The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (review)

Since my warm recommendation of Martin Puchner’s new book appears on its back cover, and he at the same time composed a text appearing on the back cover of my own recently published Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010; reviewed by Lydia Goehr in Comparative Drama), I hesitated to write this review when asked. But instead of recusing myself, I thought this would be an opportunity to raise some general issues concerning what I believe is a new direction (and perhaps even a new field) in the research of drama, theater, and performance, as well as for a philosophy that draws attention to the complex relationships between the discursive practices of these two fields. Puchner’s contributions to this emerging area of research, to which he, in different ways, has already drawn attention in his previous work, most prominently in Poetry and Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2006), demand a thorough engagement.

One of the key issues in The Drama of Ideas is how to read Plato’s dialogues and how to understand their main character, Socrates. The question is not on what grounds Plato will ban the arts from the ideal state and the (anti-theatrical) prejudices to which this position has given rise. Puchner’s major concern is rather what kind of texts Plato composed and in which sense many of his dialogues are actually theatrical, not only in the sense that they are dialogical and can be performed, but mainly because they are profoundly connected to the theater of his own time. This is not a novel idea as such, but Puchner forcefully advances this claim, turning it into the intellectual and scholarly motor igniting a Platonic, alternative historiography of Western theater, a “dramatic Platonism” even overshadowing the much more canonized Aristotelean one. Puchner convincingly carves out a Platonic tradition based on a dynamic combination of dramas where Socrates is the main character, developing scenes in Plato’s dialogues and dramatic texts with a strong philosophical basis, on the one hand, and philosophical writings (not necessarily written as dialogues) of “theatrical philosophers [who] think of drama and theater as their primary categories” (125) on the other.

One of the theoretical issues Puchner grapples with is how the genre of the dialogues, in particular, the Phaedo and the Symposium, is constructed. This is an extremely complex issue, because both works, which are indeed among the most “dramatic” of Plato’s dialogues, are actually retold by a direct or indirect witness to a curious listener who wants to learn what the participants at the occasions depicted in these dialogues said and how they, in particular Socrates, acted and reacted. Both dialogues (as well as The Republic, for example) are narrative reconstructions of past events.

Thus, after providing an analysis of the poetics of the Platonic dialogue in the first chapter (an issue to which I will return), Puchner surveys the hitherto unknown history of what he terms the “Socrates play,” plays where Socrates figures as the protagonist. This is an impressive collection of sometimes less exciting plays, but they are important for a fuller understanding of the totality of the Platonic tradition. In an appendix Puchner provides a bibliography of more than one hundred such plays, indicating that more than half of them were written after 1900. The next stage in Puchner’s argument for a “drama of ideas” is a chapter devoted to a group of modern playwrights, including Strindberg, Kaiser, Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard. Puchner argues that they can be understood as Platonic, not only because they are non- or anti-Aristotelian, but also in their own right, relying in different ways on Plato’s own dramatic practices where ideas become materialized through scene, character, and (inter-)action. The “materializer” of ideas par excellance is of course Brecht, and the question in which way his anti-Aristotelianism turns him into a Platonist (not just the initiator of epic theater...