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The Artifice of "Reality" ill Chekhov and Pinter* BERNARD BECKERMAN "REALITY" IS ONE of those elusive words that we can not do without. It can mean virtually anything, and so it often comes to mean nothing. And yet, it does suggest notions of concreteness, actuality, and relevance that are central to drama. Whether we like it or not, we are bound to use this word, though, at best perhaps, we can only acknowledge its import without being able to define its limits. For my purposes, I should like to distinguish two main sources of that elusive "reality" in the drama. First, there is the impress of reality which comes from our habit of relating a play or a scene to some broader context. The slice of life, after all, comes from a whole loaf, and our awareness of that whole loaf lends a sense of "reality" to the stage event. Even a non-naturalistic drama, such as Jean Genet's The Ba/cony, derives a powerful sense of actuality from the fact that we see the ritualized and deliberately antiquated charade against the background of our reVOlutionary age. In drama, then, one effect of "reality " is produced when the context within which the stage action occurs carries intense associational resonance. We can speak of this contextual envelope as the background or ground of the action. The second source of "reality" is the act of presentation itself, or to be more precise, the structure of the action scene by scene. There is • This paper was delivered at the MLA Convention in New York. December 29. 1976. 154 BERNARD BECKERMAN a raw reality which the actor projects by the sheer expenditure of energy in an organized manner. This organized manner takes the form of recurrent activities. Whereas this observation is true about all drama, it can be most easily illustrated by reference to the commedia dell'Arle. In commedia dell'Arte each character type had a repertory of speeches and stage routines out of which a play could be put together. The inamoroso had his dedarations of love and despair, the zanni had their routines of cheating and being cheated. These set pieces in themselves strike a chord of "reality," albeit a theatricalized "reality." That is why they have survived and survive even to this day. And because such set pieces have a distinct structure-that is, they provide a proven path for the expression of the actor's energy-they appear to us as figures in the foreground set against the background of association already mentioned. The impress of "reality" that we gain from these "figures of action," as I shall call them, comes in part from the contextual ground against which they are set. For instance, the poignancy of Romeo's duel with Tybalt is in large measure stimulated by the fact that as we watch the fight, we bear in mind the consequences it is having for the two lovers. At the same time, the fight engages our attention on a primal plane. It is exciting in and of itself, as a physical contest, and so we experience a sense of "reality" through the interplay of energies between the two actors. Indeed, this "reality" is double-sided, the "reality" of the convincing life-illusion of battle, and the "reality" of the actual skill displayed by the actors as duellists. We want and expect both kinds of "reality." Our impressions of "reality" thus nave different origins. First, as I have said, they come from the nature of the subject matter and the relation of the subject to the audience's own frame of reference, thus producing a ground of association. Second, they come from the artful structures writers and actors jointly compose to engage our interest, and thereby form "figures of action." Impressions from both these sources overlap and mingle, conflating the provinces of art and truth in the theatre. Since "reality" became synonymous with "realism" in the course of the nineteenth century, we find it exceptionally difficult to dissociate the idea of "reality" from that of versimilitude. That is why we insist on reading and seeing such work as Harold Pinter's associationally. We cannot help asking ourselves what...

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