14 Performing stories, engaging audiences
-
Janine Hauthal
Abstract
Since the 1990s, British playwrights have increasingly confronted spectators with characters that tell stories rather than enact them. Attending to this turn towards storytelling in plays that ‘stage narration’, this chapter first delineates particular features of the emergent ‘narrative aesthetics’ in theoretical terms. It then turns to Dennis Kelly and explores the concentration on performing stories as a major characteristic of his work. Adopting a transmedial narratological approach, it centres on his debut, Debris (2003), and the sense of narrative unreliability that pervades the play. It argues that the play’s narrating characters affect the use of addressivity and focalisation in a way that deviates from dramatic conventions. It also demonstrates how Debris juxtaposes mimetic minimalism with diegetic density, and how its narrative aesthetic shapes the ethics of the play as it generates audience sympathy. Ultimately, by exposing the theatricality of storytelling, Debris stimulates a re-thinking of the long-lived opposition of showing and telling, narrative and drama/performance.
Abstract
Since the 1990s, British playwrights have increasingly confronted spectators with characters that tell stories rather than enact them. Attending to this turn towards storytelling in plays that ‘stage narration’, this chapter first delineates particular features of the emergent ‘narrative aesthetics’ in theoretical terms. It then turns to Dennis Kelly and explores the concentration on performing stories as a major characteristic of his work. Adopting a transmedial narratological approach, it centres on his debut, Debris (2003), and the sense of narrative unreliability that pervades the play. It argues that the play’s narrating characters affect the use of addressivity and focalisation in a way that deviates from dramatic conventions. It also demonstrates how Debris juxtaposes mimetic minimalism with diegetic density, and how its narrative aesthetic shapes the ethics of the play as it generates audience sympathy. Ultimately, by exposing the theatricality of storytelling, Debris stimulates a re-thinking of the long-lived opposition of showing and telling, narrative and drama/performance.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- A foreword xii
- Introduction 1
- I Incubation 19
- 1 DNA in the classroom 21
- 2 Suspended in time and place 39
- 3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’ 55
- II Antibodies 71
- 4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’ 73
- 5 Utopia 90
- 6 Beautiful doom 105
- 7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama 118
- III False positives 135
- 8 ‘I just want it to be your words’ 137
- 9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ 152
- 10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism 170
- 11 Atopia 184
- IV Variants 201
- 12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’ 203
- 13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company 217
- 14 Performing stories, engaging audiences 233
- Conclusion 251
- Index 264
- Plates 267
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of illustrations vii
- Notes on contributors viii
- A foreword xii
- Introduction 1
- I Incubation 19
- 1 DNA in the classroom 21
- 2 Suspended in time and place 39
- 3 ‘I’ll teach you a thing or two’ 55
- II Antibodies 71
- 4 ‘Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?’ 73
- 5 Utopia 90
- 6 Beautiful doom 105
- 7 Subjectivity in Dennis Kelly’s early drama 118
- III False positives 135
- 8 ‘I just want it to be your words’ 137
- 9 ‘What is the difference between made up and real?’ 152
- 10 ‘What else isn’t true?’, or, Dennis Kelly’s expressionism 170
- 11 Atopia 184
- IV Variants 201
- 12 ‘Now look, are you going to tell me a story or not?’ 203
- 13 Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the Royal Shakespeare Company 217
- 14 Performing stories, engaging audiences 233
- Conclusion 251
- Index 264
- Plates 267
