"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

call ridiculous the attempts of the Soviet theatre to have the spectators
join in the play. This is connected with the assumption that the players
themselves are spectators and, indeed, we can easily imagine inexperienced
actors under slapdash management in the dumb parts of attendants just as
engrossed in watching the performance of the great actor in the major part
as we, ordinary spectators, are. But, besides the danger of letting even the
least important actor remain outside the play, there exists one inescapable
law, a law (laid down by that genius of the stage, Stanislavsky) that
invalidates all reasoning deriving from the delusion that the footlights are
not as definite a separation between spectator and player as our main stage
convention implies. Roughly speaking, this law is that, provided he does not
annoy his neighbors, the spectator is perfectly free to do whatever he
pleases, to yawn or laugh, or to arrive late, or to leave his place if he is
bored with the play or has business elsewhere; but the man on the stage,
however inactive and mute he is, is absolutely bound by the conspiracy of
the stage and by its main convention: that is, he may not wander back into
the wings for a drink or a chat, nor may he indulge in any physical
exuberance that would clash with the idea of his part. And, vice-versa, if
we imagine some playwright or manager, brimming over with those collectivist
and mass-loving notions that are a blight in regard to all art, making the
spectators play, too (as a crowd, for instance, reacting to certain doings
or speeches; even going so far as to hand round, for instance, printed words
that the spectators must say aloud, or just leaving these words to our own
discretion; turning the stage loose into the house and having the regular
actors mingle with the audience, etc.), such a method, apart from the
ever-lurking possibility of the play's being wrecked by the local wit or
fatally suffering from the unpreparedness of impromptu actors, is an utter
delusion to boot, because the spectator remains perfectly free to refuse to
participate and may leave the theatre if he does not care for such fooling.
In the case of his being forced to act because the play refers to the
Perfect State and is running in the governmental theatre of a country ruled
by a dictator, the theatre in such case is merely a barbarous ceremony or a
Sunday-school class for the teaching of police regulation--or again, what
goes on in theatre is the same as goes on in the dictator's country, public
life being the constant and universal acting in the dreadful farce composed
by a stage-minded Father of the People.
So far I have dwelt chiefly on the spectator's side of the question:
awareness and nonintervention. But cannot one imagine the players, in
accordance with a dramatist's whim or thoroughly worn-out idea, actually
seeing the public and talking to it from the stage? In other words, I am
trying to find whether there is really no loophole in what I take to be the
essential formula, the essential and only convention of the stage. I
remember, in fact, several plays where this trick has been used, but the
all-important thing is that, when the player stalks up to the footlights and
addresses himself to the audience with a supposed explanation or an ardent
plea, this audience is not the actual audience before him, but an audience
imagined by the playwright, that is, something which is still on the stage,
a theatrical illusion which is the more intensified the more naturally and
casually such an appeal is made. In other words, the line that a character
cannot cross without interrupting the play is this abstract conception that