Of course nobody can tell how works written for the theater of tomorrow will look.
This is really too bad, because tomorrow's plays must be written today. Therefore we have to know it, even if it's impossible. That means that we ourselves must decide how tomorrow's dramatic literature will be.
As writers we have only one mandate: over today we have no authority; to directors, publishers and theater managers we are superfluous—the theater needs boys to sell candy, not authors. But: over tomorrow we rule with untrammeled, absolute power. The beggar becomes king at the moment he grasps the scepter with full awareness.
And what shall we decide about the future's plays and thus about the theater of the future?
This world definitively turned into a criminal asylum at seven o'clock on the morning of August 6, 1945, at the time when the American war leaders first time use of atomic weapons. On that morning at one fell swoop practically the whole of world literature became obsolete: It all became a museum. At precisely seven A.M. both hands stopped on the clock.
What happened was actually as follows:
A scientist made his entrance on the stage, and from under his white lab coat protruded a long, thick, black tail. It was quite clear, not to be mistaken, and everyone could see that it was genuine: inside the lab coat was a tall, dark man with a real tail. Not as an “image” or “symbol” or metaphor, but quite simply the Devil in person. The Majesty himself—straight out of the Middle Ages.
I believe it was precisely at this moment that naturalism went under for good. And while The Great Mushroom still stood in the heavens, all political boundaries and all national cultures evaporated out into the cosmos. Their earthly remains persisted as local museums. World literature became a collection of children's books.
At first hardly anyone understood the full extent to which the Devil had become flesh and dwelt among us. To be sure, the sight of the tail was creepy, but we hoped for a long time that it would be possible to pretend we didn't see it. Today, almost twenty years later, it's easy to show that we didn't succeed. The long, ugly tail is and will remain utterly unforgettable—and it will take some years until we are fully abreast of the situation. Until then we must get used to the tail, keep a clear head and live in the madhouse with all the balance and cheerfulness we can manage. Hedda Gabler's muzzle-loading pistols and Miss Julie's riding crop belong in the cavalry section of the last century's bourgeois military museum. The themes which were the basis for all bourgeois and naturalistic-psychological drama are hard to take seriously when mentioned in the same breath as the 600,000 old people, women, children, and unborn Japanese slain in August 1945. Our domestic sorrows are overshadowed by the problem: What in the world are we to do with the Devil?! —It is no longer a question of “beginning with oneself” or “being oneself”, “being in the truth,” “realizing oneself”—or the ethical fine points of marriage and God knows what fancy dishes they decked the table with in the century's childhood. The situation has become more acute since that time, and we no longer feel sympathy for or interest in a heroine who hangs her head because she has sexual or social troubles. All that has become the stuff of comedy, and the old heroes have become clowns.
In spite of the Devil the old themes still exist, but in future theatrical pieces they must be seen and treated in a different way from before. And in what way?
One of Bert Brecht's most salient traits is that he fell silent at the sight of the Mushroom and the Tail. And Brecht was a very, very wise dramatist. You can search just as long for the devil in Brecht's works as in the telephone book and the census rolls. Nor will you find a direct reference to nuclear weapons. Both lay outside Brecht's sphere, and indeed outside his time. Brecht's period was the era of the class struggle, and he never goes outside his own thematic province. But the moment the uranium bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, all class differences ceased. The bomb had no social consciousness; it was a product of the criminally asocial, and it was asocial. Brecht overlooked it. It isn't found in Marx.
Actually Brecht falls silent after this. He quite certainly understood that the epoch which was inaugurated in 1945 was no longer his own, and that his thinking and writing could not meet the time which was now beginning.
As the years go by nearly all literature becomes harmless. The same fate which befell Strindberg, Ibsen, O'Neill and all the rest has hit Brecht even harder: his Marxist stage dialectics have become one of the commercial entertainment industry's greatest drawing cards; in the late capitalist world his plays are always good box-office. Brecht is harmless, because he never says a word which touches on the real problems of our time.
The bourgeois drama illuminates the worries of private life; it became “psychological”. The drama of the Brecht period illuminated the troubles of society and the economy; it became “social”. Behind Hebbel lies another world: Schiller's “morality” and “idealism”, the “idealism” of French classicism and the moralizing comedy-writers, Molière in France and Holberg in Scandinavia. Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde signify special English transitional forms, actually bourgeois comedies with a certain moralizing element of social criticism. Beside these main lines lie other isolated phenomena: Maeterlinck, later Pirandello and other pure and halfway “esoteric” portrayers of the private life's twilight hours.
