The dates of this first section dealing with the work of specific European theatre practitioners, indicate the year of the signing of the Treaty of Rome to the entry of the United Kingdom into what was then the single Europe Act of 1973.
The essays in this group will comprise, as an overview, commentaries on the work of a wide (but not all inclusive) range of theatre practitioners. The material is organised in such a way as to enable the reader to see the particular theatre practitioner in a European and historical context and to, in some ways, relate that practitioner to the broader philosophical questions that have already been addressed. Some of the individuals will be a part of mainstream theatrical conventions, belonging to large subsidised companies, or to well known commercial theatres. Other people will be known more for their individual enterprise, or for the subversive and fringe nature of their work. The term 'fringe' is also to be addressed; predominantly coming from the British theatre of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it is a term that may be usefully employed when articulating the role played by such people as Dario Fo.
Certainly a notable factor in the rebuilding of European theatre after the Second World War, was the desire to re-establish the sense of a country's culture; culture in the evaluative, rather than the analytic sense. In the case of countries that had been physically occupied and devastated, there was the need for a tangible and concrete sense of themselves as a part of European heritage. This may appear to be a direct contradiction of the preoccupations addressed in the introduction to this volume. However, it is arguably the very way by which the complexities (and contradictions) are revealed. The preoccupations with the uncertainty of human progress often provide the fuel by which culture(s) may be developed or re-invented.
It is therefore no accident that when we look at what was after the Second World War, the Federal Republic of Germany, we see a rapid and extensive theatre building and refurbishment programme. From 1948 (with the reform of the German currency) over 200 theatres were repaired, renovated, extended, or built from scratch. By 1972, there were in 77 towns and cities in West Germany and West Berlin, 86 publicly controlled theatre institutions with 192 halls between them, including those for opera and ballet. There were also 78 private theatres, most of which received smaller contributions from public funds[1].
The London exhibition of post-war German theatre architecture in 1968 was impressive. It sent a clear statement to those who witnessed the efforts put into this form of cultural identity, that the Germans took theatre and opera more seriously than the British. However, to attempt to build a clear picture, we must take into account two factors. The rebuilding of West Germany after the Second World war was of paramount importance to the Western power block, and although the funds that allowed such a progress were undoubtedly a part of the German economic miracle, the support of the USA cannot be discounted (as of course the German Democratic Republic was supported by the Soviet Union). Equally, regional rivalry in Germany, as a cultural echo of the times before German unification in the nineteenth century, played a not insignificant part in the determination on the part of local, as well as national, authorities to display the resistance of German cultural identity.
The post-war years in European theatre have been marked by the pre-eminence attained by the figure of the director as auteur.[2].Although in recent years the status as auteur has been challenged by, particularly in Britain, a sense of the collective nature of theatre-making, we would be negligent if we did not give due recognition to the significance of this role in European theatre.
Peter Stein
Peter Stein was born in Berlin in 1937, and was thus well placed to play a part in the complex cultural politics of West Germany's identity in the new Europe. His higher education was in literature and fine art with no formal education in the theatre. In this, he shares a common background with many prominent British post-war directors. His early work, certainly before he joined the West Berlin Schaubühne theatre, was marked by his evident left-wing ideology. Inevitably this espousal of socialism in his work created an uneasy tension between Stein and the authorities, both local and national, in a country that was seen by the West as the bulwark against communism. However, from around 1972 onwards, it appeared to his critics that he was becoming more concerned with what Michael Patterson has referred to as a form of 'aesthetic onanism'; concentrating his direction on the bourgeois tradition, in particular the nineteenth century and abandoning his progressive political focus[3].
Stein's first independent production was Saved by the British playwright Edward Bond in 1967. This was followed in 1968 by a production of Bertolt Brecht's play The Jungle of the Cities. The production of a play by the leading playwright of communist East Germany has been a fairly contentious issue, but Stein followed this with a production in July of the same year of Peter Weiss's play Vietnam Discourse. The production ran for only three nights. The topical nature of what was, to an extent, a piece of agit-prop theatre[4]concerning matters of imperialist aggression on the part of the USA in Vietnam. Stein was fully aware of the potential ineffectiveness of political theatre presented in safe middle-class theatres and in an attempt to constructively subvert his own project, had scrawled across the back wall of stage, the legend 'Documentary Theatre is Crap'. To follow the performance a collection in aid of the National Liberation Front was to have been made, but the collection was prohibited and Stein's contract not renewed.
The timing of this element of political activity in the German theatre is notable, largely because of the political events happening in France during the summer of 1968. This was the summer of the student and worker action on the streets of Paris. The Left-wing political activity was an immediate and practical action arising from the 'new' Marxism evolving from the Frankfurt school and associated political thinkers and activists such as Antonio Gramsci. The course taken by Europe at this time may have been, with the American involvement in Vietnam serving as a focus, very different from the one that it actually took.
Peter Stein was appointed Director of the West Berlin Schaubühne theatre in 1970. The Schaubühne was created in 1962 by students whose main concern was to create a theatre practice that rejected the hierarchical structures of both the municipal subsidised theatres and the commercially run theatres. Stein's reputation for thorough research and collective practice made him a seemingly ideal choice to head this 'alternative' theatre. It would seem that in this context, the theatre appropriate to the new thought among students and intellectuals in the Europe of the late 1960s, might find realisation. A combination of the right-wing reaction of the 1970s and the compromises made by the Schaubühne resulted in, what is now from the perspective of the 1990s, an all too familiar pragmatism. Stein himself said that:
The decision to direct a certain play does not follow any ideological or aesthetic programme, but results from impulses of a given situation.
