What was her objective? We actually don’t know. She seems to be enjoying toying with the notion of loss. And we may enjoy her antics, as they are part of a series of serio-comic sketches. The Cherry Orchard does not have a plot.

Death of a Salesman is a series of sketches on a theme equating regret with loss. What is Willie Loman’s problem? He is not a very good salesman. Arthur Miller wrote of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves that it was as if someone had photographed the human soul. But, for all its worth, one cannot say the same of Death of a Salesman. We come away having seen a play about The Other (with the exception of the scenes with Biff). This Other’s problem is that he’s a bad salesman, and we may, if we like, feel sorry for his state. But which of us actually has sympathy for another’s problems? (Part of the attraction of the Problem, Illness, or Diversity play is its invitation to convince ourselves that we do.)

The southern writer can present his regional emotionality as a party turn (Thomas Wolfe), or it may be the genius outpourings of an actual tortured soul, like William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. Mark Twain wrote that Ivanhoe was the book which ruined the South. This most famous of knightly tales grew out of the romances of the Jongleurs, Lancelot, Roland, and their mélange by Walter Scott into his creation of The Lost Cause. His was the eradication of Scottish Culture in the defeat of the Stuarts. The Southerners (Scots-Irish in the main) grafted that tragedy onto their own.

When Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi, many veterans of the civil war were still alive. His parents’ generation all suffered under Reconstruction. They, additionally, were descended from Huguenots, French Protestants exiled in the 17th century; and, to conclude the entertainment, he was — for that time necessarily — a closeted gay man. And a poet.

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

In A Streetcar Named Desire, which debuted on Broadway 75 years ago this week, what does Blanche long for? An imaginary past. What is her particular problem? She longs for an imaginary past. And she’s a whore.

Do the events in the play amount to, or are they structured around, a plot? Not particularly. But the poet is pregnant of his cause, and we are the beneficiaries, moved, if I might, not by the tragedy of Blanche, but by that of Tennessee.

Freud wrote that music is polymorphous perversity, which I understand to mean it moves us through the progression of notions which have no referent in logic: although the feeling they engender is exactly like that created by an enlightening syllogism.

The highest paid production staff in vaudeville were the Routiners, who would structure the evening’s seven acts into a whole emotionally similar to that of an actual drama: The opening production number, the duet, the rope-twirler, the slapstick clown, and so on, culminating in the headliner and the serio-comic act to send us on our way. That’s what Chekhov does in The Cherry Orchard.

Streetcar is less abstract. It is a melodrama. Here the characters are assigned qualities by which we may recognise them (white hat vs black hat; red nose indicating the drunk; ample form and high-flown speech, the Matron, flightiness, the Ingénue, and so on), given the theme of sexuality, and then allowed to play.

I never understood the plays of Eugene O’Neill. It was explained that his father was a drunk and his mother a dope fiend, and I began to understand his concerns; but I didn’t care, as the plays bored me.

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How fear consumed American theatre

By David Mamet

He paid his obeisance to that form no doubt taught by Professor Baker in his Harvard Drama course. But what did Professor Baker ever write? Nothing that I know of. But he had read a lot, and, no doubt, imparted his theories to O’Neill, who discharged the debt by the compliment of becoming academic.

Chekhov’s progenitors were the comics of the music hall, and the short stories he read and famously wrote. With the growth of wide-circulation magazines, the late-Victorian era created a grand market for the short-story writer, Chekhov and Tolstoy among them. Chekhov’s plays are, each, more similar to a collection of short stories with the same characters, than they are to conventional drama. He was creating — consciously or not — something which he had enjoyed, and practising it in a different form.

Tennessee’s forebears were The Romantic Poets, and he may be said to be the last of their line. There exist some few works about not the ineffableness, but about the agony of loss. Tragedy cleanses, as it affronts us with the human condition; which, here (as opposed to mere drama) we recognise unavoidably as our own. But no one feels sorry for either Othello or Desdemona. They are mechanical parts of a tragic progression. One would, as soon, be reduced to tears by Beethoven, and then feel sorry for the violin.

But we feel the loss of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and that of Frederic Henry at the death of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. Does one feel sorry for Blanche? We may go as far as “too bad”, but that’s as far as we’ll go. Does one feel sorry for the author, a creature of Loss? I don’t think so, as he got to write a magnificent play, and to reap all the benefits on offer thereby.

