Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice [1 ed.] 9789004415881, 9789004415874

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Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre

Australian Playwrights And Australian Drama, Theatre and Performance

Series editor Denise Varney (University of Melbourne) Founded by Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt Developed by Veronica Kelly and Peta Tait

volume 18

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ap

Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice

By

Richard Murphet

leiden | boston

Cover Illustration: The ‘epileptic’ fall in Quick Death. Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Murphet, Richard, 1945- author. Title: Acts of resistance in late-modernist theatre : writing and directing in contemporary theatre practice / by Richard Murphet. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2020] | Series: Australian playwrights and Australian drama, theatre and performance, 0921-2531 ; volume 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019037197 (print) | LCCN 2019037198 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004415874 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004415881 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Murphet, Richard, 1945---Criticism and interpretation. | Kemp, Jenny, 1949---Criticism and interpretation. | Foreman, Richard, 1937---Criticism and interpretation. | Theater--Production and direction--Australia. | Theater--Production and direction--United States. | Theater--Political aspects--Australia. | Theater--Political aspects--United States. | Modernism (Literature)--Australia--History. | Modernism (Literature)--United States--History. | Theatrical producers and directors--Australia--Biography. | Theatrical producers and directors--United States--Biography. Classification: LCC PN2053 .M85 2020 (print) | LCC PN2053 (ebook) | DDC 792.02/330922--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037197 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037198 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0921-2531 ISBN 978-90-04-41587-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41588-1 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Julian, Cody and Blaise

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Contents Series Editor's Foreword  ix Acknowledgemnts  x List of Illustrations  xii Introduction  1 1 The Three Artists: Background and Selection  5 2 Rationale for Selection  9 3 The Making of Art  11 4 Modernism and Theatre  14 5 Romantic-modernist Precursor  17 6 Late Modernism in Theatre  21 7 Form, Politics and Theatre Theory  25 8 Chapter Outlines  27 1 Richard Foreman  32 1 Theatre as a Philosophical Endeavour  34 2 Foreman’s Early Influences  35 3 Phenomena and Ontology Onstage  37 4 Molecular Creation: Insistence and Gertrude Stein  43 5 Language, Metaphor and Action in Mid-career Plays  46 6 Confusion, Enticement and the Spectator  52 7 Foreman as Director: The Relationship of Word to Action  55 8 Foreman in the Rehearsal Room  61 9 Theatre of a Quantum Age  70 10 Performers in Foreman’s Theatre: Manic Dancers of the Pattern  75 2 Jenny Kemp  82 1 Early Influences  83 2 The Verbal and the Visual  86 3 Interweaving Theatrical Modes in The Black Sequin Dress  87 4 Language Registers in Call of the Wild  93 5 Organisational Strategies in The Black Sequin Dress  99 6 The Multi-dimensional Woman in The Black Sequin Dress  102 7 Kemp as Visualiser: Storyboards and Paul Delvaux  108 8 Kemp as Director: Working with Duration  114 9 Complementary Autonomy: Artistic Collaboration  123 10 Actors: New Forms of Representation  126

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Contents

3 Richard Murphet  131 1 Cultural Influences on Subjectivity  131 2 Seeking an Epileptic Language: Quick Death  133 3 Scenic Writing: Slow Love  147 4 The Language of Disintegration: Dolores in the Department Store  157 5 Construction of Entanglement: The Inhabited Woman  167 6 Writing Invasion: The Inhabited Man  177 Conclusion  191 1 Updating Subjectivity  191 2 The Writer/Director  193 3 Two Focal Depths: The Something and the Nothing  195 4 Resistance within the Practice  198 Bibliography  201 Index  212

Series Editor’s Foreword I am delighted to introduce Volume 18 of the revised Australian Playwrights Series now identified through its extended title of Australian Drama, Theatre and Performance. The Australian Playwrights Series published its first monograph, Veronica Kelly’s study of playwright Louis Nowra, under the banner of Rodopi Press Amsterdam, in 1987. Volume 8, published in 2000, saw Peta Tait edit Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, marking the expanded field of studies in performance and spectatorship. I pay tribute here to both Veronica Kelly and Peta Tait as former editors of this important international outlet for Australian scholarly research. The revised series with Brill aims to contribute to the interpretation, critical analysis, promotion, and wider understanding of Australian drama, theatre and performance in the international field. Yet the key feature of the series ­remains central – each monograph has offered an in-depth study aimed at ­furthering our knowledge of Australian theatre and performance. Richard ­Murphet’s monograph is a fine example of this tradition. Acts of Resistance: Writing and Directing in Late Modernist Theatre offers a close, in depth and comparative study of three writers and directors. Its viewpoint is that of the theatre artist and the complex intuitive and collaborative processes that bring a work into being. The artists are Australians Jenny Kemp and Richard ­Murphet, and American Richard Foreman. Each of these artists, according to Murphet’s compelling argument, shares a late modernist framework that continues the resistant stance of artists against tradition, here dramatic realism and the subordination of theatre to text, while offering a deep insight into how the works work as theatre. This new volume offers an in-depth study of theatre for our times. Denise Varney University of Melbourne, Series Editor

Acknowledgements Primarily to Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp: two fine artists and individuals who generously shared their time, ideas, information and encouragement throughout the research and writing of this book, and whose art continues to inspire me. To all the artists and theatre workers who have enabled me to continue my own practice in the knowledge that there are those who will give their ­utmost – with little financial reward – to make it happen. I have been blessed to work alongside directors, performers, designers, and technical crew who have spurred me to enter territory I would have been terrified to chart without their talent and commitment. In the above regard, particularly to Leisa Shelton, my close collaborator for many years. It will become clear in Chapter 3 of the book the significance of the collaboration she provided during a key stage of my career. To the students and staff at the Victorian College of the Arts whom I had the privilege to encounter in both confrontation and concord. The seeds of my research into theatre practice really took root during my years training actors, directors, writers and performance-makers. They deserve my fullest gratitude for stretching an understanding of how theatre may be made. A special thanks to Lindy Davies, Tanya Gerstle, Geraldine Cook and Sara Koller for warm comradeship and constructive exchange. To Lindzee Smith, Mark Minchinton, Barry Hill, Rachel Fensham, John Ellis and Rob Meldrum, for many decades of friendship and invaluable ­ conversation. To Denise Varney, without whose constant support and detailed feedback this book would not have been possible. She encouraged me to write as I knew best, and set standards high enough to take me beyond what I knew. To Dr Diane Brown, a copy-editor of rare rigour, care and patience. And to Ian See, who provided an invaluable editorial guidance in later stages of editing. To Bruno Gaica, Heidrun Lohr, Jon Green and Jeff Busby for the generous rights to reproduce their fine photographs of several shows. To Foundation Paul Delvaux for the rights to Delvaux’s La Route de Rome. To my widening family: all of you. Particularly to Julian for his wise support and belief, to Cody for the depth of his feeling and courage, and to Blaise and Jess for their undying encouragement and the joy they bring. Inspirations all.

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Always to Jenny for all that she is and has been to me. To Theatre itself: always the most invigorating art form that has for me also been the primary way in which I think through life. ‘Blooded thought’ Herbert Blau memorably called it.

Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6

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10 11 12

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Richard Foreman directing Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013. © Richard Murphet  55 Rehearsal stage for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013. © Richard Murphet  61 Designers and technicians at work for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013. © Richard Murphet  66 The ever-patient performers waiting on-stage during rehearsals, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013. © Richard Murphet  68 Foreman’s framing techniques, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013. © Richard Murphet  73 The nightclub and the train in The Black Sequin Dress. Performers: Mary Sitarenos, Margaret Mills, Greg Stone, Natasha Herbert, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  92 The world opening in Call of the Wild. Performers: Vikki Eager, Margaret Mills, Mark Minchinton, Ruth Schoenheimer, Margaret Cameron, The Church Theatre, Melbourne, 1989. Photo credit: Branco Gaica  94 Undine filled with desire. Performers: Mary Sitarenos, Ian Scott. The Black Sequin Dress, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  104 Undine collapsed on the nightclub floor. Performers: Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills. The Black Sequin Dress, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  108 Early preparatory notebook for The Black Sequin Dress, property of Jenny Kemp  111 Paul Delvaux: ‘La Route de Rome’. © Foundation Paul Delvaux, Sint Idesbald/SABAM. Copyright Agency, 2019  112 The central moment of stillness in Still Angela. Performers: Margaret Mills, Felicity MacDonald, Lucy Taylor, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 2002. Photo credit: Jon Green  119 The ‘epileptic’ fall. Performer: Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  137 The recurring machine of death (1). Performers: Emma Smith, Kevin KiernanMolloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  142 The recurring machine of death (2). Performers: Emma Smith, Kevin KiernanMolloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  143

Illustrations 16 17

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22 23

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Film noir image (1). Performers: Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, James Cook, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photographer Jeff Busby  145 Film noir image (2). Performers: Naomi Rukavina, Emma Smith, James Cook, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  145 Windows and the voyeur (1). Performers: James Cook, Naomi Rukavina, Slow Love, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  149 Windows and the voyeur (2). Performers: James Cook, Emma Smith, Slow Love, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  149 The four multiples. Performers: Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catharine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Jodie Harris, Dolores in the Department Store, Grant St. Theatre, Melbourne, 2000. Photo credit: Heidrun Lohr  165 The four Dolores take over. Performers: Alice McConnell, Simon Aylott, Jodie Harris, Catharine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store, Grant St. Theatre, Melbourne, 2000. Photo credit: Heidrun Lohr  166 Why were you afraid? Performer: Leisa Shelton, The Inhabited Woman, Arts Space, Melbourne, 2003. Photo credit: Heidrun Lohr  175 Leo and the motel loom out of the darkness. Performers: Merfyn Owen, Leisa Shelton, Adam Pierzchalski, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  179 Leo in the room of memory. Performers: Merfyn Owen, Edwina Wren, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  184 Leo screams out his pain. Performer: Merfyn Owen, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  188 Attaching the explosives. Performers: Adam Pierzchalski, Leisa Shelton, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008. Photo credit: Jeff Busby  189

Introduction This book investigates particular modalities of theatre practice developed by three artists who both write and direct their own work: Richard Foreman, Jenny Kemp and Richard Murphet. Each artist grew up and came of age in the decades following World War ii, and their signature artistic practice developed over two decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s and continued into the twenty-first century. The prevailing dramaturgical form at the time each artist began their practice was dramatic realism, spanning six decades, from such plays as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) through to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Realism provided an ongoing critique of the deleterious effects of the industrial capitalist society upon the individual citizen. It gave central focus to the actions and sensibilities of the middle-class citizen marginalised in classical drama. However, realist drama had been, since the 1960s, increasingly viewed as representative of a narrow bourgeois worldview that focused more upon the traumas of the individual and less upon wider social concerns. In the mid-sixties, Miller himself criticised Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because it ‘gets deflected onto a question of personal neurosis’ (1966, online article). It was a view echoed at the time by several contemporary artist-­ theorists such as Karen Malpede, who attacked the narrow focus of the ‘bourgeois realism’ in the works of Williams and other like-minded playwrights (1972). Over thirty years later, Karen Jürs-Munby saw what emerged in the midcentury as ‘a discrepancy between the self-contained absolute form of drama with its interpersonal emphasis and the new social, politico-economic and philosophical subject matter which transcends it’ (2006, 3). Jürs-Munby’s comment comes from her introduction to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006). Lehmann’s book provides a poetics for the late-twentieth-­ century postmodern turn in theatre. The postdramatic artists sought to revoke the central tenets of dramatic theatre, in order to create performances that responded to contemporary society. Lehmann considers the ways in which postmodern dramaturgy has developed ‘a changed perspective on human subjectivity.’ He argues that we should not grieve over the ‘lack of an already defined image of the human being’ in these texts, because they have discovered ‘new possibilities of thinking and representing the individual human subject’ (18. Emphasis in the original). Postmodern performance has challenged the depiction by dramatic realism of a coherent social structure expressed through dramatic story, narrative and plot, and its dependence upon an illusion of fictional reality seen in the representations character and setting.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��20 | doi:10.1163/9789004415881_002

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Introduction

The work of Foreman, Kemp and Murphet discussed in this book expresses a social and artistic unease with bourgeois modernity and with the limitations of the forms of dramatic realism. However, it occupies an intermediate stage between two dramatic modes: realism and postmodernism. It is not that this intermediate stage simply provided a stepping stone across which theatre must travel in order to move from one form to the inevitable outcome of the other. Rather, the work of these artists and other practitioners who occupy similar territory has its own integrity based upon distinct conceptual objectives. However, their theatre practice consciously sits between these two possible paths: it seeks to retain the remnants of the dramaturgical devices that drive realist drama – character, illusion, story, plot and the aim of coherence – precisely in order to critique them and the belief systems they reflect. I devote space further on in this Introduction to my use of the term ‘late modernism’ to describe the theatre of Foreman, Kemp, Murphet and their peers. For now, I wish to avoid the trap that faces all writers who attempt to distinguish clearly between modernism and all its offspring: late-, post-, postpost, and so on. There are no clear distinctions: the lines of interconnection are constantly productive. These three artists consciously utilise elements from the ‘modern’ dramatic realist theatre we are subverting; moreover, elements of the subversion are influenced by the high-modernist, anti-realist experiments in art, literature, film and theatre from earlier decades. In turn, many of the ingredients that I am labelling late-modernist theatre are shared with (have perhaps influenced) the postdramatic theatre with whom our work has been largely concurrent: the questioning of character and the nature of modern subjectivity, the interrogation of story-telling and dramatic suspense as an escape from the present-ness of experience and the overriding belief that the promise of cohesion is possible in a fragmented contemporary world. These are among the qualities of a postdramatic dramaturgy discussed by Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006). It is significant, however, that Lehmann barely mentions Foreman in his comprehensive study, discussing him primarily as part of the prehistory of the postdramatic, connecting Gertrude Stein and the ‘landscape play’ with the use of theatre as a ‘speaking space’ (2006, 31 and 63). From an historical perspective, the work I am covering here is late-­modernist, because it can be understood more clearly in the context of the art arising in the decades immediately following World War ii. As Fredric Jameson has argued, ‘modernism in the 1950s and 1960s, seemed to touch a kind of limit and to have exhausted all available and conceivable novelties’ (2002, 152). This was, he asserts, ‘a moment of late modernism’ (151), which is ‘a product of the Cold War, but in all kinds of complicated ways’ (165). However, although it is a period that we may call late modernism in theatre, this act of periodisation is as

Introduction

3

strategic as it is historical. To borrow from Jameson’s pragmatic determination of late modernism, it ‘introduces an intermediary concept between the demarcations of modernism and postmodernism, a space for those artists and writers who do not fit comfortably within any of the other established categories’ (1991, 305). Jameson’s designation reminds me of the concept of the ‘minor’ artist described by Deleuze and Guattari (1986), a concept to which I return several times, especially in the Conclusion. From an aesthetic perspective, this book is specifically concerned with examining the theatre practice of artists who take on the dual roles of writer and director of their productions. Late-modernist theatre artists such as Robert Wilson, Elizabeth LeCompte, Lee Breuer and the artists profiled and discussed below controlled the vision of their projects in the manner of a film auteur. Francois Truffaut, in his 1954 essay ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,’ coined the word to account for the signifying style or unique worldview that certain directors brought to their movies. The concept of the auteur was identified with the films of the French New Wave in which the director of the movie was also its writer. The tradition continued into the postdramatic period of the 1990s when artists such as Jan Fabre,1 Jan Lauwers2 and the Castellucis3 worked across multiple artistic media in composing original and signature works. In more recent times, the term has come to be applied to visionary directors, such as Katie Mitchell, Peter Sellars, and Australians Barrie Kosky, Benedict Andrews and Simon Stone, who freely adapt classical texts as expressions of their own signifying style and worldview. Notwithstanding this recent tradition of auteurs in performance, theatre as a practice does not sit easily with the singular authority implied by the term. Theatre has traditionally been the result of a collaborative act, in which, in Paul Carter’s words, the traffic of discourse operates ‘not directly at the expense of the material resistance the work embodies, but indirectly, through material thinking’ (2004, 12). In other words, the discourse takes place in the commitment to a particular mode of art practice – collaboration – and the thought informing it, rather than in any direct socio-political commentary within the work. Such a collaborative mode of practice would seem to be at odds with the auteurist program implicit in the twin roles of writer/director. 1 A Belgian visual artist and theatre director whose theatre works include I Am Blood (2003) and Servant of Beauty (2010). 2 Founder and Artistic Director of Belgian theatre group Needcompany, whose works include Snake Song Trilogy (1994–6), All is Vanity (2006) and The Deer House (2008). 3 Italian theatre artists Romeo and Claudia Castelluci founded and directed Societas Raffaello Sanzi, whose works include Giulio Cesare (1997), Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep (1999) and Tragedia Endogonidia (2002–4).

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Introduction

A recurring theme in this book will be the tension between, on the one hand, the singular, signature visions of artists whose writing exists not only on the page but onstage, giving them the possibility of totally controlling the outcome, and on the other hand a collaborative mode of artistic practice that ‘involve[s] a deliberately chosen alteration of artistic identity from individual to composite subjectivity’ (Green, 2001, x). The singular aesthetic of both Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp may seem to assert the need for central control; however, Kemp depends in rehearsal upon the individual artistic input of her designers and her actors, while even Foreman, who fulfils the role of writer, director, set designer and sound designer, is forced to engage in different ways with collaborating practitioners once the pragmatics of rehearsal commence. In my practice, the decision to work within a consciously collaborative process has occasionally involved an attempt to constitute within the processual ‘placing’ of the work (its topoi) (Carter, 2004, 11) the ramifications of its informing concept (its topic). I have, in other words, utilised the disseminating process of collaboration at some stage of the procedure in order to highlight the polyvocal cultural influences upon an individual’s sense of self identity. From another perspective, the artists studied herein subvert their own control over the final outcome by setting one of their authorial roles, the director, into an interrogative relationship with the other, the writer. That is to say, the social and cultural instability that underlies their aesthetic project is reflected in the unstable relationship between key component parts of the creative process: the written text and the performance text. In his 1992 survey of North American artists from this period, Michel Vanden Heuvel writes that practitioners such as Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Sam Shepard and The Wooster Group ‘often seek the indeterminate fields within which performance and drama create fruitful friction and harmony, rather than trying to find a means to absorb or annihilate one or the other set’ (1993, 14). The processes of directing, designing and acting have been traditionally conceived as supportive to the written text, serving to manifest it as clearly as possible for the spectator of a performance, not getting in the way of the script but ‘absorbing’ themselves into it. By contrast, in a radically postdramatic production of a classical text by an auteurist director the production is more than often the occasion for the director to demonstrate his/her skills at the expense of the original script, which is more or less ‘annihilated’ in the process. The writing and directing of each of the artists neither absorb nor annihilate one another. They are distinct yet interdependent processes, sometimes one disappearing behind the other to lock the structure into place; at other times, each coming into focus in its own right in order to bring specific forces

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into play. There is in these productions, as Vanden Heuvel implies, a ‘friction’ experienced by the spectator that emanates as much from the judicious interplay of dramaturgical tools as from the subject matter being dramatised. Foreman and Kemp, for instance, have composed several written texts with little clear idea at the time of writing as to the theatre work they may constitute. They gather fragments of writing, notes and random thoughts, and, when they are ready to do so, place before themselves the challenge of how to render these fragments into theatrical form. The practice of directing when applied to this resistant writing is forced from the outset to claim for itself an independent status, not reliant upon past directing practice, since there is no conventionally recognisable theatre text to put onstage through the use of well-tested strategies. The directing (the overall craft of mettre-en-scene) draws attention to itself as an act in its own right; the artists prioritise some specific and unusual qualities of directing, often under the influence of other art forms. 1

The Three Artists: Background and Selection

1.1 Richard Foreman Richard Foreman was born in New York City on June 10, 1937. He graduated in the mfa Program at Yale University in 1962, where he was enrolled in the playwriting course headed by the theatre historian and theoretician, John Gassner. Under Gassner’s tutelage, the training Foreman received was primarily dramatic realism in form and structure, in which the writer’s task was to come up with a good idea with ‘the right combination of theatricality and political or psychological or sociological relevance,’ and then render it dramatically through what Foreman remembers as ‘a great deal of willed effort’ in order to produce a text that ‘was right and professional and IMPRESSIVE’ (1985, 234. Caps in original). Returning to New York in the mid-sixties, Foreman befriended a group of experimental artists and filmmakers active in the New American Cinema movement: Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Jack Smith amongst others. Foreman’s own developing artistic sensibility was strongly influenced by the minimalist aesthetic of these film artists, and by the minimalist visual artists and composers with whom they were associated. Other early influences included the German writer/director, Bertolt Brecht whose work provided Foreman with a refreshing alternative to the dominance of representational illusion on the American stage. The writing of Gertrude Stein introduced Foreman to the idea that the workings of the consciousness could in fact be the focus of artistic work. He shifted from focusing his writing upon the exploration of socio-political issues to a fascination with the nature, process and

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a­ ctivity of thought itself, and of the perceptual processes involved in watching and receiving artistic work. In this way, his work can be seen to have taken on a philosophical bent that separates him from the more politically direct companies active in North America in the 1960s, such as The Living Theatre, The Performance Group and The Bread and Puppet Theatre. Foreman produced his first text, Angel Face (April, 1968), at the Cinematheque in Wooster Street, New York, a space run by Jonas Mekas to show the films of the New American Cinema. He produced, directed and designed the show himself and presented it as a product of his newly formed company, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, under which title he has presented the majority of his shows. Over the ensuing years Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own productions in as many years, in addition to directing many classical and contemporary plays and operas in his idiosyncratic style. His major plays include Total Recall (1970–1), Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs (1972–3), Rhoda in Potatoland (1976), Penguin Touquet (1981), The Cure (1986), Lava (1990), Eddie Goes to Poetry City Parts 1&2 (1990, 1991), My Head Was a Sledgehammer (1994), Paradise Hotel (1999), Zomboid (2006) and OldFashioned Prostitutes (2013). Most of these productions have premiered, with Foreman as writer, director and designer, in the relatively small Ontological-Hysteric space in New York’s East Village. Unlike his internationally famous contemporaries, Robert Wilson and The Wooster Group, Foreman has kept a relatively low profile, preferring to continue his non-populist explorations of the drama of perception within the context of small chamber works in which he can maintain control without the pressures of large audiences or the international festival circuit. Despite this, his theatre has gained wide recognition as foremost amongst experimental work over the past half century. Seven collections of his plays have been published, several volumes of which also contain manifestos of philosophic and aesthetic intent, and selections of essays on aspects of his practice as writer and director. 1.2 Jenny Kemp Jenny Kemp was born in Melbourne on March 11, 1949. Her mother, Merle Kemp was a practising artist, and her father, Roger Kemp, an abstract expressionist painter, was a significant figure in late-twentieth-century Australian art. Some of Jenny Kemp’s earliest memories are of the family of four sisters and their parents sitting around the dining room table drawing and painting alongside one another. Her skills as a visual artist have been manifest in her theatre work over the years.

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Kemp’s own direction as an artist moved away from visual art when in 1966, on a whim, she auditioned for and unexpectedly received acceptance into the National Institute of Dramatic Art (nida) in Sydney, at that time the only fulltime training course for stage actors in Australia. Kemp had no prior experience in theatre and lasted no longer than a year at nida, joining many others as a victim of the severe pruning process at the end of first-year training. However, her appetite had been whetted; over the next decade, she continued ­intermittent work as an actor in Western Australia, in London and finally in Melbourne, where she performed in the small theatre circuit that was beginning to burgeon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1978, she undertook a short training course in vocal technique with a North American voice teacher, Rowena Balos. It was to prove a major turning point in her artistic life. One of her fellow trainees, Robert Meldrum, was a member of the Australian Performing Group (apg), a large theatre collective working in Carlton, Melbourne. The apg sought to present theatre fare alternative to the mainstream work available at companies like the Melbourne Theatre Company. Meldrum invited Kemp to join a subgroup he was setting up within the apg with a few other collective members. The subgroup, Stasis, aimed to develop work that reflected not the rough-house, externalised performance style of most apg shows but the kind of deep body–mind theatre focus emerging from companies like Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre laboratory. They adapted theatre classics such as Antony and Cleopatra and Peer Gynt and the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Kemp’s role in these productions was primarily as an outside-eye or a director; her theatre focus had shifted from acting to directing. It would soon include theatre writing. In the late 1970s, Kemp began her career as a writer/director with two short plays, The Point Isn’t To Tell You (1977) at The Festival of Australian Drama and Sheila Alone (1979) at La Mama Theatre in Carlton. In 1983, she directed her adaptation of D.M. Thomas’ novel White Hotel at Grant St. Theatre, South Melbourne. For the first time, her bold and original visual style had a chance to flower and she received favourable notices from the Melbourne and national press. White Hotel’s fascination with the conjunction of dream and trauma and the novel’s re-reading of Freudian psychoanalytic theory also kick-started Kemp’s own early series of works on these themes: Goodnight Sweet Dreams (Napier Street Theatre, 1986), Call of the Wild (The Church Theatre, 1989) and Remember (Gasworks Theatre, 1993). In 1996, Artistic Director, Barrie Kosky commissioned The Black Sequin Dress for the Adelaide Festival, and the production travelled to Playbox Theatre in Melbourne. Three subsequent works had their premieres in Melbourne over the next fourteen years: Still Angela (Playbox, 2002, 2004), Kitten (Playbox, 2009) and Madeleine (Arts House, 2010).

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Introduction

The latter two works were part of Kemp’s ‘On the Edge’ project, examining respectively the experience of manic depression and schizophrenia. More ­recently, she has been working primarily as a freelance director. Jenny Kemp is widely recognised as one of the most significant and influential writers and directors in late-twentieth century Australian theatre. In addition to writing and directing all of the above works, she has continued working as a director of other playwrights at all the major Australian companies, gathering a number of Green Room Awards in Melbourne theatre for her productions. Both The Black Sequin Dress and Still Angela were shortlisted for the nsw Premier’s Award (1996, 2003) and in 1997 she received the Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts. She was an Australia Council Theatre Fellow from 2000 to 2002. Currency Press published many of her texts, and there are three videos of her productions and her practice commercially available (see Bibliography for details). 1.3 Richard Murphet I was born in London, England on February 16, 1945, and my mother and I migrated to Australia in 1948 in the wake of World War ii and finally settled in Melbourne in 1957. My undergraduate degree was at Monash University, where I wrote my honours thesis on the stagecraft of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. I undertook a Masters in Theatre at the University of Toronto at the end of the 1960s when the alternative theatre movement was flourishing in North America. In 1975, I joined the collective at the Australian Performing Group (apg) in Melbourne, working as an actor and director. In 1976, I co-founded a subgroup within the apg, which worked with an aesthetic that reflected a late-­twentiethcentury urban approach to theatre as an alternative to the neo-Brechtian historical dramas that were the main focus of the apg collective. The subgroup, Nightshift, opened with a production of Heathcote Williams’ ac/dc, an electrically charged vision of neural re-calibration performed at The Pram Factory, Carlton in 1976. Over the few years of its existence, Nightshift presented works by a range of late-modernist writers from Europe, Britain and North America: Heathcote Williams, Rainer Fassbinder, Peter Handke, Sam Shepard, Franz Xavier Kroetz and Caryl Churchill, as well as the Australian writer, Phillip Motherwell. These writers experimented with theatrical form and writing style in order to augment a continuing dependence upon the representational power of a strong dramatic story with unfamiliar approaches to the power of presentational theatrical performance. In 1979, during a year spent in New York, I wrote Quick Death to Infinity, produced in 1981 at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, by a young French director now

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9

resident in Australia, Jean-Pierre Mignon, who later established his own theatre company, Australian Nouveau Theatre (ant). Mignon directed my second play Slow Love (1983) at ant’s new premises, Anthill in South Melbourne in 1985. At that time (1985–89) I was devising and directing work as artistic director of The Mill Theatre Company in the regional Victorian town of Geelong. In 1991, I was appointed lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts in charge of the training of theatre directors, writers and performance makers, where I remained for two decades, managing to maintain my own artistic practice alongside my educational role. My following productions as writer/director were Dolores in the Department Store (Grant St. Theatre, 1999 and 2000), The Inhabited Woman (Arts House, North Melbourne, 2003) and The Inhabited Man (Studio 28, Southbank, 2008). In 2015 at La Mama Theatre, I directed Quick Death and Slow Love for the first time, in new versions written for the occasion. My plays have received productions on four continents and throughout Australia, and in 2017 I was awarded the Life Time Achievement Award by the Melbourne Green Room Committee in recognition of my decades-long work in Melbourne theatre. I remain engaged in both directing and writing for theatre. 2

Rationale for Selection

This book is not intended as a wider survey of the field of late-modernist theatre practitioners. I have focused on three artists in order to give sufficient ­attention to the working processes of each. I shall draw out the wider implications for other artists as a result of that close examination. My selection of artists as subjects is not a random one. I have been familiar with Richard Foreman’s work from afar for several decades, beginning with a chance visit to a small theatre in New York in the 1960s. I have been attracted by its ‘power of theatrical madness,’4 as evidenced on the page, on video, through reportage and very occasional attendance, without having a clear idea of how it was created. As will become clear, Foreman has been a model for me, not only artistically, but for how an experimental independent artist can work and survive in this profession without sacrificing his integrity. My decision to embark upon a more thoroughgoing investigation into what he and others have discussed about his working processes was triggered in 2006 by reading the interview he gave to Charles Bernstein (1992). As an artist, I come to a study of Foreman’s work with the desire to know just how 4 I borrow the phrase from the title of Jan Fabre’s breakthrough production in Belgium in 1984.

10

Introduction

it works, and what has caused him to craft the strangely fascinating stageworlds of his productions. As a researcher, I come to his stagecraft from the perspective of a curious outsider. My relationship to Jenny Kemp is much closer: she and I have been life partners since 1983. I have lived alongside her throughout the period she was creating her major work; I was there to see all the productions, some several times. This has not, however, been the reason for including her here. Like many others, I have been deeply moved by her unusual artistic vision and by the singular quality of her work, often mounted in the face of quizzical confusion or uneasy disregard by the theatre mainstream. I have been drawn, too, by certain similar­ ities between her creative processes and those professed by Richard ­Foreman – giving rise, I should say, to works that could scarcely be more distinct. I bring to the discussion of Kemp’s working process a degree of understanding and familiarity beyond my reach with Foreman’s. However, I have not lived inside her mind; I was not privy to the internal decision making, the private difficulties, the unexpected breakthroughs, the specific influences at play at each stage of the development of a work. So, this investigation into her artistic practice has essentially been my own introduction to the details of that practice. Artistically, as I have come to understand, Foreman and Kemp are two artists of resistance. Moreover, it is in attempting to delineate the forms of resistance that they enact – a delineation that is the major focus of this book – that I have been able to put into perspective the nature of my own resistant artistic practice: the nature of which, in the process of doing it, is too close even to bring perspective into play. As I argue more fully in the Conclusion, the three of us are consciously artists in the sense of minority, that for Deleuze and Guattari exists when ‘the writer is [positioned] in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community.’ This may seem to be a position of weakness but, as they postulate, ‘the situation allows the writer all the more possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’ (1986, 17). This is potentially a subversive position; and I hope herein to reveal the aspects of that subversion. It is subversion not only against the other but within the artist, as the dual roles of writer and director that we share (our auteurist position) deliberately subvert one another in refusing to move into territory already charted. If this generally resistant stance in all its dimensions is one that we share, our work is quite distinct from each other’s, and thus could not be more different. A key part of that difference – informing the initiative behind our respective projects, the development of our working practices, and the signature quality of the end product – has to do with the nature of the artistic investigation each artist undertakes. Foreman is concerned with the ontological ­position

Introduction

11

of the subject lost in a world of phenomena, that ‘are always stumbling over each other in a way that renders everything totally unyielding, un-fluid’ (Foreman, 1969b, 30) in the ongoing struggle of ‘being’; Kemp follows the journey of the psyche of her female protagonists in their troubled movement towards individuation; I watch on as my anti-heroes and anti-heroines suffer at the mercy of various forms of cultural subjugation, sometimes to the point of death. Combining a North American and two Australian theatre practitioners in one book speaks also to a largely ignored and primarily one-way line of influence between theatre in North America and the burgeoning avant-garde theatre in Australia between 1960 and 1980. This book does not explore that line of influence per se. However, it is clear, both in the attention that I give to Richard Foreman as well as the interest Jenny Kemp has shown in the work of Robert Wilson, that there are traces of interconnection between, to be more precise, the experimental theatres of New York and Melbourne in those decades: traces overlooked in the standard focus on Australian theatre history within the context of British and European theatre practice. The New York influence did not begin until North American theatre itself developed a distinctive voice in the years of protest and the rise of the youth movement in the 1960s. And I think it is true to say that this influence waned in the 1990s when the postdramatic turn shifted attention back to Europe and from there to the rich theatre cultures in Asia, as hubs of theatrical innovation. But during the three decades between 1960 and 1990, theatre companies in North America provided triggers and models both for the protest theatre that emerged in Australia and for what I am calling the late-modernist experiments that followed in its wake. 3

The Making of Art

This book attends to artistic practice as distinct from artistic product. The emphasis is specifically upon how a work comes to be, rather than any deep excavation to reveal ‘latent content’ or ‘true meaning’ residing beneath the ‘manifest content.’ This approach draws from the argument made by late-modernist critical theorist Susan Sontag that ‘The function of criticism should be to show how it [a work of art] is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means’ (1961/2009, 14. Emphasis in original). I will engage in a process of exegesis when relevant to develop further an understanding of the aesthetic project and the working processes of the artists; but as an artist my most informed approach is to deal with the tactics and strategies that each artist ­develops to create work in the search for new forms of expression and communication.

12

Introduction

Until quite recently, such a focus on the making of the art has been barely on the horizon of writing on performance. In 1970, American visual artist and theorist, Robert Morris, noted a similar resistance in the writing on visual art. ‘Much attention has been focused on the analysis of the content of art ­making – its end images – but there has been little attention focused on the significance of the means’ (1995, 73). Morris believed that, contrary to the focus of most critical writing, ‘there are “forms” to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products’ (73). When performance theorists think through theatre practice to the implications of the thought behind it, any understanding of what Morris calls ‘the submerged side of the art iceberg’ still tends to be coloured by ‘the simple fact that those who discuss art know almost nothing about how it gets made’ (73). Morris’ words are deliberately provocative, and it is not my intent here to attack performance theory, which has recently shown much more sensitivity to ‘the activity of making’ in the broader discussion of artistic work.5 British scholar, Susan Melrose has for many years paid attention to rehearsal practice, and indeed has argued for a perspective in performance studies apart from what she calls ‘cursory Spectator Studies’ (2005a). She expands upon her specification of the two distinct approaches to research in her paper, ‘… just intuitive …,’ which is a response to and record of the performance-making practices of dancer, Rosemary Butcher: In most cases, writerly-interpretative apparatuses, brought by spectators, tend to engage with performance-effects, after the event, and in terms of the perceived disciplinary identity of that event, rather than with performance-making causes, which they are unable to predict. (and unable, after the event, to prove) 2005b, 6. (Emphasis in original)

In a recent article on writing about performance, Paul Allain cites the Australian performance scholar, Gay McAuley’s comment that in the twentieth century ‘[i]t is a somewhat surprising fact that, notwithstanding a century or so of scholarly concern with theatrical performance, relatively little has been written about the rehearsal practices from which these performances emerge’ (2012, 3. Ctd. Allain, 2016, 486). Against this resistance, the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, under the leadership of McAuley and her successor, Ian Maxwell, has over the past several decades devoted much of its energy to the study of rehearsal practice. 5 See for example the chapters by different scholars in two anthologies: Kelleher and Ridout (2006) and Harvie and Lavender (2012).

Introduction

13

My investigation of how theatre is made is methodologically heterogeneous, shifting my approach according to the artist in focus. With both Kemp and Foreman, I am interested not in a critical review of the work of the artist, but in an analysis of the aesthetic project that each artist seeks to fulfil, and the strategies that each artist puts into operation to do so. Both artists have sought new approaches to art-making in the later decades of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century. This book aims to elucidate those approaches and the influences that shaped them, and to understand just how their work formulates new propositions about theatrical practice in the context of late-modernist art. The reflection upon my own working practice is primarily a kind of ‘autohistorical’ research, involving analysis of events that occurred in my recent past. It draws upon the memory of practice in an attempt to describe lived experience. It is similar to the field of practice-as-research that has emerged over the past few decades, except that the particular focus of my research dwells not upon work emerging as I write, but upon an understanding in reflection of my practice over thirty years. The decision to study the work of three artists spanning several productions is, I admit, potentially reductive. In the case of artists who have been engaged in the process of developing their artistic project whilst writing and directing each production, a different play demands to some extent different emphases in both writing and directing. The experimental, highly intuitive writing of the text for one play makes demands upon the directing process that in turn demands new approaches as a director. Thus, the insights gained on the floor as a director may suggest new avenues for experimentation in the writing of the following text, which then sets new challenges for directing from which new conceptual horizons may be drawn, and so on. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to see signature features emerging across the scope of each artist’s work. These features reflect both recognisable traits in their practice and ongoing concerns in their artistic project. In fact, viewing one’s work as part of an artistic project (within which each work is one step on a larger trajectory) parallels a late-modernist theatre practice, in which the artist deals directly with their own consciousness. Susan Melrose sees an artist’s ‘signature practice’ as ‘a matter of intellectual property ownership,’ and tends to be critical of the authority that accrues to the signature of a single artist in theatre, believing that ‘it outlives the largely forgotten realities of professional collaborative practices’ (2006, 124). I prefer to see signature practice more productively as something created and earned by the artist, although the collaboration-auteur dialectic is one to which I give attention. Baz Kershaw has described research in performance practice as a way ‘to determine how and what it may be contributing in the way of new knowledge

14

Introduction

or insights’ (2002). I am concerned here with knowing not only how work is made but also what it contributes to knowledge. 4

Modernism and Theatre

When Fredric Jameson referred to ‘a moment of late modernism’ (2002, 151) at the point of ‘exhaustion’ for modernism in the 1950s and 1960s, he was primarily referring to the visual arts, non-dramatic literature, architecture and music. The artists practising in these media during these decades were working in a post-war era that saw a ‘culture of consumerism’ emerge in the United States and spread rapidly throughout the West. Such a context, Jameson argues, ‘spelled the end of a whole era of social transformation and indeed of Utopian desires and anticipations’ (165). Theatre followed a somewhat different arc during these decades. As Philip Auslander notes, movements in theatre tend to occur ‘later than the formulations for other cultural and artistic areas,’ perhaps because ‘theatre is a relatively conservative art form which tends to follow rather than to initiate trends’ (1987, 22). Unlike the modernist movement in visual art, literature and music, which sought forms that ran against the current of realism, the predominant modern theatrical form throughout the twentieth century continued to be indebted to the radical realist dramaturgy of early modernist writers such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov and George Bernard Shaw. There were several attempts throughout the twentieth century to shatter the illusion of social reality that underpinned dramatic realism. The theatre practitioners connected to artistic movements such as Symbolism, Dada-ism, ­Expressionism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd provided bold alternatives to what they saw as the limited, outward, social and bourgeois focus of dramatic realism. However, these movements were relatively shortlived and did little to halt the continuation of theatre’s predominant realist mode. With the exception of such isolated figures as Luigi Pirandello and Samuel Beckett, theatre lacked the models for a systematic, radical, high-modernist anti-realist venture as developed by practitioners in other art forms such as Picasso, Duchamp, Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot and Pound. The influential force of the first wave of realist theatre was derived from the writers’ ability to fuse convincing representations of the lives of ordinary people with strong socio-political arguments on issues attuned to the spirit of the times. As Raymond Williams, for example, argued in the early 1980s, ‘naturalist practice’ was ‘marked’ by ‘the contemporary, the indigenous and the socially

Introduction

15

extended or inclusive’ (1981, 168). The works of the early modernist realist writers were political at the level of both content and of style. At the level of content, the issues driving the dramatic action, such as women’s rights, the marginalised poor, the social morality of individual action, and the fate of the aristocratic classes, highlighted and furthered debates that came to signify social progress throughout the following century. In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer’s escape from her domestic home was originally read as a comment upon male control over the liberty of women and the hypocrisy of the ethical standards justifying this control. The circumstances of the deaths of Oswald Alving in Ghosts and Hedda Gabler in Hedda Gabler suggested a critique of the social circumstances leading to their suicides, in the hope and belief that society could be changed. At the level of style, ‘realism’s politics,’ in Arne de Boever’s words, ‘consists in how it extended – redistributed – one’s sense of what could and could not be written, introducing into literary representation realms of subjective experience that were previously off limits’ (2016, 227). De Boever is commenting upon the application to literature of the ideas of French philosopher, Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, artistic work in what he calls ‘the aesthetic regime’6 that emerged in nineteenth-century art abolishes the imperative to adhere to the hierarchies laid down by the ‘representative regime’ of earlier centuries, as to what and whom art should represent, introducing common people and the prose of the everyday into the realm of high art. ‘To become “modern”, that is to get rid of its dependency on the rules of social hierarchy,’ Rancière believes, ‘fiction simply must be faithful to what can be observed in the everyday life of any ordinary man’ (2016, 36). Ibsen succeeded exactly in lifting the everyday life of his own social class onto the stage of tragic drama, through crafting a way of writing dialogue from which the clashes between middle-class individuals and their social circumstances could emerge into what Raymond Williams calls ‘a quasi-colloquial form of dramatic speech’ (1981, 167), providing the illusion of unheightened conversational rhythms within remarkably unremarkable bourgeois living rooms. As works of theatre, moreover, Ibsen realised, in plays like A Doll House and Hedda Gabler, that he could figuratively ‘trap’ his characters, as they were trapped within the suffocating demands of social conformity, not only within the tight constraints of a dramatic plot, but also within a ‘box set’ that ­embodied 6 The ‘aesthetic regime’ emerged, according to Rancière, in the mid nineteenth century in writers such as Flaubert and visual artists such as Courbet and Millet (See Ranciere’s chapter in J. Murphet and Hellyer, 2016, 4–6).

16

Introduction

the prison they fought to escape. When Nora escapes the home that she has been trapped in like a doll, for example, she exits through the door of the threewalled box set into ‘the wings’ of the stage. When Hedda disappears to shoot herself, she moves into the inner room upstage and literally draws the curtains on her life. A similarly meta-dramatic consciousness of the politics of form and mise-en-scene is the driving dramaturgical force in the late-modernist theatre that I am studying. Within realism, however, this double consciousness of content and form is intended to remain the territory of the creative artist, not the viewing spectator. As William Worthen has noted, realism’s success depends upon ‘its ways of using theatrical production – conventions of acting, design, direction – to naturalise a particular relationship between the dramatic fiction and the offstage world of the audience’ (1992, 14). Worthen argues, with an eye on the skill with which dramatists like Ibsen and Chekhov manipulate the theatrical experience, that what is ‘most characteristic of realism […] is not the verisimilitude that it claims as its style […] but the framing machinery that seems to make such lifelikeness appear’ (14). It is the skill of the realist writer and director to utilise ‘the framing machinery’ to create the illusion of reality, not the consciousness that we are watching an act of theatre. The focus in realist drama by the mid-twentieth-century, by contrast, had increasingly become the suffering individual, alienated, without moral certainty, caught in a dysfunctional society emptied of the possibility for change. Even the most successful of the American mid-century realists such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill in his late dramas, and likewise the self-consciously ‘angry’ British realists associated with the ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the mid-fifties, left their characters, as Michel Vanden Heuvel describes, ‘to suffer the indignities of their economic situation.’ For these characters, ‘their psychological or sexual pathologies, and their social deprivations seemed to deny any possibility for positive social or spiritual change’ (Vanden Heuvel, 1993, 27). Arthur Miller, as we have seen, distinguished himself from these contemporaries, seeing his work as a continuation of the tragic mode based upon the Greek dramatists and continued in the work of Ibsen (Miller, 1966). It is arguable, however, that the note of melodramatic despair at the end of Death of a Salesman similarly leaves the characters ‘suffer[ing] the indignities of their economic situation.’ For the three artists covered in this book, and for like-minded theatre artists who began working in the late-fifties and sixties, the forms of such ‘bourgeois’ dramatic realism seemed ‘exhausted’ and to have ‘touch[ed] a kind of limit’ (Jameson, 152). Dramatic realism had been the predominant modern ­theatrical form, and the auteur-driven, late-modern agenda, in reaction to it is the focus of this book.

Introduction

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17

The Romantic-Modernist Precursor

In Late Modernism (2010), Robert Genter focuses on novelists, poets and visual artists from North America during the 1950s and 1960s, and as such the relevance for theatre is indirect. However, his triangulation of post-World War ii art into three artistically overlapping but theoretically distinguishable forms of modernism – high modernism, romantic modernism and late modernism – does enable some understanding of the trends that emerged in avant-garde theatre in both America and Australia, as the sixties shifted into the seventies and the eighties. As I have suggested, the high-modernist form, which sought to keep art clear of the corrupt influence of the marketplace, had little impact upon the theatre of the mid-century. Dependent as it is upon the support of public attendance, theatre could have little truck with the high-modernist desire voiced by art critic, Clement Greenberg to keep ‘pure art and pure literature’ free from the concept of popular culture lest it be ‘irredeemably tainted’ (Ctd. Jameson, 2002, 177). However, Genter’s second category, romantic modernism, is one with which we can identify many of the theatrical enterprises of the decades of the Cold War, including, I would argue, the majority of the theatrical experiments emerging in the sixties, to which in turn the practitioners of late modernism were reacting. For Genter, the romantic-modernist artists – and he specifically focuses upon William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer and Jackson Pollock – were ‘returning to the moment in the late nineteenth century when Romanticism gave birth to modernism, that is, the moment in which aesthetics began to incorporate the metaphysical claims once generated by religion’ (2010: 8). Genter associates this branch of modernism with ‘new forms of modernist practice that operated through shock and immediacy and that incorporated spontaneous methods of production’ (8). These features were certainly central tenets of the new wave of theatrical practice in the 1960s that relied not upon the written text so much as a direct and unpredictable relationship between the performers and the audience. ‘Paradise Now is built,’ Richard Schechner wrote in 1970 about a production by New York’s The Living Theatre, ‘so that the performance incorporates disruptions the spectators act out. […] Many spectators cannot adapt themselves to a structure that appears so disorderly. But Paradise Now is very well organised if one recognises diversion, disruption and side-tripping as part of that organisation’ (1977, 20). The seemingly self-contradictory nature of this approach – an organisation that embraces disruption – is a central part of the ideology that continues in the American theatre of the 1960s, practised by companies such as The Open

18

Introduction

Theatre, The Performance Group, and the New Dance operating out of the Judson Church. These companies built chance practices and improvisation into the fabric of their work and also featured models for an organisational energy disruptive to the dominant social forms of late capitalism: models such as communitarian idealism, myth, ritual, and the presentation of the human body as a repository of new forms of spiritual potentiality. As Schechner’s words may suggest, romantic modernism in North American Theatre can be dated from the early 1960s when the aggressively idealistic Living Theatre began to use theatre as a public call-to-arms based upon a belief in the need to re-invigorate political consciousness within the communitas, which in the terms of cultural anthropology is a body of citizens exhibiting ‘a strong sense of solidarity and bonding that develops among people experiencing a ritual, rite of passage, or other transitional state together’ (Oxford Dictionary online). Crucially, the aim was to re-enchant a society deadened by the suburban social mores and the culture of consumerism. ‘The actors have urged the spectators,’ proclaims the organising voice in Paradise Now, ‘to discard the prohibitions, and to begin to undo the structures which make these prohibitions. Certain clues have been given … The Public must now take the first step’ (Malina & Beck, 1971, 27–28). The conscious recognition of the spectators in The Living Theatre’s productions, the urge to transform them from passive spectators into active participants in the revolution, flies in the face of realism’s dependence upon ‘the invisible, indeterminable, absent scene of the spectator’s interpretation’ (Worthen, 1992, 5). The nature of the idealism evident in romantic-modernist theatre such as The Living Theatre was derived in large part from the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s experiments in political theatre in the thirties, forties and fifties. Brecht’s project of shaping a form with which to prioritise the political as a primary focus for theatre, with the aim of provoking radical action in its audiences, was continued in the United States not only by The Living Theatre but also by companies such as The Performance Group and The Open Theatre. In Australia, Brecht’s influence was also significant in the left-wing populist theatre developed at the apg in Melbourne in the seventies. By contrast, Richard Foreman, fascinated by Brecht’s example in his youth, eventually came to realise that the search for political meanings onstage engaged him neither as a writer nor as a director. Foreman’s turning away from Brecht was indicative of a shift that was to take place more broadly in the postdramatic theatre that followed. Hans-Thies Lehmann, in his survey of the field of the postdramatic, questioned the radicalism of Brecht’s dramaturgy, arguing that, far from ­providing an alternative to traditional realism, ‘the theory of epic theatre

Introduction

19

c­onstituted a renewal and completion of classical dramaturgy’ (2006, 33). ‘Postdramatic theatre,’ he concluded, ‘is a post-Brechtian theatre’ (33). In Poland, the ‘Poor Theatre’ of Jerzy Grotowski responded to a romanticmodernist yearning, not with political ideals in mind but in order to pursue that tendency in romantic modernism ‘in which aesthetics began to incorporate the metaphysical claims’ (Genter, 2020, 8). Grotowski’s work had a resounding impact on one branch of alternative theatre practice throughout the Western world during the 1970s. Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory toured Australia in 1974 and his work had a profound effect upon several significant Australian theatre practitioners, including Sydney performance artist Mike Mullens, Rex Cramphorn and his company The Performance Syndicate, and Stasis, the apg subgroup of which Jenny Kemp was a member. The aesthetic practised by Grotowski’s group differed from the democratic communitarian dream of the American companies. Grotowski’s religio-theatrical asceticism had its roots in a kind of mystical Catholicism. All unnecessary theatre baggage was stripped from the theatrical event through a process of elimination that Grotowski called the ‘via negativa,’7 until only the beauty of the trained human body remained to burn like a flame in a glass container8 within its quasi-religious setting. My recollection of attending a production by the Theatre Laboratory in Melbourne in 1974, is a sense of being an entranced member of a congregation, witness to the extremes of effort, dedication and often suffering that the participant/performer had to endure in order to lift the performance out of the realm of daily life. In the Australian context, the Australian Performing Group arose from the 1960s/70s counterculture.9 The socialist ethic fearsomely propounded by many of the members of the apg would have had little truck with the metaphysical trappings associated with the Grotowskian branch of romantic-modernist theatre. But its communitarian self-organisation, based upon the dream of the artistic community, as well as its idealistic attempts to give voice to the marginal members of society with little voice in mainstream cultural production, and to create new larrikin legends for the Australian middle class were 7 ‘Ours then is a via negativa – not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks’ (1968, 17 Emphasis in original). 8 The image is one used by Grotowski’s lead actor Ryszard Cieslak to describe the power of creativity protected by the vessel of craft (Ctd. Schechner, 1977, 19). 9 The apg began practice in the La Mama Theatre in Carlton, Melbourne in 1968. It finally ceased production and closed its second premises at The Pram Factory, also in Carlton, in 1979. The work and the working ideology of the company is covered in some detail both by Gabrielle Wolf’ (2008) and Denise Varney (2011).