Common to them all is that none wrote plays which were expected to be performed with the atomic mushroom as a backdrop, and that they therefore must remain as more or less imprisoned museum pieces—some of them pure, simple and lovely, others conventional and covered with dust—and a third group touching and sweet, in the same way that the first telephones and earliest automatic weapons can touch us today when we go through a museum of technology.
It is no hubris to declare that it's all obsolete; on the contrary it would have been total megalomania to claim that any of these things should have survived what happened in 1945, which has truly transformed our conscious life. It would have taken an absolutely unique miracle to single out dramatic literature as the only thing to survive the explosion with its relevance intact. All other spheres of activity in the humanities have been left dangerously far astern in relation to technological science; capitalism and Marxism are obsolete, the banking system is obsolete, the judicial system is centuries behind the times. Practically everything is in a mummy and museum condition compared with the real questions which have arisen in the last couple of decades.
One of the most pleasant means of escaping from these questions is of course to immerse oneself in the ancient classics, in the Elizabethans and in Shakespeare, possibly in Greek tragedy -- above all to find confirmation of one's wishful dream of “the eternally human,” “the timeless,” that “the great questions have always been the same.” We are willing to do anything, if it can just help us shut our eyes to the fact that today we are facing not merely new problems, but problems of an entirely new type.
The questions which confront us are of a purely philosophical kind. And we won't come through our crisis until we have found a fundamentally new way of thinking. From this new way of thinking must arise a new philosophy.
The new in our situation today is that for the first time humanity has met itself in true earnest.
In every way, in all conditions, and all over the world it is this which has taken place, scientifically, politically, artistically and philosophically: humanity has met humanity. We have met ourselves in Hiroshima, in the dissolution of the colonial world, in China's revolution; in short, we have met ourselves in an ongoing upheaval of all things. In a way it is the Man with the Tail who has helped us do it, and it is to him we owe thanks for the fact that our own neighbor has become aware of us.
Our own awareness has become aware of us.
And the others' awareness has become aware of us.
Humanity's development from dream to a waking state has taken a long time, but the last phase of that development has happened with shocking speed. And right after the moment of awakening we are confused. But it is still more confusing to see that without knowing it we have arrogated to ourselves all the power. It is the philosophical and intellectual aspects of this whole situation which are of interest today.
Earlier times' writing for the stage—to the degree that we're talking of plays of any significance—has by turns illuminated “the religious,” “the ethical,” “the psychological” and “the social.” What now confronts us is the philosophical, the purely intellectual aspects of every situation. The task at hand—note this well—is to make them visible.
Undoubtedly this is a more difficult task than any of the previous ones, because it must be carried out so consciously, and because it involves giving flesh and blood to more subtle things than before. The more intellectual the abstraction becomes, and the more abstract the thought is, the more dynamic and concrete the representation must be. We can also say: the more spiritual the philosophical content becomes, the more physical the incarnation must be. Of writing for a wholly intellectual theater we can then be certain of this: the manuscripts must, to a much higher degree than before, take on the character of a scenario, and the acting style must become more pantomimic and physical than before.
This is the same development which our environment has gone though; the problems are far more abstract than previously, and the consequences are reflected in a correspondingly more physical way. Erroneous thinking can exterminate whole cultures. Similarly, behind the most horrible physical effects humanity has hitherto produced—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—lay the most abstract thinking which has so far been achieved. The most striking thing is thus the degree to which abstract thought has been incarnated in matter.
The same must apply to the theater: the philosophical content will not come to life in dialogues or monologues as before—but must be ever more directly incarnated in physical stage processes.
That is: the thought—in the form of image, metaphor—must become wholly visible. The metaphor must be taken literally, shown directly—so that there arises an intellectual process, made visible in a clear and logical series of images—of physical (not mental, and not social either!) situations. A contemporary theater will thus be scientific and philosophical, and circuslike and physical, all at the same time. Everything must become action, and there will be a definitive end to the old statuary declamation of “poetic” or “profound” speeches.
Naturally this action will be one form or another of a physical fight.
To avoid misunderstanding: Every legitimate way forward toward a contemporary theater must go through a real understanding of Brecht's epic theater, seen as the place of refining and purifying which this theater is. The development of the Paris “absurd” school and of the young English drama shows what happens when one has overlooked the fact that Brecht means a turning point in the history of dramaturgy: sooner or later one falls back into pre-Brecht viewpoints and theater practice, and hence very quickly becomes a museum piece oneself. A museum of modern art is also a museum, and the more slogan-like, specialized and one-sided an art is, the faster it ends up in the glass cases.
