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English Pages 330 [335] Year 2006
MONOLOGUES Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity
edited by
CLARE WALLACE
þ Litteraria Pragensia Prague 2006
Copyright © Clare Wallace, 2006. Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors Published 2006 by Litteraria Pragensia Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Prague 1 Czech Republic www.litterariapragensia.com All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. The publication of this book has been supported by research grant MSM0021620824 “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education. Cataloguing in Publication Data Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, edited by Clare Wallace.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 80‐7308‐122‐9 (pb) 1. Theatre Studies. 2. Contemporary Drama I. Wallace, Clare. II. Title. Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Typeset and design by lazarus
Contents Clare Wallace Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance and Self as Spectacle Mateusz Borowski & Małgorzata Sugiera Everybody’s Stories: Monologue in Contemporary Playwriting from Quebec David Bradby Monologues on the French Stage in the 1980s and 1990s: Theatres of the Self Daniela Jobertová The Dialogical Monologue and the Monological Dialogue in Dramatic Works by Bernard‐Marie Koltès Mark Berninger “I am walking slowly in a dense jungle”—Monologue in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes Laurens De Vos “Little is left to tell.” Samuel Beckett’s and Sarah Kane’s Subverted Monologues Eamonn Jordan Look Who’s Talking, Too: The Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative
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Dee Heddon Beyond the Self: Autobiography as Dialogue Catharine McLean‐Hopkins Performing Autologues: Citing/Siting the Self in Autobiographic Performance Rebecca D’Monté Voicing Abuse/Voicing Gender Jorge Huerta & Ashley Lucas Framing the Macho: Gender, Identity, and Sexuality in Three Chicana/o Solo Performances Brian Singleton Am I Talking to Myself? Men, Masculinities and the Monologue in Contemporary Irish Theatre Eckart Voigts‐Virchow & Mark Schreiber Will the “Wordy Body” Please Stand Up? The Crises of Male Impersonation in Monological Drama Johannes Birringer Interacting: Performance and Transmediality Notes on Contributors
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Clare Wallace
Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance and Self as Spectacle Mm. There’s always going to be a smugness about you listening to this. / As we all take part in this convention … / And you are entitled. / This convention. These restrictions, these rules, they give us that freedom. / I have the freedom to tell you this unhindered, while you can sit there assured that no one is going to get hurt. Possibly offended, but you’ll live.1
Conventions, restrictions, freedom, smugness and offence— such are the co‐ordinates of the theatre experience ironically summed up by Conor McPherson’s disgruntled theatre critic and cantankerous monologist in St. Nicholas (1997). And for some they might also delineate a fairly accurate outline of monologue drama and performance. Indeed, from Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theatre of interiority, to Philippe Minyana’s “inventories” of everyday speech, to Karen Finley’s provocative and political solo performance pieces, these qualities are laced through radically different types of theatrical monologue. The idea for this book initially arose from an interest in the recurrence of types of monologue in twentieth century British and Irish drama, and the attendant tensions between convention and freedom. However, as is evident from 1 Conor McPherson, St. Nicholas in The Weir and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999) 108.
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the essays herein, monologue is an incredibly widespread mode spanning “conventional” drama to “alternative” theatre.2 Monologue theatre nevertheless remains contentious, soliciting questions about the very nature of theatre itself, about the nature of performance and audience response, truth and illusion, narrative and experience. Is it an undoing or dismemberment of theatre’s core characteristics—imitative action and dialogue? Is it merely an excuse for autobiographical excess where the performance text is little more than a collection of reminiscences or testimonies? Although it is to be found across the spectrum of modern and postmodern theatre, critical engagement with monologue’s modalities and implications, with the exception of Deborah Geis’s Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama, remains diffuse and scant.3 Undoubtedly, as several of the contributors to this volume indicate, critical commentary on solo autobiographical performance (which predominantly takes the form of monologue) has been growing.4 Beyond that there is a vague sense that for drama at
2 In the opening chapter of Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), Theodore Shank uses the conventional—alternative opposition to launch his discussion of the latter types of theatre. Conventional theatre is associated with playwriting, alternative with performance. He goes on to assert that “The artists who comprise the alternative theatre explore the relation of the artist to the work and the performance to the spectator” while “The conventional theatre is usually expressive of a past time. Artists convey through their works a knowledge of how it feels to be alive in their particular time and place” (7). Beyond the scope of Shank’s extensive history of experimental theatre in America however, the limitations of such an opposition are soon evident. 3 Deborah Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Among the other books that deal at least in part with monologue performance both Philip Auslander’s Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) and Theodore Shank’s Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre provide keen insights into the American context. 4 See essays by Dee Heddon and Catharine McLean‐Hopkins below. Admittedly, at least one of the performances described by Heddon, Salon Adrienne, is not
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least, all roads probably lead back to Samuel Beckett. Beckett is indisputably pivotal. While early examples of monologue plays include August Strindberg’s The Stronger (1888‐9) and Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast (1916), it is not until Beckett begins to explore the form in the late 1950s that its experimental potential is seriously developed. Nevertheless, in approaching the multiplicity of monologue forms that have appeared over the last thirty years, one must also reach beyond Beckett to the discourses and conditions that precede his work, as well as to those that succeed it. As Mark Berninger notes in his essay in this volume, one of the difficulties that dogs any discussion of theatre monologues is the very looseness of the term. The question of how to define monologue in anything more than the most basic of ways opens the usual Pandora’s Box of problems attendant on generic criticism and also brings into view a number of contradictions. This is demonstrated, for example, by Patrice Pavis in his compendious and informative Dictionary of Theatre where at first he defines the term as follows: “A monologue is a speech by a character to himself, while a soliloquy is addressed directly to an interlocutor who does not speak.”5 In suggesting a distinct difference between soliloquy and monologue, Pavis’s definition alters the standard and more general dictionary designation of soliloquy as speaking alone with or without the presence of hearers (OED). Indeed, already the notion of a silent interlocutor presents a tautology. Later, when describing the “deep structure of monologue,” Pavis refines this by stating that while structurally the monologue is not dependent upon a reply from “an interlocutor,” it “addresses the spectator directly as an accomplice and a watcher‐hearer.”6 The distinction between soliloquy and monologue first implied is thus effectively
monological as it is structured around the performer’s conversation with an audience of one. 5 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Schantz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998) 218. 6 Pavis, Dictionary of Theatre, 219.
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erased. It is perhaps finally more useful to conceive of monologue as a genre, albeit a multifaceted one, and soliloquy as dramatic device. More illuminating is Pavis’s general typology of monologues, which categorises according to dramaturgical function (narrative, lyrical/emotional, reflection/deliberation) and literary form (aside, stanza, interior monologue, authorial intervention, solitary dialogue, the monologue drama).7 These categories, whether implicitly or explicitly, inform the work assembled here. However, rather than attempting to produce an overview of types of monologue in theatre and performance or to copper fasten terminology, this collection of essays roams around various realisations and modifications of the monologue in plays and in solo performance. It is deliberately poly‐vocal and poly‐perspectival in its treatment not only of monodrama, but also of semi‐monologues, autobiographical pieces, polylogues or ensemble monologues and ultimately transmedial performance. Despite such diversity, two main strands in the theatre of monologue need to be highlighted: the monologue drama and the solo performance. While usually treated separately they have been deliberately juxtaposed here with the aim of drawing out the conceptual affinities and shared contemporary cultural conditions that underpin both varieties. These strands at times are highly distinct; at others they are closely interwoven. Both involve a speaker who delivers speeches before an audience, sometimes directly addressing that audience, sometimes addressing a silent or invisible character‐auditor. Though in some cases speeches relate stories this may not be their primary function. If there is more than one speaker on stage speeches are not dialogical, rather they function as discreet units that may overlap or contradict one another. A prime example of this technique is to be found in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) in which three characters tell overlapping, yet discordant, stories
7 Pavis, Dictionary of Theatre, 219.
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of their past lives together. Like monologue drama, the monologue or solo performance is generally carefully scripted. However, the status of the text evidently differs. If solo performance scripts appear less frequently in print, more importantly they belong to the author/performer in a way a conventional play text does not belong to the playwright. As Dee Heddon in her essay here describes: “In solo autobiographical performance, the performing subject and the subject of performance are typically one and the same.” The functions of author and performer are welded together, so it is unthinkable that a Karen Finley or a Bobby Baker solo piece be performed by someone else.8 Monologue in the sense of solo performance is therefore subjectively determined in an explicit and complex manner which is explored by Heddon and Catharine McLean‐Hopkins below. The contexts for monologue in the world beyond the theatre are relatively limited and are associated with various forms of performance activity: speeches, sermons, instruction and lectures; recitation and storytelling; confessions; and finally, “perversions” of these former categories in psychosis, hysteria and so on. It is therefore unsurprising that monologue and naturalism have little affinity with one another. As Pavis notes: “The monologue reveals the artificiality of theatre and acting conventions. Certain periods that were not concerned with producing a naturalistic rendering of the world could easily accommodate the monologue (Shakespeare, Sturm und Drang, Romantic or Symbolist drama).”9 Consequently, monologue dramas and performances rarely maintain the conventions of a naturalistic stage space. On the contrary, the empty stage or site‐specific locations deliberately disrupt the illusion of the 8 If, conventionally, playwrights more rarely take to the stage to perform their own work, then British playwright, David Hare’s performance of his own monologue Via Dolorosa (1998) playing himself changes this picture somewhat. Hare does not pretend to be an actor, rather his deliberately unpolished performance functions to authenticate the autobiographical elements of the dramatic text and to codify it as sincere testimony. 9 Pavis, Dictionary of Theatre, 218.
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fourth wall. In the absence of this convention, monologue focuses attention intensely upon the speaker and upon the way in which s/he expresses her or himself. Language, the dynamics of narrative and linguistic elements are, as a result, foregrounded. So for example a play like Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1967) stages the violent acquisition of language, described by the playwright as “speech torture.”10 At the other end of the spectrum, Anna Deavere Smith’s performances Fires in the Mirror (1991) and Twilight Los Angeles, 1992 (1993)11 are composed of eyewitness accounts (of violent clashes between African Americans and Jews in Brooklyn following the death of a black child killed by a car carrying a rabbi, and the L.A. riots) assembled and performed by Smith. Replicating the stories of the witnesses and their modes of expression through impersonation are the focal points of her performances. It might be asserted that in some cases the monologue form is “essential” storytelling, a stripping away of dramatic illusion—for instance, Eamonn Jordan in his essay here writes of the role of naïveté as an attitude in Irish monologue drama. Nonetheless, distortion and dissonance are simultaneously generated, while the regularity with which “nudity” features in solo performance seems no accident. The literal stripping of the performer may be seen as a means of exposing a “true” self while simultaneously shocking or embarrassing the audience. Yet the possibilities that the speaker may not be entirely trustworthy, or may be a deliberate trickster, that as spectators we take the role of confessors, or worse still, voyeurs, hover in the wings. Inevitably this draws any discussion of monologue to a set of central concerns orientated around subjectivity and performance. The roles of personality, persona, personification
10 Peter Handke, Kaspar, trans. Michael Roloff (1967; London: Eyre Methuen, 1972) 11. 11 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror, PBS television presentation, 28 Apr. 1993 (theatre première 1991); Twilight Los Angeles 1992 (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
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and impersonation are entangled with the linguistic and narrative elements mentioned above. Aspects of impersonation, in the sense of taking on and of giving voice to an identity, are explored in this volume by Rebecca D’Monté, in particular when she analyses Eve Ensler’s problematic “empowerment” play The Vagina Monologues (1996). Ensler’s personae exist not as conventional characters, but rather as a function of the stories they tell. The status of the play as a “personality vehicle” (D’Monté notes just some of the celebrities who have performed the text) and the pseudo‐documentary status of the stories further complicate the interplay of personal, political and performative identities. Also in this volume, in an associated though somewhat differently inflected manner, Eckart Voigts‐ Virchow and Mark Schreiber discuss how character, especially in monologue or solo performance, increasingly gives way to “permeable personae” and a highly self‐reflexive play of impersonation. In his book Presence and Resistance, Philip Auslander illustrates this tendency vividly when he contrasts the work of two well‐known American performers, Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray. Both, of course, work with or rather from autobiographical material, yet their attitudes to narrating and staging this material are, as Auslander indicates, quite radically divergent. For Anderson, performing, arranging, editing and rearranging her stories and anecdotes renders them “less literary in tone, more emblematic and less personal.” Although the stories are narrated in the first person, Anderson’s “persona in these pieces is so detached that one begins to doubt [their] autobiographical status,” argues Auslander. So their effect is, somewhat contradictorily, depersonalised, they “become the narrative equivalent of a sound bite.”12 In contrast, Spalding Gray’s monologues are proximate to the narrative structure of a television serial in which constant characters—in Gray’s case these characters are 12 Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) 74‐75.
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based on his wife and himself—reappear in different scenarios.13 Auslander, teasing out the interactions of persona, personality, the personal and impersonal in relation to these two performers, concludes that while: the persona Gray has created through his performances is overtly autobiographical … possessed of a defined personality; Anderson’s persona, on the other hand, has progressively shed its autobiographical aura to become a nonpersona … 14
Both, however, are engaged in staging or mediating the self in, and in relation to “a mediatized environment.”15 The spectacle of the (alienated) self represented in this environment is taken a step further here by Johannes Birringer who contends that as contemporary performance moves towards a “theatre of transmediality” the spaces of identity and subjectivity are necessarily transformed and displaced by technology. As several of the essays collected in this volume suggest, contemporary monologue theatre seems to grapple with the (post)modern condition of the “self.” In her study of American monologue drama, Deborah Geis argues that in contrast to the revelatory function of the soliloquy in Shakespeare’s drama, present‐day monologues are frequently characterised by the ways in which they play “tricks.” Indeed for Geis, and as is evident in some of performance work already discussed, the
13 Auslander, Presence and Resistance, 76. 14 Auslander, Presence and Resistance, 77. 15 Auslander, Presence and Resistance, 81. Auslander continues his exploration of mediatisation in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), looking in particular at the value accorded to live performance—a traditionally highly prized dimension to alternative theatre of the later 20th century. Though not a question pursued by contributors here, Auslander’s controversial argument that with dominance of the “televisual,” and latterly new media, the prestige of presence is diminished, is one which is certainly pertinent to the dynamic of monologue theatre.
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form is less engaged with character development or narrative progress than with theatricality, parody and ambivalence.16 While these dimensions to contemporary monologue seem pre‐eminently postmodern, as Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera explain, monologue in theatre emerges in the late 19th century within the context of a changing discourse around selfhood and how to represent inner, psychological states. In its turn towards monologue, theatre echoes the concerns of the literary genres of poetry and fiction, which are perhaps more indicative of the discourse of the age. Clearly elements from these non‐theatrical genres later appear woven into the fabric of theatres of monologue. Important among these elements is the development of dramatic monologue as a poetic genre in the early decades of the 19th century. What is perhaps most of significance are the ways in which dramatic monologue poetry problematises the construction of the speaking self. As Glennis Byron describes, the genre emerges at a time when notions of the self begin slowly to shift towards a concept of the subject: As opposed to the notion of the individual self with agency and control over itself, the term “subject” suggests an “I” that is simultaneously a subject to itself within its own experience and always subjected to forces both outside the self, such as social and environmental forces, and within itself, the workings of the unconscious..17
Dramatic monologue is generally perceived as a reaction to and rejection of Romantic lyricism, and a “unified Romantic subject.”18 The innovation of dramatic monologue, attributed
16 Deborah Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). 17 Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) 45. 18 Byron, Dramatic Monologue, 3. Byron however also notes that the repetition in dramatic monologues of the questions “Who am I?” or “What am I?” suggests a
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principally to Tennyson and Browning, seen in the context of changing cultural conditions is one that resonates with peculiar familiarity with claims often made for solo or monologic performance in the contemporary period. Victorian anxieties and uncertainties regarding “stable values and transcendent truth”19 find expression in this genre of poem that, according to Robert Langbaum, becomes the form “for an empiricist and relativist age, an age which has come to consider value an evolving thing dependent upon the changing individual and social requirements of the historical process.”20 Dramatic monologue enables the poet to inhabit a range of personae that may, as opposed to the confidential, earnest lyric “I,” open a space for doubt and ambivalence around the speaker. Notwithstanding the Victorian association of introspection with abnormal states of mind,21 dramatic monologue gestures towards the broader historical context in which the notion of an autonomous, conscious self is gradually complicated by the emergence of modern psychological theories of the unconscious. The perception of the self as “not autonomous, unified or stable, but rather the unfixed, fragmented product of various social and historical forces,”22 is fundamental to the emergence not only of this poetic genre, but also to the later development of modernist aesthetics. If the form ripples with latent and manifest meaning (as is famously evident in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”), it also plainly draws attention to the speaker and the tension between fictive and autobiographical voices within the poetic frame. A similar tension is to be found in some forms of solo performance explored in this volume.
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strong connection with the Romantic interest in self rather than any absolute rejection or break. See page 45 and following. Byron, Dramatic Monologue, 34. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) 107‐8. Byron, Dramatic Monologue, 43. Byron, Dramatic Monologue, 43.
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A final suggestive dimension to dramatic monologue is the way it can be seen as a venue for commenting upon or acting out particular gender roles. The device of persona permits the poet to take on the role of the opposite sex, though consideration of gender identity is rarely radical in 19th century verse.23 However, the nascent performance and questioning of gender identities in evidence in Victorian dramatic monologue can be seen fully and radically developed in much recent monologue theatre. So, as Brian Singleton, Dee Heddon, Jorge Huerta and Ashley Lucas in various ways explore, monologue today can constitute a forum for the airing of critical perspectives on normative gender roles. Similarly we may find in prose interior monologue an important precursor to contemporary monologue drama. Defined by Robert Scholes as “a literary term, synonymous with unspoken soliloquy,” interior monologue as a “technique for presenting the inward life” has an extended history.24 It is a long‐established convention that interior monologue can be used by an author to dramatise the “inner life” of characters in various ways. Scholes separates these into rhetorical and psychological.25 And although he distinguishes between the use of interior monologue in prose and soliloquy,26 it may be argued that in fact versions of both rhetorical and psychological forms can likewise be found in contemporary theatre. If interior monologue, as an umbrella term, covers various means of depicting the inner world of fictional characters, be it through “silent soliloquy,” authorial commentary and so on, then one of the most influential developments is the stream of consciousness technique. As is well known, this psychological term which hails from William James’s Principles of Psychology
23 See Byron chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of gender in dramatic monologue poetry by male and female authors. 24 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) 177. 25 Scholes, The Nature of Narrative, 195. 26 Scholes, The Nature of Narrative, 178.
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(1890), has come to designate an aesthetic strategy that deploys association and a disruption of conventional syntax to depict interior states. While the poetic genre of dramatic monologue situates the speaking “I” between internal and external forces, stream of consciousness prioritises internal experience and the realm of subjective perception. For Scholes, what connects writers who depict the interior lives of characters rhetorically (Gustav Flaubert, George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence) and those who do so psychologically (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or William Faulkner) is that they all have “faced the problem … of the limitation of verbal patterns as conveyors of thought and characterisation through thought.”27 Repeatedly, language is found inadequate for the expression of identity or subjectivity. It is this cul de sac that Samuel Beckett so memorably transferred to the stage. As Eckart Voigts‐Virchow and Mark Schreiber aptly describe, Beckett’s “soulless, monadic voices” are characterised by communication breakdown. Joyce attributed his use of interior monologue to Edouard Dujardin,28 blending it with stream of consciousness techniques; Beckett in turn adapted these elements to performance. But in contrast to Joyce’s proliferating linguistic aesthetic, Beckett’s is, to paraphrase Leo Bersani, an “art of impoverishment.”29 He notably complicates the position of the speaking self in various ways—by using technology (the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)), by distorting or disrupting narrative development, and finally by the avoidance of the first person pronoun. This is explicit in Not I (1972) where the speaking mouth refers to herself in the third person; in A Piece of Monologue (1979) which uses the third person throughout; and in Eh Joe (1965) where the voice haunting Joe uses the second and third person. Nevertheless, the implication is that these are voices belonging in some way to the protagonist and the theatre in which they 27 Scholes, The Nature of Narrative, 199. 28 Edouard Dujardin, Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). 29 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Renais (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
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speak is one of the mind, of conscience and of consciousness. Laurens De Vos in his essay here explores this interior theatre, arguing that “Beckett stages characters that are separated from themselves as a result of their introduction into the linguistic world. The discrepancy between the one who speaks and the character onstage is a theme that haunted Beckett throughout his career.” The spectacle of self as Other, strange and alienated is exacerbated by the speakers’ lack of a fictional, social or external context and their refusal, or inability to narrate their stories. In contrast to Beckett’s amputation of narrative, the theme of alienation is expressed in Bernard‐Marie Koltès’s in Night Just Before the Forests (1977) by the speaking “I” whose narratives proliferate manically. Here the speaking I does not deny itself, but rather frantically invents and reinvents itself through stories as a means of seducing a listener as Daniela Jobertová describes in her essay below. This process of invention through performative narratives is more playfully developed by Harold Pinter in his two rarely discussed monologue dramas Monologue (1973), Family Voices (1981). Pinter’s characteristic play upon hiatus and conversational games in Monologue is transformed into an elliptical speech directed to an empty chair, in Family Voices in the traffic of increasingly bizarre dead letters. In both plays any sense of consistent character identity is frustrated by the use of cliché, rote phraseology, contradiction and innuendo. Dramatic and interior monologue therefore can be seen to suggest some of the principal trajectories in contemporary monologue drama and performance. The use of persona as a means of social critique, the undermining of gender stereotypes through role‐play, blurring the outlines of the autobiographical, “authentic” subject, are recurrent features of, in particular, a genre of solo performance that has developed in the United States (and beyond) since the 1980s. Interior monologue may point towards a radically anti‐narrative theatre of the
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fragmented subject or to a much more conventional drama of story‐telling, testimony, confession and so on. The essays that follow revolve on a number of axes. The first of these concerns a primarily textual dimension to monologue theatre and the role of the writer. The aesthetics of the fragment, the role of narrative, and the relation of language to power are motifs explored by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera, David Bradby, Laurens De Vos, Mark Berninger and Daniela Jobertová. Borowski and Sugiera introduce Jean‐Pierre Sarrazac’s concept of the “playwright‐ rhapsode,” a figure whose creativity lies in the assemblage of texts and citation of various theatrical elements as a means of crafting a new work. They see monologue as “a prototypical rhapsodic form of playwriting which combines the dramatic, the epic and the lyrical mode” as well as “a model of a number of today’s developments in writing for the stage [that] necessitates a reformulation of the basic aspects of both the text for the theatre and its stage production.” Attention to the role of playwright as an assembler of textual elements is also a feature of David Bradby’s survey of monologue theatre in France since 1980. Bradby notes how in France playwrights have adopted the monologue as a means of “claiming the textual characteristics of a certain literary sensibility and using them as the springboard for a new approach.” This has involved a turn towards modernist techniques of stream of consciousness, linguistic experiment and an emphasis on textuality and the fragmenting of narrative and plot. De Vos, Berninger and Jobertová each spotlight the use of language in plays by Beckett and Sarah Kane, Pinter and Koltès respectively, exploring the dynamics of communication and lack thereof in the work. The second axis is that of monologue and performing‐the‐ self. The politics of identity in various guises is the focus of essays by Rebecca D’Monté, Eamonn Jordan, Dee Heddon, Brian Singleton, Catharine McLean‐Hopkins, Jorge Huerta and Ashley Lucas, and Eckart Voigts‐Virchow and Mark Schreiber. Gender is the most prominent area of concern here, although it [14]
is mixed with other elements such as homosexuality, ethnicity and national identity. Monologue as a venue for articulating a crisis in the conventions of masculinity, and as a renovation of those conventions, is addressed by Singleton, Jordan, Voigts‐ Virchow and Schreiber. Singleton and Jordan also explicitly connect monologue and masculinity with social and political transformation. If these essays cohere around Hiberno and Anglo‐American cultural co‐ordinates, then Jorge Huerta and Ashley Lucas’s contribution adds complexity to the map of gender identity by surveying how recent Chicana/o solo performance critiques machismo and heteronormative stereotypes. While Chicana/o theatre has been conventionally committed to social justice and consciousness raising, as Huerta and Lucas document, contemporary solo performers are challenging some of the core traditional values that have demarcated Chicana/o identity, creating spaces in which to imagine new hybrid identities. The violent, macho identities that have recently featured in work by some Irish playwrights finds an unexpected counterpoint in the unpicking of just such stereotypes in Chicana/o solo performance. D’Monté also investigates issues of violence and gender in work by Eve Ensler, Claire Dowie and Sarah Kane, and looks at the contrasts in their approaches. Lastly, Heddon and McLean‐Hopkins explore autobiographical solo performance work by a selection of American and British performers. Both highlight the dubious status accorded to the personal in performance and challenge the notion that the term autobiographical is often synonymous with self‐indulgent, self‐spectacle. Instead both argue for the political status of autobiographical performance. A third axis is foregrounded by Johannes Birringer, which angles away from the conventions of performance and drama towards a media orientated experience of self. If, as David George states, “we may be entering an age in which there are only media (semiosis, assumptions, paradigms, models) and no ontology, only experiences (and no Self except the one like an actor’s career made up of the parts we enact and rewrite)” then [15]
in this case “performance is the ideal medium and model.”30 For Birringer, performance in a medialised context with its connection to digital technology renders traditional conceptions of the body and subjectivity anachronistic. Ultimately what a “theatre of transmediality” would entail is an interactivity that undercuts spectator‐performer positions and conventional notions of presence. Despite the suggestion that the conventions of verbal or textual theatre are exhausted, Birringer’s transmedial theatre returns to issues that recur throughout this book—those of communication, interaction and the “here and now.” The performer‐actor‐viewer of Intimate Transactions (2001‐5) is markedly a body alone in the dark, instructed to make contact with an other in the virtual space of the programme, tentatively feeling a path towards “sensory intimacy” with an other who cannot be concretely identified. While technology creates the space for this encounter—a virtual theatre—the solo body charged with a desire to connect, reacting to stimuli, or perhaps simply performing without an audience, seems to fold back upon the monadic voices of Beckett’s monologue theatre like a series of feedback loops. To conclude, monologue theatre, be it solo performance or drama, plants the self at the heart of the spectacle. As the essays collected here demonstrate, that self—alienated, multifaceted, unfinished, split, political, gendered—is above all performative and provocative.
30 David George, “On Ambiguity: Towards a post‐Modern Performance Theory,” Theatre Research International 14 (1989): 83.
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Mateusz Borowski & Małgorzata Sugiera
Everybody’s Stories: Monologue in Contemporary Playwriting from Quebec When in 1888 August Strindberg in his preface to Miss Julie1 delineated the new principles of creating stage fiction, more convincing than the one created by the outworn conventions of the well‐made play, he did not hide his reservations concerning the use of monologue on stage. Admittedly, Strindberg writes, a soliloquising character on stage poses a considerable obstacle on the way to creating a convincing reality effect, because of the fundamental psychological improbability of the situation of a person talking while alone. Although he does not exclude the monologue from the new drama, treating it as a significant tool of disclosing crucial information about the character, he advocates introducing it only on condition that its appearance is well motivated by the plot and the psychology of the speaker. In this respect Strindberg, seeking a way out of the crisis in which the drama of the late 19th century found itself, retained in his project of a naturalist text for the stage the two traditional functions of the monologue. On the one hand it serves as an epic device that supplies these pieces of information about the
1 August Strindberg, Miss Julie and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 55‐109.
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characters’ past or the offstage events which cannot be revealed in a dialogic interaction between characters. On the other hand monologue appeared in drama which by the end of the 19th century followed the novel in the search for appropriate means for expressing human internal life. As a lyrical intrusion that disrupted the smooth course of a dialogic interaction, internal monologue provided insight into the speaker’s psyche. In neither of these two cases, however, did the monologue change the basic principles of creating a fictional world on stage or the rules of communication with the audience. As a confession made to other characters or a soliloquy delivered when alone on stage, monologue in the naturalist project was to stay within the confines of stage fiction. It remained enclosed behind the fourth wall and did not address directly the audience, which would destroy the perfect illusion. Obviously, the strict reservations concerning the use of monologue on stage point only to the precarious situation in which the dialogue‐based dramatic form found itself by the end of the 19th century. New themes, such as the exploration of human psyche connected to the development of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, as well as political and economic subjects required a radical rejuvenation of the old means of expression, conventions and the rules of communication with the audience. For neither the richness of the chaos of human interior life, with all its accidental reflexes, unconscious motives and libidinal pulsations, nor complex social issues could find expression in the logocentric and dialogic form of the naturalist play. It did not mean, however, that the life of monologue, understood as a verbal expression of inner thoughts or an epic narration of about events from behind the scenes, ended together with the death of traditional drama. On the contrary, monologic forms of writing for the stage from the turn of the 20th century onwards provided an answer to the crisis of dramatic form. An early instance of such an attempt occurred a year after the première of Miss Julie when that the French naturalist Jean Jullien put on stage in Théâtre Libre his play L’Écheance (Deadline) in which [18]
he tried to render with theatrical means the inner life of his central character, by trying to transplant into the field of theatre those formal solutions which had already been worked out by the psychological novel2. To indicate the extent of his departure from the model of dialogue‐based drama, Jullien called his play a “monologue‐action,” since the entire represented reality was to be treated as an expression of the main character’s unique point of view and at the same time reflect his acute psychological tensions and inner impulses. Therefore Jullien was not using the term “monologue” in the traditional sense, sanctioned by Hegel’s aesthetics and adopted by Strindberg in the above‐mentioned preface to Miss Julie. As the lawgiver of the “absolute” drama in which dialogue serves as the only means of expression which does not destroy the autonomy of the represented reality, Hegel allowed a monologue to appear only in these cases “in which the mind consolidates itself out of all past events or it realises its difference from the others or its internal split, or it makes a final decision, either suddenly or after a long meditation.” 3 The monologue which Jullien wanted to write had nothing to do with a Hegelian transposition of the moment of decision making. He treated the relationship between the speaker and the addressee typical of a monologue as a model of communication according to which he tried to change significantly the terms of the contract between the stage and the audience. Instead of making the spectator believe in the objectivity and absolute autonomy of the represented reality, in the real existence of fictional characters and in their freedom to decide about whatever they say and do, he mediated the stage events via the central figure, who thus became the proper storyteller, a narrator of his own tale, told manifestly from a subjective point of view, addressed to the audience and
2 Joseph Danan, Le théâtre de la pensée (Rouen: Éditions medianes, 1995) 84‐86. 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ästhetik (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1976) 2.527 (our translation).
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therefore binding them more forcefully with the fictional world on stage. A similar gesture of modifying or completely rejecting the traditional mechanism of projection and identification was performed by a number of playwrights of the turn of the century for whom the canonical form of drama proved insufficient to take up new topics, the intimate and psychological, as well as the political and economic. The former lay at the source of those experiments which gave rise to Strindberg’s post‐infernal plays and were later continued throughout the entire 20th century in the expressionist and neo‐ expressionist tendencies. The latter were taken up by various forms of avant‐garde political theatre, notably by Brecht’s epic theatre and its later descendants, with a significant variation. If in the typical subjective play the stage monologue belongs to a fictional character who displays the inner workings of his/her psyche in a theatrical form, in the epic play the fragmentation of the fable through montage strategies and the insertion of commentary reveal the presence of the author as the ultimate source of the stage reality. Representatives of both these tendencies for various reasons tried to break the traditional illusion so as to forge a new contract with the audience for the sake of engaging the recipients in an active participation in the co‐creation of the stage reality. However, the adoption of the monologue as the model of the new drama may mistakenly create the impression that it confirms the conviction disseminated by Peter Szondi’s studies from the mid‐20th century. According to the author of Theory of Modern Drama (1956) the emphatic presence of a narrator, be it a character of the author him/herself might be mistakenly taken as proof of the fundamentally epic nature of contemporary writing for the stage. However, when looked upon from today’s perspective the developments in writing for the second half of the 20th century, the concept of contemporary drama as a type of auctorial monologue requires profound modifications.
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This task has been undertaken by Jean‐Pierre Sarrazac’s studies, particularly LʹAvenir du drame (1981)4 and Lexique du drame moderne et contemporain (2005)5 prepared by a group of scholars under Sarrazac’s supervision. Perceptively investigating the development of contemporary playwriting, the French scholar asserts confidently that epic tendencies in European drama of the last three decades existed on equal terms with tendencies towards the imposition of a lyric subjective perspective. Moreover, this “contamination” of drama with epic and lyric elements has by no means led to the expulsion from the stage of Szondi’s pure essence of the dramatic, or to the refusal on the part of authors writing for theatre to render interpersonal relationships in a direct dialogical form. As a response to the views that he criticises, Sarrazac, looking back to Antiquity and the oral roots of theatre, puts forward an alternative theoretical solution to the problem of crisis in drama. He derives all the changes to the fundamental principles of writing a text for the stage from a radical reformulation of the concept of a playwright, who, according to Sarrazac, more and more often gives way to a playwright‐rhapsode. A rhapsode’s creative gesture consists in stitching together texts for the theatre as well as by literally quoting or allusively referring to fragments of traditional dramatic genres, aesthetic categories or theatrical conventions and staging solutions. By continually deconstructing and reconstructing, cutting and sewing together epic, lyrical and dramatic fragments, they reveal their presence as the producers of chimera‐like texts, every time ending up with unique wholes and qualities, and striving for an intimate bond with their prospective audiences. When placed within the framework delineated by Sarrazac, contemporary monologue and all its derivative forms by no 4 Jean‐Pierre Sarrazac, L’Avenir du drame. Écritures dramatiques contemporaines (Lausanne: Éditions de l’Aire, 1981). 5 Jean‐Pierre Sarrazac ed., Lexique du drame moderne et contemporain (Belval: Circé, 2005).
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means lose their significance as a theatrical means of expression. On the contrary, they enable a fundamental change of the basic tenets of communication with the audience and the referential function of theatre, i.e. the principles of connecting the stage with the outer reality. For adopting monologue, understood in this context as a prototypical rhapsodic form of playwriting which combines the dramatic, the epic and the lyrical mode, as a model of a number of today’s developments in writing for the stage, necessitates a reformulation of the basic aspects of both the text for the theatre and its stage production. The actor turns into a narrator, a story‐teller, while the spectator or the observer becomes a listener. Accordingly, the “here and now” of the theatrical situation gains validation as prior to the stage fiction while the presence of the recipient as the addressee of the words delivered on stage becomes openly acknowledged, which until now has been reserved for self‐reflexive texts. Significantly, these tendencies dovetail with the rebirth of the belief that due to the presence of spectators as witnesses and participants in a theatre event, the character or the narrator can possibly redefine his or her identity and the meaning of life. This, in turn, is also connected with the revival of the concept of theatre as a place of establishing both the collective and individual identity of spectators themselves. This particular function of monologue as a means of forging communal bonds and at the same time determining the identity of each of the community members became particularly significant for the theatre of Quebec. The French‐speaking district of Canada is often referred to by its inhabitants as an enclave which persistently tries to ward off the influences of Americanised lifestyle, hierarchy of values and popular culture which have already suffused the English‐speaking part of the country. Right from the 1970s theatre in Quebec became a crucial institution of public life and participated in the discussion of national themes. Like the proverbial mirror to the world, it reached for indigenous traditions to reconstruct the mythical beginnings of the nation, brought to light the forgotten [22]
history of the district and attempted to give a faithful representation of daily life, customs and the language in order to confirm the national identity of the Quebecois community. At least this was the function of the theatre in Quebec in the 1970s, which drew largely on the typical realist solutions and the mechanism of projection and identification. However, from the 1980s onwards, apart from the still vital tradition of psychological realism, a number of new tendencies started appearing as a result of the search for such forms of theatrical and textual expression which could more effectively turn the audience into a projected partner and co‐creator of the theatrical event; a function that would assure the performative strengthening of communal bonds. This search affected to the same extent the forms of theatrical expression, influenced by performance art, happenings and the revival of native oral traditions, as the new types of writing for the stage. Due to this particular function of the theatre, the plays from Quebec written today provide an excellent set of examples of those changes which the traditional monologue has undergone. It has developed into a rhapsodic form which combines a number of possible solutions, from more traditional monodrama to novel forms of polylogue or interweaving monologues that give rise to a hitherto unknown convention of “a dialogue of independent monologues,” which could also be regarded as a type of a reported mediated dialogue. We would like to take a closer look at five different attempts at the use of such broadly defined monologue in contemporary playwriting, carried out on different levels of the dramatic structure, and to investigate its various forms and functions, as well consequences for the perceptual habits and expectations of the audience. Perhaps the least complex instance of such a use of monologue is exemplified by Larry Tremblay’s The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (1995)6 in which the speaker, Gaston Talbot, performs a theatricalised psychodrama. In the course of his 6 Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges, 1995).
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monologue he tries to recover from the depth of his memory the crucial moment from his childhood which determined his entire later life, imprinting itself as an indelible trauma. It is this trauma that Gaston tries to play out in front of the audience and as a result to break free from its determining influence. But it seems that he himself is his greatest obstacle on the way to reaching the core of the painful formative event and recovering from it, because he clearly avoids a head‐on confrontation with his own past. His monologue meanders in different directions, taking up certain topics and switching to others after a while, without ever reaching any definitive conclusions. He hovers around the key events from his life, like the metaphoric dragonfly from his dream, but never actually recounts them from beginning till end, failing to produce a coherent narrative crucial for healing the psychic wounds. It is only by assembling bits and pieces of his fragmentary narrative that the listeners can reconstruct the story from the time when Gaston as a child for the first time in his life realised and experienced a homoerotic fascination. Gaston, a native Frenchman, allowed his friend, an English boy Pierre Gagnon, to humiliate him in a cruel game of cowboys and Indians in which the borders between fiction and reality became dangerously blurred. Acting on an inexplicable impulse, Gaston in the middle of the game smashed his friend’s head against a stone, but got away with his crime by cunningly lying to the investigating policemen. The sense of guilt intermingling with the dismay at his own deed and the inexplicability of the reasons for which he committed the murder seem to be the driving force of his monologue, which sets for the listeners a cognitive trap. It draws them into an interaction with the speaker and makes them responsible for solving Gaston’s mystery. In spite of a close resemblance to a typical soliloquy, the monologue in Tremblay’s play has a different shape than a conversation which one has with oneself in solitude. The author of The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi does not aim to create the illusion of a direct contact with the speaker’s thoughts and emotions as they [24]
come to existence unhindered and uninfluenced by the presence of a listener and driven only by internal contradictions. On the contrary, Gaston is well aware of the presence of listeners. It is for them that he (more or less consciously) performs this seemingly sincere confession. Thus what he offers is not a disclosure of the truth which he has kept hidden so far, but such a version of the truth which, as he assumes, the listeners await, and therefore will be able to understand and accept. By the same token what he says and the way he speaks depend on the form of address to the audience and the relationship he establishes with them. “If we share the same vision / we can handle the world / if we feel the same thing all together / we create a magic moment,” (12) Gaston says at one point of his monologue, defining the aim of his “performance” and, at the same time, the function of the audience as the ones who have to impose an order on his aleatory story. In this way they will sanction his identity, disintegrating under the heavy burden of memories. In order to elicit the listeners’ engagement in the story Tremblay gives the monologue in The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi a manifestly metatheatrical character, and addresses the audience directly as the listeners of Gaston’s confession. “So tonight my motto is / TO KEEP IN TOUCH,” the protagonist repeats at numerous junctures of his fragmentary soliloquy, while the deictic “tonight” anchors his words in the actual “here and now” of the evening on which the play is performed. But although Tremblay’s monologue is constructed out of multiplied planes of representation, its does not have the neat stratification of a typical play within the play. On the contrary, Gaston deliberately sets one trap for the listener after another, switching freely in time and every now and again trespassing across the border between waking life and dream. What is more, Tremblay gives his play a unique linguistic shape, simultaneously justifying this solution by the story told by Gaston, who recounts one of his dreams in which he suddenly started speaking English, although he had never known the [25]
language before. That is why Gaston does not deliver his monologue in his native French, but in a peculiar idiom, in which English words are combined into sentences according to the rules of the French syntax. This basic speech gestus not only gives rise to unexpected poetic effects, endowing the monologue with new meanings. This solution serves a much more fundamental purpose as a device that gives Gaston’s monologue a unique status, on the verge of a dream vision and palpable and concrete stage reality. For the protagonist of The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, although corporally present in front of the audience whose presence he openly acknowledges, seems to be still speaking from within his dream. The English that he awkwardly uses sounds so alien to him that he would not be able to lie in it. For this reason he seems to be more a medium of his own “self” than an actor conscious of his own skills, the solutions he uses and the tricks he plays on the audience. This double status of Gaston’s speech accounts for the ultimate impossibility to tell the truth from invention, the actual events from the desired ones, the real from the phantasmic level. Only those listeners who order the scattered bits and pieces of his interior monologue into a coherent narrative, which will finally dissolve the tension between different accounts of the past and sanction the protagonist’s identity, can solve the enigma of Gaston’s inner life. Therefore Tremblay’s monologue can be treated as a modified version of the typical interior monologue whose loose structure reflects the unrestrained flow of thoughts and engages the recipient in a search for the meaning of the speaker’s past. If traditionally the spectators are merely passive witnesses of the speaker soliloquy, in The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi they have to get involved in uncovering the secret that constantly evades the speaker. A much more radical variation of this traditional structure can be found in René‐Daniel Dubois’s play Adieu, docteur Münch… ou et personne… (Goodbye, doctor Münch… or
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and nobody… [1981]),7 which on the surface however, bears clear references to the tradition of the subjective dramaturgy in the style of Strindberg and the expressionists. This first scene opens with an anonymous Voice announcing that someone is going to die tonight, followed by a repeated attempt to fill out a certificate of death. Therefore Dubois’s play clearly presents itself as a failed attempt at ordering a résumé of the title character’s life at the very moment of his death. This might be the meaning of the opening section of the play, significantly entitled The Doctor Münch? The emphatic definite article and the question mark suggest that the basic theme of the play is a search for main protagonist’s identity. For the text reads as an attempt at linking all the numerous characters in the play, among which Pieta and Statue of Liberty appear alongside other human characters, so that all of these alter egos of the central figure of Doctor Münch form a constellation that could encapsulate the essence of his disintegrating self. However, in spite of those similarities with the tradition of subjective dramaturgy, Dubois’s text differently shapes the represented reality in his play, violating the principles of communication with the audience typical of the classic expressionist drama. Although Adieu, docteur Münch… at first glance seems structured as a traditional play with consecutive lines subordinated to different characters, it is in fact a form of a monologue. Not only does its subtitle clearly announce that the text is a sonata for a single actor, but also in the première staging the entire text was delivered by a single performer, the author himself. Thus Dubois’s text significantly differs in its structure from The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi. For even if Gaston Talbot quoted directly the words spoken by other figures from his stories and dreams, he never abandoned his unique French‐ English idiom, which assured the stylistic uniformity of his monologue and the individual quality of his voice. In Adieu, docteur Münch… instead of a monolithic soliloquy, a form of 7 René‐Daniel Dubois, Adieu, docteur Münch… ou et personne… (Montreal: Lémeac Éditions, 1982).
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polylogue appears, in which the voice of the central character keeps splitting into numerous alter egos whose interactions bring out the inner tensions and inconsistencies within the central character’s psyche. This choice of a textual form and its projected rendering on stage was dictated in the first place by the basic theme of Dubois’s play. For Doctor Münch multi‐ voiced monologue is not a search for the traumatic origins of the adult personality. The protagonist of Dubois’s text is much more perplexed by a different malady, typical of the 20th century culture and civilisation—the insufficiency of language as means of self‐expression and communication with others. By enclosing the musical polylogue within the confines of a single psyche, Dubois creates on stage an ambiguous metaphor, which reflects the protagonist’s alienation from himself and from the others. And although every consecutive scene, by bringing on stage yet another embodiment of Doctor Münch’s split psyche, makes it more and more obvious that the protagonist never leaves the confines of his solipsistic universe, Dubois tries to forge contact with the audience in a different, non‐verbal way. The polylogous structure of his play not only serves as a metaphor of a split psyche, but also enables him to orchestrate the voices in a musical way, by introducing leading motifs and their variations, interweaving dialogic parts with solos and choral passages. The form which comes into being as a result of this musical structuring brings to the foreground the rhythmic and melodious qualities of language, which reflect the inner tensions of the central character. Therefore one should note the significance of Münch’s last lines addressed directly to the audience, in which he repeats the same phrase “vous m’écoutez.” It can read both as “listen to me” and “you can hear me,” for in Dubois’s sonata for one actor the soliloquising protagonist not only speaks to us, but also becomes a musical piece which communicates with the listeners without the falsifying mediation of words and allows for a greater interpretative freedom.
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Both The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, with its blurred metatheatrical stratification, and Adieu, docteur Münch…, which presents itself as a musical rather than dramatic monologue, can be read as variations on the traditional form of a subjective play in which the central figure provides the fictional point of identification for the audience. At the same time both plays can be classified as a type of theatre of memory. The catastrophe has already happened and one can return to it only by following very faint and incomplete traces. Therefore in both cases the task for the audience consists in listening attentively and watching closely what the soliloquising speakers say and do, in order to discern the consequences that the past trauma exerted on the present moment, and to notice meaningful deformations and distortions which it imprinted on the recollected account of the past events. This is the only way of approaching these characters’ mystery. A different type of textual structure is present in Wajdi Mouawad’s Littoral (1999)8 which can be treated as a yet another variant of subjective dramaturgy. If Dubois orchestrated internal voices in order to render in a most direct way the progressing disintegration of the protagonist’s psyche, Mouawad conceives of the moment of the birth of a mature self as a journey across the world, which has visible elements of a rite de passage. Littoral is composed as a series of adventures of Wilfried who, in order to bury his dead father, returns to the country of his ancestors, finding there his family’s past and his own identity. In many respects Mouawad’s text resembles the first play of this kind, August Strindberg’s To Damascus. Also in this drama the mental changes of the protagonist are reflected in a series of events in which he takes part simultaneously as one of the characters and as a distant observer. Strindberg marked this relative, phantasmal character of the stage world in two ways. Firstly, he introduced a modal frame of the opening and the final scene, in which the Unknown, standing on the same day at the corner of
8 Wajdi Mouawad, Littoral (Paris: Actes‐Sud, 1999).
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the street, is waiting for the post office to open. Secondly, he constructed most of the characters as the Unknown’s doubles or embodiments of different aspects of his personality. He also arranged consecutive locations of action according to a palindromic scheme so that the characters follow their own traces and come back to the point of departure. However, none of the solutions that he used disturbs the autonomy of the represented reality. On the contrary, they allow the spectators to enter the stage fiction of the Unknown’s theatrum mentis, to wander through the internal landscape of his psyche and look at it through his eyes. Mouawad chooses a different strategy. In Littoral he thematises a phantasmagoric character of the represented events, giving them not a dream‐like character, as was the case in To Damascus, but an overtly theatrical dimension. Wilfried is accompanied by an imaginary film crew and a Knight Guiromelan from Tales of the Round Table which he read in his childhood. Due to their presence some scenes become literally an internal theatre. Also the dead father appears on the stage, all the time arguing or discussing something with his son. And when the son is reading the letters which his father never sent and in which he tried to recount the story of his parents’ love, his Father appears on the stage in a double role: as the Father who writes subsequent letters and as the one whom a given letter describes. All this, however, is subordinated to an all‐ embracing act of telling the story of initiation. Mouawad does not seek recourse to the figure of theatrum mentis in order to create an illusion of the truth of internal experiences and changes undergone by the main character. Instead he introduces an epic narrator as a mediator between that which happens on stage and the spectators. An act of narration lies at the source of the stage action in Littoral. In the beginning it is enacted directly on stage. Almost one third of the text is filled with an extensive exposition, when Wilfried, recounting and sometimes even performing situations from the past, gives the Judge his reasons for burying the body [30]
of his late Father in his predecessors’ distant home country. When he is finally granted the permission that he was asking for, we watch his trek through countless villages, because in the war‐torn country there are no more free places where he could bury the corpse. The dead body becomes a symbolic father to a small group of young people who in the end decide against burying it in the earth and, having ritually cleansed it, commit it to the sea. Before that, however, Wilfried weights the body with lists of the names of his dead and living compatriots, casualties of war, forgotten by the history which is always written down by the victors. Thus he turns an anonymous deceased into a symbolic shepherd of a small community created in the aftermath of this act. Although the Judge, to whom Wilfried previously addressed his story, is absent from this part of the play, now deprived of the epic dimension, it does not diminish the impression that the represented reality is neither absolute nor objective, but mediated from a subjective point of view. In the case of Littoral the spectators themselves become addressees of the words spoken on stage. For in their conversations the characters more and more often take up the topic of telling the story about the events that have been taking place within the stage world. For this reason Simone, Wilfriedʹs companion, at a certain point summarises the meaning of Mouawad’s entire play: “We have our story. A man is looking for a place to bury his father’s body. And in the course of this story, everyone tells their own stories. We will tell our story to people, repeating the words that we said and the gestures that we made. We will go on public squares and tell our story.” (117) Self‐reflexivity, reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, deprives the represented reality in Mouawad’s play of autonomy and shatters the illusion of a fictional action taking place “here and now.” It presents itself as a tale told from a subjective point of view, which fuses a rite de passage, which lays foundations for an individual identity, with a search for collective identity. This ritual act takes place in a theatre [31]
understood as a contemporary version of a public place, the only site at which an actual encounter of people may take place. It is not difficult to recognise in Littoral the presence of the basic convention of story‐telling, a form fundamental for keeping up communal life. It is typified by a specific role of the addressee and a specific context of the birth of the story, conducive to the generation of living meanings; meanings which change together with the entire community. Mouawad clearly opposes the official understanding of history, passed down by the victors as the only objective image of the past, and the understanding of history as a continually reconstructed tale, which always has to remain biased, contingent and liable to changes. Only when it remains such a repeated performance, dependent on the interaction of the participants, will it fulfil its basic function of constituting and solidifying the individual and collective identity. A story, which does not try to return to its ritual sources, but remains a consciously created artistic fiction appears also in Normand Chaurette’s Stabat Mater II (1999)9 published in the same year as Littoral. In this play the action is set in a single specific location, a morgue in the city of Manustro. Twenty mothers come to this place, called upon to identify their daughters’ dead bodies. All of them have been found in an artificial lake adjacent to a dam, a workplace of many inhabitants of a formerly impoverished city. The victims seem to be a price that must be paid for the city’s rise to prosperity. Very rarely a short and fragmentary interaction between characters occurs in Chaurette’s text. The action of Stabat Mater II is composed of a series of monologues delivered by the mothers. The soliloquies reflect an entire spectrum of feelings and emotions, from despair, through pain, hopelessness, insolent disagreement to silent surrender, and each of them ends with the same question; the question how to complete the gesture as official as the entire situation: “Where should I sign?”
9 Normand Chaurette, Stabat Mater II (Paris: Actes‐Sud, 1999).
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This is not the only motif by means of which Chaurette skilfully orchestrates the laments of the mothers from Manustro so that they become recognisable variations on traditional songs of Mater Dolorosa at the cross. Like an importunate echo the same images, metaphoric figures, language forms and expression reverberate throughout the soliloquies. Only once, as a counterpoint to the mothers’ monologues, the voice of a level‐ headed Supervisor breaks in, rambling on about sandwiches, which she prepares by turns with mustard or mayonnaise. Significantly, Chaurette does not turn the Supervisor into a figure of the author‐rhapsode, typical of today’s drama as described by Sarrazac. The Supervisor, unlike Wilfried in Littoral, neither mediates between consecutive monologues, nor between the stage events and the spectators. Rather she becomes a witness and the audience’s representative, hopeless and mute in the face of the overwhelming expression of despair like the Auditor in Beckett’s Not I. However, Stabat Mater II resembles Mouawad’s play with respect to the accentuated self‐ reflexivity. For it presents itself both as a verbal account of the past events and as a novel written on their basis. Having finished her monologue, seemingly identical with all others, Mother IX in a short exchange with Mother III not only admits that the daughters she mourns are not her own, but also quite surprisingly she confesses that she has written the novel The Child of the Desert describing the situation in the cursed city of Manustro. From this moment onwards the text provides more and more clues that the mothers’ lamentations, theatricalised already because of the speakers’ awareness of the Supervisor’s constant presence, have actually the status of a literary rendition of the mothers’ despair. The first lines of the italicised monologue of Mother XIX manifestly quote the same words which only a moment ago opened the soliloquy of Mother XVIII. Similarly, the Epilogue, announced by the author as delivered by the novelist, is written in italics. It is the novelist’s words that close Stabat Mater II with a self‐reflexive coda: “If I were old, I would probably write books in the form of [33]
responses; they would be more reassuring. But then I would have to stop recognising children which are not mine and asking myself why … why.” (53) However, before that she reveals the reasons for which the leading motif of French girls throwing themselves into a tempting black abyss is accompanied by the image of beautiful Arab boys who gather everyday by the sluice. As she claims, the story goes that a young Arab was the first victim of the new dam, but his corpse has never been found. “He is thought to have absorbed into the story of his own birth, or that he reached a mysterious shore,” (53) the novelist explains in the Epilogue. And she adds that from that moment only girls’ bodies were found. They surfaced because, as one can conjecture, they could neither reach the “mysterious shore” nor become “dissolved in the story of their birth.” For the Western civilisation has totally forgotten about those living sources of its own culture and all other aspects of everyday life. In this respect Stabat Mater II resonates with Mouawad’s play, because it ascribes to the theatre and playwrights the basic task of the reconstruction of these foundations in an artistic form. Although the spectators, familiar with the traditional metadramatic conventions, might rather expect a playwright to appear in Chaurette’s text, the author has decided to introduce a novelist in her stead. This decision has a profound reason. When Mikhail Bakhtin analysed the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s novels, he at the same time revealed the paradoxical monologic character of drama. Irrespective of the fact that its basic medium is dialogue and the characters’ dialogic confrontations (agons), traditional drama remains a monolithic form. The world it represents is strictly controlled by the superior voice of the author who can show the entire world in a meaningful cut‐ out only at the cost of depriving drama of dialogic character and preserving its monolithic character. Small wonder that the scholars investigating contemporary texts for the theatre connect the renaissance of monologic forms and its expansion in the drama of the second half of the 20th century with theatre’s [34]
attempts at leaving the strict confines of traditional, absolute drama. The search for new forms of dialogue, or more specifically of the spirit of true dialogism, as formulated by Sarrazac, in theatre also goes in this direction. It leads to such types of dialogue which are no longer a skilfully simulated confrontation within a fictional represented reality, but rather an actual confrontation of separate and independent voices which interweave or clash within a fictional world or simply on an exposed theatrical stage. The author may provoke their encounter, but its outcome remains completely beyond any auctorial control. This new dialogue, expressive of the Bakhtinian spirit of dialogism, may take the form of a collection or montage of a few monologues which enter into an unexpected interaction that does not proceed according to the principles of life probability. Delivered in solitude, in different times and spaces, these soliloquies get a chance to become a dialogue only because of the presence of the spectators/witnesses. This claim may be convincingly illustrated by Daniel Danis’s play Stone and Ashes (1992).10 “Storytelling consists in putting people, places and times in a particular perspective. And for me this putting in a perspective is where theatre begins,”11 says Daniel Danis, who in Europe is probably the most famous contemporary playwright from Quebec. In Stone and Ashes this desired auctorial perspective, within which different people appear at various places and times, is imposed not by a presentation of the events as they take place “here and now,” but as an epic account delivered post factum. “At the beginning of the story, the tragic events have already taken place” (6), Danis emphasises in the opening notes to the text, before the first character starts speaking. The same assumption in Ibsen’s analytic plays meant that the stage will show only the 10 Daniel Danis, Stone and Ashes, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995). 11 “Eclats d’une conversations avec Daniel Danis a propos de “Cendres de cailloux,” Les Cahiers de Prospero 1 (1994): 32.
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consequences of that which happened before and now casts a long shadow over the present situation. Danis’s play is different in this respect. Stone and Ashes is composed as a tissue woven out of four intermingling voices which recount past events; voices which belong mostly to dead people. This, however, is revealed to the spectators step by step, as they investigate the consequences of this auctorial choice. Ibsen still created on stage a concrete represented reality, constructing it in such a way that the events taking place “here and now” provide a good enough motivation for speaking about the play’s main topic, that is about the past. Also in this respect Danis’s text differs from a canonical analytic drama. Having decided to retell the story from the point of view of the dead, he has broken free from the necessity of inventing any type of anecdotal fable and dialogues which would ceaselessly direct the characters’ and the spectators’ thoughts towards the events prior to the action. Words freed from the restraints of a mimetic action and concrete situations flow freely and their only purpose is to recount that which already happened. Moreover such a structure of the text forces the reader or the spectator to think about the reasons why the dead suddenly decided to break silence. Formerly they returned to the world in order to complete that which they did not manage to finish when alive, to take revenge for their own or their relatives’ misery, to atone for and put right their faults, to present their own fate as an illuminating or didactic example. But what is the reason for Danis’s characters’ decision to start speaking again? And why do their monologues combine into a discontinuous and not entirely chronological tale of despair, friendship, love and death? Stone and Ashes begins and ends with nearly the same situation. First Shirley tells the story of how she and four of her friends in an act of revenge dug up the body of an old gossip, Lady Sullivan, and danced with it wildly across the cemetery. On the same night, by strange coincidence, they noticed lights in a house which had been uninhabited for a long time and into [36]
which a widower and his daughter had just moved. Obviously, by that time none of them suspected that their lives would soon come together and get entangled in a tragic knot. In the final monologue of the play, Noodle, one of Shirley’s mates, buried close to the place of the former drunken dance with the corpse, emphatically refers to those past events: “Hey, Laura! Dance! Dance with life, dance!” (128) The author additionally stresses the analogy and opposition between these two scenes, giving the first one the title “Dance macabre” and the last one “Dancing with Life.” And since those last words are addressed to Laura, the daughter of the newcomer from Montreal, the only one of the four speaking characters who has survived, the entire story in Stone and Ashes can be treated as a type of a psychodrama which helps her come to terms with her trauma. Both the shape of the monologues, as well as the entire structural tissue of the play, evoke strong connections with the basic assumptions and aims of the psychoanalysis. Speaking, giving a verbal shape to the painful experiences and memories, ordering them and linking scattered elements into a meaningful story turns out to be a necessary stage of coming to terms with the past; a stage which will enable to direct energy into the future. This, in turn, changes the status of the soliloquising voices, shifting the emphasis from the seemingly free expression towards the story constructed in a creative effort. Although Stone and Ashes does not reveal directly its immanent self‐reflexivity, as was the case with Littoral, also in this play the monologues have the intricate form of blank verse and are ordered into sequences with titles. As a result the events, which could easily be presented in the form of a coherent fable of a moving melodrama acquire a different status and require a different type of contact with the audience. For in Danis’s drama there is no other action than the transformation described above; the transformation of the opening image of danse macabre into the final image of dancing with life. However, just like in the case of all plays analysed above, it will not take effect if it is not recounted and therefore [37]
enacted in front of the audience which has to take the role of the engaged witnesses. As witnesses the spectators should again learn more than the characters. For this reason Danis neither used the traditional form of monologue nor tried to modify it. He wrote his text as a collection of separate and independent voices which, unaware of the presence of listeners, recount past events from their unique point of view. Sometimes it leads to a blatant redundancy, when the same situation returns, retold each time from a different point of view. Sometimes, however, it leads to marked elisions, when certain events, motifs and facts, necessary for the understanding of the whole fable, are never mentioned. Moreover, the action is further fragmented by the lack of a character which would fulfil the role of rhapsode, similar to Mouawad’s Wilfried, or listener like the Supervisor in Chaurette’s play. The lack of a mediator between the represented world and the spectators puts the stress on the communication between the stage and the audience. This new relationship, often described by experts on contemporary drama, ousts verbal interaction of characters in favour of a direct interaction between actors/characters and spectators. The fragmentary action in Stone and Ashes can therefore be treated as a task with which the author charges the audience. The spectators are not to repeat in their imagination the events presented on stage, identifying with the protagonist, but to complete the story, which the author deliberately opened also for other voices and the perspectives they introduce. This basic modification of the rules of the contract between the stage and the audience is typical of all the plays that we have analysed here. The texts by Tremblay, Dubois, Mouawad, Chaurette or Danis, going beyond the typical stage‐audience communication based on projection and identification, require a different spectatorial attitude. They provide excellent examples of how today’s paradigmatic shifts in the understanding of the relationship between the stage and the audience have been connected with the fundamental modification of the traditional form and function of monologue. It becomes a basic device [38]
which binds the performers and the audience into a temporarily established community, a goal which has been striven for by a number of representatives of the theatrical avant‐garde of the second half of the 20th century. Happenings and performance art tried to renew the communication with the audience through the rejection of the fictional matrix of the text in favour of direct actions carried out “here and now,” in the reality of the spectators, who can be either mere onlookers or more actively involved witnesses. The texts that we have examined are typified by a far‐reaching abandonment of action, even those actions which originate from the practice of happening and which directly and physically engage the audience. They give place to an act of narration which very often has an openly performative character and brings into being loosely combined fragments of the represented reality, those momentarily appearing and disappearing fictional planes of the “here and now” of various nature and origins. As a result the stories told by the characters/actors have the chance to become everybody’s stories, created in a concerted effort by all the participants of a theatre event. They purposely overstep the dichotomy between that which is representing and that which is represented, between signifié and signifiant, between the presence of the stage and the absence of the audience making it possible for the latter to undergo unique and identity‐building, individual and collective experiences.
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David Bradby
Monologues on the French Stage in the 1980s & 1990s: Theatres of the Self The years following 1968 were the high point of directors’ theatre in France. Established, like film directors, as “auteurs” in their own right, those in charge of the major theatres became as important as playwrights in the creative process. In fact playwrights sometimes found themselves reduced to the same minor status accorded to the script‐writer in the film industry. At the same time, the opportunities for playwrights to have their work published were reduced by the collapse of several specialist firms and the loss of high‐profile drama series at major publishers such as Gallimard. In the wake of 1968, a great many theatre companies embarked on devising their own performances following the method known as la création collective. From being the norm in the 1960s, it became the exception in the 1970s for a company to commission a new play from a writer. The reasons for this sudden change in cultural practice are many and complex and a detailed account can be found elsewhere.1 The result of the change (for those authors who did not entirely abandon writing for the stage) was that they could
1 See David Bradby, Le Théâtre en France de 1968 à 2000 (Paris: Champion, 2007) and (with Annie Sparks) Mise en scène: French Theatre Now (London: Methuen, 1997).
