Postscript on „The Crucible“ – and tragedy

For future reference: I WILL NEVER AGAIN SAY THAT I AM THROUGH WITH A FICTIONAL TEXT.

I met with Claudia for breakfast on Tag der Deutschen Einheit (October 3^rd) to plan our theatre trip in February. YESSS! We have got tickets for “Uncle Vanya”, and I sorted the credit card shit and applied for a passport. So I should be “Brexit proof” now. (As usual, I don’t really believe that I will actually see it until I see it, but at least I have left no stone unturned …)

This, and seeing “The Crucible” again, has obviously dispersed the black mood. I fully realized this only when I went to see my mother on the weekend, and she said: “O, you are always so cheerful, and this cheers ME up.” O – good! I wasn’t aware that my permanent inward grin showed on my face. And I really wish that people might see some time what they are doing not just for themselves but FOR OTHERS when they make the world a more beautiful place. It’s contagious …

At the moment it isn’t even that I am ”actively” looking forward to seeing Richard Armitage on the stage – which I cannot do because of the surprise factor. I got used to it that I can never know WHAT KIND of surprise it will be. I will have to be patient (which I can do extremely well …) Instead I have begun to look forward very much to seeing Toby Jones in Chekhov. I became increasingly fond of him as an actor during the last few years, having seen him play substantial characters in “Sherlock”, “The Tale of Tales”, and the TV series “Capital”.  I think I have never realized how much I enjoy his acting until recently when I saw him in a really tiny role in “The Way We Live Now” with David Suchet as Augustus Melmotte (gruesomely good!!!) where he played the lawyer Squercum for about thirty seconds, and I just went like 😍 … Blink!!! I imagine that he and Chekhov will get on extremely well.

Well, we’ll see … As usual, at this breakfast meeting we had an extensive exchange about our reading in the meantime, and of course I reported about seeing “The Crucible” on Digital Theatre, probably with little lights blinking in my eyes. And I realized even more what I had realized writing my post about it: that I had tried to look away from tragedy and its potential to overwhelm me to get a clearer look at the complete picture. It actually was a good idea to focus on tragedy AS A VEHICLE to carry the content Arthur Miller wanted to convey, not as an end in itself. But of course this was just a working hypothesis for me to be able to analyze it more comprehensively. Because, when we talked, Claudia said something that brought tragedy back with full force and answered practically everything that was still open about my reading of this text, and why it is actually as important as I felt it was. And it answered one of the most important questions that I have carried with me “all my life” – more precisely: since I have been a teenager. As it happens, I remember my first encounter with TRAGEDY extremely well …

(It was actually quite ridiculous – which may be why I remember it so well. It must have been when I was thirteen or fourteen because, before that, I would have been too young to read something from “Nibelungensage” in school, and after that I would have been too old to want to play it. We read this bit in class where Hagen of Tronje decides to kill Siegfried, and I was ultimately fascinated with it. I remember it because I wanted to go out into the garden and play it – as this was what my sister and I always did when we liked something we had seen or read, though, usually, it was about keeping horses or living on some Swedish island … - and realized that I couldn’t. This was really frustrating, as I recall. And I even remember that I knew I was being ridiculous but wanted to do it NONETHELESS. I think this was because I was totally fascinated with the tragic content of this scene, and utterly frustrated that I couldn’t DO anything with it.) 

Tragedy came back with a vengeance when Claudia recalled having seen “Antigone” with Christopher Eccleston as Kreon. And when she remembered how she COULDN’T ACCEPT the decision Antigone takes. At this moment, I suddenly realized what, above all other things, had been wrong with the film version of “The Crucible” and what had been so right in this theatre production: There MUST be this moment where “we” are unable to ACCEPT the decision John Proctor takes. Not being unable to UNDERSTAND it – because I think I actually did, this time. I mean, I completely understood how he comes to MAKE this decision but, nonetheless, was unable to accept it. And, if I got this right, we had both felt the same.

