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Quantum Theatre – Potential Theatre: a New Paradigm?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David E. R. George
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Extract

The ‘theatre of the world’, or Theatrum Mundi, offered a pervasive emblematic view of the relationship between God, as playwright and audience, and his terrestrial creation. Although this became peculiarly appropriate during the Renaissance period, views of the theatre as microcosmic of the larger world have persisted – whether in the consciously wrought imagery of modern sociology or the unconscious colloquial useage of theatrical terms to describe everyday behaviour. In the article which follows, David E. R. George suggests that the ‘view’ of the subatomic world presented by quantum theory makes for a paradigm which is no less compelling, according to which the sense of theatrical ‘potentiality’ which characterizen much contemporary experimental theatre is illuminated and paralleled by the refusal of scientific certainty that quantum theory confronts and accommodates. David George. whose ‘Letter to a Poor Actor’ appeared in NTQ 8 (1986), taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Gottingen, Malaysia, and Peking before taking up his present post at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His books include studies of Ibsen. German tragic theory, and Indian ritual dance–drama.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 18 , May 1989 , pp. 171 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

Notes and References

1. On the history of the Theatrum Mundi metaphor, cf. Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Barish, Jonas A., The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).Google Scholar

2. Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Penguin, 1969), p. 246.Google Scholar

3. Davies, Paul, Other Worlds (London: Abacus, 1981), p. 9.Google Scholar

4. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 4f.Google Scholar

5. Kuhn, op. cit., p. 175.

6. Davies, op. cit., p.9.

7. Davies, op. cit., p. 13.

8. Eadem, p. 14.

9. Ibid..

10. Everett, Hugh III, in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ed. DeWitt, B. S. and Graham, N. (Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 4.Google Scholar

11. Whittaker, , quoted in Talbot, Michael, Mysticism and the New Physics (Bantam, 1981), p. 77.Google Scholar

12. Ibid.., p. 79.

13. Wolf, Fred Alan, Taking the Quantum Leap (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 184.Google Scholar

14. Davies, op. cit., p. 12.

15. Zukav, Gary, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Bantam, 1979), p. 193.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.., p. 306.

17. Cf. John Wheeler: ‘May the universe in some strange sense be “brought into being” by the active participation of those who participate?… The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says’, (quoted in Zukav, op. cit., p. 29). Cf. Kostelanetz, Richard, writing about the avant-garde contemporary theatre: ‘the performance envelops the audience, who generally do not intend to be spectators, by allowing them to feel that they are participants in a significant process’ (The Theatre of Mixed Means (London: Pitman, 1970), p. 5).Google Scholar

18. Zukav, op. cit., p. 133.

19. Davies, op. cit., p. 145.

20. Talbot, op. cit., p. 130.

21. Davies, op. cit., p. 13.

22. Cf. Kostelanetz., op. cit., Schechner, Richard, The End of Humanism (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

23. Zukav, op. cit., p. 34 f.

24. Sypher, Wylie, The Ethic of Time (New York, 1976), p. 129.Google Scholar

25. Zukav, op. cit., p. 75.

26. Sypher, op. cit., p. 129, 130.

27. Cf. Goffman, op. cit., p. 20.

28. Goffman writes, quite explicitly, in the Preface to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: ‘the audience constitutes a third party to the interaction – one that is essential and yet, if the stage performance were real, one that would not be there. In real life, the three parties are compressed into two’ (op. cit., p. 9).

29. Jauss, H. R., Aesthetische Erfahrung and literarische Hermeneutik (Munich, 1977), p. 191.Google Scholar

30. Op cit., p. 136f.

31. In Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Fokkema, Douwe and Bertens, Hans (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1984), p. 53.Google Scholar

32. Ihab Hassan is one of the few to acknowledge this debt to Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty: cf. Fokkema and Bertens, op. cit., p. 28.

33. In Fokkema and Bertens, op. cit., p. 34.

34. Ibid.., p. 38.

35. The whole question of ontology has received new significance today, and the terms ontology and epistemology find themselves interchanged in a confusing manner. As McHale writes: ‘push ontological questions far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions’ (Forkkema and Bertens, op. cit., p. 60). And, we might say, the reverse too. As used here, ontology is the science of what ‘is’ and since the ‘what is’ is universally regarded now as dependent on the observer, the interpreter, all ontologies become epistemologies in the sense of knowable constructs as much posited by the speaker as observed ‘out there’.

36. Derrida writes of ‘the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming’ about which Leitch comments: ‘As prophet, Derrida presents to us deconstructive man–who accepts in joy and affirmation the play of the world,… the activity of interpretation.’ See Leitch, V. B., Deconstructive Criticism (Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 37–8.Google Scholar

37. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico ‘attacks the scholastic or essentialist idea that man has a fixed an unalterable nature’, and in effect anticipates Sartre's claim that man must define himself.… God is represented as saying to man: ‘A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself.… Thou, like a judge appointed for being honourable, art the moulder and maker of thyself: thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatsoever shape thou dost prefer’ (Lyman, S. M. and Scott, M. B., The Drama of Social Reality (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 51).Google Scholar

38. The author was Thomas Beard. For an analysis of Providence Theory, cf. Keith, Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin, 1973).Google Scholar

39. Cf. Erring: a Postmodern Anthology, ed. Taylor, Mark C. (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 74f.Google Scholar

40. Zukav, op. cit., p. 25.

41. Kuhn, op. cit., p. 77.

42. Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (London, 1959), p. 42.Google Scholar