May 26, 2009
Need to Know
The 1993 movie Farewell My Concubine is studded with powerful moments. But the one that stuck deepest when I first saw it was the dressing room face-off between actor Duan Xiaolou and Peking Opera superfan Master Yuan, who's hot for Xiaolou's fellow actor Cheng Dieyi:
YUAN
Master Duan, when the king returns to camp and meets Concubine Yu, custom has it he takes seven steps. You take but five.
(The scene starts at the 4:35 mark in this video clip.)
Xiaolou practically laughs in his face then, but later in the movie, when the "King" is forced to ask Master Yuan's help to save the imprisoned "Concubine's" life, Yuan gets his revenge.
(Jump to the 2:01 mark in this clip.)
Now admittedly, this is a particularly creepy example, but all classical theatre, no matter what culture it comes from, has this in common: the audience brings its own expertise and experience to the party.
From the night you see your first production of Hamlet, your imagination becomes the newest oxygen-carrying corpuscle in the vast bloodstream linking every interpretation in the past 408-odd years.
Actually, you were most likely infected long before you entered the theatre. English-speakers who've never seen or read a lick of Shakespeare can still quote the lyrics. Hence the collective audience ear-pricking when an actor launches into arias like "To be or not to be," "Friends, Romans, countrymen" or "All the world's a stage."
But one of the strangest experiences of working on a foreign-language classic like Phèdre is discovering a whole new world of familiar quotations and celebrated passages you never knew existed. French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1963 book On Racine, complains that
today's public consumes Racine in a purely anthological fashion. In Phèdre it is the character of Phaedra one comes to see, and even more than Phaedra, the actress herself: how will she "do" it? Some critics of our stage actually date their careers by the Phaedras they have seen. The text itself is received as an ensemble of raw materials, from which pleasure takes its choice: musical lines, famous tirades...
Reading Barthes's list of famous monologues I'd never heard of felt a bit like wandering into one's first screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where everyone but the "virgin" can recite the script verbatim:
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé.
[The daughter of Minos and of Pasiphaë.]Si je la haïssais, je ne la fuirais pas.
[If I hated her, I would not flee her.]Soleil, je te viens voir pour la dernière fois.
[Sun, I come to look upon you for the last time.]Ariane, ma sœur...
[Ariadne, my sister...]C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée.
[It is the goddess Venus clinging fast to her prey.]Présente je vous fuis, absente je vous trouve.
[I flee your presence; in your absence I find you.]Charmant, jeune, trâinant tous les cœurs après soi.
[Charming, young, trailing every heart after him.]Theramenes' narrative, etc.
(I love that "etc."! If the rest of the list doesn't make you feel like you've got your nose pressed against the window of someone else's candy store, one last little word will do it.)
Tony Harrison, in the fantastic intro to his Raj-era reimagining, Phaedra Britannica, singles out what seems to be the French equivalent of "To be or not to be", a line
which Flaubert thought the most beautiful line in the whole of French literature, and which Proust valued for its beauté dénuée de sens ["beauty stripped of meaning"]....The line in question is the famous one spoken by Hippolyte describing Phèdre as La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé.
Admittedly it is a crucial line. A line full of mythical reverberations. For those who know the myth.
"For those who know the myth." So it turns out there are two kinds of prior knowledge an audience could bring to this particular classic. You might be familiar with Racine's text itself, even if only, as Barthes laments, in "purely anthological fashion." And (or) you could know the myth.
For those who don't, Harrison goes on to explain:
The polarities represented by Minos and Pasiphaë are those which maintain the tension of the whole play and not simply the character of Phèdre.Minos and Pasiphaë, an emblematical marriage, are the opposite poles of the human consciousness.
Minos... is one of the three judge figures in Greek mythology.... Interiorised psychologically, as he is in Phèdre, he is that part of our selves which is judgement, prescription, that part that creates moral codes, imposes laws, fixes limits, the 'frontiers' of experience, defines the acceptable, and punishes transgression.
Pasiphaë is the transgressor of the codes created by Minos, that part of our selves that hungers for every experience, burns to go beyond the frontiers of current acceptability, specifically, in her case, to gratify her sexuality with a bull, incur the guilt of forbidden bestiality. She is what Henri de Montherlant made of her in his play Pasiphaé (1928), the woman who wants to transcend morality, accept every part of her nature, however 'animal' or 'bestial' it has been branded by the law-makers, to assert that nothing is unhealthy or forbidden. She rejects the codes of her husband Minos....
The problem, then, of Phèdre, as of us all, is that she contains within herself both Minos and Pasiphaë.
But how much of a problem is it if we, the audience, don't know the myth? Don't contain within ourselves both Minos and Pasiphaë and an understanding of their symbolic reverberations? How much prior homework should it take to appreciate a classic play?
Is all this backstory just a fun but optional extra, like an easter egg in a video game or DVD? Or should you plan to arrive at the theatre a half hour early to study the genealogical chart in the programme?
Because, really, if you haven't yet learned how to Do the Time Warp, or memorized the number of steps the King of Chu takes when he returns to his Concubine, can you enjoy the show as much as someone who has?
I think you can. You might even enjoy it more...
