Volume 5, Issue 2

In this paper, I discuss Chapter 2, Section 9 (Klotz et al. 2016) as hybrid of postdramatic theatre and traditional forms of oral literature embedded in the South African performance tradition, the izibongo and ntsomi. I apply two of Lehmann’s core propositions “the irruption of the real” and the “reverberation of the voice in space” to account for the formal treatment of the subject matter and the tone of this contemporary ‘protest play.’ These departure points begin to account for its dependence on, and affirmation of, its collaborative authorship and presentation mode in the story-telling register which declares the ‘pastness’ of multiple individual experiences rather than their representation or enactment in an ongoing unfolding present. The ‘play’ comprises a montage of transcripts of authentic accounts of brutal atrocities and relentless discrimination on grounds of sexual preference and identity. As such, it continues the legacy of the powerful genre of South African protest theatre, but equally marks a departure from the tone and style established by that tradition to unsettle contemporary spectatorial expectations. The politico-aesthetic implications of the staging are central to the innovative achievements of the production and this discussion.

In her last and posthumously published play 4.48 Psychosis , Sarah Kane considerably diverges from the dramatic style that she adopted in her early plays such as Blasted and Phaedra’s Love . As the play does not provide specific information about the number and identity of the character(s), the audience needs to depend on the fragmented narratives presented in the play to get a sense of the identity of the voice(s). Yet, the function of these narratives is not to mark the effectiveness of language to construct characters’ identities. On the contrary, they challenge the capabilities of language by introducing a gap between the way a character perceives his/her body and the way his/her body is perceived by others. Particularly the ambiguity regarding the sex of the character(s) results from this gap between different perceptions and language (which already makes a he/she distinction in describing a person’s sex) proves helpless to convey the identities of the voices in the play. At this point, 4.48 Psychosis puts forth a new approach to violence in in-yer-face theatre, which conventionally depicts overt physical and sexual acts and suffering on stage. The play emphasizes that it is the clash between the experienced world and the ‘objective’ world that brings about violence. The articulation of self-perception (in this case, sexual self-perception) turns into a painful process for the character(s). This process reveals itself through the tension between the medical narratives, which objectify a psychotic patient, and fragmented voices (which seemingly belong to the patient). In this paper, I will first examine the play’s treatment of different perceptions with respect to the concept of relationality propounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception . Then, giving specific references to Helen Cixous’s “Aller à la mer,” I will explore the play’s problematization of language in the depictions of sexual self-perception and of character(s)’ bodily experience.

In September 2015, Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, was widely reported in the British press as commenting on the lack of female roles equivalent in stature to the tragic figures of Shakespeare’s Lear and Hamlet, or Miller’s Willy Loman. Her observation that audiences are more “comfortable” with a “male narrative” sparked considerable debate. My article engages with and develops this debate by turning a feminist gaze on two plays in Featherstone’s Royal Court repertoire: Penelope Skinner’s Linda and Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath , both of which premiered in 2015. Mapping feminist thinking on to Raymond Williams’s reflections on “modern tragedy,” I conceive of a feminist-tragic feeling as crossing the divide between the political and the tragic. Formally, I argue this encourages a move away from the generically-bound categorisation of tragedy with its attendant definitions and theories, and makes it possible to think in more expansive, fluid, genre-crossing ways of what Rita Felski terms a “tragic sensibility.” Ultimately, through close readings of Linda and How to Hold Your Breath , I argue how each structures a feminist-tragic feeling for a world in which Western privilege has repeatedly failed to democratise.

Both critical discussion and performance reviews of Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (2003) focus on the play’s ambiguous genre. Albee’s subtitle “( Notes toward a definition of tragedy )” yokes the play to a consideration of that ancient dramatic form and only further confuses the responses to the play’s genre. However, in the explorations of the play thus far, no one has considered how Albee’s texts engage with the specifics of that subtitle: namely, “notes toward” and “definition.” This article investigates how Albee uses the idea of definition as an asymptotic limit to explore the concept of tragedy as a genre. By engaging the theories of both Aristotle and Nietzsche among others, Albee’s play ultimately demonstrates its own inability to come to terms with a goal of defining tragedy. Furthermore, the play’s habitual usage of puns and other language games indicates how the attempts to be precise with language are ultimately futile in their ability to establish comprehension among people. The play’s use of precise and imprecise language exemplifies the “toward”-ness of the subtitle that approaches the limit that the genre “tragedy” represents. The play then becomes a note-book of sorts that only offers ideas, moving toward the asymptote of a definition of tragedy, while ultimately illustrating the inability of anyone to comprehend the concept, the genre, or each other.

:On the surface, Jez Butterworth’s The River is about an avid fisherman in his annual trek to his cabin in the woods to capture sea trout and the women who accompany him in this endeavor. None of the main characters have names, only gender designations. Through a close reading of The River , in addition to exploring the array of literary allusions to Aelian, W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes, and others, my theoretical approach is to focus upon how Butterworth effectively employs theatre as a medium to address his anxiety over ecological issues and their vital connection to the relationships between human beings and their environment. Using the lens of environmental literary criticism, I analyze how Butterworth challenges his audience to re-examine both character motivation and the concept of plot in order to discuss the ritualistic transaction, the transcendent quality of The Man’s experience of fishing. The Man’s obsessive quest for the sea trout inevitably contributes to his sense of separation and isolation from the women, whom he cannot help but place in ancillary positions in the play.

Canadian contemporary theatre is defined by a preponderance of previously marginalised discourses such as Feminist drama, First Nations drama, or Queer drama. The centre to periphery dispersal that has driven the Canadian cultural scene since the Massey Commission’s final report (1951) has favoured the rise of these traditions into public awareness. At the same time, the voice of disabled persons is hardly ever heard on Canadian stages. This paper takes a closer look at two recent texts, Kevin Kerr’s Skydive (2007) and Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now (2013), that aim to fill this absence. After a concise review of critical texts on disability studies, disability theatre, and disability aesthetics in order to establish an appropriate theoretical framework and terminology, the two plays are analysed for how they represent disability and disabled people. Kerr chooses to elide the different physicalities of his abled and disabled actors, establishing a transformative disability aesthetics. Fraser, in line with his usual modus operandi, opts for a more confrontational hypervisibility of his disabled characters and maximum emotional impact. Both authors are fully abled, however, so while their texts can be considered successful contributions to the representation of disabled persons on the contemporary Canadian stage, with diametrically opposed representational strategies, the question of an appropriation of voice remains pertinent.

This article explores Rimini Protokoll’s 2013 performance piece Situation Rooms , which deals with movement and mobility in their various, currently most pressing shapes: it thematises the mobility of weapons, people, and data streams; it makes its audiences physically move; and it moves theatre itself – out of what Christopher Balme has called the ‘black box.’ The performance, which stages the dynamics between distance and nearness, makes mobility and movement graspable from challenging angles, and links them to the political, economic, and social workings of globalisation. Therefore, this article investigates the political and social thrust of Situation Rooms by exploring its different kinds of mobility and examining how these kinds of mobility are characterised. It will also ask about the experiences of mobility that the production invites its recipients to make and with which it arguably creates an awareness of mobility’s social and political effects. Lastly, the article addresses the question of how the piece’s staging and its use of digital technology expresses the multifaceted kinds and experiences of mobility.