Showing posts tagged as: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Theatre of the Absurd: Anti-Realism, Anti-Language, Anti-Play?
A term you don’t hear much these days, even among the literati, is the Theatre of the Absurd. I first heard about this theatre genre in the Seventies, when I was introduced to the plays of Beckett and Pinter, and saw the film version of Ionesco’s play The Rhinceros. Even then the Theatre of the Absurd had a kind of Fifties/Sixties feel to it. So where did it come from? Well, we have drama critic and scholar Martin Esslin to thank for the expression. In the late Fifties Esslin drew the dots between the work of various, otherwise disparate and unconnected contemporary playwrights who shared a particular world view and a number of traits and preoccupations. Esslin circa 1960 wrote that these ‘Absurdist’ playwrights were attacking the “comfortable certainties of religious and political orthodoxy, shocking audiences out of their complacency, bringing them face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation”, ie, that it is essentially absurd.
The philosophical framework for Absurdism and the Theatre of the Absurd was laid by French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. In his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Camus defines the human condition as basically meaningless and therefore absurd, arguing that “humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe (in Camus-speak = “formless chaos) was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd” (Crabb). Once we accept this inevitability we can get on with life.
The emergence of a new theatre in the Fifties which staunchly rejected realism and whose calling card was the statement life is meaningless was a reaction to the atrocities and unimaginable inhumanity of the Second World War. Interestingly, Esslin, following Camus, did not feel that the message of the Absurdists—the profound state of despair of humankind—was reason to be pessimistic about the world. Accepting the “mysteries of existence”—that we live in an irrational and “hostile universe” (Camus’ term), for which there are “no easy solutions” leaves (you) with “a sense of freedom and relief” and “the laughter of liberation” (Esslin).
Theatre of the Absurd precursors Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi is often thought of as “proto-Theatre of the Absurd”…bizarre, controversial, revolutionary, paper-thin plot, scatological scatterings, the characters speak in staccato sentences, Ubu Roi also highly influenced the Dadaist art and literary movement which along with Surrealism took its turn in passing the anti-realism torch on to the Theatre of the Absurd. Dadaism like the Absurdist plays was a reaction in part to war (WWI in this case)…as one of its main exponents Tristan Tzara explained: ”if human logic can lead the world to global war then art should abandon all logic and sense“. Likewise, Surrealism’s desire to shock audiences and its descent into the world of human dreams also anticipates some of the preoccupations of the Theatre of the Absurd.
A theatre movement disassociated from its creators Unlike Surrealism and other arts genres, the Theatre of the Absurd was not a conscious movement. Despite Esslin identifying the Parisian avant-garde as its centre and Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Adamov the leading figures of the Absurdist movement, there was no organised school of playwrights who identified themselves as its practitioners. Some like Ionesco in fact strongly objected to the label, preferring in his case the term “Theatre of Derision” to delineate his work. The exponents of this form of theatre were loosely associated, each of the playwrights arrived independently at a similar style and a vision of the futility of human existence.
Beckett (Source: samuel beckettsociety.org)A Revolutionary and subversive Theatre of the Absurd Playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco were committed to exploring absurdism in all its manifestations – philosophical, dramaturgical, existential, emotional, a radical form of drama that pushed the boundaries of theatre to the extremes (Dickson)…it’s distinctive features and innovations subverting the established theatre of the day. The Theatre of the Absurd radically departs from traditional theatrical conventions…dispensing with the conventional narrative of the “well-made play” with a beginning, a middle and an end, plots are typically disorganised, often with a non-linear or cyclical approach (“ever diminishing concentric circles”), nothing happens or if it does, it’s in a unmotivated way. Mysteries go unresolved and order is not restored at the end. Characters have no clear identities and have a homogeneity to them (eg, The Rhinoceros), they are not consistent even interchangeable (eg, Genet’s The Maids), characters don’t develop and are devoid of motivation or purpose.
Estragon: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful”.