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Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

Streetcar, like The Sorrows of Young Werther, concerns a hero who is (one or both) just of too fine sensibilities to live in the world, or has a screw loose. But romanticism seems to be compounded of Love, Longing and Death, written by the non-artist we’re left with a love story, about a Jock who Cried.

Tennessee, by his own admission (to me) was addicted to rough trade — as if it required a ghost from the grave to tell us that. The addiction is an unquenchable longing for that imagined-as-male. Whether this is the male one feels he can never become, or him he can never have, is moot — one is not going to find this love in the arms of a whore, and, so, one is doomed to perpetual repetition, failure and loss.

Tennessee-as-Blanche imagines males with their clumsy, rough fingers, as raping, beer-swilling, poker-playing bowlers. She is, at once, the longing vessel and the professional — the rough-trade.

Gay drama in straight drag was taken up by Truman Capote 14 years later as the romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and two years earlier than Streetcar, in Noel Coward’s drama Brief Encounter. The first ends in a marriage possible as the couple is presented as heterosexual; the second, in a heart-rending abandonment of the affair as the couple (in underlying truth) are not.

At the end of Streetcar, Blanche goes nuts, which is neither a victory over her situation, or fate, nor an acceptance of her failure — it is a convenience allowing the play to end. The end of the play is the continuation of the Poker Game, or “men go on, amusing themselves with a male game not only in spite, but in ignorance, of the depth of women’s anguish”.

I beg pardon for the psycho-sexual dismemberment of a great play. Streetcar is dated, but at some point it will cease being dated.

Tragedy recalls us to a sense of our fragility, but also of our value. We wouldn’t mourn for creatures we didn’t regard as precious. Not many of us are devastated by the death of a flea. A cynic is unlikely to lose sleep over Covid deaths in Indonesia.

If we are living through a tragedy, it is a collective one. The Greeks would have understood this too: the point of the Chorus, a bunch of ordinary citizens who sing and dance their way through the tragic drama, is to socialise the disaster, making it more than just the affair of a few patrician figures. Even so, you couldn’t have a cook or a cobbler as the hero, since their lives weren’t considered important enough. Those who fall from the greatest height make the biggest splash.

The death of Achilles or Agamemnon is a momentous event which sends shockwaves through the public realm, whereas the passing of a slave is private. It has no more significance than the killing of a flea. It doesn’t count as a historical event. Back then you couldn’t have a tragedy called Death of a Salesman, even if there had been salesmen in ancient Athens. It would be as bizarre as calling your play The Fall of Troy: A Farce in Three Acts. 

None of this class distinction survived the emergence of mass democracy — a political idea which, ironically, was born in ancient Greece. In the 20th century, by far the bloodiest hundred years on record, tragedy became universal. Once you develop weapons like bombs, you globalise suffering and lamentation. As the tattered old cliché has it, we really are all in this together. You just have to take anyone from the street and push them to their limit. You can even have a tragedy about plumbing, as in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. 

One of the ancient Greeks’ deepest fears is of hubris — the pride or presumption which leads you to overreach yourself and bring yourself to nothing. When the citizens of Thebes or Athens observed such arrogance they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that it would have its comeuppance. A species which dominates and destroys its natural habitat in the name of power and acquisition is now reaping the fruits of its overreaching.

Those like King Lear who would be everything must be taught the lesson that humanity is nothing — frail, sickeningly vulnerable and driven by animal need. Kings must be reduced to vagrants, as Lear wanders the heath with fools and madmen. Once you acknowledge that you’re nothing, you have a chance of becoming something — but only, like Lear or Oedipus, by being hauled through hell. For Lear, this repentance comes too late to prevent his death. Whether this will prove true of humanity as a whole remains to be seen. It isn’t looking good.

The problem is that hubris is built into the human species. Because we live not just in a physical world but a world of meaning, we are able to overreach ourselves all the time. Our bodies can build themselves a prosthesis known as civilisation. Technology is an extension of our bodies, but one that can escape our mastery. Badgers and squirrels by contrast, can’t create weapons of mass destruction, unless they’re being very furtive about it. They can’t extend very far outside themselves. They aren’t universal creatures, unless squirrels in California are somehow in touch with squirrels in the Ukraine.

