The Politics of Downtown vs Suburbia

I've now seen a few articles centred around the Toronto electoral map for the 2010 election. I post the map below, not to be inflammatory, but to offer a historical context to consider the problematic nature of the Right-wing "populism" in the outlying regions vs Left-wing "elitism" in the city centres.

This is map of the German elections of 1933, in which the Nazis won a majority. Dark brown represents the districts that they won outright; pale beige represents where they lost. Look at Berlin (#2 on the map) vs the surrounding regions. Without wanting to suggest that the actual politics are equivalent (they are decidedly not), I do want to suggest that there is a case to be made that the styles of political discourse seen in that 1933 German election (a decline into grievance- and fear-mongering, name-calling and contempt for reasoning) were comparable to those that have led to the similar looking maps of Suburban Ford Nation vs Downtown Smitherman supporters, or, in many Canadian cities, Downtown Liberals/NDP vs Suburban Conservatives. My point, really, is that an extremely divided electorate is, in aggregate, a stupid and even dangerous electorate. I hate the idea that we must fatalistically accept this situation. I believe that the major political imperative all of us face is to wrest the discourse away from sensationalist and ruthless demagogues, to find a way of acknowledging, articulating and addressing the feelings of grievance that drive many into the hands of those who are being elected on slogans rather than because of soundly-reasoned platforms. It may be infuriating that people vote that way, but they do. Mockery, however well-deserved, will not do the trick of reforming them; nor, evidently, will appeals to pure logic. Patiently reaffirming common interests in order to pull people back into some shared centre may be the best we can do.

Grotowski's lab

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this clip from a film made in the early seventies about Jerzy Grotowski's theatre lab. Now, I realize that many, if not most people in the world, would dismiss what they see as flaky, but we who come from a theatre background are supposed to be more open-minded than that. And I've tried to be, so watch it with as much of an open mind as you can muster, and then I'll say what I think.



Okay, so here's what I think: First of all, I recognize the value to a performer of feeling expressive vitality throughout the body, but this strikes me---as a lot of Grotowski's stuff always did---as pretentious and obscurantist. "If this precision is absent, then the result is useless..." says the narrator near the end. And yet, it's not clear to me what the intended theatrical "use" of this sort of thing ever was. You could defend it by analogy with theoretical physics, I suppose, but the body is not abstract, so that argument would be straining for validity. Relevance seems a fair issue to ask about. Those hand movements resemble something encountered in Kathakali training; but absent the tradition, what would be the point of such specificity of gesture? Are we really to accept on faith that it is all preparation to convey some aracane code, "signaling through the flames" (Artaud) about some inner truth? The meaning is somehow thrown back on some vague organic feeling of rightness for the performer, but what could it communicate to the greater world? We know (v. the film "My Dinner With Andre," where Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory discuss this at length) that Grotowski ended up turning his back on theatre and channeling his energies into a sort of quasi-religious isolated community---a cult.

Now, there have been plenty of people who have embraced cults, and who have found therein for themselves a tremendous existential sense of purposefulness. But my beef with cults is the same as my beef with any ideology: part of our life is---must be---irrational, but as soon as you exclude rational argument, doubt, and evidence from any project altogether, it becomes a vehicle for our broken, limited selves, and refuses to engage with what we might be.

Moving one's hand into a difficult and painful position can undoubtedly strengthen the hand and even the self; but I feel such acting exercises should never entirely lose communication with rationality. And when I look at this clip, I see Grotowski's lab well on its way down such a path.

Noël Coward’s Private Lives

These are the programme notes for my production of Private Lives, for Plosive Productions at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa, play September-October 2013.

David Whiteley and Alix Sideris in a publicity shot for Private Lives. Photo by Andrew Alexander.


“I think that very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.”