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no longer write for large casts or employ traditional dramatic modes. Their work had to be inexpensive to produce and readily transportable from one small venue to another. Dramatic monologue was thus an obvious choice. As well as such reasons arising from upheavals in the theatre business, there were more literary causes for the large number of monologues that began to appear. In the wake of 1968 playwrights found themselves faced with a particularly acute form of a condition familiar to all modernist artists: finding that all inherited forms were suspect, and having to re‐ invent everything from first principles. For many of the younger school of dramatists, theatrical writing could no longer be defined by specific qualities. It was more a case of claiming the textual characteristics of a certain literary sensibility and using them as the springboard for a new approach. Noëlle Renaude explained that her inspiration was the modernist novel: “I believe that my theatrical writing is born from the union of Proust and Joyce.”2 In 2003 the playwright Michel Azama, attempting to give an authoritative definition of what makes a text dramatic, carefully avoided the artifices of theatricality, insisting instead on the mysterious ability of text (any text) to “pass into the actor’s body”: We can identify at least two fundamental traits in dramatic writing: we could call the first its “respiration,” that is to say, its capacity to pass into the actor’s body, to produce “play.” This “becoming the word” is as indispensable to theatre as it is to poetry … The other dimension of theatrical writing is its “dramaturgy.” If a text’s respiration represents its “becoming the word,” then its dramaturgy represents its “becoming the scenic, or visual,” which does not necessarily mean writing the mise en scène, like Beckett, but rather creating surprises,
2 Noëlle Renaude, “Interview,” Trois Pièces contemporaines, ed. Françoise Spiess (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) 141.
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organising the story or stories, articulating them if there are many, structuring the variations etc.3
It is striking that this definition underlines the kinship between theatre and poetry: for Azama the dramatist regards himself foremost as a manager of words. Confronted with an opaque world, in which traditional philosophies and their associated dramatic structures had no hold, writers felt they were bound to rebuild from scratch, using the most fundamental material available to them, i.e. words. Words that unfurled in discontinuous fragments: as in Beckett’s monologues of this period, the only certainty left to the writer was the stream of words that babble incessantly in the head, refusing to be silenced. Voice was therefore primary, preceding any delineations of place or character. This state of affairs can help to explain why dramatic monologue became a first solution for writers. A particularly eloquent example is Bernard‐Marie Koltès’s La Nuit juste avant les forêts (The Night Just Before the Forests) (1977). This monologue begins in medias res, with no explanation and it leaves the reader or spectator in doubt as to the circumstances of the speaker. The audience simply understands the speaker’s urgency to connect with someone, anyone, in this case a passer‐by, on whom he unleashes his torrent of words. Through experiencing this monologue, the audience can begin to assemble the pieces of a puzzle that will never be fully complete; but this puzzling incompleteness adds up to the painful expression of the situation of the foreigner
3 “Disons déjà que l’on peut saisir, au moins, deux traits fondamentaux de l’écriture dramatique: le premier, on pourrait le nommer sa ‘respiration,’ c’est‐à‐ dire sa capacité à passer dans le corps des acteurs, à produire du ‘jeu .’ Ce ‘devenir parole’ est indispensable au théâtre comme à la poésie … L’autre dimension de l’écriture théâtrale est sa ‘dramaturgie.’ Si la respiration d’un texte représente son ‘devenir parole,’ sa dramaturgie représente son ‘devenir scénique,’ ce qui ne signifie pas nécessairement écrire la mise en scène, comme faisait Beckett, mais plutôt créer des surprises, organiser la ou les fables, les articuler si elles sont multiples, structurer les variations, etc.” Michel Azama, “Introduction,” De Godot à Zucco 1 (Paris: Editions Théâtrales, 2003) 20.
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who is not “at home.” Koltès’s hero (who is never named) is not in his own home, living on the fringes of a city where he is cut off from himself as well as from others. He dreams of being in a natural environment, of running, of rediscovering “the secret song the Arabs sang to each other,” but he is incapable of it.4 The condition of alienated man, separated from the world and from himself, had already been the central subject of theatre of the Absurd in the 1960s, especially in the work of Arthur Adamov. After the political failure of the near‐ revolution of 1968 the subject returned to the fore. The number of monologues created during the 1980s stands out as one of the main defining traits of dramatic writing from this period. Monologues were not absent from French theatres before 1980, but they were more often limited to cabaret and café‐theatre or to documentary theatre such as Antoine Vitez’s production of L’Entretien de Mao‐Tsê‐Tung avec Pompidou (The Interview between Mao‐Tse‐Tung and Pompidou) in 1979. Starting with Koltès, many young dramatists dedicated themselves to the monologue form with the aim of confronting the audience with a subjectivity that was partly intangible, because it was devoid of any context and refused any facile explanation, but which convinced through the urgency and authenticity of its words. It invited its audience to react as though they were faced with a human being for whom they actually felt a real emotion. These monologues often revived the literary tradition of the confessional, of Dostoevsky and Adamov, and it is for this reason that they can be grouped together as “theatres of the self.” Several examples can illustrate this genre. Enzo Cormann, Noëlle Renaude, Eugène Durif, Raymond Cousse Enzo Cormann’s first plays were monologues spoken by marginal characters who express themselves in a rich and colourful language, a language that seems to owe much to the 4 Bernard‐Marie Koltès, La Nuit juste avant les forêts (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988) 63.
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profusion of James Joyce (in fact, the title of one of his first texts openly alludes to the author). Le Rôdeur (The Prowler) (1982), for example, depicts a man who is exhausted, covered in mud, of shaggy‐looking appearance, in front of a recently burnt‐down house with a live falcon on his wrist. He speaks of his childhood, of his time in prison, of the people he has met, of criminal activities, but in such a jumbled manner that the audience cannot distinguish truth from falsehood or past from present. Cormann prioritises Joyce’s linguistic abundance over Beckett’s austerity, and the pleasure procured by his texts lies in listening to an unfolding of multiple possibilities and their refusal to resolve any of these possibilities. His writing develops a hybrid form, somewhere between a dramatic poem, a novel and an exploration of quasi‐autonomous language. For Noëlle Renaude, experimentation on form is fundamental and involves a study of spoken language: “each of my texts can be seen as the response to a question that I ask myself when I write: is orality enough to create theatre?” She identifies her own work by distinguishing between two major trends in contemporary theatre. One of these consists of taking “an old, even canonical, container and placing inside it all of the horrors of the day. This results in a uniform neo‐realism that aims to describe the world as it is, in all of its wretchedness.” Rejecting this methodology, Renaude’s dramaturgy followed the other trend: “the study of language and form … in conjunction with a distrust of the theatrical … For this kind of dramatist, words and language either deconstruct the narrative mould, or reduce or break it.”5 One of her first texts for theatre was Rose, La Nuit australienne (Rose, The Australian Night). Although not a pure monologue (as it ends with a section of dialogue) the main section of the play consists of a single‐voice narrative that could have come from a novel: 12 pages of monologue spoken in the third person, which, in the published version, bear no
5 Renaude, “Interview,” 142‐3.
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indication from the author as to who is speaking. It describes Rose’s intimate thoughts, merging objective facts and subjective thoughts, in such a way as to intertwine an account of the external events with the reverie of Rose’s associations and flights of fancy. According to the programme notes of Laurence Février (who staged the piece at the Théâtre Ouvert in January 1988), Rose is a singer: She performs in country dance halls. One scorching summer evening, she meets a travelling salesman with whom she has a brief but hopeless affair … Yet Rose dreams, of Australia, of other warm nights, of a life in Hollywood … There is the life we dream of, and the life we lead.6
The action centres on this woman who must content herself with her dreams because she is incapable of expressing anything else. She suffers from inarticulacy, a frequent condition of characters in the Theatre of the Everyday. Stereotypes lie in wait to crush any attempt at authentic self‐ expression. But Rose’s words are not all hollow clichés; at times they are vivacious, original, certainly bizarre, but rich in imagination. Her uncertain knowledge of the standard of life in Australia, her generous heart, her practical attitude to the man who seduces her in his convertible, all of these are recounted with a certain carefree attitude, a quality of detachment and an understanding of the sordidness of her situation, as well as, paradoxically, the passion she brings to it. The account of the first twelve pages, despite the use of oral register, is fascinating, humorous, surprising and full of verve and humanity. In the dialogue of the second part, the audience can appreciate the distance between what she feels deep down inside and the 6 “Elle se produit dans des bals de campagne. Par une nuit d’été caniculaire elle fait la rencontre d’un voyageur de commerce, elle a une aventure aussi brève que désespérante … Et pourtant Rose rêve, elle rêve d’Australie, d’autres nuits tièdes, de vie hollywoodienne … Il y a la vie qu’on rêve, et puis il y a la vie qu’on vit.” In Noëlle Renaude, Divertissements touristiques. L’Entre‐deux. Rose, la nuit australienne (Paris: Editions Théâtrales, 1989) 71.
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pathetic reality of the man with whom she mistakenly finds herself. However, she does not feel crushed by the experience. When his words become too banal or vulgar, she replies with a song from her repertoire and, before leaving, she tells him exactly what she thinks of him. In the 1990s, Renaude devoted herself to constructing an outsize epic entirely written in monologue form for solo actor: Ma Solange, comment t’écrire mon désastre, Alex Roux (Dear Solange, how can I write to you of my disaster, Alex Roux). Renaude began writing this theatrical saga in 1994 at the request of Christophe Brault, the actor who had played Maxime in her play Le Renard du Nord (The Northern Fox). It took four years to write, in collaboration with Brault, and the publishing house Éditions Théâtrales finally published it in three volumes between 1996 and 1998. More than two thousand characters appear throughout the course of twenty hours of uninterrupted monologues. Stories and characters are introduced and seem to develop in one way, then change direction or change in importance, intertwining with other characters and stories before disappearing and occasionally reappearing later. In choosing to write monologue, Renaude forgoes the sense of counterpoint that develops in the language of playwrights who rely more upon dialogue. Her play aims for the effect of being “drawn out” so that she can repeatedly approach similar material over a long linear trajectory. Phrases, particular idioms and snatches of meanings all echo, cancel out or support each other, so that the audience is confronted by a web of verbal musicality. This musicality is reminiscent of everyday life and consists of bits of expressions, moments where people are speaking seriously, others where they are telling jokes, encounters that appear to be ordinary but prove to be important, or the reverse. Renaude claimed that she wanted to “consign fiction to a later stage” so that she could “examine words, phrases, verbs, their tenses and their moods.”7 7 Noëlle Renaude, “Ma Solange, une histoire,” Théâtre Ouvert Le Journal 5 (October‐December 2002): 7.
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The title of the play reveals its profound subject matter: writing itself. This examination of words is an experiment in all of the different possible ways of writing about a disaster or other human ordeals. This means that the text has no theatricality in the classical sense of the word; it may have an oral form but it is a prose poem or reverie that demands to be read out loud, but has no tension, conflicting characters or situation. As well as this experimental approach, through which writers such as Cormann and Renaude strove for a theatre of inventive orality, both humorous and surprising, there are two other contrasting approaches: those of Eugène Durif and Raymond Cousse. For Durif, the monologue provided a useful structure for saying things that would have been impossible to show on stage without resorting to excessive melodrama and a ridiculous or unbearable outcome. With B.M.C. (1991) he exposed the historical realities of the Algerian war and its effects on French society, through the juxtaposition of two monologues: one by a prostitute forced to work in a military campaign brothel in Algeria during the 50s, followed by that of a young man of Algerian origin who is living in France, thirty years later. In the first monologue, the woman (played by Anne Alvaro in Anne Torrès’s 1991 production at the Théâtre Gérard‐ Philipe) shivers in the cold wind of the desert, while waiting for the soldiers who will pay 500 francs each to spend a few minutes with her. She speaks directly to the men, sometimes as a group, sometimes individually, as though one of them were already in front of her. She attacks their violence and their self‐ pitying stories; she says “if you can tell me a single story that surprises me, then I will listen to it right to the end, I will take my time.”8 There is no direct response to the prostitute’s words: the audience must imagine it. But, like a kind of delayed response, 8 “Ou alors, qu’il y en ait une seule des histoires que tu racontes qui m’étonne, je l’écoute jusqu’au bout, je prendrai mon temps.” Eugène Durif, B.M.C. (Paris: Comp’Act, 1991) 12.
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the second monologue presents a young “beur” from contemporary times (that is to say, towards 1990). He knows nothing of the trials recounted by the young woman, but his experience of alienation in a modern French city represents a sort of parallel with the prostitute’s life in the North African desert thirty years ago. Forced to confront the memory of the humiliations endured by the Algerian immigrants of his father’s generation, he initially rejects these recollections. But slowly, over the course of his monologue, the reality of his people’s history surfaces. His last words denounce the violent actions of the police to the Algerian demonstrators in Paris in October 1961: All of them, their names have disappeared, all of their bodies that no one wanted to see floating in the current, they cannot be buried, they cannot be laid to rest in the earth’s creases, there is no tomb to welcome them, all of these shadows looking for the burden of a lost body.9
In this way, Durif used monologues to articulate the reality of the violence of the colonial wars, branded in both the flesh and the spirit. He had already written, in 1988, a play with eight characters, Tonkin‐Alger, which portrayed a group of youngsters living in the popular district of Tonkin in Villeurbanne, one of whom must go to Algeria. Through the course of around twenty short, realist scenes, Durif had shown “flashes” of a night of festivities (the 14th of July 1957) evoking the life of the district. Wars and violence are alluded to but never directly shown; the audience only grasps its effect on everyday life. In his own way, Durif seemed to be reacting to the disappearance of the grand narratives. Historical and political realities are always present in his work, but he rejects the historical frame of reference. He creates only micro‐dramas, 9 “Tous ceux‐là, leurs noms disparaissent, tous ces corps que personne n’à vu flotter au fil de l’eau, on ne pourra pas les ensevelir, on ne pourra pas les déposer dans le repli de la terre, aucune tombe pour les accueillir toutes ces ombres à la recherche du fardeau d’un corps disparu.” Durif, B.M.C, 39.
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in which his characters, subjected to forces that pass them by, still defend their right to a point of view, to their voice, to a human reality that rebels against anonymity, against “the names [that] have disappeared.” For this project, monologue is often more effective than dramatic dialogue. Raymond Cousse’s monologues follow a very different path. Openly influenced by Beckett, Cousse portrays characters that have no historical or political dimension. These are purely imaginary creations who speak: a pig in Stratégie pour deux jambons (Strategy for Two Hams) (1979); a child in Enfantillages (These Childish Things) (1984). The first of these begins with a detailed description of the pigsty. The style is reminiscent of Beckett’s in its blend of almost pedantic detail and cautious reflection: Where I live suits my needs. (Looks more closely at the area.) I couldn’t say if the length is larger than the width, or vice versa. But I like to imagine that the width is not outdone by the length. (Complacently.) I don’t know why, but the idea of exercising my freedom in a squared area offers me precious comfort.10
However, despite being “imaginary,” the pig knows all of the concrete details about pig rearing and the different stages that eventually lead to the abattoir. According to the stage directions, “the character is suggestive of a pig rather than representative,” and the monologue successfully manages to give the audience both an objective and detached account of the last days of a farmed pig, and the intimate thoughts of a
10 “L’endroit que j’occupe suffit à mes besoins. Considère le local plus attentivement. Je ne saurais dire si la longueur l’emporte sur la largeur, ou vice versa. Mais il me plaît d’imaginer que la largeur ne le cède en rien à la longueur. (Avec complaisance.) Je ne sais pourquoi, l’idée d’exercer ma liberté dans un carré m’est d’un précieux réconfort.” Raymond Cousse, Stratégie pour deux jambons (Paris: Flammarion, 1981) 11‐12.
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fictitious animal that, after a rebellious youth and a violent revolt against his fate, finally accepts his position, and even finds a certain pride in the excellent quality of the meat he will provide: So here I am on the threshold of a prodigious adventure. (Beat). On foot, on horseback, inside refrigerating trucks or tins, my future is assured. (Beat). I will bring the good word to the entire planet. (Beat). To think, that my joints and cutlets already smell of the call of the sea.11
This method consists of recreating in and through words a complete existence that, despite its imaginary status, bears a similarity to human destiny and therefore makes the audience think about their own frustrations and pleasures. However, the use of an animal also creates a distancing effect. The process is the same for Enfantillages, except in this case it is from a child’s point of view. Once again, the performer (Cousse himself) “suggests” a child rather than trying to imitate one. He describes what he has done, what he has seen: the butcher slaughtering animals; his friend’s older sister making love; his friend dying. He also imagines his own burial. The naivety of the child’s point of view, which reacts strongly to the things that he has seen, but which lacks any restraint, is reminiscent of Victor in Roger Vitrac’s Victor ou les enfants au pouvoir (Victor, or Power to the Children). Cousse has faith in the audience’s imagination, as he does not show any adults. Other characters are experienced solely through the account of the “child.” Both of these monologues had already been published in novel form; the idea of adapting them for the stage came from Christian Le Guillochet, director of the Lucernaire, where Stratégie pour deux jambons was performed in October 1979 11 “Me voici au seuil d’une prodigieuse aventure. (Un temps.) A pied, à cheval, à l’intérieur de camions frigorifiques ou dans des boîtes de conserve, mon avenir est assuré. (Un temps.) J’irai sous peu porter la bonne parole sur toute la planète. (Un temps.) A croire que mes rôtis et côtelettes sentent déjà l’appel du grand large.” Cousse, Stratégie pour deux jambons, 72.
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(Enfantillages was performed at the Avignon Festival in 1984). The decision to stage these texts is another indication of the power of the dramatic monologue as a means of presenting, at the time, the study of an unidentifiable subject. Cousse possessed an original talent that was too prematurely cut short by his suicide in 1991. Violence and Lamentation: Adel Hakim, Patrick Kermann, Jean‐Luc Lagarce One constant element in French dramatic writing of this period is the evocation of violence, even if this violence is often kept off‐stage (a lesson learnt from the Greeks). French writers know that public imagination reacts more willingly to the account of violence than to the spectacle of simulated battles and torture. Exploiting the urgency and intensity that can be conveyed through the monologue form, several young writers have depicted the absurd and insane aspects of warfare. A successful example of this genre is Exécuteur 14 (Executor 14) by Adel Hakim, an actor, director and writer born in Cairo, but who has lived in France since 1972. Hakim was appointed director of the Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry in 1992, a year after the creation of Exécuteur 14 at Saint‐Denis. This monologue depicts the last man left alive in the ruins of a civil war. Hakim explains how tensions developed between two denominational clans and how the slow deterioration of the situation led to violence, despite individual objections. He is looking for reasons for this descent into hell, but can blame only the inexorable increase in revenge and counter‐revenge. The lamentation of the “last man standing,” surrounded by ruins and corpses, was a popular theme for many young writers, and one particularly suited to an emergent form of choral writing, in which monologues are juxtaposed of woven together. A successful example of this technique can be seen in the work of Patrick Kermann, a young writer who committed suicide in 2000, leaving behind a dozen plays. As with many of [51]
his contemporaries, Kermann used structures from Attic tragedy or musical forms such as oratorio; La Mastication des morts (The Mastication of the Dead) (1999) is even sub‐titled “oratorio in progress.” Similar to a play by Noëlle Renaude entitled Les Cendres et les lampions (Ashes and Lanterns) (1993), in which seventy‐five deceased members of the same family get up, one after the other, to speak of their existence, Kermann’s “oratorio” visits his town’s cemetery, giving a voice to about a hundred of the dead, each introduced by the name and dates inscribed on their tombstones. Some of the interjections are very short, such as Marie‐François Vinchon née Rouart (1932‐1994) whose only words are “rat filth.”12 Other monologues go on for many pages. Some of them tell jokes or remember old quarrels; others throw themselves into a detailed examination of their emotional states; while others just recount facts. What unites them all is that they are each buried in the same cemetery and have all lived and died in the same village. Clearly, the possibility of dramatic action is severely limited by the fact that each character is in the grave and that they speak exclusively in monologues. Any theatricality the text possesses is found in a sonorous and rhythmic exploration, and in the attempt to find a new rite or mystery. The power comes from the paradoxical combination of death and verbalisation implied by the description of the work as oratorio in progress. This new mystery is only possible in the abandonment of traditional dramaturgical categories in favour of an almost abstract art of “dreams that stifle us.” The presence of these voices that take shape on stage is not comforting: its urgency is attributable to a voice, both elevated and passionate, that protests against the violence and suffering in our world. One of the most frequently mentioned examples of such poetic writing is Jean‐Luc Lagarce’s J’étais dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie vienne (I was in my house waiting for the rain to come) (1994). This lamentation‐play consists of a series of 12 “Saloperie de rat.” Patrick Kermann, La Mastication des morts (Carnières‐ Morlanwelz, Belgium: Lansman, 1999) 74.
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monologues spoken by five women who all inhabit the same house. They are “the eldest,” “the mother” and her three daughters, none of whom are named. They have spent their lives waiting for the return of the young brother, who had been driven out of the family home by the father. He has now come back, but lies dying in his room. The audience never knows what he did whilst he was away or why he is dying (there has always been an assumption that the play is about Aids, but the text itself never actually confirms this). The play feels like a classical tragedy that has been denied its main characters, leaving only the chorus. The women’s voices resemble each other and create a kind of chorus in that each woman is in the same situation, tells the same story and uses the same phrases. Together they produce a lyrical voice through a verbal repetition that has echoes in musical construction. In attempting to define the nature of this text, Patrice Pavis appropriately turned to musical comparisons: “as with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Ravel’s Bolero or Philip Glass’s repetitive melodies, the listener is not in the position to memorise every detail, but he is aware that everything advances, despite the citations and reprises.”13 The voices are not identical—there are distinct differences in the three sisters (reminiscent of Chekhov)—but these differences are not accentuated enough to create characters in the conventional sense of the word: they use the same turns of phrase and the same images, thereby remaining just short of true characterisation. Watching this play is like seeing, or rather hearing, a poetic language weaving together before one’s eyes. Each person who speaks displays the same verbal tic of repetition. With no action and only the gradual accumulation of a specific and poetic voice, Lagarce’s play bears a certain resemblance to Beckett’s work. Beckett’s Footfalls finishes with the mother’s words: “will you never have done … revolving it all?” and, similarly,
13 Patrice Pavis, Le Théâtre contemporain (Paris: Nathan, 2002) 191.
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Lagarce’s female voices never finish repeating the same facts, albeit it in slightly different ways each time. However, unlike Beckett’s voices, they speak more about the present than they do the past, and their almost obsessive repetitions seem motivated by an unachievable need for precision; as though their only way of experiencing an emotion is to express the details of what they are experiencing, with increasing exactitude. This can be seen in the eldest sister’s attempt to express the joy that she felt on the return of the long‐awaited brother: when he returns when, at last, he returns, I laughed at myself, at the importance accorded to details, the idiotic yet terrifying importance that I accord to details. when the young brother, when he, after all these years spent waiting, when the young brother, at last, when the young brother returns, perhaps the thing that I have hoped for most in my life, all these years, when at last, the young brother returns, laughed to myself.14
The way that the text is set out, in free verse form, underlines its poetic status; the constantly renewed repetition of the beginning of the sentence, followed by variations using the same words, creates the feeling of being on the brink of an emotion that could vanish if it were not constantly mentioned. The confusion of verbs in both the past and present tense continues throughout the text, as though reinforcing the impression, felt and commented on by the characters, that they are living (like Beckett’s characters) an infinitely expanding 14 “lorsqu’il revient lorsque, enfin, il revient, j’ai ri de moi, de l’importance accordée aux détails, l’importance imbécile et terrifiante à la fois que j’accorde aux détails. lorsque le jeune frère, celui‐là, après toutes ces années perdues à l’attendre, lorsque le jeune frère, enfin, lorsque le jeune frère revient, ce que j’ai peut‐être espéré le plus de ma vie, toutes ces années, lorsque enfin, le jeune frère revient, ai ri en moi‐même.” Jean‐Luc Lagarce, Théâtre complet IV (Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2002) 236.
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present. But this present needs to be captured in words, which is where life exists; speech therefore qualifies existence. With no story, character or conflict, what is left as the object of these words? It is description that remains, the endless repetition of details as perceived by the person speaking, a description that the eldest sister is all too aware of in the quoted text. If her reaction to the “importance accorded to details” is ambiguous, it is because she is imprisoned by these details, as insignificant as they may be. But the very importance given to these details means that the words achieve an almost abstract poetry. This phenomenon is nicely summarised by Nöelle Renaude: “like a photograph taken from very, very close up. It is so real that it becomes abstract.”15 With J’étais dans ma maison et j’attendais que la pluie vienne, Lagarce seemed to echo the frustrated waiting of Beckett’s characters, suggesting that Godot’s arrival would not actually change anything for them. The women have spent their lives waiting for the brother to return, and indeed he has returned; however they find themselves in the same situation in terms of their relationship to him and their home: the brother’s return has changed nothing. They continue to await death—both his and their own. Their world is their family, the small group where everyone has a defined role in a hierarchy that has been accepted and lived with for many years. There is no impulse to rebel, no evocation of the external world where familial interaction is different, nothing that could endanger the impression of choral harmony in which every voice has its place. The French production, directed by Stanislav Nordey at the Théâtre Ouvert in 1997, displayed little physicality in its staging: the five actresses hardly moved, they spoke when the lighting picked them out from the shadows and remained motionless, fading into the shadows when one of the others
15 Noëlle Renaude, “Piéger le théâtre,” interview with Laurent Cibien in L’Année du Théâtre 1993‐1994 (Paris: Hachette, 1994) 73.
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started to speak. Patrice Pavis considered Nordey’s choices to be appropriate: The reading of the text and the rhythmic staging of the voices are the main focus of this play. This is something that Stanislav Nordey has understood, and the scenic interpretation leans more towards oratorio and chorus with its collective gestures rather than a spectacular visualisation. Lagarce’s theatricality is therefore less visual and more sonorous and rhythmic … Each speech is its own response, creating hesitations, explorations, anticipations or backwards movements in the phrases, its regrets, hopes, extrapolations and sudden resolutions.16
The intense emotion conveyed by the five women’s words certainly has a hypnotic effect, but the audience is primarily moved by the experience of witnessing a poetic form being created. As Pavis explained, it is the “theatricalisation” of the words that creates the elegiac tone and casts such a powerful spell. Philippe Minyana Without doubt, the dramatist who pushed the boundaries of experimental monologue the furthest in the 1980s and 1990s is Philippe Minyana. He initially wrote plays in the realist‐ naturalist tradition of Chekhov, but his writing underwent fundamental changes: “successively abandoning realism, the every‐day, the psychological, the notion of character and fiction. This progressive detachment rendered his work 16 “La lecture de la pièce et sa mise en voix rythmique constituent l’essentiel du travail de mise en scène. C’est ce qu’avait bien compris Stanislas Nordey, dont l’interprétation scénique tenait plus de l’oratorio et du chœur avec sa gestuelle collective que d’une visualisation spectaculaire. La théâtralité chez Lagarce est donc moins visuelle qui sonore et rythmique … Chaque réplique ne répond au fond qu’à elle‐même, mettant en scène les hésitations, les recherches, les anticipations ou les retours en arrière de la phrase, ses repentirs, ses espoirs, ses extrapolations, ses résolutions soudaines.” Patrice Pavis, Le Théâtre contemporain (Paris: Nathan, 2002) 196‐197.
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increasingly dense, as though it were focusing on the very core of things.”17 Having worked in education for nine years, Minyana first began to write towards the end of the 1970s and, upon discovering Vinaver (through a production of Les Travaux et les jours that toured to Metz), decided to give up teaching and move to Paris to pursue a career in theatre. Encouraged by Micheline and Lucien Attoun at Théâtre Ouvert (an organisation dedicated to promoting stage plays by new writers), Minyana became an actor until, in 1985, he dedicated himself to full‐time writing. He developed a friendship with Robert Cantarella and began to write for and with talented actresses, such as Florence Giorgetti, Edith Scob, Judith Magre, Catherine Hiégel and Jany Gastaldi. Carlos Wittig’s 1985 production of Fin d’été à Baccarat (End of Summer at Baccarat) at the Athénée proved a great success, and Inventaires (Inventories), directed by Cantarella at the Théâtre de la Bastille in 1987, won him the prize of the SACD (Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques). More than the majority of his colleagues, Minyana quickly established himself as a major new writing talent. The genesis of the monologues that introduced Minyana to the theatrical world is indicative of the condition of dramatists at the time. Minyana explained how, in 1985, he had staged Exposition (Exhibition), a play based on interviews with the inhabitants of Paris’ 4th arrondissement, with Edith Scob at the Théâtre Essaïon. The experience aroused their interest in the process; they proposed a creative workshop to France Culture and, throughout the following year, Minyana provided a weekly radio broadcast that combined written text with recorded words. He claimed to be fascinated by la parole brute (“the unrefined word”): Once a week I would interview people in the studio about their lives and this became the basis for Inventaires, these multiple 17 Laurence Cazaux, “Parcours d’écriture,” in Philippe Minyana, Fin d’été à Baccarat (Paris: Editions Théâtrales, 1997) 7.
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meetings with people who would talk, and more often than not it was women, obviously, as they are more willing to be open about themselves, whereas men usually fall back on stereotypes and clichés.18
It was also at this time that, thanks to the scenographer Patrick Duteurtre, Minyana discovered the work of plastic artist Christian Boltanski, pieces that were often a collection of objects: I saw in front of my eyes the extraordinary marriage between the trivial and the mythological, between the large historical dimension and personal stories. Traces, memory, what remains of the dead, everything was here and it completely overwhelmed me.19
The “marriage between the trivial and the mythological,” which became a constant element of Minyana’s work, was part of what he learnt through performing Vinaver’s plays, however this intertwining was less complex in his own work (especially in his monologues) than it was in Vinaver’s. The reason for this is that, particularly in Chambres (1986) and Inventaires (1987), Minyana did not go beyond a superficial fascination with the “unrefined word”: he found in it a reality, an energy and a life that exceeded what he felt he was capable of creating through plot or the reliance on fictions and forms of theatrical tradition. Jean‐Pierre Ryngaert noted that Chambres “is marked by a real 18 “J’ai interviewé une fois par semaine en studio des gens sur leur vie et c’est de là qu’est parti Inventaires, de ces rencontres multiples avec des gens qui parlaient, plutôt des femmes, comme d’habitude, qui sont beaucoup plus dans l’aveu, alors que les hommes souvent sont dans la langue de bois, la parole stéréotypée.” Philippe Minyana, “Chambres/Inventaires : la poétique du banal,” interview with Philippe Minyana and Robert Cantarella in Philippe Minyana, ou La Parole visible, ed. Michel Corvin (Paris: Théâtrales, 2000) 107. 19 “J’avais sous les yeux le mariage extraordinaire entre trivial et mythologie, entre la grande Histoire et les petites histoires. La trace, la mémoire, ce qui reste des morts, tout était là, et ça m’a totalement bouleversé.” Philippe Minyana, “Interview,” Trois Pièces contemporaines, ed. Françoise Spiess (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) 95.
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desire for disorder, by the interest in the infinitely small, in the particular and the subjective.”20 That is to say that, faced with the crisis of character and narrative, Minyana found in the incoherence of the spoken word, the evidence of a concrete, human and moving reality that short‐circuited his sense of being at an impasse with naturalism, and which offered him a new authorial path. He utilised a technique similar to Vinaver’s, which based creativity on the ordinary, on jumbles of words, on banality in all its disorder, rejecting any organising of the material based on pre‐existing value judgments.21 But despite this approach, Minyana insisted that his was a process of writing, not of documentation. He explained how, for him, the work consisted of going beyond the stereotypes of language so regularly used in everyday speech, in order to achieve what he called “poetry of the banal,” in other words, a form of expression capable of touching the reader‐audience, a form that could make them laugh or sympathise. It was about “reconstructing the spoken word with improprieties that become totally exotic, that achieve the status of poetry.”22 In the case of Chambres, his starting point was a building in Sochaux. The five monologues were written by Minyana based on various events and the place itself, next to the Peugeot factories. Each of the monologues is an account of the life of one of the inhabitants of the building, who speaks about what has happened to him or her, or about what he or she thinks (four of the five speakers are women). Inventaires was the result of a collaborative process between the three lead actors, Florence Gorgetti, Edith Scob, Judith Jean‐Pierre Ryngaert, “Paroles en chambres, paroles publiques,” Philippe Minyana, ou La Parole visible, 77. 21 This process is the verbal equivalent of the physical method used by Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeieff. Like Boltanski, Makeieff made object collections, favouring second‐hand and worn objects that bore testimony to the lives of the people who had used them. And the Deschamps‐Makeieff productions arranged these banal objects, gestures and movements, in the same way that Minyana arranged recorded words. 22 Minyana, “Chambres/Inventaires,” 116. 20
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Magre, the director Robert Cantarella and the writer Minyana. According to Cantarella, “Philippe and I cut our teeth on this play … It taught me modesty and not to trust grand theatrical machinery.”23 Minyana added: “at the time, we wanted to go against the pervading aesthetic, that of the 80s: clean, with beautiful lighting and elaborate scenery and solemn actors. We insisted on a certain ‘bad taste.’”24 In both cases, Minyana sought a sense of simplicity, a direct address to the audience; he sought to share his concern for those excluded from culture, and to create, or rather recreate, a voice that was rich enough for their existence to move an audience and go beyond the acknowledgement of failure and inarticulacy of theatre of the everyday, in order to achieve a poetry of the banal. In Inventaires, each actress portrayed the life of a friend or personal acquaintance. Minyana interviewed them several times and over the course of these meetings, he looked for objects and photos that were special to them. Gradually, a single object emerged for each of them, an object that represented an aspect of their lives and memories. For the first, it was a bowl, for the second, a dress from the 1950s, and for the third, a lamp. At the beginning of the rehearsal period, Minyana had attached drawings to the walls and asked the women to comment on them, but this lacked spontaneity. They had to find a truthful reason to speak. Minyana then came up with a “verbal marathon,” a sort of “reality show” in which the aim was to say as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. This resulted in a stream of memories, thoughts, descriptions and opinions that flowed from each actress as soon as Eve, the “host,” invited them to speak. As in Vinaver’s texts, the printed version is almost entirely devoid of punctuation, and so readers may feel they are jumping from one subject to another, but when the text is staged, the listener/spectator understands that it is a question of portraying the unpredictable movements of thought that arise through association. And 23 Robert Cantarella, “Interview,” Trois Pièces contemporaines, 94. 24 Philippe Minyana, “Interview,” Trois Pièces contemporaines, 97.
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despite the absence of a logical progression to these thoughts, the audience is left with an impression that is far from being an acknowledgment of failure. For even though their stories are often sad, and they have each suffered violence, they have some form of control over their situation because they speak about it and, through their words, they conjure up the material presence of what is happening in their head. Minyana’s Drames brefs,25 are composed of a mixture of monologues and dialogues, all presented in fragmentary form, like flash photographs or vocal recordings devoid of context. Mostly, the voices who speak are given no name by the author. The different sequences in Drames brefs (1) are untitled, and are simply distinguished by a number from 1 to 6; each of the eight movements in Drames Brefs (2) has a title. Some of the movements are very short; others are composed of several simple sequences. For example, the second movement of Drames Brefs (1) consists of two people: the old woman at the curtain and the old woman in the shadows. Only the first speaks. Through the course of three pages she mentions fragmentary memories of a child killed by a streetcar, a lover’s betrayal, the onset of night. Though this sequence resembles one of Beckett’s “dramaticules,” the cumulative effect of these successive sequences is very different. Rather than focusing on the condensed image of an entire life, Minyana’s sequences flourish, creating an abundance of moments of mourning, regret or pain, giving the impression of a much more polyphonic musicality than Beckett achieved: The alternation of verbal close‐up, reality, the reading of letters and human interaction, creates a space where sounds intersect and weave together, and the montage effect of each drama, each movement, and then drama and movement together,
25 Philippe Minyana, Drames brefs (1) and Drames brefs (2) (Paris: Théâtrales, 1995, 1997).
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produces the melody of the play, of a universe that is both sonorous and cerebral (but not psychological).26
The structural principal underlying these plays is therefore revealed to be different from Beckett’s distillation: the collection of as many possible variations on the theme as is suitable could be called “composition,” to continue the musical metaphor. Minyana’s dramaturgy consists of this accumulation of different registers of voice around a general theme. According to Michel Corvin, the theme of Minyana’s play La Maison des morts is “the incessant violence imposed on people” and the play takes shape through the relentless accumulation of testimonies to the violence of death, or the accounts of those that are already dead: Here is poetry: in the vibrant metamorphosis of identicalness; here is music: in the rhythmic replies and variations; here is dramaturgical originality: in the appropriateness found between an obsessive repetitive form and its signification, which carries a catastrophic vision of existence.27
Michel Corvin suggests that, despite their differences, Minyana does indeed resemble Beckett in the sense that his work with form goes beyond the normal distinctions between form and content. The fragmentation and discontinuity found in Minyana’s plays in the 1990s are the result of both an aesthetic
26 “Alternance du gros plan de la parole, d’effets de réel, de lectures de lettres, et de réunions d’humains, créent un espace de sons croisés, tissés, qui dans l’effet de montage de chaque drame, de chaque mouvement, puis des drames et des mouvements entre eux, produisent le chant de la pièce, d’un univers sonore et mental (et non psychologique).” Frédéric Maragnani, “Projet d’écriture” in Philippe Minyana ou La Parole visible, 84. 27 “Là est la poésie: dans la métamorphose vibrante de l’identique; là est la musique: dans les retours et les variations rythmiques là est l’originalité dramaturgique: dans l’adéquation entre une forme répétitive obsédante et la signification elle‐même, porteuse d’une vision catastrophique de l’existence.” Michel Corvin, “Chez Minyana, c’est la forme qui fait sens,” Philippe Minyana ou La Parole visible, 24.
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choice and the affirmation of a life experience, composed of disparate fragments that have no defined limitations. Conclusion In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, monologue became the dominant form in the French theatre. Antoine Vitez had famously declared in 1976 that one can make theatre from any text.28 However, writers had no intention of allowing directors to be the only ones to create theatre from any sort of text. Their own writing was now liberated from the constraints that defined traditional theatrical writing. Beginning with monologues spoken by a single actor on stage, monologue developed to the point where it became the structural basis for many plays, composed from sequences of interlacing monologues. This “theatre of the self” became more complex as dramatists increasingly demanded recognition as writers, rather than as providers of scripts for the stage. The writing of Philippe Minyana, Jean‐Luc Lagarce, Noëlle Renaude, Enzo Cormann and Eugène Durif, among others, showed an eagerness to free itself from the risk of being distorted by a director who considered himself an “auteur.” These dramatists demanded the right to be seen as literary, as well as theatrical, writers and claimed to create entire worlds that already incorporated spatial and physical components. As we have seen, many writers followed the example set by Vinaver and sought an “anti‐theatrical” writing. In their desire to create an autonomous world based on the power and process of art, they turned towards the great modernist novelists of the early 20th century, especially James Joyce. The dense texture of Joyce’s work was emblematic of the new theatrical dynamic that the writers were exploring. They found in his work a dazzling array of themes and characters, often expressed through monologues and streams of consciousness. They also 28 See Antoine Vitez, “Faire théâtre de tout,” Le Théâtre des idées (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) 199‐220.
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appreciated his ability to approach everyday situations through the filter of ancient mythology. But most importantly, they discovered a structural freedom, a rejection of the laws that governed literary genres and an environment that became more defined as the text progressed—an environment that could be either an entire city or the thoughts and dreams of a single illiterate character. They also found in Joyce a fascination with words, often detached from character in a choral voice that originated in different voices or in the self‐reflection of the writer meditating on poetic creation—which resulted in the staging—or rather the vocalisation—of writing itself. As a result of this wave of experimentation, it became difficult to differentiate between dramatic texts and non‐dramatic texts: the general characteristics that defined traditional dramaturgy (whether Aristotelian or Brechtian) lost their potency and, to use Patrice Pavis’s expression, “dramaturgy dissolved into textuality.”29 All the inherited structural devices (plot, action, character) were abandoned and in their place “textual material” was created, owing little to traditional generic form. These conditions raised the issue of whether it was still possible to define a theatrical specificity, as we saw in the definition given by Michel Azama (see note 3 above). The ambiguity of his attempt shows the difficulty of establishing adequate criteria in the textual analysis of many contemporary writers. Their texts no longer recognise the dichotomy between performance and reading: like poetry, they combine words that demand physical expression with words at their most inward and meditative. The majority of these texts are hard to approach, not readily fitting into the visual spectacle of performance. Paradoxically, however, most writers of this period show a desire to write texts that require, by their very nature, a highly physical realisation; Noëlle Renaude, for example, stated “if there is one thing, one single thing, of which 29 “La dramaturgie, en réalité, se dissout dans la textualité.” Patrice Pavis, Le Théâtre contemporain, 184.
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I’m sure, it is that theatrical writing—and theatrical writing alone—is a physical form.”30 The voice and body of the actor are essential to this writing, both to give physical presence to the “textuality” identified by Pavis, and to permit the gradual emergence of the self. But although these monologues can make for great intensity in performance, they impose a minimalist aesthetic because of their deliberate exclusion of interaction between characters. Ever since the seventeenth century, the French theatre has valued purity over profusion; in the monologues of recent decades discussed in this essay one can see the triumph of a new purist aesthetic to rival that of the neo‐classical period, despite its rejection of all the dramaturgical principles inherited from Aristotle.
30 Noëlle Renaude, “Un pari désespéré,” Théâtre/Public 100 (July‐August 1991): 93.
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Daniela Jobertová
The Dialogical Monologue and the Monological Dialogue in Dramatic Works by Bernard‐Marie Koltès: From Night Just Before the Forests to Roberto Zucco Bernard‐Marie Koltès is undoubtedly one of the greatest French playwrights of the end of the 20th century, even though he wrote a relatively small number of texts. Between 1977 and 1989, he composed only six full‐length plays: Night Just Before the Forests (written in 1977), Black Battles with Dogs (1979), Quay West (1985), In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (1986), The Return to the Desert (1988) and Roberto Zucco (1988). Additional short texts or fragments were during this period (Tabataba, Coco), also subtly composed, presenting strong fighting characters and using powerful and dramatically efficient language. Most of Koltès’s plays were directed by the eminent French director, Patrice Chéreau. His cooperation with Koltès remains one of the most fruitful theatrical collaborations in the French theatre of the late 20th century. Chéreau confesses that at first, he didn’t identify himself with the world created by Koltès, a world of surprisingly eloquent outlaws and strangers; yet, he succeeded in elaborating an adequate stage aesthetics, fully conscious of the importance of the dramatic language and [66]
dramatic space. Indeed, for a number of years, Chéreau’s productions became a sort of threatening model for other creators who wanted to confront the works of Bernard‐Marie Koltès. The two texts that will be examined in this essay, however, were never directed by Chéreau. Night Just Before the Forests was staged for the first time in 1977 in Avignon as an off‐production with Yves Ferry in the main and unique role, directed by the author himself. Roberto Zucco had its world première after Koltès´s death in 1990 in the Schaubühne in Berlin; the play was directed by Peter Stein. In the first case, the author was just slowly becoming known on the French professional stage, and it is certainly interesting to note that while the first performances of this production of Night Just Before the Forests were presented to few spectators, by the end of the festival the show was completely sold out. One of the most important dramatic principles of the author’s writing, “the appeal to the other” (extremely important particularly in Night Just Before the Forests), was in this way practiced even off‐stage, in real life. In the case of Roberto Zucco, Koltès never wanted Chéreau to direct the play. He shrewdly perceived that the director’s seal would be difficult to undo and that it might discourage other directors; this turned out to be true. And in fact, it took almost ten years before other directors attempted different stagings of Koltès’s other work. Night Just Before the Forests has nothing that could dictate the theatrical finality of the text. Published by Minuit Editions, it presents itself with no graphic signs typical for traditional dramatic texts. Featuring no stage directions, no list of dramatic characters, no distribution of lines between different (named) speakers, the text starts with quotation marks, fills up sixty pages and ends up with a series of dots and quotation marks again. Between these quotation marks, a unique and seemingly endless sentence zigzags, scrupulously avoiding all punctuation that could create the impression that the speaker has finished his allocution, lowered his voice, or intonation: [67]
neither a full‐stop nor a semicolon punctuate the text, and when a question mark or an exclamation mark does appear, it is purely rhetorical! Nevertheless, despite its apparent non‐ dramatic qualities, Night Just Before the Forests represents the first truly accomplished step in the author’s dramatic career. On the one hand, the text contains all the themes that become an obsession throughout his entire work. These themes include aborted demands for love, the fascination with “the other” and with the strangeness of the other, male friendship (conceived sometimes in an almost American way as brotherhood based on shared blood), desire for a better place to live or die, and so on. On the other hand, the text clearly anticipates the author’s most inventive work with language as the basic element of the dramatic character, dramatic situation and dramatic conflict. In fact, Koltès explicitly designates himself as the inheritor of the great French tradition of rhetorical drama. At the same time, though, he adapts the rhetoric to his needs, the preoccupations and the human state of mind at the end of the 20th century. As he remarks, the way of declaring love today is completely different from the way love was declared in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He is convinced that truly contemporary drama must not only talk about the contemporary person’s problems, but it must use such language that would effectively and poetically reach the ears of this person. Each of Koltès’s six major texts marks a distinct step within his very specific, personal, but also changing conception of drama and theatre art. His refusal to concern himself with the future destiny of his finished works is closely connected to the idea he had of playwriting. While many authors repeatedly use a dramatic formula that “works” with audiences, writing plays as endless variations of a single model, Koltès was, on the contrary, always concerned with the unique character of each new play and never let himself repeat what had already been approved. In a way, his artistic and personal “flight forward” is reflected even in his dramatic characters, some of which—such
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as Roberto Zucco—wish to escape as far as they can, even the limits of the real world. This analysis will deal mostly with the language in Night Just Before the Forests, and specifically language in the other plays by Koltès. My aim will not be to interpret the text, but rather to explore the functioning the language, of the dramatic discourse. Night Just Before the Forests is a text where traditional dramaturgical analysis of characters, time, space and action brings only partial, and not very satisfying results, while the textual analysis, using the methods of linguistics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language, provides insight into the reasons for the theatrical effectiveness of such a—seemingly— non‐dramatic play. The following phenomena will be studied in Night Just Before the Forests: the system of enunciation as the basis of the dramatic situation, the inscription of time and space within the dramatic discourse; the identities of the speaker and his counterpart such as they emerge from the speech, and the relationship between them; the principle of forbidden speech and the promise of a speech to come; the speaker’s vision of his counterpart, and the “verbal rape” disguising the “demand for love.” The ultimate goal of this essay is to show two opposite tendencies within Koltès’s work, from Night Just Before the Forests up to Roberto Zucco. As far as the form is concerned, the monologue slowly gives way to dialogue, and apparently to more dramatic and theatrical discourse and action. But as far as the content is concerned, the intensely dialogic character of the dramatic speech in Night Just Before the Forests gives way, in Roberto Zucco, to a pure monologue having no addressee. The plot of the play Night Just Before the Forests could not be simpler: a man beholds another man who is turning around the corner of the street. He starts talking to him to prevent the other from disappearing into the rain and darkness. This situation becomes literally hyperbolic (such a meeting in the street, if it happened, is not likely to last an hour, given the mono‐ directional character of the speech). The exuberance of the [69]
discourse reveals the speaker’s desperate fear of solitude despite his apparent self‐confidence. The dramatic action of the play is the young man’s discourse as the only “tangible” fact of this strange, undetermined dramatic situation. In fact, the concept of the dramatic situation seems to be of little interest here. If we want to grasp the functioning of this text and to determine where its dramatic—or theatrical—potentialities lie, we should rather base our analysis on Emile Benveniste’s concept of the “enunciation situation” defined as “putting in operation of the langue through an individual action of the parole,”1 and apply it to the specific conditions of theatrical communication. The particularity of the enunciation dealt with here consists in the ambiguity and in the voluntary imprecision of the conditions in which it takes place, in a sort of “flight forward” or “evasiveness” of all the essential elements of the situation, elements that keep metamorphosing instead of becoming more and more clear, concrete and palpable. The monolithic discourse creates at its very beginning a situation comprising an “I” and a “you” (je/tu): “You were turning the corner of the street when I saw you”2 is the first line of the text, the personal pronoun “you” opening—very symptomatically and even symbolically—the monologue of the speaker. It seems to promise a dialogue to come, but nothing of the kind happens. Yet, the monologue has an extremely strong dialogical dimension, and the speaker’s awareness of the interlocutor’s presence (real or desired) is evident. In his famous essay, Jan Mukařovský proposes the following distinction between monologue and dialogue in the general sense of the term, a definition that can work in this particular situation of the theatre communication and enunciation:
1 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 1974), volume II, 80: “mise en fonctionnement de la langue par un acte individuel de la parole” (my translation). 2 Bernard‐Marie Koltès, Night Just Before the Forests in Plays: 2, trans. Joel Anderson et al. (London: Methuen, 2004) 3. All subsequent quotations are cited in parentheses.
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By monologue we do not, of course, mean dramatic monologue but an utterance that—though addressed to a listener—is in its continuity largely feed from a consideration for his immediate reaction and from a close bond with the actual temporal and spatial situation in which the participants of the utterance find themselves. Monologue can either express the speaker’s subjective mental state (in literature, the lyric) or narrate events severed from the actual situation by a temporal distance (in literature, the narrative). On the other hand, dialogue is closely bound to the “here and now” valid for the participants of the talk, and the speaker takes into account the listener’s spontaneous reaction.3
With regard to this definition, the speaker’s “dramatic monologue” has the undeniable quality of a dialogue, with the “listener’s spontaneous reactions” staying invisible for the audiences, yet inferred through the speaker’s appeals. If we closely analyse the structure of the discourse, we find that it contains many narrations, usually fragmentary, with no proper beginning and no really satisfactory conclusion. The speech also contains a great deal of what could be called “direct address.” In fact, the speaker keeps reinforcing the phatic function of the language at different moments, using different proceedings, but always reminding us all—including the interlocutor—that he speaks to someone, here and now. We could even formulate a hypothesis that whenever the other, the interlocutor, the enigmatic young man ultimately defined by the speaker as an “angel in the middle of this shit hole” (26), makes a gesture indicating his intention to leave, to disappear, to abandon the speaker to the solitude, the speaker renews his direct address, and the “you” standing for the interlocutor reappears. In this way, we can almost see, imagine, “stage for ourselves” the actions and the reactions of the invisible other, as they appear literally through the verbal actions of the speaker. 3 Jan Mukařovský, “O jevištním dialogu,” Program D37, 31 March 1937; published in English in The World and Verbal Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977) 113.
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The interlocutor is again and again retained “here and now” by the strength of the personal pronoun “you” and by the force of the contract established—or rather imposed on him—by the speaker. Night Just Before the Forests does not make use of the rhetorical virtuosity present in later plays, especially In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. Its dramatic discourse is based on a very different verbal strategy, the essential elements of which will be described and exposed in the following lines. One might have the impression that the speech is completely chaotic, with no inner coherence. A traditional analysis of motives, their recurrence and structure gives little satisfaction to those who would like to grasp the overall meaning of the text. As previously stated, many different stories are narrated: the speaker talks about his relationship with different women, about the times he was still working (he now is without a job), about his meetings with “the stupid twats, that stand around” (3) and his clashes with them, about his family etc. But these stories remain fragments with no explicit links between them, with no proper introduction and no real ending, always with an implicit promise that the ending of the story will come, if the interlocutor stays. The curiosity of the latter is therefore constantly activated, new fragments cover those that have already been offered, and the discourse runs forward frenetically. In a sense, the speaker reminds the reader—or the listener—of a “street salesman” or even “dealer” with all possible goods, who crosses the path of another man and tries to stop him, without daring to touch him physically. Indeed, the only way to “touch” the other is the word, which has to hold the interlocutor more firmly than a hand. That is why this kind of speech is highly dialogic, while giving no opportunity to the interlocutor to intervene. Even the intonation has to always rise, because an intonation that goes down is a clear sign of finality, through which the speaker announces to his partner that “it is now your turn to act/speak.”
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This principle of “endless speech” is most subtly used by Koltès, and we can now understand the absence of all marks that imply an intonation that would invite the other to “take the floor” in one way or an other. Nothing in the text suggests that the time for the interlocutor to react has come. Even the questions are purely rhetorical, and despite the fact that the speaker clearly shows his awareness of the presence of the other and addresses all his words to him, he never lets a dialogue take place. This encourages the hypothesis that, despite the explicitly formulated need of the other, the discourse is underlined by a fear of the other’s reaction. The speech contains an implicit refusal of any re‐ or inter‐ action, and the speaker says between the lines, “I want you only to be at my disposition.” Without analysing the actual content of the speech in detail, we can already suggest that the speaker in Night Just Before the Forests violates the other by forbidding him any autonomous, independent action, physical or verbal. We will see later how he restrains his intimacy by imposing on him a relationship that is definitely unilateral. I have already mentioned that the concrete conditions in which the action—the discourse—takes place are extremely ambivalent and undefined. No stage direction concerning the time or the space helps the reader imagine the circumstances of the verbal exchange. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at the inscription of time and space in the text, to analyse the hic et nunc of this particular enunciation situation, to see its paradoxes and contradictions, and finally to mention the importance, the images and the symbolic dimension of “another place” which is the speaker’s ultimate goal. Any mimetic figuration of a precise place where the action could be located is doomed to fail. The speaker mostly uses space deictic expressions such as “here,” “there,” adverbs such as “up” and “down” (or “upstairs” and “downstairs”), thus creating a fragmented space in the framework of which individual places are related, connected to one another. The speaker frequently describes his own successive movements in [73]
this peculiarly constructed space, movements which are often contrary and which give the story a vertical dimension: now is the time that I really should dry off, go back down there, sort myself out—at least my hair so I don’t get sick, now I went down there just a second ago, looking to get myself sorted out, but down there, the stupid twats, who stand around: all the time that I’m drying my hair, they won’t move, they stay in a group, they keep an eye on your back, so I came back up here— took just the time for a quick slash—with my clothes soaking, and I’ll stay just like this, until I get a room. [3]
This vertical aspect of the hic et nunc dimension is extremely important; we never find out where “up” and “down” are, but recurrences of these words create an impression of a movement which contrasts with the apparently static situation. The places the speaker evokes in his discourse are mostly urban sites. In addition to the street, which is probably the “dramatic space” where the action takes place, he mentions other, more socially defined places, such as a café and hotel. These might become the successive stations the speaker would like to reach, if possible, with his counterpart. One of the first promises he formulates is that he will take him into a café, and he promptly reassures him that he has enough money to pay. The second step would be a night spent in a hotel, but a night during which only talking would take place. In fact, the text is surprisingly chaste as far as the relationship between the two men is concerned; the speaker affirms that he only wants to talk to his partner, and he even says that as soon as the important thing is said, he will leave the hotel. Nevertheless, these relatively concrete places (café, hotel) are always “somewhere else”; they exist in the plan of the speaker, which is to maintain contact as long as possible through various promises. However the character of the discourse suggests that the discourse itself takes place in a space which is not socially determined and which presupposes no conventionalised social behaviour as would a hotel or a café. That is why the image of the street [74]
corresponds best to the nature of the discourse, the street as a metaphor with a double meaning: on one hand, a place of meeting, of crossing each other, but on the other hand also a place of passage, a place always doomed to be abandoned by those who pass. This image of a communication that is possible and impossible at the same time, that is initiated and interrupted, is extremely important in Koltès’s works. A very similar—and for the playwright almost obsessive—theme appears in the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields with the motif of a letter crumpled up immediately after the date and the place was put upon it. “And now we are here,” repeats the speaker endlessly to his partner. He creates a halting‐point in contrast with the other places he describes not as possible phases of their future common walk, but as sites where narrated micro‐stories take place. These stories almost always happen in an urban space, and they all tell of the situation of a man lost in the world, trying to establish contact and always losing; adventures with women turn out to be fiascos for different reasons, he has no job and belongs among those miserable creatures who run from place to place looking for a job and finding out that “the work itself, it’s always elsewhere” (20). The motif of frenetic movement, a flight from one place to another, appears regularly, and the speaker ends up formulating his ultimate desire, apparently unconnected to the situation hic and nunc: but if we stop dead and say: go fuck yourselves, I will not move any more and you will hear me out, if we have a good sit down on the grass and explain things, you tell your story and those who were kicked from Nicaragua all the way here or wherever tell theirs, we can say to each other that we are all more or less strangers but ciao, now we are listening to each other, calm, everything we want to say to each other. [21]
This utopia is presented as the ultimate goal of the speaker, his most burning desire, despite the flurry of the world, to take time and talk, to engage in real exchange. [75]
As far as time is concerned, the speaker is equally ambiguous. The “now” of his discourse can be at least partially grasped and described. The moment of the meeting seems to be a Friday night, an almost ritual moment of the week when working people at last liberate the energy tamed during five working days, in order to “paint the town red” (and eventually sleep the rest of the week‐end), but we come to understand gradually that this particular moment has lost its ritual dimension for the speaker who is without a job. Moreover, the discourse takes place in extremely disadvantageous circumstances for the speaker, in the rain, that shows him weak and vulnerable. On several occasions the speaker tries to contradict this image, affirming his strength and his capacity to protect and defend the other. Yet, he confesses that just before the meeting with his silent and fugitive partner, he was beaten in the underground by two hooligans who took all his money. It clearly shows the constant oscillation of the discourse between truth and lie, between explicit affirmations and their— often implicit—negations. The adverb “now” is—together with the adverb “here”— omnipresent in the text. The discourse tries to prolong the present moment for as long as possible, it literally freezes the progression of the time at the very moment when the speaker intercepted a silhouette at the corner of the street. The time of the action is, in fact, the time of “unilateral interaction,” which is, of course, a meaningful paradox characteristic for many situations in plays by Bernard‐Marie Koltès. Different temporal levels co‐exist in the text. The past is devoted to stories told by the speaker, but also to reminders of the first moments of the “interaction” between the two men. The future is reserved to utopian visions of their future common experiences, proposed—or rather promised and imposed—by the speaker, but also to the already mentioned image of an almost surreal situation of people just sitting on the grass and talking to each other. Yet, despite the coexistence of these multiple temporal levels that interact in different ways, the discourse succeeds in [76]
creating the impression of time at a halt, and as the aim of the speaker is to “make the present last,” it is extremely difficult to find in the structure of the text any signs of a progression, of a movement forward, in other words, while the narration goes on, the story is at a standstill. In his proposal of a model for the textual cooperation of the spectator, Patrice Pavis uses rather simple, straightforward and deliberately “naïve” terminology, trying to separate two aspects: “de quoi ça parle?” (“what does it talk about?”) and “qu’est‐ce que ça dit?” (“what does it say?”), the latter corresponding to the “thesis” (“thèse”) of the text.4 The distinction between the two verbs parler/dire is highly significant, and Night Just Before the Forests is an excellent example of a (dramatic) text based on an extremely strong tension between the explicit and the implicit discourse, a tension which helps to explain another question proposed by Pavis in his scheme: “comment ça agit?” (“how does it act?” or even “how does it have effect?”). And this question definitely opens ways for dramaturgical analysis, as it concerns not only the “dramatic situation” (in our terminology and in the case of this particular play, the situation of enunciation), but also the theatre communication as such. In fact, both the interlocutor and the spectator are liable to suffer the effects of this speech, and neither of them has the power to destroy the communicational contract proposed by the speaker and by the author; one of them because of his role in the fictional structure of this dialogical monologue, the other because of his role within the situation of the theatre communication. Trying to understand the “comment ça parle,” we have to note the following significant facts and phenomena. An exhaustive list of explicit motifs does not lead to larger themes, they do not contribute to the effect of coherence of the discourse and are of little use for those who search how the text “makes sense.” The stories told by the speaker have in fact only a small 4 Patrice Pavis, “La coopération textuelle du spectateur,” Théâtre/Public 152 (2000): 43‐53.
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referential function; their function is rather phatic, metalinguistic and connotative, their role being literally to “fill the empty space” with words. They are never really long; the speaker often abandons one story in order to start telling another one or to renew his address to the other. Despite the multiplicity of the explicit motives and even fragments of stories, the text tries to carry out one single, but global speech act, as if the speaker were saying “do not go,” an order or a demand which he never dares formulate in these clear terms. The coherence of the fragments consists in the simple fact that they are assembled in a single discourse (“mis en discours”) and they participate in the same (speech) act. As already mentioned, the text is built as a single sentence, with no final punctuation whatsoever. It is impossible to divide the text into clear minimal segments or units, because the speaker continuously uses linguistic and rhetorical “shifters.”5 The discourse is a stream, and despite the fact that it possesses its own internal segmentation (as the stories do succeed one another, though sometimes they overlap), the links between different units are so tight that they cannot be untied, and the punctuation always plays the role of a “relais” (“relay”), never of a “relâche” (“relax”). The speaker never uses one rhetorical “trick” several times and tries to avoid repetition. The discourse is based on the principle of surprise, and its general strategy could be defined as “changing strategy as often as possible.” 5 See also Jean‐Michel Adam, “Des mots au discours: l’exemple des principaux connecteurs,” Pratiques 43 (1984); the author explains the pragmatic role of the words such as “mais (but), si (if), certes (certainly), alors (then, so), donc (therefore), car (because, for), puisque (as, since), parce que (because), même (even), quand même (even though, even if), bien que (although) [that] mark the discourse as strongly and as subtly as nouns. Once considered as ‘empty words’ or ‘utensils,’ these expressions play an essential role as far as the cohesion‐coherence of the text is concerned (the coherence of the progression and the linking of the clauses), and also as far as the pragmatic coherence of the enunciation is concerned” (my translation, page 107 in the original text). The English expression “shifter” is employed here as an approximation of the French word “embrayage” that describes metaphorically the textual operation carried out by what Adam calls “connecteur.”
