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South Islands, then, a couple of days later, reverts to the original
flat-chested, sharp-elbowed type. We have a couple of suicides of the
wildest sort, and the positive-finality trick is supplied by the heroine's
telling us just before the play ends that she will not commit suicide, but
will go on living in the dismal house, etc., though there is nothing to
prevent her changing her mind, and using the same old army pistol so
conveniently supplied to the other patients of the play. Then there is the
element of Fate, Fate whom the author leads by one hand, and the late
professor Freud by the other. There are portraits on the wall, dumb
creatures, which are used for the purpose of monologue under the queer
misconception that a monologue becomes a dialogue if the portrait of another
person is addressed. There are many such interesting things in this play.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing, one that throws direct light on the
inevitable artificial side of tragedies based on the logic of fate, is the
difficulties the author experiences in keeping this or that character on the
stage when he is especially required, but when some pathetic flaw in the
machinery suggests that the really natural thing would be a hasty retreat.
For instance: the old gentleman of tragedy is expected to return from the
war tomorrow or possibly after tomorrow, which means that he arrives almost
immediately after the beginning of the act with the usual explanation about
trains. It is late in the evening. The evening is cold. The only place to
sit is the steps of the porch. The old gentleman is tired, hungry, has not
been home for ages and moreover suffers from acute heart trouble--a pain
like a knife, he says, which is meant to prepare his death in another act.
Now the horrible job with which the author is faced is to make that poor old
man remain in the bleak garden, on the damp steps, for a good talk with his
daughter and his wife--especially with his wife. The casual reasons for his
not going into the house, which are inserted here and there in the talk,
keep excluding one another in a most fascinating way--and the tragedy of the
act is not the tragedy of the old man's relations with his wife, but the
tragedy of an honest, tired, hungry, helpless human being, grimly held by
the author who, until the act is over, keeps him away from bath, slippers
and supper.
The peculiar technique of this play and of other plays by other authors
is not so much the result of poor talent, as the unavoidable result of the
illusion that life and thus dramatic art picturing life should be based on a
steady current of cause and effect driving us towards the ocean of death.
The themes, the ideas of tragedies have certainly changed, but the change is
unfortunately just the change in an actor's dressing room, mere new
disguises that only appear new, but whose interplay is always the same:
conflict between this and that, and then the same iron rules of conflict
leading either to a happy or miserable end, but always to some end which is
unavoidably contained in the cause. Nothing ever fizzles out in a tragedy,
though perhaps one of the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic
situations just fizzle out. Anything remotely resembling an accident is
taboo. The conflicting characters are not live people, but types--and this
is especially noticeable in the absurd though well-meant plays, which are
supposed to depict--if not to solve--the tragedy of the present times. In
such plays what I call the island or Grand Hotel or Magnolia Street method
is used, that is, the grouping of people in a dramatically convenient,
strictly limited space with either social tradition or some outside calamity
preventing their dispersal. In such tragedies the old German refugee, though
otherwise fairly stolid, will invariably love music, the Russian émigré
woman will be a fascinating vamp and rave about Tsars and the snow, the Jew
will be married to a Christian, the spy will be blond and bland, and the
young married couple naive and pathetic--and so on and on--and no matter
where you group them it is always the same old story (even the transatlantic
Clipper has been tried, and certainly nobody heeded the critics who humbly
asked what engineering device had been used to eliminate the roar of the
propellers). The conflict of ideas replacing the conflict of passion changes
nothing in the essential pattern--if anything, it makes it still more
artificial. Hobnobbing with the audience through the medium of a chorus has
been tried, only resulting in the destruction of the main and fundamental
agreement on which stage drama can be based. This agreement is: we are aware
of the characters on the stage, but cannot move them; they are unaware of
us, but can move us--a perfect division which, when tampered with,
transforms plays into what they are today.
The Soviet tragedies are in fact the last word in the cause-and-effect
pattern, plus something that the bourgeois stage is helplessly groping for:
a good machine god that will do away with the need to search for a plausible
final effect. This god, coming inevitably at the end of Soviet tragedy and
indeed regulating the whole play, is none other than the idea of the perfect
state as understood by communists. I do not wish to imply that what
irritates me here is propaganda. In fact, I don't see why if, say, one type
of theatre may indulge in patriotic propaganda or democratic propaganda
another cannot indulge in communist propaganda, or in any other kind of
propaganda.
