What is known as drama of Ideas? How do you classify Arms and the Man as a drama of ideas?

Drama of Ideas or the drama of social criticism in the real sense is a modern development. A number of contemporary problems and evils are subjected to discussion and searching examinations and criticism in these plays. Thus in it, the structure and characterization are of subordinate importance; it ids the discussion that counts. Ibsen and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were the chief exponents of this realistic drama of ideas. To Shaw, drama was preeminently a medium for articulating his own ideas and philosophy. He enunciated the philosophy of life force which he sought to disseminate through his dramas. Thus Shavian plays are the vehicles for the transportation of ideas, however, propagandizing they may be. Shaw wanted to cast his ideas through discussions. Out of the discussions in the play Arms and the Man Shaw breaks the idols of love and war. The iconoclast Shaw pulls down all false gods which men live, love admire and adore. By a clever juxtaposition of characters and dialogues, Shaw shatters the romantic illusions about war and war heroes Shaws message is that war is no longer a thing of banners and glory, as the nineteenth century dramatist saw it, but a dull and sordid affair of brutal strength and callous planning out. The dialogues of Bluntschli, Riana and Sergius go to preach this message with great success. Here to quote Sergius who says, War is a hollow sham like love. One thing however be remembered that in Arms and the Man, Mr. Shaw does not, as some imagine attack war. He is not Tolstoy an in the least. What he does is to denounce the sentimental illusion that gathers around war. Fight if you will, says he but for goodness sake dont strike picturesque attitudes in the limelight about it.

View it as one of the desperately irrational things of life that may, however, in certain circumstances be a brutal necessity. Bluntschli is the very mouth piece of the play that exposes the dreamful reality of war. There is a lot of learning in the disillusionment of Riana and Sergius. But this is not the whole message Shaw intends to convey through his Arms and The Man. In the play he has taken a realistic view not only of war and heroism but of love and marriage. He has taken a realistic view of life as a whole. He has blown away the halo of romance that surrounds human life as a whole. His message in this play is, therefore, the destruction not only of the conventional conception of the heroic soldier but of the romantic view of marriage, nay, of life as a whole. He pleads for judging everything concerning human life from a purely realistic point of view. This is the message he conveys through the play, Arms and The Man. The hero Bluntschli here serves the mouth piece of the author. He is the postal of level headedness that sees through emptiness of romantic love and romantic heroism. He towers about all others and shatters all the pet theories and so called high ideas, and converts Raina and Sergius to his own views and succeeds in life because he faces facts and his no romantic illusions about him. Further, as all the propaganda plays go Arms and The Man lacks action and instead of action it contains plenty of dramatic dialogues. It is not a lie if we say the Arms and The Man Shaws a perfect combination of the elements of action and discussion. The conversation between Raina and Captain Bluntschli, for example in the act-I, is extremely lively and through the mouth of the chocolate cream soldier. Shaw gives expression to his own heresies about the glories of warfare. The fugitive soldier talks to the universality of the flaying instinct, but his talk is not an end in itself. He argues only with a view to persuading Raina to give him shelter and to

protect him from the raids of Bulgarian soldiers. Thus there is not a scrap of discussion for the sake of discussion. The action of the drama require that Rainas hatred of a cowardly should be disarmed, her romantic notions blasted and sympathy and pity aroused. As soon as this end has been achieved, the tired soldier drops down fast asleep. He instinctively realizes that he has become Rianas poor dear; and there is no need for further argument.

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Theater, Performance, Philosophy Conference 2014 Martin Puchner and the Drama of Ideas Publi le 14 janvier 2014 par Anna Street Martin Puchner has a track record of border crossings in life as much as in his prolific academic career. Born and raised in Germany, he exchanged his undergraduate student life at the University of Konstanz for the University of Bologna and later the University of California at St. Barbara and Irvine. Having studied literature, history and philosophy, he ultimately earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 1998. Puchner first taught at Columbia University, and since 2010 has been the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His scholarship is wide-ranging and striking in the originality of its approach be it to world literature, dramatic theory, or the nexus between philosophy and theater. His three books The Drama of Ideas, Poetry of the Revolution and Stage Fright share a common concern: they approach their subject from beyond its disciplinary borders and seek to explode internally upheld categorizations. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama approaches drama through its other literature. The closet dramas of Yeats, Stein or Beckett are exceptional here not because of their embrace but their resistance and indeed suspicion of the theatrical situation. Ultimately, antitheatricality turns into the mode that offers new impulses for the stage. In Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the Avant-Gardes, Puchner explores the border between aesthetic genre and political action by reading the manifestos power as based on its literary qualities. The manifesto becomes a testing case for how literature may insert itself and perform in the world. The book was the winner of the James Russell Lowell Award.

