Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

230 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
speaking of the planks of this stage we stand on, I’m
speaking of the very earth under our feet. It’s sinking
under you—by tomorrow, today’s entire reality will have
become just one more illusion. You see?
THE DIRECTOR: (confused but amazed) Well? So what? What
does all that prove?
THE FATHER: Ah, nothing, signore. Only to show that if,
beyond our illusions (indicating the other characters),
we have no ultimate reality, so your reality as well—
your reality that touches and feels and breathes
today—will be unmasked tomorrow as nothing but
yesterday’s illusion!
These lines illustrate Pirandello’s use of paradox, irony,
and the theatre as metaphor to create a multilayered
drama about human identity and human destiny. By contrasting
the passion of his “characters” with the frivolity
of his “actors,” Pirandello establishes a provocative juxtaposition
of human behavior and its theatricalization—
all within a theatrical format.
Theatre of Cruelty: Jet of Blood Antonin Artaud
(1896–1948) was one of drama’s greatest revolutionaries,
although his importance lies more in his ideas and
influence than in his actual theatrical achievements. A
stage and film actor in Paris during the 1920s, he founded
the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in 1926 and produced among
other works, Strindberg’s surrealist A Dream Play and,
in 1935, an adaptation of Shelley’s dramatic poem The
Cenci. His essays, profoundly influential in the theatre
today, were collected and published in 1938 in a hugely
influential book titled The Theatre and Its Double.
The theatre Artaud envisioned was a self-declared
theatre of cruelty, for, in his words, “Without an element
of cruelty at the root of every performance, the theatre is
not possible.” The “cruel” theatre would flourish, Artaud
predicted, by providing the spectator with the true
sources of his dreams, in which his taste for crime, his
erotic obsessions, his savagery, his illusions, his utopian
ideals, even his cannibalism, would surge forth.
In Artaud’s vision, ordinary plays were to be abolished;
there should be, in his words, “no more masterpieces.”
In place of written plays there should be cries, groans,
apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic
beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual models; . . .
light in waves, in sheets, in fusillades of fiery arrows. . .
. Paroxysms will suddenly burst forth, will fire up like
fires in different spots.
In a famous metaphor, Artaud compared the theatre
to the great medieval plague, noting that both plague and
theatre had the capacity to liberate human possibilities
and illuminate human potential:
The theatre is like the plague . . . because like the
plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the
exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means
of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind,
whether of an individual or a people, are localized. . . .
One cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of
carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent
Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual
division and the first carnage of essences that
appeared in creation. The theatre, like the plague, is
in the image of this carnage and this essential separation.
It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates
possibilities, and if these possibilities and these
powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of
the theatre, but of life.
Artaud’s ideas were radical, and his essays were incendiary;
his power to shock and inspire is undiminished
today, and many influential twentieth-century theatre artists
can claim an Artaudian heritage. It is not at all clear
from his writing, however, what final form his theatre
of cruelty should actually take in performance, and it is
readily apparent even to the casual reader that the theatre
Artaud speaks of is much easier to realize on paper than
on an actual stage. Artaud’s own productions were in fact
failures; he was formally “expelled” from the surrealist
movement, and he spent most of his later life abroad in
mental institutions. His one published play, Jet of Blood
(1925), illustrates both the radically antirealistic nature of
his dramaturgy and the difficulties that would be encountered
in its production. This is the opening of the play:
THE YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is beautiful.
THE YOUNG GIRL: (with a strong tremolo) You love me and
everything is beautiful.
THE YOUNG MAN: (in an even lower voice) I love you and
everything is beautiful.
THE YOUNG GIRL: (in an even lower voice than his) You love
me and everything is beautiful.
THE YOUNG MAN: (leaving her brusquely) I love you.
(A silence.) Look me in the face.
THE YOUNG GIRL: (playing the game, she faces him) There!
THE YOUNG MAN: (in a sharp, exalted voice) I love you, I am
great, I am articulate, I am complete, I am strong.
THE YOUNG GIRL: (in the same sharp voice) We love each
other.
THE YOUNG MAN: Intensely! Ah, how well-created is this world.
Silence. We hear what seems to be an immense windmill
blowing air: it soon becomes a hurricane. Two stars collide.
A mass of legs falls from the sky. along with feet, hands,
hair, masks, columns, porticos, temples, followed by three
scorpions and a frog and a beetle that come down slowly
and vomit. Enter a knight from the Middle Ages. . . followed
by a nurse holding her breasts in both hands. . .