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The speech is truly action; at this point, the model of analysis of theatre discourse by the French theoretician and playwright Michel Vinaver6 should be mentioned, because Night Just Before the Forests corresponds exactly to what he calls “parole‐action” (speech‐action), contrary to speech that is only “instrument de l’action” (speech‐instrument for the action). Among the rhetorical means used by the speaker as “direct address” that reinforce the dialogic (or phatic: i.e., I am talking to you!) dimension, the following should be noted: —the speaker directly addresses his interlocutor, calling him “comrade,” “mate,” “old chap”; —he asks rhetorical questions, such as: “what could I have done? blocked my ears?, and if she had put her lips close to my ear, what could I have done? run away?, and if she had put her hand on my lap, what could I have done then? cut it off?—or cut mine off?”(10), “’cos that’s what we need most of all, to defend ourselves, don’t you think?” (6), “have you ever yet seen them let you lie down and ciao?” (20); —he creates suspense promising things in the future: “I’ll show you, in a minute, the window” (16); —often, he presents himself as an ocular witness whose testimony is irrefutable: “I saw,” “I saw straight away”; —he uses maxims and “general truths” as arguments that should not be contradicted (which is one of the specific aspects of maxims used for example in classical French tragedy or even in other plays by Koltès, especially in In the Solitude of Cotton Fields): “but it is not always the one who makes the first move that is the weaker” (6); etc. By all these—and other—rhetorical means he animates his discourse; yet, we are far from the self‐confident rhetoric put into practice—and in service of the speakers—in the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. What the speaker in Night Just Before the Forests does is elaborate his own, instinctive and intuitive rhetoric, a rhetoric that is not yet completely sure of the effect it
6 See Michel Vinaver, Les écritures dramatiques (Arles: Actes‐Sud, 1993).
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will have. And while the two characters of In the Solitude of Cotton Fields are conscious of the efficiency of their respective weapons and dare engage in a regular verbal combat, the speaker—but not yet orator!—in Night Just Before the Forests has not that confidence in his art, and prefers not to let his partner enter the dialogue. That is why this brief analysis will be concluded by a reflection of what could be called “forbidden speech” versus “promised speech”; this will lead us to some final remarks on the status of the interlocutor, and especially on the way in which the speaker builds a new, common identity. I have tried to show how the speaker directs all his discourse towards an interlocutor, while at the same time forbidding the latter to interact, to act by word or by action. Nothing in the text invites the other to reply. Individual units are tied together so that no time is left for the interlocutor to intervene, no real question encouraging a response is asked. The speaker not only exists through his speech here and now, but his interminable sentence gives sense to all his existence, past, present and future. His life is concentrated in—and suspended on—this unique moment of enunciation, and the failure of this enunciation—the non‐accomplishment of its aim—signifies the existential failure of the speaker. Yet, despite the fact that this speech seems to be the culmination of his forces, the discourse could be called provisory or preparatory. As previously stated, it is impossible to summarise what the speaker talks about; the coherence of the discourse lies not in its explicit message, but in the speech act it carries out. Yet, one of the strategies the speaker uses in order to hold his partner’s attention is a regularly renewed promise of an important revelation: “I have an idea to tell you,” repeats the speaker again and again, but the “idea” is never really exposed and explained. The “idea” appears relatively early in the text, creating a suspense, functioning as a kind of container that awaits its contents. But the speaker suggests that the idea is extremely difficult to articulate and especially to understand, underlining the fact that it cannot be said “here and now,” hic et [80]
nunc, but “later and somewhere else.” He constantly postpones the revelation, even though it may appear at times that the revelation is coming. His idea of “a union on an international level,” defending the rights of all the unjustly oppressed and exploited (which is closely connected to Koltès’s own temporary enthusiasm for the communist movement), seems to be—at least for a moment—the idea. The union is strange, though: “The main thing, in my idea of a union, is to stop getting hard‐ons, for ever and everything is managed by the secret little gang” (10), with the motif of the sex that is almost omnipresent in the discourse but that never really interferes in the relationship between the two men. But if the speaker concludes right here, in the middle of his rhetorical exercise, that “well, that’s it, my idea, and I assure you, it won’t be long” (11), it does not mean that the promised idea was really said, in fact, some pages later the idea of “the idea to tell you” reappears. The speaker’s confession of his urge “to be in a room, old chap, where I could talk, I can’t really manage to say what I should say to you” (20) creates an effect of surprise, and refreshes the listener’s curiosity. The impossibility of delivering an important message is thus paradoxically admitted in a most eloquent way, and while the present discourse talks (parle), the future discourse will say (dira). The last confession of the speaker re‐insists on the impossibility of the Word to express what is essential, maybe even vital: “and I still don’t know how I could say it, what a mess, what a shit hole” (26); or maybe these last words are, in fact, the idea that cannot make its way out, i.e. the ultimate statement of the miserable human condition in a world where real exchange (other than commercial) is impossible. This almost existential theme reappears again in the text In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, where an attempt at a purely commercial exchange hides the desperate need for the simplest form of human exchange, communication. In Night Just Before the Forests, the fundamental theme arises not from the process of referencing to the world, but from the process of enunciation. [81]
At the beginning of this analysis, the symbolic dimension of the incipit position of the pronoun “you” was pointed out. Throughout the entire text, the relationship between the speaker and the listener is constantly reinforced by the speaker; we know little or almost nothing of the other, and we have no fact which would help us create an “image” of the listening young man, only the rather contradictory pieces of information the speaker delivers. This information is always connected to the physical appearance of the enigmatic partner, but it is never concrete or descriptive. The speaker insists on the fact that his regard is most piercing, allowing him to seize and understand what the other is in reality about. And he repeats constantly that “at the first sight” he knew. Phrases such as “I could very well see” or “I saw at the first sight” (“j’ai très bien vu,” “j’ai vu tout de suite”) always introduce a rather imprecise description of the interlocutor, a description which is rather a projection of the way the speaker would like to see him, or in other words, the image he makes of and even imposes on him. Observations depicting him as a fragile human being, such as “I saw straight away that you didn’t seem too tough, from over there walking around soaked to the skin, not very tough at all” (6), “seeing from a distance that you were still a kid” (14), alternate with those where the speaker persuades his interlocutor that the latter differs greatly from all those who are his own enemies: “on first sight, I’ve seen all right, that you, you are the right kind, the kind you can talk to” (14). The speaker thus invents his own interlocutor according the image he has of him. Using the thesis of Francis Jacques we can even affirm that the speaker creates a sort of “matrix” of his interlocutor: Before even asking ourselves whether the ideas we form about the other person influence our own behaviour towards him/her, we should inquire about the mechanism of the employment (mise en emploi) of the langue by the interlocutors in the framework of a dialogue. It is not impossible to demonstrate that an exchange between I and you leads towards the constitution of a matrix of our experience of the other, i.e. [82]
simultaneously of the conception I have of him/her AND of my way of dealing with him/her.7
This brings us to the last fundamental question concerning the functioning of the discourse in Night Just before the Forests. It concerns the interaction between “I” and “you” and especially the creation of a new common entity “we” or “us,” comprising the two so far distinct individuals. In fact, the speaker never stops repeating that the two men are alike, that they resemble each other, and their likeness is the principal, almost fatal reason for their on‐coming union or association. The allusions to their likeness abound in the text: “it’s not good to stroll around here tonight, for you same as for me” (5), “and you hang around here as well, your clothes soaking wet” (5), “you and me, me and you, who wander around this joke of a city with no money in our pockets” (5), “it’s not the money, it’s not you or me that pins us down!, well, comrade, I have this idea for people like you and me who don’t have any money, no job” (6), “not long back, I took a beating, they nearly had me, just what I was asking for, too trusting like you” (7), “you are too trusting you, just like me a while ago” (8). All these assertions build a similarity between the speaker and his interlocutor, the two distinct human entities being thus progressively connected in and by the speaker’s speech. All of a sudden a common entity appears created by all the syntactic means that yield a synthesis of two members of the sentence and the confession of the speaker’s identity (delivered in the framework of a direct speech in one of the narrated micro‐stories, but trying to reach the interlocutor at the same time), “comrade, there you are, this 7 Francis Jacques, Dialogiques: recherches logiques sur le dialogue (Paris: PUF— Philosophie d’aujourd’hui, 1979), I.13: “Avant de se demander si d’aventure les idées que nous formons de l’autre personne incluent ou influencent notre comportement à son égard, il convient de s’interroger sur le mécanisme de mise en emploi de la langue par des interlocuteurs en dialogue. Il n’est pas impossible de montrer que, par le jeu d’échange entre je et tu, se constitue bel et bien la matrice de l’expérience d’autrui, i.e. simultanément de la conception que j’en ai et de ma manière d’agir à son égard ” (my translation).
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is what I am, a foreigner as well” (10), this “as well” implying “you too,” has the power and the urgency of a real plea for empathy. In other words, the speaker “violates” the interlocutor’s identity, adapting it to his own needs. His speech is the place where the violation, a sort of a “verbal rape” takes place. The desired association is not, however, meant to last only here and now. In effect, the few moments where the future tense appears in the whole discourse correspond to the description of future common “actions” of the two men: I’ll show you in a minute, the window … if you want to go there, we’ll go see it, the window I’m talking about … you will come with me so we can get back there … you will come with me and I will show you the window where the whore looked at the swinging clothes. [16‐19]
The polite invitations (“if you want to …”) gradually become irrefutable statements (“you will come with me”); the speaker “imposes” his own regard through the prism of which the interlocutor will be invited to look at the world. He never asks, he always affirms and commands, and the future tense is used as an irrefutable fact, it has the power to create the desired reality. As a whole, the play could be metaphorically characterised as a “unilateral act of love,” where the union of two beings is imposed by one of them with brutality that often hides weakness. When the speaker says “I love you” at the end of the play, isn’t he implicitly asking “love me”? Even though he spends all his time giving promises, the only thing his speech does, is beseech—desperately and urgently. This opposition between what the character says and what he wants to say, between his explicit discourse and his implicit discourse, is an important characteristic feature of Koltès’s works in general. From many points of view, Night just Before the Forests anticipates the other five plays to come, but the demand of the other formulated in this particular case by the means of what could be called “street rhetoric” is probably the [84]
most sincere and the most touching avowal of misery, dressed in gaudy clothes. In these terms, it seems that Koltès’s most enigmatic and theatrically the most complex play, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, is the direct offspring of this first attempt to articulate the unspeakably miserable condition of the contemporary person, in need not only of communication but also of desire itself. After Night Just Before the Forests, every new play is a conscious step towards a more affirmed theatricality.8 Koltès gradually comes to understand the requirements and the limitations of theatrical expression, and his characters progressively enter into what seems to be a “real” dialogue. “What seems to be” is an important modalisation of the assertion, as every play presents a specific variation of an attempt at verbal exchange, and the question whether the characters really communicate never stops being topical. Thus, Black Battles with Dogs is a peculiar play situated at a French worksite somewhere in Africa where two racist narrow‐ minded French workers, Horn and Cal, watch a peculiar love affair take place between Léone, who has just arrived from Paris in order to marry one of them, and a black man Alboury who has come to the worksite in order to carry the body of his dead brother back to his village. The author presents a succession of situations with two speakers whose communication keeps dashing against their different respective conceptions of the functioning of the French language. While the native speaker uses words which mean something other than what he really intends to say, the black man for whom the 8 Staging Night Just Before the Forests always represents an enormous challenge for the actor and his director. The last memorable spectacle was signed by the theatre director Kristian Frédric and produced by the theatre company Lézards qui bougent (première in the Abbesses Theatre, Paris, 7 Novembre 2000). The speaker was interpreted by the well‐known cinema actor Denis Lavant. And while the director’s role was so subtle that many spectators considered it was negligible, the actor, dressed in a huge wet coat designed by the famous comic book illustrator Enki Bilal, succeeded in catching the audience’s attention thanks to the strictly non‐material nature of the hold‐up.
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French is a foreign language uses it in the most literal way. For him “a cat is a cat,” and he refuses to understand the deformed figurative way the “white man” speaks. Dramatic action seems to be at a standstill during these dialogues; it is finally the only trilogue scene bringing about a dramatic confrontation of the “husband,” the “wife” and the “lover” that puts the intrigue in motion and that makes possible the final punishment of the strangely childish evildoer Cal. The following play, Quay West, represents another case of verbal exchange, and particularly another strategy of unblocking the dramatic situation. It takes place in an abandoned hangar in a big American city—inspired by one forsaken neighbourhood of New York—where a family of clandestine immigrants tries to survive. Two intruders come, Koch and Monique, their arrival disturbing the delicate balance of the family. Charles, the “son,” wants to start anew, but his mother Cécile, his father Rodolfe and his sister Claire cause difficulties. Their communication is again blocked, and the situations hardly change from one scene to another. However, the play contains not only these “useless” dialogues, but also several monologues, emitted as requests by the dramatic characters. They all have for an addressee the only silent, non‐ speaking character of the play, a mysterious black called Abad. He is not mute, he has just decided—says Koltès himself—not to speak. And Abad is finally the one who starts the action and whose murderous gestures are delivered as acts of grace to the two characters who, in fact, ask for them: Koch and Charles. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields has been mentioned several times as the accomplishment of the task traced by Night Just Before the Forests. In this play, two men—called Dealer and Client—meet and talk together, the Dealer offering a merchandise but asking at the same time the Client to name the object of his desire, and the Client refusing to admit he has any desire at all. Neither of them is willing to uncover his weakness. At the end, the spectator finds out that the Dealer has in fact nothing to offer, and he begs for human contact as such; and the [86]
Client desperately looks for any desire, as he is one of those contemporary people who suffer from having no desire at all, and whose life has therefore become fatally hollow and without sense or direction. With Return to the Desert, Koltès tried to conquer a different public. This “boulevard comedy” presents Adrien, a self‐ sufficient French bourgeois living in a provincial town—most probably Metz, the author’s home town—, and his sister Mathilde. Mathilde has returned after years of absence spent in Algeria with her two children. She wishes not only to claim her part of the family inheritance, but is also resolved to take revenge on the respectable citizens of the town who had unjustly impeached her after the war for having slept with the Germans and had shaved her hair. Mathilde and Adrien keep fighting, at first only with their words, later on with their fists, and the spectator keeps looking for the true reason for Mathilde´s “homecoming,” finding no answer in the sister’s and brother’s provocative and at the same time extremely witty verbal attacks, accusations, outrages and subterfuges. Mathilde invades the house with her Arabic habits, and the rhythm of Islam overrules the quiet—but haunted—Roman‐Catholic and even bigoted household. Mathilde´s real intentions are revealed in a monologue delivered as a peculiar confession at the moment of vespers, where truths and lies are inextricably intermingled. Mathilde confesses that she has come only to take her beloved brother Adrien away with her back to Algeria. If she wants to succeed, however, she must never let him know that she needs him. She is the only (female) character in plays written by Koltès who never explicitly speaks of her love—in the broadest sense of the word—for someone; she never shows where her weakness is, and that is why she is the only winner. In Koltès’s last play, Roberto Zucco, the action corresponds to Zucco´s frantic evasion of prison and his flight through different places back to prison, and further on, towards the sun. The play is built as a sort of “Stationendrama” where Zucco acts almost unconsciously as a criminal; but if he kills and [87]
rapes, he always seems to respect and even comply with his victim’s wish. In the family of strangers and even outlaws invented by Koltès, he is the most silent anti‐hero, suffering from a sort of aphasia which is not physiological, but social. He almost never starts a dialogue, his speeches are mostly laconic, he makes no use of rhetoric, and instead of manipulating others through words he gives them straight and clear orders. Nevertheless, two relatively long monologic passages play an important role in the play and suggest where one of its major themes lies. The first of the two monologues takes place in the underground. Zucco presents himself as a normal boy extremely interested in linguistics, while an old man lost in the subterranean labyrinth listens to his confession. The second monologue deserves our particular attention because it shows the state of communicational vacuity this last Koltèsian hero occupies. Zucco finds himself in a phone‐box and he speaks his ultimate wish—to go away—into the telephone receiver: I want to go away. I’ve got to go away right now. It’s too hot in this fuck of a city. Take me to snowy Africa. Take me there before I die. Because nobody cares about anyone. The men need women and the women need men / but as for love, there is none. I get a hard/on with women out of sheer pity. I’d like to come back as a dog, and find a little happiness. A stray dog no one would notice, poking round the bins. I’d like to be the kind of yellow scab‐infested stray people automatically avoid, poking round the bins till the end of time. What use are words when there’s nothing to be said? They should close the schools and enlarge the cemeteries. One year or a hundred—what difference does it make? Sooner or later we all of us have to die. And that’s what makes the birds sing, and that’s what makes them laugh at us.9
The situation seems to be dialogic, with the telephone functioning on the stage as a clear material sign of communication between two speakers. Yet, the textual analysis 9 Bernard‐Marie Koltès, Roberto Zucco in Plays: 1, trans. Martin Crimp (London: Methuen Drama, 1997), 173‐174; alterations in italics are mine.
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of Zucco´s speech shows no awareness of the presence of another human being, of a listener. Zucco´s monologue is an outcry destined to nobody in a world where communication has no sense. The tragic irony of this last statement of the author lies also in the fact that the telephone receiver has been cut off. The communication channels are damaged forever and speakers have no more faith in the power of the word. In this particular scene of his last play, Koltès shows his understanding of the stage sign, but he subverts the message sent by it. The pure empty mechanism of verbal exchange is shown, but verbal exchange no longer takes place. It is therefore undoubtedly possible to conclude that dramatic characters of Bernard‐Marie Koltès undergo a real evolution as far as their “conscience”—if this improper term can be used for its metaphoric dimension—of the power of the word is concerned. Trapped between two extreme poles, the dialogical monologue in Night Just Before the Forests and the monological dialogue in Roberto Zucco, they all try different strategies that recall strangely tragic “marivaudage” in a world where love (a value dear to Marivaux) no longer exists. They manipulate each other through subtle rhetoric, but never expose themselves, never show their own weakness. In this sense, Koltès definitely is a descendent of Marivaux and other authors who make the word the principal lever for the dramatic action. However, contrary to Marivaux, words of Koltès’s dramatic characters resound with emotional hollowness.
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Mark Berninger
“I am walking slowly in a dense jungle”: Monologue in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes Harold Pinter’s writing has often proved slippery ground for critical interpretation. Some long‐standing debates about his plays have by now achieved a notorious status like, for example, the characterisation of his early drama as part of the Theatre of the Absurd or the question whether Pinter is a political playwright or not. These attempts at pigeon‐holing have proved difficult with an author who has evaded all labelling, even of the term Pinteresque, which was coined especially for his writing. One of the most cherished clichés about Pinter is his characterisation as the “playwright of silence.” However, while some critics have seen his plays as transcripts of the breakdown in communication and as an exploration of the failure to articulate, others have stressed the significance of language in his plays and have praised his ear for everyday speech and his ability to transform normal language into texts of poetic density and high symbolic power. It thus seems helpful to consider Pinter’s plays not as the expression of one central feature or concept—which they are notoriously not—but as carefully balanced constructs consisting of contrasting elements. Pinter combines pauses, language tags, sound effects, symbolism, and many other features to form a [90]
“textum,” a dense linguistic fabric. By oppositions, echoes, resistances and evocation he interweaves different speech modes and thus creates ambivalent yet significant plays. One of the central elements in this fabric is the change between single voices speaking and the verbal interaction of characters, which takes several dimensions. Speaking alternates with listening, sustained speech is juxtaposed with verbal ping‐pong, frequent questions demand answers but often meet silence or a redirection of the conversation instead of a direct reaction. Longer narratives are triggered by silence and often spun to new levels by supportive questioning or commentary and the roles of speaker and listener often change fundamentally during a play. When one considers the complexity and significance of all this, the interaction of monologue and dialogue in Pinter’s plays certainly deserves closer critical scrutiny than it has received until now. Despite innovations introduced by modernist playwriting, the conventions of stage realism still largely dominate the perception of theatre audiences. Accordingly dialogue appears the “natural” mode of drama and monologue is seen as an exception with a tendency to disrupt the seamless progression of action and interaction. Monologue is, however, not uncommon in drama, especially when it is defined in very general way as “[a]n extended speech uttered by one speaker”1 or “any sustained speech by a single person.”2 Defined thus loosely, the term monologue has to be complemented with more specific terms like soliloquy, which describes a longer speech focussing on the communication with the audience instead of the communication among the characters. While a soliloquy is therefore an element transcending the theatrical illusion, monologues directed at other characters remain embedded in the theatrical framework. 1 “Monologue,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 2 “Monologue,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
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This distinction is quite important for Pinter. Although he is usually not seen as an “epic” or “metadramatic” playwright who aims at disrupting theatrical illusion, he tends to blur it by ambiguous monologues which are often subject to audible falsification by the characters. They tend to contradict other passages of the plays and are often marked by heavy rhetoric. These monologues turn out to be treacherous, for example when the memories of the past collide with different versions of the same event. Similarly, the image the characters draw of themselves and of others in these monologues frequently contradicts other perceptions. The ambiguity thus created proves a disruptive force within the theatrical frame undermining straightforward realism and is as important for the specific character of Pinter’s plays as the often analysed verbal power games and silences. At some significant points in his work Pinter also uses soliloquies, notably in two of his later plays. The speeches of Bridget in Moonlight (1993)3 and the final monologue of Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes (1996)4 fulfil another function generally attributed to soliloquies. They serve as an expression of intense feeling of the characters and allow a glimpse at their souls. In contrast to the often treacherous and rhetoric‐driven monologues, these soliloquies present dense images of high symbolism. Instead of hiding behind speech‐masks, in their soliloquies Bridget and Rebecca become visionaries. Yet, although the opacity and ambiguity of the usual monologues turns transparent in the soliloquies, these visions are also unsettling and disruptive as they do not answer any questions of a realistic kind. They do not disclose the motivations of the characters in a logical way as soliloquies usually do. As can be seen from this short sketch of the different functions of monologic passages in Pinter’s plays, it is necessary to avoid two central problems usually associated with the analysis of monologues. One is the tendency to analyse them as 3 Harold Pinter, Moonlight (London: Faber, 1993). 4 Pinter, Ashes to Ashes (London: Faber, 1996).
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separate from the rest of the text because they lend themselves easily to being studied as self‐contained entities. The other is the perception of monologues as situations of verbal dominance. The first would underestimate the interconnectedness of monologic and dialogic passages within Pinter’s plays while the second follows the usage of the term monologue in general language and political discourse, where it is mostly characterised in a negative way as the inability to listen to others and as an abuse of verbal power.5 To avoid these two problematic associations, which would prove distractive in the analysis of Pinter’s plays, I suggest borrowing from musical terminology to describe the specific quality of Pinter’s use of monologue. The operatic contrast of aria and recitative is helpful to highlight special features of Pinter’s texts. While the recitative is the equivalent of dialogue, the aria naturally corresponds to the monologue. The recitative furthers the action and has a progressive function whereas the aria crystallises the suddenly suspended action into a dense image, like for example in the Gleichnisarie, which works with a simile usually borrowed from nature. The aria is much more formalised than the recitative in terms of instrumentation, melodic phrasing and structure. Yet, while the recitative is closer to “normal speech” it remains still audibly artificial and closely connected to the solo passages both textually and melodically. In model operas like Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro the characters move into and out of the different modes without disruption, a tendency that has even led to the blurring of recitative and aria in Wagner’s “never‐ending melody.” This also highlights the possibility of the arioso, the middle ground 5 Norbert Greiner, “Silence in Pinter: Regression from the Everyday to the Poetry of Memory,” Intercultural Encounters—Studies in English Literatures (Festschrift for Rüdiger Ahrends), eds. Heinz Antor and Kevin L. Cope (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999) 327‐334. Greiner has pointed to a similar misunderstanding of silence in Pinter’s plays against the general background of the “silencing of the other,” which has been foregrounded especially by feminist and postcolonial critics: “Surprising as it may seem, there are relatively few instances of silence as a gesture of inferiority or submission [in Pinter]”(327).
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between aria and recitative, a zone usually overlooked in the dialogue—monologue opposition. Yet another option offered by employing operatic terms is the chance to consider the duet (or trio etc.) as a non‐solistic mode different from the dialogic recitative. Reference to these musical terms is helpful in the analysis of Pinter’s plays because it stresses the formal aspects of the texts and the interconnectedness of the different parts without overemphasising the significance of plot development which is important in an author who constantly evades standard plot structures but always meticulously structures his texts formally. Even formal details like the pattern of the da capo aria with its ternary structure and the double aria with its contrast of cantabile and cabaletta prove useful tools to describe similar patterns in Pinter’s text. Finally, the comparison to musical genres also highlights the special sound quality of Pinter’s highly musical writing. The two plays mentioned above, Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes, embody this quality very clearly but they can also serve as model cases for the analysis of Pinter’s use of dialogic and monologic passages for different reasons. It is now communis opinio among critics to segment Pinter’s career into three (or four) phases, the first being the “classical Pinteresque” of his early plays, like The Caretaker (1960), leading to the connected period of his “memory plays” of the 1970s, of which Old Times (1971) is a prime example. This is followed by Pinter’s decisive shift towards the political with plays like Mountain Language (1988), then gives way to his later plays, which echo parts of his early writing without giving up the political edge that Pinter has developed in the 1980s. According to this periodisation, Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes as late plays avoid the usual categorisation as absurd or political plays and transcend the label Pinteresque while they still display features typical of all Pinter’s writing. More than his earlier plays, Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes can also be read as an experiment with different speech modes especially when they are analysed in [94]
combination. In Moonlight the different modes are displayed in separate areas and scenes, and they are embodied by different characters. Ashes to Ashes builds on this by progressing towards a greater integration and economy. Without losing any of the modular flexibility, the changes between the different modes become more fluent and the reduction to only two characters and one ongoing scene helps to create an even greater textual density than the carefully balanced, multileveled structure of Moonlight allows. Moonlight is indeed a play with a complex structure made up of several constituents. The one‐act play is split up into many individual scenes. Although they remain unnumbered in the text, they can be distinguished clearly by their change of personnel, location and tone. Yet, the action moves freely from one scene to the next, juxtaposing and connecting the different levels of the play. To enable smooth transitions, the stage is divided into three locations, two bedrooms—one well‐ furnished and one shabby, both not situated in the same building—and a third “area” whose whereabouts remain elusive and which is defined mainly by faint moonlight.6 Different characters inhabit these three acting spaces. The well‐ furnished bedroom has the ageing and terminally ill patriarch
6 See Varun Begley, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Begley argues that such a split scene is a novelty in Pinter’s work, which normally uses a single, albeit often elusive acting space: “The stage thus fractures into three distinct spaces, as if the unitary, claustrophobic room of the early Pinter could no longer contain an ongoing disintegration. Moreover, each space retains its own linguistic register—cryptic recrimination in Andy’s well‐furnished bedroom, dysfunctional burlesque in Fred’s ‘shabby’ bedroom, and poetic lament in Bridget’s nebulous ‘area.’” (33). See also Eckart Voigts‐Virchow, “Pinter Still/Again Pinteresque? Opacity and Illumination in Moonlight,” Centres and Margins (CDE Contemporary Drama in English 2), ed. Bernhard Reitz (Trier: WVT, 1994) 119‐137. Voigts‐Virchow attributes this move away from a unitary set to Pinter’s work for the camera media that allow easier transitions (122). Pinter has used the split set again, but in a less drastic form, in Celebration (2000), a play that moves back and forth between the conversations at two tables in the same restaurant.
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Andy lying in bed, tended by his wife Bel. In the shabby counterpiece to this, the young Fred spends most of his time in bed due to an undisclosed illness. He is visited by his older brother Jake and it transpires in the course of the play that the two are the sons of Bel and Andy, who for reasons unknown avoid seeing their father. The third acting area belongs to Bridget, the sister of Jake and Fred. Her ethereal appearance suggests that she is some kind of ghost, a suspicion supported by a flashback scene of ten years earlier which shows her and her brothers as teenagers. While the brothers are now in their twenties, Bridget’s age is still sixteen. Each of the three acting areas appears five times in individual scenes, some of which can be subdivided into subscenes due to the appearance of two additional characters, the couple Maria and Ralph, friends of Andy and Bel who first visit Fred individually but then appear at Andy’s bedside together. While Maria and Ralph move between the two bedrooms, both the parents and the sons have a shared scene with Bridget in her area. In the case of the two brothers this is the already mentioned flashback scene while Andy and Bel are later shown in a mostly silent, moonlit tableau with Bridget. The characters Maria and Ralph, as well as Bridget’s area with its ability to transcend time and space, help to bridge the isolation of the two bedrooms. That the two rooms are clearly separated is emphasised by the lack of direct contact between the parents and their sons. Bel has to use the telephone to speak with Jake and Fred but they do not react to her statement “Your father is very ill” (73) and undermine communication with their mother by pretending that they are a Chinese laundry. It becomes clear from this short description of the play how carefully Pinter has balanced its different constituents. All the scenes, locations, and characters are juxtaposed and interconnected on several levels. Men and women are paired (Bel & Andy, Maria & Ralph) and used as contrasts at the same time (the brothers and their sister, Maria vs. Bel, Andy vs. Ralph). The relationships between the characters consist of [96]
several, constantly changing triangles. The flashback scene shows the brothers quarrelling with each other and with Bridget about going to a gig in Amersham while Bridget later appears silent and ghost‐like to her parents. While the sons repeatedly allude to their father and thus underline their conflict‐laden relationship with him, they actually speak with their mother on the telephone but without acknowledging her. The relations among the older generation are similarly complicated. Maria seems to have had an affair with both Andy and Bel. This makes Ralph both the closest friend of Andy and the husband of his former mistress. Bel on the other hand finally tells her husband “I think I should have married your friend Ralph” (66). These complex interrelations are mirrored on the formal side by Pinter’s use of different speech modes. Two of Bridget’s soliloquies frame the play as prologue and epilogue. A third one is embedded in the flowing succession of the different scenes but all three soliloquies stand apart from the rest of the text like she stands apart from the world of the living. While she addresses the audience exclusively in these three scenes, she interacts with the other characters in the two other scenes, in dialogue in the flashback scene and silently in the tableau with Andy and Bel. When first Maria and then Ralph visit Fred and Jake, they each deliver a monologue full of memories of the past and good advice which is met with silence from the sons. In their visit to Andy’s deathbed they exchange shallow but nevertheless disquieting small‐talk with their dying friend and his wife. In their five scenes alone, Jake and Fred engage in a wild extravaganza of language circling around their relationship with their father and consisting of verbal ping‐ pong, the imitation of pompous rhetoric and comic name games, in which the two try to outdo each other in the invention of imaginary people and places. Compared to their highly artificial dialogues, the conversation between Andy and Bel seems more realistic but upon closer scrutiny the parents also turn out to be engaged in games of language and power [97]
which circle around their sons, the past and Andy’s imminent death. In doing so, they switch constantly between monologic passages and dialogue consisting mainly of Andy’s questions and Bel’s answers. To employ the musical terminology mentioned above, one can say that the play contains three arias by Bridget and one each by Maria and Ralph.7 The scenes with Jake and Fred are highly formalised duets while the conversations of Andy and Bel move mostly on the middle ground of the arioso, sometimes changing into aria mode for a short time and sometimes into plain recitative. The flashback scene just like the scene with Andy, Bel, Maria, and Ralph, and the telephone call between Bel and her sons which follows immediately afterwards, are closest to straight recitative. This shows that the majority of the scenes are static (the various arias and also the circular duets of Fred and Jake) and that the progressive modes culminate towards the end of the play when Andy’s death draws nearer. Although all scenes would merit a closer analysis regarding the use and change of speech modes, only some exemplary passages can be highlighted here. The prologue of Bridget is a piece of tightly constructed stage poetry pointing in several directions and resounding through the whole play. Speaking in “faint light,” Bridget announces her situation in short sentences: “I can’t sleep. There’s no moon. It’s so dark” (1). The evocation of the moon is a leitmotiv of the play starting here in the second sentence and leading in a long arch to an echo in the final sentence of Bridget’s epilogue: “I stood there in the moonlight and waited for the moon to go down” (80). With the moon 7 The fact that the play text itself directly alludes to singing might help to convince those who find this connection between Pinter’s play and opera far‐ fetched. Bel says about Ralph: “[He] had such beautiful manners and such a lovely singing voice. I never understood why he didn’t become a professional tenor” (67). A similar allusion can also be found in Ashes to Ashes where Rebecca describes how much her mysterious lover was respected by the people who worked under his direction: “They would follow him over a cliff and into the sea, if he asked them, he said. And sing in a chorus as long as he led them. They were in fact very musical” (25).
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Bridget also mentions the key symbol of light and darkness, which reappears for instance in Andy’s musings about the weather and light conditions in the land beyond death (46) and in Jake’s story of the light‐metre (54f). The fact that Bridget bemoans the absence of moonlight at the beginning of the play and waits for darkness at the end sets the pace for a play driven by metaphysical anxiety about death. In a second spell of slightly longer sentences, Bridget returns to her opening statement that she cannot sleep: “I think I’ll go downstairs and walk about. I won’t make a noise. I’ll be very quiet. Nobody will hear me” (1). This plan to descend from above and walk quietly about hints at her ghost‐like existence beyond the world of the living. Bridget then combines the topics of silence and darkness in now even longer sentences: “It’s so dark and I know everything is more silent when it’s dark. But I don’t want anyone to know I’m moving about in the night” (1). While her speech slowly unfolds in longer and longer sentences, the key words “dark” and “night” resound like a musical chord at the end of her utterances. Then Bridget turns her attention to her parents (“I don’t want to wake my father and mother”), whose sleep she wishes to protect and who she juxtaposes with herself and her brothers. This outlines the generation gap which dominates the play while the image of sleeping in peace and waking up rested points again to the death theme. The whole prologue is thus marked by formal repetitions and contrasts and also acts like a miniature version of the whole play and its conflicts. Self‐centred sentences starting with “I” (“I can’t sleep …,” “I think I’ll go …,” “I won’t …,” “I’ll be …”) echo through this aria and through the whole play. In the prologue they are juxtaposed first with factual, disquieting statements (“There’s no moon,” “It’s so dark”) and then with sentences about absent characters, here Bridget’s parents (“They are …,” “They have …,” “All their life …” etc.). This pattern of self‐centredness and longing for others is repeated at the beginning of the next scene starting with Andy asking “Where are the boys? Have you found them?” which is met [99]
with Bel’s answer “I’m trying” (2). Later Andy starts rambling about himself and his position as a civil servant: I’ll tell you something about me. I sweated over a hot desk all my working life and nobody found a flaw in my working procedures. Nobody ever uncovered the slightest hint of negligence or misdemeanour. Never. I was an inspiration to others. I inspired the young men and women down from here and down from there … [17]
While the basic pattern of this monologue directed at Bel is similar to Bridget’s opening soliloquy and echoes Bridget’s statement that her parents “have given so much of their life for me” (1), the tone has changed drastically from melodic cantabile to forceful cabaletta. The rhythm is now more pressing than in the prologue and Andy’s categorical use of negatives (“nobody,” “Nobody,” “Never”) underlines the difference. While Bridget’s speech voices longing and fear directly, Andy gruffly rebukes all tender feelings in an effort to overcome his needs and fears by a typically male denial of them: “I do not say I was loved. I didn’t want to be loved. Love is an attribute no civil servant worth his salt would give house room to. It’s redundant. An excrescence” (17). The anxious parent‐child relationship is repeated in another key by Maria who refers in both her monologue in Fred’s bedroom and in her small talk with Andy and Bel to her own children in the hollow chattering that defines her pseudo‐ optimistic voice: “My three are all in terribly good form. Sarah’s doing marvellously well and Lucien’s thriving at the Consulate and as for Susannah, there’s no stopping her” (16, see also 68). In similar patter she hints at the love triangle between herself, Andy and Bel: “But of course in those days—I don’t deny it—I had a great affection for your father. And so had your mother— for your father” (16). The ambiguity about who loved whom becomes even greater when Maria tells of Andy’s dancing skills and it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out who he was dancing with and in whose arms Maria longed to lie: [100]
And how he danced. How he danced. One of the great waltzers. An elegance and grace long gone. A firmness and authority so seldom encountered. And he looked you directly in the eyes. Unwavering. As he swirled you across the floor. A rare gift. But I was young in those days. So was your mother. Your mother was marvellously young and quickening every moment. I—I must say—particularly when I saw your mother being swirled across the floor by your father—felt buds breaking out all over the place. I thought I’d go mad. [16‐7]
The rhetoric of her excitement has, however, already been undermined since it echoes a parody of a eulogy delivered by Jake on his father in the scene immediately before, where Andy’s character is described in the following way: “sheer undaunted farsightedness, unflinching moral resolve, stern intellectual vision, classic philosophical detachment, passionate religious fervour, profound emotional intensity, blood tingling spiritual ardour, spellbinding metaphysical chutzpah” (12). Where Maria moves from phrases (“An elegance and grace long gone. A firmness and authority so seldom encountered”) to something very close to an emotional confession (“I—I must say … I thought I’d go mad”), Jake piles up phrases in a never‐ ending staccato of the same formula (adjective plus adjective plus noun) which becomes maddeningly hilarious. Again the expression of emotion is juxtaposed with its fierce rebuke. Compared to these games with phrases behind which hidden emotion lingers dangerously, Bridget’s central soliloquy appears again like a clear yet inexplicable picture. Her speech, which starts with the evocative sentences “I’m walking slowly in a dense jungle” (21), is divided by pauses into several “stanzas.” This pattern stands in contrast to the continuous text in the prologue but points forward to the similarly structured epilogue. The carefully arranged rhythm of the different parts of her soliloquy starts with two short parts followed by two long ones, then by a short one and a very short one. The content moves from a thematic opening statement through elaborative ornamentation, a flashback and ornamentation again before it [101]
ends with the theme of “echo” and a short closing statement summarising the central theme of the soliloquy: “No one in the world can find me” (22). Drawing on a metaphor from nature like a Gleichnisarie, Bridget’s soliloquy elaborates on her emotional situation. Moving in a dense jungle which protects her, she enjoys the lush nature around her and the abundance of life she is surrounded with is encapsulated in her ornamental enumeration of the names of flowers: “Hibiscus, oleander, bougainvillea, jacaranda” (21). This is heightened by a variation in the next part of her speech describing the memory of a barren and war‐marked landscape she has walked through before: “Thorns, stones, stinging nettles, barbed wire, skeletons of men and women in ditches” (22). After verbally returning to her shelter of the jungle where she feels “Hidden but free” (22), she is disturbed by another memory, “There is the smell of burning. A velvet odour, very deep, an echo like a bell” (22), before she proclaims herself out of reach again. This soliloquy shows in miniature how Pinter uses contrasts, paradoxes, rhythmical patterns, verbal sounds, structuring pauses, and echoes to orchestrate his play text. The microstructure of this passage reflects one strand of the complex macrostructure of the play which also proclaims a theme, generational conflict and death, permutes it through various ornamentations and variations in different moods, then echoes it again and again in cross‐connections before it finally moves out of reach again. The means Pinter employs in Moonlight are, however, so numerous and varied that the play lacks somewhat in cohesion and tends to fall apart into its several constituent parts which, like the name games played by Jake and Fred, become somewhat self‐indulgent due to their exuberant formal brilliance. In Ashes to Ashes, Pinter has avoided this by concentrating his theatrical means. The number of characters is reduced to only one couple, Rebecca and Devlin. Instead of juxtaposing three acting spaces and various scenes, Ashes to Ashes consists of only one long scene and plays entirely in one space, a ground‐ [102]
floor room in a house in the country. There is only one, albeit significant alteration of the scenery towards the end of the play when the light in the room darkens before Rebecca’s final speech: “By the end of the play the room and garden beyond are only dimly defined. The lamplight has become very bright but does not illuminate the room” (1, see also 73). This underlines with very subtle and simple means that the play develops from realism to symbolism, from the exterior to the interior. It also depicts a journey into memory. The surrounding reality recedes when it darkens while the lamplight in the room becomes bright but does not illuminate anything. The punctual brightness enhances contrasts but produces no coherent picture. The reduction of theatrical means, which is evident in this detail, greatly enhances the play’s effect. While the light change might in a realistic framework be attributed to nightfall outside, it clearly becomes a potent symbol of the play’s inner development towards its climax. The reduction of means also concerns the content of Ashes to Ashes. Out of the web of different allusions present in Moonlight, Pinter has singled out one theme—the sexual triangle which has already been the battle ground of Andy and Bel and also of the three protagonists in Old Times. Yet Pinter also expands on the thematic rage. The private topic of sexual relations, which seems to befit a domestic drama, is complemented with a political dimension counteracting the sheltered suburban world of the play’s set. When Devlin interrogates Rebecca about a former lover, she describes this mysterious man more and more as a Nazi‐like figure. Although she is forced by Devlin to admit that “[n]othing has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to any of my friends. I have never suffered. Nor have my friends” (41), Rebecca is haunted by images of forced labour, deportation and concentration camps. This series of visions is triggered by the questions about the sexual encounter with her mysterious lover who remains as evasive as the status
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of her memories of events she has not experienced.8 In the end, the private and public thread of the play are knotted together when Devlin takes over the role of Rebecca’s dark lover while she identifies entirely with the role of a holocaust victim in her closing speech. Naturally, the same tension between the everyday exterior and the abyss of the interior can be traced in the use of speech modes in Ashes to Ashes. Again with sparse but effective means Pinter sketches the battle of conversational exchange and horrifying narrative. In Devlin’s verbal engagement with Rebecca, and in hers with her memories of things that have never happened and everyday trivia, the two characters move through a whole palette of dialogic and monologic modes. Devlin asks penetrating questions, interrupts Rebecca, listens again, coaxes her with a mixture of rhetoric and soothing narrative, lectures at length about metaphysical problems and resorts again to interrogation and small talk. Rebecca partly answers and partly evades his questions, reflects them back, listens to his lecturing, redirects the conversation, remains silent and—most importantly of all—develops a series of haunting narratives. The play opens with something like an aided monologue. By starts and supported by questions from Devlin, Rebecca describes a sado‐masochistic game. The lover of her memory grabbed her neck and forced her to kiss his fist. Whispering into 8 Begley has already stressed the significance of the ambiguity of Rebecca’s memories which also manifests itself in the contrast of speech modes: “In measured, rhythmic fashion, Rebecca introduces a number of crypto‐fascist imagistic fragments, and this evolving iconography provides the counterpoint to a skeletal melodramatic pastiche made of sporadic and incomplete references to suburban life, infidelity, family visits, and trips to the movies. Something essential about the play’s politics resides in the structural interplay of these two fields of force” (181). Consequently, the exact nature of Rebecca’s relationship to the incidents she remembers remains unclear to the end of the play. “Whether Rebecca has ‘really’ experienced what she describes or whether, as a kind of psychic sponge, she has absorbed it from films, television, history books, and other forms of cultural representation—this calculated ambiguity is a key part of the play’s point” (184).
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his hand over her mouth she asked to be throttled. While Rebecca stresses the emotional bond between herself and her lover, Devlin probes especially into the sexual dimension of this encounter. Devlin: And your body? Where did your body go? Rebecca: My body went back, slowly but truly. Devlin: So your legs were opening? Rebecca: Yes. Pause. Devlin: Your legs were opening? Rebecca: Yes. Silence. [7]
Rebecca’s aided monologue thus terminates with a tight duet‐like passage resounding with echoes and is rhythmically structured by the question and answer pattern and by the hiatus of the pauses at the end. The mesmerising quality of this passage is heightened by the ensuing exchange, which characteristically starts with Devlin asking “Do you feel you’re being hypnotised?” and then moves through a series of very short exchanges which, like ping‐pong, are played back and forth between the two. This faster cabaletta to the faltering cantabile of Rebecca’s first account also ends in a coda sexual content and formal repetition: Devlin: What do you think? Rebecca: I think you’re a fuckpig. Devlin: Me a fuckpig? Me! You must be joking. Rebecca smiles. Rebecca: Me joking? You must be joking. Pause. [9‐10]
Shortly after this, Devlin does not receive answers from Rebecca any more and works through a twisted monologic passage circling around the question “what did he actually look like?” (13). He only gets a reaction when he patronisingly calls her “my darling.” This leads to a fierce argument because [105]
Rebecca claims “I’m nobody’s darling” (17). The battle of words again reaches a coda with a significant pause when Devlin exchanges “darling” with “baby” (17) and thus utters a key word that resounds through the play. This description of the first minutes of Ashes to Ashes shows how flexibly the play moves through various speech modes. This finely constructed flow of exchanges continues through the play but more and more crystallises into longer speeches. Devlin is provoked to deliver two long lectures, one on God and football (39f) and the other on himself (45f), both marked by confident rhetoric but underlying disquiet. Devlin’s second lecture is met directly by Rebecca with a contrasting monologue: Oh yes, there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you. It was funny. I looked out of the garden window, out of the window into the garden, in the middle of summer, in that house in Dorset, do you remember? Oh no, you weren’t there. I don’t think anyone else was there. No. I was all by myself. I was alone. I was looking out of the window and saw a whole crowd of people walking though the woods, on their way to the sea, in the direction of the sea. They seemed to be very cold, they were wearing coats, although it was such a beautiful day. A beautiful, warm Dorset day. They were carrying bags. There were … guides … ushering them, guiding them along. They walked through the woods and I could see them in the distance walking across the cliff and down to the sea. I lost sight of them. I was really quite curious so I went upstairs to the highest window in the house and I looked way over the tops of the treetops and I could see down to the beach. The guides … were ushering all these people across the beach. It was such a lovely day. It was so still and the sun was shining. And I saw all these people walk into the sea. The tide covered them slowly. Their bags bobbed about in the waves. [47‐8]
It is well worth quoting this passage in full and taking a close look at it as it tightly combines formal means and content in an aria of poetic but disquieting density. The unreal situation of [106]
people walking into the sea with coats and bags on a summer’s day in Dorset appears like a nightmare and the way Rebecca tells her story supports this. With short sentences and repetitions she slowly feels her way into the vision she remembers. She carefully adds one detail after the other, a process formally supported by Pinter with the repetition of sentence structures (“They seemed to be very cold …,” “They were carrying bags …,” “They walked through the wood …” or “I could see them …,” “I lost sight of them …,” “I was really quite curious …,” “I went upstairs …,” “I looked way over the tops …,” “I could see …”). Although no strict pauses are indicated, the story stops at several points to then move to a new level and new dimension (for example, with the question “do you remember?” or when Rebecca moves upstairs to see better). The key word “guide,” which has appeared before as the ambiguous description of Rebecca’s lover, is highlighted by a short hesitation before and after the word is mentioned.9 The word itself rubs against the image—“guides” who “usher” people with their luggage into the sea appear surreal but even though the situation stands in stark contrast to the peaceful Dorset scenery and cannot be connected to any specific atrocity, Pinter lets Rebecca draw a strikingly resonant picture of the holocaust. Rebecca’s monologue comes to a close after the seemingly innocent word “beach” has echoed through it. In the last five sentences Rebecca summarises the content of her monologue in beautifully measured language describing a most haunting image. After Rebecca’s speech closes with the onomatopoetic bobbing about of the bags, Devlin’s reaction is one of confusion and harsh denial when he asks: “When was that? When did you live in Dorset? I’ve never lived in Dorset” (49). The clash between unreal memory and realistic frame is thus again embodied in the contrast of two speech modes.
9 A possible explanation for Pinter stressing this term so decisively is the allusion to the German term “Führer” which means “guide” but was also used as the appellative for Hitler in Nazi Germany.
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As the play progresses the gap between Rebecca’s surreal visions of suffering and her suburban security becomes wider and wider. Rebecca describes this as “mental elephantiasis,” which turns everyday little things into symbols of universal pain. Rebecca is less and less able to disentangle herself from the images she now recounts with greater and greater frequency. Devlin’s attempt to redirect their conversation into the realm of small talk (“Did you see Kim and the kids?” 55) fails when Rebecca remembers an enigmatic encounter with a man in a cinema who appeared like a corpse to her. After a scene of great intimacy between Rebecca and Devlin, which involves the two referring to a song with the title “Ashes to Ashes,” Devlin finally gives in and starts to embody the mysterious lover of Rebecca’s nightmarish visions. While the light darkens around her, Rebecca develops the ultimate narrative about the incident with the baby the play has already foreshadowed several times. The beginning of this long speech echoes and varies Rebecca’s earlier monologues. Again she describes how she witnessed a scene of deportation from “the top of a very tall building” (71). Yet the scenery is now a cold and icy night instead of a beautiful summer day and a city has replaced the Dorset countryside. When Rebecca sees a woman with a baby in her arms among the deportees, she increasingly loses her lofty distance and starts to identify with her. This is marked by a number of significant pauses after each of which she finds herself closer to the woman until she finally feels the baby’s heartbeat and breath. After another pause she suddenly changes from third to first‐person narrative by claiming: “I held her to me. She was breathing. Her heart was beating” (73). Now, as her identification with the female victim has become complete, Devlin’s transformation into the male protagonist of the scene is also perfect. He repeats the actions Rebecca has described at the beginning of the play. The narrative of Rebecca is now suspended by their interaction when he demands her submission and playfully throttles her. After this, she is able to finish her soliloquy that is now [108]
increasingly directed at the audience only. Her account of how the baby is torn away from her arms at the platform of a train station is intensified by the fact that the last two words of each of her sentences are now repeated by a disembodied voice. The sound principle of the echo, which Pinter has used intricately in both Moonlight and Ashes to Ashes, here reaches its tangible climax when the last word of each of her last half‐dozen sentences is “baby” and the echo thus becomes painfully repetitive. Ashes to Ashes leaves the audience confused and dislocated in relation to the usual framework of theatrical realism with a “kind of action which, presented with total objectivity but without exposition or closure leaves the decision as to what kind of event is being witnessed—reality, allegory, dream, nightmare—entirely to the spectator.”10 The structural and poetic message of the play, however, is brought to an inescapable conclusion by the final scene. The use of different speech modes Pinter has experimented with in great complexity in Moonlight and has reduced to a flexible pattern in Ashes to Ashes thus reaches a simple and intense vanishing point.
10 Martin Esslin, “Harold Pinter: From Moonlight to Celebration,” Pinter Review 10 (1999/2000): 26.
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Laurens De Vos
“Little is left to tell”: Samuel Beckett’s and Sarah Kane’s Subverted Monologues Plays that are written for merely one voice are usually subsumed under monologues. However, as with all literary genres, this picture is not always as simple as it looks. The ambiguity, of course, works both ways. On the one hand, one might ask whether a play like, for instance, Steven Berkoff’s Harry’s Christmas is not a monologue rather than a dialogue, since both characters are split‐offs from each other. On the other hand, plays apparently staging only one character may harbour several different voices. Dependent on whether one considers the characters onstage or the voices, a monologue can turn into a dialogue or polyphonic text. Plays by Beckett and Kane will illustrate in this essay the complex appearances of monologues. One of the most problematic writers with regard to the limits of monologue is Samuel Beckett.1 In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), an old man mumbles to himself while he merely listens, for the lion’s share of the play, to the spools on an old tape recorder. Moreover, the voice on the spools on which he comments is his own, albeit much stronger and younger.
1 All references to Beckett’s plays in the text are made to Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). References are cited in text.
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Rockaby (1980) offers a similar scenario with an old woman rocking in her chair while listening to her own recorded voice, a few times interspersed with the single word “More,” as if she were in command of the machine. The tape recorder is replaced by a narrator in Ohio Impromptu (1981), a play also written more than three decades after Krappʹs Last Tape. Two figures with a similar appearance, called Listener and Reader, are seated at a table. While the latter is reading a tale that turns into a meta‐ tale recounting the very theatrical situation of a man reading out a story to another man, Listener himself is completely silent during this “monologue.” His presence, however, is not altogether insignificant or useless, for he compels Reader to pause and repeat certain sequences by knocking with his knuckles on the table. This way, he too, though not by speaking his lines in the usual sense of the word, has his part in the development of the “play.” In this essay I will comment on a few of Beckett’s so‐called “monologues,” and the equivocal realm between monologue and dialogue as a result of blurred identity formations. Let us first move to Not I (1972), a play which stages a Mouth, lit by a beam of light so that the Woman’s body remains in the dark. What we get next is some fifteen minutes in which Mouth utters fragmented sentences, apparently about herself, yet vehemently refusing to relinquish the third person, as Beckett has it in a preceding note (375). Downstage stands an Auditor, clothed in a long black djellaba with a hood, which prevents us from determining the sex of this figure. His (for the sake of convenience) role is restricted to only standing and watching, except for a movement in which he raises and again drops his arms “in a gesture of helpless compassion” (375), that is repeated four times throughout the monologue, though each time less convincingly or perceptibly. In an avalanche of words, Mouth relates her life story, beginning with her birth till that April morning—she is coming up to seventy—when the current torrent of speech starts flooding from her mouth. Mouth’s birth seems to have been such a traumatic experience that she cannot [111]
accept her voice as her own. In spite of the fact that this uncontrolled flood tells her life, she does not acknowledge it as her own, and keeps referring to it in the third person. It seems that the story of her life is not her life. Although the voice she is hearing “could be none other … than her own,” she denies this: “till she began trying to … delude herself…it was not hers at all … not her voice at all …” (379). The feeling that one is burdened with a voice coming from elsewhere recurs throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, and is probably most explicitly dealt with in his novel The Unnamable. Having created numerous fictions to eschew his own acknowledgement, the Unnamable decides to abandon the first person and treats his voice as an Other, speaking of it in the third person. I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put in it’s [sic] place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it. Anything to please them. It will make no difference. Where I am there is no one but me, who am not.2
The Unnamable has trouble assuming the linguistic order. From the moment that the law of language is implemented, the subject has to adopt the lack and accept his own division. In a way, as several Beckett characters lament, language disrupts them of their own selves and therefore equals their death. From now on, there is no way round the symbolic field of the Other, who takes possession of the subject. Language, for the Unnamable as well as for Mouth, is felt to be an intruder with its own agenda rather than providing an expression of the inner self. “I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, … I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words” (390). With the implementation of language, the subject
2 Samuel Beckett, Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1959) 358. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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becomes a split being, so that critics’ questions3 of who is actually speaking in Beckett’s texts is itself a repetition of the main problem faced by the protagonists. Apparently, they do not consider themselves to be speaking; rather, they feel that they are being abused as a carrier by “them,” the Other. Mouth has no control whatsoever over this voice rattling on and on. The schizophrenic feeling of Mouth is not only rendered in her refusal to say I, but in her attempts to put her own voice to the test by the emission of a scream after her own command to do so, as if one was to pinch one’s jaw to ascertain if one is awake. Similarly, the speaker in A Piece of Monologue (1979) also attributes another source than himself to the words coming from his mouth. Words come into existence rather clumsily and mechanically, as something from outside that Speaker should get used to. “Stands there staring beyond waiting for first word. It gathers in his mouth. Birth. Parts lips and thrusts tongue between them. Tip of tongue. Feel soft touch of tongue on lips. Of lips on tongue” (428). From the moment Speaker possesses the ability to speak, he suffers from an identity crisis in which he does not recognise himself anymore: “He? The words falling from his mouth” (428). Beckett stages characters that are separated from themselves as a result of their introduction into the linguistic world. The discrepancy between the one who speaks and the character onstage is a theme that haunted Beckett throughout his career. This raises the question whether his monologues can be attributed to the character who articulates them, or whether they are rather an alien text improper to this character. Such an assumption means, then, that Beckett’s monologues, which are, after all, made up of language, could not strictly be called monologues, since the character actually discusses, comments on and mostly disagrees with a text coming from elsewhere. Language in Beckett behaves as a parasite using the character onstage as a vehicle rather than the other way around. 3 For instance, Simon Critchley, “Who Speaks in the Work of Samuel Beckett?” Yale French Studies, 93 (1998): 114‐30.
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Although in many of his plays there is only one character speaking, there is always some sense of dialogue or interaction which suggests another source. Moreover, in most cases, this other source which simultaneously is the very self, is embodied onstage, be it as a tape recorder in Krappʹs Last Tape and Rockaby, two alter egos sitting opposite each other in Ohio Impromptu or as the Auditor in Not I. Four times Auditor encourages Mouth in vain to utter herself and refer to herself with “I.” However, she categorically rejects these invitations to the linguistic field: “what?..who?..no!..she!” In separating body and language, Beckett dramatises the very notion of monologue and turns this ostensibly straightforward concept into an extremely problematic one. The doubt about what exactly monologue is becomes unavoidable in the explicit reference to the genre in A Piece of Monologue in its representation of a split character who seems to narrate only the stage directions according to which he is supposed to perform. Instead of performing and speaking his actual lines, he reverses the picture and “upgrades” the stage directions to his speaking lines. Not only does Beckett raise questions about the monologic nature of these plays, his technique also paves the way for a further subversion of all monologues as such. For indeed, all monologues are, to a greater or lesser degree, dialogic in their representation of different voices. Moreover, Beckett seems to suggest that if a monologue is a play for only one voice, there is no such thing as a monologue. Beckett’s semi‐monologues exemplify Rimbaud’s and Lacan’s dictum that “I is an Other.” In an attempt to preserve the purity and platonic ideality of the real monologue, his characters like the Unnamable and Mouth prefer to denounce language altogether and attribute it to the stranger to whom it belongs. Since “I” is a pronominal shifter that is dependent on its immediate context and its speaker, it belongs to the most arbitrary and improper signifiers. “I” is the most obvious example of the signifier’s unstable relation with the signified. Applicable to all, no one can claim its exclusive rights, and thus, [114]
as the signifier used to denote the self but unable to guarantee its uniqueness, it erodes the sense of self. Mouth, among others, “embodies” the self‐alienation that Lacan has stipulated as a necessary corollary of functioning in the linguistic world. “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object.”4 Since language always belongs to the Other and can never be captured and appropriated as one’s own, Beckett sides with Lacan’s deconstruction of Descartes’s cognitive ontology. Not I reveals the “cogito ergo sum” formula as an illusion, for Mouth, like Lacan, is very well aware of her own absence on the axis between signifier and signified in Saussure’s algorithm. Thought and speech, on the contrary, are always situated where the ego is not. In Beckett, the symbolic and the imaginary notion of the self clash without ever coming to a reconciliation. Mouth does not succeed in appropriating the lack and the elusiveness of meaning that language engenders. Beckett dramatises Lacan’s adaptation of Descartes’s formula: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words that render sensible to an ear properly attuned with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread.”5 What Beckett’s plays suggest is that I is an Other, and I can never merge with myself. Moreover, in order to actually come into existence as a subject, I fully depend on the Other. To emphasise the futility of trying to obtain self‐engenderment since one meets the limits of the linguistic world, Beckett shows the failure of his characters to merge with themselves. Krapp’s bending over his recorder, as a final endeavour to unite with a past that has never been, whereby the machine “has become a maternal‐erotic substitute,”6 is the most obvious example of its
4 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Routledge, 2001) 94. 5 Lacan, Écrits, 183. 6 Paul Lawley, “Stages of Identity: From Krappʹs Last Tape to Play,” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 93.
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sheer pointlessness. This failed encounter with the self is emphasised in Beckett’s plots, which are about storytelling. In this way, the flaw that governs the difference between the statement and the enunciation is made explicit. Stories aim at fictionalising the plenitude but through these stories the lack emerges all the more blatantly. Not I stages this clash in which the reader’s or spectator’s attention is orientated to the incongruity between enunciation and statement, and their incapability of merging into a totality without conflict. David Watson states that: By stripping away the remaining debris of narrative forms, L’Innomable becomes more and more concentrated on the enunciating voice itself, on the act of narration rather than the virtually extinguished narrative. Increasingly, then, without a story to tell, the text reflects on its own enunciation in a self‐ referential fashion, obsessively exploring the relationships of self, voice and language.7
This is true to a certain extent, though I believe that Beckett’s enlarged interest in the act of narration does not intend to cancel out the plot and its narrative, but is primarily meant to reveal the hidden hinge point, the suture where signifier and signified meet, though without uniting. The stitches that mark this suture are far from concealed, but exposed so as to highlight the alienation of language. As the Unnamable explains himself, his fictionalisations do not really serve as a smokescreen, but direct our focus to where the strategy of language produces fictionalising effects: “it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist” (351). The ventriloquist, of course, is as observable in Not I, where another voice plays the first fiddle. Mouth seems to demonstrate the awkwardness concomitant with the longing for a fusion between enunciation and statement. The lion’s share of her “monologue” consists of 7 David Watson, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991) 33.
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the narration of how her mouth started to produce a steady stream of words that she could not stop. At that point it is obvious, then, that she is narrating the here and now, and that no difference can be detected between statement and enunciation. If she wants to be in the centre of completeness where these components indeed merge with one another, her language necessarily has to meet the content. Consequently, from the moment she starts speaking, she has to speak of this very activity. Narrating that she is narrating, she is caught in a vicious circle, prohibiting her from withdrawing from this verbal flood at least as long as she wants to preserve the non‐ distance between signifier and signified. If she does not want to observe such a critical distance and would not allow a reflection between what happens and what is said, there is no other way than to ensure that her talking is the subject of her talking. It follows that to live up to this ambition, she has to perpetually say that she is saying that she is saying, ad infinitum. And yet, something is wrong in this mise‐en‐abîme, because it is not pursued all the way through. After all, Mouth is not speaking of the act of speech all the time; her narration in and of the here and now is interrupted by fragments of reflection on her past habits and anecdotes. Although all narrated episodes reflect the stage situation, there is an incongruity between Mouth’s incessant talking and, as Paul Lawley notices, the fact that “She is speechless, and in three of them [i.e. of the episodes] She stares, in two of them her ‘mouth half open as usual.’”8 This friction is still further developed in Ohio Impromptu, where the entire dramatic action is made up by Reader reading a story to Listener. As the tale progresses, we realise that the plot is about a man reading a story to someone else. The act of enunciation corresponds to the statement; what is narrated is what happens as we are speaking, so to say. But is it really? We can distinguish three fictional levels in the dramaticule. First of all, the dramatic reality presents Listener 8 Paul Lawley, “Counterpoint, Absence and the Medium in Beckett’s Not I,” Modern Drama, 26.4 (1983): 412.
