Postdramatic Tragedies (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198817680, 0198817681

Table of contents :
Cover
Postdramatic Tragedies
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
The Development of Postdramatic Theatre
Brecht
Artaud
Interculturalism
Deconstruction and poststructuralism
The political
The contemporary
Postdramatic Tragedies, 1995–2015
Methodology
Structure
PART I: Rewriting the Classics
Introduction to Part I
1: Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love
Tragedy and the OEuvre of Sarah Kane
Masculinity and Sexuality in Phaedra’s Love
Violence and Voyeurism in Phaedra’s Love
2: Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino
The Postdramatic Tragic Chorus
Socio-Cultural Politics in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino
The Postdramatic Aesthetic of Repetition
3: Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender
The Role of Text in Australian Postdramatic Classical Receptions
The Postdramatic Realization of Love Me Tender: Scenes One to Three
Politics and the Postdramatic in Love Me Tender: Scenes Four to Eight
The Classical Palimpsest in Love Me Tender: Scenes Nine to Fifteen
PART II: Devising the Classics
Introduction to Part II
4: The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie!
Devising via Euripides, Seneca, and Racine
The Politics of To You, The Birdie!’s Postdramatic Form
Gender, Class, and the Classics in To You, The Birdie!
5: The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes
Devising and Performing Thyestes
The Gender Politics of Thyestes
The Postdramatic Techniques and Violent Aesthetic of Thyestes
PART III: Embodying the Classics
Introduction to Part III
6: ZU-UK’s Hotel Medea
Analysing Emancipation
Intellectual Agency in Hotel Medea and the Postcolonial Tradition of Medea Receptions
Felt Agency and the Domestication of Medea
Navigational Agency and Multi-Perspectivalism in Hotel Medea
7: Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance)
Mount Olympus as Postdramatic Classical Reception
Emancipation, Immersion, and Ethics
Mount Olympus as Modern Tragedy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors            

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C L A S S I C A L PR E S E N C E S Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Postdramatic Tragedies Emma Cole

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Emma Cole 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941419 ISBN 978–0–19–881768–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For my parents

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Acknowledgements I first encountered both Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre and Reception Studies as an academic area in the final year of my undergraduate degree, and have been exploring the overlap between them now for the good part of a decade. Many academics and artists have guided, shaped, and challenged my thinking throughout this period. Without their input this book would undoubtedly not exist. I am particularly grateful to Miriam Leonard, who supervised the PhD thesis that was the origin of this monograph and who has remained a valued mentor and now friend during the subsequent development of the project. I owe much to her astute intellectual engagement with my ideas on tragedy and performance and am enormously thankful for her feedback on drafts of both the PhD and on sections of the revised monograph. It was a privilege to have Lorna Hardwick and Fiona Macintosh as my PhD examiners; our discussions during the viva pushed my thinking in new directions, and both Lorna and Fiona provided crucial advice on both shaping the work into its new form and finding its home with Classical Presences. Michael Falk, Bob Fowler, Fiachra Mac Góráin, Christopher Hay, Ellen O’Gorman, Kirsty Sedgman, and Nancy Worman all generously read sections of my work and provided suggestions which have greatly improved the final book. Engaged audiences at the 2015 Society for Classical Studies conference, the 2015 Classical Association conference, the 2016 TaPRA conference (Directing and Dramaturgy working group), the Roehampton/South West London branch of the Classical Association, and the University of Bristol Classics and Ancient History research seminar helped me fine-tune the ideas presented in this study. I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript at Oxford University Press, whose close reading of my work and suggestions for improvement greatly assisted me in honing my argument and revising the manuscript. Alongside the mentorship and constructive feedback provided by those mentioned above, I have received invaluable research support from several institutions. The University of Sydney provided me with funding to undertake an initial MA degree at UCL, and UCL then funded

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my PhD via the Overseas Research Scholarship and the Graduate Research Scholarship. Without this funding I could not have embarked upon postgraduate study nor entered academia, and I am forever grateful for the opportunities that these grants have afforded me. The Fondation Hardt awarded me a scholarship for young researchers, which facilitated the writing up of a final chapter, and the University of Bristol generously funded the permission fees for the images found in this book, plus a research trip to Bruges for the chapter on Mount Olympus. On the personal front, I have benefited from the encouragement and intellectual inspiration of a great many friends and colleagues. Special thanks goes to Geraldine Brodie, Lyndsay Coo, Kate Cook, Tom Holloway, Ellie Mackin-Roberts, Luke Richardson, Rebecca Saffir, and Vanda Zajko. Alastair Blanshard and Eric Csapo provided key inspiration and support for my pursuit of academia and classical reception during and following my time at the University of Sydney, as did Edith Hall during my MA. My Heads of Department at Bristol, namely Neville Morley, Pantelis Michelakis, and Patrick Finglass, offered excellent leadership and research support during the development of this manuscript, and Georgie Leighton and Charlotte Loveridge at Oxford University Press were exemplary editors and advisors throughout the proposal and writing process. Finally, thanks are due to my family. My husband, Ben Still, has tolerated more than his fair share of classical performance receptions and the ups and downs of the research, writing, and editing process. Without his unwavering support and encouragement none of this would be possible. My daughter, Adelaide Still, was an extra special writing companion during the drafting of the final chapter. My parents, Chris and Christine Cole, tolerated my decision to move to the other side of the world to pursue my passion and provided me with unrivalled love, support, and understanding throughout. I have an enormous debt to all of you, and appreciate everything you have done to make this book a reality.

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Contents List of Illustrations

xi

Introduction

1 3 24

The Development of Postdramatic Theatre Postdramatic Tragedies, 1995–2015

Part I. Rewriting the Classics Introduction to Part I

35

1. Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love

39 41 50 61

2. Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino

71 79 86 95

Tragedy and the Œuvre of Sarah Kane Masculinity and Sexuality in Phaedra’s Love Violence and Voyeurism in Phaedra’s Love The Postdramatic Tragic Chorus Socio-Cultural Politics in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino The Postdramatic Aesthetic of Repetition

3. Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender The Role of Text in Australian Postdramatic Classical Receptions The Postdramatic Realization of Love Me Tender: Scenes One to Three Politics and the Postdramatic in Love Me Tender: Scenes Four to Eight The Classical Palimpsest in Love Me Tender: Scenes Nine to Fifteen

103 105 111 116 125

Part II. Devising the Classics Introduction to Part II

137

4. The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie!

143 145 152 161

Devising via Euripides, Seneca, and Racine The Politics of To You, The Birdie!’s Postdramatic Form Gender, Class, and the Classics in To You, The Birdie!

5. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes Devising and Performing Thyestes The Gender Politics of Thyestes The Postdramatic Techniques and Violent Aesthetic of Thyestes

177 179 192 199

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Part III. Embodying the Classics Introduction to Part III

209

6. ZU-UK’s Hotel Medea

215 217

Analysing Emancipation Intellectual Agency in Hotel Medea and the Postcolonial Tradition of Medea Receptions Felt Agency and the Domestication of Medea Navigational Agency and Multi-Perspectivalism in Hotel Medea

7. Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance) Mount Olympus as Postdramatic Classical Reception Emancipation, Immersion, and Ethics Mount Olympus as Modern Tragedy

224 233 238 245 246 261 268

Conclusion

275

Bibliography Index

279 305

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List of Illustrations 1.1. Scene One, Phaedra’s Love.

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Photo: Pau Ros.

2.1. Scene Fourteen, Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino.

74

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey.

3.1. Scene One, Love Me Tender.

108

Photo: Jon Green.

