On my theatrical credo 2
Now that in a day's time I'm having a chat with playwright Balázs Róbert Suda and Máté Szabó about the possibilities of young playwrights as a part of an event organized by the Hungarian Association of Young Writers, I feel it's high time that I tried to organize my thoughts about what I wanted to say about what I wanted to write.
I have to admit that I see myself less and less as a playwright. Perhaps the kinds of stories I'd like to write are, despite what I believed, more fit for prose. I also think that experimentation in short stories, for example, might be more welcome -- simply because there is less work and money involved in the publication of a short story than in a production (however small-scale) of a full-length play; because, in fewer words, there is a smaller risk. I hope, however, that my way of seeing stories will always remain inherently dramatic, and that this fact might give an interesting flavour to my writings in prose. But back to the theatre for the time being.
I've noticed that I always observe the temporal and spatial unity of action, more or less in the Aristotelian sense. This has not been a conscious decision made beforehand, but, I think, a consequence of my attempt to create storylines which strike one as leading inevitably to some doom, almost as if it has been all predetermined. There should be no "yes, but what if"-s and "now why has she done that"-s. It should all cohere and go in one direction. I strongly believe that this is the only way one can achieve a genuinely moving storyline: by following the pattern of the plots of classic tragedies.
Yes, I write tragedies, but tragedies in which nobody dies. To have someone die on you on stage is, I think, a cheap trick to show loss. Loss of values, the irredeemability of humankind, or whatever else you have in mind, should be shown in the psychology of the characters or in the intricate pattern of small events. I believe that silence is more effective than shouting; that if you really want to stun your audience, then you show a hero/ine silently breaking under the weight placed on his or her shoulders. Let the audience cry out under the pain they feel: don't make it easier for them by making the actors do the shouting.
My notion of a good plot and the sense of inevitability mean that the end of a play can come only if there is nothing that could follow the moment in question (which is a modification of Aristotle's idea), when the play, in fact, has deconstructed itself. This is why, I think, many of my plays end in questions or even in music or dance. That there is no (there can be no) answer to the final question (or, which is an equivalent thing, that there is but one answer to the question); that the play ends leaving behind language as such because everything that could be expressed has already been expressed create, in my view, the most tragic experience of all. That there remains nothing to be said or done. That the play hath ended and there is no tomorrow.
The previous post on the same subject was mostly about stage-ness, theatre-ness, and theatrical-ness. I argued that plays have always been aware of them happening on stage, but that there has been attempts to make the audience forget that they are sitting in an auditorium, perhaps to enhance identification with the characters. (This, I think, is perfectly achieved in the cinema with the darkness around you and the enormous screen you cannot avoid.) Contrary to such attempts, I would let the play happen on stage. I think no identification with a character is required to experience the tragedy unfolding before our eyes: I believe that the identification that is really important in theatre happens with the situation and not with hero(in)es. And this kind of identification can perfectly well co-exist with us being aware of the fact that what we see is a well-rehearsed repetition of someone else's words.
I, however, am not trying to turn attention back to the theatricalness of theatre by the techniques of Brecht. Nor do I attempt to somehow disrupt the personalities of the characters in a play by, for example, presenting them as representatives of solely one motive or one social force as in a morality play (a favourite technique, in my understanding, of Mr. Suda). What I try to do is to restore the status of language in theatre. My ideal theatre would affect us in more or less the same way a reading of poetry does, or a series of wordplays in a sitcom. Because of this, all of my plays border on being rituals -- I need not elaborate how important chanted sentences are in nearly all kinds of rituals.
Ritualisticness and emplotment characterised by the sense of inevitability have pushed me, I believe, looking back on my previous work, toward myths. Ancient Greek and Celtic myths surface in many of my plays either as points of reference or the backbone of the plot. My interest in language as ritual has been the reason, I think, for my using languages other than English, which are, supposedly, unintelligible for most of the audience. I have been striving, in other words, to (re-)create a mythology of our times, which is to re-create a kind of religion. I have been trying to write stories which provide momentary refuge from the horrors of reality but only to force us to face reality again -- but from another point of view. I have been trying to help us see -- and if all the techniques I've been using so far to achieve this goal and described above turn out to be (as they are doomed to do) inadequate, I shall abandon them and try again anew. Again and again and again.
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