Get Thee Behind Me, Realism

But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. – King James Bible, Matthew 16:23

So what’s wrong with Realism? Nothing. It has its place, alongside the proscenium arch, in the Dramatist’s lexicon, I’m sure. But our slavish devotion to it is killing theatre. In this, we are the unwitting accomplices of film/video/television as we pursue making our theatrical productions more like them. I refer you to At This ‘Tempest,’ Digital Wizardry Makes ‘Rough Magic’(NY Times, 1/04/17) highlighting the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production of The Tempest. It features an avatar of Ariel physically transforming right before our very eyes. All brought to you live with motion-capture, green-screen technology. First it was canals in the ‘80’s, then it was helicopters in the ‘90’s, later came the most expensive production in theatre history trying to recreate the movie magic of Spiderman. Now it’s Lord of the Rings meets Shakespeare cum Gollum/Ariel. Are we out of our minds? How much more expensive can we make a theatre ticket before we completely alienate our audiences and price our art form out of the market? All of this is self-destruction in the name of Realism.

But there is a Satan much worse than over-reaching, realistic spectacle – our attempt to realistically recreate the hum-drum banality of our mundane human existence over and over and over again on stage. As playwright and critic Walter Kerr put it in his book How Not to Write a Play:

Realism imposes a completeness of detail and casualness of deportment that does not deny the possibility of drama but that does postpone its appearance interminably… The drama may be heard as an occasional echo… If drama is my business, it is a shady business, and I must let it in the back door while everyone else is at tea. My play, as a result, moves with the caution of a man who is trying to get up a flight of stairs without squeaking any of the floorboards. I am a dramatist on tiptoe.

It is no wonder that the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found twice as many people attend musicals as they do plays. Under the shackles of Realism, the non-musical play has become an exercise in how to stifle the imagination, for audiences and for artists. It has become theatre’s Satan. Who do I blame? The Russians. Or one Russian in particular. Heck, why not. That seems to be in vogue.

The roots of our modern Realism can ultimately be tied to the influence of one of the greatest directors in modern theatre history, Constantin Stanislavski and his Moscow Arts Theatre. Stanislavski, with his “psychological realism”, was a genius for developing an acting method that taught actors to behave as real people rather than declamatory automatons. For that, we owe him a great debt. But his genius faltered when he decided to extend his work as an acting teacher onto the stage as a director. The successful result was a terrible, destructive force. Realism destroys the one abiding and great power of theatre – the imagination – and Stanislavski did it in spades. Here’s a conversation Stanislavski’s contemporary (and, perhaps, philosophical nemesis) Vsevolod Meyerhold made note of at a rehearsal for one of Stanislavski’s more memorable productions:

On the second occasion that Chekhov attended rehearsals of The Seagull at the Moscow Arts Theatre, one of the actors told him that offstage there would be frogs croaking, dragon-flies humming and dogs barking.

“Why?” – asked [Chechov] in a dissatisfied tone.

“Because it’s realistic” – replied the actor.

“Realistic! – repeated Chekhov with a laugh. Then after a short pause he said: “The stage is art. There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be ‘realistic’ but the picture would be ruined.

There it is. Theatre is art. Art is a copy of life, not life itself as Plato puts forward in The Republic. This is the basic problem with theatrical Realism. From the theatre, we require more than real life. We come for imagination.

Miriam Webster defines imagination as: “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality”. As illustrated by this definition, Realism is anti-imagination.

Imagination is theatre’s great, abiding power. It was the spark that caused its conception and the pillar upon which it stands. Through imagination, we seek not the things of men, but the things of god. In imagining, we reach for the unknown mysteries of the universe and, in doing so, reach beyond the hum-drum reality of our lives. We transcend. When we embrace the Satan of Realism, we become to theatre what Peter was to Jesus – “an offence”.

It is ironic that Stanislavski, the man who evoked imagination in acting with his “magic if”, embraced the mundane “as it is” in his directing. His Russian contemporary and poet/dramatist Valery Bryusov put it eloquently:

 It is time for the theatre to stop imitating reality. A cloud in a painting is flat, stays motionless, does not change its shape or colour, yet it contains something which excites in us the same sensation as a real cloud in the sky. The stage must supply that which is needed to help the spectator picture, as easily as possible in his imagination, the scene demanded by the plot of the play.

Meyerhold put it more bluntly:

 In the theatre, the spectator’s imagination is able to supply that which is left unsaid. It is this mystery, and the desire to solve it, which draw so many to the theatre.

Equally ironic is that in our efforts to create theatre in the image of television and film (which manufacture realism far better), we continue to chop away at the very taproot that feeds our art.

As the world mourns the loss of playwright Peter Shaffer, let us take his words from Gift of the Gorgon, his final play, as a clarion call:

 The Theatre is the only religion that can never die. It’s quiescent now, like an old fire fallen in on itself, barely smoldering. But at its height, centuries ago… the theatre gave us fait and true astonishment – as religion is supposed to do. The playwright set up his play like Athena’s shield, hammered and wrought in the celestial smithy. A great shining surface in which you can see all truth by reflection. The audience assembled before it and peered into it together in communion. They saw themselves enlarged, made legendary as well as particular in all their glory and ghastliness. It faced them with towering shapes of their most intense and terrible desires. Undeniable pictures formed of blazing words. They came away astounded, scared, exalted, seeing themselves, perhaps for the first time, in their world which they’d always thought ordinary, lit with the fire of transformation. And as they walked home, they’d suddenly really see the dragon wing of night over spread the earth; and inside themselves, the glint of their own true beings. Theatre was illuminate, sacred, and indispensible. What is now? Rows of seats for people to sit with folded arms, people who’ve forgotten their needs. I tell you, one day, stirred by new priests, that fire will blaze again. Then watch out.

Let us emerge from behind the proscenium arch and put Realism behind us. Let us reawaken the great powers of imagination from which all drama springs. Let us move forward in our quest to know the unknowable. Let us move away from the world of men and toward the worlds of god. If we lead the way, then surely our audiences will follow.

Next up, I take on cultural hierarchy.

Anon