Freaks of History

Front matter

Freaks of History Two Performance Texts

James MacDonald e intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2017 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

Part I: Critical Essays My First Playwright Julian Meyrick

Director’s Notes Martin Harvey

Crisis, Cruelty and Curation: Staging ‘Freakish’ History in James MacDonald’s Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here Jessica O'Hara

Part Il: Playtexts Wellclose Square - A Performance Text

Unsex Me Here - A Performance Text

41 43 95

Acknowledgements

Martin Harvey and I have worked together for more than 25 years and for more than ten years on this module - probably a record length of time between director and writer. And while not without its anxious moments, our relationship has been as near ideal as artistic collaborations can be. It is not within my province, perhaps, to speculate on my contribution to Martin's creative life. In my view, based on our experience, a directors contribution to a production deserves all the plaudits accorded it. Directors combine spectacular judgement with dramaturgical wisdom and the consummate ability to communicate with performers. Martin's expertise in all three is virtually nonpareil.

Jessica O’Hara contributed a wonderfully incisive essay to Carnival Texts, my previous collection for Intellect. Superseding our adversarial sporting alliances, we share an abiding passion for post-colonial cultural discourse, evident here in Jessicas wonderful essay, Crisis, Cruelty, and Curation: Staging Freakish History.

As Julian Meyrick notes in his essay, our collaboration dates from the mid-1980s, when he directed productions of three of my plays, including a revival of Too Many Monkeys, my first full production. Julian virtually filled the Northcott Theatre with a lunchtime audience that was far more receptive than were any of Edinburgh Fringe audiences in 1980, a tribute to his perspicacity and creativity in taking the play beyond its ‘kitchen sink confines into the farther reaches of grotesque Degenerate Art. It would be a gross disservice to both Martin and Julian to speculate how Julian might handle these two plays, for they are equally gifted dramaturgs. And Julian has gone on to distinguish himself as a respected theatre academic as well as an award-winning director. His contribution here, in any case, resumes our partnership in splendid fashion.

Erin Walcon contributed these vivid production photos of Unsex Me Here as well as assisting greatly in the direction of an outsize cast. The performers themselves were assessed as being among the best in the department's history, certainly in terms of their commitment to the texts and to me. My association with Intellect, over close to a decade now, has been of the most commendable order, not to be taken for granted in this era when publishing anything is at such a premium and when publishing playtexts is even more precarious. When one factors in the untimely passing of founder Masoud Yazdani, the staff’s ability and determination to carry on are truly inspirational, and I am accordingly indebted to Jessica Mitchell, Patrick Duggan and Richard Kerr for their patient and consummate guidance, especially since this is, in many ways, the pinnacle of my career.

Author’s Introduction develops the notion that ‘disability is the master trope of human disqualification’ into

what he calls ‘the aesthetics of human disqualification, identifying systemic and virtually absolute discrimination against people with disabilities (Siebers 2010: 37ff). Siebers is much to be commended, first for targeting this discrimination explicitly and then for writing as a disabled person.

A key aspect of this discrimination is that too few disabled people have been empowered to speak for themselves about disability. For example, Trevor Phillips was named spokesperson for the disabled at the launching of the British Equalities Bill (2008), though he is not disabled. This is a phenomenon that was not permitted to exist for women and for ethnic minorities in the feminist and racial equality movements. Robert McRuer acknowledges that disabled groups take the lead in activism against disability discrimination (McRuer 2006: 39ff) and adopts a Structuralist approach in developing what he calls ‘Crip Theory, an extension of ‘Queer Theory, critiquing heterosexual dominance of the status quo. This should encourage disabled people themselves to take a more active role in disability affairs.

Siebers expresses the Structuralist link between the different anti-Establishment groups thus:

T obin Siebers, taking his lead from two disability theorists (Snyder and Mitchell 2005),

Beneath the troping of blackness as inbuilt inferiority, for example, lies the troping of disability as inferior. Beneath the troping of femininity as biological deficiency lies the troping of disability as deficiency. The mental and physical properties of bodies become the natural symbols of inferiority via a process of disqualification that seems biological, not cultural - which is why disability discrimination seems to be a medical rather than a social problem. If we consider how difficult it is at this moment to disqualify people as inferior on the basis of their racial, sexual, gender, or class characteristics, we may come to recognize the ground that we must cover in the future before we experience the same difficulty disqualifying people as inferior on the basis of disability. We might also recognize the work that disability performs at present in situations where race, sexuality, gender, and class are used to disqualify people as physically or mentally inferior. (2010: 25)

I do not denounce such representation any more than I refuse to accept the idea that disability is the master trope of disqualification because it originates with two non-disabled commentators. But it is better that disabled people speak for themselves, and the two plays that comprise Freaks of History honour this belief.

