The Performing Arts and the Role of the Intermediary
I come from a culture in which the oral tradition has always maintained its strength. Improvisation is the mainstay of this tradition, and in traditional Thai folk theatre, for example, no “original” text really exists. Theatrical troupes take up familiar stories, tales, legends, even epics, agree internally on the story line and subsequently on the scenario. Once they are on stage, the actors start improvising (mainly in verse). Even when a fixed text does exist, such as the dance drama Inao, a composition by King Rama II which is regarded as the acme of Thai verse drama, a folk theatre troupe (which in the old days included actors who could not read or write) would do away with the written text and stage their performance based entirely on improvisation. The same could be said of Thai classical music, which originally knew no system of notation and has been passed on through memory. Musicians only adhere to the main melodic structure and are allowed sufficient freedom to improvise. Our actors and musicians, operating with no “Urtext”, cannot be regarded as “interpretative artists” in the Western sense, who have to refer to an authoritative literary text or musical score. Thai artists are authors and performers at the same time. They do not strictly belong to an intermediary category that interprets the works of other artists and communicates these to the public.
It is understandable that Western performing artists feel certain constraints in the tradition of reverential faithfulness to the original which they have to transmit to their contemporaries. Musicians particularly have to use their limited freedom with great acuity and subtlety. Interpretation is the fruit of this limitation, which has done much to lend spiritual strength to Western musical art. Transgression of this unwritten code of respect for the original may have arisen with the cult of stardom connected with commercialism and its concomitant advertising tricks. Advertising, of course, relies heavily on language. A small verbal shift can bring in millions — thus “Beethoven’s Fifth” becomes “Karajan’s Fifth”. Even as a foreigner (who loves classical music) I feel upset about this supremacy of the market force.
Western theatre has allowed itself greater freedom. The history of Shakespearean staging is replete with arbitrary textual tamperings. So you have a new version of King Lear with no tragic ending, with Cordelia marrying Edgar and living happily ever after. But such an alteration would today be regarded as naïve and unsophisticated, because it cannot justify itself in grandiose philosophical terms. Let us face it: the modern German “director’s theatre” (Regietheater) has come up with startling innovations (some would say aberrations) in the name of reconceptualization. I saw Hamlet at the Schaubühne in Berlin in October 2008. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, the production had been staged at two festivals, in Athens and Avignon. It was an anti-Gielgud and anti-Olivier production, deliberately trying to drain the almost “holy” text of its poetic quality, marked by vehement actions with the leading role shouting his way through the play, propped up, of course, by a new, unpoetic translation. Hamlet is usually regarded as the summit of verse drama, successfully rendered into poetic blank German verse since the 19th century. This new Hamlet, however, was meant to reflect our own unpoetic age, steeped in high-tech and coarseness of manners. Naturally, the famous monologue, “To be, or not to be…,” became a travesty of itself. I was reminded of the American literary scholar Gerald Graff’s Literature against Itself (1979), in which he deconstructed the emerging movement of Deconstruction. Likewise, Ostermeier and his team of dramaturges were attempting to stage a new play that could have been called Shakespeare against Himself!
But if what transpired on the stage was a deliberate linguistic impoverishment, the program booklet were not. This speaks to today’s trend: impoverish the primary discourse, then enrich its secondary counterpart. The director and his dramaturges dispensed with their own explication: that would have been too easy, too simplistic, unsophisticated. The booklet consisted of (sometimes lengthy) extracts from critical works on Shakespeare and Hamlet by famous thinkers and critics like Freud, Jaspers, and Eliot. You needed to be a Shakespeare scholar to glean from these various texts what the director was aiming at. The essay on Hamlet by T.S. Eliot betrayed it all. Most literary scholars know this critical text as an example of a lapse of genius: Eliot considered Hamlet a total failure because Shakespeare could not find an “objective correlative” that would correspond to what he wanted to express. By implication, was the director trying to prove to us that his was the best way to deal with a bad play?
Usually, one would go to the theatre, say, half an hour before the beginning of the performance in order to read the program notes. The Schaubühne, however, had set a far higher standard for its audience. Ideally, they should have arrived at the Schaubühne 2-3 hours before the performance and immerse themselves in these highly demanding secondary texts, so that they might grasp the profundity of this new “interpretation”. There was no need to take the authentic Shakespeare all too seriously, but one must pay heed to his critics and, implicitly, his Berlin interpreters. The death of the author makes way for the birth of the critics. We are witnessing the defeat of the primary and the triumph of the secondary.