exploit groups of the minority, such as women and people of lower class origin or who come from different countries. In the play, English is the signifier of the majority, which is characteristically oppressive, steadfast, and diehard. However, in “The Question of Liz” Liz starts to recognize the regenerative or subversive power of language in the burrow space of the minor theatre. By becoming fluent in the major language (“Your Excellency, I will endeavour to speak Mr. Farquhar’s lines with the elegance and clarity their own worth commands”), by “speaking English,” Liz transforms Farquhar and his drama, which is as less the emblem of the major literature and more as pure material, and which is susceptible to the incessant appropriations or corrosions of meaning by the actor or audience.
Towards a Minor Theatre
Take the final scene as an example. Indeed, the last scene may be regarded as the crown of Wertenbaker’s minor-theatrical politics. Critics such as Stephen Weeks notice a curious imperative—“the show must go on”—in the last scene, which is entitled “Backstage” (152). Weeks then labels the scene as a “backstage comedy,” which is pregnant with elements of self-reflexivity, such as the pre-show nervousness, the adjusting of costumes, the revising/cutting of the prologue, the role-playing, audience appeal, and so on (152). Or, as some reviewers complain, within a few lines, Farquhar’s play begins, and Wertenbaker’s concludes, and “one ends up feeling cheated out of enjoying the full version of The Recruiting Officer” in that the audience only sees rehearsal snippets (Brustein 30). Indeed, throughout the play, key lines or phrases from Farquhar are often repeated with variations. What Wertenbaker aims to do is not to reproduce Keneally’s The Playmaker, or to restage the performance of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in the penal colony. Instead, by using “backstage” to end Our Country’s Good, the playwright tries to emphasize that the convict theatre as the minor theatre not only ceases to represent or reproduce dominant ideology and power structure, but also contributes to the becoming of a minor consciousness (Fortier 6). The backstage is the assemblage of previously blocked desires of the outside, of rhizomes, and of immanence. The “Backstage” scene actualizes a Nomadology, which is an alternative to and the opposite of the authorized
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staged History.5 Wertenbaker’s backstage is not a world to reproduce, but a burrow space in which to assemble in nomadic heterogeneity to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities of lines of flight (Kafka 13).
Indeed, Wertenbaker’s backstage dramaturgy is much more complex than critics have perceived. In terms of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory, this backstage scene actualizes an immanent process of desire, a continuum made up of contiguities. Above all, the contiguous is not opposed to the continuous, instead, it is a “local” and “indefinitely prolongable” version of the continuous (Kafka 51). First, it is seen when Ralph Clark prevails upon Wisehammer to cut his satirical prologue, because it is too “political,” too “provocative”:
From distant climes o’er wide-spread seas we come, Though not with much éclat or beat of drum, True patriots all; for be it understood, We left our country for our country’s good;
No private views disgraced our generous zeal, What urg’d our travels was our country’s weal, And none will doubt but that our emigration
Has prov’d most useful to the British nation. (2.11. 279)6
Initially, when Wisehammer first shows Clark his working prologue in the scene of “The Meaning of Plays” (2.7.), the comment in response from Clark is that: “I do like it. Perhaps it needs a little more work. It’s not Farquhar” (2.7.
259). In the face of Clark’s objections, Wisehammer can only emphasize the local, the diasporic appropriateness of his prologue: “It would mean more to convicts” than something out-of-tune, out-of-date like “In ancient times, when Helen’s fatal charms” (2.7. 259, 258). Eventually, the prologue will not be
5 Here in my discussion of the “Backstage” scene, I am applying Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome in the introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (3-25).
6 Some critics attribute the above famous prologue to George Barrington, a pickpocket who was sentenced in 1790 to seven years transportation to Australia, and who was believed to have written the prologue to the first production in Sydney. However, some consider that the prologue was composed by another person named Henry Carter, a hack journalist in London, well after he had heard that the play had been performed (Hughes 340). According to Peter Buse, the prologue was initially written for a metropolitan audience as a satirical broadside aimed at the “inferior denizens of the far-off colony.”
