I’ve often grouched about specificity
and interpretation in staging plays. I’ve argued that I don’t
want things to be pinned down immobile, but that they should at least
be perceptibly demarcated within a zone of meaning or intention.
After all, a director and company will have taken the decision to do
one thing and not another, and will presumably have had their reasons
for taking that decision: what motivated them? Similarly,
although authorial intention isn’t the be-all and end-all, it does
count for a significant bit.
Po-faced
Having just returned from another reviewing trip to Berlin, I find
these concerns have been rekindled, principally as a result of watching
Falk Richter’s latest devised postdramatic piece
Fear at the Schaubühne. It
all made me consider what seems to me to be the philosophical
underpinning of postdramatic theatre: that the end justifies the
means. We’re rightly suspicious of this view in social, political
or ethical matters. Is it, however, acceptable in theatre?
And if so, why?
Theatre is about communicating with an audience, about getting ideas
and/or impressions across. Is it legitimate to exercise whatever
means one considers expedient to communicate one’s view of a play, or
of a subject? Is it all right even if one’s own view is at odds
with what appears to be that of the person who wrote the
playtext? Does the obligation to one’s own view trump any duty to
representationality of an extant work? Polonius advised Laertes,
“This above all – to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as
the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
It’s a popular quotation, whose popularity entirely ignores the fact
that Polonius is a timeserving old political hack long used to finding
glib rationalisations for doing whatever he wanted to do anyway.
Practice
Most of these deep questions are circumvented in practice. In the
case of
Fear – as with
Sebastian Nübling’s production of Simon Stephens’
Three Kingdoms back in 2012, which
ignited the debate on directorial latitude for a generation of British
theatre writers – it becomes an issue not of whether or not particular
decisions or approaches are justified in principle, but simply of
whether or not they actually work. Which, I suppose, is quite a
Polonian view in itself.
Written for Theatre Record.