Theatrum Philosophicum: A Platonic Turn in Theatre Scholarship Nicholas Johnson (Dublin) Freddie Rokem's Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (2010) and Martin Puchner's The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (2010) mark two major additions to the library of philosophy and performance. A shared impulse animates these books, which both start from a reconsideration of Plato's relationship to the theatre. The books differ in emphasis and tone, but these are overtly complementary projects; on their back covers, each book leads with a laudatory review by the other's author. Philosophers and Thespians is concerned with what Rokem calls the “ discursive strategies ” of theatre and philosophy. Based first on close readings of four key “ encounters ” between representatives of these disciplines, the second part of Rokem's book trains its focus on the historical dimension of such encounters as the Second World War approached, especially in the life and thought of Walter Benjamin. Puchner's project is somewhat narrower in its initial approach, but considerably broader in its conclusions. With primary analysis rooted in both Classical and Continental philosophy, The Drama of Ideas seems to inaugurate a larger project of envisioning a “ dramatic Platonism ” with far-reaching implications for philosophy, theatre, and academia itself. Taken together, these two works signal an important inflection point on the expanding field of theatre research that engages seriously with the philosophical discourse, and both will be essential reading for those who populate the working groups and symposia in this area of the discipline. The radical gesture in these arguments - implicit in Rokem's approach, but explicit in Puchner's writing - is the vision of theatre itself as a project of thought. The tendency to divide “ theatre ” from “ theory ” in bookstores, popular culture, and academic course design overlooks an ancient link, explored by both these authors, that is both conceptual and etymological: thea [sight] is the Greek root shared by both theatron and theorein. This link suggests something more significant than merely two neighbouring disciplines that shared a birthplace at the Acropolis of Athens. Puchner notes early in his book that thea is the root used in Plato's description of “ the drama of sight ” in the parable of the cave, and he reads the use of this morpheme as “ superimposing seeing and contemplation, ” with the profound result that “ theatre and theory [. . .] form a single activity ” . 1 Rokem treats the same idea in a more historically specific manner, stating that the theatre/ theory relation shows that “ philosophizing as a discursive practice developed and flourished in the wake of attending performances and having made a journey to attend them ” . 2 This difference is emblematic of the two approaches here. Claims stated in conceptual terms in The Drama of Ideas are often concretely staged in the historical encounters that form the basis of Philosophers and Thespians. Puchner's powerful and wide-ranging argument for a philosophy more alert to its Platonic foundation and its dramatic expression seems to dovetail, in its own Socratic dialogue, with Rokem's patient, scholarly analysis of individual cases of those who embodied that particular ethos. Rokem is enamoured of spatial metaphors in the articulation of his project. He Forum Modernes Theater, 25/ 2 (2010), 173 - 178. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen describes the terrain between philosophers and thespians as a largely unmapped “ border landscape, ” a site of struggles in which “ each partner in the dialogical encounter desires to take over the other's practices ” . 3 This mise en scène frames his project as a fundamentally dramatic event, dealing as it does with an exchange of practices that one can imagine in a workshop or studio setting. He also returns repeatedly to the figure of the crossroads, arising both from Oedipus (who features heavily in the first chapter) and from the concept of the journey (which is a central and defining metaphor of the whole project) as a “ scripted embodiment ” . In one of the valuable passages where Rokem reveals his work to be highly personal, he finds a phrase used by his mother throughout his childhood in the writings of Walter Benjamin from 1936: “ Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen ” . 4 This linkage of journey, contemplation, and narrative emerges as a core thread of Rokem's work, leading backward to his Performing History (2000) and, perhaps, forward to a future work about exile, which is mentioned several times in the introduction but underdeveloped in the body of this book. Rokem also seems to have taken to heart Bertolt Brecht's metaphor from the Messingkauf Dialogues of the theatre as a planetarium, and his book is written in the contemplative voice of a man looking at the stars. Constellations, the appropriate title for the second part of this work, are also scripted embodiments: fictions that arise from an accidental proximity, given meaning only as manifestations of human wishes. The first “ encounters ” analyzed in the book are nebular fictions in this vein, artfully manmade combinations of the arbitrary and the artificial. Assessing Plato's Symposium, the first chapter of Philosophers and Thespians offers three vital arguments that arise from Rokem's “ dramatic ” reading of the situation. First, he notes that Plato's interspersing of small disagreements in the details highlights the unreliability of narration, and by extension the instability of all Ideals. Thus, rather than the apotheosis of either mimetic representation or philosophical critique, Symposium points out the limitations on expression. The reading here also implicitly critiques the more extreme readings of Plato's essentialism. Second, Rokem unpicks the dense network of conflicts, to show that the structure embraces agon from all directions, in both content and form; this mode of “ competition ” is shown to be native to thought as well as germane in theatrical enjoyment. Third, usefully deploying the riddle of the Sphinx as a countertext, Rokem shows how the “ missing half ” that defines Eros in Symposium is linked to the “ opposition between the one and the many on which the riddle text is based ” . 