I don't see any difference because, perhaps, all kinds of propaganda
leave me perfectly cold whether their subject appeals to me or not. But what
I do mean is that whenever propaganda is contained in a play the determinist
chain is drawn still tighter around the throat of the tragic muse. In Soviet
tragedies, moreover, we get a special kind of dualism which makes them
well-nigh unbearable--in book form at least. The wonders of staging and
acting that have been preserved in Russia since the nineties of the last
century, when the Art Theatre appeared, can certainly make entertainment
even out of the lowest trash. The dualism to which I refer, and which is the
most typical and remarkable feature of the Soviet drama, consists in the
following: We know and Soviet authors know that the dialectical idea of any
Soviet tragedy must be that party emotions, emotions related to the worship
of the State, are above ordinary human or bourgeois feeling, so that any
form of moral or physical cruelty, if and when it leads to the triumph of
Socialism, is admissible. On the other hand, because the play must be good
melodrama, in order to attract popular fancy, there is a kind of queer
agreement that certain actions may not be performed even by the most
consistent Bolshevik--such as cruelty to children or betrayal of a friend;
that is, mingled with the most traditional heroics of all times, we find the
rosiest sentimentalities of old-fashioned fiction. So that, in the long run,
the most extreme form of leftist theatre, notwithstanding its healthy looks
and dynamic harmonies, is really a reversion to the most primitive and
hackneyed forms of literature.
I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to
be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of
fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw's brilliant farces
(especially Candida), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance,
Strife), in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand's Time Is a
Dream), in one or two American plays such as the first act of The Children's
Hour and the first act of Of Mice and Men (the rest of the play is dismal
nonsense)--in many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits,
artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere
which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But
the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.
The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has.
Tragedies based exclusively on the logic of conflict are as untrue to life
as an all-pervading class-struggle idea is untrue to history. Most of the
worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of
tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance. This element of
chance playwrights have so completely excluded from their dramas that any
denouement due to an earthquake or to an automobile accident strikes the
audience as incongruous if, naturally, the earthquake has not been expected
all along or the automobile has not been a dramatic investment from the very
start. The life of a tragedy is, as it were, too short for accidents to
happen; but at the same time tradition demands that life on the stage
develop according to rules-- the rules of passionate conflict-- rules whose
rigidity is at least as ridiculous as the stumblings of chance. What even
the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always
stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or
horror of chance--not merely on its ridiculousness. And it is this secret
rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the
tragic muse. Otherwise, if only the rules of conflict and fate and divine
justice and imminent death are followed, tragedy is limited both by its
platform and by its unswerving doom, and becomes in the long run a hopeless
scuffle--the scuffle between a condemned man and the executioner. But life
is not a scaffold, as tragic playwrights tend to suggest. I have so seldom
been moved by the tragedy I have seen or read because I could never believe
in the ridiculous laws that they presupposed. The charm of tragic genius,
the charm of Shakespeare or Ibsen, lies for me in quite another region.
What then ought tragedy to be if I deny it what is considered its most
fundamental characteristic--conflict ruled by the causal laws of human fate?
First of all I doubt the real existence of these laws in the simple and
severe form that the stage has adopted. I doubt that any strict line can be
drawn between the tragic and the burlesque, fatality and chance, causal
subjection and the caprice of free will. What seems to me to be the higher
form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which
the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own
individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them. It would be
absurd to suggest, however, that accident and chance may be left to play
havoc with life on the stage. But it is not absurd to say that a writer of
genius may discover exactly the right harmony of such accidental
occurrences, and that this harmony, without suggesting anything like the
iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations
that occur in life. And it is high time, too, for playwrights to forget the
notions that they must please the audience and that this audience is a
collection of half-wits; that plays, as one writer on the subject solemnly
asserts, must never contain anything important in the first ten minutes,
because, you see, late dinners are the fashion; and that every important
detail must be repeated so that even the least intelligent spectator will at
last grasp the idea. The only audience that a playwright must imagine is the
ideal one, that is, himself. All the rest pertains to the box-office, not to
dramatic art.
