I’ve been thinking a lot about theatre lately.
The Stage reckons theatres won’t be back in business until 2021.
That sucks when one of the reasons you’ve chosen to live in London is to increase your patronage of the theatre in hopes of learning the craft.
But in this challenge lies opportunity.
Reading Peter Brook’s marvellous The Empty Space, you get an overwhelming drive to refresh, reenergise, and pioneer anew in the theatre.
We are not sculpting our performances to the times, and it’s been that way for a while.
Theatre has grown stale.
We need a new expression of the theatrical.
Drive-in opera with performers spaced two meters apart is an interesting start. But I don’t believe that will actually refresh the form or delivery (though I’m open to being pleasantly surprised).
Perhaps what we need is the canon of modern-day playwrights returning to the closet dramas of the Romantic era. A kind of hibernation. A literary reset. Buried in a tomb, ready to rise again from the dead.
But what’s a closet drama?
Most people don’t know about closet dramas, so let me tell you a little bit about them, then you tell me what you think.
In the early nineteenth-century, the tail-end of the Romantic era in literature, some of the finest poets in the English language turned their hands to writing plays.
But not normal plays.
These plays weren’t written with a view to be performed on the stage. They were written to remain on the page, performed only in the reader’s mind. Therefore the term ‘closet drama’.
If you want to read some of these closet plays – and you should – check out some of these seminal representations of the form:
- Byron’s Manfred (1817)
- Byron’s Cain (1821)
- Shelley’s The Cenci (1819)
- Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820)
Brander Matthews in the essay ‘The Legitimacy of the Closet-Drama’ defines it perfectly. A closet drama is:
a poem in dialogue, – a piece of literature, pure and simple, not contaminated by any subservience to the playhouse, the players or the playgoers. It is wrought solely for the reader in the library, without any regard for the demands of possible spectators in the auditorium. Its essence is to be sought in the obvious fact that the poet who essays it is firm in the conviction that ‘the playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form.
I used to hold the firm conviction that plays needed to be experienced in the theatre. In the same way that poetry should be read aloud, I believed that reading a play manuscript would deliver not even half the power of witnessing a performance. It’s only recently, having read and relished the work of Mortimer Adler and Peter Brook that I started to alter how I approached plays.
As I’ve been putting together my lecture series on Shakespeare, rather than rely on watching performances of the plays (of which I’ve seen a great deal of masterful ones), I’ve attempted to stage the play myself and put on a performance in my mind.
I dress the actors, choose the cast, construct the lighting, and provide the soundtrack.
And it’s quite the experience.
This is the nature of closet drama – plays which contend that their subject matter and delivery is so awe-inspiring that they become unperformable.
I don’t believe the closet dramas of Byron or Shelley are unperformable, but it’s certainly interesting to approach plays that were specifically designed not to be performed. It’s gets you thinking about the nature of drama, theatre, and performance.
In the preface to his closet drama The Cenci, Shelley writes that:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable.
Shelley clarifies that if it were to be performed the horror of the events would have to be diminished and the poetic ideal would have to be increased as the pain of the events can be mitigated by the pleasure of the poetry.
Here is a paradox of Romantic closet-drama: in one instance Shelley states that his play cannot be performed and in the next he states that it could be performed.
It is often the case with the production of dramas that they are adapted by different companies to suit the audience or in striving for an aesthetic experience that bears the director’s mark (one director’s Julius Caesar is very different from another’s), therefore it is a fairly intuitive point that the drama could be performed if presented in the right way.
The problem, however, is that the contemporary dramatic scene did not yet possess the techniques and insights that would best benefit a production of the closet-dramas.
The theatre has come a long way since the Romantic era.
We’ve seen the rise of Stanislavki’s method, Brecht’s epic theatre, and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, to name just three incredibly divergent yet perfectly suitable theatrical styles.
Perhaps the theatre of 2020 needs to enter a period of hibernation just like the theatre in 1820.
From an economic, job-loss, and art-loss perspective, the theatres closing down is tragic and against the will of all involved. But maybe it’s just what it needs.
Shelley’s preface also generates a question: why is a ‘dry exhibition’ of The Cenci ‘insupportable’? At least, why was it insupportable at the time?
Answer that and we may discover a clue to how we can play with new theatre productions during this forced sabbatical.
Shelley deems his drama unperformable because of its awful themes of tyranny, violence, and incest. But surely this is nothing audiences hadn’t watched before?
To name just two examples that came before The Cenci, and each enjoying a long performance life and considered great, are Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608) and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), which collectively explore the same themes.
The main difference between Shakespeare’s and Ford’s dramas and The Cenci is that Shakespeare and Ford write didactically in order to support their explorations of adverse themes. The story of King Lear is very much one of how not to rule a kingdom and works on a level of praising James I for his kingship, whilst guiding him in how to rule through the words of the Fool. The Cenci does not have this didactic aspect and Shelley states that it must not be attempted to make the ‘exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose’.
Although it is clear that the play does not have a ‘moral purpose’, as it is a progression of negative events that the audience do not explicitly need to be told are wrong, there are instances throughout the play that could represent the moral response of the audience. Camillo’s response to the Cenci’s atrocious utterances exemplify the rejection, disgust, and disbelief that the audience would feel towards the Cenci:
Hell’s most abandoned fiend | Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt, Speak to his heart as you now speak to me. | I thank my God that I believe you not (I. 117-20).
Compounding the play’s lack of clear moral purpose is a lack of the classical idea of anagnorisis (the part of the play in which the protagonist makes a critical discovery). The Cenci does not have a revelation like Lear when he derobes on the heath. There’s also no sense of catharsis (the feeling of released negative emotions, a cleansing, by what takes place on the stage). When Beatrice exacts revenge on her incestuous father she is not rewarded, but instead punished by death. The audience do not feel fulfilled at this.
