The Burning Stage #6 - Unity
The word Unity has a special place at the heart of British Theatre. The original Unity Theatre grew out of the East End Workers Movement formed in the turmoil of the late 1930s. It was avowedly political and working class and attempted to talk about the issues stemming from the rise in fascism at that time. It innovated many forms of theatre that we take for granted today including Living newspaper, agitprop, documentaries and so on. It was a volunteer actors company meaning it was neither amateur nor strictly professional but many of the great british actors and writers of the 20th and 21st century worked there. It’s home burnt down in 1975 but it managed to soldier on to as late as 1994. The name survives in a Theatre in Liverpool with similar aims. Of course, of course, it never does to try to recreate the past. Times are different however much they appear similar. Tastes change. However, there is one one fundamental way in which Unity is reflected in the Burning Stage Idea and that is by attempting to be human sized and to talk to actors and audiences as human beings with all their human sized hopes, fears, anxieties and aspirations. And, boy. do we need that now.
What I want to talk about here, though, is a very specific type of Unity. The structure of the performance itself.
The Classical UnitiesOne Story, One Stage, One Day
I touched on the idea behind the Classical Unities before:
Unity of Place (The action should occur in one location),
Unity of Time (Over a single day) and
Unity of Action (Follow one event or course of action).
The chap who first devised these in 1514, author and critic Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478 – 1550), reckoned they originated with Aristotle but, as Aristotle’s Poetics weren’t actually translated properly until years later, I think we can discount that as poetic licence. The problem is , because of that, the Classical Unities are seen as being “inauthentic” and having little value. Any attempt to adhere to them has resulted in plays of an unbelievably stultifying nature. They restrict and confine imagination. Playwrights avoid them. After all, they reason, Shakespeare didn’t subscribe to the Unities in his plays one bit and he got by OK.
Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478 - 1550) Holding his Poetic Licence
Despite that, however, I think the Unities are somehow a natural manifestation of play making for the Burning Stage. What Trissino saw were emergent qualities of the drama. And they are a useful thing to bear in mind; if not to follow slavishly.
Through the unity of time, we can experience the events of the stage as they happen before us. It removes scene breaks and time jumps. We are aware of the reality of the actor and the fact that it takes this amount of time to get from here to here or to consider this or that course of action. Of course, the writer will condense and compress but we do gain a sense that this could have happened to a living and breathing human being in the setting of the piece. Unity of Action means we follow one thread or intellectual idea. Not so useful if you want to demonstrate a complex set of relationships but it’s still useful focus for a playwright to bear in mind. Unity of Place is an almost sine qua non on the Burning Stage, “We are here and we will unravel the magic here and now.” Of course, all of these are artificial constraints but they are useful place to start to develop the attitude of The Burning Stage.
At this point, let me clarify something about the Triangle of Engagement in which I envision an equal responsibility for the drama from the writer, the actor and the audience. The audience sees an interaction on the stage between the characters. This is mediated by the actors and so their physical reality for the audience results in a sort of meta-interaction. At the same time there is an interaction between actors, audience and the playwright. This is a sort of meta-meta-interaction where the audience responds to the playwright and the way they have shaped the story to convey a narrative. These interactions are all present on the stage at one time and all are real. We are, at the same time, conscious of the characters, the actors playing them, the writer who has formed them as well as the reactions of other audience members.
Even though we are thoroughly absorbed in the drama, we are also aware of the reality of the actor portraying the character we are following. And at the same time we are aware that the words being spoken have been written by, say, William Shakespeare. The actor and the playwright are both present and real to us as the characters in the story.
The point being that, in the intimacy of the Burning stage, all protagonists: audience, actors, writer, are conscious of the each other and, even though the audience suspends their disbelief in order to follow the story of the drama, they are still conscious of the work of the actor and of the machinations of the writer. There is Unity in any performance. Consequently, the limitations of our physical world impose themselves. However magical the world we create, time and distance are still same for all of us. The laws of motion, gravity and so on, still apply. Of course we may pretend they do not. We can play with these idesas and show an actor flying through the air or swimmming through a shark infested sea. But we neeed to be aware that this is another level of suspension of disbelief and, it still takes an amount of real time for an actor to cross a stage. (Or a character to cross a room). We have to allow for the reality of Time and Space. If they leave by one door, we question how long it will take them to re-enter and what has happened to make them re-enter from another. What is the character doing whilst waiting for an entrance? Consciously or subconsciously, we are following that meta reality. Thus, the Unities can become less abstract, intellectual restrictions but more emergent, natural properties of the story being told. Because, at some level we are always aware of the One Place where are present. The One Event we are part of. And the One Time that the whole thing takes even when we have chosen to suspend our disbelief in them all.
