The Deadly Theater

The theatre has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true in another sense—whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure. -Peter Brook

I recently reread part of Peter Brook’s theatrical didactic The Empty Space, a set of lectures on the performing arts first published in 1968. My worn copy, lifted from the venerable shelves of Magers & Quinn and pre-loved by someone named “J. Kornutsky.” The book divides theater into a neat four-part taxonomy. Theater can be deadly, holy, rough, or immediate. It could even contain all four in one show. I confess I’ve never made it past his lecture on the holy theater, or as he more helpfully labels it, the theater of the invisible-made-visible. Instead, I mostly reread his discussion of the deadly theater. His largest, most labored, and first lecture on the performing arts uses all 41 of its pages to punctiliously elaborate all the ways that theater fails.

No form escapes Brooks’ volcanic analysis. His critique shows no partiality, spares no dilettante’s favored charm. He roughs up musicals, operas, modernist theater, and of course, classical theater (by which he means Shakespeare). In fact, he has a special castigation for Shakespeare.

Of course nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring -- and in our hearts we either blame Shakespeare, or theatre as such, or even ourselves. To make matters worse there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favourite lines under his breath. In his heart he sincerely wants a theatre that is nobler-than-life and he confuses a sort of intellectual satisfaction with the true experience for which he craves. Unfortunately, he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.

A few things struck me in my last reading of this passage. First, the name gives the game away. The deadly theater isn’t alive, not fully. (Brooks tells us later that the “deadly theater isn’t dead,” meaning that it could find its vitality at any moment.) Deadly theater is “excruciatingly boring.” Deadly theater appeals to scholars who can’t bear an encounter with the real, or to people who think they ought to enjoy the classics but can’t summon any real enjoyment thereof. Deadly theater has no power to change or transform.

Second, Brooks describes the deadly theater as sly. It comfortably finds its way into productions of Shakespeare, those that might be put on by experienced and lively actors (or perhaps by well-funded-local-arts-endowments type theaters). These productions are sly because the familiarity and social circumstance that surrounds these productions makes them deadly. There’s expectation. There is an abundance of the type of social neediness that kills true art. The swarming crowds need the obvious, they need something to talk about over cocktails after. But the size of the crowd is just one risk factor. Insidiously, the deadly theater is frequently found in Shakespeare because Shakespearean drama has such obvious merit and deep humanity. Everyone wants to encounter its historic substance. But vitality is in short supply and actors are its least-desired customers. In part, the deadly theater abounds because the demand for excellence is bottlenecked on the supply-side.

Yet, a third thing to notice is the deadly spectator. The one for whom the deadly theater’s lack of life is exactly the point. The deadly spectator doesn’t want to encounter anything. An encounter is the thing that threatens to change him. Because truth, aliveness, vitality, whatever you want to call it, demands that you change.1 Of course, you don’t have to change. You can ignore truth’s demands. But the encounter forces one to the crossroad. The deadly spectator knows this and will do anything to delay his appointment with fate’s fork.

But the fourth thing to notice, and this is really the point, is the phrase “nobler-than-life.” Brooks unpacks this, somewhat unsatisfactorily, a little bit later: “Audiences crave for something in the theatre that they can term ‘better’ than life and for this reason are open to confuse culture, or the trappings of culture, with something they do not know, but sense obscurely could exist.”

Brooks elides a fuller explanation of what he means by nobler-than-life. Yet, don’t we all have a finely tuned sense for something that should exist, yet doesn’t, that would satisfy us? Doesn’t every party, every mountaintop, every sun-drenched beachhead, (here I must warn you, I’m about to become a little rhapsodic) reek of burning whiskey? Of drink that barely slakes even as it gratuitously provokes our thirst? There are moments in life that leave us desperate for more. These moments are what I imagine that Brooks means when he throws out the concept of nobler-than-life.

This idea of the nobler-than-life is interesting to me because it’s strange how theater can have the possibility of conjuring up such a thing. By definition, it is a bunch of adults using their imaginations to play pretend.

But can there be more than playing pretend?

What would a real Shakespearean do? How would he play a classic drama? Fortunately, in 1979 British director Philip Casson took it upon himself to employ the Royal Shakespeare Company in a direct-to-ITV film adaptation of Macbeth, starring an iron Sir Ian McKellen as Macbeth.2

McKellen, age forty, is wretched and commanding. His portrayal of the famous Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow soliloquy should be etched in stone. When I watch it I feel a vibration from the small of my back to the base of my skull.

Macbeth is tense and readying for war when he hears Lady Macbeth’s cry. He inquires of his servant, “wherefore was that cry?” He is undisturbed, terse, and almost annoyed that his intense focus is interrupted. “The queen, my Lord, is dead,” replies his servant. Macbeth, restlessly gloving his left hand, slows on the word “dead.” He suddenly develops a macabre self-possession.

Then the soliloquy begins. “She should have died hereafter,” he says with grave measure, “there would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” Each syllable of “tomorrow” rolls out like distant thunder. McKellen slips silence between each line. Saying as much with nothing as he does with his words. There is even a singular rhythm to how he states the last line: “signifying no-thing.” I can’t quite replicate it and I have tried a dozen times! Breath for breath this soliloquy is one of the greats.

