Tag: drama (page 1 of 1)

December 10, 2025

two quotations on historicizing

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic:

But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.

Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same — that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said.

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, at a moment when A. E. Housman as an old, in fact a dead, man (AEH) is meeting his 20-year-old self (Housman):

AEH There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.

Housman But it is, isn’t it? We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught. The poet writes to his mistress how she’s killed his love — ‘fallen like a flower at the field’s edge where the plough touched it and passed on by’. He answers a friend’s letter — ‘so you won’t think your letter got forgotten like a lover’s apple forgotten in a good girl’s lap till she jumps up for her mother and spills it to the floor blushing crimson over her sorry face’. Two thousand years in the tick of a clock — oh, forgive me, I …

AEH No (need), we’re never too old to learn.

Gal Beckerman, the author of the Atlantic article on Boddice, treats his claims as revolutionary new ones. In fact, they were the reigning orthodoxy when I was in graduate school forty years ago. We were all reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, with its instantly famous opening sentence: “Always historicize!” We got busy historicizing the crap out of everything, and were duly scornful of the very idea that one should — or even, if one’s mind was properly formed, could — be moved by the works of ancient and medieval literature that we read, as though those people were “like us.” Such thoughts were deemed ahistorical.

(People who had read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — I knew quite a few — had further means of historicizing. That was a niche view, but interesting; maybe a topic for a future post.)

Only gradually did it occur to me to ask why, if the past is an utterly foreign country, we laugh at the places in Shakespeare that were obviously meant to be funny, and cry when the characters on stage were crying — even yes, even cry when reading something as ancient as the Iliad, for instance when Hector tells his beloved wife Andromache that what grieves him the most about this terrible war is the certainty that someday he, being dead, will be unable to rescue her from enslavement.

Absolute historicizing cannot survive the experience of reading. Lament that if you wish.

Boddice’s view that the past can teach me nothing about my humanity is of course ruled out for me by my Christianity, but it’s worth noting that it is equally ruled out by evolutionary accounts of human experience ands behavior.

One more thing. Beckerman writes,

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons.

This is nonsense on stilts. It is a character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terrence who says Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. The ancient Israelites believed that “man” (adam) was created in the image of God, and the apostle Paul says that “all” — which is to say, all human beings: he’s not talking about pigs and lice — “have sinned and fallen short off the glory of God.” Later, Christian theologians in particular, working from Genesis 10, would argue that the three sons of Noah populated different regions of the world: Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa, Japhet in Europe. These understandings of humanity — these modes of humanism — underline the emergence of the individual person as the subject of laws and the bearer of rights, as Larry Siedentop has patiently and thoroughly demonstrated.

(This is not, of course, to say that the concept of the human is always and everywhere precisely the same, and it is certainly not to say that claims of universal humanity led to the acknowledgment of universal equality. They did not. For much more on these fascinating matters, see Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1996 essay, “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me.”)

Moreover, if the passage of time so radically distinguishes us from other members of our species, does not space do the same? Maybe we have nothing in common with people from other cultures either. Slaveowners in the antebellum South told themselves that it was acceptable to separate slaves’ children from their parents because “they” — the children of Ham — don’t feel it as “we” — the children of Japhet — do. The mistrust of universalism always has a demonic side, and many of the Extremely Online, on the left and right alike, are making careers out of the rejection of universalism. We don’t need any more manufactured Otherness. There’s already plenty to go around.

By all means historicize, but strive also to know the limits of historicizing. You’re never too old to learn.

November 17, 2025

W.H.A. and D.L.S.

Dorothy L. Sayers had written ”Kings in Judaea,” the first play of a series she had been asked to write for the BBC Children’s Service, in the autumn of 1940, the project fell apart when Sayers refused to make changes demanded of her by the Children’s Service staff. But the Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, who had originated the idea, was unwilling to let it drop and eventually managed to get Sayers writing again, with the Children’s Service no longer involved. In late 1941, then, she resumed writing the plays that would become The Man Born to Be King, and would work on them through the middle of the next year. (A play was performed every four weeks between December of 1941 and October of 1942.)

You may read more about this contentious and often comical situation in this excerpt from Kathryn Wehr’s outstanding critical edition of the sequence — which includes James Welch’s own preface to the original publication of the plays in book form.

