Revision lecture

Revision lecture EN302: European Theatre

What’s the rubric for the exam? • Can I write about the same texts in the exam as I did in my coursework essays? • Can I write about texts we haven’t studied on the module? • Can I bring the texts into the exam? • Should I refer to secondary criticism? • How should I organise my time during the exam? • How will the exam be marked? • What sorts of topics will the exam cover? • Where can I find past papers?

What’s the rubric for the exam? • The rubric will read as follows: • Time allowed: 2 hours • Answer TWO of the following questions. • Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the particulars are entered on each book. • Do not substantially repeat material from assessed essays, or between sections on the exam

What’s the rubric for the exam? • Please note: You may be penalised up to 20 marks from your overall exam mark if it is evident that you are in violation of the rubric of the exam paper. • Pay attention! Some questions will ask for discussion of “two or more plays”, while others will ask you to consider “two or more dramatists”. Others will be more specific, asking you to consider, for example, only Greek plays, or only Naturalist dramas. • Answer the question that is asked, not the question you wanted to answer!

Can I write about the same texts in the exam as I did in my coursework essays? • Technically, yes – but we strongly advise against it. What you cannot do is “substantially repeat material from assessed essays”. Under the pressure of exam conditions, you might not remember exactly what you wrote in your essays.

Can I write about texts we haven’t studied on the module? • As long as the question allows it. Some questions specify that you should write about “plays by writers on this module” – others do not. Do bear in mind that the module is about European theatre, though!

Can I bring the texts into the exam? • No, you are not permitted to bring the texts into the exam. Memorising some key quotations will therefore be helpful, but committing huge chunks of the texts to memory may not be the best use of your revision time! The same goes for secondary sources. • Students whose first language is not English are permitted to use a bilingual dictionary. For further details, see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/academicoffice/quality/categories/examinations/policies/a_materials/

Should I refer to secondary criticism? • It is not essential to refer to secondary criticism in the exam – the most important thing is to construct a persuasive argument. But it can help! • It would be sensible to ensure that you are familiar with the work of some of the key theorists covered on the module. These include (but are not limited to): • Aristotle (esp. Poetics) • Zola (esp. ‘Naturalism on the Stage’) • Brecht (esp. Brecht on Theatre) • Williams (esp. Modern Tragedy)

How should I organise my time during the exam? • You have two hours: that’s one hour for each question. Both questions carry an equal number of marks, so you would be ill-advised to spend longer on the first question than you do on the second! • Planning is everything. Spend an appropriate amount of time brainstorming ideas and working out a rough structure for your argument before you start writing the essay. You can cross through any work you do not wish to be marked.

How will the exam be marked? • 2.ii: Work will be conscientious, attentive to subject matter and title, and adequate in standard of presentation. The essay must employ adequate Modern English grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation. • A 2:ii essay will: • Show an understanding of the selected topic; • Show reasonable knowledge of the text(s) being discussed; • Present an argument backed up with analysis of appropriate detail from the primary text(s); • Engage with the themes and content of the module.

How will the exam be marked? • 2.i: The best work will be highly competent in organisation and presentation, showing appropriate and intelligent use of primary material. The essay must employ a good standard of Modern English grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation. • A 2:i essay might: • Incorporate perceptive analysis of well-chosen detail from the text(s) being discussed; • Present arguments in which evidence leads lucidly to conclusions; • Be organised into an effective overall structure; • Make effective and expressive use of English; • Signpost its overall argument effectively so that the structure of the whole essay is clear to the reader; • Integrate analysis of the text(s) with discussion of broader cultural, historical and/or theoretical issues.

How will the exam be marked? • First class: Work will demonstrate intellectual maturity, eloquence, and/or elements of exceptional insight in your engagement with the subject. It will show some degree of originality. • Some likely features of first-class work: • Ambitious argument carried out successfully; • Outstandingly perceptive commentary on a number of details of the text(s); • Highly developed organisation of overall argument; • Very effective and persuasive argumentative writing; • Convincing and vivid presentation of an engaged response to the text(s); • Thorough and lucid engagement with difficult ideas; • Outstandingly well-judged integration of the text(s) into discussion of broader cultural, historical, and/or theoretical issues.

What sorts of topics will the exam cover? • Social and/or religious ethics • The relationship between theatricality and life • Dramatic genre, especially tragedy and/or comedy • Naturalism and post-Naturalism • Political theatre and/or the politics of theatre • Adapting the drama of the past/intertextuality • Representations of gender • The relationship between language and the visual • Specific productions • ‘Topics’

European Theatre • Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre: • ‘For centuries a paradigm has dominated European theatre that clearly distinguishes it from non-European theatre traditions. For example, Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. Bertolt Brecht chose the term ‘dramatic theatre’ to designate the tradition that his epic ‘theatre of the scientific age’ intended to put an end to. In a more comprehensive sense (and also including the majority of Brecht’s own work), however, this term can be used to designate the core of European theatre tradition in modern times. (2006: 21)

Imitation • Mimesis contrasted with diegesis in classical thought • Central to the project of Naturalism • Role of symbolism (HeddaGabler, Spring Awakening, Yerma) • Both Zola and Brecht proposed a ‘theatre for the scientific age’ – what did this mean in each case? • Impact of photography? Film? TV? Internet?

