Two Plays: “Paracelsus” and “Prometheus Bound” by George Ryga

Ryga’s Paracelsus was written about ten years ago, and by the time Mavor Moore wrote the introduction to this book in 1982 its production had still only been “contemplated.” As Moore points out, one reason for this is that a play with a cast of twenty-four people and a three-level stage requires a formidable budget: something not usually forthcoming to Canadian theatre companies, especially if the plays are by Canadians. Moore offers a perceptive comment when he infers that the irony in Paracelsus begins with the list of dramatis personae—Ryga has written a play that Canadians will not or cannot produce, in the same way that Paracelsus offered his countrymen something which they could not or would not accept; it seems, according to Ryga, that both Canadians and fifteenth-century Germans prefer the comforts of vested interests.

Paracelsus is about Philipp Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), who kindly shortened his name for posterity to Paracelsus. Historically, he was doctor, sage, alchemist (and possibly charlatan as well); in any case, legends about him proliferated in the same way as they did in the case of his fellow countryman Johann Faust. Ryga’s Paracelsus certainly lives up to his penultimate name as he struts, postures, insults, roars, curses and sometimes heals his way through this rather sprawling play. Ryga is unfortunately so taken up by his creation that Paracelsus has a habit of sweeping everyone else into dramatic oblivion whether he is trying to or not, and the secondary characters become, ultimately, superfluous. Franz, the loyal student and disciple, does not and cannot exist outside his master, but can only really ape him. The voices or characters of authority are all one-dimensional, symbolic of the bugbear Society which they represent. They are conventionalised types, the doctors, lawyers and businessmen; they utter, with few exceptions, the same commonplaces one would expect to hear from the more conservative of those professions today. Nothing, for Ryga, has really changed.

What is interesting about Paracelsus is not its plot or characters as much as its techniques. Hardly any dramatist working today would think of using blank verse, and Ryga is brave for attempting it. Only T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry have had much success with verse plays in our century—poetic drama has become static and contrived because it assumes the familiarity of both audience and dramatist with conventions and disciplines now relegated to the intellectual rubbish heap, along with rhetoric and Latin conjugations. In Paracelsus the verse all too often achieves a staccato effect when it should be reverberating with all the discipline of Marlowe’s “mighty line.” The other notable technique, the three-tiered stage, would have been more effective had the two modern doctors not been so wooden and stereotyped. The idea, of course, is to show how we have not changed in spite of technological advances; the chauvinistic male and the idealistic female make one long for Paracelsus to exert himself and break through the aether to sweep them offstage as well. It is because Ryga fails to make the link between the ages work properly that Paracelsus may baffle rather than educate. He obviously wants us to see Paracelsus as being a compassionate if unorthodox and temperamental figure, but Bombastus gets in the way too much. The reference to Doctor Norman Bethune as an analogy also falls flat when one knows something about that good doctor’s huge ego and equally theatrical behaviour. But that is the point—we need a world which can accept and tolerate the talented eccentric because it will become a better world.

Prometheus Bound deals with the individual who was once inside society but whose conscience has caused him to allow himself to be cast out. Ryga has adapted Aeschylus’s play of the same name to a more general situation. Yet he has preserved the themes of the Greek play almost intact; and here, more than in Paracelsus, the poetry rings true, and does not sound mawkish or contrived. The only question one might ask is why do anything with Aeschylus at all, when a good translation of his play brings out all that is timeless and universal about the legend of Prometheus? Anyone who has seen Sophocles or Euripides on stage knows that adaptations are not needed. But the question really answers itself; the message of the old play may well be even stronger if the actuality of the stage is updated. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon the first of a series of great choral odes contains the line “the kindness of the gods contains an element of force”, which is the theme for Prometheus as well. The gods, or as Ryga has it, the government, knows what is best for man and may use force to bring it about. Man may learn, but he may not think, for he must not be allowed to comprehend the Janus-face of the gods. Prometheus, in Ryga’s play, sees that he can do no good as a loyal member of the government, that he is helping to build a society where materialism is the end result and where thought, art and imagination are eradicated. Like Aeschylus’s creation, who was a Titan, Ryga’s Prometheus is a son of the earth and sees both sides of the coin. He will not lend himself to the destruction of all that is human in the name of material, mechanistic progress. For this he is now being punished.

Like Aeschylus before him, Ryga presents Prometheus’s case as a series of confrontations with old acquaintances. It is a true classical drama in that there is little action on the stage and a commentary is provided by a Farmer and a Worker rather than a chorus. Even with the confrontations, Ryga’s play with an immobilised hero would be extremely difficult to produce in a convincing manner. In a sense it is Senecan tragedy, moving by language rather than action, and may read better than it could be played.

Paracelsus and Prometheus are struggling against forces which cannot be moved—society. Both believe that a world which tolerates heretics, eccentrics and people acting somehow outside the prescribed norms is the better world, not one where progress is measured by how fast a vehicle goes. Prometheus and Paracelsus want a world in which they can live and help mankind in their own way, a world which would see neither of them as a threat to its interests. That, says George Ryga, will be a long time coming, but the spirits of Paracelsus and Prometheus make it somewhat more possible. ■

John Butler.