Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics, Subjectivity 9783110333916, 9783110403909

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Cristina Delgado-García Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre

CDE Studies

Edited by Martin Middeke

Volume 26

Cristina Delgado-García

Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre Aesthetics, Politics, Subjectivity

ISBN 978-3-11-040390-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033391-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041122-5 ISSN 2194-9069 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For Luke

Acknowledgements This monograph is a reworked version of my PhD thesis, which The German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English generously selected as the winner of their biennial doctoral award in 2014. I am extremely grateful to CDE for this distinction, but also for their invaluable work promoting and sustaining research in the field. The doctoral project this book draws from was undertaken at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University between 2009 and 2013, where I received financial support through the departmental studentship. I am very thankful to my supervisors Karoline Gritzner and Carl Lavery for their rigorous guidance, inspiration and friendship. Adrian Kear, Steve Greer and Alison Forsyth responded with insightful comments to parts of the thesis manuscript in process; David Ian Rabey kindly shared photographic material and programme notes for the student production of Stone City Blue that he directed, and was crucial for my conversation with Ed Thomas. I am thankful to all of them. Beyond the Welsh coast, I want to thank Tim Crouch, Ed Thomas and Marjken Pollack for their kindness and patience, as well as the Schaubühne in Berlin and TR Warszawa in Warsaw. I am also indebted to Jean-Pierre Sarrazac and Alyce von Rothkirch for their academic generosity, to Karen Jürs-Munby and Frederic Dalmasso for their invigorating conversations, to Helen Shiner for her important translation work, and to Kirsty Sedgman for her sharp-eyed editorial grace. In Catalunya, where I was born, I have found a supportive and stimulating second home in the research group Contemporary British Theatre – Barcelona, and I am particularly thankful to Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte for their encouragement and trust from the early stages of this project. The warmest ‘thank you’ to Sef and Helen, Louise, Russ, Gareth, Thanasis, Erzsebet, Mareike, Alex, Lara and Vasilis. Moltes gràcies, Eli, Verónica and Marta. Chema, moitas grazas. María y Ricardo, gracias por apoyarme siempre. If we crossed paths, you may have lifted me up, inspired me or contravened me. Never mind the dramatis personae – this blank space, spilling on the margins with gratitude, is for you:

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Acknowledgements

Copyright acknowledgements Some parts of “A performativity of refusal: Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis” appeared first in a shorter article: Delgado-García, Cristina. 2012. “Subversion, Refusal, and Contingency: The Transgression of Liberal-Humanist Subjectivity and Characterization in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis”. Modern Drama 55.2: 230 – 250. DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2012.0026. © 2012 by University of Toronto Press. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (www.utpjournals.com).

Contents Preface: Character Remains

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Introduction 1 Inconsistent usage 1 4 Problematic methodologies The erasure of the subject 9 Aesthetics, politics, subjectivity 11 Performance philosophy: a glossary

14



The Life, Death and Second Coming of Character The precarious life of character in theatre studies 27 Death and disappearance: the 1990s Spectral second comings 33 Latest renegotiations 41 44 Conclusion

23 24

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Figuring the Subject beyond Individuality 48 50 Louis Althusser: scenes of address Judith Butler: the body, the psyche and the social amidst normative regulations 54 Passionate attachments: subjectivity and subjection beyond 55 Foucault Rethinking interpellation and recognition 56 Performativity, the body and the psyche 59 Butler’s theory of subjectivation and the debate on character 61 Alain Badiou: practice-based fidelity to the Truth of the Event 63 The terms of Badiou’s mathemes 64 Fidelity as a subjective destination: the faithful Subject 67 Further subjective destinations and their Subjects: reaction and negation 70 Thinking the theatre event through the Badiouian Event 71 Jacques Rancière: heterology, disidentification and equality 74 A community of interruptions without a common identity 78 The subject and/as politics: the redistribution of the sensible 79 “The staging of a common place”: Rancière and the theatre 81 Conclusion 83

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

Contents

Singular Subjectivities 86 A performativity of refusal: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis Framing the debate: individual “mindscapes”, problematic cartographies 88 Crave and 4.48 Psychosis on the page 92 105 Crave and 4.48 Psychosis on the stage Hybridity and relationality: Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue 114 114 Resituating Thomas’s work Textual characterisation in Stone City Blue 119 Staging Stone City Blue 135 142 Conclusion Collective Subjectivities 145 Political gestures in a post-political scenario: Tim Crouch’s 148 ENGLAND Igniting a politics-inflected debate on Crouch’s work 148 156 Performance analysis “Dabbing”: art, conviviality and privilege in ENGLAND 159 “Wringing”: disidentification and subalternity in ENGLAND 182 Conclusion 195

Conclusion

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Appendix: Brief Survey of Character-less Plays, 1900 – Present The historical avant-garde 200 Post-war European experimentation 201 British work: 1990s – present 203 Contemporary European experiments 204 Works Cited Index

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Preface: Character Remains This book intends to bring specificity and political value to the discourses on character prevailing in Anglophone theatre studies, with particular focus on the experimental script-led work that has emerged in Britain since the late 1990s. Writing about Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, and Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, scholars have frequently noted that there are no characters in these plays (e. g. Sierz 2001b: 287; Zimmermann 2002: 106; Busby and Farrier 155; Barnett 2008: 23). While these claims have been reinforced outside of academia by theatre critics writing about these works and others with similar aesthetics (e. g. Billington; Clapp; Hickling; Wilmot), they have also gained momentum and found theoretical grounding in a number of monographs published around the same time as Crimp’s and Kane’s plays premiered. Elinor Fuchs’s The Death of Character explicitly traces the alleged disappearance of character from modernist to postmodern theatre, while Gerda Poschmann’s still untranslated Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext [The No Longer Dramatic Playtext] and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre illuminate a heterogeneous style of theatre writing and performance that resists abiding to dramatic conventions – among these, character. “In the postdramatic theatre”, David Barnett summarises, “there are no characters but what Gerda Poschmann has called Textträger (text bearers) who do not speak dialogues but Sprechtext (text to be delivered)” (2006: 33). These contributions have offered an invaluable insight into the aesthetic experimentations epitomised in Britain by Crimp’s and Kane’s work. However, I find their prompt dismissal of character questionable on at least three counts, which I explore in the introduction to this book. These are the inconsistent usage of the term ‘character’, the problematic methodologies deployed in attesting its presence or absence and, finally, the narrowly circumscribed understanding of subjectivity. Taking all these issues into account, this monograph sets out to offer a politically-inflected renegotiation of the notions of character and subjectivity as they are currently used in Anglophone theatre studies. To this aim, the book assesses the debate on the crisis and death of character (Chapter One), offers an alternative body of theories of subjectivity by which to help theatre theory expand its understanding of character (Chapter Two), and then examines a sample of British works from the 1990s and 2000s (Chapters Three and Four). The plays composing this sample share the same aesthetics in their scripts: speech is either unattributed or assigned to opaque speakers, appears to be (dis)embodied or receiving several incarnations at once, and does not foster a cogent or stable

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Preface: Character Remains

sense of fictional individuality. In particular, I examine Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. The resemblance between these plays’ scripts offers a starting point to debunk a number of existing overgeneralisations regarding character in theatre, and these plays in particular. While it is a widespread position that these works challenge notions of individuality, my objective is to think beyond the disruption occasioned by such a challenge. How do these plays widen our understanding of what constitutes theatrical character, as well as where it is located? And what notions of subjectivity are effectively produced as a result? My contention is that these works evoke and arouse understandings of the subject that are unintelligible under the liberal-humanist norm that appears to dominate the received concept of both subject and theatrical character. Or to put it differently, through their articulation of character these plays reconfigure what we know about the subject and how it can be apprehended. They formulate epistemologies of the subject that are not animated by identity and individualism, but by queer indeterminacy, intersubjective constitution, and universalising affect, or by practices that shape the present time politically. As such, they need to be situated within understandings of subjectivity beyond liberal humanism. For this reason, I place Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, Stone City Blue and ENGLAND as discussants with the theories on subjectivity proposed by Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. The ultimate aim is to offer a less prescriptive definition of character – namely, that character can be any figuration of subjectivity in theatre, regardless of how it looks on the page, of how it is materialised (or not) on the stage, and irrespective also of the idea of subjectivity it figures. The central thesis of this book is that, so long as a notion of subjectivity is evoked, presented or induced in a text or performance, character remains.

Introduction The theatrical experiments carried out by these directors and many other practitioners during the twentieth century have shown us that theatre is not dependent upon its location in a designated building or institution and that it is possible to do away with plot, character, costumes, set, sound, and script. − Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (2) The character is not dead; it has merely become polymorphous and difficult to pin down. − Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre (52) ‘[C]haracter’ as a term of dramatic art can never be independent of contemporary constructions of subjectivity. − Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (8)

Experimentation with character has been a prominent feature of a strand of British playwriting since the 1990 s. Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis have become paradigmatic examples of such work, but other British plays that warp or do away with the dramatis personae include Gary Owen’s Ghost City, debbie tucker green’s Stoning Mary, Mark Ravenhill’s Pool (No Water), Simon Stephen’s Pornography and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. Obscuring, fragmenting or refusing to demarcate their speakers, these plays disfigure the familiar contours of dramatic character. Scholars and critics have tentatively or resolutely described these texts and/or their performances as lacking characters. This is a problematic claim for historical, methodological and ethico-political reasons, as I aim to elucidate now with specific reference to the reception of Attempts on Her Life and 4.48 Psychosis. The present study emerges precisely from the identification of the limits and possibilities associated with the understanding of ‘character’ marshaled in these debates. My contention is that ‘character’ warrants rethinking, given that as a category of analysis it has come to determine what forms of being we make matter.

Inconsistent usage Claims about the disappearance of character are often grounded on a popular yet rather rigid understanding of the term, overlooking what character has been and restricting what it can be. These accounts admittedly respond to a

2

Introduction

strong tendency in theatre practices and discourses in the West to equate character with the illusionist representation of a person generated by an actor. Patrice Pavis notes this predisposition in his Dictionary of the Theatre, as he claims that, throughout the centuries, “the character is identified more and more with the actor and becomes a psychological and moral entity similar to other human beings, entrusted with producing an effect of identification on the spectator” (1998: 47). Terminologically speaking, however, the term ‘character’ only began to be understood as meaning “an individual created in a fictitious work” (51) in English in the eighteenth century, as Martin Harrison explains. Prior to this, ‘character’ referred to “an instrument for marking and engraving” (51). Its use was extended in the seventeenth century to denote physical appearance and, later on, “the sum of the qualities which constitute an individual” (51). Regardless of this relatively recent usage, we have retrospectively branded as characters the human figures that populate the Western theatre canon: the list of personae appearing before a script. In practice, what we commonly label ‘a character’ does not always match with its received definition as one fictional person impersonated by one actor. In other words, our contemporary use of the term already includes instances of theatre practice that do not correspond with the ideals of fictional individuality and illusionist performance. For example, we refer to characters in Greek texts but, as David Wiles reminds us, “[t]he Greek word for ‘character’, êthos, implies a moral attitude rather than a set of idiosyncrasies” (97); that is, it is a moral stance rather than a portrait of an individual. The Greek actor was understood as the “executor [of character] rather than its embodiment” (Pavis 1998: 47), and the masks worn to signify a change of speaker or actant were neutral (Wiles 97). This discrepancy between the idea(l) of character and the historically and aesthetically diverse circumstances in which we continue to apply this label is particularly apparent in debates on modern and contemporary theatre. Some continue to speak of characters in Maeterlinck’s and Strindberg’s symbolist drama despite the fact that their ethereal nature disrupts realism (e. g. Dorra 143; Lysell 68 – 70). Scholars have similarly referred to the “non-psychological characters” (Bermel 172) of Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias (1917) regardless of their surreal and playful trajectories in the play. It is also widely acknowledged that the materialist deconstruction of reality offered by epic dramaturgies results in a fragmented character that the actor is not supposed to impersonate fully, yet Brecht’s Mother Courage is often referred to as a character (e. g. Leach 139 – 140). This inconsistent usage of the term invites us to test the elasticity of the notion of character. For example, Beckett’s drama might present improbable existences in empty spaces, along with damaged bodies or body fragments, and

Inconsistent usage

3

speech physically and temporally dislocated from speakers. However, a sense of an existing character arguably persists in the mimes of Act Without Words I (1956) and Act Without Words II (1959), in the non-gendered existential birth cry in Breath (1970), in the stream of words spoken by the mouth in Not I (1973), and in the female bundle in Rockaby (1982). Though we might not be able to impart identities to the voices or figures on the page and the stage, a sometimes-abstract, sometimes-harrowing characterisation of human existence is nonetheless conveyed through these works. It might also be argued that character remains in the staging of radically meta-theatrical works with no plot, such as Peter Handke’s 1966 play Offending the Audience. Although the speakers in this play do not impersonate four fictional individuals, they are not performing themselves either. Handke’s instructions specify that the actors’ training should include listening to “the litanies in the Catholic churches”, “football teams being cheered on and booed” and “monkeys aping people and llamas spitting in the zoo” (3). Even if the actors display a non-committal and casual appearance on the stage (5), as commanded by the playtext, their real identity is not what is being performed or perceived – rather, it is a vague amalgamation of many other performances of public address, with all the exciting, engaging but also threatening power that public performers command over their addressees. Arguably, we can speak of characters too in Quarantine’s devised piece Entitled (2011), even though there is no acting. When Greg Akehurst, Lisa Mattocks and Chris Whitwood set up the stage and address the audience as themselves, as the company’s technicians, the authenticity of their words is difficult to ascertain. Yet, even if they are being themselves, the modes of feeling and thinking that a theatre piece entices are different from those that we deploy outside our engagement with art: we do not see the performers’ persons exactly as we see our fellow spectators, and we also regard the performers differently depending on whether they are onstage or not. As Stephen Bottoms contends, “[p]laced within the frame of art, the ‘real’ is always already representational, and the ‘self’ always already a characterization” (2009: 74). To be sure, some of the works mentioned above have been summoned to exemplify the inexistence, crisis or death of character by German- and Englishlanguage scholarship (Fuchs 1996; Lehmann 2006). However, as the first chapter demonstrates, in France and Spain such performances are often taken to illustrate the variability and health of character as an intrinsically elastic category (Abirached; Ryngaert and Sermon; Hormigón). The competing uses of the term ‘character’ suggest that this is not as self-explanatory a category of analysis as might initially be thought, and that it can be understood in less prescriptive ways than those applied in the reception of works that experiment with speech attribution. One of the points of departure for the present project has been, thus,

4

Introduction

the desire to bring a historically-grounded openness and European flavour to the term ‘character’ in British theatre studies. Acknowledging that this category of analysis is already more heterogeneous and unstable than the ideal definition is a freeing premise. This allows us to operate with a more nuanced definition of character, sensitive to its potential variations on the page and on the stage – both with regards to what is being characterised and how. I will return to this later when I outline the definition of character I propose in this book, but suffice it to say for now that in resisting claims about ‘the death of character’ I intend to offer a politically and ethically charged opportunity to exercise non-exclusionary thinking, both about aesthetics and ontology. This is an opportunity to widen the frames by which we understand subjectivity to be constructed, sensuously apprehended, conceptualised and valorised.

Problematic methodologies My desire to renegotiate the term ‘character’ also stems from the perception that there is little evidence to support the claim that plays such as Attempts on Her Life or 4.48 Psychosis lack characters. Very often, the charge that these plays have ‘no characters’ is laid in passing in scholarly contributions with other agendas – broad brush-strokes summarising the textual and performative features that render character absent. Writing about the portrayal of women in Attempts on Her Life under the section heading “Speakers not characters”, Heiner Zimmermann offers a succinct summary of the most frequently-cited reasons for the disappearance of character in Crimp’s and Kane’s work: The reader of Crimp’s text no longer encounters the habitual image of passages of dialogue headed by the names of their protagonists, but “expanses of speech” (Elfriede Jelinek, “Sprachflächen”), which make no distinction between narration, dialogue, description, expository text and stage direction. The postdramatic play is performed by a group of anonymous speakers who do not impersonate characters. (2003: 74)

With regards to the formal aspects of the script noted by Zimmermann, the lack of dramatis personae in Attempts on Her Life and 4.48 Psychosis, and its opacity in Crave, is one of the recurrent pieces of evidence offered to dismiss character. This is a problematic starting point, as it implies that the existence or inexistence of character in the script hinges exclusively on the conventions used to notate it on the page. This position suggests a post-Enlightenment epistemological confidence in the readability of the world – in this case, of character – and in the correlation between existence, visibility, representation and knowledge to discern whether there is character in a play or not. In these accounts, the search for

Problematic methodologies

5

the recognisable boundaries of conventional character takes place on the page, and it is only satisfied when the text provides a personal name as a focal point of identity, with individuating physical and psychological descriptors as its contours. However, the argument about the absence of character fails to explain who, then, is speaking in the script, and what becomes of the performers voicing, embodying and producing texts with ‘no characters’. In other words, who is it that appears on the page and the stage in the wake of character? And who disappears: who remains invisible, inaudible, unrepresented – and why? Certainly, as Judith Butler suggests, there is “something like an embodiment effect that follows from certain kinds of writing practices, and which leads audiences to conclude that they are somehow in the presence of a body in the text” [emphasis in original] (qtd. in B. Davies 16). However, the result of these writing practices is that they become dangerously normative and regulatory. Butler notes how “one can actually qualify as an appropriate […] subject or as a recognizable icon of embodiment if and only if you learn to write in such a way that produces that effect” (qtd. in B. Davies 17). These contentions refer to writing practices in general, and respond to the criticisms raised against the elusiveness of the body in her writing. However, Butler’s argument seems particularly pertinent to the realm of playwriting, as being able to identify bodies or subjects in a text is crucial if such a document is geared towards a performance event that often places speaking or moving bodies on a stage. In this respect, the use of clearly-defined dramatis personae is perhaps the conventional starting point of such an ‘embodiment effect’ in a text for theatre: it offers a list of prêt-à-porter characters. This initial effect can be reinforced throughout the script, using writing techniques that generate a sense of personal distinctiveness, self-expression and social interaction. It is thus that they conventionally appear as recognisable, fullyfleshed and – although Butler is not referring here to the psyche – psychologically-rounded characters. In a similar vein to Butler, I argue that, while these conventions have crystallised as the only way to infuse a script with characters, employing alternative writing practices need not mean that character is gone. It is simply that the forms of inscribing it on the page may differ from more conventional scriptwriting practices, and/or that the bodies or subject positions on the page might vary from the normative bodies and subjects we have learnt to recognise as such. My contention is that this is the case in the playtexts of Crimp and Kane, and in the works examined in this book, and that the argument against character in such plays is normative and obfuscating. To put it differently, claiming that a text has no characters focuses attention on what the script lacks or destroys (i. e. stable and illusionist representations of individualities), yet fails to account for and examine those forms of subjectivity that are produced instead (e. g. queerly

6

Introduction

hybrid, relational or practice-based subjects that problematise the notion of identity and its politics). One of the aims of the present project is therefore to identify and interrogate alternative modes of textual characterisation in specific case studies, as well as the bodies, psyches, exchanges, forms of agency and political gestures that are outlined in each text. In doing so, I aim to bring a higher degree of specificity to the use of the term ‘character’ regarding theatre texts in general, and scripts that experiment with speech attribution in particular. Such specificity is much needed, especially given that differences between works have often been eclipsed or flattened out by their shared participation in postdramatic aesthetics.¹ At any rate, differences do exist among texts that are a priori similar on the page. For example, the characters formulated in Stephens’s play Pornography (2008) do not differ vastly from a conventional playtext: they are recognisable in terms of gender, interpersonal relations, social status, race, profession and place of residence. Even if the script has no dramatis personae, these features can be inferred from the lines. The play, presenting seven different stories set in London around the terrorist attacks of 2005, does not transgress the traditional idea of character as an individual. However, through the erasure of individual character names on the script, Pornography simultaneously formulates a collective character – the citizens of the British capital city, defined by their heterogeneity and anonymity, but also by an assumed commonality of experience and ethos. The reader of Pornography navigates the text like the rescue services who confronted the victims of the London bombings: identifying bodies and subjects, discerning individuality out of an unnamed collective. It would be impossible to put forward an equivalent inventory of characters for the text of 4.48 Psychosis, despite this also being composed of free-floating lines; Kane’s despairing script can hardly be subsumed under any given identity or identities. Taking this on board, this monograph not only acknowledges and celebrates the possibility of writing characters otherwise, but it also recognises that non-conventional writing might not necessarily invoke a radically transgressive notion of character

 Postdramatic theatre is described as rejecting drama’s alleged twofold representational drive, both in the sense of the dramatic will to represent the world “as a surveyable whole” (JürsMunby ) through the imitation of actions, and also in reference to the dramatic subjugation of performance to the representation of a text, a text marked by textual structure and coherence (Lehmann : ; :  – ). It is generally acknowledged that character is one of the categories corresponding to the dramatic rather than the postdramatic. However, Lehmann’s influential monograph avoids a direct elucidation of the status of character in postdramatic theatre. See page  f for more on Lehmann’s stance on character in postdramatic theatre.

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7

or subjectivity, and refutes the possibility that unascribed scripts must necessarily configure the same character or its absence. If the experimental notation of subjectivity on the page has prompted claims that particular theatre works have no characters, the theatrical productions of plays such as Attempts on Her Life and 4.48 Psychosis have been similarly received. The argument that character may also be lacking in performance often makes reference to the actors’ rejection of impersonation techniques and other artistic strategies used by the creative teams (Saunders 2002b: 116; Zimmermann 2003: 76). The suggestion that performers do not impersonate characters when engaging with no-longer-dramatic texts is a misguided generalisation. In the National Theatre revival of Attempts on Her Life (2007), for example, director Katie Mitchell worked closely with the actors to generate a very specific fictional setting: they decided that the performers would play the part of participants in an imaginary live BBC competition in 1997, in which they had to improvise in front of a judging panel on a topic given only minutes before the show started. In this case, the imagined topic was “A Satire on the Ills of Western Consumer Society” (Kerbel 3). The actors impersonated each participant as a well-defined creative professional, although the biographical information they had generated as preparation for their characters was not explicitly conveyed to audiences (Kerbel 6). There are further examples: director James Macdonald has explained that “the breakthrough” for actors in rehearsals of the original production of Crimp’s unassigned text Fewer Emergencies (2005) “was to realise that, actually, if there are no characters, then you are directly in the writer’s head […]. [Y]ou’re all playing the writer” (144). Writing about Deborah Levy’s The B File (1992), a play that actually precedes Crimp’s no-longer-dramatic engagement with postmodern ideas of subjectivity through an elusive female character, Claire MacDonald offers an alternative way of thinking about stage character. For MacDonald, “character is not pre-formed but exists as the outcome of all that is said and done on the stage, however contradictory” (244): it is collectively created by the five female performers without requiring impersonation, physical unity, or psychic coherence. The possibility that character may be produced without each performer’s impersonation of individuality is a line of inquiry that this book aims to pursue. An interesting assumption underlying readings on the absence of character in theatrical production is also that character can only be neutralised in performance through the collaborative work of the creative team – for example, through the use of mirrors decentring the origin of speech in 4.48 Psychosis (Saunders 2002b: 116). What is implicitly acknowledged here is that the contours of character are not outlined by the actor’s work exclusively, as it is commonly expressed. This is why collective artistic work is necessary in order to placate character, be-

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Introduction

cause character threatens to persist or to be reconfigured on the stage through the actors’ presence, their voices, their costume, through lighting, sound, and set design. My project takes as its starting point the assumption that is expressed here in negative terms – that character cannot be reduced to the impersonating work of the actor – in order to vindicate the persistence of character in the production of plays that experiment with speech assignation. Yet what is most striking in these academic readings on the staging of Attempts on Her Life or 4.48 Psychosis is their fidelity to authorial intention. The power to eschew stage character is invariably placed onto the creative work of the playwright and/or the creative team in a production. Very often, only the plays’ premieres are considered. This position disregards “the transmutation of theatrical character from one production to another” (Bourassa 83), and fails to acknowledge the co-creative role of the spectator, and the legitimacy of audiences’ ability to recognise and construe ‘character’ from whatever sensible material a play offers. As Michael Kirkby’s article “On Acting and Not-Acting” has persuasively demonstrated, there are forms of performance that do not involve impersonation but are perceived as such within the frame of the theatre event. My own experience as a spectator of 4.48 Psychosis jars with the postdramatic promise of doing away with character. Seeing TR Warszawa’s production of Kane’s last play in 2010 at London’s Barbican made it very clear to me that there were discrete characters in the play – or rather, in that particular production of the play. In it, a young, tormented female protagonist entered a spiral of self-loathing, self-harm and self-inflicted isolation following the rejection of her female lover and the incomprehension she faced from friends and medical staff. This was a different proposition to the Argentinian production directed by Luciano Cáceres, in which middle-aged actress Leonor Manso delivered the text as a monologue on an almost bare stage. What my experience demonstrates is that a play’s proposition on character does not remain with the script or with the artistic decisions made in its first performance: the formulation of character created by a play admits legitimate variation across different stagings, and the audience’s work of recognition and co-creation must also be accounted for. These are some of the premises about character upon which the present research is founded.

The erasure of the subject

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The erasure of the subject While subjectivity in the plays of practitioners such as Crimp and Kane has indeed begun to be interrogated,² the connections between subjectivity and character have not been fully explored. This is surprising given the widespread acknowledgement that theatrical character lies at the intersection of aesthetic and philosophical inquiries about subjectivity. As Elinor Fuchs puts it, “‘character’ as a term of dramatic art can never be independent of contemporary constructions of subjectivity” (1996: 8). Consistent with this idea, Erika FischerLichte has suggested that “it is likely that […] change to the structure of a drama and change to the concept of identity are directly interdependent” (2004: 5).³ In a more general sense, the absence of studies of character alongside the discourse of subjectivity in contemporary theatre contrasts highly with the profusion of research on the links between conceptualisations and representations of selfhood in Renaissance drama. The emergence of drama in the Renaissance has been consistently linked to the appearance of the liberal-humanist notion of selfhood, which was mimetically reproduced and reinforced in theatre through new, individuated characters (Szondi; Belsey). However, debates on the twentieth-century crisis of drama, the emergence of a postdramatic theatre, and the alleged death of character have not offered an in-depth exploration of how current understandings of the subject beyond the liberal-humanist paradigm have informed theatre practices and vice versa.⁴ In Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann questions the existence of character in the work of Sarah Kane amongst other contemporary playwrights, but warns that the appearance of lan See for example Clara Escoda Agustí’s “Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life”, Karoline Gritzner’s “The Fading of the Subject in Sarah Kane’s Later Work” and “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment”, and Julie Waddington’s “Posthumanist Identities in Sarah Kane”.  Problematically, Fischer-Lichte uses the terms ‘identity’, ‘subject’, ‘self’, ‘selfhood’ and ‘person’ almost interchangeably throughout her account of the history of European drama. See Glossary, pages  – , for definitions of some of these terms.  Critiques of Cartesian, liberal-humanist notions of subjectivity do exist in theatre and performance studies, and these have been approached particularly from the point of view of feminist and/or queer agendas. See, for example, Elin Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre and Jose´ Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. The novelty of my project is threefold: it focuses on contemporary, script-led theatre, both on the page and on the stage, which has not received the same scholarly attention as performance; it is open to any schools of thought that challenge normative, identity-based ideas of subjectivity within but also beyond gender studies; and it proposes a reconsideration of character alongside these alternative conceptualisations of subjectivity.

10

Introduction

guage as “autonomous theatricality” should not be equated to “a lack of interest in the human being” (2006: 18). “[R]ather than bemoan the lack of an already defined image of the human being in postdramatically organized texts”, Lehmann warns, “it is necessary to explore the new possibilities of thinking and representing the individual human subject sketched in these texts” (2006: 18). Such exploration, however, is not provided in his study. Furthermore, as Zimmermann has claimed, “[t]he reasons for the erosion of the traditional model of drama in postmodern theatre lie not only in a changed understanding of the subject and of history but also in the altered relationship between reality and art” (2003: 73). As I understand it, character is precisely the node where theatre’s aesthetics and conceptualisations of subjectivity intersect, and as such it is a suitable starting point for addressing transformations in these two realms. Interrogating the links between theatre’s experimentation with character and various understandings of subjectivity is not solely a means to filling a gap in theatre studies. It is my belief that the operations at the core of this book can be conceived as part of a wider and more pressing political task. At a time when identity politics are accused of essentialism, the grand political narrative of communism seems to have collapsed with the Berlin Wall, and no feasible alternatives to unjust globalised capitalism and neoliberalism are visible, it is possible to paint the present as a post-political era in which theatre’s engagement with politics is either thematically overt yet ineffectual, or simply non-existent. Contrary to this pessimistic stance, I believe that theatre is able to articulate an important and effective political gesture through the very category of character: first, by signalling the ways in which injustice and oppression continue to operate at the basic level of essentialising what we understand and treat as a subject, and second, by expanding our expectation of what a subject is and can be, productively demonstrating that we can continuously widen our frame of apprehension of subjectivity. In a world where, to paraphrase Butler (1993), the bodies and the lives that matter are severely circumscribed, and their possibilities limited, expanding the definition of what can be apprehended as a human life is an important political task towards equality. This is the political task I believe theatre can conduct even when party politics or identity politics are not thematically salient – a task that can be executed through the theatrical formulation of character.

Aesthetics, politics, subjectivity

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Aesthetics, politics, subjectivity The four works considered in this book are a small sample of the trend in contemporary British playwriting interested in experimenting with speech attribution, disrupting conventions about performers’ onstage roles, and exposing a discontent with ideas of subjectivity formulated around a solid identity. Although the last two decades have seen an extraordinary number of playtexts with these characteristics in Britain, this is neither a specifically contemporary writing practice, nor is it exclusively British.⁵ As a matter of fact, the avoidance or subversion of traditional dramatis personae offers too vast and heterogeneous a body of works to be taxonomically meaningful in its own right. As such, it is important to emphasise that my selection of case studies is not grounded on the claim that I believe they offer radically new articulations of character or that they produce a conceptualisation of subjectivity that, for the first time, veers away from the liberal-humanist norm. Rather, my choice of case studies responds, first, to the acknowledgement that this trend against identity and individuality in theatre-writing practices has been particularly strong in Britain since the 1990s but, as argued above, Anglophone studies has met it with problematic preconceptions. Focusing on British plays written and performed within the last two decades has provided this study with cultural, geographical and temporal specificity that would have been impossible to attain otherwise. The British context in which these plays were written roughly coincides with the New Labour government (1997– 2010). Tony Blair’s Third Way – an alleged Centre-Left political route, between the market-driven, individualist and neoliberal Thatcherite approach and the collectivist, state-centred interest of previous Labour governments – was not only more indebted to neoliberalism than the party’s rebranding would like to suggest (Heffernan), but it also effectively contributed to deflating the Left in the country. This paved the way for the fast and deep delegation of social responsibility to individuals and communities currently undertaken by the newly reelected Conservative government. During the time the plays I examine were written, New Labour’s cultural policy endorsed participatory art with an agenda of social inclusion, an agenda in which, according to Claire Bishop, an identity politics-derived “ethics of interpersonal interaction [came] to prevail over a politics of social justice” (25).⁶ In the realm of popular culture and public discourse, the  For a brief account of British character-less playtexts in the last two decades, and a relation of contemporary counterparts and predecessors in Europe, see Appendix, pages  – .  Already in , David Ian Rabey had pointed out New Labour’s entrepreneurial view of the arts, and the emphasis on ‘accessibility’ and participation – a utilitarian stance that failed to

12

Introduction

status of Britain as the new and exciting capital of the world for arts, fashion, music and business was beginning to dissolve by the late 1990s when Kane wrote Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. By the time Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Crouch’s ENGLAND premiered in 2004 and 2007 respectively, the national and international image of Britain had dramatically changed – no less because of Blair’s support of military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A survey of the entire field of British works featuring character experimentation written during the New Labour period would potentially risk fostering the sort of superficial generalisations that the present book endeavours to debunk. The case studies selected for this study have in common their subtle engagement with politics despite an overarching dismissal of both party/doctrine affiliation and identity politics. Arguably, this double repudiation is symptomatic of a political Zeitgeist during the New Labour mandate, when traditional doctrines were progressively perceived by the public as ineffectual or eroded,⁷ and identity politics was accused of being dangerously essentialist or lacking a deeper materialist critique of the world.⁸ Rather than conflating right-wing individualism with community ideals, or exposing the plights of a marginalised identity within a given social order, these plays engage in politics by rethinking subjectivity itself beyond identity, individualism and community – exposing the hybrid and interdependent nature of the subject at micro- and macro-social levels, highlighting the possibility of intersubjective recognition regardless of identity, and pointing at singular and collective responsibility for structural economic oppression.

value arts in general and theatre in particular for its artistic merits alone (:  – ). See Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship for a critique of New Labour’s discourse on the role of the arts to promote social inclusion.  Writing about the  general elections, Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice argue that Labour lost the enthusiasm and support of its traditional voters due to the party’s “distancing from the trade unions, and its active courting of the middle classes”, and purport that this disillusionment was a reaction to the political decisions of New Labour and “not part of a general trend towards civic disengagement or political cynicism” (). However, some writers have qualified Labour’s subsequent victory as “an apathetic landslide” (Harrop), as the number of abstainers in the elections of  and  was higher than the actual number of Labour voters, particularly first-time voters (Henn et al.). This young scepticism was perhaps extended to older and middle-class supporters after Britain’s participation in the Iraq war (Clarke et al.).  Within the realm of feminist theory and practice, for example, intersectionality has aimed to tackle these criticisms by considering how oppression takes place in complicated, intersecting patterns where classism, racism, sexism and homophobia meet. For more on this, see Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”.

Aesthetics, politics, subjectivity

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This leads me to unveil a second reason for selecting these four plays in particular. My project not only endeavours to vindicate the persistence of character in theatre: it also aims to demonstrate that theatre may have the ability to redefine subjectivity and intersubjective relations towards positive social change. In particular, theatre’s rethinking of character can be identified as an access point for a politics of universal equality, agency and recognisability. Taking this into account, among all the British works which destabilise conventional characterisation, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, Stone City Blue and ENGLAND stand out not only because they move away from identity-based understandings of character and subjectivity but, more importantly, because the characters and subjects they outline are politically and ethically affirmative. This political facet of their work has often been overshadowed by academic formalism in the case of Kane and Crouch, and the author’s prior Welsh nationalist agenda in the case of Thomas. Those familiar with Kane’s oeuvre – and indeed with Thomas’s Stone City Blue or Crouch’s ENGLAND – might have difficulty finding reasons for optimism in such works. However, my position is that regardless of the undeniable thematic despair, there is a strongly ethical articulation of the subject in the affective and conceptual fabric of these works, one that opens up clear pathways towards non-violent epistemologies of the subject. Conversely, although Crimp’s work might seem a significant absence in this monograph given its formal features, its postmodern pessimism with regards to subjectivity sits uncomfortably with the political hope that drives this study. Finally, the similarity in themes and textual strategies between Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue has also been instrumental to this book’s dismantling of the assumption that texts with the same texture on the page inevitably produce the same characters and notions of subjectivity. Moreover, these works contrast in scale with Crouch’s rethinking of subjectivity in ENGLAND. While Kane’s and Thomas’s plays are preoccupied with the subject’s bodily and psychic matter, Crouch’s play gestures more emphatically towards a collective subject that emerges through action, inaction and erasure, allowing for a reconsideration of collective subjectivity beyond identity-based ideas of community. This difference in scope – from the singular experience of the body and the psychological life in Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, and Stone City Blue, to collective praxis in ENGLAND – vertebrates the chapters dealing with case studies. Chapter Three explores the notion of a singular subjectivity marked by hybridity and relationality in these works of Kane and Thomas, highlighting the differences between their particular queer propositions, and assessing the effects of their staging across several productions. Chapter Four examines in detail a production of Crouch’s ENGLAND with a focus on how a number of collective subjects are characterised both in the actors and in the spectators, and how these suggest so-

14

Introduction

cial forms of complicity with capitalism and the erasure of the subaltern, but also a possibility for collective emancipation. With regards to the theoretical framework of this book, the work on subjectivation by Judith Butler, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière is presented as a sample of alternatives to the Cartesian, liberal-humanist paradigm that is hegemonic in Anglophone approaches to character. This is not to say that their theories have provided the blueprint by which to read the scripts and performances examined in these chapters – at times theatre refutes these thinkers’ contentions, continues to produce critical theory at the point where the thinkers left it, and highlights points of dissent and confluence between theories. Other authors could indeed have been put forward in addition to or instead of these when considering character: since I define character as any figuration of subjectivity in theatre, no particular understanding of subjectivity can be privileged over another, whether this is coming from philosophy or the contemporary arts. However, Butler, Badiou and Rancière offer particularly significant theories for the types of subjectivity evoked in my case studies, and especially for the politics they articulate. What these thinkers have in common is a politically and ethically-inflected preoccupation with disidentificatory modes of subjectivation, as well as a shared desire to reconsider art as a sphere capable of making political interventions. However, whilst Rancière and Badiou think politics and subjectivity through in terms of universality and collectivity, the importance of corporeal and psychic matter for the subject is missing from their accounts, which is an aspect that is counterbalanced by Butler’s work.

Performance philosophy: a glossary I want to bring this introduction to its final point by offering a very brief glossary of the key terms within this monograph. Rather than establishing definite and prescriptive definitions, these entries aim to situate my own use and renegotiation of concepts that might already be saturated with received meanings, which I do not intend to conjure up.

Character By ‘character’ I refer to any figuration of subjectivity in theatre, regardless of how individuated or, conversely, how unmarked its contours might be. My use of the term therefore encompasses not only what is commonly perceived as ‘conventional character’, which privileges understandings of the subject as a self-identical, unique, coherent and rational individual, but also those entities that have re-

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ceived alternative nomenclatures in theatre studies, such as ‘the figure’, ‘mischfigur [amalgamated figure]’, ‘l’impersonnage [impersonal character]’, or the postdramatic ‘textträger [text bearers]’ (see pages 37– 41). These alternative labels often signal discomfort with identifying as characters those instantiations of language that foreclose the reconstruction of stable imaginary biographies, coherent or intelligible bodies, and distinct personalities firmly located in space or time. My position is that theatre always and inevitably produces subjective contours. I call this contour ‘character’ and think of it as a continuum, in which some manifestations will be very clearly defined as individuals while others will be less so – thus, the figure, mischfigur, impersonnage and text bearer can simply be thought of as manifestations within this spectrum, characterised by impenetrable, interchangeable and impersonal features. In this respect, my position is not dissimilar to that of Manfred Pfister, who prefers the term “figur [figure]” to refer to theatre’s production of human contours, because of how it “hints at something deliberately artificial, produced or constructed for a particular purpose, and evokes the impression of functionality rather than individual autonomy” (161). ‘Character’, meanwhile, has the connotation of ‘person’ – and Pfister rightly notes that theatre does not always or necessarily construct persons. Unlike Pfister, however, I maintain the category of ‘character’ for the following reasons. As argued previously, my decision is grounded on the persistence of this term in the European scholarly tradition, particularly in France and Spain, and the ambivalent – even contradictory – uses that this term has received within Anglophone studies. The lack of consensus regarding the definition and uses of the term ‘character’ suggests that this category is malleable enough to accommodate different and even antagonistic interpretations. Therefore, it appears that the aesthetic and ontological boundaries of character are not only broad already but can further be broadened. In other words, theatre can think subjectivity in many ways, and it can formulate such thought through an artistic vocabulary that is large and also growing. This conclusion is momentous: allowing ourselves to think ‘character’ beyond whatever preconception of the term is currently or locally being privileged may also help us widen our frame of apprehension of subjectivity, hopefully in less normative and exclusionary ways. Taking this into account, my maintaining ‘character’ over other categories should not be thought of as a rather unfashionable and reactionary manoeuvre, but as a strategy by which we might deepen our understanding of subjectivity, and our reading of its formulations in playwriting and staging practices. There is a further clarification to be made with regards to character. The reception of experimental text-based theatre work has tended to refer to the production of character in a particular play, without drawing a distinction between textual character and stage character, or examining the connections and points

16

Introduction

of departure between the two. This distinction is currently operative in Spanish with “el personaje literario-dramático [the literary-dramatic character]” (Hormigón 12 – 15, 19 – 23) and “el personaje escénico [the stage character]” (Hormigón 23 – 31).⁹ Although Juan Antonio Hormigón’s ‘literary-dramatic character’ might seem to exclude theatrical writings that fall into no-longer-dramatic writing practices, it simply refers to character as it is textually configured in any form of script-based theatre, and therefore I call it ‘textual character’. Hormigón provides an extended typology of this literary-dramatic or textual character that demonstrates the elasticity of the term in theatre writing practices throughout history. To name but a few of his examples, Hormigón notes that there are characters that act like “sujetos reales [real subjects]” (19), characters that amount to inflated prototypes like those populating the work of Aristophanes, Ramón del Valle-Inclán or Dario Fo (20), characters as emblems of morality, such as those of Corneille and Racine (20), and characters as the expression of impersonal abstractions such as Peace, War, Beauty or Prudence in Calderón de la Barca’s work (20 – 21). Significantly for the present study, Hormigón also highlights that a text might inscribe a “personaje ausente [absent character]”, whose nonpresence is crucial for the play (22); a character that is “despersonalizado [deindividualised]” (22), eludes typification and is strictly functional; and collective characters, understood as “un conjunto de individuos [que] plantean una verbalización o acciones en común [a group of individuals [who] present common verbalisations or actions]” (21) – for example, ‘the people’ in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Whilst this book is not interested in establishing or proliferating taxonomies, Hormigón’s classification demonstrates that textual character need not be a naturalist representation of a socially and physically defined, psychologically-round fictional persona, and this is an important point of departure for this book. As regards ‘stage character’, Hormigón defines it as “una entidad de ficción que se hace presente en el espacio y tiempo de una representación teatral y que se extingue con ella [a fictional entity that renders itself present in the space and time of a theatre production and that it extinguishes with it]” (24). From his script-led perspective, Hormigón does go on to clarify that character emerges from the conjunction of a text, a performer’s active participation, and the mise en scène of a specific theatre project – which, arguably, might also include the audience. Crucially, in his definition of stage character Hormigón does not place the onus of character on the impersonating performer, but highlights the equally important role of stage design, lighting and sound. However, I would

 This and any subsequent translations from Spanish, French and Catalan are mine.

Performance philosophy: a glossary

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like to further expand Hormigón’s definition of stage character by considering his own acknowledgement of ‘absent characters’ in a theatre text, and argue that stage character as a figuration of subjectivity in performance is not instantly or exclusively or permanently materialised in the actor’s body. The production of stage character can involve one performer, many, none, and/or the spectators; it does not necessarily require speech, movement or gesticulation, and cannot be considered in isolation from lighting, sound and stage design. Finally, as my analysis of Crouch’s ENGLAND will suggest, these elements and their interactions might not produce one notion of subjectivity throughout a performance, but may dissolve and regroup into other configurations of subjectivity throughout the theatrical event.

Character-less plays I tentatively use the adjective ‘character-less’ to refer to theatre scripts that dismantle and foreclose the traditional attribution of speech to stable and welldefined characters/performers. The hyphenated form attempts to destabilise the absolute terms of the presence versus absence debate around theatrical character, and to suggest that some form of character always persists regardless of these plays’ self-aware reduction or rejection of individuated dramatis personae. In addition, the italicisation of ‘character-less’ throughout this book intends to further emphasise that the term should not be read as ‘characterless’. Rather than suggesting a lack of character, then, this points to the ways certain writers work to diminish those aspects that make a particular type of character recognisable.

(Dis)embodiment By ‘(dis)embodiment’ and ‘(dis)embodied’, I refer to the scripts’ blurring of what Butler calls the social terms “by which we are recognized as humans”; that is, “race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognisability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, [and] the categorical understanding of that ethnicity” (2004b: 2). This may occur in theatrical texts characterised by unattributed speech, although the erasure of the dramatis personae does not always signify the erasure of the terms of bodily recognition – Stephens’s Pornography (2008) is an example of the latter. Likewise, scripts with more defined dramatis personae, like Kane’s Crave, may still withhold information about the speakers’ bodies to the point that they are neither incorporeal nor physically intelligible from a heteronormative point of view (see Chapter Three). By using the brackets in ‘(dis)embodiment’, I also aim to

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Introduction

undermine the priority that criticism has granted to these plays’ scripts when discerning the presence or absence of theatrical character.

Dramatis personae The list of names provided at the beginning of a theatre piece is the dramatis personae. The tendency is to consider the items in that list to be the characters in a play. However, my contention is that a playtext may not have dramatis personae, or that the dramatis personae might omit discrete and plausible first names, without this impacting on its production of textual and stage characters.

Individuation; non-individuation; dividuation Individuation is the conferring of individuality to an entity, in this case character or subjectivity. In other words, a character or subject is individuated when it is endowed with the distinctive and essentialised appearance of what we commonly refer to as a person. Conversely, subjectivity might be thought of or experienced in non-individuated terms, for example by resisting being discerned as an individual, or by virtue of its indistinctiveness, hybridity, or fragmentation. With regards to fragmentation in particular, I speak of dividuated characters and subjects, as the term evokes a number of philosophical debates on the lack of unity and sovereignty of the subject without suggesting that this lack is a loss, an absence of something that was or should be there in the first place – namely distinctiveness, uniqueness, individuality. Thus, my use of these terms attempts to uproot character and subjectivity from an expectation of individuality, and to move away from the political and ethical effects of positing the individual, its rights and interests at the centre of governance and intersubjective relations – namely, individualism.

Ontology From the Greek ‘ont’, meaning ‘being’, and ‘logos’, ‘theory’, ontology is the study of being, and it asks questions such as: what does it mean to be? What is or what exists? What types of things exist? As Jorge J. E. Gracia admits, “[t]he use of the term ‘ontology’ to refer to metaphysics appears in early modern philosophy and is still with us” (148). However, he adds: “it is clear that it [ontology] excludes much that metaphysicians discuss” (148). My intention is to move away from the notions of obligatory unity, presence and permanence that underpin the understanding of ontology in Western metaphysics – the One, as Alain Badiou puts it (2009a: 590). A number of alternative definitions can help us dispel

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the metaphysical ghost from the site of ontology. For example, in typical mathematical fashion, Badiou argues that ontology as the “[s]cience of being-quabeing” is the “science of multiplicities qua pure multiplicities, or multiples ‘without One’” (2009a: 590). For Jean-Luc Nancy, if “ontology” relates to “Being”, then it follows that ontology can only be understood as “sociality”: “Being is with; it is as the with of Being itself (the cobeing of Being), so that Being does not identify itself as such (as Being of the being), but shows itself [se pose], gives itself, occurs, dis-poses itself […] as its own singular plural with” [emphasis in original] (38). Thus, this book refers to ontology as the investigation or conceptualisation of existence that takes place not only in the realm of philosophy but also in theatre, with a particular focus on subjectivity as a category within human ontology.

Onto-aesthetics Although a somewhat rare term, ‘onto-aesthetics’ is self-explanatory: it expresses a bond between aesthetics and ontology, an inextricable relation between form and forms of being. Arguably, if aesthetics is understood, as Rancière puts it, “as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (2004b: 13) and not just as artistic form, ‘onto-aesthetics’ appears to be also a common concern for two of the thinkers who provide the theoretical framework of this monograph. On the one hand, Rancière’s sustained efforts to disclose the aesthetics of politics (i. e. politics as the disturbance of a particular distribution of the sensible, a disturbance of the horizon that determines what is visible, audible, thinkable, sayable or doable) and the politics of aesthetics (i. e. art having the potential to intervene in the reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible) (2009a: 24– 25) could also be interpreted as the foregrounding of the inextricable relation between sensible form and forms of being: onto-aesthetics. On the other hand, Butler has argued for the normative production of epistemology alongside ontology: The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life. In this way, the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge or, indeed, to guard against injury and violence. (2009a: 3)

In so doing, Butler argues that we can only apprehend those forms of being whose form is already made recognisable to us (2009a: 7). Taking this into account, I refer to character as an ‘onto-aesthetic category’ because it is the aesthetic form that theatre gives to a particular form of being or notion of subject-

20

Introduction

ivity: it is the form through which theatre thinks, produces and encounters subjectivity.

Selfhood; subjectivity Often used as synonyms, ‘selfhood’ is a psychological term that refers to the experience of individuality and identity, whereas ‘subjectivity’ is a wider philosophical notion, encompassing a number of conceptualisations of human ontology. Selfhood bears a close relation to the liberal-humanist understanding of the subject as a self-conscious and self-same, autonomous individual (see entry for liberal-humanist subjectivity below). The use of the term ‘subjectivity’ in the social sciences, on the other hand, has come to suggest that this idea of a naturally-occurring and fully autonomous individual is untenable, as it fails to acknowledge factors such as the importance of unconscious configurations, the social construction of identity or the role of ideology. Within these academic disciplines, many other theories about what constitutes a subject and how a subject relates to the world have been put forward in contraposition to the idea of selfhood. In modern philosophy, for example, the trajectory of theories of the subject spans from Locke and Hume, to Kant and the German Idealists, to Nietzsche’s Dionysian celebration of all that is transgressive, creative and physical. Regarding contemporary contributions, competing theories of subjectivity have emerged from Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and feminist and queer studies. As a result of these, the subject is no longer seen as a unified, self-contained, self-mastered and rational individual ‘I’ defined by the hierarchical dichotomy of mind and body. Badiou summarises the three dominant theories to which his formal theory of the subject is opposed. He notes, first, the phenomenological understanding of the subject as a “register of experience” (2009a: 47); second, the neo-Kantian theorisations of the subject as “a category of morality” (2009a: 48), by which every subject must consider every other subject as a subject; and, finally, the understandings of the subject as “an imaginary through which the apparatuses of the State designate […] individuals” (2009a: 48). The polyvalence of ‘subject’ suggests that this term is always unstable, in need of qualifiers whenever it is used. In other words, the subject in Lacan’s body of work is not the same as in Foucault’s, just as the subject in Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is not the same as in Crouch’s ENGLAND. Throughout this book, several philosophical accounts of the subject and subjectivation are used, while others are elucidated from theatrical texts and performances. For an in-depth interrogation of the theories of the subject proposed by Althusser, Foucault, Badiou, Rancière and Butler and their relationship to theatre, see Chapter Two. For more on the conceptualisations of

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the subject in Kane’s and Thomas’s plays, see Chapter Three; and for those in Crouch’s ENGLAND, see Chapter Four.

Subjectivity, liberal-humanist It is generally acknowledged that the liberal-humanist subject is a particular understanding of subjectivity that emerged in the Renaissance, and reached its apotheosis during the Enlightenment. As the name indicates, this notion of the subject is indebted to the discourses of humanism and liberalism. Renaissance humanism brought an emphasis on “the development of a universal capacity to think of yourself […] as a free-standing, self-determining person with an identity and a name that is not simply a marker of family, birthplace or occupation but is ‘proper’, that is, belonging to you alone” (T. Davies 17). Liberalism, on the other hand, fashioned, sustained and reinforced the emergence of capitalism and of a rights-demanding, commercially-oriented bourgeoisie (Taylor 106, 214). This notion of subjectivity also owes to Cartesianism – or received Cartesianism – the superiority of rationality within the mind/body divide, as well as its self-legitimising consciousness. From the confluence of these ideologies and practices, the liberal-humanist subject is defined as a free and autonomous agent, characterised by its self-aware distinctiveness, self-reflection, unity and rationality. The liberal-humanist subject has received numerous criticisms, particularly with regards to the universality of its claims, as well as the grounds for the teleological narrative that sustains it (Weedon 113 – 114; Munslow 163). The Cartesian subject, central to the liberal-humanist discourse on subjectivity, has similarly been exposed to contestation. Via Étienne Balibar, Nina Power has argued that “a certain construction of the Cartesian subject” [emphasis in original] (55) has dominated philosophical debates. Indeed, Descartes’s claim that “the soul is truly joined to the whole body” (1989: 35) is hardly referred to, while the alleged “thesis that would posit the ego or the ‘I think/I am’ (or the ‘I am a thinking thing’) as subject […] does not appear anywhere in Descartes” [emphasis in original] (Balibar 1991: 33). Balibar has subsequently clarified that the category that we have interpreted as a subject, the cogito, is not an “ontological figure” but only “a legal, political, theological, and moral figure, that of a subjectus or subditus, i. e., a dependent, believing, and obedient individual” (1995: 152). Arguably, then, there should be no reason to retain such a contested and superseded notion as that of the liberal-humanist subject, particularly in the field of philosophy. However, it is important to acknowledge that liberal humanism is still a powerful modern ideology, and that it continues to shape what is popularly understood as a subject – and, indeed, how this is represented in the-

22

Introduction

atre through character. As Alan Sinfield contends, character “as it has been envisaged in our cultures involves essentialist humanism” (61). In its scrutiny of character-less theatre, the present study does occasionally refer to Cartesian, liberal-humanist characters and subjects. It does so with the awareness that liberal humanism offers an ideal to which no theatrical instantiation has ever fully conformed – not even the characters in Renaissance theatre, as persuasively demonstrated by Catherine Belsey’s focus on female abjection in her ground-breaking study The Subject of Tragedy. In this monograph I also refer to liberal-humanist subjectivity with the certainty that this ideal continues to configure the popular and theatrical understandings of who we are and who we appear to be, with important political consequences. As Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou summarise in the preface to their 2013 book Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, the force of this unitary idea of the subject continues to be with us, and it “serves a form of power that must be challenged and undone, signifying a style of masculinism that effaces sexual difference and enacts mastery over the domain of life” (ix). My aim is not to posit the characters and subjects in the plays studied here as subversive purely because they disrupt the codes of liberal humanism. There is little to gain in noting departures from the norm. Rather, this book sets out to expose how characters in certain theatrical texts and performances may be unreadable in the context of liberal humanist interpretations and logocentric methodologies. From this perspective, the unattributed speech of the plays examined here may be interpreted as an aesthetic-political tool of resistance and widening: a resistance to the effacing and othering of those ways of understanding the subject that are (made) invisible to the humanist gaze when conventional character takes over, and a widening of what character and subjectivity may mean. In other words, my intention is to suggest that the categories of character and subjectivity are in themselves empty of Cartesian and liberal-humanist obligations, and, consequently, to examine in depth the characters and subjects that appear in each work. Only by doing so can we begin to undo the hermeneutical stranglehold that liberal humanism has placed on our examination of theatre’s aesthetic and political engagements with human ontology.

1 The Life, Death and Second Coming of Character Furthermore, there could not be a tragedy without action, but there could be one without character. − Aristotle, Poetics (12) [L]a mort annoncée du personnage est souvent contredite par les traditions de l’interprétation, les exigences de la scène et les habitudes de la réception. − Jean-Pierre Ryngaert, “Personnage (crise du)” (149)

This chapter provides further scrutiny of the scholarly debate on the crisis of character that was presented in the introduction. The contributions of key theatre academics such as Robert Abirached and Elinor Fuchs have occupied the same semantic field of crisis, death or disappearance with regards to the status of character in modern and contemporary works. However, the discrepancies between their accounts of the mise en crise of this category are striking. As this chapter intimates, there is a predicament at the heart of the debate: namely, there is no consensus regarding what character is. This lack of definition has recently compelled theatre scholars to provide alternative nomenclatures, which are also examined here. Referring neither to normative dramatis personae nor to a complete void, these new terms suggest the existence of theatrical codes that do not comply with the most basic “signs of the self” (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 293) offered by what is conventionally understood as character – that is, a recognisable “name and bodily appearance” (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 293), or “[t]he linking of a name and text [that] manufactures the institution which we have come to know as the character” (Barnett 1998: 81). Whether through oversight or by design, however, these contributions eschew an in-depth reconsideration of the reasons why the category of character may have to be abandoned. These new labels seem to have substituted the notion of character for its spectral double, ontology being replaced by ‘hauntology’.¹ Moreover, they fail to examine

 Blending ‘haunt’ and the suffix ‘-logy’, meaning “science, study, theory” (OED Online, s.v. “-logy”), Jacques Derrida’s term ‘hauntology’ would initially seem to refer to the study of ghostly appearances. However, Derrida’s neologism is also haunted by its quasi-homophone ‘ontology’, adding a spin to its signification. In this respect, ‘hauntology’ links the idea of the spectre with that of being, and in so doing it destabilises and interrogates the very idea of existence (Lucy ). For Derrida, the spectre “is neither living nor dead, present nor absent”, and for this reason “does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings” (: ).

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the notions of subjectivity with which these ghostly doubles of character may be engaging. By tracing the precarious existence of character within theatre scholarship of the last three decades, what follows aims to highlight the contributions, contradictions and limitations of current approaches, and to delineate the goals and challenges for the present study.

