Absurdity of the second kind
A look at the two shows Taste of Cherry and Excuse me, what time is it? Written by Amir Amjad
We often force ourselves to think of a show; Because we think that theater is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Thoughtfulness is not the task of the theater; But it is feature of a spectrum of it. Recently, a young group, the Vida Theater Workshop, has revived the small and abandoned Mehr Theater with performances in the form of a repertoire, and for well-known reasons, this effort has remained quiet and unknown. For now, these are simple and short experiences that smell of freshness, dynamism and health. So much so that even natural and possible errors add to the intimacy with the audience and make the new even newer.
It is true that more than half a century has passed since the first experiences of the absurd, but this is one of its last experiences, and the ink is not dry yet. However, modern theater still has strong fans. A major part of the theater community still does not recognize a newer process and considers the events of the last two decades as passive and instinctive choices that have removed the question instead of solving the mystery.
But the two experiences of this workshop, Taste of Cherry and Excuse me, what time is it? There are two deals with modern theater that have different occasions and differences with the absurd method. Taste of Cherry is closing to the absurd through parallel dialogue writing. In this experience, the language is polished and has its real special function, and it does not lead to communication, and people move forward in parallel until the end. The difference between this work and absurd works is in the type of disaster. The pain of the people in this work is personal and related to the surrounding world; But it has a personal origin, and it is related to an incident in their personal life. Absurd man suffers from a common pain and suffers from a universal disaster. There is a pervasive situation in which everyone is trapped. We may see personal display nodes in UNESCO's works; But these knots belong to a story that gradually becomes empty of content and becomes ridiculous. In Beckett's works, the common pain is the main knot, and unlike UNESCO's works, it is not played with, but it affects the drama.
In Iran, Shamasi deals with this category more than others. There is this common pain in his works as well; However, it is dealt with symbolically, and its content flows through people's language in a symbolic way and in the story of a symbolic situation.
The people of Beckett and UNESCO are drawn in a real situation, a reality that the author sees. Shamasi uses that reality in a symbolic situation, and each element of his stage is representative of all kinds of natures that he found in reality. Perhaps this type of symbolism (not to be confused with symbolism) can be considered as the result of Iranian culture. It can also be said that the Shamasi's absurdity has been turn to iraninan way.
But the way the story created in these two experiences is more real than a symbol can be found in it. Unless we suppose the entire performance like,You may know by a handful the whole sack. On the other hand, most of the absurd works are forward-looking and these two works, especially Taste of Cherry, review the past, but everyone has their own past. One lost his job, the other his lover.
"Forgive..." project connects deeper with an absurd format : a man and a woman are suffering from routineness and they are repeating moments for 19 years. This plot and its events evoke Pinter's The Promiscuous ; Not the nature of the plot and the subject of its events, but the type of crisis. The crisis shows both the absurd content and the social meaning of the works of, for example, Chekhov's plays. It's good to go back and get a little closer.
In the works of absurdity, it is the responsibility of the audience to recognize the main crisis and accept the lack of connection and identity lossless of people and the contentless that is the content itself. An actor may play a complete nothingness with all seriousness. Estragon diligently searches inside his hat and shoes; So much so that it brings the audience along in this search in a completely real and serious way. This seriousness in the play assures us of the presence of sand or debris in the shoes and hats, but he may be looking for Godot! And this issue is very serious for him. Absurd humor emerges from here.
UNESCO's humor also needs this realistic seriousness: An aristocratic and slightly artistic salon, one or more three-seater sofas, a few single sofas, one of the green sofas... the walls are covered with panels with the words honorary doctorate on them. ... Ph.D., Ph.D.... The woman is seen in normal home clothes. She probably got out of bed... his friend is neatly dressed, holding an umbrella and a hat... a neat hair, upstanding, striped pants and black shoes... This is the description of UNESCO's Defect play.
UNESCO needs these factual details to create a serious situation ; They asked for a high school diploma to give a new degree to a member of the French Academy. He has all kinds of doctorates, but he didn't get the diploma for some reason, and now he took the high school exam to fix the defect in his resume and failed! Well, this is a ridiculous situation, but the academy member doesn't know that. Therefore, there is no distance between him and his role, and he faces the issue seriously. Performing an absurd work to judge the role does not distance itself from it and does not share this judgment with the audience; Maybe it can be called an introverted executive.
But the experiences of Vida Group have artifacts such as functional and single decor, exaggerated and theatrical make-up, workshop clothes and others, which tell us that this is a game, a workshop, a theatrical experience, or an experimental show. Well, this is an extroverted theater that wants to involve the audience in the performance, and as a result, the performance and the audience play the role with the help of each other, and this creates a distance between the actor and the role. We can take the dialogue Taste of Cherry as an example.
Two people have a parallel and calculated speech, which at times seems related to each other, and the show happens when these two face each other and have a serious conversation. It is a real and full-fledged game that can reveal the humor of this type of dialogue writing and carry the burden of suspense at the same time. Because when dealing with this type of dialogue, the audience must constantly recognize that "these are the same party or not?" Go back and forth between certainty and guess and doubt. But here are the crafts that are from the choices of the workshop to determine the assignment. It puts two actors side by side to say the parallel dialogue, and finds out in advance that these two have nothing to do with each other. This type of artificiality removes the drama load of this type of dialogue and brings the show closer to playreading. A playreading can also be a show, but the dialogue is not a parallel playreading. It is continuous and follows a single story.
