Martin Crimp's Theatre: Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist Society 9783110309959, 9783110309072

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Clara Escoda Agustí Martin Crimp’s Theatre

CDE Studies

Edited by Martin Middeke

Volume 24

Clara Escoda Agustí

Martin Crimp’s Theatre Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist Society

ISBN 978-3-11-030907-2 e-ISBN 978-3-11-030995-9 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. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To my family

Acknowledgements I would like to thank a number of people who made this project possible. The material published in the present volume was submitted, in a different form, at the University of Barcelona, as part of my doctoral thesis. I would like to thank Dr. Mireia Aragay, my supervisor, most warmly for her feedback and critical commentaries on the thesis, as well as for her deep and honest commitment with the project. She supervised it with utmost tact and patience, and was always deeply involved with it, bringing personal and creative suggestions to the research, and making this work her own. For all these reasons, I feel extremely lucky to have been entrusted to her suggestions and criteria. I also most especially wish to thank Professor Martin Middeke, whom I first met at the 2006 CDE conference, and later accepted, with great generosity, to become a member of the thesis committee. I thank him most warmly for his close reading of my work, for the seriousness and generosity of his feedback, and for his stimulating questions and remarks. I am most grateful to him for his believing in this book, as well as for his invaluable, unwavering support. I also wish to thank Dr. Enric Monforte for his constant support and empathy throughout the years, for his generous and thoughtful engagement with my work, and for his invaluable feedback and guidance. I am also very grateful to Dr. Marisa Siguán, for her invaluable suggestions and her willingness to share her views about Jean Améry, thus giving me the chance to gain a deeper knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust. I am most grateful to Dr. Pilar Zozaya as well, for the enthusiasm with which she made contemporary British plays and playwrights both fascinating and accessible for me. It was in the MA programme “Construction and Representation of Identities”, taught by Dr. Zozaya in 2005, where I first became acquainted with Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life. My warmest thanks also go to Aleks Sierz, who has always been there to share his knowledge of articles about Martin Crimp and has become a good friend over all these years. I am most grateful to him not only for his readiness to share ideas and research, but also for his constant support and help in finding pictures of the theatrical productions and contacting archivists. I am also thankful to Ramon Simó at Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, for his generosity in allowing me to attend rehearsals of Attempts on her Life and The Country, as well for his readiness to exchange his views on Martin Crimp from a director’s perspective, which proved most illuminating. My very special thanks are of course for Martin Crimp himself, who has most generously always been there to answer questions and exchange views on his plays and on contemporary theatre in general. As I always tell him, he has

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made it possible for this research to come fully ‘alive’, for which I am deeply grateful. I would like to give my warmest thanks to my family – Pep, Montse and Blanca – for their unfailing help throughout these years. Thank you also to Teresa Galligó, Mercedes and Olga, Jaume and Maria, and my friends, who have closely followed this process and have always been there to offer their help and encouragement. Thank you so very much to Miquel for his invaluable presence and unwavering support. Without them, none of this of course would ever have been possible.

Contents Acknowledgements

VII 1

I

Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

II

Preliminaries II: Martin Crimp’s Theatre, a Pedagogy of 13 Resistance

 . .

Martin Crimp’s Context 15 Late Capitalism and Societies of Control 15 A Post-Holocaust Writer: Capitalism and Barbarism

 . . .. ..

28 The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage Collapse on Stage: What it is and how it Works 28 I Have Witnessed: Testimony and Audience Responsibility Auschwitz and Testimony 30 Audience, Resistance and Testimony 35



Redefining Ethics: A Collapsing Body

III

Beginnings of a Dramaturgy: Violence, Memory and Retribution in The Treatment (1993) 49



Introduction: Collapse, ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ 51



The ‘Spectacle’ Filled our Pockets: Duplicity, Sexism and the Market 58 61 La Dérive: Marginal Spaces of Resistance ‘Like A Disapproving Person’: Collapse, Pretence and Alienation 68

. .  .

21

30

41

. . .

The Point of Rupture: Collapse and Barbarism 77 Stopping the Technology: Détournement, ‘Luddism’ and 81 ‘Terrorism’ Clifford’s Eyes and the ‘Banality of Evil’ 86 A Rewriting and a Parable of Ambition 92 Audience and Violence: From Voyeurs to Active Witnesses



Conclusion: Towards Subjectivity and Ethics

100

98

X

Contents

IV

Postdramatic Plays: Attempts on her Life (1997) and Face to the Wall (2002) 103

 .

Interpretation, Self-Regulation and Postdramatism Crimp and Postdramatism 110



Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Attempts on her Life 116 116 The ‘Camera’, Narcissism, and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ ‘I Can’t’: A Body in Denial 124 Ready-mades, Language and Power 135

. . .  . . .

110

‘The Stage, a Skull’: Male Collapse as Resistance in Face to the 141 Wall Fewer Emergencies (2005) and the Non-Hierarchical Theatrical Experience 143 ‘The Warm Metal – Thank You – of the Gun’: Interpretation and Violation 151 ‘Voyeurs in Bedlam?’: Re-Materializing the Audience 158

V

Dramatic Plays: Female Breakdown as Micropolitical 167 Resistance

 . .. ..

Stopping Time: Memory and Resistance in The Country (2000) 169 Introduction 169 Of Violence and Pathos 169 ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’: A Narrative of Testimony and a Power 176 Game Collapse as Self-Awareness: Corinne’s Change 181 Collapse, Mercantilism and ‘Empire’ 182 Virgil, Collapse and Testimony 185 ‘It is Only the Flesh’: Rebecca’s Moral Imagination 188 Collapse as Violence 188 Madness as Reason’s Other 193 197 Patchwork of Voices, Swarm of Resistance Outbursts of Solidarity 199 Community of Resistance 202 ‘Oh, to Reverse’: Spiralling Towards Full Time 208 Collapsing Boundaries 209 Stopping Time: An Ethics of Resentment 212 Testimony and Late Capitalism 216

. .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. ..

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Contents

.. .. .  . . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. .. . VI . . .

Path of Discovery: the Ethics of Spectatorship 220 To Survive: Self-Creation and the Paring Down of Selfhood Conclusion: Turning Towards Psychology 228

225

Oppression, Resistance and Terrorism in Cruel and Tender (2004) 231 Sophocles, Crimp and Bondy 231 Radical Ethics: The Body as Weapon, Insight and Image 239 The Cartesian Self: Verticality and the Word 240 Amelia’s ‘Embodied’ Tongue 243 Of Shamans and Cyborgs: From Bodies of Mastery to Bodies of Need 247 249 Invocation and Ritual A Utopia of Mutual Dependency 252 Collapse and Testimony: Late Capitalism and 261 Totalitarianism Inequality, Auschwitz and the Collapsing Self 264 Opening a Space of Exteriority 271 The Inheritance of Resistance 276 Conclusion: Memory as Imperative and Yearning 279 Testimony and World Inequality in Crimp’s Adaptation of 283 Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) Introduction: Mirroring Fragments, Play-Within-a-Play 285 Testimony as Resistance: Crimp’s and Mitchell’s Play-Within-a289 Play ‘Cold, Blank, Distant’: Breakdown as Resistance 298

VII

General Conclusions: Martin Crimp’s Theatre: a Dramaturgy of 313 Resistance

VIII

Works Cited

327

Primary Sources 329 Secondary Sources 330

I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

3

This book finds its origins in a series of lectures I attended in 2005 at the University of Barcelona, which were part of the MA programme “Construction and Representation of Identities”. It was during one of these lectures that a play happened to fall into my hands – it was entitled Attempts on her Life. In this beautifully crafted, insightful play, a young girl tells her parents she feels “like a TV screen” (Crimp 1997: 24). And she adds, “like a TV screen […] ‘where everything from the front looks real and alive, but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires’” (Crimp 1997: 24). The play was undoubtedly tackling the issue of collapse or breakdown in the context of late capitalism. There it was, in front of me, a sensibility which I judged akin to mine. In Crimp, the contemporary emphasis on technology and economic growth is seen to uproot individuals from themselves and one another. Collapse points to, in part, the underside of science and technology, and to the values late capitalism, with its emphasis on productivity, growth and efficiency, refuses to acknowledge and keeps repressed. Ever since I was an undergraduate student, I have been interested in how irrationality, or non-normalized behaviour, is dramatized as a form of dissent and protest. Allured and intrigued, I decided to write my doctoral thesis on Crimp’s plays, the result of which is this present book, focusing specifically on how the motif of collapse or breakdown of the self might emerge in response and opposition to the suppressed violence of the current world order. The aim of this book is to read Martin Crimp’s The Treatment (1993), Attempts on her Life (1997), The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) in the context of contemporary, late capitalist societies, and to explore how female collapse in particular works as a form of denunciation of the violence of contemporary relationships.¹ In these plays, relationships are seen to be shaped by the re-

 Crimp’s The Treatment, directed by Lindsay Posner, was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, where it ran from 15 April to 30 June 1993. The play won the John Whiting Award and established Crimp as a central figure on the new writing scene (Aragay et al. 56). Attempts on her Life was first directed by Tim Albery, and it was presented at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (then housed at the Ambassador’s Theatre), on 7 March 1997. The production ran until 5 April 1997. This study also makes occasional references to Juan Carlos Martel Bayod’s production of the play, which ran at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, from 1– 7 April 2005, coinciding with Crimp’s visit to the theatre, where he offered a series of lectures on playwriting. It also makes repeated references to Katie Mitchell’s revival of the play for the National Theatre on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. Mitchell’s production was staged at the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre from 8 March to 10 May 2007. The Country was first directed by Katie Mitchell and it opened at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs on 11 April 2000. The production ran until 24 June 2000. This study makes occasional references to

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quirements of a society which is increasingly governed by the rules of the globalized free-market economy, where an overriding lack of scruples as to personal ambition often leads institutions, corporations and individuals themselves, in their daily relationships, to perpetuate supposedly archaic forms of patriarchy. Ultimately, emerging out of the analysis and discussion of the individual plays, this book aims to offer a critical discourse in which the type of subjectivity and of relationships produced by globalized, technological neo-liberalism can be interrogated. My use of the term ‘collapse’ does not refer to socio-economic breakdown, as has been analyzed by the theories of economic collapse, and by authors such as Jennifer Milliken, Keith Krause, Dmitri Orlov, or Jared Diamond, amongst others, but to the type of subjective, individual breakdown some of Crimp’s characters undergo.² It is used as an ‘umbrella’ term that covers many forms of breakdown of the self, such as violence, hysteria or even masochism. The book analyses the instances of breakdown Crimp’s characters undergo and explores how they seek to point to the larger malfunctioning aspects of late capitalism. Finally, and most importantly, it focuses on how collapse can both signal a given situation of power inequality and also allow for different alternatives or possibilities of disruption to become manifest. Chronologically, this book takes The Treatment (1993) as its point of departure and Crimp’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) as its closing play. The book singles out The Treatment as the play that first introduces the motif of female collapse and violence within late capitalist societies of control. The structure of the present book is organized around five main blocks, in addition to the

the production of The Country directed by Toni Casares at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, from 16 February to 27 March 2005. Face to the Wall was first directed by Katie Mitchell and it ran from 14 to 23 March 2002 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. This study makes reference to James Macdonald’s production of Crimp’s triptych Fewer Emergencies, which included Face to the Wall together with Whole Blue Sky (2005) and Fewer Emergencies (2002), and which was staged at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs from 8 September to 1 October 2005. The premiere of Cruel and Tender was directed by Luc Bondy and it was first presented, in a coproduction with the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen, at the Young Vic on 5 May 2004. It ran for two weeks in May, and then from 17 June to 10 July 2004, after touring in Europe. Finally, the first production of Crimp’s The Seagull, directed by Katie Mitchell, was staged at the Lyttleton auditorium of the National Theatre, where it ran from 17 June to 23 September 2006.  See Milliken and Krause’s “State Failure, State Collapse and State Reconstruction: Concepts, Lessons and Strategies”, Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2011), or Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Survive (2006) as examples of socio-economic approaches to collapse.

I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

5

present introductory one. The second block, “Preliminaries II: Martin Crimp’s Theatre, a Pedagogy of Resistance”, carries a theoretical introduction, and considers Crimp’s theatrical production as aiming to construct, through the dramatization of collapse, a strategy of resistance to what he deems to be the profoundly totalitarian tendencies of late capitalist society. The theoretical introduction is, in its turn, divided into two sections. The first section, “Martin Crimp’s Context”, includes two chapters which offer the contextual background to Crimp’s plays. In the first one, “Late Capitalism and Societies of Control”, the type of contemporary society in which Crimp’s plays are set is outlined, and the transition from traditionally disciplinary societies to societies of control is discussed. In societies of control discipline does not come so much from an external source of authority or institution as it does from surveillance mechanisms such as ‘cameras’ and the codes of behaviour extolled through television and other media.³ This chapter also introduces the notion of bio-power as developed by Michel Foucault – namely, the power upon bodies and the control of life that began to be characteristic of modern societies as a substitute for the old right of the sovereign to take the life of his – less frequently, her – subjects and impact directly on their bodies. The transition from societies centred around the power of the sovereign over life to societies based on bio-power, in which control is exerted through ideology, runs parallel to the change from disciplinary societies to late twentieth-century societies of control. One of the most important consequences of this double transition, Foucault claims, is that it has been increasingly left to the individual to internalize codes of behaviour and to self-regulate accordingly, a mechanism which ultimately renders individuals ‘docile’ to the late capitalist economic system. The second chapter under “Martin Crimp’s Context”, “A Post-Holocaust Writer: Capitalism and Barbarism”, delves into the interface between late capitalist forms of repression and surveillance and the modes of operation of fascism or ‘barbarism’. As Elisabeth Angel-Perez has pointed out in Voyages au bout du possible: Les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel Beckett à Sarah Kane, Crimp, like many other contemporary British dramatists, does not dramatize the Holocaust directly (Angel-Perez 2006a: 12), yet contemporary British theatre, and Martin Crimp’s dramaturgy in particular, “compulsively dramatizes the problematic

 This book refers to the technological devices that characterize societies of control as the ‘camera’. The concept of the ‘camera’ is an umbrella term that is meant to include the array of technological means – the strategic and generalized use of TV sets, CCTV, the cinema, advertisements and the internet, amongst others – whereby ideology is propagated and the current world order maintained in late capitalist societies of control.

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I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

[…] of a post-Holocaust world” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 12), and it does so by actively searching for a post-Holocaust aesthetics.⁴ In Crimp, fascism or totalitarianism is understood as a radical manifestation of bio-power’s inherent tendency to erode the individual’s political potential and render him or her mere ‘docile’, biological matter. As Giorgio Agamben puts it in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999/2005), “Bio-power’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoè [the animal being] and bíos [the cultural being], the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 156), so that docile identities may be inscribed upon subjects. It is Crimp’s concern with detecting the seeds of totalitarianism in bio-power’s most repressive instances that leads him to develop a post-Holocaust type of dramaturgy, based on collapse and testimony, and which aims to invite spectators to resist bio-power’s totalitarian tendencies as they may detect them in their context, as well as to warn them of the dangers of slipping back into barbarism. The second section under “Preliminaries II” bears the title “The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage” and is divided into two chapters. The first one, “Collapse on Stage: What it is and How it Works”, defines the term and tries to describe how collapse functions, specifically, on stage. It focuses on the particular semiotic potential of a scene of collapse in the theatre, as opposed to how it works in other genres. Its main point is that collapse always seeks to make social contradictions visible for an audience by revealing how they impact on the subject. Crimp’s decision to introduce collapse in his plays functions as a means to break through the fourth wall, the conventional stage-audience separation, by calling attention to itself and interpellating spectators politically in the here and now. Collapse, in Crimp’s plays, takes three main different forms. One of them is the sudden onset of a character’s silence, which causes indeterminacy and places the theatrical event in suspension, as in Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall. The second form collapse takes is the irruption of a metaphorical, irrational language which spectators are meant to attempt to give concrete representation to by evoking specific images of their own – perhaps similar – experiences, as is the case in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender. Finally, Crimp may

 For want of an English translation of Angel-Perez’s Voyages au bout du possible: Les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel Beckett à Sarah Kane, the translation is mine. From now on, my translations of non-English texts will be indicated by providing the quotation in the source language in a footnote. In French, Angel-Perez’s quote reads, “[…] peut-être plus qu’aucun autre, le théâtre anglais contemporain rebrasse compulsivement les problématiques […] de l’aprèsAuschwitz”.

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introduce a violent act on stage which, in a metaphorical manner, aims to make contradictions visible and invites the audience to make connections – this third form of collapse is also present in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender. The chapter argues that directors can enhance the textual moments of collapse by further contributing to rendering the stage-audience separation unstable and ambiguous. In so doing, they prompt spectators to pay heightened attention to the political meanings a particular scene may be seeking to convey. Theodor W. Adorno describes such moments in art as instances in which the spectator may “lose footing […] discovering that the truth embodied in the aesthetic image has real tangible possibilities […] experience congeals in an instant, and […] it signals the breaking-through of objectivity [i.e. social conditions] into subjective consciousness” (Adorno 258). This accurately describes the semiotic potential of collapse on stage; namely, the fact that it may be used in order to push the limits of theatre, making spectators aware of the social contradictions of the present time. The second chapter in the section “The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage”, is entitled “I have Witnessed: Testimony and Audience Responsibility”, and is divided into two sub-chapters. The sub-chapter “Auschwitz and Testimony” argues that Crimp’s dramaturgy, as a post-Holocaust type of dramaturgy, is imbued by the contemporary reflections on ethics and the figure of the testimony. The sub-chapter defines the concept of testimony, and argues that, after Auschwitz, testimony offers the possibility to redefine ethics, since it leads to a notion of ethics which is not totalizing, and which takes into account the value of each particular body/individual. The sub-chapter also argues that, in Crimp’s dramaturgy, when both male and female characters collapse they seek to tap into a primeval, empathic dimension of the self which finds itself distorted or annulled by late capitalist interests. Crimp’s theatre thus strongly conveys the notion that individuals are inherently characterized by a sense of responsibility towards the Other. As a post-Holocaust writer, Crimp is imbued by the contemporary reflections on ethics carried out by thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas or Zygmunt Bauman. As shall be seen in more detail, for Lévinas, as for Bauman, empathy is the primary structure of subjectivity, and it develops spontaneously through proximity. As Bauman explains in Modernity and the Holocaust, for Lévinas, “Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility and responsibility is proximity” (Bauman 2005: 184; emphasis original). It is thus the mechanisms of distantiation characteristic of late capitalist society which cancel or truncate the development of empathy.

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The second sub-chapter, “Audience, Resistance and Testimony”, picks up from here and goes on to discuss the relationship that testimony establishes with the audience. Its main argument is that collapse and testimony are the cornerstones of Crimp’s dramaturgy – of his ‘pedagogy of resistance’, based on interpellating spectators so that they may contribute to detecting the seeds of totalitarianism as they may detect them in their context. The sub-chapter claims that the defamiliarized, lyrical language of testimony is meant to spur resistance in the audience/witnesses, and to elicit their collaboration in decoding late capitalist society’s contradictions and in resisting complacency or what Adorno termed “reconciliation” (Adorno 252).⁵ In Adorno’s words, paradoxically, “this perceived social deviance of art becomes its political justification” (Adorno 252). The audience is encouraged to decode the lyrical, indeterminate, urgent language of the irrational, which expresses itself through metaphors. In order to do so, they must bring to bear their own traumatic memories or experiences of oppression, thus becoming double witnesses – that is, both to themselves and to the character delivering the testimony. Thus, spectators will ideally assist in the testimony’s full delivery while trying to ‘read’ the play. In the light of the preceding reflections, the third and last section under “Preliminaries II”, “Redefining Ethics: A Collapsing Body”, argues that collapse is a strategy aimed at situating the body – and thus, the needs of the person – centre stage in a late capitalist context that considers individuals primarily as rational, closed-off, individualistic bodies of property and possession. When female characters collapse in Crimp’s plays, their bodies are often shown to become fluid, as they are often stained with blood, such as Rebecca’s body in The Country. Their bodies, indeed, bring to mind the “carnival[esque]” (Burkitt 49) body envisioned by Mikhail Bakhtin. The ‘carnivalesque’ is a notion of the body as an open surface that can integrate the Other, thus defying the closedoff, individualistic subject of capitalism, a subject defined by its possessions and existing in opposition to other bodies. Finally, the chapter also argues that collapse redefines ethics not as a compendium of epistemological norms or a series of agreements that must be reached before being able to act ethically, and therefore as an ability of the rational subject, as they have traditionally been considered, but as an experience of the dignity of human beings that emerges out of the individual’s own contact with suffering, out of a process of learning, in life, about the equal value of each  Vicky Angelaki’s “Subtractive Forms and Composite Contents: Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies” (2008) offers a detailed analysis of the techniques of defamiliarization Crimp employs in the triptych Fewer Emergencies, drawing in this case on Viktor Shklovsky’s, Bertolt Brecht’s and Terry Eagleton’s reflections on the political significance of alienation in performance.

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particular body and individual. Female bodies who pass on their testimony are shown to the audience in the ‘process of becoming’ ethical bodies – namely, they are able to divest themselves of ideology, and emerge as ethical out of the perceived necessity to integrate both the Other as essential parts of their beings, thus recovering the innate, Baumian sense of responsibility towards the Other. The third block of this study is entitled “Beginnings of a Dramaturgy: Violence, Memory and Retribution in The Treatment (1993)”. As has already been mentioned, this study considers The Treatment initiates Crimp’s characteristic pedagogy of resistance through the figures of collapse and testimony. The play dramatizes the process of objectification a young woman, Anne, undergoes within a media corporation, to the point of being rendered a docile, consumerist body. The process is successful, the play suggests, because women are particularly susceptible to becoming victims of the myths of behaviour the media distributes, which target their bodies and inscribe very specific gender codes on them so that they may become more effective consumers. In the play, female objectification reaches a climax as a male voyeur witnesses Anne’s sexual intercourse with another character. The voyeur’s eyes represent the power of the ‘camera’, or of bio-power, to ‘violate’ the most intimate aspects of the lives of individuals, to the point that their political dimension is annihilated and they become no more than docile, biological life, zoè. Through a very concrete, material scene of voyeurism, then, Crimp denounces the symbolic violence of bio-power, which renders individuals docile to a series of norms that benefit the globalized free market. The fourth block of the study, “Paradigms of Collapse in the Postdramatic Plays: Attempts on her Life (1997) and Face to the Wall (2002)”, contains three sections, an introductory one, “Interpretation, Self-Regulation and Postdramatism”, and two major sections, entitled “Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Attempts on her Life”, and “‘The Stage, a Skull’: Male Collapse as a Theatrical Strategy of Resistance in Face to the Wall”. While in The Treatment Crimp identifies the type of power operating in societies of control, in Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall he produces vignettes of collapse in which the oppression exercised by bio-power and its corollary, collapse, are dramatized in a more archetypal manner. It is archetypal because there is very little, if any, character development, and the gender, age and other personal characteristics of the subjects who collapse are not always specified. What these plays attempt to explore is how the body reacts when subjected to a ‘violation’ of its integrity through the sole tool of language and interpretation – that is, through discourse, the main way in which bio-power operates in order to render individuals docile. In this context, both plays represent collapse as the body’s mode of resistance to docility in situations in which ideology and power are discursively enact-

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I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

ed upon individuals. These are, indeed, more experimental plays, which have been labelled “postdramatic” by Heiner Zimmerman (2002: 106) in the wake of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (originally published in German, 1999; English translation 2006) and, subsequently, both by Aleks Sierz in “‘The Darkest Place’: Certainty and Doubt in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies” (2007), and David Barnett in “When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts” (2008). As these critics point out, the plays do away with a traditional plot, assign no specific lines to specific characters, and contain very few stage directions. Dialogue does not reflect, as in dramatic theatre, a conflict of wills, but rather consists of soliloquies or solos (Valentini 68), or of what Elfriede Jelinek termed “Sprachflächen” or “juxtaposed language surfaces” (Lehmann 18), while no particular, visible action occurs on stage. The fifth block of the study is entitled “Dramatic Plays: Female Breakdown as Micropolitical Resistance”, and it consists of two sections devoted to Crimp’s two main dramatic plays, The Country and Cruel and Tender. The first section, “Stopping Time: Memory and Resistance in The Country (2000)”, is followed by the section entitled “Oppression, Resilience and Terrorism in Cruel and Tender (2004)”. The sixth block of this study, entitled “A Note on The Seagull (2006): Testimony and World Inequality in Crimp’s Adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull”, examines Crimp’s version of Chekhov’s play by the same title. The Country, Cruel and Tender and The Seagull dramatize the same type of oppression and dangers as The Treatment, but in an even more elaborate manner, and with the context of terrorism and globalization already in full swing. In these plays, Crimp hones in on the type of dramaturgy he had begun to develop in The Treatment, namely, a whole strategy or pedagogy of resistance in which female characters enact resistance through often violent interventions and attempt to engage spectators as positive witnesses through the motif of testimony. Rebecca, one of the two female protagonists in The Country, accomplishes this by stabbing a pair of scissors into her lover’s/seducer’s hand, whilst Amelia, the protagonist of Cruel and Tender, does so through the violent act of poisoning her husband. Finally, in The Seagull, which is set, albeit in a non-explicit manner, in the post-9/11 context, Crimp takes testimony to its ultimate consequences through, as shall be seen, the strategies of mirroring testimonies and of the play-within-a-play. The “General Conclusions”, entitled “Martin Crimp’s Theatre: A Dramaturgy of Resistance”, are offered in the final, seventh block, which assesses the way in which collapse may successfully resist the most totalitarian, violent aspects of the late capitalist order. Its main claim is that collapse is successful precisely because it calls for the audience’s participation in identifying the system’s most damaging, oppressive contradictions, and in envisioning alternative subjectivi-

I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

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ties and modes of relating. The section ultimately claims that Crimp’s dramaturgy is particularly relevant to the contemporary context because it offers patterns of resistance for spectators to use as models, as well as instances of interior transformations that lead towards equality with other human beings and resist complicity with the present, unequal world order.

II Preliminaries II: Martin Crimp’s Theatre, a Pedagogy of Resistance

1 Martin Crimp’s Context 1.1 Late Capitalism and Societies of Control Many contemporary plays, such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), Judy Upton’s Bruises (1996), Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator (1998) and Stitching (2002), Jonathan Lichtenstein’s The Pull of Negative Gravity (2004), or David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness (2005) tackle the issue of mental breakdown. In these plays, collapse of the self seeks to denounce different kinds of social inequality and it is an important element of the plot. All these plays dramatize the explicit violence brought about by war or marginalization but they do not take into account the irreversible impact of globalization – of the market and of technology – on contemporary individuals and relationships, and so, unlike Crimp, they do not explore the more symbolic type of violence the system generates.¹ In a world dominated by corporations, technology and the mass media have become sources of subjectification – indeed, they are the main producers of contemporary subjectivities. Crimp’s dramatizations of collapse are directly linked to how the late capitalist society of control imposes a series of identities on individuals so that they will become docile to the market interests of the system. At the same time, in Crimp’s plays a character’s collapse is always followed by a constructive move, in which the character in question voices a utopian type of desire for alternative relationships, thus calling for the audience’s collaboration in imagining such new modes of relating. Crimp’s plays, as has already been mentioned, are set in the context of late capitalism, the socio-economic system that characterizes post-industrial societies, where the production of market goods is replaced by the production and distribution of information in a context dominated by the new technologies of communication. If industrial capitalism corresponded to a phase of accumulation and concentrated on industrial production, late capitalism works by controlling

 Interestingly, England (2007), by the Scottish playwright Tim Crouch, does tackle the violence of globalization and does suggest the idea of individual collapse. England is a thought-provoking play which focuses on the inequality of the present world order by taking as its subject a young girl’s need for a heart transplant. The authorities neglect the case and the protagonist takes it upon herself to make her case publicly known, in the form of a picture exhibition of her personal life. She publicly ‘sells’ her feelings and interiority, making concessions so that her case will appeal to a large audience. For a play by an American author dealing with the inequality caused by globalization and including a brief instance of collapse, see The Pain and the Itch (2007), by Bruce Norris.

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not production, but prices in a market that has become global.² Gilles Deleuze captures the complexity of such a change: It is not simply a technological evolution, it is a profound mutation of capitalism […] 19thcentury capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, both regarding production and property […] In the present situation, capitalism no longer concentrates on production, which is often relegated to the Third World periphery […] It is a capitalism of products, sales or markets […] A market can be conquered only when one acquires its control, not through the formation of discipline; only when one can set the prices, not through lowering the costs of production. (Deleuze 1996: 282– 3)³

Thus, Crimp’s plays speak to a context in which ‘Empire’ is still present, albeit not through the direct, physical administration of Third World territories, but through an ongoing economic control. As Sinkwan Cheng puts it in Law, Justice and Power: Between Reason and Will (2004), it is not the “shortage of goods, but the politics of entitlement in a world of cutthroat competitions, that creates overabundance for a few, scarcity for the majority [leading to] an ‘Age of Extremes’” that has produced “‘a tendential division of the ‘globalized’ world into life-zones and death-zones’” (Cheng 1; emphases original).⁴ Western countries, which possess infrastructure and technology, set the market prices and policies.

 This book uses the term ‘late capitalism’ instead of the also commonly used term ‘postcapitalism’, because post-capitalism may imply an overcoming of capitalism, and this is not the sense suggested by this book. Late capitalism refers to the form capitalism takes in what Alain Touraine calls “post-industrial societies” (Touraine 3), or in societies of information, and it thus seeks to mark the distance between post-industrial societies and “the societies of industrialization which preceeded them” (Touraine 3). This book thus uses the term late capitalism not in order to imply “ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such” (Jameson xxi), but rather “the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and allpervasive” (Jameson xxi).  “No es solamente una evolución tecnológica, es una profunda mutación del capitalismo […] el capitalismo del siglo XIX es un capitalismo de concentración, tanto en cuanto a al producción como en cuanto a la propiedad. […] en la actual situación el capitalismo ya no se concentra en la producción, a menudo relegada a la periferia tercermundista […] Es un capitalismo de productos, es decir, de ventas o de mercados […] Un mercado se conquista cuando se adquiere su control, no mediante la formación de una disciplina; se conquista cuando se pueden fijar los precios, no cuando se abaratan los costes de producción”.  ‘Age of Extremes’ is a concept Cheng borrows from Eric Hobsbawm (1994), as she herself notes. In the second part of the quotation, Cheng is quoting from Étienne Balibar’s “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty” (2001).

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As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explain in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, “A ‘network power’, a new form of sovereignty, is now emerging, and it includes as its primary elements, or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers” (Hardt and Negri 2006: xii). Indeed, late capitalism designates a phase of expansion of capitalism itself. Its beginning is considered to date from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Communist block, after which the West took a series of economic, political and doctrinal measures with a view to establishing a free-market order in the former Communist territories. As Aleks Sierz pithily and ironically puts it, in the late 1980 s one of the major events that “kicked the globalized world into being [was] the Fall of the Berlin Wall, [which] freed whole populations to become consumers” (Sierz 2007b: 1). After the tearing down of the Wall, and once Communism was fully discredited, Western capitalist governments began to replace the Keynesian type of capitalism practiced since the end of World War II with the aim to help Europe and America recover from the war, with laissez-faire, neo-liberal, corporate-led policies, as capitalism became more flexible and de-localized. As Dan Rebellato contends in Theatre & Globalization, during the 1980 s, both the UK and the US “saw their economies deregulated, state-owned industries privatized, price and wage controls abandoned, income tax levels reduced, exchange controls dismantled, and many import and export tariffs torn up” (Rebellato 2009: 24– 25).⁵ As a consequence, the “neo-liberalization of the world’s economies has allowed global corporations and global currency traders to accumulate economic power that is rapidly overtaking that of states” (Rebellato 2008a: 251). Late capitalism is more politically conservative than previous forms of capitalism, which were inflected by the accomplishments of social democracy and by welfare state policies. Without its socialist counterpart, liberalism has become more and more orthodox and less and less democratic; the old East-West standoff has given way to a confrontation between the West and the Arab world, between Christianity and Islam, between democracy and terrorism. At the same time, the change from industrial capitalism to late capitalism has been accompanied by a change in the type of regulation that is exerted upon civil society. With the advent of ever more sophisticated technological developments, and as mentioned above, society has experienced a mutation from a disciplinary kind of regulation to what is now understood as contemporary societies of control.

 Rebellato is drawing on David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007).

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If, in disciplinary societies, power was directly exerted on the body through discipline, in societies of control, which work primarily through technology, it becomes more intangible, and it is left to the individual to internalize its norms of behaviour. This change began to take shape from the Renaissance onwards, when power started to become more normative and ideological and less an objective display upon bodies of the sovereign’s power. As Ian Burkitt puts it in Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity (1999), from the Renaissance – signalling the onset of modernity – onwards, nation states “became disinclined to use physical violence against their own, unarmed populations, and instead a form of ideological control developed […] This indirect ideological control works as a form of self-discipline, through the unwritten norms and laws that govern subjectivity” (Burkitt 53). Michel Foucault, whose reflections on power have proved particularly illuminating for this study, argues that this type of indirect control is of a bio-political nature. As is well known, Foucault claims that from modernity onwards, the population has been controlled through a series of disciplines that are applied to the body. ‘Bio-power’, according to Foucault in The History of Sexuality, has an impact on every sphere of an individual’s everyday life; it produces and reproduces all aspects of social life by “administer[ing], optimiz[ing] and multiplying [social life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1978: 137). The bio-political system is no longer based on taking life or letting live, as was typical of pre-modern societies, but on the power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1978: 138; emphasis original). If, in the classical age – that is, in pre-modern times or before the advent of capitalism and the institutions aimed at maintaining it – power manifested itself mostly through the right of the sovereign to bring about death, or to let live, biopower is interested in life, in the development of “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1978: 140). This materializes through a bio-political control of the population, that is, through a series of disciplines of the body. As Burkitt adds, “through bio-power, life is brought into the field of political calculation and manipulation and there develops a bio-politics of the population, fascism being one of the most extreme examples” (Burkitt 45). Hardt and Negri have applied Foucault’s concept of bio-power to the context of societies of control in order to define how power operates in them. This, as has already been mentioned, is the specific context in which Crimp’s plays are set. As Hardt and Negri express it, Putting [a disciplinary society] to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions

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(the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate to the ‘reason’ of discipline. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23)

In contrast, We should understand the society of control […] as that society […] in which mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic’, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens […] The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common daily practices. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23)

In technological, media-ridden societies of control, the norms and laws that are supposed to govern subjectivity are radically interiorized within subjects themselves, reaching down to the regulation of their private life. As Hardt and Negri put it, in disciplinary societies, which correspond to capitalism’s phase of accumulation, discipline “fixed individuals within institutions” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 24), but it did not “reach the point of permeating entirely the consciousnesses and bodies of individuals, the point of […] organising them in the totality of their activities” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 24). In societies of control, instead, “the behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves […] Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 24). Hardt and Negri thus conclude that a characteristic of late capitalism is that power is becoming totalitarian “through the production of docile subjects” (Hardt and Negri 2006: 53). According to Burkitt, who is concerned with how the development of biopower has come to affect the understanding of the mind and body from the Renaissance onwards, over a long historical process that reaches down to contemporary societies of control, more and more emphasis has been placed on the individual’s own self-regulation and self-control, in such a way that consciousness – and power – seem to have ‘moved inward’: […] the life of humans has largely moved ‘inward’ on to a psychic plane, creating the deep subjectivity that we experience as a private possession, removed and distanced from others […] At the same time, the private world of emotion is deepened […] Emotion is delayed impulse, and the inner-delaying agency is the conscience or superego. This inner psychic censor is nothing more than the internalised social norms that govern and regulate social relations, so that, in contemporary life, conflict is also internalized and expressed as the battle between conscience and temptation. (Burkitt 53)

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Crimp’s dramaturgy as a whole, which spans the last two decades of the twentieth century and reaches into the twenty-first century, could be said to trace the metamorphosis from a disciplinary society to a society of control. Crimp’s style and his plays’ dramatic shape keep changing in order to better convey how power becomes more intangible, social control and violence more symbolic and less physical, and how these changes affect the consciousness of his characters. A change, indeed, can be observed from Crimp’s early plays, such as Suicide or The Appreciation of Music – both part of his BBC radio trilogy Three Attempted Acts – or even Play With Repeats (1989), in which power is seen to be exerted through discipline and direct control upon bodies within institutions, to later plays, written after The Treatment, such as Attempts on her Life or Face to the Wall, which portray, as he himself has put it, “a drama-in-thehead” (Crimp 2006b: 1), with power increasingly interiorized within the characters’ consciousness. The Treatment, written in 1993 – four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall –dramatizes the actual transition taking place at the time from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The Treatment is thus, not surprisingly, also the first play in which Crimp puts into practice his pedagogy of resistance, based on collapse, testimony and the interpellation of the audience in order to warn it of the dangers such new societies of control entail. The more Anne, the protagonist, internalizes the mechanisms of control of her society and self-regulates accordingly, the more she appears like a doll or marionette. Crimp thus highlights how she is rendered a docile body and empties her of subjective traits in order to suggest the type of oppression which is exerted through bio-power. In Attempts on her Life, the first play by Crimp that is fully set within late capitalist societies of control, the creation of characters – that is, of roundedoff subjectivities – is completely foregone, a comment on how bio-power renders individuals docile. Attempts on her Life signals the risks these societies entail through, among other elements, a direct intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – Hamlet’s “What is Hecuba to her or she to Hecuba” (Crimp 1997: 20) – thus claiming that the ‘camera’ erodes the individual’s ability to empathize. Crimp’s growing interest in dramatizing how bio-power operates in the mind and colonizes it culminates in his minimalist play Face to the Wall. Crimp’s whole dramaturgy is concerned with how subjectivity is constructed and experienced in contemporary societies of control. Finally, No One Sees the Video, written in 1991, could be considered as a transition play in which Crimp focuses on the new mechanism of control that now inscribes market interests and through which individuals learn to self-regulate:

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the ‘camera’.⁶ The multiple appearances of the videocamera in No One Sees the Video finally foreshadow the image of the X-ray scan as Crimp deploys it in Cruel and Tender, written in 2004 in the context of the War on Terror, and which articulates Amelia’s fear of regulation and surveillance at an airport. Thus for Crimp, the control of life or bio-power that is exerted through the ‘camera’ stands in for all the surveillance mechanisms that control identities and the passage of life, maintaining Western hegemony and an unequal world order. Crimp’s dramaturgy thus ultimately registers the rise of ‘Empire’ – the mechanisms of control and administration of life that have accompanied the emergence of the late capitalist world order.

1.2 A Post-Holocaust Writer: Capitalism and Barbarism As Angel-Perez points out, and as has been mentioned in Preliminaries I, Crimp’s dramatic plays do not thematize the Holocaust directly (Angel-Perez 2006a: 213). However, his work is pervaded by the ethical and aesthetic debates that the Holocaust generated. The Holocaust is indeed at the root of contemporary reflections on the victim and the witness and of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the ‘banality of evil’, all of which pervade Crimp’s dramaturgy. It also lies at the root of the twentieth-century reconsideration of ethics carried out in particular by thinkers such as Lévinas or Bauman. Lévinas and Bauman re-envision ethics not as an epistemology that must be agreed upon before individuals are able to act ethically, but as stemming from the awareness that individuals share a common human vulnerability. Both Lévinas and Bauman introduce the centrality of the Other to ethics. As Nicholas Ridout puts it in Theatre and Ethics (2009), Lévinas “replaced a philosophical emphasis on ‘being’ with a dedication to an ethics based on the existence of the ‘other’” (Ridout 52). For Lévinas, as Dennis Smith puts it, “the self’s original condition is to feel responsibility for the Other – for those others who occupy the world alongside with the self” (Smith 163). For Lévinas, this moral urge to do good or tendency towards goodness, however, is “not imposed […] by society or the Other” (Smith 163), but is innate. Such ethical concerns are at the root of Crimp’s work and it is precisely this understanding of ethics that his female characters evolve towards through collapse and testimony.

 No One Sees the Video was directed by Lindsay Posner, and it was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on 22 November 1990.

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As Angel-Perez puts it, after having been confronted with the necessity to represent horror, “language has lost the ability to communicate and to convey information […] one must therefore find a defamiliarizing language which places traumatism at a distance, in order to make it understandable” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 22).⁷ And she adds, “a ‘realistic’ language or one which might narrowly seek to adjust to reality would be condemned to failure” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 22).⁸ To that aim, and as mentioned in Preliminaries I, contemporary British theatre, and Crimp in particular, “recontextualize[s] the problematic inherent to a post-Holocaust theatre and […] inscribe[s] [himself] in a post-Holocaust poetics” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 213 – 14).⁹ Indeed, the historical rupture which the Holocaust signified has caused British playwrights, and Crimp in particular, to seek to develop new forms, thus making visible “the impossibility of recycling pre-existent dramatic categories and the need of a generic renovation of theatre” (AngelPerez 2006a: 200).¹⁰

 “Si notre langue perd sa fonction the communication et d’information lorsqu’elle est confrontée à la representation de l’horreur […], il faut donc inventer une langue défamiliarisante […] une langue qui mette à distance le traumatisme pour mieux le faire comprendre”.  “Une langue ‘realiste’ ou qui tenterait de coller à la réalité, parce qu’elle s’apparenterait trop au discours historique, serait vouée à l’échec”.  “[Tout le théâtre contemporain […] rebrasse] en recontextualisant les problématiques inhérentes au théâtre de l’Après et […] [il] s’inscri[t] dans une poétique de l’Après”. In “Spectropoétique de la scène: Modalités du spectral dans quelques pièces du théâtre anglais contemporain”, Angel-Perez remarks that, through the poetics of testimony, Crimp seeks to “express the unutterable, to describe that which is undescribable” (Angel-Perez 2006b: 5), that is, the experience of barbarism. According to her, Crimp chooses poetry because it is particularly able to “describe the undescribable”, it is the language of ‘unwriting’” (Angel-Perez 2006b: 5). In French, “[il s’agit […] de trouver une langue […] qui soit apte à] dire l’indicible, à décrire, l’indescriptible. [Lyotard donne la poésie comme] ‘l’écriture de l’impossible description, la décriture’”.  “[C’est donc bien plutôt avec le théâtre le plus formellement audacieux de Martin Crimp […] que se met en place une dramaturgie de l’après-Auschwitz qui rend patente] l’impossibilité de recycler les catégories dramatiques préexistantes et la nécessité d’une refonte générique du théâtre”. Inserting himself in the same ethical and aesthetic debate as Crimp and Angel-Perez, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism: Five Interventions in the (Mis) Use of a Notion, Slavoj Žižek claims that traditional aesthetic categories are rendered ineffective in the face of the Holocaust. As he puts it, “if we endeavour to represent it in an aesthetic way, abuse becomes manifest, and thus renders the aesthetic effect inoperative […] Perhaps this is one way of understanding Adorno’s much-quoted ‘no poetry after Auschwitz” (Žižek 86 – 7). Žižek also comments on the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic forms to represent Auschwitz. As he puts it, “in the tragic predicament, the hero forfeits his earthly life for the Thing, so that his very defeat is his triumph, conferring sublime dignity on him, while comedy is the triumph of the indestructible life – not sublime life, but opportunistic, common, vulgar early life instead” (81– 82). Yet, as he explains,

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Crimp’s perception of writing in a post-Holocaust world leads him to develop a dramaturgy of resistance with spectators aimed at warning them of the points in which late capitalism risks becoming totalitarian. It is in this sense that Crimp may be described as a post-Holocaust writer – his dramaturgy is pervaded by the ethical and aesthetic debates that the Holocaust has generated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it resonates with Bauman’s compelling argument in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) that the conditions that made the Holocaust possible are still part of our life in the present. As Angel-Perez puts it, dramatists like Crimp “have inherited a collective memory that transcends the frontiers of direct memory and enables them to operate a fusion between the traumatisms which have affected their private history and the tragedies of History” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 20).¹¹ In Cruel and Tender, Amelia, the wife of a General who is fighting a war on terror in Africa, is expected to turn a blind eye to her husband’s infidelity with an African girl he has brought home, as well as to the murder of civilians, in exchange for the high living standard her husband offers her. After having poisoned her husband, she fears she will be scanned through X-rays at the airport, whereby the dissent and anger that have led her to commit such a murderous act will be detected. Her fear leads her to commit suicide. Amelia is expressing a fear of homogenization, of being rendered a mere blank surface mimicking extolled behaviours and suppressing non-desired ones, thus contributing to the maintenance of a series of economic interests and world relations that ensure the hegemony of a Western elite. As has been noted in Preliminaries I, Agamben, as part of his analysis of power’s most totalitarian tendencies, claims that “Bio-power’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoè [the animal being] and bíos [the cultural being], the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 156), so that docile identities may be inscribed upon subjects. Scanning machines at airports may be seen as symbolic of the normalizing technological arsenal of states aimed at enacting a bio-political control of the population, producing what Foucault describes as a “State control of the biological”:

these categories lose their ability to contain the Holocaust, and specifically to account for the experience of the Muslim, “the zero-point at which the very opposition between tragedy and comedy, sublime and ridiculous, dignity and derision, is suspended” (Žižek 86).  “[Les dramaturges don til sera question ici] se font les héritiers d’une mémoire collective qui outrpasse les frontières dela mémoire directe et permet à ces auteurs d’opérer une fusion entre les traumatismes qui ont bouleversé leur histoire privée et les tragédies de la grande Histoire”.

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[…] it seems to me that the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life. What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological. (Foucault 2004: 239 – 40)

In this context, Amelia knows that the establishment that supports her husband’s war – represented in Cruel and Tender by a government minister – will consider her a deviant subject, and she tells Laela, her husband’s African mistress, that the security guards at the airport will notice she has a “concealed weapon” (Crimp 2004a: 46). She subsequently turns this concealed weapon, which is no more than her rage at the system, against herself – she commits suicide. When mechanisms of control and imposition of identities become blurred with torture, dispossessing the subject from her/himself, eroding her/his dignity, or inscribing her/his marketability, collapse is introduced in Crimp’s plays, as is the case in Cruel and Tender. In Crimp’s plays, such a dispossession of the subject often takes place in a low-key manner, and is reflected through the violence that permeates the characters’ relationships. Lies in the private sphere – as the male member of a couple keeps a part of his identity or a core of individualism to himself – and the values of late capitalism often echo one another, like two sides of the same coin. For instance, by keeping the truth from their respective wives, Richard, the doctor in The Country, or the General in Cruel and Tender automatically disempower them, casting them in the position of mere housewives bound to the domestic sphere, lacking all control over their own lives. In plays like The Country or Cruel and Tender, then, market interests impregnate the private sphere and its emotional relationships with violence, bringing about ‘small’, quotidian tragedies of contemporary life, and often leading female characters to attempt to search for new values and to separate themselves from their husbands. Crimp’s theatre is written from the conviction that ‘the worst’ no longer lies ahead of us, that is, in a possible future, but is already behind us, in the fracture with democratic values that took place with the Holocaust – we live in the shadow of genocide. When late capitalist society eerily erodes subjects as essentially political and social beings, and the forms of normalization that are applied on bodies and identities render them blank screens ‘open’ to the inscription of power, collapse signals the irruption of barbarism – the shadow of the Holocaust – into seemingly civilized relationships. Collapse signifies the irruption of institutionalized evil, and warns of the danger of slipping back into barbarism.¹²

 The Holocaust was, in Elazar Barkan’s words in “Genocides of Indigenous Peoples”, an

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Reyes Mate emphasizes the seeds of totalitarianism or barbarism latent in bio-power, which is precisely what Crimp aims to make visible through collapse. In Memoria de Auschwitz: actualidad moral y política, Reyes Mate links the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary society with the Auschwitz experience, arguing that the quintessential place where the separation between political life (bíos) and biological life (zoè) takes place is the Lager or concentration camp: In the Lager human beings are submitted to a treatment that reduces them to a thread of naked life. The concentration camp is not interested in the prisoner’s interiority – her/his beliefs, ideas or culture – but in her/his body. In the camp, the public or political dimension of the individual directly corresponds to her/his most private dimension. [In the Lager,] the boundaries between the public and the private are torn down, as are those between oikos and polis, zoè and bíos, a distinction which is the pre-condition for the existence of politics itself. (Reyes Mate 2003: 94)¹³

There is thus a link between the most totalitarian aspects of current societies of control and Auschwitz, which Crimp’s plays seek to dramatize. In the Lager, as also happens, albeit to a much lesser degree, in contemporary societies of control, the barrier between the public and private dimensions disappeared. Individuals were no longer political beings, but mere docile bodies; not social life (bíos) but purely biological or animal life (zoè). Bio-power makes itself particularly manifest in interrogations, particularly so where torture is involved. In interrogation and torture, the individual is made to speak or reveal a ‘truth’ about her/ himself, as though dissidence and divergence from the norms of late capitalism could easily be located and extirpated from inside the individual, and then classified and controlled according to normative parameters. Quoting Agamben, Reyes Mate describes the situation at the Lager as characterized by “a fatigue of the body which led the prisoner to experience a moral type of degradation, since s/he reached a degree of suffering beyond which ‘not only categories such as dignity and respect ceased to be significant, but also the

“extreme case of genocide” (Barkan 132) because of its systematic character. The Holocaust is thus taken as the genocide par excellence in this book, but not because it can be placed on a higher plane of importance in terms of human suffering or human loss with respect to other genocides.  “En el campo el hombre es tratado y reducido a nuda vida. Lo que interesa al campo del prisionero no es su mundo interior – sus creencias, ideas o cultura – sino su cuerpo. Lo público o político del campo es lo más privado. Ahí se rompen las barreras entre lo público y privado, entre el oikos y la polis, entre la zoè y el bíos, distinción que es condición de posibilidad de la política”.

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mere idea of the existence of an ethical boundary’” (Reyes Mate 2003: 223).¹⁴ It is when societies of control, in their enforcement of identities, reach the fuzzy zone where the distinction between zoè and bíos becomes blurred, that collapse may take place. It certainly does in Crimp’s plays, which show the latency of the violence of bio-politics in the midst of contemporary democracy – the complicity between forms of fascism and repression, and late capitalist ‘progress’. It is important to note the differences, however, between bio-power and Auschwitz. As Foucault puts it, Nazism was a combination of the sovereign’s right to kill, inherited from pre-modern times, and the mechanisms of biopower, based on the control and administration of life for the maintenance of productive, docile individuals: We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized bio-power in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms – the classic, archaic mechanism that gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens, and the new mechanism organized around discipline and regulation, or in other words, the new mechanism of bio-power – coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: the Nazi State makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people […] Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States. [Of] all modern states, [of] all capitalist States. (Foucault 2004: 260)

Nazism thus made brutally, nakedly manifest the latent totalitarian seeds of capitalism. Contemporary society, however, even in its most repressive tendencies, is not an industry or factory of death. As Hardt and Negri put it, […] sovereign power can never really arrive at the pure production of death because it cannot afford to eliminate the life of its subjects. Weapons of mass destruction must remain a threat or be used in very limited cases and torture cannot be taken to the point of death, at least not in a generalized way. Sovereign power lives only by preserving the life of its subjects, at the very least their capacities of production and consumption. If any sovereign power were to destroy that, it would necessarily destroy itself. More important than the negative technologies of annihilation and torture, then, is the constructive character of biopower. [In this context] global war must not only bring death but also produce and regulate life. (Hardt and Negri 2006: 42)

 “Un agotamiento del cuerpo que acarreaba la degradación moral pues el prisionero alcanzaba un grado de sufrimiento allende el cual ‘pierden todo su sentido (no sólo) categorías como dignidad y respeto, sino incluso la propia idea de un límite ético’”.

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In order to produce subjected individuals, bio-power must maintain life, even if it does so by keeping individuals in docility at the boundary of death. The fabrication of freedom, even if it is kept in check, is constitutive of the liberal – capitalist – state. Instead, in concentration camps death and life are blurred into a state of indistinction, in a “macabre symbiosis, which renders the frontier between the living being and the corpse fuzzy” (Sucasas 70).¹⁵ Auschwitz “is an industrial production of death […] the factory [in this case] is aimed at producing death instead of, say, screws” (Reyes Mate 2003: 124– 25).¹⁶ Also, if under totalitarianism disciplinary means are directly enacted upon bodies, in contemporary society subjects are expected to regulate themselves as a consequence of the coercive power of surveillance mechanisms and advertised identities, which are installed outside the body of individuals through the ‘camera’. In Cruel and Tender as in other plays since the early 1990 s, Crimp is concerned with the introduction of barbarism in supposedly ‘civilized’ settings, and dramatizes the impoverishment of Western institutions in the wake of the Holocaust. In Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, to go back to the play which opened this section, Amelia fears that her homogenization will imply her insertion within a hierarchical society in which she is expected to comply with her husband’s – the General’s – lies, and with a system that fights unjust wars abroad while installing security measures both in order to uphold a series of privileges for the West and in order to ‘protect’ it from the threat of terrorism – a reactive type of violence the West itself has generated through its systematic attempts to monopolize resources. Amelia’s suicide is a dissenting act whereby she ‘leaves’ the hierarchical structures of a society that allows such barbarism to take place – it is a radical refusal to become assimilated. Contemporary society has refined its modes of operation, but it shares with fascism the same willingness to sacrifice process in the name of ‘progress’ and to eliminate non-desired identities. At the same time, the late capitalist state is complicit with ‘Empire’ in its refusal to regulate wars fought abroad while it encourages the placing of anti-terrorist surveillance mechanisms in public spaces. This type of detached, administrative rationality defines a society that has unleashed some of its darkest, most violent drives. Auschwitz was an organized crime against humanity – not only a crime against humanity’s physical integrity, but “an assault on the ethical structure of the species, the structure upon which

 “[En el campo] [Ya ni siquiera cabe afirmar que la muerte sea la antítesis de la vida, pues parece haberla penetrado en una] macabra simbiosis, que difumina la frontera entre el vivo y el cadáver”.  “Auschwitz es una producción industrial de muerte […] la fábrica es destinada a producir muerte en vez de tornillos”.

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humanity’s idea of morality has been articulated” (Reyes Mate 2003: 123).¹⁷ Crimp’s dramaturgy of collapse maps out the areas of contemporary society in which similar subjective structures or modes of social organization to those which led to the Auschwitz experience uncannily make their presence felt.

2 The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage 2.1 Collapse on Stage: What it is and how it Works In Crimp, collapse always has to do with the crumbling of the self at moments of oppression, and with a desire, on the part of the playwright, to make social contradictions visible for an audience by dramatizing how they impact on the self. Instead of ‘telling’ about such contradictions, Crimp ‘shows’ how they come to bear upon the protagonist by making her – occasionally him – crumble. Collapse always takes place when the subject acutely and dramatically perceives the contradictions within which s/he is inserted. Collapse is, furthermore, a response to the reification of social and political relations, and it seeks to denounce how the interests of an economic order prevail over the concrete needs and particularities of individuals. It therefore points to the relationship between rationalization – or optimization – and abuses of political power. In such circumstances, collapse signals the refusal, on the part of a character, to participate in an unequal system. In crumbling, as Adorno puts it, the body seeks ‘nature’ (Adorno 216), that is, it seeks a more primeval sense of identity as an alternative to the ‘lucrative’ identities imposed on it. That is why collapse often takes place in the form of the introduction of a language of pathos, an irrational language that resembles the language of dreams. In dreaming, the subject does not enact a pre-established set of rules of behaviour or stratified modes of conduct, but it dissolves, so to speak, amongst images and emotions that the figures that enter her/his dream incarnate. Spontaneously and fluidly interacting with them, the subject flows without any necessity to maintain the more symbolic sense of ego it builds for itself and devotes time to trying to hold together when awake. Thus, collapse – as the emergence of an irrational language on stage – signifies an urgent manifestation and even vindication of the primeval needs that the economic and

 “[El mal radical hay que entenderlo por tanto como] un atentado a la estructura ética de la especie, estructura de la que ha dependido el ser moral que hemos conocido”.

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symbolic structure of late capitalism channels into productivity and maintenance of the current state of things. Precisely because, in collapsing, Crimp’s – usually female – characters divest themselves from the ideological trappings upon which they built their previous identities, Crimp presents collapse as a painful state of being, which almost always takes place on the margins of socially upheld behaviour, of the type of ‘performance’ that is commonly considered acceptable. Thus, in The Treatment, Anne’s collapse takes place in the intimacy of her hotel room, behind shut doors. Equally, as shall be seen, in The Country Corinne’s collapse takes place by a “littered” (Crimp 2005a: 367), deserted ditch where “there was nothing human” (Crimp 2005a: 365). Amelia’s collapse in Cruel and Tender, which ultimately leads her to commit suicide, takes place after she “grips Laela’s hand and pulls her into [a] room” (Crimp 2004a: 42). These three dramatizations of collapse suggest that the characters’ realization of the ‘barbarism’ that pervades contemporary relationships takes place in a liminal zone on the edge of ideology. Collapse is the ‘dark’ side of the ‘healthy’ late capitalist behaviour – as mentioned above, its unacknowledged child. Contemporary Western societies present themselves in terms of having attained a maximum degree of comfort, development and sophistication. Collapse, however, like a sudden gulf gaping in the midst of achievement and ‘progress’, foregrounds the notion that this idea of ‘progress’ has been defined in economic and technological terms only. In other words, it points to the vacuity of contemporary media-ridden societies or, in Guy Debord’s terms, of ‘societies of spectacle’, and to the human cost that lies beneath ‘progress’ if conceived in these terms.¹⁸ Thus collapse is the unacknowledged product of contemporary consumerist utopias. In all instances, collapse blurs the audience-stage separation – the conventional fourth wall – or pushes it to the limit, thus making spectators self-conscious and aware of their potentially passive role. Indeed, when Crimp places the theatrical event in suspension through paralysing an actor’s speech in Face to the Wall, he seeks to make the audience aware of its own presence. In other instances, through introducing an irrational type of language that works through metaphors, spectators are asked to supply concrete images, that is, to bring part of their personal experience into the play in order to help ‘read’ it. In the cases where collapse involves an act of violence that metaphorically speaks of what the character cannot articulate rationally, spectators are impelled  In The Society of Spectacle (1967) Debord claimed that public life was becoming increasingly dominated by the image, which was rendering individuals passive and docile in relation to the social injustices the system itself generated. Debord’s concept of the ‘society of spectacle’ is further explored in the fifth block, or the block devoted to the analysis of The Treatment.

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to focus on what that particular act may be standing in for, as is the case in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender. Collapse, therefore, requires a surplus of collaboration and interpretation from spectators. What makes collapse acquire a particular ‘political’ potential for resistance in the theatre is that a stage director can make use of theatrical elements in order to focus the audience’s attention with particular intensity upon a scene of collapse, which is always the scene par excellence in which social contradictions and their impact on the characters become visible in a particularly intense manner. If a particular production can accomplish this, then it may be argued that that instance of collapse will truly have a meaningful impact on the audience. A spectator who has read the play will notice that the production in question is enhancing the textual scene. This realization is semiotically important in the context of the theatre, as it means that the audience’s attention becomes particularly sharpened at that point, so the scene may acquire real political potential. Some directors, like Luc Bondy or Katie Mitchell, seem to be particularly aware of the semiotic potential they have in their hands when staging a play by Crimp, and they have enhanced it in order to attempt to lead spectators into an acute perception of social contradictions.¹⁹ In this manner, instead of limiting itself to being a reproduction of a playwright’s words, the performance suddenly becomes a form of activism, uncannily blurring the frontiers between art and life. The audience is interpellated as a theatrical community and invited to share in the director’s – and actors’– political message, which is being produced or worked through on the spot. The theatrical event becomes, albeit momentarily, a political event, and perhaps for a moment there is the sense that the performance is part of ‘reality’ and not just the acting out of a pre-scripted text.

2.2 I Have Witnessed: Testimony and Audience Responsibility 2.2.1 Auschwitz and Testimony As has been argued, even if the Holocaust is not a specific reference in Crimp’s plays, it nonetheless lies at the root of contemporary reflections on the figure of

 As shall be seen in more detail in the relevant sections below, this study refers to Bondy’s production of Cruel and Tender, which ran from 17 June to 10 July 2004 at the Young Vic, London, before premiering at the 2004 Wiener Festwochen and touring Europe, and to Mitchell’s revival of Attempts on her Life, which ran from 8 March to 10 May 2007 at the Lyttleton Auditorium of the National Theatre.

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the witness, and of ethics in general, which pervade his dramaturgy. In Crimp’s dramatic plays, that is, in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender, female characters, in their moments of collapse, seek to put the personal experience of oppression into words both for other characters and for spectators to learn or benefit from such knowledge. Thus, they make audible the type of violence the contemporary late capitalist system requires for its maintenance – a subtly veiled, submerged kind of violence, which nonetheless leaves a mark upon the particular character that has lived through it. In fact, the word ‘testimony’, from the Latin superstes, means s/he who has experienced a particular reality or has gone through to the end of an event or an experience, and because s/he has survived, finds her/himself in a position to offer a testimony about it, to report it to others (Reyes Mate 2003: 172). Anne in The Treatment, Corinne and Rebecca in The Country and Amelia in Cruel and Tender know about the contradiction others had rather gloss over or forget – the ethical sacrifice at the heart of contemporary notions of ‘progress’, ‘freedom’ and economic ‘advancement’. These characters attempt to rescue such suppressed knowledge and make it visible for the audience, exposing the faultlines of late capitalist society. Interestingly, in Crimp’s dramaturgy, the notion of a female testimony first appears in Definitely the Bahamas, written in 1987, and first published in English in 2012, although in a less elaborate form than will appear in The Treatment, The Country or Cruel and Tender. At the end of Definitely the Bahamas, Marijke, a young female student who is living with Frank and Milly, an older couple, eventually discloses to them that their son Michael, who is married to Irene and is a successful businessman, tried to seduce Marijke and is in fact an ethically dubious man. Like Corinne in The Country or Amelia in Cruel and Tender, she thus reveals the violence that underlies the couple’s veneer of success and achievement, denouncing the underside of the apparently ‘perfect’ suburbian life of Michael and his parents.²⁰ As has been argued in the previous section, it is Crimp’s women who convey their testimony to other female characters, so that they may benefit from what

 In an interview with Sierz held at the Orange Tree Theatre on 14 April 2012 on account of the revival of Definitely the Bahamas, Crimp corroborated this. Sierz remarked that the female monologue, so recurrent in Crimp’s plays, seems to appear for the first time in Definitely the Bahamas, and Crimp pointed out that, even if he did not realize it at the time he wrote this play, he is aware that, in his work, women tend to appear as “bearers of truth” (Crimp 2012b). This pattern, he claimed, reappers in scenes XII and XIII of his latest play, Play House (2012a), in the “two speeches by Katrina, [which are] two truth-bearing speeches in relation to men” (Crimp 2012b).

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they have learned. The necessity to offer a testimony to other women characters – Rebecca to Corinne in The Country, or Amelia to Laela, the General’s mistress, in Cruel and Tender – thus becomes a central act of female resistance. Through it, they try to pass on to other women the painful experience of their learning, as well as the specific risks and precariousness of their position in contemporary society, so that the recipients of the testimony may be able to avoid positioning themselves as victims with respect to it. Crimp’s evocation of the motif of testimony as an articulation of resistance is shaped by the social and historical context from which and for which he is writing. There took place, over the twentieth century, an escalation of genocide violence. In the nineteenth century there were the genocides of Native Americans in the New World, and of the Maoris in New Zealand, among others, but the twentieth century is particularly linked to genocide because technological ‘progress’ made the means of killing more effective. As Eric D. Weitz comments in “The Modernity of Genocides” (2003), “In the end Nazism is in fact the outcome of developments in the mechanisms of power [and technology], newly developed since the 19th century, that have been pushed to their high point” (Weitz 54). As Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub put it in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, after the Holocaust and other twentieth-century genocides involving ethnic cleansing – the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the Guatemala genocide, the Indonesian genocide, the East Timor genocide, the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, the Balkans genocide, among others – “testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times – our relation to the traumas of contemporary history: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, and other war atrocities” (Felman and Laub 1992: 5).²¹ Indeed, the long shadow of genocide hovered over Crimp with particular intensity after he wrote The Treatment in 1993, as the Rwandan genocide – the Hutus’ massacre of Tutsis – took place in 1994 in the face of the passivity of Western societies and politicians, who limited themselves to televising it but did nothing to prevent it when it was still possible to do so.²² In the wake of the fracture that twentieth-century genocides have signified, testimony offers the possibility to re-define ethics on the basis of the ‘small’ narratives of witnesses. As Felman and Laub point out, testimony does not offer an abstract, systematized historical memory. It is composed of the “bits and pieces of a memory […] acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated

 For a more detailed account of twentieth-century genocides, see Mann (2005).  The Rwandan context is particularly palpable in the episode “Faith in Ourselves” in Attempts on her Life, as will be shown below.

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into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). The idealistic ring of words such as ‘progress’, ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ does not contemplate the casualties, the death of civilians, the ‘small’ experiences of oppression undergone by the concrete bodies who are trampled upon in pursuit of ‘larger’ goals. Testimony is the result of an individual process of elaboration of a series of strategies that have allowed a subject to survive, assert agency and, ultimately, uphold the integrity of the self in the face of considerable oppression. The ethical value of testimony emerges out of the sense of crisis and want of a valid ethics in a post-Auschwitz world.²³ The female characters who pass on their testimony of resistance in Crimp’s plays are reformulating hegemonic views and re-thinking ethics on the basis of their discovery of the importance of the body, of the radical sameness and equality of any human body. Testimony attests to the need to begin anew on the basis of different epistemological forms – less totalizing, more particular. Yet precisely because these truths are ‘small’ they are also more solid, and are not invoked in a spirit of duplicity, hiding a double standard or double morality. Testimony, in short, is a contemporary mode of resistance because it privileges process over ‘progress’, and it is a return to the life of the body, of the tangible and the physical, according to which every single body counts and matters equally. In Dan Rebellato’s words, testimony locates the body as an “‘ethical base’, a kind of historical constant that can ground a sense of our common humanity” (Rebellato 2009: 66).²⁴ At the same time, Crimp’s theatre is also imbued by the ethical debates that have taken place in the twentieth century in the wake of the Holocaust. Since the Holocaust, thinkers like Lévinas and Bauman have sought to answer the question as to what mechanisms cancel the development of empathy and responsibility, and stimulate violence, vanity or narcissism, thus leading to the contemporary struggle for material resources which creates a markedly unequal world order. In Bauman’s words, it is late capitalist ideological apparatuses – the mass media, bureaucratic instances, the specialization of work – which enact a “distantiation” (Bauman 2005: 102) between Western, ‘privileged’ individuals

 Mike Bartlett’s My Child (2007) tackles the contemporary ethical impasse from the point of view of the neo-liberal values which have taken over since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the welfare measures implemented after WWII, which placed restrictions on market interests, were discredited, leading theorists like Francis Fukuyama, for instance, to proclaim ‘the end of history’, that is, of any rival ideologies to laissez-faire capitalism (Fukuyama 1992).  Rebellato is quoting from Helen Freshwater’s essay “The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite’s ‘Mnemonic’” (2001).

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and those who are oppressed, thus turning individuals into unempathic, refracting bodies. For Lévinas, as for Bauman, morality is the primary structure of subjectivity. According to Lévinas, and as Bauman explains, “Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates – exploits, re-directs, jams. […] Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility and responsibility is proximity” (Bauman 2005: 183 – 4; emphasis original). Thus, according to Lévinas and Bauman, empathy develops spontaneously through proximity, and it is the social mechanisms which interfere with or ‘jam’ the experience of empathy. From this point of view, ethics do not consist on a series of epistemological agreements that need to be reached before being able to act in an ethical manner, and therefore as something inherent and innate to the rational subject, but as something that precedes epistemology. Individuals can connect with one another because they are ontologically exposed to one another’s precariousness and vulnerability. Interestingly, Crimp’s theatre strongly conveys the notion that individuals are characterized by empathy and by a primeval sense of responsibility towards the Other. Collapse, even when it manifests itself violently – a violence generated by the violence of late capitalism itself – is a means for the characters to tap into that primeval, empathic dimension of the self and to divest themselves from less empathic modes of existence, which are complicit with late capitalist inequality. When characters such as Corinne or Amelia collapse in plays like The Country or Cruel and Tender respectively, they seek to divest themselves from the late capitalist forms of inequality their husbands represent, and to re-subjectify themselves in more selfless terms. In Bauman’s words, “our inclination to act as moral beings – our impulse to do right things and avoid wrong things – is ‘pre-societal’” (qtd. in Smith 124). In this regard, Smith adds, “We are born with a natural tendency to care for other human beings whom we see are weak and in need” (Smith 124). Yet, as Smith also highlights, different social mechanisms annul such immediate, spontaneous drives in the individual: […] when we come under the control of bureaucrats, professionals and other ‘experts’ acting on scientific or political authority, we are trained to ignore these moral promptings. We are socialized into accepting that we should obey commands ‘from above’, that our responsibility is fulfilled simply by obeying dutifully, that we need not consider the moral implications of our actions beyond that. As a consequence, we will carry out evil actions without feeling a sense of personal moral responsibility as long as we are ordered to do so by bureaucratic or scientific authority that we consider to be legitimate. (Smith 124)

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Mechanisms of identification, then, are annulled in societies of control through the physical distantiation carried out by the mass media and other technological apparatuses. They are also annulled as governments hide or distort information regarding wars that are fought abroad. Crucially, then, Crimp dramatizes collapse as a strategy whereby the characters seek to divest themselves of what Smith terms the “false consciousness and alienation” (Smith 97) resulting from these technological and ideological processes of control. When characters collapse, in Crimp, the inherently empathic and responsible structure of subjectivity is able to come to the surface.

2.2.2 Audience, Resistance and Testimony As Angel-Perez puts it, the challenge that faces contemporary playwrights is that of “finding a new theatre language which may allow them to overcome the ethical and, in consequence, aesthetic impasse of contemporary art, which has plunged it, for the last fifty years, into the so-called crisis of representation” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 24).²⁵ As shall be seen, it is Crimp’s perception of writing in a post-Holocaust world that leads him to move away from realism, and to develop a dramaturgy of resistance with spectators aimed at warning them of the points in which late capitalism risks becoming totalitarian. In his dramatic plays, and specifically by interpellating spectators through the defamiliarized language of collapse and testimony, Crimp invites spectators to contribute to detecting the seeds of ‘barbarism’ as they may detect them in their context, thus warning them about the introduction of violence in supposedly civilized relationships and thereby also contributing to overcoming the contemporary ethical impasse.²⁶ In their moments of collapse or breakdown, Anne, Corinne and Amelia in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender respectively seek to give

 “L’enjeu qui s’impose aux dramaturges contemporains est de trouver un nouveau langage de théâtre qui permette de sortir de l’impasse éthique et, de là, esthétique qui frappe l’art contemporain et l’a plongé depuis quelques décennies dans ce qu’il est maintenant convenu d’appeler la crise de la représentation”.  According to Angelaki, and as she expresses it in “Ethics take Centre Stage: Issues and Representation for Today’s Political Theatre”, it is these new dramatic tools playwrights like Crimp employ, which are “drawn from […] innovative, […] even experiential combinations of form and content” (Angelaki 2010: 199), that has led the very term “‘political’ theatre […] to beg for redefinition” (Angelaki 2010: 199). Angelaki analyzes Crimp’s Advice to the Iraqi Women, which denounces the Iraq war without making direct allusions to it, in a defamiliarized, indirect manner, highlighting Crimp’s “ability to communicate his messages through covert, rather than overt exposure” (Angelaki 2010: 203).

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birth to their new sense of self through testimony, as well as to further their detachment from what they now perceive as an old identity, which they wish to divest themselves from. Because the characters’ language at the point of collapse is “cognitively dissonant” (Felman and Laub 1992: 53), that is, it is a defamiliarized kind of speech, a far more irrational language than we are used to, it draws the audience’s attention to itself. Crimp’s dramaturgy, indeed, uses the concept of defamiliarization in a political manner. The ‘dissonance’ or defamiliarization of lyric with respect to everyday language produces a break and a transvaluation of “previous categories and previous frames of reference” (Felman and Laub 1992: 54) which is necessarily demanding for spectators. The metaphors that Anne, Corinne and Amelia use in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender respectively hold open the possibility for spectators to ‘fill them up’ with specific images, thus giving concrete significance to the metaphorical language the characters evoke. These images may be drawn from the oppression audience members themselves may have experienced. As Felman and Laub put it, in witnessing, the listener “partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past […] the listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, known to them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony” (Felman and Laub 1992: 58). Thus, spectators are encouraged to become ‘double witnesses’, that is, witnesses both to the character in question and to themselves. In Felman’s and Laub’s words, audience members become both a “witness to the trauma witness and a witness to him/herself” (Felman and Laub 1992: 58), a process whereby they may become resistant subjects who empathize with the characters’ newlyfound sense of ethics. At the same time, and as they are turned into witnesses of a character’s pain, spectators may re-experience the contradictions of late capitalist society, ideally becoming more aware of them. As Angel-Perez remarks, Crimp’s plays prompt spectators to experience a constant tension between Brechtian defamliarization and empathy, which enables them both to experience society’s contradictions in an emotional manner, and to rationally apprehend them – “it is the great Brechtian idea, which is here reconciled with the feeling of empathy” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 22).²⁷ This book draws on Adorno’s concept of resistant art, which he develops as a result of interrogating himself regarding the ways in which art might, in the wake of Auschwitz, contribute to eliciting resistance. According to Adorno, as Brian

 “[…] il faut donc inventer une langue défamiliarisante – et c’est la grande idée brechtienne que l’on retrouve ici réconciliée avec le sentiment d’empathie”.

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O’Connor explains, for art to be resistant, social contradictions need to be ‘experienced’ by the receiver, and “certain art holds open the possibility of that experience […]. In this way alone is aesthetic resistance possible” (O’Connor 240). For Adorno, the experience of contradiction and crisis must be an essential component of any work of art that attempts to elicit resistance. Women’s language in Crimp’s plays – Amelia’s ‘spike’ or, as shall be seen, Corinne’s ‘stone’ – is not aimed at conveying a message through discursive argumentation but, in its urgency, it seeks to make the listener – each audience member – ‘live through’ the experience and the contradictions of what is being evoked.²⁸ This, claims Adorno, is the hallmark of resistant art. As he puts it, “the greatness of works of art lies solely in their power to let those things be heard which ideology conceals” (Adorno 214) in a world in which “consciousness and conformity have become identical” (Adorno 231). He adds, […] what we mean by lyric […] has within it […] the quality of break or rupture. The subjective being that makes itself heard in lyric poetry is one which defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective and the realm of objectivity. It has, so to speak, lost nature and seeks to recreate it through personification and through descent into the subjective being itself. (Adorno 215 – 16)

Seen in this light, Crimp’s introduction of collapse is “experiential, not speculative” (Sierz 2001: 4) because it seeks to make the audience go through the same ethical process as his characters. Aleks Sierz first applied the label ‘experiential’ to ‘in-yer-face’ theatre – the type of theatre he identified as most characteristic of the British stage during the 1990 s – in his seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. ²⁹ It was Sarah Kane who identified the method she and

 Crimp himself differentiates his dramaturgy from that of other playwrights who base it on ‘explication’: “I believe writers have ideas. It’s very clear. And some people make this very explicit. I mean, Edward Bond, for instance, will tell you exactly what the ideas are and how he intends to explicate them in his play” (Devine 87; my emphasis).  It is worth noting there has been some controversy around the term ‘in-yer-face’, and other terms have been suggested. As Sierz himself explains in British Theatre of the 1990 s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, critics called the ‘in-yer-face’ sensibility “‘Neo Jacobean’, ‘new brutalism’, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, and ‘theatre of urban ennui’ […]. In Germany, they called it the ‘blood-and-sperm generation’, and sometimes ‘cool’ theatre” (Aragay et al. 142). Sierz, however, emphasizes that he “reject[s] each one of these labels” (Aragay et al. 142). To him, ‘New Jacobean’ implies tradition and continuity, and he is in favour of foregrounding change; ‘new brutalism’ focuses only on the violence of the plays, while ignoring their capacity to connect positively with the audience; ‘theatre of urban ennui’ sounds “like something from Oscar Wilde” (Aragay et al. 143), and ‘blood and sperm’, as he sees it, is even

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other 1990 s playwrights used as being ‘experiential’ (Sierz in Aragay et al. 143). Sierz notes that Kane came up with the term in her attempt to describe a play she had seen, namely, Jeremy Weller’s Mad (1992), which introduced the audience to the experience of mental illness not through “intellectual conceit[s]” (Sierz 2001: 92) but by actually “taking the audience to a place of extreme mental discomfort and distress” (Sierz 2001: 92). In Sierz’s words, experiential theatre “describes the kind of drama, usually put on studio spaces, that aims to give audiences the experience of actually having lived through the actions depicted on stage. Instead of allowing spectators to just sit back and contemplate the play, experiential theatre grabs its audiences and forces them to confront the reality of the feelings shown to them” (Sierz, ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre webpage; my emphasis). Through shock or explicit violence, experiential plays seek to make the audience undergo a similar experience to that of the characters, eventually becoming aware of their own vulnerability. As Sierz puts it, experiential theatre “goes beyond a mere description of content, and describes the relationship between the stage and the audience, between the writer and society” (Aragay et al. 143). Sierz’s views on experiential theatre have an Adornian ring to them. It is a kind of theatre, he claims, that seeks to go beyond the exposition or the “showing” of social conflicts, so that spectators may “speculate” about them; it “want [s] audiences to feel the extreme emotions that are being shown on stage” (Sierz; ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre webpage). Crimp’s plays, however, do not accomplish this through onstage violence, cruelty or shock – as ‘in-yer-face’ plays such as Sarah Kane’s and Mark Ravenhill’s do – but through the introduction of collapse and of the defamiliarized, lyrical language of testimony, which, as has already been argued, invites the audience to enhance their perception of social contradictions and to imaginatively work towards a new ethics. Female breakdown, even in those cases in which there is violence, is represented as a resistant type of action. Indeed, it is a micropolitical, focused kind of violence which is enacted against a specific agent of oppression.³⁰ In the course of the plays, female characters are seen trying out and developing a series of micropolitical strategies with a view to changing their existing social and/or emo-

narrower than ‘new brutalism’. This book opts for the term ‘experiential’ because it describes Crimp’s theatre more accurately than ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, and because it is less controversial.  Crimp distinguishes micropolitical, reactive forms of self-defense from more indiscriminate types of macropolitical violence. Face to the Wall, for instance, presents the collapse of a postman who one day throws tea in his son’s face, and then wanders into a school and indiscriminately shoots the children. As will be seen below, the postman’s violence is macropolitical, not micropolitical.

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tional relationships. These strategies are meant to act as models of resistance for the audience as well. One such strategy is the relentless attempt to dismantle a series of lies that have been introduced in daily life, as Corinne does in relation to her husband Richard in The Country. In other instances, collapse seeks to encourage rebelliousness and self-determination in the audience. Richard’s lover, Rebecca, also in The Country, sticks a pair of scissors into Richard’s palm. Thus Richard, who has lied to her about his feelings for his wife Corinne and is coldly detached from Rebecca’s own suffering, is forced to experience pain. This is a way for Rebecca to upturn the excruciating role of victim in which Richard has cast her. In Crimp’s dramatic plays, collapse is inseparable from the dramatic strategy of testimony, whereby the playwright’s own micropolitical aim, his pedagogy of resistance, comes full circle. Testimony seeks to put into words the sense of social crisis, resulting in her own oppression, which the female subject has undergone. It seeks to leave a record of the specific type of micropolitical action the female character in question has taken against oppression and, finally, it seeks to express values that she has discovered are important and worth safeguarding, and for the sake of which she has refused to comply with existing relational patterns. Unmasking and self-assertion, violence and testimony are Crimp’s own micropolitical paths towards action and agency, which he offers spectators as a fundamental part of his pedagogy of resistance. Thus, collapse ultimately aims at communicating a utopian desire to the audience, a desire for different modes of relating. An old identity unravels, an old way of behaving and of perceiving oneself gives way to a new form of identity, conceived along quite different lines. Through collapse, female characters seek to subjectify themselves as ethical beings, after having fully grasped their complicity with or participation in the oppressive identities of their male husbands or co-workers. It is worth mentioning that precisely because the language of collapse is estranging and metaphorical, there is always a dimension in it that resists full interpretation. There is something irreducibly estranging, for instance, in the metaphors Amelia uses in Cruel and Tender, when she seeks to take revenge against the General by sending him a chemical within a white pillow, and gives Jonathan, the government minister, the instruction that the General must “push his whole face” (Crimp 2004a: 32) into it until he feels “something smooth and hard inside the white pillow / snap” (Crimp 2004a: 32). This study attempts only to suggest a possible way of approaching the defamiliarizing language of collapse, but does not seek to explain away the plays’ indeterminacies or bring full closure to them.

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The desire to implicate the audience through collapse and testimony is the cornerstone of Crimp’s pedagogical intent, itself aimed at building a new ethics. This is a concern which theorists such as Reyes Mate, Felman and Laub or Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, all share, in the wake of the post-Holocaust crisis of values. Interestingly, such concern makes them all turn, at some point or other, to the motif of testimony. Fraser and Greco, for instance, call attention to how witnessing implies a very particular relationship between individuals, since it seeks the committed presence of others. Unlike other forms of reporting, testimony […] ‘implicates others in what they witness’, and transforms them into witnesses in turn […] This means that truly receiving the story involves staying with the embodied teller, and offering embodied presence to commune (or live in and with) the other’s pain/knowledge. Bodies, in this perspective, can be thought of as ethical in at least two ways: first of all, insofar as their very being is the source of particular values, and value-judgments; and second, insofar as they are able and ready to be implicated in relationships of testimony, or to become […] ‘communicative bodies’. (Fraser and Greco 31; emphasis original)

It is in this sense that Crimp’s dramaturgy seeks to mould the psychology of spectators with a view to constituting them as resistant subjects. Spectators, that is, are interpellated so that they may reconstitute themselves as responsible and “commune”, as Fraser and Greco put it, with the oppression the characters are talking about and/or experiencing on stage. Like the characters, the audience also ideally engages in the dual process of seeking to name the sort of oppression of which they are victims and striving for the values they have discovered are important. Through collapse – that is, from The Treatment onwards – Crimp’s characters undergo a process of unravelling from socially upheld, available modes of subjectification. As they undergo such a process, they struggle to maintain the minimal core of ethical values they refuse to forgo. This allows Crimp to ask the question as to what are the values, beliefs or emotions that make an individual oppose oppression and resist the erasure of certain ethical frontiers. In order to impel spectators to experience this process of detachment from the dominant ideology and work towards a new ethics, Crimp’s dramaturgy is permeated by the presence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ witnesses. Both types of characters appear in his plays in order to impel spectators undergo a process of misidentification with respect to the ‘bad witnesses’, and a processes of increasing identification with those who feel interpellated the female characters’ words and thus help them in the delivery of their testimony. Laela in Cruel and Tender or Corinne in The Country are ‘good witnesses’ of Amelia’s and Rebecca’s respective testimonies. Andrew and Clifford in The Treatment, however – Anne’s lover and colleague respectively – or Richard, Corinne’s husband in The Country, are

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‘bad witnesses’ of Anne’s and Corinne’s acts of testimony. Andrew and Richard are ‘deaf’ to the social contradictions evoked through the female characters’ words, and are thereby unable to emerge out of their false consciousness – or they do so, like Andrew, only when it is already too late. The ‘bad witnesses’ should ideally work as mirror images for spectators, prompting them to begin a process of unravelling similar to the one the women characters undergo, thereby also moving beyond their ‘false consciousness’ and towards re-defining ethics.

3 Redefining Ethics: A Collapsing Body Contemporary late capitalist society is very much the inheritor of the ideas about the mind and the body that came out of the Enlightenment, as expounded, in particular, by René Descartes. Crimp’s aim, however, is to radically deconstruct the rational subject of late capitalism and to show that it is based upon a fundamental power abuse. The Cartesian self, as is well known, is defined by the sovereignty of reason – ‘I think therefore I am’ – and by the ability to master emotions and become a fully rational subject. Indeed, “With Descartes, ‘man’ becomes a rational creature, the origin of all meaning and coherence” (López 7). The idea underlying Descartes’s view, as Burkitt summarizes it, is that “sensation cannot be the guarantor of knowledge because the senses can be fooled and are thus unreliable. What we know of the world is not based on the information gathered by touch, sight, smell or sound, but how this is classified and worked on by the intellect” (Burkitt 10). Understood in this way, the body becomes “an automaton – a physical machine indistinguishable from the bodies of other animals” (Burkitt 7). This type of dualistic thought that elides drives such as aggression, sexuality, violence or madness from the realm of the thinkable necessarily displaces them onto the body. Thus, a split or scission is created between mind and body, discourse and body. Women, who have historically, in patriarchal societies, tended to occupy positions less linked to discourse and politics than to reproduction and the body, have often been made to represent the body and the emotions relegated to it. In fact, Crimp’s theatre does not entirely escape this history of representation – but, crucially, it does seek to find a way out of its limiting, constricting, oppressive effect on women by making visible that mind and body, the rational and the irrational, are thoroughly interconnected. In The Country, for instance, it is the female characters Corinne and Rebecca who, because of the oppression Richard, the doctor, subjects them to, vindicate the realm of emotions and of the body. Richard constructs himself as moral by

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making an abstract use of language, whereby he hides his real identity and intentions from Rebecca. As noted earlier, in Scene IV Rebecca suddenly resorts to violence and stabs a scissors into Richard’s palm. Rebecca does so in order to make him feel the pain of being an individual body – just as he has previously made her experience it in refusing to commit to her. She then “sucks the wound” (Crimp 2005a: 340) caused by the scissors and her face is besmeared with blood. Thus Rebecca becomes ‘the body’ in her attempt to vindicate the realm which Richard, who represents the Cartesian self, instrumentalizes and represses, namely, the realm of feelings, of commitment, of care and attention to the particularities and needs of other bodies. Crimp is probably aware that, in order to deconstruct the Enlightenment dichotomy between mind and body, he must first partly re-enact it. By highlighting the unbalance or asymmetry that is established at moments such as this between man and woman Crimp’s theatre actually critiques the Cartesian concept of the self.³¹ Collapse calls attention to how discourse and its logic, just as the supposed priorities of the ‘self’, tend to prevail over the specific needs of human bodies. Collapse thus denounces the instrumentalizing of human beings. Characters such as Jonathan, the government minister in Cruel and Tender, or Richard, the doctor in The Country, try to persuade the women around them that the rationality of discourse is of greater value than the particular needs of the (female) bodies which ask the men for commitment. In Cruel and Tender, Jonathan tries to persuade Amelia to believe that the father of the African siblings the General brings home was not ‘murdered’, because that term does not apply to terrorists. Thus, they cease to exist as bodies that deserve dignity and respect. Equally, in The Country, Rebecca’s claims that Richard should commit to her living presence are erased by Richard’s apparently logical lies, which seek to confine her to the role of ‘mistress’ while offering no love in return. In this context, then, collapse acts like a symbol – a warning sign – of contemporary excesses of power, of the moments when the emphasis on instrumental rationality risks becoming totalitarian. In the same manner, therefore, collapse also points to the ethical impasse into which the Holocaust plunged Western society, calling out for the need to re-envision ethics. A character’s collapse on stage vindicates the needs of the body – the only locus from which a new ethics that is truly inclusive can emerge – when language is put in the service of

 The Country continually foregrounds the notion of gender and power asymmetry in a visual manner as well. Throughout the play, Corinne keeps asking Richard to kiss her and Richard keeps denying her a kiss, arguing that he has already “kissed [her]” (Crimp 2005: 307). Such an asymmetry, which, on stage, can be underlined visually by the disposition of the bodies, recurs in the play as one of its most powerful leitmotifs.

