Romain Weingarten's Stage Play Akara and the A-Temporal Realm

Romain Weingarten's Stage Play Akara and the A-Temporal Reahn BETTINA L. KNAPP • AKARA, ROMAIN WEINGARTEN'S FIRST PLAY, 1 is a hugely dramatic, profound and humorous theatrical allegory. When it was first performed by the Jeunes Compagnies in Paris (1948), Eugene Ionesco came away fascinated. He spoke of Weingarten's new stage language based on a series of concrete images woven in exciting patterns on stage. "Weingarten's truth," he further declared, "is the truth of the nightmare ... a profound and living truth;" his universe is "authentic, it is the universe of that rare ... lucid being, the poet." So intrigued was Samuel Beckett by Akara that he translated the entire card game sequence in Act III into English. What is Weingarten's reality that Ionesco and Beckett and so many more were and are beguiled by it? Weingarten maintains simply that "What is performed on stage is the world within." The stage, then, according to the dramatist, becomes a type of elective domain where alchemical and mystical transmutations take place in an attempt to externalize man's secret and arcane realm, which does not, in Weingarten's belief, imply the abolishing of mundane reality. Both worlds cohabit on stage: inner and outer, unconscious and conscious, irrational and rational, poetic and prosaic, amorphous and concrete, unconventional and conventional, spiritual and animal. They are either blended into a harmonious whole or viewed in collision; their rhythmic interchange arouses suspense, excitement, pity and cruelty within the heart of the spectator. What is the substance from which Weingarten molds his drama? Provocative themes to begin with; secondly, the creation of a new psychic reality (not to be confused with psychological reality); lastly, a fresh approach to language. The themes in Akara are of eternal concern. Interwoven into the very 355 356 BETTINA L. KNAPP heart of the drama, they are broached and manipulated with dexterity: the domineering female who seeks in a variety of ways to destroy the non-complying male (Martha); the individualist who rejects conformity and refuses to bow down to the will of the majority (Cat); the parent-child tustle (Marie-Lucien); sexual anomalies (Martha-Marie); the gratuitous nature of death (the Cat, the Count, Marie, the Lackey). The new psychic reality brought to life on stage results from a severe discipline on Weingarten's part. His first step is to enter into the domain of the unconscious by means of the dream. Such an act does not imply a half-dazed or sleeping condition. On the contrary, a conscious state may be most propitious to such searchings. It depends upon the mood, the atmosphere, the course taken by the individual's senses and thoughts at that particular moment. The dream, maintains Weingarten, is a "kind of screen or gate-way through which a rapport between an inner and external reality may be known." Once this dream state has been experienced, a new world burgeons forth: timeless and spaceless. Weingarten then proceeds to follow his dream's orbit. Passivity is no longer the rule. Effort is now required of him; a tension of the will permits him to further his probings which have now taken on the stature of a quest. Meditation and concentration upon certain objects perceived by his mind's eye permit these to come into focus. Once they are experienced abstractly, Weingarten's role changes. He becomes a transforming agent, a thaumaturge, a "master of occult ceremonies." He must, therefore, find some way of relaying his findings, his visions, to others. The playwright becomes the unifying principle, bringing together two disparate worlds: the internal and external reality, the individual and collective, the temporal and a-temporal. He also extricates from each sphere what may enrich his artistic work, discovering in this manner a fresh stage language. What audiences hear on stage, then, consists of concrete equivalents of abstract notions: that is, the transformation of the amorphous sensations and ideas into the word and/or the number. Once these verbal and numerical expressions have entered into the collective domain (the stage), they take on a life of their own. The quasi-automatic, symbol-studded, frequently incomprehensible series of images and metaphors, and the numerical symbols, with which...