Externally waiting for Godot Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was one of the earliest and best known plays to be so designated, becoming an exemplar of Adsurdist theatre. It was controversially received when it premiered in 1953, later famously described by critic Vivian Mercer as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. ‘Godot’ is a bleak tragi-comedy soaked in “existential despair”. The bleakness of the play is reinforced by the setting: no recognisable time or place❅, sparse set, minimally furnished. Stylistically the play is repetitive, open-ended almost empty of action but with snatches of vaudeville and philosophy. Characters utter illogical and circular dialogue while they wait…and wait for the title character (who never appears). Beckett’s later plays became more and more reductionist, language pared back towards “Endgame” silence.
The war on language The breakdown of language is a preoccupation in Absurdist Theatre. In Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano language disintegrates rapidly, demonstrating it’s failure as a tool of communication. Nonsense dialogue, characters speaking in gibberish, absurdist dramas often abound in cliches, slogans and non-sequiturs. The plays of Ionesco and NF Simpson also specialise in satirising “the modern prostitution of language corrupted by salesmen and politicians”. Ionesco distinguished between the way he and Beckett assailed language: “Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words“ (Interview, Paris Review, 1984).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Source: LA Times)Representing British colours in the Club de l’Absurde were Harold Pinter (The Dumb Waiter) and Tom Stoppard…the latter’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead involves a “Godot-esque” waiting game with a similar sense of anticlimax. ‘Ros’ and ‘Guil’, relocated from Hamlet, are interchangeable characters who pass the time engaging in philosophical musings and mind-numbing circular discourses with each other.
Footnote: Trans-Atlantic Absurdist Although essentially a European movement, Esslin (less convincingly) includes American Edward Albee into the collection of Absurdist dramatists on the basis that his plays (eg, The Zoo Story) attack “America’s foundation of optimism”.
———-———-———- ❅ a feature of Theatre of the Absurd plays is a sense of timelessness
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Bibliography:
Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Jerome P. Crabb, ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, Theatre Database, 2006, www.theatredatabase.com
‘Nonsense talk: Theatre of the Absurd’, Andrew Dickson, Discovering Literature: 20th century, 07-Sep-2017, www.bl.uk
‘Absurdity in Theater: Ubu Roi’, Nermin Büsra Kirisik, Artil, www.artilmagazine.com
‘Beckett, Ionesco and the Theater if the Absurd: Crash Course Theater #45′ (Video, 2018)
Caedmon to Audible: From Spoken-Word LPs to Audio Book Bonanza
The “Groundhog Day” existence of coronavirus, with people ‘sentenced’ to indeterminable periods of isolation and lockdown inside four square walls, has been a boon to the pursuit of leisure activities※. Social media platforms have gone “gang-busters” – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Zoom, and Snapchat and TikTok (for the Gen-Zs) among others. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan, ditto. In this year like no other, Audible tell us that audio books are more popular than ever – a trend promoted undoubtedly by Audible’s own deft marketing (eg, during Covid-19 they are streaming a selection of children’s stories free to the public). The uptake of Borrow Box loan activity in 2020 underscores this assertion.
Cohen & Roney 1952: taking the 1st steps for audio booksellers (Photo: Lib of Congress Blogs)
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Audio books (ABs) in one form or another have been around a long time, arguably the pioneer in the area of spoken-word records was Caedmon Records, the first to hit the mark with a mainstream audience. The Caedmon company evolved out of the initiatives in 1952 of two 22-year-old female college graduates (Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney) in the US to record a poetry reading by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The popularity of the poetry album which included A Child’s Christmas in Wales laid the groundwork for today’s AB industry. The development of technology assisted the progression of “spoken books”… from the first LPs (Long-playing records), emerging in the 1930s, which gave way to tape cassettes in the 1960s and 70s, which in turn lead later still to compact discs [‘Caedmon Records and Audiobooks, (HarperCollins), www.200.hc.com].
My own personal history as a consumer of spoken-word records begins with the aforementioned Caedmon, circa 1977. In the mid-Seventies I had watched several films in a series of commercial releases under the title “American Film Theatre”, film adaptations of a number of well-known plays…the series which utilised Lord Olivier as its promotional face included Galileo (Brecht), Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Luther (Osborne), The Homecoming (Pinter) and The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill).
At the time I came across vinyl 78s of two of the plays-to-films in the series—Butley (Simon Gray) and A Delicate Balance (Edward Albee)—in a tiny spoken-word section of a second-hand record shop. Snapping them up, this marked my first foray into the (at that time) still embryonic world of collecting ABs.
