July 12, 2012, 12:28 PM 9 Comments

Theater Talkback: A Chorus of Voices

By BEN BRANTLEY

Have you heard from the members of the chorus lately? Sure you have. They’re the ones who huddle in the office cafeteria, speculating on how long that arrogant new boss will last. Who sit before giant screens in sports bars lamenting the fall of a once mighty pitcher. Who post comment after comment on the Internet, knowing and fatalistic, about why Tom and Katie were destined to fail as a couple.

They have also been hanging out on amphitheater and proscenium stages for 2000 years or so, (Is this number correct?) speculating on how long that arrogant new king will last, lamenting the fall of a once mighty warrior and commenting ad infinitum about the marital troubles of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, or Jason and Medea. And while you may think of them, in this formal capacity, as Attic anachronisms, choruses are still very much with us in the theater, though they don’t always identify themselves as such.

I was made newly aware of the enduring presence of these rhythmic kibitzers last month during three weeks of play-going in London, an experience that encourages patterns to emerge and blur and multiply in your mind. (Does that sound like fun?) I first became fully conscious of them on this trip in an expected context, a revival of a bonafide Greek tragedy: Sophocles’ “Antigone,” directed by Polly Findlay at the National Theater.

As is often the case in modern-dress versions of ancient classics, the chorus was doing its best to pretend they were just your everyday characters in a play. Ms. Findlay’s production was set in a contemporary war room, and she had divided the choral lines among actors portraying military and office personnel. (What other times or places might suit Medea?)

Speaking Don Taylor’s simplified, de-poeticized new translation, they sounded like those know-it-all buttinskis who can be found in pretty much any workplace. And I couldn’t blame the embattled king Creon (Christopher Eccleston) for losing his temper with them as they nattered on about the ways of destiny and of men with swollen egos and hot heads. (Who are they referring to?)

This presentation offered an effective means, though, of making the chorus register for latter-day audiences as the chatty (if exceptionally eloquent) Joe Schmos they would have been to Athenian audiences of long ago. (My favorite variation on this approach: Deborah Warner’s “Medea,” seen on Broadway in 2002, in which the chorus showed up as a group of tabloid-devouring celebrity stalkers.) (What words has the writer so far used to describe the chorus?)

After this “Antigone,” I started to see choruses everywhere: in the form of the gossiping, cabin-fevered soldiers in John McGrath’s “Events While Guarding the Bofors Guns”; in the story-telling South Africans in the charming Peter Brook adaptation of Can Themba’s short story “The Suit”; in the fatuously babbling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, reimagined as student deconstructionists in the “The Rest Is Silence,” a highly condensed and fragmented version of “Hamlet.”

Choruses, of course, were mostly out of fashion by the Elizabethan age. But there is, famously and troublingly, a character who bears the weighty name of Chorus in “Henry V,” which I saw at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. That’s the person who begins the play by asking for “a muse of fire” to help the speaker do justice to the epic tale about to unfold. (What other Shakespeare play includes a chorus? How has that chorus been dramatized in different production?)

Though not singular in Shakespeare (think of the scene-setting prologue for “Romeo and Juliet”), the device is still unusual enough to have modern directors scrambling for a way to justify and contextualize its presence. Most often, in recent years, Chorus is represented as some sort of purple-prose-spewing journalist, perhaps a stern television commentator à la Edward R. Murrow (as in Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film).

Skip to Sweeney Todd.

Dominic Dromgoole’s spirited, even-handed and easily digested production for the Globe strips the Chorus of any semblance of objectivity or omniscience. In this Elizabethan-dress version, the Chorus (played by Brid Brennan) is a good ole gal, a matron in a bonnet who joins the common throng of humanity between her soliloquies. The Chorus becomes one of us, a bewildered face in the crowd doing its best to – hoping desperately to — accept the ennobling official take on a bloody war but not quite buying it.

The “Henry V” Chorus has a practical reason to be, as well. It provides expository shortcuts as the play’s soldiers and politicians travel across nations, making elaborately wrought war and peace. This narrative framework also lends a Homeric quality to the proceedings: the sense of a great tale being unfolded through the ages, reminding us of how gossip, repeated and embroidered upon, becomes the stuff of myth.

That’s the function of the chorus – a singing chorus, in this case – in Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” which has been revived by Jonathan Kent at the Adelphi Theater. Mr. Kent relocated the story from the Victorian age to the Great Depression. And as the ensemble urgently asks us to “attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” its members bring to mind a down-and-out horde of the jobless conjuring up the spirit of Joe Hill. In this context, Sweeney becomes a sort of hard-times hero, out to avenge the working classes.

But the production that for me came closest to capturing what I (presumptuously) imagine to be the original spirit of the classical chorus was set in the West Germany of four decades ago. That was the Old Vic revival of“Democracy,” Michael Frayn’s great, multilayered portrait from 2003 of the rise and fall of the charismatic politician Willy Brandt.

In “Democracy,” though, everyone’s the chorus, including the leading characters. In some of the most euphonious dialogue written during the past century, Mr. Frayn’s scrapping, endlessly ambivalent spies and statesmen blur the lines between people acting in character and (somewhat) distanced narrators. They chronicle both verifiable chains of events and unverifiable motives and attitudes.

For “Democracy” is ultimately a mystery play, in which the central enigma is human identity itself – a puzzle that only expands and deepens when set upon a world stage. Paul Miller’s production at the Old Vic isn’t the glittering jewel that the original staging at the National Theater was.

But as in Shakespeare, the language, if spoken clearly and with the proper emphases, casts its own spell. And listening to “Democracy” is like listening to a symphony of voices – internal and external – in which everyone belongs to a universal, uncomprehending chorus, forever pondering the unknowable creatures that we all are.

Start again here.

When you think about it, the choruses of ancient Greek tragedy are startlingly modern in their philosophizing. A lot of what they say ultimately comes down to: “We can’t understand why things happen, or change them after the fact; we can only reflect on the inevitable patterns we see.”

They don’t propel the action or intervene in moments in crisis; they are like most of us so much of the time, bystanders offering speculative commentary that doesn’t do anyone much good. You can imagine Oedipus and his ilk agreeing with the words of one Ralph Rackstraw, a sailor who loved above his station in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore.” Listening to the ensemble of his fellow sailors echoing his own words, he sings, “I know the value of a kindly chorus/But choruses yield little consolation.”

You’ll notice that “Sweeney Todd” and “Pinafore” aside, I’ve stayed away from the choruses of musicals and operas, which we’re more willing to accept as a theatrical convention. But all sorts of playwrights throughout the ages, as different as Brecht and Thornton Wilder, have adapted choruses to their own latter-day purposes. What are some of your favorite examples?