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Literary Critique
TROLLEY CAR LINE GREED |
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By Anthony Steyning |
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Don’t get me wrong, A Streetcar Named Desire’s a great rhythmic title and it’s what Tennessee Williams was truly terrific at: seductive labels firing up our imagination well before taking in one of his plays. Titles like a car dealer's banners and flags, as with Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten or Long Day's Journey into Night, making one wonder if the playwright hit upon a grand tag first, then managed to write a play around it until getting struck by that great American disease of sinking into self-parody. The type that musically and so pathetically afflicted talents like Liberace and Elvis. But what the hell, the marquee's everything, ain’t it? Though applause does lead to artistic death, small doses at the time, as does lauding by the hour and insipid flattery by the line. It did Mr. Williams in, which is a shame, but you can't get around it, it all started with titles just being titles, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has nothing to with cats and tin roofs, and as far as I know Night of the Iguana hasn't a single lizard on stage. And as for The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More, well, all right, perhaps a half-symbolism, but you do get my point. Thus with A Streetcar Named Desire, in fact dealing little or not with streetcars. A work containing no more panting or slow-burning desire and emotionally crippled characters unable to unconditionally acknowledge and accept each other, and all this conjures up, than stage creations by others tall and short. Of course everything can be made to fit, including the Elysian Field neighborhood of New Orleans, suddenly a Purgatory rather than the vaunted mythical Valhalla where slain heroes frolicked, but convenient poetic license aside, shouldn't metaphors apart from being beautiful, make some unexpected sense? Unless, of course... they're nothing of the sort.
Beside the 'Tennessee' business, the slickness of the State nick-name (Can you imagine Sir Normandy Halliday?), plus Mr Williams’ imaginative, baroque southern language and much name-dallying rather than tight, contemporary plots, and speaking a handful of languages myself, it always amazed me how European theatre folks took his titles so literally and his work in such vapid awe. For on another level, would anybody in his right mind ever announce Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood as Below Lactic Forest? Yet that sort of mechanical stuff gets paraded round by civil-servant run, state funded continental European theatre. I mean, a look at the Welsh map quickly reveals there in fact exists the remnant of a forest quaintly called Milk Wood. And certainly, it's rather difficult figuring out what milk and woods have in common, but that's the way it is and there's nothing we can do about it. It's the one part Mr. Thomas didn't make up. So once there existed a milky white forest, one more commonly associated with Siberia than with Wales. So what! Perhaps already then an obscure metaphor, though certainly not one now. Either way Milk Wood, being a 'nom propre', is to be left alone in the way that Montenegro is never translated as Blackmountain or Carlsberg and Monte Carlo as Charlie's Mountain. What gets translated is the 'Under' part, the preposition, leading to something like En dessous Milk Wood Sotto Milk Wood Onder Milk Wood Unter Milk Wood Debajo Milk Wood or whatever, in a given idiom. But what at this particular time provokes my brief outburst is the ridiculous translation of A Streetcar Named Desire by those same state perpetrators. For 'Desire' shouldn't be translated into something that despite Tennessee Williams' naughty insistence never was. A Streetcar Named Desire’s a clever take all right, it has the makings of such a magnificent metaphor, except that this streetcar rides for real, in New Orleans, and an old rickety affair it is. With as end of the line the Desire neighborhood where Desire Street and Desire Parkway reign. In fact End Line Desire or A Streetcar To Oblivion would have been a far more apt title for the play, given its dramatic surge. Still, it does ring so much better than, say, A Subway Direction Idlewild Airport, if then, all the way back in the late forties, the plot had been set in Queens, N.Y. The problem then with the Europeans is never taking the trouble to travel to New Orleans, and in translation having augmented William’s little title fraud to a degree bordering lunacy. Coming up, and translating it all straight back for you, with titles like Trolley Car Line Greed, producing an image of someone compulsively absconding with public transport units. (Damn, there comes another one. I'm getting mighty tired of this! Do I get anything else done today?)
So that what this is all about is not so much Mr. Williams and the dutiful, industrial productions of his work in Amsterdam, Prague, Antwerp and like cities, but all that lazy European hero-worship. Or better still, the living off international name-tags, the going along blindly of it, the lacking of all pride of it, the sad absence of critical judgment of it, the seeking to be looked up to as an important cog in the theatre trade without having a grain of creative judgment or ability oneself. Serving up and getting away with risk-free, pre-approved works: the frequency with which these and other 'known' plays are repeated staggering. This no longer about stage art, this is all about attempting to obtain stature by association. This is all about robbing great talent, playwrights nearer by, of oxygen and opportunity. Those who wait and wait and who are often shut out until they die, as production budgets, inevitably limited, get squandered on 'recognition' pieces, produced like cultural pabulum, bad translations mostly adding insult to injury. - Did you like it? - Oh, darling, It gave me the shivers. It was so dutiful... - Pardon me?
Anyway, when traveling around Europe, should you notice the staging of yet another Tennessee Williams play, advertised for the 100th time in Zurich, Zagreb or Modena, try not to be impressed. And if you haven’t got a clue which particular play’s up except for the author’s name below it simply because you don't understand the local language it's written in, don’t worry. Neither likely do the comfortable, don't-rock-the boat, hip-on-the-surface-but-tragically-conventional chaps behind such stage fluff. All of it art by committee, with predictable results. Shocks, maybe it's just me, but I don’t think these ego-tripping, falsely anointed fonctionnaires should ever mount another Trolley Car Line Greed. Anymore than they would A Highway Job Called Robbery, by the superb Oxfordshire Smith. Help Critical Thought Survive, Help Total Literary Originality; Any small donation is Deeply Appreciated:
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