather than the community, the party, the movement, history or government. 

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[1] Robert Greig is one of South Africa’s most highly regarded arts journalists and theatre critics, having twice been the recipient of the Thomas Pringle Award for Drama Criticism. He taught drama theory, criticism and history at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s, before he moved into corporate business communications for a while, though continuing to write for a range of newspapers on financial matters as well and the arts, documenting the growth of South African theatre in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996 he was appointed the arts editor of the prestigious weekly The Sunday Independent, a position he held till his retirement in 2007. He is also a published poet and winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize. He is currently part-time lecturer in theatre history at the University of Stellenbosch. 

[2] “Non-white” was used extensively and pejoratively under early apartheid to describe all who were not Caucasian. In the “new” South Africa the old racial designations  (“White”. “Coloured”, “Asian” and “Black”) continue to be used, reflecting continued inequalities. These terms are sometimes portrayed as administrative tools to identifying and thus eliminate the effects of past injustice. In this context the term “Coloured” is used non-pejoratively to refer to a specific group of marginalised Creole people living in the Western Cape, the people featured in the play under discussion.   

[3] 2008 Human Rights Report: South Africa by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the United States State department

“Rape, including spousal rape, is illegal but remained a serious problem. According to the 2007 08 SAPS annual report, the reported incidence of rape from April to December 2007 decreased 8.8 percent from the comparable nine-month period in 2006. However, over 4,000 rapes were reported on average each month, alongside 750 additional cases per month of assault.

Further, the Medical Research Council estimated that only one in nine rapes was reported to SAPS, as in most cases the attackers were friends or family members of the victims, who therefore were afraid or reluctant to press charges. This estimate implies that half a million women suffered sexual violence. The NGO Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) reported that one in three South African women would be raped in her lifetime.”

“According to a 2008 study by SAPS and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, only 4.1 percent of reported cases resulted in convictions. One in every eight suspects was under the age of 17. In rape cases involving victims under the age of 16, one of every 10 cases resulted in a conviction.

“Domestic violence was pervasive and included physical, sexual, emotional, and verbal abuse, as well as harassment and stalking by former partners.

“According to NGOs, about one in four women were in abusive relationships, but few reported it. TAC counselors also alleged that doctors, police officers, and judges often treated abused women poorly.”

[4] On Lies, Secrets and Silences: Selected Prose 1966-1978 by Adrienne Rich (WW Norton, New York 1979)

Grotowski in the 21^st century:

Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre), Wrocław, Poland

 

By Mark Brown[1]

La compagnie théâtrale polonaise Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Théâtre du chant de la chèvre) est située à Wroclaw, la ville de Grotowski, et trouve son origine dans son œuvre et dans celle de la compagnie Gardzienice, dirigée par l’élève de Grotowski Włodimierz Stanieswski ; les fondateurs de TPK, Anna Zubrzycka et Grzegorz Bral, ont tous deux été membres de Gardzienice.

Comme l’œuvre de Grotowski, la compagnie Teatr Pieśń Kozła poursuit, au plus haut niveau esthétique, une « quête spirituelle » face aux puissants pouvoirs politique, social et culturel, qui sont foncièrement hostiles aux principes du théâtre tragique.

 

The greatest theatre (that is tragic theatre) is in pursuit of the unachievable. That is to say, it strives to express in live performance the spiritual essence of humanity. That is why tragedy survives all political and theological cataclysms, and all revolutions in cultural fashion. The “success” of tragic theatre can be measured only in the depth and profundity of the emotional, psychological and erotic experience which the work evokes as it fails in its attempts to express humanity’s essence. The greatest “failures” move us to a kind of ecstasy, they achieve effects which are, in the broadest and most profound sense, spiritual.

