Benedikts Kalnačs POST-MODERN AND CLASSICAL DRAMA

Transcription

1 SENOJI LIETUVOS LITERATŪRA, 18 KNYGA, 2004 ISBN Benedikts Kalnačs POST-MODERN AND CLASSICAL DRAMA If we could travel back to Riga a hundred years ago to the year 1903, we might expect a number of interesting events in theatre and drama. In the spring of 1904, on 2 May 1904, we could watch the curtain rise at the Riga Latvian Theatre on the first night of Rūdolfs Blaumanis Indrāni. On 27 January 1905 at the present day address of Lāčplēša iela 25, at the New Latvian Theatre we could watch Aspazija s drama The Silver Veil (Sidraba šķidrauts) unfold. And on 29 October 1906, if we found the Apollo Theatre at Grīziņkalns, we could watch Stanislav Przybyszewski s play Happiness (Laime) as well as Tea Moreni, a one act play by the young Latvian playwright Edvards Vulfs. These different events would allow us to move from the centre of the city to its outskirts, changing the heretofore apparently stable and hierarchic relations between various art institutions; and at the same time these performances belong to those who at the beginning of the 20 th century stabilized the paradigm which shows the variety of tendencies in Latvian drama of that time. That is poetically philosophical drama (Aspazija), naturalistic drama (Blaumanis) and symbolic drama (Vulfs). Similar tendencies in the European drama, both from the point of view of distinguishing separate aspects, and of their interaction, have begun earlier and have taken more stable forms than in this country. This may be the reason why in the second half of the 20 th century Latvian drama needed to return to the experience of the early modernism period to re-evaluate and stabilize it. Today we may still have our contemporary Aspazija in Māra Zālīte s dramas, our Blaumanis in Inga Ābele s drama, and, possibly even our own Vulfs in Rūta Mežavilka s first plays. An interesting link is created even though each speaks from the perspective of her own period and experience. My writing is abnormally archaic, thirty-year-old Inga Ābele said in an interview. I believe this archaism is contemporary. 105

2 Let us look in greater detail at three texts from this point of view: Māra Zālīte s drama Margarēta, the first version of Inga Ābele s play Dark Deer (Tumšie brieži) and Rūta Mežavilka s Strong Northwesterly Wind (Stiprs ziemeļrietumu vējš). All these works have several common characteristics. First of all, in all the plays the confrontation of the teenage and adult worlds is crucially important: the border before entering the adult world, the clash of the two realities, sometimes - later reflection. Secondly, all these plays deal with the borderline cases, which are stressed both in time and space. Thirdly, a specifically subjective point of view is used. I will address these aspects in greater detail, first of all concentrating on the contrast between the world of the child and the adult. Zālīte s Margarēta, which explores the potential fate of Gretchen, the heroine of Johann Wolfgang Goethe s dramatic poem Faust, in a present day situation, is the juxtaposition of two different periods, brought conditionally closer to each other. On the one hand, the early 19 th century enters the work, when the first part of Goethe s poem was created (1818), and in Zālīte s play fragments from Faust are directly quoted as manifestations of 14 year-old Gretchen s emotions and judgements. On the other hand, the forty-year-old Margarēta, who has spent long years in prison after having been accused of child murder, is portrayed. In the play she is confronted with the past and is forced to evaluate her present situation. In Inga Ābele s play Dark Deer (Tumšie brieži) the heroine Ria, on the eve of whose fifteenth birthday the events of the play take place, is confronted with the adult world by means of a specific event: the attitude towards the dark deer raised in the paddock of her farmhouse. Her father Alf s original plan to turn deer breeding into a lucrative business was not successful, and the adults decided to kill the deer. At Rasa Panemune Ria, who has come to trust the deer more than people, is the only one who does not know of this plan. As in the works of Blaumanis, Ābele s play includes several generations which allows to draw the closest parallels with the plays Prodigal Son (Pazudušais dēls) and Indrāni. In his dramas Blaumanis typically creates an opposition between the older generation s stable, ethical system of values and younger generation s doubts and insecurities they face at their complex age and its dilemmas. In Ābele s play we feel a radical difference. The stable values have collapsed. The teenager Ria has in many ways already absorbed much of the 106

3 hypocritical reality of the adult world both from reading (because just by learning to read you can become immoral) and experience. She quite clearly brings into being the functionality of immorality as well as her physical maturity seen in her attempt to seduce Augusts. However, at the same time the intuitive basis of morality, which in the hunt for personal gratification is long forgotten in the adult world, still exists in Ria s psyche; this primeval sense also contributes to her extreme actions when, unable to save the deer, she chooses to kill them herself. One of the main characters in Rūta Mežavilka s play is Nata who lives in a desolate corner of the world somewhere in the northwestern end of Latvia with her mother and deranged father. In this play, too, the time is linked to a birthday Nata turns sixteen. A second trait of the plays is linked to the borderline situation of time and space, which relates to the emotions of protagonists. The play Strong Northwesterly Wind (Stiprs ziemeļrietumu vējš) is distinctly about travel in space. Luīze and Marks are on their way to her and her younger sister Nata s parents, to a seashore, a place from which the sea is gradually taking away strips of land, and it takes courage and determination not only to live in this place, but also to return to it. Mežavilka does not speak of a specific but rather of a symbolic place, the edge of the world, to which the heroes must come and where upon meeting the non-reality at this final frontier they must try to understand their innermost hidden feelings. The border interpretation in the play helps to explain not one separate, but several mutually linked fates: first, the mother who has reconciled herself to her life, which has been irrevocably ruined by the cursed place, and also the feelings of her two daughters. Luīze, on the brink of being or not being is trying to understand herself and her relationship with Marks, and Nata s greatest desire is to be on this side of the border, on the side of civilization, to get away, to escape from the place which is grim in the threats of its emptiness because nothing happens there. In her play Dark Deer (Tumšie brieži), Inga Ābele uses the contrast of civilisation and nature as a principle to organise space. In people s everyday lives everything is strictly regulated. Nature on the other hand is a wonder, which has retained its secrecy and the tempting link of life and death rituals, a natural fullness, which includes both ageing and the birth of a new life. The link between both realities, however, has snapped. Everybody (except Ria) is pragmatic, civilisation does not need life, only death, 107