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Introduction

i­ ndicative of what Genter calls ‘a new counterculture interested in community building’10 (2010, 32. My emphasis). Indeed, in a letter that theatre historian Margaret Williams wrote to the apg collective as early as 1972, she nails with a kind of brutal percipience both the power and the danger involved in the company’s idealistic quest: What is in many ways the group’s strongest quality is also its least endearing, namely … a kind of (dare I say it) arrogance, a messianic certainty of its anointed role as custodian of the Australian drama. This quality is an asset, and it may well be that that is the magic talisman which will keep the apg alive and kicking where so many other groups equally committed have floundered. Ctd. Wolf, 2008, 217. (Emphasis in original)

Margaret Williams, always a perceptive critic of theatre, was at the time attached to the collective as a literary associate. While I doubt that the descriptor ‘messianic’ had any useful relevance to the ideological stance of the apg, it is clear that, as Gabrielle Wolf comments, ‘Williams was right about the apg’s conviction that it had a destiny to fulfil’ (217). It is also clear that, for many reasons internal and external to the group, they did not remain ‘alive and kicking’: their talismanic conviction began to wane and to become diffuse in the latter years. Wolf touches on some of the wider social reasons in her book, including the claim that to a large extent that destiny had been fulfilled, artistically at least. By the early 1980s, Australian drama had found a place on the wider Australian cultural scene (218). On a more pessimistic note, the brief window of political hope and vision of progressive social policies, in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, had been forcibly shut by the forces of neo-conservatism. In Australia, this closure saw the crushing of the progressive Whitlam Labor government in 1975 after three short years, supposedly on the basis of the financially reckless decisions to make money available at long last to the poor, the needy – and the arts. In 1976, neoconservative commentator Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that ‘[t]he sensibility of the 1960s is relevant simply as evidence that the aesthetics of shock and sensation has only become trivial and tedious’ (1976, 145. Ctd. Genter, 311). The death knell for the bold artistic movements of the sixties would seem to have been rung. 10

I have emphasised the concept of ‘building’ to underscore the idealistic objective not only to sweep the community clean of its past ideologies but also to construct an alternative in their wake.

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Robert Genter’s somewhat melancholic comment on the American scene may bring us back to the emergence of an alternative theatre from the ashes of the visionary dream itself. The sheer over-exposure of the politics and aesthetics of the 1960s brought about, with the dying of the dream of an alternative social structure, the demise of romantic modernism as a vibrant force. In a sense, such a movement had its own use-by-date written into it: the shock of the new cannot outlast the moment the shock becomes the norm. 2010, 313

The subgroups Nightshift, of which I was a member, and Stasis, in which Jenny Kemp worked, emerged from within the dying body of the apg. These subgroups were examples of a late-modernist theatre aesthetic that arose as an alternative to the New Wave style of the main apg company in its heyday. 6

Late Modernism in Theatre

In introducing his third category, late modernism, Robert Genter refers to Frederic Jameson’s argument that the concept of late modernism arose as ‘an intermediary concept between the demarcations of modernism and postmodernism’ (Genter, 311). In the context of theatre, this intermediary position is equivalent to ‘the indeterminate fields within which performance and drama create fruitful friction and harmony’ described by Vanden Heuvel (1993, 14). The late-modernists, according to Genter, ‘argued not only that the nature of the aesthetic form needed to be rethought in an age of mass media but that the general assumptions about the nature of subjectivity needed to be updated’ (2010, 4). In other words, ‘the dying of the dream’ of romantic-modernist theatre did not, within experimental theatre practice at least, lead to a return of the signifying qualities of dramatic realism. In North America, Richard Foreman had already heralded a shift in another direction. Although his early work was contemporaneous with many of the communitarian North American companies, Foreman saw himself from the outset as railing against both their ideology and their theatrical style. ‘I made my theatre,’ he told Charles Bernstein, ‘as much in reaction against those people as against the Broadway theatre,’ because ‘[s]uch theatres reminded me of encounter groups’ (Bernstein, 1987, 111). He was equally suspicious of the Grotowskian experiment because ‘Grotowski’s performers were trying to find ways to emote from some cosmic centre of human emotion’ (108). Foreman’s

22

Introduction

search was not for an activated community nor for a magnetic, spiritually energised performer, but for a kind of post-Heideggerian field of ‘being-ness’ within which the human individual was neither more nor less important than any of the other phenomena that occupied the world of his stage.11 The shift made in theatre’s late-modernist phase focused not upon the urgency of socio-political idea[l]s but the question of theatrical form itself. Given the rude awakening from the dream of romantic modernism,12 given the exhaustion of the style of dramatic realism, given that the language of the everyday that realism depended upon was being increasingly reified by advertising and propaganda, and given the onslaught on the psyche by technological imagery, the question presented itself: from what perspective may theatre now address ‘reality,’ and with what tools? It is not that the focus turned to a kind of aestheticism for its own sake, devoid of ideational intent. Far from it: each of the artists covered herein has a political or philosophical or social or psychological objective, or a combination of these, driving each of their works. However, a shared position does tend to be that ‘the general assumptions about the nature of subjectivity needed to be updated’ (Genter, 2010, 4). The focus, that is to say, begins to shift markedly from larger social concerns to the arena of personal identity. If dramatic realism could be understood as a theatre of the subject, in which the figure of the human subject was central to the onstage action, what form of theatre might emerge if the very concept of subjectivity were to be placed under scrutiny? Moreover, the shift in late modernism from ideological innovation to a reconfiguration of theatrical form places the intention firmly fixed on what Genter describes as the ‘deliberate attempt to use the aesthetic form to challenge the choice of lens through which individuals made sense of the world around them and to persuade them that the visions offered by the artist were not merely more poetic but possibly more liberating’ (4). None of the artists dealt with in this book would agree that their work is simply an apolitical retreat from engagement. However, their plays no longer take for granted the previous terms that constituted the grounds for political debate in Western theatre. The turn in this late-modernist theatre was towards a conscious ‘disfiguration’ of the forms of dramatic realism through what Julian Murphet has termed, in his discussion of the achievements of modernism in literature, ‘unanticipated conjunctions’ of its tropes ‘in novel arrangements’ (2016, 211). 11 12

This concept of ‘being-ness’ and its relationship to Foreman’s work will be developed further in Chapter 1. An awakening that led the shift towards what Christopher Lasch notoriously named ‘the culture of narcissism’ at the end of the seventies (Lasch, 1979).

Introduction

23

The ‘­arrangements’ of this ‘disfigured’ form, and specifically their emergence from and impact upon the practices of the artists taking that turn, are critical foci in this book. Because these artists are operating both as writers of a verbal–visual text and as directors of the final stage production, one of the lines of inquiry will consider their unremitting investigation of how the verbal text gets rewritten during the transition to the stage text. Their investigation has not been theoretical, though Foreman for one does write numerous essays on this and similar topics; rather, it implies that attention is being paid not just to dramatic elements such as narrative and character, but equally to the possibilities and problems written texts may present in their transformation into performance. In Worthen’s words, they ‘urg[e] the staging of the word (rather than the scene of realism) as the point of the dramatic event and of the spectator’s interpretation’ (1992, 7. Emphasis in original). They do so by understanding that the authority of the verbal text becomes provisional once the productive capacity of the staging swings into action. It is not that their theatre texts are what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘textscapes’13 (2006, 148–150), existing like a text by Robert Wilson or some of Heiner Müller’s work, in which, as Margaret Hamilton puts it, ‘the text itself is comprehended as “material” and consciously surrendered to the reading/theatre process in terms of interpretation’ (2011, 160). The written texts do, however, work as active forces within the field of the performance. In the forms of performance writing about which Debra Pollock writes about in such a stimulating way, ‘writing as doing displaces writing as meaning; writing becomes meaning in the material, dis/continuous act of writing’ (1998, 77. Pollock’s emphasis). The late-modernist practitioners, as I am arguing, do not always take such an extreme position. The writing in much of the work of Jenny Kemp and Richard Murphet does operate within a recognisable territory of pre-existent meaning. It does however push the edges towards its own materiality, highlighting the inadequacies of the ‘dehydrate[d]’ (79) language of dramatic realism. Moreover, as we shall see in the closer ­analyses of their texts in the chapters on each artist, in speeches such as Undine’s ‘Terror’ speech in Kemp’s The Black Sequin Dress, and in the epileptic writing of my own Quick Death or Frank’s imploded outbursts in Dolores in the Department Store, the words have a materiality that is emergent rather than referential. Foreman’s texts operate more consistently at an edge where ‘writing ­performs’ (79). I have on occasion in my discussion of his work highlighted 13

A ‘textscape […] designates at the same time the connection of postdramatic theatre language with the new dramaturgies of the visual and retains the reference to the landscape play’ (2006, 148).

24

Introduction

the ‘performative’ nature of his writing as it seeks to revivify the audience’s perceptions, to engage the audience in the productive process of constructing new meanings in a world where ‘writing and performance have failed each other by withdrawing’ (79). The works of these three late-modernist practitioners sit uneasily somewhere between text and stage, demanding that attention somehow be paid to both. In ‘urging the staging of the word’ both sides of the equation are to be taken into account: the word is there in its own right, interrogating how it is to be staged, and yet it resists, in the process, any familiar ways of doing so. As Heiner Müller has said, ‘I firmly believe that literature has the task of offering resistance to the theatre. Only when a text cannot be done the way the theatre is conditioned to do it, is that text productive for the theatre, or of any interest’ (1989, 160). Müller’s interviewer, Horst Laube, comments: ‘Because only if it offers resistance, can it change the theatre – and the theatre change the text’ (160). Just so, that is the two-way contract of the late-modernist theatre project, as I am envisioning it. It is a project, within which Müller’s texts sit uneasily and provocatively, that does have aesthetic dimensions. ‘There are enough plays,’ Müller remarks, ‘which serve the theatre the way the theatre is. One doesn’t need to do that anew, it would be parasitic’ (160). This means that, on the other side of the ledger, the acts of staging (directing, designing, performing) are acts of original creativity no less than the writing of the text. The ­message, or the concept or the meaning of the play no longer comes to the spectator direct from the writer via the obedient vessel of the staging. ‘In response to a question about the comprehensibility of Description of a Picture and more precisely its form,’ Hamilton tells us, in words that apply as forcefully to the dramaturgical aims of Foreman, Kemp or me, ‘Müller emphasises that his own staging of the text involves a similar process of discovery and remarks: “My intention and the text are two completely different things”’ (2011, 177. My emphasis). Directing, even for an artist who has written their text, is not a secondary interpretive act but a ‘process of discovery’ similar to the one needed for writing. Each of the artists I am studying ‘specifically start[s] out,’ as Richard Foreman has described his own process, with ‘a naturalistic scenario and with essentially realistically conceived characters’ (1969, Folger Papers, 18). Then each sets out to dismantle, attack, augment or ‘dissolve’ (18) these secure, dramatic given circumstances in order to open the spectator’s perception to dimensions beyond the world depicted in a ‘naturalistic scenario.’ ‘I wanted a theatre that did the opposite of “flow,”’ Foreman explained, ‘a theatre that was true to my own mental experiences, that is, the world as being pieces of things, awkwardly present for a moment and then either ­re-presented

Introduction

25

by consciousness or dropped in favour of some other momentary presentation’ (Ctd. K. Davy, 1976, ix). ‘Here, the functioning of the consciousness became his preoccupation,’ comments Davy, instead of ‘the conventional dramatic attributes of plot development and character interaction’ (ix). This is true in varying ways for each of the practitioners I examine in the book. The choices we make are made not because we are seeking to unravel a plot or to argue a thesis. We are attempting to deal with our own ‘mental experiences’ in the process of making the work, and to induce in the audience an experience we want them to have of the world: a recalibration of their perception of that world. My task here, on reflection of this shift in focus, is to understand just how a piece works rather than how it is received or interpreted.14 However, if the overall project of recalibrating spectator perceptions is one shared by all three artists – as well as by most of their fellow late-modernist practitioners15 – the particularities of our aims in doing so are quite distinct. These aims and the practice they engender are the subject of the chapters devoted to each artist. 7

Form, Politics and Theatre Theory

In her study of Australian playwrights who emerged from the political hotbed of the apg, Denise Varney devotes a section in her introduction specifically to the terms of the debate between politics and form in Australian theatre (2011, 28–33). Varney seeks to separate formal distinctions in theatre from political ideologies, arguing that ‘debates about the inherent political affiliation of dramatic forms with left/right, progressive/conservative ideology are less important in the pluralist, multi-modal postmodern era than are its context and mode of reception’ (28). Indeed, given the politically radical project of early realist playwrights in terms of form and subject matter, it is ironic and rather sad that realist practice either in writing or production is now identified with conservative ideology. When I write that the artists studied here ‘problematise’ dramatic tropes such as story and character, I choose the word carefully; they do not, that is to say, 14

15

I am indebted to Clare Grant for clarifying this point. It aligns with Susan Sontag’s argument, mentioned above, that the task of criticism is to show why a work of art ‘is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means’ (2009, 14 Emphasis in original). Robert Genter, in his study of late-modernist novelists, argues that the novelist Ralph Ellison ‘challenged the choice of cultural lens through which its audience made sense of the world’ (2010, 12).

26

Introduction

fully reject them. Eric MacDonald, whose own study of what he calls ‘the poststructured stage’ appeared in 1993, sees the work of artists like Richard Foreman as ‘contain[ing] remnants of the theater of the “well-made play”’ (1993, 40), modelling ‘a new awareness of their “margins,”’ which, ‘by keeping as many “threads” in play as possible, open[s] the stage to the full possibilities of theatricality’ (40). The works I am studying herein do not eschew story, they dramatise the very difficulties involved in how to tell a story onstage; nor do they abandon ‘character,’ they struggle consciously and openly with exactly what the dimensions of a character or a subject may be in a late-twentieth-century context. In the early 1970s, when the late-modernist project in theatre was just beginning, Richard Schechner attempted to lay out a taxonomy for theatre in the coming era (1977b). He separated the four distinct practices involved in a theatrical production: ‘the drama is what the writer writes; the script is the interior map of a particular production; the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performers in any given performance; the performance is the whole event, including audience and performers (technicians, too, anyone who is there)’ (85). The definitions of each of these terms have undergone change in the last forty years, as successive generations of practitioners have developed more radical forms of non-dramatic performance, and tested the boundaries of theatre in an age when the dividing line between the ‘live’ and the ‘mediated’ becomes more and more blurred. However, he was emphasising that it is exactly the co-presence of each of these artistic modes of practice that dramatic realism seeks to ignore in its aim of providing for the spectator the illusion of a mimesis of reality. ‘Illusionistic mimetic theatre’ he ­argued, ‘is based on hiding the seams joining drama to script to theatre to performance’ (73). By contrast, in avant-garde practice from the 1970s onward, ‘[t]he attention of the spectators is redirected to those structural welds where the presumed unified event is broken open. Instead of being absorbed into the event the spectator is invited (or forced) to experience where the event is “weak” and disjunctive’ (73). The seams in the production process are, of course, not all that dramatic realism ‘hides’ in its attempt to represent the truth of reality. In both their playtexts and their productions, late-modernist artists set out in different ways to attack not only the forms of realism but also its attendant claims to objectivity, the limitations of its socially determined human reference, and imposed sense of satisfying closure based upon a narrowly conceived trust in ultimate truth. Moreover, their subversion of any acceptance of art as necessarily a force of cohesion extends also to the body of their own respective work.

Introduction

27

There is a sense in which the political battle once waged by theatre against external social and political targets was turned inwards, proposing a new, open-ended dialogic for theatre itself. Michel Vanden Heuvel viewed this new dialogic not in terms of an antagonism between drama and performance but as a ‘strategy … that positions text and performance in a kind of ­complementarity – a relationship that is undeniably contradictory, yet necessary to sustain the most complete possible description of nature’ (1993, 23). In light of this, the invaluable introduction by Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney, for their study of Australian women writers of the late twentieth century, The Dolls’ Revolution (2005), places the revolution of the ‘dolls’ in Australian theatre firmly in the context of an historical and socio-political analysis of Australian culture and its role in defining the image of an Australian ‘masculinist’ nation for many generations. Nevertheless, their socio-political overview of the feminist recalibration of Australian theatre cannot, it seems to me, fully explain the advent of a theatre artist like Jenny Kemp, to whom they devote a chapter of their book. Fensham and Varney are aware of this difficulty and see Kemp’s work as ‘less about a political revolution in which the writer takes up arms against gender inequality and political injustice and more about a poetic revolution in which expanded conditions of possibility for the psyche, particularly for women, are the key to cultural transformation’ (64). They see the very difference in Kemp’s work, no doubt, as an achievement of the ‘new symbolic order in which female playwrights make dramatic worlds that appear radically different’ (14). My argument is that a study of Kemp’s (or Foreman’s or Murphet’s) working practices rescues their productions from being read as part of a coherently developed thesis, since they work in ways that subvert cohesion. Each artist has their own distinctive path; it is impossible to draw the three of them together in any consistently meaningful way. As late modernists, they are, in Jameson’s coinage, in a category that escapes categorisation: ‘artists and writers who do not fit comfortably within any of the other established categories’ (1991, 305. Ctd. Genter, 2010, 10). Further, despite my attempt in this book to elucidate each artist’s signifying style and approach to theatre’s encounter with reality, their working practices and the range of their individual works resist neat obedience to any easily categorised ideological project. 8

Chapter Outlines

Richard Foreman’s focus is, as the name of his company suggests, ontological: in his words, ‘the study of being as opposed to beings’ (1969, Folger Papers, 11).

28

Introduction

His theatre places before us a seemingly inchoate array of words and visual signs whose co-presence defies the order of logic but digs away at re-perceiving the nature of things. Despite the seemingly illogically connected elements, he is not interested in what Voice in his play Lava decries as ‘[r]andom nonsense, non-sense, chance, random relations’ (1992, 335). The challenge he places before himself as writer/director is to widen our frame of perceptual cognition of the prior interconnection between the multitudinous elements with which his productions are filled, not to dismiss them as exercises in accident and chance. The chapter on Foreman delineates some of the strategies he develops and puts into play as both writer and director in order to satisfy the ever-changing terms of what he named in his first Manifesto ‘the new possibility (what distorts with its weight) – a subtle insertion between logic and accident, which keeps the mind alive as it evades over-quick integration into the mental system’ (1976, 68). His writing consists of disconnected fragments of information, forcing readers/spectators to vault across the gap by engaging their lively ‘mental system.’ Foreman sees his own creative insights existing primarily in his writing. ‘I’ve always thought,’ he told Charles Bernstein, ‘I was a more reactionary director than writer. I would crack my skull as a director, trying to figure out how to stage what seemed at first pretty incoherent in my writing. And I would figure out ways that I thought made it coherent and thematically centered’ (Bernstein, 1992, 109). Nevertheless, he is a director with a unique vision of how to stage his texts in ways that his texts do not foretell. I shall trace the lineaments of that vision and the ways in which it draws on influences from twentiethcentury theories in quantum physics, and from visual art, film, and the decidedly non-realist attitude towards art espoused by Gertrude Stein. Foreman’s artistic multi-dimensionality spreads to aspects of theatre craft not normally seen as the director’s responsibility: he designs his own sets and costumes, chooses his props/objects, and selects and designs the sound score. He is an auteur whose aim is, counterintuitively, to leave gaps in his productions into which he can ‘disappear,’16 thereby forcing the spectator to become the creative agent of reception. His theatrical materials are composed into an uneasy relationship that most often marginalises those materials that are traditionally given central focus, forcing attention onto what is normally ‘background’ to the main action. If Foreman’s writing is an ongoing philosophical investigation into the ontology of a human being, then, in his stage practice, as Martin Harries has 16

‘I want to disappear because I don’t like the world, and I don’t particularly like the parts of me that I have inherited from the world’ (2005, 23).

Introduction

29

e­ xpressed it, ‘hysteria is […] the structure of enunciation, […] all too evidently on the surface, all too theatrical’ (2004, 86). Harries continues, ‘Foreman imagines hysteria as bearing witness to an otherwise inarticulate or invisible ontological ground’ (87). The act of ‘bearing witness’ to an elusive ontological text occurs in his ‘hysterical’ stagecraft, which fashions a deliberately fraught latemodernist relationship between content and form, unlike any previous theatre model. Jenny Kemp’s project has consisted, at both a psychological and a social level, in opening up for investigation the definition of what it is to be a woman, freed from the constraints laid upon women in a gendered Western social society. Kemp’s focus is upon ‘the inner life of the psyche’ (Kemp, 1999, 8). She begins by considering this inner life in ‘relationship with the ordinary everyday world’ (8), then, typically, her central female protagonists journey inwards and downwards into areas of the personal and cultural unconscious. The image of ‘the journey’ is a key trope in Kemp’s work, as it is for her sense of the trajectory of a life: As one walks down the street one sees the ordinary world, but experiences both the street and a world of memory, imagination, fantasy, emotion, and dream. It is with this disjunction that my work attempts a ­dialogue (8). She is searching in her work ‘for a sense of being able to bypass patriarchal structures and social structures and look back in time to see other models’ (Kemp dvd, 2004). Chapter 2 focuses on the materials Kemp mixes and shapes to undertake her disjunctive dialogue. Counterintuitively, perhaps, because she is interested in the whole person, she must seek various modes of writing that render the various levels at which her protagonist may simultaneously exist: interior monologue, outside narration, interactive dialogue, fragments of (usually sexual) fantasy, dream narrative, references to myths and fairytales in which aspects of ‘woman’ have been transcribed. The passages are rarely conjoined causatively; she makes use of the writerly tactics of association, juxtaposition, complementarity, contrast, repetition and dissociation. The unconscious forces, existing beneath the surface of representation, fracture the psyche as they rise to the surface; and Kemp has often depicted the subject as literally a number of relating and competing personae, performed by different actresses, seeking some form of integration. The search for wholeness, however, is tentative, fraught, u ­ nresolvable – and in process and practice both the style of writing and her process of writing in itself, reflect and in turn impact upon the themes of her artistic project.

30

Introduction

Because Kemp produces ‘carefully crafted, highly visual performances’ (Worth, 2004, 53), there is a tendency to view her primary contribution to theatre practice as one that is ‘image-based rather than text-based’ (Barrowclough, 5). However, the materiality of language and language registers play a central role in her work: Kemp has charted an indeterminate zone that adjoins both the verbally dominated dramatic realism and a postmodern performance that has, in its determination to throw off the yoke of the dramatic text, veered towards the primacy of the image. The chapter will consider both the influences upon her developing aesthetic, and her strategies of writing and directing three of her major plays: Call of the Wild (1983), The Black Sequin Dress (1996) and Still Angela (2002). The ways in which she has sought to render simultaneously the inner and the outer life of an individual has drawn from her a range of artistic processes that place her at the heart of a more psychological line of inquiry for late-modernist theatre. My own artistic preoccupation has been with the ways in which the forces of culture have shaped the nature of the subject, and these forces in turn have shaped the nature of my practice as both writer and director. My subjects are all individuals under stress, already at breaking point when the drama begins: ‘wounded subjects,’ Denise Varney has called them in the heading of her chapter on my work (2011, 176): The sense in which late capitalism inflicts further physical, emotional and psychological damage on subjects manifests in the way in which Murphet’s characters represent the walking wounded of contemporary society, for whom life is interrupted by war, sexual abuse and terror. As Varney suggests, the immediate causes of the imminent breakdown of these subjects are endemic socio-political pressures: sexual abuse, domestic constraint, technology and war. However, on a formal level, I have also been obsessed with how theatre can update the ways in which it may deal with the nature of a subjectivity that is under the onslaught of a mass media through which ‘late capitalism inflicts [its] damage.’ My work has consciously drawn upon the models provided by other art forms, utilising their specific languages to highlight the growing power of the media in shaping the contours of our subjectivity. For example, my earliest plays, Quick Death and Slow Love, dramatise a nightmare and a fantasy existence without the semblance of (narrative) order or (plot) logic, for a man and a woman, respectively, who are trapped in chaotically de-edited scenarios from dozens of either film noir thrillers (Quick Death) or romantic film melodramas (Slow Love). My later plays continue a search for

Introduction

31

an aesthetic form with which to examine more complex occasions in which an individual psyche is pitted against the shaping forces of mass culture: film, television, radio, advertising, telecommunications, the cultural iconography of war, and the technology of prosthetics. The stress that my ‘wounded’ subjects are under is experienced as a desperate attempt to keep hold of the familiars of a social life, in a world in which comforting order is pitted against the incomprehensible chaos of mediated events beyond subjective understanding or control. This state of cultural interpenetration is, I would suggest, a typically late-twentieth-century/early-twenty-first century phenomenon, and one that has been in various ways yet another territory of late-modernist theatre practice.

Chapter 1

Richard Foreman This chapter interrogates the approaches, processes and philosophical objectives Foreman uses in writing and directing for performance. I have depended for the evidence of his process not only upon the texts and the videos of a range of his works, which often deal with the very processes of thought and construction through which art is made, but upon his essays and the interviews with him that discuss issues of practice.1 These essays and interviews discuss not only of the pragmatics of his work as writer and director, but also his ideas about the craft that drive his practice. My use of these sources was augmented by my own observation of Foreman rehearsing his play Old-­ Fashioned Prostitutes in 2013. Having such a rich and voluminous repository of words from the artist’s mouth and pen is a mixed blessing. The Intentional Fallacy, with its explicit warning against trusting the artist’s stated objectives, looms large with an artist as playful and elusive as Richard Foreman. In this context, however, Foreman’s stated intentions as an artist are worth interrogating alongside a practice which either corresponds to or diverges from them. The chapter will pay attention to a selection of theatre texts from different periods of Foreman’s career: from his early career, Angelface (1968), Total Recall: Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 2 (1970), and Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs (1971); from his mid-career, Lava (1989) and Eddie Goes to Poetry City (1990); and his most recent production, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (2013). I do not attempt an overview of Foreman’s theatrical output of more than fifty plays, nor do I seek to provide a comprehensive reading of the plays I consider. Foreman conceives, develops and writes in a molecular fashion, with little interest in weaving all his work into one consistent oeuvre, nor prior control over the cohesiveness of any one of his productions. ‘I have no need to believe that I am writing plays,’ he tells his readers. ‘I came to understand I am just writing notes, thoughts, dialogue, fragmentary observations, some of which would eventually be staged’ (1992, 14–15). He has described the nature of his texts as ‘darting and fragmentary’ (15), and suggests that spectators ‘make themselves very tiny’ (27) when they watch his productions. I have, therefore, applied a molecular

1 See, for instance: ‘Notes on the Process of Making It’ (1985, 190–197), ‘14 Things I Tell Myself’ (1985, 204–213), ‘Foundations for a Theater’ (1992, 3–31), ‘Directing the Actors, Mostly’ (1992, 32–53), ‘Visual Composition, Mostly’ (1992, 54–66).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��20 | doi:10.1163/9789004415881_003

Richard Foreman

33

focus on short sections of different plays rather than seeking to discover an overall meaning that works against the grain of his intentions. Foreman operates as both writer and director of his own texts. The specificity with which this double artistry informs his work distinguishes Foreman from most of the late-modernist theatre practitioners with whom he is often grouped. The Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, has worked with text predominantly through redefining how classic American and European theatre texts may be mis-read (specifically, mis-directed) for performance.2 Robert Wilson, Foreman’s other significant contemporary, began by writing texts for production, but they were usually treated as the pretext for his spectacularly architectural directing skills. In his later work with the German playwright, Heiner Müller, Wilson sought to transform Müller’s texts for the stage, where a ‘dynamic interaction ensues between the literary elements of Müller’s text, […] and the playful, multimedia insurgencies of Wilson’s processual elements’ (Vanden Heuvel, 1992, 54). In writing about the art of directing, Foreman displays a constantly changing attitude towards it: from an expression of sheer hatred for the clumsy mechanisms of theatre, to his obvious delight in many of the familiar routines of popular entertainment and film genres.3 He also tends to be dismissive of4 his skills as a director. It is as if only in theatre can he break down the complex structure of experience to their ‘atomic’ structure: ‘the smallest building-block units, the basic cells of the perceived experience of both living and art-making’ (Ctd. Davy, 1976, ix). But the incipient chaos that threatens stretches his patience with the directorial craft of reconstructing the units into a work of art. Nevertheless, as Charles Bernstein understood, direction is the second and equally radical phase of his theatre practice: ‘The text may be the base line, it may be the blueprint, but it still doesn’t exist in and of itself, it’s made so that it will expand with the performance’ (1987, 113). As I watched Foreman direct 2 The Wooster group has radically adapted versions of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, amongst others. The concept of ‘misreading’ is drawn from Gerald Rabkin (1983) who sought to describe a wave of directorial experimentation with text in the 1970s and 1980s. Such experimentation has become one of the features of textual performance in the twenty-first century. 3 ‘Well that’s it: theatre is vulgar. Sometimes when I start doing things that are too esoteric I say now wait a minute Richard this is a vulgar form. Years ago, I used to think that I was doing the burlesque show version of Mallarme’ (Foreman, May 4, 2013b). 4 ‘I feel that my writing self is the more advanced, radical. And I’ve always felt as a director that I’m more conventional. How can I be more adventurous? But there are various unconscious inhibitory factors when you are making theatre that I can’t avoid, though I’d like to’ (Foreman, May 4, 2013b).

34

Chapter 1

­sections of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes in May 2013, it became clear that his work as a director, rather than seeking to impose a clear artistic order upon texts that set complex challenges to any traditional directorial approach, ranges in fresh ways across the languages of the stage in order to create additional performance complexities. 1

Theatre as a Philosophical Endeavour

As his reference to ‘the burlesque show version of Mallarme’ may suggest, Foreman is deeply interested in using art to address fundamental philosophical questions about existence. He conceives of theatre, to borrow Maaike Bleeker’s words from another context, ‘in terms of thinking, where the theatre is not understood as a representation of thoughts, or processes of thinking, originating from subjects expressing their ideas though theatrical representations, but rather as a practice of thinking in which we, as audience, participate’ (2009, 148). This perspective shifts the explanation of Foreman’s radically non-­rational theatre away from it being primarily an attack on dramatic realism and grounds it in the positive drive of ‘a practice of thinking’ through theatre. Foreman’s works seem to me to be a series of constantly changing attempts to address what Deleuze and Guattari have called the ‘planes’ of philosophy and science (1994, 216) through the compositional terms of art. This helps explain his consistently absent presence as The Voice in his plays: testing possibilities, expounding theories, playing with ideas. From this perspective, his p ­ roductions are, in Bleeker’s apt phrase, ‘the stage for the movements of thought’ (148). In his early interviews and commentaries, Foreman repeats time and again that the plays he was writing at the time began in his mind from imagining a naturalistic scenario which he then set about to subvert. At one point, he speaks of looking for the gap where ‘beingness’5 (1969, Folger Collection, 11) may enter: I start out with a very – with a naturalistic scenario. I’d like to feel that I’m starting out with what we all inherit as our standard, normal everyday vision of life. And then – airing it. Letting it out on the line to air. Instead of sunlight, just letting beingness get in there (18. Caps in original). 5 ‘Ontology of course in philosophy is the study of being as opposed to beings, and what I’m really interested in is taking whatever is going on and just like – putting enough space, putting holes in it, informing it with the beingness of it just coming through, and almost swamping it and obliterating the specific beings’ (1969, Folger Collection, 11).

Richard Foreman

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At another point, he expresses his task in terms of shifting the perception of the spectator: I specifically start out in my mind with a naturalistic scenario and with essentially realistically conceived characters and the whole point is to teach people no longer to be blocked by seeing those aspects dissolve (18). Or, in discussing the name of his company with an interviewer in 1975, he refers directly to the philosophical dimension of his artistic quest: I’m taking nineteenth-century naturalistic triangles and other psychological situations, which I believe are basically hysterical at their roots, in terms of classical psychiatry, the hysterical syndrome. And I’m trying to redeem them, and open up holes by which more – well it sounds ­pretentious – more cosmic perceptual concerns bleed through, that are really ontological concerns in the Heideggerian sense (1975, Folger Collection, 12. Emphasis in original). There is, that is to say, an interest in using the liveness of performance to train focus onto both the particularity of phenomena and their relatedness to other phenomena within a dynamic relationship that may reveal ‘more cosmic perceptual concerns.’ His fascination with the particularity of phenomena is clearly evident in his process of writing, while, as we shall see, he uses the process of directing to discover patterns of interrelatedness. 2

Foreman’s Early Influences

Richard Foreman trained at Yale University in a course for theatre writing run by John Gassner,6 a leading North American theatre scholar in the 1940s and 1950s. Foreman has reflected upon the effect that the Yale course had on him: It goes without saying that at this time my writing habits were to get an idea (after searching around for the right combination of theatricality and political or psychological or sociological relevance), then do an 6 John Gassner (1903–67) spent two years as theatre critic on the New York Herald Tribune (1926–8) and over a decade as dramaturg at the Guild Theatre (1931–44). He taught theatre criticism and dramaturgy at several universities including Columbia and the University of Michigan. He was professor of dramatic writing at Yale University from 1956 until his death.

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o­ utline, then do a first draft, then rewrite and rewrite again until a) the style seemed polished and strong, and b) the plot line seemed efficient and rose to the proper climaxes with proper eddies, swirls, and theme refracting detours along the way. At this point the writing was coming out of a highly active mode of self, in which a great deal of willed effort went into making what the super-ego determined was right and professional and impressive, a great deal of effort into rewriting to eliminate what did not seem ‘right’ (1985, 234. Caps in original). He acknowledges Gassner as a key influence in his development as a writer,7 but the tone of his comments on the form of training suggests a reaction that led him ultimately to a radically different approach to writing and a rejection of the determining super-ego. The craft of the well-made play, taught at Yale and most other Western courses in playwriting at the time, emphasised the ‘effort’ of careful ratiocination (‘a highly active mode of self’) needed to develop a ‘polished and strong’ form with which to communicate a socially relevant theme. The final product should be coherent: that is to say, the writing would cohere around a narrative which represented the dramatic world as a force for cohesion that would prevail, no matter the pressures of dissolution, collapse or fragmentation placed upon the characters or their social structures. The task to obey the strictures of the form evidently demanded of Foreman ‘a great deal of willed effort’ that eventually he found counterproductive to his own creativity. He turned to other directions for influence and inspiration. Foreman has described the ‘watershed’ effect of ‘(c)oming to New York and meeting Jonas Mekas and members of the independent N.Y. Filmmakers movement’ who were also living and working in New York during the 1960s (1985, 234). The filmmakers ranged widely in form and approach, but they shared an artistic objective to reconstitute the elements of film language in order to open new perceptual fields for the viewers. ‘Subversion is now directed against content or meaning as such,’ writes Amos Vogel in his survey of the period, ‘only the work of art ‘itself’ – its structure and methodology – is declared worthy of contemplation or analysis’ (1974, 100). The films eschewed a focus on the psychological in favour of the formal, requiring spectators ‘to observe motionless objects in real time, […] compositional patterns or anti-­ illusionist deformations of the image’ (100). Representational time is replaced by the actual time of performance; silence and speech are given equal priority; and ‘tiny details, because of the absence of larger events, acquire unexpected importance’ (100). 7 Personal Correspondence, April 2015.

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Foreman recalls that encountering their work introduced him to ‘a new esthetic, built upon a truthfulness in attempting to catch the natural rhythms of the individual artist – come-what-may as a result’ (1985, 234). In turn, he was inspired and encouraged to write not from the template of a given dramaturgical process but from his own ‘natural rhythms’ as an artist. Throughout his career, he has given prime focus to ‘the work of art “itself,”’ he has exhibited a fascination with the unexpectedly important, often overlooked ‘tiny details,’ and his productions have constantly balanced upon the fine line between ­representational time and performance time. A similar consciousness of the force of the dimension of time plays a key role in my work and Kemp’s. For late-modernists, time is no longer simply a given circumstance within the fiction of a drama, but a structural element within the unstable world of the performance. 3

Phenomena and Ontology Onstage

From his earliest texts, Foreman began to interrogate and subvert the nature and the interrelationship of phenomena normally taken for granted in the unfolding of the dramatic action onstage. In the opening image of Angelface,8 a man (Max) sits alone in a chair when the door opens and another man (Walter) can be seen in the doorway. This is reminiscent of many moments of encounter in traditional drama: the entry of a second character onto the stage. However, immediately ‘air’ is let in to the expected flow of events: the man in the doorway does not follow through with his expected action and enter the room and the man in the seat does not turn to greet him. The following conversation does not deal with these missing actions as hiatuses in social interaction that may cause dramatic tension; it reports on them simply as phenomena to be noted: Max: The door opens. I don’t even turn my head. Walter: Does it turn? Max: What? Walter: Heads turn. Max: Heads turn. My head is a head. Therefore: my head turns. Open the door a second time. Walter: Why? 8 Presented by the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre at the Cinematheque, New York City, April, 1970.

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Max: Find out if my head turns. Walter: I can’t. Max: What? Walter: An opened door cannot be opened. Max: All doors can be opened! (1976, 1) Instead of the expected movement forward into greeting, establishing given circumstances through dialogue, and initiating the dramatic action that will drive the play, there is no greeting or welcome, no circumstances beyond the present moment of not entering, and no dramatic action. From this point forward, the play progresses through extensions of the kind of ontological questions proposed in this opening gambit: is a door a door if no one sees it open? Is a head a head if it cannot turn? Is a door a door if it is already opened? Foreman’s sixth play,9 Total Recall: Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 2, begins from a set-up that is similarly naturalistic in mode. A man (Ben) sits at a table. A woman (Sophia) is revealed holding a lamp, when another woman (Hannah) halfenters through a door. She pauses, then speaks: Hannah: I came in at the wrong moment (1976, 33). Again, the expected entry is denied. This is followed by the presentation of five possible variations on this opening image. First, Ben sits but Sophia has gone, and Hannah again doesn’t enter. Second, the stage is empty and the lamp gets brighter. Third, Hannah enters onto an empty stage, carrying a lamp. Fourth, Ben sits alone when Hannah enters carrying the lamp, stops just inside the door and faints. In the fifth variation, Ben sits alone, Sophia enters with the lamp, and Ben expresses the confusion we may feel as spectators: Ben: I don’t know who I believe. (Pause) The Gods speak to me but I don’t know if I believe them (34). In struggling to move the play forward, Foreman tests variations of the states of presence and absence that are at the heart of theatre, and connect it to the central ontological problem of human existence. He does so at the same time by playing with our expectations as theatregoers, causing us to participate in the proceedings. Neither Ben nor we know quite who is in control of the situation. 9 Presented by the Ontological Hysteric Theatre at the Cinematheque, New York City, December 1970 – January 1971.

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By the time of Sophia= (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs, Foreman’s tenth pro­ duction,10 the hints of a mimetic social situation have become abstracted to the verge of self-negating hilarity. ‘Not yet,’ the sonorous tone of a Voice (that is in fact Foreman’s voice from off-stage) calls out three times at the start (1976, 113), barring either Max or Ben, present at the start, from initiating any meaningful action. The two words set up a resistance to the expectation of an ­unfolding plot that the presence of such characters normally brings with it. Slowly, we become attuned to the gap between the familiar naturalistic props being assembled, such as a door, a table, a chair, a carpet, a couch, a lamp, and the performers’ inability to use these to establish recognisable social interactions. Some performers crawl onto the stage beneath the cover of a cloth, then a couch is carried on and placed on top of both the cloth and the actors beneath. Simple enough, except that while the ‘big brown cloth descends from above and covers everything,’ a legend projected onto a screen denies that this is happening: ‘Imagine the cloth slowly descending over everything. It will not actually happen, so you should imagine it if you like’ (113). The entry of the actors begins and is then resisted; stage action happens but its existence is denied. The incredibly slow and hesitant beginning to the play resists our inbuilt desire as spectators for a ‘story’ to start and for things to get rolling. The clumsy confusions onstage are a comic, almost clown-like commentary on what Foreman has called the ‘basically hysterical’ naturalistic tropes of dramatic realism (1975, Folger Collection, 12). Foreman is throwing total focus onto the machinery of theatre, that is, the mechanics of illusion that normally function to take our attention elsewhere than the theatre stage. Actions normally taken for granted as means to launch a plot can no longer be taken for granted. His aim is to make the machinery itself ‘reverberate.’11 ‘Not yet,’ we are told at the outset. Not yet, however, does not mean an entry will never happen. Something may begin to take place,12 but we cannot presume to engage until we are ready to recalibrate our theatre-going expectations. Nothing, it seems, can be taken for granted in these early productions: neither entrances nor greetings, nor doors, nor lamps, nor heads, nor eyes. All those objects and activities that within traditional theatre exist primarily as a support for the all-consuming human drama are given here an unexpected 10 11 12

Presented by the Ontological Hysteric Theatre at the Cinematheque, New York City, ­ ecember 1972 – January 1973. My account of the stage action is drawn from the videoD record of this production available on dvd (2009). Foreman drew attention to this metaphor from physics and music in the title of his collection of plays, Reverberation Machines (1985). In the section on Foreman as director I discuss more fully his focus on the preparation for ‘something’ to arrive, deferring always its actual arrival.

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focus that forces our attention elsewhere than the social, the psychological and the political. ‘Mine is a “mental” theatre,’ he wrote in his introduction to an Italian production of his work (1969b, Folger Collection, 30). However, by this he did not mean that it was a theatre devoted to the discussion amongst the characters of important, even radical ideas. ‘NoNo!’ he expostulated, ‘it is a very CONCRETE theatre, – it’s mental because the concrete elements are always stumbling over each other in a way that renders everything totally unyielding, un-fluid, giving us facts a scientist could speak about … except that the “facts” of the performance are never presented in such a way that one could know in what category to place them’ (30. Caps in original). It is clear that even at this early stage he is aware of the uneasy complementarity of the planes of science and philosophy in his artistic attempt to cause ‘perceptual concerns [to] bleed through, that are really ontological concerns’ (1975, Folger Collection, 12). Jonas Mekas, the film director who supported Foreman’s early career, recognised this fact as early as 1969: ‘Foreman’s theatre has left the emotional field and has entered into the mental sphere. This mental aspect is that [sic] interests me most and where its true importance lies’ (1969, Folger Collection, 2). He recognises that this depends upon carefully framing every object and event in the theatre, because ‘when those details become very real, they become very real only because they are hanging, each of those little details, on those frames that are very carefully worked out, constructed. Reality, to be really seen as real, has to be properly lined out’ (10). Mekas’ response was to Foreman’s stage productions; however, he draws particular notice to Foreman as writer, arguing that in his productions ‘the words, the written words were treated so royally that they became like objects – every each one of them’ (26). His insight that the words ‘became like objects’ suggests their phenomenal ‘beingness,’ and he contrasts this with his experience of watching a production by The Living Theatre, in which it was the living power of the performers as ‘beings’ that was given total focus as a political act. It is a distinction between the sound and meaning of a word operating as a rhetorical force in its own right, and human beings using words to prove their power and conviction in the performance. I thought: don’t they know that they are speaking words – don’t they see the space, the actual space between them and ME? If they would only […] use the words which are being pronounced as the messengers, transmitters. […] But they didn’t do that. They just shouted. So I walked out (11. Caps in original). His response only serves to highlight that the romantic-modernist ideals that drove Beck’s and Malina’s company were theatrical ideals against which

Richard Foreman

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F­ oreman sought to develop his own practice. Foreman’s belief at the time was that his very avoidance of character-based drama provided a necessary political alternative to the conservative tendency ‘which characterises everything as black or white, categorises the world in airtight compartments (Bernstein, 1992, 112). But any attempt he made to write directly political work forced him ‘to abandon what I considered the highly rigorous language I’d evolved for myself, which was dedicated to notating the impulsive fluctuations of human consciousness’ (112). Writing about matters of socio-political concern forced him ‘to use the going language of social convention – a co-opted language’ compared to language that was ‘artistically rigorous and revelatory’ (112). By contrast, The Living Theatre, in ‘trying to be very honest, very sincere’ (Mekas, 1969, 11), used an openly ‘co-opted’ political language. The stage directions preceding the text of political slogans in Action I of the company’s Paradise Now describe the text as ‘a call to action’ (Malina and Beck, 1971, 22). The text ‘makes suggestions for theatrical enactment by the spectator/participants, as well as suggesting subject matter for speech and dialogue’ (22). It is to be ‘spoken by and divided among the actors of the company’ who ‘remain lying prone and as each actor speaks he (sic) … delivers his lines loudly and clearly to the public, and sinks back again to his prone position’ (22). The list of ­commands that follows presents as directly as possible the message that the company wants the audience to gain from the performance. Free theatre. The theatre is yours. Act. Speak. Do whatever you want. Free theatre. Feel free. You, the public, can choose your role and act it out. Free theatre. Do whatever you want with the capitalist culture of New York. Act. Find the pain. Feel it. Make the sound of it (23). At the conclusion of this roll call, the stage directions assert categorically: The actors have urged the spectators to discard the prohibitions, and to begin to undo the structures which make these prohibitions. Certain clues have been given. […] The Public must now take the first step (27–28). Contrast the language in Paradise Now, empty of resonance except for the catechism-like rhythms of the direct political action it suggests/demands, and dependent for its force upon the ‘loud’ and ‘clear’ delivery from actors to audience, with the following passage from Foreman’s Total Recall, which opened two years after Paradise Now’s debut at the Festival d’Avignon in 1968. The stage

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crew has just taken off all the stage furniture apart from two chairs when the following (slightly edited) conversation takes place: Ben: All of the old furniture got taken off the stage before we were finished with it. There was an important experiment I wanted to try with the furniture. Hannah: There’s furniture. Ben: I mean the old furniture. That isn’t regular furniture. Leo: What happened to all the furniture that used to be out here. Ben: I wanted to try putting the extra furniture back into the first set of furniture. All of a sudden I came into the room and said hey, there’s twice as much furniture as there was originally. Each piece of furniture was repeated when I saw that. I wanted to try to make each second piece of the same furniture return into the body of the source, which I take to be the first piece of furniture. […] I don’t want to try it with bodies before I try it with furniture. Please bring back the furniture so I can try it first with furniture (1972, 50). The verbal interchange in Foreman’s text does not focus either upon the relationship between actor and audience, nor upon that between collective consciousness and individual inner emotional reality,13 nor upon that between performance and the State. Instead, elements of the set that might normally be subsidiary background material for humans performing are highlighted as events in their own right. They are given an insistent attention that tests out a wide range of possible ontological significance. Over the space of twelve lines of dialogue the word ‘furniture’ is repeated fourteen times, gaining in the process an aural weight and presence equivalent to the actual objects of furniture (one set of which is now absent from our sight) to which it refers. The word may be repeated but it does not remain the same, it shifts in significance each time it is mentioned, so that the repeated word is unable to ‘return into the body of its source.’ We move from a familiar expression of annoyance at the ­removal of the furniture (though oddly placed as an actor’s response to the functional work of the stage management crew), to the distinctions between old and new, between source and repetition, and between regularity and irregularity, to a quasi-ontological experiment about the fusion of the copy with

13

Recall Foreman’s comments to Bernstein: ‘Such theatres reminded me of encounter groups’ (Bernstein, 1992, 111).

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the source, and finally to an alarming suggestion of experimentation on bodies that may have surgical implications. These shifts progress not causally but additively, as if we were looking at the furniture from a series of perspectives. There are, it appears, political implications within this insistent progression: something as seemingly harmless as a piece of furniture may become central to plans for experimentation on the bodies of others: ‘I don’t want to try it with bodies before I try it with furniture.’ The sequence is left behind as swiftly as it is encountered; but the political point is made at a molecular level virtually parenthetical to the absurdly obsessive focus on furniture removal. Words as objects are insisted upon until their relationship with the objects they signify is problematised and left open for contemplation. ‘Foreman’s writing has a contemplative quality,’ Kate Davy argued in her introduction to the volume in which Total Recall was published, ‘in that it does not have the rapid “flow” of facts added to facts, as in an information structure’ (1976, xii). 4

Molecular Creation: Insistence and Gertrude Stein

The insistence on detail in Foreman’s writing, so unlike either the purposeful informational structure of factual documents or the interlocked causal structure in traditional drama, is an aspect of his acknowledged indebtedness to American modernist Gertrude Stein.14 Stein’s resolute attempt to write the world detail by detail as it is in the time present of writing arose from her close attention to the very act of perceiving those details: The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends on how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen (1962: 513). ‘NOTICE: NOTICE,’ cries Foreman as part of the ‘Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto ii (July 1974),’ ‘the art work should be a field for noticing. Which means: It should INVITE the viewer to SEE what’s THERE’ (1976, 143, Caps in original). He continues: ‘The result of being awake (seeing): You are in two places at once (and ecstatic). Duo consciousness. 1. You see. 2. You see yourself seeing’ (143). 14

For a fully argued coverage of this influence see Kate Davy’s article (1978, 108–126).

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It is an emphasis upon the actuality of what confronts us onstage and a recalibration and resharpening of the act of perception, which in turn is what renders the play worth perceiving. In describing the accumulative detail in Foreman’s early writing, Kate Davy draws on the molecular quality of film commented upon by Stein: Each statement, formed in the present, is succeeded by another, slightly different statement, like the consecutive frames of a film that create an image that seems to extend itself in the present for a given period of time (1976, xii). For Stein, the early cinema provided a model for a new type of detailed perception in theatre. With its infinitesimally different frames moving the action forward, tiny step by tiny step, cinema could present individual moments in full as they occurred, since in ‘a continuously moving picture of any one there is no memory of any other thing and there is that thing existing’ (Ctd. Ryan, 1984, 42). This molecular progression throws focus solely on the present moment. Each frame announces the situation, the composition and the characters anew; the story starts over each time. When the parts are taken together and followed sequentially the film gains momentum, but what may appear to be a predictable sequence of narrative causality can be broken at any time by a subsequent frame.15 Similarly, Foreman particularises each word and each i­ mage – their phenomenological presence – by subverting our habit as spectators to read them as subsidiary steps in a familiar sequence of signification. A Woman in The Cliffs attempts to define the skewed reality of a scene that confronts her: A real scene, a realistic scene, a scene, a scene keeps changing, a real scene keeps changing, a screen, a real scene and a screen keeps changing, a real changing screen scene (1976, 125). The Stein-like repetition of words here constitutes an insistent attempt to define a moment – the ‘real’ of ‘a scene’ – that is always in the process of change. A similar thought sits behind the repetition of words and motifs (the ‘door’ and the ‘head’) at the start of Angelface: Max: It is impossible to stare at Max. Walter (staring at Max): Why? 15

See my discussion of Noel Carroll’s concept of the uncertainty of ‘incremental information-gathering’ (1979, 80) in Chapter 3.