5 These three gestures - the transient narrator, the competitive dramaturgy, and the complication of singular identity - give rise to “ an ongoing, dynamic dialectic between unity and multiplicity ” . 6 It is only a short step to show that this dialectic is also definitive of the situation of the actor. The second chapter turns to Shakespeare's Hamlet, and sees itself bringing a genuinely new argument in this form: “ Shakespeare's text frequently ‘ performs philosophy ’ and ‘ philosophizes performance ’ in ways in which Hamlet himself is totally unaware ” . 7 With attention again on form and content together, Rokem argues that Hamlet is a meta-textual staging of the philosophy/ theatre dialectic, and shows convincingly that this appears in many of the discursive strategies taken by characters and by Shakespeare himself. The answer to the question “ Who's there? ” - Hamlet's opening line and the title of this chapter - is answered by Rokem as follows: “ both philosopher and thespian ” . 8 Rokem moves far beyond the play-within-a-play and the passages in which Hamlet theorizes about theatre for the players, sections in which his argument would be Nicholas Johnson 174 almost conventional. In a strategy emblematic of this book, Rokem spends the first part of the chapter looking at basic details, and then asks simple questions from which arise quite complex results, refocusing critical attention on the micro-historical concentrates in the play. For example, in a section that explores the strangeness of the dialogue between Horatio and Hamlet when they first meet in Act I Scene 2, Rokem pivots from their friendship to contrast Wittenberg - an “ uncanny ” city that represents erotic and intellectual freedom - and Elsinore, city of political intrigue. 9 The second half of the chapter, filled with individual gemlike readings of philosophers reading Hamlet, is perhaps overfull: in quick succession over ten pages, Rokem considers Derrida, Marx, Hegel, Austin, Butler, Büchner, Müller, Nietzsche, and of course Benjamin, and then concludes with a single paragraph on Wittgenstein. While the range and insight in these pages is often impressive, the feeling is that of a prolegomenon to a new and different (and necessary) work. The next two chapters depict encounters of a more biographical and historical nature. First, Rokem reads the short but intense correspondence of Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg, introducing the “ highly theatricalized modality of dialectical thinking ” 10 in Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragödie, a work that also greatly interests Puchner. The correspondence, Rokem argues, can be read “ as a modern ‘ drama ’ of how two individuals develop their own unique creativity on the brink of and beyond the borderline to insanity ” . 11 Though the letters present interesting content for readers of these authors, Rokem seems to realize that this epistolary drama “ does not contain a discussion about the discursive practices of philosophy and theatre in the strict sense ” . 12 Rather than claiming a direct logical link to the first two encounters, he cleverly connects the sanity/ madness dialectic in the letters to the philosophical questions of truth and simulation that animate Agathon's table and Elsinore's court. After a satisfying section that reads Nietzsche in a more strictly philosophical mode, the next chapter jumps forward in time to a meeting in Denmark between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, who discussed Kafka and played chess in the summer of 1934. From their mutual reading of the short story Das Nächste Dorf, Rokem extrapolates distinctive outcomes in Brecht's plays and Benjamin's philosophy, setting the scene for the final two chapters of this book. Brecht and Benjamin share the end of Philosophers and Thespians, as two emblems of a modernist experiment with different discursive linkages of performance and philosophy in the face of a specific historical catastrophe. Rokem draws together Brecht's staging of Mother Courage and Her Children, discussed at the end of Chapter 4, with a famous anecdote about Picasso and his painting Guernica. In reply to a soldier who asked him, “ did you do that? ” Picasso is said to have answered, “ No, you did ” . It is the action that fascinates Rokem here: “ the gesture of pointing [. . .] creates an interaction between the aesthetic field and a particular historical event at the same time as it activates the reader or viewer ” . 