FutureTense

I’m curious about what gives one thing dramatic weight but not another. Now I’m lost in the bewildering array of texts on drama. I can certainly recommend David Mamet’s essays Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. But the passage that I want to bring to your atention is from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space:

The condition of the Deadly Theatre at least is fairly obvious. All through the world theatre audiences are dwindling. There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole the theater not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains. The theater has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true n another sense–whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure. … [W]e do not need the ticket agents to tell us that the theatre has become a dealy business and the public is smelling it out. In fact, were the public ever really to demand the true entertainment it talks about so often, we would almost all be hard put to know where to begin. A true theater of joy is non-existent and it is not just the trivial comedy and the bad musical that fail to give us our money’s worth–the Deadly Theatre finds its way into grand opera and tragedy, into the plays of Moliere and the plays of Brecht. Of course, no where does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare. The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way–they look lively, and colourful, ther is music and everyone is dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secrely we find it excruciatingly boring–and in our hearts we either blames Shakespeare , or theatre as such, or even ourselves. To make matters worse, there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favorite lines under his breath. In his heart he sincerely wants a theatre that is nobler-that-life and he confuses a sort of intellectual satisfaction with the true experience for which he craves. Unfortunately, he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.

Peter Brook, “The Empty Space,” p. 10

Replace “theatre” with either SF or fantasy and perhaps even horror. Substitute “classic genre themes” for Shakespeare. Do we not have a fairly clear description of the field as it stands?

Anyone who watches the real successes as they appear each year, will see a very curious phenomena. We expect the hits to be livelier, faster, brighter than the flop–but this is not always the case. Almost every season in most theatre -loving towns, there is one great success that defies these rules; one play succeeds not despite but becausee of dullness. After all, one associates culture with a certain sense of duty, historical costumes and long speeches witht he sensation of being bored: so, conversely, just the right degree of boringness is a reassuring guarantee of a worthwhile event. Of course, the dosage is so subtle that it is impossible fo establish the exact formula–too much and the audience is driven from their seats, to little and it may the theme too disagreeably intense. However, mediocre authors seem to feel their way unerringly to the perfect mixture–and they perpetuate the Deadly Theater with dull successes, universally praised.

Ibidem, p. 11.

I’ve always been curious about BFF (Big Fat Fantasy). Not why it exists: the desire to leave this existence for another, exciting, one–preferably for as long as possible–is easy to understand. It’s the quality. The couple of Weiss and Hickman’s that I’ve looked at–but more so their emulators–are hard to read. The text is often choppy and confusing; the dialog painful, repetitious, and appears designed to prolong rather than reveal. I don’t think I need to go into depth about character and characterization.

I’ve heard genre snobs sneer at those who devour these books. Not me. The text itself is such an obstacle to the reader’s enjoyment and participation, these books require a dedicated reader to make it through to the end.

In theory few men are as free as a playwright. He can bring the whole world onto his stage. But in fact he is strangely timid. He looks at the whole of life, and like all of us, he only sees a tiny fragment: a fragment, one aspect of which catches his fancy. Unfortunately, he rarely searches to relate his detail to any larger structure–it s as though he accepts without question his intuition as complete, he reality as all of reality. It is a though his belief in his subjectivity as his instrument and his strength precludes him from any dialectic between what he sees and what he apprehends. So there is either the author who explores his inner experience in depth and darkness, or else the uahtor who shuns these areas, exploring the outside world–each one thinks his world is complete. If Shakespeare had never existed we would quite understandably theorize that the two can never combine. The Elizabethan Theatre did exist, though–and awkwardly enough we have this example constantly hanging over our heads.

Ibidem, p. 35

I don’t think the rote combination of the formal with the internal–the plot with the emotional arc–solves the problem. The archetypal SF short story requires both these days. You can’t set your work in front of a jury of your critique group peers without having both diligently double checked. The result–the product–is frequently competent yet surprisingly devoid of vitality or lasting interest and the genre becomes a marketplace of novelty, of talking dogs and barking monks.

Farewell, New Wave. Until we meet again.

Best regards,

Alan

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2004 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Articles & Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.