The Genesis of the Proscenium

the actor

acting is not the true self's dissipation
but not its preening either - outside the role
it honours it best fights shy of reputation -
being what prometheus stole

it is a distant spark of that first live coal
a conscious glimpse of human desperation
rekindled as a longing to console

the waning spirit or the shattered dedication
actors are allies of the delphic hole
for good or ill they echo human expectation

being what prometheus stole

After sixty years of commitment to theatre, I still find it difficult to present the multi-aspects of ideas that determine theatre shape. Stephen Joseph saw that shape in theatre, the creative experience most in touch with the presence of people, derived not by accident, nor by the needs of theatre practitioners, but from the pressure of the spiritual assumptions at the core of the ideas that allowed a society to function. That is, for example, in Western history, Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance, theatre architecture symbolically represented, and was an expression of, the assumptions deeply rooted in the inlaid practices of the time.

The key relationship in all theatre is that of the actor to the audience; but that is qualified by several other factors, all combining to make a symbolic portrait of the flows of power, spiritual, philosophical, social and practical, that make up the conglomerate (contemporary) modus vivendi.

Scientists claim they are getting close to reaching back to the start of the Universe - but as to what was before that, what sensible guesses can be made? Eternity (The Eternal) is unknowable and inchoate, even though it must be the sum of every possible form of time.

There are three kinds of time that can fall easily into the grasp of the human mind: the aeon, the era and the age. They constitute the Temporal. The aeon is a stretch of time indifferent to all planetary life. It works to its own harmonies and rhythms and mighty upheavals. Somewhen, in some aeon, life began on earth, either from some fluke within its own composition, or by intervention from outside masses or forces, or by supernatural connivance.

Whatever, by the time the light of reason or the dark of instinct manifested into human consciousness, the fundamentals of the origin of the life we know were already beyond human exposition. The Eternal could be experienced only as a metaphor: it could not be attained. None of us could do more than gawp outwards (inwards) or backwards, creating theories, imagining, dreaming about the consequences of forever.

An era is a fragment of an aeon, an imaginable cycle within an almost unimaginable one. The sum of eras is the sum of human perception: it is that unit of time that marks the complete cycle of the movement of ideas. An era is both governed by the aeonic rhythm it is a part of, and a container of a spiritual assumption, so overriding that it colours every sub-assumption that grows from it.

An era is defined by, and stretches from, the coming into consciousness of a spiritual assumption to its wearing out and settling discarded into the folds of old time. An age is a section of an era; it modifies a spiritual assumption, carries it on into its next stage of development; but it works always within the limits of that assumption, wrestling with its ongoing implications. An age wears out when the implications of the spiritual assumption want to move beyond what the age is capable of resolving.

An era carries the whole idea; succeeding ages carry the development of the idea through its stages, as it rises from concept to climax and then falls away.

As an age is to its era, so an era is to its aeon. In beyond-human terms, the aeon too is a natural conception, concocted by the shift of vast cosmic forces being played out upon the planetary system. It too works by its own logic, causing rising and falling cycles of natural behaviour. Aeonic patterns wear out, and a fresh aeonic rhythm conjures itself out of the void to preserve the infinitely complex balances that stop the whole system blowing itself to pieces. (Even the language in this is a guess, even as the theory is: at best, it is a mataphor.)

Or put it this way: an aeon begets eras, and spans several of them; an era begats ages and spans several of them. Some ages may be sub-ages: changing the idea, but not shifting the weight of it sufficiently to claim proper age-dom.

So what has this to do with the proscenium? Everything, in the long scale of things!

In "The Masks of God", Joseph Campbell suggests that all we are now can be traced back to Mesopotamia, six (?) millennia ago. Let's say the modern era began then. Out of Gilgamesh, shifting westward, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norman, Medieval and Renaissance ages grew, maybe give or take a few, and to see things through an Euro-centric eye.

Each of these civilisations grew around a changed assumption about the relationship between the Temporal and the Infinite. Essentially a spiritual assumption, since the sacred stories (myths) that accrued to each change of idea, expressed themselves through a changing definition of the godhead. However, although each idea "moved on", and pretended that it did so by rejecting what had been believed before, it nevertheless retained more of the old supposition than it liked to admit, and more honestly was an added-to interpretation of the previous sacrality, rather than a total renovation.
A spiritual assumption, symbolically conveyed through myths, needs to accrue a structure, architecturally-symbolic, a form within which ideas and actions can be conveyed, reflective of the assumption but also exploring, probing its validity and relevance to the changing times; a form faithful to the assumption, enabling the ongoing contextual debate, but itself affected by the nature of the conclusions being reached, until such times as the form finds itself to be inadequate, and is forced to alter, in some particular in order to enable the debate to reach out into newly discovered territories.

