The title promises not just degradation but “appalling” degradation. Some potential spectators feel a frisson of anticipation and check their smartphone’s storage in preparation for the photographs they will take. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” as the saying goes though Instagram will likely delete these images, on the grounds that they are “violent, nude, partially nude, discriminatory, unlawful, infringing, hateful, pornographic or sexually suggestive” (Instagram 2018). Other would-be audience members recoil in anticipated horror, outraged at the implied violence and the invitation to voyeurism. Perhaps they will start a social media campaign and an online petition, demanding that the producers cancel the performance, issue an apology, and examine the internal processes that led to this work being programmed at all. Still others are somewhat dismayed that everyone is interpreting the title so literally when it is so clearly conceptual! They also note that neither the supporters nor the critics have seen the show and that as a result we find ourselves responding to the response without having had a chance to encounter the work itself. For my part, I feel bemused, even benumbed. I have seen this show before.
Perhaps one reason for my fatigue is that contemporary public life in Australia presents endless “scenes of appalling human degradation.” Over the past five years, I have witnessed 12 asylum seekers die in the country’s offshore immigration detention centres, taking the death toll of Operation Sovereign Borders to 73 and the number of border-related deaths in the 21st century to 2,015 (Doherty, Evershed, and Ball 2018; Monash 2018). I have witnessed prison officers assaulting Aboriginal children in their care: grabbing their throats; kneeing their stomachs; throwing them against walls; knocking them to the ground; hurling fruit at them; forcing them to strip naked; tear-gassing them; and in one infamous case hooding a 17-year-old boy and shackling him to a chair (ABC 2016).
Of course, public life is not solely national. So, alongside Australia’s scenes of appalling human degradation, I have witnessed Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Netanyahu in Israel, Trump in the United States, and so on. The strong men are on the march. I have witnessed the bombing of Syria and the drowning of its toddlers. And I have witnessed the world’s indifference to most of it. Could the theatre be more degrading than any of this? Even if it could, why would we want it to be so? Why would we want theatre to participate in this economy of horror and humiliation? Yet having rehearsed this litany of atrocities, I realise that I am no longer numb. Instead I am tingling, as my flesh and conscience slowly come back to life, pushing through the pins and needles. What was I thinking when I started writing this gloss? Who is that woman in the first paragraph, so jaded and bored? Even when I have seen a show, I have not really seen it. And there is always more to see. I start reading.
Relief floods over me. It’s written by a woman; it features a woman. Perhaps this will not be so bad. Perhaps there will be a feminist twist. Perhaps the play will contemplate the impossibility of such a twist. I read on. The woman on stage is wearing “flat shoes” and is “very neatly dressed”. She could be me! Or perhaps not: she is sporting trousers and I hardly ever wear those. Enter a man, and then exit. Enter another man, and then exit again. Enter all the men – every male protagonist you have ever seen strut and fret his hour upon the stage – and they do not exit. Here come the balding and the bearded (hint, they are often one and the same). Here comes the patriarch and his son. Here comes the heir apparent and his bitter brother. Here comes the romantic suitor and his less handsome sidekick. Here comes the beggar and the mad king, the jester and the wise boy, the child prodigy and the enfant terrible. Here comes the young man on the make and the old man on the prowl. Here comes the charmer and the bully (hint, they are often one and the same). Here comes the working-class man newly redundant and the middle-class manager who made him so. Here comes the draft dodger and the war veteran, the jock and the nerd, the surprise success and the one who was always most likely. Here comes the crusader, the conviction politician, the conniving advisor, the bagman, the murderer, the one who had an affair, the alcoholic, the recovered addict, the geezer, the good bloke, and his best mate. Here comes the artist and the abuser (hint, they are often one and the same). Suddenly, I am in the mood for degradation. Let the appalling abuse begin.
But wait, a mistake has been made. Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. Doesn’t this woman know that she can’t afford a mistake? She must work twice as hard for half the opportunities; there will be no second chances. Will the men laugh at her mistake? Inevitably. Will one of them help? Condescendingly. It’s okay. She can handle it. Look, she is talking now. Oh, she speaks French. Sigh. Of course she does. That explains why she’s described as “very elegant.” For the Anglophone woman, the French WomanTM seems designed precisely to humiliate her, since French Women Don’t Get Fat; French Children Don’t Throw Food; French Women Don’t Get Facelifts; French Women’s Secrets to Feeling Beautiful Every Day; French Women’s Secrets for Ageing with Style and Grace; How Those Chic French Women Eat All That Rich Food and Still Stay Slim; A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl; French Women Don’t Sleep Alone; What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart (Hyde 2014).