This is a noteworthy event, an important experience for a workshop. Two odd choices, both equally well-paid and acceptable, offset each other's showmanship; not interesting? A theater full of creativity, taste and thought reaches the zero zone in terms of the show's emotions due to the contrast of two show vectors!
The same incident can be examined and noted from another point of view; That is, what brings most of the absurd performances here to the zero zone is the overthinking of the performance. This overthinking that imposes itself on more implementation is due to the view based on the thought and logic of history - that is, understanding the role through analysis - and it should. But our distance from that common pain makes us play a part of our analysis! A western character is possessed. In the process of modernity, he is a subjugated man who is terrified by this process. He lives this kind of terror and doesn't need to analyze it to feel it; Although to understand it, it also goes to analysis. Better to say, a western character is a modern person, and to see modernity, just look at himself. What does he see in the mirror? The actor that lost the role. He lives this lost role and exaggerates it on stage. In his relationship with the absurd, sensory, internal, instinctive and emotional vectors are first, then comes the turn of thought and reasoning. But in order to understand and understand that process, we have to start with thinking and analysis, and then we use the emotions of the game by using scientific conventions to serve that thinking. This causes the actor to play the role of a loser. An actor who lost a role becomes an actor who lost a role and the humiliation of losing a role becomes the credit of the actor, and now if the absurd method is a loud scream for the modern man, here it becomes a reasonable and wise conversation, it brings this theater closer to the zero zone, to The same interesting incident; that a calculated theater that has the right rhythm, well-thought-out and varied mise-en-scène, acceptable acting ability, unwillingness and other theatrical elements at the optimal level, suffers from a vacuum. Let's go back and change our scenery.
Why the early experiences of most of our playwrights in the realm of the absurd are more successful is a subject to be explored and written for, but there is an entry to enter a new perspective. Some may think that the reason for this relative agreement is the absence of the theater of the absurd from the logical and binding structure of realistic or classical methods. While the absurd theatre takes a more difficult path and has a more complicated structure due to the loss of the conventional ways of creating suspense and attracting the audience. The conventional structure that Aristotle defines and has found more realistic definitions in the last few centuries, usually starts in the primary balance, and if it is not clearly explained, it becomes the primary balance, knot throwing, climax, knot untying, and secondary balance.
Compliance with this academic curve alone creates attraction and relative suspense. Absurd theatre misses this possibility and starts the game after the climax. It eliminates knotting and is held entirely in secondary balance.
Absurd person has secondary balance. It is routine. The exciting crises of that curve settled in him and made him the creature we know. Well, such a situation is first of all boring, and every writer finds measures to overcome this boredom. Because of his mastery over the structure of the story, Beckett can use its constituent elements in small pieces and keep the audience with all kinds of curiosity, surprise, suspense, etc., without the need of a general story. He sometimes visits other points of that curve through short and shadowy narratives and returns quickly. These small and sequential and seemingly unrelated pieces - in total - chart the content of the secondary balance and also that shared pain. Taste of cherry also has such a method, and I said that what is shown in total has a personal origin and is not universal. This show also starts after the disaster. The news of that disaster is properly played out during the show, it quickly becomes curious and gradually the dimensions of the disaster become clear.
In most of his works, Beckett traveled the time and place far away from the secondary balance, and it takes place in a situation where the dimensions of the disaster settled in people and gave new dimensions to their ossification, which may make them seem like psychopathic creatures in our eyes. While Becket's characters is not crazy and his mind has a real occasion with the situation in which he is placed. However, the reality that Beckett sees in those times may be far from our mentality.
Taste of Cherry has another plan. The date of the disaster goes back to three days ago, and the character is still in shock and having a mental fluid flow, and this is a dramatic justification for him to review the past in a chaotic way and complete the information.
"Sorry..." is closer to UNESCO. UNESCO creates a completely serious performance situation that is empty of content, and this void is eventually filled with secondary balance content. With the help of that seriousness - which was described - the fallacious situation frees the theater from boredom and daily life and creates suspense. A man and a woman who have been living a boring life for 19 years gradually assure us that the arrival of a child will free them from routineness. At the end, the child is found, and we understand that their expectation was also a false happiness. If UNESCO wrote this play to break the dullness of that routineness, maybe he would have arranged his formal situation around the arrival of that child from the beginning, and maybe this choice of "Excuse me..." that spends most of the play's time describing that routineness is because of the boredom of the secondary balance in itself is attractive and suspenseful to us who contemplate it from the outside.
The two experiences Taste of Cherries and "Excuse me, what time is your time?", regardless of which style and context they belong to, are works that are necessary and must be seen, can be discussed and investigated, honest and frank, and as a result, educational, and from this point of view, this event It's new, it's a window of hope. Because when dealing with theatrical experience, we can add to our stage knowledge only if the owners of that experience have added to their knowledge when creating the work.
Jalal Tehrani