3.2. Scene Eight, Love Me Tender.

123

Photo: Jon Green.

4.1. To You, The Birdie!

149

Photo: To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre) DVD, 2011.

5.1. Scene Seven, Thyestes.

183

Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

6.1. The Children loop, Hotel Medea.

234

Photo: Ludovic des Cognets.

7.1. Prologue 0.3, ‘Twerk’, Mount Olympus. Photo: Guido Mencari.

256

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Introduction The opening of Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 at The Performing Garage, New York City, the day after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, marked a defining moment in the history of classical reception. The play heralded a reawakened interest in the staging of Greek tragedy; Edith Hall argues that it was a ‘socially, politically, and above all theatrically radical interpretation of Euripides’ tragedy’, and Froma I. Zeitlin, an eyewitness to the original production, notes that it was ‘a landmark in the history of the reception of Greek theatre in the twentieth century’.¹ What scholars less commonly note, however, is that the production was also a watershed moment for the genesis of postdramatic theatre. The presence of innovative, avant-garde techniques, such as the absence of a fourth wall, an unconventional, sitesympathetic performance environment, audience participation, and a radical violation of the traditional dramatic unities of time, place, and action, have all been taken up as core techniques within this experimental form. With this production Schechner became one of the pioneering practitioners who kick-started the development of postdramatic theatre. The origins of the term postdramatic are murky, and appear to lie in the last few decades of the twentieth century. In 1988 Richard Schechner referred to a ‘postdramatic theatre of happenings’ and to the paradoxical idea of ‘postdramatic drama’, and in the 1991 Theater und Mythos: Die Konstitution des Subjekts im Diskurs der antiken Tragödie (Theatre and Myth: The Constitution of the Subject in the Discourse of Ancient Tragedy) German theatre theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann created a

¹ See Hall 2004: 1 and Zeitlin 2004: 51 respectively.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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dichotomy between the pre-dramatic theatre of ancient Greece and the postdramatic theatre of (post-) modernity.² Lehmann defined ancient tragedy as pre-dramatic on the basis that our current understanding of drama developed in the Renaissance when scholars began re-reading Aristotle’s Poetics, theorizing its concepts, and applying them to contemporary plays. As such, Lehmann implies that there is a relationship between all forms of theatre and the classics through the former’s association with Aristotle and his reception. Lehmann did not fully define postdramatic theatre beyond this juxtaposition, however, until 1999 and the publication of Postdramatisches Theater (Postdramatic Theatre).³ His monograph gave the term international currency. Although Bernd Stegemann is almost certainly over-exaggerating when he claims that ‘Today, almost any theater practitioner, and for that matter almost any theater-goer, claims to know what is meant by postdramatic’, those with an interest in experimental theatre nevertheless understand the term to refer broadly to a range of productions that seek to create meaning primarily through image, sound, and affect, rather than through character and narrative.⁴ It overlaps with a number of theatrical styles, including devised, durational, site-specific, and immersive forms, yet Lehmann insists that ‘it is not intended to be a mere umbrella term, but rather it should make evident a state of coherence, a unity, and indicate a common denominator’.⁵ This denominator is the limiting of dramatic representation and mimesis usually associated with textual structure and narrative linearity. Dionysus in 69 anticipated what would become a significant relationship between Greco-Roman tragedy and the postdramatic. Almost every notable avant-garde theatre practitioner in the late twentieth century experimented with classical-themed productions, including Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, Theatergroep Hollandia, and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio.⁶ Their productions led to what is now a clear strand

² On Schechner’s use of the term, see Lehmann 2006: 26 and Schechner 1988: 21, and on Lehmann’s first use, see Lehmann 1991: 2. There are claims that the term ‘postdramatic’ appeared in German theatre magazine Theater heute in the mid-1980s. See Fuchs 2008: 180. ³ Lehmann 1999. See Lehmann 2006 for the English translation. ⁴ See Stegemann 2008: 11. ⁵ Lehmann 2006: 49. ⁶ See Decreus 2010: 124 for a summary of the trend. For other investigations into combinations of ancient tragedy and postdramatic techniques see Decreus 2008 and Campbell 2010a.

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of practice within current experimental theatre, which involves using ancient tragedy as a semantic scaffold to help audiences navigate the seemingly incomprehensible postdramatic form. Using the classics as a form of shorthand is effective because, as Benjamin Bennett states, no matter how estranged from the Aristotelian unities a production may be, when it includes the name ‘Oedipus’ or ‘Clytemnestra’ the name becomes ‘a stage direction, the communication, from author to audience, of a necessary background for the dialogue’.⁷ The development of this shorthand can be seen across a range of twentieth-century experiments with postdramatic techniques, and led to several landmark productions that indelibly coloured current modes of practice.

The Development of Postdramatic Theatre The dominant way of charting the history of postdramatic theatre is to situate it within a diachronic model made up of theatrical movements and/or literary theories.⁸ These models frequently begin with Renaissance readings of Aristotle, combined with Hegel’s aesthetics, to create a broad definition of drama that can, in turn, be increasingly rejected in a series of art and theatre movements starting in the nineteenth century and continuing until the postdramatic.⁹ Although this diachronic style situates postdramatic theatre within a continuum, Lehmann states that there is a schism separating the postdramatic from all preceding theatrical forms. He argues that past movements are linked by the fact that they are in the tradition of dramatic theatre and recall text-based ideas of narrative and character, whereas postdramatic theatre represents a rupture from these practices and positions such notions as of secondary import.¹⁰ There are various shortcomings with such teleological approaches, as they often do not consider the fact that the repercussions

⁷ Bennett 2005: 43. ⁸ Alongside Lehmann 1999, see Fuchs 1996. Other important works from scholars contemporary to Lehmann include Fischer-Lichte 1983 and 2008 and Jackson 2011. ⁹ See Lehmann, Jürs-Munby, and Fuchs 2008: 15, and Lehmann 2006: 40–5. Lehmann also suggests that drama is part of a trinity, consisting of drama, representation, and action, which the postdramatic seeks to destabilize. See Lehmann 2006: 37. See also Szondi 1987 and Schulte-Sasse 1984, esp. viii. ¹⁰ Lehmann 2006: 55.

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of individual movements are felt at different times in different places. The influences of, for example, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Theatre of the Absurd were not uniform, and took place across several decades and to different extents in different continents. Nevertheless, key moments from these genealogies provide important contextual background to both the postdramatic and the history of classical performance reception, and are consequently of relevance to this study. The argument that the Poetics should be thought of as a descriptive text of minimal relevance to our current understanding of drama, rather than a set of normative rules, adheres to a wider movement within academia which has seen scholars more consistently and comfortably think about tragedy without reference to Aristotle.¹¹ However, although the idea of a schism existing between the Poetics and the postdramatic is rhetorically persuasive, the relationship between the two is more complex than is usually indicated. Lehmann, for example, argues that Aristotle’s treatise positions drama as ‘a structure that gives a logical (namely dramatic) order to the confusing chaos and plenitude of Being’.¹² By this he means that the key Aristotelian qualities, which have come since the Renaissance to define our understanding of dramatic theatre and involve, for example, a protagonist experiencing a peripeteia and then anagnorisis, give a play a logical structure. Although these core structural elements, and consequently an ambition for logical order, can be absent in postdramatic productions, a focus on thinking through the ‘chaos and plenitude of Being’ remains present. Indeed, many postdramatic performances continue to engage with the larger concepts contained in the Poetics, including those productions that lie at the origins of the postdramatic, namely those associated with Bertolt Brecht’s ‘antiAristotelian’ Epic Theatre.