This inability to overreach themselves means that they can’t blow themselves up, but neither can they read Marcel Proust. This is because they don’t have language; but this lack of language or developed concepts is also what keeps them safe from nuclear warfare. (One might make an exception here for dolphins, who after a few lessons might be able to write as well as Jacob Rees-Mogg).

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Being a linguistic animal is both a blessing and a curse. In fact, the ancient term “sacred” means both. Because human beings live in a richly developed conceptual world, they can create things which are in danger of slipping from their control and taking on a tyrannical life of their own. Yet having language also means that they can be closer to each other than mere physical contact. They can share their inner lives with each other. Love relationships consist mainly in talking, unless I’m missing out on something.

Civilisation, so Freud claims, is a product of Eros, meaning the creative drives as a whole. There is, however, a problem. Eros is not the only source of civilisation. In order to build bridges and cathedrals, you also need to harness the power of Eros’s old enemy, Thanatos, or the death drive. The death drive for Freud is turned outwards and used to subjugate Nature. Only in this way can cities and social orders be built. Thanatos, however, is a notoriously unreliable servant. It doesn’t want to subjugate things; it wants to tear them to pieces in an orgy of obscene enjoyment. So the very force which is intended to overcome chaos is secretly in love with it. Anarchy lies at the very heart of authority.

Tragic figures aren’t exactly guilty, but they aren’t exactly innocent either. If they were deep-dyed villains, they would forfeit our sympathy and we would be indifferent to their fate. Napoleon may have been a tragic figure, but Hitler wasn’t. Yet tragic heroes aren’t blameless, because the tragic crisis results from their own actions, however little they may intend it.

Oedipus, who has been described as a “guilty innocent”, doesn’t mean to kill his father and marry his mother, but he contributes without knowing it to a network of cause and effect which causes these things to occur. His own past actions return to plague him in alien form. “We are neither the innocent nor the wicked,” remarks the protagonist of William Golding’s novel Free Fall. “We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.”

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Who set Greece on fire?

By Aris Roussinos

It is just the same with climate change, which nobody ever intended but which is the consequence of billions of individual acts. Nobody ever turned the ignition key in their car or heaped a shovelful of coal on the fire with the idea of wiping out the human race. As Inspector Clouseau might say, no-one is guilty and everyone is guilty.

It’s the same with the Christian idea of original sin, which means that we are sinful but not responsible for it. In the tangled web of human actions and relationships, you can’t move without hurting someone somewhere. Our actions spin out of control and breed monstrous consequences which can come to dominate our own lives. The ancient Greeks knew all about Marx’s concept of alienation. It’s just that they gave it the name of Fate. We are weaving our own inescapable destiny all the time, and doing so through actions which are genuinely free.

The good news is that free action to avert total collapse is still possible for us, if only just. We can take heart from the fact that not all stage tragedies end badly. The first great piece of tragic art we have, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, ends on a positive note. The blind, beggarly Oedipus is finally gathered to the gods, while Shakespearian tragedy usually ends with the tentative emergence of new life. We come away from many a tragic drama remembering the dignity or defiance of those who go to their deaths, not just their agonies. A tragedy isn’t always a piece of theatre which ends in total ruin. It’s a situation in which you have to be broken and remade if you’re to have any chance of redemption, and even then there are no guarantees. As the poet W.B. Yeats writes, “Nothing can be whole or sole/That has not been rent.”

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

We shall, for instance, weather Covid, but not reducing the planet to flood and desert is a different matter. To avoid that, we shall need to renounce the urge to power and possession which has driven us so far, and learn instead to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. That means undoing an awfully long history, and history is what we mostly are made of.

It’s true that people will do extraordinary things if the only alternative is to die. Certainly nothing short of such an alternative will cause governments and the transnational corporations to abandon their death-dealing habits. But people will also do extraordinary things if they think they are going to die anyway, such as murder, rape, loot and hunt for vengeance.

We haven’t thought enough about what kind of existence we will have if doom becomes unavoidable. People who have nothing to lose are dangerous. I wouldn’t like to be a racist cop if those I’ve beaten and humiliated know they can hang me from a lamp post without being put away for twenty years because the world won’t last that long. One thing is for sure: being broken and remade rules out mere reformism. Reformism wouldn’t have kept Lear alive, and it won’t keep us alive either.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor in English at Lancaster University.