Prof. Dr. Theresia Birkenhauer Wartburgstr. 2 10823 Berlin Tel: (030) 782 32 92 [email protected]

Representation of Dreams, Representation of Theatre

Introduction

The following reflections were triggered by an interesting observation: Nearly all studies on dreams use the theatre as a source of metaphor. Dreams are often referred to as “theatre of the soul” or “the stage of the imagination”. There is also a term called “dramaturgy of the narration of dreams”. Why this imagery? The question is rarely asked – probably because of an, at first glance, indisputable evidence: both dreams and the theatre articulate themselves in images and scenic tableaus. Both are determined by visuality. However, this does not necessarily work both ways. If we read about the history of dreams in art and literature, the theatre is certainly mentioned, but in a strangely reduced way. One may ask for the motif of dreams in dramatic texts, or the dramaturgical function of dreams and dream narrations, but the theatre performance itself is rarely seen in connection with the way dreams articulate themselves. This is where my question sets in. I am interested in the relation between the mediality of the theatre and the form of dreams. I am interested in the relation between theatrical modes of representation and those of dreams. Since I can only present a short outline here, I have chosen a few rather familiar plays.

[Calderon]

In Calderon’s drama Life Is A Dream (1625), the analogy between theatre and dream is based on the ontological positing of the theatre itself. “Theatrum mundi “– the whole world is a stage and the theatre but the monadic mirror of this world. If we concentrate on the dramatic action, the reference to the dream seems primarily educational. Immediately after his son Segismundo is born, King Basil locks him up in a tower, because his wife had dreamed in pregnancy she would give birth to a “monster” that would kill her. As the son grows up, he is eventually let out of the tower and exposed to reality for 24 hours, in order to test his reigning abilities. The experiment fails: having lived in social isolation all his life, the son acts aggressively, only to be locked up once more. To comfort him, he is told his experience outside the tower was nothing but a dream – an explanation the son takes very seriously. For the supposed dream has been true happiness to Segismund. He concludes that life itself must be a dream – a fleeting and unstable happiness. This is why, even in one’s sleep, one must honour God and act honourably in one’s dreams. This insight makes the son wiser than his father who was merely worrying about his loss of power. Seen from this perspective, the play can be regarded as the depiction of a self- disciplining process. Segismund becomes a modern subject subordinating himself to the internalized rules of reason. But the crucial conclusion - life is a dream - becomes obvious only by way of the scenic design of theatrical reality. It is the stage design that makes the abstract conclusion of the story line sensuously understandable for the audience. We see Segismund who has become a brute locked up in his cage. What is he? A king? An animal? A “monster”? The other characters are equally difficult to define: Rosaura, the female main character, appears as a valiant stranger, a desired chambermaid, a combative liberator. She appears in different costumes, as a man, as a woman and, finally, as a masculine woman – and only in the end she is let known that she is also a daughter (of a mother who was dishonoured, just like her). The same is true for Clotaldo, who is not only a faithful servant to the king and his son, but also an unfaithful lover and a secret father. Which identities – gender, origin, social affiliation – are reliable? Which roles are deliberately chosen by the individual and which superimposed by others? Although the play takes place on just one reality level (no dream is actually ever shown), it is the simultaneity of heterogeneous realities, deceiving confusion and the delusory inability to decide that reveal the logic by which life itself should be regarded as a dream. This logic can only be grasped by the theatrical modes of representation. The dream logic of life corresponds to the specific mediality of the theatre.