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and Reader sitting at a table. In front of Reader lies a book, which forms the second fictional layer. The story in the book is about a man being separated (we do not get to know from what, though again, we may expect an existential separation from his self due to language rather than the plausible possibility of a separation from his wife). To comfort him in his solitude at night he is visited by a man who reads him a sad tale, until this man eventually disappears for good, “[t]he sad tale a last time told” (448). This tale may be regarded as the third level of fictionality. However, we are left in the dark about what this sad tale is about, which leaves us in doubt as to whether we may believe our intuition which associates the narrated story in the book with the dramatic reality. Thus, the mise‐en‐abîme does not exactly reproduce the situation we are watching on stage. Moreover, Reader reads that the man closes the book and announces that he has come for the last time. Even if this man were a double of Reader and Listener the protagonist of the narrated plot, there is at least a lapse between the narrated time and the time of narration. For when the closing of the book is narrated towards the end of the story, only at the end of the play is it actually closed, and as opposed to what has been narrated, Reader remains silent and does not announce his departure, nor does he indeed leave. As the narrative progresses we feel awareness first of all of the coincidence of words and action and then progressively, of their non‐coincidence; so that, at the end, it is hard to know whether the listener and hearer are sharing the narrative of themselves, or whether they are another couple, or another narration.9
Thus, like Not I, Ohio Impromptu reveals both the art and the clumsiness of the narrator, it points at the suture where narration—and by extension language—has to acknowledge its 9 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 133.
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own limits. However closely it approaches the signified, it will never manage to “return to where they were once so long alone together” (446). Moving in and out of their own world, Not I and Ohio Impromptu tell a narrative that is and is not about itself, making them no simple mise‐en‐abîme monologues. The characters’ inability to reach self‐fulfilment and to be in the exact middle where terms are absent because they are subjected to the flaw of language is extrapolated to the act of narration, which is of course equally stuck in the linguistic dimension, and which will, consequently, never succeed in uniting signifier and signified. This failed encounter with the self and with narration renders Beckett’s plays so problematic in terms of monologues. The recorded voice in Krappʹs Last Tape for instance very well exemplifies the eternal division of the self and the impossibility of monologue. A monologic structure is always subverted by voices coming from elsewhere. This preoccupation is prevalent in a contemporary play that equally so explores the borders of monologue. 4.48 Psychosis (2000) was written by the once controversial but now glorified playwright Sarah Kane.10 Not only was Beckett one of her favourite authors, it is hard to think of another playwright who was more influential for her work than the Irish Nobel prize winner. Several correspondences between their oeuvres have been outlined already,11 but what they have in common most fundamentally is probably the juxtaposition of several voices in a monologic structure. 4.48 Psychosis is a very incoherent and hermetic play that does not make clear how many characters it should have, and stage directions are extremely sparse. With respect to the text’s lines we do not know whether it is a woman or a man speaking. In fact, the play does not have a real plot, logically built‐up
10 All Kane references are made to Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001). Subsequent references are cited in text. 11 For example Graham Saunders, “The Beckettian World of Sarah Kane,” Sarah Kane in Context eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2007).
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dialogues, but only scattered sentences and fragments that might result from mental turmoil. 4.48 Psychosis is a collage of monologues, pieces of dialogues, medicine subscriptions, suicide plans, thoughts, feelings, psychiatric tests, symptoms and diagnoses. As for the dialogic fragments, we are left in the dark to whom they are directed, whether it be to a clinical doctor or to herself. Thus, while some performances present the play as a “real” monologue with only one actress, other performances have the dialogic extracts—indicated by a dash in the script—performed by two actors. In his production for the Tangram Theatre Company (2006), Daniel Goldman even staged as many as seven women. The central persona, in any case, is a suicidal patient taking leave of this life. Kane’s last play is reminiscent of Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue in the fusion of main text and stage directions. If “Hatch opens / Stark light” was written in italics or put between brackets, the purpose would be clear enough. Differing in nothing from the other bits of text among which it regularly re‐appears, though, more doubt moves in, and some theatre companies indeed opt to have the actress say the lines. As in Beckett’s work, here too, the central concern is the anger derived from the sense that the self itself does not come across as a unity: “Here I am / and there is my body,” the persona says (230).12 Although some stretches of dialogue may be discerned in the text, 4.48 Psychosis is essentially a monologue, but the narrative aspects that one would expect here yield to an introspective self‐analysis whereby communication with the spectator has virtually disappeared. In a way, one could argue that Kane’s most well‐known plays, from Blasted to Cleansed, are her most atypical ones, because not only did she finish her career with (semi‐) monologues, her first dramatic pieces were monologues as well. None of Kane’s plays excel in communication, and for many critics her last play is no longer 12 Laurens De Vos, “Sarah Kane and Antonin Artaud: Cruelty towards the Subjectile,” Sarah Kane in Context eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2007).
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considered drama, unsuitable for performance. In other words, is there still a possibility for drama to unfold if what is generally thought to be the core of drama, i.e. interaction, is abandoned from the stage? Graham Saunders is right, then, in asserting that “[t]he monologue privileges the individual with its mode of the confessional, and while it does not necessarily reject the audience out of hand neither does it overtly choose to include them.”13 Kane’s as well as Beckett’s monologic structures share a predilection for introspection and isolation from the outside world. However, communication has not vanished altogether. Besides the dialogic passages the persona expresses her wish to break out of her mental isolation: to communicate, to converse to laugh and make jokes to win affection of desired Other to adhere and remain loyal to Other to enjoy sensuous experiences with cathected Other to feed, help, protect, comfort, console, support, nurse or heal to be fed, helped, protected, comforted, consoled, supported, nursed or healed to form mutually enjoyable, enduring, cooperating and reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal [235]
It appears that any attempt at monologue offers a way of escape from the persona’s death. In fact, language as such serves as a means to hold things together. Numbers appear twice in the play, first scattered at random over half a page, later in a series beginning from 100 in which each time 7 is subtracted from the previous number. These series point at the patient’s wish to keep up some kind of communication and interaction with the other, because she fully realises that not only her mental stability but her life depend on these moments of interaction. Far from glorifying suicide, she is prepared to try to get back to
13 Saunders, “The Beckettian World of Sarah Kane.”
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the sanity of the linguistic world. The abbreviations “RSVP ASAP” (214) are a cry for communication; her attempt to enter into a dialogue is genuine, but we comprehend that her abilities to communicate evaporate, resulting in a series of aborted letters. In light of what psychoanalysts have discovered, one could even consider her self‐mutilation as an ultimate longing for communication.14 Thus, we may say that speech in 4.48 Psychosis, as well as in several Beckett plays like A Piece of Monologue or Rockaby, is both a means of communication and isolation. Although these monologues do not entirely discard every kind of verbal interaction, the question remains as to whom speech is directed. Who is the Other in Kane’s and Beckett’s texts? It is my contention that language itself plays an active role in these playwrights’ work, not just as a messenger recounting a character’s story, but the story itself is subject of the story. Language is the Other, the sole creator of a character in a non‐ space, the preserver of his Dasein. Alain Robbe‐Grillet attributes Beckett’s characters with nothing but the Heideggerean quality of presence, Dasein: The condition of man, says Heidegger, is to be there. The theatre probably reproduces this situation more naturally than any of the other ways of representing reality. The essential thing about a character in a play is that he is “on the scene”: there.15
Whether it is Didi and Gogo or Hamm and Clov, “we have the essential theme: presence. Everything that is, is here; off the stage there is nothing, non‐being.”16 Without language, Beckett’s characters would be nothing. Speech is the only thing that keeps them going in an environmental vacuum. 14 Paul Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire (New York: The Other Press, 1999) 172. 15 Alain Robbe‐Grillet, “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre,” Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs, 1965) 108. 16 Robbe‐Grillet, “Samuel Beckett, or ‘Presence’ in the Theatre,” 114.
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This protective function of language is felt in 4.48 Psychosis as well. The persona’s existence depends on the here and now that she fabricates by means of her monologue. There is no longer a theatrical environment that might sustain her. As opposed to the hotel room in Blasted, the royal palace in Phaedraʹs Love, and the concentration camp or university in Cleansed, the setting is gradually getting vaguer in Crave, until it has completely disappeared in 4.48 Psychosis, where the persona has nothing to fall back on but her own words. Monologue, at times alternated with imagined fragments of dialogue, either with a doctor or with world literature in an intertextual game, is the last resort the persona can have recourse to in order to not evaporate into nothingness. She has to speak despite the senselessness of it. To speak is the only way for her to survive. What is more, as long as she speaks, she will go on. The end of the play, however, is marked by silence. The disintegration of her monologue and the evaporation of her last words ultimately end in silence. Monologue yields to death: “watch me vanish / watch me / vanish / watch me / watch me / watch” (244). In spite of her self‐imposed obligation to go on and to speak “Speak / Speak / Speak” (243), she cannot avoid falling silent and thus putting a final stop to her monologue. This is probably the most important divergence from Beckett, who continuously felt, as he explains in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, “[t]he expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”17 The repetition compulsion that guarantees the continual resumption of the story‐telling keeps the void at a distance, as B in That Time correctly analyses: “just another of those old tales to keep the void from pouring in” (390). While Beckett’s semi‐ monologues reveal a continuous repetition, Kane’s are seen to be much more linear. She allows the void to enter by cutting
17 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1965) 103.
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down her own monologue in the awareness that going on will not bring her any further at all. While Beckett concludes that one can do nothing but to start all over again, over and over again, without ever reaching a satisfactory end, Kane jumps off this carrousel of repetitive starts. I leave it to the reader to decide who is the more pessimistic or nihilistic.
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Eamonn Jordan
Look Who’s Talking, Too: The Duplicitous Myth of Naïve Narrative The Glut of Monologues While international theatre, in the main, from the late 1980s and into the 1990s pursued big scale, design conscious, stylised, and theatricalised productions, Irish theatre, did something different. Monologues increasingly became a staple of Irish drama, or more accurately, monologues written mainly by men, for male characters, with female characters all too noticeable by their frequent absence, with some references to the feminine serving the type of symbolic function that many commentators have traditionally resisted or found utterly distasteful and prejudicial. If one was to categorise loosely these monologues then one could identify four broad strands. The first cluster comprises single character interior monologues, with the actor on stage telling a story, without too much embellishment, as Conor McPherson’s Rum and Vodka (1994), The Good Thief (1994) and St. Nicholas (1997) exemplify: the first play is about a male hitting emotional and social turbulence, the second about a character out of his depth in a criminal underworld, and the third play about a theatre critic and his encounters with vampires. In a similar fashion, Jennifer Johnston’s Christine (1989) (also known as Ananias, Azarias and Miseal), its companion Mustn’t Forget High Noon (1989) and Twinkletoes [125]
(1993) are single character monologues that deal with violence and its implications for Northern Ireland, prior to the establishment of the peace process. The second group, also involves a single actor on stage, only on this occasion, there is a great deal more re‐enactment, with the performer impersonating a range of characters, dexterously switching between roles, and perhaps using the props within the space for very specific and imaginative purposes— fundamentally, more a one person show than anything else. Examples of this cluster would include Donal O’Kelly’s Catalpa (1994), which is a re‐enactment by Matthew Kidd in his bedsit, of his rejected screenplay about the rescue of Fenian prisoners from Australia by the whaling ship Catalpa, Conall Morrison’s Hard to Believe (1995), which is set in an attic space, and is about a spin doctor for military intelligence in Northern Ireland, who is about to commit suicide. Marie Jones’s A Night in November (1994),1 set in an unspecified location, is about the journey of the bigoted working class Ulster Protestant, Kenneth McCallister, from tribal prejudice to the following of the Republic of Ireland’s football team to the 1994 World cup. Finally, Richard Dormer’s Hurricane (2002) is based loosely on the life of the snooker player, Alex Higgins. The third discernible cluster of monologues consists two or more characters narrating, characters who may or may not interact with each other, the latter being the more likely scenario. Subdivisions exist within this broad grouping and they are dependent on the degree to which either the narratives, substantiate or contradict each other. These are plaited or interdigitated narratives. Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) seems to have initiated that tradition and he followed it up stylistically with Molly Sweeney (1994); in the former, three characters reflect on the faith healing ability of Frank Hardy, the joy and the havoc he brought to the lives of his mistress/wife Grace and his manager, Teddy. In the latter, the interference in the life of the 1 Most Northern Irish monologues tend to be about the troubles, Jennifer Johnston’s, Conall Morrison’s and Marie Jones’s work seem to confirm this.
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visually impaired Molly Sweeney by two males, her partner Frank, and her surgeon Mr Rice is detailed. With Friel’s Faith Healer, there is so much contradiction and so many anomalies in the diverse accounts that it is difficult to decide what to believe, indeed, disbelief may be the natural response. The other sub‐division is when there is general agreement on the central incidents, but each character’s reflection on this circumstance is distinctive. In McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower (1995), the three male characters extend the narrative by brief turns, and each from their own perspective on the substantial incidents of a robbery and a rape. Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999) is a tale of mayhem, vengeance, vendettas, accidents, and murders in two parts, part one delivered by The Rookie Lee, and part two, by The Howie Lee, whose story continues on from the first, in a different voice and from another point of view, relay‐like, the baton of narrative responsibility is passed on. Eugene O’Brien’s Eden (2001), has a couple, Billy and Breda, who relate, again by short turns, different perspectives on their relationship over a weekend. O’Rowe’s Crestfall (2003) has three female characters, Alison, Olive, and Tilly, who by single turns, reflect on a life in a midland’s town, where all kinds of butchery and savagery take place over an evening. Each story interlocks. The second narrative builds on the first and the third on the previous two. The final node within this cluster of intermeshing monologues is when the characters, on the surface, have relatively tenuous or autonomous relationships with each other. Paul Mercier’s We Ourselves (2000)2 is a series of monologues, which follows the lives over a number of years of seven characters who had previously worked together in a vegetable factory in Germany. Each narrative is stylistically different. In McPherson’s Port Authority (2001),3 the connections between the 2 Thanks to Passion Machine for providing me with the unpublished script. 3 Conor McPherson, Port Authority, in Plays Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004) 132. Hereafter, all page details given in parentheses within the text for this and all other plays.
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three characters initially appear incidental at best. However, it is the layering of the monologues that offers a complicated perspective on things, rather than the impact of individual stories in isolation, in the instance of these last two mentioned plays. The fourth and final strand is evidenced by Michelle Readʹs Play About My Dad (2006),4 literally about her dead father, and Gerard Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003) a testimony of brutality and violation that Flynn’s character James O’Neill experienced at the hands of agents of church and state, which is rooted in Flynn’s own testimony to the High Court in his claim for compensation against the state. Overall, the monologue range runs from single monologues, whether dramatic or testimonial, to layered monologues, from interlocking, if contesting monologues, to a series of loosely related monologues whose connections are often notionally tenuous. Many explanations and theories abound as to why there is such a glut of monologues. Might monologues be the “easy wipe formula”5 as Michael Colgan, Director of the Gate Theatre, suggests, or is it the “restoration of the lost art of narrative?”6 as 4 Fintan O’Toole argues, “In recent years we have seen the emergence of what might be called reality theatre: shows in which the actor writes and presents his or her own experiences. Hitherto, the form has been used to explore extraordinary events with an urgent public dimension. George Seremba’s Come Good Rain was about his own kidnap, torture and near‐murder by the Obote regime in Uganda.” O’Toole goes on to say (with regard to Michelle Read’s piece), “But all of this seems to substitute a personal for an artistic intimacy. Instead of making us care about herself and her father through language, insight, and expression, she seeks to make us care through friendship. Because we like Michelle, we will like her Dad, and because we like him we will be as moved by his death as she is. This isn’t art, though, it’s emotional blackmail.” O’Toole finds that it is only when the political and the personal merge that such projects work. Fintan O’Toole, “Review, Play About My Dad” at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Irish Times, 4 Feb. 2006 http://www.ireland.com/ newspaper/features/2006/0204/pf1164158910HM2REVIEW.html. 5 Michael Colgan, South Bank Show, Special episode on Conor McPherson, London Weekend Television, 18 May 2003. 6 Michael Billington, South Bank Show, Special episode on Conor McPherson, London Weekend Television, 18 May 2003.
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Michael Billington claims of McPherson’s The Weir, or are monologues saying something about relationships in crisis? For Karen Fricker, “Irish drama is an ongoing chronicle of male weakness, frailty, failure, reflecting a culture in which representations of masculinity and femininity have been historically, and problematically, linked to national identity.”7 She adds, “With guilt comes paralysis.”8 Marina Carr’s comments sum up in some ways, many of the resistances that people have towards monologues: I can write monologues very easily … There is something intrinsically un‐dramatic about the monologue … They are easy to write and you can get all the information that you want across. You can indulge your “literary sensibility,” you can show “I can write beautiful sentences,” but finally, that is not what theatre is about. It is about the spoken word and conflict. It is about people bouncing off of one another.9
For Brian Singleton the monologue formats “reveal an anxiety about theatre as a medium for communication.”10 Ben Brantley argues differently, when he states, of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, “Let’s make one thing clear: Mr McDonagh is not preaching the power of stories to redeem or cleanse or to find a core of solid truth hidden among life’s illusions.” He adds, it is “about, above all, storytelling and the thrilling narrative potential of theatre itself.” 11
7 Karen Fricker, “Same Old Show: The Performance of Masculinity in Conor McPherson’s Port Authority and Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China,” Irish Review 29 (2002): 85. 8 Fricker, “Same Old Show” 87. 9 Marina Carr in interview with Melissa Shira, Theatre Talk, eds. Lilian Chambers et al. (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001) 60‐1. 10 Brian Singleton, “Am I Talking to Myself?” The Irish Times, 19 Apr. 2001 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/2001/0419/pfarchive.01041900070. html. 11 Ben Brantley, “A Storytelling Instinct Revels in Horror’s Fun,” New York Times 11 Apr. 2005.
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Those critics alert to Ireland’s religious background will of course connect narrative to the confessional space/sacrament of Roman Catholicism, the purging and retributive process where absolution is available. Further, many see no merit in the monologue, because nothing obliges the plays from being little more than static therapeutic transactions, with no change earned. If, previously, Irish theatre from the 1960s to the 1980s was jammed in the processes of memory retrieval and the primary use of the history play was a means of making sense of the past, and more indirectly the present, the monologue, while often grounded in narrative memory, is less of an immediate disguise or denial of the present. It might also be said of the monologue that it is more suggestive of the type of single identity that is regularly absent from the Irish theatrical tradition, a healing of the rupture brought about by colonialism, where split subjectivities were the inevitable consequence of oppressive rule.12 (Of course Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie, bucks that trend, as the two characters are co‐joined by the play’s title, and it pushes the tradition of Irish dramatic doubles in a new direction, with Bruce Lee, the martial arts figure, the mythic point of origin/convergence/cohesion. Such a move could be read as a switch from post colonialism to the colonisation of popular cultural, by way of Hollywood or the californication13 of identity.) Clearly, one cannot divorce monologues from their cultural moment.14 Contemporary plays have emerged from a youth
12 Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post‐colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996) 129. 13 See Red Hot Chilli Peppers Album by this name. 14 There are also arts policy contexts. There is probably a direct relationship between funding revenue declines, not even so in terms of amounts, but in terms of true costs, and a decrease in the number of actors per production. Monologues can be low risk financially, and if the texts and performances are of a high standard, the production becomes all the more rewarding, because audiences are drawn by the high quality of the performances, which are regarded as memorable. The monologue also makes touring easier. And when
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culture in the 1980s and early 1990s that was more likely to spend less time in contact with either their families, friends, or communities than previous generations. Smaller family units, single siblings to rooms, a high incidence of chat/confessional radio show formats, access to television, music and video games in the rooms of teenagers, led to a sort of headphone/headset, room‐alone, media‐saturated generation. Second level students in Ireland were also increasing the time spent doing homework, exam revision and preparation, as if they were professional students, thanks to a highly competitive points system, furthering isolation, and, of course, this was before internet, chat rooms, mobile phones, and texting. Furthermore, there was increasing exposure to what Gerry Smyth calls the “Oprahfication”15 of society, that strange mix of confession, the naming of upset or hurt in a very public domain of television broadcasts and collective celebration of success, defiance and recovery. If the monologues were mainly a 1990s phenomena, the 1980s in Irish theatre witnessed a series of plays that dealt very specifically with a crisis in masculinity. Plays were populated by deeply troubled characters, who could not give expression to their unease, and it was during moments of isolated reflection, or through extended narratives related in public that there were opportunities to release, to express what could not be accommodated through inter‐character exchanges of dialogue. Kristin Morrison argues that narrative is “a complex mechanism of revelation and concealment which uncovers, for
monologues seemed to win the hearts of audiences, it sets a template. Irish monologues internationally were also an issue, in that Irish theatre could not export large scale productions, but it could small scale ones. Finally, the Irish plays by the younger generation of playwrights that got breaks in London were initially monologues. 15 Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) 98.
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the audience, depths of the speaker’s interiority unfathomed by other theatrical conventions.”16 In Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), Michael, through narrative confirms his lack of success in New York and an attempted suicide, and Frank McGuinness’s character The Sinner Courtney in The Breadman (1990) responds almost with a nervous breakdown to the drowning of his brother. The Gigli Concert (1983) again is about mental breakdown, and the exchanges of narrative between therapist, JPW King and his client, the unnamed Irish Man, lead also to an exchange of aspirations. Deluded, and high on mandrax and alcohol, JPW sings like Gigli, fulfilling the Irishman’s fantasy. The transformation is as much to do with the potential of theatre as it has to do with pretence. Frank McGuinness in Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Conor McPherson in The Weir (1999) and Martin McDonagh in The Pillowman (2003), all use narrative very deliberately and brilliantly, in order to unnerve the conventions of representation and easy responses to it. In these plays narrative, on the one hand, offers the consolation of fiction, while on the other, elaborates on the way storytelling shapes socialisation, as the imprint of ideology is everywhere. Narrative breaches bring the plays onto another, fantastical register, whereby there are dialogical tensions evident between fact and fiction, freedom and restraint, and surrendering to despair and redemption. Regardless, these above mentioned plays attempt to integrate public and private spaces, dialogue and monologue/narrative, as characters attempt to communicate with each other either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, through story. If Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) captures the tensions between public and private, the socialised and inhibited public persona and the radical, subversive internal voice, the monologue seems to be a way in part of closing down that dialectic, as if 16 Kristin Morrison, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 5.
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monologue meshes the private and public inextricably. McPherson points out that his monologues are “set in the theatre” (132)17; so the identifiable parameters of the notionally real world are in abeyance. In contrast, Dermot Bolger’s In High Germany, is set on “platform 4 of Altona railway station, Hamburg, Germany.”18 The rise in monologues also parallels the early emergence of the Celtic Tiger, and as Robert Putman warned in America,19 the more society serves economic and financial capital requirements and imperatives, the more social and interpersonal capital decreases (however, uncomfortable one might be with the emphasis on “capital” used in this way), or higher incidences of individualism, self‐reliance and self‐focus emerge. In theatre, monologues seemed to set aside interpersonal spaces to a significant degree, meaning there was less of a contestational reality, as you had in a play like Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985), which had a strong reliance on memory and narrative. If these monologues set aside the interpersonal, they also set aside context, and it is here where some of the benefits and complications emerge. Further, given the strong connection between monologues and suicide, the internalisation of play, leads to death, so the monologue form has a strong alliance with suicide, and the especially frighteningly numerous incidences of suicide amongst young males, with the inability of males to communicate, to talk, to
17 In his Author’s note to Three Plays, McPherson says, “The first problem for the actor performing these pieces is probably ‘Where am I?’ ‘Where is the play set?’ I’ve made up my mind about this. These plays are set ‘in a theatre.’ Why mess about? The character is on stage, perfectly aware that he is talking to a group of people … The temptation may be to launch not a one man ‘performance,’ to ‘act things out.’ But such a performance will never be as interesting as one where the actor trusts the story to do the work.” Conor McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower, Three Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1996) 18 Dermot Bolger, In High Germany in A Dublin Quartet (London: Penguin, 1992) 73. 19 Robert Putman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London and New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
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seek help, or to be unhinged by despair. Aloneness proves to be the revised cultural norm, as well as a form of sanctuary. That said, when it comes to monologues there are three main features I wish to combine. The first is the notion of narrative as identity formation. Of course dramatic character and individuality are completely different things, yet I think we can examine the narrative of characters as indicative of an internal validating and self‐constituting system, despite anomalies, contradictions and disjunctions. Additionally, it is easy to view dramatic character more substantially in terms of dramatic function, theatricality, performativity and within the framework of play, than we might in terms of individuals. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the accumulative theatricality and performativity of identity, as identity is not just the accumulation of experience, choices, failings, sensations, perceptions, fears, desires, emotionality and genetic and hormonal compositions. Secondly, I wish to connect the monologue, the absence of communication and how violence linked with bravado invites the possibilities of licence and embellishment, taking the dramas onto a different register. Thirdly, I wish to trace the shift from the default setting of innocence as a dominant Irish dramaturgical trope to one of “naïvety,” and I also wish to look at the role of audiences in relation to that notion of naïvety, when the spectator is not so much in a position of higher knowledge, but instead he or she is estranged, in the Brechtian sense of the word. The Narrative Honey Trap Ciarán Benson’s work on the cultural psychology of self is extremely useful. What Benson has to say about identity, applies almost equally to narrative formations and disclosures in theatre. Characters in monologues construct stories, out of which audiences make “sense” of the theatrical world in which the character(s) operate(s). For Benson, “The story or stories of [134]
myself that I tell, that I hear others tell of me, that I am unable or unwilling to tell, are not independent of the self that I am: they are constitutive of me.”20 Further, Benson argues that the “Self” functions primarily as a locative system, a means of reference and orientation in worlds of space‐time (perceptual worlds) and in worlds of meaning and place‐time (cultural worlds). This understanding of self as an ongoing, living process of constant auto‐referred locating recognises the centrality both of the body and of social relations.21
(The self he refers to is substantially a single self, and yet Irish cultural identity formation would also suggest a divided self.) More substantially, for Benson, “We cannot imagine being nowhere … Being nowhere is quite simply a contradiction in terms … Self, acts of self‐location and locations are inextricably linked and mutually constructive.”22 The characters in monologues are shaped by the place in which they find themselves. That recognition alone quite obviously theatricalises the narrative, but also complicates the processes of contextualisation. The “where” 23 you are that Benson works with, is an endeavour to historicise and to contextualise, but the space of performance is a found, contrived space, where additional conventions and pretence dominate. The physical theatrical space between characters in Faith Healer or Eden is either the void of death or inability to communicate. In the former, each character has their own designated stage space, but there remains no contact, in Eden (2001) the actors share seating on stage,24 but do not engage with each other, apart from one poignant occasion in the Peacock Theatre production.
20 Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001) 45. 21 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, 4 22 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, 3‐4. 23 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, 4. 24 The design by Blaithin Sheerin for the Peacock production had brownish patterned carpet on all surfaces.
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Performance adds not only the layer of theatricality, but also location and dislocation, and just as vitally, the situating of the mobile actor’s body in a defined performance space. In a way McPherson’s Rum and Vodka is in part about inappropriate attempts to validate the self—the masculinity astray model. The character loses his job, but he has been spending, drinking and acting irresponsibly for some time. He is casually and serially unfaithful to his partner, with whom he attempts to have sex while she sleeps. He remarks, “I saw myself in the mirror. I looked like I was dead. Like I’d been beaten to death. I scrubbed myself from top to bottom. I was pissed out of my head. I felt okay” (32). This pattern of acknowledgement and almost simultaneous denial is evident in many monologues. His faux paranoia is evident in the lines: “I often think the world gets together behind my back while I’m on the jacks or in bed and makes hasty decisions about new ways to get me to leave the planet” (9). Port Authority continues that pattern of male insecurity and ungroundedness. Joe states “I’ve no idea about myself! I don’t even know if I’m happy or sad!” (151), Dermot admits that he “was generally a bit of a disaster” (156) and Kevin adds, “And I was thinking maybe there isn’t a soul for every person in the world. Maybe there’s just two. One for the people who go with the flow, and one for all the people who fight. Maybe lots of us just share a soul” (179). Male characters display an absence of awareness, the lack of internal composure, an inability to have an inner dialogue, rather than an inner monologue. Reflection seems endlessly postponed, not because of indifference per se, but because of an inability to validate or substantiate; the world is all just out there, at a distance, detached and never close enough to engage with. In Conall Morrison’s Hard to Believe, the central character John Foster is on stage, in an attic space surrounded by the costumes of previous generations. He is a spin doctor for military intelligence. The play opens with John listening to
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Schubert and he exclaims “music to top yourself to.” 25 He has just come back from the funeral of his mother and is about to electrocute himself. Before he does so, John wears his mother’s dress, his brother’s sports jacket, and his grandfather’s religious robe, so as to suggest the different layers of accumulated identity and the distinct values and imperatives that each has transmitted to him. His brother died eight years previously in a booby‐trap, placed under John’s car. John was the intended target. He, himself, has no religious beliefs. Key to his success at work comes about when he establishes the inexpensive “Four, Square, Laundry, Service” (319), and gets to inspect, literally, the dirty linen of the local community for evidence of paramilitary activity. His ex‐girlfriend, Monica had a termination from which he gets the idea of listening in on confidential help lines, and stopping women on their way back from England following abortions, in order that he can blackmail them (332). Monica left him when she heard of his deeds. Now he is in a “stable relationship with two pieces of liver and a jam jar” (332). Jennifer Johnston’s, Twinkletoes (1993)26 is a story of thirty‐ seven year old Karen, who lives alone, now that her teenage daughter has just got married and her husband, Declan, remains in prison for republican paramilitary activity, having spent nine years already behind bars. She has returned home from a night in the pub and reflects on the pressures and controls around her. A local man, Danny McCartney, is interested in her, she perhaps in him, but word would get around. Her aloneness, her abandonment, and her sense of betrayal come across: “I want to have more kids. I want love. Not just on Thursdays. Aye, Declan, I love you. I lie well (29). Johnston’s Christine and its companion piece Mustn’t Forget High Noon accounts for the relationship between Christine and 25 Conall Morrison, Hard To Believe in Far From The Land, ed. John Fairleigh (London: Methuen, 1998) 311. 26 Jennifer Johnston, Twinkletoes, Mustn’t Forget High Noon, Christine (also known as Ananias, Azarias and Miseal) in Three Monologues (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1995).
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Billy Maltseed. In Christine, Billy has been shot and the news of his murder leads to the death of his father due to shock. After his friend Sammy was shot, Billy joined the Regiment, a loyalist group. Karen in Twinkletoes bemoans the absence of other children, and Billy and Christine can’t have any. Fundamentally, there is the need to believe, however hard it is to believe. For the characters, believing is the key to survival, whether it is a belief in God, community, humanity, self or the future. John Foster’s remarks on fabrication are pertinent: And when I realised it was all fabricated, that everybody was peddling their stories to prove their points of view, that there were no facts, nothing you could really believe in … then I decided the only way to keep that fact clearly in front of my eyes was to become one of the people who was helping to make it all up, one of the fabricators, see it from inside the machine. [335]
In Twinkletoes, Karen’s comments on her deception are also apt: “On Thursday, I’ll tell him … everything and nothing” (30), and it is that tension between “everything” and “nothing” which is central to the monologue. Up to this point, the discussion has focused primarily on single character monologues. I now wish to broaden the focus. Set in Edenderry, Eden is the story of Billy’s and Breda’s failing relationship. He spends his weekends on pub crawls, is impotent, and yet has vivid sexual fantasies about a younger woman, Imelda Egan. Breda is hankering after a return to the earlier romance of their relationship.27 Breda, once called Pigarse, has had a weight problem and has dieted for some time. She is more confident and hopes that a special evening
27 Mic Moroney suggests of Eden that “Like recent work from Enda Walsh, Ken Harmon and Mark O’Rowe, this slots into an Irish idiom of monologue‐driven, dialect‐intoxicated, only part‐feminised lad’s theatre full of adrenalised Hiberno‐English, rhyming slang and florid nicknames painting a vivid portrait of pub‐drenched machos and their foolish sexual rivalries” Guardian 27 Jan. 2001 http://arts.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4125707‐110430,00.html.
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out will lead to some type of reconciliation. For his part, he doesn’t want that. (Details of infidelity and casual sex are prominent in the drama. Billy’s friend is the local stud, and Ernie Egan’s wife, Evonne, has threesomes with “the two Boylans.”)28 Male casual conversation is called, “talkin’ shorthand,” “ol’ shorthand” or “talkin’ shite” (3), and later described as “fierce shorthand, load of me hole rigmarole” (4) and “eegoty shorthand” (25). Yet the monologue preserves an audience from the indulgences of such “shorthand” conversations. If Billy’s sexual fantasies, inspired by a painting in his bedroom of men harvesting, are of him having sex behind a tree, Breda’s sexual focus is on solo‐sex, prompted by accessing weekly a book of sexual fantasies. The scenario to which she returns again and again, is one of a harem and group sex, that inspires her fantasy, which starts off with her being prepared for the Sultan, with Billy bound, but he can’t be restrained, so breaks free of his binds, joining the action as she indulges in wild sex and they all “come together in one huge amazin’ orgasm” (7). (There are certain fantasies that Breda is not so keen on, involving “bondage, and rape and Alsatians” (8), which are detailed in the book.) By the play’s end, Billy has made a fool of himself with Imelda, and Breda has gone home from the pub alone, initially, finding herself beside the canal with Eoghan, the putting green salesman. As she has sex with Eoghan, he blurs into the Sultan. In a way, her sexual infidelity has as much to do with sexual frustration and emotional despondency, as it does with desire (or is this a male playwright’s take on female desire): “Billy is behind us in the tent, tied up in the tent, forced to watch us, and I’m laughin’ because he can do his thing and me, I can do my thing. I grab hold of the sultan’s hair and it’s over now, beautifully over, heavy with breath, both of us, and we kiss”(36). She can laugh all the way “up the town,” whereas Billy slips despondently into the room with his children. In a
28 Eugene O’Brien, Eden (London: Methuen, 2001) 3.
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way, it is hard to see her actions as a victory, other than one for dysfunctionality, desperation and disappointment. The different individual perspectives on their relationship keep an audience working to stabilise the contradictions, and obviously toiling to anticipate where all of it will lead. Neither counselling nor talking “longhand” or “shorthand” will resolve their differences. Male impotency has its root in many different areas, emotional, physical, or psycho‐sexual, but none of these is teased through in the drama. The impotence of a society to support such problems shines through, as does the dysfunctional dynamics of an alcohol‐focused community. Everything is “pure mule,” a phrase Breda and her friend Eilish use to describe “anythin’ from a night out, to a long queue, to shite beer, to a bad snog, but it always meant that the thing was desperate, or disappointin’” (14). With Eoghan by the canal, Breda states: “I’m tellin’ this total stranger about me marriage, and the more I’m goin’ on the better I’m feelin’,” but the audience is only told of the satisfaction of telling (35). The audience never gets to hear that opinion of her marriage, perhaps luckily. Harvey O’Brien describes the one moment of possible contact between them: “As Wycherley’s character struggles with an inner conflict where he suspects he may be attracted to his own wife [Catherine Walshe] and resists it (because that would interfere with his self‐image as a freewheeling stud), the actor casts sidelong glances at his silent co‐star, who sits frozen in a pose of intense concentration.”29 In McPherson’s Come on Over (2001), imposed isolation, is transgressed, and the characters on two occasions interact. It is a moment between a Catholic theologian, Matthew, and a woman, Margaret, his former girlfriend from years ago. Matthew (to Margaret): I was lost.
29 Harvey O’Brien, Review of Eden http://www.culturevulture.net/Theater/ Eden.htm.
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Margaret (to Matthew): Stop. Keep going, I’m sorry.30
Later Margaret takes off her hood, and he tells her to put it back on. Eventually, she puts it back on. The play ends with Margaret embracing him, and he leaning against her. Likewise in This Lime Tree Bower, there is a consistent failure to acknowledge the constant, if unlit, presence of other actors on stage. Yet, again, there is one moment when the characters interact. Ray is telling about him puking over a visiting academic, and Frank responds by saying to him “I never heard that.” Ray replies, I’ve been saving it.”31 (Johnston’s Christine ends with the only character saying “I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time” [55].) Singleton, argues that monologues like these “use the onstage presence of the other silent and seemingly un‐present characters to act poignantly as referents to the spoken text.”32 In McPherson’s St. Nicholas the narrator addresses directly the audience, acknowledging consciously its presence, while in most others, this does not occur. Clearly, Billy and Breda, have great difficulty in relating to each other. Each character delivers their own take on the world—their individual “talk time.” As characters they need to talk together, yet dramatically, if they did talk, the potential dialogue between them would probably not take off, it would lack resonance, accuracy and intensity of the type that might shift the destructive dynamics of their relationship to something more resourceful—evidence of which is found in their recollections of dialogue between each other. It would be uninteresting to stage, yet in the monologue, with each offering a perspective on the world, alone, uninterrupted, unchallenged, it seems to bring an audience further into the mindset of the character, to comprehend the structures of intention and denial,
30 Conor McPherson, Come On Over in Plays Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004) 198. 31 Conor McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower in Three Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1996) 118. 32 Singleton, “Am I Talking to Myself?”
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of desire and destructiveness at the centre of each narrative formation. In the above plays, the characters display yearning, and a need for comfort, but seem to refuse the mantle of agency. Each has some reflections on violence, but the next cluster of plays to be evaluated focuses in on brutality, and abuse in very different ways. O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie is set in Dublin and deals with an accidental and a violent death. Its strengths are the interplay between the two discrete monologues and the different tones and perspectives taken by the two characters. By the play’s end The Howie, having been victorious in a brutal fight, ends up getting thrown out a window and is impaled on a railing, only for a van, that is being chased by the police, to smash into him as well. The violence is mythologised through the figure of Bruce Lee, the martial arts movie star, but also by the tones of mock bravado where a casualness and de‐sensitisation towards violence reveal something altogether different. Of O’Rowe’s Crestfall, Fintan O’Toole argues if the play “was indeed a movie, it would probably be banned … [having a] climax of such extreme violence that it makes Reservoir Dogs seem like a Hallmark Mother’s Day card.”33 Heroin abuse (the scourge), bestiality, forced abortions, animal mutilation, incest, paedophilia, human violation, and six murders are documented by the narratives. All three stories offer individual perspectives on this “savage quarter, this perpetual crestfall,” without either the playfulness or the indiscretion of the two narratives delivered in Howie the Rookie. The violence in Crestfall is a brutal search for extremes that seems to be validated by the authenticity of a female voice. In Howie the Rookie the violence is described more like street fighting, arcade game‐style. What O’Rowe’s work seems to reflect is that neither pain/pleasure nor joy/despair offers the coherence and the assurance of identity. The lenses of performance and irony introduce casualness, and a sort of defiant flippancy, when characters
33 Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times 22 May 2003.
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refuse to accept that they will be hurt by interaction. So it is almost a childish defiance, the two fingers to the trauma of existence, and a closing of the senses to darker realities. In contrast the violence in Gerard Mannix Flynn’s James X (2003),34 which builds on his novel Nothing to Say (1983), is altogether different and the elements of bravado and boisterous defiance are really a confidence trick. In the “Introduction” to the play, Flynn believes that the character “begins a quest to rescue his own story, and that “The truth will set you free.”35 And while Flynn talks about his character James O’Neill, the narrative reflects many of the extreme incidents from his own life. It is predominantly Flynn’s story, with Flynn performing, under the guise of O’Neill. The connection between Flynn and his character is not like that of any other work under discussion here. James is in the High Court before a tribunal “giving testimony about the events of his life at the hands of the agents of church and state” (6). James, “a man in his forties,” carries “a file containing State documents relating to himself and at various times throughout the play he reads reports from this file” (11). Brought up in a family of thirteen, in Connolly House, his is a notional history of delinquency, deviancy, and anti‐ social behaviour. At the age of eleven, he is sent to St Joseph’s Industrial school, Letterfrack, Connemara (no pastoral idyll here), from there to a Reformatory School in St Conleth’s Daingean, to mental institutions in Portlaoise Hospital and Central Mental Hospital Dundrum, for the “criminally insane” (39), and then at sixteen to St. Patrick’s Institution—a prison for young offenders, so that by his early twenties, his life has been scarred by interacting with the agents of Church and State, including a short stay at Goldenbridge, while his mother went 34 First performed at Project Arts Centre in 2003, the revived production a year later included, “Flynn’s multimedia exhibition Safe House, Safe Place, on three levels of Liberty Hall.” See Fintan O’Toole’s Review of James X, Liberty Hall, Irish Times, 2 Oct. 2004 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/2004/1002/3800189922HM2SATRE VS.html. 35 Gerard Mannix Flynn, “Introduction,” James X (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003) 7.
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into hospital to give birth and during her recovery period, where he remembers a great deal of physical and psychological violence. Initially, as an aggressive response to the judiciary, James insists that he will tell “it my way, to myself. I won’t delay. I won’t abandon myself. I’ll reclaim myself, myself” (14). The narrative recounts, his early years, including his birth. An audience gets a feel for the circumstances—the poverty, the troublemaking, the delinquency, the violence at industrial school—after two days at home for his holidays he had to have two operations to repair damage from beatings dished out by the Brothers. To this list is added the psychological diagnoses by the institutions of the state, the time in jail for a larceny he did not commit. All of this revelation is framed and presented in the language of defiance, aggression and a perceived sense of injustice. In prison, he had near insanity experiences, which he calls “an orgy of madness” (42). Out from prison, at twenty‐one, he hits the streets of Dublin, forms some bands, gigging at the “Frozen Arts Centre” (50) and then spends a great deal of his time fighting, arguing, and getting drunk and high, generally eking out trouble. There is evident rage, maliciousness, numbness, disbelief, despondency and above all denial in his narrative. Now in therapy, somehow the objective of James’s therapist is to move from positions of “relapse” to “release.” Then, close to the play’s end, James gets his day in court and the opportunity to make a “statement.” What the audience has heard up to now is the abridged version certainly, but more importantly, the fabrication, composed partially in denial. Also it serves to give an audience a hold on the story, without being bludgeoned by the burden of the deeper trauma. It is a false story, a “grandiose” cover story. Another voice emerges, as a new sense of purpose and calculation filter through: So here goes. See that story I just told you. That’s the same story I told to myself all my life. That’s my grandiose story, my euphoric recalling of the events of my life. If I hadn’t gotten that version I wouldn’t have survived … I didn’t discover my birdy [144]
(penis) myself at the industrial school … That’s my sideshow story, my Jewish humour. [52]
Later he adds: “But now it is time to tell the truth. The honest truth. This is my statement. My truth. The real story. The story I came to tell” (52). He goes on to document beatings, physical and sexual assaults, and the emotional tortures that he experienced in these institutions: the Brother who “orally raped” him on his way to Letterfrack, the anal rape at the hands of the Caretaker at the same institution. Persistent beatings were meted out there and also at the reformatory school. In prison, he was also raped by another inmate and nothing was done when it was reported. Nobody would either listen to or accept his story, each time he tried to relate it to an agent of the state. It was professionals, and professions in denial at best, utterly negligent at worst, conspiring with a society which could not countenance the abuse deriving from agents of church and state, which could not accept that it tacitly facilitated such violation. (How much easier is it to be in denial about another’s abuse?) “I never spoke those words till now, never had the voice, only the fear. I thought it was all my fault and drinking my bollix off numbed the pain away,” he claims (53‐4). The shame he felt, falls away. He hands back to the state his file, because the documents are really their belongings, their accounts, their narratives, their judgements, the state’s evidence against itself, the state’s “shame,” the state’s delinquency (54). A truth narrative and its brutality give the meaning necessary to sustain a life. The play ends with little emotion in the lines spoken. But behind the facts there is the subtext, the hidden content that reflects the trauma, and the burden of denial and isolation. Truth potentially brings freedom from shame. His female therapist said that he “was only as sick” as his “secrets” and that the “truth would set” him “free” (52). Testimony tests that sentiment. Testimony tests the value of telling, the validating of secrets and the disregard for the lies of
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state. There is of course the “life‐lie,” the narrative needed to make sense of despair and to frame survival. That he is a survivor of such horror in a democracy is almost beyond belief. It is hard to take that the state and its agents, when “in loco parentis,” would do such wrong, but in such cases, hanker after “no‐fault settlements” (54). This was not the dark ages; this was 1973, when Ireland joined the European Community. If this was documentation sourced from times of colonial rule, there would be outrage.36 For O’Toole, “The story they [the official documents] tell is not really about the boy who is the subject of all the official reports. James X is the torch that illuminates the institutions and gives form to the official mentality, and Flynn is right to use him as a buffer between himself and us. The rawness and ferocity of the story need to be controlled and shaped, so that Flynn, calm and composed, can be all the more devastating.37 The composure and generosity of the actor, is vital here, and is rightly picked up by O’Toole, when he notes, “Flynn has performed an act of astonishing generosity.”38 Truth is about the unburdening of shame, the doling out of responsibility, about the reclamation of dignity, being in this instance blatantly non‐performative. Flynn stands before an audience as evidence of the violated body. Flynn is neither actor nor truth teller/informer, witness nor narrator. He is a survivor. Performance can only celebrate that heroic bravery. And of course, Flynn’s role gets us into the functions of the performer, and what an actor brings to a performance, and the complex relationship between actor and audience reception, which I will examine eventually through the lens of naïvety. 36 The documentation published alongside the performance script is appalling in the views and attitudes taken. In 1970 a Doctor’s note to the Juvenile Courts tells of James’s claims of physical abuse at Letterfrack. Dr Stevens’s (not real name) assessment of James X for the Eastern Health Board, notes of influence of “possession and control by little men,” “homicidal fantasies,” “evidence of severe neurosis,” but he was not “psychotic” (79). 37 O’Toole, Review of James X. 38 O’Toole, Review of James X.
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Beyond Naïvety For individuals, narrative functions as a statement of implicit and explicit experiences and perspectives of the world in such a way that there is an almost synonymous relationship between narrative and the narrated self, veiling the false sense of unity and cohesiveness that narrative purportedly brings. For individuals, often the public narrative and the need to impress manage to betray the private narrative, which is often a more complex accumulation of needs, desires, fear, beliefs, sensations, reflections, actions, failures, hesitations, and rewards. For individuals, the expressivity of the body often betrays the intent and consistency of narratives expressed in public, and the obligation for the actor is to do likewise, to find the necessary physicality and modes of expression that contest the relative cohesion of scripted character narratives. In single person monologues the actor is often standing relatively still; there is little by way of sweeping physicality, in that the composition of the visual image is relatively static, especially when working within unaltered physical scenographic environments, apart from lighting. The act of performance is one of delivery and one of leakage, of revelation and self‐betrayal, through subtext and physicality, through the mindsets, assumptions and values revealed implicitly and explicitly in a monologue. The audience is obliged to rely on the nuances of language and story structure as much as on the visual, with far more emphasis on verbal codifications than is the norm in contemporary cultures, where the visual dominates. Playwrights afford their characters inner‐ constructed narratives that audiences will buy into, or from which the characters themselves can salvage something, whether it is by way of dignity, non‐accountability, and irresponsibility, fuelled by unconscious need, imperatives to procreate, drugs, or alcohol addiction or by a supreme hatred of the innocuousness of the ordinary. Jim Norton, who played Jack in the first production of The Weir, noted that after performances, audiences kept coming up [147]
to him, wishing to tell their stories.39 Monologues/narrative disclosures seem like an invitation to share, to re‐affirm community. In an Irish Times interview with Eileen Battersby, O’Rowe notes, “When I heard the actors I realised they spoke to the audience, they make the audience complicit.”40 In a way he is attempting to reflect on how audiences respond to such a type of opening up. While uncontested narratives may exist, audiences can fulfil a dialogical, adversarial function, by grasping the unsaid and re‐configuring the narrative. An audience may be thus positioned by being more aware than the character, by viewing characters as in denial or too openly naïve, which may of course have something to do with class, since most of the characters in monologues, male and female, are working class.41 Naïvety is established in a number of ways, initially through the myth of progress, the belief that something can be done to initiate change. In Eden, Breda loses weight, hoping that it will make a difference to her marriage, and Billy believes that sex with Imelda will resolve his impotency. In Howie The Rookie, the males think fancifully, that they can somehow inhabit the combative spirit of Bruce Lee. After The Howie is ejected from a window, The Rookie responds “me impaled mate, me namesake the name of Lee, me saviour,” and he will go home to The Rookie’s family to “Let them know he was good at the end.”42 The redemptive tones clearly suggest naïvety as does
39 Jim Norton, South Bank Show, Special episode on Conor McPherson, London Weekend Television, 18 May 2003. 40 Eileen Battersby, “The Eloquence of Rage and Fear,” The Irish Times, 18 Mar. 1999. 41 Alan Gilsenan’s stage version of John Banville’s novel The Book of Evidence (2002) provides an apt example in that audiences seemed to resist the arrogance and articulateness of the character on stage, in a way that a reader of the novel would not have the same defiance. Articulation in the hands of the upper or middle classes has always been something resisted by middle class theatre audiences, who prefer articulacy, in general, to remain with the notionally dispossessed and the working classes. 42 Mark O’Rowe, Howie the Rookie, (London: Nick Hern, 1999) 51.
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the filtering of violence through the lens of irony, false heroics and masquerade. The feminine across so many of these plays is romanticised. In Rum and Vodka the narrator states: “If I could be with that girl (Myfanwy) she could cure my life” (25). In Port Authority, Kevin’s, Dermot’s, and Joe’s, relationships with themselves and with the women in their lives are deeply suspect. There is this tension between the real and unrealisable partner. For Kevin it is his flatmate, Clare, about whom he fantasises, but he settles for Trish. For Joe, it is his neighbour Marion, and not his wife Liz. In contrast, Dermot’s wife states that she is with him, “because I knew you’d always need someone to look after you. And I always will” (182). Singleton suggests, “Abetted by the monologue form, Woman, with whom these characters are preoccupied, is rendered mute and denied self‐ determination.”43 On the relative “muteness” I can agree, not so on the “self‐determination,” as neither gender seems to has access to that. While women did serve a symbolic function traditionally in Irish theatre, in the monologues, it has little resonance beyond the personal and the immediate, because it has no metaphoric or mythic aspiration in terms of composition, just the literal, therefore, it is more difficult to confront the gender issue today. In many of the plays, male impotency is an issue. Billy and Christine in Christine and Mustn’t Forget High Noon can’t have children. Billy accuses her of being “barren” (48) in his piece, and in her monologue, she says that he was incapable of having children—“I never had the heart to tell Billy what they said at the hospital … I just let him think it was my fault … You know the way some men are … they get very hurt about that sort of thing, ashamed … (55). In Eden, Billy is impotent and in Dermot Bolger’s Tramway End (1990), Monica’s husband is impotent and this ruined their relationship to such an extent that when
43 Singleton, “Am I Talking to Myself?”
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he died, she admits to poisoning him, even though she is not held accountable: I tried to pray but nothing would come. You’ve stolen my youth and left me barren, you’ve stolen my gaiety and gave me shame, and when I die I will die unmourned. But I could forgive you, Swifty, everything except that … seated there at the right hand of God, you have stolen my Christ away from me (142).44
In Eden, the vulnerability associated with children takes the form of Breda telling of a woman on the chat show Kenny Live, whose child was murdered by Myra Hindley, and is pleading for no parole for the killer of her child. At times of frailty, Billy remembers the little boy he “pulled outta the sea,” but he never found out if the child ever lived or died, preferring the ambivalence (6). The death of The Mousey Lee in Howie the Rookie is the source of monumental trauma, and is in stark contrast to the survival of the child in Crestfall which smacks of naïve redemption. In Bolger’s In High Germany, after the defeat of the Irish team to Holland in the European championship, Eoin still has things to believe in: “I saw thirteen thousand pairs of hands moving as one, united by pride. I knew Frieda will still be waiting up, with my child, my future, a tiny pearl inside her” (108).45 In McPherson’s Come on Over, Matthew is back in Ireland to investigate the remains of a child that has not decomposed, who had been buried possibly four hundred years ago, as he hides a secret of his rape of an eleven year old girl, Patience, who had stabbed him in the face. He is going to say that the preservation of the corpse is a miracle, despite the fact that the corpse once moved begins to decompose. It is a miracle because he wants to see it as evidence of the will of God, and as a sign of god’s forgiveness: “Not trusting God was my greatest sin. But he sent me this little girl. Preserved for hundreds of
44 Dermot Bolger, Tramway End in A Dublin Quartet (London: Penguin, 1992). 45 Bolger, In High Germany in A Dublin Quartet (London: Penguin, 1992).
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years. To forgive me” (204). So many playwrights use the notion of dead or violated children, or the inability to have children as a way of calibrating meanings that may not be available through any other device. It is a type of dramaturgical “shorthand.” In Hard to Believe there is a pair of children’s boots, backstage on a case, as if to represent the aborted child from John’s relationship with his girlfriend. Differently, in the case of James X, it is the child from the age of three branded delinquent by agents of the state that haunts an audience. Clearly, innocence or the violation of innocence, as I have argued elsewhere, is the default setting for much of Irish dramaturgy. Naïvety may concern adults in relation to their dealing with children, or it may be a by‐product of attempting a level of symbolism that is not earned. In a way, like so many plays, the excesses real or imagined of the male are tamed. They are punished in childlike ways. In Eden, Billy is infantilised, going to sleep in the children’s room, just as the character in Rum and Vodka (109) does after his binge of waywardness. Both men voluntarily exile themselves to the child’s world. Progress, uncontested violence, identification, the feminine, impotency, innocence, redemption and infantilisation are all part and parcel of the same processes of naïvety. Peter Brooker identifies the concept of “Haltung” which runs through Bertolt Brecht’s vocabulary. Its meaning for Brecht has to do with the “naïve” blending of opposites, by “joining contraries”: it was a look, a posture, an attitude of mind: it implied an intelligent simplicity, innocence and shrewdness, joining the conceptual and concrete, the popular and the philosophical. A naïve attitude would estrange the familiar, and problematise the self‐evident, signalling a dialectical movement from the ordinary and everyday to the original and innovatory.46
46 Peter Brooker, “Key Words in Brecht’s Theory and Practice of Theatre,” The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, eds. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 199.
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As is noted by Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins this estrangement is added to by the ideas of “trickster” and “dreamer.”47 The subversive part of the Irish storytelling tradition does this; the monologue, at its best does likewise, positioning itself somewhere on a continuum between dreaming and trickery. For Stephen Di Benedetto the group of thirty‐something Irish male playwrights are not: going far enough to make their point clear to audiences, they rely on our understanding and empathising with their predicaments, rather than suggesting an alternative course of action to try and come to a solution. Their worlds inevitably explode or fail, without negotiating a path that might avoid destruction.48
In some instances that is true, in others false. Brian Singleton says as much when he states the monologue “traps characters in the past tense and keeps them frozen in unenlightened isolation.”49 Morrison notes “evasion itself is often the main action” of narrative.50 Audiences become a sort of spurious community, feeding back into the process, by individually and collectively either embracing or being repelled by revelations and by all variations in between, but also by engaging and joining “together contraries.” Audiences, in this dynamic have
47 In post‐colonial literatures, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins raise the notion of “trickster” who is capable of disrupting “all conventional categories, including corporeal hierarchies upon which various forms of discrimination are based,” and the latter through “transformations.” Gilbert and Tompkins, Post‐ colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, 235. 48 Stephen Di Benedetto, “Shattering Images of Sex Acts and Other Obscene Stage Transgressions in Contemporary Irish Plays by Men,” Performing Ireland: Australasian Drama Studies, eds. Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan 43, (October 2003): 63. 49 Singleton, “Am I Talking to Myself?” 50 Morrison, Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, 8.
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more power, more responsibility, because it is the naïvety that characterises monologue performance most of all. According to Benson, “A story is an answer to a question.”51 A story is also the answer an individual or character wishes to give, it can be an alibi, selective, fictive, imaginative, exaggerated, and contain all sorts of self‐deception. Unravelling the contradictions, the anomalies, false justifications, undermining the self‐aggrandisement, and empathising with either the person’s or character’s journey, or the inequity of an encounter, are all part of the process. Most monologues are about making a story stick. Yet it is the contestation of that narrative from within or from without which is often the defining attribute: from within, through acts of self‐betrayal, belated acknowledgment or revision, or from without, by engaging dialogically with a plausible alternative, or by the upgrading of one’s narratives, myths, symbols and metaphors, with the aid of another. In theatre, contestation is also possible through the provision of rival non‐complementary disclosures, as with Faith Healer, if not from other characters, at least from an audience. Alternative stories allow revision, reconstruction, the re‐making, upgrading and recalibrating of narratives. Further, both culturally and interpersonally, the meshing of narratives is often fundamental to relationships. Since monologues are delivered in isolation, without layering, there are fewer possibilities for this dialogical process. Thankfully, dark nights of the soul are not going to drive people out of the theatre, because the composition of the monologue does something unusual, through the convergence of pain/pleasure and play, voyeurism and exaggeration, the “ordinary” and the “original.” It is the absence of either mature reflections or serious existential interiority which is foremost. It is the unknowingness that filters through. Dislocation, rather than location, is crucial. There is a strong sense that narrative emotion is only feasible when it is marked or enhanced by
51 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, 45.
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performance. The greatest confidence trick of course is that through the displacement that play brings about, the characters, do not feel anything too deeply. That is the essential pleasure of naïvety that audiences work with. Delivering a solo narrative, one assumes that the actor is hyper‐alert to the feedback and forms a bond with an audience, as there is no other character on‐stage to focus on or to interact with. This self‐consciousness almost equally applies to the audience. Thus the spectator receives the energy of the performer and the narrative ambivalence—as Richard Schechner notes, “performance is the domain of the audience,” thus in the transmission of the monologue, naïvety is also potentially positioned within the “domain of the audience.”52 So, in a Brechtian sense, there is both a conscious dramaturgical naïvety implicit in the performance narrative as well as in the potential reception of the piece. Conclusion: Monomania/monophobia Nicholas Grene rightly argues that for an older generation of Irish playwrights the “stories told … betoken the layered nature of Irish culture as palimpsest of past and present, with the mythic buried within it,”53 whereas with McPherson’s work, Grene claims, narratives “are truths of ordinary experience, spoken without any amplifying echo‐chamber of myth or archetype.”54 He goes on to suggest that “What we are given are stories in shallow space: deeper structures, echoes and resonances are deliberately denied.”55 For me, that depth is not so much “deliberately denied,” as inaccessible to contemporary
52 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 53 Nicholas Grene, “Stories in Shallow Space: Port Authority,” Irish Review, 29 (2002): 75. 54 Grene, “Stories in Shallow Space,” 80. 55 Grene, “Stories in Shallow Space,” 82.
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dramaturgy.56 In St. Nicholas (1997), the unnamed male theatre critic states: “I had my health. I had resolve. But most important. Over everything else. I had a story.”57 If a society offers no resonating myth, the final authority might be the myth of self through “story.”58 Ciarán Benson, as already pointed out, argues “who” and “what” you are, is a function of “where” you are.59 Maybe the “who” and “what” you are, is not a “function” but fiction of “where” you are, the illusion of placing oneself within a myth, within a narrative. Fundamentally, such a myth is about negotiations between innocence and guilt, making sense and non‐sense, self and non‐self, space and non‐space, narrative and non‐narrative, and between authenticity and inauthenticity. Many myths are stabilising narratives, ones of reaching and yearning, yet the inability to make sense of desire, shame, and guilt is the profoundest trauma. If so, the myth of self is an elemental contestation of the demise of meta‐ narratives or master narratives. The struggle to constitute is a defiance of the postmodern impulse to unhinge subjectivity, and thus of identity in free fall. Traditionally, dominant practices of Irish theatre dramaturgy emphasised collective communal spaces where people interacted, in conflict, where connections and intimacies had a history and depth, however negative these might be. The recent trend is for people to have at best tenuous associations. Now disconnection is normalised, whether it is Corn Exchange’s Everyday (2006) by Michael West, or Paul Mercier’s Homeland (2006). The monologues seem to have been a mid‐ point on that journey between old and new, mythologising 56 See “Urban Drama: Any Myth will Do?” Contemporary Irish Theatre, eds. Paul Murphy and Melissa Sihra (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, forthcoming). 57 Conor McPherson, St Nicholas in Four Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1999) 177. 58 Monologues in Irish theatre tend to be about urban characters. As Fintan O’Toole notes, “No one has ever mythologised this housing estate, this footbridge over the motorway, that video rental shop. It is, for the writer, virgin territory.” See “Introduction” to Dermot Bolger’s A Dublin Quartet (London: Penguin 1992) 2. 59 Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, ix.
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identity and through the brief recognition of connection between characters, reflecting back onto an audience the communicative structures of contemporary culture itself, the novelty and naïvety of newness. Maybe, then, that dramaturgical gesture is not so naïve after all. Maybe, it is about accountability and not complicity, about resilience, about expressivity, and maybe, that myth, however it might be downplayed, is worth talking about? If you can’t “bounce” characters off each other as Marina Carr suggests, then you can perhaps bounce them and their duplicitousness and notional naïvety off of an audience—which might be called not so much the haunting spectre of naïvety as the spectacle of naïvety.
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Dee Heddon
Beyond the Self: Autobiography as Dialogue
I got very worried because I read a review in The Guardian, of course, about the Edinburgh Festival. There was some heavy criticism about all these shows by aspiring artists which smacked of the confessional box, and I blushed. This is just what I was about to do. (Bobby Baker, Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, 1988)
The explicit use of personal experience in performance, drawn upon as a material resource and regarded as a dramaturgical point of focus, can be traced to the first wave feminist movement where the “personal” was understood also as “the political.” This insistence on the cultural and political value of the personal proposed it as an appropriate subject for art—a radical proposition in an era dominated by the purported objectivity of minimalism (presumed to be detached and cool in its style and effect). Carolee Schneemann’s iconic performance, Interior Scroll (1975), in which she pulled a scroll of text from her vagina and read aloud a reflective statement on her status as a female artist, formally and textually represented this confrontation. Schneemann issued a direct challenge to an art world that marginalised women, that dismissed “personal clutter” and read the “diarastic” gesture simplistically and patronisingly as a mere “indulgence.” [157]
The connection between feminist consciousness‐raising activity and the use of personal experience as a resource has been remarked in various published histories of feminist performance.1 Autobiographical performance was, from the outset, political in its aspirations and the roll‐call of performers who explicitly draw on their own life—experiences underlines the continuity of this fact, from Rachel Rosenthal’s “auto‐ biological” or “autoethnographic” performances,2 to Tim Miller’s persistent demand for equal rights for gay men and lesbians in the USA, to Bobby Baker’s illuminating performances representing the struggle of simultaneously being a wife, mother and artist or, more recently, her challenge to the cultural taboo surrounding mental health, to Joey Hateley’s discourse of living beyond the fixed binaries of sex and gender. Having witnessed many autobiographical performances over the past ten years I have found that the vast majority of them draw on personal experiences in order to bring a pressing political matter into sharper focus, and to use the specific medium of live performance—shared time and space; an event happening here and now, between you and me—to impress that politics upon my own flesh and mind. Autobiographical performance, then, should be understood as having the potential to make a lasting impression. Given the historical link to the second wave feminist movement, and the continuing political urgency and political intention of much autobiographical work, I am repeatedly surprised that so many critics read performances of the “self” as being intrinsically, implicitly or essentially “narcissistic,” “solipsistic” or “egotistical.” This point is picked up also by Ernest Larsen when he notes that “This impoverished site is 1 See for example Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard eds., The Power of Feminist Art: the American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 2 See Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Judith Hamera, “Loner on Wheels as Gaia: Identity, Rhetoric, and History in the Angry Art of Rachel Rosenthal,” Text and Performance Quarterly 11.1 (January 1991): 34‐45.
