Nationalism is not
overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated
thereby into a system.
Martin Heiddegger
For the past several
years I have been teaching a course on theatre criticism and reviewing to
undergraduate students. The following comments are largely the result of that
experience and, of course, they are not intended as a system of criticizing
that will replace other approaches, but a a kind of tool that could illuminate
some of the darker matters in the field at a time when habits of thought,
feelings, expectations, aesthetics, levels of tolerance and ideologies have
dramatically changed to a point beyond recognition
Writing and the
terror of ghosts
I would like to start
this paper by quoting Thomas Docherty’s opening lines in his interesting
book Alterities. Modern criticism, Docherty notes, is an act of
writing “conditioned by terror. It begins from an anxiety about its object (be
that a text or any other artefact whose source is independent of—other than--
the critic); and its response to such a fear of Otherness, of the
object-as-such, is the production of a subject of consciousness characterized
firstly by a presumed understanding and consequent appropriation of objects, and
subsequently by mastery over or control of its ostensibly recalcitrant Others”
(1996: 1). Whatever the critic’s approach is (be it formalist, Marxist,
psychoanalytic, feminist etc), it is but an instance of his/her sometimes
desperate tactics deployed to validate the subject of his discourse, very often
at the cost of the radical otherness (alterity) of the object (Docherty
1996: 1). To put the case in more theatrical terms: criticism, in the form of
reviewing, is the chasing of Hamlet’s ghost, a kind of search doomed to ask the
same questions over and over again: What is there? Who is out there? Why is
there? The reviewer hardly has time to realise what is going on, and another
ghost appears, and then another and another, casting their shadow upon his/her,
our lives. No matter what we do, Horatio’s question --“What, has this thing
appeared again tonight?”-- will keep coming back, spilling the target upon the
ground. Seeming, seeming, seeming, Blau says. A real Catch 22 situation, no
doubt; for if the ghost doesn’t appear, the play is obviously in trouble. And
if it does, can we really believe it? The only certainty is that if we ask too
many questions the subject of our observation is likely to disappear,” in
order to reappear again later for more questioning (Blau 2004: 255). Niall Lucy
very eloquently makes the point: the Hamletic ghost of the stage will always
remain “someone as someone other”; his very
presence “will always vex the metaphysics of presence, will always put into
question any grounds for deciding definitively between the actual and its
outsides” (Lucy 1997: 145).
Who is there? The terror
of the gaze
Having said this, let me
turn to another ghost that “haunts” the theatre house and affects the job of
the reviewer: the onlookers. What theatre is, and what one feels and thinks it
is, depends on who does the looking. This means that the job of the reviewer or
critic[1] is
to look at a production from the point of view of a hypothetical audience.
Within, say, 600 or 700 words, we are expected to capture the fleeting
otherness of our object of observation, the temporal “is-ness” of the event of
our criticism, claim its ownership, and convincingly articulate reasons for our
specific evaluation of the performance. Which means that we do not write in a
vacuum. Whether we like it or not, a reviewer has to operate as a
consumer-guide (not reader’s aid),[2] and
at the same time document an already exhausted artistic event, judge
the degree of its success by discussing aspects of the production (script,
acting, lighting etc), provide background information and commentary, offer
suggestions for possible changes in the production, instruct potential
theatregoers and invite, if necessary, greater support for theatre (Palmer
1988: 143). Depending on the medium that hosts the review and οn the
conditions of the performance, the nature of each function may change. One does
not write the same way for the Wall Street Journal and Daily
Mirror, for television or the radio, for a sophisticated journal or a
regional newspaper, for a commercial show or a community happening or a low
budget college production with a short run, for a newspaper with limited tirage
and a newspaper with a large one, for a newspaper that carries a regular
theatre column and a well-respected culture section and a newspaper with
irregular culture and theatre commentary, for a newspaper that monopolizes
theatre activities in a city and a newspaper that has to compete against dozens
of others to have a share of the market. [3]
The daemons of the
market and the ghost of unemployment
One of the problems with
reviewing today is that urban newspapers are mostly run by business people or
trusts with no or little respect for deontology (professional ethics). What
counts most is power and profit. Their ultimate goal is to sell and they expect
their reviewers/critics to be able to sell their “piece” too with pass-to-read
journalistic jargon. Like advertising: “You must see this”, “do not miss that”,
“stay away from that”. Fast food. Fast forward. SMS style. A kind of writing
that cultivates a particular ideology of reading that reduces people to mere
consumers. With the exception of large newspapers which hire experienced
theatre specialists just to write reviews, most other newspapers either turn to
unemployed or inexperienced young critics whom they usually do not pay (on the
grounds that they give them a legitimate forum to make their presence felt) or
turn to their own permanent staff to do the job. The latter are asked to write,
besides reviews, many other things including stories on upcoming productions,
interviews, background features on specific stars. What transpires from their
reports is their fondness for theatre, at best supplemented by a lot of
on-the-job training and improvisation (Palmer 1988: 2).