Peter Brook observed this spiritual dimension through his experience of the work of the great Polish dramatist Jerzy Grotowski:

Right from the first moment when one begins to explore the possibilities of man, whether one likes it or not, whether one is afraid of what this represents or not, one must face up squarely to the fact that this search is a spiritual search; I begin with an explosive word, which is very simple, but which creates misunderstandings. I mean “spiritual” in the sense that, as one goes towards the interiority of man, one passes from the known to the unknown, and that as the work of Grotowski's successive groups has gradually become more essential, thanks to his personal evolution, the inner points that have been touched have become more and more unseizable, further and further from any normal definition. It may thus be said that in another epoch, this work would have been like the natural evolution of a great spiritual tradition.[2]

Brook’s identification of the “spiritual” in the work of Grotowski – and, by logical extension, his successors – is both profound and subversive. It is profound in the sense that it identifies in Grotowskian theatre an attempt to achieve the unachievable; namely, an expression of the essence of human experience (what Brook calls “the interiority of man”). Theatre artists have, since the days of antiquity, attempted to express that essence in tragedy, through a profound and fearless exploration of the seminal and unbreakable connection between sexual desire and death.

Brook’s observation is subversive because it reasserts the spiritual, sexual desire and death in the context of a late capitalism which attempts to expunge those elements from the human imagination. Late capitalism assaults the spiritual through a culture of instant gratification and hyper commercialism. That culture contains within it a negation of sexual desire, which it attempts to replace with a pornographic fixation upon a sexual pleasure which is merely mechanical (rather than spiritual) and the degradation of the human body. It also contains a negation, a refusal of death, through the faux optimism of a commercial culture which is sustained by the myth of “I’m gonna live forever”.[3]

In 2009, 10 years after Grotowski’s death, the “spiritual search” identified by Brook continues to be pursued by the remarkable theatre company Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre).[4] Based in Grotowski’s home city of Wrocław, Poland, Teatr Pieśń Kozła (TPK) has its origins in the work of Grotowski and in the Gardzienice company of Grotowski’s student Włodimierz Stanieswski;[5] TPK founders Anna Zubrzycka and Grzegorz Bral were both members of Gardzienice. Although credited widely with developing its own distinct aesthetic, TPK shares a number of key aesthetic predilections with Grotowski and Gardzienice.

In particular, TPK shares with Grotowski an insistence upon a highly concentrated and precise form of performance. Company director Bral explains that TPK’s method is to ferment their productions slowly, until they find something which is “not banal”.[6] As a consequence, although the company has existed for over a decade, it has only created four complete productions: Song of the Goat (after The Bacchae by Euripides), Chronicles: A Lamentation, Lacrimosa and Macbeth (in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company).

The company has a deep interest in ancient myth, surviving ancient cultures and the power of ritual; TPK runs the annual ‘Brave’ festival of endangered and surviving cultures in Wrocław.

As in the work of Grotowski and Gardzienice, there is, in the performances of TPK, a focus upon the possibilities of song, movement and image in theatre. There is a preference for the notion of ‘performer’, rather than ‘actor’.

The focus is upon a highly specific physical and vocal aesthetic and upon intense research, which a) means that no performer can simply join the company, they have to be trained in TPK’s techniques; and b) leads to a wider pedagogical programme; TPK runs an MA in Acting Techniques in association with Manchester Metropolitan University. The international nature of the company is partly a consequence of this programme.

Based in a 14^th century monastery in Wrocław, in which they have their theatre, the company’s work sits on the cusp between ancient ritual and theatrical modernism; as can be seen if we consider the latter three of their productions.

Chronicles: A Lamentation is inspired by the 5,000 year old story of half-god, half-man Gilgamesh (the world’s oldest recorded folk story). The piece required two years of research into the traditional Balkan music of lamentation; particularly in the Epiros region of Greece and Albania. It culminated in a production which lasts less than one hour, in which the performers sing a polyphonic song continuously throughout the performance. The ultimate focus is upon the tragedy of Gilgamesh’s attempt to negate death (which long precedes Faust).

Lacrimosa is set in late 15^th century, plague-infested Arras, France. Musically, it draws upon the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. The performance is also less than an hour long, and combines movement, song and spoken texts. The physical aesthetic of the piece was partly inspired by the company’s study of the ancient Greek fire-walking cult of Anastenaria.

