Lifting the Painted Veil: Romantic Drama as Holy
Theatre
Amy Muse
University of St. Thomas
“Holy Theatre” is a term known to drama students and theatre practitioners
primarily from Peter Brook’s treatment of it in
his 1968 classic,
The Empty Space. It is,
Brook says, “the Theatre of the Invisible – Made –
Visible” (42); it is the kind of theatre that arises from a deeply felt urge to
“capture in our arts the invisible currents that rule our lives” (45).
Christopher Innes, in his study
Holy Theatre, observes that its “hallmark” is an
“aspiration to transcendence, to the spiritual in its widest sense” (3) and that
it attempts to “transcribe subjective experience directly into stage terms”
(29). The effect is meant to be communal: a theatre “that brings its spectators
into emotional harmony with one another by celebrating their common identity as
human beings” (Auslander 13).
Innes’s and
Auslander’s descriptions may strike readers as very Romantic and therefore
familiar, but some further clarification may be in order since the term
“holy theatre” can be misleading and, for some, off-putting. It does not
mean, for instance, a “religious” drama; indeed, much of Artaud’s and Grotowski’s work in the twentieth century (and Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s, for that matter) was considered sacrilegious, even
blasphemous. Most theatre that meets the criteria I discuss in this essay is
no longer given the label of “holy,” and a look at the scholarship of Christopher Innes is instructive for
understanding why. His book Holy Theatre: Ritual and the
Avant Garde (1981) was revised and updated in 1992 under the
title Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992. While the
content and organization of the book remain much the same in the course of a
little over a decade, he felt it necessary to change his title: the term
“holy theatre” had apparently run its course. Did it seem hopelessly dated,
a hangover from the 1960s, like “groovy” and “far out”? The clue is found in
Innes’s initial definition of his
book’s subject. In the 1981 Holy Theatre his
introduction describes a number of qualities (e.g., exploration of dream
states, interest in ritual) that the works of this master current of theatre
share, and observes that “it is in light of these qualities that the term
coined by Antonin Artaud is so apt: ‘the
Holy Theatre’” (3). However, in 1993’s Avant Garde Theatre
1892-1992, following the same description of qualities, Innes remarks that “Antonin Artaud’s pretentious claim to a ‘Holy
Theatre’—picked up by various avant garde artists . . . is revealing” (3).
Perhaps there’s little talk of a holy theatre, then, because the idea (and
the ideal?) of a holy theatre has become pretentious. It is considered
affected, showy, claims more than it can actually demonstrate. This course
is hoping to revive the term for its evocative power—or at least to revive
an interest in this theoretical approach to theatre and its plays.
Brook took the term “holy” from Antonin
Artaud’s vision of theatre as “a metaphysical
force,” “holy rite and quasi-religious practice” (
Esslin,
Antonin
Artaud 101).
Artaud’s
work was in part a return to and a nostalgia for the prehistory of theatre, the
ancient cult rituals and goat-songs that developed into Greek drama, and that
were celebrated as the “Dionysian” split from “Apollonian” harmony, rationalism,
and sculpture in Nietzsche’s highly influential
The Birth of
Tragedy (1872). This metaphysical or “holy” impulse in theatre has a
long history, and can be seen as one of the “master currents” of dramatic
literature and theatre theory.
As is well known, the study of European drama has greatly favored the
master current that flows toward realism and naturalism, a narrative of progress
that celebrates the late nineteenth century arrival of the “well-made play” and
the “problem play” (ushered in by the reigning triumvirate of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, with the
frequent addition of Shaw), dramas that work from the “bottom up,” grounded in
the material world and social issues. Plays that endeavor something else, namely
to stage subjective states, have been dropped into the valley of the unstageable
and unstageworthy. These are the plays of the master current of the holy
theatre. They tend to get labeled “closet dramas,” “symbolist,” “impressionist”
or “expressionist,” “experimental” or “avant garde.” Philosophical plays
concerned with revealing states of mind, consciousness, dreams, ghosts, magic,
they work from the “top down” and begin in abstraction, “sojourning through
consciousness and affecting the ‘reality’ of the material world beneath it,” as
William Demastes explains in
Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of
Mind (15). The plays are an exploration of the human condition, but
from the “inside out” rather than the social realism approach of “outside in.”
(However, plays with the greatest lasting impact tend to be a combination of
both these traditions, from
Hamlet to
Death of a Salesman to
Angels in
America.)
William Demastes argues in Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind
(Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002) that “either consciousness
or materiality is not really a choice. Inevitably, theater
uses a both/and proposition of confronting consciousness integrally through
materialism rather than discretely through mystical or spiritual channels”
(41). I have borrowed the useful terms “bottom up” and “top down” from his
work.
The dramatists of this lineage (loosely defined) were also deeply invested
as theorists of the theatre (or, put differently, this way of seeing theatre
attracted theorists who became dramatists to test their theories). We see this
pattern very clearly in the emergent Romantic theatre of the eighteenth century
in Germany (e.g., in the work of Lessing, Schiller, Tieck, and Kleist) and in
early nineteenth-century England in the staged theories of Joanna Baillie and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Theatre and consciousness studies have
only grown more popular in recent years, alongside and as a result of the
rise of cognitive sciences in humanities research. In addition to Demastes’s
Staging Consciousness, see Ralph Yarrow, Sacred Theatre (2007) and Yarrow and Peter Malekin’s
Consciousness, Literature, and Theatre (1997)
as well as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe’s Theatre and
Consciousness (2005), Performing
Consciousness (2010), edited with Per Brask, and his edited
issue, “Drama and Consciousness,” for Studies in the
Literary Imagination (34.2: Fall 2001). Within Romantic studies,
Alan Richardson’s work is essential reading, from his 1988 A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic
Age to his more recent British Romanticism and
the Science of the Mind (2005) and The Neural
Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2010).