And even Shakespeare was conscious of this. On his stage he could shift focus but remain, largely, in one place. Thus: “Another part of the Battlefield,” “Another part of the Garden” and so on. Even if these aren’t strictly Unities of Place, they do not require a break in the action for the audience. The drama might occur in any fantasy location but it must be consistent and obey the inescapable laws of physics as we know them. Any change or shift of focus is a an intrusion into our concentration. And somehow we have to be signalled of that change. We might have to import a narrator or include notes in the programme. As an audience member I do not want to be wearied by continually shifting place and time, or having to understand different realities, and having them signalled to me: Now we are Here. Now we are somewhen else.
That’s not to say I don’t like to play with these unities when I am writing but I remain conscious of the reality, the meta-reality and the meta-meta-reality that the whole enterprise is subject to. Occasionally it is fun to fold two time-lines together, to coincide two places, the let more than one course of action resonate off another. As wise people always remark “Rules are made to be broken” but, I think understanding what natural rules and restrictions there may be, make the breaking more artistically satisfying.
How Does this help the Burning Stage?
What’s more, there are a couple of definite advantages in using the Classical Unities as a guide to making theatre. One is that it avoids the temptation to show scene after scene after scene using a sort filmic language. Quick cuts hurry the action on in films but they can be wearying on stage and lead to a more alienated response. This alienation I call Spectacle. This dodging about from location to location also implies that we are in the hands of the writer and director who show us what details of place and time they want us to see and how they want us to feel about it. It becomes a Power Gradient in which the audience is manipulated into one response to the narrative. There is less room for engagement. The audience can only sit back and watch as the parade passes by.
For any writer brought up with the language of film, thinking in terms of the Classical Unities, may help to produce a crisper, more direct form of narrative. On the Burning Stage it is better to show us one setting in great detail rather than a sketchy attempt to reproduce a huge series of landscapes. It is using the very thing that is unique to theatre, a living experience, to its best advantage. In a Burning Stage drama, the audience is physically present in the bedroom as Othello murders Desdemona. Our response is immediate and genuine.
The other reason to follow the Classical Unities is to avoid a sort of nudge-nudge wink-wink cheap gag which breaks the fourth wall convention. In The Burning Theatre, there is no fourth wall. The actor does not refer to the audience either in character or out of it because that says, in effect: “I have no faith in your commitment to the piece” and “I know you don’t believe any of this nonsense.” This can degrade any genuine emotional response into a forced humour or tristesse. And, while this might have its place at times, anything that refers directly to the audience as an audience has the danger of being obvious and lumpy. It does not value the audiences desires to be transported to a new reality where ideas can be explored and examined dispassionately. We set off on a journey together and must credit the audience with enough intelliegence to be able to accompany us without being chivvyed along.
There is one strong outcome of this for the writer and that is through Dramatic Irony. Here the audience are led to knowledge of something happening that the characters in the Drama do not. It is almost as though the writer is speaking directly to the audience over the heads of the characters.
Intensity and Focus
The great advantage in the Burning Stage is the intensity and focus given by the audience. This enables the writer and actors to explore characters and situations further and deeper than they might in traditional settings. We are told that a person’s attention span is 15 minutes. But my experience, (incidentally backed up by contemporary research from Kings College, London) shows that, provided that there is a subject that the audience can identify with, an individual can and will concentrate for much longer than this. Given the right environment and a feeling that the experience is direct and personal the audience member will want to follow the narrative to the end without being constantly harassed by scene changes and effects. My advice to writers might be: Don’t be afraid to experiment with the Classical Unities. Keep the ideas flowing. Let the drama expand at its own speed and engagement will follow.
There is an idea that the imagination can range wider and innovate more when it is restricted in some way. While the unities may not been seen as necessary, they may be useful in stimuulating imaginative leaps and acting as the rules of a game that we theatre makers are playing along side our audience.
Are you a writer or theatre goer? How do you respond to a drama that takes time to unfold? Do you get bored easily or are you pleased when a writer treats you as someone who can follow a narrative without being prodded to stay awake every few seconds?