Yet, this is not the
whole story. In such an environment, there is so much pressure, insecurity and
antagonism, leaving little room for deviance. Everybody feels vulnerable and
expendable, especially, younger critics, who look readier to execute
assignments that they are given instead of pausing to test one course and its
outlook against another. They seem (or have) to downplay the importance of
comparison, of analysis and evaluation, the importance of criticism as a
counterforce, a form of intellectual resistance and cultural change. As Merod
observes, in his study on the political responsibility of the critic, “to write
criticism today, much as always, is to follow fairly worn paths of critical
respectability […] no real thought about the place of scholarship and criticism
in capitalist culture”. This kind of attitude comes to endorse the paradoxical
idea that says, criticism is necessary (as a “civilizing inlfluence”) but
useless (as a practical tool) (1987: 5), a total reversal of what I thought
when I first entered this line of work.
The ghost of
disillusionment
Like most newcomers to
the scene, with a dim sense of the ways of the world, “of the historical,
political and cultural complications that surround and in fact situate [plays
and] texts in a world of people and institutions” (Merod 1987: 10), I felt that
theatre criticism still had some impact, some power. And probably it did. The
fact that there was an identifiable audience out there willing to listen, an
audience that belonged to a national group that carried attributes, symbols,
aspirations, passions and values that described the defining content of group
identity made the task of writing somewhat easier, in the sense of being more
focused and, in a way, more influential (Kruger 1992). Now, some 25 years
later, many things have changed beyond recognition. Critics not only wonder who
is on stage (Hamlet’s ghost) but also who is out there. Who is the potential
reader of their review and what does s/he expect to read? Identities are
different. The very ontology of the genre is different. Taste is different. And
so are expectations and ideologies. The nomadic subjects of our times, no
longer able to find long-term abodes in social or institutional settings, join
virtual communities on line. They increasingly identify with abstract or
distant symbols of “conviviality” offered by electronic culture. Social
practices shift further and further from public to privatized, home-centered
activities. People spend more time in front of a computer screen and less in
face-to-face contact with other human beings or in attending theatre (see also
Klaic 2008: 226-27).