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Max: Because Max is never in the same place. He’s always in different places (1976, 2). And, therefore, presumably, the ‘real’ Max ‘keeps changing.’ The difficulty faced in the attempt to define the present moment, and the impossibility of defining it through any act of re/presentation through art is suggested in The Cliffs by the Legend that immediately follows the Woman’s comment on ‘the real scene’ above: the cliffs. the difficulty of making art happen with the confines of nature. the transformation of the natural setting into an artificial setting. that has already happened of course but it has not happened effectively enough (1976, 125. Caps in original). For Foreman, as for Stein, spectators must hold onto each word or image, look for the subtlest change, and remain attentive to each tiny shift, if they are to hope to enter the play. Marc Robinson summarised it well: Each event or utterance dislocates the one that precedes it; each sentence or gesture asserts its own priority, rearranges the scene around itself, directs our attention onto itself as strongly as it can, and radiates with an intensity that can only be achieved by an artist willing to dispose of the image or phrase after it has appeared. Foreman […] prizes the shape and sensuality of each item on his dramatic list, and gives each a place all its own (1993, 153). Within the context of a performance, unfolding in space and time, the ‘dislocation’ of these items, and the radical disposal of ‘each event or utterance’ after its momentary attention, affects the dynamic pattern of energy released – the ‘radiation’ of its ‘intensity.’ Foreman sees the pattern ‘like Indira’s necklace in which every pearl is supposed to reflect in some way every other pearl,’ meaning that ‘each of those moments [pearls] still contains some of the stuff that’s in the air because of all the other moments’ (Foreman, May 4, 2013). The thread that holds the separate pearls (moments, words, images) together in performance is finally provided through the attentive perception of the reader-­ spectator, with the dramaturgical help of the director. It is a mode of molecular pattern-making that seems to have emerged early on in Foreman’s career. He has written that he developed a process of gathering material in a disparate and serial manner: he would ‘write a little bit every

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day, or every other day, not knowing what would get used in a production’ (1992, 14). He rid himself of the goal of the coherent text, emphasised in his training at Yale University, telling himself instead that ‘I am just writing notes, thoughts, dialogue, fragmentary observations, some of which would eventually be staged’ (15). These notes and snatches of text would accumulate over a period of several months without any sense at the time of how they might constitute a play text.16 He tells Charles Bernstein: I decided to use my written ‘false starts,’ whatever appeared in my notebook, because in my notebook ideas would get jotted down while I was reading a book like this one on the table. This one talks about current chaos theory, and I might have said, ‘Hey, there is something in here applicable to a play.’ So I might write a little four-line scene, and that would go down in the notebook. Then, months later, when I decided it was time to type up a lot of that as dialog […] I would have no idea who was talking. It would just be language talking. bernstein, 1992, 105

5

Language, Metaphor and Action in Mid-career Plays

‘It would just be language talking’: meaning is arrived at through following the thread that the language creates, not through following the thought processes of the character speaking it, or even of the writer thinking it, although a fascination with his mental consciousness in action lies behind the accumulation of material in the first place. The listener has to negotiate a way across the gaps between the different fragments that constitute the textual fabric of the language. It is a process reminiscent of the act of poeisis (meaning-making) that a reader-listener undertakes when absorbing a metaphor. ‘So what is a metaphor?’ Foreman asks in his introduction to his play Lava (1989): It’s a marker that indicates the presence of a gap – a gap the mind jumps across in the ecstasy of getting the idea. […] The gap leads you to make the jump, and the jump excites you into consciousness, it brings you to life […], you increase the size of the gaps if you want more consciousness (1992, 314).

16

This process of gathering disparate material over a length of time is similar to one used by Jenny Kemp, as described in Chapter 2.

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In other words, he juxtaposes unlikely images and words not to clarify for the spectator a meaning he is driving at, but to excite the consciousness of that spectator to seek for the unfamiliar zone of what Voice in Lava calls Category Three, which ‘eludes logic, yet it is not random or chancelike, but a connective tissue that cannot be traced, and yet the one truly lively way of perceiving the world’ (335). The seemingly illogical juxtaposition of unlikely molecules of text is evident in the following passage as it moves breathlessly forward in the first version of Eddie Goes to Poetry City.17 Road, road, road, he said to himself in the hopes it might indicate a direction. Also realizing it could be more than one. And again automobiles started jumping a little bit like pretend molecules of a very bright light – and he decided to spend a lot of time and effort creating what was more than a simple lament, because it was never simple. […] He nevertheless fell quite off the track into the car. But do cars ride on steel tracks, or on asphalt pavement! sometimes? Put them together this way – Have you ever imagined one of those incredibility ravishing contests between automobile and passenger train? Somebody thought you’d have to go back to the turn of the century for that, but what they were really imagining, his friends volunteered, was the nineteen-thirties. But the confusion was understandable, because the turn of the century was the epic, par excellence, of that powerful iron-horse metaphor-as-drug, and if there’s one thing that did need to be drugged, It was this sensibility in question that above all was scheming to get out of here any way possible (1995, 8. Emphasis and Caps in original).

17

First presented by The New City Theatre, Seattle, Washington, September – October 1990. Directed by Richard Foreman.

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The first three lines of this section of speech18 suggest the multi-directionality, not only of the journey that Eddie is about to embark upon, but also of the unpredictable movement of mind and thought in the lines to follow. Why did ‘he [fall] quite off the track into the car’? How do you fall off a track into a car? What track was he on beforehand? Why do we need to know whether cars ride on steel tracks or asphalt pavements? What is the relevance of a turn-of-thecentury race between automobile and passenger train? Why did his friends suggest the 1930s? The answers to all of these and more questions, which may normally arise in an actor’s preparation of their text and in an audience’s attempt at comprehension, are unclear and never forthcoming. However, the energy of the language is undeniable and reinforces the sense of speed and power suggested by the images of industrial-age transport. The images and metaphors, crowding in on one another with breathless rapidity (far from the ‘contemplative’ pace of the earlier plays), keep reiterating a sense of movement that refers outwards to the complexity of life beyond the theatre event, and that leads finally to the capitalised command: ‘GET OUT OF HERE any way possible.’ The command is reminiscent of the directives spoken in Paradise Now, but the intent here is ironic: there is to be no escape for the hapless Eddie. The thoughts are complex, ‘never simple’; and the open weave of the thinking process allows room for ‘molecules’ to ‘jump […] a little’ as the other elements of mise-en-scène are intermixed. The language may seem to skim, but in fact a number of very potent images are yoked together by the bold grammar of their uniting structure – and in theatre by the power of the speaking voice. It is an example, I suggest, of what Debra Pollock refers to as the ‘evocative’ nature of performance writing, in which rather than building the illusion of a clearly re-presented fictional world, the writing ‘evokes worlds that are otherwise intangible, unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect and in-sight’ (1998, 80). The emphasis is not upon a story or thesis about the world he wants to represent, but upon the writer’s and the audience’s experience of a world in the process of coming into being. This is one of the signifying aspects of late-modernist theatre practice that is present also in the writing by Jenny Kemp and myself and is later picked up and developed in postdramatic performance. It is not that the text from Eddie lacks meaning; at any one moment we can locate ourselves more-or-less comfortably in a sense of what is being said. However, the problem for the reader-listener attempting to make sense of the text as a whole is that meaning seems, as Foreman puts it, like ‘an amorphous 18

This speech, spoken from offstage by ‘Deep Voice through a Loudspeaker,’ was voiced by Foreman in the original. The text is removed from the ongoing stage action and given its own material weight and presence.

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cloud of molecular particles, circulating in a seemingly random pattern, like Brownian motion’19 (1992, 27). Foreman encourages the reader of his texts and the spectator at his performance to become ‘very tiny’ (27) in one’s perceptual attention, so as to perceive the world on a molecular level, instead of sweeping aside the words or images in the pursuit of a larger meaning, and thereby getting lost in the ‘amorphous cloud’ (27). The promise of meaning is constantly deferred and is never quite delivered in the form expected, as different words, metaphors, lines or at most sentences rise up to claim attention in their own right. So, if the meaning begins at the particular level, then the energy of the whole exists as much in the jumps over the gaps between the semantic molecules (units of meaning) as it does in the molecules themselves. The bridge over the gap may link together barely associable words (‘incredibility ravishing contests’) or images (falling ‘off the track into the car’), or it may work as a metaphoric fusion of two or more elements that together suggest another (‘that powerful iron-horse metaphor-as-drug’). The underlying meaning may be difficult to ascertain but as Foreman has suggested, the mind is forced to jump hither and thither in ‘the ecstasy of getting the idea’ (314). When we turn our attention to Foreman’s work as a director, we shall have occasion to revisit this passage from Eddie Goes to Poetry City. In the context of performance, yet another layer of dissociation is established between whatever meanings the words may suggest, or images they may evoke, and the stage actions and images that are juxtaposed with them. The spoken word, which in his earlier plays shared the stage space with the slowly unfolding sparse imagery, takes primacy of position in Foreman’s midcareer plays such as Eddie Goes to Poetry City and Lava. This does not indicate a more humanist focus upon the dialogue of characters arguing for power or expressing emotions. In fact, it is quite the opposite; the figures onstage (in Lava, especially, they hardly gain enough dimensionality to be called ‘characters’) are subjected to the power of the word itself, amplified onto the playing arena through the authorial, authoritative voice of Richard Foreman. Foreman, in his preface to Lava, explains the distinction in this way: Usually in my plays something bizarre will happen onstage and then the spoken text will give you a new perspective on what you were seeing. But 19

In an early scene in Kemp’s The Black Sequin Dress, she seeks to find an enactment of Brownian motion as a key to the structural irregularity of the unfolding action. ‘Brownian motion’ is defined by The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary as ‘the irregular oscillations of microscopic particles suspended in a fluid’ (1994, 291). Wikipedia includes an interesting discussion of it as a ‘probabilistic process’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_mo tion. Accessed, 8/9/2016.

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with Lava it was the reverse. First the text would be delivered in a way that made the audience aware of the text itself, then something would happen onstage to give a new perspective on the text (1992, 311). In his ‘Introductory Notes to Lava,’ Foreman called the play ‘a series of staged essays, […] ruminations of philosophical ideas in which the intent is to enjoy, to savour, and to dance with the music of your ideas and what they spark inside you’ (309). The ‘staged essays’ are not published documents and nor are they presented in the form of a lecture to an audience. The spectator watches a group of performers moving around a table which occupies most of the playing space, handling an array of objects, as the sonorous tones of Voice are amplified through the space, speaking the ‘ruminations of philosophical ideas.’ Voice opens the play by dismissing the ‘meaningful acts’ of traditional drama as simply the repository for ‘given, oppressive ideology’ (1992, 320). In this context, it may be ironic that the philosophical ruminations of Voice dominate the aural space throughout the play. There are occasions when the onstage figures talk with one another, but their dialogue is interrupted by repeated phrases from Voice throughout. On other occasions, words spoken by the characters are simultaneously spoken by Voice, undermining the authenticity and authority of individual speech. Voice and Matthew: That’s expressing yourself. Voice and Peter: Oh no it isn’t, that’s something I’ve been programmed to do also – Voice and Matthew: Biologically programmed, yes – Voice and Peter: Well that biology isn’t me, there’s something else. Voice and Matthew: Oh? (328–329) Finally, one of the speakers comes to the realisation that ‘I didn’t have these thoughts. I memorised something that somebody else wrote, and now … I’m blocked’ (330). However, even this possibly epiphanic realisation has been prethought and predicted by Voice. Voice: W  hatever words you use to express any of those feelings are words you were born into. Words you can choose all predetermined by the particular language you were born into. Because the test of time and millions of human beings having experiences have proved those words – useful and exact and correct (327). Much of the material in the ‘staged essays’ in Lava has to do with issues of language and its relationship to reality. In his introductory notes to the play,

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F­ oreman described such passages as ‘tongue-in-cheek’ commentaries on ‘standard poststructuralist theory’ (309). The ‘tongue-in-cheek’ irony consists, I believe, in the fact that throughout the play an unstoppable voice continues to voice its thoughts on language and meaning, whilst at the same time accepting Derrida’s argument that speaking is always preceded by writing, and that therefore we are ‘incapable of making meaning absolutely precede writing’ (1978, 10). And, of course, the words that Foreman speaks in the play have already been written by him in a language that precedes him. Category Three, as described by Voice in the passage quoted earlier, would seem to align with the position Foreman asserts in his second Manifesto as the choice that a writer must make ‘ALWAYS’ because it is ‘the new possibility (what distorts with its weight) – a subtle insertion between logic and accident, which keeps the mind alive as it evades over-quick integration into the mental system.’ The objective is to ‘distort […] the field of play’ in such a way that ‘the mental pre-set is excluded’ (1976, 68. Caps in original). By ‘evading over-quick integration into the mental system,’ meaning arises indirectly and subtly through the spectator’s act of perception of the performance; it is not readily available to be put to use by the writer but arises in the act of writing. However, this will only happen if the artist is willing to set up tactics to ensure that the play is not used as a vehicle for easily accessible ideas. Things that are ‘not connected, are in fact connected,’ The Voice tells us in Lava, ‘but in a way that is not perceivable within our available grids’ (1992, 335). ‘That’s why you find me hard to understand, I have to … trick myself – so that I don’t get in the way of myself, understand’ (332)? Therein lies the challenge to the spectator: to alter his/her ‘available grids’ of perception in order to respond to the work, thereby gathering the skills to engage with their own lives, not through the given grids of ideology but autonomously, creating their own sense of understanding. ‘The time and space construction is not mechanical or learned,’ says Robert Wilson, distinguishing his late-modernist ‘constructions’ from the ingrained habits of traditional dramas. ‘If you think about it too much, you miss the experience’ (1997, 85). Whereas in traditional dramatic narrative, ‘dialogue usually serves to make you see past the spoken language so that you watch the story it is telling’ (1992, 310), Foreman’s objective in Lava was ‘to stage a play that would give the spectator the sensory experience of listening, word by word, to what was being said’ (310.). The stage production of the text, however, does not consist solely of words. Simultaneous with the amplified Voice, a series of stage actions provide another perspective. It is likely that Foreman would have created these actions on the floor with the actors. They are nevertheless finally integral to the communication of meaning, providing ‘a form of reverberation hinting at the ways in which the imagination could carry that text further’ (Foreman commentary

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on Lava dvd, 2009). As The Voice outlines the argument for Category Three referred to above, the following stage action takes place. One of the performers has ‘dragged a pedestal with an oversized vase of flowers into the room.’ She tilts the pedestal and stares up at the vase ‘which doesn’t, amazingly, fall off’ (1992, 334). Another performer holds one of the pillars of cloth hanging in the room, hugs it and slowly lifts it and carries it to a wall so that the performers end up ‘frozen, both with their large and rather absurd “packages of material” suspended unnaturally, as they stare each other down’ (335). Shortly thereafter, the two performers drop their objects as if their actions had never taken place, and ‘all the men sit and pick up lipsticks and start applying them to their mouths […] with concentration [and] manic seriousness’ (335). At face value, these actions appear to have no causal connection either to one another or to the words spoken: they seem to be undertaken with no apparent motivational source. Nevertheless, the concentration with which the performers undertake the tasks20 seems to belie any sense of arbitrariness in them. One may in a close interpretive reading make a connection between the creative act undertaken by the artist and the ‘absurd “packages of material” suspended unnaturally,’ suggesting the molecules of disconnected verbal and visual material that Foreman suspends before us, at which we dutifully ‘stare.’ The ‘packages of material’ may be absurd in appearance, but the action of carrying a vase of flowers or a bolt of cloth across a room is not unfamiliar in ­theatre. What is going on may not at first glance be clear; but it is clear that something is happening that seems to waver between the domestic and the surreal, between the comic and the dramatic, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. This intermediary state is the place of the gap, the void. There is no connective tissue immediately evident between text and stage action; but the impression lurking is of another perceptual frame through which the interconnection may be discerned. As spectators, we are being asked to make the ‘jump’ that interconnects. 6

Confusion, Enticement and the Spectator

Writing, Jacques Derrida claimed, in words that could have been spoken by Voice in Lava, ‘does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, 20

As demonstrated in the section of the production available on the dvd, 35+ Year Retrospective Compilation (2009).

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primarily, its future’ (1978, 11). Meaning will emerge from its own unstoppable flow – the precipitate energy with which Foreman invests Voice in Lava. ‘Communication in literature,’ according to Merleau-Ponty, ‘is not the simple appeal on the part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori of the mind; rather, communication arouses these meanings in the mind through enticement and a kind of oblique action’ (Ctd. Derrida, 1978, 11). Foreman has depended upon his constant renewal and recalibration of the tactics of ‘enticement’ through ‘oblique action.’ They remain at play in his most recent script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes,21 in which the enticing ‘category of the coquette’ invites one to view the states of confusion and transparency as analogous. samuel: This confuses me. suzie: But coquettes are always / Confusing to people. samuel: Why does that surprise me. / Being under the impression / That to be in the category which could be the category of the coquette – would be to bathe in a certain intense / And obligatory lucidity – a forced cleansing, as if – / total ­t ransparency – suzie: Which is, of course – / The height of confusion. / The veritable definition of confusion? (2013a, 39. Caps in original) Confusion as a path to intense lucidity has traversed the territory of Foreman’s texts from his earliest plays, in which the steps toward understanding are distributed across a wide and slowly moving landscape of theatrical elements. These elements work in consort, not to reveal and support a meaning structure as in traditional drama, but to frustrate any attempt to read them as contributing signals to a lucid meaning. Foreman’s objective, it is clear, has been to cause confusion for the spectators, in order to shift them out of ingrained habits of reception into a state of ‘not knowing,’ and to trigger a significant re-­calibration of the relationship between perception and reality by presenting a profusion of phenomena onstage that stimulates their attempt to do so. Whether that artistic intention reaches fulfilment in audience reception of the productions is a complex issue that is somewhat outside the scope of this book. For a spectator, the ‘ecstatic field’ in a Foreman production can be a place of unease and loneliness, despite the manic humour that often fills his stage. 21

Old-Fashioned Prostitutes opened at the Public Theater, New York, on May 7, 2013, directed by Richard Foreman.

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‘Foreman keeps deferring conventional ideas of coherence,’ as Robinson writes, ‘in the hope that spectators will move past their confusion, past even their rage at confusion, and start looking towards themselves for satisfaction’ (1993, 154). Foreman hypothesises that ‘if you are open enough, and allow yourself a more dissociated perceptiveness, you can free yourself from being hypnotised by the world’ (1992, 26). Nevertheless, the performance has to succeed in engaging the spectator sufficient to provoke this activity. The humorously absurd association between unlikely “packages of material” is one means to hold our attention. But we are offered also the constant promise of familiar and comforting theatrical tropes. ‘Speakers,’ as Marc Robinson puts it, ‘have the makings of characters. And characters have the wherewithal to participate in stories’ (1993, 152, Robinson’s emphasis). The plays seem at various stages to be assimilable; they slip away, but the promise remains as a lure throughout. Finally, given that the text is only one element in a work of theatre, the ‘enticement’ of a production also lies in a mode of directing that flirts with representation, yet jettisons accepted theatrical forms in order to construct its own synthesis before the eyes of the spectator. Foreman describes this mode to Bernstein as ‘being concerned with taking whatever statement is there: “Rhoda, you look beautiful tonight,” and adding a “yes-BUT” in the staging’ (1987, 28, Caps in original). A ‘yes-BUT’ is another way of yoking two unlikely elements, a form of metaphorical leap between word and action. It is, as he describes it at another point, ‘a method of working in productive counterpoint to the text’ (1992, 20). He uses his directing process to subvert the written text, and to reconstitute another unexpected level of meaning. Directing is conceived, in this way, as another aspect of the discourse. In a manner common to late-modernist theatre practitioners, the mise-en-scène subverts the expected mode of writing as a vehicle for meaning, in which ‘you watch the story it is telling’ (Foreman, 1992, 310), building in its place a multiperspectival form of ‘performance writing’ that is, in Debra Pollock’s words, ‘nervous:’ a writing that ‘anxiously crosses various stories, theories, texts, intertexts, and spheres of practice, unable to settle into a clear, linear course, ­neither willing nor able to stop moving, restless, transient and transitive, traversing spatial and temporal borders … (1998, 90–91). The restlessness of writing within Foreman’s texts is a signature mood within the late-modernist practice I am considering here. It has its expression in my own work, most evidently in the ‘epileptic’ writing in my early texts; and in Jenny Kemp’s work it can be seen clearly in the extreme mood and style jumps between the fragmentary scenes in a play like Call of the Wild.

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Illustration 1 Richard Foreman directing Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013.

7

Foreman as Director: The Relationship of Word to Action

Foreman recounts in his commentary on the video selection from Eddie Goes to Poetry City that he comes to the first rehearsal with the text written, the set design planned (and usually the rehearsals take place on that set), a range of props to be used and ‘thirty or fifty music tracks’ (Foreman dvd, 2009). With the actors and the crew present, he ‘blocks’ the play page by page until the end, then they go back and re-work the moves and the images again and again until he is satisfied with it. Gestures and action are not chosen to communicate any prior meaning, even symbolic meaning, rather ‘it is all instinctual’ (2009), based though it is upon many years of experience. The stage images in the plays from the 1990s, such as Eddie Goes To Poetry City, shift rapidly and unpredictably, partly, he has said, because he gets bored with long visual sequences that only serve to illustrate what the text is already saying, and partly in response to the post-structuralist assertion that meaning is ‘just a succession and overlayering of codes, so you just reference something then throw it away’ (2009). To get some idea of just how the stage action relates to the words from the text, here again is the speech near the start of version one of Eddie Goes to Poetry City, this time with its accompanying stage directions:

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(marie has posed her body on the tilted table, spreading her legs, slowly unwrapping a bandaged leg to reveal a red wound on her inner thigh, and holding out an apple in one hand to tempt Eddie, who slowly crosses to her. […] eddie is creeping up onto the table toward marie’s apple, but in reaching for it he somehow stumbles and falls on his back, between marie’s now uplifted legs, and her apple drops and bounces off his head. […] The doctor is at the rear, cleaning a large shovel and crying softly to himself, as eddie and marie remain frozen on the table) Road, road, road, he said to himself in the hopes it might indicate a direction. Also realizing it could be more than one. And again automobiles started jumping a little bit like pretend molecules of a very bright light – and he decided to spend a lot of time and effort creating what was more than a simple lament, because it was never simple. […] He nevertheless fell quite off the track into the car. (The doctor and estelle have gathered around the table where eddie and marie lie frozen and entangled, and all now start shading their eyes against what might be a terrible vision, or a very bright light) But do cars ride on steel tracks, or on asphalt pavement! sometimes? Put them together this way – Have you ever imagined one of those incredibility ravishing contests between automobile and passenger train? Somebody thought you’d have to go back to the turn of the century for that, but what they were really imagining, his friends volunteered, was the nineteen-thirties. But the confusion was understandable, because the turn of the century was the epic, par excellence, of that powerful iron-horse metaphor-as-drug, and if there’s one thing that did need to be drugged, It was this sensibility in question that above all was scheming to get out of here any way possible. (marie gives eddie a shove off the table, and he falls and grabs onto a cardboard industrial drum that stands at the foot of the table. Then he feels his way over the top of the drum and goes to the ground head first, but as his feet follow, his legs grasp the barrel and he begins crossing the room in a crawl on the floor, legs locked around the barrel, which follows him upstage, and estelle runs and puts a little mechanical toy on its top. It waddles

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around in a circle on the barrel top, as eddie drags everything upstage, marie and estelle then run to saw on the logs, and the doctor makes the wind machine turn at a great rate. Finally, things quiet down, and marie and estelle race to one of the side walls and begin feeling along the wall for things to do) (1995, 7–9). The stage directions do not in any way directly illustrate the words spoken, and, moreover, as the video selection from the production (unfortunately not of this scene) makes evident, the directions, relatively clear and distinct when laid out on the printed page, are rendered opaque and elusive within the plethora of simultaneous action and random props that clutter the stage (dvd, 2009). However, the stage actions are not obscurely abstract, and the objects, while oddly juxtaposed, are real and material. They have a familiarity drawn from daily life, or myth, and/or from the cultural loading placed upon them by constant re-use in theatre, art and film: a posed body, spread legs, the temptation of an apple, a man creeping up onto the table to take it, a red wound on an inner thigh, two bodies frozen and entangled, an industrial drum, a mechanical toy. Their use always gives a comic, absurd edge to the proceedings: the performers undertake physical tasks seriously but are thrown into slapstick situations that undermine their intentions. The objects and actions congregate with the spoken words to create an unstable dynamic of clashing forces in the reverberating chamber of stage-time and stage-space. Whatever we make of this ‘overlayering of codes,’ the final image of two figures ‘feeling along the (side) wall’ for a secret door should remind us that we cannot hope to come to any understanding of what goes on in that chamber unless we can shift our perception enough to tune in to its frequency: You can’t find the secret door, because it isn’t in this world, but in the other. The one you want to escape to. So use it. Use the secret door. […] Use it (1995, 9). Moreover, if we do shift our perceptions, the congregation of material onstage may herald the arrival of something remarkable onstage – an arrival suggested when all the characters ‘start shading their eyes against what might be a terrible vision, or a very bright light’ (8). In Foreman’s production, the world (the setting) of the play is visually presented fully at the start and does not markedly change. Objects and people may come and go; however, the focus is not upon arrival and departure but

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upon inhabiting, waiting, suffering and surviving. Eddie does not arrive in Poetry City, or even ‘go to’ it in the literal sense; he is in it from the outset and his movement is one of encounter, of coming up against the unpredictability of the city as he attempts to figure it out, to decode it. This is not a peaceful, meditative encounter; it is a physical, often quite a brutal, familiarly urban one. Both of Foreman’s versions of the play are suffused with images of duress that Eddie must endure: he ‘hits the padded wall he hadn’t expected to run into,’ a ‘blindfold is put over his eyes,’ he ‘tries to compose himself,’ he ‘loses courage,’ ‘runs to hide his head,’ ‘faints,’ ‘lies unconscious,’ is ‘thrown back into the room with such force that he falls to the floor,’ and many times he ‘collapses.’ There are extended passages in which the other figures subject Eddie to unexplained physical aggression to the point of exhaustion: Estelle has snuck up behind Eddie. She pushes him violently into the wall; he bounces off, dropping a briefcase he’s been clutching for security. He recovers and runs to the rear wall to escape but miscalculates and bounces off that also, falling to the floor, and as he rises Marie and Estelle are holding a metal bar above his head, so he lifts to his feet but clunks his head on the bar and reels dizzily to a chair where he collapses (1995, 63–64). There are images of dreams or surreal strangeness that do suggest the proximity of the ‘other world’: the doctor with a huge head on his tiny body, a table with a model stage on it like a Roman arena, the doctor in a mask of a pig’s nose with tubes from the nose and a bald skull, a number of paintings of heads and halos produced from different places. But by and large Eddie’s encounters with Poetry City in Foreman’s productions are with actions and objects drawn from the inexplicable and unpredictable reality of city life in a metropolis like New York. As Michel De Certeau has suggested, life in a metropolis is lived midst ‘the thicks and thins of an urban “text,”’ which cannot be explained but must be fully encountered ‘without being able to read it’ (Ctd. During, 1993, 153). These are not morality plays about the evils of the modern city; they are the creations of an imagination shaped by and infested with ‘the dark space’ (153) of a city, understood here as not ‘in this world, but in the other’ (Foreman, 1995, 9). Imagining a city of poetry where ‘something out of the ordinary [may] ­happen’ (48) through ‘a door to another world’ (5) may suggest a romantic modernist sensibility ‘burning,’ as Allen Ginsberg, the poet of the city, rhapsodised, ‘for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the ­machinery of night’ (Ginsberg, 1995, 126). Foreman is far too circumspect to partake fully of such a vision, but its remnants can still be discerned throughout the play.

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The seemingly random usage and non-illusionistic framing of the objects and setting on the deep stage of the open space in Foreman’s production of Eddie Goes to Poetry City: Part One, as shown in the dvd selection (2009), break any illusion that the spectators may have of witnessing a dramatic representation of reality. Nevertheless, they provide an image of what Foreman has called ‘the complexity of the lived world’ (1992, 54), by depicting what Gerald Rabkin sees as its ‘dense babble of signs and energies’ (Rabkin, 1999, 1). The ‘strange objects’ that fill the ‘dim stage’ at the start of Part One (Foreman, 1995, 3) could well be items on a New York lower east-side sidewalk on trash days, or sitting outside an East Village junk store: ‘a tilted table with a low built back that contains small arches,’ ‘many chairs of different, nondescript style,’ ‘a circular wooden revolvable merry-go-round frame,’ ‘an antique wind machine,’ ‘a revolving drum,’ and so on (3). In addition, as if straight from the disaffected street life on The Bowery, there is ‘a woman who sits alone […] on a high stool […] wearing a black dunce cap […] shout[ing] aggressively’ (3). Foreman’s theatre exhibits a phenomenological force in which, in the words of Bert States, ‘what enters the theatre enters, so to speak, in the driveway outside’ (1987, 39). States, in his book on the phenomenology of theatre, Great Reckoning in Little Rooms, argues that theatre ‘ingests the world of objects and things only to bring images to life’ (39). The streets of the East Village that I passed through on my way to the rehearsals for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes were filled with the scatter and chaos of ongoing street life and trade: cafes and boutiques, small vans double-parked, impassioned arguments, isolated mutterings, trash on the sidewalk, abandoned domestic furniture, buskers, the homeless, nurses, police, people entering and exiting doors up to lofts above, the smells of coffee and bratwurst and rotting fruit, bursts of music, the choking fumes and constant thrust of traffic. These are Foreman’s given circumstances, and it is no surprise that the mise-en-scène of his productions ‘ingests (his) world of objects and things’ (39) bringing to life such a perverse array of paraphernalia. The written text does not make evident the nature of the world that will be constructed onstage. ‘The only way to evoke the reality of life in the theatre,’ Foreman tells Bernstein, ‘is to let these different levels of discourse participate in picturing the world onstage. And if the language as written does it all first, then […] that suppresses the richness of a world in which each level of discourse is actively interfered with by contesting levels of manifest being’ (Bernstein, 1992, 116–117). The view contrasts with the traditional belief that the ­levels of discourse operating in the construction of the stage production should be in service to the overriding primacy of ‘the language as written.’ For ­Foreman, all levels ‘interfere’ with one another, and are in productive contestation.

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He calls upon the language of physics in order to help him define the q­ uality – ‘the force’ – in theatre that lies in neither the written text nor the mise-en-scène alone, but in a space that is created between the two when ‘each level of discourse’ allows the other to take part in constructing the experience. ‘The invoked energy or force isn’t what gets written,’ he argues. ‘It arises, then, in the staging.’ However, neither is the staging the sole source of that energy; it is a subtler interaction between the two that is taking place: The writing invokes the force when that writing is then staged, so long as that staging is such that it allows the force to come. The staging doesn’t make it (the force) but the staging gets the writing (which is the original invoking) out-of-the-way in the proper way. So that then the force can be there’ (1985, 206, Caps in original). The statement seeks in its complexity to capture the difficulty for a practitioner in managing the interrelationship between text and staging. The theatre stage operates as a field – a force field – consisting of different levels of discourse that exercise their influence upon material objects and elements existing within its boundaries. In order for new materials, new elements, new ideas and new revelations to emerge within this field, what is of absolute necessity, above and beyond even the specific qualities of any one of the existing objects and elements, is their seemingly random juxtaposition in space or concatenation in time. The interrelationship between text and staging must clear the ground for ‘the force’ to have room to operate, and to allow (or disallow) seemingly infinite possibilities of combination and recombination. ‘I am interested,’ he has said, ‘in a kind of dialectical relationship between what you see and what you hear, which becomes a kind of rhythmic articulation – an evocation of a different level of being, a different kind of energy that one can bring to life’ (Ctd. Rabkin, 1999, 131). Two issues arise at this point. The first issue has to do with the means by which Foreman constructs his mise-en-scène from the plenitude of material he places at his disposal, with no prior sense of their potential. All the materials we find available in that theatre should be thrown together in full polymorphous play. Curtains, scenery, moving platforms, lights, noises, bodies – all add complexity to the stage space. […] The text should be an open file system, so distributed in its references that all aspects of the world seem connected to it (1992, 54). There is a clear tension here between Foreman the writer, utilising the play of words to engage with a range of ontological concerns, and Foreman the

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Illustration 2 Rehearsal stage for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013.

d­ irector, infiltrating and displacing the text’s primacy of power, introducing slippage, gaps and an indeterminate relationship between text and staging. The staging, he seems to be saying, is the process that connects ‘the world’ to the written text. 8

Foreman in the Rehearsal Room

Another tension arises from the source of power during the process of construction: who is in control of connecting ‘aspects of the world’ on the rehearsal floor and how is that control exercised? Whose imagination is the team working to fulfil? What is the ratio of focus given to the material properties of the world onstage, in comparison with that given to the human participants in the action? What role do the performers have in a situation in which, as he readily admits, ‘I want the spectators to be watching my decisions. I want them to be watching me’ (44. Emphasis in the original). What are the reasons for and the ramifications of the choices that Foreman has made on this issue? Does it reflect a ‘post-humanist,’ technologised turn in late-modernist theatre? Or is it

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Foreman’s means of manifesting the inner psychological fears and desires of the central human protagonist, without becoming entwined with the demands of character representation? In which case, how much do the fears and desires expressed reflect his own preoccupations? Richard Schechner, in an interview on Eddie Goes to Poetry City ii at the time of its production, raises this distinction. I think there’s an exploration of psychology, not an exploration of character. Character is a particular thing that belongs to a particular form of drama. It means coherent words and action relating to an unfolding story that we the spectators are interested in and demand some sort of resolution for. That’s not life. That’s a particular kind of thing that happens in drama (1991, Folger Collection, 5). By contrast, Schechner defines psychology as ‘what’s going on inside one ­person’s consciousness at a given moment’ (5). He sees this as focused, in Foreman’s case, primarily with ‘his own consciousness,’ as if he is saying to the spectator, ‘“Here’s what’s going on inside my head insofar as I can write it out and show you in pictures”’ (5). I was interested, when I witnessed Foreman directing, to see how this focus upon ‘his own consciousness’ would manifest in the decision-making process in rehearsal. At the rehearsals of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes in April/May 2013, for example, I witnessed Foreman engaged in the construction of a world onstage composed of the tension of ‘beingness.’ ‘The process of work,’ I noted after one of the rehearsals, ‘has the feeling of an artist (e.g. Michelangelo) with a team of apprentice artists helping him to build from his sketches onto the large and full canvas’ (Murphet, 20 April, 2013). The creative input came almost solely from Foreman throughout: the suggestions of changes, the ideas for shifts in position, or for new sounds, or additional set elements, the sudden flashes of inspiration that everyone had to patiently work with, several times resulting in the reinstatement of the status quo. It was like watching an artist attempting to give expression to the elusive outcome of constant and deep self-reflection. This self-reflective aspect of Foreman’s productions reminds me of a New Wave French film auteur like Jean-Luc Godard, who, in movies such as Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville and Made in the u.s.a. uses strategies like written words on the screen, unidentifiable voice-over commentary, as well as direct communication to the audience to explore and communicate the musings of the filmmaker’s own consciousness. The rehearsals for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes showed clearly evidence of an auteur in control of the vision of the production. Even prior to the start of

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r­ ehearsal, Foreman had, like most directors, spent time preparing the text for rehearsal; as set designer, he had already built a detailed model of the set, which was from the outset rendered in broad detail onstage; and as sound designer he had a thorough knowledge and recordings of the many sound sources he would be working with. Within the rehearsal room, then, he was able to work on all aspects of the production virtually simultaneously, and, most importantly, his thorough preparation of all aspects allowed him to work with intuitive freedom in rehearsal without fear of losing contact with his vision in the process. ‘The mise-en-scène he is building has its own reality (distinct from that of the language),’ I noted after one rehearsal. ‘It is intuited rhythmically and spatially from a host of given resources, and is in a constant state of flux’ (20 April). My notes enumerate the congregated artists and facilities at his command: There are fifteen technical crew with twelve computer monitors surrounding him in the auditorium: one Stage Manager and four Assistant Stage Managers; one Lighting Designer and one Assistant Lighting Designer with computerised lighting boards; one Sound Designer and one Assistant Sound Designer with computers connected to speakers; one Assistant Director, who takes notes from Foreman for his later feedback session with the actors; one Costume Designer; one Lines Manager and four Assistant Lines Managers, who follow the lines spoken and check mistakes and changes in lines and moves. He relates to all of these assistants all of the time. Well the main ones anyway. The five actors wait (patiently or not so patiently) for attention from him. But they never get much of it. He is not really interested in actors except as part of the overall mise-­ en-scène (20 April). All the materials and personnel had been present in the room from the outset, and simultaneous tracking of performance, light, sound, costume, and props had been established as the modus operandi. As the stage manager told me in passing: ‘It has been a tech [i.e. the equivalent of a technical rehearsal] from the first rehearsal’ (20 April). One could be excused for having the impression at first that Foreman holds all the materials of the theatre under a kind of magisterial control. In seeking to construct a ‘performance of consciousness,’ he has over four decades had to attend carefully to forms of dramaturgy that neither fulfil a spectator’s expectation for a character’s ‘progression through a series of adventures’ (Davy, 1976, ix), nor present the image of radical collective energy as an alternative illusion. The idealised image of direct communal action sought in the theatre of the

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1960s was rejected by Foreman, in a passage quoted by Davy, in favour of ‘a theatre that was true to my own mental experiences, that is, the world as being pieces of things, awkwardly present for a moment and then either re-­presented by consciousness or dropped in favour of some momentary presentation’ (ix. Emphasis in original). Susan Letzer Cole, in her report on attending rehearsals for Foreman’s production of Kathy Acker’s play, Birth of a Poet,22 found that ‘there is in the rehearsal work some kind of collective creation by actors and director’ (1992, 142). From my experience at Old-Fashioned Prostitutes and from the evidence of his own comments, rehearsal as a ‘collective creation’ seems to be anathema to Foreman. ‘Such theatres remind me of encounter groups,’ he commented to Charles Bernstein. ‘I thought of myself as a writer, an isolated consciousness’ (1992, 111). Nevertheless, Foreman no longer ‘“conducts” the performance,’ as Kate Davy described his process in the early years (1976, ix). He has gradually relinquished much of this direct intervention from within the performance event, handing over the lighting and sound cues to technical operators. His most noticeably direct presence-in-performance during the 1980s and 1990s was his sonorous voice-over, which, as I have described, insistently pervaded the stage action with a form of philosophico-poetic comm­ entary. In Lava, this was an attempt to set the obsessions of his ‘isolated ­consciousness’ against the dynamics of the constructed world. However, by the time of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes the external voice-over in the performance has all but disappeared. He found the means to conduct the rehearsals in ways that followed his own active consciousness as it responded to the onstage action, by surrounding himself with technical equipment and with technical personnel alive to his wishes, and by constructing the world as directly as possible from the immediacy of his own thoughts. As early as 1984, Jill Dolan and Guy Scarpetta were commenting that ‘Foreman’s theatrical space – which he does not hesitate to refer to as psychic space – is above all an unstable space’ (1984, 28). The connection between the instability of the space and the realm of personal reflection was evident in the ­rehearsals I witnessed. His management of the space in rehearsals for Old-­ Fashioned Prostitutes felt ‘unstable’ to me because he chose to trust his intuitions: he worked impulsively, rhythmically, and yet sometimes gave a great deal of thought to an idea as it emerged. Such a process often left the artists working alongside him without bearings, waiting for the director to come to his decision. However, he was not operating in a dictatorial fashion, ordering people around as he systematically manifested his preconceived blueprint. 22

Presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dec 3–8, 1985. Music by Peter Gordon. Directed by Richard Foreman.

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He was quite openly at a loss himself at times, trying to capture ‘the kinetic sensations that result from a rapid succession of compositional moments’ (Foreman, 1992, 55). There was a shared knowledge amongst all involved, which was often joked about quite openly, that they were all waiting to respond to the fleeting inspirations emanating from Foreman like electrical charges that would enliven the space. However, through his disarming confusion and the humorous banter they all engaged in, Foreman seemed able to earn the trust of the technical artists he worked with. There was constant traffic of ideas between the director, who had a small lighting desk on his lap to work with, and the lighting designer, testing out possibilities on the spot as they emerged: blackouts, sudden bright lights on parts of the stage that held no central action, moments of mood change, and so on. At other times, Foreman would lean across to his sound designer, who sat right beside him, and suggest a thought for a sound that may be indirectly appropriate or surprising; the sound designer would improvise on his computer and within seconds the sound emerged onstage as aid or contrast to the action; the sound would either become part of the pattern of inputs, or as easily abandoned after trial. A similar ongoing interaction took place with the stage manager, the costume designer, and the team of young assistants. The difficulty for all concerned (including the director!) was that they couldn’t rely upon any clearly articulated meaningful plan of action to guide their choices; nor was the process one of heading towards a meaning that would emerge in any recognisable way through the work being done. The stage action, developed within a set design that was already completely abstracted from representing a setting for the ‘content’ of the play, struggled against meaning-making as theatre-goers have come to expect it. ‘Often when plays drift in the way of implying a certain meaning,’ Foreman told me, ‘I erase it’ (Foreman, 4 May, 2013b). His focus is not upon emerging meaning but upon present experience, so that what a spectator ‘takes away and dwells upon is having been through something’ (4 May). To this end, one of the main aims of the rehearsal processes is to prepare the ground for heightened anticipation (in spectators as well as participants) that ‘something’ may arrive to make sense of the proceedings. At the start of Eddie Goes to Poetry City ii, for example, Eddie expresses the desire for ‘something … out of the ordinary to happen’ (1995, 48). He may, at a fictional level, be voicing the yearning of an office worker frustrated with his limited life. However, the words also voice the wishes of a performer at the threshold of a new project, and the wish that a theatregoer brings to an avant-garde performance. In the play, the doctor suggests that Eddie should remain patient. ‘A god will manifest in this very room’ (48). ‘Will I recognise him?’ asks Eddie (48). The following

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Illustration 3 Designers and technicians at work for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013.

exchange between Eddie and Estelle places the focus exactly on the state of unfulfilled anticipation that Foreman seeks to arouse in the spectator: Estelle: You’re anticipating. Eddie: What? Estelle: The arrival of somebody invisible. He or she will walk on the stage – Eddie: What stage? Estelle: – but you won’t know it happened (49). In fact – and this demonstrates how the procedure of the rehearsal process is instrumental to the final performance – all those involved in the rehearsal of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes appear to understand that none of them may ever experience the arrival of a ‘god’ in the rehearsal room. ‘God knows whether we’ll ever get there,’ the stage manager said to me at the end of one rehearsal. ‘Even if we knew where “there” is’ (Murphet, 20 April, 2013). They have to remain ever-patient as their director waits and watches and re-calibrates the nature of the stage event (or more precisely his experience as a witness of that

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event as it develops) with circuitous attempts to surprise himself even as he watches. Foreman is constantly interrupting the rehearsal to make additions or deletions, but interestingly he is not a demonstrably ‘active’ director. He does not pace around the space, energetically drawing attention to the work he is doing, externalising his inner turmoil. He sits slumped in his chair, rarely standing, rarely raising his voice above a murmur. It is the image of a passivereceptive state. If he is to be true to the deeply self-reflexive nature of his project, his attention must be paid equally to his perceptions of the external inputs from the rehearsal floor and to the inner workings of his consciousness in relation to them. Foreman has over the years developed for his plays a wide range of theatrical devices to frustrate the forward flow of the action and to prevent ‘the inevitable drift into normal, narrative form’ (Foreman, 1992, 8). He admits that ‘I build frustration into the very structure of my performances’ (9), in order to reinforce a minuteness of focus, and to mark the moments when a new act of perception is necessary to respond to a different level of discourse. The sudden and unexpected amplification of loud buzzers and bright lights turned onto the audience are well known as disruptive devices in his work.23 But his use of oddly placed non-diegetic musical sounds or visual distractions stretches far beyond one or two sound inputs. In Sophia = (Wisdom): Part Three: The Cliffs, for instance, over the course of five pages in the script the following sound directions underlie the action: the women and then the men go ‘bo-o-inggg,’ a hammer hits, a string is plucked, a ringing noise gets louder, a hum gets louder, a whistle sounds, a rocking deep bass music is heard, a single piano note plays, and bells accompany organ music (1976, 114–118). In addition, screens with projected legends are wheeled on and off, frames are placed around people’s heads, naked women and men enter and roll on the floor, photos are taken, people point at objects or at parts of another’s body, and so on. Even words spoken in the play are denied their expected flow, their meaning deferred by the distortion of their sound; as when a ‘crowd’ calls out, holding onto and extending syllables almost to the point of incomprehension: ‘We/e ha/ave a/a ri/ight to/o ge/et ou/ur hou/use ho/old po/ossess/ions ba/ack int/to ou/ur hou/uses’ (124). 23

Interestingly, in the performance of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes that I attended in 2013, the use of these two devices, with which Foreman has persisted for decades, prompted not shock in the spectators but a mildly amused chuckle of appreciation: a sign, perhaps, of their waning effect as disruptive shocks.

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Illustration 4 The ever-patient performers waiting on-stage during rehearsals, Old-­ Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013.

All these actions and sounds are integrated into the Foreman mise-en-scène as ways of framing, challenging, disturbing, sharpening and realigning the act of perception itself. ‘Guess what. I’m not looking through you, Rhoda’ (119), Sophia says at one point, as if to remind us of the opaque ‘beingness’ of all we see before us on a Foreman stage. ‘I’m not even looking inside your head,’ she continues, shifting her attention from the possible psychological motivations for Rhoda’s actions, ‘I’m looking at the surface of your eyes, aren’t I?’ (119). Her visual focus lands finally on the organs of perception themselves; it is a challenge for the spectators to become similarly aware of their own role as witnesses of the performance. The Cliffs also features the lengths of string that Foreman has stretched across the stages of so many of his productions – and which return once more four decades later in Old-Fashioned Prostitutes. Foreman suggested to Bernstein that these string lines are equivalent to ‘what happens when you’re sketching and don’t know quite what you want to draw, you don’t know how to draw, and you scratch out energetic lines, you feel a thrust, a direction’ (1992, 123). The description brings to mind the frenzy of graphic lines with which, for

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example, the Italian artist, Alberto Giacometti sketched figures in preparation for his sculptures.24 Foreman’s lines, like Giacometti’s, self-consciously foreground the difficulty of visually rendering his art, at the same time as they feel out the ‘direction’ it may follow. At their simplest level, the lines across the space hold the spectator’s eye ‘in suspension between all points of the stage picture’ (Foreman, 1992, 55). He suggests that if in one of his plays ‘a character stabbed another in the back,’ a third performer might have stretched a line that pointed towards the point on a figure’s body where he had been stabbed. ‘At first, this might lead you to believe I wanted to call extra attention to the act of stabbing’ (55), he writes, calling to mind the way that perspectival lines in a Renaissance painting draw the viewer’s attention to the major focal point. However, he argues that the lines of tension in his productions work counter-intuitively and self-referentially by ‘call(ing) attention to the method of pointing, rather than to the act being pointed out’ (56). They act to decentralise rather than centralise the spectator’s focus ‘spread(ing) your attention over the whole stage, implying that the whole stage participates in the event’ (56). Working against our propensity to adhere to the depth illusion of perspective lines, Foreman flattens stage depth, demanding that we undertake visually the kind of associative ‘jumps’ between visual signs that he challenges us to make between the words of his writing. In holding the eye ‘in suspension’ across the entire stage, the lines ‘contradict a unitary reading of the stage space’ and ‘increase an awareness of [its] “reverberation chamber” aspect’ (56). As I watch the rehearsals and performance of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, the lines of string, stretched in this case across the front of the stage, separating the auditorium from the stage action, operate visually as a series of frame-lines for the stage action, dividing the scene in front of me in unpredictable ways into discrete particles for my closer perusal. ‘They remind me,’ I noted at the time, ‘of the way in which electrical power lines divide up the landscape of city or country. We are used to looking at the landscape as if they are not there, but the instant they come into focus – if, for instance, a bird lands upon one – the scene behind is fragmented in ways that destroy any semblance of unity’ (Murphet, 20 April, 2013.). They deny any involvement in the flow of actions onstage without a simultaneous awareness of my witnessing it. In the end, the physical act of seeing, as Foreman demanded it should, implicates me in the action

24

In his introduction to Giacometti’s drawings, Luigi Carluccio sees these frantic lines as emerging from the artist’s desire ‘to penetrate the resistant veil of appearances and conventions’ (Carluccio, 1965, xxvi).

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before me. My act of observation, as Quantum theory has argued, is inextricably part of the phenomena I observe.25 9

Theatre of a Quantum Age With respect to theatre, we should not pretend that we’re elsewhere than in a theatre watching a play. Not only is the idea of a constant, discrete, and single identity for any portion of the external world challenged by the role of the observer in the observation, but that of the observer is as well. The observer is not a recording consciousness, a fixed entity; observation, requiring interaction, necessarily affects the observer’. crohn schmitt, 1990, 9

Richard Foreman has used the terminology of contemporary physics – the concepts of ‘quanta’ of information, ‘seeing small,’ and the electromagnetic ’force field’ – from his earliest writings (Foreman, 1976, 135–148 and 1985, 204– 214), and he told Kate Davy that his theatre work has been influenced by his readings of twentieth-century scientific theories (Davy, 1981, 29). The reading of Foreman’s self-reflective individualism must be widened in this context to include a dynamic, possibly post-humanist interest in the interconnectedness of all phenomena, including those people and materials involved in the creation of artistic work. The discontinuity of elementary particles in Foreman’s texts – the fact that they are not drawn together by a cause-and-effect ­relationship – may necessitate associative ‘jumps’ between seemingly disconnected words and actions. However, as a director he develops onstage a complex interrelationship of these discontinuous events in time and space. ‘We are omniattentive’ as Natalie Crohn Schmitt puts it, in her study of the relationship between theatre and the discoveries of quantum physics, ‘we do not perceive only one thing at a time but many things at once and discontinuously’ (1990, 16). Foreman’s stage replaces an Aristoteleian focus on time and motion with a quantum theatre of space and event. ‘According to contemporary science,’ Crohn Schmitt summarises, ‘the unit of things real is the event – energy, not matter, constitutes the basic datum. Particles are not material stuff, but dynamic patterns or processes’ (19). Through paying attention to the ­dynamism 25

Charles Bernstein comments that the lines create a resistance within the space of the theatre that ‘break[s] down perspective and Euclidian space: the whole sense of a unified space of the stage’ (1987, 123).