The critic John Lahr once declared Noël Coward’s Private Lives to be the “high-water mark” of “comedies of bad manners.” If we remove the qualification “bad” from Lahr’s memorable description, we will find that Coward’s play is joined by a couple of others, most notably Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Should that observation encourage us to look for a sensibility shared by two writers who created widely celebrated, socially astute personas within a society that rejected their sexuality, we may certainly find evidence of it in the plays. It is undoubtedly true that any society that criminalizes homosexuality must inevitably turn every gay person into a performer of some sort; a select few will become consummate performers whose personas define the style of their eras.

Rather than resting with that one insight, however, we do well to consider some of the other sources of the disengagement Coward felt ⎯ and in turn bestowed upon his characters. As suave as he seemed as a public person, Coward had known humiliating poverty before he finally knew great wealth, and this, along with his status as a “bohemian” artist and agnostic, made him highly conscious of his lack of ease amongst complacent materialist philistines and prudish Pharisees. Many if not most of his comedies are founded on such a conflict: “artistic” types discovering that they are not merely incompatible with, but weirdly incomprehensible to those who complacently identify with social conventionality.

At its darkest, Coward’s indictment of such complacency was expressed in Post Mortem, the work that is chronologically closest to Private Lives and which shows the ghost of a man killed during the Great War returning to find that in the 1930s, people apparently have learned nothing whatever from that debacle: complacency remains the greatest threat to vitality and humanity. At its lightest, of course, we have Private Lives itself, in which glib, impatient irony is the method of deflecting an awareness that might otherwise lead to bleak nihilism. Amanda and Elyot are very witty; but implicitly, “being in on” the joke means one also has to “be in on” something of the raging discontent that seethes beneath the surface of this bad-mannered comedy.

In some respects, it seems impossible to set Private Lives at any time but when Coward conceived it: between the two World Wars. And yet there is very little in the play that obstinately refers to a specific time and place. Amanda’s Paris apartment is, in some ways, out of time: a forest of Arden, an Illyria, an Athenian forest, in which nature and enchantment reveal true selves in suspended time until the clock moves on and the public world must be confronted again. And it is with that in mind that I have taken a few liberties concerning the dates of some songs I have used. It is, from that outlook, simply a dull error of chronology that Rodgers and Hart did not write Elyot and Amanda’s “theme song” ---"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," from Pal Joey (1940)--- in time for the first production of Noël Coward’s play.

Raging discontent haunts idyllic Paris. Photo by Craig Walker.

The Great Gatsby

It's been years since I've read The Great Gatsby but it made such a strong impression on me at the time that it continues to haunt me in some ways. With a new feature film based on the novel about to open, there has been a renewed discussion of the book. And, inevitably, in any such discussion of a widely acknowledged classic, there will be some who claim to have discovered that the emperor has no clothes. In The Globe and Mail, books editor Jared Bland posted this article:

Why F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is anything but great

I wrote the following in response, but since I don't anticipate that the Globe and Mail will publish this in the Letters to the Editor section, I decided to post it here as well:

Jared Bland’s claim that the “emptiness” in the style of The Great Gatsby makes it a bad book is exactly wrong. The passage that he chooses to illustrate his argument is, in fact, a perfect example of how Fitzgerald captures the maddeningly elusive texture of a life that has been founded on delusion and falsehood. Practically every image defeats the reader’s normal expectation of establishing a concrete picture of the world being described, giving us the vertiginous sensation of directly experiencing Gatsby’s existential nullity. I am reminded of those who have criticized the film Citizen Kane, claiming to have discovered something “hollow at its core.” What is hollow at the core of that film is Kane himself; what is hollow at the core of Fitzgerald’s novel is Gatsby, and both have become classics because they so perfectly capture what is hollow at the core of the American Dream.

Death and the Maiden

These are the programme notes I wrote for the production of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden that I directed for Plosive Productions at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa. It plays until May 19th.

Genevieve Sirois and Paul Rainville in Death and the Maiden. Photo by David Whiteley.