My main concern, in
other words, has nothing to do with the variety and confusion of interpretive
positions so much as with the fact that theatre reviewing, local or global, no
longer seems to have the primacy and the weight it once did. It is outweighted
by the new business ethos that dominates the Press industry --gossip columns,
free press lifestyle jargon, general culture commentary; it is superseded by
weblogs and other technology inspired interventions.[4] In
most newspapers, paid ads, interviews and profiles of stars do the job of
reviewing. The culture industry responds to the individuals’ search for new
objects of identification by offering a plethora of new sites of consumption,
information, interaction and entertainment to the point of drastically
disempowering the impact of traditional reviewing (see also Klaic 2008:
226-27). [5] Even
professional artists seem to be less and less eager to find out what serious
critics have to say. They have more than enough from easy-to-read free press
reports, public relations and other sources to promote their work.[6]
Triple task
In the midst of a
rapidly developing multicultural and electronic era, I feel that we are in
need of a critical discourse to enable us a) to confront and explain a
racially, religiously and culturally more fragmented and hard to define
reality, that has fervently embraced the prefix “re” to mark its desire to
“reconfigure, reinscribe, resignify the law (cultural, social, linguistic,
dramatic)” (Diamond 2000: 31) and b) to also confront and survive a free-market
capitalism that has brought a radical cultural shift that inevitably has had
its knock-on effect on theatre in general and theatre criticism in particular
and, finally, c) to attract the attention of a postmodern viewer who
can very easily get all the information s/he needs via an electronic
route rather through a traditional review. This constitutes a triple task that
requires a clear vision of the critic’s relationship to and responsibilities
within the corporate structures of national and international life as well as
an adequate tool to de-construct both the dramatic re-creations of the world
and the endlessly re-created world itself, in other words, the politics
and poetics of representation.
Playing with fragments
Earlier theories of
theatre and characterization were all dependent upon the paradigmatic dichotomy
of appearance and reality and their narratives were always apocalyptic, in the
sense that “they moved from mystification to enlightenment and revelation” (Docherty
1996: 63). In the last three or four decades, the changes that have occurred
have widened the field inviting the critic to also widen his or her
understanding by reshuffling all his past knowledge of drama and the world. He
is asked to see that there is “nothing transparent” out there that can be taken
for granted (de Man 1986: 15). Most works offer fragments of character and plot
instead of fully coherent constructions of an identifiable and apocalyptic
whole. In their own way, they reverse all prior trajectories of meaning, order
and characterization. From an assumed homogeneity of identity and praxis they
have moved towards an endlessly proliferating heterogeneity, whereby stable
signs are endlessly deferred. No dramatic (or literary) text can be exhausted
by any act of reading or reviewing, simply because there is no end to the
contexts in which critical relations can occur. Some readings/reviews may look
more convincing than others, but never so convincing that nothing remains to be
said (Lucy 1997: 110).
By this I do not mean
that there is some peculiar quality or essence that belongs to theatre, which
denies the possibility of the “last word” on its value. What I mean is that
every word and every body must have a context. And the performance must be
viewed in context. There is no outside-context. And a reviewer must think of
theatre in its totality and not reduced to pure essences (linguistic, stylistic
etc). He must think of the possibility of constant resignification, the same
way that he must think of his position in the world.
The critic, the self and
the world
In this ghost-ridden
world of temporalities and shifting identities, we, as critics, should not feel
either “alien”, as Matthew Arnold argues or “exiled”, according to Edward Said.
Dazzled, yes, but not homeless; let alone, useless. Such homelessness and uselessness
do not become the reviewer. We are of this mazed and amazing world and our
major challenge is to give back to our profession at least part of its lost
social significance and status. And one of the ways to achieve that, Merod
suggests, is by showing that criticism “is about questioning, the risks of
daring to question and the responsibilities of those who question” (1987: xi,
188). But before we judge others we first question ourselves, for we are also
part of society’s economic logic. We have to ask how we are positioned within
this global culture and how we are used, how our work is used and how we lend
ourselves to those uses. That is, we have to address our own participation in
culture and its commoditization (1987: 19). Most of us (critics/reviewers) are
after a stable career and good working conditions. Once given legitimacy in
institutions, Merod argues, many of us find motivation to cross-examine our own
authority either absent or faltering. Not much to be done or look ahead
to. It is as if we are embarrassed to acknowledge our allegiance to the
system of power. Yet these questions persist, Merod notes. They have a
force that cannot be ignored, especially by a reviewer who is also a teacher
helping students to map a critical approach of their own, to explore
institutional conditions, not merely to decode or deconstruct them (1987:
10-15, 19). Students-would-be-critics must be aware of the social world in
which dramas are written and shows produced. They must think that
literature is not something distinct from the world, and that criticism is
unavoidably interrelated with social and political context, that critical
activity, whether it takes the form of a play review, a book review or a longer
article, is “the one human force most committed to clarifying the world’s
structure in order to change it” (1987: 1). And since reviewing involves
individuals in the process of making decisions and of studying how these
decisions affect the lives of artists, students, people who pay to see a show,
and their way of defining dramatic literature and human nature, it is also, and
inevitably so, about ethics, about our choices and the nature of our
choices. Which means that it can very easily turn out to be an act of violence
if not handled properly (Siebers 1988).
