Theater as Politics

Given the spectacle of audiences activated in response to Churchill’s writing through their public visibility as critics and commentators, I suggest that the role of the spectator and the actor can be further examined through Augusto Boal’s insight on theater. After the premiere, not only did the original dramaturgy trigger debates among critics with different reviewing aspects, it has also inspired several authors to

create their own narrative niches in the Israel/Palestine question. In the meantime, except for the staging in theatrical spaces, the play featuring its short and adaptable (no specific setting or stage directions) script allows performances in any form. For example, a street rehearsal of the play as a different experimental performance to demonstrate political needs can be found on YouTube.²⁸ Exerting their discursive visibility, some spectators thereby propagate against the ideological systems they comprehend in the play. Others, using the framework of the play, display similar standpoints to Churchill’s and further politicize the play. In this regard, I argue that the participation of different communities in the Seven Jewish Children after-show events presents the double roles of the spectator and actor as in Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.

“The Theatre of the Oppressed”, as coined by Boal, “is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!). They are Spect-Actors” (15). As some Jewish critics choose to display their opinions on the commentary websites as analyzed in the previous chapter, they circumscribes a scope of a community connecting each other to review a history of the past from which a new one is being made. Ultimately, the theatrical experiences invoke their communal traumatic experiences whether their knowledge of the holocaust is genealogically passed on them or not. I suggest that this formation of a community could be compared to what Yuyachkani (Peruvian theatre group) achieves in presenting the surviving struggle in atrocities:

28 The street play of Seven Jewish Children in Hebrew was directed by Samieh Jabbarin, an Arab-Israeli

theater artist based in Jaffa. The video remarks that “Jabbarin was not in attendance” because he was under house arrest after protesting a right wing provocation at the Arab-Israeli town of

Umm al-Fahm; The Guardian further reports that “he directed proceedings via phone and Skype”

(Olinsky; Shabi).

By partaking actively in workshop or street events, spectators could enter into dialogue with a historical trauma. The witness, like Boal’s spect-actor, was able to accept the dangers and responsibilities “of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.” In this way, such performances continue to reaffirm to these communities the collective subjectivity and communal memory.

(Campbell and Kear 14)

Even though the follow-up dramas and debates provoked by Seven Jewish Children are not intentionally grouped in the form of official workshops, by trying to get involved in the original play, the audience creates a spectacle of theatrical

participation from which different communities emerge. In this way, those who write dramatic texts to counteract Churchill’s narrative embodies the active role of

spectators.

The cacophonous voices from the critics and playwrights create dramatic meaning as well as action. As fulfilled in Boal’s Forum Theater, the spect-actors attempt to see different outcomes when they intervene the original performance. In the course of participation, Seven Jewish Children develops into a theatrical practice through which it could reach its ultimate goal of gathering people together for real political action. As Randy Martin’s reading of Boal suggests,

Theatre is a means for drawing people together across time and space, and for representing this accomplishment once it has gotten them together by virtue of what is presented on stage. I have referred to this technology for gathering publics to reflect on their own capacity for assemblage, attention, and participation, made manifest in the theatre as the socialist ensemble (26).

A theater of politics aiming at certain social changes lies in the participation and intervention of spect-actors. For Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, who take part in the course of this theater-making, they understand the play as a medium to propel the participation of the Jewish community in a global sense: “…Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.” This appeal, foregrounding the ethics of spect-actors, proves that the responsive actions from the audience, be it supporting or disapproving, to be

imperative.

Boal’s theory presupposes that the position of onlooker is inherently oppressive.

In an interview, Boal directly states that “‘I want the spectator to act not watch. It is obscene for a human being who is fully capable of doing to merely

watch’”(Mellgren). Amalia Gladhart has pointed out that “the nonintervening bystander, however, also facilitates oppression, allowing torture to continue

unchecked, accepting spurious ‘explanations’ of disappearance and imprisonment”

(qtd. in R. Martin 27). Therefore, “the audience must be whipped into shape” which

“allows the political agency of theatre to be considered as part of a continuum of forces of violence beyond the stage” (qtd. in R. Martin 27). To this end, not limited to stage acting, Boal’s theater reveals its possibility of transformation when the

performance can always be rewritten elsewhere in public spaces. In his suggestion of dramaturgy, Boal explains that

[t]he original solutions proposed by the protagonist (in the play shown to provoke the audience’s interventions, ‘the model’) must contain at the very least one political or social ‘error’ which will be analysed during the forum session. These errors must be clearly expressed and carefully rehearsed, in well-defined situations….The original play—the model—must present a mistake, a failure, so that the spect-actors will be spurred into finding

solutions and inventing new ways of confronting oppression. We pose good questions, but the audience must supply good answers. (242)

In the regard, the mistakes and failures in the original Seven Jewish Children have facilitated the following productions from spect-actors challenging the very problematic textual contents in the play.

Therefore, I maintain that Seven Jewish Children successfully rids the spectators of the role of onlookers, making the theater event a political practice.

Moreover, Gladhart extends the idea of political practice through theater to a reckoning that “there is no neutral place in theatre or in politics” and “the theatre is not an innocent space of make believe but is part of a coercive economy through which state, capital, and popular opposition engage” (qtd. in R. Martin 27). The play’s controversy elicited by reason of anti-Semitism debates poignantly proves that theater may not always be “neutral” and “innocent”. In fact, to view it as a work deliberately created to be offensive could still shed lights on the possibilities of a political theater.