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of artistic energy, Richard Foreman reconstitutes particular matter on the theatre stage into ‘dynamic patterns’ of processes about to take place or already happening. The theatre stage acts as a truly creative force field functioning primarily as the ground upon which this new material may emerge. Foreman does not make these ‘dynamic patterns’ immediately discernible for the spectator, nor for the production crew, nor for himself. He does not strip the stage bare of all theatrical elements in order to begin with a tabula rasa, as Jerzy Grotowski did in his ‘poor theatre’ productions. ‘At times,’ he recalls, ‘I have considered working without sets and props, in an empty theatrical space without the burden of an elaborate physical production. But then I realize that such a naked space does not allow the text to ricochet between levels of meaning, which is my obsession’ (1992, 65). Jerzy Grotowski’s aesthetic of the ‘via negativa’ aimed towards ‘gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous’: nothing onstage could get in the way of ‘the actor–spectator relationship.’ He wanted a theatre ‘without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects’ (Grotowski, 1969, 19). By contrast, Foreman packs the stage full of seemingly unrelated but theatrically familiar material to the point of excess, and challenges himself, his actors and his audience to make what they can of their co-existence. ‘You turn Grotowski’s critique on its head,’ Bernstein commented to Foreman, ‘by rejecting traditional set design as insufficient and moving toward a hyperdense, incredibly articulated, scenography’ (Bernstein, 1992, 109). Foreman’s work in the rehearsals of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes suggests that he begins without any prior sense of the potential that may emerge, given the action of ‘force’ upon the interrelating elements. I was fascinated throughout the rehearsals with his tendency to keep the performers/characters and their moments of interaction to the periphery of the space for as long as possible: ‘He is emptying the space of human figures – creating areas where no human action is happening, and banishing it to the perimeters of the space’ (Murphet, 20 April, 2013). In a traditional theatre production, the natural tendency involved in directing stage action is to centralise the important figures or moments. There is a kind of in-built fear of space empty of human energy as if it indicates that nothing worthwhile is happening. On Foreman’s stage, however, the space is never truly empty; it is filled with juxtaposed non-human materials and the potential energy that they may release when disturbed by the added factor of the mobile humans. The action generated by the performers must struggle to find its place within the whole, providing a circulating energy that integrates the multiplicity of visual information. Human figures are at times deliberately underlit. Attention is paid to the critical point at which a figure

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enters and shifts from peripheral zone to the central area; and care is taken that a turning body does not demand irrelevant visual focus.26 At times the proliferation of visual material onstage verges upon chaos barely held at bay. This is true of most of Foreman’s productions I have witnessed in the theatre and viewed on video. The overall effect of a Foreman production is one of disturbance: visual, verbal and conceptual. Set against this incipient chaos, however, is the particular organising eye of the artist: each item is framed so as to highlight not the detail of the information it contains so much as its own visual integrity. The geometric precision of the visual frames and the ways in which they inform each other visually is reminiscent of abstract juxtapositions in Mondrian and Malevich, as well as the clean minimalist forms of North American Minimalism that influenced Foreman early in his career. Down the two side walls of the set of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes hang two rows of photographs in frames, each row containing up to sixteen separate but visually matching photographs of unnamed figures not connected to the ongoing action. Along one half of the back wall, sheets of newspaper have been attached in exactly repeated diagonals, and these are echoed by another lower row hanging just behind the block of seating rostrum, upon which are placed a number of square cushions. The other half of the back wall consists of a large, black rectangle, across which a sliding wall can be drawn. Metal arches like bicycle racks have been installed across the front of the stage, so that when the main character does fully enter the centre of the space it is invariably to stand supported by two of these frames in order to lean out from them to talk to the audience. A doorway in each of the side walls provides a frame for characters caught indecisively between entering and exiting. In front of each of those doorways, attached to the walls at shoulder height, are metal circles about head size in diameter. Occasionally an actor puts their head through one of them as he/she speaks. More frequently, they poke an arm through and their hand is lit by a light bulb attached to the walls for that purpose.27 The overall impression, in visual tension with the initial sense of a random collection of urban paraphernalia, is of a stage image that always promises but never quite accomplishes the coherence of a pattern of abstract shapes, organised painstakingly according to an overriding but unstated principle.

26 27

‘A lot of attention is being given to whether a turn is completed full 360 degrees or turned back on itself after 180 degrees. This is a recurrent instruction about turns and eventually the actors build it into their enquiries: “A full turn?” “Yes”’ (Murphet, 21 April, 2013). Most of the elements mentioned can be seen in the accompanying photos of the rehearsal set for Old-Fashioned Prostitutes.

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The energy released by the density of material – objects, set pieces, words, movements, gestures, light and sound – within this ‘reverberation’ chamber seems always potentially too much for the container to hold. This is not due to the kind of over-physicalised, over-heated human activity with which some directors fill their stages, as if to prove that something important is going on. Foreman’s work is far cooler than this in style. He describes his compositional process in terms that reference some of the key tenets of physics: Composition is always a question of the tension between a container, and the contained energy that wants to break out of that container and flow forth. The basic compositional reality is the tendency to flow and expand, and the countertendency to block and contain that flow. Composition plays with that expansive thrust; it manifests at the point where thrust is contained by a strong barrier that either stops it, or better yet, redirects it so it can continue on, but now patterned in a way that generates a complexity like that of the world (1992, 57–58).

Illustration 5 Foreman’s framing techniques, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Public Theater, New York, May 2013.

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The ‘strong barrier[s]’ mentioned by Foreman, which contain, stop, or redirect the ‘expansive thrust’ in his productions, constitute the various ‘frames’ that he has used in all aspects of his work. The use of lights, sound, objects and space as frames is not peculiar to Foreman’s work. Any director, working compositionally with the materials at hand, will utilise those materials to draw the audience’s attention to key moments in the unfolding drama. For Foreman, however, their purpose is not solely to highlight significant moments or action in the narrative or plot. The materials are given focus in their own right. In the mellower dramaturgical style of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, the onstage action is cooler, less frenetic than in his mid-career plays like Eddie Goes To Poetry City, filled as those are with humans interacting with elements of the set and the props. The action of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes takes place mainly downstage, so that the material of the setting provides a backdrop to this encounter between Samuel and the coquettes. The sense of impending combustion, which, nevertheless, provides an unmistakeable edge even to this recent, nostalgic drama, is the result of careful compositional processes in which ‘matter and space are inseparable and interdependent parts of the single whole – the field’ (Crohn Schmitt, 1990, 21). At one point in the rehearsals, for instance, a seemingly inordinate amount of attention is paid to what appears to be a ridiculously small act of framing a ridiculously insignificant moment of ‘normal, everyday life.’ The Michelin Man, an oddly surreal figure lurking around the stage and haunting Samuel, enters with a board with a white square painted on it that is in turn framed by a white circle. He seats himself leaning against the square cushions and places the board behind Samuel’s foot as he proceeds to polish Samuel’s shoe. Foreman and all the crew in the rehearsal auditorium pay a period of intense consideration to this white circle. That is to say, no time is spent on the action of shoe polishing or the encounter between two people it entails. Rehearsal focus is paid to the visual frame for this action – a frame that would most likely have been ignored within a traditional naturalistic production within which the encounter between the two humans would be paramount. Suddenly Foreman has an intuitive flash. ‘Oh I know why it looks so awful,’ he announces. ‘We need to add something’ (Murphet, 21 April, 2013). He draws a sketch of what he envisions: a piece of white plastic emerging from the heel of the shoe up to the top of the ankle, like a half gaiter, or a wide shoehorn. The costume designer is consulted and the next day the white plastic is there, providing a frame within a frame for the otherwise dramatically insignificant action of polishing a shoe. It is as if a camera lens was focused in from the larger actions of human agents to the molecular details of seemingly insignificant life that provide the context for those actions. In the process, our perceptual field

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is sharpened. We are forced (as spectators) to encounter visually and aurally that ‘dense babble of signs and energies out of which normal, everyday life surfaces as the transitory, heartbreaking thing it really is’ (Ctd. Rabkin 1999, 1). Meanwhile, the human participants, in particular Samuel, the dislocated, disoriented, dis-equilibrated traveller, hover around the two side entrances never fully able to inhabit the central space. Samuel, like Eddie on his way to Poetry City, is a traveller attempting to encounter the strangeness of a world promising a deeper level of meaning if only he knew how to read its signs. ‘Travel,’ as Gerald Rabkin writes, ‘forces us to recognize what Foreman has known all along: consciousness demands confronting the strange. We are all tourists in the terra incognita of reality’ (8–9). We do more than witness Samuel’s encounter; we too experience the seductive impenetrability and allure of the objects within his environment; we recognise that we too are victims of the ubiquity of the signs and cultural codes in the world within which we all function; we watch with fascination as the dynamic patterns set up within Foreman’s stage world suggest fresh ways to decode those signs. 10

Performers in Foreman’s Theatre: Manic Dancers of the Pattern

Richard Foreman’s theatre plays with levels of pretence; it consists of a world placed self-consciously between an attempt to create an illusion, and an awareness of itself as an onstage phenomenon forever unable to sustain that illusion. This state of indeterminacy, caught between the illusion of representation and the immediacy of a theatre act taking place here and now, constitutes part of the radical shift attempted by late-modernist theatre. In this uncertain domain, a spectator becomes aware of a process of seeing and indeed seeing oneself seeing the unfamiliar world that confronts us. ‘In Foreman’s work,’ writes Erik MacDonald, ‘there is always some sense that the “real” event does not take place onstage, nor behind what is onstage, but exists somewhere between the perception of the event and the event itself’ (1993, 47). Therein lies the ontological aspect of Foreman’s late-modernist theatrical project. In his conversation with Charles Bernstein, Foreman acknowledges the influence of a wide range of twentieth-century artists and thinkers: Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Anton Ehrenzweig, Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger and Edmond Jabes. However, as seriously as he may take his project, he also keeps firmly in mind both the essential nature of play at the heart of theatre, and the danger looming for even a serious late-modernist thinker to imagine he is approaching the truth of reality.

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I think a lot of the things that I said in my earlier manifestoes were relatively polemical, and I’ve always maintained that speaking theoretically, which I do very easily, makes me feel a little bit dishonest because somehow I know I’m playing games. It’s fun, exhilarating, an ego trip, but it’s not necessarily the truth bernstein, 1992, 117

The image of a writer/director ‘playing games’ as part of an ‘exhilarating ego trip’ raises a problematic aspect of the auteurism with which we have come to associate Foreman’s artistic process. Kate Davy commented in her introduction to the collection of Foreman’s earliest texts that ‘every aspect of Foreman’s art is done for and by himself’ Emphasis in original. Davy was writing at a time when Foreman kept hands-on control of most departments of the production process. ‘During each performance,’ she describes, ‘Foreman sits at a table, directly in front, or above and in back, of the audience seating section. From this table, he operates the various tape recorders and lighting instruments thereby “conducting” the performance since he controls all of the lighting and tape-­ recorded cues’ (xiii). For Davy, the lack of collaboration in his company was due to the fact that ‘the impulse behind Foreman’s work is fundamentally different than that of most of his theatre contemporaries’ (ix), including The ­Living Theatre, whose contrasting use of theatre language I have already discussed. Foreman’s work, she argues, ‘stands in direct opposition to the various forms of physical, energetic expressionism adopted by experimental theatre artists of the 1960s’ (ix). Richard Schechner, one of the central practitioners in North American theatre of the 1960s, has reflected that companies such as The Living Theatre, The Performance Group and The Open Theatre ‘recycled’ the ‘radical experimentation … connected to a radical politic,’ practised by artists such as Meyerhold and Brecht. In this work, there was ‘a lot of audience ­participation and involvement,’ however he admits that ‘I don’t think we ever had a working-class audience as such, but we were looking for it’ (1991, Folger ­Collection, 2). Erik MacDonald has attacked Foreman’s control over his productions as ‘a blindness to the repetition of the author-creator mechanisms that … fail to account for the assumptions that underlie their own discourse’ (1993, 63). He gives as an example Foreman’s use of naked women in several of his early plays. MacDonald argues, continuing a critique already undertaken by Jill Dolan (1991), that ‘Foreman’s assumption, that he can control the perception of objects onstage regardless of their ideological status of function … is predicated on his belief in his ability to determine fully the meaning of his words and images’ (1993, 61). Certainly, from one perspective, Foreman could be seen to

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d­ isplay a lack of regard for the ideological effect of decisions such as the use of naked women (although, as MacDonald points out, his early work also included naked men). However, as I have described in my discussion of Foreman at practice in the rehearsal room, and as his own comments attest, he seeks not to work from ‘his ability to determine fully the meaning of his words and images,’ but to create from a position that sits uneasily outside the realm of conscious control. Indeed, an inability to determine the meaning of words and/or images is a mainstay of much poststructural thought, and Foreman is fascinated with the questions raised by the slipperiness of meaning. Foreman’s theatre, despite his comment to Bernstein, is not ‘an ego trip’ (Bernstein, 1987, 117) so much as a trip into the ego. The material we encounter is there as a byproduct of his exploration of his uncertain consciousness; it does not pretend to be anything else. All personnel dedicated to the task of putting on his plays are struggling to manifest that inner search for meaning. As a restless philosopher, seeking to confront in theatre questions that concern him about the nature of Being, Foreman places a diverse range of phenomena into the theatre space and attempts to find patterns of interconnection that will shift our perceptive apparatus into new territory. Whether he should be more in control of his stage images is another matter. However, as an artist dedicated to breaking taboos of normalcy, I believe he deserves licence to push boundaries, including those of taste and ideology. What am I after? Something that eludes the rational […] Yet copies the moves of rationalness, so as to really undermine it. And that copy is informed by other codes, other grids, than the mere local. Another grid suddenly pops over the last one foreman, ‘Theory.’ My emphasis. Caps in the original

This is not to absolve the artist of responsibility for the end product, but to gain a new perspective on the work as a process of exploration of which the printed text and the stage performance are but phases. Where, then, does this place the question of human agency, specifically that of the actor, within the philosophical, post-humanist form of late-modernist art that Foreman creates? Is there any active role for performers who are robbed of plots developed around human traumas, actions, emotions and triumphs? Certainly, Foreman has the reputation of a director who pays little attention to the role of the actor in creating his productions. It is a reputation that he has had some part in nurturing himself. ‘I suffer agonies listening to actors “speak” the lines,’ Foreman told me. ‘That’s another awful thing about theatre: that the actors are human beings and they can’t help but drift’

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(­Foreman, 4 May, 2013b). As a fellow-director, I can understand his frustration with the tendency by actors to ‘drift’ from decisions carefully made during rehearsal. But his impatience with their fallibility reinforces the frustration in turn expressed by several actors at Foreman’s ignorance of and lack of interest in their needs.28 Kate Manheim, Foreman’s partner and the leading performer in his early and mid-term work, told Richard Schechner that ‘[w]hen I started working for him [Foreman] I was in a position where I did everything I was told. I did not question that at the time’ (Schechner & Manheim, 1987, 136). Manheim started without any prior experience as an actress; she was dependent upon Foreman for direction and guidance.29 As she gained experience and her own autonomy through performing with the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, her obedience to the director-driven process became strained. ‘Now I’m in a position’ (speaking in 1987), ‘where I systematically refuse to do anything I’m told. Of course, Richard’s still the director’ (136). She was left with the distasteful fact that, despite the inestimable contributions she made to the final form of the production, once the production season was over, ‘as far as I’m concerned, it’s finished. […] My contribution vanishes’ (136), whereas Foreman can publish the texts in his name and receive the plaudits. She concludes bitterly that ‘it’s the writer and the director – and in this case we have everything mixed in together – who pulls all the strings’ (137). From the other perspective, Foreman acknowledged very early Manheim’s instrumental role is shaping his aesthetic, reluctant as he may have been to listen to her. He told Terry Curtis Fox in 1978: There’s no question that she (Kate) has forced certain changes in my work, which has made it more accessible. She’s interested in all sorts of razzmatazz, which I’ve had to be dragged into reluctantly, but I think it’s been very healthy for my work. No question also that it’s changing the whole complexion of my casting and that it will continue to do so. Kate clearly has a unique virtuosity that I want to use more and more and that I want from others (Ctd. Fox, 1978, Folger Collection, 2). However, Kate Manheim does give voice to a dilemma Foreman has faced in shifting the focus of his theatre from the socio-psychological to the philosophical. Foreman wants the spectator to focus not upon the actors, except insofar as they aid the audience to ‘relate to my decision and my composition’ (Ctd. Nahshon, 1976, 89). ‘The actor’s role is the same as the role of the words, 28 29

See some (but not all) of the actors’ opinions expressed in Nahshon, 1976, 83–100. The lead actress in Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Alenka Kraigher, was similarly inexperienced, and dependent for direction upon Foreman’s instructions.

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s­ cenery, lighting, et al. … It’s part of the real world that I’m trying to organize’ (89). In his early career, Foreman was interested in ‘taking people from real life, non-actors, and putting them onstage to allow their real personalities to have a defiant impact on the conventional audience’ (1992, 32). In this, he was consciously ‘working very hard to bring that area of naturalness into the theater’30 (33. Emphasis in original), a theatre that had traditionally been focused on denying as far as was possible the reality of the performer in favour of the representation of the fictive character. But also implicated in this aesthetic choice was a desire to shift audience attention from the performer and onto the production as a whole and the thought informing it. He did not want traditional actors to get in the way with their tricks of drawing attention to themselves. And further, he did not want the audience to be swayed by an actor’s skills in eliciting empathy. ‘Empathy,’ he felt, ‘obscured what was happening in the spoken language as well other aspects of theatrical activity, such as the stage movement, the lighting, the sound effects’ (37). Empathy with the performer ‘wiped out other levels of meaningful experience for the spectator’ (37). As his work gained a philosophical complexity that depended more upon the written text than the minimalist production, he abandoned the use of nonactors. He now needed skills and a performance intensity that most untrained performers simply do not have. He needed ‘performers whose skill enables the audience to look through them to see into the text itself’ (37). Through their very ‘naturalness’ and awkwardness onstage, non-actors often inadvertently draw attention to themselves and their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. By contrast, dramatic actors have the skills to ‘enable […] the audience to look through them to see into the text itself’ (37). Nevertheless, for this to happen, their very idiosyncrasies and habits as actors must be eliminated if the audience is to be able ‘to look through them.’ In order to shift the actor-performers in Old-Fashioned Prostitutes out of their familiar patterns as actors,31 Foreman tries throughout to steer the performers away from any ‘actorly’ habits that may indicate a dependence upon familiar theatrical signs, closing off the openended potentiality he is after. After the dress run, one of the notes he gives to Alenka Kraigher continues an ongoing discourse they have been having into the image of ‘the prostitute.’ He instructs her not to ‘sit down with your leg up like that’ (Murphet, 21 April, 2013.). It was a stereotypical pose signifying ‘a prostitute’ onstage, and the actress had slipped into it comfortably as a cultural

30 31

This trend in theatre towards the untrained ‘real’ person as performer has returned in recent years in the desire for ‘authenticity’ in theatre. Even if, as with Alenka Kraigher, such habits had been learned primarily from watching other actors at work.

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sign of coquettery that she could depend upon. Foreman is asking her to resist exactly that dependence. ‘“So, you don’t mind if my move is clumsy?” she asks. He replies, “No, no, that’s good,” since “clumsiness” indicates a state outside the zone of familiar signification’ (21 April). The intent of the exchange with Kraigher recalls the tactics of de-familiarisation that Brecht employed. In his essay on working with actors, Foreman gives many examples of the tactics of de-familiarisation that he builds into his work with performers ‘in order to call attention to the fact of the actor’s body as object – something that he [sic], exemplifying the human condition, must labor with through the course of his life’ (1992: 47–48. Foreman’s emphasis). The perception of body as object emphasised here, places the human figure as only one of many elements within a force field; ‘the chair a man sits on is as important in the scheme of things as the man sitting’ (48). Nevertheless, in witnessing Foreman at work and in viewing several productions, it became clear to me that the performers are central ingredients in his philosophical quest. Apart from their functional role in communicating the ideas within Foreman’s verbal text, they play an integral role in forming the dynamic pattern of the elements that interact within a production. Some sense of this can be gained from Foreman’s description of the processes of his composition: The distribution in space of actions and objects – whether that distribution suggests expansion into a field or contraction into a point – may well be the unconscious focus of my direction, because that’s what I always seem to be manipulating. I want to take every moment of the play and give it a relationship to the total field of the world in which it occurs. I find that can best be done by orchestrating how the actors approach, receive, replace, or reposition the objects and themselves onstage (50). In the video selection from Eddie Goes to Poetry City Part I, the performers are constantly on the move: bowling balls, repositioning cones, pointing sticks at Eddie, displaying and gathering tin cans (dvd, 2009). In Lava, the performers read books ‘like a Jewish reading circle’ (Lava dvd, 2009), present their hands for inspection, write on a blackboard, place photographs on the table, apply lipstick, hold out hand mirrors in front of them, and so on. In the rehearsal of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, it is evident that even seemingly functional gestures and activities are given heightened attention in order to frame them as an event as strange as the world created onstage. At one point, the two performers of the coquettes stand in readiness for an encounter with Samuel. They stand next to a pole, one with a drink in her hand. He asks one of them to put her

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finger in the drink being held by the other. There is a lengthy trial of how this action should happen: from the top of the glass, or curled around and coming up from below the glass, the arm stretching around the front of or behind the pole, the finger pointing first, or the hand pushed out and finger suddenly emerging from it, and so on. The careful experimentation lasts over three hours, so that the gesture finally decided upon has gained weight from the performers’ body-memory of the significance with which it has been invested. If the lengths of string criss-crossing Foreman’s stages signify the electrical currents that fuse the unlikely particles into dynamic visual patterns, it is the human action of the performers that actually does the work of bringing the objects into dynamic interrelationship. As Foreman puts it, in order to create ‘the total field of the world’ from all the materials that occupy it, he needs to ‘orchestrate’ the performers to give it form and life (1992, 50). He is not, finally, a visual artist playing with abstract shapes and inanimate material. He is a theatre practitioner; his stage is alive with fresh, often absurdly unexpected, life. It is the incessant energy of human action and interaction that provides the consistent endeavour, the curiosity, the humour, the patience and the electrical charge that is needed to ‘find the spark of light’ in ‘a world of broken pieces’ in order to ‘lift them back to […] the wholeness that they are supposed to have’ (Ctd. Rabkin, 1999, 132). In this way, he constructs a synthesis from the disjointed ingredients revealed through his constant process of analytic deconstruction.

Chapter 2

Jenny Kemp Richard Foreman’s distinction between ‘beingness’ and beings is a useful place to begin a discussion of the work of Australian theatre practitioner, Jenny Kemp. In contradistinction to Foreman, Kemp’s interest lies not in the wider ontological investigation of ‘beingness’ but in the specificity of ‘beings,’ particularly female beings. However, like Foreman, her theatre stage depicts a field of primarily non-causally connected phenomena. In her case, the field of phenomena pertains to the psychic nature of the central protagonist. ‘I have always been fascinated with the inner life of the psyche,’ she has said. ‘And in particular its relationship with the ordinary everyday world’ (1999a, 8). This interconnection between ‘the inner life’ and ‘the ordinary everyday world’ brings to mind Foreman’s statement that he ‘start[s] out in [his] mind from a naturalistic scenario’ (1969, Folger Collection, 18), and then sets about radically dissolving it. As fantastic and dream-like as Kemp’s plays may become, she too begins from the premise of ‘a naturalistic scenario’ out of which her protagonist either chooses or is forced or happens to embark upon a journey that will strip the veils off her daily social persona and reveal the dimensions of her inner life. Call of the Wild1 (1999b), begins with the Woman sitting in her domestic suburban living room, watching television. At the opening of The Black Sequin Dress2 (1996), Undine is seen standing in front of her suburban home with its brick wall behind her. Angela in Still Angela3 (2002) is shown sitting in her suburban kitchen, listing the domestic objects in it and the mundane tasks that face her on that day. The psychic journeys upon which Kemp takes her women reveal the ‘disjunction’ between the outer being, trapped within the constraints of society, and the potential released by their realisation of the dimensions of their inner life. Kemp’s hope as an artist is that her ‘investigation into the psyche’ will enable it ‘to function creatively in the modern world’ (Kemp, 1999a, 8). What is of vital significance in Kemp’s theatre is that the phase of the writer’s process that deconstructs the coherent forms of narrative realism is analogous to the deconstruction that her central female protagonists face as each 1 Premiered at The Church Theatre, Melbourne in 1989, directed by Kemp. 2 Premiered at The Adelaide Festival, March 1996, directed by Kemp. 3 Premiered at The Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, April 2002, directed by Kemp.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��20 | doi:10.1163/9789004415881_004

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steps off the edge of the recognisable world and falls apart into her constituent multiple selves. Similarly, just as the women in Kemp’s works (with the exception of the fatally fragmented schizophrenic figure of Madeleine in the play of that name4) head, each in her own way, towards some promise of re-­ constitution at play’s end, so Kemp, like Foreman, marshals the deconstructed materials of theatre to construct a production held uneasily together by the ‘manic dance of theatricality’ (Foreman, 1985, vii). Several questions arise in relation to Kemp’s artistic process. For example, as a writer how does she determine the premise from which the rest of the work will unfold? How does she compose and develop a verbal text that proceeds non-causally and with a narrative arc that is vertical rather than horizontal? How does she re-organise and shape her fragmentary text into a form ready for rehearsal? And finally what are the determining schema that inform her work as director in realising her uneasily structured script into performance? This chapter does not seek to present an overview of Kemp’s theatrical career, or even to undertake a comprehensive analysis of any one of her plays. It looks closely at a several scenes and sequences from three of her plays to investigate in detail how her writer- and director-self integrate to build a performance beyond the limitations of either. In these sections of close analysis, the dual role of Kemp as writer and director will be highlighted, even as they are seen to be informing one another. Kemp balances the singularity of her artistic vision with modes of collaboration with her fellow artists and actors in order to create polyphonic productions that put into play all the materials of theatre. 1

Early Influences

Jenny Kemp grew up in a household dominated by visual art, in particular the increasingly Abstract Expressionist art of her father Roger Kemp, an Australian painter practising from the 1930s to the 1970s. The daughter grew up surrounded by her father’s artwork and spent many hours watching him in the act of painting. She did not sit in front of any one of his paintings to study it deliberately, like an art critic or an artist seeking to gain inspiration or a model for practice; rather, the artwork entered her through osmosis – as it were – simply because it was always around in the house as she was growing up (Kemp, 22 December, 2015). 4 Premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in 2011, directed by Kemp.

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That was a starting-point, having to grapple with that, and having to grapple with the abstraction of the paintings, with metaphysics, and coming to terms with something which is non-representational. That causes one to go inside and look for, or to build, a dialogue inside oneself. Ctd. minchinton, 1998, 77

Kemp made a choice at the age of seventeen to move out of the realm of visual art by enrolling at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. However, it is significant that her artistic sensibility was shaped partially in response to Abstract Expressionism, poised as that art movement was, on the cusp of high modernism and late modernism. Abstract Expressionism is the visual art movement that Robert Genter associates, specifically through the figure of Jackson Pollock, with ‘the project of romantic modernism’ during the early post-World War ii decades (2010, 165). Genter’s later section on ‘Spontaneity and the Ejaculating Artist’ expands on romantic modernism within the context of artistic practice in the 1950s (206–209). Genter sees Abstract Expressionism as ‘transforming painting from being a reflection of external reality to being a reflection of the inner landscape of the artist’ (165). This transformation is akin to Jenny Kemp’s stated fascination with ‘the landscape of the psyche;’ and it is clear that her fascination with ways of visually representing ‘the inner landscape’ in theatre had its seeds not only in her exposure to Roger Kemp’s painting, but in the childhood years she spent as one of four sisters sitting around a table drawing in his presence. The line of influence was a circular one. As art historian, Christopher Heathcote tells us, Roger Kemp drew his inspiration, not only from the flattened, angular shapes of the early-modernist, Paul Cezanne and the early cubists, but also from the theatre; specifically, from the fusion of music and highly expressive body shapes he witnessed in the modernist dance of the Ballet Russes during their Australian tour in the 1930s. Entranced by the stirring music, colourful costumes and whirling figures in the company’s Spectre de la Rose and the symphonic ballet, Les Présages, designed by the surrealist André Masson, Kemp experimented with vividly coloured semi-abstract and geometricised figures (2007a, 44). In a painting such as Figures in Rhythm (1936–9), ‘the figure [becomes] a visual metaphor for restless energy, [and] the eye is invited to see beyond the ­composition of the picture and, in construing it as a soaring or spinning ­ballerina, retain the illusion while savouring the configuration it describes’ (2007b, 44).

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The presence of surrealist art in the design of the Ballet Russes suggests a fascination with the meeting point between the inner and outer landscapes. The dual level of communication, balanced between ‘retain[ing] the illusion’ of social reality, whilst ‘savour[ing]’ the deeper reality suggested by a more abstract ‘configuration’ of visual elements, is also a marked quality of Jenny Kemp’s theatrical aesthetic. She discusses it, in her response to Belgian artist, Paul Delvaux’s surrealist paintings, in terms of a ‘spatial dynamic:’ The paintings seem to be only partially to do with the everyday world; they evoke another world, another landscape, an inner landscape. It’s something to do with how a spatial dynamic causes an emotional dynamic: when I work with the actor, even when she or he is in a particular position with a particular tension that causes a gestalt to open up, or to drop through on the vertical level. I’m looking for the stage moment to have a multiplicity of meanings. Ctd. minchinton, 1998, 80

The spatial dynamic of her father’s paintings depended upon the strict parameters of their framing. ‘I’ve come to understand it,’ she explains, ‘as spatial dynamics and energy in relationship to the frame’ (80). The energy of the works gathers within their frames and the frames become the container of that energy, such that they increase the intensity by this act of containment. This brings to mind Foreman’s concept of the stage as a ‘reverberation chamber’ against the walls of which the materials of his theatre collided, creating an internal energy that was like a ‘force field’ (Foreman, 1985, 191). The action of framing has been a vital dramaturgical tool for Jenny Kemp at all stages of her creative process. Working within the time-based art of theatre, she suggests change and development by carefully juxtaposing the often-­ jarring elements of her verbal, aural and visual texts. The interconnection ­between scenes is made through association not causation, and the associative leaps are rarely harmonic or rational; they propel us into new states of being that in the end gain their effect through the rightness of their placement within carefully articulated frames, either visual or rhythmic. These frames contain the intensity of the scene into what she has called ‘parcels’ of material (Kemp, 22 September, 2012), between which the gaps operate as strategically as do the scissions between the words and images in Richard Foreman’s texts.5

5 And we may recall the ‘“packages of material” suspended unnaturally’ in Foreman’s play Lava (1992, 335).

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The Verbal and the Visual

Given her background, Kemp has always viewed visual art and theatre as interdependent forms of expression in her work. Working as an auteur from a latemodernist sensibility that is looking to break from the literal application of a mimetic view of art, she has embraced this dual artistic vision as her mode of operation from the outset. I just like writing … I like the process of writing … I like the process of pen on the page. I used to draw – writing’s a bit like drawing. Ctd. minchinton, 1998, 81

As drawing can often act as a sketch of possible material to be rendered in painting or sculpture, so Kemp has viewed writing as a means of sketching possible material for theatrical production. Kemp writes her way into a work: she uses writing to find out what the work may be about, and even when that starts to become clear she does not write to fulfil a planned map, but keeps the cells of written material separate in order to find out where they may take her. Each choice that is made in this writing phase is not pre-determinable; it is part of the hunt for the unthought thought. Instead of carefully constructing a blueprint of the developing action of the drama, and then writing the scenes accordingly, Kemp is letting the writing lead her to the dramaturgical shape. ‘The best thing,’ she has said, in words that could almost have been spoken by Richard Foreman who treats writing in much the same way as Kemp, ‘is to be surprised by what comes out, and not to recognise it after. Then there’s the huge task after to see the pattern the writing presents’ (81). The interconnection ­between drawing and writing is developed practically in her construction of visual storyboards for the production, described below. The conception of writing as sketch drawing means too that, in order to remain surprised by what may emerge next, each written unit lasts only as long as it takes to deal with the present moment. The written scenes are short; there is no attempt to build into them what may happen next, what has happened before, or the ramifications of what is happening now. In Call of the Wild, her earliest play to utilise consciously this cellular writing methodology, the scenic units operate as singular fragments: associating, intruding obliquely upon one another, but never arising from rational dramatic progression. It is the individual units that take priority over any larger structural frame. It is as if she imagines each scene like a separately framed painting, one image in a series of separate storyboard sketches. However, the spectator in a Kemp production is not set completely adrift in a molecularised world, as can be the case with Richard Foreman. When asked about the discontinuity

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b­ etween the scenes of The Black Sequin Dress, Kemp explained that for her ‘the continuum was the woman herself and these were just moments of whatever got focused on by that woman. She was entering – a very simple activity – but the scenes were what happened at any particular point of that entry’ (Kemp, 22 September, 2012. Emphasis in original). 3

Interweaving Theatrical Modes in The Black Sequin Dress

For the woman, Undine, in The Black Sequin Dress, the concept of life as a continuum is exactly what is at issue. Undine, like the central figures in the other two plays I shall be considering, is a woman struggling to free herself of the social bonds that contain her in a socially continuous world whose parameters are too tight for her to gain autonomous release. But in escaping from the constraints of that world, she falls into a state of discontinuity, realised dramaturgically through the discontinuous cells of writing that trace her journey. When we consider the dramaturgical discontinuity between consecutive scenes in Kemp’s works, it is important not to lose sight of the central female figure, but in Kemp’s production of the play, as we shall see, even that figure was fragmented into four distinct, though interwoven personae, played by four different actresses. Kemp dramatises the deconstruction of her central protagonist through interweaving associatively her written and her production texts. She puts into motion the material forces of theatre not in the service of one central meaning structure, but as a polyphony of simultaneously combined, complementary and contrasting significations, uneasily harmonising with one another. Just how she renders the various levels at which her protagonist simultaneously exists can be seen in the opening scenes of The Black Sequin Dress, which set in train the focus of the plot and the ways in which it will need to be experienced. The first seventeen scenes constitute the initial sequence of the play, named in the contents page of the Currency text as ‘Sequence A: The Gestalt’ (1996, vi). ‘Gestalt’ is defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts’ (Online, Accessed: 7/2/2017, My emphasis). The material phenomena that constitute the various modes of communication in Kemp’s performances are integrated through the act of spectatorship but the overall effect is always more complex than the specific effect of any of the parts. The process of integration is both aided and complicated by the choices the artist makes while rehearsing the production.

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Scene One, entitled ‘Undine’s Story – Part One – The Brick Wall’ is barely a page in length. In the original production, the theatre spectator looked at a woman standing in front of a screen upon which was projected an image of a wall of red bricks, whilst the text was spoken by a female voice from offstage. Undine lives in the suburbs in a commission home. A Brick one. All the houses in Undine’s street are the same with just slight variations, so you want to go into other people’s houses to spot the difference. Undine closes her eyes to the bricks and finds herself in a flat land. She gazes at the horizon but oddly it does not appear distant, she looks down and sees her two feet, they look as if they are standing on the horizon. Has she grown tall or have they receded? She cannot look into the depth of the landscape, she stands on it. She stands on a flat plane; she may as well be standing inside a perspex cube. She puts out her hand to test the space in front of her. Nothing, just air of a medium temperature, or even of no temperature at all. She waves her arm, it moves jerkily, it is a message from her brain, she knows telling her arm to move and wave, as if someone is standing at a distance outside her cube and needs to be acknowledged. Her arm goes down, her knees bend and she keels over, she faints off the edge of the earth, she falls out of the dead landscape. Her body crumples to the ground, her head falls back against the hard earth, earth as hard as stone, ping like a metal ball, it bounces for a moment and falls still (1996, 1). The tone of the speech in its written form begins calmly and factually. Its implications become more complex as it develops but the tone and grammar ­retain the simplicity of a children’s story. There is a sense of untapped potentiality and vulnerability, with depths beneath the surface calm only touched upon. ‘She cannot look into the depth of the landscape,’ we are told, ‘she stands on it.’ Keeping her eyes closed, she feels as if she is at the edge of the horizon, at the edge of the world, until finally she ‘faints off the edge of the earth, she falls out of the dead landscape.’ That fall, we are to discover, begins a journey of vertical descent that will confront Undine with levels of reality beyond her own imagining. The narrative mode of this opening scene suggests a form of story-telling: a recognisable prose narrative that begins at a point of instability in a woman’s life, in order, perhaps, to cover the space and time necessary to resolve that instability through narrating the life. However, no attention is paid in the words to the inner feelings or thoughts of this woman standing outside her

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front door. As Kemp the director knows, Kemp the writer can hold back the expressivity of language, because the mood can be established in the performance. The narration is provided not as expected in first person directly by the woman we see onstage, but in third person by an unseen female. The decision to deflect the voice-over from the central figure may have been made during the process of editing the written fragments of text, but it is under Kemp’s direction that the unseen speaking actress modulates the ‘voice’ of the narration to suggest a sense of care and tenderness that is not indulged but implicit.6 Kemp is triangulating her lyric self through one woman’s voice and another’s body, hovering on the edge of a mythic journey. She does not go so far as to place her own voice directly within the performance as Foreman has regularly done, but this tender voice from an absent speaker, combined with the bold opening image of a still, solitary woman, returning the spectator’s gaze, are traces marking her presence-as-artist. While we listen to the calm, tender words, Kemp the director places the woman ‘from the suburbs,’ directly in front of our eyes in close up, for critical appraisal, trapped between the bricks and the edge of the stage. She is unmoving, hovering in the stillness of her stance, vulnerable in her reception of our gaze. She is on a threshold (the threshold of the stage, in fact), while behind her the image of a brick wall is insubstantial in a theatrical way, like a painted backdrop (in this case projected) on a screen that is evidently paper thin, permeable, able to be torn down; tightly drawn but with its creases also visible. The opening stage directions tell us that the Woman ‘wearing a simple day dress, is standing centre in front of the brick wall,’ which is ‘a projected image.’ (1996, 1) At the end of the speech, after Woman 1 ‘collapses to the floor,’ ‘The bricks fall (the cyc should fall slightly behind her.)’ (1). The collapsible, projected image of the wall that we see is at odds with the blunt description of it in the verbal narration – ‘A brick one’ – much as the crashing sound of collapsing bricks is rendered by the folding fall of a gauze cyclorama. That false ­continuity between image told and image seen is indicative of a breakdown between the subjective and objective realms that informs much of Kemp’s work. All of these production choices – the thin substantiality of the wall, the unmoving figure near the edge of the stage, the unseen presence of the speaker, the tender tone of voice – were decisions made by Kemp as a director. They were not written into, nor even assumed by the deceptively ingenuous fragment of verbal text when it was written. Some of the decisions may have been 6 I am relying upon the video of the 1996 Playbox production (Kemp dvd, 2012), to refresh my memory of this quality of the speaking voice, as well as of later visual details.

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caused by the machinery of theatre itself: how else, for instance, other than with a screen, could the image of a brick wall be created, metonym for a middle-class Australian suburban house, that can be removed swiftly to reveal the nightclub space behind? The result of this design decision, nevertheless, is to display the representational illusion of a familiar Australian suburban home as just that, an illusion: a veil that needs to be pulled aside for another kind of journey to begin. Scene Two, entitled ‘Nightmare 1,’ is a dramatic outburst of four lines, spoken by a woman (Woman 3), reclining upstage, as she awakes. What’s that! What was that scream? I thought I heard a scream. I need a drink of water. I think I fell, or someone fell. I need some water (1996, 2). The tone, in contrast to the calm mood of Scene One, is abrupt and confused; at the point of the first moment of descent (Undine’s fall), the first note of fear is introduced. She believes that she has been woken by a scream from someone who fell – could be her or someone else. In fact, when Undine fell in the preceding scene she did not scream, or at least we did not hear her. Perhaps this second woman has heard what we cannot – an internal scream. Significantly, when she speaks we realise that she was the unseen woman who narrated the opening scene. The choice of which actress should perform which facet of Undine in each scene is a directorial and dramaturgical task of trial and error. In this context, the fact that the woman we witness asleep at the start of Scene Two turns out to be the woman we heard narrating Scene One suggests from the very outset that Undine’s journey could be part of a dream. Certainly, the juxtaposition of the woman fainting, falling and cracking her head on the hard earth with the woman waking in fear and confusion manifests in the space the possible apprehension of a new reality. Moreover, the replacement of one female figure by another in what may be read through conflation as a causal sequence (a Woman faints and then awakens), or through concatenation as a serial progression (one Woman faints and then another awakens) prepares us for the use of multiple actresses to track this one multidimensional journey. This ‘nightmare’ scenario returns another six times throughout the play, at various critical moments, as a constant reminder of the threat hovering over each phase of descent and ascent. Scene Three, entitled ‘It’s As If My Body Has Been Taken Apart,’ sets the terms for the shocking fullness with which every moment, and every strand of every moment, isolated in tightly framed ‘parcels’ as they are in the arc of this

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play, will have to be encountered. As Undine (Woman 1) leaves the stage after her fall in Scene One, Woman 4 is revealed embracing a skeleton. It is she who speaks the text of Scene Three, as yet another persona of the protagonist. It’s as if my body had been taken apart and put together again. One part separated from another, all floating, speeding off, as if bombed, shooting out into the darkness, the universe, and put together again. Again, as if all this may have happened many times before. Something better this time, put together, by the force of the return flight, after the bombing which had just occurred. A shock which something in me knows all about. But now I don’t. What could it be? – a memory which returned with an incredible force, fell, or was propelled from one area into another. Perhaps there was a kind of explosion in this area which set it free, or maybe just things changed then the shock was the new arrangement. Something completely different after all these years (1996, 2–3). The written words keep the cataclysmic images under the control of a descriptive if reflective tone, but the actress’ performance, visible on the dvd recording, seems to be a response to a forceful experience, generating a deep nervous energy that counterpoints the calm surface of the writing. Woman 4’s thoughts and mood may respond to the impact of the fall at the end of Scene One (she is after all ‘dressed in the same day dress as Woman 1’), and/or the terror expressed in Scene Two, as she imagines her body fragmented by an explosion, ‘taken apart and put together again.’ Kemp as director has her embracing a skeleton as she speaks,7 and the play between the image of a skeleton and her vision of her body ‘taken apart’ suggests that she may be embracing an image of her own gutted self. By speech end, she realises that her fragmentation may have forcefully shifted her into ‘a new arrangement,’ perhaps ‘Something better this time.’ The ground is prepared for an arrival (however long it may take) into a new state of being: ‘Something completely different after all these years.’ The audience is presented with a present impacted so forcefully that it becomes a moment of critical mass set to explode. At the textual level, too, the unified ‘body’ of the mise-en-page (Worthen, 2005, 11), familiar to us from realist drama, is ‘taken apart’ by Kemp’s short textual fragments that resist coherence. As a director, she reinforces this fragmentation through creating a stage image that operates on various levels of co-existing but not correlative reality. As with her fellow late-modernist, Richard Foreman, the word and the image 7 An image influenced by a recurrent motif in the art of Paul Delvaux.

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are in unexpected counterpoint with one another, suggesting a composite meaning beyond any literal interpretation. Accompanying the speech, stage directions, a record of the production decisions not of choices in the writing phase, depict an alternative action seemingly unrelated to Woman 4: the train (with facade up) slides slowly from the sr [stage right] tunnel across the stage and into the opposite tunnel. in the first carriage we see the man and the waiter, both with hats and jackets, sitting opposite each other at a small table having a drink. it is daytime and it is the buffet car. woman 2 (also in the day dress) begins to walk from the front end of the train past the men towards the second carriage, as she passes them she slips and nearly falls she steadies herself on their table the waiter helps her they exchange glances, she then looks at the man (who is facing the front of the train) and continues to her carriage. she sits at her table drinks some water then turns and looks out the window as the train leaves the stage (2. Caps in original).

Illustration 6 The nightclub and the train in The Black Sequin Dress. Performers: Mary Sitarenos, Margaret Mills, Greg Stone, Natasha Herbert, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996

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The train,8 crossing the back of the space in a blue light, appears like an image from a dream, or a distant memory, running beneath the surface of the present reality. The silent activities between the two men and the woman have the teasing sense of a normal encounter coexistent with, but disconnected to, Woman 4’s speech. However, the fact that the woman is dressed in the same clothes as Woman 4 suggests that it could be an image of the memory she refers to, ‘returning with an incredible force.’ The stage action contains many of the motifs that will recur throughout the play: a woman aware that she is being watched by men, her subsequent fall to the floor, a man as an aid in her moment of embarrassment, and the train itself, ‘shooting out into the darkness’ (2). At the same time as the image suggests an image of the past, it looks ­towards the future: the streams of time are gathering, and the unity of stage action splits under their force. French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze argues that in the post-World War ii European cinema that he calls the cinema of the Time-Image, ‘the construction of concepts is guided by an “image of thought”,’ which ‘inspires by its developments, forkings and mutations the necessity of always creating new concepts, not as a function of external determinism, but as a function of a becoming which carries along the problems themselves’ (Ctd. Tomlinson and Galeta, 2013, xiv-xv). Such ‘forkings’ and ‘mutations’ are the formal leaps and disjunctions with which Kemp seeks to render her ‘image of thought’: the fluid, unpredictable and potentially explosive ‘landscape of the psyche,’ in which ‘every time you make your observation more precise, you discover new zigzags – and the increasing complexity of the movement seems to have no limit’ (1996, 6). 4

Language Registers in Call of the Wild

As an artist, Jenny Kemp has given herself the objective of re-defining how to trace the life of a contemporary woman in contemporary terms: to dig beneath the social strata to reveal the multi-dimensionality of an internal life that is always present, yet always also in an ongoing relationship to the world outside her. The revelation is not pre-planned: Kemp as writer descends to a place of unknowing, like her central protagonists, from which she writes units of material whose purpose is uncertain and unformed. This artistic uncertainty continues until she begins rehearsing with her fellow artists, who, like the artists in Foreman’s rehearsals, are often waiting for some sense to emerge, as Kemp ­pursues the image of her thought. 8 Another image influenced by a recurrent motif in Paul Delvaux’s paintings.

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It has, therefore, been important for Kemp to be engaged in writing before knowing consciously what she has been writing about. Like Foreman, she accumulates through episodic practice, sometimes over several years, short passages of writing with a guiding image but little sense of the script they may constitute. She recalled the simple premise upon which she began writing Call of the Wild, and the indeterminate nature of the artistic outcome: There was the woman sitting in a little chair – a woman alone. […] What happens to her when she finds herself in a new stage of being a mother, when nothing before that had in any way prepared her for that, and that suddenly in one’s mid-thirties you have to be an entirely new person. So, the woman was alone and trying to find out how to be a mother and to be alone. So, from that point of view the writing had a kind of purpose, and I think I was aware that these pieces would eventually be a piece of theatre, but that wasn’t dominating the way I was writing at all (Kemp, 22 September, 2012).

Illustration 7 The world opening in Call of the Wild. Performers: Vikki Eager, Margaret Mills, Mark Minchinton, Ruth Schoenheimer, Margaret Cameron, The Church Theatre, Melbourne, 1989

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The ‘kind of purpose’ that was driving the writing, that is to say, had to do with discovering how this contemporary woman may learn to deal with the confusions of her life. Kemp may have been writing for theatre, but she wasn’t at this stage writing as playwright. The units of written text in Call of the Wild, like the unexpected elements of her internal world, operate as singular fragments – associating, intruding obliquely upon one another, indirectly anticipating the next, but never arising from rational dramatic progression. The individual units take priority over the larger structural frame, which accumulates in slow increments. The starting point is a narrowly framed singularity. Woman in Green Skirt: I am full of despair tonight because I looked at African tribes, dancing, making music, and I was in my sitting room, with carpet, and watching them on TV and I just dried my baby’s hair with a hairdryer, with him screaming all the time. So I went out on the veranda and looked at the suburb-scape, it was raining which was nice. But it was pretty hard to breathe, because I was wondering where to go in myself (1999b, 9). A female figure ‘filled with longing,’ is trapped in a domestic living room with a small child, watching television, and ‘full of despair,’ not at her situation but at her place within the wider scheme of things. The following scene details more directly, through another persona performed by a different actress, first the claustrophobia the Woman feels, then a vision of possible escape from domesticity through the imagination: Woman in Short Skirt: I am too big for my sitting room. When I sit in it my knees almost touch the other wall. The carpet is too pale so the stains show on it and I can’t hang pictures on the walls because the walls aren’t solid enough. The windows, all those transparent molecules so strong and stretched and thinly there keeping out the wind and keeping in the warmth. I like windows, I sit in the chair and yet I can look at the stars. The windows let the stars into the room and the night. And the television, a little cube with hundreds of people and places forever moving on and off its screen. As I sit here I can see the Arabian Desert, a camel ­walking in the desert. I can see everything I am not and am not in contact with. It can make me laugh and cry, it can make me feel as if many people are here. It can make me go deep into my memory or my feelings. I can learn or I can forget things as I watch it. I feel a part of

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s­ itting room and the garden outside, the wall and the road and the sky (9–10). Immediately following this, the Woman, each of her personae speaking in choric unity, recounts a dream of escape, which releases the pent-up sense of frustration or limitation: Voices of All Women: I went for a fantastic gallop on a horse in my dream. I was on the horse in such a way as never to fall – the horse was like the wind, my legs held tight. Then we were in a shopping complex and I knew we had to get out of there. Without panicking I found a gap in the wall and we got out, we got out (10). The journey out into the unknown has been enjoined, through ‘a gap’ in the social world. Thereafter is unleashed a vast array of verbal material, all presumably emerging through this gap, from the woman’s ‘inner world of memory, imagination, fantasy, emotion, and dream’ (1999a, 8). The manifold potentialities of the woman are explored in a theatrical language that deliberately draws attention to itself as an active force within the drama, as the place where things happen. Action takes place in the contrast between the different language styles, voices and genres from one written unit to another, rather than within any single unit. Language style is constantly, restlessly, on the move, as if ­unable to settle upon how to speak the newly exposed, limitless facets of the inner life of this domestic woman in relation to the outside world. One ­sequence, for instance, begins with the dread male tones of the King James Bible: Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye shall eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil (1999b, 11). Then follows the banter of sexual seduction, based upon assumed roles of power and helplessness, but expressed with an almost tongue-in-cheek lack of awareness: Woman in Short Skirt: I can’t do it. I just can’t carry it. Man: Oh, my poor darling – Let me help you. Woman in Short Skirt: Oh, darling, thank you – I’m just so hopeless when it comes to anything like that.

