Reaction is the basis of all drama. A play cannot come to life without being able to rely on the chain of reactions that make up the dramatic form: an electric current passed from one actor to another. The virtue of a play therefore rests on it’s credibility. Or does it?
Traditionally, theatre places an emphasis on the ability of the play’s art to reflect life in the most realistic way. The goal of the actors is to pierce the fourth wall separating the stage and the audience, reach into their minds and hearts and leave there an imprint of their production, but the crucial element to this theatrical convention is that this intended impact is never stated. That the goal of the actors is to make the audience believe in what they see enough to be moved, that they are acting at all, that their words are not their own but come from a script, that their clothes were chosen for their characterisation, and that the actors are not free to determine their own actions, but puppets to articulate an artistic message, are facts that are almost subconscious to both the actors and the audience. If, as in a production of Barnes’ The Ruling Class, a character is ordered to get off the stage, the unsaid is said, the audience is immediately uncomfortable. That what the audience is reacting to is not real, that they are in fact spectators at all, are facts that when articulated seem to dangerously toy with the conscious destruction of the fourth wall.
If, tauntingly, a character on stage asks a rhetorical question of the audience, provoking them to react to the art as they would do if they were asked the question in life, the audience almost become actors – they are unable to answer the question invoked for fear of destroying the art. The character of Bishop lampton in The Ruling Class’ statement “Therefore if anyone can show just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace.” to which characters stare deliberately at the audience is an example of this in practice. If members of the audience were able to react how they wished to what they saw, the production would cease to be a play, but a verbal interaction between actors and audience members.
That the reactions of the actors are artistic, meaning contrived, the word artistic originating from the Latin artificium, and the origins of art referring to craftsmen, and their skill to create, and the reactions of the audience, if they haven’t seen the play before, are genuine, leads to a paradox. Is reacting to art a real reaction? If one sees a play in which an actor murders another actor and one sees someone being murdered in real life, would one react in the same way? Of course not.
Reaction is based on the premise of not only repeated action – re, action, but also of a pre existing action to which the reaction comes from. But which is the first action which triggers the chain of the drama? To what does the first actor react to? Is it the ticket men tearing the tickets at the door? Is it the audience taking their seats? Is it the hush falling over the room? Is it the lights coming on the stage? Is it the actor’s first words? Is it it the first note of the orchestra? Or is it when the playwright first discovers the plot of the art? The convention of the drama dictates that these things naturally progress, one reaction leads to another reaction, until the play is finished, but when the conventions are drawn attention to, the line between art and life is made conscious, the life that the art represents is at risk of being shattered. In the same way that some members of the audience have run on stage to save Cordelia in a particularly riveting production of King Lear, the lives of the characters are at risk when their being characters becomes apparent.
The Ruling Class is a particular instance of playing with theatre, and drawing on its artificiality. The alternate reality that exists for the protagonist Jack, a paranoid schizophrenic, namely, that he is married to a fictional character, is manifested in the form of the lady of the Camelias in act 1, who is in fact a woman pretending to be his supposed wife bribed by his family in order to cajole him into marrying, and thereby release his inheritance. This is another instance in which a work of literature becomes life, within a play which is equally an enactment of a literary work. The last line of scene 8 draws on this irony as Dinsdale Gurney exclaims
“I say, Mother’s just told me this Lady-of-the-Camelia-woman’s a fake. I know J.C.’s as batty as a moor-hen, sir, but this isn’t playing the game.”
To which Sir Charles replies, “Game? What game? It’s no game, Sir! This is real.” Indeed, when confronted with this, Jack refuses to accept the boundary between reality and art, and becomes frenzied, and even more bound up in his own world, seen by the stage directions upon his being confronted with the truth of the tale – “The Earl puts his hand to his face; when he takes it away his features are covered with white make-up.” If he were to accept that the Lady of the Camelias was a fictional character, and that his father had asked someone to pretend to be her, he might also have to accept that he himself is playing a part, that he is a fictional character, and a literary figure. Thus his inability to concede that the lady of the Camelias is artificial, is also his inability to concede that he himself is artificial. In this instance madness is blurring the boundary between art and life, to such an extent that it becomes impossible to distinguish between the two.
So reaction, the chain of electric current which defines the movement of the play, and on which the play depends, when broken, shatters the illusion. If the audience has no reaction to the art, the play becomes useless. If the actors have no reaction to each other, the play naturally ceases to be credible, and the art is destroyed. It is the reaction on which the dramatic form rests, but when the role of the actors and the audience is made explicit during the production, the world that exists for the actors and for the audience from the time they take their seats to the time of the first clap of the applause, is exposed as both real and not real; A psychological paradox which both fascinates and terrifies those involved.