Such a change of form also reflects back on the validity of the assumption that begat it; and in minute ways the assumption has to adjust too, which again adjusts the form which again enables the range of the debate. There is then, within the era, a constant flux of change and adjustment, until the form is no longer capable of further adjustment, and the assumption itself either has to adapt in a major way or collapse in favour of a fresh spiritual dogma. When the form gives way, a new age comes into being. When the spiritual assumption is worn out, a fresh era begins. Meanwhile the aeon, bustling and puffing its way through its own massive contents, will itself (say every 26,000 years) reach the end of its own convulsions (each one of which has directly, if unrecognisably, affected each flick of the age's debate) and a fresh aeon, stirred up with a very different sense of itself, will start its own lonely climb towards "harmonising"
the cosmos. I suspect, by these reckonings, when aeon and era and age find themselves exhausted at the same time, then the whole existence of the planetary system (if not the universe) becomes fraught. (And this may exactly be the point of existence we are at now.)

Assume though that we're not, despite the closing-down antics presently being indulged in by statesmen: we are certainly at the end of an age, where western domination, the so-called Renaissance (a bit of word-play I gather of the 19th century) are being left stranded out of water with the ability only to gasp irresolutely at the world that is turning in on them. Plenty of people, such as Nietsche, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Henrik Ibsen, have been putting the markers out for well over a century.

What has this to do with the proscenium? We're getting to it.

Out of the relationship between Temporal and Etaernal - the spiritual assumption.

Out of the spiritual assumption - the symbolic form.

Out of the symbolic form (architecturally translated) - the practical form.

The practical form determines the permissible dialogue, and the relationships through which that dialogue must pass and with what social constrictions.

Theatre shape becomes the template, the form pressurised by the state of ideas the spiritual assumption has expressly come to.

Each age's theatre-form therefore can be de-constructed to reveal the workings of its contemporaneous "civilisation" - that is, its controlling channels.

The proscenium (ah!) stage came into being as the product of the change in the spiritual assumption (the one that probably started out in Mesopotamia millennia-ago, but forced to modify itself through several ages and sub-ages since) that brought about the Renaissance, and, for all sorts of interlocking reasons, gave the "Western world" a leash of power it has exploited, so far, ever since.

In Medieval times, a much more static social organism, the divine right of Kings began giving way to barons; with the Renaissance, with the rise of the middle classes, and its greater grasp of technology, fluidity entered the system and Authority was forced off its high horse and expected to be more accountable to the (important) people. Theatres moved indoors, seeing became increasingly as important as hearing, perspective was rumbled. Opera, in Italy; ballet, in France
became the rage. The spoken word began to lose its need to be everything in performance. Machinery made illusion much easier. The world of the "imagination" (scenically-interpreted) became a world apart from that of everyday patter. Myth was lessening its hold on ordinary perception. Business and entrepreneurial individualism took over. Scepticism and distance paradoxically grew as the key bodies of the enfranchised expected the powerful to act on their behalf. The somewhat arenal structure of the old theatres (heightened stages, but audiences able to be on three sides) gave way to end-on structures.

In Medieval Theatre, exit stage R was to heaven; stage L was to hell. Man was torn between the two. The backcloth (background) was static. The Proscenium Stage became an embodiment of the Renaissance, though the Arch took some time to come. Machinery intruded into the performance; sets were devised to show off perspective; the backcloth became more fluid. The need for historical accuracy crept in. The basic spiritual assumption undewent a considerable modification. Elizabethan theatre turned into the darker Jacobean variety. Masques became the fashion. With Protestantism (in its Puritannical phase), theatres were banned for a while. Charles came back from the continent stuffed with the growing fashions of a renewed Catholicism. Tennis courts were taken over and converted into performance spaces - audiences became long and thin. With the ability to light, actors, for their own safety retreated up into the lit space; the unruly audiences very gradually (over two centuries) had to be tamed. Professionalisation was the rage: The creation of trained institutionalised "experts", trying to be serious about their jobs, needed protection from the representatives of the "hoi-polloi" who increasingly were not the hoi-polloi at all: except at some point the theatre split into two: the old native tradition survived as music-hall and pantomime; the new theatre, picking up on its revived classical roots, went for the more high-blown stuff; but, for both, the stage became entrenched as a mysterious, cut-off, magical place of spectacle where the lit experts cavorted, and the unlit gawpers-in increasingly shut up (except to laugh and applaud). The Proscenium Stage, replete with its arch, found the form that still dominates theatre today in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It mutated, over time, into landscape and fourth-wall theatre (among others) as the major ideas of the day wrestled with the difficulties of handling the underlying spiritual assumption, that the Renaissance was both struggling to be loyal to, but growing increasingly critical of.

