INFLUENCIA DE LA COMPOSICIÓN DE LA MEZCLA EN LA ENERGÍA DE COMPACTACIÓN

Shakespeare Our Contemporary did not appear in English until 1964, but Peter Brook –

whose production of Titus Andronicus, with Laurence Olivier as Titus, Kott had seen in

381

Moshie Postone and Eric Santner, Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 5.

382 _{Erik Vogt, ‘“The Useless Residue of the Western Idea of Art”: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe Concerning Art}

“After” Auschwitz’, Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, ed. Ryan Crawford and Erik Vogt (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2014), p. 35.

383 _{Hebert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, trans.}

148

Warsaw in 1957 – read the French edition in the early 1960s.384 His 1962 RSC production of

King Lear at Stratford, with Paul Scofield taking the title role, was famously influenced by

the absurdist reading that was pioneered by Kott, which changed the way Brook thought about Shakespeare, tragedy and modernity. Through Kott, Brook had come to view King

Lear as a prototypically absurdist drama – a play that might almost be a ‘Concentration

Camp document’.385

Brook chose a stage aesthetic that reflected the cataclysmic fallout of recent European history. His stage was virtually bare, while the few props Brook did use were in a state of disintegration – as in the rusty thunder-sheets that visibly descended from the flies to rumble ominously in the storm scenes.386 This bare space was meant to signify a vacant and Godless universe – a pitiless void in which human life is drained of any meaning or purpose, leaving individuals bereft of hope and unable to act. ‘The emptiness was

metaphysical, as well as “actual”’: ‘The fierce illumination banished any shadows of divinity, mystery or superstition’.387 By treating King Lear as the ‘prime illustration of the theatre of the Absurd’ – ‘from which everything valuable in modern drama has been drawn’ – Brook also stressed the grotesque violence of the play.388 This meant cutting any moments that might relieve the brutality, from the servants who tend to Gloucester after he is blinded to the final, doomed attempt of Edgar to do ‘Some good’ (V.iii.291) and reprieve Lear and Cordelia.

By intensifying the violence, Brook disallowed the redemptive consolation found in Christian interpretations of King Lear. This was epitomized by the ending (such as it was) of

384

See Leanore Leiblein, ‘Jan Kott, Peter Brook and King Lear’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 1:2 (1987), pp. 39-49.

385

Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 74.

386 _Ibid.

387 _{Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (London: Associated University Press, 1975),p. 34.} 388

149

the production. Where the 1940 Gielgud production ended with formal acts of mourning, adumbrating the return of some form of Christian metaphysical order, in his production Brook had the actor playing Edgar unceremoniously drag the corpse of his vanquished brother off-stage, while, somewhere in the distance, the low, ominous rumble of thunder that had presaged the storm scenes was heard again.389 This not only forestalled any possibility of resolution; it also intimated that there would soon be another outbreak of catastrophic violence. The dénouement – once again – drew on Kott, who in his image of the ‘Grand Mechanism’ observed that, in Shakespeare, individuals are mere ‘cogs’ in a self- perpetuating and repetitive historical cycle, which does not admit of any transcendent meaning.390

Even while acknowledging that Kott set the ‘dark’, post-Auschwitz tone of his production, Brook self-consciously drew on an array of Continental stylistic influences and theories: Kott, Beckett, Ionesco, Artaud and Brecht.391 The use of Brechtian dramaturgy in 1962 was most obvious in its use of the distancing Verfremdungseffekt. Whereas past productions (as in Gielgud-Barker in 1940) sought to promote empathetic identification with Lear, Brook wanted to ‘detach the audience’.392 This was evident in the storm scenes, where the thunder-sheets hanging over the stage served as a constant reminder of the aesthetic unreality of the events Lear is (ostensibly) struggling through on his path to ‘redemptive’ self-realization.

Book also drew on Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty aims less at rational disinterest and more at puncturing the subconscious of the spectator through remorseless sensory

389 _{See Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, pp. 54-55.} 390

Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 10.

391 _{For more on the self-consciously hybrid stylistic influences informing the 1962 production, see The Empty}

Space, especially ‘The Rough Theatre’, pp. 65-97.

392

150

agitation.393 This informed the way in which Brook chose to stage the blinding of Gloucester. Brook purposefully contradicted the way the scene was usually staged. It had been

customary for the blinding to be staged after the interval, so that anyone in the audience unwilling to watch the violence couldprudently postpone his or her re-entrance. Brook not only placed the blinding before the interval, forcing the audience to watch, but also ‘cruelly’ raised the house-lights, intensifying the visceral impact of the scene on a stunned

audience.394

The 1962 production remains, in the words of Jay Halio, ‘undeniably the most influential post-war production of the play’.395 But the most important contribution of the Brook production was to ‘de-Englishize or de-nationalize King Lear and Shakespeare’.396 Where in the 1940s and 1950s the play was typically understood as positive reminder of British Christian civilization, over and against the destructive threat of ‘unnatural’ forms of Continental modernity, Brook used the play for the purposes of a far less insular

engagement with the catastrophes of twentieth century Europe and to reflect on the shared experience of living through Stalinism, Nazism and, most harrowingly, the Holocaust. Brook brought Shakespeare and King Lear into dialogue with a variety of European, late modernist theories and dramaturgies as these developed in the wake of Auschwitz, from Beckett to Brecht. This would set the scene for other post-Auschwitz analyses and appropriations of the play.

