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William Storm Irony and the Modern TheatreIrony and the Modern Theatre. William Storm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+256.

2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/671967

1545-6951

Martin Andrucki,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeWilliam Storm Irony and the Modern Theatre Irony and the Modern Theatre. William Storm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+256.Martin AndruckiMartin AndruckiBates College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWilliam Storm’s Irony and the Modern Theatre revisits some well-mapped territory, surveying as it does the nature and purpose of irony in selected dramatic texts from Ibsen to Tony Kushner. He also scans, though in a more cursory way, the possibilities of mise en scène—the scenic element that makes theater theater—as a vehicle for irony.As Storm tells us in his introductory chapter, irony’s “identity always lies fundamentally in meaningful opposition and juxtaposition” (11). That being the case, it’s difficult to imagine drama of any sort—modern or otherwise—that does not rely on irony as a fundamental structural element. A play without “meaningful opposition and juxtaposition” is like a joke without a punch line: all setup, no payoff. Without irony, we wind up with what Aristotle called the “simple plot,” an arrangement of incidents lacking recognition and reversal, those moments of “opposition and juxtaposition” between present and prior states of knowledge and happiness. Without an ironic recognition, Oedipus would still fancy himself the child of Luck, and without an ironic reversal, Agamemnon would be tucking into a hearty dinner in his palace at Argos after a nice warm bath. Absent recognition and reversal, characters remain the same from start to finish, and the events of the plot roll unsurprisingly along, like mile markers on a turnpike.Strong informs us that, “by way of anchoring” his analysis of irony, he will “return to such concepts as personification, embodiment, [and] enactment” (11), a focus that will lead him to pay “extensive attention to representative characters, to the figures that, in effect, bear the ironic freight” in order to “relate a spectrum of ironic techniques, capabilities, and world-views directly to figures that are shown in individuated theatrical situations, relationships, historical periods, and locations” (12). The variety in period and location is important, Storm explains, because irony is to be “understood as a phenomenon that is historical as well as aesthetic” and because it “has fluctuated notably in potency in range and application since the early twentieth century” (11–12).Strong begins somewhat earlier than the twentieth century with an analysis of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, first performed in 1893. His chapter title tells us that the play is an example of “Irony Personified” (13), with Halvard Solness, the master himself, as a vehicle of constant “ironic self-awareness” (13), always conscious of the fact that he owes his success as a builder to the blaze that destroyed his wife’s family house, an eyesore he replaced with a home of his own design, thus launching his brilliant career. But that fire also indirectly resulted in the deaths of his twin sons and the hollowing out of his family life, so that his good luck was also his greatest misfortune. And because he secretly longed for the blaze, he is also plagued by a sense of guilt for its consequences. In creating Solness, according to Storm, Ibsen has fashioned a “character…for whom life’s incidents turn into evidence of an inclusive pattern” (15), a character “excruciatingly aware…of the contradictions” both “in his circumstances” and in “their meaning” (17). Indeed, the ironies surrounding Solness are so perfect in their aesthetic and moral joinery that they seem to imply the existence of “levels of supersensory activity and implication” (36), something like a divinity that shapes the builder’s ends.Storm next turns his attention to two Chekhov characters, Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Vershinin from The Three Sisters (1901). Lopakhin, he asserts, “occupies the dramatic center” (41) of The Cherry Orchard and, like Solness, is a “personification of…irony” (40). Also like Solness, he is fully aware of the ironies that he embodies, nowhere more keenly so than the moment in Act III when he announces that he has bought the estate, savoring his transformation from servant to landlord and also, in Storm’s view, fully conscious of the ironic fact that he “has been so energetic in his effort for this result not to come about” (48). Vershinin, by contrast, is “irony’s unwitting spokesman,” though he is “also its performative agent in the action” (40). Constantly philosophizing about the distant past and far-off future, “irony’s moment,” for Vershinin, “is neither recognized nor isolated in time. It is, rather, perpetual, existing in the relentlessly mysterious present condition of his past recollections and future predictions” (72).We then double back to the late nineteenth century with a discussion of Shaw’s Candida (1894), under the heading “Irony and Dialectic” (73), with Storm using the latter term in its most forthright sense of logical, moral, or political disputation. The play takes up “the critical issues that arise around maternity, marital and extramarital relations, the romantic or idealistic versus pragmatic viewpoint, [and] action versus talk” (75). It is the ragged and physically unprepossessing poet, Marchbanks, who must serve as “the drama’s chief catalytic agent” and the “prompt” for the dialectical strife that shapes the play (75). It is, for example, the catalytic presence of Marchbanks that exposes the angel-tongued preacher, Morell, as mere sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. The “critical issues” in dispute are subject to the pressures of “opposition and juxtaposition,” leaving none of them—or rather, none of their advocates—in undisputed possession of the field at the play’s end, which suggests, ironically, “that irresolution is in fact the dialectical goal” (102).In Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), the Father’s view of himself is forever undermined by the Stepdaughter’s hatred and contempt for him, while the Stepdaughter’s rage is undercut by the Father’s remorse and penitential kindness to his shadow family. Thus, the ironic “layering” is so thick, in Storm’s view, that the various levels “must finally cancel one another out,” with irony becoming “a powerfully negative proposition.