Читать книгу Dynamics of Distancing in Nigerian Drama - Nadia Anwar - Страница 8

An influential playwright and theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) developed the concept of epic theatre which aimed at social and political change in pre-World War II Germany. Heavily based on Marxist principles and co-conceived with the Piscatorian aesthetics that represented theatre as a political laboratory, his theatre created a new inventory for playwrights, directors, and actors in terms of technique, style and stagecraft.[9] It is important here to note that Brecht was not the first to conceive the notion and model of alienation for his theatre. Many prominent political, social and literary influences helped him develop his dramatic formula. The post-World War I cultural milieu demanded a greater challenge to authority by questioning undemocratic social structures, and in this context Brecht was motivated to study Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) Das Capital. His engagement with the Communist Manifesto led him to set up his learning-plays, Lehrstücke, along the lines of the Piscatorian aesthetics of political theatre which had a purely utilitarian purpose. However, Brechtian theatre soon reverted from this agit-prop stance to the propagation of a dialectical vision which resulted in Brecht’s later masterpieces such as Galileo (1938) and Mother Courage (1939).

Brecht also shared many of his theatrical postulates with Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), an esteemed German playwright and artist. Like Brecht, Wedekind showed contempt for bourgeois society and achieved his estranging effects through short, loosely connected scenes, melodrama, and slapstick humour. Brecht’s early works, such as Baal (published 1918, produced 1923), also show signs of Georg Buchner’s (1813–1837) dramatic techniques, especially with regard to Aristotelian theatre known for its gradual plot development, and epic theatre in which each scene as an individual unit stands on its own. With regard to non-conformist principles, Expressionism[10] also seems to have influenced Brecht in developing his principles of estrangement. Yet, being subjectively inclined, the movement placed emphasis on the distortion of reality to create intense emotional effects on its recipients; Brecht, by contrast, envisaged alienation or detachment in non-empathetic terms—an estranging characteristic aiming to curb emotional involvement.

According to Walter Benjamin, Brecht presented a non-Aristotelian dramaturgy because he realized that “the conventional, Aristotelian theatre with its empathy, catharsis and non-participation was disturbing the critical faculty of the audience” (1969, 28–29; Banerjee 1977, 176). However, as Ruby Cohn rightly argues, Brecht’s “opposition of Epic Theatre to Aristotelian Theatre was a matter of emphasis rather than an absolute polarity” (1969, 44). In fact, Brecht did not reject ‘the existing’, nor did he try to create a completely new theatrical topos, but sought to put “old things together in new ways” with the aim of “[addressing] himself to the conventions and traditions by which society views the world” (Hornby 1986, 24). While subverting the idea of empathy and catharsis, Brecht achieved this emphasis by trying to promote theatrical distancing not only in terms of audience-performance relationship but also in relation to an actor’s emotional distance from the character he is supposed to perform. The actors, according to his distancing paradigm, while remaining detached from their characters invite criticism of them by performing social gests.[11] This notion is as much applicable to an actor as to any member of an audience, aiming to “[teach him/her] a certain quite practical attitude” and raising his or her capacity “of thinking and of reasoning, of making judgements even in the theatre” (Brecht 1974, 72, 78–79). In this respect, the theatre becomes not only a place where political and social issues are reported but also a learning experience in which emotions are channelled through and moderated by critical thinking.

Brecht’s theory of estrangement is crucial to his notion of epic theatre, which seeks to turn both the audience and spectators of a particular performance into third-person observers. However, this does not entail a complete breach between the stage event and its audience; rather, as Kot indicates, Brecht aims for “intellectual identification” (1999, 8), which instead of playing with the “audience’s hearts”, should portray the figures on the stage as “coldly, classically and objectively” as possible (Brecht 1974, 15). Thus Brechtian epic theatre aims to appeal less to the feelings than to the audience’s intellect, for only in that way can a balanced distanced position be achieved. Expressing his concerns about the production of his plays Baal and Dickicht, Brecht claimed that he “kept [his] distance and ensured that the realization of [his] (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds [while] the ‘splendid isolation’ [of the spectators] is left intact” (9). Since the Brechtian formula of epic theatre also hinges on pleasure,[12] this isolation does not fail to appreciate the importance of aesthetics which refer to the sensory-emotional values inherent in a piece of performance. The acceptability of pleasure, however, depends on the cognitive capacity of any work of art (Suvin 1967, 56–57). For the same reason, later in his dramatic career, Brecht preferred the term ‘dialectical’ to ‘epic’ as manifesting the true spirit of his theatre.

