3 Truth and Illusion

 

 

 

Antonin Artaud's provocative collection of essays, The Theatre and its Double, is a call to arms for those who care about theatre. ‘Life itself is in decline’, he announces in the opening lines;1 but the theatre, which could be a source of significance and vitality, has been stifled and suppressed: ‘we have for too long been told theatre is all lies and illusion.’2 Certainly, the claim that theatre is bound up with untruth, with falsehood and illusion, is long-standing: one ancient source reports that the very first tragedian, Thespis, was called a liar by Solon, the renowned Athenian lawmaker, for making things seem other than they are.3 In a sense, Plato's complaints (which we explored in the previous chapter) are a version of this. But even without Plato's metaphysical commitments, the idea that theatre is somehow mendacious or illusory has echoed through the ages.

In the Preface, I pointed to the long-running antagonism between philosophy and theatre. We will look at a number of tensions between philosophy and theatre during the course of this study, but perhaps the most significant centres on the questions of truth. To put it provisionally: philosophers have always characterised themselves as truth-seekers, whereas – it is often claimed – theatre requires a certain kind of falsity or illusion. By way of a response, defenders of theatre have often claimed that plays, for all their apparent falsity or illusion, can somehow teach us about the world. This claim also goes back a long way: Gorgias the sophist, for example, claimed that tragedy is a form of poetry in which ‘the deceived is wiser than the undeceived’.4 Dramatists have frequently claimed that their works contain truths, even if such claims have been treated with scepticism.5 The aim of this chapter is to investigate the claim that theatre rests upon falsity and illusion, and to examine the response that plays can, in fact, teach us about the world. There are, as we shall see, a number of different and apparently contradictory claims made about the relationship between theatre and truth; an important part of my task, therefore, is to try to disentangle them.

Content and form

Artaud's remark about ‘lies and illusion’ reminds us that, even at first glance, there are two completely different ways in which theatre might be said to be untruthful (or truthful): the first is through content; the second is through form.6 As for content (‘lies’): theatre might be untruthful (or truthful) because it somehow makes false (or true) claims about how the world is.7 As for style (‘illusion’): theatre might be untruthful because, in order to function, it depends upon some kind of illusion on the part of the audience. These things are separate and independent of one another. The focus in the case of content is on whether or not the play makes true or false claims (we will discuss what this might mean); this has nothing to do with the state of the audience. The focus, in the case of form, is on what state is required of the audience in order for the play to get going at all; this is independent of what the play is about, what it claims about the world, what statements it makes and so on.

One could therefore imagine different complaints focusing on the different elements. One way of thinking about Plato, for example, is that he complains about the content of plays being false, whereas their mode of presentation in the theatre making their false content seem true: poets don't really know about carpentry, but when they write plays about carpenters we take their claims seriously. The reverse seems to be the case in the following aphorism from Kierkegaard's Either/Or, in which the character referred to as ‘A’ writes:

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.8

In terms of content, what the clown is saying is perfectly true. But the form, the context of theatre is one in which he cannot be believed. What is ‘false’ about theatre here is not that it makes false claims seem true, but that it shuts out the possibility of recognising what is true and what is false. This, I am suggesting, is a criticism aimed at the form of theatre, not at the false claims made by individual plays. I propose, therefore, to consider separately the questions of how truth relates to the content and to the form of theatre.

Truth and content

When we watch things, we tend to learn from them. Sometimes we learn about the particular things themselves; sometimes we generalise. So if I watch a cat chasing a bird, I learn about that cat and that bird, perhaps also about cats and birds, perhaps predators and prey. For these sorts of reasons, the idea that we learn from theatrical performances in that sense isn't particularly controversial. What's more, when I watch Hamlet, I certainly learn plenty about Hamlet (the work of art) – about the characters, the plot and so on. It is also true that plays draw our attention to certain things or stimulate our reflection. I'll be thinking about different things, having seen Hamlet, than I would have done otherwise. Sometimes we are guided by the performance to think in a particular direction – about a certain historical event or theme or problem. If these kinds of thinking and reflecting – and the conclusions we sometimes draw from them – could be understood as a kind of ‘learning from theatre’, then that too seems uncontroversial. But those who claim that the theatre can teach us seem to be offering something more than these three kinds of cases can offer. Theatre (perhaps as art or literature more generally) is meant to offer us something special: more – or perhaps: more concentrated – than what we get in everyday watching; going beyond merely knowing about the artwork and beyond simply stimulating our thoughts. The point is not that these kinds of learning aren't important; it's that I don't think that anybody would deny that they are available to us at the theatre – and those who claim that theatre can be a vehicle for knowledge seem to think it can offer something more. To be clear: I'm not suggesting that we learn one thing, or one kind of thing, from theatrical performances: the thought is, rather, that there are lots of different ways that we might think we can learn. The question is: in what way or ways does that occur?

One obvious place to look is at what gets said. Writing about Hamlet, Bertrand Russell claims that ‘the propositions in the play are false because there was no such man’.9 There is something that seems right about Russell's remark. The play is a work of fiction – it is made up. And in Hamlet, as in most other works of fiction, there are propositions – claims about how the world is – that are false. Hence, for example, Bernardo tells Francisco that the clock has just struck twelve, which is very unlikely to be true in any modern production.10 That is the sense in which what Russell says seems to be right. But there is also a sense in which Russell's remark seems to miss the point, at least as far as we're concerned. We do often feel as though we have learned something from a play – and it's not clear that what we have learned corresponds to anything that any particular character says. If plays are just strings of false propositions, then what or how do we learn from them? Conversely, if we leave the theatre having learned something about the world, then surely there must be a kind of truth presented to us on stage, at least some of the time? To answer these questions, it will help to think about what gets said explicitly at the performance as well as what may be implied.

Even with regard to explicit statements, Russell's claim requires serious qualification. First of all, there's a great deal more to Hamlet than ‘propositions’ (regardless of whether the propositions are true or false). First, of course, there are sentences that are not propositions. So, for example, neither the opening line (‘Who's there?’) nor the closing line (‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot.’) is a proposition: they don't make claims about how the world is and they couldn't be ‘true’ or ‘false’. There's no reason why a play need contain any propositions at all – plenty don't.11 Second, a play is more than just a series of sentences, whether or not they are propositions, and whether or not those propositions are true. Some plays have no words at all.12 But even in conventional theatre, actions speak as loudly as words. Philosophers who have written about truth and literature have tended to focus on novels and poems – presumably because these artworks are (typically) a matter of words alone. In theatre, words are only part of the experience.

Finally, however, although many of the explicit propositions uttered in Hamlet are indeed false, there's no reason why some of them shouldn't be true. Plays often contain statements about the world that are true.13 Here are three kinds. First, historical claims: when Horatio describes the state of Rome before the death of Caesar, he is drawing on a description from Plutarch.14 As it happens, what he claims about Rome is probably false: the dead, we may suppose, did not arise from their graves; but there is no particular reason why we couldn't imagine Horatio saying true things about Caesar's Rome. Second, simple, factual statements: when Gertrude says ‘there is a willow grows askant the brook’,15 it may be that, somewhere out there in the real world, there is a willow that grows askant a brook – hence, that particular claim is perfectly true. Third, what I call ‘words of wisdom’: Polonius tells Laertes that ‘loan oft loses both itself and friend’.16 Similarly, Oedipus Tyrannus notoriously ends with the ‘words of wisdom’: ‘we should call no one happy, until he has crossed the border of life without enduring pain’.17 This kind of general claim looks true (or, if one disagrees with these examples, one could at least imagine an equivalent). All in all, the fact that there is no such person as Hamlet, Gertrude or Horatio does not entail that every claim that they make about the world is false. Indeed, one could imagine a play in which many more true claims are made than in Hamlet.18