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abstract rationality. In a post-Holocaust context, a collapsing body becomes a symptom of an unresolved tension in Western culture between mind and body, economic development and ethical development, asking the audience to attempt to envision their own temptative solutions to the post-Auschwitz ethical impasse. As Crimp’s women collapse on stage their bodies are represented as becoming fluid through the contact they establish with irrationality, violence or masochism. Their bodies become wet or besmeared with tears or blood in their attempt to connect with the unempathic, individualized, shut-off bodies of their husbands, lovers and male co-workers. Amelia, in Cruel and Tender, masochistically clenches her fist around some shattered glass, seeking to find a space external to a society based on rank and exclusion which her husband, the General, epitomizes. In Scene IV of The Country, after Rebecca sticks the scissors into Richard’s palm, the stage directions indicate that she “sucks the wound” (Crimp 2005a: 340) caused by the scissors, so that there’s blood on her face. As opposed to their male co-workers’, their lovers’ or their husbands’ bodies, which refract the Other, these women’s bodies become porous and absorbing bodies as they attempt to reach out towards the individualistic male bodies around them, and as they vindicate the need to reinsert honesty, commitment, equality and connectedness at the core of relationships. Their experience of the body, at these moments, comes close to what Mikhail Bakhtin terms the “grotesque” or carnivalesque body (Bakhtin 1994: 228). According to Bakhtin, in medieval carnival festivities individuals experienced their bodies as “part of an endless chain of bodily life […] retain[ing] [only] the parts in which one link joins the other” (Bakhtin 1994: 234). Indeed, the metaphors of carnival and the grotesque put forth by Bakhtin seek to define a body which, rather than being individualized and closed-off, displays ambiguous lines of demarcation between inside and outside and is tied to notions of change and renewal, as was characteristic, Bakhtin claims, of the pre-modern understanding of the body. According to Bakhtin, carnival built a “second life outside the officialdom which presented a different understanding of the person and of human relations, in which all medieval people participated” (Bakhtin 1994: 197). Carnival was sensuous and playful in character and it “was the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter” (Bakhtin 1994: 198), cancelling any distinction “between actors and spectators” (Bakhtin 1994: 198) since everyone participated, and blurring the frontiers between “art and life” (Bakhtin 1994: 198). If the official liturgy aimed at reinstating rank and the established order and to celebrate truths “already established” (Bakhtin 1994: 199), asserting that all was “unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political and moral values, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1994: 199), carnival festivities emerged as its

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necessary counterpart, almost as the inseparable twin of official, ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonial. Bakhtin detects a utopian potential in the carnivalesque or grotesque understanding of the body, because it might allow for human relations based on mutual dependency, sharing and incorporation of the Other. Carnival festivities, Bakhtin claims, represented the people’s aspirations of “community, freedom, equality and abundance” (Bakhtin 1994: 199) and they, therefore, “had to be tolerated and even legalized outside the official sphere” (Bakhtin 1994: 199). During carnival, as Bakhtin sees it, “people were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations” (Bakhtin 1994: 198). These relations, however, were “not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced” (Bakhtin 1994: 198), primarily in a bodily manner. Crimp’s women, similarly, move towards an understanding of the self as non-compartmentalized or cut off from others, as more empathic. In The Country Rebecca is unexpectedly linked to Richard’s unempathic body through his blood smearing her face. In opposition to Richard’s body, which refracts the Other, hers is now completely traversed by the Other, by the need to reach out towards Richard. In Cruel and Tender, Amelia masochistically clenches her fist around broken glass in order to refashion for herself a primeval identity that will allow her to channel the aggressive drives of her body, its refusal to bear passively her husband’s unfaithfulness and involvement in a war on terror abroad. Amelia thus makes visible the symbolic violence of which she is a victim, giving it physical presence through her blood. This allows her to reject the expectations of those around her – specifically, that she comply with her husband’s treatment of her in exchange for material comfort and prestige – almost as though she were reborn for “new, purely human, relations” (Bakhtin 1994: 198). Amelia kills herself at the end of the play, but the text suggests she is in a way reborn in Laela, to whom she passes on her utopian desire for purer social relations, unpolluted by rank, privilege and hypocrisy. Views such as that propounded by Descartes, in which there is a difficulty to integrate mind and body, rationalism and emotions, were prompted by changes in Western culture as it evolved into fully-fledged capitalism. The authority of the church diminished, and self-regulation, as has been argued above, increasingly replaced external authority and discipline. The scission between the private and public realms was consolidated, and the self began to be considered a private, intimate space of interiority, constituted by its capacity for reason, divorcing itself from ‘irrational’ bodily drives, unproductive from a capitalist perspective. As the idea of the individual with a series of ‘private’ interests to defend emerged, the body also began to be understood as a closed, smooth surface, and this view replaced previous understandings of the body which considered

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it in more “grotesque” (Bakhtin 1994: 228) terms. With modernity, instead, the body becomes more closed to others, fears of contamination emerge and “stronger taboos are placed around bodies and the substances that pass between them” (Burkitt 51): The closed and rationalized Cartesian body is therefore severed from is sensual connections with the world and its collective associations with other beings. Alone and in perpetual doubt of sensate experience and the certainty of any knowledge, the self is plagued with that ontological insecurity so redolent of modernity […]. No longer is there the hearty collective laugh of the carnival to dispel fear; no longer the ambivalence surrounding bodily existence and the dividing lines of the inner and outer. The person of rationalism and classicism is firmly encased in his or her closed bodily shell, alone with his or her doubt, uncertainty and fear. (Burkitt 49)

With modernity, then, the body was trimmed off of everything which “protrude [d], bulge[d], sproute[d] or branche[d] off” (Bakhtin 1994: 235) – in short, of everything which took place at an inter-subjective zone of contact with other bodies. All that had previously taken place “on the confines of the body and the outer world” (Bakhtin 1994: 234), such as eating, defecating or copulating, were eliminated from the new bourgeois, capitalist body through self-discipline. Carnival, instead, was “hostile to all that was immortalized and completed” and took place beyond barriers of “caste, property, profession and age” (Bakhtin 1994: 199). It was a celebration, therefore, of the interstitial space between self and Other, of their points of intersection and contact. In any culture whatsoever, as Jean Baudrillard puts it in “The Finest Consumer Object: The Body”, “the mode of organization of the relation to the body reflects the mode of organization of the relation to things and of social relations” (2005: 277). In late capitalist society, bodies are first and foremost understood as a field of “narcissistic investment” (Baudrillard 2005: 277) for the attainment of status or of a series of precepts of happiness which are supposedly achieved by applying to the body a consumer-object logic. Such a view encourages the understanding of the subject as a subject of property, individualized and selfenclosed – in Burkitt’s terms, as an “armoured body” (Burkitt 50). Thus, in a capitalist society, “the general status of private property applies also to the body, to the way we operate socially with it” (Baudrillard 2005: 277). Understood in this manner, the body is conceived as a surface that refracts the Other while it invests in self-image and in property. Crimp’s plays directly challenge the prevailing understanding of the body, reinstating a more open, ‘carnivalesque’ body that challenges both the subject of property and the mind-body dualism of Cartesian thought. As they collapse, Crimp’s women reinsert the body as fluid in opposition to the radical individu-

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alism their husbands (quite literally) ‘embody’, in a gesture that seeks to link the body again to the sensuous connections it keeps with other bodies, to its essential vulnerability and dependency on other human beings. In this sense, Crimp’s theatre shows affinities with Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double (1938), a critique of the Western tradition and its scission between the body or materiality and the word or abstraction, from the point of view of how it resulted in the privileging of text-based theatre, or of the written word over the spoken word. Artaud believed that Western theatre had traditionally placed too much emphasis on the text and the word, to the detriment of movement and bodily expression. According to Artaud, Western culture has tended to privilege verticality, abstraction and the word, thus erasing the concrete materiality of the body and of relationships. Artaud argued for a ‘theatre of cruelty’ which, according to him, would lead the individual back to her/his archaic, material roots, stripping her/him of social fictions and ideology. Crimp’s women reconstitute the body in terms of empathy, challenging the abstractions of discourse that legitimize unequal allocations of profit and differences in importance between human beings. They reinsert the need to value each human being in her/his essential materiality, specificity, connectedness and indebtedness to others. They reinstate Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘grotesque body’, a metaphor for a body which does not seek to get rid of its own abject aspects by projecting them outside itself but rather asserts its earthly character and its interdependence with other beings. Most importantly, Crimp’s women’s new sense of self reconfigures the body, in Lévinas’s terms, as inherently responsible, as being there primarily and essentially for the Other, thus re-valorizing ideas of sharing which, in a late capitalist context that conceives the body as an object, are usually dismissed as signifying dependency and lack of personal drive. Crimp might at first sight appear to relegate irrationality to women, and thus to replicate the Enlightenment division between mind and body, reason and impulse, male and female. Yet on closer inspection, he actually shows that women are able to become the bearers of a new ethics through a process of relating with vulnerability – their own and that of others – thanks to the position their gender affords them. As women, they are socially expected to stay in close touch with the minutiae of life – children, their emotional upbringing, or the particularities of quotidian life. In contrast, most of Crimp’s men do not undergo the same process because they are seen to exist on the ‘male’ side of the same gender coordi-

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nates and thus linked to the maintenance of a more symbolic identity based on status and power.³² Crimp’s characters thus ‘embody’ aspects of social problems; they are selective representations of specific social tendencies. It should not be inferred from Crimp’s plays that all males are duplicitous, while all females have the potential to envision and work towards a new ethics. Crimp’s characters are not naturalistic – they do not reproduce, mirror-like, readily identifiable aspects of social relations. They are rather representations of the most ‘obscure’, contradictory aspects of late capitalism, that is, of the aspects of society which ‘do not work’ or ‘fit together’. Thus, Crimp’s theatre is symbolic, that is, a partial, purposefully biased representation of the social tendencies it seeks to reveal. It is a theatre that satirizes in order to better reveal. The body, then, is the focal point of Crimp’s dramaturgy of collapse, the crucial locus upon which issues of gender, inequality and the violence of discourse come to bear, but it is also the utopian site for a reconstruction of ethics. Women’s bodies become, after a process of detachment from late capitalist, propertybased subjectivity, ethical bodies on stage, they actually ‘become’ the subjective truth they embody and seek to reconstruct. They attest to the fact that every single body, in its particular journey towards experience, is the site of an unrepeatable subjectivity mattering in and for itself alongside any other body. This is the truth the testimony knows; namely, her radical similarity – similarity in difference – to any other body. In conclusion, then, particularly through the female characters, Crimp’s plays explore how bodies, by coming in touch with the experience of pain and suffering, are able to develop concrete, local responses to violence and to redefine humanity in the wake of the ethical impasse the Holocaust has signified. Crimp’s pedagogy of collapse and testimony thus dramatizes the process whereby a series of characters are able to become ethical bodies on stage, modelling, perhaps, an alternative for spectators.

 In The City (2008), for the first time in Crimp’s dramaturgy, it is a man who is the victim of his wife’s subjection and duplicity, part of her attempt to construct herself as a subject of status. In this sense, The City could be considered to be a re-writing of The Country and an exercise in self-questioning, where women are not portrayed as bearers of the ‘truth’ of the body. The City also stands in dialogue with The Country in that it continues to show how it is the position individuals occupy within the late capitalist system that accounts for their behaviour and subjectivity. In this case, Clair’s, the woman’s, proximity to power and status in the world of academia is greater than that of the man, Chris, who, in the play, loses his job and stands closer to the ‘smaller’ yet equally important needs of his family and household.

III Beginnings of a Dramaturgy: Violence, Memory and Retribution in The Treatment (1993)

1 Introduction: Collapse, ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ Unlike Crimp’s other plays, The Treatment is specific in its setting. It is located in New York City, which, in the Western imaginary, symbolizes a thoroughly consumerist society and, within New York, the play is set within a media corporation – the symbol of late capitalism par excellence. ¹ The Treatment is made up of four acts, each containing from two to five different scenes. Act One presents Anne, the protagonist and a woman in her twenties who, seeking to escape a relationship of domestic violence with her abusive husband, Simon, takes a job with a media corporation, TriBeCa, where she agrees to sell her story to two executives, the couple formed by Andrew and Jennifer, who then attempt to turn it into a major film. Right from the start, it is clear that the executives aim to titillate the widest possible audience, and they soon begin to manipulate Anne’s words. The company then hires Clifford, an “elderly man” (Crimp 2000: 289) who sells dishes and household goods in the street because he has so far been unable to make a living as a playwright, as the film’s scriptwriter. The play shows how Anne becomes increasingly isolated as a consequence of the coldness of the market-driven relationships she is becoming part of and the ethical frontiers she is being asked to overlook as the executives distort her story. As Martin Middeke pithily puts it in “Fashion and the Media Age: Hyperreality in the Plays of Stephen Poliakoff”, in the state of “superficial surfeit” created by ‘the spectacle’, “human action deteriorates into the mechanical reproduction of stereotypes”, and Anne becomes a “simulacrum in a world of simulacra” (Middeke 1995: 110 – 11). Eventually, she succumbs to a state of utter disorientation and catatonia and, despite her initial resistance to the ‘spectacular’, market-driven relationships which take place within the company, Anne gradually acquiesces to Andrew’s attempts to seduce her, to the extent that, in Act Two, Scene Three she agrees to have intercourse with him. In connivance with Andrew, however, Clifford, the scriptwriter, witnesses Anne and Andrew’s sexual act in order to, as he puts it, obtain first-hand material for his script, thus acting as a voyeur of their intimate relationship. Despite her having been partly complicit in her own victimization, Anne is not able to get

 Crimp explains the play emerged out of his having been sent to New York by the Royal Court in 1991 as an exchange playwright with New Dramatists. As he puts it, “The Royal Court Theatre sent me to New York on a playwrights’ exchange at New Dramatists, so I felt I owed them a play, and if I owed them a play, maybe it should be a play set in New York, even if it was going to be a New York of my imagination” (Aragay et al. 57).

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over the incident, nor is she willing to forget the symbolic ‘rape’ Clifford’s eyes perform on her. In Act Three, Scene Four, irretrievably haunted by the introduction of violence within apparently civilized relationships, in a state of breakdown, Anne asks Simon to carry out an act of revenge and they blind Clifford by stabbing a fork into both his eyes. Finally, in Act Four, Scene Two, which takes place a year later, Anne is shown to have plunged into a state of madness. Obsessed about the act of violence she and Simon committed, she goes back to her abusive husband’s home – she is expecting a baby by him. On his part, Andrew, who started attempting to seduce Anne in Act One, is shown to have become emotionally attached to her. He refuses to attend the movie’s launch, which takes place in Act Four, Scene One, and, instead, he goes all the way to her home to reclaim her. At this stage, however, Anne has already succumbed to madness. Through Andrew’s progressive attachment to Anne, which attests to a move away from self-interest, Crimp suggests that individuals are malleable, and that just as they may adjust their ways of feeling to the requirements of the late capitalist market, positive change is possible at a personal, indeed moral level. As shall be seen, The Treatment also presesents an instance of male collapse. Andrew, who is partly the agent of Anne’s victimization, is finally shown to realize the empty core at the heart of the company’s relationships and, in Act Three, Scene Three, he attempts to leave his wife, Jennifer, in order to begin a new life with Anne. Torn between his desires on the one hand, and the economic interests his wife reminds him of on the other, Andrew is seen to be unable to leave his wife and finally collapses when, leaving the restaurant in distress, he claims that he is “sick” (Crimp 2000: 362) and “frightened” (Crimp 2000: 363). As shall be seen, his collapse attests to Andrew’s having undergone subjective change and to his desire to detach himself from the reified ‘spectacular’ relationships within the company. At the movie’s launch, which takes place in Act Four, Scene One, John, a black movie star whom Jennifer hires in order to play the male lead in the film about Anne’s life, and who eventually rises to a very influential position in the company, makes a speech which claims that quality was never sacrificed and covers up the human cost behind the company’s success. John transforms Anne’s violent collapses into tenderness-inspiring, moving moments in which she “told us her story and wept” (Crimp 2000: 372), and justifies the executives’ continuous manipulation of her story by claiming that “truth must be laid on a Procrustean bed and cut here and there until it fits” (Crimp 2000: 372). John promotes Nicky, the so far almost invisible secretary, to an important post, and after his launching speech she asks him if he really “mean[t]” (Crimp 2000: 377) what

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he said. As an answer, John says he “recall[s] nothing” (Crimp 2000: 377), and begins to massage Nicky’s shoulders, making advances on her.² Feeling oppressed by her husband, who aims to keep her totally confined, and remembering how Andrew betrayed her in setting Clifford up as a voyeur when she had intercourse with him, in Act Four, Scene Two Anne suddenly breaks into a run and escapes. Right at this point, Jennifer, who usually carries a gun because she “feels threatened” (Crimp 2000: 329), and is walking towards Anne’s home in pursuit of Andrew, shoots Anne when she runs at her threateningly, from Jennifer’s perspective. The play ends as a black, blind taxi driver takes the blinded Clifford away through the streets of New York, in an image which summarizes the play’s meaning – namely, Crimp’s critique of a society where the “blind lead the blind” (Middeke 2011: 85). The Treatment, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre on 15 April 1993, is set right after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, which led to an intensification of the ‘spectacle’ and consumerism.³ The tearing down of the Wall, indeed, led to a rapid transition from the social-oriented type of capitalism practiced since the end of World War II to a type of capitalism increasingly based on laissez-faire, neo-liberal, corporate-led policies – from the disciplinary societies of industrial capitalism to the emergent societies of control. In The Treatment, Crimp draws on the Situationist legacy of British playwriting, practiced in the 1970s, amongst others, by playwrights such as Howard Brenton, and adapts it to his dramaturgy of collapse and audience interpellation, in order to make spectators aware of the ‘darker’ side of late capitalist democratic societies.⁴

 Note that, when Act Four, Scene Two begins, the stage directions indicate that Anne, who is now in her husband’s apartment and has been rendered completely submissive and docile, “occupies exactly the same position as Nicky in the previous scene, sitting in a chair” (Crimp 2000: 378). The stage directions specify that “unlike Nicky, [Anne] is tied to the chair and her mouth is taped shut” (Crimp 2000: 378) – a clear indication that, in allowing herself to be seduced by John, Nicky may well end up occupying the same utterly oppressed position as Anne.  In an interview for the Independent, Crimp pointed out that “The Treatment deals with the idea that markets and aspects of business are like the air you breathe; the characters don’t really have the strength to bring anything to bear against it, like they might have done ten or twenty years ago” (Donald 35).  Brenton participated in the touring company Portable Theatre, which was founded by Tony Bicât and David Hare in 1969, and, as Megson puts it, “concentrated largely on the analysis of bourgeois spectacles of disintegration” (2004: 21). G.D. White claims that Situationist influences had a clear effect on a number of English theatre practitioners besides Brenton, such as “Trevor Griffiths, Chris Wilkinson, Heathcote Williams, and Snoo Wilson, and to some extent other writers such as David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff” (180).

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Debord and the Situationists, who were inspired by the revolutionary events of the student revolt of May ’68 in France, claimed that public life was becoming increasingly dominated by the image, which was rendering individuals passive and docile towards the social injustices the system itself generated. The ‘spectacle’, as Debord defined it in his book The Society of Spectacle, originally published in French in 1967, is “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord 12). And he adds, “the spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep” (Debord 18). It is, in particular, through the three main moments of collapse Anne, the protagonist, undergoes, that Crimp seeks to interpellate and empower spectators into “shattering the spectacular screen […] thus access[ing] a forbidden realm of ‘authentic’ experience” (Megson 20), thereby emerging out of the values the ‘spectacle’ promotes.⁵ Anne’s first moment of collapse takes place in Act One, Scene Four, as she suddenly leaves the Japanese restaurant in which Andrew is trying to seduce her and, in a state of “catatonia” (Megson 19), takes a taxi in order to meet Simon in Central Park. The taxi, which is driven by a blind black man, eventually initiates a goalless movement through the streets of New York, symbolic of Anne’s state of mental unrest after her encounter with the executives. In this scene, Crimp adapts the strategy of la dérive, inspired in the Modernist figure of the ‘stroller’ or flâneur, to his emergent dramaturgy of collapse and audience interpellation, precisely in order to invite spectators to resist the ‘docility’ generated by the ‘spectacle’. As Peter S. Donaldson explains in “‘In Fair Verona’: Media, Spectacle and Performance in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet”, la dérive introduces a “goalless and spontaneous walking in the city […] involving the cultivation of sensitivity to energies and traces of an urban experience prior to or resistant to the regime of the spectacle” (Donaldson 70). La dérive, then, is the strategy through which Crimp expresses Anne’s collapse in the face of the duplicitous, narcissistic relationships the ‘spectacle’ endorses. Anne leaves the ‘noise’ of the city and, searching for a space of intimacy, attempts to recover her own ‘au-

 In “‘The Spectacle is Everywhere’: Tracing the Situationist Legacy in British Playwriting Since 1968”, Megson claims that the playwrights who belong to the ‘in-yer-face’ trend which began in the 1990s – such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill or Patrick Marber – were in fact also reacting, like Crimp, to the intensification of laissez-faire capitalism which started after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of the radical, violent strategies they use in order to shake the complacency and voyeurism of a media-saturated audience do in fact resemble, and are possibly inspired by, Situationist strategies. They could, therefore, like Crimp, be described as “post-Situationist” playwrights (Megson 19).

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thenticity’ or subjective desires. As Donaldson puts it, “one might think of the strategy of la dérive as a practice that reflects the search for the tattered map of the real in the hyperreal urban grid that has all but effaced it” (Donaldson 72). In Act Two, Scene Three, as Anne’s involvement with the values of the executives increases, she undergoes her second moment of collapse, as she attempts to tell Andrew about the dehumanization and loneliness she is experiencing as a consequence of the individualistic relationships generated within the corporation. In this case, then, collapse directly points to the human cost behind the laissez-faire model of ‘progress’. Here Crimp dramatizes the numb catatonia Situationists claimed was the characteristic state of the contemporary individual, while at the same time he adapts this concept to his dramaturgy of testimony in an attempt to interpellate spectators as positive witnesses of Anne’s pain. In the same scene, Clifford and Andrew connive with one another to have Clifford witness Andrew’s sexual encounter with Anne. Anne, on her part, agrees to have sex with Andrew because, as she puts it later in Act Three, Scene One, she was “lonely” (Crimp 2000: 351). Crimp shows how, through policies of rationalization and optimization, relationships have emptied themselves out of any ethical requirements, and highlights how all of the characters are involved in the violence of modernity; they all exist in a ‘grey zone’ of complicity. It is precisely in order to claim for a return of a radical sense of discrimination between right and wrong – jeopardized by the duplicity and passivity generated by the ‘spectacle’ – that Crimp inserts Anne’s violent fourth collapse in Act Three, Scene Four, her ‘in-yer-face’ blinding of Clifford’s ‘spying eyes’, a venting of aggression which is no more than the revenant or returning ghost of her authentic desires and subjectivity, coming back furiously and belatedly in order to reinstate privacy, ethics, and Anne’s – the woman’s – control of her own body and image within a late capitalist economy that operates through ‘spectacle’. Anne’s onstage, ‘in-yer-face’ act of violence, which works in the manner of, in Debord’s words, a détournement, seeks to involve the audience in a pedagogy of resistance. As Megson explains in “The Spectacle is Everywhere’: Tracing the Situationist Legacy in British Playwriting Since 1968”, détournement is a typically Situationist strategy which “enacts an affront to expectations, a ‘division’ from orthodox ways of seeing, a ‘restoration’ of those contradictory qualities in ideas which may have been effaced and assimilated – it is a ‘style’ which seeks subversively to precipitate the unexpected” (Megson 21). Indeed, Crimp introduces a familiar, domestic object, namely the fork Clifford sold Simon in Act One,

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Scene Two, and uses it in a completely defamiliarized manner as an instrument of retributive violence.⁶ Through their act of violence, which, as will be seen, can be considered a ‘terrorist’ act, Anne and Simon attempt to, symbolically, assert their subjectivity and ‘true’ desires, which have so far been channelled into socially productive drives through the ‘spectacle’ and consumerism. Most importantly, Anne’s and Simon’s ‘in-yer-face’ act of violence is staged in order to spur resistant thought from the audience regarding the values and modes of feeling of the ‘society of spectacle’, as well as to induce audience members to question their own role as spectators. As an ‘in-yer-face’ act, Anne’s violent collapse intends to jolt the audience out of their position as voyeurs, a position in which they had previously been cast by the play itself, inviting them to identify with the voyeuristic Clifford. Through the blinding, spectators, like Clifford, are suddenly deprived of their power as potential voyeurs of the ‘spectacle’. Thus, Crimp challenges the audience’s position of comfort with regard to the violence on stage. Through the particularized pointing to Clifford’s eyes, the eyes of the ‘bad witness’, Crimp aims to prompt spectators to engage in a reflection regarding the significance of positive witnessing, so that they may become positive witnesses of the violence they may observe in their own, perhaps also corporate, environment. Spectators should, indeed, distance themselves from the voyeuristic Clifford, who has been a ‘bad witness’ to Anne, and eventually identify with Andrew, who in Act Four, Scene Two, as mentioned above, becomes a ‘positive witness’ – albeit belatedly. In the context of complicity with the violence of late capitalism which all characters share, Andrew stands for the common man who is at first complicit with the values of an unjust system, yet subsequently learns to empathize with the Other – Anne – through seeing her suffer. The fact that Anne chooses to blind Clifford, the passive ‘bystander’ of her victimization, is Crimp’s attempt, as shall be seen, to foreground the crucial role of the witness in contemporary, post-Holocaust societies. In late capitalist societies, ‘positive witnessing’ may be an important vehicle for social change, in a context where power no longer has any definite seat, but rather ‘Empire’, and the violence it exerts for its maintenance, are spread throughout the social body. At a different level of interpretation, through détournement, particularly if the violence is staged in a non-realistic, stylized manner that prompts the audience to reflect on the many resonances and implications of the blinding, The  As G.D. White puts it, the aim of the Situationists, as their name indicates, was to construct ‘situations’, that is to say, they aimed at the “concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality” (178), which might counteract the ‘numbness’ in which the ‘spectacle’ leaves individuals.

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Treatment may also be considered to be a powerful feminist rewriting of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (ca. 429), one in which, unlike in Sophocles’s play, where a man blinds his own ‘vanity’ after having trespassed a series of limits, it is Anne, a woman, who points to the self-aggrandized subjectivities late capitalism produces by blinding Clifford in an act of retribution. Anne’s violent collapse symbolically represents Crimp’s conviction that women need to regain full control of their own body and of the circulation of their own image in a society which uses the female body as a lure to entice the male gaze, channelling it in ways which thoroughly objectify women. Détournement, which aims to upturn the audience’s ‘spectacular’, conventional modes of seeing, ultimately seeks to engage spectators, by foregrounding Clifford’s eyes, in a reflection on the deeply harmful narcissism encouraged by late capitalist, laissez-faire structures. As shall be discussed, Clifford is portrayed as a ‘banal man’ through whom Crimp inserts his play in the contemporary debate regarding the ‘banality’ of evil, triggered by Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963/1994). Crimp suggests, in the same vein as Arendt in her analysis of the figure of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, that it is contemporary institutions themselves which are ultimately accountable for the appearance of irresponsible, disciplined individuals like Clifford, who are thoroughly unaware of the unethical nature of their ‘work’. The Treatment thus denounces the ‘banal’ subjectivities which are endorsed by the late capitalist system, and Anne’s and Simon’s violent blinding of Clifford may be read as an atempt to ‘castrate’ one such ‘banal’ subject. Ultimately, the play can be read – in fact, it all but requires to be read – in the context of the wider debate on the issue of retribution in the face of historical crimes of barbarism, suggesting as it does a parallelism between contemporary forms of symbolic violence and the fundamental twentieth-century crisis of barbarism. Crimp takes pains to dramatize the transition which was taking place, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and at the time he wrote the play, from capitalism to late capitalism, or from the traditional disciplinary societies of industrial capitalism towards the newly emergent societies of control. In order to show the audience that such a transition involved a significant change regarding the way in which individuals relate to one another and the way in which they perceive their identities, Crimp places Anne at the crossroads between both societies, which allows him to uncover the different type of oppression each implies for women. Anne’s abusive, domineering husband, Simon, who keeps her locked up in their home, exemplifies the older, patriarchal, disciplinary societies. Andrew, on the other hand, the company’s boss who seduces her, embodies the apparently more attractive lures of consumerist societies of control. Thus, bewitched by the

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attractions of her new life with the media executives, Anne initially casts Simon away. When he warns her that she will be corrupted by the executives, Anne, in her attempt to liberate herself from him, replies that perhaps she “want[s] to be corrupted” (Crimp 2000: 323), since she has “spent her life with [him] behind a steel door” (Crimp 2000: 323; emphasis original). Yet it is clearly implied that in seeking to liberate herself from patriarchy, Anne plunges into the more diffuse, impersonal type of gender oppression characteristic of the new societies of control. If Simon’s control of Anne is dramatized as being ‘directly’ exerted upon her body – in Act Four, Scene Two, for instance, when Andrew comes to her rescue, Anne appears tied to a chair with tape on her mouth – Andrew represents a less localized, more diffuse type of gender oppression, which is not so much a consequence of a gendered social organization founded upon productive needs, as in industrial capitalism, but of a flexible global market which continually needs to be enhanced and is allowed, through laissez-faire policies, to go all lengths as regards the female body in order to turn it into an ‘image’ that sells. Although written as a “relentless satire” (Middeke 2011: 86), then, The Treatment can also be read as a tragedy that dramatizes the inexorable onset of corporate-led societies of control – which is what Anne’s four different breakdowns crucially attempt to symbolically arrest – culminating in the production of Anne’s docile body – an individualistic, ‘female-gendered’ body of property and possession. In this sense, it may be claimed that in Crimp’s The Treatment both breakdown and violence seek to arrest the full entry into the newly emergent societies of control, and therefore also to ‘stop’ an idea of progress based on the laissezfaire model of maximum benefit, as well as the inertial character of the exploitative relationships this model sets in motion. Indeed, both through her first two moments of breakdown and through her third collapse or belated act of ‘in-yerface’ violence, Anne seeks to articulate her resistance to being ‘transformed’ into a docile individual, and the play attempts to make the audience experience the dissociation between technological and material improvements and moral or ethical development.

2 The ‘Spectacle’ Filled our Pockets: Duplicity, Sexism and the Market Act One, Scene Four, indeed, presents Anne’s first breakdown, which takes place after Andrew and Jennifer take Anne to a Japanese restaurant in Act One, Scene Three. Breakdown is Anne’s reaction to the type of relationship the executives

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keep with one another, governed by the ‘spectacle’, duplicity and narcissism. In the restaurant scene, which precedes her collapse, and taking advantage of Jennifer’s delay, Andrew begins to try to seduce Anne, in order to depoliticize her as a subject. Anne feels progressively invaded and ‘colonized’ by Andrew’s market interests, as he seeks to involve her in the same type of duplicity he is participating in, while offering her a good salary so that she may forget the ethical boundaries the corporation regularly oversteps: Anne sips the wine. A waitress enters with dishes. Andrew lowers his voice. I love you, Anne. Waitress K? Andrew K is mine. Waitress G? Andrew G is for Jennifer. She’s sitting there. (The empty seat.) Waitress F? Anne doesn’t react. F? F? (Waitress puts the dish F in front of Anne and goes.) Anne I’m sorry? You love me? Andrew Yes, Anne. Yes, I do. She laughs softly in embarrassment. Please don’t laugh […] I’m talking about loving a person’s soul as revealed through their eyes. You have the eyes of the city. (He runs his fingertips over her eyes and down her cheek.) Please don’t mention this to my wife. […] Andrew (sotto voce) I want you, Anne. Jennifer Could we just have the check, please. (Crimp 2000: 296 – 303; emphases original)

Anne defies Andrew’s advances, aware that he is trying to render her docile to his interests while luring her into accepting the company’s conditions, which are shown in the play to lead to the distortion and ‘selling out’ of the female body according to the precepts of maximum economic benefit and of the ‘spectacle’. In the scene, the violence of market interests is dramatized as an almost physical colonization that encroaches upon Anne: Andrew […] Jennifer is my wife. Anne I didn’t know that. Andrew You’re not eating. Anne I’m sorry? Andrew You’re not / eating. […] A moment passes. Andrew dips food in the sauce and holds it up to her lips. What process?

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Andrew Anne Andrew Anne She knocks

Eat. I’m not a child. But you should eat. I’m not a child! the chopsticks out of his hand. (quietly) I don’t want to be loved. That’s not why I came. She takes a cigarette. Andrew lights it. (Crimp 2000: 297– 98; emphases original)

The executives, indeed, lure Anne with promises of a materially easy life, symbolized by Andrew’s attempt to place food in Anne’s mouth, against which Anne reacts violently. Andrew’s continuous advances progressively leave Anne with no physical space. Through the scene, Crimp dramatizes what Bauman, in Liquid Life, labels the “ubiquitous and obtrusive ‘marketization’ of life process” (Bauman 2006: 88) taking place in societies of control. In “Taking a Bite of the Big Apple: Martin Crimp’s The Treatment”, Vicky Angelaki revealingly argues that, “should Anne consume Andrew’s feelings, this will consequently lead to her more willing collaboration, guaranteeing her acquiescence to Andrew and Jennifer’s vision of the film” (Angelaki 2008b: 263). The scene, indeed, reproduces both male and female myths of behaviour which the mass media help circulate and reinforce through the identities they distribute. Andrew tries to feed Anne in the mouth, to which Anne replies it makes her feel like a “child” (Crimp 2000: 298). Andrew further tells her that such a moment – the moment of her joining the company and of being seduced by a man such as himself – must be “the moment she’s always dreamed of” (Crimp 2000: 302). Anne, however, continues to resist such ‘docilization’. Going against the grain of what her culture teaches her to desire, she later snaps at Andrew, “I am not interested in dreams. […] Dreams are just circular” (Crimp 2000: 302). Thus, Anne violently rejects the premises and lures of the ‘spectacle’. Andrew’s treatment of Anne dramatizes, in a metaphorical manner, the overall situation of individuals in developed countries. As Baudrillard puts it in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (2002/2003), written in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ‘spectacle’ sets its supposed ‘beneficiaries’ in a “relentless situation of receiving, always receiving […] Not now from God or nature, but through a technical system of generalized exchange and general gratification. Everything is potentially given to us, and we are entitled to everything” (Baudrillard 2003: 102– 103). Anne rejects this; she seems to intuit that this “universal availability, this definitive fulfilment” (Baudrillard 2003: 103) characteristic of late capitalist societies is not truly for free. In particular, Andrew’s behaviour invokes a series of myths of femininity according to which he expects Anne will

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self-regulate, and which will lead her to accept the enterprise model of life they offer her. Indeed, the whole scene of the Japanese restaurant, which revolves around the image of Anne being fed in the mouth, metaphorically suggests the duality of late capitalist societies, which offer money – a life of material comfort – on condition that individuals will turn a blind eye to the ethical sacrifices and the social injustices they may observe taking place around them. In this context, breakdown and the irrational are the means through which Anne attempts to resist her full entry into a late capitalist structure. She refuses to be dazzled and benumbed by the reified relationships she has come into contact with and attempts to detach herself from the model of femininity according to which she feels she is being asked to self-regulate.

2.1 La Dérive: Marginal Spaces of Resistance Following the restaurant scene, in Act One, Scene Four, entitled “Taxi!”, Anne leaves Jennifer and Andrew and takes a taxi, claiming that she’s “going to the Park” because she needs “space to think” (Crimp 2000: 303). The taxi, however, is driven by a blind driver who needs her directions and who tells her right from the start that the situation within the taxi is “One of trust” (Crimp 2000: 307) – she will even have to tell him the fare. He adds that, at night, he “dream[s] that [he] can see” (Crimp 2000: 307), and asks her decontextualized questions on the nature of love: Anne Taxi! Taxi! The taxi driver appears. Central Park West. […] Driver D’you know the way? Anne Right. OK. Are you an immigrant? Driver I’ve lived in this city all of my life. Anne Uh-huh. My apologies. […] Driver Just tell me when we reach Abingdon. Anne OK. Driver I’d appreciate that. Are you meeting someone in the Park? Anne I’m sorry? Driver Someone maybe that you love. Someone maybe whose hand you will hold, under the trees. Anne I’m not meeting anybody. In fact I want I need to be on my own.

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Blast of horn. Anne OK so this is Abingdon. (Listen, you’ve just gone through a red / light.) Driver Someone whose life maybe is dearer to you than your own. Are we on Eighth? Anne Yes. Just go straight uptown. Driver Are you sure we’re / on Eighth? […] Anne Do you have a visual problem? Is your sight impaired? Are you blind? Driver I was born blind. Right up there on a Hundred Twenty-Ninth Street. Today you would operate, but back then / nobody even knew. Anne (intense panic) Oh fuck. Oh Jesus Christ. Driver it was a medical condition. Because I was born out of wedlock and my mother was just a child they thought this blindness was a judgement from God. / They thought Anne Let me out. Driver it was a moral issue not a health issue. Today it would take just a simple operation at birth but she was a poor woman and / she had sinned. Anne STOP THE CAB! LET ME OUT OF THIS CAB! Silence. The taxi has stopped. Anne recovers her breath. Very slowly the driver turns his face towards her. Driver Is this where you want to get out? ’ Or drops. They just put drops in your eyes at birth. Very slowly he turns back again. You have to tell me the fare. That’s the situation here. One of trust. Some nights I have dreams about those drops. I dream that I can see. I dream about light which I have never seen. Anne Just drive on. Driver Don’t you want to get out? ’ I thought you were afraid. I thought you wanted to / get out. Anne Just drive on to the Park. (Crimp 2000: 304– 07; emphases original)

In this scene, and throughout Act One, Crimp has recourse to the Situationist strategy of la dérive, which he merges with his dramaturgy of collapse, based on rendering the fourth wall fuzzy in an attempt to interpellate spectators as positive witnesses of a character’s pain. As Peter S. Donaldson describes it, la dérive offers resistance to the myths evoked by the mass media and the ‘society of spectacle’ by introducing, as noted above, a “goalless and spontaneous walking in the city” (Donaldson 69). Anne’s search for a physical space in the city where she may have a chance to think is an indication that she is also looking for a space within herself, that she is seeking ways to resist the reified tendencies of the system, including the values the executives have confronted her with.

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As Donaldson puts it, “deriving, perhaps, from the persona of the hypersensitive urban stroller in Baudelaire and other Symbolist poets […] [la dérive] involve[s] the cultivation of sensitivity to energies and traces of an urban experience prior to or resistant to the regime of the spectacle” (Dondaldson 70). Through the strategy of la dérive, Crimp introduces Anne to a subworld, that of the taxi driver and Central Park, that allows him to explore spaces which may be outside the regime of the ‘spectacle’. Anne’s disorientation and despair is aroused by having everything available to her, while she remains oblivious to her own true desires. As already noted, the strategy of la dérive is deployed together with a pedagogy of audience interpellation, as though Crimp was seeking to reach his audience at an intimate, immediate, barely conscious level. Jean-Pierre Ryngaert and Julie Sermon argue this is characteristic of contemporary theatre. As they put it, “the [playwright’s] unconscious seems to be the source of certain verbal messages which characters sometimes address directly to the reader’s [or spectator’s] unconscious, as though skipping the rules of theatre” (Ryngaert and Sermon 141).⁷ In this scene, therefore, Crimp rehearses the key technique on which his dramaturgy of testimony will be based, namely, audience interpellation, effected by ‘cutting through’ the fourth wall through the indeterminate, metaphorical language of collapse. The conversation Anne has with the taxi driver, which verges on the absurd, suggests that Anne’s ‘docilization’ and psychic deterioration has already begun, as the fragmentation Anne experiences could be claimed to signify her advancing madness and to prefigure her subsequent, more serious moments of collapse. In fact, the taxi driver could be said to encompass the different voices of Anne’s fragmented consciousness, as he presents her with a series of paradoxes which, at the same time, work like riddles or “objects of interpretation” (Zimmermann 2002: 117), which the audience is invited to decode, in order to, like Anne, try to envision alternative forms of identity and happiness to those endorsed by the regime of the ‘spectacle’, as well as to, if possible, ‘see through’ available modes of subjectification.⁸

 “[…] c’est bien l’inconscient qui serait la source de certaines coulees verbales et le personage s’adresserait alors directemement à l’inconscient du lecteur, comme en passant par-dessus les lois du theatre”.  The “objects of interpretation” (Zimmermann 2002: 117) Crimp offers the audience through his dramaturgy of collapse and testimony are creatively expanded and elaborated upon in Attempts on her Life, where they take the form of linguistic ready-mades, clearly inspired in Marcel Duchamp’s visual ready-mades, as will be seen below.

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The driver is physically blind yet symbolically far-seeing, while Clifford is symbolically blind and needs to be literally blinded in order to see better. The driver explains that he was “born blind. Right up there on Hundred TwentyNinth Street” (Crimp 2000: 306; emphasis original). Despite the superstitious constraints which harmed his life, however, at night the taxi driver dreams that he “can see” (Crimp 2000: 307), “I dream about light which I have never seen” (Crimp 2000: 307). The taxi driver’s urgent, irrepressible desire to see, which is carried to absurd lengths, aims to make Anne – and by extension, the audience – also wish to ‘see beyond’ what comes to them as ready-made discourses, patterned forms of behaviour, and a life devoted to the pursuit of material comfort and self-promotion. From this perspective, Anne jumps into the taxi in order to recover her own self, that is, the ‘I’ which, in late capitalist societies, is engulfed in forms of subjectification and mediated notions of success that encroach upon and colonize the subject. The taxi driver also reminds Anne and the audience of the real nature of love, so that both may separate it from the kinds of duplicity, seduction, and flattery Crimp has presented earlier. As the driver puts it, “Are you meeting someone in the Park? […] Someone whose life maybe is dearer to you than your own” (Crimp 2000: 305). The driver, that is, points out that love implies true disinterest and ethical commitment, that it is a holistic feeling in which the self gives its own core away completely for the benefit of the loved being. What either Simon or Andrew are offering Anne is clearly not love. The driver’s questions, then, aim to invite both Anne and the audience into a reflection regarding the narcissistic and individualistic modes of feeling and relating characteristic of ‘societies of spectacle’, which Jennifer and Andrew embody. The driver trusts individuals’ fundamental good will – “You have to tell me the fare. That’s the situation here. One of trust” (Crimp 2000: 307) – and he ‘intuits’ the streets and directions of a city which he claims to know like the back of his hand. As he tells the blinded Clifford in the play’s last scene, “I think it is Canal Street. It feels like Canal Street” (Crimp 2000: 386; emphasis added). As mentioned earlier, then, when Anne takes the taxi the audience finds itself in a sub-world which may well represent Anne’s mind, as she is in a state of shock where different, conflicting discourses – the outward modes of subjectification put forward by the executives and her more authentic, more ethical, subjective voices – struggle for prominence.⁹ Through the driver’s speeches, com-

 In Face to the Wall, as shall be seen below, Crimp depicts a similar situation, this time recreating the stage as though it was the male unconscious, with the different characters representing different ‘voices’ in Speaker 1’s head.

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bined with the Situationist strategy of la dérive, Crimp is rehearsing the type of communication with spectators that will characterize his subsequent dramaturgy of testimony, where the audience is relentlessly interpellated and impelled to ‘fill in’ the characters’ indeterminate language. Testimony is born out the playwright’s urgent need to denounce late capitalist society’s contradictions or, as Ryngaert and Sermon put it, out of the playwright’s desire to speak directly to the audience, which leads Crimp in this case to “economise with any form of fiction, as though the usual artifices of theatre prevented the proximity with the reader or the spectator” (Ryngaert and Sermon 141).¹⁰ The taxi driver represents a space set apart from the “catatonia” (Megson 17) and “generalised autism” (Megson 19) Debord saw as characterizing the ‘society of spectacle’, from which Anne seeks to move away in order to ‘think’. Because he is black and blind, both his race and the grotesque character of his situation satirically and ironically suggest the marginal character of the spaces which stand outside the regime of the ‘spectacle’ in such an incipient, late capitalist society.¹¹ The world of the taxi driver, however, is by no means idealized. It is, as can be noted through the dialogue, pervaded by values which are so radically opposed to those of the executives which verge on the dramatically absurd and grotesque. Act One, Scene Four, then, is all about contrasting two different realities – the marginal space of the taxi and the park versus the world of the executives – in order to stir the audience’s desire for other possible worlds. It is through Crimp’s dramaturgy of collapse, that is, by doing away with the fourth wall and ‘speaking’ directly and satirically to the audience, that Crimp stimulates the audience’s capacity to imagine new ‘worlds’ and recesses of the individual which remain unexplored in the context of a late capitalist form of production. Like the Situationists, then, Crimp “mount[s] a sustained attack on the stunted desires proffered by capitalist society and the mechanisms by which it impair [s] the expression of authentic desires” (Baum 25).

 “L’effet de reel recherché dans et à travers la relation fait l’économie de toute forme de fiction, comme si les artifices habituels du theatre empêchaient la proximité et l’intimité avec le lecteur et le spectateur”.  Crimp refuses to simplify his play in terms of both race and gender. Although the black taxi driver seems to stand outside the market-driven values of the corporation, the other African American character, John, the black actor whom Jennifer hires for the company, turns out to be an extreme embodiment of late capitalist modes of behaviour. Andrew is finally morally unable to attend John’s inauguration speech in Act Four, Scene One, rejecting the hypocrisy which characterises the corporation. Jennifer, instead, who is a victim of Andrew’s duplicity, is, unlike him, finally unable to detach herself from the lies on which both her life and her position in the company are based.

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The satire that pervades Act One, Scene Four clearly emanates not only from the absurdity or ‘irrational’ character of the dialogues, but particularly from the uncanny suggestion Crimp throws at the audience that such state of double-consciousness or interior struggle is in fact the metaphysical situation of the contemporary individual. It encapsulates the fragmented way in which s/he experiences her/his subjectivity as s/he seeks to self-regulate according to the myths and identities of the ‘society of spectacle’. In Satire (1977), Arthur Pollard defines the role of the satirist as that of a “kind of moral policeman […] a guardian of ideals” (Pollard 3). The best satire, that which is “surest in tone, is that which is surest in values. Satire is always acutely conscious of the difference between what things are and what they ought to be” (Pollard 3). As Sierz pithily puts it, the “blind taxi driver in The Treatment is both an entertaining ‘ironical comment on the notion of the blind seer’ and a statement about the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of the city” (Sierz 2006: 147). At the level of plot, the taxi driver functions as the ‘blind seer’ who warns Anne of the deeper reality which she cannot clearly ‘see’. Anne, indeed, does not reflect on the words of the taxi driver and she finally decides to get off at Central Park and meet Simon. In the next scene, Act Two, Scene One, then, Crimp takes the audience to the world of Central Park, where a series of actors, amongst them John, the black actor Jennifer will hire to help her run the company, are staging Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1604). Through the play-within-a-play, which is, as is well known, about the topic of domestic violence, Crimp arguably engages the audience in a deeper reflection on the type of sexism that is characteristic of disciplinary societies, and contrasts it with the more subtle gender oppression which would be characteristic of the emerging societies of control. In Act Two, Scene One, as the stage directions clearly indicate, a series of actors are performing “Act Five, Scene Two of Othello” (Crimp 2000: 319), that is, the play’s last scene. The actors are staging the moment when Emilia, Desdemona’s maid, discovers that Othello has killed Desdemona, and threatens to make the murder public, arguing she does not care about Othello’s “sword” (Crimp 2000: 320). Iago, Emilia’s husband, subsequently kills her after so that she will not openly denounce that it was Iago who actually slandered Desdemona and led Othello to believe she was unfaithful, thus precipitating Othello’s murder of Desdemona. However, before she dies Emilia shouts out and denounces Desdemona’s murder: Movie Star 2 Thou hast not half that power to do me harm As I have to be hurt. O gull! O dolt! As ignorant as dirt! Thou hast done a deed – I care not for thy sword; I’ll make thee known,

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Though I lost twenty lives. Help! help, ho! help! The Moor hath kill’d my mistress! Murder! Murder! (Crimp 2000: 320)

Like Othello and Desdemona’s relationship, Simon and Anne’s relationship is characterized by domestic violence. As explained earlier, Simon represents the type of overt gender oppression which is characteristic of disciplinary societies. Like Othello, he feels dispossessed when Anne tries to leave him, and asserts his masculinity by retaining Anne, since he feels undervalued as a worker. Both Othello and Simon are victims of class and gender forces that remain largely outside their control. When Anne tells Simon that she is not coming back, Simon “grasps her wrist” (Crimp 2000: 321) and, “hurting her” (Crimp 2000: 321), he prompts her to shout that he “LET GO OF [HER]” (Crimp 2000: 322). Desdemona’s passivity vis-à-vis Othello makes her complicit in her own death, just as Anne’s complicity with her own victimization also accounts for the increasingly violent character events take in the play. Indeed, even if Anne here seems very strong-minded about leaving Simon, she depends on him throughout the play. When Andrew tells Anne to “come away” (Crimp 2000: 352) and escape with him in Act Three, Scene One, after she collapses in front of the group of executives, Anne surprisingly answers that she does not want “to be loved” (Crimp 2000: 352). She asks Simon to blind Clifford for her, and it is finally Simon she returns to in the end, after the blinding. In this scene, Anne believes that, in refusing to go back with Simon, she will automatically become liberated. She is unaware of the diffuse type of gender oppression that awaits her in the company. Right when she claims that she “want[s] to be corrupted” (Crimp 2000: 323) and that she has spent her life “behind a steel door” (Crimp 2000: 323; emphasis original), however, her words are uncannily received by intense cries of “Bravo!” (Crimp 2000: 323) from the audience watching Othello: Anne Simon Anne […] Simon

[…] I’m not coming back, Simon. I’m never coming back. I have my own room. Money. People who are (because they are) interested in me. Interested in corrupting you… Well perhaps I want to be corrupted. Perhaps I need to be corrupted. I’ve spent my life with you behind a steel door.

…people who feed you in the mouth, who give you money to tell them what happened to you as a child – Anne Not just as a child, Simon. They want to hear about us. They want to hear about you. (faint laugh) The distant sound of applause and cries of ‘Bravo!’ from Othello. Touch me and I’ll scream. She stands her ground smiling faintly at Simon.

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The applause and cries grow louder, carried on the wind. (Crimp 2000: 323; emphases original)

Through the play-within-the-play, then, Crimp invites the real audience to adopt an ironic distance from Anne’s naiveté. Andrew, indeed, represents the more diffuse gender oppression of the emerging late capitalist societies, which Anne is surprisingly ready to accept. Ironically and dramatically, she tells Simon she “need[s] to be corrupted”, unaware of the implications that these words carry in the context of the whole play and, in particular, of Act Two, Scene Three, when Clifford witnesses her moment of sexual intimacy with Andrew. Crimp thus alerts spectators that the patriarchal seclusion of disciplinary societies that Anne wants to run away from in this scene has led to a more intangible but perhaps more perverse type of gender oppression – one in which, under the guise of apparent liberation, women’s naked bodies are objectified by the intruding look of the ‘camera’. Ultimately, the play-within-a-play thus aims to involve spectators in a reflection regarding their own position as spectators. The fictive audience cries “Bravo!” (Crimp 2000: 323) and applauds after witnessing Desdemona’s death at the end of the play, and Crimp may in fact be suggesting that they have become voyeurs of the ‘spectacle’. Unlike the fictive audience, Crimp aims to spur the real audience to be critical of the transition towards late capitalism and to detect both Anne’s self-delusion and the contradictions dramatized in the play, rather than simply applaud at the play’s end and celebrate it for its cathartic effects. Crimp thus encourages the real audience not to remain passive but, instead, like Emilia, to become positive, active witnesses with respect to the different types of (gender) violence present in their late capitalist context.

2.2 ‘Like A Disapproving Person’: Collapse, Pretence and Alienation Anne’s second breakdown takes place in Act Two, Scene Three, in Andrew’s and Jennifer’s apartment, in the wake of her progressive involvement with the TriBeCa media corporation and with the type of individualistic, narcissistic relationships it expects individuals to hold with one another. By attempting to pass on her testimony to Andrew, Anne seeks to denounce how the company is constructing her as a subject of property and possession according to late capitalist, female-oriented models of success, and how this creates in her a continual tension or ‘double-consciousness’ – a ‘conflict of voices’ between who she would like to be and who she feels pressed to become. As she puts it to Andrew,

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who remains a passive witness of her collapse, suggesting, at best, a “change [of] hotel” (Crimp 2000: 332): Anne

[…] I’ve never travelled out of this state and yet I think I must be somehow jetlagged because I can’t sleep but I can’t really wake up – is that what it’s like? I just go from the shower to the bed and back to the shower again and my thoughts are in a loop: how I replied to the ad never thinking anything would happen – then there was the call and the limo arrived – it was so long and white and cool inside and the driver never met my eyes – then you listened to my story and we went to the restaurant where I must’ve made such a fool of myself knowing nothing about anything, what to order, how to use chopsticks, nothing, what to say to you, and I reply to the ad and the call comes, and the limo comes, and I tell my story, and we go to the restaurant and I just lie there staring at the fan which is like a person a disapproving person shaking its head going ‘no no no I don’t believe this can be you Anne no no no no no no no…’ As she chants ‘no no no…’ she moves her head slowly from side to side in imitation of the fan, her eyes shut. Andrew comes behind her and gently takes hold of her head, stilling it. Andrew We could change your hotel. She opens her eyes. She moves away, sipping the drink. (Crimp 2000: 331– 32; emphases original)

Drawing on the Situationist legacy, Crimp portrays Anne as being immersed in what Debord would call a sense of “catatonia” (qtd. in Megson 19), riveted by the ‘society of spectacle’, by the models, relationships and luxury offered by the corporation, a state from which she wants to ‘wake up’ without knowing how. Anne increasingly loses her initial resistance as she is progressively dazzled by the apparently self-legitimating power of the ‘spectacle’, which invade every dimension of her life. As she puts it, the ‘spectacle’ overcomes her suddenly with its might – “how I replied to the ad never thinking anything would happen – then there was the call and the limo arrived – it was so long and white and cool inside” (Crimp 2000: 332; emphasis original). Through Anne, then, the play denounces the ‘spectacle’ as a sign of the undisputable strength of capital. As though overpowered by an experience of the sublime, individuals cannot but bend to it. As Debord puts it, “the spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear’. The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that is has already secured by […] its monopolization of the realm of appearances” (Debord 15). Overwhelmed by the ‘spectacle’, Anne feels immediately coerced into adjusting to its law and engaging in the race to become an outstanding ‘actor’ in it, so that she may be fully accepted within the company.

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The ‘spectacle’ and the individualistic and narcissistic relationships it entails, then, turn individuals into ‘actors’, struggling to fit into a system based on status and outward appearances. As Megson points out, “the spectacle itself compels [individuals] to participate in a relentless and ostensibly meaningless competition over appearances” (Megson 19). Thus, Anne “feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere” (Megson 19). As Anne puts it, “I must’ve made such a fool of myself knowing nothing about anything, what to order, how to use chopsticks, nothing, what to say to you” (Crimp 2000: 332; emphases original). Here Anne has started to develop a ‘double-consciousness’, that is, she begins to strive to become accepted within the system by replicating its ‘gestures’. As suggested by Anne’s second breakdown, a gulf opens at this point between how the individual experiences her/himself and how s/he must act for an imagined gaze or ‘camera’. It is the fan – “like a person a disapproving person” (Crimp 2000: 332) – which ironically warns her of the rift between her subjective desires and beliefs and the social mask she is required to abide by. Through Anne’s collapse, Crimp aims to warn the audience that a series of boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, authenticity and in-authenticity, which Crimp sees as forming the basis of a moral identity, are being transgressed. Anne’s collapse is a sign of the dissolution of these boundaries; it signifies her refusal to become a docile body. The ‘spectacle’, then, the promise that individuals will have all their most superficial needs fulfilled, inspires rejection, a desire to upturn the existing order and revert to more primitive, even sacrificial forms of existence – which is what Anne has recourse to through the blinding in Act Three, Scene Four. As Baurdillard puts it, the self-complacent material fulfilment of late capitalist societies may find violent opposition, which “takes the form either of open violence (terrorism is part of this) or of the impotent denial characteristic of our modernity, of self-hatred and remorse – all negative passions that are the debased form of the impossible counter-gift” (Baudrillard 2003: 103). In Act Two, Scene Three, the fan embodies the remorse Anne feels as she senses she has traded her profoundest desires for acceptance within the system. Through the urgent, testimonial language of breakdown, Anne pursues, as though haunted, the primeval desires that lie latent in her, which she does not know how to separate from external, mediated desires. She seeks to recover the ‘I’ that was lost after the interview in Act One, Scene One, when Jennifer and Andrew turned her story into myths of behaviour, or in the restaurant scene, in which she felt colonized by Andrew’s physical proximity and his attempt to insert her within the company’s network of emotionally disengaged relationships. As Felman and Laub state it, “testimony is […] the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness and reconstitutes

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the internal ‘thou’, and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener inside [her] self” (Felman and Laub 1992: 85). Thus, through testimony Anne seeks to turn herself into a listener of her own inner voice. Anne’s fragmentary speech proceeds by freely associating the different events that have occurred – the ad, the limo, the interview, the restaurant – through an urgent language of pathos that seeks to articulate and denounce the suppressed violence she senses has begun to structure her life – the violence of isolation, anonymity and market interests. In order to testify, Anne free-associates and her narrative becomes disjointed as the syntactic chains of punctuation and logic break down. In instances of collapse, as in lyric, language and subjectivity seem to merge. In Adorno’s words, at moments in which the subject “submerges in language”, language itself seems to speak for the first time “not as something foreign to the subject but as his [sic] own voice” (Adorno 218). Because language and desire meet and become one at moments of breakdown, society’s contradictions are made visible for the audience. In particular, Anne lays bare the dissociation between surface needs and deeper needs. That is, the relentless replacement which is enacted in late capitalist ‘societies of spectacle’ of true desires by outwardly imposed desires, which leads individuals to experience a radical loneliness and emptiness as they lose touch with themselves. In this scene, then, Crimp begins to employ the lyrical, indeterminate language which characterizes collapse in his future dramaturgy, particularly in The Country and Cruel and Tender – notice Anne’s use of feeling-designators as she claims she “must be somehow jetlagged because I can’t sleep but I can’t really wake up” (Crimp 2000: 331), or when she claims the fan appears to her “like a disapproving person shaking its head” (Crimp 2000: 332). Spectators are here invited to supply the meaning of her words by filling them out with images drawn from their own experiences of ‘double-consciousness’, emptiness or attempted resistance. Collapse requires the audience’s act of witnessing to become double, that is, they must bear the testimony to what happens on stage, but also to their own experiences of loneliness, isolation or oppression. Only in this manner can they become fully aware of the system’s contradictions, of the sacrifice and suppressed violence it requires for its maintenance. Thus, Crimp encourages the audience to activate the ‘the listener’ in themselves. Through the defamiliarized, lyrical language of collapse and testimony, which asks for the audience’s collaboration in order to be decoded, Crimp seeks to interpellate spectators and empower them to “[shatter] the spectacular screen and thus access a forbidden realm of ‘authentic’ experience” (Megson 20), thereby emerging out of their previous ideological coordinates. As Dominick LaCapra puts it in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), in an act of testimony “the listener has to let […] trauma fragments make their impact both on him and

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on the witness […] Thus, when the flow of fragments falters, the listener has to enhance them and induce their free expression” (LaCapra 71– 2). Anne’s denunciation thus takes the form of the passing on of a testimony to spectators, who are encouraged to work with her in recreating or identifying the alienating tendencies of late capitalist society, that is, the sacrifices, at the level of human values, which the late capitalist system enacts in the name of ‘progress’. Through testimony, Crimp tries to arouse empathy in the audience, so that they may consciously draw a link between themselves and Andrew and, in so doing, they may challenge his notion of personhood, defined by property and position, individualism and status. Andrew, at this stage, is still a ‘bad witness’ who, upon seeing Anne so distressed, can only suggest a change of hotel so that Simon will not be able to find her, but does not take on the responsibility her words demand of him. Crimp inserts mental breakdown in order to turn spectators into ‘good witnesses’ of Anne’s pain. Collapse, in the form of irrational speech, aims to engage the attention of the audience because it functions elliptically and metaphorically, thus requiring the audience’s active collaboration in decoding it. In Act Three, Scene One, following Clifford’s voyeuristic witnessing of Anne’s sexual relationship with Andrew, Anne collapses during a meeting held at the company office. At this meeting, Clifford suggests he would like to introduce an element of voyeurism in his script – an old man, Brooke, who witnesses the sexual acts between Anne and Simon. Clifford, John, Jennifer and Nicky press Anne to tell them about Brooke, even though, as Andrew reminds them, “Brooke isn’t real” (Crimp 2000: 348). When Anne tries to resist, Jennifer asks the others to leave them alone and violently strikes Anne, accusing her of having seduced Andrew, while Anne begins to cry and moan on the floor, her body struck and reduced to a state of animalization. It is worth mentioning that, at this point, Andrew, albeit weakly, attempts to defend Anne by pointing out, “softly but firmly” (Crimp 2000: 350), that they are altering her story for commercial reasons. Crimp thus indicates there is some potential for change in Andrew – yet he also shows the limit to it. With Anne still lying on the floor, he seems to be more worried about his own feelings of ‘love’ for Anne, or his own ego, than about Anne’s suffering. He calmly “lights a cigarette” (Crimp 2000: 351) and, even though he asks her to “come away with [him]” (Crimp 2000: 352), he is clearly more concerned about his own feelings than he is about Anne: Andrew

I’m forty-four years old, Anne, but I sit at my desk and I write your name on pieces of paper. A-n-n-e. Anne. Then I strike it out in embarrassment. When I told you I loved you I thought, ‘OK this will be useful, I’ll have some control,’

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but now I find I meant what I said. The words, just the words, brought the emotion into being, and look at me – I have no control at all. Anne pays no attention. She remains huddled. Andrew crouches beside her and raises her head by the hair, forcing her eyes to meet his. Come away with me. Now. (Crimp 2000: 351– 52)

By witnessing Anne’s several moments of collapse, Crimp implies, Andrew gradually comes in touch with injustice and begins to undergo a process of personal change that culminates in Act Four, Scene Two, when he goes all the way to Anne’s house to retrieve her. Crimp, therefore, shows Andrew’s potential for change throughout the play. His transformation, Crimp suggests, is the result of his being exposed to Anne’s suffering. Through Anne, he discovers the violence underlying the values of the ‘society of spectacle’ and becomes more empathic. Anne’s several moments of collapse, Crimp implies, contribute to Andrew’s gradual change, until he becomes a positive witness and goes all the way to Anne’s house in Act Four, Scene Two. In Act Three, Scene Three, which also takes place in a restaurant, Andrew himself collapses as a consequence of the tension he experiences between his desire to leave Jennifer and begin a new life with Anne, and his need to maintain his position within the company. As Angelaki puts it, “The final scene to be situated at the restaurant offers a profound, disclosing look at Jennifer and Andrew’s personal and professional relationship, with Andrew being presented as being on the brink of a breakdown, consumed by guilt stemming from the treatment which he and Jennifer have given Anne” (Angelaki 2008b: 261). Ultimately, and as happened to Anne in Act One, Scene Four when she took the taxi in a state of distress, Andrew wants to exit the reified relationships within the company. His collapse is triggered by his realization that the values of the company are dehumanizing and his perceiving the mercantilism that impregnates relationships. In Act Three, Scene Three, Andrew is waiting for Jennifer at the Japanese restaurant, where he tells her that he is “going” (Crimp 2000: 360), presumably in order to begin a new life with Anne. Jennifer prompts Andrew’s collapse, since she reminds him of the economic and material needs that tie him to the corporation, and of the impracticality of his desires. She tells him John threatened to withdraw his economic support for the movie when he saw Andrew defend Anne during Anne’s collapse at the meeting. She also implies that Anne has lied to them about her life. Andrew finally begins to collapse himself and is unable to leave Jennifer: Jennifer

Defending [Anne] in front of John I was so embarrassed. […] I’ve been talking to him for hours, Andrew. […] Calming him. […] Calming him, Andrew.

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Andrew Jennifer

’ I’m going, Jennifer. […] I’ve never seen him to mad. He threatened to withdraw everything, the finance, his name.

[…]

Andrew Jennifer

The truth is Andrew is that you will never go. Go where? With whom? With Anne? Go with Anne is that the idea? who is at most half your age and in all likelihood mentally (judging by her behaviour today) deficient and what? meet her parents in the Lucky Throw? (That’s not her parents, that’s / his.) Have babies? Move into the suburb? Barbecue a pig on the fourth of July? Put up your / flag? That’s not the only alternative.

Andrew […] Jennifer Are you crying? He averts his eyes. Jennifer begins to eat. I worry about you, Andrew. She continues to eat, choosing her moment. John said something very interesting. He said, ‘What if there is no such man?’ Andrew looks at her. […] The man she describes is too weird, he is too weird Andrew to be plausible. And to’ve married him? To’ve experienced those humiliations day after day? […] Andrew Anne is lying? Jennifer Had you ever thought of that? ’ […] Andrew I feel sick. Jennifer Are you sick? What is it? Andrew I need some air. (I believed in her.) Jennifer You have some air. This room is full / of air. Andrew I want to go. I want to leave. Jennifer Right now? Andrew I want to leave the restaurant. Yes. ’ […] Andrew I need to be outside (He stands.) I’ll call a cab. D’you need the bathroom? Jennifer Andrew I want to walk. […] Jennifer Is this about Anne? Andrew Yes it’s about Anne. Of course it’s about Anne. […] Andrew I believed in her. Jennifer We all believed in her. Andrew I loved her. Jennifer So did we all love her. But it doesn’t affect the work. The work’s unaffected.

2.2 ‘Like A Disapproving Person’: Collapse, Pretence and Alienation

Andrew […] Jennifer Andrew Jennifer Andrew Jennifer Andrew

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She lied to us? To me? Are you sure? You’re too easily deceived. You lack insight. I know. I’m sorry. She’s a bitch. John opened my eyes. A bitch (that’s right) in heat, Andy. I feel humiliated. You have been humiliated. It’s frightening here. (Crimp 2000: 361– 64; emphases original)

Andrew’s collapse is reminiscent of the strategy of la dérive, as he seems to want to begin a goalless or spontaneous walking in the city, which might enable him to separate himself from his complicity with the values and requirements of the ‘society of spectacle’, just as Anne does following her collapse, when she takes the taxi in order to be “on [her] own” (Crimp 2000: 305). Here Andrew claims, “I need to be outside […] I want to walk” (Crimp 2000: 363). Even if he is finally unable to leave Jennifer, collapse plays a major role in Andrew’s transformation towards a more empathic understanding of selfhood; it is a point of inflection, the moment when he brings otherwise inertial, exploitative modes of relating to a momentary halt, thus separating himself emotionally from the system. Most importantly, through Andrew’s collapse Crimp suggests that individuals are malleable, and that solidarity and love are natural responses which the structures of late capitalism prevent from developing. Andrew’s moment of self-realization is interrupted by Jennifer, who keeps invalidating, even ridiculing, his attempts to begin a new life with Anne, reminding him of the impossibility of fully separating himself from the system.¹² Andrew thus collapses out of the conflict he experiences between the demands of his position and his utopian desire for more humane, selfless ways of relating. Andrew seems to be afraid of the possibility that Anne, whom he trusted, may

 In this scene, Jennifer seems to be cast as a ‘Iago’ figure, since she activates culturally dominant, ‘common sense’ perceptions and ultimately convinces Andrew of the implausibility of his desires. Just as Jennifer does with Anne, in Othello Iago slanders Desdemona, in this case by manipulating dominant perceptions of gender and race. In “Cultural Materialism, Othello, and the Politics of Plausibility”, Alan Sinfield states that “Iago’s stories work because they are plausible” (Sinfield 31). Quoting Peter Stallybrass, Sinfield adds that “Iago is convincing not because he is ‘superhumanly ingenious’ but, to the contrary, because he is the voice of ‘common sense’, the ceaseless repetition of the always-already ‘known’, the culturally ‘given’” (Sinfield 31). Crimp makes explicit that Jennifer is improvising her narrative – “she continues to eat, choosing her moment” (Crimp 2000: 361) – and even has her use the word ‘plausible’ when she insists Anne must surely be lying – “The man she describes is too weird, he is too weird Andrew to be plausible” (Crimp 2000: 362). Like Iago’s soliloquies, this scene seeks to impel spectators to realize the ideological nature of Jennifer’s narrative.

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have been lying to him, and he feels he cannot go back with Jennifer either. He thus claims that he “feel[s] sick” (Crimp 2000: 362) and that he needs to “get out” (Crimp 2000: 363; emphasis original), caught between his material demands and his utopian aspirations. Through collapse, for a moment Andrew ‘floats’ and ‘hovers’, as it were, between both options, panic-stricken as he realizes his complicity with the late capitalist system. As he puts it, he is “frightened” (Crimp 2000: 363), that is, he is afraid that he must succumb to the values he finds dehumanizing and to continue to abide by them, thus becoming a ventriloquist, an impersonator of an identity which is built on exploitative premises. The word “frightened” (Crimp 2000: 363), in response to Jennifer’s comment that he should forget about Anne also conveys that Andrew has an uncanny foreboding that Anne’s collapse in Act Three, Scene One may lead to greater violence – and indeed, Andrew’s and Jennifer’s conversation in the Japanese restaurant is followed by Anne’s and Simon’s blinding of Clifford in Act Three, Scene Scene Four. Jennifer wants Andrew to reassert himself as a subject of status, precisely the type of identity he seeks to break away from through collapse. Instead, Andrew begins a goalless, aimless movement in order to separate himself from the late capitalist pressures of status and productivity, which Jennifer embodies. Andrew seeks to detach itself from privilege and to defend instead a core of ethical values, even if, in order to do so, his life must adopt a non-linear, even ‘spiralling’ movement characterized by improvisation. Even though, at this point, Andrew does not yet leave Jennifer, the scene ends in “indeterminacy regarding the future of not only Jennifer and Andrew’s partnership, but of their marriage, as well” (Angelaki 2008b: 261). Andrew’s collapse reveals that, despite the pressures which exist, in late capitalism, for individuals to surrender to ‘spectacular’, narcissistic modes of feeling, Andrew learns to transcend what Bauman sees as the “false consciousness and alienation” (qtd. in Smith 97) instilled in individuals by the economic logic of ‘Empire’. As Reyes Mate puts it, through his particular experiences of injustice, it is suggested that Andrew realizes the need for ethics, since “ethics, like justice, are a response to specific injustices, to an experience of evil […] Ethics is born out of moral feelings, in particular out of the feeling of indignation when one is faced with injustice, and of the feeling of compassion for the victim” (Reyes Mate 2003: 120 – 21).¹³ Andrew’s going all the way to Anne’s house in Act Four,

 “La ética como la justicia surgen como respuesta a injusticias concretas, a una experiencia del mal […] La ética nace de sentimientos morales, en particular del sentimiento de indignación ante la injusticia y de compasión con la víctima”.

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Scene Two, in order to attempt to take responsibility for her, signifies he has learned to “be in charge of the body, of the real suffering of individuals” (Reyes Mate 2003: 121), and has therefore become a “good person” (Reyes Mate 2001: 121).¹⁴ Andrew’s process is similar, as shall be seen, to the one the General undergoes in Cruel and Tender, although the General has to undergo much more painful experiences in order to change. Crimp suggests that, through his contact with oppression, which culminates in the collapse he undergoes in Act Three, Scene Three, Andrew becomes a more empathic character than he was at the beginning of the play. He thus embodies the potential for resistance Crimp sees in the common, everyday individual. Indeed, in Act Four, Scene One, at the movie’s launch, Jennifer comments that “we seem to’ve lost Andrew” (Crimp 2000: 373), since he just lies down and sleeps” (Crimp 2000: 375). Andrew clearly does not partake of the general self-complacency of the other characters, who celebrate either their own promotion, like Nicky or, like Jennifer, the fact that they have “closed the account” (Crimp 2000: 363). Andrew thus finally refuses to partake of the ‘spectacle’ and becomes a “brooding” (Crimp 2000: 358) character, as described in the stage direction at the start of Act Three, Scene Three – a character who has profound doubts with respect to the late capitalist system.

3 The Point of Rupture: Collapse and Barbarism The network of sporadic encounters, encompassing infidelity and betrayal, in which Anne finds herself immersed culminates in Act Two, Scene Three. In what could be termed a ‘double rape’, Andrew penetrates her without “any preliminaries” (Crimp 2000: 334), having previously agreed with Clifford that the latter will witness their sexual act in order to gain first-hand experience for the voyeuristic element he intends to include in his script. In this scene, Anne is a victim of both Clifford’s overriding desire to ascend within the company and of Andrew’s self-aggrandizement: Clifford appears in the room – not through the door, but from where he’s been standing in the shadows. He drags on a cigarette. Andrew You’re a dark horse, Clifford. Anne (sits up) Who is that? Get him out. Was he watching us? (She gets up.) Andrew I’d like you to meet Clifford.

 “Ser bueno […] es hacerse cargo del cuerpo, del sufrimiento real de los individuos”.

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Clifford Andrew Anne Clifford Anne Clifford

Anne […] Clifford

This may not be the moment. Clifford is your writer. Was he watching us? Get him the fuck out of here. This may not be the moment. I understand. Get out. I understand. ’ No. Really. / I do. A writer?

Listen I understand exactly what you must feel at this moment. ’ Anne So what do I feel? Tell me – I’m interested – what I feel. ’ Andrew Anne… Anne spits in Clifford’s face. Anne That’s what I feel. ’ Clifford I respect that. Anne That’s what I feel. Andrew Clifford’s an old man and also a very good writer. You don’t have to spit on him. Jesus. Anne I hope you die, Clifford. I hope you burn. For a moment Anne stands paralysed by anger and humiliation. (Crimp 2000: 334 – 36; emphases original)

Although, throughout the play, Anne acknowledges her complicity with the violence she has been submitted to, repeatedly stating that she “was not raped” (Crimp 2000: 383), her intimacy is, as it were, twice ‘stolen’. Right before Anne has intercourse with Andrew, the stage directions assert that “she expects and is willing to have intercourse with [Andrew] – but not at all prepared for the sudden brutality of it” (Crimp 2000: 334). While Andrew’s physical brutality lays bare the way in which the late capitalist system encourages careless, fast consumption, treating the female body as though it was a product – while, in a reverse movement, it infuses products with animate, almost passionate qualities – Clifford’s eyes stand for the more symbolic violence of the ‘society of spectacle’ which turns women’s bodies into titillating, reified objects. In Act Four, Scene Two, when Andrew comes to Anne’s apartment and Anne has already reverted to a state of utter submission, she refers to her and Simon’s blinding of Clifford in Act Three, Scene Four as “You won’t believe this, but we put out a man’s eyes. (Faint laugh)” (Crimp 2000: 381). Rubbing her wrists as if to highlight her state of bondage, when Andrew asks her what she means by “put out”, she answers “Right out of his head. How else out?” (Crimp 2000: 381),

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thereby hinting that Simon and Anne “put out a man’s eyes” as though turning off a neon light or, more to the point, a camera. Clifford’s eyes stand in metonymically for the concept of the ‘camera’ which, in turn, stands in metonymically for media-ridden, late capitalist societies. Cameras regulate individual behaviour, but they do so from a distance; they do not act directly on bodies. As Susan Sontag puts it in On Photography (1979), the technology evolving from photography – video and cinema – has made “photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behaviour, predicting it and interfering with it” (Sontag 157). It is the individual herself who must constantly be on the watch-out regarding how she behaves, and either enact self-censorship or strive to imitate the identities the system ‘advertises’ as desirable. In this scene, Crimp seems to be intent on dramatizing bio-power, the type of oppression characteristic of late capitalist societies of control, symbolically revealing how it comes to bear upon women’s bodies at both a local and a global level. Clifford’s eyes represent the threat that societies of control, through the use of technology and the ‘camera’, pose “to the integrity and organicity of the human body” (Baum 31) – the female body in particular – which is repeatedly turned into a marketable image. In Act Three, Scene Four, then, Anne and Simon blind the ‘camera’ – or Clifford’s ‘all-seeing’ eyes – which in contemporary society is responsible for the infiltration of consumer-object patterns in relationships. Clifford’s voyeuristic act symbolically dramatizes how, through technological means – various types of cameras, the internet – media-ridden societies turn (particularly female) individuals into no more than blank registering surfaces for the inscription of docile identities, submissive to the demands of late capitalism. Through a theatrical, material representation of the ‘rape’ of Anne’s physical and moral integrity, Crimp points to the wider metaphysical situation of (female) individuals in contemporary society. Crimp views such daily incorporeal transformation of individuals as a barbaric act whereby they are made to become biological life, zoè, as opposed to political beings, or bíos, and subjectified with a predefined social role or identity. As already mentioned, Agamben claims that the subconscious of contemporary bio-power, in its drive to regulate and administer life in order to maintain the current allocations of profit, aims to produce “in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoè and bios, the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 156). In The Treatment, so to speak, Crimp ‘discovers’ bio-power or the mode of operating of late capitalist societies of control, which regulate life through the coercive power of the media and surveillance devices – that is, through technology. While for some collectives, such as immigrants or Third-World populations,

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this implies being left in a state of mere survival bordering on death, for Anne, as Act Two, Scene Three symbolically demonstrates, it entails sinking to a state of docility and alienation. What the scene of the ‘double rape’ symbolically attempts to convey, then, is how the ‘camera’ has become the main ‘invasive’ instrument in contemporary society, as it endlessly reproduces and circulates the demands of the market, brings them home to every individual, and shapes their modes of relating in crucial ways, so that individuals will in turn endorse the interests of late capitalist corporate structures. With the help of technology, and because media-ridden, late capitalist society is based on ceaseless competition, cameras turn individuals into “struggling actors” (Megson 19) who aim to ‘perform’ the mediated identities and achieve the ‘advertised’ desires. Clifford’s eyes also uncannily prefigure programmes such as ‘Big Brother’, or even recent internet developments such as Facebook.¹⁵ Although both ‘Big Brother’ and Facebook thrive on the illusion of providing intimate access to the lives of individuals, being aware of the fact that one is exposing oneself to the gaze of others, be it on television or on the internet, automatically entails self-censorship on the part of the individual. Individuals, as already mentioned, ingrain the mechanisms of social integration and regulate themselves according to them. Both ‘Big Brother’ and Facebook attest to such self-regulation; they are the record of such self-regulation, as individuals ‘reveal’ themselves according to the pressures exercised by spectators. At the same time, Clifford’s eyes may also represent, by extension, the consumer’s avid eyes as they sort through commodities. The more Anne’s private space recedes, the more ‘readable’ she becomes, like a commodity. Act Two, Scene Three thus point back to Act One, Scene One, the interview scene which starts the play in medias res, with Anne telling Andrew and Jennifer her story. As the executives reinterpret Anne’s feelings and experiences in order to make them accessible to the largest possible audience, her words lose their mystery, their inherent ambiguity and opaqueness. The interview, thus, is as obscene as Act Two, Scene Three. In “The Ecstasy of Communication”, Baudrillard claims that the sense of intrusion that the market prerogatives of late capitalism insert

 The idea for the ‘Big Brother’ reality show was born in 1997 in Holland, and was first suggested by John de Mol and his company, Endemol. The name was inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the inhabitants of Oceania are constantly watched by the country’s authoritarian government. At the time Crimp wrote The Treatment, however, similar programmes already existed. MTV’s ‘The Real World’, for instance, which was first broadcasted in 1992, recorded a series of individuals who did not know each other living together for a long period of time.

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in modes of relating is a form of ‘obscenity’ which “begins precisely […] when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication” (Baudrillard 1993: 131). Anne’s words and life become, as Baudrillard would put it, pornography. In blinding Clifford, then, Anne and Simon seek to metaphorically blind the ‘camera’ which obscenely overrepresents women while at the same time covering up their absence from or minority status in positions from which they might be able to control their own representation. Blinding the ‘camera’, in terms of the specifically female-oriented abuse the play focuses on, represents Anne’s attempt to regain control, albeit momentarily, of what gets ‘distributed’, what is ‘marketed’, what is made visible and what remains invisible. Anne’s violent outburst is a distorted, concentrated ‘speech’ which seeks to make the situation of women within late capitalism transparent to contemporary audiences. Anne tries to ‘speak’ through her violent act, a belated denunciation condensed into a riddle, an act that has a metaphorical, symbolic character. The ‘camera’ – Clifford’s eyes – both misrepresents women to men, encouraging men to treat women as objects, and at the same time instils such a view into women themselves and prompts them to self-regulate accordingly. Crimp shows how certain roles and expectations of female behaviour have already become ingrained in Anne, producing her “jetlagged” state (Crimp 2000: 331) or catatonia. As has been mentioned, Clifford’s voyeuristic ‘filming’ of her sexual act, in connivance with Andrew, points to women’s overexposure when it comes to their being represented and circulated as images. At the same time, Anne’s act of revenge suggests a desire to place the control of female representation back in the hands of women themselves.

3.1 Stopping the Technology: Détournement, ‘Luddism’ and ‘Terrorism’ In Act Three, Scene Four, where Anne and Simon blind Clifford in an act of ‘mad’ collapse, Crimp has recourse to a Situationist strategy, détournement, in order to prompt spectators to emerge out of their complicity with the ‘society of spectacle’ and to see the contradictions underpinning the late capitalist model of ‘progress’. The fork, which first appeared in Act One, Scene Two, when Simon buys it off Clifford in the street, reappears here, but it has been ‘détourned’ – it is used in a defamiliarized context and for different purposes, and hence is now open to a multiplicity of significations:

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Simon Clifford

Simon Clifford Simon Clifford Simon Clifford Simon

I have a complaint about this fork. A complaint? ’ I remember. I sold you this for five. What’s wrong with it? Look at these tines. What tines? What is a tine? The prongs. Look at them. The prongs are called tines? That’s interesting. I didn’t / know that. Didn’t you know that? I thought words were your trade. Feel them. Yes. They’re like needles. They shouldn’t be / like that. Exactly. I sharpened them on a stone. ’ Well you’ve done a very foolish thing. You’ve ruined a good fork. Don’t call me a fool. It was a good fork. It had a history. I have a complaint.