The precarious life of character in theatre studies The point of departure for this chapter must be Robert Abirached’s 1978 La Crise du personnage dans le théâtre moderne, if not due to its pioneering attention to the status of character in modern theatre then because of its long-lasting impact upon French scholarship – despite the disregard that his work has found within Anglo-American academia. Yet to be translated into English, La Crise du personnage sets out to chart the degeneration of character in modern European theatre. Abirached provides a definition of character that combines Aristotelian theoretical precepts, an awareness of the interplay between theatrical writing and practice, and semiotic analysis. For the French scholar, character is “un ensemble de rapports (entre l’image et le monde, le langage et la parole, la représentation et le sens) [a set of relations (between the image and the world, language and speech, representation and meaning)]” (28). Implicit in this relational conceptualisation of character is its sign-structure: the theatrical character is a symbol deployed in a mimetic economy; the words on the page are the signifier pointing to a signified reality from which the character emerges. Following Aristotle, Abirached argues that theatrical character can only be superior or inferior to its referent (10, 21, 38; Aristotle 5), but never an equal to the reality that is being imitated: in other words, the character of tragedy exalts the persons in reality, whilst that of comedy demeans them. La Crise du personnage therefore portrays character at the verge of reality, as its emergence from reality also constitutes a departure from it (21). Abirached’s semiotic account of the production of character is completed by considering the actor the medium that materialises and transmits the character to an audience, in the same way that language is materialised into speech, crystallising one in an infinite number of potential realisations or vocalisations of character (77– 78). The communicative circle established by Abirached is closed by the audience, whose role is that of “témoin [witness]” (79). The cornerstone of Abirached’s account of the rise and decline of character is that “le théâtre est imitation [theatre is imitation]” (10), albeit a mimesis that he defines as an imitative-imaginative device. This is directly extrapolated from Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis. As André G. Bourassa reminds us, “Aris-

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totle’s function of mimesis [μιμησις] translates as ‘to make an image’ rather than ‘to imitate’” (90). Thus, for Abirached, “[l]a mimésis ne copie pas le réel, elle l’invente [mimesis does not copy the real, it invents it]” [emphasis added] (63). For this reason, Abirached argues that the illusionist art forms that emerged in the eighteenth century generated a pervasive crisis in the notion of mimesis and, along with it, a crisis of character. For Abirached, in trying to create scaleddown replicas of individuals and their social networks, illusionist art deprived itself of the inventive aspect praised by Aristotle in his concept of mimesis (11). The resulting atrophy of mimesis brought about the loss of “le sacré et l’imaginaire au bénéfice d’un impérialisme […] de la rationalité [the sacred and the imaginary in favour of an imperialism […] of rationality]” (93). For Abirached, the shedding of the imaginary and sacred components of theatre led to a crisis of character: in place of a character that creatively springs from reality emerged a figure that seeks authentication in reality by trying to conceal its very theatrical nature and providing exhaustive, persona-building information (102– 108). Abirached continues by examining the theatrical efforts made to overcome this crisis. Despite their resistance to realist constraints, the nineteenth-century Symbolist endeavours to create a “personnage désincarné [disembodied character]” (180 – 186) are disregarded as the potential revitalisers of this category in La Crise du personnage. Symbolists fail to fulfil the Aristotelian “protocole de la mimésis [mimetic protocol]” (184) that Abirached establishes as crucial to character. However, Abirached celebrates three theatrical traditions that have attempted to overcome the crisis of mimesis/character. Firstly, he points to Alfred Jarry’s notion of character as “une abstraction qui marche [a walking abstraction]” (187); that is, a character that is still mimetic yet reduced to its minimal elements. Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet, according to Abirached, are part of this tradition that reduces character to a naked form, in which language is given sovereignty (399 – 407); Edward Gordon Craig’s attempts to evacuate the actor from the stage share Jarry’s experimental drive (182). The second strand is that of Brecht’s epic theatre, which uses Verfremdungseffekt to produce theatrical character within the parameters of mimesis yet without the stagnation of illusionism (282– 291). Finally, Abirached applauds Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for its rejection of representational theatre (332– 351). A link could be drawn between the character-less plays examined in this book and the body of work that Abirached groups under the overarching aesthetics of the “souveraineté du langage [sovereignty of language]” (399). Indeed, critics have picked up on the aesthetic similarities between Beckett’s work and the (dis)embodied and unattributed speech in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (VoigtsVirchow 206 – 218; Saunders 2002a: 128; Tönnies 67; Wallace 2004: 127), and be-

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tween Beckett’s plays and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND (Morin 73 – 74).² However, further connections have also been made between Artaud and Kane (De Vos 2010; 2011), and between Brecht and Crouch (Ilter 397), which suggests that the legacy of the three pathways presented by Abirached might be intricate and diffuse in the work of these contemporary practitioners. In any case, and taking the licence to apply Abirached’s 1978 contentions to contemporary British theatre, I would also argue that the renaissance of character in the work of Beckett, Brecht and Artaud might be applicable to some character-less plays, for example those examined later in this book. Yet to argue for the vitality of character in character-less plays, as I will do, does not necessarily imply agreement with Abirached’s methodology. His deployment of Aristotle’s Poetics provides his project with a seemingly solid structure for the semiotic analysis of character. However, the notions of reality and mimesis upon which it is founded bring Abirached’s line of argumentation to a double deadlock. On the one hand, Abirached presents reality as the unproblematic, constant referent of theatrical mimesis, but neither reality nor our knowledge of it can be conceptualised as objective and non-signified. From Cartesian scepticism to Foucault’s theses on the connection between knowledge and power, it has been consistently argued that our access to reality is always-already mediated. How then can we know what the object of imitation is? How can we consider some imitations more dependent on referents than others, if any access to such a referent is always-already steeped in ways of knowing? The measure used in Abirached’s assessment of character is therefore deeply problematic. Rather than presuming an indisputable reality, this book springs from the conviction that subjectivity is conceptualised and experienced in a wide range of forms. As such, experimentation with character in theatrical texts and practices can be seen as a form of widening our epistemologies of the subject. On the other hand, the ‘Aristotelian protocol’ that forms Abirached’s theoretical framework is still an object of investigation amongst scholars, as Aristotle’s  Hans-Thies Lehmann has also pointed out the similarities between postdramatic theatre and the work of practitioners such as Ionesco and Beckett. However, Lehmann has argued that, contrary to absurdist drama, “for the postdramatic theatre of the s and s the disintegration of ideological certainties represents no longer a problem of metaphysical anguish but a cultural given” (: ). Additionally, he contends “that epic as much as absurdist theatre, though through different means, clings to the presentation of a fictive and simulated text-cosmos as a dominant, while postdramatic theatre no longer does so” (: ). Generalisations feature rather heavily in Lehmann’s argument. If Attempts on Her Life is paradigmatic of postdramatic theatre (Barnett :  – ), then Lehmann’s suggestion that the collapse of ideological certainties is not followed by anguish in contemporary postdramatic pieces does not hold. Crimp’s play surely conveys an anxiety related to the lack of ideological referents.

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understanding of mimesis is somewhat lost in translation (Belfiore 45 – 53). The controversy surrounding mimesis exceeds the exegetical and translation problems posed by the Poetics, as the concept is still considered “indeterminate” and “impossibly double” (Diamond 1997b: v). Regardless of the imprecision of the term, La Crise du personnage insists on assessing theatrical writing and practice according to it – or, rather, according to what playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has called “Aristotalitarianism” (qtd. in Edgar 17): that is, its compulsory normativisation. Behind Abirached’s willing subjection to the ideal of mimesis lies his suspicions about the politics of non-representational art, as noted by this reflection: “une fois assuré l’empire presque absolu de l’image sur la scène, le personnage menacé de mort et l’auteur chassé des coulisses ou réduit au rôle de comparse, il n’est pas très sûr qu’on sache encore au bénéfice de qui et pour quoi faire [Once the absolute hegemony of the image is ensured on the stage, character threatened by death, and the author dismissed to the backstage or reduced to the role of an extra, it is not certain that we know who would benefit from this and why]” (14). Contrary to Abirached, I am intrigued by this indirect and rhetorical question, and suspect there is much to gain from pondering the meaning of an image-based theatre, or from considering what a character-less work can say about character, subjectivity and authorship. I am excited about the forms of collaborative work that may emerge when the author’s directions withdraw, and the types of subjectivity that appear in doing so. These are some of the questions that this book considers in the study of Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis and Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue in Chapter Three, and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND in Chapter Four.

Death and disappearance: the 1990s La Crise du personnage concludes with a note on the resilience of character: “[l]e personnage, depuis si longtemps promis à la destruction, n’a cessé de renaître sous nos yeux, d’âge en âge réajusté, mais toujours irréductible [character, after having been promised its destruction for so long, has never ceased to be born again before our eyes, adjusted from age to age, but still irreducible]” (439). Contrary to this view, Elinor Fuchs sets out to argue for the disappearance of this category in The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. This was a foretold loss, chrono/logically preceded by others: Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, Foucault’s suggestion of the disappearance of Man in The Order of Things, Roland Barthes’s claim about the death of the Author, and Francis Fukuyama’s contentions about the end of History. Arguably, in the two decades between the contributions of Abirached and Fuchs the status of character in con-

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temporary theatre drastically changed, and Fuchs indeed refers to “the ‘crisis of representation’” that has affected “one field and another […] in the past twenty years” (1996: 2). The first part of The Death of Character, entitled “Modern after Modernism”, focuses on the same time span and practitioners examined by Abirached. However, Fuchs’s attention to narrative and the representative role of character, as well as her deconstructive practice, lead her project to a strikingly different conclusion than that proposed by Abirached. According to Abirached, the turn of the twentieth century saw the first attempt to rescue character from the crisis of mimesis (180). For Fuchs, the 1890s brought instead a “rejection of the human image” (1996: 30) and a “loss of interest in the principle of character” (1996: 22). As I elucidate above, Abirached identifies three pathways for the rebirth of character in the twentieth century, represented by Jarry’s and Craig’s stripping down of character, Brecht’s alienated/alienating characterisation, and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (288 – 407). Conversely, Fuchs proposes a threefold tradition of “dissolution of autonomous character” (1996: 31), represented by almost the same practitioners. Firstly, Fuchs identifies the “modernist mysterium” of dramatists like Strindberg or Beckett, whose work replaced individual character with semi-allegorical figures (1996: 31– 32). Secondly, she argues that the Brechtian strand of “critical theatre” (1996: 32) also dislocated the identification of actor with individual. The final strand that represents the death of character for Fuchs is that of “theatricalist” plays, such as those of Luigi Pirandello, where a meta-theatrical “dramatic mode” is favoured “to express the relative and multiple nature of self-identity” (1996: 33). The discrepancy between Abirached’s purported revival and Fuchs’s perceived decline stems from their different understanding of theatrical character. For Abirached, character is an open relational sign that is linked to reality through an activity of mimesis-as-poiesis. Elin Diamond defines this particular understanding of mimesis as “a mode of reading that transforms an object” (1997b: ii). From Abirached’s Aristotelian viewpoint, character has little to do with the unfolding of the plot or the representation of a coherent and recognisable fictional person. As Aristotle asserts in his Poetics, “the events, i. e. the plot, are what tragedy is there for” and it therefore follows that “there could not be a tragedy without action, but there could be one without character” (11, 2).³ For

 It is worth noting that again the word ‘character’ here is a translation of the Greek term ‘êthos’, meaning “moral attitude” (Wiles ), disposition, or “human nature” (Burns ). As Edward Burns warns, “if we translate êthos as ‘character’, we must remember that the Greek word overlaps in function with only a limited number of the connotations of the modern term” (). Therefore, Aristotle’s statement, often quoted in reference to the possibility of theatre without theat-

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Fuchs, on the contrary, character is “the motor or agency of dramatic structure” (1996: 22) and the figure that “stands in for the entire human chain of representation and reception that theatre links together” (1996: 8). Thus, the ‘death of character’ derives from its deterioration as the driving force of drama, and/or a breakdown in the ‘chain of representation’. Underpinning Fuchs’s notion of representation is an idea of mimesis that differs from that of Abirached: it is indeed seen as imitation without poetic license. Diamond has argued that what Fuchs is pronouncing is “the death of humanist conceptions of character” (1997a: 111), rather than the death of character as a whole. This is indeed implicitly expressed in the contradiction between the supposed ‘death’ of character within the three theatrical strands that Fuchs identifies, and their production of alternative – allegorical, epic or theatricalist – human figures. Human ontology is not erased. Taking this into account, it might be argued that Fuchs’s thesis is negatively synecdochic: it presents the disappearance of the cogent and autonomous, humanist character as the demise of character in absolute terms. In defining character as a flexible and contingent figuration of human ontology, my research on character-less plays aims to show that it is possible to rethink these non-humanist voices as a proliferation rather than a death: as an excess that contests individuality or independence as a prerequisite for being, and that rejects the (normative) limitations proposed by representational structures. Moreover, Fuchs claims that The Death of Character aims “to align his [Jacques Derrida’s] attack on metaphysical presence with the undermining of theatrical presence” (1996: 11). In this respect, Fuchs’s theoretical alignment has its limitations, insofar as it is grounded on a common preconception about how poststructuralism engages with art – namely, by “understanding art as representation, and then understanding art as being in the crisis of representation” (O’Sullivan 2001: 125). This criticism, like Fuchs’s methodology, is guilty of oversimplifying the activity and effects of deconstructive thinking. Judith Butler, following Derrida, brings attention to what she calls “affirmative deconstruction”: the practice that allows for a concept to be “put under erasure and played at the same time” in the hope “that the critical interrogation of the term will condition a more effective use of it, especially considering the criticisms” [emphasis in original] (2000b: 264). From this perspective, deconstruc-

rical character, is in fact establishing a hierarchy: for Aristotle, action (praxis) is more essential to tragedy than “human disposition” (êthos). Although, as Burns suggests, “Aristotle provides no examples of plays without êthos”, this does not mean to say that human ontology effectively disappears: “the human is primarily represented in drama – its representation as êthos, as the qualities of its being, is secondary, approached through praxis or, sometimes, not at all” ().

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tion consists not only of critiquing the blind spots of a supposition, but also maintaining it for strategic reasons: in order to begin to think beyond it, to renegotiate its use and meaning. Contrary to Butler’s description of deconstruction as a productive activity, Fuchs’s analysis stops short at highlighting postmodern theatre’s disregard of representation and presence through character. The second section of The Death of Character, “Theatre after Modernism”, focuses on the status of character in contemporary theatrical practice, assessing in particular the “literalization or textualization of the theatre event” (1996: 74) and the emergence of performance theatre in the 1970s (1996: 74– 88). Here, Fuchs continues the project she started previously in her 1985 essay “Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking Theatre after Derrida”, which had a marked Derridean grounding. In The Death of Character Fuchs continues to refer to the work of practitioners such as Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Elizabeth LeCompte and Stuart Sherman, who sought “the undermining of the presence-effect […] through the infiltration of what has traditionally been the banished ‘other’ of dramatic performance – the written text itself” (1996: 71) as the expression of a highly mediated culture. Fuchs concludes that the effect of this textualisation of performance is that character “reassume[s] its cursive, pre-psychological meaning – character as impression or inscription” (1996: 74), rather than the representation of a fictional person. The causal correlation between the performative highlighting of textuality and the generation of prepsychological character is underdeveloped here. Yet, leaving this question aside, Fuchs’s contention is compelling because of how her rhetoric turns against itself at this point. In suggesting that character may ‘reassume’ a form that is not based on the physical and psychological representation of a unitary subject, Fuchs is unwittingly presenting a typology of character that goes against the supposition underlying The Death of Character: namely, that character can only represent an autonomous and individuated subject. Inadvertently, Fuchs’s argument comes to fortify the presumption of French and Spanish scholars who consider character to be a resilient and malleable category. Fuchs then continues her exhumation of theatrical character by examining “another version of the pastoral” (1996: 92), a label that makes reference to Gertrude Stein’s wish to make her landscape play Four Saints in Three Acts “pastoral” (qtd. in Fuchs 1996: 95). With this, The Death of Character attempts to reconceptualise work such as Robert Wilson’s as a new pastoral, one that conjoins the conceptual, spatial and static features often associated with Stein’s landscape theatre with an idealised vision of nature that Fuchs argues has been disregarded in Stein’s work. Examining other examples of landscape theatre, Fuchs argues that the visually centripetal force of conventional character is dissolved in landscape plays, as “the human figure, instead of providing perspectival unity to a

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stage whose setting acts as a backdrop and visual support, is treated as an element in what might be described as a theatrical landscape” (1996: 92). However, it is debatable that this flattening, this two-dimensional reification of the human figure, necessarily means a collapse of character. Maybe character is to be found in the landscape itself, including but also exceeding the boundaries of the actor, and encompassing the scenography as a whole. Finally, Fuchs suggests that, “[i]n this way, and in a variety of others, postmodern theatre artists hint at the possibility of a post-anthropocentric stage” (1996: 107). Perhaps it is not necessarily fair to argue that the stage is no longer centred on the human figure, but rather that the very human figurations the naturalist stage has privileged have changed. To begin to think about the ways in which theatre may have become post-humanist or post-anthropocentric, it seems necessary to admit that alternative figures of the character and the subject exist, and that they may have been silenced by studies focusing on a particular representational paradigm. At the crossover between Abirached’s analysis of character in pre-1970s drama and Fuchs’s contentions about a post-humanist/post-anthropocentric theatre after the 1970s lies William E. Gruber’s interrogation of non-individuated characters in modernist and contemporary drama. In Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama, Gruber claims that “character remains a defining ideal among modern dramatists, especially among those dramatists who seem deliberately to have forsaken it” [emphasis added] (12). Anticipating the title and argument of Fuchs’s 1996 monograph, Gruber concludes that “its death […] has been greatly exaggerated” (182). Importantly, Gruber’s thesis is that what is missing in these dramaturgies is not character but “personal identity within a discrete subject” [emphasis in original] (9). Indeed, the equation of character with identity and subjectivity is widespread in theatre studies. For instance, this is the cornerstone of Fischer-Lichte’s “Signs of Identity: The Name and Body of Character” and History of European Drama and Theatre. Although Gruber does not provide a clear definition of each term, his distinction between character, identity and subjectivity allows him to argue that “modern and postmodern dramatists stage characters who sometimes lack ‘interiority’, whose outlines and edges blur into the environment, and whose chief characteristic often turns out to be a collection of qualities not private but public” (9). Aiming to provide an “emphatic description” (8) and not a comprehensive or exhaustive chart of depersonalised theatre, Gruber focuses on the work of five practitioners: Edward Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Maria Irene Fornés. In his analysis Gruber sides with Abirached, by arguing that character only reaches its completion when it is “enacted” (7). It

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is the performative element of drama that allows Gruber to contend that the involvement of “recognizably human figures” on the stage overwrites the relative “scepticism” (2) that contemporary dramatists have displayed towards traditional characterisation. This is an important observation. In engaging with plays such as Attempts on Her Life or 4.48 Psychosis scholars have demonstrated a graphocentric stance towards character, often relying on the script as the only source of character and thus failing to acknowledge that “text and production are distinct formations – different material modes of production, between which no homologous or ‘reproductive’ relationship can hold” (Eagleton 1978: 66). Taking into account Gruber’s welcomed focus on the performative, but also Eagleton’s contentions, this monograph seeks to address the problematic sovereignty of the dramatic text in the study of theatrical character, interrogating how text and performance, as different modes of production, may converge and diverge in their configuration of character and subjectivity. Although Missing Persons provides a close analysis of a small number of works, Gruber significantly contributes to the debate on character and selfhood by setting the conditions for its renewal on two fronts. Firstly, Gruber suggests the possibility of rethinking the category of character beyond any supposed obligations by unmooring it from the two mimetic models put forward by Abirached and Fuchs – respectively, mimesis as poiesis, and mimesis as presence and representation. His thesis embraces the possibility of “flat, schematized, heraldic” (1) and “depersonalized” (13) characters in drama, which consequently widens the potential physiognomy and means of production of character without providing a prescriptive taxonomy. Secondly, Gruber’s destabilisation of the supposed individuality, inwardness, agency and autonomy of the personae of theatre suggests an underexplored link with philosophical interrogations of the subject. His argument that “[c]haracter is not self-expression but imitating, resonating, ghosting” (97) echoes, amongst others, Judith Butler’s important contentions about the iteration, performativity and citational incorporations of the terms by which we are recognised as human (1993: 95; 2004b: 2). Finally, Gruber’s case for the “‘depersonalization’ of drama” (9) anticipates my choice of case studies: text-based, character-less scripts and their performances. Scholars have often preferred postmodern, intermedial forms to illustrate the move away from humanist representationalism in theatre and performance (Fuchs 1985; Lehmann 2006; Fischer-Lichte 2008), whilst research on how a parallel move has taken place in script-led theatre has been neglected. As FischerLichte describes in The Transformative Power of Performance, [w]ithin the culture of performance of especially the 1960s and early 1970s, the actor’s body, and particularly their naked body, was seen as the locus and epitome of presence. In con-

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trast, dramatic character incarnated representation. Predetermined by the “authoritative controlling mechanism” of the literary text and recreated by the actor as a physical representation of such textual prescriptiveness, the stage character was considered proof for the text’s ultimate repression of actors and particularly their bodies. Their bodies thus had to be liberated from the strangling chains of representation in order to break free into the spontaneity and authenticity of their physical existence.⁴ (2008: 147)

In further pursuing Gruber’s renegotiation of character in text-based works that experiment with speech attribution, this monograph explores the antithesis of Fischer-Lichte’s contention above. In short, it interrogates whether works that are firmly grounded in text can still transcend ‘the strangling chains of representation’.

Spectral second comings If the crisis and death of theatrical character preoccupied the debate until the mid-1990s, the discussion has since turned towards the character’s doubles in the early 2000s, with categories such as ‘l’impersonnage [impersonal character]’, the ‘hypersubjective figure’, ‘der Textträger [the text bearer]’ or ‘mischfigur [amalgamated figure]’.⁵ Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s 2001 article “L’Impersonnage. En realisant La Crise du personnage [Impersonal Character: Materialising La Crise du personnage]” explicitly sets out to render tribute to, and update, Abirached’s legacy. Sarrazac’s focus remains faithful to Abirached’s interest in the work of Strindberg, Beckett, Pirandello and Adamov. In so doing, Sarrazac misses the opportunity to take the pulse of theatrical character since the publication of La Crise du personnage. For Sarrazac, character in modern theatre, which he understands as ranging from Strindberg to Beckett and beyond (2001: 11), may be better defined as an ‘impersonnage’, a figure without unity or personal identity (2001: 16), a “personnage sans caractère [character without features]” [emphasis in original] (2001: 4). Blending the French terms for impersonal (‘impersonnel’)

 Fischer-Lichte’s chronological situation of the performative turn is decidedly focused on the American scene. As José A. Sánchez notes, some of the propositions of performance are already found in the s “postteatre [post-theatre]” pieces of Catalan writer Joan Brossa (). Alternative histories of the performative turn are indeed possible.  The German-language term ‘mischfigur [amalgamated figure]’ has been left out of this discussion of alternative categories to ‘character’. This is due to the absence of this term from scholarly debates. Unlike the other labels referred to in this section, the concept of ‘mischfigur’ has not been elucidated by a particular scholar, but does appear in a number of German-language reviews and interviews, especially with regards to the work of Elfriede Jelinek and Heiner Müller.

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and character (‘personnage’), Sarrazac’s term ‘impersonnage’ seems to crystallise the process of depersonalisation of character that had been identified by Gruber. However, it is unclear whether Sarrazac’s neologism aims to overwrite the notion of character or simply to qualify it, as ‘l’impersonnage’ is not systematically defined. Similarly, Sarrazac does not clarify how ‘l’impersonnage’ relates to ‘figure’, the label he had privileged over character in L’Avenir du drame: écritures dramatiques contemporaines, where he argued: “La figure ne représente donc ni l’hypostase ni la dissolution mais un nouveau statut du personnage dramatique: personnage incomplet et discordant qui en appelle au spectateur pour prendre forme; personnage à construire [The figure therefore represents neither the hypostasis nor the dissolution of dramatic character, but a new situation: an incomplete and discordant character that necessitates the spectator to take shape; it is a character to be created]” [emphasis in original] (1981: 87). Like Fuchs’s work, Sarrazac’s article on l’impersonnage conjures up the philosophical debates on the closure or crisis of the metaphysics of presence. He argues that l’impersonnage is “présence d’un absent, ou absence rendue présente [presence of an absence, or absence rendered present]” [emphasis in original] (2001: 4). The deconstructive thinking behind this idea of ‘rendering the absent present’ is central to Sarrazac’s revision of Abirached’s discourse on a character in crisis. Also, implicitly, it is key to the renewal of the understanding of mimesis that had dominated the theatrical debate. Following the work of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in L’Imitation des modernes, Sarrazac contends that mimesis has to be translated as “rendre présent [to make present]” (2001: 4), and not as creative imitation or representation, as Abirached and Fuchs suggest. Therefore, ‘l’impersonnage’ allows Sarrazac to dispel a narrow, prescriptivist understanding of mimesis from the debate, and yet still keep mimesis in play as part of his deconstructive thinking. It is within the renewed mimetic framework articulated by Sarrazac that l’impersonnage testifies to the loss of a fully present subjectivity. Sarrazac argues that “[l]e sujet qui s’exprime dans les modernes dramaturgies de la subjectivité […] est donc un je en perte irrémédiable de soi [the subject expressed in these modern dramaturgies of subjectivity […] is therefore an I in irretrievable loss of itself]” [emphasis in original] (2001: 12). Sarrazac’s short article fails to elaborate upon what constitutes the loss of this ‘self’ and, hence, what the subject without itself may be. Likewise, the claim that Strindberg and Adamov “visent en réalité cette dimension impersonnelle et transpersonnelle de l’humain [in reality aim for this impersonal and transpersonal dimension of the human being]” (2001: 15) is not developed. Yet Sarrazac’s correlation between l’impersonnage and dramaturgies primarily concerned with subjectivity outlines one of the starting points

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of this book: namely, that through the absence of individuated characters, theatre may bring attention to other forms of subjectivity. There is nevertheless a slightly different rationale behind Sarrazac’s linking of l’impersonnage to ontological loss in dramaturgies of subjectivity, and my own study of character-less plays. Whilst Sarrazac interprets l’impersonnage as the mimetic expression of a being-in-absence (2001: 12), I understand the character-less quality of the plays I examine not as a means of expression of ontological loss but as a means of performative production. This is perhaps better explained by considering Pierre Macherey’s argument on the production of meaning in literature. For Macherey, “what the work cannot say is important, because there the elaboration of the utterance is acted out, in a sort of journey to silence” [emphasis in original] (83). Admittedly, Macherey is dealing here with the symbolic economy of the literary work rather than with the iconic economy of theatrical performance. However, I am interested in the possibility of testing Macherey’s insights within the theatrical event. Focusing on the work of Kane, Thomas and Crouch, Chapters Three and Four investigate what notions of subjectivity are ‘acted out’ by not ‘saying’ that the subject is a cogent, unitary individual. Sarrazac’s contribution also demonstrates the side effects of terminological renovation, as ‘l’impersonnage’ is problematic for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the argument for the presence-in-absence, absence-in-presence of the subject could have been more persuasively defended had the category of character not been dismissed. In producing an impersonal figure in which to locate these aporias, conventional personnage is implicitly described in rather fixed terms. In other words, the personnage continues to be the locus of presence, identity and being, while the conflation of absence and presence becomes something exceptional that cannot bear the same name. On the other hand, the replacement of ‘character’ with ‘impersonnage’ takes place because of Sarrazac’s consideration of loss and absence. However, this is inconsistent with the author’s preservation of the category of the subject, even when this is described ‘in loss of itself’ (2001: 12). My suggestion is that, just as subjectivity has come to be considered a pervasive yet contingent and politically-invested category (Weedon 111– 132), perhaps the same protean and political qualities can be attributed to character. A first step into that realm is made by Les Essif, who uses the terms ‘figure’, ‘character’ and ‘subject’ almost interchangeably.⁶ Essif’s contribution suggests

 Essif occasionally uses the expression ‘hypersubjective dramatic character’, although prefer-

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that Beckett’s work puts forward “extreme, reductive cases of the dramatic figure as a metaphysical, meta-theatrical, human icon” [emphasis added] (2). Calling for a re-evaluation of “the subjective status of the dramatic character” (8) that moves away from textual dependency, Essif introduces the label of the “hypersubjective figure”: “an artistic form” that “is neither person nor impersonal; just so deep and profound – so far beyond the referential – that the ‘personal’ loses relevance” [emphasis added] (13). Essif defines hypersubjectivity as “a figural, metadramatic subjectivity, a subjectivity created out of spatial construction and spatial consciousness” (7). For Essif, the hypersubjective figure can be found in the nouveau théâtre of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with Beckett’s Endgame its first mature expression. Essif’s somewhat prefix-saturated work is charged with epistemological and ontological claims that unfold in a clearer manner when examining, one by one, the effects of supra-referentiality. According to Essif, the hypersubjective figure is supra-referential because it does not comply with a sign-referent relation (13). In this respect, Essif acknowledges the influence of the phenomenological studies of Bert O. States and Stanton B. Garner, which he qualifies as “neither antisemiotic, nor a-semiotic, but extra-semiotic” (13). This supra-semiotic figure on the empty stage does not stand for ‘the person’”; it does not represent a singular, self-identical entity. On the contrary, Essif argues that it “signals”, firstly, “the absolute irrelevance and untenability of the concept of the subject as, in [Fredric] Jameson’s words, ‘a self-contained monad’” (55), and, secondly, “the birth of a new kind of subject that forms the crux of tragedy in contemporary theatre” (58). Essif argues that this announced “new subjectivity” is “a hyperpersonal, hypertheatrical, hypersocial awareness, an organic awareness that precedes and transcends, one that theatrically overreaches but in no way undermines the constitution of the social subject” [emphasis added] (212). Essif’s project is driven by the impulse to conceptualise theatrical character beyond the text-based methodologies and representational/mimetic assumptions that have dominated scholarship, an impulse that I share here. However, Essif’s elucidation of the links between the empty stage and the hypersubjective figure in nouveau théâtre leaves many aesthetic, philosophical and political questions unanswered. It is not clear whether this hypersubjective figure is applicable to dramaturgies other than Beckett’s, or whether it requires an empty theatrical space in order to be configured. Similarly, Essif argues that the hypersubjective figure signals to a new subjectivity, but the connections of such a

ence is given throughout to ‘figure’, as expressed in his book’s title: Empty Figure on an Empty Space: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation.

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“new subject” or “hypersocial awareness” (212) with contemporary experiences and understandings of the subject are not fleshed out in his project. Finally, there are contradictions in his argument that the Beckettian ‘empty figure’ transcends semiotics and referentiality. This figure is defined as a “human icon” (2) that “signals” (55, 58) a hyperpersonal and hypersocial idea of subjectivity (212). This suggests that semiotics, and the chain of correspondences between performer, character and personhood cannot be as easily dismantled as Essif’s discourse seems to propose. Unlike Essif’s exploration of the Beckettian hypersubjective figure, Gerda Poschmann’s notion of the “textträger [text bearer]” emerges from a relatively wide survey of theatre practices on the German-speaking stage, and has been extrapolated to describe the experimental work of contemporary British playwrights such as Crimp and Kane. The term admittedly originates in the late 1990s, and as such precedes the other two labels examined thus far in this section.⁷ However, Poschmann’s argument about the obsolescence of character as a theatrical and critical category has only been distilled to English-speaking audiences a decade later through third parties. David Barnett, for example, has explained that the text bearer’s function is simply to deliver the text, rather than to engage in interpersonal dialogue (2006: 33). Elsewhere, Barnett has also suggested that presenting rather than representing the script is key to the construction of postdramatic text bearers, and he trusts that this guarantees the “removal of the individual” and the pre-eminence of language identified by Poschmann (2008: 22). Birgit Haas has also reported that, for Poschmann, postdramatic works such as those of Elfriede Jelinek or Heiner Müller “try to break open the textual surface to show deconstructed beings in a non-linear montage of textual fragments” (86). According to Haas, Poschmann sees “[t]he figures on their stages” not as “three-dimensional characters, but [as] ‘linguistic planes’, meaning that they consist of language, they are nothing more than linguistic surfaces” (86).⁸ These reports, however, do not clarify Poschmann’s position on the performers’ bodies, or her

 Poschmann’s study of “no longer dramatic” texts also predates Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre. Lehmann does not address the question of character directly but, very much like Poschmann, contends that speakers are “vehicles of a discourse” (: ) in the work of Müller. In more recent contributions, Lehmann has continued to eschew the category of character, referring to the “speaking ‘characters’” in René Pollesch’s work – note the scare quotes – as “collective instances of speech” (: ).  Haas is referring here to the term ‘Sprachfläche’, which also appears in Lehmann’s discussion of Jelinke’s work in Postdramatic Theatre as “language surfaces” (: ). Lehmann does not elucidate this notion any further.

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views on the role of the audience in supplementing or reconstructing the individuality of the performers. While we await a full translation of Poschmann’s 1997 Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext [The No Longer Dramatic Playtext], in what follows I begin to situate Poschmann’s coinage within the context of a first-hand analysis of the chapter section “Status der Textträger [The status of the text bearer]”.⁹ Poschmann begins her discussion of the text bearer by detailing the notion to which it responds – character, or, as more commonly referenced in the German language, ‘die Figur [the figure]’ (see page 15). Here, Poschmann argues that in drama there is a pervasive correspondence between the performer, the figure/character, and the notion of person. Via Manfred Pfister, Poschmann admits that the audience plays a part in sustaining this equation (305). However, she insists that the dramatic text plays a key role in creating the necessary sense of unity between speech and speaker and, ultimately, in the production of a figure of human characteristics (305). Furthermore, Poschmann argues, drama positions the performers as representatives of a human subject at the centre of attention, both conceptually and perceptually. It makes “ihr Schicksal, ihre Geschichte [their fate, their story]” (305) the intellectual focus, places their bodies as the vanishing point within the perspectival system of representational theatre, and gives their speech aural priority (305 – 306). Poschmann concludes: “Folgerichtig ist diese Einheit auch erstes Opfer der Dekonstruktion durch postmodernes Theater [This unity is consequently the first thing to fall victim to postmodern theatrical deconstruction]” (306). Similarly to Fuchs, whose The Death of Character was published in the same year, Poschmann argues that the category of figure/character is an ineffectual unit of analysis, given the evident dismantling of the unitary subject on the stage. Poschmann then proposes her alternative: Dieser Entwicklung soll durch die Ersetzung des Begriffs ‘Figur’ durch ‘Textträger’ entsprochen werden, der die Funktion der Schauspieler bezeichnet, wie sie im Theatertext entworfen ist – unabhängig davon, ob es Sprech- oder Zusatztext ist, der von den Schauspielern “getragen” wird und unabhängig auch davon, ob Verlautbarungs- und Diskursinstanz in eins fallen oder getrennt sind. [By replacing the term ‘figure’ with ‘text bearer’ as a means of characterising the function of the actor, as determined by the dramatic text, we address this development here, regardless of whether a spoken text or an additional text is to be “represented” by the actors involved,

 The section “Status der Textträger” in Poschmann’s Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext ( – ) was translated by Helen Shiner for the purposes of this study. Page numbers refer to the German original. ‘Textträger’ is translated as ‘text bearer’ to ensure consistency with Barnett’s terminology, but ‘text signifier’ is also acceptable.

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and irrespective of whether the agent making a statement and the agent of discourse are one and the same or separate]. (306 – 307)

I later return to some of the problems presented by the notion of the text bearer. However, for now I want to highlight that Poschmann explicitly refers to it as a function of the performer, which poses the question of whether this new unit of analysis can account for textual figurations of subjectivity. Poschmann’s contentions about the text bearer discussed in this section can be summarised in five points. First, the text bearer is posed as an indicator of the postmodern/poststructuralist critique of the liberal-humanist subject, an intellectual and artistic climate also identified by Fuchs. Second, Poschmann argues that the text bearer refers to a mode of performance in which the actor is not oriented towards impersonation, but is reduced to the function of delivering the text. Figuration/characterisation in the dramatic sense is lacking altogether, or present in very rudimentary or ambiguous terms (309). Even if a postdramatic text does attribute lines to figures/characters, Poschmann notes that the performers can avoid portraying a human figure: “Aus Figuren können Funktionsträger werden, die jenseits der Darstellung menschlicher Subjekte ganz auf ihre Funktionen als Träger theatralischer Zeichen (bewegter Körper, Stimme, Mimik) reduziert werden [Figures can become functional signifiers, to be reduced entirely to their functions as carriers of theatrical signs (body in motion, voice, facial expression) beyond any depiction of the human subject]” (307). Third, bringing these two points together, Poschmann contends that the text bearer signifies that the subject is gobbled up by language: “ersetzt das Sprechen das sprechende Subjekt [speech replaces the speaking subject]” (309). Poschmann’s fourth point is that, contrary to the dramatic figure/character, the text bearer does not have an internal function: it lacks a role within a constellation of other figures/characters within the fiction. Its function is external, within the remit of the performance itself, producing rhythm, affect, or uncertainty rather than meaning (307). Fifthly, and finally, the presence of text bearers on the stage does not call for comprehension but “für alternative Wege von Wahrnehmung und Bedeutungserzeugung [for alternative means of perception and meaning-making]” (308). According to Poschmann, the sort of understanding required by the text bearer relies heavily on sensory processes, and consequently the work and the text bearer itself have a contingent quality (308 – 309). Poschmann sees the work of Müller as being paradigmatic of the postdramatic stance on subjectivity and its theatrical manifestation through the text bearer. For Poschmann, Müller’s is a “‘Theater von Stimmen statt Personen’, in dem der Diskurs sich vom Subjekt löst und das Subjekt ‘gesprochen wird’, so daß die Personen als ‘bloße Träger eines Diskurses’ fungieren [‘theatre of voices

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rather than people’, in which discourse is divorced from the subject and the subject ‘is spoken’, so that people act as ‘mere discursive carriers’]” (308). Her idea of actors becoming what could be translated as “speaking templates” or “speaking machines” (308) finds another example in Peter Handke’s Kaspar, and the work of Werner Schwab, Rainald Goetz and Jelinek further enlarge the list of performances that replace human figures with abstract or unstable roles. Moreover, meta-theatricality continues to point the way towards “Dezentrierung des Subjekts und seine Spaltung in multiple Rollensegmente [the decentralised subject and its splitting into multiple, partitioned roles]” (306). According to Poschmann, the lack of hierarchy between roles proposed by meta-theatrical works such as those of Friederike Roth and Thomas Brasch makes it impossible to locate character among “verschiedene gleichberechtigte Masken [various equivalent masks]” (307). Through meta-theatricality, these works eschew “die Figur als gesicherte dramatische Kategorie [the figure/character as an established theatrical category]” (306), and thus point towards her notion of the text bearers. Poschmann’s contribution fits squarely with the work of Jelinek, Müller, Goetz, René Pollesch, Gisela von Wysocki and Oliver Czeslik (Haas 86). However, as Birgit Haas has noted (86), opening up the range of case studies may indeed have produced a less prescriptive understanding of both character and the text bearer. With regards to the latter, Poschmann uses the postmodern and poststructuralist labels to theoretically ground her new term. These theories – like the theatre practices studied by Poschmann – critique the idea of the unitary subject and propose a decentred, impenetrable and unstable subjectivity that is constituted by discourse. However, it is important to note that poststructuralism does not abandon the category of the subject altogether. As Jacques Derrida clarifies, “[t]he subject is absolutely indispensable. I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it” (1970: 271). The poststructuralist agenda concerning subjectivity is to call certain presuppositions into question, not to do away with it (Butler 1993: 30). An equivalent move in theatre studies, which Poschmann attempts here, would have therefore continued to use character and subjectivity as the units of analysis, reformulating their meaning, aesthetics and politics following a deconstructive inquiry. Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of Poschmann’s definition of the text bearer is her insistence that postdramatic texts successfully avoid outlining a human – or, rather, humanist – subject in performance. While Kane’s script for 4.48 Psychosis certainly produces a non-humanist subject, this has not always been the case in performance. In other words, a playtext might promote stagings in which the performer does not work towards creating a notion of individuality, but we must acknowledge that a postdramatic text might not always or necessarily lead to a post-humanist staging.

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Poschmann’s arguments about the production and reception of de-personalised text bearers are also questionable. She does acknowledge that the actor is traditionally read in semiotic terms as a sign that represents a human subject, which can be a hard presumption to relinquish (309 – 310). However, Poschmann notes that this iconic-humanist function can be subdued by the works’ “Funktionalisierungen des Schauspielerkörpers jenseits der Darstellung einer Rollenfigur [instrumentalising of an actor’s body beyond any depiction of a character]” (310); for example, by using the performer’s body as a marionette à la Edward Gordon Craig. In accordance with this, Poschmann argues, the critic should avoid subjecting the piece to a semiotic-humanist reading of the performer (310). This caution about automatically identifying the performer as a fictional individual is indeed a noteworthy contribution, and one that this book aims to consolidate. However, this should not make us dismiss spectators’ desire to recognise human beings in a postdramatic performance as inadequate responses. As I explain in my interrogation of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis in Chapter Three, this desire to apprehend a human subject regardless of its opacity can help us to better understand the ethical type of recognition marshalled by these pieces.

Latest renegotiations The spectral ‘second coming’ of character in theatre studies – epitomised here by Sarrazac’s ‘impersonnage’, Essif’s ‘hypersubjective figure’ and Poschmann’s ‘textträger’ – has allowed scholars to engage critically with dramaturgies that resist conventional characterisation and yet sidestep early debates about the crisis/ death of character. This terminological caution has been noted by Jean-Pierre Ryngaert and Julie Sermon (10 – 11), who have recently endeavoured to shift the focus back to character. In their 2006 study Le Personnage théâtral contemporain: décomposition, recomposition, Ryngaert and Sermon argue for the “existence pragmatique [pragmatic existence]” of character regardless of “[q]u’on l’appelle personnage, figure ou entité parlante [whether we call it character, figure or speaking entity]” [emphasis in original] (14). The authors make a case for the vitality of theatrical character as expressed by the crisis of mimesis identified in Abirached’s work: “[l]oin d’être mortifère, la ‘mise en crise’ du personnage est ainsi devenue, dans les écritures modernes et contemporaines, l’un des signes de sa vitalité [far from being deadly, the ‘challenging’ of character has therefore become, in modern and contemporary writing, a sign of its vitality]” (7). This interpretive twist on Abirached’s contentions allows the authors to reconcile their work with that of the theorist who championed the study of theatrical character in France. Moreover, it serves to elaborate further the suspicion that has already

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been raised by Jean-Marie Diemme, who three years prior to Ryngaert and Sermon’s publication wrote: “[i]t is not that the character is in a state of crisis, just that there is an ongoing exploration of what ‘character’ actually means” (qtd. in Blattès 79). Confirming and updating Abirached’s thesis on the irreducibility and mutability of character, and contra Lehmann, Ryngaert and Sermon argue that theatrical character exists even when it is the object of a “décomposition postdramatique [postdramatic disintegration]” (14). As Ryngaert puts it elsewhere, the “farewell” to character is “at least an au revoir” (2007: 15). Ryngaert and Sermon’s Le Personnage théâtral contemporain argues for the persistence of character regardless of the reduction or disappearance of autonomous and unitary identity, action and dialogue (19 – 21; 24): that is, the defining features of theatrical character as fashioned according to liberal-humanist discourse. For these authors, even when characters are only sketched in the script, as in the dramaturgy of contemporary French playwright Noëlle Renaude, “les acteurs emplissent forcément les vides laissés par les personages [actors necessarily fill the gaps left by the characters]” (20). Surprisingly, however, it is not the physicality of the performers but their speech acts that produce character. Ryngaert and Sermon argue that there has been a shift in theatrical writing and practice: from a theatre where speech is an instrument of action, to a theatre in which “parole est action [speech is action]” (51; Ryngaert 2007: 28). The authors contend that “le ‘dire’ est devenu le seul socle, la seule loi, la seule nécessité de tout un pan du théâtre contemporain [‘to say’ has become the only basis, the only law, the only necessity of an entire strand of contemporary theatre]” (51). This hypothesis grounds Ryngaert and Sermon’s analysis of the décomposition and recomposition of character. Considering how the list of dramatis personae affects the production of character even before the diegetic universe has begun to unfold, two “modèles extrêmes de présentation [extreme models of presentation]” of character are identified in Le Personnage théâtral contemporain: “[l]a première tendance, paradoxale, consiste à ne pas présenter les locuteurs supposés [the first, paradoxical tendency consists in not introducing the supposed speakers]” (52), whilst the second one “consiste à proposer des listes de personnages démesurées [consists in proposing excessive lists of characters]” (54). I will focus here on the “dénégatoire [denegatory]” (54) model,¹⁰ since it comprises plays with the same aesthetics as those examined in this book. Making an important first step towards  Although a rare term in English, ‘dénégatoire’ can be translated as ‘denegatory’, meaning ‘contradictory’ and ‘having the effect of denying’. The term conveys the apparent paradox of considering the avoidance of character presentation as a means of presenting character, but also the rejection of something – arguably, a ready-made identity for consumption.

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discharging the dramatic text from the accusation of being always-already an “authoritative controlling mechanism” (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 147), Ryngaert and Sermon contend that these works aim to dislodge the actor from a fixed and unique relation to role. For Ryngaert and Sermon, the fact that an introduction to character might not be provided to actors, readers and spectators does not prompt the disappearance of character. Rather, it is a situation that allows for another production of character on the stage. Although the two authors are vague in defining this character, they suggest that the result is “un théâtre de voix, de fantômes, de présences, qui se profilent, apparaissent et disparaissent selon les mouvements du texte [a theatre of voices, of ghosts, of presences, which are outlined, appear and disappear according to the movements of the text]” (53). The terms used to describe this theatre remind us of those spectral doubles of character introduced by Sarrazac, Essif and Poschmann, but the originality of Le Personnage théâtral contemporain resides in its maintaining of the category ‘character’. Ryngaert and Sermon furthermore vindicate the performative powers of not only enunciation but also the musical quality of language in these plays: Cette ontologie verbale, seule réalité du personnage tout compte fait, demeure tout ou partie occultée tant que la parole est mise au service d’une action autre qu’elle-même. Dans ces dramaturgies de l’oralité, la notion d’épaisseur et d’énergie énonciatives se substitue au contraire à toute autre considération d’existence: c’est par concrétions rythmiques et linguistiques que l’écriture fait corps. [This verbal ontology – all things considered, the only reality of a character – remains totally or partially hidden inasmuch as the word is put in service of an action other than itself. Within these dramaturgies of orality, the notion of enunciative depth and energy is, on the contrary, replaced by a completely different consideration of existence: it is through rhythmic and linguistic concretions that the writing makes the body]. [emphasis added] (53– 54)

Despite the lack of speech attribution, Ryngaert and Sermon make a case for the pervasiveness of character in plays with no dramatis personae, arguing that character is an effect of speech. According to Le Personnage théâtral contemporain, it is in and through linguistic utterance that theatrical character is produced: “[c]’est parler qui fait être [it is speech that makes being]” (65). This constitutes an interesting departure from Abirached’s semiotic reading of acting as the materialisation of character in the performer, who has to “incarner [embody]”, “jouer [play]” and “interpréter [interpret]” the character-to-be as proposed in the script (68 – 78). For Ryngaert and Sermon, the ontology of character is verbal – that is, oral – and so its “existence se réduit, partant, à un temps limité d’énonciation [existence is therefore reduced to a limited time of utterance]” (53). Although Rynga-

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ert and Sermon eschew direct engagement with the complex notion of performativity, this is undoubtedly the underlying concept at play in their argument. In the act of speech, it is not only words that are being spoken. Here the very notion of character itself begins to be configured. Ryngaert and Sermon use the phrase ‘dramaturgies of orality’ in this sense, but they also note that the rhythms, the pauses, the formal variations and “‘[…] les conjugaisons d’affects’ qu’autorise la parole [‘the conjugation of affects’ authorised by speech]” [emphasis added] (Lacoste, qtd. in Ryngaert and Sermon 54) trigger the production of character in performance. The introduction of ‘affects’ in this list of characterising tools suggests that this new dramaturgy of character goes beyond orality. Indeed, speech and its qualities have performative power in the production of character. As Sandrine Le Pors notes in her 2011 Le Théâtre des voix: À l’écoute du personnage et des écritures contemporaines, there is evidence that “la perte partielle d’individuation du personnage va toujours de pair avec un accroissement proportionnel de toutes ses manifestations vocales, individuelles ou chorales [the character’s partial loss of individuation always goes hand in hand with a proportional increase in all its vocal manifestations, either individual or choral]” (41). However, the productive and performative ways in which the bodies of the performers ‘speak’ for themselves without engaging in verbal communication should not be disregarded – and here I not only refer to the presence of the performers’ bodies, but also to the possibility of characterisation contained in movement, in interpersonal distances, in gestures, both of a singular performer or a collective. As I will argue when examining Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND in Chapter Four, there are ways of producing character that involve neither speaking nor embodiment by a performer: the spectators’ act of looking, their remaining silent or their being subjected to specific environments suffice to conjure up the contours of a character.¹¹

Conclusion In interrogating how the vicissitudes of character in modern and contemporary works have been interpreted within theatre studies, this chapter has outlined one of the theoretical debates in which the present project is situated. Charting the

 Sermon has begun to examine this in her contribution to Théâtres du XXIe siècle: commencements, noting how visual and aural mediatisation in performance reformulates the question of character and its incarnation (). Despite offering evidence of the different scales of intimacy, fragmentation and presence that technology can bring to the notion of character in performance, Sermon’s account reassesses neither the category of character nor that of subjectivity.

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oscillations of the academic discourse on character foregrounds that the same aesthetics have been construed, first, as promising attempts to overcome the alleged crisis of character, and, later, as testimonies to its death. These seemingly antagonistic interpretations stem from a marked lack of consensus regarding what theatrical character is, to which notions of reality or subjectivity it is entitled to relate, and through what aesthetic procedures it is created. The recent terminological renewal or eschewal of the label ‘character’ within academia has certainly proven productive for the development of the field, inasmuch as it has facilitated the study of figures in dramaturgies that seemingly aim to obliterate this category. However, these contributions also suggest the ‘pragmatic existence’ of character, to use Ryngaert and Sermon’s phrase (14), even when this figuration dissolves the familiar boundaries of the received, humanist understandings of the self. Whilst Ryngaert and Sermon’s celebration of the vitality of character in contemporary work is an important and necessary step, this term still needs further rethinking in the context of contemporary British theatre. In the rest of this volume, I aim to initiate such a re-examination through interdisciplinary engagement with a selection of British character-less plays of the 1990s and 2000s. Mapping out the discursive terrain on theatrical character has also revealed a number of overlooked intra- and inter-disciplinary connections and methodological problems. Firstly, I have explored a debate that has been taking place in France and Germany for the last thirty years, and from which Anglo-American scholarship has remained largely disengaged. Without this reference framework, the experimentation with character in British script-led works has received a fairly insular response, characterised by a narrow understanding of what character is considered to be. This is a gap that this book aims to fill. Secondly, the literature in the field has consistently placed character at the crossroads between theatrical and philosophical thinking about subjectivity, with particular emphasis on poststructuralist challenging of the unitary subject. However, character studies thus far have contributed minimally to the examination of notions of subjectivity alternative to the liberal-humanist subject, and have disregarded the opportunity for inquiry into the politics of thinking and fashioning of subject otherwise. By focusing on character and notions of subjectivity that are not defined by their unity, identity or individuality, the present project aims to make a step in this direction. Thirdly, this chapter has also revealed the methodological problems that stem from examining the production of character within, but also against, a semiotic paradigm. These problems are primarily: the competing notions of mimesis, the inevitable epistemological implications attached to every account of a referent reality, and the impossibility of incorporating the asignifying aspects of art (O’Sullivan 2001: 126). Also methodologically problematic is the privileging of either text or performance in the study of character.

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Consequently, the challenges for this project are: to move beyond the intraand inter-disciplinary isolation that has characterised the Anglo-American debate on character, to do away with a necessarily mimetic and semiotic understanding of character, to begin to revise the familiar conceptualisation of this notion alongside ideas of subjectivity, and to do so by considering theatrical texts and performances to be two “material modes of production” (Eagleton 1978: 66) that are engaged in a dialoguing yet non-hierarchical relationship. In order to successfully meet these challenges, I propose a new strategic and subtractive definition. Character is any figuration of subjectivity in theatre texts and performances. This definition can be synthesised further. Character is an onto-aesthetic category: it is what links aesthetic form to forms of being. This definition filters out all the particularities underlying discussions about the crisis or renewal of character, while retaining their common denominator – namely, that we understand character to be intricately linked with notions of subjectivity, that theatre cannot but reflect on subjectivity, and that character is therefore a pervasive yet malleable category in theatre texts, practices and criticism. The openness of this definition prevents us from requesting theatre to be a mimetic or humanist investment, and frees us from engaging in a purely semiotic analysis of character or in a deconstructive archaeology of the failure of representation. Rather, it compels us to consider all of the sensory material that theatre texts and performances mobilise in the production of character: signifiers and a-signifying affective material alike. Utilising this malleable definition of character, therefore, Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre aims to produce one less obituary for character, and one less taxonomy of the principles of characterhood. Instead, this project intends to begin by interrogating what subjects are thought, imagined and becoming, in and through what aesthetic means, and with what political aims or effects. As I have argued above, the liberal-humanist understanding of subject is often considered to be the conventional – if not the only – ontological position inhabited by character. Theatrical departures from this notion and its illusionist fashioning have resulted in the negation of character’s existence altogether. Fuchs’s contention in The Death of Character is that contemporary alternative theatre puts forward a postmodern, “dispersed idea of the self” (1996: 9), very much attuned with “the poststructuralist emptying out of the subject” (1996: 9), and that ultimately this dispersal is incompatible with the notion of character. What Fuchs, Poschmann and many others supporting this claim have missed here is that in the pulverisation of selfhood a different notion of subjectivity is created, and with it the category of character can be renewed. In order to rethink character anew as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity, the next chapter examines

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a number of theories of subjectivation that reject the liberal-humanist tenets of identity and individuality as the subject’s defining features.

2 Figuring the Subject beyond Individuality The subject is called a name, but “who” the subject is depends as much on the names that he or she is never called: the possibilities for linguistic life are both inaugurated and foreclosed through the name. − Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (41) Whoever is the subject of a truth (of love, of art, or science, or politics) knows that, in effect, he bears a treasure, that he is traversed by an infinite power. − Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (54) [W]e could act as political subjects in the interval or the gap between two identities neither of which we could assume. − Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” (61)

The previous chapter has established that redefining character as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity can be a useful academic manoeuvre to further the debate. On the one hand, this subtractive definition effectively encapsulates the common denominator of Anglophone, German, French and Spanish uses of the term – namely, that character in theatre always relates to notions of subjectivity. As such, it offers Anglophone theatre studies the possibility of incorporating scholarly legacies that have been neglected thus far. On the other hand, this definition signals the three areas of inquiry that any claim on character should address. First, what figurations of subjectivity are outlined in a theatre text and/or its performances? Secondly, through what aesthetic means are these notions of subjectivity effectively figured – i. e. represented, formulated, evoked, implied or enticed in a playtext and on the stage? And, finally, given that the concept of subjectivity is deeply entrenched in politics, what are the political implications of outlining such subjects, and of doing so through such aesthetic strategies? In my renegotiation of character as an onto-aesthetic category that is capable of figuring any notion of subjectivity, subjectivation constitutes a pivotal object of study, and this is what concerns the present chapter. Subjectivation is the moment or process when the subject comes into existence.¹ Thinking about when and how the subject is configured highlights that “the subject is not just ‘there’ from the beginning (i. e. from the moment it is born), but instituted in spe-

 Both ‘subjectivation’ and ‘subjectification’ are widely used by contemporary thinkers and their English translators when referring to the process of emergence/production of the subject. Except in quotations, where the original is respected, ‘subjectivation’ will be preferred here.

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cific contexts and specific times” [emphasis in original] (Salih 2002: 10). In other words, thinking about the subject’s emergence foregrounds one of the main criticisms levelled against the liberal-humanist subject – namely, that subjectivity is not a ready-made, self-evident and universally granted status. Contrary to this liberal-humanist discourse, contemporary theories of subjectivation emphasise that the formation of the subject must be understood as a contingent process, a process that is dependent on factors other than the existence of a reflective self – factors such as intelligibility within a given normative framework, amongst others. Insofar as the subject occurs rather than is, theories of subjectivation implicitly or explicitly foreground that there are forms of human ontology that may be denied the status of subjects, or subjects that may be dissolved after their constitution. In other words, these theories about how and when a subject is configured also put the spotlight on abjection and subalternity, as they are the photographic negative that gives definition to what subjectivity is. Finally, theories on subjectivation demonstrate the sheer plurality of accounts beyond the Cartesian, liberal-humanist paradigm. Interrogations of how and when the corporeal, affective, historical, political and ethical inflections of human ontology take place have brought about a number of different notions of the subject, all of which veer away from the idea of a naturallyoccurring and fully-autonomous individual endowed with a distinct identity. Ultimately, then, theories of subjectivation can offer character studies a wider horizon with regards to existing concepts of subjectivity and their political baggage. Also, they suggest the need for important methodological adjustments concerning the location of character in a theatre piece. If we define character as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity, and we establish that for some thinkers the subject does not coincide with the individual or with identity, it follows that character might not need a clearly recognisable individual on the page to exist; likewise, stage character may not correspond to each performer, but be generated otherwise. Also, if subjectivity can be thought of as an effect of performativity, as a relation, or as a practice towards the future – as this chapter will explain at length – then we need to rethink character accordingly. Character too may be configured as a relation between elements, or emerge through a process, rather having to be located in a fixed substance. In all, if the subject can be described as a contingent ontological category, so should character. As a first step towards this conceptual and methodological shift in the study of character, the present chapter examines the theories of subjectivation of three contemporary thinkers: Judith Butler, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Their respective understandings of subjectivity and subjectivation have not only moved away from the Cartesian, liberal-humanist model and its dependency on unity, autonomy and identity, but they are also key components of their

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left-leaning political convictions and agendas. These two intertwined aspects resonate strongly with the political persuasions animating this project. My examination of their politically-inflected theories of the subject here is preceded by a brief introduction to the work of Louis Althusser on interpellation, which has profoundly influenced these three thinkers, as well as having informed the only in-depth study of theatrical character and the production of subjectivity, namely Catherine Belsey’s 1982 The Subject of Tragedy. In examining these thinkers’ work, this chapter introduces several theoretical approaches to the subject that will be placed as discussants with those put forward by the plays examined in this book. It also highlights the significance of thinking about subjectivity within a progressive politics of emancipation and social change. Finally, it initiates a dialogue between these theories and theatre’s thinking about character.

Louis Althusser: scenes of address The two most influential anti-humanist accounts of subjectivation, namely Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation and Michel Foucault’s thoughts on discursive constitution, emerged in France in the 1960s and 1970s. In both Althusser’s and Foucault’s work, the subject is steeped in constitutive and inescapable relations of power. To put Althusser’s theory of subjectivation in very succinct terms, the subject is brought about in two movements within a scene of address: interpellation and recognition. In his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser contends that ideology metaphorically hails us with the role of subjects we must have in the social division of labour, and that we are subjectivised as we recognise ourselves in the name being summoned (244– 249). For Foucault, on the other hand, the “assujettissement” or subjectivation of individuals is the result of a process of objectification (2002: 326), thus dismantling the traditional opposition between subject and object. Foucault identified three modes of objectification through which human beings are discursively produced as subjects. First, through scientific inquiry, human beings and human life become an object of study; secondly, human beings also become objectified by “dividing practices”, processes that segregate them socially (i. e. through penitentiary exclusion) or divide them internally (i. e. through morality); finally, human beings also objectify themselves, for example by “recognis[ing] themselves as subjects of sexuality” (2002: 326 – 327). Through all these modes of objectification, argues Foucault, we become subjected to a

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form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. (2002: 331).

