Tragedy, Edith Piaf, and Toast

Just been to see King Lear at the Globe.

Year 7 science taught me an important fact about Tragedy. It wasn't just the fact that we deliberately destroyed every shred of self-respect that our teacher could cobble together every lesson -(although we did)- It was the difference between a reversible and irreversible reaction.

A reversible reaction is something like water - ice. It can go both ways. An irreversible reaction, so went the immortal example, is something like bread turning into toast. Once bread has become toast it cannot unbecome toast. Here, as it were, are the seeds of tragedy.

Bear with me.

Plays are essentially reversible reactions pretending to be irreversible, i.e. man standing up to man lying down (reversible) masquerading as man alive to man dead (irreversible). For tragedies to work, the actors have to make us believe that irreversible things really are happening. We need to watch the stage, gripped in the complete belief that something - beauty, youth, love, truth, hope - whatever - is being forever consumed, burnt up, destroyed, toasted, and can never be replaced. We see terrible things happen to the characters, and we want to see it almost physically eat away at them, because then we can believe.

Real life can go one better than tragedies in this respect. If we believe the papers, and believe that Amy Winehouse is destroying herself, then we are fascinated by her. Although I doubt it, I sometimes believe she is killing herself to some extent, and as a result I find her otherwise demure stage presence gripping.

Edith Piaf is a better example, by virtue of the fact that she was a 20th century Winehouse who has already completed the journey through genius, drugs, to death. Her early records are a mix a barnstorming music hall melodies with maudlin sentimentality. Towards the end of her career when (so I hear), eaten away by heroin, every performance could be her last, sentimental songs take over. Predictable, perhaps.

But there is nonetheless something else interesting happening in the arrangements. The melodies swell up to and finish on long, high bravura notes which would be a challenge for any singer in decent health, let alone an ageing junkie. However the arrangers kept on putting these notes in: the later the songs, the longer and higher the notes. The early songs don't have any of this, which makes sense, because Piaf's voice didn't even suit it. She wasn't an opera singer, after all. However these notes are there as a framework for a cruel kind of exhibition, a way of stringing out a dying performer over greater and greater lengths. Because this is where the fascination lay. The grim fascination in seeing someone struggle to come up to performance, all the time knowing that the shock to the system could be fatal. With these high notes, it is all -can she? Can't she? Will she make it? The fascination is of seeing something - life - consumed, eaten up, onstage.

As I have said, the best performances of tragedy are where there appear to be irreversible reactions in the actors. However, directors have devised various ways to get this 'once and once only' effect through props or sets rather than actors. In Tim Supple's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, there were some poor sods whose job it was to paste up paper as a huge backcloth over some scaffolding, which the actors could then burst through at the beginning of the play. I heard of a Complicité in which all props, some costumes, and a lot of the set, were torn or folded from long rolls of paper rolled out all the length of the playing space. Then there was Auto Auto, the German musical/performance piece, where two performers cut up and destroyed a car, making music out of the component parts as they went. In all of these, props or the set are deliberately destroyed every performance.

Watching these onstage tricks can be disappointing, however, Watching a glass smash on stage, the instant reaction can be ... hmm, a glass smashed on stage, I wonder how much that is costing them over the run. I.e. it doesn't convince us of the irreversibility of the moment.

Hence I didn't go to Auto Auto because I heard they were too gentle with the car. So it is with drama as well: when I watch it I want to feel like I have seen something properly destroyed, properly irreversibly toasted. And this Lear comes close. David Calder is at his best in II, 4, in a magnificent rant at his daughters which seemed in my eyes to be one moment the earth-crushing rage of a titan, and the next to be the embarassing tantrum of an old man. His onstage stamping was magnificent. I have never seen anyone stamp like I have seen David Calder stamp this evening.

However, the diagnosis of the performance must wait for another time, because unfortunately it doesn't belong to the point about toast.