[Shakespeare]

But it is not Calderon’s Life Is A Dream but Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream that first comes to mind when theatre and dreams are mentioned. This is probably due to Max Reinhardt’s famous productions of 1905 and 1913, which use all the potential of theatrical means of representation. In their visual possibilities, they suggest the analogy to the fantastic of dreams. (The film gives an impression of this.) Visual opulence, an abundance of playful fantasy, virtuoso acting – it is these attributes that make Hugo von Hofmannsthal describe the stage as a “dream image”– alluding to Max Reinhardt’s productions. But Shakespeare’s play also makes the relationship between dreams and theatre tangible in various other ways. The title claiming this relation should not necessarily be regarded nominalistically - as if A Midsummer Night's Dream were actually shown on stage. It can also be interpreted as a question the audience is asked. At the end, there is actually a reference in this direction, as Puck suggests to the audience to regard everything they have just seen as a dream: "And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream."(V, 416-17)

But what is it that the audience have just seen? Four different plots, intricately blending into each other: The preparations for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding are interrupted by the amorous woes of four youths from Athens who flee to the forest. There is also a group of craftsmen (“mechanics”), who are rehearsing for a performance of the tragedy “Pyramus and Thisbe” at the wedding. Both groups are subject to a magic practical joke the jealous Fairy King Oberon has his elf, Puck, play on them, in order to disgrace Titania. This construction unites several spatially and temporally separate subjects: Greece, the Middle Ages and Elizabethan England; upper and lower rank – nobility and craftspeople; the city as the place of social order, and the forest as location for a delicate bewitchment. All the couples are mirrored by an other: the ducal couple in Athens finds its double in the Fairy King Oberon and Queen Titania, the sorrow of the couples from Athens is reflected by the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the “mechanics”. Regarding its fabula, the drama is structured like a comedy: The disturbances of the wedding preparations are happily resolved by the events in the Athens forest. But the theatre performance turns this formula upside down. Oberon’s magic elixir creates such transformations that the characters are dissolved and disfigured in their identities - because Puck confuses the couples. What they experience is much less magical but rather abysmal: Lovers begin to hate each other, unloved ones turn into objects of desire, fairy queens become fools: the characters recognize neither themselves nor the others, love’s desire results in brutality, desire isn’t protected by any conventions, the eroticism is bestial. In the end, each of the characters is lost in a fog "black as Acheron" (III,357). Is all this just a rite of passage? Is the forest a picture for the transformation of sexually confused youths? The fabula could be read that way. But what is easily discernible on the fabula level becomes more and more confusing for a theatre audience: the frame with the wedding preparations and the transformation due to a magic elixir; court and forest, day and night. The reason for this confusion is the mode of theatrical representation itself. For to the audience, both areas, the world of day and the sphere of nightly metamorphosis, are equally present during the performance. Because the nightly aberrations are just as present to the audience as the events at the court, the difference claimed by the dramatic fiction becomes blurred. This difficulty to differentiate is squared, if we assume that both ruling couples are played by the same two actors. The orderly Theseus is also a dominating Oberon, the chaste Hippolyta also a donkey-loving Titania. The characters are themselves and others at the same time. They are over-determined fusions of opposed characters, “hybridisms” in the sense of Freud. In the end, the strange occurrences in the forest are described as a dream by each of the characters, although nobody was dreaming and the monstrous metamorphoses were caused by sorcery. Just a dream is the explanation Oberon offers and which makes the events bearable. Is this actually a relief or rather a cause for concern? The answer certainly depends on how one qualifies dreams. The ambivalence of this explanation becomes obvious in the discussion taking place among the characters, immediately after the night sequence. Hippolyta seems disturbed by the strange reality of the dream narrations: "’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of." (V, 1) and doesn’t want to perceive them as purely fictional: "But all the story of night told over, … More witnesseth than fancy images." (V, 23,25) Theseus, however, qualifies the dream as an unreal chimera: "More strange than true. I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains." (V, 2-5).

