The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Autopsy of a Puppet

Alberta Theatre Projects, in association with the Banff centre for Arts and Creativity, is staging The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the Martha Cohen Theatre from October 22^nd to November 9^th. The play is a modern adaptation of Washington Irving’s 19th-century version. In Irving’s version, we follow the travails of Ichabod Crane in a small Dutch settlement that abounds with superstitious thinking, called Sleepy Hollow. He is an awkward schoolteacher who falls in love with Katrina Von Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. There is more than just love at stake here; Ichabod is an opportunist who hopes that marrying Katrina will help him access the wealth and patronage of a landed elite. Ichabod’s rival is Brom Bones, a rustic and swaggering local hero, who is aware that Ichabod has set Katrina in his sights. Brom seeks to undermine him with pranks, backhanded comments, and stories about a headless Hessian (German mercenaries who fought for the British) horseman who lost his head in the American Revolutionary War. We see Ichabod outwitting Brom with his charm and sociability. After being quietly dismissed by Katrina (which might be assumed to be rejection), Ichabod rides alone through the woods. What results is an encounter with the ghoulish Hessian (left open by Irving as to whether this is, in fact, a metaphysical encounter or psychological warfare by Brom). The village finds out the next morning that Ichabod has vanished; all that is left at the scene is a shattered pumpkin and his hat.

It is an interesting story and one that acts as a potential canvas for the superimposition of contemporary interpretations. This production does exactly this; it uses the story as a placeholder for the broader examination of contemporary themes, and uses puppets and a set with a large tree (called 'liberty') to embellish the life-world of the drama. The story was written in the early modern period, but the worldview inside the play is most definitely pre-modern. This makes it ripe for re-interpretation because it thematically occupies a threshold between folklore and rationality; in this world, metaphysical causality and human reason grate against each other.

Ichabod, in this production, is hired by the new republic (USA) to go to rural areas of the country and engage in a ‘civilizing mission’. With education comes propaganda, and Ichabod sees no difference in pedagogy and indoctrination. Language is the means par excellence to reorganize the world of the village politically and conceptually, to overwrite the cultural memory of a community. For anyone with an interest in the law, this is redolent of the common law tradition as an institutional practice. Judges, after the Norman conquest (1066), were sent to shires (England) to settle disputes, to deliberate on cases, and to develop legal principles that would then be standardized. On the face of it, such a practice has clear advantages; it creates a unitary legal system with nationally coherent principles, but it is clear on deeper analysis that this was also a disciplinary project. It has been argued that such a project disrupted local communal and customary life, imposing a sovereign with rights over land, life, body, and limb over its inhabitants.

The British Empire’s civilizing mission in India extended to using education to achieve the same ends as the historical example of the common law above. Many who have lived in South Asia will have heard the name of Thomas Macaulay, (British politician) and his famous statement, “a class of persons, Indian (subcontinental/South Asia) in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” I usually desist from these reviews adopting an ideological slant; I have reasons for this. I do not believe that art should be mobilized for political grandstanding. I acknowledge the limitations of such a worldview, but this is the result of having been reared in societies (outside of Canada) where art was subjugated to state-approved messaging. If Art had any point to make, it was in the service of nourishing the ideological virility of the State; outside of that, it could not breathe. Context may be everything here; some may say this is Canada, political grandstanding in art is designed to address the anxieties of a democratic populace and not serve as the handmaiden of state-sanctioned ideology. Sure, but when we use the stage to marshal the sentiments of an audience against a particular brand of politics, we are cutting close, because we are no longer using drama to allow audiences to arrive at those conclusions themselves but are reducing art to a vehicle for predetermined thought.

This production (in the first act) makes its political architecture so evident that it flattens the symbolic ambiguity that potentially abounds in the world of Sleepy Hollow. Using the ‘No More Kings’ anthem as a declamatory rally against political developments in the USA trades thematic and dramatic depth for the easy temptation of didactic statement. This causes the symbolic world of the play to shatter; we are not asked to try to creatively interpret how history influences the present, we are told how it does. By doing this, the production detonates the inner mystery of these central characters and turns them (and everyone around them by consequence) into low-resolution avatars.