In this drama course we examine some of the major dramatic texts that could
be said to make up a holy theatre tradition, with Coleridge’s
Remorse (1813) and
Baillie’s
Orra (1812) representing Romantic drama.
My argument is to incorporate Romantic
drama into courses on drama (where it has long been neglected), but the
approach I outline in this essay could certainly be used for an entire
course on Romantic drama. Plays such as Manfred and
Prometheus Unbound obviously fit the paradigm
of exploring consciousness. For this course I have chosen to include Orra and Remorse because of
their intriguing relationship to Shakespeare, the Gothic, and the avant
garde, and for the opportunities they present for examining notions of
“high” and “low,” “avant garde” and “popular.” They are also both included,
most conveniently, in Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer’s Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (2003). Alongside
these plays we read theatre theory and study developments in stagecraft that
allowed dramatists to explore subjective states onstage. In this context
students are encouraged to see Romantic drama as inspired by the vision and
techniques learned from
Shakespeare’s
plays (rather than weak imitations of
Shakespeare), as a reworking and transformation of the Gothic, and
as the birthplace of the modern avant garde. To many Romanticists this is going
to look (suspiciously, perhaps) like the “old” approach to Romantic drama—that
is, Romantic drama as “mental theatre,” a label under which it has not tended to
fare well in criticism. However, when studied within the lineage of holy
theatre, Romantic drama can stand out as a peak—rather than a valley—in the
history of dramatic literature and theatre theory.
I am not interested in establishing a new hierarchy. But,
for illustrative purposes only, let's say we charted a theatre history
using as our standard the criteria of holy theatre (rather than the
criteria of realism): plays in which the invisible is made visible, in
which states of mind are explored onstage, and what is most prized is
not verisimilitude, mimesis, the staging and working out of a dramatic
conflict, psychological characterization, and dialogue on social issues,
but instead the unveiling of the hidden, the representation of internal
states of mind and feeling, and symbolic presentation of psychological
issues. Furthermore, in these plays, language is used at its height not
for witty stichomythia, political speechifying, or ironic distancing,
but for the revelation of internal states, the representation of being,
and startling the audience into communal feeling. A charting of “peaks”
and “valleys” might show
Remorse, Orra, Manfred, Prometheus Unbound, and A Dream
Play as peaks, and The Way of the
World, A Doll’s House, and The Iceman Cometh as valleys.
My idea here is not to denigrate the plays in the new
“valley”; I’ve deliberately selected excellent, “classic” plays to point
out the absurdity of doing so. It is instead to question the idea of
constructing a historical narrative of peaks and valleys, “golden ages”
and “dark ages.” Categorizing dramas by their affinities with parallel
“master currents,” grouping them by their primary concerns and the
approaches to staging those concerns (the “top down” and “inside out”
versus “bottom up” or “outside in” methods mentioned above) may prove a
more effective method.
One key reason Romantic drama has been seen as odd is
because of the way theatre history was produced and, later, reproduced
in teaching. As Jacky Bratton has
written, “the continuing strength of the received way of reading theatre
history can be gauged from the difficulties critics, performers and
historians still have when they attempt to recuperate anything from the
early nineteenth-century stage” (
New Readings in
Theatre History 12). My long-range goal is to re-see
dramatic history and encourage the reorganization of courses in theatre
history and dramatic literature. For instance, instead of the standard
two-semester survey that moves chronologically from the ancient Greeks
to the present, we could teach a course in two master currents of world
drama, the “holy” and the “rough,” to use Peter Brook’s terms, or the “top down” and “inside out” interest
in consciousness, versus the “bottom up” and “outside in” interest in
social realism. While the typical historical timeline reveals the
dialectical development of theatre and drama between “outside in” and
“inside out” approaches, the “master currents” approach avoids the
conception of peaks and valleys, and may allow students to see more
clearly patterns of influence between particular playwrights and other
theatre artists, and of approaches to playwriting and theatre. Core
differences on the function of drama and theatre come into
focus, and this master current challenges some fundamental assumptions
of drama and theatre, such as whether there is even a natural
relationship between drama and the theatre—that a dramatic text is
indeed intended expressly for and only completed upon performance.
For an argument similar to my own, see Jeffrey N. Cox’s
discussion of Romanticism’s “counter-theatre of ‘virtuality’” (177) in
“The Death of Tragedy; or, The Birth of Melodrama,”
The Performing
Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and
Peter Holland (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
161-81.
There are several tributaries of the master current of holy theatre: one
focuses on pure form (we see this in the modernist avant garde in particular,
e.g., in the theatrical experiments of Gertrude Stein and Wassily Kandinsky),
another on myth and ritual (which points up the ancient origins of holy theatre,
running from Euripides’s
The Bacchae to Peter Shaffer’s
Equus). In order to highlight the stream of holy
theatre attempting the revelation of consciousness, this version of the course
begins with
Shakespeare’s “strategic
opacity” and
Hamlet, the Ur-text of the dramatic
representation of consciousness.
To Romantics and their followers, the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre
(and the thereby conditioned Elizabethan audiences) were ideal because they drew
upon the imagination, truly created a “theatre of the mind.” Those early modern
audiences viewed a virtually bare stage with no external lighting (at the
outdoor theatres such as the Globe, anyway); the language of the plays
frequently remind them to imagine the scene that is being played out before
them. Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century
admirers developed a new form of literary criticism—“character criticism”—in
response to the complexity and seeming humanness of his characters, and gave us
the now-familiar figure of the natural genius Shakespeare who had discovered the secret to how to reveal
interiority on the stage. A. W.
