This is for Janelle, although she’s probably the last one to read it…
“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why theater is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. […] the theater, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected to the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. […] in a purely formal sense the theater is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. […] The theater is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize the audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. […] But the theater must, if need, stoop – and stoop – until it attains that direct, that universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease. Hence the assault, the noise, the characteristic impatience.
[…] The theater is a place for obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul.”
Iris Murdoch, “The Sea, the Sea”, Penguin Books, 1978 – pp. 33-34
Reading this I realize how much I miss going to the theater… Ever since I left Romania theater became a luxury almost always out of reach. Especially good theater. If music and dance were readily available in Boston and in Maryland (thank God for that!), theater was never around, at least not good plays at student prices. And now in Sweden people express themselves on stage in a language I do not yet feel, so…
“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why theater is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. […] the theater, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected to the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. […] in a purely formal sense the theater is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. […] The theater is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize the audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. […] But the theater must, if need, stoop – and stoop – until it attains that direct, that universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease. Hence the assault, the noise, the characteristic impatience.
[…] The theater is a place for obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul.”
Iris Murdoch, “The Sea, the Sea”, Penguin Books, 1978 – pp. 33-34
Reading this I realize how much I miss going to the theater… Ever since I left Romania theater became a luxury almost always out of reach. Especially good theater. If music and dance were readily available in Boston and in Maryland (thank God for that!), theater was never around, at least not good plays at student prices. And now in Sweden people express themselves on stage in a language I do not yet feel, so…
1 comment:
Thank you. I have started "The Sea, The Sea" myself. I think the last paragraph is perhaps the most accurate.
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