In sum, we become subjected to a power that allows and sustains our conceptualisation as individuals with an identity; we become subjects in the twofold sense of the word, as subjected substance. Of these two theories, Althusser’s account of interpellation and recognition has been the most profusely critiqued, even though it is still acknowledged as a compelling account of subjectivation. Terry Eagleton has pointed out the possibility of not feeling addressed by or directly ignoring the hailing of ideology; in other words, both ideological interpellation and recognition may potentially fail (1991: 145). The failure of interpellation is not seen as a possibility but as a certainty in the work of Slavoj Žižek, for whom the subject is not the effect of subjectivation (2005: 276). For Žižek the subject precedes and exceeds subjectivation, since subjectivation “designates the movement through which the subject integrates what is given them into the universe of meaning”, but “this integration always ultimately fails, there is a certain left-over which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe” (2005: 276). Peter Dews has also called attention to the subject’s necessarily ‘subjective’ interpretation of the position it is being given by ideology, and therefore its potentially inappropriate enactment (78 – 79). The notion of the subaltern, posed first by Antonio Gramsci’s political writings of the 1930s and later deployed in postcolonial studies, has enabled further criticisms of Althusser’s suggestion that “[t]he category of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’” (244). ‘Subalternity’ refers to socially subordinated groups to whom not only agency but also their belonging to understandings of citizenship or humanity is denied; it “suggests a practice of excluding individuals from the scene of political subjecthood altogether” (Carr 28). The existence of the subaltern therefore questions Althusser’s pressumption of an alwaysalready successful subjectivation through interpellation. It challenges the privileged supposition that “it is clear that you and I are subjects” (Althusser 244), and reveals that the opportunity for subjectivation and the space for subject positions might not come to us all. As I argue at length below, Judith Butler’s work on subjectivity can be interpreted as an attempt to problematise, supplement and reformulate Althusser’s and Foucault’s theories on interpellation, recognition and subjection. Butler has articulated this critique by focusing often, though not exclusively, on the failures of the processes of interpellation and recognition in the context of gender, sexuality and desire. Butler has attempted thus to argue for the subject’s potential to resist and refuse the norms that allow for its very subjectivation. These ar-

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guments vertebrate her early work, particularly Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. Alongside her interest in subversive subject positions, Butler has also outlined an ethics based on the redefinition of recognition throughout Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence and Giving an Account of Oneself. Here, Butler’s notion of recognition is not based on the identification of a role but on the acknowledgement of one’s own opacity and precariousness and, in turn, of the opacity and precariousness of others. Theatre can also offer particularly interesting insights into Althusser’s theory of subjectivation. The character-less plays under investigation in the present monograph, for example, challenge interpellation and recognition as the only mechanisms by which a subject position may be acquired and acknowledged. By refusing to attribute speech to individuated characters on the page, the character-less playtexts studied here arguably boycott the task of ‘hailing’ or objectivising the subjectivities formulated in their scripts. In other words, they present subjects on the page that may not allow being objectified in terms of their gender and sexuality, ethnicity, or social position. This textual resistance to allocating a particular identity to the characters not only enables but also actually fosters variety in the ways in which notions of subjectivity might be generated on the stage.² Furthermore, examining the role of the spectators reveals that the processes of subjectivation are more complex than Althusser’s schema might initially suggest. In any performance, spectators have the interpretive power to conjure up subject positions and intersubjective relations for the actors. Regardless of what notion of subjectivity a theatre performance might be attempting to stage, spectators might conjure up other fictional subject positions for the actors. For example, even if a given production of Sarah Kane’s Crave attempts to offer a non-individuated portrait of subjectivity, spectators might still recognise the speakers as individuals endowed with personalities – spectators may resist ‘hailing’ the actors in the way the performance expected. Acknowledging the interpretive power of the spectators in a theatre performance problematises Althusser’s scheme, as it reveals that recognition is not only enacted by the subject who is being interpellated.

 Of course, script-led performance constitutes an intervention on a text. As Badiou points out, theatrical performance always “retroactively qualifies” (b: ) the text with results that are unforeseeable by the author (b: ). My contention is that a character-less text like Crave or . Psychosis not only accepts and anticipates such an intervention but actually encourages it, especially with regards to the physical embodiment of the words in the script.

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Character-less works thus foreground a number of criticisms that can be applied to Althusser’s theory of interpellation and, subsequently, to the direct implementation of his theory in theatre scholarship.³ More importantly, though, character-less plays also evince the resilience of the subject. Regardless of their experimentation with speech attribution, these are not subjectless plays: these character-less texts and performances undeniably take the pulse of fictional subjects, who are formulated as amalgams of affects, unconscious processes, or economic transactions rather than independent individuals. Some characterless plays – and the qualifier ‘some’ is needed to avoid essentialising these aesthetics and their effects – collapse the Althusserian scene of address. This collapse is, on the one hand, a gesture against the violence of assigning and being assigned an identity. On the other, it is a move towards thinking the subject as capable of emancipation. As Alain Badiou notes, since the Althusserian subject is “a function of the State” and “revolutionary politics cannot be a function of the State”, it follows that there is no room for a political subject in Althusser’s scheme (2005c: 63). What some of these character-less works suggest is that the subject is capable of resisting being subsumed to a fixed identity, and that this rejection may be part of an emancipatory redefinition of the subject. In this respect, contemporary French thought on subjectivation offers useful models that move away from Althusser’s fatalism in relation to ideology, as well as from Foucault’s assumption of a ubiquitous and diffuse power “structur[ing] the possible field of action” (2002: 341).⁴ Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in particular have respectively redefined subjectivation as the irruption of a political, collective and emancipatory practice or relation – practices and relationships that transcend ideas of individual and collective identity, and are anchored in the universality of equality. Beyond France, although an inheritor of the French and Germanic traditions, Judith Butler has defined subjectivation as a process of subjugation to norms of intelligibility, albeit a process that discloses  Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy scrutinises the production of liberal-humanist subjectivity in and through sixteenth-century theatre under the theoretical influence of Althusser. For Belsey, both the form and content of Elizabethan tragedy contributed to the production of a liberal-humanist subject in the fictional universe of the plays, as well as outside the diegesis (). Belsey recognises that women in the fiction were not interpellated with the liberal-humanist subject position (), yet this potential failure or withdrawal of the address does not transfer into her understanding of audience subjectivation. For further problematisations of Belsey’s project, see Hugh Grady’s “On the Need for a Differentiated Theory of (Early) Modern Subjects”.  Although the notion of resistance pervades Foucault’s work more strongly than early criticisms recognise, the related concept of emancipation does not. For more on this, see Brent L. Pickett’s “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance”.

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the unsustainability of individualism, the possibility of agency, and the basis for the construction of a ‘radical democracy’. This is what the next section will examine.

Judith Butler: the body, the psyche and the social amidst normative regulations Judith Butler has devoted a vast part of her philosophical production to discussing the processes of subjectivation, most famously with regards to gender and sexuality, but also in relation to how governance and international relations operate on the basis of particular understandings of subjectivity. Throughout her work, Butler combines the familiar anti-humanist notions of interpellation and discursive constitution with a reinterpretation of Hegelian ethics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer debates. Underscoring this rich amalgam of sources is Butler’s attempt to find moments of agency within the processes of subject formation. In her own words, Butler has aimed to outline “a theory of agency that takes into account the double workings of social power and psychic reality” (2000a: 151), as well as the performative engendering of bodies, identities and desires.⁵ Butler’s endeavour to name the fissures of ideology/power and her commitment to identifying agency within the processes of subjectivation are part of a wider political project, namely that of pointing the way towards a “radical democracy” (1993: 192– 95; 2000c: 13; 2003: 25). Butler has consistently deployed this term in the sense proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 1985 Hegemony and Social Strategy. Laclau and Mouffe define “radical democracy” as “a form of politics which is founded not upon dogmatic postulation of any ‘essence of the social’, but, on the contrary, on affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every ‘essence’, and on the constitutive character of social division and antagonism” (193). Butler’s work thus strives to consider how we may achieve a ‘radically democratic’ politics, marked by anti-essentialism, anti-dogmatism and nonviolence beginning at the level of human ontology – a principle that resonates strongly with my argument that theatre can make a political intervention by stretching our understanding of subjectivity through its experimentation with character.

 For a definition of ‘performativity’ see pages  – .

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Passionate attachments: subjectivity and subjection beyond Foucault Butler’s thought on subjectivity participates in “the great ‘historical play on words’” regarding the term ‘subject’ (Balibar 1995: 154), and which Foucault defines thus: the subject is simultaneously “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by conscience or self-knowledge” [emphasis added] (2002: 331). More specifically, Butler argues that race, body morphology, sex, desire and ethnicity are the norms to which we are subjected in the process of subjectivation (2004b: 2).⁶ Through our subjection to these norms, not only do we gain our appearance as “continuous, visible, and located” subjects (1997b: 29) within a given frame of “cultural intelligibility” (1993: 2), but we also acquire and are subjected to our personal sense of self. In other words, Butler contends that the subject appears if and when she assumes the norms that render her culturally intelligible according to the “frames through which we apprehend […] the lives of others” (2009a: 1): The foreclosures that found – and destabilise – the subject are articulated through trajectories of power, regulatory ideals which constrain what will and will not be a person, which tend to separate the person from the animal, to distinguish between two sexes, to craft identification in the direction of an “inevitable” heterosexuality and ideal morphologies of gender, and can also produce the material for tenacious identifications and disavowals in relation to racial, national and class identities that are very often difficult to “argue” with or against. (2000a: 153)

For Butler, there are normative frames that stipulate a range of possible (i. e. legitimated) identities, bodies and desires, and these frames are not only imposed upon the subject, but are also appealing to the subject as structures for the assumption and apprehension of identity (2009a: 1– 12). These frames outline the legitimate ontology and epistemology of the subject in a given social order, whilst rejecting, or abjecting, those identities, bodies and desires that are conceived, experienced and perceived otherwise.⁷  The double understanding of ‘norm’ as that which is regulatory but also as that which normalises (i. e. that which has the effect of producing and naturalising what is considered typical) is key in Butler’s work on subjectivation and agency. The term further anchors Butler’s work in Foucault’s legacy, as it refers to the ‘regulatory ideal’ that Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality (Vols.  and ), and Power/Knowledge.  First theorised by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the notion of the abject reoccurs in Butler’s discussions of subjectivity. In Kristeva’s work, the abject is that which exceeds and destabilises the self, and provokes repulsion, fear or loathing. For Kristeva, the abject, thus, ranges from blood and excrement to babies. Butler extends this use of the term to the practices and identities outside of the heteronormative matrix.

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As Butler has repeatedly argued, there are lives whose legitimacy, authenticity and worth are denied precisely because they fall out of the perimeters set by the norm (1993; 2006b; 2009a). Regulatory norms, therefore, do set the ground for injustice and violence. However, the subject’s foundational subjection to regulatory norms is not envisioned by Butler as the enemy. For Butler, the existence of the norm and the subject’s attachment to it are neither necessarily negative nor compulsory. Butler argues, on the one hand, that the subject is unconsciously, collaboratively and “passionately attached to his or her own subordination” (1997b: 6) because subjection is the necessary requirement for the subject’s social presence. Butler’s contention is that “[w]here social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all” (1997b: 20). On the other hand, Butler’s theories highlight that it is precisely in the existence of the norm that we find the subject’s potential for agency. Although Butler suggests that we cannot exactly equate the norm with violence,⁸ she agrees that regulatory norms do restrict “the very categories that are politically available for identification” (2000a: 150). For example, the existence of a heteronormative matrix restricts the categories available for gender identification to two: male and female. However, Butler trusts that “the very terms that bring the subject into political viability […] become, with luck, the site for a disidentificatory resistance” (2000a: 151). Continuing with the example above, the heteronormative matrix that allows for the assumption of sex and gender also offers itself as the site where resistance can take place, the field where (queer) subversion and refusal of the norms are staged. The norm therefore offers itself as both the space for identifications, insubordinate uses, and disavowals (2000a: 153).

Rethinking interpellation and recognition Butler’s description of the subject’s attachment to regulatory norms situates the Foucauldian double-bind of subjectivation – subjection to the norm and to the

 Butler has argued against identifying power “exclusively with violence, or with domination, although it does take that form” (in Beck-Gernsheim, Butler and Puigvert ). For Butler, power “can be good and it can be used, and we must not be afraid to use it” (in Beck-Gernsheim, Butler and Puigvert ). There is, for example, an erotic use of norms within and outside heteronormativity. As Butler explains elsewhere, in “socially condemned” sexual relations whose fantasy is grounded on the transgression of the norm, “the norm structures the fantasy, but does not determine it; the fantasy makes use of the norm, but does not create it” (a: ).

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subject’s sense of identity – within the framework of interpellation. Throughout all her work, Butler has retained the Althusserian premise that subjectivation takes place in relation to the constitutive address of discourse. However, as I elucidate below, Butler contends that “interpellation works by failing” (1997b: 197); that is, that the subject is never fully constituted by the interpellation of these regulatory ideals. Her consistent criticism and revision of Althusser’s formulations have allowed Butler to identify the occasion for agency within the scene of address. Butler’s revisions of the theory of interpellation apply to two areas: namely, the redefinition of hailing – its nature, instruments and outcomes – and the refuting of recognition. These two areas of inquiry, developed throughout her career, amount to a questioning of the efficaciousness of interpellation, and the discovery of moments of resistance and agency. Firstly, for Butler “[i]nterpellation must be dissociated from the figure of the voice in order to become the instrument and mechanism of discourses whose efficacy is irreducible to their moment of enunciation” (1997a: 32). In other words, discourse always inaugurates the subject, but it can take forms other than the active, overt, verbal hailing. Following this argument, Butler has thus bestowed the power of ‘summoning’ and initiating the subjectivation process on unexpected ‘callers’, such as bodies and silences, which can also conjure up subjectivising discourses. Amidst her consideration of hate speech acts in Excitable Speech, for example, Butler argues that the body interpellates: whatever the content of a verbal exchange with another might be, our body speaks to the other in ways that escape our consciousness: “the body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said” (1997a: 11). Likewise, Butler contends that interpellation can be formulated as a silence (2000a: 157). For Butler, “‘who’ the subject is depends as much on the names that he or she is never called” as on the name that he or she receives (1997a: 41). The contention that interpellation and discursive constitution can be instigated too through corporeal and immaterial carriers of discourse is momentous. First, it reaffirms Foucault’s description of power as diffuse, continuous and multiform, referenced throughout his Discipline and Punish (2002: 337– 342) and other writings: for Butler, the hailing of discourse might arrive from anywhere and everywhere. These arguments on the vehicles for interpellation also support Butler’s main thesis in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter: namely, that a subject’s corporeal and psychic reality is informed by iterative subjection to regulatory norms that she calls “performativity” (2006a). From this perspective, the subject can be seen as the effect of turning to the same interpellation over and over again, an interpellation derived from various sources, regarding various regulatory norms, and placed at various times. Moreover, if discourses

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exert their subjectivising power over the individual again and again, it follows that interpellation – and, hence, subjectivation – is an ongoing process that remains forever unfinished. It confirms that the subject is not always-already there, and suggests that it actually never quite congeals into a permanent entity. Butler’s theories also revise the sources of interpellation, and propose that subjectivation is a process that we occasion too in our exchanges with others; in Butler’s words, “the subject constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing others” (1997a: 26). The subject is therefore not only that which is passively subjected and subjectivised, but also an active part in subjectivation processes through his or her address to the other in speech, in flesh and in silence. The political and ethical implications of this contention are not to be disregarded. The subject’s voice and body may indeed become “the instrument and mechanism of discourses” (1997a: 32), complicit in the implementation of regulatory norms. However, the subject’s own share in the subjectivation of the other opens up the possibility of agency, the possibility of “speaking [to the other] in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms” (1997a: 41).⁹ Butler’s reformulation of the ways in which the subjectivising address takes place therefore considers how subjects hold the possibility of interpellating others, perhaps invoking subject positions that might be foreclosed under normative modes of subjection. Butler’s revisions of the Althusserian theory of subjectivation apply not only to interpellation but also to recognition. In Althusser’s account, the hailing of ideology is followed by the individual’s recognition in herself of the subject position being hailed. This internal recognition is accompanied and endorsed by social recognition. Butler complicates Althusser’s assumption that recognition takes place in an inevitable and straightforward manner within subjectivation. On the one hand, Butler argues for “the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilised” (1993: 226). This is so, Butler contends, because the subject always exceeds the boundaries of the social position with which she is being hailed. The subject’s experience of their body and their exposure to others is “non-narrativizable” (2005: 39), and cannot be fully relayed or possessed in language – its nature slips from the grip of discourse.

 Besides her reformulation of the processes of interpellation, Butler has also highlighted that “[a]s an instrument of non-intentional effects, discourse can produce the possibility of identities that it means to foreclose” (a: ). This is the case, for instance, in the reappropriation and resignification of injurious speech.

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Moreover, for Butler the subject is partially opaque to herself, given that the net of psychological primary relations that constitute the subject are irrecoverable for her (2005: 39). On the basis of the subject’s “partial blindness” (2005: 41) to herself, and the impossibility of recognising oneself in the hailed subject position, Butler has proceeded to reformulate the Hegelian interpretation of recognition, which she summarises as “a reciprocal act whereby I recognise that the other is structured in the same way that I am” (2005: 27). Butler’s ethical proposition is that the object of this reciprocal recognition is precisely that we are all partially opaque to ourselves. Since this introspective blindness is invariably shared by everyone, it “occasions [one’s] capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others” (2005: 41). According to Butler, the possibility of recognising the other as somebody who shares my experience of opacity should be integrated into my own ethical responses and understandings of responsibility and accountability (2005: 135 – 136). Given the anti-representational quality of the plays examined here, these are relevant questions for the present study of character. On the other hand, even if the subject recognises herself in the position to which she is being allocated, Butler’s argument for the “instability and incompleteness of subject-formation” (1993: 226) casts doubts on how permanent and comprehensive the effects of recognition can be. For Butler, subjectivation takes place repeatedly – performatively, through the iterative avowal of the norms – and this means that the process is perpetually ongoing; this potentially allows for the subject to turn around otherwise to the hailing of the norm. In other words, in Butler’s thought, the incompleteness of subjectivation is guaranteed by the very fact that the regulatory norms that occasion the emergence and subjection of the subject operate in a performative fashion.

Performativity, the body and the psyche Probably Butler’s most popular and enduring contribution, performativity is precisely what allows for this possibility of disidentification and subversive assumptions of subject positions. Oft-misunderstood, the notion of performativity as defined by Butler’s work in the early 1990s is not equivalent to the concept of performance: performativity is not an ‘act’ in the sense of fiction or role; it does not emerge from a pre-existing subject’s self-conscious freedom and agency (1993: 12– 13). Performativity, as defined in Butler’s early work, is “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names”

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(1993: 2).¹⁰ Under the influence of J. L. Austin’s notion of ‘performative utterances’, Derrida’s understanding of ‘iterability’ and Foucault’s use of ‘discourse’,¹¹ Butler describes performativity as an iterative process operating at the level of both the psychic and corporeal life of the subject. On the one hand, performativity is “a repetition and a ritual” (2006a: xv) concerning the subject’s sense of interiority that installs the force of regulatory norms in the subject’s psyche by means of their poietic anticipation, “an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon it anticipates” (2006a: xv). Butler’s theories on the performative aspects of psychic configuration have circled around gender identity and desire. In her work, gender identity and desire appear through a performative engagement with a heteronormative matrix of discourses and practices. Combining Foucault’s theory on subjection with a critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Butler argues that, for heterosexuality to succeed as a norm that regulates the psyche, it is necessary that the same-sex object of desire is repeatedly repudiated and abjected, and that the norms of heterosexuality are likewise iteratively upheld, reproduced. This has unexpected consequences for heteronormativity itself. Following Freud’s theory about melancholic identification, Butler suggests that the same-sex object of repudiation is not lost, but installed within the psyche of the melancholic subject. Thus, Butler argues, at the heart of the heterosexual psyche there is “a possible identification with an abject homosexuality” [emphasis in original] (1993: 111). For Butler, then, “the ‘truest’ lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman and the ‘truest’ gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man” (1997b: 146 – 147). What Butler is arguing here, therefore, is that there is an unacknowledged queerness at the core of heteronormativity, which dismantles essentialist ideas

 In the  Preface to the new edition of the ground-breaking monograph Gender Trouble, Butler admits the difficulty of defining ‘performativity’ due to her revision of the term and to the significations it has taken on by being used elsewhere. In “Competing Universalities”, she expands the meaning and political potential of performativity as it stood in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter by intimating that there is a “performativity proper to refusal” (a: ). My discussion at this point centres on Butler’s early and most influential definition of ‘performativity’. See pages  – .  J. L. Austin’s ‘performative utterances’ are those instances of language in which what is named is enacted or produced (); Derrida’s notion of ‘iterability’, “formulated in response to the theorization of speech acts by John Searle and J. L. Austin, also implies that every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act and which perpetually drain any ‘present’ act of its presentness” (Butler : ). In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault highlights that discourses do more than simply reduce reality to language, and defines them instead as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (: ).

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about the unity and self-sameness of the subject. Butler proposes that, in its psychic composition, the subject is characterised by relationality, hybridity and opacity. In works such as Precarious Lives: The Power of Mourning and her recent collaboration with Athena Athanasiou in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Butler has begun to develop a theory of how relationality is not only born out of foundational and irretrievable relations, but also by virtue of our sociality, our contact with others. “[W]e sometimes no longer know precisely who we are, or by what we are driven, after contact with some other or some other group, or as a result of someone else’s actions. One can be dispossessed in grief or in passion – unable to find oneself”, Butler writes (in Butler and Athanasiou 3 – 4). And she concludes: “we cannot understand ourselves without in some ways giving up on the notion that the self is the ground and cause of its own experience” (in Butler and Athanasiou 4). If performativity concerns the construction of a sense of interiority, it is also, on the other hand, the process by which regulatory norms are repeatedly incarnated through the body (1993: 2). For Butler, these norms at once materialise and are materialised in the body. As such, heteronormativity or race are considered regimes of the regulatory production of bodies, repeatedly informing how corporeality is to be perceived, conceived of, and experienced. As a repetitive practice that affects the body, the notion of performativity suggests that there cannot be a “pure body” (1993: 10), unhinged from the parameters of materialisation and intelligibility bestowed by power; the body is always-already materialised and apprehended in relation to power’s regulative norms. Butler’s understanding of performativity also suggests that power is not the metaphysical force that dis -places the humanist values of mastery and agency: “[t]here is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (1993: 9). Thus, if performativity is an iterative practice, neither power nor the body that it informs can be understood in essentialist terms. Consequently, Butler argues, performativity exerts the regulatory norms of power, but it also contains the very conditions for their subversion. Failure to reiterate or cite those norms, or to do so adequately, can destabilise their power (2006a: 185 – 193; 1993: 105 – 111).

Butler’s theory of subjectivation and the debate on character Taking all of the above into account, Butler’s theory of the subject can be synthesised as a performative process whereby the subject is subjected to regulatory ideals that repeatedly inform her corporeality, define her sense of identity, and

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establish her social intelligibility. As such, Butler argues, “every life is in this sense outside itself from the start” (in Butler and Athanasiou 5): every subject is relational, interdependent and partly inscrutable to herself and others; every subject is partially denied the ownership of their subjectivity. Precisely because of this foundational dispossession, for Butler, every subject is also vulnerable to social forms of deprivation, ‘dispossessed’ in the sense of the violent removal from sustaining material and affective environments (in Butler and Athanasiou 1– 6). Because our constitution as subjects is hinged upon normative frames of apprehension of human life, Butler argues, subjectivity is also by definition marked by a shared vulnerability. Ultimately, what compels Butler’s account of subjectivation is an ethical-political imperative: “that we must learn to live, and to embrace, the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not to know in advance what precise form our humanness will take, but to be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence” (2003: 17).¹² Butler’s theories on subjectivation therefore present a key contribution to this book. Butler consistently calls into question the idea of the autonomous individual and favours instead an understanding of the subject defined by her relationality, interdependence, opacity, precariousness, instability, and citational nature. Butler’s work effectively stretches the ontological horizon available for character studies, suggesting that – if character is a figuration of subjectivity – these attributes can also be assigned to character. Butler’s theories also bring attention to the role of regulatory norms in the formation, recognition and repudiation of subjectivity, as well as foregrounding moments of agency and responsibility in the processes of interpellation and recognition. Correspondingly, an important task for character studies is to question what frames of apprehension are endorsed, subverted or refused in a playtext or performance, if we are to examine what subjectivities theatre can outline and through what means. Moreover, Butler’s expansion of the agents and means of interpellation offers an opportunity for self-examination for theatre studies as a discipline, as it foregrounds that we as scholars also have a role in the perpetu-

 Butler often articulates her thought on subjectivation using the term ‘subject’ alongside those of ‘human’ and ‘liveable life’. Unlike Rancière, whose work finds refuge in an equality that is by definition unhinged from a potentially exclusionary understanding of humanity, Butler insists on continuing to deploy the term ‘human’ in order to re-signify it in terms that are radically inclusive and egalitarian. For Butler, only through a sustained and critical relation to these categories – human and subject – may we “find out the limits of their inclusivity, the presuppositions they include, the ways in which they must be expanded to encompass the diversity of what it is to be human” (: ).

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ation of certain frames of apprehension of human life – that we are hailing others, even if these others are encountered within an artistic or fictional frame. It follows that, by continuing to contend that there are no subjects or no characters in particular theatre works, we are effectively collaborating to circumscribe narrowly what lives we are ready to acknowledge. This places failure on the subjects outlined by these works – i. e. these subjects fail to appear as intelligible individuals – rather than reflecting on the inadequacy of the subject categories with which they are hailed. Importantly, although Butler’s theories dismantle the idea of the unity and individuality of the subject, they nonetheless remain preoccupied with how these external regulatory norms interact with what the subject perceives as herself. The subject’s body, her desires, the intersubjective bonds that define her, the way the subject is physically exposed to others: all are paramount in Butler’s work. Butler’s interest in the corporeal and psychic life of the subject and her commitment to rethinking the subject as relational and intersubjectively constituted resonate strongly with three of the works examined later in this book – Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue – which in turn pose questions to Butler’s rethinking of recognition. Unlike Butler, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière tend to disregard the corporeal and psychic in their respective theories of subjectivation, and direct their interest towards notions of equality, universality and disruption. Their theories occupy the next two sections in this chapter.

Alain Badiou: practice-based fidelity to the Truth of the Event Alain Badiou’s complex understanding of subjectivity and subjectivation has unfolded and evolved over a number of publications, particularly in his Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Badiou’s theories are grounded on mathematics (Cantorian set theory in particular), Platonism and dialectical materialism. They attempt to rethink the Subject in universalising, subtractive terms (i. e. after all contingent qualities have been filtered out), without losing sight of how historical change is brought about.¹³ While

 Scholars are inconsistent in the use of capital letters when referring to the Badiouian notions of ‘Event’, ‘Subject’ and ‘Situation’. In order to avoid confusion with non-Badiouian uses of these terms throughout this book, I capitalise these, as well as ‘Truth’, ‘Body’, ‘Present’ whenever they refer to Badiou’s theories. Marking the difference between a Badiouian ‘Event’ and what we commonly refer to as an ‘event’ is also vital in the context of theatre studies, as it is

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the Althusserian, Foucauldian and, to a certain extent, Butlerian understandings of subjectivity consider the subject’s emergence as a process that subjugates her (more or less successfully) to the grip of ideology, discourse or regulatory norms, Badiou, on the other hand, proposes a take on the Subject that is initially more optimistic: for Badiou, the Subject “bears a treasure” and is “traversed by an infinite power” (2003: 54). Badiou devolves power to the Subject to the extent that the Subject’s own persistence depends only on its own strength and commitment (2003: 54).¹⁴ However, Badiou’s description of the Subject as holding power should not be understood in liberal-humanist terms: that is, the Badiouian subject is not a unique and autonomous individual. Similarly, if in the theories of subjectivation we have examined so far the subject is inserted in a given social order by virtue of this subjectivation, for Badiou the Subject is the process that takes place after the disruption of a Situation (2005a: 393). Badiou’s theories therefore see subjectivation as a potential force for change rather than for the preservation of the status quo. As I aim to elucidate here, the Subject for Badiou is a doing: a praxis related to a disruption in historical time and to the production of the present – a radically new present in the case of what Badiou calls ‘the faithful Subject’.

The terms of Badiou’s mathemes In order to fully grasp Badiou’s understanding of subjectivation, it is necessary to situate first his use of four terms: ‘Event’, ‘Truth’, ‘Body’ and ‘Present’. What Badiou identifies as different types of Subjects or ‘subjective destinations’ (i. e. the faithful Subject, the reactive Subject, and the obscure Subject; see pages 67– 71) are nothing but different relations between an Event and its Truth, a Body and the Present. Following Lacan’s use of mathemes, Badiou synthesises these three Subjects or subjective destinations in three different formulas. Given its central role in Badiou’s theory of the Subject, it makes sense to begin by defining the Event. For Badiou, subjectivation takes place precisely after the unforeseeable arrival of what he calls an Event. The Event is “a real rup-

easy but wrong-headed to equate the former with the event of a theatre performance (Reinelt :  – ). In quotes, the upper or lower case original usage is respected.  I am using the neutral pronoun ‘it’ to refer to the Badiouian Subject despite the fact that Badiou at times uses the masculine pronoun ‘he’. With this, I aim to highlight that the Badiouian Subject is a process, a practice, and therefore it cannot be thought in gendered terms. Badiou’s use of the masculine pronoun has to do with the ‘material support’ or ‘Body’ of political or amorous Subjects, which is indeed composed of gendered individuals.

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ture [that] has taken place in the world” (2009: 50), a fissure within a given ontological order or ‘Situation’.¹⁵ It is an incident that was completely unthinkable under the parameters of the Situation, and which exceeds and supplements it. For Badiou, Events can only take place in four realms (2005a: 17): the arts, love, science (mathematics and physics), and politics. Thus, “the creation of the possibility of naming that which was without name” (Badiou; in Badiou and Critchley 364) is an Event in the field of art; the encounter of two individuals, that unforeseeable rupture of the individual’s world, can be considered an Event in love; Cantor’s set theory was a scientific Event that disrupted the mathematical landscape; and Spartacus’s slave revolution, the French Revolution or the Chinese Cultural Revolution are examples of political Events (2009: 38, 54, 72– 76). Therefore, “stricto sensu, there is no subject save the artistic, amorous, scientific, or political” (Badiou 2005a: 17). As the rare and ephemeral rupture that it is, the Event neither remains within nor immediately transforms a Situation but leaves behind a trace: the consequences of the Event, which is what the Subject must evaluate. The trace of the Event receives the symbol ε in the mathematical formulas that accompany and schematise Badiou’s thesis. Although an Event does not belong to a Situation and should therefore be considered extra-ontological, Badiou concedes that a Situation has ‘Evental sites’. For Badiou the Evental site stands at the border of a given Situation, “on the edge of the void” (2005a: 175), and consists of “an entirely abnormal multiple” that “belongs to the situation, whilst what belongs to it in turn does not” (2005a: 175). In other words, the site is part of the Situation but contains the abnormal, the unaccountable from the perspective of the Situation, and therefore it holds the promise of challenging and transforming the Situation, even if this promise could not have been inferred from the site. For example, in Christian theology Christ’s death is an Evental site: it is both proof of Christ’s mortality, from which its resurrection could not have been inferred, but it is also the premise for Christ’s Second Coming (2003: 70). The Evental site allows Badiou to conceptualise the Event as locally hinged to a Situation yet as an  It is worth noting again that any ontological order (i. e. any Situation) is, for Badiou, a pure multiplicity. Therefore, Badiou’s notion of the Situation is opposed to ideas of ontology that are related to essence or oneness (: ). In fact, Being and Event opens with a first meditation where Badiou states that “the one is not” [emphasis in original] (a: ), it does not exist in its own right: “What has to be declared is that the one, which is not, solely exists as operation. In other words: there is no one, only the count-as-one. The one, being an operation, is never a presentation” [emphasis original] (a: ). Badiou’s suggestion that there are operations of ‘counting’ that give the semblance of oneness to what is positively multiple resonates strongly with what Rancière describes as the ‘distribution of the sensible’. For a discussion of this Rancièrean term, see pages  – .

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extra-ontological, unexpected encounter. In so doing, Badiou veers his thought away from narrativising history in terms of dialectical causality only, and introduces an element of chance. History thus becomes marked both by necessity and contingency.¹⁶ This has implications for the Event itself, as it can be redefined as being “composed of, on the one hand, elements of the site, and on the other hand, itself” [emphasis in original] (2005a: 179). The Event therefore “‘mobilizes’ the elements of its site, but adds its own presentation to the mix” (2005a: 182). The next key concept in Badiou’s theory is ‘Truth’. As synthesised in Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis, a Truth is a “concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice […] arise, exist, and eventually disappear” (2010: 231). Although Badiou’s definition of this term has evolved throughout his oeuvre, all his works specify an indissoluble link between the emergence of a Subject (in particular, the faithful Subject, as I elucidate below) and a Truth as a procedure through which the new is produced. If the Event is exceptional, so is the production of Truths. Truths are exceptional constructions, sustained through the epistemological and practical shifts that are brought about in the wake of an Event by a faithful Subject that “attempt[s] to investigate their world in the light of it” (Meillassoux 1). It is for this reason that Badiou at times speaks of Truths eliciting a Subject: “to be a Subject (and not a simple individual animal) is to be a local active dimension of such a [Truth] procedure” (2005a: xiii). Therefore, a Truth is characterised by its exceptional, post-Evental, and Subject-eliciting properties. It is clear, then, that by Truth Badiou does not mean what we call ‘veracity’, the impossibility of a statement to be falsified with arguments. Neither is Truth a metaphysical concept: Truths – note that Badiou uses it as a countable noun, insofar as he considers Truth a multiplicity – are not only linked to a given Situation and a specific Event, but also “[p]roduced in a measurable or counted empirical time” (2009: 33). And yet, regardless of this specificity, a Truth “is nevertheless eternal, to the extent that, grasped from any other point of time or any other particular world, the fact that it constitutes an exception remains fully intelligible” (2009: 33). In other words, “of no truth can it be said, under the pretext that its historical world has disintegrated, that it is lost forever” (2009: 66). Thus, two important properties of Truths are their particularity (they are drawn from a particular world) and their eternity. They are therefore intimately linked to both the Situation and the disruption of the Event: Truths are a part of a Situation, albeit a part that might be indiscernible; but they are also

 See Colin Wright’s “Resurrection and Reaction in Alain Badiou” for a compelling discussion of history, necessity and contingency in Badiou’s thought.

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“that which makes a hole in a knowledge” (2005a: 327), the procedures that challenge the status quo of the Situation. Badiouian theory establishes that Truths are articulated in the four realms in which an Event can take place – the arts, love, science and politics. Or, to put it differently, Truth procedures might be initiated within these four realms. For a newcomer to Badiou’s theories, it might seem possible that a Subject engages in a Truth procedure out of false or unethical commitments, that a destructive newness might be created in the name of a so-called Truth. However, Badiou grounds his understanding of a Truth in universal equality: “Truth”, Badiou claims, “is only the philosophical name for a new universality”, a universality that is new in contraposition to the so-called universality of globalised capitalism (2004: 106). For Badiou, therefore, political Truths aim at “collective emancipation” (2010: 231), and they articulate an egalitarian will that goes against “the fear of the masses” and “the ‘natural’ free play of competition” (2009: 27). An artistic Truth is art’s “proposition about a new definition of what is our sensible relation to the world, which is a possibility of universality” too (2004: 106). For Badiou, the Truth of an amorous Event is the procedure constructed on the basis of a “Two Scene” (in Badiou and Truong 29), the “experience of the world from the perspective of difference” rather than from the perspective of individualism and self-same individuality (in Badiou and Truong 39). Finally, by the subjective ‘Body’, Badiou does not refer to human corporeality but to “the set of everything that the trace of the event mobilises” (2009: 467). It is the materiality of a Subject, “the bearer of the subjective appearance of a truth” (2009: 467, 451). The Body, thus, can be a musical piece, or paintings such as those by Picasso; it can be algebra, Spartacus’s troops of rebellious slaves, or the lovers. These are not to be considered a Subject or an Event in their own right, but the material support by which a Truth appears in a Situation. The Body receives in Badiou’s formulas the symbol C. By ‘Present’, Badiou refers to “the set of consequences of the evental trace” (2009: 52), realised point by point by the Subject, of which the Present is a part. The Present receives the symbol π.

Fidelity as a subjective destination: the faithful Subject How does the Subject relate to an Event, a Body, and the Present? The Event itself does not produce the Subject. As Badiou explicitly expresses, the Subject is neither a result of the Event nor its origin (2005a: 392). Rather, as defined in Being and Event, the Subject is a post-Evental, local and finite configuration of

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a fidelity to the Truth of the Event (2005a: 393).¹⁷ Or, in Bruno Bosteels’s words, the Subject in Badiou’s thought is “a fragment of the sustained enquiry into the consequences of an event for a possible universal truth” (25). Therefore, at this point in Badiou’s enquiry, the Subject is a figure that is necessarily militant insofar as it “organizes their life differently and in fidelity to it [the Event], testing the different elements of their particular situation […] against what this event has revealed” (O’Sullivan 2009: 156). It is for this reason that Saint Paul’s hagiography, from his early persecution of Christians to his unexpected conversion to Christianity and consequent missionary activity, conveniently epitomises subjectivation for Badiou. Saint Paul “brings forth the entirely human connection […] between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-practice that is this rupture’s subjective materiality” (Badiou 2003: 2). Having witnessed how people encountered such a rupture but then “abandoned the lessons of the event” and “returned to ordinary life” (in Badiou and Critchley 362), Badiou argues that the exercise of ‘fidelity’ to the truth of the Event – also described as ‘militancy’, ‘loyalty’ or ‘continuity’ – is necessary for sustaining subjectivation. Therefore, the Badiouian Subject is configured as contingent and processual, at the verge of vanishing if it relinquishes the lesson of the Event. The Subject is indeed not substance; it is a relation to the Event and a relation to the beliefs and practices that follow from acknowledging this Event (Badiou 2005a: 391– 392). The Subject is thus “the bearer [le support] of a fidelity, the one who bears a process of truth” (Badiou 2001: 43). In this respect, Badiou evokes but also defies the propositions of Althusser, his former teacher, and Foucault: the Subject’s relation of fidelity to the Event is one of subjection too, yet one that is desired, self-sustained and, according to Badiou, empowering. It may also be argued that Badiou’s requirement for continuity embraces the spirit of performativity, inasmuch as the Subject does not become an immutable substance through subjectivation but rather has to enact the relation to the Event through which the Subject is induced. Contrary to Butler, Badiou does not inscribe this performativity in the corporeality or the psyche of the individual. The nature of subjectivity is for Badiou collective, its existence unthinkable prior to the Event. In short, the Badiouian Subject does not coincide with the psychological subject, or the Cartesian and Kantian reflective subjects (2001: 43). Thus, for example, Badiou explains  In Logics of Worlds, Badiou expands this definition to encompass subjective figures that do not pursue a militant fidelity to the Event. Therefore, his definition of the Subject as a configuration of fidelity to the Event in Being and Event only applies to the faithful or militant Subject. For a discussion of the non-militant Badiouian Subjects see pages  – .

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that fidelity to the amorous, Evental encounter between two individuals does not induce the emergence of two Subjects of love: “[t]he lovers as such enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both” [emphasis in original] (2001: 43). As Badiou expresses in The Communist Hypothesis: [T]he individual body and all that it entails in terms of thought, affects, potentialities at work in it, and so forth, becomes one of the elements of another body, the body-of-truth, the material existence of a truth in the making in a given world. This is the moment when an individual declares that he or she can go beyond the bounds (of selfishness, competition, finitude…) set by individualism (or animality – they’re one and the same thing). He or she can do so to the extent that, while remaining the individual that he or she is, he or she can also become, through incorporation, an active part of a new Subject. I call this decision, this will, a subjectivation. (2010: 234)

In the case of the faithful or militant Subject, subjectivation therefore is this incorporation of the individual into a subjective Body that is producing the Present in fidelity to the Event and its Truth. “Every subject is artistic, scientific, political or amorous”, claims Badiou; “out of these registers, there is only existence, or individuality, but no subject” (1999: 108). The being of the Badiouian militant Subject is therefore the operation through which “the ideological glue that holds together our particular identities” is dismantled and “a strict egalitarian affirmation” (Bosteels 30 – 31) is brought forward, point by point, step by step, into the Present. As an operation (i. e. a relation and a practice) rather than a substance, the faithful Subject can be synthesised in a mathematical formula (2009: 53): " "! !#

Although Badiou’s mathemes may seem to unnecessarily complicate his theory, they can be a visual reminder that the Subject comprises the entire formula, and not any of its parts individually. This is particularly useful in the case of political and amorous Subjects, given that their Body, their material support, involves a number of individual human beings. The faithful Subject then is the practice that this formula schematises: it is the relentless production of a new Present (π), a production that is the direct consequence (") of acknowledging the trace of the Event (ε), of acknowledging that something that radically changes the Situation has taken place, and that raises the question: what is to be done to act consequently? The Subject’s Body (C) is not only subjected to the trace of the Event and therefore placed under it in the equation, but it is also actually a fragmented or divided Body (!#): a Body that is never unitary or always-already formed, but fragmented insofar as it must, point by point, decide how to articulate the Truth of the Event into the Present (2009: 52– 53).

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Further subjective destinations and their Subjects: reaction and negation The militant Subject is only one configuration of the Badiouian Subject, albeit the most relevant and profusely examined given Badiou’s interest in thinking the arrival of the new. In Logics of Worlds, however, Badiou offers a slightly more complex view on the possible Subject positions available, adding two other subjective destinations with their own mathemes: reaction and negation. Respectively, these positions occasion the reactive and obscure Subjects, which allow us to think how change is impeded or negated in favour of the status quo. By ‘reactive Subject’, Badiou refers to the subjective figures that “resist the call of the new” – that is, the interpellative force of the Event – and “create arguments of resistance appropriate to the novelty itself” (2009: 54). In other words, the reactive Subject does not just remain in the past, oblivious to the rupture in the Situation that the Event has produced. Rather, Badiou sees this subjective figure as the negation, “the ‘no to the event’” (2009: 55), and the production of a Present that is not “the affirmative and glorious present of the faithful subject” but “a measured present, a negative present, a present ‘a little less worse’ than the past”: “an extinguished present” [emphasis in original] (2009: 55). To give a Badiouian example from the realm of politics: following an Event such as the slave insurrection begun by Spartacus, the reactive Subject could be identified in those slaves that did not join the insurrection. This Subject acknowledges the existence of the faithful Subject, but does not ‘incorporate’ itself to the Body of slaves forcing a new Present: the militant transformation of a Situation in the wake of an Event is seen by the reactive Subject as too drastic, and prefers engendering a moderately better Present – for example, by preferring small ameliorations of the slaves’ circumstances that will follow if they remain with their owners (2009: 56). The obscure Subject, on the other hand, does not negate the call of the Event or subdue the importance of the Present being produced by a faithful Subject: it simply places the Body and the Present “into the night of non-exposition” (2009: 59). In other words, this Subject negates that the Event has taken place, and negates the existence of the Body of the faithful Subject attempting to articulate a new Present. To continue with the example of Spartacus’s revolution, the obscure Subject would be “placed under the murderous sign of the City and her gods, crucifying thousands of the vanquished so that even the memory of the present which was created over the course of two years by the slaves’ uprising be abolished” (2009: 70). It is the practice that suffocates the consequences of the Event as a means to deny that it ever occurred. Although Badiou is interested in identifying the creation of emancipatory, militant Subjects, these two other subjective figures offer an opportunity to

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locate the ways in which the production of the new is impeded or denied, particularly in the political realm. Badiou indicates thus the existence of procedures, of Subjects and their Bodies, who can be made accountable for reinforcing the status quo and suffocating the articulation of collective emancipation.

Thinking the theatre event through the Badiouian Event In this monograph, I set out to renegotiate how the term ‘character’ is deployed in theatre studies, considering that this notion may encompass figurations of subjectivity beyond the liberal-humanist norm, physical articulations other than those offered by the impersonating actor, and politics that are detached from identity and individualism. With this in mind, Badiou’s work proves to be a fertile ground for the development of character studies and the rethinking of theatre’s political gestures. First, the Badiouian Subject lends character studies a model of subjectivity that is based on praxis rather than essence, an understanding of the Subject as universalist and collective rather than individual, one that has agency and responsibility with regards to the production of the new, and that is also exceptional and ephemeral rather than always-already there. Following this, Badiou’s propositions can contribute methodologically to the study of character. If character is the way a theatre text or performance figures subjectivity, then it follows that a practice-based, collective, universalist and ephemeral notion of subjectivity might not mobilise the same aesthetic apparatus required to fashion a liberal-humanist subject. Character, too, might be found in the practices that have an effect on the political present being constructed in a theatrical fiction, rather than in the individuals or materials that initiate or support those practices. Therefore, a notion of stage character inspired by Badiou’s theories would seek character – a performance’s figuration of subjectivity – in the combination of practices that contribute to produce, deny or prevent a new Present, considering the bodies of the performers as one part of the subjective figure.¹⁸

 This is not Badiou’s own view on character. Badiou writes that, on the page, “the subject exists only as linked to his discourse”, while in a theatre performance “the character does not exist”, and the actor is simply “a body eaten by the words of the text” (b: ). In accordance with his own understanding of subjectivity, Badiou’s definition of textual and stage character emphasises the centrality of practice (speech) over essence or materiality (the actor’s body). However, this is too narrow an understanding of stage character, and appears disconnected from Badiou’s own thinking of subjectivity. As my analysis of Crouch’s ENGLAND demon-

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Secondly, Badiou’s theories are relevant for the study of subjectivity in theatre studies not only because theatre creates figures of the subject in the diegetic fabric of a text or performance. Theatre works may also play a part in processes of subjectivation outside the fiction. Indeed, theatre is for Badiou “the most eventful of the arts” (Puchner 263) and, hence, potentially more prone than other arts to activating the process of subjectivation. As Badiou makes clear in his treatise “Rhapsody for the Theatre”, a theatrical representation may be “an event […] from which a truth proceeds”, offering the spectators the possibility of “implicat[ing] themselves” (2008b: 210).¹⁹ In other words, spectators may become incorporated into a Subject of the Truth that theatre “fugaciously giv[es] brilliance to” through a “sensible arrangement of bodies, voices, and images” (2008b: 199). Badiou seems to offer here a compelling scenario, since it provides theatre studies with an alternative to the liberal-humanist model of spectators’ subjectivation proposed by Catherine Belsey. Evoking Althusserian concepts of interpellation and recognition, Belsey’s work in the 1980s contended that the theatrical play works as an “exhortation” and that spectators “recognize […] their own imaginary unity” [emphasis added] (23). Yet, if Belsey’s model has long been pointed out as problematic (see page 53f), so too is Badiou’s proposal of subjectivation through the interpellation of the theatre Event – at least, as it is evoked in “Rhapsody for the Theatre”. In this treatise, Badiou distinguishes between “theatre”, in scare quotes, which provides “established meanings” and “induces a convivial satisfaction” (2008b: 198), and the Theatre, which “demands that its spectator […] attach the development of meaning to the lacunae of the play” (2008b: 199) and “interpellates the spectator at the impasse of a form of thought” [emphasis added] (2008b: 197). Needless to say, it is only the latter that is Evental and can summon the spectator to think in an “encounter with the eternal” (2008b: 230). Badiou’s distinction between a lucrative and pleasing “theatre” and the Evental Theatre is arguably too dogmatic. It divides the entire history

strates in Chapter Four, a Badiouian notion of subjectivity can be outlined on the stage precisely through the practice of silence, or through movement across the space for performance.  Bruno Bosteels’s English translation of Rhapsodie pour le théâtre preserves the term ‘representation’, as the French ‘representation’ is used in the original. From the context of its use and Badiou’s concession that this is “a word that we will put to the test at length” (b: ), it is clear that this term is unrelated to ideas of mimesis. Alberto Toscano’s translation of “Theses on Theatre” in Handbook of Inaesthetics acknowledges the French ‘representation’ and opts for the English ‘performance’ (b: ). It is in this sense that the use of ‘representation’ in Badiou’s work should be understood.

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of theatre works using unclear criteria,²⁰ among which there is the disputable claim that the spectator of convivial “theatre” belongs to an audience “marked by an identitarian sign, be it constituted by class or by opinion” (2008b: 198). Moreover, Badiou fails to explain why a “theatre” that aims to induce gratification can never be Evental. As my analysis of Crouch’s ENGLAND will argue, conviviality might interpellate negatively, by repulsion or, in Rancière’s terms, by disidentification.²¹ Badiou’s suggestion that “theatre” lacks Evental potential appears to forget or disregard the intelligence of the spectators. As Rancière reminds us, the spectators are already emancipated; they are capable of independent thought and free to interpret the work of art according to their own experience (2009b: 13). Therefore, we cannot – as Badiou does – presuppose that a convivial, commercial type of “theatre” will not provoke thought, whereas the Theatre always will. Finally, Badiou’s theories about subjectivation are appealing on yet another count – this time related to the Badiouian notion of ‘forcing’ and the importance of the ‘future anterior tense’. In Being and Event Badiou borrows the term ‘forcing’ from mathematician Paul Cohen to explain an important step in a Truth procedure. Forcing is “the operation whereby a truth changes the situation in which it is included, so as to impose or ‘force’ its recognition in a transformed version of that situation” (Hallward 135). In other words, forcing is the process by which a Truth actually becomes a discernible element of the reconfigured version of the Situation. Badiou distinguishes between ‘inclusion’ and ‘belonging’ to justify this transition. The Truth is included in a Situation, regardless of the fact that it might not be made apparent until the emergence of the Event. ‘Belonging’, on the other hand, “indicates that a multiple is counted as an element in the presentation of another multiple” [emphasis added] (2005a: 81). In order to move from the suppressed inclusion of a Truth in a Situation to its belonging to the new Situation, forcing needs to take place. Forcing therefore makes room for the materialisation of the Evental promise, so that a Truth actually belongs to an extended version of the Situation (Hallward 135). Forcing, Badiou tells us, operates through a transformation not of the Situation per se, but of its language, in particular through “the making of a statement

 Howard Barker’s differentiation between “theatre” and “the art of theatre” echoes this hierarchical dichotomy proposed by Badiou. Like Badiou, Barker considers that “theatre purports to give pleasure to many”, and suggests that “the art of theatre” instead produces anxiety () – an anxiety which Badiou expresses in terms of thought (b:  – ).  In this, Badiou’s expectations are not distant to those of Brecht, for whom a particular theatre could enlighten the spectator with the truth of the Situation and produce militant subjects. See Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator for a critique of this logic.

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that can only be verified in a future situation, one which the forcing itself helps bring about” (O’Sullivan 2009: 160). Badiou’s example of Spartacus’s revolution comes with the following illustration of the statement that the Subject goes to verify: “The slaves want to and can, through their own movement, decide to be free” (2009: 64). Regardless of its grammar, this is a statement that is implicitly written in a future anterior tense: it declares what will have been, as the Subject goes forth to verify this statement, transforming thus what can be known. This is precisely the temporality in which theatre operates: for Badiou, theatre always writes and thinks what will have been in the theatrical performance (2008b: 207), but it requires the performance to do the investigations, to verify the validity of its statements – to force its unverifiable thought into the Situation. Taking these two concepts into account, ‘forcing’ and the ‘future anterior tense’, we might argue that the character-less playtexts examined in the present project do not generate new notions of subjectivity: they write in a future anterior tense the understandings of subjectivity that are already included in our Situation despite being unintelligible in a humanist language. The staging of these works can thus be seen as part of the inquiry that verifies a statement that could be summarised thus: “There are characters and subjects other than the individuated ones”. Staging can therefore articulate the transition from a Situation where notions of subjectivity based on responsibility, agency, equality and collective practice are invisible, to another Situation in which they can be apprehended – in all, a new Situation where these notions are not included but to which they belong.

Jacques Rancière: heterology, disidentification and equality While Althusser’s legacy pervades in Butler’s and Badiou’s work, Jacques Rancière’s theory on subjectivation resolutely breaks away from the Althusserian notions of interpellation and recognition.²² Rancière clearly states in his essay “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” that subjectivation is not the process whereby the individual recognises in herself the pre-existing subject pos-

 Rancière had worked closely with Althusser, particularly around the reading group on Marx’s Capital that Althusser run at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but Rancière’s experience of the social, political and intellectual climate in France in the years leading to  motivated a shift in his political thought. After May , Rancière wrote a number of pieces expressing his discontent with Althusserian doctrine: “On the Theory of Ideology (the Politics of Althusser)”, “How to Use Lire le Capital”, and Althusser’s Lesson. For more on Rancière’s rupture with Althusser see Oliver Davis’s Jacques Rancière ( – ).

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ition with which she is interpellated (1992: 62). Neither does subjectivation mark the “assertion of an identity” (1992: 62), nor the moment of self-awareness when “some collective ethos [is] capable of finding a voice” (1999: 36). Instead, Rancière defines subjectivation as “the formation of a one that is not a self but is the relation of a self to an other” [emphasis added] (1992: 60): that is, subjectivation cannot be equated with a pre-existent and insular notion of the self, but is the formation of a bond. ²³ As I elucidate below, Rancière suggests that this is a bond based on the principle of universal equality. In short, rather than being an agentless vessel whose given identity guarantees the existing economy of power, the Rancièrean subject is collective and relational, connected by the contestation of a status quo ridden by inequality. The relational aspect of subjectivity for Rancière can perhaps be clearer if we examine his contention that subjectivation is a “heterology”, that is, “a logic of the other” (1992: 62), a logic of that which differs or dissents. Rancière views subjectivation as an emancipatory gesture that is animated by a threefold relationship with alterity. Firstly, and overwriting Althusser’s lesson, subjectivation is for Rancière “the denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy” (1992: 62). The term ‘policy’ or, as is more commonly translated, the police order warrants further clarification here. Although ‘the police’ is evocative of social control and discipline, Rancière insists that it should not be equated with “[t]he notion of a state apparatus” (1999: 29). With this, Rancière distances himself from Althusser’s classification of the police force as a Repressive State Apparatus that exerts hard power within the public domain, as well as from the Althusserian metaphorical police hailing the subject (Althusser 244). Rather, according to Rancière the police order is “the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organisation of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution” (1999: 28). In other words, the activities that are part of the police order comprise the production of consent, the management of power and the creation of channels and structures for the legitimation and allocation of this power. The police order is therefore close to what we would normally refer to as ‘politics’, a term that Rancière deploys to refer to a different set of activities. Rancière notes that “the police” is a “‘neutral’, nonpejorative” term (1999: 29), but this claim is obviously disingenuous. I will return to this later, but suffice it to say for now

 It is for this reason that the Rancièrean subject will be referred to henceforth with the pronoun ‘it’.

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that Rancière argues that the police “wrongs equality” [emphasis in original] (1992: 59) with its self-legitimising distribution of experiences of the world: The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and sayable that sees that that particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (1999: 29).

Because of Rancière’s emancipatory outlook, this wronging of equality is not described in terms of a victimisation of those whose speech is blocked as noise, and whose life experiences are not counted (1999: 39). Rather, the wronging of equality perpetrated by the police order is described by Rancière as the trigger for a process of verification of equality (1999: 39) – a process that Rancière will alternatively call ‘the subject’ and ‘politics’, as I explain below. Leaving to one side the particular ways in which the police order distributes the sensible reality and wrongs equality, it is worth returning to Rancière’s statement on the heterologous nature of subjectivation. If the police order allocates identities, roles and functions in unequal ways, subjectivation for Rancière begins with disobedience, with the rejection of the assignation of roles (1992: 62). This is a much more radical position than that advocated by Butler. Where Butler emphasises “the failure of interpellation to capture its object with its defining mark” (2000a: 157) and finds in this systematic failure a possibility for subversion, Rancière altogether disregards the value of interpellation and attributes subjectivising power to disidentification. Secondly, and further dismantling the allegorical scene of address posed by Althusser, Rancière contends that subjectivation is not the scene where the subject is addressed but the scene where the subject makes an address. For Rancière, subjectivation is “the staging of a common place”, “a polemical commonplace for the handling of a wrong and the demonstration of equality” (1992: 62). The subject emerges from action whereby equality is not asked for, but taken for granted, asserted and demonstrated. Subjectivation is also heterologous in this respect: as Rancière argues, any staging always presupposes the other of an audience, “even if that other refuses evidence or argument” (1992: 62). If the police order is essential to understanding that subjectivation entails dissent and disidentification, Rancière’s conceptualisation of equality is similarly important here. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière argues that “[e]quality and intelligence are synonymous terms” [emphasis in original] (1991: 73), yet not to be confounded with reason and will. For Rancière, “[t]he equality of intelligence is the common bond of humanity, the necessary and sufficient condition for a society of men to exist” (1991: 73). Outside his writings on education, Ran-

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cière has avoided providing a clear definition of equality, noting only that it is “not a value given in the essence of Humanity or Reason” but “a universal that must be supposed, verified, and demonstrated in each case” (1992: 60). Rancière rejects thus the subjugation of equality to notions of “the human” or “the rational animal” that have historically proved to be restrictive and therefore exclusionary. For Rancière, equality cannot be considered a right to be inferred from any human essence, or to be bestowed legally, but a principle that is to be presupposed always (2004b: 52). In Rancière’s words: “[e]quality is a presupposition, an initial axiom”, not a goal (2007: 223).²⁴ The presupposition of universal equality is posited thus as the grounding and genesis of any political gesture, rather than its horizon. If the police order arranges personal and social existence in unequal ways, the certainty that we are all equal warrants action to remedy the wronging of equality. Finally, Rancière’s contention that subjectivation is heterologous is based on the fact that it involves an “impossible identification” with the other, “an identification that cannot be embodied by he or she who utters it” (1992: 61). Rancière illustrates this point with a clarifying personal example: [F]or my generation politics in France relied on an impossible identification – an identification with the bodies of the Algerians beaten to death and thrown into the Seine by the French police, in the name of the French people, in October 1961. We could not identify with those Algerians, but we could question our identification with the “French people” in whose name they had been murdered. That is to say, we could act as political subjects in the interval or the gap between two identities, neither of which we could assume. [emphasis in original] (1992: 61)

Rancière offers the possibility of thinking about the subject as collective and transcending identity – namely, as a heterogeneous community that is sustained by the demonstration of equality, rather than by identity-based claims that can be exclusionary or simply false. While we cannot claim that ‘we are all Algerian’, we can declare that we are all equal, and take action to deal with the existence of inequality. Taking into account this threefold ‘logic of the other’, we can summarise that the subject for Rancière emerges from the repudiation of any interpellative call, from the impossibility of identifying with any existing identities, and from active management of a wronging of equality.  Rancière’s reluctance to justify the universality of equality in terms of its bearers is not dissimilar from the contentions of queer theory, which also operates under the influence of disidentification and according to an unconditional principle of equality. See, for example, Oliver Davis’s article “Rancière and Queer Theory: On Irritable Attachment”.