(Perhaps it is time to clarify the use of the word “museum”, and it should be said at once that the word is not used only in a derogatory or disparaging sense: it's not just anything which is worthy of a permanent place in a good museum, and it is regarded as an honor for painters and sculptors to end up in museums while they are still alive. So to say something belongs in a museum is already a recognition and an expression of respect. Personally I have a great weakness for museums and visit them diligently in every country I go to—not only out of passion for the objects in their collections, but also because I am fond of the quiet, peaceful, unworldly and meditative mood which always reigns in good museums: The quiet whisper of the transitoriness of all things and of eternity. And you can learn in museums: Above all you can learn what you should not do; it is of the very greatest value to know what has been done, and what it is unnecessary to do over again. Besides, the really good museums stand for something in the direction of an Ariadne's clew leading backwards in time; it is good to know that you have a place to come from. Without museums we would be homeless in foreign cities. The museums are our common, shared portion of humanity and culture, our most central common possession.
The problem is that art and the life of the mind don't arise in museums; there must always be places outside the walls where something new is being born. For literature the library corresponds to the museum, and we would have a miserable world without libraries.
With regard to the theater the concept changes completely; a so-called “theater museum” cannot preserve anything but the theater's earthly remains—props, costumes and photographs, sketches and models of stage sets etc.—in other words only the dead body. The theater itself, this most fleeting and perhaps most beloved of all art forms, cannot be preserved in collections in the same way that pictorial art and literature can. At best single performances can be canned in a mutilated condition through tape recordings and documentary films. The true museum enterprise takes place on the stage, here and now. And the awful thing about this is that the public, the critics, directors, theater managers and actors are only very rarely aware of it. Every historical play, whether from Paris of the thirties or from Pericles's Athens, must be a museum, even if in lucky circumstances a kind of appearance of life can arise on the stage. And the actors and directors are subject to a fate which no other artists could imagine: they must unceasingly pretend that they can “live themselves into the past,” and must also fill their consciousness with words and thoughts which in reality have nothing to do with their own existence—except as a remote analogy. Perhaps the worst thing about the situation is that the critics by and large believe that that's how it ought to be; only museum is allowed to count as art.
Only been during periods when the theater was in flower have the contemporary dramatics has dominated the boards. This applies to all of theater history from ancient times until today, and it is due to André Antoine's immortal contribution that modern plays step out of the museum state—and only then do you discover how difficult is to be a free and independent artist in your own time.)
The one wave of post-Brecht literature for the stage has been the English one—and it was due to a meeting between a few enthusiastic and able theater folk and a series of good plays of mixed psychological and social content. They undoubtedly did much to bolster interest in theater in England and hence the English theater's position inside its own country, but they didn't bring the theater one step further, and their performances abroad already seemed like a traveling museum of English contemporary art. People saw or read the plays with admiration, and nodded and said: “Yes, it must not always be so easy to live in England!” The pieces demanded nothing more of the theaters than a solid and traditional naturalism from the pre-Brecht period. For modern theater they just meant reproduction of texts.
The group of Parisian expatriates writing in French have had an entirely different significance. The “theater of the absurd” has left lasting traces in theater history, and it has shown that the concepts “stage” and “stage art” are far wider and far freer than we thought. It is also a far more philosophical and intellectual theater (and therefore also more physical) than the contemporary English theater; in short, a universal theater.
The weakness of the “absurd” school lies in its lack of dramaturgical consciousness and its lack of a relation to Brecht. Its whole iconographic technique lies in pulling out a naturalistic “symbolic” detail and magnifying it up into an “absurd” giant format. At times the technique becomes annoyingly formulaic, because the school lacks certain elements of a modern theater which it actually could only have gotten from Brecht; among other things it lacks the distance from the private which only passion for social problems can give. The absurdists have decidedly seen the man with the tail and the whole atomic mushroom, but because they are missing the simple human will to justice, they fail to acquire the moral authority which is necessary for a play's relevance.
In Strindberg's Ghost Sonata the mummy in the cupboard contains all of the “absurd” in one image, and it is from Strindberg that the movement stems. But they have overlooked the central thing in Strindberg, namely his “old-fashioned” quality, his devoutly religious temperament: he believed in God as Brecht believed in Lenin. Both of them believed in justice—here or in the hereafter.