Can any of these true propositions help us to understand what we learn from plays? In the first two cases, clearly not. As to historical claims, we do not go to Hamlet to learn about Ancient Rome.19 Second, suppose it's true that a willow grows askant a brook; Gertrude goes on to say that Ophelia drowned in that brook, a claim that (if we follow Russell) we must suppose is false, because there was no such person as Ophelia. In the context of watching the play, we do not distinguish in any way between these two claims, even although one is true and one is false; it makes no difference to us; it has no connection (I would suggest) with whatever it is that we think we learn from plays like Hamlet.20

That leaves ‘words of wisdom’. The kinds of ‘truths’ expressed here look rather more like what we might want to learn from Hamlet. In the case of plays like Hamlet in particular, these are the sorts of phrases that get quoted independently of their dramatic context. Of course, even if one holds that some of the ‘words of wisdom’ uttered during the course of a play are true, there may well be many that are false. It doesn't seem right to say that what is learnt from the plays is achieved by the spectator sifting through the various ‘words of wisdom’ and accepting all the ones that she finds plausible. To put the point another way: if one were to go through the text of Hamlet, locate all the ‘words of wisdom’ with which one happened to agree, isolate them, and them get someone to read them out on stage to an audience, our intuition, I suspect, would be that this would be nothing like the ‘learning’ experience we talk about when having gone to see a performance of Hamlet. This suggests that ‘words of wisdom’ can't be all there is to it.

This consideration of ‘words of wisdom’ has been a matter of explicit statements in the text of plays. But, to state the obvious, words of wisdom, even when they appear explicitly in plays, are often woven into the action. They are not best understood as isolated statements by the playwright, in which he discloses his general views about the world. That is one reason why isolating the true words of wisdom from Hamlet and reading them out on stage would completely fail to have the right effect. Similarly, the claim that we shouldn't say that someone is happy until she has died without pain is hard to separate from the story of Oedipus himself. Putting this thought together with what we said earlier about the non-propositional content of a play, we have an incentive to move away from looking for truths in the explicit language of the play, and look instead for implicit truths.

Implicit truths

In a typical performance, a great deal is implied, rather than stated explicitly. If the explicit propositions uttered on stage are of no use to us (on their own), then perhaps we should turn to what is implied. Within what is implied, it might be helpful to distinguish between the specific (or particular) claims and general (or universal) claims.21 Ibsen's Ghosts, for example, implies the particular claim that Captain Alving had syphilis, although this is never stated outright. It also implies the general claim that (contemporary) society systematically disadvantages women.

When people talk about learning from theatre, one common suggestion is that they are learning from implied, universal claims.22 This thought is expressed by Aristotle, and I focus on his view, although he is by no means the only one.23 Aristotle, recall, argued that tragedy presents universal to its audience. In presenting universals (what ‘would happen’), plays can teach their audiences about the world. Aristotle's claim about universals has nothing to do with whether the explicit statements made by particular actors are true or false. Tragedy is an imitation of action (including verbal and non-verbal elements) and it is via the action that universals are made apparent to the audience. The play distils universal features of the everyday and then presents them on stage, such that what the audience sees is a presentation of what types of people do in types of situations. Hence the presentation of universal truths (about types of people in types of situations) is perfectly consistent with a fictional story, featuring completely made-up characters, who utter no truthful statements whatsoever; the universal truths must be implicit, not explicit.

When he wants to explain what he means by poetry expressing universals, Aristotle states that it shows us ‘the kind of speech or action which is consonant with a person of a given kind in accordance with probability or necessity’.24 Two interesting problems immediately arise from this account. First of all, what kinds of speech and action accord with probability and necessity? Second, whatever they are, how do plays show them? To put the point another way: if we want to know whether, say, Oedipus Tyrannus presents the kind of thing that would happen, then we need to ask two questions: first, what kinds of things happen? Second, what kind of thing does Oedipus Tyrannus present?

The first question – just what are the kinds of thing that happen? – is obviously not just a question for the theatre. But I stress it in order to distinguish between the (purported) message or claim made by a particular play and the truth of that claim. Even if we accept that plays are able to put alleged ‘universals’ on show, there's still a vast debate to be had about what kinds of things are in fact universal. Aristotle clearly thought both that certain types of people behaved in certain recognisable ways and that people's characters were relatively consistent over time. Plays – to express universals – should therefore depict people who correspond to type and who do so consistently.25 This view has been a popular one: thus, fairly strict limits have, in the past, been placed on which characteristics were appropriate for which character types;26 or actors and actresses could specialise in being a particular character type, known in nineteenth-century England and America as ‘lines of business’.27 Some of these ‘types’ look false or dated now, such as Aristotle's claim that it is inappropriate for women to display certain types of courage, or Lessing's view that women couldn't be viciously or cold-bloodedly murderous, although they could be murderous as a result of jealousy or some other passion.28 And August Strindberg wrote, in the preface to his play Miss Julie, that the very idea of character as playwrights had hitherto conceived of it was completely false. People change their minds, act irrationally and behave inconsistently; strictly speaking, then, there's really no such thing as ‘character’. If that's your view, then it will certainly change your notion of which universals might be on display.29 There's a big difference between the communication of some universal truth and the confirmation of a particular prejudice or social attitude.

Even if one were agreed on what counts as a ‘universal truth’, we should be concerned with the second question – namely, how are such things communicated on the stage? Just what is universal about Oedipus? For one thing (as we saw in the previous chapter), we should avoid the temptation to equate what's universal (‘what would happen’) with ‘what happens most often’ or ‘what happens every day’. Oedipus Tyrannus does not, thankfully, depict an everyday event, nor does it depict that event in a way that makes it look like an everyday event. Discovering that you've murdered your father and married your mother is hardly typical in that sense ' and there don't seem to be any universal rules for how people behave in such conditions. Indeed, part of the fascination with the play lies exactly in the fact that the audience gets to watch the spectacularly unusual and horrifying event unfold before their eyes. But Aristotle obviously thinks that certain elements of that play may be universalised. Perhaps the play depicts a universal claim about how a person like Oedipus would probably or necessarily behave in such circumstances: someone concerned with his own status, who identifies himself with the prosperity of Thebes under his guidance, whose pride derives from his ability to solve problems, who would hunt relentlessly for whoever had polluted the city. Perhaps we could accept that such a person with such a history might tend to act in the ways that he does. Hence, in this sense, the play might offer the kind of thing that would happen.30

The trouble is that the more we include the specific details of the story (Oedipus' character, the riddle, the swollen foot), the less we end up with something that looks like a universal – like something that presents a kind of person or a type of situation. If the play just tells us what Oedipus himself would do in his particular circumstances, then we're left with very little that's universal. On the other hand, the more we try to generalise (the play shows us that ‘a good man, acting in accordance with his best judgement, acts in a way that leads, unforeseeably though with astonishing ease, to his own destruction’.31), the more we end with ineffective slogans and platitudes that fail to capture the subtleties of the play and, often enough, happen to be non-universal or even false.

Furthermore, once we generalise away from the specifics of the story, we face the problem of different and perhaps inconsistent universals. Does Oedipus Tyrannus tell us the story of a proud man, or of a relentless truth-seeker, or both? Does it say that what happens to such a type is that he always comes to no good, or that he probably comes to no good? Does it tell us that we should try to accept our fate or that it doesn't matter whether or not we try to accept our fate? If it tells us something universal about humans, is it that knowing the truth about ourselves would ruin us, or is it that we all secretly want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers (and that this knowledge could be therapeutic)?

All in all, it's not very clear which kind of thing or kind of person or general truth a complex play like Oedipus or Hamlet can be said to depict. To put the point another way: we said that the universal claims are not uttered explicitly, but rather are implied by the action; the problem that we are facing here is that it's difficult (which is not to say impossible) to say just what is being implied.