Schlegel’s image from his 1808 lectures is a familiar one: Shakespeare’s characters are like “watches
with crystalline plates and cases, which, while they point out the hours as
correctly as other watches, enable us at the same time to perceive the inward
springs whereby all this is accomplished” (“A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art
and Literature” 362). More recently, Stephen
Greenblatt has echoed this language in
Will in the
World when he argues that
Shakespeare “perfected the means to represent inwardness” (299)
through the innovation of the soliloquy, in particular what
Greenblatt refers to as “strategic opacity,”
or a new technique of “radical excision” in which
Shakespeare took out a “key explanatory element, thereby occluding
the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action
that was to unfold” (323-24). Relying on “inner logic” rather than causal
events,
Shakespeare “fashioned an inner
structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of
images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas,
the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsession”
(324).
Greenblatt’s
Shakespeare is remarkably Romantic, and
effectively introduces holy theatre dramaturgy; strategic opacity was “not only
a new aesthetic strategy,” but “expressed
Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of
what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things
untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and
settled” (324).
Both
Hamlet (1600-01) and
The
Tempest (1610-11) exhibit the Renaissance view of the world as a
stage and faith in theatre as a means of revealing truth. Thanks in large part
to Romantic writers and critics—Goethe, Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge—
Hamlet has come to be considered a play about
consciousness, and Hamlet the “prince of the inward insurrection” (
Greenblatt 303). When read as a foundational
text of holy theatre, what comes into focus are Hamlet's conversation with the
Ghost and the unfolding of Hamlet’s consciousness through the soliloquies,
tracing the fluctuations of his mind from his first appearance to Act V. The
course then moves to
The Tempest, which, among its
dominant interpretations, can be seen as a play about the magical power of
theatre to bring about reconciliation and forgiveness. It also provides an
excellent entrance into
Coleridge’s
Remorse, as both plays use an act of magic, of
dramatic illusion, to prick the conscience of and draw remorse from a wayward
brother.
Baillie’s Orra
(1812) is chronologically prior to Remorse
(1813), but teaching it afterward allows the course to move immediately
into Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, which is similarly “hauntological” and
includes an apparition as well as “living ghosts,” characters who are,
like Orra in the final scene of the play, psychologically haunted and
poised between death and life. Moreover, Strindberg’s desire for an intimate performance space that
could capture the nuances of his plays—which resulted in the founding of
the Intimate Theater in Stockholm in 1907—carries startling echoes of
Baillie’s “Introductory
Discourse.”
Teaching Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s
Remorse
The main plotline of
Remorse echoes themes in
The Tempest; in both, an ambitious and
rebellious younger brother (Antonio in
The Tempest,
Ordonio in
Remorse) plots to kill a virtuous older
brother (Prospero, Alvar) and sends that virtuous brother into exile. (The
differences can be illuminating to discuss. Prospero can set up
circumstances to awaken Antonio to his wrongdoing, but cannot ultimately
transform Antonio’s inner self; while Prospero expresses forgiveness in the
end, Antonio does not appear to express remorse.) In
Remorse, while Alvar is gone (Ordonio had arranged to have him
killed, and assumes him dead), Ordonio tries to win over Alvar’s beloved,
Teresa. She wants nothing to do with Ordonio, and, anyway, is waiting with
hope for Alvar’s eventual return, since his body has never turned up.
Ordonio designs a spectacular illusion to convince Teresa of Alvar’s death:
a glowing altar which will summon the image of the dead Alvar. Unbeknownst
to all (except the audience), Alvar is not dead; he had escaped the assassin
and has returned with a plot to awaken Ordonio to his evil deeds. Notably,
this plan is
not to seek revenge on Ordonio, but to bring him
to remorse. Alvar manipulates the altar trick, making it boomerang on
Ordonio: the altar bursts into flames to reveal a picture of the
assassination attempt on Alvar, masterminded by Ordonio. Thus Ordonio
realizes (1) Alvar is still alive, and (2) he knows about the plot to kill
him.
Remorse (1813) is a reworking of an earlier
revolution-oriented play entitled
Osorio (1797)
into a deeper, more psychological study of consciousness: the revision of
title alone gives us a clue. In
Remorse
Coleridge is staging a shift in
consciousness, which brings about a change in conscience.
The psychological state of remorse was a familiar
theme in Gothic plays, although Jeffrey
Cox points out that Coleridge's work, as one in the second wave of Gothic
popularity, reassesses the theme and can be read as a “culminating work
in the Gothic tradition” (30). Cox charts
two major surges of Gothic drama, the first in the 1790s, which Coleridge catches onto with
Osorio (1797), the second hitting its peak
in 1815, which Coleridge
anticipates with Remorse (1813). Cox links these two surges to political
issues surrounding the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars,
particularly the fall of the Bastille and the fall of Napoleon. See
Cox, ed. and intro., Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825 (Athens: Ohio UP, 1992),
30-32. In the
Table Talk jottings,
Coleridge expressed a special fondness for
Remorse:
“the ‘Remorse’ is certainly a great favourite of mine,” he stated, “the more
so as certain pet abstract notions of mine are therein expounded” (II: 360).
Exactly what those pet abstract notions were was never explicitly stated,
but reading
Remorse within the communality that is
characteristic of holy theatre illuminates the play as a tragedy intended to
wake not just the character Ordonio but the audience from their dogmatic
slumbers or wrongdoings and force them to confront the Otherness that exists
inside as well as outside themselves. As has been discussed in a number of
studies,
As well as Sophie Thomas’s “Seeing Things (‘As They
Are’)” from Studies in Romanticism (included on
the Reading List), see John David
Moore, “Coleridge
and the ‘modern Jacobinical Drama’: Osorio,
Remorse, and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the
Stage, 1797-1816” Bulletin of Research in the
Humanities 85.4 (Winter 1982): 443-64; and Peter Mortensen, “The Robbers and the
Police: British Romantic Drama and the Gothic Treacheries of Coleridge’s Remorse” in European Gothic: A Spirited
Exchange 1760 – 1960, ed. Avril Horner (Manchester UP,
2002): 128–46. in order to present this concept effectively,
Coleridge drew upon the
spectacular stagecraft of the popular Gothic drama, which contradicts his
theoretical writing, where he finds the Gothic weak and even dangerous.