Curiously enough, at the same time in 1941 that Sayers resumed work on her plays, W. H. Auden began writing what could become For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio — a task he would complete in the late spring of 1942.

Two gifted Christian writers, then, asking themselves at the same time the same question: How might one portray, for a 20th-century audience, the life (or part of the life) of Jesus Christ in a manner that is artistically and religiously serious?

In an introduction to the published version of the plays, Sayers writes incisively and shrewdly about the challenges she faced:

This process is not, of course, the same thing as “doing the Gospel story in a modern setting.” It was at a particular point in history that the Timeless irrupted into time. The technique is to keep the ancient setting, and to give the modern equivalent of the contemporary speech and manners. Thus we may, for example, represent the Sanhedrin as “passing resolutions” and “making entries in the minute-book,” for every official assembly since officialdom began has had some machinery for “agreeing together” and recording the result. We may make a Roman officer address his squad with modern military words of command, since some similar verbal technique must always and everywhere have been used to start and turn and stop bodies of soldiery, or to inspect their kit and parade-order. We may make a military policeman or a tax-collector lard his speech with scraps of American slang; for the local speech must have been full of catch-phrases picked up from the foreign soldiers and merchants who swarmed along the great trade-routes of the Empire; and for these bits and pieces of vulgar Latin, bastard Greek, and Syriac dialects the language of Hollywood is the modern equivalent.

The American cultural imperium!

These changes were necessary, she felt, precisely because the story was so well-known to many BBC listeners in the lovely cadences of the Authorized Version:

It is this misty, pleasant, picturesque obscurity which people miss when they complain, in the words of one correspondent, that in the modern presentation “the atmosphere created seems so different from that of the original story ….. where it is all so impressively and wonderfully told.” So it is. The question is, are we at this time of day sufficiently wondering and impressed? Above all, are we sufficiently disturbed by this extremely disturbing story? Sometimes the blunt new word will impress us more than the beautiful and old. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” said Jesus — and then, seeing perhaps that the reaction to this statement was less vigorous than it might have been, He repeated it, but this time using a strong and rather vulgar word, meaning “to eat noisily, like an animal” chew? Munch? Crunch? Champ? Chump? (But in the end, I was pusillanimous, and left it at “eat” not liking to offend the ears of the faithful with what Christ actually said.)

Thus far, then, concerning the language. I should add that no attempt has been made at a niggling antiquarian accuracy in trifles. The general effect aimed at has been rather that of a Renaissance painting, where figures in their modern habits mingle familiarly with others whose dress and behavior are sufficiently orientalised to give a flavor of the time and place and conform with the requirements of the story.

Auden was faced with few of the challenges that beset Sayers: no grumpy listeners writing under the impression that “the original story” was made by King James’s translators, no Protestant Truth Society denouncing the plays before they even had been written. But when he sent his oratorio to his father — a physician and a learned man, but not especially literary — he received much the same kind of criticism.

Auden replied on 13 October 1942 — as it happens, five days before the final play of Sayers’s sequence, “The King Comes to His Own,” was broadcast — with gentle firmness:

Sorry you are puzzled by the oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental — the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. What we know of Herod, for instance, is that he was a Hellenised-Jew and a political ruler. Accordingly I have made him express the intellectual’s eternal objection to Christianity — that it replaces objectivity with subjectivity — and the politician’s eternal objection that it regards the state as having only a negative role. (See Marcus Aurelius.) . . .

I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way, until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been “humanized,” and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago, hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard.

If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization — there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.

That last point is a very shrewd one, and an explanation of why Auden makes such a point of modernizing his narrative: he rarely misses the opportunity to introduce a chronological incongruity, and is not afraid to relish the resulting humor. Here, for instance, is King Herod reflecting on his reign in Judaea:

Barges are unloading soil fertiliser at the river wharves. Soft drinks and sandwiches may be had in the inns at reasonable prices. Allotment gardening has become popular. The highway to the coast goes straight up over the mountains and the truck-drivers no longer carry guns. Things are beginning to take shape. It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches.There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches.

