Back
when I was reading Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, there
was a passage about the Zapatistas that shone so suggestive a light
on Dead Centre's show Chekhov's First Play that it sparked me into
writing about it (this is a postscript to that text). In a chapter on
revolution, especially the social revolutions that have taken place
in South America over the past few decades, Solnit talks about
carnival and the idea of jubilee, a Biblical notion of social renewal
whereby once every 50 years liberty from work, ownership and
exploitation is proclaimed “throughout all the land” (now that's
a religious tenet I can stand behind). It leads her to celebrating
the Zapatistas, and to a discussion about their literary figurehead,
Subcomandante Marcos. She reports how, in response to journalists'
speculation as to his identity, Marcos wrote:
“Marcos
is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a
Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in
Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in
Germany … a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at
10pm, a celebrant of the zocalo, a campesino without land, an
unemployed worker … and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of
southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan
'Todos somos Marcos' ('We are all Marcos')...
So
much of Chekhov's First Play is concerned with the possibility of
social revolution: of smashing down hierarchies and all the
structures that (up)hold them, of replacing the cult and the claim of
the individual with the selfless anonymity of the collective. When
the wrecking ball falls, the stage picture shatters with carnival
energy, and at the centre of that chaos is Platonov. Plucked from the
audience, Platonov could be anybody – in the same way that Marcos
could be anybody.
In his
confusion, his hesitant movements, his inability to keep up with the
action, the manifold ways in which he doesn't fit, Platonov radiates
the imposed powerlessness of the outsider, no matter how much the
characters on stage are magnetised by his presence. And again, that
not-fitting makes him one with the ostracised whose identity Marcos
so joyfully adopts, whose presence is a problem to authority, and yet
who can, through persistence, through simply continuing to be,
challenge their surroundings and even change the script. The slogan
that Platonov inspires, the line that every character repeats in
turn, is: “You made me nobody.” Once they've said that, they fall
silent: the final vestige of hierarchy – language – demolished as
surely as the country-house set.
That's
pretty much what I intended to say when writing about Chekhov's First
Play the first time, but it wasn't the only thing, and somehow in the
(general indulgence of the) writing I forgot to say it at all. And I
might have carried on forgetting, except that I'm now reading another
Solnit book, Hope in the Dark, and again there's a bit of writing
about the Zapatistas that reminded me of Dead Centre. There's a
beautiful line, also quoting from Marcos, on facing the future with
bravery and expectation of change: “With our struggle, we are
reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is
being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights,
if, that is, one dreams.”
Solnit
picks up on this because it supports her reasonable and reassuring
thesis that political despair is a drain on human resources; that
while fatigue is understandable, and temporary loss of faith a
natural response to disappointment, the defeatism of long-term
despair is unacceptable: “even an indulgence if you look at the
power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone”.
Despair rejects the slow, patient and repetitive work required to
bring about social change, and replaces it with inactivity and
maudlin doom-mongering. It's necessary, she argues, to believe in
other possibilities; even, quoting F Scott Fitzgerald, “to see
things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”.
This
argument for an embrace of the unknown is exactly what she
illuminates in Chekhov's First Play. Despair in the play is figured
in the character of the “director”, who seems perky enough at
first, but gradually reveals his self-doubt and crushing sense of
failure. He shoots himself out of proceedings, only to return at the
end, still “tormented, without anything to believe in”, but now
aware of the need for hope: for “courage … to keep on living”.
What might happen in the future he doesn't know: he just has to
continue – and do so reaching outwards. When he speaks his final
word, hello, he's no longer the “director” but a single being
with Platonov, their identities merging just as “todos somos
Marcos”.
Our
relationship with the unknown was a central concern in another work
by Dead Centre, Lippy – but there they undermined their own
proposition, maintaining a sense of visual mystery in the staging
while chipping away at narrative ambiguity in the text. Chekhov's
First Play similarly (but with less self-contradiction) shapes its
dream of the future even as it professes uncertainty: the other
slogan repeated by each character in turn, just before the “You
made me nobody” sequence, is: “Is this mine? I can't imagine
owning anything.” This is the politics of anti-capitalism, of the
Zapatistan maxim quoted by Solnit: “Todo para todos, nada para
nosotros” – “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves”.
And the word “imagine” is crucial: it suggests not a physical
shift, but a mental one, the same as Solnit advocates in her book.
All the social and political transformations we've witnessed in the
past century and that are yet to come have one thing in common, she
says: “they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to
gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the
possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom
and safety. … To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that
commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”
Dead
Centre plucked Chekhov's First Play from the past, tore it and
transformed it into a commitment to imaginative hope. No wonder I'm
still thinking about it.
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