Audio books then were pretty much unknown in retail record departments and shops… major book retailers were yet to cotton on to the potentiality of thus broadening the market for their products, and online goliaths like Amazon were yet to come into existence. I remember that I got my first spoken-word cassette by (pre-online) mail order from the Royal Blind Society in 1978. The RBS had more incentive than anyone else to embrace “talking books”⋓, an innovation which opened up a whole new world of leisure for the visually-impaired. The first (double cassette) AB that I purchased was a BBC recording of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
Since that time the audio book industry has exploded with heavyweights like Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster, all with significant “skin in the game”. Lording over all these competitors is Audible (Amazon), unchallenged as the dominant market leader. Even before the pandemic the global AB market was valued at US$2.67 Bn in 2019 (wwwgrandviewresearchcom/]. The coronavirus is sending that worldwide sales trajectory even higher (US audio unit sales are up 16% dwarfing the book market growth of the industry as a whole (wwwthenewpublishingstandardcom/)).
The success of audio books has been welcomed by the book industry as a positive addition (cf. the advent of Kindle and e-books which raised fears of ‘cannibalisation’ of the main product)⊞. The takeaway from the AB phenomena is that the aural experience is a different one, and that ABs (according to a Deloitte report) tend to attract a younger demographic that is less inclined to read print books [‘A word in your ear…why the rise of audiobooks is a story worth celebrating’, (Alex Preston), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com].
The versatility of audio books is behind its blossoming into an integral part of the literature landscape for ‘readers’. ABs can be integrated easily into one’s life in all manner of ways that are not confined to a sedentary or stationary state – while exercising, walking, jogging, cycling, in the gym, while cooking, doing housework, driving a car, commuting, etc [‘Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don’t read’, (Clare Thorp), BBC, 06-Jan-2020, www.bbc.com].
For many buyers of audio books a factor in choosing a title is the reader itself. Having “A-list talent” and the “dulcet tones of a familiar voice” as reader certainly can add value to the product✦, but big names only work if they have a genuine connexion with the material (Thorp). Some ABs work better when the author doubles as reader, this particularly applies to memoirs and non-fiction titles. Having this can convey to the listener a more authentic experience of the subject’s journey. For myself, the AB experience that I most enjoyed was John Lithgow’s brilliant reading of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Character actor Lithgow brought such an energy to the reading, greatly enhancing the flavour and tone of Wolfe’s biting satire on greed and status in NYC (in marked contrast to the disappointing Tom Hanks movie version), probably my all-time favourite AB.
Another memorable audio book collection I would place high on my AB order of merit are the recordings of Samuel Pepys’ Diaries (readings by Kenneth Branagh and a BBC dramatisation). From both sets of recordings I got a real “living history” insight into Pepys’ thought processes and compromised behaviour—flaws and virtues, so redolent of that of the modern bureaucrat—and of the everyday life of an event-filled London in late Stuart Britain.
One of the reasons I took to audio books is that it offered me a way into critically acclaimed works of fiction that in print form I had found Sphinx-like and impenetrable. Back in the 1970s I made several attempts at reading the 754 abstruse and puzzling pages of Joyce’s Ulysses before raising the white flag in defeat. Ulysses’ emergence in the AB format in the, must be late Eighties/early Nineties (albeit in an abridged four-CD form) was the key I needed to unlock the stylistic labyrinth of Joyce’s prose. ABs also let me get a handle on that other Irish author of literary complexity Flann O’Brien, and his convoluted metafiction maze The Third Policeman.
Ftnote: Cædmon Caedmon, the name chosen by Cohen and Roney for their revolutionary business enterprise, was the name of the first known English poet (flourished late Seventh century AD), a Northumbrian cowherd turned exponent of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse poetry.