Maybe there hadn’t even been anything wrong with the film, only with my READING of it. There might have been a moment like this when I saw it half a lifetime ago, but it got “cancelled” by something that they often do in films, and which cannot happen in the theatre. There was this kind of postscript where they explain that a certain number of people declined to sign the false confessions and got executed, and that, because of the way people reacted to this, they had to stop the trials. Historically speaking, this is extremely important information, and it is extremely comforting. Because, all of a sudden, this agonizing decision we see John Proctor struggling with on the stage begins to MAKE SENSE. And I think this is exactly what Arthur Miller went to such lengths to AVOID. That “we” would be able to do what we are always trying to do with tragedy. He wanted this moment where we are totally unable to accept the “tragic” decision because we understand that it has nothing to do with heroism. It may seem so AFTERWARDS, for the “survivors”, but at the moment it happens there is no solace in being heroic. There is our “goodness”, or decency, or humanity, or whatever we want to call it, to fall back on JUST because there is NOTHING ELSE. I always felt that Antigone’s sacrifice is absurd and unnecessary, and AT THE SAME TIME totally understood why she does it. It only makes sense if we understand that it is ABOUT HERSELF, not about any other person or any greater good that she wants to achieve. It is just that what is at the core of her being would be annihilated if she gave in. SHE would be annihilated even BEFORE her death.

But the actual point of tragedy – as something that happens on a stage! - is not to understand but to EXPERIENCE it. When Claudia said that she remembered how SHE couldn’t accept Antigone’s decision I knew that something had HAPPENED when she saw that play and realized that it was the same thing that happened when I saw John Proctor taking this decision. And that this was why the production finally turned out so right.

I think I got it now what it was about when Richard Armitage said that he didn’t know if he could do it. That it was not just some kind of “inverse” motivation thing – to make the stakes higher so that he would leap higher – but actually the truth of the matter. As he said, he had a history with this character. What we saw on the stage had been “in the making” for twenty-three years or so, and it shows! He knew better than anybody else where he had to go, but you can ANTICIPATE something like this as much as you want, you only know the moment it has happened that it actually CAN happen.  And having achieved something like this, having been there FOR REAL, probably makes the emotional chasm in the aftermath unavoidable. It is even very likely that it has been the same chasm for both of us, regarding my own obsession with tragedy. And this wouldn’t have been the least bit weird or special, by the way, because tragedy is (still!) extremely consensual. It is really very seldom that I feel Claudia and I totally agree about something we have seen, even though we have established such an efficient way of talking about it. But where great tragedy is concerned, it is rather likely that many people who saw it would have ended up in the same place.

This finally concludes the issue of why this text has been so special for me – from the time when I first saw the film. What the long history that I had with it was ultimately about.  And why it has obviously been so special for many people, and still is. But it also answers one of the big questions I tried to come to terms with in my blog: What tragedy is about, and why it still is the “format” we use to discuss certain important content that cannot be dealt with by just thinking about it.

I realized that I had been SO close already, discussing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and how they react differently to their lives having become “tragic”. I think I even wrote this already, word for word, but didn’t quite understand what I was writing. Tragedy is about ACCEPTING THE UNACCEPTABLE.  Which means, when tragedy turns out ultimately beautiful and rewarding it has to be there FOR REAL: the moment where we CANNOT accept what is happening, and THEN accept it.

It is a blatant contradiction, and I think this is even the most important thing about it. Contradictions  are not only one of the most fascinating challenges of philosophy, they are one of the basic structures of real life. Most of the times when we cannot resolve an issue by thinking, or by just dealing with it, there is probably some kind of “genuine” contradiction behind it. I believe that the tragic is still so important because it is the ONLY technique that “we” have ever learned of dealing emotionally with a certain kind of ubiquitous contradiction. I just hit on this great synopsis of the tragic constellation by Vampire Weekend in their song “Harmony Hall”:

“I don’t want to live like this. But I don’t want to die.”