The dispute about the status of dreams is not resolved in the play, but passed on to the audience at the end by way of a play-within-the-play construction. The main plot is interrupted three times by the craftsmen’s play, thus emphasising that the whole affair is, in fact, staged. This self-reflexive reference to the theatre culminates in Act V when the craftsmen finally get to perform their play, Pyramus and Thisbe - which fails, because it does not manage to create a theatrical illusion for the audience. The craftsmens’ play thus demonstrates the ultimate condition for every performance. In the end, everything depends on the audience’s willingness to perceive an actor as the embodiment of a fictitious character – be it of a wall, a moon or a lion. Theseus puts it like this: "The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them" (V, 209-211). It is the imagination of the audience that gives life to the performance – a reality and at the same time a non-reality. This is also true for the play that has just been shown. Puck alludes to this when, at the end, he calls upon the audience to view the events as a dream. Puck: "If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumb'red here/ While these visions did appear / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream" (V, 412-417)

If this play, in which neither a dreamer nor a dream situation are shown, is still announced as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this is done with an audience in mind that will recognize a vision in the scenic representation. The audience does not refer to the dramatic plot that attributes the characters’ aberrations to the effect of a magic elixir. It is rather the illusionary presence of the scene during which the action seems like a dream sequence to them. The representation in its illusionary character corresponds to the recipients’ own experience of dreaming. Shakespeare’s play does not address the dream on the plot level, by making dreams or dreaming persons its subject. Instead, the difference between the mode of the dream and the representation of a dream comes into focus. Lysander wants to talk about what he experienced as a dream, Bottom wants to have a ballad written about it. But the audience have neither heard Lysander remembering his dream nor the literary adaptation of Bottom’s dream experience. They have experienced, in the illusionary presence of the scenic representation, what memory and literature work on later. It is this difference between scenic realisation and simple dream narration that Shakespeare’s play is about – in analogy to the difference between a successful and a failed theatre performance. The question of the dream is connected to the reflection about the scenic structure of the theatre. This structure comes into focus as a double fictionality. On the one hand it is the fiction of dramatic action, on the other hand it is the illusion of a real scene taking place. If the performance is successful, the audience may well experience the wizardry of the Fairy King as something familiar, as a vision. Shakespeare is quite ahead of his time here. A Midsummer Nights Dream clearly illustrates that theatre and dreams are not linked by a thematical connection, but by the theatre’s scenic structure – the double fictionality of dramatic plot and scenic reality. The theatre can give the audience the opportunity to watch themselves dream, whether the dream is the subject matter or not.

[Moritz]