Perhaps the exemplifier for this change of ideological direction was Stein's production of Shakespeare's play, As You Like It. His methodology was a familiar one to those who knew his work: many weeks (sometimes even months) of research and rehearsal with the actors and designers. Out of this research came a working of the text that would, to the eyes of many British critics seem an impertinence. Stein often worked with sets that enabled him to stage related scenes simultaneously, or to reveal characters as they were, simultaneously with how they are now. The setting for As You Like It was housed in a huge film studio, in which the scenes in Duke Frederick's court were played out in one place, coldly lit and coloured, with isolated figures moving on raised catwalks. The audience were then required to move into another immense space and found themselves physically in the midst of the Forest of Arden. The reworking of the text, juxtaposing scenes in various ways and reordering or repeating scenes is a technique familiar to the continental European eye, as we will see when we look at the work of Giorgio Strehler. However the British, as it is with many aspects of their view of Europeanism, seem to operate by less flexible ideological constructs. Perhaps one distinct difference is the space afforded by the British to the pre-eminence of the literary text as a fixed entity. Whereas many of the other European cultures are serious about theatre as a form in its own right, allowing the theatrical reading to roam freely, unrestrained by a valorised sense of the text's meaning. Stein's deliberate juxtaposing of time sequences, encouraging the audience to see time as fragmented, rather than as a linear progression, seems to bear out many of the preoccupations in European thought that have already been delineated.
Peter Weiss
Much of what may be said about the period of European cultural history from 1957 to 1974, as we have seen with the work of Peter Stein, hinges around the reactions to Marxism provoked by the reaction against Soviet communism/Stalinism, as the intellectuals in the West learned of the repressions culminating in the atrocities against Hungary in 1956. The rethinking of left-wing political philosophy, led by the Frankfurt School, produced a generation in the theatre that rejected the seeming modernism of absurdism and surrealism and the quasi-religiosity of Artaud. One of the early notorious successes of Peter Stein was his production of Peter Weiss' play Vietnam Discourses. The full title is typically revealing:
Discourse concerning the Origin and Course of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Vietnam as an Example of the Need of the Oppressed to Take up Arms against their Oppressors as well as as the Attempt by the United States of America to Destroy the Basis of the Revolution.
Weiss rejected the retreat, made by many writers, into a 'non-political' subjective response to the world of the late twentieth century. Particularly in the German Federal Republic, the reaction to the recent Nazi past was to attempt to espouse a non- politically aligned position. This generated a complex ideological patterning in the post-war culture of western Germany. There was, without doubt, political alignment in that West Germany was a part of the Western Bloc under the influence of the United States of America. However, equally there was the impetus towards an individualistic ideology, that allowed operation within the national hegemonic complexity that evolved out of the ruins of war; hence the articulating of the experience of the world in the subjective, seemingly uncommitted, language of many post-war theatrically closed cultures.
In the West, what emerged as opposition to the closed subjective ideology, was an alternative to the close adherence to the 'party line', demanded by Stalinism and for that matter Nazism; both of which required, respectively, their own versions of 'socialist realism' whereby art serves the needs of the party. The belief was that political intent does not imply a close adherence to a party line. The purpose of art, if we are to refer again to Brecht and Benjamin, is to disrupt an accepted view of reality. The idea of documentary theatre emerged as a form having the potential to offer a sense of authenticity in the narrative presented to an audience. This does not necessarily imply the factual agit-prop style of The Living Newspaper, but offers an open-ended cultural experience, where the aim is to enable the members of an audience to observe the dialectical process and to make their own decisions regarding the perspectives of reality offered by the range of theatrical narratives.
Thus, we may observe a movement away from Weiss' post-war identity as a rootless emigré‚ with largely unsuccessful work, displaying a tendency towards the Kafkaesque and a form of self- discovery[5]. When Weiss was in his late forties, he produced the first of the new style documentary works which were to prove interesting, not only in their intrinsic merits, but also in the manner by which they were appropriated by differing ideological interests. The first of these 'documentaries' was produced in 1964, with almost as long a title as the later Vietnam Discourses:
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
The Marat Sade as it is popularly known, represents well the complex ideological positions of artists, particularly Germans, at this point in European history. The play itself could be said to represent three readings of both social culture and the stage. Set in what is referred to as a lunatic asylum, the play shows the Marquis de Sade supervising a performance by patients of the murder of Marat. Marat's position is that of the revolutionary; the figure conscious of ideology and the need for revolution. The Marquis de Sade is the intellectual individualist; the proto-bourgeois (despite his aristocratic position) who is only able to view the world in terms of the individual. The play itself is both product of and commentary upon the cultural context of its making.
It is apposite to this argument, to note three theatrical readings of the play: the West Berlin premiere, Peter Brooks's London production of 1965 and the East German production later in that year. Strictly speaking, the two latter examples should be outside of the remit of this research, as neither were members of the European Community at this time. However, the point to be made is germane to the argument, relating as it is, to the cultural context of post-war Europe. In West Berlin, it would come as no great surprise that the over-lying theme focused on the need for compromise, recognising the need to avoid, at all costs, the dangers of dictatorship from the left or the right. While Brook, in London in the mid-1960s, took an approach that emphasised the extreme individualism of de Sade's position, drawing on the influence of Antonin Artaud and his concept of 'theatre of cruelty', meaning the harsh awakening of the senses of both the audience and the performers. Inevitably, the East Berlin reading articulated the accuracy of Marat's argument as the revolutionary, while ignoring the very real irony of performing this reading in the light of the realities of Stalinist repression in East Germany.
Given the argument that a single text may well have the potential for an infinite plurality of meaning, it is necessary to take note of the contexts for the production of those meanings. The position of Western Europe at this particular point in Europe's history, was complex to say the least. If we care to see it in a particular way, the multi-layered meanings of Weiss' play the Marat Sade, may operate as cultural paradigms for the complex ideological discourses of Europe that emerge in the attempt to create a coherent identity.
While the Marat Sade offered the possibility of a subtle and complex debate on the question of personal and political identity in post war Europe, his later play of 1968 dealt more obviously with what we may term the 'Theatre of Fact'. At this point the debt to the American Living Newspaper[6]. and Erwin Piscator becomes clear. Vietnam Discourses, which dealt with the 2,500 year long Vietnamese struggle for liberation, offered a collage of documentary images juxtaposed with narratives taken from history and contemporary experience, but in terms of the theatre event, fictionalised. This technique developed in the Living Newspaper, often created its narrative by demonstrating the effect of broad historical events on the personal lives of fictional characters. The influence of this convention is clearly seen in Clifford Odets' play, Waiting For Lefty. Though not a part of the Living Newspaper project, Odets took the theme of a particular taxi drivers' strike in the American depression; using the frame of a union meeting, he demonstrated the effects of deprivation on the personal lives of individuals. In many ways this preceded the popular contemporary call of 'personal is political'. Vietnam Discourses fitted well into the debates in Europe in the late 1960s. It dealt with Europe's relationships with the United States of America and that country's involvement with Vietnam, and it created a furore that, among other consequences, led to the banning of Peter Stein's production in Munich.
