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APPENDICES
theatre and you look at Jacobean theatre they all had spaces that are analytical
of their society. The Greek stage has the chorus area, that’s the public area,
and at the back it has the stage that where the principles live, and a house
behind that and up there is heaven, the Gods they fear, up there. So literally
you have got the architecture, the market place and mount Olympus there,
so if anybody moves in that place they take the social reality of that space
with them. And the Greeks theatre gets very subtle about all that, because
it’s the orchestra where the public are, the citizens are, but they dance and
they have the big lyrical odes. They are not simply confined to the kitchen
table, so that it is possible to put the edge of the universe down there in the
marketplace, and the Greeks would do that. It becomes a very subtle use of
space, because architecture is actually the social architecture. we are still
thinking of structure, but the structure in here (points at his head) can still be
re-appropriated into different areas. Because the Gods come on - in the play
where Hercules goes mad — the Gods come on and they are like witches.
They really should come from Hell. They come “oh I am going to drive him
mad, and he is going to kill his kids” haha — and they are the Gods. You can
use that architectural space and use it in such a way to show that society is
contaminated by itself. But we think - that’s the Palace, or 10 Downing street,
or that’s the Castle in Budapest, where this happens and that’s the gutter,
where murder happens. We proportion it in that way and of course my plays
don’t do that. So if you look at the Jacobean stage it has heaven up there, or
the aristocrats or the battlements of the castle, and it has a space down here,
it is the agora, it’s a public space, and you have got hell below that under
the trapdoor down there. You have got literally that structure, and so the
ghosts can come up, and you can meet the ghosts in Tesco, as it were. That’s
a very subtle arrangement about what happens in the head and what happens
in the social space. But we don’t have that. So what you have to do is try to
build those things into the structure of the play and then that becomes an
important part of the analysis.
AB: Do you mean each site of the play has to mirror that?
EB: If I can give you an example, this early play of mine The Pope’s Wedding,
Max Stafford-Clark said “oh we had been out of the village where it was set.
We are really doing our job terribly well, aren’t we” I said “what did you do
there? What did you have for lunch?” “Oh, we went to Tesco’s and bought some
sandwiches” So I said “did you see any dead bodies in Tesco?” And he said
“Where would we see those?” And I said “On the shelves! Where else would you
see them.” And he thought oh it’s him being awkward again. But the Greeks
and Shakespeare would understand that question. Even horror films would
understand it, because somebody in a horror film would take off a couple of
things from the shelf and there is a dead hand behind, or a hand comes out
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