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A community of interruptions without a common identity The Rancièrean subject is therefore constituted out of disidentificatory practices and a radical verification of universal equality. But who or what is this subject? According to Rancière, the effect of disidentification and the staging of equality is “the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part” (1999: 36). In other words, when the existing police order is cracked in the name of equality, the previous allocation of identities, and of ways of doing and being, can no longer hold. The subject position that emerges from an egalitarian and dissenting gesture is for this reason described by Rancière as “an outsider or, more, an in-between”, “a crossing of identities” [emphasis in original] (1992: 61). The Rancièrean subject is an outsider subject because it had no existence in the world as arranged by the police order. It is a crossing of identities because anybody who aims to verify universal equality rather than asserting a particular identity can be part of this subject position. It is a subject comprised of anybody who actively interrupts the current order to demonstrate that we are all equal. The Rancièrean subject therefore exceeds the individual. However, this is not to say that it is a communal subject, at least not in the sense of what Rancière calls a community of “inter-esse” – i. e. it is based neither on a common interest nor in the commonality of being-among (1999: 137).²⁵ The subject for Rancière is “not reducible to social groups or identities”, but forms “collectives of enunciation and demonstration surplus to the count of social groups” (2004a: 6). Alongside this excessive quality, if the Rancièrean subject can be considered a collective or community, this must be “a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself” (1999: 137). This dislodgement of politics from identity is a central premise in Rancière’s work, and perhaps one that is difficult to understand in terms of social class, or social movements. This is however the focus of his monograph The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, which Rancière illustrates succinctly in the afterword to the much-delayed English translation of The Philosopher and His Poor. In this afterword, Rancière looks back at The

 Here, Rancière is playing with the Latin expression ‘inter homines esse [being among men]’, extracting the ideas of ‘interesse [interest]’ and ‘inter-esse [being-among]’ to draw relations between interests and the formulation of identities.

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Nights of Labor and explains that “working-class values” did not emerge from ideology or from a sense of identity. Rather, Rancière argues, [i]t was a rupture in the order of things that founded these “values”, a rupture in the traditional division [partage] assigning the privilege of thought to some and the tasks of production to others. The French workers who, in the nineteenth century, created newspapers or associations, wrote poems, or joined utopian groups, were claiming the status of fully speaking and thinking beings. At the birth of the “workers’ movement”, there was thus neither the “importation” of scientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation of the worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appropriate the “night” of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual. [emphasis added] (2007: 219)

In other words, the collective disruption of legitimate roles, times, thoughts and visions on the basis of universal equality is what gives the subject its porous features, and not a pre-existing sense of identity. As such, “subjects do not have consistent bodies” (1999: 89), Rancière argues; their composition is heterogeneous and their permanence is contingent on their actions; “they are fluctuating performers who have their moments, places, occurrences” (1999: 89).

The subject and/as politics: the redistribution of the sensible To recapitulate, for Rancière the subject is relational, collective, contingent, fractured, never centred on identity, and always the agent of an emancipatory political gesture grounded on the principle of universal equality. Before considering the significance of Rancière’s theories for current debates on character and subjectivity in theatre studies, I want to bring this exploration of Rancière’s theory of the subject to a close by focusing on two concepts that are intimately linked to subjectivation: the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and ‘politics’. Rancière’s original expression ‘le partage du sensible’ hinges on the two meanings of ‘partage’, one of which is lost in the English translation. ‘Partage’ can be understood in the sense of division, partition and classification, but also as participation in a common activity (James 118). On the other hand, ‘the sensible’ refers to that which is perceptible through the senses – which, of course, is already determined by pre-set horizons of perceptibility. Taking these meanings on board, we could begin to define the distribution of the sensible by saying that it is an implicit norm that governs what can be perceived, what can be seen or heard, what can be said, thought or done, by whom, when and where. This implicit norm governing what is perceptible operates, first, by dividing the world into parts, a division that is “based on a distribution of spaces, times and

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forms of activity” (2004b: 12). Rancière argues that this division “determines the very manner to how something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution” (2004b: 12). The distribution of the sensible, therefore, not only establishes what parts can be perceived, but also what their participation in the sensible order is. Furthermore, those who are given no part in the division [‘les sens part’] are excluded from participation and, suitably, from perceptibility. Their ‘dissensus’ has to be understood as their dissent from the current distribution of the sensible, but also as their dis-sensus, their falling out of the frames of sensory perceptibility (Panagia 96). Returning to the notion of the police order, Rancière describes the police mode of “being-together” as based on the assumption that “it gives to each the part that is his due according to the evidence of what he is” (1999: 27), when in fact it violates the principle of “equality of anyone and everyone” (1999: 17). Democracy, for example, is for Rancière illustrative of the police order (2006: 52): it operates under the premise that society is effectively composed of groups that are characterised for what they do, make, say and think, and the supposition that its apparatus comprehensively mirrors, articulates and governs the voices of these identifiable parts that make the social whole. However, the social whole is composed of parts that are already unaccounted, invisible and unintelligible under its distribution of the sensible; arguably, then, the police order wrongs the universal principle that we are all equal. In Rancière’s thought, politics proper takes place when the unjust distribution of the sensible under the police order is called into question and universal equality is verified. In short, politics for Rancière is exclusively “the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality” (1999: 30). Taking into account Rancière’s definition of subjectivation as the emergence of a subject from the disavowal of given identities, the impossibility of identifying with any part, and the necessity to demonstrate universal equality, it now becomes apparent that subjectivation is tantamount to politics for Rancière. The Rancièrean subject is always-already political. Because it is not accounted for in the police distribution of the sensible, Rancière argues, the subject is indeed “supernumerary […] in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society” (2004b: 51). Importantly, however, the subject does not merely make a (political) scene, interrupting the self-evident partition of the world and its regimes of perceptibility and participation. Rancière contends that the subject also reconfigures the sensible, changing the implicit laws of perception and participation (Panagia 100) – in a similar way to how the Badiouian

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Subject reconfigures the Situation, so that the Truth of the Event is not simply included in the Situation but actually belongs to it.

“The staging of a common place”: Rancière and the theatre Similarly to Badiou’s theories, albeit without the necessary irruption of an Event, Rancière’s account of subjectivation also offers theatre studies an understanding of subjectivity that transcends ideas of individuality, identity and ideological subjection. Rancière’s work can thus help us widen the notions of subjectivity that are available for characterisation within a theatre work. It also suggests that character – like the subject – can be thought of beyond the boundaries of the individual persona/performer, and understood in terms of relations and practices. This is a momentous contribution, as it can theoretically ground the non-iconic and non-humanist readings of character/performer, such as those proposed by William Gruber and Gerda Poschmann (see pages 31– 33, 37– 41). Furthermore, Rancière’s theory of subjectivation can help us reconsider how a work might be politically salient because of the epistemological effects of its characterisation, rather than its themes. More specifically, theatre might bring into the field of perception collective subjects that have otherwise no place in an identity-based, individualistic distribution of the sensible. In this regard, Rancière’s thought enables us to appreciate that the political intervention of a theatre piece might lie in its interruption and reconfiguration of “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience” (2004b: 13). This is precisely what Rancière calls the ‘aesthetics of politics’. Rancière’s postulation of the aesthetics of politics is rooted in the belief that politics perceptibly transforms what is given as self-evident facts. Crucially, Rancière argues, art can also disrupt the ordinary forms of sensory experience, and materially rearrange the field of possible subjects and actions (2004b: 39). Therefore, according to Rancière, it is not the political commitment of the artist producing “politicized art” (2004b: 60), or the “messages and sentiments it [art] conveys concerning the state of the world” (2009a: 23) that make art political. Rather, the ‘politics of aesthetics’ refers to art’s ability to establish “modes of narration or new forms of visibility” that can in turn “enter into politics’ own field of aesthetic possibilities” (2004b: 65). Following Rancière’s definition of the aesthetic aspects of politics and the political force of aesthetics, character-less plays can be understood as political in their rearrangement of what is presented to sense experience as subjects, both to the performers who have to work with the text and to the spectators.

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Furthermore, Rancière’s account of subjectivation also offers a new direction to rethink the encounter of subjectivities within the performance event itself, in particular the status of the audience. Given that Rancière considers subjectivation to be a repudiation of a given identity, his theories also compel us to think about theatre as a non-hierarchical encounter, as an encounter between equals. In other words, and against the pseudo-Althusserian scenes envisioned by Belsey and Badiou, a work might interpellate the audience into a subject position, but it does not follow that the audience will recognise itself in it. As I illustrate in the final chapter of this book, this potential for a repudiation of the identity given to an audience is precisely what Tim Crouch explores in his 2007 piece, ENGLAND. While this egalitarian understanding of the spectator can be extrapolated from his theory of subjectivation, this is explicitly vindicated in Rancière’s oftcited The Emancipated Spectator. Here, Rancière attempts to challenge and reconfigure the police order of the theatrical scene, arguing against the equation of a theatre’s audience with “community, gaze and passivity, exteriority and separation, mediation and simulacrum” (2009b: 7), and its opposition to theatrical performance as image, appearance, activity, self-ownership and knowledge. Rancière argues here that these binaries presuppose “an a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions” (2009b: 12): they establish a gulf between the allegedly passive and uncritical mass of the audience, and the artist’s transferable knowledge. As Rancière notes, this prejudiced distribution of roles fails to acknowledge that audiences are “both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them” (2009b: 13), “plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them” (2009b: 16). It is important to emphasise that Rancière does not suggest that theatre should change in order to trigger the spectator’s emancipation, as has wrongly been implied. For example, following a quote of Rancière’s dictum that “[e]mancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting” (2009b: 13), Steve Bottoms suggests that “[Tim] Crouch, similarly, is concerned with maximising the possibility of personal responses to – rather than herdlike acceptance of – the enacted events” (2011b: 454). Crouch’s concerns might stem from the Rancièrean conviction that the spectator is always-already intellectually active, as the theatre-maker is indeed familiar with Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator (Crouch 2011c). Yet, Bottoms’s line of argumentation suggests that there can be such a thing as a ‘herd-like acceptance’ of the theatrical work of art. Such a derogatory understanding of spectatorship is, precisely, what Rancière attempts to dispel when he argues for the intellectual work of interpretation that the spectator always conducts when viewing. Bottom’s article furthermore suggests that the specta-

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tors’ interpretive power is granted by the peculiar openness that characterises Crouch’s work: “By minimising staging apparatus”, Bottoms argues, “Crouch opens up the possibility for audience members to make circumstantial interpretations of their own. This is part and parcel of his concern to individualise spectatorial response – to authorise his audience” [emphasis added] (2011b: 448). This alleged benevolence or permission is, however, problematic with the Rancièrean stance regarding the already-existing autonomy and intellectual activity of the spectator. On the contrary, Rancière vindicates a re-conceptualisation of spectatorship grounded on the universal principle of equality and the repudiation of an allocated role – just like the notion of the subject that his thought offers to character studies.

Conclusion Following my strategic redefinition of character as any figuration of subjectivity in a theatre text or performance, this chapter has explored four theoretical alternatives to the liberal-humanist notion of the subject. The rationale behind this inquiry is that by furthering our knowledge of contemporary accounts of subjectivity we can begin to evacuate the category of theatrical character from its received understanding as a recognisable, discrete, autonomous and self-same entity. In short, it can help us divorce the notion of character from a compulsory engagement with liberal-humanist subjectivity. As Chapter One has demonstrated, this is a necessary task for a number of reasons. First, such an understanding of theatrical character is not only prescriptive, but also inconsistently used in theatre studies. Also, research on theatrical character has indeed testified to the current, widespread problematisation of the liberal-humanist subject and its theatrical fashioning; however, the links between current formal experimentation with character and emergent conceptions of subjectivity in our historical conjuncture have remained unexplored. By examining the theories of subjectivation put forward by Althusser, Butler, Badiou and Rancière, this chapter has begun to investigate a range of contemporary understandings of subjectivity that can contribute to updating and diversifying the notions of the subject that we understand theatrical character to outline. Furthermore, this chapter’s examination of subjectivation paves the way towards a politicised renewal of the debate on character. Highlighting how the subject is understood by these thinkers as enmeshed in questions of power, ideology, perceptibility, resistance and emancipation suggests that character studies should not only notate the aesthetic possibilities of character on the page and the stage, but also the political issues surrounding the question of subjectivity, its appearance and sustainability.

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To this end, this chapter has begun by considering the work of two thinkers that focus on the subject as a discrete, finite life – starting with Althusser’s influential and much disputed interpellative theory, and following it with Butler’s work on performativity. I have argued that theatre works can contribute to the body of existing theoretical criticisms of Althusser’s account of interpellation and recognition. My analysis has suggested that the Althusserian theory of subjectivation must be approached with caution in theatre studies: alongside intrinsically problematic aspects, we must take into account how a text or performance may avoid hailing the subjects of the fiction with a specific social position, and that the readers/spectators play a role in validating the subject positions offered by a piece. Theatre’s resistance to the Althusserian scheme can be considered a politically-motivated expression of dissent, an argument that I will present at length when examining the work of Kane and Thomas in the next chapter. Butler’s renegotiation of the Althusserian notions of interpellation and recognition offers a fertile ground for the study of theatrical character and subjectivity. Butler contends that the formation of the subject depends on the performative iteration of normative regulations that inform the subject’s personal sense of selfhood, their desire and their body, as well as the perceptibility and social acceptability of these for others. Butler also updates the Althusserian notions of interpellation and recognition in ways that are particularly relevant for theatre as a place where we encounter and perhaps reformulate subjectivity. According to Butler, interpellation is not always explicit or consciously executed: our bodies and silences have the power to interpellate others into subject positions. Furthermore, the recognition of one’s subject position is posed in Butler’s work as not only internal, as Althusser has it, but also external, social. Thus, Butler’s theories of subjectivation offer character studies the possibility of examining what normative subject positions may be performatively avowed, subverted and rejected in and through a theatre text or performance. Also, Butler’s work enables theatre scholars to question whether our own preconceptions about subjectivity and its theatrical fashioning violently dismiss or erase nonhegemonic understandings and experiences of the subject. This chapter has also examined two theories that view the subject not as a finite, human life but as a collective – a collective that is unmoored from identity politics, and an agent of emancipatory, egalitarian politics. On the one hand, Badiou defines the militant Subject as a local and finite practice that, acknowledging an Event, forces the production of an egalitarian Present, point by point. Badiou also notes the existence of other Subjects, who are also collective and also not based on identity, who are induced by practices that oppose or nullify the militancy of the faithful Subject. On the other hand, Rancière proposes that the subject is a political community of interruptions: a heterogeneous col-

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lective that emerges from the repudiation of allocated and available identities, and that sets out to disrupt and reconfigure the distributions of spaces, times and forms of activity on the basis of the principle of universal equality. These two notions of subjectivity can further contribute to disarming the expectation that the subject – and, therefore, the related notion of character – only exists as it is conceptualised by liberal humanism. Badiou’s understanding of theatre as an Evental art form and Rancière’s arguments about the politics of aesthetics (i. e. the claim that art’s ability to interrupt purportedly self-evident facts is political) should also compel us to reconsider the sort of political interventions that theatre can make. As this book suggests, theatre’s fashioning of subjectivity through characters that avoid identity and individuality can be understood as an interruption and reconfiguration of the hegemonic ‘count’ of the world, a count that operates on the basis of individuality and identity. Incorporating the work of Butler, Badiou and Rancière into theatrical considerations of character and subjectivity also entails a methodological shift. By posing the subject as a contingent category, emerging from performative citations of norms (Butler), praxis in relation to an Event and to the present (Badiou) and a relation established on the basis of equality (Rancière), these theories evince that we can no longer think about the subject exclusively as an individual. Given the repeated association between character and subjectivity, these theories suggest that character might too be configured in ways that exceed the boundaries of the individuated speaker on the page, or the body of the performer on the stage. The production of a character might therefore involve several bodies – or none. Character, for example, might be created through a particular spatial practice. It might appear through specific relations between elements on the page or the stage, and disappear if these relations are brought to an end. In sum, demonstrating that the subject can be conceived as being other than an individual suggests that character can too be formulated in non-individuated terms. In the next chapter, I bring these ideas together for my examination of three case studies that focus on finite lives: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, and Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue. I argue that these playtexts outline subjects whose lives and bodies are finite, but resist notions of identity, individuality and intelligibility attributed to the notion of a person. I describe the textual characters in these works as either non-individuated (uncountable entities that directly reject the regulatory norms that confer individuality) or dividuated (countable subjects that challenge the supposed unity, self-sameness and autonomy of individuality by bringing attention to fragmentation, relationality and hybridity). In each case, this resistance to individuality and identity is accompanied by a redefinition of subjectivity with significant ethical and political implications.

3 Singular Subjectivities Let us say we for all being, that is, for every being, for all beings one by one, each time in the singular of their essential plural. − Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural [emphasis in original] (3) [W]hat kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? − Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (22)

The previous two chapters have examined the differences in historical and cultural understandings of character and its crises, as well as a number of politically-inflected theories of subjectivity beyond the liberal-humanist paradigm. With this, I have sought to demonstrate, first, that character can be best understood as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity, as this is the common thread in competing views about this notion. Secondly, I have presented and assessed a number of theories that do not conceive the subject as a unitary, autonomous, intelligible or rational entity. This has led me to suggest that theatre can also represent, evoke or entice subjectivities beyond the tenets of liberal humanism, and beyond an obligatory equation with the body of the performer. Finally, I have begun to argue that the political preoccupations and strategies of a theatre piece may be found in its configuration of character. In other words, widening the frames of apprehension of human life, and indicating the possibility of resistance to and emancipation from systems that support inequality, are in and of themselves politically significant tasks that theatre can undertake through characterisation. In order to demonstrate these claims, the present chapter examines three plays that share very similar aesthetics on the page, albeit with different effects with regards to their elucidation of what I call ‘singular subjectivities’. By referring to ‘singular subjectivities’, my study zooms in to the level where the tangible boundaries set by physical matter, the psychic sense of the self, and the non-transferable experience of finitude are considered. In other words, the phrase ‘singular subjectivities’ is used hereafter in lieu of what would popularly be called ‘a person’ or ‘an individual’. Unlike these terms, however, the phrase ‘singular subjectivities’ does not necessarily entail the status of personhood, or the uniqueness, homogeneity and indivisibility normally attached to individuality. Singular subjects may well be experienced and encountered as split or di-

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viduated,¹ or eschewing any sense of individuality altogether. Likewise, their admission into the realm of ‘personhood’ might have been denied due to normative ideas of subjectivity and abjection. Thus, I understand the term ‘singular subjectivities’ as a heterogeneous category, through which I acknowledge that human life is finite, that the body has tangible contours, and that these are non-transferable. Furthermore, my use of the plural grammatical number in this chapter’s title – ‘subjectivities’ – is meant to activate two meanings. On the one hand, ‘subjectivities’ evokes the existence of multiplicity within the finite subject. Put differently, it already hints to a plurality within the singular – a notion that in the realm of philosophy has been examined by Judith Butler’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories, amongst others. On the other hand, the term acknowledges that the notions of discrete human lives are manifold, and may range from the humanist conceptualisation that has come to be implicitly normative in our popular understanding of the term ‘subject’, to other, counter-hegemonic views. In order to explore how contemporary British character-less drama has contributed to the proliferation of notions of singular subjectivities, this chapter focuses on three case studies: Sarah Kane’s Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (1999), as well as Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue (2004). The first section attempts to offer an alternative to the existing, contradictory discourses on character and subjectivity in Kane’s work by focusing on how a queer, non-individuated subject is produced on the page and the stage. Through an examination of Stone City Blue, the second section dislocates the study of Thomas’s work, that is, suspends momentarily his well-documented concern with the Welsh condition, and highlights his otherwise obfuscated, career-long interest in subjectivity. Considering these plays together highlights the differences in their approaches to character and subjectivity, regardless of the similarities between the two scripts.

 My particular use of the terms ‘dividuation’, ‘dividual’ and ‘dividuated’ aims to explore the way the subject might be understood as split and thus in opposition to the notion of the individual as unified, indivisible and unique (see Glossary, page ). ‘Dividuated’, ‘dividuation’ and ‘the dividual’ have currency in French and francophone-influenced thinkers, but the contexts and implications of their use vary. See for example Deleuze () and Critchley (: ).

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A performativity of refusal: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis Framing the debate: individual “mindscapes”, problematic cartographies Sarah Kane’s oeuvre has been unanimously interpreted as an exploration of the limits of human experience, following from the playwright’s dramatic “interest in expressing extreme states of being” (Wallace 2006: 193).² Extreme and self debilitating suffering in the dramatic fiction, alongside the progressive disappearance of fictional identity markers in her work, has grounded the widespread consensus that character, selfhood and subjectivity are pivotal to Kane’s dramaturgy. Early in the development of Kane studies, Graham Saunders expressed this by bringing attention to the “introspective” force that had structured Kane’s work since Cleansed, and that culminated in the intense “individual mindscapes” of 4.48 Psychosis (2002a: 128). In further elaborations, however, Saunders has argued for the progressive “dissipation of the self” and “absence of character” in the same three plays (2003: 104). The purported disappearance of character and identity in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis has become almost a cliché among scholars (see page 92), while the presence of totalising “mindscapes” (Saunders 2002a: 128) or “inner states” (Tönnies 67) has also been asserted. Although not mutually exclusive per se, these two arguments suggest the existence of an aporia that has been perpetuated at the heart of Kane’s studies: namely, that the subject is perceived as simultaneously vanishing and intensely present.³ As this section will argue, it is neither subjectivity nor character but selfhood and its modes of representation that disappear from these plays.⁴ It is only recently that attempts have been made to position the figuration of subjectivity in Kane’s work. A major contribution is the compilation of chapters on “Subjectivity, Responsibility and Representation” within the recent collection Sarah Kane in Context (2010), edited by Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders. Surprisingly, these chapters avoid a clear formulation of what notion of the sub Some of the arguments I develop here originate in an earlier, shorter article. See Delgado-García’s “Subversion, Refusal, and Contingency: The Transgression of Liberal-Humanist Subjectivity and Characterization in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Crave and . Psychosis”.  Karoline Gritzner’s Adornian-Lacanian framework offers a less dichotomous approach. For Gritzner, the subject in Crave and . Psychosis seems “on the verge of disappearance” because his or her consciousness of the fragmented self “turns the experience of identity into an experience of impossibility and negativity” (: ). Elsewhere, Gritzner has argued that “it would be misleading to assume that […] subjectivity is erased within the theatrical space” (: ).  For more on the distinction between ‘selfhood’ and ‘subjectivity’, see Glossary, pages  –  above. The debate has shifted from using the terms ‘self’ and ‘selfhood’ to ‘subjectivity’.

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ject is outlined in Kane’s work, as subjectivity is often considered tangentially, in relation to other aspects such as voice, time, space and cruelty (103 – 208). Among these chapters, only Julie Waddington’s analysis focuses exclusively on subjectivity, or rather on what she calls “[p]osthumanist identities” (139). Waddington’s contribution rightly notes that Kane moves away from identity politics (142), and that her “experimentation with character […] signals a challenge to humanist principles of subjectivity by destabilising the idea of the ‘I’-centred subject” (145). However, and somewhat paradoxically, Waddington goes on to ground this post-humanist subjectivity in the theories of one of the ideological cornerstones of humanism: Descartes. Waddington proposes that the subjects in Kane’s plays are caught in a futile attempt to overcome the foundational Cartesian split between mind and body (143 – 46), and claims that “a society funded on the principle of the individual subject is, at the same time, one which is based on the violent splitting of that subject” (143).⁵ As for character, Waddington refers to its “dissolution” (145), a term that suggests the erosion of its boundaries and change in its form, although not necessarily its absence. Waddington’s contribution directly addresses the underlying view of subjectivity in the collection Sarah Kane in Context. Earlier in the volume, Saunders similarly argues that Kane’s “growing preoccupation with nihilism” stems from her troubled stance regarding “Cartesian models of selfhood” (2010: 72, 71). For Saunders, the Cartesian division between mind and body is a source of anxiety in 4.48 Psychosis, which is only overcome in the play through suicide (2010: 71– 72). The co-editor of the collection, De Vos, offers a less biographicallyinflected elucidation of the “reunification of the split subject” (2010: 131) in 4.48 Psychosis, but one that is nonetheless steeped in Cartesian discourse. According to De Vos, the reunification of the split subject is sought not thematically but aesthetically, through “the artistic endeavour to abolish representation in favour of presentation” (2010: 129). Elsewhere, De Vos’s work has continued to elaborate on the premise for this reunification: “[t]he persona in 4.48 Psychosis experiences the gap between body and soul, the division that marks her [sic] as a human subject” [emphasis added] (2011: 141).⁶

 For an alternative view of humanism in Kane’s work see Louise LePage’s “Rethinking Sarah Kane’s Characters: A Human(ist) Form and Politics”.  De Vos uses the feminine form ‘her’ in relation to the ‘persona’ in . Psychosis, even though he states that “we do not know whether it is a woman or a man speaking” (: ). This is perhaps a heteronormative reaction to the reference to a masculine lover in . Psychosis (), an unwittingly biographical reading of the play, an inference from the numerous stagings with a female lead actor, or an attempt to counterbalance the universalising use of masculine pro-

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I have a number of misgivings about a Cartesian reading of subjectivity in Kane’s work. As I argue below, fragmentation is indeed characteristic of the subject positions presented by Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. However, subsuming this fragmentation into the Cartesian scheme is problematic for at least three reasons. Firstly, De Vos’s underlying assumption that the split between mind and body is what marks the human as human is theoretically anachronistic. The Cartesian model for subjectivity has been extensively critiqued, and there is a plethora of existing alternatives to it – a situation that warrants approaching the Cartesian paradigm with more caution than that exhibited in the edited collection. Claiming that the Cartesian split between mind and body is what marks us as human turns a blind eye to both these criticisms and alternatives.⁷ Secondly, the assumption that the subjective fragmentation in Kane’s plays is Cartesian is also insensitive to the problematic relationship between the Cartesian cogito and psychic life. By establishing self-reflexivity and rationality as the premises of subjectivity, Descartes banishes madness and unconsciousness from the domain of subjectivity. Those “whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapours of melancholia […] are insane”, Descartes argues, “and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself” (1984: 13). The script of 4.48 Psychosis precisely notes the effects of Cartesian rationalism, how a subject that does not locate herself in the realm of Cartesian rationality is destined to abjection: “We are anathema / the pariahs of reason” (228). The play focuses extensively on the expression of irrationality. Therefore, Waddington, Saunders and De Vos simultaneously understand subjectivity in 4.48 Psychosis as being Cartesian (i. e. split in the image of Descartes’s distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa, mind and body) but also, paradoxically, caught in the non-rational experience that is excluded from the Cartesian paradigm (i. e. the experience of psychic disintegration, psychosis). Thirdly, the Cartesian priority given to the mind has resulted in critics’ neglect of the important role that the body plays in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. The subject positions in these two works are so rooted in a relation with bodily matter that they can hardly be subsumed under Descartes’s rejection of corporeality.

nouns. The script does not posit the ubiquitous first person in gendered terms, and there are numerous references to discomfort with the given body morphology ().  A common critique is that “the neutrality of the Cartesian cogito is false and conceals male primacy (on account of its abstract-universal character, etc.)” (Žižek : ). The Western tradition has alternatives to the Cartesian subject contemporary to Descartes, for example in Spinoza’s Ethics. Beyond Spinoza, “other concepts of transindividuality” have been identified in modern philosophy: “not only Leibniz and Hegel (with some qualification), but also Freud and Marx” (Balibar : ). See also Glossary, page .

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Descartes concludes: “I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks” and “not that structure of limbs which is called a human body” (1984: 18). However, the problem exposed in 4.48 Psychosis is that the body assigned at birth is experienced as “alien” and “wrong” (214– 215), and therefore “mind and body are not just separated but unrelated” (Mirzoeff 14). Thus, and contrary to the Cartesian readings of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, I would contend that it is not simply the split between body and mind that Kane is expressing here, but the subjective experience of exceeding the heternormative regulatory ideals regarding gender identity and body morphology. In this respect, Kane’s politics stem from intimating that, from a heteronormative perspective, the subject can have an unintelligible or undefined flesh, and an unexpected relationship between mind and body. Thus, it is not “a politics of the soul” (Kritzer 38) that we see in her work, or at least not exclusively. It is a politics of queer bodies and subjects too. Contrary to these Cartesian interventions, an incipient line of inquiry has begun to compare Artaud’s work to Kane’s, with tangential observations about subjectivity. For Clare Wallace, Kane’s preoccupation with “extreme states of being” and her “focus upon the experiential” (2006: 193, 192) offers points of connection with Artaud’s work; Wallace contends that Kane shared a “pronounced interest in the status of the self and the unconscious” with Artaud, although Kane gave this interest a contemporary and secular theatrical framing (2006: 193). De Vos has also noted that both Artaud and Kane were “[i]nimical to individuality and identity” (2011: 138), although he has not elaborated upon what alternative subjective positions either practitioner put forward in their work. Whilst a detailed comparison between Artaud and Kane escapes the remit of this book, I would suggest that Kane’s connection to Artaud in relation to subjectivity also stems from the requests both practitioners made of theatre as a site that eschews representation. Methodologically, most of the work on character and subjectivity in Sarah Kane studies is eminently text-based, and the effect that the bodies of the performers may have on the plays’ fragmented subjectivities has been neglected. When the event of the performance is considered, authority is still conferred to the script. For example, Emilie Morin writes about 4.48 Psychosis and works of similar aesthetics: “the impersonal player merely executes a self-governing piece” [emphasis added] (77). The argument about impersonal execution can be made on the basis of the lack of individuation in the scripts, and in specific performances, but it is certainly not the only possibly outcome of production. The scholarly engagement with character and subjectivity in Kane’s work has therefore commented on character/subject disappearance within or into psychological ‘mindscapes’, has approached subjective fragmentation from a problematic Cartesian stance, and has widely dismissed the question of how these

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elements work on the stage. Aiming to overcome these problems, in the two sections that follow I examine the processes whereby a notion of singular subjectivity is figured in the scripts and performances of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, and how this has been negotiated to different effect across productions.

Crave and 4.48 Psychosis on the page A central argument regarding both Crave and 4.48 Psychosis is that they are somehow devoid of characters. In one of the first scholarly articles to be published on Kane, Ken Urban suggests a discomfort with naming Crave’s speakers as characters: “while not characters per se, [they] have clear genders and ages” (43). Writing about Crave, Eckart Voigts-Virchow also refers to the “dissolution of characters” (211). While Saunders does not directly say that there are no characters in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, this contention nonetheless finds its way into his first monograph on Kane, “Love Me or Kill Me”: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of the Extremes. In it, for example, Phyllis Nagy argues that “[a]s we move through her [Kane’s] work […] we begin to find an absence of character” (qtd. in Saunders, 2002b: 104). Similarly, director James Macdonald suggests that Crave made a move towards “abstraction of character” that was developed even further in 4.48 Psychosis (qtd. in Saunders 2002b: 121). Elsewhere, Saunders has contended that Crave and 4.48 Psychosis “largely dispensed with formal notions of character and narrative” (2002a: 128). Following the same line, Selina Busby and Stephen Farrier argue that in 4.48 Psychosis “there are no wellrounded characters, in fact, there are no characters” (155). Ehren Fordyce has similarly described 4.48 Psychosis in terms of its “lack of plot, character, setting and disembodied voice(s)” (103), and Robert I. Lublin eschews altogether the label ‘character’ when writing about 4.48 Psychosis, opting instead for “the speaking subject” (124). My first claim is therefore that the scripts for Crave and 4.48 Psychosis do contain characters, and that subjectivity does not vacate their pages even if it does not appear in the form of an individual. In the case of Crave, the lines spoken by C, M, B and A evoke recognisable emotions, quotidian activities, bodily functions and remnants of a socially-shared cultural memory.⁸ From M’s fear of ageing in isolation and poverty – “I don’t want to be living in a bedsit at sixty,

 Although it is common practice to list Crave’s speakers A, B, C and M, I am maintaining the rather awkward enumeration offered in the script in an attempt to remain faithful to its resistance to indexing its speakers either alphabetically or in order of appearance.

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too scared to turn the heater on because I can’t pay the bill” (165) – to A’s passionate lover’s discourse (169 – 70), to the reference to the famously photographed Vietnamese girl whose “entire existence [is] given meaning and permanence in the thirty seconds she fled from her village, skin melting, mouth open” (180), the text undoubtedly captures and expresses experiences related to contemporary life, albeit in a fragmentary manner. Similarly, the script of 4.48 Psychosis offers glimpses of anonymous agonising subject(s) in a tenuously unfurled fictional universe. The fact that the plays succeed at fictionally sketching something about the experience of human suffering already questions the conjecture that Crave and 4.48 Psychosis are in fact devoid of any characters. My contention is, rather, that these plays demonstrate the resilience of character and subjectivity in theatre, since a particular understanding of the human subject can still continue to be apprehended through, and in spite of, the unmarked playtexts and their “bewildered fragments” (Kane 2001a: 210). In short, I will argue that there is character in these scripts – only indefinite and uncountable. Following my premise that theatrical character is an elastic onto-aesthetic category through which theatre figures and encounters subjectivity, I want to argue that what we find in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis can perhaps be better expressed by borrowing Badiou’s terminology in his work about ontology. Badiou argues that the apparent oneness and consistency of being is merely the result of operations of counting-as-one; yet ontology, he insists, is pure and inconsistent multiplicity (2005a: 24– 25). Kane’s approach to characterisation in the script could be described similarly as rejecting the count-as-one of individuality. This enables the scripts to present the being of singular subjectivity as inconsistent, hybrid and fluid. There are three main strategies deployed in the scripts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis in order to create such non-individuated characters: firstly, the negation of an a priori identification of the plays’ speakers; secondly, the instability generated by Crave’s faux dialogue and 4.48 Psychosis’s uninterrupted and unattributed speech; and, finally, the overt challenge to heteronormative definitions and alignments of body, gender and desire. These strategies should be regarded as characterising devices in their own right, as they are the theatrical means by which singular subjectivities are outlined on the page. While these operations offer resistance against static and intelligible categorisations of the subject, they must also be seen as constructive processes that textually notate and vindicate the existence of queer subject positions.

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Refusing to interpellate the subject The first characterising device in these scripts is their twofold resistance to interpellating the speakers as individuated beings. As Denise Riley argues in “Your Name Which Isn’t Yours”, one of “the unflagging paradoxes of ‘identity’ [is] that what individuates you”, that is, your given name in Riley’s account, “is a ready-made badge pinned onto you by someone or something else”: it is “sheer ‘extimacy’” (115).⁹ A first name might offer – and impose – particular expectations in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, social position or even faith. However, both Crave and 4.48 Psychosis tactically eschew bestowing an a priori identity on the subjects they outline. In the playtext for Crave, it is specified that the four “characters” (154) are C, M, B and A. These alphabetical signs enable a clear attribution of the lines, whilst obfuscating the identity of their speakers. Following the playwright’s suggestion that A could stand for Author, Actor and Abuser; B for Boy, C for Child, and M for Mother (Saunders 2002b: 104), however, scholars have been inclined to read these alphabetic tags as traces of otherwise fully-fleshed, comprehensible subjects enmeshed in understandable plots (Cohn 47; Voigts-Virchow 210; Urban 43). Aleks Sierz has warned that this “rationalist approach can attempt to work it out as a coherent play” (2001a: 118), and I also suspect that the reliance on authorial intention to reveal and fix the identity of fictional characters is problematic, inasmuch as it contravenes the script’s avowal of obscurity and polysemy with regards to character. As the following two sections argue, there is no textual evidence to support a stable, individuated and gendered characterisation of the speakers in Crave’s playtext, even though this might change in performance. As such, perhaps we should simply note that Crave undermines the illusion of individuality on a foundational level by offering alphabetic labels that are not only inconclusive but also open to re-significations. In 4.48 Psychosis, conventional autonomous, individuated character on the page is firstly foreclosed by the total absence of dramatis personae. The script fully abandons the conventional attribution of speech to a limited number of speakers, and is composed instead of free-floating text divided into a series of fragments. The formatting of six of them evokes dialogue, as their lines are pre-

 Coined by Jacques Lacan, the neologism ‘extimité [extimacy]’ blends ‘exteriority’ and ‘intimacy’, problematising the supposed division between exterior and interior in the context of the subject. ‘Extimacy’ therefore suggests that “the unconscious is not a purely interior psychic system but an intersubjective structure”, where the other is at the heart of what we consider our most intimate self, and thus, that “the centre of the subject is outside; the subject is ex-centric” (Evans ).

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ceded by a dash; however, no information is given about who the possible speakers of these exchanges might be. Both scripts’ reluctance to bestow upon their characters a name produces what Sandrine Le Pors calls “locuteurs incertains [uncertain speakers]” (41), a category that she nonetheless describes as “incluant des identités indécises ou de faire disparaître le personnage dans un paysage sonore absorbant bruits et rumeurs environnants [including undecided identities and the disappearance of character in a soundscape absorbing surrounding noises and rumours]” (41). Although Le Pors’s assertion about the uncertainty of the speakers’ identity is accurate, her suggestion that character disappears in the soundscape is less so. Perhaps the utterances that Le Pors cannot attribute to any one character should not be disregarded as simply noise, but as part and parcel of how subjectivity is figured on the page. Arguably, Le Pors’s statement reveals how the procedures that Jacques Rancière calls ‘the police’ operate: the ordering of bodies and allocation of activities that sees “that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (Rancière 1999: 29). If we agree that we live in an order structured around the notion of individuality, where the rights, desires and uniqueness of the individual are constantly referred to, then uncertainty about a subject’s identity becomes rather anomalous, unacceptable. In short, it is the presumption that individuality is the only basis for subjectivity that leads to the argument that there are no subjects and no characters here. It is perhaps more accurate to suggest that the opaque speakers of Crave and the free-floating speech of 4.48 Psychosis produce characters that are not individually silhouetted onto the ‘lang-scape’ of the page – that is, non-individuated characters.¹⁰ By using alphabetic labels and free-floating text, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis avoid conjuring up an identity for the characters by the very act of bestowing a name upon them. The scripts’ resistance to giving a name can therefore be seen as a small gesture of dissidence: a resistance to participating in the interpellative voice of ideology in Althusser’s account of subjectivation (see pages 50 – 54). The scripts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis refuse to hail anybody with a preliminary subject position in a given social situation, and resist complicity in the objectification and categorisation of life. This is an important gesture, as such categories set the basis for expectations, relationships of power, exclu-

 I prefer the term ‘lang-scape’ (Bowers  – ) to Le Pors’s ‘soundscape’ here, as it seems more suited to a consideration of textual character, that is, character as generated in a theatrical text. See Patrice Pavis’s Preface to Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance for more on the “[t]he dematerialisation, miniaturisation, and virtualisation of visual or gestural elements” such as the actor through sound (: xi).

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sion and control. By putting forward the speech of indeterminate subjects without categorising them, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis demonstrate that ideology and its subjectivising power can be challenged, and that clarity and legibility are not prerequisites for the existence of a subject.

Foreclosing an account of one’s selves The second source for the production of non-individuated character in these playtexts resides in their rejection of dialogue as the process by which individuality may be disclosed, implied and recreated. More specifically, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis undermine the received notion of speech as, on the one hand, a tool for self-expression through which the speaker can grasp and convey their sense of identity, and, on the other, as the basis of exchanges whereby individuals effectively address and respond to one another. In so doing, the scripts counterbalance Peter Szondi’s assumption that dialogue goes hand in hand with the configuration of modern, individuated character, as well as with the emergence of liberal-humanist subjectivity (8). Indeed, these scripts show that dismantling dialogue can effectively lead to models of subjectivity alternative to the unitary self. In this regard, Crave’s structure mimics that of a four-way conversation, in which speakers take orderly turns and seemingly elaborate on shared thematic threads. However, as Szondi warns regarding Maurice Maeterlinck’s work, “[t]he fact that this language is divided into individual lines in no way makes it synonymous with the conversation in genuine Drama” (34).¹¹ In this vein, Crave simulates and yet obstructs personal communication. Elsewhere, I have described the play’s opening as paradigmatic of how Crave raises and frustrates expectations with regards to character (Delgado-García 2012: 239), but examples abound: M B C A

Someone somewhere is crying for me, crying for my death. My fingers inside her, my tongue in her mouth. I wish to live with myself. No witnesses. ()

 In Theory of the Modern Drama, Szondi refers to ‘genuine Drama’ as the model of theatre that emerged in the Renaissance and was reinforced during the Neoclassical period, and that focused on “the reproduction of interpersonal relations” through dialogue in the creation of a hermetic fictional world (). The work of Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann in the nineteenth century represents for Szondi the crisis of Drama, as they focus on the intrapersonal rather than on the individuation that comes through interpersonal relations ().

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Here, M’s reference to their death generates uncertainty about their ontological status, as well as mystery about the impact that their actual, imagined or future death may have on someone unknown. B’s subsequent intervention sits ambivalently in this context. Could this ‘her’ be M? Or is this female that ‘someone’ crying for M’s death? Could it be someone else altogether? Is the eroticism of this line to be framed as romantic? Or, given previous references to rape and paedophilia (156), is this a description of non-consensual sex? Is this a memory or a fantasy? Significantly, A’s intervention could be a response to the previous three lines: M’s death and someone’s crying, B’s sexual intercourse, and C’s solitary life could be furtive, have “[n]o witnesses”. Following these four interventions, M offers a humorous and self-referential statement that neatly summarises the communicative scenes in Crave: “And if this makes no sense then you understand perfectly” (159). As a result of the continuous destabilisation of communicative scenes, potential identities and relations are always suggested yet ultimately deferred. The capacity of speech to individuate is further destabilised in Crave’s playtext through what Le Pors identifies as the double organising principle of the play. Le Pors notes, on the one hand, “la dissémination des voix des personnages devenus locuteurs incertains [the dissemination of the voices of the characters who have become uncertain speakers]” and, on the other, “la dissolution des voix (passées, présentes ou à venir) dans la voix d’un seul [the dissolution of (past, present and future) voices in the voice of only one [character]]” (47). Although Le Pors’s argument is acute, it is important to highlight the effects that voice dispersion and dissolution have on subjectivity. Complementing Le Pors, I would argue that Crave’s script subverts the expected correlation of speech, self-expression, individuality, character and subject. This subversion is conducted in the text through the use of impossible biographical revelations, the fragmentation and symbiotic dissemination of speech, and poetic/choral interventions, which I will now briefly examine. Crave’s script is interspersed with what appear to be snippets of the speakers’ biographies. However, these do not allow the reader to psychologically round, physically imagine and spatially locate the characters. These revelations leave the reader in the dark, and also suggest an uncanny relationality at the heart of the subject: M I ran through the poppy field at the back of my grandfather’s farm. When I burst in through the kitchen door I saw him sitting with my grandmother on his lap. He kissed her on the lips and caressed her breast. They looked around and saw me, smiling at my confusion. When I related this to my mother more than ten years later she stared at me oddly and said “That didn’t happen to you. It happened to me. My father died before

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you were born. When that happened I was pregnant with you, but I didn’t know it until the day of his funeral”. ()

Not only memories but also “[g]enetically impossible” facts, like having inherited a broken nose from one’s father (162) or bringing to life an imaginary friend (163), constantly hint at the idea that certain aspects of our selves are inexplicably indebted to others. There are “messages”, content, that we receive from others and integrate into our subjectivity “faster than we think and in ways we don’t think possible” (162). This is so much so that the other is presented by various speakers as structurally part of the subject: “If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse” (192); “A: Can’t get you out of my system. / M: It’s okay. / B: I like you in my system” (173). In short, biographical revelations and accounts of the self in Crave subvert the expectation of self-explanatory speech, while the notion that the subject has an uncanny impact on others’ existence and vice versa is also introduced. Crave thus begins to formulate an idea of subjectivity that resists being expressed and understood in terms of self-sameness. This notion of an uncanny interconnectedness is further reinforced by the speakers’ frequent sharing of long utterances, such as: “C: Why did I not die at birth / M: Come forth from the womb / B: And expire” (193). The interventions of each speaker complete one another, suggesting that the boundaries of both character and subjectivity necessarily stretch beyond those of C, M, B and A respectively. On other occasions, the lines constitute enigmatic sequences with poetic tone and musical structures: “B: The vision. / M: The loss. / C: The pain. / A: The loss. / B: The gain. / M: The loss. / C: The light” (192). In these cases, speech is deployed neither as a tool for individual self-fashioning, nor as a vehicle for linguistic exchange. Rather, speech serves the purpose of collective expression of affect, such as anxiety or extreme sadness – emotions or desires that demonstrate that the subject is never quite in full possession of itself, as they are triggered by the relationship with the world and in turn disturb the world inhabited by the subject. Through this symbiotic and choral deployment of speech, Crave continues to characterise the subject as opaque, irremediably relational, and composed of an inextricable – and sometimes inexplicable – extimacy. Like Crave, 4.48 Psychosis also produces uncountable, non-individuated character by carefully designing anti-communicative scenes – scenes that foreclose the possibility of communication and, with it, the development of roles and identities. The playtext alternates first-person contributions, series of numbers, and sequences resembling abstract poetry. The layout of the text in itself opens gaps between words that intensify as “the rupture begins” (240) – the rupture arguably being the subject’s heightened separation from a normative ideal

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of selfhood provided by “that smooth psychiatric voice of reason”, according to which “there is an objective reality in which […] body and mind are one” (209). The absence of clear communicative scenes in the script has a direct impact on the production of character as non-individuated. According to David Barnett, “one could be forgiven for seeing a single speaker emerge from the text” (2008: 19). Indeed, there are instances that are reminiscent of a soliloquy, and even the more poetic interventions allow for speculation regarding their author. However, the free-floating script for 4.48 Psychosis continues to resist an exegesis that would ultimately create one discrete subject in the fiction. The abundance of first-person utterances plays a key role in this self-effacement. Because the ‘I’ does not need to name, number or categorise itself to itself, the first-person contributions in the play produce a highly elliptical script. This is especially so because the utterances voice emotions and mood, rather than narrativising events or relationships with others. Emotions are universalising, rather than individualising, as anybody can potentially feel these regardless of who they are. For example, the script reads: “I am sad / I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve / I am bored and dissatisfied with everything / I am a complete failure as a person” (206). Anybody could be the author of these words, and anybody could identify with or understand this restless sadness and disaffection. The absence of biographical detail and context, and the deployment of affective clichés, makes these statements universally recognisable. First-person utterances therefore resist giving a clear account of the self whereby a notion of a unique, individuated character might be reconstituted. Rather, these statements mark the presence of an indeterminate number of subjects, while offering everybody the possibility of identifying with them, with their emotional situation. If 4.48 Psychosis fails to outline its character(s) by means of a clarifying soliloquy, the playtext cannot be construed as a monologue either, through which the reader might be able to reconstitute the speakers’ body morphology, gender identity, sexuality, race, age, social class, or geographical and temporal location. This is the case, to a certain degree, in Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Night Just Before the Forests (1977), where we are able to partially recreate the identity of the speaker through his attempts to ingratiate himself with a silent passer-by. Neither does the ‘I’ in 4.48 Psychosis explicitly address the audience, looking to avoid conventional characterisation through the meta-theatrical role of the performer as performer. Peter Handke’s 1966 Offending the Audience and SelfAccusation are further familiar examples.¹² Instead of proposing a pseudo-

 See Appendix, page  – , for more on these and other works by Koltès and Handke.

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effacement of character via meta-theatricality, the script of 4.48 Psychosis insists on the configuration of a fictive universe, and on presenting human experience within it. There are a limited number of sections that suggest dialogue in 4.48 Psychosis. These instances, such as the play’s opening scene, contain little evidence of the qualities that may enable us to apprehend the subject(s) involved: (A very long silence.) – But you have friends. (A long silence.) You have a lot of friends. What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (A long silence.) What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (A long silence.) (205)

The silence of one of the real/imaginary interlocutors provides no information about the subject(s) present in this attempt at dialogue. Yet even when turntaking does take place in other dialogic sections within the text, it remains impossible to ascertain an identity for the interlocutors. The exchange about reasons for self-injury (216 – 217), the discussion about resistance to antidepressants (219 – 221), and the redefinition of a relationship as purely professional (236 – 238) similarly reveal little about who is speaking in 4.48 Psychosis. The scripts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis therefore structurally avoid generating straightforwardly communicative scenes, either in the form of a soliloquy, monologue or meta-theatrical address to the audience. One reason for this avoidance might be found in the communion of form and content: the non-communicative structure of these plays mimics the isolation experienced by their indefinite characters. The eschewal of communicative scenes can also be regarded as a strategy of characterisation, which contributes to conceptualisations of the subject as, using M’s words in Crave, “utterly unknowable” (167). Both plays suggest that giving an account of oneself – or, of one’s selves – is an impossible task, because such knowledge is inaccessible for the subject. In this respect, the scripts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis are not only anti-Cartesian but also Butlerian avant la lettre. In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler argues we are all partially opaque to ourselves; amongst other reasons, this is due to the

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fact that the primary psychological relations that are foundational to our subjectivity are irretrievable, and that we are forever reliant on a fundamental exposure to others that makes us who we are, an exposure over which we have no control and which we cannot fully grasp (39). The ‘I’ for Butler always “remains the unaccounted for and […] constitutes the failure that the very project of selfnarration requires” (2005: 79). Against the Cartesian, humanist view that portrays the subject as an attainable object of exploration, and in Butlerian terms, the subject in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis is unfathomable and therefore unnarratable. 4.48 Psychosis expresses this condition in an image reminiscent of the setting in Beckett’s Endgame, with a painting facing the wall: “It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind” (245). These playtexts therefore require that the reader suspend any demands for clarity and exhaustiveness, and that subjectivity be apprehended even if this is given without any consistent or specific individual contours. As a result of these characterising strategies with regards to communicative scenes, textual character in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis can be described as nonindividuated, opaque and uncountable; the presence of the subject is attested by variations and oscillations of affects and moods, rather than identity or individuality. Through this characterisation, both scripts offer an understanding of singular subjectivity as an unfathomable entity that is intersubjectively constituted, overflowing with extimacy and emotion, but unable to fully engage with others.

Resisting heteronormativity My third and final point regarding textual characterisation in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis is that, physically and psychically, these subjects are presented as ill-fitting pieces in the heteronormative matrix. To put it differently, nonindividuated character is also produced in these playtexts through the refusal of the terms by which the body may become visible on the page. More specifically, it is the expectation of heteronormative gender identities that is subverted here. Such a transgression enables character to function as a fluid access point for queer notions of subjectivity. Crave provides no ethnic or racial markers, but the playtext is full of red herrings regarding sex and gender. These suggest but ultimately fail to confer recognisable, verifiable and stable gendered or sexed morphologies upon the play’s characters. Thus, whilst M’s female-gendered craving for motherhood is repeatedly suggested (154, 161, 182), the script is ambivalent about the correspondence of this marker of female gender identity to a female, male or even an ambiguous anatomy. M’s “I’m not an older woman” (158) could imply a denial of the pre-

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sumption of old age or the female gender/sex. M’s question “You think I’m going to rape you?” (163) likewise introduces uncertainty about M’s body morphology: although rape can be committed by male or female individuals, M’s words appeal to the presupposition that sexual abuse is perpetrated predominantly by males. A’s “I’m a paedophile” (156) and the claim of never having “visited a prostitute” (162) once again hint at the presumption that sexual offences are chiefly committed by males. However, A’s confession of having had thrush (162) further generates uncertainty: although the infection can sometimes develop in men, it is most commonly found in women. A could therefore be a female, reflectively referring to itself as an external entity in the line: “I am lost, so fucking lost in this mess of a woman” (171). Similar doubts apply to C’s words: “She’s talking about herself in the third person because the idea of being who she is […] is more than her pride can take” (183). If C is the speaker who talks in the third person, C’s female body is suggested pronominally. However, that may not be so, and C may be referring to somebody else, who needs to talk in third person about herself. The resulting situation is that the characters in Crave’s playtext elicit temporary gendered embodiments without ever securing them, fulfilling one of C’s self-defining, and yet self-effacing as ever, statements: “That’s me. Exist in the swing. Never still, never one thing or the other, always moving from one extreme to the furthest reaches of the other” (194). The script for 4.48 Psychosis provides scattered notes on sex and gender. Yet, unlike Crave, Kane’s last playtext highlights the possibility of discord between physical morphology and gender identity. The clipped playtext of 4.48 Psychosis insists on the pain suffered by the disjunction between soul and body: “[b]ody and soul can never be married” (212), and life is therefore “this dreary and repugnant tale of a sense interned in an alien carcass” (214). The theme of an uninhabitable body is repeated in the question “[d]o you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the wrong body?” (215), whilst the self is perceived as fragmented because identity and the assigned body are dislocated: “Here am I / and there is my body” (230). If Cartesian dualism is grounded in the harmonic hierarchy of mind over body, 4.48 Psychosis questions such hierarchy and accord, which destabilises the basic principles of liberal-humanist selfhood: unity, coherence and self-sameness. 4.48 Psychosis suggests a more complicated distinction between body, soul and mind than is normally acknowledged. The body is perceived as alien explicitly because of its dissonance with the soul (207, 212), suggesting that were corporeality to be aligned with the subject’s sense of selfhood it would not be repudiated. As for the soul, this is described in terms that are reminiscent of physic states: it is “bisected” (233). The mind is described as “immaterial” but not as a resource for rational thought and awareness of the world and oneself;

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it is rather a “pit” where the ‘I’ is bound to “drown in dysphoria” (213). In all, the subject figured in the script of 4.48 Psychosis could be described as fragmented, yet not in a Cartesian fashion. While the body is unmoored from the mind as it is in Descartes’s thought, the marriage between body, mind and soul is yearned for in 4.48 Psychosis. The script does not refuse the body in favour of the mind, as in Descartes’s work (1984: 18), but is simply rendered unsatisfactory because it is “the wrong body” [emphasis added] (215). The mind in 4.48 Psychosis is not the all-powerful cogito that enables the subject to attain knowledge about the self and the world, but a groundless pit obfuscated by emotion. Rather than Cartesian, the fragmentation presented in 4.48 Psychosis could therefore be better described as queer, since it demonstrates that one’s (gender) identity and body do not necessarily align from birth. The suffering triggered by the “dreary and repugnant” (214) uncoupling between mind and body contains a longing for internal and external alignment, as Waddington has suggested (144). However, it is important to note that in acknowledging the split of mind, soul and body, the script of 4.48 Psychosis also highlights the existence of lives outside cisgender and heteronormative parameters.¹³ While the dislike of the body is repeated throughout the play, the script openly suggests a non-cisgender alignment between (gender) identity and body morphology: “I dislike my genitals” (207).¹⁴ Furthermore, in one of the scarce references to sex in the play, 4.48 Psychosis offers a body that does not fit with the heteronormative presumption that there are only male and female morphologies. Rather, the script alludes to “the broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself [sic] alone” (205). Therefore, the experience of self-same subjectivity that the liberalhumanist model takes for granted is experienced as an impossibility on the grounds of both identity and body. Since queer theory and politics vindicate indefinition and rootlessness against the fixity of the “hetero/homo binary” (Schoene 292), 4.48 Psychosis’s suggestions of transgender and intersexuality further allow for a queer reading of the notion of subjectivity presented in the playtext.

 The prefix ‘cis-’ means “aligned with or on the same side of”; thus, the term ‘cisgender’ describes “individuals whose gender identity matches the expected norms for their sex (for example, a masculine gender identity and male sex)” (Shapiro ). The term is frequently used in queer activist circles as a synonym for ‘non-transgender’, and it is considered important to create a sense of equality between transgender and non-transgender individuals (Serrano). ‘Cisgenderism’ is understood as a prejudice against non-cisgender subjects.  This transgender sentiment is also present in Kane’s Cleansed, where Grace yearns to be her brother/lover Graham and eventually transforms into him. See Delgado-García (:  – ).

