Both Janet Suzman and Patricia Hodge
explicitly consider literary knowledge as the (only) kind of knowledge
that counts in a theatre audience.
Canard
For Suzman, the (alleged) fact that “People don’t understand literary
and historical references any more” is proof that they are “not as
well-educated”, or at least not as widely. Hodge is even more
parochial, bemoaning specifically that “they’re not being cultivated
into the language [of theatre] in the way that we once were”… note also
the implicit presence there of the old canard that “the kind of
education I received in my childhood was the kind that everybody should
receive now”.
It seems to me that these ladies are right in the narrowest sense –
succeeding generations have indeed less of a foundation in literary
reference – and staggeringly wrong in the wider view – in other words,
that situation in no way means that the totality of younger people’s
learning is less. Surely over the last century, perhaps the last
two, it has become ever harder to operate within a developed society
without an ever broader knowledge base. Could Suzman or Hodge say
what SMS stands for, swap out a hard disk in a computer, or know the
difference between Tony Hawks and Tony Hawk? (Hawks is a comedian
and television personality, Hawk a skateboarding guru). Are those
skills and references less “important” because they have less sanction
from high culture? It’s a circular, authoritarian argument: “This
is more important because a culture that values such things says it is.”
Lamenting
But not knowing is one thing; not caring is quite another.
Michael Billington is quite right, in an article online at
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/09/tom-stoppard-audiences-references-hard-problem,
to ask simply, “Does it matter?” This particular ball was set
rolling by Tom Stoppard lamenting that audiences now don’t get his gag
in
Travesties about
Goneril. Yet as Billington observes, it’s a
gag that requires no more recondite knowledge or inference than that
Goneril is (a) a character in a play and (b) female – hardly the kind
of taxing stuff which Stoppard should be aggrandising himself for
having written.
However, in another online discussion on the topic (unfortunately I
can’t track it down right now to provide a link) I’ve seen someone who
considers themselves a committed theatremaker, not just -goer, declare
defiantly, “We don’t need to know Shakespeare”. Now, I’m not
going to take the reactionary position that this is blasphemy, but for
a theatremaker to deem the (by common consent) greatest dramatist in
history superfluous does strike me as, shall we say, a somewhat
sub-optimal approach.
Useless
There are some things that seem reasonable to consider beyond us.
Another Stoppard example cited by Michael is the question in
The Hard
Problem, “Could the cosmos be teleological?” Now, I’ve
remarked
before on what an unashamed intellectual snob I am, and even if I’d
routinely remembered what teleology means, rather than looking it up
again when I got home, I would have found that question so abstruse and
vague as to be meaningless and thus useless both intellectually and,
even more so, dramatically.
I’m also much less inclined to take Stoppard’s word about his own
intellectual prowess since I found
it so easy to take apart his arguments – or rather, his assumptions –
in
Rock ’n’ Roll. It
seems to me that
The Hard Problem
exhibits
the same flaws only in a more rarefied field of reference. As I
suggested last issue, within the first couple of minutes of the play,
he has claimed that the optimum approach in the “prisoner’s dilemma” is
the diametrical opposite of what game theorists in fact recognise as
the most beneficial one. (I learned this from David Edgar’s 2001
play called simply
The Prisoner’s
Dilemma.) This fallacy is the
first indication that the play is not an investigation, but – like
Rock
’n’ Roll – an
ex cathedra
justification of a particular political/moral
perspective. The whole play proceeds from the attitude that if
people don’t agree with the authorial view, it must be because they
don’t understand it, and if they don’t understand it, it must be
because they’re ignorant; the possibility that even a smidgen of
responsibility might be located in the vicinity of Stoppard is
literally inconceivable. And that can be the most pernicious kind
of ignorance of them all.
Written for Theatre Record.