I loved it because it is delivered so casually, kind of deadpan – but most of all because it shows that the “tragic” is in fact a feature of everyday life, not just this far out situation at the end of all things that will hopefully never arise because we will drop dead before it does. No - It is kind of THE underlying structure of our lives. (Or at least one of the most important ones. I am afraid the RIDICULOUS might be the underlying structure of our lives, most of the time. I am just not prepared to look at it like this, most of the time. And quite often they lie close together - as in the song!) And we ARE dealing with it all the time, of course, depending on the nature of the situation: by not taking it seriously, by fighting like mad to get ourselves out of this position (Which is, by the way, the BIGGER part of tragic storytelling, basically the complete “Macbeth”: how we get ourselves into a deadly fix and are struggling in vain to get ourselves out of it. Thinking about it, I find it interesting that Chris Eccleston gave his Macbeth a very brief, very matter of fact moment of acceptance – which is NOT in the text …), or by being able to find that there is a “third way”. Even most of the time, like myself, by cowardly avoiding everything that could get us into one of these positions. Or, if it has happened already, by starting to “need the things that stop you dreaming” (Passenger) or making the awful mess we are in a more comfortable place in one of a hundred other ways - by lying about it to others and to ourselves, by taking drugs, by falling back on stoicism, or self-pity, or irony, or deadpan … But I am convinced that, deep down, “we” are all extremely aware that this moment WILL come where nothing of this will work anymore. When we will have to make this leap: to ACCEPT the unacceptable. And then it just MIGHT be that we find our own “goodness” underneath it all. This may seem ridiculously elevated, but I believe that - IF we haven’t “sold out” before the end! - we actually might. 

Somebody had a plan

Reading is now overtaking me – again, there is just no lack of great fiction at the moment. I have to save my reading of “The Other Queen” which I have bought as an audiobook, and which - again - yielded a surprise.

I bought it because Richard Armitage performed the part of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury – and because I like the books by Philippa Gregory. In fact, I noticed only after I had ordered it, that I have already read TEN of them. And that I had conveniently stopped after the one that, in historical order,  came before “The Other Queen”! If I remember this right, it was the one about the short and dismal reign of Jane Grey – whom I had never noticed to have been Queen of England in the first place. Well, it might be contestable …

Nonetheless – I was so fed up with these horrible Tudors then that I stopped, and now I had the guts to go on with it. Didn’t take a lot of persuasion because the book – and the performance! – is amazing. I think I never bought this one as a paperback because I had had so many different accounts of this brief period of history – when there were two queens in England and the country got divided over them – that I thought I didn’t need this one on top of it. Well, I was wrong. Maybe I really didn’t need it to understand the history – but I needed it to finally understand BREXIT.

By the way, not one of these ten books is redundant or boring because she always tells the story from such an interesting perspective that it cannot fail to upset me at some point. That is, she tells it from DIFFERENT perspectives, radically subjectively, so that I always come to emphasize with ALL the characters at some point. Even, marginally, with the absent Queen Elizabeth … I just could understand her terrible predicament. (And I always quite LIKED Queen Elizabeth – even though she was horrible!)

Much more surprising that I should ever come to emphasize with Mary, Queen of Scots, whom I have never liked. Only very briefly - where her fate touches one of my deepest fears: of being hung out to dry. But it is certainly understandable that she did what she did. Philippa Gregory always manages to distress me at some point because she always gets so close to people’s “innermost” person – and so convincingly, because she always keeps this consistency with their “outermost” person as a political and social being – that I always believe her about everybody. (Even when I am totally convinced AT THE SAME TIME that the real George Talbot, and the real Queen of Scots - and probably even Queen Elizabeth – if they lived today, would have been right to sue for libel …) This time I got distressed on three different accounts – at least! – and, at some point, just thought: I CANNOT believe this godawful mess!!!

This time, for once, there is even somebody who can be made RESPONSIBLE for the mess. According to Philippa Gregory, the culprit is William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Everybody hates him, or is extremely wary of him, and, of course, nobody likes him. I always get suspicious when I notice this happening about a fictional character. It always raises a spirit of contradiction. Besides, I always quite LIKED Lord Burghley …

I never knew why I liked him. Of course he played for the winning team, and he played it so very shrewdly … Maybe it is cheap to like somebody because he was on the “right” side of history, but it is also stupid to automatically side with the losers. Besides, I am not always for the winners. I “always” was a Yorkist – that is, I was a Yorkist a long time BEFORE I had an obvious reason to be. I always kind of hated the Tudors … NOT because of Henry VIII, but BECAUSE of Shakespeare!???