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Overall, the scattered hints about gendered/sexed bodies refuse to create a clear and stable physical contour for the voices in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. This refusal is nevertheless significant. It may be argued that the bodily boundaries of the subject constitute precisely that which Crave and 4.48 Psychosis cannot say in order to act out a particular notion of subjectivity. If, as Butler contends throughout Bodies that Matter, the body is an effect of genders which can only be taken up within the constraints of existing cultural norms, laws and taboos, Crave’s and 4.48 Psychosis’s reluctance to provide readers with the information needed to imagine bodily matter enacts a total refusal of the social terms “by which we are recognized as human” (Butler 2004b: 2). By not fixing the “race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognisability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, [and] the categorical understanding of that ethnicity” (Butler 2004b: 2), Crave and 4.48 Psychosis implement, through omission, a disregard for the hegemonic cultural norms that discern which gender positions and physical embodiments are intelligible and inhabitable, and which are not. The strategy used in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis to destabilise individuated character and, along with it, the liberal-humanist understanding of subjectivity might be better understood if we turn to Butler’s oft-overlooked suggestion of a “performativity proper to refusal” (2000a: 177). In her early work, Butler argued that the performative nature of sex contained the very conditions for its subversion, insofar as failure to reiterate or cite those norms could take place and destabilise the heterosexual norm (2006a: 185 – 93; 1993: 94 – 95, 125). However, the initially-defended radicalism of appropriation and destabilisation of normative positions is implicitly questioned in Butler’s contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. In the chapter entitled “Competing Universalities”, Butler is suspicious of a subversive occupation of normative positions, as sometimes the occupation of the “dominant norm in order to produce an internal subversion of its terms” (2000a: 177) actually results in the norm’s assimilation of radicalism and, hence, in the unwitting reinforcement of its power (2000a: 175). As such, Butler suggests a rejection of these norms: I am not, in this instance, arguing for a view of political performativity which holds that it is necessary to occupy the dominant norm in order to produce an internal subversion of its terms. Sometimes it is important to refuse its terms, to let the term itself wither, to starve it of its strength. And there is, I believe, a performativity proper to refusal which, in this instance, insists upon the reiteration of sexuality beyond the dominant terms. [emphasis added] (2000a: 177)

Arguably, subjectivity and character in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis are also performatively produced in Butlerian terms – produced through a performativity

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of refusal. In the context of theatrical writing, these playtexts reject the hegemonic norms that circumscribe what a subject is, and what makes the subject identifiable. The subject nonetheless persists in these playtexts, and is made apparent through accounts of the self that are fragmentary and based on emotion, gender identities that are neither stable nor disclosed, and finite bodies that cannot be subsumed into heteronormative binaries. In so doing, the playtexts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis stretch the received understanding of character and singular subjectivity beyond the liberal-humanist horizon and its demand for a recognisable, narratable, stable and individuated identity.

Crave and 4.48 Psychosis on the stage In his short book Theatre & Globalization, Dan Rebellato claims that theatre has the potential to tap into the cosmopolitan idea of the universal community of beings. Despite the particularity of bodies employed in a performance, theatre can avoid the “descent to the particular” (76) that can theoretically clash with the universal aspirations of cosmopolitanism. In support of this argument Rebellato gives a threefold defence. First, he suggests that “theatre can create characters who are less particular than real people tend to be” (76). Rebellato notes that this skimming of particularity is strongly characteristic of playwriting in the era of globalisation, and reads this tendency as a cosmopolitan response to it (76). Secondly, “[e]ven if the characters are embodied by real people” in performance, Rebellato argues, “any reasonably competent theatregoer knows that not everything that is true of the performers we see in front of us is true of the characters they are playing” (77): character therefore exceeds or may be dissonant with the performers animating it and as such the appeal to the idea of a universal community is not necessarily challenged. Finally, Rebellato reminds us of the precarious and ephemeral nature of performance: “[w]henever we watch a play, even if we are watching it for the first and only time, we are aware that it could be staged differently” [emphasis in original] (78). Rebellato posits Crave and 4.48 Psychosis as examples of this playwriting trend against character particularisation or individuation, and as samples of the cosmopolitan potential of theatre in general. While he frames this gesture against globalisation, I have contended that Kane’s non-individuated textual characters also react against obligatory intelligibility, against the expectation that we must have and be able to narrate a stable identity, and against heteronormativity and cisgenderism. Rebellato’s belief that plays like Crave and 4.48 Psychosis “create characters who are less particular than real people tend to be” (76) prioritises script over performance, even if only temporarily. Precisely

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because any play can be – and is – staged differently in every production, as he does note, we cannot make assumptions about the universalising or cosmopolitan value of any theatrical work as a whole. Such claims need to be anchored to the text, or to specific performances. This final section on Crave and 4.48 Psychosis examines stage characterisation and its elucidation of understandings of subjectivity across a number of European productions.

Spectatorial hailings As elucidated in the previous section, one of the strategies that pre-empts individuated characterisation on these scripts is the texts’ resistance to performing a subjectivising interpellation. Unlike the policeman in Althusser’s example, the playtexts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis do not hail characters with a first name and, along with this, a subject position to fulfil. Characterisation onstage, however, works differently, as the performers’ exposure to the spectators’ active gaze provides another site of interpellation. As Rancière notes, “[t]he spectator […] acts like the pupil or the scholar” (2009b: 13) in the sense that their intelligence “is always at work” regardless of what it does not know: it is “an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what other intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it” (2009b: 10). When confronted with performers whose characters’ names and the relations that set them together on the stage are unknown, spectators nonetheless engage in a process of translation and refiguration. Spectators can undoubtedly borrow from the physical features of the performers to name and categorise the performers on the stage, and thus co-create the notion of subjectivity produced in a given production. This spectatorial exercise of characterisation, which obviously cooperates with the sensorial stimuli provided by the theatrical event, becomes manifest in the process of relaying the performance to somebody else. Reviewers of the different productions of Crave testify to how the play can be perceived as generating more or less individuated characters on the stage. Writing for The Independent, Dominic Cavendish drew parallelisms between Vicky Featherstone’s 1998) production of Crave and a “daytime TV chat show”, in which the two men and two women in it “appear not to know one another, but gradually details emerge” (1998a: 13). These details seemed clear to Alistair Macaulay, reviewing the same production for the Financial Times: “[p]art of what the women need […] is just to be free of these men and their demands” (1152). Benedict Nightingale went even further in his view of the performers as individuated characters and his consequent mapping of connections: he saw an obscure past relation-

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ship “between Alan William’s smooth, ageing A, who serenely describes himself as a paedophile, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s young C, who displays the desolation and self-hatred of the abused and rejected”, whilst M is “a middle-aged woman who wants children”, unlike B (1152). These deduced biographies and the individualising effect on character they activated were missing in the reception of the production directed by Bernard Sobel at Gennevilliers, entitled Manque (2000). In this production, the four performers were among rows of mannequins in tiered seats facing the audience, camouflaged as the source of speech by their rigid posture, make-up and costumes, as described by one of the reviewers: “Cette fois, c’est une tribune de stade qui nous fait face. Au milieu de mannequins sont assis les quatre acteurs, tous pareillement englués dans leurs vêtements et leurs visages peints aux couleurs du Royaume-Uni [On this occasion, there is a platform stage facing us. The four actors are sat among mannequins, all similarly stuck in their clothes, and their faces painted in the colours of the United Kingdom]” (Bouteillet). The effect of this obfuscation of the sources of speech was the potential for thinking of character as unknowable, supra-corporeal and yet individualised, as the voices “pourraient très bien venir d’une seule personne [could well originate from one person]” (Salino). Conversely, for the reviewer of Les Inrockuptibles, the performance provided the image of “un chœur antique [an ancient chorus]” that relayed “le triste dire d’expériences désastreuses [the sad words of disastrous experiences]” (“Sarah Kane, Bernard Sobel”). In this case, the reviewer had translated the signs offered by the performers’ acting and the scenography into a collective character, the choir, without individualised opinions or experiences. Gier (2000), the German-language production of Crave directed by Thomas Ostermeier and presented at Berlin’s Schaubühne, placed the four performers on raised, long, insular platforms on an otherwise bare stage.¹⁵ The performers were arranged in alphabetical order from stage right to stage left. At the time of this show’s premiere, the cast loosely matched the genders and age differences suggested by Kane’s comment that A could potentially stand for Actor, Author and Abuser, B for Boy, C for Child and M for Mother (Saunders 2002b: 104). In this staging, the performers neither addressed one another nor the audience, who were positioned at a significantly lower level. Rather, they directed their lines expressively into their microphones and outwards, towards the void. Regardless of the physical isolation of the performers, their delivery without addressees, and the absence of particularly individualising costumes, reviewers

 This analysis is based on DVD documentation of a performance of Gier at the Schaubühne, Berlin, recorded by the theatre.

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continued to characterise the actors in terms of four separate identities. The reviewer for the Spiegel speculated that M might be a mother and A either a father or a lover (Kaempf), while the reviewer for the Berliner Zeitung went further to suggest that C timidly occupies a central position and ultimately offers a “Porträt der Autorin [portrait of the author]” (Koberg); that is, that C is an autobiographical rendition of Sarah Kane.

Artistic intervention Following on from these examples, it is also apparent that the use of non-individuating speech in the texts of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis might not necessarily stand in performance. Stagings may or may not generate communicative scenes that are foreclosed in the text. Insofar as gesture, facial expression, body language, posture and proxemics are unavoidable for the human body, a non-verbal communication that is absent on the page can be established between the performers. Consequently, the characterising attributes and relationships that the script rejects may be non-verbally constituted. In the case of Sobel’s Manque [Crave], these are precisely the elements that were forcefully avoided in production, with actors and mannequins equally frozen in their rigidity according to reviewers (Salino). However, body language has facilitated the spectators’ individuating characterisation of the performers in other productions. Vicky Featherstone’s precedent-setting production had the actors seated in a row facing the audience. Rather than directing their lines to one another, “[m]uch of the delivery was directed out towards the spectators” (Aston 94), although not all of it. This allowed for two scenes of address to emerge: one between performers onstage, whose bodies occasionally addressed one another and hinted at relationships that were unforeseen on the page; the other, between performers and spectators as the addressees of speech. As a result of this, the spectators were arguably positioned as the silent counterparts of an exchange enabled by their very listening and watching. The 2012 production of Crave by the Actors Touring Company, directed by Ramin Gray, supposed a middle-ground between Vicky Featherstone’s confessional staging and Sobel’s non-individuating reifying proposal, by offering a slightly more individuated scenario.¹⁶ Whilst Sobel’s staging camouflaged the speakers with the use of mannequins and de-individualising apparel and make up, this production also provided a uniform of sorts, yet a subtler and hu-

 This analysis is based on the performance of Crave at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on  March .

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manly quotidian one. All the performers appeared in nightwear: pyjama trousers and a bare chest for A, negligee for M, t-shirt and boxer shorts for B and loose trousers and t-shirt for C – an instant hint to recognise their speech as nocturnal ruminations. Like in Ostermeier’s production, the cast was clearly influenced by Kane’s words: Jack Tarlton, in his mid-thirties, was A; Derbhle Crotty, in her forties, was M, whilst B and C were played by the younger Cazimir Liske and Rona Morison. Only six objects were placed on an otherwise bare stage – a glass of water, a pack of tissues, a balloon tied to a car toy, and two plastic sheets appeared on the centre left, placed onto a U-shaped metallic structure that engulfed the actors throughout the performance. Not looked at or used by the actors, these objects almost faded into imperceptibility, as the entire event was dominated by a heightened sense of the performers’ immobile stance. Although the Actors Touring Company piece did not attempt to dissolve the bodies of the performers into an indistinguishable chorus, communicative scenes and personal expression were nonetheless foreclosed in this production – thus acting out the play’s thematic loneliness. The actors stood downstage without ever moving, touching or looking at one another, their arms falling heavily and immobile either side of their body, visibly repressing overt gesticulations, facing the audience at such close proximity yet neither seeking nor feigning eye contact. Their rigidly-paralysed bodies demanded undivided scrutiny in the same way that the tone of the lines of the play can be deemed a call for attention. The four actors rapidly delivered their lines with an unstoppable automatism that was reminiscent of Beckett – a far cry from the emotional elocution in Ostermeier’s production. Through their immobility and repression of gestural communication, Gray’s Crave foreclosed the formulation of scenes of address. Romantic, familial or power economies were impossible to ascertain in this production, given the ostensible absence of dialogue between the four performers, and the automatic style of delivery. While their age- and gender-sensitive costumes, and their geographically different accents, created the experience of particularity, a sense of an unexplained interconnectedness between the actors was conveyed through the musical quality that their speech achieved collectively: the collaborative delivery of self-reflecting thoughts, their identical stance and tense bodies and, perhaps more tenuously, through their costumes. The gaps between the actors’ rigid bodies physically expressed a disconnection but also a craving for touch.

Queerness and the body The scripts for Crave and 4.48 Psychosis implemented a refusal of any defined or stable physical contours, producing non-individuated and queer subjectivities.

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However, through the bodies and voices of the performers, the norms that allow for intelligibility are momentarily avowed. The performers’ age and race are conveyed onstage, and presumptions about sex and desire can also be made on the basis of physical appearance and gender presentation. While the scripts suggested (dis)embodiments, in having these playtexts spoken and performed, presentations of particular bodies are inevitably made, and physical contours of subjectivation are consequently imposed. As Butler points out, “speaking is a bodily act” and “[w]hatever is said […] constitutes a certain presentation of the body” (2004b: 172). From the examples above, it is obvious that the shifting gender positions of C, M, B and A can be lost in performance and become temporarily crystallised – either through male and female positions or, as in Sobel’s production, in non-gendered figures. In the case of 4.48 Psychosis, any delivery of the script generates a demarcation and gender assignation that is nonexistent in the text. This is the case where the play has been staged with multiple performers, for example in its London premiere (2000), the German-language production directed by Falk Richter, 4.48 Psychose (2001), or TR Warszawa’s Polish-language production (2002). This also occurs in 4.48 Psicosis (2009), the Argentine version directed by Luciano Cáceres and performed solely by sixty year-old actress Leonor Manso – an interesting departure from biographically-influenced young casts. With regards to 4.48 Psychosis, directorial intervention has gone beyond the allocation of the text to a number of performers whose morphology is more or less evident to the spectator. For instance, TR Warszawa’s production – which premiered at Teatr Polski in Poznań (2002), and was staged in Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre (2008) and London’s Barbican (2010) – was unabashedly inspired by Kane’s own biography.¹⁷ Directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, this production situated the performers as intelligible subjects immersed in a relatively clear social and affective network: a female protagonist experiencing the abysmal suffering of unrequited lesbian love, self-hatred and the incomprehension of friends and medical staff, and being driven by despair to commit suicide. Here, references to gender dysphoria or intersexuality that are indeed present in the play were crucially omitted. The reference to a “hermaphrodite” in the script (205) vanished from the performance directed by Jarzyna, which instead started with Magdalena Cielecka’s abridged and non-gendered exposition of her character’s psychological problems to an impassive, unresponsive young man, Rafał Maćkowiak: “I am  This analysis is based on the performance of . Psychosis at the Barbican, London, on  March . Quotations are transcribed from the English surtitles used at the Polish-language productions in the UK, and extracted from DVD documentation of the performance recorded by TR Warszawa.

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fat / I feel that the future is hopeless / and that things cannot improve”. Although Jarzyna’s piece carved distinct individuated characters from the script, it is worth noting how the piece contributed to destabilising the equivalence between performer and character by introducing ghostly figures: a young girl and an elderly woman bearing a striking physical resemblance to Cielecka silently interacted with the protagonist throughout the play, bringing onto the stage an innocence and joy that seemed lost forever, a decrepitude that the protagonist’s body would not achieve because of suicide, and a sense of ongoing vulnerability. Indeed, props and technologies have been used to provide a sense of the “dissociation of selfhood” (Saunders 2002b: 116) in both plays. Jeremy Herbert’s set for the London premiere of 4.48 Psychosis featured a series of mobile mirrors slanted at a forty-five degree angle, providing the audience with a simultaneous doubling of the performers’ bodies, which were sliced as they moved; moreover, webcam images were projected onto the mirrors, superimposing images of pedestrians on a street over the reflection of the actors’ bodies (Saunders 2002b: 116). Saunders has interpreted this as a device mimicking clinical depression “where patients frequently talk of feeling as if they are trapped observers looking down on themselves” and a mechanism to help visualise the “separation of mind from body” (2002b: 116). Falk Richter’s 4.48 Psychose also counterbalanced the need for attribution of speech to performers by having three young female performers and a male performer speaking the lines, sometimes sequentially and at other times simultaneously.¹⁸ The bare stage design further reinforced this idea of the doubling and de-centring of the subject, as the performers stood, moved and sat naturalistically yet drawing parallels between one another – mirror images without a mirror. However, this visual de-centring of the body cannot erase the fact that speaking is a bodily act, as noted by Butler: Of course, there are ways of using speech that occlude the body as its condition, which act as if the meanings that are conveyed emanate from a disembodied mind and are addressed toward another disembodied mind. But that is, as it were, still a way of doing the body, a way of doing the body as disembodied. (2004b: 172)

As such, the de-centring and refusal of identity categories put forward by the playtexts presents quite a challenge for the stage. As we scan the performers’ bodies for mouths that move, for chests that lift with breath and speech, we find gendered contours and voices, along with the certainty that somebody tangible, stable and recognisable is here before us.

 This analysis is based on DVD documentation of a performance of . Psychose at the Schaubühne, Berlin, recorded by the theatre.

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Rethinking the subject: contingency, opacity and recognition To summarise, the scripts for Crave and 4.48 Psychosis experiment with the attribution of speech, dismantle its expected self-explanatory and communicative function, and eschew heteronormative perceptions of the body. These aesthetic strategies constitute textual characterisation techniques, whereby non-individuated and uncountable characters generate a notion of subjectivity on the page. Through this characterisation, the subject is formulated as unfathomable, unnarratable, fragmented, intricately linked with others, and queer. As we have seen, some of these aspects present a challenge for staging, as the materiality of the performers’ bodies and the emergence of communicative scenes may contribute to individuating stage character. However, the unavoidable emergence of discrete and gendered characters in performance does not cancel the plays’ radical departures from liberal-humanist notions of the self. As Rebellato notes in Theatre & Globalisation, any script-led performance inevitably intervenes and modifies the propositions of the text (78). In the case of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, scripts not only allow but encourage variation regarding how the script can be voiced and embodied. The number of performers – as well as their anatomical sex, gender identity and gender presentation – can alter in any given staging, since the norms for subject-formation are explicitly eschewed in the plays. As such, considered diachronically, the performances of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis highlight the fact that subjectivity is always-already contingent – provisional, subject to change. I want to bring this discussion of stage character and subjectivity to a conclusion with a brief consideration of recognition. As I elucidate above, the production and reception of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis shows that artistic intervention and/or the gaze of the spectator result in discrepancies between textual character and stage character. Unlike Poschmann (309 – 310) and Barnett (2008: 21), however, I do not see this as a misguided or avoidable scenario. Artistic and spectatorial creative work with regards to the formation of stage character and subjectivity is not problematic per se – it is inevitable. Arguably, and more positively, these activities of producing and seeing character in other ways than established in the text foreground that, first, the subject is always constituted socially, and secondly, that we desire to recognise subjectivity even when there is little information by which to do so. While there are ways of recognising the other that erase or misrepresent all that which is alien to oneself, I would contend that Kane’s obscure scripts are more preoccupied with eliciting more ethical ways of recognising a subject than with denouncing the potential violence of misrecognition. Contrary to Poschmann’s and Barnett’s fears of theatre productions tampering with the impenetrability of no-longer-dramatic scripts, I doubt that any per-

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formance can fully substitute these texts’ obscurity with certainty with regards to character and subjectivity. Even in productions that seek to create characters with defined personalities and social networks – such as TR Warszawa’s 4.48 Psychosis – the thematic elusiveness of these playtexts is such that we cannot but remain in the dark about certain aspects about the characters. Where are they? What sort of lives did they lead before their emotional collapse? What is the full story of the relationships between them? The poetry and musicality of the lines does not allow for an exhaustive account of the self either. In this sense, Kane’s pieces anticipate Butler’s rethinking of recognition in Giving an Account of Oneself. Here, Butler argues that we are all partially unknown to ourselves and that this gives us the ability to actualise a special, more ethical kind of recognition of the other. Acknowledging that I am blind to myself and that I cannot give an account of myself to others allows me to accept that others cannot render themselves fully visible and narratable to me either – what I can recognise, in these instances, is the opacity that we have in common (2005: 41). Arguably, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis entice a type of recognition of subjectivity that needs to accept a certain degree of subjective unknowingness, both in the subjects figured in the script and on the stage. This is also one of the features that Kane’s plays have in common with Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue.

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Hybridity and relationality: Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue Resituating Thomas’s work In the context of scholarship on Ed Thomas, my investigation of character and subjectivity in his latest play, Stone City Blue (2004), may appear to be slightly out of place and out of time. Neither these issues nor the play itself have received much scholarly attention – a situation that the present section aims to explain and begin to redress. Indeed, the academic reception of Thomas’s work has focused almost exclusively on five of his eleven titles, namely the so-called New Wales Trilogy (1992), Songs from a Forgotten City (1995) and Gas Station Angel (1998).¹⁹ Detrimental to the study of Stone City Blue, the congealment of this academic corpus has certainly had to do with timing. The most important intervention in the study of Thomas’s work so far is the collection of essays edited by Hazel Walford Davies, which appeared in 1998. At that time Thomas’s status as “Wales’s most exciting new writer” (Adams 1998b: 218) had been consolidated by critical appraisal and extensive and successful touring of his work, not only in Britain but also abroad. The six-year hiatus in Thomas’s playwriting career after 1998, the apparent shift in the aesthetic and thematic direction of his comeback with Stone City Blue, and the absolute lack of theatrical output thereafter seem to have reinforced the academic tendency to direct interest towards Thomas’s most prolific and popular period, between House of America and Gas Station Angel. ²⁰ Beyond these chronological issues, however, the academic marginalisation of Stone City Blue arguably has to do with Thomas’s early production of a hermeneutics for his playwriting work – a hermeneutics that cannot easily be applied to his last play. From his declaration of principles in his 1991 essay “Wales and a Theatre of Invention” to subsequent elaborations of his arguments in interviews and periodical articles (Thomas 1994– 1995: 58; 2004a: 96; Roms 1998b: 188 – 89; Cavendish 1998b), Thomas has consistently framed his own  The New Wales Trilogy comprises Thomas’s debut with House of America (), Flowers of the Dead Red Sea () and East from the Gantry (). Thomas’s company Y Cwmni toured these three plays in  under this umbrella title. The pieces that complete his stage work before Stone City Blue are Adar heb Adenydd [Birds without Wings] (); The Myth of Michael Roderick (), which was based on Adar heb Adenydd, the installation and performance project in collaboration with artist Iwan Bala entitled Hiraeth/Strangers in Conversation (); Envy (); and the site-specific, multimedia performance Raindogs () conceived with Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson. Some material featured in Raindogs “made a reappearance in Stone City Blue” (Roms :  – ).  There are only three exceptions to the otherwise scholarly vacuum with regards to Stone City Blue. See Rabey (), Blandford () and Roms ().

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work as an attempt to invent new narratives of and for Wales. In particular, Thomas has highlighted the importance of creating a type of drama that he has called a “theatre of invention” (1991: 15), “theatre of imagination” and “dramas of possibilities” (1998b: 118), a theatre that is attuned to the imaginary status of Wales: In a Wales that only exists in the hearts and minds of those who desire it and who see that existence based on constant re-invention, any new Welsh theatre must be a theatre of invention, with its own new language, form and style. It is a theatre based on a life imagined rather than a life reproduced, and naturalism can play no part in it. The argument for a new Welsh theatre of invention is part of the argument for a new and invented Wales. (1991: 17)

Honing this argument further, Thomas has maintained elsewhere that “[t]he only definition of a culture or nationhood is desire” and, hence, that “Welshness is a state of mind” (qtd. in Cavendish 1998b). With this description of Wales and Welshness not as a presence that is on the verge of extinction but as an absence, always in formation through creativity, Thomas has deftly situated himself as an exemplary Welshman in the tradition described by Gwyn A. Williams and others. For these historians, the Welsh are “a people who have retained some kind of historical identity by constantly and consciously amending their own narrative of nationhood, rather than by the preservation of a dogmatic monoculturalism” (R. Owen 101). From this perspective, Thomas’s theatrical work is therefore framed as a Welshman’s exercise of love and poiesis, through which the persistence of a continuously-changing Welsh national identity is guaranteed. Thomas’s self-positioning as a Welsh writer who re-invents narratives for an ever-elusive and inexistent Wales has facilitated a particular reception of his work. Almost without exception,²¹ the academic debate has focused on analysing his fundamentally Welsh playwriting ethos, the re-imagined Welsh identities, geographies and myths embedded in his plays, and the significance of his oeuvre for the renewal of Welsh culture in the contemporary context.²² Such a paradigm, however, does not lend itself easily to the interrogation and critique of Stone City Blue – a lengthy and passionate exploration of odium

 Gramich (), Rabey () and Pearson () offer alternative analyses. David Adams does interrogate Thomas’s role in Welsh history, geography, popular culture and identity, yet concludes that “Thomas’s work is about identity […] and not simply about Welshness” (a: )  These investigations do not always concur with Thomas’s own reading of his dramatic practice. Heike Roms (a), for example, has suggested a series of paradoxes regarding what Thomas’s theoretical writings say about notions of identity, visibility and memory and what The New Wales Trilogy actually enacts in relation to them.

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fati, seemingly unmoored from Thomas’s imagined Welsh landscapes. The play is loosely located in the anonymous, interchangeable and heterotopic space of a hotel room. Here, four “characters” (2) named in the script as R1, R2, R3 and R4 re-live and re-enact traumatic episodes of a life in a non-linear fashion: the collapse of romantic relationships ridden by infidelities (39 – 43, 67– 71, 80 – 85), a child witnessing his father figure betraying and abandoning him and his mother (45 – 53), the physical decay of the estranged father (55 – 60), and his subsequent death or suicide in a hotel room in Antwerp (61– 64). Interwoven with the present time in the hotel room, these flashbacks are removed from their chronological and spatial settings, and little information is offered about the subjects that experienced them. This clarity of emotion and discernible social relations did not impede critics’ ability to welcome the play with the familiar description applied to characterless work: “Stone City Blue has no discernible plot, setting or characters” (Hickling 1430). However, and regardless of the absence of specific temporal or spatial grounding and linear narrative, the play does outline the life of a singular subject that we can only (mis)identify through his moniker, ‘Ray’.²³ Throughout the play, R1, R2, R3 and R4 portray ‘Ray’ as someone asphyxiated by the nightmarish conviction that he belongs to a lineage of men accursed with “killing love” (37) and by the sense of history repeating itself. ‘Ray’ is ultimately presented as longing for the restoration of the intersubjective laces that define and ground the subject: R R R R R R R R […] R

To be connected again. To be reborn. Free. To belong again. To forgive again. And be forgiven. To love. And be loved. To be home. ()

Despite the outpouring of regret, mourning and desperation, Stone City Blue concludes with the feverish imagination of impossible future tenses, in which the

 My use of inverted commas aims to work as a constant reminder of the uncertainty regarding this subject’s identity as it is emphasised throughout the play, and to continue to defer the equation of this name with a clear and fixed persona.

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unrealised potential of the past is overcome, and the words “I love you” (102) can finally be delivered to those that are long gone. From this exposition, it is apparent that the drive of Thomas’s latest play is not the production of a fictional Welsh identity that may replace or fill a void. Rather, the play explores the instability and vulnerability that stems from a subject whose disconnection from others suggests that subjectivity is relational. However, the key notions that have been articulated in studies of Thomas’s work – lack, desire and location – still offer the possibility of unveiling some continuities between Thomas’s theatre works prior to Stone City Blue and his latest play, if the focus of scholarly attention shifts from Welshness on to subjectivity. Indeed, the correlation that Thomas has established between Welshness, Wales as an absence, and a generative will to exist, can be interrogated not only from the perspective of national identity – as in the reception of Thomas’s most frequently-studied works – but also from that of subjectivity. As Jacqueline Rose points out, “Lacan’s account of subjectivity was always developed with reference to the idea of a fiction” (49), having the fiction of the child’s mirror image as its most famous (and theatrical) articulation. Moreover, desire as Lack – more specifically, ‘manque-à-être’ or ‘want-to-be’ – is precisely what defines the subject in Lacan’s thought: the subject is a lack that generates desire, a want-to-be (Evans 98). This position is apparent in Thomas’s earlier work, where it is clearly stated that “Wales was invented by the Welsh because they desired a Wales”, insofar as “[a] people invent a country because they desire its invention” (1991: 15). Yet, arguably, a want-to-be also permeates Stone City Blue, where the vacuum of identity – “The name on my passport isn’t mine and I have no ring on my finger. Who I am and where I come from nobody knows” (86) – is expressed alongside a futural desire of presence and plenitude: “I want to be myself again” (92). Subjectivity, lack and desire are therefore persistent variables in all of Thomas’s work. Similarly, although space or geography might not be too concrete in Stone City Blue, it can be argued that location – albeit an increasingly abstract notion of it – remains pivotal, as the singular subjectivities in the play are indeed trying to locate themselves in various manners, to find where they stand in and through their grief. Often quoted in reviews, the lines “Winter in the city. Berlin, Paris, Cardiff, Antwerp. It could be anywhere” are actually not included in the verbalised script for Stone City Blue; they are part of the information provided through the performance programme, or the playtext’s blurb. This unspecific location is thus only evoked through what Susan Bennett, adapting the work of Erving Goffman, calls “outer theatrical frame”: “those cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event” (139), but are not produced by the actual visual

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or aural signs of the performance. In fact, there are clues within Stone City Blue that situate parts of the fiction in Cardiff and other Welsh locations. The play opens in a hotel room in The Big Sleep Hotel (17) – a chain with a branch in the Welsh capital. Soon after, R4 confesses: “I’ve been cruising the city” (7). Following this, the four speakers take turns to provide a list of twenty-four female names (7– 8), nineteen of which correspond to street names of the Welsh capital. The play thus elusively maps Cardiff in terms of its urban layout, whilst simultaneously suggesting the emotional geography of a womaniser’s ‘cruising’ of the city. The references to John Malkovich also invoke local knowledge and memory: the actor not only partly owns The Big Sleep Hotel where the play is loosely located, but he also “got into bed with 300 Welsh secretaries in the lobby of The Big Sleep Hotel [in Cardiff]” as a publicity stunt four years prior to the premiere of Stone City Blue (“John Malkovich”). For the Welsh-performance connoisseur, the numerous cross-references to and borrowings from Raindogs, written and devised by Pearson/Brookes with Thomas, also situate the action in the Welsh capital. Notwithstanding these hints, the text attempts to erase an explicit sense of Welsh specificity, and foregrounds instead the way that space is saturated with memories and desires concerning self and others. Taking these continuities into account enables a shift in the perspective from which Thomas’s plays and reflective writings might be interrogated. Whilst temporarily suspending the unquestionable weight that geographic location has had in his work, such a critical shift highlights that subjectivity, be it collective as in his Wales-focused work, or singular as in Stone City Blue, is one of Thomas’s primary preoccupations. Intrinsically linked to subjectivity, the notion of character can provide further lines of connection between Stone City Blue and Thomas’s previous theatrical work. Reflecting on his characterisation techniques, Thomas has confessed that non-conventional characterisation is one of the ongoing features of his career: “I don’t think I’ve ever ‘written a character’ in the standard way. Adar [beb Adenydd] was a play completely about form; in [The Myth of] Michael Roderick, the tale was a washing line from which I hung the characters” (Thomas; qtd. in Rabey 2006: 545). Further connections between characterisation in his betterknown works and Stone City Blue have arisen in conversation with the playwright: Flowers of the Dead Red Sea is a precursor of Stone City Blue. It is in dialogue, rather than monologue, but it is the same rhythmic enquiry between two people and some vestige of characterisation. They’ve got names [in Flowers of the Dead Red Sea], but the same idea is taken to a natural extreme in Stone City Blue. (Thomas 2012)

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Significantly, Thomas has also expressed his belief that the creation of character ultimately resides with the actors and not with himself, even in work prior to Stone City Blue where text was attributed to a more naturalistic textual character: “As actors, what they do is they create the characters, they believe in the characters they create, and away they go. I didn’t invent them” (Thomas 2012). Taking this on board, not only does Stone City Blue emerge as a development in Thomas’s career-long engagement with subjectivity, but his political preoccupations can be rethought beyond the national identity agenda. Instead, we might argue that Thomas’s work has always revolved around questions of how a subject appears, and how subjective life is sustained. My study of character and subjectivity in Stone City Blue begins to implement this renewed perspective on Thomas’s plays.

Textual characterisation in Stone City Blue In an interview conducted by Hazel Walford Davies in 1997, Thomas gave an account of his experience of the first stages of the playwriting process: “I just write three to four hundred pages of dialogue without male or female characters. The characters, then, are sexless and stateless. What I have are words and rhythms and at least two hundred pages have to be scrapped” (Thomas 1998b: 120). Thomas’s characterisation technique has therefore always been loosely antiessentialist in the first moments of writing, with the traditional markers of identity added later on. Linking this insight to the creation of Stone City Blue in particular, David Ian Rabey has explained that the unassigned preliminary written material was transformed into the final script by “simply dividing the text into four voices which partly express the warring but interdependent facets of a single turbulent sensibility in personal and political breakdown” [emphasis added] (2006: 548). Thomas later clarified that the opaque attribution of speech to letters in Stone City Blue was also a side effect of his comeback to the theatre after a significantly long pause. Returning to a much-changed theatre scene after the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, Cool Britannia and Cool Cymru, and doing so after an arduous personal time away from theatre, entailed a different starting point for Thomas: By 2002 and 2003, I was keen on writing again because I hadn’t written anything for about four years. I realised that everything had changed. Any semblance I had of being able to write characters had long gone – I couldn’t write characters. And then I thought that the only thing I knew was to write rhythm, literally almost like making poems up, without assigning any particular sex to them, there was just ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, etcetera […]. Initially I thought it [Stone City Blue] was a poem, and then I realised that you can make that thing

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dramatic. There was one consciousness and there were many contradictions. I thought the best way of making a drama out of it was getting four characters to play the contradiction. (Thomas 2012)

Found “by accident, rather than design”, the character-less and groundless musicality of Stone City Blue was for Thomas a liberating form of playwriting: “you discover a meaning and a truth through the rhythm that, had you written it in a more conventional character voice, you wouldn’t have found” (Thomas 2012). Both Rabey’s diagnosis that in Stone City Blue we encounter a polyphonic yet single sensibility, and Thomas’s reference to one consciousness and four characters, raise a number of questions. Is Thomas’s initial anti-essentialist stance also present in the final version of this particular script? How is that sustained in performance? Do these four voices amount to four characters, as Thomas seems to suggest, or should we consider them components of one character only, given that they appear to be facets of the same ‘sensibility’? How can we best apprehend the notion of subjectivity produced and enabled by this playtext beyond asserting its expression of personal and political collapse? Or, to put it differently, what is it that remains or that emerges from that breakdown? And what can this reveal in terms of subjectivity? In order to begin to answer these questions, I propose an investigation of the means by which the playtext of Stone City Blue aesthetically informs human ontology on the page. I focus on the characterisation procedures that shape subjectivity as dividuated: as neither possessing nor eschewing individuality, but rather partaking in and subverting the idea of individuality itself – splitting it, placing it into inextricable and constitutive relations with others. I now examine how character is constructed through an aesthetics of refraction: that is, a series of devices that suggest the fragmentation, multiplicity and interpersonal constitution of the subject.

Refracted textual character, singular-plural subjects Stone City Blue shatters the expected correspondence between the ‘I’ of experience (i. e. the embodied entity that thinks, lives, dies), the speaking ‘I’ (i. e. the embodied entity giving an account of themselves) and the syntactic ‘I’ (i. e. the subject of language that appears in the enunciation). In common speech, we operate under the assumption that the syntactic ‘I’ of my utterances is and represents myself – that there is no dissociation between the subject that experiences and thinks, the subject that speaks, and the subject of which an account is being given. The script of Stone City Blue disrupts this anticipated equivalence in three ways.

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Firstly, the playtext augments the number of speakers for each identifiable subject of experience. In other words, for each discrete life in the fiction, for example for the father figure ‘Tommy’ or his wife, at least two speakers are provided – four in the case of ‘Ray’. This has the effect of aesthetically doubling or redoubling the subject. Secondly, the subject of experience is posited as splintered, hybrid and intersubjectively constituted. This is an important remark to make, as otherwise it would appear that the playtext simply fragments, multiplies and relates subjects that are essentially or originally unitary. On the contrary, and through mechanisms I describe below, the subject of experience is presented as always-already plural. Finally, further complicating the relationship between these categories, sometimes the speakers also act as omniscient narrators and commentators of the action. In a Brechtian/storytelling fashion, speakers at times drop whatever individuated role they last had and switch to a third person and external point of view, only to become speakers within the fiction again. This passage is an example, where R1 switches from narrator to Mrs Eddie: R R R R R

Look after yourself, Tom. I will. Tommy leaves. Eddie watches him go: Mrs Eddie joins him. She pulls down the blinds. What we having for tea? Faggots. ()

The sort of characterisation put forward in Stone City Blue’s playtext can perhaps be better illustrated through the phenomenon of double refractions. In the same way that light gets decomposed into two rays when passing through certain materials, through the optics of the play singular subjects appear aesthetically split into some of their psychic components. The splitting does not in itself create but demonstrate an existing plurality. To conveniently make use of one of the scant first names provided in the play, ‘Ray’ is decomposed into other ‘Rays’: R1, R2, R3 and R4. These aesthetics of refraction apply to all the subjects of experience that are part of the fiction: ‘Ray’, his father Tommy, his father’s friend Eddie, his mother, his past partner, and the women he may or may not have slept with. In all of these cases, we are able to apprehend them as discrete fictional lives: lives marked by their own finitude and by the corporeal limits that separate them from others. Therefore, on the one hand, the playtext’s characterisation strategy outlines singular subjects that are sensibly apprehended as plural due to the proliferation of speakers. On the other hand, these speakers collectively outline singular subjects of experience, lives that are discrete despite being excentric and hybrid.

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Character-less nuance: Thomas and Kane Both Crave and Stone City Blue deploy textual characterisation to conceive singular subjects outside the parameters of individuality and self-same identity. Both plays ground their characterisation on the naming of the dramatis personae and a poetic use of speech, and share a similar mood of desperation and pain. However, it is important to closely examine each instance, so that generalising assumptions about character-less playwriting can be debunked. Regardless of the similarities in speech attribution between Crave and Stone City Blue, there are aesthetic and thematic nuances that need to be taken into account. In Stone City Blue, the process of refracted characterisation is achieved, in the first instance, by means of what Jean-Pierre Ryngaert and Julie Sermon call “un mode d’appellation ‘matricule’ [a ‘registration plate’ mode of naming]” (63). Through this alphanumeric nomenclature of the speakers, Ryngaert and Sermon argue, “les auteurs privent les personnages de leur unicité – les rendent uniformes: ils ne les présentent plus comme des êtres singuliers, à l’irréductibilité supposée, mais comme les parties d’un tout, les occurrences d’une série, les variables d’un système organisé [authors deprive characters of their uniqueness – rendering them as uniform: they do not present them as singular and supposedly irreducible beings, but as parts of a whole, occurrences of a series, variables of an organized system]” (63). Indeed, in Stone City Blue, all four speakers are named ‘R’ as if they are part of a series, only distinguished from one another by the impersonal number that marks their order of appearance in the play. However, this ‘registration plate’ style of naming does not confer the sort of anonymity and potential for re-signification that we have seen in the playtext of Crave. Stone City Blue strenuously attempts to help readers, performers and spectators to decipher these alphanumeric labels as subsets or refractions of a wider category – namely, the subject known as ‘Ray’. At the onset of the piece, R4 reveals: “Those who think they know me call me Ray” (4). From there on, ‘Ray’ is repeatedly used as a vocative in the moments where the four speakers are not reenacting past events. Importantly, the stage directions ensure that R4 obediently turns to this name, but also establishes that the other Rs do so too. Through this gesture, the playtext already begins to intimate a subject who is, to paraphrase Nancy’s epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, singular in its essential plural: a subject whose being cannot be contained within the limits of the individual. In the second instance, refracted characterisation is also achieved through dividuating dialogue: that is, a use of speech that explodes the subject of experience into many subjects of speech. Like in Crave, thoughts that seem to emanate from a single subject of experience are disseminated among all four Rs:

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In a hotel room. Alone. But who am I? What am I? How did I get here? ()

Self-reflection is very often divided and disseminated among the four Rs. Yet, in contrast to Crave, this does not serve the purpose of obfuscating the subject of experience; it is not used to avoid an idea of individuality settling with one of the speakers. Rather, this dividuating dialogue establishes the relation between aesthetics and ontology: the play’s kaleidoscopic presentation of subjectivity gives sensible form to the conjunction of multiplicity and singularity within the subject. With the purpose of reinforcing this notion, numerous ‘headcounts’ (6, 9 – 10, 68 – 69, 101– 102) appear in the play. These enable the speakers to explicitly announce their joint belonging to a first person that can manifest itself in both the grammatical singular number – “R2: Me. / R1: Myself. / R3: I.” (9 – 10) – and the plural ‘we’: R R R R R R R R

Who’s we? All of us. Me. And me. And me. And you. How come I’m a you not a me? You are a me. [emphasis added] ()

This constitutive plurality of the subject becomes the theme of even more overt discussions than the headcounts above. To R1’s anguished question “Why the fucking hell does it have to be so COMPLICATED”, R4 responds: “Because the glue that’s kept us all together can’t hold” (34). Here, and elsewhere through the thematic emphasis on important but frail relationships of kinship, love and desire, the script suggests that the crisis of the subject is not brought about by its fragmentation or plurality. Rather, it is the loss or lack of a fulfilling relationship with the other in the present that occasions the experience of subjective instability. Indeed, it is only when ‘Ray’ is in a loving, romantic relationship that he accomplishes reflexive plenitude, revealing that the glue that seems only to bind self to other is actually a constitutive part of the subject: R I’d look in the mirror. R I’d recognise the face looking back at me.

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R It was my face. R If the rooks and ravens were circling then I never heard them. […] I was happy. […] There was love. ( – )

Conversely, when relationality is experienced as the relation of non-relation, the subject’s sense of cohesion and selfhood vanishes. The lack of emotionallynurturing relations brings a sense of self-alienation, as expressed by R4: “I killed myself at the loins of whores in the lust of the city night. / And it won’t let me go. / I look at the man I used to be. / In black and white, a photograph. / That man is no longer. / Me” (85). Thus, in highlighting that the subject is contingently composed of the ties that bind them to the other, Stone City Blue resists stigmatising fragmentation as the cause or effect of the subject’s experience of crisis. This charge is often made in reference to Kane’s presentation of a split subject in 4.48 Psychosis, which I have argued instead in terms of resistance to cisgender normativity. In Stone City Blue, while also moving away from the Cartesian split between mind and body and avoiding the liberal discourse of self-sameness, Thomas is putting forward psychic fragmentation, hybridity and relationality as defining attributes of subjectivity.

“And I’m alone” The serial naming of the dramatis personae, the polyphonic voicing of selfreflective thoughts and past experiences that only ‘Ray’ could have witnessed, and the overt discussions about being multiple exhaustively clarify for the readers that all four speakers, and the ‘I’ of their utterances, refer to the life of the fictional subject of experience we know as ‘Ray’. Yet the script strives to convey even further that the subject is fragmented, multiple and relational, and brings attention to other strategies of dividuated characterisation. We are constantly reminded that ‘Ray’ is alone in the hotel room where the action is vaguely set. Admittedly, the statement is always modulated by the suggestion that he is accompanied, or haunted, by his “demons”, “angels”, “naked succubae” and “voices” (3, 33, 38, 93). At a textual level, however, the script makes it impossible to discern between the ontological and the hauntological, the external and the internal, the ‘I’ and the other – a blurring that separates Stone City Blue from other dividuating scripts and performances, such as debbie tucker green’s Stoning Mary (2005).²⁴ These dichotomies collapse because R1, R2, R3 and R4 indistinctively voice and incarnate all that pertains to the subject’s psychic life, including the  See Appendix, page , for more on tucker green’s Stoning Mary.

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irrationality that the Cartesian schematisation suppresses, and the fragmentation and alterity that cannot be subsumed by the humanist account. The result is, to borrow André Breton’s terms, “a sort of absolute reality, a surreality” (268) in which the conscious and the unconscious, restless wake and dream (and nightmare), collate to provide a fuller account of subjective existence. In a context where the distinctions between memory, fantasy, reality, public persona, self and other collapse, the references to and (imaginary) dialogues with John Malkovich (15, 17– 18, 21– 27) serve to do more than the purpose of obscurely, and unexpectedly, locating the play in Wales. The actor’s name immediately conjures the key themes of the 1999 film Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman and starring Malkovich himself. In the film, an ex-puppeteer discovers a portal into the actor’s subjectivity: whoever goes through this portal is able to experience the world as if occupying the actor’s mind and body for fifteen minutes, creating confusion and havoc in Malkovich’s real life. When Malkovich’s character eventually enters the portal, however, the temporary doubleinhabiting of his own corporeality results in a nightmarish world where every body he encounters is an identical copy of his. Through intertextual association with the film, the name ‘Malkovich’ and the affinity that ‘Ray’ presumes he would have with him (22) efficaciously put the spotlight on the central themes for Stone City Blue. The disjunction between a subject’s public persona (perhaps comparable to the speaking ‘I’) and their inner ‘I’ (the psychological life of the subject) is one of them. This separation in Stone City Blue is poetically experienced as a barrier for intimate, intersubjective relations, as expressed by one of the play’s refrains: “One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul yet no one ever comes to sit by it” (14, 63). The reference to the film also reinforces the play’s emphasis on the hybridity of the psyche: the fact that a number of others populate and inform our inner world even if our external appearance is one of individuality – something that in Being John Malkovich takes place literally. Evoking the effects of Malkovich’s embodiment of himself, in Stone City Blue we assist with the proliferation of ‘Rays’ that takes place on an exceptional night, when “things are different” (9) because the subject leaves to one side his public persona, ‘Ray’, and undergoes an immersive experience of his own subjectivity. “[T]onight”, says R4, “I’m free from crazy Ray and the people who think they know him. I am myself” (9). What the play proposes is that being oneself, relinquishing one’s public façade, is nothing else than acknowledging one’s constitutive multiplicity – the otherness within. As spectators of a disclosure, we witness not the revelation of a self-same individuality that has been hidden under the moniker ‘Ray’, but the exorcism of the others that compose and are his subjectivity.

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The refraction of ‘Ray’ as a singular-plural subject is therefore dramaturgically configured through its serial naming of the dramatis personae, the dividuating use of a dialogue that recurrently counts – and accounts for – the multiple components of ‘Ray’, and the levelling of self and other in what the script proposes as an honest and unmediated exposition of the subject, free from his public persona. Whilst these devices generate a discursive characterisation of ‘Ray’ as a singular subjectivity that is essentially plural, the play also prescribes one instance in which the tension between the singularity and plurality of ‘Ray’ manifests itself physically, rather than psychically. When R1 produces a gun, R4 vigorously pleads to be shot (35). Yet R4’s demand is soon echoed by R2 and R3, in what constitutes a choral death-wish: “R4: Kill me and put an end to it. / R3: Send me to Hell. / R2: For killing love. / R4: Killing myself” (37). The degree to which the speakers are interdependent becomes apparent when R1 pulls the trigger, which creates a domino effect: R4 is intact, but “[b]lood spurts from R3’s mouth. R2 falls backwards, apparently dead” (38). The effects of the shooting are, however, immediately undone, as these deaths are revealed to be metaphorical, stagings of the collateral damage that follows the deterioration of any relationship: “R1: Loved her enough to kill her? / R4: I didn’t kill her. / R3: You killed her inside. / R2: She killed me inside” (43).

Role-playing, melancholia and queerness These mechanisms of refraction are not only used to sensibly and ontologically outline a dividuated and hybrid subject, ‘Ray’, but they are also applied in the characterisation of his others. From his father to the unnamed lover with whom he did feel subjective completion, a series of subjects are presented in the play with the same characterising technique. These characters emerge precisely through the last device used to present ‘Ray’ as a fragmented, hybrid and multiple subject: namely, the amalgamation of almost unframed sequences of role-playing without a stable and original role.²⁵ In the context of meta-theatrical studies, “role-playing within the role” is often defined as the device in which “a character […] takes on a role that is different from his usual self” without resorting to the ‘play within the play’ device, and as a strategy that provides an insightful “ambiguity and complexity with regard to the character” (Hornby 67). However, as the play emphasises from the  Acting and pretence are recurrent themes in Thomas’s work. For a study of the paradoxes emerging from using role-playing in Thomas’s early attempts to invent a theatre form for Wales, see Heike Roms’s “Caught in the Act: On the Theatricality of Identity and Politics in the Dramatic Works of Edward Thomas”.

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beginning, ‘Ray’ is also a façade, a public persona that is put on by a subject who presents himself as unfathomable. Without anybody other than ‘Ray’ as an audience or addressee for the assumption of such roles, R1, R2, R3 and R4 conjure up those others who have played defining roles in the protagonist’s life development. Through its use of role-playing, Stone City Blue continues to characterise ‘Ray’ as ex-centric and hybrid, whilst introducing and dividuating new subjects of experience. Insofar as the play offers a vision of ‘Ray’ as partly composed of both male and female components, Stone City Blue’s emphasis on the relational constitution of the subject partially transcends the dictates of the heteronormative matrix. Whilst the play does not challenge the view that desire and relations normally take place between people of different sexes, the heteronormative expectation that beings are either male or female, both in sex and gender, is complicated by the account of the psychic life of the subject. Indeed, ‘Ray’ is portrayed as male and heterosexual at best – at worst, he appears as a solipsistic patriarchal man lamenting the estrangement of his father without sympathy for his betrayed mother, a man exposing the self-inflicted void occasioned by his own disaffection towards past female romantic and sexual partners. Yet paying attention to the play’s emphasis that, in psychological terms, his subjectivity is composed of male and female melancholic incorporations can perhaps help to attenuate the strong phallocentric tone of the script. Butler’s theories of the subject can enable a queer reading of subjectivity in Stone City Blue. In her reworking of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” and The Ego and the Id, Butler troubles the heteronormative assumption that gender identity, gender presentation, and desire are as homogenous and aligned as heteronormativity would have us believe (1997b: 132– 98). Regarding heterosexual individuals, for example, Butler concludes that the adoption of gender positions always relies on a forbidden homosexual desire (cathexis) that can only be let go through a process of melancholic incorporation and identification (1997b: 135). As a result of this necessary installation of the other in the psyche, Butler argues that the self can never achieve self-identity (2004a: 133) but, more importantly, that gender performativity constitutes “the ‘acting out’ of unresolved grief, whereby performative genders (both straight and gay) are allegories of heterosexual/homosexual melancholia” (Salih 2004: 244). In other words, for Butler, the subject adopts the abject gender position that s/he has repudiated as a possible recipient of love: a heterosexual woman, for example, can be redefined as a lesbian melancholic (1997b: 146 – 47). Such redefinitions are momentous insofar as they suggest that subjectivity cannot continue to be thought in essentialist terms. Whilst Butler’s concern in The Psychic Life of Power lies with the formation of the subject and the development of gender identity and desire, her understanding of

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the melancholic and queer nature of subjectivity encompasses not only the symbolic losses of repudiated cathexes. In other works, such as Precarious Life, the melancholic component of the subject also includes the real losses experienced by the subject – the loss of separation from or death of the other that the subject experiences throughout life. From this perspective, even if ‘Ray’ is male-identified and his desire is articulated as heteronormative, he is also strongly figured as a deeply melancholic subject in the Butlerian sense of the term – independently of desire, the subject that we (mis)identify as ‘Ray’ is queer in his psychic make-up. Through roleplaying, Stone City Blue allows the four speakers to ‘act out’ the inter-subjective and relational psychic composition of ‘Ray’, those multi-gendered lives that have been lost in romantic failure or paternal estrangement, that have been internalised and are now part of who ‘Ray’ is. In this respect, the queerness of Stone City Blue differs from that of Kane’s Crave, whose speakers constantly allude to gender identity and body morphology in accordance with heteronormative predictions, but ultimately never settle for one. The queerness of Stone City Blue is also different from that of 4.48 Psychosis, which elusively exposes transgender issues. The transgression that subjectivity in Thomas’s play proposes is not, to use one of Butler’s terms, the ‘panicking’ of heteronormativity (1993); the play does not focus on the abject genders, presentations and desires that heteronormativity places at the margins of what is natural and acceptable. Rather, Stone City Blue calls into question the very notion of heteronormativity, by presenting a queerness that does not only reside away, in the abject other, but also within the most heteronormative ‘I’.

Self-disclosure and authenticity Besides queering heteronormative positions, another effect of role-playing in Stone City Blue is the redefinition of authentic self-disclosure and the ways in which we attain knowledge about a subject. The script proposes the seemingly paradoxical situation that subjective authenticity is delivered, first, through the pretence of role-playing within an already dubious role (‘Ray’), and, second, through the invocation of the lives of others instead of the construction of a selfcentred, individualistic narrative. By the end of the play, R4 insists: “The name on my passport isn’t mine and I have no ring on my finger. Who I am and where I come from nobody knows” (86). Yet, through role-playing, Stone City Blue does provide a thorough portrait of ‘Ray’. This portrait, however, renders the social and material condition of this subject opaque, irrelevant. Instead, Stone City Blue maps the network of relations and emotions that configure ‘Ray’, that are

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Ray, disclosing his extimacy and yet never revealing what his identity outside the hotel room may be. The playtext therefore powerfully delineates an anti-Cartesian affective epistemology of the subject, for which knowledge about the self and the other is not attained rationally. On the contrary, the script for Stone City Blue proposes that we get to know the subject through compassion. This compassion can be understood as a deep concern for alien suffering, focusing on emotion and not on identity. Yet, compassion can also be interpreted as Nancy describes it, as “com-passion”, “the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil” (xiii), that is, an intersubjective exposure to the other that will affect who I am. Indeed, the play insists that ‘Ray’ is opaque to the world because he has lost emotional proximity to others. His alleged unknowingness stems from a selfprotective secrecy that only exacerbates the severance of intimate ties. Early on in the play, ‘Ray’ admits: “Honesty is not always the best policy. I’ve been described by some as being too sensitive, as a result I’ve reigned myself in, exposed myself to fewer situations where that sensitivity might lead to my downfall” (12). In this sense, the play presents a double irony. ‘Ray’ comes to understand that to be, and to have loved, is an opening-up to the other, a mutual exposure and a contagion, but this realisation only arrives to him negatively, through the relation of non-relation to others. The second irony is that, despite the use of monikers, and the anonymising lack of social, geographic and temporal context, the entire play is an enactment of self-disclosure through which we as readers/ performers/spectators get to know ‘Ray’. Thus, the play presents the perfect scenario through which to stage an affective epistemology of the subject based on this double notion of compassion. Knowing of the grief of the other, and being in contact with it, is sufficient for us to recognise a subject even if their public identity remains undisclosed or incomprehensible to us. In relation to the notions of self-disclosure and opacity, a quote attributed to Sainte-Beuve is used twice: “One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passers by see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way” (14, 63). Found in a handwritten note under the Bible in the hotel room, the note pertinently captures the solitude of a subject whose formative ties have been severed, like the protagonist of Stone City Blue. The play introduces this theme through an ironic coup by deferring, once more, the reader’s/spectator’s understanding of speech in relation to a real identity. The author of the quote is not Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, as the fiction intimates (14, 63). Sainte-Beuve was an early nineteenth-century French literary critic who did vindicate sensitivity to biographical detail in literary studies, since “literary production […] is not distinct or separable from the rest of mankind’s character and activity […]. I am inclined to say, tel arbre, tel fruit – the

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fruit is like the tree” (Sainte-Beuve 281). However, the attribution suggested in Stone City Blue is false. Nor is Tommy (the protagonist’s father) the author of this quote, as it is ambivalently suggested later on (63). The quote actually pertains to a letter by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, written in 1880 and therefore years after Sainte-Beuve’s death. In the letter the painter, like ‘Ray’, not only expresses his wish to re-establish a good relationship between himself and his father, but also, like Stone City Blue’s protagonist, manifests his longing for a redeeming, deep connection with an other: “So now what are we to do, keep this fire alive inside, have salt in ourselves, wait patiently, but with how much impatience, await the hour, I say, when whoever wants to, will come and sit down there, will stay there, for all I know?” (Letter 155). The use of the quote by van Gogh thus not only thematically fortifies the play’s discourse on the solitude and opacity of the subject, but performs the very trick of disclosure of emotion and protection of identity on which the play operates. The issue of the anonymised over-exposure of ‘Ray’, which the script self-reflectively acknowledges with the question “[w]hose identity are we protecting here?” (71), provides further insight into one of the main arguments of this book: namely that what might be deemed similar characterising techniques do not necessarily figure subjectivity on the same terms. Earlier in this chapter I argued that the serial dramatis personae and the dividuation created by dialogue outline a singular-plural subject that the script can only name ‘R’ or ‘Ray’ in acknowledgment of the subject’s opacity and ex-centricity. The attribution of speech to ‘registration plates’ in Stone City Blue, however, has a different effect compared to Kane’s Crave. Regardless of the well-known interpretations suggested by the playwright, Kane’s playtext refuses to clarify what the origin or meaning of the letters M, C, B and A might be, and creates indeterminate, queer subjects that acknowledge and yet subvert the norms that are deployed to individuate and subjectivise. Stone City Blue, on the other hand, insists on providing the clues for the identification of R1, R2, R3 and R4 as facets of a subject whose name may or may not be Ray, but whose vital trajectory, personal relations, and intersubjective sense of the self can be retraced and provide an emotional portrait of the subject, even when the notion of original, self-same and stable selfhood is strongly foreclosed.

