Santiago, Chile
Adel Hakim led a workshop on
the theme of ''Tragedy and Modernity'' at the Universidad
Catolica in Santiago, Chili from 15 March to 30
July 1999. He chose the following four plays to
work on: Agnès by Catherine Anne,
Suzanne by Roland Fichet, Phaedra
by Seneca, and Iphigenia by Euripides.
The project with the Universidad
Catolica was initiated by Ramon Lopez, director
of the Escuela de Teatro, during a symposium on
French and Chilean playwrights held in 1997 in which
Adel Hakim took part. The group was made up of sixteen
drama students completing their final year, all
of them professional actors. Each play was performed
six times in a 60-seat theatre at the university
specially inaugurated for the event. The plays were
translated by Milena Grass.
Adel Hakim recounts his experience
here, which was made possible thanks to the Universidad,
AFAA, the Institut français, and above all
to Ramon Lopez, with whom he built the whole project,
and to actress, stage director and company director
Coca Duarte, who was Hakim's assistant
and interpreter throughout the project.
For me, the only meaning in theatre
is political. I mean political in the broad sense
of the word with its philosophical, aesthetic, didactic
and sociological connotations. A dialogue develops
around the issues raised in the play, the mind opens
up and, as the performance progresses, audience members
continue to ask themselves questions not only about
the play but also about their own lives. Plays aren't
meant to answer questions or dispense messages, and
they can't resolve political problems either. But
they give people a chance to ask themselves questions.
This way of approaching and exploring the theatre
has always been the driving force behind my work as
well as one of the goals of this workshop.
The four plays that we worked on
during the workshop are linked in two obvious ways.
Through their titles, which are all women's names
- those of four heroines clashing with men and their
world, their power and their laws. They are all tragedies
- not in the strict, literary sense, but in a broader
sense in that the characters never succeed in shaking
off the weight of their destinies.
Through the story of these four women
belonging to men, that very system of ownership is
called into question - a system that generates the
social order that in turn engenders violence. Thus,
Iphigenia belongs to her father Agamemnon, Phaedra
belongs to her husband Theseus, Agnès belongs
to her husband, and Suzanne belongs to her husband,
who appropriates her life and creates plays from it.
As Agnès and Suzanne are contemporary
plays, thus influenced by the feminist movement, the
notion of ownership is highly contested by the characters.
One could even say that contesting male domination
is one of their fundamental themes, i.e. how can women
try to get out from under this male domination? While
the notion of ownership lies at the core of the tragedies
by Seneca and Euripides, they do not question it.
It simply leads to the death and sacrifice of women.
Some of the four plays feature catharsis,
while others do not. This is also a deciding political
factor in the theatre. Must tragedy and its inherent
pain be sublimated to the point of turning the victims
into saints and martyrs of repression? Or, on the
contrary, should the causes of this suffering and
the social processes that lead to tragedy be denounced
by exposing the horror and injustice of the suffering
inflicted and by highlighting the monstrosity of the
situation? Sublimation (cathartic theatre) or denunciation
(didactic theatre)?
Iphigenia quite obviously
transforms the young princess into a heroine of the
Trojan War, a figurehead of Greek nationalism and
a saint who thenceforth will be dear to every soldier
in the army, justifying the sacrifices that will be
asked of them and their families during the bloody
campaign which will last over ten years and will destroy
Trojan civilisation. As for Clytemnestra, she questions
neither the tyrannical patriarchy nor the logic of
sacrifice. Her way of reasoning also complies with
the logic of war.
What is extremely disturbing from
a contemporary perspective is, on the one hand, the
skilfulness of Euripides' writing and his intelligence
in creating moving - and thus very human - characters
even within this inhuman context; and, on the other
hand, the poetics of the sublime that create something
very beautiful out of fanatical Iphigenia's end. She
is fanatical because, in the end, the system succeeds
in convincing the young girl to die gloriously for
her fatherland (and for her father's career) rather
than to continue living like any normal girl her age.