In a sense, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden marks a return to the enduring theme of one of the oldest masterpieces of drama ⎯ the work that, arguably, defined for two millennia what theatre could do better than any other form of art ⎯ The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Both the very old trilogy and the much newer play treat the difficult question of vengeance and its relation to justice. But whereas Aeschylus places the question of retributive justice in a complex context of multiple and conflicting moral and religious imperatives, Dorfman has pared that question down to its starkest dimensions: the establishment of guilt and the question of what to do about the guilty.

Still, lurking behind these questions in Dorfman’s play lies another, one that is perhaps still more disturbing: the question of who we are as human beings, once the constraints of law enforcement and practical responsibility for the consequences of our acts are removed. Given absolute power over the life of another person, what would we do with that power? Such circumstances present the ultimate existential laboratory: with unlimited power to define ourselves, the mask of civility dropped, we might be revealed as monsters, as angels, or as anything in between. The question strikes to the very heart of who we are, who we want to be, and the sort of world in which we want to live.

In Canada, we may feel ourselves to be comfortably removed from any urgent necessity to personally address such questions. And yet we have a government that, on our behalf, has expressed its intentions of imprisoning more of our population for longer periods of time, and its willingness to accept information extracted from prisoners under torture. What is done, then, will be done for us, and is therefore our moral responsibility, and it is only by a willful self-deception that we can pretend to shrug such matters off.

Meanwhile, there is the unpleasant but unavoidable fact that each of us lives under a natural sentence of death anyway. So, while the consolations of any sense of justice that does not include revenge are, perhaps meagre, so are the consolations of justice that DOES include revenge. Our past suffering cannot be obliterated by the fresh suffering of another, and there is no escape from death for either the victim or the oppressor.

This is a play about someone who has been forced to become prematurely intimate with death at the hands of another, and about the question of what to do about that encounter. Intimacy of that sort cannot ever be erased entirely, so to look here for magical versions of justice that vanquish death would be naïve. But it is perhaps possible that, by fully addressing some of the questions this play raises, we can learn something about how to live.

Who Killed the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company?

(with apologies to Bob Dylan and Cock Robin)

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said City Hall, they depended on us,
And we gave them free rent, in that you can trust.
Although we clawed back surcharges galore,
Still, it’s just that the theatre should have made more.
Forty-eight years of no grants, whereas others got lots?
Yes, but why didn’t the company make pots and pots?
Sure we took tens of thousands from them each year
Did we think it would break them? Well, we don’t have a seer!
Look, last year they were desperate, we tossed them a bone,
But they failed just the same. Maybe accident prone?

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the Olympics, from their vast bed of cash
If they say so, it’s envy! Their teeth they can gnash!
We kept them out of First Avenue? Yes, that is true.
But constructional dust would’ve made athletes blue.
So we forced them to wait, but your blame we defy;
It’s not all our fault downtown rents are so high.
Too bad they were cash-broke once we had done.
But we did pretty performances; weren’t they good fun?

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the Feds, when they looked up at last
And anyway theatre belongs in the past.
It’s prisons and jets where our money must go;
And corporations need more, as you surely must know.
Maybe THEY could’ve helped Playhouse out of this jam
The ordinary folk, we know, don’t give a damn.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said big business, why look at us?
They should make their own money and not moan and cuss.
We’ll sponsor a show where our profit seems sure
And we’ll place a few ads in a glossy brochure.
But the kickback we get from the Feds is our own
And you know that you’ll never get blood from a stone.
The community’s health, hey that’s not our affair,
And the media says profits trickle down there.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the media, indignant and hurt
You can’t expect US to wear a hair shirt.
We’ve cut back on arts coverage, this much is true
But celebrity gossip is more fun to view.
As for moral duty, it’s weighed in the scales
And we struggle ourselves now to keep up our sales.
Intelligent critique is boring old hat
The public is fickle, but certain of that.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the public, shocked and aghast,
We’re beyond all reproach, we should never be asked!
If our taste has been coarsened, that is our right,
An evening of theatre? A dead boring night!
Sure, once in a while, some of us go,
But then only if it is “something we know.”
Reality t.v. is what really shines,
‘Cause we’re down to earth. (What’s “philistines?”)