What ‘Ray’ can do for critical theory In the article “Scholars Comment: If the Commodity Could Speak”, Butler brings attention to how critical theory and performance can encounter one another in fruitful conversations, asking questions such as, “Where do we find performance within critical theory?; and, indeed, [Butler’s] favourite, What form of critical the-

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ory do we find in performance?” (2009b: 23). Before we turn to examine Stone City Blue in performance, I want to address here what Thomas’s play offers to the theories of subjectivation examined thus far, beginning with Althusser’s theory of interpellation. The use of ‘registration plates’ to name the speakers does not mean that the text necessarily averts occupying the subjectivising role of ideology in Althusser’s thought, as I have argued is the case in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. The script of Stone City Blue does acknowledge the structure of interpellation, albeit deploying the interpellative framework in a subversive manner. On the one hand, Thomas’s script stages a number of classic criticisms of the Althusserian scheme. For example, although R1, R2, R3 and R4 are vaguely hailed by the script with the role they supposedly play in the fiction – that is, as facets of a male character known as ‘Ray’ – the subjectivising effects of such an interpellation are neither as definite nor as defining as Althusser would have it. Neither the label ‘Ray’ nor the discrete tags ‘R1’, ‘R2’, ‘R3’ and ‘R4’ completely capture the subject’s experience of subjectivity, since they do not reflect the multifaceted, melancholic extimacy of the subject. With regards to Althusserian recognition and subjection to the name being hailed, the play makes clear that the subject repudiates ‘Ray’ as his identity. ‘Ray’ is always acknowledged as a fake public persona that allows the subject to mask his sense of selfhood. Thus, Stone City Blue reverses the hierarchies and flows of power embedded in Althusser’s theories. Here, ideology does not impose upon the individual a mandatory subject position: it is the subject who offers the name whereby to be addressed, the name that shields him from a subjectivation from above. The subject is therefore understood as having the power of self-determination and self-obfuscation, the power to remain unmarked. The subject as outlined by Stone City Blue is, therefore, surreptitious, elusive to power, excessive to its signifiers. In its insistence on repudiating the given identity, the fiction of the play also suggests that the notion of disidentification is central to subjectivation. Indeed, the subject we call ‘Ray’ does not conceive of himself as ‘Ray’: “Will you quit calling me Ray? I’m not Ray, I never was Ray and I’m not Ray now”, says R2 (44). The refusal of this public persona, of this given label, would seem to match the first premise of political subjectivation according to Rancière: that is, “the denial of an identity given by an other” (1992: 62). However, Rancière takes as the conditions of possibility for subjectivation another two relations with the other: the impossibility of identifying with any of the existing identities in a particular distribution of the sensible, and a demonstration of the universal political principle of equality (1992: 62). Stone City Blue poses important ques-

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tions with regards to the impossibility of identification within a political framework. As I elucidate in Chapter Two, Rancière argues that a political subject identifies with the plight of the other, but can never identify with the other. Conversely, Stone City Blue appeals to processes of identification as the basis for important transformations in the ways we think and interact with others, transformations that are politically significant. Although Thomas’s play establishes a direct connection between ‘Ray’ and the father figure (both unable to sustain love, both consumed by isolation), it also demonstrates that processes of identification might not necessarily be conscious or desired. Melancholic incorporation can be considered a process of unconscious identification, whereby the lost other is absorbed into the self. Stone City Blue posits these overt and unconscious identifications as the trigger of two crucial changes. First, within the fiction, acknowledging these identifications prompts ‘Ray’ to recognise the intrinsic relatedness of the subject, and to realise that individualism contravenes this relatedness and results in the destruction of self and other. Secondly, these identifications serve to conceptualise the subject in hybrid terms, disarming essentialist preconceptions about identity that can be mobilised for exclusionary action. Arguably, then, disidentification with social identities and identification with others are posited in the play as crucial for the egalitarian reconfiguration of the sensible which Rancière calls politics.²⁶ Yet perhaps a little more needs to be said about why Stone City Blue rethinks Rancière’s description of politics. As I have aimed to show in this chapter, the figuration of subjectivity in Stone City Blue can be seen as disrupting a partition of the sensible that still participates in the tenets of Cartesianism, liberal humanism and heteronormativity. In this partition of the sensible, relationality, fragmentation, and psychic life in all its ex-centricity and alterity are not accounted for. The subject is thought of as necessarily rational, unitary and individuated, as classifiable by sociological brackets. Contrary to this, Stone City Blue renegotiates what is to be seen, heard and accounted for in our understanding of subjectivity, and this renegotiation encompasses a repudiation of the given or played social identity, and a vindication of its psychic fragmentation, otherness and relationality. The play not only disrupts the identity-based and individualistic hegemonic understanding

 In this, Stone City Blue not only contravenes Rancière’s scepticism towards identification, but also Bertolt Brecht’s resistance to empathy, which he understood as an obstacle to rationality and to the project of the Left. For a persuasive and innovative reappraisal of Brechtian theory, see Bruce McConachie’s examination of Brecht’s theories through cognitive science, which concludes that empathy “actually holds the promise of enhancing a person’s rationality in social situations” ().

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of subjectivity, it actually reconfigures what we understand a subject to be – and be sustained of. What Stone City Blue can offer to Rancière’s theory of politics and political subjectivation is, therefore, a testament to forms of relations with the other that might resemble or indeed be based on some form of identification with the other, but that nonetheless can be the conduit for disarming individualism and essentialism. What ‘Ray’ could tell Rancière is that identification with others is not a rational choice, but an unavoidable condition of subjectivity that can enable less self-centred and more compassionate forms of relatedness. Stone City Blue can moreover offer a rapprochement between collective understandings of the subject and the psychoanalytical aspects of Butler’s theory of the subject. Badiou’s formal theory of the Subject is relevant here because filial and romantic love lays the foundations of subjectivity in Stone City Blue, and love is one of the four Badiouian truth procedures whereby the Subject emerges.²⁷ Although mathematics and politics qua truth procedures have received more attention than love or art within Badiou’s oeuvre (Bosteels 25), his recently-translated conversation with Nicolas Truong under the title In Praise of Love begins to address this imbalance. In Praise of Love approaches the topic in a less formalised manner than earlier accounts (1999: 83; 2009: 73 – 74). Here, Badiou describes the amorous encounter as an Event that disrupts our world and that is susceptible to inducing a faithful subject of love – a Subject that resiliently constructs the world anew point by point in the present, in fidelity to this encounter. It is important to take into consideration three aspects of Badiou’s theory of subjectivation in the realm of love as elucidated in In Praise of Love. First, for Badiou the amorous subject is neither each lover involved in the process, nor a fusion of these into a single entity that erases their particularity (in Badiou and Truong 24). It is the actual exercise of a militant fidelity to the love encounter itself, an operation of constantly enacting (performing) a subjection to the amorous encounter: “the real subject of love”, Badiou clarifies, “is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts” (in Badiou and Truong 90). Secondly, the truth that love qua procedure creates is the construction of “a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity” (in Badiou and Truong 25), “the world from the perspective of difference” (in Badiou and

 I continue to capitalise the terms ‘Subject’ and ‘Event’ when they refer to Badiou’s theories in order to avoid confusion with non-Badiouian use of these terms. ‘Event’ therefore refers exclusively to this extra-ontological, disruptive, unforeseeable rupture of the situation, whilst ‘Subject’ applies only to the procedures exercised in relation to that Event. See pages  –  for more on Badiou’s theory of subjectivation.

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Truong 39). Badiou insists that love as a procedure is a “Two Scene” (in Badiou and Truong 29). Finally, consistent with Badiou’s militant Subject in politics, the element of duration and resilience beyond the encounter is tantamount: “In love, fidelity signifies […] the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure, through the birth of a world” (in Badiou and Truong 45 – 46). After the element of chance that characterises the encounter, love as a procedure “lock[s] chance into the framework of eternity” and “[t]he problem then resides in inscribing this eternity within time” (in Badiou and Truong 47). In all, the Badiouian amorous Subject has to resist lapsing back into a world based on individuality; it has to avoid relinquishing the project of the couple’s togetherness. These two situations signify for Badiou a collapse of the amorous Subject. Revisiting past scenes of unfaithfulness, disconnection and estrangement, Stone City Blue suggests a different scenario when addressing the issue of subjectivity and love. More specifically, Thomas’s play highlights that Badiou’s understanding of love as a truth procedure is constrictively framed within a romantic type of love, which requires both the Evental amorous encounter and a “scene of Two” that is collectively and continuously being constructed. However, Stone City Blue partially focuses on the painful impossibility of declaring and fulfilling a filial love given the estrangement and death of the father. Unlike the parental love that Badiou nonetheless views with certain suspicion (2012: 50 – 51) – and indeed unlike romantic love – filial love does not emerge from a random, inexplicable, Evental encounter: it is an extraordinary bond created precisely out of the truth procedure itself, through the performative power of being a son to one’s father. As regards romantic love, Stone City Blue also evinces that Badiou’s model does not account for a construction of life “through the filter of difference” as opposed to the filter of “identity” (in Badiou and Truong 60) outside the successful, combative love that the philosopher vindicates. In the play, fidelity to the Event has ceased to be pursued, the exercise of militancy to love has been abandoned or betrayed, and the collective Subject of love has collapsed. However, the decentring of the world continues to affect ‘Ray’. To put it differently, if Badiou’s formula dictates that conviction, militancy and certainty are crucial for the existence of the amorous Subject and of love as procedure, Stone City Blue’s fragmented and hybrid ‘Ray’ evinces that, when the “enchanted existence” (Badiou 2009: 74) produced by the Subject of love has come to an end, the legacy of the love procedure can continue to impact the lives that participated in that Subject. In short, after the collective amorous Subject has collapsed, the decentred experience and construction of the world might persist within the person who once was a lover, part of an amorous Subject. The abandonment of individualism

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that love entails has the potential to persist within the singular subject after a love procedure. Badiou fails to consider this remainder of the amorous truth procedure, this trace of the logic of the Two that animated the amorous project and that may continue to animate a singular life. Badiou does acknowledge what he calls “resurrection” which in love “takes the form of a second encounter, of an enchantment recaptured at the point in which it had been obscured, where routine and possession had obliterated it” (2009: 76). What I discuss here is not a second encounter but the maintenance of the logic of the Two despite the abandonment of the truth procedure. This remainder of the scene of the Two can perhaps be maintained regardless of the absence of the Event in the case of filial love, and after the collapse of the love procedure, because relationality is inextricable from the singular subject. Indeed, Thomas’s play testifies to the acknowledgement, in a moment of heightened solitude, that we are also our affective bonds. Acknowledging this relationality effectively constitutes an experience of the world based on the difference that the procedure of love exacerbates. This relationality is precisely what Butler beautifully addresses in Precarious Life, where she highlights how loss can entail a reframing of our understanding of subjectivity: When we lose certain people […] something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. (2006b: 22)

In a similar vein, in its exploration of grief, Stone City Blue portrays a melancholic singular subject that, having experienced the estrangement and death of the father, and the loss of romantic partners, acknowledges that the ties that once bound them continue to constitute who he is. In all, the play suggests that alterity and multiplicity lie at the core of the singular subject, and that giving an account of ourselves is a melancholic ‘acting out’ of the relations of love and grief that define us.

Staging Stone City Blue To recapitulate, Stone City Blue’s playtext conceives singular subjectivity as essentially plural, fragmented, relational and queer. Since the play’s figuration of subjectivity does not share liberal-humanist and heteronormative ideals, nei-

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ther does its textual character. Like the other characters evoked, ‘Ray’ exceeds any notion of psychological and physical unity. On the page, ‘Ray’ is collectively executed by all four speakers: it comprises the male subject of experience to which their speech mostly refers, and the absent subjects that the Rs evoke. Furthermore, the script suggests that the subject is only partially knowable through a compassionate exposure to their emotions. This final section complements my examination of Stone City Blue’s treatment of character and subjectivity by considering the play in production. At this point it is worth noting that Stone City Blue has not had the resonance that Thomas’s previous work achieved in terms of touring and stagings. The original production, directed by Thomas and premiered at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold (2004) was only brought to Newport and Cardiff. A Swedish version, devised by the theatre company Kiss My Art Sthlm, was staged in Stockholm in 2007 under the direction of Majken Pollack, but did not tour. Finally, David Ian Rabey directed a student production in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University in 2008. Unlike the pieces directed respectively by Thomas and Pollack, both featuring two male and two female actors, the production at Aberystwyth had to adapt to the scale and demographics of a large student group, which resulted in a cast of fifteen students, most of them female (Rabey 2008). Examining how the cast composition affects stage character and subjectivity, and interrogating these productions’ preference for physical choreographies, will contribute to the investigation in this chapter of character and subjectivity in Stone City Blue, and highlight the differences between this and character-less work with similar aesthetics on the page.

Casting and role-play Exempt from conventional characters and stable spatial grounding, a playtext like Stone City Blue allegedly allows directors and performers great creative freedom. However, Thomas’s characterisation leaves little room for manoeuvring away from the concept of character established in the text. This is so because the formation of dividuated characters on the page is strongly rooted in three relatively fixed features of the script: namely, the overt thematic reference to subjective multiplicity and fragmentation, the structural dissemination of selfreflective speech to various speakers, and the requirement of role-play. With regards to the thematic reference to subjectivity as both singular and plural, these conversations are so recurrent that the script would have to be severely modified in order to avoid or tame this meaning. As for the dissemination of self-expressive speech, it appears that substantial changes in the expected numbers of performers would actually enhance the meta-theatrical premise of the play. In other

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words, a potential reduction of the cast to one or two performers, or a substantial increase, as was the case in the student production at Aberystwyth, would only accentuate the already-existing dynamic of role-playing. Similarly, if hybridity and relationality are invoked through role-playing, significant textual changes would have to be undertaken in order to alter the meta-theatrical weight of the piece – to avoid others being ventriloquised. Thus, the script already offers quite sturdy parameters for a dividuated stage characterisation, which could only be done otherwise through deep intervention in the text’s architecture and themes. The script is also decisive with regards to stage character and gender. Although the playtext thematically emphasises that the protagonist’s identity is inaccessible, ‘Ray’ is discursively portrayed as a middle-aged, heterosexual, male subject. His self-disclosure throughout the play furthermore outlines a series of gendered subjects: amongst others, his parents and female partners. As such, the configuration of gendered stage characters is led by discourse. The role-playing dynamic of Stone City Blue compels spectators to disregard the materiality of most (if not all) bodies on the stage, to interpret them as the support for conjuring up other subjects through speech. In this sense, Stone City Blue differs from other character-less works such as Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. Crave’s script subversively utilises some of the norms that allow us to read the body and the subject (i. e. gender, sexuality and desire), while the text for 4.48 Psychosis avoids them altogether. As I argued above, stagings of these two plays by Kane run the risk of congealing the slippery and non-identifiable subjectivities of the playtexts into the already-gendered, age- and race-specific bodies of the performers. In Stone City Blue, the gender identity of the character called ‘Ray’ is always fixed by the text. While differences in the cast do not affect the gender identity of the fictional subjects outlined, they can impact on the play’s queering of heterosexuality. The cast for the original production matched the genders of the performers with those of the characters haunting ‘Ray’ and evoked through role-play.²⁸ In this piece, when not left in that common zone that is ‘Ray’, Nia Roberts and Alys Thomas embodied the roles of the mother, the babysitter, the lover, and the prostitutes, whilst Ryland Teifi and Richard Harrington played Tommy and his male butcher friend. The same allocation of genders was applied in Pollack’s Swedishlanguage production.²⁹ Importantly, the script’s suggestion that the subject is al This and subsequent insights are based on information provided by Thomas in a telephone interview, and reviews and stills from the original Theatre Clwyd production.  This analysis is based on DVD documentation of a performance of Stone City Blue at the Teater Scenario, Stockholm, in March  recorded by the theatre.

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ways psychically queer is arguably less palpable here, as role-playing always falls on the ‘right’ gender in the cases of R1, R2 and R3, while R4 as the relatively central perspective for ‘Ray’ remained male. The student production directed by David Ian Rabey, on the other hand, took advantage of the script’s multiplication of speaking subjects and increased the original dramatis personae to fifteen (Rabey 2008).³⁰ Counting only five male performers amongst them, this show sought a unified and stereotypically masculine appearance through costume. All fifteen actors wore pinstripe suits, white shirts, black shoes and ties; female performers had their hair tied back. The proliferation of bodies on the stage reinforced the singular-plural notion of subjectivity, foregrounding how the psychic, hauntological components within the subject effectively decentre it. The inclusion of male and female speakers in the predominantly masculine roles of R2 and R4, and the overwhelming presence of female actors in drag across all four Rs, strongly configured stage character in line with the queer subjectivity of the script – perhaps more so than in the original staging. Consequently, the gender composition and presentation of any given cast has little impact on modifying the gender identity of the play’s characters, although it does have the ability to highlight or downplay the script’s queering of heteronormativity. The challenge for staging Stone City Blue is not so much fossilising each character into the body of one actor only, but rather finding a gestural, physical, spatial and phonic vocabulary attuned to the subjectivity outlined verbally – that is, a vocabulary that relays singularity and plurality, queerness and masculine identification, and enduring, constitutive relatedness.

Movement, touch and scenography Given that some aspects of characterisation are strongly influenced by the playtext, it is not surprising that the three productions of Stone City Blue have favoured that which is exclusive to the theatrical event: the sensuality of bodies, movements, pace, sound and lighting. All three stagings of Stone City Blue discussed thus far coincide in their dynamic and expressive choreographies. This greatly contrasts with the immobility of and corporeal distance between performers favoured for stagings of Kane’s Crave. Either having the performers standing up rigidly throughout the piece (as in Bernard Sobel’s Manque or the recent Ac-

 This analysis is based on DVD documentation of two performances of Stone City Blue at Stiwdio R. Gerallt Jones, Aberystwyth, on  and  January . These were recorded by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University.

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tors Touring Company production), or sitting down (as in the productions directed by Vicky Featherstone and Thomas Ostermeier), Crave has prompted artistic teams to highlight corporeal paralysis and insularity. Undoubtedly, these artistic decisions are rooted in the notion of subjectivity put forward by Kane’s playtext and its grieving mood. More specifically, positioning oneself outside the normative frames of apprehension of subjectivity cannot but bring subjective isolation and longing for human/social contact, while grief might contribute to socially isolating and paralysing the subject. Attuned to the emphasis on the subject’s constitutive relatedness and interdependency, the productions of Stone City Blue directed by Thomas, Pollack and Rabey have respectively privileged physical contact and collaboration among the performers in order to characterise ‘Ray’ on the stage, on occasion placing part of the responsibilities for stage characterisation on scenography. In the original production, the set design was “absurdist, like an [M. C.] Escher sculpture, with tables on the floor and hanging from the walls in impossible angles” (Thomas 2012). This setting aimed to generate the impression of “a hall of mirrors without the mirrors” (Thomas 2012), with the performers perceived as multiple and distorted reflections of the same subject in a slightly claustrophobic space. A stream of water was revealed from underneath the floorboards (Thomas 2012), illustrating some of the most imaginative moments of the play – the story of a child pulling fish out of a blue carpet (18), and the pseudomyth about “[t]he stone that started all this / That was thrown in the river / That created the commotion” (96). Stage design thus partially contributed to visually conveying and reinforcing ideas of subjective redoubling and self-reflection, while the river evoked not only the stream of consciousness, but also the uncovering of a psychic life boarded-up behind a public persona. The trope of the mirrors was further emphasised by movement in the original production, with the actors often copying one another’s gestures on the stage. According to Thomas, the physicality of the original piece was accidentally found during rehearsals (2012). The unconventionality of the script made cast members feel vulnerable, which resulted in unexpected group dynamics; if one of the actors moved to one side of the stage trying to find a form, the others would follow: “They were like a bunch of wild animals in the Savannah, like a herd”, Thomas notes, “[p]robably because at the early stages of rehearsal they didn’t know what the hell they were going to do, or who they were” (2012). Later on, this choreography found its way into the piece as a way of creating “unity of purpose” (Thomas 2012) – or, in this chapter’s parlance, singularity – with movements that included mirroring, touching and the expression of conflicting attraction and repulsion:

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If you took all the text out and looked at the movement, there’d be this desperate clustering and re-clustering, reconfiguration, looking for a form to get out of it, out of something […]. They were always going together to try and solve a problem in a myriad of shapes, forming, reforming, regrouping it and doing it again. Using all the stage in a circle, in a square, and eventually, through constant moulding and re-moulding they end up in a reasonably still position and leave the stage. (Thomas 2012)

These movements and shapes climaxed in the original production in one final image recreating the logics of disunity, multiplicity and singularity of character, as the four performers assembled on a pile that struggled to be stable. The productions directed by Rabey and Pollack similarly made extensive use of choreography as a stage characterising tool, although reducing the input of scenography. The student production at Aberystwyth deployed a traverse stage, materialising the play’s emphasis on an affective epistemology of the subject. The thesis that emotional proximity and compassion are essential for getting to know the other, rather than the disclosure of social identity, was thus tested in performance itself. While not together on the stage at all times, the fifteen performers offered an expressive, fractured and highly dynamic choreography. At times, the actors performing the same gestures would find themselves dispersed on the stage, just as the notion of subjectivity offered by the work is split and disseminated. On other occasions, one of the actors would be excluded from several group choreographies taking place simultaneously, visually evoking the experience of loneliness and the inescapable presence of others in the psychic life of the subject. Also memorable are images expressing the loss of positive intersubjective bonds and the subsequent isolation and destabilisation of the subject: for example, with one of the performers struggling to stand up and gain his ground, physically entrapped in a circle formed by other actors with their backs turned to him. Choreography was also crucial for stage characterisation in Pollack’s production, albeit unfolding at a much slower pace and in a more sensual tone than the Welsh student production. Performed on a bare stage, the four casuallyand heteronormatively-dressed performers switched from conversing with one another to engaging in slow dances in pairs and group sculptures, until these recurrently became unsustainably heavy and tense before imploding. Rather than foregrounding the experience of R4, Pollack’s production favoured the subtext of romantic love and betrayal. Here, like in Rabey’s production, choreographies and group body sculptures were deployed to generate images for the play’s plot, but also for its understanding of subjectivity. Significantly, not only movement but proximity and physical contact among the performers were constantly required to generate group sculptures or movement sequences, or to build tran-

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sitions between them – conjuring up an idea of the subject as not only fluid but also, inevitably, formed by the ‘touch’ of others.

Rehearsing non-individualism I want to finish these reflections on Stone City Blue in performance by briefly considering the rehearsal space. Arguably, rehearsals do not only serve the purpose of determining how a notion of subjectivity will be presented within a performance: they also provide an opportunity to renegotiate the performers’ conceptualisation of subjectivity, perhaps to enact it without the fiction. As Thomas recalls, the absence of individuated entities in the script presented difficulties to the performers in the original production (Thomas 2012). In general, performers found solace in the moments when a memory is relived and role-playing is required, as those snippets contained clearer roadmaps for acting ‘in character’. The expression of grief or anxiety almost unhinged from a clear individuality was harder to approach, and female actors in particular struggled with the strong masculine voice in the play (Thomas 2012). According to Thomas, Harrington, who had not received traditional actor training, in this respect “was freer than the others, who desperately wanted something to hang their hats on” and who “struggled with creating a character because they had nothing to go on” (2012). Eventually the performers found a strategy to negotiate their relationship with their roles, based on the understanding of their memories and those of the cast members, rather than the construction of an individuated persona. Thomas recalls how Harrington would ask him “all kinds of questions about my [Thomas’s] background, and then he would steal that like a magpie and put it into his own narrative; that would be his character”. The other performers would share personal experiences that could be related to the emotion expressed in the script (Thomas 2012). The rehearsal process then became an act of emotional exposure for the performers, a collective sharing of experiences and emotions – rather than the individual creation of four separate characters. In so doing, the process of finding stage character reformulated the actors’ relationship with their own subjectivity, and their method of understanding one another. In short, working towards the performance of Stone City Blue required relinquishing individual-centred acting practices and understandings of the subject, in order to focus on interdependency and emotional disclosure – the two tenets of the play’s compassionate epistemology of the subject. In a different vein, the Swedish version and the student production at Aberystwyth also deployed rehearsal methodologies that focused on interdependency. Both productions utilised the Viewpoints principles originally created by Mary Overlie and subsequently expanded by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau

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(Pollack; Rabey 2008). These techniques are considered useful not only for actor training and for generating a physical score for the stage, but also, significantly, for “producing ensemble” (Bogart and Landau 7) – for forging a non-hierarchical collective of performers. Although the Viewpoints principles certainly can be used for the composition of any piece, it is nonetheless noteworthy that they were chosen for these two productions of Stone City Blue. Like Thomas’s play, the ethos of Viewpoints techniques is openly non-individualistic, attempting to find a physical language based on collective creativity, responsibility and attentiveness. “Value is placed on listening and responding to others”, Bogart and Landau establish; “[p]ressure is released from any one person who feels that they have to create in a vacuum. Emphasis is placed on the fact that the piece will be made by and belong to everyone in the ensemble – there are no small roles” [emphasis added] (Bogart and Landau 122). These methodologies thus share a common ground with Stone City Blue in their displacement of individuality, their favouring of interdependency and collaboration, and their will to recognise and express emotions and desires without resorting to the illusionist understanding of a fictional persona. As such, in the process of finding a visceral, physical language for the performance of Stone City Blue, these two groups of performers were already rehearsing the non-individualistic and interdependent notions of subjectivity elucidated by the script.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates how my proposed redefinition of character – as the figuration of subjectivity in a theatre text or performance – can be put to use in the analysis of Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, and Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue. In doing so I aimed to counter the arguments concerning the lack of character and the disappearance of subjectivity in these plays. As my survey of character studies in Chapter One has demonstrated, such claims are often grounded on normative ideas about what a character is and how it should be notated on the page, as well as on narrow understandings of subjectivity, and text-centric assumptions about script-led performances. In the case of Kane studies in particular, these arguments have also resulted in problematic statements about the status of subjectivity in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis (perceived at once as vanishing but also intensely present) and its alleged Cartesian undertones. With regards to Stone City Blue, the lack of academic engagement appears linked to the difficulty of subsuming the play into the narratives about Welsh national/personal identity that Thomas’s playwriting career has fostered thus far. Here, I have proposed a new direction for the debates on Crave, 4.48 Psychosis

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and Stone City Blue, focusing on their experimentation with character and their figuration of subjectivity, and the political implications that these might contain. This chapter has offered the notion of singular subjectivities as an alternative category of analysis to what would popularly be called ‘a person’, ‘an individual’ or ‘a human being’. Unlike these terms, this alternative does not presuppose that the subject is unique, autonomous and endowed with an identity, or that the status of personhood or humanity has been socially bestowed upon them. Instead it refers to any conceptualisation of the subject that focuses on corporeal and psychic experience, acknowledging that the boundaries of the body are tangible and finite, and that psychic life is non-transferable. The term offers the possibility of thinking about this finite subject within and beyond the tenets of liberal humanism. This chapter has therefore argued that these playtexts have in common an interest in rethinking singular subjectivity in ways that are politically and ethically significant. While all three playtexts oppose liberal-humanist ideals of unity, autonomy, transparency and self-sameness, the processes of characterisation deployed and the singular subjects configured through them are variegated. More specifically, I have suggested that textual character in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis is indeterminate, uncountable and non-individuated: that is, resisting being discerned and understood in terms of individuality. These plays’ shared characterisation strategies include the resistance to interpellating the subjects in the fiction by giving them a name, the avoidance of communicative scenes that may thematically generate subject positions, the rejection of coherent and informative accounts of the self in favour of universalising expressions of emotion, and the refusal to subscribe to the norms that regulate and give intelligibility to the body (for example, race, age, gender and sexuality). Subjectivity is therefore configured through what Butler calls “a performativity proper to refusal” (2000a: 177): an iterative resistance that is itself productive. Crave and 4.48 Psychosis consistently reject the categories that regulate and give intelligibility to the subject in order to starve them of their power over subjective life. The rejection of heteronormative markers of identity is a common strategy in both plays. Crave elicits temporary gendered embodiments for its speakers, only to frustrate them subsequently. Contrary to this subversive occupation of heteronormative gender positions, characterisation in 4.48 Psychosis signals to queer subject positions such as transgender and intersexual. The experience of fragmentation is not Cartesian, as argued thus far, but an expression of alignments between gender identities and body morphologies that challenge the heteronormative paradigm. Although apparently similar in aesthetics and mood to Crave, the script for Stone City Blue does not reject the idea of individuality. Rather, the text evokes

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the notion of the individual in order to redefine it, to shed it of its expected autonomy, unity and identity. By splitting the subject of experience into a growing number of speaking subjects, the script refracts the aesthetic appearance of the subject into its many psychic components. These components are also ventriloquised through the proliferation of role-playing scenes. Through these mechanisms, Stone City Blue generates textual characters that are dividuated rather than individuated: they outline the subject as fragmented, melancholic and extremely relational, exposing an inevitable queerness even within heteronormative positions. The examination of several productions has evinced further points of divergence among these plays, whilst continuing to vindicate the resilience of character and its heterogeneity. I have demonstrated thus how artistic intervention and spectatorial imaginative collaboration should be accounted for, with productions of Crave offering perhaps the best examples of diversity with regards to stage characterisation (ranging from the generation of personal stories in its premiere to the opaque statuesque figures in Sobel’s production). While the gender opacity requested by Kane’s playtexts is difficult to maintain in performance, the meta-theatrical force of Stone City Blue, on the other hand, offers relative freedom to the materialisation of stage character without intervening strongly in the final configuration of subjectivity on the stage. Contrary to the static quality of most productions of Crave, Stone City Blue has generated dynamic and expressive choreographies, which emphasise the related and interdependent aspect of subjectivity in the play and, moreover, suggest that stage character might not necessarily be produced by the work of the individual actor but encompass a combination of actors, gestures, movements and scenography. Examining these plays together has demonstrated that theatre texts and performances continue to figure singular subjectivities even when they reject the received understanding and fashioning of a person. As such, we cannot consider character to have vanished in these works: it has simply been transformed. This has the effect of giving sensible form to alternative notions of the subject. Continuing the work of explaining how theatre may outline subjects other than those imagined by liberal humanism, the next chapter moves on to examine aggregations that include and transcend singular subjectivities, and that can be regarded as subjects in their own right.

4 Collective Subjectivities I feel my work is very politically motivated, but not in terms of party politics, but in terms of the public, the people, of giving a different model of being together that I hope acknowledges […] how we are together, and what we mean to each other when we are together. – Tim Crouch in conversation with Dan Rebellato Globalization proposes to us an abstract universality. A universality of money, the universality of communication and the universality of power. That is the universalism today. And so, against the abstract universality of money and of power, what is the question of art, what is the function of artistic creation? Is the function of artistic creation to oppose, to abstract from universality only a singularity of particularities, something like being against the abstraction of money and of power, or as a community against globalization and so on? Or, is the function of art to propose another kind of universality? – Alain Badiou, “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art” (105)

Following my consideration of singular subjectivities, this chapter focuses on the figuration of collective subjects in Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND (2007). As the previous chapter made apparent, my analysis does not posit ‘singular’ and ‘collective’ as mutually exclusive terms. Indeed, Chapter Three demonstrated that the notion of the collective fundamentally traverses that of the singular in the texts for Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue – and, potentially, in their stagings. ENGLAND also involves finite lives, decaying bodies, and interactions between singular subjects that are discernible from one another. However, it is my contention that Crouch’s play emphasises practices and experiences that exceed the boundaries of the singular subject. These practices and experiences delineate subjects whose ecosystems are at once local and transnational. Their actions and relations to others are materially significant even when a face-to-face encounter between the individuals has never occurred. To put it differently, regardless of the presence of singular subjects in ENGLAND, the play focuses on the collectivities that operate in our contemporary sociopolitical scenario. These collective subjects emerge in a context of globalised capitalism, neocolonialism, and a fierce neoliberal spirit whose policies, entrepreneurial practices and personal ethos spill over geo-political boundaries. Thus, the present chapter only zooms out to the level of the collective, shifting attention from the body and the psyche towards notions of collective practices and their effects.

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The first aim of this chapter is to elucidate what notions of collective subjectivity are formulated in ENGLAND’s story and enticed in its performance. I argue that, contrary to essentialist, identity-based ideas of community, ENGLAND offers an understanding of subjectivity that is rooted in praxis. Crouch’s piece considers how a collective subject is induced through what we do – through our market exchanges, political disaffection and aesthetic jouissance of the world. ENGLAND portrays and partially incites what could be seen as the inimical double of Alain Badiou’s militant Subject: a ‘reactive Subject’.¹ By ‘reactive Subject’ Badiou refers to the subjective figures that resist being incorporated into the production of political novelty (2009: 54– 56). In this chapter I argue that ENGLAND depicts a collective subject similar to this Badiouian figure: a subject that continues to say ‘no’ to modes of interaction that are alternative to capitalism and its structural injustices. This collective subject is brought about by its direct and indirect perpetuation of asymmetrical relations, by absconding from its own accountability, and by its erasure of the subaltern. Alongside inquiring how theatre can widen our understanding of subjectivity beyond individuality and identity, this chapter also continues to evacuate the notion of theatrical character from two presumed correspondences. The first of these is the assumption that character is always-already the fictive construction of a liberal-humanist subject. Or to put it differently, this chapter argues that character does not necessarily refer to a unique psychological and moral entity endowed with the agency and self-same individuality that is usually encapsulated in the term ‘person’. This supposition has partly underlain the Anglophone scholarly debate on the ‘death of character’ and the prevalent description of plays that experiment with speech attribution as having no characters, as I discussed in Chapter One. In working under this assumption, scholars have displayed a reluctance to acknowledge as characters those textual and performative instances that foreclose the reconstruction of complete imaginary biographies, coherent or intelligible bodies, or distinct personalities firmly rooted in space and time. However, a historical overview of theatre practices reveals that ‘character’ has not always been equated with the notions of personhood or individuality (Abirached; Pavis 1998: 47– 49). Therefore, this chapter intends not only to rethink (collective) subjectivity as portrayed and enticed by ENGLAND, but to do so alongside a renegotiation of ‘character’. With this, I continue to dislodge

 I continue to capitalise ‘Subject’ when referring to Badiou’s understanding of the notion. Although I argue that the subjects outlined in ENGLAND bear a resemblance to Badiou’s understanding of the reactive Subject, the notion of subjectivity as put forward in Crouch’s play should not be absorbed by Badiou’s. As such, I use lower case to refer to the subjects in the play.

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this category from a niche that excludes its extant and potential non-individuated configurations. Secondly, this chapter also continues to dismantle the assumption of a oneon-one correspondence between character and actor in the theatrical event, epitomised by Bruce Wilshire’s dictum: “an actor must stand in for a character” (qtd. in Fuchs 1996: 8). This prevalent reading presumes that stage character always collapses into the body of the actor, who fulfils the task of “impersonation” (Bentley 150) or “embodiment” (Pavis 1998: 47). From this perspective, the performer’s labour of acting consists of “represent[ing], or pretend[ing] to be, in a time or place different than that of the spectator” (Kirkby 3), embodying a different identity. My analysis of Crave and 4.48 Psychosis in the previous chapter provided an alternative to this view, in that it proposed that character need not be a countable category on the stage. Similarly, my investigation of Stone City Blue suggested that a singular character can be configured in the theatrical space collaboratively, residing not in one body at a time but discontinuously shared among the bodies, movements and verbalisations of a number of actors. The present chapter further explores the possible relationships between stage character and corporeality by interrogating ENGLAND’s wide breadth of characterisation techniques, ranging from the actors’ sharing of roles and the direct address of the audience as a fictional persona, to the non-fictionalised characterisation of spectators as subjects of consumption and consent within a capitalist regime. Aiming to unlock stage character from discrete and identity-based impersonations, this chapter updates the notion of collective character that remains operative in Francophone and Spanish theatre studies. According to Juan Antonio Hormigón, collective character is any group of performers that presents common verbalisations or actions (21). For Hormigón, it therefore encompasses aggregations of non-individuated entities (for example, the chorus in Greek tragedy), collectives with a distinct and shared identity (‘the Roman citizens’ in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), and collectives created by action or speech (‘the people’ in Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna) (21). What is momentous in Hormigón’s definition of collective character is that it has the potential to explore collective subjectivity beyond the nostalgic, identity-based notions of community: in some occasions, common actions or speech suffice to sustain this character. This potential freedom from identity politics opens possible correspondences between character and the collective subjects elucidated by Badiou and Jacques Rancière, which respectively emerge from sustained practices and a disidentificatory force – not from identity. Similar ideas can be found in José A. Sánchez’s understanding of collective character in the performances of Catalan theatre groups Els Joglars and La Fura dels Baus, whose work simply deploys the actor as the executor of actions that together create character without evoking

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individuality (432). Unlike Sánchez, Hormigón frames his definition of collective character within an analysis of theatre texts, and admittedly conceptualises the collective in performance as a literal aggregation of individuals. However, this first definition of collective character can perhaps be qualified by taking into account Mireille Losco and Martin Mégevand’s understanding of the chorus as a character that retains the sign of the collective even when staged by one actor (39 – 40). Emerging from these views is the idea that collective character may receive different physical instantiations and be based on different ideas of collectivity. Thus, I define collective character as any theatrical figuration of collective subjectivity. In other words, the collectivity of collective character may correspond to the conventional notion of community, to “the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2001; 2004), “the people” (Rancière 1992: 59; 1999: 22– 23, 61– 62), or any other aggregations that exceed the singular. Similarly, I understand character as collective irrespective of whether one actor, more than one or none are responsible for the articulation of collectivity in performance. In examining character from the point of view of collective subjectivity notwithstanding its materialisation, I continue to make steps towards evacuating character from an obligatory match with the discrete body, voice and costume of an impersonating performer. Before launching into my examination of ENGLAND, I want to situate Crouch’s play within the context of its emergent academic reception. The critical narrative generated thus far is relatively formalist, and unwittingly anchored in liberal values and presumptions about authorial control. My analysis of ENGLAND will attempt to redress this situation by calling attention to how the play’s characterisation techniques mobilise affects, perception and concepts against essentialism, individualism and collective violence.

Political gestures in a post-political scenario: Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND Igniting a politics-inflected debate on Crouch’s work Academic attention on the work of English theatre-maker Tim Crouch has thus far focused on his main titles for adults: My Arm (2003), An Oak Tree (2005), ENGLAND (2007) and, especially, The Author (2009). The incipient scholarly debate on Crouch’s work has only considered character incidentally, and exclusively in aesthetic terms. To name but one example, in identifying the trademark features of “Crouch’s conceptual drama”, Stephen Bottoms has highlighted “the

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non-coincidence of actor and character, [and] the overt fictionalization of both performance space and audience” (2009: 75). These apparently straightforward attributes are nonetheless pregnant with unexplored complexities. The observation that actor and character can engage in a relationship other than correspondence has not, however, led Bottoms to further map the ontology of character on those occasions when it eludes or exceeds the body of the actor, as is the case in most of Crouch’s plays for adults. In other words, where does character reside on the stage when not in the performer? And what is the status of the actor if/when character is elsewhere, as Bottoms suggests, yet the actor is not performing him/ herself? In later discussions on ENGLAND, Bottoms has opted for the term ‘storyteller’, although with regards to ENGLAND’s protagonist rather than Crouch’s acting techniques. Bottoms refers thus to “the increasing ill-health of the storyteller” or “the storyteller and his/her boyfriend” (2011b: 448, 449). This use of this term perpetuates the problematic myth that character must be a fictional person embodied by one actor and, therefore, that any disruption of this correspondence must be given another name.² The argument for the fictionalisation or characterisation (Bottoms 2009: 66) of the audience also requires development. Assuming that the play’s interpellation of the audience into a character is the origin and terminus of spectatorial characterisation privileges authorial intention over the reality of the theatrical event. Perhaps, as the character called Adrian exclaims in Crouch’s The Author, “The audience has been badly written!” (20), and this fictionalisation is only partial, or suggested tongue-in-cheek with the knowledge that it is a mis-characterisation. Or perhaps the audience disidentifies with the character allocated by the fiction. In other words, it is important to identify if and how Crouch’s work summons the audience as a character, but also to acknowledge an audience’s real and potential responses to such beckoning calls, as well as their own strategies of self-characterisation.³ This can help us reconsider the relationship between character, interpellation and embodiment. Moreover, in questioning if spectators  See Michael Wilson’s Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Storytellers and Their Art. Wilson argues that “the division between storytelling and acting is largely a false one, based upon a narrow understanding of acting” (), largely (but mistakenly) understood as representational.  See Sophie Nield’s “The Rise of the Character Named Spectator” for a reflection on the characterisation of the audience in immersive theatre. As Nield suggests, spectators characterised by a piece may not necessarily feel like characters to themselves: “instead, without the protective apparatus of characterisation, rehearsal, fictive otherness, perhaps we risk staring into the black hole of the theatre itself, mute, stage-affrighted, awaking to the actor’s nightmare of being on the stage, and not knowing the play” (). As I argue below, this tension between the play’s interpellation of the audience as a character and the spectators’ self-awareness of being something other than that character is deployed in ENGLAND to political effect.

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can become characters without their consent, without the labour of acting, and without their intervention in the show, we are further compelled to re-examine what character can be, and how and by whom it is created. As I argue below, the audience in ENGLAND is implicated in far more complicated ways than “being cast, collectively, in this single role of the veiled Muslim woman” (Bottoms 2011a: 18). The question of character in Crouch’s plays has moreover not been associated with figurations of subjectivity, politics or ethics. This is striking because representations or “mediatisations” of the human (Crouch 2011b), and questions of exploitation, vulnerability, responsibility, and agency are thematically and structurally central to his work. Interested primarily in providing initial overviews of the aesthetics of his plays, studies have thus far centred on two overarching aspects of his dramaturgy. The first is his work’s engagement with conceptual art (Bottoms 2009; Morin). The second is Crouch’s widely-documented intention to promote spectators’ imaginative and intellectual work by skimming the determinacy of his plays (Bottoms 2009; 2011b; Lane 139; Crouch 2011b). As I argue later in the chapter, these two aspects can still provide some ground for a politically sensitive investigation of character and subjectivity in Crouch’s plays, particularly in ENGLAND.

Conceptual art and dematerialised politics Crouch’s interest in combining suggestive language with non-representational performance, and in refiguring spectators as co-creators, can be related to the concerns and strategies of conceptual art as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, Crouch’s work has also been described as conceptual (Bottoms 2009: 75; 2011b: 449), often in relation to the term ‘dematerialisation’ (Bottoms 2011b: 449; Crouch 2011c; 2012). This interest in the heritage of conceptual art in Crouch’s practice has provided a valuable first framework from which to interrogate his plays, as well as an important practical contestation of HansThies Lehmann’s theories on postdramatic theatre (Bottoms 2009: 67, 70; Ilter 397; Morin 74). However, in attempting to acknowledge the artistic referents embedded in Crouch’s plays for adults, these contributions have understated the historically heterogeneous ontology of theatre practices, and have contributed to occluding the importance of politics in Crouch’s work. As I have argued elsewhere, the attributes ‘non-representational’, ‘meta-theatrical’ and ‘post-Brechtian’ can also describe the pared-down aesthetics of Crouch’s practice (Delgado-García 2014: 80). David Barnett characterises “postBrechtian performance” as that which follows five underlying principles: it is “concerned with reconciling materialist theatre practice with epistemological

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uncertainty” (2011: 339), deploys the Brechtian notions of Gestus, Haltung and Arrangement (albeit without providing the Marxist meta-narrative as a reference frame by which to decipher these expressions) (2011: 344), may develop its own formal approaches in order to relate the action onstage to society (2011: 349), and “actively resists interpreting social and/or political material and passes this work on to the audience” (2011: 349). Although Barnett’s description is certainly illuminating, circumscribing post-Brechtian performance to these five points might generate strict dichotomies that are not necessarily representative of Brecht’s legacy. Crouch’s work for adults, for example, complies with all of these points except perhaps for the deployment of Gestus and Haltung, as his acting technique favours the reduction of connotative body language. However, his dramaturgy self-consciously participates in the Brechtian legacy (Ilter 397).⁴ In the attempt to see in Crouch’s work a renewal of theatrical form through contact with conceptual art, the political idiosyncrasy of both conceptual art and Crouch’s oeuvre has also been overlooked.⁵ With regards to Crouch’s own political motivations, the theatre-maker has argued that these are rooted in what could be read as a democratic energy: he sees his political intervention as grounded in the notion of “polis, the people”, “in giving the majority of the people in the theatre an understanding of their potential or authority” with regards to their creation and individual interpretation of the play, and their essential role in performance (2011c). This is a slightly different approach to the triangular relationship between theatre, politics and the polis formulated by Amelia Kritzer, who argues that “within theatre’s space, assembled citizens view and consider representations of their world enacted for them in the immediacy of live performance” (1). While Kritzer identifies the political value of artistic exposition and spectatorial assessment, Crouch’s definition of theatre’s political potential has its foundation in the idea of equal participation (insofar as spectators share their responsibility with the actor in the creation and meaning of the piece), and in the forms of togetherness that emerge in performance (Crouch 2011a: 422). Although theoretically differing from Kritzer’s description of what takes place in performance, Crouch is also interested in confronting the “brief holiday from responsibility” (Kritzer 3) she attributes to the general non-political theatre experience. However, Crouch’s views on the political value of his practice also need to be challenged. Firstly, Crouch’s political understanding of the egalitarian and par For a looser understanding of post-Brechtian or Brechtian-influenced theatre in the British context, see Janelle Reinelt’s After Brecht: British Epic Theater.  For more on this, see Cristina Delgado-García’s “Dematerialised Political and Theatrical Legacies: Rethinking the Roots and Influences of Tim Crouch’s Work”.

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ticipative configuration of spectatorship in his work might not necessarily be progressive: the idea of creating a play that will ultimately be produced and owned by each spectator, rather than the company or the audience as a collective, appears still to be deeply embedded in the logic of individualism and ownership on which (neo)liberalism rests. The labour of the performance may be democratically distributed, insofar as the production of the play relies on the involvement of all those present, but the play becomes a non-transferable commodity of personal property. Secondly, in a neoliberal sociopolitical context where individuals and communities are asked to take responsibility for everything, ranging from bureaucratic procedures to their healthcare provision to community services, the prospect of taking or being granted ‘a brief holiday from responsibility’ can too be articulated as a liberating political gesture. As I see it, Crouch’s most recurrent preoccupation is in the exploration of violent and nonviolent ways of togetherness, and the interrogation of art’s role in relation to these. In ENGLAND, this is articulated as an explicit critique of materialistic individuality and exploitation, as a reminder of our obliviousness to structural inequalities and, more positively, as a reformulation of subjectivity in singular-plural and collective terms. As I argue throughout this chapter, the configuration of character is a conduit for these political gestures.

Crouch’s ENGLAND and political economy ENGLAND offers a keen example of the scholarly oversight with regards to Crouch’s political stance. A site-generic play for art galleries, ENGLAND premiered at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2007, directed by Karl James and a smith, and has been consistently performed since by Tim Crouch and Hannah Ringham – the latter, a founding member of the London-based devising theatre collective Shunt.⁶ The play comprises two acts, evocatively titled “Dabbing” (13) and “Wringing” (44) in the playtext. The first act has audience members gathering freely around the two performers and the works of art within the gallery. Here, the actors take turns at giving a joint first-person singular account of the development of a life-threatening heart condition. This account is rigorously gender-neutral but not completely void of biographical detail: the protagonist self-identifies as English, their wealthy Dutch-American boyfriend is an art dealer, and they live in an old jam factory in Southwark. The location for this first act is the specific art gallery where

 There is only one exception to this: the Italian-language production of ENGLAND premiered at the Naples Theatre Festival in  under the direction of Carlo Cerciello.

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the performance is taking place, but also, simultaneously, the protagonist’s home in London, Southwark Cathedral, and a number of medical premises in England. The second act takes place in a different room in the gallery, where the audience is seated. This change of location signifies a chronological, spatial and epistemological shift in the story: the protagonist has received a life-saving heart transplant and is now in a hotel room, in a remote non-specified Islamic country. The English protagonist is here to meet the supposed donor’s widow with the intention of gifting her an expensive piece of art as a token of gratitude for Hassam’s heart donation. In this second act, the two performers take turns as the English protagonist and an interpreter, and they address the audience posed as the widow. As the exchange unravels, it is clear that the protagonist understood the transplant to be a generous gesture from Hassam that has been rewarded monetarily, while for the widow the transplant is the murderous outcome of a private clinic coaxing her into terminating the life of her hospitalised husband. The widow claims to have agreed to the donation without fully comprehending the terms of the contract in which she was engaging, and having been pressurised to do so at a time of intense distress and poor economic conditions. Hassam’s body, we learn, was not been returned to her and she allegedly received a very small sum of money. Regardless of the ubiquitous references to art throughout the play and its performance location, the story unfolding in ENGLAND and the dynamics engendered in the performance pivot on the subjective experience of elemental political issues, such as consent, consensus and representation. This is not to say that these political concerns overwrite the play’s overt interest in art; as I aim to demonstrate, the two are intricately linked and find their nodal point in the play’s figuration of subjectivity. However, the debate on ENGLAND has tended to eschew politics by subsuming into the artistic realm the play’s interest in political economy. The play highlights the reification and abuse of certain lives as inscribed in transnational market exchanges, but the debate has situated the economic and political preoccupations of ENGLAND within art history and art as a trade. In short, the play has been considered as a cultural object that reflects exclusively on the history and political economy of culture. Thus, Bottoms purports that, for Crouch, the impermanent nature of performance allows theatre to resuscitate conceptual art’s “betrayed promise” (2009: 75) of producing uncommodifiable art. Indeed, the relationship between conceptual art, artistic commodification and capitalism is more complex than it is often acknowledged, and one that seems to betray the

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anti-capitalist impetus of some conceptual artists.⁷ However, theatre is enmeshed in the logic of capitalism beyond the supposed uncommodifiable nature of a performance. As I argue below, ENGLAND also intertwines art and the perpetuation of structural injustice through what might be called an ‘aesthetic disposition’. I will return to this later, but suffice it to say for now that, in its enchantment with the aesthetic pleasure contained in the world and derived from the (artistic) commodity, this aesthetic disposition might encourage obliviousness to injustice. In a similar occlusion of the wider political concerns articulated in ENGLAND, the question of value in the play has been tied exclusively to the monetary, symbolic and even therapeutic worth of the work of art, and its subsequent status as the “preserve of the wealthy” (Bottoms 2011b: 450; Morin 71– 72). However, this disregards ENGLAND’s reflection on the differential value given to human life from the epistemological vantage point of the privileged Western protagonist. Arguably, in the play’s reception it is politics and political economy that have been repressed. Even when the crossover between capitalist markets, value and agency in the play has been interpreted as transcending self-referential artistic concerns, overt political readings have been met with caution on the basis that ENGLAND’s “reflection upon neocolonialism remains subordinated to a subtle interrogation of the relation between theatre and conceptual art” (Morin 72). For Emilie Morin, the imprecision of the play’s political programme with regards to late capitalism impedes a political reading; she contends that “attempting to ascribe clear political intentions to the play is self-defeating and leads only to outlining an agenda of exorbitant scope which the play does not fulfil” (76). Indeed, the play does not clearly reveal its political intentions, although it provides sufficient “nod[s] towards global relations” (Lane 138) to inspire a wide range of metaphorical readings steeped in contemporary historical events. For example, given the British and American nationalities of the protagonist couple in ENGLAND, the story of the transplant could be seen as an evocation of current economic structures, perhaps with the failing health of Western economies metaphorically being kept alive with Arab oil. The casualties of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq during the American- and British-led War on Terror, the war paradoxically waged in the name of peace, also seem to vibrate in apparently innocuous lines such as “Even clean hands leave marks and damage surfaces!” (29). Supposedly delivered in relation to the artworks in the gallery, but spoken by Ringham with alarm, this warning strikes a

 See for example Alexander Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity.

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chord, as the play has at this point established an equivalence between art objects and human life. We could also infer a more general critique of transnational abuse within the scripted contracts of globalised capitalism: Hassam’s widow has received some money for her husband’s heart, but it is clear that whatever the legal status of the contract the transaction is not ethical. Likewise, Crouch’s anguished exclamation “All this beauty can’t just stop, can it?” (22) comes after the correspondence between capitalist investment and the production of aesthetic pleasure has been established. Arguably, this resonates with the anxieties behind what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”: that is, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” [emphasis in original] (2). As Fredric Jameson puts it, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (199). Identifying and deciphering these supposed political ‘nods’ is certainly a daunting task. ENGLAND neither deals with specific political issues, like Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (2009), nor lends itself easily to unequivocal allegorical readings, like Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) or Mark Ravenhill’s Over There (2009).⁸ However, I would argue that the absence of specific political certainties does not eliminate the political charge of the play. A reminder of how capitalism relies on subjects’ engagement with immateriality – and not only in relation to the financial and cognitive-cultural aspects of late capitalism – might help us reassess our expectations about where the political might be located in ENGLAND, and how this relates to material conditions of life. Capitalism relies on our ability to perceive, conceptualise and be emotionally affected by the world. It seductively mobilises our desire to own commodities: much consumption is triggered by the pleasure of having purchased something. Capitalism successfully fabricates our understanding of some commodities as socially or culturally obsolete. It effectively enables us to suspend our knowledge of the suffering and environmental damage that sustains the fabrication and circulation of goods. Immaterial affects, percepts and concepts are therefore politically crucial. Rethinking immateriality in these terms allows us to recuperate Crouch’s interest in conceptual and active spectatorship for a political reading of his work. I will develop this point throughout the chapter, but my suggestion is that ENGLAND’s commitment to the project of the Left – loosely understood in terms of egalitarian social  Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? offers an allegorical reading of the special relationship between the US and the UK, while Ravenhill’s Over There explores the division and reunification of post-war Germany through the relationship between two brothers. See Appendix, page , for more on Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children.

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change – is not only expressed thematically through plot, but also embedded in the design of the audience’s sensorial and affective experience of the performance event.

Performance analysis This chapter takes the performance event as its sole focus. This represents a conscious methodological shift with regards to Chapter Three, which examined Kane’s and Thomas’s work on the page, and then contrasted the playtexts’ propositions with their (re)formulations in different productions. Comparing textual and stage character in Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue was vital for two reasons. It served to dismantle the text-centric and liberal-humanist assumption that the lack or obfuscation of dramatis personae on the page entails the disappearance of characters and subjects, both in the text and on the stage. Given that these scripts delegate responsibility to each production regarding the size and composition of the cast and, in the case of 4.48 Psychosis, the attribution of lines to each performer, the comparative analysis of texts and stagings also indicated how casting, acting, movement and even translation strategies impact differently on the production and reception of stage character. The direction of such comparisons – page to stage – is not a suitable methodology for this chapter. While the text in ENGLAND’s first act is free-floating, the script already determines that the cast should have two actors, “one male and one female” (13), who jointly narrate a first-person singular account. In Act Two, the lines are attributed to “English” and “Interpreter”, but the script determines how and when the actors should swap roles halfway through the act (53). As this chapter demonstrates at length, these stage directions are not in place to resist regulatory categorisations of the singular subject. Rather, they are devices to stimulate a ‘telescopic logic’ in performance: they dissuade spectators from equating each actor with a role in the fiction, from understanding the story in terms of particularity, and instead encourage the conceptualisation of character as parts of wider, transnational collectives. In this respect, a comparison between script and performance is less fertile a ground of inquiry: ENGLAND offers unattributed speech and unstable speakers on the page, but its script reduces textual indeterminacy and is already performance-oriented. Further to this, issues that relate exclusively to the performance event are an important part of how collective character is produced in ENGLAND. The nationality of the actors, the country where the performance takes place, the artwork shown on the performance site, the behaviour of the audiences and their mother tongue: all are essential to the play’s figurations of subjectivity. To name but one

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example, it is in the gathering around the actors that the spectators of ENGLAND are characterised as consumers; such aspects are absent from the script but carefully orchestrated in performance. Characterisation, subjectivity, and the politics derived from these hinge strongly on the theatrical event and its specificity. As a consequence, more can be gained from focusing solely on the performance event. Also methodologically important here is the question of how to relate the figuration of subjectivity that takes place during the performance. As I have begun to suggest, ENGLAND relies heavily on the interactions between actors and spectators in order to create collective characters. However, the nature of these interactions is not disclosed to the audience prior to the performance, and they are neither immediately apparent nor constant throughout the two acts. For example, a sense of familiarity, commonality and consensus with the protagonist’s upper middle-class habitus is so softly manufactured in the first act that the crafting of a collective character embracing performers, audience and the furnished art gallery is only made apparent retroactively in the second act.⁹ ENGLAND does not lend itself easily to structured arguments about its overall construction of subjectivity, given that the actors’ work of characterisation takes place intermittently throughout the piece, alongside spectators’ contributions to unwittingly characterising themselves and the performers. Further complicating my analysis is the fact that the type of collective subjectivity articulated in ENGLAND is not immediately evident to the senses: the subjects referred to are not to be understood as collective merely because of the plurality of bodies assembled in the art gallery where the performance  As deployed by Pierre Bourdieu in his influential monograph Distinction, the term ‘habitus’ refers to a set of acquired dispositions – that is, patterns of thought, behaviour, and taste – that inclines individuals to act and react in particular ways in their everyday relations to others and to objects, and that stems from and reproduces social inequalities; these unconscious, inculcated dispositions allow for the corporeal embodiment of social class, and are capable of generating concurring practices and perceptions in support of these dispositions. Although Bourdieu’s work has had enormous impact in the social sciences, Rancière has been consistently critical of its premises. According to Rancière, Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus presupposes a fixed social distribution, where each class is matched to a specific level of education, entitlements, capabilities and tastes. This supposed homogeneity within the partitions of the social field, Rancière argues, is an operational construct necessary for the sociological explanation of social structures to work, but it is one that erases existing disruptions, incongruences, or points of connection across these partitions; it is a distribution of the social that disregards the universal principle of equality among all (:  – ;  – ). Moreover, such a fixation on the idiosyncrasies of the habitus results in the fossilisation of social structures, rather than their rearrangement (Rancière : ). My use of the term ‘habitus’ in this chapter is therefore steeped in these critiques.

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takes place. Nor do the collective subjects configured in and through the show exactly correspond to ideas of nation or community. Sociocultural commonality is indeed evoked in the play through the recognisable habitus of the privileged English-American couple in the fiction, which is amplified in the English and American assembly of actors and spectators in the specific performance I will analyse. However, such commonality, or common habitus, could hardly be subsumed in an identity-based notion of community – it transcends too many national borders to be meaningful in that sense. Rather, I see the collective subjectivity outlined in ENGLAND as being attuned to Badiou’s definition of the Subject: that is, the combination of practices, their relation to the construction of a Present, and their engagement with the trace of an Event. As my examination in Chapter Two has demonstrated, the collective in Badiou’s understanding of subjectivity is not rooted in the identity shared by a number of individuals. Its ontology is clearer when considering Badiou’s articulation of this theory of the Subject through mathemes. Writing with reference to the mathematical formulas that schematise the three possible Subject positions or destinations (i. e. the faithful Subject, the reactive Subject and the obscure Subject), Badiou clarifies: “[i]t is important to understand that the […] subject as such is not contained in any of the letters of its matheme, but that it is the formula as a whole” (2009: 53).¹⁰ In other words, the Subject in Badiou’s thought is neither a pre-existing entity nor a stable product of the Event: rather it is a performative practice in relation to the Present and to the trace of the Event, as well as the outcomes of this practice. This, I argue, is the nature of the collective subjects outlined in ENGLAND. In sum, the complexity of character and subjectivity in ENGLAND is best explained by accompanying the performance in its chronology, identifying affects and concepts that collectively impact on character and subjectivity as they appear, vanish, are withheld or connected with precedent or posterior situations. In this case, I will follow the production at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in September 2008. Quotes refer to this performance and not to the playtext published in 2007. For this reason, fragments are attributed to Crouch and Ringham below as they were delivered in performance, but they appear unassigned in the published script. Slashes indicate a change in speaker.

