Theater and Film Reviews: The Dimensions of Tragedy

King Lear

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Gregory Doran

Starring Antony Sher

Brooklyn Academy of Music

April 19, 2018

The Mayor of Casterbridge

By Thomas Hardy

Yerma

Written and directed by Simon Stone (after Federico Garcia Lorca)

Starring Billie Piper

Park Avenue Armory

April 11, 2018

Sansho the Bailiff

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

What makes a good tragedy? The same themes of human missteps followed by self-induced or extrinsic punishment have fascinated us since the dawn of civilization. Classical Greek tragedy usually consisted of a human misstep, major or minor (e.g. Oedipus’ mistaken killing of his father), followed by a divine retribution, often out of proportion to the initial mistake. The punishments are usually divine, but occasionally more linked to humanity. For example, Phaedra, scorned by her young lover, falsely claims to have been raped by him, leading to his death after his horses stampede, frightened by vengeful Poseidon’s sea monster. This balancing of human error (the precipitant) with exponentially worse divine or human consequences (the punishment) continues to interest authors to this day. Shakespeare played with it endlessly. His tragic victims encompass murder for power (Macbeth), murder to avenge patricide (Hamlet), sexual jealousy (Othello) and merely falling in love with the wrong person (Romeo and Juliet). Yet their punishments are all equally gruesome. The punishments themselves often seem driven by a larger destiny, similar to those of the Greek gods. Think of the multiple mistaken identities or mystical overlays that drive the destruction in Macbeth.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music reminded me of this. Here, a relatively minor mistake by the king (he vainly dis-inherits his loving daughter after she fails to effusively praise him) leads to a cosmic sequence of tragedies, storms, blindings, and insanity. These are sometimes driven by real human psychopathy, as in the bastard Edmund’s blinding of his father and banishing of his brother, but mostly seem driven by larger forces. Shakespeare never invokes a Christian god, but clearly believes in these larger forces. The RSC production emphasized Stonehenge-like ritual and costumes and integrated primitive-sounding live music of horns and percussion. There were no wild directorial ideas on display. Interestingly, the director chose not merely color-blind casting, but cast over half the performers from black actors. However Lear,  2/3 of his daughters, and most of the nobility were white, an asymmetry suggesting a directorial message of some sort. The innocent daughter Cordelia was played by a black actress, perhaps because she stands out from the other two in her innocence? 

In any case, the Lear of Antony Sher was less deranged than normal. He seemed more like a guy with early Alzheimer’s disease, and there was always a connection to reality in his performance. This made things less manic and mystical, but perhaps more connected to our world. As expected from the RSC, the actors delivered Shakespeare’s poetry both melodically and clearly. Overall, the performance lacked a little punch and excitement. This was a well thought through and well considered Lear, but a polite one, and I missed the primeval upheaval that the play can invoke.

By the twentieth century, authors were less interested in divine-cosmic-fateful retribution, but more how people cause their own downfall, reflecting the era of psychoanalysis. Perhaps the first modern novelist, Thomas Hardy, previews this in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Here, an initial drunken mis-step (a big one) where a surly man auctions off his wife and loses her, is played out for an entire novel. He rises to the mayoralty of a town, then gradually loses everything. The tragedy is played out as a mix of human precipitants (his violent temper and intemperate actions) but includes an overlay of Fate, with constant evocations of ancient England, dead ancestors, etc. The later great twentieth century tragedians balance this human and super-human tragedy in different ways. Blanche duBois, Willy Loman, and Violet Weston (August, Osage County) clearly fall due to their own disturbed psychology, without any push needed from the gods. However, Eugene O’Neill continues the older human-divine tragic dichotomy much like Shakespeare does. His two early plays Desire under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra update Greek tragedies and mix psychoanalysis with the hint of a larger hand of Fate’s punishment. But even later plays like The Iceman Cometh, consumed with inner human weakness and voices, seem in their length and calamity to be driven by a larger Punishing Hand. O’Neill also maintains the ancient tradition of the fall coming after a human misstep, whether adultery (Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra) or uxoricide (The Iceman Cometh).  The latter play returns to an Oedipal model in which we sense something is tragically wrong with the character, but the sin is only revealed at the end of the play, thus explaining and justifying the already-observed punishment. Only in his last play Long Day’s Journey into Night does O’Neill show decline and fall without initial sin. Here O’Neill joins his colleagues Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in showing tragedy resulting from man’s own innate flawed character, not due to any specific sinful actions. Of course this too is recycled, a non-religious upgrade of Martin Luther’s emphasis on original sin.