As a companion text, students can read “Letter II” of “Satyrane’s
Letters”—included in Chapter XXII of the 1816
Biographia
Literaria but written in 1798—where
Coleridge as much as accuses the
Gothic theatre of inciting terror. He found the self-reflection of Gothic
drama dangerous on at least two counts. The Gothic drama had a tendency
merely to reflect, rather than to challenge, the selves of the audience; the
values often reflected an easy morality that kept the audiences complacent
and inert. Also a dangerous aspect of facile self-reflection, and a more
tempting one for
Coleridge and
others, was, as
Jeffrey Cox notes in his
discussion of North's
The Kentish Barons, that the
emotions can be “more deeply rooted by reflection,” a feature much
glamourized in Gothic hero/villains. One ideally wants neither passive
reflection nor the dangerous inward turn to self-consciousness, both of
which can result in fixation and a resistance to change, but instead a
self-consciousness which has its ultimate origin in a moral relation to
others and which develops dialectically in continual relation to others. One
way to break out of a potentially solipsistic cycle is to engage with
others, and for a writer, the stage is therefore an ideal medium.
Coleridge was frustrated with the
limitations of the commercial stage of his day, but he knew that that was
the means through which to present such ideas visibly and publicly, and to
reach the widest audience for his ideas. As
William Galperin points out in
The Return of
the Visible in British Romanticism, issues of the visible
continually verge upon issues involving
community (164) and,
though
Coleridge in his criticism
may have occasionally demonstrated an anti-theatrical bias, he reached for
the visible to present the transformation of a consciousness to and for a
community. In
Remorse he adapted the Gothic formula
to his own purpose, and used the Gothic spectacle to affect his audiences,
as he advises in “Satyrane’s Letters,” “in union with the activity both of
[their] understanding and imagination” (XXII:437).
The Drury Lane playbill for
Remorse
advertises all new sets, which, according to the dictates of the stage
directions, included “wild and mountainous” country scenery and a desolate
cavern dripping with water; the setting is the Spanish Inquisition, a remote
and terror-ridden time.
Coleridge
commissioned a score from Michael Kelly, who had composed the music for the
most successful of all Gothic dramas, Matthew Lewis’s
The
Castle Spectre (1797). As Paula Backscheider has noted, “Gothic
drama used music in sophisticated ways to engage the senses while
subliminally both exercising and containing anxieties” (173); it was as
crucial to the play as scores are to film and, increasingly, theatre today.
The dramatic structure of the play, however, is focused on Ordonio's
consciousness.
Coleridge wastes no
time getting to his purpose; very little exposition is given before Alvar
declares that he has returned to confront his brother and “rouse within him
/ REMORSE!” in order to “save him from himself” (I.i.18-19). Preparations
begin at once for the visible spectacle which will force upon Ordonio a
cathartic experience, described by Alvar as “the punishment that cleanses
hearts” (I.ii.319)—remorse, rather than revenge. This experience is designed
to raise Ordonio's self-consciousness which will in turn prick his
conscience and force him to face his transgressions. The visual elements are
crucial: Alvar queries his servant Zulimez concerning what they need, “Above
all, the picture / Of the assassination—.” “—Be assured / That it remains
uninjured, Zulimez answers him (I.i.92-4). The spectacle will work in such a
way, Alvar discloses when alone, that “That worst bad man shall find / A
picture, which will wake the hell within him, / And rouse a fiery whirlwind
in his conscience” (II.ii.172-74).
In order to understand how Gothic techniques can work to present
onstage the awakening of a consciousness—and, perhaps, to model a
transformation of consciousness in the audience—try staging the key scene of
the play in your classroom. This is the moment of the climactic trick that
boomerangs on Ordonio, the overwhelming spectacle that results in the first
awakening of his conscience.It
should be noted that the scene enacted, III.i, is not the
scene in which Ordonio feels remorse. It works much like “The Mouse
Trap” in Hamlet in that the consequence is that
Ordonio (like Claudius) has been aroused to the point where he is
conscious that someone is working on him, and so he becomes watchful. He
feels guilty, yes, but only to the extent that, again, like Claudius, he
is anxious to rid himself of the external causes of his pain; in other
words, he seeks to kill the “traitors” (Isidore, and the “sorcerer” [the
disguised Alvar]) rather than experience fully the internal pain and
attempt to alleviate it through conversion and reformation. However,
others notice the experience he underwent, and become players in the
process of forcing his essential confrontation with what he tried to do
to Alvar, which finally occurs in V.i. Unfortunately, Ordonio has hardly
begun to experience the pangs of true remorse when Alhadra and a band of
Morescos enter and demand Ordonio's life in exchange for his murder of
Isidore, a conclusion that comes far too quickly for many spectators
(and readers) to feel the full impact of the remorse, and undercuts
Coleridge’s apparent
design. This spectacle is the showpiece of the evening. It was
well-advertised, and no theatrical elements were spared. Thomas Barnes’s
review of the play (included in the
Broadview Anthology of
Romantic Drama) provides an eyewitness description: “the altar
flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the
mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to
overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted
our senses” (392). Barnes’s choice of words—“mystic,” “awful,” “overpower
reality,” and “half believe the enchantment”—are all central to the desired
effect of the holy theatre.