This current French Woman of the Theatre reminds me of another—Hélène Cixous. I recall the line:
Nous vivons devant le rideau de papier, et même souvent en tant que rideau. Mais ce qui nous importe, ce qui nous blesse, ce qui nous fait sentir que nous sommes les personnages d‘une aventure immense, c‘est ce qui se passe derrière le rideau. Et derrière le rideau il y a la scène nue. (Cixous 1987)
(We live before the paper curtain, and often as curtains. But what is important to us, what wounds us, what makes us feel we are the characters in an immense adventure, is what comes to pass behind the curtain. And behind the curtain there is the naked stage.) (Cixous 1994, 152)[1]
Please, as if French women have paper curtains! Surely, French Women Decorate in Organic Linens? In any case, the pulling of the curtain here makes me feel like a fool. Of course the scenes of degradation are going to happen offstage or, more accurately, onstage but out of view. It’s the oldest theatrical trick in the book. It predates the book. The Ancient Greeks knew that our imaginations would have those men doing things far worse than the theatre could ever stage.
Yet the spectacle of “rotat[ing] two concentric squares of chairs” suggests that theatre’s degradation may be rather more banal. Yes, it is degrading because it stages suicides, infanticides, matricides, patricides, blindings, beatings, rapes, and violations. Yes, it is degrading because it renders its artists impoverished and precarious, stranded mid-career with no savings or health insurance and few prospects. Beyond that, though, theatre degrades as a computer does: slowing down, glitching, getting caught in strange interminable loops. Its users download upgrades only to find that the software and hardware are no longer compatible. The cursor blinks, the hourglass drains, the pinwheel spins, the blue screen of death appears and becomes a black mirror. Once theatre was the original black mirror, offering dark reflections of ourselves interspersed with backlit scenes from other worlds. Now I am not so sure.
Theatre has been, depending on who you read, a mirror, a window, a hammer, a haven, a release valve, a rehearsal for the revolution to come, a redressive ritual for the wrongs that were done, and an alternative archive for precious cultural knowledge. To borrow from Cixous again:
[L]e Théâtre c‘est le lieu du Crime. Oui le lieu du Crime, le lieu de l‘horreur, aussi le lieu du Pardon. … Pourquoi aimons–nous si immédiatement, si éternellement certaines œuvres de théâtre ou d‘opéra ? Parce qu‘en nous montrant nos crimes au Théâtre, devant témoins, elles nous accusent et en même temps elles nous pardonnent. (Cixous 1987)
([T]he Theater is the place of Crime. Yes, the place of Crime, the place of horror, also the place of Forgiveness. … Why do we love so immediately, so eternally, certain works of theater or opera? Because by showing us our crimes in the Theater, before witnesses, they accuse us and at the same time they forgive us.) (Cixous 1994, 154)[2]
No wonder theatre is having a meltdown! The system cannot help but overload, crashing under the weight of hope and expectation. Theatre, you have too many tabs open! Now there is an internal fatal error and as a result kernel panic. The operating system cannot safely recover without major data loss. The result is man-beetles rearranging chairs and a woman drawing a curtain across the stage and saying:
Je suis désolée mais vous devez partir.
(I’m sorry but you need to leave.)
In this way, the fourth wall is breached but a fifth wall is erected. The strong men would be proud.
Works Cited
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). 2016. “Dylan Voller: Timeline of Teenager’s Mistreatment in NT Youth Detention.” ABC. July 27, 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-26/timeline-of-vollers-mistreatment-in-detention-centres/7661788
Cixous, Hélène. 1987. “Le lieu du Crime, le lieu du Pardon”, L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves, et quelques écrits sur le théâtre. Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987, pp. 253-259. Reproduced: “Le lieu du crime, le lieu du pardon,” Théâtre du Soleil, https://www.theatre-du-soleil.fr/sp/a-lire/le-lieu-du-crime-le-lieu-du-pardon-4018
Cixous, Hélène. 1994. “The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness.” Translated by Catherine MacGillivray. In The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers, 149–56. London: Routledge.
Cixous, Hélène. 1995. “The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. In Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook, edited by Richard Drain, 340–44. London: Routledge.
Doherty, Ben, Nick Evershed, and Andy Ball. 2018. “Deaths in Offshore Detention: The Faces of the People Who Have Died in Australia’s Care.” Guardian, June 20, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2018/jun/20/deaths-in-offshore-detention-the-faces-of-the-people-who-have-died-in-australias-care
Hyde, Marina. 2014. “French Women Don’t Get Fat – Or Live in Actual France.” Guardian, 17 January 17, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/17/french-women-cliche-francois-hollande-stereotype-the-french
Instagram. 2018. “Terms of Use.” Last modified November 1, 2017. https://help.instagram.com/1188470931252371
Monash University. 2018. “Australian Border Deaths Database.” Last modified June 15, 2018. https://arts.monash.edu/social-sciences/border-crossing-observatory/australian-border-deaths-database/
Notes
[1] Catherine MacGillivray’s translation. Eric Prenowitz translates it as: “We live before the curtain of paper, and often even as the curtain. But what matters to us, what wounds us, what makes us feel we are the characters of an immense adventure, is what happens behind the curtain. And behind the curtain there is the naked stage” (Cixous 1995, 341).
[2] Prenowitz has it: “[T]heater is the place of Crime. Yes, the place of Crime, the place of horror, also the place of Pardon. … Why do we love certain works of theatre or opera so immediately, so eternally? Because by showing us our crimes at the Theatre, before witnesses, they accuse us and at the same time they pardon us.” (Cixous 1995, 342–43).