Plot • Aristotle’s hamartia, anagnorisis, and peripeteia • Aristotle described structure as the ‘most important of all’ dramatic elements: • ‘A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.’ • Importance of causality (Oresteia, Miss Julie, Galileo)

Recognition • Pursuit of ‘truth’ in Oedipus: • ‘light’ (p. 187), ‘stubborn’ (p. 188), ‘terror’ (p. 196), ‘both parent and murderer’ (p. 201), ‘no comfort’ (p. 202) • ‘Seeing’ and Teiresias • Think about the endings of, for example, The Spanish Tragedy, Phèdre, Yerma, or The Skriker. • Catharsis: • ‘…the bringing about of affective recognition and solidarity by means of the drama and the affects represented and transmitted to the audience within its frame’ (Lehmann 2006: 21).

Drama and ethics • ‘Playwright’ was synonymous with ‘teacher’ in Ancient Greek (didaskalos). • In his Preface to Phèdre, Racine described classical tragedy as ‘a school in which virtue was taught not less well than in the schools of the philosophers’. His own tragedy was written with a similar didactic aim, founded upon reason, decorum and moral utility. • Aristotle on comedy: • ‘Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type, - not, however, in the full sense of the word bad; for the ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. It may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain.’ • Henri Bergson (‘Laughter’, 1900): • ‘Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is really and truly a kind of social “ragging”. … In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently correct our neighbour.’ (1900: 148) • Moral of Tartuffe: • ‘Learn to distinguish between virtue, / Real and feigned.’ (p. 72)

Drama and ethics • Molière’s ‘Preface’ to Tartuffe (23 March 1669) describes the play as ‘a skilful poem which, by agreeable lessons, reprimands men’s defects’: • ‘If the mission of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I fail to see why some should be privileged. In the State, this one is of an importance much more dangerous than all the others; and we have seen that the theatre is a great force for correction.’ • ‘It is a great blow to vice to expose it to everyone’s laughter. We can easily stand being reprehended, but we cannot stand being mocked. We are willing to be wicked, but we will not be ridiculous.’

Drama and agency • Do dramatic characters have agency, or are they driven by unseen forces? • Conflict between gods in classical tragedy; • Revenge / classical gods / Christian God in The Spanish Tragedy; • God-as-audience and power of prophecy vs. freedom to ‘overcome the stars’ (p. 36) in Life Is A Dream; • Gods and guilt in Phèdre: • ‘Heaven lit in my heart an ill-omened fire’ (p. 213); • ‘I know my baseness, and do not belong / To those bold wretches who with brazen front / Can revel in their crimes unblushingly.’ (p. 184). • Determinism and entrapment: society, heredity, physiology and psychology in Naturalism and beyond.

Drama and agency • Zola published his manifesto on this subject in 1881, in an essay titled ‘Naturalism on the Stage’. • He claimed to be reflecting the scientific and rational spirit of the age in which he lived; ‘the impulse of the century,’ he argued, ‘is toward naturalism’ (1881: 5): • ‘I am waiting for someone to put a man of flesh and bones on the stage, taken from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie. … I am waiting for environment to determine the characters and the characters to act according to the logic of facts combined with logic of their own disposition. … I am waiting, finally, until the development of naturalism already achieved in the novel takes over the stage, until the playwrights return to the source of science and modem arts, to the study of nature, to the anatomy of man. (1881: 6)

Conflict • Agon / thesis and antithesis: • Antigone and Creon are forced to choose between family and state. • Pentheus must choose between order and chaos: ‘When I come out, I’ll either be fighting, or I’ll put myself in your hands.’ (p. 405) • Phèdre is torn between passion and reason. Her mother and father symbolise two different drives: sexuality and moral judgement. ‘Reason reigns no longer over me… I have lost my self-dominion’ (p. 180-1). • Melchior is offered an ambiguous choice at the end of Spring Awakening; in choosing the Masked Man, perhaps he makes the opposite choice to the ones made by the protagonists at the ends of both HeddaGabler and Yerma.

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy • “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” (Part VI) • “Every Tragedy […] must have six parts, which parts determine its quality – namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. …most important of all is the structure of the incidents.” (Part VI)

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy • Aristotle valued a “structural union of the parts […] such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed” (Part VIII). • “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence.” (Part IX) • “… the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy – Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes [Anagnorisis] – are parts of the plot.” (Part VI)

Modern tragedy • Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy (1966) analyses some of the ways in which various modern plays might be conceived as having adapted the conventions of classical tragedy. • Williams defines tragedy as ‘the conflict between an individual and the forces that destroy him’ (2006: 113).

Liberal Tragedy • For example, Williams describes Ibsen’s drama as ‘Liberal Tragedy’: • ‘…the hero defies an opposing world, full of lies and compromises and dead positions, only to find, as he struggles against it, that as a man he belongs to this world, and has its destructive inheritance in himself.’ (2006: 124) • In this view, society is at fault: it is seen as false and oppressive, a trap from which it is impossible to escape.

