Masterpieces

MORE MASTERPIECES Robert Brustein n 1967, I wrote a controversial essay called “No More Masterpieces,” in which, following the French radical theorist Antonin Artaud (The Theatre and Its Double) and the Polish critic Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary), I argued against Islavish reproduction of classical works. I agreed that we had reached the end of some cycle in staging these plays, that actor-dominated classics, particularly Shakespeare, were beginning to resemble opera more than theatre, with their sumptuous settings, brocaded costume parades, and warbled arias. I believed that modern directors were now obliged to freshen our thinking about classical writers in the same way that modern playwrights (notably O’Neill, Cocteau, Sartre, and T.S. Eliot) were freely revisioning the Greeks. My hope was for approaches that would revitalize familiar works wrapped in a cocoon of academic reverence or paralyzed by arthritic convention. Theatre, being a material medium, was settling too cozily into ostentatious display, disregarding the poetic core of a text, its thematic purpose and inner meaning. One way to avoid this, I thought, was through metaphorical investigation by an imaginative director, in close collaboration with a visionary designer, locating the central image of a play through visual icons and a unified style. This was what Peter Brook was doing with the Royal Shakespeare Company in his revitalized productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (channeling its youthful energies into acrobatics and circus acts) and King Lear (translating its vision of old age and death into a bleak visual vocabulary influenced by Beckett). Such productions were making Shakespeare our contemporary through suggestive associations, bringing audiences a fresh appreciation of classics in danger of dying from hardened stage arteries. There was another modernizing technique already in vogue at the time called “Updat- ing.” This approach relocated a classical play in some later time and place, thereby demonstrating its “relevance” through a more contemporary environment. Updating was the style usually associated with Michael Benthall’s Old Vic and the Stratford Shakespeare Theatre in Connecticut and the early Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Guthrie himself called this process “jollying Shakespeare up.” © 2008 Robert Brustein PAJ 90 (2008), pp. 1–7. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 Jollying Shakespeare up gave us such novelties as a Measure for Measure set in Freud’s Vienna, a Much Ado About Nothing relocated in Spanish Texas, and a Troilus and Cressida occurring during the American Civil War—creating geographical transplants that managed to provide visual surprise and an illusion of immediacy without any particular insight into the heart of the play. (To my disgrace, I myself once directed a production of Macbeth set in Stonehenge, featuring extraterrestrial witches.) Updating was an improvement on traditional Shakespeare, but it was nevertheless a visual and histrionic rather than a metaphorical and imaginative act. I preferred an approach that would navigate between the Scylla of dry academicism and the Charybdis of empty fashion. A few of my colleagues thought I had taken leave of my senses, among them John Simon, who believed that classical plays should be produced on stage exactly as they were originally written. My old friend Harold Bloom, battered by bad productions, preferred the theatre in his head, often wondering aloud whether his beloved Shake- speare should be staled on stage at all. I sympathized with Bloom’s frustration, but obviously plays had no real life unless embodied in the flesh of living actors. And to satisfy Simon’s demand for “original intentions,” Shakespeare’s women would have to be played by boys and his Cleopatra would be required to wear a hoop skirt. To me, these were prescriptions for embalming the classics in formaldehyde. Partly as a result of such debates, we were beginning to witness major changes in classical production. While traditional and updated approaches continued to hold the stage, the succeeding years also saw the rise of the auteur director, claiming the same freedom in regard to theatre texts as the movie director had with screenplays. The result was a host of brilliantly reconstituted and recalibrated, if highly controversial productions. Among the most celebrated of these (after Brook’s original forays) were André Gregory’s Endgame set in a cage to emphasize its claustral atmosphere, performed in a vaudeville style punctuated by old movie comedy soundtracks (some years later at the American Repertory Theatre JoAnne Akalaitis would scandalize the playwright by placing Endgame in an abandoned subway station in order to literalize its post-nuclear subtext); Andrei Serban’s Fragments of a Trilogy, composed of three Greek tragedies returned to their choreographed ritual roots, not to men- tion a host of other brilliant Serban reinterpretations, including his post-industrial Cherry Orchard for