Weiss was never an easy playwright to pin down to a specific ideological position. His perceptions, as well as his forms of work, constantly changed. A later play, Hölderlin, seems to hark back almost to a Hegelian idea that outward material condition is not always commensurate with the 'spiritual' condition. Although Hegel's argument was perhaps more to do with material deprivation not being able to affect a sense of spiritual freedom, the analogy is close to Hölderlin. The revolutionary poet in exile (as Weiss had been in Sweden) is condemned by everyone to be insane; a topic also dealt with by Weiss in 1970, in his play Trotsky in Exile. The theme deals with the argument that the great figures of the nineteenth century had made compromises with their material conditions and the question is asked, is this the inevitable reality that all revolutionaries must face? It would seem that Weiss has pre-empted the cynical mood of the 1970s in Europe; after the revolutions of the 1960s, the revisions of the 1970s.
Peter Handke
The generation following Weiss, was that of Peter Handke, who in particular seems to articulate in theatrical form aspects of the linguistic debates of structuralist theory. Strictly speaking, Handke should not be included in this volume, as he is Austrian and not at this point in history a part of what we are identifying as the European Community; nevertheless, his presence should not be ignored. That he is a writer in the German language brings him close to the argument at this point, but he may also serve as a sideways comment on the development of this aspect of European identity.
Handke's main theme may be said to be the (European) crisis of language. In a brief examination of his play Kasper (1969), Handke takes the well known story of Kaspar Hauser, who lived in total isolation without human speech until adulthood. Handke builds that narrative into a discourse on the concept that language, while defining us, encloses us in patterns of hegemonic convention. His predominant source was Wittgenstein and 'the reflection of language', but he took these forms of linguistic argument to the point where he was no longer concerned with an attempted objective reality, but only concerned with the reality of the words themselves.
Glancing back to Handke's first notable play Offending the Audience (1966), we see a sprechstuck of four speakers who, over the period of about an hour, verbally abuse the audience, while constantly contradicting themselves and subverting any possible responses from the audience; they aim to expose the manipulative effects of language. Further forward to 1969 with his play My Foot My Tutor, we observe that language stops altogether. The authority that the players take unto themselves, as do all performers once the audience is seated and bound to them, becomes more terrifying in this mute performance.
Handke's concerns with a distrust of acceptance of a concept of objective reality may not ultimately be at one with the central discourses of structuralist linguistic theory, but nor is it entirely removed. Again theatre reveals its potentiality as a cultural site, whereby contemporary theories of language and identity are given, at the least, a concrete form of interaction between what we may think of as the self and its relationship with the other: performer(s) and audience.
Günter Grass
A leading member of the Gruppe 47 (as was Handke) Günter Grass has been in the mainstream of West Germany's search for its post-war identity. Possibly better known as a novelist, he has experimented with most of the later twentieth-century genres of playwriting, achieving wide spread recognition with his play, The Plebians Rehearse The Uprising. This play, which draws on Shakespeare's Coriolanus and a supposed rehearsal by Brecht for his version of that play, represents again, one of the many debates questioning the identity of self and the complex problem of how political art functions in relation to the reality of a particular context.
The play is set in the Berliner Ensemble on June 17 1953, when East German workers demonstrated against government demands for higher productivity. The figure of Bertolt Brecht is depicted in a character referred to only as the Boss, who at the time of the workers' demonstrations, is in rehearsal for a production of Coriolanus. The workers ask for the Boss's support, which he refuses to give, but at the same time refusing to denounce the demonstrations when asked to do so by the Stalinist authorities.
It is worthwhile spending a little time outlining the nature of these demonstrations, for they were not simply related to wage demands (although that voice can never be separated from broader political issues). The initial action on the part of the Stalinist government was referred to on June 14 by the Central Organ of the Socialist Unity Party, Neues Deutschland, as 'sledge hammer' techniques that denied any democratic voice to the workers. A general strike was called for June 17 and workers were asked to attend a rally on Strausberger Platz that morning. The day before a group of workers had gone to 'Radio in the American Sector' (R.I.A.S) and appealed for their support. The outcome was that a resolution listing their demands was broadcast on June 18. How far the motives of the American sector radio were objective we probably shall never know, but nevertheless, the resolutions broadcast make clear that the level of dissatisfaction was profound and far reaching:
• payment of wages in accordance with the old norms on the next pay day;
• immediate reduction in the cost of living;
• free and secretive elections;
• no punitive measures against strikers and their spokesmen.
One can never be sure what position the governments in western Europe were taking at this point, but the issue is important, if only to illuminate the ideological dilemmas facing the left in the West, when confronted by the authoritarian position taken by the Soviet bloc.
Günter Grass' position in the play is certainly more complex than a simple direct attack on what one might suppose to be Brecht's complicity with the East German government. In the play the Boss (Brecht), in refusing to give his public support for the demonstration (which is in its early stages), argues that unplanned action is senseless. He continues with his rehearsal, incorporating the real workers, in order to observe their reactions to issues dealt with in his attempt to politicise Shakespeare's play for the twentieth century.
The position of Grass is a curious and complex one. In some ways he is seemingly post-modern, in his conscious (and some might say cynical) exploitation of various aspects of Brecht's dramaturgy and techniques, while clearly not entirely at one with their original political points. This may clearly be seen in much of his early work, where he uses deliberate pastiche, in first an expressionist style, and then later in a series of 'absurd' plays. The earlier work concentrates on exposing the grotesqueness of the Nazi period, while the experiments with the absurd genre are more to do with contemporary 1960 political corruption and coercion. The culmination of the appropriations is to be found in Plebians Rehearse The Uprising.
Jean-Louis Barrault
Turning from Germany to France, the figure of Jean-Louis Barrault features significantly in this period of European development (1957-1974). I do not mean in any sense to isolate the individual as a cultural icon, but as an expression of a particular instance of cultural liberalism, that found itself uneasy with the materialist debates that were so prevalent in the 1960s.