Liberal Tragedy General Gabler’s memory Regional location Oppressive environment Social class / expectations HEDDA GABLER Tesman / identity as ‘wife’ Judge Brack’s ‘leverage’ Threat of scandal Intellectual boredom Impending motherhood Patriarchy

Private Tragedy • Strindberg’s drama, on the other hand, belongs to a category that Williams calls ‘Private Tragedy’, a form which ‘begins with bare and unaccommodated man’: • ‘All primary energy is centred in this isolated creature, who desires and eats and fights alone. Society is at best an arbitrary institution, to prevent this horde of creatures destroying each other. And when these isolated persons meet, in what are called relationships, their exchanges are forms of struggle, inevitably. Tragedy, in this view, is inherent.’ (2006: 133) • The association between love and destruction is ‘so deep that it is not, as the liberal writers [like Ibsen] assumed, the product of a particular history: it is, rather, general and natural, in all relationships.’ (2006: 134)

Private Tragedy Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc. Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc. JEAN MISS JULIE CHRISTINE Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.

Private Tragedy Jean’s heredity, body, psyche, etc. (suggests Strindberg) are better equipped for survival… or are they? JEAN MISS JULIE

Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate • Williams describes the ‘deadlock’ of liberal tragedy: • The hero ‘sees what has to be done, and tries to do it. He is left to struggle alone, is misunderstood and is broken. He also breaks others, in his own fall.’ (2006: 172) • He argues that this deadlock, ‘familiar to us from Ibsen’, is ‘transformed by Chekhov into a new condition: that of stalemate’: • ‘In a deadlock, there is still effort and struggle, but no possibility of winning: the wrestler with life dies as he gives his last strength. In a stalemate, there is no possibility of movement or even the effort at movement; every willed action is self-cancelling.’ (2006: 172) • Williams on Three Sisters: ‘The breakdown of meaning is now so complete that even the aspiration to meaning seems comic.’ (2006: 174)

Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one! HAMM: I wonder. (Pause.) Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at! (Beckett, p. 108)

Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate • Peter Brook on Beckett: • ‘Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forges his merciless ‘no’ out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which the contour of its opposite can be drawn. …When we attack Beckett for pessimism it is we who are the Beckett characters trapped in a Beckett scene. When we accept Beckett’s statement as it is, then suddenly all is transformed. There is after all quite another audience, Beckett’s audience; those in every country who do not set up intellectual barriers, who do not try too hard to analyse the message. This audience laughs and cries out – and in the end celebrates with Beckett; this audience leaves his plays, his black plays, nourished and enriched, with a lighter heart, full of a strange irrational joy.’ (1990: 66)

Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’ • Brecht: We ask you expressly to discover That what happens all the time is not natural. For to say that something is natural In such times of bloody confusion Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness Of inhuman humanity is to Regard it as unchangeable. (The Exception and the Rule, p. 37) • ‘For art to be “un-political” means only to ally itself with the “ruling” group.’ (1977: 196).

Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’ • As Brecht argued in his Short Organum for the Theatre: • The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium). … Shakespeare’s great solitary figures, bearing on their breast the star of their fate, carry through with irresistible force their futile and deadly outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death, becomes obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is beyond criticism. (1977: 189)

Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’ • According to Brecht, it was the role of the theatre to debunk such notions. As ‘the Philosopher’, Brecht’s spokesperson in The Messingkauf Dialogues, puts it: the philosopher. The causes of a lot of tragedies lie outside the power of those who suffer them, so it seems. the dramaturg. So it seems? the philosopher. Of course it only seems. Nothing human can possibly lie outside the powers of humanity, and such tragedies have human causes. (Brecht 1965: 32)

Brecht’s rejection of ‘dramatic theatre’ • ‘The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable – That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.’ • ‘The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’ (1977: 71)

Playing with form SKRIKER. … May day, she cries, may pole axed me to help her. So I spin the sheaves shoves shivers into golden guild and geld and if she can’t guessing game and safety match my name then I’ll take her no miss no me no. Is it William Gwylliam Guillaume? Is it John Jack the ladder in your stocking is it Joke? Is it Alexander Sandro Andrew Drewsteignton? Mephistopheles Toffeenose Tiffany’s Timpany Timothy Mossycoat? No ’t ain’t, says I, no tainted meat me after the show me what you’ve got. (Churchill, p. 9)

Where can I find past papers? • Here! http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/exampapers/

References • Brecht, Bertolt (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willett, Chatham: W. & J. Mackay & Co. • Brecht, Bertolt (1977) Brecht on Theatre, trans. J. Willett, London: Eyre Methuen • Brook, Peter (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin. • Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Abingdon: Routledge. • Strindberg, August (1888) ‘Preface to Miss Julie’, in Meyer, M. [trans.] (2000) Strindberg, Plays: One, London: Methuen Drama, pp. 91-103. • Williams, Raymond (2006) Modern Tragedy, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. • Zola, Emile (1881) ‘Naturalism on the Stage’, in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001) Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper Square Press, pp. 5-14.

Revision lecture