The ultimate subject of Lacrimosa is the tragedy of Man’s attempt, in conditions of crisis, to assume the powers of God, including the power of life and death over other human beings. In the case of 15^th century Arras this tragedy found a particularly anti-Semitic outlet. The relevance of this to modern Poland is powerful and difficult.

In Macbeth we find, despite the truncated nature of the production, a much greater reliance on spoken text than in previous TPK works. The piece is not Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but, in shaping their own meditations upon the play into a specific Pieśń Kozła performance, the company has vocalised much of Shakespeare’s text.

The integration of Shakespeare’s language into TPK’s very particular, highly stylised physical and visual aesthetic is a fascinating Grotowskian experiment. Created initially as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘Complete Works’ programme (initiated by the RSC’s then new artistic director Michael Boyd), the presentation is (as Boyd no doubt intended) very far from the tradition of British Shakespearean performance.

What we find in all three of these productions is that the body plays an equally important role with the voice in TPK’s tragic aesthetic. Great professionalism and precision is required to create such elegiac movement. The combination of live flame, darkness, subtle lighting and shadow, with the physical movement gives the performance a Caravagesque visual appearance.

The conscious, carefully constructed sensuousness of the performance combines with subject matter which focuses always on the sensuousness of death. Not all death is tragic – any fool can die, and, indeed, does – but TPK focus exclusively on tragic death. Howard Barker argues that human crisis and pain can be beautiful.[7] TPK place the human body at the core of tragic beauty.

There are those, not least in the British theatre tradition (which is, as Barker comments, obsessed with the “utility of works of art” and a requirement that art works serve a “liberal humanist” purpose)[8] who consider work such as TPK’s to be exemplary of what they deride as “art for art’s sake”; the implication is that there is no political or social weight attached to such work.

However, as Bral explains, not only does a spiritual theatre carry profound political and social implications (it is, as I have argued above, intrinsically subversive), but the theatre of TPK and other eastern European practitioners is rooted in a response to Stalinist repression, and continues to respond subversively to the demands of late capitalism:

The period of the 1970s and 1980s, during the communist time, was the golden age of Polish theatre. Because of the political repression, theatre could never be explicit. Everything had to be hidden. We continue to produce that kind of theatre. If you are intelligent or sensitive enough, you know what we are talking about. Theatre nowadays is often explicit, because it thinks it can change something. I don't think theatre can change anything. Its power lies in symbolism. That is what interests me.

The very cheap American culture coming to Poland now - the cheap movies, cheap literature, cheap commercials, and so on - is a huge threat to metaphor, subtlety and symbolism. In some ways the enemy is still there. It's just changed its face.[9]

Like the work of Grotowski, Teatr Pieśń Kozła’s theatre pursues, at the highest aesthetic level, a “spiritual search” in the face of powerful political, social and cultural forces which are fundamentally hostile to the principles of tragic theatre. For that, world theatre owes this exceptional Polish company a profound debt of gratitude.

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[1] Mark Brown is theatre critic of the Scottish national newspaper the Sunday Herald. He teaches in theatre studies at the University of Strathclyde and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Association of Theatre Critics.

[2]Peter Brook, With Grotowski: Theatre is Just a Form, (Wrocław: The Grotowski Institute, 2009), p.34.

[3] Lyric from ‘I’m Gonna Live Forever’, from the screen musical Fame (director Alan Parker, 1980).

[4] Tadeusz Kornaś, Between Anthropology and Politics: Two Strands of Polish Alternative Theatre (Warsaw: The Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre institute, 2007), pp. 23-25.

[5] Ibid, pp.14-19.

[6] From an interview I conducted with Bral in Wrocław in July 2007.

[7] From the symposium ‘The Theatre of Howard Barker’, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, May 24, 2008.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Quoted in Mark Brown, ‘Poetry in Motion’, New Statesman (London: August 2, 2007).

Portuguese perplexities, contradictions and a fierce debate

Sebastiana Fadda[1]

Il y eut d'abord la traduction d'une scène de la Cantatrice chauve en 1957 et, deux ans plus tard, un festival Ionesco à Lisbonne. Mais la reconnaissance d'une nouveauté au théâtre ne s'est pas faite sans un sursaut et quelques perplexités.