"That's all very fine," said the producer leaning back in his armchair
and puffing on the cigar which fiction assigns to his profession, "that's
all very fine--but business is business, so how can you expect plays based
on some new technique which will make them unintelligible to the general
public, plays not only departing from tradition, but flaunting their
disregard for the wits of the audience, tragedies which arrogantly reject
the causal fundamentals of the particular form of dramatic art that they
represent--how can you expect such plays to be produced by any big theatre
company?" Well, I don't--and this, too, is the tragedy of tragedy.
flat-chested, sharp-elbowed type. We have a couple of suicides of the
wildest sort, and the positive-finality trick is supplied by the heroine's
telling us just before the play ends that she will not commit suicide, but
will go on living in the dismal house, etc., though there is nothing to
prevent her changing her mind, and using the same old army pistol so
conveniently supplied to the other patients of the play. Then there is the
element of Fate, Fate whom the author leads by one hand, and the late
professor Freud by the other. There are portraits on the wall, dumb
creatures, which are used for the purpose of monologue under the queer
misconception that a monologue becomes a dialogue if the portrait of another
person is addressed. There are many such interesting things in this play.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing, one that throws direct light on the
inevitable artificial side of tragedies based on the logic of fate, is the
difficulties the author experiences in keeping this or that character on the
stage when he is especially required, but when some pathetic flaw in the
machinery suggests that the really natural thing would be a hasty retreat.
For instance: the old gentleman of tragedy is expected to return from the
war tomorrow or possibly after tomorrow, which means that he arrives almost
immediately after the beginning of the act with the usual explanation about
trains. It is late in the evening. The evening is cold. The only place to
sit is the steps of the porch. The old gentleman is tired, hungry, has not
been home for ages and moreover suffers from acute heart trouble--a pain
like a knife, he says, which is meant to prepare his death in another act.
Now the horrible job with which the author is faced is to make that poor old
man remain in the bleak garden, on the damp steps, for a good talk with his
daughter and his wife--especially with his wife. The casual reasons for his
not going into the house, which are inserted here and there in the talk,
keep excluding one another in a most fascinating way--and the tragedy of the
act is not the tragedy of the old man's relations with his wife, but the
tragedy of an honest, tired, hungry, helpless human being, grimly held by
the author who, until the act is over, keeps him away from bath, slippers
and supper.
The peculiar technique of this play and of other plays by other authors
is not so much the result of poor talent, as the unavoidable result of the
illusion that life and thus dramatic art picturing life should be based on a
steady current of cause and effect driving us towards the ocean of death.
The themes, the ideas of tragedies have certainly changed, but the change is
unfortunately just the change in an actor's dressing room, mere new
disguises that only appear new, but whose interplay is always the same:
conflict between this and that, and then the same iron rules of conflict
leading either to a happy or miserable end, but always to some end which is
unavoidably contained in the cause. Nothing ever fizzles out in a tragedy,
though perhaps one of the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic
situations just fizzle out. Anything remotely resembling an accident is
taboo. The conflicting characters are not live people, but types--and this
is especially noticeable in the absurd though well-meant plays, which are
supposed to depict--if not to solve--the tragedy of the present times. In
such plays what I call the island or Grand Hotel or Magnolia Street method
is used, that is, the grouping of people in a dramatically convenient,
strictly limited space with either social tradition or some outside calamity
preventing their dispersal. In such tragedies the old German refugee, though
otherwise fairly stolid, will invariably love music, the Russian émigré
woman will be a fascinating vamp and rave about Tsars and the snow, the Jew
will be married to a Christian, the spy will be blond and bland, and the
young married couple naive and pathetic--and so on and on--and no matter
where you group them it is always the same old story (even the transatlantic
Clipper has been tried, and certainly nobody heeded the critics who humbly
asked what engineering device had been used to eliminate the roar of the
propellers). The conflict of ideas replacing the conflict of passion changes
nothing in the essential pattern--if anything, it makes it still more
artificial. Hobnobbing with the audience through the medium of a chorus has
been tried, only resulting in the destruction of the main and fundamental
agreement on which stage drama can be based. This agreement is: we are aware
of the characters on the stage, but cannot move them; they are unaware of
us, but can move us--a perfect division which, when tampered with,
transforms plays into what they are today.
The Soviet tragedies are in fact the last word in the cause-and-effect
pattern, plus something that the bourgeois stage is helplessly groping for:
a good machine god that will do away with the need to search for a plausible
final effect. This god, coming inevitably at the end of Soviet tragedy and
indeed regulating the whole play, is none other than the idea of the perfect
state as understood by communists. I do not wish to imply that what
irritates me here is propaganda. In fact, I don't see why if, say, one type
of theatre may indulge in patriotic propaganda or democratic propaganda
another cannot indulge in communist propaganda, or in any other kind of
propaganda.