Clifford Simon Clifford Simon […] Clifford catches sight of Anne. Clifford Listen…I’m sorry about the fork. Please choose another. Simon I don’t want another. Clifford Look, take back your five. Take back ten. Simon I don’t want back my five. Clifford So what do you want? Anne DO IT. Simon (matter of fact) Revenge. Clifford Listen, why don’t we – Simon stabs the fork into Clifford’s eye. Anne TWIST IT. Simon twists the fork, lets it fall. The other eye. Simon! As Simon backs away Anne rushes forward and stabs the fork into Clifford’s other eye as he lies on the ground. (Crimp 2000: 367– 69)

Through détournement, Crimp makes an apparently quotidian object, the fork, be utterly transformed into an instrument of retributive justice; that is, into the object which Anne and Simon use to carry out revenge. It is, indeed, the object through which Anne seeks to break through her state of catatonia – her “jetlagged” state (Crimp 2000: 331) – brought about by the requirements of the ‘society of spectacle’. It is important to bear in mind that Anne does not (initially) perform the blinding herself, but asks Simon to carry it out for her, while she casts herself in the role of a director. As she puts it to Simon, “I want you to hurt someone” (Crimp 2000: 354). Simon readily agrees, partly because, it is implied, he feels undervalued and out of place in a late capitalist system which exploits workers – “I have a lot of work […] I’m always digging up the sidewalk. It

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numbs my hands… […] …so I can’t grip things […] I mean I possess a skill, but they have me labouring, Anne. They make me dig like an animal” (Crimp 2000: 355 – 56). The fact that Anne asks Simon to blind Clifford infuses their act of violence, albeit to a limited extent, with the connotations of a rebellion of the ‘masses’, the lower and middle classes, against the new ‘masters’, the patrons of late capitalist corporations. Strangely, however, and as shall be discussed, the violence is partly misdirected, because ultimately Clifford is not the ‘master’ of the corporation, but rather, John, Andrew or Jennifer are. As shall be seen, Anne and Simon target the eyes of the passive ‘bystander’, the ‘bad witness’, and through their act of violence Crimp attempts to highlight the potential for social change and justice he believes lies in the figure of the ‘good witness’ in post-Holocaust societies. From Simon’s point of view, his violent act works very much in the manner of a ‘Luddite’ rebellion against the forms of servitude implemented by the late capitalist society of control. The blinding, as already discussed, symbolically points to the new instrument of control, the ‘camera’, which Simon and Anne “put out” (Crimp 2000: 381) in order to interrupt the continuum of ‘progress’ they experience as dehumanizing.¹⁶ Through violence, Simon and Anne belatedly attempt to stop the full onset of the emergent society of control, based entirely on the ‘spectacle’, and to symbolically become instead the protagonists of their own life stories. Their ‘Luddite’ act is a gesture whereby they seek to enter history by becoming self-conscious, deliberately refusing their state of bondage. As Kelly Baum puts it in “The Sex of the Situationist International”, for the Situationists, “consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity […] The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle” (Baum 35). Hence, through détournement, the fork is infused with political, almost revolutionary meaning.¹⁷ Just as, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and of disciplinary societies, workers identified the new factory machines as the symbolic cause of their en-

 In “‘The Spectacle is Everywhere’: Tracing the Situationist Legacy in British Playwriting Since 1968” Megson analyses Howard Brenton’s Fruit (1970), which he sees as a Situationist play that contains a ‘luddite’ act – the main character, Paul, smashes his TV set after hearing a politician speak in a ‘spectacular’ tone.  The antiques Clifford sells on a blanket are, in fact, remnants of an older world; symbolically, the fork represents an object that has not been submitted to the late capitalist logic of global exchange and which in Act Three, Scene Four, returns with all its symbolic might in order to halt the entrance into late capitalism.

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slavement and tore them apart in a series of violent, seemingly irrational rebellions, now Anne and Simon point violently to the key late capitalist source of symbolic violence and barbarism, the ‘camera’. The ‘camera’, Clifford’s eyes, are symbolic of the alliance between neo-liberal interests and technology, aimed at maintaining current allocations of profit. Anne’s and Simon’s violent act thus becomes an attempt to ‘castrate’ the overriding ambition of these power structures. Their act of violence seeks to identify the new form of oppression and barbarism characteristic of the new societies of control which emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, thereby ‘stopping the technology’. Anne’s and Simon’s act, then, can be described as a ‘Luddite’ act – or, to adapt it to the late capitalist moment, a ‘terrorist’ act. It is an act that confronts the system itself with collapse, with its sudden interruption. Terrorism also carries things to the extreme, “to the point of paroxysm” (Baudrillard 2003: 58). In Baurdillard’s words, “It exacerbates a certain state of things, a certain logic of violence and uncertainty [through] a violent deconstruction of that extreme form of efficiency and hegemony” (Baudrillard 2003: 59). The blinding of Clifford thus deconstructs the system’s smooth efficiency – metaphorically based on artificial light, dazzling appearances, a pornographic excess of vision and stimulation – and confronts it with a collapse into darkness. In Act Three, Scene Four, then, through détournement Crimp offers a picture of collapse and madness – in the form of violence – in order to make society’s contradictions visible by symbolically “put[ing] out” (Crimp 2000: 381) the ‘technology’. The blinding represents Simon’s and Anne’s attempt to reject the mediated, inauthentic desires imposed on them by the ‘society of spectacle’ and to symbolically reinsert their own desire and subjectivity into history. They seek, that is, to establish “synchronicity with [their] own desires and realize these desires in the world” (Baum 35). Their mad violence, then, is the instrument through which they attempt to “actualize [their] desire [with their] subjectivity” (Baum 35), split apart by the precepts and the identities distributed by the ‘society of spectacle’, precisely because it is based on the continuous replacement of true desires by mediated ones. In the context of the late capitalist, image-dominated victimization of women, the blinding represents “a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real in an allegedly virtual universe” (Baudrillard 2003: 28), as though Anne was claiming, as Baudrillard argues contemporary terrorism does, “‘There’s an end to all your talk about the virtual – this is something real!’” (Baudrillard 2003: 28). Anne’s and Simon’s terrorist act stages a contest which Baudrillard, writing in a post – as opposed to pre – 9/11 context, claims has become the struggle par excellence of contemporary society. It is a contest between “an

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in-different, low-definition culture [versus] high-definition cultures; of disenchanted, disintensified systems [versus] the cultures of high intensity; of desacralized societies [versus] sacrificial cultures or forms” (Baudrillard 2003: 98) – the latter half of each dichotomy embodied, since 9/11, by Islamic terrorism. As Middeke puts it in his chapter on The Treatment for the Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Dramatists, “Crimp portrays a Baudrillardian world […] [where] an excess of technological communication has brought about a proliferation of (virtual) meanings” (Middeke 2011: 86). Andrew and Clifford, who represent the system’s beneficiaries, are in fact disenchanted; Andrew tells Anne in Act One, Scene Three: “I’ll tell you what excites us, Anne […] You’re real”, as opposed to people whose “lives must be spent behind a screen or they will have a respiratory crisis” (Crimp 2000: 295 – 296; emphases original). Anne and Simon face Andrew’s and Clifford’s disenchantment with the blinding, an act through which Anne in particular attempts to recover a non-distorted relationship with her body and desires. As Baudrillard puts it, societies of control represent the “virtual space of the global […] the space of the screen and the network, of immanence and the digital, of dimensionless space-time” (Baudrillard 2003: 92). In disciplinary societies, instead, “there was still a natural reference to the world, to the body and to memory” (Baudrillard 2003: 92). Through the blood that, on stage, must necessarily flow from Clifford’s eyes, Simon and Anne make the body ‘real’ – in other words, they make visible the symbolic violence whereby late capitalism perpetuates itself. Qua terrorist act, the blinding metaphorically enacts a “resurrection of history” beyond, in the context of voices such as Fukuyama’s, its “proclaimed end” (Baudrillard 2003: 28). Terrorism, however, is paradoxical because it is dependent on the media for its effect. A characteristic of terrorism is that it replicates the materials with which the ‘spectacle’ works – it relies on the media to distribute, at a global level, the symbolic defiance it enacts. In terrorism, Baudrillard argues, it is almost as though “reality is jealous of fiction […] the real is jealous of the image” (Baudrillard 2003: 28). Terrorism initiates a kind of “duel” between reality and image, “a contest to see which can be most unimaginable” (Baudrillard 2003: 28). As is typical of terrorism, then, the blinding re-enacts the system’s violence in an explicit, ‘in-yer-face’ manner. To sum up, then, through Anne’s and Simon’s violent, mad act of revenge, Crimp metaphorically ‘puts out’ the ‘camera’, the technological means whereby the interests of the market are amplified and made to reach the most private dimensions of individuals, and whereby Anne is objectified as a woman. While the scene of Clifford’s voyeurism symbolizes, and at the same time gives concrete representation to, the blurring of the dichotomy between public and private

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that underpins late capitalist media-ridden, technological societies, in Act Three, Scene Four, the thoroughly material, bodily image of the ‘eyes’ conveys the otherwise abstract risks involved in ‘progress’, which Anne and Simon attempt to halt.

3.2 Clifford’s Eyes and the ‘Banality of Evil’ Anne’s act of violence, like Crimp’s mistrust of the ‘spectacle’ and technology, can be further illuminated by placing it against the backdrop of the twentiethcentury crises of barbarism. Through Clifford, Crimp seems to be exploring Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’, which she put forward in her report on the trial of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Provocatively, Arendt claimed that Eichmann, who was responsible for the deportation and death sentence of thousands of Jews, was not a particularly evil man. After observing his behaviour during the trial, Arendt concluded that Eichmann was simply a ‘banal’ individual, afraid of his own freedom and intellect. Educated under a highly disciplinary regime, he limited himself to faithfully obeying the orders of his superiors. As Sultana Wahnón puts it in “Arendt frente a Eichmann”, In The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] Hannah Arendt distinguished between two types of criminals within Nazism. To the first class, made up primarily of individuals from the plebs, belonged the ‘criminal and abnormal’ elements of the regime, accounting for the ‘blind beastliness’ of the SA members in charge of the concentration camps during the first years of Nazism (before the War and the Final Solution). The evil this type of Nazi criminals perpetrated had elements in it of perversion, of the kind of irrational, sadistic cruelty which had its origins – as Arendt observed – in deep hate and resentment […] To the second class of criminals […] belonged, instead, individuals like Adolf Eichmann, that is, individuals of whom one could not claim they were pathological cases of evil and sadistic cruelty, not even of irrational hatred of the Jews. (Wahnón 360)¹⁸

 “En Los orígenes del totalitarismo Hannah Arendt distinguió dos clases de criminales dentro del nazismo. A la primera clase, surgida del populacho, habrían pertenecido los ‘elementos criminales y anormales’ del régimen, y con ella habría estado relacionada, por ejemplo, la ‘ciega bestialidad’ de los miembros de la SA que se ocuparon de los campos de concentración en los primeros años del nazismo (antes del a Guerra y de la Solución Final). El mal llevado a cabo por este tipo de delincuentes nazis habría tenido, por tanto, mucho de perversión, de esa clase de crueldad irracional de tipo sádico, tras la que, casi siempre – como observaba Hannah Adrendt – se escondían un odio y un resentimiento profundo […] A la segunda clase de criminales […] habrían pertenecido, en cambio, seres como Adolf Eichmann, es decir, individuos de quienes no

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Arendt placed the ‘blame’ for the tragedy of the Holocaust primarily on the second type of individuals, that is, on those individuals who were not ‘sociopaths’ and were apparently ‘sane’. According to her, it was Hitler’s dream of a ‘perfect bureaucracy’ based on discipline and authority, and on separate ‘categories’ of individuals – the Jews and others versus the Arian race – removed from direct contact with one another, which prevented empathy from developing and led so many ‘normal’, ‘banal’ men to exterminate others they had never seen. Similarly, in the chapter “Categorial Murder, or the Legacy of the Twentieth Century and How to Remember It”, Bauman engages on an elaborate discussion on how the singularity of the Nazi genocide is that it represents a “categorial” type of murder, whereby “men, women, and children were exterminated for having been assigned to a category of beings that was meant to be exterminated” (Bauman 2008: 87). Bauman believes this is the defining characteristic of the Holocaust, which explored the “limits (or limitlessness?) of the sovereign power of exclusion” (Bauman 2008: 85). The Holocaust, he claims, would be “inconceivable outside the frame of modern society [since] […] to eradicate a ‘race’ or a ‘class’ [of people] it is necessary to suppress human emotions and other manifestations of human individuality, and submit human conduct to the uncontested rule of instrumental reason” (Bauman 2008: 84– 5). As Arendt puts it, Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And his diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. (Arendt 1994: 287; emphasis original)

In The Treatment, Clifford is portrayed, from the start, as an extremely disciplined man who embodies attitudes such as deference to authority and eagerness to obey. In Act One, Scene Two, when he talks to Simon in the street, he proudly states, “every year without fail I have completed a play. That’s fortyone shows in as many years. Now there’s a word for that. The word my young friend is discipline” (Crimp 2000: 290). Discipline per se, not quality or creativity, is what Clifford cherishes. Yet Clifford is unaware of himself, unable to dispose of his own freedom and thoroughly dependent on external praise or authority in order to achieve a sense of coherent, purposeful identity.

se habría podido decir que fueran casos patológicos de maldad y crueldad sádicas, y ni siquiera de odio irracional contra los judíos”.

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Arguably it is the “rule of instrumental reason” characteristic of late capitalist modernity (Bauman 2008: 84– 5) that Crimp attempts to critique through Clifford. What prompts Clifford to become the passive ‘bystander’ to Anne’s victimization is the hierarchical structure of contemporary ‘societies of spectacle’, in which self-interest and individualism, anonymity and obedience, prevail over political, collective consciousness. As Clifford continues to explain to Simon in Act One, Scene Two, I mapped out the course of my life very early on – in the fifties in fact. In the fifties I must’ve been your age, but already / I had decided […] I would divide each year of my life into two halves. In one half of the year I would do whatever was necessary to live […] And then the rest of the year, each year […] each and every year what I’ve done […] is I’ve risen early, often in the dark, and I’ve sat at my desk […] and every year without fail I have completed a play. (Crimp 2000: 289 – 90; emphasis original)

Even if Clifford is an artist, a would-be writer forced to sell “dishes and other household goods arranged on a blanket” (Crimp 2000: 289) and to take on a variety of odd jobs, he is also a ‘banal’ man with the spirit of a bureaucrat, and this makes him one of Crimp’s most fascinating figures. Arguably, Crimp takes pains to denounce Clifford’s marginalization as a writer, which lies behind his act of voyeurism, the means by which he hopes to gain the favours of the company’s executives. As has been shown, Crimp has Clifford himself describe his precarious existence; in addition, Clifford includes an underpaid painter, Brooke, in his own script, which reads, “[Brooke] has spent a lifetime doing menial jobs in order to finance his secret life as a painter. He paints obsessively in a tenement building up in the hundreds, spending whatever he earns on paint and materials” (Crimp 2000: 315). And as he confesses to Andrew, “There’s a sense in which I am Brooke” (Crimp 2000: 317; emphasis original). Clifford, that is, uses storytelling in order to express his own feelings and his situation of oppression as an unsuccessful writer in a late capitalist context. In this respect, Angelaki states that The Treatment is a “critique of the blatant commodification of art and he manipulation of the author/artist by the art industry for the purposes of financial gain” (2008b: 258). Surprisingly, however, after his act of voyeurism, Clifford never once becomes self-reflexively aware of what he has done. It is significant that, immediately after his blinding, he asks, “It’s dark. Who did I offend?” (Crimp 2000: 370). Agustín Serrano de Haro’s point about Eichmann may also be applied to Clifford. According to Serrano de Haro, such an experience of “‘normality’ [regarding one’s own crime] can [only] be put down to the absence of thought. Those who did not stop calculating and organising […] did not lack intelligence, but the ability to pay attention, in a reflexive manner, to the meaning of what they

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did and saw others do around them” (Serrano 41).¹⁹ Tenacious as he is, then, Clifford embodies discipline without feeling or a clear ethical purpose; in fact, he applies the late capitalist logic of maximum benefit and productivity to his own existence. Serrano de Haro adds, “to claim that such an individual ‘did not think’ is tantamount to asserting that the experience of things and of men, the worldly experience which, mostly spontaneously and naturally, can tell right apart from wrong, had been completely eroded [in Eichmann], and that such loss did not seem to have left any sequels in him” (Serrano 41).²⁰ Unaware of himself and of his surroundings, when Simon and Anne blind him Clifford can only blurt out he is not aware of having offended anyone. Clifford is not evil; he is simply a mediocre, ‘banal’ man. When Anne finds out that he has witnessed hers and Andrew’s sexual act and spits in his face, Clifford’s immediate apology – “Listen I understand exactly what you must feel at this moment” (Crimp 2000: 335), and later, “Listen, if I’ve offended anyone…” (Crimp 2000: 336) – reveals his profound lack of awareness of the significance of his act of voyeurism, or even of the fact that he has been manipulated by Andrew. By making Clifford such a complex character – both representing a contemporary marginalized artist and a ‘banal’ man who is essentially not evil, yet commits an evil act whose significance he is unable to grasp – Crimp relates late capitalist structures of power with the post-Holocaust debate initiated by Arendt. By showing how a ‘normal’ person allows himself to be manipulated into occupying an unethical, passive, ultimately evil position with respect to another human being, Crimp challenges the spectators’ comfortable assumptions and impels them to reflect on how evil can easily be perpetrated or maintained as long as individuals do not have the strategies, the political consciousness, or the sense of entitlement necessary to vindicate positive witnessing as an instrument of social change. Clifford is also both an exponent and a victim of a desensitized, ‘bureaucratic’ corporate machine, which never encourages him to approach Anne as a person with whom to relate on equal terms. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bau-

 “Tal ‘normalidad’ nace de la ausencia total de pensamiento en el individuo. De lo que carecía quien no cesaba de calcular y ordenar […] no era desde luego de inteligencia, sino de una detención y atención reflexiva al sentido de lo que él hacía y de lo que veía hacer a su alrededor”.  “Decir que un individuo tal [Eichmann] no ‘pensaba’ es en realidad decir que la experiencia de las cosas y los hombres, la experiencia del mundo que con bastante espontaneidad y naturalidad nombra el bien y el mal, se había en su caso perdido por entero, y que la pérdida no parecía haber dejado secuelas en el personaje”.

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man claims that, in the context of Hitler’s bureaucracy, the dehumanization of the Jews began through a process of depersonalization or ‘distantiation’. Dehumanization is made possible “at the point when, thanks to the distantiation, the objects at which the bureaucratic operation is aimed can, and are, reduced to a set of quantitative measures” (Bauman 2005: 102). Similarly, Clifford is ‘distanced’ from Anne by the hierarchical, de-personalized structure of relationships within the corporation. For Bauman, a terrifying consequence of ‘distantiation’ is that, “reduced, like all other objects of bureaucratic management, to pure, quality-free measurements, human objects lose their distinctiveness. They are already dehumanized – in the sense that the language in which things that happen to them (or are done to them) are narrated, safeguards its referents from ethical evaluation” (Bauman 2005: 103). One wonders, for instance, what type of power structure made it possible for someone to push the button that would drop the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima. Such readiness to obey the orders of superiors, which led to a massive slaughter of civilians, results from a hierarchical division of work, where there is a ‘distantiation’ or a gap between the orders one receives and obeys from above and the possibility of observing the immediate consequences of such an act of obedience on real subjects themselves. Both in TriBeCa, the media corporation in The Treatment, and in the context Arendt discusses, there exists such a gap between the efficiency of work and the possibility of observing the impact of such ‘small’ efficient actions on the real bodies of individuals. As Bauman highlights, in the context of the Holocaust the result of maintaining such a hierarchical division of work without being aware of its risks culminated in the “irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic operation” (Bauman 2005: 101; emphasis original). Crimp, instead, affirms the possibility of working towards a more empathic social organization, where different subjectivities and alternative human relations may thrive. Clifford, then, embodies a sort of subjectivity that was instrumental in bringing about the tangible horrors of the Holocaust, and which, in the late capitalist context, continues to uphold the inequality of the current world order. The play hereby highlights the difficulty of allocating guilt in a post-Holocaust era where power does not have a specific seat, but is rather propagated by diffuse means. Clifford embodies, like some of the Nazis themselves, an utter dissociation between efficiency and ethics or morality.²¹ As Whanón puts it, “[…] unlike other

 Such dissociation reappears in Crimp’s 2006 version of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1899), through the figure of Trigorin, the play’s established writer, as argued below.

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Nazi officials such as Goebbels, Goering or Hitler himself, [Eichmann] did not like excesses of any kind; his psychology was that of the gregarious bourgeois man who, before anything else, is a hard worker and a good family man and whom everybody, furthermore, described as ‘a man of exquisite courtesy’” (Whanón 2002: 361).²² Further, as Serrano de Haro argues, Eichmann, like Clifford, “understood his activity as an office job which had to be done with the mindset […] of the selfdemanding functionary. The lack of proportion is thus provoked by, precisely, the terrifying ‘normality’ of the executor, his common personality and his completely normal goals – to do his share for the country, to do his duty, to improve his professional career” (Serrano 41).²³ Clifford, then, epitomizes the profoundly unsettling paradox of the person who abides by order and ‘law’, yet is deeply amoral. Lured by the possibility of producing a ‘perfect’ piece of writing, he performs the violent act of interfering with someone else’s privacy, oblivious to the unethical character of the means whereby he hopes to achieve his goal.²⁴ Abdication of thought and responsibility go hand in hand with the fear of failure and the vulnerability that are constitutive of living. Arendt, for instance, explains that even in the face of death, Eichmann appealed to the Nazi clichés that had structured his entire life and according to which he would now die without fear.²⁵ These clichés he experienced as being so much larger and stronger than himself that he could renounce the intricacies and anxieties of independent

 “[…] a diferencia de otros dirigentes nazis como Goebbels, Goering o el propio Hitler, [Eichmann] no gustaba de excesos de ningún tipo: su psicología era la del hombre-masa (burgués) que, antes que nada, era un trabajador y un buen padre de familia, al que todos, además, podían describer como ‘un hombre de exquisite cortesía’”.  “[…] concebía su actividad como un trabajo de oficina que desarrollar con la mentalidad […] del funcionario exigente. La desproporción proviene, pues, precisamente de la escalofriante ‘normalidad’ del ejecutor, de su personalidad común y sus móviles completamente corrientes – cumplir con el país, cumplir con su deber, hacer carrera profesional”.  As Jonathan Glover points out in Humanity and Inhumanity (2001), the individuals who contributed to the Nazi genocide were mostly raised in an educational system based mainly on authority and the obedience of orders: “Nazi obedience was reinforced by fear. It was also supported by the general human disposition to obey, and by the rigid cast of mind perhaps created by an authoritarian upbringing” (Glover 335). Arendt explains that at his trial, “[Eichmann] excuse[d] himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else” (Arendt 289).  Interestingly, Glover quotes Eichmann’s description of how he felt once Germany was defeated and the system of orders which had shaped his life finally collapsed. He felt totally baffled – “I sensed I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult – in brief, a life never known before lay before me” (Glover 336).

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thought and, as it were, ‘become’ the concepts they evoked, even to the point of forgetting it was his own death sentence he was attending to: He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period […] It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these ‘lofty words’ should completely becloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. (Arendt 1994: 287– 88)

In the play, Clifford also renounces personal thought and self-deliberation – what Felman and Laub term the “burden” of “responsibility” (Felman and Laub 1992: 3) of the witness – in the name of concepts, ideas and external forms of subjectification such as discipline, hard work, duty or service. Like Eichmann, Clifford represents the individual’s fear of freedom and subsequent identification with instances that are bigger than her/himself. Authority and discipline were so deeply ingrained in him, that Eichmann made decisions not according to his own experience or political views, but according to precepts – such as his debt to the ‘nation’ or to his ‘homeland’. As Arendt concludes, in the three minutes during which he faced death, Eichmann summed up “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (Arendt 1994: 252; emphasis original). Through Clifford, then, Crimp provocatively aims to establish a parallelism between the power structures which led to the Holocaust and the contemporary late capitalist structures which lead Clifford to behave amorally and, therefore, to commit ‘evil’ acts like the ‘double rape’ perpetrated against Anne.

3.3 A Rewriting and a Parable of Ambition As has been argued, then, through the Situationist strategy of détournement as applied to the fork, Crimp adds multiple layers of signification to the play. Additionally, the blinding of Clifford replicates an image that has become archetypical in Western literature, and which stands for the punishment of vanity and self-aggrandizement. The blinding of Clifford, indeed, carries intertextual echoes of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (ca. 429), and The Treatment may be considered, like Sophocles’s play, a parable of ambition or excess, which directly speaks to the contemporary, post-Holocaust context.

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In Act Three, Scene Four, Anne and Simon symbolically ‘punish’ the self-aggrandized subjectivities late capitalist structures both produce and require, which lead to the various forms of symbolic and literal violence reflected in the play. Yet by having Anne, a woman, instead of a man as in Oedipus the King, direct the blinding, Crimp actually re-writes Sophocles’s narrative – it is not Oedipus who punishes himself through blinding, but it is a woman, victimized by Oedipus’s-Clifford’s ambition, who sets out to place bounds on such self-aggrandized male subjectivity. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Iocasta, King and Queen of Thebes, are told by an oracle that Oedipus will mate with his own mother and shed the blood of his own father. Upon hearing this, Laius binds the feet of his infant son tightly together with a pin and orders Iocasta to kill him. Unwilling to do so, she asks a servant to destroy him, but the servant abandons the baby in the fields where a shepherd finds him, and names him Oedipus, or ‘swollen foot’. A second shepherd carries the baby with him to Corinth, where he is taken in and raised in the court of King Polybus as though he was his son. Years later, Oedipus hears the rumor that he is not his father’s son and Tiresias, the blind oracle, foretells “A thing mot horrible: […] that I / Should mate with my own mother, and beget / A brood that men would shudder to behold, / And that I was to be the murderer / of my own father” (Sophocles 1998b: 75). Desperate to avoid his fate, and believing he is actually living with his biological parents, Oedipus flees Corinth and goes to Thebes, where his biological parents really are. It is on his journey to Thebes, that, ironically, Oedipus kills his father Laius upon a petty rivalry, thus fulfilling the oracle’s prophesy. Once in Thebes, as a reward for having solved a riddle posed by a Sphinx, he marries Iocasta, Queen of Thebes, his biological mother. Gradually, Oedipus learns about what he has done. When a plague is sent to the city of Thebes, apparently because Laius’s murderer has not been caught, Oedipus asks the blind oracle Tiresias for help. Tiresias finally tells him that he himself is the murderer, and therefore the one who has brought the plague to Thebes. As soon as Oedipus learns about what he has done, he blinds himself in selfinflicted punishment. Yet this punishment is also a means to recover his identity, which he has hitherto blown out of proportion, turning it into pure ambition. Self-blinding or the blinding of someone else expresses the transgression of a certain taboo or boundary, marking the point where the self has neglected to abide by a restriction through vanity or excess. As Creon, his brother-in-law, tells Oedipus at the end of the play, “seek not to have your way in all things: “Where you had your way before, / your mastery broke before the end” (Sophocles 1998b: 99). Oedipus’s self-blinding, therefore, is a belated means to acquire a human identity; it is a means for Oedipus to reshape his overblown ego into

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human form, even if, paradoxically, it works like a castration. ‘Castration’, or the setting of limits to the self that allow for social relationships and meaning to emerge, is thus preferable, even for Oedipus himself, to the absence of limits – the madness or anarchy caused by narcissism and self-aggrandizement. In Oedipus the King, as in The Treatment, the blinding thus aims, paradoxically, to bring about a positive, purifying effect, both on society – which cannot be organized around incest – and on the self, since both can subsequently restore their lost boundaries, the pre-condition for the existence of meaning. Socially, the blinding performs the function of reinscribing a taboo, albeit not in the negative sense of prohibition or censorship. It restores a sense of right and wrong that relocates the subject as finite and responsible; it is only on this basis that social justice and order may be constructed. Clifford stands for the ethical impoverishment of late capitalist, neo-liberal institutions, and Anne ‘blinds’ or ‘castrates’ Clifford’s unrestrained self-aggrandizement. Like Oedipus, Clifford, the ‘bad witness’, has ‘seen’ too much. As Angelaki puts it, in Act Three, Scene Four, Clifford observes the scene as the “auteur-voyeur. […] [B]y allowing Clifford to witness this intimate moment, Andrew serves Anne and her life up on a platter for Clifford, presenting the woman as a form of sacrifice in order to please Clifford’s creative vision” (Angelaki 2008b: 260). Anne’s blinding of him, whereby she attempts to regain control of her own image and identity, is arguably a rewriting of the myth of Oedipus along feminist lines. Symbolically, Anne takes her body away from social discourses which, with the help of technology, disseminate models of female behaviour which threaten, as Baum puts it, the “integrity and organicity” (Baum 31) of the female body, thus rejecting mediated, distorted notions of femininity and “actualiz[ing] her desire [with her] subjectivity” (Baum 35). In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon argues that classical texts are often refashioned by contemporary authors in order to incorporate the teachings of the past and thus make them speak to contemporary times.As she puts it, “Parody is one mode of coming to terms with the texts of that ‘rich and intimidating legacy of the past’” (Hutcheon 4). Crimp has recourse to a classical text which examines essential distinctions between right and wrong and the consequences that ensue when individuals do not abide by them, in order to caution late capitalist subjectivities as to their own limits. Hutcheon adds that parody signals a desire, on the part of contemporary authors, to refunction forms of the past to serve their own needs: “Their doublevoiced parodic forms play on the tensions created by historical awareness” (Hutcheon 4). Most importantly, then, through rewriting the Oedipus myth and bringing it to bear on Clifford, who is forced to undergo a radical, internal

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change, Crimp makes his play directly speak to the contemporary debate on responsibility and resentment. The dialogue of Act Three, Scene Four, the scene of the blinding, has resonances which inscribe the play within such contemporary debate. Right before Simon and Anne blind Clifford, Simon unsettles Clifford by facing him with a series of defamiliarizing questions that produce estrangement. Simon’s and Clifford’s dialogue is thus given larger historical undertones – in particular, it advances gradually so that the audience can almost anticipate the question of retribution, climaxing on Clifford’s “So what do you want?” (Crimp 2000: 368), and Simon’s “Revenge” (Crimp 2000: 368). Crimp creates a sense of foreboding, in which the underlying drive for retributive violence seems to become barely suppressible, threatening to break through to the surface at any moment. Since the experience of the Holocaust, what Agamben, by reference to Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, has termed as an “ethics of resentment” (Agamben 100) has fuelled a continuous struggle to force the apparent ‘normal’ individuals who ‘merely’ obeyed orders to acknowledge their complicity and to bring them before justice. As Améry puts it, “my resentments are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity” (qtd. in Agamben 100). In the same line, Reyes Mate, quoting Agamben, claims that, “only at that point, when the executioner has experienced that he must contend with an event that mortally contaminates his/her whole life and that, on account of it, he/she wishes it had never happened, only at that point can reconciliation take place, since the executioner stops being an enemy in order to become kin” (Reyes Mate 2003: 209; emphasis added).²⁶ And he adds, “the aim is for the criminal not to lose sight of her/his crime, that is, for her/him to be unable to organize his/her personal and collective life as though nothing had happened” (Reyes Mate 2003: 209).²⁷ As is characteristic of the twentieth-century ‘ethics of resentment’, then, Anne wants Clifford’s subjective conditions to change. Oedipus blinds himself in order not to forget; his blindness is a continuous reminder of his ‘mistake’. Anne blinds Clifford in the same spirit. Oedipus wishes that his “ears could have built / Some dam to stay the flood of sound, that [he] / Might lose both sight and hearing, and seal up / [his]

 “Sólo entonces, cuando el verdugo ha experimentado que se las tiene que ver con una experiencia que contamina mortalmente toda su vida y que por eso desea que ojalá nunca hubiera tenido lugar, sólo entonces se produce la reconciliación pues el verdugo ‘deja de ser enemigo para convertirse en prójimo”.  “Se trata por tanto de que el criminal no pierda de vista su crimen, es decir, que no organice su vida particular y colectiva como si aquí no hubiera pasado nada”.

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wretched body […] How good to dwell beyond the reach of pain! (Sophocles 1998b: 95). He blinds himself so that he may not look at his children’s faces “with level eyes” again, after having discovered such “taint” (Sophocles 1998b: 95) in himself. Similarly, by blinding Clifford Anne seeks to force him to experience a sea-change, so that he may not forget. In a bout of mad violence, Anne reinserts the memory of violence and barbarism back into history, thus holding off the inevitably conservative, amnesiac character of time. As Reyes Mate further clarifies, What the victim demands is not that the executioner may be submitted to a torture similar to the one s/he underwent, but that the executioner may live through the act s/he committed in a self-conscious manner, just as, unfortunately, the victim her/himself is also forced to live through it – by lamenting it ever happened. Personal resentment protests against the healing enacted by time, which turns forgetfulness into humanity’s second nature, as though amnesia was the natural state of society and memory an aggression against such natural state of things. (Reyes Mate 2003: 209)²⁸

Through the blinding, then, Anne wants Clifford to undergo, like Oedipus, a change so radical that his subjectivity will be completely altered; he wants him to “live through the act he committed in a self-conscious manner” (Reyes Mate 2003: 209). The intertextual relationship between The Treatment and Oedipus the King highlights the debate surrounding the ‘ethics of resentment’ as a central theme. The Treatment intervenes in the contemporary debate by exploring the limits and the social purposes of resentment. Anne’s and Simon’s blinding of Clifford is a political act carried out with the purpose of reclaiming the memory of barbarism in the present, so that the violence the late capitalist system requires for its maintenance will not go unheeded. Crimp, however, does not justify retributive violence per se; he is not arguing that irrational violence is a valid alternative to barbarism. The ‘ethics of resentment’ is rather a reminder that contemporary institutions should supply the conditions necessary for the subjective make-up of individuals – which, historically, has led to barbarism – to change and become more humane. Thus, by blinding Clifford, Anne causes the system to short-circuit, leaving the play ‘in the dark’. Not surprisingly, the blind taxi driver finally takes charge

 “Lo que la víctima plantea no es que el verdugo sea sometido a una tortura semejante a la que él tuvo, sino que viva conscientemente el acto que cometió, como desgraciadamente tiene que vivirlo la víctima: como algo que mejor nunca hubiera sido cometido. El resentimiento personal protesta contra esa cicatrización del tiempo que convierte al olvido en una segunda naturaleza, como si la sociedad amnésica fuera lo natural y el recuerdo una agresión a la naturaleza”.

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of Clifford in the grotesque scene that closes the play, Act Four, Scene Three, which implies, nonetheless, that Clifford may be finally symbolically undergoing personal change. Throughout the play, the taxi driver is increasingly related to ethics and morality – although, as has been said, the scenes where he appears are traversed by an underlying irony which suggests his world is so subjective and ‘primitive’, so impervious to self-interest, that it borders on the unreal. In the last scene, Clifford asks the blind taxi driver to take him to his office, where he must urgently deliver the script of Anne’s life: Driver Where to? Clifford Where is this? Driver ‘Where is this’? Don’t you know? Clifford I think I know. Driver Well tell me what you think. Clifford I think this is Canal Street and Broadway. […] Driver Where can I take you? Clifford Broadway and East Fifty-Second. Driver There is no such thing. […] Clifford I have to deliver some work. Driver In the middle of the night. Clifford Is this the middle of the night? Driver Certainly. Clifford I didn’t know that. Driver What kind of work is it? Clifford A script. […] (gripping the paper). Am I losing pages? […] Driver I’ll take you uptown. Do I have a green light? […] Clifford Are you mocking me? I’m blind. Look at me. Driver I’m not mocking you. Clifford OK. Driver Were you blind at birth? Clifford No. Driver D’you have a disease? Clifford I don’t want to talk. Driver So I just /drive? Clifford Just drive. Yes. […] He turns on the radio. Softly, the boogie-woogie heard at the top of Act Three. Clifford Am I losing pages?

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The pages continue to blow away and tumble across the space. The driver clicks his fingers in time with the music […] The music grows louder. The pages tumble through the air. More frequent horn blasts […] Music continues as they go into the dark. (Crimp 2000: 386 – 89; emphases original)

As already suggested, Anne’s blinding of Clifford is a metaphorical castration. It takes Clifford’s ego away from him and makes him vulnerable and dependent. Once he is deprived of his accustomed frames of reference, Clifford’s vision or knowledge, as well as his ability to discriminate, have to come from inside. Clifford is at a loss, his pride gone as much as his capacity to derive power or a sense of identity from another’s failure, pain or victimization. And his script, the work emanating from his violence, begins to lose its pages, as though the blinding, an act of retributive justice, had managed to erase his deed from history, thus preventing it from repeating itself in the future. Anne’s trauma, as it were, is undone, as though she had ‘broken the spell’, and both Clifford and the driver drive into the “dark” (Crimp 2000: 389) future. After the blinding, Crimp suggests, Anne can revert to passivity and ‘die’ as a character, as indeed she does, because her memory has been reclaimed. She does not “want back [the] five” that Clifford offers Simon for the damaged fork (Crimp 2000: 368); she wants the subjective conditions of those who committed the act of barbarism – specifically Clifford’s – to change. To summarize, The Treatment can be understood as a feminist rewriting of Oedipus the King, that is, a rewriting that vindicates the active role women – whose bodies are particularly affected by the intrusion of the ‘spectacle’ – should play in history by contributing to ‘stopping’ the technologies of ‘progress’ and rationalization, thereby curbing the unmitigated ambitions of those who hold power in the late capitalist global economy. Thus, not only does Crimp place the instrument of justice in women’s – Anne’s – hands, so that they may symbolically liberate themselves from the source of their victimization, but he also relocates the myth within a distinctively post-Holocaust, contemporary ‘ethics of resentment’.

3.4 Audience and Violence: From Voyeurs to Active Witnesses If staged in an ‘in-yer-face’ manner, the blinding of the ‘bad witness’ is meant to jolt the audience out of their position as voyeurs and induce their empathy towards both Anne and Clifford. In Act Two, Scene Three, the ‘double rape’ scene, spectators are cast in the same position as Clifford, that is, as potential voyeurs of Anne’s victimization, whereby an uncomfortable identification is elicited between them and Clifford, underscored by the fact that spectators, like

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Clifford, can anticipate events on stage which Anne cannot. Right at the moment when Anne is dispossessed and disenfranchized, therefore, the audience is paradoxically bestowed with a sense of power. When the blinding takes place in Act Three, Scene Four, however, the audience, like Clifford, is no longer in the know, and thus they cannot possibly contemplate the blinding from a perspective of voyeurism. The violence and the blood-shedding are thus part of a theatrical strategy that aims to shock spectators, thereby making them feel vulnerable. Like Clifford, who is deprived of certainty and power, the audience are also jolted out of their comfortable position with respect to Anne’s victimization and asked to engage in a series of unsettling reflections having to do with the attribution of guilt and collective and individual responsibility. In performance, Clifford’s bloodied eyes make the symbolic violence of late capitalist societies of control – that is, bio-power – suddenly visible and purposefully highlight the tension between passivity towards other people’s pain – Clifford’s towards Anne’s – and the intensity with which pain is experienced in one’s own body. Through this tension Crimp aims to elicit empathy, the ability to imagine the pain of others. The blinding aims not only to denounce the violence of late capitalism, but crucially to involve spectators in a reflection on the inexcusable needs for connection and empathy. In “‘Because it Feels Fucking Amazing’: Recent British Drama and Bodily Mutilation”, Rebellato asks himself why images of extreme bodily mutilation and violence, such as the ones that are dramatized in The Treatment, intensified so dramatically in the 1990s, and concludes that they originated as a response to the increasing individualism and social fragmentation of late capitalist society and consumer culture. According to Rebellato, indeed, bodily mutilation stands as a metaphor of a consumerist society which has “fragmented the social body, and [thus,] the individual body has followed” (Rebellato 2008b: 203). An act of violence such as Simon and Anne’s stabbing of the fork in Clifford’s eyes, then, “offer[s] a kind of socialist analysis, […] one reconstructed and recast in the experience of capital, and one that operates at the level of feeling and metaphor, rather than explicit analysis” (Rebellato 2008b: 202). Fragmentation stands in opposition to the whole body, a “body freed from instrumentalization” and “the whole body that lurks beneath these fragmented bodily images is a utopian object, a placeholder for an experience yet to come” (Rebellato 2008b: 203). The image of Clifford’s blind, bloodied eyes, that is, seeks to evoke its opposite in the audience’s minds – specifically, the possibility of the ‘whole’ body, and therefore a utopian desire for more egalitarian relationships as well as for relationships of positive witnessing, which have thus far been absent from the world of the play.

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Furthermore, and as mentioned earlier, in The Treatment, the violence of the blinding is aimed at the figure of the ‘bad witness’, Clifford, instead of Andrew or Jennifer, who clearly orchestrate Anne’s victimization throughout the play. Surprisingly, Anne chooses to place responsibility on the witnesses – that is, on the ‘viewer’, not on the ‘producers’ of the images. As Megson indicates, détournement is “plagiaristic” (Megson 21) because “its materials are those which already appear within the spectacle” (Megson 21), but its tactics are clearly those of the “‘reversal of perspective’” (Megson 21). Through this “reversal of perspective” (Megson 21) achieved through détournement, Crimp thus impels spectators to focus on why Anne chooses the ‘bystander’ as the site upon which to enact her resistance in an attempt to dissociate them from their role as voyeurs, and in an attempt to begin working towards relationships of positive witnessing. By inviting spectators to offer an answer as to why Clifford becomes the subject against whom Anne chooses to revenge, Crimp prompts his own audience to ask themselves questions regarding political responsibility, guilt and complicity – not the responsibility of those in high positions of power, but that of average individuals in everyday situations. In the play, this potential Crimp seeks to activate in the audience is represented by Andrew – the middle-class individual who is finally able to change in the wake of his contact with injustice; the ‘positive’ witness Crimp invites the audience to identify with in Act Four, Scene Two, as he goes all the way to Anne’s house, and encourages her to leave with him. Ultimately, then, the blinding is a very focused action against the ‘bystander’ to Anne’s pain and is meant to engage spectators in a reflection on the need for ‘positive witnessing’, specifically, on the need for individual spectators themselves to act as ‘positive witnesses’ of the injustices they may observe in their own context. Through the metaphorical resonances of the figure of the blind witness, then, Anne’s act of violence acquires its micropolitical status and function, and becomes the means through which Crimp involves the audience in a pedagogy of resistance.

4 Conclusion: Towards Subjectivity and Ethics Crimp’s The Treatment begins to show a particular sensibility, one that postulates witnessing as the necessary counterpart to the violence of contemporary society and thus partakes of Felman’s and Laub’s statement that testimony has become a “crucial mode of our relation to events of our times – our relation to the traumas of contemporary history” (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). This is so because, in its refusal to subsume events within a coherent, totalizing historical narrative, testimony resists the homogenization of ‘spectacular’, late capitalist societies.

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Crimp, then, vindicates the realm of the particular, as well as the dignity of every single human being, often obscured in the late capitalist race towards profit and rationalization. Female collapse, and the subsequent need to pass on the testimony of resistance in the face of exploitative relationships, becomes, from The Treatment onwards, Crimp’s preferred mode of denunciation of contemporary anxieties. In The Treatment, collapse – in the forms of breakdown of the self and of violence – is used in order to identify and name contemporary society’s most totalitarian tendencies. Anne rejects ‘amnesia’ and forgetfulness and seeks to leave a record of the violence the system exercises for its maintenance. Indeed, through collapse, Crimp attempts to transform and mould the audience’s psychology into more empathic forms. Arguably, The Treatment is the first of Crimp’s plays to initiate a particular mode of relationship with spectators through female testimony and violence, aimed at achieving a series of interior modifications in them. As manifested in Act Two, Scene Three, the scene of the ‘double rape’, and in Act Two, Scene Four, the blinding scene, in The Treatment Crimp first identifies bio-power and its totalitarian underside and begins to construct a dramaturgy of collapse pervaded by a post-Holocaust sensibility as a means to warn the audience of the introduction of violence within ‘civilized’ relationships. The Treatment is based on the assumption that ‘the worst’ is not ahead of us but already precedes us, and Crimp weaves into the texture of the play key literary and cultural figures that emerged in the debate about the Holocaust, such as that of testimony, or of the passive ‘bystander’ or ‘negative witness’. Because of the symbolism inherent in Clifford’s act of looking, Anne’s violent collapse in Act Three, Scene Four – her blinding of Clifford – prompts spectators to experience social contradictions, in particular the disparity between technological advancement and ethical progress, as well as their own contradictory position as part of a cultivated yet leisured society of passive spectators. Most importantly, The Treatment signals, and thus warns the audience against, the transition from the patriarchal, disciplinary societies of industrial capitalism into the societies of control, based on rampant consumerism, which began to emerge after the fall of the Berlin Wall and which brought about a radicalization of the ‘spectacle’ and of the laissez-faire economic ethos. In order to denounce such transition, Crimp begins to develop his distinctive dramaturgy, based on collapse and testimony, whereby he interpellates spectators through the lyrical and defamiliarized language of testimony regarding the symbolic violence of societies of control. As Megson indicates, however, the foregrounding of violence on stage is a risky strategy in that it may participate in the very same politics of the ‘spectacle’

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it attempts to subvert. Even if its tactics are clearly those of a “reversal of perspective”, détournement is “plagiaristic” because “its materials are those which already appear within the spectacle” (Megson 21). In his subsequent plays, therefore, and once the late capitalist system is fully established, Crimp continues to hope the system can be short-circuited at crucial and important points, through brief instances of collapse and testimony, but does not depict explicit violence on stage. Crimp, indeed, is increasingly aware that the technology cannot, at this stage, be retrieved from the neo-liberal elite. Thus, he seems to partake of Jonathan Glover’s conviction, which he expresses in Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century (2001), that – “the means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology” and therefore “it is to the psychology that we should now turn” (Glover 114). As Baudrillard puts it, the violent, belated “calling into order of the Real and History is itself a thing of pathos, as it corresponds to an earlier phase, and not so to the present” (Baudrillard 2003: 76). In his subsequent plays, therefore, Crimp does not replicate the materials of the ‘spectacle’ through violence and, instead, hones in on his dramaturgy of testimony and audience interpellation.

IV Postdramatic Plays: Attempts on her Life (1997) and Face to the Wall (2002)

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After The Treatment, once Crimp has identified the violent, even totalitarian underside of contemporary, media-ridden societies of control, he alternates the writing of dramatic plays with the writing of postdramatic pieces. While in his dramatic plays The Country and Cruel and Tender Crimp develops a dramaturgy of resistance based on collapse and testimony, postdramatism allows him to represent collapse in a more paradigmatic, universalized manner, since it is not tied to a particular psychology. Indeed, in Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall – the two postdramatic plays this study focuses on – characters do not leave the record of a process of change for the audience to witness, but simply and ‘spontaneously’, through acts of rejection and denunciation, halt a situation of group coercion which their environment takes as normal in order to highlight its violence. Both Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall dramatize a character’s collapse consequent upon a coercive act of interpretation or of identity construction. In both plays, collapse functions as a specific intervention that puts a stop to a process of symbolic violence whereby, in the process of relating to one another, the characters perpetuate some of the most violent tendencies of the late capitalist system. In the postdramatic plays, therefore, the emphasis does not lie on the transformation of a character into an ‘ethical body’ on stage; rather, collapse simply signals the point at which an ethical boundary is transgressed. Such moments of collapse are then offered as possible models of resistance to spectators. In Attempts on her Life distress leads a female character to faint and lose consciousness, thereby momentarily stopping the process of coercion that was taking place on stage; in Face to the Wall it leads a male character to vent an uncontrolled outburst of rage on the audience. Crimp thus presents a character’s collapse as her/his body refuses to respond, to collaborate with the system, and he offers it as a paradigm of contemporary oppression – thereby alerting the audience to the totalitarian underside of late capitalist ‘societies of spectacle’.¹ In  This study takes Katie Mitchell’s revival of Attempts on her Life, which ran from 8 March to 10 May 2007 at the Lyttleton Auditorium of the National Theatre, as its main stage reference. As mentioned in Preliminaries I, Attempts on her Life was first directed by Tim Albery at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, where it opened on 7 March 1997. This study also makes occasional references to Juan Carlos Martel Bayod’s production of the play, which ran from 1 to 7 April 2005 at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, to coincide with Crimp’s visit to the theatre, where he gave a series of lectures on playwriting. Face to the Wall was published in 2002, together with another short play, Fewer Emergencies (2002). In 2005 Crimp wrote Whole Blue Sky, and the three plays were published as a triptych, Fewer Emergencies (Crimp 2005b), with Face to the Wall as its middle play. Whenever this study refers to the staging of Face to the Wall, it is in relation to James Macdonald’s production of Crimp’s triptych, which ran from 8 September to 1 October

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the penultimate scenario of Attempts on her Life, episode 16, satirically entitled “Pornó” – which this book pays particular attention to as it is the episode towards which all the others seem to lead – a “very young woman”, “fourteen perhaps or younger still” (Crimp 1997: 65), is coerced into reading from a script which discursively transforms her porn activity into a valid, feminist, even ‘progressive’ way of life. Although the text is purposefully indeterminate, Crimp seems to suggest that she finds herself in a television plateau, where she is asked to act in a commercial and make a case for pornography.² The stage directions indicate that, as the young woman speaks, “her words are translated dispassionately into an African, South American, or Eastern European language” (Crimp 1997: 65). The audience soon learns she is a poor, immigrant woman who, in Katie Mitchell’s 2007 production, spoke in a marked Rumanian accent. She is blonde and attractive, and a man by her side gives her cues whenever “she seems to have forgotten what to say” (Crimp 1997: 66), which happens only occasionally at first, but then with disturbingly increasing frequency.The commercial, which is being translated into a Third World or an Eastern European language and which, through cameras and television sets, can reach every corner of the world, is a means to lure Third World or Eastern European women into working for the porn business in developed countries. Thus, a situation of utter inequality aimed at maintaining the existing hegemonic world order is perpetuated through the mechanisms of translation and interpretation. As the young woman is constructed according to the interests of the late capitalist elite and a docile identity is enforced on her, she experiences a nervous breakdown and suddenly argues that she “can’t” (Crimp 1997: 69)

2005 at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. It was the first time the three plays were staged together, as one single theatrical event, although in 2002 Katie Mitchell had directed Face to the Wall at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. In both Attempts on her Life and the triptych Fewer Emergencies, the speakers’ gender – except in the case of Speaker 1 in Whole Blue Sky and Face to the Wall, respectively labelled by Crimp ‘female’ and ‘male’ – had to be determined by the director on the basis of the type of oppression each character is subjected to. Crimp portrays gender as an effect of power and discourse, not as an attribute inherent to his characters.  Mitchell decided to explicitly locate “Pornó” in a television plateau and made a constant use of screens throughout her production. Yet screens were not used in order to reproduce the mediaridden society Crimp criticizes in the play, but in order to subvert its tenets and values. In the case of “Pornó”, before the young woman appeared on stage to shoot the commercial Mitchell showed a close-up of her face while she was putting some make-up on, a moment of solitude and silence. The screen thus made visible the sense of masquerade and impersonation of identities. Cameras were used by Mitchell in order to create a sense of intimacy between the audience and the characters, and in order to show the underside of the glamour that is usually associated with ‘spectacle’.

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go on delivering the script. There is a “momentary confusion” (Crimp 1997: 69), and the crew is forced to call in another speaker. Yet, once the breakdown is over, the young woman joins in again and goes on with the speech, this time without interruptions. As the stage directions put it, “the first girl drinks a glass of water and is revived” (Crimp 1997: 69) – she is unable, that is, to sustain her dissent, afraid perhaps that she might be replaced by a more willing speaker. As will be discussed at greater length below, it is worth mentioning that in her revival of the play, Mitchell chose to emphasize that particular moment of collapse and to stage it in a slightly different way from its presentation in Crimp’s text. Mitchell chose to portray the young woman as willingly leaving the stage and as not joining in again, thus empowering the moment of collapse by turning it into a self-conscious move on the part of the woman who is being oppressed. In Face to the Wall, the middle play in the triptych Fewer Emergencies, a man is made to impersonate a Hollywood hero and boast about the violence he might inflict on others. A mass murder has been perpetrated at a school, involving the killing of children and the principal. A series of individuals, possibly members of the community that has been shattered by the event, sit together and discuss its causes. It seems that the man that violently attacked the school, who is referred to as the Postman, led an apparently normal, comfortable suburban life with his wife and children, having, in the eyes of the speakers, everything he could possibly desire. As Speaker 1 begins to describe how the killings took place, the other speakers push him towards identifying with the murderer and trying to impersonate him, as though the murderer’s rage was his own and the whole event was a Hollywood action movie, with the aggressive hero as protagonist.³ Thus violence suddenly becomes glamorous and a mass murder at a school is turned into an act worthy of admiration, perpetrated by an angry man who has taken justice into his own hands and terrorized others in the name of a mission. As the other speakers begin to give him cues, Speaker 1 experiences a conflict between what he really feels towards the children and what he is being encouraged to feel, and his discourse begins to fall apart. He begins telling the others they

 This study refers to the characters of both Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall as ‘speakers’. To speak of ‘characters’ would imply maintaining the term Crimp, as shall be seen, is precisely questioning. The term ‘speakers’ is not meant to ignore the physical dimension of the characters, but it seems more fitting for plays which are so close to the postdramatic mode. Crimp himself refers to his characters as ‘speakers’ in the stage directions of the episode “Pornó” in Attempts on her Life. When the young woman collapses, “another speaker takes over. In fact the rest of the company have probably appeared and may share the following lines” (Crimp 1997: 69).

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should not be helping him with his lines, and he finally vents his anger on the audience and is unable to finish the story he had set out to tell. Both Mitchell and Macdonald used the potential for resistance inherent in the strategy of collapse in order to accomplish different, very specific objectives in relation to the audience. As has been mentioned, in her 2007 production of Attempts on her Life Mitchell made the young woman in “Pornó” leave the plateau as an active manifestation of dissent, instead of, as in Crimp’s text, having her join the other speakers again after her breakdown. Crimp’s text thus emphasizes the extent of the oppression which the contemporary, unequal world order exerts on women, while Mitchell turned Crimp’s textual and theatrical strategy into an active, self-conscious act on the part of the young woman, which was offered to spectators as a viable model of resistance. On his part, in his 2005 Royal Court production of the triptych Fewer Emergencies, Macdonald took advantage of theatrical devices such as light and the pause in order to make Speaker 1’s collapse function as a possible model of resistance for the audience. Arguably, Macdonald invited spectators to assess the effectiveness of violent reactions; yet, by having Speaker 1 vent his rage on the spectators’ ‘bodies’, his aim was to allow them to physically experience the extent of the violence which was being enacted on Speaker 1 himself, thereby turning collapse into a theatrical strategy which aimed to have an effect on the audience’s psychology – namely, to make them aware of the violent underside of the late capitalist, consumerist society they live in. In these minimalist plays, collapse works in a paradigmatic manner. It is presented as a person’s immediate response against the imposition of an identity from without, through a coercive act of interpretation. In Attempts on her Life, such an act of domination has wider resonances than in Face to the Wall because it is shown to be circulated globally via television screens – the ‘camera’ – in an attempt to legitimate the economic and sexual exploitation of Third World women. Face to the Wall, in contrast, has a more indeterminate setting that allows more freedom to stage directors and spectators. Quoting Sierz, Middeke argues that “whether we witness a script meeting, a brainstorming session, a rehearsal, or even a performance, or whether the voices are inside the writer’s own head or those of the actors remains open to conjecture” (Middeke 2011: 94).⁴

 Sierz claims that “the playlets [in the triptych Fewer Emergencies] are […] about how narratives are created […] [and] could also be about different situations, a script meeting perhaps, or a rehearsal, or a party game, or an acting workshop or a publisher’s brainstorming session” (Sierz 2006: 69). In an interview with R. Darren Gobert, Macdonald asserts he understood the triptych as a “reduced version of a writer’s journey through a story” (Gobert 144). As he puts it, “if there are no characters, then you are directly in the writer’s head: you’re dealing with the writer’s

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As noted above, in Face to the Wall Speaker 1 is forced to behave as an aggressive man of action. Face to the Wall was initially written by the playwright as a “footnote” (Sierz 2006: 60) to Attempts on her Life, with the aim of dramatizing similar concerns from the point of view of how they affect a man.⁵ And indeed, while Attempts on her Life dramatizes female collapse, or the collapse a woman undergoes by virtue of her gender, Face to the Wall dramatizes the collapse a man experiences by virtue of being constructed as a man in contemporary late capitalist society – a society that constructs men, as Burkitt puts it, as “closed and rationalized” (Burkitt 49), “armoured” (Burkitt 50), unempathic bodies who are expected to exercise and/or rationalize different degrees of violence in order to uphold the economic interests of the system. In Attempts on her Life, the “very young woman” (Crimp 1997: 65) who is coerced into adopting the identity of a ‘feminist’ porn star is later turned, when she “join[s] in again” (Crimp 1997: 70) after her collapse, into the embodiment of the speakers’ long denied aspirations. Being identified as the ‘Anne’ the play constantly refers to, she is said to be a “TV personality”, to “run her own country pub”, to “travel the world”, or “end animal suffering” (Crimp 1997: 70), as though she could fulfil all of the speakers’ desires. As shall be discussed below, by creating a protagonist, ‘Anne’, who is made up of a patchwork of opinions but who is, in reality, the play’s central absence, never materializing on stage through a single, definite, unified physical presence, Crimp satirizes the social myths and identities individuals, particularly women, are bombarded with in contemporary ‘societies of spectacle’.⁶ Thus, both the young woman of Attempts on her Life and Speaker 1 in Face to the Wall are expected to self-regulate according to specific social myths, actually ‘becoming’ a ‘porn star’ or a ‘man of action’. Crimp’s main interest in these plays is to explore whether and how the individual can resist the imposition of an

problems, with his own material” (Gobert 144). In order for the actors to be able to plausibly impersonate writers, before rehearsals he “got writers in. […] We just quizzed them relentlessly about how they work, the hours they keep, what happens when they get stuck, where they get their inspiration from” (Gobert 144).  As Crimp puts it in British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, referring to the link between Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall, “I naïvely thought there was a formula, so I could try it with men. Face to the Wall is as far as I got. For a long time I thought Face to the Wall was the beginning of something, and then I realized that it just was something” (Aragay et al. 65).  In “Pornó”, the “very young woman” (Crimp 1997: 65) who collapses on stage might be ‘Anne’ herself, forced to read from a script that refers to herself in the third person. In this sense, “Pornó” is the only episode in which ‘Anne’ seems to materialize. When she does so, then, she collapses because of the specific female identity projected upon her.

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identity from without, according to which s/he is expected to self-regulate. In these plays, collapse signifies the individual’s refusal to be colonized in such a way, that is, the psyche’s refusal to exercise violence against its own integrity. Thus, after The Treatment, interpretation is seen as the characteristic means whereby late capitalist power operates as it circulates models of behaviour through the media, which individuals are expected to perpetuate. Crimp, therefore, does not seek to elaborate on the particular psychologies of characters – speakers are identified simply by their age, as in Attempts on her Life, or by numbers, as in Face to the Wall, which signals the loss of ‘identity’ or of individual characteristics that takes place as a result of bio-power’s erosion of the political, embodied subject or bíos. Instead, his aim is to explore and denounce the self-regulation bio-power demands from individuals and how external myths and images inform their consciousness. Thus, he presents self-regulation as a form of self-inflicted violence required by late capitalist society, and then explores whether individual resistance to it is possible.

1 Interpretation, Self-Regulation and Postdramatism 1.1 Crimp and Postdramatism In The Treatment, as has been argued above, Crimp dramatizes the capacity of bio-power in societies of control, or ‘societies of spectacle’, to intrude within and subjectify individuals, rendering them compliant, docile bodies. After The Treatment, in Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall in particular, Crimp has recourse to a form, postdramatism, which allows him to represent in a more schematic, archetypal manner the totalitarian underside of late capitalist power and how it causes collapse in individuals. In an ever more pared-down, immediate way, he gives concrete shape to bio-power. There is a debate, however, as to whether Crimp’s plays could be considered postdramatic. As Sierz points out, Crimp has often been described as a very European playwright. Indeed, he “questions the British tradition of naturalism and social realism” (Sierz 2006: 2) and does not hesitate to have recourse to European forms, such as that of postdramatism, which is particularly strong in Germany or Belgium. In the same vein, Edward Kemp, who was involved as dramaturg in the original production of Cruel and Tender, argues that Crimp “is perfectly aware of, and sensitive to, developments in playwriting in Continental Europe, especially

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France and Germany, and his work bridges the gap between the English and Continental traditions” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 205). Postdramatism, a term coined and circulated by Lehmann in his seminal study Postdramatic Theatre, refers to a number of tendencies and stylistic traits occurring in avantgarde theatre since the end of the 1960s, precisely as an aesthetic response to the spread of the mass media or ‘spectacle’, with particular intensity since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As Rebellato has argued in “From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwrighting”, “globalization has created dramatic and new conditions […] [and] the rules of political theatre have been transformed in response” (Rebellato 2008a: 259). Thus, “Where realism seemed essential, now a kind of non-realism seems so; where politics was the object, now it is ethics, where once playrwrights proclaimed ‘message first’ […] now aesthetic experiment may be the right means to achieve an effective political response to the challenges of a consumer culture and a marketized world” (Rebellato 2008a: 259). Theatrically, postdramatism is not about creating characters in a naturalistic manner. As Heiner Zimmermann puts it in “Martin Crimp, Attempts on her Life: Postdramatic, Postmodern, Satiric?”, “the prototypical postdramatic text has no dramatis personae and no characters impersonating human beings who define themselves by speech and action” (Zimmermann 2002: 106). In Attempts on her Life and in Face to the Wall, Crimp foregoes the characters’ psychological dimension because, as he himself puts it, he seeks to “tell about complication quickly” (Crimp 2005c). At the same time, in a postdramatic text the characters’ words do not contribute to the development of a coherent, linear plot; rather, through soliloquies, they create a multiplicity of quickly sketched, at times recurrent, at times abortive, stories. Often, in postdramatic texts, spectators are directly addressed, so that the otherwise closed circuit of onstage communication is disrupted. In this way, spectators are impelled to reflect on the nature of the linguistic expressions which are presented as though they were riddles for them to decode and to interpret. In a society in which individuals are easily turned into passive consumers of images, into voyeurs of ‘spectacles’, spectators of postdramatic theatre are no longer asked to just fill in “the gaps in a dramatic narrative” (Jürs-Munby 6), but to “become active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are also willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning” (Jürs-Munby 6). On the face of it, both Attempts on her Life and Fewer Emergencies seem to share these postdramatic elements. In the introduction to her English translation of Lehmann’s book, Karen Jürs-Munby labels two of the playlets in the triptych,

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Fewer Emergencies and Face to the Wall, postdramatic on the grounds that they are “‘open’ or ‘writerly’ texts” that require spectators to become “active co-writers of the (performance) text … active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making” (Jürs-Munby 6). From Jürs-Munby’s perspective, the two short plays exemplify the postdramatic turn to performance in new writing for the theatre. In a similar vein, Sierz recognizes a productive clash between dramatic and postdramatic elements in Crimp’s triptych, with the latter encompassing the use of anonymous speakers and absent protagonists rather than naturalistic dramatis personae, unspecified settings, and the narration rather than enactment of the story events (Sierz 2007a: 377– 78). Both Sierz and Middeke, however, have pointed out that terming Crimp’s most experimental plays as postdramatic is problematic, arguing that they still depend principally “on an individually authored [dramatic] text and not a mise-en-scène to achieve [their] effects” (Sierz 2007a: 380). Sierz, indeed, argues that “the Sprachflächen [juxtaposed linguistic surfaces] so characteristic of postdramatic theatre – which make no distinction between narration, dialogue, description, expository text and stage direction (Zimmermann) – have little in common with Crimp’s text, which is all dialogue, and recognizably conversational dialogue at that” (2007a: 380).⁷ In this respect, Middeke also claims that “even though Attempts possesses sections – most notably perhaps the examples of concrete poetry in Scenario 11 or the overkill of simultaneous discourse in various languages in Scenario 16 – which border on what Elfiede Jelinek conceived of as ‘expanses of speech’, by far the largest part of Crimp’s language is the everyday speech of dialogue of ‘real people’ that seems fairly grounded in the tradition of British drama” (Middeke 2011: 98). This discussion contends that Crimp’s Attempts on her Life and Fewer Emergencies can be considered postdramatic, however, from the point of view that the theatrical text itself is just one more element of the performance, and their meaning depends on what Lehmann calls the “performance text” (Lehmann 85; emphasis original) resulting from the interaction between the “linguistic text, […] the texture of the staging […] [and] the theatrical situation” (2007: 85). While Lehmann makes no reference to Crimp in Postdramatic Theatre, he does argue that the work of some contemporary playwrights shows a “profoundly changed mode of theatrical sign usage” which suggests that “it makes sense to describe a sig-

 As Sierz notes, Sprachflächen is Elfriede Jelinek’s term. Sierz’s quote is from Heiner Zimmermann’s “Images of Woman in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life” (2003), from the European Journal of English Studies 7.1, (Zimmermann 74).

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nificant sector of the new theatre as ‘postdramatic’” (Lehmann 17).⁸ Adam Ledger, on his part, has also recently suggested that Sierz’s is an essentially dramatic – textual – analysis of the triptych (Ledger 124– 25), to the detriment of what Lehmann calls the theatre situation or joint text resulting from the interaction between the linguistic text, the mise-en-scène and “the mode of relationship of the performance to the spectators” (Lehmann 85). For the most part, however, Lehmann is cautious not to set up a binary opposition between dramatic and postdramatic theatre. He states, for instance, that “In the emergence of a new paradigm, the ‘future’ structures and stylistic traits almost unavoidably appear mixed in with the conventional” and speaks of “‘postdramatic stylistic moments’ embedded within dramatic texts” (Lehmann 24). This leads him to claim that “text theatre” can be a “genuine and authentic variant of postdramatic theatre” (Lehmann 17). As Barnett also explains, in these plays “the words themselves, one of the dominant elements of the dramatic theatre, become just another element in a theatrical mode that militates against hierarchies in performance” (Barnett 16). Postdramatism is the form that best suits Crimp’s desire to dramatize how individuals internalize the mechanisms of control of late capitalist ‘societies of spectacle’. A series of postdramatic strategies of minimalization allow Crimp, precisely, to focus on the language ‘characters’ speak instead of on their psychology or the (naturalistic) relationships between them, which ultimately serves the purpose of foregrounding thought processes themselves. Attempts on her Life signals the beginning of a paring down of language and characterization which the triptych Fewer Emergencies takes a step further. As Middeke puts it, “with this trilogy, Crimp continues the minimalist aesthetics, of Attempts on her Life only to exacerbate the process of aesthetic reduction and concentration” (Middeke 2011: 94). In the triptych, Crimp continues filtering and concretizing language and turns the minimalization into a personal poetics. Indeed, if Attempts on her Life includes no specified characters and very few stage directions, the triptych is even more sparse. It includes four nameless speakers – 1, 2, 3, and 4 – who, given the absence of any stage directions, are usually made to appear on a bare stage in order to seemingly ‘improvise’ stories through their soliloquies. The plays’ only visible ‘action’, so to speak, is constituted by the events the speakers’ words conjure up as they make up the stories.⁹

 Lehmann further suggests that ‘the attack on the spectator in [British ‘in-yer-face’] plays would have to be theorized as a tension between dramatic and postdramatic theatre” (Lehmann 9).  Crimp speaks of “a progression” (Crimp 2005c) from The Treatment through Attempts on her Life to Fewer Emergencies, which led him to increasingly emphasize the plays’ written nature. He

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In Macdonald’s 2005 production of the triptych, the actors in Face to the Wall, the middle play, were placed at a white table ‘improvising’ stories so that the action was clearly made up of the speakers’ words instead of taking place physically, as action, on stage. Among the forerunners of the postdramatic sensibility, Beckett is perhaps the most important one for this study, since Crimp has often acknowledged his indebtedness to him, dating back to his early youth when he saw a staging of Not I (1973) at the Royal Court.¹⁰ Both Beckett and Crimp highlight the different roads discourse can take, at times becoming coercive, at times liberating. Crimp’s postdramatic theatre resembles Beckett’s because he is not interested in offering psychologically fleshed-out, naturalistic characters and because he turns the stage into what he calls “the reality of the skull” (Crimp 2005c), progressively becoming more interested in the “voices” (Crimp 2005c) that inform individuals than in reflecting the external world.¹¹ In The Theatre of Martin Crimp, Sierz links Crimp’s postdramatic theatre undeniably to Beckett and highlights its ‘improvisatory’ nature – “[The postdramatic plays] show how ideas morph out of each other, out of control – in the words of Beckett, ‘always going, always on’” (Sierz 2006: 69).

refers to his growing focus on how writing, language and power are interrelated through the construction of regulatory archetypes or social myths as follows: “The Treatment and Attempts on her Life can be considered to be two different attempts at describing someone, but the last one explores writing itself without the theatre scenario. In it, the idea of writing is closer to the surface. In Cruel and Tender and The Country the idea of writing is not close to the surface. Attempts on her Life came from 1985, from Four Attempted Acts. It is a play on words with this radio play. It means I am revising it, but with a change: the ‘attempts’ at writing are clearer in Attempts on her Life” (Crimp 2005c).  In British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, Crimp states, “There is something very special about Face to the Wall for me, and that has to do with Beckett’s Not I which was the first piece of professional theatre I ever saw, while I was still living in the north of England. In 1975, I made a trip to London and saw it at the Royal Court – it was fantastic. Ever since then I’d always wanted to write a short play, and have it done at the Royal Court. So there was a very personal thing about Face to the Wall. Motivation is always a very complicated issue” (Aragay et al. 65).  In order to emphasize the idea that speakers might embody the different discourses which ‘populate’ the contemporary mind, in his production of Fewer Emergencies Macdonald considered the possibility of presenting a completely empty stage with no actors at all, but simply ‘voices’ – “I thought maybe it would be interesting if you couldn’t see the actors at all, you could just hear them discuss – voices – and have them sit in a dark room” (Gobert 144). He finally forewent this idea because it was important to him to foreground the responsibility of the speakers in relation to the story they are inventing (Gobert 144).

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As has already been suggested, since postdramatism is not tied to the creation of specific onstage action and character development, it can make mental processes transparent, so that the conflicts and tensions the society of control causes in the psyche can be fully observed. Crimp’s postdramatic plays build a whole dramaturgy around the concepts of minimalism and stage emptiness in order to dramatize the mental operation of discourses, and thus provide a concrete, material representation of bio-power. As Crimp himself describes it, “In these plays the process of invention of story and characters is made visible to the audience. The story isn’t told ‘on stage’ but in the minds of all the participants – the audience included. It’s a bit like injecting the story intravenously” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 140). Crimp has explained that he has “consciously developed two modes of dramatic writing: one is the making of scenes in which characters enact a scene in a conventional way – for example my play The Country – the other is a form of narrated drama in which the act of story-telling is itself dramatised – as in Attempts on her Life, or Fewer Emergencies […] The dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one” (Crimp 2006b: 1; emphasis original). In this “drama-in-the-head” (Crimp 2006b: 1), the process of thinking itself is dramatized. Postdramatism, then, is the form that structurally best captures self-regulation – the self-conscious state-of-being in which individuals walk their way through contemporary, media-ridden society. In these plays he attempts to reflect how “the consumer-citizen of a liberal democracy generally experiences and is encouraged to experience the world as a set of private choices and personal pleasures (or grievances) – so perhaps this drama-in-the-head is simply a reflection of this state of affairs” (Crimp 2006b: 1). Crimp’s way of dramatizing power in the postdramatic plays, then, focuses on highlighting how bio-power informs his speakers, so that they exist in tension with their desire for more authentic modes of being and relating. Out of this conflict there emerges the figure of collapse. Crimp populates the stage with ‘voices’ and turns it into a ‘skull’ in an attempt to externalize the discourses that inform the mind in the ‘societies of spectacle’.

2 Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Attempts on her Life 2.1 The ‘Camera’, Narcissism, and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ Attempts on her Life, Crimp’s most experimental play to date, is composed of seventeen episodes or, as Crimp himself calls them, seventeen ‘scenarios’ for the theatre, in which a series of speakers try to represent a woman called Anne. In so doing, they engage in the process of constructing and recreating a contemporary subjectivity. As has been mentioned, Anne is both the play’s central figure and its central absence, in the sense that the audience does not have a stable referent against which to read the speakers’ verbal constructions. As Mary Luckhurst has put it in “Political Point Scoring: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life”, “‘Anne has multiple identities, occupies multiple locations […] is represented variously as victim and perpetrator […] and can be both person and thing” (Luckhurst 50). The play does not present the story of a character, as the title might at first sight suggest, but the story of a process of identity construction. Anne does not materialize on stage because her body has been rendered opaque by discourses – the ‘Anne’ these discourses create has no referent in the external world, ‘it’ is sheer language.¹² The discourses through which Anne is imagined and described, the play suggests, are mainly those circulated by institutions and the media; what the speakers imagine as plausible, as consensual, is always media-induced. As Rebellato argues, Attempts on her Life seems to share Baudrillard’s understanding of the human body in late capitalism as a “pure screen, a pure absorption and resorption surface of the influent networks” (2008b: 195), as well as Foucault’s idea that the body is “the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration” (2008b: 195).¹³

 Mitchell’s 2007 production of the play for the National Theatre did choose to portray Anne on stage. In some of the scenarios, different women, all dressed alike and wearing a long, red dress, paraded through the stage while the characters talked about ‘Anne’, thus suggesting they were the different ‘Annes’ referred to. The fact that they all looked the same and took over the stage in an almost clone-like, mechanical manner suggested the homogenization discourses disseminated through the media subject individuals to.  Rebellato is quoting from Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication (1988) and from Foucault’s Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (1977) respectively.

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To mention just a few of the identities she is given, in the first episode, “All Messages Deleted”, Anne is a young girl who seems to be participating in some kind of terrorist plot – someone leaves a message on her answering machine telling her that she has to “leave the device in a small truck a the back of the building” (Crimp 1997: 1) and wait for more instructions. In the second episode, “Tragedy of Love and Ideology”, Anne is the protagonist of a glamorous European film the speakers improvise and conjure up – “young and beautiful, naturally” (Crimp 1997: 5). In the following episode, “Faith in Ourselves”, she is referred to as Anya, the inhabitant of a Third World village which has been devastated by a tribal outburst of violence. In “The Camera Loves You” she has become famous – she is a Megastar the speakers idolize and project all kinds of desires on. In “Mum and Dad”, the sixth episode, her parents describe her as an NGO activist who, as a grown woman, seems to have attempted suicide. In “The New Anny” she is a car which “comes with electric windows as standard” (Crimp 1997: 30). In “The Threat of International Terrorism™” Anne, who suffered from incontinence as a child, has clearly become a terrorist. In “Untitled (100 Words)” she is a performance artist who is being assessed by pretentious art critics because she has filmed her several attempts to kill herself and then exhibited them as art. In “Strangely!” she is a woman who is trying to drive away from a “bombed out city” (Crimp 1997: 53) She carries her own daughter, Annushka, in two bags and wants to take her to the airport. In “The Girl Next Door” Anne is a ‘normal’ Western girl who could, however, also be “a killer and a brand of car”, a “femme fatale” (Crimp 1997: 60) or “a cheap cigarette” (Crimp 1997: 59), among a range of other identities. “Pornó”, as mentioned before, shows a very young woman, possibly Anne herself, first as a porn actress and then as a heroine who can adopt all sorts of identities. Finally, in “Previously Frozen” the speakers seem to reassess Anne and claim that she is a fairly representative Western woman who has been abandoned by “husband [and] children” (Crimp 1997: 75; emphasis original) and who likes reading classic texts, or rather “skim[ming]” (Crimp 1997: 79) them, because “skim[ming] seems to be more appropriate to the world / she’s living in” (Crimp 1997: 79).¹⁴ Anne, in sum, is fragmented into different female myths and even objects which might, or might not, be aspects or ‘faces’ of the same alleged person. As Luckhurst puts it, “the scenarios are all distinct from one another though

 Although this book focuses on the topic of collapse, it is worth mentioning that the play is characterized by a black type of humour. Mitchell’s production sought to emphasize this aspect of the play. In the episode “Mum and Dad”, for instance, Anne tells her parents that she wants to become a terrorist, kill a victim per week and then drink Earl Grey tea – mum and dad are of course “horrified” (Crimp 1997: 25)… at their having to buy Earl Grey tea!

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each focuses compulsively on constructing narratives around ‘Anne’, sometimes referred to as ‘Anya’, ‘Annie’, ‘Anny’, and ‘Annushka’” (Luckhurst 50). The more the speakers try to capture Anne through language, the more elusive she becomes. Although the play is a mosaic of viewpoints, a collage, each of these viewpoints is enmeshed in the materialistic, non-egalitarian values of late capitalist society. This has led Luckhurst to assert that the speakers might be “a gaggle of art critics, sinister interrogators, border guards and accusers, advertisers, salespersons and corporate executives, showbiz entertainers, inexplicably authoritative narrators, apparent sexual abusers, friends and lovers” (Luckhurst 50). That is, they represent a wide spectrum of society but mostly those that uphold and perpetuate the present order. In reproducing the neoliberal ideology and not being able, or willing, to contest it, the speakers repeatedly block out the disruptive possibilities of discourse. At first glance, such a fragmentation of Anne might appear to celebrate the many roles and identities women now have access to, but in fact it is an experimental device that enacts an acid critique of the identities that are imposed on women in the ‘society of spectacle’. Thus, and as Sierz claims, “what is being satirized is the male gaze, and Anne’s creation by different men who each have their own agenda” (Sierz 2011: 216). Through the regulatory power of language, the speakers create social myths of female behaviour that correspond to the roles in which late capitalism seeks to encase women. As has been suggested above, Anne does not materialize on stage because her body has been rendered opaque by discourse, to the point that this discursively-generated ‘Anne’ ceases to have any referent in the external world – ‘Anne’ becomes sheer language, a sum of “floating signifiers that have lost their (transcendental) signified” (Middeke 2011: 91). Crimp himself has argued that his refusal to have Anne materialize on stage corresponds to his desire not to structure the play according to a central image that is ‘transparent’, reassuring and readable; in fact, he left the play ‘imageless’ – “in Attempts on her Life I wanted to create a play with no images, out of perversity” (Crimp 2005c). Rather than being an instance of mere perversity, however, this structural device has the effect of subverting the expectations fostered by the ‘society of spectacle’ and of inviting spectators to focus on how language is used ideologically to represent human beings and social relations. Specifically, through extreme satire and irony, in Attempts on her Life he wanted to dramatize “precisely how women are viewed in our culture” (Aragay et al. 65).¹⁵ In his post-

 As Zimmermann has put it, Attempts on her Life was originally intended as a “kind of grotesque footnote on The Treatment” (qtd. in Middeke 2011: 88).

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dramatic plays, Crimp refuses to work in the same way as power operates in the late capitalist ‘society of spectacle’ – thus he chooses not to give Anne, in Attempts on her Life, any specific identity.¹⁶ Interestingly, and at a metaliterary level, Crimp’s refusal to give his speakers and protagonist a definitive identity in Attempts on her Life can also be read as an exercise in self-questioning – he is challenging any writer’s task as a designer of identities. The ‘attempts on her life’ the play’s punning title refers to might also be pointing ironically to the playwright’s – any writer’s – self-appointed task to write about identities. Crimp, in sum, refuses to reduce his protagonist to one single, unified, readable image, and turns such criticism of the way in which societies of control operate into the play’s basic structural mechanism, creating a parallelism between the propensity of power to subjectify individuals and his own role as a playwright.¹⁷ The title, therefore, points both to the play’s unspecified core of resistance and to the diverse attempts to erode it and fill it instead in with externally imposed identities. As David Edgar puts it in State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting (1999), “Crimp’s purpose is not only to question whether we can truly know another human being, but whether we can regard other people as existing at all independent[ly] of the models we construct of them” (Edgar 31). In episode five, entitled “The Camera Loves You”, the speakers explicitly turn Anne into a commodity, fetishizing her as the object which satisfies their narcissistic drives and desires. As they put it, We’re saying that we want to be OVERWHELMED by the sheer quantity YES BY THE SHEER QUANTITY of all the things that Anne can be ALL THE THINGS THAT ANNE CAN BE. (Crimp 1997: 20)

Unsurprisingly, this is preceded by the anxious need to be reassured that such a system of relationships is indeed solid and real, not just a simulacrum:  Interestingly, Face to the Wall also denounces the late capitalist construction of archetypes by introducing an absence, a collapse of meaning, right at the moment when the construction of an archetype – the aggressive man of action, the soldier, the entrepreneur, the ‘full man’ – reaches a climax. At this point, right in the middle of the play, the script Speaker 1 is expected to deliver comes to a halt, a point of collapse, leading to a momentary paralysis of the theatrical event.  In this respect, Middeke asserts that one of the clearest messages of the play, is that “Who Anne is, who anyone is, what a self or what an identity is is ultimately unaccountable […] whoever would even try to pin a life down to an essence or an absolute truth would go way towards murdering it” (Middeke 2011: 91– 92; emphases original).

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We need to feel what we’re seeing is real It isn’t just acting It’s far more exacting Than acting We’re talking reality We’re talking humanity. (Crimp 1997: 19)

The late capitalist social context that promotes the structures of domination that Crimp’s play denounces is very similar, despite the temporal distance, to the one described by Debord in Society of the Spectacle. What Crimp denounces, amongst other things, is the fact that, “in all its specific manifestations – news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment – the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life” (Debord 13). This implies that language, subjectivity and social relations exist within the media model of representation, which is based on materialism to the point that individuals become fetishized. The ‘spectacle’, according to Debord, is “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image” (Debord 34). Crucially, Debord argues that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation amongst people that is mediated by images” (Debord 12). These ‘spectacular’ social relations, according to Crimp, isolate people both from themselves and from other individuals. As Debord puts it, following the advent of the ‘society of spectacle’, what “once was directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord 12).¹⁸ Thus, ‘Anne’ and, as Crimp’s satirical critique implies, women in general, are represented through a polymorphous, metamorphosing set of female stereotypes that circulate within our culture and are both generated

 As mentioned above, Crimp had already dramatized this in The Treatment, where Andrew claims that “we started out real, but the real-ness has burned out of us” (Crimp 2000: 352). Attempts on her Life opens with an epigraph which highlights the mediated character of experience in contemporary society. Crimp quotes a statement from Baudrillard, which claims that “No one will have directly experienced the actual cause of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them”. This epigraph is linked to the one in The Treatment, where Crimp quotes Paul Auster’s assertion in In the Country of Last Things (1987) that “Life as we know it has ended, and yet no one is able to grasp what has taken its place… Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself”. Both plays, then, are related in their attempt to denounce the mediatized character of experience in ‘societies of spectacle’. The 9/11 attacks against the Twin Towers, for instance, were depicted in a manner that obscured their causes. The crumbling of the towers was shown on television over and over again, yet the historical and contemporary causes which ultimately accounted for those images were rarely addressed. The images were therefore offered as ahistorical, decontextualized pictures of Western victimization, meant to evoke an emotional response from the viewers.

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and then exploited by the media. As the speakers put it in “The Girl Next Door”, Anne ranges from being a “femme fatale” (Crimp 1997: 59) to being a “man with a van” (Crimp 1997: 60), or even a “cheap cigarette” (Crimp 1997: 59). The speakers in Attempts on her Life repeatedly voice feelings of emptiness that derive from spectacular structures that exalt reified identities. In the sixth episode, entitled “Mum and Dad”, two speakers who could be Anne’s parents recount, not without surprise, that as a child Anne once said she felt like a “TV screen”. As they recall, “‘I feel like a screen’. […] Like a TV screen […] where everything from the front looks real and alive, but round the back there’s just dust and a few wires” (Crimp 1997: 24). The metaphor continues – “She’d like to act like a machine, wouldn’t she” (Crimp 1997: 25). And another speaker answers, “Act? She’d like to be a machine. Sometimes she spends days on end, whole days on end pretending to be a television / or a car […] an automatic pistol or a treadle sewing-machine” (Crimp 1997: 25; emphasis original).¹⁹ Such a statement foregrounds ventriloquism, unsurprisingly a major theme in the play – namely, how individuals are prompted into patterns of behaviour and identities by subtle regulatory instances. Indeed, performing for the narcissistic ‘eye’ that governs late capitalist social relationships, namely, the ‘camera’, implies a considerable amount of self-regulation and even violence. The speakers recount that as a child Anne would have liked to become pure act, not consciousness, in order to fit in. Crimp’s point throughout the play is that the very narcissism that makes individuals ‘perform’ for an all-seeing ‘camera’ – which works both to control their most resistant attitudes and to endorse even their most insignificant ones as long as they perpetuate specific social models of behaviour – also shapes social relations at an international level. In the third episode, “Faith in Ourselves”, for instance, Anne is recreated as a Third World woman, Anya, who lives in a village that represents the uncanny opposite of Western society. In this village, “the traditional ways have been maintained for generations”, “life is so felt” and “trees have names” (Crimp 1997: 12; emphasis original). Here Crimp satirizes the Western self-complacent, patronizing gaze, for which empathy implies a fetishization of the Other as representing a primitive mode of accessing reality, in which people still write their names on “blades of grass” (Crimp 1997: 12). Perhaps influenced by images of genocides they may have seen on television, the speakers who are conjuring or ‘making up’ Anya go on to recount that her land has been devastated. The land is in turmoil; soldiers have invaded

 As indicated in the Faber edition of the play, a slash (/) in the middle of a sentence is meant to mark the point of interruption in overlapping dialogue.

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it who now stand by the atrocities “laughing” (Crimp 1997: 14), although “these are their own cousins, their own parents, their/mothers and fathers” (Crimp 1997: 14; emphasis original). People have buried them “alive up to their necks in the fertile earth, then smashed their skulls open with a spade” (Crimp 1997: 14). Anya explains that they “set light to [her] little girl’s hair [which] crackled like a pile of sticks” (Crimp 1997: 15). Then she curses as she “advances towards the camera” (Crimp 1997: 15). Crimp recreates a situation of mass murder that brings to mind the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which the Hutus massacred the Tutsis, their “cousins” (Crimp 1997: 14) – the reference to “spades” (Crimp 1997: 14) recalls the axes the Hutus used in order to wield violence on the civil population, a violence in the face of which Western UN troops remained passive. Indeed, the episode also brings to mind the inability of Western powers to react, to help the civilian population or to contribute to making the land resourceful in order to facilitate the conditions for peace. The speakers debate whether Anya would not “scream” (Crimp 1997: 15), as she “breaks down and scratches her cheeks like something / from an ancient tragedy” (Crimp 1997: 15). Even if, at this point, the speakers empathize with Anya, the feeling of empathy almost automatically finds expression in a narcissistic attitude. Empathy, which implies self and Other, is appropriated by Western individuals in order to ‘humanize’ themselves and to re-inscribe their relative superiority. Crimp enacts a critique of ‘catharsis’ – notice the reference to “ancient tragedy” (Crimp 1997: 15) – of the fact that the contemplation of images of violence in the media often leads simply to a confirmation of one’s ‘hidden’, ‘humane’ feelings, which are actually utterly divorced from any act of help. Ultimately, then, the atrocities which appear in the media act like a distorted mirror where individuals project and recognize their own feelings, but which in no sense helps them understand their historical reality or the causes of what is being shown. As the speakers put it, – – – – – – – – –

She has – well obviously – a right to be angry. Everything destroyed. A way of life destroyed. A relationship / with nature destroyed. And that is why we sympathize. Of course we sympathize. Not just sympathize, but empathize. Empathize because… Yes. …because Anya’s valley is our valley. Anya’s trees are our trees. Anya’s family is the family to which we all belong. So it’s a universal thing / obviously. It’s a universal thing in which we recognize, we strangely recognize ourselves. Our own world. Our own pain. Our own anger.

