Drama vs. Theatre

The playwright Edward Bond raised a few eyebrows recently by, among other things, dubbing Brecht "the playwright of Auschwitz". His argument was so patently absurd that I barely hiccuped. Instead, another statement caught my eye. Bond was speaking of a production of his play The Woman, which he directed at the National: "I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'." You could almost hear his disgust.

It seems that Bond has a very specialised definition of "theatre", one that comprehends the entire art form as, heaven forbid, a kind of meta-Tom Stoppard play. But his comment gave me pause, because this distinction between "drama" and "theatre" is one I've heard many times before, and almost always from writers.

The implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art. As Mrs O'Neill said of her husband, Eugene O'Neill was no mere playwright: he was a dramatist, and thus sat with the gods. Drama, we are given to understand, is Serious. Through the landscape of Drama stride the likes of Sophocles and Euripides and Shakespeare, lightning bolts of genius in each hand, their brows corrugated with Olympian thought.

An impressive picture, certainly, and one can see at once why a jobbing playwright might aspire to such divinity. But something inside me is irked by this picture. I love writers - why, some of them are my best friends - but it does seem rather self-serving. There is, in any successful production of even the most uncontroversially play-like play, rather more going on onstage than just the words: there's an entire texture of sound, design and performance and, crucially, there's an audience responding to it. If drama is just about the writer, then it might as well stay on paper.

If I'm in categorising mode, which is lamentably seldom for a critic, I think of theatre as the general noun, and of drama, like comedy, as a subset of theatre. Theatre has many mansions, and writers are resident only in some of them.

Critic Hans-Thies Lehmann coined the term "post-dramatic theatre" to describe a shift in practice away from a hierarchical model, with the writer (usually a dead writer) at the apex and the director interpreting the writer's "intention". As an aside, it's probably rather easy to know a writer's intention if he or she is dead and unable to argue: like Humpty Dumpty's vocabulary, it means just what you choose it to mean.

In the post-dramatic theatre, the place of the writer is less easily defined, with the creative emphasis equally existing in the contributions of other theatre-makers. Companies like Holland's Dood Pard are perhaps exemplary of this approach. But the term has also been applied to the writer-centric theatre of playwrights such as Sarah Kane or Howard Barker. Does this mean these writers are not dramatists?

After all, Shakespeare worked very much like Howard Barker, collaborating closely with his own company. And Shakespeare had jugglers and singers between the acts to keep the punters happy, which seems very unlike a divine dramatist. If Shakespeare is a dramatist, surely Barker is too? And if Barker is a dramatist, can he be post-dramatic? Or is Shakespeare himself suspiciously post-dramatic? What am I not getting here?

And returning to Bond: if drama isn't theatre, then what is it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/jan/09/whatsthedifferencebetweend

How the Theatre Failed America

Not-for-profits, For-profits in it together

Caucasian, upper class, senior citizens.

Where are our young people? Has our theatre become so advanced and specialized that it only appeals to those with at least 60 years of experience ON EARTH to understand it? Let alone afford it?

Keep in mind, Shakespeare's theatre--the popular entertainment of it's time--cost 10% of a SINGLE DAY'S salary for the lower class. My old plawrighting teacher paid .50 for standing room only seating for the opening run of Death of a Salesman.

Given these figures, can we obsess about stoic ideas of theatre? How can we get messages across if there's nobody seeing our shows? Do we compromise ethics? Do we turn towards film?

I'D RATHER BE A CYBORG THAN AN ACTOR... part 2

To the Greeks, their theatER and their theatRE were not only places to debate their civic issues, but also a place to express their wonderment about the universe. A place where they could freely worship the god Dionysus--he of wine and sex and other revelry--not only by attending these plays, but by participating in the festival. Historians tell us that the greek audience was loud and it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to say that they had been drinking since sunup (we DO know that the City Dionysia began at dawn). It was a religious holiday... and eventually a PAID religious holiday, at that. While many would dispute this as being "not worthy of classical civilization", it is far too easy (and naieve) to address this as simply a "primitive" notion of culture. No, for anyone concerned with the future (and ultimately the past) of the theatRE this belief can be seen as key.

Additionally, for those theatre "purists" who think that musicals do not have the potential for true and meaningful theatre, this much is known. One of the most likely origins of theatre involves the recitation of the dithyramb, or "goat song". Likewise, historians know that the choral roles involved were sung and involved dancing. To what extent, we are unsure. Perhaps Wagner was right in saying that in the beginning (of theatre, at the very least), all the arts were one.

I'D RATHER BE A CYBORG THAN AN ACTOR... part I

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner. -- Eleanora Duse

This quote is attributed to the legendary stage actress Eleanora Duse around the turn of the 20th century. While her quotes rebel against Ibsen and the realistic theatre of the late 1800s, Duse's thoughts came ahead of their time. Had Duse lived past 1924, she would have seen the (re)rise of the star system on Broadway and on film. Additionally, the notion of "theatre" has (perhaps?) changed from a theatRE that functions as an organization to a theatER that functions as a place.

How many times have we gone to the theatre, only to be told what we can't do. The theatre is essentially a place where action prevails. This can include action that occurs onstage, as well as the action that the audience experiences--be that emotional, social, critical, or (in the best of cases) a combination of everything. The audience must experience something more full than "story"--than "actors". If we are called to put life onstage, then we must put life in all of it's complexities and nuances--it's colors and textures. This is perhaps what Ibsen wanted to express, but (as many 20th century avant-garde theatre artists would say), the plot replaced the experience of being in the theatre.

Yet more often than not, we are told what to say, where to sit, how to think. Don't text, don't drink, don't pee until the intermission. Social debate is important, but when we place the value of our seat covers (the value of our theatER) over the quality of our shows (the value of our theatRE)--one degree removed from the value of our audience's experience then the battle is already lost. Think about that the next time you pay 9.50 for a Crown and Coke, then wish you had ordered a simple shot because the second act is beginning and you can't take the drink into the theatER.