Theatre is founded on a science of illusion. I am not now stating the obvious truism that the wall of a house shown on a stage is not a house built for men page 477 to live in, or that when a man appears on the stage and calls himself Orestes, we know perfectly well that he is not Orestes, not a Greek, nor perhaps a man different in any noticeable way from ourselves, but simply an actor, that is, an artist whose job it is to be an illusionist. I am referring to something more radical and profound: that when a playwright assigns particular words to a particular character in a play, he cannot, without sabotaging the whole dramatic structure, allow those words to contain his own considered view of life. The character tells the dramatist’s lies for him. It was, I think, John of Gaunt in one of Shakespeare’s plays who spoke about England as a demi-Paradise. Generations of English nationalists have adopted this speech as their own mystical credo, no doubt considering that it expresses Shakespeare’s view of England. We do not know what Shakespeare’s own view of England was; but I suggest that, simply because he was a practising dramatist, it could not have been that expressed by the character John of Gaunt. If it had been, then the play would have ceased to be a play. I think he said rather to himself – ‘I need some words here for John of Gaunt to speak. What should I give him? Some words perhaps in praise of England . . .’.

I hope you will meditate on the rather terrible meaning of my suggestion. It means that, for example, a Christian writing a play in which there is a character who is also a Christian dare not identify himself with that character. If he does so, the play will immediately move away from the creative void in which dramatic illusions are born, and become a tract. This is not to say that the character may not be one of his menagerie of interior selves. If one is writing a scene about a prison camp, in which there is a dialogue between a prisoner and a sadistic guard – if I were doing this, I would not find it hard to locate the prisoner – he would be quite near the surface of my mind, hungry for words to say. I would have to dig a little deeper to find the guard – yes, I have found him now – he is that self in me who used to walk behind another nervous and sickly child on the way home from school, slashing the backs of his legs with nettles. Certainly any character who breathes on the stage is brought to life by an infusion of the dramatist’s own blood; yet if he were to identify his creative intellect with any one character, that character would become a mere mouthpiece and the other characters would turn to stone.

It may appear then that the desire of an audience to receive truth – whether a truth of hope or a truth of human tribulation – from the words of a dramatist is bound to be frustrated by the nature of drama itself. The situation is not quite as barren as all that. I am by habit a poet, and when I began, no doubt very awkwardly, to write plays, I fell naturally enough into the trap of trying to give my characters truths to say as truths might be conveyed in a poem. Thus, in my play The Wide Open Cage I gave the priest appropriate words to say about the relation of God to man and man to his neighbour which represented what I then thought to be my own view of the page 478 matter. Thus the play was stalled nearly every time the priest spoke. At best I had tried to give him poems to speak. In a poem, though no single image, or cluster of images, contains a truth, the totality of images – along with sound, rhythm, and all that goes to make a poem – form a complex mirror to reflect and perhaps even ‘incarnate’ some complex truth of the human condition. In a play, however, it is different. The total play resembles the total poem: thus no single statement by a single actor, or cluster of statements by various actors, will convey a message from the dramatist to the audience. One has to look for the message (if that is the right word for it) in the play as totality – in words, movement, colour, shape, noise, silence – as a highly complex pattern of illusions combining organically to reflect or ‘incarnate’ a truth not otherwise conveyable. When I grasped this fact I ceased to be a dramatic journalist or pamphleteer and became a dramatist, however feeble my powers may be. It was a metaphysical step into that terrifying void of creative scepticism which is represented in the theatre by the stage itself, the wooden ‘O’, the birth cave and death cave, the arena within which communal myths are able to be enacted.

If the playwright is the man who makes the play, the producer is undoubtedly his surrogate. An actor may not be aware of the play as a totality, but the producer must be, since he is the man who adds three more walls of a house – sound, movement and spectacle – to the one wall the playwright has given him in the form of a script. Some say that the producer must understand the original intention of the playwright: the aim is no doubt worthy, and may lead to good side-results, but I think it is impossible. He would have to become the playwright before it could happen. No; rather he must discover in himself those conscious and subconscious attributes which are nearest to those which he has discerned in the playwright. He must think and feel like Ibsen, like Aeschylus. And I think this involves fidelity. An actor whose own bodily rhythms conflict with those offered to him by the words of a particular part may modify the playwright’s words a little without making more than a tiny dent in the possible structure of the play. But a producer who instead of being the playwright’s surrogate tries to be the playwright will run headfirst into trouble. If they are worth using, the words should be a sacred text. If the producer wishes to be a playwright, let him then write his own plays and produce them. You may take it from this that I am fundamentally opposed to the methods of workshop drama. If a play is to be a collective construction, made – as some quite good vaudeville acts may be made – by the creative ad-libbing of producer, actors, and a captive playwright, the result will be nobody’s work and a dog’s breakfast. I see it (despite the intelligence and courage of people like Joan Littlewood) as an act of trespass on the part of the producer.