One additional twist added in some twentieth century tragedy is a person’s downfall due to society’s intolerance or unjust laws, rather than their own individual failings. This intolerance theme was used earlier by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and most of all in Romeo and Juliet where the couple is truly blameless individually. But this tragedic formula really took off in the twentieth century, emerging from socialist theory promoting global world revolution to overthrow an unjust society. A modern adaption of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 play Yerma, playing in a stunning production at the Park Avenue Armory, depicted the decline and fall of a blameless woman who, failing the expectations of Catholic Spain, is unable to bear children. She finally goes mad and kills her husband for reasons that are unclear. Lorca was a poet and playwright associated with the socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was killed by the fascist/Franco forces for his nonconformity—he was an openly gay member of the Spanish avant garde (joining Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel) and was the sort of threat to tradition that elicited the hatred of the Nationalists. Lorca’s Yerma and Blood Wedding both critique the traditional view of women in society.  Yerma is rarely performed now, perhaps too caught up in Catholic symbolism for modern audiences. In this production, Australian actor/director/writer Simon Stone has rewritten and reconceived the play for today, an era when women are still torn and pressured to bear children. The striking modernist production (designed by Lizzie Clachan) places all the action in a transparent glass box flanked on both sides by an audience who sees the harrowing play unfold clinically and brightly lit, as if the actors were lab animals being studied. 

This wondrous set allows scene changes to happen quickly, in utter darkness within feet of the audience, achieving a sort of magical conjuring effect. Every acting gesture is amplified, and one gets the sense that there is nowhere for the characters to hide. Billie Piper, a pop singer turned actress, is fearless and terrifying in showing us the woman’s gradual disintegration (over 90 minutes) from sexually open single woman to psychotic childless wife. She is onstage in every scene and uses every inch of the revealing glass box set to portray angst, repression, and psychosis. 

You are exhausted watching this performance. As in the original, her decline and fall lead to bloodshed, and there are no convenient explanations as to exactly why.

A very similar tragedy plays out in the classic 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff. Director Kenji Mizoguchi shows a blameless family of an innovative leader torn apart, sold into slavery and prostitution, and largely dissolved into suicide and shame. The film can be seen as a critique of conservative image-conscious Japanese society which rejects nonconformity: “the nail that sticks out above the board should be pounded down”. What tempers the unrelenting tragedy here is the beauty of blameless nature and the family’s unrelenting desire to reunite despite overwhelming tragedy. Mizoguchi was a master of slow panning camera shots that make the characters seem utterly alone in a landscape. Mizoguchi is brilliant in using lighting, slow camera pans, and closeups to heighten the drama, yet also place it in an otherworldly sphere like Lear’s mad scene in the storm. Watch this two-minute sequence   where the enslaved daughter escapes, is pursued, then commits suicide by drowning herself, gobbled up by Nature, accompanied by the eerie singing of her ghostlike exiled mother pleading for her reunion with her. The suicide is one of the most beautiful death scenes I know: she slowly walks into a placid pond, with only residual concentric ripples showing that she was once there. Like Shakespeare and O’Neill, Mizogochi elevates human drama to cosmic calamity. This feels like a return to the mysticism of King Lear, but here mixed with societal intolerance. Mizoguchi continues the tradition of our best dramatists re-inventing the ancient formula of tragedy.