Puchners Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theatre and Philosophy again reads two archenemies together: theatre and philosophy. Platos dialogues turn into dramatic pieces that embody the deep involvement of the two disciplines with one another. The drama of ideas that Puchner sketches here is ultimately not geared towards the sphere of corporeality but rather reveals the possibility of staging thought rather than action. For the new discipline of performance philosophy, Puchners book is a groundbreaking work because it opens up new avenues for thinking philosophy through the theatre. The Drama of Ideaswas awarded the Walter Cabott Channing Prize as well as the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre in 2012, and described by the jury as a work of exceptional literary power and disciplinary consequence.Puchners interventions continue to question and redefine disciplinary frames. He is at the forefront of thinking about theories of the theatre and at yet another border: that of performance and philosophy. Martin Puchner is also the Director of the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard University, which offers emerging scholars from around the globe a forum for exploring and contributing to the future of the discipline. His output of edited volumes and sourcebooks is wide-ranging and reinforces the interdisciplinary scope of his expertise, whether in political theory, modernist aesthetics, metatheatre or, most recently, world literature. Selected bibliography:

Puchner, Martin. Norton Anthology of World Literature. General Editor,

with Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Wiebke Denecke et. al. (New York: Norton, 2012)

Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas. Platonic Provocations in Theatre

and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Puchner, Martin. Norton Anthology of Drama. 2 vols. General Editor,

with J. Ellen Gainor and Stanton Garner, Jr. (New York: Norton: Norton, 2009)

Puchner, Martin. Modern Drama: Critical Concepts. Editor, 4-volume

anthology of critical writing (New York: Routledge, 2008)

Puchner, Martin. Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the

Modernist Stage. Editor, with Alan Ackerman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution. Marx, Manifestoes and the

Avant-Gardes. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Puchner, Martin. Introduction to Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on

Dramatic Form, by Lionel Abel. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2003)

Puchner, Martin. Stagefright. Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and

Drama. (London and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) [Written by: Ramona Mosse] http://tpp2014.com/martin-puchner-drama-ideas/

The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy(review) Freddie Rokem From: Comparative Drama Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 2011 pp. 445-447 | 10.1353/cdr.2011.0030 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Since my warm recommendation of Martin Puchners new book appears on its back cover, and he at the same time composed a text appearing on the back cover of my own recently published Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010; reviewed by Lydia Goehr in Comparative Drama), I hesitated to write this review when asked. But instead of recusing myself, I thought this would be an opportunity to raise some general issues concerning what I believe is a new direction (and perhaps even a new field) in the research of drama, theater, and performance, as well as for a philosophy that draws attention to the complex relationships between the discursive practices of these two fields. Puchners contributions to this emerging area of research, to which he, in different ways, has already drawn attention in his previous work, most prominently in Poetry and Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2006), demand a thorough engagement. One of the key issues in The Drama of Ideas is how to read Platos dialogues and how to understand their main character, Socrates. The question is not on what grounds Plato will ban the arts from the ideal state and the (anti-theatrical) prejudices to which this position has given rise. Puchners major concern is rather what kind of texts Plato composed and in which sense many of his dialogues are actually theatrical, not only in the sense that they are dialogical and can be performed, but

mainly because they are profoundly connected to the theater of his own time. This is not a novel idea as such, but Puchner forcefully advances this claim, turning it into the intellectual and scholarly motor igniting a Platonic, alternative historiography of Western theater, a dramatic Platonism even overshadowing the much more canonized Aristotelean one. Puchner convincingly carves out a Platonic tradition based on a dynamic combination of dramas where Socrates is the main character, developing scenes in Platos dialogues and dramatic texts with a strong philosophical basis, on the one hand, and philosophical writings (not necessarily written as dialogues) of theatrical philosophers [who] think of drama and theater as their primary categories (125) on the other. One of the theoretical issues Puchner grapples with is how the genre of the dialogues, in particular, the Phaedo and the Symposium, is constructed. This is an extremely complex issue, because both works, which are indeed among the most dramatic of Platos dialogues, are actually retold by a direct or indirect witness to a curious listener who wants to learn what the participants at the occasions depicted in these dialogues said and how they, in particular Socrates, acted and reacted. Both dialogues (as well as The Republic, for example) are narrative reconstructions of past events. Thus, after providing an analysis of the poetics of the Platonic dialogue in the first chapter (an issue to which I will return), Puchner surveys the hitherto unknown history of what he terms the Socrates play, plays where Socrates figures as the protagonist. This is an impressive collection of sometimes less exciting plays, but they are important for a fuller understanding of the totality of the Platonic tradition. In an appendix Puchner provides a bibliography of more than one hundred such plays, indicating that more than half of them were written after 1900. The next stage in