Buse further claims that, by recycling the doggerel written by Carter the London journalist to serve its purpose of the sentimental self-expression of the convicts, Our Country’s Good re-appropriates “the language of the colonizers on behalf of the colonized” (165).
Towards a Minor Theatre 43
used in that night’s performance. However, as Sideway proposes, Wisehammer’s prologue will be used in the Sideway Theatre which he is going to establish, and which will recruit the convict players in the next day’s auditions (2.11. 275). The convict performance is no longer a question of the convicts’ becoming major (their subjugation to the majority by means of coercion or redemption), but a collaborative enterprise of a new “haecceity,”
and a new becoming. And this becoming is not presented as a simple imitation or adoption of the elite culture of the dominant community, but as an assemblage of the minor consciousness through transversals; it is not a physical escape of trajectory, or movements in “extension,” but as movements in “intensities” or “intension,” or as lines of flight in “becoming” (Bogue 171).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, fleeing is useless movement in space, a movement of false liberty; while in contrast, flight is affirmed when it is a stationary flight, a flight of intensity, or a way out (Kafka 13). Let us examine the change, the becoming of John Arscott. Arscott, who planned his
“renegade escapade” with other prisoners in vain, is seen “in chains,” “bent over, facing away” at the very beginning of Act Two (2.1. 240). He is afflicted by the impossibility of escaping this Australian penal colony which is a
“foreign upside-down desert.” Tortured with perceptions of barrenness, entrapment, and disorientation, Arscott keeps yelling: “There’s no escape!”
“There’s no escape I tell you” (2.1. 242). The process of becoming minor and the trajectory of flight can be identified in the monologue uttered by Arscott in Act II, scene 7, who is playing Sergeant Kite. Curiously and ambiguously, here Arscott seems to draw on the stationary flight in the convict theatre more than on the useless fleeing in geographical space: “I don’t want to play myself.
When I say Kite’s lines I forget everything else. … I don’t have to think about what happened to Kable, I don’t have to remember the things I’ve done, when I speak Kite’s lines I don’t hate any more. I’m Kite. I’m in Shrewsbury” (2.7.
261-62). Arguably, Arscott presses on, trying to forget his past errors as he aims to find a home and function within the world of the convict theatre. And according to Arscott himself, his acting is characteristic of the solipsistic “I”
slipping away, hiding, or disappearing into an absence, an illusion to ward off the evil past, the troubled present, and the uncertain future. Here at this stage, the convict theatre bespeaks for Arscott an escape, a kind of thoughtful awareness of an absence rather than a promising and joyful line of flight. The
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true sense of becoming minor, of an immanent process of desire, and of a continuum of contiguities has to be postponed to be realized until the last scene of the whole play, “Backstage.”
Backstage, we can sense the change/becoming of Arscott as well as the assemblage of the minor consciousness. Mary Brenham tries to comfort Arscott that there shall be “[no] more violence,” and Ralph Clark also advises Arscott to stay “calm,” to which Arscott admits that he has been “used to danger” (2.11.276, 278). However, Arscott, the one who has been used to violent challenges and physical escapades, is heard persuading Dabby to give up plans of escape and to be committed to the convict theatre: “When I say my lines, I think of nothing else. Why can’t you do the same?” (2.11. 274).
Arscott’s proposal is further seconded by Wisehammer and Sideway:
WISEHAMMER. I don’t want to go back to England now. It’s too small and they don’t like Jews. Here, no one has more of a right than anyone else to call you a foreigner. I want to become the first famous writer.
. . .
SIDEWAY. I’m going to start a theatre company. Who wants to be in it?
WISEHAMMER. I will write you a play about justice.
SIDEWAY. Only comedies, my boy, only comedies.
WISEHAMMER. What about a comedy about unrequited love?