393 _{See Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: OneWorld Classics, 2010).} 394

Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, p. 45.

395 _{Jay Halio, ‘Introduction’, The Tragedy of King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 47.} 396 _{Zoltan Markus, ‘Kott in the West’, Great Shakespeareans, Volume Thirteen: Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber,}

151

Buzz Goodbody was, as Elizabeth Schafer has remarked, influenced by Brook.397 Her 1974 RSC production of King Lear drew on the same empty aesthetic Brook had used, with a

mise-en-scène that was, for the most part, ‘uncluttered’ by props.398 But her version was far more consciously politicized, offering a vision of the play that was ‘forcefully directed towards social change’.399 This production, which has been viewed as the most important re-evaluation of King Lear since 1962, was the first production at The Other Place, the smaller studio space Goodbody opened in 1974 with the intention of staging more politically and artistically avant-garde productions than were possible at the main Royal Shakespeare Theatre.400

Goodbody cut the play drastically and concentrated her interpretation of its action around the poor and the disenfranchised, revealed to Lear when he confronts Poor Tom. Dympna Callaghan observes that, over the action, the gulf between rich and poor was powerfully shown in the simple distinction being ‘being clothed and going naked’.401

Goodbody sought to underscore the way in which the modern capitalist system reduces the masses to a form of naked – ‘unaccommodated’ – bare life. She would go as far as to include a controversial prologue – spoken in unison by Lear (Tony Church) and Edgar (Mike Gwilym) – that drew parallels between the condition of the iterant poor in the early modern era and that of the industrial working-classes of the 1970s.402 For her, the aim was to indict ‘the

397

Elizabeth Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 234.

398

Ibid.

399

Dympna Callaghan, ‘Buzz Goodbody: Directing for Change’, The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-

Renaissance Reconstruction of the Works and Myths, p. 177.

400 _{For more on the foundation and history of The Other Place, see Alycia Smith-Howard, Studio Shakespeare:}

The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), pp. 1-3. For a

reading of the 1974 (King) Lear, see pp. 35-42.

401 _{‘Buzz Goodbody: Directing for Change’, p. 172.} 402

152

capitalist order’ and its ‘cultural apparatus’ in its ‘totality’.403 It is an order which debases and – quite literally – denudes subjects. The moment when Lear chances on Poor Tom and ‘unbuttons’, as he promises to pass the ‘superflux’ to the naked masses, became the centre for a revolutionary Marxist-socialist staging of the play that stressed the necessity of social and political action. Lear gained a heroically ‘oppositional consciousness’ over the

production, becoming a radical critic of the social injustice he has blindly presided over during his reign.404

By showing the subject reduced to a form of bare ‘naked’ life, Goodbody revealed that her social and political conception of modern capitalism is implicitly informed by Auschwitz and the production of ‘unaccommodated man’ in the concentration camps. This, as I have shown, is not unusual in post-1968 critiques of capitalism; but it also reveals her specific debt to Bond. Goodbody, evincing the influence of Bond, shortened the title of King

Lear to Lear, signalling the importance which she placed on the transformation of the King

to a destitute figure. Her understanding of the play and its relevance for modern capitalist society was informed by Bond and his post-Auschwitz version of the play, which views King

Lear as ‘a play where people are getting on and off a train with a lot of luggage’ – an image

that recalls the mass transportation of Jews to the camps and the appropriation of Jewish property by the Nazis.405

Goodbody was both a Marxist and a feminist.406 Her production concentrated on Lear and his nascent understanding of social injustice; but it also sought to provide a critique of patriarchal culture by showing ‘how much the “bad” sisters had to put up with’.407 This

403 _{‘Buzz Goodbody: Directing for Change’, p. 177.} 404

Ibid.

405 _{Quoted in Shakespeare and Me, ed. Susannah Carson (London: OneWorld Classics, 2013), p. 54.} 406 _{See ‘Buzz Goodbody: Directing for Change’, pp. 163-167.}

407

153

desire to fashion new perspectives on the play, from institutionally and politically ‘marginal’ spaces, would become an important aspect of Shakespeare criticism. It is to the increasingly politicized understanding of culture and identity in Shakespeare Studies that I turn in the next section.