Ich Sterbe/I’m Dying/Я умираю
‘Ich Sterbe/I’m Dying/Я умираю’ is the third installment regarding the question of realism, as style, and its long and lasting influence on the theatre of our time. In addition to three live performances, we presented an installation ‘Everybody Loves Chekhov’; and parallel to ‘I’m Dying’ we’re publishing ‘Uncle Vanya -The photo roman’.
It is a mistake to assume that realism as a style is over and that many other styles and techniques took its place. A quick look at our theatre stages will prove that realism is alive and kicking and its influence is very much still visible. That influence is not limited to the text but it can be seen in the style of acting, the directing, the sets, but also in the concepts behind many performance art events with the notion of ‘real people’ on stage. The idea behind the full and long process was, in essence, to juxtapose the theory with the practice, to put the play in the context of theatre and performance in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Instead of claiming that there is something called “realism,” which effaces the theatrical framework in performance, and its antithesis, which one could call “formalism” (although never called that by its adherents) or “deconstruction,” perhaps it would be better to recognize that each side can be seen as a species of realism insofar as realism means the attempt to locate and present the truth of a situation, whether the situation refers to the dramatic material or to the theatrical frame. Thus the “realism” that performance artists and political-theatre theorists dismiss, or complain about, can be called “dramatic realism,” insofar as it tries to conceal or efface the apparatus of presentation - that is, theatricality - in an attempt to enhance the illusion of reality of its subject-matter. And we can call the other “theatrical realism.” It is applied in all uses of self-conscious, ideology-unmasking theatre - insofar as it either concentrates on showing the reality of the apparatus of illusion (or at least refusing to conceal it), but in the best instances attempting to create a self-conscious dialectical relation between the form of presentation and the content, the matter that is represented.
From the theatrical/performance side the problem with dramatic realism is that it never seems to question the terms it is using at all, therefore masking its own ideological position, refusing to question the hidden agenda of the how of its practice, pretending that its means are transparent to its subject-matter or its ends. This is not entirely fair or necessarily true in the best instances of dramatic realism, in which from within their dialogic narratives the character’s or even the play’s own ability to discern the truth or to recognize the paradoxes of the force of illusion in human life is questioned. Its discursive action becomes a relatively transparent depiction of the non-transparency of the terms of human cognition and belief. This self-reflexivity can be found in Shakespeare as well as Ibsen and Chekhov. It is also there in Beckett and Pinter, although “realism” is usually not applied to the two; yet if we were to be true to the distinction between “dramatic realism” and “theatrical realism” both Beckett and Pinter would for the most part fall into the “dramatic realism” camp. In these latter playwrights there is little overt necessity to call attention to the immediate performance situation, with rare exceptions in plays like Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
Clearly, dramatic realism and theatrical realism inhabit each other’s domain in varying degrees: one could even say that neither could exist without the other. Since every framework of attention in what we call theatre is fictional, there can be no true and pure theatrical realism; attempts to locate it always turn into an infinite regress. Yet every position from which it could frame itself as theatrical must necessarily not be theatrical, that is, from the standpoint of the content it is automatically cognitively accepted as an implicitly true and solid perspective. (The best metatheatrical example of this is Genet’s The Balcony, in which the recognition of the illusory nature of prior scenes depends upon the acceptance of the truth-perspective of the present scene, each present scene undermining the reality-status of the previous one.) In fact, there is even something that exists outside of the physical theatre that nonetheless produces a perspective of truth about the theatre, and that is theatre or performance theory. Readers of such theory may or may not carry its perspective with them into their experience of theatre, depending on their own interests or personal agendas.
Typically, avant-garde theories of resistance exist in parasitical relation to the thing they resist.
Quite often, the empowering of the resistant theory is built upon the creation and destruction of a straw-man version of the thing it resists. For all its concentration on historicism, political avant-garde criticism usually defines realism in an ahistorical manner (while claiming that realism itself is ahistorical). Thus everything becomes assimilated to the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth-century well-made naturalist play. Ibsen, as much as we may love him, is the paradigm of this bad stuff. This way of thinking ignores the fact that every age creates its own conception of realism, just as what we might call attitudes of philosophical or political realism change with new condition that create new behaviors. What is important is that the avant-garde challenges to traditional realist forms of whatever period have themselves anticipated changes in the nature of realism because they have anticipated the forms of influence that new media technology has had on our conception of reality as well. Realism in our time that never accounts for these things is nostalgic or blind to its own social reality. Realism that takes them into account in the very structure of its representations begins to share characteristics with avant-garde forms that presumably negate realism as a form that is inevitably ideologically corrupt.
But corruption can work the other way. In fact, the general nature of a postmodern mediatized society that is overwhelmingly image-based seems predicated on the devaluation of language and its possible nuances of meaning. Since dramatic realism is understood as dialogical and language-based, avant-gardism heads in the other direction. But this very maneuver can end up “realistic” (showing things as they are) in depicting the mediatized state of the world. The forms of the avant-garde turn out to be the advanced forms of consumer capital, and the avant-garde no longer has a monopoly on the concept of self-reflexivity. The very concept of “spin” around which the media as a whole revolves in its representation of politics indicates the omnipresence of rhetorical self-reflexivity in our society. But spin also indicates the incapability, at least today, of simply identifying self-reflexivity with political effectiveness based on an understanding of the material conditions of our knowledge. Socrates’ conflict with the Sophists about the priority of truth over rhetorical effectiveness by any means is far from over, even though it would seem the Sophist have won. But the final irony is that anyone committed to political change has to believe in truth (as Vaclav Havel puts it, to “live in truth”), no matter how much he or she accepts the relativity of language and the concept of truth as merely an effect of power.
So, to what extent is theatre itself ontologically caught in this very paradox? How is truth arrived at by illusion? How do we, as Polonius proposed, “by indirections find directions out”. What drives the truth of illusion (the “theatrical realism” concern) in order to produce the illusion of truth (the “dramatic realist’s” concern), in a way that nonetheless results not in the mere illusion of a truth, but in a truth itself? Or to put it another way, how does the illusion of truth that nonetheless illuminates some truth (the “dramatic realist’s” concern) depend upon the truth of illusion (the “theatrical realism” concern) in a way that does not negate both the truth sought in representation and the truth showing that the means of investigation are themselves based in illusion?