Every moment screams nobler-than-life. Here he is, the ascendant Macbeth suddenly brought low. In that movement lays the drama. The soliloquy, by Shakespeare’s brilliance, seems to simply appear out of thin air as naturally as mist on a spring morning. But it is not just in the words. It can’t be, as Peter Brooks helpfully articulates:

With Shakespeare we hear or read the same advice—‘Play what is written’. But what is written? Certain ciphers on paper. Shakespeare’s words are records of the words that he wanted to be spoken, words issuing as sounds from people’s mouths, with pitch, pause, rhythm and gesture as part of their meaning. A word does not start as a word—it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictate the need for expression.

The nobler-than-life feeling that McKellen masterfully evokes is not a product of simply reading the play. There is an impulse at its beginning, an impulse to which McKellen is acutely attuned. This impulse was just an inkling in Shakespeare’s imagination, something grander than the quotidian humdrum of Stratford-upon-Avon. And across centuries McKellen rediscovers this sacred impulse. How could this be described as anything but spiritual? Isn’t this just communion?

I think back to a passage authored by Federico Garcia Lorca, in his essay Juego y Teoria del Duende:

Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.

In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’

In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ‘30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’
Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity, opened like a ten-fingered hand as in the feet, nailed there but storm-filled, of a Christ by Juan de Juni.

I apologize for the long quotation, but each paragraph reeks of nobler-than-life and I couldn’t help myself. In this passage are duende and the muse: two contrasting spirits at play with the artist. La Niña de Los Peines first sings with the muse, and her form is perfect. But she has a tough crowd looking for blood. She must banish the muse to summon duende. The duende is symbolic of the struggle, of pushing beyond the reasonable into the self-sacrificing.

I bring up this passage because it so helpfully illustrates the spiritual resonance needed between an artist and his audience. Perhaps it is only a metaphor, perhaps not. But the crowd sought duende and no muse could do. La Niña de Los Peines could not connect with her audience without channeling the right kind of spirit.

But McKellen’s performance is slightly different, though no less spiritual in my reading. There is a fittingness, or sense of definition, or a sense of resolution to McKellen’s Macbeth. La Niña de Los Peines had to destroy her voice and technique to access the duende. She had to access the duende to move the crowd. But McKellen’s technique is like some mind-meld with Shakespeare himself, McKellen just is Macbeth in the soliloquy. The crowd may see it or the crowd may not see it. It would be a shame for McKellen to give such a performance before a crowd of deadly specators, for everything would be perfect and nobody would care. But his performance is real whether the crowd sees it or not.

This, I think, is the key. There is a reality, through imagination, through his connection to the past, that exists regardless of whether it is recognized. There is something to be changed by in the same way that McKellen seems to have been changed by his own encounter with the play.

“This is all well and good Geoff,” you might say. “How does this affect my life?” Great question, one that I would ask if I were in your chair. The nobler-than-life feeling is real, it happens to us sometimes. On mountaintops and sun-drenched beachheads, yes. But also when we don’t expect it. Can we learn to recognize it?

On the Turkey River, near Elkader, Iowa. I was on the beach with a couple of friends gossiping by the fire. In the center of the narrow river was an anchored rowboat with blinking neon string lights that lit up the small chalk-cliff on its opposite side. On a small stage up-beach, a man from California played his guitar pretty badly. But that was okay, he was just background music while we waited for the headliner to take the main stage. There were about eighty of us spread out on the venue, an unlikely tall-grass prairie reserve run by a guy named Gary. When most people think of Iowa they think of cornfields. That is pretty much right, Iowa is 85% cornfield by square footage, but here we’re close to the thalweg of a river valley paradise.

Every year Gary runs a series of bluegrass festivals on the land, mostly small and local affairs. People would camp out and pass around bottles of bourbon. Although my friend Kelsey found out about these in a roundabout way: her friend from Rochester had a friend who was in a band who played Turkey River and posted about it on Instagram. So that’s how these city folk ended up in such an unexpected place.

So anyways, a wind started to rush through the valley. It was soft at first, but then began to roar, in what had been a windless night. It must have been the dead of night among the trees, because one started to see things once one had heard them. In this case, the spirits seemed to whisper of lightning and thunder.

There was an abrupt rustling of people packing: guitars and beers and chairs and soon my friends and I were huddled in one of our tents while rain assaulted us and found ingress along an unsewn seam. It was the worst kind of rain. The kind that was hot as it fell, so that in the summer heat your sweat couldn’t help you. And the wind! It was like a clarion calling right in your ear.

I was in a tent with eight other people and sweat and heat and Bush’s baked beans for dinner. I couldn’t have been more happy to be there and I wouldn’t have wished to be anywhere else.

I’ve hit on a lot of conceptual pieces. The deadly theater and the deadly spectator, duende and muse, nobler-than-lifeness, and the spiritual resonance between artist and audience. But all these bits and bobs are mental scaffolding for real experiences. Moments where I feel outside of time and space. As if I’m connected to others in an immediate way. Sometimes it is everyone around me, sometimes it is just one person on the other side of the room. Often I’m unsure if it is just me who feels like that or if someone else feels it too.

Such an experience, like the Turkey River, when expressed as a story comes out a little like overcooked syrup. It’s too sweet, too thick. It wasn’t like that! It was something less than what I said, but in a way that made it feel more real! It wasn’t profound, it was more normal than most things could ever dream of being. It was nobler-than-life.

But mostly it just was.