Volume 4, Issue 2

David Greig’s Outlying Islands can be read as a study of how people watch each other, and the implications of watching and being watched, both for fictional characters and for the spectators. This article analyses the ways identification processes are shaped with the gaze as the mediating actor, and how sexual awakening is bound up with the workings of the look. Sartre and Lacan’s perspective on the look will help to explain the experience of being a subject and an object as described in the play. In addition, the article claims that Outlying Islands is a complex of intricate questions as to the nature of theatre itself in which the spectator is implicated as he is urged to engage in the play’s identification set-ups. Furthermore, Greig’s play explores the relation of the theatre to other art forms such as the cinema and photography, which enhances its metatheatrical nature. Both are predominantly present in the play as they question our way of looking that is initiated by their respective objects. Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum in photography will be tested on its usefulness in theatre studies.

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things (2015) presents a theatrical interpretation of the treatment of alcoholism and addiction. Through the medium of therapy and recovery, the play explores the re-construction of the self, to consider how personal and social identity have become fluid because of the unreliability of language. The article explores the consequences of the breakdown of the grand narratives of religion and therapy, and considers what could replace them as a substitute structure for the self. Examining the representation of Emma, a character who is an actress as well as an addict, the article considers how theatre presents a real self and real life experience through the use of dramatic forms such as naturalism and Brechtian theatre. Such forms are found to be unsatisfactory because they cannot convey an authentic sense of the self on stage. But this failure of representation stems also from the inadequacy of language to encompass a definition of self. Emma tries to redefine herself by using different narratives about herself, whether or not they are true. The problems of the indeterminacy of language are seen to interfere with the therapeutic approach to the healing of illness. With the decline of the religious and the therapeutic narrative to help explain ourselves and our actions, the article considers whether the language of commercialism is now the defining narrative of self, and considers whether a secure personal identity is in itself any longer necessary in the twenty-first century.

Colonial adventures and imperialistic travels have taken a new pattern as in the cases of humanitarian travel and dark tourism in the twenty-first century. Dark tourism not only satisfies Western individual’s hunger for orientalism labeling the touristic site a marginal and exotic landscape, but also uncovers the touristic undercurrents involved in the voyage. In this article, by utilizing the immediacy of the theatre genre, I argue that dramatic literature shares similar ambivalent spatial relations with humanitarian travel in that they both locate themselves between proximity and remoteness in their relation to the other. Similarly, by staging metatheatrical aspects, Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie underline the spectral feature of theatre blurring the distinction between reality and performance, distance and closeness. Thanks to this self-referentiality, the plays create a distance between the actresses and the spectators and, simultaneously, establishes a bond through the protagonists’ endeavor to present a remote story that instigates empathy from the audience. Written in two sections, my article first explores the concept of dark tourism and the genre’s overlap with this ambiguous relationship between distance and proximity in humanitarianism, and then does a close reading of both plays .

This paper analyses the ways in which Coetzee creates a hybrid tragi-comic epic through presenting the moral journey of very flawed, ordinary characters struggling with the aftermath of social change in a post-apartheid South Africa. The play, Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny , is analysed for those elements which work towards a serious examination of the journey of the individual towards greater self-knowledge, or of the soul towards salvation. Karen Armstrong’s identification of the elements of myth provides a basis for comparison with the allegoric world created by Coetzee and experienced by the characters in the play. The balance between tragedy and comedy is considered to be the hallmark of this work and thus the paper also engages with aspects of style, such as characterisation, language, imagery and plot, which categorise the play as comic. With reference to Bergson’s classic writing on Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, the play is shown to reveal many of the traditional comic elements. Throughout the play, the audience member alternates between an intellectual appreciation of the accuracy of the satire and a growing understanding of the darker implications of the story. Coetzee’s facility with language is examined, both in its literary and performance aspects, as is his ability to create recognisable characters and meaningful imagery.

The subject of theatre audience engagement has preoccupied scholars and practitioners in theatre studies and research-informed theatre. Yet at the same time, there is a profound absence of data about audience members. The Canadian play and research project, Home / Less / Mess , offers insight into the attitudes and emotions of over 300 audience members as they attend a very alternative theatre production in their small city. A collaboration between homeless writer/actors, academics, and community workers, Home / Less / Mess highlights conflicts concerning methodological approaches as well as different expectations of art and research. The group is held together by the shared goals of engaging audiences emotionally, intellectually, and politically. The audience survey is viewed as the tool which will reveal the effectiveness of those goals. The Home / Less / Mess survey benefited from a high response rate and the use of qualitative open-ended questions. The survey results reveal that many audience members, at least in the short term, were touched and educated by the homeless actors and their play.

