Plato In Theatre

Dear M., I am trying to answer your questions as well as I can. As I see it, they all relate to the connection between content and form. At some point in my work with Plato, I asked myself the question: Why did Plato say, what he had to say, in a dialogue and not in a normal text? Normally, philosophers say their opinion in a straightforward text. What matters, is the content and not the form of the text. The form of a text is usually the concern of the poet or the playwright. Let me illustrate with two examples, what I am trying to say. I once saw a mosque. It was an old building, very beautiful. On it were writings in Arabic letters. I was told that those writings were quotes from the Koran. The Arabic letters intertwined like dancing snakes or whirling ivy. Everything was made as a mosaic with bright, colourful stones. Now, I do not know Arabic, cannot distinguish Arabic letters, have not read the Koran, yet, am not a Moslem, and have not been raised in an Islamic tradition. Still, those writings talked to me through the form its maker had given to them. The meanings I read were something like harmony, beauty, joy of life, devotion, pride, self-confidence, humility. All through and only the form. Or someone tells that he ate an apple. He can just say that, give the information. Or he describes the apple, the different tastes he experiences, and his own condition while eating it. Or further, he can say which feelings and memories those tastes evoke in him. Maybe memories of his childhood in his long-dead grandparents’ garden, memories of a world without cynicism and bitterness. Then he puts all this into a rhythmic language and condenses it into a few sentences. The result is a poem that speaks through its form as much as through the information of the words. In philosophy, the content wants to reach its readers through the intellect. In the arts, the form wants to reach the spectators/viewers/readers through the sub-conscious in order to stir up emotions. The form bears a meaning that cannot be defined so easily intellectually, but that meaning can nevertheless be very strong. I am positive that Plato wanted to combine those two ways of saying his convictions: through the intellectual concept and through the artistic form. I am also sure that the intellectual concept mattered more to Plato than the form of his texts. Whenever it becomes too important for him that a text be not interrupted by questions, he lets Socrates go off on long monologues. Still, in order to understand Plato fully, one has to study the form he gave to his texts as well. One will often find that the dialogues are carefully moulded and constructed in terms of rhythm, words, irony, or seriousness. “Hippias minor” is a very good example for that. Now, do I think that Plato intended his dialogues to be performed? The theatrical experience, which truly first of all is an emotional one, can manipulate the spectators in order to keep them attached to the events on the stage and through this make them follow an intellectually very demanding philosophical discourse which many people would normally find dry and boring and would abandon. That theatrical experience is true, of course, also for literature. (Compare e. g. with the long philosophical passages in Dostoyevsky.) And I think that Plato experimented with forms. As said, dialogues like “Hippias minor” with all their careful use of rhythm, speed, humour, etc. consist even of a dramatic setting: Hippias is in a dilemma between the challenging Socrates and Eudicos spectator. In the “Symposium” he uses the device that one usually knows only from literature: somebody tells somebody else about remarkable events happened a long time ago. This way those events become somewhat mysterious. In other dialogues, however, one finds only a pure dialectic question-answer scheme. I think that Plato wanted his works at least to be read by a wider than only a specialist public. On the other hand, we know that at his times it was quite common to memorize extremely long texts in order to perform them, like e. g. Homer’s epics. So why not memorize and perform a text that is a bit longer like the “Republic”? As for teaching purposes, I am of the opinion that some dialogues or parts of dialogues were performed within his philosophy school. One cannot perform even only a small part of the dialogues without fully understanding them. Only memorizing the words is not enough. This has been a painful experience for me as an actor, when I tried to play a Platonic character. And it does not matter, whether the performer is a professional actor or, let us say, a philosophy student. Therefore it could be an interesting exercise with your students, if you gave them a part of Plato, let us say the final of “Hippias minor” or the geometry part in “Meno”, and had them memorize and perform it in class. Now to your questions, I find it difficult to say whether they are “plays”, “performances”, or “dramas”. They are, first of all, philosophical dialogues with some of them having a lot of dramatic elements. They can all be played and performed, but some are more and some less exciting. The words “play”, “performance”, and “drama” can all be exactly translated into German: “Stück”, the actual theatrical piece; “Aufführung”, the play being shown on stage; and “Drama”, a theatrical piece with a rather dramatic content in opposition to a comedy. About your second question, whether in Germany we have a different than a generally conceptual orientation. From what I have come across, we do not have a different tradition than you in Iran. I must say, though, that I have not studied philosophy in the university nor moved around in philosophy circles. To bring Plato to the stage seems to be an exceptional experiment that is done very rarely. To my surprise, however, the performances of “Hippias minor” and “Ion” were well received and had a sold-out audience for the four nights that they were shown. There was request for more performances later, with teachers wanting their school classes to see it, but the theatre director did not wish it to be in his programme anymore. There was a big theatre in Berlin, the Schaubühne, that in 1996 or 1997 did the “Symposium”. I have been brought to Plato by my directing teacher, Yury Alshitz. He, a Russian living in Berlin, had worked with Plato in his directing school in Moscow. His teacher there, Anatoly Vasilyev, seems to be the one that had the idea to bring Plato to the theatre. I know that his students have had to work with Plato for many years now.

To your last question, whether I think in Plato’s dialogues we have personalities or characters. First of all, it is not so easy to distinguish these two terms. If we say that a “personality” is a figure that merely fulfils an action and that a “character” is more than this, that it is an archetypal representation of human beings, then I think that in Plato we have both. The more Plato uses literary and theatrical devices for his texts, the more his figures become like real humans with passions, emotions, etc. and therefore characters. The “Symposium” is a very good example for that. The more he stays away from that and retreats to a mere dialectical search of definitions, the more his figures are just pawns in a predevised scheme, and, according to my earlier definition, only personalities. I hope to have met your questions. A.