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A universal thing which strangely…what? what? what? Which strangely restores. Which strangely restores – I think it does – yes – our faith in ourselves. (Crimp 1997: 16; emphases original)

In addition, the image of the soldiers that stand by “laughing” (Crimp 1997: 14) uncannily foreshadows, in the indifference it suggests, images of the American soldiers who were involved in the torture of prisoners in the wake of the Iraq invasion – at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison, for instance. At the same time, the “burning people running blazing between the fruit trees which bear their names […] while the soldiers stand by laughing” (Crimp 1997: 15) also evokes other iconic images of Western military violence, such as the picture of Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl who was photographed running naked, her back burning, after her clothes had been blown to smithereens by the impact of napalm.²⁰ The photograph shows Kim Phuc in the foreground and a series of other children screaming as they flee Trang Bang, a village close to Saigon. Like the more recent images in which Abu Ghraib torturers appear laughing as they stand beside bodies whom they have deprived of dignity, Kim Phuc’s picture also highlights the dramatic contrast between the children’s scared faces and the detached poise of the soldiers in the background. The situation in which Crimp’s speakers imagine Anya to be immersed may thus transport the audience back and forth between past and present images of barbarism. Precisely in order to identify these acts as barbaric – instead of, as is the case with the official, legitimizing rhetoric of the contemporary War on Terror, as ‘civilizing missions’ – when rehearsing the episode “Faith in Ourselves” as part of a workshop for students at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, stage director Ramon Simó chose to insert a moment of theatrical collapse at the exact point where the play’s depiction of violence accelerates, breathlessly piling up images of twentieth-century acts of devastation, as though it sought to urgently unravel a traumatic memory.²¹ Right at the moment when the speakers were looking for the appropriate word to describe the soothing effects of watching safely removed instances of violence – “It’s a universal thing which strangely…what? what? what?” (Crimp

 Napalm is a compound made from nafta, benzyl and polystyrene, used by the US army in incendiary and defoliating bombs. It was massively used in Vietnam. The picture of Kim Phuc, an icon of twentieth-century violence, was taken on 8 June 1972. Kim Phuc currently lives in Toronto and volunteers as UNESCO ambassador. In 1997 she created the Kim Phuc Foundation.  The workshop was part of a course on stage directing taught by Ramón Simó from November 2006 to January 2007.

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1997: 16) – Simó introduced a silence which lasted for almost a minute. The collapse led the previously homogeneous ‘consciousness’ suggested by the claims to universality – “a universal thing” (Crimp 1997: 16) – to disintegrate as the speakers became speechless and bewildered, repeatedly asking, ‘what?’, ‘what?’, and looking at one another for prompts. If the play portrays global power inequalities and Western narcissistic responses to them, Simó sought to confront Western spectators with a nagging void that threatened to suddenly bring the whole ‘spectacle’ to a halt. Simó consciously sought to create a moment of theatrical collapse in order to make spectators intensely aware of the ethical frontiers that Western individuals overstep and/or turn a blind eye to in their urge to preserve their own ease and comfort. Through the interruption, the violence depicted by the text abruptly ceased to operate as a mirror of the audience’s cathartic feelings, and became a tableau of the atrocities that have characterized the twentieth century. The silence acted like a blank screen on which the violence the speakers described was forcefully inscribed, impelling the audience to experience their own responsibility with regard to world violence. Simó, in short, sought to unsettle spectators and make them feel vulnerable by theatrically disrupting the voyeuristic/consumerist emotional economy of the West, bringing to the surface its subconscious of haughtiness and narcissism, which fully manifests itself as ‘barbaric’ in moments of conflict and war.

2.2 ‘I Can’t’: A Body in Denial In Attempts on her Life, Crimp dramatizes the impact of media discourses and models of behaviour on the construction of identity. When the speakers talk about ‘Anne,’ every register they use is a form of power through which a fiction of her is created. The play aims at making evident the social mechanisms of subjectification, of creation of subjects in and through discourse, in the ‘society of spectacle’. As Miguel Morey states in his introduction to Foucault’s conversations on power, Un diálogo sobre el poder y otras conversaciones, repression and ideology are only power’s most extreme manifestations. The constant of power, instead, is that it “produces [the Real] through a technical transformation of individuals” (Morey in Foucault 2001: 11).²² And he adds, “it is important not to forget this organizational aspect of power […]. In our societies, such technical transformation of individuals, such production of the real, receives the name of nor-

 “[El poder] produce [lo Real] a través de una transformación técnica de los individuos”.

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malization, the modern form of servitude” (Morey in Foucault 2001: 11).²³ In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault explains how subjects are ‘produced’ in discourse through a series of relationships that are established between complexes of […] institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterization; and these relations are not present in the object […] they do not define its internal constitution, but what enables it to appear, to juxtapose itself with other objects, to situate itself in relation to them, to define its difference, its irreducibility, and even perhaps its heterogeneity, in short, to be placed in a field of exteriority. (Foucault 2007: 49 – 50)

If discourses which fix significations – and thus, exert power – are socially accepted, then we can speak of institutionalized forms of power and identity construction. As Foucault argues, discourses are not mere “groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 2007: 54). In this sense, ‘Anne’, the absent protagonist of Attempts on her Life, is a registering surface on which processes of identity construction are inscribed, either successfully or as they reach a point of crisis, which is expressed through collapse. The play calls attention to and dramatizes the power of discourse to violate the integrity of subjects as they absorb identities put forth as models that are, in reality, thoroughly traversed by economic interests. The play’s seventeen episodes are in themselves examples of how language and interpretation can violate individuals (Leggatt 2005: 1– 7). The identification between the violence of language and the act of violation reaches a paroxysmal extreme in the penultimate episode, “Pornó”, a key episode in the play, as already noted, regarding the enforcement of identities. The distortions effected on ‘Anne’’s integrity that take place in the preceding episodes build up to this one, where a scene of translation/interpretation is directly equated with rape. In this episode, as has already been pointed out, a young woman of “fourteen perhaps or younger still” (Crimp 1997: 65) is made to appear on a television plateau and forced to deliver a script which justifies her involvement with pornography by arguing it is a feminist, subversive way of life, rather than a process of objectification that turns women into docile bodies and is designed to perpetuate established power inequalities. As the episode progresses, the young wom-

 “Conviene tener muy presente este aspecto organizacional del poder […]. En nuestras sociedades, esta transformación técnica de los individuos, esta producción de lo real, va a recibir un nombre: normalización, la forma moderna de la servidumbre”.

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an’s speech begins to fail, and she finally collapses in “true distress” (Crimp 1997: 69), refusing to participate in the masquerade. Her collapse signals a refusal to accept the masking of deep class and gender divisions within late capitalism, particularly through the objectification and exploitation/symbolic violation of women. Crimp links these ‘attempts’ against the integrity of (female) subjects to acts of symbolic intrusion – acts of violation. In “Pornó”, the attempt to mediate the subject by making her absorb roles imposed from outside reaches a crisis. “Pornó” portrays a resisting body who argues that she “can’t” (Crimp 1997: 69) go on delivering the script handed down to her by the late capitalist media establishment. That is, she refuses to assist with and participate in her own violation. This scene of coercion takes place in a high-tech television plateau, equipped with a simultaneous translation set which translates word for word what the young woman is saying. As the stage directions indicate, “As she speaks her words are translated dispassionately into an African, South American, or Eastern European language” (Crimp 1997: 65). The television plateau is part of a globalized society where geographical distances are overcome through various technological means. Under the appearance of liberation, the speech the young woman is forced to deliver perpetuates the gender, class and racial inequalities that are the product of such a globalized society.“Pornó” thus begins by invoking the fantasy of liberation through porn: – – – – – – – – – – – – –

The best years of her life are ahead of her. [translation] She may be seventeen or eighteen… [translation] …but ideally she’s younger… [translation] …fourteen perhaps or younger still. [translation] It’s really really important to understand that she is in control. [translation] She’s always in control of everything that happens. [translation] Even when it looks violent or dangerous. (Crimp 1997: 65)

– And then, – – –

She’s young and fit, and happy with her body. [translation] How she uses her body is her decision. […]

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– – – – – – – – – –

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Porno doesn’t stop her leading a normal life. [translation] (In the translation ‘Porno’ should have a distinctive stress: ‘Pornó’) She has a regular boyfriend… [translation] …and all the normal interests of a girl of her age. [translation] […] The difference is… [translation] …is that Porno is building up for her the kind of security and independence many women would envy. [translation]. (Crimp 1997: 66 – 7)

The script the woman is made to deliver aims to lure young women to pornography in order to perpetuate the business of female exploitation in lesser developed or Third World countries by representing it as a liberating option. Underlying this speech is the notion that sexuality, as Jonathan Dollimore points out in “The Challenge of Sexuality” (1983), is a “utopian alternative”, potentially capable of undermining socially repressive mechanisms with the “disintegrative and anarchic power of unrestrained desire” (Dollimore 51). What the speakers seek to tap into is the belief that “sexual transgression and deviance [can] radically challenge an existing, repressive social order”, since the repression and sublimation of sexual drives is the “pre-condition for capitalism’s successful transformation of the body into an instrument of labour” (Dollimore 51). In the 1960s, indeed, sexuality was perceived as the source and haven of the authentic, unitary self, otherwise distorted by the demands of productivity. Not unlike Dollimore, Crimp proves that such a binary opposition does not hold. Dollimore rightly claims that, in truth, “sexuality has no meaning other than that given to it in social situations” (Dollimore 65). Gender and sexuality thus do not reveal a “spontaneous self” (Dollimore 73), but are rather crucially informed by the dictates of power.²⁴ Dollimore concludes by arguing, like Foucault, that

 At a course on playwriting Crimp taught in La Garrotxa, Spain, which was part of the Summer Seminar ‘Obrador d’Estiu’ that the Sala Beckett organizes annually and ran from 7– 15 July 2007, Crimp pointed out that Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) uncannily related domestic objects to larger, political violence and pressures, thus revealing that the supposedly intimate space of the family and the self are essentially political and ideological terrains (2007a). Crimp then pointed out that in the episode “Kinda Funny” in Attempts on her Life he had self-consciously made a similar use of a domestic object – “And they’re both […] in the same kitchen he sat in as a little boy witnessing his parents’ terrible arguments […] And there are these tiny scratches in the table which he recalls having made secretly with a fork. And you’re aware, y’know, like of the continuity of things, of the bittersweetnesss of things” (Crimp 1997: 41;

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“because our sexuality is in-formed by the social and ideological structures into which we are born, rebellious desire can be expressed only in and through the existing forms of its subjection” (Dollimore 73 – 81). In the same manner, the apparent freedom the young woman in “Pornó” derives from “producing the images” (Crimp 1997: 67), instead of “consuming them” (Crimp 1997: 67; emphasis original) is undermined by the fact that the images she is producing are inextricable from a series of economic interests which she is contributing to perpetuating, whether consciously or unconsciously, by acquiescing to her own reification, that is, to the identification of the female with an object. Seen from this point of view, sexuality “ceases to be a utopian alternative, and its simple ‘release’ no longer promises to transform the social order” (Dollimore 81). Instead, it appears as “one site of our social construction and, therefore, of potential subjection” (Dollimore 81). As Luckhurst puts it, “Pornó” aims to denounce “market economies which represent woman’s sexuality as a commodity […] [as well as] the exploitation of women, both institutionally and internationally [in which] corporate mentalities [are] implicated before anyone else” (Luckhurst 54– 5). In Mitchell’s revival of Attempts on her Life for the National Theatre in 2007, the sense of veiled coercion in “Pornó” was foregrounded. A woman was first seen on a screen putting make-up on, and then two men dragged her onstage. The two men sat to each side of the woman and continually gave her cues, highlighting the situation of ventriloquism into which they were forcing her. In the same production, the thrust towards violation and colonization of identities that underlies the late capitalist media establishment was also particularly emphasized. The young girl, who looked extremely Caucasian – an embodiment of the blonde beauty paradigm she models herself after – displayed a marked Rumanian accent which betrayed her origins and highlighted the masquerade and distortion to which she was being submitted. This was, then, the mise-en-scène for the delivery of lines such as: – – – – – – – –

The scenario in fact of the drugged and desensitized child… [translation] …humiliated… [translation] …and then photographed or filmed without her knowledge… [translation] …is a ludicrous caricature. [translation]

emphasis original). The course included the presence of playwrights such as Biljana Srbljanovic, José Sanchis Sinisterra, Gabriel Izcovich and Sergi Pompermayer, in addition to Crimp himself.

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– – – – – – – – – – – –

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[…] Everything is provided for her needs. Including a regular education. [translation] By age twenty-one the best years of her life will still be ahead of her… [translation] …and she’ll have money in the bank from Porno. [translation] Not everyone has this start in life. [translation] Or her opportunities. [translation] Obviously [translation]. (Crimp 1997: 67– 9; emphases original)

Technology and translation, then, are used here not in order to ‘globalize’ ethical advancement, but in order to convey a specific, ideological vision of progress in accordance with the economic interests of those who own the technological means to export this kind of discourse. In the theatrical context, when the audience watch and listen to the play, they will not necessarily understand the language into which the script is being translated, thus increasing the opacity of the event as well as the sense of manipulation, constructedness and enforcement.²⁵ Symbolic acts of violation such as the ones epitomized in “Pornó” are institutionally mediated; however, like physical, direct action upon bodies, they also ‘attempt’ against the integrity of subjects. Just as physical violence objectifies the victim through direct aggression upon her/his body, symbolic violence also objectifies the subject and seeks to suppress her/his potential for resistance. Yet it does not accomplish this through any direct incidence on the subject’s body, but rather on her/his behaviour understood as a representation of her/his social identity.  Translation also plays a major role in Lluïsa Cunillé’s play Après moi, le déluge (2007), where it is similarly used in order to prompt spectators to reflect on the rift between the First and the Third World. The play was directed by Carlota Subirós, and it ran at Teatre Lliure, Barcelona, from 13 December to 13 January 2007. Cunillé, with a sensibility close to Crimp’s, portrays a senior businessman who thrives in Kinshasa, Africa, by exploiting the mineral coltan. One day, he receives the visit of a local old man who asks him to hire his young son and take him to Europe, so that he may not die in Africa as a result of violence and deprivation. The businessman calls for an interpreter to mediate between him and the old man, and the play is about how the interpreter keeps translating the old man’s plea that the white man hire his son, which he keeps refusing to do. The businessman finally dismisses the old man, and the interpreter stands up and asks for her fee. Cunillé foregrounds this economic transaction, so that the triangle of ‘communication’ that had been established turns into closed-off circuit of privilege which excludes the old African man from the businessman’s and the interpreter’s exchange.

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According to Foucault, physical violation is a unilateral act, a ‘masturbation’ inside the body of another individual – a deposing of the aggressor’s identity on the body of the victim. Such an act acquires meaning only after the victim has been ‘marked’ by a lesion. As Foucault puts it, “violation is not orgasmic. It is a kind of fast masturbation on the body of another. It is not sexual. It is a lesion” (Foucault 2001: 128).²⁶ In the same manner, power ‘marks’ individuals, leaving a register or lesion on them. A symbolic type of violation leaves a mark of power by imposing identities through language, through interpretation. It ‘transforms’ the subject by leaving on her/him the marks of subjectification that the interpreter forces upon her/him. To the institutions of power and to the media establishment in particular, a non-subjectified identity is like a non-interpreted text. In the same manner, for a sexual aggressor, a body that has not been forced and does not bear the mark of the aggressor’s mastery, is like a body without sexuality. Crimp’s Attempts on her Life dramatizes the symbolic ‘marks’ discourse leaves on individuals and equates them with acts of violation – unilateral acts of interpretation and subjectification aimed at enforcing social roles and identities upon individuals. In the episode “The New Anny”, for instance, Crimp dramatizes how women are constructed as bearers of (supposedly) male fantasies and objectified to the point that Anny finally becomes a hybrid between woman and car. As the text puts it, “[the Anny] hugs the bends between the picturesque hillside villages […] The sun gleams on the aerodynamic body […] The aerodynamic body of the new Anny […] We see the new Anny snake along between the red-tiled Mediterranean rooftops […] Fast […] Sleek […] Free […] We now understand that the Anny comes with electric windows as standard” (Crimp 1997: 30; emphases original). In this case, the lines are meant to be “spoken in an African or Eastern European language” (Crimp 1997: 30) and followed by an “English translation” (Crimp 1997: 30). Crimp thus demonstrates that female identities are reified to the point that the words used to describe a woman may work just as well for a car, and viceversa. To Zimmermann, this episode ultimately exposes “the fascist subconscious” of “capitalist ideology” (Zimmermann 2002: 121). Indeed, Crimp satirically highlights the exclusion implicit in the standards of beauty and success advertisements put forth, as when the speakers say that “there are no filthy gypsies in the Anny. […] Not in the Anny nor in the sun-filled landscapes through which the Anny drives. […] There is no room in the Anny for the degenerate races… […] …for the mentally deficient… […] …or the physically imperfect. […] No room for gyp-

 “La violación no es orgásmica. Es una especie de masturbación rápida en el cuerpo del otro. No es sexual. Es una lesión”.

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sies, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Kurds, Blacks or any of that human scum. […] We understand that zero per cent finance is available. […] But hurry. […] Since there is a limited offer” (Crimp 1997: 33; emphases original). Such overstepping of ethical boundaries reveals the underside of capitalist ‘progress’, its latent barbarism. Precisely in order to bring to the surface the ‘marks’ discourse can leave on bodies, in his production of Attempts on her Life Juan Carlos Martel Bayod decided to make the female actor who was delivering the lines in “The New Anny” experience a nervous breakdown. She was uttering the lines as though it was a commercial, when suddenly, as though mimicking the pressures and imperatives of the discourses she was made to reproduce, she began to speak the lines increasingly fast, until her body collapsed like a machine refusing to ‘work’.²⁷ She became increasingly hysterical, her movements progressively more mechanical, until she collapsed in a state of frenzy. Through the woman’s hysteria, late capitalism’s own madness became visible. In the same manner as Martel Bayod did in his mise-en-scène, in “Pornó” Crimp brings the values and tenets of the ‘society of spectacle’ to a point of collapse through the dramatization of the young woman’s physical and mental breakdown. Crimp shows how the potential weakness of a system that privileges ‘spectacle’, simulacra and make-believe manifests itself when it is compelled to prove its veracity, its reality. At this specific moment, the young woman breaks down, unable to sustain the masquerade. Indeed, even though “Pornó” generates the expectation that the dominant ideology is going to be finally triumphant, the young woman’s tightly controlled speech suddenly begins to fall apart, and she increasingly looks for prompts and asks the other speakers to complete her words: – – A – – – – – –

It’s actually far more exacting than acting – for the simple reason that it’s really happening. [translation] pause. She seems to have forgotten what to say and looks for a prompt. Yes? (prompt) She enjoys her work. What? (more emphatic prompt) She enjoys her work. She enjoys her work. [translation]. (Crimp 1997: 66)

 The production ran from 1 to 7 April 2005 at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, to coincide with Crimp’s visit to the theatre, where he offered a series of lectures on playwriting.

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Note that when the speakers force her to say the porn actress actually “enjoys her work” (Crimp 1997: 66), she questions the assertion – “What?” (Crimp 1997: 66). She effectively dis-covers the lie their words attempt to mask and, therefore, a “more emphatic prompt” (Crimp 1997: 66) must come. The scene begins to acquire surrealist tones that suggest the young woman is beginning to detach herself from the meaning implicit in the prompts. The lines make less and less sense to her. The speech is becoming sheer verbal artifice. At the same time, the scene’s growing grotesqueness invites spectators to also detach themselves from the proffered meanings: Again a pause. She seems to have forgotten what to say: but this should imply a distress which is never allowed to surface. She looks for a prompt. – Yes? – (prompt) She is not insensitive to the evening light. – What? – (more emphatic prompt) She is not insensitive / to the evening light. – She is not insensitive to the evening light when it strikes the tops of the pine trees with brilliant orange. – [translation]. (Crimp 1997: 68)

The scene’s surrealist character suggests that the young woman’s collapse is placing the situation of symbolic violence in suspension – she is paralysing the process. It thus becomes increasingly clear that she is resisting her insertion within late capitalist exploitative relationships, refusing to play the expected role. Indeed, her speech begins to disintegrate until she collapses and refuses to participate head on: Again a pause. Again she looks for a prompt. – Yes? – (prompt) Everything is provided. – What? – (more emphatic prompt) Everything is provided for her needs. Pause. – I can’t. – [translation of ‘I can’t’] Pause. – I can’t. – [translation of ‘I can’t’] She turns away. Momentary confusion. But then another speaker takes over. In fact the rest of the company have probably appeared and may share the following lines, while the first girl drinks a glass of water and is revived; again it should not be clear whether she’s suffering stage-fright or true distress. (Crimp 1997: 68 – 9)

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In this scene Crimp challenges spectators to reject the kind of society he portrays in the play, as though speaking out, through this woman, his own radical disagreement with its parameters – “I can’t” (Crimp 1997: 69). In this light, Anne’s absence from the play comes to represent the alternatives that are being suppressed, so they ‘can’t’ actually exist and find a road towards expression. After she is revived, however, the young woman decides to “gradually […] join in again, supported by the other voices” (Crimp 1997: 70) – she finally decides to continue contributing to the masquerade, possibly out of fear of being excluded from her already precarious position. However, the shadow of the young woman’s dissent hovers over “the […] company” (Crimp 1997: 69). The dislocation that is being imposed on the woman’s identity has produced a momentary collapse of meaning. In Attempts on her Life, collapse, socially viewed as loss of lucidity or mental clarity, functions as a political strategy in and of itself. Working like a chemical reaction within a stable system – a late capitalist society of control – collapse breaks the code through which ideology and language become allied in order to normalize individuals. In her 2007 production of Attempts on her Life, Mitchell clearly portrayed the young woman’s collapse as a self-conscious political act. Instead of momentarily fainting, she willingly chose to leave the stage not to return again – a conscious refusal to continue collaborating with the system. Mitchell thus turned what in the text is either “stage-fright” (Crimp 1997: 69) or “true distress” (Crimp 1997: 69) – the woman’s collapse – into an active refusal to remain on the television plateau. In Mitchell’s rendition, the young woman’s refusal to participate was an active, self-assertive move. She turned her collapse into a model of resistance spectators might want to imitate if engaged in a similar situation. In both the text and in Mitchell’s production, the young woman’s collapse causes an indeterminacy in the other speakers’ otherwise tightly controlled speech – its degree of oppression momentarily decreases. They are forced to “share the […] lines” (Crimp 1997: 69) and can no longer proceed with their apology of porn. Instead, they begin to claim Anne has become all of the identities and achieved all of the goals the West puts forth as desirable. Through the speakers’ words, again, the identities extolled in ‘societies of spectacle’ become visible as Crimp continues to unveil the construction of stereotypes through language and ideology: – – – – – –

She could for example become a model… [translation] …a TV personality… [translation] …run her own country pub or travel the world. [translation]

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– – – – – –

She could paint… [translation] …swim professionally… [translation] …or study a degree in chemical engineering. [translation] (Crimp 1997: 70 – 1)

The young woman’s collapse in “Pornó” represents a sudden release which confronts the hierarchical structures with absence of production, with a deregulated body that manages to momentarily cast doubt on the system’s self-complacency. Her collapse represents dissent, a refusal to become a conduit for exploitative ideologies, to become ‘docile’. The dramatization of collapse, a sudden interference within a tightly controlled machinery of power, allows Crimp to point to the violence that underlies the late capitalist economic structure. Through the woman’s collapse in “Pornó”, Crimp seeks to destabilize an affluent society that leaves three quarters of the world population in extreme poverty, while generating ghettos of marginality in its midst. The play as a whole also suggests that collapse may be more effective than indiscriminate, terrorist violence in resisting the system. In the episode “The Threat of International Terrorism”, Crimp poignantly reflects on how acts of terrorist violence are systematically appropriated by American neo-conservative discourses, thus neutralizing their subversive potential. Crimp places the ™ or ‘Trademark’ symbol by the side of words like “Terrorism™” (Crimp 1997: 37), “Fantasy Ken™” (Crimp 1997: 37) or even “God™” (Crimp 1997: 37) to indicate that the late capitalist ideology appropriates any concept or notion, no matter of what kind, by virtue of the power that capital and the market provide – this includes the appropriation and commodification of terrorist acts of violence in terms of late capitalist strategic and political interests. As opposed to indiscriminate violence, in “Pornó” collapse transforms the docile ‘machine’ Anne had so far become into a liberated subject. Collapse disrupts the dominant idea of maximum efficiency and undermines the ‘spectacle’ of societies of control from within. Although the translator “remains impassive” (Crimp 1997: 69) and keeps translating the young woman’s words, s/he is now ironically translating her utter rejection of the values she is being forced to transmit – “Pause. I can’t. [translation of ‘I can’t’] Pause. I can’t. [translation of ‘I can’t’]” (Crimp 1997: 69). The young woman in “Pornó” confronts late capitalist values – and their utter lack of scruples – with nothingness, an absence or an emptiness of discourse. Theatrically, the silence is an affront to the symbolic verbal violence to which she is being submitted and to the economic interests it represents.

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Collapse can, albeit minimally, shift the course of ‘history’. It is a way out of what Crimp perceives as the likely repetition, over time, of the atrocities which tend to accompany ‘progress’ and the struggle for the world’s resources. Collapse foregrounds the suppressed Other and demands that attention be paid to her/ him. Mental and bodily collapse thus interrupt the “continuum of progress” (Reyes Mate 2003: 149) – which deals with individuals as though they were just zoè, bodies to be administered for mercantilistic purposes – and re-write the present moment as full and pregnant with possibility again.²⁸

2.3 Ready-mades, Language and Power In order to encourage spectators not to take up the reified identities enforced by a media-ridden society unquestioningly and to activate new modes of relating, Crimp inserts a series of perhaps more marginal, but equally disruptive strategies throughout the play, which Zimmermann terms ‘linguistic ready-mades’ (Zimmermann 2002: 117). The ready-mades are fragments of de-contextualized language through which Crimp seeks to interrupt the speakers’ discourses, calling attention to their subtext of symbolic violence. Crimp adapts this strategy from Marcel Duchamp’s visual ready-mades and uses it to radically re-envision the relationship the play keeps with its audience, investing it with political relevance.²⁹ Duchamp’s ready-mades, which had an influence on early twentieth-century poetry, presented de-contextualized objects – such as a urinary or an upsidedown bicycle – in the context of the museum. These objects were offered as unfinished; the audience was expected to appropriate them and give them a new function and meaning which had nothing to do with their primary use. In this manner, in Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) a urinal acquired the status of a piece of art just because of the museum context in which it was inserted. Duchamp’s ready-mades, which are not devoid of irony, may also be considered a critique of the commodification of art, of its appropriation as a mere sign of status by media discourses that distort its potential social messages. Crimp’s achievement in Attempts on her Life consists in carrying this strategy over to the theatre context in order to re-fashion the relationship between the play and its audience. His verbal ready-mades, indeed, invite spectators to inter “[La novedad supone] interrumpir el continuum del progreso”.  Crimp has stated that he “often look[s] for inspiration [for his plays] in the field of the visual arts” and that in Attempts on her Life he was influenced by the “work of Marcel Duchamp” (Crimp 2005c) in particular.

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pret the de-contextualized fragments of language, to decode the ‘riddles’ or the de-familiarized fragments which are ‘thrown’ at them. The fragments of language function as instances of disruption that disturb the ‘normal’ flow of some of the episodes, and they may take the form of a catalogue of instructions in the event of a plane crash, questions aimed directly at the audience, or riddles which are inserted within the speakers’ songs. Ultimately, Crimp’s linguistic ready-mades seek to turn spectators into active witnesses of the general context of symbolic violence that is portrayed on stage. In episode five, “The Camera Loves You”, for instance, Crimp inserts a direct reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet into a song the speakers are singing. Thus, right at the moment when the speakers postulate they “need to sympathize”, they “need to empathize”, and they “need to advertise” (Crimp 1997: 19; emphases original), he introduces the riddle “What’s Hecuba to her or she to Hecuba?” (Crimp 1997: 20). As the speakers put it, The camera loves you The camera loves you The camera loves you We We We We We We

need to sympathize need to empathize need to advertise need to realize are the good guys are the good guys

We need to feel what we’re seeing is real It isn’t just acting it’s far more exacting than acting We’re talking reality We’re talking humanity We’re talking of a plan to be OVERWHELMED by the sheer totality And utterly believable three-dimensionality THREE-DIMENSIONALITY Of all the things that Anne can be ALL THE THINGS THAT ANNE CAN BE What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? A megastar A MEGASTAR. (Crimp 1997: 19; emphases original)

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As is well known, in Act Two, Scene Two of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1601), Hamlet asks an actor to embody Hecuba, Priam’s wife and Hector’s mother in The Iliad, when she cries on account of Priam’s death. When tears come to the actor’s eyes, Hamlet wonders, “What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” (Shakespeare 1998: 233). In this scene, Hamlet is reflecting on his own inability to cry or to, as Crimp puts it, “sympathize” and “empathize” (Crimp 1997: 19) with his father’s death. Hamlet admires the actor’s ability to do this and laments his own inability to ‘feel’. By invoking this Shakespearean moment, Crimp prompts the audience to reflect on the inability of individuals to fully empathize with others in the context of the ‘society of spectacle’, where true empathy is replaced by the illusion and simulation of contact through diverse media technologies. One of the longest and most significant linguistic ready-mades is found, not coincidentally, in “Pornó”, and it clearly aims to disrupt the process of identityconstruction that the young woman is forced to undergo. As the speakers, oblivious to the young woman’s collapse, continue constructing Anne in different ways – as a “model”, a “TV personality”, a heroine who could “change the world” and “end animal suffering” (Crimp 1997: 70), as someone who has learnt to “fly helicopters”, “studied a degree in chemical engineering” and then “seen the world from space”, and even engaged in secret government missions such as “scatter[ing] information in the optic fibres” (Crimp 1997: 71) while taking it upon herself to “distribute the world’s resources evenly across the earth” (Crimp 1997: 70) – Crimp suddenly rips the speakers’ discourse apart and their words mutate into a de-contextualized catalogue of instructions in the event of a plane accident. As the stage directions put it, “the speakers divide, creating two simultaneous strands, each strand impassively translated into a different language” (Crimp 1997: 71). At this point, the layout on the page also divides the two strands of discourse into two different, visibly separate columns. Thus, while some of the speakers go on constructing Anne as someone who has “personally endorsed a brand of imported lager”, or as someone who has “exterminated the gypsies” and then “hung on a cross to die” (Crimp 1997: 72), the other group of speakers, as though dissenting from the oppressive use of language made by the first group of speakers, suddenly begin to offer the instructions: – – – – – – –

Anne will now demonstrate the crash position… [translation] Which you should adopt when instructed by the stewards… [translation] Head down. [translation] Knees drawn up.

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– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

[translation] If oxygen is required… [translation] …oxygen masks will drop down automatically. [translation] Pull on the mask to start the oxygen. [translation] Do not smoke while oxygen is in use. [translation] Please ensure that your seat-belt is fastened… [translation] …your table is folded away… [translation] …and that your seat is in an upright position. [translation] During the flight… [translation] …we will be coming round with a list of duty-free goods. (Crimp 1997: 72– 3)

Until the two strands converge on: –

Anne will save us from the anxiety of our century… (Crimp 1997: 73)

The de-contextualization and, hence, the defamiliarization of instructions in the event of a plane accident creates a sinister undertone. This ready-made enables an acute perception of how late capitalism aims to construct subjects as consumers – “during the flight […] we will be coming round with a list of duty-free goods” (Crimp 1997: 73). The ready-made, indeed, suggests late capitalism is a plane heading for disaster. Understandably, then, all the speakers hold on to Anne in the hope she may save them from “the anxiety of our century” (Crimp 1997: 73). The third and last of the ready-mades occurs at the very end of the last episode in the play, “Previously Frozen”, where the speakers engage in small talk regarding what Anne’s life may be like in the present moment. They point out that Anne now prefers to skim instead of reading, so they speculate about what bits of important information she may have missed. At this point, the speakers divide into two strands again. One group claim she must have missed “That thing about the killer” (Crimp 1997: 79) and begin to minutely describe a murder in a detached, ‘spectacular’ manner: – – –

How he’d inflicted a total of 37 stab-wounds on the child’s mother as the child slept. And it was his own child. No, it wasn’t his own child. But his own child was there.

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– –

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He brought his child to watch. He brought his own child – that’s right – to watch him murder this other child’s mother. (Crimp 1997: 79 – 80)

As they coldly turn the murder into a spectacle by means of language that evokes the plots of violent films and video-games, the other group of speakers claim Anne must have missed something about “the salmon” (Crimp 1997: 79). This second group offer the ready-made, a question, both to the other speakers and to the audience, as an “object for interpretation” (Zimmermann 2002: 117): – – – – – –

What thing was that? The salmon? Yes. Well about how you define the word ‘fresh’. What the word ‘fresh’ in a phrase like ‘fresh salmon’ actually means. You mean it can mean ‘previously frozen’? Exactly. (Crimp 1997: 80)

It is clear that this second group of speakers is dissenting from the values of the first group, who interpret reality according to the tenets of the ‘society of spectacle’. The first strand of speakers relate to the world and its conflicts as consumers who, instead of empathizing with the atrocities the mass media make accessible to them, use them as something to be consumed, something which can even amuse. This ready-made aims to involve spectators in a reflection on the fact that experience and information are thoroughly mediatized in contemporary society – “previously frozen” for ‘consumers’. Increased access to world conflicts does not lead to engagement and commitment since conflicts are ‘frozen’ into an image that often becomes divorced from an explanation about its real causes, thus preventing empathy from developing. Individuals, therefore, cannot assess the significance of information since they are overwhelmed by facts and images, all divorced from their causes, that frequently act as a smokescreen to blur the uncomfortable nature of other events. Because of the way in which violence is cut off from its causes and often glamourized, the mass media create a society of voyeurs rather than prompting individuals towards greater responsibility and engagement. As Crimp himself puts it in “Faith in Ourselves”, watching a violent event on screen accomplishes a cathartic, narcissistic response at best. Like the ‘fresh salmon’ which is not ‘fresh’, information and ideas – like food – come down to us, in the ‘societies of spectacle’, always-already manipulated and distorted. The ready-made highlights the issues not only of mediatization and manipulation, but also the pervasiveness of lies in contemporary late capi-

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talist society.³⁰ The ready-made “previously frozen” seeks to make spectators aware that it is through simple, daily lies that violence, and therefore the latent threat of barbarism, are covered up. It is thus offered to the audience as an object of interpretation, in an attempt to make them aware of the symbolic violence to which they are subjected as Western individuals and apparent beneficiaries of the system. It invites spectators to become aware of the lies that underpin their society, prompting them to become sensitive to them as the first step towards preventing the resurgence of barbarism. In a ‘society of spectacle’ in which, as the speakers who discuss the murder show, it is easiest to just stop thinking critically and let oneself be carried away by the ‘spectacle’, Crimp highlights the need to open up a space for reflection in our daily lives. In “Previously Frozen”, Crimp is ultimately talking about the need to maintain dissidence and the crucial importance of never foregoing the possibility of reflection in the contemporary ‘society of spectacle’, which relentlessly aims to construct individuals as passive spectators or voyeurs. The ready-mades function as a direct call on spectators to re-think and activate a new code of ethics and as the equivalent to the lyric fragments of the language of testimony Crimp inserts in his dramatic plays, as will be seen. Crimp not only intertwines the fields of poetry and the visual arts through his use of verbal ready-mades but, in bringing them to the theatre, he seeks to re-design the relationship between the play and its audience – by asking spectators to focus on the poetic, indeterminate, de-contextualized fragments of language, the play encourages them to experience society’s contradictions, instead of simply being told about them. Attempts on her Life as a whole manifests an anxious concern with the ethical impoverishment which it sees as characterizing Western culture. In fact, the last episode in the play, “Previously Frozen”, begins with the assertion that “something has died” (Crimp 1997: 74). The statement has a resonance beyond the obvious reference to Anne’s life. Because the referent, Anne, is not mentioned until later, the statement is foregrounded, and becomes, so to speak, de-contextualized. It acts in the manner of an epilogue to the whole play, and interrogates spectators regarding the inequalities they have witnessed thus far. Crimp prompts spectators to reflect on the transgression of ethical boundaries which (barely) sustains late capitalism, asking them to pay attention to the lies which they may observe in their own daily interactions.

 For another contemporary British play dealing with the lies and distortion effected by the media, see Mark Ravenhill’s Product (2005).

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In Mitchell’s 2007 production of Attempts on her Life, in this last episode the speakers were all lined up downstage, standing on a mobile platform which took them down, like a lift, even before they had finished speaking and answering the question about the ‘fresh salmon’. The platform took the speakers and their last question to the audience away before it was completely formulated, and there was the risk it might not capture the audience’s attention, thus remaining unanswered. Arguably, Mitchell sought to emphasize the sense that the audience’s commitment was urgently being called upon – spectators must answer the question quickly, before the play ends. In Mitchell’s revival, then, spectators were powerfully interrogated and asked to address crucial questions regarding language manipulation and inauthenticity, and they were urged to do so before the speakers completely disappeared and their speech was cut short. Thus, a sense was arguably created that there was almost no time left to change, and yet the need for social change was absolutely imperative. Crimp closes the play with a sense of a world which has become deeply morally impoverished and interpellates spectators in the hope they may become responsible subjects before it is too late. Spectators clearly became the play’s other half, on whose shoulders now rested the responsibility that the horrors witnessed might not repeat themselves.

3 ‘The Stage, a Skull’: Male Collapse as Resistance in Face to the Wall Face to the Wall is a short play about the empty individualism that characterizes life in middle-class suburbs and leads to various kinds of symbolic and reactive violence. It forms part of a triptych Crimp published in 2005. To two short, minimalist plays he had initially published together, Face to the Wall (2002) and Fewer Emergencies (2002), he added a third play, Whole Blue Sky, and published the three of them as a triptych bearing the common title Fewer Emergencies. Although this section focuses on Face to the Wall, which contains an instance of male collapse, it first briefly considers this middle play in the context of the other two, as well as in relation to James Macdonald’s production of the triptych for the Royal Court Theatre in 2005.³¹ Taken together, the three plays constitute a picture of what is seen as an unequal, contemporary world order. In fact, each play dramatizes how characters

 Macdonald’s production of the triptych Fewer Emergencies was staged at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, where it ran from 8 September to 1 October 2005.

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are assaulted by different kinds of violence, all of them a product of the unresolved tensions of the late capitalist system. Crimp links three types of violence – in Whole Blue Sky he explores domestic violence between the genders; in Fewer Emergencies, he focuses on the violence wielded by those who ‘have not’ in reaction to the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, which gives rise, as the title indicates, to ever more frequent ‘emergencies’; and in Face to the Wall he dramatizes the internal, sudden outbursts of violence symptomatic of the ennui and emptiness fostered by consumerism. The three types of violence are understood as endemic to the late capitalist order, and the triptych as a whole reflects on how its unresolved contradictions might bring it to its eventual demise.³² In Face to the Wall, the triptych’s middle play, the speakers experience the impact of random violence. A postman, living in apparent comfort in a middle-class suburb with his family, commits a mass murder at a school. The speakers in the play try to fathom what may have led the postman to carry out such an indiscriminate act of violence. The play suggests it was triggered by the emptiness of a culture based on appearances, consumerism and individualism, which installs a deep anxiety and loneliness within individuals. In this play, then, violence comes from the very midst of late capitalist society – small wonder it is metaphorically positioned as the triptych’s ‘middle’ play. Whole Blue Sky focuses on the suppressed tensions that shape family relationships. While this first play, paradoxically written last, presents the damaging effects of the late capitalist structure on an affluent family, Fewer Emergencies, the last play in the trilogy, looks at the same family as it is attacked from without. In Fewer Emergencies, a series of immigrants rebel against the conditions in which they must live. The sudden ‘emergency’ and violence they bring about eventually causes the family’s home to collapse. As shall be seen, in this last play the family’s house stands for Western, late capitalist economic and emotional structures – they already show signs of internal disintegration in the first play and are brought to their final undoing in Fewer Emergencies.

 In an interview with Aleks Sierz, Macdonald reads the triptych as being centred “on the experience of being a ‘have’” (Sierz 2006: 220) and argues that Crimp “uses extraordinary imagery to describe the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, which in the Western world is increasing all the time” (2006: 220). According to Macdonald, Crimp’s triptych “is both selfcritical and a clever sleight of hand which turns the tables on a liberal audience. […] There are more emergencies in the world because we have the goods and other people don’t. And that’s all you need to know – so what are you going to do about it?” (Sierz 2006: 220).

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3.1 Fewer Emergencies (2005) and the Non-Hierarchical Theatrical Experience British director James Macdonald, who staged the triptych at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005, turned light into one of the major operative elements of the mise-en-scène. Taking advantage of the plays’ indeterminate character, whereby the stage directions specify no particular setting, Macdonald decided to place light at the same level as the other sign systems composing the theatrical event.³³ Thus, what Lehmann calls the postdramatic “performance text” (Lehmann 85) emerged out of the combined interaction of the spectator not only with the linguistic material of the performance, but also necessarily and simultaneously with the mise-en-scène. Macdonald relied on light artist Martin Richman, who works within the minimalist tradition initiated by artists like Dan Flavin.³⁴ The stage image was made up of four speakers that sat at a white table and ‘improvised’ stories, that is, they ‘improvised’ the plays themselves in an attempt to make sense of the unpredictable, violent events recounted in them. In Macdonald’s production, around the speakers there hung a wide light screen of one single colour, different for each play. Richman’s lights thus covered the three walls around the stage and the ceiling in one single colour, creating a background that was reminiscent of abstract expressionist paintings such as Mark Rothko’s. In Macdonald’s production of Crimp’s triptych, prompted by impulses they received from the text, spectators inevitably began to ‘read’ minimal changes in intensity, shape and colour on the light screens, triggered by the need to interpret the play. Light and text thus created a space of synesthesia, that is, of interrelation between different perceptive fields, which made spectators feel they found themselves in an open space, thus rendering the conventional separation between stage and audience, the fourth wall, fuzzy and ambiguous. Staged in this way, the play resembled a piece of installation art that could be shared among the spectators (Middeke 2011: 96). Through a synesthetic effect in  As Macdonald explains, his early training in theatre was at the International Theatre School Jacques Lecoq, in Paris, with Philippe Gaulier. Lecoq is a school which is “primarily about movement, about the abstract elements of theatre really, not text-driven” (Gobert 141). Yet Macdonald was interested in “applying the Lecoq theory to texts” (Gobert 141).  Macdonald explains that “something [he]’d always wanted to do is make it so that the audience can’t see any visible sources of stage light. So we thought to make a box out of gauze, or screen, or fabric, and to put all the lights behind it” (Gobert 145). And he adds, “We were doing things that reminded us of James Turrell, so we decided to get a light artist. We got Martin Richman, who is not a theatre lighting designer at all. […] I don’t like to put things on stage unless they seem to need to be there. I am a kind of minimalist I suppose” (Gobert 145 – 55).

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which visual and auditory stimuli merged, light helped audience members ‘read’ the plays themselves, at the same time making them aware of the mental, subjective, highly malleable process through which meaning is constructed.³⁵ In Robert Wilson (2003), Miguel Morey and Carmen Pardo characterize the role of light in Robert Wilson’s theatre in terms that might be applied to Crimp, as well as to Beckett’s ‘shorts’ or minimalist plays. Morey argues that light, in Wilson, works almost like an actor – “the visualisation of these textures and intensities effectively makes the light an actor, helping us not only to see but to listen” (Morey and Prado 57). And they add, “light helps us to see and listen to the scene it paints […] to that internalizing of the gaze that is, in some way, listening” (Morey and Prado 57). Thus, light “invents a space for listening” (Morey and Prado 167). In the minimalist setting Macdonald and Richman devised for Fewer Emergencies, light was certainly meant to help the audience reflect on the meaning of the plays. Guided by the text, spectators were invited to turn the screens of light into a sort of painting – the externalization of their interior emotional landscape. Sound bestowed light with dynamism, and each light screen expanded, in its turn, the potential significations of the words. Visual and auditory stimuli were intertwined in order to help the audience in the act of ‘listening’.³⁶ Arguably, this was done with a political goal in mind, which was pushed to its full extent in Face to the Wall, both the triptych’s middle play and the most experimental one. In this play, which is dealt with more extensively below, the disruption of the fourth wall interpellated spectators as responsible subjects with respect to the situation of violence that is portrayed on stage, which eventually causes a speaker to collapse in anger. Light, which sought to challenge the ‘safe’ boundary dividing stage and audience, was part and parcel of a pedagogical strategy aimed at making spectators experience some of the most totalitarian

 In his interview with Sierz, Macdonald explains his attempt to turn the auditorium into an open space, thus making the play reminiscent of a piece of installation art: “As Martin had jettisoned all conventional theatrical procedure in this text, it felt important to do the same thing with the production. We wanted to throw up in the air what an audience might expect from a production – just as the writing challenges what one might expect from a play. […] So we started by turning the Theatre Upstairs black box into a white box, including the seating, and brought the lights up when the play started instead of dimming them. There was no set, no situation: just three or four voices discussing a possible situation, chewing away at it” (Sierz 2006: 219).  As Macdonald puts it in his interview with Sierz, he wanted the actors to keep “relatively still so that the audience could listen carefully and not be distracted by any action. No visible theatre lights, just an atmosphere that acts as a germ or mood for each story” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 219).

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or violent aspects of contemporary society, in the hope they might be able to resist them outside the theatre. Through such postdramatic use of light, Macdonald sought to enhance what Erika Fischer-Lichte, in The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), calls the “feedback loop” (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 38) between actors and spectators. As Fischer-Lichte puts it, “performances are generated and determined by a self-referential arid ever-changing feedback loop. […] The job of the director lies in developing relevant staging strategies which can establish appropriate conditions for this experiment” (2008: 38 – 40). As shall be seen, in Face to the Wall, through collapse, such a postdramatic use of light, and a minimalist use of the pause, Macdonald invited spectators to feel physically engaged with the situation portrayed on stage, thus re-embodying them as resistant subjects instead of mere voyeurs of the spectacle, and turning them into a community of engaged, “response-able” (Lehmann 185) spectators. Whole Blue Sky, the first play in the triptych, portrays an upper-middle-class family made up by an absent father, a mother who misses her former, independent life, and a tormented, scared child called Bobby. The mother knows that her husband’s eyes often ‘slide away’, “yes, under the hat – even in the toy shop selecting a toy – his eyes slide away” (Crimp 2005b: 11). Indeed, the wife reveals that she would just pack her books and leave if she only could, but “Money”, “Property” and “Family” (Crimp 2005b: 14) prevent her. As Angelaki puts it in The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange, Whole Blue Sky “centres on the turmoil of ostensibly successful individuals, who consistently define happiness on material terms” (Angelaki 2012: 140). The woman, who is represented as slightly more detached from power and more focused on the domestic sphere, is more able to see the contradictions behind the Western narrative of acquisition and property. As she puts it, referring to the cost of the family’s and their friends’ high living standard, “Haven’t they worked? Haven’t they struggled to extend this table? Haven’t they screamed at each other in private? Punched each other? Haven’t they broken each other’s skin to open this, for example, bottle of wine?” (Crimp 2005b: 14). The family, that is, is depicted as disintegrating from within.³⁷ In Macdonald’s 2005 production, Whole Blue Sky submitted the audience to the penetrating gaze of a white, fluorescent light. As Crimp points out, emphasizing his and Macdonald’s strategy to draw spectators in and involve them with onstage events right from the start, the play “already begins in light,

 Whole Blue Sky can be read as a footnote to The Country, written five years earlier, which also shows the rift between genders within the upper-middle-class Western family. The Country is discussed extensively in the next block in this thesis.

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even before it starts, and it never dims to darkness” (Crimp 2005c).The ultraviolet light had the uncanny effect of preventing spectators from seeing each other’s true colour and difference, filtering all faces through a homogenizing colour that intensified the whiteness of their clothes and their teeth. It evoked the dazzling, shiny smoothness of glossy magazines and consumer ‘utopias’, which create a society of surfaces where one can read but the most external signs. The stark sheen of, for instance, the American mall, computer screens, or even of iPods – icons of luxury that the media impel individuals to desire – was evoked metonymically through the dazzling ultraviolet light. Happiness, in the play, is understood in terms of the capitalist dream. In this context, the constant, dazzling white light reminded the audience of upper-middle-class luxury, and of the fact that any possible desires or understanding of happiness – any ‘blue sky’ – are equated in the late capitalist ‘society of spectacle’ with material possessions and status; in short, with life in a consumerist ‘utopia’. This is the way people express their love for Bobby, the family’s child: 2 1

Maybe he’d like some fruit. Maybe he’d like, yes, one of these plums. Or maybe he’d like just the tiniest sip of wine? No? What’s that he’s saying? […] Everybody likes him. Everybody has always liked him. Mummy – Daddy – people in shops – people in the street – people on market stalls have always offered [him], for example a banana – bent down, hooked cherries / over his ears […] people have always liked him: always offered him fruit, always offered him love, pulled down his winter hat to keep his / head snug […] Bought him pets, built him snowmen, assembled his jigsaws late at night so that in the morning he’d come down the spiral stairs to find the sky, and I mean the whole blue sky completed, cut the crusts off his sandwiches and taken / the cheese out. (Crimp 2005b: 16 – 18)

The light work thus intertwined with the textual emotions and ideas, synesthetically bringing about a mood of utter absurdity. Light itself was indeed like an actor helping the audience perceive the play’s political message; it created a space for ‘listening’ in the spectators’ minds. Despite the abundance and material comfort of consumer ‘utopias’, Crimp shows that the cost that upper-middleclass Western families must pay for ‘happiness’, conceived in terms of consumption and narcissism, is absurdly excessive. In Macdonald’s production, however, the political message was not conveyed through a discursive or argumentative use of language; rather, spectators were encouraged to negotiate it as the theatrical event unfolded and enfolded the entire auditorium with the dazzling, homogenizing white light, involving them in a synesthetic process in which visual and auditory stimuli merged.

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At the same time, however, the light seemed to vary in intensity and to exist in movement, creating an unstable, fluctuating atmosphere. Such gradations of light seemed designed synaesthetically to enhance the spectators’ perception of the half-suppressed, dark strand of unease, even of violence, that lurks just beneath the glossy surface of late capitalism, as when Speaker 1 uncovers the hidden cost of the family’s and their guests’ high living standard – “haven’t they screamed at each other in private? Punched each other? Haven’t they broken each other’s skin to open this, for example, bottle of wine?” (Crimp 2005b: 14), or when Bobby asks his parents to sing him a song so as to stop the nagging voice in his head that does not let him sleep at night, the voice of dissent and distrust of the system. Bobby has everything he could desire in material terms and is regaled with smiles and attentions by his parents and occasional guests, yet he seems to be aware of the undercurrents of violence in his home, and at night he hears a nagging voice that will not let him sleep, voice of dissent and mistrust of the system, and perhaps the same voice which nags the postman, as shall be seen, in Face to the Wall. As the speakers put it, 3 1 3 2

He’s saying he can hear a noise. What noise? That’s just the guests laughing about all the things that make life worth living. He’s saying it’s not the guests. […] He’s saying no not Bobby. […] He’s saying no not Bobby: it’s a voice. […] In his head: he’s saying it’s a voice in his head. (Crimp 2005b: 16 – 17)

Bobby has an acute perception of the underside of the consumerist ‘utopia’, where individuals are pampered to the point that the “crusts” are cut off from their “sandwiches” (Crimp 2005b: 18), but which also generates gender violence in his home. In Middeke’s words, the voice he hears is a “disharmonious note that unmasks the artificial fiction of material comfort established before as a simulacrum of happiness” (Middeke 2011: 95). Ultimately, the effect produced by the combination of the ultra -violet light and the text was to expose the mechanical senselessness of lives devoid of any awareness of their own deadening limitations. The desire, on the part of families as well as individuals, to adapt better than anyone else creates a society of surfaces, which barely manages to hide the void at its core. In Whole Blue Sky, the speakers get confused all the time and keep calling Bobby ‘Jimmy’, showing it is difficult for them to think of Bobby as a distinct personality, given the homogenization the family submits itself to. They talk of ‘Bobby’, but might as well be talking about Bobby’s friends or neighbours,

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since they all lead the same kind of life and have the same problems, no matter how much they try to keep them repressed: 1

1 1 2 1 3 1

Mummy – Daddy – people in shops – people in the street – people on market stalls have always offered Jimmy, for example, a banana – bent down, hooked cherries / over his ears. Offered Bobby. What? Have always offered Bobby, for example a banana – bent down, hooked cherries / over his ears. I said Bobby. You said Jimmy. Well whatever I said AND I KNOW FOR A FACT I SAID BOBBY people have always liked him. (Crimp 2005b: 18)

Fewer Emergencies, the closing play in the triptych, brings the audience back to Whole Blue Sky – Bobby, the family’s child, bears the same (uncertain) name as the child in the first play. While the family in the first play was disintegrating from within, the family in Fewer Emergencies is threatened from without – it is attacked by a rebellious crowd of dispossessed immigrants. As Bobby is caught by a gunshot, a link is established between the microcosm of the family and larger world relations. As Sierz has pointed out, the “the wildly imaginary nature of Bobby’s possessions is […] a critique of social inequality of consumer capitalism” (Sierz 2011: 219). In this play, Crimp creates a parable of world inequality through imagining Bobby’s house as the place where the treasures of the late capitalist Western world are kept. He does so in a miniature-like, highly satirical, Swiftian manner, relishing the tiniest detail. The contents of Bobby’s room, which he wants to keep away from the rioting crowd for his own selfish pleasure, range from “a shelf full of oak trees, and another where pine forests border a mountain lake” (Crimp 2005b: 45) to pornography. He keeps the island of Manhattan within a secret drawer, and a “wardrobe full of uranium and another full of cobalt […] and a row of universities” (Crimp 2005b: 45). And the key, of course, to withdraw in emergencies from the weight and responsibility of so many unshared privileges. Bobby’s home, then, standing for the West’s economic and cultural structures – which, as Whole Blue Sky shows, demand serious emotional sacrifices of Western individuals themselves – is symbolically brought down, made to collapse, by those who are excluded from it. Speaker 2 exclaims Bobby “wants to reach the key” (Crimp 2005b: 47), and 1 states he is going to use it in order to “open the door” (Crimp 2005b: 47) instead of in order to lock himself in; they conclude he “must be / completely mad”

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(Crimp 2005b: 47). Under the pressure of violence, the speakers are forced to go on ‘improvising’, so to speak, what may be leading Bobby to open the door to the rebellious crowd, and they conclude that if Bobby eventually let them in, they would “always love him” (Crimp 2005b: 47): 1 2 1 2 3 1

3 2 1

He’s crawling – that’s right – that’s good – up the spiral stairs. Using his arms mainly. He wants to reach the key. He wants to open the door. He must be mad. Open the door? He must be / completely mad. Ah yes – but you have to know what’s going on in Bobby’s mind. In Bobby’s mind, if he opens the door, if he lets people in, if he takes them up the stairs, shows them the cupboards of precious wood, the fresh figs, the knives and the uranium – if he lifts a corner of the cloth and gives them a glimpse of Paris – if he shows them the swollen cock going into the swollen cunt and lets them pick a restaurant or a string quartet – if, after a swim in the mountain lake he lets them take home a human egg – then what? – they’ll what? – they’ll…Yes? Love him. They’ll love him. They’ll always love him. (Crimp 2005b: 47)

It is only when the speakers in Fewer Emergencies are brought face to face with the violence sweeping through Bobby’s neighbourhood, that they eventually ask themselves if it might be possible for Bobby to share some of his privileges and let the crowd in, thus starting to live according to more selfless terms – a question which had so far been veiled, like a taboo. But the playwright remains impassive – there will be no glorification in return; the West will not be held up as a hero. Western citizens, indeed, expect ‘love’ and further adherence to Western values in return for sharing their privileges, but this will not necessarily be the case. The truth is put forth in all its bluntness and yet it is also oddly liberating. Just as Bobby’s house threatens to be brought down by the crowd in a sudden ‘emergency’, the playwright foregrounds the ‘key’ for the audience to watch, thus bringing home to them that sharing – or extending privileges – and refusing to do so are two options that swing over their heads like a pendulum, just as the key swings over Bobby’s head and he “watch[es] [it] swinging” (Crimp 2005b: 49) at the end of Fewer Emergencies. ³⁸

 In Fewer Emergencies, then, Crimp reflects on the possibility that, due to late capitalism’s own drawbacks – including constant emergencies resulting from outbursts of local and global violence – the system itself might eventually reach a point of collapse, thus finally leading to a re-thinking of its main values and economic laws. Crimp finished writing Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies, as indicated on the last page of the first, 2002 Faber edition, on 10 Sep-

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Light, in Macdonald’s production of Fewer Emergencies, was made of different shades of green which were projected on the auditorium’s walls and ceiling, suggesting fertility and creating indefinite shapes that varied in texture and intensity and seemed to represent matter at a formative stage, in the process of becoming something other, something else.³⁹ Furthermore, the stage walls, as Macdonald disposed them, did not fit together but were asymmetrically arranged so that they did not delimit a closed space. This produced a sense of emptiness and placelessness. In this open space, light had an incidence on the audience’s receptivity not as a tangential element, as in dramatic theatre, but as a central factor that circulated freely, uniting stage and audience. Without the filter of the fourth wall that demarcates what spectators are supposed to receive as the play’s meaning, the semiotic hierarchy of traditional theatre was replaced by a postdramatic transversal disposition. In its metamorphosing character, the green light expressed the play’s underlying aim to bring about a subjective change in spectators that would impel them towards sharing and empathy. The green light synaesthetically highlighted the position of the three speakers in the play, of the child whose story they narrate, and, crucially, of spectators, who at the end of the piece stand on the verge of subjective change, and may start to rethink late capitalist economic and cultural values from that liminal position. By becoming invisible to Bobby, the speakers, and the audience alike, the key – like the light design across Macdonald’s staging of Crimp’s triptych – discounted the fourth wall, and it was simultaneously foregrounded in the speakers’ narrative. It thus became the locus for the ethical dilemma confronting spectators as much as Bobby at the end of the play: acknowledging the demands of the Other and refusing or failing to do so are two options that ‘swing’ over their heads, just as the key (invisibly) swung before their eyes. Crucially, the green, malleable light of the playlet Fewer Emergencies worked together with the open theatrical space to articulate the thrust both of Crimp’s triptych and Macdonald’s production – to mobilize the spectators’ ethical potential to transform themselves.

tember 2001. The following day, the attack against the Twin Towers targeted the heart of the late capitalist system, forcing individuals to take positions – either to admit that the system needed to be rethought and privileges extended, or to go on regardless of the system’s own fragility and (perhaps, in the long run, lethal) contradictions. This is the dilemma facing Bobby at the end of Fewer Emergencies.  In an interview with Gobert, Macdonald explains that the green light was achieved through theatre lights, but “they’re just all diffused through fabric. [Richman] points them at strange things, which reflect light as well – bits of metal fabric and sequins. So they’re bounced off unusual materials; that’s the way he achieved those effects” (Gobert 145).

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3.2 ‘The Warm Metal – Thank You – of the Gun’: Interpretation and Violation Face to the Wall presents four nameless speakers, 1, 2, 3 and 4, who are trying to come to terms with a mass murder involving the killing of school children and of a school principal. The event, which they may have seen on television or may have taken place close to where they live, has had a powerful impact on them, and they are trying to fathom its causes. In this context, Speaker 1, identified in Crimp’s text as ‘male’ while the other three speakers are ‘ungendered’, begins holding the floor as he describes how the killings took place. Apparently, a postman who led a comfortable, easy family life decided to turn against the system overnight. In Macdonald’s production of Face to the Wall, as already noted, speakers sat at a white, transparent table in a reflexive attitude, as they sought to understand what might have led the postman to kill the school-children. One of them, Speaker 4, the one who speaks the least, was bent down on the table, profoundly affected by the news. He was a melancholic figure, and Macdonald made him sing the final song which, in Crimp’s text, is not assigned to any speaker in particular in Crimp’s text. Speaker 4 who, as shall be seen, perhaps stands for an artist figure – maybe Crimp himself? – displays a non-coercive mode of interpreting events, unlike the other speakers. His final creative song is an attempt to understand the life of the postman beyond the “pictures of happiness” (Crimp 2005b: 10) which his life in the consumerist suburbs might at first suggest. In Macdonald’s production the other speakers gazed absently in front of them and towards the audience. At the start of the play, Speakers 2 and 3 soon begin to prompt the speech of Speaker 1, making it increasingly reminiscent of media discourses. However, as soon as they claim that they should not be “help[ing] [him]” (Crimp 2005b: 31) deliver his speech, Speaker 1’s narrative begins to fall to pieces, unable to adapt to the discourses that are required of him, until he finally undergoes a nervous breakdown, insulting those around him as well as the audience. In Face to the Wall, male collapse – as has been mentioned, Speaker 1 is the only speaker who is explicitly cast as ‘male’ – aims to denounce the most alienating tendencies of bio-power, the type of social control that, in late capitalist societies, is exerted through the media and technology. As individuals ingrain the mechanisms of control circulated, in particular, by the mass media, they inevitably come to shape their modes of relating, accounting for scenarios of symbolic violence such as the one Crimp presents in Face to the Wall. Macdonald’s production used the atmosphere created by light, which blurred the conventional separation between stage and audience, in order to directly

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and politically interpellate the audience, turning its members into “responseable” subjects (Lehmann 185) with regard to the symbolic violence and male collapse portrayed on stage. In Face to the Wall a monochromatic screen of intense red light bathed both the stage and the auditorium. Light painted the actor’s faces of a red colour, which turned their concerned expressions into representations of contemporary anxiety. Such an atmosphere of anxiety was the reverse side of the white, consumerist ‘utopia’ which the light work of Whole Blue Sky sought to satirize. As shall be seen, light also created a unity of space and time which symbolically turned the stage into the unconscious of a male mind, thus emphasizing the idea that the play dealt with an instance of specifically male collapse resulting from the symbolic violence inherent in contemporary gender discourses, particularly in relation to how masculinity is envisioned in late capitalist society. The play portrays how a very specific kind of male identity – understood in terms of individualism and lack of empathy – is imposed on Speaker 1, so that he will self-regulate accordingly. The play shows that, as he tries to do so, Speaker 1 contributes to his own effacement, even to his own violation. In this play, as in Attempts on her Life, a link is established between interpretation, self-regulation, and violation. The aim is to allow the audience to observe that, as Speaker 1 begins to enact the role of the violent postman, fully inserting himself in the mind of an individualistic, unempathic man highly reminiscent of Hollywood-like heroes, he experiences a conflict between the caring, protective attitude he would like to adopt towards the school children, and the role he is prompted to embody. The longer 1 plays the ‘glamourous’ role of the postman, the more his conflict intensifies, as does the distortion enacted on his body and psyche. When he eventually refuses to take on the identity he is being coerced into interiorizing, 1 finally collapses and begins to vent his anger on the audience. Breakdown, which in Crimp always unsettles the conventional boundary dividing stage and audience, here works as a theatrical strategy of resistance that seeks to make spectators experience, upon their own bodies, the extent of the violence that has been exercised on Speaker 1. As in Attempts on her Life, Crimp inserts the scene of collapse right before the speaker’s psyche gives in and is, so to speak, ‘bent’ into a new shape by bio-power, forced into an act of ventriloquism. Face to the Wall begins with Speaker 1 holding the floor as he seeks to give the postman’s mass murder an interpretation. Immediately, however, the two of the speakers by his side join in and begin to prompt his speech, making it more overtly violent:

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Yes? says the receptionist, What can I do for you? How can I help you? Who did you want to see? Do you have an appointment? He shoots her through the mouth. He shoots her through the mouth and he goes down the corridor. Quite quickly. Goes – good – yes – quite quickly down the corridor – opens the first door he finds. Walks straight in. Walks straight in. Yes? says the teacher, How can I help you? Shoots him through the heart. (Crimp 2005b: 25)

If 1 at first stutters and hesitates, he nonetheless soon adapts to the discourse which is demanded of him, and regulates his thoughts accordingly. Every time his speech sounds as is expected, he congratulates himself on his performance, as his insistent “good” (Crimp 2005b: 25) and “yes” (Crimp 2005b: 25) reveal. 1 increasingly begins to portray events from the murderer’s perspective, minutely describing what the murderer sees and feels as though he was filming it with a camera. As events appear increasingly framed by that ‘camera’ or perspective, it becomes obvious that 1 has slipped fully into the role demanded of him: 1 2 1 3 2 3 1

He moves on. He shoots child D – in the head. So there must be blood. Well of course there’s blood – not just blood on the wall – not just blood on the floor. But blood in the air. Blood in the air. Blood hanging in the air. A mist. An aerosol. An aerosol – that’s right – that’s good – of blood – which he hadn’t foreseen – he hadn’t foreseen the aerosol of blood – or the sound – is this right? – this is right – or the sound of the distressed children when his head was on the white pillow – on the white pillow – don’t help me – when his head was on the white pillow picturing the scene – but now – don’t help me – but now it’s clear – now the picture is clear – and there’s another sound – what’s that other sound? – don’t help me, don’t help me the sound of his heart – no – yes – yes – the sound of his heart – the sound of his own heart – the sound of the killer’s heart sounding in the killer’s head – that’s right – that’s good – which he hadn’t foreseen – he hadn’t foreseen the sound of his own heart in his own head – filling his head –his own heart filling his head with blood – popping his ears – popping his ears with blood – like a swimmer – not swimmer – don’t help me – like a diver – this is right – diving into blood – he’s like a diver diving into blood – that’s right – that’s good – very good – down he goes – down he goes away from the light – diving into blood – popping – popping his ears […] (Crimp 2005b: 30 – 1)

Violence is thus made glamorous – a school mass murder is held up for admiration, turned into a celebration of masculinity, into an event which offers 1

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the opportunity to prove himself a hero. However, 1 seems to be losing control of the narrative right from the start, because, as he puts it, the postman had “not foreseen” the bodily, material aspect of violence – conveyed through the “aerosol of blood” and the “sound of the distressed children” – which suddenly becomes real to him. 1 is therefore distracted and the voice in his head prompting him to exalt violence seems to lose momentum. Slowly, he begins to focus on the signs of humanity around the killer; that is, the distressed children, the aerosol of blood, the sound of his own heart – all the things he had “not foreseen”. There is a strain in 1 between the social mores he is required to follow – epitomized by his repetitive and polite “thank you” (Crimp 2005b: 26), the self-congratulatory “good” (Crimp 2005b: 30), or the faltering “yes?” (Crimp 2005b: 26) – and the horrors described. The social voice that glamourizes violence and demands of him a ‘true’ masculine performance is ‘colonizing’ a more deeply felt, intuited voice that leads 1’s body to empathize and connect with the bodies and small hands of the children: 1

And it’s interesting to see the way that some of them hold hands – they instinctively hold hands – the way children do – the way a child does – if you reach for its hand as it walks next to you it will grasp your own […] (Crimp 2005b: 26)

1 replaces this more authentic voice by a discourse which comes to him from the outside. Occasional slips of the tongue, however, keep undermining the social mask, revealing the extent of the distortion it demands from him. Increasingly, and although he tries to suppress it, 1 unwillingly betrays his deep unease about the role he is being asked to perform, and his stuttering becomes more and more obvious. He constantly checks his words against a model he has imbibed: “an aerosol – that’s right – that’s good – of blood” (Crimp 2005b: 30). Increasingly, and although he denies he needs their assistance, he asks the other speakers for help: 1 4 1 4 1 3 1 4 1

He moves on to child C. Child C – yes? Tries to duck away. What? Child C tries / to duck away. He shoots child B – in the head. He moves on. He moves on to child C. Child C tries to duck away. He shoots – no – yes – no – not shoots – yes? But to no avail. Tries to duck away. But to no avail. He shoots child A – in the head. (Crimp 2005b: 27)

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As the others continue to give him cues, the conflict 1 experiences between how he really feels towards the children and how he is expected to feel becomes more acute. Crimp makes visible 1’s unwillingness to adopt an aggressively masculine role by continually showing him correcting and suppressing spontaneous emotions which do not fit the ‘script’. He would spontaneously tell the children to “look away” (Crimp 2005b: 31), but he checks this desire and continues to threaten them: 1

diving into blood – popping – popping his ears and what are you staring at? – eh? – eh? – what are you staring at? – turn away – look away – no turn away – that’s right – turn away or you’re next – be quiet or you’re next – that’s right – that’s good – you saw what happened to child A, you saw what happened to child B, you saw what happened to child C – you saw what happened to child C – you saw what happened to child C – no – yes – no – don’t help me […] (Crimp 2005b: 31)

By portraying the discourses clashing within 1’s mind, Crimp dramatizes exactly how individuals regulate themselves and their everyday relations according to the models that come down to them through the media. Thus, in Face to the Wall Crimp dramatizes the very focused yet diffuse, decentralized form power takes in late capitalist society, where the control exerted in order to maintain the current world order and allocation of profit is dispersed throughout the social body. As Hardt and Negri put it, “Bio-power is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23 – 4). Bio-power reaches down to all spheres of social, economic, cultural and political life, at the same time as it produces them. Indeed, the speakers in the play are ‘producing’ what, in Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity, Burkitt terms the “closed [off]” (Burkitt 49), individualistic bodies that favour the productivity of the late capitalist state, based on property and possession – the type of subjectivity which brought about the horrors of the twentieth century. Speaker 1 experiences a transformation from being a ‘felt’, lived body into becoming a discourse-ridden body, fully self-regulated. The play highlights how the contemporary processes of identity construction and normalization actually violate the individual’s primordial, intuited body and identity to the point of brining her/him to collapse. 1 is made to impersonate a social myth which constructs men as closed off bodies – that of the entrepreneurial man who is expected to display an individualistic, unempathic emotional structure in order to succeed.⁴⁰While focusing on the children, 1 almost forgets about the violence he is

 Crimp has commented that, after reading Joshua S. Goldstein’s War and Gender (2003),

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supposed to be recounting. Yet when 4 reminds him of the speech he must deliver, 1 reproduces it unquestioningly, despite the strain this causes in him: 1 4 1

Just as the child – child A – now flinches away from what? – yes? From the warm metal. From the warm metal – thank you – of the gun. (Crimp 2005b: 26)

Right before 1’s body undergoes the transformation that turns him into a ‘full man’, Crimp inserts the motif of collapse which ‘stops’ the metamorphosis and invites the audience to experience its violence, to ‘feel’ it upon their own bodies. Indeed, in an act of resistance, 1 suddenly tears his discourse apart, angrily repeating that he wants to tell the story all by himself, that he does not need any ‘help’ from the others. He then begins to shout in such a manner that his speech – previously enclosed within the circuit of onstage communication – begins to be directed at spectators in the form of outright insults: You saw what happened to child C – you saw what happened to child C – no – yes – no – don’t help me – Pause. Don’t help me – 4 You saw what happened to child D. 1 Don’t help me – you saw what happened to child A, you saw what happened to child B, you saw what happened to child C, you saw what happened to child D, so – so – you saw what happened to child D, so – 4 So shut the / fuck up. 1 YOU SAW WHAT HAPPENED TO CHILD D, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP. CUNT. CUNT. LITTLE CUNT. I SAID DON’T HELP ME. Long pause. (Crimp 2005b: 31) 1

The anger or hysteria Speaker 1 vents on the audience mirrors the violence which has been exerted on him. It is followed by a “Long pause” (Crimp 2005b: 31) so that its impact can be fully felt. The pause is used as a theatrical strategy in order to spur spectators towards reflexive thought. Indeed, the long pause after 1’s collapse invites the audience to experience the extent of the distortion that has been enacted on him. Crimp himself has reflected on his self-conscious use of the

which inspired him for his writing of Cruel and Tender, he realized the extent of the distortion men are forced to undergo in order to become soldiers or “full men” (Crimp 2004c). In Cruel and Tender, as will be seen in block V of this study, Crimp dramatizes more fully the process of transformation required by the hegemonic model of masculinity that constructs men as potential soldiers, as well as the sacrifices such a transformation entails.

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pause. To him, it is a uniquely theatrical resource that reveals much about the type of ‘relationship’ the playwright establishes with the audience: What is unique to theatre is that the performance is about the relationship of the play to the audience. It’s a relationship that involves a group of people, so there’s a sort of tension there, which I think you are conscious of in writing […] And you don’t write silence unless you are aware of the audience, because otherwise the silence doesn’t mean anything. The silence in a play is about the relationship between the actors on stage and the audience, and this is a very special and particular thing – the acknowledgement of that silence. (Devine 90)

Crimp introduces collapse at the point where an individual refuses to be considered a mere screen for the projection of a docile identity. Collapse brings to the surface the totalitarian unconscious of bio-power. As already mentioned, in Agamben’s terms, the aim of bio-power, in its most extreme forms, is to effect, “in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being [the biological body] and the speaking being [the cultural body], zoè [animal life] and bíos [cultural life], the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 156), so that docile identities may be inscribed upon subjects. Speaker 1’s collapse thus stops the process whereby he would become a subject not in the sense of, as Foucault puts it, being “tied to his own identity by [consciousness] and self-knowledge”, but in the sense of being “subject to [another instance] by control” (Foucault 1982: 212) and repression. Referring to the experiential nature of Face to the Wall and of Crimp’s triptych in general, Angelaki argues that, in Macdonald’s production of Face to the Wall, “language, materialised through speech, [was] treated as a corporeal entity, […] as much physical and concrete as a practical enactment would be” (Angelaki 2007: 10 – 11). Quoting Merleau Ponti, Angelaki claims that language is material, and “every expression always appear[s] […] as a trace, […] leaving only a bit of verbal material in our fingers” (Angelaki 2007: 11). In Face to the Wall, then, Crimp treats language – specifically the language signalling 1’s collapse – as a corporeal entity foregrounded through the use of the pause and the ‘empty’ stage, so that the violence of late capitalist discourses may be effectively felt by the audience. The traces of materiality which 1’s insults leave on the spectators’ bodies thus prompt them to become aware of some of the most totalitarian aspects of contemporary society. Ultimately, then, collapse works as a pedagogical strategy that brings to light the totalitarian tendencies of bio-power, as well as the potential of language and ideology – as they are distributed through the media and technology – to violate individuals in their attempt to normalize them. Collapse is the response to what an individual perceives as an exercise of distortion of her/his identity enforced

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on her/him from without. Crimp uses collapse, therefore, as a means to make spectators pay attention to how bio-power and the self-regulation it demands from individuals amount to a violation of their integrity. In Face to the Wall Crimp places the bodies of nameless speakers on an ‘empty’ stage in order to highlight the incorporeal or invisible transformation 1 is being made to undergo. Collapse, in the last instance, signals the beginning of barbarism, the disappearance of the political being or bios, the point at which individuals become mere ‘puppets’ performing reified identities that endorse the economic interests of late capitalism.

3.3 ‘Voyeurs in Bedlam?’: Re-Materializing the Audience Speaker 1’s ‘metaphysical’ conflict mirrors the one spectators experience as they make their way in late capitalist society. 1’s violent collapse and the long pause that follows act in the manner of a direct call on the audience, and are meant for it to experience the totalitarian nature of bio-power – that is, the symbolic violence attendant on the kinds of identities favoured by the neo-liberal elite in control of technology and communication – and to develop a critical distance with respect to it. Collapse, in this case empowered by the long pause and the freely circulating red light, blurs the fourth wall and is the means whereby the playwright seeks to address spectators directly. Through the use of breakdown in the form of an explosion of anger, Crimp asks spectators to measure the extent of the violence enacted upon Speaker 1, which so far they may have witnessed passively. In Face to the Wall, through a violent form of collapse and through a minimalist use of the pause, Crimp seeks to intepellate spectators as subjects who, having perhaps so far been voyeurs of a spectacle, are now impelled to become responsible bodies aware of the totalitarian underside of ideological control. Face to the Wall thus asks a similar question to Attempts on her Life. In the episode “Untitled (100 Words)”, as mentioned earlier, Anne becomes a performance artists who records her own attempts to kill herself and exhibits them as art, while a series of unspecified critics seek to judge her work. The critics, however, never empathize with the causes which might have led her to commit suicide, but always comment on the art work from a detached position, offering, at best, postmodern clichés about contemporary social problems. At a given moment, however, one of them claims that, “If she really is – as it appears – trying to kill herself, then surely our presence here makes us mere voyeurs in Bedlam” (Crimp 1997: 50). Such realization is the first step towards, perhaps, beginning to empathize with the art work Anne is presenting them with. In Face to the Wall,

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just as he does with the critics in Attempts on her Life, Crimp also positions spectators as voyeurs, yet, through 1’s collapse he challenges such positioning and, instead, invites them to become aware of social contradictions. Macdonald’s 2005 production of the triptych did much to reinforce Crimp’s distinctly political dramaturgy. As argued above, the theatrical space itself aimed to shatter the invisible boundary between stage and audience in order to elicit the spectators’ “response-ability” (Lehmann 185) with respect to the events on stage. The walls of the auditorium and the stage did not fit together like a closed structure. In such an open space, the red light that emanated from the single, monochromatic screen placed behind the speakers’ backs seemed to circulate freely, uniting stage and audience. In his interview with Sierz, Macdonald confirms that his intention was, precisely, to “envelop the audience” in the atmosphere created by light. As he puts it, “by wrapping the set around the audience, the intention was to make them complicit: we’re all inside Martin’s head” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 219). Thus, instead of being placed on the ‘safe’ side of the stage/audience divide, in a position marked by ‘absence’ with respect to the events portrayed on stage, spectators were more ambiguously situated. The fourth wall seemed to have disappeared, and spectators were made acutely conscious of their own material presence. Ultimately, by having spectators physically experience the violence enacted on 1, Macdonald sought to turn spectators from passive voyeurs of the ‘spectacle’ into participants, thus creating a community, albeit temporarily, of engaged spectators. In Fischer-Lichte’s words, the shift from spectator to participant is in fact “the prerequisite for the change in perspective and thus, for experiencing community” (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 53). Collapse leaves a void on stage, an indeterminacy. As discussed in relation to Attempts on her Life, it introduces hesitancy, momentarily invalidating assumed roles and modes of relating, even placing a whole symbolic structure of social control in suspension. This makes it possible for another voice to take over, one that seeks a different route to the interpretation of events. And indeed, after the long pause, 3 timidly tries out another mode of access to the postman – “So he is not a sympathetic character” (Crimp 2005b: 31), he begins, feeling at a loss after Speaker 1’s collapse: 3 1 3 1 3 1 3

We can’t feel for him. No. Cry for him. No. He’s never suffered. No. Experienced war.