Sayers could not have done this, even if she had wanted to — and she was unlikely to have wanted to. She was tasked with sticking closely to a narrative shape clearly recognizable from the Gospels, and I think she enjoyed that challenge. Auden’s (self-chosen) job was a very different one. But both of them were moved to reflect, and reflect very intelligently, on the ways that the Gospel story demands that we understand it both historically and contemporaneously. It is Then and it is Now.

June 17, 2025

the composer as ASS and other exasperations

In May of 1942, as Sayers was writing the eleventh play in the sequence called The Man Born to be King, she shot a quick letter to her producer, Val Gielgud:

As proof that I am doing something, and because it is urgent, I am sending you Mary Magdalen’s song to be set. You remember where it comes — the Soldiers will not let her and her party through to the foot of the Cross unless she sings to them — “Give us one of the old songs, Mary!”

The song is thus the, so to speak, “Tipperary” of the period, and must be treated as such. That is to say, the solo portion is nostalgic and sentimental, and the chorus is nostalgic and noisy; and the whole thing has to be such as one can march to. We want a simple ballad tune, without any pedantry about Lydian modes or Oriental atmosphere….

I want a tune that is both obvious and haunting — the kind that when you first hear it you go away humming and can’t get out of your head! And quite, quite, low-brow.

In September, when the company were rehearsing the play, DLS wrote to a friend,

We had an awful time with rehearsals. Everything seemed to go wrong — it was one of those days. Claudia’s Dream had been done badly (owing to my not being there to explain just what I wanted!) and the ASS who set the song disregarded all my instructions, and not only set it in ¾ time instead of march time, but had the vile impertinence to alter my lines because they wouldn’t fit his tune. I threw my one and only fit of temperament, and we sang the thing in march-time and restored the line, but it wasn’t a good tune anyway!

In another letter she wrote, “I’m still furious with the man who wrote that silly tune.” Who was this “ASS”? His name was … Benjamin Britten. Probably never made much of himself.

It’s fun to write about DLS in part because she is very entertaining when she is outraged by something. Some years after this incident she reluctantly gave an interview to a reporter from the News Chronicle, who then announced to the world that Sayers had declared that there would be no more Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Sayers to the paper’s editor:

Your interviewer appears to have misunderstood me. I did not say that I had given up writing detective stories. I did not say that there would be no more Peter Wimseys. I made no announcement on the subject one way or the other. I only said that for the next few years, I had another job which would take me all my time.

(The “another job” was translating the Divine Comedy.) The editor’s reply merely created further exasperation:

There is no need to wonder how your reporter came to misinterpret me. Your own letter provides the explanation, since it shows you to have fallen into a similar misunderstanding, and for the same reason; namely, that Fleet Street renders a man incapable of taking in the plain meaning of an English sentence. You say you are “glad to hear that there will, in fact, be further Wimsey stories”; how, pray, do you contrive to extract that conclusion from my statement that “I made no announcement upon the subject one way or the other”?

I have not said, and I will not and cannot say, whether I shall write any more detective fiction or not; for the excellent reason that I do not know. Is that sufficiently clear?

Three times your reporter tried to force me into promising that I would write more of this kind of story; three times I refused to commit myself to any such thing. This refusal he interpreted to suit his own fancy; you in your turn have done the same.

March 11, 2025

on Pygmalion

One way to interpret the story of Pygmalion, it seems to me, is to see it as a tale in which the monster wins — because Henry Higgins is, quite obviously, a monster. The darkness of the story can be felt more strongly in the 1938 film version than in the play, largely (though not wholly) because of the magnificent performance of Wendy Hiller, in her first film role, as Eliza. I’ll consider the key differences between play and film later, but I won’t say anything about My Fair Lady, which is effectively a different thing.

The story is, I guess, still widely known. When Henry Higgins, the great scientist of phonetics, meets a poor flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle in Covent Garden, he bets his new friend Colonel Pickering that in just a few months he can transform her speech so completely that even the snobbiest of snobs won’t be able to tell that she’s not one of them. Thanks to Eliza’s smarts and skills, Higgins wins that bet. (Marginal notation: Eliza is typically called a Cockney, but whether that’s right or not depends on how you define “Cockney”: the strictest definitions confine the term to the East End of London, but Eliza is from Lisson Grove in the City of Westminster. In what follows I will use “Cockney” to mean a style of spoken English shared by many Londoners of the working classes: whether or not Eliza is a Cockney, she speaks Cockney.)