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vulnerable to the imputation that a politics whose only sure referent is the self is hardly a politics at all.”3 Larsen’s hunch is borne out by other critics’ responses: Many artists draw all their resources from themselves and continually reflect only their own image.4 The dangers in autobiographical art are legion: solipsisms that interest an audience of one.5 It is as often an ego show as a revelation; the virus of the “I‐ Did‐It‐My‐Way/I‐Gotta‐Be‐Me” strain afflicts the larger number of such acts, particularly in the performance art arena which presents amateurish staging techniques and mini‐personalities as often as original methods and subjects.6 Solo performance is, of course a field rife with self‐indulgence and incipient monumental egotism, and I have sat through as many shows demonstrating this as anyone—typically performed by frustrated and mediocre New York actors trying to jump‐start their me‐machines with sitcom‐shallow autobiographical monologues.7
Performer Richard Layzell recognises that this dominant conception of autobiographical performance—its supposed self‐ indulgence—is nothing but a stereotype, and one which we are stuck with until a shift in understanding dislodges it.8 My own
3 Ernest Larsen, “Questions of Feminism: 25 Responses,” October 71 (Winter 1995): 31. 4 Bonnie Marranca, “The Self as Text: Uses of Autobiography in the Contemporary Theatre,” Performing Arts Journal 4.1/2 (1979/80): 85. 5 Ruth Weisberg, Artweek 22 Nov. 1980; cited in Rachel Rosenthal, ed. Moira Roth (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997) 107. 6 John Howell, “Solo in Soho: The Performer Alone,” Performing Arts Journal 4.1/2 (1979/80): 158. 7 Jonathan Kalb, “Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self,” Theater 31. 3 (2000): 14. 8 Richard Layzell, “Audience, Context, Content,” Live Art, eds. Robert Ayers and David Butler (Sunderland: Artists Newsletter Publications, 1991) 49.
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critical writing over the past few years has been an attempt to contribute to that shift, insisting that autobiographical performance is one means to reveal otherwise invisible lives, to resist marginalisation and objectification, and to become instead speaking subjects with self‐agency; performance, then, as a performative act that brings into being a “self.”9 Like Sidonie Smith, I regard “autobiographical practices,” as the “occasions for restaging subjectivity” and “autobiographical strategies” as the “occasions for the staging of resistance.”10 Given the historical link between women and autobiographical performance, it might not be too cynical to suggest that the “stereotypical” responses to the form belie deeper prejudices not so far removed from that earlier rejection of the “diaristic” as an “indulgence.” This is certainly Irene Gammel’s view when she considers the specific “danger” of confessional forms for women. As Gammel notes, when personal experiences are expressed via the female voice, they are perceived as being informal and lacking in authority, belonging to the realm of parole rather than the more abstract langue, and as such are dismissed as being of less concern.11 Leslie Satin and Judith Jerome reach a similar conclusion when they relate that although “historically, autobiography has been 9 See “The Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill (London: Routledge, 2006) 137‐153; “Fingerlicks: Lesbian Tales from Centre Stage,” Women, Theatre and Performance: Auto/biography and Performance, eds. Viv Gardner and Maggie B. Gale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 217‐238; “Tim Miller’s Autobiography of the Future,” New Theatre Quarterly 19.3 (2003): 243‐256. Of course, some autobiographical work does fulfil the stereotypes, and this “genre” is no more safeguarded from the production of “poor” work than any other. See “The Politics of the Personal: Autobiography in Performance,” Feminist Futures? eds. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (London: Palgrave, 2006) 130‐148. 10 Sidonie Smith, “Autobiographical Manifestos,” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 434. 11 Irene Gammel ed., Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self‐Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) 4.
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a primarily male province … autobiography in its less socially elevated form … has long been identified as a woman’s genre.”12 Live performance might be considered an example of a “less socially elevated form.” Feminised, autobiographical performance practices are then trivialised by the description “(merely) autobiographical.”13 As I hope to show, there is rarely anything “mere” to autobiography, in form, content or politics. Although autobiographical performances appear to be monologic (given that they are most often concerned with the life story of the performer), the specific demands of making the work, and its public context, render them as dialogues in more ways than one. Autobiographical performances are rarely about the (singular) self. Dialogue in Four Parts 1. Communicating (with) the Self The performance of autobiography is precisely and unavoidably that, a performance, and every performance is composed, structured, rehearsed, edited, revised, honed and usually performed more than once. In solo autobiographical performance, the performing subject and the subject of performance are typically one and the same. Tim Miller performs Tim Miller; Bobby Baker performs Bobby Baker, etc. In the process of making an autobiographical performance, then, the self is inevitably in dialogue with the self. “What happened that day? What did I feel when Scott bullied me? Why did that event happen? What does that tell us about so‐ called justice? What do I now wish I had done? What was I doing when my dad went for a swim? Should I place this section here, or leave it till later in the show? What might the 12 Leslie Satin and Judith Jerome eds., Introduction to issue on “Performing Autobiography,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19/20 (1999): 12. 13 Satin and Jerome, Introduction to issue on “Performing Autobiography.”
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audience take from this?” Already, we are in the field of collaboration as the self dialogues with the self, even if only in the register of the inner voice.14 It is, however, more accurate perhaps to say that selves are inevitably in dialogue with selves, because in the performance of autobiography there is the self who performs, and the self who is performed; there is also the self who lives beyond the performance—the self that we, the spectators, do not witness. Complicating this further (there is nothing “mere” to autobiographical performances), it would be even more accurate to say that these selves are themselves subject to splits and multiplications, because each of these “selves” is more than one; in Tim Miller’s case, the performing self might simultaneously and variously be gay, white, male, middle‐class, American … The performed self is 45 years of age, five years of age, straight, gay, victim, agent … The self that exists off‐stage is gay, white, middle‐class, American, lover, friend, son, actor, teacher, activist … In the process of making an autobiographical performance encounters between selves are staged, prompting self‐reflection in a hall of mirrors where no “self” takes precedence. This is less the fractured “self” than the multiplied self. In mapping the self that was (the five year old), the self that is (the 45 year old), and the self that will be performed (the five and 45 year old), the discursive and shifting nature of the “self” and of its performativity become apparent. Such awareness of the multiplicity of selves lessens the risk of supposing or proposing a simplistic mimetic reflection of “authenticity,” whether of identity or experience. Moreover, in this “matrix” of subjectivity, the different locations that each “I” occupies is in dialogue with those other
14 In fact, collaboration is often more explicit than even this, since most solo performers work with other creative partners, including directors, dramaturges, writers, designers, etc.
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locations; 15 for Tim Miller, then, the gay man with the white man; for Robbie McCauley, the heterosexual woman with the black woman; for Joey Hateley, the middle class and white with the transgendered. The one might very well teach the other(s) something new about discursive operations, about inter‐ and intrasubjectivity, about subjugation and domination. Dialoguing with various “selves,” autobiographical performance continues to be a mode of consciousness‐raising for the performer as much as for the spectator. What also needs to be recognised in the staging of “autobiographical” performance is that the “self” is inseparable from “others”; psychoanalytically/structurally, the self is dependent on the other in order to have self‐definition. As Mikhail Bakhtin proposes, the “‘self’ can never be a self‐ sufficient construct,” since the self is always already a “relation.”16 More materially and pragmatically, it is almost impossible to tell any story from one’s life without also recounting the role that others played in that. As Paul John Eakin recognises, “our own lives never stand free of the lives of others.”17 For example, Tim Miller cannot demand equality without also revealing to us that his relationship with his lover is considered to be less valuable than a heterosexual’s relationship with their lover. His lover, then, features largely in his performances. Autobiographical performances then are more accurately termed auto/biographical since always there is the “self” and “others.” Lisa Kron’s Well (2004) explicitly stages this process of inevitably performing others, and the ethical responsibilities/risks that accompany this act. In Kron’s earlier 15 I am indebted to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 343‐351. 16 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World, 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2002) 19. 17 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) 159.
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shows, such as 101 Humiliating Stories and 2.5 Minute Ride, though Kron was the solo performer she did also take on other “personae.” The protagonist of 2.5 Minute Ride, for example, is Kron’s father, and at key moments in the production Kron becomes him, relating his experiences in the first person.18 In some senses, then, Kron steps into her father’s shoes. For Well, her most recent performance, the focus switches to her mother, and at the heart of this deeply meta‐theatrical play lie ethical questions surrounding that act of appropriation; how to understand the experiences of another and how to practice empathy? Most untypical in the “genre” of “autobiographical performance,” the piece is performed by a full cast—Kron plays her “self,” but other actors play other characters, including the role of her mother, Ann Kron. This explicit presence of actors serves to make explicit that the “others” in this play are storied; they are creative, artistic representations. At a key moment in the production, one of the performers/characters advises Kron to stop “trying to make sense of [your mother] through your experience” and instead to “try just listening to her directly.”19 When the character “Lisa” admits that her mother, Ann, doesn’t “make any sense as a character,” “Ann” replies, “Well, I guess that’s the problem with using someone else’s real life for your play.” In order to write Well Kron interviewed her mother about certain events in their shared past, and according to Kron a lot of the words in Well are her mother’s.20 In addition to their frequent discussions, Kron would give her mother drafts of the script to read. Kron admits to having to confront her mother’s terror in order to reassure her that the portrayal of her would not be negative. Kron also had to remind her mother that she wrote the whole play—including the character of “Lisa Kron,” a
18 Lisa Kron, 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001). 19 My thanks to Lisa Kron for a copy of the script for Well. This has subsequently been published; see Well (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006). 20 Lisa Kron, interview with the author, New York, 2004.
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character distinctly lacking in empathy. Given that Well is written by Kron, drawing on her own life, we could argue that it is, in spite of appearances, a monologue. Yet literally inscribed within the play are multiple dialogues—Kron with her various “selves” (artist, performer, writer, but also daughter); Kron with her mother; her mother with Kron. There are also imagined dialogues‐‐conversations between them that have yet to take place. 2. Discursive Performances One danger supposed of autobiographical performances is that they render as unproblematic the relationship between experience and its representation. Even more than this, they take experience as the “ground” of some insight—experience proffered as a symbol of authority—rather than recognising it as already being a product of interpretation.21 In such instances, there is indeed a risk of essentialising as natural something that is in fact historical, cultural and social. As is by now well rehearsed in critical theory, experience does not precede representation for it is always already culturally inscribed. Of course the point (at least for the purposes of this essay) is that there is no singular or monolithic culture that inscribes a single interpretation to any event, but rather many possible cultural locations and readings (variously dominant and subordinated). There are always any number of discourses available from which we are able—indeed compelled—to make something mean, or to make it meaningful. Even the meaning we ascribe to our “self,” indeed, the very notion of a “self,” is culturally located. Here, we might also usefully be reminded of Bakhtin’s concept of the “dialogic.” There is no “absolute” or “authoritative” language (and hence meaning) since all language (or dialect) is the result of an inevitable contact with 21 Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London: Routledge, 1992) 22‐40.
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other languages; language, then, is a dialogic heteroglossia. In Sue Vice’s words, “At any moment, our discourse will be synchronically informed by the contemporary languages we live among, and diachronically informed by their historical roles and the future roles we anticipate for them.”22 The inevitable and continual interactions between languages propose that all are capable of being influential and of being influenced. As Michael Holquist summarises, schematically dialogue can be reduced to three elements: an utterance, a reply, and the relation between the two. It is in the relation between the two that the possibility of a change in language is proffered. Through confronting others’ dialects, our own (already dialogic dialect) potentially undergoes further transformation. A dialogic world is one in which I can never have my own way completely, and therefore I find myself plunged into constant interaction with others—and with myself. In sum, dialogism is based on the primacy of the social, and the assumption that meaning is achieved by struggle.23
Encouraging transformation, it seems to me, is precisely the task of the artist. Painted with the same brush as Jill Dolan I want (and need) to believe that performance can be a transformational act. My desire to attend autobiographical performance is partly prompted by the need to “reach for something better, for new ideas about how to be and how to be with each other.”24 Performer Denise Uyehara recognises this utopian imperative: Finally, and most importantly, performance is transformative. It provides new ways of expressing or imagining a culture,
22 Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) 46. 23 Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World, 39. 24 Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 455.
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situation or struggle. It challenges us to imagine a new world in which to live.25
Butting up against dominant discourses, those spoken most widely and forcefully because institutionally supported, subjects who speak otherwise stage an explicitly dialogic encounter, a performance of contestation. In Glory Box (2001) Tim Miller, speaking in the (dominant) voice of nine year old class‐mate Scott who insisted even at that age that boys could never marry each other, also proffers another dialect, equally insistent in its assumption that gay men and lesbians should have the (same) right to marry.26 Similarly Joey Hateley, in A:Gender (2003) speaks in the dominant discourse that insists on the existence of two discrete genders, but also presumes the possibility of other narratives. Hateley and Miller both recognise that in a fundamental way the stories told in our culture extend the range of stories available, and therefore available to be lived. As Liz Stanley insists, in a vein not dissimilar to Bakhtin, stories are powerful in that they are concerned with a “literary and political re‐shaping of language and thus consciousness.”27 Hateley’s one‐person autobiographical show, A:Gender (2003), explores female masculinity. Taking on various personae, juxtaposing live performance with video recordings, and spoken text with movement text, Hateley’s work makes explicit the impact of discourse on the bodies and lives we inhabit. As “Professor L. Gooner,” Hateley introduces us to the medical discourse that variously construct the “transgendered” body, including the “developmental model,” “the psychodynamic model” and the “biological model,” each one attempting to “explain” the “transgender case study” and
25 Denise Uyehara, Maps of City & Body (New York: Kaya Press, 2003) 16. 26 See Tim Miller, Body Blows: Six Performances (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 27 Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) 116.
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presenting their perspectives as “facts” or “truths.” These are set beside other discourses which offer the spectator an alternative script to that of heteronormativity. In the guise of “Gender Joker,” Hateley challenges dominant assumptions that align sex and gender as neat and coherent categories of identity (and identification) by instructing us that “there are over 70 recognised intersex conditions.” In her reciting of other “dialects” (and this is also performed literally, as Hateley adopts a different speech mode for each character she plays), Hateley reveals the impact and inadequacy of the hegemonic ones.
Joey Hateley, A:Gender. Photo Jason Lees
My reflection on Hateley’s work presumes that I am “other” to her “other”; that the “dialect” she proffers is “alternative” to me/mine. But in any audience attending Hateley’s shows, there will be subjected or marginalised “others” who are the “same” as she is, who identify with her. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson
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makes this simultaneous doubling of same/other clear in her reflection on black women writers: Black women writers enter into testimonial discourse with black men as blacks, with white women as women, and with black women as black women. At the same time, they enter into a competitive discourse with black men as women, with white women as blacks, and with white men as black women … Through the multiple voices that enunciate her complex subjectivity, the black woman writer not only speaks familiarly in the discourse of the other(s), but as Other she is in contestorial dialogue with the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or “ambiguously (non)‐hegemonic” discourses.28
Working with the theories of both Bakhtin and Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Henderson identifies within black women’s writing the operation of both a “dialogic of difference” (the other/contestation) and a “dialectic of identity” (the same/identification). Hateley’s performance works in a similar way as it “speaks” to a diverse spectatorial constituency. Hateley attempts to find the “same” in “difference” (or, more radically to “queer” the normative), by inviting audience members who may think they are “other” to Hateley to recognise moments of identification. On the other hand, like Henderson’s writers, spectators who easily identify with Hateley as the “other,” may very well also find themselves “othered” as the “normative.” For example, Hateley is careful to draw attention to the difference that race and class make to transgendered experiences/interpretations. The political agenda of A:Gender is to create a place to be something other than “other” by insisting on the prevalence of differences across gender, sex, race and class; we are all variously “others.” Gender Joker: “Trapped in the wrong body?” Is that the only mainstream metaphor transsexuals have? Why focus on the biology of transsexuals rather than perspective … Our main 28 Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 346.
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character is finding out that being androgynous creates a third gender, lumping all kinds of different genders together under one banner of “it”: deviant … deviance from, but always, in relation to, man / woman—prevailing once again. Take for example the difference between butch dykes and F2Ms? Why are we read against each other, across a singular continuum; as if we’re in competition with each other? That model sounds a little too familiar for my liking. But perhaps that’s why we still have post‐ops looking down on pre‐ops, who dislike transgender, who hate she‐males, who canʹt stand drag queens, who snub drag kings, who detest transvestites, who pity closet cases, who disdain androgines, who shun hermaphrodites, who spurn men with cunts, who sicken grrl boyz who bore cross‐ dressers, who mis‐understand post‐ops.29
3. Engaging the Audience Given the political imperative that so often drives the making of an autobiographical performance it is fair to suggest that, contra the frequent accusation of “egotistical,” these performances are made with a spectator in mind—these “utterances” are other‐ directed. For Kron, “the goal of autobiographical work should not be to tell stories about yourself but, instead, to use the details of your own life to illuminate or explore something more universal.”30 Tim Miller similarly wants to use his individual experience in order to find “a window for” the audience.31 Again, we might be reminded of Bakhtin’s critique of assumptions regarding the monologic form, since the “monologue” also necessarily takes its place within an act of communication: Any monologic utterance … is an inseverable element of verbal communication. Any utterance … makes response to something
29 My thanks to Joey Hateley for a copy of the unpublished script of A:Gender. 30 Kron, 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories, xi. 31 Tim Miller, “California Performance, Vol. 2,” Mime Journal (1991/92): 140.
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and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances.32
In place of the “self” so often assumed to lie at the centre of the autobiographical work, I propose the spectator. Autobiographical performances are very deliberately addressed to, and may variously hope to raise consciousnesses and educate, politicise, incite, anger, move, and inspire. Understanding the relationship between representation and experience, the aim of autobiographical performance, which works specifically with the matter of real life, is to transcend the theatrical frame and return to the realm of the transformable “real.” Autobiographical performances represent the already lived in order to beckon us towards, urge us to imagine, or compel us to create the yet to be lived. Bearing in mind this liminal space that exists in autobiographical performance—between performance and life—most performers create a mode of address that acknowledges the spectator’s presence, alongside the theatrical context. Though there may well be a stage space and an auditorium, rarely is there a fourth wall separating them. Tim Miller, for example, talks directly to his audience, often inviting them to participate vocally. In My Queer Body (1994), after drawing attention to his stage entry, he physically touches them, metaphorically bringing their bodies onto the stage which in turn becomes shared. Notably, in Miller’s later solo performance, Glory Box, he deliberately foregrounds the “yet to be lived” in order to bring home the reality of the present—that which we are already living. Glory Box focuses on Miller’s long‐term relationship with his partner Alistair in order to reveal the systemic inequality
32 Mikhail Bakhtin/V.N.Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MASS.: Harvard University Press, 1973); extract in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994) 35.
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and very real impact of legislation on the lives of thousands of gay men and lesbians in the USA.33
Tim Miller, Glory Box. Photo Darrell Taylor
Though Miller and his partner have been together since 1994, Alistair, an Australian, faces deportation. If they were heterosexual, their relationship would be recognised and Alistair could legally stay in the country. Narrating this story, Miller interweaves tales of other instances of homophobia he has faced throughout his life. He also interweaves a theatrical “as if”—showing us what it will be like if (when?) Alistair is refused entry back into the USA. Miller strategically mixes the autobiographical, mediated past with the purely fictional “future.” At the end of the “make‐believe” story, Alistair is “next in line” at the airport immigration desk.34 It has taken him the entire show to get here. The immigration officer informs 33 Miller puts the figure at 100,000. 34 My thanks to Tim Miller for a copy of the script for Glory Box. This has also been published in Tim Miller, Body Blows: Six Performances (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) 203‐241.
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Alistair that, as they have reason to believe he has “developed significant ties to certain persons in the US and that you will have no intention of leaving the US,” he is being denied entry and will be returned to Australia on the next plane. Miller’s attempts at intervention are useless, and an officious cop tears them apart, dragging Alistair off in a chokehold. Alistair, looking over his shoulder, begs that Miller “do something! Don’t let them send me back!” Miller, in turn, is being dragged out the exit. You assholes, he’s my lover, my partner, my husband. You can’t do this. I’m a fucking American citizen. I have rights! You can’t do this.
Of course, under current legislation, this is precisely what the Immigration Officers can do—and in fact do do on a daily basis, and will continue to do to thousands of lesbians and gay men until there is a change in the legislation. Like his lover Alistair, then, Miller is appealing to us, those in the auditorium tonight, to “do something!” By foregrounding this dramatic scene as an explicitly fictional autobiographical moment, Miller makes us aware that the actual story—the ending—has not yet been written. It is, in fact, yet to be written and in that sense, importantly, this scene can be rewritten. The outcome of this “real” story—Miller’s and Alistair’s autobiography—depends on the bringing about of real changes in the legislature. Miller, then, through constructing a “future‐orientated” dimension to his autobiography is willing the audience to provide the ending for the “real” story.35 It is the spectators’ activity that will determine how Miller’s and Alistair’s life‐story turns out (in relation to the issue of immigration, at least). This surely puts a different spin on the post‐structuralist notion of the “spectator as author” for in this instance, the spectator, through his or her 35 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) 293.
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actions (which include doing nothing) will actually author Miller’s autobiographical story. By talking to the spectators, in shared time and space, Miller addresses them as active and present subjects and attempts to activate them, transforming them into activists. As Miller himself acknowledges, it is these activated spectators who are the “absolutely crucial agents for change.”36 Where Miller makes an appeal for action to the spectator, Sally’s Rape, by Robbie McCauley, makes an appeal for dialogue, understanding dialogue as crucial to change. First performed in 1989 Sally’s Rape initially carried a subtitle: The Whole Story—The Past Becomes the Present in this Portrait of Survival within Today’s Plantation Culture.37 This made transparent McCauley’s aim to connect past to present, she to me, and I to you, where the “past” is the institution of slavery and the rape of women as part of that institution and the “present” is pervasive (institutionalised) racism. The Sally of Sally’s Rape is McCauley’s great‐great‐grandmother and therefore, as Harvey Young reminds us, McCauley literally carries the body of her great‐great‐grandmother within her. This history of rape is very directly and literally her own, present story.38 In Sally’s Rape, “the past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present.”39 For Rebecca Schneider, as for each of us, “implicit in the visibility of my “whiteness” is a host of invisible bodies—a host of counter‐memories that reverberate between us.”40 In one scene, McCauley stands naked on a table, as if on a slave auction block, while actress Jeannie Hutchins asks the spectators to chant “Bid ’em in.” Many “white” critics have 36 Tim Miller, “Out of the Box,” Theater 31.3 (2000): 90. 37 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997) 174. 38 Harvey Young, “Touching History: Suzan‐Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley and the Black Body,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23:2 (April 2003): 146. 39 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) 33. 40 Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 159.
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reflected on how painful this moment is for them.41 Certainly, as a spectator at Sally’s Rape during its presentation at the ICA, London (1995), I recognised, like Vivian Patraka, that participating in this event meant acknowledging my “complicity” or “connection” to it which served in turn to bring this history closer.42 Of course, as both McCauley and Rebecca Schneider make clear, an actual, literal genealogy is not what is at stake here. Rather, the connections are to be found in “historical” events, “regardless of bloodlines” and it is those shared histories that continue to supply the blood flow to our still troubled contemporary veins, where the pulse of racism beats steadily.43 The “auction scene,” then, inflicts what Jill Bennett calls an “affective prick” which accompanies “the realization ‘I am in this scene,’ it affects me, I am a witness.”44 In Sally’s Rape, one is not only “implicated” because one is called upon to be a witness; rather, the “prick” is also a realisation that one is bearing witness to a shared historical past. Harvey Young has suggested that McCauley “locates the misplaced and mislaid body of black history, listens to its story, channels it through her, and then prepares to properly memorialize it.”45 His reference to channelling and memorialising might suggest that McCauley’s performance enacts a cathartic exorcism. However, McCauley insists that her work is rather the catalyst for a beginning, providing an “opening for movement” and creating “the groundwork for dialogue.” Confronting cultural and historical taboos, including the admission of shame and guilt, for example, or “speaking the
41 See Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance 174; Deborah Thompson, “Blackface, Rape, and Beyond: Rehearsing Interracial Dialogue in Sally’s Rape,” Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 135. 42 Vivian Patraka, “Robbie McCauley: Obsessing in Public. Interview by Vivian Patraka,” A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage, ed. Carol Martin (London: Routledge, 1996) 212. 43 Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance 159. 44 Jill Bennett, “Arts, Affect, and the ‘Bad Death’: Strategies for Communicating the Sense Memory of Loss,” Signs 28:1 (Autumn 2002): 348. 45 Young, “Touching History,” 151.
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unspeakable,” the work of her performance is to get each of us to share our own stories in response to hers.46 McCauley’s belief in the necessity of dialogue in order to move forward is reflected in the dramaturgy of the performance. Though based on her own family history— monologic in content, then—the form of Sally’s Rape explicitly configures “dialogue” as the work was made in collaboration with white actress Hutchins. McCauley explains in her author’s note to the published text that “some of the scripted dialogue in this piece came out of my conversations over tea with Jeannie Hutchins. Some of it emerged from improvisations during our performances.”47 Choosing to confront the racial tensions in wider culture, and most particularly the existence of racism, McCauley conducts that exploration within the making and performing of the piece itself. Throughout the performance McCauley and Hutchins themselves stage dialogue around experiences relating to race, including the experience of engaging in open, and often difficult conversation. Most crucially, this dialogue is improvised in performance and its outcome is unknown in advance; the “risk” is real. The spectators are also directly included within the dialogic structure as they are asked to contribute to the performance by offering scripted exchanges at key moments. McCauley and Hutchins mark this interaction as belonging to some communal ritual event by allocating “parts” to the spectators at the same time that they distribute food. Establishing Sally’s Rape as a ritual means that the spectators are active participants, rather than merely passive observers. The “cast list” of players in the published script even includes “AUDIENCE, those who are there, who witness and talk back” (218). This participative element of the performance continues to the “end” of the piece, which, matching McCauley’s perceptions that the work is in 46 See Patraka “Robbie McCauley.” 47 Robbie McCauley, “Sally’s Rape,” Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African‐American Women, ed. Sydné Mahone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994) 218. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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fact an “opening,” sets the stage for the beginning of dialogue between the spectators. Mirroring the praxis of McCauley and Hutchins, the Epilogue, entitled, “Leaving the Audience Talking,” provides the opening for the actual work that the performance hopes to have prompted. Before walking off stage, McCauley instructs each spectator to “turn to somebody else and find out something” (237). McCauley recognises that speaking about the difficult issues circulating around race relations is itself a useful act (213). Resisting closure, Sally’s Rape also resists presuming that dialogue will simply result in the overcoming of differences. The “effective history” that McCauley performs for us is not that of “reconciliation to all the displacements of the past,” not a “completed” or “continuous” development.48 McCauley is not, then, “talking about ‘we shall all hug and overcome everything’” (214). Nor is dialogue proffered as “cure.” Becky Becker makes the point that examining differences might in fact result in “misunderstandings” although, after Peggy Phelan, she also recognises that misunderstandings could themselves be considered “generative and hopeful,” providing “opportunities for conversation.”49 4. Collaborative Practice Where most autobiographical performances are constructed with spectators in mind (and these spectators are themselves multiple), some also deliberately court the active participation of the spectator in the creation of the project—transforming them into authors/performers in the process. A participatory mode inevitably causes the monologue to fracture. Mike Pearson’s Bubbling Tom (2000), commissioned to “mark” in
48 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977) 152‐153. 49 Becky Becker, “Robbie McCauley: A Journey Toward Movement,” Theater Journal 52 (2000): 519‐42; 523. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) 174.
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small and personal ways the Millennium, provides a useful example of the aesthetic and critical impact of collaborative “scripting.” For this performance, and for the first time in his long career, Mike Pearson chose to return to Hibaldstow, the home of his childhood.50 Working with the evocative Welsh notion of “y filltir sgwar,” the square mile of our childhood, a place that we know intimately and “in a detail we will never know anywhere again,” Pearson performed a guided tour of Hibaldstow, stopping in ten sites that held personal childhood significance (181). His concern was to find “ways of telling,” luring the spectators in through the “grain of the voice”— “chatting, lecturing, reciting, orating, seducing” (175).51 Accompanied on the tour by only a small number of spectators, the majority of whom were residents in the village, the performance space Pearson engendered enabled close encounters. It’s 1953 again and I’m on the move. We’re whizzing down East Street and I’m clinging onto Dad’s handlebars, perched on the small saddle fixed to his crossbar. He recently brought home a tortoise in his saddle‐bag. Found it on Station Bridge, where Granddad Pearson once met a red light swinging in the fog. Gingerly, he pedalled forward, to find that the lamp was tied to the tail of an elephant. [179]
Pearson had hoped that his telling of personal stories would prompt other stories of the places passed through. To Pearson’s own surprise, those other stories were actually offered during the performance itself. At each stop on his guided tour Pearson’s largely scripted performance was spontaneously and unpredictably added to, interrupted, and challenged with other stories offered by the spectators who knew this place as well as, or better than, or differently to Pearson himself. Bubbling Tom 50 Mike Pearson, “Bubbling Tom,” Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the Marking of Time, ed. Adrian Heathfield (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000) 175. Subsequent references cited in text. 51 See also Roland Barthes, Image‐Music‐Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977).
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unwittingly became a model for participatory performance where the content or “script” of the piece was largely dictated by the spectators52 Spectators in fact became equal participants in the performance event as Pearson’s monologue became a dialogue, full of interruptions, counter‐memories, gaps, overlaps, debates, arguments … The performance structure of Bubbling Tom, an example of an “aesthetically produced instance of democratic sociability,” provided the space for different and often unexpected memories.53 Geographer Doreen Massey proposes that we imagine space “as a simultaneity of stories‐so‐far,” and this seems uncannily appropriate to Pearson’s performance.54 Michel de Certeau also usefully reminds us that stories, potentially at least, serve to “diversify, rather than totalize.”55 Prompting recollection, Bubbling Tom also prompted the animation and further reinvention of this place called Hibaldstow as the spectators re‐ plotted and reshaped both the place and the performance, rendering the “community” of Hibaldstow diverse in the process. In performing “at home,” with others, what Pearson in fact brought home was that place, including local or intimate place, is fractured, layered, multiple—a babble of voices rather than an authoritative monologue. The title, Bubbling Tom, refers to a stream called Bubbling Tom where local lore has it that if you sip from its source you will always return to the village. The final stop on Pearson’s tour was this source, or “origin.” To mark the end, Pearson had planned that everyone would congregate in this locally “significant” place. In fact, what actually happened was that “whole groups of people [were] heading off in different directions saying, ‘No, it’s here,’ ‘No,
52 Pearson, interview with the author, Cardiff, 2001. 53 Shannon Jackson, “Touchable Stories and the Performance of Infrastructural Memory,” Remembering: Oral History Performance, ed. Della Pollock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 62. 54 Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage Publications, 2005) 9. 55 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1988) 107.
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it’s here.’”56 This unscripted moment of live theatre offered itself as an apposite and entirely unexpected symbolic finale. In the end, there was no agreement on where Bubbling Tom actually was; the “origin” or “source” could not be located. If the dialogic form that Pearson’s solo performance took was unplanned, Adrian Howells’s solo confessional performances actively and deliberately solicit collaboration with the spectators in order to conjure an intimate exchange. Adopting a persona called “Adrienne,” but nevertheless performing autobiographical revelations, Howells strategically interrupts his own monologue by inviting spectators to share their autobiographical reflections in turn. Howells’s work, then, formally resembles the structure of dialogue; he speaks, I speak, he speaks, I speak. Though Howells constructs a broad framework for each of his performance encounters, within this the “script” is entirely improvised. Howells may prompt certain trains of conversation, but he does also really listen to what each spectator says, and responds to the specifics of that before moving the conversation on. For Salon Adrienne (2006), for example, Howells took over a real salon in the West End of Glasgow. Each spectator was booked in for an appointment with him—a one‐to‐one encounter which included having one’s hair washed, getting an Indian head massage, and enjoying a cup of tea and biscuits. Each action was accompanied by an appropriate exchange of information. As “Adrienne” massaged my head, he told me how his mum used to wash his hair in the bath when he was a child; and of the jug of clear water she used to rinse it off. Listening to him, I recalled my own bath time rituals as a child, the same bath water used consecutively by each person—first my younger brother, then me, then older brother, then my mum, who would keep topping it up with newly hot water; I saw the white plastic measuring jug used for hair washing. I also remember the first time I washed my own
56 Pearson, interview with the author, Cardiff, 2001.
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hair—the responsibility I felt for ensuring that I washed all the foam clean away; and the distinctive smell of an apple shampoo that used to attract wasps. As “Adrienne” rinsed off the conditioner, he asked me when someone other than a hairdresser had washed my hair for me. I couldn’t remember. I was surprised—and disappointed—that I couldn’t remember. Later, facing the mirror as he gently brushed my wet hair, “Adrienne” confided to me that he has not always been comfortable in his body, but that he has grown into it as he watches it age. In response, I talked about how it felt to look at myself in the mirror, about being 36 years of age, and teaching students who are always 17 or 18; I get older, they stay the same. I also talked about my mother, who died of cancer at the age of 42.
Adrian Howells, Salon Adrienne. Photo Niall Walker
This unplanned dialogue continued for a whole hour; the time passed quickly. Howells’s memories prompted mine; his reflections reverberated with mine. It was undoubtedly the most sincere encounter I had had all week. When did someone [181]
last ask you anything about yourself? When did they listen so intently to what you had to say? When did someone last give you the time and space to think before speaking? Unlike the “script” usually performed in the hairdresser’s (or indeed the therapist’s office), Howells gives of himself before asking of you.57 He also gives the impression that he actually cares about the questions he asks and the answers they solicit. In Howells’s work, the exchange of dialogue is a gift and the performance is us much about you as it is about him. Conclusion Though critiques of autobiographical performance typically deploy the adjectives egotistic, solipsistic and narcissistic, in my own spectatorship of autobiographical performance over the past decade I have most often encountered performances that strategically walk the fine line between essentialising the individual and assuming a common “we”; between insisting on lived experience whilst also recognising the historical, cultural and discursive imperatives enabling that experience; between “the past” and “the future.” Talking from the experiences of the “self,” whilst also subjecting those experiences to critical scrutiny, performers enable or instigate a dialogue, recognising that the act of performance is an act of communication. It is the potential of autobiographical performance to act as a “bridge” or “window” between performer and spectator, and between performance and world, that makes the form appealing to so many “marginalised” subjects. In place of the self‐interested monologue, autobiographical performances frequently press into service a dialogic form or structure, and therefore solicit from the spectator their own autobiography. British performer Bobby Baker, though a seasoned practitioner of the solo 57 The relationship between “confessional” performances and therapeutic practices is explored in my chapter “The Resistant Confessions of Bobby Baker,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill (London: Routledge, 2006) 137‐153.
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autobiographical form, persistently worries that her performances might be considered “self‐indulgent.”58 However, neatly capturing the paradoxical dialogic property adhering to this supposedly “monologic” form, Baker reflects that after Box Story (2001) the: audience actually don’t come away from the show very often talking about my life … They actually relate to it as people, they’ve had that experience, or similar experiences … I heard some sort of fantastic stories about people leaving the show and then standing on the pavement for a long time telling each other stories.59
Baker understands that people make stories up in order “to make sense of the world.”60 Live autobiographical performances can capitalise on theatre’s unique temporality, its here and nowness, and on its ability to respond to, and engage with, the present, always keeping an eye on the future. It is precisely the nowness of autobiography when conjoined with performance, and the potentiality that resides in this nowness, that makes it vital and filled with vitality. As Della Pollock comments, performance is a promissory act. Not because it can only promise possible change but because it catches its participants—often by surprise—in a contract with possibility: with imagining what might be, could be, should be.61
I take the term “participants” to refer to the spectator as much as the creator. Though all performances must reckon with the act of communication, the relationship that autobiographical performances (performances that are ostensibly at least about
58 59 60 61
Bobby Baker, interview with the author, London, 2001. Baker, interview. Baker, interview. Della Pollock ed., Remembering: Oral History Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 2.
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some “self”) attempt to forge with the spectator (some other “self”) seems to be particularly heightened. Autobiographical performance encourages the production of other tellings, an exchange between other selves; both the selves within and without.
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Catharine McLean‐Hopkins
Performing Autologues: Citing/Siting the Self in Autobiographic Performance Situated in a specific time and place, the autobiographical subject is in dialogue with her own process and archives of memory. The past is not a static repository of experience but always engaged from a present moment, itself ever‐changing. Moreover, the autobiographical subject is also inescapably in dialogue with the culturally marked differences that inflect models of identity and underwrite the formation of autobiographical subjectivity … In effect, autobiographical telling is performative; it enacts the “self” that it claims has given rise to an “I.” And that “I” is neither unified nor stable— it is fragmented, provisional, multiple, in process.1
Autobiography embraces a range of multidisciplinary forms which, at times, have been dismissed as representing the merely personal yet, more recently, claimed as the forms most capable of capturing and representing the performative, unstable nature of subjectivity. Autobiographic performance is a form of autobiography that theatrically stages the self. Theories of autobiographic performance have drawn from Life‐ Writing and Performance and the field has recently seen the
1 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson eds., Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 9.
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publication of several works.2 These works examine a range of both biographical and autobiographical performance genres which encompass performed representations of a life. Autobiographical performance is distinguished from biographical performance, by the presence, in performance, of the subject. Many, if not most, autobiographical performances employ a clearly recognisable monologue form as their narrative device. Autobiographical performances perform the disclosure of an interior, private world to an exterior, public audience. This essay will consider the use of this narrative form in autobiographical performance and in particular in the autobiographical works of British performer Bobby Baker. Autobiographical monologues appear to be distinct in that they are one performer speaking their remembered selves themself. The live presence of their body complicates the representation of a remembered yet multiple, fragmentary and passing self which creates a complex discursive dynamic between the performer, the performed and the spectators. Autobiographical performers are speaking, live, the complexities of their own remembered subjectivities: performing autologues. With origins in performance and fine art Bobby Baker’s series of live performances incorporate the verbal, visual, spatial, temporal and aural structures of theatrical representation in minutely devised performances that theatrically create a pictorial representation of emotions having their foundations in personal experience. She performs an attempt to reconcile the remembered past, in the present, 2 Recent publications include: Grace Sherrill and Jerry Wasserman eds., Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006); Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner eds., Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Lynn Miller, Jacqueline Taylor and Heather M. Carver eds., Performing Women’s Autobiography: Voices Made Flesh (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson eds., Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
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cohering around a narrative of memory, a comic persona and a painterly composition undertaken in a tone that draws from British comic theatre traditions. She incorporates the transgressive use of food as a painterly medium as she performs, the usually, private activity of artistic composition imbuing her performances with an imagery most frequently located in the uncelebrated and equally private world of her own feminine, domestic domain. The performed reiterations of her remembered selves and memories trace a personal journey from her art school days of the seventies to her most recent performance How to Live.3 The apparent ordinariness of her life as a woman / mother / daughter / wife allows for an examination of the process by which she reinterprets her selves as she passes through the predictable patterns of family life. The inter‐performance discourse layers revelation and testimony across an extraordinary career of performance and presents a project of interpretation and reinterpretation. Performance and the devising of performance appear to be a personal strategy for self evaluation and reconciliation. Bobby Baker’s performances tackle personal questions staging her internal emotional conflicts with painful levels of exposure whilst her comic façade belies her anger and ameliorates the intensity of personal confession. It is frequently claimed, and sometimes lamented, that we live in an age of confession. Grace Sherrill and Jerry Wasserman argue that the popular appeal of the autobiographical is the product of a “me” culture and that the autobiographical forms of memoir, film, documentary, portrait, blogs etc. reveal a deep and pervasive insecurity which is reflected in the western
3 Bobby Baker, How to Live, Barbican Theatre, London, Nov. 2004. Many of Bobby Baker’s performances are available on video or DVD from: Arts Admin, Toynbee Studios, London, E16AB, UK. They can be ordered online from: [email protected].
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preoccupation with memory.4 Hovering around the anxieties about the proliferation of these forms is a view that the everyday life of the ordinary person is not worthy of reproduction, that it calls both the person and the art into question; however, Sherrill and Wasserman claim these forms represent a crucial site for archiving cultural memory5 and autobiographical performance can be considered as just such an archive. The individual’s stories are the stories of a community in that they represent the remembered construction of social identity both as narrative and as embodiment. Live autobiographic performance, like all live performance, is an ephemeral repository in which cultural memories are archived which is complicated by the presence and continuance of the performer’s body. The live, autobiographic performer already represents an archive of cultural memory. The body contains the inscription of experience and is an integral component of the narrative. The potential for the body and the narrative to represent different versions of subjectivity offers the spectator a complex interpretive role. The effects of cumulative experience, of living, are a crucial site for the examination of subjectivity. The exchange of meaning between audience and performer is vitally informed by extracting meaning from the body before them. The live presence of the body creates a complex renegotiation between the narratives of memory, the impersonation of the self and the daily “reading” of bodies as practiced in everyday life. Bobby Baker both plays with and against her embodied inscriptions. Her performance of the personal is a display of her social construction albeit a fragmentary and unstable construct. Her repeated negotiations of memory and subjectivity through a performance life concerned with representing the personal become a complex reproduction of social construction which as
4 Grace Sherrill and Jerry Wasserman eds., Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006) 15. 5 Sherrill and Wasserman, Theatre and Autobiography, 15.
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performance becomes the far from everyday revelation of subjectivities. Susan Bennett writes that the body in autobiographical performance complicates the argument that autobiographies can only resort to fictive structures.6 The argument that the act of representing memory, creating narrative, is a fictive process and that autobiography therefore contains the conditions of fiction within it seems at first even more apt when considering the relatively narrow strictures of live performance, however, as Bennett writes, it is the very liveness of the event that accentuates the problem of the body for autobiography. Identity here is complicated by the relationship between the autobiography and the autobiographer which in performance are both present and open to interpretation by the spectator. In its physical presence the body is not simply those identities it claims for itself but also those identities claimed on its behalf. The body’s signification as an archive of lived experience enacts its inescapable history. The body has itself been scripted prior to its subject matter and is an account of all experiences leading to the present moment, the archive of a life lived.7 The identity of the self being representing in autobiography is itself open to contestation and change. Paul John Eakin argues that the self suggests something too fixed and unified to represent the complexity of subjectivity.8 “The self” rather describes an awareness of subjectivity in process. He claims that identity formation happens at the subconscious level and we cannot expect to witness the emergent sense of self precisely because it is an ongoing process. There is always a rupture that divides us from the past we are attempting to construct and the moment those memories were created.9 This tension between
6 Susan Bennett. 3D A/B, in Theatre and Autobiography, eds. Grace Sherrill and Jerry Wasserman (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006) 35. 7 Bennett, 3D A/B, 35. 8 Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999) x. 9 Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, xi.
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the remembered past and the present self informs the sense of enquiry of much autobiographical performance. As a woman Bobby Baker could be said to be claiming a contested space for her self in a political move which is central to the work of many women autobiographical performers. Claire MacDonald describes Baker’s career as an exemplary feminist project performing as she has alongside the development of feminism from the second wave onward.10 She maintains that “women artists had to struggle to negotiate the relationship between women as the object of artistic representation and the woman artist as agent and author of her work.”11 Similarly, Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner contend that it is possible to see much autobiographical work by women in the theatre as an attempt to claim agency and reinsert themselves as part of a constructed group identity into a theatre history, a cultural moment, or performance space from which they, as women, have been rendered absent. A sense of absence is a recurring image among autobiographic performances especially for women performers for whom agency has been problematic and contested. Performers are inevitably influenced by their social, economic, historical positions and this history includes the history of women in theatre.12 As Lynn Miller relates women autobiographical performers can both resist and transform existing autobiographical traditions and that encounters between live performers as live spectators always have political and social consequences, all the more so for performers whose access to the stage and to
10 Claire MacDonald, “Assumed Identities: Feminism, Autobiography, and Performance Art,” The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells (London: Taylor Francis, 1995) 188. 11 MacDonald, “Assumed Identities,” 189. 12 Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner eds., Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 4.
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authority has been hard won.13 Sherrill extends such an observation still further when she states: At their best, auto/biographical plays are profoundly philosophical; they probe and weigh what it means to claim a personal or national identity—to use the first person pronoun and assert I (or even not I )—to make ethical choices that affect, or have affected, the actual lives of other real people, and they challenge the social construction of identity by staging processes of identity formation that invite audiences to see themselves and others as able to recreate identity and to reassert personal agency.14
If women’s autobiographical performance displays, reveals and performs identity construction then Judith Butler’s theorising of the performative nature of gender construction has a particular resonance for a performance act that interrogates subjectivity and identity. Butler argues that gender is created through sustained and reiterated social performance, a performance which is never stable or authentic.15 Gender can be considered as a learned, socially regulated, reiterated performance. These repetitive series of acts are performative in that the acts are real only in their performance and the effect the performance produces. There is no “reality” referred to by these acts, but it is the reiterations of these stylised acts that produce the effect of gender. Bodily gestures, movement and styles constitute the illusion of an enduring, gendered self. Autobiographical performance could be considered to reveal the self‐awareness of engaging with those performative iterations of gender construction.
13 Lynn Miller, Jacqueline Taylor and Heather M. Carver, eds. Performing Women’s Autobiography: Voices Made Flesh (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) 3. 14 Sherrill and Wasserman, Theatre and Autobiography, 15. 15 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990)
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In her examination of American performers Spalding Gray and Karen Finley (both of whom have produced a series of autobiographical performances over long performing careers), Susan Bennett explores how the presence of the performer’s body in autobiographical performance complicates interpretations of subjectivity.16 She considers the nature of the relationship an audience may have with a serial autobiographical performer and asserts that “the body in live performance can provide a critique of an assigned identity.”17 So for instance, Karen Finley’s body itself is in public circulation because of her insistence that in her performance work she has a body and that its effects are borne significantly in her life. The body is not protected by the contextual framework of a work of art and neither can it escape from its accumulation of signification outside the aesthetic practice itself. She further argues that the singularity of autobiographical subject as author and performer can hardly fail to produce an over significance and emphasis upon the spectator’s response to the body against which the narrative competes. It seems self evident, Bennett asserts, that the body has the ability to produce signification that the autobiographical subject, author, performer cannot restrict or control.18 Bobby Baker shares a repertoire of themes similar to those explored by Karen Finley but performs a seemingly very different political and artistic polemic. The comedy in Baker’s work masks the brutality of her underlying emotions. Where Bennett describes Karen Finley in American Chestnut showing a video of herself expressing breast milk onto black velvet, Baker in Drawing on a Mother’s Experience uses milk in baby bottles— safe sanitised containers—to represent her own milk as she paints an almost invisible mark on the sheet of her “drawing.”19 16 17 18 19
Bennett, 3D A/B, 35. Bennett, 3D A/B, 39. Bennett, 3D A/B, 41. Bennett, 3D A/B, 39.
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She says to the audience “don’t worry, it isn’t …” which elicits a laugh of embarrassed recognition, a moment that will resonate differently as Baker moves beyond the reproductive years. The video in one and the comedy in the other provide a layer of representation between the abject leaky body and maternal function, both diffusing and drawing attention to the maternal body. In contrast to Finley, Baker’s aggressive and brutal emotions are performed through a British comic persona that draws upon theatrical traditions of stand up, pantomime and drag. It is the speaker in her exaggerated self impersonation that gets away with it and the carefully devised work anticipates reaction to a female character ridiculing herself. Whereas Finley’s provocative performance work and the publicity associated with it has brought death threats,20 Baker’s self parody appears to accept her marginal and ridiculous status, contentious only because she has claimed centre stage. Her safety resides in the familiarity and traditional marginalisation of her middle aged female character, however as she has said herself she sees her work as being deeply political. Her personally specific sites for performance are sometimes fraught with deep emotions that in performance are not highlighted. Box Story,21 for example, appears to be a performance about fate and reminiscence. There are obvious visual references throughout the piece to Christian belief as well as earlier foundational belief systems. Despite being the usual comic performance structured around storytelling and containing the performed composition of, in this case, a world map, Baker is a woman who is so angry at the arbitrary, early death of her father when she was sixteen years old, that she 20 Bennett. 3D A/B, 40. Susan Bennett describes how, on the day of the first performance of American Chestnut at The American Repertory Theatre, Harvard, Karen Finley had received death threats and would need a police escort. It is widely known that Finley always travels with her baby daughter. 21 Bobby Baker, Box Story, Performed at St Luke’s Church, Holloway, London July 2001. London International Festival of Theatre, (LIFT). (available on DVD from Arts Admin.
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stages her rage within her own church and challenges her own God. Furthermore she has invited an audience, clearly not a congregation, to bear witness to this rage. Smith and Watson write that features of autobiographical representation are situated in a specific time and place and that the autobiographical subject is in dialogue with her own process and archives of memory.22 The past is not a static repository of experience but is always engaged from a present yet ever changing moment. The autobiographical subject is also inescapably in dialogue with the culturally marked differences that inflect models of identity and underwrite the formation of autobiographical subjectivity. Autobiographical telling is performative in that it enacts the “self” that it claims has given rise to an “I,” an “I” that is neither unified nor stable but fragmented, provisional, multiple and always in process.23 For Baker, Finley and other autobiographical performers this dialogue between the subject and their archived, yet unstable, memory is carried on over a series of performed self representations. Their memories in performance are revisited from the altered subjectivity of the, inevitably, older performer. Their performances are a process of interrogation and negotiation, an inter‐performance and extra‐performance discourse that is an ongoing exploration of their subjectivity. If the monologue in autobiographical performance may be called an autologue it is distinguished as a self‐narrated performance of the self—a performance practice that both cites the self as remembered iterations of identity performance and sites the self with the theatrical frameworks of space, time and presence. It is the embodied, inscribed performance of a life performing a partial, remembered and narrativised telling of that story, an interplay of spoken, ordered, theatrically structured representation of memory that is inevitably in relationship with the inescapable physical inscription of that same life upon the body of the performer. 22 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 9. 23 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 9.
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Baker’s autologue is delivered in a persona that “speaks” in her daily voice but is delivered in the parody of a character for whom the daily trivia of domestic life and everyday detritus appear to have an importance out of all proportion to their ordinariness. Her direct address to the audience is reticent and tentative appearing to reveal insecurity at occupying the performance space and performing. This, as Lucy Baldwin describes, comprehends a very British gamut of emotions of reticence, hesitancy, embarrassment and irony.24 Baker asserts her identity in her declaration: “I am Bobby Baker, I am a woman, I am (x) years old,” as she calls attention to her performances as performance. As long as she can perform, her part can never become unplayable; she is playing her present self however her relationship to those memories, themselves recorded in a devised performance blue print at a specific time, will change. She exaggerates those features and traits most closely associated with a woman whose life is mostly lived in the domestic domain and invites the audience to regard her, her persona and her narrative as ordinary, everyday and belonging to the world of private family life. Drawing on a Mother’s Experience25 and Box Story are the two most directly autobiographical of Baker’s performance works. In an interview Baker discussed how she has oscillated between the very personal and the more general with each performance being aware of the frequent criticism of the autobiographical as self indulgent.26 As Smith and Watson have remarked, the two criticisms most frequently levelled at women’s autobiographical representation in self portrait, diary and performance are that they are “merely personal” and “merely narcissistic.”27 In these performances Baker narrates parts of her 24 Lucy Baldwin, “The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker’s Culinary Events,” The Drama Review 4 (Winter 1996): 37. 25 Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, Jackson Lane Theatre, London, Sept. 2000. How to Live, Barbican Theatre, London, 2004. 26 Unpublished interview with Bobby Baker interview with author, July 2003 and April 2003. 27 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 4.
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life story in performances structured around memory segments that are marked with the use of food. Drawing on a Mother’s Experience sets up the theatrical framework for many of her future performances and begins a series of performed autobiographical narratives that are framed by domestic image and personal recollection to produce a conflicting, fragmented, variously intense recollection of significant moments of her life. Drawing on a Mother’s Experience was first performed in 1988 and Box Story in 2001. Both performances recount memories which are marked by the transgressive use of food in performance as an artistic medium and memory marker. Both performances also generate a transitory work of art which combines all these memories that will, significantly, be cleared away almost without trace before the end of the performance. Drawing on a Mother’s Experience is performed on the site of a double sheet which Baker brings to the performance space in one of the two plastic shopping bags filled with the foods that will she will paint with. As she recounts memories of motherhood carefully avoiding anything but coyly oblique references to the physical details of motherhood she composes an abstract, painterly representation on the sheet with food stains. At the end of the piece, having all but obliterated her composition with a sifting of flour, she wraps herself in the sheet and takes the stains of experience that have seeped through the, now exposed, underside away with her. She exits the performance space wearing the sheet, dancing to Nina Simone’s My Baby Just Cares for Me. Box Story was first performed in St Luke’s Church, Holloway, London. Beginning with Baker entering the space from a side door carting an enormous appliance size box, which is, we discover, a box of boxes, she narrates memories from her earliest childhood memory to her recent past as a performer. Most of the memories are about seemingly significant events in the development of herself as artist, some directly about her performance and artistic career, others about moments that may have been integral with a psychological need to become an [196]
artist. In this performance a choir comments on each remembered event like a Greek chorus, the voice of conscience or her mother’s reprimands, all except for the story of her father’s death which is greeted with silence. Each memory is marked by a box of familiar household products which are emptied onto the church floor and used to compose a world map. The map is swept back into the largest box at the end of the performance and Baker takes her place, along with the sweepings, inside the box. After a sustained pause she cuts a hole with a knife from inside the box then, wearing the box in a parody of Christ carrying the cross, or Hope let out to rescue the world from the ills released by Pandora, she exits the performance space/church wearing responsibility. Baker has received critical attention as a feminist autobiographical performer where, as Adrian Heathfield writes, “the artist is both the subject and the object of the art work, claiming previously denied autonomy and agency disclosing private experience into the public arena in order to speak of an identity overshadowed by patriarchal culture.”28 However, he argues that her work is more elusive and innovative than this and refers to Claire MacDonald’s claim that the identity being performed in these works is much less stable that it appears where the use of an apparent monologue form in performance gives the appearance of the artist speaking their “real life.”29 MacDonald contends that in autobiographical performance there is a highly specific relationship implied between the performer and the performed which, when transgressed, can be politically explosive.30 Baker uses this relationship to disrupt and disturb in performances where art and life cross over to illuminate each other. The strategies address, disrupt and restore order and sense in the world. “We
28 Adrian Heathfield, “Risk in Intimacy: An Interview with Bobby Baker,” Performance Research 4.1 (Spring 1999): 97. 29 MacDonald, “Assumed Identities,” 193. 30 MacDonald, “Assumed Identities,” 193.
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build identities through improvising in the face of necessity, through actions and narratives.”31 Smith and Watson have written extensively about women’s autobiography and their recent work addresses what they call the “interface” between the textual and visual forms of self representation.32 Theatrical forms of representation inevitably engage with visual and textual forms and Smith and Watson’s framework of subjectivities can be usefully applied to women’s autobiographical performance. The multiple aspects of subjectivity they describe as existing at the interface of the textual with the visual are further complicated in performance by the embodied subject speaking herself at the interface of the textual, visual, performed and performative. They categorise subjectivity at the interface of textual and visual self representation as: memory, experience, identity, embodiment and agency. Examining each of these aspects in Baker’s work I will now consider the ways in which she creates autologues that represent her complex subject positions by citing and siting her self and remembered self in live theatrical performance. Memory Smith and Watson describe autobiographic subjectivity as actively creating meanings or interpretations of a past which is inevitably unstable, fragmentary and never fully recovered. Memory and the narrative of memory, is something which is culturally and historically specific and the recollection of memory, the narratives of memory, have to be learned in childhood as part of culturally coded communication acts. Memory is located in the specific practices of remembering in our bodies and in specific objects of our experiential histories.33 In Baker’s performance works the selection of stories and the way they are marked in performance represent her subjective 31 MacDonald, “Assumed Identities,” 194. 32 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 9. 33 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 9.
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position(s) as she uses food as a culturally specific memory object to signify the connection between past and present. The remembrance of food is a trigger for recounting sections of memory in a predictable pattern of narrative. Food, as well as being a symbol of nurture, becomes a symbol of inevitable disintegration and a signifier for mutability and decay, representing the unstable and uncertain traces of a lifetime’s work. Foods are culturally laden markers which, in Baker’s case, would be recognisable to most of audience members who grew up in Britain. The cultural significance and potential of food as a memory marker is indicated in the way that Baker uses intergenerational differences to locate herself within British middle class. In Drawing on a Mother’s Experience cultural change and intergenerational tension is signified by the differences between the food she prepares for her family and the food her mother brings to sustain her through the traumatic aftermath of childbirth. Her dialogue about not being able to use the bright orange (and it is implied, e‐number laden) breadcrumbs her mother uses in her own cooking both situates the audience members as complicit with Baker, the reference bringing the laughter of recognition, and the distance of intergenerational relationship. The “mother” referred to in the title, it becomes clear, is a complicated reference to both her mother and herself and their shared function in society. Baker’s story is not hers alone to tell and in citing herself as mother she inevitably cites her own mother. In her performance she uses food to claim an identity over and above her maternal function. Food and memory are deeply intertwined in family history and are always loaded with emotional importance and cultural significance. The mutability and culturally coded significance of food allow Baker to create an oblique performance representing her extreme emotions with reference to the abject female body as she variously reproduces the stains and emissions of childbirth. In a performance work that appears to be a retelling of the horrors of post partum depression the interwoven narrative, food markers and the drawing she produces combine [199]
to represent a performer who confesses she was very, very angry.34 Family relations appear as a continuing, discursive narrative through the series of Baker’s performance works. Her father, remembered for the smell of the old fashioned shaving soap on his neck, in How to Shop35 reappears in Box Story as she records how on the day of her exam results her father drowned during a family holiday. Still very angry at such a loss, her father, represented by mustard in the world picture being created at her feet, is a star is placed apart from the world that Baker has been left to inhabit. The comic tone of the performance however, alleviates the pain of witnessing the revelation of such deep personal emotion. The ritual of emptying the contents of a box re‐establishes for the audience an awareness of the performer as performer. Experience Smith and Watson describe experience as the process of becoming a subject with identity in the social realm; this identity is constructed through material, cultural, economic, and inter‐psychic relations. Autobiographical subjects do not, they note, predate their experience; they know themselves as subjects of particular kinds of experience attached to social status and identity.36 Baker uses personally specific performance sites to represent an important memory of location and experience. From her early work, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, sited in her own home, to the use of a double sheet in Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, her own kitchen in Kitchen Show and her own church in Box Story, Baker invites her audience to witness the sites of
34 Unpublished interview with Bobby Baker interview with author, July 2003 and April 2003. 35 Bobby Baker, How to Shop, Bedford College, University of London, 1993. Video, available from Arts Admin. 36 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 10.
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her own experience.37 By placing the audience within these personally specific sites the audience is provided with a point of comparison with the performed representation of that site at the same time as being thrust into a private domain which in performance becomes transgressive. In Drawing on a Mother’s Experience the site of the performance, a white double sheet, marks the intimately personal site of actual and artistic conception in a performance which interrogates her status as artist and her right as a mother to continue as an artist. She tells the audience where she has bought the sheet and how many she has had to buy for previous performances, making clear its representative status. In stiff, awkward movements Baker sets out the canvas with precision, claiming centre stage for a performed revelation of personal site as a public venue. The canvas is placed on the floor at an awkward angle for painting which forces the deliberate pace of the performance. As Baker performs the piece over the years her own movements become more aged and her voice breathless as the physical nature of her performance exacts a physical toll. In her performance of September 2000, she plays on her age (then approaching fifty) to exaggerate the comic effect of showing her knickers as she bends with her back to the audience to launch her food and drink at the canvas.38 The intensely personal site is transformed, in performance, into a public canvas that would usually be preserved as a work of art but in this case is erased and the sheet, we are told, will be washed to remove all stains. In a reverse of most artistic production where preservation is paramount, Baker performs her artistic creation to demonstrate a lack of identity, a lack of value ascribed to her experience and the sites in which they take place. The effects of her experience are erased as she is erased from recognition as an individual in society so that even
37 Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home 1976; Kitchen Show, Performance, Performer’s home, 1991. Video available from Arts Admin. 38 Bobby Baker, Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, Jackson Lane Theatre, Sept. 2000.
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as she achieves artistic production her work disappears almost without trace. Identity Smith and Watson claim that identities materialise within collectives and out of culturally marked differences that constitute symbolic interactions within and between collectives, however, these identities like social organisations and symbolic interactions are always in flux.39 Identities are therefore always discursive, provisional, intersectional and unfixed. Examining identity is the nature of the quest in putting a life on stage. Baker calls attention to the audacity of her claims to space on stage and invites the audience to laugh with her. She stakes her claim and the right to tell her own story by playing on the response to a flustered, middle aged, woman whose range of reference seems to be rigidly domestic. Wearing her trade mark, body masking, overalls that designate at different times the mantle of expert/medic/baker/patient/Madonna, Baker’s costume is gender, age and identity masking and always ambiguous. The shoes that are chosen for each performance are, by contrast, always clearly feminine, frequently pink, high heeled and usually removed during the performance. She declares her identity at the opening of each performance as she reminds the audience that mistakes have been made because of her gender ambiguous performance name and people may have expected a man. There is a sense that this gender subterfuge is how she has managed to stake a claim to the performance space. She gestures vaguely across her breasts that she is quite clearly a woman. Her apologetic, hesitant giggle and received pronunciation locates her performance persona within white, middle‐class, British womanhood. Although the overalls efface the feminine shape of her body she refers to her maternal body yet avoids the
39 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 10.