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1 3 1 2 1 2

No. Experienced poverty. No. Torture. Torture? Been tortured – yes – for his beliefs. You heard what / I said. (Crimp 2005b: 31– 2)

Collapse has created a gap which seems to have opened up the possibility of taking a different discursive route for interpreting events according to values which are not those of the ‘society of spectacle’. If the speakers started off by glamourizing violence, they now realize the postman may simply not be “a sympathetic character” (Crimp 2005b: 31). Collapse signals the introduction of Otherness in otherwise inertial relationships. It allows for other voices to surface and ‘rewrite’ the postman’s story. Collapse disperses the tight control on meaning and narrative the speakers were exerting, offering the possibility of polyphony. And the speakers continue: 2 3 1 2 3 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 3 1 2 3

What about his own children? Yes – perhaps they’re sick. No. His wife? His wife what? Sick? No. Is his car unreliable? No. What about the milkman? Yes – is the milkman in his neighbourhood ever late? No. Or the postman? Sometimes. Pause. How does he feel when the postman’s late? Angry. So now he’s going to kill the postman. Typical. (Crimp 2005b: 32– 3)

1, 2 and 3, that is, begin to imagine how, even if the postman’s wife, on the day he committed the murder, was not “sick” and his children were fine, the postman may have been angered by some small nuisance, such as by his car being “unreliable” or the fact that the “milkman” was late. In late capitalist societies of control, any unforeseen disturbance in the expected order of things, in the technology which supports the lives of consumers, may turn the consumerist ‘uto-

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pia’, the dream of a ‘perfect’ life, into a nightmare. If a spoke in the wheel of the technological, consumerist ‘utopia’ fails, then the whole system may become vulnerable and reveal its radically constructed, materialistic, empty core. Prompted by an urgent need to find solutions to the risk of social violence, 1 and 4 engage in a duet and begin to wonder whether, given different social conditions, the murder might have been prevented. 1 and 4 envision social change through improvisation: 1

4 1

Of course he’s not going to kill the postman. It’s not the postman’s fault – he knows it’s not the postman’s fault – sometimes there are problems sorting the letters – the machine for sorting the letters has broken down, for example, and the letters have to be sorted by hand – or perhaps there are lots of parcels and every parcel means a conversation on the doorstep. Pause. A conversation on the doorstep – yes? In the sunshine. Means a conversation on the doorstep in the sunshine. And sometimes the postman’s boy can’t wake the postman up. ‘Dad, dad’, he says, ‘it’s five o’clock’ […] (Crimp 2005b: 33 – 4)

1 and 4 speculate that, if the “machine for sorting the letters” (Crimp 2005b: 33) had broken down on that day, perhaps the postman would have had to talk to the neighbours instead of simply delivering the letters anonymously. If the “letters had [had] to be sorted by hand” (Crimp 2005b: 33), furthermore, “every parcel” (Crimp 2005b: 33) might have meant “a conversation on the doorstep” (Crimp 2005b: 33) with the neighbours. Competitiveness, individualism, technology and anonymity would have been replaced by transversal, face-to-face contact, which stimulates the development of empathy. As mentioned in Preliminaries II, empathy and responsibility, according to Lévinas, are the primary structure of subjectivity, and they arise “out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility and responsibility is proximity” (Bauman 2005: 184; emphasis original). A society organized around face-to-face contact provides spaces for civic activity and community that radically challenge the values upon which the late capitalist system is based. The speakers in Face to the Wall seem to be envisioning technological collapse in the context of global late capitalism as a liberating, utopian possibility. The motif of technological collapse, indeed, is radically powerful and subversive. If technology fails, the whole late capitalist order inevitably collapses. Furthermore, technology not only characterizes global relations but, as has been shown, also shapes the relationships between individuals on a micropolitical level – it depersonalizes them and renders them anonymous. A system that

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trusts technology as the solution to any emergency, and considers individuals as essentially rational, productive beings, gives rise to various forms of violence through which the ‘disregarded’, emotional, irrational side of individuals demands attention. Both Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies dramatize the possibility of global collapse, and suggest this might lead to a rethinking of the tenets of late capitalism. If based exclusively on consumerism and technological comfort, late capitalism creates a depersonalized society of surfaces, which is simply not ready for the ever more frequent ‘emergencies’ it generates. In this context, male collapse – which, as Crimp shows through the story of the postman, expresses itself in the form of indiscriminate, random violence – is represented as a hysterical, exaggerated mimicking of the system’s own individualism and competitiveness. The postman vents his rage against the system on the children, hoping this masculine ‘performance’ will turn him into a hero. Male violent collapse, therefore, is shown to be a hysterical manifestation of the barely suppressed symbolic violence the system is based on. It makes this symbolic violence material and concrete: 4 1 4 1 4 1

‘Wake up. It’s five o’clock.’ ‘Dad, dad,’ he says, ‘Wake up. It’s five o’clock. I’ve brought you / your tea.’ ‘Time to get up.’ ‘What?’ ‘Time / to get up’. ‘Dad, dad,’ he says, ‘Wake up. It’s five o’clock. Time to get up. I’ve brought you your tea.’ But the postman – don’t help me – but the postman – this is right – I’m right – don’t help me – ‘Time to get up. I’ve brought you your tea.’ But the postman – but the postman – but the postman just pushes himself harder against the wall. (Crimp 2005b: 34)

This time, in the wake of his collapse, 1 speaks ‘authentically’ from a position outside the values of the ‘society of spectacle’ he inhabits. He is now certain about what he wants to say – “This is right – I’m right – don’t help me” (Crimp 2005b: 34). In Macdonald’s production, Speaker 4, who had been cast as a quiet, melancholic figure, was made to sing the “Twelve-Bar Delivery Blues”, the song which, in Crimp’s text, follows the conversation where 1 and 4 evoke the conditions for a more peaceful society. As though building on 1’s utopian aspirations, then, Speaker 4 held the floor at the end of the play in Macdonald’s production and began the song where the postman’s story is retold in a poetic manner. Through the song, 4 creates a parable of male collapse and exacerbated masculinity, and tries to grasp just how the postman may have felt, that is, the emo-

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tions that may have led him to collapse. Here 4 conjures up a small space of autonomy, a mode of interpreting reality that is not enforced coercively from outside, on the basis of the values of the ‘society of spectacle’, but is rather self-generated:

Twelve-Bar Delivery Blues Woke up this morning Heard my son call Turned away from the window Turned my face to the wall. Daddy daddy, he said to me Daddy daddy, I’ve BROUGHT YOU YOUR TEA. Son, I told him, Your poor daddy’s dead There’s another person Come to live in his head. Son son, your daddy’s not well Son son, your DADDY’S A SHELL. There’s another person Speaking these lies There’s another person Looking out through my eyes. Son son, he’s filing reports Son son, he’s PROMPTING MY THOUGHTS. My son poured tea From the brown china pot Said, drink up your tea, dad, Drink up while it’s hot. Daddy daddy, you’re not sick at all Daddy daddy, turn a-WAY FROM THE WALL. Hey daddy, You’re a liar – and a fake Take off those pyjamas There’s deliveries to make. I lifted my head from my white pillow case Threw my hot tea RIGHT IN HIS FACE. Hey sonny, If there’s one thing I’ve learned It’s don’t rub on butter When your skin is all burned. Son son, I ain’t got no choice

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Son son, I JUST HEAR THIS VOICE (Saying…) (Crimp 2005b: 34– 5)

In the song, the postman’s ‘voice’ claims he is “A SHELL” and that there is another person “looking out through [his] eyes”. This other person is “PROMPTING [HIS] THOUGHTS”, and although his son tells him he has got “deliveries to make”, he throws his hot tea right in his face and keeps arguing he “JUST HEARS[S] THIS VOICE”. By using the verb ‘prompt’, which brings the reader/ spectator back to what 2 and 3 were doing to Speaker 1, Crimp suggests that the postman’s situation is similar to that of Speaker 1 – they both have their thoughts ‘prompted’ by external discourses. Yet only the postman has become almost totally ‘colonized’ by them, to the extent that he has been uprooted from himself – “There’s another person / looking out through my eyes” (Crimp 2005b: 35). Through song, 4 sought to reach out to the Other – the postman – rather than demonize him, to reactivate the spontaneous, presocietal inclination towards empathy and care for the Other that Lévinas speaks of. At the same time, it was strongly suggested that Speaker 4 was a poet figure and, consequently, that artistic creation emerges out of a potent feeling of unease about the loneliness, individualism, and lack of proximity to the Other that characterizes late capitalist culture and a desire for change. Revealingly, Crimp has described the artist as a “canary in a cage” (qtd. in Sierz 2005a: 18): that is, as a ‘listener’– the role Speaker 4 plays through most of Face to the Wall – who ‘sings’ out of a sense of impotence and entrapment. By choosing to sing – not a rational, discursive process, but a creative response – Speaker 4 broke through the signifying circularity that had taken hold of the speakers’ conversation so far by introducing on the stage, in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s words, “the pluri-linear, multidimensional semiotic of forms of corporeality, gesturality, and rhythm” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 117), a moment of creative fertility to counterpoint Speakers 2 and 3’s suppression of spontaneous feeling in their effort to align themselves with dominant discourses. Face to the Wall, the middle play, is the most daring piece in the triptych in terms of its formal experimentation, powerfully revealing how, in postdramatic theatre, the ‘simultaneous and multi-perspectival modes of perception’ have replaced the traditionally linear structures of drama. Face to the Wall displays a dream-like, non-linear, post dramatic structure which is, perhaps, the formal expression of the non-hierarchical, utopian ‘face-to-face’ encounter that Speaker 4 sang about at the end of Macdonald’s production. As Lehmann points out, “an essential quality of the dream is the nonhierarchy of images, movements, and

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words. Dream thoughts’ form a texture that resembles collage, montage, and fragments rather than a logically structured course of events. The dream constitutes the model par excellence of a non-hierarchical theatre aesthetic” (Lehmann 15). In this way it enacts a suspension of the laws of time and narration that “heralds a more liberal sphere of sharing and communicating” (Lehmann 83 – 4). Through Speaker 4’s song and the intense red light, Macdonald’s Face to the Wall sought to “produce presence” (Ledger 126), to return to the ‘corpo-reality’ of the Other, as opposed to the bodilessness, a-historicism, and inequality generated by mass-media culture. Crimp and Macdonald presented the (red) collective unconscious of late capitalism as a potential site of resistance, the ground where socially mediated discourses compete with pre-societal impulses not subsumed within the reification of an exchange society. To sum up, Crimp’s triptych, as inflected through Macdonald’s production, aimed to re-subjectify spectators as resistant bodies through collapse, light and the pause. Crimp and Macdonald make spectators experience some of the violent tendencies of late capitalist society and invite them to become bodies of empathy and connection, in whom intention and voice, discourse and feeling, are not, as they are in Speaker 1, utterly divorced. The final goal of such a pedagogical strategy is to make the audience intensely aware of the incorporeal transformation power effects on individuals, ‘writing’ specific identities onto the materiality of bodies. Through the use of light, Macdonald contributed to creating the theatrical conditions to trigger the spectators’ subjective transformation. In Crimp’s postdramatic plays, collapse operates as a paradigmatic, visual image of bodily and mental breakdown that denounces bio-power’s capacity to violate the integrity of individuals. It signals the point at which the political subject is turned into a mere conduit of power, which is also the point at which the psyche’s resistance is erased and the subject is completely placed at the service of an external, oppressive instance, as in totalitarian conditions. Right before the psyche gives in, the body collapses as an organism that refuses to keep on working. Indeed, collapse places the demands of the body centre stage – namely, the desire for authenticity, creativity, contact, and face-to-face communication which societies of control, placing the emphasis as they do on individualism, productivity and instrumental rationality, refuse to acknowledge. Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall portray different forms of breakdown of the self resulting from coercive acts of interpretation. In addition, the potential for resistance which each play depicts is not exactly the same. While the young woman in Attempts on her Life internalizes oppression and undergoes mental breakdown, thereby turning her rage against the system upon herself, Speaker 1 in Face to the Wall externalizes it, and is therefore better able to high-

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light society’s contradictions and even force the other speakers to confront them. In Attempts on her Life Crimp focuses on the degree of oppression to which women are subjected by the late capitalist world order, while in Face to the Wall he focuses on the situation of a middle-class man who perhaps feels marginally more empowered to protest. In her production of Attempts on her Life, Mitchell presented female collapse as a viable micropolitical model. Macdonald’s Face to the Wall built on Crimp’s use of collapse as part of a theatrical strategy that sought to work on the spectators’ psychology through a combination of communicative devices, such as light or the pause, in order to transform them from passive voyeurs of the victimization portrayed on stage into individuals aware of the violent underside of consumerist societies. Speaker 1’s collapse is, in this sense, resistant, both because it manages to stop the onstage construction of a violent type of masculinity, and because of how it works on the audience.

V Dramatic Plays: Female Breakdown as Micropolitical Resistance

1 Stopping Time: Memory and Resistance in The Country (2000) 1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 Of Violence and Pathos The Country, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs on 11 April 2000, three years after the groundbreaking Attempts on her Life, has generally been seen as offering a critique of language as a means to evasion which is traditional in form. Aleks Sierz, for instance, claims that, “having pushed the boundaries of theatrical possibility to the limit with Attempts on her Life, Crimp’s next play, The Country, ostensibly [takes] a more traditional form” (Sierz 2006: 60). In the same vein, Martin Middeke suggests that the play “returns into the calmer, even if […] more shallow waters of mainstream theatre” (Middeke 2011: 92). This book, in contrast, reads The Country as a play that sets out, in Angel-Pérez’s potent formulation, to “rethink the question of realism in the theatre” pushing theatrical boundaries, as Crimp seeks to find a language and a type of dramaturgy that may enable him to “emerge out of the ethical and, therefore, aesthetic impasse” brought about by the Holocaust, which has “plunged [contemporary art] into the so-called crisis of representation” (2006: 24).¹ As Angel-Perez points out, and as has been argued in Preliminaries II, for the most part English playwrights, and Martin Crimp in particular, do not dramatize the Holocaust directly (Angel-Perez 2006a: 213). However, “perhaps more than any other type of theatre, contemporary British theatre compulsively dramatizes the problematic […] of a post-Holocaust world” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 12) by re-contextualizing the representational dialectic of a post-Holocaust theatre and actively searching for a post-Holocaust aesthetic (Angel-Perez 2006a: 214).² Crimp’s The Country, which Angel-Perez does not discuss, does not thematize the Holocaust;³ rather, through a poetics of female violence and testimony, the

 “[Il s’agira donc de] repenser la question du réalisme au théâtre […] [L’enjeu qui s’impose aux dramaturges contemporains est de trouver un nouveau langage de théâtre] qui permette de sortir de l’impasse éthique et, de là, esthétique, qui frappe l’art contemporain et l’a plongé depuis quelques décennies dans ce qu’il est maintenant convenu d’appeler la crise de la représentation”.  “[…] peut-être plus qu’aucun autre, le théâtre anglais contemporain rebrasse compulsivement les problématiques […] de l’après-Auschwitz”.  Angel-Perez devotes one last brief chapter to Crimp (Angel-Perez 2006a: 197– 215), where she looks at Attempts on her Life (1997) and Cruel and Tender (2004).

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play articulates a dramaturgy of resistance that is arguably aimed at engaging spectators ethically in a reflection on the continuing presence within the current late capitalist world order of the seeds of totalitarianism and barbarism. The Country can be considered a post-Holocaust play in that, like the rest of Crimp’s plays this study analyses, it resonates with Bauman’s compelling argument in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) that the conditions that made the Holocaust possible are still part of our life in the present. The Country is about Corinne and Richard, a forty-year-old London couple who “move to the country in an attempt to save their marriage” (Angelaki 2007: 9). Richard, a successful doctor, is soon revealed to be duplicitous both in the work and in the private spheres. The play begins as he brings home his lover, Rebecca, a twenty-five year old American woman he illegally supplies with drugs, after she has taken an overdose. In Scene II, furthermore, a long telephone conversation between Richard and his colleague Morris makes clear that, in order to be with Rebecca and once again abusing his power, Richard has neglected an old patient who has just died, and Morris has agreed to cover up for him. In his reflections on the Holocaust, Agamben understands barbarism as the points where the market interests of late capitalism filter down into the lives of individuals, thus rendering them zoè – mere biological, docile bodies – as opposed to political bodies, or bios (Agamben 156). In The Country, and for the sake of upholding Richard’s and Morris’s professional and economic status, both Corinne and Rebecca are required to become zoè, docile bodies turned into conduits of ideology. Richard, in particular, attempts to exchange the women’s silence regarding his duplicity both at home and at work for economic and other material compensations.⁴ Through repeated moments of collapse, Corinne and Rebecca attempt to liberate their bodies from Richard’s mark of power, even if this takes them to the point of irrationality or violence. At the same time, through the ‘irrational’, ‘embodied’ language of collapse, which leads them to pass on their testimony to one

 For a different approach to The Country and to the characters of Richard and Morris in particular, see Peter Buse’s “Solicitations téléphoniques: La Campagne de Martin Crimp”. Buse takes a Lacanian perspective and claims that, through Morris, the play questions traditional ethics and reveals it to exist at the service of property and the status quo. Buse understands The Country as being about Richard’s attempt to “free himself from a series of contradictory orders which emanate from an alienating moral conscience” (Buse 165), represented particularly by Morris, who censures his affair with Rebecca and remains an offstage presence precisely in order to suggest this notion of moral control. In French, “[Richard] tente de se dépêtrer de tout un réseau d’ordres contradictoires émanant d’une conscience morale aliénante”.

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another, Corinne and Rebecca undo the ‘colonization’ Richard, and also Morris – Richard’s colleague and friend – enact on their bodies. After having been rendered speechless vehicles for the men’s self-aggrandizement, they re-inscribe themselves as resistant subjects. That is, they re-embody themselves as political subjects – bíos – and make the body, which Richard denies, a visible, tangible entity that has a particular, unrepeatable, meaning-full geography.⁵ Through a physical, fable-like language that rescues the concrete materiality of the body Richard erodes through discourse, Corinne and Rebecca aim to erase the marks of power which have been ‘written’ on their bodies. The Country is divided into five scenes which take place, entirely, within Richard and Corinne’s middle-class country home. The play begins in medias res as Richard brings his lover Rebecca home in the middle of the night, to his wife’s astonishment. Most of The Country recounts the events that take place during that night. Scenes II, III and IV focus on Richard’s attempt to subjugate both women by concealing the real nature of his relationship with each of them, as well as on the women’s reactions and their subsequent realization they need to “cut” with (Crimp 2005a: 291) Richard. Scene V takes place “two months later” (Crimp 2005a: 346), and this is where Corinne tries to pass on her testimony to Richard in an attempt to come to terms with the personal and global situation of violence in which she finds herself. The play traces Rebecca’s and Corinne’s attempts to liberate themselves from Richard’s subjection and lies, both through violence, and by passing on a testimony of resistance. Corinne collapses three times in the course of the play – in Scenes I, II and V – and Rebecca undergoes two moments of collapse – in Scene III and Scene IV. The play thus contains five moments of breakdown, one in each scene. Through pathos and violence – Corinne’s screaming in Scene II, or Rebecca’s stabbing of a scissors into Richard’s palm in Scene IV – the women manage to progressively sever their ties with Richard, and Crimp enacts a critique of the

 The Country is about how women experience their bodies, and particularly about how oppression, liberation and, ultimately, personal identity, are first and foremost experienced through the body. Katie Mitchell, who directed The Country at the Royal Court Theatre in a production that ran from 11 April to 24 June 2000, also asserts that the body is central to The Country: “The Country is about what people do with their bodies: sticking syringes full of heroin into them or fucking each other, with all the mental effects of betrayal and confusion that that involves. Although the children never appear onstage, the minute that Corinne feels a real threat, she ships them bodily off to a safe place. Bodies: whether you put pure water into your body or have an alcoholic drink. It’s a very visceral play. If you go through it carefully, there are countless moments when touch, or taste, or smell is mentioned. All the senses are engaged” (Mitchell in Sierz 2006: 203). The play’s corporeal character, it will be argued, is eminently related to its post-Holocaust sensibility.

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duplicity of the late capitalist, individualistic subject Richard incarnates. Through testimony – the one Corinne delivers in Scenes I and V, and through Rebecca’s in Scene III – the women capture the contradictions of the late capitalist system and become increasingly aware that the rupture with civilized values Richard imposes on them is part of a larger violence exerted with a view to the maintenance of an unequal world order. It is specifically through the poetics of the testimonies Rebecca and, in particular, Corinne delivers in Scene V, however, that Crimp sets out to find a language capable of both encompassing the experience of barbarism and articulating a dramaturgy of resistance that will mobilize the spectators’ ethical potential, their capacity to identify the seeds of barbarism in their own, everyday context. In Scene II, Corinne openly rebels against Richard as she discovers a needle in Rebecca’s bag. Richard and Corinne had decided to move to the country so that Richard could start anew, leaving behind, the text suggests, his dubious relationships with other women and his drug-addiction. As the full realization dawns on her regarding the precarious position Richard’s constant lies put her in, Corinne cries out she no longer knows “what [he] want[s]” (Crimp 2005a: 311). Corinne’s violent breakdown, as shall be seen, aims to unmask Richard’s duplicity, and is a response to the absence of commitment that characterizes postmodern relationships, which are based on what Helena Béjar calls the “‘de-ethicized’ bond” (Béjar 143).⁶ In Scene I, instead, Corinne’s collapse takes the form of an act of testimony. Here she is attempting to make sense of Rebecca’s presence in their home. She intuits Richard is being unfaithful, and that there is something Morris and Richard are hiding away from her. By passing on to Richard her testimony of her afternoon with Morris, Corinne attempts to link both types of violence – the violence Richard has enacted on his elderly patient and the one he enacts on her through Rebecca – to late capitalism’s structural inequality. The deeply unsettling presence of the young woman in their home brings to Corinne’s mind the conversation she had with Morris in the afternoon, in which she felt “control [led]” (Crimp 2005a: 358) and submitted to interrogation. Morris, as shall be

 In an interview with Sierz, held at the Orange Tree Theatre on 14 April 2012 on account of the revival of Crimp’s Definitely the Bahamas, Crimp pointed out the similarities between Morris and Michael, his “first successful offstage character” (2012b: 2) from Definitely the Bahamas, also an apparently successful, yet ethically dubious man. As he put it, “you feel that if you brought [these characters] onto the stage [they] would be too much, and […] would create an imbalance. And it is the same with Michael, who really has an awful lot of negative qualities. He’s a man who goes off to South Africa in the 1970s, makes a lot of money, which means he’s probably been deeply unscrupulous, and it gradually emerges that he’s not very nice” (Sierz 2012: 2).

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seen, sought to find out how much Corinne knew about the old patient himself and Richard ‘accidentally’ let die. In Scene IV, Rebecca, who feels like a “map” (Crimp 2005a: 342) open to Richard’s inscriptions, openly rebels against him through violence. In the middle of a conversation that celebrates Richard’s achievements as a doctor, Rebecca suddenly stabs a pair of scissors into his palm. Through her act of violence, Rebecca brings Richard’s elusive body, which takes refuge in the abstractions of discourse, to the fore, and raises questions about empathy and commitment to the Other. Richard dissociates his acts of duplicity from the identity he fashions for himself through discourse, that of a ‘moral’ subject. Rebecca’s violent act reminds the audience of the real individual that lurks beneath the folds of discourse. Richard’s abuse of power consists, precisely, in appropriating rationality, and Rebecca threatens his self-sufficiency, his constituting himself as a closedoff, independent, unreachable body that ignores the demands of the tangible Other. Against both Richard’s and his friend Morris’s implicit belief that lying is an inevitable component of relationships, Rebecca and Corinne refuse to integrate this as part of ‘normality’ and defend their position to the point of becoming irrational or violent. In scene III, as she collapses, Rebecca attempts to pass on her testimony of Richard’s violence to Corinne. Having just woken up from her sleep, Rebecca “sits on a chair with a blanket over her shoulders” (Crimp 2005a: 316) and tells Corinne of the breakdown she experienced the previous night in Richard’s company. In her testimony, Rebecca, like Corinne in Scene I, understands Richard’s violence against her as part of a system which impels individuals to base their identities on status and self-aggrandizement. In the lyrical, defamiliarized language of testimony, she compares Richard’s violence against her, his having seduced her for the purpose of enhancing his status, to the hardness and rigidity of a “stone” (Crimp 2005a: 316) which she describes as an “outpost…of the empire” (Crimp 2005a: 316). Through testimony, then, Rebecca attempts to understand the game of privilege into which she is inserted, thus linking her personal situation to the structural inequality of late capitalism. Corinne’s and Rebecca’s repeated attempts to liberate themselves, then, culminate at the end of the play, in Scene V, when Corinne undergoes what can be described as an utter loss of self-control or collapse of the self and, drawing on Rebecca’s attempt to express her experience in Scene III, she attempts to pass on her testimony to Richard and enacts her final – albeit ambivalent – separation from him. Her final breakdown is a response to Richard’s suggestion that she should ignore the lack of honesty and care which characterizes their relationship, in exchange for the economic compensations her life with him offers her. Corinne thus collapses when she realizes her entire life, down to her most

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intimate core as a subject, has been ‘colonized’ by market values. Refusing to remain a conduit for Richard’s exploitative aims, Corinne rejects Richard’s suggestion they should “drive somewhere” (Crimp 2005a: 359). Instead, she remains in the house and delivers her testimony both to him and to the audience, seeking to position herself politically despite the difficulty implicit in her desire to “reverse” (Crimp 2005a: 362) the course of her life. Most importantly, Crimp implies that the women help one another in their struggle towards empowerment. Gradually, Corinne and Rebecca – together with Sophie, the children’s nanny, who remains an offstage presence – set up a loose yet effective community of resistance through which they help each other remember and resist Richard’s power. Like the text, which records their acts of testimony as though weaving itself through an effort to remember, the women seek to empower one another and free themselves from Richard’s power by accessing their memory of resistance. Throughout Scene III, for instance, in which Rebecca passes on her testimony, Corinne “watches her speak” (Crimp 2005a: 316) and fills in her testimony with her own words whenever Rebecca’s language or memory falters. In this way, the women begin to share a common code of resistance. Corinne’s final act of testimony, which takes place in Scene V and through which she enacts her final and complete emotional separation from Richard, is made possible thanks to her and Rebecca’s joint effort in Scene III to unveil and articulate the contradictions of late capitalism through testimony. The unstable, irrational or violent forms of behaviour the women adopt in the course of the play vindicate the importance of values which are mostly considered negligible and ‘small’ within late capitalism, values which success and prestige seem to remove from the men’s view. Specifically, Rebecca’s and Corinne’s moments of collapse represent resistance to the suppressed violence that seems to be the sine qua non condition for the maintenance of the high living standard represented by Richard’s and Corinne’s life in the country – the violence of lying and of putting one’s own lucrative desires and search for status before the lives of other people, as Richard’s ‘accident’ with the old patient suggests. In her testimony, Corinne uses a lyrical, indeterminate, metaphorical language, expressing herself “through darkness and through fragmentation” and through “cognitively dissonant” speech modes (Felman and Laub 1995: 24). Like Rebecca in Scene III, she talks about the series of stratified gender behaviours that separate her from her husband, as well as about the greed that characterizes Richard as well as the late capitalist structures they inhabit, in terms of a “stone” (Crimp 2005a: 364). Through this kind of defamiliarized language, she attempts, in Adorno’s terms, to “make those things be heard which ideology con-

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ceals” (Adorno 214), tapping into her experience in order to make social contradictions visible. At the point of collapse, then, Corinne looks for a mode of expression in which language and subjectivity can merge, becoming one and the same, thus suturing the rift Richard has opened up between her subjectivity and the roles she has been forced to embody. As mentioned in Block III, Adorno claims that “language itself first speaks when it speaks not as something foreign to the subject but as his [sic] own voice” (Adorno 218). Corinne speaks in ‘riddles’ made out of very concrete, realistic, tangible words which yet have a metaphysical resonance. For instance, she argues that the “road” (Crimp 2005a: 363) to her home is “coercing” (Crimp 2005a: 363) her, or that “reversing” (Crimp 2005a: 362) the car’s mirror gave her “enormous pleasure” (Crimp 2005a: 362). Through Corinne’s collapse, Crimp invites spectators to experience the social contradictions in which they, as Western individuals and as apparent beneficiaries of the late capitalist system, are also immersed. That is, through highly symbolic images that require the audience’s collaboration, such as those of the watch Corinne lost on her “trip” (Crimp 2005a: 361; 365) away from her home to the barren ditch, or the “stone” “devouring” her “heart” (Crimp 2005a: 365), Crimp disrupts the conventional stage-audience separation and seeks to invoke the memory of resistance of the spectators themselves. At this point, and because the images Corinne uses in order to refer to the socio-political order her husband embodies are highly personal, spectators may fill in the symbolic meaning of Corinne’s words – just as Corinne, as shall be seen, does with Rebecca’s testimony in Scene III – by bringing into the play remnants of their own traumatic experiences of coercion, thus becoming ‘double witnesses’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 58) – that is, witnesses to Corinne act of witnessing and to the presence of the seeds of barbarism in their own context. Through the poetics of testimony, that is, spectators are interpellated in their capacity for ethical responsiveness. Through the poetic, estranging language of collapse, spectators are invited to decode the images by taking up a position as active witnesses rather than mere passive ‘voyeurs’. Ultimately, it will be argued, both Corinne’s and Rebecca’s violence and the dramatization of testimony are part and parcel of a search for a new ethics grounded on subjectivity and the body. Through violence and testimony, spectators are impelled to move towards an ethical framework based on proximity and on what Lévinas, in response to the post-Holocaust ethical impasse, metaphorically terms the space of the “meeting” (Lévinas 69) or the ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the Other. The play thus becomes, together with The Treatment (1993) and Cruel and Tender (2004), a prime instance of Crimp’s focus on ‘psychology’, that is, of his attempt to change the spectators’ subjective conditions through tes-

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timony. Mental breakdown, and testimony in particular, is above all a means to empower the audience, to encourage them to activate new values and modes of relating. Through testimony, Crimp places spectators in the position of witnesses in order to work on their subjectivity, just as he works on Corinne’s.⁷ Corinne, as shall be seen, undergoes a process of minimalization or paring down of the self, consequent upon her desire to become an ethical subject despite the losses – economic as well as in terms of security, position and status – this entails. As Corinne liberates herself from her husband in Scene V, she ceases to be subjected to him and begins to be true to her inner moral self instead, which allows her true freedom as a subject. Her transformation shows the self as a “nomadic” (Morley and Chen 166) site of struggle within a given political reality, characterized by fluidity and the constant negotiation of meaning. Corinne lives through the entire experience of deceit and finally chooses to leave a record of it by offering her testimony and pursuing subjective change. Through collapse Corinne slowly yet steadily separates herself from her husband’s values, becoming progressively aware of the precarious position she, as a woman, is made to inhabit, and thus of her necessity to change as a subject, since her life so far has been based on false premises. The process Corinne undergoes as she becomes a fully conscious, ethical body on stage is offered as a model for the audience to follow. The Country is Crimp’s response to the urgent question as to whether it is possible, in Western, affluent societies, and given the existing unequal world order, to live according to more selfless terms. Through collapse, and seizing on the women characters’ slightly peripheral position in relation to the system, Crimp seeks to situate spectators at a distance from late capitalist values so that, like Corinne, they may be enabled to dissociate themselves from them. The Country records a process of paring down of the self to an ethical core of values. Through repeated moments of female breakdown, the text performs a deconstruction of the duplicity of the late capitalist, individualistic subject Richard incarnates, mobilizing a utopian desire for authenticity and honesty.

1.1.2 ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’: A Narrative of Testimony and a Power Game Crimp conveys the women’s struggle against Richard’s ‘colonization’, on a symbolic level, as though it were a power game. On the right margin of the last page

 This pattern is also pursued in Crimp’s version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006), as shall be argued in block VI.

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of each scene, in brackets, there appears one of the three choices in the popular children’s game ‘paper, scissors, stone’. As Middeke puts it, these annotations are part and parcel of Crimp’s ironic deconstruction of the dream of the countryside, or of his “assault on the pastoral myth” (Middeke 2011: 93). Crimp, indeed, ironically reproduces the five-act structure of classical tragedy, and then destroys its unity as “the children’s hand game of rock-paper-scissors determines the succession of the scenes” (Middeke 2011: 93). The play suggests, indeed, that Richard’s unethical deployment of power has altered the linear, progressive narrative of the women’s lives and of life in ‘the country’. Seeking to adjust to the chaotic shapes of Richard’s power, it has lost, so to speak, its classical five-act structure. At the same time, the annotations are a reflection on the degree of success the women have had in the scene in rebelling against Richard and, therefore, on the degree of justice that characterizes relationships in Richard’s and Corinne’s home. As shall be seen, when the scenes end in ‘scissors’ it is implied that both Rebecca and Corinne have taken a step forward, that is, they have achieved a small victory over Richard. If the scene in question ends in ‘paper’, it metaphorically signifies that they have begun writing their own life-story as distinct from the one Richard wants to inscribe on their bodies, even if this is achieved through violence and pathos. Finally, if the scene ends in ‘stone’ it points both to the women’s realization, which they attain through their respective testimonies, of the situation of personal and social violence in which they find themselves, and to Richard’s power game, through which he manages to ‘write’ a good portion of the women’s life and identity. The game of ‘paper, scissors, stone’ according to which the play is structured, therefore, aims to convey a sense that The Country is both a narrative of collapse and testimony leading to female empowerment, and a warning, the record of a man’s power game. Scene I begins with Rebecca sleeping off her overdose in Richard’s and Corinne’s country home. Corinne, who is “cutting” (Crimp 2005a: 291) out paper figures for the children, insistently besieges Richard with questions regarding the young woman’s identity, which he tries to keep hidden. In this scene the audience also finds out about Morris, Richard’s colleague, and Sophie, the nanny, through the couple’s conversation. Like the couple’s children, Morris and Sophie never actually appear on stage although Richard repeatedly talks to Morris on the phone, just as Corinne stays in touch with the children’s nanny. Most importantly, in this scene Corinne tries to pass on to Richard the testimony of her having felt invaded and interrogated by Morris in the afternoon, in an attempt to denounce the bond of complicity between the two men. Metaphorically, therefore, Corinne is already “cutting” (Crimp 2005a: 291) with Richard. This particular episode, therefore, ends in ‘scissors’.

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In Scene II Corinne and Richard continue discussing the reasons for Rebecca’s presence in their home. Corinne accidentally finds a needle in Rebecca’s purse, which she retrieves from Richard’s car. Corinne collapses when she sees the needle, and asks Richard about his intentions. At this point, Morris calls. Although Corinne begs Richard not to answer the phone, he picks it up and talks to Morris about the old patient they have let die. Richard is urgently needed in hospital, presumably to help Morris cover their ‘accident’ with the patient. This particular episode ends in ‘stone’, since Corinne is seen not to be able to leave Richard yet. While suspecting something is wrong at the hospital, she still tries to trust Richard’s word. In Scene III, only Rebecca and Corinne are present and they gradually become aware that Richard has betrayed them both. Rebecca passes on the testimony of the night when Richard brought her to their home – Scene I – and of the violence he has inflicted on her. Corinne listens throughout, and she fills out Rebecca’s narrative at the moments when she cannot go on speaking. Rebecca and Corinne then engage in some small talk about how and why Corinne and Richard moved to the country, and Rebecca questions Corinne’s ideal of a quiet country life. The scene ends with Corinne asking Rebecca to leave their home. In this scene, they talk about Morris’s knowledge of Latin, and Rebecca claims that she would like to meet Morris and “discuss history” (Crimp 2005a: 322) with him. This scene ends in ‘paper’, a reference to Rebecca’s desire to “discuss” and, indeed, re-rewrite “history” (Crimp 2005a: 322). In the following scene, Rebecca confronts Richard violently and leaves his home. It is thus made clear that if both women help each other, they will be able to ‘rewrite’ their own histories, and thereby also perhaps ‘His-story’. Scene IV focuses on Richard and Rebecca. The scene juxtaposes calmness and fierceness, since what looks like a relatively placid conversation suddenly betrays a subtext of tension between the two characters, which ends in an act of violence on Rebecca’s part. Rebecca asks Richard what his intentions were in seducing her and bringing her to his house. Then they again try to talk calmly about how Richard has successfully delivered a baby. In the middle of this conversation, however, Rebecca sticks a pair of scissors into Richard’s hand. It becomes clear that, after physically taking revenge on Richard through her violent act, Rebecca will do precisely what Corinne does not dare to do – leave Richard and their home. This scene, like Scene I, also ends in ‘scissors’. Finally, Scene V takes place two months later. Corinne and Richard are alone in the house in what seems to be the calm after the storm. The scene, however, portrays Corinne’s full emotional separation from her husband. At this moment, Sophie calls and tells Corinne Richard unexpectedly gave her an enormous sum of money, which terrified her. This triggers Corinne’s collapse. As she unravels,

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she passes on the testimony of what she has lived through both to Richard and to the audience. Using an irrational, poetic language, she talks of the tension she experiences, trapped as she is between the impulse to remain with Richard and protect her family and position, or abide by her own ethical values and leave him. This final scene, as has been mentioned, ends in ‘stone’, thus suggesting that the play can be read both as a narrative of testimony leading to female empowerment and self-awareness, or as the record of Richard’s own power game, that is, as the narrative of his attempt to ‘write’ his identity on the bodies of the women he has seduced. The popular game of ‘paper, scissors, stone’ according to which Crimp structures the play reflects how Richard’s ‘game’ – his drive towards self-aggrandizement which results in different kinds of violence – is presented in fundamental opposition to that of the women, who re-define themselves as a core of essential ethical values instead and who, therefore, undergo a process of paring down of their selfhood. Crimp, indeed, seems to presents Corinne’s subjectivity as a model to the audience, a subjective model through which to resist the irruption of barbarism. From Corinne’s perspective, the play is the record of a process of personal change which leads her to understand the importance of honesty and authenticity in relationships, and to become a more ethical subject at the end of the play than she was at the beginning – a process which the audience is invited to witness. The ‘naming’ of the scenes according to the popular game of ‘paper, scissors, stone’, therefore, reflects the main theme of The Country – namely, the tour de force between Richard and the women as an instance of the gap of misunderstanding which characterizes relationships between both genders in contemporary society. In order to explore this gap, Crimp decided not to assign the lines to specific characters and to make them mention one another’s names only very occasionally.⁸ In this way, the scenes between the women and Richard acquire a “more archetypal character” (Crimp 2007a) and the audience can focus on the relationship between the characters, instead of feeling impelled to identify with them as is the case with more naturalistic approaches.⁹

 When Rebecca tells Richard the parable of how they met she utters her own name: “Hello. I’m Rebecca. I’m the maid” (Crimp 2005a: 341). In Scene V, when Richard gives Corinne the present, he also utters Corinne’s name – “it’s perfectly normal, Corinne, to be given things” (Crimp 2005a: 353).  At a seminar on playwriting Crimp gave in La Garrotxa (Spain), which ran from 7 to 15 July 2007, he pointed out this strategy was common in contemporary British theatre and mentioned Caryl Churchill’s Far Away as an example. Far Away is a dystopian play where the characters voice different views on how the world should emerge from a situation of global war. The course

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The lack of specificity when it comes to assigning the characters’ lines, then, does not suggest that the male and female roles could be interchanged depending on the director’s choice, but it is an attempt to explore the gender gap that (still) characterizes late capitalist society. Precisely in order to create this state of tension – which makes The Country resonant of a play by Harold Pinter – Crimp structures the play according to a fast-paced question and answer pattern as well.¹⁰ As Angelaki points out, reviewers “have tended to identify [Crimp] as a successor of Harold Pinter [and] the reviews of The Country, in particular, brim [med] with such comments” (Angelaki 2012: 5). As Middeke adds, “the prevailing atmosphere of an intriguing, creepy menace is generated by such Pinteresque devices as the clipped dialogue […] in which […] single words such as ‘solicitous’ or ‘clean’ acquire a ‘sinister resonance’ and produce an ‘enigmatic inscrutability’” (Middeke 2011: 93). Corinne’s and Rebecca’s questions are answered evasively by Richard, which prompts the women to continue besieging him with more questions.¹¹ Crimp has pointed out that both Churchill’s Far Away and Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes follow a “question and answer model” which creates a tense situation in the theatre, since it seems as though the characters were “playing hide-and-seek with one another” (Crimp 2007a). The ‘Pinteresque’ question-and-answer model, then, together with the strategy of not having the characters mention one another’s names, aims to present the struggle between Richard and the women as an archetypal one. Crimp, indeed, portrays Richard on the one hand and Corinne and Rebecca on the other as characters who embody antagonistic views of the world and of selfhood.

was organized by Sala Beckett as part of the Summer Seminar ‘Obrador d’Estiu’, held at Mas Espuella, Arguelaguer.  In British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, Michael Billington highlights the influence Harold Pinter exerts on the younger generation of playwrights. Billington argues that Pinter’s influence is a “generalized, pervasive influence, rather than a specific one” (Aragay et al. 114).  This study includes photos from Toni Casares’s production of The Country [El Camp] which ran at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, from 16 February to 27 March 2005. As notified to the author by the editor of Theatre Record, Ian Shuttleworth, Ivan Kyncl, the photographer for Katie Mitchell’s production, which ran at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs from 11 April to 24 June 2000, died in 2004 and it has proved impossible to have access to his material.

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1.2 Collapse as Self-Awareness: Corinne’s Change Despite the apparently isolated life Richard and Corinne lead in the country, they inhabit what Cheng, drawing on Hobsbawm, calls an “age of extremes”, in which “it is not the shortage of goods” that is the problem, creating “overabundance for a few, scarcity for the majority”, but the undemocratic “politics of entitlement” (Cheng 1; emphasis original) to these goods.¹² In order to maintain certain privileges, what Hardt and Negri refer to as the contemporary “Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2006: xii), made up of a network of corporations and other powers, is engaged in “cutthroat competitions” (Cheng 1) for the control of resources. This includes the continuous waging of wars abroad in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. Thus, Corinne and Richard are part of a globalized world, which sees “the rise of global capitalism operating under neoliberal policy conditions” (Rebellato 2009: 12; emphasis original). Although hospitals are not directly implicated in the control of the economy as banks and corporations are, they are nonetheless imbued with the same type of neo-liberal values which characterize more visible organisms of globalization. Human lives are also, in hospitals, valued primarily in profitable or mercantilist terms. Not only does Richard abuse his power as a doctor and sell Rebecca some drugs, but he also lets an old man die in hospital and asks Morris to cover up for him. There was a visit noted for him to assist the old patient which, in the end, never took place. As Richard callously puts it in Scene II, –

Well hang on a minute, Morris, hang on a minute. Because the fact is, is (a) I fully intended to make that visit, and (b) regardless of any visit the man was always going to die. This was a sick old man, Morris. You’ve been there. You’ve seen that house. You’ve seen him trying to breathe. You know his history. And please don’t let’s forget that the man was a bastard. (Crimp 2005a: 309)

And he goes on to ask Morris to lie for him even as he denies this is what he is doing: –

Now listen, Morris, I’m assuming I have your support – […] Well of course I’m not expecting you to lie, Morris. No one has to lie. That wouldn’t be appropriate. It’s jut simply a matter of putting these events in some kind of order, some kind of intelligible order. (Crimp 2005a: 310)

 Cheng draws on Hobsbawm (1994).

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Corinne and Rebecca’s various moments of breakdown throughout the play are signs of their discovery, as mentioned above, of the contradictions of the late capitalist society they form part of, that is, of the rift between economic progress and ethics. Corinne, in particular, realizes her family and her home have become what Rebecca, in Scene III, calls an “outpost…of the empire” (Crimp 2005a: 316). Corinne’s collapse in Act V signals her resistance at the market becoming the centre of her existence – in the form, for instance, of her husband’s attempt to ‘buy’ her silence regarding his dealings at the hospital in exchange for material and economic compensations. In this context, Corinne’s three moments of collapse are represented as a particularly female form of self-awakening. In particular, by being kept ignorant of the bond of mutual interest between Richard and Morris, Corinne is placed in a marginal position – she is not in control of her own identity. She remains confined to the domestic sphere and to being a vehicle for Richard’s exploitative treatment of her. Collapse is the sign of Corinne’s realization that market interests have intruded within her daily life and have placed her in a precarious position as a woman. In this context, then, Corinne and Rebecca’s moments of collapse are represented as a particularly female form of self-awakening.

1.2.1 Collapse, Mercantilism and ‘Empire’ In Scene II, Corinne undergoes collapse when she finds Rebecca’s purse containing a series of drugs and needles which Richard, abusing his power as a doctor, has sold her. Corinne’s collapse signals the point when she discovers that she has been unwittingly participating in her husband’s lack of honesty and ethics – she discovers that she occupies an uncomfortable ‘grey zone’ of complicity with ‘Empire’. After Morris’s call, which makes her aware that there has been a problem with a patient, Corinne seeks to continue unmasking Richard, she goes all the way to their car and finds Rebecca’s bag. Corinne thus asks Richard whether Rebecca paid him for him to illegally sell her the needles: –

Yes, I looked for the bag. I not only looked for the bag, I found the bag. Here is the bag. She gently empties the contents of the bag onto the floor. Pause. It’s just that I suddenly feel, I suddenly feel – help me – I suddenly feel lost. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. Because I thought you’d stopped. I thought you were clean. But if you’ve stopped why are there needles in her bag? Whose needles are they? Are they yours? Did she pay you for these things? How did she pay you? (Crimp 2005a: 311; emphases original)

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This episode prefigures Corinne’s collapse at the end of the play. In Scene II, Corinne realizes she has become a conduit for her husband’s exploitative dealings. Corinne has been reduced to mere zoè, a purely biological body upon which an alien identity is imposed. Collapse, therefore, is Corinne’s reaction at having had her individuality moulded by and submitted to market interests, and thus rendered docile. Her collapse in Scene II signals the start of her refusal to be eroded as a resistant subject and to install mercantilism at the centre of her being, keeping silent in exchange for the economic compensations Richard can offer. Corinne’s breakdown is a response to a society that, as Richard Sennett puts it in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, “provides human beings [with] no deep reason[s] to care about one another” (Sennett 1998: 148). Corinne reacts violently against the idea that, in emotional relationships, no party is responsible for her/his behaviour to the other party. This is Richard’s view – he hides away from Corinne his true purposes and designs, and even forces her to move to the country under a false promise, namely, that he would stay “clean” (Crimp 2005a: 311) from drugs and from attachments to other women. According to Bauman, irresponsibility characterizes postmodern relationships. As Béjar puts it in Zygmunt Bauman; Identidades Inciertas, postmodern emotional relationships are characterized by the ‘floating strategy’, which is a vivid metaphor that expresses the ‘de-ethicized’ bond that is nowadays constructed through the implicit premise that individuals should not account for their behaviour to the other partner, since the bond itself is based – paradoxically – on an absence of commitment. (Béjar 17)¹³

Yet, according to Bauman, responsibility is precisely “the nucleus of ethics itself, and by extension, of all moral behaviour” (qtd. in Béjar 16).¹⁴ In Scene IV, Richard is worried that Rebecca may wake his wife up if she takes a shower and is prepared to act violently in order to prevent her from revealing herself to his wife and children. Thus, while inflicting psychological torture on both women, Richard aims to, at the same time, keep subjecting them both. Given that Richard takes no responsibility for either Corinne’s or Rebecca’s bodies,

 “Las relaciones amorosas postmodernas se regían por la ‘estrategia de la flotación’, vívida metáfora de un vínculo ‘desetizado’ que se construía bajo la premisa implícita de que nadie tiene que rendir cuentas a nadie por su comportamiento, puesto que el vínculo se basa – paradójicamente – en la falta de compromiso”.  “La responsabilidad [es] el núcleo de la ética y, por extensión, de todo comportamiento moral”.

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the bodies which are close to him, it is no wonder he refuses to take any responsibility for the bodies of his patients, much less for those he has not even met. Lévinas defines the link of mutual responsibility, which stands in sharp opposition to the de-ethicized bond Richard keeps with Corinne and Rebecca, through the metaphor of the caress. As Béjar explains it, the ‘moral’ relationship is like a caress which may touch the other “without pressing too hard and without trying to possess or to annihilate” (Béjar 142).¹⁵ Rather, it should be marked both by an identification with the Other, and the acknowledgement of her/his difference. [The metaphor of the caress] implies that, although there is an urgent need for connection, one accepts the opacity of the loved one. […] The image of the caress expresses a profound bond with the other in which certainty is offered without imposing any conditions or pre-requisites. ‘[Such an] experience resembles that of the child who rubs her/his mother’s skin: slowly I can perceive how different the details of your experience are from mine, but I do not take away my mental hand’. (Béjar 143)¹⁶

In this light, Corinne’s breakdown is a direct consequence of the contradiction in which Richard keeps her. He both ‘subjects’ her and ‘betrays’ her; both aims to keep her yet puts his own needs first. Corinne’s collapse signals the rupture with human values that takes place when individuals try to adapt their behaviour and their ‘principles’ to late capitalist values. Richard’s duplicity is related to his proximity to power within a hospital which stands for a late capitalist, hierarchical, competitive work place, in which relationships are governed by the criteria of optimization and benefit. ‘Empire’ is not dramatized directly in the play, only its symptoms are, one of its most evident of which is precisely the erasure of responsibility in interpersonal relationships.

 “Lévinas propone la metáfora de la caricia como paradigma de la relación moral, una caricia que toque sin apretar y sin intención de poseer ni aniquilar”.  “[…] la identificación con el [O]tro y el reconocimiento de su diferencia, y supone que, a pesar de la urgencia íntima de conexión, se acepta la opacidad del otro. […] La imagen de la caricia expresa un vínculo profundo en el que se da una certeza sin exigencias […] ‘[Esta] experiencia se parece a la del niño que roza la piel de la madre: poco a poco percibo lo diferentes que son los detalles de tu experiencia de los de la mía, pero no retiro mi mano mental’”. In the second part of the quotation, Béjar is quoting from Richard Sennett’s Respect in a World of Inequality (2003).

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1.2.2 Virgil, Collapse and Testimony Scene I presents Corinne’s attempt to pass on to Richard her testimony of the conversation she held with Morris in the afternoon, which unsettled her to the point of collapse. This scene of testimony is inserted between Corinne’s opening conversation with Richard about Rebecca’s presence in their home, and her subsequent attempt to continue besieging Richard with questions about the young woman. Scene I thus suggests Corinne begins to discover Richard’s unfaithfulness not only with Rebecca but also regarding the old patient he and Morris let die. Her testimony helps her see both types of violence as part of the same unequal world order, based on status, rivalry, and the search for personal benefit. Through testimony she unveils the contradictions of the system both for herself and for the audience. The defamiliarized language Corinne employs as she tells Richard about her afternoon with Morris clearly suggests she is experiencing a moment of collapse. Corinne seeks to remember every detail of the afternoon and the impact the meeting has left on her, pursuing it to the point of crisis. Richard is cast as a witness, like the audience, to Corinne’s full delivery of her testimony. Corinne does not initially fully understand the implications of her encounter with Morris and of Richard’s intrusive attitude as she recounts it, but she perceives their violence, the mark of docility they aim to leave on her body. Richard begins to ask her questions to bring the full delivery about, as though prompting her progressive unravelling. Richard, however, is not a positive witness, and slowly yet steadily he begins to enclose Corinne, attempting to prescribe her behaviour. As he puts it, “I hope you were nice to him” (Crimp 2005a: 302). Since Corinne has highlighted the unpleasant character of her meeting with Morris right from the start, her reply is bitterly ironic – “I was incredibly nice to him. Even when he squatted right next to me in his terrible tweeds” (Crimp 2005a: 302). Thus, the image of Corinne and Richard sitting and conversing beside one another mirrors the scene of coercion between her and Morris that she is telling Richard about. Corinne tells Richard how her conversation with Morris felt to her like an interrogation – “[Morris] squatted next to me – yes – and asked how we were settling in […] I kept thinking, ‘Why have you come here? What do you want?’” (Crimp 2005a: 302– 3). As she tells her husband about the details of the conversation, her speech increasingly becomes an act of testimony, an attempt to give voice to an act of coercion and to the mark this intrusion of violence has left on her:

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– – – –

– –

–

– –

He just asked how we were settling in. Did we miss the city? And did we? What? Miss the city? Well I didn’t. I told him I couldn’t speak for you. […] He said he was on his way to the DIY superstore to buy some paint, and did we need anything? […] Doesn’t he have any paint at home? Well that’s what I said. I said, ‘Don’t you have any paint at home?’ And no, he doesn’t. Or rather, yes, he does. He does have some paint at home – it’s the paint he used last time he painted the posts – only he doesn’t know where it is. […] […] But the thing is, is then he began to talk to me in another language. One moment it was English – the paint and so on – then the next it was like he was chanting to me in another language. He said, ‘It’s Latin. It’s Virgil.’ Vigil. Well that’s what I said. I said, ‘Virgil, Morris? You make me feel so ignorant.’ And he did. He was making me feel very very ignorant. Squatting there. Chanting like that. (Crimp 2005a: 302– 03; emphases original)

Virgil thus becomes a metaphor for the ‘masculinist’ economic ‘Empire’ Richard and Morris embody which, understandably, makes Corinne feel “very ignorant” (Crimp 2005a: 303). The conversation became coercive and interrogative, but instead of saying so directly Corinne uses Virgil as a metaphor. As the most representative poet of the Roman Empire, Virgil is the iconic ‘voice of the Empire’. Rebecca brings Virgil’s poetry to view again at the start of Scene IV, when she recites a few lines from the Georgics: “‘This song of husbandry…of crops and beasts and fruit trees I was singing while great Caesar was thundering beside the deep Euphrates in war, victoriously for grateful peoples’” (Crimp 2005a: 331). Rebecca immediately points out how much Rome’s economic well-being depended on the wealth of the ‘Empire’ and denounces the ethical sacrifice required for the achievement of such wealth, the divorce between a moral economy and a productive economy. She does this by questioning Virgil’s statements and thus orally rewriting History: “Grateful peoples (faint laugh). But what did he know? About crops. Or trees. How did he know that the ‘peoples’ were grateful? […] And how were the farms run? […] I’ll tell you how the farms were run. By slaves. By the labour of slaves. Which he neglects to mention” (Crimp 2005a: 331; emphasis original). Thus, by association, Crimp links the Roman and the current late capitalist ‘Empire’ through the constant state of regulatory wars they create and their exploitation of a large number of people for the sake of the well-being of a minority.

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As Rebecca does in Scenes III and IV, then, in Scene I Corinne begins to discover the essential contradiction of the system, that is, that a narrative of ‘happiness’ and ‘progress’ that is truly universal and inclusive and is not achieved through an unequal world order is yet to be written. As though haunted, Corinne tries to recover the memory of her afternoon conversation with Morris in order to unveil, rather than forget, its suppressed violence. The more Corinne senses Morris’s coercion and the rupture with civilized values it signifies, the more she insists on rescuing her conversation with Morris from forgetfulness. The metaphorical, urgent language of testimony attests to the urgency of the attempt not to allow such violence to be forgotten. Already in Scene I, then, Corinne intuits deceit and violence have invaded her intimate space, but she is not fully conscious of it yet, so her speech also highlights the surrealism of the event, the ‘strangeness’ of Morris’s attitude. Corinne reveals she was offended by Morris’s lack of clarity, and argues that the ‘language’ Morris spoke sounded to her like Latin, an indirect assessment of the bond of privilege that Morris and Richard embody as both ‘strange’ and ‘colonizing’. By maintaining the surreal overtone of her meeting with Morris, Corinne tries to divest herself from the mark of docility he attempts to inscribe on her, and to re-subjectify herself as a resistant subject instead. As an epistemological form, testimony is less totalizing than factual discourse, both more particular and more metaphorical. In its dream-like nature, its surrealism or its recourse to fantasy, it is more defamiliarized. On stage, it aims to directly interpellate spectators, eliciting its collaboration in order to decode, in this case, Corinne’s intuitive perception of the violence of late capitalism. As Ryngaert and Sermon put it, regarding the use, not of testimonial narratives, but of interior monologue in drama, “the unconscious might be the source of certain verbal messages which characters sometimes address directly to the reader’s [or audience’s] unconscious, as though skipping the rules of theatre” (Ryngaert and Sermon 141).¹⁷ Seen in this light, the defamiliarized language of testimony ultimately aims to render unstable the conventional separation between stage and audience, the fourth wall, inviting the audience to connect the references to Virgil and the Roman Empire to their own contemporary, late capitalist society, and thus eventually detect, like Corinne, the latent signs of barbarism.

 “C’est bien l’inconscient qui serait la source de certaines coulées verbales et le personnage s’adresserait alors directement à l’inconscient du lecteur, comme en passant par-dessus les lois du théâtre”.

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1.3 ‘It is Only the Flesh’: Rebecca’s Moral Imagination If Corinne cannot easily disentangle herself from Richard, in Rebecca there is less of a fissure between her feelings and her actions, what she would like to do and what she actually does. Rebecca is a more embodied character than Corinne – she enacts what she feels, and thus can eventually leave the house at the end of Scene IV just as enigmatically as she entered it in the first place. But before she does, Rebecca forces Richard to commit to her and to her presence and asks him, with terrifying irony, whether he has brought her home in order for her to be “the maid” (Crimp 2005a: 336). At this point, tension increases to a peak, but then it seems to subside as Richard manages to divert the conversation to his achievements as a doctor. In the middle of this apparently civilized, celebratory conversation, however, Rebecca suddenly stabs a pair of scissors into Richard’s palm. Rebecca’s attack is a focalized act that places Rebecca’s body outside the distorting limits Richard has set it in. Richard builds a discourse that entraps both Rebecca and Corinne into accepting his lies to them as minor misdemeanours, reparable mistakes, legitimated by his job and the demands it places on him. Rebecca reacts violently against the implicit belief that lying and duplicity are inevitable components of relationships, and rejects the colonization Richard seeks to effect through discourse. Theatrically, her violent act – her stabbing a pair of scissors into Richard’s hand – destabilizes the conventional stage-audience separation again, and invites spectators to supply the reasons why Rebecca should, at a moment when Richard is talking about his achievements as a doctor, feel the impulse to hurt him. Her violent reaction turns the spectators’ attention to their own intersubjective spaces and relations. Thus, once again, Crimp offers a quotidian situation in which power manifests itself and suggests strategies in order to destabilize it.

1.3.1 Collapse as Violence Through Rebecca’s act of violence, the play enacts a critique of the late capitalist male subject that hides his duplicity and power abuse behind a discursive display of ‘reason’. Scene IV begins with Rebecca trying to force Richard to commit to her and to her presence in the home, asking him whether he has brought her home in order for her to be “the maid” (Crimp 2005a: 336). Richard diverts the conversation to his achievements as a doctor, and begins to talk about a baby he has successfully delivered. Immediately after Richard’s account of the birth, Rebecca suddenly and furiously stabs the pointed tip of a pair of tiny scissors

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into his hand. In Toni Casares’s production of the play for Sala Beckett, in Barcelona, the scene was played with Richard and Rebecca sitting down on a sofa, where Rebecca eventually faced Richard and rebelliously forced him to acknowledge the subjection in which he holds her:¹⁸ – – – – – –

This is not – I’m sorry – your home. Then why did you bring me here? You know why / I brought you here. Was it to offer me a position? To do what? To offer me a position? To help your wife? To be the maid? Was it to be the maid? (Crimp 2005a: 336)

In a parody of herself, Rebecca mockingly insists that Richard is forcing her to play the role of the ‘maid’: “Hello. I’m Rebecca. I’m the maid. Let me tell you a story” (Crimp 2005a: 341). But as Richard puts it, not even as the maid is Rebecca worthy of attention: – – – –

Get a maid. Fuck the maid. I don’t want to fuck the maid. Everyone wants to fuck the maid. Well not me. In fact the opposite. (Crimp 2005a: 336)

At this point, Rebecca “takes his hand” (Crimp 2005a: 336) and they continue talking with apparent ease about a baby Richard has successfully and humanely delivered. Thus, Richard’s blatant amorality as regards Rebecca is juxtaposed to his seeming humane behaviour at work. The sequence in which he talks of the baby’s father’s gratefulness towards him follows immediately upon his victimizing of Rebecca. It is Rebecca herself who prompts Richard’s self-congratulatory narrative of personal achievement and success: – – – –

Was it beautiful? They found it beautiful. The parents. Yes, the parents found it beautiful. And so did I. Pause.

 This production ran from 16 February to 27 March, 2005. Rosa Cadafalch was Corinne, Xavi Mira was Richard, and Maria Ribera was Rebecca. Sala Beckett invited Martin Crimp to run a workshop on playwriting and it staged both The Country and Attempts on her Life, while also offering a series of rehearsed readings of Cruel and Tender (2004) and the triptych Fewer Emergencies (2005), which Crimp had just finished writing at the time.

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– – – – – – – – –

– – – – –

The father thanked me. He thanked you? He put his arms around me. He was grateful. He was very grateful. I’d delivered his son. It was a boy. It was a baby boy. Yes. It was a family. It had…become one. Yes. He wanted me to have a drink with him… So you had a drink with him? …but I wouldn’t. Pause. You should’ve had a drink with him. The man has become / a father. But I wouldn’t. […] Well of course he was happy. You had delivered his son. But I said, ‘No. I have to go. I have to work.’ You disappointed him. He wanted to celebrate. (Crimp 2005a: 337– 38)

It is immediately after Richard’s account of the birth that “[Rebecca] grips his hand more tightly” (Crimp 2005a: 338) and, in a moment of collapse, stabs the pointed tip of a pair of tiny scissors into the palm of his hand. It is the dichotomy between how Richard constructs himself through the trust and authority others confer on him and how he behaves towards herself that prompts Rebecca to collapse through violence: – – – – – – –

Don’t hurt me. I’m not hurting you. I said: don’t hurt me. What? Does it hurt? Yes. It hurts. Stop it. What is it? Really? Does that hurt? Yes. He pulls his hand out of her grip. The tiny scissors drop to the floor. (Crimp 2005a: 339)

The scissors literalize the violence that the words themselves can barely conceal. At this point, the audience’s attention is directed to a rip in the fabric of the play through which its underlying violence comes to the surface. Through her violent collapse, Rebecca suddenly focuses the audience’s attention on the political nature of interpersonal relationships, throwing light on how Richard was erasing her personhood through discourse.¹⁹ Through a careful, disembodied use of dis-

 Rebecca’s act of stabbing the scissors into Richard’s palm may be read in the light of the

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course, indeed, Richard constructs himself as a moral subject for Rebecca, albeit refusing to commit to her demands of honesty and empathy. By stabbing the scissors into his palm, Rebecca reasserts the importance of the body, which Richard denies from his position of lofty superiority, and forces him to acknowledge the emotions of anger and pain: – – – – – – – –

You’ve made a hole in my hand. A hole in your hand? Yes. Oh my – you’re angry. Yes. (laughing) You’re so angry, Richard. Keep your voice down. I’ve made a hole in your hand? Is it deep? Are you in pain? (Crimp 2005a: 339)

Even the way in which Richard and Rebecca met, which involved a medical examination, felt to her like an act of colonization in which she was subjected to a mode of interpretation. Speaking of herself in the third person, this is how she reconstructs that meeting: –

She went to a doctor and she said, doctor, doctor, it hurts, I need some medicine. But the doctor wouldn’t give her any. He said, go away – don’t waste my time – I have no medicine. So she went back again and she said doctor, doctor, it really hurts, I need some medicine. And this time the doctor went to the door. He locked the door. He said: I need to take a history – roll up your sleeve. So she rolled up her sleeve and the doctor took a history. Then, children, he got one instrument to look into her eyes. And another instrument to listen to her heart. And when he’d looked into her eyes and listened to her heart, he asked her to undress. So the treatment began. The treatment was wild, children. It could take place at any time of day or night. In any part of the city. In any part of her body. Her body…became the city. The doctor learned how to unfold her – like a map. (Crimp 2005a: 341– 42)

Rebecca, indeed, feels Richard has seduced her and made her fit into a pre-established scheme. Just as Richard does with patients – situate their symptoms in a net of visibility and ascertain the ‘truth’ of their illness – so he does with ReSituationist strategy of détournement, discussed above in relation to Anne’s collapse in Act Three, Scene Four of The Treatment, when Anne and Simon blind Clifford with a fork. The scissors, like the fork in The Treatment, appear as a de-contextualized object. In both plays, a woman uses a domestic object as a weapon in order to curb the ambition of a late capitalist (male) subject. Also, as is the case in The Treatment, and as shall be seen, Rebecca’s collapse causes an unexpected turn in the plot, since Richard is suddenly rendered fragile and vulnerable through such an act of violence, after which Rebecca leaves the house.

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becca. He totalizes her and then subjects her, names her, re-individualizes her with a very concrete identity. As can be noted, Rebecca has recourse to metaphors and, fable-like, she attempts to universalize her situation. Only if she speaks metaphorically, in a fairy-tale style that mixes realism and magic, can she hope to convey the deeper significance of Richard’s “treatment” of her as a violation of integrity. Rebecca is made to become what Richard needs her to be – if Corinne is ‘the country’, she must become ‘the city’, standing for risk, passion and ‘illegality’. What matters to Richard is the place each element – each woman – occupies. This leads him to the point of denying Rebecca’s living presence, asserting she is not even there. That is, although physically there, she is at the same time non-existent – she is not in the place she should be within Richard’s compartmentalized consciousness: – – – – – – –

We have an agreement. Nothing’s changed. Everything has changed. ‘Nothing has changed’? What? […] For one thing, I’m here. No. You’re wrong. You’re not here. I’m not here? No. So where am I? (Crimp 2005a: 341; emphases original)

Rebecca, indeed, feels like a ‘map’ that is submitted to scrutiny, to a form of interpretation. Upon Rebecca a scheme, a mode of knowing and interpreting others, is imposed, within which she is made to play a certain role. Medical discourse itself, Foucault claims in Archaeology of Knowledge, is characterized by prescriptive utterances that presuppose “a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement” (Foucault 2007: 36; emphasis original). It is the style Richard uses when he justifies his acts by virtue of his job. Richard adopts the ‘role’ of doctor and ‘plays’ it in all spheres of his life. As he puts it in Scene I to Corinne, it is his job “as a matter of fact, to know” (Crimp 2005a: 305), or it is his job “not to seem” (Crimp 2005a: 294) concerned. As Foucault puts it, From the nineteenth century […] medicine no longer consisted of a group of traditions, observations, and heterogeneous practices, but of a corpus of knowledge that presupposed the same way of looking at things, the same division of the perceptual field, the same analysis of the pathological fact in accordance with the visible space of the body, the same system of transcribing what one perceived in what one said (same vocabulary, same play of metaphor): in short […] medicine was organised according to a series of descriptive statements. (Foucault 2007: 37)

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Thus, Richard’s ‘knowing’ of Rebecca is inseparable from his mastering her, his classifying her in relation to a series of other ‘objects’ – his wife, his co-workers, his property – among which she must occupy a visible and highly circumscribed role. Rebecca points out that Richard’s mode of proceeding is unilateral, so she states she does not think they “have an agreement anymore” (Crimp 2005a: 341). Rebecca feels this form of bondage in her body. As she puts it, “Her body…became the city” (Crimp 2005a: 342) – it was ‘mapped out’ by Richard, colonized, made to signify. Rebecca tells herself about Richard’s domination and violation of her body just as she would tell Richard’s children – talking about terrible things in such a way as to diminish their power to hurt. Indeed, in Scene IV Rebecca talks about Richard’s scrutinizing look and his mastery of her in parable-like terms. As she puts it, Richard told her he “need[ed] to take a history – roll up your sleeve […] The doctor learned to unfold her – like a map” (Crimp 2005a: 342). In the same manner, she explains how she was trapped in a relationship of dependency with him – “The more medicine she took, the more medicine she craved” (Crimp 2005a: 342). Parable is then the sign of violence, and a mode for women to articulate a situation in which their bodies are traumatically subjectified by means of an act of interpretation. Their traumatic experiences are thereby universalized and rendered archetypal. Rebecca has recourse to parable in order to reappropriate a past event of which she has been a victim, offering it not so much as fact but in the form of a moral lesson.

1.3.2 Madness as Reason’s Other Richard is a discursive entity rather than a ‘real’, embodied individual. He abstracts himself from reality, constructs his own narrative of success and, as Reyes Mate claims is characteristic of the Enlightenment understanding of mankind, he “reduces the specific situation of inhumanity [which he imposes on both Corinne and Rebecca] to insignificance, to absence of importance and of meaning” (Reyes Mate 2003: 143).²⁰ Because of her/his ability to dissociate her/his words from her/his acts, Agamben, by reference to Foucault, claims the post-Holocaust subject is “a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues” (Agamben 140).

 “[La idea ilustrada de la humanidad hace] abstracción de la realidad y, por tanto, reduc[e] a insignificancia, a carencia de significado, la situación concreta de inhumanidad”.

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As Agamben postulates, the post-Holocaust subject is characterized by a scission between the biological body and the symbolic, speaking body, since words cannot ‘become’ the material body itself. As he puts it, “Outside theology and the incarnation of the Verb, there is no moment in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living being is able to render itself linguistic, transforming itself into speech” (Agamben 129). Such disconnection between the biological and the rational leads Agamben to assert that “the human being exists in the human being’s non-place, in the missing articulation between the living being and logos” (Agamben 134; emphasis original). Or, as he rephrases it, “the human being is thus always beyond or before the human, the central threshold through which pass currents of the human and the inhuman, subjectification and desubjectification, the living being’s becoming speaking and the logo’s becoming living” (Agamben 135). In the light of the scission Agamben sees as characteristic of the post-Holocaust subject, throughout Scene IV Richard tries to maintain a lie for Rebecca, making her believe that a subject is what s/he speaks, that there is indeed no real subject but only various positions of subjectivity which any individual can adopt in order to legitimize her/himself, and thus shun responsibility. From this perspective, “the subject is stripped of all substance, becoming a pure function or pure position” (Agamben 141). Richard points Rebecca not “to his own face” (Agamben 143), identity or ultimate intention, but in the direction of the utter “disjunction between the living being and the speaking being that marks its empty place” (Agamben 150). Richard’s body is thus ‘privatized’, an individual possession. The play shows how, by constructing himself as a closed-off body, Richard perpetuates the late capitalist fantasy of the self-sufficient body of the entrepreneur, a fantasy that leads individuals to refuse to come to terms with the concrete needs of the Other. If Richard could be said to embody the ideals of the Enlightenment – science, rationality, material and technological progress – he also incarnates its drawbacks. In his exclusive reliance on his own achievements and mastery of reality and of others, he misses the demands and needs of the women’s concrete bodies. Béjar points out that Frankfurt School theorists, including Adorno or Walter Benjamin, went as far as to suggest that “the Enlightenment turns men into the sovereigns of everything that exists, casting a glance upon the world which corresponds to that of a ‘self-appointed master’” (Béjar 60).²¹ Richard embodies a type of rationality which is “categorial” (Bauman 2008: 87;

 “[…] la Ilustración hace del hombre el soberano sobre todo lo existente que arroja sobre el mundo una ‘mirada de patrón’”.

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emphasis original), that is, which divides individuals and reality into categories and hierarchies, with itself at the centre of all that exists. Richard, indeed, appropriates the domain of thought, reason and discourse for himself. Necessarily, then, he forces the women around him into being the “Other of thought” (Felman 1975: 206), that which his manipulative rationality suppresses, always only one step away from falling into the place the Cartesian self has already assigned to them – the space of madness: Thought is, by definition, the accomplishment of reason, an exercise of sovereignty of a subject capable of truth. I think, therefore I am not mad; I am not mad, therefore I am. The being of philosophy is thenceforth located in non-madness, whereas madness is relegated to the status of non-being. The Cartesian gesture is symptomatic of the oppressive order. (Felman 1975: 210)

Precisely because Richard’s body remains a closed-off body – individualistic, unilateral, praising his own task as a doctor while being unable to feel empathy towards Rebecca – Rebecca is forced, so to speak, to become the Other of rational thought in order to remind Richard of the emotions and the real bodies the Enlightened man refuses to acknowledge.²² Richard embodies the Cartesian self inherited from the Renaissance the Enlightenment (Burkitt 46 – 9), an exercise in domination whereby women and all those who are oppressed by such instrumental use of reason are made to represent the body. Self-identity, however, is a result of how both aspects – the physical and the rational – interact. The “tiny scissors” (Crimp 2005a: 339) Rebecca stabs into Richard’s hand become an icon of the dual nature of the individual, which she furiously attempts to remind Richard of. After her stabbing the scissors into Richard’s hand, Rebecca “sucks the wound” (Crimp 2005a: 340), ending up with blood on her face, as was the case in Toni Casares’s production. Depending on the stage production, Rebecca’s face may be portrayed as evoking Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body, “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. [It] ignores the impene-

 As mentioned in Preliminaries II, in The City (2008) Crimp offers a re-writing of The Country regarding gender relations. In The City it is Clair, the woman protagonist, a recognized translator, who constructs herself as a subject of status, whilst Chris, her husband, stands closer to the domestic sphere. Thus, in Scene IV, it is the husband who passes on to their daughter the testimony of his wife’s duplicity with other men as well as of the growing emotional distance between them. In The City it is the man who stands closer to emotions and to the ‘irrational’, whilst his wife remains a subject of status, detached from the ‘smaller’ commitments of daily life.

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trable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon” (Bakhtin 1995: 226 – 7). Rebecca’s body, with its open, sucking mouth at its centre, has suddenly become organic and material, and as such, it is clearly juxtaposed to Richard’s closed-off body. It represents the ‘openness’ of the grotesque body, thus signalling her capacity for ethical commitment. While Richard takes refuge in the self-legitimating rationality of discourse, Rebecca’s body, in contrast, becomes fluid, open to the Other. Rebecca’s act of stabbing the scissors into Richard’s palm makes visible the constructed nature of the Cartesian self, based on rationality to the detriment of the body. Living, however, means acknowledging impulses such as aggressiveness, pain or sexuality – which the Enlightenment relegated to ‘the body’ – as well as reason, the capacity for logos or discourse. Because Richard denies these basic biological demands, Rebecca’s body, in opposition, stays closer to the biological. Because Richard refuses to acknowledge that Rebecca and himself are interrelated, mutually dependent, ‘needy’ bodies, Rebecca reinserts the body, placing its basic demands of empathy, interrelation and dependency centre stage. Rebecca’s body, which Richard had not thought of as resistant, asserts itself through violence in an attempt to place Richard in the Real of bodies in pain and snap him away, so to speak, from the realm of discourse. Living, indeed, implies acknowledging the self first and foremost in its physical nature. As Anthony Giddens puts it in Modernity and Self-Identity, the interrelation of reason and impulse is crucial for the individual’s sense of self-identity – “the body is not just a physical entity which we ‘possess’, it is an action system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-today life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity” (1991: 99). The basis of the self, as Rebecca intimates, is always the biological, the individuals’ primary need for connection, which, if unacknowledged, emerges ‘violently’. Rebecca’s open, grotesque body stands in contrast to Richard’s who, as a subject of property, is closed-off from the reality of other bodies. She, instead, postulates the essential sameness and equality of all bodies. Rebecca vindicates the subject as a whole – that is, as an organic totality, primarily made of physical impulses, yet also capable of thought. Rebecca’s sudden outburst of violence thus unmasks Richard’s totalitarian exercise of ‘reason’; it literalizes the violence – Richard’s – which had hitherto been latent and, because of its unexpected character, shakes the audience into becoming fully alert to the inequality of the relationship portrayed on stage. The blood, indeed, ‘quantifies’ the degree of violence Richard exercises on Rebecca; it makes it manifest. Although spectators cannot experience Richard’s pain, they are impelled to imagine it, even project it onto their own bodies. As Rebellato argues, violence, in the theatre, “draw[s] attention to the body, the per-

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former’s and the audience’s […] [T]his encourages the audience to reflect on their own body, contemplate the limits of the flesh” (2008b: 193). Her violent act undermines the conventional stage-audience divide, inviting spectators to wonder whether they experience their own bodies as autonomous, docile or in bondage in relation to other bodies. Rebecca’s violent collapse thus displaces the problem from the fictional world onto the audience, turning the spectators’ attention to their own intersubjective spaces and relations, and inviting them to imaginatively work towards a new ethics. Not unlike Lévinas, indeed, The Country seems to suggest that ethics should not lose sight of proximity and the body. In Scene IV, Rebecca both exemplifies and demands what Lévinas envisioned as the “I-Thou” relationship (Lévinas 73), which consists in “confronting a being external to oneself […] one which is radically Other, where the self does not seek to master or appropriate the Other; it is an ethics that is realized in the intersubjective space of the “meeting” (Lévinas 69), that is, the ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the Other. When Rebecca sees Richard’s contorted face after she has stabbed the scissors into his palm, she comments, “It’s only the flesh” (Crimp 2005a: 339), echoing the contempt for her suffering body – and that of his old patient – he had displayed earlier. Ironically, prompted by Rebecca’s act of retribution, it is Richard himself who at this point acknowledges the utterly vulnerable, essentially dependent nature of individuals, when he says, “There is only flesh” (Crimp 2005a: 339; emphasis original). He thus redefines human beings as vulnerable bodies of need. Through Rebecca’s act of violence and its specific mode of interpellation of spectators, then, the play encodes a critique of the late capitalist (male) subject and alerts spectators as to the continuing presence of the seeds of violence and barbarism within late capitalist, ‘civilized’ relationships.

1.4 Patchwork of Voices, Swarm of Resistance As has been seen, Rebecca vindicates the body as the inescapable reality which Richard’s and Morris’s totalizing power must eventually contend with. Not only Rebecca, but also Sophie, the children’s nanny, challenges Richard – dismantling his lies, taking him by surprise at the points where he is most vulnerable. Sophie is clearly far less well-off than Richard and Corinne. Like Morris or the children, she remains an offstage presence throughout, peripheral to Corinne’s life, in spite of which, as will be seen, she manages to convey to her the need to resist. As the play proceeds, women – even Corinne, as shall be seen – increasingly become empowered thanks to their gradual building of a loose yet effective net-

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work of resistance. Hardt and Negri argue that micropolitical resistance can be effective even if it takes the form, precisely, of a non-organized, ‘guerrilla-like’ network. Referring to the difficulties that have threatened the hegemony of the United States in Iraq, Hardt and Negri argue that the organization of resistance in terms of a network threatens “centralized and sovereign subjects” (2006: 54): One characteristic of the distributed network form is that it has no center. Its power cannot be understood accurately as flowing from a central source or even as polycentric, but rather as distributed variably, uneven and indefinitely. The other essential characteristic of the distributed network form is that the network constantly undermines the stable boundaries between inside and outside. This is not to say that a network is always present everywhere; it means rather that its presence and absence tend to be indeterminate. […] A network may be surprisingly ‘target poor’: if it has no center and no stable boundaries, where can we strike? And, even more frighteningly, the network can appear anywhere at any time, and in any guise. (Hardt and Negri 2006: 55)

Contrary to Richard’s centralized mode of acting, based on the authority his position and job confer on him, female resistance in The Country takes the shape of a network and occurs in a spontaneous and improvised manner that catches him off guard. Crimp is particularly interested in exploring the lines of resistance that bind the women together. Just as Rebecca knows how to “pull the rug”, in Sierz’s words, from “under the men’s feet” (Sierz 2006: 92), Sophie refuses to accept Richard’s mercantilism through a steady micropolitical resistance. Both Sophie and Rebecca, through an unpredictable, non-organized type of resistance, manage to besiege Richard, acting, as Hardt and Negri put it, in the manner of “a swarm of ants or bees – a seemingly amorphous multiplicity that can strike at a single point from all sides or disperse in the environment so as to become almost invisible […] It is very hard to hunt down a swarm” (Hardt and Negri 2006: 57). In the same vein, Bauman argues that, in contemporary society, individuals associate in loosely connected networks or ‘swarms’, not in hierarchical and organized groups. Swarms, in Bauman’s view, offer opportunities for resistance: In a liquid-modern society, swarms tend to replace groups, with their leaders, hierarchies, and pecking orders. A swarm can do without all those paraphernalia without which a group could not exist. Swarms need not be burdened by the group’s tools of survival: they assemble, disperse, and come together again from one occasion to another, each time guided by different invariably shifting relevances and attracted by changing and moving targets. […] A swarm has no top, no center; it is solely the direction of its current flight that casts some of the self-propelled units into the position of ‘leaders’ to be followed for the duration of a particular flight or a part of it, though hardly longer. (Bauman 2008: 15; emphases original)

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As shall be seen, the women in The Country raise one another’s awareness of their own precarious position through a disorganized, swarm-like yet precise kind of resistance. Their bond is a temporary, yet politically very effective one. The play suggests that their liberation from Richard might not be possible without their joint activity, which is at the same time autonomous and non-hierarchical.

1.4.1 Outbursts of Solidarity Despite Corinne’s tentative approximation to them, in fact Sophie and Rebecca often appear in the text as Corinne’s feared Others, embodiments of the kind of female ‘monstrosity’ which Corinne fears she may become and thus represses in herself. In particular, Sophie’s latent, enigmatic presence in the play suggests she is Corinne’s Other. She, more than any other woman in the play, embodies female poverty. She is the kind of person Corinne might become if she refused to continue to endorse her husband’s dubious dealings. In repeated acts of forgetfulness or, rather, self-imposed amnesia, Corinne keeps failing to remember, for instance, that Sophie is poor and possibly also lonely; that she takes very good care of her children and gets little in return. Thus, in Scene I, while Corinne cuts out paper figures, she and Richard talk about how Corinne took the children to Sophie’s. Ironically, it is Richard who reminds Corinne of Sophie’s difference: – – – – – – – – –

I took them to Sophie’s, actually. I left them at Sophie’s for the afternoon. I had a whole afternoon free. Sophie’s so kind. I hope you gave her something. I always give her something. In fact I always give her far too much. As if she were poor. She is poor. Sophie? I didn’t know she was poor. Everyone knows she’s poor. But she’s so neat. And her house is so neat. It’s so clean. She has flowers in the kitchen. What d’you mean ‘she’s poor’? […] That cup she puts the money in? Well the money she has at any time is in that cup. (Crimp 2005a: 299 – 300)

If Corinne, who it must be assumed has no job as it is never mentioned, chose to leave the man around whom she has articulated her dependency, she might well become a kind of Sophie – someone who works for others, who takes care of people, but whose work is certainly not as highly valued as that of a doctor or an entrepreneur. In Corinne’s mind, Sophie is poor because she does not own property – she is a tenant. Corinne continually denies to herself that the

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nanny, someone on whom their own well-being so clearly depends, is clearly far more disadvantaged than they are. The middle-class individual tends to forget s/ he is involved in what Agamben labels as a “brotherhood in abjection” (Agamben 17). Even if Agamben introduces this concept in the context of his discussion of the Holocaust, arguably part of Corinne’s strain is derived, as in the case of the testimonies of those who survived the concentration camps, from an awareness of complicity with an unjust system. Corinne feels the need to deny she is actually enjoying more privileges than someone whom she sees every day – just as Western middle-class individuals tend to ‘forget’ they are complicit in a system that keeps a third of the world population in a condition of severe deprivation or even starvation. At this point, as Agamben puts it, “good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion […] What is at issue here, therefore, is a zone of irresponsibility” (Agamben 21). Corinne tries to forget she is benefiting from a system – that she is complicit in a system – that is dramatically unequal. What is most interesting is that Corinne eventually does become a subject who accepts being deprived of her ‘possessions’ for the sake of ethical values, thus reinserting responsibility at the core of her identity. As mentioned above, this process is made possible through collapse, which is presented as a specifically female form of self-awareness and change. As soon as Corinne chooses resistance, she will have to confront the ‘monstrous’ Other in her life. In fact, Corinne both desires to be like Sophie – strong and autonomous – and utterly fears becoming like her. It is clear, however, that Sophie fascinates Corinne from the very beginning, because she manages to live with so much less than Corinne feels she needs. As she puts it, “But she’s so neat. And her house is so neat. It’s so clean” (Crimp 2005a: 330). At the end of the play, however, Sophie is precisely the female model she turns to, urgently, as she pursues the final crisis. In Scene V, when Corinne talks to Sophie on the phone, she learns that Richard has paid the nanny an almost ‘offensive’ amount of money. Sophie is terrified by the money Richard has left in her cup, and reacts angrily to it: – A mistake? What kind of mistake? As Sophie explains, Corinne bends over and slips off the shoes. – Uh-huh…uh-huh…Really? Well if that’s what he gave you, then I assume that’s what he meant / to give you. – I felt generous. I thought she might like to go out and / buy something. – (laughs) I’m sure he didn’t mean to frighten you – he was just being generous. – Frighten her? Of course I didn’t mean to / frighten her. – […] – (Hangs up). Why did you give her so much money? She said she was terrified.

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By what? By all that money. (Crimp 2005a: 355 – 56; emphasis original)

In refusing to accept the money, Sophie suddenly becomes material and concrete to Richard – she ceases to be his ‘property’, a simple projection of his fantasies of self-aggrandizement. The play thus attests to the erosion of egalitarian respect for others in a late capitalist society where value is conferred according to the position occupied by individuals. Sophie stands for an idea of respect based not on position but on the inherent dignity of any individual. As Glover puts it, There is a more egalitarian kind of respect, which is shown to all members of a community, and which is sometimes thought of as respect for people’s dignity […] Behaviour showing respect for someone’s dignity symbolizes that person’s moral standing. Those who are weak are protected by social conventions about the respect they should be shown. (Glover 23)

Richard attempts to ‘buy’ Sophie’s compliance, just as he tries to buy that of Rebecca and Corinne, so as to turn her into one more component of his ‘map’ of subjection. By dazzling Sophie with money, Richard may intend to compensate for something – his negligence of ‘smaller’ things, like time spent with the children, daily chores, the mere pleasure one obtains from relationships – or, in the worst scenario, he may be trying to coerce her into remaining silent about something she may have witnessed or even experienced – the play does not say, for instance, whether Sophie has found out about the existence of Rebecca or about the incident with the patient. Crimp himself provides an alternative reading of Richard’s ‘present’ to Sophie: “[Richard and Corinne] are not people who’ve inherited their middleclass status – they’ve climbed up to it – which is why they’re ill at ease with it, why Richard gives Sophie, who cleans their house, too much money […] out of guilt” (Sierz 2006: 105). In any case, Richard is baffled and disempowered by Sophie’s response. In saying ‘no’ to Richard’s money, Sophie upholds the integrity of her own person and refracts his power, symbolically ‘castrating’ him. She, indeed, engages in a micropolitical struggle in the Real and uses work in order to enact resistance. Crucially, Sophie chooses to tell – to tell Corinne – so that her lower-class position, her relative unimportance, becomes the platform from which she undermines the values she feels threatened by. At this point, then, there is a potential for solidarity and connection between the two women, since the values they consider inherent to their personhood have been threatened by the same man. Crimp represents this moment as a long telephone conversation where Corinne and Sophie are able to finally connect, just as Corinne and Rebecca are shown to connect in Scene III, as shall

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be seen below, when Rebecca passes on her testimony of her previous night with Richard to Corinne and they experience a shared epiphany. As Sennett puts it, solidarity and sympathy usually take place as “a sudden bursting out of understanding of another person which comes […] not right away but only after a long period of resistance or misperception” (Sennett 1998: 144). The telephone line materializes this sudden outburst of interconnectedness between Corinne and Sophie. As soon as Sophie begins to explain about the money, Corinne takes off the shoes Richard has given her as a present. While she first describes the shoes to Sophie as “lovely” (Crimp 2005a: 355), as soon as the nanny points out that the money Richard left her must be a “mistake” (Crimp 2005a: 355), Corinne “slips off the shoes” (Crimp 2005a: 355). At this point, that is, Corinne seems to realize that Richard operates by offering the women material compensations to mask his emotional unilateralism. Thus, Sophie both anticipates and reinforces Corinne’s own misgivings about Richard, so that Corinne instinctively, as it were, protects herself and her body from Richard’s domination. The apparently unimportant gesture of taking off her shoes, then, is in fact a gesture of self-defence whereby she attempts to free her body from the colonization she begins to suspect Richard is effecting. Sophie is a resistant subject because she interprets Richard’s attempt to dazzle her with money as a threat, a unilateral display of power, a bid to “structure the possible field of action of others” (Foucault 1982: 221). Through a ‘moral’ type of imagination, Sophie helps Corinne ‘remember’ – “A mistake? What kind of mistake?” (Crimp 2005a: 356). Instead of using the phone, as Richard and Morris do, in order to forge a link of privilege, she uses it with Corinne in order to open up a utopian space for non-mercantilist values. Corinne and Sophie are shown to come eventually together on the basis of what they intuit to be their common need not to be dazzled – coerced – by Richard’s impositions and not to sacrifice their own values for the economic compensations they may be offered in exchange.

1.4.2 Community of Resistance The same metaphorical “road” (Crimp 2005a: 363) that Corinne, in Scene V, says “coerces her” (Crimp 2005a: 363), then, also coerces Sophie and Rebecca. The women help activate each other’s resistance by remembering. They have a post-Holocaust “moral understanding of memory” (Reyes Mate 2003: 118) which allows them to rescue the past from the oblivion caused by time or iner-

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tia.²³ The text postulates that a community of individuals who resist the lure of power is the only force that can counteract the prevalence of late capitalist market values within daily life and relationships. And indeed, Corinne’s final testimony is clearly a response to Richard’s mercantilism, partly prompted, as noted, by Sophie’s telephone call. At the same time, in her final testimony Corinne borrows expressions used by Rebecca in Scene III when recounting her own mental breakdown. Corinne’s final testimony, then, is the outcome of a collaborative effort of resistance in which Sophie and Rebecca, as resistant women, are also involved. Corinne’s testimony flows like a stream thanks to the other women’s previous attempts to verbalize their own struggle against Richard. It is the final act of denunciation in the play, one that proceeds by gathering within itself a patchwork of female voices.²⁴ In Scene III, when Corinne sees Rebecca studying Latin, Rebecca remarks on the importance of knowing History, which, at this point, has come to stand for the ‘world of men’, the economic ‘Empire’ Richard and Morris embody – ‘Hisstory’. Corinne states she is not interested in History, and that she precisely left her life in the city in order to run away from it. Here Rebecca, as opposed to Corinne, vindicates the importance of memory and of the transmission of knowledge: – – – – – –

Everybody is interested in History. Perhaps where you come from. But I’m not. We’re not. In fact, the opposite. The opposite? Yes. What opposite? What opposite? Because the opposite of History is surely – forgive me – ignorance. (Crimp 2005a: 323)

 “Que no se repita Auschwitz significa, de entrada, no perderlo de vista, es decir, recordarlo, por eso el nuevo imperativo es […] el deber de recordar o, si se prefiere, la concepción moral del recuerdo”.  A ‘patchwork’ of voices emanating from an unorganized female community of resistance is also beautifully portrayed in Crimp’s earlier play No One Sees the Video (1991), where Liz, a market researcher, is asked to interview a group of people about their views on certain products. One of the female interviewees suddenly rebels against such market control. When Liz reports the incident to her lover, Paul, who turns out to be the woman’s husband, it is clear the experience causes her to reflect on her own job and realize that she is in fact attracted to the woman’s ethical stand. At the end of the play, when Liz’s daughter Jo asks Liz, “what d’you think she’s like?”, Liz answers, “I think she suffers” (Crimp 2005a: 93 – 4). Thus, No One Sees the Video is the first play by Crimp that explores the possibility of a latent yet effective female network of resistance which may counteract the violence the market exercises on individuals.

