Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theatre is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. Even a middling novelist can tell quite a lot of truth. His humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas the theatre, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected with the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. This is the sense in which ‘ordinary’ theatre resembles life, and dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good. On the other hand, in a purely formal sense the theatre is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. I used to think that if I could have been a poet I would never have bothered with the theatre at all, but of course this was nonsense. What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. Art’s relation with its client is here at its closest and most immediate. In other arts we can blame the client: he is stupid, unsophisticated, inattentive, dull. But the theatre must, if need be, stoop-and stoop-until it attains that direct, that universal communication which other artists can afford to seek more deviously and at their ease. Hence the assault, the noise, the characteristic impatience. All this was part of my revenge.

How vulgar, how almost cruel it all was; I gloatingly savour now that I am absolutely out of it at last, now that I can sit in the sun and look at the calm quiet sea. This solitude and quiet after all that babble, after all that garish row, a deep undynamic stillness so unlike the fine dramatic silences of the theatre: Tempest scene two, or the entry of Peter Pan. So unlike too the strange familiar and yet exciting hush of an empty theatre. Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. How I enjoyed rending expectant silences with noise, noise as structure, noise as colour. (I once directed a thriller which began with a long silence and then a scream. That sound became famous.) Yet, or perhaps consequently, I do not care greatly for music. Noise yes, music no. I admire the intricate and essentially silent musical drama of ballet, but opera I detest. Clement used to say this was a case of envy. I must admit I envy Wagner.

The theatre is a place of obsession. It is not a soft dreamland. Unemployment, poverty, disappointment, racking indecision (take this now and miss that later) grind reality into one’s face; and, as in family life, one soon learns the narrow limitations of the human soul. Yet obsession is what it is all about. All good dramatists and directors and most (not all) good actors are obsessed men. Only geniuses like Shakespeare conceal the fact, or rather change it into something spiritual. And obsession drives to hard work. I myself have always worked (and worked others) like a demon. My mother’s training made me a compulsive worker. She was never idle and she did not tolerate idleness in others. My father enjoyed a certain amount of fixing and mending, but he would have liked to sit sometimes quite vacantly and watch the world drift by, only he was never allowed to. My mother was not ambitious for him in a worldly sense-she scorned the successful world of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle, though I think that the prospect of it always hurt her in some obscure way. She simply wanted my father to be always usefully employed. (Fortunately discussing books with me counted as useful.) She did not profess to understand his office work, she showed no curiosity about it and I suspect she had no idea what he did. She organized him at home. She also organized me, but this was easy because I was only too ready to be obsessively industrious. Journalists have often asked me how it was that I first started to write plays. I did not, as has been unkindly suggested, turn to writing out of disappointment with my career as an actor. I started to write when I was still quite young because I could not bear to waste time when I was unemployed. I early saw the demoralization of so many of my out-of-work companions. ‘Resting’ is one of the least restful periods of an actor’s life. Those times were also, of course, my university. I read and I wrote and I taught myself my trade.

Since there has been quite a lot of uninformed and not always unmalicious speculation on the subject let me now say something about my plays. They were always intended to be ephemeral, rather like pantomimes in fact; and they existed only in my direction of them. I never let anyone else touch them. Unless one is very talented indeed there is no resting place between the naive and the ironic; and the nemesis of irony is absurdity. I knew my limitations. The plays were also said to be only vehicles for Wilfred Dunning. Why ‘only’? Wilfred was a great actor. They do not make them like Wilfred any more. He started his career in the old Music Hall in the Edgware Road. He could stand motionless, not moving an eyelid, and make a theatre rock with prolonged laughter. Then he would blink and set them off again. Such power can be almost uncanny: the mystery of the human body, the human face. Wilfred had a face which glowed with spirit; he also had, with the possible exception of Peregrine Arbelow, the largest face I have ever seen. It is true that he was in a sense the only begetter of my work as a dramatist, and when he died I stopped writing. I can say without regret that my plays belong to the past and I bequeath them to no one. They were magical delusions, fireworks. Only this which I write now is, or foreshadows, what I wish to leave behind me as a lasting memorial. Someone once said that I ought to have been a choreographer and I understood the comment. People were surprised that I was so popular in Japan. But I knew why, and the Japanese knew.

Though described as an ‘experimentalist’ I am a firm friend of the proscenium arch. I am in favour of illusion, not of alienation. I detest the endless fidgeting on the surrounded stage which dissolves the clarity of events. Equally I abhor the nonsense of ‘audience participation’. Riots and other communal activities may have their value but must not be confused with dramatic art. Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. It is a factitious present because it lacks the free aura of personal reflection and contains its own secret limits and conclusions. Thus life is comic, but though it may be terrible it is not tragic: tragedy belongs to the cunning of the stage. Of course most theatre is gross ephemeral rot; and only plays by great poets can be read, except as directors’ notes. I say ‘great poets’ but I suppose I really mean Shakespeare. It is a paradox that the most essentially frivolous and rootless of all the serious arts has produced the greatest of all writers. That Shakespeare was quite different from the others, not just primus inter pares but totally different in quality, was something which I discovered entirely by myself when I was still at school; and on this secret was I nourished. There are no other plays on paper, unless one counts the Greek plays. I cannot read Greek, and James tells me these are untranslatable. After looking at a number of translations I am sure he is right.

Of course the theatre is essentially a place of hopes and disappointments and in its cyclical life one lives out in a more vivid way the cyclical patterns of the ordinary world. The thrill of a new play, the shock of a flop, the weariness of a long run, the homeless feeling when it ends: perpetual construction followed by perpetual destruction. It is to do with endings, with partings, with packings up and dismantlings and the disbanding of family groups. All this makes theatre people into nomads, or rather into the separated members of some sort of monastic order where certain natural feelings (the desire for permanence for instance) have to be suppressed. We have the ‘heartlessness’ of monks; and in this respect we suffer the changes characteristic of ordinary life with a difference, in a sublimated symbolic way. As actor, director and playwright I have of course had my full share of disappointments, of lost time and lost ways. My ‘successful’ career contains many failures, many dead ends. All my plays flopped on Broadway for instance. I failed as an actor, I ceased as a playwright. Only my fame as a director has covered up these facts.