Educating the viewer
Let us not forget that
nothing about drama is hardwired into our nervous system; and contemporary
audiences may be more cosmopolitan but theatrewise they still need tutoring.
And one of our tasks as critics, especially traveling critics, is to help
re-educate the new audiences, enrich their horizon of expectations, teach them
how to appreciate world theatre and through theatre appreciate not only
cultural difference but also communality. We have to develop a more
nomadic and appealing critical discourse in order to show them that good
theatre is still a place for the unexpected, a place where miracles can happen;
that good theatre, no matter where it comes from, can help us make better sense
of our lives. Yet to reach those people, our own people and the “other”, we
have to share a language with them, which means participating in a complex set
of mutual expectations and understandings and at the same time being a step
ahead, being in a position to raise more questions, provide more
information, links and insights that no other available source at the moment
can do.
Through our critical
writings we can help promote the idea of a more tolerant international
community, which means that we can transfer the feelings of loyalty to communities
to broader groups as a way to reduce conflict among groups and as a way to
expand the sense of obligation to help compatriots. Crossing borders of any
kind should by no means mean erasing difference. The absence of nationalist
impulses may reinforce objective criticism, but the absence of the local
definitely weakens discourse. I do not believe in disembodied criticism just as
I do not believe in normalizing universality. To be useful at all, we, as
critics, must help fight provincialism (of all sorts) by fostering a healthier
communication and a more honest dialogue among different people. And this
dialogue requires deep understanding of the contexts of construction but also
reflection on how playwrights, artists and the productions we watch around the
world seek to negotiate these contexts. I certainly do not imply here
that we can change the world or overcome the commercialization of culture, but
at least we can help expand the aesthetic and intellectual boundaries of people
a little; we can show them that we are connected to the earth as well and not
to “a” place on it. That we are connected to all sorts of places and their
theatres. Even if we do not want to accept the old cosmopolitan ideal of
transcending the distinction between strangers and friends, we all still depend
on what Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois calls in the Streetcar Named
Desire, the “kindness of strangers” as much as we depend on the
kindness of our own (Robbins 1998: 3).
A conclusion against
macdonaldization
I am not in favour of
criticism (local or international) that argues in black and white. Nor am I in
favour of any debate that converts even the minimal difference into an
antithesis. We cannot be at odds with everything. Nor can we denationalize
everything in the name of a global and still very hazy supra democracy. To have
a good international democracy requires a solid and healthy local democracy. In
the same sense, to have a good global theater one needs the local to provide
the foundations and make the difference. Theatre should not operate like a
multinational corporation that disperses more or less identical goods to every
corner of the globe where they can be sold in virtually identical theatre
(shopping) malls and department stores. Theatre is not MacDonald’s or a credit
card that participates in the same revelry of consumption following identical
trends and fashions. Of course we expect theatre, whether in writing, theory or
practice, to help towards the direction of a better understanding of people,
but definitely not towards a homogenized global consumer society that shapes
the intercultural tastes of citizens around the world and contributes to the
disintegration of local culture. Being embedded as it is, in processes, in
institutions, in structures and in markets located within national sovereign
territories, theatre (criticism) can negotiate its skills and insights in the
international market, but not at the expense of its distinct features of
origin. Which means that it can be partly unhomellike but definitely not
homeless.
To conclude: our job as
reviewers chasing Hamlet’s ghost, is to balance between particularities of
places, characters, faces, aesthetics, presences and ideologies and
macro-interdependencies. It is our responsibility to transfer in a constructive
way the otherness of the international collective to the national collective
(and vice versa) without sacrificing the one for the sake of the other (Ree
1998: 77-90, Rorty 1998: 1-19).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blau, Herbert. The
Audience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
Diamond, Elin. “Blau,
Butler, Beckett, and the Politics of Seeming.” The Drama Review 44.