Puchners argument for a drama of ideas is a chapter devoted to a group of modern playwrights, including Strindberg, Kaiser, Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard. Puchner argues that they can be understood as Platonic, not only because they are non- or anti-Aristotelian, but also in their own right, relying in different ways on Platos own dramatic practices where ideas become materialized through scene, character, and (inter-)action. The materializer of ideas par excellance is of course Brecht, and the question in which way his anti-Aristotelianism turns him into a Platonist (not just the initiator of epic theater) needs to be carefully studied, an endeavor for which Puchner provides a very useful starting point. Martin Puchner The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy Reviewed work(s): The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy. Martin Puchner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xii+254. Markus Wessendorf University of Hawaii at Mnoa One of the dualisms that have informed the history of Western theater theory since Greek antiquity is the opposition between Aristotles affirmation of theatrical mimesis and Platos antitheatricalism. Whereas Aristotle, in his Poetics (ca. 330 BCE), laid out the rules for a tragedys effective appeal to an audiences emotio ns, Plato is mainly remembered as the philosopher who, in his Republic (ca. 375 BCE), condemned theatrical representations as detrimental to society and demanded that art should engage the intellect. Even though, in more recent times, Aristotelian mimesis was rejected first by the theater avant-garde and later by postmodern theorists, this has not led to a Plato Renaissance in recent practices, theories, and histories of drama and performance. Martin Puchners The Drama of Ideas: Platonic

Provocations in Theater and Philosophy aims to correct this situation by establishing Plato as the foundational figure of an alternative history of Western theater that unsettles the prevailing perception of the Greek philosopher as an enemy of the theater. Even more ambitiously, Puchner intends to demonstrate the historical impact and continuing relevance of dramatic Platonism with regard to modern theater and philosophy. Puchners revisionist approach proceeds from a dramatic understanding of Platolets call it dramatic Platonism (33), that is, the assumption that Plato, despite his reputation as an idealist philosopher, was first and foremost a playwright who dramatized the tug-of-war between material reality and the realm of abstract forms. Even though Platos dialogues evoke universal and unchanging forms, these will never and can never appear by themselves; they manifest themselves by indicating that whatever and whoever is present onstage is connected to forms and thus cannot derive stability and identity from mere matter (33). Puchner argues that Platos dialogues represent an alternative form of drama, which reconfigures Aristotles notions for different philosophical ends. Platos Phaedo (ca. 385378 BCE), for example, appropriates the form of tragedy by using a potentially tragic plot device, Socratess death, to teach Socratess own untragic theory of forms, which implies the immortality of the soul and its separation from the body. Puchner argues that the constant oscillation between human drama and abstract argument in Phaedo compels the audience to alternate between weeping and laughingthe first out of pity for Socrates, the latter because his message has sunk in. In his Symposium (ca. 385380 BCE), on the other hand, Plato not only portrays Socrates as a comic stage philosopher (64) but also points toward comedy in his depiction of the pitfalls of love and the different ways in which

bodily reality interferes with philosophical reflection. Contrary to traditional comedy, which ridicules intellectual endeavors by confronting them with the material world, Plato suspends his philosophical comedy between the pull of ideas and the lure of bodies. Puchner also maintains that Plato, in addition to classical theater genres, reassembles other aspects of Greek dramaturgy: character, action, and audience. Platos dialogues are written in prose, instead of verse, and feature small casts of characters, but no choruses. The dramatic action consists in philosophical conversations of a didactic nature more likely to be performed as staged readings rather than full theatrical productions. The climactic plot of Aristotelian tragedy is replaced by a meandering and often inconclusive stop-and-go rhythm of questions and answers (26). Platos intended audience is a small group of active listeners intellectually capable of joining in the dialogue, thereby replacing the far larger and more passive audience of the Greek amphitheater. Puchner also recognizes the influence of Plato the dramatist in the history of the Socrates Play (37), that is, a type of play that dramatizes aspects of Socratess life (such as his trial and death and his relationships to Alcibiades and Xanthippe) and occasionally even integrates passages from Platos dialogues. Although Puchner acknowledges that the Socrates Play is a minor and neglected genre, he nevertheless regards it as major evidence of Platos continued dramatic legacy since the Renaissance. Since most of the discussed plays by Amyas Bushe, Jean-Marie Collot, Francis Foster Barham, and others not only follow a conventionalthat is, Aristoteliandramaturgy but also exploit the human interest in Socratess foibles, they undermine rather than prove Puchners point. Generally, Puchner equates too easily the dramatic value of Socratess life and personality with an interest in Platonic philosophy.

