Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann (review)

Hans-Thies Lehmann's Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, published in German in 2014 and now available in English translation, is a magisterial work: addressing the scope of a distinctive European genre of dramatic writing, it treats major theoretical figures from Aristotle to Nietzsche, major moments in the development of tragedy as a literary and theatrical form, and the writing of several major playwrights. Taking issue with Walter Kauffman's sense that tragedy is "a form of literature that [...] presents a symbolic action as performed by actors" (2), Lehmann argues that "tragic experience is tied to the theatre" (8), proposing an experience unachievable and unimaginable without theatrical performance.

Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre is critically dependent on the claims of Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre, which argues that the contemporary theatre has changed, at least as far as European theatre is concerned, from a theatre asserting the "declamation and illustration of written drama" (2006:21), to a theatre in which the text is one of many factors working to constitute a uniquely theatrical event. The epochal character of Lehmann's postdramatic theatre is widely familiar, but hardly unexceptionable; theatres historically have had extraordinarily different ways of conceiving the dramatic script, delivering it to the performers, implementing it in performance, and relating its work to other signifying formations, often at least as important to audiences as receiving "the drama." Even today, one might wonder about the impact of "restored" venues like Shakespeare's Globe and the Wanamaker theatre in London, or the vogue for "original" performance practices that claim to recreate an emulated mode of past experience on the horizon of contemporary performance. Since Lehmann brings "the perspective derived from investigating the 'postdramatic' character of contemporary theatre in the broadest sense to bear on the 'dramatic' tradition of tragedy" (3), tragedy emerges, not surprisingly, as postdramatic avant la lettre: a genre defined as experiential in contrast to the text-dependent theatre of the era intervening between the "predramatic" classical period, and the postdramatic present, the era of a capitalist and bourgeois European theatre preoccupied with representing "the play" as a figure for the ideological coherence of the world it reflects and enables.

From Aristotle onward, tragedy has been understood to arise from the formal logic of the playwright's text; given Aristotle's segregation of opsis from the essential elements of tragedy, tragic theatre is understood as infected by the senses, offering a disqualifying, "deceptive appearance of thinking" even when, properly understood, it might call "one to think about the deception it practices" (25). To render this experience tragic, Lehmann ascribes to it a thematic unity replacing the formal unity attributed to tragedy as a literary genre. That experience is not the tragic hero's, but "the experience of those who witness—or, as the case may be, 'live through'—the tragic process as spectators and observers, or even as participants of the event" (10). In the very different dramaturgy explored by Sophocles, Jean Racine, or Sarah Kane, tragedy consistently involves "the articulation of excess, transgression and self-loss" (299), so that within "this framework, the constitutive features of tragic experience are caesura and taking distance, catharsis, shame, anger and, finally, anagnorisis: understanding non-understanding" (168). Tragic experience must break "through the prison of cultural intelligibility," involve "self-confrontation and self-foreignness," mediated through a process of observation in which the "'realities' at issue—the canonical reactions of terror, pity and/or sorrow—are given form through a 'staging' that activates affective potential," in which an "individually experienced" situation is "determined by a situation that is not experienced individually" but addressed to "a public" (168).

Although the book's 11 chapters proceed more or less chronologically, the argument has a topical logic, pausing for a history of Antigone's reception in philosophy, and to comment on the relation between revenge and tragedy, on neoclassicism, on Racine and Jacques Lacan, and on various engagements with the possibility of a postdramatic tragedy...