The powers of the producer are already real enough. He is the necessary Zeus of the universe of the theatre. A Zeus who wishes to take charge of page 479 every detail of stage management may, however, become dictatorial and petty-minded. I have watched three producers at work. The first was Ngaio Marsh. Her method was somewhat rigid. In a performance of Sartre’s The Flies, she had every move of the actors plotted, if not with chalk then near enough to it. Yet she could accomplish a brilliant and mannered production. The second was Richard Campion. His relation to the actors seemed less rigid. He had verve and flamboyance and a liking for spectacle, with that wish to let off bombs on the stage which is a pleasure to any playwright. I think his approach was instinctive rather than intellectual. He had a bad play of mine, Three Women and the Sea, move and breathe as far as was possible for something dramatically and intellectually defective: he managed to cover up the gaps by spectacle. In a better play, The Wide Open Cage, he advised me to write a middle act; which I did, to the play’s advantage, since this act came out as black comedy. But this advice stopped short of the methods of workshop drama. Campion made the suggestion and left it at that. He did not tell me how to go about my job, or ask me to groom a part for a particular actor.

The third was Patric Carey at the Globe. He allowed more freedom to the actors than either of the others did; and I think this factor increased the vitality of his productions. He also felt his way towards a clear intellectual and emotional grasp of the intention of the playwright, by a process of identification and with entire respect for the given script. His Zeus did not intervene in every detail of stage action. He seemed concerned most with bringing dead areas to life, with increasing pace when it lagged, and with the play as a totality. The fact that his theatre is basically non-commercial has allowed him to put on the plays that he actually wishes to produce. I think I have understood most of what I know of the art of the producer by watching him.

While the playwright is obviously enough the primary creator of the play, the producer is not therefore only a secondary creator: it is ‘his’ Antigone, ‘his’ Look Back in Anger, that takes shape on the stage; and in the course of a lifetime he may create a thousand more plays than any one playwright has ever written the scripts for. By naming him the playwright’s surrogate, I wish only to stress that he is the builder of the theatrical structure of illusion, not its original architect. Yet an architect may know very little in a practical way about the exact uses of concrete and metal. I doubt if the playwright should try to be a co-builder. Where the producer insists on being the co-architect of a play as well as its builder, the result is commonly an absolute reliance on the art of spectacle.

Lately I took the part of the old boozy doctor in a performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Globe Theatre. Because of Carey’s practice of allowing actors to work out their own version of a given character, their own bodily movement and their own way of speaking the lines, I had a chance to find out what the art of an actor is. The doctor claimed to have little or no page 480 memory of past events; but this was no help to my own defective memory – I still had to remember the lines through which he claimed to be unable to remember, and solved part of the problem by cheating, by pasting a partial typewritten script on the inside of the newspaper he is supposed to be reading most of the time on stage. This brought home to me with particular force the truism that the actor is not in fact the character he plays. I can think of five separate faculties I had to bring to bear on the part – the faculty of memory, in my case overstrained; the faculty of bodily movement (while the play was in progress, I found myself cultivating, wherever I was, an old man’s dragging step); the faculty of expressive speech; the faculty of understanding, which included some attempt to comprehend the way in which my particular part fitted into the play as a whole; and a faculty for spectacle, which I indulged by making my hair resemble a birds-nest, to illustrate a line that Chekhov gives to the doctor, and by various slovenly details in my way of dressing. And there may also be the faculty of observation, which I do not possess in any marked degree. Underneath all this, however, I had to find that subconscious area in myself which corresponded most nearly to that segment of Chekhov’s subconscious mind which is the doctor: a sentimental nihilist to whom life seems a gigantic graveyard. Since I am alcoholic I had no trouble at all in finding him; and once I had found him, my acting was real acting, however incompetent otherwise.

The problem then occurred to me, as it had done several times before, in particular when my plays were being produced by Campion: If a girl who is a virgin is given the part of a prostitute to play, how can she play it well? The answer lay now in my own experience – namely that the actor or actress has only to find that subconscious area in himself or herself which corresponds to the character they have to play. The art of the actor has much to do with subconscious vitality but very little to do with objective experience of life. Perhaps the virgin would play the prostitute more aptly than an actual prostitute could, because she would be drawing on an unused part of herself. Could a prostitute play a virgin? I do not doubt it, remembering Blake’s lines –

‘Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce! . . .
Every harlot was a virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan . . .’

