A Response to Milling and Ley (2001) on Boal vs Aristotle: Or When is Tragedy Coercive Theatre?

Augusto Boal was a cultural activist and a revolutionary. Aristotle was a 4th century BCE philosopher and arguably conservative, setting public life above private life. He considered anything that concerned the polis, the city, politics, in the sense that it mattered for order and his conception of the natural hierarchies between men, men and women, and men and slaves. Men who were citizens were naturally meant to be the rulers over men who were not, over women and over slaves. He explains all of this in some detail in his treatise Politics. This difference between Boal and Aristotle is relevant to their theories about the theatre and its function. 

A baseline for looking at the politics of art in relation to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is his conception in Poetics that the artist “must of necessity imitate one of three objects, - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be” (1997: 53). These possibilities cover reality, perception and vision for the future. However, Aristotle does not delve into any differences in terms of their effects on the audience. Instead, his theory simply states that the developments in a play should have “a tragic effect that satisfies the moral sense” (36). Implied in this statement is that, for Aristotle, there very much is or ought to be a governing morality. The idea of the necessity of a governing morality is good. Few would disagree. It is not a problem until one finds oneself outside the law or dominant moral code of the society in which one lives. A non-citizen, an employee disadvantaged by labor laws, a person disadvantaged by social expectation within their religious community, a teenager disadvantaged by sexual prejudice in their family or community. For these people, the suggestion that the theatre should uphold a certain moral code is oppressive and therefore problematic. This list is not exhaustive but meant merely to highlight certain social types that deserve a voice in not only the theatre but theatre theory - and today they have both. Boal provided an important impetus to this in his seminal work Theatre of the Oppressed (1979/2008). 

Boal’s perception of Aristotle’s ideal theatre as coercive rests on his interpretation of the theory as proposing that the best tragedies are scripted for the audience to feel pity and fear with the hero rather than just for, i.e. on an expected identification attachment (30-31). He sees the development of the plot as complications arise and the hero is made to recognize his own error as a process that the audience experiences at the emotional level alongside the hero. Because the fate of the hero is framed as inevitable, Aristotle’s theory of tragedy becomes a model for how to gain the audience’s acquiescence to the hero’s downfall (and the downfall of anyone like him) as morally appropriate (32-34). Any “anti-social characteristic” shared by the audience with the hero is thus vicariously purged and there is a moral realignment with society. For Boal, Aristotle’s proposal of the necessity of the reversal of fortune, the recognition of error and the resultant catastrophe that the hero should suffer are thus the three-step process that scripts this catharsis.

For Jane Milling and Graham Ley (2001) and Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis (2004), Boal’s theory “depends on the invention of a missing emotion, which is not pity or fear, but mysteriously ‘something directed against the laws’,” (Shepherd and Wallis 195). They cannot identify this feeling and believe that Boal has added it to Aristotle’s theory. Boal is not mysterious; he identifies the feeling as the “anti-social” impulse (Boal 34) and links it to the hamartia, to use Aristotle’s term, the socially unacceptable fault, that will lead to the hero necessarily meeting a catastrophic end. Boal does not add anything to Aristotle but he questions whether this fault is indeed always a fault or whether it is constructed as a fault by the “social ethos” (Boal’s term) that underlies the very structure of the plot in the tragic play that Aristotle describes as ideal.

Cited

Aristotle (1997) Poetics. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. 

Boal, Augusto (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.

Milling, Jane and Ley, Graham (2001) Modern Theories of Performance: From Stanislavski to Brecht. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Shepherd, Simon and Wallis, Shepherd (2004) Drama/Theatre/Performance. A New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.