Brecht Although Peter Szondi sees a crisis in modern drama occurring as early as the work of Henrik Ibsen, the specific rejection of dramatic principles associated with the postdramatic is most commonly thought of as beginning with the work of Brecht.¹³ Brecht wrote and directed work

¹¹ See, for example, Bennett 2005, esp. 26. ¹³ See Szondi 1987.

¹² Lehmann 2006: 40.

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throughout his life that was explicitly marked as a rejection of Aristotle.¹⁴ His Epic Theatre posits an opposition to Aristotle in its name, as in the Poetics Aristotle contrasts epic and tragedy as opposite forms of poetry [1447a13–16]. Yet Brecht departed from Aristotelian ideals not in terms of unities but through the core idea of mimesis and the aim of provoking catharsis through empathy. In his ‘Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, and later in his Short Organum for the Theatre, he explained how his theatre would conceptually depart from the purpose, dramaturgical structure, and spectatorial positioning of ‘Aristotelian theatre’.¹⁵ His Verfremdungseffekt, the effect of making the familiar appear strange, was explicitly concerned with disrupting the spectator’s passive enjoyment of mimetic representation, and sought to turn spectators into active observers and to arouse their capacity for action. The techniques employed in pursuit of a Verfremdungseffekt blurred the boundaries between representation and action and subverted prior ideas about dramatic form; Szondi suggests that they ‘served to isolate and alienate the traditional elements of the Drama and its staging’.¹⁶ Lehmann argues, however, that despite these departures from popular notions of drama a number of Aristotelian features are nevertheless retained within Brecht’s Epic Theatre, including the conventional dramatic form of the scripts and the traditional ideas of plot and character to which they adhere.¹⁷ Lehmann consequently maintains that postdramatic theatre is distinctly post-Brechtian, as ‘it leaves behind the political style, the tendency towards dogmatization, and the emphasis on the rational we find in Brechtian theatre; it exists in a time after the authoritative validity of Brecht’s theatre concept’.¹⁸ Yet just as Brecht’s theatre was not as anti-Aristotelian as first glance implies, so too are postdramatic productions not quite as anti-Brechtian.¹⁹

¹⁴ For scholarship on the relevance of Brechtian theatre to classical performance reception, see Revermann 2013. ¹⁵ See Brecht 2017: 65 and Brecht 2017a: 229–55. ¹⁶ Szondi 1987: 71. ¹⁷ Lehmann 2006: 41. ¹⁸ Lehmann 2006: 33. David Barnett claims that postdramatic theatre is hostile to socially engaged art that draws concrete social conclusions (an attestation that I dispute) and thus differs from ‘post-Brechtian’ experiments. See Barnett 2011, esp. 350–1 and 353. For additional scholarship on what post-Brechtian theatre involves, see Jackson 2011: 147–50. ¹⁹ Barnett touches upon the fact that postdramatic theatre is not the same thing as postBrechtian theatre in Barnett 2013.

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Postdramatic productions often engage with numerous Brechtian strategies, including the aim of inspiring action and maintaining a connection with ideological movements. Similarly, they frequently evince Aristotelian dictums. Aristotle, for example, claims that tragic poetry should be mimetic not to persons but to actions and life [1450a14–19]. Many postdramatic productions feature a disparate structure, multiple sources of meaning, and release information at a speed reflective of life in (post-) modernity.²⁰ The genesis of postdramatic theatre therefore lies in a dialectical engagement with Brecht’s reading of Aristotle, rather than as the next chronological stage following Brecht’s ‘rejection’ of the Poetics.

Artaud The significance of Aristotle to Brecht’s innovations, and consequently to wider postdramatic theatre, indicates that the postdramatic is related to the classics at its conceptual core. Avant-garde French theatre theorist and practitioner Antonin Artaud, another key twentieth-century artist whose practice is regularly invoked within histories of the postdramatic, similarly gave the classics prominence within his artistic practice. Artaud is most famous for his Theatre of Cruelty and the manifesto The Theatre and its Double.²¹ His conception of theatre aimed at liberating drama from its textual origins and presenting a more pure and heightened form of emotion and physicality to expose complacency in society. His theatre engaged with contemporary socio-political problems by directly confronting the audience and being ‘cruel’ and ‘terrifying’; Artaud broke social taboos to prompt audiences to reassess the issues raised.²² The classics held pride of place within Artaud’s œuvre, as Artaud believed Senecan tragedy to represent the best textual example of his Theatre of Cruelty.²³ Several scholars have consequently analysed Artaud’s work in the context of a broad Senecan aesthetic; Helen Slaney, for example, notes that the overlaid, coexisting images and the inhumane scale of the conflicts that Artaud portrayed had deep affinities with Seneca’s dramaturgy, and that: ²⁰ See also Lehmann 2007: 47. ²¹ Artaud 1964. On Artaud’s role in the development of the postdramatic, see Lehmann 2006: 30–1. ²² Artaud 1964: 146–7. ²³ Artaud, cited in Crewe 1990: 98–9.

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Artaud’s aesthetic revolution was motivated by a senecan drive: the need to replace a theatre of imitation with a theatre of affect, a theatre in which figures (rather than characters) embody passions too fierce for the skin to hold, moving their audience through immersive sensation rather than mimetic sympathy.²⁴

Jonathan Crewe further argues that Artaud perceived Senecan tragedy to represent ‘the simultaneously empowered and terrorized suspension of culture over a cauldron of untransformed horror’, and posits that Artaud consistently drew upon Seneca due to his belief that Senecan tragedy contained confrontations with truth, and representations of bearing witness to the violent horror of society.²⁵ Alongside this broad Senecan undercurrent to Artaud’s theoretical work lie two explicit examples of Senecan reception: a translation of Seneca’s Thyestes, and a production of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci. Very little is known of Artaud’s Thyestes, titled The Torments of Tantalus, as the script was never staged and has subsequently been lost.²⁶ Christopher Innes records that it was due to be staged in a Marseilles factory or public hall for ‘“the bulk of the masses” who, precisely because they had no time for “subtle discourse” or “intellectual gyrations”, would “not resist the effects of physical surprise, of the dynamism of cries and violent gestures, of visual explosions”’.²⁷ Artaud did manage to realize his adaptation of Shelley’s The Cenci, however, which he staged in 1935 to demonstrate the principles of his Theatre of Cruelty.²⁸ The production featured distortions of scale, cinematic slow motion, and juxtapositions of the everyday and the abnormal by, for example, blurring the sounds of torture with those of a factory.²⁹ As a gothic revenge tragedy The Cenci intersected closely with the Jacobean and Elizabethan periods of Senecan reception, and consequently embodied a combination of Cruelty and the classics.³⁰ Despite appearances, however, The Cenci was intricately choreographed and consequently contradicted the calls to ritual primitivism and

²⁴ Slaney 2016: 232. The relevance of Slaney’s distinction between Seneca and what she terms the ‘senecan aesthetic’ [sic] to the postdramatic is discussed in Chapter 1. ²⁵ Crewe 1990: 100. ²⁶ Davis 2004: 551. For details on Artaud’s vision for the performance, see Slaney 2016: 234–5. ²⁷ Innes 1993: 91. ²⁸ On The Cenci see Slaney 2016: 228–42. ²⁹ Innes 1993: 75–6. ³⁰ For a comparative analysis of The Cenci and Seneca’s Thyestes, see Stout 1996: 85ff.