※ another pastime, gaining impetus in the lockdown and perhaps capturing the zeitgeist of 2020 is doomscrolling – the social media practice of continuing to read long streams of news feeds which are disheartening in content
⋓ the term as I recall more in currency at the time than audio books
⊞ print books managed to repulse the challenge from e-books in part due to pricing strategies which disincentivised e-book purchasing [Amazon’s Audiobook Boom’, (Alex Shepard), The New Republic, O3-Jul-2018, www.newrepublic.com]
✦ the rise of ABs has provided a source of peripheral work for some actors, a very welcome and in some cases lucrative sideline
Launder and Gilliat: Prolific and Tradesman-like Collaborators of British Cinema
Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were two English film-makers who maintained a steadily consistent presence in the British cinema between the 1930s and the 1970s. Launder and Gilliat’s creative contribution to films, whether as writers, directors or producers (or as all three), contributed to over 100 British films in that era, including nearly 40 together as co-writers and producers.
The two co-wrote The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery which was a breakthrough feature for Alfred Hitchcock❈. Interestingly both Launder and Gilliat (hereafter L & G) had their (separate) starts in the film business composing inter-titles (title cards) for silent movies in the late 1920s, the same industry beginnings undertaken by Hitchcock several years earlier. L & G combined their talents behind-the-camera together for the first time from the mid 1930s. The L & G partnership had a flexibility and a particular pattern to it … invariably they would jointly produce films and/or also co-write screenplays (although on other occasions either man would co-write films with various other collaborating screenwriters). But almost with very few exceptions one or the other would direct a specific film singly – this was done apparently to avoid confusing the actors[1].
A versatile¤ and fecund partnership
As well as being prolific contributors to the creation of British films for such a long period, L & G’s film output spanned a range of genres … from thrillers and ‘whodunits’ like Green for Danger (1956) and Secret State (1950) to WWII social-realism films such as Waterloo Road (1944) and Millions Like Us (1943) to romance/adventures like The Blue Lamp (1949) to historical dramas such as Captain Boycott (1947) to farces like The Green Man (1956) and light comedies such as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a precursor to a popular series of movies set in a girls’ boarding school immobilised by riotous juvenile anarchy – starting with The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) which spawned a string of increasingly predictable sequels.
“Journeymen auteurs?” The Times of London described the Gilliat/Launder team as “one of the most sparkling writing, directing and producing partnerships in postwar British cinema”[2]. Notwithstanding such praise, L & G’s body of work has tended to be undervalued by the bulk of film critics … at times eliciting back-handed appraisals from critics such as “toilers in the British comic tradition”; (their films at best exhibiting) “unfailing good humour and the occasional brainy prankishness”[3]. Certainly, technical innovation and self-conscious artiness was not Gilliat and Launder’s style, but they never managed to garner anything remotely like the prestige or critical approval that was lavished on other contemporary British film-makers, eg, Powell and Pressburger, Carol Reed or the Boulting brothers. Bruce Babington has attributed this in part to L & G’s ‘reticence’ as film-makers, the way that they declined to project themselves forward and intervene in controversies and debates of the day, unlike say, their contemporaries the Boultings[4].
Enlistment in the production of propaganda vehicles So closely did the personal film-making styles and interests of the two collaborators align, many people found it hard to distinguish between a Launder-directed picture and one directed by Gilliat … most L & G films tended to resemble the fruits of their combined efforts. Or as Adair and Roddick put it, “it would take a lynx-eyed buff to be able to distinguish one from the other”[5].
The war-time pictures, Millions Like Us and Two Thousand Women can be identified as reflecting in particular Frank Launder’s preoccupation with the portrayal of strong, defiantly independent women[6]. These films were commissioned by the UK Ministry of Information to counter the prevailing low recruitment and morale of women in war-time factory work. Millions Like Us, as Judy Suh has noted, conveyed the “double valence of women as productive workers and domestic symbols of national unity”. L & G’s social-realist films, though propagandist in purpose, posed questions of gender and class whilst depicting the routine of ordinary people at work. The necessities of war-time brought out the conflicting roles and identities of women in such an out-of-the ordinary circumstance, as well as the existence of crossings of class boundaries[7].