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

It was I, said Max Reimer, I did the deed.
I killed it when all it could do was just bleed.
My artists and I did our best to persist,
But the time finally came to no longer resist.
Yes, art and finance is a balancing act;
One wants both acclaim and the theatres packed.
But with hits of both kinds, we’d begged for support,
‘Til at last we just had to give over the fort.
Exhausted and heart-broken: that is my cost.
I wonder if others even know what they’ve lost?

Not Anonymous

The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare

The movie Anonymous, which opened in Canada last week, is only the latest ⎯ although perhaps the loudest ⎯ in a series of attempts to discredit William Shakespeare that reach back to the nineteenth century. Anonymous depicts Shakespeare as a fraud, a middling actor who merely served as the beard, or front man, for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whom the movie portrays as the real author of the plays. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, who is best known for the disaster movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and for 10,000 BC, a film that gives an idea of the kind of distaste Emmerich has for historical accuracy.

And, indeed, Anonymous doesn’t disappoint in that regard. Emmerich shows us the playwright Christopher Marlowe alive and well on the day the Earl of Essex leaves for Ireland in 1599, when Marlowe had already been dead six years; he has a character say that Marlowe died when his throat was cut, whereas famously Marlowe was stabbed through the skull, just above the eye; he has audiences marvelling that Romeo and Juliet is written in blank verse, when blank verse had been the medium for drama for at least thirty years already, since Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc in 1561; and most baffling of all, he offers no explanation as to how the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, went on to write a series of Shakespearean plays that continued to emerge at the rate of one or two a year for the next nine years, including some, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, that allude to specific historical events that occurred after Oxford’s death.

In short, Anonymous is a dishonest work. If it exposes anyone as a fraud, it is Roland Emmerich, not Shakespeare.

However, while he bears ultimate responsibility for the movie, some readers will rightly object that Emmerich himself is not responsible for the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works. True: that responsibility belongs to a man who rejoiced in the name J. Thomas Looney. Looney first proposed that Oxford was the real playwright in a book called Shakespeare Identified (1920). However, Looney was himself responding to earlier questions raised about Shakespeare’s authorship that had begun in the 1840s, and in particular those that had been advanced by Delia Bacon, who (surely not motivated by regard for her surname) had argued that a group of writers led by Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays. And those are just the two most familiar of many astonishing theories. Other candidates who have been proposed include Christopher Marlowe (who, in this theory, faked his own death), William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, and, most recently, Sir Henry Neville. What all of these candidates have in common is that they were graduates of either Cambridge or Oxford University, which William Shakespeare was decidedly not. Moreover, all of them, with the exception of Marlowe, were also nobles.

Those facts point us to what ultimately seems to motivate all theories that call into doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. They are all based in snobbery. They are founded in indignant incredulity at the very possibility that the son of a small-town merchant could become the greatest writer of all time. The theorists try to couch their objections in supposedly irrefutable facts: they say the plays must be the work of someone who was well-educated in literature and law, someone who understood court manners, and someone who was well-travelled. But each of these points is easily answered.

The evidence of education that the plays show is hardly anything that would be particular to the university, where little literature, let alone dramatic literature, was studied. Universities then concentrated on subjects such as philosophy, theology, logic and natural science. Rather, the plays show evidence of some education in rhetoric and Latin, both of which were taught in ordinary Grammar schools. One of these was located in Stratford-upon-Avon, less than a kilometre from Shakespeare’s home, and he would have been eligible to attend it free, because his father was the town’s High Bailiff (an office equivalent to Mayor). And if Shakespeare had no formal education after he left that school, he would be in good company, for any list of candidates for second best playwright in English would have to include the great polymath, Bernard Shaw, who dropped out of school at age fifteen, and the intellectually brilliant Tom Stoppard, who ended his formal education at seventeen.

