The Culture of Exclusive Pity
Ignored, marginalised groups should have a voice, but should it be to the exclusion of all other voices?
On Thursday the 5th October Brian Halliday, a professional hypnotist for thirty years, will be talking about how we can resist propaganda and break free. Tickets are free - register here.
The theatre is, in some ways, the most captivating form of art, its advocates would argue. Being in the room with living breathing actors, a group of sensitised people and suspending belief to allow yourself to become engrossed in the story being told, can be a powerful experience, if the production is a good one. For thousands of years, this human capacity to enjoy theatre had been a subject of debate, beginning with the contention between Plato and Aristotle as to how it operated on the psyche.
In those days, plays had two forms: tragedy and comedy. Tragedy either acted as a profound emotional emetic or revealed the noble suffering that lay as the deeper reality of human life; comedy showed us human foolishness or the cosmic absurdity of the human condition. These two genres increased over the centuries from the salon satires to the existential angst of Pirandello; from the tragicomedy of Samuel Beckett to the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s.
Throughout the drama’s course of existence, from Ancient Greece to the present day, there has been a consistent expansion of characters’ social, economic and social status. Unsurprising, as this has been the part played by the democratic strand of art in its history: widening the pallet of voices allowed to colour the stage with their truth. Great artists have been partially recognised by their ability to paint in those new colours. And, dependent on your belief in the power of art, the product of these great artists has either adumbrated the future or made it.
Few would argue that great dramatic art and artists have followed a liberal agenda of humanising the marginalised: Aeschylus did it over two thousand years ago in The Supplicants, giving, in the era of the city state, despised and rejected immigrants a voice; Shakespeare made two of his most tragic characters black and Jewish - it was not an accepted belief in Elizabethan or Stuart England that either race were human enough to be the subject of tragedy; Ibsen showed the middle class could be tragic and Becket in Waiting for Godot, extended humanity to the tramp, the homeless, the economically lowest rung of the ladder.
Lesser but still valid artists have continued the project relating the positions of the disabled, gender and sexual minorities, and the neuro-divergent. There is no reason why this should not be supported and encouraged. Art has many purposes and one of them is to present us a world that we are unfamiliar with.
Yet are we becoming over-saturated with minority and marginalised voices to the point where their affective power is almost nil? Have playwrights inferred a simplistic formula and concluded that great playwrights produced great plays with marginalised characters, therefore, if they write marginalised characters then they will create great art? (They are encouraged in this simpleism [neologism - drawing an overly simplistic conclusion despite the complexity of the evidence] by the financial incentivising of bodies such as Creative Scotland who themselves are invested in the tenets of inclusion, equality and progress.) And has the humour, grandeur of inexorable Fate which entertained and ennobled humanity been slowly lost under a swamping sympathy for the disadvantaged that’s oscillates between the bi-polar notes of morbid pity and humourless ideology?
To read through the Traverse Theatre’s autumn schedule, you will discover your choices for plays are restricted to a series of performances that are almost exclusively about marginalised groups. It is a cacophony of voices, all calling for recognition and empathy. All human affliction is pondered over through dialogue and execution of the parts. We as an audience are invited to understand, but, unless they are a truly great artist, then the emotional pathway can descend all too regularly to pity and commiseration. And there are few great artists.
To give some illustration: Disciples is explained as ‘a piece led by poetry but including music, text and image’ that has an ‘ensemble of women, non-binary’ and those that ‘identify’ as disabled, deaf and neuro-divergent; One of Two is about two twins with cerebral palsy; And…And…And…is about two teenagers with climate anxiety, along with a collection of other worries; others are about trauma, grief, depression, unemployment…and…so on.
It is not that these are not worthy issues to be explored and it is vitally important that all voices are heard if we are to expand our appreciation and conception of the human being, but, as the home of new playwriting in Scotland, is there no room for anything else other than the marginalised or themes that dwell on the disadvantaged and darker side of life? All the works claim to be exploring important questions, and, they are from their perspective. But what is wrong with asking other questions or depicting other types of characters, not riddled with anxiety or guilt or trauma: questions that look at how human beings can raise themselves, ground their lives on integrity, celebrate some of the great lives, with their not dissimilar sufferings, as they achieve what did not seem possible; or, as an alternative, an aggressive, brave, radical theatre, expose the hypocrisy of the ‘untouchable’ institutions in our society - the military, charities, the unions and many, many more. Where is this radical theatre that challenges more than just our ability to be inclusive?
Strangely, the intention to include narratives shunted to the sidelines is suffocating the potential for these other voices which are now more vital than ever. It may be asking too much, given the circumstances and the cyclopic gaze of theatre when it comes to the reality of politics, but where are the pieces on the billionaires buying and manipulating the media? The docility of the population when it came to Covid and the vaccines is surely one of the most urgent issues that theatre could address? What about the medical tyranny and double-standards? All vital issues. Yet being hard-headed political is the wrong kind ‘political’ for the stage which wants its examination of contemporary issues to fit the inclusive agenda.
Troubling is the thought that it might be partly due to Creative Scotland only funding these types of plays that causes the loss of equally as urgent art to be silenced. In fact, the grip that Creative Scotland has on the arts through their funding of venues means that the myopic priorities of those that deal out the grants, decide which artists flourish and which ones do not; and the ones that flourish push the ideology. Ask the female artists who had their funding pulled after expressing a scepticism that men can be biological women.
Theatre is dependent on cash infusions from the state because it is dying. It is dying because the agenda, in a limited way admirable, but its continued repetition has made it boring. There are so many great stories to be told and purposes to attempt on stage, all lost under the light-touch censoriousness that keeps art in line with those parameters set by government bodies or their proxies. Nowadays, if you want to feel unremittingly miserable, depressed, pitiful or if you just want to sleep - the theatre is the place to go.
On Thursday the 5th October Brian Halliday, a professional hypnotist for thirty years, will be talking about how we can resist propaganda and break free. Tickets are free - register here.