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At this point in the play Corinne still believes in the fantasy that if Rebecca goes away the bond between her and Richard will be restored. Rebecca, however, dismisses the men’s view of ‘History’ and ‘Empire’ through asking Corinne a series of ironic and rhetorical questions. The scene ends with Rebecca ironically pretending she will be at a loss if Corinne forces her to leave the house, and asking Corinne what to do and how to act in a men’s world: – – – – –

I want you to leave. I want you to get out. Where can I go? I don’t care where you go. Oh, shall I go to Morris? Pause. Shall I go to Morris? Shall I speak Latin? Shall I talk History? (Crimp 2005a: 330)

However, at this point in the play, Corinne is not ready to acknowledge what Rebecca is trying to shock her into realizing.²⁵ So she justifies Richard’s behaviour even if this forces her to resort to gender clichés which portray men as being less astute than women and, therefore, likely to be seduced. She claims it is Rebecca who must have seduced Richard, while Richard did not interpret her “signs” (Crimp 2005a: 328) in the appropriate way: –

I’m asking you […] to forget this error (which I’m sure it was) of judgement. You don’t know him. He’s not… Yes, he’s a man, obviously, but he’s not… And perhaps – I don’t know – but perhaps you gave him a sign, unwittingly gave him a sign which he misread. Which is no excuse – of course not – no. But maybe the sign – to him – d’you see? – who maybe can’t read these signs – because he is a man maybe can’t read these signs. Yes? (Crimp 2005a: 328; emphases original)

In Scene III, then, Corinne is still shown to be enmeshed in her culture’s parameters; she fully shares her husband’s materialistic values. She tries everything before letting go of her position, before she acknowledges that her life with Richard has been based on false premises. Rebecca, on her part, tries to make Corinne snap out of her blindness regarding Richard; she impels her to stop justifying his actions no matter how dubious they are, and to see the real nature of the

 In “Performing Phenomenology: The Theatre of Martin Crimp”, Angelaki carries out a very illuminating phenomenological analysis of Scene III. Angelaki departs from the notion that “spatiality is a recurring concern” (Angelaki 2007: 8) in Crimp’s dramaturgy, which comes to the fore, in particular, in the conversation Corinne and Rebecca’s hold in Scene III. Specifically, she focuses on how Corinne’s language in this scene conveys spatiality or her her sense of “territoriality” (Angelaki 2007: 9) vis-à-vis Rebecca.

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man she is sharing a roof with. As Rebecca puts it, acting as a “bearer of truths no one wants to hear” (Sierz 2006: 60): –

D’you really have no inkling? And yet you condescend to me. You patronise me. With your house, your land, your children. And accuse me of sententiousness? Just for an afternoon? He came to the country to be with me. Yes. Because of his longing to be with me. Because of his greed to be with me. […] How can you deceive yourself? And then to apologise to me – on his behalf…(faint laugh)…in your own house? (Crimp 2005a: 329; emphases original)

Interestingly, Crimp suggests that Rebecca’s truths eventually do help Corinne wake up from her dream of the country, and yet it is not by being told these truths to her face that she actually attains full awareness. It is only when Rebecca passes on her testimony of the breakdown she experienced the previous night with Richard, in Scene III, that she and Corinne are able to fully connect with one another, to the point of sharing a joint epiphany. Rebecca’s testimony remains within Corinne, germinating in Scene V, even if, at the end of Scene III, she is still unable to understand Rebecca’s direct words. At the beginning of Scene III Rebecca, who has just woken up from her sleep, “sits on a chair with a blanket over her shoulders” as “Corinne watches her speak” (Crimp 2005a: 316). Collapsing under the impact of the painful memories she is recounting, Rebecca tells Corinne about the mental breakdown she experienced the night before with Richard. Through her testimony, she attempts to understand the type of power Richard wields on her and how it is, as she discovers, part of a larger situation, an “outpost…of the empire” (Crimp 2005a: 316). Corinne experiences a moment of recognition since, in between Rebecca’s words, she is able to read her own experience. She therefore contributes to Rebecca’s delivery, even filling out the gaps in her speech: –

–

The sun was shining. The trees were green, but each green was different. I mean the green of each species was a different green. Pause. And I’d found the stone. Yes. This…outpost…of the empire. Only it wasn’t just a ‘stone’ because it had arms, like a chair. And I rested my arms along them. I rested my arms along the arms of stone. And there was a kind of congruence. Pause. Oh really?

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– – – – –

– –

– – –

– –

Yes. A kind of congruence – what, does that surprise you? – between the arms: the arms of stone, and the arms of… Flesh. What? Flesh. Exactly. Between the arms of stone and – yes – exactly – my arms of flesh. So – okay – I watched the trees. I’m watching the trees. And each tree is green, but each green is different. And in fact each leaf is different. Each leaf within each tree is of a different green. And they’re all trembling. I mean each leaf is trembling, and the whole line isn’t just bending, it’s also waving. But ever so slightly. While the cold of the stone is – what – is seeping into me. Pause. Then it was getting dark. I thought it was light. It was light. Absolutely. It was very clear and light up there – so clear and light that you could see the dark coming. Pause. Then I woke up and this was over me. What was over you? This. This thing. This blanket was over me. I thought I had died. I thought, well okay, this is death. Pause. D’you have my watch? What? My watch. I was wearing a watch. (Crimp 2005a: 316 – 17; emphases original)

As noted, through the word ‘empire’ Rebecca links the power Richard wields on both women with the kind of power the late capitalist system exerts for the sake of its continuity. It is a type of power that deprives a part of the world not just of material comfort but also of a minimum of spiritual well-being; a type of power that submits even some of its supposed beneficiaries – Rebecca and Corinne in this case – to violence. It is a system Rebecca feels is made of “stone” – that is, it is by no means humane enough. Thus, Rebecca realizes that the type of violence Richard enacts on her is an instance of the violence the current world order exerts for the sake of its continuity. Speaking in the urgent, metaphorical language of collapse and testimony, Rebecca claims she reached a “stone”. Richard, like the late capitalist system itself, is violent, and this causes Rebecca to feel her arms to be vulnerable “arms of […] flesh” in comparison. Yet Richard also offers material compensations, so there was a “kind of congruence” between her arms and the “stone” – her arms could paradoxically “rest” along the arms of the stone. Rebecca looks for metaphors to articulate what she feels is the essential contradiction of the

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system. She stutters, and it is Corinne who, in fact, helps her pin down the system’s essential contradiction by supplying the missing word – “flesh”. When Rebecca claims there was a “congruence” between the “stone” and her own arms, Corinne immediately realizes her own experience is very similar. By speaking of arms of “flesh” in comparison to Richard’s ‘stony’ violence, Corinne highlights the transformation Richard’s power effects on the women’s malleable, vulnerable identities – a type of symbolic violence which turns them into victims. Corinne is able to complete Rebecca’s testimony because Rebecca’s experience is also, in part, her own. The women thus experience a shared epiphany; together they discover a truth through which they are able to better understand themselves and one another. And they bond on the basis of their mutual recognition that they will remain fragile and vulnerable as long as they remain with Richard. Rebecca is receptive to Corinne’s help and is from then on able to continue her narrative. She lost consciousness – it became “dark” (Crimp 2005a: 317) – and she woke up much later in their house with “this blanket […] over [her]” (Crimp 2005a: 317), right at the moment when she felt the “cold of the stone […] seeping into [her]” (Crimp 2005a: 317). That is, Rebecca collapsed precisely when she felt in her own body the incorporeal transformation Richard’s lies were effecting on her, as he sought to subjectify her according to roles compliant to his interests. Collapse thus takes place when the women are rendered zoè, mere biological life, as opposed to bíos or cultural, political life – that is, when the late capitalist world order embodied by Richard and Morris shows its totalitarian underside. Rebecca’s testimony foregrounds Richard’s normalizing power by highlighting how, before collapsing, she realized the world was enormously diverse. Encouraged by Corinne’s providing the missing word, Rebecca feels empowered to continue portraying Richard’s violence as totalitarian. Rebecca creates a tension in her testimony between Richard’s attempted normalization of her identity and her insistence that reality is in fact multiple and full of detail. She describes the leaves on the trees as markedly different from one another – “I’m watching the trees. And each three is green, but each green is different. And in fact each leaf is different. Each leaf within each tree is of a different green” (Crimp 2005a: 316 – 7). Even the trees are more alive than Rebecca, who has been rendered docile by Richard’s power. Rebecca bestows human qualities on the leaves and claims, in the poetic language of testimony, that the trees were all “trembling. I mean each leaf is trembling, and the whole line isn’t just bending, it’s also waving. But ever so slightly. While the cold of the stone is – what – is seeping into me” (Crimp 2005a: 317). In this metaphorical way, Crimp indirectly points to the totalitarian

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tendencies of ‘Empire’, which destroy “political life because, in the first place, [they attempt] against plurality, that is, against the fact that the species is unique but the individuals making up the species are all different” (Reyes Mate 2003: 98).²⁶ Rebecca’s testimony amounts to her and Corinne’s joint denunciation, and is an account of their realization of the totalitarian underside of the current world order which, like the cold seeping into Rebecca’s body, engulfs contemporary social relations. Rebecca finally interrupts her testimony to ask where her watch is. As shall be seen, the text suggests that Corinne actually keeps Rebecca’s watch and never gives it back to her, since, when she herself collapses in Scene V, she is wearing a watch which is not hers and which looks remarkably like Rebecca’s. She may have kept the watch as a memento of Rebecca’s testimony, so that the memory of the truths they discover together will remain within her. Scene III, then, attests to Corinne’s slow yet steady internal change. Intuitively, by tentatively filling in the gaps in Rebecca’s testimony with metaphors through which she attempts to convey the violence Richard’s lies enact on both their bodies, Corinne takes a step towards realizing the truth. Rebecca and Corinne thus complete each other’s discourse as though they were writing ‘her-story’ – as opposed to “History” (Crimp 2005a: 322, 323, 330) – fragment by fragment, building a narrative of empowerment and resistance as one picks up where the other falters. The play suggests, ultimately, that life itself, like the testimony that grows out of ‘fragments’ of resistance, is possible thanks to the perseverance of common, everyday individuals like Corinne and Rebecca.

1.5 ‘Oh, to Reverse’: Spiralling Towards Full Time If Rebecca’s act of violence in Scene IV points to the violence underlying the late capitalist, Cartesian male subject, Corinne’s and Rebecca’s repeated attempts to liberate themselves culminate at the end of the play, in Scene V, when Corinne passes on to Richard her testimony of her attempt to escape the night before. Scene V, the last one in the play, focuses on the growing detachment between Corinne and Richard and portrays their full fracture. It is only relatively relevant whether Corinne actively leaves Richard at the end of the play – the full fracture has already taken place. After a series of failed attempts at approximation on Richard’s part, through which he tries to ‘buy’ Corinne’s acquiescence, Corinne

 “[El totalitarianismo] destruye la vida política porque atenta, en primer lugar, a la pluralidad, es decir, al hecho de que la especie será única pero los individuos son diversos”.

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suddenly collapses, and refuses to spend the afternoon in the countryside with Richard. Instead, she passes on to him and to the audience the testimony of the deceit she has witnessed. Corinne’s final collapse leads to self-discovery, her realization of her own complicity with Richard, and the decision to move away from him. The language of collapse shares with that of testimony, as paradigmatically exemplified in the literature of the Holocaust, a compulsive need to tell, to denounce. At this point in the play, Corinne becomes fully aware that she has thus far existed in a ‘grey zone’ of complicity with her husband’s values and that, therefore, she too is responsible for the precarious position in which she finds herself – and even for the pain Richard has caused others. Such a grey zone, according to Agamben, is that indeterminate area where “victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is brotherhood in abjection” (Agamben 17). Agamben defines the term in the context of Auschwitz, in which complicity with the Nazi regime, aroused by the need to survive, was taken to extreme points. It is of course an entirely different context, yet Corinne also feels she has been implicated in her husband’s amoral values, and that her life in the country has been based on false, exploitative premises. In spite of the contextual differences, then, it should be noted that what prompts Corinne to sever herself from Richard and to pass on her testimony of resistance is her sense of “complicity” (Crimp 2005a: 362). While in Scene I Corinne refuses to ‘feel’ for Sophie and in Scene III she denies Rebecca an ashtray – “No, I’m afraid there’s nothing you can use as an ashtray” (Crimp 2005a: 321) – she eventually steps out of her own complicity in order to “twist the mirror” and “look at [herself]” (Crimp 2005a: 361).

1.5.1 Collapsing Boundaries Scene V takes place two months after Corinne has found out about the existence of Rebecca; Corinne is still living with Richard. It is Corinne’s birthday and she has received a series of birthday cards. The couple are alone in the house for the first time in the play. They are chatting, apparently trying to suture the rift Richard has installed at the heart of their relationship. It seems Richard has written an apology for Corinne on his birthday card for her and he asks her whether she likes it; he even assures her he is keeping himself “extremely clean” (Crimp 2005a: 347). As they put it, talking about both the apology and his promise,

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– – – – – – – – – –

D’you like it? D’you mean this? […] It’s a promise. Will you keep it? What? I said will you / keep it? I am keeping it. You know I’m keeping it. Keeping yourself clean. Keeping myself – yes – extremely clean. (Crimp 2005a: 346 – 47; emphases original)

Soon after this, Richard gives Corinne a present – the pair of shoes – presumably aimed at helping bridge the gap between them. At this point, it begins to become apparent to Corinne that all of Richard’s attempts at approximation are in fact acts of compensation, ways of using money to try and fill in the void in their relationship while simultaneously keeping her submitted to his amoral behaviour by offering material gifts in return. Richard is effecting an incorporeal transformation of Corinne’s identity through the simple prop of the shoes. As the stage directions indicate, “there is something unsettling about [the shoes] […] Perhaps, for example, they are a little too high for her” (Crimp 2005a: 352):

– – – – –

She walks. She turns. She smiles. […] You look…transformed. (laughs) Transformed? Into what? […] You look quite different. Is that what you want? What? Yes. No. (Crimp 2005a: 353 – 54)

On an equally disquieting level, Richard’s are acts of normalization through which he subjectifies Corinne into a consumer identity compliant with the interests of the late capitalist economy and its elite. The shoes, “too high for her” (Crimp 2005a: 352), subjectify Corinne as Richard’s property – by wearing them, she becomes Richard’s refined, ornamental wife. As Bryan S. Turner puts it The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, an effect of the extension of the commodity form to more and more aspects of social life […] has been the reification of social relationships and cultural artefacts, which leads to the primacy of a secondary exchange […] value which rests uneasily alongside, and even conceals the original use-value meaning. (Turner 173)

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The high-heeled shoes are a symptom, an indication that the late capitalist social world expects women to deploy their bodies as consumer sites, investing them with a narcissistic purpose in order to prop up the economic system embodied by their husbands – Richard in this case. If Corinne wants her ethical views and her micropolitical struggle to prevail, she will have to leave her husband. Through the shoes, Corinne feels Richard is imposing on her a series of mediated desires – to look young, to win his attention, to be ‘better’ in Richard’s eyes than Rebecca. These are the meanings that are added to the use value of the shoes; the meanings Corinne is expected to buy into if she accepts them. The play creates a sharp contrast between the type of ethical commitment Corinne demands from Richard, and how for Richard the boundaries between ethics and economic drives, love and self interest, seem to have collapsed. Significantly, when Corinne comments that Richard is being strangely solicitous, he replies that the word reminds him of the verb ‘solicit’, “paying […] for sex” (Crimp 2005a: 349). Instead, Corinne points out that “solicitous” refers to “to care” (Crimp 2005a: 348). Richard’s duplicitous nature is shaped by the late capitalist economic system itself, its lack of ethical regulations and boundaries. The play crucially aims to reveal how, in late capitalism, structures of feeling are shaped by larger socio-economic structures. In Corinne herself, the boundaries between inside and outside, self-identity and imposed identity, private subject and public subject, are also made to collapse – her individuality is submitted to a series of very specific pressures that aim to render it docile. She becomes zoè, a sheer biological body. The market values of the late capitalist economic realm intrude into her daily life, an outward colonization that is a symptom of the barbaric aspects of the larger reality. Corinne’s final collapse in the play begins with Richard’s gift of the shoes. Subsequently Sophie, who is minding their children, phones them and speaks angrily about Richard’s flaunting of his money – as mentioned earlier, he has left an inordinate amount of money in her money cup. At first Richard attempts to lure Corinne away from the phone by kissing her, but as soon as Sophie begins to explain, Corinne’s first action is to remove the shoes Richard has given her: –

– – – – –

Well…Richard made me breakfast…Yes, and then I opened my cards…Yes, and then I opened my present. Shoes. He’s given me a pair of shoes. […] (laughs) He’s telling me I’m decadent. (Stop. I’m talking to Sophie.) Deeply decadent. Nothing. Sorry. He’s just being a little…(You’re distracting me. Stop.) He’s just being a little…stopping me from / talking. (moving away) Ask her, did she find the money?

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– –

[…] A mistake? What kind of mistake? As Sophie explains, Corinne bends over and slips off the shoes. (Crimp 2005a: 354– 55)

The present and Richard’s kissing aim to lure Corinne into a kind of amnesia. There is a tension between her desire to succumb to what Richard represents, to the life of material comfort he promises her, and the pull of ethical responsibility, the space for resilience that Sophie’s words instil in Corinne’s mind. Clearly, and as discussed earlier, by the end of their long conversation the two women are finally able to connect. Corinne’s first, unconscious move is to get rid of the possessions that ensnare her, emblematically represented by the shoes. Corinne realizes, that is, that her body is the first reality that must step out of the late capitalist, patriarchal, symbolic ‘mapping’ or mode of interpretation. Her movement signals her realization that hers is a subjected body. The shoes Richard has given her make her subjection apparent; as has already been argued, Corinne is being coerced into inhabiting a particular type of female identity for her husband.

1.5.2 Stopping Time: An Ethics of Resentment In the play, it is suggested that the physical and spatial structure of Richard’s and Corinne’s house mirrors Richard’s own mental structure. As Angelaki puts it in “Inside the Frame: Place and the Plays of Martin Crimp”, in Crimp’s plays, space is “more than just a locale; it is an entire framing device, a state of mind. It is on this unsafe ground that the characters play out their saturated relationships. […] A major crisis is only one step away” (Angelaki 2012: 1). It is Richard’s suggestion that they could change some things upstairs in their home, indeed, that brings Corinne to the full crisis. In Scene IV, there is a long sequence in which Rebecca claims she would like to take a shower while Richard insists she cannot, as she would have to go through the children’s room to get to the bathroom. The structure of the house is thus adapted to Richard’s duplicity; it is shaped according to his mental ‘map’, in which wife and ‘maid’ must not overlap. Thus, Rebecca immediately points out that it is a “strange – yes – route to your bathroom” (Crimp 2005a: 335), and asks him whether he thinks it is a “reasonable route” (Crimp 2005a: 335): –

[…] But no – no, you don’t go up the stairs because what I mean is, is you have to pass through their room. The shower is through the children’s room. Now do you see?

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– – –

– – – – – –

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[…] I see. Your children. Yes. But why is that? Pause. Why is your house designed like that? Why do you have to pass through your children’s room to reach / your bathroom? […] But is this reasonable? What is reasonable? This…route. Route. This strange – yes – route to your bathroom. Is this a reasonable route? I believe so. Yes. In fact it’s always been a very good route – an ideal, you could call it, route (Crimp 2005a: 332– 35)

In Scene V, Richard tells Corinne he wants to change the “layout upstairs” (Crimp 2005a: 358), presumably in order to prevent any possible chance of his future lovers waking up Corinne or the children when they take a shower. Corinne’s suspicions are immediately aroused – “What’s wrong with upstairs? I like upstairs. I like this house. I don’t want / to change it” (Crimp 2005a: 358). If a house stands for the mind of those who live in it, then Corinne’s and Richard’s does reflect the split in the male mind whereby the husband’s lover must be utterly separated from the domestic sphere, where the wife belongs, as the guardian of the domestic. Crimp uses the metaphor of the house’s structure in order to provide spectators with a visual referent of Richard’s solipsistic, radically individualistic mind. When Richard argues that the way things are distributed upstairs is not logical, Corinne immediately asks him why it should be ‘logical’. Why should Richard’s subjective ‘map’ or emotional structure, indeed, be more ‘logical’ than Corinne’s? Richard and Corinne have become antagonists, and they are defending two different views of ‘logic’, of relationships and love. Corinne asks Richard if the change upstairs was Morris’s idea, given his “thirst” (Crimp 2005a: 358) for controlling their life. Seeing Richard is elusive, she begins to pass on to Richard the testimony of her collapse. As she puts it, connecting Richard’s infidelity with Morris’s attempt to cover up the incident with the old patient, “You left a man to die and Morris lied for you” (Crimp 2005a: 359). Richard tries to divert Corinne’s attention from both the dead patient and from Sophie’s objection to the way he has tried to impress her with his money, and suggests they go for a drive in the country, but it becomes clear that Corinne will not abide by Richard’s rules anymore. Richard suggests they should “get out the map” and visit “the Wall” (Crimp 2005a: 359), but Corinne

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answers she has already “been out” (Crimp 2005a: 361), she “went on a trip” (Crimp 2005a: 361) the previous evening: – – – –

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

– – – – –

We could visit the Wall. We could have a picnic. […] You mean walk along the Wall. […] Have we really never walked along the Wall? Never. […] Pause. Is something wrong? No, nothing’s wrong. Let’s go out then. I’ve been out. I don’t think so. I think I have. When was that? Yesterday evening. I went on a trip. What trip? You took the children to Sophie’s, and I went on a trip, that’s all. You didn’t tell me. Oh, didn’t / I tell you? What trip? Pause. What trip? Why? I’d like to know. You’d like to know what I did with my evening. Well yes – yes, I would like to know what you did with your / evening. You’d gone. I locked up. I crossed the yard. I got into my car. I twisted the mirror. I looked at myself. (Crimp 2005a: 359 – 61; emphasis original)

As is the case with the rest of the play, here the very realistic images that are employed take on a symbolic meaning. Thus, Richard and Corinne are aware their relationship has hit a ‘wall’. Richard is asking Corinne to continue feigning love and to keep walking with him ‘along the wall’; that is, he asks Corinne to ignore his duplicity and even his victimizing of other people, like the old patient. Corinne resists what Adorno calls the “interminable metabolism of need and gratification” (Adorno 257) – “I’ve been out” (Crimp 2005a: 361; emphasis original), she snaps at Richard. Corinne’s gesture here characterizes The Country as a resistant, ‘unsatisfied’ type of art, given that Corinne, its central consciousness, refuses to comply and, in Adorno’s terms, “sin against those needs which remain

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unfulfilled” (Adorno 257). In a way, at this point in Scene V, Corinne stops time, freezes it, so that the scene becomes a scene of trauma. Significantly, Scene V, and thus the play as a whole, ends with the telephone ringing indefinitely, as the couple face one another – “The phone continues to ring. […] Neither moves. The phone continues to ring” (Crimp 2005a: 366). The telephone, like an alarm bell, calls attention to this frozen moment as both a scene of trauma and also one that is full of potential, brimming with the possible onset of the unexpected and of change. The final image, indeed, is the image of two people united by their fear of failure, of loneliness, of time passing – by all the feelings that may exist between a man and a woman except love and respect. The play, indeed, is about lies and subjection, but not just Richard’s, also those that women tell themselves to avoid facing the truth. Like Rebecca when she stabs the scissors into Richard’s palm, in Scene V Corinne chooses ‘resentment’ or dissatisfaction, thereby going against the grain of time. Agamben refers to what can be termed an ‘ethics of resentment’ in relation to Holocaust survivor Jean Améry’s radical willingness to remember, to resist the inertia of time: Natural consciousness of time actually is rooted in the physiological process of woundhealing and became part of the social conception of reality. But precisely for this reason it is not only extramoral, but also antimoral in character. Man has the right and the privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence, including the biological healing that time brings about. (Améry qtd. in Agamben 100; emphasis original)

Both Rebecca and Corinne, as moral individuals, demand the “annulment of time” (Améry qtd. in Agamben 100). Corinne seeks to “reverse” (Crimp 2005a: 362) its course. And both seek to remember, instead of forgetting, the unspoken, suppressed violence upon which the current order rests. In so doing, they break away from the chain of foreseeable, chronological events and reinsert the possibility, in Reyes Mate’s words, of “full time”, “the assertion of the absolute value of every instant” (Reyes Mate 2003: 144), as opposed to “empty time”, in which the present time “is just a platform for the self to project into the future, and it is just the logical result of the past […] and an advancement towards the future” (Reyes Mate 2003: 143).²⁷ ‘Empty time’ “dissolves history into a continuum without possible novelty; from a political point of view, it is the ideology of the con-

 “[El] tiempo pleno es la afirmación del valor absoluto de cada instante […] El tiempo vacío es aquel en el que el presente sirve de trampolín al futuro y es el resultado lógico del pasado […] y avance de futuro”.

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querors” (Reyes Mate 2003: 143; emphasis original).²⁸ By disrupting the teleological sequence, the linearity and coherence of her identity and life – maintained only through the suppression of the ethical potential that dwells in her – Corinne makes it possible for the Other to irrupt into her life. In order to focalize attention upon what risks remaining unsaid, Corinne takes Richard on a different ‘walk’, and continues to speak, now relentlessly, of how she tried to escape from her family, even from civilization, since the road she pursued led her to a place where “there was nothing human” (Crimp 2005a: 364). As she puts it, she was trying to escape from her own complicity with Richard’s values – “You’d gone. I locked up. I crossed the yard. I got into my car. I twisted the mirror. I looked at myself” (Crimp 2005a: 361). Richard asks her what she looked like, and she answers she looked “complicit” (361). In leaving the house, indeed, Corinne was trying to detach herself from her ‘complicity’ with Richard’s mercantilist approach to life. It is as though, by looking at herself in the rear-view mirror, she was trying to construct a new identity, to decide who she wants to be, by reconfiguring herself out of the two pulls in her – the desire to be an autonomous, ethical subject, and the desire to continue enjoying the material well-being and the status Richard affords her. Corinne is ‘complicit’ because she enjoys the luxury deriving from her husband’s profession, which implies covering up the death of a patient. Corinne’s sense of shame as she looks at her face in the rear-view mirror attests to the impossibility of “hid[ing] herself from herself” and to “the intolerable presence of the self to itself” (Agamben 105). As Agamben puts it, “To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates in our own intimacy; it is what is most intimate in us (for example, our own physiological life) […] In shame, the subject thus […] becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject” (Agamben 105 – 06). The pitch of anxiety for Corinne is reached when she realizes she forms part of a ‘grey zone’ of complicity.

1.5.3 Testimony and Late Capitalism Corinne feels ‘complicit’ with her previous self-delusion, with her inability to realize the ideological forces that were coming to bear on her. In having been unable to leave Richard in the past, she has become complicit with her own status

 “Este planteamiento que […] disuelve la historia en un continuum sin novedad posible, es, desde un punto de vista político, la ideología de los vencedores”.

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as a victim. Crucially, Corinne realizes that, if she stays with Richard, she will be submitting to a ‘stone’. As she puts it, she began to drive, then leapt across a ditch and began to follow a barren track that eventually ran out. That is when she saw “the stone” (Crimp 2005a: 364): –

– –

– –

– –

The track – that’s right – gave out, and now there were just… clumps. Which meant, of course, stepping – although I needn’t – but stepping from one clump to the next. You should’ve seen me stepping the way a child steps from one clump to the next until I reached the stone. Well I say ‘the stone’, but the stone had arms, like a chair. So you could sit…within the stone. You could rest your arms along the arms of the stone, and from within the stone, look out at the land. Pause. And how was the land? Oh, the land was lovely. But the stone was cold. I don’t think the sun had ever warmed it. I was afraid it would stick to my skin, like ice. And then Morris appeared […] He said, ‘I’ve been following you for hours. Didn’t you hear me calling you? You dropped this.’ Dropped what? Well, that’s what I said. I said, ‘Dropped what, Morris? Just what have I dropped?’ ‘Your watch, of course,’ he said. And he dangled it in front of my face from its golden strap, so I could see all its tiny works. I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It’s very beautiful, but it’s not mine. It’s very delicate, but it isn’t mine.’ Which is when I noticed – and this will amuse you – that the stone had started to devour my heart. Pause. Oh really? […] I said to Morris, ‘Morris. Help me. This stone is devouring my heart.’ […] He said, ‘Are you afraid?’ I said, ‘Well yes, Morry, of course I’m afraid. I don’t seem able to move and this stone is devouring my heart. When I get up from this stone, what if my heart has gone? What if I have to spend the rest of my life simulating love?’ (Crimp 2005a: 364– 65)

The stone, then, becomes a metaphor for the hard core of late capitalist individualism which Richard embodies, and which infuses her life with violence. It is also the cluster of lies and self-interest which has characterized his relationship with her, the core within Richard she knows she can never reach, because he keeps it away from her. The stone Corinne finds is clearly the same stone Rebecca reaches just before she collapses. Like Rebecca’s stone, which was “cold” (Crimp 2005a: 317) yet had “arms, like a chair” (Crimp 2005a: 316), the stone Corinne comes to is also both cold and alluring, its “arms” offering rest and comfort (Crimp 2005a: 364). Indeed, as noted earlier, the stone, like the current “empire” (Crimp 2005a: 316) or world order, is both comfortable and violent. Not only does it offer wealth and privileges to some while withholding them from others, but it also oppresses those who appear to benefit from the material abundance it offers, such as Corinne. Richard, the ‘stone-hearted’ man, is both comfortable

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and scary – he provides Corinne with rest and material ease, yet is violent to others and seeks to subjectify Corinne herself as utterly docile – as zoè. Corinne’s breakdown, therefore, signifies her ethical resistance, her refusal to become a conduit for an exploitative ideology. Corinne has finally reached what Rebecca calls, in her own testimony in Scene III, an “outpost…of the empire” (Crimp 2005a: 316), that is, the cluster of values and lies that her husband expects her to embrace at the expense of her own convictions – the stone, which welcomes Corinne and offers her a place to rest. Corinne’s testimony is ultimately prompted by what late capitalism defines as ‘progress’, the unbearable tension between material comfort, the sacrifices it demands, and the hidden, suppressed violence it implies – the dichotomy between ‘progress’ and absence of ethics. As she recounts the breakdown she experienced, Corinne mentions having dropped Rebecca’s watch, which Morris subsequently found and attempted to give back to her.²⁹ Thus, while Corinne symbolically places the continuum of ‘progress’ in suspension, Morris, who embodies the status quo, seeks to remind her of the ‘watch’, that is, the imperatives of family and property, gripping her shoulders in order to “establish a certain authority” (Crimp 2005a: 365). The coldness of the stone, then, represents the extent to which late capitalist market forces shape interpersonal relationships and the violence they bring about – both active, in the form of coercion, and reactive, in the form of rebellion on the part of those who feel victimized. Corinne thinks the sun had never “warmed” (Crimp 2005a: 365) the stone – that is, it is not humane enough. And Rebecca’s violent act in Scene IV – stabbing the scissors into Richard’s palm – is a warning that a ‘stony’ subjectivity, like the cold, ultimately undemocratic late capitalist system, engenders violence and madness in others as they attempt to impose certain limits on it. In the production of The Country at Sala Beckett, Barcelona, Corinne performed an irrational action at this point, splashing water from the glass Richard brings her at the start of the scene on her face and body and drenching her clothes.³⁰ Corinne’s action focused the audience’s attention on her, on her suffering and her needs. In the play, instead, the stage directions indicate Corinne drinks up the water Richard brings her in an attempt at being compliant. Casares’s decision to make Corinne splash water on her body functioned as a visual sign of her desire to free herself from the role of victim that Richard’s subjection  Sierz sees Morris’s discovery of Rebecca’s watch as ambiguous, possibly a suggestion that Richard is still meeting Rebecca (Sierz 2006: 59).  The reference is, once again, to Toni Casares’s production of the play for Sala Beckett, which ran from 16 February to 27 March 2005.

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has repeatedly made her adopt. She aims to break through her imprisoned body and hopes the impact of the water will help her see better, thus strengthening her effort to change.³¹ Her gesture emphasized her willingness to break up with Richard despite inertia, despite the ‘distractions’ that are offered her, that is, despite her own ‘unwillingness’. The water highlighted her urgent attempt to bring herself to remember these feelings of complicity and shame. Only if she remembers how ashamed she feels can she continue to pursue the new identity which is emerging, divesting herself of the external roles she both was made to play and adopted as her own. By focusing attention upon the actress’s body, the semiotic potential of Corinne’s collapse was forcefully brought to the surface – it literally emanated from her ‘collapsing body’. Through the impact of the cold water, Corinne tries to reconceive her body as autonomous and free despite the constraints of, as Crimp puts it in Whole Blue Sky, “money, property, family” (Crimp 2005b: 14). Such an act of embodiment on Corinne’s part was arguably also potentially so for spectators, conceived not as passive onlookers but as ‘Spect-Actors’ (Augusto Boal qtd. in Keefe 44) always-already ethically involved with the actions on stage, always part of the ‘ethical frame’ (Keefe 2010). The water worked as a focus of attention for spectators, urging them to ask questions regarding their own bodies – the extent to which they are docile and bound to instances of power, or fragile and fragmented yet self-determining. Corinne also urgently points to the only possible source of change in her life – change must come from her body. She either writes her own meanings upon her body, or she allows men to impose victimhood on her. Indeed, Corinne’s bodily behaviour in the play has so far been conditioned by Richard. In Scene I, Corinne accidentally cuts herself with the scissors, and she “sucks her finger – looks at him” (Crimp 2005a: 305). That is, she immediately looks for her husband’s reaction, which reveals the extent to which he structures her entire field of action, her subjectivity. This moment displays, in terms of physical pain, the symbolic net Richard has cast over Corinne through language, the net which she eventually attempts to shake herself loose from through the impact of the cold water. Rebecca’s and Corinne’s bodies are ‘stolen’, turned into a ‘map’ open to the doctor’s scrutiny. By splashing water on herself, Corinne seeks to connect intuitively, urgently, with the locus from which liberation must

 It is worth noting that Katie Mitchell’s production of Crimp’s adaptation of The Seagull (2006), which ran at the Lyttleton auditorium of the National Theatre from 17 June to 23 September 2006, made use of the same theatrical strategy – Mitchell had Polina, a female character placed in a similar situation to Corinne, splash water on herself for similar reasons. Crimp’s adaptation and Mitchell’s production are discussed in detail in block VI of the book.

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emanate. At the same time, water, which has strong pre-symbolic associations with cleansing and rebirth, seems to bring Corinne to a new start, by actually helping her articulate her new identity through an act of testimony.

1.5.4 Path of Discovery: the Ethics of Spectatorship Early on in her testimony, Corinne recalls driving until the road stopped, leaping across the ditch and beginning to climb a promontory so barren that there was nothing human to be found. Corinne deviates from her normal existence, from comfort and privilege, in order to find out about the true significance of the violence she has experienced. Crimp presents Corinne’s discovery of the ‘stone’ as signifying an encounter with late capitalism’s totalitarian underside. Indeed, it is by following a barren land where “there was nothing human” (Crimp 2005a: 364) that Corinne eventually discovers the ‘stone’. Corinne drives on until the road stops, so she leaps across the ditch and begins to climb a sterile promontory, so sterile that there is not even a “needle or a piece of brick” (Crimp 2005a: 364): – –

Why wouldn’t you go back to the car? […] (quietly) I didn’t want to go back to the car, not now I had discovered the track. It wasn’t anything at all what I’d imagined, not the hard thin sheep or goat track I’d imagined. No, it was…broad, and littered with shale. At least, I think it was shale. It made a noise as I walked, a kind of clatter. That’s when I realised, as I slithered and clattered my way along the shale, that there was nothing human. Well I was there, obviously. I was human, but nothing else was. I looked out for human things. Because I thought I might see – you know – a piece of wire or a spent cartridge with the top blown out. I thought I might see a plastic bag snagged in a hedge. Only there was no hedge. I thought I might see a needle or a piece of brick. I longed – you know – to see something human like a needle, or a piece of brick mixed with the shale. Or to hear – even to hear something human other than myself. Other than my feet. Other than my heart. A plane. Or children screaming. Only there was nothing. Not even a track now. Because the track – just like the road – stopped. Or it…what did it do?…it ‘gave out’ (Crimp 2005a: 364; emphases original).

The barren land is a sign of the sterility of Corinne’s and Richard’s relationship and of Richard’s violence, but the apocalyptic landscape, read against its historical context, suggests a global, not just a personal, cul-de-sac. The images of barrenness strongly intimate that following the road of the ‘stone’ can only lead to a no-man’s-land of sterility – a post-Holocaust landscape. The Holocaust, as noted earlier, signified the application of the Enlightenment ideas Richard embodies, those of instrumental rationality and “categorial” reason (Bauman 2008: 87; em-

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phasis original), to the point of paroxysm. According to Bauman, the singularity of genocides is that of being “categorial murders” (Bauman 2008: 87; emphasis original); that is, in genocides, individuals are exterminated because of their belonging to a specific category. During the Holocaust, Bauman clarifies, it became irrelevant “how old or young, strong or weak, genial or malevolent the victims were” (Bauman 2008: 87) since, in genocide, the prospective targets of violence are unilaterally defined and denied a right to response. The victims’ conduct or the qualities of the condemned category’s individual members are irrelevant to their preordained fate. The sufficient proof of the capital offense, of the charge from which there is no appeal, is the fact of having been accused. (Bauman 2008: 82)

Richard embodies the ideals of the Enlightenment in all their paradoxical nature. He incarnates the belief in a type of progress based on instrumental rationality and on the “categorial” (Bauman 2008: 87; emphasis original) division of individuals. He classifies individuals according to the profit he can extract from them; he objectifies them and places his patients and his women into different categories of importance within his own mental ‘map’. In the hospital, Richard’s instrumental rationality leads to the death of the old patient. At home, it makes the women feel victims of a totalitarian type of violence, which leads them to pass on their testimony to one another and to the audience. Through Corinne’s collapse, which she tells Richard about in Scene V, Crimp links Corinne’s life, which has become sterile due to Richard’s rupture with civilized values, with the historical rupture the Holocaust signified. In contemporary late capitalist society, the free-market ideology of ‘Empire’ can be said to be creating a series of lower-key holocausts. In these ‘smaller’ holocausts which ‘Empire’ causes and is interested in maintaining, women bear a considerably heavier burden. As opposed to Richard, Corinne begins a movement down to the heart of things, towards getting rid of the values of late capitalism. Crimp records her process of personal change – her becoming an ethical body on stage – with the aim to offer it, perhaps, as a model of resistance to spectators. It is a model of subjectivity for a more democratic world order, one which might contribute to diminishing the radical inequalities generated by late capitalism and the ‘smaller’ holocausts it engenders. As mentioned earlier, there is a sense that time stops during Corinne’s collapse, which is conveyed by her losing sight of any signs of civilization, as well as by her accidentally dropping her watch. Only the wind can be heard and, as Corinne puts it, “everything flapped – my hair, my clothes… […] My dress was flapping round my legs like a flag and I knew I should go back to the car but I knew I wouldn’t go back to the car” (Crimp 2005a: 363). By ‘stopping

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time’, Corinne’s ‘excursion’, which leads her to understand the furthest reaches of Richard’s unethical deployment of power, metaphorically evokes the sense of paralysis history underwent with the Holocaust. Since the Holocaust, history has ceased to be understood, as it had been from the Enlightenment onwards, as a chronological progression towards an inclusive ideal of ‘progress’ and advancement. Corinne’s personal narrative breaks down because of Richard’s violence, just as history came to a standstill after the Holocaust, and any notion of progress or of continuity cannot be rebuilt out of the materials – values and beliefs – inherited from history, particularly not out of the Enlightenment idea of progress based on instrumental rationality, that is, on mastery and objectification of the environment. Corinne is thus living in a time of fragments, both personal and historical. This sense of fragmentation is reflected in the play’s structure itself, that is, through the annotations ‘paper, scissors, stone’ Crimp inserts at the end of every scene, which seek to impose a sense of order on Corinne’s experience, but which, paradoxically, also multiply its interpretive echoes. The absence of chronology and the fragmentation conveyed by the annotations suggest both Corinne’s personal rupture and, by extension, that of history after the Holocaust, after which the only fragments of history and experience which are worth conserving, as in Corinne’s case, are those which resist the introduction of barbarism in the culture. In Scene V, Corinne, like Rebecca in Scene III, employs images of bodily intrusion in order to describe the subjectifying effects of the totalitarian underside of late capitalism Richard embodies, that is, how power has the capacity to inhabit the frontier between zoè and bíos, cultural life and animal life. In her collapse, Corinne discovers this duality of power and seeks to convey it through very physical, bodily images. Thus, in her testimony Corinne claims she collapsed “like a mad thing” (Crimp 2005a: 365); she feared the “stone [was] devouring [her] heart” (Crimp 2005a: 365); she was “afraid it would stick to [her] skin, like ice” (Crimp 2005a: 365). Corinne’s words echo Rebecca’s own testimony, when she claims she collapsed because she was afraid that the cold of the stone might “seep” (Crimp 2005a: 317) into her – that it might leave a mark of power on her, rendering her docile, turning her into zoè. Through Corinne, who takes spectators to the ‘barren land’ of breakdown, Crimp challenges the audience with the possibility of abandoning a society which masks its totalitarian violence as ‘progress’. The play’s poetics of testimony – Corinne’s defamiliarized, highly metaphorical use of language – thus put into practice a dramaturgy of resistance which is meant to turn spectators into positive witnesses of the totalitarian tendencies of contemporary society. Corinne and Rebecca speak in the defamiliarized language

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of testimony in order to convey exactly how they experience Richard’s mercantilism and his instrumental use of rationality in their bodies. Through the defamiliarized language of collapse, Crimp invites spectators to fill in Corinne’s indeterminate language with concrete fragments of their own memories of having experienced the subjectifying and coercive effects of power. Spectators are thus impelled to re-examine their own context with a view to detecting the seeds of barbarism in it. Corinne’s concrete, realistic images are infused with a highly symbolic potential, as when she claims that she found herself on a solitary road, where she “was human, but nothing else was” and she kept looking for “a piece of wire or a spent cartridge […] a plastic bag snagged in a hedge […] a needle, or a piece of brick” (Crimp 2005a: 364). If the audience wants to decode the estranging language of collapse they need to become ‘double witnesses’. As Felman puts it, being the listener of a testimony implies partaking “of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past […] the listener, therefore, has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma witness and a witness to himself” (Felman and Laub 1992: 58). Spectators, that is, are impelled to become witnesses both to Corinne and to themselves, by allowing Corinne’s testimonial language to resonate with their own, possibly fragmented, memories of experiences of coercion. The play’s ending is open – as already discussed, whether Corinne eventually leaves Richard or succumb to him is left unspecified, and her “heart” may have been lost or “gone” (Crimp 2005a: 366) under the pressure – but in positioning spectators as double witnesses, Corinne’s testimonial speech articulates the ethical desire that they may activate their own potential for resistance.³² According to Adorno, and as O’Connor explains, it is only if the audience can experience the contradictions dramatized on stage – not just listen to or discursively comprehend them – that art can produce resistance: “political messages will be filtrated through false consciousness and dismissed. Rather, social contradictions need to be experienced” (O’Connor 240; my emphasis). Corinne’s language is full of riddles, objects of interpretation with a markedly metaphori-

 Middeke claims that the play “ends in a Beckettian fashion as a cul-de-sac situation of paralysis” (2011: 93) where neither Corinne nor Richard make any gesture of approach or of final rupture, while the “phone continues to ring” (Crimp 2005: 366). In their introduction to the Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Sierz claim that the ending seems to convey that “money is an insufficient simulacrum after all, [since] the nightmarish ending […] has the female protagonist imagine that the rest of her life might be a simulation of love” (2011: xix). This is “an appeal to love as a transcending force […] and a humanist feeling” (2011: xix).

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cal character. She, for instance, talks about the ‘stone’ – the cluster of lies she perceives as about to “devour [her] heart” (Crimp 2005a: 365) – as being “cold” (Crimp 2005a: 365), adding she was afraid it would “stick to [her] skin, like ice” (Crimp 2005a: 365). Images are not used in order to aestheticize Corinne’s pain, but so that the audience may seek to give them concrete meaning by refracting them through their own experiences of oppression. The play, indeed, demands that spectators become aware of their own experience of contemporary forms of oppression and suffering and take on the burden of their own testimony. Corinne’s testimony resonates with Agamben’s claim that every testimony is “a field of forces incessantly traversed by currents of subjectification and desubjectification” (Agamben 121). Her body and language attest to a transition, to the moment when she stops being who she was and tries to voice the new identity that oppression has caused to be born in her. Agamben claims there is a silence that traverses Holocaust narratives of testimony, because many witnesses did not survive – “no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice” (Agamben 35). In Corinne’s testimony, however, there is the silence of that which is not yet fully born, since she seeks to bring to light a potential self that is not yet coherently or fully articulated. Seeking to give a voice to what is just being born, Corinne uses metaphors because she is groping ‘blindly’, intuitively, for an identity that is still unuttered. By passing on the testimony of her failed attempt to escape the previous night, Corinne uses memory in an ethical manner – against amnesia, in order to pursue her newly-emerging ethical self. By splashing water on herself – in Casares’s production – or by keeping Rebecca’s watch, Corinne vindicates, urgently, intuitively, the importance of memory as a means to begin reconstructing herself. By deploying a moral kind of memory through testimony, Corinne gives voice to her utopian hope for different modes of relating. Ultimately, then, collapse indicates Crimp’s reluctance, in Adorno’s words, to “sin against those needs which remain unfulfilled” (Adorno 257), and thus, his unwillingness to offer harmony and closure. Adorno claims that since Auschwitz, poetry can only be at the service of dissatisfaction and resistance, not harmony. It cannot, he argues, reproduce the consumer-object pattern whereby art enters the “interminable metabolism of need and gratification” (Adorno 257). In the same vein, Agamben alerts as to the risk of aestheticizing testimony, thereby rendering it a merely ‘poetic’ exercise – “neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem” (Agamben 36). As Keir Elam explains in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980), ‘difficult’ or indeterminate art may arouse both resistance and pleasure in the audi-

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ence. As he puts it, resistant art seeks to plunge the spectator into a situation of “undercoding” (Elam 95), that is, it faces her/him with an appealing strangeness. Yet much of the audience’s pleasure, at the same time, derives from the “continual effort to discover the principles at work […] the receiver tries to perceive the text according to canons known to him, but through the method of trial and error he is convinced of the necessity of creating a new code, as yet unknown to him” (Elam 95). According to Elam, in order to come to terms with the play, the audience must supply its intederminacies. The new code spectators may discover as they seek to decode Corinne’s and Rebecca’s bodily metaphors of the subjectifying effects of power is created by taking themselves and their own experiences as ‘matter’ for interpretation, thus becoming aware of the social contradictions that bring about their own experiences of oppression as well as of the link between contemporary violence and past barbarism.

1.5.5 To Survive: Self-Creation and the Paring Down of Selfhood In refusing to remain with Richard and the material compensations he offers, Corinne constitutes herself as a responsible subject, in the double sense that she is there for the Other, and becomes resistant through establishing connections with women like Sophie or Rebecca, who have resisted before her. If at first Corinne felt her right to ‘happiness’ and stability were her inalienable rights, the ‘props’ that sustain the postmodern self of late capitalist, highly developed countries, she now discovers selfhood as a vehicle for truth and ethics. By the end of the play, her previous ‘aspirations’ do not seem ‘rights’ any more, but burdens that hinder the possibility of bonding with others and tapping one’s own deepest wishes. Unlike at the beginning, Corinne is now ready to be interpellated and to respond by passing on her testimony. In this respect, Reyes Mate’s description of the role of the witness is relevant: The witness is not s/he who speaks but s/he who exists in tension, willing, available to answer the question that may come from someone else. To be a witness implies constituting oneself as a human subject. […] That is, being a witness does not consist in making a gesture towards somebody else who is vulnerable, but in constituting oneself as a witness in so far as one responds to the demand or request of the Other. The witness is s/he who can say ‘here I am’. Such ‘here I am’ sounds like a response to a call for help someone has placed on me. But it is not so – the witness’s gesture of availability is different since there is no previous demand for help; rather, the witness’s answer comes first. (Reyes Mate 2003: 177)³³

 “El testigo no es quien habla sino el que está en tensión, dispuesto, disponible a la pregunta que viene de fuera. Ser testigo equivale a constituirse en sujeto humano. […] Es decir, el test-

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Despite contextual differences, Corinne discovers, like concentration camp survivor Terrence Des Pres, that “in the final analysis life is survival” (qtd. in Agamben 92). This is what prompts Corinne to speak. In Agamben’s words, “in the extreme situation of Auschwitz, the very nucleus of ‘life in itself’ comes to light as such, freed from the hindrances and deformations of culture” (Agamben 92). And he quotes Des Pres to the effect that, “stripped of everything but life, what can the survivor fall back upon except some biologically determined ‘talent’ long suppressed by cultural deformation, a bank of knowledge embedded in the body’s cells” (qtd. in Agamben 93). This takes Des Pres to the conclusion that “the true ethical paradigm of our time is […] the survivor, who, without searching for ideal justifications, ‘chooses life’ and fights simply to survive” (qtd. in Agamben 96). Ultimately, then, Corinne becomes the witness to a long-lasting experience of coercion and deceit that has taken place in the most quotidian of situations. Corinne’s determination to register what is happening to her may be the sole reason that prompts her to survive. She becomes an ethical body on stage, a self pared down to a core of resistance. Crimp does not deconstruct the self by placing his characters’ biological lives at risk – which would imply the explicit staging of violence on stage – but rather through psychological collapse or mental breakdown.³⁴ Once Corinne refuses to install monetarism and late capitalist market values at the centre of what it means to be an individual, she discovers that to live is not to possess, to own and enjoy certain supposedly ‘unalienable’ rights, but simply to survive. What makes her, and all of us, human is the steady defence of a small yet fully responsible ethical self which can also empower others. The play’s structure also seeks to present a map of resistant subject positions as an alternative to the net of control and oppression Richard weaves around the women and as a model for the audience. The play shows several possibilities for rupture, while it stops short of representing them as fact. Scene I ends in emotional rupture and with the annotation ‘(…scissors)’ on the margin of the page (Crimp 2005a: 305), yet Corinne does not physically leave Richard. Scene IV

imonio no consiste en hacer un gesto respecto a ese otro vulnerable, sino en constituirse en testigo en tanto en cuanto uno responde a la solicitud del otro. El testigo consiste en decir ‘heme aquí’. Ese ‘heme aquí’ suena a respuesta a una convocatoria que alguien me hace en demanda de ayuda. Pero no es eso: el ‘heme aquí’ del testigo es diferente pues no hay convocatoria previa, sino que primero es la respuesta”.  For two examples of how violence and the shock of cruelty are used on stage as a means to reconstruct a sense of humanity or human values, see Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003).

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ends in ‘(…scissors)’ (Crimp 2005a: 345), and presents both Rebecca’s act of violence against Richard and her escape from the house, while she also claims that Corinne is “gone. Some while ago. She took the kids, and left. (Slight pause.) They were so sleepy” (Crimp 2005a: 345). Scene V shows Corinne’s emotional separation from Richard, but ends as “neither moves” while “the phone continues to ring” (Crimp 2005a: 366). The scene ends in ‘(…stone)’, which may either be an assertion of Corinne’s victory over Richard, of her having fully unmasked him, or may indicate Corinne’s willingness to continue “simulating love” (Crimp 2005a: 366). The ending suggested by Rebecca in Scene IV is one of the play’s possible endings, no less ‘true’ than the play’s real ending, where Corinne is still in Richard’s house. Through the continuous suggestion of possibilities, as well as by the dissociation between fact and representation, Crimp aims to encourage the creation of spaces of resistance in the spectators’ minds. The different moments of rupture suggested are meant to spur utopian thought in the audience. Sermon and Ryngaert claim that the elliptical or fragmentary character of [contemporary] plays and the absence of a hereafter for the characters impel the reader to invent, both for the creatures of the fiction and for her/himself, developments and sequels which favour the creation of ‘places’. Even if they remain virtual […] they are important. Many narrative modes are nowadays invitations to prolong, to invent sequels which are purely imaginary. (Ryngaert and Sermon 134)³⁵

These unfinished ‘spaces’ are meant to remain in the audiences’ mind as sites where utopian desire is actualized in more or less concrete forms. Rachel Spengler has argued that Crimp’s writing style in itself aims to reflect this openness. Although she focuses on the actor’s soliloquies in Attempts on her Life, Face to the Wall and Fewer Emergencies, her argument could also be applied to The Country: digression […] thus becomes the site of the fiction, in the literal sense of creation of imagination, since it is the place of the free association between ideas [and] […] metaphorically, the place where a universe, a utopia, is created. […] As many alternatives are suggested the referent loses its unity and it is, instead, constantly de-centered. […] [Digression] brings on the stage […] the pleasure of invention in all its possibilities. […] [the characters’ words,

 “Le caractère elliptique ou fragmentaire des œuvres, et l’absence d’avenir et d’horizon des personnages, induisent le lecteur à inventer, pour les créatures de fiction autant que pour luimême, des développements et des ‘suites’ qui favorisent quand même la création de ‘places’. Bien que celles-ci demeurent virtuelles […] elles demeurent importantes. Car certaines façons de raconter aujourd’hui sont autant d’invitations à des prolongements, à des suites purement imaginaires”.

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therefore] far from being directed by a psychological project, are constantly re-generated. (Spengler 64– 6)³⁶

The structure of The Country itself thus ‘re-memorates’ all of the possibilities it opens up in an act of memory similar to that performed by the female characters themselves. Ultimately, what Corinne does with her scissors in Scene I as she cuts out paper figures – select, rearrange, create something – is the same kind of operation the playwright is carrying out in relation to the play’s scenes. If only fragments remain of Corinne’s previously unified identity, Corinne’s picking up these fragments, sorting through them and rescuing the ones that are ethically valuable constitutes an act of resistance in itself. Her testimony attests to such an experience, as well as to her own necessity to choose, from the identity that is now falling to pieces, which fragments and which values are truly important. And it is in remembering what is essential about her experience that Corinne finds her new identity. Corinne finds her core of resistance, the ‘fragment’ of herself which is essential, not subjected to others – particularly to men. It is her sense of ethics.

1.6 Conclusion: Turning Towards Psychology Collapse implies a self-discovery whereby the individual understands her/his own complicity with forms of power and decides to detach her/himself from them. Thus, it operates both as a denunciation of forms of oppression and a discovery of one’s own potential for resistance. Corinne, that is, discovers herself as a repository of ethical values and becomes a source of micropolitical struggle within the Real of power relations. Not only Corinne, but also Rebecca and Sophie end up discovering a personal truth and ethics; this manifests itself through a continuous micropolitical struggle that takes the form of a loose yet effective community or network of individuals. The Country identifies the totalitarian seeds of late capitalism and shows how they affect individuals who are the supposed beneficiaries of this system. It deconstructs the idyll of the countryside – of a wealthy and ethical West –

 “La digression […] devient cependant le lieu de la fiction, au sens littéral de création de l’imagination, en étant le lieu de la libre association d’idées [et] […] métaphoriquement, le lieu où se crée un univers, une utopie. […] Le déploiement des alternatives perd l’unicité du référent au profit de son décentrement constant. […] [La digression] [met] en scène […] le plaisir de l’invention de toutes ses virtualités. [Les paroles des personnages cependant] bien loin d’être dirigé[es] par un projet psychologique, se régénère[nt] constamment “.

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as being sustained by a constant, regulatory exercise of violence. The death of the patient and the symbolic violence to which Richard submits Corinne are the symptoms of a late capitalist global order which is based on relentless economic growth and which is markedly unequal. In this context, Corinne discovers that what makes her a valuable subject is not a function of her privileged relation to male power, family and social position, but precisely the result of the absence of all these. Crimp thus defines the self as a core of ethical values, and through collapse he strips it of mediated forms of existence and pares it down to that ethical, resistant heart. Having identified, in The Treatment, the potential for barbarism inherent in the turn towards late capitalism and the advent of societies of control after the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Country is the first play to fully develop Crimp’s pedagogy of resistance, and is paradigmatic of Crimp’s search for a “post-Holocaust aesthetic” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 214) which may enable spectators to work towards a new ethical framework, with the aim to emerge from the post-Holocaust ethical impasse. In The Country, the reconfiguration of ethics takes place “within the self”, in an “inner horizon of values” (Smith 32). Both Rebecca and Corinne come to represent Lévinas’s vision of subjectivity as inherently responsible. According to Lévinas, while it is ‘responsibility’ which constitutes the subject, this potential is often interfered with by social structures (Bauman 2005: 183). Corinne’s achievement, from this perspective, consists in divesting herself from social pressures and re-constituting herself as a responsible subject. A fundamental part of Crimp’s aim in The Country, indeed, is to show how individuals, initially predisposed towards the Other, see this impulse distorted through their immersion in hierarchical economic structures that favour “greed” (Crimp 2005a: 329), as Rebecca puts it in Scene III. In The Country Crimp develops his characteristic pedagogy of resistance – which he had put into practice for the first time with The Treatment – whereby he seeks to counteract the introduction of barbarism in relationships by inviting the audience to move towards subjective change and towards developing a resistant subjectivity. In contemporary society, indeed, technology and the ability to kill have been developed to their most sophisticated extremes. As Glover puts it, “we have experienced the results of technology in the service of the destructive side of human psychology. Something needs to be done about this fatal combination. The means of expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have already been fully developed” (Glover 414). Crimp is aware of this destructive potential; he also knows that it is already “too late to stop the technology” (Glover 414), and that, therefore, it is to “the psychology” (Glover 414) that we should now turn – as he turns to Corinne’s.

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The play asks the audience’s collaboration in interpreting the indeterminate, lyrical and metaphorical images Corinne and Rebecca evoke in their respective testimonies – such as the recurrent image of the ‘stone’. If spectators want to understand the play, they will have to fill in the indeterminate images Corinne presents to them as objects of interpretation with figments of the memories of their own oppression, thus becoming double witnesses – both to Corinne’s testimony and to their own, similar memories of oppression. In order to act as positive witnesses to Corinne’s testimony, spectators must necessarily experience Corinne’s ethical transformation along with her. Ideally, then, Corinne’s transformation in the play finds an echo in the similar process of ‘transformation’ spectators undergo in the act of becoming good witnesses to her testimony and process of change, thus contributing to detecting the totalitarian underside of late capitalism. Furthermore, by sketching a series of vignettes of escape which are no more than suggested possibilities, and by refusing to portray Corinne’s physical separation from Richard on stage, Crimp leaves it up to spectators to imagine the play’s dénouement, to choose from the different possibilities it offers, and to think about the best possible course of action. Thus, the play first encourages spectators to detect the system’s totalitarian tendencies and to identify the moments when they may have experienced them in their own lives, and then it elicits a utopian desire for change from the audience – it creates “virtual”, utopian “sites” (Ryngaert and Sermon 134) in the audience’s minds whereby they may be able to resist the totalitarian tendencies the play presents them with outside the theatre. Corinne becomes a more ethical subject at the end than she was at the beginning, and the play is the record and the memory of such transformation. She evolves from being dependent on male power and status, “complicit” (Crimp 2005a: 362) with ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2006: xii), into a subject who is able to detach herself from the exploitative values and material compensations of late capitalism. The Country thus offers a model of a pared-down, alternative subjectivity which may resist the introduction of barbarism in civilized relationships. Corinne’s resistant, pared-down subjectivity, indeed, is offered to the audience as a model of selfhood which can counteract the inequality of the present world order. Corinne learns that material possessions and status are in fact burdens that, in contemporary society, prevent individuals from connecting more fully with other people and with themselves. From this perspective, The Country can be understood as a response to the urgent question as to whether it is possible, in affluent societies and given the existing unequal world order, to live according to more selfless terms. Through both Rebecca and Corinne Crimp demonstrates that

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this is indeed possible and that (Western) individuals do not in fact need the material abundance that the mass media sell as a condition for happiness or even as an indispensable attribute of being human, at the expense of ethics and human values themselves. Instead, Crimp places ethics at the forefront of the individual’s and of society’s well-being, and of any idea of real progress.

2 Oppression, Resistance and Terrorism in Cruel and Tender (2004) 2.1 Sophocles, Crimp and Bondy Cruel and Tender (2004) is a rewriting of Sophocles’s tragedy The Trachiniae, written in 430 BC, an “ancient story of marriage and violence” (Sierz 2006: 63). The play certainly shows how frustrated desire can turn into aggressiveness and even violence. Heracles, Deianira’s husband, is in love with Iole, King Eurytus’s daughter, and he attacks the city of Trachis in order to capture her. Then Lichas, Heracles’s herald, takes her to Heracles’s home, where Deianira has long awaited Heracles’s return from the war. Lichas introduces Iole and other women to Deianira as war spoils and slaves. Once Lichas finishes speaking, however, a Messenger tells Deianira that Heracles ravaged the city only in order to seize Iole. In order to win Heracles back, Deianira sends him a tunic soaked in the poisoned blood of Nessus, the Centaur, who once told her she could use it as a love charm if Heracles ever looked at another woman. However, the blood-soaked tunic badly damages Heracles’s body and mental health. Deianira immediately realizes she made a mistake in trusting the dying Centaur, and kills herself violently. When Heracles comes back home, both physically and mentally undone on account of the poison, he commands his son Hyllus to prepare a funeral pyre for his body and asks him to marry Iole. The Trachiniae is not formally divided into acts or scenes, but it is made up of two basic thematic parts, each devoted to one protagonist. The first part of the play centres on Deianira who, in Crimp’s rewriting, is called Amelia, and the second on Heracles, whom Crimp turns into a war General, Amelia’s husband. Crimp’s play is formally divided into Parts and Scenes. Crimp chose to give Cruel and Tender a three-part structure, and to focus the first two parts on Amelia and the last one on the General who, as in Sophocles’s play, never meet. Whilst Parts One and Two are divided into three and two scenes respectively, the last part contains no scene division at all, and works in the manner of an epilogue.

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As Charles Spencer puts it, “Crimp sticks closely to the plot of Sophocles’s play, but has dragged the action into the 21st century” (Spencer 633). Crimp substitutes Lichas by Jonathan, a government minister, who, as in Sophocles, brings Amelia distorted news from the war, and the Messenger by Richard, a journalist, who tries to tell her the truth. Hyllus, Heracles’s and Deianira’s son in Sophocles’s play, is named James in Crimp’s. Finally, Crimp replaces both the Greek Chorus and the Nurse, who in Sophocles’s play sympathize with Deianira, with a train of three accompanying ladies, a Beautician, a Housekeeper and a Physiotherapist. They pursue Amelia wherever she goes with advice on how to take care of her body and appearance and on how best to behave as the wife of a man of status, thus focusing the audience’s attention on the pressures which come to bear upon women’s bodies in contemporary society. Cruel and Tender, which opened at the Young Vic on 4 April 2004, directed by Luc Bondy, is set in the context of the contemporary War on Terror – the General, Jonathan informs Amelia, is fighting terror in Africa (Crimp 2004a: 13).³⁷ Indeed, the play came almost three years after the 9/11 incidents in New York (Angelaki 2006: 39), and it represents Crimp’s reaction to the context of duplicity he observed around him after the bombings in Afghanistan.³⁸ Sierz claims Cruel and Tender is part of “a significant body of theatre work in London” which, coinciding with numerous verbatim plays such as Richard Norton-Taylor’s Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003) or Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (2004), immediately responded to

 Bondy’s production was first presented at the Yong Vic Theatre on 5 May 2004, where it ran for two weeks, and then again from 17 June to 10 July 2004, after touring in Europe, with Kerry Fox as Amelia, Georgiana Ackerman as Laela, and Joe Dixon as the General. Bondy’s staging of the play was a co-production with the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen. The play was commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen, the Chichester Festival Theatre, and the Young Vic Theatre Company. It was Luc Bondy himself who encouraged Crimp to encouraged Crimp to “take the original subject [of The Trachiniae] in a new direction” (Sierz 2006: 64). Bondy’s production will be mentioned at different points in this chapter.  As Angelaki puts it, the fact that the war, in Cruel and Tender, takes place in Africa instead of in the Middle East, suggests that it “perhaps bears […] affinities with to the tragedy of Rwanda” (Angelaki 2006: 39). By reference to Sierz, Maria Elena Capitani also observes that Crimp “decided to transfer the battlefield from the Middle East to the African state which, in 1994, suffered one of the bloodiest genocides in history, in front of which the West showed an unforgivable indifference” (Capitani 108 – 109). Crimp, indeed, places the War on Terror in Africa instead of the Middle East in order to make the play more evocative of present and past crises of barbarism emerging from late capitalist inequality. In Italian, Capitani’s quote reads as follows: “Crimp decide quindi ditrasferire il campo di battaglia dal Medio Oriente a Ruanda, lo stato africano che nel 1994 viene straziato da uno dei genocidi più sanguinosi della storia, in occasione del quale l’Occidente mostra un’imperdonabile indifferenza”.

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the War on Terror (Sierz 2006: 63). As Crimp puts it, he began “collecting photographs of child soldiers from current wars. [And he] couldn’t imagine writing a play that wasn’t cut, linguistically, culturally, from the material of contemporary life” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 64). And he adds, “As for the background of terror, political hypocrisy, and a city destroyed for a lie, I didn’t have to look very far to discover a congruent universe” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 63 – 4). As Crimp himself has stated, he “started working on this piece [when] the War on Terror was in full swing, but [he was] concerned not to reduce the play to an anti-war diatribe” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 107). In Cruel and Tender, indeed, Crimp does not directly represent atrocity, but he continues his search for a “defamiliarizing language” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 22) with the aim to interpellate spectators to become aware of the seeds of barbarism present in their unequal, contemporary world order, as well as to oppose the introduction of barbarism as they may detect it in their own, daily context. Cruel and Tender is one of Crimp’s most accomplished attempts, in Angel-Perez’s words, to “rethink the question of realism in the theatre” with the aim to find a language and a type of dramaturgy that may enable him to “emerge out of the ethical and, therefore, aesthetic impasse” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 24) brought about by the Holocaust, and which was particularly intensified after the War on Terror and the bombings of Afghanistan. In Cruel and Tender Crimp depicts the personal journey of Amelia, and her attempts to resist, in Angelaki’s words, “the misleading to which she is subject by government authorities regarding the true nature of her husband’s war impetus” (Angelaki 2006: 33), and by Laela’s presence in her home.³⁹ In this context, Amelia asserts the importance of empathy and honesty and refuses to give up memory in a highly technological context in which death and war can be made to become ‘invisible’ and ‘virtual’, a context which is thus prone to ignore the alliance between technology, violence and barbarism that has characterized the twentieth century. Thus, she undergoes four different moments of collapse through which she attempts to denounce the violence late capitalism exerts for its maintenance. According to Adorno, if discursively offered political messages may easily be filtered through the audience’s consciousness and dismissed. Instead, as O’Connor puts it, for Adorno contradictions need to be experienced by spectators – “in this way alone is aesthetic resistance possible” (O’Connor 240). As shall be seen, it is, in particular, through Amelia’s third moment of collapse in Part Two, Scene

 Interestingly, and as Crimp puts it, one of the things that attracted him to The Trachiniae was the “constellation of two women and one man” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 64), as in The Country.

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Two, as she passes on her testimony of the violence the current world order enacts for its maintenance, that Crimp searches for a post-Holocaust poetics and, through the lyrical, indeterminate language of testimony, seeks to invite spectators to experience the contradictions of late capitalism, thus articulating a dramaturgy of resistance that is aimed at engaging spectators ethically in a reflection on the continuing presence within the current late capitalist world order of the seeds of totalitarianism and barbarism.⁴⁰ In Part One, Scene Three, after Amelia receives the visit of Jonathan, the government minister, who brings her distorted news from the war and seeks to force her to adopt the role of ignorant wife of a man of status, she begins to develop a bodily, material language of collapse, in touch her primary drives of love and aggression, through which she seeks to defend her own dignity, as well as that of Laela and her brother. In Part Two, Scene One, Amelia undergoes what is arguably her second moment of collapse as she begins to design her scheme of inserting the tube with the chemical inside a pillow and sending it to the General, so that he may pull out of the war. In Part Two, Scene One, Amelia undergoes what is arguably her second moment of collapse as she begins to design her scheme of inserting the tube with the chemical inside a pillow and sending it to the General, so that he may pull out of the war. Seeing that the chemical has completely destroyed the General’s body, however, Amelia begins to fantasize that, when she goes with Laela to pick up her husband up at the airport, the security guards will detect that she holds a “spike” (Crimp 2004a: 45) inside, and will not let her go through. Aware that such a society would qualify her own rebelliousness as an unspeakable act of terror, she kills herself, in her fourth moment of collapse. Yet before doing so she performs her crucial act of testimony, which will be fully discussed below, and which is her third moment of collapse – she tells Laela that she refuses to go on living a consumerist that is dependent on her husband’s status and wealth, which derive from the War on Terror he is waging in Africa. Through breakdown and testimony, Amelia reacts against the tendency of bio-power, the type of power that emanates from the late capitalist world order, towards turning political, subjective life – bíos – into mere biological life – zoè, a ‘blank surface’ upon which docile identities are inscribed. In

 As Sierz notes, shortly alter writing Cruel and Tender, Crimp argued his belief that “even the so-called ‘new terrorism’ has at its root plain old-fashioned social injustice” (Sierz 2006: 66). And he added, “How can theatre cope? By constantly reminding us that human beings are more contradictory and strange than any ideologue could ever imagine” (Sierz 2006: 66 – 67). Cruel and Tender as a whole, and particularly his dramaturgy of resistance, are thus motivated by such realization.

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order to resist the incorporeal transformation bio-power effects on subjects, she begins to develop a resistant subjectivity characterized by a language of collapse which is highly physical or bodily, and which culminates in her violent act against the General, as well as in her final testimony and suicide. Through collapse and testimony, Amelia seeks to divest herself of late capitalist, external and mediated identities and to access a primeval identity made up of the primary drives of love and empathy, and which may allow her to keep resisting the duplicity and violence she observes in her late capitalist, globalised context. Through the metaphorical associations of Amelia’s violent act, which takes place in Part Two, Scene One and, as shall be seen, renders the General’s body like that of a cyborg, Crimp seeks to invite spectators to become aware of the dissociation between technological progress and ethical progress that characterizes late capitalism. Crimp, indeed, suggests that Amelia poisons her husband for similar motives to those that spur contemporary anti-Western terrorist acts – in order, that is, to express her rejection of the duplicitous, unequal policies of the late capitalist Western hegemony. Although Amelia’s violent act is micropolitical – that is, unlike terrorism’s macropolitical violence, it is specifically directed against the body of her oppressor – the play suggests it can symbolically be interpreted as a terrorist act. Amelia uses a chemical developed by the establishment against the establishment itself, epitomized by the General. According to Edward Kemp, who participated in Luc Bondy’s production of Cruel and Tender as dramaturg, Amelia uses the “tools of the West” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 207) – its technological might, its sophisticated scientific research – against the West, confronting it with its own ‘spectacular’ technology. It is specifically through the poetics of testimony, however, that Crimp seeks to interpellate spectators as responsible subjects who may become aware of the rift between economic and technological progress on the one hand, and ethical or moral development on the other, and of the alliance between technology and barbarism that has characterized the twentieth century. In her testimony, Amelia uses a lyrical, indeterminate, metaphorical language, expressing herself “through darkness and through fragmentation” and through a language that is “cognitively dissonant” (Felman and Laub 1995: 24). She, for instance, refers to the homogenizing apparatuses of societies of control, or to the violence of bio-power, in terms of an “X-ray” (Crimp 2004a: 45) machine that classifies individuals, and to her ethical choice to resist the duplicity of the establishment her husband represents in terms of a “spike” (Crimp 2004a: 45), which is no more than the form her resistance, or her utopian aspirations, take as she feels compelled to defend them to the point of violence. Through this kind of defamiliarized language, Amelia taps into her experience in order to make social contradictions visible for spectators.

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The late capitalist system, indeed, expects Amelia to condone her husband’s infidelities, and to satisfy her needs for connection and love by focusing on her body and on consumerism, and by profiting from the wealth her husband offers her through fighting a War on Terror abroad. Because the images Amelia uses in order to refer to the socio-political order her husband embodies are highly personal, spectators may fill in the symbolic meaning of her words by bringing into the play remnants of their own, similar experiences of coercion, thus becoming ‘double witnesses’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 58) – that is, witnesses to Amelia’s act of witnessing and to the presence of the seeds of barbarism in their own context. Through the poetic, estranging language of collapse, spectators are invited to decode the images Amelia offers them and to become active witnesses who are aware of the violence late capitalism enacts for its maintenance. Ultimately, Amelia’s testimony attests to her decision to become an ethical body; that is, to her choice to defend an ethical core of values, and it records the process whereby she makes such a choice for the audience to witness and to experience with her. Thus, Amelia comes to represent Lévinas’s vision of subjectivity as inherently responsible and exemplifies his claim that “the self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles” (Lévinas 107). As shall be seen, Crimp claims, like Bauman and Lévinas, that it is late capitalism itself that generates violence in individuals, by promoting values which threaten the inherently responsible nature of social relationships, and by foregoing values such as attention to vulnerability, honesty and care. Cruel and Tender begins with Amelia, in Part One, Scene One, talking about how her father married her off to the General. They immediately had a child, James, who appears to be rather detached from the rest of the household. Anxious about her husband’s prolonged absence from the household, Amelia sends James to Africa to look for the General. In Scene Two, the Beautician and the Physiotherapist talk about how Amelia feels depressed because of the General’s absence. Jonathan, the government minister, comes to her house to announce that the General has sent home two African siblings, Laela and her younger brother, who Jonathan claims are the “survivors of [the General’s] assault” (Crimp 2004a: 12). As Lichas does in The Trachiniae, he tells her a fabricated story according to which the General discovered that Seratawa, their father, was using the city of Giseny “to recruit and to train terrorists” (Crimp 2004a: 13). In his mission to “root out terror” the General “pulverised” the city, but found these children “in a drain” (Crimp 2004a: 13) and asked Jonathan to bring them to his and Amelia’ house as a reminder of “our common – I hope – humanity” (Crimp 2004a: 14). In Scene Three Richard, the journalist who is present in Amelia’s house when Jonathan tells her his fabricated story, comes back to inform her of the

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truth. Unlike Deianira, who is unaware of the fact that she is being lied to, Amelia replies that “of course” the minister is lying – “it’s his job / to lie” (Crimp 2004a: 17). Possibly drunk and perhaps, the text suggests, veering on collapse after having witnessed Jonathan’s distortion of the truth, Richard tells Amelia that the General is so “inflamed” with Laela that he was “prepared to murder not just the father, but the inhabitants of an entire city…” (Crimp 2004a: 18) in order to take possession of her. When Jonathan comes back he is finally forced to admit that the General has massacred an entire population and killed Laela’s ‘terrorist’ father, Seratawa, in order to get hold of the girl. Amelia obtains the truth only after verbally threatening Jonathan and claiming that “love and truth / are the same thing” (Crimp 2004a: 22). In Part Two Amelia begins to design the scheme of inserting a tube with a chemical Robert, a weapons development scientist she met at the university, gave her, inside a pillow and sending it to the General, so that he will feel a desperate need to return home. She asks Jonathan to “be [her] messenger” (Crimp 2004a: 31) and take the pillow to her husband, who must breathe deeply into it. In Scene Two, the last scene in Part Two and a crucial one in the play, James comes back from Africa and tells Amelia that her husband’s body is badly damaged, that he has “an animal” (Crimp 2004a: 40) under his skin. Amelia realizes the consequences of her act and does not recover from the impact. At the same time, she realizes that the social structure she forms part of endorses her husband’s views on the war and on the need to exercise strict control on suspects of terror. Aware that such a society would qualify her own rebelliousness as an unspeakable act of terror, while simultaneously condoning her husband’s immoral conduct at home and abroad, she kills herself. Yet before doing so she performs her crucial act of testimony, which will be fully discussed below – she tells Laela that she refuses to go on living a consumerist life that is dependent on her husband’s status and wealth, which derive from the War on Terror he is waging in Africa. In Part Three the General finally comes back home, his body wrecked by the poison. He is also under the effect of shell-shock and is practically mentally insane. As he is arrested for war crimes, he repeats to the point of exhaustion that he only did what he “was instructed to do” (Crimp 2004a: 60) and that he is not “the criminal / but the sacrifice” (Crimp 2004a: 68). The cameras televise his arrest, using it as a smokescreen to divert the public’s attention from the war that is being waged. The war, however, goes on. The General, guilty as he is, points to the state’s and the government’s complicity with the army in carrying out a task which turns men into murderers. He wants the cameras to record his arrest as he cries out that soldiers are not criminals, but sacrificed human potential. It shall be argued that at this point Crimp introduces an instance of male collapse in

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order to denounce the distortion that the late capitalist state enacts on male subjectivities in order to transform men into unempathic soldiers. The play concludes with Laela reading an extract from Hesiod’s Works and Days (ca. 700) which prophesizes doom. Because the play was modified during rehearsals when Luc Bondy directed it for the Young Vic Theatre in London, there are two versions of Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender. This book takes the published version, published in 2004 by Faber, as the reference for page numbers unless otherwise indicated. The unpublished version – the one that includes the modifications from Bondy’s rehearsals – presents two main differences with respect to the published one. Whereas in the published version the Housekeeper (Rachel), the Physiotherapist (Cathy) and the Beautician (Nicola) are identified as ‘Housekeeper’, ‘Physiotherapist’ and ‘Beautician’ respectively, in the unpublished version they are simply identified by the numbers 1, 2 and 3. Identifying them by numbers seems like a more coherent option if one bears in mind Crimp’s intention throughout the play to empty these characters of subjective traits. He presents them as depoliticized beings who simply perform the roles they are ordained, unquestioningly partaking of the values of consumerism and bent on teaching Amelia and Laela to behave like the wives of a man of status by making them concentrate on their bodies and appearance. The second main difference between the Faber edition on which this study is based and the unpublished version has to do with the ending. The play, as noted above, ends with the General being arrested for war crimes and Laela reading from Hesiod’s Works and Days. In the earlier, published version, the Physiotherapist helps Laela read, prompting her lines. In Bondy’s version, it is Laela herself who has finally learned to read and uses literature in order to convey an urgent political message.⁴¹ Laela’s reading the whole text by herself and without difficulty means that spectators are more able to focus on the meaning of the lines in relation to the whole play. In Bondy’s version James helps Laela utter one line, which refers to the troubled relationship between sons and fathers and is therefore specifically pertinent to his own situation – “Father will not respect son” (Crimp 2004b: 76), says Laela, to which James adds that son will therefore “…despise his father” (Crimp 2004b: 76).

 At the course on playwriting Crimp taught at La Garrotxa, Spain, which was part of the Summer Seminar ‘Obrador d’Estiu’ that the Sala Beckett organizes annually and ran from 7– 15 July 2007, Crimp was asked about the ending of Cruel and Tender as it appears in the Faber edition. He claimed that “the play no longer ends this way; I’ve changed the ending” (Crimp 2007a). It may be inferred from this that Crimp prefers the version which came out of the rehearsals with Bondy, which he may consider to be the definitive one.

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In the published version, the Physiotherapist orders Laela to help “clear up the mess” (Crimp 2004a: 70) – meaning the ‘mess’ brought about by the General’s arrest, and by extension, the psychological damage caused in the household by his and the establishment’s lies and immoral conduct – which Laela rebelliously refuses to do, while a plane – a reference to technology and globalization – flies over the house on its way to the airport. Bondy’s version, which contains fewer stage directions, simply ends with Laela reading from Hesiod as the stage is “drowned out by the music” (Crimp 2004b: 77), which possibly has a more immediate, powerful impact upon the audience.

2.2 Radical Ethics: The Body as Weapon, Insight and Image In Part One, Scene Two, Amelia receives the visit of the journalist and the government minister – Richard and Jonathan, respectively. Whereas Richard helps her find out the truth about her husband’s actions in the war, Jonathan is unambiguously portrayed as a representative of the establishment, with vested interests in the War on Terror the General is fighting. Through an abstract, totalizing use of discourse, Jonathan deprives Laela and her brother of humanity and rights and declares that the killing of their father, Seratawa, cannot be considered a murder because he was a terrorist. By lying to Amelia both regarding her husband’s war actions and regarding Laela, Jonathan subtly yet steadily pushes her towards concentrating on domesticity and consumerism as her main spheres of subjective investment. In Part One, Scene Three, then, she asserts both Seratawa’s personhood and her own. While Jonathan attempts to ‘write’ the patriarchal identity of a depoliticized housewife on Amelia’s body, she confronts him with an ‘image-full’ speech that erases Jonathan’s abstractions and becomes ‘action’. Even if, unlike Jonathan, she has no power or status, she is nonetheless able to ‘write’ her own meanings on Jonathan, eventually forcing him to tell her the truth and even ‘help’ her in her act of retribution against the General. At this point, as indicated by the images of violence and pain in her speech, Amelia experiences her first moment of collapse. Against Jonathan’s lies, she steadily claims that “love and truth” are the “same thing” (Crimp 2004a: 22) and, through a physical, embodied language she seeks for a resistant identity through which she defies the external, mediated roles she is made to play. Such resistant subjectivity finds full expression at

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the end of Part Two, in Amelia’s passing on of her testimony of oppression to Laela.⁴² Amelia’s ‘embodied’, graphic language of collapse or pathos in Part One, Scene Three counteracts the tendency of bio-power to erode the political potential of social relations and re-constitutes the subject as inherently responsible and empathic. Through such language Amelia attempts to rescue the particularities of Laela and her brother; the bodies that Jonathan and the General ignore in their relentless pursuit of ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’. Amelia’s language is generated by the bodily location of feelings. Late capitalist society privileges rationality, verticality and the word. The separation of feelings from their bodily basis, Artaud claimed, has been the mistake of Western civilization from the start, leading to the privileging of verticality and the word over the materiality of bodies. Artaud believed that “every emotion [had] an organic basis” (Artaud 95). Amelia’s language is ‘spatial’ or ‘tangible’, and in this sense Crimp’s play shares in Artaud’s belief, as put forth in Theatre and its Double, that “metaphysics must be made to enter the mind through the body” (Artaud 77).⁴³ Through a language that borders collapse, Amelia seeks access to a primeval bodily identity. In touch with her bodily pulsations, rhythms and drives, and using her body as a field of action, Amelia resists the context that aims to make her ‘docile’ and re-defines herself as a resistant subject instead.

2.2.1 The Cartesian Self: Verticality and the Word In Part One, Scene Three, Richard tells Amelia the truth about Laela’s and his brother’s identities – they are not “‘victims’ – ‘survivors’”, but the “spoils” (Crimp 2004a: 17) of war, the General’s sexual and human trophies. As has been mentioned, Crimp presents Richard as being drunk, thus introducing a passing instance of male collapse – Richard is presumably affected by the manipulation of truth and the physical violence which is taking place around  In an interview with Sierz for The Theatre of Martin Crimp, Crimp argues that he sees Amelia as being “strong and direct” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 107).  In “Theatre and Psychoanalysis: Or Jung on Martin Crimp’s Stage: ‘100 Words’”, Solange Ayache also traces the correspondences between Crimp’s theatre and Artaud. Ayache focuses on Crimp’s use of Concrete Poetry in scenario 11 of Attempts on her Life, entitled “Untitled (100) Words”, and claims that Crimp’s aim is to “reactivate a verbal theatre” and to “invent a dramatic language of the poetic sort: a theatre based on the necessity to create different, almost artaudian, missions for words (chosen for their ‘vibratory’ potential), a theatre emerging from the music of the signifiers, ultimately a theatre of voices by which he manages to escape the ethical and aesthetic aporia postmodernism walled itself in” (Ayache 7).

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him. When Jonathan arrives and Amelia directly confronts him, asking him “who exactly” (Crimp 2004a: 20) the siblings are, he claims that he is not “in a position to say” (Crimp 2004a: 20). As opposed to Jonathan’s, Amelia’s language immediately pulls away from abstraction towards singularization and empathy so that the children can be fleshed out and made concrete – “But presumably they have names” (Crimp 2004a: 20), she insists. The more Jonathan becomes elusive, the more Amelia demands he be specific. Thus she asks about the children’s parents as signs of their humanity. Yet Jonathan evasively claims that they “don’t have papers”, so “nothing at this stage can be confirmed” (Crimp 2004a: 20). Deprived of names, of parents, and of papers, the children’s bodies are transformed into zoè, mere animal bodies instead of resistant political bodies, bíos. Jonathan’s is a closed-off body based on property and possession. He embodies the smooth, finished, strictly delimited, radically individualistic Cartesian body that privileges rationality and the word. However, as Amelia shows, intelligence and resilience have to do with the corporeal. In Bodies of Thought, Burkitt points out that the “closed and rationalized Cartesian body is […] severed from its sensual connections with the world and its collective associations with other beings” (Burkitt 49). And indeed, Jonathan appears as utterly disconnected from the bodies of the children.⁴⁴ The Western tradition of privileging the word over the specificity of matter is the result of the project of colonization that started in the sixteenth century and of which contemporary society, as it comes to Amelia in the figure of the government minister, is the epitome. Such “subordination of matter to the training and perception of the mind” took place in parallel to the “taming of nature in order to bring about a domination of natural wilderness and social reality [which] culminated in the control and subordination of the external societal environment by the West” (Turner 13). Significantly, Jonathan’s abstract, clichéd use of discourse denies the children’s humanity by arguing that their father was not ‘murdered’ because this verb does not apply to terrorists: Jonathan Richard Jonathan

Their parents – I’ve explained this – are dead. Murdered. What?

 In Part One, Scene Two, Jonathan describes the murder of children through images of terrifying violence. As he puts it to Amelia, the General has “asked [him] to bring these children who couldn’t stand up for blood – who were slipping, Amelia, in that drain, barefoot on the blood, and on the pulverized bone of their brothers and sisters […] to this house” (Crimp 2004a: 14). Yet, it turns out that he is a false witness, and he is just using these images in order to fabricate a lie for Amelia.