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specifics with an exaggerated wiping gesture saying “but don’t worry I won’t …” swiping her hands across her breasts or womb. Whilst performing this seemingly self effacing persona she uses food as paint to create the image of blood stains at once contained and made safe by the reference to a cold beef lunch, but sited and cited on the sheet to become both a visual and emotional retelling of the most abject parts of childbirth. In Box Story Baker enters wearing the overalls but this time in a Madonna blue that echoes the painted walls of the church and the colours of a triptych on the back wall behind her. She is wearing very high heeled, sparkly evening shoes in a matching shade of blue and having effected a laborious entrance pushing and carrying a large box, she establishes herself at the front of the performing space and continues her usual identity announcement. She then declares that the most important part of this show is … her shoes. The theatrical use of colour declares her position as a woman in a Christian church wearing a colour that widely represents the most important female figure in Christianity and visually establishes her link to the décor of the building. The visual composition of her performance space is symmetrical and ordered, pillars framing the area of performance. She has placed her large box centre front of the performing space, as an altar, and places herself in front of the altar claiming the traditionally male preserve. Each personal anecdote is accompanied with the addition of the boxed product being unleashed with abandon: cornflakes, matches, soap powder, representing the planet, seeds, the ozone layer. The fragility of human life and the randomness of fate are drawn against a personal narrative. In opening the box and organising their contents she is Pandora and Eve and Mary. Her quietly transgressive acts with domestic products in her church perform her female responsibility for the ills of the world. She assumes Pandora’s/Eve’s guilt as she declares “it is all my fault.” She is as a woman culpable and guilty, predestined and responsible assuming traditional role of woman as sinner and yet she complicates this identity by [203]
assuming, literally, in performance, the male position as interpreter of text. In her artistic creation she becomes the creator and the subject and in a clearly ambiguous relationship with her own beliefs. Embodiment Smith and Watson describe the body as a “textual surface upon which a person’s life is inscribed, the body is a site of autobiographic knowledge because memory itself is embodied.”40 They cite what Elizabeth Grosz called “the imaginary anatomy”41 which reflects social and familial beliefs about the body more than it does the body’s organic nature. The body is both a social and political body. The set of cultural attitudes and codes attached to the public meanings of bodies underwrites power relationships. This cultural encoding is an integral part of meaning making in theatre where culturally encoded body language creates significant meaning. The visual dominance of popular culture and the dominance of the visual in popular culture ensure that the reading of the body’s inscriptions has great immediacy and potentially a primacy against which other readings of the performer’s representation are interpreted. This subjectivity displayed by the live presence of the performer is the defining aspect of autobiographical performance. The complicated discourse set up between the self selected narrative of memory and the inscribed history of the performer upon the body creates a discursive performance practice. The body is read as a visual product whilst the narrative is interpreted as a textual/theatrical product. The two texts are unavoidably out of synch, the one a being in the
40 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 10. 41 Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as / at the Limit,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thompson (New York: New York University Press, 1996) 55‐66. Cited in Smith and Watson eds., Interfaces, 10.
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present and the other a present performance of a recollected past. The discursive dynamic resides in the exchange between the multiple versions of the self as they are performed. Performed versions are read as inevitably fragmentary but the embodied version is read as inescapably whole, encapsulated within the body’s boundaries with experience etched upon its surface and a summative product of the body’s experience. Baker uses her body to call attention to the incongruity of the middle aged female body on the stage claiming agency, identity and the self importance to claim centre stage. Her use of costume works to eliminate reading her body as only female as the overalls function as a symbol of a job or task rather than individual identity. The overalls suggest protection from the world of mess and represent a barrier between her body and her life’s work. In Take a Peek42 Baker used layers of white overalls to represent various stages of vulnerability in a performance which parodies the many medial examinations women are frequently subject to. The slow and tortuous revelation of the body and the person beneath the clothes performs the patient as object in a series of baffling medical examinations. At the end, however, she reveals, and revels in, her nakedness as she takes a bath in chocolate custard and covers herself in sugar sprinkles. This self display of a middle aged, female body, albeit partially hidden by custard and sugar sprinkles, challenges a visual culture dominated by youth and perfection. She displays her naked body as she demands the audience’s gaze upon this parody of erotic objectification. Her apparent abandoned enjoyment of the bath is inevitably received as the comic highlight of the performance and diverts attention from the naked middle aged female body on stage.
42 Bobby Baker, Take a Peek, Video of performance at The Royal National Theatre, London 1995.
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Agency The autobiographical is always a claim to agency in that it is inevitably an attempt to control the representation of the self. Smith and Watson argue that if the self and self knowledge are constituted through discursive practices then the process by which the autobiographical subject assumes agency over their self representations becomes complex.43 The discursive relationship that is held between the subject and the self created object which represents the subject is in a constant state of flux. Baker claims agency as a woman performance artist negotiating the right to perform and to perform herself. Baldwin outlines how she “uncovers the invisible, unacknowledged chores of motherhood and domestic life, which, unfinanced and disrespected, daily threaten to erode identity.”44 Baker is claiming agency in her transgressive performances which use the unpredictable translations of memory that cause us simultaneously to interpret the past through the gaze of the present and to invent the present as a response to the past.45 Geraldine Harris writes that Baker performs subjectivities which are at the same time not Bobby Baker and not not Bobby Baker, both an exaggerated theatrical character and the “real” thing.46 Both subjectivities are socially constructed and unique so that she is effecting a double movement by inhabiting an identity at the same time as calling it into question and therefore producing “a hiatus of iterability—a space of defamiliarisation.” It is this space, Harris argues, which potentially represents agency.47 The subjectivities of Smith and Watson’s framework indicate the complexity of unravelling autobiographical representation which, when considered in the light of the distinctive 43 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 10. 44 Lucy Baldwin, “The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker’s Culinary Events,” The Drama Review 4 (Winter 1996): 37. 45 Baldwin, “The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker’s Culinary Events,” 53. 46 Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) 137. 47 Harris, Staging Femininities, 137.
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conditions of autobiographical performance, demonstrate the ongoing discursive practice that is autobiographical performance. They claim that there are four ways in which artists may texture the interfaces between the textual and the visual regimes of self‐representation: relationally, contextually, spatially and temporally.48 Performing autologues uses each of these textures in a practice which cites the self and sites the self within a theatrical framework necessarily engages the audience in a discursive process of reflection which does not allow for a stable representation of the subject. Autobiographical performance is the setting of the autobiographical subject’s negotiation of their own subjectivity, a setting of revelation and disclosure which is continually challenged by the presence of the inscription of experience upon the live body. Baker’s performance practices engage, across a series of performances, with the potentials of self—representation. Although performed in a superficially comic theatrical form her engagement with the textual, visual and theatrical performs an intricate and complex examination of the performativity of subjectivity that is identity. Autologues, then, are the theatrical form of representing subjectivity: the speaking, live, of the complexities of the remembered construction of subjectivity, always in dialogue in performance, with the body of the subject.
48 Smith and Watson, Interfaces, 21.
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Rebecca D’Monté
Voicing Abuse/Voicing Gender The idea of the female voice, particularly that expressed in a public arena like the theatre, has always been considered a threat to society. Michelene Wandor, herself an actress and playwright, has noted that: the female dramatist provides “words, emotions, and an imaginative structure for others to inhabit and create anew onstage. A playwright—in this theoretical sense—thus makes other people speak and act—an act of public responsibility and control which is very rare indeed for women in other parts of society. No wonder, then, that even the woman playwright with the mildest of messages is bound to be seen as an anomaly, if not an actual threat. Who knows what she will say once she gives voice? Who knows what she will tell other people to say and do?”1
Once second‐wave feminism began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women’s access to theatrical language began to be raised by a number of feminist critics, who exposed the connection between the notion of women as “sign” and the dominance of
1 Michelene Wandor, Carry on, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (London: Routledge, 1986) 128.
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the “male gaze.”2 As Jane de Gay and Lizbeth Goodman have said, Speaking across and about gendered uses of language raises the question of whether the languages of theatre are patriarchal: that is, whether the linguistics of the play‐text and the conventions of gesture and symbol alike are sign‐systems that render women objects not subjects, spoken for and not speaking.3
In order to seize control of their own representation, women dramatists have utilised a number of different techniques: creating plays with all‐female casts, awakening audiences to the connection between the personal and the political, rewriting history as her‐story, and drawing on the sharing of common experiences to create a sisterhood. The theatrical monologue, as interpreted by women dramatists, has been another technique that focuses attention on the female voice and body. From the 1990s, this has become increasingly confessional, experiential and experimental, as boundaries are blurred between the autobiographical and the invented, helping to create an intimacy with the audience. It can thus be argued that, in a supposedly “post‐feminist” era, monologues are still a way for female dramatists and performers to privilege the female voice and to break the silence often allotted to women in the theatre. Whilst this would suggest a dramatic form that empowers, paradoxically the subject matter frequently focuses on physical and mental abuse. A prime example is Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues (1996), which can be seen as a direct descendant of 1970s feminist drama: angry, political, and demanding action. Gender 2 See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6‐18. 3 Jane de Gay and Lizbeth Goodman, “Introduction: Speaking in Tongues— Making (Sense of) Women’s Languages in Theatre,” Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women, eds. Jane de Gay and Lizbeth Goodman (Bristol: Intellect, 2003) 2.
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is at its centre, in that it is a play that looks at male violence against women for a primarily female audience. In contrast, the work of Claire Dowie and Sarah Kane opens up the monologue to engage with issues of abuse, but deliberately moves away from the concept of a fixed gender. Instead, questions of gender are embedded in the language, staging, and thematics, where it is represented as something slippery and unstable. The Vagina Monologues is nothing short of a theatrical phenomenon. Starting as an off‐off‐Broadway show in the 1990s, it went on to win the 1997 Obie Award, as well as being nominated for the Drama Desk and Helen Hayes Awards. Since then it has been seen around the world, fuelled by the supposedly liberatory possibilities of the female voice and celebrity endorsement.4 Based on interviews by Ensler with over 200 women, the monologues celebrate the vagina as a place of female empowerment, whilst contradictorily portraying actions of abuse perpetuated by men. The play is composed of, mainly, individual monologues—comic, tragic, inspiring; poetic, colloquial, narrative. This auto/biographical approach to theatre draws heavily from “The women’s movement, with its consciousness‐raising groups, [which] encouraged the exposure of personal material in public. Personal history was turned into art by decisions about structure and form; new structures and forms arose with the expression of this personal material.”5 The focus is upon the woman’s experience of her body. A few talk about the positive aspects of the vagina, as in masturbation, lesbianism, and giving birth. However, most are to do with different forms of abuse, from the internalisation of cultural perceptions of female genitalia, through trying to control the female body, to rape and incest. One woman’s husband “hated hair. He said it was cluttered and dirty. He made me shave my vagina. It looked 4 Famous women who have starred in the play include Glenn Close, Sophie Dahl, Whoopi Goldberg, Jerry Hall and Kate Winslet. 5 Lenora Champagne ed., Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990) xi.
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puffy and exposed and like a little girl.”6 A woman rages against the intrusions dreamt up by advertisers, doctors, fashion: there is “An army of people out there thinking up ways to torture my poor‐ass, gentle, loving vagina … Spending their days constructing psycho products and nasty ideas to undermine my pussy. Vagina motherfuckers” (69). Others talk about extreme forms of violation, most notoriously in “My Vagina was my Village”: “the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me. So cold, the steel rod cancelling my heart” (62). Underneath all of these monologues is the unspoken belief that patriarchy is at fault for all the atrocities in the world, of which those against women are only one part. Interspersed with the monologues are facts and observations about the vagina. Sometimes these present alarming statistics, as when the audience is told that “Genital mutilation has been inflicted on 80 [million] to 100 million girls and young women” (67). Other times, they are deliberately comic: “If your vagina could talk, what would it say, in two words?” Slow down. Is that you? Feed me. I want. Yum, yum. Oh yeah. [19]
This seesawing between different kinds of emotion has both the effect of inciting the audience to action, and of breaking up the intensity of feeling. Moreover, the audience is encouraged to purge their feelings about their bodies in a collective cathartic process through group chanting of the word, “cunt.” This use of a taboo word is designed to be shocking, but by the end, has turned into a shared activity of “sisterhood,” and so audience
6 Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues (London: Virago, 2001) 9. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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participation extends the performance space into the auditorium and beyond. Here Ensler extols the power of the collective voice. This “reclamation” of the female body, in some senses, takes up Hélène Cixous’s message that “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies … Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”7 The writing of the play was fuelled by Ensler’s own abuse at the hands of her father, and the familial secrecy in which it was shrouded. The original production started as a solo piece for Ensler herself. She claimed that by saying the word “vagina”: 128 times each show, night after night, naming my shame, exorcising my secrets, revealing my longing, was how I came back into my self, into my body. By saying it often enough and loud enough in places where it was not supposed to be said, the saying of it became both political and mystical and gave birth to a worldwide movement to end violence against women. The public utterance of a banished word, which represented a buried, neglected dishonoured part of the body, was a door opening, an energy exploding, a story unravelling.”8
Lenora Champagne has argued that using such intimate autobiographical material: was criticized as “confessional.” But this view overlooks the difference between confession and revelation. The role of the spectator was not that of pardoner, but of witness. In work based on the direct expression of the unspeakable—what is left 7 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” quoted in Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, ed. Leonora Champagne (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990) ix. 8 Eve Ensler, “The Power and Mystery of Naming Things” http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/vmoments/0603201.
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unsaid in culture—the author/performer becomes a mediator between (or medium for) this knowledge and the spectator.9
Writing and performing the story of her personal abuse becomes, for Ensler, a form of empowerment, and in connecting this with other accounts of male violence against women, she aims to further empower all women. In other words, as Elaine Aston suggests, “What Ensler does is to take a ‘70s style of radical feminism and give it a ‘90s makeover: takes consciousness‐raising and radical feminism as a basis for a more up‐to‐date style of self/sexual‐empowerment politics.”10 The pre‐eminence of the spoken word is stressed by Ensler: “I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what’s right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible.”11 So, a connection is made between the female body and the process of speech as a form of resistance. It is this naming and sharing of what Ensler sees as a universal experience that is so commanding. She notes: I think of women naming the atrocities committed against by them by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or women telling of the systematic rapes during the Bosnian war, or just recently in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, women lining up in refugee camps to name their nightmares and losses and needs. I have traveled through the world and listened as woman after woman tells of being date raped or acid burned, genitally mutilated, beaten by her boyfriend or molested by her stepfather. Of course the stories are incredibly painful. But I believe as each woman tells her story for the first time, she breaks the
9 Champagne, Out from Under, xi. 10 Elaine Aston, “A Good Night Out, For the Girls,” In‐Yer‐Face? British Political Drama in the 1990s, eds. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2007). 11 Aston, “A Good Night Out, For the Girls.”
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silence, and by doing so breaks her isolation, begins to melt her shame and guilt, making her experience real, lifting her pain.12
Here geographical, cultural, and social boundaries are irrelevant. All women who have suffered at the abusive hands of men are the same. The theatre becomes a place that can highlight the similarities between women and work to strengthen those bonds. Mary Brewer points out: Historically, women’s groups have recognised the importance of theatre as a means of disseminating women’s issues … Women’s theatre has proven to be one of the most social forms of a woman’s cultural production; performances have often worked as a form of group Consciousness Raising and have assisted women to develop political identities by providing a supportive context. At its best, women’s theatre has validated aspects of women’s culture that have been/are disparaged by the dominant. It has furnished women with information about and analysis of their various situations, helped to strengthen feminist solidarity, and provided entertainment free from the sexism prevalent in so much of the mainstream media.13
Yet Brewer herself recognises this as idealistic view, which suggests that all women’s experiences are the same, regardless of race, class, sexuality or culture. Eve Ensler grounds her play in a way that seems unaffected by the feminist debate in the 1970s over difference.14 She even admits herself that the subject matter was more important than the identity or “voice” of the woman who spoke it, stating at the beginning of the
12 Ensler, “The Power and Mystery of Naming Things.” 13 Mary F Brewer, Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Women’s Theatre: The Construction of ‘Woman’ (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1999) 3. 14 See, for example, Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985) 177‐210; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987). On how this relates to drama, see Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
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monologue, “Hair,” that “Some of the monologues are close to verbatim interviews, some are composite interviews, and with some I just began with the seed of an interview and had a good time. This monologue is pretty much the way I heard it.”15 Yet few clues are given to specifics of background. The stage directions tell us that “The Flood” is spoken in a “Jewish, Queens accent” (25) “The Vagina Workshop” in “A slight English accent” (43) and lastly “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could” denotes a “Southern woman of color” (77). Other than this, the person speaking a monologue—often a privileged “celebrity”—can assume whatever voice they choose.16 Ensler has certainly attracted much flak for appropriating the experiences and voices of others. Using other women’s words will always lead to questions about authenticity. Gayatri Spivak has commented on the degree to which translation can be seen as a political matter, and therefore a translator should “be capable of distinguishing between … resistant and conformist writing by women … She must be able to confront the idea that what seems resistant in the space of English may be reactionary in the space of the original language.”17 In the writing and performing of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler strips each narrative of its original context, with Elaine Aston claiming that “Ensler does not politicize, rather she
15 Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, 7. 16 A problem also arose with the original production of Bryony Lavery’s Goliath (1997). This was a one‐woman show, based on Beatrix’s Campbell’s 1993 book about the outbreak of riots in Britain two years earlier. Nicola McAuliffe performed all the roles herself, regardless of race, gender or class. However, as Elaine Aston notes: “On occasion, McAuliffe’s naturalistic performance style was problematic in relation to particular roles, most especially in her interpretation of an Asian shopkeeper that was in danger of becoming a westernised, mimicking of ‘Asian‐ness,’” Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990‐2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 209. 17 Gayatri Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, eds. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) 186.
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spectacularizes the suffering of others.”18 Particular concern has been expressed about “My Vagina was my Village,” taken from the testimonies of Bosnian women who had been raped. It is perhaps worrying, in this light, that a new monologue is added each year to highlight similar atrocities, such as in 2003 when Afghanistan women suffered at the hands of the Taliban. Other critics, most notoriously Camille Paglia, have argued against “the psychological poison of Ensler’s archaic creed of victimization.”19 Although the monologues speak, ultimately, of female empowerment, Ensler can be accused of producing an outdated play which suggests that men are oppressors and women are victims. Moreover, women are equated with their vaginas, which gives the effect that a woman’s identity stems only from her sexual organs. Nevertheless, The Vagina Monologues has worked to create a debate about violence against women, spawning numerous activist offshoots. The most notable of these is “V Day.” Held on 14th February, and with the “V” standing for “Victory, Valentine and Vagina,” this is a “global movement to stop violence against women and girls” and works to promote “creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalise the spirit of existing anti‐ violence organizations.”20 There is no doubt about the sincerity of such an endeavour, with 2,700 events taking place in 2006 to help those women affected by acts of brutality. Other female dramatists have been more innovative with their representation of gender. One of the most interesting theatrical experiments with the monologue has been the intersection forged between stand up comedy, performance art, cabaret, and theatre. Alison Oddey traces this development when she observes how, “Since the 1980s the nature of female comic performance has changed from simply telling jokes to incorporating specific gender problems via an integral 18 Aston, “A Good Night Out, For the Girls.” 19 Camille Paglia, “The Bush Look,” Salon.com 28 Feb. 2001 http://archive.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index2.html. 20 “About V‐Day,” V‐Day.org http: www.vday.org/contents/vday/aboutvday.
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autobiographical process, which is then transformed into a public performance.”21 Starting as a comedienne, Claire Dowie now situates herself within this nexus of forms, styling herself the inventor of “stand‐up theatre.” From the start, Dowie’s work has dealt with gender identity, whether this is the playing of male roles or the transformative process of changing sex.22 The woman in Why Is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? (1991) rejects her gender as a reaction to the misogyny she encounters. H to He, I’m Turning into a Man (2006) is based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but rather than turning into an insect, the central character describes the strangeness of perception as a woman comes to terms with the discrepancy between how she feels inside and the outward public persona of an aging body. Dowie’s conversion from female through an a‐gender state to male, takes place directly before the audience’s eyes, implicating them in the performative aspect of gender. Judith Butler has famously theorised this idea: In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.23
21 Alison Oddey, Performing Women: Stand‐ups, Strumpets and Itinerants (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999) 6. 22 Laurie Anderson is another performer who “plays” with gender identity by using “electronic ‘audio masks’ to change her voice from female to male,” Rose Lee Goldberg, “Introduction, Laurie Anderson,” Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000) 83. 23 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenlogy and Feminist Theory,” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue‐Ellen Case (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990) 270.
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In this way, Dowie’s onstage transformations do more than transgress gender boundaries. Rather, her transvestism takes up Judith Butler’s reading of Esther Newton’s notion of drag as a “double inversion”: Drag says … “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ … is masculine.” At the same time it symbolises the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ … is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ … is feminine.”24
As Butler goes on to say: “Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity.”25 Internal and external evidence of gender is shown to be unreliable, freeing Dowie’s characters to step into and out of conventional behaviour and expectations. Again, the subject matter of Dowie’s work is often the extremes of human emotion, particularly a concern with abusive relationships, and the complex ways in which “the victims are in some way complicit with their victimisers, who in turn are usually seen as themselves victims.”26 In Easy Access (For the Boys) (1998), she plays Michael, a male prostitute who was sexually abused by his father. Her starting point was the current media trend for child sexual abuse cases, which she debated in an interview with Aleks Sierz:
I suppose what Iʹm saying politically is that when someoneʹs a victim, everyone around them helps keep them a victim, telling them what they should be thinking or feeling.” In the play, Michael colludes with his abusive Dad, “but he needs to do so for the sake of his own sanity.” Then he “stops protecting his
24 Esther Newton, quoted in Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) 137. 25 Butler, Gender Trouble, 137. 26 Aleks Sierz, “New Writing A‐Z” http://www.inyerface‐theatre.com/az.html#v.
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abuser, and starts to unravel the lie that heʹs weaved. So you donʹt have to be a victim—but donʹt think itʹs easy not to be.27
At one heightened emotional moment, Dowie incorporates a video of her own daughter that runs while a male voiceover describes his paederastic sexual fantasies. In filming her own child, Dowie destroys the boundary between performance and reality, rather in the same way as the photographer, Sally Mann, whose nude photographs of her own children caused such controversy in her exhibition, Immediate Family, at the beginning of the 90s. In his ground‐breaking book, In‐Yer‐Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Sierz identifies what he sees as a new style of theatre: The widest definition of in‐yer‐face theatre is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking alarm. Often such drama employs shock tactics, or is shocking because it is new in tone or structure, or because it is bolder or more experimental than what audiences are used to. Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort.28
Whilst not a contender for the title of “in‐yer‐face” drama, Dowie’s plays share some of the same qualities. At times, they can be seen as experiential, forcing the audience to experience the emotions portrayed on stage, rather than relating to them in an intellectual and passive manner. This is done through deliberately forging a connection between the audience and
27 Aleks Sierz, “Interview with Claire Dowie,” 24 May 2001 http://www.inyerface‐ theatre.com/archive9.html. 28 Aleks Sierz, In‐Yer‐Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) 4.
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performer (usually, though not always, Dowie herself), furthered through the small, intimate spaces in which the plays are staged. As has been noted, this intimate and immediate relationship is “very direct and risk‐taking. You remove the fourth wall and don’t know how an audience will respond.”29 Dowie also uses ungendered casting to provoke directors into considering the constructs of gender. For example, Adult Child/Dead Child has been staged, and indeed described, as a play about a young woman. In it, the character catalogues acts of mistreatment, chiefly by her parents. This has resulted in the splitting of the self into two, as a coping mechanism. So, the Child imagines a friend, with whom she conducts a “dialogue,” because she has been unable to be heard in the outside world. If Dowie had created this role for a woman to play, it could be argued that the doppel‐ganger would act as a conduit for female feelings of anger and disappointment, emotions that are usually disallowed women in society. However, Dowie deliberately states that the narrator is non‐gender specific. This allows gender issues to be renegotiated, or even for theories of gender as “unnatural, a cultural construction,” to be posited.30 In fact, the initials of Adult Child/Dead Child—AC/DC—either knowingly or unknowingly—draw attention to gender and sexual malleability. The role could also be seen to represent a generic “Child,” who is unable to move from childhood into adulthood because the correct processes of communication have not been followed.
29 Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Methuen, 1997) 157. In an interview with Peter Lathan, Dowie also remarks that stand‐up theatre means that “The actor is talking directly to and interacting with the audience, responding directly to them in a way that doesnʹt happen in a normal production. And that means if something goes wrong, you make something of it rather than try to cover it up. It’s a bit like pantomime in that way.” Peter Lathan, “Claire Dowie: Stand‐up Theatre” 2001: http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/otherresources/interviews/Claire Dowie.htm. 30 Sara Salih, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih, with Judith Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 21.
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This is underlined through the repetition of key words and phrases:
You become aware of your lack of love the lack of love you had as a child you are aware of the lack of love as a child and the anger grows because you are aware of the lack of love and the wall gets stronger as awareness grows the anger grows and the wall gets stronger because you are aware of the lack of love and the wall gets stronger and the anger grows because you are aware of the adult power you are aware of adult power and the lack of love and the anger grows and the wall gets stronger because frustration comes.31
The adult world continues to reflect back the dangers and isolation of childhood, because this had now been internalised. If we take up Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage,” where there is an eventual fusion between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, we can see that for the Child in Dowie’s play there is a “lack,” an inability to create a wholeness. This is shown in the central image of the imaginary friend, named Benji, after a kindly neighbour’s dog. This creation turns out to be “a monster and a horror and a terror,” who subsumes the Child’s own shaky sense of identity within its own (10). Here, then, “lies the conundrum of Child’s existence … for Benji is not just Child’s only friend, but also the instrument of her rage.”32 The solo performer makes manifest the position of the Child, as Jo Bonney explains:
The presence of a single performer in front of an audience of many instantly creates conflicting roles for both performer and viewer—great power and great vulnerability. As the
31 Claire Dowie, Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? and other Stand‐Up Theatre Plays (London: Methuen, 1996) 22. Subsequent references are cited in text. 32 Chrys Salt, ed. The Methuen Book of Contemporary Monologues for Women (London: Methuen, 2003) 50.
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anonymous author of “The Nature of the Monologue” put it in Writing for Vaudeville in 1917, “The word monologue means “to speak alone”—and that is often how a monologist feels.33
Thus, the form of the play as monologue reinforces the sense of abandonment and defencelessness that the Child feels. Yet, ironically, this is done whilst communicating that isolation to the audience. A further outcome of Dowie’s non‐assignation of gender is the way that it allows for more directorial flexibility. One production of Adult Child/Dead Child, performed in Birmingham and the Edinburgh Fringe, moved right away from the play as monologue by adapting it for a large cast of mixed‐ gender teenagers. It was noted that, “though little original text was written in the adaptation process and few lines were changed, the radical fragmentation and distribution of the text amongst fifteen performers was seen by many as a reinvention of this popular piece.” The performers took up the pose of a school photograph which was “held, almost unbroken, for the seventy minutes of the show. A limited number of iconic props are used. There is barely any “acting out” of incidents. Instead emphasis is placed on the “choral distribution of text,” which repeats in a “cyclical, often incantatory manner.”34 The rhythmic musicality becomes a means of connecting with the audience, and ironically underlines the narrator’s struggle to be heard. Claire Dowie came of age during the 1970s, and her plays are defiantly feminist in tone, although she found herself disagreeing with what she saw as women’s “colluding” with patriarchy: “Women can get together and stop whatever they want to stop, really. It’s institutions I have a problem with and
33 Jo Bonney, “Preface,” Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, ed. Jo Bonney (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000) xiii. 34 The production was staged by Stage 2, a Birmingham Youth Group, http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/adultchilddeadchild/index.html.
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feminism has become an institution.”35 Her work, meanwhile, deliberately engages with issues of gender and sexuality, showing “femininity” and “masculinity” as performative. In the 1990s, a new generation went further by deliberately distancing themselves from the term “woman playwright.” Sarah Kane argued that “When people talk about me as a writer, that’s what I am, and that’s how I want my work to be judged—on its quality, not on the basis of my age, gender, class, sexuality or race. I don’t want to be a representative of any biological or social group of which I happen to be a member. I am what I am. Not what other people want me to be.”36 That is not to say, though, that Kane’s work ignored issues of gender. Graham Saunders sees her work, like much of in‐yer‐face drama, exploring “the so‐called ‘crisis of masculinity’ and the interplay of power between men and women,” whilst Elaine Aston argues that “Kane offers a new perspective to the Butler style of 1990s gender philosophising, one that contests the ‘normalising’ forces through which the sexes are kept in place, by making us feel the violence of the symbolic masculine.”37 This is certainly true of all her plays, which concentrate to a greater or lesser degree, on abusive power relationships. What is more striking, however, is the level to which Kane explodes narrative, characterisation and dramatic structure through her experimentation with language. In this way, she can be seen as the successor of Caryl Churchill, whose plays have shifted from the “Brechtian‐feminist dramaturgy” of Top Girls (1982), whose “aim was to make visible the invisible gender (class/race) apparatus,” to her innovations with movement, form and language in plays like The Skriker (1994), Blue Heart (1997), and Far Away (2000).38 35 Stephenson and Langridge, Rage and Reason, 160‐61. 36 Stephenson and Langridge, Rage and Reason, 134‐35. 37 Graham Saunders, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 30; Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990‐2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 80. 38 Elaine Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage 27, 28.
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Initially, Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) caused an outcry amongst theatre critics, who reacted to it with hostility. Paul Taylor wrote that watching it was “a little like having your face rammed into an overflowing ash tray,” Charles Spencer called it a “nauseating dog’s breakfast of a play,” and Jack Tinker dismissed it as “utterly without dramatic merit.”39 Whilst Kane had her champions, it was the production of Crave in 1998, and the posthumous 4.48 Psychosis a year after her suicide in 1999 where Kane’s true artistic voice was understood and appreciated. Wary of the way in which her notoriety preceded her, Kane wrote Crave under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon. Whilst not strictly a monologue, the play interweaves four voices in a way that is designed to fragment character. Here Kane’s work can be seen as similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of language as “not singular and monolithic but plural and multiple, always containing many voices.”40 In the play, the “characters” are given letters instead of names, unsettling certainties of identity: A is possibly an abuser, B is perhaps an addict, C may be an abused child, and M stands for the maternal figure. The representation of their internal worlds through snatched sentences is similar to Virginia Woolf’s dissection of the character in her stream‐of‐conscious novel, The Waves (1931). Also labelled the “interior monologue,” this modernist narrative technique worked through the free association of ideas and images. At points in Crave, the sentences seem to follow on from one another, as if in a conversation: A C B
I fucking miss you. It’s my virginity. I miss fucking you.
39 Quoted in Mary Luckhurst, “Infamy and Dying Young: Sarah Kane, 1971‐1999,” Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660‐2000, eds. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) 108. 40 Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (London: Routledge, 2003) 16.
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C M B A M
A fourteen year old to steal my virginity on the moor and rape me till I come. One of these days Soon very soon Love you till then (and after?)41
The Author’s Note in the published version states that “Punctuation is used to indicate delivery, not to conform to the rules of grammar” (155). The missing punctuation allows the meaning to flow from line to line, so that the “characters” respond to one another while, at the same time, continuing an interior thought. At other times the connection is enhanced through rhythm as well: C M C A B M C
The vision. The light. The pain. The loss. The gain. The loss. The light. [192]
The cadences, as David Greig has observed, draw attention to the musicality of the piece: “The text demands attendance to its rhythms in performance, revealing its meanings not line by line but, rather like a string quartet, in the hypnotic play of different voices and themes.” In performance, the sound of the voices ebb and flow; at times, one voice becomes dominant, at others, they all receive equal presence. Whilst there is a concentration on language, however, Crave would lose in dramatic tension if it was produced as a radio play, as the audience needs to see the actors react to the words that have been used. Again, Greig stresses the disjunction between the visual and aural: “Four voices become one. This effect is replicated in the stage image. 41 Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001) 177‐78. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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The overwhelming impression is that the four voices are, in fact, voices from within and without one individual life, yet the stage is occupied by four physically real bodies.”42 Gender is unspecified, although Kane had in mind a younger and older woman (C and M), and a younger and older man (B and A), and some of the lines only seem suited to a particular gender.43 Each character has a coherence in terms of personality. M seems to want a baby that B cannot or will not provide. A indulges in sexual fantasies about young girls and may have abused C, who is haunted by memories of rape. These pairings represent the pain of love and loss, and of patterns of abuse, as shown when A’s outpouring of love for C (emphasised through the disparity between its length and the short sentences usually accorded the other characters) is underpinned by C’s muttering throughout his speech, “this has to stop” (169‐70). However, the duos are not fixed, and each character may be addressing any of the others. This has the effect of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the overall feeling expressed by A that “Only love can save me and love has destroyed me” (174). The universal concerns of love and death are also amplified through Kane’s complex use of allusion, an area of her work that had been missed by many early critics. The emphasis on form and language in Crave forefronts this, as Aleks Sierz and Graham Saunders make clear: Its inherent intertextuality underpins its formal and thematic structure: fragmentary quotations taken from literary, religious and popular culture are embedded within the characters’ own elliptical narratives … these allusions to other texts function alongside highly personal addresses from the characters, so that there is a constant shift between a tone of impersonal distance and one of stark emotional intensity.44
42 David Greig, “Introduction,” Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001) xiv. 43 Saunders, Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, 104; 105. 44 Aleks Sierz and Graham Saunders, “Crave,” The Literary Encyclopedia 21 June 2004 http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15074.
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An example of this is Kane’s evocation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) through direct reference, and the fractured use of language, as well as in the central theme of the disintegration of modern society.45 The poetic technique of a dislocated discourse becomes a way for Kane, as for Eliot before her, to suggest a multiplicity of meanings simultaneously. Different voices weave together in both works in a way that suggests an underlying disconnection between individuals and an inability to cope with the violence and despair inherent in the world. Yet while Eliot puts the blame for this loss of purpose in the decay of religion, Kane suggests that a lack of faith in love is at the heart of the play’s despairing tone, leading her characters to a rejection of life itself. Sarah Kane saw Crave as her most pessimistic play because of this inability to believe in love, whilst her last work, 4.48 Psychosis has been labelled by others as a “declaration of suicide,” and a “75‐minute suicide note.”46 In some ways, this response is understandable, given that Kane killed herself shortly after completing the play. Again, the subject matter describes a psychotic breakdown, and includes details of Kane’s own treatment while she was hospitalised, as well as information taken from clinical records and “self help” books. Chrys Salt sees this as a play “about a woman for whom the pain of living is so acute, no other option but ending it makes sense. Look at the language … ‘cadaver,’ ‘buried,’ ‘decaying,’ ‘grave,’ ‘gallows’ all grimly pre‐emptive of the characterʹs fate and reflective of sentences, emphatic repetitions, paranoid observations, angry outbursts and fragments of anguished poetry.”47 However, a simple autobiographical reading would mask Kane’s sophisticated meshing of form and content. Once again, this play completely eschews the notion of
45 A good account of Kane’s use of allusion in Crave appears in Saunders, Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes Chapter 5. 46 Susannah Clapp, “Blessed are the Bleak,” Observer Review 2 July 2000: 9, Michael Billington, Guardian 30 June 2000. 47 Salt, The Methuen Book of Contemporary Monologues for Women, 35.
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characterisation and narrative. There is no cast list and, although the original production used three actors (one male and two female), this is left entirely up to the director. At times it appears as if there is a dialogue between doctor and patient, but the lines are unassigned, so that any individual may speak any of the lines; it could even be performed solo without any detriment to the dramatic flow. Here, once again, one can see the influence of modernism, as well as the late 50s/early 60s Beat poets, particularly in the way that the play is set out on the page:
Where do I start? Where do I stop? How do I start? (As I mean to go on) How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? How do I stop? I’ll die
A tab of pain Stabbing my lungs A tab of death Squeezing my heart
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Edward Bond, with whom Kane has been compared, and who was himself an admirer of her work, believed that “it is important that the structure is used in the [theatre] direction: it has to become a window through which you see the play.”48 The disjointed form and lack of clear character identification can seem to represent the breakdown of the mind. Beyond this, though, Kane also uses the words to expose the tenuous
48 Quoted in Saunders Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, 112.
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boundaries between sanity and insanity. The title posits the view that 4.48 in the morning is the time when most people feel suicidal. Aleks Sierz and Julie Waddington have observed that it also refers to the sixth book of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, The Silver Chair (1953). In this work, Prince Rilian believes that for an hour each night he achieves clarity of vision, but those around him see it as his hour of madness.49 This chimes with Kane’s view, expressed throughout her work, that it is impossible to make claims of madness when living in a society that is insane. Thus, in the play, the personal voice is fused with a more impersonal one, all the more shocking for being based on historical events: I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs, I fucked small children while they begged for mercy, the killing fields are mine, everyone left the party because of me, I’ll suck your fucking eyes out send them to your mother in a box and when I die I’m going to be reincarnated as your child only fifty times worse and as mad as all fuck I’m going to make your life a living fucking hell I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE LOOK AWAY FROM ME. [227]
This bringing together of the subjective voice and objective, the personal and the political, is embedded into the form of 4.48 Psychosis and therefore works in an entirely different way from Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. For Ensler, gender is an easy category, and one that has a direct and simplistic relationship with abuse. Thus, gender is presented as a battle, male vs. female, where male = bad and woman = good. This is exemplified through the changes that Ensler was forced to make to the monologue entitled “The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could.” This piece presents a lesbian relationship between a girl who suffers at the hands of men and sees her vagina as “a very bad place, a place of pain, nastiness, punching, invasion,
49 Aleks Sierz and Julie Waddington, “4.48 Psychosis” The Literary Encyclopedia 25 June 2004 http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15075.
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and blood. It’s a site for mishaps. It’s a bad‐luck zone” (79). She finally loses her virginity through a one‐night‐stand with an older woman, who plies her with alcohol and seduces her. Rather than being seen as a form of abuse, this encounter is vocalised in positive terms: “my coochi snorcher that I always thought was nasty before, and wow … She says, ‘Your vagina, untouched by man, smells so nice, so fresh, wish I could keep it that way forever’” (81). Originally, the girl used the line: “If it was rape, it was good rape.” However, due to adverse criticism and the threat of possible legal action, the girl’s age was raised from 13 to 16, and the line about rape taken out. Yet the piece still ends with the girl admitting that the woman “was my surprising, unexpected, politically incorrect salvation” and is rather too redolent of sexual fantasies about deflowering a virgin. This is not to suggest that Ensler’s sincere attempt to represent and denounce male violence against women is wrong‐headed. It is just that her play presents a rather simplistic view of gender and abuse. Her play sets out to present a “universal” female voice, which—if shouted loudly enough—creates a superficial sisterhood amongst audience and performer. Dowie and Kane, on the other hand, strip away gender as an element that is, if not redundant, at least reductive as a means of dissecting issues of abuse. Dowie’s work, as Gabriele Griffin has argued, “is centrally concerned with unsettling and unsettled identities, and specifically issues of troubling gender identities.”50 Here the choice of monologue as a form reveals itself to be particularly appropriate for the interrogation of identity since its focus on the single individual suggests the ontological coherence and unity which conventional gender norms and indeed realist theatre demand but at the same time allows for the explosion of the coherence 50 Gabriele Griffin, “Troubling Identities: Claire Dowie’s Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt?” Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance eds. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 154.
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through the enactment, by one performer, of diverse versions of the self: past, present, feminine, masculine, performing self, performed self and so on. The monologue thus enables a particular performance of gender performance.51
Kane also uses the monologue or semi‐monologue to create a world where certainties of character, language, narrative, are exploded. Abuse and violence are capable of being directed as much to men as to women; violence against the self is also depicted. Here perhaps Kane’s work can be seen as being a‐ political. Mary Luckhurst has commented that her last works “delineate a shift from an exterior to an interior world, and are set at a far remove from external political structures.”52 In this way, Kane differs from playwrights like, say, Sarah Daniels, whose plays like Ripen Our Darkness (1981), The Devil’s Gateway (1983) and Masterpieces (1983) portrayed a “radical‐feminist politics of male domination.”53 Like Daniels, Ensler can be seen as wanting to effect a change in society: this is drama as social intervention. On the other hand, both Dowie and Kane ultimately present a mesh of complexities between gender and abuse, which are not easily expressed or answered. With all three dramatists, though, the use of the monologue is central to an interrogation of the female theatrical voice, whether confessional, experiential, or experimental.
51 Griffin, “Troubling Identities,” 168. 52 Mary Luckhurst, “Pinter and Poetic Politics,” In‐Yer‐Face? British Political Drama in the 1990s, eds. Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2007). 53 Aston, Feminist Views on the English Stage, 39.
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Jorge Huerta & Ashley Lucas
Framing the Macho: Gender, Identity, & Sexuality in Three Chicana/o Solo Performances While the Chicana/o theatrical tradition has historically addressed social justice issues, Chicana/o solo performers tackle many of the same concerns by re‐imagining Chicana/o identities which include previously marginalised subjectivities within the community. In her excellent study, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Jill Dolan describes the process of using theatre to explore the possibility of a more perfect society: “My contention is that performance—not just drama—is one of the few places where a live experience, as well as an expression, through content, of utopia might be possible.” She goes on to affirm that she is: Interested in the material conditions of theater production and reception that evoke the sense that it’s even possible to imagine a utopia, that “no place” where the social scourges that currently plague us … might be ameliorated, cured, redressed, solved, never to plague us again.1
1 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) 37.
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The long list of “social scourges” that Dolan gives includes issues that have always been important to the Chicana/os such as anti‐immigrant legislation, racial and gender discrimination and poverty—as well HIV/AIDS, an issue that is still shunned by Chicana/o communities at large. These and other socio‐ political and cultural issues have always been at the forefront of the formation and creation of a Chicana/o identity. Building on Dolan’s concept of performing the social change that artists could make in the world, we analyse the work of Chicana/o solo performers in terms of how their performance pieces reshape the largely masculinist identity represented in early Chicana/o theatre. We provide brief overviews of early Chicana/o theatre and a range of Chicana/o monologists as a means of providing a context for discussing the work of Luis Alfaro, Monica Palacios, and Rick Najera. Among the best‐ known of Chicana/o solo performers, these three all make pointed critiques of machismo in Chicana/o culture and displace the perception of the straight Chicano male as the pinnacle of Chicana/o identity. What is of interest to us here is the notion that theatre (and by extension, solo performances), as Dolan argues, “[c]an move us towards understanding the possibility of something better, can train our imaginations, inspire our dreams and fuel our desires in ways that might lead to incremental cultural change.”2 Chicana/o theatre artists have been searching for that utopian dream even before they were Chicana/os, which is to say, before the United States government took what is now the Southwestern U.S. from Mexico in 1848. While some scholars characterise 1848 as the “birth of the Mexican‐American,” we believe that Chicana/os, and indeed Chicana/o theatre itself, have their roots in the cultures of the indigenous peoples who populated Mesoamerica long before the arrival of the Spaniards
2 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, 39.
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in 1519.3 For our purposes here, we will give a brief overview of Chicana/o theatre since the mid‐20th century. From Whence We Came: A Brief History of Chicana/o Theatre It is important from the onset to define what we mean when we refer to Chicanas and Chicanos, to clarify the differences between the various Latina/o groups residing in the United States. In terms of population and longevity, Mexican‐ Americans or Chicana/os, usually born in the U.S. of Mexican heritage, make up the largest group. The second‐largest group is the Puerto Rican, U.S. citizens since 1952 when the island became a U.S. commonwealth. The third‐largest group is the Cuban‐American, either Cuban‐born or born in the U.S. All three groups have active theatre communities, often with distinct agendas but all with the common goal of bringing to the stages of their communities (and beyond) the lives of their compatriots. We focus here on the works of a Chicana (read “female”) and two Chicanos (read “male”), leaving a comparative study of the vital monologists from various U.S. Latina/o communities to other scholars.4 Much has been written about the early theatre of the Spanish‐speaking communities of the Southwestern United States, particularly the Spanish‐religious folk theatre found mostly in New Mexico and Texas. Because that theatre was in Spanish rather than English, it was relegated to the margins by theatre scholars and exoticised by anthropological scholars
3 For more on the indigenous roots of Chicana/o theatre see Jorge Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press, 1982), Chapter 6; and Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Chapter 1. 4 Prominent among the non‐Chicana/o performers are Mexican‐born and raised, Guillermo Gomez‐Peña; Cuban‐Puerto Rican, Marga Gomez; Cuban‐born, Alina Troyano, a.k.a. Carmelita Tropicana; and Coco Fusco, also Cuban‐born. The most famous performer is John Leguizamo, whose one‐man shows have been produced to sold‐out houses on Broadway and in other cities as well as on HBO television.
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more interested in the socio‐cultural expressions of the people than in politics or art. It was not until the advent of the Chicano Theatre Movement, inspired by the Teatro Campesino (Farm Workers’ Theatre) founded by Luis Valdez in 1965, that attention was paid by non‐Spanish‐speaking scholars to any performances by Chicana/os. The early Teatro Campesino was a theatre composed of real farm workers locked in a life‐and‐death struggle with the wealthy growers for better wages, better working and living conditions, and the basic necessities of life. Because the performers and musicians were farm workers and not actors, the raggle‐taggle troupe garnered world‐wide attention and praise and became an important voice for the farm workers union of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta as well as for the emerging Chicano political movement. Under the able guidance of Valdez, the members of the Teatro collectively created actos, or sketches, that dramatised their struggles in a genre that combined commedia dell‘arte physical farce with morality play‐like demonstrations of the triumph of Good (The Union) over Evil (the Growers). These actos were not monologues but mostly duologues that pitted the bad guys against the good guys who always won, of course, in a union contract. Most importantly, we recognise the Teatro Campesino for fostering the many Chicana/o theatre groups that seemingly sprouted up wherever the Teatro Campesino had performed. Most of the early Chicana/o theatre groups were composed of college or university student activists and thus they easily adapted the actos to their particular socio‐political agendas. During the latter 1960s and into the early 1970s the war in Vietnam was raging and progressive Chicanos expressed their anger over that war on the streets as well as in songs, poems, and actos. Other issues that occupied these actor/activists were injustice on the streets and in the courts, inequities in education, the exploitation of urban workers, and the need for unity. These early teatros then inspired the individual artists featured here as well as many others, to develop their one‐person performances. [235]
Chicana/o Solo Performance in Context: An Overview of Significant Performers and Plays I Am Celso Although there had been a long tradition of Spanish‐language lectores in the Southwest, practically from the beginning of the arrival of the Spanish colonisers in 1598, we believe that the first monologue performance created by and about a Chicano was I Am Celso. Unlike the other performances being featured here, I Am Celso is the result of a collaboration between the actor, the late Rubén Sierra and the director, Jorge Huerta, who adapted the poems of New Mexican poet Leo Romero into a monologue.5 Celso is a fictional character, the outlandish sinverguenza del pueblo, the aging barrio bum, drunk and philosopher. What attracted the collaborators to this project was the humour in Celso’s tales, the reality of the character and his cronies as well as the folk wisdom captured by Romero in his poems about Celso. As the actor read each poem aloud to his director, the two would classify each poem according to recurring themes: love, death, superstition, religion, and just plain fun. Most especially, the character of Celso presages the three playwrights we discuss in depth here in that Celso gave an embodied voice to the underclass, those invisible members of any barrio who manage to just get by on their wit and resourcefulness. Comedy Fiesta/Culture Clash and Latins Anonymous At the same time that I Am Celso was being created the Chicana/o theatre group now known as Culture Clash was forming in San Francisco, California, under the name Comedy Fiesta. On Cinco de Mayo of 1984, visual artist Rene Yañez brought together six actors, comedians, and poets for their first 5 Romero’s poems can be found in Leo Romero, Celso, (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985). The theatrical script, titled I Am Celso remains unpublished.
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performance together as a performing troupe.6 Marga Gómez and Mónica Palacios split off from Comedy Fiesta to pursue their careers in solo performance, each articulating feminist, lesbian versions of Latina identity in their work. The remaining members of the group, Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Sigüenza, and José Antonio Burciaga renamed themselves Culture Clash and created performances which have been critiqued for their macho and homophobic politics: Culture Clash participates in the continual reinscription of a binary sociosexual system that insists on fixed gender roles and rigid, socially constructed meanings for sex acts. Chicano power, as staged by Culture Clash … remains in the hands of impenetrable men who exercise their privilege in continual displays of phallic domination.7
The four performed monologues and sketch comedy together until Burciaga left the group to spend more time with his family and to perform alone. The remaining three members began writing full‐length plays, which were a mix of monologues and dialogic scenes. From the trio’s inception to the present, Culture Clash’s work has become more complex in terms of the narrative structure of their plays and their representations of a broad variety of ethnic identities in the U.S. From the early 1990s to the present, Culture Clash has been and remains by far the most commercially successful Latina/o theatre producers and performers. While Culture Clash was forming in Northern California, a quartet of Hollywood‐based Chicana/o and Latina/o actors were creating another comedy troupe, Latins Anonymous, founded in 1987. The original members of the group were Diane Rodriguez (formerly of El Teatro de la Esperanza and the Teatro Campesino), Rick Najera (to be discussed later), 6 Antonia Grace Glenn, “Comedy for These Urgent Times: Culture Clash as Chroniclers in America,” Theatre Forum (Winter/Spring 2002): 63. 7 David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 180.
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Armando Molina, and Luisa Leschin, of Colombian and Guatemalan descent, respectively. The premise of their signature play, appropriately titled Latins Anonymous, is that these Latinas and Latinos are in a twelve‐step program to accept their Latin roots. The piece is a combination of sketches as well as monologues and has been produced by the original creators as well as other companies across the country.8 Both of the groups, founded on sketches and monologues, inspired other monologists and comedy troupes echoing the early Teatro Campesino. Silviana Wood Many other Chicana and Chicano solo performers began to emerge in the 1980s. A native of Tucson, Arizona, Silviana Wood was a founding member of Tucson’s Teatro Libertad in the 1970s. She later began to write plays and was noted for her one‐woman piece, Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him?9 Although published as a play for five actors, Wood has performed the piece as a one‐woman show, playing all of the characters in this view of working‐class Chicana/os on their first day of the 6th grade in public school. The piece begins in the present, at a job training centre and goes back in time to when each of the characters was in school. Of course, the teacher is an Anglo woman, Miss Folsom. From the moment Miss Folsom begins to take roll we know that she and the students are in trouble, for she cannot pronounce their Spanish names and immediately sets about changing Guillermo (William) to Willie, Francisco to Frankie, Antonio to Tony, etc. This rehearsal of the acculturation process is common in Chicana/o narratives whether in short stories, novels, or plays
8 Latins Anonymous: Two Plays (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996) 55‐101. 9 The one‐act play version (for five actors) of Silviana Wood’s Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really needed Him? in Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology, eds. Alberto Sandoval‐Sanchez and Nancy Saporta Sternback (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2000) 176‐193.
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and exposes the denigrating treatment Mexican youth have faced for generations in schools with non‐bilingual teachers. María Elena Gaitán Making a social critique similar to Wood’s, María Elena Gaitán uses solo performance to confront stereotypes about race and class. A performer, cellist, teacher, and activist based in Los Angeles, Gaitán has performed her one‐woman piece, Chola con Cello (Chola with a Cello), throughout the southwestern U.S. The term chola, or cholo, generally refers to younger Chicana/os whose manners and demeanour label them rebels. Gaitán’s performances resemble lecture‐demonstrations presented by her alter‐ego, Connie Chancla, an older chola, wearing an outlandish and stereotypical outfit and exaggerated wig. When she appears on stage, Gaitán’s very presence causes some audience members to snicker in response to the familiar, yet not‐so‐familiar, Chicana. Her demeanour is based on an amalgam of wise woman and smart‐ass, but then she sits down with her cello and performs a lyrical piece of music that startles the audience, forcing them to reassess their notions of a middle‐ aged Chicana who looks like everybody’s wayward aunt. Her ability to play the cello upsets stereotypical notions of race and class. Gaitán then takes her audience on a slide‐projected and video journey of the “Chancla people,” a metaphor for the Chicana/os themselves. She uses images and stories of real events throughout indigenous, Mexican, and Chicana/o histories to describe and reinscribe the formation of contemporary Chicana/o identity. Guillermo Reyes, Carlos Manuel Chavarría, Greg Ramos, and Dan Guerrero Integrating issues concerning sexuality into the conversation around Chicana/o identity, a significant number of queer male solo performers have emerged in the Chicana/o theatre [239]
community since the 1990s. Although not a performer himself, Guillermo Reyes scripted one of the first solo performances for a gay Latino titled Men on the Verge of a His‐panic Breakdown. First produced in Los Angles in 1994, the piece is a collection of monologues by different fictional characters to be performed by one actor.10 While Men on the Verge of a His‐panic Breakdown was ostensibly about being gay and Latino, Reyes’s subsequent collection of monologues, titled Deporting the Divas, is about being gay, Latino, and undocumented. Eventually Deporting the Divas (1996) developed into a play to be performed by four actors, focusing on a Mexican‐American Border Patrolman who falls in love with an undocumented Mexican.11 Both of these plays have been produced throughout the U.S. In another take on queer border crossings, Carlos Manuel Chavarría’s autobiographical play La Vida Loca, first performed in 2000, tells the story of his undocumented immigration to the U.S. from Mexico at age eight and his coming of age as a gay man. In 2003, Greg Ramos based his one‐man play Border Stories on fifty interviews he conducted with members of the LGBT community on both sides of the El Paso/Juárez border, integrating ethnography and performance into his queering of the transnational identity of this community.12 Dan Guerrero’s 2005 performance of Gaytino! chronicles the odyssey of a Chicano born during World War II, coming out of the closet in the 1960s.13 These plays employ a combination of humour, music, dance, personal narratives, and strategic bilingualism to document and perform the experiences of queer Chicana/o and Mexican communities. In this manner, this work fits very much into the practice of framing the macho, which the plays
10 Guillermo Reyes, Men on the Verge of a His‐panic Breakdown is published in the following: Staging Gay Lives, ed. John M. Clum (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996) 401‐24; and Guillermo Reyes, Men on the Verge of a His‐panic Breakdown (New York: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1999). 11 Guillermo Reyes, Deporting the Divas, Gestos vol. 27 (1999): 109‐58. 12 Gregory A. Ramos, Border Stories (Unpublished manuscript, 2004). 13 The script to Gaytino! remains unpublished, as does Chavarría’s La Vida Loca.
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discussed below by Luis Alfaro, Monica Palacios, and Rick Najera helped to establish. Luis Alfaro: Queering the Macho Luis Alfaro’s solo play Downtown uses a combination of story‐ telling, cross‐dressing, spoken word poetry, and eating on stage to talk about his feelings of rejection in both white gay culture and Latina/o culture.14 Born in 1961 in Los Angeles, Alfaro grew up participating in political protests alongside his parents who were both community activists. Ethnic studies scholar Michelle Habell‐Pallán notes the influence of Alfaro’s Catholic upbringing on the spirituality, ritual, and faith seen in his performances.15 His blend of queer, Chicano, and Catholic sensibilities combine with his intimate knowledge of Los Angeles to make his plays highly specific descriptions of his cultural experiences, but his work, particularly in its most poetic moments, also resonates profoundly as a general social commentary on the communities he represents. His compelling work in both the theatre and spoken word poetry has brought him many accolades and widespread recognition. He won the coveted MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a “genius” grant, in 1997,16 garnering a level of recognition which in many ways legitimised his work in the eyes of mainstream theatres and critics. Alfaro has been writing full‐length plays as well, most notably his adaptation of Sophocles’s Electra, re‐titled Electicidad. This play has been produced at major regional theatres and was published in American Theater Magazine, a distinction few Latina/os or Chicana/os have enjoyed.17 14 Luis Alfaro, Downtown in O Solo Homo, eds. Holly Hughes and David Román (New York: Grove, 1998) 313‐48. Subsequent references are cited in text. 15 Michelle Habell‐Pallán, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 85. 16 Center Theater Group Website 17 May 2005 http://www.taperahmanson.com. 17 Alfaro’s Electricidad is published in American Theater Magazine (February 2006): 63‐85.
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Downtown: The Virgin Mary, AIDS, and a Playwright from Pico‐ Union Alfaro divides his monologue performance into eight titled “scenes,” most of which are written in verse. Unlike Palacios and Najera, Alfaro appears to be reading his material, placed on a music stand. After so many performances through the years, we assume the actor has memorised his text, but the idea of appearing to be reading gives the performance a kind of confessional feel, like a long letter or letters to a friend. Except for the music stand, there are no set props and minimal costume changes intended to add to the mood of the piece being narrated. Lighting plays an important role, also contributing to the performer’s intended tone. In his written introduction to the published version of this piece, Alfaro clarifies the significance of downtown Los Angeles, so near yet so far from his working‐class neighbourhood of Pico‐Union, a short bus ride away. Pico‐Union is to Los Angeles, what Bedford‐Stuyvesant would be to New York City, not an easy place to grow up. Yet, this memory piece is not a critique of the area as much as a remembrance of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The piece opens with Petula Clarke’s rendition of the song, “Downtown,” popular in the 1950s, a song of “escape” to a special place where all things seem possible. Thus, Alfaro takes us back to his Pico‐Union reality, a kind of authentication of his working‐class roots, warts and all. After “Downtown” plays for a few moments, the houselights dim, and we hear the sounds of a helicopter overhead. The sound fades, and the performance begins as Alfaro rises from a seat in the audience and begins to speak. This gesture immediately embraces the audience and the performer as one of them. Without any introduction, Alfaro begins with the following, titled “On a Street Corner”: A man and a woman are walking down Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. The man looks at the woman and says, “Bitch, shut up.” The woman looks at the man and says, “Aw, honey. You know I love you. I just wish you wouldn’t hit me so [242]
hard.” And the man looks at the woman and says, “What, what, what? You want me to leave you or what?” And the woman looks at the man and says, “Aw, no baby, you’re the only thing that I remember.” Because desire is memory and I crave it like one of the bargains in my mama’s church. But it’s hard to be honest sometimes, because I live in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. [319]
This monologue is a fitting prologue to the remainder of the performance as it establishes the various emotions, settings, and situations that Alfaro will share with us as he exposes characters familiar to most Chicana/os and some situations that the more conservative members of his community would rather ignore, like HIV/AIDS and homosexuality. Within this brief capitulation, Alfaro takes us to his neighbourhood, on a bus ride, to a department store—all sites of an indiscretion or mistake of some sort. He summarises this excursion with: A man got slapped. A woman got slugged. A clown threw toys. A drunk staggered. An earthquake shook. A slap. A slug. A shove. A kick.
As David Román states, “Initially sounding like non sequiturs, these gestures will be recontextualised throughout the performance and serve as leitmotifs of the piece, physical reminders of the battles Latinos face daily.”18 The lights change to an overhead spot that will make it appear as though Alfaro is a “doll on a stand as it turns.” In this monologue, titled “Virgin
18 David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 189.
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Mary,” Alfaro tells us about his family, dysfunctional as anybody’s. He tells us more about his neighbourhood, his aunt who died of cancer, and his first male love. Holding the story together is his remembrance of a rotating Virgin Mary doll which the family had bought on a midnight trip to Tijuana, Mexico, to visit his father’s mother. He relates how the rotating doll would bless his family, inspired by the belief that, “Blood is thicker than water, family is greater than friends and the Virgin Mary watches over all of us,” a refrain he repeats several times throughout the monologue. The irony is that we eventually learn that in his queer Latina/o community, blood may not be thicker than water. The metaphor of blood permeates the performance, not only as symbolic of “family” but as real blood, a deadly liquid in a time of plague. Indeed, blood seems to be everywhere in this piece. In the section titled “Heroes and Saints,” Alfaro tells us about a “guy beating the shit out of his lover” in the parking lot of a popular Latino gay club. The man tells his lover: “Get up you faggot piece of shit. Get up, you goddamn faggot piece of shit.” It was the first time I saw us act like our parents. [329]
This reflection suggests that Alfaro, and perhaps many participants in queer culture, had hoped that gay relationships would forego the domestic cruelty which plague the heterosexual realm of “our parents.” Interpersonal violence has no boundaries, Alfaro is telling his audiences, ironically underscoring the sad reality of his father’s macho violence yet again. People are watching the unfortunate couple, but not getting involved. A drag queen tells Alfaro: That’s a domestic thing, baby. Besides, that girl has AIDS. Don’t get near that queen. [329]
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The macho role of the abuser has been somewhat displaced. With this statement the victim of the violence becomes the more dangerous party in the dispute because the “queen,” whose blood has been spilled could transmit a deadly disease to anyone who tries to help her. Blood no longer binds people as a family or culture but becomes the harbinger of death and destruction. In the final monologue, titled “Orphan of Aztlán,” Alfaro concludes his ruminations with a final assault on the contradictions within the several cultures he embodies: Mexican, but not really; gay, but not Anglo‐American: With one foot on each side of the border not the border between Mexico and the United States but the border between Nationality and Sexuality I search for a home in both yet neither one believes that I exist. [343]
Alfaro describes the classic Chicana/o tension of being rejected by mainstream cultures on both sides of the U.S. Mexican border, and he complicates it by posing the equally exclusionary binary of nationality vs. sexuality. Juana María Rodríguez, author of Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, further elucidates the internal conflict of being both queer and Latina/o: most of the activism in gay and lesbian Latina/o communities in the United States has been organised around issues of identity, as a means to counter both the Eurocentrism of the mainstream
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gay and lesbian movement and the heteronormative mandates and queer effacement of most Latino political coalitions.19
Alfaro uses his performances as strategic contributions to this activist struggle, enabling queer Latina/os in his audiences to see an aspect of their identity represented on stage and educating other spectators about the particularities of this doubly (and even multiply) marginalised group. Alfaro’s closing gesture is to become that revolving doll again, the Virgin Mary silently blessing all sides of the room. Blackout. The ritual introduced at the beginning of this performance resurfaces to bring the play and the performer back to the Mexican Catholicism which shaped Alfaro from childhood. As David Román indicates, “Alfaro tells the story of the Virgin Mary in order to call into question the cultural belief systems of his Latino and Catholic family … Alfaro, while critical of this system of exploitation vis‐à‐vis the church and the state, cannot deny the power of its influence.”20 Over the course of his life as described in the play, he has grown beyond the traditional characterisations of what a Chicano is, yet he does not lose or suppress his ethnic identity in adopting identity politics and cultural practices which negate many aspects of machismo. Rick Najera: Critiquing the Macho Rick Najera was born in San Diego in 1958 to a middle‐class Mexican‐American family. He performed in local theatres throughout his childhood and went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts from the American Conservatory Theatre’s Actor Training Program in San Francisco, California. He also graduated from the Warner Bros. Comedy Writing Program.21
19 Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003) 39. 20 Román, Acts of Intervention, 189. 21 Rick Najera Website 25 October 2006: www.ricknajera.com.
