Performing history studies in theatre history & culture Edited by Thomas Postlewait Performing HISTORY theatrical representations of the past in contemporary theatre Freddie Rokem University of Iowa Press Iowa City University of Iowa Press, Library of Congress Iowa City 52242 Cataloging-in-Publication Data Copyright © 2000 by the Rokem, Freddie, 1945– University of Iowa Press Performing history: theatrical All rights reserved representations of the past in Printed in the contemporary theatre / by Freddie United States of America Rokem. Design by Richard Hendel p. cm.—(Studies in theatre http://www.uiowa.edu/~uipress history and culture) No part of this book may be repro- Includes bibliographical references duced or used in any form or by any and index. means, without permission in writing isbn 0-87745-737-5 (cloth) from the publisher. All reasonable steps 1. Historical drama—20th have been taken to contact copyright century—History and criticism. holders of material used in this book. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), The publisher would be pleased to make in literature. 3. France—His- suitable arrangements with any whom tory—Revolution, 1789–1799— it has not been possible to reach. Literature and the revolution. I. Title. II. Series. The publication of this book was generously supported by the pn1879.h65r65 2000 University of Iowa Foundation. 809.2Ј9358—dc21 00-039248 Printed on acid-free paper 00 01 02 03 04 c 54321 for naama & ariel, and in memory of amitai contents Preface, ix Introduction, 1 1 Refractions of the Shoah on Israeli Stages: Theatre and Survival, 27 The Theatrical Modes of Israeli Shoah Performances, 31 Yehoshua Sobol, Ghetto, 38 Dudu Ma’ayan, Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa, 56 Hanoch Levin, The Boy Dreams, 76 2 Three European Productions about the French Revolution, 99 Peter Brook, Marat/Sade, 102 Ariane Mnouchkine, 1789, 111 Ingmar Bergman, Madame de Sade, 117 3 Three American Productions of Danton’s Death, 135 Büchner’s Play and Its Beholders, 141 The Production Qualities, 162 The Individualized Crowd, 170 The Execution, 179 4 Theatrical Energies, 187 Textual Energies, 192 From Textual to Performative Energies, 194 Performance Energies, 196 The Eavesdropper and the Survivor-Witness, 202 Metaphysical Energies, 206 Epilogue, 209 Notes, 217 Bibliography, 227 Index, 241 Preface Quoting Histories... Revolution is the mask of death. —Heiner Müller Engel und Puppe dann ist endlich Schauspiel. —R. M. Rilke During the first years of my university studies I had a fantasy that the ultimate goal of academic scholarship was to compose a study con- sisting of quotes so perfectly put together that no one would notice that this was an act of plagiarism. Only afterward did I read Jorge Luis Borges and study Walter Benjamin and recognize that even this fan- tasy was basically intertextual, a quotation. My “project” was inter- rupted by more menial tasks, and also by some much more important ones. Now, when trying to understand what I have done in this book, it seems that this fantasy still has a grip on me. That is why I start with a series of quotations which I have brought with me as fragments “res- cued” from different textual pasts, pasts with which the theatre, in its attempts to “perform history,” also has to come to terms. This is a more speculative way to approach my subject, not yet the intro- duction to the book itself. History is an organization of time: “An insight: in one hour’s time, sixty minutes will have passed,” says Danton in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. The question is: How will this “insight” be understood after this hour has passed? And will it still be an insight then? Or just a painful recognition of a routine which must be repeated over and over again every sixty minutes? In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (II, 7, 20 –28) Jaques reinforces the sense that quotations carry a unique force, referring to the wisdom about the passage of time he once heard from a “motley fool”: ...he drew a dial from his poke, and looking on it with lack-lustre eye x Says very wisely “It is ten o’clock.” Preface “Thus we may see,” quoth he, “how the world wags. ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more ’twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.” Besides the sexual expenditure which serves as the subtext for the sense that time organizes not only our lives but the tales about it, here the hours are consecutively numbered, while Danton, measuring time on the basis of his own subjective position, will always, at every moment, place himself in an anguished, unidentified present. The vision of the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin is informed by an anguish about history to which he gives a cynical expression. The mother, Tsescha, says: If I did not know that we are living [in] history I wouldn’t be able to stand it [manage/stay alive]. These are the very last lines of Levin’s grotesque play Shitz from the mid-1970s. The question they raise is: When is the life of an indi- vidual transcended in order to become included in that form of con- tinuous linear “eternity” we call history? And under what circum- stances does the individual within this flow become aware (à la Hegel) that this is the case? And not least, does such an awareness bring con- solation? Tsescha’s proud pronouncement, after her daughter has lost her husband in one of the wars, is a kind of reversed (or even ironic?) “threat,” based on a conditional structure (If . then): since Tsescha knows that she is living “[in] history,” life is worth living, which means that without this “absurd” certainty, life would become totally mean- ingless. To live is to live in history. And history as we know it consists of a series of threats. The anonymous (last) hours of Danton’s life, as they have been cap- tured by Büchner in his play, were always at the point of a new start for the next hour, and for Danton they probably did not even enter the more organized spheres of history. Paradoxically, he was unable to perceive the kind of causal chain of events and consequences that we generally call history. That was his tragedy. But at the same time Danton’s own death, through Büchner’s play, created the rhythm and the movement we consider necessary for such an awareness of history. Otherwise, repeating Tsescha’s triumphal conclusion as a question, how could we be able to stand it all? xi Preface “I’m not a historian,” says Gogo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In a world where Godot does not appear (again tonight) and where there is no continuity and causality, it is indeed impossible to be a historian. There is room for historians only in a world where it is pos- sible to establish relations between the past and the present. And his- tory can be performed, in the world and on the theatrical stage too, when different structures of time (besides the daily reappearance of the sun), can be distinguished, making it possible to ask not only if the things that appear again are natural phenomena but if they are trig- gered by some kind of agency, creating a pattern, not just a mechani- cal repetition. That is no doubt why Marcellus (in the Folio and First Quarto of Hamlet)orHoratio (in the Second Quarto) asks: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” This, I believe, “isthe question” when begin- ning to explore different plays and performances about specific his- torical events. What does it mean to present these events again on the stage? What can be seen in Hamlet is how a burden (some kind of un- finished business from the past) becomes transformed into an actor’s being and doing “this thing” on the stage, appearing again in tonight’s performance, continuously performing a return of the repressed on the theatrical stage. History can only be perceived as such when it becomes recapitulated, when we create some form of discourse, like the theatre, on the basis of which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the chaotic torrents of the past within an aes- thetic frame. This is probably true of the more conventional forms of historiography too, as practiced in history books. The ghost inHamlet appears on the stage as a disturbance of the ef- forts to create meaning and order after the death of the old king, break- ing the patterns that have, perhaps too soon, already been established. The other world imposes itself, and this invasion of a new occurrence immediately has to be explained. It is Horatio, who has witnessed the arrival of the ghost (and reports it to Hamlet) and is asked to watch the king during the performance of The Mousetrap, who becomes the historian in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Beginning from a totally different point of departure, Roland Barthes wrote in his Camera Lucida that the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its xii division. History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider Preface it, only if we look at it — and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of His- tory, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own his- tory (impossible for me to believe in “witnesses”; impossible, at least to be one .