Papp’s Lincoln Center and his commedia dell’arte King Stag for the A.R.T; and preeminently Ingmar Bergman’s totalitarian Hamlet and brutalized Peer Gynt, indeed any classical play he chose to put his inspired hand to. The reinterpretation of classical plays became such a popular activity in ensuing decades that it began to attract directors not normally interested in such material—Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines staged a controversial version of The Tempest at the New York Shakespeare Festival (co-directed by Ruth Maleczech) that had actors imitat- ing Mae West, W.C. Fields, and Sid Vicious. And Robert Woodruff, Sam Shepard’s chief director, contributed the first of numerous classical reinterpretations, a Lincoln Center Comedy of Errors featuring the Flying Karamazovs doing a juggling act. Alvin Epstein, previously known best as an actor, contributed a production of Midsum- 2 PAJ 90 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 mer Night’s Dream based on the Purcell/Dryden opera and the combat paintings of Uccello, Ron Daniels gave us a Hamlet where the title character spent the whole play in his pajamas, while an army of new young American directors, including Karin Coonrod, James Lapine, Anne Bogart, Emily Mann, Brian Kulick, Liz Diamond, Bill Rauch, Darko Tresnjak, and many others began embracing classical plays as a way of exercising new creative muscles. I even managed to persuade the celebrated auteur Robert Wilson to do his first classical productions—Euripides’ Alcestis and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken after which he became as devoted to classical plays and operas as to his own original creations. Such productions were enough to persuade me that reinterpreted classics were the highway to a new theatrical Eden. But it was not long before the garden was being blighted by a trace of plant mold. In 1968 the Living Theatre returned to these shores, after a nomadic period in Europe, bringing Paradise Now, The Mysteries, and Frankenstein. But despite the fact that its repertory featured one classic play, Antigone, reinterpreted as an indictment of the Johnson administration and the Vietnam War, the company that, before its exile, had staged Brecht, Lorca, Cocteau, and Pirandello now appeared to have lost its stomach for written plays and playwrights. During a New York symposium in the early seventies, Judith Malina announced that she would much rather play Judith Malina than Hedda Gabler, and she was soon sec- onded by one of her actors shouting his own scholarly analysis of the classics—“Fuck Shakespeare. Fuck Euripides.” During the same period, Richard Schechner and The Performance Group transformed The Bacchae into a group grope called Dionysus in 69 (curiously reminiscent of the The Living’s writhing Paradise Now), and it was growing obvious that classical theatre was being used less as an opportunity for understanding human destiny than as an invitation for physical intimacy between actors and spectators, in the chummy fashion of the time. I look back on this age as a period of theatrical self-absorption, one which left a permanent imprint on our stage. Radical theatre had turned into a mode of institu- tionalized narcissism where the self-indulgent fantasies of directors and actors were often being substituted for the intentions of the play. Previous experimentalists had also taken great liberties with texts—but when the great Russian Meyerhold did a surrealist version of, say, Gogol’s The Inspector General, he was primarily trying to expose its dream-like roots. Now the production apparatus was replacing, rather than reinforcing, the playwright’s function, and the text was becoming a springboard for subjective directorial journeys. “To the tumbrels with the author,” as the critic Kenneth Tynan described it, after threatening to apply a lighted match to the bare feet of the next actor who clambered naked over his lap. Under the influence of The Living Theatre and The Performance Group, and to some extent Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” with its actor-generated classics like The Constant Prince, the emphasis had begun to fall on the gesture rather than the word, on physical rather than vocal projection. Even Peter Brook was abandoning the process he had done so much to advance. Having produced a Living Theatre-type protest exercise with the Royal Shakespeare Company called US in 1966, Brook departed England BRUSTEIN / More Masterpieces Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 to set up his own experimental group in Paris, called the International Centre of Theatre Research. There he began working on a series of projects that were more likely to be adaptations of non-theatrical works than written plays, though poets like Ted Hughes sometimes contributed dialogue. The results were group-created projects, usually adapted from religious or sociological or anthropological or psy- chological tracts, like The Mahabharata, The Conference of the Birds, The Ik, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Load more