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The Modern Theatre as Autonomous Vehicle GERALD D. PARKER • DESPITE THE OPPRESSIVE PRESENCE in modern drama and theatre criticism of many highly progenitive terms - some the obvious product of hard-sell critical propaganda1 - it can possibly be argued that two principal directions have been taken in modern drama and theatre. The first of these is the concern with the art of the playas text (thus, in a sense, as literature): the exploration of literary, and rooted in the literary, various theatrical means of presenting new ideas and visions of human society and the human personality. Such a direction has been taken by such diverse playwrights as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Yeats, Eliot, Brecht, Pirandello, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Weiss. At their best, these dramatic authors have enlarged our consciousness of self, have met through an exciting variety ofapproaches the demand of drama posited by Hegel: The demand of the drama, in the widest sense, is the presentation of human actions and relations in their actually visible form to the imaginative consciousness, that is to say, in the uttered speech of living persons, who in this way give expression to their action. Dramatic action, however, is not confined to the simple and undisturbed execution of a definite purpose, but depends throughout on conditions of collision, human passions and characters, and leads therefore to actions and reactions, which in their turn call for some further resolution of conflict and disruption.2 This is not as conservative a statement about the nature of drama as it might at first appear. This is a statement which clearly posits three major conditions of drama: (1) drama (as opposed to the epic, the novel or a sermon) demands "an actually visible form" - that is, drama is staged, is an art requiring, as Hegel says later, an "entire bodily realization;"3 (2) dramatic 373 374 GERALD D. PARKER realization demands "the uttered speech of living persons," and this "uttered speech" is the principal agent of "action"; (3) drama demands certain "conditions of collision" - forces, characters, and actions which collide, and through such collision, spark reactions. We might well question the relevance to, say, Beckett (at least the Beckett of Endgame) and Ionesco of Hegel's "the uttered speech of living persons"; we might well question the quality of "life" represented by Hamm and Clov, or by the old couple in Ionesco's The Chairs. Yet, even here, these characters recall (and language is still the agent of such recollection) and enact the passions, dreams, and guilt of existence: that is, they ponder and are engaged in the very drama of the self which occupied the intelligence and the art of Ibsen and Chekhov. The drama of Beckett and Ionesco is still a drama - as was Ibsen's and Chekhov's - in which "collisions," actions, and reactions come from "uttered speech," from words. The word, in Ionesco and Beckett, may have lost much of its former prominence as a vehicle of rational discourse, as an agent of the understanding; as Ionesco says with regard to his experience prior to the writing of The Bald Soprano: For me, what had happened was a kind of collapse of reality. The words had turned into sounding shells devoid of meaning; the characters too, of course, had been emptied of psychology and the world appeared to me in an unearthly, perhaps in its true light, beyond understanding and governed by arbitrary laws.4 Still, the essence, and, in Hegel's phrase, "the entire bodily realization" of this vision of existence is presented, paradoxically, through words. Ionesco's assemblages of words, his apportionment of "speeches" governs the actor, and the overall rhythm of the play-performance, just as Ibsen's words govern his actor and the rhythm of, say, Ghosts. That is, in Ionesco, as in Ibsen, the language, as Hegel says, "is in its free domination asserted as the commanding central focus, upon and around which all else really revolves."s Hegel's statement here provides us with an adequate basis for recognizing and defining one major direction in modern drama and theatre. In such drama and theatre, the playwright's words inform and direct the integrated activities of director and actor: the...

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