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Richard Jonathan

Their parents have been / murdered. Their parents have not been ‘murdered,’ Richard – please grow up, please grow up – Seratawa was / a terrorist. (Crimp 2004a: 20; emphasis original)

By being reduced to concepts or ideas, the particular bodies of individuals enter a hierarchy in which they are assigned different degrees of importance. This sense of order and logic is achieved at the expense of these bodies’ concrete characteristics, their history and their specific context. This tendency towards mastery through discourse in Western society, which Jonathan epitomizes, has progressively developed a mind/body dualism whereby discourse and the norm prevail over the specific needs and claims of particular bodies. It is this dualism Crimp opposes through Amelia’s collapsing language. In his critique of Western rationality, Adorno claims that Western rationality, indeed, does not “work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method” (Adorno 157); to the Enlightenment, “that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature” (Adorno 160). In a sense, then, from the perspective of instrumental rationality, Amelia produces ‘literature’, specifically a ‘literature of the body’. It stands in fundamental opposition to Jonathan’s rationalist discourse which, by applying the norm, the law, seeks to homogenize individuals and to erode their resistant character, transforming them into docile entities. According to Jonathan’s ‘categorial’ (Bauman 2008: 87) use of reason, it is the ‘category’ of the dead that is important, not their death in itself. Because Seratawa is a ‘terrorist’, his death cannot be categorized as murder. Bauman, alerting like Reyes Mate alerting of the seeds for barbarism latent in Western instrumental rationality, claims Nazism’s singularity is that it represents a “categorial” (Bauman 2008: 87; emphasis original) type of murder. In Nazism, “men, women, and children were exterminated for having been assigned to a category of beings that was meant to be exterminated” (Bauman 2008: 87). The Holocaust, indeed, revealed the “limits (or limitlessness?) of the sovereign power of exclusion” (Bauman 2008: 85), the limits of the categorial kind of thought and discourse Jonathan embodies. The type of body that lurks behind Jonathan’s lies is a ‘normalized’ body that is submitted to a hierarchy of power – the type of body which, historically, led to the massacre of the Holocaust.

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2.2.2 Amelia’s ‘Embodied’ Tongue The rationalist, categorial use of discourse has contributed to certain collectives being dehumanized so that their annihilation may become feasible. Thus, in Part One, Scene Three, in what is arguably her first moment of collapse, Amelia presents Jonathan with the reality of a body in pain, thus reinstating the bodies and subjectivities that ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ erase. The barely controlled cadence of her speech, opposing Jonathan’s abstract language through waves of growing intensity, attests to the fact that Amelia is beginning to collapse. This moment is a crucial turning point in the play, since Amelia begins to define her body as one that is in touch with its essential, resistant drives of love, empathy and responsibility: If you call me distressed Jonathan one more time or use my name Jonathan one more time tonight I won’t scream no what I will in fact do is stuff your mouth with barbed wire. Because forgive me but I’m starting to find the way you speak an atrocity which makes cutting a man’s heart out seem almost humane. If you have something to say about that child and my husband say it. But don’t and I repeat don’t think you can what? ‘spare my feelings?’ because I am not a child and do not expect to be treated like a child in my own house – is that clear? (Crimp 2004a: 21– 2)

In order to oppose the violence of Jonathan’s symbolic attacks against her and the African children’s integrity, Amelia uses violent bodily images that materialize her resistance. The more Jonathan manipulates discourse and lies to her, the more violent her images become. Jonathan creates the fiction that Amelia has to be shielded from the truth because the news of what her husband has done would make her “distressed” (Crimp 2004a: 21). He perpetuates the fantasy that women need to be protected from men’s different, unrestrained sexuality

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and attempts to transform Amelia into a docile body, which is the identity he needs her to adopt so that the atrocities in Africa may continue. Jonathan, indeed, embodies the violence of what Hardt and Negri (2006), as well as Baudrillard, call the contemporary ‘Empire’. As Baudrillard puts it, the “violence of Empire” consists in having the “defeated peoples […] exiled into the mirrors, from where they are condemned to reflect the image of the conquerors” (Baudrillard 2003: 63). These “defeated peoples”, Baudrillard adds, “one day […] begin to look less and less like their conquerors, and in the end they smash the mirrors and attack the Empire” (Baudrillard 2003: 63). This is arguably what Amelia eventually does through her ‘terrorist’ act – her poisoning of the General – and what she already begins to do in this scene through language alone. By tapping into an identity based on radical truth and honesty, Amelia postulates her difference from Jonathan and begins to “smash the mirrors” (Baudrillard 2003: 63) of domination through translating Jonathan’s symbolic violence into concrete images. By translating Jonathan’ symbolic violence into its equivalent physical pain – “stuff[ing] your mouth with barbed wire”, “cutting a man’s heart out” – she attempts to make him share part of the pain he forces her to experience. Amelia challenges Jonathan’s Cartesian, individualistic understanding of the body. She defies the consumerist notion that bodies are completely self-enclosed entities, whose ability to empathize ends at the confines of their outer limits. Instead, Amelia appeals to a radical ethics of the body that might assert the importance of the concrete and the physical, which late capitalist ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ suppress as part of a logic of mastery. The play shows that a system that places no restrictions on market interests creates duplicitous subjects both in the political and in the personal terrain. In this sense, the sexism – or patriarchal oppression – that characterizes Jonathan’s and the General’s relationships with their wives is represented as a consequence of the larger late capitalist system, which encourages vanity and self-aggrandizement. The General channels his narcissism through the high status his position within the hierarchy of the army affords him, and keeping an African mistress increases his sense of omnipotence. For her part, Amelia is expected to channel her own narcissism through investing in her body and becoming a consumer. In the late capitalist context the female body is considered, as Baudrillard puts it in “The Finest Consumer Object: The Body”, both “capital and fetish” (Baudrillard 2005: 277). Crimp makes such objectification of the body visible throughout the play by presenting Amelia and Laela as accompanied by a Beautician, a Housekeeper and a Physiotherapist. Amelia’s social training is particularly foregrounded in Part Two, Scene Two, when the Beautician zips up her dress:

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Hurry up with this zip can’t you? It’s tight. It’s meant to be tight – it’s a / tight dress. […] You’re hurting me – be careful. (Crimp 2004a: 34)

Foucault understands the body in contemporary society as a surface upon which a series of “micro-powers” (Foucault 2005: 101) are strategically applied, and this is what the constant, nagging presence of the Beautician, the Physiotherapist and the Housekeeper clearly dramatizes. According to Foucault, “the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks […] to emit signs” (Foucault 2005: 100). The Beautician, the Physiotherapist and the Housekeeper represent the disciplinary control that is exerted on the body, particularly the female body, in societies of control, first and foremost through the media. In a capitalist society, as Baudrillard puts it, “the general status of private property applies also to the body, to the way we operate socially with it” (Baudrillard 2005: 277). Crimp thus portrays, through these figures, the social forms of control that act upon the female body in order to discipline it and make it marketable. Through these nagging presences, which work like Amelia’s cumbersome second skin, Crimp dramatizes what Foucault terms “the political investment of the body” (Foucault 2005: 100). As the wife of a man of status, Amelia is dependent on her husband’s living standard, and domesticity, motherhood and the body are the sole areas where she is supposed to invest her narcissism. Yet, at the same time, having no status besides that of being the wife of a powerful man, the body is all that Amelia has. This leads her to focus on her body as a source of resistance. Thus, the more Jonathan pushes Amelia towards adopting the docile identities that would favour his interests, the more Amelia presents herself as resistant. In the rest of her speech to Jonathan in Part One, Scene Three, she presents her body as sensuous, a body which is impermeable to pain, whereby she escapes Jonathan’s attempts to fix her identity as that of a docile woman: You think it’s a secret that my husband has other women? You think he doesn’t tell me about them? Oh yes – oh yes – he tells me about them – their names the colour of their hair – because he knows I’d rather be told even if being told is and it is

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I can promise you that it is like having my face sprayed with acid. When I slept with you Jonathan I told him the same evening and after he’d punched his fist through the bathroom wall he made me put on my red dress and took me dancing. Whereas – let me guess – you and Kitty? – was that Kitty on the phone? – yes? – Kitty? – Kitty and yourself – poor little Kitty has never been told, has she, even though her ignorance is precisely what you despise about her – am I right? Slight pause. You see Jonathan I happen to believe that love and truth are the same thing. (Crimp 2004a: 22)

Amelia takes away Jonathan’s fantasies of male superiority – the fantasies which have led him to ‘write’ Amelia as a “child” (Crimp 2004a: 22) who must remain unaware of the men’s exploits, both sexual and military. She debunks his fantasy that he and other government officials like the General enjoy a privileged circle of male bonding, in relation to which the women they sleep with are cast as Others. It is now Jonathan who is cast as both an outsider and voyeur to Amelia’s and the General’s pact to tell one another about their conquests. Kitty, Jonathan’s wife, who is despised for her ignorance regarding her husband’s sexual conquests, is a female ‘ghost’ that haunts Amelia.⁴⁵ She is and is not Amelia; she is Amelia’s Other, whom she resists becoming. In order to recover both her own and Kitty’s personhood, Amelia re-experiences the masochistic pleasure of being told by her husband about his infidelities right in front of Jonathan, to the point that she becomes oblivious to the fact that Jonathan is there – “Oh yes – oh yes – he tells me about them – their names – the colour of their

 Interestingly, Crimp uses the diminutive name ‘Kitty’, which calls attention to itself through repetition, creating a satiric effect. He may have been inspired by Pinter’s use of a similar mannerism in Ashes to Ashes, also in order to produce a similar effect. At the course he taught at La Garrotxa (8 – 9 July 2007), Crimp pointed to Pinter’s insistent repetition of the alliterative phrase “Kim and the kids” in Ashes to Ashes (Pinter 55), which, according to him, Pinter must have used in order to satirically draw attention to a picture of domestic infidelity (Crimp 2007a).

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hair” – until Jonathan becomes, as he puts it, “appal[led]” by her “indiscretion” (Crimp 2004a: 22). Amelia’s is a performative speech, a speech through which she takes her body away from Jonathan’s power net by offering a visual image of a man of status ‘dancing around’ his wife’s sexuality – as conveyed by her undulating red dress. By so doing, Amelia slowly recovers the command of her identity, and ‘erases’ Jonathan’s duplicitous text with the powerful reality of her body, which escapes male definitions and control. She tells Jonathan that she can endure being told about her husband’s sexual conquests, which to her is like having her “face sprayed with acid” (Crimp 2004a: 22). If she can endure the pain of acid on her face, which would render her faceless, she can no doubt resist Jonathan’s attempts to ‘write’ on her body and change her identity, similarly an attempt to render her ‘faceless’. When Amelia’s social identity is eroded, she takes refuge in new expressions of the self, such as masochism and violence, in an attempt to uphold the integrity of the self. Amelia’s language is embodied because it retains the two basic bodily pulls of eroticism and violence, pleasure and pain, simultaneously. It is the language of collapse, which paradoxically helps her survive and to escape the establishment’s encoding of her body as both a docile, domestic female body and a consumer object. Such language, mixing as it does erotic pleasure and violence, prefigures the masochistic identity she will begin to develop as oppression increases. Specifically, it anticipates her act of clenching her fist around broken glass at the end of Part Two.

2.3 Of Shamans and Cyborgs: From Bodies of Mastery to Bodies of Need When in Part Two, Scene One, Amelia decides to send the General the chemical Robert gives her, she is not fully in control of the effects it will have on the General’s body but she knows it can be highly destructive. Amelia sends the General a white pillow with the chemical inside and tells Jonathan he must breathe hard into it “until / he feels something smooth and hard inside the white pillow / snap” (Crimp 2004a: 32). In Part Two, Scene One, then, Amelia carries out a violent act that can be considered to be her second moment of collapse in the play since, as has been explained, Amelia already begins to adopt a ‘terrorist’ identity and to collapse in Part One, Scene Three, as she defends her body and identity through a bodily language of pathos from the symbolic attacks of Jonathan’s lies and treatment of her.

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As mentioned earlier, Amelia’s act of violence can be read as a terrorist act, that is, as a violent act that uses the technology of the establishment against the establishment, as happened in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which Americantrained Middle Eastern pilots aimed American planes at the Twin Towers. Her act of violence also symbolically forces the establishment to experience the highly destructive effects of its own ‘spectacular’ yet unequal technological and economic development, in an attempt to bring about its collapse. Significantly, Cruel and Tender was in part inspired by Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, a work that discusses the impact of the 9/11 attacks against the Twin Towers. As Sierz puts it, “One of the books [Crimp] read while writing Cruel and Tender was Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, about the events of 9/11” (Sierz 2005b). Baudrilard’s interpretation of the 9/11 attacks and his discussion of the complex set of emotions which led to the event certainly seems to lie behind Crimp’s portrait of Amelia. Amelia, it shall be argued, reacts with ‘terrorist violence’ to the violence of the state. Kemp points out that during rehearsals Crimp had Baudrillard’s work in mind and was “keen to include some passages […] particularly the material about how the tools of the West were turned against the West, which echoes the original myth’s idea that the Centaur gets his revenge when his blood-soaked cloak is used against Hercules” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 207). As is the case with terrorism, she aims to provoke a radical change in the state of things. Through her second moment of collapse, Amelia uses the chemical in order to ‘write’ what she perceives to be her society’s inherent contradiction – the dissociation between progress and ethics – on her husband’s body. Thus, through the chemical, she turns her husband’s body into that of a technological monster, the cyborg. The way in which the General is described as he comes back home, however, alternatively evokes the figure of the cyborg and that of a body in need. Amelia, indeed, ultimately seeks to ‘write’ a different understanding of subjectivity on the body of her husband. Specifically, as shall be seen, she seeks to render his soldier’s body frail and dependent, as well as to force him to redefine his relationship of domination to the bodies of others. She uses the act of violence with a utopian aim, and in order to turn her husband into an empathic body. As he comes back home, the General is condemned to experience a relentless sense of pain, and he progressively becomes a porous body, dependent on the care and reassurance of others. From this perspective, her violent act is, paradoxically, a way to ‘invoke’ a series of social values which are marginalized or directly absent from her culture.

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2.3.1 Invocation and Ritual In Part Two, Scene One, represents Amelia’s descent into ‘madness’, her mental breakdown, in the form of ritual and magic in order to express the notion that she is, indeed, breaking through socially mediated boundaries and taboos and seeking “nature” (Adorno 216). Through collapse, Amelia gets back in touch with a primitive dimension of the body and invokes the corporeal presence of the General. Amelia says that, according to Robert, the chemical, his “baby” (Crimp 2004a: 30), would make the General immediately yearn for the security of home and, therefore, would make him long to come back to her: But the thing is what I’m trying to say is is on that day at the facility he gave me this She produces a glass tube the size of a pen-top. which he said was his ‘baby’. He told me that this whatever it is chemical that this chemical his baby took the will to fight out of a soldier by making the soldier yearn for a safe place making him feel the need of a safe place an absolute need for the love and the reassurance of the person he was closest to. Humane was the word he used to describe his baby. (Crimp 2004a: 29 – 30)

Robert used the words “baby” and “humane” (Crimp 2004a: 30) to refer to the chemical. His words help convey the notion that Amelia is invoking, through ritual and magic, precisely those values which Robert projected onto the chemical, because they are absent in her society – the values of care, mutual identification, the desire to protect the Other, the desire to nourish or to think of the future and beyond the self. Amelia’s invocation thus acquires the meanings Robert associated with the chemical. Her words suggest she desires to turn her husband’s body into that of a baby, that is, into a ‘pure’ body, undistorted by social mechanisms. As he comes back home in Part Three, the General relies on prostheses to lengthen his life, as suggested by the long list of items that the Housekeeper pre-

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pares for his reception and by the stage directions themselves: “Beautician has wheeled the trolley over to the General, knelt to pull down his jogging-pants, revealing a urine-bag strapped to his leg” (Crimp 2004a: 52). At this point in the play Crimp’s imagined monster – the cyborg, the inorganic, technological monster – enters the picture. As opposed to the General, and as the play progresses, Amelia becomes an organic ‘monster’, whose different collapses set her in touch with a primeval, bodily dimension of herself. The General, on the other hand, is rendered a technological monster through the chemical, a cyborg which expresses the divorce between progress and ethics.⁴⁶ In Part Two, Scene Two, James describes the General as a monstrous figure with “eyes like a cat in the sun” (Crimp 2004a: 40) who has, as he himself puts it, “been breathing in uranium” (Crimp 2004a: 58).⁴⁷ Through the chemical/potion, Amelia subversively allows for the identity which lies latent within the culturally constructed body of the contemporary ‘full man’ or soldier – that of the cyborg – to emerge. In Donna J. Haraway’s words, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 50). The cyborg is, indeed, the unconscious of the late capitalist envisioning of progress in terms of an exclusivist, Western technological utopia alone, and it “contains on its surface and in its fundamental structure the multiple fears and desires of a culture caught in the process of transforma-

 In her article “The Private and the Public Wars: A Play by Martin Crimp”, Angelaki claims that “Amelia and the General are each other’s antagonists. Amelia’s onstage composure and grace is directly contrastable with the General’s aggression and brutality and the audience is offered two diametrically different stage images” (Angelaki 2006: 35). Angelaki analyzes the play from a phenomenological perspective and focuses on how Crimp conveys in spatial, performative terms the war Amelia fights against Laela and the General in her home. Departing from Stanton Garner’s notion that “the worlds that language succeeds in generating on stage are equally visible as those that are presented by means of set design” (Angelaki 2006: 35), Angelaki analyzes Amelia’s speeches and compares them to those of the General, discussing the ways in which Crimp conveys their antagonism through language.  Through the reference to uranium Crimp’s play opens itself to a variety of significations which are of crucial relevance to contemporary audiences. It has recently been discovered that many US soldiers, after returning from fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan, began to suffer from migraines and serious health problems, while some of the children they had after returning from the war had malformations. This coincided with an increase in the number of cancers among the Iraqi population, particularly in those areas where the Gulf War was fought. It has recently been proved that these phenomena may be related to the presence of depleted uranium in explosives used to attack tanks (Johnson). Yet the Pentagon claims that until depleted uranium is proven to be seriously damaging the US will not stop using it, since the chemical is highly effective in destroying enemy tanks.

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tion” (González 58). Such transformation has to do with the rapid spread of late capitalism and technology. Discussing the increasingly dominant role of cybernetics in contemporary society, Haraway argues that we are witnessing an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism: we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system […] [a] transition from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination. (Haraway 53)

Amelia’s act thus reveals the late capitalist unconscious to be one which would like to produce identities like that of the ‘man-machine’. The term ‘cyborg’ expresses the dystopian fear that technology be used for unethical purposes; it embodies the nightmare that technology may escape our control and that we may become its servants. As Haraway explains, the term was first used specifically in order to refer to those kinds of entities that became historically possible around World War II and just after. The cyborg is intimately involved in histories of militarization, of specific research projects with ties to psychiatry and communications theory, behavioral research and psychopharmacological research, theories of information and information processing. It is essential that the cyborg is seen to emerge out of such a specific matrix. The cyborg is not ‘born’ but it does have a matrix! (qtd. in Mirowski 5)

Haraway sees in the cyborg, the human-machine, the potential for liberating possibilities, since even if it signifies a loss of human characteristics, the body of the cyborg is a site where the traditional boundaries between nature and culture, male and female, organic and inorganic are undone. The cyborg is a hybrid being that escapes the traditional dichotomies upon which patriarchal and colonial dominations have been built. Crimp’s portrayal of the cyborg, however, is not liberating; rather, as James puts it, the General is not even human. Which is why when he talks to me – when he says ‘It’s going dark: give me your hand’ – when he says ‘Help me, help me, give me your fucking hand’ there is no way I am going to let this person – no – sorry – thing – no way I am going to let this thing with the pin-point fucking eyes that used to be my dad even touch me. (Crimp 2004a: 40; emphasis original)

As Crimp himself has explained, the chemical Amelia sends the General “is […] one of the organophosphates, which were banned by the Geneva Convention, although countries are still developing them” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 108). Amelia’s violent act inscribes on the body of her husband the contradiction between prog-

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ress and ethics that structures contemporary society. Haraway adds, crucially, that “the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (Haraway 51). Ultimately, the cyborg embodies a cultural nightmare of chemistry and technology applied to war with a view to enhancing humanity’s destructive potential. Amelia thus inscribes on her husband’s body what she feels is the essential duality of the human being and of history – the dissociation between ‘progress’ and ethics that both characterizes history and exists within each particular human being. As Crimp himself has put it, “the human body contains both heaven and hell” (Crimp 2007b).⁴⁸ The cyborg embodies the fear of technology when placed at the service of war. It represents the risk that the systematic relegation of humane values may in the long run cause the human species to mutate, to learn to exist without its humane traits. Most crucially, it gives voice to the fear that individuals may not experience the suppression of humane values and the species’s subsequent mutation as a loss, that is, as leaving behind any significant ‘scar’, mark, or trauma. This is what Crimp seeks to denounce through collapse and through the alternatives collapse itself makes visible.

2.3.2 A Utopia of Mutual Dependency As already noted, through her violent act Amelia also aims to write her desire for an alternative subjectivity on the General’s body, making it deeply organic and malleable again, needy and dependent like a child. Indeed, violence also produces a subjective change in the General – he is rendered vulnerable and dependent, with no clearly marked boundaries between himself and other subjects. Through her act of violence, Amelia ‘writes’ on her husband’s body a series of values her society dismisses in its relentless march towards ‘progress’. The very graphic descriptions of the General’s body as he comes back home also suggest that Amelia has set limits to the General’s self-aggrandized subjectivity, forcing him to experience himself as finite, fragile, and vulnerable. He can barely take care of himself and is at the mercy of the other members of the household to even carry out his essential bodily functions. It is implied that the chemical, which renders the General vulnerable and dependent, suddenly makes him re-

 Crimp made this statement in an e-mail conversation, and in relation to Amelia’s development of a ‘terrorist’ identity. As he put it, “I think it is José Saramago in one of his novels who talks about the human body as ‘containing both heaven and hell’. I like this idea because it’s materialist and metaphysical at the same time. A bit like theatre in fact…” (Crimp 2007b).

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alize the destructive effects of the war. He thus returns home in a shell-shocked state of collapse. Through Amelia’s violent act against the body of her oppressor, Amelia attempts to make visible a series of utopian, alternative values that late capitalist society alienates its individuals from. Amelia poisons her husband in order to render him ‘needy’ and ‘dependent’ on home like a “baby” (Crimp 2004a: 30). She aims to take “the will to fight” (Crimp 2004a: 30) out of him, making him humane and thus undoing the distortion effected on his identity as he was turned into a soldier. In the metaphors Amelia uses when she talks about the poison, referring to it as a “baby” (Crimp 2004a: 30), or in her description of the General pushing his face into the pillow, ‘kissing’ it, there is a strong undercurrent of feminization. Amelia destroys the General’s skin and previously coordinated anatomy and, by rendering his bodily limits fuzzy, makes him aware of his essential need to bond with others in terms of mutual dependency, of his essential vulnerability and sameness with any other human being. The previously unempathic body of the soldier, strictly delimited, ‘private’ and individual, becomes permeable. Its outer physical limits, which were also the limits of the General’s concerns, are now no longer clear – he becomes a “grotesque body” (Bakhtin 2005: 91).⁴⁹ As Bakhtin puts it, the ‘grotesque body’ cancels out the distinction between self and Other, inside and outside, because it naturally tends towards the Other. The contemporary, late capitalist body is “self-sufficient and speaks in its name alone. All that happens within it concerns it alone, that is, only the individual, closed sphere. All actions and events are interpreted on the level of a single, individual life. They are enclosed within the limits of the same body, limits that are the absolute beginning and end and can never meet” (Bakhtin 2005: 93 – 5). In contrast, the grotesque body

 Amelia’s act of poisoning her husband – a “high intensity”, almost “sacrificial” act (Baudrillard 2003: 98) – suggests the ancient Greek ritual of sparagnos, practiced by the women who participated in rituals in honour of the god Dionysus. In Euripides’s The Bacchae (ca. 405BC), the women tear apart the body of King Pentheus of Thebes as a punishment for his having opposed the god. As Zeitlin explains, “in this primitive regression, women undo the body; its structures cannot hold, its limbs are unbound, and the masculine self, originally so intent on opposing himself to anything feminine, is fragmented and flies apart” (Zeitlin 352). Zeitlin argues that the female body, in Greek Dionysian rituals, is understood as being “open to the breeze that darts through the womb in pregnancy as well as to the torments of eros” (Zeitlin 351). It is represented as a body “permanently at odds with itself, subject to a congenital dissonance between inside and outside” (Zeitlin 351). Such an act, in the case of Amelia, is no longer physical but, given the context of globalization in which the play is set, it is performed through a chemical and effected from a distance.

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ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and complete phenomenon. The grotesque image displays not only the outward but also the inner features of the body: blood, bowels, heart and other organs. The outwards and inwards features are often merged into one. […] [It] never presents an individual body; the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception. (Bakhtin 2005: 93)

The General’s poisoned body is a disordered, ‘grotesque’ body, which seems to merge with everything he touches. Wounded and bleeding, it ruins the objects it comes into contact with, blurring the distinction between inside and outside, as though objects sprouted from it. Crimp deliberately portrays the General’s body as a fluid surface. The sick, disordered body is actually grotesque by definition, because it is dependent and unsettles the distinction between inside and outside. Part Three opens with the Housekeeper and the Beautician describing the long list of objects the General now needs for his survival. Crimp conveys the General’s dependency on both the Housekeeper and the Beautician, whom he needs for his most intimate daily routines, through the long list of instruments: There’s a new object in the room: a small stainless-steel trolley containing items (cotton-wool pads, bottle of alcohol, medication, towels, thermometer, plastic gloves, etc.) to care for an invalid. […] Housekeeper Toothbrush. Hairbrush. The bed. The pillow. Nightdress under the pillow – pure silk – ruined. Oh, and underwear. The underwear drawer. Edge of the kitchen table. Wall of the passageway. (Crimp 2004a: 47– 8)

In a similar manner, those he has killed now become part of the General’s identity, as the General experiences “infinit[e]” (Crimp 2004a: 53) waves of pain in his own body, as though he had suddenly been forced to feel for the bodies he has killed and not taken responsibility for. By poisoning him, as already noted, Amelia returns the General to the imperatives of the body; she makes him aware of the infinity of suffering the war has entailed, as though, beyond the limits of his own anatomical body, he carried in himself the pain of those he has maimed or killed:

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The General experiences an intense pain which momentarily stops him speaking. To master the pain he counts back in sevens: One hundred and three…ninety-six…eighty-nine…eighty-two… General? Keep back – don’t touch him. seventy-five…sixty-eight…(Pain eases.) sixty-one…and so on… (Smiles.) to infinity. (Crimp 2004a: 53)

The General has, as James puts it, “wiped people off this earth like a teacher rubbing out equations. [He has] stacked up bodies like bags of cement” (Crimp 2004a: 57). Now the bursts of pain he repeatedly undergoes make him acutely conscious – he never faints – of the suffering caused by war as it comes to bear on the torn, disfigured body of the soldier. Amelia’s poisoning of the General suggests what Agamben, by reference to Jean Améry, terms the “ethics of resentment” (Agamben 100) or of retribution, which must necessarily characterize the demand for ethics in the post-Holocaust context. It is not enough, Crimp suggests, that the General, like those who are complicit in war crimes, may be sorry for what he has done – he has to repent, and to experience repentance means wishing, every moment of his life, that those killings had never happened. The crime must “become a moral reality for the criminal”; he cannot simply claim he ‘repents’ through a convincing narrative, but he must be “swept into the truth of his atrocity” (Améry qtd. in Agamben 100), leading to a necessary inversion of values. Like the 9/11 attacks against the Twin Towers, Amelia seizes on a “fragility”, a “fracture and disarray” at the heart of “power itself” (Baudrillard 2003: 74). According to Baudrillard, the Twin Towers also collapsed by their own hand, that is, because of the system’s own internal failures. Like the General, the superpower the 9/11 terrorist acts attacked had become vulnerable at a single point – as Baudrillard puts it, “the more concentrated the system [or ‘Empire’] becomes globally, ultimately forming one single network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point” (Baudrillard 2003: 8). It was vulnerable because it is unfair, and hence, open to the possibility of reactive violence. According to Baudrillard, this is “the truth” (2003: 74) of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is also the truth of Amelia’s act. According to Baudrillard, it was because the 9/11 attacks managed to convey this highly symbolic significance – that the system itself had almost committed suicide due to its own internal failures and excess – that they represented a true “setback for globalization itself” (Baudrillard 2003: 3). And indeed, like the late capitalist system itself, the General approached omnipotence, placed himself “in the position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy)” (Baudrillard 2003: 7) and he

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thus generated the contrary effect – he became “suicidal, and declared war on itself” (Baudrillard 2003: 7). Crucially, because Amelia wished for the General’s destruction, she will not be able to feel any remorse. She is not surprised when she discovers the effects of the chemical. Amelia arguably exemplifies the secret wish of (some) Western individuals to see the tyrannical Western superpowers destroyed, which they saw materialize through the destruction of the Towers – the “prodigious jubilation at seeing this global, [unempathic] superpower destroyed – better, at seeing it, in a sense, destroying itself, committing suicide in a blaze of glory” (Baudrillard 2003: 5). Baudrillard adds, For it is that superpower which, by its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world, and hence that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwells in all of us. The fact that we [like Amelia] have dreamt of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it – because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree – is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. […] At a pinch, we can say that they [Amelia] did it, but we wished for it. If this is not taken into account, the event loses any symbolic dimension. (Baudrillard 2003: 5; emphases original)

The 9/11 attacks are a symbol of how the unequal policies of late capitalism generate violence and rebellion in the individual; a symbol of how the individual’s potential for love and empathy can metamorphose into violence and aggression if the conditions for empathy to develop do not exist. Through its technological superiority, the West exerts a sophisticated yet relentless violence upon Eastern and Third World countries, controlling market prices and policies, in order to maintain the hegemonic world order. Amelia’s act, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, attempts to challenge the hard core of Western policies, the closed-off, unempathic, individualistic body of the General/West, by reminding it of its own fragility, materiality and humanity. On 9/11, the closed-off body of the West was confronted with its Other, the ‘terrorist’, violent ‘monster’. Yet this monster was no more than its own, unacknowledged offspring – the angry, violent child its own policies had engendered. The chemical, it is implied, divests the General of the socially mediated discourses which had so far constituted his male, unempathic identity – which had constituted him as a soldier. Thus, his essentially empathic subjectivity, his spontaneous need to empathize and identify with the Other, is now allowed to surface. Interestingly, Crimp also uses the General’s madness as a state of mental undoing which brings to the surface the subject’s primeval pulls, once the social veneer of discourses that constitute bodies as sealed-off properties is torn apart. Through the fissures and cracks in the body of ‘the soldier’ a desire to connect

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emerges, a reminder of the essentially moral, responsible structure of subjectivity. The General’s breakdown reveals how the natural process of connection with, and responsibility towards, other bodies is dramatically prevented from developing in the context of the War on Terror. Madness is seen as a force that accelerates the dissolution of the discourses of subjectification which have trained upon the body of the ‘soldier’. Crimp has argued that in Sophocles’s The Trachiniae, “when Herakles is brought in, injured, the verse goes completely mad. Odd little onomatopoeic phrases express his distress” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 106). It was Sophocles’s portrayal of Herakles that inspired Crimp’s own portrayal of the General’s madness. Crimp presents the General, as the stage directions indicate, as “half speaking, half singing” (Crimp 2004a: 50).Speaking in fragments, he keeps fighting against his decomposing mind, trying to note everything down in a diary, and talking about a tight schedule he has to adhere to. He fears there are not “enough helicopters” (Crimp 2004a: 51) to help the wounded soldiers. Finally, when he is arrested for war-crimes, he keeps repeating, to the point of collapse, that he is not “the criminal” (Crimp 2004a: 68), but “the sacrifice” (Crimp 2004a: 68), with the mental lucidity afforded by madness. Made acutely aware of social contradictions by madness, in Part Three the General also reveals something about himself which had been kept repressed – he insistently talks about an African “son” (Crimp 2004a: 59) he left in the war. James, astonished, claims he is the General’s only ‘natural’ son. Once Amelia has committed suicide and before the establishment comes to arrest him, he keeps asking James to tell him when “the attack” (Crimp 2004a: 59) will be, and insists he wants to see his “son”, his “little one” from “Gisenyi” (Crimp 2004a: 59). One possible reading of such deliberately ambiguous lines might be that the boy the General brought home is not Laela’s brother but Laela’s and the General’s son. According to Angelaki, “the General is burdened by the brutal death of a boy who had allegedly developed terrorist activity” (2006: 38). Yet the General’s highly confused state also allows for the inference that the war has finally ‘touched’ him to the point that he feels an urgent need to connect and empathize with others, particularly with those he may have hurt or killed in the war, whom he now feels as part of his own body. His formerly tightly closed-off body seems to be disintegrating, and through its cracks and crevices the General shows his desire for connection with other human beings, his willingness to reach out towards the Other – as he insistently repeats, “but where is the other one? Where is my little one? The one from Gisenyi?” (Crimp 2004a: 59). The text is indeterminate and evocative enough to allow for the reader/spectator to imagine that the General may be referring to a child he may have met in Africa, and whom he would now like to acknowledge as his own child. The Gen-

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eral’s lament – “James – Jamie – my only son” (Crimp 2004a: 59) – suggests he is mourning the fact that he could not ‘father’ more sons, or manage to protect more children. Male collapse, then, it is implied, makes it possible for the General’s primeval subjectivity, constituted by empathy and responsibility for others, to surface.⁵⁰ Through contact with violence and barbarism, by becoming a witness to the horrors of a militarized state as they come to bear on his own body, the General becomes more humane. After witnessing the death of children and other war atrocities, the General reveals a desire to invest relationships with their primeval characteristics of connection and responsibility. It is now James, paradoxically, that seems to have ‘inherited’ his father’s aggressive, unempathic self, and is disconcerted at his father’s demonstrations of tenderness towards him and towards someone he does not know: General James General James

But where is the other one? Where is my little one? The one from Gisenyi. Slight pause. (in disbelief) Fuck off. Where is my little one? Fuck off Dad – that isn’t true. (Crimp 2004a: 59)

The son is now left to cope with the inheritance of the General’s previous violent masculinity. Empathy and responsibility, indeed, seem to pour out of the ‘maladjusted’ crevices of the General’s psyche, torn by madness and collapse. Through male madness Crimp suggests, once more, that empathy is the primary structure of subjectivity, and that it is eroded through social discourses constructed in order to legitimize differential allocations of privilege. The General proves Glover’s assertion that “robot psychology, defensive hardness and distancing, and the assault on moral identity, all have their limits. Sometimes the old, more human psychology breaks through the new hard crust” (Glover 52). The General’s collapse demonstrates that, even in the context of war, the ‘older’ ethical consciousness, the fundamentally responsible and empathic structure of subjectivity, can unexpectedly break through. Ultimately, Amelia’s poisoning of her husband, the violent act she perpetrates upon his body, is an elliptical, indirect form of speech which reveals both her desire to reinstall dependency and care in social and emotional relationships, and also to challenge what she perceives to be a central imbalance in her life – the dissociation between ‘progress’ and ethics that she has been experiencing all along. Through both Amelia’s and the General’s collapse, then,

 Crimp has asserted that “the more I read about soldiers, the more I understood that killing hardly ever comes naturally to people” (Sierz 2006: 107).

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Crimp claims, like Bauman and Lévinas, that empathy and responsibility conform the primary structure of subjectivity, since collapse allows for the deeper needs of the individual to surface. The General’s ‘madness’ reveals, through the cracks and fissures of the cyborg and of the ‘rationalist’ discourse that has so far subjectified him, an essential desire to connect with others. Existential responsibility, the only meaning of subjectivity for Lévinas, “has nothing to do with contractual obligation [or] with my calculation of reciprocal benefit” (Bauman 2005: 183), because a person constitutes her/himself as a subject through the presence of the Other, and hence by becoming responsible. Thus, responsibility being the “existential mode of the human subject”, morality is, by necessity, “the primary structure of inter-subjective relation in its most pristine form” (Bauman 2005: 183; emphasis original). From this point of view, the technological and bureaucratic achievement of modern rational society defers responsibility towards others and, in the context of the War on Terror, makes it possible for some to kill, to announce that they will ‘retaliate’ or ‘invade’, and for Western individuals to accept that wars be fought in their name at a distance. For Lévinas, the simple fact of existing places the subject in a relationship of responsibility towards any potential Other who may interpellate her/him. It is the Other, in consequence, who constitutes the self as a subject. As Bauman explains, Lévinas thus sees responsibility as the primary structure of subjectivity, which is inevitably ‘there’ as an innate presence as a consequence of the existence of the Other: Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates – exploits, redirects, jams. […] Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility and responsibility is proximity […] Defusion of responsibility, and thus the neutralization of the moral urge which follows it, must necessarily involve (is, in fact, synonymous with) replacing proximity with a physical or spiritual separation. The alternative to proximity is social distance. The moral attribute of proximity is responsibility; the moral attribute of social distance is lack of moral relationship […] Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an Other. The process of transformation is one of social separation. (Bauman 2005: 183 – 84; emphases original)

Morality, to Lévinas, is not a construct that society devises in order to keep innate ‘savagery’ within bounds, or a set of rules and precepts that are passed on. On the contrary, it is humanity’s most essential capacity, and something which can be more or less neutralized or manipulated by a system or society. Ideological discourses which prevent empathy from developing thus annul the moral ability to commit to the Other. As Bauman adds, “It was such a separation

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which made it possible for thousands to kill [during the Holocaust] and for millions to watch the murder without protesting. It was the technological and bureaucratic achievement of modern rational society which made such a separation possible” (Bauman 2005: 184). It is precisely this deferral of the Other that Cruel and Tender points to by dramatizing the spatial separation of the protagonist couple, a separation created by late capitalist socioeconomic structures which brings about thwarted desire, destruction, violence and terrorism. The dichotomy between empathy and distance is present in the very structure of Sophocles’s play. The Trachiniae’s bi-partite structure suggests a radical distance between bodies, since the two protagonists never meet or even physically inhabit the same scene. Crimp takes advantage of this gap in order to make his play speak to his contemporary context of the War on Terror. While Sophocles presents the radical distance between the bodies of husband and wife in mythical terms, making the play’s gap signify the two basic drives of love and hate, in Crimp it signifies the separation between bodies created by late capitalist ideology, which Amelia intends to undo through her ritual. Collapse, then, is a response to a regime that does not offer individuals any profound reason to care for one another. Hence Amelia’s persistent use of words like ‘humane’, ‘yearning’, ‘safety’, ‘baby’ or ‘reassurance’. It is a response to a social situation in which human relations do not contemplate honesty, care or cooperation. As Sennett puts it, in the context of globalization “all the shibboleths of the new order treat dependence as a shameful condition”: The attack on rigid bureaucratic hierarchy is meant to free people structurally from dependence; risk-taking is meant to stimulate self-assertion rather than submission to what is given. [Even] the attack on the welfare state, begun in the neoliberal, Anglo-American regime […] treats those who are dependent on the state with the suspicion that they are social parasites, rather than truly helpless. The destruction of welfare nets and entitlements is in turn justified as freeing the political economy to behave more flexibly, as if the parasites were dragging down the more productive members of society. (Sennett 1998: 139)

Thus, Amelia chooses not to submit to the most radically laissez-faire aspects of late capitalist relationships, to the ‘flexibilization’ of both emotional and social commitment. What Amelia desires to accomplish is as simple as it is utopian – she desires to restore to relationships the bond of responsibility and empathy, that is, to allow for the General’s essentially ethical subjectivity to surface. In rendering her husband a cripple, a body in need, she makes him dependent on others, on care, on community. Survival now imposes itself and its imperatives redefine human relationships.

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2.4 Collapse and Testimony: Late Capitalism and Totalitarianism In Part Two, Scene Two, James, Amelia’s son, tells her of the disastrous effects the poison has had on her husband’s body. As he puts it, “It’s not Africa that’s idle and destructive, Mum, it’s you. Don’t you understand / what you’ve done?” (Crimp 2004a: 42). It is at this point that Amelia’s third collapse begins; and this time, she passes on her testimony to Laela. Oppressed by her son’s accusations and by the observable consequences of her actions, Amelia inevitably identifies with the subjectivities late capitalist society, in the polarized context of the War on Terror, labels as ‘deviant’. In a way, Amelia becomes ‘Africa’, a ‘continent’ full of spite against the hegemonic civilizing order. Guilt-ridden and confused, Amelia pulls Laela into the room she and James are in. It is James who signals to the audience that Amelia’s collapse is beginning when he points out she is “hurting” (Crimp 2004a: 42) Laela by violently pulling her into the room. James then leaves the room and Crimp focuses on Amelia and Laela, physically isolating them in order to narrow the audience’s attention down on Amelia’s words. Right before Amelia delivers her testimony, Laela asks her whether they will really go to the airport together to pick the General up. Amelia’s reply draws a grotesque picture of contemporary male self-aggrandizement and duplicity: Laela Amelia

Can we really go to the airport? Of course we can, sweetheart. But first you’re going to pour me a glass of wine. Let’s have a glass of wine together, shall we? Then what we’ll do is we’ll take the General’s car and we’ll drive to the airport and meet the General – yes? The two wives will drive to the airport in their husband’s car to collect their husband from the airport […] (Crimp 2004a: 44– 5)

After this conversation, Laela leaves to fetch some wine glasses, thus leaving Amelia alone with the audience for the first part of her testimony, with Laela being present only during the second half. In her narrative of testimony, Amelia imagines driving to the airport with Laela, but claims the women at security will not let them through: Laela goes out. I know what we can do, Laela: how about we put ourselves – mmm? – through the machines – what d’you say? How about we lie down on the rubber track and ask to be X-rayed

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because obviously there’s obviously something inside of us Laela some sharp object some spike something inside of us a prohibited object we didn’t know about but that will show up on the screen close because I think it must be very close to our hearts – don’t you think? – that spike? So they’ll ask us to strip. And when we’ve stripped (which I hope we will do like grown-ups without complaining) one of those women with a rubber-glove will push her hand like a midwife Laela will push her hand deeper and deeper into us until the tip of her finger rests just so on the spike. Laela reappears, holding glasses. And she’ll say ‘I suspect you of terror. You have a concealed weapon. I can feel it next to you heart.’ ‘Oh really?’ I’ll say ‘D’you mean love?’ And she’ll say ‘Not love no I’m talking about this spike. Have you concealed this spike deliberately? Or could it have been placed there without your knowledge?’ And I’ll lie to her I’ll say ‘Deliberately of course.’ Because otherwise I could be mistaken for a victim and that’s not a part Laela that I’m prepared to play. (Crimp 2004a: 45 – 6)

Through, as shall be seen, an Artaudian language that conveys psychic pain as a bodily-felt reality, Amelia makes “those things be heard that ideology conceals” (Adorno 214). Having begun a war abroad, the state then seemingly protects its civilian population through mechanisms of control and surveillance like the scanning machines at airports. In reality, however, it performs the more refined task of homogenizing all individuals so that they will organize themselves

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around the economic interests of the few in whose name war is waged. Amelia experiences such incorporeal demands of self-regulation and repression of her desire, which is channelled into consumption and subservience, as a violation of her identity – hence the reference to the security guard’s gloved hand intruding into her body. Such self-regulation implies that Amelia should take herself as an object, entering a hierarchical constitution of life in which the body is treated as a possession onto which the individual’s narcissistic aspirations are inscribed. Such selfobjectification, to Amelia, is tantamount to an act of self-inflicted violence, which she refuses to perform. Instead, through a very physical, carnal language of experience, Amelia re-subjectifies herself back as an ‘embodied’, resistant subject, thereby re-defining herself as a core of essential ethical values which she will not forego. Hence “the midwife” (Crimp 2004a: 46) comes across something solid within her, a barrier, the “spike”, that will not let her get through.⁵¹ Amelia’s “spike” or “concealed weapon” (Crimp 2004a: 46), formed “close to [her] heart”, is no more than the form “love” (Crimp 2004a: 46) – her utopian aspirations – takes in its defensive state. As she puts it, “because I think it must be very close to our hearts / – don’t you think? – that spike?” (Crimp 2004a: 45). At first glance, Amelia seems to repent her poisoning the General – “WHAT HAVE I DONE?” (Crimp 2004a: 44). From this point of view, through her suicide, Amelia would seem to be enacting her own punishment; she would be punishing herself for her deviation from ‘normal’, Western prescribed attitudes in the polarized context of the War on Terror, and the text would effect closure. Amelia would then really be a victim, and would die as a ‘colonized’ subject. Yet, as she puts it, this is not a “part / [she] is prepared to play” (Crimp 2004a: 46). Her suicide, therefore, may be read instead as the outcome of her realization that late capitalism has pushed her into a cul-de-sac or contradiction with her-

 As has been seen, female characters like Anne in The Treatment or Rebecca in The Country take a domestic object and use it against the body of the oppressor, a micropolitical act that aims to set certain ethical boundaries to the aggrandized subjectivities of their husbands, lovers or coworkers. The sharpened fork which Clifford sells Simon as an antique in Act One, Scene Two of The Treatment becomes a symbol of Anne’s rage in Act Three, Scene Four, when she stabs it into Clifford’s eyes. Anne’s fork finds an echo in the “tiny scissors” (Crimp 2005a: 339) Rebecca stabs into Richard’s hand, a domestic object which suddenly takes the plot in a new direction. Finally, as has been seen, both the fork and the scissors eventually converge in the “spike” (Crimp 2004a: 46) Amelia invokes in Cruel and Tender. Amelia’s “heart”, which she believes is made up of the inseparable twins of “love and truth” (Crimp 2004a: 22), mutates into a spike she is afraid might be discovered by the X-ray machine at the airport.

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self – it has led her to use the system’s own violence to attempt to defeat the system. Baudrillard claims that terrorism, as the system’s Other, inaugurates, against the “inhumanity of integral exchange” (Baudrillard 2003: 71), that is, against the late capitalist commodification of social life, “a metaphysics of truth” (Baudrillard 2003: 71), centred on the humane values late capitalism stifles and keeps repressed. In this sense, Amelia might be labelled by the establishment as “regressive and fundamentalist” (Baudrillard 2003: 66), but she is prompted to be so “out of despair” (Baudrillard 2003: 66), that is, out of the need to reclaim the values to which the establishment is indifferent. Her testimony thus articulates this “metaphysics of truth” (Baudrillard 2003: 71). In a context which has lost all sense of the universality of human rights – in an ethically eroded context – Amelia becomes a “singularity” (Baudrillard 2003: 91), opposing the homogenizing mechanisms of the state. Amelia’s suicide is thus ambivalent. If at first sight it seems to signal closure and a re-establishment of ‘order’ through Amelia’s apparent repentance and elimination of her own dissidence, it simultaneously, and potently, undermines this reading. Even if she is partly complicit with the violence of the system in using the system’s own ‘weapons’ and materials, the fact that she does so with eyes wide open makes her an agent. The spike would then be the signifier of Amelia’s ethical choice to resist, to ‘punish’ the General’s subjectivity in a selfconscious act of retribution. From this point of view, the spike is ‘deliberate’, and Amelia does not die as a victim or as a colonized subject. And yet, at the same time, she says she’s “lying” when she says the spike is ‘deliberate’. Her violent resistance, therefore, does not come naturally, is not of her essence, but rather a reactive response to the violence of late capitalism.

2.4.1 Inequality, Auschwitz and the Collapsing Self Since the War on Terror began, airports have increasingly been filled with strategically located TV sets which bombard individuals at check-in lines with images of pre-scribed behaviour. They display footage of attractive young women who tell other women how nice it is to stroll around, have a cup of coffee at Starbucks, wink at the barman, and then take advantage of their leisure time to buy a bottle of perfume and some new lipstick. The state, then, does not so much attempt to ‘protect’ individuals as homogenize them as docile, obedient consumers. As Foucault puts it in “Subject and Power”, the state employs a very sophisticated mechanism whereby “individuals can be integrated under one condition: that [their] individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set

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of very specific patterns” (Foucault 1982: 214). Most of the time, Foucault claims, the state functions as a “kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or group amongst citizens” (Foucault 1982: 213). The system the General epitomizes, indeed, leaves three-quarters of the world population in poverty, and promotes conflicts and even begins wars in order to maintain its global control of resources. Consequently, in a self-perpetuating cycle, the system must deploy mechanisms of surveillance in order to regulate the identities of those it has dispossessed, including strict measures of protection against terrorists at airports. In addition, while such a system tries to protect its civil population from the consequences of a dangerous inequality it itself has created, it also performs the more refined task of attempting to homogenize all individuals around consumerism. Contemporary forms of control at airports, just as “measures having to do with public health, the work market, immigration control, or drug prohibition, display the eminently bio-political nature of contemporary public policies”, applied as they are “upon naked lives taken into the categories and devices of a power which treats them as such: exposed and administered lives” (Grelet and Potte-Bonneville).⁵² In this respect, Hardt and Negri contend that it is by the “production of docile subjects” (Hardt and Negri 2006: 53) through the most quotidian routines of their lives that a seemingly protective, democratic power in capitalist societies is nowadays “becoming totalitarian” (Hardt and Negri 2006: 53). When Amelia fears that she cannot manage to suppress her disagreement, and masochistically fantasizes about being put through an “X-ray machine” (Crimp 2004a: 45) at an airport, she is, indeed, expressing a fear of homogenization. Technology, as Susan Sontag puts it, “has made photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behaviour, predicting it, and interfering with it” (Sontag 157). And she adds, “cameras implement the instrumental view of reality by gathering information that enables us to make a more accurate and much quicker response to whatever is going on. The response may of course be either repressive or benevolent” (Sontag 176). In her description of the imaginary scene at the airport, Amelia uses a series of words that contribute to giving it a sense of initiation ritual. She argues that she will be helped in being ‘born’ as a ‘normalized subject’ by a “midwife”  “Les mesures de santé publique, de mise au travail, de contrôle de l’immigration ou la prohibition des drogues révèlent la nature éminemment biopolitique des politiques publiques contemporaines. [Elles s’appliquent précisément] à des vies nues prises dans les catégories et les dispositifs d’un pouvoir qui les traite comme telles – vies exposées et administrées”.

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(Crimp 2004a: 46) who will attempt to extract the “spike” (Crimp 2004a: 45) from her body. The ‘machine’ Amelia refers to, then, is in charge of filtering individuals, of allowing them to join a hierarchical society as ‘normalized’ subjects. Just as the young woman in Attempts on her Life refuses to ‘collaborate’ with the media industry, in Cruel and Tender Amelia refuses to cooperate with the ‘midwife’ at the airport, to behave ‘like a grown-up’, “without / complaining” (Crimp 2004a: 45). Through the image of the midwife’s intruding gloves, Amelia expresses how she experiences the self-regulation the system demands of her as a violation against her integrity. Crimp takes the X-ray camera in particular as a metaphor for the oppressive nature of bio-power and the human potential that is sacrificed through the maintenance of an unequal world order. Cameras, following Sontag, implement order, but it is a reified type of order, an order without a subject. The system’s hierarchical nature, the ‘law’ that controls immigration and constitutes individuals with rights while it deprives others of them ultimately excludes many possible identities and, above all, human potential – an enormous sacrifice of human life and richness. In Foucault’s words, the state applies itself to immediate everyday life […] [categorising] an individual, mark[ing] him by his own individuality, attach[ing] him to his own identity, impos[ing] a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. (Foucault 1982: 212)

In the context of the War on Terror, scanning machines at airports similarly attempt to pry into the private space of the body and collect symptoms and signs from such ‘intimacy’. The camera has the ability to visually penetrate within the body of the individual without ‘opening’ it. It is a normalizing look whose findings are interpreted as either ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’, and pressed into the service of re-constituting the subject along desired lines after fragmenting it.⁵³ As mentioned in Preliminaries II, as much for the Nazi regime as for late capitalist society, photography or the camera, “through techniques which refer to anthropometry, seem to explore the body of the detainee, which is understood as the first symptom, the global symptom of everything that is still veiled, both in every in-

 Akram Khan’s dance spectacle Zero Degrees, which ran from 28 to 30 September 2007 at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, is explicitly about bio-power. Its main theme is precisely the increasingly enforcing policies of regulation of life and immigrants at airports and, being a dance spectacle, it shows the effect of these policies on the body, through different plastic and visual means.

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dividual and in the social body” (About 2002: 37).⁵⁴ In this way, certain physical characteristics such as skin colour or a particular life style are taken to stand for and express a ‘vile soul’. If, in Auschwitz, detainees were photographed and their corporeal space was reorganized according to the abstract language of symptoms and illnesses, in contemporary society disciplinary scrutiny is epitomized by the surveillance of an “X-ray” (Crimp 2004a: 45) camera. Auschwitz, indeed, was the culmination of a socio-political model which had developed around the axes of efficiency, productivity, discipline and optimization of time and resources, which lie at the heart of disciplinary, capitalist societies: Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. (Foucault 1979:138)

Discipline was applied in institutions through structures like the panopticon from which individuals could be constantly seen, “examination being the technique by which power, instead of emitting signs of its potency, instead of imposing a mark on subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification” (Foucault 1979: 187). In Auschwitz, these techniques were applied to the point of torture, by which discipline did impose a mark on the bodies of subjects and eventually stripped away bíos, the cultural, constructed dimension of the life of an individual. This gave way to zoè, the naked stage past animalization in which biological life merges with death, and the political dimension is eliminated. Similarly, for Amelia, the frontier between the public and private, her own control of her body and power’s decisions over it, seems to uncannily blur and disappear. As she puts it: So they’ll ask us to strip. And when we’ve stripped […] one of those women with a rubber-glove will push her hand like a midwife Laela will push her hand deeper and deeper into us (Crimp 2004a: 45 – 6)

 “[La fotografia], utilitzada amb unes tècniques que fan referència directa a l’antropometria, sembla explorar el cos del detingut, captat com a símptoma primer, símptoma global de tot allò que encara roman velat, tant en cada individu com en el cos social”.

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As Reyes Mate puts it, clothes are a sign of culture, of bíos. In Cruel and Tender, they are thus identified with resistance. Clothes were also the first thing prisoners were asked to separate themselves from in Auschwitz as they put on the camp uniforms. Instead of rendering them docile, as is the case with Amelia, Auschwitz sought to physically annihilate prisoners, yet Crimp uncannily evokes concentration-camp images when Amelia claims they must obey “like grown ups without complaining” (Crimp 2004a: 45). Reyes Mate quotes a witness who recounts how those who were in charge of leading prisoners to the gas chambers tried to give them some extra time when they undressed, because they knew that their clothes were a sign of culture and personal integrity: the dresses they wear are like a cocoon, the blanket under which their life is still sheltered. […] Once they separate themselves from their clothes and become naked they will lose their last defences, the anchorage on which their life depends. This is the reason why we do not have the courage to tell them to undress faster and hurry up – just let them stay within that cocoon, within that blanket of life one more instant. (Reyes Mate 2003: 234)⁵⁵

Despite the obvious differences with this account, the image of the “midwife” in Cruel and Tender attests to how the law, which must be integrated by the subject, trespasses into her body and undoes the boundaries between private self and public self, thus homogenizing Amelia. The “spike”, then, is the testimony, the political anger, the ethical outcry that defies the X-ray machine of homogenization. In its concern for pinning down what Reyes Mate calls the ‘pure identity,’ the contemporary security state demands absolute docility where genocides pursue the annihilation of difference. Thus the late capitalist ‘Empire’ approaches the totalitarian obsession with sameness: Genocide […] obsessed with the search for the pure identity […] tends to homogenize human existence, literally polishing it, declaring as an unbearable anomaly the singular character of each individual life. This implies reducing politics to death […] death is the final goal of a type of politics which is indifferent to individual life. (Reyes Mate 2003: 214)⁵⁶

 “Los vestidos que ellas llevan son como la coraza, el manto en el que todavía se recoge su vida. […] En el momento en que se despojen de sus vestidos y se queden desnudas perderán sus últimas defensas, su último apoyo, el último punto de anclaje del que pende su vida. Ésa es la razón por la que nosotros no tenemos valor para decirles que se desvistan más rápidamente. Que signa todavía un instante, un momento, en esa coraza, en este manto de vida”.  “El genocidio […] obsesionado con la búsqueda de la pura identidad […] tiende a homongenizar la existencia humana, puliéndo[la] literalmente, declarando como anomalía inaguantable la singularidad de cada existencia. Eso es reducir la política a muerte […] la muerte es el final de una política indiferente a la vida individual”.

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The image of the X-ray machine in Cruel and Tender is particularly poignant because it reduces individuals and their bodies to the ‘secret’ or ‘deviation’ that can be extracted from them and thus they enter a symbolic machine of classification, hierarchization and normalization – a process which, in its most extreme form, is reminiscent of the Auschwitz experience. Cruel and Tender shows the latency of bio-politics in the midst of modern democracy, or the complicity between fascist forms of repression and late capitalist ‘progress’. Indeed, these contemporary techniques of surveillance and classification culminate in repressive institutions such as Guantánamo. There is, then, a parallelism between the Auschwitz experience, in which disciplinary control was enacted upon bodies to the extent that they were reduced to mere zoè, and forms of contemporary social control which reduce the individual to a “life exposed and administered” (Grelet and Potte-Bonneville), to a thread of life or a purely biological body – the result of an unequal world order.⁵⁷ The latter process is more subtle and symbolic than the former, but no less coercive. The individual is also made to regulate her/himself through mechanisms of coercion that render categories such as that of subject and object, public and private, subjectivity and objectivity indistinguishable. At the same time, as pointed out in Preliminaries II, bio-power differs from the Auschwitz experience in that it is interested in maintaining life, not in bringing it to an end. Bio-power is the modus operandi of liberalism, not that of totalitarianism; it is interested in generating freedom and keeping it in check, not in extinguishing it. It is interested in docility. From this point of view, Amelia’s suicide is particularly subversive, because it confronts the state with a radical absence, with a body that rejects docility. According to Foucault, since bio-power is interested in maintaining life, “death now becomes […] the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy” (Foucault 2004: 248). Foucault claims death has symbolically become, in contemporary society, “the limit, or the end of power” (Foucault 2004: 248). Consciously or unconsciously, Crimp writes from the cultural perception that ‘the worst’ does not lie in the future, but has happened already. The undercurrent of barbarism Crimp denounces in Cruel and Tender as running parallel to forms of ‘progress’ in late capitalist societies clearly also underpinned the Holocaust experience. The contemporary world of which the play’s audience forms part is shown to be, like the one that led to the Holocaust, ethically impoverished. Its worst instincts have been unleashed through the War on Terror. Ac-

 “Vie[s] exposées et administrées”.

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cording to Agamben, this makes testimony a crucial figure in contemporary society, both as a mode of denunciation and as a form of resistance and social change. Testimony, in Agamben’s view, is the narrative model which precisely accounts for the subject’s “own desubjectification” (qtd. in Grelet and Potte-Bonneville), her or his ‘un-writing’ at the hands of the state.⁵⁸ Oppression prompts Amelia to define herself in opposition to her context and, therefore, as a repository of an unalienable core of ethical values. In the very act of recounting her undoing, Amelia re-subjectifies herself as a resistant subject. Through testimony, Amelia seeks to give the feelings of oppression she experiences a bodily location for the audience, thus making them shareable. Testimony is, literally, the ‘flesh’ made word. In testimony, indeed, “words […] keep as close as possible to the original experience (written life: bio-graphy)” (Sucasas 331).⁵⁹ The lyrical language of collapse seeks to interpellate spectators as witnesses. Crimp invites spectators to supply Amelia’s personal, indeterminate images, which speak about the larger political reality by reference to their own figments of traumatic memory or personal experiences of oppression. In this manner, spectators may become ‘double witnesses’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 58) – both to the character’s experience and to themselves, to their own traumatic memories. In the act of becoming double witnesses, audience members may ultimately re-subjectify themselves, like Amelia, as resistant subjects, initiating a movement away from late capitalist society’s alienating tendencies. It is in this sense that Crimp’s images of collapse, which defy the conventions of realism and strive for an unfamiliar language, try to bring about a change in the audience’s ‘psychology’. Interestingly, Crimp has acknowledged that he “submits to an unconscious process” of writing, which allows him to make discoveries in language (2006c: 2). Through a metaphorical, indeterminate and defamiliarized language of testimony – the ‘X-rays’ that will detect her ‘concealed weapon’, the ‘midwife’ who

 “[J’ai essayé un peu dans le livre sur Auschwitz, à propos du témoignage, de voir le témoin comme modèle d’une subjectivité qui ne serait que le sujet] de sa propre désubjectivation”.  “la palabra se mantiene […] lo más cerca posible de la vivencia original (vida escrita: biografía)”. Edward Kemp, who has been dramaturg at the Chichester Festival Theatre since 2003 (Sierz 2006: 250) and who, as already mentioned, worked on the original production of Cruel and Tender, perceives the tension between sign and body, language and experience as taking place in Cruel and Tender as a whole. He claims the play is characterized by a tension between the strict formal rules of tragedy and Amelia’s passion. As he puts it, “Cruel and Tender has a particular combination of head and heart. [As happens with Alban Berg’s music], you get this extraordinary tension between the formality of the rules and the yearning of the music. Martin certainly felt the passion of the Greek original and when he hits the balance between formality and feeling it really works” (qtd. in Sierz 2006: 207).

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will help her cross the boundary and become a fully regulated subject or, indeed, the ‘spike’ which metamorphoses into ‘love’ – Crimp defies the conventions of realism so that spectators may experience, in Adornian terms, the social contradictions Amelia presents them with, rather than simply being told about them. The question is how language can be restored as a channel to articulate resistance, and how it can best interact with the audience. In relation to his reading of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), which might equally be applied to Crimp’s dramatic plays, Adorno claims that “commitment and hermetic art […] have in common a disaffection with the status quo” (Adorno 262). As O’Connor explains, for Adorno, in a late capitalist, consumerist world in which “consciousness and conformity have become identical” (O’Connor 231) the lyric poem stands in opposition to the collective and the realm of objectivity. In it, as Adorno puts it, the subject has, so to speak, “lost nature, and seeks to recreate it through personification and through descent into the subjective being itself” (Adorno 216). Through her moments of collapse and, particularly, by delivering her testimony, Amelia separates her consciousness from the false consciousness resulting from the power mechanisms that are enacted upon her, and invites spectators and Laela to do so too. Amelia’s language is lyrical precisely in order to reach that “moment of selfforgetting in which the subject submerges into language and [it] speaks not as something foreign to the subject but as his own voice” (Adorno 218). That is, Amelia separates herself from the social, reified identities she is supposed to perform, and speaks through her ‘own voice’, urgently searching for images at a level that hovers between consciousness and unconsciousness, the body and the word. Whereas mass culture, in Adorno’s words, “takes pains to leave everything as it is” (Adorno 260) and, as O’Connor explains, “induces an experience of satisfaction and harmony in the consumer”, derived from seeing “fictitious conflicts resolved” (O’Connor 230 – 31), the language of collapse and testimony is meant to spur utopian desire in the audience, a desire for different modes of relating.

2.4.2 Opening a Space of Exteriority Amelia, then, realizes she cannot go on performing for the establishment. As has been mentioned, just before her testimony, in a tone of mocking despair, she asks Laela whether she would like to pick the General up at the airport – “If we could drive a car, we could drive to the airport. We could go shopping at the airport. What d’ you think?” (Crimp 2004a: 44). Amelia, that is, is expected to take Laela by the hand and obediently go pick their shared husband up at the

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airport. She feels coerced into teaching Laela how to be the good wife of a duplicitous man, taking her shopping for shoes or for some “luggage on wheels” (Crimp 2004a: 44). As she says in a cadence that sounds like sobbing, “The two wives will drive to the airport in their husband’s car to collect their husband from the airport” (Crimp 2004a: 45). In late capitalist societies, commodities become invested with secondary meanings which are no more than “constant reminders of what we are and might with effort yet become” (Featherstone 178). Through narcissistic investment, the body is delimited, singularized and individualized as private property, alongside other visible, displayable objects. In late capitalist societies, and as Mike Featherstone puts it in “The Body in Consumer Culture” (1992), shopping ceases to be a quick visit down the streets amidst neighbours and becomes a more organised expedition into more anonymous public spaces where certain standards of dress and appearance are deemed appropriate. The individual is increasingly on display as he/she moves through the field of commodities on display. (Featherstone 173)

These expectations are also inscribed in the social geography around Amelia – her depersonalized context of shopping malls and duty-free airports. Amelia is expected to channel her aspirations through the body, that is, by using it as a sign of her status, happiness, beauty and well-being. The narcissistic investment in the body, orchestrated as a mystique of liberation and accomplishment, is always in fact “an investment of an efficient, competitive, economic type” (Baudrillard 2005: 279). In this system, women are most clearly trapped in the “narcissistic, self-surveillance world of images, for apart from being accorded the major responsibility in organising the purchase and consumption of commodities, their bodies are used symbolically in advertisements” (Featherstone 179). It is hardly surprising, in this light, that Amelia should discover herself, all of a sudden, as inserted “in the generalised context of other objects” (Baudrillard 2005: 281). As oppose to how she is socially expected to experience herself and her body, Amelia’s new, alternative approach to identity includes a congeniality with violence and pain as one of its essential characteristics. As already noted, at the end of her testimony Amelia “clenches her fist around one of the shattered wine-glasses on the table and squeezes as hard as she can. When she finally opens it, some of the glass drops out, some remains sticking to her hand” (Crimp 2004a: 46). This masochistic act points to the ‘monstrous’, abject identity that instrumental rationality expels as belonging to the realm of the irrational, but which is in touch with primeval drives of love, empathy and responsibility. It is this dimension of herself which Amelia finally takes to its full consequences,

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progressively detaching herself from the roles and identities she is expected to play. Building on the materiality and physicality suggested by the text itself, Bondy’s 2004 production of the play for the Young Vic Theatre expanded on the semiotic potential of Amelia’s collapse, emphasizing its theatricality in order to highlight its social and metaphysical implications and elicit the audience’s collaboration. As John Ginman puts it, in Bondy’s production Kerry Fox, the actress playing Amelia, “used the blood from [her] wrist to systematically daub every item of furniture with blood […] to the distorted formality of a chorus by Handel” (Ginman 115), a macabre, almost Dionysian ritual of abjection, which mentally prepared her for her suicide.⁶⁰ In Bondy’s production, then, Amelia ‘wrote’ herself on the furniture, attesting to the continuity of love and empathy in a context which congeals them through self-surveillance and through the imposition of sanctioned identities. In reference to acts of masochism, Gilles Deleuze explains that “the masochist is obsessed; ritualistic activity is essential to him, since it epitomizes the world of fantasy” (Deleuze 1991: 94). Through ritual, which postpones achievement and renders temporality malleable through invocation and repetition, Amelia becomes what she desires, casting away the identities she is pressured to perform. Time thus ceases to exist as a chronological sequence of events leading to a goal, and it begins to be governed by the rhythms of the body. As Elisabeth Grosz puts it in Space, Time, and Perversion (1995), “libido is not irrational, illogical or even non-rational; rather it exhibits a logic of its own governed by modes of intensification” (Grosz 196). This was conveyed, in Bondy’s production, through Handel’s music, since music’s sensory, emotional nature can heighten the self’s modes of intensification, the unstable nature of desire. In Cruel and Tender, these modes become more central and imperative, as social modes of stratification of desire, homogenization and deferral of feelings become more acute. Through masochism, Amelia carves a space away from bio-power, undoing the conventional boundary between pain and pleasure upon which narcissistic notions of the self, encouraged by consumerism and late capitalism, rest. She seeks a primeval identity as she approaches a “wild ecstasy from some primitive

 The Independent review described this moment graphically – “there’s a sequence that viscerally involves you to a truly tension-inducing degree when, realizing what she has done, halfdrunk and with a crushed wineglass in her hand, Amelia staggers bleeding round the compound to the counterpoint of a piercingly pure German oratorio. Already, around her, the furniture is being covered in the polythene sheeting and the room turned into the ‘crime scene’ it will become [in Part Three] after she is dead” (Taylor).

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past” (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 4), through which she may regain control of a body which was, unbeknownst to her, and as she explains in her opening speech in Part One, Scene One, first handed over to the General’s duplicity and then to the multiple inscriptions of the market interests of a consumer society. In In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (2003), Victoria Pitts claims that masochistic acts that involve body modification, such as scarification – not unlike what Amelia does to her hand – “expand the [subjects’] sense of embodiedness” (Pitts 32). Subjects, at this point, understand themselves “as experiencing subjectivity to the full” (Pitts 32). Amelia thus becomes the ‘monstrous’ Other that the good wife of a General must repress. She effects a ‘bloody transformation’ that welcomes this new self even if, in so doing, her social identity is set at risk. Through ‘writing’ on her skin with glass, Amelia opens up a gap between the oppressive forces that come to bear on her body and herself, in order to defend values that are absent in her context. She seeks a place of exteriority in relation to the disciplinary meanings of pleasure and pain upon which consumer culture bases its tenets and values. Through ritual, Amelia approaches, again, the notion of the ‘grotesque body’, which she vindicates for herself.⁶¹ The grotesque body, as already mentioned, stands in opposition to the self-regulated body of the subject of property – a strictly individualized, unempathic, closed-off body, which secures its own ‘progress’ and achievements while separating itself emotionally from the bodies of others. It is the body of the entrepreneur, ready to take part in highly competitive structures, entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body […] shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All the orifices are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade […] All that happens within it concerns it alone, that is, only the individual, closed sphere. (Bakhtin 2005: 93 – 5)

Pitts has argued that, for the female, such an impenetrable body is primarily achieved through beauty and consumerism, that is, by becoming an object of status, rather than a subject. As she puts it, “standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body […] they define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom […] in our culture, not one  As noted in the preceding chapter, in The Country Crimp also offers a compelling portrait of a woman, Rebecca, who is pushed towards vindicating irrationality and ‘monstrosity’ in order to confront Richard’s exploitative use of discourse and rationality. The idea of female grotesqueness is thus present in both plays.

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part of the woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement” (Pitts 52). For women, then, moments of collapse like the one Amelia experiences at the end of Part Two, Scene Two imply first and foremost an exploration of the limits of identity that rejects compliance and self-regulation, unleashing a female self that borders on the monstrous or the abject. By having Amelia daub the furniture with her blood, and through Handel’s music, Bondy self-reflexively foregrounded the scene of collapse. Bondy’s rendering of the scene heightened Amelia’s pursuit of a grotesque, abject identity in the face of the severely restricted space she is offered to develop herself as a subject.⁶² Through her masochistic act of collapse, Amelia opens her body to the exterior. Through the language of testimony and through ‘writing’ on her own skin, Amelia writes herself back as resistant and as a fully political, free-determining subject who refuses to be docile, a mere surface for the inscription of the identities that those in power deem valid. Amelia, indeed, opens up a space of love/personal resistance between herself and the identities that are imposed on her. Thus, Bondy sought to interpellate spectators as political subjects, that is, to make them aware that a specific political message was being delivered. The music and the acting not only called attention to the scene itself but, through the actress’s pathos and through her act of daubing the furniture with her blood, which is not present in Crimp’s text, the scene could also induce the audience, as Fischer-Lichte puts it in Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre, to mistake the actress’s “semiotic body” for her “phenomenological body” (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 5). In other words, at that point, Amelia and the actress playing Amelia may have merged to the point of confusion, especially since her clenching her fist around the broken glasses was conveyed through very realistic means that brought the theatrical event close to the more life-like character of performance art. In performance art, actors can and often do interact with the audience. Through the changes Bondy deliberately introduced in the text in order to achieve a specific political effect, the scene in question might suddenly appear lifelike and ‘real’, that is, spontaneous like a piece of performance art. By further focusing the audience’s attention upon the scene with the help of the music,

 This may have been suggested by Sophocles’s The Trachiniae itself, where Amelia’s nurse claims that, before stabbing herself, Deianira “went to hide where nobody would see her, / Throwing herself down, inconsolable, by the altars / Soon to be neglected forever. And she wept. / She wept as she touched the furniture, things she used, / Rushing here and there, all over the house. / Catching sight of servants she was fond of, / She would stare at them, poor thing, and burst into tears” (Sophocles 1998a: 91).

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Bondy challenged the boundary separating stage and audience, fiction from reality, acting from being and feeling, thus interpellating spectators by making them feel self-consciously present – all part of an attempt to make social contradictions apparent to the audience. Helped by the intensity of the music which sounded at full volume, Bondy played with the illusion that the fiction had dissolved and the real actress’s body beneath the character of Amelia had made Amelia’s pain her own. Adorno describes such acts of interpellation as moments in which the recipient of the art work “loses footing, as it were, discovering that the truth embodied in the aesthetic image has real tangible possibilities” (Adorno 258). That is, the spectator both immerses her/himself fully within the action – s/he commits him/herself to it – and self-reflexively realizes s/he has been interpellated by it. In Adorno’s terms, what is mediated, or evoked, at these moments, is an “incisive, encompassing experience” (Adorno 258), a moment when “experience congeals in an instant, and for it to do so the whole of consciousness is required rather than some one-dimensional stimulus and response […] it signals the breaking-through of objectivity into subjective consciousness” (Adorno 258). By objectivity Adorno understands the moment when the individual perceives her/himself as inserted within society’s contradictions, inevitably shaped and conditioned by them. As he puts it, thanks to non-naturalistic, political effects, “objectivity [may mediate] aesthetic experience even when the subjective response is at its most intense” (Adorno 258). Bondy exploits the potential of theatre to bestow full significance, in Adornian terms, on the events that are dramatized. Thus, through playing with the boundary between the semiotic body and the phenomenological body, the ‘fixed’, set fiction of the text and the reality of an ‘improvised’ performance, Bondy ultimately rendered the fourth wall fuzzy. He called attention to the scene itself and to the layers of oppression that it seeks to make visible. Bondy’s production of Cruel and Tender emphasized this particular instance of collapse in order to make social contradictions clearly perceptible, thus enhancing Crimp’s political denunciation.

2.4.3 The Inheritance of Resistance By the end of Part Two, Scene Two, when Amelia offers Laela her testimony, she has become a referent for her, an educator. In the previous scene, Amelia takes the gun the boy is playing with away from him – “I said no guns” (Crimp 2004a: 27) – just as, immediately after that, she smacks Laela in the face when she obsessively repeats “with growing intensity” (Crimp 2004a: 27) what she has been

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told, that “boys need to fight – they need to learn – they need to kill” (Crimp 2004a: 27). When the two women are left alone in the room in Part Two, Scene Two, just before Amelia begins her final, testimonial speech, Laela addresses Amelia as her educator and her silence is pregnant with respect. While James refuses to understand Amelia’s perspective, Laela empathizes with her, acquiescing to Amelia’s wish to turn off the TV so that they are able to talk in privacy:

Laela Amelia Laela Amelia Laela Amelia Laela

In the silence, a plane passes. Then: I turned off the TV. Mmm? I turned off / the TV. Thank you, Laela. I’m sorry about the drawer. The drawer doesn’t matter. I will punish the boy. (Crimp 2004a: 44)

Laela is ready to take up Amelia’s resistance – she is significantly shown at the end of the published version of the play refusing to collaborate in cleaning up the house after the General’s arrest. The Housekeeper tells her, “Enough now. You can help us clear up the mess” (Crimp 2004a: 70) – the ‘mess’ literally standing for both Amelia’s suicide and the General’s physical and mental state, while symbolically pointing to the relapse into barbarism that the war has signified.⁶³ Laela answers, “Clear up the mess? (Smiles.) That is your job” (Crimp 2004a: 70). Instead, she begins to read from Hesiod’s Works and Days, prophesizing doom. At the end of the published version, then, Laela refuses to become an active participant of an oppressive system. Through her reading of Hesiod, she warns the audience about the dissociation between ethical and technological development, offering images which bring to mind the idea of the cyborg, and recreating a future in which the technological utopia has become a militarized dystopia. Despite the Housekeeper’s and the Physiotherapist’s attempts to stop her from

 This ending brings to mind that of Caryl Churchill’s first scene in Far Away (2000). Joan, a child, has observed an apparently isolated instance of violence in her uncle’s home, but her aunt keeps veiling it by means of a neo-liberal language which represents violence as ‘purposeful’. By the end of the conversation, Joan seems convinced by her aunt’s arguments, yet when she asks her aunt if she can help her in any way, she is told she can help “clean up [the crime scene] in the morning” (Churchill 2003: 21). Crimp has manifested a strong affinity with Churchill’s work: “Churchill uses the language of domesticity, the very concrete images of daily life, in order to present an allegory of world violence, thus linking particular acts of violence, even family violence, with larger, global atrocities. She hits very hard with it” (Crimp 2007a).

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delivering such horrifying ‘truths’, she urgently continues to read as if she was delivering her own testimony: The Housekeeper is the first to start clearing up the room. Beautician joins her and helps. Physiotherapist goes over to Laela and helps herself to some of the food on Laela’s plate. Laela reads aloud from her book. Laela (reads) ‘I wish I was not of this people. I wish I was dead or still un…un…’ (Shows word.) Physiotherapist Unborn – not born yet. Laela ‘Or still…unborn. We are the people. We are the people of iron. We work by day and in the night we grow sick and die. Our babies will be…born, will be born with grey hair and god will destroy us.’ Housekeeper (under breath) That will do, Laela. Laela ‘Father will not respect son and the son will…’ despise? Physiotherapist Despise – that’s right – his / father. Laela ‘Will despise his father and hurt his father with cruel words. The children of the people of iron will cheat their parents of what is owed to them, condemn them, and disobey their wishes.’ Housekeeper (as before) I said that’s enough. Laela ‘Men will turn the cities of other men to dust without reason. Shame and truth will put on white dresses and hiding their…beauty from the people will abandon the earth.’ (Crimp 2004a: 69 – 70)

The relationship between fathers and sons Laela talks about is uncannily reminiscent of the one James keeps with the General. Laela touches upon patriarchy here, upon oppressive social constructions of masculinity. The General was not empathic and taught James to imitate a type of masculinity defined in terms of mastery of the environment, and so, when the General comes back wrecked by the poison, James is unable to reach out to him and to redefine his relationship with his father. Images of cyborg-like bodies, emerging out of a militarized society engaged in competition for the earth’s resources, are evoked again through the references to babies being born with “grey hair” to “a people of iron”. Laela thus continues Amelia’s resistance, making her testimony her own. Like Amelia, who kills herself and ‘exits’ the late capitalist social structures that are complicit with the contemporary atrocities of war, Laela wishes she “was not of this people. I wish I was dead or still unborn” (Crimp 2004a: 76). As Laela puts it, “we are the people”, that is, we – she herself, the Housekeeper, the Physiotherapist, the audience – are the common people who make up democratic societies, yet we are “the people of iron”. Through the rulers we elect and the modes in which we live we prove unable to empathize with those who are far away from us, who are not immediately linked to our own, private circle, thus loving ‘small’, if at all.

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The Housekeeper and the Physiotherapist were removed from the closing moments of Bondy’s version of the play, and Laela read her speech out to the audience on her own while the stage was “drowned out by the music” (Crimp 2004b: 77). On the one hand, it could be argued that the fact that, in the published version, the Housekeeper and the Physiotherapist help Laela read, diminishes the impact of the play’s final lines. By having Laela read undisturbed and on her own, the audience can pay much more attention to her denunciation and to literature’s capacity to prophesize events and articulate the consequences of inequality. Yet, on the other hand, the Housekeeper’s and the Physiotherapist’s repeated attempts to silence Laela may also work on stage to emphasize her resistance, since she goes on reading although she finds some words difficult to understand. Unlike Amelia, Laela does not choose suicide but goes on living in order to become a resistant body. Performances of the play, indeed, may choose to emphasize how she has just become a resistant body on stage. Because there are few ethical points of reference in the play, the audience is left in charge of empowering Laela’s voice, of rescuing her message from its fragmentation and becoming a testimony to her truths. That is, it is left to the audience to perpetuate Amelia’s and Laela’s resistant voices.

2.5 Conclusion: Memory as Imperative and Yearning Crimp’s plays, and particularly Cruel and Tender, ultimately show that the twenty-first century mode of relating to traumatic experiences hinges, at least in part, on the possibility of testimony. After the rupture with civilization that Auschwitz signified, “the moral understanding of memory” (Reyes Mate 2003: 118) emerges; in Adorno’s terms, it is the moral imperative to remember, a “new categorical imperative […] – that Auschwitz may not repeat itself, that nothing similar may ever happen again” (qtd. in Reyes Mate 2003: 118).⁶⁴ Crimp’s use of testimony as a key strategy in his attempt to uncover late capitalist abuses of power is crucial, because through testimony Amelia articulates the obligation to remember as the basis of a new ethics. Cruel and Tender is one of the most accomplished examples of Crimp’s search for a “post-Holocaust aesthetic” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 214) which, through

 The full quote reads, “El nuevo imperativo es […] el deber de recordar o, si se prefiere, la concepción moral del recuerdo […] [Hitler ha impuesto a los hombres] un nuevo imperativo categórico […] que Auschwitz no se repita, que no vuelva a ocurrir nada semejante”.

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the metaphorical resonances of Amelia’s act of violence, and through the lyrical and indeterminate language of testimony, may enable spectators to work towards a new ethical framework, with the aim to emerge from the post-Holocaust ethical impasse. In Cruel and Tender Crimp is fully at home with his dramaturgy of resistance, which he had initiated with The Treatment, and fully implements in The Country, and whereby he seeks to counteract the introduction of barbarism in relationships by inviting the audience to move towards subjective change and towards developing a resistant subjectivity. Amelia’s testimony attests to her decision to become an ethical body; that is, it records the process whereby she makes such a choice for the audience to witness and to experience with her. The play, indeed, asks the audience’s collaboration in interpreting the indeterminate, lyrical and metaphorical images Amelia evokes in her testimony – such as the image of the ‘spike’. Thus, if spectators want to understand the play, they will have to fill in the indeterminate images Amelia presents to them as objects of interpretation with figments of the memories of their own oppression, thus becoming double witnesses – both to Amelia’s testimony and to their own, similar memories of coercion, thus contributing to detect the totalitarian seeds of late capitalism, as they may observe them in their context. Both for Adorno and for Reyes Mate, to be truly effective as a means of resistance, poetic speech should be circumscribed to expressing the most anxiety-inducing, alienating aspects of contemporary society. As Reyes Mate puts it in “Jorge Semprún: el testimonio literario”, “the question cannot be ‘whether poetry is possible after Auschwitz’, but rather what kind of poetry after the horror […] – a type of poetry which manages to express the suffering of individuals in their most anxiety-ridden moments” (Reyes Mate 2002: 353).⁶⁵ The symbols and metaphors Amelia uses in her speech help illuminate the totalitarian underside of the kind of oppression which Laela, herself and the audience are victims of. Her words do not seek to achieve cathartic satisfaction and reconciliation, but rather throw light on the sources of oppression so as to make them visible for the spectator. Amelia undergoes a process of minimalization or paring down of the self to an ethical core of values, consequent upon her desire to become an ethical subject despite the losses – economic as well as in terms of security, position and status – this entails. Thus, Cruel and Tender, like The Country, offers a model

 “La pregunta no debe ser ‘si es posible la poesía después de Auschwitz,’ sino más bien es otra: qué poesía después del horror […]: la poesía que expresa el sufrimiento de los hombres en sus momentos más angustiosos”.

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of a pared-down, alternative subjectivity which may resist the introduction of barbarism in civilized relationships. By becoming a witness to injustice and oppression, Amelia, like Corinne, discovers the radical equality and importance of every single individual. Cruel and Tender is thus paradigmatic of Crimp’s attempt to search for a new ethics through subjectivity and the body, a new ethics which may be based on proximity and the body, and which develops in what Lévinas terms as the space of the “meeting” (Lévinas 1989: 69), or the ‘face to face’ encounter with the Other. Ideally, then, in the act of becoming good witnesses to her testimony, spectators may also undergo Amelia’s process of change, and work towards a new ethics.

VI Testimony and World Inequality in Crimp’s Adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006)

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1.1 Introduction: Mirroring Fragments, Play-Within-a-Play On the face of it, Martin Crimp’s 2006 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1899) is in many ways consonant with the original play. It maintains Chekhov’s structure, plot, and setting.¹ Both plays are about the difficulty a series of characters experience in connecting with one another while spending the summer at Piotr Sorin’s country estate. In his 2006 adaptation, however, Crimp transforms these problems into clearly visible vignettes of contemporary social tensions and contradictions. In Crimp, the difficulty to connect, Nina’s breakdown and Kostya’s outrageousness, melancholia or acts of self-inflicted violence, are articulated as a consequence of the structural violence of contemporary society, increasingly dominated by market forces and by the search for status. The difference in emphasis offered by Crimp’s 2006 version of The Seagull in contrast to Chekhov’s original is achieved, primarily, through alterations to character and relationships, but it is Crimp’s treatment of Nina’s two key speeches in the play (the one she delivers in Act One as she performs the role of a war survivor for Kostya’s play, and the one she delivers in Act Four, as she passes on to Kostya her testimony of Trigorin’s violence) that is key to this discussion, particularly in the way that he transforms them into urgent, direct acts of testimony. As well as functioning as a critique of contemporary society, Crimp’s version of The Seagull is also, importantly, a post-Holocaust play, in that it seeks to make social contradictions transparent for the audience, and to elicit a resistant type of memory in spectators. Nina’s language is not rational and referential, but lyrical and often highly symbolic. Haunted by the violence, both personal and political, she has witnessed, and in her attempt to testify, she “actively pursue[s] the [traumatic] accident […] through obscurity, through darkness and through fragmentation” (Felman and Laub 1992: 24), in a language which is often “cognitively dissonant” (Felman and Laub 1992: 53). Via Nina’s testimony of her experiences of suffering, Crimp seeks to make the audience engage with the duplicity of contemporary society and to recognise and critique the fractures violence has created in the twentieth century. In responding to violence in a historical and dramatic context that is significantly post-Holocaust, Crimp is seeking appropriate ways of ‘representing’ atrocity. How should or could barbarism be dramatized? According to AngelPerez, the historical rupture which the Holocaust signified has caused British

 One exception in relation to setting exists: Act Two is not set on a “croquet lawn’ (Chekhov 1964: 124) but takes place indoors, “in the dining room, just before lunch” (Crimp 2006a: 22).

