A play is not a spanner
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008The recent Europe Theatre Prize (held in the Greek city of Thessaloniki in April) forced audiences, practitioners and critics to negotiate the often treacherous territory where politics and aesthetics meet.
The many Greek and international guests of the programme were in Thessaloniki to see work by a variety of European companies and artists, including the winner of the main Europe Theatre Prize itself; which was received, if his staging of Janacek’s opera From the House of the Dead (a film of which was screened at the event) is any indication, by a worthy winner, French director Patrice Chéreau. There were also prizes for the oddly entitled “new theatrical realities” (opposed, one assumes, to “new theatrical unrealities”); awarded to Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski and German theatre company Rimini Protokoll.
The problem came in the shape of the winners of the “special mention” prize, the Free Theatre of Belarus (FTB); a company which has stood up bravely against the repression of one of the ugliest regimes in Europe. Proposed for the award by such eminent figures as Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, with the prominent support of the Guardian’s longstanding chief theatre critic Michael Billington, the company’s three productions in Thessaloniki were anticipated eagerly.
Sadly, when they presented their first two shows, Generation Jeans (a barely dramatised monologue in which American blue jeans are invoked as a symbol of freedom) and Being Harold Pinter (a leaden ram raid on the Nobel speech and theatre works of one of England’s greatest living playwrights), there was widespread suspicion that the award was a purely political gesture.
Billington had written at some length before the prize, and, indeed, has written since, making considerable claims for the aesthetic achievements of FTB; a company which, he suggests, takes “big risks” in artistic terms. I searched in vain for another delegate in Thessaloniki who shared his enthusiasm.
The consensus I encountered in the broad (but, admittedly, unscientific) sample of people to whom I spoke (including colleague critics from countries as diverse as Iran, Romania, Israel and India), was that, whilst the courage and conviction of FTB must be respected, indeed should probably be recognised in Thessaloniki, there was little or nothing happening on stage to justify an award on aesthetic grounds. The unintended irony, we agreed, in FTB’s second play, Being Harold Pinter, was that, having invoked Pinter’s wonderful assertion (from his Nobel speech) that something can be both “true and untrue” in the theatre, the Belarusians proceeded to employ excerpts from a variety of Pinter plays, from The Homecoming to One for the Road, in the most unsophisticated, pointedly polemical fashion; the use of a transparent plastic sheet as a symbol of the claustrophobia of a repressive regime and the concluding commentary on events within Belarus only served to underline the show’s degeneration into mere agit-prop.
Being Harold Pinter is a work of what one might call “megaphone theatre”. It is, surely, long since time that we accepted two simple principles: 1) megaphones are for the street, and 2) the theatre is not the street.
Of course, there are certain times and places (as evinced by Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed) that create a space, even a demand, for a theatre with a direct political function. Yet, as with the FTB, are such projects lauded for their courage in immensely difficult circumstances, or for their artistic achievements?
The irony of all this, in the case of the Belarusians, is that eastern Europe has a great cultural legacy, dating back to the days of Stalinist dictatorship, of a much less polemical, far more metaphorical theatrical answer to tyranny. Talk to any number of eastern Europe’s great and profound creators of a theatre of the visual image (Song of the Goat, from Poland; Akhe, from Russia; Farm in the Cave, from the Czech Republic; Fabrik, from the old East Germany) and all agree, their powerful work has its roots in a theatre which understood not only the dangers (of persecution by the regime) inherent in polemic, but also the artistic (and, ultimately, political) power of a metaphorical and poetic form of performance which could both move audiences profoundly and circumnavigate the censor.
This is not a debate merely for Belarusia or countries living under dictatorship. It continues to rage in Britain, and (it appears to me, as a Scottish theatre critic, based in Scotland) especially England. Last year, at a symposium in London, I raised the general argument I’ve alluded to above (vis-à-vis the predominantly metaphorical, poetic possibilities of live drama; as the great English playwright Howard Barker writes: “It is not to insult an audience to offer it ambiguity”), and I was accused, by the playwright David Edgar, of believing in “art for art’s sake”; in other words, of suggesting that theatre has no political import.
This, of course, is the abusive last line of defence of the scoundrel; or, in this case, the tired theatrical polemicist. As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to see Edgar’s recent play Testing the Echo (a sort of left-wing version of the unlamented TV sitcom Mind Your Language, with almost as many cultural stereotypes, albeit more self-consciously ‘liberal’ ones) will testify, what really matters when a self-proclaimed ‘political’ author is at work is not the political intent of the piece, but the artistry with which it is expressed.
The political implications of Pinter’s early plays, such as The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, are immense. His later, much-maligned, ‘more political’ pieces (most notably the fine One for the Road) resonate with ambiguities, metaphors and poetry which raise them well above the sort of polemic with which people like Edgar and, latterly, David Hare (save us, please, from the English critics who lauded the dreary The Permanent Way) attempt to massage the liberal conscience.
Barker, detested though he is by a shamefully large number of people in English theatre, is entirely right when he asserts that a play has no “use”. A play is not a spanner, not a blunt instrument, but (it should hardly have to be said) a work of imagination.
There is nothing revolutionary in the self-satisfied posturing of the David Edgars and David Hares of this world. The courageous work of the Free Theatre of Belarus irritates, sometimes possibly threatens, their regime, but it offers little to the wider world of theatre.
The truly revolutionary implications of theatre emerge in work which, without sentiment and moralism, brings us face-to-face with the realities of human existence, raising us above the infantilising mediocrity of our day-to-day culture. We find that in the Greek tragedians, of course, and in Shakespeare, at his best. We find it too, if only more English directors and critics could bring themselves to admit it, in Barker.