There is, however, evidence of fairly wide reading. But, demand the conspiracy theorists, where would someone of modest income find these books in the absence of a public library? Well, many of the books upon which Shakespeare’s plays depend (including some of the most important, such as an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, a Latin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a few others, possibly including Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source for the history plays), were published by Richard Field. Field was a prominent London publisher and book-seller, who was about two-and-a-half years older than Shakespeare and had grown up about a block away from him in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was Field who published all three of Shakespeare’s long poems.

It is true that the plays show some sense of how the law worked (although there is little about actual law cases); but then the Elizabethan middle class was breathtakingly litigious, and we have plenty of evidence that William Shakespeare was frequently in court.

As for the insistence that the author of the plays would have to be a noble to be as familiar with royalty as the plays suggest, there are several quick answers: court intrigues and manners were all but universally imitated in the literature of the time; and anyway, Shakespeare was often at court as an invited performer. Furthermore, it would have been much easier for a middle-class writer to learn of courtly manners and speech than for a noble to imitate the language of commoners, which the plays also contain, and which is represented more convincingly than was managed by other playwrights of the time.

The most laughable objection is that plays that are set in Bohemia, Italy and Greece show that the author must have been well-travelled, whereas Shakespeare had never been outside of England. Well-travelled? The plays speak of the seacoast of land-locked Bohemia, and likewise suggest that there is a sea-port in the inland city of Milan; they put a thick, dark forest on the outskirts of Athens, where for centuries there had been no more than olive groves; and they seem innocent of the knowledge that there are canals in Venice. I could go on, but the point is that these are the works of someone with a vivid imagination much more than they are eyewitness accounts compiled by a world-traveller. (By contrast it has to be said that the plays accurately depict the geography of England.)

Other complaints concern the alleged lack of evidence that the actor Shakespeare was an author. For example, it is sometimes declared that we have no letters written by Shakespeare. Not true. We have a few, all prefacing his poetry and typical of the grovelling that writers of a lower class were forced to assume toward noble patrons. We also have first-hand testimonials as to his authorship from those who knew William Shakespeare, such as fellow actors and company share-holders John Heminges and Henry Condell, and from his friend and greatest rival as a playwright, Ben Jonson (for whom Shakespeare had acted). Those who believe these statements are evidence that a vast conspiracy was maintained amongst all those who worked with Shakespeare have obviously never worked in the notoriously gossipy theatre profession, let alone encountered the level of indiscretion that can be expected from a bitter rejected actor. And on that point, we can say that there are also statements from enemies, such as those who objected to the success enjoyed by a playwright of modest class and education, which likewise explicitly identify William Shakespeare as the author of the plays, the author with the actor, and the actor with the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The bald fact is that no doubt whatever was raised from any quarter about whether Shakespeare had written the plays attributed to him until the 1840s, about 230 years after his death.

Why was such a doubt raised then? Well, we know that the nineteenth century saw an enormous growth in the status-obsessed middle class, and the identification of fine sentiment with aristocratic nobility. But a further reason must be that the authors of that age showed remarkably little feeling for theatrical language. Although theatre was popular, there was little new real literature to be heard on the stage; and the attempts to write new poetic dramas in the vein of Shakespeare’s resulted in many flat, turgid “closet dramas” that no one thought of staging then, let alone today. Accordingly, they overlooked the one point that stands most conclusively in favour of the actor William Shakespeare being the author of the plays attributed to him: his plays are better than the others produced during his lifetime because they were and are more theatrical. And why? Well, here is the crucial fact: of all his contemporaries, Shakespeare was one of the very few playwrights who actually lived every day in the theatre, where he learned how actors thought and worked and how audiences watched and listened. Shakespeare clearly loved the theatre, and understood better than any of his contemporaries its enormous potential to reach the secret recesses of the human heart. That he and his fellow company members realized that potential over and over again is not an achievement of which he should be robbed simply because some people cannot imagine how he did it.

The true Shakespeare is not anonymous.