The “theater of the absurd,” then, has a small fragment of Strindberg as a point of departure, and is therefore pre-Brecht in its essence and in its concept of the theater. That is why the plays so often feel just like petty-bourgeois, private, naturalistic episodes: We've seen this before, and there's no new thought in it. Its merits notwithstanding, the “absurdist” movement lacks the central feature of modern theater and of modern art in general: the anti-illusionary, which in Brecht bears the name “Verfremdung”, and which is a very special oscillation between illusion and anti-illusion. It has an intense consciousness-raising effect on the viewer, and is a legitimately modern force.
Some of the most important elements in pantomime theater rest on this.
Before we go on, however, we shall look at yet another set of phenomena which we can profit from in a negative sense—the wholly technicized media within the mass entertainment industry: film, radio theater and TV theater. It is obvious that today nearly all artistically obsolete forms are experiencing a kind of renaissance in these channels: and the more technically perfect they become, the stronger their possibilities in a purely imitative direction: their ability to “create” a naturalistic illusion becomes a temptation for almost everybody who has to do with them. The imitation of nature which was beginning to be antiquated in the theater flourished anew and acquired new possibilities with every technical “advance” made by the technicians of radio, film and TV. The movies illustrate this backward development quite clearly: A Chaplin film from the beginning of the century is stylistically much more modern than a Bergman film of today. And in the latest triumphs—wide-screen, color or even three-dimensional film—all artistic considerations are put aside in favor of the demand for “true-to-nature” imitation. The illusion will eventually become so strong that all distance can cease completely.
Something similar happens with radio theater. With its sound effects—paper crumpled to sound like “a tiger breaking through in the jungle,” or whistling wind, thundering trains, etc. etc.—along with its pathetic overuse of the actors' voices, it frolics shamelessly with “dramatic” naturalistic effects which even the most old-fashioned stage theater would blush to use.
Exactly the same thing has rapidly taken the upper hand in TV theater, which combines the film's misuse of naturalistic closeups and common illusory tricks with radio theater's sorry resuscitation of all forms of conversation drama.
These technical mass media have acquired their intense reactionary power through one common trait: They lack the last anti-illusionistic corrective which even the naturalistic stage theater has—including the sight of the stage, the orchestra pit, the heads and napes of the onlookers in front of you, the sense of hearing the audience around you, etc.—in short, all the things which have prevented absolute and perfect naturalism from definitively penetrating the living, true theater. In film, radio theater and TV theater these last inhibitions fall away, and the technicians have been able to romp freely and realize their own ideals of “art” which shall be “lifelike.” This has naturally had its destructive effect on the audience, which -- even if it doesn't expect humming car wheels, closeups of drowned people, avalanches and catastrophic floods and snowstorms, copulations and closeups of torture scenes -- still wants its theater as true to nature and illusionistic as possible.
For the theater, however, these effects of canned entertainment are harmful only so long as the theater folk themselves fail to draw firm lines, but try to imitate the technical media or compete with them in the use of illusory tricks—be it through manuscript, direction, stage setting—and not least the style of acting. The right approach must be the diametrically opposite one:
Let film, radio theater and TV theater keep all their junk, their props and tapes and imitation tigers! Let them blow their train whistles and rumble their sheets of tin, film the eyes of the priest in front of the altar and take closeups of people over abysses, complete with burning bridges and screaming brakes. Let the technicians keep all the trash of 19th-century naturalism, and let us rejoice over the clueless but wonderfully useful trash-removing function they perform:
Whatever film, radio and TV theater are doing, we don't have to waste our time with on the stage!
The absolute opposite of technical simulations of nature, tricks of illusion and attempts at imitation, is pure pantomime. Perhaps the mime works more anti-illusionistically than any other stage artist, competing only with the musical acrobat-clown. Both work through direct ridicule of illusory tricks. Mimes such as Marceau, Barrault and Samy Molcho have in common that they are all great observers, indeed great realists; what makes them so is precisely their irony and their distance—their contempt for illusion and its technical method: naturalism.
The theater's degeneration can almost always be detected in the use of outward things: in the overuse of machines, technology and equipment. Where the spirit is lacking, one instinctively tries to divert the public's attention from inner poverty by substituting outward and borrowed finery in direction, trappings and gestures. One offers illusion instead of truth, and as long as this goes down with the public, one firmly believes that spirit can be replaced by dishonesty, and that the deception won't be discovered. In this way it is almost always the conventional and mercantilized theater of illusion which itself prepares the soil for the coming revolutions and reforms -- albeit to the very highest degree against its will.
Pantomime needs three things: a human body, an empty stage and an action. In any case the rest comes under the heading of things money won't buy.