A leap in time brings us to the 18th century, to Karl-Philipp Moritz (1757-1793), best known for his novel Anton Reiser: A psychological novel. However, Moritz also wrote a play – his only one. Blunt, or The Guest. A Fragment (1780). The play remained unknown and was performed first as late as 1986, more than 200 years after it had been written. The following scenario is depicted: An elderly couple at a table around midnight: Blunt, bitter because of his poverty, is plagued by murderous fantasies. The six-year old daughter already has apparitions of her own. They all sleep on chairs as the bed has been rented to a stranger. The guest is in fact no other but their own son who the parents believe to have died in a shipwreck. The son wants to spend a night at his parents’ house before he reveals himself to them. Blunt, following his obsession, kills his son without recognizing him. In the morning, the identity of the son is revealed as his bride and her father arrive for a family reunion. The fiancée goes mad. Next to the body of the murdered, Blunt wishes "Könnt' ich das Geschehene ungeschehen machen." […] O, daß doch alles ein Traum wäre! - daß es ein Traum wäre." (“Could I undo what I have done." […] Oh, that everything were a dream! – that it were a dream.”) This is followed by a poem repeating the plea: "So rufe mir den Augenblick/ Eh' noch die Tat geschah, Ruf' ihn mir noch einmal zurück." (p.26) (So call back to me the moment ere the deed was done, call it back to me.) Instantly, the scene where Blunt is standing before his son “with a drawn knife” repeats itself. Like in a film cut, the action picks up again in that very spot. This time, the murder is not committed. As bride and father arrive in the morning, all the problems are solved, and the celebration is already prepared. The father is left with the shock and shame - to recognize his son in the stranger he felt an urge to kill in his sleep. But the son implores him: "Daß sie von dieser Sache inskünftig kein Wort weiter reden". (That you will speak not a word of this thing again.) Following the fabula, there could be a conventional, familiar pattern here: the father’s moral conversion through an insight into a disastrous action, apostrophed as a dream. But this would be ignoring the dramaturgical peculiarities of the play. For there is not a single authority reflecting on morals there. Moritz does not use the dramaturgic function of the dream as it was common in the 18th century: as an instrument which can illuminate the inner consciousness of the characters. Instead, the whole theatrical performance is represented as a dream. The play does not focus on the reflection of the dramatic characters, but on the scenic vision that is directly addressed to the audience’s perception of reality. They do not see a person on stage that is supposed to be dreaming, but a scenic representation that consists of two dream sequences and one interruption. Karl Philipp Moritz was the founder and editor of the "Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde", a groundbreaking publication in the field of empirical psychology that was published in ten volumes between 1783 and 1793. It presented reports on psychological peculiarities and unusual phenomena, but also focused on the “seemingly small”1, the “unspectacular, the normality of human life” – without the morally tinted concept of enlightenment that was common in the contemporary weeklies. Essays on dreams play an important part in the “Magazin”. The general topic of interest seems to be the individual, so-called natural dream. Dreams are collected and catalogued – and thus become an issue of theoretical and empirical curiosity. It is against this background that we should regard Moritz’ contribution to the theory of dreams: It is actually an essay in the shape of a dramatic vision, which – unlike rationalising explanations – seeks to uncover the dream as a specific mediality of the consciousness, as a sort of “soul production”. Moritz’ Erfahrungsseelenkunde is especially interested in the reality effect of the dream. This effect was examined as a phenomenon of “deception”, of illusion. The paradigm of this mode of experience, however, was the theatre, and that is what the unusual dramaturgy of Blunt is based on. The play consists of short sequences that rather expose a motif than follow plot logic: Without bothering with convention of dialogue, the characters utter a text that doesn’t express anything but their own motivation: Right in the beginning, the father mentions murderous thoughts: "Ich will keine Tränen, ich will Blut" (9), (I want no tears but blood.), the mother calls her husband "stolz und barbarisch"(10) (proud and barbaric), the daughter would like the "fremden Herrn" (strange gentleman) as a lover and brother, and the son wants to shock his parents with his sudden reappearance. Moritz’ play shows a special interest in a thing Freud later described as “Teilung” or “Spaltung (splitting) of a dream in pre- and post-dream, in which the same material is displayed from different points of view (TD 314).This is how the poem comes into the play: the lyrical break of the dramatic form marks the moment of waking up, before the vision is picked up again, this time from another perspective. Without any framing, only interrupted by a poem, the play thus presents the events of a dream twofold: the nightmare – a murderous fantasy – and the utopian dream – a happy fantasy. The reason why Moritz utilises the theatre to reflect upon dreams is the special perception mode of the theatre, the scenic illusion. His play connects this mode of perception and the dream vision. Moritz uses the illusionist effect of the theatre to make the dream experience itself visible.

[Kleist: Prinz von Homburg]

We now come to Heinrich von Kleist. It is especially in connection with his oeuvre that the term “theatre of the subconscious” is used, in view of the many dreaming characters in his plays. This especially concerns those characters whose dreams articulate, hidden in speech, a desire unknown to them. The crucial point, however, is that Kleist exposes the audience to the very same doubts about the reality status of their perception the protagonists are experiencing. This explains why Kleist uses the theatrical structure in a much more complicated way. He interlaces the different levels of reality in a way that makes not only the characters but also the audience doubt the accuracy of their perception.