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frenzied spectacle contained in Artaud’s theory.³¹ The subsequent lionizing of Artaud by later avant-garde practitioners has nevertheless ensured that he is not overlooked in histories of the postdramatic, even if this practice somewhat misrepresents Artaud’s work. Traces of Artaud’s theory, if not his theatre, can be seen within many postdramatic techniques, which often work to create a theatre of affect and ask spectators to consider the immediate phenomenological question of ‘what does this feel like?’ over the retrospective semiotic question of ‘what did that mean?’.

Interculturalism Both Artaud and Brecht influenced the postdramatic via numerous routes, both in terms of individual theatrical techniques and broader modes of practice. An example of the latter can be seen in the crossover between their work and intercultural theatre. Intercultural practice is usually defined as a form of theatre that bridges two or more cultures through performance.³² It originates within the modernist movement, although Erika Fischer-Lichte notes that its roots go back to antiquity.³³ Artaud and Brecht both had notable encounters with non-Western forms of performance via witnessing Balinese dance at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, and Chinese acting in Mei Lanfang’s 1935 Moscow performance respectively. These encounters, as Ric Knowles notes, were key to the formation of a universalist and materialist approach to intercultural practice: Artaud’s discovery led directly to the formulation of his ‘theatre of cruelty’ in his essay ‘On the Balinese Theatre’, first published in 1931; Brecht’s to his first use of the term Verfremdungseffekt (‘defamiliarization effect’) in his 1936 essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese acting’.³⁴

The crossovers between Artaud and Brecht’s theatre and intercultural practice should see interculturalism included within overviews of the development of the postdramatic; however, interculturalism is often only

³¹ See Innes 1993: 60, 64, 93. ³² For definitions of intercultural theatre see, for example, Knowles 2010: 1, 4, and Pavis 1996: 8. ³³ Fischer-Lichte 1996: 28. ³⁴ Knowles 2010: 12–13. Schechner uses the terms integrative and disruptive, rather than universalist and materialist.

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implicitly invoked, and is confined to the afterword of Lehmann’s monograph.³⁵ It is of particular relevance here given that instances of intercultural practice intersecting with formative postdramatic performances often occur within classical receptions. Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 is in many ways a prototype for contemporary intercultural practice. The production embodies the multiple, often simultaneous, influences that fed into the developing postdramatic form. Dionysus in 69 combined references to Greek tragedy with ritual exchanges from New Guinean tribes. Its influence can be seen within Schechner’s own scholarship on intercultural practice, as well as throughout the American neo-avant-garde performance scene.³⁶ The thirteen-month duration of Dionysus in 69 meant the production was extensively reviewed and witnessed by a large audience, allowing the techniques it featured to become well known and copied by other artists.³⁷ In particular, the production’s dismantling and reinvention of text, its experimental use of space, and its political dimension were aspects that other practitioners picked up and disseminated throughout the artistic community, eventually becoming foundational elements of postdramatic theatre.³⁸ The process the practitioners went through to turn Euripides’ Bacchae into Dionysus in 69 embodies the transition from text-based, narrative-, and character-driven drama to postdramatic theatre. The cast began with a direct translation of Bacchae; William Hunter Shepherd, the actor who generally played Pentheus, describes in his ethnographic account of the production how Schechner brought the William Arrowsmith translation to the company with the suggestion that they stage it.³⁹ The cast began ³⁵ Lehmann 2006: 176–7. ³⁶ See, in particular, Schechner’s work with Victor Turner, and his later work on intercultural theatre within colonized cultures in Schechner and Pavis 1996. ³⁷ The production ran from June 1968 until July 1969 and played 163 times. The notoriety of the performance meant that some critics reviewed the production multiple times. See, for example, Brecht 1969. ³⁸ Although of less significance in terms of interculturalism, The Living Theatre’s contemporaneous production of Antigone (1967–9, 1984) represents another formative classical performance reception for the development of the postdramatic. Adapted from Brecht’s Antigone by company co-founder Judith Malina, the production aimed to join Brecht’s theories with Artaud’s and was a ‘two hour sound and movement piece’. See The Living Theatre 2018 and Rosenthal 2000. ³⁹ Shepherd 1991: 74. I say ‘generally played Pentheus’ as the actors rotated roles at the end of the season.

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rehearsing the play in January 1968, ‘experimenting with improvisations centered around ritual dances, the Asmat birth ritual [a kinship exchange between tribes in New Guinea], and social conflicts between forms of freedom and oppression’.⁴⁰ The resulting performance featured a combination of Euripides’ script with dialogue newly written by the actors in line with Schechner’s goal to allow ‘as much personal expression as possible in a play that deals so effectively with the liberation of personal energy’.⁴¹ The style of performance and the venue chosen attest to further postdramatic elements. Schechner directed Dionysus in 69 as an example of Environmental Theatre, a style he founded which shares many characteristics with Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Environmental Theatre uses found environments rather than theatres to produce work in the hope of breaking down actor-audience relationships.⁴² Dionysus in 69, for example, was staged in The Performing Garage, a venue that was in reality a renovated garage in downtown New York. There were no seats, but rather wooden platforms and a carpeted floor that the audience could inhabit and move about within as they wished. As a complete style of performance, Environmental Theatre did not have the same impact as Poor Theatre and was infrequently taken up outside of Schechner’s company; however, Schechner’s use of an unconventional performance space and an immersive stage configuration was nevertheless regularly copied in the avant-garde scene. Lehmann considers this move away from the proscenium arch into spaces that encourage direct interaction between actors and audience members to be one of the defining elements of the postdramatic.⁴³ The political dimension of Dionysus in 69 is perhaps the most significant element of the production for my purposes given that many Anglophone postdramatic productions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century had a range of socio-political objectives. Dionysus in 69 achieved most of its fame and scholarly interest due to the way it radically reworked Euripides’ Bacchae into a production with a thematic focus on both reconciling individualism with communality, and on the sexual revolution

⁴⁰ Shepherd 1991: 74. ⁴¹ The Performance Group 1970: np. Zeitlin notes that the production retained 600 of Euripides’ 1392 lines. See Zeitlin 2004: 64. ⁴² See Schechner 1973. ⁴³ See Lehmann 2006: 150–2.

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of the late 1960s.⁴⁴ Various exchanges within the script, and indeed the title of the performance, were changed to reflect what was then considered provocative.⁴⁵ For example, as the actors deemed dressing in drag no longer a controversial sign of Pentheus’ capitulation to Dionysus, they altered this scene to feature a homosexual encounter in which Dionysus seduced Pentheus. Furthermore, on several occasions in the play, such as the Asmat birth ritual, the actors were completely naked, and audience participation was encouraged in the form of a ‘group grope’.⁴⁶ The scene, which Schechner describes as a form of ‘academic interculturalism’, involved ‘actual physical gestures and the interior meaning [ . . . ] of welcoming somebody into the group’.⁴⁷ These provocative inclusions were imaginative and new ideas, not only within the reception of Greek tragedy but also within contemporary theatre generally, as can be seen by the arrest of the entire cast when on tour in Ann Arbor. The production attests to the significance of the classics, the intercultural, and the political within the history of postdramatic theatre. Despite the formative role that Dionysus in 69 played within the development of the postdramatic, the show’s legacy has not been altogether unproblematic. Knowles notes, for example, that like Peter Brook’s Mahabharata Schechner’s work is part of an intercultural discourse dominated by charismatic white male Westerners, which has: unwittingly participated in the commodification of the ‘other’ and thereby the perpetuation of the colonial project, in which the raw materials of the world (including its cultures and peoples) were and are grist for the colonial mill of western industry and capitalist production.⁴⁸

It is important to acknowledge individual instances of implicit colonial discourse within intercultural practice. Given, however, that there are also several instances of the reverse trajectory during this period, where the East borrows from the West, we can nevertheless situate the production in a broader environment characterized, as Fischer-Lichte notes, by attempts to fashion new types of cultural identity that do not necessarily

⁴⁴ On the former issue see Fischer-Lichte 2014: 28. ⁴⁵ See, for example, Knox 1979: 6 for a discussion of the significance of the sexual innuendo contained in the production’s title. ⁴⁶ The nudity began mid-way through the season, and was at the suggestion of Grotowski. For detail on ritual within the performance, see Fischer-Lichte 2014: 34–5. ⁴⁷ Schechner and Pavis 1996: 43. ⁴⁸ Knowles 2010: 21–2.