As actors interpreting the play,
our stance was not to misrepresent Euripides' nationalism
or way of thinking by pulling it in another direction,
but rather to follow his cathartic dramatic line to
the end. We hoped that audiences would have a free,
modern reading of how youth is enrolled by an imperialist
military system that begins by devouring its own children
before even undertaking a war against the enemy, without
leaving them the slightest margin of autonomy or decision
with respect to their own lives. Iphigenia belongs
to her father, to her clan, to the army, to her country,
and to the interest of the nation. Iphigenia doesn't
have the slightest say in the matter even when it's
a question of her own life. Her only way of getting
through it with any dignity is by becoming an ally
to her torturers.
Phaedra is the most radical,
violent, pessimistic and the least cathartic of the
four plays. It wasn't for nothing that Antonin Artaud
took Seneca's plays as the absolute role model for
his ''theatre of cruelty''. Phaedra is a play
about monstrosity. There isn't one likeable character
that you can identify with at first sight. And yet
.
Seneca's strength - and the thing
that interests me about him all the more today - lies
in his conception of human nature. It is rather like
that of Hobbes, the 18th century English philosopher
who was against Rousseau, asserting that ''brother
will turn on brother''. That is what Seneca seems
to believe. Civilisation is only a veneer to him.
The veneer is constantly cracking under pressure from
our drives, revealing a monster behind the mask of
civilised man. This man's desires are extreme; he
kills, instigates wars and genocide. He is ready to
betray everyone and commit all kinds of horrible acts
and crimes - not from any ideological need, but simply
to assuage his unquenchable thirst for power and blood.
Like a genetic legacy that nothing can quell.
What makes Seneca particularly modern
to me is that all of his characters - led into catastrophe
and driven by passions that inevitably turn into hatred
- are possessed by visions. He plunges the audience
into the darkest parts of the characters' unconscious,
into its most unmentionable recesses. Seneca brings
to light these dreams that we, as civilised beings,
repress most of the time. In a certain sense, by going
to the end of those destructive drives, Seneca's plays
act as a kind of exorcism.
Agnès presented more
technical rather than dramatic difficulties. The actors
immediately got behind his cinematic writing style.
But we had to work on the fact that what was at stake
in the play was something ''illustrative'' rather
than ''emotional'', that it was up to the audience
to feel the emotion, which would only come across
if the interpretation was rigorous. I chose to show
the incest process and its consequences in a ''clinical'',
''surgical'' fashion - incest with all of its machinations,
wretchedness, inherent logic and violence. Here, too,
a father clearly states that ''Agnès is my
daughter, so she belongs to me'' because he believes
it and because apparently the social and family order
allow it.
The play is cathartic in that Agnès
finally finds solutions to her tragedy by becoming
a lawyer, by analysing her problem and meeting a man
who really understands her, sincerely loves her and
helps her pull through it. It all finishes with a
happy end. Well, almost.
Agnès is also a tragedy
insofar as the weight of destiny (family, genetics,
society) is perceived at its most powerful. In particular
during the scene when Agnès sees her sister
about to be subjected to the same violence that was
inflicted on her. But the sister reacts differently,
keeps the father at a distance, and refuses to accept
the same fate. It is a key scene in which Agnès
starts to analyse her own tragedy. She suddenly becomes
aware that fate is like a combination of circumstances,
and individual freedom becomes a very concrete issue.
The tragedy for Agnès at that point involves
not only the painful intrigues that she has experienced
but also the analysis of those acts.
While tragedy in ancient plays is
essentially one of repletion (events, violence perpetrated
against individuals by family, society and gods),
tragedy in modern plays involves suffering from distressed
and guilty consciences as much as from external events.
It is our genetic programming rather than the gods
that decides. The tragedy no longer comes from outside.
It is inside us.
Suzanne is the play with the
most complex tragic content. Indeed, it is no longer
a matter here of a particular event generating suffering.
It is the story of someone's entire life. It isn't
an epic about a family or a nation, but rather of
the inner life of a woman (Suzanne) and a man (Max/Zolar).