I suddenly understood why I have always liked Cecil when it came to the trial of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. I had had this distinct feeling a few times before this that this entirely historical story – and this way of analyzing it – is telling us a lot about what is going on RIGHT NOW, right there where it happened. But, at that moment, I realized that the reason for the godawful mess - and why so many people died for no good reason, or were brought so low they never would have dreamt they could be – was FEAR. That the party in power was living in fear, and was so deeply distrustful of ALL THE REST OF EUROPE. (With good reason, by the way!) Therefore, the Queen of Scots acted as some kind of catalyst, and had to be removed. And I realized that the predicament today is almost exactly the same. Or rather MY analysis of the predicament is exactly the same. I couldn’t analyze it, though, on my own, I just always thought when I heard German journalists comment on the issue: Don’t you know ANYTHING? Believe me, you have the wrong end of the stick entirely …

Where I am concerned, I ALWAYS understood why the British – or rather the slight majority that never got used to “us”! – wanted Brexit. When I came to think of it, I even realized that I have never understood why they joined the European Union in the first place. Strictly speaking, THIS was their historical error – which is now almost impossible to undo. “What’s done cannot be undone …” – maybe I am not quite as pessimistic. But I think that everybody who believes that they can “undo” this mess now, or even should, by undoing Brexit, is wrong. - I will miss them. I am already missing them more than I can say, more than I even ALLOW myself to feel, and I so HATE them for leaving us – but I was never surprised that Brexit did appeal to so many people. Let’s face it: They NEVER liked us, and they never TRUSTED us, and they never took us as seriously as we are taking ourselves, by the way - with good cause! Whereas the rest of Europe will be so much the loser for losing the part of its soul where a brain and a heart can still work TOGETHER, I am afraid that they won’t miss us so very much in the long run.

Obviously, I always liked William Cecil because he was the man who had a plan. He “saved” Britain by coming down on everybody who threatened its independence: He subdued the “papists”, the Irish, and he even had a plan for Scotland that worked – in the long run. He actually set up Britain PERMANENTLY as what it is today! And I even think, in their historical subconscious, many British people will be missing Lord Burghley these days, fervently wishing that there was just ANYBODY who had a plan …

Digital Theatre!!! 💓💓💓

Reading has been a bit slow lately – other things to do! – but it has definitely picked up pace with the “cinema season”, and now I have discovered DIGITAL THEATRE!!! As I should have done years ago, of course … First thing I did was to rent out “The Crucible” for 7.99 £ to watch within the next 48 hours. Not just because it is the first thing that hits the eye when you open their page – still, after all these years!!! (I must say, I was sooo pleased!)

Of course I knew that I was kidding myself pretending that I didn’t WANT to see it another time, but I couldn’t own up to it. It was just too painful to acknowledge that I will never EVER have it on DVD. But Digital Theatre certainly is the next best thing. There was a sound reason, though, for not wanting to see it again because there was a genuine fear of spoiling the supreme pleasure I remember from my first time. A danger that it suddenly might appear “relative”, and that I wouldn’t even know why I had loved it so much. So, I set this up because I knew that I had to – now that I had discovered that I could! -  but didn’t really dare to look forward to it.

Apart from that, there was the tiny little hiccup that I cannot set it up at home (at least not yet, I am definitely working on it!) and had to watch it in my office, a prospect I didn’t fancy that much. There is nobody in my office on the weekends, though, and, of course, I am not supposed to be there, but what …?! So, I bought a quarter of prosecco and some cake for the interval to prevent low blood sugar, and, on a beautiful Oktoberfest Saturday, set out on my quaint mission. (I mean, how WEIRD is this: going to my office to watch digital theatre while “everybody” is outside in the sun in dirndl and lederhosen, gaping at the horses and drinking beer …? I definitely began to like this!)

It was just as well that I didn’t bother with it because I could never have ANTICIPATED the pleasure I experienced seeing it again. It was even better than seeing it the first time, even though it was only on a computer screen with insufficient sound, not on the big cinema screen in surround. (The sound was very clear, though, so that I could understand every word and appreciate every “voice feature”. So, basically, everything was fine.) And I cannot even begin to say how pleased I am that I HAD BEEN RIGHT! Right about seeing it again as well as about my first impression of this being the best production of a play I have ever seen. The most perfect, most beautiful, and most emotionally exact production of a fictional text I have ever seen – be it on screen or in the theatre. I remember thinking, when I saw this for the first time,  that this must be the best production of this play EVER, and I am now positive that it will be. There is just NOTHING RELATIVE about it, and this is what I enjoy more than anything. That it is possible to leave all my petty “construction sites” behind me for a few hours and have the FEELING of this in my memory for years - potentially forever. This is what I want, and it is what I can get when I am playing it right. I think I understand now why Richard Armitage talked about “opera” on behalf of “The Crucible”. This is exactly what opera is destined for – though, in my case, it doesn’t work because I don’t enjoy the music that much and am always so suspicious about the romantic and tragic content. Arthur Miller is just so RIGHT about everything, and intellectually and emotionally challenging, that there is no problem at all with the tragic content. Richard Armitage roaring at the skies at the end with everything that was in him is just EXACTLY as it should be.