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exclude the influence of the foreign.⁴⁹ One of the most widely known instances of the Far East borrowing Western theatrical practices again features prototype postdramatic performances heavily reliant upon ancient tragedy. Tadashi Suzuki founded his company Waseda Shogekijo (now the Suzuki Company of Toga, or SCOT) in 1966 as an alternative to the Japanese orthodox shingeki theatre.⁵⁰ Shingeki relies upon a Western understanding of the mind and Stanislavskian methods of interpreting and performing a script.⁵¹ Suzuki criticized this approach and sought to reintroduce traditional Japanese practices, such as Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku puppet theatre, and the martial arts to canonical Western scripts to create a new form of theatre.⁵² His productions have an element of sitespecificity to them, created and initially performed in the remote mountainous Japanese village Toga, although later touring worldwide. His fusion of Eastern and Western performance styles has a clear political motivation; by taking Japanese theatrical forms out of their traditional contexts Suzuki provokes a re-engagement and re-assessment of the form and content depicted, and implicitly critiques the prior indiscriminate assumption of Western dramatic forms by Japanese practitioners.⁵³ To date Suzuki has applied this process to six works of classical reception: The Trojan Women (1974); The Bacchae (1978); Clytemnestra (1983); Electra (1995); Oedipus Rex (2000); and Waiting for Orestes (2012).⁵⁴ The former three, in particular, are important forerunners to postdramatic theatre as they epitomize the early experiments that led to ⁴⁹ Fischer-Lichte 1996: 33. Allain 2002: 27–9 draws attention to the tensions surrounding the hegemonic role of the male director Tadashi Suzuki within his own theatre company, whose classical receptions constitute my next example. The positioning of charismatic males as dominating intercultural discourse is consequently not limited to Western borrowings but is another quality potentially found in instances of the East borrowing from the West. ⁵⁰ Prior to this, from 1961–6, Suzuki ran a different company with playwright Minoru Betsuyaku called Jiyu Butai. ⁵¹ See Goto 1989: 103, Allain 2002: 14–15, and Yasunari 2004: 1. ⁵² McDonald 1992: 23–4 and Allain 2002: 4. ⁵³ For further information about the implicit political dimensions of Suzuki’s productions, see Goto 1989: 119. ⁵⁴ Clytemnestra was a fusion of Aesch. Oresteia, Soph. El., and Eur. El. and Or. Oedipus Rex was based upon Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera. Some of these productions went on to spawn other Suzuki classical receptions. For example, The Bacchae was used as a basis for the 1990 Dionysus, and Clytemnestra was reworked into the 1983 play The Tragedy: The Fall of the House of Atreus. On these productions see Allain 2002: 162 and 167 respectively.

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the establishment of the style. Yukihiro Goto, for example, argues that out of Suzuki’s entire œuvre these three are ‘most remarkable’ and ‘can be regarded as representative works’.⁵⁵ Suzuki’s first Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women, provides the clearest example of the effect achieved by combining classical drama with the formal physical styles of Kabuki and Noh. Paul Allain classifies the production as the piece against which all other Suzuki works are measured, and its enormous influence upon worldwide theatre practice is reflected in its continual international touring until 1990.⁵⁶ In this production Suzuki employed a showmen engi, a forward-facing performance style utilized in Japanese theatre. The technique was employed, for example, in the duologue between Hecuba and Andromache [577–708] and involved Hecuba sitting downstage and Andromache upstage.⁵⁷ The two actors did not physically engage with or look at one another for the entire scene. The staging contrasted remarkably with naturalist theatre, as Goto notes when he argues ‘Hecuba and Andromache, mother and her daughter-in-law, would be physically close to one another in the same plane and would almost always face each other when they talk, so as to convey their psychological relationships’.⁵⁸ The influence of Suzuki’s heavily stylized Kabuki and Noh techniques, and the perceived effectiveness of the juxtaposition achieved through the application of these techniques to Western scripts, can be seen in other twentiethcentury classical performance receptions including Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides.⁵⁹ Suzuki’s The Trojan Women, however, marked one of the first, and most influential, examples of the utilization of Japanese techniques in a classical performance reception. The later postdramatic techniques of direct address, a disrupted fourth wall, disembodied dialogue, and outward-, rather than inward-, facing action can all be seen as speaking to Suzuki’s unusual staging configuration, alongside the more commonly cited influences such as Brecht’s Epic Theatre. The stylized physicality seen in The Trojan Women also arguably helped inspire a range of later performances involving actors communicating without

⁵⁵ Goto 1989: 104. ⁵⁶ Allain 2002: 151–2. ⁵⁷ Carruthers 2004: 141. ⁵⁸ Goto 1989: 116. ⁵⁹ Mnouchkine incorporated several Asiatic theatrical styles in Les Atrides, including Noh techniques for the role of Cassandra and Kathakali techniques for the chorus in Agamemnon. See de la Combe 2005: 283.

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recourse to mimetic gesture and eye contact, and even at times nonverbally.⁶⁰ The Trojan Women additionally demonstrated the gradual displacement of linear, character-driven, and text-based narrative in Suzuki’s theatre. Euripides’ script, for example, was replaced with newly innovative forms of story and several techniques now considered to be postdramatic. Suzuki’s summary of The Trojan Women development process demonstrates his methodology; he explains: my first step was to eliminate from the text all terms that require special knowledge and leave only just enough for a modern audience to understand the basic situation of defeat in war which Euripides was trying to depict [ . . . ] what is left are only the fragments in which the characters lay bare their real feelings.⁶¹

Suzuki’s process became more radical following The Trojan Women, and by the mid- to late 1970s it regularly involved the premodern Japanese device of a double structure, where action moves back and forth between different spatiotemporal dimensions.⁶² Furthermore, in The Bacchae Suzuki rearranged dialogue and cast characters inconsistently, evoking a fluidity of roles typical in Noh theatre and pre-empting the displacement of traditional notions of character and plot for which postdramatic theatre is most known.⁶³ Suzuki justified stripping the text back so completely through his belief that the actor, and their relationship to the audience, is the most important element in theatre. His goal was to create performances that engage audiences so completely that they are urged to respond emotionally, and even religiously.⁶⁴ To layer his work further and assist in this immersion he added populist cultural forms to productions. These additions were most regularly in the form of contemporary pop music and poetry, which created a conglomeration of performance styles that could have a disassociating effect upon the spectator.⁶⁵ Suzuki likened his combination of a restructured script, populist forms, and techniques from the traditionally elitist Kabuki and Noh theatres to the Japanese literary device of honkadori, meaning allusive variation and referring to the practice of new poems being ⁶⁰ See McDonald 1992: 55–6. ⁶¹ Suzuki, quoted in Goto 1989: 110. ⁶² Goto 1989: 113. ⁶³ See McDonald 1992: 60–3. ⁶⁴ McDonald 1992: 30. ⁶⁵ Carruthers notes that popular music, for example, was used in The Bacchae’s final moments. See Carruthers 2004: 149, 152, and also Allain 2002: 154.

