The Nature of Drama

The Nature of Drama

In his Poetics (Aristotle, 1965), Aristotle describes the ritualistic beginnings of the dramatic arts:

โ€œBoth tragedy and comedy had their first beginnings in improvisation. The one originated with those who led the dithyramb, the other with the leaders of the phallic songs which still survive today as traditional institutions in many of our cities.โ€ (Aristotle, 1965:36)

โ€œAs Alan Little suggests in his book Myth, Society and Attic Drama (Little, 1942), this original aspect of Greek theatre, inevitably, entailed a merging of religious, social and psychosocial imperatives that can be seen as missing in the Christian paradigm (Little, 1942: 70). The theatreโ€™s place as a crucible of cathartic social importance can, in some senses, be seen to be abandoned with the onset of clearly defined delineations between the secular world of Art and the religious world of the Judeo-Christian Church.

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โ€œIn this essay, I would like to look at the works of a number of leading playwrights and dramatic theorists and examine the ways that they attempt to reassert the importance of myth and ritual in the theatre and the degree to which drama, itself, mirrors the functions and processes of mythology and religion.

โ€œAntonin Artaudโ€™s The Theatre and Its Double (Artaud, 1985) stands as one of the most revealing and intriguing texts on the nature of theatre written in the Twentieth Century (Knapp, 1980). As Derrida suggests in his essay The Theatre of Cruelty And the Closure of Representation (Derrida, 2004), at its heart, Artaudโ€™s work represents a deconstruction of the very relationship that exists between author, actor and audience:

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โ€ โ€œ(For Artaud) Western theatre has been separated from the force of its essence, removed from its affirmative essence, its vis affirmative. And this dispossession occurred from its origin on, is the very movement of origin, of birth as death.โ€ (Derrida, 2004: 293)

โ€œFor Derrida, as for Artuad, the real essence of theatre resides in the spectacle, not the speech. In his essay Mise En Scene and Metaphysics (Artaud, 1985), for instance, Artaud stresses the importance of production over text, eradicating the hierarchical dominance of author over actor. For Artaud and the theatre of cruelty, the true meaning of theatre was in the mise en scene, the spectacle that is, at once, violent and disturbing, as described in Theatre and the Plague (Artaud, 1985) or unrepeatable as in No More Masterpieces (Artaud, 1985):

โ€ โ€œI suggest we ought to return through theatre to the idea of a physical knowledge of images, a means of inducing trances, just as Chinese medicine knows the points of acupuncture over the whole extent of the human anatomy, down to our most sensitive functions.โ€ (Artaud, 1985: 61)

โ€œThe unrepeatable cathartic violence espoused here recalls Aristotleโ€™s assertions on the social function of tragedy. It is only through an embracing of myth and ritual, asserts Artaud, that the true artistic function of theatre can be realised and Artaudโ€™s plays and screenplays like the short but highly visually arresting The Spurt of Blood (Artaud, 1988), in which reality and nightmare merge into a play that is, in some senses, all mise en scene reflects this.

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โ€ โ€œOn their heads are tough masks made of alternating bands of silver wire and leather: their eyes are outlined by leather blinkers. The actorโ€™s own heads are seen beneath them: no attempt should be made to conceal them.โ€ (Shaffer, 1993: xxiii)

โ€œWe are reminded here not only of the Chorus in Attic theatre but also the Japanese Noh plays (Waley, 1988) and the costumes worn by the Balinese actors written about by Artaud (Artaud, 1985: 36-49). Shaffer, straightaway centres his play within a history of ritual rather than mimetic drama, the actors that play the horses in Equus mirror, not so many actual animals as their totem. The audience, in this sense, becomes not merely observers of a drama but participants in a shared artistic creation, much like those attending a rite or ceremony where the importance of the actions and images are based in myth and ritual rather than mimesis.

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โ€œOf course, the plot to Equus also reflects this sense. Dysart can be seen very much as a dramatic equal to Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun: the Western rational man, whose views and belief systems are questioned and, eventually, overthrown by the vital energy of paganism.

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