Despite the play’s lack of classical conventions to moderate the tragedy, it does not mean that the play should not be performed. The play adheres strongly to Edmund Burke’s idea of tragedy and is a powerful demonstration of the sublime and arousal of awe and terror:
The nearer it approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power.
By not constructing the play with traditional theatrical conventions such as didacticism and anagnorisis, Shelley more closely approaches reality and evokes a greater, more affecting, response.
Shelley is not beyond all restraint, however, and the instances that are the most horrible, such as the Cenci’s rape of his daughter, are only suggested (Beatrice avoids denotational language and suggests the atrocity by saying such things as ‘I have endured a wrong’, III. 213). These atrocities do not happen on the stage.
There is a sense that without these classical conventions a new approach to the theatre was being approximated. Anne Barton, in the essay “A Light to Lesser Ages’: Byron’s Political Plays’, sees Byron as a forerunner to Brechtian theatre, which may have been seen in light of Artaud’s staging of Shelley’s The Cenci given the similar level of reform both writers influenced on the dramatic scene, and sees Byron as needing Brechtian techniques of performance to stage his plays.
Byron had been ‘castigated for not achieving emotional effects which, like Brecht after him, he had specifically tried to avoid’. Barton also writes that there
are almost too many reasons for the gradual cheapening and decline of the English stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: sentimentalism and prudery, the siphoning off of creative energy into the novel, the changing composition of the audience, the establishment of tyrannical stage conventions which debased drama and, above all, the sense that a great tradition had exhausted itself without appointing an heir.
Perhaps the term ‘closet-drama’ became so prevalent because of a sense of the inadequacy of the contemporary theatre to stage the plays Byron and Shelley were writing. David Erdman reinforces this idea in the essay ‘Byron’s Stage Fright: The History of his Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage’, specifically in the case of Byron, by suggesting that Byron did not consider his plays to be unactable but ‘only feared they might be’ and so opposed to his works being performed out of a fear of failure. An investigation of Manfred or Cain reveals two predominant reasons why Byron’s fear of failure was a valid one.
Firstly, similar to the potential inability of The Cenci to be performed, it is Cain’s subject matter which poses a problem. Contemporary society misconstrued Cain as blasphemous. Like Shelley, Byron dispensed with conventions such as didacticism and, to use Leonard Michaels’ statement in ‘Byron’s Cain’, converted ‘myth to the personal psychology of the hero’. Rather than presenting the myth in a didactic way, as the morality plays of the medieval era did, Byron explores the reactions and drives behind the figure of Cain. For example, in the first act Cain implores, out of a feeling of injustice that is understandable,
wherefore should I toil? – because | My father could not keep his place in Eden. | What had I done in this? – I was unborn, | I sought not to be born; nor love the state | To which that birth has brought me. (I. I. 64-8)
Further to the blasphemy that could be inferred from this, Byron appears to glamorise Lucifer’s words and present him as the moral centre of the play. Lucifer makes remarks that resonate and reflect certain ambivalences towards God, arguing that ‘Goodness would not make | Evil’ (I. 146-7), to which Cain replies that Lucifer ‘speak’st to me of things which long have swum | In visions through my thought’ (167-8).
Although perhaps Byron dispensed with didacticism only true to a certain extent. Byron portrays Lucifer as a teacher rather than the archetypal depiction in morality plays as demon and erects a tone of socratic dialogue between Cain and Lucifer, with Cain asking questions such as ‘What is death?’ (284) and Lucifer providing an answer. Even with these examples, however, the play is not truly blasphemous. Byron, like Shelley, is simply not providing an overt moral purpose to the play. He does not change the end of the myth and so the audience are expected to infer any moral purpose for themselves.
We’ve seen a similar distancing of sympathetic protagonists in postmodern TV dramas such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad with the rise of the anti-hero. That leaves a few questions. What’s next? Where do we go from here? What would be considered blasphemous, and therefore unperformable, in this day and age? Answer those questions and you have the beginning of a sorely needed theatrical revolution in your hands.
The second way in which Cain could be deemed unperformable is one which Manfred and Prometheus Unbound also share. The abstract ideas of the ‘immortal, the unbounded, the omnipotent’ (III. 178) in Cain, as well as the abstract scenes in which the dialogues take place, seem appropriate reasons to attract the classification of closet-drama.
Descriptions abound (‘huge brilliant luminous orbs’, II. 3, for example) but because of the profundity and profusion it would be incredibly difficult, unless undertaken in, say, a Brechtian approach, to perform the play with accompanying visuals. Although metaphysical with ‘symbolic externalizations of mental acts and powers ’, the plays explore ideas in a way that approaches music. This can be seen in the choruses and voices in Manfred and repetitions that evoke the technique of musical motif, such as ‘Alas! Pain, pain ever, forever!’ in Prometheus Unbound.
A solution to make a closet-drama performable, in this sense as it presents itself as more poetic than dramatic, is to embrace its musical qualities, such as in the case of Schumann’s operatic adaptation of Manfred.
I close this article with a thought, perhaps a challenge for those of you working in theatre today.
How can you make your next play unperformable?
Through blasphemy, abstraction, horror? Or perhaps we’re already too well-acquainted and prepared to deal with these issues. Perhaps that’s the problem. We need something new to solve.
Now’s the time to revolutionise the theatre. What looks like fallow land, theatres closing down in the wake of social distancing, is actually rich and fertile soil.