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Man: Little precious, you sit down here. Woman in Short Skirt: Mmmm. Man: Let me help you. Here you are, darling. Woman in Short Skirt: Thank you. Man: What gorgeous silky legs. Let me take off your shoes (12). Another woman in a transparent skirt describes in detail the objects she sees around her in her bedroom: In my bedroom, there’s a mirror on a stand, a coat and a waist coat hanging on it. There’s a small painting, of the sea, there’s another small painting, of a very strong man holding up a female acrobat …’ (12). Her inventory continues as interruptive words from the text flash onto a screen: ‘His pants are down her skirt is up his cock is thumping’ (12). ‘Around her thighs’ (12). ‘She is gasping’ (12). Immediately, the woman in the short skirt expresses an unnameable fear in response not to the man with whom she had exchanged teasing dialogue, but to a disturbance in her bedroom. Does the fear emerge also from an internal response to the flashing texts? What is this fear, something rumbling lying on the bottom layer? What is it that I’ve got on the top layer? Everything is in order. I’ve ironed those clothes and I’ve swept the floor, and had a cup of tea and a biscuit. But what was that, a hand punching through the plate glass door? It’s got blood everywhere! Now I’m screaming, that’s a big scream, it didn’t hurt that much! I’m still screaming! (12). This private fear is succeeded by macabre gossip amongst the women: Woman in Transparent Skirt: I once met a woman when I was visiting the woman’s prison who had killed her husband. She was huge and she was in a wheelchair. […] She had cut him up and put him in the fridge and then had a bite for dinner each night until she was caught. Woman in Pale Hat: A young pregnant woman of 18 who lived in an inner-city high-rise flat threw her two-year-old out the window and then jumped out herself. […] Woman in Pale Hat: There was a lady whose husband died while they were in America. The funeral directors had prepared the body for her. They put him in a ‘natural setting.’ So when she went to see him he was

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standing in a room with a dinner suit on, a cigarette in hand, looking at her. She fainted (12). The flashing sexual suggestions, the fear of invasion and the visceral gossip exchange release language that contains poetic sexual energy in its own right – though there is no suggestion of a causal connection: Woman in Green Skirt: Fuck fuck fuck, sitting on a chair with no panties on, that carrot, that knife handle, your leather belts. My bed, my clothes, the armchairs, Driving my car. […] Taking them all off, and leaving my shoes on, […] walking in a slippery petticoat. A man standing in front of me. His belt. […] My breasts pressed up against a man, the sides of my breasts which bulge out and he strokes. My eyes closed, his eyes closed stillness breathing. […] Sexy sex, hot, fast, slow, soft, tense. Surrender abandon (16). Here, the roll-call of the objects and actions of sexual desire and encounter has an uncontrollable build with an orgasmic rhythm, which then climaxes in the Woman in Short Skirt’s outburst of sexual aggression: Woman in Short Skirt: Fuck fuck fuck, everything I look at is a fuck, the round table is a big fuck, a glass of milk, the indoor plant, my red shoes, the plug plugged into the wall, the washing machine, the snorkel, the ball, I’m going to fuck someone stupid, in a minute, I will pulverise them, I will ride them and gallop and thump and push and pull (16). The theme of forced invasion and violence against the body of a woman is unmistakeable, but the theme is developed prismatically; the drama emerges from a contrast in language register, a penetration of one tone by the next, rather than from a causal build up of suspense or revelation. The scenes last little longer than the fragments I have quoted. The time frame is tight and uncompromising, barely suggesting the wider dimensions of suburban despair; there is time enough for the plain statements and no more. Kemp wrote these short fragments independently without reference to one another, and without any plan as to how they might be ordered. Each scene stands on its own, setting its own parameters, gathering its own power. They gain much of their intensity from the tightness of their frames. As fragments, each barely covers the massive territory it implies and pushes against the limits of its frame. The written text of Call of the Wild charts new territory, accessed when the constraints of social time, realist narrative and a patriarchal world-view are

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thrown off. This is not to deny that there is a process of change moving through Call of the Wild, distinct from the clash of language registers. However, Kemp refers to the script’s trajectory in terms that do not bring to mind our normal understanding of dramatic action: There is something achieved in that the meditation itself has happened. At the first monologue there is an agitation, a sense of being stuck inside whereas at the end something has been loosened (Kemp, 22 September, 2012, My emphasis). The concatenation of language registers in Call of the Wild does more than mark the release of different facets of a woman’s identity. It destroys any possibility of the harmonious, cohesive identity that was adhered to in traditional dramatic realism. There is no immediately discernible logic to the kind of material that is gathered up in the energy waves radiating out from the despairing woman in her tiny sitting room. Nor is there any sense of a preconceived plan for the order in which these scenes will be encountered. As a consequence, her scenes provoked questions for Kemp about their placement. If I’m not writing with a clear sense of beginning, middle and end, what causes me to put something at the start and then next and next and next? (22 September, 2012). Narrative realism would have provided a template for answering that question; without that template Kemp has to find her own answers. She had to ask herself ‘what other layer exists alongside or down underneath or on top of’ the layer revealed in each scene (22 September, 2012). The performance result of this explosion into unknown and unpredictable terrain is a sense of boundless possibility, terrifying in its chaotic abandon, but also joyous in its choral strength, and comic in its absurd associations. The re-energised sense of ­language and the freedom of theatrical form, the objectives of all the late-­ modernist work I am covering, are at one in this section with the new terrain entered into by the female protagonists. 5

Organisational Strategies in The Black Sequin Dress

In The Black Sequin Dress, produced seven years later, the individual fragments of writing, almost as diverse in topic, genre, style and voice as those in Call of the Wild, achieve a structural strength not reached by the earlier play. This is

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accomplished through Kemp’s use of two new organisational strategies in her writing process. The first strategy arises from a stronger thematic subject around which separate scenes can circulate. In The Black Sequin Dress I was aware that I was writing into something conceptually – this woman entering and falling. In that respect there was already a sense of structure; and that I was going to repeat these entrances and exits because there was really only one entrance and I was trying to communicate the complexity of a human being inside a simple action (22 September, 2012). The conceptual arc of the journey is structurally clear. After her fall outside her suburban house, Undine is launched upon an involuntary journey: from the exterior of a brick suburban home, via the shiny floor of a nightclub, downwards and internally towards ‘the underworld’ (Kemp, 1996, vii) then up again to re-enter the suburban world. At this point, near the end of the play, she reflects upon the nature of the journey. As with the opening scene this reflection is voiced by an unseen female in the third person: What happened to time here she wondered. It was as if the whole story was rotating around the wilderness, and her entering and leaving it. Where did that put the story with its logical A.B.C.D. She sat and stared at the brick wall. And she saw that the brick wall was a part of a large forest which she was inside and outside was a street and then another brick wall. There were brick walls everywhere. She realised the suburbs were made of bricks. Which the wolf could not blow down. The inside was the outside, she remembered. The bricks the forest the walls the sky, entering and leaving. One minute seven years … (55). When time no longer operates as horizontal social time (the ‘logical A.B.C.D.’) but according to a vertical internal pattern, where ‘the inside was the outside,’ then narrative cause-and-effect is abandoned and different modes of composition must be sought. Once the formal schema of the work was clear, Kemp could start finding the right placement along the path of the journey for the dozens of textual fragments that she had produced over months of preparatory writing. During this organisational phase, Kemp decided upon the concept of The Hero’s Journey as an overriding mythic structure within which the play could function. The anthropologist, Joseph Campbell had developed the concept of The Hero’s

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Journey in 1949, in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1973), and in the early 1990s Christopher Vogler applied the concept to the craft of writing for screen (1992). Kemp was influenced by both Campbell and by Vogler’s schematic version during the 1990s. The relative independence of each of her ­textual units allowed them to be shuffled, sifted and sorted patiently until a pattern emerged. We can see the results of this patterning process on the contents pages of the published text of The Black Sequin Dress (vi-viii). After the terms of the journey are set up in the phase entitled ‘The Gestalt,’ the Woman’s journey moves through four of the stages of the mythic journey: Going Down, The Underworld/Doing the Work, Coming Back Up with the Child, and Reentering the World. Moreover, once she had begun to discern the nature of the material as a writer, Kemp obsessively circulated around certain motivic focal points. She placed versions of each motif within the journey structure she had chosen. Distributed across the larger units there are seven nightmares, five fantasy dances, thirteen fantasy conversations, five myths concerning crossing the River Styx, nine entrances into the nightclub, and four country walks. There are two parts to Undine’s Story that frame the play; and the vision of her body being ‘taken apart’ – Scene 3 – returns in a slightly shortened form towards the end of the play. The variations found within the motivic reprisals are manifold and surprising: sometimes scenes repeat without a word changed and gain new meaning through their context, sometimes the words adjust subtly to the changing context, sometimes it feels as if a motivic title has yoked together scenes that have little in common. In the latter case, the scene title is more a guide for the writer/director and performers than a clear marker for a potential audience, which after all will not know the title given to a scene, or a section or a phase of the overall journey. In addition, scenes suggesting that there is a realm of thought beyond the terms of Undine’s journey are interjected into the compositional structure. They provide a perspective that sets Undine’s personal plight within the context of wider considerations outside the given frame. Explanations of scientific theory, dictionary definitions of words, recipes, and mythic source material connect the personal to unexpected dimensions. They ‘put thought into contact with an unthought, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable,’ as Deleuze comments on similar unlikely juxtapositions introduced by directors of the Time-Image, like Alain Resnais (2013, 220). Within the overall thematic structure of the journey, Kemp composes the material according to patterns of its motivic repetitions and variations. There were different layers [of written material]: dream, memory, mother etc. I would organise my piles of writing: all ‘the [country] walks’ for

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i­nstance, [were placed] on the floor over there, all the bits about the mother over there, all the conversations here, etc. And then I would examine them and I would see immediately that I had, for instance, too few conversations, or too many – […] that if I wanted to create a good structure then I needed to create contrast. The country walks had a particular rhythmic position and I needed so many [i.e. a certain number] of them, if I had so many of the others. There was something about the repetition that in each parcel these components existed and therefore each parcel needed its version of these components and then once I had those piles […] I would think ‘oh I need to write a lot more of those ones, and this is missing there, and that’s boring.’ […] I would ask myself ‘given what is presenting rhythmically here, what would be powerful as the next choice?’ (Kemp, 22 September, 2012). Such decisions are not unlike those that any dramatist may be forced to consider, except that without the fall-back position of causal dramatic progression, Kemp is forced to emphasise other principles as the basis for building a structure that isn’t ‘boring.’ She looks instead to forms of contrast, rhythmic position, motivic repetition and variation to inject fresh energy. The significant artistic achievement of the staged production of The Black Sequin Dress lies in its complex polyphonic synchronicity, whereby various materials of theatre are conceived as thematically independent, and are then interwoven onstage. However, the process of polyphonic patterning begins long before the rehearsal period. The tightly framed ‘parcels’ of verbal material resonate meaning through a structuring process that is neither based upon rational sequencing nor lost in the chaos of random chance. 6

The Multi-dimensional Woman in The Black Sequin Dress

The distribution of the role of Undine amongst four female personae in The Black Sequin Dress establishes from the outset several levels of reality at which this figure will be seen to operate. This is the portrayal of a multi-dimensional woman. She is not psychologically split as in Multiple Personality Disorder,9 nor shattered psychically as in schizophrenia.10 This is not the study of an

9 10

See my explanation of this syndrome in the section on my play Dolores in the Department Store. A condition that Kemp explored fully in Madeleine (2012).

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a­ berrant condition; rather, it is an attempt to depict the fullness of a woman from several perspectives. There is no clearer realisation of this multi-perspectival approach than in the seven scenes that render variations upon one central action: the arrival in a nightclub of a woman wearing a black sequin dress. In Entrance 1, Woman 1, who had previously been seen collapsing outside her suburban home, is filled with awe and delight as she enters the charm and sociality of the club – not even certain as to how she arrived there. I can see a beautiful nightclub. Black shiny surfaces, all polished and clean, sparkling glasses full of champagne. Women melting into their partners’ bodies, the men wrapped around them like blankets, the band, in a row laid back, handsome. Snacks, cards, cigarettes, money, lipstick, watches, jewellery, high stools, dancing, wild dancing, bare bodies under not much (1996, 3). As her description continues, it is clear that she has entered an arena of desire: a place where people ‘have learned how not to care, how here to let go the reins.’ The contrast with the timidity of the woman from the suburbs at the outset, whose attempts to contact others outside her home had the jerky awkwardness of an automaton, could not be greater. This is an arena of performance, where people ‘want to show off, they want to fall in love with the ­moment and it to fall in love with them’ (4). The mode of the speech is narrative, and a woman looking in from outside could well speak the first half of the narration, as though she is still separate from the beauty she sees. However, in describing the hunger for love that she imagines filling the people she sees in the club, Undine relocates the obsessive desire from ‘them’ into ‘me.’ I love, I love, I love, I love love they think. Love me, me, me, me, all of me. Fill me up, fill me up, put on the finishing touches (4). The personal pronoun may be intended as reported speech but its effect is to re-focus the desire into the speaker herself. Then without warning the very tense of the speech shifts from the present to the future conditional – to be precise the future unreal conditional, used specifically to talk about imaginary situations in the future. Or someone could walk up their timing perfect, and stand fitting the shape of me. Perfection, it would register. I would breath out, relax and they would sit and put a hand out somewhere on the table, it would

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c­ ontact my hand and ping down the arm would go the message and it would run up the shoulder into the head, down whiz straight into the heart and zoom, zing the genitals aflame (4). The Woman can now feel what it would be like were she to be in there; she projects herself into the nightclub where ‘my dress would fill up with light.’ It would be a place for contact – perhaps the kind of contact she was seeking just before she fell down in Scene One. She ‘put a hand out’ then too, but in this arena, she senses, she would feel that someone might respond. Over the course of the play, Kemp takes this central thematic location of the nightclub and puts it through several variations in mood, attack and implication. The variations demonstrate the multiple levels at which this woman is operating at any one moment. I was going to repeat these entrances and exits because there was really only one entrance and I was trying to communicate the complexity of a human being inside a simple action. kemp, 22 September, 2012. (My emphasis)

Over the next three variations, the language registers that Kemp employs inform the action of the unit. They shift from the content and tone of a mindfulness tape on relaxation:

Illustration 8 Undine filled with desire. Performers: Mary Sitarenos, Ian Scott. The Black Sequin Dress, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996

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Allow yourself to relax, relax and let yourself experience your own internal rhythm. Let your muscles go, let go your diaphragm (‘Entrance 3: Relax,’ 1996, 11); to the fear of a woman caught between two men playing dice as she walks: I’ve stopped. I can’t go on, I’m stuck. I feel as if someone is behind me, creeping up, are they going to bash me over the head? This is not a good idea (‘Entrance 4: The Men,’ 1996, 19–20); to the roll-call of the territory covered in order to reach the depth of the journey downwards: Over the raw edges over the babies’ nappies over the kisses over the past over the sink the bedroom, my mouth. Crunch crunch my feet land, it sinks under the floor, I push it down […]. The grass is harsh and springy, couch grass which grew over dry earth miraculously thick. My feet are sinking, I’m walking in a swimming pool (‘Entrance 5: The Cup and Saucer,’ 1996, 22). In the sequence ‘Entrance 6: Pleasure,’ a much more noticeable transformation takes place; the nightclub transforms from the arena of desire and sexual fantasy into the image of The River Styx, the watery entrance to the underworld. As Woman 1 walks down the dance floor towards us, she completes a metamorphosis of dance floor to water through the transformative power of language: Pleasure, ple, sure, please your. Ple shore by the shore. Pleasure by the beach. You’re sure of pleasure by the shore. Pleasant pleasure, sinking, soft, sure, satisfying, pleasure. Please let me have pleasure. […] We’re sure to have some pleasure by the shore. Sure. Given the dance floor is made of sea, it could be that we are able to have pleasure right here. Sure, we could, we will dance on the shore for our pleeasure (25, My emphasis). Kemp does not depend upon technological aids to create an illusion of water for us. The word play continues long enough for the imaginative transformation to be complete: the dance floor turns into water. Woman 1 continues to narrate her journey now in the third person, as if the performer speaks for the character, reflecting upon the process of entry. She relaxed as she entered through the small chink that suddenly appeared. She slid immediately straight through and did not look back, she

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sighed and released forward into the realm where ah, where ah, ah at last she was, she could be (25). We are now in the territory of myth – of Persephone or Eurydice about to ­descend into the underworld. The juxtaposition of the sensual, playful, first-­ person wordplay on ‘pleasure’ compared with the careful third-person pasttense narrative suggests again the trust Kemp places in the use of language registers to suggest the underlying dramatic action to the reader and listener. In ‘Entrance 7: She Walks to her Table,’ the text is spoken not by a female voice but by the male Waiter who closely observes the arrival of Woman 4 into the nightclub. The close detail of his description objectifies her, just as she is at her most vulnerable: The woman who is now not so young, more middle-aged, of an age which confuses the onlooker, this woman dressed smartly in a glamorous, svelte black sequin dress walks into the nightclub […] She steps out feeling no doubt as if she is on an ice skating rink or indeed alternatively in an enormous desert through which she has to travel, without a drink. Her body is upright, perpendicular. Her face at present appears almost mask-like (32). In its cold precision, this is a speech reminiscent of the prose style in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet,11 in which human action is stripped of its humanity and achieves the status of the inanimate world. The action of falling, previously experienced as a visual event only, is now described forensically, denying it any emotional resonance. At this moment she is thrown off balance, her left foot slips and loses its formerly secure contact with the high sheen floor and her body crumples, appears to cave in and land in a heap, quite a small heap in the centre of the nightclub. The heap is instantly quite still. In looking more closely one can see that the head is thrown backwards, one leg is stretched out while one is trapped beneath the body (33). Through the Waiter’s male gaze, Undine has become ‘the body.’ In ‘Entrance 8: Terror,’ Undine arrives at a profound depth. In performance at this point, she is stripped of all her clothes except for high-heeled shoes, and, with no defences apart from her small clutchbag, walks again down the 11

See the section on Slow Love in Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of Robbe-Grillet’s work.

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nightclub floor to stand naked before the eyes of the audience. She begins speaking, but her verbal play on the word ‘terror’ has none of the slightly selfconscious playfulness brought to the word ‘pleasure’ earlier: Terrorise, terrorist, terrify, terrible, terrific terror, I feel terror, terrible terror, tremendously terrifying terror. I feel terrible. I feel terrified of this terror I feel. Don’t terrorise me, you terrible thing. I will terrorise with my terror. I am a terrorist, a terrible terrorist so watch out. I am terrific at knowing about terror, right on this edge of terror I stand (38). The speech, which continues for another twenty lines, is a pure struggle to speak words when their role as signifiers gives way to their invocatory and associative power. The materiality of the word ‘terror’ – and all its attendant versions – calls attention to itself, before and beyond its translation into the voice of the performer who must speak it. It invokes the very terror it names. Performance theorist, William Worthen has argued that ‘one way to regard the history of dramatic theatre is as an ongoing effort […] to satisfy our desire to find or express that animalady, the restless infection of language, the desire to enact words as deeds’ (2005, 139). The image of ‘the restless infection of language’ is a vivid one, as is the neologism ‘animalady,’ which Worthen borrows from Charles Bernstein as a term for the ‘bodily grounding of language’ in performance (Ctd. Worthen, 2005, 135). It is as if, once the word ‘terror’ enters Undine’s system, it metastasises, producing seemingly limitless versions of itself, infecting her being with the very state it names: A landscape of terror, monstrous, empty. Tables and chairs and people all terribly normal right to the awful horizon. Step by step all alone, from left to right I look as my feet press on. Deserted in my terrible landscape, should I look back, turn my head? Which way? (1996, 39). A speech such as ‘Terror’ is thick with its own materiality,12 visible on the page, absorbed into the flesh of the speaker, and then ‘ineradicably’ into the imagination of the audience. The Woman begins in a state of terror, but once the word is spoken she cannot escape it; the experience of that terror now resides in the language as well as in her flesh; it holds her in the moment, traps her in the experience and gives it substantiality. It is as if the word and all its etymologically connected versions trap her in a forest of their own materiality. She 12

Cf. Bernstein for whom ‘The tenacity of / writing’s thickness, like the body’s / flesh, is/ ineradicable, yet mortal’ (Ctd. Worthen, 2005, 129).

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Illustration 9 Undine collapsed on the nightclub floor. Performers: Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills. The Black Sequin Dress, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, March 1996

may eventually escape its clutches – ‘it’s wandered off terror,’ she later says, ‘slipped off like a fish, off to somewhere else’ – but she knows that, like a fish, dark fear can always ‘dart back whenever it pleases’ (39). 7

Kemp as Visualiser: Storyboards and Paul Delvaux

Almost from the point that Jenny Kemp begins writing the drafts of her textual fragments, she is accompanying them with framed sketches of the images they may suggest. Quickly sketched preparatory images fill the early notebooks for each of the plays: testing out, on the run as it were, developing ideas, concepts, gestures, movement patterns and possible spatial configurations. These sketches exist in her preparatory notebooks alongside the jottings of preliminary thoughts, descriptions of dreams, ideas picked up from her reading, observations of life around her and the fragments of writing that may or may not make their way into a final script. In these rough sketches, the overall concept is ­being visualised at the same time as it is being written, despite the fact that, as she says, she is not writing with the theatre paramount in her mind.

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However, there is a phase of visual composition that takes place after the writing has been completed that is dedicated to what she calls a storyboard. ‘Practically, writing the text is separate from the writing of the scenic action,’ she told Minchinton. ‘That’s more like drawing a storyboard’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 80). The separation of the two phases of ‘writing’ suggests that they will be in counterpoint at least, or more likely in collision. It is through the disjunction between word and image that Kemp reveals the simultaneous existence of inner and outer reality. In the storyboard, the tightly framed cells of verbal text are re-imagined and given approximate visual forms, which may also serve as early feeds for the designers and for herself as director, in the preparation of the texts for rehearsal. Within rehearsals, the sketch images provide her and her fellow artists with clear visual starting points upon which to build each scene. However, the images she draws, as simple and cartoon-like as they appear, cannot act as realistic figurative stimuli. Her artistic project insists upon a-social spaces within which to track a journey intent on leaving the social world far behind. The visual storyboards are for Kemp a means of imaginatively composing the flow of scenes by juxtaposing one ‘bit’ of material against another visually on paper before they are on the stage, in order to test, organise and re-organise the developing shape of each larger ‘parcel’ of varying units. She is imagining the arc of the work on the page before she gets it out in the space. Kemp draws her storyboards in landscape format on sheets of A3 or B5 paper, each page consisting normally of twelve images segmented in a squarelike grid pattern. Each image depicts a moment of key action that will visually signify a scene, or a major sequence within a scene. Kemp, that is, literally draws her text as well as writing it: ‘writing’s a bit like drawing’ (81). A drawn image may begin simply enough: cartoon-like figures hastily sketched within the outline of a room with only a rough sense of what or where it is. But as the work on the text gets deeper and denser, each frame is returned to, and filled with a plethora of both drawn and written notes that operate as reminders of all the elements that could be included within a scene or a unit of action. Moreover, unlike the fragments of text, which still retain their temporal frames within performance through the rhythm of their start and finish, the framelines of the storyboard that denote each image are permeable. As the complexity of the field of action grows, the frame-lines are barely strong enough to contain the multifarious implications of each image within their bounds. Lines and notes cross borders as the interconnection between the visual fragments becomes clearer. The following illustration is a storyboard for four of the first five scenes of The Black Sequin Dress, prepared for the start of rehearsals. We can see elements of those scenes already discussed: in Scene One, the singularity of the

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image of woman and brick wall; in Scene Three, the train crossing behind the downstage action, the woman with the skeleton and the woman awaking from her nightmare and leaving. The growing complexity of the stage image gathers, frame-by-frame, as the implications of each moment accumulate and gather force. In frame 4, the strongly underscored line of Woman 1’s first walk down the nightclub floor to the moment of her first fall provides a vertical track that comes to dominate the rest of the play. The vertical thrust (in performance from up-stage to the front edge of the stage) is balanced by the horizontal line of the train in the previous frame, and of the rolling ball in frame 5. By frame 5, the criss-cross diagonal lines across the image are destroying these neatly right-angular vectors, as Undine’s reality is systematically being taken apart. We may connect the geometric forms here with Roger Kemp’s abstract expressionist images, in which similarly intersecting lines create a spatial dynamic within the work’s frame. Accompanying the illustration are notes that Kemp makes for herself to orientate the overall development of the forward flow. The shift from the ‘Ordinary World’ in frame 1 to ‘Call to Adventure’ in frame 4 are references to phases of Joseph Campbell’s anthropological pattern of the hero’s journey. At the same time as Kemp is launching her protagonist on a journey without a rationally discernible sense of direction or unity, she is finding for herself a mythic sub-structure that can hold some cohesive power, and resonate deep within a spectator’s unconscious. At one level, this is the synthesising force that gives constructive meaning to the deconstructed portrayal of the individual psyche. In her search for a way of visualising a structure that can include the dimensions of myth, Kemp was drawn in the early 1980s to the paintings of Flemish artist, Paul Delvaux. In the paintings of Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), Kemp visualised a timeless, indeterminate zone of dream and myth where the unexpected is always on the edge of happening. ‘The paintings,’ she commented to Minchinton, ‘seem to be only partially to do with the everyday world; they evoke another world, another landscape, an inner landscape’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 80–81). They are not, that is to say, completely from ‘another world;’ they ‘evoke’ it, but have their foot also in ‘the everyday world.’ It is an intermediate zone: a version, at the level of dramatic content, of the zone that Kemp, Foreman, Murphet and their fellow late-modernist practitioners have sought to occupy. As distinct from the extreme other-worldly surrealism of an artist like Salvador Dali, Delvaux returns to this intermediate zone in each of his paintings, as he composes and re-composes similar thematic motifs in various combinations to view its mysteries from manifold perspectives. The thematic motifs, many of which also recur throughout Kemp’s work, are part of a landscape of

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Illustration 10 Early preparatory notebook for The Black Sequin Dress, property of Jenny Kemp

dream, death, desire, release and threat: semi-naked women, lush costumes from the fin de siècle period, suited men with newspapers or magnifying glasses, skeletons, trams, trains, classical sculpture, natural foliage. Kemp has spoken of Delvaux’s paintings in terms of a ‘remeditative relationship’ that they formed with her as a viewer (Ctd. Barrowclough, 1995, 6). The nature of such a relationship shifts the focus away from the work and onto the spectator: It’s always interested me that the still image [in visual art] can cause activity/ movement in the viewer, can activate the viewer. What I’ve found problematic often, is that when theatre is very active the audience becomes passive, is acted upon. I want theatre that allows the audience to be much more active. I’m pulling away from work being an ‘active’ thing

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and introducing elements that make the audience stop moving forward (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 79. Emphasis in original). Four Delvaux paintings are named within the production text of Call of the Wild, each operating as a basis for the visualisation of one section of the play: Section One has ‘La Route de Rome,’ Section Two has ‘La Voie Publique,’ Section Three has ‘La Venus Endormie,’ and Section Four has ‘Le Sacrifice d’Iphigenie’ (Kemp, 1999b, 9, 12, 17, 24). Exactly how each of these paintings works as a compositional force differs from painting to painting. ‘La Route De Rome,’ to take one example, has played a major part in the utilisation of theatrical space in several Kemp works, from Call of the Wild, through Remember, to The Black Sequin Dress, and even Still Angela. There is a predominance of spatial depth vis-a-vis width in the painting: the central figure is depicted walking down the centre of the canvas towards the viewer, while distributed on either side of her, facing in different directions, other women stand or sit in various stages of undress. There is little sense of visual differentiation in the depiction of these women; it is as if they are all versions of the one woman, all serenely waiting for something, or, to Kemp’s eyes, all inwardly focused. Also, to the side are a number of doors leading off the space sometimes into small rooms hidden from view. The frame for the scene is created by Nature in the form of trees, water and mountains, with

Illustration 11 Paul Delvaux: ‘La Route de Rome’

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d­ istant steps leading up to another square. In the distance, suited men walk amongst the women. Male figures recur throughout Delvaux’s paintings, on the margins, seemingly oblivious to the nakedness or semi-nakedness of the women who crowd the scene. For Call of the Wild, although there is nothing in the written text that calls for this specific spatial configuration, the stage production was predominantly built around depth of field, and the costumes (or lack thereof) and configuration of women were inspired directly by this and other Delvaux paintings. In The Black Sequin Dress, the walk towards the viewer, central to the painting, has become the constantly repeated challenge that Undine, in all her manifestations, must undertake and fail: the walk down the nightclub floor towards the audience, often under the gaze of a man or two. It is that path that is scored so heavily in the storyboard drawing for Scene Four of the play. Clearly, the design for The Black Sequin Dress was based on the spatial configuration in ‘La Route De Rome’: the central thrust of the shiny nightclub floor with entrances and exits only from the side, leading into mysterious rooms and alcoves through which different versions of the female figure enter, alongside men in formal dark suits. The tram or train that emerges out of the darkness, like an unexpected dream image, throughout The Black Sequin Dress, can be seen in ‘La Voie Publique,’ as in many other Delvaux paintings. Above all, the sheer unabashed nakedness of women’s bodies, visible in many Delvaux works, was the unavoidable striking visual force of both Call of the Wild and The Black Sequin Dress. It was paradoxically an image of power and vulnerability, of desire and fear, of ordinariness and the taboo, of confrontation and seduction, and of outward exposure and inward focus. Kemp is fond of moments of stillness and silence in her work so that ‘the audience [can] stop moving forward,’ but her reading of Delvaux’s paintings differs from those commentators who emphasise the ‘silence, absence, emptiness’ (Rombaut, 1990, 11) of the worlds depicted. For her, the externally undemonstrative quality of the female figures in Delvaux has primarily to do with their preoccupation with a vibrantly active internal life, where they exist on the edge of a never-ending desire. By contrast, the male figures are to her eyes ‘small, less luminous, and quite ugly, they’re imploding; the women are empowered because they are involved in their own meditation’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 80). The passivity and stillness of the women in Delvaux’s images make us active as a viewer, because they are an image of an unseen life. Ultimately, when transferred into the palpable world of theatre, the women who people Kemp’s performances do not display ‘the state of weightlessness’ that Marc Rombaut sees as the condition of Delvaux’s nudes (1990, 7). Kemp’s women are all-too-solid flesh, wandering figures in a sustained present, set adrift from their domesticity, occasionally caught in an ambiguous stasis,

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but filled with a range of unpredictable emotions. They are ‘strangely awake,’ as Rombaut also describes Delvaux’s women (1990, 7), but their alertness in theatre is loud, passionate, subtle, direct, flirtatious, terrified, energised and undeniably alive beyond their surface beauty. In consciously using Delvaux’s paintings as sources for the visual texts of several of her plays,13 Jenny Kemp made a bold and challenging move. She could have ‘simply animate[d] them’ as Minchinton recognised (1998, 79). But she did something far more radical in intent: she built her storyboards from the templates of the paintings, not from the content of her own written text. In the normal course of dramatic production, a director and designer conceive of and build a mise-en-scène that responds directly to the fictional world created by the writer’s text. The design, however bold, will essentially be a visual response to the text as the primary source, often in fact simply rendering into three dimensions what is implicit in the stage directions. By contrast, as I have discussed, the process of visual conception for Kemp is split from the process of text-writing. Having written the cells of text, and begun creating a shape for the overall work composed of these cells, she puts aside the writing and ‘meditates’ upon several of Delvaux’s paintings as the basis for a mise-en-scène that can ‘operate independently of the text and in juxtaposition to the meaning’ (Kemp, 1999a, 8). Given that it is ‘the landscape of the psyche’ that her work explores, she is forced to ask herself both what exactly is its relevant landscape and how may that landscape be realised onstage? 8

Kemp as Director: Working with Duration

I have discussed the sequence midway through The Black Sequin Dress when Undine begins her journey downward to the point where she encounters the sheer materiality of terror. Woman 1 tells us, as she enters the nightclub space for the sixth time, that ‘She slid immediately straight through and did not look back, she sighed and released forward into the realm where ah, where ah, ah at last she was, she could be’ (1996, 25). Up to this point, Kemp the writer has depended largely upon the materiality of the language and voice to bring about the transformation to the edge of what she calls in a following scene ‘The River Styx’ (27). 13

The plays that most directly reference Delvaux’s paintings are Call of the Wild, The Black Sequin Dress, and Remember. Still Angela has an artist’s variation on a Delvaux theme on the cover of the published text, but in fact no painting is used as a direct source for its visual text. By then, Kemp had absorbed Delvaux’s elements more fully into her own aesthetic.

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It is here, on the threshold, perhaps of the River Styx, where voyagers are brought to a standstill, so the myth tells us, by the dog with eyes as big as saucers, that Kemp as director halts the forward progression and sustains the moment. The blue train (the image of internal travel) slowly crosses the space, people gather to watch, as the silent figure of Woman 2 enters carrying a closed box, preparing, we presume, to open it. Woman 3 enters and meets ‘the dark man from the shadows’ who ‘fuels’ her for ‘the journey’ (26) with conversation, and the offer of food and drink. Where and when, we wonder, is the journey downwards to commence? A number of subsidiary actions seem to be in operation deflecting us from the main objective. Then we notice, at the side of the space, next to ‘a model of the earth and the phases of the moon’ (27), that Woman 1 has fallen asleep. Margaret Hamilton has argued that sleep, in Kemp’s work, is ‘a dilation in time’ that relieves the sleeping figure of ‘the burden of purposeful speech’ and ‘alleviate[s] “the strain of meaning”’ (2011, 103). Sleep here certainly takes the focus off forward movement and the ‘strain’ to make sense of it. Having prepared the ground for the journey with words, the journey itself will take place in silence, without commentary, without movement, at an unconscious level. In a sequence of hushed beauty, Woman 2 (played by a dancer) silently opens the box and is overcome with what emerges from it.14 We do not see what that is – it is not visible at a social level – but we see her eyes glaze and her body twist and spiral away from it, as she is ‘wrapped in a dense cloud of drowsiness and falls slowly to the ground, in a Stygian sleep’ (27). This fall is much deeper than the previous falls onto the nightclub floor; psychically, we are now well beneath the surface. Simultaneously, a projected image hovers above Woman 2 of a naked woman swimming underwater, surging forward powerfully, as the sound of breathing is amplified through the space. Sleep (which, if we are to understand the moment in reference to the myth of Psyche, could be what has emerged from the box) has stilled ‘the strain of [social] meaning’ (Hamilton, 103) in order to release psychic action. In this way, Kemp the director makes the shift from the verbal text, which has within its rhythm an inbuilt forward momentum, even if it is not driven by action, to a visual text that holds in one barely moving image three indications of the depth of change going on: a sleeping figure at a small window, a female figure dropping slowly to the level of the Underworld, and a woman swimming beneath the surface of the water. As Deleuze described the effect of sustained time in film, ‘we may conclude that there exists somewhere a whole which is changing, and which is open somewhere’ (2013, 10). Jenny Kemp has described

14

The performance details of this section are drawn from the dvd of the production (Kemp dvd, 2012).

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her need as an artist to get free of ‘social time’ in order to approach a zone of open possibilities: Well I think what I’m saying is that we get too dominated by the continuous in life. My work is arguing against that. The function of daydreaming and sliding sideways – the work of the imagination – I don’t feel that is given enough space a lot of the time; the focus is on staying on the clock, and the practical, functional conforming to the social rules and fitting in and being productive in a more concrete way. The resources within the psyche are not valued.15 kemp, 22 September, 2012

She surmises that social time has been structured from a male organisational perspective, and that therefore, ‘I don’t feel like the structures actually suit me, so I have to live outside them in order to feel comfortable.’ Her female protagonists, too, are endeavouring to discover how to live outside these structures. Kemp’s desire to develop a theatre practice that is free from social time began before she started writing her own work. In 1978, shortly after winding up their group Stasis16 at The Pram Factory, Kemp worked with fellow Stasis member, Robert Meldrum, together with other performers, Lindy Davies, Margaret Cameron and Nicholas Lathouris, in a series of extended exploratory sessions at St. Mark’s Hall in Fitzroy, Melbourne. (Kemp continued her investigations later in partnership with Meldrum.) As she remembered it, the focus of this later phase was on the performer’s state of presence without the drive of dramatic action informing it. She told Minchinton that ‘we were interested in all the things that seemed to sit in between things, something like the moments of hesitation or pause, the silences between words, the thing about timing, and what shows up as human frailties or flaws’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1996, 185. Emphasis in original). Kemp and Meldrum were working on basic performance actions, stripped of extraneous meaning: entering a room, walking, stopping, and exiting the room. ‘We just did it obsessively,’ Meldrum told Minchinton, ‘over and over, watching different ways of entering a room’ (185). They waited for ‘the moment when someone in that situation ends up in repose,’ becoming ‘fascinated by that moment of change’ (185). Critically, given Kemp’s later dependence upon various states of ‘waiting’ in her theatre, she discovered that ‘if you leave an image long enough then the change seems like an enormous shift; ­everything seems to rearrange itself in that moment. […] The performer 15 16

See also Kemp, 1996b, 29–33. The group’s name, Stasis, already indicates a preference for duration rather than action.

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i­nitiates […] change and it then happens in the spectator’ (185. Emphasis in original). Subsequently, in her productions, Kemp sought not to sweep the spectator up in the excitement of plot-driven dramatic action, but to hold us in sustained time, in ‘a duration,’ as Libby Worth has named it, in order to create the ‘space […] to examine many aspects of our experience of time’ (2004, 57). However, as she had discovered with Meldrum, being caught in a duration does not mean that no change takes place. Kemp drew direct inspiration from the ancient Chinese concept of the field-in-time, as communicated to the West by Carl Jung and his followers. According to Jungian psychologist, Marie Louise von Franz, the ‘field-in-time’ is concerned not so much with ‘What happens next?’ (a basic urge behind all Western suspense drama), as with ‘What tends to happen together in time?’ So, the centre of the field concept would be a moment on which are clustered the events A B C D and so on. […] For the synchronistic way of thinking it is even essential to watch both areas of reality, the physical and the psychic, […] there it is the key moment – a certain moment in time – which is the uniting fact, the focal point for the observation of this complex of events. von franz, 1980, 8–9

For Kemp, this concept provides a release from the choking hold that social (clock) time has upon our Western culture. Its influence may be seen directly in the state of understanding that Undine reaches at the end of The Black ­Sequin Dress: What happened to time here she wondered. It was as if the whole story was rotating around the wilderness, and her entering and leaving it. Where did that put the story with its logical A.B.C.D. kemp, 1996, 55

‘The story,’ that is, ‘rotat[es]’ around a ‘cluster’ of events (a ‘wilderness’ – a concept captured in the very title of the play Call of the Wild), in lieu of a reliance upon a causal interconnection of events, where ‘A follows C which follows B which follows A’ (55). The concept of time is being stretched and applied with a fluidity that highlights what Kemp calls time’s verticality, rather than its horizontality. ‘In vertical time,’ she believes, ‘we exist in a space where past, present and future coexist’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 78). Moreover, ‘the synchronistic way of thinking’ brings into the frame both levels of reality that Kemp is

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­ reoccupied with: the everyday and the psychic. And, as we have seen, Kemp p begins each of her major plays with a ‘key moment – a certain moment in time’ (for instance, a fall) from which the complex of events bursts forth or unfolds. Her attraction to a ‘synchronistic way of thinking’ has been enriched throughout her practice, from Call of the Wild through to the Simpson desert scenes in Still Angela, by her awareness of the Indigenous Australian sense of the eternal now. Kemp has been deeply affected by several eco-feminists and pan-psychist philosophers writing in the late twentieth century. Writers such as Deborah Bird Rose (1992), David Abram (1996) and Freya Mathews (2003) work from the premise that an Aboriginal relation to country and time aligns with the critique of phallo-centric Western philosophy they are undertaking. In Mathew’s words, ‘it illustrates just about everything I have been trying to say in this book’ (206). Mathews, a close friend of Kemp for many years, also refers to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and the Taoist way (that is implicit in the concept of the ‘field-in-time’) as resonant with the ecological moral at the heart of her argument (207). For Kemp, both female time and Aboriginal time ‘just bounce off this society altogether, thank God. […] I just want to leave it’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1996, Appendix g/viii, 448). It is exactly that urge to escape the urban social world that drives Angela in Still Angela17 to ‘the dead heart’ of the Simpson Desert in Central Australia, where not only is she able to make face-to-face connection with her long dead mother and father and herself as a young girl, but she can sense for the first time the moving energy of all things simultaneously. At midpoint in Still Angela, Kemp works first with image then with words to halt all forward momentum, so that the goal of Angela’s voyage to the Simpson Desert becomes somewhere where nothing will happen. Angela has travelled here, via a trip on the Ghan Great Southern Rail Train, which travels from Adelaide to Darwin, to escape the manic tension of her life in the city apartment with her boyfriend Jack. When she arrives in the desert, it is dark on the open stage space, overhung with an upside-down tree whose roots protrude across our eyeline. We become aware that this desert space is also ‘a landscape of the psyche’ and a ‘field in time’ because inhabitants from three different periods in Angela’s life are dimly revealed around the stage: Angela as a young girl, Angela’s mother and father who are long-dead, and Angela’s boyfriend Jack who remained in urban Adelaide when she departed on her trip. These figures walk or crawl out onto the space, the girl Angela lies asleep, and her father ‘slowly begins to build the path, from a pile of concrete slabs at downstage centre. […] At 17

The ‘stillness’ in the title refers to a state of being that the protagonist, Angela, must achieve in order to undergo change.

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Illustration 12 The central moment of stillness in Still Angela. Performers: Margaret Mills, Felicity MacDonald, Lucy Taylor, Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, 2002

times he stops and rests or thinks or moves elsewhere in the space’ (Kemp, 2002, 18). It is a hushed moment of duration, whose power as mise-en-scène is impossible to render in description.18 The adult Angela sits in a chair at the side of the space ‘murmuring or chanting […] to herself’ (18). Her voice ‘is quite distant like a voice inside the wind or nature itself’ (18). The sense of duration is sustained and expanded through the unbroken rhythm of her microscopic perception: angela 3: I can hear it breathing, I can hear it, it’s moving inside it’s moving everywhere, the wind the birds, the air the sky the sun the moon, the stars, the clouds, the grass, the earth, the ants the worms, the spiders, the leaves the trunks, the apples and oranges, the rain the hurricanes the sausages we eat, the potatoes down in the earth, the insects, the darkness, the tree shadows the roots under the ground, the caves, my lunch box my walking, the stillness the winter the hail the snow, little bushes in the desert, the heat rising off the desert the rivers the ponds the puddles, the sea the ocean the moon the stars outer space. The wind, the wind in the sea, the sun in the sand, the rain in the clouds, me in the storm, my body held 18

For its performance power, see the film presentation of the scene (Kemp dvd, 2013).

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in the gale rigid forced backwards, the worms down there inside the dry sand, the stars in the sky the hot air in my lungs, the drops of rain down my neck, my back, inside my nose, my mouth, my red blood pumping next to the river (18–19). In this sustained moment of perception, Kemp dissipates any centralised focus and breaks the false or forced continuity of progress from one image to another that we experience when time is subordinated to dramatic action. The protagonists in all of Kemp’s plays go through a process of change by resisting direct activity. They are like the anti-heroines in the late-modernist cinema of the New Wave in France and Italy who, in Deleuze’s insightful reading, ‘become a kind of viewer.’ Deleuze’s description, despite its pronominal gender,19 perfectly captures the state of Angela, sitting in the desert ‘prey to a vision’ that gradually gathers around her. He [sic] shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. […] He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action (2013, 3, My emphasis). Deleuze argues, in response to one of Henri Bergson’s theses in his book Creative Evolution, that ‘[t]o say that duration is change is part of its definition: it changes and does not stop changing’ (9). Angela is undergoing change precisely because she has stopped attempting to accommodate the pressures of social time. She stays still within a duration. Unlike the journey into the interior undertaken by Angela, the dramatic progress of Call of the Wild depends upon the juxtaposition of events that ‘tend to happen together in time.’ In Call of the Wild, it was more like a field of all the things in the woman’s life: when she’s alone and the focus is sexuality it’s like this, and when she’s alone and the focus is the child it’s like this, and grief it’s like this. [The play is] trying to describe the field, that is the fullness of her psyche, 19

Deleuze’s use of the male pronoun is particularly misleading here, since the central characters in many of the films of those post-war directors who receive much of Deleuze’s attention – Rosselini, Antonioni, Resnais, early Godard, for instance – are not male action heroes set to save the community from evil, but ordinary women, engaged in the participial processes of witnessing, watching, waiting, experiencing, remembering, feeling.

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so instead of one scene continuing into another, it was more like ‘what other layer exists alongside or down underneath or on top of [her]: a ­social layer, a fantasy layer, a historical layer, an emotional layer, a remembered layer?’ That was developing the sense of travelling on a continuum. kemp, 22 September, 2012

The concept of ‘travelling on a continuum’ refers not to a forward moving journey without detours but to a vertical or mythic time, within which a journey takes place outwards and inwards rather than onwards. A journey such as this is like a dream, in that while the dreamer lies relatively still in bed, internally she moves through countless scenarios. Unfortunately, there is no accessible video version of the production of Call of the Wild, and the published text does not include detailed onstage directions, as do the publications of The Black Sequin Dress and Still Angela. However, Mark Minchinton’s fascinating account of Kemp’s rehearsal process in Call of the Wild20 is indicative of her determination to unlock the structures of social time, and to contact ‘our own intuitive cycles and rhythms’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1996, 210). Minchinton describes an initial rehearsal process – one that operated at the start of rehearsals for all three works – which goes by the name of ‘Running, Walking, Standing Still.’ It is a form of open-ended movement exercise that can be seen to have emerged from the early work Kemp undertook with Robert Meldrum, which focused upon entering a space, walking within it, standing still, leaving the space. It is also part of a tradition, introduced by Jerzy Grotow­ ski and his peers, that trained performers to develop a ‘pre-expressive’ state of ‘pure impulse’ in order to counteract the kind of expressive gestural acting that represented a character by ‘pumping an emotional state’ (Ctd. Richards, 1995, 3621). Kemp ‘explicitly link[s] impulses to breath and to a state of waiting’ (Minchinton, 1996, 200. Emphasis in original). The participants are not expected to push for something exciting, dramatic, or original to happen as together they run, walk or stand in the space. Instead they must wait and trust that something will emerge through ‘spatial configurations, tempos, and rhythms between performers’ (200). Meanwhile, internally, these interactions are 20

21

Mark Minchinton was one of the acting company in Call of the Wild. He also performed in Still Angela. His extended account of the working practices of the theatre artists he covers in his thesis, in particular Kemp and myself, has provided a guide for my own practicecentred approach. Thomas Richard’s book also contains a discussion of ‘pure impulse.’ For the state of ‘preexpressivity’ in a performer see Barba, 1995, 104–108.