…That the theatre can deliver the total import of this combination…is at the core of this play’s transcendent and ongoing impact” (107).Like Pirandello’s Father, Brecht’s Mother Courage, another parent, also ironically subverts the meaning of her name. As she experiences the deaths of Swiss Cheese and Kattrin, the audience “sees Courage’s level of participation, as well as her reactions” (127). Through such moments the play reveals “the most profound contradiction of all, that between a mother’s creation and a war’s destruction” (127). Additionally, Brecht’s Courage is meant to be viewed through a distancing theatrical lens, that of the alienation effect. Supposedly estranged from the character through this filtering process, the audience is free to observe and analyze the ironies of her actions undistracted by pity and fear—a situation ironically not evident during the 1949 German premier of Mother Courage (1941), when viewers soaked their hankies with empathetic tears.The ironies in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) are on ear-catching exhibition, with language serving as the major obstacle to communication and instead persistently functioning as the vehicle for empty banality or interminable rigmarole, devolving finally into gibberish. Moreover, as Storm intriguingly notes, the play’s mannered drawing-room conversations among tightly-wound members of the British bourgeoisie invite comparison with “the theatrical worlds of Wilde, Shaw, or Coward” (139), where, in ironic contrast with The Bald Soprano, language glitters with intelligence and wit.Through its ironic juxtaposition of scenes from the past and the present, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993), “steadfastly questions the ability of historical inquiry to determine the personalities and passions, if not the events” (159) of earlier ages. The audience witnesses both the honest mistakes and the self-serving wrongheadedness of the contemporary characters who attempt to recapture the events and personalities of a previous century. Meanwhile, back in that “unknowable” past—which, paradoxically, we, as spectators, get to know quite well—Septimus conducts his intellectual and carnal affairs in blithe, Oedipus-like ignorance of the dire fate that will overwhelm him on the morning after the play’s final scene. Stoppard thus adds another stratum of irony to the play, conjoining the inability of the present to know the distant past with the complementary incapacity of the past to foresee its own immediate future.Noting that Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles (1988) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part I (1991) achieve many of their ironic effects through their knowing deployment of references to pop-cultural artifacts and personalities, Storm points out the consequent “limitations in terms of shelf life” (192) for such works. The enactments of irony prevalent in these plays often involve either hipster-to-hipster sharing of cultural references or hipsters talking over the heads of their straight-man interlocutors, which leads Storm to observe that “the characters’ use of irony can be as much for mutual recognition [and] community” (205) as for other, more far-reaching ends.In his final chapter, “Irony’s Theatre,” Storm pays somewhat more extended attention to the power of staging and stage imagery to create dramatic irony than he does elsewhere in the book, where such matters are largely overlooked—an odd omission, given the obsession with mise en scène that has animated so many dramatists and directors in the modern period. From Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau through Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht and down to Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Giorgio Strehler, and Robert Wilson, the drive for an intensified “poetry of the theater” has been a preoccupation of the makers of the modern stage. Having largely passed over these matters, Storm makes a welcome acknowledgment that dialectic and irony in the theater “are likely to be sensory… [and] may be seen as well as heard,” which sets them apart from the way they “might operate in, say, a literary narrative” (217). He follows this unexceptionable statement with a discerning commentary on the importance of the sharply differing physical appearances of Morell, Candida, and Marchbanks as indispensable elements in establishing the ironies in their relationships. More such discussion of the physical dimensions of theatrical irony would have been illuminating throughout.Finally, Storm asks us to consider that cosmic irony—the sense that our relationship to the universe is both “inscrutable” and marked by “meaningfulness” (222)—has fallen on hard times. Although it is “among its more exalted qualities,” the “cosmic trait” may also be seen as “among [irony’s] rarest manifestations.…Irony of late, or in the postmodern context, is more localized, more constrained, and more skeptical of so embracing a view, its referentiality narrowed at times to merely a sly quotation” (223). Strong’s account of the evolution of irony from Ibsen to Kushner supports that conclusion. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671967 Views: 345Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.