 As a reminder, these letters are ε, π and C, and stand respectively for the trace of the Event, the Present, and the Body. By the subjective ‘Body’, Badiou does not refer to human corporeality but to “the set of everything that the trace of the event mobilises” (: ). The Body, thus, can be a musical piece, algebra, Spartacus’s troops of rebellious slaves and the lovers. These elements are part of the Subject, but not the Subject as a whole. See pages  –  above for a full exposition of Badiou’s theory of the Subject.

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“Dabbing”: art, conviviality and privilege in ENGLAND At the time of the staging of ENGLAND in Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery, the Stroum Gallery was exhibiting the work of three contemporary artists: Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu and David Maljković. The exhibition, entitled The Violet Hour, presented the work as depicting “the metaphorical twilight of our day and age”, whilst offering “alternative realities that mirror our world while inverting and contesting it” (“The Violet Hour”). It featured, amongst others, Day Jackson’s Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), an ominous yet lively sculpture consisting of a crashed racing car frame, lit from below with colourful fluorescent lights. Day Jackson’s Chariot II occupied a central position in the Stroum Gallery. This is the room where the first act of the play is performed and which provided an expressive scenography for ENGLAND. The play’s thematic preoccupations with affluence, art and murderous transactions in a cosmopolitan/neocolonial/capitalist scenario ricochet off an exhibition fascinated with social and environmental crisis, destruction and renewal.

Waiting in the Stroum Gallery On this occasion, the spectators are leisurely talking when Crouch and Ringham arrive in the Stroum Gallery. The actors blend with the audience, looking at the artwork or casually striking up a brief conversation with a spectator or gallery staff member. After a few minutes, Crouch and Ringham carve themselves out of the group by moving decisively towards the centre of the room and addressing their first ceremonial lines to what has now become a listening crowd, an audience, encircling them: Ringham: Crouch: Ringham: Crouch: Ringham: Crouch: Ringham:

Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. You saved my life.

Flanking Day Jackson’s sculpture Chariot II, Crouch and Ringham are positioned facing one another, but their tone makes it clear that their lines are addressed to the spectators and not to each other. They do not appear as characters contained within a fictional world and separated from the reality of the gallery. The performance, however, is not initiated in this first moment of public speech but, arguably, is already in motion when actors and spectators briefly ex-

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perience together the art gallery as a space for social interaction, where the hierarchic distinction between the actor (the maker and purveyor of art) and the spectator (its consumer and silent discussant) is put under pressure. This fleeting moment of conviviality and equality with the audience is not exceptional in Crouch’s work for adults, nor is it gratuitous in relation to character in ENGLAND. Crouch has vindicated the authenticity of this interaction at the onset of some of his shows, claiming that it is not “a performed idea of making contact” (in Svich) but rather a moment in which the audience is made aware of the responsibility entailed in spectatorship, as well as a point where a genuine sense of equality and interchangeability between audience and performers is established: I have always said that theater practice is just an extension of audience practice; that we actors are nothing special; it’s just the contract that we’ve agreed on for this show, that I’ll be here this time and you’ll be there. Next time, maybe, it will be the other way round. (in Svich)

In ENGLAND, this initial moment of contact between Crouch, Ringham and the spectators imbues the actors with an aura-less status, a sense of equivalence with the audience. The performers retain this appearance when they begin to speak, and its effectiveness is measured, tongue-in-cheek, when Crouch rhetorically asks later in the play: “Do I look like an artist?”. The question is posed in the fiction by the English protagonist, who is repeatedly teased by friends about having faked the real Willem de Kooning sketch in their house. Yet, simultaneously, the question is also posed by Crouch as an artist, who from the beginning of the performance has worked to preclude any distinctions between cast and audience. Regardless of how the exhibition, the imminence of the play, or any other issue might be affecting the spectators at this point – indeed, impatience, elation, self-awareness or exhaustion in the absence of seats might be some of the affects felt in the room – these few minutes of waiting in the Stroum Gallery aim to warm the audiences towards the performers: to prolong and naturalise the leisurely coexistence of the group. In other words, by immersing the performers within the audience and dilating the onset of performance speech, ENGLAND promotes the formation of a heterogeneous collective subject, outlined by the actors’ and spectators’ casual inhabiting of the art gallery – otherwise an elitist, quasi-religious and silent space of contemplation. Moreover, the soon-to-be spectators are made to feel ‘at home’ with the artwork, to experience ordinary waiting and conversing, to kill time, while being surrounded by the extraordinariness of the exhibit. A sense of exclusiveness and privilege is granted not only

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by this waiting in the company of art and artists, but also by the fact that the performance takes place when the gallery has closed its doors for visitors. Thus, waiting for, and later seeing, the performance of ENGLAND at the Stroum Gallery gently generates in the audience the same disposition towards art and artists as that embodied by the privileged protagonist: one of casual coexistence with the luxurious and the extraordinary. Brecht proposed the use of workingclass environments as a means to bring both theatre and political awareness to the proletariat, and lit auditoria to encourage a sense of individual presence and identity in the audience (Kritzer 17); for ENGLAND, Crouch takes drama out of the traditionally elitist theatre space and into a similarly highbrow venue, where spectators, unprotected from the darkness of the theatre stalls and in full view of everybody else, are compelled to embody or feign – to perform – a certain ease with the environment.¹¹ Waiting in the Stroum Gallery already begins to create the collective character that will develop throughout the play – character as the performative outline of a convivial, educated, culturally curious, privileged and heterogeneous collective subject. This subject is theatrically figured not through shared identity but by the exercise of a comfortable togetherness of actors, spectators and artwork in the white cube and the apolitical present it produces. Although it seems improbable to speak of a Badiouian Event at this juncture, given that the performance has hardly begun and this convivial waiting seems at any rate non-eventful, this figuration of the subject in ENGLAND can still be seen as akin to Badiou’s schematisation of the Subject. Like Badiou’s Subject, the subject outlined in ENGLAND also encompasses the trace of an Event, a praxis and a particular production of a present within the realm of the political. I shall return to this later, but suffice it to say for now that this collective subject brings forth through its actions and inactions an economically complacent, somewhat uncritical, and apolitical present.

 Since Crouch ‘transplants’ the theatre piece from the theatre venue to the art gallery, it is worth noting the elitist connotations of this space. For more on this, see page f below. Crouch’s decision to bring ENGLAND to this site would seem to resonate against Peter Handke’s observation that his contemporary “politically committed” theatre shied away from theatre venues because they were “falsifying art rooms that render all words and all movements vacuous” (: ): a charge that could also be made against the gallery itself for its taming of radical artwork. Against the use of the theatre space, Handke observes (and proposes) a more radically disruptive theatre, which sets out to “‘terroris[e]’ reality” itself (: ). In contrast, Crouch’s play does not attempt to democratise the theatre experience or to disrupt everyday environments, but to address the supposed cosmopolitan elite in its contented habitat.

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Conviviality, consensus and cosmopolitanism While the spectators gather to face the actors as they begin to speak, Crouch announces with amusing spatial precision: “Welcome to the Stroum Gallery, here, at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, in the United States of America”. Although the spectators almost certainly know where they find themselves that evening, the welcoming note is more enticing than redundant: it invites them to mentally zoom out, to rethink ‘here’ beyond the local and beyond the state, as part of wider geographical and symbolic configurations. It subtly intimates a telescopic logic at the heart of the play, which is reiterated throughout the performance: for example, with the incessant qualification of individuals, artworks, buildings and materials according to their national origins or areas of influence. The seeds for rethinking character and subjectivity as wider than the individual are sown here too. Following these initial welcoming pleasantries, some contextual information is provided. Crouch and Ringham enthusiastically brief the audience on the credentials of the Henry Art Gallery, which derive not only from the current exhibition, The Violet Hour, but also from its genealogy and development. A short history of the gallery is outlined, from its foundation thanks to “the Seattle railroad magnate Horace Chapin Henry” to the architectonic transformations that have brought the gallery to its present state. At this point the first leg of a pervasive parallelism between architecture and human lives is established. For example, the expansions undergone by the Henry Art Gallery will be analogous to the protagonist’s heart surgery, which we later understand has taken place between Acts One and Two. This relies not only on the motif of structural changes to buildings and subjects, but is also a common indicator of the relationship between capital, appearance and permanence. As the play will demonstrate, enjoying financial support and being considered of value go hand in hand with the very possibility of a flourishing existence. This is the experience of the Henry Art Gallery and that of the English protagonist, but not of the supposed heart donor, Hassam. This initial discourse in which the gallery and the exhibition are presented to the spectators appears to be innocuous, but it has four underlying effects for the play’s work of collective characterisation, as well as for the grounding of character and subjectivity in a political terrain. I will now examine the first three, and the fourth consequence of this initial discourse – related to characterisation and types of acting – will occupy the next section. First, the performers’ initial speech about the art gallery draws attention to the building as a work of art in its own right, rather than as a simple container or site of art. With this, Crouch and Ringham initiate the play’s work of activating and directing the spectators’ aesthetic gaze: their ability and disposition to apprehend their surroundings as art. As I explain later, this gaze is pivotal for

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the play’s suggestion of a commodification and valorisation of subjective life in globalised capitalism. Moreover, this convincing introduction to the Henry Art Gallery and The Violet Hour operates in the same way consensus on beauty or value is construed in reality. This introduction works on our dispositions with a power that is both seductive and inclusive. “This is the space we are in now. Look. It’s beautiful”, Crouch says. The actors lure us into awakening to the beauty and worth around us, in a manoeuvre that trains the eye to look for aesthetic pleasure (albeit potentially at the expense of turning a blind eye to the allegedly ugly and unworthy, as becomes apparent in the second act). The second strand of this discourse, which impacts on the formation of character and subjectivity, relates to cosmopolitanism, both in its casual connotations of well-travelled cultured sophistication and in the political-philosophical tradition of equality and global community. In this initial speech, introducing the gallery and the exhibit to ENGLAND’s spectators, Crouch and Ringham painstakingly stress the variegated geographical origins of the artists habitually presented in the Henry Art Gallery – “Japanese, Argentinian, Vietnamese, Canadian, French, Belgian, British, German, Mexican, Korean, Lebanese” – before specifying the nationality of the artists participating in The Violet Hour. In so doing, this first section of ENGLAND continues to veer the spectators away from microsocial scenarios and biographical details, and appeals instead to cross-national interactions where subjectivity operates collectively and, seemingly, for everybody’s pleasure. Beyond strengthening the telescopic logic intimated earlier, the double meaning of cosmopolitanism is evoked in the context of the art world. On the one hand, art is cosmopolitan because it implements the notion of a global community of equals: it can emerge from any ethnic or sociocultural background, and its appeal is equally universal. On the other hand, the gallery is also cosmopolitan in the more popular sense of an openness to and appreciation of the world’s cultural and artistic multiplicity and richness. In ENGLAND, this popular understanding of cosmopolitanism is equated with quality; the internationalism of the art gallery is effectively a brand that in itself connotes value, irrespective of the product. The evocation of this twofold cosmopolitanism of the art world is strengthened by the performance of ENGLAND in the Henry Art Gallery, as it constitutes the exportation of an English play to America for a Seattle-based audience. A collective subjectivity that encompasses actors and spectators is thus loosely outlined on the grounds of their sharing of a multicultural outlook that produces the appearance of equality. This is a collective subject created outside the fictional narrative, formed by these cosmopolitan theatre-makers and spectators in an art gallery that professes its own sophistication by ‘exhibiting’ Crouch and Ringham. This collective subject mirrors another collective subject

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within the play: a collectivity integrated by the protagonist couple, but also by the migrant doctors, frequent travellers and capricious art-lovers that populate the fiction, like the boyfriend’s client who is “building a Bavarian Schloss. / A castle outside Pittsburgh!”. However, this discursive and practical celebration of cosmopolitanism is subtly undermined on two accounts. On the one hand, the emphatic presentation of the gallery’s multicultural credentials suggests the possibility of a utilitarian and self-interested deployment of the exoticised other, as the nationalities of artists are worn like brands, badges that tell us more about the quality of the art gallery than about the artists themselves. The extent of this self-serving, orientalist and commodifying stance will be revealed in Act Two, not only because the sourcing of a heart is embedded in utilitarian international transactions, but also through the protagonist’s presumption that the transplant of an Eastern heart has infused them with a newly exotic psychological life: “Since the operation, I’ve been having weird dreams – with snakes and elephants and monkeys, you know”, we will hear Ringham confess to Hassam’s widow via the figure of the translator. “I thought maybe, because of the – Did your husband, ask her, did Hassam – did he work with animals?”. On the other hand, the privileges of this sophisticated and cultured collective begin to be exposed here. Ringham’s exhaustive list of nationalities, claiming that the gallery exhibits the work of “artists from all around the world”, is brought to an end with Crouch’s clarification: the artists exhibited are “mostly American”. The suggestion of a pro-American bias in the cultural industry is certainly banal and lightly humorous at this stage. However, it points towards the play’s later disclosure of the privileges and injustices that weaken the imagined cosmopolitanism of a global community shared by all human beings as equal. As the second act will reveal, the cosmopolitan collective subject that articulates a present time under the semblance of international equality will be disclosed as the executor of structural injustice on a global scale. Thirdly, Crouch and Ringham’s introduction to the Henry Art Gallery presents capital as indispensable and good-natured. The gallery founder and subsequent funders are openly thanked and acknowledged for making possible the building, the current exhibition, and the performance of ENGLAND. This gratitude highlights the theme of interdependency that runs through the play – the fact that objects, events and, importantly, human subjects are not autonomous but reliant on one another, interconnected. In this instance, the weight of interdependency is placed into capital-owning hands. “Thank you Horace Chapin Henry and the Allen Foundation for the Arts, if it weren’t for you we wouldn’t be here. / You saved our lives”. Through this reference to the real funders of the Henry Art Gallery, the first act begins by unabashedly linking capital with

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the provision, enhancement and circulation of goodness (and goods) in the world outside the fiction. This will be reinforced later in the story through references to corporate philanthropy, as we hear about the protagonist’s father-inlaw: he regularly donates part of his company’s profits to the Presbyterian Church and once sponsored a sculpture park for a cancer ward: “he puts back what he gets out!”, Ringham exclaims. Thus, the onset of the performance persuasively ventriloquises the discourse that conceals the centrality of capital gains for businesses within our globalised economy behind the façade of socalled social responsibility and corporate values. The dutiful gratitude to capital owners and their investments first expressed by Crouch and Ringham here sets the mood in this first act for an unquestioning contentment with global capitalism, as it is depicted to nourish good art and the good life. Although spectators might disagree with this candid or disingenuous view, a semblance of consensus about the desirability of capitalism prevails. Dissent is foreclosed by the necessary silence of the audience within the structure of the performance; the familiar and seemingly innocuous positions embodied by Crouch and Ringham attenuate this one-sided discourse about capitalism’s beneficial social impact. It is in this combining of discourses and the construction of a collective character that the play’s political overtones begin to emerge. In coordinating apparent consensus regarding the achievements and ethical commitments of capitalism, this speech and its subsequent verbal and physical reverberations nullify the truth about the social effects of private property and its exploitative crossnational transactions. For strategic reasons that become apparent in the second act, and implicating the audience with regards to questions of collective responsibility and self-determination, a Badiouian reactive Subject is outlined in the first act of ENGLAND. Following Badiou’s schematisation, we can argue that through the articulation of discourses, practices and affects that produce gratitude for and compliance with globalised capitalism, a present is created. In this present, the egalitarian struggles of anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements are implicitly rendered unnecessary in the face of capitalism’s bonhomie, its apparent attempts to repair the world’s evils and its active engagement in the promotion of culture and social development. This is, in accordance with Badiou, a conservative present (2009: 55): the inequalities that are structurally embedded in the functioning of globalised capitalism remain unchallenged, while a radically different present is traded off for “ameliorations”, “small novelties” within a Situation (2009: 56). In Act One’s continuous production of this uncritical contentment a collective, reactive subject is induced – a subject that negates the trace of the Event, and avoids incorporation into a new era while producing “a present ‘a little less worse’ than the past” (Badiou 2009: 55).

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Although the creation of a present through the practices, discourses and affects of political contentment is apparent, the reactive subject that I argue is outlined in ENGLAND seems to lack the typically Badiouian anchoring in the Event. In ENGLAND it is impossible to identify one particular Event – a specific, ephemeral, unpredictable disruption of a Situation – against which the practice of an uncritical disposition towards private property and global capitalism might be reacting. Indeed, we cannot link the reactive subject in ENGLAND to an Event such as those populating the examples in Badiou’s work: the slave insurrection led by Spartacus, the Cultural Revolution in China, or May 1968 in France. However, the Badiouian reactive Subject is meant by definition “to act as though nothing has taken place or, more exactly, to be convinced that, were the event not to have occurred, things would be basically the same” (2011: 92). Badiou insists that “it is because there is revolution that there is reaction” (2009: 62) – yet the revolution is not in sight either in ENGLAND’s fiction or its performance. Also, Badiou rejects “the whole ‘left-wing’ tradition which believes that a progressive politics ‘fights against oppression’” (2009: 62), and poses this view as an essentialist and causal conceptualisation of history that neglects the chance aspect of revolution. Even the re-emergence or ‘resurrection’ of a political Truth “presupposes a new world, which generates the context for a new event, a new trace, a new body” – in short, a new Subject within a different world (2009: 65). How can we, then, without a clear Event in sight, conceptualise the praxis reproduced in and incited by ENGLAND as inducing a reactive Subject? My suggestion is that ENGLAND’s first act does evoke and stimulate the formation of a reactive subject akin to Badiou’s, a subject that pivots on the denial of Evental traces. However, the identification of such an Event is complicated by the fact that history is intentionally absent from the fiction and that the art gallery’s relationship with history oscillates between contingency and eternity – the gallery has the plasticity to accommodate and conjure up different eras through its art, as well as the power to exemplify atemporal aesthetic value. This erasure of history in ENGLAND’s fiction and the ambivalent relationship between the art gallery and history constitutes, in itself, a way of denying the dialectical nature of history, of flattening out the disruptive appearance of Events, of prioritising the vantage point of a static present. ENGLAND’s reactive subject is, however, the gentle-faced legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s There Is No Alternative (TINA) neoliberal doctrine in the 1980s – it is gentle only in its appearance of social responsibility, but the structural inequalities and exploitation upon which it relies remain unchallenged. This subject implicitly hinges on the demise of the political project that crumbled with the Berlin wall in 1989. In other words, the subject incited in the first act of ENGLAND reacts against the fidelity to past and present communist Events, as well as producing

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a pre-emptive reaction against subsequent Events. By ‘communism’ I do not mean an affiliation with a political party or specific historical political projects, but more generally the idea that “the logic of classes, the fundamental subordination of people who actually work for a dominant class, can be overcome” and that “a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth” (Badiou 2008a: 98). Following Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy and The Communist Hypothesis, one could perhaps argue that the current political Situation is one of impasse, an interval between communist Events past and future. In this context, militant subjectivities attempting to force a communist, egalitarian present are stifled by the post-political appearance of consensus regarding the desirability of globalised capitalism and the virtues of democracy. The celebratory discourse about capitalism invoked by ENGLAND’s performers, as well as their seductive inclusion of spectators in a world of cosmopolitanism and privilege within the art gallery, suspends our awareness of the existence of disenfranchisement. Moreover, it occludes the possibility – even the desirability – of creating an egalitarian present that is not controlled by capital: it negates the rationale for and the operations of dissent. In the white-walled art gallery where the performance takes place, alternative socio-economic arrangements seem uncalled-for because capitalism is vindicated as cultivated, multicultural, and occasionally philanthropic. Importantly, Badiou notes that “the form of the faithful subject nonetheless remains the unconscious of the reactive subject” (2009: 56): it is through the negation of the faithful Subject that the reactive Subject appears. Indeed, the practices of resistance and prefiguration marshalled by anti-capitalist and antiglobalisation social movements are implicitly posed as unnecessary or utopic, while the leftist discourse on equality is absorbed by globalised capitalism in the form of more responsible corporate practices. As the second act of ENGLAND intimates, this repressed faithful Subject has the potential to resurface.

Crouch and Ringham: two types of simple acting, twice The introduction to the Henry Art Gallery theatrically outlines (i. e. characterises) a collective subject spanning artists and audiences. In its cultured, amiable inhabiting of the art gallery, and its gratitude to capital, this subject articulates a present under which the problems of global capitalism and the potential for alternatives are erased. While this applies to the ‘doing’ of performers, spectators and artworks within the gallery, there are more levels of characterisation activated by Crouch and Ringham’s introductory speech. Linking the three elements explored above together, the performance’s first moments partially characterise

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the actors as two art guides – ciceroni in a cosmopolitan art world who diligently interweave factual detail about the works of art with gentle product-placement references to philanthropic funders. This characterisation unfolds with their meta-theatrical descriptions of the Henry Art Gallery and The Violet Hour, and the references to the duration and location of the performance itself. It also emerges with their “simple acting”: acting “in which only one element or dimension of acting is used”, focusing for example on the pretence of emotion, or on the pretence of action (Kirkby 8). Crouch and Ringham appear in an almost neutral standing position next to the works of art, Ringham often with her arms by her sides, and Crouch occasionally moving them more emphatically. Their voices are resolute and engaging, their speech peppered with the discursive clichés that feature in real guided tours: they enumerate dates, materials, alterations and repairs. Although at the onset of the play these refer to the art gallery and the works exhibited, these details will progressively be about the protagonist of the story. In short, Crouch’s and Ringham’s body language and linguistic register are those of two art guides initiating a translation of the artworks for the visitors/spectators. Their acting is at this point almost indiscernible as such, partly because the art gallery naturalises their stance, discourse and delivery as those of somebody not ‘in character’ but ‘at work’, but perhaps also because an art guide’s work is in itself invisible and emotional labour: being a friendly, selfless, informative and engaging companion. What we see, however, is not self-disclosure or a performance of the self, but ‘simple acting’. The perception of Crouch and Ringham as two individuals is somewhat overwritten by their speech, with Ringham announcing: “I am English”, and Crouch continuing: “My boyfriend is American”. From this moment on, their joint firstperson singular speech outlines what appears to be a singular-subject protagonist, rather than two art guides. This singular subject is marked by the experience of finitude and desire, differentiated from others, albeit without (heteronormative) corporeal finality. He/She/Ze is an English citizen,¹² who lives in  The gender-neutral pronoun ‘ze’ is an alternative to the gender-marked pronouns he/she and is frequently used within the LGBTQ+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, fluid and questioning). ‘Ze’, and other pronouns such as ‘hir’ and ‘hirs’, are used to eschew the grammatical assumption of binary gender identities. In the same way that the uncountable character in . Psychosis has been endowed with a female gender (see De Vos : ), heteronormative slips have occasionally taken place in the reception of ENGLAND. David Lane assumes that the protagonist is a woman (), as does critic Lyn Gardner’s review of the show in its premiere (). Gardner rectified this assumption in a subsequent piece on the performance at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, two years later where she referred to “the unnamed and ungendered narrator” ().

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Southwark with a wealthy Dutch-American art-dealer boyfriend, and who has a heart condition that is eventually life threatening. The lines are crafted so that the story’s protagonist is not endowed with a specific gender, achieving an opacity reminiscent of Sarah Kane’s Crave. However, if Crave occludes the possibility of individuating C, M, B and A – that is, if the script impedes ascertaining whether the lines correspond to one individual or more – ENGLAND provides rich sociocultural details about the protagonist, offering no doubt as to the subjective unity encompassed by Crouch’s and Ringham’s lines. In this respect, the characterisation of a finite singular subjectivity that begins here is manifested through an aesthetics of refraction similar to that of Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue. In other words, the usually aligned subject of experience (i. e. the embodied entity that thinks, lives, dies), the speaking subject (i. e. the embodied entity giving an account of themselves) and the syntactic subject (i. e. the subject of language that appears in the enunciation) are disjointed and exposed to discrete treatment in performance. More specifically, Crouch and Ringham offer two voices for the one syntactic subject, for the same grammatical first person. Their acting with respect to this gender-indeterminate singular subject is also ‘simple’. Their bodies do not impersonate the protagonist, as they continue to deploy the stances and movements of two art guides in an exhibition. Only their voices adopt a different quality, progressively raising in pitch and urgency, as the news about the heart condition seems to worsen. Overlapping with their initial simple acting as two art guides, this increasingly emotional vocal delivery is another type of simple acting. The first instance of simple acting is thus produced through the friendly and approachable demeanour of two art guides, through Crouch’s and Ringham’s body language and movements across the room. The second, following one of Michael Kirkby’s examples, “exists only in their [the performers’] emotional presentation” (6). Significantly, this grammatical first person materialises more often in the possessive forms ‘my’ and ‘our’, portraying an account of individuality rooted in a capitalist logic of private property. To put it more clearly, Ringham’s first-person assertion of Englishness seems self-confessional, yet what follows provides more information about what the protagonist has, either first-hand or vicariously, than about who he/she/ze is. In what seems to be the onset of personal disclosure, Crouch and Ringham actually engage in a description of assets: “My boyfriend is American”, “My boyfriend has three passports”, “My boyfriend can speak four different languages. He’s a citizen of the world!” and, finally, “I have no languages” [emphasis added]. The property-related undertones of this introductory self-presentation become pervasive throughout the first act. We hear Crouch and Ringham exclaiming: “We have a duplex. / We have white walls”, “We don’t have much here, but what we have is pretty amazing”,

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“In the other room, seriously, we have a small Willem de Kooning”, “It’s worth more than this duplex!”, “Look at the floor! When we bought this place it was photographs of wood made to look like real wood, we replaced it with real wood”. Arguably, within the story of physical decay that occupies the first act, the subject of experience remains, like the art gallery, blank. It is only through the exhibition of possessions – a cosmopolitan boyfriend, a luxurious duplex, original artwork, a failing heart – that a vague semblance of individuality is externally amassed. In other words, this act of self-disclosure is detached from the physical and psychological uniqueness upon which the fashioning of liberal-humanist subjectivity relies, whilst also veering away from the non-individuated affective/compassionate epistemologies of the subject of 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue. What we apprehend as a first-person narrative of self-disclosure in the first act of ENGLAND actually amounts to an inventory of subjects, objects and spaces amassed by somebody: it is a self-centred narrative about the protagonist’s cognitive and material(istic) possession of the world. Although for Crouch the fictional world in ENGLAND is dematerialised, and only conjured up by language and spectatorial imagination (Crouch 2011c), the material world that defines the protagonist in ENGLAND does have physical representation in this performance, in particular with regards to the buildings and artworks the protagonist owns or uses. The Henry Art Gallery itself, its exclusive art, and its culturally savvy spectators/visitors: they all constitute material signs that subtly represent the elitist and cultured world inhabited by the protagonist. Arguably, The Violet Hour stands for the couple’s private collection as an alreadymade stage design, and the Stroum Gallery, with its clean lines, suitably evokes the couple’s flat, the Southwark gallery, and the increasingly exclusive medical centres they visit.¹³ Even the non-correspondence between the performers’ phys-

 The gallery offers more than just a material invocation of the habitat of the protagonist. Regardless of its immaculate, timeless and apolitical interior design, the art gallery finds itself in a complex relationship with capitalism and inequality, like the protagonist couple. The protagonist’s boyfriend in ENGLAND illustrates the connections of art and capitalism with his understanding of art as a profitable commodity. As the protagonist puts it, “Good art is art that sells!”. Indeed, purchasing and accruing the artwork is part of what an art gallery does, and the gallery’s own value is determined by what it has to offer. Besides the monetary transactions behind exhibitions and collections, the art gallery has traditionally been aligned with the higher and middle classes: if the cultural world has been controlled by “a specialised and non-democratic elite” (Kritzer ) imposing values of beauty and permanence, “artistic contemplation now has to include a degree of erudition” (Bourdieu ) in order to make sense of an art object precisely as art. The alignment of art with high and middle classes is a point of contention for the art gallery itself. Through guides, signposting, and outreach activities, the art gallery acts as a

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ical appearance and the singular character they speak for gives material form to a body that feels increasingly alien due to poor health. We hear the protagonist speaking through Crouch and Ringham: “This isn’t my skin. / This isn’t me”. I will return to this later, but the materialistic undertones of the performers’ self-characterisations – of their figuration of a singular subject through the exhibition of possessions – are muffled in the narrative through a persuasive vindication of the aesthetic and spiritual pleasure gained from art. For example, Ringham explains: “My boyfriend believes that art shouldn’t just be in galleries. It belongs to people’s everyday lives”. Here, the universality of art is delicately blended with the capitalist illusion of universal purchasing power, which comes to reinforce the positive face of capitalism supported in this first act. However, the original artwork owned by the couple surpasses by far what the average citizen of England or America would be able to afford: they have a Marcus Taylor, a Gregory Crewdson, a Gary Hume, a Marc Quinn, a Tacita Dean and a Willem de Kooning. This portfolio would certainly not belong within the everyday life of the disadvantaged. Incidentally, these names are only meaningful to those with high cultural capital, providing another implicit characterisation of the audience as being at ease with the art world. Importantly, then, this first-person account trains the audience to conflate the material circumstances and belongings of a subject with the subject itself. Thus, ENGLAND presupposes or activates a materialistic disposition within the audience, as the spectators’ ability to ‘see’ individuality on the basis of what a subject has is necessary for the play to work. In other words, when Ringham and Crouch break the illusion of being two art guides with their joint first-person account, it is not only the protagonist of the story that begins to be characterised, but also the audience as a collective subject – as the configuration of the present in materialistic terms. However, and running parallel to this materialistic and superficial fashioning of the self that begins with “I am English”, the grammatical first person shared by Crouch and Ringham also offers signs of a non-individuated, nonindividualistic notion of subjectivity. The account is not only plagued by the possessive pronouns, but also by the plural nominative ‘we’, especially early in the

mediator, offering access to and translating the works for the visitors, as their cultural capital always risks being inferior to that required for understanding the works. The gallery, with its concealed and undesired participation in capitalism and inequality, and its aura of immutability regardless of political and historical changes, is therefore a suitable stage for ENGLAND’s thinking about the invisibility of injustice, elitism, and the arguable universal pleasure of art as/and commodity. For more on the art gallery and ideology, see Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.

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first act. A non-individuating force within the protagonist’s experience is suggested through the abundant expressions in this first person plural. It is as if what Badiou calls the ‘Two Scene’ (see page 67), that which pervades the amorous and the political Badiouian Subject, has found its grammatical translation in ENGLAND through the first person plural: “We love London!”, “We don’t have much here, but what we have is pretty amazing”, “We don’t make jam!” or “We love wine. We love Vinopolis”. The relationality of the subject is indeed acknowledged through the first person, not only through the gratitude of the play’s refrain – “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. He saved my life” – but also through explicit references to relationality: “My boyfriend is so strong. When he holds me, I feel his strength come into me”. As the protagonist’s illness develops and the prospect of death is imminent, the singular ‘I’ occurs more frequently, and not surprisingly so. For all the psychic and material relationality that constitutes the subject, finitude is nontransferable, utterly singular: “I have had a bad night again”, the protagonist explains, “I can’t concentrate”, “I’m never ill” or “Can’t lift my feet”. Although descriptions of the material habitat of this subject and the pleasure derived from its apprehension take the place of characterisation in most of this act, when physical pain and the proximity of death become more pressing, real emotional selfdisclosure occurs: Crouch

I am useless. What’s happening to me? Something’s wrong with me! I’m worried that he will become distant towards me. Ringham Look. Crouch I love him so much. I lie awake and listen to my boyfriend breathing. I listen to the horses galloping in my chest. I feel all alone in the world. I wonder what it would be like to be dead. I hate it when my boyfriend doesn’t get what he wants. I wonder if everything stops. I wonder if there’s an afterlife. There must be. All this beauty can’t just stop, can it?

Still far from the emotional intensity of Crave, 4.48 Psychosis and Stone City Blue, these moments of personal revelation pierce the construction of a social archetype. The immaculate social habitus of the cultured, cosmopolitan and privileged Westerner appears to be increasingly at odds with Crouch’s and Ringham’s progressively anguished delivery.

Obedience, reification and transient characterisations This introduction to the protagonist of the story is cut short as Ringham confesses only ‘having’ English. After a significant pause, and raising his arms apologetically, or expressing resignation, Crouch delivers a worn-out justification for

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Anglophone ethnocentrism in globalised times: “Everyone speaks English!”. Following this line, he leaves his position and decisively makes his way to one side of the room, staging the first of a number of sudden departures and relocations within the Stroum Gallery. In his search for a new position, Crouch is forced to break the crowd that surrounds him and Ringham. He does so decisively and politely, murmuring “sorry” as he finally relocates to one side of the room, with his back to a series of framed artwork on a wall. Ringham remains in the centre of the Stroum Gallery for a few seconds and then follows him, occasionally turning to the spectators she is leaving behind, acknowledging them with a courteous smile. She takes up her new position a few metres away from Crouch, her arms again resting by her sides, her eyes on the crowd and occasionally looking at the artwork behind her. They stay thus, silently looking and being looked at. This is the first of four relocations within the Stroum Gallery that will take place in the first act. At this point the wall behind the performers exhibits part of David Maljković’s Lost Pavilion series (2006 – 2008). The complete series encompasses the artist’s sculptural reconstruction of the American pavilion that had been prototyped for the Zagreb World Fair in 1956, as well as related films and photo collages (“David Maljković: Retired Compositions”). The framed collages behind Crouch and Ringham show snippets of photographs geometrically cut and arranged on paper, leaving vast blank spaces that are as vacant as the obsolete World Fair complex in Zagreb appears in the photographs. If the Zagreb Fair epitomised optimism towards economy, the emptiness of the collages provides a suggestive background to both ENGLAND’s vindication of capitalism thus far and the necessary abandonment of this positivity in the face of the inequalities revealed in the second half of the play. Almost ten minutes after relocating in front of Maljković’s photocollages, Crouch moves to the nearby wall where Matthew Day Jackson’s Missing Link (X-Ray) (2008) is displayed, and stands to one side of the artwork. Ringham follows him, and stands to the other side, framing Missing Link. This is a lightbox-mounted artwork in which eleven faux X-rays compose a post-human skeleton, with tree roots for feet and mechanical components blended into the bone structure of a human being. In this location, the narrative of illness starts to take centre stage, and the protagonist recounts their pilgrimage to several doctor practices. From here they move to Day Jackson’s Terranaut (2008), a sculpture situated in the space between Lost Pavilion and Missing Link, in which a long piece of burned wood stands upright, while a white hand is suspended holding on to it, with two tree roots coming out from the wrist in place of the radius and ulna. This is a shorter section, where we hear that the protagonist is diagnosed with atrial fibrillation at Guy’s Hospital in London. The first act’s final speech will be in front of Jen Liu’s Testament of

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1368: Light-Burst of the End (2008), a huge mixed-media print displaying the iconic recycling symbol in its centre. During these moments of transition from one point in the Stroum Gallery to another, the audience is never summoned by the performers. Yet the withholding of an overt beckoning can be considered in itself a fleeting procedure of spectatorial characterisation. More specifically, audience members are interpellated as the liberal subject of capitalism, in a silent version of Althusser’s scheme (see pages 50 – 54): as a subject endowed with self-determination, agency and individuality, all of which must be put into practice during the performance as spectators are offered a non-scripted situation. They are free to remain where they are or free to find a new place within the performance space; free to gauge their desired distance from Crouch and Ringham and to select the angle from which they want to observe. In all, they are free to customise their experience of ENGLAND as a performance. If we take character as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity, this momentary characterisation of the audience as an aggregation of liberal subjects suggests that character may not exclusively occupy the body of the performers: characterisation may be incited by the actors or the performance design, but completed by the audience’s behaviour without involving their acting or performance. It also demonstrates that the inscription of character in the theatre event might not take place through speech. Furthermore, this characterisation of the audience reveals that spectators can be characterised whilst remaining outside the fictional narrative, that they can be part of a piece’s figuration of subjectivity without being given a part in the fiction. The role of this spectatorial characterisation in ENGLAND in Act One is, firstly, to conjure up a subject endorsed by the protagonist’s vindication of capitalism and consumer culture. This freedom will highly contrast with the spectatorial characterisation in Act Two. Immobile and stuck in the location of their seats while interpellated as Hassam’s widow, spectators are in this second half forced to undergo a much more constricted experience of the performance. Secondly, this characterisation of the audience evinces the weight of social convention and inertia. More specifically, and regardless of the appearance of freedom of movement in the first act of the play, the audience predictably takes the actors’ relocation and silence as their cue to move towards them: consensus about what should take our attention is silently created. Thirdly, this type of characterisation in Act One produces a sense of self-determination in the audience that is crucial for the play’s enticing of political subjectivation in Act Two, where agency and responsibility are tested. Providing the audience with an unjust situation, this second act implicitly demonstrates the difficulty of inter-

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rupting and calling into question a given order – of acting out our alleged freedom, agency and desire for equality. In all these instances of relocation, spectators invariably surround Crouch and Ringham yet give them a wide berth, fulfilling and also expanding the meaning of Crouch’s polite notice at the onset of the performance: “Please always stand no near than half a metre to the walls and to the exhibits, and please don’t touch anything”. After the crowd has settled around them, in these transitional instances, Crouch and Ringham always withhold their delivery for almost a minute. Their silent waiting in these moments of transition is another instance of characterisation, deploying neither speech nor acting but only the gaze. Placing themselves next to the artworks of The Violet Hour and allowing themselves to be scrutinised by the audience, the actors reify themselves as living works of art. An aestheticising and commodifying dynamic is instigated in these moments of silent waiting, and continues throughout the first act also through the overt thematic reification of subjective life: “This is art. / Look at me!”.

“Look at us. All this is art” but “Please don’t touch anything” A practice of reification and consumption of the subject is encouraged during these moments of waiting, but the incessant search for aesthetic beauty in the world is thematically activated throughout the play: Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham

Look! Look! Here you can see me in the night. Here you can see me leaning. Here you can see me in the early morning. Look. I’ve been sleeping on the sofa. Look. Look! This is the view out there. Look at the sun from the windows. Look how the reflections from the buildings around us convey a sense of depth. Look! My skin is damp with sweat. Look! I’ve left a stain on the fabric of the sofa.

Here and elsewhere in the first act, a connection between human life and the work of art is established. We are asked to marvel at the aesthetic value of the body, the world. An X-ray is akin to a photograph, and the anomalies of a heart with atrial fibrillation are pointed out in awe, using the same imperatives that an art guide would use: “Look at the muscles in the heart. Look at them

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thickening. Look at how the pumping chamber gets smaller and keeps the heart muscle from relaxing properly between contractions”. These quotidian objects and spaces, and the subjects that we are asked to perceive as artworks, are not physically present. However, in having ENGLAND performed specifically in a gallery the play symbolically brings (quotidian) life to the art quarters, as if this is where it also belongs. What these descriptions suggest is that human life and the world at large can be perceived as art if the beholder has an aesthetic disposition (Delgado-García 2014: 82). This is the same aesthetic gaze that can give the abstract expressionism of de Kooning, the crown of the protagonist’s personal collection, its status as art. This aesthetic disposition can be related to what Rancière calls “the aesthetic regime of the arts”, which “destroy[ed] the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making” (2004b: 23), and has been pervasive in the ways of making and consuming art for the last two centuries. For Rancière, under this regime “the property of being art is no longer given by the criteria of technical perfection but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension” (2009a: 29). In the light of this correspondence between life and art, Crouch’s and Ringham’s movements and positions entail more than just ‘simple acting’ as two pseudo-gallery guides. Standing before the works of art within the exhibit, and constantly appealing to our activation of this gaze, this aesthetic sensibility before the world, they become the object of it. They become a living object of art that we are invited to identify and value. This is especially acute in those moments where both performers stand before the works of art without speaking, those long pauses in which they allow themselves to be consumed by the spectators’ gaze – while also gazing back at the spectators. Their seemingly inactive bodies, therefore, are engaged in an invisible labour of characterisation: they figure the subject as capable of being both the agent and the object of this gaze. Lyn Gardner summarises this in her review of ENGLAND at the Whitechapel Gallery in London: “from where I was standing, the pair were perfectly framed by two Isa Genzken sculptures. I was looking at art through art, two things at once, seeing double” (2009). This gaze, proper of the aesthetic regime of the arts as understood by Rancière, would seem to re-enchant the world and democratise beauty: “All this is art”. However, as Rancière warns, art as we know it in the aesthetic regime is the implementation of a certain equality. It is based on the destruction of the hierarchical system of the fine arts. This does not mean, however, that equality in general, political equality, and aesthetic equality are all equivalent. (2004b: 52– 53)

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As I have noted elsewhere (Delgado-García 2014: 82), while this aesthetic gaze may be able to re-enchant the world for the beholder, it might inadvertently do so through the appropriation, commodification and/or erasure of the lives of others. The optimism surrounding the aesthetic apprehension of life is certainly shattered in Act Two. Here, spectators learn that Hassam’s heart was indeed treated like an artwork: tracked down, priced and relocated to please a privileged few. In a context where art is a lucrative commodity, the invitation to see the world aesthetically becomes a dangerous incitement to perceive it in mercantile terms, and to spectate commodification in awe and detachment – “all this is art”, but “please, don’t touch anything”. Bringing my analysis of Act One to a close, the next two sections examine the political significance of characterisation thus far, starting with characterisation as embodied by Crouch and Ringham.

Invisibility The two types of simple acting – as two art guides in the Henry Art Gallery, and a singular subject of experience living in London – converge soon after the introduction to the gallery and to the protagonist: “My boyfriend travels the world. He’s never been to the Henry Art Gallery. He’d love it if he came here. / He’d think it was fantastic. He’d love all these clean lines”. In terms of characterisation, this disjunction between the plurality of bodies given to us by the senses of sight and hearing and how we make sense of it as a singular, fictitious individual is crucial. My contention is that character here does not fall on either side of this divide between what we perceive and what we conceive: that is, between percepts and concepts. The split between these two types of acting is not Brechtian in the sense of separating the actors from their roles. Rather, the two roles overlap. Thus, the characterisation of Crouch and Ringham in Act One lies precisely in the fluid crossover between their two very different bodies, the content and the tone of their speech, their silent offering to the spectators’ gaze, and the latter’s imagination and aesthetic dispositions. In outlining singular-plural and collective subjects, the characterisation activated by Crouch’s and Ringham’s acting is epistemologically and politically significant in at least three ways. First, the play demands that we believe in the singularity of the subject even though this is mediatised through two bodies. This could be perceived as just a variation of the faith that the staging of any fiction always requires from the spectator. However, ENGLAND places emphasis on looking; it constantly asks us to look at a subject that is not there. This emphasis on the gaze debunks the epistemological correlation between visibility and existence, or visibility and presence. This collective and disjointed articulation of character, therefore,

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already starts reclaiming the value of a subjectivity that might be invisible from where we stand but that nonetheless exists. And this is a politically important exercise that the play requests of its spectators, precisely because injustice relies on modes of rendering others invisible and therefore undervalued if at all counted in the property-based partition of goods and rights (Rancière 2004b: 12). This is, of course, one of the issues that will become more salient in Act Two, not only because we retroactively realise that the everyday reality of the Islamic world had been erased from the understanding of what ‘a citizen of the world’ is and where such a citizen operates, but also because this Eastern Islamic widow continues to be ‘invisible’ both to the protagonist in the fiction and to ourselves. In the fiction, and behind a veil, the widow appears inscrutable for the English person. For the spectators, she is also invisible. Finding themselves sat in rows and having been given the role of the widow without consent, they cannot see the widow as they cannot see themselves. As Butler reminds us, our body is our own blindspot (1997a: 11). Secondly, and taking the other side of this argument, the spectators are asked to accept the plurality of the actors as a valid outline for one life. To use a pertinent metaphor, they are asked to ‘buy’ the fiction established by the story, while the materiality of the performers constantly defamiliarises this fiction and adds further layers of meaning. I argue that this collectively-executed characterisation materialises a particular notion of subjectivity that, following Jean-Luc Nancy’s terminology deployed in Chapter Three, we could describe as ‘singular-plural’. In other words, regardless of the fact that we shape our world around the notion of individuality, and notwithstanding the protagonist’s confusion of material possessions with individuality, ENGLAND demonstrates that we are tied to others through our actions and – as the second act reveals – transactions, and that those connections are also part of who we are. I argue that this essential plurality within the singular subject is materialised through a characterisation that is executed collectively. Regardless of the protagonist’s individualistic discourse, the suffering subject of experience that Crouch and Ringham jointly incarnate is presented as intersubjectively constituted by romantic, financial, and later on biological ties to others. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here”, spectators are constantly told. Very much like the dividuated protagonist of Stone City Blue, this subject of experience is not unitary. Understanding that the subject might be singular in its finitude, in its experience of the self, but that it is also essentially plural in the way it is configured by its relations to others has significant ethical and political potential. It can be the basis for a non-individualistic and non-violent stance towards one another. Finally, this character brings about an undecidability about gender that is also significant. We cannot ascertain from the words whether the English person

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is a heterosexual woman, a homosexual man, or whether we should think this subjectivity in genderqueer terms that bypass the binaries established by heteroand homonormativity. All of these possibilities are plausible, but none definitive. However, another way of reading this undecidability is that perhaps the character partially embodied by Crouch and Ringham invokes more than just the plurality and relatedness of the singular subject. As argued above, the play introduces hints of a telescopic logic at work within the narrative, which invites us to see and evaluate the events beyond the personal realm. In effect, alongside the moments in which the protagonist zooms out to locate subjects and objects within their country of origin, residency or position, and influence, there are cues that point to this wider geographical and sociocultural grounding of the play in ENGLAND’s “outer theatrical frame”; that is, “those cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event” (Bennett 139) but are not produced by the actual visual or aural signs of the performance. The play is, after all, called ENGLAND. Also, in presenting the play Crouch’s theatre company drew attention to a contemporary link between England and a new form of imperialism. “Forget thoughts of skinheads or nostalgia”, the company’s website states (in a clear reference to Shane Meadows’s film This Is England (2006), which premiered a year before ENGLAND went onstage). “ENGLAND is about an empire of a different kind – one of transmigrations and transplantations” (news from nowhere). Arguably, then, the character configured by Crouch and Ringham may relate to a type of subjectivity that is not only singular-plural but also, and simultaneously, a collective subject. In other words, this genderless “English” (as the script will name them in Act Two) might refer not to an English person in particular, or to ‘the English’ or ‘the English-speaking’, but, as is my argument, all of those whose practices inscribe them into the same subjective figure as the Anglophone protagonist couple. Although the endless references to countries would seem to suggest that this collective subject could be understood in terms of national identity, my contention is that these allusions serve the purpose of activating our thinking in terms of a synecdoche, yet that the ‘whole’ for which the protagonist couple stands is not the geographical demarcation of England or sociocultural attitudes exclusive to ‘Englishness’, but a collective subject whose habitus, practices and relationships with the production of a political present transcend national boundaries. From a Badiouian perspective, the practice-based production of a contented and uncritical present gives rise to a reactive subject that cannot be subsumed exclusively into a national identity. To put it differently, the vindication of capitalism, the unquestioning contentment with the commodity, the uncritical celebration of privilege, and the reification and valorisation of every element of life do not construct a present that is exclusive to England; the subject of

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this praxis cannot be solely English. These practices in fact resonate very strongly with American culture in the case of the performance in the Henry Art Gallery, but have the potential to resonate just as well with privileged audiences within consumerist societies globally. The cross-national value of this collective subject activated by Crouch and Ringham hinges on the fact that ENGLAND’s protagonist speaks the lingua franca of global capitalism: not just in the literal sense, English, but also a persuasive language of post-political contentment and delight in private property. It appeals to the sort of “universality” that globalisation proposes, according to Badiou: “[a] universality of money, the universality of communication and the universality of power” (2004: 105). This – the translatable nature of this reactive subject and the seemingly universal applicability of its praxis – is crucial for the political investment of the play, and the potential emergence of political subjectivities. The potential of a progressive politics is located here, as the spectators’ incorporation to this reactive subjectivity is ethically unsustainable by the time the second act reveals its participation in oppression. Posited between this privileged collective subject and the unrepresented other, Hassam’s widow, spectators are invited to find their own position, their own praxis, within economies of power.

Preparing the ground for the political As my analysis of ENGLAND’s first act aimed to show, spectators are characterised throughout in ways that challenge and expand the normative understanding of character, with regards not only to where it might be located but also to how it is produced, and what notions of subjectivity it might formulate. Thus far in the performance, audience characterisation does not involve a direct and fictionalising address from the performers, as will be the case in Act Two. It neither entails the professional skills of acting, nor does it require speech – challenging views on the primordial “ontologie verbale [verbal ontology]” (Ryngaert and Sermon 53 – 54) of character. Rather, spectatorial characterisation in Act One is a heterogeneous and intermittent process, activated both by the audience’s actions (movement, gaze) and inaction (silence). More specifically, on some occasions the audience is part of the theatrical figuration of a reactive subject involving Crouch and Ringham. In this case, characterisation is produced by spectators’ waiting for the performance to begin, their silently following Crouch and Ringham across the Stroum Gallery, and their participation in art consumption in a context in which art is revealed as mercantile and elitist. Designed by the performance event but enacted by spectators as agents, these practices generate a notion of collective subjectivity that unwittingly or uncritically supports the protagonist’s discourse on the bonhomie

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of capitalism. Crouch has explained how in a production of ENGLAND in Lisbon, after he exclaimed “Everyone speaks English!”, a member of the audience rebuked “No, they don’t!” (qtd. in Horowitz 100). This interruption was interpreted by Crouch as a sign of critical spectatorship against the “lazy, laissez-faire view of the world” sponsored by the protagonist (qtd. in Horowitz 100): a sign of disidentification. However, the performance does not encourage spectatorial interventions such as these and, indeed, not one spectator spoke in the performance recorded in the Stroum Gallery. What the reaction of this spectator in Lisbon foregrounds is that the production of consensus is silent and embedded in the structure of the performance, and that, unless an intervention from the audience breaks the spell of unanimity across the floor, actors and audiences are enmeshed in the same reactive subjective figure. This is therefore crucial for the play’s political strategy. In forcefully orchestrating consensus, the play prepares the scene for spectators’ disidentification with this reactive subject when, in Act Two, the abusive practices obfuscated by this contentment with economy and the beauty it affords to the privileged are finally revealed. Moreover, the play takes for granted spectators’ consent to be interpellated as art connoisseurs or at least aficionados, as sharing the habitus of the protagonist. While this fictional interpellation of the spectators as allies appears to be innocuous, it nevertheless sets a precedent for Crouch’s and Ringham’s figuration of the audience as an Islamic woman in the second act. Spectatorial characterisation then poses important questions about uninformed consent and how this might be scripted within economic transactions – in the purchasing of a theatre ticket for the spectator, in the signing of some documents by Hassam’s distressed wife. In other moments, the audience is posed as an aggregation of autonomous subjects separated from Crouch and Ringham: they are characterised as a collection of spectator-consumers, as agents who make decisions about their position within the room and the show. Significantly, they must take the other into account before they reposition themselves, and continue to function as a group. The last of these characterisations takes place at the end of Act One. The cacophonous sound recording that has been underscoring the performance thus far becomes louder after Crouch and Ringham have delivered their last lines. The two performers stand in silence for a second, and Crouch suddenly leaves the room in haste, while Ringham stays behind in the Stroum Gallery, smiling. The audience is neither invited to follow Crouch nor to wait with Ringham. Spectators must make a decision individually, but the group also weighs in on the decision-making process. Set against the appearance of consensus and ungranted consent, this and other brief moments of individual agency and collective awareness offer an anticipatory glimpse of the notion of subjectivity that ENGLAND

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may facilitate – one characterised by agency, responsibility, and a mindful relation to the other.

“Wringing”: disidentification and subalternity in ENGLAND The first act is brought to an end after a long intervention in front of Liu’s Testament of 1368: Light-Burst of the End (2008). Liu’s piece is a dark, wall-sized print on cloth featuring a huge recycling icon in its centre, composed primarily of white candles – a suitable symbol for the imminent reusing of organs that will take place in the story but also, perhaps less literally, an implicit call for collective mindful behaviour not dissimilar to that which ENGLAND’s story spurs. The performers’ voices have gained an anxious quality at this point. They loudly overlap one another through the crackling, noisy score that has progressively come to dominate the aural space of the performance. Their shouting and the noise rise to an unbearable pitch in the echoing white room until, suddenly, there is silence. Then, Crouch and Ringham, with renewed composure, recount the protagonist’s visit to a leading heart surgeon at a stately home in Berkshire. The building, they tell us, was designed for the Earl of Renfrewshire in 1768 and had to be rebuilt in 1830 following partial destruction by a fire. “In the rebuild, the architect transformed the main façade in the Indian style – adding the domes and minarets that give the house its distinctive appearance today”. The transformations of this building anticipate the protagonist’s imminent surgery and the cultural hybridity that the protagonist will infer from the transplant. More importantly, however, the comparison completes the parallelism between architecture and human life introduced at the very beginning of the play. At that point, a metaphorical relationship between buildings and subjects had been initiated, raising important questions regarding assigned value, enjoyment of financial backing, and possibilities of existence and growth. This metaphor is hereby completed, and one of the last images given to the spectators before Act Two is that of capitalism’s progressive colonisation of life, the mercantilisation of everything, offered as an apparent non-sequitur that is nonetheless pregnant with meaning: “In 2004 [the building] was purchased by a international consortium. / Architecture is like a living organism, adapting to the culture of its time”. Spectators follow Crouch through a staircase and corridors, and into a bare wooden-walled, well-lit, functional room, where the last twenty minutes of the performance take place. This transition operates as a shift in space and time within the fiction: the story skips to an indeterminate time in the future, after the protagonist has received a heart transplant and is now waiting to meet the

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donor’s widow in order to express gratitude and bestow a gift upon her. The blending of meta-theatrical references to the Henry Art Gallery with fictional locations around London and England is abandoned. In place of shifting spatial references, Act Two immerses actors and spectators in a comprehensive fiction that is set in a hotel room in the donor’s country. With this unexpected shift, ENGLAND casts itself as the photographic negative of Kane’s Blasted (1995) with regards to structure and aesthetics. Blasted brings a remote war into a hotel room in Leeds in order to interrogate the non-exceptional nature of violence and the pervasiveness of trauma in the contemporary West, using affective images of violence. ENGLAND, on the other hand, gently relocates the English protagonist from a pleasant cosmopolitan London to a foreign hotel room on a mission of gratitude not devoid of self-centred reasons. The meeting was “meant to be a celebration”, says ENGLAND’s protagonist, “I came to make a reconciliation. I came to understand what’s inside me, to learn”. Like in Kane’s play, this spatial shift serves to draw connections between a common logic at work both in transnational scenarios and in the everyday lives of the privileged Western citizen. In ENGLAND’s case, this is the logic of liberal mercantilism, at play both in the uncritical enchantment with the world produced in Act One and in the effects of violent commodification of human life revealed in Act Two. The bareness of this new space within the Henry Art Gallery adequately functions as a ready-made stage design for the new location of the fiction: a hotel room in an unnamed Eastern country. The hotel was “recommended by the Embassy”, the protagonist will explain to the interpreter, as it is a neutral setting for the encounter: “same all over the world!”. The supposition of the hotel’s neutrality already hints at the pervasive ethnocentrism with which Crouch aims to characterise the English (protagonist). Despite the aesthetic repetition offered by a hotel franchise with global presence, corporate ownership and the accumulation of capital do have geopolitical determinations, and they have a specific cultural and economic impact on each place where they are located. In fact, a number of the American-owned Marriott hotels have been the subject of Islamist terrorist attacks around the world, including the 2003 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in South Jakarta, Indonesia, that is loosely evoked in this second part as the interpreter translates the widow’s words for the protagonist: “Her husband was injured in an explosion. An explosion outside the Marriott. It killed an American official”. The assumption that a hotel is a neutral place for the encounter is thus a reflection of a cultural ethnocentric position with regards to the real circumstances of non-Western life in general, and Hassam’s death in particular.

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“English”, “Interpreter”, and vice versa There is a raised stage in this new room but Crouch stands in front of it, at ground level, facing the rows of seats that are being progressively occupied by the spectators arriving from the Stroum Gallery. Once again, this is neither a pause nor an interlude but part of an operation of self- and other-characterisation. Crouch has started acting already, and is visibly expressing a nervous, moved elation as spectators arrive in the room. This not only poses him temporarily as the English protagonist but aims to silently characterise the audience. Although audience members unfamiliar with the script will be unaware of it at this moment, the stage directions state clearly an allocation of characters to bodies in the second act: “The wife is us, the audience. When the audience enter the space, it is her entering the space” (44). When Ringham arrives, following the last spectator, she positions herself next to Crouch, standing with a seriousness that contrasts with Crouch’s visible joy. They stay thus, looking at particular spectators, until Crouch finally breaks the silence. The speech that starts here echoes the same grateful platitudes of the beginning of the play, although they are infused now with a new heartfelt humble ring – retroactively rendering the pleasantries of the two art guides as empty. Feigning a translation, from the protagonist’s English to the widow’s language, Ringham delivers a concise and detached rephrasing of Crouch’s words: Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch Ringham Crouch

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here! If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here. You saved my life! You saved my life. Look! Look. Never thought I’d be here. Never thought I’d see this or meet you or anything, really! It’s amazing! People at home think I’m crazy but I’ve been imagining this, you know?, since I was ill. Imagining coming here and meeting you. And thanking you face-to-face. I am so grateful to you. And honoured to meet you. It is an honour to meet you! Ringham I never thought I’d meet you.¹⁴

 In keeping with my analysis of the performance, any quotes from the second act will be attributed to the actors as they were delivered in the recorded staging of ENGLAND at the Henry Art Gallery, rather than following the attribution to ‘English’ or ‘Interpreter’ marked by the playtext. The performance varied from the script on several occasions, the most important being the moment in which Crouch and Ringham swap roles.