But what is the accuracy of perception in the theatre, in view of events whose unreality is stipulated on the plot level? This issue is raised as early as in the first scene of Prince of Homburg: In the night before the decisive battle, the Prince of Homburg is sleepwalking through the castle grounds; his friend, the Count Hohenzollern, presents the spectacle to the Elector and his entourage. In the stage direction it says: “A garden in antique French style. In the background, a castle with a ramp leading down. It is night. 1st scene: The Prince of Homburg is sitting under an oak, with bare head and open shirt, half awake and half asleep, braiding himself a crown of laurel.” In the events on stage, the theatre situation is in fact doubled: The Prince is exposed to the entourage who, so it says, are looking “down on him from the banister of a ramp”. Torches illuminate the dreaming sleepwalker. The Elector interferes with the dream scene by, like a director, staging the “scene”2 of a victory ceremony for the sleepwalker. Homburg is supposed to be handed the crown and chain by the Princess. The dreaming man addresses the Princess as his “bride”, the Elector and his wife as “father and mother”. As Homburg wants to take hold of the trophy, everybody draws back from him, and all that remains of the dream is a glove. After waking up, Homburg recounts the events as his dream. In his tale, the dream scene becomes a magnificent fantasy of wishful thinking – until the moment when the glove irritates the distinction between dream and reality. The dream narration falters, the Prince has forgotten the woman’s name. The end of the play repeats the opening tableau. But now it is represented not as a somnambulant dream, but as a real part of the plot. The Prince is not asleep but awaits his execution with bandaged eyes. One moment he was expecting death and pondering the vision of his immortality, the next he is celebrated as a hero and the Princess hands him the laurel wreath. Homburg faints. Kottwitz answers his question “No, say: Is it a dream?” with “A dream, what else?” upon which “all” tune in to the battle cry: “To dust with all enemies of Brandenburg!” Between the opening and final scenes, an action unravels that is marked by strange concatenations, slips and misinformation. Disturbed by the real dream prop, the Princess’ glove, and dazed by the nightly dream of the victory ceremony which he interprets as a prophecy, Homburg fails to hear the Elector’s orders for battle - and wins just because of this. ["Zerstreut - geteilt; ich weiß nicht, was mir fehlte."] (Distracted – divided; I don’t know what ailed me.) The Elector dies in battle. Hastily, Homburg takes up his position with Natalia and proposes marriage to her. The next instant, the death notice turns out to have been wrong. A coincidence – the exchange of a horse – has saved the Elector’s life. The Elector learns of Homburg’s failure to obey and sentences him to death – which leads Homburg to the question: “Am I dreaming? Am I awake? Alive? In my right mind?” The Princess effects pardon for him, which the Elector grants on condition that the Prince decide by his own sense of justice whether he should live or die. Homburg volunteers to die. At the same time, the officers demand that the verdict be reversed. The execution scenery is set up, in order to stage the act of clemency as a victory ceremony. Random decisions, mistakes and accidental slips determine the events between dream and war, dream and death. They undermine the logic of the depicted plot as well as the reality criteria of perception. The fictional action begins with Homburg’s dream and it ends with it coming true. Homburg, however, experiences it the reverse way: From his perspective, the first crowning was real, whereas the second feels like a dream to him. The point of view of the others is just as unclear. They see, above all else, Homburg’s mental state, as a sort of “bad habit of the mind” and explain his actions with somnambulism, an illness, or narcissistic ambition, a triumphal precognition of victory. The same lack of clarity is true for the audience’s point of view. This becomes evident in the final scene. Is the pardon a dream? Or the re-entry into the war? Or is the Elector’s dream of re-uniting his men in battle against the enemy coming true? The problem of the inability to differentiate between dream and reality also arises on the level of the character construction, on the level of the reciprocal perception of the characters as well as on the level of the play as a whole. Here, the war experience is made a subject. Kleist combines these three levels by systematically playing with the impossibility to differentiate between the theatrical illusion that equally simulates reality and fantasy. He presents a dream scene that is also staged as a theatre scene. Audience as well as dramatis personae are left with the questions where the dream ends and the war starts – and where the theatre.