Antoine, Copeau and Brecht created their epoch-making theater for less money than what is spent today on making an average Norwegian film. It's an old but unshakable truth that it's almost incredible what can be done with simple means. And today—when film, radio theater, TV theater and illusionary theater have relieved the stage of superfluous nonsense—it ought to be more natural than ever to gather wholly around the basic elements in the theater: the physical situation and the intellectual idea.
In the very image of the mime and the clown there is something which yields an unusual power of penetration; the figure's archetypical quality, its resemblance to an ancient image: The mime is mute, and the clown's monologue is limited to Grock's and Rivel's eloquent cries—“Acrobat oh!” and “A bridge! A bridge!”—possibly accompanied by musical expressions without words. You never miss a more naturalistic text.
In reality we ourselves are mute, and it is our own horrified muteness vis-…-vis the world that the mime and the clown have taken out of our mouths. If the modern dramatist has words of his own to add to this advanced silence, then they must be very, very central. The immense pleasure we can take in the great mime and the great clown consists precisely in the fact that we escape hearing words which aren't central enough.
The clown and the mime don't bother us with painfully superficial solutions of a religious or political sort. Their art is just as free of illusion intellectually as it is on stage. And it is chaste enough not to flirt with destruction and decay. By avoiding all tricks of illusion and all imitative naturalism, both have kept their intellectual purity, their spiritual innocence. This places them in the greatest contrast to the great sorry sellout, the spiritual mass bordello, which the rest of the entertainment industry is.
Some of the most important events of European stage life in recent years come from their quarter; the Wroclaw Pantomime Theater—founded and led by Henryk Tomaszewski—aroused the very greatest attention at the theater festivals in Berlin and Paris, and rightly. The peculiar thing about the pantomime troupe is that it consists not of soloists and their individual acts, but of an ensemble who together act out a pantomime theater. Because of its muteness the theater is cut off from the most direct and naturalistic form of communication—the word—and thereby it seems to acquire a kind of open mandate shared by no other form of theater. It is anti-illusionistic from the bottom up, and for that reason necessarily becomes the freest theater of all. Tomaszewski has broken with the classic pantomime form and works with sound, music, props and sets. Only the muteness remains as a guarantee that no naturalism can be used, only the truly basic elements of the theater. It turns out that there are no limits to how far one can go in destroying illusion; the central, straight theater becomes all the more clearly visible. Tomaszewski's own view is this: “The pantomime theater can only deal with human beings—as they experience the world and come into conflict with it. But we must describe them through the objects they meet, that is, objectify them completely. The literature of the future must be created wholly from the stage and not from the desk—we can only renew the theater by going back to its basic elements, and distancing ourselves from all those things from which the technical mass media liberate us.”
The pantomime theater, in my opinion, will come to acquire the very greatest significance for verbal stage of the future, for tomorrow's theater, and for tomorrow's theatrical writing.
Within post-Brechtian dramatic literature it is Dürrenmatt who has the sharpest intelligence and the deepest knowledge of the stage. His caustic, analytic intellect stands wholly in the service of the humane. As far as I know he is the only Brecht disciple who has abided by Nietzsche's dictum: “It is a bad pupil who does not become unfaithful to his teacher.” This “unfaithfulness” which Nietzsche demands is, however, the true fidelity, far deeper than that which dogmas, “schools” and trends recognize. It means going on alone.
Dürrenmatt characterizes both himself and his drama by an expression which has gradually become well-known: In a time like this no serious person can write anything but comedies.
I think he's right, because today everything that isn't central enough must needs become unintentionally funny when shown on a stage. Ordinary private life and psychology or social mores can only be presented ironically and with distance—and by our taking the comedy freely upon ourselves. That is soberer and better. No one will get free of seriousness any longer.
Thus we already have definite fragments with which we can begin to create the mosaic: Tomorrow's stage literature and its theater will contain elements of the absurd theater's dramatic and stage achievements. It will take as an absolute given Brecht's dramaturgy and his Verfremdung praxis. It will have decided points of linkage to pantomime theater and its reduction of the theater's basic elements; and not least, it will have much in common with the tragic or comic musical clown.
Intellectually and consciously Dürrenmatt is, I believe, the dramatic writer who stands closest to it today.
What we can predict must be a synthesis of the intellectual-philosophical and the plastic-physical: the body as instrument for logos—spirit and body as a unity. Borrowing an expression from medicine, one could christen it “the psychosomatic theater”—the high literary circus.
This page added October 1998; revised June 1999