LIZ. I’ll be in your company, Mr. Sideway.
KETCH. And so will I. I’ll play all the parts that have dignity and gravity.
SIDEWAY. I’ll hold auditions tomorrow.
DABBY. Tomorrow.
DUCKLING. Tomorrow.
MARRY. Tomorrow.
LIZ. Tomorrow. (2.11. 274-75)
“Tomorrow” carries with it a sense of prolongable, contiguous continuum of desires and possibilities: individual ambition, cruelly suppressed in England, will blossom in the new colony, the new minor theatre (Buse 169).
Wertenbaker’s convict theatre never refers to a real theatrical performance,
Towards a Minor Theatre 45
but corresponds to new zones of movements, vibrations, and thresholds in the deserted penal colony. By means of the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome and the burrow space of the convict theatre, the future Australian Sideway Theatre Company is seen burgeoning to displace all the transcendental and the major (such as law and justice) with the celebration of the continuum of desires (“Only comedies, my boy, only comedies”).
Arguably, Wisehammer’s writing and Sideway’s dramaturgy will function together as the literary machine to generate new lines of flight. Like a fertilized ovum, this literary machine will split, divide, and grow into being;
another new open network of burrows, tunnels, and passages will be constructed to spread indefinitely; a process of division and multiplication is felt to be evolving virtually interminably.
When Black Caesar’s drunkenness, his stage fright, and his fear of displeasing his Madagascan ancestors threatens to ruin the forthcoming performance, Ralph tries to coerce him into performing by reminding that
“our ancestors are thousands of miles away,” and Mary encourages Caesar to
“[think] of us as your family” (2.11. 276). In this “we,” this universal, intimate (“us as your family”) collectivity, Wertenbaker displays not only the assemblage of the dislocated outcast/outsiders, but also the functioning of this assemblage. In the last moments of the play, Arscott (who plays Sergeant Kite with a mission to recruit new membership) successfully recruits Black Caesar to go up on stage with him, when “to the triumphant music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the sound of applause and laughter from the First Fleet audience, the first Australian performance of The Recruiting Officer begins”
(2.11. 281; emphasis mine). This final stage direction, with its ambivalent overtone of happy ending and “triumph,”7 remains the final word of the play.
For Wertenbaker and for the remaining actors backstage who “listen with trepidation to Kite’s first speech” (2.11. 280), this on/offstage represents a line of flight away from the world of the familiar and the conventional towards a pure encounter with the world of sheer variation and becoming. At the point when the play ends, it is an activity of life in which one is held outside oneself, a movement of translation which involves not so much the transposition of material bodies in space, as a movement of vital inner transformation. The end
7 In his examination of post-war British drama, Buse maintains that the ending of Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good is strikingly different in its resolution. See Buse’s discussion under the section title of
“For Happy Endings Go to Australia” (166-69).
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of the play shall not be interpreted as the successful pacification of an underclass by the ruling class of New South Wales (Wilson 33; Sullivan 143).
In fact, the play ends with a beginning (Buse 167).
At this point, we the audience/reader are reminded of Wertenbaker’s public statement of celebration of the humanizing force of theatre: the social function of theatre is not to legitimize or complot with the dominant ideology of the master, but to affirm individual human value and experience, that is, to place the interests of the convicts before those of the colony and the empire.
Wertenbaker’s writing machine is a massive machine whose components are conjoined through transversals to form another community and country. By means of an indefinite and open production of dramatic and performance text in the future, a process in perpetual motion, which is less a completed burrow than a ceaseless burrowing, is thus rendered possible (Bogue 188). The end of the play anticipates lines of flight that manifest the rhizomatic direction of detour/retour, of deterritorialization/reterritorialization.