Certainly I have found as a playwright that I am more able to handle the stage projections of romantic love as those projections have tended to play a smaller part in my own life. Purity of acting may well be in inverse ratio to the sense of personal involvement in a part. The virgin, however, who was also a Puritan would encounter the problem of negative involvement. One can see why the Cromwellian Puritans felt they had to close down the theatre. It was too near home for them.

How much of the play can be derived directly from the diction of the playwright? Certainly stage speech itself embodies that diction, with whatever interpretive nuances the actor may choose to give to it. As far as a play is speech, it relies on what the playwright has written. The pauses and silences which may be the most expressive parts of a play are also likely to be discernible in the script, even if the playwright has not indicated them in a fully conscious way. It seems to me wisest for the playwright to give no more than the minimum of stage directions, in order to avoid trespassing on the territory of the producer. Following the opinion of Carey, but not unduly swayed by it, I think that the movement of an actor on stage can be derived from the rhythms of the words and phrases he has been given to speak. If the playwright’s own imagery is predominantly auditory or visual, this may be a hindrance and lead to a static performance; if, on the other hand, his imagery is predominantly kinaesthetic and muscular, this will lend itself readily to the movement of the actors. One could say then broadly that the part of the total meaning of the play which is meant to be expressed in bodily motion can be found not in the intellectual meaning of the playwright’s words but in the rhythms of his phrases and sentences. The point at which the movements of separate actors begin to cohere and flow together in a total movement involving all the actors is the moment when the play itself begins to move.

The visual illusions of the stage are, to my mind, the most variable factor and the one that need depend least on the playwright’s intention as expressed in the script. The same play could quite possibly be performed on a bare stage, or with naturalistic costume and setting, or with an abstract stage design, and in each case the total meaning of the play would certainly be modified but not essentially changed. It is only when the play itself has little or no meaning apart from spectacle (as in pageant plays) that the type of spectacle can seriously determine the meaning of the play. The best stage designer in this country is Rodney Kennedy; he is also an able producer; and I seem to remember that his inventive flair was highly various, so that one could be certain of a new stage design for every new production of a play. The stage designer is the freest man in the theatre.

What questions do I ask? What questions will any playwright ask himself in these days? The central kind of question that we ask ourselves about the human condition will determine the kind of drama, if any, that we will create and receive. I do not ask myself whether the human race will survive the next holocaust. That is a question for the journalist and sociologist – for the sincere administrator – perhaps for the good family man – and the drama that comes from it will be massacres and protest marches, not plays. I do not ask myself whether Christ is God, nor indeed whether God exists – I have made up my mind about those matters long ago, and so could only hand on a tract, not share a problem with my audience, since (for me) God died on the Cross and page 482 lives in each one of us. It is better to be silent. The question of the age seems to me a narrower one: Whether man does or does not possess free will? It is the question which guns and newspapers propound to us. I do not fear the annihilation of God; but I fear the annihilation of human freedom. One may say that the theatre would suffer if man died, even if he still moved and spoke by reflex and was able to watch a TV screen; for the theatre depends on tragedy, and without free will no tragedy is possible. The mood of the problem has been stated exactly by Lawrence Durrell:

The hyssop and the vinegar have lost their meaning
And this is what breaks the heart . . .

In the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd I see evidence of a gigantic spiritual struggle to express the tragedy that occurs when tragedy loses its meaning. It is only too easy to see the outward and visible evidence of this diabolic change, when the annihilation of a thousand villages by liquid fire cannot draw a sigh or a tear from the faces made of glass and steel and newspaper. Fear, whom Bernanos called the daughter of God, has left us, to be replaced by the Devil’s daughter, Vacuity. Are we to blame the playwrights of the Absurd for expressing in their plays the horror of this change? Indeed not. They may help us to understand ourselves. The theatre of spectacle which our audiences seem to prefer – if one can judge by the endless performance of Salad Days by all the drama groups in this country who hope to make ends meet – will never do that for us.

Apart from the actual Theatre of the Absurd, whose playwrights – Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, and perhaps Genet – I am prepared to honour and learn from – there has been a gradual coming together of tragedy and comedy in the theatre at large. Again, the mood of the problem has been stated by a poet, Louis Johnson:

The clown in the grip of the ceremonial terror
That without laughter darkness inherits the flesh . . .