The play starts with a doubled fiction: In the theatre, a dream scene is depicted that coincides with the fictional reality of the play. This is transferred into a theatre scene, a performance, with the Prince of Homburg as the exhibition object. Twice, the Elector is playing director: In the beginning, he is tempted by the “urge of curiosity” and he tries to expose the Prince’s secret wishes by taunting him with the “tableau” of the victory ceremony. In the end, he makes him experience the horror of death before arranging the pardon like a theatre scene in which the Prince’s dream seems to come true. However, this also makes it unclear for the audience how to differentiate between dreamed and staged reality. Are the constant re-evaluation and strange linkage of events an effect of the shifting of dream and reality in Homburg’s mind? Or is it the consequence of a military logic that stimulates the soldiers’ affective economy by alternately staging the immanent glory of victory and the threat of death? Does the audience recognize the scene as a description of the protagonist’s inner reality, or do they perceive the whole scenic arrangement as a dream image of the objective reality in the war society?

Who is dreaming? Is it the Prince of Homburg? Or Heinrich von Kleist? A Peter Stein production (1972) that has become very famous takes up this structure by staging the play as “Kleist’s Dream of the Prince of Homburg”: “… no dramaturgy of the disfigured visions of the unconscious - but a clear, logical, levitating-stabilized dream construction (…) That is where the immanent unreality of the characters in this play stems from: they are mounted from a “real” picture corresponding to Kleist’s reality and an “ideal” (the dream part they are made of), and they represent both images at the same time” says Botho Strauss, dramatic adviser of the production. Half unreal, half real – that is what characterizes the status of these dramatic characters. Kleist operates with the undeterminable reality status of the theatrical scene. It is to him a possibility to interpret the reality of the dramatis personae as the dream of one character.

[Grillparzer]

That is why, in Kleist’s dramas, dreams seem to distance themselves from the general dream experience. They resemble reality. They have no code. Unlike those Romantic writers who were interested in dreams as the dark side of the human soul, Kleist was curious about the hardly noticeable line between imagined and real experience, dreamed and experienced reality. This dream theatre was impossible (to perform) on the 18th century stage: Kleist’s dramaturgy shook up a dramatic practice that had been subordinating scenic fiction solely to the illusion of real events. The medium of scenic presentation of dreams changes with the Romantics‘ interest in the fantasmatic and aesthetic potential of dreams: “Dreams are spontaneous poetry” – as Jean Paul puts it. Not the theatre but the novella and the novel become the privileged media for linguistically shifting the symbolic border connected to dreams. It is thus that literary, “artificial dreams” , as E. Lenk calls them, are created. The fantasmatic potential is also what Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben. Dramatisches Märchen in vier Aufzügen (A Dream Is Life 1817/18, completed 1826- 31) is about. Here, the distance between dream and reality is constitutive. Rustan, the protagonist, is supposed to marry the daughter of a rich countryman, but his urge is for adventures, great deeds and fame. The night before he wants to leave, he dreams about such adventures, which anticipate the life he so desires. Upon waking up, he will abjure this life. In Act IV he is ready for marriage. At first glance, the simple scheme of an amendment drama presents itself. Converted by his dreams, Rustan recognizes the illusion of fame and greatness and returns to his fiancée. But unlike many other dramas in which a bad dream is the reason for the return of the hero, this dream is not narrated but put into the centre of the scenic performance. Grillparzer also operates with the difference between fictional action and scenic representation. The instrumentalisation of dreams (for moral purpose) on the plot level enables the breaking with dramaturgic and moral norms of presentation in favour of an abysmal fantastic. The scenic presentation creates an aesthetic attraction that undermines the moral purpose. The dramaturgic economy is in accordance with this, as the presentation of the dreams takes up almost the whole play. Rustan murders and lies, he desires the daughter of a strange king whom he kills, he usurps the power and becomes a tyrannical dictator until he wakes up while falling off a bridge. The dream leaps to and fro between times and places, lonely mountains and exotic landscapes with golden snakes, daggers, witches and enigmatic women. It wallows in adolescent fantasies of anarchy and violence. Grillparzer is careful to distance the dream from the level of the fictitious reality: The allegoric characters of sleep and dream are standing next to the dreamer’s veiled bed. But it is this containment that creates the space for a spectacle that undermines moral intentions in its aesthetical effect. Unlike in Calderon’s Life is a Dream, the title here aims at the basic gap between dreams and reality and thus signals a siding with fantasy rather than life. This is probably the reason for the success of this dramaturgical scheme. Grillparzer’s play became a prototype for many similarly constructed dream plays: from Toller’s Die Wandlung, Karl Kraus’ Traumtheater to Brecht’s Die Gesichte der Simone Marchard. [Strindberg]