13 It is telling that a painting, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, also inspires Martin Puchner to state that pointing is the most Platonic of gestures, 14 though Plato has long since been relegated to the background of Rokem's argument. Rokem's late readings of Kafka, Brecht, and Benjamin form a convincing argument for the work of art as thinking a thought, as Alain Badiou has put it. The ideal name for this “ thinking art ” is available in German, and is the subject of the final chapter of Rokem's work: das Denkbild. This sixth chapter focuses on the performative storytelling of Walter Benjamin, whose final works (especially the unfinished Passagen- Werk) are framed as an expansive gesture 175 Theatrum Philosophicum that alternates between acting and writing, a “ performative modality ” weaving thought with action. It should be clear simply from the structure presented here that Rokem's logic is that of the glückliche Zufälle, the logic of the constellation, the line drawn through space and time to create unexpected connections. It is interesting that an author so historically attuned is capable of jumping across such expanses of time. There are moments that suggest their own staging: in his recurring critique of J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, one can almost picture a present-day Rokem patiently raising his hand at the back of a Harvard lecture in 1955. If there is a key weakness here, it is the tendency - apparently a choice - to hold back the fullness of theoretical conclusions that arise from these questions. Rokem's scholarly ethos thus feels almost too delicate at times, more engaged in the particular than the general, more attuned to people than to disciplines. Standard caveats sprinkled across the introduction - “ I could have set out [. . .] ” , 15 “ no claim is made for completeness ” , 16 “ it is impossible to make any sweeping statements ” 17 - blur into quite surprising resistance to follow through: “ I will [. . .] not engage directly in this debate of theories, even if they are an important part of my agenda ” . 18 While simultaneously acknowledging the contemporary political and ideological issues that his readings invoke as “ urgent ” , Rokem obliquely refers to his hope to shed “ indirect light ” on them. The difference in ethos is evident in the titles of these two works: if Rokem is thinking, then Puchner is provoking. The Drama of Ideas clearly fits into a larger project within Puchner's work to envision a dramatic philosophy and a philosophical drama. A founding metaphor for this interest appears in a personal anecdote in the preface, and like Rokem's, it is also a spatial one. Puchner notes that the black box theatre in which he spent much of his free time in university was directly underneath one of the largest lecture theatres, “ in the space left by the ascending auditorium, an arrangement that echoed Plato's parable of the cave ” . 19 Puchner conceives of his effort as one of synthesis, of understanding the relation between these two spaces as the relation, in fact, between two events. His introduction hovers at times on the polemic border that Rokem is so hesitant to cross, since there is a clear corrective reflex to this book that means to “ rescue ” Plato from disciples and critics alike. Any potential excess in this dimension is keenly avoided, however, through the exemplary clarity of the writing and the obvious command of the philosophical terrain. Fascinatingly, Puchner reads Plato not as an enemy of theatre, but rather as a radical reformer: the type of enemy who sees himself as the truest friend, and who is sometimes proved to be so. Puchner denies the simple perception in popular consciousness (held even among numerous philosophers who are listed here) that Plato is an absolutist and an idealist, revealing instead a profoundly materialist attention through an alternative dramaturgy of his dialogues. An appealing structural awareness defines Puchner's approach here: instead of the circus atmosphere surrounding the Festival of Dionysus, Plato's dialogues offers chamber theatre for small audiences of friends; instead of poetry, he offers prose; instead of a chorus, his actors are individuals. The contemporary critique that Plato's legacy has been insufficiently taken up is implied, simply by the observation that the dominant form of philosophy remains the monologue in all its forms (lecture, treatise, monograph, review), rather than the dialogue (though brief historical exceptions are acknowledged). By their fusion of truth and fiction, comedy and tragedy - the mixing of which Puchner is hardly the first observer - the most important dialectic in the dialogues is shown to be that of abstraction and 176 Nicholas Johnson embodiment. 20 Curiously, the attention to this dialectic engine of conflict reclaims a Marxist, or perhaps more properly a Hegelian, reading of Plato. This novel approach will undoubtedly expose him to a critique from surprised philosophers who feel their anti-Platonism is justified, or from the identity-focused discourse within Performance Studies, a group that has largely rejected Badiou's neo-Platonism out of hand. Puchner can be read in this case much as he reads Plato: the structure of this argument shows that he is staging his own “ dramatic Platonism, ” and is himself a reformer, rather than an enemy of either discourse. The dramatic perspective on Plato's own dialogues that makes up Puchner's first chapter is developed further in Chapter Two. The chapter traces the history of what Puchner calls “ the Socrates play ” , a grouping that would benefit from more concretely stated principles of inclusion and exclusion. The plays mentioned clearly form a minor tradition of adaptations and extensions from Plato's dialogues, including chamber/ closet dramas, educational projects, tragedy, comedy, and opera. This tradition is seen by Puchner as serving to keep alive the notion of Plato as dramatist, but the chapter doesn't integrate as clearly as it might with the thesis expounded in the introduction. The section might have benefited from a more “ Platonically materialist ” attention to the differences in structure, approach, apparatus and reception across the drama; these differences are ironed out in gestures like the list of plays in Appendix 1, 21 which is helpful to researchers but naturally cannot be claimed as exhaustive, and by the graph of these plays that is presented in Appendix 2. 