I think of the existential parables projected by Marcel Marceau in pure mime, or the great tragi-comic statements of Chaplin himself, where social satire undoubtedly has its roots in the human condition. Then, if one examines that play of Living’s in which a man takes up residence in a boilerhouse, and endeavours to grow mushrooms there to feed himself and his wife, one sees that the genre is both tragic and comic: the distinctions have melted and vanished. The playwright has improvised a myth. If one looks for the source of such a myth, it might well be found in the Greek Hades, where Tantalus reaches out for food and water that perpetually escapes him, and Sisyphus each day of his infernal life rolls the same boulder to the crest of the same hill.

A dramatist is not in any ordinary sense a sociologist. It was, I think, one of the errors of the Theatre of the Left to blur this necessary distinction. As a result their plays tended to become crude demonstrations of social theory, depending much on spectacle rather than the revelation of a myth concerning the condition of man. One major playwright of the Left was, however, free in the main from the prevailing defects of shallowness and crudity. I refer to the work of Bertolt Brecht. Why did he not succumb? I suggest that when he dismembered the bourgeois theatre of his day, it was not to reassemble an alternative illusion that spiritual security belongs to the proletariat. Instead he presented us with parables of the human condition in which man is inveterately insecure, the builder and abandoner of cities. And he had an instinct that led him to any sources of folk art he could find: the same instinct that has led many English playwrights to try and tap the folk energies of vaudeville. I imagine that many orthodox Communists would complain that Brecht is too pessimistic, too distrustful of the reality of any proposed Utopia. This distrust, however, was his glory and his element of freedom.

A deliberate realism will always tend to butcher and deform the necessary illusions of the theatre. Given that our own defect is more likely to be sensational nihilism (since a capitalist society breeds nihilism as a dungheap breeds flies) than any doctrinaire political straitjacket, I think the first temptation of a New Zealand playwright will always be to become a dramatic journalist. I have not seen Bruce Mason’s The Pohutukawa Tree on the stage or on television; but when I read the play, it struck me that despite the genuine warmth and nobility of its conceptions, two factors had damaged its dramatic structure – Mason’s implicit pro-Maori argument, which tended to annihilate the necessary dramatic detachment, and a realism that would at the point of crisis slide over into melodrama. I was sympathetic, since I had walked into the same trap myself when I tried to put Maori characters on the stage; and Mason’s play does go beyond the ordinary limits of journalism; but since the temptation is likely to be endemic, I must try to indicate how it may be overcome.

There was a play written in Victorian times about the murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn; and it has since been put on the stage as a kind of period comedy. In that play, as in actual life, a young man killed the girl whom he had made pregnant and buried her under the floor of a barn. Some person (the girl’s mother, it may have been) was visited by her dead daughter in a dream and told about the murder and the manner of burial. The precise details do not matter much. But lately I was trying to work out how one would write an actual play, not a melodrama, about such an event: and this is what I came out with, in my head, though not on paper.

A young man, living peacefully with his wife in a house in a New Zealand suburb, opens the paper one morning and reads about a case of combined page 484 murder and rape. The victim of the assault is a schoolgirl of thirteen. Throughout the rest of the play he has to wrestle with the delusion that he is the man who has raped, murdered and buried the girl. The peaceful, even banal happenings of his household would provide a counterpoint of black comedy to this central fiction; and there would be some implicit indication that the household was not as peaceful as it seemed, but contained the hidden seeds of desperation, vacuity and violence. Thus the play would not present the journalistic problem – ‘How is it that some people, not ourselves, become monsters?’ – which is of course the false dilemma presented by all melodrama – but the problem, to my mind genuinely dramatic – ‘How do I come to be at the same time a criminal and not a criminal?’ Since this human dilemma is shared subjectively both by those who happen to commit crimes and those who do not happen to commit them, the audience’s problem of identification with the central character would be immediately solved. Though the play might exhibit elements of the Theatre of the Absurd, the audience would not ask the truly absurd ‘realist’ question – ‘Who is this person on the stage? Could he be a neighbour of ours?’ Unless wholly entrenched in illusions of spiritual security, they would recognise him as themselves. The problem of situation would be very much the same, at a less complex imaginative level, as that of Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. A phrase from a poem of my own that strikes like a tuning fork in my mind with regard to this unwritten play runs like this –

I have done murder in dreams; sleepwalking wait
The agony of light . . .

The phrase itself would be much too flamboyant for use in such a play; but it indicates the genuine spiritual dilemma with which I would be concerned. The play would not be journalistic and soothing; it might include an explosive use of the vernacular – and so I suppose it would never make any money for me . . . Yet does this have to be an absolute assumption? Do our audiences get the playwrights they deserve? Or is it rather that our playwrights get the audiences they deserve? When half the audience had left the imagined performance of my unwritten play, whether in body or in spirit, the half who remained (say, twenty-one people) would be that receptive group for whom it is a privilege to make works of art. And they might include quite as many semi-literate office and factory workers as pseudo-literate teachers and university people. At least that is what I dare to hope. The hardest thing, however, would be to find a good producer who was not already bankrupt or furiously producing Salad Days in order to fill his empty coffers.