Conclusion
The protean nature of the play and of Wertenbaker’s dramaturgy as a whole can be best described by Max Stafford-Clark, who has directed many of Wertenbaker’s plays, including Our Country’s Good: “there is usually a reluctance to see events through the eyes of one person . . . Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays are also sometimes criticized for lacking a narrative line, for lacking a principal character. And sometimes those criticisms are also a critic’s limitations to come to grips with a new form which is a strength as well as a weakness” (Calvalho 38). I maintain that this new form is a dramaturgy of the minor theatre which celebrates the cultural translation of history and the minorization of hegemonic structures of identity. It is a project of becoming minor that puts forward a new paradigm for literature, for theatre, which is open to multiplicity, difference, and variation (Fortier 2).
Wertenbaker’s strategy of “becoming minor” is reflected in both the content and form of Our Country’s Good. Through subtle reminders of the existence of the oppressed cultures, of the palimpsests of cross-cultural contextuality, the play interrogates the issues of (post-)colonial identity together with concomitant themes of loss of home and belonging, spiritual displacement and reterritorialization. Framed in between the spatiality of offstage and backstage, the play is always in the middle, “between things, interbeing, intermezzo,”
Towards a Minor Theatre 47
and it is characterized by a relationship of alliances rather than filiation, by a logic of “and . . . and . . . and . . .” rather than “to be” (A Thousand Plateaus 25). Arguably, instead of bespeaking an abiding anxiety of fluidity in identity as a result of physical displacement in a complex web of cultural dislocation, Wertenbaker, as well as her characters, is fully aware of “the indeterminate nature of experience” (Carlson 146), recognizing the concept and practice of the “cross-border” politics of identity. In her series of play-making, from page to stage, in her series of the dynamic process of translation/adaptation, of transposition/transcreation, Wertenbaker has carved out a significant minor theatrical space for the indeterminate, unfinalizing dialogism between the subjectivity and textuality, between the text and the world. What is expected is the recurrence of difference in theatrical performances which aim not to repeat, reproduce the same and the dominant, not to master the simple and straightforward difference, but instead to induce a series of differences with variations.
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Works Cited
Bligh, Kate. “Oppositional Symmetries: An Anthropological Voyage through Our Country’s Good & The Poetics.” International Dramaturgy:
Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker. Ed. Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 177-93. Print.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Brustein, Robert. “Our Country’s Good.” The New Republic 204.23 (June 10 1991): 29-30. Print.
Buse, Peter. Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama.
Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2001. Print.
Carlson, Susan. “Language and Identity in Wertenbaker’s Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Eds.
Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000.
134-49. Print.
Carvalho, Paulo Eduardo. “An Interview with Max Stafford-Clark.” The European English Messenger 7:2 (Autumn 1998): 33-39. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.
——. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia U P, 1987. Print.
Dymkowski, Christine. “‘The Play’s the Thing’: The Metatheatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker.” Ed. Nicole Boireau. Drama on Drama:
Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage.
London: Macmillan, 1997: 121-35. Print.
Fortier, Mark. “Shakespeare as ‘Minor Literature’: Deleuze and Guattarie and the Aims of Adaptation.” Mosaic 29.1 (1996 March): 1-18. Print.
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. New York: Vintage, 1988. Print.
Roth, Maya. “Engaging Cultural Translations: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s History Plays from New Anatomies to After Darwin.” International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker. Eds. Roth, Maya E. and Sara Freeman. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 155-76. Print.
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Sullivan, Esther Beth. “Hailing Ideology, Acting in the Horizon, and Reading Between Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker.” Theatre Journal 45.2 (May 1993): 139-54. Print.
Weeks, Stephen. “The Question of Liz: Staging the Prison in Our Country’s Good.” Modern Drama 43.2 (Summer 2000): 147-56. Print.
Wertenbaker, Timberlake. Timberlake Wertenbaker: Plays I. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print.
Wilson, Ann. “Our Country’s Good: Theatre, Colony and Nation in Wertanbaker’s Adaptation of The Playmaker.” Modern Drama 34 (1991): 23-34. Print.
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