As Martin Harvey explains in Director's Notes, the plays were performed as a major part of a popular undergraduate module in Interpretive Acting at the University of Exeter, a significant advance if not a precedent in disability awareness in mainstream culture. Effectively, disability became a regular feature of a popular undergraduate module, not simply a one-off feature of an applied drama module. Equally significant, the plays were written by a congenitally disabled person and permanent member of staff with suitably advanced academic qualifications. (People with disabilities remain under-represented in universities and on university staffs.)

Disability has featured in a few popular plays. The eponymous Porgy in both the play Porgy by Dorothy and Dubose Heyward (1929) and the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin (1934) is an amputee who gets about only by means of a primitive skateboard. Ihe Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance (1977) and Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff (1980) are more recent examples of plays whose theme is disability. But these were written by non-disabled authors, a frequent criticism by disability pressures groups. As a point of comparison, it is instructive to note that Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to In Abraham’ Bosom (1926) and to Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) for their detailed depiction of African American life, though their authors, Paul Green and Julia Peterkin, were white. The works fell from favour in very short order once African Americans like Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston began speaking for themselves. Toni Morrison’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 was a sign that African American authors had at last achieved mainstream recognition.

Disabled authors, by stark contrast, are still struggling for the most modest degree of representation. Ramon del Valle-Inclan, the fin de siécle Spanish playwright, prototypically promoted the disability perspective by claiming disability as a status symbol. Already disabled, he deliberately maimed himself further to enhance his ‘celebrity status’ (Delgado 1993: xvii). Disabled characters feature in his work, especially in Bohemian Lights (1924), with its blind poet protagonist, and disability is a driving trope in Inclan’s general statement about the dispossessed. My plays have much in common with Inclan’s in this respect. But he is not viewed by the critical establishment as a ‘disabled playwright.

The BBC occasionally launches drives to promote disability drama, and they do have the online programme Ouch led by people with disabilities. But too often disabled people remain engaged in a consultative capacity, reinforcing Sieberss notion of disqualification. My own parents were guilty of this in believing that Martin Harvey wrote these plays under advisement from me. There have been modest moves to redress this situation. The publication of my plays by Intellect and by Routledge is part of this trend. Victoria Ann Lewis, a groundbreaking disabled performer, director and theatre academic edited Beyond Victims and Villains (2006), a large anthology of plays by disabled playwrights. More recently, Lewis has published ‘Tn praise of plays (2015), an essay about current plays by disabled playwrights including a discussion of Unsex Me Here. Such essays, covering many more plays, should

Author’s Introduction have been part of the critical canon long ago. In my more than 50 years of writing plays, this is the first time my work has been featured in a general discussion of drama.

In the introduction to Russia, Freaks and Foreigners, I reference a distinguished agents objection to disability as a subject for drama (MacDonald 2008: 6). Although she regularly encouraged writers to write from personal experience, she described my depiction of disabled life as ‘hideous’ and uncommercial, and the rest of the theatre establishment seems to share this view.

Consequently, I duly stopped writing about disability until Martin Harvey offered in 2000 to direct my disability plays; but this also meant that my non-disability plays, lacking depth, were not taken up for the most part.

The work of Jill Dolan and other leading feminists provides a useful barometer for gauging the progress of disability activism in the arts. Dolan’s Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) provides a thorough analysis of the feminist perspective in opposition to the pre-eminent model (white, middle class and male). This analysis establishes ‘the feminist gaze’ as a permanently viable extension of the status quo in cultural discourse. And, ideally, disabled artists could hope for the same positive inclusion in adding their experiences to the cultural discourse. But Dolan and others exclude ‘able-bodied’ from their definition of the constituents of status quo authority, as though this did not require explicit identification. Such ‘Able-isny (the discrimination against disability and the disabled) has been in existence for as long as disability has existed, and it is only now, with the advent of general anti-Establishment activism, that ‘the disabled gaze’ has sought similar recognition. This disabled perspective has been the leading component of the academic discipline Disability Studies, introduced in a select number of universities, pre-eminently at the University of Illinois (Chicago), Michigan University and Vermont University in the United States and Leeds University in Britain. Detailed discussion of the discourse is perhaps out of place in an introduction to a volume of plays. But artistic application of the gaze, in keeping with Dolan’s discussion, is certainly in order.

Disabled academic and performer Carrie Sandahl has raised doubts about disability being used metaphorically (Sandahl 2005: 344). She even takes issue with The Glass Menagerie’s depiction of disability because it is mainly symbolic (345).! Even if we concede a certain amount of verisimilitude in Menagerie’s portrayal of Laura Wingfield, the disabled gaze will perceive her differently from the standard gaze of mainstream culture, including the feminist gaze. Placing value on every aspect of disabled life (Siebers 2006: 48) validates disabled experience like Lauras by rendering a positive verdict on her encounter with Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller who, according to orthodox criticism, breaks Lauras heart as he disables her glass unicorn. While able-bodied Amanda Wingfield may regard her daughter’s encounter as a debacle, the woman herself does not, and the disabled perspective insists that we respect her feelings.

Accordingly, this may well amount to the happy ending insisted on by Hollywood producers for the film version of the play (Lahr 2014: 165). In my essay, “The virtue of living a lie, I advocate validating disabled experience by measuring it by equivalents (2010). This gauge would recognize Lauras date with Jim as the fulfilment of her dreams and the mainstay of her memories. (She gives Jim the broken unicorn as a romantic momento.) Such a reading may be viewed as perverse by an able-bodied community whose expectations are larger. Within a disabled community accustomed to less but encouraged to privilege their experience, however, their celebration is not only justified, it is de rigueur. And the charge that a sympathetic response from the able-bodied community is somehow patronizing is, in itself, a patronizing failure to acknowledge the needs of disabled people. Robert McRuer gives proper weight to the inherent differences between able-bodied and disabled experience when he identifies the latter as ‘a new form of Existentialism (letter to the author, 29 June 2015).

In any case, “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualificatio concludes with a discussion of the anti-Nazi artistic movement Degenerate Art, featuring badly deformed people as artistic models. We might also mention the photography of Diane Arbus with its focus on freaks. Lest these artists be accused of exploiting an already-oppressed minority, it is worth pointing out it is far better to celebrate disability than to ridicule or even to ban it. Playwright David C. Freeman includes a cerebral palsied artist in his ground-breaking play about disability, Creeps. The character, much in the manner del Valle-Inclan, celebrates the grotesque in his own version of Degenerate Art (Lewis 2008: 33).

A guiding aim of the two plays in Freaks of History is to represent disabled characters according to their own values and experiences within a context of general marginalization. In Wellclose Square, a trio of young disabled men are shown interacting with young women in what might be termed ‘pre-sexual activity. Perhaps basing their responses on able-bodied heterosexual behaviour, the women are revealed to be apprehensive, at least initially. My intention, however, was to demonstrate the limited, perhaps sublimated desires of each of the men, giving value, nonetheless, to this contact by suggesting that it is welcomed, eventually, by the women.

In Unsex Me Here, the focus is on disabled women in captivity facing immanent euthanasia. The aim here is to reveal the rationale behind such treatment, including the suggestion that the Nazi nurses and prison staff were, themselves, disabled by their circumstances. The game-show interlude, in Act One, is intended to show that the American attitude towards disability was ambiguous to say the least. Siebers cites the example of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer who, today, advocates euthanasia for people with the most severe disabilities (Siebers 2006: 23). It seems disabled people have yet to be fully ‘qualified’ as human beings. This is very much part of the agenda of these plays, and their first productions on an undergraduate theatre syllabus have been a genuine movement towards qualification.

It would be welcome if political issues replaced romantic ones in theatre as a whole. But it is reassuring to suppose, in any case, that Theatre Studies could not be considered sufficiently rigorous unless they focused on political debate. And it is equally reassuring to note that disability as a subject has transcended the confines of medical science and grown to become a culturally significant phenomenon. Notions of cure and correction have yielded their pride of place to engagement and understanding.