Barrault had been a significant figure in the French theatre for many years as actor, producer, director and adapter since his early work in the 1930s, when he was hailed by the French visionary, Antonin Artaud, as having achieved his own ideal in the theatre[7]. Barrault is probably best known outside France for his role as Baptiste in the film, Les Enfants du Paradis. His professional associates represent many notable figures within pre- and post-war French theatre, including Charles Dullin, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Claudel. Likewise his craft includes mime as well as acting and directing. Well known abroad, especially in Britain, Barrault was applauded for his innovations as a director with classic texts of Britain and Germany, as well as with the French canon. Equally, his reputation for experimental work with authors such as Ionesco, gave him a reputation as a member of the avant-garde. It is this reputation that provides the cultural location for the interesting ideological clash, into which Barrault was drawn in the Paris political demonstrations of 1968.
His autobiography depicts a man who is totally devoted to his art[8]. This in a sense is the crux of the matter. For Barrault, art is transcendent of other more 'material' matters. This is not to say that his work is ethereal and without the materiality of theatrical craft; quite the reverse, long passages of his books are devoted to the craft of his theatre. The question is more to do with his ideology regarding the function of art. In this he views art as transcendent of cultural materiality. In the liberal humanist tradition, from the early nineteenth century, Barrault sees for art an aesthetic function operating by its own laws. This is made clear in one of the final chapters of the autobiography entitled, May '68, Collective Ordeal, Individual Ordeal.
This chapter is an account of how Barrault's theatre company, Théâtre des Nations, was taken over by the student demonstrators. An event which laid bare the conflict between the sensibilities of the artist against, what Barrault perceived as the cynical philistinism of the revolutionaries. He made it quite clear that he had a liberal sympathy with the idea of protest, but that what was happening in Paris was something alien to his culture.
The so-called 'May events' still puzzle public opinion. People have had the shock, lived through the fear, imagined the reaction .... It is not a French affair, it is a world-wide phenomenon. In May the lightning struck in Paris. That is all. The storm, it seems to me, came from far away, and is still wandering around the world .... For the second time I had fallen into the trap. I was left with the disagreeable impression of something which I did not understand, but which seemed to me calculated and, here, again, to have come from far away - yes, I repeat, from Far Away[9].
It is difficult not to draw parallels with Margaret Thatcher's pronouncements against 'alien political philosophies in our midst', but probably unfair. Barrault was genuinely shocked by his confrontation with the action of the May demonstrations. He saw a part of himself belonging to what he termed the underground movement. This is demonstrated by the fact that on the eve of the 'invasion' of the Odéon, he had organised an evening of 'beatnik poetry', a term which had long since left popular usage by 1968. What really dismayed his artistic and humanistic sensibility, was the description of his theatre (the performances, not necessarily the building) as 'an emblem of bourgeois culture'. His disorientation at the attempt at popular culture through a popular uprising is perhaps the salient feature. Barrault failed to see that his 'avant-gardism' bore little relationship to a radical concept of the potentiality of popular art. A figure such as Peter Stein may have reached an ideological hiatus by the mid 1970s, but he maintained a sense of contemporary European thought, that Barrault's essentially nineteenth-century liberal humanism, never understood.
Out of the confusion of the May days at the Odéon, Barrault articulated four points that he understood were the demands of the occupiers of his theatre:
1. that the action of the students was not directed against either a man or a programme (this was soon stated in their first bulletin d'occupation);
2. that the Théâtre de France, as an emblem of 'bourgeois culture' was suppressed;
3. that the Odéon would now be used as a political form;
4. that no dialogue (discussion) was possible[10].
Barrault saw the events becoming more and more anarchic, as he perceived fewer and fewer students involved in the occupation of the Odéon and more, what he terms in his autobiography as, 'agitators and bruisers of all sorts'. If Barrault had a liberal sympathy with certain student grievances, he also believed in the necessity of rescuing art from politics. His quotation of Pascal would seem to sum up his position. 'When Plato and Aristotle wrote about politics, it was as if they had to run a madhouse'[11].
Roger Planchon
On April 8 1959, André Malraux as Minister of state for Cultural Affairs, announced a programme to revitalise the French national theatres. The reform was essentially one of restructuring and redistribution of repertory resources. There had, for some years been a degree of dissatisfaction with the recent history of the Comédie Française. Under the new plan, Claude Bréart de Boisanger was appointed director of the Comédie Française, which was then deprived of one of its two subsidiary theatres. One of them, the Salle Luxembourg, was now to be operated by Jean Louis Barrault and renamed the Théâtre de France. The broader implications were to do with a widening of the scope of the funding for theatre in France, moving away from the old High Art ideals of French nineteenth- century cultural hegemony, towards an egalitarianism more appropriate to the new Europe.
Roger Planchon was one director who seems to have been a part of this new egalitarian policy, offering a rather different perspective on the function of theatre in France in the 1960s, to that embodied by Barrault. While Barrault experimented with the avant-garde, but nevertheless appealed to the cognoscenti, Planchon was more concerned with the broad functional appeal of his theatre. This example is not an argument for a binary polarisation of ideology in French theatre at this time; the situation is more complex than that. However, this context does point to the difficulty involved in identifying the exact nature of cultural operations in the theatre. Barrault's, or for that matter anybody's avant-gardism, does not necessarily imply popular art in the radical leftist sense. This argument will be made clear perhaps when after 1974, we deal with liberal and leftist theatre in Britain after joining the EEC. The pertinent case would be in the work of Peter Brook, whose experiments in theatre, it may be argued, are a curious mix of the avant-garde and post-colonialism.
Planchon's working class origins serve rather more than a spurious and nostalgic explanation for the nature of his work in French theatre. He was largely self educated, with the result that he was less than hampered by the restrictions that a formal education can sometimes place upon the individual. His very clear and simple aim was, and is, to bring a popular theatre to as broad an audience as possible. As his work developed through the 1950s and into the 1960s, it is possible to detect a more clearly formulated and articulated political theory informing his theatre practice. Certainly by the time of the late 1960s, the time of politics moving out on to the streets, Planchon committed himself to an anti-establishment declaration commenting on the work of the managers of most of France's subsidised theatres.