EXERCISE 1: STAGING THE AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In this exercise students will perform Act III, scene I of
Remorse, recreating the Gothic setting for the “altar scene” in
order to understand how the stagecraft works to convey an experience of an
awakening of consciousness. You will need at least six actors to play Alvar,
Ordonio, Teresa, Valdez, Monviedro, and a few “familiars of the Inquisition”
who act but don’t have speaking parts. Others can create music “expressive
of the movements and images” of the scene, play it according to the stage
directions, and sing the Chorus parts. A third crew can construct the altar
spectacle.
- From the text, gather information about the stage setting and
recreate this in your classroom. For instance, Coleridge's stage directions call
for “a Hall of Armory, with an Altar at the back of the
Stage” and “soft music from an instrument of Glass or
Steel.”
- Onstage enter Alvar (dressed in a Sorcerer’s robe; the others
don’t recognize him), Ordonio, Teresa, and Valdez (father of the
brothers Ordonio and Alvar).
- The music should score their dialogue and action. Beginning at
about III.i.62, a “voice behind the scenes sings ‘Hear, sweet spirit’”
during (the disguised) Alvar’s incantation to raise up the soul of
Alvar.
- The goal of the altar spectacle is to awaken Ordonio’s
consciousness, so the actor playing Ordonio needs to convey a change
over the course of the scene. In the early stages of Alvar’s
presentation, for instance, Ordonio still thinks that he is
controlling the action, and comments that it would be a joy to see Alvar
again. Alvar then begins to unleash upon him a verbal barrage and
throughout the scene addresses his lines “still to Ordonio,” heedless of
Valdez's interruptions, protesting this assault, which culminates with
the stinging “it gives fierce merriment to the damned, / To see these
proud men, that loath mankind, / At every stir and buzz of coward
conscience, / Trick, cant, and lie, most whining hypocrites!” Alvar then
turns away, shooing him “Away, away!” Then, like a director perfectly
timing his dramatic effects, he orders, “Now let me hear more music"
(III.i.110-14).
- Music cue: the stage directions read “The whole Music clashes
into a Chorus.” The Chorus chants “Wandering Demons! Hear the spell! /
Lest a Blacker charm compel—”
- Recreate the spectacle of the portrait: the stage directions
indicate that “the incense on the altar takes fire suddenly, and an
illuminated picture of Alvar's assassination is discovered, and having
remained a few seconds is then hidden by ascending flames.”
- Ordonio “start[s] in great agitation” and tries to
blame the situation on “the traitor Isidore.”
- Monviedro and the familiars of the Inquisition enter and seize
Alvar.
- Ordonio “recovers himself as from stupor” and
orders that they take Alvar to the dungeon.
CLASS DISCUSSION
Reflect on how the class’s performance affected you as an actor, designer,
and/or spectator. How did the Gothic elements, particularly the music and
the altar spectacle, highlight the emotional relationships between the
characters and the theme of awakening remorse?
It is likely that the Gothic elements felt awkwardly phony, even laughable,
to you. Imagine the original performance circumstances: you are
watching
Remorse in the 3,000-plus seat theatre at
Drury Lane. You go to the theatre eager for spectacle, delighted with and
amazed by the technological developments in theatre and the effects they
have on you as they lure you into a belief in their reality. (To imagine
this, fast forward to the spectacular theatre of today, such as
The Lion King,
Phantom of the
Opera, or
Miss Saigon.) How do you
think you would have reacted in those circumstances?
Teaching
Joanna Baillie’s
Orra
Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the
painted veil” (1818) provides an effective lead-in to this reading of
Orra because holy theatre, like Orra herself, seeks to
lift the painted veil, with often (and necessarily) painful—or, as
Artaud later famously phrased it,
cruel—results.
Baillie’s
tragedy on
fear in the
Plays on the
Passions,
Orra’s dramaturgical concept
is to show the progression of fear in Orra, which starts in a somewhat
playful fashion with the enjoyment of ghost stories, and ends in a terrible
madness; this aspect of the play takes precedence over the plotline about
Orra’s resistance to a forced courtship.
Orra shows
Orra’s internal state; the audience doesn’t physically see any ghosts, but
instead watches the actor playing Orra unveil her hauntedness, or, in other
words, react to fear.
Julie Carlson’s essay “Baillie’s
Orra:
Shrinking in Fear” (included in the recent collection
Joanna Baillie, Romantic
Dramatist) works well as a contemporary supplement to the play.
Carlson proposes the idea that
“hauntology” rather than ontology describes our current being and time, and
writes that
Orra is a haunted and haunting play; it
is the exception rather than the rule in the
Plays on the
Passions and undermines
Baillie’s usual emphasis on rational morality. Orra herself is a
“spectral subject” in the play (216), a position between the “twos” of
binaries (much like
Baillie’s own unusual
situation in Romanticism and theatre history—not yet acknowledged as a truly
“major” figure, yet too major to be “minor”).
This conundrum is discussed in Thomas Crochunis’s introductory essay
to Joanna Baillie,
Romantic Dramatist, ed. Crochunis (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 3.
Like
Remorse,
Orra draws
upon the conventions of the Gothic and of Romantic medievalism, and
similarly, the spectacle is utilized,
Carlson argues, as a way of transporting us to a psychic space
of sensory perceptions—a “before-human” state that precedes meaning-making
(217)—a technique used in
Artaud’s
twentieth-century performance events that gave audiences a “sensory
overload” to break down their habitual rational responses. Gothic spectacle
provided “a way of exploring the psychological even before twentieth-century
constructions of it,” and “becomes linked to the internal state of the
characters’ minds as authors explore how individuals react in times of great
stress,” Christine Colón explains (xxiii). Furthermore, since the Gothic
“compels an audience to derive pleasure from fear,” it “clearly allies
itself with the idea of the sublime”; and “for a playwright like
Baillie who desperately wishes to stir her
audience members’ imaginations and compel them to transform their lives, the
spectacle of the Gothic sublime would have been appealing. It had the
potential to awaken audiences and cause them to act” (Colón xxii-xxiii).