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a­ ttuning the performers to become aware of ‘subtle and profound changes in the perception of time and space’ (200). Kemp then pins on the walls around the space a number of words, such as ‘Listening,’ ‘Longing,’ ‘Reflecting,’ ‘Waiting,’ ‘Remembering,’ ‘Fantasising,’ ‘Orienting,’ ‘Awakening’ and ‘Changing.’ These are not chosen from the written text, but are intended to offer more general meditational focal points whilst ‘Running, Walking, Standing Still’ proceeds. Minchinton explains: The performers spent a short time looking at the words then returned to the space and began working on rws [‘Running, Walking and Standing Still’] keeping one or more of these words in mind as they did so: ‘reflecting,’ ‘longing,’ and so on, were performed through rws. Effectively, the performers meditated on the word through rws allowing themselves to be affected by their personal associations with the understandings of the word’s meanings (203). Expressed as present participles, the words exist in the eternal delay between the extinguished past of nominal states such as ‘Reflection,’ ‘Remembrance,’ ‘Fantasy,’ and possible future actions such as ‘Remember,’ ‘Reflect,’ ‘Fantasise.’ Although Kemp’s list also includes such words as ‘erupting,’ ‘seducing,’ ‘confiding’ and ‘fearing,’ the majority do not involve direct intention but ‘seemed to sit in between things, something like the moments of hesitation or pause’ (185). It is the actors’ task eventually to weave together the rough, irregular fragments of text, as they negotiate their personal associations with the word stimuli. When rehearsals are underway, despite the rigours of her process, ‘their atmosphere,’ in Minchinton’s words, ‘was not in any way forced or coercive, rather, the atmosphere was one of easy collaboration and unforced attention’ (209). Far from being the sign of a laissez-faire approach to achieving results, the objective of this measured beginning and seemingly slow rhythm was to take the focus off quick results, ‘to remove the time pressure altogether, to give the illusion of incredible time and space’ (209). There is a level of implicit trust involved, not just in the skills and intelligence of the performers but in the productive power of sufficient time. Minchinton cites her comment that ‘the state I’m talking about is heightened awareness, and once the state is right, the emotional state is right, then the material you’re wanting the actor to do can just be placed there […]’ (209). It is not until this point has been achieved that the director can make specific decisions based upon the material in front of her. In fact, throughout all the stages of rehearsal, the attempt is made to remove from the actor’s mind the clock-driven schedules that run most professional productions. Kemp and her stage manager may be carefully plotting the

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rehearsal schedule, but for the performer ‘The time allocated was the time needed’ (209). There is a sense in Kemp’s rehearsals that the work is the result of the given process, rather than the process being structured to produce a product. The sense of awaiting the arrival of the right state – the moment of magical ‘there-ness’ – is one that Kemp shares with Foreman, who, as I have described, sat during rehearsals in a state of external passivity and internal percipience, waiting for what he calls a ‘god’ to arrive in the room. I can attest to this need for patient readiness in my own rehearsals. It has to do with a fascination, shared by all of us, with moving into the unknown, rather than re-mapping discovered territory. It is, too, an attitude towards time that is evident in the rehearsal practice of similar late-modernist European and North American theatre companies. Susan Letzer Cole writes meticulously of the slow and careful rehearsal processes of JoAnne Akalaitis, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and others (Letzer Cole, 1992). In her preparation book for the production of The Black Sequin Dress, Kemp wrote several pages of hand-written notes on the work of director and designer, Robert Wilson. She notes Wilson’s comment that in his work, ‘I give you time to reflect, to meditate about other things than those happening on the stage. I give you time and space in which to think’ (Kemp, 1995b, Source not noted in original). The note suggests his influence upon her application of asocial time structure in her work. She commented that in Wilson’s productions ‘prolonged duration, proved a means of opening up channels of perception and communication and overcoming sensory overload’ (1995b). For Minchinton, it is the ‘focus on the moment of change, the space between things,’ that connects Kemp’s aesthetic to that of Wilson who, he comments, ‘is famous (or infamous) for slowing movement so that both actor and spectator are thrown out of habitual ways of seeing and perceiving, and asked, or allowed, to inhabit a dilated moment of change’ (Minchinton, 1996, 186). 9

Complementary Autonomy: Artistic Collaboration

Jenny Kemp initiated, wrote, visualised, developed, and directed the works under discussion here. Like Richard Foreman, she can be considered the auteur of her productions. Libby Worth argues that any sense of ‘openness within the text that demands a collaborative rather than illustrative response, is matched by Kemp’s strong directorial vision exerted over the stage world she creates’ (Worth, 2004, 154). The application of the controlling vision of an auteur could be seen as a replacement for the lack of narrative cohesion in the text. Unlike

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traditional drama, Foreman’s and Kemp’s work eschews what the Structuralists may call an ‘underlying principle’22 that interconnects all the various elements of the dramaturgy. A synthesis of sorts may be achieved by Kemp in the process of directing and mounting her production, but it is a synthesis that tenuously holds together a vast array of material drawn into unlikely juxtaposition and always threatening to dissolve into its constituent parts. However, we saw with Foreman’s process of directing that there is a difficulty in applying the term auteur with its suggestion of total control to his ­careful fumbling through the dark of the unknown towards a final shape for his productions. A similar problem arises with Kemp. Despite the multi-­ dimensionality of her vision for the production, by the time she begins rehearsal Kemp has already consulted with set, costume and sound designers. ‘It feels important’ she explains, ‘that I don’t have too much control’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 81). Australian cultural theorist, Paul Carter presents a case for collaboration not as a means to an end but as a creative act in its own right. Emphasis is removed from sole interest in the finished product, and the ‘process of making the work becomes inseparable from what is produced’ (2004, 11). The process is not a smooth one, in fact the discord that can result from the ‘often fiery exchanges between the collaborators’ (11), as well as the difficulties raised in the use of different approaches and materials cause a productive ‘resistance’ (11) in all phases of the process. The resistance that surfaces often in the process of collaboration is familiar to all those who work in theatre. However, the nature of the material collaboration as conceived by Carter deliberately seeks not to smooth out the disagreements in collaborative input but to aim for a ‘composite, synthetic’ process, so that ‘images and texts could combine to create a third apprehension of reality different from what either could achieve on its own’ (12). A ‘composite’ theatre practice does not ‘match’ the force of collaboration, but creatively seeks the unexpected changes that result from a complementary autonomy. A form of unstable auteurist control is a feature of late-modernist theatre practice. The very nature of theatre’s working conditions means that it is by default more unstable than the form of visionary control available to auteurs working in film. Collaboration provides the grist in the mill of work on the rehearsal room floor. The nature of Kemp’s collaboration with her fellow artists sometimes suggests the ‘fiery exchanges’ and the ‘collisions’ of which Carter 22

For a discussion of a structuralist understanding of the dramaturgical relationship between text and performance, see Richard Hornby (1977, 38–39). Hornby’s bottom-line is that ‘one should define the unifying principle as a statement […] that enables a person to grasp the significance of a playscript as a whole’ (120).

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makes mention. Jackie Everitt who designed the set for all of Kemp’s major shows, and Elizabeth Drake, her musical director, were/are both significant artists in separate media thrust into a new domain to engage in material collaboration with Kemp. In Call of the Wild, Drake brought to the process a highly developed artistic intelligence that informed her aesthetic judgment, her ideological intent and her working methodology. Drake worked chorally with the four female performers to produce a spoken form expressive of the materiality of Kemp’s written text. The spoken form was closer to sprechstimme, rather than mimetic of daily conversational rhythms and tones. The declamatory nature of sprechstimme is placed somewhere between singing and speaking, using ‘lilt and rhythm but not precise pitches’ (The American Heritage® Dictionary Online, 2009). Drake has described her objective of ‘doubling and multiplying the voices and adding simultaneous action,’ in order to develop a ‘co-presence of discontinuous elements,’ thereby creating a ‘recurrent patterning in which the recognition of meaning was endlessly delayed’ (Drake, 1999, 9). In their response to the production of Call of the Wild, Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney describe the performance sound as ‘carefully orchestrated with overlapping speeches, voice-overs, singing, sound effects, Italian opera and other musical tonalities, such as a piano or strumming guitar. At other times, the sound of mewing, cooing, aching and screeching established an audibly feminine acoustics’ (2006, 71). They write in physical terms of the ‘vocal choreography,’ arguing that ‘“the passionate voice” of the female performers with its rising and falling, its breathiness and its higher pitch were key elements of signification’ (71). Drake’s ‘feminine acoustics’ were built from Kemp’s language and ran alongside and informed the optical image. Together, the three approaches revealed a dimension beyond the reach of one alone: a dimension which, in the words of Deleuze, writing of the use of sound and optics in postwar European film, ‘makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable’ (2013, 19). Kemp is seeking in her theatre to dramatise both the ‘intolerable and unbearable’ state in which her female protagonists exist initially, and the ‘intolerable and unbearable’ stages through which each much pass in finding her ­autonomy. Drake’s re-working of several of Kemp’s verbal texts into ‘feminine acoustics’ succeeded in establishing the aural dimension of these states. As Drake told Minchinton: I did know there was this very definite thing about wanting to come from somewhere where I was, so I’d glance over23 and then say … ‘I really want 23

From where she was placed in the rehearsal room – see Kemp dvd, 2012.

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to explore this sound.’ There was a collision, which I felt was not destructive (Ctd. Minchinton, 1996, 195, My emphasis). In Drake’s recollection of the rehearsal process, we can see both the complementary autonomy that she and Kemp claimed and ‘the collision’ caused by their productive resistance: 10

Actors: New forms of Representation

Given Jenny Kemp’s strong directorial vision, it may seem somewhat counterintuitive that for her the stage performer is of paramount importance. This very contradiction lies at the heart of Kemp’s particular form of psychologically focused late modernism. We may compare it with the ontological explorations by Richard Foreman, for whom the performers are only one, often ­marginal, element of his dramaturgical materials. Kemp’s alternative worlds have a human being – a woman – at their centre, the better to reveal the a-social levels at which we humans experience the world. She seeks to track constant slippage between the subjective and the objective: that is, to track both the ways in which the outside world collides with an individual’s internal state of being, and the effect that an individual’s internal journey has upon her ways of perceiving that world. The performer-as-human, then, is the subject matter of Kemp’s artistic experimentation. In Kemp’s rehearsal, the performer receives constant close attention. As the footage included in the documentary of the making of The Black Sequin Dress (Kemp dvd, 2012) illustrates, her rehearsal room is open weave: the rhythm of decision making is based upon a process of give-and-take; the mood for the most part is lively even playful. Without calling a halt to work on the floor, Kemp calls out from the side-lines suggestions for movement or tone, comments of reinforcement, questions about decisions; or she walks into the space and speaks quietly to a performer face-to-face; or she listens to suggestions from the performers about how to resolve a tricky moment in a scene; or she leans across to sound designer, Elizabeth Drake, who is watching from the table alongside her, and asks her opinion about another moment. There is toand-fro between director and performers that has the double effect of drawing the performers into the process of creation, and of giving the director access to their space and to their thoughts, needs and problems. Her whole project is to free the individual from the constraints of social construction, so it is evident that she needs her performers to free themselves from the constraints of a

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r­ ehearsal hierarchy that mirrors and reinforces that social hierarchy. She wants them to work with a sense of ownership of the material, the space and the means of performance. However, the world she is constructing in order to realise this project is her original formulation; its dimensions are, at source, outside the realm of the imagination of anyone other than the artist who has conceived it. Indeed, if the performers were too fully in control of the world of the play, there is a danger that they would be sitting outside of its internal world, and that the process of psychic disintegration so central to all of her work, would be much more difficult for them to realise. We are witnessing in her work an artist discovering through praxis new ways of narrating a woman’s life, and, as a part of this, new ways of using the resources of theatre to construct alternative versions of dramatic character. In order to tackle the unfamiliar challenges raised by these new forms of narrative and character, the performers need to develop new approaches to performing. Both Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp have sought to dismantle the primacy of dramatic character in theatre. Foreman made the shift from ‘non-­ professional actors’ in his early works to ‘professional non-actors’ in his later works; actors who had the skills to play their part without taking ‘responsib[ility] for the fiction’ (Ctd. Savran, 1993, 43). The link that he is asking his performers to make is his version of ‘the link between the man and the world’ (43). When I assign the lines I think of the collision between the particular character of my performer and what I consider to be the more universal thrust of my language. […] I’m trying to make ever more vivid what they [the performers] are and allow that to inhabit the particular environment of my text (43, My emphasis). During the period in which I was watching him at work, Foreman showed little interest in any character construct beyond the theatrical frame. He works from what the performers offer through their personalities, and brings these into creative conflict with the demands made by his text. As I witnessed several times, when they ask him character-based questions, he instructs them to deal with such concerns themselves. Jenny Kemp is similarly focused, in essence, upon bringing the performers into direct confrontation with the text, unmodified by any fictional third party: When my writing really works it demands a focus of a particular kind from the actor […] I never rehearse with them as if they are playing

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c­ haracters. I’m interested in them as people because they are interesting complex people in this situation. kemp, 22 September, 2012. (My emphasis)

The interesting complexity she alludes to is a quality she is already seeking during the process of casting. She admits to Mark Minchinton that when she was casting for The Black Sequin Dress, ‘I felt there was a certain sort of sexual energy that I wanted onstage, to focus on, and part of casting was trying to pinpoint that energy’ (Ctd. Minchinton, 1998, 82). This ‘energy,’ a noticeably attractive internal life that the performer can project into the world, has been a central requirement in all of her works. It is there in all the female performers she has used and in the male performers, but with less dynamism than the female figures. Kemp has returned to certain female performers throughout her work – actresses such as Margaret Cameron, Natasha Herbert, Margaret Mills, Mary Sitarenos – because she initially pinpointed in their personalities the internal energy she required. Over the years, she has built with them a new mode of performing that she (and they) can depend on. Kemp does not ‘rehearse with [her performers] as if they are playing characters.’ Nevertheless, because she is setting out on a journey into unknown territories of the psyche, she is not interested in the inner lives of the actual women who are performing. What we have here is not the complete abandonment or ‘death of character’ traced by Elinor Fuchs, especially in theatre of the later decades of the twentieth century, wherein ‘character is no longer the ground and center of drama, and […] drama, unmoored from character, passes into performance’ (Ctd. Schneider, 1997, 541). Nor is her stance that of postdramatic theatre, in which, viewed from Bernard’s Stegemann’s provocative stance, ‘[t]he act of observing humans for the purpose of examining and understanding their behaviour and their actions is considered to be an illusion and a ­habituated lie’ (2009, 18). Kemp is interested in the act of observing and understanding humans; there is in all her works a fictional female figure trying to negotiate a world of strange materialities, illusions, delusions and revelations. As with each of the latemodernists in this book, she makes use of many key elements of dramatic literature: dialogue, dramatic monologue, a sense of representational space, and figures who are at the very least representative of selves or fragments of selves that exist in the mind and on paper, before performers are cast. Yet the elements are deconstructed, separated from their normal function within the ­unravelling of a dramatic narrative, used as fragments in their own right, until finally, in the words of the Woman in The Black Sequin Dress, they discover a ‘new arrangement […] after all these years’ (Kemp, 1996, 3).

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The explosion/deconstruction of the one integrated woman into the manywomen-within-one means that a performer cannot follow the arc of singular character development throughout the drama, since the responsibility for performing any sequence of scenes is spread over several actors playing the same figure. Within the supportive narrative structure of a dramatic realist play – with attendant questions such as ‘What is my back-story?’ ‘What is my objective?’ and ‘What is my problem to overcome?’ – a performer may depend upon a scene-by-scene dramatic build to take her to the necessary emotional state for each phase of the drama. By contrast, in Kemp’s theatre a process of ‘composite’ performance is complicated further by the fragmentary ‘parcels’ that constitute her texts. Dependence upon a dramatic build towards a state of readiness for a scene has to be replaced with the craft of hitting with precision a single moment or a short sequence within the a-logical pattern of moments. The juxtaposed, short, disjointed, fragmentary texts I have discussed from Call of the Wild and The Black Sequin Dress provide a clear example of the extreme precision necessary to perform distinct moments that associate and ­intrude obliquely and rapidly upon one another, never arising from rational dramatic progression. The variation of language that registers from one scene to another is a stark indicator of the challenges facing the performers in rehearsal as they seek an appropriate vocal tone or emotional attack. As Kemp explains: We find a physical manifestation of an emotional/mental state that is registered perceptively in a physical position. Time and again the actor will go back and her body won’t necessarily remember, and I’ll have to remind her of the exact shape. Ctd. minchinton, 1998, 84

As a director, Kemp needs to be able to sense what that shape may be, but it is vital that the performer discovers the state and its signifiers for herself: [W]e need to locate how the particular performer locates that state. These aren’t necessarily familiar states that actors are used to working with. […] When the actor has located the state of remembering, for instance, it’s got a particular rhythm for her, I can’t tell her what her rhythm is because my rhythm will be different (85. Emphasis in original). For Kemp, this is the performers’ work, and it is often at odds with what the text may suggest. She watches for the moment when the performer is in a state of readiness to speak exactly these words:

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When the actor hits the emotional, balanced state where she or he is whole [i.e. fully present], then I’ll try to describe her precisely; and I’ll probably give her some text instantly, because that’s where the language needs to come from (84). Given the parallel visual text provided by the storyboards, and the vivid image sources of Delvaux’s paintings, it is clear that Kemp is not constructing a miseen-scènethat directly illustrates the written text, nor is she allowing the performers to fill the space with unnecessary (and often distracting) realistic ‘business.’24 Kemp’s rehearsal process steers her performers away from any signs of familiar, social forms of speaking or behaving. In this way, they may begin to embody the a-social dimensions of life that she wishes her audience to experience.

24

An actor’s term for phatic stage action that is insignificant to the main drive of the drama, but that gives the illusion that daily life is being led onstage.

Chapter 3

Richard Murphet 1

The Cultural Influences Upon Subjectivity

My theatre work has been the site of an ongoing struggle between the possibilities for an autonomous self-hood or subjectivity and the forces of culture and technology that act with increasing conspicuousness to determine the nature of that subjectivity. The human beings at the centre of my plays all face existential trauma at the mercy of cultural forces beyond their control. My two early plays, Quick Death and Slow Love,1 aimed to shatter from the outset both the concept of dramatic character with the sense of integrated subjectivity that it entails, and the image of a coherent reality communicated through an explicable story-line. However, the destructive force out of which these two plays emerged was initially not cultural, philosophical, social or psychological. The key influence upon their theatrical form was the personally dislocating experience of grand mal epilepsy, which began when I was twentyfour years old and continued for twenty years until medication controlled it. Nevertheless, the nature of my dramaturgical choices for the plays did cause me to seek not a realistic representation of the sufferings of an epileptic but a form for each play infected with a dysfunctionality that was my response to the experience of epilepsy. In Quick Death, a man (Man A) is trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare in which his home and his psyche are invaded by uninvited figures from the world of crime, and more specifically, from the celluloid frames of film noir. The danger the figures pose is both physical and psychological as they threaten him with injury, death and guilt for crimes unknown to him. Their power is both cultural and psychic in that they assault his internal state with words, gestures, actions and emotions derived from cultural tropes that have no direct connection to his own circumstances. In addition, the danger is formal: any hope for predictability, consistency and consequentiality is shattered by the fragmentary nature of the encounters, by their sudden and constant emergence out of 1 I have written three versions of both Quick Death and Slow Love. The original versions were written in 1979 and 1983 respectively and they are unpublished. A second version of Quick Death (based closely upon the 1979 version) was completed in 1999 for publication in Allen and Pearlman (1999), and of Slow Love (a distinct re-write) for a production in 1999 in Belgium. A third, quite altered version of each was written for my own production of the two plays in 2015. I shall refer to each version separately throughout.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��20 | doi:10.1163/9789004415881_005

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the darkness, and by the absence of any continuity to his own experience, as he lurches or is thrown from one present moment to another. Man A is pushed to his physical and psychic limits, unsure at the end whether death awaits him, or whether, in some perverse way, the intensity of the whole event has given him an understanding of what it is to really be alive. The short scenes in Quick Death are neither causally linked nor self-evidently explicable. It is intended as a disconcerting, ‘epileptic’ experience for a spectator, filled with the panic of absence and uncontrollable pain. Slow Love opens with an unidentified Woman ready for love, reaching out to any object, person or action as a means of giving her desire the means to express itself, and to form something constructive in her life as a woman. Driven by the need to maintain desire rather than to satisfy it, neither she nor her fellow players can truly satisfy their yearnings and they come to depend instead upon the empty rituals that culture has made available to them. Their inescapable cycles of seduction, over one afternoon and early evening on a sunny veranda, consist entirely of snatches of narrative possibility derived from the powerful cultural ‘machine’ of Romance. Trapped within this machine, the human figures in Slow Love resort increasingly to stereotypical behavioural mannerisms. Cultural influence here is experienced, not, as in Quick Death, as a destructive force splitting apart the vulnerable psyche, but as an inescapably corrupting yet highly attractive factor in what may feel like the most intimate of positively human acts: being in love. In my following three plays, each central protagonist suffers at the start from a traumatic condition caused specifically by antagonistic cultural forces. In Dolores in the Department Store, Dolores suffers from Multiple Personality Syndrome, caused partially by extreme domestic psychological abuse, but brought to a crisis point by the pressures of commercial marketing devices, gendered advertising and the female masquerade. In The Inhabited Woman, the Woman seeks desperately to escape the cultural models of womanhood, motherhood and wifehood that entrap her, even within what appears to be a fairly benign marital set-up. In The Inhabited Man, Leo, a physically and psychologically injured veteran from the Vietnam War, surrounds himself with numerous technological prostheses to support his ongoing life. His crisis is brought to a head by his inability to control the input of electronic feeds from a twenty-first century culture he does not comprehend. These later plays are more clearly latemodernist than the early pair in that each places ‘the walking wounded of ­contemporary society’ (Varney, 2011, 176) into a more discernibly realistic environment. It is as if the external world penetrates the walls of their subjectivity through the holes of their wounds, and any image of the autonomous self dissolves. To put it less metaphorically, individuals under great stress are .

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v­ ulnerable to the pressures of the external world. Denise Varney argues that my work ‘recuperates the film noir thriller and kitsch settings to point to the mysteries that remain unsolved in the lives of contemporary subjects as “the black hole of the empty cinema”’ (176, In-text quotation from Murphet, 1999a, 47). My objective as practitioner has been to lay bare the effects of these cultural control mechanisms upon the individual psyche, and to posit some instances of how it has attempted to fight back. This objective has in turn led me to find ways in which the form of the theatre – its language, its scenic action, its human figures – may reflect the processes of dissolution and disintegration that are central to the subject matter. The investigation in this chapter into the nature of the practice that gave rise to these works will be an investigation into the memory of that practice – or more particularly the memory of what constituted the sources, the driving thematics and the methodologies of that practice. Such an investigation necessitates moving constantly between, on the one hand, the artistic act and my memories of its creation that emerge from within, and, on the other hand, the material of theatre and the thinking about theatre that exists in the world that has affected my artistic practice. I am not aiming to establish normative interpretations of the plays, but to provide a background to the inception and ­objective of each phase of their creation, and – as memory will allow it – a coverage of the modalities of my practice. 2

Seeking an Epileptic Language: Quick Death

At the start of the 2015 version of Quick Death, Man A, whose name we learn is Ray, stumbles into the darkened space and slumps onto a chair, resting his face in his hands. We may possibly deduce that he is a writer, exhausted by the process of typing that we have heard in the darkness before he enters, and distracted by the crying baby whose screams eventually drown out the sound of the typewriter. There is a long pause as he sits alone, then ‘eventually he gets up to leave. He turns. Looks out in horror at the black hole that faces him. He falls’ (Murphet, 2015a, 1). In facing the black hole, which in the theatre context happens to be the auditorium within which the audience is seated, Ray senses that he faces an abyss, the rip in the fabric of his own identity. In the original 1979 version, the rendition is less developed: Man A is already ‘in the space’ when the lights come on. ‘He looks behind him,’ and then, ‘He falls’ (Murphet, 1979a, 1). Though it was less philosophically explicit, the intention was the same; Man A’s need to check over his shoulder behind him is indicative of a sudden loss of security that causes his fall. There is an echo between Man A’s

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fall and Undine’s fall onto the nightclub floor in Jenny Kemp’s The Black Sequin Dress (1996). The echo, between two plays separated by two decades, would seem to be a case of artistic coincidence rather than influence. The Man’s fall in Quick Death is an epileptic moment of absence; the Woman’s in The Black Sequin Dress is the beginning of her descent from social reality onto other more psychic levels. The black hole of absence and the concomitant fall had personal connotations for me as I conceived of and wrote Quick Death. Ten years earlier, on an evening in December 1969, I had had a massive epileptic seizure. It was my first such seizure. I was alone in an apartment in Toronto while my partner was in hospital giving birth to our first child. I was twice absent that evening: from the birth of my son, and from my conscious self. As I lay recovering over the following days, it was these absences that haunted me. The onset of epilepsy (that is to say, the recurrence of unpredictable grand-mal epileptic seizures) was a critical break that radically subverted my trust in a sense of self under the control of a regular and predictable frequency. This in turn affected the art that I felt compelled to create. I began writing Quick Death to Infinity (as it was originally titled),2 during a period in North America in 1979, my condition barely under the control of anticonvulsive medication, my mind still preoccupied with the seizures and their decade-long effect upon me. I wanted to try to find a theatrical form that might evoke both for me and for the spectator the phenomenological experience of a seizure. The objective was to think epilepsy through theatre: to use the epileptic condition as a template for the formal ‘condition’ of the work. One of the entries in the notebook I kept during my time in New York in 1979 is the following medical description of epilepsy, gleaned from my reading at the New York Public Library: Arrest of activity, staring or dazed expression leading to repetitious, automatic, stereotyped, apparently purposeless […] movements. Accompanied by repetitious, automatic reflexions of disordered and confused or irrelevant speech, rages, tantrums, mumbling or running wildly. 1979b. (Quotation unsourced in original)

I had noted next to the medical quotation: This is the feeling that I want to evoke onstage, not necessarily to have it represented by the actors. The ‘irrelevance’ of speech suggests verbal randomness, snatches dialogue and text to be inserted. 2 The name of the play was shortened to Quick Death in the 1999 version published in Allen and Pearlman (1999).

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The play was not to be about epilepsy but to be epileptic. My experience of being epileptic had to do with a precipitous state of being, always on the edge of falling back into a chaotic darkness. The opening of the play had to establish just this confusion of sound and action, a lack of discernible causality in brief visual moments of scenic action, and a seemingly endless series of repeated falls, as if recovery was only the occasion for the onset of another collapse. lights Man in space He looks behind him He falls lights Man in space He looks behind him He falls

V/O: Hi! I’m Ray B/O

FX: A gunshot

lights Man in space He looks behind him V/O: Call me Raymond He falls  FX: A gunshot V/O: A woman’s scream

B/O

B/O

lights Man in space V/O: It’s a cold clear morning Pause. Faint music can be heard V/O: A woman’s scream Man looks behind him FX: A gunshot Man falls 

B/O

lights Man in space FX: A gunshot Man looks behind him V/O: Ask me what I’m doing here V/O: A woman’s scream Man falls 

B/O

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lights Man in space V/O: A woman’s scream Man looks behind him V/O: Ask me if I’m ready. He falls FX: A gunshotB/O lights Man in space He looks behind him He falls V/O: A woman’s scream is heard FX: A gunshotB/O lights Man falls V/O: Are you ready?B/O FX: Three gunshots Pause lights Door flies open – dazzling light No one is there murphet, 1999a, 48

B/O

The early versions of the play (1979/1999), approximately sixty minutes in playing time, consist of over fifty blackouts, mostly preceded by a fall, with the ­sequences of visible action in between, sometimes barely registering their presence before the darkness interrupts again. The intent from the outset was to use the epileptic form in a drama about a man who was faced with recurrent falling and darkness in a context that had nothing to do with epilepsy. This ‘epileptic’ form of writing is another example of the ‘nervous’ performance writing about which Debra Pollock has written. In this case, the writing was not to do with speech but with the overall dramaturgical form of the stage rhythm and image. A couple of years prior to my 1979 New York trip, I had acted in a production of Heathcote Williams’ play AC/DC, presented by Nightshift at The Australian Performing Group.3 I performed Maurice, a schizoid pinball parlour e­ lectrician 3 Presented by The apg in The Back Theatre at The Pram Factory in June 1976. Directed by Lindzee Smith.

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Illustration 13

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The ‘epileptic’ fall. Performer: Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

with epileptic tendencies, whose best friend Perowne is a full-blown ­epileptic attempting to use his hypermediated frequencies to tap into the source of direct current from the universe. It was a futuristic, science fiction fantasy, for which Williams invented a verbal language with epileptic energy that plugged the world of AC/DC into an almost incomprehensibly charged mental power source. Such language had not been heard in theatre before, and to my ear has had no equivalent since. Maurice: tzzzzzzzaaaaaahhhh! I’m getting my head out as an electromagnet to deflect the cathode rays. I’m setting up a smoothing cycle to damp down their energy fields. I’m sending out highly concentrated protein flux via various psychic rheostats to block them off, so shut up because I don’t want you to abort any of my discharge mechanisms. heathcote williams, 1972, 37

As this excerpt from one of his speeches suggests, Maurice is attempting to tune his brain waves as a defence mechanism against unwanted input from the culture at large. His heightened rants emerge from an internal energy source, derived from his epileptic propensity. Performing Maurice, I had to increase the electrical discharges of my own performance energy to extreme levels each night. Not surprisingly, I had two seizures while involved in the production: one after an exhausting rehearsal, and one after the opening night performance.

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However, the fact that the epileptic power of AC/DC was discharged through the language of the characters and the fictional world they inhabited, caused me to define more precisely what I wished to create in Quick Death. I could not, nor did I seek to compete linguistically or fictionally with Williams’ play. I ­decided that in my own play the shattering quality of epileptic seizures should emerge not from the language spoken by characters – in the original version of Quick Death to Infinity no words were spoken from the stage – but from the rhythm of the stage action itself. I sought a stage rhythm that could break the stranglehold of continuity that controls the traditional rhythm of unfolding action in a stage drama. This dramaturgical sense of continuity, based upon the unifying force of the narrative drive has the ultimate effect of assuring the spectator that continuity is an underlying feature of life itself. My epileptic condition, however, suggested to me that life is governed by impermanence and discontinuity. My search for a stage rhythm that could manifest a state of discontinuity led me to consider the rhythm of film action, where shots of varying lengths from an array of shifting spatial, temporal and psychological perspectives are edited together into a final assemblage; or where, at a more microscopic level, individual frames on a film reel, separated from one another by an imperceptible blackout, succeed one another at the rate of 24 per second to produce the illusion of continuous action. An article by film theorist, Noel Carroll, “Towards a Theory of Film Editing,” published whilst I was in New York, drew my attention to the power of the structural element of the film shot. It stimulated me to imagine the interplay between suspension and disorientation, and between expectation and surprise, as integral elements in the language of the film medium that I could translate into theatrical terms. It articulated the active role that the spectator played in the construction of the meaning of the film work. Carroll argues that in the case of film editing, the language of film breaks with the sequential expectations made familiar to us by the grammar of language: A series of shots, for instance, of a gun firing, a man falling and a woman screaming, can come in any order. There is no correct formula for this scene, and, more importantly, there is no wrong one either’.4 carroll, 1979, 79

4 This passage gave rise to the opening sequence of Quick Death discussed above: pp 135–6.

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Here were three key motifs from which a theatre event could arise: ‘falling’ and ‘screaming’ were central to the epileptic experience that was my preoccupation; ‘a gun firing’ reinforced my growing realisation that the film genre from which the content of the play should be drawn was crime movies, more particularly the style known as film noir. Provocatively, Carroll suggested that action could develop out of a resonant image in any direction that the image itself implied, either directly or indirectly, without having to obey the formula of narrative plotting. ‘The reference points’ of each image, he argues, ‘can change depending upon their context’ (79). He admits that ‘in traditional narrative films, the spectator doesn’t respond to the addition of shots as individual shots but as increments of information concerning the progress of an ongoing narrative’ (80). However, he argues that this process of incremental informationgathering has uncertainty built into it, since ‘it is an inductive process involving inference by the spectator and implication by the maker’ (80). There is, in other words, always the chance that inference and implication will not match, that expectation will be shattered by surprise.5 The expectation of the future implied in a series of shots is thereby potentially subverted by the shock of the ensuing image. There is a moment of schism in the perception of film reality; and in that schism the transparency of the medium is shattered in order to bring heightened awareness to the implications of what the spectator is actually perceiving, and to their experience of that perception. Alongside my notes on Carroll’s essay in my 1979 notebook I wrote: ‘discarded film shots on the cutting-room floor’ (Murphet, 1979b). The thought was one of total imaginative fancy: I wanted to ‘rescue’ all those shots that had ended up rejected on the cutting-room floor. These rejections were material evidence of the particle level at which film operated on its way to being crafted into a cohesive work of art. They were the evidential remainders that disproved the illusion of continuity in a film. More than that, at an existential level, these discarded moments seemed to me evidence of a kind of resistant subjectivity, fighting against the reduction of ‘character’ into sign. For the actors involved, they may well have been moments in which they themselves felt most alive, most authentic in their performances. Their subjective feelings counted for little in the technological process of the cinematic machine.

5 As an example, Carroll cites Charles Chaplin’s use of this uncertain match when The Tramp, who at first appears to us to be vomiting over the railings of a ship at sea is later revealed to be laughing uncontrollably.

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I could sense in film, more clearly than in theatre, the tension that operates between, on the one hand, the cohesive forces of narrative and the illusion of reality, and, on the other, the entropic force of the particles of film that held their own power, and that threatened always to out-manoeuvre the fictional narrative for the spectator’s attention. This in turn fed my own artistic desire to hold onto faint suggestions of narrative, an illusion of reality, and a sense of character, the better to subvert and dismantle them. It was a deconstructive urge on my part: to dis-member a film (or a genre of film) into its constituent parts, and to ‘re-member’ them6 into an act of theatre. It arose directly from my personal ongoing attempt to reconstitute a functional continuity of sorts into my own daily living, despite the constantly dislocating episodes of my epileptic condition. Death was uppermost in my mind as I was conceiving of the play: not death as a final exit from life, but as a recurrent series of temporary mini-exits – ‘les petites morts’ is the French colloquial expression for epilepsy. When Man A stares out into the black hole of the auditorium at the start of Quick Death, he is looking at the threat of death; but in the 2015 version, the connection with epilepsy is established when, a moment later, at the climax of the first direct threat encountered by Man A, Woman A appears in the throes of a convulsion: 7. Man A stands in the SR doorway – shirts, pants, coats, hats. 8. Man A stands in space looking out.

Man B stands in the SL doorway – shirts, pants, coats, hats. Man B enters with bag, stands next to him.

Lights

Man B: Excuse the casual entrance … the bell didn’t answer. Man A: Convenient. Man B: We’ve met before haven’t we? Man A: No … no I don’t think so.

B/O Lights

B/O

6 I borrow the term from Paul Carter who writes of how ‘the stories, ideas, locations and materials’ that have been ‘dismembered’ within the first stage of creative research ‘are put back together, but re-membered, in a way that is new’ (Carter, 2004, 11).

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Woman A then appears: 11. Woman A standing alone in spotlight against wall, still for a second. Then begins tossing incessantly from one side to another – a seizure? Extended longer than expected. 12. Woman A stands at the window. [Silence] She stands. [Silence] She begins to pace. Man A enters into SL doorway. Watches her with his strange focus.7 Does not move.

Electrical sounds return at full volume

Lights

B/O Lights

The sound of her footsteps on the bare boards They continue in the darkness

B/O

murphet, 2015a: 3–4

I noted in my program note for the 2015 La Mama production that ‘the subject would need to be Death, since epilepsy is recurring death constantly returned from, death by instalments’ (Murphet, 2015c). The note continued: Death – the fear of death – keeps us alive: it is one of those survival drives that have caused evolutionary change. But I fear that we have taken this deep-seated recognition of our fate to an uncontrollable degree of fascination. We are culturally obsessed with death in our imaginations, our media and our political and social behaviour: so much so that to our horror the machine of death now constrains us in so many ways from fully living (2015c). 7 At a medical level, the ‘strange focus’ with which Man A watches her suggests the ‘aura’ of disconnectedness that often precedes the onset of a seizure, or remains after the convulsions have levelled out.

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In the penultimate sequence of my 2015 production, I sought to take Man A, within the confines of the small, dimly lit theatre, to the limit of his endurance in facing up to his fear of ‘the machine of death’: Man A runs in. Scared and in desperate flight. In the semi-dark he runs back and forth through the space. Bouncing off the walls. Trying to find a way out. He can no longer escape out the back doors. A man trapped. Until finally, he is forced again to approach the black hole (2015a, 38). The machine of death has existential dimensions but its threat of dominating our lives arises from our cultural preoccupation with its seemingly limitless manifestations: through murder, suicide, assassination, war and the recent fascination with various causes of pathological fatality. The combination of an obsession with the death drive and a fascination with the possibilities of filmic language led me inevitably to film noir. My first introduction to this film genre had come through the French New Wave, in particular the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Chabrol. These directors wrought into films of mystery and suspense a superbly playful yet utterly serious awareness of the games and rituals of murder and death that developed at first in the French film noir of the 1940s and was brought to a peak in the American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. The content of the American noir movies was fixated upon the threshold between life and

Illustration 14

The recurring machine of death (1). Performers: Emma Smith, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

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Illustration 15

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The recurring machine of death (2). Performers: Emma Smith, Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

death, between possession and loss, and between the fear of the known and terror at the unknown. This conceptual territory perfectly matched my preoccupations in Quick Death. Indeed, many of the film titles suggest their fascination with, desire for and terror at the ‘black hole’ facing an individual: Whirlpool, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Detour, Pitfall, The Narrow Margin, The Street with no Name, Darkness at the Top of the Stairs, A Kiss Before Dying. The plot of a film noir tends to follow a generic pattern and the fascination lies in the ways in which the pattern varies for each protagonist. An ordinary man (or woman, though usually a man) is drawn inexorably into a black hole of murder, crime and illicit desire by forces that are at first seemingly outside his/her control but that may in the process reveal inner wounds and/or character flaws. However, arguably the most imaginative aspect of the genre, certainly its strongest influence upon subsequent film, was the stylistic choices made with which to depict the fairly simple plots. The conceptual binaries of death/ life, possession/loss and known/unknown were rendered in black and white tones that featured stark contrasts of dark and light, within settings that swung from empty open roads or parking lots, to smoke-filled interrogation rooms packed with cops, to enclosed rooms trapped behind barred windows or the shadows of venetian blinds, with nothing but a cigarette and a naked light bulb for company. I wanted to propel the victim protagonist of Quick Death, caught in the dark basement of his house, into a nightmare world with no explanation, ­confronted

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by figures whom he has never met but who appear standing next to him as he rises (awakens) from yet another fall. In sudden but inexplicable shifts, as he emerges from yet another blackout, he finds himself carrying a gun and clothed in the requisite grey suit jacket and black fedora of the movie private eye, as he turns to face an enemy who dresses exactly the same. He is, in other words, thrust into the zone of film noir, but in a zone of suspense that has no plot and no resolution. No specific film is referenced; rather Man A (named Raymond after Raymond Chandler) is entangled in a net of what Slavoj Zizek has called ‘sinthoms’ from across the range of the genre. Zizek describes a ‘sinthom’ as ‘the same visual or other motif that insists, imposing itself through an uncanny compulsion and repeating itself from one film to another, in totally different narrative contexts’ (Zizek, 1992, 199). All the motifs in Quick Death roll through repeatedly, and with each repetition new elements are added and more complex patterns of combination and reincorporation develop: the tough man, the femme fatale, the girlfriend who ends up as corrupt as the others, guns, wrapped packages, handshakes, wounds, kisses, cigarettes, suitcases filled with money or clothing, and the action of dying and falling to the limit. Man A is implicated in various criminal plots that are abandoned almost as soon as they are mentioned. There are snatches of dialogue, monologue and overheard conversations that are familiar but have no context in the development of a cohesive narrative. They are signs that Zizek might describe as having ‘no determinate meaning; [they] just give body, in [their] repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment’ (199.), or in this context excessive pain. ‘The effect is mesmerising and confusing,’ Mark Minchinton wrote in response to the 1981 production in Melbourne, ‘as multiple narratives are built up, decomposed and recomposed’ (1996, 128). As a writer, I was bombarding the protagonist with relentless narratives, actions, images and states of being as a form of bodily and mental reshaping until he can no longer distinguish between who he thinks he is, and how he is being viewed and treated. He becomes victim to a vindictive cultural saturation that seeks to destroy his self-authenticity. After one particularly intense barrage of orders, seductions, shootings and fallings, Man A staggers to his feet and finds himself, as the male voice-over describes it, walking and talking like the hoodlum archetype in noir: MV/O: He remembers when he was growing up, going to see Richard Widmark play Tommy Udo in ‘Kiss of Death.’ He went a dozen times. He can’t recall the plot, what happened to Udo in the end. He remembers only the man in his locale. His posture, walk, body language, slang and style of dress. And himself in the cinema, drinking it all in (2015a, 13).

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Illustration 16

Film noir image (1). Performers: Kevin Kiernan-Molloy, James Cook, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

Illustration 17

Film noir image (2). Performers: Naomi Rukavina, Emma Smith, James Cook, Quick Death, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

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Throughout the twentieth century, avant-garde modernist art sought ways of bringing the artistic medium into the foreground of the work; in order to ‘force an audience,’ in Francisco Varela’s words, ‘to look at the medium instead of looking through it and denying its existence’ (2000, 009). With epilepsy as my model, the particularity of the task I undertook was to counteract the flow of theatre by throwing against its direct current of communication an alternate current that would resist that familiar flow. The materials of theatre were foregrounded as elements in the cultural manipulation of the individual. In contrast to their normal position as a background reality to the fiction being represented, in Quick Death they interrupt the spectator’s focus on whatever fiction may be glimpsed in between the blackouts. As French cultural commentator, Paul Virilio puts it in his discussion of epilepsy in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, the experience of the epileptic is not one of expected forward flow, it is ‘suspension pure and simple, […] disappearance and effective reappearance of the real, departure from duration’ (1991, 22). In fact, for a grand-mal epileptic, the periods of disappearance are as much part of reality as the world that re-emerges once the seizure has finished. In a paradoxical way, the intense muscular spasms during a seizure mean that, despite being unconscious, the epileptic is more active physically than in his/her normal state. Similarly, the blackouts within Quick Death are part of its reality, and should be as integral to the reality onstage as the glimpses of possible ­narrative that emerge into the light. Their effect may provoke in the spectator a heightened awareness of theatre in a state of seizure, but it may equally cause a degree of personal disorientation about how to look at and receive actionimages that are in a constant state of disappearance. Mark Minchinton noted that the ‘conscious use and subversion of theatrical and filmic tropes and the mechanisms of staging and representation’ in Quick Death provoked in him a concern with ‘“here and nowness,” presentation, “surface,” and intensive states of being’ (1996, 128). This discomfort induces at best a kind of hyper-sensory awareness that approximates the over-charged state of the epileptic: extreme, panicky, out of control but highly sensitised to all sights and sounds. Reality as rendered through cultural mediation is lost; then a new reality is re-formed with fresh intensity. ‘The voices and actions of the actors are hollowed out,’ Minchinton wrote, ‘so that they belong to no-one in particular; the actions and words clearly move and speak them, not the reverse’ (1996, 128). There is an odd correlation here to the performing figures in Richard Foreman’s Lava who are ‘spoken’ by the offstage words of The Voice, and moved by a series of actions that are clearly not rationally motivated. Nevertheless, it is my contention that in the crucible of a theatre space, the collision of the deliberately constructed cultural cliches with the energy of live

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human performance promises some resurgence of the human spirit. ‘Live ­performance, the movement of bodies in an empty space, exhausts the glamour of cinema, pushes it until the spell breaks,’ Andrew Fuhrmann contended, in his response to the hyper-extended, and more violently physical version of the play in 2015; ‘and in the aftermath we sense the possibility of something new, something beyond the serried repetitions of the silver screen’ (2016, 44). Within this possibility exists the promise that lies within the unstable project of late-modernist theatre. 3

Scenic Writing: Slow Love

In Slow Love, I again turned to film and literature, this time for my sources of the cultural expression of Romance. I conceived of Romance as the ‘machine’ of love, within which the unadorned and fragile emotion of love struggles to survive. In 1983, I read Denis de Rougemont’s text, Love in the Western World (1983), and was intrigued by his argument that the concept of anarchic, unappeasable romantic passion, which arose in medieval troubadour poetry, has developed into a powerful cultural myth in which passion lives only for passion and finds its consummation only in death. Within this powerful myth, based upon the need for the constant satisfaction of ever-insatiable desire, how can love survive that needs (slow) time to mature and deepen? I drew the opening image of the play from a key moment in the film, The Letter (directed by William Wyler, 1940), starring Bette Davis. It is an image of a woman standing on the veranda of a colonial house, looking out, her body and expression filled with an unnameable longing. In the movie, Bette Davis’ character was facing the surrounding tropical jungle that represented what she most feared and desired, and into which she would walk towards her death at the end of the movie. In Slow Love, Woman 1 is facing into the darkness of the auditorium, waiting for something to arrive to break the tedium of her life. She cries out to someone as yet unknown: Jesus, George, Jesus, I’ve got so much inside me dyin’ to bust out and I’m fucked if I know where to begin’. murphet, 1983, 1

The Letter still holds for me all the romantic tension – desire, loss, impatience, yearning, hatred, fear and inner dignity – that gives such power to the better examples of filmic romantic melodrama. Bette Davis, stuck between the conventions of the British colonial house and the exciting horror of the tropical

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jungle, heading towards an ending that can only be fatal, infuses her entrapped character with a life and a nervous energy far too large for the tawdry little murder plot she is involved with. The Woman in Slow Love is similarly entrapped, but I sought to invest the play with an open-ended sense of narrative profusion. Whereas Quick Death was intended as a demolition of narrative possibility, Slow Love would be about the weaving together of multiple, possible threads of narrative. I began with no plan for its unfolding. The original process of writing it was an act of daily invention, which provided a compositional guide for the concept of a woman tracking her way through the byways of Romance with no idea where the search may take her. Woman 1 and her fellows are trapped within the one genre and the one house, the better to dramatise the restrictions of Romance itself. But the action of the play opens out into the unpredictable and the unstable, weaving restlessly in and around a light-filled house, with a veranda and two bedrooms that can be seen into from the veranda through Venetian or cane blinds. In the 1983 and 1998 productions of the play, both bedrooms could be seen in their entirety, revealing glimpses of the intimacies therein. However, in the 2015 production that I directed at La Mama, the small theatre space did not allow for full bedrooms, so we presented only the veranda, and suggested all that went on inside the house with two windows in its front wall. Windows in theatre present to the spectator portals for voyeurism, the thrilling thresholds of forbidden zones. The spectator is thus implicated as participant, drawn to watch from the dark (the auditorium) the intimate goings-on in a house of Romance. Much of the magnetic energy generated by the surface narrative of film romances also turns upon this voyeuristic fantasy; we are implicated as spectators, waiting upon whatever intimate, hopefully illicit detail may be revealed next. In seeking to implicate both writer and spectator in the private proceedings of the fiction, I drew upon a model of novelistic perception charted by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet was a key figure in the New Novel in France during the same decades as the French New Wave film. His two early novels, The Erasers (1953) and The Voyeur (1955) were on my mind as I was sorting out the implications of death and epilepsy for Quick Death. Both these novels are undergirded by the presence of crime and mortality, but the phenomenological presence of the writing itself denies the reader the familiar release offered in the plot-dominated thriller genre. His novel Jealousy (1957) was the most significant source-model for writing Slow Love, which covers the same territory of desire, obsession, jealousy and death. In Jealousy, the plot accumulates through the detail of precisely described and obsessively repeated perceptions of object, gesture and action:

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Illustration 18

Windows and the voyeur (1). Performers: James Cook, Naomi Rukavina, Slow Love, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

Illustration 19

Windows and the voyeur (2). Performers: James Cook, Emma Smith, Slow Love, La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, 2015

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The second window, which looks south like this third one, is nearer the southwest corner of the house; it too is wide open. Through it can be seen the side of the dressing-table, the edge of the mirror, the left profile of the face, the loose hair which hangs over the shoulder, and the left arm which is bent back to reach the right half of the hair. Since the base of the neck is bent diagonally to the right, the face is slightly turned towards the window. robbe-grillet, 1994, 67

The sharp focus upon these perceptions of the phenomenal world gives each phenomenon its own individual shape and power, as if they are lit with full light, which bestows them with an undeniable clarity. The perceptions, accumulating with erotic obsession, seem to emerge from an omniscient narrative ‘voice’ that is placed outside the characters involved. However, the obsessive voice of detail is eventually revealed as the traumatically jealous husband, who is the unseen but implicated narrator. If one is to thread together the elements into some form of narrative pattern (and this task is handed to the reader, ­rather than being the possession of the writer), the specific quality of each ­phenomenon must first receive its due. The force of narration comes from the particularity of the objects and actions observed, and any particular image could be repeated multiple times throughout the circuitously inescapable network of the novel. As in film, there is a constant tension between the inexorably forward-moving arc of the plot and the momentary power of each particle. The reader becomes aware not just of the semiotic function that a detail of observation fulfils in an unfolding story, but of its phenomenal presence, and of the vertiginous compositional skill with which the web is being spun by the obsessed narrator, who is himself entrapped by the consuming jealousy that determines both the scope and the angle of his perception. As Robbe-Grillet has described it, once he has etched the particularity of the imagery that will circulate through the text, the task facing him is a compositional one: The breaks of cutting, the repetitions of scene, the contradictions, the characters suddenly paralysed as in amateur photographs afford this perpetual present all its force, all its violence. It is, then, no longer a question of the nature of images but of their composition. robbe-grillet, 1965, 149

He argues that he is borrowing these techniques from ‘cinematic structures’ (149); and it is clear that he is drawing also from photography and theatre in his

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description of the techniques he uses. He was also involved with the French New Wave cinema, writing the script for Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1960), and writing and directing several films himself. Each of these films crafts a singularly distinctive grammar of film shooting and composition. Robbe-Grillet’s intention to sustain the action in a ‘perpetual present’ was attuned in the case of Slow Love to the ‘slow’ unfolding of love in contrast to the suddenness of death inherent to the epileptic experience in Quick Death. In writing Slow Love I sought to frame each image as a photograph or a film may do. My aim is to encourage each spectator to seek not only the meaning of an image (i.e. its immediate connection to the image preceding and succeeding it) but its unique associations in the storehouse of his/her cultural unconscious. My preoccupation is with the potentiality of each image in its own right, ‘violently’ resisting its forward movement, before it disappears to become part of the gradually accumulating pattern of the show in the mind of each spectator. Shorter images have to be framed perfectly to outlast their brief moment onstage. Blackouts have to be timed so that they cut into and against the flow of action, framing with precision the images that emerge momentarily into the light. Each emerging image has to be lit with precise focal range, sometimes throwing the viewer’s attention in close to the detail of hands on a table, for example: 56.

Lights

M1 and W2 have gone.

M2 sits at SR table watching as W1 W1 stands at SR table bandages his hand leaning over M2 and bandaging his hand Eventually she sits in the other chair. She places her upstage hand on the table and lets the other hang beside her.

He places his upstage hand on the table and lets the other hang beside him.

She relaxes. Looks out He relaxes. Looks front. out front.

B/O

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57.

Lights

The above image is repeated except that their hands have moved fractionally closer to one another.

B/O

58.

Lights

The above image is repeated except that their hands have moved fractionally closer to one another.

B/O

59.

Lights

The above image is repeated except that their hands have moved fractionally closer to one another.

V/O (M): You should know its name: “Je t’aime”

60. The above image is repeated except that their hands have moved fractionally closer to one another.

M2 turns to watch W2.

B/O Lights

W2 walks into courtyard. She is talking on the phone.

V/O (F): You don’t love me then. (M): You’re wrong. I do love you.

Pulsing music again B/O

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61.

Lights

The above image is repeated except that it is now W2 who sits with hand close to M2.

W1 is moving across the yard, talking on the phone.

M1 appears in the SL doorway.

V/O (M): You don’t love me then. (F) You’re wrong. I do love you.

B/O

murphet, 2015b, 32

At other times, the attention is shifted nervously across simultaneous activity taking place in different areas of the house or veranda. Moreover, the decisions about each image, angle, lighting, and composition of figures and objects framed by the blackouts must be attuned to shifts in mood, thought and perception that are not dependent upon a causal narrative logic. 74.

Music

W1 carrying a bottle of wine through the door. 75.

B/O M2 walking from SR towards SL door.

76.

Music

Lights B/O

Music

W2 in SL window brushing her hair. 77.

Lights

Lights

B/O M1 and M2 standing next to one another at oblique angle. M2 has 2 bags.

Music

Lights

B/O

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78.

Music

W2 standing next to W1 as she puts on her gown in the SL window. 79.

B/O M1 standing in upper window talking on phone.

80.

Music

Music

Lights

B/O M1 and W1 in doorway, physically fighting.

82.

Music

Lights B/O

Music

M2 standing in dsl spot, carrying a knife. 83.

Lights B/O

W2, sitting on edge of SR table in slip, carrying a knife. 81.

Lights

Lights

B/O W1 tearing up a letter beneath SL window.