Back to the Monster: Henry Higgins’s behavior in this movie, and in the play, is so bad that you find yourself casting around for a character to notice it. For much of the story the only plausible candidate for Conscience here is Henry Higgins’s mother. Colonel Pickering is certainly kinder to Eliza than Higgins, and this is true throughout the play/film: in the first scene, when an accusing crowd gathers around Eliza, he defends her, and when Higgins is trampling her he asks Higgins to consider the possibility that the girl has feelings. (Higgins considers it and decides that she doesn’t.) But after Eliza triumphs at an elegant ball, charming everyone and dancing with a prince, when they return to Higgins’s flat to celebrate, Pickering ignores Eliza about as completely as Higgins does. It is only Higgins’s mother who suggests, later, that they might have thanked Eliza for all the work she did to win Higgins’s bet for him. But Higgins does not thank her, and he does not apologize for her months of verbal abuse. There’s only one moment when he acknowledges her quickness and resourcefulness, and he does so out of her hearing. It is only Mrs. Higgins who criticizes her son for his bad behavior; Pickering is perhaps a little too afraid of him to do so. But any criticism he receives is mild in comparison to what he deserves — at least until the final minutes.

Now, about Eliza herself. Wendy Hiller got an Oscar nomination for her performance, and of course she should have won; perhaps her status as a newcomer worked against her. It’s difficult to overstress how great she is here, in an exceptionally challlenging role. At the outset she’s doing broad comedy and doing it fabulously, but then she has to go through several stages of development.

First of course she’s a poor lass who talks pure Cockney, easy enough for a reasonably skilled actress to mimic. But then, as Eliza undergoes her training, Hiller has to overlay a labored R.P. on Cockney vocabulary and diction — which, by the way, leads to the funniest moment in the whole movie, when as she leaves a tea party the besotted toff Freddy (about whom more later) asks her if she’s walking across the park: she replies with her newly-acquired cut-glass diction, “Walk? Not bloody likely! I’m going in a taxi.” Watch the whole scene and on the basis of that alone you’ll be ready to give Wendy Hiller every Oscar statuette ever made.

Eventually Eliza matches her grammar to her new accent; and finally — this is the most astonishing thing about Hiller’s performance — in a moment of great emotional distress she loses her grip on her training and partly regresses to her native speech, wavering between her recent acquirements and her whole personal history. Higgins loves to hear this, because he treats it as proof that her changes are superficial and that she will always remain the “guttersnipe” he likes to say she is. (In the play he also calls her an “impudent slut.”) He wants at one and the same time to celebrate his great achievement and to dismiss it as little more than putting lipstick on a pig.

It’s not just vocally that Hiller excels. Throughout the whole ballroom scene, and especially as she’s dancing with every eye on her, she seems to be in a dream — at one and the same time committing to the role demanded of her but also comprehensively dazed by the coming-true of a poor girl’s fantasy. And afterward, as Higgins rejoices and Pickering (though he has lost the bet) shares his delight, Eliza looks absolutely devastated, and we can see that’s she is not merely exhausted from the demands of her command performance, but also is just beginning to realize how few genuine choices now lie before her.

She has seen a world of elegance, beauty, and plenty, and, should she go back to her old life selling flowers on the streets, or even should she achieve her former ambition of working as a clerk in a flower shop, she won’t be able to forget everything she now knows. Near the end, Higgins’s casual demand that she fetch his slippers and become a kind of servant to him infuriates her, and Freddy’s obsessive puppy-like love for her brings no comfort. It seems clear that she has come to love Henry Higgins, though it’s not clear just what kind of love it is. Would she want to marry him? Or does she simply want to force him to treat her as a human being?

After their big blow-up, in the final scene of the movie she returns to his flat. But why? She doesn’t say. And with his back to the camera, Higgins once more, in a light-hearted tone, tells her to fetch his slippers. The End.