By highlighting the difficulty of pinning down which universals are implied by a theatrical performance, I do not wish to suggest that no universals are implied or that nobody learns from theatre in this way. But our discussion of Aristotle's view raises a significant concern. As we have seen, hunting for explicit formulations of universal propositions that are (supposedly) implied in plays is a difficult business. If it's open to the individual spectator to derive certain implications into one universal proposition or another, then we are no longer talking about a straightforward instance of ‘learning’ from true propositions (implicitly) expressed in the play; instead, we are talking about a kind of interaction between spectator and performance, in which the spectator develops or reflects upon her own views in relation to the play. There is nothing wrong with this, and indeed it may be an important part of what we enjoy about and take from good theatre. But this is not best characterised as ‘learning truths’ from a performance. If it is a kind of learning, then it's not clear that anything in the performance itself needs to amount to a truth, implicit or otherwise; all that's required is a certain kind of provocation or stimulation to thought. I don't suppose anyone would deny that theatre is able to offer that.

Non-propositional learning: learning how and learning that

Particular plays may convey certain messages – taken to be true by some spectators – either via what is uttered or via what is implied. In both cases, we have been talking about a play communicating to a spectator the claim that something is the case (a claim that may or may not be true). Philosophers often distinguish between knowing that something is the case (e.g. I know that a bicycle has two wheels) and knowing how to do something (e.g. I know how to ride a bicycle). On a standard view, knowing how differs from knowing that in at least two ways: first, knowing how does not consist in the knowledge of any particular proposition; second, knowing how manifests itself in having a particular capacity to act in certain ways.32 Correspondingly, we might look to learning in two different ways: learning that something is the case, compared with learning how to do something. After all, we often learn how to do certain things without learning facts at all. Ancient rhetoricians were convinced that the best method of learning how to deliver an excellent speech was to watch other excellent speakers and to imitate and practice accordingly; this wouldn't involve any statements of fact about how best to deliver a speech – indeed, most writers on the subject agreed that trying to write down clearly articulated truths about delivery would be pointless. Finally, note that learning how needn't have any verbal content at all: I might learn how to drill a hole in a wall just by watching and repeating – neither the action nor the learning requires words; nor would I necessarily be able to express what I have learnt in words. This is helpful, because it takes us away from needing to look for verbally expressed (or implied) ‘truths’ to account for our learning – and summaries of the ‘messages’ from particular plays are notoriously weak (what one writer has nicely called the ‘poverty of propositional paraphrase’33). So might what we learn from theatre be a matter of learning how, not learning that?34

For the moment, though, note that if the first feature of knowing/learning how (that it is not propositional) was helpful, the second looks to be more problematic – namely, the commitment to ‘knowing how’ as an activity. The typical cases of learning how involve some kind of activity in response to something: riding a bike, drilling a hole in the wall, delivering a better, more powerful speech. It's not clear what the equivalent of this activity would be in the case of theatre. Audiences at plays are, to the dismay of some critics (such as Nietzsche or Rousseau), distinctly inactive; they are not obviously practising anything, during or after the performance.35 The second, related point has to do with the evidence that something has been learned. It is perfectly true that those who have learned how to do something cannot always articulate in words what or how they have learned. But there is still little doubt that they have learned something. Abilities, like delivering a speech well or using new philosophical terminology and techniques, may not be reducible to lists of facts; but they can be demonstrated. Theatre audiences do not leave with any obvious new skill or ability.

Illusion

The other kind of worry that we noted at the start of this chapter was focused on the form of theatre, not on the content. This worry was focused on the concept of theatrical illusion. The association between theatre and (some form of) illusion is long-standing, although there have also been dissident voices.36 But the question of what the illusion is and the related question of whether the audience is in some sense deceived by the illusion have proved highly contentious. Thus the focus of our discussion will be twofold: (1) What kind(s) of illusion do we find in theatre? (2) Does this kind of illusion require that audiences are deceived in some way? We will look at both of these questions in relation to different kinds of illusion. Before doing so, however, a word about their connection.

One reason why some might object to the very idea that theatre requires illusion is the thought, expressed by Dr Johnson amongst others, that theatre audiences are not deceived by what they see.37 If illusion implies the state of being deceived by something and theatre audiences are not deceived, then they can be under no illusion. Some critics have suggested that the term ‘illusion’, when applied to the theatre (or to other kinds of art) is nothing more than a useful misnomer: thus, for Sparshott, it is ‘a shockingly bad description’ but ‘an uncommonly useful label’ and hence what is called ‘illusion’ is ‘no more an illusion than German measles is measles or Vienna steak steak’.38 If Sparshott's remarks may be taken to apply to ‘illusion’ at the theatre, then we might hope for reconciliation: no, theatre audiences are not really under any illusions, because they are not really deceived; but they do experience something analogous to an illusion, something for which ‘illusion’ is an adequate metaphor.

Unfortunately, however, things are not that simple. To agree on this account of theatrical illusion, we would have to agree on two claims: first, that theatre audiences are not deceived; second, that illusion implies deception. Neither is uncontroversial. As to the first, we have already noted Gorgias' remark that theatre audiences are deceived. Stendhal claims that a spectator may achieve (very brief) moments of ‘perfect illusion’, in which she believes that what is merely imitated on stage is really taking place; for him, then, the audience certainly is deceived (albeit momentarily) and, what's more, plays achieve their best effects just when spectators are subject to perfect illusion.39 As to the second, although illusion can deceive, there are clear cases in which it does not. Driving down a familiar stretch of road on a hot day, I see a mirage for the tenth time; I am not deceived in the slightest, but for all that the mirage is still an illusion. So being the victim of the mirage illusion does not entail having the false belief that there's water on the road. So we can't agree, without further discussion, that theatre audiences aren't under illusions because they aren't deceived: for one thing, some people think audiences are deceived; for another, victims of illusions don't always entertain false beliefs about what they are seeing. Discussion of theatre and illusion requires a more detailed analysis of the kinds of illusion that may be present at the theatre, as well as the relation between each type of illusion and deception on the part of the audience.

Optical illusion

The Fraser Spiral (see figure) is an optical illusion: it is carefully constructed in such a way that it looks spiral; but, in fact, it is a series of discrete, concentric circles, which do not touch each other. To begin with, let us note some of the features of this illusion. First, the illusion is not total – it is not, say, a very (or maximally) realistic dream. The latter is the kind of ‘illusion’ suggested when philosophers speak of the ‘argument from illusion’, which begins by imagining someone (say) completely under the illusion (i.e. very convincingly dreaming) that she is in front of the Taj Mahal.40 It is a stipulated feature of the totalising illusion that ‘one cannot tell from the phenomenology of one's awareness’ whether or not it is an illusion.41 But the Fraser Spiral is not like that. It is clearly distinguishable from a real spiral, because you can follow any individual circle with a pencil and see that you are going round in a circle, not spiralling into the centre. Indeed, one could go further: optical illusions are often found in books for children, and it is often part of the fun of optical illusions that the person under the illusion can show that the picture on the page is not as it appears to be. Illusions like these may also play a significant part in visual art: hence, a talented sketch artist can make the white of the blank page in one part of the picture look brighter than the same white page in another part of the picture.42

image

A second feature of the Fraser Spiral has been alluded to already, but let us be more explicit in this case. As an optical illusion, the Fraser Spiral is ‘belief-independent’: it looks like a spiral to me, even once I know that it is not a spiral. As I look at the Fraser Spiral, I am still experiencing an illusion – even though I don't have any false beliefs about it at all. Illusion is therefore compatible with an absence of false beliefs (about the illusion). Another way to put this would be to say that the victim of the illusion need not be deceived: hence, spectators may be ‘victims of illusion’, even although they know the truth about what they are seeing. Of course, that doesn't mean that there is no connection between illusion and false belief. It's just that a necessary condition for X being an illusion cannot be the existence of a false belief exactly when I look at X.

If we all agree that optical illusions are illusions, then an obvious question to ask would be: ‘are there optical illusions at the theatre?’ The answer is that sometimes there are, notably as a feature of set design. From the perspective of the audience member, the ‘room’ on stage can look a certain way (say, symmetric); on closer inspection, it turns out to be completely different (say, asymmetric). But, of course, plenty of theatre does not make use of optical illusions in set design, so it wouldn't be right to say that optical illusions are a systematic or fundamental feature of theatre. The most we can say is that they may well be employed and (from the perspective of the audience) it can be hard to tell.

