On the Relevance of Punk

I guess I’ve been partial to “pulp” plays for a long time now…ever since I first saw Steve Pickering and Charley Sherman’s Cyberpunk adaptation, William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, at The Next Theatre in Evanston.  I was still an undergraduate at the time, and in love with all things that seemed to challenge traditional ideas of what art should be.  As a card-carrying sci-fi geek, the prospect of presenting an icon of pop-culture as high art was just too great a temptation to pass up.

The Poor Players’ Guild, the campus predecessor of what would one day become Idle Muse Theatre Company, acquired the rights to and performed Burning Chrome in the Spring of 2000.  Three years later I would stage that same play again as my graduate thesis, using the production as a sort of personal barometer to gauge how much I had learned in the interim.

I like pulp literature, like Sherlock Holmes, because it serves as sort of modern mythology. To borrow a bit from my thesis, Cyberpunk stories, like Burning Chrome, Blade Runner (adapted from Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and The Matrix take place in a dystopian future—a sort of out-of-control information age, in which nations and economies have faded away in favor of the only true remaining currency: data. 

Generally, in Cyberpunk, these forces give rise to some sort of all-encompassing social and technological system that is in direct conflict with the human.

In any narrative, relationships are a kind of mirror in which various aspects of the protagonist are reflected.  But when those relationships become so numerous and complex as to be overwhelming, one cannot be distinguished from another. One’s sense of self is lost in the maelstrom of collective identity. There is no self distinct from the group, no unique identity, only a machine-like producer-consumer of the master system.

The fact that Cyberpunk characters are criminals makes them rebels against the rules of their society, which is the force of dehumanization. Humans in Cyberpunk are turning, metaphorically and literally, into machines. Against this setting, the punk becomes a symbol of the human struggle against the forces of dehumanization that we fear exist even in our own information-driven world today.

So, why all these words about Cyberpunk in a blog dedicated to a play about Sherlock Holmes? More on that in the next post…and a look at something called Steampunk…

The Old Order Changeth

Longtime Idle Muse fans who saw Bloody Poetry (2008) already know that we have an interest in the Romantic Poets. At the same time, I’ve also always been partial to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I’ve always seen him as something of a transition poet, straddling the divide between the Romantic and Victorian Era’s.

In the literary timeline I posted a few days ago, I dated Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in 1885, because that’s when the epic poem was completed. He actually began composing it in 1834, just prior to Victoria’s taking the throne. It was published over time in sections (idylls) and is considered by many to be something of an ongoing commentary on the era in which the poet lived.

The Victorians found in the myth of King Arthur an image of themselves. Throughout the period, there was a resurgence of Arthurian themes depicted in art and literature. The tale of the legendary British king’s emergence, rise and death provided a ready metaphor for the changing nature of their times – and they were indeed full of change.

Victoria’s reign oversaw the Industrial Revolution in England, and with it urbanization, overpopulation and widespread poverty. Simultaneously, this occurred at the height of the British Empire, a period called the Pax Britannica, during which British colonial interests and trade power were unmatched throughout the world. Meanwhile, science and technology were blossoming: gasworks and sanitation systems improved the quality of life in major cities, soap and antiseptics gained widespread use, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species rocked the world.

Underscoring all of this, a strict moral code sought to suppress the expression of emotion and rampant libertinism of previous ages – in a society that was becoming more and more deeply influenced by “oriental” ideas from abroad, even as it was reshaped by new technologies.

A side note: I love Wikipedia.

You can’t use it for academic purposes and you can’t blindly trust it – but if you already know a bit about a given subject, it can make for great conversation starters – not to mention dramturgical summaries in actor packets. For those looking to learn more about Victorian England, a couple of Wikipedia articles which, if not comprehensive or academically rigorous, make for good primers on the subject are:

Victorian Morality – short, condensed historical context

Victorian Era – longer and broader in focus

As for Tennyson, named Poet Laureate during this period, he addressed the fast-turning Victorian world in his Idylls through Bedivere’s lament, spoken as his king lay dying:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

Facing the harsh realities of the Industrial Revolution and looking back on the Romantic Era, it must have seemed to the Victorians that they might indeed be standing at the end of an ideal age. But Tennyson wanted to offer his readers one more thing…

Hope.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

During the Victorian Era, people began looking at society analytically and believing it could be improved. There was a kind of faith that the acquisition and application of knowledge could better the individual and the world. This is the same era that gave birth to John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle – and during which people were reading the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. This is the era in England that gave birth to the idea of the self-made man, through which a burgeoning middle class won a place at the table among the aristocracy based on the strength of personal success.

This was the idea that an industrial, imperialist society, with all its inherent imperfections and injustices, could be better understood and was constantly evolving, on its way to something better:

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint,
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Even to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Where Credit is Due

More posts on Sherlock soon to come, but first I need to do a quick plug for Paul Holmquist’s Neverwhat? blog.  Paul’s directing an adaptation of one of my favorite novels, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, over at Lifeline Theatre that opens April 30 – and it looks like it’s going to be fantastic.

I also need to give Paul credit, because his production blog is the conceptual model I based The Road to Baker Street off of (read: “stole shamelessly from”).  Check it out at:

Neverwhat?

Literary Levers

Directors read. Directors read a lot. One of the first things we do when beginning a new production process is try to immerse ourselves as much as possible in the world of the play. This takes many forms: iPod playlists, collections of art and poetry, handwritten lists of images and sense-responses to the text, and often the reading of a great many books and articles. We go through a lot of highlighters. Knowing the history a story is set against is a critical component of the given circumstances in which the characters operate. Other people’s ideas, whether you find yourself agreeing with them or not, are great levers for prying open the text, tipping you off to angles of analysis and approaches to thinking about the play you may have otherwise missed entirely.

One of the first things that jumped out at me immediately when beginning this work was the incredibly broad range of disparate literary works the period produced – so much so that I found myself stopping everything else to assemble a timeline of when they were published. Arranging them in order is like looking at a fantastic cross-section of the ideas that were at play shaping people’s lives during the reign of Victoria in England.

More on this to come…in the meantime, here’s the list:

Timeline of Victorian Era Literature

1813 – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

1819 – Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

1833 – Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1837 – Begin Reign of Queen Victoria

1837 – The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle

1839 – The Adventures of Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

1841 – On Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle

1843 – A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

1844 – The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels

1845 – Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman

1850 – David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

1854 – The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1854 – Walden, Henry David Thoreau (United States)

1859 – On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

1859 – A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

1859 – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (trans.), Edward Fitzgerald

1859 – On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

1861 – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

1864 - Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman

1865 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

1872 – Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

1879 – Euclid and his Modern Rivals, Lewis Carroll

1883 – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

1885 - Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1885 – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

1886 – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

1887 – A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1888 – A New English Dictionary (OED), Vol 1

1890 – Gunga Din, Rudyard Kipling

1891 – A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1891 – Rerum Novarum “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” – Pope Leo XIII, influenced by Henry Edward Cardinal Manning

1893 – The Final Problem, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1894 – The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

1895 – The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

1897 – Dracula, Bram Stoker

1899 – Rudyard Kipling

1901 – End Reign of Queen Victoria

1902 – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1923 – Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw

Broad as Nature

Welcome to The Road to Baker Street, an online diary of my research for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, adapted by Steven Dietz (based on the original 1899 play by William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle). Sherlock is scheduled to open in August of 2010, but evoking the Victorian world Holmes and company will inhabit on the stage is actually a journey that begins months before the first rehearsal or the play is even cast. Over the coming months, I will endeavor to share some the of experiences and insights we discover along the way.

"Steel True, Blade Straight"