Does the space of performance play a dynamic role in South Africa twenty years after the end of apartheid? Can theatre tell the stories that resonate in a landscape of ambiguity and uncertainty, where fragile and fractured memories remain concealed? The post-apartheid milieu produces a complex audience dislocated by spaces of inherited physical and mental boundaries. Theatre played an important oppositional role during apartheid. Now, the challenge for theatre is far more entangled and calls for theatre-making that heightens the community’s critical social and political reflection. Ubu and the Truth Commission produces new assemblages that implicate the Deleuzian “lines of flight,” where shifting boundaries penetrate into spaces of desire and peripheries of potentiality, emerging with imagined vocabularies of meaning that create in the audience – in the listener and thinker – a critical understanding. Subverting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s legal framework, the production’s affective manifestation of institutionalized violence dislocates the voices, translations and bodies of the witnesses and brings them into the “active body” of the community (Rancière), giving expression to Deleuze’s idea of “becoming-minor,” and evoking a theatre language of emergence and creating a space of immanence; a site for Loren Kruger’s “embodied spatial practices and imaginations.”

Edward Albee’s play The Goat reimagines tragedy for the 21C by engaging with a key term of classical tragedy. Leaving behind the illuminating and socially responsive recognition exemplified by Sophocles’ Oedipus , The Goat renders contemporary alienation through the yearning for, and ultimate absence of, recognition. The dismantling of this prominent generic feature indexes protagonist Martin Gray’s rejection of human relationships, and underpins his reorientation toward his animal lover, Sylvia. Recognition thus marks a shift in tragedy’s purview, from relations between men to those between humankind and nature. Loving Sylvia, however, does not mean Martin eschews anthropocentrism. Although he moves a long way from the primacy of relations between humans, he remains unable to acknowledge a world beyond duality.

This article considers the six plays written by Caryl Churchill between 2000 and 2012 ( Far Away , A Number , Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? , Seven Jewish Children , Love and Information and Ding Dong the Wicked ) in relation to the vision of feminist theatre offered in Sue-Ellen Case’s “Towards a New Poetics,” the final chapter of her 1988 study Feminism and Theatre . It thereby offers an assessment of how far Churchill’s work in the ‘post-feminist’ period accords with or deviates from an earlier feminist agenda, one that proposed to decouple theatre form from patriarchy by re-making it from scratch. It is argued that Churchill’s work during this period, while no longer explicitly feminist in intent, nonetheless contains and expresses – both in its thematic concerns and its formal properties – the feminist “residue” that has been described by Janelle Reinelt. The body of the discussion offers a consideration of the plays in relation to the four main tenets of feminist theatre as envisaged by Case: breaking with realism; constructing woman as subject; deviating from linearity; and offering multiple and ambiguous meanings. The argument concludes by suggesting that Churchill’s widespread influence on contemporary British playwriting can be seen in part as the influence of the kind of feminist thinking exemplified by Case’s “new poetics.”

Simon Stephens’s Carmen Disruption (2014, Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg; 2015, Almeida Theatre, London) is a contemporary rewriting of Bizet’s Carmen , which depicts a day in the life of five individuals in an atomised urban landscape. This paper focuses on the formal and thematic disruptions that inform the play and imbue it with political resonance. I consider the play’s intertextual structure as the first and most evident of these disruptions, then go on to explore the disrupted representation of time and communication, addressing, finally, Stephens’s problematic engagement with the British realist tradition. The playwright’s poetics and previous works shed light on his systematic desecration of dramatic conventions, and allow us to read these disruptions both as a means of portraying contemporary alienation and, more importantly, as acts of creative transgression. Stephens’s reliance on dramatic empathy thus acquires significance as the most vital of these transgressions, encouraging the audience to transcend the isolation portrayed in the drama. I conclude by briefly considering possible controversies related to Stephens’s dramatic style, which seems, at times, to mimic the logic of consumer capitalism. This, I argue, serves not to validate the mechanisms of alienation but rather to bring them onstage, in order to catalyse a sociopetal movement within the audience, and return the contemporary individual’s predicament to a collective state.