There are those among us who would be glad to see a safe religious drama: tableaux from the Gospels perhaps, performed in the church porch on Holy page 485 Saturday. And recently I attended the performance in First Church, Dunedin, of a religious drama of a different kind. The playwright was an Italian whose name I forget, but who had been a judge under the Fascist Government in Italy; the play was performed by a company from the Globe Theatre; and the theme of the play was the religious and ethical problem of free will most basic to our times. The minister deserved praise for his courage in allowing the play to be performed in his church. The acoustics were inevitably somewhat unsatisfactory, though the actors tried to speak twice as loudly as they would have done in a theatre. During the discussion that followed the play, in a room at the back of the church, it seemed to me that the audience was somewhat bewildered and dissatisfied with the kind of play which had been presented to them. Some, though not all of them, would have preferred a clearer ‘message’ – a statement of spiritual security, I think, rather than a statement of the insecurity of the human condition. Their dissatisfaction merits consideration.

Human stupidity, not Divine illumination, is the communal foundation of dramatic art. If man’s intellect were not partially blinded, he would reject the spectacle of the theatre, since no illusion could satisfy a mind already in possession of the truth; if man’s will were not weak and his passions disordered, the main material of the dramatist would be lacking. It is precisely the element of doubt and possibility, both moral and intellectual, which enables the dramatist to ‘corrupt’ his audience with illusions which they find more satisfying than a void reality; indeed, as in the plays of Beckett, where the dramatic structure comes very close to embodying that void reality itself, the satisfaction of the audience is often uncertain. If I say that dramatic art is essentially religious, this is not to imply that it is likely to be safe or edifying. Ionesco records how, at the first performance of his first play, La Cantatrice Chauve, he felt terrified at seeing characters of his own imagination walking about the stage; and when the director of the play, Nicolas Bataille, played the part of Martin, the playwright found something almost diabolical in this incarnation.

The attempt to create a deliberate Christian drama would probably kill theatre. I recall how at the end of a recent play of my own, The Band Rotunda, the character who has most sense of order in his make-up is impelled to cry out to his crucified God – ‘Come down! Come down, you dirty mad old bugger! Can’t you see that we’re dying? . . .’ That ejaculation can no doubt be theologically justified in terms of the terrible and mysterious saying of St Paul, that Christ was made sin for us. But the obvious dramatic justification is that it was necessary at that juncture of the play for that particular character to use those precise words. My own Christian soul was by no means overjoyed by it; but when I write a play I am concerned not with edification but with dramatic truth expressed through a series of illusions. I am not Concrete Grady, though Concrete Grady is one of my secret selves. But a certain type of bourgeois religious audience may be unable to distinguish the statement page 486 of a character in a play from the total dramatic statement of the play itself: an inability quite understandable when one considers the slops on which they are daily fed by the radio, the newspaper, the TV screen and the commercial theatre.

My belief is that the only true Christian drama already exists in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. When, near midnight on Holy Saturday, the officiating priest plunges a gigantic candle, signifying the Risen Christ, three times into the water of the baptismal font, the Church expresses and signifies by this phallic action the impregnation of her own womb by Christ the Bridegroom. One may (I think) also claim that she is expressing in the purest and most massive dramatic form the sexual and aggressive impulses which are part of human nature; thereby refuting by word and action the Puritan in our hearts who would regard the Incarnation as a gross event, and much prefer, in place of that magnificent liturgy, a cluster of abstract ideas surrounding a void.

I do not see myself as likely to add my own glosses to the liturgy of the Church. It is possible that no Western drama, since Christ, can avoid either an incarnational element or the pressure of its absence. But the Christian element, if it is discernible, will enter rather as the colour of blood spreads through water, secretly and all but invisibly. It may be no more than a literary awareness that infinity and eternity have lodged themselves at the core of human hebetude, like bombs planted there that will eventually and mercifully blow us to pieces; or an awareness like that which one finds in these words of W. B. Yeats:

Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline . . .

I am still moving in the sphere of generalities, abhorrent to the producer and the actor. Yet if, as I strongly suspect, all drama is religious drama, the religion which has most shaped and tormented us cannot be wholly excluded from the dramatic equation.

