Content Warning: Discussion of suicide.
In 1703, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was written and produced by Japanese master playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. It followed in the tradition of shinjū plays, or double suicide plays, in which such acts were viewed as a method of accomplishing an escape from a constricting mortal materiality through a transcendent rebirth in the ‘Pure Land’. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki was based on a real double suicide, that of Tokubei, a soy sauce salesman, and Ohatsu, a sex worker, who allegedly fell in love. Yet, as it so often seems to happen, both found themselves bound by constraints of a society characterised by rigid moral divisions, oblique codes, and arcane customs, a society which created the conditions such a play critiques. Following Chikamatsu’s play, seventeen other couples within the region committed double suicides within the year. Some nineteen years following the play and after another Chikamatsu shinjū play similarly titled The Love Suicides at Amijima in 1721, the Shogunate banned the performance of all shinjū theatre.
Such stories are common in art, in theatre especially. Orestes provided for many years the model of the psychologically tortured Prince, his mother Clytemnestra the model of the psychologically tortured Queen. Throughout history there has always been a monomaniacal fictional mental case that makes swoon the hearts and heads of all young and self-celebrated aspirant aesthetes. Hamlet sweeps across the stage in a black cloak and half of Europe declares their kinship. Ophelia continues to reign today as chief melancholic maiden in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, a title not without its contenders. The workings of the interior mind is necessarily bound in the outward activity of the player themselves. Pre-modern plays relied heavily on symbols to express this to an audience, often showing the character acting in isolated self-talk. Modern diagnosis for these characters is difficult, if not downright impossible, because they act in a manner of depiction that contracts contemporary knowledge of the mind, yet still they are found to be relatable to modern audiences.
Contemporary audiences too are not without their champions. Fleabag is a more modern example of this, her talk directed both into her interior and her audience, who are also positioned as interior. Like these premodern characters, Fleabag is difficult to diagnose as her characterisation actively resists this, the focus of the show not on signposting her specific struggles or declaring her as such, but rather depicting her struggling in her world, within a continually changing mental state to serve the purpose of the expression of her character. It is this difficulty of depiction that art must contend with. It is not enough to simply declare the static diagnosis of a character and to have them act this out. What must be shown is some expression of experience, an expression that has been at the centrepoint of aesthetic criticism. Are these plays bad if they probe at some corruption of the moral fibre of the mind, if they make you recognise yourself in their emotionally scarred characters, and if they do this imperfectly? Should we simply ban the performance of art that depicts such issues as the Shogun of Chikamatsu’s era did?
This question, while perhaps platonic in nature, is best encapsulated by a turn of focus to a society which leads to the production of such art. It must become an issue over the quality of the art itself and its depiction of such matters of reality. The art must, through its core and adaptive strength of its creation as a work of art created by an individual or group, allow for the viewer to create further and further themselves. It must allow a viewer to recognise within it their own understanding of their own circumstances, societal circumstances that themselves must be interrogated. The artists themselves must treat the matter in a manner accordant with their experience of it, rather than attempt to depict it with the conscious effort to arise within the audience some emotional reaction, to knowingly twist their attempt at self expression into an attempt at wringing requisite emotions from viewers as water is wrung from cloth. It is a testament to the brilliance of plays like Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Purcell’s’ Dido and Aeneas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lear, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, indeed too Waller-Bridges’ Fleabag that they can stimulate the individuality of such a widely different audience, an audience also phenomenally removed from the playwright’s own context, largely due to the emotional truth expressed at the heart of their aesthetic totality.
At the centre of all of these works is an examination of the society they were produced in, synthesised through the holistic and sincere emotional and psychological recreations of the artist’s conception of this society. Perhaps the criticism should not initially be levied at the art itself should it succeed in stimulating the viewer. Perhaps such criticism should account also for the society which this art so often also critiques, in an attempt to understand an existence which produces within the viewers of the art these responses.
This is not to say that criticism cannot be reflected back upon the art or the production of the art itself. A recent production of Dido and Aeneas at the Opera House demonstrates the dangers of adaptation without a consideration of the implications embedded within a work. Throughout the production acrobats danced, throwing each other across the stage, to a point where it significantly distracted from the embedded themes within such a work, one being a concentration on its characters’ mental states. This, combined with the display of quotes from Notting Hill and Titanic as if the show were merely a romcom, considerably distracted and even undercut Dido’s performance and the core expression of the piece, attempting to display its traits not through an earnest expression of such conceptions, but through an attempt to demonstrate their traits through signalling, leading to a mocking of the core emotional tension inherent within Dido’s character. Such elements of modern production must be considered in the performance of premodern plays, lest they lead to a destruction of themes and conceptions in the core of these works.
This is not to say that modern productions of premodern works are not capable of expressing these complications, or that modern works must strive to venerate the past. What must be considered, indeed what is always considered in the personal interpretation of a work, is the manner in which the person creates their understanding of the work for themselves. The gulf between the past and the present is not so definite as is often conceived, and the past thrives within the present always as a matter of interpretation. These pre modern understandings must always be considered, examined, and contended with in an attempt to understand your current experience, and nowhere is this more present than within the bounds of art.