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composed out of elements or images in existing well-known poems.⁶⁶ Goto, however, believes the pastiche method and the jarring mix of cultural styles are best understood through the surrealist technique of dépaysement.⁶⁷ A sense of disorientation and a difficulty in interpreting a production that utilizes a variety of performance styles has become another key element in postdramatic theatre. The experimental treatment that Suzuki subjects his scripts to reached a new height in Clytemnestra, in which he combined six different Greek tragedies by all three extant tragedians alongside traditional Japanese theatre techniques to comment upon contemporary issues regarding familial, psychological, and sociological breakdown.⁶⁸ Clytemnestra is arguably Suzuki’s most politically engaged Greek tragedy; Marianne McDonald notes that in this work Suzuki argued he was recreating Greek tragedy to comment on problems he saw in modern Japan.⁶⁹ She further suggests that the work resisted the ‘stultifying victory of technology and the corporation’ by creating a dramatic act that affirmed human existence.⁷⁰ In Clytemnestra Suzuki combined Kabuki and Noh choreography, masks, and costumes, adopted a predominately physical approach, and included non-naturalist conceptual ideas such as drama occurring across multiple simultaneous temporal planes. The strategy of supplementing a single classical tragedy with content from other dramas is another Suzuki feature that is later echoed, perhaps unconsciously, in Les Atrides, where Mnouchkine added Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis to Aeschylus’ Oresteia as a prequel.⁷¹

Deconstruction and poststructuralism The overlap between intercultural modes of practice and the development of the postdramatic is indicative of the porousness between the wider range of movements and contextual environments that fed into, and indelibly influenced, the emerging postdramatic form. In addition to interculturalism, the literary landscape and particularly the theories

⁶⁶ Carruthers 2004: 125 and Goto 1989: 109. ⁶⁷ Goto 1989: 106. ⁶⁸ See Allain 2002: 165 for further details on Clytemnestra. ⁶⁹ McDonald 1992: 53–4. ⁷⁰ McDonald 1992: 55. ⁷¹ For scholarship on Les Atrides see Bethune 1993, Goetsch 1994, Kiernander 1993: 135–8, and de la Combe 2005. The strategy of supplementation, along with other examples of this methodology, is discussed in Chapter 7.

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associated with deconstruction and poststructuralism also helped shape the key productions which kick-started the postdramatic phenomenon. Elinor Fuchs pioneered the analysis of postdramatic theatre—which she terms postmodern theatre—in light of these intellectual environments. She argues, as Christopher Balme has summarized, that postmodern experimental productions were ‘a response to the massive critique of Western models of subjectivity that we associate with terms such as poststructuralism and deconstruction’.⁷² Her monograph, which recalls Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ in its title The Death of Character, posits that postdramatic productions are performative responses to a cultural climate characterized by a dispersed idea of the self that mediates and bridges the heterogeneity of life and the abstractions of theory. She argues that it is necessary to view these productions in the context of the poststructuralist and deconstructionist intellectual environment, and draws attention to the regular presence of theatrical metaphors in the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Baudrillard to argue that this is a two-way process.⁷³ The plays of Heiner Müller demonstrate the intersections between postdramatic theatre, the classics, and deconstruction and poststructuralism particularly clearly. Müller was a prolific literary figure who produced an enormous body of work encompassing poetry, essays, and dramas. He is regarded, alongside Brecht, as one of the most significant German dramatists of the twentieth century. His innovative texts and the productions that they led to, most notably in collaboration with iconic avant-garde theatre artist Robert Wilson, position him as one of the most important practitioners in the genealogy of postdramatic theatre.⁷⁴ Müller’s significance to postdramatic theatre derives from his texts for performance, and specifically their trademark ambiguity of meaning and the open performance style which they invite.⁷⁵ Jürs-Munby argues that these plays are a crucial example of postdramatic writing, evincing a style that requires ‘the spectators to become active co-writers

⁷² Balme 2004: 1. ⁷³ Fuchs 1996: 14. ⁷⁴ Indeed, Müller is one of the most oft-quoted dramatists within studies of postdramatic theatre. Lehmann has also co-authored a monograph exclusively about Müller. See Lehmann and Primavesi 2003. For scholarship on Müller’s theatre œuvre, see Kalb 1998. ⁷⁵ Müller’s seven-page version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Die Hamletmaschine, and the infamous seven-hour production it resulted in, is a paradigmatic example.

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of the (performance) text’.⁷⁶ Müller’s work testifies to how the term postdramatic does not necessarily imply an absence of dramatic text, but rather a moving away from previous notions of drama into new dramaturgical forms.⁷⁷ Lehmann describes Müller’s dramaturgy as creating a world ‘in which the reality-level of characters and events vacillates hazily between life and dream and the stage becomes a hotbed of spirits and quotes outside any homogeneous notion of space and time’.⁷⁸ Jonathan Kalb has remarked upon the significance of these innovations, noting that ‘Nearly every study of recent innovative and experimental theater touches in some way on Müller and the shift he popularized toward decentered characters and stages conceived as quasi-“conscious” or “intelligent” landscapes’.⁷⁹ Müller regularly applied this oneiric style to adaptations of Western texts, including a number of Greek tragedies. Müller justified his decision to create adaptations of canonical plays through his belief that we must confront these works to progress in our storytelling and understanding of the world.⁸⁰ A significant number of the resulting adaptations were inspired broadly by the ancient world;⁸¹ Carl Weber argues that adaptations of Greek drama and myth are a conspicuous trend in Müller’s writing, and both Bernd Seidensticker and Lorna Hardwick suggest that the receptions may have been motivated by political censorship increasingly hampering his realistic plays about social and economic problems in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).⁸² His most notable classical performance receptions include Ödipus, Tyrann (Oedipus, Tyrant) (1967), Philoktet (Philoctetes) (1968), Medeaspiel (Medea Play) (1974), and Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts) (1982).⁸³ The last of these is perhaps the ⁷⁶ Jürs-Munby 2006: 6. ⁷⁷ For scholarship on the relationship between text and postdramatic theatre, see ČaleFeldman 2011 and Jürs-Munby 2011. I interrogate this relationship in detail in Part I. ⁷⁸ Lehmann 1994: 88. ⁷⁹ Kalb 2000: 80. ⁸⁰ Campbell 2008: 87. ⁸¹ For scholarship on Müller’s receptions of antiquity, see Domdey 1982, Gruber 1989, and Kraus 1985. For scholarship on Müller’s work on Greek tragedy and mythology more specifically, see Colombo 2009. ⁸² See Weber 2005: 117, Seidensticker 1992: 353. ⁸³ For a fuller list see Weber 2005: 117–18. Müller was particularly interested in the Medea and Jason myths and explored them on numerous occasions; in addition to Medeaspiel and Medeamaterial, Lü notes that a fragmentary film script from the early