In his central chapter Puchner analyzes how dramatic Platonism, Platonic dialogue, and the Socrates play have influenced the Drama of Ideas (73) of modern playwrights from August Strindberg to Tom Stoppard. Puchners Plato-centric case studies of these playwrights make for interesting reading and shed new light on supposedly familiar material. Strindberg, for example, wrote his own Socrates play (1903), but it was marred by the same misogyny that characterizes many of his other works. Georg Kaiser not only published a manifesto on Platos drama, in which he argued that the play of thought should replace a theater based on viewing pleasure, he also incorporated passages from the Republic and theSymposium into Alcibiades Delivered (191719). A surprising spin on Platos philosophy of forms can be found in Oscar Wildes dialogue The Decay of Lying from 1889, which inverts the hierarchical relationship between art and nature byinsisting that nature imitates art and that art itself is nonmimetic but directly related to ideas. Puchner also shows how the Socratic figure of the comic stage philosopher reappears in George Bernard Shaws Man and Superman (1903) and Tom Stoppards Jumpers (1972). The plot of Luigi Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author(1921) illustrates the Platonic notion that the artist must impose form onto the chaos of ever-changing life. Bertolt Brechts The Messingkauf Dialogues (193751) is conceived as a Platonic dialogue between a philosopher and various theater practitioners, in which the philosopher tries to convince the practitioners of his new theater concept by inviting them to view theater through a philosophical lens. Puchner claims that modern drama should be understoodspecifically as Platonic (73), and all of the discussed plays are Platonic to the extent that they involve theoretical debate and a non-Aristotelian experimentation with dramatic form. Yet, despite the obvious interest in the realm of ideas, not one of the plays is

invested in resuscitating Platos theory of abstract forms. Each one of the mentioned playwrights adopts selected Platonic devices and concepts for a very specific reason that transcends the notion of a return to Plato for Platonisms sake: socialism for Shaw, aestheticism for Wilde, communism for Brecht, and so on. Unfortunately, Stoppard is the only post-1950s playwright discussed in The Drama of Ideas. (Itamar Mosess Outrage from 2003, for example, should have been included since it features Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, and Brecht as characters.) Puchner states that modern drama can be called Platonic also in its insistence that theater be an intellectually serious undertaking, a theater of ideas (73), but his repeated emphasis on a dramatic Platonism that will invoke abstract forms (33) also suggests that only a modern theater continuing Platos legacy can be taken seriously as a theater of ideasthereby excluding a wide range of intellectually demanding works by Richard Foreman, Heiner Mller, Caryl Churchill, Rimini Protokoll, and many others. Puchner starts his chapter on dramatic philosophy with a discussion of Sren Kierkegaard, who uses various dramatic aliases in his work and conceives of irony as an abstraction from existence. Despite his avowed anti-Platonic position, Friedrich Nietzsche uses the title character of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (188385) to present his philosophy through dialogue and interaction, with speech being the main dramatic action. Existentialism, with its notion that existence precedes essence, suggests a new relationship between philosophy and the theater: Jean-Paul Sartres main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), is often interrupted by dramatic scenes that reveal a playwrights imagination; Albert Camus, on the other hand, conflates existentialist act and theatrical acting, arguing that actors, despite their recognition of the worlds hollowness and ephemerality, continue to act.

Puchner considers Kenneth Burke the culmination of philosophys dramatic turn (163) because of Burkes application of such dramatic concepts as agent, agency, act, purpose, and scene to the analysis of major philosophical works. To Gilles Deleuze, philosophy is contingent with the theater: his proposed Platonic theater no longer represents ideas but provides a technique for generating endless series of repetitions and proliferations of conceptual personae. Puchner also relates Alain Badious critique of Deleuze as a Platonist in disguise, whose concern with multiplicities conceals a Platonic conception of the One. Similar to Deleuze, however, Badiou envisions a philosophical theatricality that defines the essence of philosophy as an act. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Iris Murdochs Platonic novels and plays and Martha Nussbaums revisionist reading of the Symposium as a philosophy of emotions. Puchner convincingly demonstrates the dramatic traits of these philosophers, but he fails to provide evidence for their interest in Platos abstract forms (with the exception of Badiou). One major omission in this chapter are the Socratic dialogues by Paul Valry (Dance and the Soul [1923]). Overall, Puchners return to Plato reads like a classicists dream of returning to an irretrievable past when the validity of Platos theory of forms was not yet undermined by language philosophy and poststructuralism. Puchner attacks philosophies of relativism and a culturalism of difference (197), but instead of critically engaging with these approaches and proving them wrong, he takes Platos assertions that there must be an absolute point of reference for knowledgethere must be a single idea of the good (195) at face value. Puchners underlying motivation is extremely vague, namely, to imagine a projective universal, a universalism to comethe possibilities that differences can be bridged (197). Different from Badiou, however, this potentially totalitarian

