Everyman, Cultural Relativism, and Theatre

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”

- Edward Sapir, Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech

A wise man me told that the basis of culture is language. Obviously, language transfers data to one form to the next. Like software, language changes. Sometimes from one writing script to another like Turkish, which went from Persian-Arabic script to a Latin based alphabet. Now some institutions are pressing to revert back to the Persian-Arabic system. It’s always interesting to see the relationship between art and language. Does art yield to language or is it the other way around? Does it depend on the art form, the culture, or the language?

There was a very interesting case study done, specifically focusing on the relativity of culture, language, and literature. A cultural anthropologist by the name of Laura Bohannan spent two months in West Africa cataloguing the Tiv culture. Her experiment for the ethnographic research was the translation of Hamlet into the Tivi language. She hypothesized that stories, like Hamlet, can be grasped in universally.  Much to her chagrin, her theory was neither right nor wrong. She found that there were some cultural compromises that needed to be made in order for story to be relevant. Although with the changes the message of Hamlet remained the same. This was the case of a European cultural item being presented to a West African (Tiv people) audience.

In contrast it’s interesting to observe, as a thespian and amateur anthropologist, to see a company interpret a play such as Everyman and then see the response of the Audience. Everyman is an ambiguous piece. There is no recorded author, there is not account for its conception, nor is there accounts for its original language. For specialists in the field of medieval literature, its original language could go far beyond Occitan. The earliest written piece is circa 1510 in Middle English. This production of Everyman was modernized, a lot.  For instance the beginning of the play after an exposé by God (depicted as a ragged maid), Ev, or Everyman, is the main spectacle of his 40^th birthday party. His party was like a scene from Wolfe of Wall Street, drugs, alcohol, and sex galore. The author of the text had no conception of what Miami Vice was much less what “…doing blow,” meant.  The language wasn’t necessarily changed though; there were additions to text. The artistic design team fro this production took a lot of artistic licensing, but it mad the piece relevant. It was a very interesting choice. Dialogue would go from Middle English syntax to modern slang. It was like seeing a Middle English cake sprinkled with the words fuck, shit and cunt. In a way, the writer Carol Ann Duffy made a choice of Juxtaposition. Textually, this gives the players and the audience to experience the archaic language in a raw and gritty way.  Surprisingly, it was effective in the story telling. Before the augmentations, Everyman was a medieval morality play, a piece that would have focused on the ecclesiastical journey of every “catholic” rather then everyman. If present today without its compromises, I believe it would be lost to the general audience. Most audiences are not versed in catholic tradition and let alone Christian Theology.  Like Laura Bohannan’s Hamlet, Everyman had to be augmented for it to be relevant. The message stayed the same. This was a message about the mortality of man and why it’s important to be conscientious of our actions, a message even more important in this day and age.