The Dramaturge is a Bureaucrat

On a recent post, a commenter said that they had acted as a ‘Dramaturge’ for a fundraiser called “Shakesbeer’s Showdown.” The fundraiser, which I researched on the commenter’s suggestion, featured actors performing Shakespeare’s plays after a few drinks. As the actors become drunker, the work gets sloppier; audiences laugh. The commenter says this is done in gest; for a lark; that there was no attempt at creating ‘art;’ art is not the intention.  I expressed my surprise that a fundraiser, said to be frivolous fun, had a Dramaturge.

The commenter replied, in what seemed frustration from their use of folksy rhetoric (a tell-tale sign of outrage), that the script selections needed to be curated.  This answer clears nothing up as to why there was a Dramaturge.

The lack of clarity in this answer is not the result of ignorance on the commenter’s part; the commenter, despite their use of folksy rhetoric, is a knowledgeable person; the lack of clarity is due to a larger confusion on what a ‘Dramaturge’ is.   

After sifting through definitions, essays, interviews with those who define themselves as Dramaturges, they seem to have three purposes: research, plot or message continuity (script collating), and ‘clarity sheriffing.’

Dramaturges are theatrical bureaucrats.

‘Bureaucrat’ is the most frightening word in the English language.  Anyone who has ever read a novel by Kafka knows the horrors that bureaucrats create. The bureaucrat is not a malevolent figure. They have no demon inside, but it is their adherence to code, to rules, to stipulations, even when faced by the absurdity of that pursuit, which helps them cause Gehenna. The Chernobyl accident, the starvation of millions of Russians and Ukrainians in the 1930s; even, to some degree, the Holocaust was caused by bureaucracy. The tyrant can be seen, his malevolence is clear; the bureaucrat’s tyranny is less clear, it is cloaked in confusion.

The average Canadian rehearsal room consists of Actors, the Director, the Designer, the Stage Manager – and their assistants – and the Dramaturge. It is the Actor’s job to perform; to channel their creativity in chiselling something from nothing. Perhaps there is a script; perhaps only improvisation.  The Director grasps what the Actor presents and moulds it into a coherent whole; a putty. The Designers use the impulses of the Actors, themselves, the Director, and dye the putty to find its novelty. The Stage Manager assures the creative putty does not melt; that the process does not descend into a bacchanalian orgy. There is no natural spot for the Dramaturge in this process.  

The Dramaturge first might supply research.

‘They might salt the putty…?’

Research for performance is problematic.  Theatrical performance is not a representation of reality. It cannot be because theatre is live and artificial. Research is used to enhance realness. Realness, whatever that might mean, is pointless; impossible; but, my bias as an artist aside, if there is any research to be done, for any reason, it falls on the Director to conduct it. It is the Director’s job to create coherence. If they need research to do it, then so be it; therefore, if the Director conducts research the Dramaturge need not do the same.   

It is the Director’s job, beyond research, to guide the players to finding a ‘throughline.’  A production must have a purpose for its existence, even if that purpose is to have no purpose; eg. the work of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, or Genet. The Director, like the conductor of a symphony, acts as a metronome so the many different voices of the rehearsal room can look to one place and stay in rhythm. This role can become tyrannical. The best Directors are not tyrants, but facilitators who help the instruments find consensus.

If this is the second purpose of the Dramaturge, then they are, again, irrelevant.

Any script coordinating can be done by the Stage Management team. Sometimes this job is done by a Script Secretary: whose soul purpose is to collate versions of scripts.

In my investigation of the Dramaturge, the word ‘clarity’ kept appearing.  It seems that the Dramaturge is supposed to act as an audience member and try to see if the audience would understand, or ‘take in,’ what is presented. The Dramaturge is a sheriff that gages what is clear and what is unclear.

Clarity is a word used for mirrors. The theatre is not real; it is not a mirror on reality.

The theatre cannot be real. Cinema can do reality better.  

That does not mean the theatre need be fantastical; need be delusional in a pursuit of entertainment only. Embracing the presentational nature of the theatre is where the medium excels. Imposition of ‘realness,’ or clarity in performance, distracts from the liveness; the activity of the art.  The theatre should not be clear.

Clarity comes from knowing one’s purpose. The theatre has spent the last two centuries looking for reality. Film made that search irrelevant. The theatre is rudderless. The purpose is gone.  We must find purpose in the opposite; theatre will succeed if it remains nubilous.  

The Dramaturge imposes clarity on something that needs to be unclear; that needs to be a mess.  The Dramaturge becomes a ‘second guesser’ in their pursuit of clarity. Second guessing is dangerous to creativity; creativity relies on free impulse.  The Dramaturge impedes free impulse; they ‘hum,’ they ‘hah,’ they wax poetic on bullshit, and while they do this the creative impulse dies in memos.

No wonder so many actors feel they need alcohol to be impulsive on the stage. With the second-guessing Dramaturge eyeing them from the table, numbing becomes the only means of survival against judgement.

Remove the bureaucracy and freedom will return.

Remove the Dramaturge.