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As mentioned earlier, Najera was also a founding member of Latins Anonymous. He wrote for a number of popular television shows, including Culture Clash,22 Mad TV, and In Living Color, and published three of his theatrical works in a collection entitled The Pain of the Macho and Other Plays in 1997. Of Najera’s plays, Latinologues, a series of monologues which uses multiple actors, has been the most produced and most celebrated, winning the prestigious Imagen Award for Best Live Theatrical Production in 2005.23 The Broadway run of the show that same year was directed by Chicano comic, Cheech Marin and lasted a record‐breaking sixteen weeks, longer than any other Latina/o‐written play. Despite his commercial success and numerous articles and reviews about his work in the popular press, Najera’s plays have received almost no scholarly attention. The Pain of the Macho: The Many Comedic Incarnations of Machismo In 1993, Rick Najera performed The Pain of the Macho at the prestigious Goodman Theatre in Chicago and has toured the solo performance to critical and audience acclaim in a variety of venues across the U.S.24 The Pain of the Macho is made up of a series of monologues delivered by various Latino “types,” each one dealing in one way or another with his machismo. Najera takes an ironic, politically incorrect look at Latino machos, sometimes sympathetically, often critically. All of the characters are played by one person, himself, and the piece demands a versatile comic actor, which he is. Most importantly, the actor has great fun portraying his machos and including the audience in his antics as often as he can through improvisation.
22 Culture Clash was the television incarnation of Culture Clash’s theatrical sketch comedy work. It ran for only one season on the Fox Network in 1993. 23 Idy Fernández, “Latino Tales: Director Rick Najera’s Latinologues Arrives on Broadway,” Hispanic Magazine (September 2005): 68. 24 Rick Najera, The Pain of the Macho and Other Plays (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997) 7‐52. Subsequent references cited in text.
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Before we meet our first macho, an announcer’s voice tells the audience that: “The role of the macho will not be played by Rick Najera tonight.” We immediately hear two other male voices on the auditorium speakers reacting negatively to this news. Sound effects of a riot ensue when suddenly Najera runs onto the stage and shouts: Please remain calm. Puerto Ricans stop inciting the Mexicans. Mexicans stop inciting the Puerto Ricans. Cubans stop inciting everybody. In the name of Edward James Olmos (The rioting sounds stop immediately.)(10) Thank you. I’m Rick Najera. I’m sorry, but I can’t play a macho tonight. My therapist has warned me not to play a macho. He feels it would be very dangerous because I have worked very hard to get rid of the macho and I don’t want to regress. I hate the word macho. I prefer the more politically correct term: “Latino males with strong opinions.” I have been in therapy to forget the macho inside of me … I want to be a friendly minority that dances folkloric on Sundays. [11]
By portraying the Cubans as “inciting everybody,” Najera satirises one of the stereotyped differences among the three Latina/o groups he lists. We visualise Mexicans and Puerto Ricans locked in their intercultural divergences while the Cubans are supposedly making everybody unhappy. The reference to the famous Chicano actor, Olmos, will elicit laughter among those who know of his efforts to bring all Latina/os together after the 1992 social unrest in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdict. In this opening monologue, Najera performs himself, or rather variations on himself as a macho‐in‐therapy. The tone of the monologues ranges from the ridiculous, “How can I be a macho? I was never part of a street gang. I failed the written test”(12), to what appears to be a sincere homage to his grandfather: “For the memory of my grandfather, for him and all the other machos I’ve known, I will play the macho. I’ll play a macho for just one night, and for just one night, I’ll [248]
remember” (14). In this opening monologue Najera uses his grandfather as his role model. “When I say macho, I see my grandfather, a man: good, kind, gentle and strong,” contextualising the positive strength of a macho, he tells us, “A macho has a big heart,” referencing his grandfather (13). However, the remainder of his machos are full of flaws. Najera knows his macho stereotypes very well, pointing‐out their inherent sexism and homophobia. He identifies a man in the audience and tells him: “I would like to bond with you and I would hug you, but I’m still dealing with homophobia. Not that I am, but I’m worried about you!” (12). We do not know if he has singled‐out an Anglo man in the audience, but his macho perspective vis‐à‐vis Anglos is confirmed when he explains, “Barrio just means neighbourhood, just like ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood.’ Except we don’t let old Anglo bachelors play with our children. That’s an Anglo thing. Sorry, I don’t mean to blame shift—what you people do is your business” (12).25 He is implying that Chicanos are not homosexual paedophiles, but Anglos are suspect, subverting a sexual stereotype and getting a good laugh at the expense of the Anglos in the audience. Following the Prologue we meet our first macho character, Alejandro, dressed in a tuxedo jacket, resembling a toreador: I’m a macho. I’m a great macho … I fight the bulls. In my mind I’m always fighting the bulls. But in real life, I’m fighting the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]. I’m fighting the deportation, the health department and the bad tippers. I’ve been gored twice by bad tippers! [15]
Alejandro thinks of himself as a great lover, the ultimate stereotype of Latin Lover established during the silent movie era, which obtains to this day, but Alejandro is not a repugnant figure. As a busboy, he is a member of that ubiquitous yet
25 The reference is to the much‐loved children’s Public Television series, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” in which Mr. Rogers was indeed a bachelor.
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invisible working class, seen but not heard in restaurants across the country. The majority of the monologue is devoted to a sexual encounter he says he had with a beautiful performance artist with a pierced nose: “She wore it as a form of protest against the oppression of the Third World. Luckily, I was a member of the Third World” (17). He quits his job to accept her invitation to her “performance art slash apartment space” to make mad, passionate love. She asks him, “Is it true Latin men are hung like bulls?” to which he says, “Who’s been telling you this stuff, Cubans?” again poking fun at the Cubans (19). Ultimately, this monologue is about desire and rejection. We laugh at the socio‐sexual‐political references, even as we sympathise with this macho’s wounded ego. The next macho is Slow Guy, a youth who struts his stuff with “arrogant cholo pride.” He speaks to the audience: My name is slow guy because, because, because … I don’t know why they call me Slow Guy. Alejandro, the guy who works at the restaurant, he says Slow Guy’s a bad name to have if you’re looking for a job. [20]
By referring to Alejandro, a character we previously met, Najera brings his machos into the same discursive space, creating a bit of humor as well. These men know each other, are players in the larger world of Chicano machos, as if they were in the same “club.” Slow Guy also makes topical artistic references that the cognoscenti will enjoy when he refers to Luis Alfaro. Slow Guy then relates how he is working in the movies. He is actually an extra, the fate of most Chicana/os in Hollywood as dramatised by Luis Valdez in his play, I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!, first produced in Los Angeles in 1986.26 Like Valdez, Najera works in Hollywood and
26 In Luis Valdez’s critique of Hollywood stereotyping, I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! the central characters are the “king and queen of the Hollywood extras.” See Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit and Other Plays (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992) 155‐214.
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writes from first‐hand knowledge of the frustration all Latina/os have felt in Hollywood for generations. The fifth macho is Dr. Steve Sánchez, an old, gravely‐voiced Chicano Studies professor. He is giving an academic lecture on machos and we are his unwitting students. “I was not at the girl’s dorm last night, a nasty rumour started by a Women’s Studies professor. She’s a lesbian. I know because she didn’t want me. Any woman that doesn’t want me must be a lesbian. You’ll be surprised how many lesbians are out there” (24). Dr. Sánchez is a contradiction who falls apart at the end of his lecture. In this monologue Najera is critiquing the academy, especially the aging Chicano Studies professors who cannot hide their macho, sexist tendencies even as they struggle to prove that they are not machos. Alejandro returns for a final monologue in a touching eulogy to one of his co‐workers, who was run‐over and killed by a passing car while attempting to cross the freeway at the border, a common occurrence at the time. Like the Prologue, in this monologue the humour is tempered by pathos as Najera brings us full‐circle from the death of his grandfather to the death of his innocent friend, a victim of false borders and dangerous crossings. Underlying the ethnic humour in this piece is a political critique, an awareness of the problems both citizens and undocumented Latinos have faced and continue to confront in U.S. society. The issue of illegal immigration into the United States has gotten much political play in 2006, a midterm election year that has the conservatives grasping for issues that will fire‐up their constituency when the Republican president’s ratings are at their lowest. Indeed, all of the monologues in Pain of the Macho speak to the marginalisation of the Chicano/Latino male while poking fun at traditional notions of what a macho is. In a gesture that may elude most observers, Najera makes an implicit critique of non‐Latino machos when Alejandro relates his abduction by a group of Anglo feminists. There would be no Anglo‐American feminist movement if many Anglo men were not sexist and, yes, “macho.” [251]
Monica Palacios: Displacing the Macho Monica Palacios recognises the sexism, homophobia, and racism both inside and outside the Chicana/o community. She has written and performed a handful of one‐woman plays, including Greetings from a Queer Señorita which explores her sexuality in terms of her adolescence, her marriage to another woman, her career, and her relationship with her family. One of six children in a family from San José, California, Palacios was born on June 14, 1959 but did not come into her lesbian identity until she reached adulthood, after having dated a number of men. She describes the discomfort she felt when she performed a straight identity, “Having sex with a man never felt right for me. I’d be double dating, and my girlfriend would be all over her guy, and I’d respect the guy I was with, but I’d be—‘uh, I’d rather have some chocolate cake.’”27 Palacios’s humour masks the awkwardness and confinement of attempting to fit into the heteronormative model of female identity. Further, in terms of the audiences she encounters, Chicana/o Studies scholar Yvonne Yarbro‐Bejarano states, “Centering the Chicana lesbian subject also means decentring the traditionally privileged spectator,”28 a fact Palacios learned early in her career. When beginning her career as a stand‐up comic in 1981, her first performances were at a straight club called the Other Café in San Francisco. Palacios had not yet developed the politicisation and cultural specificity seen in her later work. She says of those early days, “I just did funny. I wasn’t thinking about sexuality or nationality or anything.”29 The discrimination she experienced while performing in mainstream comedy clubs caused her to emerge in June of 1982
27 Quoted in Steven Liegh Morris, “Comedy, Sex and Being Recognised: Monica Palacios and Culture Clash, Separated but Equal,” LA Weekly 6‐12 Aug. 2004: 47. 28 Yvonne Yarbro‐Bejarano, “The Lesbian Body in Latina Cultural Production,” ¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, eds. Emille L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 193. 29 Quoted in Steven Liegh Morris, “Comedy, Sex and Being Recognised,” 47.
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as “one of the nation’s first openly Latina lesbian performers.”30 Queer comedy clubs, including San Francisco’s Valencia Rose Café, fostered Palacios’s career and helped her to build a loyal audience base. As her popularity increased, she joined the newly formed troupe Comedy Fiesta in 1984 but soon left the group that became Culture Clash so that she could return to her solo performance career. Her first autobiographical solo play, Latin Lezbo Comic, premiered in 1993, and Greetings from a Queer Señorita opened in 1995 at the One in Ten Theatre Company in Tucson, Arizona. Greetings from a Queer Señorita: The Advent of a Chicana Lesbian’s Identity Greetings from a Queer Señorita explores Palacios’s personal experiences as she matured and came into her sexual identity as a lesbian. The piece jumps back and forth in time and begins with Palacios as an eighth grader, overhearing her mother and sister talk about her middle school basketball coach as a lesbian. Despite the fact that Palacios feels a certain attraction to other women, which she does not yet admit, the concept that her coach could be homosexual “tripped [her] out.”31 The very word lesbian disturbs her so much that even after she starts dating women, she searches for another term to call herself: “I mean, like, why do we have to use that word?! It’s sooo gross! Why can’t there be a different word like—precious! If men are gay, I Want to Be Precious!” (370). What Palacios seems to fear is not the word lesbian but the stereotyped identity attached to it. In a running joke which appears throughout the play, she mocks the trepidation and disgust with which some people 30 Antonia Villaseñor, “Dos Lenguas Listas: An Interview with Monica Palacios,” Latinas on Stage, eds. Alicia Arrizón and Lillian Manzor (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2000) 234. 31 Monica Palacios, Greetings from a Queer Señorita, in Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance, eds. Caridad Svich and María Teresa Marrero (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000) 369. Subsequent references cited in text.
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regard the term lesbian: “I’ve noticed the word lesbian makes some people cringe. And I think this is happening because the word lesbian makes people think of some yucky sexual activity that has to do with a tractor! (Mimes driving a tractor, then raises right hand and waves)” (369). After this initial explanation of the joke, Palacios punctuates several other statements about attitudes towards lesbians by repeating the mime of driving the tractor and waving. This recurring image reveals the pervasive homophobia which Palacios has encountered in her school life, family, and career. Performance Studies scholar Alicia Arrizón cites Palacios’s use of comedy as a political intervention: “[Palacios’s] narrative, at once revealing and subversive, embodies a critique of homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality. As a comic, she is determined to accomplish this radical agenda with humor.”32 The comedy in her performance makes the political agenda of her work accessible and perhaps even more palatable to audience members who might be uncomfortable with queer issues, but humor is just one of the tools she uses to make her point. Palacios also confronts the societal judgments made on lesbians and their culture by frequently using the taboo words lesbian and vagina and by describing her sexual fantasies and practices in detail. In one scene, she embodies her forbidden desire as though she has to physically restrain herself from acting on her sexual impulses. She wears a black slip and heels, and the stage directions read, “(Monica sits on a chair á la Sophia Loren. Legs are crossed, hands are tied behind back and head hangs down. She slowly struggles in chair to get loose; she maintains this throughout the poem)” (379). The poetic monologue which follows describes a stranger, to whom she refers as Miss Sabrosita (Spanish for “tasty”), eating carne asada (beef) tacos. Since Palacios repeatedly remarks on her vegetarianism throughout the play, she connotes Miss Sabrosita’s sensuous body and delectable meal as forbidden. Bound to the chair and 32 Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 141.
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unable to do more than watch the woman eat her food, Palacios articulates her longing in culturally specific terminology which characterises the diner, her tacos, her manner of eating, and her sexuality as Latina: Didn’t just wolf down her two tacos and Corona [beer] with two limes. She consumed her meal creatively, slowly, tenderly— Con pasion. [With passion] Ab‐so‐lute‐ly loved when she closed her eyes after every bite. Chewing at least twenty times as if she was becoming one with the carne asada. OOOOMMME! Peaceful and beautiful she looked as her full Chicana lips produced kisses as she mas‐ti‐ca‐ted! [380]
The smatterings of Spanish, description of the food, rhythm of the language, and reference to Miss Sabrosita’s “full Chicana lips” work together to provide a sensual description with a distinctly Chicana lesbian sensibility. In their book Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater, Alberto Sandoval‐Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach cite this monologue as an incidence in which Palacios critiques and perhaps reshapes Latina/o culture: Palacios’s voyeurism [in watching Miss Sabrosita eat tacos] displaces the male gaze and refocuses the audience’s attention and the sexual object into ethnicity … She takes possession of male representation as the ultimate cultural expression of mexicanidad [Mexican‐ness]. In doing so, she dynamites male
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flaunting of machismo by outdoing its posturing herself and redirecting it back on her audience.33
The fact that the audience does not see Miss Sabrosita aids in the subversion of machismo described above. The spectator watches Palacios encountering her sexual yearnings, and rather than displacing the Chicana as an object of desire, the performer assumes the macho agency of lust. Through her performances, she teaches her audience to see the world as this Chicana lesbian sees it. Because Palacios had no role models of openly lesbian Latinas in stand‐up comedy, theatre, film, or television, she had not seen herself represented in performance and had to struggle to articulate her identity publicly: “I kind of learned about my queer culture through performing.”34 In breaking away from the straight stand‐up comedy circuit and from the macho sketch comedy being performed by the male members of Comedy Fiesta, Palacios gave herself the freedom to publicly embrace her full identity: There were so many problems when I was trying to be mainstream. For example, the homophobia, the racism, the sexism, the bullshit, the competition. I hated it. When I was trying to be mainstream, I wasn’t myself; therefore, my performance, my art, really suffered, because I couldn’t be a hundred percent. And in choosing to be my true Chicana lesbian self, I do more than a hundred percent.35
Palacios describes here a version of Chicana/o identity which had hardly been seen in the Chicana/o theatre which preceded her. In combining Chicana and lesbian identities into a single hybrid performance, she not only liberates herself but also
33 Alberto Sandoval‐Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001) 115. 34 Villaseñor, “Dos Lenguas Listas,” 239. 35 Villaseñor, “Dos Lenguas Listas,” 240.
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embarks on an activist project to incorporate lesbianism into a public and shared understanding of Latina identity, as she stated in an interview with the Spanish‐language newspaper, La Opinión: My plan is to intertwine my lesbian side with my Mexican side. I want to continue talking about this, writing about this, with the desire that these groups (lesbian and Mexican) which have problems, can understand one another, that they take notice that both are oppressed groups.36
Palacios tries to bring queer and Latina/o communities into dialogue with one another by creating performances which are culturally specific to both groups simultaneously. In this manner, her plays work in concert with the other solo performers examined here to reclaim chicanidad for a broader community than that defined by the strict parameters of traditional machismo. Conclusion: The Macho Framed In their work from the 1980s to the present, solo performers have pushed the boundaries of not only Chicana/o identity politics but also what constitutes Chicana/o theatre and how both mainstream and Latina/o audiences view that theatre and themselves. The collective performances which defined the Chicano Theatre Movement of the 1960s and 1970s depicted Chicana/o culture and identity as maintaining traditional Mexican values and heteronormative familial and social networks. Despite its constant push for social justice for Chicana/os, the ideologies promoted by the Chicano Movement 36 “Mi plan es entretejer mi lado lesbiano con mi lado mexicano. Quiero continuar hablando sobre eso, escribiendo sobre eso, con el deseo de que los grupos (lesbiano y mexicano) que tienen problemas entendiéndose, que se den cuenta que ambos son grupos oprimidos”; Antonio Mejías‐Rentas, “Mónica Palacios cuenta su vida en comedia,” La Opinión (Quinta Sección. 1 marzo 1991) 2; translation mine.
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often suppressed the agency of women, homosexuals, and even straight men who did not perform machismo as a primary facet of their identities. The three performers discussed here are representative of the varied and various ways Chicana/o identity is being challenged by embodying three distinct types of Chicana or Chicano. Luis Alfaro, Rick Najera, and Monica Palacios are all well aware of the Chicana/o theatrical tradition which preceded them, and they make deliberate departures from it. None of these monologists promotes an ideology of Chicana/o nationalism or ethnic separatism. Together they make a powerful argument for chicanidad as an increasingly humanist ideology. Their solo plays discussed here represent Chicana/o identity as a progressively more inclusive cultural and political discourse with a focus on Mexican and U.S. hybridised social practices. The fundamental tenet of Chicano Movement ideology that all of these plays address and strictly maintain is the pursuit of social justice and a desire to include the audience, regardless of its ethnic composition, in the struggle. Above all, these performers must ask their audiences, as theatre scholar and actor, Michael Peterson does, “Why are you listening?”37 It is no coincidence that the lesbian and the gay performers are seen mostly in gay‐friendly spaces, while the heterosexual performer can be produced in heteronormative venues without problems. On the other hand, with the rise of both gay and lesbian theatre and literary scholars, more critical discourse has been written about Palacios and Alfaro than about Najera. Machos, it would seem, are not as interesting to the critics, as are gay and lesbian narratives. Above all, each of these individuals (and many others we could not discuss here) are excellent writers and performers, doing what they do on virtually empty stages. In a gay Latino venue, Alfaro does not have to ask his audience why they are listening. He knows, as any Chicana/o theatre artist knows, that 37 Michael Peterson, Straight, White Male: Performance Art Monologues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997) 5.
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his audience is starving for his words, his stories, his failures and triumphs to be given their rightful place in their imaginary. Najaera, too, is cognisant of the Latina/os and Chicana/os in his audience who laugh at the veracity of his characters, the improbable as well as the probable tales and situations. Palacios grew into a fuller consciousness of her identity and sexuality because of her interactions with her audiences, and in doing so, she carved out a place for Chicana lesbian subjectivities in the realm of solo performance. Chicana/o theatre was born of the necessity to educate and entertain farm workers about the need for a union; their actos are still relevant forty years later, as are the performances of these three individuals, giving a voice to the voiceless and bodies to the invisible. Most especially, recall that each of these performances are about memory, not always a utopia that Jill Dolan calls for but a history that can no longer remain ignored and elided.
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Brian Singleton
Am I Talking to Myself? Men, Masculinities & the Monologue in Contemporary Irish Theatre Whereas the monologue form of drama has been used strategically by muted groups in Anglophone theatre to give voice to the voiceless, particularly for the subjectivities of race, class, gender and sexuality, the form has been the preserve of male writers in contemporary Irish theatre. The plays of Mark O’Rowe (Howie the Rookie) Conor McPherson (Rum and Vodka, This Lime Tree Bower, Port Authority), and Owen McCafferty (Cold Comfort) all manifest a trend of incommunicability, isolation and self‐delusion. They reveal a series of definitions of masculinities as defined by R. W. Connell, Kenneth MacKinnon, Peter Lehman, Sally Robinson and Stephen Whitehead such as hegemonic, protest, hard‐body and toxic. The focus of this essay is to set masculine rationality of action in those plays against the construction of woman within the male narratives revealing how they shore up the fantasy of masculinity. The symbiotic relationship between masculinity and violence, masculinity and “wound culture” will be explored, as well as the male’s relationship with his body and his spatial relationship with other bodies. For this, mention will be made of specific Dublin productions of these plays in order
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to establish the embodiment of masculinities on the contemporary Irish stage. The father of modern Irish drama, Brian Friel, already has provided a template for these new writers. Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) act as a point of comparison with their three characters oblivious to one another recounting the same event from their own subjectively blind perspective, the form mirroring the subject in the latter play significantly. Whereas in Faith Healer the actors do not appear in real time with other characters, operating always in isolation (similar to Howie the Rookie), the onstage presence of the other silent and seemingly un‐present characters in Molly Sweeney act poignantly as referents to the spoken text (as in Port Authority). No one character can hear or see the other and are called into play either by a controlling exegetic light or sound. The interest lies primarily in the divergence in the stories by each, making meaning unstable, and forcing spectators to either thread all together or side with a particular version of events recounted. The “drama” lies at the points of divergence. When in real life do we ever use the monologue form?; publicly, in the performing professions (law, politics, religion, education), and privately, either in the confessional, or in the psychiatrist’s chair. In the latter, we are accorded the privilege of the unbroken narrative denied us in the public sphere of sociability where we are trained to contribute rather than hold forth. Our narratives are supposed to reveal sinful actions for which we seek absolution, or damaged thought patterns that the psychiatrist will try to challenge and correct. The listener to the narrative is imperative in the contract of the confessional and the psychiatrist, as is, more importantly, the intervention. The monologue thus comes to be associated with troubling guilt or psychological distress, attenuated first by the telling of it, and then by absolution or the reprogramming of the damaged thought pattern by an external authority. Throughout the century, since Yeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902) the anxiety of the Irish male about his blood sacrifice for [261]
the nation is contrasted with the stoic figure of Woman, a constant in a fast‐changing national picture. Women in the national theatrical project have been categorised as either Róisín Dubh or Aisling, iconic females for the national cause, but men in the Irish theatre have had a less than glorious representation, particularly in their urban manifestations. In Sean O’Casey’s plays, for example, political figures are often ridiculed for their vacuous rhetoric, and the ordinary working man is caricatured as a pompous, and hapless drunk, or a narrow‐minded “boys own” nationalist, forsaking hearth, home, mother and wife. Since the early 1990s, a generation of new male playwrights has emerged through the smug trendiness of “Cool Hibernia,” that is the cultural manifestation of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. Surprisingly, instead of forsaking tradition, these authors look to Irish theatrical precedents for their form, but to other performative genres for their content. In their work, the modernist influences of Joyce and Beckett abound; streams of consciousness prose are worked into theatrical monologues. But the characters and settings, however, tend to derive inspiration from the post‐modern Hollywood screenwriting and direction of Quentin Tarantino, with his brash underworld of violence, drugs and sex wrapped up in non‐linear narratives and seemingly arbitrary cul‐de‐sacs of plots. O’Rowe’s and McPherson’s monologue plays inhabit the shady world of Dublin’s ganglands), all with their petty hoodlums and violent hardmen. In many respects this infatuation with the criminal underbelly of Dublin’s sprawling working‐class suburbia is written with such an obvious attraction that they might be accused of glorifying it. Certainly their male characters take on many of the features of a Tarantino anti‐hero; madcap obsession with trivia as a sidetrack from impulsive decisions and behaviour; spurious self‐justifying logic interrupted by an instinctual need to lash out; and philosophical discourse on the human condition cracked by the anxiety of what it takes to be a man.
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There are, however multiple masculinities on offer in these plays, despite the fact that they are monologues and not monodramas. The actor must inhabit each of the characters as a singular unit and tell the stories of the other characters from the perspective of the principal character. Most of the younger men in the plays are living in a boys own fantasy world of their own agency of masculine power that acts as a counterpoint to their social status. None of them could be described as hegemonically masculine as they have no social agency, however, they do conform to one of the principal drives of hegemonic masculinity, and that is a “compulsory heterosexuality.”1 They live on the margins of society and are ruled by prejudices and fears, primarily of their own masculine status and its perception by others. Women exist within their narratives either as conquests of the hunter‐hero, or dismissed as attempted and rejected prey. This centrifugal narrative of male caught up exclusively and unchallenged in his masculine fantasy is what Sally Robinson describes as “toxic.”2 Their tales of survival from violent scrapes exhibit a drive to construct the self as the wounded hero. This wound culture is a significant feature of Hollywood westerns. The new Irish male monologues feature a rogue male caught between historic representations of other rogue males. They represent the hard and tough “cowboy” figure of the Western genre. They must set wrong to right within their own moral codes, mete out the justice of male authority from their marginalised positions, and all the time operate in the outback of society’s socially deprived wastelands. O’Rowe’s characters in particular feature the “man‐ as‐hunter,”3 the lone male who forsakes hearth and home for a heroic project, usually one of revenge. Woman, either directly
1 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) 103. 2 Sally Robinson, “‘Emotional Constipation’ and the Power of Damned Masculinity: Deliverance and the Paradoxes of Liberation,” Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (London & New York: Routledge, 2001) 135. 3 Stephen M. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) 119.
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or indirectly is the prize. The hero’s action will deliver the woman. However, the cowboy image fails to be consistent. He is caught between his loyalty to other males and his attraction and attractiveness to alluring females. Invariably, as the narratives proceed in Howie the Rookie, the male undergoes significant transformation from the hard‐body of fantasy to the wounded hero of actuality. Wounds are constructed as trophies, physical manifestation of violent and heroic impulses and triumphs, indices to a wished‐for hegemonic status in a wider world.4 O’Rowe catapulted to fame in the 1999 Bush Theatre, London production of his plays Howie the Rookie (which was revived and toured for several years thereafter in the UK and in Ireland).5 It features two of his favoured working‐class young toughs, the Howie Lee and the Rookie Lee. They share many things apart from friendship: an insatiable lust for sex, obsession with machismo, and actions motivated by almost animal instinct. They appear to lack the power of reasoning, satisfying their sexual needs as they arise, seeking violent retribution in an instant for perceived crimes committed against them. They live, like O’Rowe’s many characters before them, in an Old Testament world of “an eye for an eye,” as codes of honour force them, like in The Aspidistra Code, to take on and seek retribution for crimes committed against their friends. Thus their fighting and other associated violence is seen as “pure,” not tainted with the rage of personal involvement, while the person to whom the original wrong has been committed can stand back and admire the purity of the retribution. The play is written in virtual prose in the form of two distinct monologues, allowing us to situate character
4 See Robinson, “‘Emotional Constipation’ and the Power of Damned Masculinity,” 141. 5 It was revived in 2006 at the Peacock Theatre Dublin, directed by Jimmy Fay, and using the same actors as in the first production (Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels).
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somewhere between what each says about himself and about the other. They tell their stories in the present tense interrupted by dialogue, jolting the spectator out of the cosy relationship with the onstage males, as they give voice to other characters in the drama that is their lives. Their women, again mothers and “hooers” are invariably ugly, with bad breath and overweight. The men’s “service” to the women is presented as benevolence thus maintaining a separation from them. The Howie’s mother is depicted by him disparagingly as a “nineteen‐fifties popsock teenybopper”6 while the Rookie’s mother is an alcoholic after the father left for “a ten years younger hooer” (30). The Howie picks up a girl in a nightclub, impersonally named Blondie, meanwhile he has occasional sex (but absolutely no relationship) with his gay friend Ollie’s sister, Peaches. He finds her disgusting and is ashamed of her, but his animal needs, in the absence of any better woman, win out. But because the women only speak through the mouthpieces of the two male characters, their discourse and their representation is entirely a male construction. Women only ever exist in the narrow‐ minded imagination and memory of men. The gay friend Ollie throws up a particular conundrum for the two “lads.” They despise all effeminacy but seem to tolerate Ollie as a friend, although they make sure they keep their distance from him. They will never share a bed with him, as the Howie reveals: “You’re a bloke and you’re game, you can kip in the bed with him. Game meaning gay, neither of which I am, furthest thing from, so I go the mat” (7‐8). He is useful to them in many respects, first because though gay he can also look after himself physically, which ingratiates him in their company, though ironically it leads to the death of the Howie at the end. Being gay does not exempt Ollie from the underworld’s dialectic of action and consequence. Second, having a gay man in their midst enables the lads to get closer to women: “Bein’ a faggot he doesn’t get overwhelmed by the dollyness” (19). Such 6 Mark O’Rowe, Howie the Rookie (London: Nick Hern, 1999) 8. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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is their complete incomprehension of women and female behaviour that they are rendered speechless in a nightclub, and rely totally on Ollie for engineering conversation. Although they “tolerate” Ollie’s sexuality and are able to nominate, label it, distance and disparage it, though still maintaining his friendship, they remain constantly scared that they may copy any such behavioural signs as Ollie might display. For instance, the Rookie describes how the Howie cares for him after a beating: “Then he reaches out and touches me bruised eye. Gently. Gently. Not gay like, just … Me voice trembles like a pansy’s” (41). Tenderness is similarly distanced by nominating it as gay. “Being a man” in their distorted worldview is to eliminate all traces of tenderness, affection and effeminacy. Men, in their eyes, bond only through physical violence, ironically pushing and punching the other men away in their attempts to get close. O’Rowe’s play features a very significant device in the narrative of masculinity. The phallic masculinity of the Rookie is overturned in his own monologue of male violence into what Peter Lehman describes as “its vulnerable, pitiable, and frequently comic collapse.”7 This is also a deliberate masochising of the male body in that it is temporarily dephallicised according to Sally Robinson “in order to rephallicise it.”8 This is a familiar trope of the Western in which injury plays an important role in the construction of masculinity. The male body, once injured, must then go through a period of convalescence and recovery. And once recovered the body is rehabilitated in order as Suzanne E. Hatty describes as “to establish the validity of masculine identity.”9
7 Peter Lehman, Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2001) 26. 8 See Robinson, “‘Emotional Constipation’ and the Power of Damned Masculinity,” 141. 9 Suzanne E. Hatty, Masculinities, Violence, and Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA & London: Sage Publications, 2000) 168.
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This notion of “wound culture” put forward by Mark Seltzer10 also has another important feature, namely that despite being wounded, the male hero emerges continually unscathed in the narrative of his own self‐defined heroic project. The play was first performed at the Bush Theatre in London in 1999, directed by Mike Bradwell and performed by Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels and subsequently went on extensive touring throughout Ireland. The two actors were brought back together in 2006 by director Jimmy Fay in the Peacock Theatre Dublin to perform the same play again and it was interesting to see the two characters played as significantly older. Whereas the machismo in the first production signified a very definite realistic threat, seven years on (with less hair and much heavier in build) Kelly and Shiels respectively represented a physical disjunction between the stories and storytellers. The monologues with an older cast took on a hue of nostalgia. Although at least half of the monologues are written in the past tense, this past seemed pushed further into the distance. Thus when the characters shifted into the present tense we saw a much greater gap between the narrative masculinity of a remembered past and an embodied masculinity of present reality. Conor McPherson’s early work is composed entirely of the monologue form, first as the singular narrative and then as triple narratives of the same sequence of events from simultaneously present on‐stage characters. His first play Rum and Vodka had its amateur première at University College Dublin in 1992 and its professional debut in 1994 at Dublin’s City Arts Centre by McPherson’s own Fly by night Theatre Company. The play has no character definition and no age specification from the author (although the character identifies himself as twenty four). It is written in one‐sentence paragraphs signifying a linear thought‐pattern. The male monologist stumbles from one sentence to another recounting a three‐day exceptional moment in his life when he protested against his 10 See Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in American Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).
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existence by forsaking hearth and home in favour of alcohol and quit his cushy but mundane Dublin Corporation clerical job. McPherson constructs the monologue tightly from the perspective of his protagonist. There is very little reported speech and it exists only for the sake of the narrative, rather than to shed light on the character. The character situates himself within a panoply of north Dublin lower‐middle class characters, his hapless wife Maria who is also a devoted mother, his ne’er‐do‐well alcoholic friends Phil and Declan, his nerdy office manager Eamon, and Welsh college graduate (and two‐day stand) Myfanwy. His rollicking journey through the pubs of Dublin sees the character seeking solace in alcohol. He talks of his depression but fails to see his own solution to it alcohol) is also the cause of it. Women, for him, are constructed as servants or sites of solace. His wife started out as some girl at a party, nameless, but pregnant. Subsequently her primary function in his life is to shore up his rage against the world: “We got on well and the more shit I got off other people the more I found comfort with her.”11 Similarly during his three‐ day bender, Myfanwy performs the same function: “I wanted the lovely girl to look after me” (25); “She was experienced, worldly, she could look after me” (28). Overall, though, he is not a violent person. His violence is expressive, driven by emotion and it is not directed at women. In fact, the only violence in the play is the reported physical assault on him by his wife with a can of peas. This clearly is a narrative device to construct himself as victim. He is aware of his own non‐ hegemonic status, and thus protests against his positioning in the world by rejecting it, and denying others a chance to redeem him by not permitting them any significant reported speech.
11 Conor McPherson, Rum and Vodka, in This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays (London, Nick Hern, 196) 11. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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McPherson’s second monologue play, The Good Thief (that started life as The Light of Jesus)12 moves into the territory of male violence and again notably the character does not identify himself, while none of the other characters mention his name. Thus this naming becomes a device to deny being objectified and subjected to questioning. The monologist is a former soldier who has turned hard‐man for a local criminal. This collapse of the symbol of state authority (soldier) into a protest masculinity against society represents the reversal of repressive ideologies. Time is collapsed further into a two‐day incident in which a job meting out punishment is thwarted by an ambush. He manages to escape taking with him voluntarily the wife and child of the man he was supposed to harm, and is ultimately trapped like a hunted animal by his criminal associates who mete out their own justice on him. The monologue begins with the character presenting himself as victim. His girlfriend Greta has left him for crime boss and publican Joe Murray. His reflection on that (“Power attracts women”)13 positions himself in a masculine order with women as objects of transaction in power relations. This is most evident as the narrative sacrifices the life of the escaped woman in an attempt to cover up the failure of the violent actions amongst the criminals. In this play he permits many of the characters a voice but these occur in the central part of the narrative that is driven by action. Bookending this action are reflections before and after to reveal the journey he has undergone from his presence in the world as reflected through the self‐image of his phallic power (with guns and women) through the comic collapse (his failure to execute his job and himself as sacrificial lamb to other more powerful masculinities). He ends the play having left Ireland, has further
12 The Light of Jesus was first performed on 18 April 1994 by Fly by Night Theatre Company at the City Arts Centre, directed by the author. It subsequently was performed under the title of The Good Thief as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival by Loopline productions, again directed by the author. 13 McPherson, The Good Thief, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1996) 49. Subsequent references are cited in text.
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succumbed to alcoholism and is living the life of a recluse. His acknowledgement that he is “no good” (78) at the end of the play is an acceptance of his lack of agency in a masculine order. That masculine order remains unchallenged, and the often comic narrative shores up the order still further. In This Lime Tree Bower, McPherson writes three intersecting monologues with three characters onstage simultaneously throughout. Performed first at Dublin’s Crypt Arts Centre in 1995,14 this play presents three by‐now familiar stock character types, all of whom conform to the man‐as‐victim trope so clearly established in the early plays. All three men know each other, have all varying degrees of experience of several events in their lives, and all have dysfunctional relationships with women. Joe is still at school and is in awe of his new friend Damien whom he presents as the hero (although carefully constructing his awe as worship rather than attraction). His brother Frank works in his father’s chip shop and robs a bookmakers owned by a councillor to whom his father is in significant debt. Their sister Carmel’s boyfriend, Ray, is the third character. He is a University Philosophy lecturer and through from a different social class is able to connect through shared masculinities. Joe’s is an emerging masculinity. He is positioning himself between his father’s honest and hard‐ working model and the heroic adventurer of school‐friend Damien. He has a fascination with and fear of the opposite sex, although he is very clear about his opposition to Damien the rapist. Ray uses his female students as playthings and objects of his instrumental violence. He equates violence with sex: “I know that if I don’t get it in her in the next few minutes I’m going to give someone a dig.”15 Like for the two narrators in the first two plays sex for him is another weapon of instrumental
14 First performed 26 September 1995 in a co‐production by Íomhá Ildánach and Fly by Night Theatre Company. It later opened at the Bush Theatre London on 3 July 1996. Both productions were directed by the author. 15 McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower: Three Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1996) 115. Subsequent references cited in text.
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violence that purges aggression. What is most interesting about this play, however, is that all three characters are named and they name each other. So despite some of the heinous and socially unacceptable behaviour, they do live in each other’s world and thus can be challenged in their narrating of it. There is one significant moment towards the end of the play when Ray is recounting his humorous though inadvertently violent response to a lecture by the “famous philosopher Konigsberg” (he vomits) when Frank turns to Ray and says directly, acknowledging his presence “I never heard that,” and Ray responds “I’ve been saving it” (118). This is a key moment in this drama of the monologue in that they acknowledge both a shared space but also a shared discourse. This is the moment when dialogue anchors the narrative of the monologue in a shared reality. They can confirm each other’s existence, although they do not challenge each other. This moment of verbal and ocular recognition is the occasion when the shared masculinity of the discourse is validated by the form. Although monologues feature in all of his subsequent work as narrative moments deriving diegetically from action, McPherson’s last whole monologue play was Port Authority, produced first by the Gate Theatre Dublin at the New Ambassador’s Theatre, in London in 2001.16 He retains the tri‐ partite structure of This Lime Tree Bower, but this time his three characters only inhabit the shared city of Dublin and the same stage space. They do not in any other way share the same fictional world (although the oldest character purports to have a son called Dermot, the same name as the middle character). Each narrative is individual and charts separately the transitional moments in the lives of three Dublin men. Kevin has just left home trying to make it in an adult world. He has copious sex, and consumes lots of alcohol, but he ultimately returns home, as his life is disordered as his one‐room existence. Married man Dermot is also at a transitional point in 16 First London performance on 22 February 2001 and first Dublin performance on 24 April 2001. McPherson again directed.
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his life, being offered a job by mistake and one for which he is not qualified. He is embarrassed by his wife’s size and is hampered by his own fear of his new world of work. He, too, turns to alcohol and his body lets him down socially. Returning home he ponders on his own lack of agency. And finally Joe is in his seventies and in a nursing home run by a religious order. He reminisces about a transitional moment in his life when his wife was gravely ill in hospital and he yearned for his neighbour Marion. A parcel containing a photo of Marion prompts him to remember his inaction and lack of understanding of his feelings at that moment. What these three men share is their self‐confessed lack of agency in the world and their complicity with that lack. Kevin is the most explicit about this: And I was thinking that maybe there isn’t a soul for every person in the world. Maybe there’s just two. One for people who go with the flow, and one for all the people who fight.17
Dermot concurs with this lack of self‐belief: “I was someone to whom things happened” (50). Similarly, Joe explains his lack of action with Marion when a younger man as “It just wasn’t in me” (54). Unlike the protest masculinity espoused by This Lime Tree Bower, this play exemplifies what R. W. Connell calls “the renunciation of masculinizing practices.”18 The tri‐partite monologue drama does not create competing narratives for the one reality, but rather complementary narratives in a requiem for masculinity. McPherson’s original production separated the men in an abstract space, removed from the comforts of reality, and called the men to speak with the strike of a bell further reinforcing their lack of agency and ringing out the irony of the
17 McPherson, Port Authority, rev. ed. (London: Nick Hern, 2005) 49. Subsequent references cited in text. 18 Connell, Masculinities, 131.
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title. Masculinity rendered passive both in writing and performance is a rejection of the agency of the male narrative of the 1980s American monologists such as Eric Bogosian,19 and a reflection of the separation of the sexes, perhaps of a masculinity emerging from a theocratic society. McPherson’s men, to a large extent, seek solace in alcohol. They do not question their existence but appear quite self‐aware of their failings. But that self‐awareness is not sufficient to bring about change. Self‐awareness does not challenge self‐acceptance and thus the characters remain frozen in individual spotlights that shed light on masculinities that are masochistic and toxic.20 In Belfast writer Owen McCafferty’s plays and in his monodrama in particular, his males are configured between the building sites of London and the watering holes of Belfast with a dysfunctional relationship between father and son. His 2005 play Cold Comfort fits neatly into this tradition and he presents his familiar working‐class male anti‐hero caught up in a web of self‐loathing, self‐pity and nostalgia. Kevin Toner21 is the lone male delivering a monologue at the funeral of his father. He has returned from the stock‐in‐trade North London building site to Belfast. He is alone on stage, his only comfort the whiskey bottle, the contents of which loosen his tongue. O’Kane cut a dashing and yet tragic figure, torturing himself with memories of his childhood. The character is dressed in one of his father’s old suits, just as he bears his father’s name. It is quickly revealed that both father and son have led similar lives after the break‐up of their marriages, both seeking solace in alcohol, both with a predilection for violence. McCafferty first twist in a masterful narrative is to reveal that the character is not addressing the audience, but is talking
19 See Michael Peterson, Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). 20 Robinson, “‘Emotional Constipation’ and the Power of Damned Masculinity” 141 and 135 respectively. 21 Performed by Patrick O’Kane in a production by Prime Cut at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast.
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to his dead father. And this is a significant departure from the use of the monologue form by the previously analysed Dublin writers. We are at first unsure if even he is dead as well, and both are in the other world, although it would be too hubristically out of character for Toner junior to believe that he has made it to heaven. He challenges his imagined father about the past in a torrential narrative of rhythms and repetitions that range conjure up a whole gamut of emotions for both him and the audience. But one quickly gets the impression that he is not so loquacious in real life as we discover that neither father nor son could articulate emotion in real time. Kevin Toner would fit fairly well into McCafferty’s earlier work (such as in Scenes from the Big Picture, for instance), given his emotional injuries but had he appeared in that play he would have been struggling to say nothing at all. In Cold Comfort, however, he is freed from his inhibitions to challenge both his father and himself. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that it is all too late. McCafferty’s next shift in the narrative unsettles us once more as Toner conjures up his mother and sets himself in the middle of an imagined relationship, inventing the dialogue for himself. Later, his own wife Theresa appears in the narrative and his nostalgia turns to invective as McCafferty charts the swift decline of their relationship. Like all monologues, damaged thought processes are unable to be challenged because of the form. Thus Toner weaves his way around one‐ sided characterisations that support his own sense of self. It his difficult thus to have any sympathy for him, save perhaps for the cycle of the past repeating itself from which he is unable to escape. And that is where the tragedy of this piece lies, as McCafferty gives his narrative one final twist to reveal that his own baby son, also called Kevin, is also dead, presumably from neglect. Reliving the moment of discovering his dead son in his cot, Toner’s articulacy dissolves while in the production O’Kane crashed to the floor and delivered a series of very painful primal screams. He held them to the expiration of the breath and continued with more until it almost became unbearable to [274]
listen to him. McCafferty, who also directed the play, did not let us turn away but held the fading lights for what felt like an extraordinarily long time. The one‐hour monologue of very bleak self‐destruction was played against a set composed of a large newspaper obituary ripped in two. One of its columns had the death notice of a Kevin Toner and one immediately thought that this was the death notice of his father. But as the play proceeded it became clear that this was not his father at all but that of his own son, before the narrative revealed that his son had died. This double death and double wake sees Toner caught in a tragedy of generations before and after him. We learn his father was a brutal alcoholic all the while we can see on stage that he is simply repeating learned behaviour with a whiskey bottle of his own. He attempts to talk to his absent parents, wife and son, and uses us as audience to replace them. This direction of the monologue forces us to confront such a damaged character front‐on but in silence. Rather than the requiem approach by McPherson or the comic spectacle of collapsed masculinity of O’Rowe, McCafferty’s monologue brings us into the heart of the drama through the direct address to us as characters within the fiction. Enveloped within the drama thus, O’Cafferty firmly fixes a crisis of masculinity within a context of social deprivation and its emotional fall‐out. The form thus creates a role for the spectator beyond the witness and begs us to offer absolution so the character might be redeemed. This monodrama thus challenges the criticism levelled at the Irish theatrical monologue as being “the individual point of view without context.”22 The inclusion of imaginary other characters and by placing them in the space of the audience through direct address forces McCafferty’s character to ultimately collapse. But this is not a comic collapse.
22 Stephen Di Benedetto, “Shattering Images of Sex Acts and Other Obscene Staged Transgressions in Contemporary Irish Plays by Men,” Performing Ireland: Australasian Drama Studies, eds. Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan 43, (October 2003): 51.
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It is a complete “renunuciation of masculinising practices,”23 that would appear to lead to a potential “re‐embodiment”24 of the masculine, though McCafferty allows no such closure. McCafferty pulled the rug out from under Toner’s appeal to us (and redemptive possibilities) with a final line of expletives, presumably directed at his imagined family, but also pointed at us. The masculine “protest” rages on. The monologue was the primary form of drama by Irish male authors for the stage in the 1990s and in the early twenty‐ first century. They were invariably first plays in the career of the authors and were criticised by some as embryonic exercises in character construction. The focus here has been on Irish masculinities as constructed by male authors and male characters in dramas that do not permit women to appear on stage. There are other notable monologue plays in which women characters do appear alongside men and on their own. Eugene O’Brien’s 2001 play Eden features a husband and wife in a shared space telling the stories of how alcohol has rendered their relationship dysfunctional. Although the characters do not speak the challenge to the aberrant form of masculinity by the male protagonist comes from alternative versions of his stories by his wife. Mark O’Rowe’s 2003 play Crestfall features three women in a fictional Irish country town who have been suffering abuse from a panoply of men in their lives. And as they recount those tales of abuse they assault us with a torrent of violent verbiage pointing to the extent of their own brutalisation in a masculine order. O’Brien never lets the man and woman acknowledge each other, while O’Rowe’s women are never permitted sisterly solidarity as a vehicle to escape. Thus the monologue traps women still further despite their embodiment. In all the plays analysed no hegemonic masculinity is present and no masculinity is “true.”25 The male on the contemporary Irish stage is invariably wounded 23 Connell, Masculinities, 131. 24 Connell, Masculinities, 233. 25 Connell, Masculinities, 45.
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psychologically, and often physically. They construct themselves as “hard‐body characters”26 in their narratives but on stage they fail to practice socially their masculinity as they are not permitted to interact with others or sometimes not even move. Symbiotic with the toxicity of this construction of masculinity is the unchallengeable monologue form in which the authors choose for their men to talk to themselves. We are able to challenge and perhaps absolve aberrant behaviour from the hegemonic norm. However, the form does not permit masculinity to seek out alternatives with which to re‐embody itself.
26 Kenneth MacKinnon, Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media (London: Arnold, 2003) 55.
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Eckart Voigts‐Virchow & Mark Schreiber
Will the “Wordy Body” Please Stand Up? The Crises of Male Impersonation in Monological Drama—Beckett, McPherson, Eno The Drama Handbook by John Lennard and Mary Luckhurst tells us that before the 16th century, an actor was simply called ‘player’ or ‘comedian,’ until Sir Philip Sidney defined him as “one who personates a character, or acts a part.”1 This definition, focussed on “personation,” will be the starting point of this paper. With Sidney, the theatre “do‐er,” determined merely by his participation in what goes on on stage, turns into an impersonator who inhabits a role more in accord with contemporary notions of consistency and plausibility. A lot of performance theatre in the past decade has been devoted to the project of restoring the actor as “do‐er” to the theatre in general and to the “wordy body” (Will Eno) of monological speaking in particular. This tendency has at least two distinct sources; one is avant‐garde performance theatre, the other pervasive forms of popular comedy. In both of these theatrical forms, the interchanges between consistently personated characters have been replaced by the permeable personae (i.e., the masked 1 John Lennard and Mary Luckhurst, The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 173.
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second and third selves of the authors/actors that steer and organise the narrative without becoming a fully consistent fictional identity). The Latin root of “persona,” after all, is “personare,” i.e., resound or “sound through.” Whenever the actor’s body, therefore, dominates a role which is only tentatively assumed and impersonated, we shall speak of a persona, or a transparent mask through which the body/face appears—a technique employed to great effect by Anna Deavere Smith. In one of the manifestoes of post‐dramatic theatre, Tim Etchells (of the renowned Sheffield‐based performance troupe Forced Entertainment) names “intuition, chance, dream, accident and impulse”2 as a set of trademarks for their performance—and the gap between this theatre and the declamation of written lines attached to more or less coherent characters impersonated on a stage could not be wider. Variations of this theme, the essence of the ephemeral moment in performance, are all over the place—from Richard Schechner, Roselee Goldberg or Marvin Carlson to Peggy Phelan. No matter how carefully scripted or studiously controlled a performance may be, it is in the unrepeatable slippage that we find its essence, and Allan Kaprow’s term “happening” points out precisely what is at stake in this kind of theatre which may be addressed as paratheatre or post‐ dramatic theatre. Both, stand‐up comedy and postdramatic theatre have abolished the Aristotelian formula (mimetic illusionism, narrative, impersonation, and dialogue) in favour of an unrepeatable, autonomous performance without the fictional time‐space continuum in which dramatic action, impersonation, illusionism, referentiality, and representation occur. Performance theatre has its two roots in confrontational modes against the art gallery and drama (conceptualised as art
2 Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1999) 19.
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performance and performance art by Noël Carroll).3 Contemporaneous with performance art in the 1960s, but in a widely different context, stand‐up comedy emerged from the Victorian music halls and variety show circuits up to the 1960s. Although they spring from different roots, however, barriers between stand‐up comedy and performance art are, at least theoretically, permeable.4 When solo performance artist Deb Margolin (formerly of Split Britches) was asked after her roaringly funny solo performance at the 2002 MLA conference at New York in what way her performance was different from stand‐up comedy, she solely referred to the fact that she hoped it did more than make you laugh—and that must surely also apply to the best of stand‐up comedy.5 Both Deb Margolin’s solo performances and stand‐up comedy, however, are marked by the temporary assumption of theatrical personae. In Margolin’s Of All the Nerve she appears as “Performer” before assuming the unlikely personae of “Nerve Cell,” “Jazz Musician,” “Chelsea Coffee Waitress” and stepping back into the performer persona. As performer, she calls herself “Debbie” and berates Kris Kristofferson for the redundancy in his name (she argues he should be called Kris Tofferson).6 Again, the jokey metatheatrical personae in Margolin’s “material” are less stable but not at all unlike and the “characters” regularly employed by comedians such as Harry Enfield or, on an even grander scale, Sacha Baron Cohen (“Ali G,” “Borat”).
3 See Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd, Drama, Theatre, Performance The New Critical Idiom Series (London: Routledge, 2004) 83‐84. 4 Attempts at definition are legion. Darko Suvin has clearly failed in his attempt to associate non‐scripted happenings with non‐cognitive theatre (traditionally for a lower‐class audience, see Darko Suvin, “Reflections on Happenings,” The Drama Review 14.3 (1969): 125‐144. One should also point out that the Dada roots of contemporary performance can be found in the popular stages of the Cabaret Voltaire, i.e., performers Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings at Munich, Vienna and Zürich. 5 Deb Margolin in personal conversation with Eckart Voigts‐Virchow. 6 Deb Margolin, Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo, ed. Lynd Hart, Critical Performances Series (London & New York, Cassell, 1999) 18.
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In Oliver Double’s account of what he does as a stand‐up comedian, the ephemeral moment of performance is just as central as in avant‐garde performance: I’m improvising. New punch lines for old routines suddenly strike me. The idea comes into my head, and without a second thought it tumbles out of my mouth, and there’s a laugh. I say things about what’s going on in the room, how the jokes are going down, people in the audience, and the things I say get laughs. This is instant comedy with a butterfly lifespan. These jokes exist for a moment, then they’re gone. If you repeated them to somebody outside of the gig, you’d just get a blank stare.7
The joke, therefore, puts the conditions of performance in a nutshell, and small wonder, then, that in the wake of various kinds of post‐dramatic paratheatre and the transmedial ubiquity of stand‐up, it is this area of (anti‐mimetic) improv theatre that has gained ground on the text‐based, dramatist‐ originating theatre (still occasionally denounced as “bourgeois,” although post‐dramatic theatre is hardly less bourgeois). Stand‐up, therefore, is the poor popular counterpart of post‐dramatic performance as it is defined (a) by a rejection of impersonation in favour of permeable personae and (b) by the quintessential impromptu interaction with the audience beyond the confines of the dramatic text. Even a carefully scripted monologue of impersonation participates in this “liveness.” For instance, Conor McPherson points out in his “Afterword” to Four Plays how wonderful it was when Brian Cox was “drying” at the beginning of St. Nicholas. Having lost his lines, he simply turned around and said to the audience: “‘I’m terribly sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I wonder would you mind very much if I started again?’ … Live theatre always has the possibility of turning into a mess,
7 Oliver Double, Stand‐Up! On Being a Comedian (London: Methuen, 1997) 2.
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and that’s part of the fun.”8 In the mess, the permeable persona becomes apparent. It is interesting to note the flavour of the professional language here. Both stand‐up comedians and performance artists will inevitably speak about their “material” rather than their script or play text. In this paper we will try to weave a thread from a number of wildly different theatrical strands together—Beckett and the tradition of Irish stage storytelling as a paradigm of monologues evident in 1990s Irish playwrights such as Conor McPherson, stand‐up comedy as an important impetus to contemporary monological writing, and the solo performance in the contemporary avant‐garde theatre. In the work of Will Eno, a Brooklyn‐based dramatist lauded by Edward Albee and particularly well‐received in Britain, these strands come together. Having made the distinction between fully impersonated characters, text and fully scripted drama on the one hand, and the performing personae of partly scripted or unscripted improvisation on the other, we will now tie this distinction to its effect in the discourse on masculinities. The issue of masculinity has emerged as one of the preoccupations of monological plays (and beyond) in recent years. Gender is arguably the most important category in the discourse on monologues. This is evident, for instance, in the gender distinction in the numerous anthologies of stage monologues for audition, which will inevitably separate male from female monologues and male from female performers.9 The issue of masculinity is of particular importance to our examples because of the misogynist legacy of both avant‐garde theatre and stand‐up comedy. Interestingly, the focus in performance theory has been laid particularly on performers
8 Conor McPherson, Four Plays (London: Nick Hern, 1999) 179. Further McPherson page references are cited in text. 9 See, for instance, Jane Edwardes ed., The Faber Book of Monologues: Men (London: Faber, 2005) or Michael Earley and Philippa Keil eds. The Contemporary Monologue: Women (London: Routledge, 1995).
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such as Carolee Schneeman whose performative work is inextricably linked to the sexual politics of body art.10 As Oliver Double clearly states, the blue jokes about sex in traditional working‐class comedy seek to reinforce a hierarchical status quo of gender relations and keep the taboos firmly in place.11 It is up for debate whether the female version of this humour by comediennes such as Jo Brand or Jenny Éclair may be tipping the scales simply by their female authorisation.12 Clearly, however, the mere presence of female performers goes some way towards reversing subject‐object relations. In the remainder of this paper, we will look at the way in which male‐ authored and male‐enunciated monologues take issue with the current problem with defining and “personating” masculinity at a time when male stage supremacy has (or should have) become a thing of the past. One might link the issue of masculinity to the long‐standing tradition of tying monologues to a general crisis in communication. First of all, monologues indicate a crisis of action in that they replace enactment with narration. The modernist monologue emerged in the plays of August Strindberg, Jean Cocteau, and others from two sources: (1) the disruption of the holistic “I” in psychoanalysis, and; (2) the linguistic turn with its sceptical attitude towards communication and language.13 Obviously, monologues and monodrama provide excellent forms to express the breakdown and impossibility of dialogical exchange between fully coherent, holistic, stable identities. It has, in fact, been argued that monological speaking dominates even in modernist dialogues, and clearly narrative literature and poetry have 10 See Wallis and Shepherd, Drama, Theatre, Performance, 140‐150. 11 Oliver Double, Stand‐Up! On Being a Comedian (London: Methuen, 1997) 110. 12 For a collection of interviews with female actors and stand‐up performers, such as Victoria Wood, Jenny Éclair and Jo Brand, see Alison Oddey, Performing Women. Stand‐Ups, Strumpets and Itinerants, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 13 See Sybille Demmer, Untersuchungen zu Form und Geschichte des Monodramas (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1982) 120‐131.
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produced their own versions of monological speaking in the 20th century.14 Nietzsche, for instance, separated “art in front of witnesses” from “monological art,” the latter being an introspective art based on the forgetting of world and audience. In this view, monologues tend to express a rejection of the world and a retreat towards the incommunicable self—and in the work of Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard even further towards a full destruction of the very ideas of “self” and “communication.” Beckett’s monodrama has taken the monologue to a level of extreme unknowability and Beckett’s monologues deal first and foremost with the monologue itself. In plays such as Play (1963‐ 64), Not I (1972) or A Piece of Monologue (1979), he presents the audience with “windowless,” often logorrhoeic monads (an idea derived from Leibniz), i.e. the simplest, indivisible entities. These are anything but perfect, as Leibniz’s Monadology (1714) has it, but rather soulless voices (vox inanis).15 Beckett’s soulless, monadic voices have lost the ability to express themselves. They do not have access to their past and they are “windowless” in that they are lacking the means to communicate their experience or the change they are going through. Bent on manic self‐perception, it has become impossible for Beckett’s soliloquisers to stage their identity: The old and diminished Krapp has been disconnected from his former, more vital self in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Mouth has been severed from the “I” she cannot utter, forced to replace it with the recurrent “she” in Not I. Both of these Beckettian voices fail in the sense that they cannot initiate a 14 For a study of monologues in narratives by, among others, Borges, Kafka and Beckett, see Michael Niehaus, ‘Ich, die Literatur, spreche…’ Der Monolog der Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, (Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). Interestingly, a recent monograph on dramatic monologues also discusses personae in theatrical monologues by Anna Deavere Smith, Eve Ensler, and Alan Bennett, see Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue, New Critical Idiom Series, (London: Routledge, 2003) 130‐131. 15 This is Beckett’s term in a letter to Joe Chaikin, see James Knowlson, The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) 824 n41.
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dialogue between the split selves that constitute an inner dialogue one encounters so often in traditional monologues— between a former “I” or a variant of the present “I” addressed in the monologue by the speaker. Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue, originally entitled From an abandoned (interrupted) soliloquy, has its failed fragmentariness contained in its very title. The play was prompted by actor David Warrilow’s request of Beckett to write a play about death. The monologue is accompanied by the skull‐sized white globe of a lamp, which starts to fail thirty seconds before the end of the monologue. The piece starts with the words “Birth was the death of him. Again.” And ends on yet another early title of the piece: “Gone.”16 Among specks of memories and pictures ripped to pieces, the speaker is reduced to quantifying his life mathematically into “Two and a half billion seconds” and “Thirty thousand nights” (425), adding more seconds while he is perceiving himself. In Act Without Words I (1957), Beckett had dispensed with language altogether. Called into action by a whistle and hurled back onto the stage from the wings, a player seeks to reach a carafe by putting cubes on top of each other—and fails. Where can you go from these extreme reductions by Beckett? One may of course re‐conventionalise monologues by returning to the speaker a command on his former self by making him narrate past experience. Conor McPherson’s plays, which often show only one performer on a stage without or with very little stage paraphernalia, are evidently rich in narrated action. “Let’s begin with an incident” (51), the narrator starts off in The Good Thief (1994)—and in Rum and Vodka (1992), the protagonist (who remains nameless throughout the play) begins by initiating the traditional monological dialogue with himself: “I think my overall fucked‐upness is my impatience” (9). In contrast to Beckett, the fictional universe is still there and apparently fully intact, but it is mediated by the voice of the monologist rather than directly enacted in front of the audience. 16 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) 425, 429. All further Beckett references are to this edition and are cited in text.
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When the narrator throws his desktop computer out of his office in Rum and Vodka, we learn this from his narration. Where does this narration occur? Is there a scene, a situation implied? Or are we nowhere? And why does the character talk to the audience? What does the audience do, do they react at all? Do they listen to the story merely as spectators or have they become witnesses—a distinction suggested by Etchells.17 Etchells’s idea of the witness clearly harks back to Richard Schechner’s distinction between “efficacy” and “entertainment” and the avant‐garde ideal of overcoming aesthetic distance and arriving at an active audience concept. An audience as witness would experience the monologue as a burden, as a demand on its faculties. Etchells argues that the “art‐work that turns us into witnesses leaves us, above all, unable to stop thinking, talking, and reporting what we’ve seen.”18 Witnesses require the event. In the absence of other addressees, any kind of monologue and, even more so, a monodrama will achieve an intensified reciprocal awareness between performer and audience, which renders the “fourth wall” far more permeable than in a traditional dialogical play. There are, of course, monological plays that are so focused on expressing linguistic isolation that they insist on dis‐establishing links to the audience. One may interpret several monologues by Beckett in this way. For instance, he introduces a quasi‐dialogic counterpart (the tapes in Krapp’s Last Tape, representing the failure of communicating with one’s own past, or the auditor in Not I, which, logically, dispenses with the audience). With a few exceptions, Beckett’s monologues express his nihilistic endurances and communication failures by a male performer, and McPherson also explores masculinity in crisis. Men’s studies of various hues have focused in the past decades on how men have become redundant for procreation (by genetic engineering) and subsistence (by women at work) 17 Etchells, Certain Fragments, 17. 18 Etchells, Certain Fragments, 18. For Schechner’s distinction, see Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1994).
