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Tragédie et modernité
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