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most popular of Müller’s Greek tragedy adaptations and is a bleak three-part reinvention of the myth of Medea covering not only the events of Euripides’ tragedy (in Medeamaterial) but looking both back to Medea’s murder of her brother, and forward to contemporary society and the transference of issues and themes from the Medea story to the modern world. Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten is in many ways a prototype postdramatic text revealing the strong historical links between the postdramatic, the political, and ancient tragedy which run throughout the theatrical form.⁸⁴ The short play features almost no character delineation and is constituted by three episodic sections, which Müller recommends be performed simultaneously and are described by Campbell as not a singular narrative but ‘three distinct narrative voices that seem to traverse or ignore time and space [ . . . ] literally constructed out of three different works composed years apart’.⁸⁵ The dialogue avoids linearity and is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that is completely devoid of punctuation; the overloading of information and the ambiguity regarding how each statement connects is regularly mimicked in later postdramatic productions. No temporal location is indicated, and the suggested settings for each segment, which include a peep show, a mud-filled swimming pool or bathing facility at a nerve-clinic, and a dead star respectively, do not clarify the content of the play but instead further layer the potential meanings inherent within the text. The stylistic importance of the script is regularly commented upon in scholarship. Fuchs, for example, describes Medeamaterial as a: study in the contrast between the postmodern darting, grasping, nomadic, shopping aesthetic and the binary classical aesthetic—‘classical’ here meaning the observation of an unbridgeable distance between spectator and spectacle.⁸⁶

1980s contains detailed references to Jason’s death from the falling Argo. See Lü 2008: 183. There is also evidence that Müller was interested in adapting Lys. See Weber 2005. ⁸⁴ For a discussion of the text and its original performance, see Barnett 1998: 219–44. ⁸⁵ Campbell 2008: 88. Müller describes the ‘I’ in each section as a collective in his introductory note to the text, shedding doubt upon whether he intended there to be three distinct voices, or three collectives in each third of the play. An early draft dictated that a chorus deliver the first part of the trilogy; see Hardwick 2000: 72. ⁸⁶ Fuchs 1996: 136. See also Campbell 2008: 98 for a discussion about the influence of Müller’s montage and fragmentation techniques upon contemporary theatre.

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Structurally and stylistically, Müller’s script is one of the most iconic early postdramatic texts, and shares many features with the examples contained in subsequent chapters. The ambiguity of meaning present in productions of Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten, and our inability to grasp such a notion in its entirety, provides a particularly lucid example of Fuchs’ argument regarding the connections between postdramatic productions and the literary theories under discussion.⁸⁷ John Caputo’s summary of deconstruction captures this overlap well: The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things—texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need—do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose, that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy. What is really going on in things, what is really happening, is always to come. Every time you try to stabilise the meaning of a thing, to fix it in its missionary position, the thing itself, if there is anything at all to it, slips away.⁸⁸

Similarly, the poststructuralist idea that the process of reading is what renders the ambiguous and multiple meanings in a text intelligible also ties in with the experience of watching postdramatic theatre. Just as poststructuralism places primacy on the act of reading over ideas of authorial intent when discussing the analysis of a text, so too does postdramatic theatre, asking spectators to interrogate their individual experience navigating a production, rather than determine a central meaning from the performance and its paratexts. Although deconstruction and poststructuralism are the literary theories associated with postdramatic theatre that are most pertinent to Müller’s Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten, other works of postdramatic theatre regularly intersect with different theories, particularly reception theory and psychoanalytic criticism. It is inevitable that discussing the development of postdramatic theatre in terms of individual theorists and theories will neglect approaches that others would deem essential to the phenomenon. As such, a case study approach as championed here, as opposed to a diachronic history of the ⁸⁷ The relevance of deconstruction to postdramatic productions will be treated at greater length in Part II. ⁸⁸ Caputo 1997: 31.

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postdramatic, provides a particularly useful methodology for the study of this subject.

The political The undisputed significance of Müller’s text to the development of postdramatic theatre again testifies to the crucial, often-neglected role of the classics during this period. Alongside demonstrating the nexus between the classics and select literary theories, Medeamaterial also offers an early example of the intertwining of the ancient world and contemporary socio-political environments in postdramatic theatre. The relationship between postdramatic theatre and the political is an area gaining increased attention in scholarship, most notably via the 2013 book Postdramatic Theatre and the Political.⁸⁹ Prior to this collection the postdramatic was most often discussed in terms of its aesthetic features, rather than its political function. The distinction between aesthetics and politics, however, is a false dichotomy. Lehmann himself notes, for example, that ‘questions of aesthetic form are political questions’, and the aforementioned collection seeks to prove that although the modes of political engagement contained in postdramatic productions are significantly different to what has previously been considered ‘political theatre’, such productions are not necessarily any less political.⁹⁰ Indeed, many postdramatic productions can be analysed through the concept of a politics of form, or a politics of aesthetics. Furthermore, postdramatic classical receptions are unified through a shared interest in the political. Often, this interest takes the form of practitioners utilizing unconventional performance tactics to focus sharply on one or more political issue. The use of ancient tragedy as a springboard text thus provides a background layer of meaning that contributes to the potential efficacy of the performances. The role of the political can be glimpsed in Müller’s framing of the Medea myth through contemporary debates regarding class, gender, and colonialism.⁹¹ His framing involved, in particular, the positioning of Medea’s infanticide as an act of political rebellion to demonstrate ‘the

⁸⁹ Jürs-Munby, Carrol, and Giles 2013. ⁹⁰ Lehmann, Jürs-Munby, and Fuchs 2008: 16, and Jürs-Munby, Carrol, and Giles 2013: 1. ⁹¹ McDonald 1992: 156.

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violent rejection of the accepted modes of resolution’, and the creation of an apocalyptic vision of the future in which nuclear power and modern technology have destroyed the natural landscape.⁹² The script is also closely tied to ideas of exile. The theme of exile is particularly pertinent to the socio-political context in which Müller was working, as he wrote the piece whilst a virtual exile within the GDR.⁹³ Müller was, for part of his career, a non-person in the GDR who was unable to leave the region, nor work or study within it. He was formally excluded from the Writers’ Union in 1961, meaning he could not earn any money for works published in his name. This difficulty, however, was artistically productive for Müller and he chose to remain in East Germany even when opportunities to leave were presented to him. Indeed, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Müller’s 1995 death he reduced his creative activities, authoring just one play.⁹⁴ The theme of colonialism comes through even more clearly than that of exile. Peter Campbell, for example, argues that the play’s focus is on ‘the problematic subject and its manifestations in a postcolonial world in which the marginal subject has become the new centre’.⁹⁵ Müller’s structure and the content included within the trilogy emphasizes this theme. The glimpses of narrative contained in Verkommenes Ufer, for example, focus on the invading Argonauts’ sexual colonization of the women of Colchis, which merges into Medea’s murder of her brother and Jason’s subsequent betrayal of Medea in Medeamaterial. Although the dialogue in the third act is not assigned to a particular character, an earlier published version of the script attributed it to Jason.⁹⁶ The attribution to Jason positioned the act as a reflection on the eventual chaos caused by Jason’s colonial endeavours, and particularly the destruction of the landscape, natural resources, and humanity. By removing this character delineation the commentary became detached ⁹² See Campbell 2008: 85–8. ⁹³ See Lü 2008: 174–6. ⁹⁴ Lü 2008: 176. After the fall of the Wall, Müller’s plays were also produced less frequently. Hardwick, for example, notes that ‘once the Berlin Wall was dismantled and Germany reunited, performance of Müller’s plays seemed to have lost its public raison d’être as a theatrical expression of political dissent or uncertainty’. See Hardwick 2000: 72. ⁹⁵ Campbell 2008: 85. Postcolonial receptions of Med. are discussed more broadly in Chapter 6. ⁹⁶ Barnett 1998: 226. Jason is the most obvious attribution for the lines, especially given that the dialogue uses the first-person singular. However, an earlier draft indicated that the dialogue should be performed by the collective voice of the Argonauts; see Lü 2008: 179.

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from the specificity of the mythological context and more explicitly applicable to the contemporary world. These readings, however, are subtle and ambiguous, and due to the style of the play are just selections of the many meanings that can be uncovered from the text.