I suggest that the controversy of a theatrical production could be viewed as predictable, if not necessary, for creative freedom which aims at provocative thoughts.

In the field of art, politically charged events lead to different viewpoints about the use of political correctness which tinges the term with mostly negative implication. In the observation of the controversy around Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice,²⁹ Janelle Reinelt proposes to use the term political correctness in a rational and

profounder way instead of eliding it into a derisive retaliation or censoring tool. Even though Reinelt holds that England People Very Nice, a play accused of racist

stereotyping immigrants in Britain, may not be politically correct in depicting certain

29 Accusing director Nick Hytner and playwright Richard Bean of racist elements in the play, Hussain Ismail, “a theatre director from Bethnal Green, the community depicted in the play, organized a campaign against the play with pickets at the theatre” ( Reinelt 144).

groups of people, she would not rail against its performance because “the criticism it received is healthy in a democracy and raises appropriate questions about the value of the play”( Reinelt 145). She then appropriates Richard Bean’s own dismissal of criticism about his play to point out the ambiguity of political correctness in different cases involved with individual political standpoints:

Bean brushed aside this criticism as so much political correctness and countered that playwrights are too scared of causing offense: ‘The problem with our playwrights is that they’re all so polite. They daren’t say anything about anybody, unless they’re slagging off America.’ He must not have read the plays of Mark Ravenhill, or noticed Caryl Churchill’s play for Gaza,

Seven Jewish Children…Of course he did notice Caryl Churchill’s play. As

John Bull has pointed out, Bean’s pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian sentiments are worked into the political fabric of his play…. (Reinelt 144-5)

Bean describes people living in Hampstead as “the Hampstead Hamas,” ironizing them as pro-Palestinian, far-leftist chattering intellectuals (Reinelt 146). Bean speaks in defense of his ridicule of immigrants in his play under the banner of dismantling the “polite” political correctness in creating artistic work while holding his own solid stance regarding Israel/Palestine question.

It is also noteworthy that Bean’s controversy is explained as “the charge of giving offence is being used more and more to stifle free expression” by Melanie Phillips, who firmly rivals against Seven Jewish Children in which she finds Churchill’s “true prejudice against Israel and the Jews.” Suggesting not to take seriously of Bean’s caricatures and stereotyping like “the token Palestinian as consumed by a kind of geopolitical Tourette’s Syndrome of unstoppable anti-Israel ranting,” Phillips otherwise criticizes Churchill’s writing by condemning it as

“inciting yet more frenzied hatred and true prejudice against Israel and the Jews”

(“England People Very Confused”). In view of this contradictory judgment and definition about artistic freedom, the fine line between radical act against politeness and the violation of political correctness requires scrutiny and discussion instead of immediate censorship. What accounts for the “fitting and timely” appropriation of political correctness in cultural performance events remains the question at stake (Reinelt 145).

Yet one thing is certain—the after-show firestorm of Seven Jewish Children shows that the play successfully breaks the framework of politeness. The breakdown of polite barrier throws light on the connection of theater and spectator in a political context where particular communities gathered are activated in social arenas beyond stage performance. Boal’s goal is to use theater’s power to bring influence to society, that is, “Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of

transforming society”(16). As Randy Martin summarizes: “Boal’s work’s is a most intriguing place to unpack this contradictory relation between theatre’s call to

presence and liveness on the one hand, and to ensemble and mediation, on the other”

(26). To this end, “political theatre readily finds itself, through its very ambition, already compromised in its ability to bring all the elements together, onstage and off”( R. Martin 24).

Ultimately, I suggest that one can navigate different ideas of theater theorists so as to view Seven Jewish Children as an event that aspires to bring the audience members together to achieve political actions. I further argue that the different approaches of theatricality are not necessarily contradictory to each other and can actually be applied in a complementary manner. As noted by Peter Brook, “For Artaud theatre is fire; for Brecht, theatre is clear vision; for Stanislavski, theatre is humanity.

Why must we choose among them” (qtd. in J. Martin 81)? Seven Jewish Children therefore designates a further understanding and conflict converged in the theoretical approaches of Artaud, Brecht and Boal. The convergence of the theater theorists lies in the bonding of theater and audience, to be more precisely, the active spect-actors.

As Siân Adiseshiah has it,

the role of the audience as both spectator and participant in the writing of a political narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict strengthens Seven Jewish

Children’s processes of subjectivization. Invited to consider if, or what, to

tell children about the conflict and to deliberate the issues in post-show discussions, audiences are offered the opportunity to accept or decline their emergence as speaking subjects”(117).

The spectator in transformation exemplifies Peter Brook’s attempt to “fight against

‘deadly theatre’—‘a theatre which exists on politeness, where people do not respond directly to one another and where the audience also reacts politely’” (qtd. in J. Martin 76). In this regard, Brook experiments with dramaturgy and explores the theatrical spaces. Likewise, Seven Jewish Children has invited theatrical experiments from active spectators based on which the theater of politics keeps evolving.

在文檔中 《七個猶太小孩》的論述與戲劇奇觀 (頁 63-70)