So does the monster win? Will Eliza fetch Henry’s slippers? Or will she walk out on him again as a hopeless case? Does he mean it jokingly, or does he mean it as a final refusal either to apologize or to treat her with courtesy? It’s hard for me to see this as anything but Henry’s reassertion of his contempt for Eliza, and if I could write my own ending for the film I’d have her fetch the slippers, set them on fire, and shove them into his eye-sockets. But that’s just me.

In any case, the filmmakers are leaving room for us to think that Henry is making light of his earlier fight with Eliza in order to create room for reconciliation. This is more than Shaw had done in the 1913 play, which ends with Eliza refusing to be his servant and stomping out of his house and maybe his life, after which Higgins dismissively insists that eventually she’ll do as she’s told. Curtain.

But even that was not sufficient to dissuade audiences who wanted to believe that Higgins and Eliza would eventually marry. Still less would the film’s ending do so. Shippers gonna ship. What shall we call their image of the characters’ future? How about: The Shipping Forecast.

In any event, this kind of response bothered Shaw sufficiently that he ended up writing an epilogue in which he effectively said to the shippers: Not bloody likely.

What is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Shaw actually wrote the outline of a second play, or maybe a novel, in which Freddy and Eliza marry and start a flower shop; in which Freddy’s family is reconciled to the marriage through reading the more hortatory works of H. G. Wells; and in which — this is my favorite part — Colonel Pickering “has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins.” And you know what’s great? She doesn’t do it. I would love to see that play or movie, for sure.

I feel so strongly about all this largely because of Wendy Hiller’s magnificent performance — and especially that moment of bleak collapse after the ball, when, as Higgins capers about in triumph, she feels that she has lost everything. It’s one of the most memorable moments in film and drama, for me. It’s wondrous what a great actor can do to transfigure a scene without saying a single word, in Cockney or R.P. or anything else.

December 29, 2023

on Wagner

As part of my ongoing project to understand myth and mythmaking in the modern era I have been sitting down to a full encounter with Wagner’s Ring cycle — which I’ve never before listened to completely and in sequence. I’m doing this by listening to the legendary Georg Solti Decca recording and following along with the excellent Penguin Classics bilingual edition of the libretto. I have some reservations about John Deathridge’s translation, but fortunately my German is (barely) good enough that I can make it through without only occasional consultations of the English version. (I’ve got the beautiful hardcover edition, which I think may have been printed only in the U.K.)

I’m not finished yet but I have gotten far enough along to say with some confidence that Wagner’s celebrants who think him a nearly incomparable genius are absolutely correct, and Wagner’s detractors who think him unforgivably self-indulgent are also correct. And I’ve also come to some conclusions about why both of these things are true. (Probably many other people have come to the same conclusions, but I have read very little Wagner criticism, with one major exception noted below.)

Again, I am not fluent in German but anyone with even minimal competence in the language can see how brilliant a poet Wagner is, and especially how skillfully he employs alliteration and assonance to create his effects — and with a remarkable economy of language. Nietzsche’s inclination to compare Wagner as poet only with Goethe is remarkable but not utterly extravagant.

But in a way Wagner’s greatness as a poet is a problem — or perhaps I should say that it became a problem when he made the fateful decision to write the entire libretto before composing a single note of music. Why was that decision so fateful? Because Wagner knew he was a great poet. He knew that he had written magnificent poetry and he didn’t want to sacrifice any of it once he got to the stage of musical composition

That isn’t that big of a problem in Das Rheingold, which in fact moves with remarkable fluidity and pace: it has almost none of the longeurs that the later dramas in the cycle suffer from. The difficulties kick in with the first act of Die Walküre. If you haven’t heard this work … well, imagine something like the Prologue to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, except instead of lasting six minutes it lasts more than an hour. More than an hour of pure exposition, in which characters — well, mainly one character, Siegmund, tells us his entire history. C. S. Lewis (famously) wrote that the final books of Paradise Lost, in which the archangel Michael tells Adam of the future of humanity, is an “untransmuted lump of futurity”; likewise, the first act of Die Walküre is an untransmuted lump of historicity, with only occasional orchestral coloration to enliven matters.