Even before being performed on the Portuguese stage with a fully translated play, Ionesco’s theatre was the object of interest of Luiz Francisco Rebello, the scholar and dramatist. In 1957 he had translated and published excerpts of The Bald Soprano, more precisely the dialogue between the Smith couple about Bobby Watson, in the 1st edition of Teatro Moderno - Caminhos e Figuras (Modern Theatre – Paths and Characters) (1957). The performance of this excerpt, together with excepts taken from the requiem in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and from Berolt Brecht’s Prologue to Antigone was given at a conference about the Caminhos do Teatro Contemporâneo (The Paths of Contemporary Theatre) held in January 1959 at the Trindade Theatre in Lisbon. 

Also performed a few months later, in April, on the same stage was the premiere of Waiting for Godot, staged by Francisco Ribeiro and in May, the Ionesco festival was held. It was staged by Luís de Lima and was based on excerpts taken from The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chairs.

They were memorable events: the appearance of new routes to modernity brought us into the vanguard theatre – also called “the new theatre”, the “antitheatre” or the theatre of derision by the critics. Portuguese stages had hitherto placidly accommodated themselves to the bourgeois theatre and entertainment, and this new theatre caused a wave of perplexity, contradictory reactions and even gave rise to heated arguments in the most traditional, conservative environments.

It should be mentioned that Luís de Lima’s version was performed for the first time in Portugal but it had already made its highly successful debut in the first world premiere on the Brazilian stage in 1957. To be fair, the most progressive critics in Lisbon praised the performance. It was like a breath of fresh air, challenging the stagnation of both the theatre and the Portuguese Conservatory. Some critics attempted to contextualise the fact that the Portuguese public was unable to understand this kind of theatre and there were others who even sought to give a fair opinion, awarding the playwright his rightful place in the history of contemporary theatre, although refusing to give way to facile enthusiasm and imposing limits on his theatrical horizons.

A few months later in the same year, Inesco visited Portugal in order to take part in the 3^rd Sintra Theatre Festival. On 3 September he saw a performance that included La Leçon and Les Chaises, put on by the Théâtre Studio Champs-Elysées. He then gave a talk about his theatre and accepted being interviewed by José Sasportes, where he stressed his artistic point of view. Among other subjects, he talked about the indirect influences the work of Jarry, Apollinaire and Kafka had on him, as well as a curious coincidence with certain views held by Artaud, whom he had been unable to read because Le théâtre et son double had been sold out. He also mentioned his divergence with Brecht's theatre. Nevertheless, whether owing to his plays or to what he had said, particular critics continued to disagree with him for a long time although it did not stop his theatre from marking its presence fairly regularaly, and sometimes even assiduously, in Portuguese company repertoires.

 

Bibliographical reference

Sebastiana Fadda. 1998. O teatro do absurdo em Portugal (The Theatre of the Absurd in Portugal). Lisboa: Cosmos.

For more information on performances on Ionesco’s plays see the site online: http://www.fl.ul.pt/CETbase/default.htm

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[1] Sebastiana Fadda is an Academic at the Centre for Theatre Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. She is also a member of the Directive Board of the Portuguese Association of Theatre Critics and of the Editorial Board of the theatre journal Sinais de cena and is a translator from Italian to Portuguese.

Interview with Marta Carreiras

 

Interviewed by Rita Martins;

translation by Francesca Rayner

 

Marta Carreiras was born in Lisbon in 1975. She holds a first degree in Stage Design from the Theatre and Cinema Higher Education School and a post-graduate qualification in Theatre Studies from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. She began her professional career as a scenographer and costume designer in 1997 with Teatro Meridional, a theatre company with whom she has worked on a regular basis up until the present day. She has developed projects in collaboration with Teatro Praga (Theatre of the Plague) and A Truta (The Trout) and has worked with creative artists such as Miguel Seabra, Natália Luiza, Ana Nave, Cristina Carvalhal, Carlos do Rosário, Pedro Seda Nunes and Nuno Pino Custódio.

