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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts of activism
(1969)
Holden, Joan
Part VI: guerilla theatre: comedy and revolution, pp. [415]-[420]
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Page 419
insure the triumph of spring and the vital principle over winter and death; by the psychologists, following Freud's WIT AND THE UNCONSCIOUS, it is interpreted as fantasy wish-fufillment acting out the triumph of the id over restraints. It is also the basic plot of any revolution. This makes it relatively easy to represent a revolutionary action. You have the oppressed class in the servant characters, the oppressors in the power figures (whom you can identify as specifically as you like: the more specific, the more the audience will love to see them beaten), the vanguard in the hero; enlarge the goals of the victorious struggle, from marriage or money to freedom or peace, and it becomes a revolution; the new order is represented in the distributive justice of the happy ending. The moral is always clear: do like the hero. Now you have only to decide what revolutionary action you can suggest to your audience; you have caught up with the rest of the vanguard. In our version of L'AMANT MILITAIRE (1967), the soubrette heroine dressed up as the Pope, appeared over the curtain, and stopped the war in Vietnam; then came down and told the audience, "If you want something done, my friends -do it yourselves." This meant, take power, but we admit it begged the question of how. It did leave the audience wanting power (and won us the epithet "cheerleaders of anarchy," which we would accept with pride if it were amended to "cheerleaders of the socialist violent revolution"); compare with the effect of Peter Brook's film, TELL ME LIES, which in one sequence shows the hero very plausibly entering the Pentagon during working hours, hiding till night, and starting a conflagration in a vast bank of IBM cards; just when the audience is thinking "Wow - it really could happen" the character wakes up and we learned that it is only a nightmare. Mr. Brook could not stick with anything stronger than the question which ends the film: (supposing a napalm-burned child appeared at your door): "What would you do?" Why make the film? In RUZZANTE (1968) we were concrete: the hero blew up the co-opted professor (destroy the university in its present form). This happy ending was appreciated on campuses but people reproached us for making revolution look easy -the hero didn't make the bomb himself, it appeared by magic. 419 The problem is that if it doesn't look easy it isn't magic, and if it isn't magic you might as well write a pamphlet. If the artist has to choose between creating the desire and outlining the means he must choose the first, as the thing that art is best at. Art conveys implicit messages deeper than it does explicit ones. The special power of comedy as revolutionary art lies not in the facility of representation -that problem can be solved in other ways - but in the psychological correspondence between comedy and revolution: the pattern wherein anger and love combine in a movement toward freedom. If you don't think love is a revolutionary motive, Che thinks so. The double motivation, what he calls "celebration and abuse," is repeatedly emphasized by Cornford. It was not enough simply to carry on the Maypole: first winter had to be driven out with sticks. The endurance of this pattern in art suggests that it endures in our psychology, awaiting release to be expressed in life. What comedy has special power to do is create a compelling vision of this release. Dull critics basing everything on their misunderstanding of the comedy of manners have written a lot about the "inherent conservatism" of comedy and the "restoration of right order" in the comic resolution; a revolution may equally be said to be conservative, in that it "restores" justice. In either case the order or the justice was never there before: the "restoration" consists in making reality at last conform to an ideal which has long been held. Few comic writers have envisioned the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it is true that many (including Aristophanes, the most Utopian) have appealed for return to older ways. But it is only since Marx that the Golden Age has been placed in the future: before him the way it ought to be was always the way it must have been some time before. The "right order" of the happy ending is always a wished-for ideal: that is what the limited happiness of the comedy of manners and the triumphal new world of Aristophanes' endings have in common. The magic ending of TARTUFFE, where the king sets everything right, has earned Moliere the
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