The theatre that announces the connection between dream and theatre already in its title is Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which alludes to real dream experiences in a very different way. Whereas in Grillparzer’s play the dream makes it possible to partially abandon realistic conventions of performance, it becomes a new mode of scenic presentation for Strindberg. Strindberg’s play marks a cesura in two ways: It corresponds to the new, modern concept of dreams as a representation of the unconscious as well as to a new understanding of the mediality of the theatre. Even if Strindberg writes in a letter: "The Dream Play is a new form, which is my invention", it is the medial changes of the theatre around 1900 that are constitutive for this play. Modern stage technology and a new definition of directing establish the performance, the scenic staging, as an independent form of artistic expression. The space, the voice, the sound and décor are no longer predefined to an illustrative function, but become autonomous from the literary text.

Strindberg implements this new mode of representation in two ways: The dramaturgy of Dream Play solely focuses on the scenic staging – not on the plot level – “no intrigues, no acts that end looking for applause” (Strindberg says in his preface). It depicts the scenario as a visual composition of a pictorial space, and thus breaks with both the Aristotelian drama of strict causality and conflict as well as with the drama of character. The play consists of 92 separate scenes of various length – from very short to minimal Handlungsspots (spots oder spots of action???). Locations change even during a scene – without any logical reason in the story line. Time can stretch or compress (in front of the stage entrance, entire years pass in seconds) or take an opposite direction (an old officer is suddenly back at school). Material objects develop a life of their own, the line between animate and inanimate is annihilated (a castle grows like a plant, a ship becomes a skyscraper with trees). Instead of a protagonist, there are various changing characters, who are not individualised: officer, advocate, concierge, glazier … as well as innumerable minor characters that are perceived as polyphone voices. “They are not parts, nor characters nor caricatures” Strindberg writes in the preface of 1907. The characters do not determine the action. They are part of a visual scenario which develops a whole mesh of correspondences in the objects, the silhouettes, the colours and the light. The centre of the play is the dream, but neither as a motif nor as a plot but as a mode of representation. In the preface of 1902, it says, programmatically : “The author has tried to reconstruct the incoherent but seemingly logical form of dreams. Anything can happen, everything is possible and even probable. The laws of space and time have been nullified.” Unlike in Grillparzer’s play, it is not the purpose of the Dream Play to conjure up a fantastic reality. It is rather the everyday social reality seen in the mode of dream perception: school, marriage, university, backstage, divorces, poverty, unjustified punishment and wrong presents, in short, the daily monotony. This reality is broken up into different perspectives, transformed, blown apart, decomposed, disfigured. It is taken apart and condensed into scenes. The stage thus becomes the pictorial space of a dreaming consciousness that is not personalised in any character: “A mixture of memories, events, inventions, incoherencies and improvisations” as Strindberg puts it. He goes on to say: “Persons are split, doubled, they stand in for each other, they disappear in thin air, they condense, melt and reunite. But there is a consciousness above all this: that of the dreamer. There are no secrets for this consciousness, no inconsequence, no scruples, no laws. It doesn’t judge, it doesn’t acquit, it only reports.” Regarding the title, Strindberg does tie in with Calderon: A Dream Play is as much a name for a genre referring to the mode of representation as it is a statement about life: “The audience will perhaps find certain similarities between the seemingly random conglomeration of dreams and the multicoloured cloth of ungovernable life made by the “weaver of the world”. (Preface of 1907) Unlike Kleist, Strindberg does not aim at the ontological status of the dramatic characters in the scenic presentation, their illusionary presence.3 He aims at the theatre’s individual forms of expression; he is interested in their imaginative potential beyond the function of the illusion. The stage becomes a pictorial space that 1constantly changes into new, fictional settings that permeate each other. This space corresponds to a specific temporality that produces different intensities of duration: They can widen, fragment and invert. The stage constitutes a gliding visuality in

