The Postdramatic and Its Discontents

It has become trendy in recent years to speak about "postdramatic" theatre. The idea is that drama can create an overall mood and emotional connection to the audience without being... well... dramatic.

It might seem odd for drama theorists to be anti-drama, but the idea is hardly new. While some scholars see the origin of a postdramatic theatre in the 1960s, way back in the 1890s it was Symbolism that prophesied a theatre without traditional realistic plot structure.

One of the great practitioners of Symbolism was the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. His play Pelléas and Mélisande, which premiered in 1893 in a production directed by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, was roundly attacked by critics. Lugné-Poe draped gauze in front of the playing area and intentionally used low lighting, so the audience literally had a fuzzy view of the action. This created a dream-like atmosphere that was the antithesis of the Realism then popular.

Perhaps even more outrageous was the obscurity of the play's plot. It is filled with water imagery, such as when the heroine, Mélisande, appears at the beginning of the play, crying into a spring. She is not from here, but from somewhere far, far away. She is lost, and is gazing down at a crown at the bottom of the spring. Someone gave it to her, but now, she doesn't want it anymore.

"Ah-ha!" cries the veteran audience member of well-made plays. "We're going to find out who this young woman is! She clearly has a long backstory that will be revealed throughout the drama, and eventually we'll find out who she is, where she comes from, who gave her the crown, and the significance of it falling into the spring."

Nope. We find out none of that. Though after she marries Prince Golaud, Mélisande does later gaze into an old fountain together with her brother-in-law Pelléas. She drops her ring in the fountain, never to get it back again. When Golaud questions her about the ring, she claims she dropped it near the sea. (Why not tell him the truth about the fountain?) He sends Mélisande to search for it in a seaside cavern, together with Pelléas.

Later, Golaud takes Pelléas down into the underground passages beneath the castle where there appears to be a subterranean lake. You know. Just 'cuz. It isn't so much that there is no cause and effect. Rather, cause and effect follow the emotional sense of the drama. Maeterlinck builds up water image after water image, not to mention imagery involving hair, light, and gold. These images create the emotional response of the audience, not sensationalistic plot points.

Last night, I saw Claude Debussy's opera based on Pelléas and Mélisande performed by the Metropolitan Opera. The music was beautiful, and Paul Appleby and Isabel Leonard did wonderful jobs in the title roles. Marie-Nicole Lemieux was exceptional making her Met debut as Geneviève, Golaud and Pelléas's mother. So, did the audience love it?

"Nothing happens!" I kept hearing people complain. And it's true. Very little happens in the opera from a plot point of view. The opera, like the play it's based upon, does a wonderful job creating mood and providing the material for reflection and contemplation. It does not, however, provide the operatic drama of a heroine leaping from the battlements or a hero throwing himself on the limp body of his consumptive lady love.

So if you're not down with the postdramatic, I recommend you skip Pelléas and Mélisande. However, if you want to experience the intensity Symbolism is capable of in a world class venue, go now. The opera is only playing through the end of the month.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats all admired the Belgian Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. So did break-through dramatists, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekov, and Alfred Jarry.  It's a pity we don't see more of his plays performed today.

Maeterlinck wrote mostly in obscurity, until 1890, when the critic Octave Mirbeau wrote a review in Le Figaro declaring Maeterlinck's first play, Princess Maleine, one of the greatest masterpieces ever written. In Mirbeau's words: "Maeterlinck has given us the most ingenious and extraordinary work of these times, and also the most naïve, comparable, and dare I say it, superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare."

That type of hyperbole sounds ridiculous today, as it did to many people in 1890. However, in October of that year, Paul Fort (director of the Théâtre Mixte, soon to become the Théâtre d'Art) requested Maeterlinck's permission to stage Princess Maleine. Maeterlink instead granted André Antoine at the Théâtre Libre the rights to the play, but it was not produced during the playwright's lifetime.  In fact, the first performance of Princess Maleine by professional actors was not until 1962.

Paul Fort instead produced two of Maeterlinck's one-act plays, The Intruder in May of 1891, and then The Blind later that year. Greater fame came with Pelléas et Mélisande, published in 1892 and first performed on May, 17 1893, under the direction of Fort's protégé, Aurélien Lugné-Poe. The work is highly literary. Mallarmé said that "Pelléas et Mélisande, on a stage, exhales the delight of the page."

This work came to exemplify the Symbolist movement. According to Yeats, Symbolism "never mentions an external thing except to express the state of the soul."  Like all great Symbolist works, the play is noted not so much for what it shows, but for what it leaves out. The audience becomes a part of the work, having to supply that which is missing in the text.

Maeterlinck's works have inspired numerous composers, including Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, Anton Webern, and Sergei Rachmaninov.  Though Debussy's opera is the most famous musical adaptation of Pelléas et Mélisande, Fauré debuted his incidental music for the play years earlier, during the piece's London premiere at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1898. Though the entire score is lovely, the highpoint for me is the "Song of Mélisande" from Act III.

The song takes place during the most famous scene of the play, as Mélisande leans out the window of a tower and Pelléas caresses her hair. The original song Maeterlinck had written for the piece wasn't working in the original Paris production. He instead gave about thirty poems to the actress playing Mélisande, and asked her to pick one.

She ended up choosing "Les trios soeurs aveugles." Maeterlinck asked the young composer Gabriel Fabre to set the piece to music, which he did to great acclaim. When Fauré wrote music for the English production, however, he used the translation done by Jack Mackail. It goes like this:

          The King's three blind daughters
          Sit locked in a hold.
          In the darkness their lamps
          Make a glimmer of gold.
          Up the stair of the turret
          The sisters are gone.
          Seven days they wait there
          And the lamps they burn on.
          What hope? says the first,
          And leans o'er the flame.
          I hear our lamps burning.
          O yet if he came!
          O hope! says the second,
          Was that the lamp's flare,
          Or a sound of low footsteps?
          The Prince on the stair!
          But the holiest sister
          She turns her about:
          O no hope now forever --
          Our lamps are gone out.

Maeterlinck was not without his critics. Camille Mauclair praised Percy Bysshe Shelley, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Richard Wagner for work that is truly dramatic, but he left out Maeterlinck, finding his plays too philosophical.  Such criticism, however, did not stop Maeterlinck from winning the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature.