Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 30

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS • VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 • SPRING 2018
HYPOCRITE, ACTOR, POLITICIAN ...
OLGA TAXIDOU
University of Edinburgh
In an astonishingly evocative scene from Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo
Ui�his 1941 allegory about the rise of Nazism and in particular its “charismatic,”
demagogical leader�Arturo Ui receives lessons in performing political speeches, lessons
in “electrocution” as the play calls them, from a has-been actor. This scene can be
read as part of a long genealogy of meta-theatricality, where the medium of performance
itself is in many ways quoting the longue durée of the anti-theatrical legacy.
What is Brecht doing here in injecting this meditation on Nazism with an equally powerful
meditation on the impact of theatricality itself? Is he in some way undermining his
own play? Is the art of acting itself open to such powers of manipulation and corruption?
And if this washed-out actor can give lessons to a would-be dictator, how are we as the
spectators of this scene protected from being manipulated by the play itself? Who has
the last laugh here? Is there ethically and politically good acting and bad acting? In conflating
the roles of the actor and the politician, this scene foregrounds the constitutive
relationships between the two. In a sense, this taps into the long-standing interface between
the “performative” as a philosophical/critical category and actual performance
conventions. Does the style/manner/form of presentation and performance matter as
much as the content itself? At the same time, the scene also quotes the equally entangled
relationship between theatre and democracy, as Brecht is primarily concerned with the
power of theatre to unmask false democracy.
Brecht’s own proposal of Epic Theatre does offer some responses to the above questions
and purports to expose some of the pretences or failures of democracy itself. What I
would like to reflect on for the purposes of this brief excursion is the long tradition that
this scene quotes and enacts on the stage. This is a tradition as old as Plato’s fear of theatre
and its democratic potential, coined in the brilliant term he uses in Laws, “theatrocracy,”
1 revived in the anti-theatrical tracts of the seventeenth century as evidenced in
William Prynne’s magisterial Histriomastix (2017 [1633]): the Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s
Tragedy, which at once looks back to Plato and forward to Antonin Artaud (and the
Theatre as the Plague), and enacted in the heretical Marxism of Guy Debord’s manifesto
The Society of the Spectacle (1995 [1967]). 2 These three diverse but iconic tracts share
1 See Plato (1999:1225–1513). Plato writes: “By compositions of such a kind and discourse to the same
effect, they naturally inspired the multitude with a contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their
competence as judges. Thus our once silent audiences have found a voice, in the persuasion that they
understood what is good and bad in art; the sovereignty of the best, aristocracy, has given way to an evil
sovereignty of the audience, a theatrocracy.” (my emphasis)
2 For the ways anti-theatricality is articulated in Renaissance England as part of the puritanical debate see
Prynne (2017 [1633]). For insightful reflections on this and on Plato’s theatrocracy see Fisher (2017).
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doi: 10.18278/aia.3.1.3