 

1. In your country or city, is there any major issue (for example, a contemporary social problem) that artists have failed or neglected to address on stage? Why? Is it because of censorship, or a blind spot in the community's collective perception of the world? A community’s consciously or unconsciously turning a blind eye?

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think there is. Any creative process breathes in and reflects the surroundings in which it is created. You could look at Portugal or Lisbon as being site-specific locations on a large-scale, where creative artists, consciously or subconsciously, are always interacting with what’s around them and their creative work is a reflection of this relationship. Professional problems and social, economic and cultural concerns are active discourses in the act of creation. Whatever the theme, the performance always conveys the concerns of “being here, right now”.

As a member of an audience, I’m not interested in seeing a specific theme represented onstage which is limited to its social and political content. Major shifts in awareness invariably happen when we’re not talking about them.

Looking at the theatre created by this younger generation, my own generation (Gonçalo Amorim, Pedro Gil, Truta, Teatro Praga), I don’t believe there is a lack of political awareness about the world. There is a new generation who are restless, who are not content or passive and who explore oppositional themes.

 

2. What, if anything, is difficult for you in communicating with the director? Why? How early and how often do you exchange views about the coming production? Have you directed yourself, and if so, does that make communication easier?

In general, two types of difficulty can arise: artistic or emotional. The former can happen if you don’t know the people you’re working with. They sell you an idea, you accept it and work with it. Later, you realize that the project has nothing to do with your own form of expression and you make a choice. You can go through with it. You defend the performance’s design choices and you put them into practice. But I don’t really believe in this “putting into practice” or “serving” the performance. You can make this choice, but it leads to a lack of coherence and critics will write about the staging and the design as if they were separate entities.

And then there are emotional conflicts. Working with the same group of people for a long period has advantages and disadvantages. Without doubt, one of the advantages is the level of creative understanding which is established over the years, which enables a collective artistic

growth which could not happen any other way. A disadvantage can be that it sometimes becomes more difficult to establish limits between artistic and personal relationships.

I don’t believe in the set designer who works at home and then delivers the model of the set. I spend a lot of time working very closely with the performance: I watch the rehearsals, I do my research with the actors, I make proposals for the staging, we try them out, we start again. The design element “enters” the work of the actors.

 

3. In your creative process, which bit do you enjoy least? Why? How do you tackle it?

I collaborate with directors who work from almost nothing: a concept and five actors. We have to create a universe, a special language, a text, if it has one. Everything begins with the idea and the research, which I love. When rehearsals begin and you have no idea what the performance is going to be about, I love it. Then, seeing it come together and that moment of breakthrough – I love that too! Maybe what I like least is the time between having an idea and seeing it become a reality. It’s that waiting time between conception and experimentation and, as I believe in processes of research through experimentation, it’s a difficult time for me. The physical and conceptual answers are only found onstage. Whenever there are questions, you need to concentrate on the stage. And it’s difficult when it comes to an end. You have to separate yourself from the object. But that’s part of the enchantment of working with the ephemeral. Otherwise theatre would not be a form of rejuvenation each time it takes place. But you can’t give everything, you have to give a little at a time. It’s important to maintain your sense of direction. Only then does the work of the artist have any value. After that, you have to bring your emotions under control and breathe deeply.

4. During your career, have you received a particularly insightful piece of criticism? When was that? Do you remember it well enough to quote? What was so important about it?

Yes, Rui Pina Coelho’s review of the stage space in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui [2008]. It was risky to work in a space that had a pillar in the middle of the stage, a garage at the back and toilets to the side. There were ten actors, each with different psychological spaces. The actors developed the scenography in character and that was difficult. The gangsters’ space was that which they gradually came to occupy, as in the play. From a scenographic point of view, this left a huge void. I thought Rui Pina Coelho’s review was very perceptive, because he understood all the transformations of the space, the osmosis between scenography and dramaturgy, which was something that was invisible; and he said “instead of creating the scenography, she has gradually adapted the space”. He understood that the scenography was created by the actors.