And I had been right, by the way, about not having WANTED to see it in the theatre. I would just have been crushed and totally unable to analyze. Unfortunately, most of the time I am actually happier with a solid screen between me and the text instead of an imagined fourth wall. Not least because it prevents me from trying to distance myself from the text, which was rather important in this case.

I won’t embark on an analysis now – not just because I would never be able to finish. The main reason – and this might appear kind of sad, but isn’t! – is that I have FINISHED reading it. Seeing it this time has closed everything that was still open from seeing it the first time, and this is also something that I thought could never happen with any important text, but it has. And it is not the least bit sad but feels great because this is a stage I have probably never reached with any text, but which SHOULD be – ideally! - where reading leads to. I will never discover anything new now about this text because I have seen it all, and I have understood it all, and felt it all. And this is, of course, why this production is so good. (It is even exactly right to feel like shit for three days, realizing that such a high will probably never come again. I just hope that it won’t happen again this time …)

I already tried to analyze the complexity of this play, dealing with tragedy in my blog. And I think I already discovered tragedy as a VEHICLE. I wouldn’t distance myself in the least from anything I have written about Richard Armitage playing John Proctor – quite the contrary. I think I still couldn’t believe seeing something so powerful and so exact AT THE SAME TIME. Like the rest, it was even better than my memory of it. I didn’t know that he got an Olivier Award nomination for this until I finally read the Wikipedia this year. The only thing I will never understand is that he didn’t get the award. (Well, the audience’s choice in this case would have been obvious: it is still one of the top three productions on Digital Theatre, and the others much more recent!) Nonetheless, reading all these interviews by him afterwards, and being still so preoccupied with my own issues about the play, my reading got biased. I missed most of the complexity of this incredible text, and this was what I could compensate this time. I even knew that I had only these fuzzy memories left of what I felt about certain moments, and had lost the text, REMEMBERING at the same time what I had lost. This was kind of frustrating, and it got completely mended seeing it a second time.

It think that, for the first time ever, I actually NOTICED directing. I sometimes notice camera, very rarely, and only if I get kind of hit on the head with it. Nonetheless, camera is crucial, and I instantly notice when something is wrong with it. I never notice directing. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even possible to notice directing, but this time I actually SAW it. Being able for the first time to take in the complexity of what is going on on the stage, the number of actors involved, almost everybody being equally important and everybody as right about what they were doing as could be, the incredible timing and dynamics … Sure, there is this great STAGE TEXT – that you think would work like a charm almost by itself when you see this – but of course this is not so! Somebody has to set this up so that it can work like a charm. I’ll never forget now Elizabeth Proctor standing alone on that stage at the end, speaking her last sentence exactly as she spoke it. The end is as strong as the beginning, and there is not one weak or fuzzy moment, or any single second of insufficient acting, in between. So – Yael Faber is a genius and a miracle, and her directing is the main reason that I could read this text so COMPLETELY. It is incredibly complex and exact - and utterly terrifying! - as to what happens in between people, what society is made of, and how people would react when something like this is breaking loose. The “classical” tragedy is just the most powerful vehicle to carry this through to the end – and NOT to leave us in a muddle of wretched feelings which would make us want to forget this “mess” as fast as possible, as we would do in real life … Arthur Miller certainly is a genius when it comes to handling “us” – and in this case I don’t mind!

So, back to my petty construction sites! After this, I have even more reason to go to London next year to see “Uncle Vanya” than I had before, but now my credit card is buggered because I cannot set up the new secure code shit they have deviced, and there is nobody who can help me with it. One day we’ll finally all be so secure that we cannot leave our flats anymore … It is such a ridiculous issue but so important because, before this is resolved, I won’t be able to book anything for next year. I don’t even know if my MasterCard will still work in the UK after Brexit – or will I need Visa??? As usual, I have no idea … At least there will still be Digital Theatre for me, and Amazon – but how long until they will have noticed that they have to implement the new secure shit …??? The horizon is darkening, and I just hope that SOMEBODY has a plan …