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playwrights, and Crimp in particular, to seek to develop new forms, thus making visible “the impossibility of recycling pre-existent dramatic categories and the need of a generic renovation of theatre” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 200).² Indeed, through Nina’s testimony and its form as lyrical, indeterminate language, Crimp seeks to position spectators in such a way that they become aware of their unequal, contemporary world order, and to oppose the introduction of ‘barbarism’ as they may detect it in their own, daily context. Comparing Crimp’s adaptation with Anne Dunnigan’s 1964 and Michael Frayn’s 1986 translations, this paper argues that whilst these other versions make Nina’s words in Act One express a metaphysical and religious problem, Crimp chooses to emphasise another context, the one of late capitalism which led to the War on Terror.³ In The Seagull, the deceit that permeates character relations in both informs and reflects a larger political milieu of rivalry amongst world powers, thus turning the multiple vignettes of emotional duplicity which permeate Chekhov’s play into symptoms and causes of an unequal contemporary world order. Indeed, in Nina’s speeches, the link between the micropolitical and the macro- is interestingly explored. When Nina delivers the testimony of the war survivor in Act One, the language in which she talks about world relations is strangely reminiscent of interpersonal relationships. In Act One, Nina uses possessives, such as “my” enemy (Crimp 2006a: 14) or “my” white throat (Crimp 2006a: 14), and talks about the enemy as the “violent Other – origin of material brutality” (Crimp 2006a: 14), thus deliberately personalising political relationships. Similarly, in Act Four, Nina speaks about the violence of interpersonal relationships in another act of testimony in which her experience blends with and is given resonance by the lines of the war survivor she impersonated in Act One. She thus indirectly refers to Trigorin’s violence and lies as being, like she claimed in Act One about international relations, “COLD, BLANK [and] DISTANT” (Crimp 2006a: 64). Crimp thus renders the search for power and ambition in terms of the

 “Martin Crimp […] met en place une dramaturgie de l’après-Auschwitz qui rend patente l’impossibilité de recycler les catégories dramatiques préexistantes et la nécessité d’une refonte générique du théâtre”.  The Seagull has been widely translated and adapted into the English language, particularly by British playwrights. Playwright Stephen Mulrine translated The Seagull in 1997, and Pam Gems (1994), Tom Stoppard (1997) and Christopher Hampton (2006), like Crimp, produced their own adaptations. This section focuses on Anne Dunnigan’s and Michael Frayn’s translations because they are representative of two different historical moments, namely, the 1960s and 1980s, thus covering, together with Crimp’s 2006 version, a significant time span. However, occasional reference is also made to Gem’s, Stoppard’s and Hampton’s adaptations for comparative purposes.

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essential question of how the self is conceived and of whether it can come face to face with its limitations and acknowledge the Other, or else contribute to oppression of the Other and to emotional – or terrorist – violence. The language of testimony, which Crimp gives as lyrical, urgent and indeterminate, is an important strategy of Crimp’s in his efforts to relocate The Seagull as a response to contemporary society and violence and to reposition his audience as personally and politically engaged. The lyrical testimony requires the ‘collaboration’ of the audience in the sense that they are encouraged to evoke personal experiences of inequality, which they may either have witnessed or undergone, and which are then turned into material for interpretation. This process requires the spectators to become aware of late capitalist inequality, and of the duplicitous subjectivities it creates. In so doing, audience members may re-experience the contradictions of late capitalist society, ideally becoming more aware of them, thus contributing to resist violence. Crimp’s use of testimony and lyricism in Nina’s speeches, indeed, responds to an art post-Holocaust, and are an example of what Adorno, who interrogates himself regarding the ways in which art might, in the wake of Auschwitz, contribute to eliciting resistance, understands by resistant art. As Adorno puts it, and has been argued in Preliminaries II, and in the preceding block, for art to be resistant, social contradictions need to be ‘experienced’ by the receiver, and “certain art holds open the possibility of that experience […] In this way alone is aesthetic resistance possible” (Adorno 240). According to Adorno, the experience of contradiction and crisis, then, must be an essential component of any work of art that attempts to elicit resistance. In The Seagull, Crimp emphasizes the potential for resistance of testimony through the mise-en-scène itself. The lyrical, poetic language of Nina’s testimony in Act One is framed, in Chekhov, by a play-within-a-play, since Kostya’s play is staged for both the fictive, bourgeois onstage audience and for the real audience. Yet in Crimp’s version spectators become what in Chekhov is the setting, namely, the lake in front of which Kostya’s play is staged for the enjoyment of the fictive audience. Crimp’s opening stage directions indicate: “Evening. A terrace at the back of the house on Sorin’s estate. Upstage is the rest of the house. Downstage – i. e. in the space occupied by the auditorium – must be imagined a lake. On the terrace, Yakov and other servants are making arrangements to stage Konstantin’s play” (Crimp 2006a: 3). As she delivers her speech for the fictive audience before the lake, therefore, Nina necessarily turns her back to the real audience, thus refocusing the spectators’ attention on the ‘fictive’ audience. The onstage audience for Kostya’s play is made up of Piotr Sorin’s guests, who are spending a summer vacation at his country estate. Nina’s fictive audience is not responsive, and cannot understand the message she tries to deliver.

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Such spinning of the opening scene thus invites the ‘real’ audience to become responsible with respect to the violence which is spoken about on stage, and which is similar to the context of duplicity which led to the War on Terror. In this way, Crimp encourages the real audience to cease to be mere voyeurs of the spectacle, and to position themselves actively with respect to contemporary structural inequality. The play’s ultimate aim, indeed, is that, out of their contact with oppression and suffering, the audience may ideally work towards developing a new, more personal sense of ethics, one not necessarily based on a series of ‘commonsense’, prescriptive moral rules. On the contrary, ethics are negotiated by the audience as they experience their absence in particularized, daily-life instances. In both in Chekhov’s play and in Crimp’s adaptation, in Act One Kostya’s play is staged as a play-within-a-play. Nina and Kostya are in love but Kostya is a poor writer. Kostya has explicitly written a part for Nina which, in Crimp’s version, is turned into the political testimony of a war survivor. Kostya’s audience is not responsive, which only increases his sense of frustration. Act Two introduces Trigorin. In Crimp, Trigorin’s relationship with writing is reassessed from a contemporary perspective in order to acutely point to the gap, especially in Act Four, between living and writing, acts and words, and how a ‘good writer’ – an efficient, skilled professional – may not necessarily be an ethical individual.⁴ As Trigorin puts it, he is unable to fully enjoy any experience he lives through because he is always thinking he should turn it into material for a good story, thus separating himself emotionally from his own life. Kostya’s political commitment through art as shown in Act One thus dramatically contrasts with Trigorin’s self-centredness. Increasingly frustrated by poverty and the spiritual emptiness of contemporary society, however, Kostya begins to flirt with violence and finally kills a seagull. When Trigorin sees it, he claims that a nice idea for a story would be that of a young, innocent girl who, like the seagull Kostya has just killed, is seduced by a man who destroys her. His words turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy and, in Act Four, the audience is told he has seduced Nina and ruined her life. Act Three focuses on Kostya’s relationship with his mother, Irina Arkádina, an actress who, despite Trigorin’s unfaithfulness, stays with him in the hope of gaining more visibility within the theatre world through acting in his plays. Afraid of losing recognition if she leaves him, she listens to Trigorin “fantasise”  Trigorin and Kostya’s fortunes as writers – the former being successful, the latter unsuccessful – is contrasted with their framing as good or bad men – the former being duplicitous, the latter ethical. By such means, Crimp seems to critique the society that permits, even facilitates, immoral action in the service of ambition and worldly success.

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(Crimp 2006a: 42) about Nina, clinging to him despite the psychological torture he submits her to. Crimp, unlike Chekhov, presents Kostya and his mother locked in a generational conflict. Kostya is still economically dependent on his mother since he cannot make a living as a writer, yet his mother does not understand his ethical commitment to his profession, and refuses to help him economically. On the other hand, Kostya is fully aware of Trigorin’s duplicity and warns his mother that she should not allow Trigorin to “control her” (Crimp 2006a: 39) as he is only “salivating over Nina” (Crimp 2006a: 39).Crimp makes Trigorin’s unfaithfulness more explicit than Chekhov, and presents Kostya’s rebelliousness against his elders and his “refus[al] to recognise their authority” (Crimp 2006a: 40) as a political act against a duplicitous establishment. Interestingly, Arkádina’s and Trigorin’s relationship mirrors yet another vignette of infidelity which Crimp decided to give more emphasis to as well. Polina Shamraev, wife to Ilya Shamraev – a retired lieutenant who manages Sorin’s estate – is shown in Acts One and Two to be in love with Dorn, a doctor. Although Polina complains that women have always been “all over” Dorn (Crimp 2006a: 10) and that he cannot control his flirting, she later apologizes and even justifies his conduct arguing it comes with his profession. As shall be seen, in Crimp these vignettes are made sharper and more violent than in Chekhov, both as a consequence of the men’s – Trigorin’s, Dorn’s – search for prestige or inability to commit, but also of the women’s – Arkádina’s, Polina’s – lack of self-awareness and inability to snap out of their state of dependency. Eventually, in Act Four Kostya, who has kept flirting with violence, shoots himself offstage. Yet before he does so, Nina comes back after a two-year absence and pays Kostya a visit, during which she passes on to him the testimony of the deceit she has experienced in her emotional life, combining it, in her state of breakdown, with the speech about world violence from Kostya’s play which she delivered in Act One. Nina thus tells about how Trigorin’s imagined plot for a story in which a girl is destroyed by a man who seduces her actually became real as he enacted it on herself. In conclusion, then, Crimp’s version of The Seagull removes Chekhov’s references to Russia, and is instead set in a late capitalist context of deceit and male double-standards which mirrors a larger, political context of duplicity and rivalry amongst world powers.

1.2 Testimony as Resistance: Crimp’s and Mitchell’s Play-Within-a-Play Crimp chose to update Chekhov’s The Seagull by paring down the language and giving it the urgency and directness of testimony. In the play-within-a-play, as

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already mentioned, Nina embodies a survivor from a world war in which individuals have engaged in a “brutal material struggle” (Crimp 2006a: 13). She speaks about the destruction of a large portion of life on the planet. Nina’s lyrical language evokes a world torn by violence – a dystopia brought about by competition between nations, greed and wars – and the ensuing loneliness of the subject who has witnessed violence: Everything human, everything animal, every plant, stem, green tendril, blade of grass – each living cell has divided and divided and divided and died. For millions of years Now this earth is ash, this lake thick like mercury. No boat lands on the empty shore. No wading bird stands in the shallows. And the moon – look – picks her way like a looter through the ruined houses of the dead slicing open her white fingers on the sheets of smashed glass – COLD BLANK DISTANT. Pause. The brutal material struggle of individuals has ended. Only the steady heartbeat of the world goes on. I am that heartbeat. I am the blood moving under the skin. I am the slow pulse of the universal will. […] I am alone. Once in a hundred thousand years I try to speak but my mouth fills with brick-dust and broken glass. Nobody hears me: not the moon not the pale fires ringing the cracked horizon – billions of atoms chaotically changing. Only the steady heartbeat of the world does not change. SLOW DEEP IMPLACABLE. (Crimp 2006a: 12– 3)

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In this barren, dystopian context, the moon is “like a looter” (Crimp 2006a: 13) who drags herself “through the ruined houses of the dead / slicing open her white fingers / on the sheets of smashed glass” (Crimp 2006a: 13), lamenting the lost potential of individuals. Refusing to take part in such a violent game, the moon disclaims her memories of humanity, as it were, and pours herself over the unacknowledged and forgotten site of violence. What is crucial is that, unlike previous translators of Chekhov’s play, Crimp makes the social context transparent through Nina’s words by making her speak a language that addresses contemporary conflicts. The shadow of genocide hovers over Nina’s words, since the war she talks about has involved the whole of humanity and seems to finally have taken on Holocaust proportions.⁵ In Dunnigan’s 1964 translation, instead, Nina’s speech becomes an ontological or spiritual riddle. Dunnigans’s translation claims that “for thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature” (Chekhov 1964: 115), but there is no mention of a war having taken place. It is rather more reminiscent of a religious apocalypse than of a war between human beings. Life is no more, but there seems to be no explanation or cause: Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, starfish, and all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more…. For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature. And now in vain this poor moon lights her lamp. Cranes no longer wake and cry in meadows, May beetles are heard no more in linden groves. Cold, cold, cold. Empty, empty, empty. Awful, awful, awful. Pause. The bodies of all living creatures having turned to dust, eternal matter has transformed them into stones, water, clouds, and all their souls have merged into one […] I am all alone. Once in a hundred years I open my mouth to speak, my voice echoes dolefully in this void, and no one hears it… And you, pale lights, you do not hear me… (Chekhov 1964: 115)

Dunnigan, following Chekhov, renders Nina’s speech as a metaphysical meditation, whereby the destruction of the multiplicity of life on earth is evoked only in order to convey a sense of chaos and materiality, which should finally be resolved into one single universal spirit. Instead, Crimp evokes the lives of animals and of blades of grass, of humans and of cells, in order to lament the fact that the effort undertaken by past generations has been undermined by a war and made to disappear without a trace. In this context, both Nina and the moon become witnesses who recall the memory or the trace of violence so that the lives of

 Notice also the contrast between the “green tendril” (Crimp 2006a: 12) and the “lake thick like mercury” (Crimp 2006a: 12), which may allude to the effect of nuclear disaster as well.

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those who have come before them will not have been in vain.⁶ Crimp suggests that the earth’s multiple forms of life dwell within Nina, thus making it possible for her to exist. As bodies that have become part of her, she can, in the face of destruction, evoke them in order to draw strength. Crimp’s adaptation, then, deliberately brings the barrenness of the stage and of the earth into sharp political focus. As Nina speaks, her testimony increasingly seems to encompass the voice of her contemporaries, who acknowledge their complicity with violence after having refused to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Other. Nina makes reference to how it is always the presence of the Other that makes the self confront its own boundaries and abide by ‘reason’: And now my enemy approaches: The violent Other – Origin of material brutality. I can hear his body churn the lake – smell his foul breath. I can see his terrifying lidless eyes. The violent Other: hoping to wind the steel wire of reason round my white throat HARD BITTER RESTLESS. (Crimp 2006a: 14)

The language is lyrical and indeterminate and it works like a poetic riddle for the audience. World relations have been undemocratic and savage because of the fear, amongst Nina’s contemporaries, to yield to the demands of what she calls the “violent Other” (Crimp 2006a: 14). Violence seems to have arisen because “the Other – origin of material brutality” (Crimp 2006a: 14) always makes the self aware of its necessary boundaries. Thus, as Nina suggests, the Other was seen as “terrifying” and as wanting to “wind the steel wire of reason”

 As shall be seen, later in her first speech Nina describes herself as being that “steady heartbeat” (Crimp 2006a: 13), the “slow pulse of the universal will” (Crimp 2006a: 13), and the “blood moving under the skin” (Crimp 2006a: 13). Nina may thus also represent a more abstract principle, such as humanity’s creative, vital impulse to adapt and survive, as opposed to its selfdestructive tendencies. Given the fact that she is a witness, she may represent memory itself, in its potential to prevent violence from repeating itself.

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(Crimp 2006a: 14) around the self, that is, as hoping to restrain the ambition of her contemporaries. Yet, at the same time, through the reference to the Other as having “lidless eyes” (Crimp 2006a: 14) Crimp seems to suggest that the enemy was perhaps also violent in its demands.⁷ However, Crimp portrays this fear of the Other as being exaggeratedly visceral – note the enemy is ‘felt’ as a presence that “churn[s]” (Crimp 2006a: 14) the otherwise peaceful lake and is detected by its “foul breath” (Crimp 2006a: 14). Crimp sketches out a polarized situation which possibly, and satirically, evokes not only the political climate of the War on Terror, but also popular Hollywood-style movies that the War on Terror both helps to produce and in turn feeds on. The Other, like a steel wire that winds around one’s own throat, signifies self-limitation and is a powerful reminder of the inherent smallness of the self. Nina, in her role as a war survivor, understands violence as the result of the self’s inability to make sacrifices for the Other. The ‘enemy’, indeed, is that who, in political relationships, often asks world powers for a certain self-restraint. S/he is seen as terrifying because s/he seeks to “wind the steel wire of reason / round my white throat” (Crimp 2006a: 13), demanding justice and sharing. Nina speaks in a language that is a mixture of registers – it is at the same time personal and political, lyrical and academic. In its riddling quality, it produces a strangeness which aims to capture the audience’s attention. The references to the ‘Other’ belong to the context of academia and psychology, but are given poetic quality by being de-contextualized. In this sense, they work very much like an objet trouvé or even a linguistic ready-made (Zimmermann 2002: 117), offered to the audience as objects of interpretation, in the manner of those in Attempts on her Life, as discussed above. Crimp thus mixes the registers of the essay and the poem in a poetics of strangeness in order to draw spectators in. As Zimmermann has argued in relation to Crimp’s Attempts on her Life, Crimp’s linguistic ready-mades, in their being de-contextualized, and thus opaque, fragments of language, introduce signifiers whose signified is inaccessible

 Note the intertextual echoes between The Seagull and Cruel and Tender, a play which also dramatises the contemporary context of the War on Terror, and which is also a re-writing of another play, Sophocles’s The Trachiniae. In Cruel and Tender, Amelia similarly refers to the terrorist as a face with “no eyelids”: “my husband is sent out on one operation after another with the aim – the apparent aim – of eradicating terror: not understanding that the more he fights terror the more he creates terror and even invites terror – who has no eyelids – into his own bed” (Crimp 2004a: 2).

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or which do not represent anything, but simply ‘are’” (Zimmermann 2002: 117). Crimp’s verbal ready-mades, then, inspired by Marcel Duchamp visual readymades from the early twentieth century, invite spectators to interpret the de-contextualized fragments of language, to decode the ‘riddles’ or the defamiliarized fragments which are offered them. In this way, spectators are impelled to contribute to create new ethical codes as they seek to bring closure to the play by decoding the ‘riddles’ with which they are presented. According to Adorno, for art to be resistant, it must defy the conventions of realism. Adorno theorized about the potential of lyricism – and thus, of the literature of testimony – to act in a resistant manner for the reader/audience. As he puts it, and has been argued in Preliminaries II, “what we mean by lyric […] has within it […] the quality of break or rupture” (Adorno 215). As Adorno puts it, the lyric poem, through its defamiliarization, attempts to bring to light “things undistorted […] not yet subsumed” (Adorno 213) to dominant modes of perception, and to the reification of an exchange society. Indeed, if the audience wants to bring closure to the play, and understand the testimonial language Nina presents them with, they will have to fill out Nina’s words with specific images. These images may be drawn from the audience’s own, personal experiences of inequality, thus becoming ‘double witnesses’, that is, both to “the trauma witness and a witness to him/herself” (Felman and Laub 1992: 58). Through Nina’s defamiliarized, lyrical language, Crimp thus seeks to interpellate spectators into becoming active witnesses with regard to the violence of their unequal world order by inviting them to detect violence as it takes place in their own, interpersonal context. Indeed, Crimp invites spectators to resist violence, as well as the introduction of ‘barbarism’ within civilized relationships, by making it aware of its symptoms, that is, of how it first manifests in their own context. In Katie Mitchell’s production of The Seagull Nina was wearing rags and her eyes were bandaged, but her vision, it was suggested, came from within. Mitchell developed the potential inherent in the role and speeches Crimp had devised for Nina. She attached a light bulb on Nina’s back, through which she attempted to bring light to others, even if it had to be artificial. Nina was made to represent the continuity of humanity and ethics that the war had all but destroyed. Like her artificial light bulb, her speech sought to bring wisdom to others, including the audience.⁸

 Mitchell’s production ran from 17 June to 23 September 2006 at the Lyttleton auditorium of the National Theatre.

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In Crimp’s version of The Seagull it is in this world that the battle between good and evil is waged, not in the other world, as in Dunnigan’s or even Michael Frayn’s translations. Dunnigan, for instance, evokes life on the planet in order to convey a sense of chaos and materiality which are finally resolved into the ‘eternal spirit’ or transcendental value of God, in which they dwell as essences. As Nina puts it, Fearing lest life should spring up in you, the devil, father of eternal matter, at every instant produces in you a continual interchange of atoms, as in stones and in water, and you are ceaselessly being changed. Within universe, spirit alone remains constant and unaltered […] One thing is not hidden from me: in the cruel, persistent struggle with the devil, the principle of the forces of matter, I am destined to be victorious, then matter and spirit shall merge in glorious harmony, and the kingdom of universal will shall be at hand. (Chekhov 1964: 115)

Frayn’s translation follows very much the same line as Dunnigan’s. It also turns Nina’s speech into a metaphysical or religious problem that dismisses life’s multiplicity and seeming randomness in the name of a more placid afterlife: For fear that life might appear to you, the Father of Eternal Matter, who is the Devil, effects in you, as he does in stones and water, a constant replacement of the atoms, and you are in a state of continual flux. One thing alone in the universe stays unchanging and constant – spirit itself (Pause). All I am allowed to know is that in this stubborn, bitter struggle with the Devil, marshall of all material forces, I am fated to be victor; and that matter and spirit will thereafter merge in wondrous harmony to usher in the reign of Universal Will. But that will come about only after long tens of thousands of years, when moon and bright Sirius and earth alike will gradually turn to dust… And until that time, horror, horror, horror. (Chekhov 1997a: 70)

What Crimp portrays in terms of a social and psychological competition for the earth’s resources, in Frayn, as in Dunnigan, is portrayed in terms of a struggle which takes place in the afterlife between God and goodness and the devil. Notice Nina’s words in Dunnigan, which stand in the place of Crimp’s “Now my enemy approaches / the violent Other / Origin of material brutality” (Crimp 2006a: 14): “Behold, my powerful enemy, the devil, approaches. I see his awful, blood-red eyes” (Chekhov 1964: 116). In contrast, in Crimp’s version, as already mentioned, the fight between good and evil is seen as a result of the self-aggrandizement of a few at the expense of a disenfranchized majority – of the refusal to have the “steel wire of reason” (Crimp 2006a: 14) wound up around one’s throat for the sake of acknowledging the claims of the Other.⁹  It is worth mentioning that Pam Gems’s, Tom Stoppard’s and Christopher Hampton’s adap-

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In Mitchell’s rendition, as suggested by Crimp’s version, it will be remembered, Nina delivered her speech by turning her back to the real audience in order to address the fictive audience, thus necessarily making the real audience self-consciously aware of its ignored presence. As Crimp puts it in the stage directions, “Downstage – i. e. in the space occupied by the auditorium – must be imagined a lake” (Crimp 2006a: 3).¹⁰ The real audience, indeed, becomes the lake, while Nina speaks of a world torn by violence to a fictive audience which is not receptive. They dismiss the play as experimental and make fun of Nina’s words, which is highly frustrating for Kostya. As Arkádina puts it, “(sotto voce) Is this one of those experimental things?” (Crimp 2006a: 13). Or, “(laughs) I can smell sulphur. Is that intentional? […] (laughs) Of course – it’s a special effect!” (Crimp 2006a: 14). Polina finds Dorn’s hat more interesting than Nina’s lines, which prompts Arkádina’s sarcastic comment that “the doctor is doffing his hat to the violent Other, origin of / material brutality” (Crimp 2006a: 14), leading Kostya to finally lose his nerve. Nina’s speech, in short, encounters bad witnesses on stage. Yet because her fictive audience fails to grasp the importance of her message, the real audience, who are facing the onstage audience from behind Nina’s back, can potentially become positive witnesses. In Chekhov, the lake is not supposed to be visible either, obstructed from view by the amateur actors who are staging Kostya’s play, but the stage is not turned around 180 degrees. By means of this device, Crimp explicitly interpellates the real audience, making it feel self-conscious and ill at

tations of The Seagull also highlight the spirit versus matter theme. Note Hampton’s version: “And for fear that life might quicken within you, the devil, the father of eternal matter, shuffles your atoms in continuous flux and reflux, as he does rock and water, so that your fate is neverending change. Through the whole universe everything changes, everything mutates but the spirit” (Hampton 2007: 19). Hampton’s adaptation is the most recent one in the English language to date, coming only one year after Crimp’s. It was staged at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs from 18 January to 17 March 2007, and was directed by Ian Rickson, with Kristin Scott-Thomas as Arkádina.  In this respect it is worth pointing out that some critics deplored Crimp’s decision to remove Chekhov’s references to the Russian situation in the nineteenth century, and to replace the spiritual versus material theme with oblique contemporary references. Neil Dowden, for instance, claimed that “the delicate tragicomic balance of Chekhov’s first great play [had] been sacrificed for the sake of a spurious contemporaneity” (Dowden 1). However, Mitchell’s staging of Nina’s speech was generally appreciated. Phillip Fisher, for instance, claimed that “one interesting development [was] the spinning of the opening scene through 180 degrees” (Dowden 1). Perhaps anticipating a certain controversy, Crimp added an appendix to the 2006 edition of The Seagull, two months before the play was staged, entitled “Note on this version of The Seagull”. There he stated he had stripped away “some of the apparatus” (Crimp 2006a: 67) of nineteenth-century drama, and included a more literal version of Chekhov’s original Act One.

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ease, as they are seemingly being ignored by Nina, while at the same time they do not seem to be more real, in their position as observers, than the fictive audience they are watching on stage. And yet it is in this context that Nina’s language, which is non-conventional and personal, lyrical and indeterminate, requires the audience’s active interpretation. Crimp interpellates the real audience explicitly as potential receivers of the message of the artist, and even as potential artists themselves, who may go beyond pre-established patterns of thought and find hope despite the conflicts and violence that pervade contemporary world relations. In this context, it is worth remembering that Nina agrees to play the part in Kostya’s play because she believes plays ought to convey some kind of message to the audience. As she puts it to Kostya before stepping on the stage, “I’m not sure a play’s really a play unless it has some kind of message … Don’t you think? […] Yes. About love or … I don’t know … people’s feelings … relationships” (Crimp 2006a: 9). In opposition to the self-aggrandizement that has led to world violence, Nina discovers herself, in the process of witnessing violence, as a vehicle for truth and ethics. Thus, Nina is now pure impulse, or pure love, engaged in surviving alone: Only I am I am I am

the steady heartbeat of the world goes on. that heartbeat. the blood moving under the skin. the slow pulse of the universal will. (Crimp 2006a: 13)

Like Corinne in The Country, Nina discovers that, beyond all fictions and desires, what remains in her is the impulse to survive so that her new-found understanding of ethics and justice can survive with her. Crimp’s adaptation thus places a major emphasis on remembrance. Both The Seagull and The Country present a process of minimalization and paring down of the self – they focus on the encounter of the self with the primal will to survive in order to struggle for a sense of ethics. Nina discovers herself as sheer blank, material time, a “heartbeat” (Crimp 2006a: 13) upon which hope can be inscribed. The continuation of life is made possible thanks to the “steady heartbeat” (Crimp 2006a: 13) for truth she discovers in herself, which connects her to the larger resilience of life on earth – “SLOW, DEEP, IMPLACABLE” (Crimp 2006a: 13) – as well. Nina offers the audience the testimony of destruction and violence but also of her process of change and growing awareness. Thus, it is out of her contact with injustice that Nina, as a human being, discovers the need to struggle for human rights and justice, and Crimp makes such process visible for the audience to witness. In this manner, Crimp encourages spectators to lead a life that may also, like Nina’s, attest to an ethical pursuit.

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The wish to divest the self of forms of self-aggrandizement, then, might be the ‘message’ about relationships and love that Nina is convinced art must convey or teach.¹¹ It is also the play’s underlying message and it indicates Crimp’s drive to turn towards moulding his audience’s psychology by placing the focus on their daily relationships. Crimp thus turns towards relationships and towards working with the audience through a pedagogy of resistance that seeks to involve them as responsible subjects with regard to the very real risks spoken about in the play.

1.3 ‘Cold, Blank, Distant’: Breakdown as Resistance In Act Four, two years after the staging of Kostya’s play, Nina comes back and passes on to Kostya her testimony of the failure of her emotional relationship with Trigorin, the writer who seduced her and “juggled” her (Crimp 2006a: 52) with another woman even when he was expecting a child with her. As Kostya puts it, “She had a baby. The baby died. Trigorin left her and resumed his previous… relationship. As you would expect. In fact, he’d never really given it up but somehow… revoltingly… juggled them both” (Crimp 2006a: 52). Nina comes back in a state of breakdown, affected by the violence she has experienced within interpersonal relationships. She tells Kostya of her suffering in a barely coherent, deranged speech, in which she keeps jumping from her present as an actress to when she first met Trigorin at Sorin’s house, and back again: Oh well. Who cares. He said theatre was useless – kept making fun of me – kept chipping and chipping away till I felt useless myself – no confidence – second-rate – didn’t know where to put my hands – couldn’t act, couldn’t stand right, couldn’t control my voice. Horrible. I’m the seagull – is that right? – no. Remember? You shot one. ‘Man turns up. Mindlessly destroys it. Idea for a story’. Is that right? No (Rubs her forehead.) What was I saying? Oh yes: chipping away. (Crimp 2006a: 63)

And later:

 The part where Nina expresses what she feels is the social function of art was translated more vaguely by Dunnigan and Frayn. Frayn makes Nina say she thinks Kostya’s play “doesn’t have much action […] it’s just a kind of recitation. And I think a play absolutely has to have love in it” (Chekhov 1997a: 66). Frayn echoes Dunnigan: “There’s not very much action in the play, only reciting. And I do think a play ought to have love in it” (Chekhov 1964: 112). The corresponding lines, in Crimp, express his whole pedagogy of resistance, that is, his belief that theatre can contribute to shape individuals’ subjectivities and the way they look at relationships.

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I love him more than ever. I want him. I can’t bear it. I’m completely obsessed. Remember how innocent we were? Mmm? How good it felt? ‘For millions of years.’ Remember? ‘For millions of years now this earth is ash, this lake thick like mercury. No boat lands on the empty shore. No wading bird stands in the shallows. And the moon – look – picks her way like a looter through the ruined houses of the dead slicing open her white fingers on the sheets of smashed glass – COLD BLANK DISTANT.’ (Crimp 2006a: 63 – 4)

As in The Treatment, The Country and Cruel and Tender, the passing on of a testimony becomes the medium through which the subject attempts to convey her own collapse or breakdown after having experienced ‘barbarism’ within relationships. Thus, in the spectators’ minds, the ‘coldness’, ‘blankness’ and ‘distance’ of the world after violence is juxtaposed to the coldness of interpersonal relationships – in which Nina was progressively “chipped away” at (Crimp 2006a: 63) by Trigorin and, as she puts it, rendered ‘useless’ or docile. Through these echoing testimonies Crimp thus links world violence and emotional violence, seeing them both as part of the same structural inequality. Nina’s language is lyrical and fragmented precisely in order to reach that “moment of self-forgetting in which the subject submerges into language and [it] speaks not as something foreign to the subject but as his own voice” (Adorno 218). Nina, indeed, attempts to separate herself from dominant modes of perception, and speak through her ‘own voice’, urgently searching for images, and hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a language of free associations. Nina’s defamiliarized, non-realistic language “throw[s] new light on the familiar, thus meeting the objective need for a change in consciousness that might ultimately lead to a change of reality” (Adorno 256). Nina’s repeated reference to being ‘chipped away’ evokes the policies of ‘Empire’ regarding international relations. She is referring here to her own feeling of erosion at being lied to by Trigorin, but the language which, furthermore, appears juxtaposed to the “COLD, BLANK [and] DISTANT” (Crimp 2006a: 64) policies of global capital, also conjures up the exploitation of the Third World by Western hegemony, which wields a type of power that keeps individuals docile. As Foucault has put it, the power exerted by liberal democratic societies to maintain the current world order is no longer based on taking life or letting live, as was typical of pre-modern societies, but on the power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1978: 138; emphasis original). It is this aspect

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of bio-power that has led Hardt and Negri to conclude that a characteristic of late capitalism is that power is becoming totalitarian “through the production of docile subjects” (Hardt and Negri 2006: 53). Thus, while Nina’s reference to the ‘violent Other’ in Act One was deliberately personal, here Nina’s language contains deliberately macropolitical echoes. Through these echoing testimonies Crimp thus links world violence and emotional violence, making them both appear as part of the same structural inequality. Because lyrical language is indeterminate, the personal and political metaphors Nina uses hold open the possibility for the audience to ‘fill them up’ with specific images of personal and political violence, thus giving coherence to the symbolic images Nina evokes and contributing to bringing closure to the play. In The Country, Corinne expresses how the violence of the system comes to bear on her marriage through the metaphor of the “stone” which the sun had “[n]ever warmed” (Crimp 2005a: 364). Nina and Kostya articulate world inequality and the symbolic violence of late capitalism – which they experience as a reality in their daily lives – by directly pointing to Trigorin’s dishonest subjectivity. Over and over in the play, be it in their acting and writing, through the riddling language of collapse or in overt denunciation, they refer to the individualistic, solipsistic nucleus of the late capitalist entrepreneur who refuses to acknowledge “the steel wire of reason” (Crimp 2006a: 14) – the requirements of the Other – in any contract or situation. In order to make sense of her situation, to place it within an understandable context, Nina evokes the memory of the war survivor whom she embodied in Act One, invoking memory in a resistant manner. Nina begins to merge her own life with the experience of violence of the survivor she impersonated in Act One, and thus inserts her tragedy within a larger contemporary context of violence. In Dunnigan’s or Frayn’s translations, this parallelism cannot be inferred, and nor can the latent danger, or the shadow, of genocide. In both these versions, Nina appears as being obsessed by Trigorin and the love he may still offer her, just as the memory of the play she evokes is a de-politicized comment on the random, chaotic, multiple nature of existence. Dunnigan has Nina say: When you see Trigorin, don’t say anything to him … I love him. I love him even more than before … A subject for a short story … I love him, love him passionately, desperately … How good life used to be, Kostya! Do you remember? How clear, how pure, warm, and joyous, and our feelings – our feelings were like delicate flowers … Do you remember … Do you remember? [Recites.] Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, silent fish that dwell in the deep, starfish, and creatures invisible to the eye – these and all living things, all, all living things, having completed their sad cycle, are no more … For thousands of years the earth has borne no living creature. (Chekhov 1964: 168)

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Dunnigan’s Nina is the record of the loss of a certain female naiveté after having been seduced and hurt by an inconstant man. Such a portrayal of Nina as someone who loves Trigorin all the more because he makes her suffer does show female complicity with victimization. Yet beyond (potentially) inciting a sense of impotence in the audience by replicating the stereotypical male and female attitudes, the fragment does not point to cultural contradictions as Crimp’s does. Frayn’s translation follows Dunnigan’s in this respect: I love him; I love him passionately; I love him to the point of desperation. It was good before, Kostya! Do you remember? Such a bright, warm, joyous, innocent life. Such feelings. Feelings like graceful, delicate flowers … Do you remember? (Recites) ‘Men and lions, partridges and eagles, spiders, geese, and antlered stags, the unforthcoming fish that dwelt beneath the waters, starfish and creatures invisible to the naked eye; in short – all life, all life, all life, its dismal round concluded, has guttered out. Thousands of centuries have passed since any living creature walked the earth and this poor moon in vain lights up her lantern. In the meadows the dawn cry of the crane is heard no more, and the May bugs are silent in the lime groves …’ (Chekhov 1997a: 123)

Thus, Crimp moves away from previous versions of The Seagull, such as Dunnigan’s or Frayn’s, and creates a minimalist, pared-down adaptation that attempts to encompass the coldness of international relations and how it impacts on interpersonal relations, also cold and reified. Nina, for one, perceives her personal experience of deceit and dishonesty to be inserted within larger, macropolitical world relations. The fragment, however, also reflects and denounces women’s complicity with victimization – “I love him more than ever. I want him. I can’t bear it. I’m completely obsessed” (Crimp 2006a: 63). Indeed, Nina participates and is complicit in the patriarchal system that oppresses her. As she puts it, once Trigorin ceased to love her or to consider her valuable, she “felt useless [her]self – no confidence – second-rate” (Crimp 2006a: 63). Nina shows what Pierre Bourdieu has called “the paradoxical submission” (Bourdieu 7) of the victims – in this case, women victims of violence – to the structures of domination, leading them to view themselves through the structures of domination which have been imposed on them, thus re-enacting “dominant modes of perception […] which lead them to acquire a negative representation of their own sex” (Bourdieu 20).¹² The fragment, however, also insistently points to what Nina experiences as a mind-and-thought-defying or ‘obsessive’, contradiction – the fact that a person

 “Cette soumission paradoxale […] C’est ainsi que les femmes peuvent s’appuyer sur les schèmes de perception dominants […] qui les conduisent à se faire une représentation très négative de leur propre sexe”.

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holding a position which implies ethical reflection may completely dissociate such an activity from the way in which he acts in the world, from his emotional life and reality. Nina relentlessly focuses on Trigorin’s lack of scruples when it comes to turning his thoughts into acts, on how his writing has not helped him become a ‘better subject’. Instead, paradoxically, he acts out what he appears to be attempting to denounce through his writing. Nina keeps repeating to herself Trigorin’s words while “rubb[ing] her forehead” (Crimp 2006a: 63), as if seeking to understand – “I’m the seagull – is that right? – no. Remember? You shot one. ‘Man turns up. Mindlessly destroys it. Idea for a story’. Is that right? No (Rubs her forehead.) What was I saying? Oh yes: chipping away” (Crimp 2006a: 63), she tells Kostya. She asks the audience, almost compulsively, whether such dissociation between art and life, words and acts, is ethically correct. The audience is interpellated as embodying the possibility to re-envision and defend ethics where it is most needed, that is, in each audience member’s real-world process of relating to others. Nina cannot bring herself to understand, as she repeats obsessively, how Trigorin could feel the need to write about a young girl who is “mindlessly” (Crimp 2006a: 63) destroyed by a man, and at the same time enact it for real. Writing, the implication is, should precisely operate as a source of reflection which should make individuals refrain from committing barbaric acts or from inflicting violence. Trigorin’s cold-hearted dissociation between his words and his actions prompts both Nina’s reflection on the dissociation between writing and ethics and her collapse.¹³ It is worth pointing out that Crimp’s ‘re-writing’ of the character of Trigorin and the ethical riddles he is meant to awaken in the audience are intimately connected with Crimp’s post-Holocaust context. In A Theory of Parody (1985/2000), Hutcheon explains that contemporary authors “trans-contextualize” (Hutcheon 11) previous works of art and, in so doing, they parody them. The momentous historical events which took place between Chekhov’s and Crimp’s life-spans may be claimed to account for the differences in their treatment of the most cru Interestingly, in 2003, American playwright Steven Dietz wrote the two-character play The Nina Variations (2003), a series of fragmented vignettes for the stage, each proposing a different possible ending for Act Four, which is when Nina and Kostya meet for the last time before Kostya commits suicide. Dietz explores the reasons why Nina and Kostya finally do not come together, and has Nina talk about her past life, specifically about her “baby […] [who] is part of Trigorin, the man who could never find a way to love me completely” (Dietz 25). Dietz imagines both Kostya and Nina eventually declaring their love for one another. Throughout his play, Dietz also develops the theme of writing and the concern for new forms but, unlike in Crimp, it is not turned into a vehicle of denunciation directly related to central questions pertaining to morality and ethics.

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cial passages, of the main characters and, in particular, of Trigorin. The Holocaust, indeed, was driven forward by individuals who, having an education and forming part of a productive, civilized society, committed acts of barbarism. In Hutcheon’s words, “parody is, in another formulation, repetition, with a critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (Hutcheon 6). As she puts it, such self-conscious reworking of old texts “play[s] on the tensions created by […] historical awareness. They signal less an acknowledgement of the ‘inadequacy of the definable forms’ of the predecessors […] than their own desire to ‘re-function those forms to their own needs” (Hutcheon 4). Indeed, that is why, in Crimp, Nina’s personal language resonates with larger, political implications. The use of collapse and irrationality as a vehicle for denunciation is present in Frayn’s translation, but not in Dunnigan’s. Frayn has Nina say, “Do you remember – you shot a seagull? One day by chance a man comes along and sees her. And quite idly he destroys her … And idea for a short story … That’s not right … (Rubs her forehead.)” (Chekhov 1997a: 122). Madness and irrationality, producing a speech based on seemingly incoherent fragments, are vehicles for expressing the absence of ethics that defines the contemporary individual’s search for status and profit and the “de-ethicized bond” (Béjar 144) that characterizes late capitalist interpersonal relationships.¹⁴ As Béjar puts it, “postmodern love relationships do not contemplate the possibility of responsibility towards the Other. […] [And yet] responsibility is the substance upon which morality is based” (Béjar 144).¹⁵ Dunnigan, however, does not highlight the subversive potential of madness or irrationality. In her translation, Nina says, “Do you remember, you shot a sea gull? A man came along by chance, saw it, and having nothing better to do, destroyed it … A subject for a short story … No, that’s not it … (Rubs her forehead)” (Chekhov 1964: 167). Dunnigan’s Nina is frail and distressed, correcting herself and failing to remember; whilst in Frayn’s and Crimp’s versions she makes herself remember to the point of irrationality and madness.¹⁶ Her collapse and the irrational language of breakdown thus obsessively point to the contemporary site of barbarism; they are in fact the means to bring to light the violence of the existing order.

 “[…] una relación des-eticizada”.  “[…] las relaciones amorosas posmodernas tienen como cláusula implícita la suspensión de la responsabilidad en relación al otro. [Y, para Bauman como para Lévinas] la responsabilidad es la materia de la moral”.  Interestingly, Hampton’s 2007 adaptation follows Crimp’s in this sense, while Gems’s and Stoppard’s versions stay closer to Dunnigan’s.

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In Crimp, Trigorin represents the establishment and is deliberately portrayed as a dishonest figure. In Crimp, Trigorin tells Arkádina she should understand his fascination for the young woman, since it is just a passing fantasy. In Crimp’s rendering, Trigorin is represented as a whimsical, childish, utterly selfish man who simply cannot avoid being fascinated by Nina. Yet Crimp’s vignettes of non-reciprocal relations also evoke a social malaise which is the result of long-inherited patriarchal habits, including women’s lack of self-awareness and their unwillingness to liberate themselves from the traps of male subjection and narcissism. Thus, Arkádina patiently listens to Trigorin’s long, boastful recitation in Act Three: […] imagine waking up and she’s next to you – she’s right there – her head’s right there on the pillow and she’s looking straight into your eyes – completely open – totally trusting – and it’s like she’s taken you back to the exact point in your life where everything was possible but you failed to realise. (Crimp 2006a: 42)

Crimp’s Trigorin begs the question of why women should allow themselves to be victimized in a manner which only helps reproduce existing cultural stereotypes of women as the self-appointed, faithful caretakers of inconstant men who vindicate their need to be ‘free’ of emotional constraints. Yet in the process of showing the rifts that separate men and women in contemporary society, Crimp also reveals the means whereby women could actually enact resistance against the kind of exploitative, late capitalist subjectivity Trigorin represents. Trigorin wants both Nina and Arkádina, and demands of Arkádina that she understand his feelings for another woman while still continuing to love him and stay with him. When Arkádina shouts out that she does “NOT WANT TO HEAR THIS” (Crimp 2006a: 42; emphasis original), Trigorin simply responds, “LET ME” (Crimp 2006a: 42); when Trigorin says he “can’t get rid of it” (Crimp 2006a: 41), Arkádina replies, “Don’t want to get rid of it is what you mean. You cannot talk to me like this, Aleksei. I am a normal person and I have / normal feelings” (Crimp 2006a: 41; emphasis original). Arkádina’s suffering as a person who requires responsibility and commitment from Trigorin emerges through her simple but desperate claim that he pay attention to her humanity, to the fact that she is made of flesh and blood. In the process, her remarks, reminding Trigorin of her humanity, also point to the late capitalist global order that produces such reified relationships. In Frayn, Arkádina’s humanity does not emerge so powerfully and neither does Trigorin’s attempt to subject her while seducing Nina, so the contemporary crisis of relationships cannot be observed. Instead, Frayn depicts the break-up of a relationship without allowing spectators to infer the social causes underlying

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it. Arkádina points out that she is “a woman like any other – you cannot speak to me so” (Chekhov 1997a: 101), thus perhaps implying that she should be spared the suffering because she is a woman. In the same vein, in Frayn it seems Trigorin has made up his mind to leave Arkádina and that he is simply being honest with her in telling her he does not love her but Nina. In this sense, in Frayn there is no conflict; he simply seems to be portraying the end of a relationship: The sort of love I’ve never known yet … I’d no time for it when I was young, when I was beating on editor’s doors, when I was struggling with poverty … Now here it is, that love I never knew, it’s come, it’s calling to me … What sense in running away from it? (Chekhov 1997a: 101)

In Crimp, Kostya, as a poor, unrecognized writer, is made to be keenly aware of society’s contradictions. Like Nina when she comes back in Act Four, he knows that the system that is keeping him in poverty is concentrating wealth and status in other hands and waging wars abroad. Kostya feels oppressed by what he sees as a duplicitous establishment. In Act Three, while Arkádina is removing the bandages from his forehead, after his first attempt to kill – or hurt – himself, Kostya asks her why she lets Trigorin control her. The argument between mother and son culminates in Kostya’s angry claim that he will not recognize the authority of the ‘established’ individuals around him: Arkádina Konstantin

You’re jealous. People with no talent always try and belittle the ones with real talent – just like your father did. Real talent (with anger) I’ve got more talent than all of them put together. (Pulls off the bandage.) It’s you – the reactionaries – who grab the positions of power, decide what is or is not art, and suffocate the rest of us. I refuse to recognise your authority. And I refuse to recognise his [Trigorin’s]. (Crimp 2006a: 39 – 40)

In her production of the play, Mitchell had Kostya shout out his dissent, which resonated loudly through the house’s corridor as he tried to reach the ears of the rest of the guests. His voice echoed across the walls of the theatre, allowing the audience to experientially share the contradictions Kostya was highlighting. Kostya is actually experiencing collapse, and he turns his rage against the system on himself in acts of self-inflicted pain. At this point, he calls his mother, who refuses to support his writing, a “Tight-fisted bitch” (Crimp 2006a: 40), to which Arkádina replies by calling him a “Parasite” (Crimp 2006a: 40). Kostya just “sits down and quietly cries” (Crimp 2006a: 40) in a state of breakdown. In his pared-down version of Chekhov’s play, Crimp brings to the surface the truth of Kostya’s previous words – he has indeed become a ‘parasite’, but only because

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those who ‘have’ and who dictate taste in art have “grab[bed] the positions of power” (Crimp 2006a: 39) and “suffocate[d]” (Crimp 2006a: 39) everyone else.¹⁷ Dunnigan’s and Frayn’s translations are neither as pared down nor so concise in diagnosing the essential social problem and making social contradictions emerge – the contradictions of an unequal system which lead Arkádina and Kostya to shout at each other and to suffer. Thus, the real tension accounting for Kostya’s suicide cannot be inferred or experienced by the audience. Because Dunnigan and Frayn include many insults and imprecations, they are less precise in pinpointing the social issue. This is Frayn’s version: Arkádina Konstantin Arkádina

You shopkeeper! Yes – Kiev shopkeeper! Parasite! Miser! Ragbag! (Chekhov 1997a: 99)

Unlike Crimp, that is, Frayn does not use words and phrases like “reactionaries” (Crimp 2006a: 40) or “grab the positions of power” (Crimp 2006a: 39) or even Kostya’s refusing “to recognise [their] authority” (Crimp 2006a: 40). The social critique is still there, but on a lower key, as Kostya claims he doesn’t “acknowledge any of you” (Chekhov 1997a: 99). Crimp, instead, presents male and female collapse – to the point of rebellion and violence – as a consequence of how larger power interests and greed permeate emotional relations, even if female characters, like Nina or Arkádina, are complicit in their own victimization. In Crimp, Kostya is represented as being depressed, as placing all his hopes in his art, and as increasingly looking to the past for solace. Art, indeed, is Kostya’s main way to express his rage against the hypocrisy he observes around him. While Nina survives by passing on her testimony, Kostya becomes increasingly shut off in conflicts he cannot find a way out of. Kostya is a victim to the system and decides to abandon such a ‘cold’ and ‘distant’, reified society, finally killing himself off-stage. His suicide, just as the wounds and bandages on his head, is a concretization of the symbolic violence that permeates late capitalist relationships, based on double standards, greed and self-aggrandizement. Thus, while his mother puts bandages on him so that he may heal – that is, so that the trace and memory of the underlying violence of the system may be

 Interestingly, and despite the different contexts which their dissatisfaction addresses, there are many similarities between Kostya and Hamlet. The ‘bandage scene’ in Act Three echoes the so-called ‘closet scene’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Hamlet forces his mother, like Kostya does his, to realize the duplicity in which she is immersed. Both Hamlet and Kostya “put on […] an antic disposition” (Shakespeare 1998: 195) in order to pursue their criticism of their society, yet Kostya does not really control his ‘madness’ to the extent that Hamlet does.

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forgotten – he actually desires to flaunt the scars for everyone to see. Notice Kostya’s emphasis on remembrance in Act Three when he talks to his mother, before she changes his bandages, about positive memories he has of her, which lie in the past, when she used to help and be useful to others: Your hands are so magic. Remember – ages ago – you were starting out, and I was still tiny – remember that fight in our building when that laundrywoman got seriously injured? She had to be carried back to her room? And you visited her every day – took her medicine – washed her children in an old metal bath? You must remember. (Crimp 2006a: 38)

Clearly, Kostya opposes such fond, detailed memories, to the greed and self-aggrandizement he observes as permeating contemporary relationships. Not surprisingly, when Arkádina steps forward in defence of Trigorin, as discussed above, Kostya immediately pulls the bandages off in a bout of anger, thus deliberately signalling his refusal to forget the violence upon which the system is based. Paradoxically, then, masochism and suicide, like writing, are once more considered, in Crimp, to be acts of memory and self-inscription – be it upon the self or upon paper – so that the symbolic violence of the late capitalist order may not be forgotten.¹⁸ When Arkádina changes Kostya’s bandages, she describes him as looking like a “cross between a wounded soldier and an Egyptian mummy” (Crimp 2006a: 38). In Mitchell’s production of the play, indeed, Kostya carried a gun throughout, whereby he became a menacing presence for the audience, a threatening focus of instability – a ‘terrorist’ – the ultimate embodiment of the symbolic violence of the rest of the characters and the unfocused tensions of the play. In order to portray the duplicity of the establishment, Crimp includes many vignettes of male infidelity, a theme already present in Chekhov’s text, but which Crimp pares down to essentials, making it exemplary of the “de-ethicized bond” (Béjar 144) Béjar claims characterizes late capitalist relationships. As in a game of Chinese boxes, the pictures of unfaithfulness are inserted within larger images of world imbalance and power inequality. In this way, Crimp claims that when responsibility is placed in suspension in relation to the individual’s relationship with the Other, it is morality itself which is being suspended. The relationship with the Other is, indeed, the nucleus of any possible ethics or morality.

 Crimp shows that the stronger the community’s pressure to forget is – as in Kostya’s and, in Cruel and Tender, in Amelia’s case – the less that particular character is able to overcome society’s contradictions. This is not Corinne’s case in The Country, since she finds a community of other women who feel like her and participate in her struggle.

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The relationship between Dorn, the doctor, and Polina, Ilya Shamraev’s wife, or that between Trigorin and Arkádina epitomize Béjar’s ‘de-ethicized’ bond. In Act One, Polina snaps at Dorn that he is “obsessed with actresses” (Crimp 2006a: 10). Dorn replies that “if people idealise performers and tend to treat them differently from – say – pig-farmers, then that’s just […] outside of our control” (Crimp 2006a: 10). Crimp brings such de-ethicized relationships to the fore for spectators to reflect on the social causes that underlie them. In this instance, in contrast to other translators, such as Dunnigan or Frayn, he makes Polina’s reply particularly emphatic and snappy. To Dorn’s cool, well-argued, apparently learned talk, Polina replies, “Women have always been all over you – I suppose you can’t control that either” (Crimp 2006a: 10). In Dunnigann’s translation Dorn says that “if society loves artists and treats them differently from … merchants, let us say that is in the nature of things. That’s idealism” (Chekhov 1964: 113), while Polina responds, “Women have always fallen in love with you and hung on your neck. Was that also idealism?” (Chekhov 1964: 113). Similarly, in Frayn, Polina says, “You’ve always had women falling in love with you and hanging round your neck. Is that supposed to be a yearning for higher things?” (Chekhov 1997a: 67). In Crimp, Polina’s answer places responsibility on Dorn and his willingness or unwillingness to “control” (Crimp 2006a: 10) or restrain himself for the sake of the Other, that is, his willingness or unwillingness to – unravelling Crimp’s riddle in Act One – have the “steel wire of reason / round [his] white throat” (Crimp 2006a: 14). Crimp seeks to make the audience aware that, ultimately, it is individuals themselves who decide on the shape their relationships take, as well as on their politics. Polina is complicit in her own victimization. In Act Two, Arkádina and Nina want to leave Sorin’s estate, and Sorin claims that he cannot get them a carriage. Polina suddenly asks Dorn to leave the estate with her, taking Masha, her daughter, with them, and to “tell everyone the truth” (Crimp 2006a: 27) about their relationship. When Dorn retorts, “I’m fifty-five. It’s too late” (Crimp 2006a: 27), Polina immediately submits even if she knows the real reason why Dorn does not want to leave – “I know you’re saying that because there’s not just me, there are other women as well. I do understand. But you can’t live with all of them” (Crimp 2006a: 27). Surprisingly, she even goes on to ask Dorn for forgiveness, out of the fear of losing him: Polina Dorn Polina

I’m sorry: I know I’m boring. No – not at all. I’m so jealous. But you can’t avoid women – obviously – it’s your job. I do understand. (Crimp 2006a: 27)

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From their exchange it can be inferred Dorn only aims to subject her without offering anything in return. By describing it as Dorn’s “job” (Crimp 2006a: 27) to involve himself with women, Crimp actually continues to unmask him, suggesting how, in contemporary society, power abuses are committed behind the mask of authority or the demands of one’s ‘job’. Polina, however, eventually shakes off her dependency on Dorn, even if she can only do so through breakdown. Somewhat later, in the same act, Nina – another would-be victim of male duplicity, and the actress Polina claims Dorn ‘admires’ – comes into the dining room bringing some flowers for Dorn. Polina suddenly “tears [the flowers] to pieces and throws them onto the floor” (Crimp 2006a: 28), in an instinctive, irrational act of collapse. In Mitchell’s production, Nina brought Dorn a jug of flowers, and Polina splashed the water from the jug upon her own dry clothes and body. This signalled her wish to shake herself loose from numbness and not be afraid to start all over again, even if she has to go on without the symbolic strength and status she feels emanates from Dorn. Indeed, despite her fear, Polina seeks to actually break away from her bond with Dorn, which inscribes her as a victim. Thus, rewrites the politics of her relationship with Dorn, and they are finally seen to part in different directions. Kostya, the young playwright, observes the duplicity and amorality that reign in his uncle Sorin’s home, and attempts to use art as a means to denounce it. In Act Three, Kostya tries to express his frustration to his mother Arkádina but, as already noted, she interprets his complaint as jealousy of Trigorin’s position. In Crimp, Kostya argues that Trigorin has “got the two of us at each other’s throats and at the same time he’s in this house salivating over Nina and trying to convince her he’s a genius” (Crimp 2006a: 39). Frayn’s translation, on the other hand, does not portray identities in conflict, nor does he politicize the interpersonal bond. In Frayn, Kostya argues Arkádina has let Trigorin “come between” (Chekhov 1997a: 98) Kostya and her, and says Trigorin is in the house “educating Nina, trying to convince her once and for all that he’s a genius” (Chekhov 1997a: 98). Crimp, unlike Frayn, portrays Trigorin as subjecting both Arkádina and Nina to his self-aggrandizement and fear of loneliness. The women, on the other hand, cannot detach themselves from him because they either fear the realization that they are too old to be offered good roles – Arkádina’s case – or, like Nina, believe they cannot make it as actresses without his help within such a competitive system. Arkádina, indeed, makes frequent comments about her age, as when she asks Dorn, comparing herself to Masha, “(to Masha) Come on – on your feet. They both stand. Closer. Right – you’re twenty-two and I’m nearly twice that. Ev-

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genyi – who looks younger? […] [I am] like a little bird. I could play a fifteen-yearold” (Crimp 2006a: 22). Most importantly, however, Crimp’s version includes a reflection on the role and function of the writer and on the nature of art, which is not so explicit either in Chekhov or in Dunnigan’s or Frayn’s translations. Trigorin is the play’s ‘established’ writer, yet he is duplicitous and continually dissociates his words from his actions. He cannot live authentically; every feeling he has he turns into a possible line for his plays or stories, with a view to feeding his status as a prominent author. As he puts it to Nina, “D’you know what a ‘fixed idea’ is? – like when someone obsesses about … God knows what … the moon? Well my moon, my single obsessive thought, is writing. Write write write – it’s a compulsion” (Crimp 2006a: 30). And he continues, Obsessive-compulsive more like it. Here I am for example talking to you now – genuinely talking – but at the same time I know there’s always a story lurking. I see a cloud, for instance – one like a grand piano – and I’m thinking, I must get that cloud like a grand piano into my story. Or I smell the jasmine and I think: ‘jasmine – white stars – heavy scent – use to describe summer evening.’ Every word that you or I are saying now is being spiked on a pin and stored in a special box marked literature. (Crimp 2006a: 30)

Trigorin seems to be telling Nina he cannot enjoy a simple conversation with another person, let alone care for her or him, because of his obsessive compulsion to uphold his identity as a prominent writer. His comment that he does not have a life, but just “raw material” (Crimp 2006a: 31) is poetic from an existential point of view – is it not just the situation of all individuals to work out a coherent pattern out of life’s raw experiences or ‘raw material’? – but terrifying when read against the way in which he treats Nina. Against Trigorin’s words, Crimp postulates the necessity to both live and to write about life, but only if writing about life articulates the author’s political and ethical commitment and, therefore, bears a direct connection with an ethical dimension. For Crimp, writing should only emerge after having experienced life intensely. It should be linked to emotions generated by ‘daily’ things and by contact with the Other. Only in this manner, Crimp postulates, can art – and life – truly possess an ethical dimension. As opposed to Trigorin, literature helps Nina and, to a lesser degree, Kostya, as well as Crimp himself, to survive. It is inferred that Kostya can express much of his frustration at his deprived economic situation and at the duplicity of the relationship between Trigorin and his mother through writing. In a similar manner, it is inferred that Nina can survive her personal tragedy because she can evoke the memory of the war survivor she impersonates in Act One, the witness who lived only to tell and discovered the self did not depend on a linear, coherent narrative of success in order to be ethically valuable and embody truth and

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survival. By evoking the testimony of a world war, Nina attempts to master her own rage at Trigorin’s behaviour without surrendering to her personal tragedy. In conclusion, then, Crimp transforms the failure of interpersonal relationships as it is depicted in Chekhov into a very tangible, political reality that responds to the world today. Breakdown and testimony seek to interpellate spectators as responsible with respect to contemporary violence, by making them aware of the need to resist it as they may detect it in their context, thus making them aware of the need for ethics, and of preventing the introduction of ‘barbarism’ within civilized relations. Nina’s two key testimonies are offered to the audience as poetic riddles about the process of transformation of a person into a vehicle for resilience and ethics, on the basis of his or her own contact with suffering and oppression. Crimp creates a post-Holocaust version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, suggesting that ethics, in the contemporary context, do not consist on a series of epistemological agreements that need to be reached before being able to act in an ethical manner, but as something that precedes epistemology. Individuals may be able to connect with one another in being ontologically exposed to one another’s precariousness and vulnerability. A new ethics can thus only emerge out of the audience’s realization of the need for relationships to be redesigned in their own personal lives. Through the indeterminate, lyrical language of breakdown, Crimp aims to make spectators evoke a resistant type of memory which may make them aware of the need to oppose the seeds of barbarism as they may detect them in their context, and of the fact that they have the potential to become, like Nina, ethical and committed individuals.

VII General Conclusions: Martin Crimp’s Theatre: a Dramaturgy of Resistance

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This study has started off from the premise that collapse is the cornerstone of Crimp’s dramaturgy of resistance. Through readings of The Treatment (1993), Attempts on her Life (1997), The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and Crimp’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006), it has claimed that, through the figure of collapse – which breaks through the fourth wall and can take the form of silence, the introduction of an irrational language that culminates in an act of testimony, or an act of violence – and from The Treatment onwards, Crimp develops a pedagogy of resistance based on audience interpellation and aimed at impelling spectators to experience social contradictions and become aware of the totalitarian underside of late capitalist society. As suggested in Preliminaries I and II, Crimp’s dramaturgy, taken as a whole, attests to the transition from (nineteenth-century) disciplinary societies to postmodern, late twentieth-century societies of control, where discipline is no longer exercised directly upon bodies, but from a distance, that is, through the normalizing role of the ‘camera’ – surveillance and technological devices – that extol and enforce identities favourable to the late capitalist economic system. As Hardt and Negri have argued, in societies of control “mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic’, ever more immanent to the social field [and there is an] intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common daily practices” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23). In late capitalist societies of control, it is increasingly left to the individual to internalize the prescribed codes of behaviour and to self-regulate accordingly, a mechanism which ultimately renders individuals ‘docile’ to the late capitalist economic system. As Baudrillard puts it in Simulacra and Simulation, societies of control are characterized by the absence of “violence […]: only ‘information’, secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implosion, and simulacra of spaces in which the effect of the real […] comes into play” (Baudrillard 2010: 29 – 30; emphasis added). As argued in Preliminaries II, from No One Sees the Video (1991), which detects the increasingly intruding presence of the ‘camera’ in daily life, to Cruel and Tender, which is set in a ‘bodiless’ techno-utopia, Crimp critiques the identities dictated by late capitalist ‘societies of spectacle’ and the reified, noncommittal relationships they set into play. In late capitalist societies of control, indeed, individuals are meant to absorb ‘spectacular’ images and myths of behaviour which come to them through the ‘camera’. As Foucault claims, ‘bio-power’, the type of power exercised in liberal societies, is no longer based on the power of the absolute sovereign to take life or let live, as was the case in pre-modern societies, but on producing and reproducing all aspects of social life by “administer[ing], optimiz[ing] and multiplying [social life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations”

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(Foucault 1978: 137). Crimp’s plays show how identities are colonized in different ways by the interests of the market, which reach down to the most private dimensions of individuals, often annulling them as political subjects and rendering them mere registering surfaces of outwardly given identities. This study’s main claim has been that Crimp introduces the figure of collapse in order to warn spectators of the points where late capitalist forms of power become totalitarian. Fascism has been understood as a radical manifestation of bio-power’s inherent tendency to erode the individual’s political potential and render him or her mere docile, biological matter. Agamben’s claim in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999/2005), that “Bio-power’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoè [the animal being] and bíos [the cultural being], the inhuman and the human” (Agamben 156), has proved fundamental to this study’s approach to Crimp’s plays. Crimp’s concern with signalling the moments in which contemporary society becomes totalitarian, and his attempt to develop a pedagogy of resistance, through collapse, which may position spectators as responsible vis-à-vis the introduction of ‘barbarism’ in contemporary relationships, characteristically makes him a post-Holocaust writer. Crimp’s dramaturgy is underpinned by the perception that “the worst […] is not waiting for us in the future, it precedes us. […] It is the mark left by systematic genocide, by the industrial production of genocide. It is also the mark of programmed nuclear collapse” (Kovadloff 210).¹ According to Angel-Perez, and as mentioned in Preliminaries I, the historical rupture which the Holocaust signified has caused British playwrights, and Crimp in particular, to seek to develop new forms, thus making visible “the impossibility of recycling pre-existent dramatic categories and the need of a generic renovation of theatre” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 200). Crimp’s theatre, indeed, inserts itself in a post-Holocaust ethical and aesthetic debate, and does not represent the Holocaust directly, but, through a defamiliarizing language, “places traumatism at a

 “Lo peor – vivencia y conciencia del extremo horror consumado – no nos aguarda, nos precede. […] Esa huella es la del genocidio sistemático, la de su producción industrial. Esa huella es también la de la hecatombe nuclear programada”. Arendt claims that, once acts of destruction have been committed, they remain as a latent possibility in culture – “every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past” (Arendt 1994: 273).

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distance, in order to make it understandable” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 22).² It has been argued that Crimp shares Adorno’s belief that for art to be resistant in the post-Holocaust context, social contradictions need to be ‘experienced’ by the receiver and, as O’Connor explains by reference to Adorno, “certain art holds open the possibility of that experience” (O’Connor 240). Through the figure of collapse, and from The Treatment onwards, Crimp develops a pedagogy of resistance based on audience interpellation and aimed at impelling spectators to experience social contradictions and become aware of the moments in which contemporary society risks becoming totalitarian. This book has also claimed that collapse, in Crimp’s dramatic plays, works differently from the way it does in his postdramatic plays. In the postdramatic plays, such as Attempts on her Life and Face to the Wall, collapse is dramatized in an archetypal manner. It is archetypal because there is very little, if any, plot and character development in such plays, and the age and other personal features of the ‘characters’ who collapse are not always specified. What these plays attempt to explore is how the body reacts when subjected to a ‘violation’ of its integrity through the sole tool of language and interpretation – that is, through discourse, the main way in which bio-power operates in contemporary society. Right before power effects a ‘transformation’ of the bodies of these ‘characters’ and renders them docile, their body steps in, signalling the introduction of ‘barbarism’ within contemporary relationships. The two plays also assess the extent to which individual resistance is possible in the contemporary context. It is in his dramatic plays that Crimp develops his pedagogy of resistance to its furthest extent. When female characters collapse in the dramatic plays, they seek to pass on the testimony of the oppression they have experienced at the hands of their colleagues, lovers or husbands, to other characters and to spectators. Haunted by such violence, both personal and political, they attempt to testify “through darkness and through fragmentation”, in a language that is often “cognitively dissonant” (Felman and Laub 1995: 24). Spectators are encouraged to decode the lyrical, indeterminate, urgent language of the irrational, which expresses itself through metaphors. In order to do so, they must bring to bear their own traumatic memories or experiences of oppression, thus becoming double witnesses – that is, both to themselves and to the character delivering her testimony. Thus, spectators will ideally assist the witness in the delivery of her testimony as they attempt to ‘read’ the play. Through female collapse, therefore,

 “Si notre langue perd sa fonction the communication et d’information lorsqu’elle est confrontée à la representation de l’horreur […], il faut donc inventer une langue défamiliarisante […] une langue qui mette à distance le traumatisme pour mieux le faire comprendre”.

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Crimp interpellates spectators and asks them to ‘remember’ the violence the present late capitalist order exerts for its maintenance.³ In dramatic plays such as The Treatment, The Country or Cruel and Tender, however, collapse seeks to unleash a plurality of micropolitical possibilities for spectators, some of which are offered as models of resistance. An important micropolitical strategy that is made visible through female collapse is the attempt to dismantle a series of lies through discourse. In The Country, as has been seen, both Rebecca and Corinne besiege Richard with questions in an attempt to find out what it is he is hiding away from them. To a certain degree, this strategy is similar to the one Amelia uses in Cruel and Tender when she confronts Jonathan’s indifference towards Laela and her brother by bringing his attention to bear on their needs and bodies through a highly physical language that borders on collapse. Collapse may also seek to encourage rebelliousness in spectators, as is the case in The Country when Rebecca suddenly stabs a fork into Richard’s palm. Rebecca’s act of retribution leaves a physical a mark of power on Richard which is similar to the one she feels he has symbolically inflicted on her body by lying to her. A crucial strategy of resistance collapse sets in motion is the female characters’ attempt to pass on their testimony of oppression to other characters and to spectators. The language Crimp’s female characters use at these points is powerfully lyrical and self-reflexive, and it asks spectators to supply specific images for the social and personal tensions that throb beneath the words.⁴

 In an interview held in London on 17 August, 2010 Crimp spontaneously mentioned that he was, at the moment, reading the testimonial narrative of Holocaust survivor Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933 – 1941 and To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942 – 1945, a journalist and Professor of Literature at the University of Dresden. Crimp noted that he was fascinated by Klemperer’s resistance in the face of the Holocaust, and by his decision, once the Nazi regime ended, to settle with his wife Eva in East Berlin, not West Berlin. Revealingly, in the same interview, Crimp mentioned that, in 2009, he visited Warsaw and was struck by the pervasive presence of history and memory in that city. He claimed “There are cities in Europe where you can see history everywhere […] in the UK, however, we seem to live in an ahistorical present, there doesn’t seem to be a sense of history. That worries me” (Crimp 2010). Crimp’s post-Holocaust dramaturgy of resistance, with its focus on ‘psychology’, clearly articulates what he feels is the need not to forget history.  As mentioned in Preliminaries II, in The City (2008), a play which stands in dialogue with The Country (2000), for the first time in Crimp’s dramaturgy, it is a man, Chris, who has recently lost his job, who passes on his testimony of his wife’s duplicity, Clair, a successful translator, to his daughter. As he puts it to his daughter through a parable-like language, similar to the one Rebecca uses in The Country, “I heard Mummy laughing out in the street – and there she was – under the street-lamp – sharing a joke – something about crocodiles – with the taxi driver out in the street. (Laughs.) Oh, it was windy! […] And when she came through the front door – still

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Finally, in the dramatic plays, oppression may lead a specific female character – Anne in The Treatment or Amelia in Cruel and Tender – to commit an act of violence against the body of their oppressor. Female breakdown, even in those cases in which there is violence, is represented as a resistant type of action for spectators. Female violence in such cases is a very focused action triggered by the female characters’ utopian desire to transform the coordinates whereby the male characters live, radically altering their subjectivity. Arguably, at the same time Crimp also points to the limitations of violence. As he shows in Cruel and Tender, when Amelia sends the General the poisonous chemical – her second moment of collapse – violence renders Amelia vulnerable and ‘monstrous’ to herself because she replicates the violence of the late capitalist system and is thereby complicit in its violence – she, that is, uses the “tools of the West” (Kemp in Sierz 2006: 207) against the West. Female violence, in Crimp’s plays, seeks to engage spectators in a post-Holocaust debate about retribution and its limits. As has repeatedly been observed throughout this study, such interest links Crimp with post-Holocaust writers such as Améry, Reyes Mate or Agamben, who explore the need for what Agamben, by reference to Améry, terms an “ethics of resentment” (Agamben 100). Améry’s central concern is to ensure, through communal memory, that the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust would not repeat themselves. He claims that, in the post-Holocaust context, the crime must become “a moral reality for the criminal” (Améry qtd. in Agamben 100). For retribution to have any significance at all, those who bear responsibility for what happened must be “swept into the truth of [their] atrocity” (Améry qtd. in Agamben 100), which must lead them to experience a necessary inversion of values. Anne’s stabbing of the fork into Clifford’s eyes in The Treatment, or Amelia’s destruction of the General’s body through the chemical in Cruel and Tender, are presented as resistant actions because they manage to alter the previously nonempathic subjectivities of their co-worker (Anne) or husband (Amelia). After the blinding, Clifford is forced to, like the taxi driver that drives him through New York in the play’s last scene, “trust” and “feel” (Crimp 2000: 307 and 386) the Other rather than ‘see’ and master him or her through an objectifying gaze/relationship. In the same manner, Amelia’s violent act against the General holds within itself a utopian potential because she aims to radically change his subjec-

laughing, by the way – guess what: two enormous chestnut leaves followed her right into the house” (Crimp 2008: 46). The City may indicate Crimp’s wish to problematize gender issues further, as well as to approach the contemporary gender gap from a different perspective.

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tivity – to transform the oppressive, masterful body of her husband into a body that acknowledges its radical dependency on the Other for survival. In those instances in which collapse takes the form of violence, its value as resistant action depends on the relationship its metaphorical connotations set up with spectators. In The Treatment, Clifford’s bloodied eyes are meant to shock spectators and invite them to reflect on the absence of, and therefore the need for, positive witnessing, as opposed to the passivity and voyeurism inherent in late capitalist, ‘spectacular’ relationships. Ultimately, therefore, spectators are impelled to reflect on their role as spectators. Furthermore, if the blinding is staged in a symbolic rather than an ‘in-yer-face’ manner, its intertextual echo with the Oedipus myth may lead spectators to reflect on the aggrandized contemporary male subjectivities resulting from – and underpinning – late capitalist institutions. In a similar manner, the General’s cyborg-like, dependent body in Cruel and Tender may force spectators to think about just which human(e) values and needs are absent from Amelia’s context, an absence that leads her to ‘write’ them on her husband’s body. In addition, the fact that Crimp’s dramaturgy of collapse and testimony mostly keeps violence off stage contributes to producing a resistant theatre, since it discourages voyeurism and “deactivate[s] the sadistic drives of spectators” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 45).⁵ The “absence of violence” on stage, as AngelPerez puts it, “refuses realistic figuration and allows for a greater manifestation of anguish and pain which cannot, in any case, awaken ‘jouissance’ on the part of the spectator” (Angel-Perez 2006a: 45).⁶ While The Treatment, where Clifford’s eyes are plucked out with a fork, allows for an ‘in-yer-face’ rendering of the blinding that would replicate the ‘spectacle’ the play itself aims to denounce, in his subsequent plays Crimp chooses to focus on his dramaturgy of testimony and audience interpellation and refuses to portray explicit, ‘spectacular’ violence on stage. In Crimp’s plays, as has been seen, collapse takes place when the body’s needs for connection, empathy and solidarity are eroded by the goals and aims of late capitalist productivity and instrumental rationality. Collapse thus places the needs of the body centre stage, and is the focal point of Crimp’s post-Holocaust dramaturgy. Collapse aims to signal the introduction of violence within late capitalist, ‘civilized’ relations, that is, the presence of the long shadow of the Holocaust – the point in history par excellence in which market inter “[La violence a lieu en hors-scène, peut-être pour] désactive[r] la pulsion sadique du spectateur”.  “L’absence refuse la figuration réaliste et permet une matérialisation de l’angoisse et de la douleur qui ne peut en aucun cas susciter de jouissance de la part du spectateur”.

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ests were made to prevail above the specific needs of individuals – within late capitalist structures. In Crimp’s plays, when characters collapse, they seek ‘nature’ (Adorno 216), that is, they seek to get back in touch with a primeval sense of identity, away from the market-driven interests and myths of behaviour enforced upon them. Contemporary, late capitalist society, as has been argued, is the inheritor of the ideas about the mind and the body that became established during the Enlightenment. The Cartesian self, as is well known, is defined by the sovereignty of reason – ‘I think therefore I am’ – and by the ability to master emotions and constitute itself as a fully rational, individualized subject. As Bakhtin puts it, the Cartesian body, “presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. […] That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated” (Bakhtin 2005: 93). This is the type of subjectivity characters like Andrew and Jennifer in The Treatment, Richard in The Country, or Jonathan, the government minister, in Cruel and Tender, represent. Female collapse, instead, questions and deconstructs the Western, capitalist, ‘Cartesian body’, characterized by reason and mastery of the environment. When female characters collapse, they make visible the needs of the body, and re-define the subject as made up by both the physical, immediate drives of empathy, connection and love – which, in late capitalist society are relegated to the inferior realm of the body – as well as by its ability to think and reason. As has been argued, when Rebecca or Amelia collapse in The Country and Cruel and Tender respectively, their bodies become the opposite of the rationalized, shut-off, Cartesian bodies Andrew, Jennifer, Richard or the General, quite literally, ‘embody’. In their attempt to reach out to the enclosed, individualistic bodies of their husbands, lovers or co-workers, female characters like Rebecca or Amelia in particular become representations of what Bakhtin terms the “grotesque” or carnivalesque body (Bakhtin 1994: 228). For Bakhtin, “the events of the grotesque sphere are always developed on the boundary dividing one body from the other and, as it were, at their points of intersection” (Bakhtin 1994: 236). Through his dramaturgy of bodily collapse and testimony, Crimp seeks to re-define ethics in an attempt to transcend the post-Holocaust ethical impasse. When women collapse, their bodies become open towards the Other. As they attempt to reintroduce the values of cooperation, empathy and honesty within relationships, the female characters’ bodies become a utopian site for the construction of a new ethics, one which may encompass, rather than refract, the Other. In their moments of collapse, women seek to divest themselves from ideology, and they urgently look for a new sense of self inherently characterized by

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responsibility and empathy towards the Other. In Crimp’s plays, then, collapse seeks to make visible that empathy and morality are, by necessity, “the primary structure of inter-subjective relation in its most pristine form” (Bauman 2005: 183; emphasis original). When they collapse, female characters oppose the closed-off, Cartesian bodies of their male co-workers and become open to the Other to the point of becoming grotesque. Crimp’s idea of ethics, I would argue, is similar to the one articulated by Bauman or Lévinas. In particular, female characters exemplify Lévinas’s understanding of the moral self as inherently responsible, as “being-for the Other” (Lévinas 83). In contemporary society, however, this impulse towards the good is interfered with and eroded through several ideological mechanisms of physical and emotional “distantiation” (Bauman 2005: 102), such as the main tools of societies of control, that is, the ‘spectacle’ and the mass media. Collapse, in Crimp’s plays, initiates an exploration of an ethics grounded in the body and within subjectivity. When female characters collapse in Crimp’s plays, they seek to divest themselves from late capitalist ideology, thus exemplifying Crimp’s understanding of ethics as something prior to social mechanisms. They, as it were, have an “awakening to [their] true self” (Lévinas 32), returning to their primeval impulses and needs prior to ideological mediation. Their newfound sense of responsibility seems to precede the self’s awareness of itself, exemplifying Lévinas’s claim that “the self is through and through a hostage, older than the ego, prior to principles” (Lévinas 107). This is what Crimp proposes in Face to the Wall, the middle play in the triptych Fewer Emergencies, for instance, when Speaker 1 refuses to internalize the identity of a violent ‘man of action’ and he comments instead on the children’s innate capacity for emotional rapport – “And it’s interesting to see the way that some of them hold hands – they instinctively hold hands – the way children do – the way a child does – if you reach for its hand as it walks next to you it will grasp your own […]” (Crimp 2005b: 26). From this perspective, then, being ‘human’ implies returning to the interiority of “non-intentional consciousness, to mauvaise conscience, to its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it” (Lévinas 85; emphasis original). This, I would claim, is the type of radical ethics which Crimp explores through characters like Corinne or Amelia. In Scene V of The Country, for instance, when Corinne passes on to Richard her testimony of her attempt to leave her family the night before, she reports that she looked at herself in the car’s mirror and she felt “complicit” (Crimp 2005a: 362) – that is, Corinne feels ashamed of having preferred ‘assuring’ being, and she now realizes that her existence in the world is, in Lévinas’s terms, not ‘justified’. After this discov-

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ery, the play implies, Corinne breaks all links with her husband and starts to live according to her own ethical self instead. As has been argued, in Crimp’s dramaturgy it is generally women – except, partially, for the cases of Andrew and the General in The Treatment and Cruel and Tender respectively – who are cast as bearers of the truth of the body, of the possibility of a new ethics. Crimp’s dramatic plays, first and foremost, are the record of how the female characters divest themselves of ideology and become ethical bodies on stage, as opposed to their male co-workers, lovers or husbands. Crimp thus places an enormous responsibility on women and partly, it might be argued, continues to replicate the Western tradition which links women to emotions and the body. Yet by doing so, Crimp arguably strikes at the core of this tradition in order to radically deconstruct it by suggesting that the subjectivity of the Western male self is constituted upon a fundamental power abuse. Crimp’s plays repeatedly show that, in postmodernity, “although we have a natural inclination to care for others […] we rediscover this inclination at the same moment that all guidance about how to behave morally is taken away from us” (Smith 163 – 64). Through his dramaturgy of collapse and testimony, Crimp ‘works with’ the audience towards the production of empathy, and seeks a new ethics grounded on the body and subjectivity, and attempts to impel spectators to experience the need for such a new ethics to be activated in their context. In that sense, Crimp encourages spectators to undergo the same process as the female characters who collapse. As has been mentioned in Preliminaries II, in their attempt to contribute to the testimony’s “full deliverance” (Felman and Laub 1992: 71), spectators should ideally ‘misidentify’ with the plays’ bad witnesses – such as Clifford, Andrew or Richard – and begin a process of identification with the female characters. As spectators attempt to fill out the indeterminate, riddling nature of these characters’ testimonies with specific images taken from their own, lived experiences of oppression, they should also begin to question the most reified, violent tendencies of the system. Crimp’s theatre, therefore, looks for a new ethics not through a discursive dramaturgy of edification, but through an experiential dramaturgy which places the body and subjectivity centre stage. Instead of directly dramatizing political relations, Crimp turns to the supposedly ‘private’, ‘subjective’ sphere, that is, to micro-political relationships. Like Lévinas, he tries to find ethics within subjectivity, “within the self”, and the plays are the record of the female characters’ discovery of a subjective, “inner horizon” of values (Smith 32). Like Lévinas, Crimp also proposes that this new ethics should be based on the “I-Thou” relationship (Lévinas 73). This relationship does not seek to objectify the Other, thus turning it into an ‘it’, or even to ‘know’ and thus ‘master’ the

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Other’s difference, but is a type of approach to the Other that recognizes the absolute Otherness of the ‘Thou’ or Other – “if one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power” (Lévinas 51). The type of ethics Crimp proposes through the “I-Thou” (Lévinas 64) relationship, indeed, is one of radical equality between self and Other, and which is realized in the intersubjective space of the “meeting” (Lévinas 69), or of the ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the Other. This meeting takes place in the “realm of being” (Lévinas 65); that is, empathy, Lévinas claims, requires physical proximity. In Crimp’s Face to the Wall, distressed by the postman’s outburst of violence, 1 and 4 begin to imagine the postman starting up a “conversation” with the neighbours “in the sunshine” (Crimp 2005b: 33), in which case, it is suggested, the mass murder could have been prevented. As 1 puts it, “sometimes there are problems sorting the letters – the machine for sorting the letters has broken down, for example, and the letters have to be sorted by hand – or perhaps there are lots of parcels and every parcel means a conversation on the doorstep. Pause. A conversation on the doorstep – yes?” (Crimp 2005b: 33). Crimp, that is, envisions technological collapse – the collapse of the mechanisms of, in Bauman’s terms, ‘distantiation’ of late capitalism – and has speakers 1 and 4 picture a society built around the Lévinasian ‘face-to-face’ encounter with the Other. This type of subjectivity, characterized by an essential or ontological responsibility for the Other, is the one Crimp’s female characters work towards and finally attain through testimony. Corinne, Rebecca and Amelia, in The Country and Cruel and Tender respectively, move away from the individualistic, narcissistic subjectivity of their lovers or husbands and redefine subjectivity and the human in terms of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship. This is the type of relationship Rebecca aims to lead Richard towards through her violently stabbing the scissors into his palm, and it is also the type of relationship Corinne privileges and identifies with when, in Scene V, she finally empathizes with the children’s nanny, Sophie, and she “slips off the shoes” (Crimp 2005a: 355) Richard has just bought her, choosing instead to pass on to him the testimony of her oppression and discovery of ethics. From this point of view, characters like Corinne, Rebecca or Amelia are not merely particular, individualized ‘identities’ representing concrete social situations. Even if they are ‘dressed’ with particularities, and each female character is given a different, individualizing context and ‘identity’, they in fact stand for the potential that lies within every single individual to connect and empathize with the Other. In this sense, they are universal representations of the human, “anarchic” (Lévinas 84) predisposition towards the Other. In his plays, and particularly in Cruel and Tender, Crimp registers the discredit of terms such as ‘common humanity’ or ‘human rights’, or of the human-

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istic idea of ethics inherited from the Enlightenment, which understands it as an outwardly-given set of inclusive moral rules, but which, as Crimp shows through the figure of Jonathan, the government minister, can be invoked in a duplicitous way. Crimp, however, is not a postmodern author in the sense that he denies the possibility of a universalist ethics, or in the sense that he believes only in local and contingent, particular truths.⁷ Crimp’s dramaturgy, indeed, does not partake of the celebration of postmodernism one may identify with philosophers such as Alain Badiou or Jean-François Lyotard, who, in works such as Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Just Gaming respectively, for instance, have explicitly denied that there can be any universalizing moral principles on the grounds that they are coercive and exclusivist. This type of radically disillusioned response is symptomatic of a post-Holocaust attitude that defines individuals as having no agency or capacity for responsibility. Rather, Crimp suggests that a new, universalizing ethics needs to be based on the body, the physical grounds for the “I-Thou” relationship (Lévinas 73), and on the radical equality which may emerge out of proximity. In Crimp’s dramaturgy of resistance, indeed, subjectivity and the body, both that of the characters and that of spectators, are the grounds from which an encompassing, thoroughly ethical articulation of human rights may be (re)constructed. It is ultimately spectators who are asked to ‘remember’ the violence that the current, late capitalist world order enacts for its maintenance and – like Crimp’s female characters themselves – develop a new, radical ethics out of their particular, lived experiences of oppression and inequality.

 Crimp is in fact wary of postmodernism “because it appears to have no moral position”, and sees himself as a sceptical satirist (Aragay et al. 59 – 60).

VIII Works Cited

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