84. W2 and M2 embracing in SL window. murphet, 2015b, 43–44

Music

Lights B/O

Music

Lights

B/O

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Denise Varney has described the text of Slow Love as an example of ‘scenic writing’ (2011, 175). She quotes Jim Carmody’s use of the term as he applies it to the work of Brecht and the French theatre director, Roger Planchon: Scenic writing made it possible to tell several different, even conflicting, stories at the same time or, as an alternative, it made it possible to present simultaneously the same narrative from a number of different points of view. carmody, 1990, 25–38, Ctd. varney, 2011, 175

The focus on ‘scenic writing’ has meant that the texts of both Quick Death and Slow Love are primarily composed of stage directions of action in space. Essentially, it is writing that was imagined from a position somewhere between an authorial attempt to render into words the images that constitute an imagined reality, and a directorial effort at setting precisely the terms of an unfolding theatrical event. The texts are intended as more than suggestive jottings for a future director to work with; these are theatre scripts that pre-imagine the theatre production, in order to provoke a director into new modes of operation. There is no need to spend time on why actions take place, as there is in naturalist drama where establishing the objectives implied by the words is a major focus for both director and actors. When a performer is caught in the culturally constructed machines of death or romance, decisions about causality and intention are taken out of the domain of individual psychology. A director does not need to be concerned with what scenic action should accompany what words, for the ‘text takes care of the what’ (Murphet, 1999b, 46). However, the questions of when, where and how – questions of rhythm, mise-en-scène and onstage/back stage practicalities – remain for each production team to answer. Slow Love and Quick Death seek to bring into equal and interdependent ­focus each element of theatrical material: words, images, light, sound and audio-visual technology. Each element runs alongside the others on partially ­autonomous ‘tracks’ of material. In writing the texts, I was faced with the pragmatic question of how to place these several tracks on the page to suggest both their singular autonomy and their apposite timing in relation to one another. I solved these compositional problems, as can be seen in the examples included, by setting the work in landscape format, dividing the page into several columns, each of which was devoted to one aspect of the performance text. After years of tedious rewriting with pencil and eraser, the advent of computer technology, with columns and tables as part of the toolkit, has inestimably aided the compositional process. It is as if what William Worthen has called the

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‘mise-en-page’8 (2005, 11) of my artistic work was waiting for computer technology to fulfil it. In my later plays, the multi-columned template adapted to reflect the nature of the project involved. In Dolores in the Department Store, for example, it tracked the four alters of a split personality within the arenas of domestic abuse and consumerist desire. In The Inhabited Woman, it tracked the barrage of various cultural technologies upon the fragile psyche of an individual woman. In The Inhabited Man, it navigated the deadly currents for the lonely security guard, catapulting him between a war-torn past that will not die and the terrors of an ongoing present he cannot handle. In each of these texts, the layout of the ‘mise-en-page’ suggests the nature of the external world threatening to split, drown or destroy the shaky subject at the centre. Slow Love provides some balance to Quick Death’s terrifying spiral into the complete destruction of the autonomous self. The danger remains for Woman 1 of submersion in the flood of the cultural bricolage of Romance, but she is not, finally, submerged. The play questions what it is like to be alive in the world if our subjectivity is merely, as Julia Kristeva has argued, ‘the hypothetical inside of an imagined container whose walls are permeable’ (1982, 1). The multiple, juxtaposed tracks in Slow Love suggest the forces waiting to permeate the container of our individuality. However, there are glimpses, too, of the ‘­inside’ of the ‘container.’ They occur in moments of stillness, when nothing appears to be taking place in the stage action: a woman stands quietly in a window looking out, a man smokes a cigarette alone in the courtyard, two women chat over wine, one brushes her hair or talks quietly on a mobile phone, a man and a woman sit at a table, not facing one another. These are times when the theatrical machine must be forced to pause, so that we can sense within its desperate functionaries the possibility of a dimension of their individuality that is in excess of the necessities of the plot. Yet, the moment that the Woman or any of her fellow participants in their romantic plot begin to speak or enact the language of love, they are entangled in a network that has been culturally shaped and commodified. Woman 1 is seeking love with little sense of the forces it may bring into play. At times, she believes that she is in control of what she imagines is her intimate private experiences, unaware that ‘the boundary fence’ between herself and the outside world is ‘never finished.’ At other times, she is lost, disoriented and distressed at how little she can control the shape of what is taking place. Her subjectivity is, in Kristeva’s words, ‘experienced as an intense ambivalence. […] It is always under threat, in an unresolved state’ (1). 8 Worthen argues that ‘by representing a relationship between writing and performance, the material properties of printed plays inevitably represent the identity of drama in the age of print: they frame the mise-en-page as a site of performance’ (2005, 11).

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But this irresoluteness, unlike the sheer terror of Quick Death, is in the end experienced, in the paradoxical terms that Kristeva recognised, as ‘exciting as well as dangerous’ (1). 4

The Language of Disintegration: Dolores in the Department Store

The central protagonist in Dolores in the Department Store is a young married woman, living in a suburban home with a child and a psychologically abusive husband. Pushed to the point of extremity, she splits into four versions of herself, and the play follows the ramifications of that split upon her psyche and her family, and tracks the original source of her psychic fragility back to a moment of sexual abuse in her childhood. The topic and the fraught central protagonist of the play had been lodged in my brain since, as a teenager, I saw the black and white movie The Three Faces of Eve (directed by Nunnally Johnson, 1957). The film was based upon a report by the two doctors who treated ‘Eve’ when she presented for attention in the early 1950s.9 The subject is the unexpected takeover of the mind of an American suburban housewife by the emergence of two new personalities or ‘faces.’ The film gained notoriety, at the time, as the first filmic treatment of a psychological condition – Multiple Personality Disorder – that had already been ­receiving criticism from the medical community.10 Multiple Personality Disorder (mpd) was finally defined in 1987, long after the first recorded case of mpd, by the American Psychiatric Association under the category of DSM-III-R: A. The existence within the person of two or more distinct personalities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self). B. At least two of these identities of personality states recurrently take full control of the person’s behavior (Ctd. Hacking, 1995, 269, note 10). I was deeply affected by Three Faces of Eve: here, ten years prior to the onset of my epilepsy, was a vision of a subject whose personality was split in a way that was out of her control. As a teenager, the prospect of multiple sides to one’s personality was both exhilarating and terrifying. However, when I came to 9 10

The two doctors wrote up their experience in a book that was the basis for the film (Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957). For a detailed coverage of the disorder, its cases, and its detractors see Hacking, 1995.

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write the play, thirty-five years later, the process was not an easy one. Unlike the relatively rapid, impulsive process of daily invention that had given rise to the texts of Quick Death and especially Slow Love, written in a month, Dolores in the Department Store took me years to write. It went through upward of ten drafts before it reached its final form. I was not rewriting to perfect the tone and style of an early version that had lain the groundwork for what was to come; I was working into the unknown throughout. Each new draft involved a complete rewrite in response to my realisation that I had not yet found what I was writing about. The central protagonist in this project has a social, psychological and medical context that is denied the central figures in Quick Death and Slow Love. She is not a theatrical construct; I did not have the license to build her story from scratch as in the earlier plays; she already had a history of sorts. Her model, ‘Eve,’ is but one of several mpd sufferers whose cases made their way into book and film form during the 1950s and 1960s. The film tells ‘the story of Eve’ in realistic detail; it follows the genre of the biopic, complete with an introduction by the well-known journalist, Alistair Cook, exhorting us to take it as a true account. I knew from the outset that this would not be my approach. My aim was to make manifest the fragmented personality states in the very language with which each expresses her ‘pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self’ (269). In other words, I would apply the pressure of fragmentation that overtakes my suffering protagonist by fragmenting the languages of the play, subverting conventional narration through a process of disjunction. I tried in the early drafts to make use of the epileptic writing style I had developed in Quick Death. Lights on in small room. Man enters carrying some papers. Puts them on table. Rubs his temples. Sits at computer. Begins typing … [and etc]

Blackout

Lights on Woman 1 who sits up and smiles. One foot crosses the other and begins slow, rocking motion. She leans forward and scratches her leg just below the knee. Stands. […] Inhales air as if it is cigarette smoke. … [and etc.]

Blackout.

murphet, 1993

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However, as my understanding of the complexity of the interweave between inner and outer dimensions deepened, the subject needed the power of speech to develop subtleties of thought and feeling that physical action alone could not suggest. Dolores in the Department Store was the result of thinking through a life that was not my own. The rhythms and composition of the language attempted to reflect this process of ‘thinking through.’ The characters did not speak with an easeful articulacy: the struggle to speak, to find the right word or phrase was both mine, as a writer charting unknown psychological territory, and theirs, as they fought to deal with an emerging experience that put them out of their depth. The tentative process of finding the words to express ‘thinking through’ can be seen in an internal monologue, written early in my process, which finally accompanied the entry of Dolores 1 – a long and slow entry by a woman who senses that she is on the threshold of some irreversible change, not knowing what that may be. I had gathered references to widely disparate people, places, events and realms of thought that shared a similarly liminal state of existence. The challenge remained as to how to weave these references together in a way that was sensitive to both her fragility and to the poetic interconnection that may give meaning to her incipient state of fragmentation. The result is a text that drew from both a simple, ballad-like enumeration of events and a prayerlike confessional. It remains as a premonition of what is about to unfold; her voice in this is unlike her speaking voice throughout the remainder of the play. Each of the five stanzas begins with the tentative annunciation: ‘I, ­Dolores.’ The last stanza, below, takes her to the point of implosion: I, Dolores. At the edge of the world as if watching a film through the mist. The spy seen through the goldfish bowl. The passenger in the seat of that wrecked car. The deserted country station at night. The outline of the murder victim on the footpath. The cancelled phone call still alive on the line. The hypnotised patient when the hypnotist’s dead. The threshold of the mirror. The threshold. The shadow. The echo.

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The gap between ‘the’ and ‘echo.’ The comma, the colon, the dash, the bracket. ‘The gaping holes in the black earth of the rose beds bordering the drive.’11 I, Dolores. Swollen. murphet, 2000, 2

From early in my writing process I had been haunted by a very short scene in The Three Faces of Eve that depicted a heated argument between Eve White and her confused and harassed husband when he discovers he has been inexplicably charged for a dress from the local department store. Eve White cannot remember the purchase because it was her headstrong ‘alter’ Eve Black who had bought it. I tried to imagine the heightened state of the husband, dealing with a wife multiplying before his eyes. In the movie, the sheer virtuosic energy of Joanne Woodward in the title role reduced her husband to alternating bursts of inadequate rage and apoplectic implosion. I sought to render his internal convulsions into language that could provide an energetic intensity to match her unpredictability; a ‘nervous’ performance language, in Debra Pollock’s taxonomy (1998, 90), shattering linguistic coherence, and the separation between character and performer: Frank: Honest to god honest to fucking god fuck me you know fuck me if I know what’s going on I’m beside myself I’m telling you he shakes his head vigorously beside myself with well what can I call it shrugging his shoulders worry anger confusion doubt rage Sometimes pointing a jabbing finger sometimes I repeat sometimes I think emphasising I am the one who’s going nuts thrusts finger at temple Ha cynically ha Fuck me Fuck me shaking Fuck my head What am I supposed to Give a man a getting more agitated look at this holding out the dress look at it You’ve scooped the pool this time Dolores this really takes the throwing the dress on to the floor first it’s the stockings then it’s the red shoes third it’s the gloves now it’s a dress red dress red red dress How am I just how am I how are we where’s the money coming it’s not as if you ever wear I mean if only if only Dolly so why are 11

A line quoted from Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957, 1.

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you what am I paying for […] what do you think just what do you think I’m made of just what is going on –.

murphet, 2000, 27

Something else nagged at me about the short scene in the movie: it suggested a broader social and cultural context for Multiple Personality Disorder, widening the scope of the drama beyond the domestic, psychological realm. In 1996, three years after beginning writing the project, I read an article by cultural theorist, Hillel Schwartz about the simultaneous emergence of the ­department store at the end of the nineteenth-century and the first appearance of the psychological condition known as kleptomania (Schwartz, 1989). Schwartz outlines cases from the period when well-dressed middle-class ­women, denied access to disposable money by their husbands, would become entranced with the goods on open display in the department store and steal items they desired without being consciously aware they were doing so. It was as if an alternative side of their personality had taken over, so that the act of purchase, or in many cases theft, was not under their control. This wider context extended my ongoing fascination with the effect of cultural mediation upon subjectivity, and I developed a scene dramatising the seductive power of targeted advertising and the irresistible charm of the newly established shrine of capitalist allure, the department store. This scene, ‘In the Department Store,’ became a central sequence in the final production. As ­Dolores 2, the passionate alter always open to seduction, is drawn towards a hovering red dress, two speeches,12 chanted by two store attendants, with the accompaniment of appropriate muzak, are interwoven into a hypnotic spell cast over her. Attendant One: Our store is a world apart, ladies. A dream world. The Palace of Dreams. Here you may fall in love with objects of fancy. Here you can find sanctuary in changing rooms, restrooms, tearooms. Our store makes every effort to observe the boundaries between the utilitarian and the luxurious, the vital and the trivial. It is suffused with sensuality. Note the mirrors and the cornucopia mouldings on the walls and ceilings. They expand the horizons of your desire, […] your natural propinquity for trance and for transformation and for theft. 12

Many of the turns of phrase in the first of these speeches echoed Schwartz’s descriptive passages.

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Attendant Two: Shoes and ribbons and partyforks and lipstick and turnip cutters and gloves and silk and sealing tape and stilettos and boiled sweets and shoes, and perfume and silk and gardening implements and books by Jackie Collins and dentorub and cornholders and screws and silk, and mousetraps and curtains and bells and shoes and bridges and combs and roses and silk and cakes and candles and knives and little address books with attached pencils and horse collars and porcelain pots and silk underwear and […] Tim Tams and tattoos and silk – (2000, 18). The central challenge that faced me throughout all the versions of the text that I wrote remained how to write the fragmented, split, multiple personality. Not until I came to understand and appreciate the materials I would be working with in my original production of the text did the nature of the writing become clear to me, and was I able to establish its particular theatrical form. In describing the central figure of Dolores, Denise Varney cites ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary multiple subject, whose “libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities” disperse across planes of possibility, eluding the laws of the family and the state that bear down on them’ (2011, 188. In-text quote: Deleuze and Guattari, 1994a, 32–34). As a writer, my search was for ‘multiplicities’ of language register that could elude the conventions of narrative realism and coherence, thereby rendering how the ‘libidinal, unconscious, molecular’ condition of Dolores fractured the sense of a stable subjectivity and broke open the nuclear family and questioned social mores. I was, however, frustrated for years in finding the way of translating her state into a textual form. How could I make manifest in performance the multiplicity of this woman? I wanted to steer away from depending upon the magnetism of one actress’ performance, as the film had done. For a long time, in fact, I tried to imagine the central protagonist as character-less. I thought I could suggest the disintegration of personality by robbing the woman of a singular identity, without any overt display of emotional depth or verbal articulacy by the various ‘alters’ either singly or in interaction. I went so far as to rob her of physical substance: I wrote different versions of the text for radio and for puppetry, two essentially disembodied media. In 1998, Jenny Kemp and I worked on a treatment of a puppetry version for Handspan Puppetry Theatre13 that seemed to open potentially fruitful possibilities. In the end, however, it became 13

Presented as a showing for invited audience at the Handspan Theatre space in Melbourne in 1998.

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clear that the attempt to take from the woman her phenomenal substance was exactly what was not needed. It was the substantiality of an individual that was at stake, eliciting the shock, the agony, the psychological criticality, the physical exhaustion and, yes, even the playfulness of her many alters. I realised that her individuality and the assault upon that individuality by the presence of her multiplicities were best represented iconically through the bodies of real women as performers. I discovered the form for Dolores in the Department Store when the opportunity arose to direct the text with a large group of acting and design students at the Victorian College of the Arts (vca) in Melbourne.14 I could cast multiple women in the role, and thereby re-imagine the manifestation of the split self as the never-ending, sinuous, entwining struggle of multiple beings. These multiple selves would be competing not for unilateral control of one body, but for dominance, presence, attention, and ultimately a means of co-survival in a finely balanced multilateral existence. Instead of multiple identities within one, there would be poly-vocality and poly-corporeality as one. I could bring to the surface the state of internal dissolution that I imagined existing just beneath the thinly stretched ‘mask’ of any one identity. Instead of the gaps and blackouts that caused disjunction in Slow Love, the rhythm of the production would be based on long extended scenes within which the woman was subjected to the incessant and frighteningly present onslaught of psychic fragmentation. The suspense would arise not from unpredictable disappearance and emergence from an epileptic blackout, but from the constant visible threat of invasion by one or more competing alters. Unlike the film, the alters in my play did not disappear when another appeared but remained to deal with the consequences. The text of Dolores in the Department Store was radically rewritten during rehearsals to take advantage of the production opportunities offered. I could now write from four separate points of view, albeit they were all emanating from the same body and mind. Some of the text could follow the form of familiar dialogue, but this time between aspects of the one figure, eliciting a dialogic encounter in which each participant begins from an entirely different premise, an entirely different sense of the objective driving their action, and is unable to shift their objective or their preoccupation to interact meaningfully with the 14

There were two productions at the vca. The first was presented as part of a season entitled Splitting, in 1999 at Grant Street Theatre, Melbourne. The other play in the season was an adaptation I wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For the second production, Dolores in the Department Store was presented on its own in March 2000, at Grant Street Theatre.

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others. An example is the first emergence of the alters, at a seemingly unstressed moment when Dolores 1 is engaged in the mundane activity of ironing a shirt for her husband, Frank. dol 1 (ironing): On and on and on till tomorrow dol 2 (making a grab for the iron): Or till time stops and ironing is no more. dol 1: On and on and oh no its still there that damn spot. dol 2: Watch your language Dolores! dol 1 (looking at a stain): It will not come out no matter how hard I rub. dol 2: t hese words i swear are not mine. i would not say these words. dol 1: It’s so obvious, look at it Dolores, stuck right in the middle of the blouse for all to see. What will they think? What will they say to themselves? That I’m that I’m…what’s the word?! dol 2: I can’t even think of the word now. can she? dol 1: Can’t ask Frank. He already thinks I’m…. you know, Dolores, That word--dol 3: Say it Dolores…. dol 2: Crazy. He thinks you’re crazy, baby. He doesn’t know a thing. dol 1: Oh that damn damn spot. dol 3: Sitting around the chess board. Me with the pawn. Remember. dol 1: Tried the Lux and the Solvol and the Preen and the White King. dol 2 (sings): ‘Crazy for you …’ dol 1: What was that? Feeling… dol 3: Daddy shaking the Black Queen in my face, dol 3: His face was so ugly / dol 2: His face is so ugly. dol 1: Guilty, yes, that’s the word. Guilty (2000, 6. Caps in original).

The rehearsals for Dolores in the Department Store enabled me to discover a language for my ‘multiple subject,’ a language of disintegration and dispersal rather than coherence. This was aided in no small way by the talent and bravery of the four women playing Dolores and her alters, but also by the work of my associate director, Leisa Shelton, the director of movement for the production. Shelton choreographed stage images that responded to the multiple linguistic forms and voices in the text. In turn, as I watched her at work, I was stimulated to write new text that may support the physical work they were producing.

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Illustration 20 The four multiples. Performers: Angus Grant, Alice McConnell, Catharine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Jodie Harris, Dolores in the Department Store, Grant St. Theatre, Melbourne, 2000

The process became more complex later in the text when the alters had fully emerged and had established their own mode of speaking and thinking. As they make their way up the stairs to the doctor’s surgery where they (one of them) will finally be able to voice the childhood incident of sexual abuse that caused the first split, their tension and disagreement means that their language barely holds together as a recognisable dialogic exchange: dol 1: (this is said in a whisper as if it is too hard to say) Leave me. Leave me. Leave me. Leave me. dol 4: Edge of the Edge of the. dol 3: Who’s watching? Whose face? dol 2: Smell the. Smell it. dol 3: No I won’t. I said no. Leave me. I can do it myself. I’m going home. dol 1: Home. Edge of the. dol 4: Edge of the.

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dol 3: My finger is connected to my shoulder. dol 2: My body belongs to me. dol 3: Leave it. I said no. dol 3: Go through the door. dol 4: Do you think so? dol 2: No I won’t do that? dol 1: Or maybe. dol 3: The king can’t move into check though, can it? dol 2: No. So I won’t do that. dol 3: Not on the surface. It was all the way through. Did you see? Swamp to the centre of the earth (2000, 37).

Shelton conceived of the movement for this scene as an image of disturbed flow of alternating currents buffeting up against one another. As the various alters shadowed one another or split up around the space, the hesitancy in the language, the struggle to determine intention, the unpredictable movements, the shifts in body angle, the looks over the shoulder and the physical checks

Illustration 21

The four Dolores take over. Performers: Alice McConnell, Simon Aylott, Jodie Harris, Catharine Moore, Rita Kalnejais, Dolores in the Department Store, Grant St. Theatre, Melbourne, 2000

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and balances suggested intimately the various currents interweaving as they dealt with the inner necessity that drove them. The form of the writing fragmented the flow of language and suggested a rhythm of interruption, but it was in the process of rehearsal that the writing achieved its true formulation. In both the writing and the production of Dolores in the Department Store, I took the familiar narrative form of the old black and white movie, The Three Faces of Eve, dismembered it, and ‘re-membered’ (Carter, 2004, 11) it into a new form that aimed to shift the spectator’s perception of what happens to subjectivity imploding at the extremity of social and cultural pressures. Richard Foreman describes how he ‘twists and controls the artistic structure, so that the form and sequencing of the play itself reflects that impulsive, usually suppressed, energy of the human mental/emotional apparatus’ (Foreman, 2001, 8. Caps in original). It is, he says, an ‘isomorphic relationship between form and content’ (8). My aim in this production was to find a theatrical and linguistic form that was ‘isomorphic’ with the disintegrated state of my protagonist. According to Foreman, this uneasy concordance between form and content ‘often perplexes people about contemporary art’ (8). It is central to the project of late-modernist theatre that I explore. 5

Construction of Entanglement: The Inhabited Woman

Melbourne artist and performer, Leisa Shelton, initially conceived the idea for The Inhabited Woman. With Shelton I then developed the concept theatrically in a series of practical workshops, after which I wrote the performance text and directed the play. Shelton performed the play. It was an example of the kind of collaborative practice described by Paul Carter through a metaphor from the practice of weaving: To work collaboratively, passing the shuttle of creative vision back and forth, in a way that advance or changes the pattern, is to imagine community in terms of affiliation, rather than filiation. carter, 2004, 11

There are difficulties that arise in such collaboration, differences of opinion and process that I will address, but these are seen as the productive frictions of creativity rather than its blight. ‘It is a technique for making sense of gaps, interruptions and unpredictable crossovers’ (11), Carter writes. In order to be true to the nature of our process, I shall structure the writing on this project according to the order of its creative working method.

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The Woman in The Inhabited Woman is a housewife, like Dolores, although in contrast to Dolores she has a seemingly perfect domestic set-up: a young child she adores and a husband who is attentive and attuned to her needs. Nevertheless, she is ill at ease, dissatisfied, not overwhelmingly, but enough to drive her to escape, for a day, the physical and social confines of the home in search for a neutral place where she might have the space and time to find out who she is beyond the social roles that she plays. The play tracks her speculative search for just such a refuge. The figure of The Woman (deliberately unnamed in the text) is loosely based on the character Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1999). In the novel, Laura Brown is, like Dolores in my previous play, trapped in a 1950s social context, and many of the cultural references, particularly those concerned with the domestic zone, were drawn from that era’s familiar images of woman-as-wife. However, the treatment of the situation and the journey in The Inhabited Woman is more evidently political and philosophical in intent than Cunningham’s novel; its ­cultural references become increasingly contemporary, and the play seeks a more radical outcome than Cunningham’s objective seems to have been. The Inhabited Woman is a reflection upon one narrative thread within The Hours from a more overtly15 feminist perspective. The intentions informing The Inhabited Woman had to do with the body’s entanglement in cultural ‘determinations,’ so clearly tracked by Elin Diamond in her book, Unmaking Mimesis. For Diamond, the body ‘is inevitably “located,” tangled in a dialectic of social-sexual-historical articulations and determinations; meaning-laden, part of the perspectival space, but also temporal and ephemeral’ (1997, 104). Shelton and I sought in our production to trace the effect of being thus culturally ‘tangled’ – ‘inhabited’ – upon the body and the psyche of a late twentieth-century woman, at that period in her life when the demands of family competed with career potentiality, and thereby threatened to dismantle her sense of autonomy. Placed in the 1980s,16 in the aftermath of the second phase of feminism in the West, the challenge the play presented was political in its belief that continuing struggle was possible and necessary for such a female subject to discover her possible place within society, and the limits of her own subjectivity. However, it was also philosophical in that it problematised the nature of subjectivity itself, and sought a new definition for subjectivity within a late-capitalist society mediated by technology. I make this 15 16

I stress ‘overtly’ here because the informing project of Cunningham’s powerful interwoven narratives of three women is quite evidently written from a perspective shaped by the impact of feminism. Although many of the visual references were deliberately drawn from the 1950s.

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distinction at the outset because, without wishing to distinguish completely the informing objectives of the two artists involved, I think it is true to say that Shelton’s initial conception was largely political in intent, whilst I brought more philosophico-cultural concerns to the table, especially when I wrote the verbal text. Leisa Shelton began the project preoccupied with the role of a woman in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, when the successes of first and second-generation feminism had supposedly liberated contemporary women from the limited choices formerly open to them. As the range of choices now open to her came into conflict with the reality of the competing demands they placed upon her, the dilemma for Shelton lay in reconciling her guilt at not fulfilling the competing demands of her double role as wife/mother and career woman. This in turn led to a deep fear of loss of self-definition. She expressed the existential fear at the heart of the project as ‘a moment of fright in the middle of the night, … a startling panic that takes hold and can’t be explained’ (Shelton, 2002). The night-fright has for her two possible sources. In the first, a sense of being vulnerable to ‘the other, something unknowable beyond the windows ready to attack,’ in turn opens out to a wider ‘instability and uncertainty derived from living in a world where much is out of one’s control’ (2002). In the second, the loss of self-control causes a ‘fear of the self, [of] what one is capable of when alone in the darkness.’ The self is at the mercy of an ‘anxiety stemming from a lack of perceivable boundaries of that self, [with] external forces telling you what you are’ (2002). Following my focus in Dolores in the Department Store upon the fragmentation of subjectivity and the temptation to replace it with cultural artefacts, my interest in this project was stimulated by Shelton’s vivid ‘night-fright’ at both identity loss and the resulting vulnerability to ‘external forces telling you what you are’ (2002). What may these external forces be, I asked, and in what ways do they promise reconstitution of identity? Artistically, I was attracted by an interest we shared for discovering an alternative to conventional forms of theatrical representation in order to render the dissolution of self. We began work in an old proscenium-arch space and auditorium that was mainly used for dance performance. We did not seek at first to fix the work space imaginatively as a specific location, allowing it to act as an undefined field of action and image within which Shelton could perform physical responses to verbal and ­imagistic provocations that I provided. I drew many of the provocations from motifs that triggered my imagination in The Hours. In addition, we sourced other texts that seemed relevant to our project: for example, the novels and the life of French existential feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, and some writing from French essayist and playwright, Helene Cixous. We were exploring, to begin

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with, the sense of being absent from the centre of one’s subjectivity; and the provocations prompted Shelton to approach the space in ways such as: – In a dream-like state – unaware of where you are, floating on a wave of feeling – As if hit by a barrage of business and sound like an assault on the body – In a sudden stillness, a suspension of activity – As if you are a foreign looking woman who has no one to turn to – As if walking onto a stage in a play you have to discover as you go – Like a model on a catwalk, aware of eyes that watch you – Aware of every move you make – as if looking at pictures of women in a magazine. (Murphet, 2003b). My own work was interestingly placed here: provocations such as the ones listed above (and there were many others) were intended only for use on the rehearsal floor, but they drew upon a writerly fascination, which I had gained throughout the creation of Slow Love, with rendering often ineffable states of being into words. However, on this occasion I was writing text not for performance, but in order to provoke pre-performance performance. As I read out the provocations for Shelton’s physical response, I was reminded of the physical and imagistic shorthand that constitutes the texts of Quick Death and Slow Love, but my rehearsal notes for The Inhabited Woman were never incorporated into the written text. They remain in my notebook as evidence of work that sits poised somewhere between writing and directing, since it was nothing other than a phase of directing that I was undertaking in helping to develop the performance schema. They were not unlike the notes that a director may write in preparation for directing any text, except that these workshops took place before any written text existed. In addition, Shelton and I worked in response to Cindy Sherman’s wellknown photographic sequence of herself transformed through clothing, makeup, position and setting into recognisable Hollywood genre icons. Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’ consist of eighty-four black and white photographs that were first exhibited at Metro Pictures, New York in 1980. They depict lone women with no other figures in the frame, and the deep loneliness they suggested felt appropriate as a springboard for our planned solo performance about a woman in her private self. Sherman’s careful staging of these iconic female stereotypes emphasises the part that the culture industry plays in constructing female identity, and how, in Jennifer Malkin’s words, it ‘encroaches, intrudes, forces its way in and possesses’ female subjectivity (1999, 9). Because we wished to focus on aspects of fragility and instability in female identity, our work on these images in the theatre space had as much to do with the speed of transformation between images as with the accuracy of each representation. This

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choice is reminiscent of the speed required of the performers in Quick Death and Slow Love, which sought, in the words that Arthur Danto uses to describe Cindy Sherman’s work, to ‘tease [the spectator] with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told’ (1990, 9 Ctd. Cruz, 1997, 4). Leisa Shelton brought to the project not only a series of questions, but a physical repertoire based upon both a highly-developed methodology from her training with French performer and movement coach Etienne Decroux,17 which gave her the ability to etch with precision the iconic elements of female behaviour, and an embodied knowledge that could transform her response to that behaviour into a repertoire of performance acts. As a performer, that is, she was already ‘inhabited’ by a repertoire of performance responses to the culturally constructed dominant female stereotypes that we sought to show ‘inhabiting’ the central protagonist that she played. Shelton’s performing body is highly charged with historical, social and cultural ‘habitation,’ but the task for her at this early stage of the process was to signify nothing (no dramatically engaged character) except her own presence, precisely to explore states of being in which The Woman (Shelton’s fictional other) was ‘trying to lose herself’ or having ‘trouble believing in herself’ (Murphet, 2003b). Hans-Thies Lehmann suggests that when the responsibility of representing a character is removed from a performer’s body ‘What happens is an interesting volte-face’ (2006, 96). He argues that, ‘as the body no longer demonstrates anything but itself, the turn away from a body of signification and towards a body of unmeaning gesture (dance, rhythm, grace, strength, kinetic wealth) turns out as the most extreme charging of the body with significance concerning social reality’ (96). Lehmann’s seemingly paradoxical insight is that, with the extraneous social issues of dramatic plot removed, the performing body becomes the only means through which social or cultural or historical issues can gain focus. Shelton brought to the rehearsal a rich amalgam of ‘dance, rhythm, grace, strength, kinetic wealth.’ However, in our rehearsal work at this stage, we were not trying to ‘move[s] away from a mental, intelligible structure’ (96), as Lehmann describes the intention of postdramatic theatre. Shelton was not seeking to construct a dramatic character in this early work, but neither was she being purely herself out there. In a sense, that was the point. The provocations I set and the work that ensued explored what ‘being oneself’ might entail in a culturally constructed world within which a woman might lose herself on a daily basis. The world depicted, even in this early work, did not all emanate from the absolute presence of Leisa Shelton, as engaged as that presence already was 17

For an example of Decroux’s approach to physical performance see Decroux, 1985.

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with a socio-cultural iconicity. The very nature of the provocations placed social, cultural, historical ‘determinations’ upon her and around her that pre-­ existed (in fact, prescribed) her own. Thus, in another volte-face, our work sought not the body as pre-eminent subject matter, but the disappearance (and the hoped-for reappearance) of individual identity within collective history. In response to viewing The Inhabited Woman, Melbourne writer, Sarah French described its overriding theme as ‘the dissolution of the individual [that] results in a conception of memory that is displaced from the notion of the “remembering subject” and instead represented as constructed and retained by the proliferation of cultural images of the past’ (French, 2004, 12). We consciously worked towards ways the woman’s individuality might be disrupted continuously by both inner and outer cultural and social forces that fought for control over her sense of self-definition. I began writing the performance score and verbal text for The Inhabited Woman on the landscape template that I had devised for Slow Love. With Dolores in the Department Store, the split-columned page was an image of the psychic split in need of suture. For The Inhabited Woman, by contrast, I imagined the blank page as the body and mind of a woman. Thus, the variety of texts entered across the vertical columns – other voices, sounds, tunes and a constant barrage of images and fragments of film – were here conceived not as ­simultaneous narratives, but as the constant interplay of forces entering into and thereby impacting upon the consciousness of this one individual. The following short sequence from the performance text demonstrates my attempt to juxtapose the range of personal, impersonal, external and cultural material I have been discussing. I will discuss the setting of the cube following this. This is a sequence in which at a narrative level The Woman is simply walking towards and entering her kitchen to make breakfast. However, both surface domestic activity and the coherence of a performance text itself are under ­assault through an overload of internal disturbance from external cultural images and sounds. The male voice-over is the narrative voice of an observerperspective, removed from the heat of the struggle but nevertheless implicated in her fate. This seemingly objective perspective returns several times throughout the play. It is the obsessive but uninflected voice, which I learned from Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, of the indirect (male) participant whose close observation of The Woman is also an act of possession. Perhaps it is my own voice engaged in the act of imagining her, yet another source of inhabitation. It may be a trace within my own imagination from childhood years, watching my mother at work in the kitchen, while I listened to radio detective shows and serials in which the voice-over was both a figure of mystery and a guide to the narrative. In discussing the engaged narrative voice in Raymond Chandler’s

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Action Text

Woman: I’m coming. OK I’m coming. The kitchen! How will I be in there? It’s too bright, too lucid My Magic Carpet family fridge. My Ecstasy blender. My neatly displayed cupboards and my Sayonara expresso deluxe. With that yellow wall backing it all. And in the middle of the wall the square of blue sky. The sill is dusty, I must clean it. The glass has a ripple in it. Beyond the window is space and flesh and rock and hunger and war. Is there someone in the garden? Someone beautiful. The shadow of a bird streaking across the blinding white of the neighbour’s garage. A small slug is crawling across the sill towards the sink. Is it going back down the plughole? the room is too alive.

The Woman walks along the back corridor – she does not make much headway.

Visual Text

The cube turns so that she is now walking down a side corridor towards the ­audience – we alternately see her and then not during this sequence.

Film of Simone de Beauvoir walking behind bars.

The cube turns so that it is now a front corridor, running along in front of the audience. It turns again so that she walks down and away from us.

Montage of: Lost Highway, Vertigo, Working Girl, Run Lola Run, Silence of the Lambs. On the other screen appear the following projected lines:

Film of Kim Novak cutting in and out

She likes to imagine After a short break she that she has a touch of returns fully dressed, brilliance herself, just a along the corridor and hint of it … out onto the front of the stage. This is the entrance to the kitchen.

Aural Text

A soundtrack from the movies sits behind the film montage

Kitchen sounds begin and build to the end of this sequence.

B/O

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4: the kitchen Woman: Here it is: a house, a kitchen, a woman, her husband, their child.

Once the music begins she is drawn Male Voice-over: despite herself into a When she looked in at choreographed the kitchen through movement sequence the open door it made up of houseseemed to be in wifely preparation combat mode. The positions a la the kettle growled. The 1950s. fridge snarled. A metal lid smacked the rim of its pan. The radio shrieked. The toaster was steaming with She stops dancing. desire. The breakfast Looks around. things were lined up on the table for inspection. The oranges snapped, the She walks up and Cornflakes crackled, faces the image. the milk popped. The cube turns.

A sequence projected The Crewcuts: of 1950s kitchens, Sh-Boom utensils, housewives at work, etc.

On the screen are the following projected lines: She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket, or has her hair done, if Music stops other women aren’t all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing. Visual of Cranach’s painting ‘Eve’ appears. B/O

murphet and shelton, 2003a, 11–12

novels, Fredric Jameson argues that it was indicative of ‘the omnipresence of radio culture as it resonates out into the other genres and media’ (2016, 61). More particularly, he sees its ‘structural specificity’ arising from the fact of ‘the visual presumably being always incomplete’ (61). The use of the disembodied male voice in The Inhabited Woman is intended to suggest the incompleteness of what appears visually on the surface level. There are always readings of the situation that can suggest other dimensions, even if those readings (specifically a male reading of a female state of mind) are themselves questionable and ‘always incomplete.’

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Columns three and four (visuals and sound) of the landscape text contain a profusion of borrowings from the image-bank of popular culture. In particular, I focused upon images that may haunt a woman like her, with the threatening loss of her own interiority, by insisting upon a repertoire of choices upon which she is expected to model her life: from seductive images in advertisements of housewives in the 1950s, to sleek women on the run in movies like Lost Highway (directed by David Lynch, 1997) and Vertigo (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), to women asserting power from within the confines of the system that trap them, as in The Grifters (directed by Stephen Frears, 1990). The two overarching objectives of the project (political and ontological) found a common footing in these proliferating images from film, television and advertising. Politically, we placed them so that the fragmentary images of women were disconnected from whatever narrative meaning they may have in the films, and could function as constructions of femininity inscribed by the patriarchal culture-industry: attractive or domestically happy or fragile or submissive or ­hysterical, and so on. Ontologically, under their onslaught, the Woman loses self-definition, and in panic flees the haven of the home for the unknown and dangerous terrain of a motel on the edge of town where, in Varney’s words, ‘she struggles to find a body or a language beyond hysterical iterations of the celluloid world of Kim Novak and Janet Leigh’ (2011, 196). It is a struggle for an individual authenticity that, as I have suggested, can only ever partially succeed.

Illustration 22 Why were you afraid? Performer: Leisa Shelton, The Inhabited Woman, Arts Space, Melbourne, 2003

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The set designer, Ryan Russell designed and constructed a cube three metres square, its open walls covered by opaque/transparent screens, able to be rotated on its base so that any one of the screened walls could face the audience, displaying different facets of the stage action. Upon these screens, we projected the overflowing product of an inescapable technological environment, such that the visual reception of The Woman as a live subject in performance is constantly mediated by projections of the cultural traces within which she fears she may drown. The intention was that the projected images and words should seem at times to emerge from her internal imaginative landscape and at other times from the production houses of the culture-industry impacting upon that inner landscape. It is as if, to apply the psychological metaphor, the culture is projecting onto the subject images of its own limited definition of female subjectivity. Her imagination is inexorably permeated by technological product; there is no possibility of a carte blanche, uninhabited state of being. This is her dilemma both sociologically and existentially. She leaves her domestic environment in the hope that she can find room for her authentic self to re-emerge; but even after her somewhat romantic escape to the neutrality of a motel room, she exists still within the determinations of projected image and sound. In entering the motel room, that is to say, she is still entering the rotating cube, its internal setting has changed, but its screens are similarly crowded with images and words. As I write about this process from the vantage point of hindsight, it may read as if all the images and sounds crowding the theatrical space were fulfilling a theoretically comprehensive artistic intention. In practice, however, the suggestive potentialities of the screens and the projections upon them only developed as we pushed and pulled the cube around on its axis and discovered the effect of the external visual information upon our perception of the woman inside. The multiple screens presented me with the opportunity to develop my ongoing fascination with the conceptual interrelationship between film and theatre. The dramaturgies of Quick Death and Slow Love were indebted both to the formal elements of film noir and film melodrama, and to the grammar of film and film editing, as outlined by Noel Carroll (1979). However, in these early works I had not sought to attempt a collage of the two media: film was referenced but never present as a medium. This was largely due to my dissatisfaction with theatre productions I had witnessed that used film and video footage as a means of adding a patina of contemporaneity to a plot that otherwise didn’t require it. In The Inhabited Woman, we planned it so that the use of audio-visuals was central to the thematic project we had undertaken: acting as spurs to her action, or reminders of her fears and obsessions, or the never-ending ‘noise’ of

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her culture that she sought to escape. All aspects of the production were focused upon and through the central female protagonist. As Varney noted, she ‘is not a multiple personality like Dolores, but her psyche is represented in a multi-modal form […] and is rendered discontinuous with the everyday through the cinematic, musical, visual and other means through which her subjectivity is elaborated onstage’ (2011, 194–195). The visual images were projected upon her body or upon the screens that surrounded her; the amplified voices were for the most part her own thoughts triggering shifts in her physical engagement, or those of the absent male narrator touching on material that detailed her inner life; the revolving cube was a shell that both entrapped and framed her body, spinning to reveal different perspectives. Her fight to escape the cube/room was her fight to escape the limitations society and its culture placed upon her subjectivity. The onslaught of other media upon her intensely responsive body manifested Shelton’s original night-terror of ‘something unknowable […] ready to attack’ (2002). 6

Writing Invasion: The Inhabited Man

The Inhabited Man developed from an idea I had conceived many years before and that had originated in a personal experience. It is about war and surveillance, and in turn the loss of self that results from the damage that each has done / does to the central male protagonist. The central protagonist, Leo Bone, a veteran of the Australian Army Corps in the Vietnam War, now lives a secluded life as a night security guard for The Springs Motel in the suburbs of a large city. Aged 58, he suffers from a comprehensive list of wounds both physical and psychological received from the war. As he describes it: Leo: One leg missing in action: buried with honours on the field of battle. Heart started failing to report for duty some time back. Liver organ assessed as dysfunctional by civilian medic. Skin cells responded less than favourably to chemical defoliants. In addition, sleeplessness, social shyness, failed marriage, failed fatherhood, regret, shame, memories involuntary but continuous. Oh and recent severe rotting in the gut region (2008: 26). The play follows Leo’s final dark night of the soul as he attempts to discover what is taking place in Cabin 7 at the motel, occupied by a youngish man and woman who are finally revealed building a terrorist bomb. The revelation comes too late for Leo, who dies as the bomb explodes. His one achievement is

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that, just before the fatal explosion, he is finally able to articulate to himself (and to us) the ridiculous strategic mistake in the Vietnam campaign that resulted in his leg being blown off by a mine. His achievement is pyrrhic: the flash of clear memory is outbalanced by the tragic result of his blindness to what is taking place in the motel under his nose. In 1986, cultural theorist, Paul Virilio wrote in his prescient book War and Cinema that ‘alongside the “war machine,” there has always existed an ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) “watching machine” capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders, with a visual perspective on the military action underway’ (2009, 14). He argued that this hidden surveillance technology has come to define our lives, so that ‘[s]eeing and foreseeing […] merge so closely that the actual can no longer be distinguished from the potential’ (14). It is exactly this confusion between the phenomena of actual reality and the potential threat of the unforeseen that haunts Leo Bone, the inhabited man, throughout the play. It is a haunting provoked by a technology that is either beyond his understanding, or eludes his knowledge or is out of his control. The central action of the drama is frustrated surveillance, but the attempts at surveillance range in focus from past memories to present dangers to future possibilities. As the military action at its source suggests, The Inhabited Man confronts socio-political issues more directly than any of my previous projects. The Inhabited Woman has at its heart a concern with the politics of gender and subjectivity. It is not, however, attached to a specific historical event in the way that The Inhabited Man references the Vietnam War. The idea for the project arose from a sense of personal guilt that I have been carrying since the age of eighteen, when I had been conscripted into the Australian army to fight in the Vietnam War. I was violently opposed to that war politically; and at a psychological level, mentally unable to imagine firing a rifle at someone who was not my enemy. I did all that I could to avoid military service, including applying for conscientious objector status. In the end, I found a way of failing the medical examination and my conscription was dismissed. I knew, however, that someone would have been drafted in my place; and the thought of that man dying or enduring a life of suffering and trauma that could have been mine has been a nagging source of guilt ever since. I did not, however, wish to write an historical drama about ‘our boys’ or even ‘our boy’ in Vietnam. The war had played an indirect but unforgettable part in my early adult years; but I did not believe I had the capacity to bring the field of war to the theatre, nor did I have the intention to argue through theatre a specific political line for or against it. The task that I set myself in The Inhabited Man was not to deal with a reality that I did not know, but to work

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from what I did know: the battlefield of theatre itself. That is to say, I wanted to bring the field of battle into the construction of the theatre work, and to create a series of fraught encounters between and within the very materials being used to write and direct it. I had in mind a kind of dramaturgical ‘minefield’ that I could only cross through the most indirect and unpredictable pattern of creativity, not knowing at any moment whether a step may ‘blow up’ in my face. Mines, I knew, would be of central importance to Leo’s war experience. Mines are usually placed at nodal points of intersecting paths in the jungle and across the fields of the war front. They are deadly indicators of converging tracks. I was interested in lifting the hidden reality of mines out of the battlefield and placing them both as central images and as metaphors in the drama. Leo was to become a figure within which manifold tracks would converge during the unfolding hours of his ‘final’ night; and given that this final night was the event of the performance, I wanted the tracks traced by the various materials of performance to converge explosively onstage as his life reached its point of crisis. The responsibility of relaying in some way the reality of the nightmare of war in Vietnam from my own once-removed perspective, felt so heavy at times

Illustration 23 Leo and the motel loom out of the darkness. Performers: Merfyn Owen, Leisa Shelton, Adam Pierzchalski, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008

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that I struggled through many failed attempts to find the words with which to speak it. Interestingly, my own difficulties, my stuttering starts, my dislocation between thought and word, and my inability to articulate details that I have not experienced were limitations that I placed also upon my central protagonist, Leo Bone. Bone did experience the war firsthand but the overwhelming impact of the events meant that his voiced thoughts are unable to achieve sustained coherence or clarity: Leo: Shit fuck Leo is I was the man was I sitting in the bar what are you doing now Leo hunching one shoulder jaw clenched tight so I can’t now couldn’t then speak of a fucking fucking great like a wave sob would will come out of my stomach was hurting then too I can see it shit Leo tight as a groomed wolf fucking pain has a mouth eating me out I was a wolf I was but the cub the cub’s gone it’s not Leo not not fucking Christ not what a wolf shit in actual pain he doubles over would do is this pain in the guts or the soul is that where it is but something’s gone Leo something went and did it start then this pain at that moment in that bar when she left and hasn’t ever never came back not him either so something has taken its place eh … eh? murphet, 2008, 9–10

Leo’s imploded linguistic confusions here, as he tries in vain to remember the origin of his crippling emotional pain, are reminiscent of Frank’s incoherent rage in Dolores in the Department Store. They are examples of ‘nervous’ performance writing that foregrounds its own materiality as words, but does not completely jettison the complexity of dramatic character in doing so. The fragility of human subjectivity is given voice in the very inarticulacy of the language they use. In all my theatre texts I have made use of a conscious instability of writing registers, a preference for the inarticulate, an avoidance of daily social discourse or conversation. In highlighting this instability in Quick Death and Slow Love, Mark Minchinton referred to Deleuze’s statement, ‘[t]he point is to make language itself cry, to make it stutter, mumble, or whisper’ (Ctd. Boundas and Olkowski, 1994, 25). Minchinton argued that this description ‘can be appropriated to read for Murphet: The point is to make theatre itself cry, stutter, mumble or whisper (1996, 132. Emphasis in original). He connected this with my early interest in an improvisatory theatre that was ‘characterised by hesitancy, pauses, moments of interrupted flow, and an inability to create a successful illusion’ (170). Practice in improvisation allowed me to open up cracks in the illusion of

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articulate conversation and narrative flow. I came to believe that the dark heart of experience might be heard only in whispers or inarticulate cries against the flow: the ‘[r]uin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary),’ which Maurice Blanchot sees as the only way to write the disaster (1995, 33. Italics in original). In ‘Postdramatic Theatre,’ Hans-Thies Lehmann draws attention to a new ‘autonomous’ use of language in theatre: The ‘principles of narration and figuration’ and the order of a ‘fable’ (story) are disappearing in the contemporary ‘no longer dramatic theatre text’ (Poschmann). An ‘autonomization of language’ develops (2006, 18). For Lehmann it ‘is not a foregone conclusion’ that such a theatrical language ‘bears witness to a lack of interest in the human being.’ He asks, ‘Is it not rather a matter of a changed perspective on human subjectivity?’ and answers, ‘What finds articulation here is less intentionality – a characteristic of the subject – than its failure, less conscious will than desire, less the “I” than the “subject of the unconscious”’ (18). In The Inhabited Man, I did not attempt to use language as some ‘transparent’ writerly tool with which to describe this returned serviceman, or to ‘tell his story,’ or even to present intelligibly the struggle he was undergoing. The language is part of the struggle, both for the disappearing subject, and for the ­actor attempting to perform him. The words are not under the control of his conscious will; rather, throughout the play, he is at the mercy of the words he speaks, or the words he cannot speak, or remembers, or the words that are spoken at him, or about him by some unlocated ‘narrator’ voice, or the words that exist in the space alongside him, but are disconnected from him as ‘floating’ language that he may not even hear or see. Language surrounds him, is projected at him, inhabits him, pours out of him, or is blocked inside him like bottled gas. More than anything else, speaking the language that needs to be spoken is the struggle he has on his hands. Before I began writing the play, I already had an opening image in mind: an image of the dark unknown out of which Leo would emerge, but which would remain as an image of the conceptual heart of the drama. This image, jotted down in my early notebook, survived barely unchanged as the opening directions in the text. Darkness. A dark room can be gradually seen, looming in the background against a dark blue night sky. The sound of feet on gravel interspersed with the sound of someone walking through dense bush. We do not see anyone

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until a shaky torchlight picks out the head of a figure in the distance (2008, 1. Italics in original). The dark unknown I was trying to evoke is the one that lies behind all the cultural baggage that surrounds and maintains war: the scripted headlines, the familiar patriotic cries, the stereotypical heroes and the villains, the armaments and the flags, the speeches and the rallies. It is the deep unknown of ‘purpose’ (‘why?’ ‘to what end?’ ‘for whom?’), when faced with death on an unknown battlefield, or with the living death that the older Leo was now enduring: irredeemably wounded physically, emotionally, psychically and socially, awaiting death every minute but hoping for a flash of understanding before it arrives. As Leo wanders around the motel at night, with only a torch to illuminate his way, his voice can be heard, rambling through a mix of disconnected thoughts and impressions: Leo’s voice:

A vague evening Lost between day and night A lost evening An evening stuck outside the door Screaming to be let in; Kids of the night inside Screaming to be let out; ‘We were locked in this kitchen I turned to religion I wondered how long she would stay’18 A day that can’t find the way to die An evening of the river Figures hovering like ruffles in the current Sixteen legs in the water Bodies floating above it Like light (2008, 1).