A half century ago, when I was contemplating my first national exams, I attended a school for disabled boys in Berkshire. Perhaps the boys at another time were more successful. But

Author’s Introduction during my year at the school, only a few boys attained even the lowest pass marks. The emphasis was on social interaction, worthy in itself because the boys needed the contact of others like themselves, and there was a model absence of friction bespeaking tolerance of the rarest kind. But it is alarming to recognize how little was expected ofthese boys, most of whom left after several years without a single qualification.

A sea change has taken place since then, and disabled people not only matriculate in higher education but hold down professional posts. But this needs to be the norm rather than the exception worthy of surprised comment.

It is a testament to both the defeat of Ableism and the concomitant success of integration that Freaks of History emerges as a sturdy artefact worthy of the widest dissemination and the longest life. Its proudest boast, engaging the participation of a host of interested contributors, is that it speaks to lives that are pre-eminently qualified. Its proudest boast, in any case, is that it speaks to a segment of society that can no longer be viewed as disqualified.

Note: These plays are a fictional reflection on historical events. The characters, although abstracted from history, are still products of the authors imagination.

Bibliography del Valle-Inclán, Ramón (1993), Plays: One (ed. M. Delgado), London: Methuen Classic Drama.

Dolan, Jill (2012), The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Lahr, John (2014), Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, London: Bloomsbury.

Lewis, Victoria Ann (ed.) (2008), Beyond Victims and Villains, New York: Theater Communications Group.

(2015), ‘In praise of plays, not A Christmas Carol, http://www.wordgathering.com/ issue33/reading loop/lewis.html. Accessed March 2015.

MacDonald, James (2008), Russia, Freaks and Foreigners, Bristol: Intellect Books.

— (2010), “The virtue of living a lie, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 30: 3, pp. 289-303.

McRuer, Robert (2006), Crip Theory, New York: New York University Press.

Sandahl, Carrie (2002), ‘Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre, in The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (ed. Paul Kahn), OPENING STAGES - A Quarterly Newsletter for People with Disabilities Pursuing Careers in the Performing Arts, Washington: The Kennedy Center.

— (2005), Bodies in Commotion, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Siebers, Tobin (2010), Disability Aesthetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Snyder, Sharon L. and Mitchell, David T. (2005), Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Note

1 Carrie Sandahl praised a play of mine for its realistic depiction of disability beyond mere symbolism (Sandahl 2002).

Part I

Critical Essays

Julian Meyrick intercalated by phases of regular flow, or ones assumed to be so. What happens in

signal moments shapes our view of what happens thereafter. As in a play, the measure of human experience is determined in Act One, which provides, in Aristotelian fashion, the crucial inciting incidents. This is how existence works. We lurch around at one level of understanding until interrupted by something that does not fit into it. We crash headlong and the drama begins. What happens afterwards is up to us.

In 1982, I was a 20-year old undergraduate and would-be theatre director at the same university to which James MacDonald had absconded, he told me, from an incomplete doctoral thesis on the semi-colons in the novels of Henry James. I was thin, callow, narrow, untested. He was ten years older, smart as a whip and supremely affable. He kept boxes of dog-eared books in wooden crates around his room and worked on a typewriter that looked like one of Hemmingway’s discards. My father’s death the year before had opened up for me the world of pain, and I knew a little of what time has in store for everyone, sooner or later. James exampled as a recipient of the gift of physical deficit. We both chain-smoked. And, of course, we both loved theatre. We spent hours analysing the intricacies of plays, performances and theatre companies; tons of fag ash. I don’t remember any beer. And I have wiped from my memory the instant coffee I now regret we ever consumed. Perhaps we drank tea. Mainly we talked. Our drug of choice was conversation, and in the realm of shared ideas there was no puerile youth and no cerebral palsy. There was search and discovery and a great deal of fun to be had.

Towards the end of the academic year James asked me to direct his play Too Many Monkeys. Set in London's East End, then ungentrified, as inaccessible as any pit town off the rail map, it tells the story of a hapless working class family and their wheel-chaired-bound disabled son. I suppose I would call it now a ‘slice of life naturalism. Back then I didn't have any genre categories so it was just ‘a play, as mysterious as any Heath-Robinson contraption arriving through the post without instructions. I gathered a group of college actors as green and keen as me, and we read it serially, hoping its meaning would spontaneously reveal itself.