After starting work in the early 1950s, Planchon experimented with an eclectic range of styles; moving easily between the avant- garde plays of Adamov and Ionesco, to self-scripted musical comedies. He did this with his amateur group, which turned professional after winning a prize in a competition in Lyon. In this period Planchon was experimenting with, and learning about, a wide range of theatrical styles. His interests included English, Elizabethan stagecraft and American gangster films among other sources for his growing resource. This electism could start to sound like the so many disparate images produced by a devotee of post-modernism, the rationale being that there are no more new stories, so we now only revel in the intertextuality produced by eclecticism. This would be a cynical, but accurate assessment, if it were not for the influence of Jean Vilar and Bertolt Brecht. Vilar is perhaps best known for his directorship of the Théâtre National Populaire at Chaillot, where his aim was to produce a theatre as popular and as 'classless' as was possible. His insistence was that theatre should be a service available to all, just as water or electricity. Such an ideal sounds hollow today when not only is theatre having to become more and more commercial in its dealings, but the basic services in the UK are now privatised.
Vilar's exemplar was reinforced by a meeting with Bertolt Brecht in 1954. It was through this meeting, and to an extent the influence of Adamov, that Planchon was able to develop a theoretical Marxist base to his popular theatrical stagecraft. He became one of France's foremost director's of the plays of Brecht, offering not a cautious and reverential rendering of the literary text, but a complex and thoroughly theatrical text in its own right. Here we see one of the fundamental distinctions between much of what was being developed on the continental mainland, and what has evolved in Britain.
Planchon serves well as an example of this very fundamental distinction, between the British and the continental European attitude towards the text and the performance. Planchon coined a term écriture scènique which may be translated as 'scenic writing', in order to express the importance of the director's role in the creation of the theatrical performance. His view was that the director, rather than simply serving what are determined as the needs of the text (that is being subordinate to the text) should be seen to complement the role of the author of the text. His term then, for the author's role, was that of dramatic writing. Scenic writing and dramatic writing should be seen as equal and complementary roles within the theatrical process. This concept sits uneasily in the British mind, where for so long the play, as literary object, has been held to be culturally pre-eminent over the theatrical performance.
To digress momentarily from Planchon's work, it is worth examining a little further the idea of the director that is prevalent in Germany and Italy, as well as France. They look upon the director as the primary creator of the production. The practice that brings together the visual and aural imagery of a play is taken as a serious language in its own right; the play as literary text therefore becoming one of the factors (as opposed to the single prime factor) in the performative practice. Edward Gordon Craig saw the theatre as the art of the designer and the director; the actor being relegated to the role of über marionette. The technical name in French, for the director, is metteur-en-scène, with particular directors held in very high regard being afforded the title of animateur. The designation implies s/he who is the unifier of all that is seen and heard on stage.
There is a problem, however, with this designation, especially when, as it was later in his career, afforded to Planchon. While the model of écriture scènique combined with dramatic writing is potentially radical and progressive, the structure becomes open to question when it moves towards the idea of animateur; certainly if it is conceived of in terms of Craig's model. For Planchon, influenced by Brecht, Vilar and Marxism, the implied autocratic figure of animateur seems to be somewhat contradictory. While the contradiction holds true in many cases, Planchon avoided the worst excesses. His work avoided Vilar's concept of theatre as the great unifying force for all society. While his practice drew all the elements of theatrical practice together, it was not to serve a 'master-vision', but to be the result of a collective activity that sought to make the best of theatre available to working class audiences. Equally, his work sought to reveal the injustices in society, rather than appeal to a sense of cultural oneness through art. Much of this work was achieved in the large municipal theatre in the workers' suburb of Lyon that he took over in 1957, when his company achieved the title of Théâtre National Populaire.
Aesthetics and Popular Art in Italy
In turning to Italy we may gain another perspective on the cultural patterns evolving in this period of Europe's post-war development, by assaying the work of two quite distinct theatre directors. The work of Giorgio Strehler and Dario Fo represents just such a divergence of the ideology of aesthetics that we have surveyed in France and Germany.
The point to emphasise here is the nature of the role of theatre within the construction of culture, rather than what is often perceived as the isolated actions of individuals. Art is, we may argue, not simply a collection of texts (performances) existing outside the material conditions of economic production; nor is the work of the artist a transcendental vision uninformed by economic laws, obeying only the laws of 'aesthetics'. The production of human consciousness may appear to be governed by laws unrelated to economic production and many students of art are content to believe that it exists in a separate realm. However, art is a form of social production and the understanding of this argument can determine our understanding of the nature of art itself. In the work of Strehler and Fo we may be able to observe how the material conditions of their work, form the ideology of their respective aesthetics.
An examination of the work of Giorgio Strehler gives the impression that his theatre is, consciously, politically engaged. In the late 1960s and early 1970s this was apparently so, but only to a limited extent, and may be seen as the general (temporary) shift left-ward in Western Europe, that occurred as a result of the political movements of the late 1960s. Certainly, we may say that on the facts, his work has been, and is, more concerned with contemporary appropriations of European classics, than it ever was with contemporary issues. His 'concept' productions of plays like The Tempest were the product of an ideology of individualistic directorial vision, as were those of the more avant-garde English directors, rather than an attempt to appropriate the text to a specifically contemporary ideological reading.
This is not to deny that Strehler's individual directorial vision is somehow transcendent of ideology. The question is perhaps more to do with the ideological currency by which we, the potential audience, may be able to locate the director's meaning in the performance. The former will inevitably be what we may express as a closed cultural event; the meaning either being obscure (perhaps even inarticulate, much art hides behind this mask assuming the masque of insight). Or the patterning of imagery can only be read by the informed cognoscenti, who are in possession of a high degree of information already in their cultural armoury. The latter point offering the potential to appropriate (as one might argue any act of theatrical realisation is an appropriation of the playwright's text) in the sense of popular aesthetics; the performance enabling the audience to confront, through the play, aspects of their own realities. The individualistic vision encloses the theatrical experience to a specific (élite) cultural experience: the popular appropriation opens the event out for debate.