universalism to come is not tied to any particular political project. The dramatic Platonism proposed by Puchner deconstructs itself given the extended and rather contradictory notions that the concept is supposed to encompass. On one hand, Puchner rejects the idealist Plato of uniform identity, contagious imitation, and immaterial essence, thereby forfeiting any believable return to essentialism. On the other hand, Puchner nevertheless insists that theater and philosophy point to truth, the universal, the idea, even if these terms cannot and should not be filled with content (198). Ultimately, the Platonic provocations promised in the title of Puchners book turn out to be an empty gesture.

The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy(review) Nickolas Pappas From: Modern Drama Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2011 pp. 257-260 | 10.1353/mdr.2011.0024 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Plato the philosopher, meet Plato the dramatist. The philosopher's name has come to mean idealism, asceticism, and conservatism: stern dogmas, rigidly held. But the dramatist that this same Plato had been since his youth persisted when the young man turned from tragedy to philosophy, embedding those severe tenets of Platonism in a new literary form that blends dramatic genres; and this dialogue form subverts Platonic dogmatism. If Plato's metaphysics leads the mind away from human bodily contingency, his form of writing leads that same mind back into particularities. The Forms may reside in Plato's heaven, but the dialogues draw their readers back down to earth. Indeed, modern thinkers who understand their project as the overturning of Platonism are late arrivals to that task; as Martin Puchner notes in The Drama of Ideas, "[I]t was Plato's dramaturgy that effectively 'overturned' Platonism" (171). Some scholars read Plato as Puchner does, emphasizing Plato's mode of writing if not to the exclusion of doctrine then at least so that drama undermines or qualifies doctrine. In my opinion, the more closely you look at this approach, the more problematic it becomes. Besides negating almost the entire tradition of Platonism, this interpretation abandons too many unforgettable, bold, uniquely Platonic proposals about reality and human nature, offering little in exchange but truisms about the human need for stable moral discourse.

The Drama of Ideas does not dwell on Plato himself. Four of its five meaty chapters take the first chapter's conception of Plato the dramatist and trace his modern influence. In Puchner's view, Plato the dramatist generated a subterranean tradition that has run along beneath the philosophical tradition for five-hundred years. Interestingly, though Puchner does not underscore this point, the underground stream of Platonic writing begins simultaneously with the above-ground river's reappearance in the modern west. Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato into Latin in the fifteenth century, also inaugurated the genre of the Socrates play, with which the legacy of dramatic Platonism begins. Puchner identifies four phases or strands in the submerged tradition, beginning (chapter two) with the Socrates play that put Plato's characters on the modern stage, followed (chapter three) by the modern drama of ideas, the theatre of Strindberg and Kaiser, Wilde and Shaw, and varieties of meta-theatre produced by Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard. Then come two philosophical traditions in which Puchner espies a slyer theatricality. Chapter four brings Continental thinkers together under the rubric "Dramatic Philosophy," from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through Sartre and Camus to Kenneth Burke and Gilles Deleuze. Those philosophers are followed by another set: Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Alain Badiou, the "new Platonists" of chapter five. It is not hard to see Socrates plays as Platonic. Puchner tells a fascinating story about the authors who dramatized the trial and death of Socrates or the Symposium's dinner party. But he turns from these clear Platonic inheritances to figures in theatre and philosophy whose names are widely known, but not as Platonists. Some of these inheritances are more plausible than others. As Puchner notes, Walter Benjamin had already connected Brecht with Plato (106); and perhaps

Wilde, Pirandello, and Stoppard do show the influence of the new possibilities that Plato discovered in mimicking conversations. Even so, locating these playwrights in a history of dramatic Platonism depends on Puchner's having described that Platonism correctly in the first place. This is the book's weak point, because it relies on a contentious and extreme reading of Plato. Puchner's Plato "is not an idealist but rather a dramatist" (8), and the Socrates in his dialogues "not the historical Socrates but a fictional character" (45). The Platonism in modern thought is not "traditional Platonism" (74, 171). If Plato the dramatist proves to be, as I think he is, impossible to square with the author who spells out arguments for specific doctrines, then dramatists like Pirandello are misinformed about Plato rather than informed by him. It might still be true that Puchner has assembled a group of playwrights who took themselves... http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_drama/summary/v054/54.2.pappas.html