The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective by David Cole (review)

REVIEWS David Cole. The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspec­ tive. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 177. $10.00. Perhaps in fear that theatre in our society is dying, a number of con­ temporary critics and performers have turned to anthropological accounts of mystical experiences and ritual to uphold it. Cole is now among them. But his defense of theatre goes even further: "Theatre, and theatre alone of human activities, provides an opportunity of experiencing imagi­ native truth as present truth" (p. 5). This unique aspect of theatre, Cole argues, is the essence of the theatrical experience and its significance. From this premise the author moves to the idea that theatre is necessarily a manifestation of an illud tempus as Eliade explains it: "a time of ori­ gins, the period of Creation and just after, when gods walked the earth, men visited the sky, and the great archetypal events of myth-war in heaven, battles with monsters, the Quest, the Flood, the Fall-took place. Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Greek mythology are familiar por­ trayals of the world in illo tempore, 'in those days' " (p. 7 ) . Theatre is a manifestation of the place where the original events are always happening and the original figures are always to be found. This illud tempus Cole identifies with our psychic interior. The actor is he who, like a shaman, goes to meet the images and, like a hungan (possessed person), returns as them to us. The audience, then, understandably feels itself to be in the presence of the uncanny. Its role is to gain awareness of how the illud tempus manifests itself at once through actor's bodies, scenic resources, and language. The scenic resources serve as hierophanies in instances where the human body cannot. Language in the theatre is the hierophany of consciousness. Cole states that the perspective his analysis aff ords is corrective, and to some extent it is: it directs our attention to theatre as a medium and a process, as analyses in terms of content and meaning do not; and it re­ examines the problematical nature of the acting process, persuasively challenging the idea that acting can fully be understood as imitation. At the same time, despite the au courant vocabulary and sources, Cole's perspective is narrow and conservative. His genetic argument is proscriptive. Cole highly regards that theatre which follows a narrative sequence, is manifest in language, yields to analysis in terms of Jungian archetypes, the language of which is expressive of individual character's psychology. ''Political" theatre, by which Cole means all that theatre which is not principally about the problems of its own realization, is misguided: "There is no place in the theatre for the great concerns of 172 Reviews 173 man : suffering, identity, justice, love, death" except insofar as these con­ cerns provide a means of exploring mimetic problems" (p. 161 ) . "The situation is only a means" (p. 161). Oddly, though, the most reflexive theatre of all , the avant garde theatre in our time, is not well-regarded by the author either. Environmental theatre and audience participation experiments, he says, deny the audience its separateness and passivity which are essential parts of the response to the uncanny. And the actor in the avant garde theatre seeks to manifest not an archetypal image but himself: "The criterion of an action's being theatre is not the reality of the action but the state of mind of the person who performs it; that is, whether he regards it as his deed or the Images" (p. 78). Then, too, theatre which is difficult or for a limited audience is inferior: "Theatre should be widely and instantly comprehensible . . . it follows from the nature of the event. 'Hierophany' is total revelation; being a hierophany, theatre totally reveals" (p. 1 41 ). A playwright, Cole denies the value of the work of directors Meyerhold, Peter Brook, Grotowski, and the Becks because they have "interpreted" the archetypes rather than presented them in all their original strangeness, and thus have denied them their power. Distrust of language is the expression of lack of "confidence in the ability of any exterior channel to manifest the life of...