Strehler's main body of work has been with the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, but for a period between 1968 and 1972 he formed the Gruppo Teatro e Azione. This latter venture was directly influenced by the political events in Europe, particularly in Paris. The Piccolo Teatro is a subsidised theatre with the aim of reaching as wide an audience as possible. In many ways its cultural position is very similar to that of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the United Kingdom. A curious and complex liberal cultural role is sought by this kind of institution. On the one hand it is confined by the machinery, both economic and architectural, of that kind of liberal bourgeois institution. However, it does have the aspiration of disseminating its culture to as many people as is possible, even though its performances may still be hidebound by a less than popular ideology. In the 1980s his work increasingly became involved with the work of Théâtre de l'Europe, for which company he directed the Brecht/Hauptmann play The Threepenny Opera.
Strehler's repertoire has been very wide, both internationally and culturally. In the 1950s Brecht was an important influence, but to what extent this betrayed a political affiliation with Brecht, or to what extent Strehler's work was following the kind of appropriation that was undergone in Britain, where the main impetus was to rescue the artist Brecht from his 'repressive' political ideology is difficult to tell. Although his work has covered a very wide range of Italian plays of all periods, his other notable concern has been with Shakespeare, including in his work Richard III, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. The Shakespearean production for which he is best known throughout Europe is probably The Tempest.
The question of Shakespearean production in post-war Europe is complex, and a distinction needs to be made between the dissemination of this playwright on the English stage and productions in the rest of Europe. It is difficult not to avoid making generalisations, but there is a degree of accuracy in describing the English theatre as being more inclined to foreground the play as literature, than there is to perceive the theatre's potential as a visual medium. The skill of the director, particularly where Shakespeare is concerned, has never, at least by critics, been taken as seriously as that of the poet. In England the cultural construction of Shakespeare over the last 400 years has been such that, not only has he been transformed from theatre maker into the philosopher/prince, but he has been instituted into the central canon of English hegemonic culture. This has meant that the sixteenth-century playwright has become intrinsic to the eternal spirit of England[12].
In the rest of Europe this situation, for obvious reasons, has never been exploited in quite the same way; even considering the place afforded to Shakespeare in the German canon. Strehler is an excellent example by which to understand one of the fundamental differences between the English attitude towards the theatre director, and the position afforded to him or her in the rest of Western Europe.
Strehler's reading of the play, placed the metaphor of theatre itself at the centre of the representation of Prospero. The magical power of Prospero/ Shakespeare/artist is the power of art itself to change the world. To this end the Milan production employed elaborate 'self-reflexive' stage effects in order to facilitate Prospero's objectives in the play's narrative. As an example Ariel, depicted sometimes as a white face clown and at other times as a stage manager, was suspended from the flying space of the stage on what was obviously a theatre cable. There was no attempt to disguise the machinery by which Ariel flew, in fact it became the visible means by which the actor was able to perform, self-consciously, a series of circus acrobatics which could be read as his magic. This is one example of a number of spectacular stage effects employed by Strehler. His aim was, unlike the pictorial spectacles of the late nineteenth-century stage, not to create an illusion but to expose it. Prospero's/Shakespeare's art could enable, but had its limits, and an important point in this production was to expose the limits to which art could be efficacious. Nor must Strehler's exposing of the 'magical' machinery of art be confused with Brecht's concept of Verfremdung.[13] Brecht's exposing of the machinery of theatre was to enable the audience to be reminded that the event was art and not to be absorbed into a belief in the illusion. Thus, being freed from empathy, the audience could read the performance in its relationship to the realities of their histories.
Strehler's treatment of the received Shakespeare text was cavalier, by the values of many English literary scholars. As of course was Peter Stein's production of As You Like It. The masque scene in The Tempest was cut, apparently because it disrupted Strehler's building of the comic scenes and their inspiration from the Italian tradition of commedie dell' arte.
Certainly Strehler's production offers a radical challenge to the sanctity of the received literary text. However, its radicalism in a sense is confined in the closed cultural world of self-referential art. In Strehler's work with the Italian canon, there is strong evidence to suggest that he has worked towards a recovery of the Italian commedia tradition. However, it maybe argued that this work has been geared towards an appropriation of an Italian popular art form into the enclosed cultural world of 'high art'. In contrast to this impetus, the work on the commedia tradition by Dario Fo stands in marked distinction to Strehler's appropriations.
Dario Fo
Dario Fo is a contemporary of Strehler, but works within a very different tradition; in fact very much in the subversive tradition of commedia dell' arte.
Fo's work has not been in any sense dedicated to 'reviving' the commedia dell' arte as an historical entity, but has more accurately been centred in a similar satiric and anarchic mode that is of the twentieth century[14]. His career has varied from that of a popular entertainer in a broad sense, through to committed communist working in factories, performing to working class audiences. Latterly, after his break with the established Italian communist party, his work has been ideologically related to the 'new left' movement that emerged after the demonstrations of the late 1960s. However, it was during the political movements of the late 1960s that his work was most closely tied with the Italian Communist Party; his break, both ideologically and in practice, came in the 1970s.
His work has never rested easily in the prevalent categories of post war European theatre, particularly the dominant manifestations of 1970s British left wing theatre represented by such writers as Howard Brenton, Edward Bond and David Edgar. Perhaps the only British theatre maker that in any way comes close to the popular tradition of Dario Fo is John McGrath, particularly his work with the 7:84 company[15].
The early phase of his work was in collaboration with the Italian actress Franca Rame (to whom he was once married), and drew largely on material and techniques from nineteenth-century farce, as well as from modes of popular entertainment. Although satirical in its nature, this period of work was not in any real sense, overtly political or leftist. During the political demonstrations of the 1960s, Fo and Franca Rame formed the company Nuova Scena in association with the Communist Party. The general sense of the work drew on Bertolt Brecht's concept of the Lehrstück. The Lehrstück is often translated as 'teaching play'. However a translation closer in spirit to the purpose of the Lehrstück is the idea of 'learning play'. The subtle difference between 'teaching' and 'learning' through theatre is important. For both Brecht and Fo, the theatrical methodology was intended to expose problems and by so doing, enable the audience to make certain decisions. This was as opposed to a more didactic agit-prop technique of 'telling' the audience what to think.
