Oi! 20th Century Theatre, who’s your daddy?

Clearly it would be a valid thesis to suggest that those theorists and practitioners of antiquity who’s works have be interpreted and re-interpreted with so much Sisyphus-like determination; who’s works are repeatedly drawn upon in the, (apparently) ever increasingly futile, search for the inherent truth in Art, have had the most influence on 20th century theatre. They have simply had more time to push the rock of 20th century theatre practice up the hill of its own legacy. The influence of the philosophic commentaries of Plato and Aristotle, for example, can not be denied and, in the self referential modality of artistic philosophical thought, we see these antiquarian theorists absorbed anew with every passing phase of human artistic development. It is not by coincidence then that we perceive Plato’s, now dystopic, Republic in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 nor that we rejoice in our postmodern reading of Plato’s theory of Form’s, (that the material world is but a shadow of the Real) so theatrically presented in his Cave analogy, in Texts such as The Matrix (1999) and Total Recall (1990).

Aristotle’s Poetics is similarly subject to a litany of reinterpretations both philosophical and artistic. Dr. Wong Kui of the University of Hong Kong provides a rational explanation for Nietzsche’s disparity of Aristotle’s suggestion that the mimetic is the underlying justification for the act of performance. Nietzsche, suggests Kui, is in favor of a less “real,” a less purposeful, basis for artistic representation. More recently, the contemporary semiotician Umberto Eco made great aesthetic use of Aristotle’s Poetics in the novel and film The Name of the Rose (1980 and 1986 respectively).

If, however, “importance,” and by inference “influence,” can be measured by longevity then clearly the more dead one is the more opportunity one has had to be influential. It is for this reason that I believe, if one single theorist must be chosen (perhaps an irrational tenet in itself), Freud has been the most important theorist in relation to the development and practice of 20th century theatre. Since the publication of Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have had an abundant influence on the art and culture of the 20th century. His legacy can be seen in such a multitude of facets of contemporary performance that we may wonder why such thinking took so long to come to fruition. It is important to remember that Freud is writing as a psychologist and empiricist. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche considers the theatrical structures of Ancient Greece through the lens of philosophical analysis, but Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex is not meant as an evaluation on Sophocles’ text but a metaphor for the development of the infant’s conscious self. The practicalities of Freud’s psychoanalytic techniques have fallen out of favor with modern therapeutic notions but his theories still abound in the field of literary criticism, Freud himself started this tradition in his analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, delivered in his essay entitled The Uncanny.

It is no intellectual stretch to associate Freud’s theories into everyday life. Advertisements appeal to our (ever increasingly conscious) subconscious desires. Food has replaces the cigarette as the objectification of oral fixation. “Repression” and “displacement” have become cliched buzz words of pop culture psycho-babble in everything from Law and Order to Oprah and we are ever ready to believe what any self-titled “authority” may tell us about the meaning of our dreams. The contribution that Freud’s investigations have made to artistic aesthetic understanding far out way any of the other major thinkers since the dawn of Western thought, except arguably Marx. I pointed out earlier that antiquarian theories have had more opportunity to be influential on the grounds of their longevity, it is Freud however who provides us with the most complete tools with which to re-consider the genealogy of theory that has led us an understanding of 20th century theatre. Freud allows us to consider both the presented work on stage (workshop floor, dance studio, empty warehouse, back of a U-haul - delete as applicable) and our understanding of what we, as self-conscious artists, are.

There is, of course, a danger to embracing Freud as the Über-influence on 20th Century theatre, primarily because the Marie-Clair and TV-Weekly-Advice-Page understanding of the subconscious and the pleasure seeking principal has not necessarily helped to produce better art. The rise of pop-psychology has merely assisted in the practical production of the Postmodern condition, by which I mean, the sociological and artistic position that we find ourselves in at the end of the Postmodern era. I propose that this is due to the rational that; if we are conscious of our own sub-conscious, if we are constantly questioning our own motivations our own desires, if we repeatedly (and with malicious forethought) sensor our own pleasure seeking which manifests itself as the creative impulses fundamental to art, if we become conscious of the subconscious and adhere to the limitations that this must surely cause then we may as well put away the masks, roll up the Marley, take down the backdrop and go home to watch the Christian Channel on Cable. If we think we know what we think we know then Dr. Timothy Leary got it right 50 years ago and we may as well “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

In conclusion I should like to address my own sub-heading “20th century theatre, who’s your daddy?” Freud does not get to claim this accolade because, as Freud has so consistently pointed out, we long to dispose of the father figure, to remove him from that position of authority which prohibits us from obtaining our desires. This accolade then must belong to Stanislavski - the face of Naturalism which late 20th century theatre has shunned with such ferocity. Freud then is the mother figure, the embodiment of the Ego Ideal in the infant that is 20th century theatre. In Freud we see an understanding of everything that 20th century theatre longs to be. Like Freud’s dream works we recognize now both a latent and a manifest content in all performance works (and in all Texts), repression of the predisposition representation and the fetishistic longing for the “new” are readily explained as theatre’s neurotic symptoms created by the formation of its own identity. Freud is, like the infant’s mother, both the instigator of theatre’s personality disorder and the means by which we can understand it.

Bibliography and works cited
Dr. Wong Kwok Kui    Nietzsche, Plato and Aristotle on Mimesis
Lingnan University of Hong Kong
http://dogma.free.fr/txt/KwokKuiNietzschePlatoAristotle.htm#fn2

Rivkin J. &Ryan M.,    Modern Literary Theory: An Introduction 2nd Edition Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2004.

Plato    The Republic

Corbet, Edward P.J.    “Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student” Modern Literary Theory: An Introduction 2nd Edition. Ed. Rivkin J. and Ryan M., Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2004. (p.142-161)

Plato     Trans. Lee Desmond Plato: The Republic
            Middlesex, England, Penguin, 1983

Plato     Trans. Robin Waterfield The Norton Anthology of heory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Aristotle    Trans. J.L. Creed and A.E. Wardman The Philosophy of Aristotle. Ed. Renford Bambrough, N.Y., New American Library: A Mentor Book. 1963

Hoffmann, E.T.A. Trans. J.T. Bealby.. “The Sandman.” Weird Tales. Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

Freud, Sigmund. Trans. Alix Strachey.“The ‘Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Also cited in: <http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/uncan.htm>

David J Glover

Oi! 20th Century Theatre, who’s your daddy?

Writing About Theatre