4 (2000): 31-43.
De Man, Paul. The
Resistance to Theory: Theory and History of Literature, 33.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986
Docherty, Thomas. Alterities:
Criticism, History, Representation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Klaic, Dragan. National
Theatres Undermined the Withering of the Nation-State. National Theatres in a
Changing Europe. Ed. S. E.Wilmer. London, Palgrave, 2008. 217-27.
Kruger, Loren. The
National Stage:Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and
America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Lucy, Niall. Postmodern
Literary Theory: an Introduction. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
Merod, Jim. The
Political Responsibility of the Critic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Palmer, Richard H. The
Critics’ Canon: Standards of Theatrical Reviewing in America. New York:
Greenwood P, 1988.
Ree, Jonathan.
“Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationalism.” In: Cosmopolitics:
Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Chean & Bruce
Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnessota P, 1998. 77-90.
Robbins, Bruce.
“Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In: Cosmopolitics: Thinking and
Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Chean & Bruce Robbins.
Minneapolis: U of Minnessota P, 1998. 1-19.
Rorty, Richard. “Justice
as a Larger Loyalty.” Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed.
Pheng Chean & Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnessota P, 1998.
45-58.
Siebers, Tobin. The
Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell, UP, 1988.
[1] Although the terms “reviewer” and “critic” are used
interchangeably here, there are important differences that separate them.
As Palmer well notes in his book on American criticism, the difference between
review and criticism “parallels the contrast between a news and a feature
story, the first is controlled more by considerations of reportage, the second
more by the need for indepth coverage” (1988: 1).
[2] By relating theatre-going to other forms of “shopping” I do
not mean to be insulting, of course. Attending theatre is an expensive form of
entertainment. Which means that people, before they “buy a show” consult other
people (or sources) to ensure that the product merits the costs. And the
reviewer is one (and for sure not the first) of their possible consumer guides.
[3] It goes without saying that wherever there is a big number
of newspapers to cover a production, the impact of each review is much less.
For example, in Athens, Greece, a city of close to four million people, there
are at this moment well over thirty daily and weekly publications that cover
theatre productions, yet with the exception of only one, none of them has any
real impact on the box office. In New York, on the other hand,
things are very different. After the 1960s many newspapers folded and the city
was left with only a few; as a result, Palmer notes (1988), the remaining
theatre critics/reviewers carried much more weight and power than before, to
the point of closing down productions they did not like. Their word outranked
that of any playwright, producer or star. Today success on Broadway still
depends on pleasing one individual, the critic of New York Times,
producer Thelma Holt admits; “it is only the NYT that has any influence”(http://entertainment.timsoonline.co.uk).
[4] A recent gallop published in a Greek newspaper (Eleftherotypia 3/5/2009)
has shown that 64.3% of those who plan their evening entertainment (which
includes theatre as well) first consult friends and relatives. A second source
of information is the commercials on television or the posters on the streets.
In third place one finds newspapers, journals and the internet.
[5] Twenty five years ago, I would never have guessed that
theatre would be assessed by visual symbols or ratings. Today it is common
practice. The most influential publication in Greece now is an Athenian weekly
magazine called Athenorama that provides a panoramic view of
what is going on among the city’s approximately 500 annual productions, and
ranks performances from 0 to 5 (like evaluating hotel facilities). At the end
of each season, readers can vote (with coupons offered by the magazine) on the
best performance of the season, the best leading male or female actress etc. It
suffices to say that the prizes offered by the particular magazine have by far
surpassed in terms of popularity the prizes offered by the Association of Greek
Theatre Critics.
[6] As a member on the Board of Greece’s State-funding committee
I see that every year we find in the application files submitted for evaluation
more reviews from bloggers and personal websites than from traditional sites,
like a serious newspaper.