(I'm getting there! The next blog will look at what the Proscenium is really saying - and why we need to dump it from the way we look at things. )

a roundel for ptolemy

the earth is not the system's centre- so ok
heliocentric - well our sun's a midget
spawning galaxies blow our minds away
space then equal to a digit

the mightiest telescope's a widget
science at best hard guessing gone astray
no genius stretch beyond a second's fidget

ptolemy discarded yet may have his say
infinity takes a hologram to bridge it
each shard of us contains the cosmos -
space then equal to a digit

Deconstructing the Proscenium - early stages

When I retreated from London to Southampton, I started with the thought that the proper alternative to the Proscenium would be the open stage - not sure when I read Richard Southern's book of that title, but its arguments impressed me greatly - so went about setting up a small company The Rostrum Theatre that gave no doubt what I was about. Swollen-mindedly, I jumped into a production (one performance only) of Othello, using a cast of friends and acquaintances, plus one apparently highly-regarded ex-professional who had come to teach in the town (now city). The venue was a downtown equivalent of The Albert Hall. It failed in most aspects, aided spectacularly by the ex-professional, playing Othello, who had quit the stage, I then learned, because he had to get drugged up in order to perform. After which, those in the company still willing to admit being part of it would stay members only if performance was confined to behind the proscenium arch. From 1953 to 1957, then, I did such plays as Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Easter and Priestley's An Inspector Calls, deconstructing the Proscenium set-up from within, discarding lighting, scenery, costume and stage furniture, one item after another, until the company performed Chekov's The Bear with two chairs only, both of whiich had to be broken by the end.

When the curtain rose on such a bleak vision, the audience (part of a Drama Festival) froze into dismay and found it hard to titter once at all the on-stage slapstick. Finally, before throwing in the Rostrum's towel, I wrote a one-acter for another Drama Festival, which started with an open curtain looking on to three chairs set out as a triangle on the stage's edges. The play was called Triangle; actors sat in the chairs when they were "off-stage". It was actually praised by the adjudicator.

Meanwhile, I had started teaching, and from 1955 to 1957 had written and directed three Christmas plays for large casts in the all-age Hampshire school I was appointed to. I hadn't the courage there to insist on working outside the proscenium - partly because there was already a tradition there for a stage to be built for some kind of seasonal show. My innovation was to write the plays.

Ron James turned up as Hampshire Drama Adviser during that period, was very much into the new ideas of school drama, and already an advocate of open-staging. So, at last I met someone moving along the same lines as myself (indeed rather further ahead) and I was boosted by a relationship that still continues today.

In 1958 the Senior Section of the all-age school I was at shifted temporarily into Eastleigh; I was offered the post of Head of English and found myself in an old Grammar School building with two large halls and no stage. In that year, I met Stephen Joseph, who was touring his Studio Theatre from Scarborough in Southampton, and booked Brian Way to bring his Children's Theatre Group to perform in what was now my drama hall. Both were the major advocates of theatre-in-the-round. That then was the year of my conversion from open-stage theatre to the Round, though in Ron James's Children's Theatre Groups set up by him in a number of Hampshire's districts performances stayed within the semi-arena. Since that year I have only once performed on the proscenium stage - and then to help out a neighbour working with her own amateur company in Southampton who found herself short of someone for the main part.

