Some Notes on Drama

A day or two ago I sat through that very beautiful film Ulysses and it occurred to me several times how much the producer had gained by dispensing with middle-class decorum, particularly by his use of Joyce’s actual language. Though films are not plays the experience led me to consider again the use of language in the modern theatre. Being by habit a poet, I have often wished one could write good plays in verse. Yet verse seems to be a dead language in our 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 page 354 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 constitute an audience.

A modern dramatist will naturally wish to use the language of his time at the most vital level; and it seems that he will find it in holes and corners, and 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 is still there at the bottom of my mind when I look for it. This means 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 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 a rhythmical bureaucratic prose set as verse. The one real exception may be Murder in the Cathedral; and if itis 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 television – 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 require a certain sprinkling page 355 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 may be the bank balance of the producer.

When I saw my own play, The Spots of the Leopard, produced by Richard Campion at the Downstage Theatre in Wellington, there were several things that cheered me up. The first was that Campion had recognised clearly the element of vaudeville in the play and brought it fully to the surface. And there was also the vigorous performance of particular actors – no doubt one should not single out a particular performance, but I remember Kuki Kaa’s relaxed performance as a returned soldier recapitulating the massacre of German soldiers in Crete.

The structure of that play was deliberately non-realist, verging on anti-theatre. Why? There are various reasons. My acquaintance with New Zealand theatre is limited; partly by my own choice. My relation to the theatre has been a sporadic liaison rather than a marriage. I had felt that to know ‘everything’ about the theatre, to be able to compare producers and actors, to go along to every second play that was put on, might lead me into a world of mirrors. And even in poetry I prefer rather to work from a position of naïveté and ignorance than to be using someone else’s do-it-yourself kit and getting bogged down in style and fashion. The narcissism of the theatre is no doubt a subject that could occupy a thousand pages. 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 before even a word is spoken at the beginning of a play, the stage has already begun to signify that area 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 was this, I think, which I feared.

I had begun with a piece of hybrid radio drama derived from Dylan Thomas, but with a New Zealand theme – Jack Winter’s Dream. Campion put it on the stage, and I had that peculiar moment of recognition – ‘yes, this is mine and not mine – by God, it’s a play!’ The second play, The Wide Open Cage, was designed for the stage – though it was clumsily tied together, I think it had real vitality. Still highly ignorant, I was too much affected by the critics – first positively by Bruce Mason’s enthusiastic and generous review, then negatively by some comments James Bertram made at the postmortem. Bertram held that I had made a gallery of grotesques; that the play was not truly realist; and that I had violated the Unities of Aristotle. Contrite, I decided to mend my ways – and made a play in three neat boxes – Three Women and the Sea – doggedly realist, with a pattern of action and counter- page 356 action which I then thought corresponded to the Aristotelian Unities. Of course, it lacked any true metaphysical dimension. On the boards, it was held together by Campion’s skilful producing and some sympathetic acting. So it seemed realism was not my cup of tea.

I find that writing a play is a very subconscious process. The self who makes my plays for me is very different from the one who makes the poems. The language tends to be violent and clotted. The action moves by a series of explosions like an old internal combustion engine. I have perhaps an ineradicable tendency towards vaudeville. So, deliberately, I decided to write a play in the pattern of a sophisticated revue, underlining throughout the fact that the action was not realist. I have heard that when The Spots of the Leopard was put on in America, the Lady Editor of the Saturday Evening Post walked out in disgust half way through (at the moment when a girl was blowing up a condom on stage) and wrote a review saying that the play was entirely about sex. Perhaps if she had waited longer she would have changed her mind: perhaps not. At any rate, when I saw the play recently in Wellington, it cheered me up because I could see that its non-realism was a great deal nearer the processes of life than anything I had been able to cook up in Three Women and the Sea. The problem is this: that a deliberate realism moves so easily into sentimentality or into melodrama, because it lacks depth. I feel that every good play embodies a myth, whether or not the myth is recognisable by the audience. The myth of Ibsen’s The Master Builder is Faustian; the myth of Mason’s The Pohutukawa Tree is Edenic; the myth of my The Spots of the Leopard is the same one that haunted the Greeks – ‘Why am I and you at the same time criminals and not criminals?’ It is perhaps the Promethean myth. If what I suggest is true, then there are realist and non-realist modes in the theatre but no play is ever fully realist.

Since then, I have written a number of plays, none of which have yet been produced, though Patric Carey will be putting on three of them at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin in August – The Band Rotunda, The Sore-Footed Man and The Bureaucrat. They combine both realist and non-realist modes. I imagine that they will go well enough on the stage. It is the small theatres in this country which makes it possible for New Zealand plays to be staged. It becomes most evident in the small theatres that drama is by nature pro-communal and anti-cultural. One wishes perhaps to show New Zealand to itself; not to confirm in an audience its illusions of spiritual and material security.

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