Wagner trusts overmuch in the power of his own verse, or is simply overly attached to it — which is a reminder that often it’s good to divide the labor of the librettist and the poet. When Auden was writing his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, he did so hoping that his friend Benjamin Britten would set it to music. But when he gave to Britten the magnificent fugal chorus on Caesar he had written, Britten couldn’t help laughing. He told Auden that if he wanted an actual fugue to be written, and a figure that would set a single scene in an oratorio with many scenes, then he should have written three lines, not seventy. So Auden kept the poem as written and gave up on the idea of having it set to music. By contrast, Wagner never had anyone to remind him of the necessary constraints; so he ignored them.

And there’s another problem as well. Recently I read Walter Murch’s famous meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and was taken by his articulation of one of his chief rules: “You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” It’s interesting that Wagner understands this principle so well in his music, which often is rich and deep with suggestion, without understanding it at all in his writing. Exposition often dominates. I think his addiction to detailed exposition has something to do with his belief in himself as a sage and a mythographer.

I may have more to say as I move through this extraordinary work of art — though maybe not, because the experience is tiring. Right now I feel about it much as Virginia Woolf felt about Joyce’s Ulysses, which she called “a memorable catastrophe — immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” But it fascinates me as a myth, especially as a humanist myth — a myth about the ending of the gods and what Bonhoeffer would later call the “coming of age” of humanity. I think that is why Roger Scruton — a man convinced of the absolute necessity of religion to humans but without any firm faith in Christianity — loves the Ring cycle so much. His book about it is magnificent, I think, but also somewhat depressing, because as a Christian I certainly don’t think that a humanist myth has the power to sustain us. But Wagner put an enormous charge into his effort to make it do so.

November 22, 2022

From a lovely profile of Will Arbery by Chloé Cooper Jones:

One of the first stories Arbery ever told me was how, even as a child, he longed to protect [his sister] Julia’s nuanced way of speaking. When he was away at camp, and then later, as a young adult in college, he would receive letters and emails from Julia and could tell when they had been edited, her language standardized by someone else. But Arbery loved the particular cadence, rhythms and arrangements of her sentences and did not want them changed.

In the program note for “Corsicana,” Arbery says that he wrote the play thinking about the dances Julia makes up, the songs she sings in private, the art she makes that belongs only to her. “I’ve been thinking about the way Julia sings ‘O Holy Night,’ making everyone shut up and listen and watch her, and then getting too nervous to start. So we all have to sing it together, trudging through the notes until we reach the time-to-shine part — ‘fall on your knees, oh hear the angels’ voices’ — and that’s when her voice rises unmistakably above all of ours, and she finishes the song, and suddenly there’s a new thing in the air above our heads and we all get quiet.”

I have some thoughts on Arbery’s play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” in this essay.

May 26, 2021

Hockney’s Rake

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David Hockney’s set designs for the 1975 performance of The Rake’s Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

June 5, 2019

the theater of concurrence

Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was one of the sensations of the nineteenth century because of its portrayal of Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who ultimately finds the confines of bourgeois life unbearable and leaves her family. Even the suggestion that Nora might be right to do so was outrageous at the time — so much so that one of Ibsen’s contemporaries said that the play “pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics.”

Indeed, when the play was first performed in Germany the famous actress playing Nora refused to perform the final scene: “I would never leave my children!” Since Ibsen had no copyright laws to protect his play, and anyone could change it in anyway they wished, he, with gritted teeth, wrote an alternative ending in which Nora, on the verge of departing her home, is forced to look into her children’s bedroom, whereupon she sinks to the floor in mute acknowledgment that she could never leave her children. Fade to black. Ibsen called this ending a “barbaric outrage” upon his play, but figured that changes made by other hands would have been even worse.

In 2017, a new play reached Broadway: A Doll’s House, Part 2, by Lucas Hnath, which revisits Nora and her family fifteen years after she walked out of the “doll’s house” in which she had been kept by her husband, slamming the door behind her. And in Hnath’s sequel Nora is very glad that she left her husband and children all those years ago.

To which the shrewd critic Terry Teachout said: Well of course. Can you imagine a play on Broadway in 2017 suggesting that Nora perhaps should have swallowed her frustrations and remained to raise her children?