In this period, Fo produced works with titles such as The Worker Knows 300 Words, The Boss 1,000; That's Why He's The Boss and Can't Pay? Won't Pay! The latter play portrays a group of Milanese women who 'liberate' goods from a supermarket as a protest against inflationary measures. However, this period of his work is probably best known for his one-man show, Mistero Buffo. Buffo is not in fact a play in the conventional sense, but a series of sketches based upon acts traditionally performed by medieval minstrels. Fo here is deliberately foregrounding the role of the performer in aligning himself with a popular tradition led by performers, rather than often is the case in much of Europe, the playwright (and more recently the director) as auteur. This emphasis on the popular performer in much of his work (as opposed to the actor of plays in formal theatres) is as intrinsic to his radical ideology as is the politics derived from Marx, or more locally and precisely Antonio Gramsci[16].
The presentational form of the Mistero Buffo pieces drew heavily on an audience/performer relationship more familiar to the stand-up comedian, than to the actor, who certainly since the nineteenth century, has become increasingly isolated from his/her audience. This isolation is both physical and cultural with the members of the audience isolated in the darkened auditorium, while the seamless narrative unfolds before them. How like reading a novel going to the theatre has become since the 1880s. Fo, like Brecht and many twentieth-century cabaret performers of this century, seeks to break through the 'terrifying gulf of the orchestra pit'[17]. An amusing, but telling anecdote relating to one of Fo's Buffo performances gives a good account of the open cultural dynamics between performer and audience, that was sought after by Fo.
There was one telling moment in the course of the dialogue between the drunk and the angel, which is part of Mistero Buffo, when a woman got to her feet to start shouting. She was getting annoyed with the angel who would not let the drunk get on with his story, and yelled: 'Let him talk, you bastard! Otherwise, I'll come up there and give you a kick in the halo.' The amazing thing was that she was raging at the character whom I had sketched out in the air; she was pointing at the spot where I had left him. Another patient got up and shouted out: 'Nurse, will you stop it?' The angel had been transformed into the day to day authority they had to deal with[18].
The performance had taken place in a Turin psychiatric hospital. The point is that the nature of Fo's performance and its relationship with the audience encourages (and indeed enables) the audience to enter into an active relationship with the moment of theatre. The audience becomes an expert, because of how the individuals relate the action to their own realities, and become collaborators in an open-ended practice, rather than the passive consumers of a finished art object[19].
Franca Rame
Franca Rame would be ill-served (to say the least) if she was mentioned only in terms of her husband's work. She came from a family of popular entertainers, whose sole ambition was located in the popular 'entertainment business'. Rame however, offers a clear-sighted, theoretical articulation of her work within popular theatre. It was Rame rather than Fo, who saw the full theoretical possibilities in her husband's work, as much as she did in her own.
One criticism levelled against Fo is that although his work does challenge the forms and relationships of bourgeois theatre, by not being fully theorised, it often offers only the delight in the art of the conjuror and does not reach out beyond the stage. Fo quotes an incident in Argentina after a performance of his piece Trumpets and Raspberries (1981):
She (a member of the audience after the performance) started by accusing the whole La Commune company of organising events that are often coldly mechanistic, and have little to do with theatre, and do not reach out beyond the stage .... The barbs were rarely aimed at political targets but at incidents and accidents, and my aim was to distract the audience with the same techniques as some conjuror who prepares away from the audience, the wonderful tricks which will have them all gasping with amazement[20].
Franca Rame in Tricks of the Trade theorises the theatre in which she and Fo are involved in general terms, relating much of what she has to say to Bertolt Brecht's concept of the epic[21]. However, beyond this a more particular argument relates Rame's theorising of feminism and comedy to the theatre. In a volume such as this, the interest is in the role that theatre has played in the development of post-war European consciousness; it is therefore interesting to note Rame's relating of her feminism to sexual (as opposed to gender) identity and the potentiality of comedy. What Rame has to say on this subject reveals the process by which ideological similarities across Europe, may undergo significant changes, in a move from northern European cultures to Mediterranean cultures and vice versa.
Her examples are drawn from Mediterranean cultures and focus on the role of women in the theatre. In ancient pre-Hellenic theatre, she argues, women were banned from any level of involvement in theatre. However, there is a tradition in ancient Mediterranean cultures through to modern times, of the women minstrels and Italian traditions of the bawd in storytelling. She is quite precise in the way that she presents the argument, dispensing immediately with what she regards as the new prudery and denial of sexuality that she perceives in the 'radical' feminisms of northern Europe, as well as the objectification of women's bodies for no reason other than to titillate an audience.
Inevitably, the role of the women minstrels arose because it was the only role allowed them by male dominated cultures. Rame's argument turns on the methods by which the women of different ages exploited the space allowed to them, in order to subvert the enclosing ideology. This perception of course bears a direct relevance to our contemporary world, just as it has done so throughout history. Today, perhaps more so than at any other time, the task of the radical is to locate the moment of potential subversion, rather than to seek revolution on a grand scale. Specifically, Rame sees the role of the woman as bawd in just this light. It is a role where women deliberately use their sexuality to provoke, rather than titillate; to reach out to an audience in conspiracy, rather than to be enclosed as sex objects. The women storytellers in Baccaccio's Decameron, she reminds us, are the ones generally in control and 'their stories are more erotically entertaining and spicy than those of their male counterparts'[22].
Her argument is a critique of 'naturalism'. This, at first glance, seems to be a fairly conventional comment on the convention of theatre, that by its reliance on illusion, can only represent an enclosed social totality, maintaining that this view of reality is indeed reality itself. The problem perceived by Rame, is for theatre to be able to reach out to its audience. She argues that the best tool for this task is as it has always been, self-reflexive comedy. The idea of self-reflexivity is important here; to simply make people laugh is not enough. For the audience to merely enjoy themselves, indeed to laugh at the expense of the sense of the play, is to miss the point. Pantomime, in its various manifestations, should not undermine either the play, or the dignity of the performer. Rame argues that in many senses the history of clowning and the mime, such as the white-faced pierrot, has been a history of castrating women. For Rame, it should be a question of self-conscious style and comment.
