Critical+Essay+2

Critical Essay #2
// In this excerpt, Bulman discusses how Bond related the themes of Shakespeare's // King Lear // to his belief that playwrights "must be morally responsible to their societies," the result being his own version of the classic play. // Edward Bond thinks that playwrights must be morally responsible to their societies. Their plays ought not only to analyze history--how societies became what they are--but also to suggest ways in which societies can better themselves. Too often, he believes, theater is immoral. It encourages playwrights who have no political awareness; it fosters uncritical attitudes toward plays that have become classics. Such plays, he argues, may have been moral enough ill their days. But they have outlived their historical moments and entered the realm of myth; and because myth codifies and perpetuates the values of the old order, it is dangerous. Bond wants his audiences to "escape from a mythology of the past, which often lives on as the culture of the present," and thus be free to correct injustices: theater therefore must commit itself to political reform if it is to be moral instead of frivolous. Its aesthetic cannot be divorced from that commitment. Not surprisingly, then, Bond has turned repeatedly to our most revered cultural myths as subjects for his plays. By doing so, he has been able to feed on fables of proven theatrical power, yet, by revising them, to attack their social and political presuppositions The myth of King Lear haunted Bond most of all. Why Lear? Bond replies: "I can only say that Lear was standing in my path and I had to get him out of the way" // (Theatre Quarterly, //Vol 2, No.5, 1972). For Bond, Lear epitomized all that was best and worst in Western culture. Lear was authoritarian, his rule was socially oppressive, he was blind to the needs of common humanity, and he resorted to violence. And yet the old king learned to see he acquired the power to penetrate the myths of the civilization he had made--belief that tyranny can be just, that despotism can be benevolent, that violence can preserve peace. Bond loved the old king for his insight, loathed him for neglecting to act on it. Likewise, Bond admired Shakespeare's // King Lear //for its potent critique of the human condition; but insofar as Shakespeare elected to focus on Lear's // personal //suffering rather than on the society that Lear had tyrannized, Bond condemned the play as a dangerous product of its age, bound in by the very myths it exposed. Perhaps "condemned" is too strong a word. In // The Activist Papers, //Bond explains that the Elizabethan aesthetic was different from ours. In soliloquy, Hamlet and Lear spoke not merely through their own consciousnesses, but through "the consciousness of history itself." Their voices were at once personal and universal: When Shakespeare wrote the court had political power and the rulers were a private family as well as a state institution. This meant that Shakespeare didn't need to distinguish clearly between public and private, political and personal. He could handle the two things together so that it seemed as if political problems could have personal solutions. That is, the problems of Lear's world could be purged within the confines of Lear's own imagination. What was true for the Elizabethans, however, is not true for us. Bond suggests that by maintaining a fascination with the personal at the expense of the political, with the individual at the expense of the social, modern drama has devolved into absurdity; and he rejects the theater of the absurd on moral grounds: Now society can no longer be expressed politically and morally in terms of the individual and so soliloquies don't work in the same way. The individual is no longer a metaphor for the state and his private feelings can no longer be used to express cause in history or will in politics. Changes in social and political relations make a new drama urgently necessary ... The bourgeois theatre clings to psychological drama and so it can't deal with the major dramatic themes. Hamlet's soliloquy has withered into the senile monologue of Krapp's last tape. This in part explains, I think, why Bond felt compelled to revise //King Lear-//-to rip it from the embrace of bourgeois psychology where our modern sensibilities are wont to lock it and to address more clearly the moral issues it raises; to make it the public play that Bond thought it had the potential to become. Bond's model for such revision was Brecht. He had seen the Berliner Ensemble when it visited London in 1956, and his work with George Devine and his successor William Gaskill in the Royal Court Writers' Group educated him more formally in Brecht's methods. // Lear, //which he began in 1969 and which opened at the Royal Court in 1971, represents Bond's first significant attempt at // epic //drama. In it, he presents a series of scenes (equivalent to Brecht's // gestus) //that offer social and moral perceptions of the world: he disavows coherent psychological motivation of characters and eschews conventional notions of dramatic causality. Ms Carlson's interruption to explain the basics of the italicized term above...It's about Bertolt Brecht; don't get confused!

The Gestus
This is Brecht's term for that which expresses basic human attitudes - not merely “gesture” but all signs of social relations: department, intonation, facial expression. The Stanislavskian actor is to work at identifying with the character he or she portrays. The Brechtian actor is to work at expressing social attitudes in clear and stylized ways. So, when Shen-Te becomes Shui-Ta, she moves in a different manner. Brecht wished to embody the “Gestus” in the dialogue - as if to compel the right stance, movement and intonation. By subtle use of rhythm pause, parallelism and counterpointing, Brecht creates a “gestic” language. The songs are yet more clearly “gestic”. As street singers make clear their attitudes with overt, grand but simple gestures, so, in delivering songs, the Brechtian actor aims to produce clarity in expressing a basic attitude, such as despair, defiance or submission. Instead of the seamless continuity of the naturalistic theatre, the illusion of natural disorder, Brecht wishes to break up the story into distinct episodes, each of which presents, in a clear and ordered manner, a central basic action. All that appears in the scene is designed to show the significance of the basic “Gestus”. We see how this works in Mother Courage. Each scene is prefaced by a caption telling the audience what is to be the important event, in such a way as to suggest the proper attitude for the audience to adopt to it - for instance (Scene 3):

“She manages to save her daughter, likewise her covered cart, but her honest son is killed.” The words in red express the playwright's view of how we should interpret the scene; Courage's saving her business at the expense of her son is meant to prove how contemptible our actions are made by war.

