Eugenio Barba
THE SKY OF THE THEATRE
Speech to thank the members of the Academy of Music and Theatre of Estonia for bestowing the title of Doctor Honoris Causa, Tallinn 27 September 2009.
A friend advised me: “For this honour you receive in Estonia, a country you have never visited, you should thank them with a “prophetic” speech. You should talk of the theatre as fatherland.”
Noticing my sceptical reaction, he quoted a great Italian actor of my age, Carmelo Bene, who died a few years ago. He had said: fatherland in a prophet.
It was the paradoxical reversal of the ancient evangelical saying: nobody is prophet in his own country, Each of us has at least nine lives, as many as a cat is said to have. But among my nine lives, none is as a prophet. As I am unable to foretell and preach, I will speak once more about the only reality in which I recognise myself: the house in which I live.
Theatres are humble hovels, even when they are embellished with gold, plaster and velvet. They are always small and rustic when compared to the grandeur of the shows which gloriously populate our periphery? An island of freedom? An exile which at length wearies?
- Are you not fed up with theatre after almost fifty years?
I was asked this question, word for word, by three different people during the last few months. It is normal for an old man with white hair. Two of my interlocutors were inexperienced youths, facing their own choice to be actors with apprehension. The third was an older colleague. To all of them I answered: no, I was not fed up. The pressure of the work weighs more than before, but on the other hand my patience has increased. I know that it is only a matter of time, and sooner or later even the most tangled circumstances will find a solution. For the most part, it is a sensible solution that was merely hidden. In rare and fortunate cases, I manage to find a way out through obstacles which appeared insurmountable. Despite the many years passed in the profession, still today unexpected paths suddenly open up, making me feel like a beginner on the threshold of new explorations. “Young” paths remove the feeling of tiredness from my shoulders and bones. My elderly colleague insisted:
- Are you really not fed up? To be honest, I don’t believe you.
- Yet it is so.
- Why?
- How long do I have to answer you?
- A couple of words.
- Then I will tell you: because in theatre I see the sky.
- Ridiculous!
- What you call ridiculous is the richness of theatre. Its mystery.
He threw back at me a scornful question:
- Is the ridiculous the mystery of the theatre, or is it its mystery which is
ridiculous?
- Both the one and the other.
- Do me the favour of explaining it.
I did this by telling him a fable. In a corner of a square in a village where people live most of the time in the open air, there is a small puppet theatre. An ancient story is being performed: the tragic life of Orestes who avenges his father, kills his stepfather who is an usurper and, blinded by fury, stabs his mother. Revenge is a duty for a warrior, but matricide is a crime without remission. Orestes fears the lightning of the gods. He scrutinises the sky to guess the punishment that will be inflicted upon him. Death? Madness?
While the puppet Orestes tries to look beyond the blue curtain of the sky that hides the abode of the gods, one of those sudden summer storms is unleashed, typical of hot countries. The small puppet theatre is shaken by the wind, the set is demolished and the blue paper of the sky splits in two. But the split reveals nothing to the puppet Orestes. Up there, there are no divinities sitting on the clouds or on the tops of the mountains.
Orestes keeps on looking, waiting for an answer. But he sees only a void. The Age of Myths is ended and that of bare Reason begins. Orestes has become Hamlet.
- Not bad! – said my elderly colleague – did you invent this story?
- No, it is told by a character in Pirandello’s novel
Personally, I don’t think that Orestes is the representative of the ancient world, and Hamlet the exponent of the crisis of conscience in modern times. They are always simultaneously present. For me, this simultaneous presence of opposites is the theatre.
- Are you trying to tell me that, as director, you observe your actors as if they were the directors of your mental theatre? Is this the makes you see?
- My actors are the flash, the contradictions of “reality” as it is – not as I imagine it. And I can work on this
one glance with the technique of a craftsman.
- Therefore you assert that you are not fed up with theatre despite the inevitable routine, the endless hunt for money and the obligation always to start afresh?
- Exactly, despite all of this.
- Tell me: how would you define the sky?
- In a couple of words?
- Yes, just a couple.
- That which protects me from life.
- And the theatre?
- The same.
- Then you believe in the gods!
- Yes, but only in unbelieving gods.
I am not exaggerating when I say that theatre is what protects me from life. I believe that theatre is not only a profession, but a small and somewhat childish microcosm in which I may live other lives. Does its vulnerable space of fiction and the fact that it is a game, leave lasting forms behind it, a smaller art, or an exercise of knowledge that can transcend art?
Today theatre has a lot of natures. But none of them can create the proverbial monument “which lasts longer than bronze”. Beyond any goal and sense that each of us gives to the nature of the theatre we are doing, our work doesn’t remain, although it forges relationships. It serves to make us travel, each of us, within our own inner individual, and together with others. Its roots are relationships, both before and after the performance, between those people who do theatre and those who watch it: relationships connecting past and present, history and biography, intention and action, the person and the character, the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead.
The microcosm of the theatre is not fed by success. Its triumphs are only the foam of the surrounding indifference which breaks onto the beaches of our theatrical islets.
This is what experience teaches us. Just as Vasili Vasilich Svetlovidov, the actor protagonist of his greenroom and woke up in the solitude of the theatre abandoned by actors and spectators. His only companion was the prompter, accustomed to living under the stage, as a mouse, but a young mouse enthusiastic over the miracles of the stage. To him Svetlovidov, a protagonist of comedies and a defeatist in life, displayed his wisdom: the sacredness of art is a nonsense, it is only delirium and deception.
It is also delirium and deception to complain endlessly about the decadence of the theatre, about its inadequacy with regard to the spirit of the time, its destiny as a small business, a mere workshop with a sense of inferiority towards the great industry of the spectacle, and fearful of being swept away.
Theatres are not only workshops, imposing buildings or crumbling hovels which shelter and keep alive our darkest needs. They may be small houses, yes, but with many staircases.
What is it that nourishes the theatre microcosms? Not technology, but personal technique. Small techniques, barehanded, not solitary, and lived in common. For this very reason they give life to fatherlands in miniature. The winds of acclamation and dissent pass, but if the relationships and techniques respond to our own inner values, to our mythologies and superstitions, then they are able to oppose resistance, to come into contact with the outside and to escape isolation. Provided they are not satisfied with the first steps, on which those people who love and enjoy theatre often sit only briefly, without feeding its discontent. As when we eat without hunger and drink without thirst which, according to Baudelaire and Artaud, are mortal sins for whoever is called to the arts.
The theatre’s personal techniques are staircases, they descend and climb. Our theatre house is endless when it has such staircases.
I think of certain old houses in the countries of the South, at the mercy of damp, deprived of comfort, invaded by shade, with small windows that seem to fear heat and light, and shut out the bright landscapes of the sea and the olive trees. In these houses people live at close quarters, and mutual impatience often taints their daily life with the anguish of imprisonment. But in each of these houses a small staircase blackened by time leads to a flat roof where you can stand: a terrace deprived of handrails, which obliges you to be alert because a false step can send you plunging to the ground.
A house with a flat roof on which the sky impends. And where each of us can converse with ourselves, losing our gaze over the horizon.
In only a couple of words: theatre, for me, is similar to such a house.
Translated from Italian by Judy Barba