What is sometimes overlooked is that Brecht’s theatrical art was not just a cold and objective rendering of events and a distanced political laboratory, but “a catalyst to social action and cultural making, a making that extends beyond the auditorium as the audience leave” (Franks and Jones n.d., 12). Thus, the medium of theatre should be taken as a three-edged tool serving to educate, provide aesthetic pleasure, and generate political argument and action (3). In support of this view, Brecht termed his Threepenny Opera a report on life in which any member of the audience not only sees what he or she wishes to but also what questions these wishes. This is what he calls “complex seeing”; that is, “to think above the stream than to think in the stream” (Brecht 1974, 43–44). This process is more of a discovery of one’s cognitive potential, rather than a reliance solely on one’s emotional reservoir. Since “emotional involvement in the political message” (Kot 1999, 8) cannot be denied, an audience should, simultaneously, be enabled to “assemble, experiment and abstract” from the changing circumstances on the stage (Brecht 1974, 60). In this respect, John J. White observes that after the 1930s, Brecht’s epic theatre sought to acknowledge the role of both feelings and the cognitive capacity of the audience (2004, 2006–9). The current study of contemporary Nigerian drama also focuses on the potential capacity of the plays to engage audiences both critically and emotionally. In his famous retort “Much Ado About Brecht”, Ola Rotimi counteracts widespread assumptions that force together politically motivated rational capacities of Nigerian audiences with Brechtian principles promoting intellectual detachment. While explicating the importance of both emotions and intellect in African traditional performances, in which the roots of modern Nigerian drama are found, Ola Rotimi finds Brecht’s epic theatre to be deficient in its appeal to emotions (Rotimi 1990, 255). Although the degrees of emotional evocativeness may vary in both types of theatre (Brechtian and African), an overview of Brecht’s dramaturgy shows that it is an error to consider epic theatre as completely failing to produce an emotional environment. This discussion is, however, irrelevant in the context of this study.

It is important to mention that in Nigerian drama the relevance of Brechtian drama is limited to its conceptual framework. Any connection between the Brechtian theory of estrangement and the role of distancing in Nigerian theatre is in fact coincidental—just as it is erroneous to assume that Brecht’s theory of distancing derived directly from other dramatic traditions such as Russian and Chinese Peking Opera. Besides, Brechtian aesthetics also changed from his early to later plays—his principles gained maturity and became less rigid in terms of his take on the role of emotions, while his oeuvre moved from traditional to more experimental dramatic structures, such as the transformation we see between Baal (written 1918, produced 1923) and Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (written 1940, produced 1948). The ideological stress on socio-political theories which he introduced into his plays according to the demands of the context, also wavered with time. Conscious of the “faulty and time-bound character” of these theories, (as are Nigerian playwrights) “he opened them for discussion” by approaching them “undogmatically” (Mueller 1994, 90).

While this study makes a partial and selective use of Brecht’s theory of estrangement, Brechtian ideas are transposed here as a constituent feature of a metatheatrical framework allowing one to read contemporary Nigerian drama and its sociopolitical contexts. Traditional distancing techniques such as framing, masking and costume drama, which have their roots in pre-independence performance practices and West African ritual drama, play a significant but different role in Nigerian drama, as opposed to European drama. They do not produce distancing by compromising the emotional involvement and subsequent catharsis. Here it is important to mention that since Brecht himself knew that “the spectator […] is the one element the dramatist cannot control, in any form” (Williams 1973, 318), in the analysis of selected Nigerian drama his ideas are applied exclusively to the action and dramatic design of the plays. In addition, this reappropriated and recontextualized Brechtian model is supplemented by Thomas J. Scheff’s theory of balanced distancing in emotions. To observe and codify the effects of catharsis and the way it is revealed through the actual emotive state of an audience is beyond the scope of this study; therefore, the analysis of the plays relies on the possible impact of an effective distanced space, which is characterized by both cognition and aesthetic pleasure. However, since emotional states of mind are famously known to lead to some kind of mental release and equilibrium, the possibility of catharsis in audiences of Nigerian drama remains at the forefront.