The Dramatist's Dilemma

The Dramatist's Dilemma CHRISTOPHER INNES The stage has always shown a fascination with its own workings from the Shakespearian play-within-a-play - Hamlet's "Mousetrap" or BOllom's farcical "Pyramus and Thisbe." It continues through eighteenth-century satires like Buckingham's Rehearsal or the Victorian vogue for self-parodying displays of coarse acting in the multiple versions The Savage and the Maidell: or, Crummles alld the Infallt Phellomelloll - adapted from Dickens - to Henry Irving's 1880 production of The Corsican Bwtizers (where in one scene the audience were presented with an exact mirror image of the Lyceum auditorium , complete with spectators). Even the most naturalistic drama offers examples of the same overt theatricality, as in the amateur symbolist staging with which Chekhov opens The Seagull. However, during the twentieth century this trend has intensified, as in popular contemporary successes like Alan Ayckboum's Chorus of Disapproval or Michael Frayn's Noises Off. Here the setting itself is a theatre and the whole action revolves around a performance of a play. "Metatheatre," as Lionel Abel christened such self-reference, may be inseparable from the dramatic experience. Yet in the modem era it has become almost obsessive. Quite apart from the development of presentational styles that expose the artifice or machinery of performing, whether Pirandellian or Brechtian, modem English and American drama offers literally hundreds of plays where theatre as such is the subject under discussion or the main focus. In these the characters are actors, authors, comedians, chorus lines, theatre critics or figures from other plays: the fictional context is on-stage, off-stage, back-stage or behind the scenes, and even occasionally in the auditorium. One aspect of this is only natural, of course, in a period where performers have become the most publicized of public figures. With commercial boxoffice based on the star system, matinee idols and film stars (to say nothing of pop singers) serving increasingly as models for behaviour or marketable Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 466 The Dramatist's Dilemma commodities, there is high demand for such icons as well as popular desire for insights on their private lives. The stage has responded. Recent dramatizations include Noel Coward's relationship with Gertrude Lawrence, and plays featuring turn-of-the-century stars such as Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, or Sarah Bernhardt (Christopher Durang'~ The Actor's Nightmare or Ronald Harwood's After the Lions), as well as numerous more fictive Thespians. The same tendency to self-glorification can be seen on the screen, with a film such as Diva, or in the musical, where a singer like Cliff Richards can play himself. That such figures should be so common is partly due to their inherent theatricality: heightened dialogue, emotional display and histrionic gesture are expected of the acting profession, where these would appear unnatural in ordinmy characters. At one extreme are Cocteau's mOllstres sacrees, at the other end of the spectrum (as in Neil Simon) performer-personae are simply used as picturesque subjects, like Murillo's beggars. However, what does seem exceptional and, at first glance, surprising is the even greater number of plays dealing with writers: specifically playwrights, but also poets and novelists. Even a cursory survey of major British dramatists alone gives a count of over fifty plays, in which authors are centre-stage, and almost half as many again if the field is extended to cover other types of creative artist, or journalists.I Unlike larger-than-life on-stage performers, the sedentary and largely solitary occupation of playwright would hardly seem an appropriate focus for extrovert theatrical action. In addition, drama is generally considered the most objective art form, since it requires that thoughts be not only expressed through the mouths of different (and at least nominally independent) characters , but communicated through intermediaries. Consequently, however egocentric in personality, the author has traditionally been absent from the stage, as Pirandello's Six Characters found. Yet this traditionally self-effacing figure can be seen as one of the defining marks of twentieth-century drama. Normally characterized as a poet (thus throwing the focus on to questions of artistic philosophy, moral integrity, social responsibility), rather than playwright (with its connotations of hack craftsman...