The sterling work of the actors notwithstanding, they are too often tasked with stating meaning rather than embodying it. It is no easy feat that these actors are asked to perform; it is to give life to characters who are conduits for argument and rhetorical excess. The inner life of the characters constantly erodes under the weight of what they are made to represent. They do not exist as human beings in a strange and liminal world; they are flattened into the text on the script. There is no space for them to develop their performance between, or around the text, they remain servants to it and hence become extensions of the puppets on stage. In the second act, when the rhetoric is less emphatic, we see no improvement, because these characters were not designed to express their inner worlds to us, they were designed to deliver a position and not live a story.

This is why the stakes never rise, we never feel anything for the characters, and we are increasingly left with the impression that this is well-rehearsed pageantry. The audience is reduced to participants in an argument and not the active subjects of meaning-making, which is what one would argue is precisely the role of the theatre. We are left with a situation where meaning is stripped, and all that is left are desultory rhetorical images. I am usually excited at the prospect of being able to co-create (via a review) with a production after I leave it, to think about the symbols and themes that rise up to the surface of the drama. That is the joy of theatre, meaning is not administered to us through a pulpit or hypodermic needle, but is emergent. Unfortunately, nothing much is allowed to emerge in this production, which is why no sense of the uncanny lingers with us after we leave.

These reviews, as long-winded and tedious as they are (for the poor readers), are never presumed to be a replacement for the actual art itself; they orbit at a very large distance from the real site of meaning that is developed on stage. The interpretive richness, on stage, arises from the space between bodies, gestures, and atmosphere. The theatre tells us all that we do not have language for; it is in those gaps that we discover our language. Those gaps are sealed in advance in this production; the production established meaning before we have had a chance to find it for ourselves. We are unable to ferret out emotion, choice, deliberation or agency while watching the production because, like Ichabod, it tries to ‘civilize us’. It seeks to give us tastes and opinions that unify human interpretation through sanctioned canons.

Also, for some who have not been born in the West and have grown up in the global south, the West’s current quagmire, around which political candidate or party best represents the enlightenment and empathy of the West, is seen with a certain amount of amusement. This is because the machinations of empire have assumed their own foreign policy logic, one that is perpetuated irrespective of what leader, party, or narrative claims to hold the 'moral centre'. As stated earlier, I usually try to avoid these readings, but here we are. Hardt & Negri (American & Italian political theorists), “Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and de-territorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”

Turning the stage into a rallying cry for a Eurocentric conception of political universalism is arguably not universalism; it is particularism, and in this production, it turns the stage into an empty dais for self-congratulatory posturing. The ideological superstition in this production is not to be found in the world of Sleepy Hollow, but in the vision that births it. This is the peril of using the stage to broadcast party-partisan politics, it releases ideological sentiments that are no longer focused on the symbolic and thematic depth of the art but focused on things (I would argue) that bring the neurosis of the world back into the theatre with us. If we must address political issues, and if we feel we are at a critical political junction then we should derive inspiration from how the unconscious mind reveals truth to us. Sigmund Freud (Viennese Psychiatrist) understood that difficult truths express themselves through symbols, metaphors and dreamscapes - meaning arrives through these conduits to us, it is never d-e-c-l-a-r-e-d. This is where theatre thrives, as a civic space that can hold that ambiguity, but it will never be able to do this under a megaphone. In psycho therapeutic terms, the more we are told what our symptoms mean, the less we are able to understand them for ourselves.

Apropos of the common law example cited above, this production takes it upon itself to determine what opinions we should be forming, it usurps the creative sovereignty of the audience to fulfill some liturgical political mission in terms that are far too propagandistic for the sensitivity of the stage. As a result, we are left with nothing that symbolically speaks to us at the level of meaning. The production might have taken heed of the philosophical necessity of allowing audiences to autonomously employ the liberty of their imagination in excavating these political themes on their own. The tree on stage is, after all, called Liberty.

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