This is in two parts.

 

PART ONE

 

Here is what he said.

 

He said that theatre changes nothing.

 

He said that the audience is not the public. Nor is it the people. It is barely even an audience.

 

He said that the neither the transformative power of the aesthetic nor the utopian performative amount to a hill of beans.

 

He said that the feeling you sometimes get in the theatre, of being in a community, is an illusion and that the path to hell is paved with pseudo-participation.

 

He didn’t say that he stood with Plato in this respect, but if he had thought of it in time, he might have done.

 

He said that as a model, as an analogy or as a metaphor for politics, theatre was, on the whole, profoundly conservative in its implications.

 

He said he realised this claim was not entirely consistent with his earlier claim that theatre makes no difference to anything.

 

Which is not quite what he meant, in any case.

 

He heard other people worrying that the sort of things he had been saying implied a retreat from political engagement and action.

 

He said it wasn’t, really, no, not at all.

 

He said that, after all, if you really wanted to take political action you wouldn’t go to the theatre to do it, you’d go somewhere else and, oh, I don’t know, seize the means of production, or something.

 

He was a little vague on specifics.

 

Then he said something about seizing the means of theatre production. All well and good, he reflected, but you’d still be producing within capitalist logics in which reception was understood as consumption, and therefore, to some extent, reproducing those logics.

 

That was a very obvious move, he thought, and felt a momentary stab of shame.

 

In the end, he said, what he meant, he thought, was not that you couldn’t do political theatre, or do theatre politically, but that what really wound him up was the idea that doing that sort of theatre was the same as, or even better than, other kinds of political work. That’s what he said, when pressed on the matter.

 

Fair enough. But he also said this. And I quote.

 

‘Some, but not all, of these passionate amateurs will be found at work making theatre or trying to make, of the theatre, a fleeting realm of freedom within the realm of necessity and to make it, perhaps paradoxically, endure’.

 

What?

 

Really?

 

 

 

We could deal with this contradiction in a number of ways.
We could put it down to human error.

 

We could try to adjudicate between the merits of the two positions, on either theoretical or empirical grounds.

 

Or we could find merit in both positions, perhaps by saying that while the first position is broadly true, the second points to the exception that proves the rule or some other liberal pabulum.

 

Or we could ask where this contradiction comes from. This would be a dialectical sort of solution.

 

Or we could talk about The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

 

 

PART TWO

 

The Caucasian Chalk Circle stages a solution to a problem. Who should take ownership of the valley now that it is back in the USSR after the defeat of fascism at the end of World War Two?

 

Oh. This is a question about the means of production, isn’t it?

 

The solution is presented in the form of an allegorical tale which we are to assume is intended to bear directly upon a contemporary real world problem.

 

But let us not forget, in all the excitement about theatre’s capacity to offer solutions to real world problems, that the contemporary real world problem – the question about the valley – is actually nothing of the sort. The opening frame of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is itself a representation, and just as capable of allegorisation as the more obviously allegorical allegory of the chalk circle for which it is the occasion. So we still have to do the work of imagining the real world situation to which its representation in the play might refer. Which would itself be imaginary. And we also have to take the word of a fictional character that the fable of the chalk circle has anything at all to do with the problem of the valley.

 

The two stories are of the same order, then, even if that order itself – we could call it the theatrical order – seems to be able to place them in a hierarchical relation in which, to put it crudely, one is more real than the other, and the other has the capacity to comment upon the former.

 

It happens in Ulysses all the time. Particularly in the chapter where Leopold Bloom encounters the fiercely nationalist and anti-Semitic Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s. The nameless narrator of the chapter says:

 

So we turned into Barney Kiernan’s and there sure enough was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink (380).

 

But then suddenly there is this:

 

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneedbrawnyhandedhairyleggedruddyfacedsineweyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus) (382).

 

Two presentations of the same figure. The first presented as though it refers to a real world, the second as though to a mythical world of heroic Irish giants. It is our reading habits that make us take the second for a mock-heroic repetition of the first, and to rely upon the first rather than the second for our reading of the supposedly real scene that is being depicted. The text draws attention to what we are doing when we are reading. In Joyce and in Brecht.

 

If I go any further down this path I will turn into Paul de Man.

 

In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the solution proposed in the fable presented by the Singer to the villagers in the valley is understood to be that the valley should be allocated to those who can make most productive use of it. The fable arrives at this apparent solution through the actions of an accidental and unqualified judge, Azdak, who applies his version of the chalk circle test to determine whether it is to be Grusha Vachnadze, who has cared for the child, or his birth-mother, the Governor’s widow, who will keep him.

 

I am pausing a moment here to wonder what happens if we accept the allegorical correspondence supposedly proposed here between ownership of the means of production – the valley – and the socially reproductive labour of caring for a child.

 

Pause.

 

In the current Berliner Ensemble production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Thalheimer (in which, it should be noted, the opening scene of the dispute over the valley is not played) the manner in which the play ends is what caught my attention enough for me to want to think about it here.