General sensory illusion

Perhaps the Fraser Spiral and other optical illusions just form a subset of an ‘enriched’ or broader kind of sensory illusion, which is a much more widespread feature of theatre?43 In designing a set as, say, a living room, it seems that the set designer has to decide whether to make the ‘room’ with materials that are as they seem to be (the ‘room’ seems to be and in fact is made of plaster, bricks, etc.) or which are not as they seem to be (the ‘room’ seems to be made of plaster, bricks, etc., but is in fact made of cardboard, canvas, etc.). A typical set may well make use of at least some scenery that is not what it appears to be; so, if the latter is a kind of illusion, then it seems that illusion is at least a common feature of theatre. I call this ‘set-design illusion’, but it could be a feature of props and of the actors' costumes, too. (A ‘live’ example might be the well-established although now unfashionable practice of dressing up children to look like adults, and then placing them at the back of the stage to make it look further away.) The key point is that (unlike some other illusions that we'll discuss) these illusions, if they are such, could arise from a static view or snapshot of the stage and actors: we are talking about the materials of the set and costumes, perhaps the make-up, lighting and so on.

It is important not to exaggerate the use and effectiveness of this kind of illusion. Often sets, costumes, lighting and sounds are aids to imagination rather than attempts to fool an audience. A man sitting on a simple, wooden chair and wearing a paper crown does not produce the illusion that we are looking at a king, seated on a throne in full, splendid regalia; what we see are conventions that we are able to ‘read off’. The aim of creating a set that resembles as closely as possible what it represents is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of theatre, although many theatregoers now take it for granted. The existence of conventional representation, such as the wooden chair and paper crown, has led some to argue that convention accounts for all of what we see at the theatre, hence that there is no illusion at all of this kind. Sensible theatregoers (people who understand what theatre is) know full well that what they see is a representation, so it's not a matter of illusion but one of convention.44

However, convention isn't all there is to it: sometimes (following the set-design example) spectators are genuinely tricked into thinking that a wall is made of brick, when it is not, and so on. In Thomas Mann's novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Krull, the trickster narrator, recalls a formative childhood trip to the theatre. During the performance, he becomes enamoured with the dashing young actor, Müller-Rosé; but, meeting him in the dressing-room afterwards, Krull realises that (amongst other things) Müller-Rosé is ugly, smelly, spotty and coarse, and that his beautiful chestnut hair was merely a wig which, now removed, reveals him to be a redhead.45 Müller-Rosé's hair looked chestnut but is in fact red. Krull, who believed that Müller-Rosé's hair was chestnut, had a false belief. It looks very much like the use of make-up, wigs, perhaps also lighting, very often, even typically, causes spectators to hold false beliefs. The same goes for set-design.

Now, as we've already seen, there's more to an illusion than the production of false belief; and some illusions function without producing false belief at all. But it's clear from this brief discussion that set-design can lead to things seeming to be other than they are, hence to deception and false belief on the part of the audience. All of this, taken together, seems adequate for the conclusion that this kind of illusion may well be a common feature of theatrical performances. Even so, does this mean that illusion (of this kind) is always present at the theatre? The answer, of course, is no. We have already seen how theatre can function perfectly well without scenery, without props, without elaborate make-up and costume design. Recall Peter Brook's set of minimal conditions for an act of theatre (the ‘bare stage’): clearly, the kind of illusion under discussion here would not be necessary for such a performance. But we should notice that the set-design illusions occur relatively frequently, when one includes all the features of the set, the props and the costumes; and sometimes it can be very hard to know whether or not they are being employed.

The illusionist's illusion

A third kind of illusion may be associated with the theatre – namely, the illusions of the so-called ‘illusionist’, or stage magician. The illusionist, let us call him ‘Houdini’, may during the course of his performance make use of optical illusions and set designs of the kind we have already discussed. But he may not; and he certainly doesn't have to. Consider the following case: Houdini is bound tightly in chains and handcuffs, standing on the edge of a tank of water; his stage assistant kisses him goodbye (for he might really drown) and we see him thrown into the tank; a curtain is lowered, so that we no longer see him; a few minutes later he emerges, triumphant, freed from the chains. For the audience member, let us suppose, it looks as though Houdini has somehow wriggled himself free from his chains, using nothing but his body.46 In fact, when the assistant kissed him, she passed him a key in her lips which, when the curtain went down, he used to unlock his chains. This example is not a visual illusion like the Fraser Spiral or like the ‘brick wall’. In a very general sense, of course, things are not as they seem to be. But there is no trick object (the cardboard that looks like brick, the circles that look like a spiral); the trick was in the action, the concealment, the sleight of hand.

Although we have seen reason to doubt the use of deception or false belief as a criterion for theatrical illusion, note that Houdini's trick – the one that I just outlined – is connected with false belief in a different way. Most importantly, it is not obviously belief-independent: if I know full well that Houdini has just been given the key, then I won't be taken in by the illusion. I may admire his skill, but that is a different matter. Indeed, one can work backwards and say that if the illusion has worked on me then I probably have some false beliefs: that Houdini did not have a key, that the kiss was innocent, and so on. This helps explain other kinds of responses to the illusionist: when I nervously watch Houdini sawing his assistant in half, I probably don't really (and falsely) believe that he is subjecting her to a horrible, violent death. Still, even if I don't falsely believe that she is being sawn in half, I am likely to be (falsely) believing something else. Perhaps her legs are not where I believe them to be, and what I believe to be her legs are the legs of a different assistant. Thus, for both the handcuffs and the sawing tricks, if I know exactly how the trick works then illusion will simply fail. This is not so for the Fraser Spiral.

Do we find Houdini-type illusions at the theatre? Illusionists' shows are themselves a type of theatre, so in one sense the answer is obviously yes. But do we find them in more conventional, dramatic theatre? Certainly, on some occasions we find exactly that: Charlotte performs some in Act III of The Cherry Orchard. More generally, there are frequent examples of the audience being made to believe that something has happened, when in fact it has not. So it can look to the audience as if, say, one character has slapped another, when in fact she has not. This may be less impressive, but it is structurally equivalent to Houdini's handcuffs illusion: the audience really believes that something has taken place; but if they knew what was going on, the action would not necessarily have the same effect. Just as Houdini creates tricks to convince the audience that something is happening, when in fact it is not, so actors learn and practise plenty of methods by which they can fool their audiences; and, often enough, the spectator who recognises such a trick sees this as a mark of poor acting, just as the spectator at Houdini's show may be disappointed if she figures out what the kiss was for. Note that to say that the stage slap may be equivalent to Houdini's handcuffs trick is not to say, first, that there's no difference between the two. There is: Houdini's audience have come to see him in order to be awe-struck by his illusions, whereas the stage ‘slap’ is part of a dramatic performance with a different set of criteria for success (whatever they are). Second, this is not to say, of course, that every stage ‘slap’ is or ought to be trying to fool the audience into thinking that it is real: sometimes the slap is real; other times it might be obviously fake, for comic or for aesthetic purposes. But examples of this kind are not particularly hard to find and one can understand why they have been associated with theatre.

In the case of the stage ‘slap’, the actors behave in such a way that the audience thinks that something has taken place when, in fact, it hasn't. One can, of course, imagine an equivalent false belief, which doesn't exactly relate to an action. Recall the young Krull, who believed that Müller-Rosé, the actor, had chestnut hair. Krull visits Müller-Rosé not because he likes chestnut hair, but because he is so impressed by Müller-Rosé's personality. Müller-Rosé is loved by the audience, male and female, and he receives rapturous applause – applause directed at him, not at his character (even if it is in virtue of his character). It is not merely Müller-Rosé's hair colour, then, that turns out to be illusory. Müller-Rosé's ‘dashingness’, his heart-stealing prowess turns out to be a product of the stage, of lighting, make-up and distance. The contrast between Müller-Rosé's attractiveness on stage and his unattractiveness in the dressing room is what particularly fascinates Krull: Müller-Rosé is the repulsive little worm, who, each night, is transformed into a butterfly by the tricks of the stage.

