Blood and Bones: Part 3 Apollo and Dionysius

I first wrote these essays about playwriting - and writing in general - eight years ago. I think it largely still holds up.

You know that old question “Who would win in a fist fight – The Terminator or The Alien?  Well, who would win out of a playwright and a philosopher?  If the playwright was Euripides (You rippa dese trousers, I give you bloody nose)  and the philosopher was the heavyweight Friedrich Nietszche?  Well given that Euripides was dead at least two thousand years before the Prussian Pugilist   then it’s hardly a fair fight but in The Birth of Tragedy Nietszche lays into the Greek playmaker with no let up in zeal.  And then he goes on to give Aeschylus and Sophocles no less of a spanking. What got Friedrich’s goat was the fact that the playwrights sided with either Apollo or Dionysius in their dramas.  Friedrich considered that this produced a cruelly lopsided work of art.  A playwright needed to entertain both of these deities.

Let me elaborate.

The authentic narrative is a sensory explosion occurring within an intellectual context.  Or an intellectual explosion in a sensory space. Whatever it is We know it when we feel it as acutely as we feel a kick on the shins at a cheese rolling event.

I’ll come back to the mechanics of theatre and writing for it in later chapters But first I want to explain how I feel theatre has become side-tracked away from its primary function.  The desire for an instant gratification has reduced many forms of theatre to spectacle.  Exciting and thrilling funny and even emotionally engaging but in the end, hollow and without heart.  Similarly with introspective pieces about the pain when you shut your finger in a drawer or site specific pieces where the only excitement is in getting stuck in the lift with a blood soaked shop dummy between scenes 13 and 14. That is not to decry any of these art forms but I always get the feeling that there is so much more theatre could be achieving. If a performance does not leave us shaking with emotion, angry, fearful, delighted, in love with the world, then, to my mind, it has failed.  Actor and audience alike should feel challenged, uplifted, crushed, beaten and absolutely shattered.  And, in that communion, a sense of well-being and grace.

Peter Brook, in his seminal work “The Empty Space” decries a form of theatre he terms “Deadly Theatre”.   “A doctor can tell at once between the trace of life and the useless bag of bones that life has left; but we are less practised in observing how an idea, an attitude or a form can pass from the lively to the moribund. It is difficult to define but a child can smell it out.” 

At the core of live theatre experience is the fact that each performance is new and different.  No actor can reproduce the exact same circumstances of performance night after night.  He or she brings themselves to it with all their own foibles and disappointments.  And we all know that the audience is different performance by performance.  The reaction to the wild shamen on stage maybe quite different on a wet Thursday afternoon from a joyous Saturday night out.

The actor is key, he or she is living, breathing and sweating.  It is up to the playwright to give the actor the energy to our audience and, in short, to fill the emptiness : means to create that rank, odorific moment.  And the shape of the play provides the narrative underpinning that will make this more than a moment in time. Plays happen here and now right in front of and, perhaps, in and around the audience.  The actors are constructing and driving characters and their stories right in front of our eyes.  Plays happen to everyone in this room.

Theatre is a social event.  There has to be at least two to make it work – an actor and an audient.  the bigger the audience up to a point, the better the experience.  We all become part of a swelling tide of ideas and emotions.  But this is not a mass Nuremburg style rally.  each audience member will experience something unique and individual.  They will consider the stage from their own viewpoint, maybe concentrating on actors that are not at the front of the stage, understanding by their actions and reactions.  They m ay also follow a subsidiary narrative strand.  Draw their own conclusions.  For this reason, the bigger and bolder the drama, the more scope there is for an individual experience. While The playwright challenges the audience to think, to consider what they are feeling he or she cannot forecast what the actual experience will be.

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Watching drama in a theatre We react quite differently from the way we would in a cinema or sat at home.  We feel a deeper emotional bond with those on stage than their virtual, digital counterparts; these are suddenly real people.  We know them. we are embarrassed at their mistakes, angered by their cruelties.  We feel joy at their success, disappointment in their failures.

Jerzy Grotowski when he talks about physical theatre, is not talking about empty acrobatics but in the direct, living engagement of the actor with the text.

“Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art?

Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves...art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.”
― Jerzy Grotowski

Antonin Artaud when he describes a Theatre of Cruelty. “I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”
― Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings

Even Brecht, the other great thinker about theatre, for all his arguing that the audience should be less engaged emotionally and more reflective and critically inclined, was driving at undermining the primly defined conventions of theatre as he saw it. He was a man of the theatre and understood the necessity of emotional engagement in his plays even if he didn’t preach it. 

That’s where we get to Nietzsche’s ideas in “The Birth of Tragedy” He felt that the individual watching a drama can and should lose themselves in a collective Dionysian event and thereby undergo an ecstatic transformational experience.  At the same time  they should be able to recognise an intellectual Apollonian authenticity of the created world.

In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of reason and the rational and appeals to logical thinking, while Dionysus is the god of the irrational and chaos appealing to emotions and instincts. the two gods were not considered opposites or rivals, but were somehow intertwined.  You can still see their representtions in the twin masks we call Comedy and Tragedy.

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But in this fractured, opinionated world of 2017,  Where are the contemporary “Three Sisters”  “Hedda Gabler”.  Where are the bold playwrights like Aphra Behn or Dario Fo? Sadly, playwrights are losing opportunities to write with such engagement, to construct towering mountains of ideas or to create worlds of experience.  And without those opportunities, the skill withers away. Many of the current ways into playwriting are no help.  The ten minute sketch or the monologue are excellent introductions to the art and may be an art form in themselves but they are not the art.  while it may be funny, thoughtful, clever, witty it simply does not have the room to construct a proper narrative or to follow characters that are allowed to build and develop.  Aspiring playwrights may hear only the glib quick cut language of film and television making.  They are not sufficiently exposed to the theatrical narrative style which requires time to develop.  The new writer emerging from the writing course may be well acquainted with Apollo.  He or she may have all the rigorous understanding of a play as literature but she is not infected with the madness of Dionysius.

Emerging playwrights ought to be given real incentives to write real plays with both Apollo and Dionysius standing at their shoulders, and, I suggest, as soon as the plays become big and challenging with room for big ideas then audiences will be enticed back as they always are to the authentic narrative which has no counterpart in the other media..

I’m not blaming theatres as such but as support decreases and resources dwindle, at least in the non-metropolitan areas, programming becomes more timid and audiences too passive. Writers have become too introspective, too influenced by film and tv instead of the unique qualities of theatre. Theatre needs a riotous chaotic exuberance, a waterfall of ideas and interactions.

It is essential that theatre is grabbed back from the accountants and gatekeepers.  And wrested from control of the large commercial funders who would seek to channel the inspiration of the creatives.  We must join forces with like-minded creatives and producers and write the sort of theatre that will, once more, galvanise audiences.

But, at this juncture, when the will is most imperiled, art approaches, as a redeeming and healing enchantress; she alone may transform these horrible reflections on the terror and absurdity of existence into representations with which man may live. These are the representation of the sublime as the artistic conquest of the awful, and of the comic as the artistic release from the nausea of the absurd. The satyric chorus of the dithyramb is the saving device of Greek art." Nietzsche “The Birth of Tragedy