It is the love story that binds them, one of possession
and dispossession, of a woman being vampirised by
a man whom she loves and from whom she cannot get
free. It is the story of George Sand and her lovers,
of Lou Andréas Salomé with Rilke, of
Marie-Luise Fleisser and Brecht, of Camille
Claudel with Rodin and her brother Paul Claudel. So
many man-woman tragedies in which the women sacrifice
their lives and careers for those of their men. It
is also the story of a woman fighting the mind set
that has been in place for thousands of years, established
through men's organisation of society represented
by priests, writers, directors, psychoanalysts and
merchants. Each one ''reads'' women through his particular
perspective, profession, and codified view of the
world, in which women are both an enigma and a useful
object to their profession. This appropriation of
women reaches its climax in the final scene in which
every single object that belonged to Suzanne, including
her most intimate things, becomes something to deal
in, exchange or fantasise about. Despite the suffering
it causes him, Zolar is driven by some sort of male
instinct to sell his soul as well as Suzanne's to
the Visitor, a Mephistophelean merchant ever ready
to convert lives made of flesh and dreams into hard
gold.
The other tragedy exposed in Suzanne
is that of the rural world that she belongs to
and its slow extinction leading to modern man's wretched
conscience in its relationship to nature. The rural
world itself seems an entirely feminine one. It is
a magical, irrational world full of ghosts, legends,
and buried despair - a spiritual, impalpable world.
On the opposite side is the modern world - materialistic,
swaggering, macho and rational - that is constantly
changing and in which success consists in a scientific
programme that must be followed strictly and logically.
The two worlds are fighting an unfair match. In the
modern world, the fate of the rural world is to be
put to death.
The direct effects of this neurotic
relationship between men and women, and between the
country and the city, are sterility, a loss of meaning,
and the desperate search for spirituality and a reconciliation
with oneself that can only happen at the approach
of death.
The actors' main difficulty in this
play was in maintaining a subtle equilibrium between
a magical world and the very concrete world of our
everyday lives. It was in this play that one could
feel most intensely what Freud called ''a disturbing
strangeness'' that in my opinion is an essential element
in acting, especially in contemporary plays. Indeed,
the supernatural plays an explicit role in ''archaic''
plays: the presence of the gods, rituals, ghosts,
and a sense of wonder before the power of the cosmos,
the stars and planets, and the mystery of life. Greek,
Latin and Shakespearean plays are filled with this
supernatural element that coexists side by side with
human beings. The writing itself is affected by it,
and it is often the origin of a play's poetic power.
It is evident that this dimension exists in Suzanne
through the constant presence of the Last Person,
the ghost of Suzanne's father, and through Suzanne's
very belief in these supernatural forces. Yet often
the writing in contemporary plays is too close to
our everyday references if you compare them to Iphigenia
or Phaedra, in which there is a certain
distance that is inherent in the era in which they
were written. Looking for this ''disturbing strangeness''
that emanates from our everyday lives and dwells in
our unconscious becomes a process that magnifies everyday
objects, giving them a soul and dramatic intensity
they wouldn't otherwise have. Thus, it is a matter
of creating a ritual that dramatises what is familiar
to us and turns it into something magical. The Greek
playwrights' dramatic approach is nearly the opposite,
as they must make familiar something that is foreign
and distant. In both cases the dramatic tension comes
from the balance that the actors create between familiar
and foreign.
Finally, there are constant references
to cinematic styles in Suzanne, both in Roland
Fichet's writing and in the staging. The first period
in the play refers to French and Italian naturalist
cinema from the late fifties; the second period (1971)
refers to Jean-Luc Godard's films (Le Mépris,
Pierrot le fou); and the third period (1981) refers
to John Cassavettes' films starring Gena Rowlands
(Opening Night, A Woman Under the Influence);
in 1991, it was the Italian comedies from the '80s
(by Ettore Scola and Dino Risi); and in 2001, Stanley
Kubrick. But we were attempting to do all of that
without the proper funds, thus with a great deal of
humour.
Considering the characters
like statues is one way of interpreting tragedy.