Over the summer we did our research and rehearsed. We met up in deep-shadowed London church halls to engage in the religious rite of character improvisation. And we spent a bright, memorable day at Bermondsey market, amidst a sea of then-fashionable pastelcoloured shirts and jumpers. I got lost in a mazy square of low-rise flats, stacked like tins of tuna, buzzing with muscular, shouted life - it was a Saturday; vans coming and going; me, ignored, drinking in the atmosphere. Working class life! This was it! I can't remember if

M: first school. My first love. My first loss. Life is a barrage of explosive firsts

James came up to London, or if that was another time, another play, a few years later, one I screwed up. I think we were on our own, getting by. James trusted us. And he was right to do so. Our only thought was to do well by him and by the play. Thus was the pattern set in my soul: the playwright as collaborator, confessor, prime creative, friend. It is hard to recover from disaster. But if you are a theatre director you learn the knack or get out of the game. It is impossible to recover from success, the sense of inner assurance you have not only done good but done right. My relationship with James was successful, and 30 years later Iam what it made me: a playwrights director.

I never thought about James’ disability in a critical way. I never used the word ‘disability’ around him or about him. He said to me ‘ifI fall over, pick me up; don't hesitate, just do it. So I did, at the supermarket, man-handling him like a sack of onions. In Stigma (1963) Erving Goffman meticulously details the social reality that those judged less-than-normal must face, the daily appraisals they must wade through like a bank of mud. Its kindest face - by which I mean the least immediately objectionable - is civil inattention, the means whereby the ‘less’ in the less-than is filtered out of consciousness by the ‘normals’ around them. Thus the height of the dwarf, the status of the divorcee, the sexuality of the homosexual is ignored by way of a consensual temporary amnesia, a collective looking away. Since the 1960s Goffman’s list of stigmas has changed, but I doubt it has gotten any shorter. The number of ‘less thans’ is a structural constant, something a world elevating difference to transcendental significance seems to need. Against this - and born from naivety, not maturity, I readily admit - I decided to treat James as equivalent to myself. I saw no other way. As with Too Many Monkeys I lacked categories of discrimination. And I was spiritually lazy. It seemed the easiest course to take.

Exeter University has a pocket-battleship of a repertory theatre, the Northcott, where for a few lunchtimes we were permitted to stage the play. For reasons of expediency rather than acting ambition, I took the role of the disabled son. He had no dialogue to speak of, just one long speech at the start of the second scene, which I did not trouble to learn, thinking I would pick it up along the way. Rehearsals continued smoothly. James seemed pleased. Posters were mimeographed and stuck up around campus. Our short season got under way.

Then the signal moment arrived, preceded and followed by a procession of smaller illuminations like attendant bridesmaids. It happened like this. I was in the wheelchair, waiting for my soliloquy to begin. Come opening, I still had not memorized my speech - too busy telling other people what to do; not really an actor anyway; thinking of the scene as a bridge to the rest of the play etc. So I wrote it out and put it between my legs, the old dodge. My thinking was to cast my eyes downward, where the audience could not see, and read my lines from the crib. But I had miscalculated the intensity of the stage lights which blinded me and kept me from seeing anything myself. I was stuck like a glued fly. I could not move from the wheelchair without blowing the part. I could not read my lines. And I did not know them. A full auditorium waited. Time loomed, like a stalker. For a moment, I knew what it was like to want to do something but be totally incapable of doing it. For a moment, I knew what it was like to be disabled.

For the neo-Platonic Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou, the great ontologist of our age, and a playwright himself, playtexts exist in the future anterior. They are objects that will have been played (2008: 211). When they are first written their natures are undisclosed, awaiting completion. They are less texts than pretexts. Performed, they are then revealed for what they are, if not fully - different interpretations always remain possible - then substantively. How many times since 1982 have I waited on this moment, heart in mouth, career in hands, waiting for a playtext to be born, its body in print but its spirit arriving only when the actors are cued to move and speak on its behalf? In drama, nature is everything. Clumsy dialogue, poor structure, cliched storytelling: none of this matters if the living principle, as the critic Stark Young called it, is clear and extant, ‘the supreme soul and test [of a play], first and last’ (quoted Cardullo 2008: 129). So it was with Too Many Monkeys. Page and stage cohered. A true dramatic experience was had. Only then, like a man walking backwards to a cliff and trying to stop on the edge, did I properly understand the play James had written.