Much of my awareness of the value and significance of the Round started from conversations with Stephen Joseph, whom I last spoke to a week or two before his death in 1967 at the age of 46. He started, I think, as a theatre designer after his war service in the navy, and came to the Round through contacts in the United States but also with drama practitioners in the UK. Theatre shape to him had symbolic significances well beyond theatre itself; he looked at its development through Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance periods in the light of its relationship with the philosophical and political structures of those civilisations. This touched several nerve ends in my own inchoate searches into significant form, nudged into being by the writings of Clive Bell and others; and since those conversations I have followed the implications of the Round at every level of my creative and social endeavours.

seventy-nine and a future radical

After grammar school during and just after the 39-45 war, I did my National Service in the Education Corps (in this country and Germany) and then did a three-year stint at University in London until 1952, where I gave up my bent for French, Spanish and Latin and switched to English. Though I was active in theatre and literature as a student, I came to three conclusions that have followed me, maybe dogged me, through life. I gave up on the value of examinations (though I was granted a lower second to help me to become a teacher as it turned out and added a supplement to my earnings) and decided the sooner I stopped living in London the better.

Most importantly, though, after producing my first plays and then being treated to a surfeit of opera and ballet by a keen friend, I realised that nothing in my temperament could reconcile itself with the pretences of proscenium staging.

I returned to what was then the country town of Southampton and married in the same September, determined to search for another way of doing things theatrical. For four months I happily dug ditches as a Waterworks Labourer in and around my birthplace. In some ways, it was the most engaging job I have ever had. I left after four months for another three reasons: my wife was pregnant, I needed to earn more than a labourer's wage, and I wanted my evenings free so that I could get on with my theatre intentions, rather than spend nights controlling makeshift traffic lights on country lanes to save motorists from driving into the lurking ditches.

I was happier wallowing in ditches than in being swallowed by education once more, but I was ambitious at the time and couldn't see that I had much choice.

Falling out of love with London (well, not entirely; but as far as culture was concerned) and theatre's all-powerful form of staging, more or less in the same breath, dumped me in the ditches even before I started digging them; and these kinds of ditches I don't think I have ever crawled out of (as far as culture is concerned!).


This blog is going to explore all the paradoxes, the prejudices, the driving convictions this spate of early decisions has ingrained in me. I have lived at 51 different postal addresses, not one of them for more than nine years. I probably qualify as a maverick, have a great suspicion of establishments and top-down authority, honour the ordinary - my website www.rggregory.com is labelled "cathedral of OHS". OHS stands for Ordinary Human Spirit. I have written thousands of poems, few of which have been properly published; many plays for the round that rarely get presented, a novel that agents don't want to read, and scripts long and short on educational and theatrical issues that few other than myself have ever looked at. In all sensible terms I am a failure. I am certainly not part of the paradigm that decides the great and the good of contemporary drama and literature.

So, for anyone stumbling on this blogsite who believes that we are in a golden age of culture, focussing the peak of its achievements on London; who holds that the height of theatre resides in the miserabilities of Beckett and Pinter - my advice must be look elsewhere. You may be right. Mavericks are rarely good judges. I inhabit an alien paradigm (more peopled than the cognoscenti can dare to accept) and one to be rationally suspicious of. Yet it has its merits and has its roots in the Albion that Peter Ackroyd has explored. It is worth singing about. As I shall try to do in this blog.

confession

for all my country poses
my cells belong to a town
grass is symbol-deep in me
but brick dips deeper down

mountains knock me sideways
a moor chills my bones
a field of wheat exults me
i'm awed by ancient stones

but lines of dowdy shop-fronts
mean unpolished streets
sever the green man in me
coddle my heart's retreats

my marrow's grey as asphalt
my brain's a shirley tram
the royal pier dreams fish for me
what southampton was - i am

i'm an ecological liar
a trickster with mother earth
dreaming grass may ravel me -
bricks nourish my birth

thirteener - 12

i hate the arty - those who are sure
they have the right of breeding to proclaim
high art - and preen themselves for it
high art's a complicated game
with rules to make itself obscure

to all but the gifted sensible elite
the rest were best to drop dull heads in shame
culture's mutes immune to culture's cure
grotesqueries cast by art's pure flame
the butt and fishbowl for creative wit

art's not a spiritual furniture
for proper minds - it's a common claim
the rough diamond in everybody's kit

thirteener - 40

so much of london i have grown to hate
the powers skiving there (scheming to be wise)
the suffocating traffic of its laws
plain truths being processed into stately lies
the choicest pickings piled on one plate

london's an eagle with its costly claws
ready to swoop and tear out local eyes
london's interests and the state's equate
london's the jewel - all else is colonies
taxed of much toil and wisdom for the cause

shame then (casting your river) that you bait
me with such beauty to which (dumb fish) i rise
each summons (sprung with longing and applause)