Crommelynck’s Farcical and Mythmaking Expressionism

Crommelynck’s Farcical and Mythmaking Expressionism Bettina Knapp Crommelynck’s brand of expressionism as dramatized in The Magnificent Cuckold (1920), Golden Tripe (1925), and Hot and Cold (1934) is innovative.l He enhanced expressionism, defined traditionally as a subjective presentation of a bitter vision of humanity, by introducing farce into the stage happen­ ings, thereby enabling him to point up and then cut down social convention, organized religion, and political organizations. To the lyrical language, so important a factor in expressionist plays, Crommelynck added other means of articulating feeling: onomastically, semiotically, and onomotopeically, The farce, then, dismembered the stifling, narrow, and rigid society under scrutiny, while language exteriorized the hostility implicit in the play’s themes. To this combination of elements Crommelynck included a mythmaking device. By interweaving a structured view of humanity onto the plot, he rebuilt and solidified what the farce had destroyed during the course of the play. But this fresh view of the collective as depicted in the myth (no better than the earlier situation) became in Crommelynck’s hands an added weapon to deride and caricaturize a society for which he felt contempt. Crommelynck’s theatre is neither a civic festival nor a morality lesson, nor is it designed for relaxation. It is a theatre of action, of psychological probing, of violence and of fascinat­ ing and bizarre machinations. It is a composite of opposites: serious drama and farce. On stage, therefore, there are beatings and whippings; a series of visual dialectics that divest the hap­ penings of all sensitivity; and cacophonies that include raucous speech, screeching, jeering and snickering. The hilarity of Crom­ melynck’s monstrous emanations as viewed in The Magnificent 314 Bettina Knapp 315 Cuckold, Golden Tripe, Hot and Cold, or The Puerile Lovers is only apparent. The fun lies on the surface; it is a mask which hides a bent for the macabre and somber, a need for the grotes­ que, a derisive tendency to debase what is beautiful in life and to destroy the tenuous spiritual climes. Treachery, eroticism, and satiric ferocity are de rigueur in Crommelynck’s theater. We are made privy to a dramatist who cuts his characters open and who inflates their traits and ridicules their propensities with carnal delight in the unforgettable manner of a Kokoschka, a Wedekind, and a Strindberg. Understanding and tenderness have been banished from Crommelynck’s world. We are at the antipodes of Giraudoux’s golden realm or of Anouilh’s illusory domain. Rather, we are closer to the nightmarish and fiendish ghouls of an Arrabal, Vauthier, or Ghelderode—each wearing the gargoyle’s smirk. Crommelynck’s theatre flagellates in spectacular ways. Crommelynck’s plays such as The Magnificent Cuckold, Golden Tripe, and The Sculptor of Masks are written in the expressionist tradition of Wedekind, Kokoschka, and Strindberg. Like Wedekind whose plays depict bizarre and absurd situations, and who has been labeled “the father of expressionism and the prophet of sexuality in modem drama,”2 so Crommelynck’s theatre also focuses on the pathological, distorted, offensive, and bewildering facets of human nature. Just as Wedekind in The Awakening of Spring (1891) indicted bourgeois society for its failure to give sex education to children—his two protagonists die at the end, one from an abortion and the other from suicide— so Crommelynck shocked audiences by introducing voyeurism, phallus worship and all types of sexual perversions in The Magnificent Cuckold. The blame for these anomalies was directed at the spectators and their culture. In Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1903), the dramatist satirized society’s attempts to mask man’s enslave­ ment to sexuality, thus increasing its power over the individual and the collective. In The Sculptor of Masks Crommelynck ex­ pressed the negative side of instinctual repression with excori­ ating results. To reinforce his anger, Wedekind had his actors proclaim their lines in an unrealistic, impersonal manner, exag­ gerating every word, phrase, and clause, thus reflecting through rhythmic and tonic structures the hardness and frigidity of some of his characters. Although Crommelynck’s language is 316 Comparative Drama poetic— even lyrical at times as was Wedekind’s, particularly during love-duets—its beauty is hard, cold...