Back in the wheelchair, forcing down panic, I fribbled, as Elizabethan actors termed it, regurgitating half-remembered phrases and stringing them together with cries, grunts and howls. The scene passed. Ihe show was well received, and I hid my shame and vowed to terminate my acting career forthwith. Ever gracious, James said nothing. We had the show to talk about anyway. We picked through our achievement repeatedly but, again, the word ‘disability’ never occurred in any context. How is it possible to stage a play in which disability is the main focus of the action and yet not mention it by name? Too Many Monkeys was a well-written play; a well-acted play; a well-directed play; an interesting, moving, thoughtful, challenging play. Yet the thing that lent meaning and sense to these judgements was never openly broached. Weird; and, in retrospect, profoundly depressing.

Fast-forward three decades and the situation is different yet not so different. The world has little difficulty mentioning the word “disability” now. Indeed, it is profuse in verbal acknowledgements, with this issue as with so many others, as if words by themselves could address the problems they are presumed to identify. And no doubt they do, up to a point. No doubt it is not helpful to civilly inattend as I once did. But talking the talk isn't walking the walk. The issue is, to what is this acknowledgement conjoined? To use a distinction of Montaigne’s, are we improving our soul’s motion, our wisdom, or are we throwing up a screen of learning that takes us away from the very object we should be labouring to understand?

This quandary foregrounds the epistemological difference between drama and discursive scholarship, a difference not simply in structure method but in value and purpose. It is an old dispute that goes back to Plato’s The Republic where he icily asks - the memory of Aristophanes’ poisonous caricature of Socrates still rankling - whether ‘[playwrights] really know the things that people think they say so well’ (Book X: 375). Aristotle's Poetics was in part a rebuttal to Platonic scepticism of dramas worth, but the face-off is a real one and should not be lightly set aside. If plays like Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Her claim to tell us something true, something we did not know before, then the question arises, is this more than an effect in language? And if it is, if these plays, and by extension drama of a like kind

(let us not give it a label quite yet), present something we cannot find in another form - in statistics, case studies, surveys, encyclopedias - then how do they do it? In what way are Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here ‘about’ disability, and how does this transform into new knowledge?

To answer this question, we must hone-in on the moment when a play discloses itself - when pretext becomes text - and observe the two sets offorces operating: those beholden to live performance and those beholden to literary drama. It is in the encounter between these separate worlds, the sum of which is larger than all the contributing factors, that something real is born. The encounter may not be successful. But it is invariably fundamental. Live performance and literary drama are not just different elements, different structures. They are separate ways of being, separate ontologies. In theatre, the attempt to map one type of being onto another may be fruitful but it is always confronting - one reason we take it personally when plays fail, and hunt out the writer and director for accusing looks and resentful comments (of which I have copped my share).

For all the thousands of books we have on acting - going back to the avalanche of manuals that started appearing in the eighteenth century - the job of the live performer remains a deeply mysterious one. It is something easier to understand than fully explain. Whatever adaptive advantage we ascribe to our ability to performatively enter the cognitive space of another human being, the impetus to do so comes from our deepest, non-utilitarian instincts. We do it. We act. Ex post facto we look back on the dark cloud of what we have done, giving reason and shape to our efforts. When we come across terms like ‘Stanislavskian? or ‘Brechtian, therefore, we must not imagine a clear-cut taxonomy of theatrical creativity akin to a bus timetable. Anyone who reads Halliwell’s translation of Poetics - and sees that it is less a book than a collection of lecture notes - will appreciate the ambiguity of ka@dapoıg (katharsis) as Aristotle presents it (Halliwell 1986). Anyone who then reads Brecht will grasp that his use of the term is instrumental, if not tendentious. Whatever else Brecht may have been, he was no ancient Greek scholar. Nor was his knowledge of twentieth-century realism deep or complete. He was a man in a context, and this context was if not narrow then certainly bounded. We must not fall into the trap of flipping the adjective ‘Brechtian’ around as if it were self-illuminating, foreclosing examination of what it might be referring to. Likewise with ‘Stanislavskian, that other consummately woolly adjective used to badge efforts across the theatrical gamut from nineteenth-century Moscow to twenty-first-century Hollywood. Without rejecting the terms as meaningless - for they make sense to those who use them and find them of conceptual value - we should look at the reality behind the labels.