To reiterate: Krull has not mistaken the character (as a whole) for the actor. He doesn't think that Müller-Rosé is the attaché (whose character he was playing). But just as it isn't possible to tell (as a spectator) whether Müller-Rosé's hair is his real hair, so, from watching the whole performance, it isn't possible to tell whether Müller-Rosé's charm is a function of the stage or a function of the actor (or both). Of course, this needn't just apply to charm: one might imagine getting a false impression of how frail an actor is. The person who asks, after a performance, ‘do you think the actor really is so frail?’, has not misunderstood the nature of theatre. Indeed, she has recognised that theatre tends to present actors in such a way that they (i.e. the actors) seem to be what they are not. As with the Houdini case, it seems at least possible that, had Krull gone to see the performance knowing Müller-Rosé's off-stage character and appearance, he wouldn't have found him so attractive when he was on the stage; similarly with the actor's frailty.

Krull, as we have seen, does not believe that Müller-Rosé is an attaché. But sometimes we do unthinkingly transfer the qualities of the characters to the actors who play them, without necessarily realising it. For some philosophers I have corresponded with while developing this chapter, the idea that we can be seriously confused about what ‘belongs’ to the actor and what to the character after a performance is simply unthinkable. But consider the following anecdote, reported by the playwright Michael Frayn:

I once saw a performance of The Elephant Man at the National Theatre where one of the cast collapsed on stage. […] Nicky [Henson, another member of the cast] told me afterwards that a doctor who happened to be in the audience […] had at once gone backstage to help. After examining the patient he diagnosed not a heart attack but simple hyperventilation – then turned to Nicky and asked him with courteous professional deference if he agreed. Nicky looked around to see if there was a second doctor standing behind him. There was not. The second opinion was himself, or rather the character he had been playing on stage, who happened to be a doctor and whom he evidently embodied offstage still, even in the eyes of a real doctor.47

What this anecdote tells us is, of course, open to interpretation. Clearly, in the heat of the moment, the (real) doctor got a little confused; in general, once the performance is brought to an end, we do not take the actors to have the knowledge of the professionals they portray. It's unlikely, furthermore, that the doctor mistook the actor for the Victorian doctor he was playing on stage, or a doctor involved in the case of the Elephant Man, and so on. But this story might help to caution us against oversimplified dismissals of the power of theatrical illusion. After all, the doctor was not improvising along to the play, or suspending his disbelief, or taking some sort of fictional stance to the patient – that would have been wholly inappropriate to the gravity of the situation. Nor did the doctor lack a rudimentary understanding of how theatre works. Rather, he made a mistake, directly as a result of the theatrical performance. A mistake this pronounced may be rare – the exception, rather than the rule – but it should not be ignored, all the same.

It's likely that there will be types of theatre in which these sorts of illusions do not arise. Marionette theatre, for example, is unlikely to raise questions about the personality traits of the actors compared with the characters. But so far we have identified four types of illusion that it would be hardly surprising to find at a typical performance: optical illusions in the design of the stage; objects and materials that seem to be that which they are not; Houdini-type tricks, which make you think that actions have taken place, when in fact they have not; finally, actors whose qualities are sometimes employed and sometimes cleverly concealed for the sake of the performance. To say that not a single one of these is a necessary condition for theatre is to miss the point. When you go to the theatre, any or all of them may well be in play. To say that you can't believe your eyes is not to say that your eyes are always deceiving you; it's to say that they aren't reliable.

Under the spell

Although we have enumerated a number of different illusions that may be in play at a performance, it is notable that when philosophers (and dramaturges) write about theatre and illusion they often appear to have something else in mind – something that I want to characterise as being ‘under the spell’ of the theatre. This is the kind of trance-like or dreamlike state that occurs as the spectator is absorbed in the action taking place on stage. Indeed, it seems to be the comparison with the dream that comes up most often. The spectator under the spell is watching intently, engrossed in the performance; the spectator not under the spell is thinking about what she will do once the performance is over, and checking her watch to see when that will be.

In each of the previous examples of illusion, I've suggested that they can be, perhaps often are, a feature of a typical theatrical performance. But being ‘under the spell’ seems to be a much more central feature of theatre. Indeed, it is a perfectly common and intelligible complaint about a performance that, for whatever reason (be it the poor acting, the miserable script, the nearby spectator talking on her phone) one simply could not get lost in the play or the spell kept on being broken – what Coleridge nicely calls being ‘disentranced’.48 We have seen why speaking of theatre in terms of ‘necessary conditions’ is a hard task, but a performance that does not in any way demand or produce the need to go ‘under the spell’ is at least a non-typical kind of theatre.49 This accounts for the number of writers who are interested in techniques for maintaining theatrical illusion (in this sense) as well as those who are keen to warn against certain pitfalls. Needless to say, there has been plenty of disagreement: the discussions about the ‘unities’ of time and place (especially in France, but also elsewhere) were often associated with a concern for shattering the illusion: would an audience simply be unable to engage with a play that depicted the passing of several months within just a few hours? Is the use of advanced rhetorical technique, word-plays and poetic skill an impediment to illusion?50 Are the rules for maintaining the spell different in comedy and tragedy?51 And the debates between symbolist and naturalist theatre at the turn of the previous century often focused on what would maintain or disrupt illusion. Thus, on the naturalist side, Ibsen could write to the director of An Enemy of the People, demanding that the staging should not disturb ‘the illusion that everything is real and that one is sitting and watching something that is actually taking place in real life’; Bruisov the symbolist could argue, in contrast, that ‘the more lifelike the sound [of crickets chirping in a performance of Uncle Vanya], the less convincing the illusion’.52 These (often heated) debates testify to the significance of this kind of illusion in theatre.

The claim that going under the spell is central to theatre must be qualified in two ways. First, as many writers on the subject have noted, it is not a binary matter of either being or not being under the spell. Stendhal and Coleridge (for example) are clear that one drifts in and out of this state to varying degrees during the course of a performance. Second, it is not necessarily the case that the more effective the illusion, the better the play. I've said that plays are unsuccessful (or, if successful, highly unusual) if they do not produce a certain quantity of illusion of this kind; but that doesn't mean that the more, the better. Breaking the spell, or manipulating its intensity, may well be part of a successful performance. Thus, for example, Lessing notes that tragedy depends far more heavily on illusion than comedy: breaking the spell can be a good way of making people laugh, but a bad way of making them cry.53 For Coleridge, some modes of breaking the spell may be very effective near the beginning of the action, but disruptive at its height (for others, vice versa).54

The spell of theatre is clearly distinct both from visual illusions (the Fraser Spiral, the ‘brick’ wall) and from Houdini-type illusions. Coleridge rightly says of the spectator under the spell that ‘it is at all times within his power to see the thing as it really is’.55 This does not hold for the other types of illusion discussed so far.

One question that we have about the spell phenomenon is whether the spectator under the spell genuinely (but mistakenly) believes that the imitated action is real. As we have seen, the presence or absence of deception is not necessarily a helpful way of establishing whether or not the spell counts as an illusion; but because the discussion of illusion often veils a discussion of false belief, it is appropriate to say something about their relationship.

The main point to make is that it's difficult to tell what the spectator does and does not believe.56 After all, how could we settle it? A standard (although not flawless) way to find out what someone believes is to ask her; but asking someone who is under the spell is going to break the spell. Another way (again, hardly perfect) of finding out what people believe is to look at their behaviour. Do people watching plays behave as if the plays are real? Unfortunately, the behaviour of spectators who are highly absorbed in what they are watching (especially those who weep during tragedies, or, equivalently, look scared during horror films) is far from uncontroversial and it has been the subject of much philosophical discussion, some of which we explore in Chapter 6. We can't go into the details here, but clearly there isn't an unambiguous answer. Indeed, much of the discussion seems to begin with the thought that people can't believe that what they're seeing is real (and hence to draw conclusions about the meaning of their behaviour) or, instead, to begin with the thought that people can't cry unless they think something is real (and hence to draw conclusions about their beliefs). A last option, favoured by Plato and Augustine – and not without contemporary advocates – is to conclude that audiences are temporarily insane.

