Confronting Ourselves: Writing Tragedy in a Godless World
by Colleen Murphy

Theatre Alberta and Alberta Playwrights' Network were honoured to host Colleen Murphy as the keynote speaker at PlayWorks Ink 2009. The following is Colleen's full keynote address, delivered at Alberta Theatre Projects' Martha Cohen Theatre in Calgary, on October 24, 2009.

Listen to Colleen Murphy's complete address >  [56 MB / 49 min.]

The 21st century is a good time to explore the tragic form. We have all the ingredients: war, social upheaval, the churn of political agitation, anger at abuse and rage at injustice; we are surrounded by instant pleasure, porn on our laptop, alcohol, pot, ecstasy, crack delivered to our doors if we wish, and at the same time we are being consumed by corporate lust, trapped by fear of environmental doom or viral contagion. We are broken by the disintegrating family, appalled at our own greed, afraid of our own heartbreak, obsessed with our own youth and terrified
of our own death. But the 20th Century was also a good time for tragedy, so was the 19th… so was the 5th century BCE. Any time is a good time.

The British playwright Edward Bond once said that “the human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is
absolutely saturated with drama.” The stage is a perfect place to confront ourselves because the scale of the stage is a human scale. Actors on movie screens are blown up out of proportion, on television they are too small and on the internet actors are like bugs, but in the theatre the equality of scale allows us to confront ourselves. We have a relationship here—the actors and the audience have a living relationship.

There are many forms of drama, but tragedy is the most exciting. I contend that when you enter a tragedy you do not step from the real into the unreal comfort of pretend, you step from the real into the more real; you step into the primal, roiling tensions between human pleasure and human pain and into a place where you can speak the unspeakable.

The seeds of tragedy are found in chaos, order and sacrifice. Religion and theatre were intertwined in ancient ritual events. The word tragedy is a Greek word meaning ‘song of the goat’. Scholars suspect this may be traced to a time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or that the chorus danced around the goat prior to the animal’s ritual sacrifice.

Twenty-seven hundred years ago the festivals in Greece consisted of members of the ten tribes of Athens doing dithyrambs. A dithyramb was music and song performed by a chorus of fifty men or boys as they danced in circular motions accompanied by a reed instrument like an oboe. The vocabulary of the chorus was full of narrative content and each chorus had a leader…then everything changed when the first masked actor was brought in—now the writers were in competition. Aeschylus brought in a second masked actor—now there was dialogue and tragedy. Sophocles brought in a third and now there was triangular conversation. Aeschylus lived from 525 to 456 BCE, during the time where ideas of city state and justice
were new. Sophocles lived from 496 to 405 during the rise, peak and decline of the golden age of democracy. Euripides lived from 480 to 406, during the decline and the Peloponnesian Wars. He was very interested in people and not too keen on the gods.

But who are the gods? John Barton, in his introduction to The Greeks says "perhaps they are created by humans in order
to define and describe human experience and to make some sort of sense of the universe; or gods are partly anthropomorphic, the result of humans seeing the gods in their own image; or perhaps they are the laws of nature, or they
are the psychological forces inside us, or again, they may represent some sort of dialectic conflict within individual men and women and women the universe as a whole, or, perhaps they are unknowable".

Take the gods away and what are we left with? We are left with ourselves. And if left with ourselves where then does that leave the gods? I think that though the gods leave us, we don’t easily leave the gods. D.H. Lawrence writes, “Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.”

What is fate? Is it genetic? A cancerous cell inherited while we were in the womb—a chemical imbalance in our brain? Is it pedagogical training? A lousy childhood? No, fate is none of these. Fate is related to what we do in our lives, to every single choice we make. Remember that Oedipus knew his fate and did everything he could do avoid it, but one day he got angry and killed a stranger called Laius. No god forced Oedipus to kill Laius—he got mad and killed him. How was he to know that Laius was his father? It doesn’t matter… the point is, he raised his arm and killed of his own free will. Oedipus is a complicated man. Medea is a complicated woman. Agamenmon, Phaedra, Hercuba, Dianaria—they’re all complicated characters because tragedy is not interested in cartoon villains and heroes or heroines. It is a place for human beings to wrestle with themselves and each other and even their gods. The tragic form wants characters that think with their hearts and feel with their minds. Socrates says, “Know yourself.” That is what tragedy requires from those involved in it.

I contend good drama is about human beings who find themselves in situations where they must make hard choices, and in tragedy the choices are especially hard because those human beings are caught between a rock and a hard place. Tragedy is about right against right… not good against evil. Antigone must bury her brother whose body lies putrefying under the
scorching sun. Her uncle, Creon, must convince her not to do it because he must uphold the edicts he created as king. Creon is right and Antigone is right. That is drama with high stakes and consequences.

I believe that, even without gods, if one keeps the powerful structure of tragedy, if one respects all that is human—and it was Tennessee Williams who once said,“Nothing human disgusts me”—then dramatists can find the courage to speak the unspeakable.

Freud searched through the guts of Greek drama and found material that continues to be psychologically relevant today. With Freud we began to examine what stripping away the gods really meant, for it was he who suggested that after all is said and done, we are not only responsible for our own actions, we are also responsible for our own unconscious.

Process of Illumination: In tragedy we see ourselves. We watch characters confront themselves and each other by facing their own actions.

Tragedies are plays with purpose. Tragedy is about family, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, sister and sister, and about watching them make choices, tough choices… the choices they must make in order to weather catastrophe, and nowhere is it written that tragic form has been lost in the mists of time. Nowhere is it written that the only acceptable tragedy is an updated version of The Trojan Women in modern dress. No, not good enough, not any more—write a new play, a play about a group of Afghani women, wives and sisters of insurgents who are captured by Canadian soldiers, and a Canadian soldier who tosses one of their sons off the roof of a smashed building in Kabul. Why not? You say it could not happen… I say open your eyes. Nowhere is it written that gods are necessary to tragedy, and nowhere is it written that a tragic play cannot also be jam packed with belly laughs and irony and pratfalls—no, nowhere. The tragic form fits our time like a silk glove… and I urge you to slip your hand in all the way up to your elbow.

Edward Bond says, “If you can’t face Hiroshima in the theatre, you’ll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself.”

Open your eyes. Turn on your light and see that dramatic meaning must be given to the human condition and to the feelings that erupt from people who live in these times—our time.

Colleen Murphy is one of Canada’s premiere playwrights, known for works such as The December Man, Beating Heart Cadaver and The Piper. At the time of the address she was serving as a guest playwright at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.