St Trini’s girls with their jolly hockey sticks (Ronald Searle cartoon, 1954)
After the war, witty and farcical comedies (albeit slight), were their forte (with the occasional thriller thrown in). Like other high-profile international film-makers L & G had their favourite performers that they liked to work with. L & G got the best performances out of British actors like Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Rex Harrison and George Cole. Of these luminaries it was Alastair Sim whose star shined most brightly under the direction of L & G. Sim appeared in at least ten L & G movies and his deliciously roguish star turns as a middle class word-spinning con-man were pure gold. George Cole, who also had a regular gig in the St Trinian’s cycle as the ultra dodgy spiv Flash Harry◘, described working with Gilliat and Launder (and Sim) … to Cole (later himself to find TV fame as consummate, malapropistic con-man ‘Arfur’ Daley in Minder) their films meant:
“Good scripts but terrible money. If Alastair was in the film it was even worse because he got most of it. But they were wonderful people to work with”[8].
‘Pure Hell of St Trinians’ (1960)
In the 1940s Launder and Gilliat formed their own production company, aptly named Individual Pictures, at this time they were contractually engaged by Gainsborough Pictures … in 1958 the partners took charge of the production side of the struggling independent studio British Lion. By the 1960s both the quality and quantity of Gilliat/Launder productions had receded. In 1980 Launder went once more to the St Trinian’s well❃ with yet another sequel, Wildcats of St Trinian’s … unwisely so as the novelty of L & G’s feature films based on Ronald Searle’s charming cartoons of feral schoolgirls had long since lost their appeal.
PostScript: The Charters and Caldicott characters trope – antiquated, old school Englishness L & G wrote into The Lady Vanishes two minor characters that were to become iconic, background characters in British cinema. Played by actors Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne, the two incidental supporting figures are singleminded cricket enthusiasts—or “cricket tragics” as one recent Australian PM was dubbed—trying to hurry back to England to see the last days of the Manchester test match. The popularity of the characters saw them reappear in other L & G movies (including Night Train to Munich, Millions Like Us and in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes), and in several other non-L & G films, eg, the Boxs’ A Girl in a Million and (appropriately enough) It’s Not Cricket. Charters and Caldicott were also reprised for several radio series, and for a 1985 television series. Charters and Caldicott’s fame also extended to their inclusion in a series of Carreras Cigarette cards in the 1950s.
⏏︎ Charters & Caldicott
The starkly gormless personalities of Charters and Caldicott, a couple of blithering “Colonel Blimpish” snobs, was a comical throwback to a past England with ‘proper’ gentlemanly good manners and standards of dress[9]. Matthew Sweet saw the two blunderers (in their 1938 incarnations against a backdrop of appeasement) as symbols of “a peculiarly British obstinacy in the face of Nazi aggression” in Europe[10]. Their apathetic dispositions and complete lack of perspicacity about the momentous events happening around them also puts one in mind of Tom Stoppard’s two artless and aimless courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern roaming through Elsinore, ‘Everyman’ figures in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but even more prosaic!
The L & G team
❈ The Lady Vanishes helped open Hollywood doors for Hitchcock … after ‘Hitch’ completed Jamaica Inn in 1939 (written by Gilliat et al) he set sail for America (for good), inviting Gilliat to join him however the Cheshireman declined the offer, preferring to stay in the smaller and infinitely less lucrative pond that was the British film industry (Babington, 2002) ¤ “Versatility” Gilliat once said, “was always our curse”, but as Gilbert Adair remarked in a 1994 obituary for the film-maker, “it was also their own form of individualism” ◘ Cole as well appeared in nine of L & G’s films ❃ this was twice too often to the well as the preceding Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966) was also a lame effort at rehashing the by now decidedly stale formula
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[1] although such was the working symbiosis between the two that the non-directing partner would in all likelihood make suggestions for improvements to the designated director where necessary, B Babington, Launder and Gilliat (2002) [2] quoted in The Age (Melbourne), 08-Jun-1994 [3] G Adair & N Roddick, A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film, (1985) [4] Babington describes Launder and Gilliat as “modest auteurs”, Babington, op.cit. [5] Adair & Roddick, loc.cit. [6] ‘Launder and Gilliat’, BFI Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk [7] J Suh, ‘Women, Work, Leisure in British Wartime Documentary Realism’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 40(1), 2012 [8] ‘Obituary: Frank Launder’, The Independent, 24-Feb-1997, www.independent.co.uk [9] ‘Charters and Caldicott’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Charters and Caldicott’, www.chartersandcaldicott.co.uk [10] M Sweet, ‘Mustard and cress’, The Guardian, 29-Dec-2007, www.theguardian.com