A final strategy might be to point to the contribution of the spectator. Given that we can snap ourselves out of the spell, one could argue that it requires a kind of consent, cooperation or even active involvement and, hence, that the spectator is not deceived. How we describe the ‘voluntary contribution’ from the spectator may vary: Coleridge, for example, describes the ‘temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part’.57 (And elsewhere, of course, he speaks of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.) Although he disagrees with the details of Coleridge's formation, McCollom defines theatrical illusion specifically in terms of ‘the spectator's […] participation in a dramatic action’.58 But we can't simply move from the voluntary contribution of the spectator to the lack of false belief on her part. It would be perfectly consistent to hold that we contribute to our own false beliefs. Tied to the mast and screaming to be released, Odysseus believes (falsely, one assumes) that visiting the sirens is a pretty good plan; and there's a fairly intuitive sense in which Odysseus has contributed to this false belief. Of course, although he contributed to it, Odysseus can't obviously snap himself out of his false belief once it is in place; but to say (with Coleridge) that it's always within the power of the spectator to break the spell does not mean to say that the spell, when in place, is not a false belief. In any case, one could consistently claim that the spectator contributes to her false belief and that there are moments when she cannot snap herself out of it; in effect, this is Stendhal's view.59

We should set aside the question of whether the entranced spectator falsely believes. Instead, even if the spell is or causes a kind of false belief, the false belief doesn't last longer than the performance itself. Compare this with those generated by the other kinds of illusions that we have discussed: Houdini's audience, for example, will be as confused after the performance as they were during it; Krull was surprised by what he saw in the dressing room, long after the performance was done. It is true that certain psychological effects of the spell may endure past the final bow; but even if being under the spell means ‘believing it's all real’, we can all agree that nobody does so once the curtain goes down.60 Indeed, Rousseau at one point complains that whatever beneficial moral effect is produced by theatre (if indeed there be any) ‘lasts no longer than the illusion which produced it.’61 In the Prologue to Wallenstein, Schiller asks the audience to be thankful that the muse, although she does ‘create illusion’, goes on ‘in honesty’ to ‘Reveal the trick she plays, and not pretend/ That what she brings us is the stuff of truth’.62 Even if the spell does produce moments of false belief, the fact that these come to an end with the performance suggests that Schiller is right to call the illusion an honest one.

Although they are different, the types of illusion that we've discussed may have an impact upon each other. Clearly, there are occasions when the visual and Houdini-type illusions go wrong and the mistake breaks the spell: if, say, a part of the set collapses; if we see the fake blood capsule before it explodes; if an actor is really hurt in a stage fight. But this is by no means the only way that these kinds of illusions may be related. Indeed, one might think that complicated but highly impressive Houdini illusions could also have the effect of breaking the spell – namely, if the audience is thinking ‘how on earth did they do that?’ instead of being engrossed in the play. In a recent production of Danton's Death, Danton was guillotined in such a realistic way that all the audience could think about was how such a stunt was performed. The distinction between different types of illusion can also help us to be clearer about which kinds of illusions we are referring to when we talk about theatre and illusion. Brecht, for example, is often considered to be ‘anti-illusion’ when it comes to the theatre: we look at his ideas in more detail in Chapter 7. In that chapter, I cite a description of a Brecht performance, in which what looks like a solid marble proscenium arch turns out, with a change of lighting, to be made of a transparent gauze. The effect is supposed, in part, to prevent the spectators from falling under what I'm calling the ‘spell’; but note that Brecht is happy to use an illusion of one kind (the gauze that appears to be marble) in order to undermine an illusion of another kind (the spell).

The term ‘theatrical illusion’ evidently does not refer to one phenomenon. We have found a number of different kinds of illusion that often do play a part in a theatrical performance. Sometimes this is clear to the spectator; sometimes not. Although being deceived is not a necessary condition for illusion, spectators can be and frequently are deceived by theatre.

Nietzsche: illusion as truth?

Our treatment of theatre and illusion has thus far been an investigation of which types of illusions there may be at a theatrical performance. Some, as we have seen, do seem to require deception or false belief on the part of the audience; others do not. However, it might be possible to argue that illusion has a more positive role in relation to truth – not merely ‘honest’, as Schiller puts it, but truthful. The philosopher who wrote most extensively about theatre and illusion, Friedrich Nietzsche, came to a version of this conclusion.

Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is an account of the origins, nature and function of Greek (specifically, Attic) tragedy.63 Following Schopenhauer, the young Nietzsche held that what we take to be ‘the world’ (people, things, time, space, causation) is itself nothing but an elaborate illusion created by a single, unified, metaphysical ‘will’.64 For Schopenhauer, the reality of the will and the unreality of (what we mistakenly take to be) the real world of people and things has a number of devastating consequences. Chief among them is our everyday experience of desire. We want certain things, and we erroneously think that when we get these things we will be satisfied. But, since the world just is will (or desire), all that happens when we get what we want is that we want something else. Alternatively, if we do not get what we want, we are unhappy in our frustrated desire. The combination of these two thoughts is overpowering: first, none of what we think matters is real (our family or friends, our history or identity, our goals or achievements); second, to make matters worse, humans are systematically set up to be unhappy, to be suspended between being bored with what we have and being unhappy with what we don't have. Schopenhauer does not advocate suicide as an escape from ‘the suffering of the world’, but he clearly takes some comfort in the thought that the systematic roller-coaster of human suffering ends with death; certainly, it would be hard to take Schopenhauer's philosophy seriously without coming to the conclusion that we're better off dead than alive.65

Nietzsche's account of ancient tragedy combines his knowledge of the Greek world with his interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy. What Greek tragedy offered the Greeks, he thought, was an insight into (basically Schopenhauerian and very unpleasant) truths about the world and the place of humans within it. On occasion, to be sure, these truths could be expressed in the form of words uttered during the course of the performance. The chorus of Oedipus at Colonus is able, for example, to express the thought that the best thing for humans is not to be born at all (followed closely by dying very young).66 These basic truths could also find expression in elements of the plot: Oedipus (in Oedipus Tyrannus) learns that his apparently stable, comprehensible and benevolent world is in fact appallingly brutal and in some sense fated to bring him misery.67 Nonetheless, the truths expressed in ancient tragedy are not primarily located in the text and in the plot – and it has been, Nietzsche thinks, a mistake of the modern world (more or less following Aristotle) to seek them there. To understand what the truths are and how they are expressed, we must understand the nature of tragic illusion.

Nietzsche posits two forces at work in Greek tragedy, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents the drawing of (and respecting) distinct boundaries between individuals. Dionysus represents the loss of individuality and the transgression of boundaries. The tendencies that go by the labels ‘Apollo’ and ‘Dionysus’ are found, of course, in the gods who bear those names. But they are expressed in real-world activities (Apollo in dreaming; Dionysus in drunkenness and orgy) and also in characteristic forms of art (Apollo in epic poetry; Dionysus in choral dance and lyric poetry). Thus in epic poetry we learn about (but are separate from) the stories of Odysseus and his men; his adventures take place in a different time and in different locations. This is Apollinian in at least two ways: first, the listener learns about and is distinct from the different characters described in the epic; second, the listener is not himself imaginatively involved in what is described – he does not imagine himself as part of the story. Choral dance is Dionysian, Nietzsche supposes, in that the participant gets lost in the crowd and in the present moment, with no sense of separation and no notion of there being a ‘himself’ apart from others – what Nietzsche calls a ‘complete self-forgetting’.68

Along with their differing activities and art forms, Apollo and Dionysus are connected with different states of mind.69 In the case of Apollo, the characteristic state of mind is the illusion of the dreamer (although Nietzsche suggests that it is the dreamer who knows he is dreaming70). This is something like what I have described (above) as being ‘under the spell’: Nietzsche speaks of illusion, but also of ‘semblance’ (Schein). In the case of Dionysus, the characteristic state of mind is intoxication (Rausch).71 The Apollinian Homer-listener is in a dream-like state of illusion; the Dionysiac participant in the drunken, choral dance loses himself in the crowd. Note that both states of mind are, in turn, unlike the experience of the average Greek, going about his day-to-day business – both take him away from the (for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, illusory) everyday world. To that extent, both Apollinian and Dionysian art forms already offer a ‘truer’ experience than that of the average Greek citizen, who thinks that what he experiences is real: the epic presents a realm of illusion that the listener knows to be illusory (unlike the everyday realm of illusion, which he does not recognise as such); the intoxicated choral dancer escapes from the (false) idea that each of us is a separate, unique individual.