In addition, Baillie’s “Introductory
Discourse” and note “To the Reader” to the
Plays on the
Passions should be taught alongside
Orra.
Baillie is slowly becoming recognized as
a significant theorist of theatre; each year a larger number of
articles, it seems, appears on Baillie,
and Catherine Burroughs’s Closet Spaces (1997), Judith Bailey Slagle’s
critical biography Joanna
Baillie: A Literary Life (2002), and Thomas C.
Crochunis’s edited collection of
essays, Baillie,
Romantic Dramatist (2004) have all been major contributions.
Excerpts or complete versions of her “Introductory Discourse” have been
anthologized for some time in collections of Romantic-era writing,
particularly of women’s writing, e.g., The (Other)
Eighteenth Century (1991) and Women Critics
1660-1820 (1995), and in Peter Duthie’s edition of the 1798
Plays on the Passions (2001). However, she
is not yet included in the major, much-used critical studies or
anthologies of theatre theory or dramatic criticism such as Marvin
Carlson’s Theories of the Theatre; Daniel
Gerould’s Theatre/Theory/Theatre or Bernard
Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She has
been given a paragraph in the latest (tenth) edition of the standard
textbook History of the Theatre, by Oscar
Brockett and Franklin Hildy, but as a playwright, not a theatre
theorist. Furthermore, while scholarship on Baillie has been impressive, it hasn’t yet penetrated drama
scholarship deeply to show Baillie’s
influence on the modern avant garde. For instance, one description of
expressionist drama is not just that it is a highly subjective art form
in which “internal acts become externalized,” but, more specifically,
that the “drama becomes concentrated to a point of ‘pure’ emotion”
(Innes, Holy
Theatre 44, 45), an innovation of Baillie’s. (Both are excerpted in
The Broadview Anthology of
Romantic Drama.) As do the other
dramatist-theorists in the holy theatre tradition,
Baillie is writing a manifesto: creating drama for a theatre
that could be—that is, the theatre she wants rather than the theatre she
has. It is in the “Introductory Discourse” that
Baillie develops the idea for which she’s become best known,
that of “sympathetic curiosity.” She does not just make the point that we
are curious about other humans, especially when they are experiencing
emotional trauma, but that we want to fix our eyes on the manifestation of
such trauma on their bodies and faces—to observe their
symptoms, as it were. To take just one example that works well
with teaching
Orra,
Baillie writes that one of the things humans are most curious
about, yet most scared of, are ghosts. “No man wishes to see the Ghost
himself, which would certainly procure him the best information on the
subject, but every man wishes to see one who believes that he sees it, in
all the agitation and wildness of that species of terror” (359). In other
words, we are more interested in reactions to ghosts, in witnessing the
experience of having seen a ghost, than in the ghosts themselves. We are
aware that it is rude to stare at people, yet we have an overwhelming urge
to watch people in distress: “how sensible are we of this strong propensity
within us, when we behold any person under the pressure of great and
uncommon calamity!” Out of courtesy we will turn our eyes away, yet “the
first glance we direct to him will involuntarily be one of the keenest
observation, how hastily soever it may be checked; and often will a
returning look of enquiry mix itself by stealth with our sympathy and
reserve” (359). In short, we enjoy staring at others who are experiencing
emotional turmoil; while we restrain ourselves, and offer merely expressions
of sympathy, we covertly observe in minute detail the features and
physicality that indicate the person’s suffering. Such gazes are
inappropriate in polite society; however, our sympathetic curiosity is
satisfactorily aroused and exercised by attending the theatre. It gives
spectators the opportunity to vicariously steal into the closet—and into the
mind—of another. For, as
Baillie writes,
“there is, perhaps, no employment which the human mind will with so much
avidity pursue, as the discovery of concealed passion, as the tracing the
varieties and progress of a perturbed soul” (360).
The success of Baillie’s designs to
allow audiences to trace the varieties and progress of Orra’s perturbed soul
depend heavily on the skill and style of the actors, and thus it is no
surprise that her script is filled with detailed prescriptions for gesture
and movement to convey the internal state of the character. Here, too, she
is advocating for a transformed, intimate theatre in opposition to the
conventional performance spaces of her day, which were growing ever larger;
in “To the Reader” she writes that the “department of acting that will
suffer most under these circumstances, is that which particularly regards
the gradual unfolding of the passions, and has, perhaps, hitherto been less
understood than any other part of the art—I mean Soliloquy” (375). The plays
she is creating need actors who can exhibit “the solitary musings of a
perturbed mind” with “muttered, imperfect articulation which grows by
degrees into words” or “that rapid burst of sounds which often succeeds the
slow languid tones of distress” (375). These precisely observed descriptions
remind us of what may be most remarked upon about Baillie’s playwriting, in her own day as well as ours: her
diagnostically observant eye and analytic, “anatomical” dramaturgy. The
reviewer from
Edinburgh Magazine writes in 1818
(excerpted in the
Broadview Anthology of Romantic
Drama) that “no one” except
Baillie ever thought of giving, in dramatic form, “an anatomical
analysis, a philosophical dissection of a passion” (381). Her plays work as
a kind of “microscope, by means of which she seems to think that she has
brought within the sphere of our vision things too minute for the naked
intellectual eye” (381-2). The reviewer thinks this is the “radical defect”
of her plays, but today it is considered perhaps her most brilliant
endeavor, an innovative theatrical experiment.