1 a gliding to and fro between plot level and scenic level - [a dramatic context has been suspended by him.] which objects and characters constantly change and transform, while the voices and sounds become the material for the composition of independent acoustic sceneries. Instead of dramatic progression, there is an ongoing change of gestalt with sudden coups de theatre, discontinuities and repetitions. What does the audience do in this theatre? The convention that makes them the watchers of events from the outside is negated. Strindberg’s Dream Play asks them to give up their sovereign position in favour of a gliding attention that submits to the events. It seems that this proved very difficult. In order to make the production easier, Strindberg wrote a prelude in 1907 that shows the descent of Agnes, daughter of gods, to the world, and informs about her motives. This framework introduces two levels – just like Grillparzer – that give the perception of the audience a clear orientation.

However, the dream play also proved very difficult to put on the stage. The first few times the play was performed, acting and stage remained realistic. To this day, the play is a promise as well as a challenge. The list of famous productions reads like a Who’s Who of the theatre: Max Reinhardt (19 ), Antonin Artaud (1928), Ingmar Bergmann (1963 (TV) 1970,1986), Robert Lepage (1994) Robert Wilson (1998). The spectre reaches from oniristic ??? play , biographical tableau and melancholy revue to the dematerialised ghost show.

[Conclusion]

I am now returning to my original question of how the theatrical modes of representation and those of dreams are related. The examined plays prove in how many different ways the theatre’s medial form was used when it came to showing dreams and dream experiences on stage. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, the vision becomes the standard for a scenic presentation that, in its illusionary visual presence, has the same envisioning power for the audience as the dream sequence does. Blunt or the Guest, Karl-Philipp Moritz’s forgotten drama, shows an understanding of dream presentation and stage that sees the key to exploring the psychological reality of the individual in the dream itself. The 18th century theatre of the illusions??? gives Moritz the opportunity to convey this experience in all its complexity by way of the theatrical illusion. For Kleist, this psychologic reality becomes the means for character construction. It refers to the theatre as a means for making these characters understandable by presenting them as figures in a dream. Systematically, Kleist plays with the impossibility of distinguishing theatrical illusion, in order to cross-fade between wish and reality in such a way that both the logic of the depicted action and the reality criteria of perception are shaken. Grillparzer with his clear differentiation between dream and reality is an example for the Romantic understanding of dreams as an alien “dark side” of the soul. Here, the illusionary presence of the scene is mainly a possibility for depicting an unrestrained fantasy. Strindberg, finally, starts from this representational potential of the stage, but liberates it from its mimetic connection to reality. The stage space becomes a pictorial space, where the everyday social world is displayed in the mode of a dreaming consciousness. It becomes a space of consciousness for which, as Freud puts it, “the most general und noticeable” condition of dreams is true. Quote: “A thought, usually the desired one, becomes objectified in a dream. It is displayed or, as we like to think, experienced, as a scene.” This relation between subjective thoughts and scenes in which these thoughts present themselves as objective events in an outside world, is what structures the medial form of the European theatre.