Theatre and History: A Conspiracy Theory

THEATRE AND HISTORY A Conspiracy Theory Herbert Blau When you spend most of your waking life in the dark, in the theatre, thinking about it (as I have done), the platitudes about illusion improve with age. And the redundancy you come to amounts to this: if life is the dream, what is the theatre? Since there are stranger things in heaven and earth, what moves us there? Think about it: even the familiar, outside, may move us more. The slightest infraction of daily life, the barest slight, will affect us in depth more instantly than most scenes in a play. A small disappointment may ruin a week, and surely the death of a dog, a horse, a rat may shake us more than the death of King Lear. Indeed, it is now a staple of acting technique to use the memory of the death of a dog to support the emotion an actor might need as, say, Kent or Edgar at the death of Lear. The squashing of an insect may prepare you for the murder of Duncan. With imagination enough, it may prepare you as well for suffering the moral consequences. Or, with the paranoid scruple of a Kafka, there's a metaphysic in the insect, which has its emotions too. Then what moves us to the theatre and why go there to be moved, when the routine, accidents, and psychopathology of everyday life can provide us with the emotions we are experiencing, and even more intensely? It's not 9 the emotion, emotion is cheap. What we are really experiencing is something other, instinct scrupling, an afterimage, the integrity and shape of emotion, a sign, the consequent order of emotion, the cost, an afterthought. Theatre is theory, or a shadow of it (as we know etymologically from the Greek). In the act of seeing, there is already theory. Aristotle, much abused for ideas still inexhaustibly relevant, situates theatre between history and philosophy. Where exactly that is shifts from period to period with the histrionic sensibility, as history-in a linguistic space which scatters time-becomes philosophy, which is more and more obsessed with the trace of history, its disappearance. Use your experience, the actor is told, even as it is being invalidated. In the human sciences-psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology-research is busily "decentering" or dissolving man, that "simple fold in our knowledge" (Foucault), through a network of impersonal systems, into which the very concept of individual experience may disappear like a single ribosome in the endoplasmic reticulum or a wrinkle in the curvature of space. To say the human situation is unstable is to define the human. We are rooted in a place, we are rooted in the absence of a place. After passing through the End of Ideology, we now speak of reaching the end of history, as if all motion were but flashes and specks, a paradox of gravity, being sucked through the proscenium and out the Black Hole. Nevertheless, we are still overselling the significance of our experience. All science aside, our experience is severely limited, by frailty, screening, lapsed memory, fright. The scattering of history confounds our sense of origins. What we are is more than what we know, and most of what there is to be known we've left behind, as in a dream. "I speak to those who understand," says The Watchman in the Oresteia, rooted stonily in a place, an absence, waking over the whole known world to the virtual beginning of time. "But if they fail, I have forgotten everything." If there is theory, there is also conspiracy. The lure of the theatre has obviously something to do with the fact that others are gathered there, as if there is safety in numbers, and the repressed might be acknowledged. There is no guarantee, no more than in psychoanalysis. It is not group therapy. We wouldn't need the theatre if experience served us better. What The Watchman wants us to understand is a mystery. At least that's what the history books tell us. As time goes on, the Chorus speaks, the Plot moves, and it's not all clear that we know enough of it to remember . The...