The names of Joanna Baillie and Constantin Stanislavski are rarely,
if ever, linked, but he too taught a form of anatomical observation, telling
his students that, when creating a role, they should first read the text
carefully for the “physical truths” about the character. The fame of
American Method acting’s “inside out” approach has obscured other ways of
building characters and distorted part of Stanislavski’s original teachings; he instructs his actors not
to “truncate” the “inner line” of a role and replace it with their own
“personal line,” but to begin with the “physical life” of the character,
which is tangible. “The spirit cannot but respond to the actions of the
body, provided of course that these are genuine, have a purpose, and are
productive,” he explains (
Creating a Role 149). Put
differently, instead of the later Method acting technique of drawing on the
actor’s own emotional and sense memory, the actor was to take on the
physical stance, gestures, posture that signaled the emotional feeling of
the character. By putting oneself into the physical position, the emotion
would follow.
In the eighteenth century, the use of ritualized gestures and poses to
convey specific states of emotion had been made popular, codified in acting
manuals that illustrated the proper appearance of the gesture or pose and
explained what each indicated. (This often seems oddly nonrealistic to us.
Similarly, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant garde
theatre, actors would strike archetypal poses, rather than move and pause in
the realistic manner that’s familiar to us now; these poses were meant to
convey certain emotional effects, indeed to heighten the emotional effect
altogether.)It is not unusual
for playwrights to prescribe the acting style that fits the view of how
consciousness is presented in the play, particularly in this holy
theatre tradition in which realistic causal explanations for behavior
are eschewed or excised. For instance, Sam Shepard told the cast of
Angel City, one of his earliest
experimental plays (written right before Suicide in B
Flat and predating his turn to more naturalistic family
dramas with Curse of the Starving Class and
Buried Child): “Instead of the idea of a
‘whole character’ with logical motives behind his behavior which the
actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured
whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme . .
. . In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz
improvisation” (105). See Don Shewey,
Sam Shepard (New York: Da Capo Press,
1997). The unveiling or revelation of a character’s internal
state was a primary feature of late eighteenth-century and Romantic acting
theories; the matter of expressing a character’s “passion” is considerably
more complicated than having the actors constantly emoting onstage, which
would eventually result in a flattened-out performance and not move the
audience. To express internal states convincingly, performers developed a
number of techniques that included drawing upon their own memories,
thoughts, and emotions and transferring them to the character; focusing on
communicating explicitly the specific shifts of feeling of
thought that a character experiences from one moment to the next; and
cultivating an attitude of sympathy among the triangle of character,
performer, and viewer by finding the vulnerability of the character and
inviting the audience to experience it. As we see featured in
Orra, one way an actor would reveal the interiority of
a character was by focusing on the way the character
reacted to
the dramatic situation. As
Jonathan Bate has
written, the popular view among Romantic theatre artists was that “the
essence of human nature is to be found in reaction, not action, and so it
was that their performances were most intense at certain moments of
reflection” (“The Romantic Stage” 97).
Baillie’s detailed descriptions of
Orra’s physical actions and gestures, particularly in her mad scene,
instruct the actor on how to accurately depict the progression of her fear.
To see how Baillie’s stage directions
“direct” the play and help her actors create their roles through anatomical
analysis, and to experience how physical gestures can work to help
performers feel for themselves and reveal to spectators the characters'
emotions, try the following exercise.
EXERCISE 2: PHYSICALLY CREATING THE INTERIOR STATE OF MADNESS
In this exercise students can test Baillie’s
instructions to the actor playing Orra in the key scene where she finally
goes mad from fear (IV.iii). To play the entire scene you will need actors
for Orra, Rudigere, Cathrina, Theobald, and Franko. You could also choose to
play just Orra’s soliloquies (IV.iii.27-52 and IV.iii.147-165), as these are
the moments for which Baillie provides most
specific direction.
- Make a list of all the stage directions that describe Orra’s
actions (or reactions) in the scene. (For instance, “pacing to and
fro,” “stands fixed with her arms crossed on her breast,” “striking
the floor with her hands,” etc.)
- To experience the physical life of the character and the “arc”
or progression of Orra’s madness, practice enacting all of the stage
directions, the gestures and postures, without saying the
lines of the scene. You might treat this as a kind of dance, repeating
the series of gestures and movements until you begin to feel the
emotional life of the character.
- Then go back and play the scene in its entirety, following the
directions as you deliver the lines.
- Everyone should have a chance both to enact Orra’s gestures and
to watch others doing so.
CLASS DISCUSSION
What did performing the gestures and actions feel like? Did you ever feel
fear rising in yourself simply from doing the physical gestures associated
with a person feeling fear? If so, when in particular did you feel it? Of
Baillie’s descriptions of a person
becoming overwhelmed with fear, in what ways were they accurate
and in what ways merely literary?
How did others look when they played Orra? Which gestures or postures most
effectively conveyed fear? Which looked most outdated or stagy?
The final scene of
Orra makes a nice pairing with
Strindberg's
The Ghost Sonata (1907). Orra returns
to the stage, completely mad, and tells her guardian Hughobert, upon hearing
the news that his son died, that “the damn’d and holy / The living and the
dead, together are / In horrid neighbourship. – ‘Tis but thin vapour, /
Floating around thee, makes the wav’ring bound” (V.ii.208-12).
The Ghost Sonata also takes up the notion that the
living and dead are in “horrid neighbourship” together, with only the finest
boundary between them, although it does so to more psychological ends. In
the second act’s famous “ghost supper,” the characters “look like ghosts”
and have been drinking tea together for twenty years, “always the same
people, saying the same things, or else too ashamed to say anything” (279).
“God, if only we could die! If
only we could die!” the
character named the Mummy cries (283).