Greek tragedy combines the characteristic art forms and states of mind associated with Apollo and Dionysus. Dionysus is represented in the intoxicating song and dance of the tragic chorus, whereas Apollo is found in the actors and the plot, which, dreamlike, represent the actions of other people in other places. In combining the illusions and intoxications of the different art forms, tragedy also combines and expresses their characteristic kinds of truth.

It has been a great mistake, Nietzsche thinks (made by Aristotle, among others), to look only at the Apollinian elements – notably the plot, the characters, the illusion – and to ignore the significance of the chorus. Ignoring the song and dance in favour of the plot and character has been made that much easier, of course, because our principle way of accessing Greek tragedy is through the surviving play texts, which preserve details of the Apollinian elements but not the Dionysian. What the Dionysian offers, with its intoxicated song and dance, is a kind of insight into metaphysical reality. We really are all one being (‘Will’), not individuated beings with different goals; so the intoxicated, Dionysian mind is (in a sense) confronted with an important truth, albeit one that it could not express very coherently in words. Hence it is no surprise that the Dionysian state of mind – intoxicated self-forgetting – has a certain dominance over the dream-like, Apollinian illusion in Nietzsche's account of Greek tragedy. This accords well with the centrality of the god Dionysus to the festivals at which Greek tragedies were performed. The trouble is that the truths revealed by intoxication are hard to bear: if you really came to understand that everything apparently important to you is in fact completely insignificant, you might wish to give up on living. Hence, Nietzsche suggests, the knowledge acquired by the Dionysian man is repulsive to him. The function of the Apollinian illusion is to keep that knowledge at a sufficient distance, such that it does not destroy him completely: ‘[Dionysian] knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of [Apollinian] illusion’.72

The Greek spectator, then, identifies primarily with the dancers in the chorus, in their intoxication and self-forgetting. The veil of illusion provided by the plot and characters at the tragedy are sufficient to prevent the participants (actors, chorus, spectators) from accepting the truths to the extent that they end their existence. Although the horror, dissolution and destruction presented on stage and felt by the tragic chorus are really a feature of all human existence, the illusion that they are primarily happening to someone else – someone called ‘Oedipus’ or ‘Agamemnon’ – is sufficient to make them bearable. The Apollinian illusion (in the context of the overwhelmingly Dionysian tragedy) has the function, then, of bringing the Greek as close as possible to the truth, without permitting him to be consumed by it. It is a kind of heat shield, which enables him to immerse himself that much deeper in the fire of truth.

Nietzsche's account of ancient tragedy was mocked in its own day, especially in philological circles. Certainly, he was willing to take interpretative leaps that were not supported by the kind of historical evidence that his contemporaries expected. We needn't enter into philological debates about the origins of tragedy, but can quickly appreciate some complications and peculiar results of Nietzsche's account. First, of course, the apparent dependence on Schopenhauerian metaphysics is controversial and the appeal to Schopenhauer would subsequently be a source of some embarrassment to Nietzsche, who made it his task to criticise and oppose a wide range of Schopenhauerian claims. Whereas The Birth of Tragedy encourages the thought that this world is merely a dream or illusion, the later Nietzsche criticised precisely this view. From our point of view, although Schopenhauer's philosophy is insightful and stimulating, his central, metaphysical views are no longer taken seriously. Second, Nietzsche is offering an account of ancient tragedy, not of tragedy in general, let alone all theatrical performance. The Greeks were able to achieve their balance of truth, illusion and intoxication only in the context of a religious festival that is unknowable to us now; Greek dance and music – central Dionysian elements – are also largely unknowable. Indeed, Nietzsche thinks, true tragedy quickly became unknowable to the Greeks themselves, once they were under the influence of Socrates and Plato.73 So even if we were to accept his account of ancient tragedy, it would add little to our modern understanding of theatrical experience, which (he insists) would be completely alien to the Greeks.74 Finally, one cannot understand The Birth of Tragedy apart from the young Nietzsche's infatuation with Richard Wagner, including with the composer's views about art and society.75 The final sections of The Birth of Tragedy call for a reinvigoration of ancient tragedy, pioneered by Wagnerian music-drama. This serves to underline the point that a central interest of Nietzsche's was the musical element of ancient tragedy, which (he felt) was lacking on the modern stage.

Conclusion

Theatre has never been too far from questions about truth and illusion. In both cases, what look like unitary notions turn out to reveal a cluster of different ideas, some of which we have had a chance to explore. Although we learn from theatre in lots of ways, and plays may in some sense contain or express truths, we did not find a particular or special way in which we learn from theatre – either in terms of learning that certain facts hold about the world, or in learning some new technique or skill. As for illusions, we noted that many different kinds of theatrical phenomena may go under the name ‘illusion’, that some of them suggest an audience that is deceived, whereas others do not. Finally, in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy we find a vision of Greek tragedy that combines various kinds of illusion with the drive to understand and cope with what Nietzsche takes to be a truth about our existence. It also shows the place that a challenging account of theatre may have within a complex philosophical account of human culture.

Further Reading

Philosophical discussions of truth and fiction or truth and literature tend to focus on novels or poems rather than plays (or to treat play texts as independent works of dramatic literature). Walton (1990) and Lamarque and Olsen (1994) are weighty and influential tomes, not for the faint-hearted; for a helpful discussion of poetry and knowledge, see Geuss (2005: 184–219). On theatre and illusion, see Hamilton (1982), who argues – contrary to what I have suggested in this chapter – that theatrical ‘illusions’ are not deceptive and are not really illusions at all. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, for all its idiosyncrasies, remains important and interesting; Geuss (1999) offers a helpful introduction to a difficult but rewarding text.

Notes

  1 Artaud (2010: 3).

  2 Artaud (2010: 54).

  3 See Barish (1981: 1).

  4 Fragment 23, quoted in Halliwell (1986: 13).

  5 See Puchner (2010: 75). Puchner also speaks of modernist playwrights using theatre as a ‘laboratory of truth’ (p. 119).

  6 I'm not suggesting that there is afirm, self-evident or watertight distinction between content and form; the point is just to distinguish between two types of accusation concerning theatre and falsehood.

  7 The notion of a ‘lie’ suggests not just making false claims, but knowingly making false claims in order to deceive. This seems wrong, so I won't pursue it further here: I take it that the untruths uttered on stage are meant to be ‘lies’ because the playwright and actors know that what they say is false, but they have to say it in order for the play to function. However, as we shall discuss in the following, the actors do not expect to be believed, to ‘get away with it’. ‘Lying’, therefore, seems inappropriate – I shall speak instead of ‘untruth’.

  8 Kierkegaard (1992: 49).

  9 Quoted in Lamarque and Olsen (1994: 53). Russell had a general view concerning propositions about non-existent entities (like Hamlet or the present King of France) – namely, that statements about such entities were false, rather than, as Strawson argued, neither-true-nor-false. Russell's is not an undisputed view, but I shall not challenge it here.