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Through this turn-taking, the Anglophone side of an exchange between the now recuperated protagonist and the heart donor’s widow begins to unravel, with Crouch as the English patient and the silent audience as the Islamic woman. This fictional conversation is mediated by the unnamed and genderless character of a Mancunian interpreter, who sombrely translates the protagonist to Hassam’s widow, and vice versa. While the playtext leaves the lines in Act One without attribution, they are explicitly allocated to ‘English’ and ‘Interpreter’ in Act Two. However, this attribution of speech to two specific characters in the script is only set in place in order to facilitate a role swap halfway through the second act, a strategy that guarantees that the characters of the protagonist and the interpreter will not congeal into Crouch and Ringham respectively. Unlike the first act, where Crouch and Ringham simultaneously acted the same two roles (overlapping the discursive clichés, stances, and movements of two art guides, with the escalating emotional anxiety of a first-person narration), here the two actors embark on a more traditional labour of impersonation, which they share again albeit sequentially. Crouch’s body language, his speech, and his delivery at the onset of the second act converge seamlessly into the creation of the English protagonist. His work generates a character that is grateful and goodintentioned, an individual who is moved to meet the relative of their own life-saviour, but also one who is culturally ignorant and awkward, and who reacts selfrighteously when the accusation of being responsible for Hassam’s death is yielded: “She got plenty of money, you know?”. If in the first act the protagonist’s ignorance was emphasised in relation to the art market, their disregard for the value of the other’s life is approached here, as an expensive painting is offered to the widow as a sign of gratitude for Hassam’s life. Ringham’s unemotional voice and standing posture serve the purpose of characterising the detached interpreter at work. The role swap takes place ten minutes into this act. Hassam’s widow has left the room to retrieve a photograph of Hassam from her handbag, and the English protagonist is trying to strike up a conversation with the interpreter. While confessing how physically and emotionally challenging the illness has been for the protagonist, Crouch turns to Ringham, addressing his lines specifically to her. She, in turn, rotates to face him. Halfway through Crouch’s intervention Ringham takes over the monologue, along with the emotional impersonation of this character: Crouch

It’s been a bit of a year as you can imagine. Coming so close to death! You stop making plans, you know? Getting strong again, though. Not easy getting used to the idea of someone else inside you. From here! Not easy for people. Impossible for some to reconcile. Damaged goods. Imperfect. No longer me. Not me anymore. Can’t accept it. Look! I feel fine! You wouldn’t know, would you?

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Ringham Would you? From the outside. This is meant to be a celebration. My way of saying thank you. Closing a chapter. I wish I had a couple of phrases to say to her. It’s my life, though. I mean, I got my life back. Wasn’t cheap!

As Crouch and Ringham turn to look at the audience once again, their roles have now reversed from their starting point in Act Two. This provides yet another variation regarding the collective production of singular character in ENGLAND. To put it more clearly, the English protagonist is characterised, figured in performance, by means of Crouch’s and Ringham’s simultaneous simple acting in the first act, and by their sequential adoption of the same role in the second. Crouch has explained that both synchronous and sequential acting in ENGLAND serve the purpose of resisting the congealment of a character into one actor. “The mission is not to ascribe a gender to the protagonist of the play”, explains Crouch; so that character continues to be “physically present but in no form, or in two forms that are constantly shifting” (2011c). Beyond a question of experimentation with form, this decision has to do with the notion of subjectivity at play in the performance. For Crouch, “the story of ENGLAND is not about gender but about culture and national identity”: “That is not a man, that is not a woman. That is a person, that is a nationality: that’s an English, that’s an American” (2011c). Indeed, the avoidance of a gendered character, alongside the zooming-out and persuasive strategies discussed above, allow us to put the protagonist’s individuality under erasure – the individual remaining legible but also crossed out, enabling at once a collective reading of subjectivity, agency and responsibility, without losing sight of the finite life imagined in the fiction. By virtue of the transplant, and through the widow’s worldview, this finite and singular life is rendered again as physically and symbolically plural, non-individuated. This singular-plurality is what the two actors give material expression to: “No longer me”, says the protagonist”; “she can hear her husband, he is inside you”, translates the interpreter when Hassam’s widow is listening into the protagonist’s chest. Moreover, I would argue that the indeterminacy of gender at this stage of the play also serves to update the traditional gendering of imperial discourse, whereby colonial processes were narrated through the images of penetration, conquest and domination of the feminised other (Midgley 2). ENGLAND updates the narrative to the current scenario of smooth neocolonialism, which affects unexpectedly urban spaces (“This traffic!”, says Crouch in awe), takes hold of qualified workers (not “work[ing] with animals”, as the protagonist expected of Hassam), and is carried out legally (“all the paperwork [is] correct”). In this

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new context, relations of transnational oppression are better evoked by sidestepping traditional gender analogies and expressed through the material image of a collective, two-faced, cool-blooded,¹⁵ heartless, yet apparently grateful cosmopolitan trader. However, the playwright’s assertion that the characters in ENGLAND convey notions of national identity needs to be qualified, as it risks painting a partial picture of the play’s thinking of collective subjectivity. As I have argued above, there are indeed numerous references to national origins within the play, with only one exception: Hassam’s widow’s nationality in Act Two. This notable absence signals her erasure from, or unintelligibility for, the protagonist’s epistemological paradigm, and forces the audience to contemplate the world’s subjects from this ignorant perspective. Regardless of the multiple references to nationality elsewhere, and contra Crouch, I would argue that ENGLAND deploys information about national identity in order to, firstly, map out our contemporary world as a scene for cross-national interactions, transactions and transpositions, as a way of ‘tracking’ both the movement and value of subjects and objects. Secondly, it allows for the introduction of the notion of a collective subjectivity. Indeed, the problematic relationship between the protagonist and Hassam’s widow is not rooted in their respective national or ethnic identities. Rather, the conflict in ENGLAND is based on the neocolonialist practices of globalised capitalism, such as the outsourcing of cheap labour and raw materials in the Periphery, benefitting in this case the English and exploiting the bearer of an unnamed Islamic nationality. Moreover, the subjectivity outlined in ENGLAND does not redefine contemporary Englishness, if by this we understand a sense of belonging to a community as characterised by a shared language, ethnicity, history and culture. In Crouch’s play, the English protagonist and the Dutch-American boyfriend are comparable because of class, because of their shared sociocultural habitus, but these are different from a fellow English person, the interpreter. In fact, ENGLAND offers ample evidence that the protagonist’s actions are not necessarily exclusive or defining of the English as a nation, and that the collective subjectivity at play is one that is not based on identity but on practices. In the first act, the protagonist, the American boyfriend, the faux art guides and

 In the original script, while the widow has left to retrieve a photograph of Hassam, the English protagonist complains to the interpreter about the surprisingly cold temperature in this country. “Can we turn this up?” (), the protagonist asks in a clear reference to the regulation of temperature necessary to look after the works of art in Act One. Before the interpreter offers a reply, the English protagonist says: “Aren’t you cold? It’s my blood. Don’t bother” (). These lines were omitted in the performance at the Henry Art Gallery.

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the audience jointly reaffirm the tenets of neoliberal consensus in a global, postpolitical scenario. These persuasive discourses and configurations of the present create a type of subjectivity that transcends the English frontiers, and that embraces, broadly speaking, those who are privileged and who continue to uncritically perpetuate globalised injustice and capitalist oppression. This collective subject is not particular to any given identity but partakes of the “abstract universality” of globalisation – as Badiou describes it, it is the so-called “universality of money, the universality of communication and the universality of power” (2004: 105). The character of the interpreter in the second act serves to dismantle the assumption that one is automatically and essentially incorporated into this reactive subjectivity by virtue of their national identity: that Englishness can be equated with a habitus or disposition that finds aesthetic and spiritual pleasure in uncritically inhabiting a privileged world, and that is incapable of communication with the other. The translator, we learn through the short exchange with the protagonist, is also English but speaks different languages and lives in this unnamed country. “Here? Bloody hell! Good on you!”, Crouch’s English protagonist says in shock. The interpreter does not follow the protagonist’s culturally insensitive cues. The protagonist’s references to the widow’s veil, “Hard to see how they’re feeling with just the eyes” and “How am I meant to have a proper conversation when I can’t even see her face?”, are met with Ringham’s indifferent face and silence. The cruellest accusations by the protagonist are not translated and relayed to the widow. When the exchange is proving to be too upsetting, Crouch acting as the interpreter takes a step towards the audience and whispers: “You can stop this if you want to”, enacting the interpreter’s self-determination and reminding the widow of her own. Importantly, then, the figure of the interpreter in this act subtly cracks both the potential national stereotyping of the English and the appearance of consensus as produced in Act One. The play performs thus the interpreter’s noncompliance with the protagonist’s dispositions, with the habitus of the Western privileged. This character retroactively highlights how exploitation goes unchallenged in favour of consensual and convivial behaviour, as was the case in Act One. It also performs a model of repudiation of the collective reactive subject outlined in the first half of the play, and the potential for attempting a noninvasive cultural translation rather than the creation of a cosmopolitanism that capitalises on the other. The interpreter can therefore be read as a cue for the audience to consider their own disidentification with the privileged subject position they had been lured into in Act One.

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Characterising the audience: subalternity Consistent with my definition of character as theatre’s figuration of subjectivity, by audience characterisation I mean the inclusion of spectators within the work’s thinking of the subject. The audience can therefore be characterised, figured in terms of singular and/or collective subjectivity, regardless of whether the subjectivity outlined involves a psychologically-defined fictional role or whether it is based on the rejection of fiction. Peter Handke’s 1966 Offending the Audience would be an example of the latter. Here, the audience is formulated as the collective subject that the theatrical event takes as its non-individuated telos and point of reception, perhaps simultaneously reminding us of our experience of individuality outside the theatre: You are not treated as individuals here. You don’t become individuals here. You have no individual traits. You have no distinctive physiognomies. You are not individuals here. You have no characteristics. You have no destiny. You have no history. You have no past. You are on no wanted list. You have no experience of life. You have the experience of theatre here. You have that certain something. You are playgoers. (11)

To recapitulate, in ENGLAND’s first act, spectators – like Crouch and Ringham themselves – are doubly characterised. On the one hand, they are figured as part of a collective reactive subject, enmeshed in a convivial, uncritical and privileged inhabiting of the world. They are incorporated into the collective subject epitomised by the protagonist. On the other hand, they are also understood as an aggregation of autonomous singular subjects whose positioning in the Stroum Gallery stems from a combination of personal initiative, collective inertia, and awareness of the self and others (performers, co-spectators, works of art) in the room. Similarly, audience characterisation in Act Two is once again twofold: spectators are characterised both as the donor’s widow in the fiction and as a collection of mis-characterised subjects, as subjects other than the widow or the protagonist, who are exposed to an experience of disidentification. Undoubtedly, the audience is posed as Hassam’s widow, and thus it collectively stands for a singular subject – a finite life mourning the loss of another. A non-individualist reformulation of subjectivity is put forward here, yet not on the basis of human loss, as it is explored in Thomas’s Stone City Blue and theorised in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (see page 135). The decentring of the subject is marshalled through the widow’s translated discourse on familial love and religious faith, in a speech that not only informs anew the subjectivity of the English protagonist due to the transplant, but is extensible to any human life: “I have a child. Until you have a child you will not know what love you have inside you. Until you know God, you will not know what love you have inside you […] You have love inside you now. Inside here, inside Hassam, inside Hassam’s heart, in-

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side you, inside God. God inside you, inside everyone, inside Hassam, inside you”. Besides this notion of singular subjectivity, which exceeds individuality and immanence, the character of the widow also works in terms of a synecdoche, as a part that stands for the subaltern as a collective in the context of neocolonialism and global capitalism – those who are subjected to social, disciplinary, economic and epistemic violence that renders them unintelligible and not representable for the privileged Western distribution of the sensible. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it in her foundational text “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, “[t]he clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity” (76). Dispossessed of a specific national identity, occupation and name, the widow contrasts with the artists and artworks painstakingly described in Act One: her singularity falls outside the performance’s cosmopolitan mapping of the world and its citizens and, as I argue now, she is encountered not as herself but as a part of the incomprehensible and unrepresented other. Or, to express this with a Marxist metaphor, like the commodity, she cannot speak. With regards to how such characterisation of the audience takes place, Althusserian interpellation would seem to play a central role. Yet, as I argue below, this is neither an exclusive nor a definitive tool for spectatorial characterisation. Contrary to the public speaking performed by Crouch and Ringham in Act One, here each actor addresses their lines to five or six specific members of the audience at a time, as if they were the donor’s widow. Crouch’s and Ringham’s ‘simple acting’ consequently unfolds as if in response to this fictional character, establishing and averting eye contact, addressing words and gestures to them. This form of audience characterisation is therefore partially imposed onto the spectators by the performers, and does not require or request the audiences’ consent, impersonation or overt participation. The spectators’ silent presence suffices as the actors’ addressee. Direct address to an audience that is cast as a fictional figure of subjectivity is not unusual in theatre, although often spectators are then cast as spectators and, more often than not, punished for their passive consumption of a spectacle.¹⁶ However, what is striking about

 The alignment of spectatorship with passive consumption is deeply ingrained. Examples abound of theatre pieces that directly address their spectators, construing them as an audience that is decadent; that needs to be critiqued or politically marshalled into action. See for example Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (), Handke’s Offending the Audience (), and Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations () and Comedians (). “[I]n the spirit of the big society” () and the aus-

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ENGLAND is that the creation of the character of Hassam’s widow as/and the subaltern within the audience relies not only on this direct address, but also on the radical transformation of experience of spectatorship with regards to Act One, and on the ambiguous placement of this character within the sensible world presented by the performance. On the one hand, the formation of the character of the widow as/and the subaltern relies on a diminishing of the spectators’ sensorial privileges with regards to the first act. The freedom of movement and generous offer of visual stimuli enjoyed by spectators is withdrawn for the totality of Act Two. Spectators can only occupy their seats, and thus become physically and symbolically cornered into the subject position with which they are interpellated. Their field of vision is occupied by Crouch and Ringham, with only bare walls on which to rest the eyes. This shift in the design of spectatorship not only accommodates for the new location in the fiction – a generic hotel room, an unknown country that we can only guess is poorer than the world evoked in the Stroum Gallery – but also serves as a characterising device. The widow qua subaltern is imagined by the privileged Westerner as a confined life, deprived of freedom, mobility and aesthetic jouissance. On the other hand, ENGLAND offers the audience, and therefore this character, an ambiguous status in the sensible world, especially with regards to visibility, audibility and tangibility. First, the widow’s utterances are inaudible (for the audience in the performance) and incomprehensible (for the English characters in the fiction). Her existence as a subject in the sensible world of the performance is both sustained and overwritten by the interpreter and their translations. ENGLAND does not provide any sonic support to the widow’s words. The interpreter’s words are thus rendered a simulacrum à la Baudrillard: a copy without an original. The subaltern, like the audience, cannot speak – and vice versa. Secondly, she is not only inaudible/inscrutable, but she is also invisible for both the characters in the fiction and for the spectators of the performance. The veil is reported as the material obstacle for her visibility/intelligibility in the fiction, something that the protagonist expresses in plural as a reference to Islamic culture. For the spectators, she is invisible too. ENGLAND denies its spectators the possibility of encountering the subaltern face-to-face. With this, the performance destroys the collective subjectivity they had shared with the protagonist in Act One: the English protagonist can look Hassam’s wife in the eye, the spectators

terity measures put forward by the British coalition government in , David Greig’s Fragile () requests that the audience “step[s] in” () as one of the characters in the play, and reads out this character’s lines as they appear projected on a PowerPoint presentation.

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cannot. Neither can they witness the encounter from the outside, as the encounter necessarily involves them. Interestingly, in the recording of the performance at the Henry Art Gallery, multiple cameras were used but none pointed at the audience in Act Two – rendering the audience/the widow invisible too in the archive. As a result, everything that does not pertain to the Anglophone world is erased from the performance’s ‘sensible’ appearance, from the organisation of what can be seen, heard and known. To put it differently, the subaltern subject of Western neocolonialism cannot be seen or heard within the count of subjects in this act, as her existence is both represented in the audience and denied in that very (mis)placement of representation. Characterising the audience as Hassam’s widow brings attention to the operations through which the subaltern is systematically erased from the sensible but, importantly, without stepping up to incarnate the subaltern, without fully controlling their representation and political entrance in the sensible. A meaningful encounter between the English protagonist and Hassam’s widow is overtly desired, but not materialised in the fiction. Crouch, as the interpreter, relays that the widow would like to hold the English protagonist: “She asks if she can hold you. Touch you. She asks if she can touch you” – a clear violation of the rules established by the performers as art guides in Act One, who warned the spectators not to touch anything. Yet this cosmopolitan coming-together is physically impracticable given that the audience remains in their seats. In this particular performance in Seattle, nobody moved towards the actors. Ringham pronounces the production’s final words, whispering, moved and confused, while staring at the audience: “What is she saying? What? What is she saying? What did she say? What did she say?”. In a final erasure of the subaltern’s speech, Crouch as the interpreter stops translating the widow’s words into English, and the performance is brought to an end acknowledging the inscrutability of the post-/neocolonial other, as a beautifully Western music score fills the room in place of the widow’s words.

Disidentification and the expiry of consensus The characterisation of the audience as Hassam’s widow is a politically strategic misinterpellation. It allocates a singular subjectivity onto a plural body, and transposes an underprivileged subjectivity onto the lives of the privileged. In the same way that meta-theatricality pierces the fiction in the first act, and dismantles the congealment of the protagonist with reminders of the here-and-now of the Stroum Gallery, Act Two also uses self-referential cues with the aim of cracking the very fictionalisation of the audience it claims to promote. More spe-

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cifically, this second act contains some ambivalent references to the audience as both the widow and itself, a collective who is decidedly not occupying the subjective position of Hassam’s wife. Emilie Morin has already pointed out “the double meaning of the collective ‘they’, relating to the exotic and possibly veiled wife, and to the silent audience” (76) in Crouch’s “Hard to see how they’re feeling with just the eyes”. To this, it is worth adding the faux gift economy that the protagonist insists on implementing, which also offers a poignant reference to capitalism’s mechanisms of selferasure within the economy of the performance. Despite having paid Hassam’s family for the heart, the English protagonist chooses to narrate the exchange as a donation, while also aiming to reciprocate the incommensurable gift of life by presenting the widow with an exorbitantly priced work of art. In doing so, their relationship is further embedded into the logic of the market, in which the value of services and commodities is weighted and then exchanged for a token, while the discourse of the gift economy obfuscates the rule of capitalism in the same way that had been obscured in Act One. As Nicholas Ridout has noted, the fabrication of a gift economy and the muddying of exchange are also present in the ways spectators and actors interact after a performance. Ridout argues that, despite having paid for the show, at the curtain call “[t]he audience is trying to figure itself as the recipient of a gift” (165); their applause attempts to frame the encounter between producers and consumers of art as one “in which the economics of exchange are somehow suspended” (165), an encounter in which they are the recipients of a gift – a gift economy that at times is appropriated by the performers’ reciprocal applause to the audience (164– 165).¹⁷ Traces of these processes are hinted at by Ringham in ENGLAND’s second act, in ways that affect the transactions that occur both between the protagonist and the widow, and between performers and spectators: “I have a present, a gift. To thank you. To say thank you. To help you. I brought it from England”, exclaims Ringham. “It’s a work of art. […] It’s worth a lot of money, it’s beautiful, you can do what you want with it”. Speaking as the English protagonist, it is clear that Ringham is claiming here to bear a present for the widow. Yet her lines also resonate with her role as an English performer who has brought the audiences a theatre work from England, and who relinquishes authorial authority and ownership over the piece. The audience is characterised here as both the widow and

 Interrogations and reformulations of the economies subjacent to the theatre event have been the subject of a number of contemporary pieces. For example, Hannah Ringham and Glen Neath’s Hannah Ringham’s Free Show (Bring Money) () places the existence of a monetary contract between audiences and theatre-makers at the centre of the production, as the audience is requested to put a price on the performance.

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itself, and placed in a position in which the gift of the performance cannot but be accepted, while the gift in the fiction appears ludicrous and unable to mask the workings of exploitative transactions. Conflating the obviously ill-fitting interpellation of spectators as Hassam’s widow with subtle meta-theatrical references to performance creates a fissure in the fictionalisation of the audience as the subaltern. The spectators’ impossible identification with the subaltern supplements a previous disruption in the identity and habitus allocated to them previously: although they had been posed as part of a ‘cosmopolitan’, culturally-aware, free Western subject alongside the performers and protagonists in Act One, they have been denied such privilege in Act Two. Arguably, ENGLAND not only ejects the audience from the subject position of the privileged in this second act, but actively promotes the spectators’ repudiation of this first identity by disclosing the effects that the economic transactions of the privileged have on others. In short, ENGLAND positions the audience at a site where no identification is possible: neither with the collective, reactive subject epitomised by the practices of the English protagonist, nor with the subaltern. This mis-characterisation opens up the possibility for spectators to experience their own erasure, to identify with the subaltern at least in this respect, and, potentially, to claim their own subjective position in repudiation of the two key positions of conviviality offered by the fiction: that of the capitalist reactive subject and that of the subaltern. Therefore, as spectators, we are not only compelled to assess where we stand morally or legally regarding the issue of exploitation; we are not only presented with the dilemma of whom to believe or support in the story. We are also prompted to consider who we are, who we are not, who cannot represent us, and whom we cannot represent. If, as an audience member, I cannot bear the Islamic woman’s name, if I cannot speak for her, and cannot hear her – then who am I? If the privileged Westerner who is complicit in transnational oppression does not represent me – then who will? From a Rancièrean perspective, these impossible identifications set up by ENGLAND provide an opportunity for the spectators to reconfigure their own sense of singular and collective subjectivity anew – not in the fiction, but outside the gallery. In Badiou’s language, this disidentification also posits spectators at the brink of political subjectivation, as part of an Evental site (2005a: 175). As I elucidate in my discussion of Badiou’s theory, the Evental site is the part of the Situation that contains the abnormal, that which does not make sense given a particular situation but exists within it nonetheless. In Badiou’s theory, the Evental site is precisely what can be mobilised by the trace of a political Event, and towards the production of an egalitarian Present. On the one hand, the spectators

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in ENGLAND are posed as part of a Situation that compels them to “Look!” at beauty, to find aesthetic pleasure in the world around them, but never to register their participation in injustice or to acknowledge those whom it affects. On the other, the performance subjects them to the experience of what it is to be erased, silenced, misrepresented, deprived from beauty, confined – albeit in an abstracted, scaled down, and white-walled version of the world. It also invites them to reframe the habitus of the English protagonist and its self-centred practices as exploitative. Through these contradictions, ENGLAND strives to demonstrate to spectators that the gratification they achieve from inhabiting a world of beauty is incongruous with the guilt they experience for contributing to economic injustice. ENGLAND endeavours to encourage the audience to experience the way they already are the incongruous part of a neocolonial, late capitalist Situation. Alongside these two opposite experiences of privilege and culpability, and the disidentifications that accompany them, ENGLAND also offers glimpses of agency and dissidence. Act One highlights that the audience is indeed an agent, capable of making decisions that take into account the presence of others. In Act Two, the English translator begins to demonstrate a resistance to forms of privilege that are damaging to others. Tapping into the guilt that is incongruous with capitalist joy, yet reminding us of our own agency, ENGLAND suggests to spectators that they could potentially incorporate themselves into the production of a better Present, into the process of reconfiguring the Situation on the basis of universal equality that Badiou calls ‘the militant Subject’. Although ENGLAND does not prefigure how a collective political subject might look, it incites its audiences to disidentify with the habitus and the practices that would position them as the actors and spectators of capitalist injustice.

Conclusion Without abandoning the notion of singular subjectivity introduced in Chapter Three, my examination of Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND has continued to explore the figures of the subject that theatre can produce, this time zooming out to investigate collective character. Drawing on Spanish and French theatre scholarship (Hormigón; Sánchez; Losco and Mégevand), the notion of collective character has been defined as the representation, evocation or enticing of a collective subject that need not be organised on the basis of a common identity, or performed by a literal aggregation of actors. My rethinking of character as the figuration of a collective has enabled me to identify aesthetic processes, subjective figures and political gestures thus far neglected in the reception of Crouch’s work. These include the multiple charac-

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terisations of the audience throughout the piece, the connections between the non-gendered protagonist and the collective subjects that operate in the contemporary globalised economy, as well as the role of characterisation in the production and challenging of a post-political consensus within the performance. This has problematised the current critical emphasis on the supposed dematerialisation at play in Crouch’s dramaturgy. I have demonstrated how the materiality of the site where ENGLAND takes place is crucial for the performance in general and for the articulation of character in particular. I have also argued that ENGLAND’s aesthetic interest in the immaterial aspects of the production and reception of theatrical work is intricately linked to a critical investigation of how the material (and materialistic) living conditions that we inhabit are created and sustained. Drawing on Badiou’s thinking of the Subject as a collective figure emerging from practices, this chapter has argued that character can also be induced through a doing, rather than instantaneously appearing with the presence of an actor. In ENGLAND these practices range from walking freely in the performance space to being encouraged to sit down, and from gazing to exposing oneself to the gaze of others. Significantly, character does not necessarily require impersonation. Nor does it always coincide with the actor: character might be produced by a silent audience who is not openly interpellated with an identity, but is nonetheless characterising itself in its reaction to the performance. Through these processes of characterisation, ENGLAND requires spectators to undergo politically-charged operations. On the one hand, the performance takes for granted the audience’s consent to be part of the fiction. It treats spectators as privileged equals only to debunk this appearance of equality later. It deliberately misrepresents them and the subaltern. On the other hand, it encourages spectators to conceptualise subjectivity as materially and affectively interdependent, to ‘see’ subjects that are otherwise erased from the representational field, and to exercise their agency to position themselves within the spectacle. ENGLAND attempts to provoke the disidentification of the audience with the subject positions allocated to them by the fiction. It demonstrates the undesirability of identifying with the privileged, its habitus, and the practices that perpetuate inequality and suffering. It also reveals that this subject cannot represent the subaltern. In pointing out the spectators’ awkward alignment with those who wrong equality, and by demonstrating the audience’s agency and capability of executing politically-significant operations, ENGLAND foregrounds their political potential. It demonstrates that they are capable of disentangling themselves from the processes that valorise some lives, while others are reified, exploited and erased.

Conclusion Q: Is it the case that you tried to write a sequel to Attempts on Her Life, entitled Attempts on His Life? A: Yes, I naively thought there was a formula, so I could try it with men. − Martin Crimp, Interview by Mireia Aragay and Pilar Zozaya (65) Could the hour in which we presume to know nothing of each other offer us moments when we might learn to notice each other, outside our relationships to each other, as if for the first time? − Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics (64– 65)

This book has proposed to rethink character as any figuration of subjectivity articulated in a theatre text or performance. In so doing, I have encouraged a shift in the academic stance on character: from the negative assertion that some theatre texts and performances no longer portray liberal-humanist subjects, to the affirmative investigation of what each work proposes in their place. My conviction is that this has the potential to enhance our understanding of theatre in three ways. It can help us to elucidate the subjectivities that are actually figured in specific theatre texts and performances. It can widen our insight into the multiple processes through which subjects are outlined on the page and/or the stage. It can promote a consideration of the political concerns embedded in the theatrical renegotiation of character. But perhaps more importantly still, exercising non-exclusionary thinking about character can also offer theatre studies an opportunity to test the discipline’s own regulatory presumptions regarding subjectivity, the appearances it considers legitimate, and the utterances that count – not only in the theatrical context, but also beyond. These preoccupations have traversed my analysis of a small sample of contemporary British plays that destabilise the attribution of speech to individual speakers: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue, and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. I have referred to these plays as character-less, suggesting through this hyphenated form that their alleged characterlessness is not complete: that character persists even when attributes such as age, gender and social background are diminished. My argument has been that some theatrical characters may be unintelligible for a humanist epistemology because their contours do not match those of the unitary, self-same individual. In the four playtexts examined, for example, character is neither notated on the page with a first name, nor formulated as a psychologically-round, physically-discrete and autonomous individual. In the stagings of these works, character might not be

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embodied by one performer only. However, the fact that these plays vividly evoke unwanted and decaying bodies, desires, personal experiences, losses, and affective and material ties demonstrates that subjective life is somehow captured. As attested in this book, the possibilities for outlining subjects that are not aligned with liberal humanism are manifold, and they need to be elucidated discretely through appropriate frames of apprehension. In favouring depth over breadth in my case studies, I have intended to offset the tendency to make tangential and homogenising claims regarding character and subjectivity in these and similar works. This preference for deep analysis has required me to be necessarily selective, with the four works examined in this monograph chosen because of their similar aesthetics, their shared historical and geographical context, and their contribution to the reformulation of subjectivity in ways that are politically and ethically affirmative. While these are, I think, especially rich examples, it is important to note that this approach has naturally come with certain disadvantages. Firstly, this book has had to strike a difficult balance between introducing four separate accounts of subjectivation (and their respective vocabularies) and unpicking these in rigorous detail. It has accordingly built its foundation on the bedrock of interlocking philosophies borrowed from a range of thinkers. This is of course just one potential approach: within the discipline of theatre studies there is ample room for projects that draw on the work of one thinker only, and thereby generate an exhaustive exposition of their philosophy in relation to a larger body of theatre work. For an excellent example of this tradition see Laura Cull (2009, 2011). However, this book attempts a slightly separate manoeuvre, fuelled by the belief that no theoretical lens could, on its own, respond to and be challenged by all four case studies. Secondly, in its exclusive concern with script-led theatre this book has been unable to draw into its reach an analysis of other performance forms, such as physical theatre, intimate ‘one-on-one’ work, or Verbatim pieces, to name but a few. This has meant that an investigation of alternative areas such as physicality, affect and authenticity reverberate beyond the scope of this project, and must be left to the purview of further research. Choosing a number of plays with similar aesthetics, however, demonstrates that scripted works that are often presumed to have no characters actually offer a wide range of figurations of the subject. In short, the apparent aesthetic similarities of the scripts set the basis for highlighting the differences among these texts, as well as among their relative performances. Thirdly, and finally, there is a risk of essentialising unassigned scripts as always-already reacting against liberal-humanist understandings of the subject, or formulations of subjectivity that epitomise or envision acts of resistance and

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emancipation. This is certainly not the case. I challenge this presumption overtly in the Introduction, and the Appendix contains a range of additional characterless plays that outline politically diverse views of the subject. However, further avenues of exploration would call for a more comprehensive overview, with a particular need identified for cross-national studies to continue the task commenced here: namely, of building a counter-narrative to the postdramatic and postmodern discourses that consider character and subjectivity to be redundant categories for theatre practice and analysis. These limitations offer opportunities for further research on what a subject is and how it appears in the theatre. It is my hope that this book has also invited a rethinking of what is political in a theatre piece. While the case studies analysed here seemingly present apolitical stories, they disrupt the hegemonic understanding of the subject in ways that have much political purchase. Crave and 4.48 Psychosis legitimate subjective indeterminacy and opacity. Stone City Blue intimates that individualism is self-destructive. ENGLAND foregrounds our desire to disidentify with the oppressor. In Badiou’s terms, these works contribute to the construction of a new Situation by ‘forcing’ extant understandings of the subject into visibility. They performatively call a less individualistic world into existence.

Appendix: Brief Survey of Character-less Plays, 1900 – Present As I suggest in the introduction to this book, in many ways experimentation with character is nothing new. A brief historical review uncovers countless instances of characters that do not fit with the presumption of a stable, autonomous, psychologically complex individual. These range from the Greek tragic character understood as a personal trait (êthos), to the allegorical ‘flattening’ of character by Medieval morality plays into virtues or vices, to the staging in Symbolist drama of “characters [that] split, double, multiply, evaporate, densify, disperse, assemble” (Strindberg 24). This Appendix offers a necessarily incomplete, but hopefully indicative, survey of the large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the historical avant-garde, with particular emphasis on the last two decades. Needless to say, the work of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht has been crucial to the development of acting techniques that destabilise conventional notions of character in the twentieth century – the former, by desiring creation rather than “refraction of the script on the stage” (Artaud 72; see also Derrida 2001); the latter, by requesting the actors’ “demonstration” of and detachment from their roles, rather than “be[ing] wholly transformed into the person demonstrated” (Brecht 125). The “new performative turn” of the 1960s and 1970s (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 235 – 239) also destabilised the expectation of the performers’ impersonating task, not only in the newly-identified performance art but also in theatre. However, this Appendix is not concerned with actors’ practice, but with written works that have similar characteristics to the scripts that constitute my case studies. It therefore comprises only texts that foreclose the attribution of speech to clearly defined, individuated personas.

The historical avant-garde Within the twentieth century, the dismantling of liberal-humanist character can be traced back to the avant-garde. This is one of the effects of the Expressionist investigation of the psyche, illustrated in plays such as Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919) and Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (1917). Futurist synthetic theatre also proposes doing away with a naturalist fashioning of the liberal-humanist subject. Contrary to Expressionism, Futurist work offers fast-paced and succinct scenes that disregard psychological expression. For an intriguing example, see Filippo Marinetti’s 1919 Feet. Here, characters are generated through the combin-

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ation of concise verbal interventions and the movements of the actors’ feet, which is their only visible body part beneath a slightly-raised curtain. Although the avant-garde is immediately identified as a European phenomenon, somewhat foreign to British theatre, Clare Warden has recently highlighted the existence of an autochthonous avant-garde tradition in Britain between 1914 and 1956. For illustrative plays, see for example W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier (1938), and Ewan MacColl’s The Other Animals (1948).

Post-war European experimentation Jean-Pierre Ryngaert and Julie Sermon have noted a tendency in post-war European playwriting to reduce the weight of identity either by withholding information about the speakers or by stereotyping them with one of the markers of their identity, such as gender (60). These authors usefully identify a number of shared techniques, including the propensity to use letters and/or numbers rather than first names to designate the speakers. Examples of this strategy abound in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit to different effects with regards their outlining of subjectivity. I will name just two examples here, which complement this book’s exposition of the differences between plays by Kane and Thomas that also use alphanumeric dramatis personae. Marguerite Duras’s 1968 Yes, peut-être [Yes, Maybe] reduces the information about its two main characters to their gender. Placed in a beige-coloured scene, A and B are described as two females “sans amertume, sans malice, sans amabilité, sans intelligence, sans bêtise, sans références, sans mémoire [without bitterness, without malice, without kindness, without intelligence, without stupidity, without references, without memory]” (155 – 156). In a non-descript post-apocalyptic world reminiscent of Beckett’s landscapes, these two women without identity encounter one another and allegorically create new forms of togetherness. Far from imagining alternative arrangements of the world, Peter Handke’s 1966 Prophecy is a play conceived for four speakers – A, B, C and D – who either take turns to deliver their lines or speak in unison, in different formations. The result is a choral litany of predictions that consistently sit between the teleological and the tautological: BD ABCD A B

Those who are doomed to die will stand like those who are doomed to die. The stuck pig will bleed like a stuck pig. The average person will behave like an average person. The bastard will behave like a bastard. ()

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Despite offering no information about these speakers, Prophecy conjures up a complex, collective subject position. This is a subject that discursively creates and empowers itself through compelling-sounding yet vacuous statements, and that resonates strongly with religious and political bodies and their multiple intersections. The lines in Prophecy would seem to suggest that faith in redemption – or, more generally, faith in the new – is futile. Indeed, the play ends with the inevitable prediction that “Every day will be like every other” (17). The subject position voicing such prophecies is also itself presented as incapable of creation and novelty. Even in the realm of language, every sentence collapses into itself, with each new predicate simply reiterating the content of its grammatical subject. The script is thus haunted by the question of who, if not subjects like these, may be able to produce novelty and change. Handke’s 1967 Calling for Help simply refuses to evoke an individual or collective identity, but this does not mean that his Sprechstück is devoid of characters either. In this play, a flexible number of performers act their seeking of the word ‘help’ and their discarding of other expressions uttered in the process of searching – expressions that amount to snippets of ready-made discourses and that are immediately negated: “in the name of the republic: NO. in one part of yesterday’s edition. NO. lunch from twelve to two: NO. a six-month guarantee: NO. danger, construction: NO” (25). As the production notes suggest, Calling for Help aims to reverse the received locus of reality and fiction in a theatre event: the performers literally look for the word ‘help’ without feigning a need for it, while spectators’ envisioned “helpful shouts of ‘help’” are to be fictionalised, visibly taken by the performers “as genuine distress calls” [emphasis in original] (22). Although anti-representational in its use of language and performance style, Handke’s play still characterises performers and spectators as opaque subjects, whose words are detached from meaning and authorial intention, and among whom communication is destined to fail. While experimentation with character can indeed involve the reduction of identity, as well as the fragmentation of speakers, there are instances that escape such clear categorisations. For example, the long monologue composing Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1977 Night Just before the Forests offers a character/subject on the verge of disappearing off the field of intelligibility and, importantly, sociability. Similarly, character in Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972) may be physically reduced to the mouth, but this provides an excessive and unstoppable selfpresentation. As elucidated in the introduction (see page 3), Beckett’s Act Without Words I (1956) and Act Without Words II (1959), Breath (1970) or Rockaby (1982) offer fascinating examples of experimentation with character.

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British work: 1990s – present Since the 1990s, there has been a remarkable increase in performances that destabilise speech attribution in the British context. Commissioned by the Magdalena Project in 1991 and premiered a year later at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Deborah Levy’s The B File is perhaps the first well-known instance, although its importance has since been foreshadowed by the popularity of Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997). Levy’s devised piece featured five female performers who individually and collectively responded to the name of Beatrice, and were notated on the page as B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5. Claimed both by the ‘inyer-face’ theatre and postdramatic parties (Sierz 2001a: 117– 21; Lehmann 2006: 18; 2011: 336), Sarah Kane’s last two plays, examined in this book, offer an immersive portrait of suffering with little clues about the subject undergoing it, and virtually no stage directions or production notes. In the new millennium, Crimp has undoubtedly been the most prolific of British playwrights producing scripts with no speech attribution, an unfixed number of speakers and/or illegible bodies. Since Attempts on Her Life, Crimp presented at the Royal Court his Advice to Iraqi Women in 2003. This is a short unassigned script, in which a series of instructions for Iraqi mothers blend state paternalism and middle-class concerns for children’s wellbeing. In the three playlets composing Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies (2005), Crimp admittedly endeavoured to return to the “formula” used in Attempts on Her Life (2007b: 65). His latest play, In the Republic of Happiness (2012), contains a middle section entitled “The Five Essential Freedoms of the Individual” that is aesthetically and thematically reminiscent of Attempts on Her Life, staging the narcissistic obsessions of an otherwise empty subject firmly situated in late capitalism. Caryl Churchill’s rapid-response play Seven Jewish Children (2009) also withdrew character assignation. Written after the Israeli military campaign in Gaza in the winter of 2008 – 2009, Churchill’s play premiered at the Royal Court and was famously available free of charge on the Internet, with the proviso that any performance should not charge entrance but invite collections for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (8). The absence of dramatis personae strategically facilitated stagings, as the text does not impose any constraints on the cast. Despite being voiced exclusively by Jewish characters, Seven Jewish Children imagines the Jewish community as ridden by competing views and lacking a clear telos. Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) also withholds any details about the over one hundred characters that appear in its almost sixty scenes. Precisely through this indeterminacy, the play demonstrates our desire to know and understand the other.

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While remarkably different to Seven Jewish Children, Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2008) also contains an interesting tension between singularity and collectivity. Pornography does not attribute speech to individuated characters, but it is possible to infer such identities from the dialogue. The play nonetheless evokes a collective character: that of London’s inhabitants on the days around the terrorist attacks of 2005. In withholding the names of the speakers, the playtext echoes the anonymity granted by the city. Presented with the backdrop of the Live8 concerts and the announcement of the Olympic games in London 2012, Pornography offers a darker rethinking of community building and participation in Britain, as its social fabric is woven out of acts of betrayal, racism, abuse, immoral relations, pornographic consumption and terrorism, while charitable and allegedly inspiring events are experienced with awkwardness. Two Welsh playwrights also premiered work of similar textual characteristics in the early 2000s: Gary Owen’s Ghost City (2004) created a human geography of Cardiff through a sequence of twenty-four short passages attributed to anonymous speakers in the city, one for each hour of day; Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue (2004), partly influenced by Kane and discussed at length in this book, investigated suffering, isolation and relationality from a resolutely male perspective. Other British plays of similar character-less features on the page are debbie tucker green’s Stoning Mary (2005), which divides most fictive subjects following a basic psychoanalytical fashion (we see and hear the wife and the wife’s ego, her husband and his ego, and so forth); Mark Ravenhill’s unascribed play for the physical company Frantic Assembly, Pool (No Water) (2006), in which a flexible number of actors characterise the Group, a collective of friends and artists rejoicing at and exploiting the physical decay of one of its members; and Mike Bartlett’s Cock (2009), which signals to the stability of gender identity and desire in two of its characters by naming them with two initials: M for man and W for woman. This also offers a symbolic, reductionist view of these characters, much like that experienced by the confused third part of this love triangle, John.

Contemporary European experiments British theatre is not alone in its interest in destabilising speech attribution to recognisable, individuated, conventional characters. Contemporary to the work analysed in the present project is, among others, Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland (2004), a collage of mimicked and real media citations created in response to the war in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. Also by the Austrian playwright is Death and the Maiden: The Wall (2005), the last of Jelinek’s five Prinzessinnendramen.

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This play has two identified characters, Sylvia and Inge, but opens with the following parenthetical clarification: While the dialogue is arranged by paragraph here, the characters could easily double up or triple up on their lines; the paragraphs are there merely to indicate chunks of dialogue, not to draw distinctions between the characters of Sylvia and Ingeborg because each of them speaks on behalf of many others. [emphasis added] (Jelinek 2005).

Rainald Goetz’s Jeff Koons (1998) also does away with dramatis personae and speech attribution, leaving a text that combines prose and verse, first- and third-person accounts, and unassigned dialogues in a piece that has more to do with the frantic socialising of artists and journalists than with Koons, the American artist. Falk Richter has not only directed German-speaking productions of Crimp’s and Kane’s work, but has also written a number of plays under the influence of British theatre and in response to an interest in the social and political role of the media. His plays Kult – Geschichten für eine virtuelle Generation [Cult – Stories for a Virtual Generation] (1997), Gott ist ein DJ [God is a DJ] (1999), Seven Seconds (In God We Trust) (2003) and Im Ausnahmezustand [State of Emergency] (2007) either reduce characters to their gender, or do away with any marker of identity. In the script for Seven Seconds (In God We Trust), for example, Richter specifies that the play is for “6 – 8 male and female voices” (1). Also in Germany, René Pollesch has written and directed a number of works experimenting with speech attribution and aimed at a variable cast. Beyond the German-speaking, postdramatic tradition, Jon Fosse’s plays also indulge in giving indeterminacy to its characters, which is often amplified by unspecified settings. Fosse’s Sleep My Baby Sleep (2001), for example, situates three opaque characters – “The First Person”, “The Second Person” and “The Third Person” – in a nondescript space, or void, and records the characters’ confused and existential attempts to infuse it with meaning: “I’m a bit uncertain about it”, The Second Person says, “It feels familiar / and at the same time totally strange / It looks a bit like my children / But at the same time there is nothing here” (84). Writing about his 2003 work Les Repas HYC, French playwright Christophe Huysman states that “Dans cette pièce, il n’ya pas de personnages. Il y a sept voix. Reste leur corporalité à inventer [In this piece, there are no characters. There are seven voices. Their corporality remains to be invented]” (9). What we encounter in the script is a series of hyphenated lines, words that have been disassembled, reconstructed and disembodied from their original speakers – guests at a number of dinners organised and recorded by the author. The results suggest an editing process more preoccupied with musicality and rhythm than with meaning-making.

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Barcelona’s Sala Beckett has not only housed some of the British characterless work mentioned above, but also fostered Catalan new writing featuring experimentation with speech attribution. Among them, Marc Rosich’s Party Line (2006) reflects a postmodern configuration of the subject as a vacuous, selfobsessed and monitoring entity, a subject position that animates and is animated by a brand-fetishist capitalism, and whose desire to communicate cannot mask the fact that there is nothing to tell. The influence of Crimp – whose Cruel and Tender had been translated by Rosich the previous year, and whose seminars in L’Obrador de la Sala Beckett had been attended by Party Line’s director Andrea Segura – is palpable in this piece. The playtext labels its five speakers simply with their gender and a technological property or commercial brand popular in Spain: “la dona wireless, la noia bershka, la mujer habitat, el chico fnac, l’home H&M [the wireless woman, the bershka girl, the habitat woman, the fnac guy, the H&M man]”. In performance, constantly on their mobile phones, entering and exiting a glass cage on the stage, the actors continuously talk without communication ever taking place. Also from Catalunya, Après Moi, le Déluge (2007) by playwright Lluïsa Cunillé plays with a three-way conversation in a hotel room between a privileged Westerner, his female translator, and a native of the former colony where the encounter takes place. Presented at Teatre Lliure in Barcelona the same year that Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND premiered, in Cunillé’s piece, like in Crouch’s, this exchange takes place with only two actors, rendering the third character immaterial yet present in the room. My final example of contemporary, character-less work comes from Russia. The script for Illusions (2011), by Ivan Viripaev, establishes that there are four “characters”: “First Woman” and “Second Woman”, in their thirties, and “First Man” and “Second Man”, both thirty-five (3). These young, unnamed men and women directly address the audience as an audience with a staggered account of how two elderly couples reaffirm, question and reconfigure their relationships in the name of true love just before dying. The play’s title adequately fits a plot ridden by false impressions of reciprocal and unrequited love, but also its effect on the spectators, who are led to make errors in perception and belief that are disclosed as the storytelling unfolds. The configuration of subjectivity in Illusions is epitomised by one of the elderly women’s last words: “I can’t find order, I can’t find permanence” (41) – the ‘I’ disclosed as an intractably opaque, inexplicable and impermanent entity, touchingly moving forward towards the other. As this Appendix demonstrates, playtexts that experiment with speech attribution are neither a contemporary invention nor a British phenomenon. As such, a contextualising coda to my case studies was needed. The purpose of this monograph was not to map the terrain of character-less work but to rethink the categories of character and subjectivity, and to offer an exceptionally in-depth ana-

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lysis of a small sample of plays. This brief survey intimates that there is room for further studies of twentieth-century and contemporary theatre in this vein.

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Index Abirached, Robert 3, 24 – 29, 31 – 34, 41 – 42, 43, 146 Actors Touring Company 108 – 109, 138 – 139 Althusser, Louis 50 – 53, 57 – 58, 64, 68, 72, 74 – 76, 82 – 84, 95, 106, 131, 174, 190 Apollinaire, Guillaume 2 Aristophanes 16 Aristotle 23 – 26, 28 Artaud, Antonin 25 – 26, 28, 91, 200 Auden, W. H. 201 audience – characterisation 149 – 150, 161, 163, 189 – 195 – participation 11, 151, 190 f – See also under authority authority – of the audience 151 – of the author 8, 193 – of the text 4 – 5, 33, 43, 91 – See also graphocentrism avant-garde 200 – 201 Badiou, Alain 14, 18 – 19, 20, 52 f, 53, 63 – 74, 81, 82, 84 – 85, 93, 133 – 135, 146, 147, 158, 161, 165 – 167, 172, 179 – 180, 188, 194 – 195, 196, 199 Balibar, Étienne 21, 55, 90 f Barker, Howard 73 f Barnett, David 23, 37, 99, 112, 150 – 151 Barthes, Roland 27 Bartlett, Mike – Cock 204 Beckett, Samuel 2 – 3, 25 – 26, 28, 31, 33, 36 – 37, 101, 109, 201, 202 – Act Without Words I 3 – Act Without Words II 3 – Breath 3 – Not I 3, 202 – Rockaby 3 Bernhard, Thomas 31 Bishop, Claire 11 Blair, Tony 11 – 12

Bogart, Anne – See Viewpoints Bottoms, Stephen 3, 82 – 83, 148 – 150, 153 Bourdieu, Pierre 157 f – See also habitus Brecht, Bertolt 2, 25, 26, 28, 31, 73 f, 121, 132 f, 151, 161, 177, 200 – See also post–Brechtian Brookes, Mike 114 f, 118 Butler, Judith 5, 10, 14, 17, 19, 22, 29 – 30, 32, 40, 51 – 53, 54 – 63, 68, 76, 84, 85, 87, 100 – 101, 104 – 105, 110 – 111, 113, 127 – 128, 130, 133, 135, 143, 178, 189 Cáceres, Luciano 8, 110 capitalism 10, 14, 21, 67, 145 – 146, 147, 153 – 155, 159, 162 – 163, 164 – 167, 169, 170 f, 171, 173 – 174, 179 – 183, 187, 188, 190, 193 – 195, 203, 206 – capitalism and art 153 – 154, 177 – capitalist realism 155 – See also neoliberalism Cerciello, Carlo 152 f character-less plays – definition 17 – sample of European plays 200 – 207 character – definition 14 – 17 – dramatis personae 18 – êthos 2, 28 f, 200 – l’impersonnage [impersonal character] 33 – 35, 41 – textträger [text bearer] 37 – 41 Churchill, Caryl – Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? 155 – Love and Information 203 – Seven Jewish Children 1, 155, 203 cisgender 103, 105, 124 – See also transgender cogito – See Descartes, René communism 10, 167 conceptual art 150 – 151, 153 – 154

226

Index

consensus 157, 162 – 163, 165, 167, 181, 188, 192, 196 Corneille, Pierre 16 Craig, Edward Gordon Craig 25, 28, 31, 41 Crimp, Martin 4, 9, 13, 205 – Advice to Iraqi Women 203 – Attempts on Her Life 1, 4, 7, 9 f, 13, 26 f, 197, 203 – Cruel and Tender 206 – Fewer Emergencies 7, 203 – In the Republic of Happiness 203 Crouch, Tim 13, 26, 82 – 83, 145, 148 – 152 – ENGLAND 12 – 13, 17, 26, 44, 71 f, 73, 82, 146, 147, 152 – 195, 196 – 197, 199, 206 Cull, Laura 198 Cunillé, Lluïsa – Après Moi, le Déluge 206 de la Barca, Calderón 16 deconstruction 28, 29 – 30, 34, 37, 38, 40, 46 – See also Derrida, Jacques – See also poststructuralism del Valle–Inclán, Ramón 16 Deleuze, Gilles 87 f dematerialisation 95, 150, 170, 196 – See also conceptual art – See also Crouch, Tim Derrida, Jacques 23 f, 29 – 30, 40, 60, 200 – See also deconstruction – See also poststructuralism Descartes, René 9 f, 14, 21 – 22, 26, 49, 68, 89 – 91, 100 – 103, 124, 125, 129, 132, 142, 143 (dis)embodiment 17 – 18, 25, 110 – See also embodiment dividuation 18, 87, 120, 124, 126, 127, 130 dramatis personae – See under character Duras, Margarite – Yes, peut–être 201 Eagleton, Terry 32, 46, 51 embodiment 2, 5, 44, 52, 102, 104, 120, 143, 147, 149, 157, 161, 169, 179 – See also Butler, Judith Essif, Les 35 – 37, 41, 43

êthos – See under character Featherstone, Vicky 106, 108, 139 Fischer–Lichte, Erika 9, 23, 31 – 33, 43, 201 Fisher, Mark 155 Fo, Dario 16 Fornés, Maria Irene 31 Fosse, Jon – Sleep My Baby Sleep 205 Foucault, Michel 26, 27, 50 – 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 64, 68 Frantic Assembly 204 Fuchs, Elinor 3, 9, 23, 27 – 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 46, 147 Fukuyama, Francis 27 Goetz, Rainald 40 – Jeff Koons 205 Gramsci, Antonio 51 graphocentrism 32 – See also under authority Gray, Ramin – See Actors Touring Company Greig, David – Fragile 191 f Griffiths, Trevor – Comedians 190 f – Ocupations 190 f Gruber, William 31 – 34, 81 habitus 157 – 158, 172, 179, 181, 187, 188, 194 – 196 Handke, Peter 161 f – Calling for Help 202 – Kaspar 40 – Offending the Audience 3, 99, 189, 190 f – Prophecy 201 Hardt, Michael 148 heteronormativity 17, 55 f, 56, 60, 61, 89 f, 91, 93, 101 – 105, 112, 127 – 128, 132, 135, 138, 140, 143 – 144, 168, – See also queer Hormigón, Juan Antonio 16 – 17, 147 – 148, 195 Huysman, Christophe – Les Repas HYC 205

Index

identity politics 10, 11, 84, 89, 147 ideology 20, 21, 26 f, 50 – 53, 54, 58, 64, 79, 81, 83, 95 – 96, 131, 171 f impersonnage – See under character individuation – definition 18 interpellation 50 – 54, 56 – 58, 62, 70, 72 – 77, 82, 84, 94 – 96, 106 – 108, 131, 143, 149, 174, 181, 190 – 191, 192, 194, 196 – See also Althusser, Louis ‘in-yer-face’ theatre 119, 203 Isherwood, Christopher 201 Jameson, Fredric 36, 155 Jarry, Alfred 25, 28 Jarzyna, Grzegorz – See TR Warszawa Jelinek, Elfriede 4, 33 f, 37, 40, 204 – 205 – Bambiland 204 – Death and the Maiden: The Wall 204 – 205 Kaiser, Georg 200 Kane, Sarah 4 – 5, 9, 12 – 13, 26, 35, 37, 88 – 113, 203, 204, 205 – 4.48 Psychosis 1, 4, 6 – 8, 12 – 13, 25, 32, 40, 88 – 96, 98 – 104, 105 – 106, 108 – 113, 124, 128, 131, 137, 142 – 144, 156, 145, 170, 172, 197, 199, 203 – Blasted 183 – Cleansed 88, 103 f – Crave 4, 12, 13, 17, 52, 88, 90 – 98, 100 – 102, 104, 105 – 109, 112 – 113, 122 – 123, 128, 130 – 131, 137, 138 – 139, 142 – 144, 156, 169, 197, 199, 201, 203 Kirkby, Michael 8, 147, 168 – 169 Koltès, Bernard-Marie – Night Just Before the Forests 99, 202 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 34 Landau, Tina – See Viewpoints Le Pors, Sandrine 44, 95, 97 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 3, 6 f, 9 – 10, 26 f, 32, 37 f, 42, 150, 203 – See also postdramatic theatre

227

Levy, Deborah – The B File 7, 203 Macdonald, James 7, 92 MacColl, Ewan 201 Macherey, Pierre 35 Marinetti, Philippo 200 Meadows, Shane 179 mimesis 9, 24 – 29, 32, 34 – 35, 36, 41, 45, 46, 72 f, 176 Mitchell, Katie 7 Müller, Heiner 33 f, 37, 39, 40 Nancy, Jean-Luc 19, 86 – 87, 122, 129, 178 Neath, Glenn 193 f Negri, Antonio 148 neocolonialism 145, 154, 159, 186 – 187, 190, 192, 195 neoliberalism 10, 11, 145, 152, 166, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 27 onto-aesthetics 19 – 20, 46, 48, 93 Ostermeier, Thomas 107, 109, 139 Owen, Gary – Ghost City 204 participation – See under audience Pearson, Mike 114 f, 115 f, 118 Pirandello, Luigi 28, 33 political theatre 13, 151 Pollack, Majken 136 – 137, 139 – 140, 142 Poschmann, Gerda 37 – 41, 43, 46, 81, 112 post-anthropocentric theatre 31 post-Brechtian 150 – 151, 177 – See also Brecht, Bertolt post-humanism 31, 40, 89 post-politics 10, 167, 180, 196 postdramatic theatre 4, 6, 8 – 10, 15, 26 f, 37, 39 – 42, 150, 199, 203, 205 poststructuralism 20, 29, 39 – 40, 45, 46 – See also deconstruction – See also Derrida, Jacques

228

Index

Quarantine 3 queer 9 f, 13, 20, 54, 56, 60, 77 f, 87, 91, 93, 101, 103 – 104, 109, 112, 126 – 128, 130, 135, 137 – 138, 143 – 144, 168 f – See also heteronormativity Rabey, David Ian 119 – 120, 136, 138 – 140, 142 Racine, Jean 16 Rancière, Jacques 14, 19, 53, 62 f, 65, 73 f, 74 – 85, 95, 106, 131 – 133, 147 – 148, 157 f, 176, 178, 194 Ravenhill, Mark – Over There 155 – Pool (No Water)] 1, 205 Reagan, Ronald 166 Richter, Falk – Gott ist ein DJ 205 – Kult – Geschichten für eine virtuelle Generation 205 – Im Ausnahmezustand 205 Ringham, Hannah 152, 154, 158 – 160, 162 – 165, 167 – 169, 171 – 182, 184 – 186, 188 – 194 Rosich, Marc – Party Line 206 Ryngaert, Jean–Pierre 23, 41 – 45, 122, 180, 201 Sarrazac, Jean–Pierre 33 – 35, 41, 43 Schwab, Werner 40 selfhood – See under subjectivity

Sermon, Julie 41 – 45, 122, 180, 201 Sobel, Bernard 107 – 108, 110, 138, 144 Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri 190 – See also subalternity Stein, Gertrude 30 Stephens, Simon – Pornography 1, 6, 17, 204 storytelling 121, 149 Strindberg, August 2, 28, 33, 34, 96 f, 200 subalternity 49, 51, 146, 182, 189 – 192, 194, 196 subjectivity – definition 20 – 22 Thatcher, Margaret 166 Thomas, Ed 12, 13, 114 – 142, 201 – Stone City Blue 12, 13, 35, 40, 114 – 142, 156, 169, 170, 172, 178, 189, 197 – 199, 204 Toller, Ernst 200 TR Warszawa 8, 110, 113 transgender 103, 128, 143 – See also cisgender tucker green, debbie – Stoning Mary 1, 124, 204 van Gogh, Vincent 130 Viewpoints 141 – 142 Viripaev, Ivan – Illusions 206 Weiss, Peter

190 f

Žižek, Slavoj

51, 90 f