Remorse can
be reintroduced at this point because it also pairs well with
The Ghost Sonata when the characters seek to make
Jacob Hummel (“Old Man” in the
dramatis personae) awaken to his
past evil actions and feel remorse for them. Like
Remorse and
Orra,
The
Ghost Sonata is rather Gothic and could profitably be brought
into a discussion of distinctions between “Gothic,” “Romantic,” “symbolist,”
and “expressionist,” for the same elements of stagecraft are alternately
labeled “Gothic” when describing
Remorse,
Orra, and many other Romantic dramas and are thus
often considered “low,” pandering to the masses’ love of being surprised
with special effects; or they are labeled “Romantic,” “experimental,” or
“avant garde,” and then considered “high art.”
Romantic drama as the birthplace of the modern avant garde
When works of the modern avant garde are studied immediately after
Remorse and
Orra, the
kinship with Romantic drama becomes clear in both the shared vision of
theatre and the stagecraft employed to realize it. As
Peter Brook explains, the holy theatre does not only
present the invisible in drama, it “also offers
conditions that make its perception possible” (56), such as
theatrical spectacle, lighting, a use of ritualistic devices, dance and
movement, musical scores and other kinds of sound, and even, in some cases,
smell.
Amiri Baraka’s use of
smell in Slave Ship to convey a sense of
“atmosfeeling” is a good example. Far from being “mere” spectacle
or surface—an entertaining painted veil—these elements, whether labeled
Gothic, Romantic, or Holy, are employed to lift or transcend reality.
Paula Backscheider writes in
Spectacular Politics, in a discussion of
The Castle Spectre, that Gothic playwrights who added
the word “romance” to their titles “signaled their freedom from the
referential, veridical world of realist texts and allied themselves with a
highly symbolic art, often reaching for a higher reality or a deeper
psychology” (156). Theorists of the Gothic,
Backscheider continues, have argued that the form “is best
distinguished by the experience its readers or spectators have, and it is
now widely accepted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the
possibilities of conventional literary realism” (156). This dissatisfaction
leads to the modern avant garde tendency to elevate mood over plot, or
internal over external states, presaged by
Baillie’s work in particular.
The twentieth century part of the course looks at Strindberg’s
A Dream
Play (1901); one-act experiments
Interior (1891) by Maurice Maeterlinck,
The
Wayfarer (1910) by Valery Briusov, and Wassily Kandinsky’s
The Yellow Sound (1909); Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot (1953), the text seen by
Peter Brook as the apotheosis of holy theatre;
Sam Shepard’s
Suicide in B Flat (1976) and the
off-off Broadway movement; Amiri Baraka’s Artaudian “historical pageant”
Slave Ship (1967) and Ntozake Shange’s
“choreopoem”
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the
rainbow is enuf (1975); and ends with consideration of the career
of Sarah Kane, particularly her plays
Blasted
(1995) and
4:48 Psychosis (2000). We also discuss
the influence of director-theorists
Antonin
Artaud (
The Theatre and Its Double
[1938])
It might be interesting
for students to note that Artaud’s
Théâtre Alfred Jarry planned seasons that included Strindberg’s A Dream
Play (a favorite, intended for his first season, 1926/27,
but produced in 1928), Büchner’s Woyzeck and
Shelley’s The
Cenci (perhaps Artaud’s
best-known production—as well as the best-known version of The Cenci), as well as an archival reconstruction
of the story of Blue-Beard and the Jacobean drama The
Revenger’s Tragedy) (Esslin,
Antonin
Artaud 96; Artaud,
The Theatre and Its Double 99-100).
and Jerzy Grotowski (
Towards a Poor Theatre
[1968]—probably best known to people outside the theatre from Andre
Gregory’s descriptions of his participation in Grotowski’s life-changing
rituals in the film
My Dinner with Andre [1981]),
whose methods and experiments are probably what first come to mind when one
learns about holy theatre. What often strikes twenty-first-century students
about this current of theatre is how raw it seems, how earnest or even naïve
in its search for authenticity; there’s an openness and vulnerability that
can make contemporary audiences conditioned to irony uncomfortable.
Contemporary traces of holy theatre are difficult to find; we see them more
in rave music, light shows, art installations, and communal performance
events such as Burning Man than in staged drama. Postmodernism so changed
the tenor of much of the aesthetic that when consciousness is examined in
contemporary performance, the tendency has been toward a deconstruction
rather than a search for universals and communality. An important response
comes in the form of Jill Dolan’s argument for “reanimating humanism (after
we’ve deconstructed the blind, transcendent universalisms it once espoused)”
(163) and her conceptualization of “utopian performatives” in
Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater
(2005).
Film is probably the most engaging and accessible contemporary
porthole for entering the realms of the holy theatre tradition. As Bert Cardullo notes of modernist avant-garde
plays, Romantic dramas would perhaps have been “better suited to the screen
than to the stage, assaulting as they did the theater’s traditional
objectivity or exteriority and its bondage to continuous time and space”
(3). Film is a medium that has been friendly to experiments with the
concerns of holy theatre—consciousness, dream states, alternative realities,
magic—as can be seen in the popularity of films about consciousness, such as
Richard Linklater’s
Waking Life (2001) and the
documentary
What the Bleep Do We Know? (2004),
critical acclaim for Julian Schnabel’s evocation of human consciousness in
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), the
work of Michel Gondry (
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind [2004],
The Science of Sleep
[2006]), and Christopher Nolan’s
Inception (2010),
to name just a few recent examples. A work like
Prometheus
Unbound (1820), for example, seems to call out for a film
adaptation (although the first known staging, by the Rude Mechanicals
theatre company in Austin, Texas, in 1998 would challenge that statement. It
was excellent.) While film lacks the communality in liveness called for in
holy theatre, it can conjure the images and experience of transcendence that
were desired onstage. Students probably bring a curiosity about the
philosophical, scientific, and psychological matters explored in these
films, which may raise interest in seeing how Romantic drama attempts to
explore them, too, with the result that Romantic drama is seen as relevant,
even prescient, to our artistic concerns, and as a fertile ground for
theatrical experimentation.