Postdramatic Theatre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postdramatic Theatre Piet Defraeye Hans-Thies Lehmann. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. x + 214. $35.95 (Pb). Seven years after the original German publication, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre is now also available in English. While any new “post-” category added to the swelling corpus of theory raises eyebrows, Lehmann’s [End Page 644] post-dramatic has been markedly and swiftly co-opted by continental theatre criticism. Although the post-dramatic is defined most easily in negative terms and any affirmation turns out to be post-dramatic anathema, Lehmann puts together a series of assertive and defining observations. While the dramatic takes the world out there as its main referent in the process of signification, post-dramatic theatre is focused on the theatrical itself and entails a deconstructive project from within the theatre. The stage is no longer a site of mimetic transcription of action and dialogue; therefore, signification is not the be-all and end-all of performance. Text and stage are set free from one another so as to metamorphose into “a theatre of states” (as opposed to action) and “scenically dynamic functions” (68). “When action does happen, it is in order to show that it lacks interest,” Lehmann writes (119). Post-dramatic theatrical expression responds and refers back to a field of ideological disintegration, as opposed to the unifying Weltanschauung of the drama. Gesture and movement lose their purposive functions and become the object itself. The book often turns into an exciting polemical argument about the merits and new possibilities of this hyper-theatricalized form of theatre. The author seems extremely optimistic and believes the aesthetics of the post-dramatic will provide answers to an anaemic form of boring and “irresponsible” simulation (71). Lehmann’s post-dramatic playbill seems to be exclusively filled with good theatre. Like the post-dramatic itself, the structure of his argument is not linear. While his point of departure is a demarcation of both Brecht and Peter Szondi’s epicization of theatre, he follows a paratactic path of reasoning, with lots of repetition and non-affirmation. Various aspects of post-dramatic theatre are brought into focus, in a non-hierarchical way. Breath, rhythm, and corporeal presence take precedence over logos, which doesn’t vanish but will “resurge in its whole amplitude and volume as sonority and as address, as a beckoning and appeal,” text as “chora-graphy” (146), which, incidentally, underlines the re-emerging function of chorus and choral text. In post-dramatic theatre, text moves from sense to sensuality and moves in contiguous tandem with the self-reflexive experience of time and space. Theatre turns into a physical event, a “time sculpture” (156), whose materiality is manipulated by prolongation of time, repetition, technical infiltration, and multi-medial juxtaposition. Lehmann’s journey through post-dramatic phenomenology and his panorama of examples is illuminating. While he sees precursors of the post-dramatic in the historical avant-garde, especially symbolist and lyrical theatre, Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Play and Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s Pure Form are singled out convincingly as harbingers of, respectively, de-focalized and static theatre. Tadeusz Kantor’s ceremonial theatre is, for Lehmann, the beginning of a successful post-dramatic tradition. His astute, descriptive analysis of Kantor’s theatre is highly engaging. Subsequent post-dramatic theatre makers include Klaus Michael Grüber and Robert Wilson, whose [End Page 645] art Lehmann greatly admires. A rich web of other artists allows Lehmann to develop a colourfully textured argument, with multiple examples, mostly German, Dutch, and Flemish. Directors Einar Schleef, Christoph Marthaler, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers; theatre companies Victoria, Hollandia, and Maatschappij Discordia; and playwrights like René Pollesch and Werner Schwab are expertly glossed for a readership that may not be familiar with them. Exciting and/or controversial names in the post-dramatic world that did not make it into the book include Guy Cassier, Johan Simons, Luk Perceval, and playwrights Gert Jonke (choral functions!), Jon Fosse, and Bernard-Marie Koltès. Lehmann’s study/polemic offers altogether new departures for dramatic theory and criticism. His notion of the “afformative” (after Werner Hamacher) and “Afformance Art” seem extremely useful, capturing an art...