The speech attempts to suggest a mind filled with a stew of fragmented images from Leo’s experiences in Vietnam, together with observations he picked up during the nightly rounds of his present job as a security guard, or snatches of popular songs, or whatever else made its way into his brain like invading 18

Lyrics from Leonard Cohen. ‘Night Comes On.’ (Various Positions. CD, Sony Music Entertainment, 1984).

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memes. As I tried to discover the dimensions of Leo’s reality by adding one phrase to another with little idea what the next step may be, I had to trust that Leo, too, would find the words he needed to speak coherently. Caught as he is in a non-stop attack from disjointed impressions, the question of Leo’s subjectivity in relation to his enveloping culture arose, as it did in both Dolores in the Department Store and The Inhabited Woman. Leo retains only a minimally secure place as a subject within the wider socio-cultural context. This is partially to do with a question of class: battered by war, abandoned socially, and punishing himself with isolation, Leo stands on a low rung of the social strata. He lacks, or believes he lacks the potential for agency. His disbelief in ‘the self’ is as crippling as his wounds. This disbelief is to a large degree the result of his inability to address two deeply repressed moments in his life that have radically affected its unfolding: the events leading him, momentarily out of the field of direct battle, to step on an exploding mine that tore off his leg, and his fateful decision to abandon his newly born child on his return from the war. His recall of the traumatic meeting with his wife in an early morning restaurant, in which he tells her that he cannot be a father to their son, is a stumbling attempt to locate some reason for his perpetual disbelief in his own agency. During rehearsal, we discovered that the physical context that could finally release these words from their cage of internal repression was Leo’s entry for the one and only time into the ‘forbidden zone’ of the motel room. The moment he does so, the room transforms into the restaurant of his past. As the memory of his wife, conflated in his mind with the intermittently present, ever-elusive woman in the motel room, stands there before him, the voices of the dialogue that he reports are constantly interrupted by the direct speech that his memory releases: Leo: ‘It’s you I love, Ida.’ My absent leg is twitching. ‘You’re the one.’ I lean in close and speak almost a whisper ‘Of course I love our baby too but it’s different’ – ‘It’s not different, Leo.’ She talks down into the coffee and I wish I could see her eyes. ‘Let me see your eyes.’ ‘My loving has just expanded to fit him in.’ She is whispering to me. Female (V/O): It’s not like a cake you cut into smaller pieces depending on the number of people wanting a bit. There’s you – Leo: A bus is pulling up right outside our window and a man with a wheelchair is lifted out. Female (V/O): And you were there before the war. Then he was born when you were away and now you’re back and there’s all three of us.

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Leo: ‘That’s four,’ I say and try to drink my coffee but it’s still hot and it feels wrong to be sipping. ‘What do you mean?’ She hasn’t moved or looked. ‘Four?’ ‘Four. You and me and him and the war.’ (Pause) Nothing. Silence (2008, 24). I knew that on an emotional and visceral level the dark heart of the play was the experience of war. How could I reveal that dark heart with neither the experience of it in my own past, nor the ability to rely on highly sophisticated and expensive audio-visual aids to simulate an immersion in the war zone? Midway through the play, in fact, Leo is overwhelmed momentarily by the amplified sounds and projected images of war; but this audio-visual assault could not be extended without broadcasting its ineffectiveness as an image of the modern battlefield. When I read Martin Heidegger’s essay on technology, a possible way out of my practical dilemma came to mind. For Heidegger, technology (‘techne’) ‘reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us …’ The purpose of technology, he argues, lies not in ‘making,’ nor in ‘manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing,’ in ‘bringing forth’

Illustration 24 Leo in the room of memory. Performers: Merfyn Owen, Edwina Wren, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008

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(Heidegger, 1978, 318). For a theatre practitioner, seeking to manifest through performance what would otherwise remain hidden, such an unexpected insight into technology opened up multiple levels at which Leo’s devices could operate. The cultural forces that dominate The Inhabited Man are not only the images and songs of popular culture that preoccupied him during war service and that continue to assault him now, but also the direct impact of invasive technologies upon his body, his mind and his emotions as he is forced to deal with and work through them. There are the technologies of war, technologies of surveillance, technologies of communication and the prosthetic technologies that result from injuries sustained in war. At the immediate physical level, Leo must deal with the prosthetic technology he depends upon: a prosthetic leg, and a walking stick and transplanted liver. These devices are constant reminders of what the military machine wants to keep hidden; that is, the collateral damage of ruined bodies and lives outside the radar of the publicly acclaimed war dead and war heroes. Leo Bone is a man who continues, long after the war has ended, to be a victim of that war, suffering external and internal wounds that have become indistinguishable. When he cries out, it is from a grief born of the anger at war’s theft of his youth, his family, and his organs and limbs:

Leo: Liver is the organ of anger Liver is the organ of anger But anger lost me my liver Work that one out you fuckers You fuckers lost me my leg (2008, 8).

His grief and anger are inseparable from the detritus of daily life he comes across on his nightly security rounds. ‘He felt anger at the scraps of the evening,’ the female voice-over tells us. ‘A gardening glove two packs of condoms unused woman’s smile mini-frisbee pair of kids’ handcuffs scattered limbs of various dolls cabbage leaves cries of a lost child screams of a lost childhood lost toes and a kneecap in the reeds torn passport photo relationships lying there in the gutter … (8). Anger and pain colour, too, his view of life on the city streets: Leo: …light of dawn over the city… light… like I’m in a dream… fuckin’ twitching leg… in the gutter… (sings) ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ …claps of

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e xhaust from a bus…. dead cars jammed up against the curb… jammed tight… (Pause) people sell crack in this street…seen ‘em bending over here and there … (Pause) men bending over me by that river screaming…limbs flying (Pause. The Cube begins turning towards him. A figure dressed like Ida can be seen in the corridor) Politicians are scum…gnawing the bones …gotta stay alert at all times Leo…some kids laughing across the river…cold blue knees… makes me feel like laughing… a street like this one cold morning (13). So that, he finally comes to realise that war will always continue as part of what it is for him to be alive: Leo (singing): You’re fighting a battle It never will finish Been fighting this battle since the day you were born Reinforcements arriving As your numbers diminish You’re loading your rifle but your nerve ends are torn (17). In his present circumstances, Leo’s task of maintaining security in a small suburban motel is a bitterly absurd reduction of the stated military objective of waging war to provide security for country and democracy. Even so, the technologies of guardianship at his command – the baton, the mobile phone and the walkie-talkie used in response to his growing sense of disturbance – prove woefully inadequate, either in ascertaining the concealed act of terror being prepared in the motel room, or in communicating and combating the invisible force of ‘the worldwide digital network’ (21). Nor do his phone and his computer enable him to make connection with his boss, or with the son with whom he is desperate to re-connect. Technology is of little help in repairing the wounds

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caused by human cruelty or neglect. His self-belief is undermined by the fact that the very technological communication devices he has come to depend upon consistently hinder any of his attempts at personal communication. Within the motel cabin under his surveillance, an unknown contemporary version of war is unfolding. The concept of the terrorist cell lies outside the experience or the imagination of a man who served in Vietnam. It is a contrast that I built in from the start between two states of being, two cultures of behaviour. Leo’s memories of his war are primarily somatic, visceral, emotionally laden ones, whereas, the streamlined unemotional language used by the Man in the motel room is at one with the fact that his role is part of an impersonal technological network with which he feels ‘at home’: Man: We learned to anticipate that moment, the moment when all our personal electronic devices will seamlessly be linked in a wireless body net that allows them to function as an integrated system and connects them to the worldwide digital network […] We knew that by this point we will have become cyborgs. […] We will have become modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborgs. And without the possibility of death, we would have no memory (21). As the play reaches its climax, Leo’s body technology serves as a bitter contrast to the bomb that the Woman in the motel cabin carefully attaches to the Man’s body in the final scene of the play. The quiet, silent and methodical process of setting up the body-bomb is counterpointed with Leo’s horrified verbal outpouring at the tragic purposelessness of his war service, until the memory of the mine explosion coincides with a present detonation in which all three are killed. Onstage, I sought to infuse the dark space of the suburban motel at night with the intrusion of images and ‘voices from the air,’ dependent upon the technology of theatre. On the screen hanging above Leo’s guard station and the multiple screens of the motel room (the same revolving cube as in The Inhabited Woman, though with different screens on the sides) appear images from Leo’s past, hanging there like ghosts always to be dealt with. These are not images plucked from the deep pool of popular film and television fictions that infected the earlier plays. The source here is the image bank from the culture of war: a Vietnamese village, a soldier de-activating a mine, helicopters strafing a field, or more metaphorically, wolves fighting one another for the flesh of a deer. The sounds, too, are aggressive and invasive: helicopters, loud phone calls, electrical disturbance, women sobbing, distant explosions. They intermix with the voices that permeate Leo’s consciousness: his boss demanding

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Verbal Text

Visual Text

Leo: I’m screaming into the jungle, …. my left leg raised in the air… Everyone seems to be screaming… Snoopy’s over there yelling…don’t hit the bank, mate…mines…And I’m sobbing too…can you hear that Ida? … Fucking year of duty to my country and it’s come to this. Guarding the security of the folks back home from this kid who was loading cabbages into a boat but half of him’s still in the river mud and half, I’m shaking around like a wolf with its carcass…losing my mind … losing my balance…mines!! Holy shit! … Security!!! security… … Explosion as mine tears off his leg.

Man puts elastic around neck Woman putting phial into man’s neck band Woman places battery on his stomach Woman tapes battery onto his stomach, puts phials in bands on his arms Woman gathers ends of the wires on phials and attaches them to battery Brings two wires together

Explosion as bomb detonates.

murphet, 2008, 36–38

Illustration 25 Leo screams out his pain. Performer: Merfyn Owen, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008

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Illustration 26 Attaching the explosives. Performers: Adam Pierzchalski, Leisa Shelton, The Inhabited Man, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008

immediate action, merged with the incessant memories of his sergeant calling orders, military headquarters issuing commands, and his wife arguing about the fate of their child. My focus in The Inhabited Man is a man isolated from the world of social discourse and interaction, abandoned by the society that had sought protection from him. In contrast to the Woman in The Inhabited Woman who sought

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escape from the entrapment of the revolving cube of her domestic life, for Leo the cube represents a world he can never enter, a world he no longer inhabits. Yet he is never truly alone or at peace, inhabited as he is with his past and with the cultural memes that permeate his consciousness. I sought in the production process to fill the airwaves with audio-visual material, in order to confront the spectator with Leo’s fragmented narratives from past, present and future. The theatrical experience was as inhabited as the dark night of the man it followed.

Conclusion Each of the artists I have studied in this book could be seen as self-consciously minor, refusing to ‘fit comfortably’ (Jameson, 1991, 305) within established theatre modes. There are no masterpieces studied in these pages, there are no ‘major’ artists, there are a number of intensive and significant experiments that originate from different objectives and preoccupations, all emanating from an ongoing critique of dramatic realism and an aim to provide an alternative to the realist way of portraying reality. Each artist has either chosen minority or had minority imposed on them, or both. Richard Foreman has rigorously occupied a minor position in a city in which ‘making it’ is one of the myths driving its engines – be they in business or art. Over four decades he has c­ hosen to produce short seasons of his chamber theatre in small theatres or theatre clubs in downtown Manhattan for a relatively small paying public. Similarly, Jenny Kemp and I have, with few exceptions, each developed and presented theatre in non-mainstream venues in Australia, a country and a culture that exists at the fringes of the Euro-American axis. According to Deleuze and Guattari, one of the positive benefits of a minor literature is that ‘if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, the situation allows the writer all the more possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’ (1986, 17. My emphasis). The three artists studied here are seeking to create theatre that recalibrates a spectator’s perceptual sensibility, and adheres to the late-modernist belief that ‘the general assumptions about the nature of subjectivity needed to be updated’ (Genter, 2010, 4). 1

Updating Subjectivity

Foreman critiques the whole question of subjectivity by formulating a theatre in which the subject, the human figure, does not occupy the central focus but shares the space and the action equally with non-human objects and forces. Words, actions, objects and images are deconstructed to their molecular level as he analyses the nature of ‘being-ness’ (Foreman, 1969, 11), only to be reconstituted into new arrangements through the ‘manic dance’ (Foreman, 1985, viii) of performance. This reconstitution is a slow and thorough process, as I witnessed in the rehearsals of Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, and as Foreman has himself been at pains to emphasise:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��20 | doi:10.1163/9789004415881_006

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Ten weeks of maddeningly slow and deliberate rehearsals, changing and changing everything dozens of times until each ‘irrational’ cell seems to me to have coherence with the overall structure (2001, 9). However, the coherence in a Foreman production does not emerge from a plot that is constructed around the fate of a human being. A stronger interest in the destiny of a protagonist began to emerge in his later plays, but even in those works that follow a central protagonist – such as Eddie (Eddie Goes to Poetry City) and Samuel (Old-Fashioned Prostitutes) – the figures are launched into a world that already is filled with objects and settings that have their own ‘beingness,’ and their encounters with the inanimate objects as well as with other humans are the occasions for events that constitute the theatrical experience. As such, there is no plot other than the events in the theatre; there are no characters with a psychological dimension other than what accumulates perfor­ matively before our eyes. The action of a Foreman play is the action of the ­consciousness of this philosopher/artist as he pursues ‘other codes, other grids, than the mere local’ (Foreman, ‘Theory’), through which he can understand the nature of reality. It has been argued that the subjectivity at the centre of these plays is the consciousness of this auteurist writer/director; however, these are not auto-referential works in the accepted sense. Foreman is everywhere present, yet absent, ab/stracted, in the dynamic formal patterns of his texts and his performances. Jenny Kemp’s theatre, by contrast, demonstrates her own deep dissatisfaction with the narrow frame that society places upon the untapped reservoir of human individuality, and in particular the ways in which a patriarchal social order has restricted the potentiality of female subjectivity. And, in that sense, individual beings and their theatrical representation as ‘characters’ are of prime importance for her. However, her endeavour has entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the primarily social dimension of realist characters, engaged as they are in struggles within the social domain. She seeks to substitute instead a constantly opening revelation of a woman-in-process, a multiply faceted being who is on an involuntary journey, where the possible resolution into some form of authenticity is hinted at, but never fully realised. The mise-en-scène within which the non-realistic journey is undertaken is filled with objects, images and figures that often seem as laterally connected to the fate of the central woman as they may have been in any Foreman production. There is a distinct difference, however. Kemp works associatively and intuitively like Foreman, but the associations and intuitions intrude upon one another in more concerted ways, and the images and actions all focus in upon the protagonist: to

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reveal potentialities hidden within her and threats hidden from her, and to provide some guidance along the dark and unknown paths she traverses. From my own earliest plays, the struggle onstage has involved the subjects and their subjectivities in battle against the forces of cultural influences that surround them, that seek to permeate their consciousness, and that aim to annihilate any discrete sense of an individual’s authenticity. The criminal figures that force themselves into Man A’s room in Quick Death and that repeatedly take him to the edge of death have no reality other than the filmic media out of which they originate. But from my perspective their force onstage is no less powerful than if they were representations of the ‘real.’ In these plays, cultural interference is written into the very terms and forms of the dramas within which the characters find themselves. The interference is incoherent and unpredictable, and it comes in the form of fragmented shards of action, image, light and sound. Cultural interference is written too into the form of the dramas of my later works. But here the protagonists are more fully formed subjects whose subjectivities are ‘wounded’ (Varney, 2011, 175) not only by the action of the worlds they occupy, but by specific forces emanating from the cultures of the family, capitalist commerce, the media industry and war. In this way, these plays are more consciously political in intent. In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, the second characteristic of a minor literature is political: the ‘cramped space [of their marginality] forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, 17). In my three later plays, Dolores, The Woman and Leo struggle within the ‘cramped space’ afforded them by various forms of cultural entrapment or inhabitation. They are abandoned figures forced by their social marginalisation into power battles on behalf of their own subjectivity. Any heroism they exhibit, in plays bereft of the familiar heroism of dramatic theatre, hinges around the question of how we might fight or resist a cruel contemporary society when our very persons are products of, mediated through and colonised by violent forms of power and authority symptomatic of that society. 2

The Writer/Director

The other main focus of this thesis has been upon the practices of artists who have written and directed the works under consideration. Foreman and Kemp begin writing before they have any clear idea what subject matter the writing may constitute. Similarly, my attempts at ‘epileptic’ writing in Quick

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Death and Slow Love focused primarily upon the form of expression without knowing beforehand the plots it may constitute. Moreover, each of the artists has left the performance form of their plays unconceived and in a sense unconceivable until they move from the role of writer to that of director. Of course, the distinction is not as clear as this suggests; there are overlaps and bridging processes that implicate one phase of the process with another. But the occupation of both roles by the one artist counterintuitively allows more separation between them than is the case for a traditional playwright who writes for the stage, or for a traditional director who directs as the text commands. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the two modes of creation in terms of the order in which each is engaged: A major, or established, literature follows a vector that goes from content to expression. Since content is presented in a given form of the content, one must find, discover, or see the form of expression that goes with it. That which conceptualises well expresses itself. But a minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualise until afterward (1986, 28). The challenge that each of the artists studied herein has faced is that once the well-conceptualised theatrical form is broken in the process of writing and directing their productions, they have had to ‘reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things’ (28). They do so in ‘slow and deliberate’ rehearsals (Foreman, 2001, 9) that map out freshly conceived structures consisting of remnants of dramatic realism, such as story, character, dialogic interaction and fictional illusion, stripped apart, but never fully left behind. Foreman, who is the most anti-realist of the three artists, has nevertheless stated many times in various ways over the years that he is not seeking an abstracted formalism, empty of all content. It is rather, for each of the artists, that the gaps in conversational flow, the gear-shifts of unplanned utterances or actions, the sudden breaks in logical consequence are there to allow an energy to surface that may originate in the subconscious of the artist but that manifest through the poetics of body, voice and space of live performance. This is the reason that all three artists, influenced by and tempted though they have been by other art forms, have continued to work within the theatrical mode. There is a constant tension in all the works between the spectatorial desire for a guiding vision or voice, mocked by the domineering Voice in Foreman’s plays, and the replacement of the familiar representational certainties with theatrical strategies less easily comprehended. Each of the artists looks at theatre as a

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venue of possibility. Foreman’s expectation that ‘a god’ may arrive onstage (1995, 48) is neither ironic ridicule nor an easy reliance on a metaphysical solution to his potential chaos. If the right pattern of his molecular stagecraft can be achieved, if full attention is paid to the perception of each moment, if ‘the manic dance of theatricality’ (1985, viii) can have its effect, then a form of alchemical magic may take place and ‘god’ in some form or another will manifest. In a similar vein, in responding to my recent production of Quick Death and Slow Love, Australian critic Andrew Fuhrmann wondered in the end if ‘it come[s] back to faith – faith that there is always some new creative possibility hidden within the real?’ (2016, 44). He continues: ‘In these two plays, you do sense a kind of reverent power, a manifest conviction, even if, in performance, it is apprehended only for a moment, in the darkness and the charged silence that precedes the applause’ (44). The artists, that is to say, engage in theatre not to re-present reality, nor to destroy it, but to ‘restore’ it, to borrow Fuhrmann’s term, as what could ‘really’ take place. 3

Two Focal Depths: The Something and the Nothing

I have made mention several times of the dark unknown into which these artists willingly tread in the creation of their works: their gathering of disconnected writing as the unlikely substance out of which a theatre work shall be constructed, their resistance to premeditate a plot or even subject focus prior to the start of this act of construction, and their dismembering of the tropes of dramatic realism in order to ‘re-member’ the disjointed parts into ‘the shock [of] the new arrangement’ (Kemp, 1996, 3). I have referred also to various versions of what one may call the focus upon the fragmented in both content and form: Foreman’s ‘molecules’ of ‘darting and fragmentary’ material and his instruction to a spectator to ‘make [yourself] very tiny’ in the reception of his work rather than trying to make sense of the whole; Kemp’s juxtaposition of unlikely ‘parcels’ of short scenes, wildly variant in style and subject; and the brief shards of stage action glimpsed between light and darkness in my own experiments in ‘epileptic’ writing. The theatre these artists produce contain elements that, in Foreman’s words, ‘are always stumbling over each other in a way that renders everything totally unyielding, un-fluid’ such that ‘the “facts” of the performance are never presented in such a way that one could know in what category to place them’ (1969b, 30). Given this resistance to cohesion, the question needs to be addressed as to how it is possible to construct and shape a work of art into a comprehensible performance. I will respond to this question from an indirect perspective.

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The filmmaker, Trin Minh-Ha is a Vietnamese filmmaker and theorist, born within a few years of the artists covered in this book. She has been making films for four decades and her career both chronologically and conceptu­ ally dovetails into the category and the artistic approach I am calling late-­ modernist. Trin Minh-Ha had this to say about the indeterminate nature of making her films: ‘I think the only thing that gives me some confidence in what I do is not what I know ahead of time, but the trust I have in working with “nothing.” This “jump into the void” is a most exciting moment of enablement. When you know that everything fragmented and seemingly unrelated around you can become the film whose coherence – in discontinuity – is due to the fact that ‘I’ constitutes a site where incongruous things can meet’ (1999,13). There are a number of ideas contained within Minh-Ha’s statement that are worth noting in relation to late-modernist theatre. The first is the space and time that the unplanned nature of the ‘jump into the void’ leaves for the felicitous (or dangerous) accident (‘everything fragmented and seemingly unrel­ ated’), and the willingness on the part of the artist to adapt and adjust her ­progress (to feel ‘enabled’) accordingly. The second idea has to do with whether the ‘nothing’ with which she is working is in fact nothing, given that she does presumably know something ‘ahead of time.’ It is because she is a filmmaker that Minh-Ha, the director/maker, the ‘I’ that constitutes the site of coherence, is able to recognise something as filmic when the ‘nothing’ presents whatever image it does to the film lens. In some ways, this already trained sensibility of the artist is a limitation; it is surely its absence in the naïve artist that gives rise to the particular attraction of their work, and one of the recurrent qualities of the ‘postdramatic’ theatre has been a kind of self-conscious amateurism. And yet, it is an innate trust in this sensibility that enables artists to move into the seemingly uncharted area of ‘new’ performance without fear; truly amateur theatre tends to stick to the known and familiar territory of psychological naturalism. What you don’t know holds less fear when what you do know is that you will know it when you see it. Experienced theatre artists (Melrose’s ‘expert-practitioners’) know and trust that their intuitive flash of interest in a verbal or physical image, or in a short encounter in the space will find its true meaning and rightful place as the whole work begins to take shape. Something does ‘happen,’ not only in the final performance, but presumably along the way towards it. As we may surmise from Minh-Ha, it is not that ‘nothing’ is there but that the end result is not predetermined. Her confidence lies in the fact that a meaningful result will eventuate without having pre-planned it, and that she will recognise it. There is another way of understanding the ‘nothing’ that Trin Minh-Ha has the trust to work with. To take her statement literally, Minh-Ha is saying that

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she works not only with the full presence of images, ideas, materials, but also with their absence, with emptiness, with ‘the void.’ She is claiming the state of emptiness as a productive state within the creation of her work. There are many theorists who have encouraged the artist to work from a Zen-like state of emptiness in order to allow their work the space to develop from within. This meta-physical dimension is not my primary focus. I am interested here in the kind of attention that an artist gives to a work in the process of building it that takes their focus for a moment away from obsessively working upon it in order to allow it to work on them. This form of attention alternates with the careful attention to detail of the often-disconnected building blocks; it requires instead the slightly blurred gaze of what Anton Ehrenzweig calls ‘undifferentiated attention’ (1970, 39). The two kinds of attention can be described metaphorically as putting into service two distinct focal lengths of perception. The work on the detail needs to be up close and to be involved in the sequence as it gains shape. Only with close attention to all its constitutive elements will its essential quality as image or encounter become clear. It is work that we might call intensive, or ‘vertical.’ The looser, extensive, ‘horizontal’ focal length is described by Ehrenzweig as a ‘flexible scattering of attention’ (38);1 it is a phrase that is reminiscent of Richard Foreman directing in response to ‘the kinetic sensations that result from a rapid succession of compositional moments’ (Foreman, 1992, 55). In a documentary made by Eliot Caplan of the process used by Merce Cunningham in building a dance piece, Points in Space (1986, dvd), for bbc television, we can watch Cunningham, another artist from the late-modernist ­period, alternate between three forms of viewing his work as it emerged. In the first, he built small units of work with couples and trios. He would describe a short movement sequence, watch the pair attempting it, demonstrate what he meant if necessary and then leave the pair to develop it on their own, while he moved on to work with another duo or trio. This work was detailed and carefully built. We don’t see any footage of him composing the overall work, and there are no indications that he ever worked with the full landscape in focus. However, there are two ways in which it is evident that he was continually scanning for how the piece might be integrated. From time to time, he stood back and, flicking his head from side to side, looked quickly and repeatedly at the several small units of work being practised simultaneously on the floor. It is clear that he was not only checking to see how each unit was progressing but 1 In his chapter, ‘The Two Kinds of Attention,’ Ehrenzweig details the nature of this ‘undifferentiated attention’ or ‘syncretistic vision’ at work in the practice of both visual and musical artists (1970, 35–45).

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‘flexibly scattering [his] attention’ to sense how the units may cohere. Then, he occasionally picked up a viewfinder and looked at the developing sequences through it, to gain a sense of how he might place each of them in relation to one another and the space that each may occupy in the limited frame of the TV screen. Cunningham was working both intensively and expansively. The final result was not something he knew beforehand. He allowed it to emerge; but he kept a practiced eye on its emergent shape. 4

Resistance Within the Practice

My contention in this book has been that the theatre practice of the late-­ modernist artists discussed, which includes within its parameters remnants of a dramatic realism it seeks to challenge, is literally subversive in that adopting a subversive stance is not so much a way of switching things round, but rather involves rethinking the very rules of the game without abandoning the game entirely. It is a practice that chooses to work from within the system that it contests – the better to reveal the inconsistencies, the blindspots, the inadequacies and the biases that the system does its best to overlook. The strategies employed by each of the artists discussed are strategies of resistance against not only the view of the world implied by dramatic realism, but also against the dominance of that worldview. Their strategies interfere and compete with those of dramatic realism and call into question the mastery that realism claims to have over forms of theatrical representation. This struggle operates at an aesthetic level, quite obviously, but it also has possible implications for a wider political struggle. Above all, the struggle, built into the very working practices that lead to their productions, admits to a reality within the art-making process itself that realism either ignores or seeks to obscure. ‘The REAL part of the event,’ Foreman announced at the outset of his career, ‘is not the alluded to war and social turmoil depicted in the play but the author trying to CREATE his substance and structure’ (‘Manifesto iii.’ 1976, 192. Caps in original). The war and turmoil in Foreman’s works do not disappear into aesthetic games; they are felt as the agonies of creating new life from the molecules of unformed matter that this artist allows as the material of his art. In this sense, they are the stuff of an ontological endeavour. Jenny Kemp uses the insights provided by a psychological perspective on her female protagonists, not to cure these women and prepare them for re-entry into an ‘inauthentic’ society, but to release them from the manipulative dictates of an authority that parades its narrow versions of reason and order as justifications for the status quo. Forms of realism underlie

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her dramaturgy, just as forms of social order sit at the back of the new territories that the women encounter on their journeys downwards and inwards. It is not that either Kemp or her women seek to return finally to the social world and theatre form they are subverting, but that that world and that dramatic form do exist as one of the options at which things may operate, but only one. Her task as practitioner has been to use all the strategies at her command to keep the dictates of that option at bay until alternative perspectives of reality have been revealed. My own central protagonists, marginal nobodies in the greater scheme of things, are thrust onto centre stage to battle for self-­ understanding, resolution or simply survival in a violent and/or cruelly disinter­ ested society. I built my early plays from the experience of the uncontrollable jolts between presence and absence of epilepsy, and the instability caused by that medical state is the fraught state that has informed my ongoing struggle to create a theatrical form that matches it. Each of these three distinct late-modernist practitioners has been searching for theatre languages with which to write not a new order, but the very nature of instability itself. The relationship between the reality of the world and the rendition of that world in theatre will always be more complex and unexpected than we can predict. These artists have attempted to provide requisite forms for those dimensions of reality avoided by a mimetic representational drama intent on cloaking its manifest untruth. These attempts, as Foreman admits, involve a degree of artistic ‘turmoil.’ The open inclusion of that turmoil within the artistic project may provide a model for future theatrical ventures seeking an effective and critical knowledge.

Bibliography Primary sources Jenny Kemp (1989) ‘Call of the Wild.’ Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts, edited by Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman (1999). Currency Press, Sydney. Jenny Kemp (1993) ‘Remember.’ Australian Women’s Theatre, edited by Peta Tait and Elizabeth Schafer (1997). Currency Press, Sydney. Jenny Kemp (1995) ‘A Dialogue with Disjunction.’ Telling Time edited by Virginia Baxter (1996). Playworks. Jenny Kemp (1995a) ‘Preparation Book for The Black Sequin Dress.’ Unpublished manuscript, property of Jenny Kemp. Jenny Kemp (1996) The Black Sequin Dress. Currency Press, Sydney. Jenny Kemp (1999) ‘Artistic Statement for Call of the Wild: The Written Text.’ Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts. Edited by Richard Allen and Karen Pearlman. Currency Press, Sydney. Jenny Kemp (2002) Still Angela. Currency Press, Sydney. Jenny Kemp (2008) Kitten: A Bi-Polar Soap Opera. Unpublished manuscript, property of Jenny Kemp. Jenny Kemp (2010) Madeleine: A Shadow in the House of Love. Unpublished manuscript, property of Jenny Kemp. Jenny Kemp (2012) ‘Interview with Richard Murphet, 22 & 23 September 2012.’ Unpublished manuscript, property of R. Murphet. Richard Foreman (1969a) ‘The Ontological Hysteric Theatre of Richard Foreman,’ ­interviewed by Amy Taubin, Michael Snow, P. Adams Sitney, ­Ernie Gehr, Jonas Mekas, Joyce Wieland, Ken Kelman. Richard Foreman Papers. ­Folger Library, New York University, Series 8C, Box 34, Folder 1708A. Richard Foreman (1969b) ‘MSC Notes by Richard Foreman.’ Richard Foreman Papers. Folger Collection. Series 8C, Box 34, Folder 1708A. Richard Foreman (1975) ‘Richard Foreman,’ interviewed by Michael Feingold, Yale Theatre, Yale School of Drama, New Haven, Connecticut. Richard Foreman Papers. ­Series 8C, Box 37, Folder 1711. Folger Collection, NYU Library, NY. Richard Foreman (1976) Richard Foreman Plays and Manifestos, edited by Kate Davy, The Drama Review Series, New York University Press, New York. Richard Foreman (1985) Reverberation Machines: The Later Plays and Essays. Station Hill Press, Barrytown, New York. Richard Foreman (1992) Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater, edited by Ken Jordan. Theatre Communications Group, New York.

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Index Note: page numbers in italics indicate an illustration. Indexed footnotes are shown as, for example, 123n4, which indicates footnote 4 on page 123. A Doll’s House 1, 15–16 ac/dc 136–7 actor See performer Angelface 32, 37–8, 44–5 audience See spectator Australian Nouveau Theatre (ant) 8–9 Australian Performing Group (apg) 7, 11–13, 25 and Brecht 18–20 auteur 3–4, 19 and control 3–6, 32, 61–4, 76–8, 123–5, 127, 167 See also writer/director avant-garde theatre 11, 17, 26, 146 Brecht, Bertolt 18–19 Brownian motion 48–9 The Black Sequin Dress 49n19, 104, 111, 113, 123, 128, 129 and ‘field-in-time’ 117–18 journey, motif of 87–90, 100–01, 105–06, 109–110, 114–15 and language 103–07 and multiple performers 87, 90–1 and Multiple Personality Disorder 102–03, 132 structural strategies 99–102 and terror 91, 106–08, 114 and text 87–93 train, image of 92–3, 109–10, 113 use of images 88, 89, 91n7, 93 and voice-over 88–9 Call of the Wild 30, 54, 93–9, 113, 125–6 journey, motif of 96, 120–1 and time 117–18, 120–21 writing of 54, 94–5, 98–9 Campbell, Joseph 100–01, 110 Carroll, Noel 44n15, 138–9, 176 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1 character 2, 16, 25–6, 54, 128 abandonment of 26, 131

deconstruction of 24–5, 35–6, 49–50, 127–9, 131, 140 in dramatic realism 1–2, 16 in Foreman 40–1, 50, 61–3, 71, 72, 127 in Kemp 121, 127–9 in Murphet 30, 131, 139, 140 cinema See film The Cliffs See Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs collaboration 3–4, 122–3 and Drake, Elizabeth 125–6 and Kemp 4, 83, 122–7, 162–6 and Murphet 4, 162–3, 168 See also Shelton, Leisa cultural influence 4, 31, 57, 144, 146, 156, 193 in Murphet 133, 156, 161, 167, 182 on subjectivity 131–3, 193 cultural interpenetration 31 culture, popular 17, 31, 175, 185 Dolores in the Department Store 132–3, 156, 193 collaboration in 125–6, 164–6 and deconstruction 163–7 and fragmentation 159–60 and Multiple Personality Disorder 157– 8, 160–2 multiple selves in 82–3, 162–7, 177 and performance language 159–60 in rehearsal 163–7 and The Three Faces of Eve 157–8, 160–1 use of multiple performers 162–3 writing of 158–60, 163–4, 172 deconstruction of central character 24–5, 35–6, 49–50, 140, 195 in Foreman 32–3, 40, 54, 61–2, 64, 81, 191–2 in Kemp 82–3, 87, 110, 127–9 in Murphet 30–31, 131–3, 144, 157–67, 163–7 Delvaux, Paul 85, 91n7, 93n8, 110–14, 130 direction 5, 24, 54, 60–1

213

Index Foreman’s attitudes to 33–4, 54 See also auteur; writer/director disintegration of character See deconstruction of central character dissolution of character See deconstruction of central character dreams, in Kemp and journeys 90, 93, 96, 121 in scripts 7, 28, 82, 93, 101, 161 Eddie Goes to Poetry City 32, 47–50, 65–6, 74, 80, 192 directing style 55–9, 62 and meaning-making 48–9, 57–8 and ‘other world’ 57–8 epilepsy 131–5, 138–42, 146, 157–8, 199 epileptic experience 132, 134–6, 139, 146–7, 151, 163 ‘epileptic’ writing 23, 54, 133–47, 158, 193–5 expressionism, abstract 6, 83, 84, 110 feminism 27, 168–70 ‘field-in-time’ 117–18 film 36, 44, 124, 125, 148, 150–1 influence on writer/directors 2–6, 28, 30–31, 138–40 influence on Foreman 33, 36–7, 40, 44, 62 film, romantic 30–1, 147–8, 156–7 See also Slow Love and sustained time 115–16, 117 film noir 30–1, 131, 133, 139, 142–6, 176 See also Quick Death Foreman, Richard 4–6, 10, 21, 24–5, 194–5 as auteur 28, 62–3, 123–4, 192 compositional process 73–4, 80–1 and control 4, 6, 62–4, 76–7 critiques of 76–7 deconstruction of central character 32– 4, 40, 54, 61–2, 64, 81, 191–2 as director 28, 32–9, 47–8, 54–61, 64–5, 72 and film 5, 6, 36–7, 40 framing of action and objects 40, 44, 59, 68–70, 72–4, 80, 172 and Grotowskian approach 21–2 and hysteria 28–9, 35, 39 influence on Murphet 9–10

influences on 5–6, 18, 28, 35–7, 75 science 28, 34, 39n11, 40, 60, 70–71, 73, 93 Stein, Gertrude 2, 5–6, 28, 43–6 and language 41, 46–52, 59–60 and meaning 51, 53–4, 65, 71, 77 and the molecular 32, 43–9, 52 Ontological-Hysteric manifestos 43–4, 51 Ontological-Hysteric Theater 6, 27–8, 35 and performers 77–81, 127 and rehearsal process 61–4, 66–8, 194 and realism 2, 5–6, 26, 198–9 and reality 40, 44–5, 50, 53, 59, 73, 75, 192, 198 and reverberation 39, 51–2, 57, 69, 73, 85 and self-reflection 61–2, 64, 66–70 as set designer 4, 28, 55, 62–3, 64 as sound designer 28, 39n11, 55, 62–3, 64 and spectator expectation 6, 23–5, 35, 38 and string lines 68–9, 81 and subjectivity 1–4, 21–2, 191–2 and text 23–4, 40–3, 59–60, 70–1, 80, 85 use of props 28, 39, 55, 57, 59, 60–1, 191–2 use of The Voice 28, 34, 39, 47–8, 50–53, 64 as writer 28, 35–6, 48 as writer/director 33, 32–9, 193–4 writing process 5, 28, 32–3, 46–7, 69, 193–5 See also Angelface; Eddie Goes to Poetry City; Lava; Old-Fashioned Prostitutes; Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs; Total Recall: Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 2 framing See under Foreman and Kemp Gassner, John 5, 35–6 Godard, Jean-Luc 62 Grotowski, Jerzy 7, 21–2, 71, 121 and Poor Theatre 9, 71 attitude of Foreman to 21–22 influence on Australian theatre 19–20 and performers 21–2, 121 Hedda Gabler 15–16 The Hero’s Journey 100–01, 110 The Hours 168, 169 hysteria 128–9, 35, 39, 175

214 Ibsen, Hendrik 1, 15–16 The Inhabited Man 132–3, 156, 180, 189–90 and culture 183, 185, 193 inspiration for 177, 178–80 staging of 181–2, 187–8 and technology 156, 178, 185–7 and use of audio-visuals 184, 187–9, 190 and use of language 179–83, 186–8 The Inhabited Woman 132–3, 175–7, 189–90 cultural influences 168, 170–2, 175, 177, 193 and feminism 168–70 inspiration for 169–71 and Shelton, Leisa 167–74, 175, 177, 179, 189 and popular culture 175–6 technology, effects of 156, 168–9, 176 use of voice-over 172–4, 177 writing of 170, 172–4 Jealousy 148–50, 172 journey, motif of 87–90, 100–10, 126, 128, 192–3, 198–9 journeys dreams and 90, 93, 96, 121 The Hero’s Journey 100–01, 110 mythic 89, 101, 106, 114–15, 121 psychic 11, 29, 82–3, 84 Kemp, Jenny 2, 4, 7–8, 10, 111–12, 121 acting career 7, 84 and arc of work 83, 90–1, 100, 109, 129 background 6–8, 11, 30, 83–5 and character 25–6, 121, 127–9 and collaboration 83, 122–7, 162–3 deconstruction of central character 82– 3, 87, 110, 127–9 and Delvaux, Paul 85, 91n7, 93n8, 108–14, 130 as director 89–90, 91, 100–02, 114–23 dreams 108 and journeys 90, 93, 96, 121 in scripts 7, 29, 82, 90, 93, 101–02 exploration of inner landscape 84–5, 93, 110–11 exploration of inner life 29, 30, 82–3, 96, 109, 128 and feminism 27, 118

Index focus on female protagonist 29–30, 82, 95, 192–3, 198–9 and framing 85, 86–7 and The Hero’s Journey 100–01, 110 influences 83–5 influence on Murphet 9–10 journey, motif of 87–90, 100–10, 126, 128, 192–3, 198–9 journeys, mythic 89, 101, 106, 114–15, 121 journeys, psychic 11, 29, 82–3, 84 and language 30, 89, 93–9, 104–07, 114, 127, 129–30 and language registers 30, 93–102, 104–08, 129–30 and Meldrum, Robert 7, 116–17, 121 and meaning-making 85, 110 motivation 10–11, 29, 30, 194–5 and multiple voices 87, 90–1, 95–8 and multi-dimensional woman 29, 82–3, 93, 102–08, 127 and parcels of material 85, 90–1, 101–02, 109, 129, 195 and performer 116–17, 121–3, 125–30 reflection in 99, 114, 122–3 in rehearsal 4, 83, 93, 109, 122–3, 124–30 silence in 113, 115, 116 staging of work 49n19, 93, 125–6 stillness in 89, 106, 113, 116, 119–22 and storyboards 86–7, 108–10, 113–14, 130 and subjectivity 89, 126, 192–3 train, motif of 92–3 and visual art 83–5, 86, 192–3 and waiting 112, 116–17, 121–3 writing and images 30, 108, 192–3 writing process 54, 86, 100–01, 193–4 as writer/director 7, 23, 83, 123–4, 193–4 See also The Black Sequin Dress; Call of the Wild; Madeleine; Still Angela Kemp, Roger 6, 83, 84–5, 110 Kraigher, Alenka 78n29, 79–80 language dramatic realist 22, 23 ‘epileptic’ 23, 54, 133–47, 158, 193–5 filmic 36, 138, 142 and Foreman 41, 46–52, 59–60 and Kemp 30, 89, 93–9, 104–07, 114, 127, 129–30

215

Index and Murphet 133–8, 143, 156, 157–67, 175, 180–2 ‘nervous’ performance of 54, 136, 160, 180 theatre 23n13, 41, 76, 133, 137–8, 181 language registers 30, 93–102, 104–08, 129–30 Lava 32, 49–52, 64 and Category Three 47, 51–2 and metaphor 46–7 and ‘packages of material’ 52, 54, 85n5 use of The Voice in 28, 47–8, 50–3 LeCompte, Elizabeth 3, 33 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 1, 2, 18–19, 23, 171, 181 The Letter 147–8 literature 2, 14–15, 17, 22–4, 53, 128 minor 3, 10, 191, 193–5 The Living Theatre 6, 40–1, 76 Madeleine 7, 83, 102n10 Manheim, Kate 78 mass media 21, 30–31 and popular culture 17, 31, 175, 185 meaning 40, 53–4, 57–8, 65, 77 construction of 75, 138–9, 150 levels of 71, 85, 110, 138, 151 meaning-making 23–5, 49, 65 and Foreman 36, 46–9, 51–4, 57–8, 71, 79 and Kemp 85, 110 and Murphet 138, 151 and spectator perception 51, 52–4, 75, 138–9, 150 Mekas, Jonas 5, 6, 36, 40 Meldrum, Robert 7, 116–17, 121 melodrama 30–1, 147–8, 176 metaphor 84, 167, 179, 187 in Foreman 39n11, 46–9, 54, 56 and meaning-making 46–7 Mignon, Jean-Pierre 8–9 ‘minor’ art 3, 10, 191, 193, 194 ‘mise-en-page’ 91, 155–6 modernism 1–3, 14, 17–18, 20–21, 25–6 late 22–3, 26, 27, 31, 132–3 in theatre 26, 36–7, 48, 54 and modernist realism 14–15 romantic 16–22, 40–1, 84, 132, 147–8, 156 in theatre 2–3, 17–18, 196 molecular approach 32, 43–9, 52 and spectator perception 49, 74–5

Müller, Heiner 23, 24, 33 Multiple Personality Disorder 102–3, 132, 157–8, 160–2 multiple selves 82–3, 161–7, 177 multiple voices 87, 90–1, 95–8 Murphet, Richard 2, 4, 8–10, 24–6, 155–6, 175–7 and ‘black hole’ 133–5, 140, 142–4 and character 30, 131, 139, 140 and collaboration 167–75, 177, 179, 189 and cultural influences 10–11, 30–31, 131–3, 175, 193 and cultural interference 131–3, 167–70, 176, 177–8, 183 and death 140–4, 147, 148, 151 deconstruction of central character 30– 31, 131–3, 144, 157–67, 163–7 epileptic experience 132, 134–6, 139, 146–7, 151 ‘epileptic’ writing 23, 54, 136–8, 158, 163, 193–5 and epilepsy 131–5, 138–41, 146, 157–8, 199 and film noir 30–1, 131, 133, 139, 142–5, 176 influences on 9–10, 131, 147–8, 199 ac/dc 137–8 Carroll, Noel 44n15, 138–9, 176 film 138–40, 142, 176–7 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 148–51, 172 The Three Faces of Eve 157–8, 160–1 and language 133–8, 143, 156, 157–67, 175, 180–2 and meaning-making 138, 151 multiple selves 82–3, 162–7, 177 and subjectivity 139–40, 156–7, 161–3, 193 and technology 156, 168–9, 176, 178, 184–7 as writer 134–6, 144, 155, 172, 180 See also Dolores in the Department Store; The Inhabited Man; The Inhabited Woman; Quick Death; Slow Love; myth 29, 57, 100–01, 110, 147 mythic journeys 89, 101, 106, 114–15, 121 nature of being 37–43 neo-conservatism 20–21 New American Cinema movement 5, 6

216 New Wave film, French 3, 62, 120, 142, 148, 151 New Wave, theatre 21 Old-Fashioned Prostitutes 32–4, 55, 61, 72, 73 and deconstruction of central character 191–2 directing of 71, 74 and meaning 53–4 and performers 79–81 rehearsals 32, 61–9, 71, 74–8, 80–1, 191–2 and subjectivity 91–2 and string lines 68–9 Ontological-Hysteric Theater 6, 27–28, 35 The Open Theatre 17–18, 76 ‘packages of material’ 52, 54, 85n5 Paradise Now 17–18, 41–2, 48 ‘parcels’ of material 85, 90–1, 101–02, 109, 129, 195 perception See spectator perception The Performance Group 17–18, 76 performance theory 11–12 performer 26, 146, 171 and collaboration 64, 79–80, 83, 126–30 and Foreman 52, 61–2, 65, 68, 71–2, 77–81, 127 and Kemp 107, 116–7, 121–30 and The Living Theatre 40, 41 multiple, for one role 90, 128–30, 162–7 and Murphet 139, 146, 160–1, 181 non-actors as 78–80, 127 role of 26, 77–81 spectator, relationship with 17, 71, 78–9, 123, 170–1 training for 7, 116, 171 physics 28, 39n11, 60, 69–70, 73, 93 Quick Death 30–31, 131–4, 145 cultural influences 144, 146–7, 193 and destruction of autonomous self 156, 157 epilepsy and 132–4, 140–2 and ‘epileptic’ writing 193–4 and filmic language 138, 176 influence of film noir 139, 142–4, 176 staging of 138, 144, 146, 155–6 writing of 138, 144, 158, 180

Index Quick Death to Infinity See Quick Death realism 1–2, 14–16, 25–6 anti-realism 2, 15, 26–8, 129, 130, 62, 194–5 in Foreman 34, 39, 194 in Kemp 82–3, 91–2, 98–9, 198–9 dramatic 1–6, 14–16, 21–8, 129, 130, 191 and late modernism 21–6, 31, 191, 198 reality 40, 44–5, 50, 53, 59, 73, 75, 192, 198 reflection 99, 114, 122–3 ‘reverberation chamber’ 57, 69, 73, 85 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 106, 148–51, 172 romance 132, 147–8, 156 melodrama 30–1, 147–8, 176 romantic modernism 16–22, 40–1, 84, 132, 147–8, 156 Running, Walking, Standing Still 121–2 science, influence of 28, 34, 39n11, 40, 60, 69–70, 73, 93 set design 4, 28, 55, 62–3, 71 Shelton, Leisa 164–6, 175, 177, 179, 189 and feminist approach 168–70 as performer 167–74, 170, 171, 177 silence 36, 113, 115, 116, 195 Slow Love 150, 151, 155–7, 180 and ‘epileptic’ writing 193–4 and film 176 and framing 151–3 and Romance 132, 147–8, 156, 176 staging of 148, 155 writing of 147–57, 158, 172 Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 3: The Cliffs 32, 39, 44, 45 sound design 4, 28, 39n11, 55, 62–5, 124 spectator expectation 38–9, 45, 63–4, 138–9, 146 spectator experience 5, 16, 25, 26, 146 and Foreman 40, 48, 51, 65, 79, 190 and Kemp 126, 130 and Murphet 132, 134, 139 spectator involvement 76, 148150 spectator perception 36, 44–5, 51–2, 67–8, 79, 123, 139 in Foreman 35, 44, 49, 51, 53–4, 57, 74–5 and meaning-making 51, 52–4, 75, 138–9, 150

Index and molecular approach 44, 49, 74–5 need to recalibrate 24–5, 47, 167, 191 shifting of 6, 23–25, 35, 53–4, 57 Stasis Group 7, 19, 21, 116 Stein, Gertrude 43–5 influence on Foreman 2, 5–6, 28, 43–6 Still Angela 30, 118–21 and ‘field-in-time,’ 118–19 stillness 89, 106, 113, 116, 119–22, 156, 170 See also Still Angela storyboards 86–7, 108–10, 113–14, 130 subjectivity 1–4, 191–3 cultural influence on 131–3, 193 in Foreman 21–2, 191–2 in Kemp 89, 126, 192–3 in Murphet 139–40, 156–7, 161–3, 193 need for updating 21–2, 191–3 Surrealism 14, 84–5, 110 technology 22, 30, 132, 178, 184–5 in The Inhabited Man 156, 178, 185–7 in The Inhabited Woman 156, 168–9, 176 The Three Faces of Eve 157–8, 160–1 theatre 22, 26, 27, 41, 181, 199 late modernist 21–6, 36–7, 48, 54 postdramatic theatre 1, 2, 4–5, 16, 48, 196 and Brecht, Bertolt 18–19 realist 1–5, 14–16, 25, 129, 130, 191 See also anti-realism under realism time 45, 88, 93, 115, 117–19, 121–3, 196 in Foreman 36–7, 44–5, 57 in Kemp 93, 98, 100–02, 115, 117, 120

217 social 98–9, 100, 115–16, 120–21, 123 and space 51, 60, 70–1, 88 and Stein, Gertrude 43–4 ‘vertical’ 100, 117–18, 120–1 Time-Image 93, 101 Total Recall: Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 2 32, 38, 41–2, 43 train, image of 92–3, 109–10, 113, 115, 118 Victorian College of the Arts (vca) 9, 163 visual text See storyboards voice-over 64, 88–9, 172–4, 177 voices, multiple 87, 90–1, 95–8 Wilson, Robert 3, 4, 6, 33 influence on Kemp 11, 123 The Wooster Group 6, 33 writer Foreman as 28, 35–6, 48 Kemp as 54, 94–5, 98–9 Murphet as 134–8, 144, 147–60, 163–4, 170, 172–4, 180 and training for 6, 35–36, 46 See also storyboards writer/director 1, 3–4, 10, 23, 193–8 influence of film 2–6, 28, 30–31, 138–40 Foreman as 33, 32–9, 193–4 Kemp as 7, 23, 83, 123–4, 193–4 Murphet as 148, 155, 163–70, 179 Also see auteur