Indeed, successful performances of tragic plays are
often quite static. There is little physical action
(although the actors' bodies are intensely alive)
and little movement on stage. But this economy of
movement requires a great deal of precision. Where
does this ''stasis'' come from? In fact, the extreme
nature of the events experienced by the characters
transforms them into prototypes of suffering, of human
contradictions and monstrosity. So they are transfixed
- for an instant or forever - into figures of terror,
or they become symbols transformed from their individual
existence into a representation of an event or sentiment.
Thus all tragic playwrights must create statues.
In Agnès, it is the
terror inspired by the Father's tyrannical (and monolithic)
nature that paralyses and transfixes the characters,
determining each one's position, even geographically.
It is the Father who determines the layout of the
stage. As they are modern characters, they have trouble
accepting their immobility. They struggle constantly
to move and break out of the role assigned to them
because of the father's violence. For instance, the
exchanges between Agnès and Pierre become increasingly
fluid throughout the play, symbolising Agnès'
progressive liberation.
The opposite is the case in Suzanne.
The beginning of the play requires a comedic tempo
based on fluidity and movement; and as the play progresses,
the characters are confined into tragic statues until
the final scene which is like a museum where they
are completely frozen in their suffering.
Staying alert is an absolute
in the theatre. Peter Brook gave a series
of talks entitled ''Boredom is the devil''. The role
of everyone involved in a production is to keep the
audience constantly alert. It is a difficult and subtle
challenge Then what can one do?
First of all, keep up the state of
tension that could be called ''the actor's presence''.
You must be present. You must be full of energy and
constantly vary the nature of that energy. In other
words, you must be intensely alive since that is the
case for the characters (if the play is well-written).
Then you must get behind whatever is at stake in the
play, in every scene and every line with as much intensity
as possible without ever letting up (except in a controlled
way to give the audience a breather). To do this,
you must listen to your partners and to the
audience and speak in a real way. It is only through
speaking genuinely that you can act and create the
space for acting on stage.
Finally, you must surprise the audience
by taking it to unexpected places. One of the great
flaws in French theatre today is its good taste. Good
taste consists in doing what audiences are
expecting you to do. Personally, I think that is a
miscalculation. I believe that the theatre must resort
to bad taste on an aesthetic, moral and political
level. It is an effective way to hold the audience's
attention. So much the better if some green colour,
an outrageous costume or attitude, or music that's
too loud suddenly bothers them, makes them jump out
of their seat and prompts them to criticise the production.
That's better than allowing them the dubious distinction
of feeling drowsy and comfortable. But it's all a
matter of using the right doses to achieve the one
really valid goal, which is for the playwright's
words to be heard.
My work with the students from the
Universidad Catolica in Santiago consisted first of
all in initiating a huge project dealing with the
dramatic composition of the following four plays.
There were four playwrights from three different historical
periods, thus with different writing styles, forms
and world views. This first phase enabled us to define
several performance procedures that became the basis
for our work.
-
Addressing the audience directly
without the idea of a "fourth wall", and its corollary:
seeing the audience in a very precise way exactly
as if it were another actor in the play.
-
Developing concrete connections
to each scene while developing a specific poetic
world (cruelty in Seneca; war in Euripides; Catherine
Anne's technique illustrating the incest process;
and Roland Fichet's use of cinematic references).
-
Developing the actors' "political"
commitment with respect to each of the themes
in the plays, meaning the positions the actors
take through their characters. This involves first
of all trying to grasp the playwright's stance.
What stance has he taken and what philosophical,
moral or political stance has he developed in
the play?
-
Defining group cohesion. The
commitment in question is only possible if the
entire group working on the play knows exactly
what overall goal is being pursued.
-
Defining the relationship between
tragedy and modernity. Being faithful to the spirit
of the playwright was of constant concern for
us. We discovered a style suitable for each playwright
that came out through the rehearsal process. Constant
references to current events (in this case the
war in Kosovo, social problems in the poor neighbourhoods
of Santiago, the Mapuche issue, etc.) were an
essential element in giving substance to the language
of tragedy.
-
Avoiding any psychological techniques
in the acting (such as naturalism), and also avoiding
sentimentalism. Characters in a tragedy don't
complain or weep. They don't have time for that.