The favorable reception of A Doll’s House, Part 2 was as much a foregone conclusion as is its ending, which is a quintessential example of what I call the “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything. The success of such plays is contingent on the exactitude with which the author tells his audience what it wants to hear, and Hnath obliges in every particular. Above all, the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.

I haven’t seen the play, but I have read it, and I don’t think Teachout is right about Hnath — though he might be right about the performance he saw. Reading Hnath’s play I found myself disliking Nora very much, especially the way she recasts her abandonment of her family in terms of heroic sacrifice. For instance, she tells the family’s servant Anne Marie about the great personal “discipline” she had to exercise in order to prevent herself from sending Christmas presents to the three children she left without a mother. How brave of you, Nora! (Later, whern Anne Marie tells Nora it was terrible for her to leave her children, Nora replies that it’s not a big deal, men leave their families all the time.)

And there’s a powerful moment when Nora meets her daughter Emmy — the daughter who doesn’t remember her because she was so young when Nora left. Emmy knows that Nora has written books denouncing the institution of marriage, and so is reluctant to tell Nora that she herself is engaged. “You think no one should get married,” she says, which Nora at first denies, but then goes into a lecture about how “Marriage is this binding contract, and love is — love has to be the opposite of a contract — love needs to be free.” And when Emmy resists this (I’m adjusting Hnath’s eccentric punctuation):

NORA: How much do you even know about marriage?
EMMY: Nothing.
NORA: Exactly.
EMMY: Because you left, I know nothing about what a marriage is and what it looks like. But I do know what the absence of it looks like, and what I want is the opposite of that.

And ultimately Emmy forces Nora to admit that the only reason Nora is speaking to her is to enlist her help in getting Torvald to give Nora a formal divorce.

This does not, to me, look like a situation in which “the viewer is never allowed to doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own fulfillment.” You could perhaps play it that way. You could do something to make Emmy unattractive — in fact, perhaps the only way to make Nora seem unquestionably right is to make every other character in the play seem unquestionably awful — but Hnath’s writing is not handing you that interpretation on a platter. (Very much the same is true of his earlier play The Christians.) If the director and cast of the performance Teachout saw managed to make the play’s meaning unambiguous, then that’s a sign of how desperately the performers as well as the viewers of plays can feel the need for a “theater of concurrence” — even when the playwright wants to deny them that comfort.

February 6, 2017

theatrical memories

Recently, Teri and I have been watching both Victoria and The Crown — an interesting pair of experiences which I may say something about in a future post — and one of the pleasures of both series has been Alex Jennings, who in The Crown plays the oleaginous and embittered Duke of Windsor (i.e., the abdicated Edward VIII), and in Victoria plays the oleaginous and manipulative King Leopold of Belgium.

All of which reminds me that I first saw Jennings in 1990, at the Phoenix Theatre in London, playing Hjalmar Ekdal in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck alongside David Threlfall’s Gregers Werle. It was a magnificent production, and one of the reasons I remember it is that Teri and I had an extremely intense argument about it on our walk back to our hotel in Bloomsbury. All I can remember about the debate is that she thought the production was weighted towards the perspective of one character and I thought it was weighted towards the perspective of the other — which suggests that it was actually an ideal theatrical endeavor, capable of producing very different reactions in equally intelligent and attentive viewers. Even now I remember with great vividness the set, and a handful of crucial scenes.

I had already seen Threlfall on TV, in his amazing performance as Leslie Titmuss in John Mortimer’s Paradise Postponed — I can still see him in my mind’s eye, a working-class boy listening with passionate intensity to the radio and trying to mimic the BBC announcers’ intonations (in the days before the BBC thought it should represent the varieties of British speech patterns) — but Jennings was new to me, and was simply electric as Hjalmar. It’s so good to see him still at work.

June 25, 2013

One of my minor hobby horses is defending some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays that are frequently given short critical shrift, particularly two early comedies. Strip away your expectations about The Taming of the Shrew and you will find a genuine love story, about two dark and damaged characters unexpectedly finding each other, and love, in what appears to be a most unlikely match with one another. And step back from the familiar but still workable farce of A Comedy of Errors, and you will find a play structured very much like the late romances, and striking many of the same deep chords.

— A terrific post by Noah Millman