22 Though the only claim in this graph is for a gradually increasing “ number of sources, ” rather than “ number of Socrates Plays ” over time, such a numerical approach is not particularly indicative of anything without a full statistical apparatus behind it. The graph more likely reflects an increase in the approach and technology of theatre documentation, rather than forming any empirical basis for this argument. Its performance of rigour makes it an easy target for those who see “ interdisciplinary ” as a mere buzzword, and its lack of frame does not do justice to the rest of the book. Puchner returns strikingly to the comforts of home turf, however, in the final three chapters. This recapitulation of the book's core is signaled first by the title of the third chapter, “ The Drama of Ideas. ” In it, Puchner reframes a modern drama often referred to as “ non-Aristotelian ” as specifically “ Platonic ” . 23 The utility of the detour into Socrates plays becomes more evident when two of their authors, August Strindberg and Georg Kaiser, are assessed for their transformative power on the modern theatre. More selfconscious dramatic Platonists that the chapter goes on to cover include Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Tom Stoppard. Having approached through drama, the book then turns in the fourth chapter to delve into philosophy. The result is sweeping in scope and striking in depth, opening with a thorough re-reading of Søren Kierkegaard that is considerably more satisfying than Rokem's brief invocation of this massive legacy. 24 The natural step, via the newly “ dramatic as well as theatrical way of writing philosophy ” 25 inaugurated by Kierkegaard, is down the line often categorized as existentialist: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and, rather surprisingly, Kenneth Burke and Gilles Deleuze. Added to these names in the final chapter are three writers and philosophers who explicitly embrace Plato, and in whose writing Puchner accurately detects the shade of the dramatic: Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and Alain Badiou, who haunts this book from the very beginning. The concluding Epilogue returns to the “ provocations ” of the first chapter and use- 177 Theatrum Philosophicum fully suggests that dramatic Platonism is a kind of antidote to the excesses of what Puchner calls “ corporealism ” in the humanities and relativism in culture. 26 This is precisely the explicit debate that Rokem seems intent to avoid, though many of these same questions arise in his book. Behind the attempt to find a new mode of relation between theatre and philosophy lingers an active institutional debate: “ how to integrate drama and philosophy? ” 27 This oblique reference to practice as research is declared early on as part of the “ implicit agenda ” in Philosophers and Thespians, and it resonates with Rokem's two questions stated in his introduction: “ how can artistic practice be considered a form of research? and what type of thinking is produced by such artistic and creative practices? ” 28 Such questions are clearly worthy of ongoing exploration in the field. It testifies to the strength of the scholarship in both works that the audience is left wanting more, a truism known to both these researchers from the theatre. It is also a positive indicator, more so than a critique, that so many alternative examples can be imagined. Foremost, for this reader, are those from the works of Samuel Beckett and Theodor Adorno, both of whom have strong bonds with this discourse that are treated only briefly. One further outcome from these important works should be a reconsideration of pedagogy in theatre studies, in both content and form. There are innumerable undergraduates in Theatre Studies and acting courses who have been instructed to read Aristotle's Poetics, but the work done by Rokem and Puchner offers a convincing argument for including at least Plato's Symposium at the bedrock of this discipline as well. Though they may not put to rest the “ ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry ” spoken of by Plato, these two works demand a revision of both anti-theatrical prejudice and anti-Platonic reflexes in philosophy. For the thespians, these works advocate a return to the crossroads, the planetarium, and the void that marks the border between the lecture hall and the theatre. Notes 1 Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Oxford, 2010, 7. 2 Rokem, Freddie. Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance. Stanford, 2010, 31. Rokem attributes his own insight into the “ journey ” component of theoria to Wilson Nightingale, Andrea. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge, 2004, 3. 3 Rokem 2010, 3. 4 Rokem 2010, 17. 5 Rokem 2010, 45. 6 Rokem 2010, 45. 7 Rokem 2010, 61. 8 Rokem 2010, 60. 9 Rokem 2010, 67. 10 Rokem 2010, 90. 11 Rokem 2010, 91. 12 Rokem 2010, 104. 13 Rokem 2010, 166. 14 Puchner 2010, 198. 15 Rokem 2010, 1. 16 Rokem 2010, 6. 17 Rokem 2010, 4. 18 Rokem 2010, 6. 19 Puchner 2010, vii. 20 Puchner 2010, 20. 21 Puchner 2010, 199. 22 Puchner 2010, 209. 23 Puchner 2010, 73. 24 See Rokem 2010, 109 - 112. 25 Puchner 2010, 138. 26 Puchner 2010, 193. 27 Puchner 2010, 193. 28 Rokem 2010, 5. 178 Nicholas Johnson