When I say that all drama is religious drama, I am not referring to God, our heavenly Father, but to the gods – who are, as it were, our imaginary relatives, our secret selves, principles embedded in nature and in the human breast. The incurable pantheism of the human soul has a legitimate expression in the art of the theatre. To sharpen the matter, I would like you to ask yourselves – ‘Who is the more real – Orestes or Jupiter – in Sartre’s play, Les Mouches?’ Or – ‘Who is the more real – Miranda or Caliban – in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest?’ Or indeed – ‘Who is the more real – John Osborne’s Luther, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Aeschylus’s Prometheus?’ And page 487 if you think long enough about it, you may come to the conclusion I have come to – that Jupiter the god and Orestes the man have an equal dramatic reality; that Miranda and Caliban are citizens of the same world, the world of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination; that Luther and Julius Caesar and Prometheus, aesthetically speaking, are in their separate plays not men but gods, principles, powers disguised as men (or in the case of Prometheus, a demi-god without disguise) – and that what we go to the theatre to see is the conversation and battles and liaisons of the gods, who inhabit our own breast, and who are freed from bondage by the magical illusion of the dramatist and producer and actor and stage designer. I gain some support for this view from two comments that I heard recently – one (I forget the source from which it came) to the effect that without the presence of the gods the plays of Aeschylus would be mere melodrama; and another from Professor Kitto, one of the most profound critics of drama now living, to the effect that what Aristotle meant by plot was not the mechanical arrangement of a pseudo-realistic sequence of events on a stage (this would come nearer perhaps to the necessary element of spectacle in a play) but mythos, the arrangement of the total drama in the dramatist’s mind, embodied in his script, and corresponding most nearly to the modern use of the word ‘myth’. When one considers that fantasy is personal but myth is communal, one can see what Aristotle may have meant.

Following these clues, and looking again at Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it occurs to me that the myth of the unicorn is central to the play. According to that myth, the unicorn is a barbarous and innocent creature who can only be tamed and captured by the intervention of a virgin. The myth is not a matter of personal fantasy: it corresponds directly to the spiritual experience of adolescence, and the horn of the creature signifies the inhuman solitude of adolescent sexuality and intellect. The great dread of the adolescent is that his solitary spirituality will be dismembered and destroyed by involvement in the adult world. When Hamlet lays his head in Ophelia’s lap, he is the unicorn trapped by the virgin and surrounded by the hunters; and in fact Shakespeare makes explicit reference to the instruction of Ophelia by Polonius her father as to the best way to entrap the unicorn Hamlet. I do not suggest that a single myth accounts for the whole dramatic value of the play; or that Shakespeare consciously used the myth as a dramatic tool – but I do suggest that many of the apparent peculiarities of the play will dissolve if one regards it primarily as a dramatic parable of the adolescent state. The concern even of the Queen for the sanity of her son is not uncandid: apart from her own adultery and condoning of her first husband’s murder, she is an average mother troubled by the adolescent spirituality of her son. The themes of incest and murder may in fact be secondary. The adult world, the hunters of the unicorn, are by definition fallen creatures, either actual or potential liars, murderers and adulterers; and the unicorn Hamlet knows that the adult action of killing his uncle will make him one of them. Thus Hamlet’s death at the end of the play page 488 represents the necessary death of adolescent spirituality when an adolescent becomes a man. On the other hand, his hesitation fills him with shame and self-hatred, not for the ostensible reason that he is disobeying the command of his dead father – this I see rather as a necessary objective device – but rather because he knows that his spirituality is suspect, since it depends on inaction. The nearest modern parallel would be Hugo in Sartre’s Les mains sales, who criticises the veteran Communist leader Hoederer for the blood and filth that belong to adult action.

The death of Ophelia is to my mind also central to the myth of the play. I suggest that she is the tragos, the sacrificial goat whose blood propitiates the gods thus enabling Hamlet to break the spiritual stalemate. The tragic poetry of the play flows freely, like blood, whenever she is present; and it is at her grave that Hamlet acquires the power of adult action. Without a sacrifice of the putatively innocent there is no tragedy.

A myth set bare upon the stage would be simply a dream play. For full dramatic force it is necessary that the myth should be incarnated in concrete and realistic detail. Nevertheless this fact provides no sop to the theatre of realism whose proponents imagine they can put actual men on the stage. They can; but without myth the result is barren spectacle and melodrama.

The fact that Shakespeare’s plays are written mainly in verse, and verse appears to be a dead language in our theatre, is not actually relevant to the argument concerning plot seen as myth. When Falstaff comes on the stage, speaking an inflated version of the language of the street, he is just as much a mythical character as Ophelia: he is perhaps an earth-god, the wise and drunken Silenus who instructs the adolescent Prince Hal, but for whom, tragically, there is no use when adolescence is over. And one may see his death also (entirely central in the play) as the necessary death of the tragos. I believe that Shakespeare’s comedy contains elements that may embody the myth of a given play quite as much as his ostensible tragedy.