10 Hamlet, 1.1.5. (Citations from Hamlet refer to the edition listed in the bibliography.) Elizabethan productions typically began in the afternoon, so it's unlikely to have been true for them either.

11 Beckett's Rockaby might be one contender. Francesco Cangiullo's Detonation, which has no words at all, is a clear case.

12 Such as Francesco Cangiullo's Detonation.

13 This is a modest claim, with which most philosophers agree; there is disagreement about if and how such statements are ‘asserted’ by the author or actor (see e.g. Beardsley [1981: 421] on ‘assertion in the fullest sense’). I do not mean to suggest that any of the truths described in the following paragraphs are sincerely uttered by the author or actor. See Urmson (1976); Lamarque and Olsen (1994), Chapter 3.

14 1.1.111–9; Plutarch's ‘Life of Julius Caesar’.

15 4.7.164.

16 1.3.75.

17 Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 1529–30, in Sophocles (2003) p. 107.

18 Walton (1990: 79) goes further in holding that an author could write a work of fiction in which every sentence is true. Currie ‘What is fiction?’ offers a helpful exploration of some problem cases.

19 I am suggesting that historical truth/falsity makes little difference to us in plays like Hamlet; but for a certain class of plays, namely history plays, I'll argue (in Chapter 4) that it does make a difference. As we'll see, this is more than just a question of whether the history play's propositions are true.

20 Not only does it make no difference; it may be, as some have argued, that asking whether a statement in a play or novel is true or false is inappropriate or somehow misses the point. See Gale (1971).

21 Obviously, this distinction holds equally for explicit claims, discussed above. Horatio's statements about Rome are particular; Polonius' ‘words of wisdom’ are general or universal.

22 Artaud himself, with whom I began this chapter, writes (in defence of his ‘theatre of cruelty’) that ‘we are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. And above all else, theatre is made to teach us this’. See Artaud (2010: 57).

23 Hence, for example, when psychoanalytic models were applied to literature, they were said to ‘reveal’ the universal features of the characters and explain their real motives and actions. For Freud on Hamlet, see Freud (1961: 265); see also Jones (1949). Many other kinds of literary analysis claim to uncover latent or concealed claims.

24 Poetics 51b.

25 Poetics 54a. For Lessing, Aristotle's point is that, although there are inconsistent people, they don't make for very good characters in plays. See Lessing (1962: Section 34, pp. 98–9).

26 This formed part of the French concept of les bienséances – roughly a notion of the decorum appropriate to the stage.

27 Booth (1995: 330).

28 Lessing (1961: Section 30, p. 84).

29 In Strindberg's case, he thought Miss Julie did present to its audience universal truths – rather unpleasant, misogynistic ones about how women can never be as good as men. But it didn't do this through fixed character types.

30 See, e.g. Frede (1992). Frede argues that Aristotle posits pleasure in tragic imitation because of the recognition that certain types of people do certain types of things.

31 This is taken from Shelley (2003: 185). We discuss the context of his claim in Chapter 6.

32 These two features are identified as standard in the literature by Snowdon (2004), although he goes on to criticise this account.

33 Jacobson (1997: 198).

34 This has proved a popular idea, especially among those who claim that theatre teaches us how to be moral – claims that we explore in more detail in Chapter 5. Take, for example, Palmer's claim that the artwork ‘gets us to see something and not merely to know’ that something is the case. See Palmer (1992: 193).

35 This is not true for all plays, of course – and some modern theatre practitioners have attempted to train audiences to develop certain skills. See e.g. Boal (1995), who prefers to speak of ‘spectators’ than ‘spectators’.

36 Brecht, Nietzsche, Stendhal, Coleridge, Lessing, Rousseau and Boucicault are some of the writers on theatre who have taken it as evident that illusion is involved in theatrical performance in some way. Hamilton (1982) argues against this, although he largely assumes that illusion implies deception – an assumption we have reason to challenge.

37 See Fogle (1960).

38 Sparshott (1952). Sparshott is talking about illusion as applied to art in general.

39 Stendhal (1962).

40 See e.g. Reynolds (2000).

41 Dancy (1995: 421).

42 See Gombrich (2002: 190).

43 Taking ‘fake’ set designs to be an extension of optical illusions follows the structure of Hamilton (1982: 41), who considers and eventually rejects this formation as an instance of illusion.

44 This is one of the claims of Hamilton (1982).

45 T. Mann, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 2007), p. 32.

46 There may also be cases, as there were with Houdini, in which the ‘illusionist’ really does do something highly difficult or unusual and the audience believes truly that he has done it and admires this feat; in the context of the illusionist's performance (as opposed to the official, record-breaking attempt), not knowing what is real and what is not adds to the pleasure.

47 Frayn (2010: xi).

48 Quoted in Fogle (1960: 35).

49 See Chapter 1. If stand-up comedy is a kind of theatre, then that might be one candidate.

50 Stendhal (1962), Fogle (1960: 40) and McCollom (1947: 185–6) discuss these phenomena.

51 Lessing (1962: Section 42, p. 28) argues that they are: tragedy relies much more on the spell than comedy; breaking the spell can have comic effects.

52 Ibsen quoted in Booth (1995: 299); Bruisov (2001: 74).

53 Lessing (1962: Section 42, p. 128).

54 See Fogle (1960: 34).

55 Quoted in Fogle (1960: 36).

56 Brinker (1977: 191–6) agrees that asking spectators whether they really believed is pointless. Note that, unlike me, he uses ‘under the spell’ to indicate those moments when the spectator really believes in the action.

57 Quoted in Fogle (1960: 36).

58 McCollom (1947: 184).

59 See Chapter 6.

60 Hence, to take a standard (but non-theatrical) example, I might fear stepping into the shower after seeing Psycho; more generally, I might feel sad or emotionally drained after seeing a tragedy. But this is not a matter of entertaining false beliefs. Gendler (2003) discusses this phenomenon. The doctor-spectator at The Elephant Man, discussed above, does not (as I argued) believe everything he saw on stage – he carries over one rather major illusion.

61 Rousseau (2004: 268).

62 Schiller (1979: 169).

63 Although we think of Nietzsche as a philosopher, he was also professor of classical philology with relatively little formal philosophical training.

64 Or rather, The Birth of Tragedy is best explicated in the light of Schopenhauer's views. Nietzsche had already expressed severe reservations about Schopenhauer's metaphysics and some commentators take The Birth of Tragedy to be intelligible apart from any commitment to Schopenhauer. See Janaway (1998), in which Nietzsche's remarks are reprinted and discussed. References to The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth: BT) will give the section and, where appropriate, the page number in the listed translation.

65 See ‘Additional Remarks on the Suffering of the World’ and ‘On Suicide’ in Schopenhauer (2000). Schopenhauer's view of death is more complicated than I've suggested: individuals die, but they never really existed in the first place; the will, which creates (the illusion of) individuals, is unchanging and eternal. For Schopenhauer's own, rather different account of tragedy, see the third book of his The World as Will and Representation.

66 Sophocles (2006: 97); for Nietzsche's view of the significance of this thought, see the discussion of the story of Silenus at BT 3.

67 Schopenhauer, of course, does not have a monopoly on thoughts of this kind; but one can see how they are easily subsumable under his metaphysical framework.

68 BT 1, p. 17.

69 BT 2, p. 19.

70 BT 4.

71 The connection between Dionysus and intoxication is clear enough, in that he was the god of wine. ‘Schein’ (illusion, semblance) means ‘illusion’, but is also related to light (i.e. ‘shining’). Hence the connection with Apollo, god of the sun.

72 BT 7, p. 40.

73 Nietzsche is not so much referring to the specific arguments of Plato and Socrates, which we looked at in the previous chapter (though they may have played their part); instead, he means the Socratic method in general, with its heavy emphasis on a particular kind of rationality.

74 BT 8, p. 42.

75 Like his infatuation with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche's infatuation with Wagner weakened as he got older and he became highly critical of Wagner. But both Wagner and Schopenhauer remained significant influences on his thinking.