I don't see any difference because, perhaps, all kinds of propaganda
leave me perfectly cold whether their subject appeals to me or not. But what
I do mean is that whenever propaganda is contained in a play the determinist
chain is drawn still tighter around the throat of the tragic muse. In Soviet
tragedies, moreover, we get a special kind of dualism which makes them
well-nigh unbearable--in book form at least. The wonders of staging and
acting that have been preserved in Russia since the nineties of the last
century, when the Art Theatre appeared, can certainly make entertainment
even out of the lowest trash. The dualism to which I refer, and which is the
most typical and remarkable feature of the Soviet drama, consists in the
following: We know and Soviet authors know that the dialectical idea of any
Soviet tragedy must be that party emotions, emotions related to the worship
of the State, are above ordinary human or bourgeois feeling, so that any
form of moral or physical cruelty, if and when it leads to the triumph of
Socialism, is admissible. On the other hand, because the play must be good
melodrama, in order to attract popular fancy, there is a kind of queer
agreement that certain actions may not be performed even by the most
consistent Bolshevik--such as cruelty to children or betrayal of a friend;
that is, mingled with the most traditional heroics of all times, we find the
rosiest sentimentalities of old-fashioned fiction. So that, in the long run,
the most extreme form of leftist theatre, notwithstanding its healthy looks
and dynamic harmonies, is really a reversion to the most primitive and
hackneyed forms of literature.
I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to
be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of
fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw's brilliant farces
(especially Candida), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance,
Strife), in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand's Time Is a
Dream), in one or two American plays such as the first act of The Children's
Hour and the first act of Of Mice and Men (the rest of the play is dismal
nonsense)--in many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits,
artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere
which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But
the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.
The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has.
Tragedies based exclusively on the logic of conflict are as untrue to life
as an all-pervading class-struggle idea is untrue to history. Most of the
worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of
tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance. This element of
chance playwrights have so completely excluded from their dramas that any
denouement due to an earthquake or to an automobile accident strikes the
audience as incongruous if, naturally, the earthquake has not been expected
all along or the automobile has not been a dramatic investment from the very
start. The life of a tragedy is, as it were, too short for accidents to
happen; but at the same time tradition demands that life on the stage
develop according to rules-- the rules of passionate conflict-- rules whose
rigidity is at least as ridiculous as the stumblings of chance. What even
the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always
stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or
horror of chance--not merely on its ridiculousness. And it is this secret
rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the
tragic muse. Otherwise, if only the rules of conflict and fate and divine
justice and imminent death are followed, tragedy is limited both by its
platform and by its unswerving doom, and becomes in the long run a hopeless
scuffle--the scuffle between a condemned man and the executioner. But life
is not a scaffold, as tragic playwrights tend to suggest. I have so seldom
been moved by the tragedy I have seen or read because I could never believe
in the ridiculous laws that they presupposed. The charm of tragic genius,
the charm of Shakespeare or Ibsen, lies for me in quite another region.
What then ought tragedy to be if I deny it what is considered its most
fundamental characteristic--conflict ruled by the causal laws of human fate?
First of all I doubt the real existence of these laws in the simple and
severe form that the stage has adopted. I doubt that any strict line can be
drawn between the tragic and the burlesque, fatality and chance, causal
subjection and the caprice of free will. What seems to me to be the higher
form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which
the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own
individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them. It would be
absurd to suggest, however, that accident and chance may be left to play
havoc with life on the stage. But it is not absurd to say that a writer of
genius may discover exactly the right harmony of such accidental
occurrences, and that this harmony, without suggesting anything like the
iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations
that occur in life. And it is high time, too, for playwrights to forget the
notions that they must please the audience and that this audience is a
collection of half-wits; that plays, as one writer on the subject solemnly
asserts, must never contain anything important in the first ten minutes,
because, you see, late dinners are the fashion; and that every important
detail must be repeated so that even the least intelligent spectator will at
last grasp the idea. The only audience that a playwright must imagine is the
ideal one, that is, himself. All the rest pertains to the box-office, not to
dramatic art.
"That's all very fine," said the producer leaning back in his armchair
and puffing on the cigar which fiction assigns to his profession, "that's
all very fine--but business is business, so how can you expect plays based
on some new technique which will make them unintelligible to the general
public, plays not only departing from tradition, but flaunting their
disregard for the wits of the audience, tragedies which arrogantly reject
the causal fundamentals of the particular form of dramatic art that they
represent--how can you expect such plays to be produced by any big theatre
company?" Well, I don't--and this, too, is the tragedy of tragedy.