They are struggling to survive. Characters in
the theatre have their own reality, their own
truth, but that reality is different from our
daily lives. So it's not a question of "believing"
that one is Phaedra or Agamemnon, but rather of
defending their point of view and, in short, of
generating an infinite number of questions (without
necessarily providing conclusive answers to them)
that enable you to construct the character through
successive layers of interpretation.
-
Constructing and hiding. The
actor's art consists of constructing an inner
life for the character that remains hidden.
-
Striving to bring out emotions.
The modernity of these plays lies in the necessarily
modern emotions felt by current audiences. The
acting work that ensues involves finding the logic
of those emotions and the process that brought
them about. Once the process is grasped and mastered,
it is up to the actors to transmit the emotions
to the audience.
At the end of this first phase of
about one month, Coca Duarte and I proceeded to cast
the play. After consulting with the students we decided
to stage all four plays, giving them all an equal
chance to work on the various roles, i. e. at least
one character from an ancient tragedy and one from
a modern play.
A real crisis broke out during the
second month of work. There were a lot of absences,
frequent "illnesses", disinterest in other people's
work, difficulty for some in learning their parts,
and an overall lack of concentration. The project
was in jeopardy. Finally, after a long discussion
during which the numerous difficulties were brought
up, all of the students decided to really commit to
the four plays, no one backed out, and the workshop
turned into a genuine group project that progressed
under better conditions. In the end it was decided
that all four plays would be staged. And the goals
that we had set up together were respected and became
visible from the outside.
Roland Fichet's presence at the beginning
of the second phase of work was very beneficial. Here
was a living French playwright who could speak about
his work, express his ideas about the theatre and
his view of the actors, share his thoughts with the
artistic team and sometimes tell us how surprised
he was at how we had staged his play (Thus, the very
surprising "Faustian/Mephistophelian" dimension in
the last scene of Suzanne that was quite a
find for us and quite new to Roland.)
Performances of the four plays were
of good quality on the whole. Nevertheless, some plays
seem frailer when performed - and thus more difficult
and fickle.
A contemporary plays such as Agnès
"goes down" easier. The well-oiled staging and immediacy
of the themes and writing style made it easier to
establish a rapport with the audience. It was the
most didactic of the plays. Suzanne is already
a more subtle and complex play that requires a certain
grace in being performed.
The difficulties in staging the ancient
tragedies were of another nature entirely because
of the immensity of the characters, the protagonists'
highly complex genealogies determining their behaviour,
the length of the actors' lines and the breathing
techniques required to deliver them, the indispensable
group concentration, and the distance separating our
world from that of Euripides and Seneca. All of these
elements required the troupe to be conditioned - and
to condition the audience - to accept a world with
its own rules, codes and references that are different
from ours.
The result is that while audiences
can imagine their own personal references to compensate
for imperfections in a contemporary play, a performance
of a Greek tragedy or a play by Seneca must come close
to a certain kind of perfection in order for the audience
to grasp and follow what is taking place.
Working on a project of this size
in a foreign language was a very exciting first for
me. And I have to say that Coca was an invaluable
collaborator, translator and friend for me and the
entire team. I was really delighted to work at the
University and to meet the Chilean actors, teachers,
dramatists, and technicians - and naturally the young
actors full of energy, dreams and aspirations for
the theatre. I hope they will keep that youthful spirit
throughout their lives.
Despite the difficulties we had in
getting this long and exciting adventure launched,
everyone finally made it on board and participated
in taking the ship safely to its destination with
a great deal of generosity, friendship and talent.
We made it to the shores of Tragedy. Now there is
the whole country left to explore. I am sure that
each of us on his own will travel along a splendid
path from here, and I wish a fair journey to all.
Working abroad is always thrilling
and shows you the greatness and universality of the
theatre. There is a sense of deep communication in
spite of the language barrier, taking us out of our
strictly French issues. Each of us brings along his
own culture, resulting in a dialogue that concerns
''all cultures''.
Adel Hakim, 30 August 1999
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