It is not a matter of prudery. I am in complete agreement with those who are struggling for liberation, once and for all, from those senseless inhibitions on sexual matters which have been inculcated into over the years, but I would always, even when dropping my knickers, like to achieve that with a minimum of style[23].
Conclusions
In an attempt to consolidate the arguments pursued in this, the first part of Theatre and Europe, it may be of use to mention briefly the work of experimental theatre in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s. By so doing, some of the issues that will be raised as we progress towards the later decades of Europe, will be contextualised. Certainly, the more recent decades of Europe have seen movements away from readily recognised conventions in the theatre, towards 'mixed-media' events, involving the visual arts, dance and music. Emanating from what is often referred to as the 'fringe', collective experiments in performance art have moved more and more towards the centre of cultural concern in Western European culture. This move to the notional centre of culture is, in reality, more a question of appropriation of radical emergent forces by the hegemonic structures of western societies. There are many examples, not least those being the production of Shakespeare in the British theatre of the 1970s. However, we may locate the two important elements that challenged theatrical conventions in the 1960s as being in the Netherlands.
The challenge was ideological and was centred in two central practices: the use of space and the nature of theatrical production, with particular reference to the role of the director. The Mickery-theater was established in 1965 by Ritsaert Ten Cate in his farmhouse in Loenersloot, a village near to Amsterdam. In 1970 the Mickery-theater moved to a converted cinema in Amsterdam. The salient feature of the theatre building is that there are no fixed areas dedicated to audience or performers. A familiar convention now established in a small number of theatre buildings in the 1990s, was then a radical break with architectural developments of perspective scenography, that had been evolving since the late sixteenth century in England and even earlier in Italy. The nature of the performing space in both the physical and social sense, was devised in an appropriate manner to the demands of the performance. While hosting many experimental groups in the late 1960s and 70s, such as La Mama from New York, The Pip Simmons Theatre Group of London and Tenjo Tsukiji of Tokyo, the Mickery-theater produced its own pieces, increasingly exploring the nature of the relationship between fiction (theatre) and reality.
Appropriately, the other movement in the Netherlands at approximately the same time, was the Aktie Tomaat. This movement is translated as 'Action Tomato' or the 'Tomato Campaign', after the events of late 1969, when tomatoes were thrown at actors during a performance by the Nederlandse Comedie at the municipal theatre of Amsterdam. Aktie Tomaat was appropriate in the sense that while the Mickery-theater was challenging hegemonic conventions regarding theatrical space, the Aktie Tomaat protest challenged the authoritarian status of the director. The main thrust of development in post-war European theatre has been centred in the rise of the director as auteur. The notable theatrical developments of the 1970s and 1980s saw the actors attempting to regain a voice in the creative act of theatre. The role of the director has not been substantially changed in many large subsidised theatres throughout Western Europe, but in the smaller companies, those arguably in the vanguard of theatrical experiment, a distinctly collective ideology of theatre making has emerged.
The protest of the Aktie Tomaat was led by students of the Amsterdam School of Drama (Toneelschool) and was a part of that broader movement throughout the United States of America (anti-Vietnam-war campus demonstrations) and Western Europe in the late 1960s. The call in the theatre, as it was on the broader political front, was for more democracy. Specifically, in the theatre, the demonstrations voiced discontent with the kind of director who, who seeing 'himself' as auteur, drew heavily on the inspiration of Edward Gordon Craig in the treatment of actors as übermarionettes, subject to the will of the individual interpretative vision.
In one sense these 'biographies' of individuals and theatre companies seem to be dealt with in isolation, with little in-depth analysis of the detail of their particular circumstances. However, while sacrificing that element, the intention has been to pick out instances in post-war cultural history as moments of significance, or signposts, the purpose of which was to signal points by which a debate may be enjoined.
The call may read as one for theatre to become more socially relevant and in the next section, which historically allows us to consider developments in British theatre (once the UK had joined the then styled Common Market), we will be able to examine the wide spread of theatre groups which espoused a collective methodology of work, with an overt political agenda.
Notes:
1. Deutscher Bühnenverein, Theater Statistik 1971-72. Cologne. 1973.
2. In German and French the accepted title is Regisseur.
3. Patterson, M. Peter Stein: Germany's Leading Theatre Director. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981.
4. Agit-Prop or Agitation and Propaganda. The term used to describe theatre pieces devised to ferment political action (agitation) and propaganda.
5. Weiss lived in England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden.
6. The Living Newspaper, the documentary, newsreel-like presentation of current events, has been used in agitational theatre in many countries, but its flowering in the West was undoubtedly the American Living Newspaper created by Elmer Rice and the Federal Theatre Project in 1935.
7. Artaud's ideas are to many people, largely incoherent, but it is generally understood that he sought after a sense of the spiritual in the theatre; a reclaiming of total emotional and physical commitment as a rejection of 'psychologism'.
8. Jean-Louis Barrault. Memories for Tomorrow: The memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault. trans. Griffen, J. London: Thames and Hudson. 1974.
9. Ibid. pp.311-313.
10. Ibid. pp.314-315.
11. Ibid. p.319.
12. Examples of nineteenth-century 'deification' of Shakespeare from popular playwright into philosopher/prince may be found in Shakespeare. Matthew Arnold. 1844 and To Shakespeare After Three Hundred Years. Thomas Hardy. 1926.
13. Verfremdung: to induce in the audience a detached and critical stance.
14. Dario Fo has, however, demonstrated commedia dell'arte techniques and mask work in some of his one-man performances.
15. 7:84.The title is taken from the statistic that claims that 7% of the British population owns 84% of the wealth.
16. Antonio Gramsci (imprisoned by Mussolini's fascists) is an important figure in the development of socialist thought in the latter half of this century. Most widely disseminated are the editions of his prison notebooks.
17. I believe that Constantin Stanislavski, among others, made a similar statement.
18. Fo, D. The Tricks of the Trade. trans. Farrell, J. London: Methuen. 1991, p.190.
19. This point has been argued by many: Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams are notable in this field.
20. Franca Rame, in Fo, D. The Tricks of the Trade. trans. Farrell, J. London: Methuen. 1991, p.196.
21. Ibid. p.199.
22. Ibid. p.200.
23. Ibid. p.201.