(from a GCSE study guide on Brecht: http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/drama/brecht.htm#14)

A few instances will illustrate how Bond has transformed Shakespeare' s original into a Brechtian critique of contemporary culture. 'For example, he does not allow Lear a loving CordelIa to forgive him his Sills and entice him into the antisocial resignation of "Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in the cage." Such // contemptus mundi //finds no sympathy in a socialist bent on reforming // this //world. In fact, Bond regarded Shakespeare's Cordelia as "an absolute menace--a very dangerous type of person." I suspect he felt this way for two reasons. First, by fighting a war on her father's behalf, Cordelia presumes to use violence to protect the "right", and "right" to her means returning society to what it was--reinstituting a patriarchy. And second, by defending her father, by ignoring his past iniquities and assuring him that he has "No cause, no cause" to feel guilt, she reduces the play to a melodrama about a poor old man who has been mightily abused. Bond abstracted those qualities of CordelIa that seemed to him politically most significant--her self-righteous militarism and her willingness to overlook Lear's social irresponsibility--and divided them between two characters in his own play: the new Cordelia (no longer Lear's daughter) and her husband, the Gravedigger's Boy. Bond's Cordelia is a victim of the war that Lear wages against his daughters and that his daughters wage against each other. She hears soldiers slaughter her pigs; she watches soldiers brutally murder her husband; then she herself is raped. These atrocities prompt her to take revenge. She becomes a kind of guerrilla leader bent on reform who, once victorious, attempts to make her country safe by rebuilding a wall to protect it. She thus repeats Lear's error of building the wall in the first place. Lear himself has come to understand the folly of it. Walls only bring woe; and so, as a blind prophet at the end of act three--a British Oedipus at Colonus--he speaks against them. Cordelia defends herself with the myth that one needs walls to keep out enemies; and when he protests. "Then nothing's changed! A revolution must at least reform!", she replies: "Everything // else //is changed". Through CordelIa, Bond dramatizes what he regards as the major flaw in our conception of a humane society: defensiveness. Against this self-destructive CordelIa, Bond pits the Gravedigger's Boy, who embodies the more charitable instincts of Shakespeare's Cordelia--someone who would allow the king to retreat from self-knowledge and live out his old age in ignorance of what he has done. Rather like Lear's Fool, the Boy attempts to talk sense to the poor old king--to calm the storm raging within--when the king comes to him unhoused. Later, when he returns as a ghost, the Boy tempts Lear, in the words of Simon Trussler, "towards an easeful rather than a useful death" --with a vision of idyllic retreat such as Shakespeare's Cordelia offered her father. But Bond's Lear knows he must resist the temptation, because it would mean turning his back on political responsibility; and Bond's Lear has learned, as Shakespeare's had not, that to reform society, to build it into something more humane, one must acknowledge the loss of innocence and then act on that loss by tearing down the wall that separates men from other men, not merely suffer in guilty silence. Together, then, Cordelia and the Gravedigger's Boy represent the **Scylla and Charybdis**, maimed in opposition, of political defensiveness and private retreat between which Lear must sail if he is to become a genuinely moral man. . ..

Me again...Just a note about this last reference (in //my// **bold**):
 * The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002. ||
 * **Scylla and Charybdis** ||
 * (SIL-uh; kuh-RIB-dis) In [|classical mythology], Scylla was a horrible six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of a narrow strait. Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side. When ships passed close to Scylla’s rock in order to avoid Charybdis, she would seize and devour their sailors. [|Aeneas], [|Jason], and [|Odysseus] all had to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. ||
 * (SIL-uh; kuh-RIB-dis) In [|classical mythology], Scylla was a horrible six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of a narrow strait. Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side. When ships passed close to Scylla’s rock in order to avoid Charybdis, she would seize and devour their sailors. [|Aeneas], [|Jason], and [|Odysseus] all had to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. ||
 * (SIL-uh; kuh-RIB-dis) In [|classical mythology], Scylla was a horrible six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of a narrow strait. Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side. When ships passed close to Scylla’s rock in order to avoid Charybdis, she would seize and devour their sailors. [|Aeneas], [|Jason], and [|Odysseus] all had to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. ||
 * (SIL-uh; kuh-RIB-dis) In [|classical mythology], Scylla was a horrible six-headed monster who lived on a rock on one side of a narrow strait. Charybdis was a whirlpool on the other side. When ships passed close to Scylla’s rock in order to avoid Charybdis, she would seize and devour their sailors. [|Aeneas], [|Jason], and [|Odysseus] all had to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. ||

Source: James C Bulman, "Bond, Shakespeare, and the Absurd," in // Modern Drama, //Volume XXIX, no 1, 1986, pp.60-70.