 

The production also omits the minor storyline of the couple who have come to get divorced, which is the mechanism by which Azdak permits the Gruscha-Simon reconciliation. This is in keeping with what I take to be an attempt at a particularly bleak – but nonetheless plausible and provocative – reading of the play (denying spectators the minor satisfaction of the comic resolution of the play’s hetero-romance).

 

So in Thalheimer’s production the ending works like this. The judgement is given. Stephanie Reinsperger, the prop baby in her arms, lies sideways across a chair centre stage, visibly working to maintain her balance. Thanks, by the way, to Lindsay Goss for observations about this production choice that have helped me think better about what’s going on in this moment.

 

Tilo Nest as Azdak comes downstage of her, stands centre stage, almost out of the light and then slips swiftly offstage as Ingo Hülsmann as the Singer announces that Azdak disappeared, never to be seen again, but that to this day the people of Grusinia remember his time as judge as ‘a golden age of almost-justice’.

 

This gesture, coinciding with an image in which Gruscha is more or less exactly where she was when she made the mistake of picking up the baby in the first place, seemed to me to erase the entire Azdak section of the play, as if the play in this production were saying, ‘Those scenes you saw? Never happened.’ A made-up story, a myth, just like I said it would be. Theatre changes nothing. Said the theatre.

 

But in what sense is the material that preceded it on stage any more actual? If the solution can be removed just as easily, why should we imagine that the problem is any more durable?

 

Thalheimer’s production, with the emotional intensity of its acting, and the persistent presence of that most authenticating theatrical sound, the electric guitar, seems to suggest that it is, just as the conversational tone of Joyce’s nameless narrator inclines the reader to accept his account, rather than the story of mythical giants, as the underlying fictional reality in this chapter of the novel.

 

But it need not be that way, and even in Thalheimer’s production it is possible to see this retrospective cancellation working still, not least as a commentary upon the theatrical techniques involved in the production of emotional intensity and authenticity.

 

And had Thalheimer staged the valley scene, it would, as I have already suggested the play inevitably does, have invited further questions about the actuality of the valley scene and the adequacy of the allegorical solution to its problem ostensibly proposed by the play.

 

Because the solution is not proposed by the play, at all. It is proposed within the play.

 

This might point us towards some ways of thinking about theatricality and politics.

 

It might even invite questions about the possibility of any relation between the political and the theatrical. You know I like those sort of questions.

 

Why is it, for example, that we assume such a relation to exist? What are the reading habits, if you like, that make this possible? Or, to frame it more constructively, what is the nature of the critical work we do to produce that relation – allegorical or otherwise?

 

Because The Caucasian Chalk Circle does not present its solution in order to propose a solution, it does so to keep the problem alive, by the theatrical device of staging competing, incompatible and undecidable truth claims.

 

Which, for good or for ill, may be the most we can hope for in terms of transformation, utopia or a golden age of almost-anything.

 

 

 

My title – ‘the reader will remember’ – is taken, as the reader will remember, from a moment, or rather, two moments in Beckett’s 1976 play, Footfalls. The phrase appears twice, both in the third and final part of the play. The first is when M, pausing in her pacing, introduces the listening audience to the previously unknown figure of Mrs Winter. ‘Old Mrs Winter, whom the reader will remember, one late autumn Sunday evening, on sitting down to supper with her daughter after worship, after a few half-hearted mouthfuls laid down her knife and fork and bowed her head’ (242). The second comes just a few moments later, as M’s narrative of the Sunday evening conversation between Mrs Winter and her daughter continues: ‘But finally, raising her head and fixing Amy – the daughter’s given name, as the reader will remember'(243).

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Form (or genre)

Form is a relationship. When writers, painters or theatre-makers choose, adapt or even fabricate from nothing a form for their work ­– a world, frame or register in which their work has its being and communicates whatever it communicates – they do so with a relationship in mind. It is when that relationship is instantiated, in the act of reading or viewing, that the form of the work is realized. Until that moment, form does not really exist. This may not be obvious in the case of a painting or a sculpture, of which it might make some kind of sense to say that the object or product, in either two or three dimensions, possesses a form in-itself: it is just this shape or this arrangement of marks on such and such a surface of these particular dimensions that constitutes the form of the work.

But in the case of theatre it seems clear that form is a relationship. Of course there are examples of theatre practice in which the performance that is the work appears, or perhaps pretends, to behave as though its spectators did not exist. But this appearance or pretence is always just that, since it is always embedded in a framing recognition that, even if it is being ignored or excluded, the audience is there and the work would not be there without them. Nor is the audience an abstract audience. Each member brings with them their own ‘content’, ranging from their ‘brain’ to their social and economic circumstances, none of which they leave in the cloakroom (see Brecht). Form, we might suppose, then, is the relationship instantiated in the performance among the actions, objects and images, the spectators, their ‘brains’ and the institutional circumstances under which all these elements are brought together. This is not simply a relationship of simultaneity, circumscribed by the ‘live’ co-presence of all these elements, but one in which histories, memories and returns also play their part. The form may be partially achieved before the performance in question, then, in that both production choices and a larger set of historical experiences will have determined the range of possible forms that might appear in any given performance. But the form cannot be achieved until it is activated in its relationship with a particular historical audience.

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