4 regardless of whether it is a rooster, rabbit or deer; in the play nature appears in the form of slaughtered carcasses. Ria s actions at the end are in accordance with the laws of the world, but challenging in their futility: according to Leon s detailed story on how to kill animals, the girl shoots the deer herself, after which they cannot be used for tanning hides, and she also shoots the dog Baris. Is she the same as all the others now, or is she alone at the last border point to save nature s rights to self-regulation and the cycle process? The living space of Māra Zālīte s Margarēta is the most confined it is a prison. Possibly an allusion to the decades of Soviet regime with the caged, artificially isolated existence of man. Prison in the play is modernised: we see a coffee machine, exercise bike, and, notably, many books. The Lawyer s (as revealed in the play Margarēta s son who is believed to be dead) attempts to acquit Margarēta provide a radical moral as well as spatial challenge whether to move from the world, which has expanded in her awareness and has been experienced in her imagination to the reality of civilisation. The border pierces Margarēta s soul with the question if and how she should change her life, which was created by one set of conditions, while now completely different conditions must be considered. Here, the third aesthetic characteristic seen in all the plays might be introduced forced subjectivism, a visionary individual world, which is typical of the artistic work regardless of the differing styles of the works. At the centre of Māra Zālīte s drama, as in Aspazija s dramas, is an individual and the experiences of her soul are central to the composition of the play. The dialogue of Māra Zālīte s Margarēta and the Lawyer can be accounted for as the protagonist s dialogue with voices, with different possibilities for the development of the situation which is also rooted in Margarēta s past. In contrast to her play Court (Tiesa), where Māra Zālīte, to divide the living space of Latvians and Germans, uses fragments of the Latvians by the German-Baltic author Garlieb Merkel as an objectified generalisation and a contrast to the Latvian world, the fragments of Faust used in Margarēta are not separated, they are part and parcel of the main character s self analysis whereby a dialogue with her own previous experience is created. The structure of the play is also significant, because the dialogue of both heroes in each scene is concluded by Margarēta s monologue. The basis of Inga Ābele s drama both from the composition and content point of view is Ria s emotions, which are defined as detachment 108

5 from the surrounding world due to the uniqueness of her personality and unawareness of certain events (the plan to kill the deer), her confrontation both with the surrounding people as well as the threatening, inexplicable reality in general. Rūta Mežavilka s play is also characterised by doubtless subjectivism. We can perceive the events as the elder sister Luīze s desire to meet and understand herself; the beginning of her travels is a letter from her mother with a request to come and the play ends with Luīze s harsh realization that now I will have to learn to look into emptiness. The play is set out in separate short scenes, which, like elements of additional texts (encyclopaedia entries, song texts) can be interpreted as the strata of Luīze s experience, scenes from her memories or imagination. We do, however, find parallel threads to Luīze s inner rifts in her mother s and younger sister s lives. This helps to overcome the apparent fragmentation of the play, because it is clear that impressions about the play are increased by the close link of the content to the structure. It is the younger sister Nata that can be perceived to be a projection of Luīze s fate or the other way round. Nata is Luīze, as Luīze might have been a few years earlier on the threshold that encourages hope of contact with the adult world, and with a vague inkling of how dramatic the first experience of love will turn out to be, when she will learn that support is not forthcoming even from those who were previously so close to her her mother and father. Luīze, on the other hand, can see Nata as a testimony of her former naivete and expected disillusionment; when she again ends up in a borderline situation, Luīze realises that she is judging the world with a completely different, more sceptical and bitter gauge. The subjectivisation of a woman s fate in all the plays is even more pointed because the authors make their protagonists confront one of the most tragic situations of life the loss of a child. For Luīze this is her yet unborn child which she gives up under the pressure of her parents who believe that she is not yet ready to be independent and in a position to shape her own life. Margarēta leaves her child on another woman s doorstep, convinced that she would not be able to raise him herself, and spends her life ignorant of her son s fate. Ria in Dark Deer (Tumšie brieži) participates in the birth of Timor the deer, and this becomes one of her most meaningful experiences, which influences her emotional and even existential relationship with the endangered deer. 109

6 Although all plays can be analyzed from the standpoint of various signs and symbols used in them, I believe that the most significant characteristic is that a dramatic and harsh depiction of the fate of an individual is always at the centre. The styles differ: Māra Zālīte s philosophically intense reflection is different from Inga Ābele s naturalistically harsh reality which reaches into the subconscious, or Rūta Mežavilka s symbolic interpretation of the sense of borders. However, all of these works offer more than just a simulation or perception of reality; they create an accelerated subjective model of the world and are deeply and painfully honest. In my opinion there is a living link in these plays with the literature of the early 20 th century, which today can already be considered to be of classical value. Įteikta Parengta