Verse seems to be a dead language in the modern theatre. I do not know for certain why this is so; but I can suggest two main possibilities. The first involves the natural tendency of poets to regard each separate statement of a character within a given play as being the equivalent of a poem. The effect of this tendency is abundantly clear in the plays of Christopher Fry, where each separate poetic soliloquy is itself a metaphysical poem, sparkling with metaphor, but the play as a whole has no dramatic unity. The second involves the general decay of the vitality and precision of language over the past four centuries, a process greatly speeded up in our own times by mass media of communication. We have no aristocracies to provide us with a court language (unless the language of the technocrat is such) and no peasantry to provide us with a folk language. Thus either court poetry or folk poetry is now a communal impossibility: the communities do not exist who might page 489 constitute an audience. A modern dramatist will naturally wish to use the language of his time at its most vital level; and it seems that he will find it in holes and corners, most of all perhaps in the explosive metaphors and jokes of pub conversation. That at least is where I found it, when my mind unconsciously soaked it up like a sponge during a period of ten years more or less compulsory imprisonment in our pubs; and I find it still there at the bottom of my mind when I look for it. This means of course that one has to do without the traditional literary decorum. The two poles of modern literary language are the deadpan banalities of our bureaucracies (invaluable for satiric use) and the explosive language of the street and the pubs and the farms and the wharves. Together they can make a dramatic idiom; but that idiom will necessarily be prose.

The later plays of T.S. Eliot may seem an exception; but I suggest that they contain in fact no language of poetry, but rhythmical bureaucratic prose set out as verse. The one real exception may be Murder in the Cathedral; and if it is a true drama rather than a magnificent pageant play, it is significant that Eliot was not able to repeat the success. Nor do I see that such a play could have been written outside a special Anglican context.

If the state of our language is as I suppose, then there are two corollaries that follow from it. The first would be that any dramatist who tries seriously to work within the conventions of radio and TV (I have tried the first but not the second) will imprison himself within the straitjacket of bureaucratic language; and when he tries to construct a ‘poetic’ or metaphoric alternative, he will find that his images are like cut flowers, that he is constructing only a bogus poetry – that is, unless his theme is death and the void itself, when he may achieve a razor-edge metaphysical sharpness in the manner of the script of a Hitchcock film. The aesthetics of bureaucracy are the aesthetics of nihilism. Words like people are told what to do by the State. The second corollary would be that the theatre should and must offer its stages to playwrights who use street language, and put aside its remnants of middle class decorum. The reward will be a spoken language that flows easily into physical movement on the stage. I do not envisage an invasion of the obscene: only that the rhythms of popular speech in our time require a certain sprinkling of swearwords, and that the creek in general will have to run muddy before it can run clear. At the present time, however, the only theatres that will run the risk of upsetting the taste of some of their audiences will be those that do not exist for financial profit or to cater to the social illusions of those audiences. Decorum is the first casualty when one tries to present a dramatic truth. The second casualty is the bank balance of the producer.

The narcissism of the theatre is a theme that could no doubt occupy a thousand volumes. A true love of the stage is at least in one sense a love of the space and silence of the human mind itself; since even before a word page 490 is spoken at the beginning of a play, the stage has already begun to signify that which gives a shape to the communal mind of the audience, who are also in a sense the only real actors. There is also a false love of the stage which expresses itself objectively in meaningless spectacle and subjectively in the pervasive narcissism for which the theatre is notorious. It is, I think, most in the realm of commercial theatre, and of those productions which are designed to produce in the audience an illusion of social stability, that narcissism shows itself like an hysterical poltergeist – ‘What a pretty set! . . . Wasn’t Marjorie marvellous! . . . The town’s looking up – they say the Golden Rivet Players are hoping to get a grant of £5000 from the Government! . . . No; he’s not homosexual; he’s the only one in the cast who isn’t – when they struck Temuka the girl absolutely rushed him! . . .’ These depressing side-issues do not interest me, except as a subject of satire. They are indications of the airless cupboard of non-drama. It does not trouble me much that they exist, since every dog must have its fleas; but when I look round the country I see at times only fleas and no dog.