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and how anti‐social behaviour, violence, drug abuse, sexual aggression, paedophilia and suicide are mainly male phenomena. Shaken in their traditionally dominant patriarchal regime by the feminist movement, men are known to be characteristically deficient in social skills as well as assertions of emotionality and are outperformed by women in education. The traditional male role model of the macho, dominating the public sphere as well as heading the heteronormative family, has crumbled by a new diversity of male lifestyles and gender identities. On the other hand, the increasing frequency of “men in crisis”‐diagnoses in the public sphere may herald an anti‐ feminist backlash which appropriates gender studies to reinstall traditional images of masculinity in need of rescue from feminist subversion. It may be argued that Ireland has been a particularly poignant battleground between traditional versions of masculinity and new questionings of gender identity proliferating in the fast‐paced, global and post‐industrial world brought on by the economic success story of the “Celtic Tiger.” The generation of playwrights to which McPherson belongs have all grown up during the 1970s and 80s in Ireland, a time that has witnessed tremendous chances in Irish society and culture.19 For Conor McPherson the monologue offers a way of sharing a narrative between actor, audience and writer. In a single character on stage, McPherson argues, monodrama may engage more closely and more directly with the audience. Whereas Beckett seeks to build a “fourth wall” strictly fortified and separated from that of the irrelevant audience, McPherson 19 Among contemporary Irish playwrights, Conor McPherson is not alone in his preference for solitary characters and their monological ramblings about the major and minor catastrophes of life. In fact, there seems to be an entire generation of younger, mostly male playwrights in Ireland whose work is dominated by singular characters and voices. Apart from Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh and Mark O’Rowe clearly are the best‐known of that group of writers (even if Walsh’s plays have tended to resound much more successfully with non‐Irish audiences).
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aims at an intimate communication between the actor or actress as a story‐teller rather than as part of a stage world. And it is exactly this intimacy which allows a character to step out of his role quite easily in case he finds the need to do so and to address the audience as “one of them,” even if it is only to admit that he has lost his lines. From the early successful plays Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief onwards, one of McPherson’s central themes has been that of human relationships and the constant struggle to establish and uphold a sense of dignity even in the direst circumstances. His protagonists are isolated characters who are looking to find solace, friendship and understanding. The monologue as a dramatic form seems to lend itself perfectly to that project. In plays like Rum and Vodka, The Good Thief or St Nicholas (1997), the singular protagonist stands on stage and tells us a story, his story. This Lime Tree Bower (1995), The Weir (1997) or Port Authority (2001) feature a group of characters who do not interact verbally or physically, however, but again deliver individual monologues. All characters, apart from Valerie in The Weir are male. Whereas the stories they tell are not merely the quintessentially male and Irish pub stories about problems with women, alcoholism and vomit, they do address a “crisis of masculinity” detectable in much of contemporary Irish theatre. McPherson brings to the stage desperate and hopelessly lost male characters in need to share their stories with us, the audience. Why does a man with wife, house and children and a solid job start excessive drinking and throws his computer out the window? Why does a theatre critic start imagining stories about vampires? Or why does a philosophy lecturer risk his occupation by engaging in sexual relations with his student and vomiting all over the audience during a guest lecture by a famous German philosopher?
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“A man speaks. He is looking for healing. And he finds an audience.”20 This short and poignant summary of Rum and Vodka in an announcement of a production of the play in Cologne makes clear that we as audience are there to help the character through our listening to his story. The unnamed protagonist in Rum and Vodka has a wife, Maria, two kids, Carol and Niamh, and two friends, Declan and Phil. From his marriage, an elaborate if boisterous and dysfunctional personality emerges, that, according to David Ian Rabey is indicative of “the regressive and self‐compounding shame which frequently haunts Irish masculinity.”21 McPherson’s narrator tells a story meticulously located in a specific space, the estate in Raheny, and a specific time, the “last three days” (9). As a rationale for his monologue, the protagonist announces no more than his intention and the result is a long and, in part, harrowingly funny exposure of self‐hatred and misanthropy. He tells his story, but he does not turn his telling of the story into an issue, not even when the circumstances of the production suggest that the scripted role is infiltrated by the performative moment, turning the monological narrator into a permeable persona. McPherson’s protagonists do not explicitly acknowledge the presence of the audience, but implicitly the listeners become complicit in whatever the dysfunctional male narrator claims to have done. In The Good Thief, the abusive, delinquent thug, a former soldier who claims to be a hard‐drinking, drug‐abusing arsonist and murderer, tells a story of manslaughter, gore and imprisonment. All of this seems to spring from beating up and losing his girlfriend Greta. This prime example of dysfunctional and emotionally crippled masculinity arrives at the conclusion that he is unwilling to dissect his psyche, resigning to his own inadequacy (“I sometimes wonder about the person I am, but not for long. I’m no good.” 83). During his storytelling, with 20 See http://www.theaterszene‐koeln.de/stueck.php?id=19166 (my translation). 21 David Ian Rabey, English Drama since 1940 (London: Longman Pearson, 2003) 161.
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whatever cathartic effect one may ascribe to his delivery, he addresses the audience as his “buddies”—as if his degenerate, low‐life Dublin identity were the normal state of affairs for any man. In a production of The Good Thief the actor Garrett Keogh (a cousin of McPherson) went through one evening after having indulged in too much drink the nights before. McPherson reflects: in his weakened state and with diminished judgement he decided to give the last line a little bit of quivering emotion. Just as he said “I was trying to get out of the rain,” he let his voice break. The tiniest sob, but enough … And instead of bringing the lights down on his last line I left them at full power, leaving Garrett standing there with no more lines. Just standing there waiting for the blackout. Until I began the slowest fade, thinking, “Act now, you fucker …” Cruel, no? [184‐185]
Despite the total exposure of the slightly shaky actor under full blast stage lighting with nothing more to say, the actor still remains “in‐character” here, unlike Will Eno’s Thom Pain, who would shout a loud “Boo!” at the audience right there. Will Eno’s play Thom Pain (based on nothing) acknowledges its audience in the very first line, which would be worthy of any stand‐up comedian: “How wonderful to see you all.”22 The sketchy characterisation, laboured and haphazard specks of storytelling and pervasive meta‐theatrical level in Thom Pain generate an area where drama and performance merge, sustaining a persona in which the dramatic “as if”‐tradition merges with post‐dramatic elements. The theatrical tradition is very much alive in Conor McPherson’s theatre, in which actors act a part. McPherson retreats from innovators of the theatre such as Samuel Beckett or Peter Handke. In Beckett’s theatre, characters become shadowy fragments whose parts have been 22 Will Eno, Thom Pain (based on nothing) (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005) 7. Further Eno page references are to this edition. The play won the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe First Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2005. For more information on Thom Pain, see http://www.thompain.com/Release.htm.
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reduced to bits and pieces, and Peter Handke’s characters turn into theatre “do‐ers.” Will Eno’s character tries to do all of this at the same time. He sums up his nature as a theatre “do‐er” (and maybe also the essence of theatre monologues) when he refers to himself as a “feeling thing in a wordy body” (17). Eno’s work is often related to (a) stand‐up comedy and (b) the reductionist revision of drama in Samuel Beckett. With reference to (a), in Thom Pain the rejection of impersonation is closely linked to the dominant mode of narrated action in monological plays. In short, in the monologues by Conor McPherson as well as in stand‐up comedy or in Thom Pain telling supersedes showing. With reference to (b), performer‐ audience interaction crucially defines the play, which puts him at odds with Beckett, who nevertheless has clearly inspired Eno. In spite of the nihilist disavowal of reference in its title, Thom Pain (based on nothing) is obviously based on something. In fact, the references implicit in the very title are so obvious that they turn the title into a paradox. For instance Beckett’s Endgame that appears in the very first part when Pain almost instantly says “I should quit” and, a few lines later, resigns Hamm‐like, “Now. I guess we begin” (8) or Handke, whose Sprechstück Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) is quoted when Pain tells the audience a story about the young boy in the cowboy suit and abruptly ends it on the recommendation: “Now go fuck yourselves” (9). Handke and his interaction between audience and performer reappear frequently. Pain muses about the fact that he is “fucking around” (13) with the audience’s life and reflects on his own asides (11). He dares a man in the audience to share “his larger hopes” and can reasonably expect him to remain silent (13) and demands of his listeners to “imagine a pink elephant” (12, a well‐known euphemism for inebriation that recalls the delirious experience of McPherson’s Rum and Vodka). He also flirts threateningly with female audience members (15, 16, 20) and pretends to have access to the mental images forming in the audience (18). One [291]
man is scripted to leave the audience, not necessarily in opposition to the show, in order to provide an “objective correlative” to the analysis of absence and loss (10). Finally, he brings a (planted or un‐planted) volunteer on stage in order to use him as a touchstone to discuss the nature of “fear” (29)— these techniques are frequently employed by stand‐up comedians in performer‐audience‐interaction. All in all, the audience becomes aware at a very early stage that it has stepped into a piece of metatheatre.23 The theatrical situation, therefore, becomes quite evident in Thom Pain. Initially, the author advises against directorial effect and for a “poor theatre” of an empty space—thus returning the presence of the actor’s body as essence to the theatrical experience. Again, this strategy is not unlike solo performance art in the vein of Deb Margolin or, for that matter, stand‐up comedy, in which the performer is often crucially determined by his “costume” alone. Secondly, Eno frequently employs deictic expressions that immediately make the theatrical situation a presence. Effects of darkness and light make the question of audience‐performer‐relation, literally, obvious. Next, Pain metalinguistically monitors his own language use, for instance of the vacuous “I’m like whatever” (10) as a highlight to his hollow identity. When Pain invokes the raffle, he quotes from traditional variety show interactivity. Eno’s Thom Pain inhabits a terrain in between the obvious metatheatricality of Handke and the comedians on the one hand, and the specific “as if”‐identity supplied by more traditional monologues, for instance in Conor McPherson’s plays. At the beginning of the performance, the audience might ask the question: “Why does this person appear on this stage and starts to talk to me?” even if they will probably forget about this as the narrative thickens with characters and plot. 23 The metatheatrical monologue has been established on stage by artist’s monologues or actor’s monologues, for instance in Thomas Bernhard’s Minetti (1977). See Sybille Demmer, Untersuchungen zu Form und Geschichte des Monodramas (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1982) 244‐253.
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In contrast to McPherson or, for that matter, Beckett, Eno from the very start of his performance directly involves the audience in his dramatis personae and has scripted parts for audience reaction. One should keep in mind that his audience interaction remains scripted and textual, whatever will actually happen in a performance. One should also mention that, unlike Handke’s Sprechstück performers, he, in part, impersonates. First of all, the title provides an identity, Thom Pain, “male, 30‐ 40, cold, grave, angular. A skinny, wounded, stray‐dog type but with an odd intellectual aspect” (5), a man in crisis in that he is full of suppressed feeling (4). However, this identity is overdetermined with semantic content, it carries meanings rather than providing a character: King Lear’s poor Tom mentioned by Thom Pain himself (“Poor Thom is fucking cold,” 17, Edgar poses as a Bedlam beggar, accompanying Lear on the stormy heath and prompting Lear’s “Is man no more than this?”), Since Jan Kott’s famous reading in “King Lear or Endgame” the play has often been cast in existentialist or absurdist terms. Doubting Thomas, from the Biblical story of the apostle who needed proof of Jesus’s wounds in John (20:24‐29). Pain as the emotion alluded to in the title and compounded by the protagonist’s discourse on fear as well as the fact that he is “capable of great cruelty, perhaps due to his having suffered great cruelties himself” (5). Finally, the most obvious resonance, the enlightened rationalist anti‐church Deist and revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737‐1809). The reference to Thomas Paine in particular opens Eno’s play to readings that engage contemporary American values and attitudes to religion on a quasi‐allegorical level. Unlike McPherson’s characters, Pain, again metanarratively, refers to his naming: “People ask about the name. ‘Thom Pain.’ I don’t answer. Or I say, ‘It’s been in the family a while.’ Or I say, ‘Child Harold,’ for no reason. Then one of us walks away” (12). This is clearly the Beckettian “We’re not beginning to mean [293]
something”‐attitude that expresses the stance against interpretation and for “theatreality” (Ruby Cohn). The title claims, after all, that Thom Pain is based on nothing.24 Another Beckettian element is the relation of the narrator to his material—or of the remembering subject to his memory. Both in the male narrators of Conor McPherson and in Thom Pain we experience dysfunctional masculinity, often expressed in verbal obscenities, aggression, and cynicism (“Love cankers all.”25 Unlike McPherson’s narrators, however, Pain implicates the audience uneasily in his aggression, for instance directed at a woman in the audience. We gradually sense that Pain’s fear and aggression emerge from childhood trauma (an electrocuted dog, an attack by bees) and an unhappy love affair expressed in a climactic “Disappearing Act”‐speech in which genders and identities (he, she, mother, father, I, cowboy) blur (29‐30). Eno’s adaptation of variety show magicians might recall Beckett’s vaudeville antecedents, and Eno has also learnt from Beckett that this traumatic past must remain fragmentary and pre‐empt the cause‐and‐effect of psychological readings. Finally Pain juxtaposes the happiness of a past he cannot properly recall to the inescapable frustration of the present stage/stage present: “Then I was in love. Now I’m here” (30). Conor McPherson’s narrators tell tall tales of masculinity in crisis—but seem to be rather in command of their memory. Will Eno’s Thom Pain, on the other hand, fails in the face of his task, the audience’s demand to construct a plausible or at least marginally coherent identity from his ramblings. Just as, say, Mouth in Not I, Pain’s stories about the little boy are at first dissociated by third person reference that excludes the originator of the utterance. As Pain ironically refers to the boy as Child Harold (11) and remarks “I’m like him” (10) the audience will suspect that he seeks to articulate personal experience in order to express the sincere disgust alluded to in Eno’s “General Performance 24 If Child Harold might be interpreted as a play on the missing “e” (“Childe Harolde”), this graphemic point is of course lost in the performance. 25 Eno, Thom Pain 23.
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Notes” (4). Only gradually the “I” emerges. The disruptions, false starts, gaps and losses in the narrative evoke a man at the mercy, rather than in control of his “material.” His sweeping statements and blatant contradictions—he attacks the audience member who left as “cunt” (cleverly excusing precisely the wrong part of his phrase: “Au revoir, cunt. Pardon my French” 10), only to equate himself with that man. He even admits to telling a story without “the main parts” (29). Although far better at interacting with the audience, Pain shares with Beckett’s characters the attitude towards life as play before nothingness (Beckett’s version of theatrum mundi). Implicit in this are both the inability to access or express an essence (stage and play are pervasive and whatever sincerity there is appears only on stage) and the awareness of imminent and/or ultimate disappearance expressed in Pain’s “Disappearing Act” (29) as well as in its versions (blackouts, offstage reference). Just as various Beckett characters he moves from verbosity to drying up, ending yet again on the phatic “boo” (spoken “normally and quietly” 31) as the sudden expression of the terrors of normalcy and quietness. To sum up, we have discussed a variety of performative versions of masculinity in crisis, from the degree zero of monological speaking in Beckett to the more traditional impersonation in the work of Conor McPherson and the amalgamation of various versions of the monologue in Will Eno. To varying degrees, all of the writers veer towards solo pieces and monodrama, they have generated texts for single male performers. The male monologue tends to illustrate anti‐ social masculinity, its aggression and cruelty as well as its communicative shortcomings. Apparently unable to communicate meaningfully with other partners, these performers have taken to the stage where they appear and start to tell stories. After all, as a recent introduction to drama reminds us, even a “dramatic text is a script for collective
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storytelling.”26 In rejecting the Aristotelian stage interaction, the male narrators have, both in terms of form and content, been transformed from men of action to static wordmongers, who tell their stories with varying degrees of confidence in the cathartic healing this limited congress with an audience may afford. The monologue, this much is clear, is an excellent means in expressing masculinity in crisis. The chief difference between a fully impersonated dialogue and the identity shift in the permeable personae of performance theatre may lie in the degree to which an overlap between audience and performance sphere occurs. The audience will inevitably construct an “I” from the stories they hear from the wordy bodies on stage, and this “I” may be judged as more or less in control of his identity, to be more or less able to relate to his experience, to be more or less dysfunctional and to be closer or further removed from their own experience. When the male persona in crisis, however, stands up and directly confronts the audience with its “boo” at a point when the stories are drying up, seemingly addressing it outside the confines of a script as a mere theatre “do‐er,” it may be slightly more difficult for the audience to dismiss the ramblings as just another story of a thirty‐ or fortysomething “man in crisis.”
26 Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd, Studying Plays, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 2002) 90.
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Johannes Birringer
Interacting: Performance & Transmediality* Performance and Transmediality The conditions under which we work have changed, and artists’ strategies are obliged to change as their context of production and reception does. The performances I want to talk about here involve processes which address a complex global world of many intersecting cultures, languages, media of communications, and immaterial information. The theatrical system of representation has always included material forms (texts, architectures, objects) and immaterial information (personal memories, collective stories, songs, dance, rituals, performance‐behaviours, celebrations, games). The theatre of the material archive, with its national canons of plays and technical pedagogies, with its maps for the production of closed, completed and autonomous stage works, is now similar to the museum of the old masters, even though one could argue that the museum’s display strategies are changing, and mise‐en‐ scène making has undergone remarkable innovations during the last century both in terms of styles of directing or visual staging and in the slow hybridisation and mediatisation of theatre * I wish to thank Angeles Romero for contributing to the research for this essay and for her inspiring work on the collaborative design for Sueño. The performance is documented in our website: http://www.aliennationcompany. com/gallery/sueno.htm.
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(noticeable in the increasing use of video and live cameras on stage). Contemporary performance suggests a hybrid theatre of transmediality which moves between media forms and the principles that drive the digital medium and computation, drawing from diverse popular cultures (film, television, games, etc), graphic and sonic forms, and movement vocabularies. Just looking at sampling and other operating systems in contemporary electronic music and hip hop cultures, it is obvious that new softwares and networks support these forms and distribute them globally. In this context of performance, the old roles of the script, the director, and the actor gradually disappear. Collaborative processes turn solo performance into a curiosity, but perhaps a particularly interesting one to look at, and the question of what happened to the monologue or the unfinished self (cf. Xavier Le Roy’s 1998 dance piece Self Unfinished) will perhaps be posed differently. In the following, I sketch some of the dimensions of the theatre of transmediality. In particular, I explore the notion of “interactivity” which the arts adopted from media culture and the sciences (cybernetics), drawing attention to the ways in which interactivity as a participatory model moves between theatre, dance, installation art, net.art, telematics or more straightforward uses of the internet, and computer games. Examples refer to specific kinds of new practices and some of my own recent collaborations with members of my company and other artists/designers who work in interactive and networked performance. It will be helpful, first, to outline some of the conceptual aspects of live art/performance and interactivity in order to position my thoughts on “inter‐acting” into the contemporary context of new media practices. For a critical understanding of the contemporary relations between performance and technology, it is important to define the parameters for the aesthetic and social construction of multimedia work that is promoted as “interactive” or “online performance,” especially at a time when art academies are beginning to introduce [298]
courses in “digital theatre” based on design concepts generally derived from gaming, 3D animation and VR (virtual reality) design. The shift towards design and the programming of malleable environments, as we also see it in artificial life research, the biological sciences, and the computer‐generated models of contemporary architects (FOA, Diller + Scofidio, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, etc), is a clear sign of the impact of computing on all areas of cultural and scientific production. The impact is felt in art and design schools and venues, but less so in the theatre proper, and there is a charming sense of confusion when we hear of the “intelligent stage,” as it was set up at Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts, and discover it is not a proscenium theatre but more of a sound/film set.1 Interactive art and networked performance, two areas of computer‐mediated production that are most relevant to our expanded notion of the theatre, often overlap but are not equivalent. In fact, the conceptual differences—in the use and understanding of interactivity—between performers and digital media artists can be significant. The transcultural development of interactive genres in the current context of globalisation, and the integration of interactive tools into theatre, dance, and music practices, suggests that we look at the historical conditions for the current use of interactive design processes. A focus on design implicates political questions regarding the contingencies of the performing body in its coupling with technological systems. It allows us to formulate some strategies of interaction which offer alternatives to representational theatre and to the dominance of the image in contemporary media performance. In particular, such alternatives concern the role of kinaesthetics and “behavioural play” in transmission. Playing through movement, or movement interfacing with distributed (mediated) spaces, implies new phenomena of proprioception and feedback in displaced actions. 1 Johannes Birringer, “The Intelligent Stage,” Performance Research 6.2 (2001): 116‐ 22.
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Interaction: Beyond Spectacle The concept of “interactivity”—connecting bodies to digital interfaces—gains its meaning if we read it in the context of design processes which build an extended, transindividual nervous system. The notion of “system” is increasingly used by artists working with improvisational and computational modes of composition while also drawing from the discourses of cognitive and life sciences. The discourse on the body in live art and the politicised representational theatre relied on familiar political notions of subjectivity, identity, knowledge, power, nature, etc., filtered through the lessons learnt from Foucault and recent feminist and performance theory. Transmediality, however, points away from the individual body to techniques of the machine and complex human‐technical involvement, to feedback systems and communication loops that involve technology. As a mode of technical mediation within a collective infrastructure, interactivity points to a new understanding of environments of relations/responsivity and a relational aesthetics based on interhuman exchange or physical interaction as well as a new technological kinesthetics. Designing digital interfaces in dance, for example, means organising a sensory and intelligent space for communicative acts that are inherently changeable and unpredictable. The space is not “set” for a fixed choreography, but programmed for potential interactions and movements in which partners behave within a network of relays and responses, and in which technologies and media generate perceptions of reality. Some programmers speak of “performative input” when referring to actor, dancer or musician, and in this connection one might also think of the interface configuration as an instrument (to use a musical analogy of the augmented gestural action). Interaction thus involves the whole environment, and it maps its “world” through the continuous biofeedback it receives via direct sensory stimuli which are also technically mediated (sound,
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image projection, tactile sensors, wearable computing built into textiles, etc).2 The interactive system is also set up in such a way as to generate an integrated aesthetic output, i.e. a performative input can facilitate any number of multimedia outcomes. What used to be referred to as “live art” or performance art would under these conditions be considered in terms of the “real‐ time” operations in the system. In terms of compositional operation and outcome, interactive art is grounded in an aesthetics of process, an art historical notion referring to the dematerialisation of the art object in the conceptual and ephemeral, performance‐based practices of the 1960s. Beyond these live art connotations, process as interactive playing can be associated with a wide spectrum of behaviours in social, pedagogical, therapeutic, gaming and sports contexts and, for example, in the activities of online game players participating in gaming worlds where numerous people playing roles make up the plot in the process, trading and chatting, joining or building separate clans, adding to the environment or altering it, while the software of the game engine provides the parameters or proposes rules of play. The rules of play in an interactive performance system are called “parameters” and refer to the programmed limits and the system’s transformative capabilities. The modernist notion of composition no longer applies; rather, the programming of an environment resembles a kind of continuous postproduction of recording/recorded data, as interactivity uses the input from the tools of connection and manipulates, mixes, and remixes the data, which in the case of dance includes bodily movements, gestures, sensations, and in the case of a singer or actor might include voice, pitch, timbre
2 For an extended discussion of interactivity in dance, see my “Dance and Interactivity,” Dance Research Journal 35.2/36.1 (2004): 88‐111, and the chapters “Dancing with Technologies” and “Impossible Architectures” in my book Media and Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) 27‐144.
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or rather, the entire spectrum of the kHz waveform. The same open‐space concept of interactivity in dance or music is now also explored in the gaming world, with EyeToy and Playstation programs where there is a dynamic environment for physical audience interaction. The emphasis has shifted from the object of representation to emergent, adaptive situations, and to the materialisation of technology itself. Interactive real time computing in installations shifts the “process” to the physical involvement of the observer or user, and thus alters all conventional distinctions between “artwork” and “observer,” which is not the case in interactive performances staged for an audience. Interactivity, in general, offers and assigns roles to the users when interacting becomes an essential component in the condition of the situation, its actualisation and reception. As a consequence, interactivity undermines the aesthetics of spectacle. I define interactivity as collaborative performance with a control system in which the performer‐action or play is tracked by cameras, sensors or other interface devices and thus used as input to activate or control other component properties from media such a video, audio, motion capture and midi‐data, text, graphics, scanned images, etc. The latter scenario I call an interactive performance system that allows performers and computers to generate, synthesise and process images, sound and text within a shared real‐time environment. Gradually, we also see the term “wearables” used in this context, as mobile computing devices and transducers now begin to be built into the garment or attached to (inserted into) the body. The real‐ time processing differs from the historically evolved understanding of multimedia performance, either based on a dramaturgy/choreography (Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I are interesting for their proto‐cinematic and even musical quality) or more open‐ended constellations like the chance operations Merce Cunningham has used in his dance collaborations (with John Cage in the 60s, and more recently with designers Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar). Historically, interactivity as an aesthetic category does not derive from a [302]
political context, for example the actionism of live art that incites public intervention, ranging from guerilla theatre to various anarchist or protest movements. Happenings and participatory rituals, like underground rock and punk music, belong to a romantic discourse of opposition which might be traced back to Dada, whereas interactivity basically denotes an economy and ecology of exchanges, it concerns technical processes and the question of boundaries or interfaces between living bodies and technological networks. Interface design is a fundamentally commercial activity (cf. computer games), and of course it also trains us to live in a culture of technical apprehension. Oliver Grau, in his study of virtual reality, traces the concept of immersion through a long history of image spaces (panoramas) of illusion, and argues that virtual techniques attempting to overwhelm the senses and fuse the observer with the image medium are not new, but that today’s real‐time computation and sensorial interactivity, linked with telepresence and distributed networks, infinitely expand the “processual variability of the work” the status of which is challenged by interactivity even as intervention is only possible within the framework of the program.3 Compared to interactive installations and virtual reality environments, interactive performance in the strict sense of computer‐assisted design cannot claim such a long history, nor has it resolved its relationship to the spectator as user. The proscenium is one dilemma, as long as theatre practitioners remain committed to presentational stagings of multimedia works for the consumption and aesthetic contemplation of the audience. Another unresolved question might be how audiences will behave once intervention into the performance is expected and emergent, entropic output desired as a result of real‐time modulations, and thus becomes conventional. At this point, we can observe how interactivity is explored on stage, 3 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) 343‐44.
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and how it is explored without a stage. In the following, I trace the connections between these models. The Inter‐actors Working with interactive/reactive environments involves dynamic collaborative processes that bring actors, dancers, and musicians together with programmers, filmmakers, composers, and engineers. The politics of the process have changed, requiring new concepts of “script” and “dramaturgy.” Developing a new piece in which the interface design plays a central role requires a shared “performance writing,” so to speak, namely a choreographic or improvisational approach to the input and an artistic coding/software conceptualisation which knows the reactive or transformative capabilities the system, arranging its functions in such a way that desired output and affect can become manifest. The process is a new intimate interaction with digital materials. We adapt to the mediated environment, learning how to affect the evolution of image and sound design. Joining in different flows at the same time creates the possibility of networking streams of material and immaterial data, so as to create an awareness of where we are and what we can do. We do not live in societies that use digital data archives; we live in a global information world which is a digital archive. Understanding the world means understanding what digital databases can or cannot do. However, we need to expand memory in order to recognise images of ourselves and keep track of our inputs. There are so many images, and the speed of the digital technologies is so fast that we need to slow down. The performing body in this theatre of transmediality will be a slow body. Not an “obsolete body,” as Stelarc has predicted, no doubt tongue‐in‐cheek, but an expressive body that incorporates the sensorial environment and acts with it or is “acted”: a body of information, improvising with new cognitive and kinesthetic processes, and
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a new awareness of networks and connected realities (internet, telepresence).4 The network is a living collective data base environment, always fluid and evolving, elastic, changing, and unpredictable. The theatre adopts the network as a metaphor and a practice. The networked theatre creates new roles (for the actor and the audience as inter‐actors) and new processes of exchange. It begins to demonstrate the dimensionless reality of a “digital” discipline. A discipline that is perpetually in the process of a loss of ground, a loss of discipline—a forgetting and isolating effect that perhaps forms digital transmediality, an involution of ideas, realities, spaces that are already present somewhere else. The spaces, realities, aesthetics and effects of digital production and cultural translations have a spectrum of simultaneous potentials and presences that continue to move‐ between, dispelling any fixture or location. This allows for cultural production—production that is necessarily within a digital cultural environment—to be continuously reconfigured, repositioned, and recognised: fluid samplings and exuberant aesthetics that are perpetually represented in and by different locations. Renato Cohen, a theatre artist from São Paulo, has called these practices “human technologies,” including phenomenological experiences of shamanism, travelling of spirits, possession, doubling, and convergences of the Eastern and Western cultures.5
4 For fascinating discussions of Stelarc’s experiments with prosthetic devices and involuntary movement, see Marina Grzinic ed., Stelarc: Political Prosthesis and Knowledge of the Body (Ljubljana: Maska/MKC, 2002), and Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 89‐132. 5 See the “Dialog” published after the forum “Reflexiones sobre Performance, Cultura y Tecnología/Reflections on Performance, Culture & Technology,” featuring Latin American and North American digital artists. Hyperdmedia Studio, Los Angeles, 2002. http://www.aliennationcompany.com/projects/ repercute.htm.
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This process is witnessed in film, design, music, online cultures and many other fields of interactive production. We see a huge blurring of the lines of authorship. For example, in music culture, the relations between performance and production roles (songwriter, musician, producer, sound engineer) have changed. In the current Dj culture, scratching and mixing are performance styles that also display the vast archive of pre‐recorded music. The practice of “live mixing” incorporates the archive into performance material in real‐time. The archive is re‐usable as information that can be animated, moved, distorted and recomposited, multiplied and sampled. Rather than isolating a single voice (monologue), the archive is always collective rhythms, mix culture. In this sense of dislocation, it is also a paradox to speak of the transmedial theatre as having a “Western” or “Latin‐ American” identity, even if we argue that the Wooster Group is based in New York City, El Periférico de objetos in Buenos Aires, and Mózgo Ház in Budapest. Mózgo Ház’s adaptation of Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man, a furiously complex multi‐ lingual multi‐media performance (directed by Lázló Hudi), makes the ritual‐anthropological theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Bacchae, for example, look like a throw‐back to the days of Grotowski’s sacred actor. Throw‐backs of course can be interesting, but they tend to invoke a more contemporary sensibility or double consciousness when the beat pulsates with cross‐cuts. Mózgo Ház, like New York’s Wooster Group and Builders Association, uses a hybrid performance language based on constant mediation and reprocessing of images and voices, a surreal theatre that neither Tadeusz Kantor nor Bertolt Brecht could have quite imagined. Rather than reflecting a cultural location, the transmedial theatre mixes various forms of cultural communication to reflect on the limits of the theatrical system itself. Cohen suggested that we are all working in an international network; local culture is subliminal, archival forms running in the
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unconscious of the actor. In my first example, the archival material is opened up for recompositing. Sueño: The Actress as Filmmaker I describe three scenes from this process of recompositing, drawn from an interactive play written and performed by Angeles Romero. Its performance was first designed (in early 2003) for Ohio State University’s Mount Hall, a black‐box theatre. Sueño refocuses the life of 17th Century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, an iconic figure in Latin America and Spain, her fame based on her voracious drive for knowledge and her exceptional gift as a writer. From her silent solitary cell, this free‐thinking nun conducted scientific experiments, wrote hundreds of poems, plays as well as theological essays. She was frequently attacked and chose to defend not only her own interest in worldly learning, but also the broad rights of women to education and a life of the mind. With interactive digital video and sound sculptures, this performance evokes realities in the intellectual mindspace of “Sor Juana,” a world that borders on a continuous sliding between concrete experiences, intellectual exercises and psychological hallucinations. In Scene 2, in which the actress creates an imaginary dialogue with Father Antonio, a film of Father Antonio appears. It is a projection of his head. She then intervenes into the image‐ movement, freezing the image with a snap. The still allows her a close‐up observation of the physiognomy of the Father. Like under a microscope, distortions of the face become apparent, which elicit Sor Juana’s interpretation of different perceptions of reality. The image itself then deteriorates, as she unfreezes it, and the film forwards slowly. The interaction highlights the function of the zoom/close‐up as well as the anamorphosis made possible through the digital compositing technology. [307]
[Fig.1] Sueño, by Angeles Romero. Videostill by J. Birringer
In Scene 6, which is an intimate seduction scene between the Vicereina and Sor Juana, the projected film of Maria Luisa directly interacts with the stage actress. Maria Luisa demands that the actress look at her while she slowly undresses. The actress steps out of the scene and in complete darkness provides the voice‐over to the black and white film. She implicates the audience in a narrative description (transported with the microphone) of psychological violence in her fantasy: a paradoxical erotic attraction and repulsion. Her verbal recitation, at the same time, echoes and repeats an earlier filmic image from Scene 1 which depicts an act of physical violence fantasised by the young Juana. The scene ends with the actress re‐entering the scene to abort the seduction. In a precisely choreographed interaction between (pre‐recorded) film and theatre, film actress and stage actress resolve the conflict by making an exchange: Maria Luisa asks for her manuscripts and Sor Juana places them at her feet. [308]
[Fig.2] Sueño, by Angeles Romero. Videostill by J. Birringer
In the final scene, Sor Juana becomes the filmmaker. Under a step the actress finds the hidden filmstrip of her life. She holds it against the light and like a filmmaker begins to develop the sequence of time‐frames in her existence. The last frame situates her in panorama zero, a non‐local, a‐temporal continuum. The Sor Juana the audience met in the flesh becomes a memory in the moment her contemporary edition (a younger film actress) is gigantically projected against the wall. The modern film actress and the stage actress recite a poetic text that Sor Juana had written. The double recitation creates a spatial montage: as Eisenstein suggested many years ago, the spectator now travels with the image of the future that is created in the montage, seeing not the representative elements of a finished work, but experiencing the dynamic process of emergence. The actress of the future takes over while the stage actress already fades into memory of the past. Sueño mediates the actress’s ability to exceed physical, spatial and temporal limitations. The crossing of filmic, theatrical and sonic spaces in the mixed reality of the [309]
performance reflects on the integration of concrete “virtual” techniques. Interactive media change our idea of the theatrical image and allow a more complex, layered, polysensory experience of physical and abstract spaces.
[Fig.3] Sueño, by Angeles Romero. Videostill by J. Birringer
Flying Birdman: telepresence Telepresence integrates video, communication and network technologies into performance environments which connect distant sites via the internet. The production process involves international collaboration and project management of remote and multiple site events with streaming media, web technologies, video production and editing, and the live coordination of mediated performance across different time zones. It is also called “telematics,” defined by Roy Ascott as “computer‐mediated communications networking between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions … and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence
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and perception.”6 Telepresence leaves the stage as well as the local area network (LAN) behind; it operates in a world‐wide transmission system that is accessible by anyone with a computer and a modem. Interaction between remote performance partners involves a variety of protocols and strategies; most of them are familiar to internet users who have used chatrooms and browsers, downloaded streaming media or explored the hypertextual linking of networked computing systems. Flying Birdman was created collaboratively online (November 2002), produced by seven teams that are part of the research group ADaPT (studios in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Detroit, Columbus, Salt Lake City, Madison, Nottingham, Brasilia and São Paulo).7 The performance linked five cities in the United States with two locations in Brazil. It was based on short narratives and structured spirally like a Japanese “renga” (poem), composed of live dance, real‐time audio and sound processing, pre‐recorded filmic images, still images, spoken voice, and graphic text‐communication exchanged by participants and audience during the live performance. The performances in the various sites played with the theme of “left‐overs,” debris, decomposition, and the idea of re‐ cycling. Paradoxically, the poetic form of the piece evokes the older form of the monologue, but here we can clearly see the changed context. The anchoring voice of the Flying Birdman ran through the entire telematic performance, but this voice of the fictive Birdman was spoken by five different performers, under‐scored with subtle audio mixes and other travelling and 6 Roy Acott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, eited and with an essay by Edward A. Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 232. 7 The event was produced by the Association of Dance and Performance Telematics, of which my Ohio team was a member: http://www.dance.ohio‐ state.edu/~jbirringer/Dance_and_Technology/birdman.html. The ADaPT online performances are documented and critically discussed among the participant researchers at: http://dance.ohio‐state.edu/~jbirringer/Dance_and_Technology/ips3.html.
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whispering voices that functioned like echoes (words were randomly chosen by the participating performers, picked up and digitally transformed by the other collaborating site partners). The run‐on voice of the Birdman was recited by five sites while the other streams were created (video, movement, still images, drawing, writing). The Birdman’s voice changed and transformed from one language to an other; the audience would not necessarily know where voice transmission originated from. Each site functioned both like a film set and a gallery for the local public that was invited. The website address for the online performances was announced on the internet. Each site was free to design their environment for the production and transmission but we agreed that each local site would experiment with panoramic or surround screens (with many windows open at the same time) allowing the performer to see all sites dialogue with each other in a spiral. This cinematic arrangement also allowed local live audiences to see the intersection of public and virtual spaces, and how the local actors constructed the dialogues with remote partners in real‐ time. My role was to create a digital dramaturgy for this telematic “earthwork,” as I began to call it in reference to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. I envisioned a spiralling dialogue— between sites and “non‐sites”—with at least two sites dialoguing with each other (video, audio) at any given time during the 10 scenes. Each scene was six minutes long. The dialogue was passed on and moved around, and the internet audience could follow the movement of the dialogue by opening the respective site‐addresses (URLs).
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[Fig.4 ] Here I come again/Flying Birdman, ADaPT, multi‐site telepresence performance, 25 November, 2002. Videostill: J. Birringer
Although the internet is a new medium, we are re‐adapting existing forms and media to the new interface. We see telepresence as an interactive environment that allows the real‐ time synthesis of various media forms in a distributed performance. These media respond to each other over large distances. We are separate but appear to be together in a shared virtual space. The emphasis is on the performer actions (performative input), not on pure digital data exchange or synthetic world modelling. The radical challenge is that we perform these interfaces without knowing that all partners (and audiences) are physically present and in one location. We don’t know our internet audience; we are no longer on a “stage.” This leads to a re‐scaling or modifying of existing aesthetic operations. The professional experience of most of the ADaPT members is dance/physical performance. In telepresence, performance is adapted into live camera‐editing/framing and thus a form of live filmmaking and live soundmixing, accompanied by textual communication (chat) which functions as a secondary or commentating medium (like subtitles). We have not fully explored other forms of online performance which involve interactive storytelling or distributed web narratives as platforms for the audience’s direct collaboration in fiction development or in spatialised narrative wherein the interactive user takes the role of cameraperson and editor.8 8 For an example of hypertextual or recombinant poetics, see Bill Seaman, “Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Explorations of Digital Video in Virtual
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The Birdman voice was performed by a dancer who also acted on camera. Initially, we experimented with connectivity, infrastructures, and languages to probe the technological system. We had to decide on a shared software and agreed‐ upon protocols. Then we improvised together, following the model of free jazz or hip hop jam. I proposed a precise temporal dramaturgy for “Flying Birdman” built on cybernetic principles of the feedback loop. “Roles” were passed on, from site to site, but the behaviour of the digital objects was unpredictable and thus affected the behaviour of the system they constituted. The loop narrative was translated into streaming video and audio, and different components of the story were developed by the participating sites. In this sense the narrative became a Rashomon‐like spiral, distributed among the participants. Each site would see something different, for sure. The dramaturgy only organised the length of each scene and the distribution of roles/media, not the content which would evolve. One of the main challenges in telepresence is the conscious incorporation of the camera interface into the performance, with performer and cameraperson working very closely together in a restricted area that has to be well lit. Camera and microphones (connected to the computer) are the key interface between performer and network technology. They are the basis for linking the different site‐environments into meaningful relationships between the visual and kinesthetic forms and digital outputs. Taken together, the seven sites produce a form of real‐time digital compositing, since some of the partner sites
Space,” New Screen Media/Cinema/Art/Narrative, eds. Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp (London: BFI, 2002) 237‐55. A different take on “recombinant theatre and digital resistance” is offered by Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2001). As Seaman investigates spatialised narrative and the relations of new media to the postcinematic, his concerns overlap with Lev Manovich’s cinematic approach to digital operations. See Manovich’s The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) 161‐75. See also Ken Goldberg ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
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also use video mixers and compositing software. Dance here becomes a filmic practice, since much of the attention goes to the phrasing and framing of the action, the choice of camera angles, camera movement, and in‐camera editing or mixing, the “montage within a shot” (Lev Manovich). The sound does not have to flow directly into the webcast but can be filtered and modified through interactive software. A second challenge is the strategic use of the small delays in internet transmission (how small depends on the network traffic at any given time) and the degradation of image and audio transfers. Depending on the choice of thematic content, the break‐ups and fragmentations of the video stream can become part of the aesthetic.
[Fig.5] ADaPT rehearsal at Ohio State University’s Environments Lab. Videostill: J. Birringer
I have so far addressed the architecture of the environment, both on the formal and the technical level of mixing the streams and producing the distributed content. The involvement of live audiences both on‐site and online, and the transcultural integration of different platforms and behaviours, proved to be more complicated. Our local audience witnessed the actual processing of distributive content, the construction in front of their eyes, which became the webcast on the screen. For online audiences it was more difficult to understand the specificity of these constructions and to follow the spiral, even though the website provided a map for the navigation. [315]
The strongest moments happened when the dancer (Birdman character) was moving with or—seemingly—through the landscape or architectural filmspaces of another site, becoming “present” in a virtual space. The telepresent actor is present in a distant image world which is being created by others. The camera work (framing, angle, motion) transports the actor into the frame compositions of the virtual image. Digital real‐time dramaturgy implies that the actor or dancer is integrated into, or inserts herself into, a moving architecture, allowing the viewer to make particular associations, if you imagine such a figure to be on the edge or “inside” a dream space or moving through a navigable space. Telepresence, or tele‐action, means entering into the streaming images of the remote site, thus affecting the reality or virtuality perceived at that location.
[Fig.6]Helena Ren, Natalie King, Jo Willie Smith in telematic live performance, tedr Nottingham‐Phoenix, 1 December 2005, Digital Cultures festival. Videostill: J. Birringer
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Even more crucial, for our purpose, is the recognition that live performance, unlike completely computer‐generated environments or game, brings corporeality as real material into the teletechnologies and, via the streams, to a real remote physical location. The actor can sense the remote movement, information streams have more resonance when they appear in a “concrete scene.” When their proportions are measured by our bodies, they become part of our physical existence and then close the gap between tangible and abstract architectures. When we act in telepresence, we cannot become completely immersed in the illusion that our bodies are elsewhere, but we are immersed in a hyperphysical environment. We see our projected arms, shoulders and faces appear in the movement‐ images, and since the telematic image has a delay of a few seconds, our telepresenced bodies will always try to catch up with us. We dance in a strange feedback‐loop. And then there are the little mistakes that happen, in the network transmission. Our bodies freeze, break up, then recompose, or our partners on the other side have changed our colours, inverted us, or multiplied us into a polyp with many arms. As we gain facility with the interface, diving to play with distanced body images, we can have ironic relationships with the processing of our movements, enjoy the thrill of the exchange of energies and strange imaginings with performers in the other sites, and savour the natural precariousness of temporary networks with their lags, interruptions and collapses. The network behaves like an unstable ecological system. Everything evolves through adaptation. Telepresence challenges interaction as it redefines the self in relation to others, as it troubles the theatrical role of audiences (as onlookers) and voids distinctions between inside and outside, sender and receiver.9
9 The 2003 Association of Internet Researchers (AoiR) conference in Toronto proved that social science research and media/communications studies on the use of telecommunications technologies and the internet form a thriving new field (http://www.ecommons.net/aoir/). But there were very few panels on internet art and only one session on physical performance interactivity (“Dance,
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Intimate Transactions: The Audience as Interactor The final example extends the concept of transmediality to include the audience as (the only) participants. In Intimate Transactions (2001‐05), the distributed interactive media installation by the Australian group Transmute Collective, what is at stake is the etiquette at play between the sites of this work and the people who participate in the situation. A shared world comes into being through the relationship formed between the interactors. But what is meant by “shared world” or “third space (person to person),” as the artists call it? What is it that emerges in these encounters? It is perhaps not irrelevant to note a recent trend among choreographers and live artists to devise intimate transactions and exclusive one‐on‐one encounters with their audiences.10 On the other hand, as live art grows more hybrid and the remediations of bodies in the terrain of digital information grow more complex, the phenomenal body can no longer be relied on as a site. Firstly, bodily transactions that occur in
the Body and the Internet”). For an earlier but influential theory of communications, see Vilém Flusser, Kommunikologie (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996). For theories on installation design and interactive users, see Annette Hünnekens, Der bewegte Betrachter: Theorien der Interaktiven Medienkunst (Köln: Wienand, 1997) and Peter Gendolla, Norbert M. Schmitz, Irmela Schneider and Peter M. Spangenberg eds., Formen interaktiver Medienkunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001). See also Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London: Continuum, 2002), and Söke Dinkla and Martina Leeker eds., Dance and Technology/ Tanz und Technologie: Moving towards Media Productions— Auf dem Weg zu medialen Inszenierungen (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2003). 10 Cf. “This Secret Location,” an exhibition of performances and installations during the 2006 In between Time Festival at the Arnolfini, Bristol, or Kira O’Reilly’s performance “Untitled Bomb Shelter” at the 2005 New Territories/National Live Art Review in Glasgow and other venues across Europe. Choreographers like Willi Dorner and Felix Ruckert are known for having blindfolded audience members and brought them inside separate rooms to be alone with a dancer. A growing number of contemporary artists also use performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others (pedestrians, shoppers, browsers, the casual observer‐turned‐participant), and most of these activities happen outside of the traditional theatre or art spaces. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002).
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immersive environments have begun to look more and more abstract, post‐human. Even if derived from bodily motor data or other body rhythms such as pulse, heartbeat or breath, the digital transformation in real‐time (synthesis, animation) often generate molecular graphics, particle structures and nanospheres. The voice is shredded; its sound processed through granular synthesis or other filters. At the 2005 Ars Electronica festival, such becoming of hybrid creatures, cultures and ecologies was celebrated: the festival welcomed hybridity and techno‐cultural ecologies casually as a “way of life.” Such digital performance renders a different becoming through constant (self)modifications. Secondly, interactive performance design includes the body with all its transactional capabilities—its expenditure of energies. Through pervasive dimensions (networks, wearables), bodies provide data to touch sensors. But such a technical description does not tell us much. What is more interesting is the role or quality of “gestures”: how the body touches and what this touch generates. This is an important dimension of Keith Armstrong’s and Transmute’s work. Intimate Transactions produces a networked performance that continuously hovers in‐between participant‐actor and the invisible other, floating to come into touch with a whole (a‐life) ecology. Bodily movement affects the virtual world and the species that live in it. What emerges here is a new composite form of human‐machinic performance as the streaming media is produced by physical action but effects an environment of artificial life. Armstrong and collaborators Lisa O’Neill and Guy Webster conceive of this resonation as immersive: transactions between participants make us sense our role in a wider web of relations and possibilities that connect living forms. This is the philosophical aspect of the work, extending notions of social sculpture (Beuys), “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud) and the parangolé (Oiticica) into the digital. Transmute’s installation offers striking concepts of movement converging with a virtual environment as well as, [319]
from an ecological point of view, concepts of the preservation and sustainability of its elusive nature. Within Intimate Transactions, interactive performance no longer assumes control of digital image and sound animation but inter‐action is emergent, dynamic. The mutation of media forms is interdependent. Bodily energy is the ghost in the restless relationship.
[Fig. 7] Intimate Transactions by transmute collective, courtesy of the artists.
How did I confront the uncertainty of the situation and negotiate the experience of the artificial world? I now address the physical/virtual interface and the bodily experience in the transactive, multisensory environment. Paradoxically, the “local” performance in the installation created by Armstrong and his collaborators is a solo performance, first re‐turning physical and sensory attention of the visitor to our own, individual body. I enter the space alone and am “placed” on the Bodyshelf. But the task explained to me indicates I’m to walk out onto a pier: to collaborate with a remote, unknown partner [320]
via the screen‐world. Physical gesture will drive the emerging digital species‐avatars. The material body cannot be transplanted somewhere else, but it contributes to the modelling and simulation of biological existence in a‐life (artificial life). In its operation system, Intimate Transactions surprises with an interface design which is unusually thoughtful, sensual, and challenging from a synaesthetic perspective, as the Bodyshelf combines various motor‐sensory, tactile and haptic dimensions. It detects shifting balances of weight and different types of back pressure. The ocular focus on the mediating visual world (video projection) is maintained, but the transitive sensory relation to the screen is rather complex, as I manoeuvre in the virtual world through the soles of my feet, shoulders and back. We will not exchange words. With another participant, situated in a different physical location, I will transact with the work through peripheral surfaces of the body, not the obvious limbs such as the hands. Reclining within a new form of furniture that reacts to peripheral bodily movements, we are simultaneously surrounded by immersive soundscapes and engage flowing combinations of digital imagery (ghostly, ethereal creatures and avatars) by moving the feet or rubbing the back and shoulders against the shelf. Using the physical interface, gently swaying our bodies on the “smart” responsive surfaces, and by working both individually and collectively—observing our avatar‐ species float in space, connect and disconnect—we are able to create convergences of movement, which in fact influence the evolving “world” created from digital imagery and multi‐ channel sound. This world, however, also exists without us. How do I experience my relationship to this world? I would call the situation that is formed a paradoxical one. I cannot see or know the other person with whom I am connecting. I am in a dark, closed space, a kind of theatrical womb, while a visually projected world opens up and develops behaviours. In this “intimacy,” I forget entirely that my condition is distributed to another site, and that another human actor elsewhere is going [321]
through my motions. I become self‐absorbed, beginning to “lean” into the interface, as I had to first learn the transactive behaviour (tilting my feet, the rubbing with shoulders and spine) that moved my avatar into contact with the other avatar. Thus I explore coordinating my movements in such as way that the life forms in the virtual world emerge and merge. Only at this point can I imagine changing my orientation. This is the learning curve, a process of adaptation. The initial self‐absorption is the first kinaesthetic affect of the installation. The first level of engagement is one of orientation, literally of proprioception. This auto‐referential sensory processing is not directed at the outer world. As I concentrate on my sensations, I am cognitively innocent (I don’t know what to do, what I am looking at) and I await “instructions” which arrive and tell me the rules of engagement. The instructions of course increase my uncertainty. I start again, stop and start again (I did the wrong footstep, the unfolding world folds back). As I slowly begin to trust the relation of movement to world, I gain confidence. My slight problem is that I get confused by the avatars (who am I— the bright one or the dimmer one? I try to catch the brighter, only to realise that I may very well be the brighter one myself). This is good identification: I forget which one is mine and which one may belong to another player. The sensory intimacy with the other, far away person is, of course, purely an illusion. This is not telematic dreaming or consensual hallucination but hard work. The erotics of transactivity may lie entirely in the realm of fantasy, yet there is physical feedback, and also a certain amount of cognitive thrill once the mind recognises the plural movement in this world. My body’s perceptual relationship to this environment of movement patterns is subjected to the “digital phenomenon” of the swirling, unpredictable creatures. I am not fully aware of what I do, I don’t know their rhythms and cannot place myself in the virtual world, but on an unconscious level I am rewarded. Through a pouch in front of my stomach, I sense vibrations when I am able, stumblingly, to connect my avatar‐ [322]
creature with other creatures. It feels as if my energy— connecting as it does with the digital world and my fellow creatures—is radiating from the centre of my body. As Lisa O’Neill’s Suzuki‐inspired choreographic vision for the work unfolds, such energy streams, physiologically and emotionally, from the bodily centre into all spatial directions.11 The stomach vibrations create a sense perception of “streaming” which I have rarely experienced before except in heightened moments of telematic performance, when the sonic energies of multi‐channel sound, white noise, and flickering pixels pulsate through the networked studio and resonate deep inside the bowels of my body. But vibrations can also be perceived on a micro‐level, challenging us to think of listening‐ sensing in subtle environments of invisible and near‐inaudible sound (plants, branches) where the topography and air influence how sound is transmitted. On the non‐post‐human level, what resounds most strongly, however, is the motor‐somatic activity in Intimate Transactions. The interface activates my body in a way I do not normally activate my muscles. When I step down at the end, I almost cannot walk any more, my muscles are cramped, sore. How much I must have focused on some parts of my body (feet, calves, thighs, shoulders, back, neck) and not others. I enjoy this, as I enjoy muscle ache after any practice, dance or sport. But I only notice it after the fact as disequilibrium in my cramped, intimate body. The cramping could also be a psychological effect. This complex installation, more explicitly than any of the interactive 11 Tadashi Suzuki’s training method, sometimes called “grammar of the feet,” helps performers to realise unconscious patterns for movement and posture, which they will then be able to alter. Interestingly, the quality of contact of the feet with the floor, in this method, determines the quality and energy of spiritual, mental and emotional expressiveness. The presence of the group in this training method generates a physical pervasiveness that allows participants to experience a sense of fictional space. The interactive design of Transmute’s installation is meant to provoke this transindividual energy, connecting the player to the virtual world.
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artworks I have seen in the past, challenges our affective sensory relationship to the constantly evolving virtual world to which we become orientated.12 I was not as fluid or experienced in its “navigation” as I would have liked to be. I could not fully perceive it. Facing the abstract flows of the virtual ecology, I never fully understood how my physical behaviour and emotional attitude affected the world, and how it affected me. Can one be too immersed to even realise one’s body as a source of action? Following Bergson’s theory of perception, how can I experience the digital media environment from within? And, if I am affected in my body through my motor‐sensory action, can I process such perception without recourse to the representational content of the media? The challenge of Intimate Transactions lies precisely in the uncertainty I have about the digital world even though I sense my connection to it and to the other person who is (not) there. Digital video is image space, after all, and not a world. It thus cannot behave as the physics of 3D space, and the convergences of our bodied perceptual rhythms with the behaviour of the digital creatures are without consequence. This makes it a theatrical situation, except that I could say that I moved through the image‐world, with feet and back and that I felt it in some way, but not explicitly, and that I also sensed it acoustically, but again not consciously. The affectivity in this work appears necessarily subconscious. This accentuation of the physical and the virtual contradicts conventional analytical ways of interpreting which dominated by the transference of the linguistic to the non‐linguistic make 12 For important insights into affective perception, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. My reflections on “digital” phenomenology are inspired by Mark Hansen’s theorisation of the digital image (extending Henri Bergson’s theory of perception in Matter and Memory), particularly his description of interactive information environments which become a bodily process of filtering and composing images. See Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) 93‐ 124.
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the body a secondary phenomenon and sensation redundant. In this artwork, the immediacy and presence of the physical/virtual bodies, their co‐evolution or adaptation in a hyperplastic media environment, are made the focus of interpretation. Intimate Transactions is therefore a formidable work that requires us to reinterpret the correlation between the participant’s body (“placed” in action) and the digital situation. In the terms I evoked in the beginning of this essay, the world (“non‐site”) of virtual ecology is not external, preconstituted but irreducibly bound up with our (collective) movements, the transactions of energies between another’s and my own body. This suggests that perhaps phenomenological investigations into the sensing body need to be revived in order to understand complex transactive media environments, especially interactive art and performance which use “sensory processing” involving haptic feedback and embodied perception which is primary and yet transient.
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Contributors MARK BERNINGER teaches English Literature at Johannes Gutenberg‐Universitaet in Mainz. In 2002 he edited with Bernhard Reitz a collection of essays on British Drama in the 1990s and his PhD thesis on New Forms of the History Play in Great Britain and Ireland since 1970 is to be published in 2007. He is currently working on a new book about the influence of Milton on other writers to the present day. JOHANNES BIRRINGER is a choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., an international multimedia ensemble based in Houston (www.aliennationcompany.com). He is also a founding member of ADAPT, an international network of studios collaborating on internet‐based performance. His books include: Media and Performance: Along the Border (1998), Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (2000), and Dance Technologies: Digital Performance of the 21st Century (forthcoming). He directs the Interaktionslabor, a media lab in Germany (http://interaktionslabor.de) and is Professor of Performance Technologies at Brunel University in London. MATEUSZ BOROWSKI teaches at the Drama Department at Jagiellonian University, Krakow. His doctoral dissertation, In Search of the Real. New Developments in the European Playwriting of the 1990s was written within the framework of IPP Performance and Media Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.
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His main research areas are theatre and drama of the 20th and 21st century and theory of drama and theatre. DAVID BRADBY is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Modern French Drama 1940‐1990 and Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1991 and 2001 respectively), The Theater of Michel Vinaver (1993) and (with Annie Sparks) Mise en Scène: French Theatre Now (1997). He has translated and edited two books by Jacques Lecoq: The Moving Body (2000) and Theatre of Movement and Gesture (2006). He has also translated and edited plays by Michel Vinaver and Bernard‐Marie Koltès (1997 and 2004). With Maria M. Delgado, he edits the Contemporary Theatre Review and published The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City’s Stages (2002). He is general editor of the CUP series Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. REBECCA D’MONTÉ is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol. With Nicole Pohl she has edited a volume on female utopias, Female Communities 1600‐1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (1999), and written articles on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She is presently preparing a monograph, Images of England: Popular Women Dramatists 1930‐1960, as well as writing on British drama 1900‐1950 for the Year’s Work in English Studies (1997). LAURENS DE VOS teaches Comparative Literature at Ghent University. His articles, published in Documenta and Modern Drama, include essays on the work of Kane, Stoppard and Beckett, as well as on contemporary theatre performances, e.g. by Jan Fabre. He is currently co‐editing with Graham Saunders Sarah Kane in Context forthcoming with Manchester University Press.
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DEE HEDDON is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow. She is the co‐author, with Jane Milling, of Devising Performance: A Critical History (2006) and is currently completing a monograph for Palgrave, Performing the Self: Autobiography and Performance. Recent research performances include Warden, Return to Sender and One Square Foot. JORGE HUERTA is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, San Diego. He is a professional director and a leading authority on contemporary Chicana/o theatre. He has edited three anthologies of plays: El Teatro de la Esperanza: An Anthology of Chicano Drama (1973); Nuevos Pasos: Chicano and Puerto Rican Drama (1979, 1989), with Nicolas Kanellos); and Necessary Theatre: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience (1987, 2005). Huerta published the first book about Chicano theatre, Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms (1982) now in its second edition. His latest book, Chicano Drama: Society, Performance and Myth, was published by Cambridge University Press in late 2000. DANIELA JOBERTOVÁ teaches at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She has studied at Charles University, Suffolk University in Boston, and Université Paris VIII—Saint‐Denis. Her translations include The Dictionary of Theatre by Patrice Pavis. Her research interests include the dramatic works of Bernard‐Marie Koltès, contemporary French drama and theatre, and its reception in the Czech cultural context during the 19th and 20th centuries. EAMONN JORDAN is Lecturer in Performing Arts at the Institute of Technology Sligo. His book The Feast of Famine: The Plays of Frank McGuinness (1997) is the first full‐length study on McGuinness’s work. He is the editor of Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre and co‐editor (with Lilian Chambers and Ger Fitzgibbon) of Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish [328]
Theatre Practitioners. Most recently, he co‐edited with Lilian Chambers The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories (2006). ASHLEY LUCAS is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her articles “The Stigmatized Body on Stage: Evelina Fernandez’s Dementia as a Response to the AIDS Crisis” and “Teatro de la Esperanza’s Guadalupe and the Production of Social Meaning” appear in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and International Perspectives. Lucas is also the author of the play Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, which she has toured as a one‐woman performance in the US and Ireland. CATHARINE MCLEAN‐HOPKINS lectures in Drama and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire where she is Subject Leader for Drama. She has written on Bobby Baker for Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance eds. Maggie Gale and Viv Gardner (2004). She is completing her PhD at Manchester University examining women’s autobiographical performance. MARK SCHREIBER teaches British and American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology. He has written on Enda Walsh in Extending the Code: New Forms of Dramatic and Theatrical Expression CDE11 (2003) and has contributed entries on Mark O’Rowe, Conor McPherson and Enda Walsh to The Literary Encyclopaedia and Literary Dictionary, ed. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott and Janet Todd (2000). He is editor with Thomas Rommel of Mapping Uncertain Territories. Space and Place in Contemporary Theatre and Drama CDE 13 (2006). BRIAN SINGLETON is Head of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and Vice‐President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is former Editor of Theatre Research International and a board member of Irish Theatre Magazine. He [329]
has published two books on the life and work of Antonin Artaud (1998, and 2001), and a monograph on Orientalism and British Musical Comedy (2004). He has edited two collections of essay on contemporary Irish theatre: “Performing Ireland” for Australasian Drama Studies with Anna McMullan, and “Critical Ireland” for Modern Drama, with Karen Fricker. MAŁGORZATA SUGIERA is head of the Drama Department at Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Her most recent books include Realne światy / możliwe światy (Real Worlds / Possible, 2005) devoted to German drama of the turn of the 20th and 21st century, and Upiory i inne powroty (Ghosts and Other Returns, 2006) tackling the issues of history and memory in contemporary drama and theatre. ECKART VOIGTS‐VIRCHOW is Professor of English Literature at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is currently treasurer of CDE: The Germany Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English. His Introduction to Media Studies (Klett Uni‐ Wissen) was published in 2005. He is also editor of Dramatized Media / Mediated Drama (2000) and Janespotting and Beyond. British Heritage Retrovisions since the Mid‐1990s (2005). CLARE WALLACE is a lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Charles University in Prague. She is co‐editor, with Louis Armand, of Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other (2002) and with Ondřej Pilný Global Ireland: Irish Literatures for the New Millenium (2006). She has contributed essays to The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules was Made” (2003), Engaging Modernity (2003), Extending the Code: New Forms of Dramatic and Theatrical Expression CDE11 (2003), Beyond Borders: IASIL Essays on Modern Irish Writing (2004), Irish Literature Since 1990: Diverse Voices (2007), and Sarah Kane in Context (2007).
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