On the other hand I do not feel that a rigorous solemnity is any cure. I recall how in my very early twenties I attended a Christchurch performance of Allen Curnow’s verse drama, The Axe. To hear the poetry spoken was in itself an absorbing experience. I was sitting at the back with Denis Glover and had the advantage of being somewhat drunk. There were occasions when it seemed that spirits might indeed ascend from the floorboards or descend from the ceiling; yet taking into full account the nobility of Curnow’s conception and the intricate skill of his verse, I had still a mainly subconscious nagging feeling – ‘This is fine, but it’s not quite drama; something has got clogged in the works . . .’. There are several factors (other than my drunkenness) which may have accounted for this negative impression. The first factor is one I have already mentioned: namely the tendency of poets to conceive of a given speech as a total poem, not, as it were, as a single unit in the total dramatic poem which is the play. I think that Curnow had been misled in this respect by the practice of W.B. Yeats. A second factor is the one indicated by Aristotle when he said that the imagination of a dramatist and the imagination of an historian move on quite different levels. The historian is concerned to find out and state what happened; the dramatist is concerned to say what might have happened or could happen. It is quite likely that Curnow’s very meticulousness as an artist had betrayed him – that he paid too much attention to the historical development of Christianity in Polynesia, thus supplanting the imagination of the playwright with that of the creative historian. We are plagued a little with this kind of thing in New Zealand. One goes to the theatre to see a play, not to find out whose grandfather buried the musket where. A third factor seems to me the most important – that Curnow may unconsciously have identified himself with the ageing pagan priest Tereavai, to whom he gave a magnificent page 491 bravura part. This identification of the playwright with a particular character may have caused the action of the play to freeze. I recall how, some time after the performance, when Glover and I were drinking elsewhere, Glover got up and without apparent premeditation launched into the crowning imprecatory speech of Tereavai, clawing the air and emphasising its bravura quality. This was for me an experience quite as memorable as the performance of the play itself.

Among New Zealand historical plays the wittiest and most humane that I’ve read (it might be the most playable, though I’ve never seen it on the stage) would be Frank Sargeson’s play about the missionary Kendall. Sargeson seemed to me to have the necessary dramatic detachment.

I remember also seeing a play in Wellington, written by a playwright who was a colleague of mine in the Department of Education. Wisely he had drawn on his own experience of teaching in country schools, and had presented a dramatic situation in which a humane and progressive schoolteacher is being frustrated by an other-minded community. This playwright was too intelligent a man to present a mere equation of progressive sociology. His schoolteacher had some weakness, some impatience, and a certain degree of pig-headed rashness (at least that is how I remember the character now after a lapse of years) and the local community in addition to their prejudices had certain natural, unconscious assets. Yet I think that this playwright was trapped by an identification with the dramatic illusion he had created in the person of the chief character. One had the impression that the rebellious and Utopian statements of the chief character were intended to convey a truth, a preferred view of life; and this was the identification which finally scuttled the by no means ramshackle boat of the play.

If there is to be a live drama in this country, it is the small theatres which will make it possible, such as Downstage in Wellington or the Globe in Dunedin, and their function will not only be aesthetic but also therapeutic. The art of the theatre at its best is pro-communal and anti-cultural. We can certainly find enough actors. We need producers who do not want kudos or money. We need playwrights who have vigorous illusions and do not identify themselves with any of them. I would hope to see more plays written in prose by Peter Bland (a poet, actor and playwright) and plays by Louis Johnson, since both these New Zealand poets already show in their verse the capacity to discover mythical patterns in social and domestic situations. They would both be capable of using an imagist prose derived from the vernacular. Poets who become playwrights are less likely, I think, than novelists or short-story writers to be trapped by non-mythical journalistic conceptions. We need audiences who will turn their backs on the soporific commercial theatre and come to watch actual plays. I remember another thing – that when a play of mine had been put on in Wellington, a varsity critic got up and complained page 492 that it did not correspond with the unities of Aristotle – rightly or wrongly I felt that his sense of decorum had also been offended, and I wrote a quatrain which ran something like this –

When Skully trod upon the stage
Mrs Grundy groaned in rage.
Upend her, boys! And then we’ll throttle
The old grey ghost of Aristotle . . . (Uncollected)

Skully was a character in the play, a retired pensioner with a Maori mistress. My feelings about Mrs Grundy remained unchanged. I think it is impossible to make or produce good plays in a wholly Puritan environment. But since I heard Kitto speak, my feelings about Aristotle have changed. I realise that Aristotle has suffered from his interpreters. Unity of action means to me that the words express a coherent myth held down by the tent-pegs of local knowledge and experience. Unity of time means that the time a play takes to be performed represents a day in the life of Everyman, that day which is also his lifespan, his permanent now. Unity of place means the stage itself, that narrow universe which is for the time of a play a womb and a tomb, the place where the audience project the communal drama of their own minds, helped in this creative labour by playwright, producer, actors and stage designer. By this process of creative illusion they may perhaps learn who they are, or at least who they are not.

1967 (487)