The contemporary It is questionable whether postdramatic theatre would have developed if not for the legacy left by the practices and practitioners outlined. Artists such as Schechner and Müller championed new processes of creating work, a diminishing importance of text, and abstract forms of meaning and story, all of which have had lasting influence. However, implying that the movements and productions discussed built directly upon one another is problematic. For example, the international influence of any practitioner deemed relevant to the postdramatic, such as Tristan Tzara and Samuel Beckett, who are associated with Dadaism and the Theatre of the Absurd respectively, was often felt long after the première of their key works.⁹⁷ Furthermore, the subsequent plays and theatrical forms that emerged in response to their innovations did not occur concurrently worldwide. Charting the multiple, simultaneous influences upon the development of postdramatic theatre is a more beneficial methodology that provides a clearer and more encompassing starting point for distinguishing when and how the postdramatic formed. It was the diverse contextual background that saw the development of intercultural modes of practice and deconstructionist and poststructuralist schools of thought, combined with the practitioner innovations formulated in response to unique socio-political climates, alongside, notably, a shared interest in the classical, that resulted in postdramatic techniques. However, following the production of the plays discussed here the postdramatic took off in a new direction, utilizing the techniques first explored by these dramatists but now largely focused on devising new work rather than reinventing dramatic texts. With practitioners such as Einar Schleef, Klaus Michael Grüber, Jan Fabre, and Pina Bausch at the helm, the style became particularly noteworthy and recognizable in Germany, Belgium, and

⁹⁷ I have not detailed the relevance of these movements to the postdramatic as their formative roles involve less frequent classical performance receptions; however, see Worth 2004 on the parallels between Beckett’s dramaturgy and Greek tragedy.

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the Netherlands and, arguably, less overtly political.⁹⁸ Yet when, during the 1990s, this type of theatre gained traction in Anglophone countries the works once again included strong socio-political associations and regularly featured canonical texts as an integral element.⁹⁹ It is these productions, which reflect a return to what I have identified as the classical conceptual core that underpinned the development of postdramatic theatre, which are the subject of this book. My overview of the postdramatic begs the question of how the postdramatic relates to broader ideas surrounding avant-garde theatre and experimental theatre as well as debates over adaptation and translation. For the purposes of this book and following Günter Berghaus I reject the idea of avant-garde theatre referring to any art that pushes the boundaries of theatrical possibility.¹⁰⁰ Instead, I see avant-garde theatre as referring to a historical moment extending from the work of the French symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century through to the early work of The Wooster Group and their off-off-Broadway contemporaries in the mid-1980s. Avant-garde theatre is unified by a political opposition to mainstream culture; it attempts to revolutionize beyond the theatre.¹⁰¹ Productions which can be classified as postdramatic do not neatly fit into this temporal period or hold this overarching political purpose. It is true that some of the techniques that I, following Lehmann, refer to as postdramatic can be found in select historical avant-garde productions, yet I do not perceive this to be a source of tension. The postdramatic is understood here to be a cluster of techniques, rather than a theatrical movement, and consequently twentieth-century productions can include postdramatic techniques even if they were not understood by this name at the time. I am not convinced, however, that any of my aforementioned

⁹⁸ For detail on these figures and the postdramatic see Lehmann 2006: 68–81, and Fuchs 1996: 178–83. Of relevance to the history of Greek tragedy within postdramatic theatre is Peter Stein and Klaus Michael Grüber’s The Antiquity Project I and II (1974, 1980). On these productions see Fischer-Lichte 2014: 93–115 and Fischer-Lichte 2017: 269–312. ⁹⁹ The American director Robert Wilson is a notable exception prior to this. ¹⁰⁰ Berghaus rejects this definition on the grounds that it ‘belongs to colloquial language, not to aesthetic criticism’. See Berghaus 2005: 35. ¹⁰¹ Aronson states that ‘if the avant-garde stands in opposition to the practices and postures of mainstream society, then there is very little in today’s theatre that can be considered avant-garde [ . . . ] the raison d’être of the avant-garde has fallen away— evaporated—leaving behind a kind of exoskeleton of style and form that has been subsumed within aspects of thriving popular culture’. See Aronson 2000: 205.

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avant-garde examples made meaning predominantly through image, sound, and affect, rather than narrative and character, and consequently although they may feature postdramatic techniques I would not retrospectively classify the productions as postdramatic. It follows that productions featuring a greater cluster of postdramatic techniques would follow after the theorization of this form, and hence my remaining examples are taken from between the decade in which Lehmann’s monograph was published and the present. All productions, however, both avant-garde and postdramatic, experiment to some degree with the possibilities of theatrical form, and I consequently use experimental as a broad adjective manoeuvring between historical moments, theatrical movements, and theorized styles of techniques. All receptions discussed in this volume are adaptations of classical tragedy and could be analysed in light of debates within adaptation and translation studies, and particularly in terms of foreignization. Due to my focus on performance, rather than text, and the structuring of the volume around key debates within theatre studies scholarship, I have avoided discussing my case studies in the context of these areas and leave them as an avenue for further exploration. However, I maintain that postdramatic techniques can translate feeling, sensation, and emotion from a source text, as they do in Phaedra’s Love, and can foreignize an adaptation and make a familiar text become strange, as is done in Hotel Medea.¹⁰² Rather than stand in opposition to translation and adaptation, postdramatic classical performance receptions contain similar strategies of textual transformation.

Postdramatic Tragedies, 1995–2015 Postdramatic Tragedies sets out to rectify the neglect of postdramatic tragic receptions in scholarship, to intervene into theatre studies debates regarding the form, function, and development of the postdramatic, and to explore what this new form of reception can tell scholars about the role of tragedy in modernity. Each of my three sections explores classical reception within a specific strand of postdramatic theatre: text-based theatre, devised theatre, and theatre that transcends the usual boundaries ¹⁰² These productions are discussed in Chapter 1 and Chapter 6 respectively.

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of time and space, such as durational and immersive theatre. My focus in the three sections is upon the première production of each classical reception, and although I may refer to the written text my interest is always primarily in the postdramatic performative realization. Collectively, these sections represent a cross-section of postdramatic classical performance receptions over two decades, which range from incorporating only sparse postdramatic techniques towards encompassing an almost entirely postdramatic aesthetic. Each section tests my central claim regarding the relevance of the classics to the postdramatic, and the postdramatic to the classics, and provides an additional piece to the jigsaw that is postdramatic classical reception.

Methodology My discussion is made up of a combination of two forms of analysis. The first of these is a form of semiotic analysis. Semiotic methodologies have been applied in scholarship on performance since at least the 1980s and the publication of Keir Elam’s The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama.¹⁰³ My semiotic methodology follows the schemas advanced by theatre scholars Gay McAuley and Patrice Pavis.¹⁰⁴ It involves analysing the various signs seen both on stage, and in what can be considered the performances’ paratexts, such as the programme, the theatre building, and the production publicity. The process allows me to compound the individual signifiers of performance, including elements of the mise-enscène, text, and performance segmentation, to reveal the potential meanings offered to an audience. A semiotic analysis does not necessitate a clear, exclusive relationship between signifier and signified, and contains room for the individual components of a performance to have multiple, or perhaps unascertainable, meanings. Nevertheless, it assists in unpicking the various referents involved in these productions, and facilitates a clear, engaged style of analysis. The second type of analysis is a form of phenomenological analysis.¹⁰⁵ The idea of a phenomenology of performance has gained notable traction within the past decade of theatre studies scholarship. However, the methodology goes back at least to 1985 and the publication of Bert ¹⁰³ Elam 1980. ¹⁰⁴ See McAuley 1998, esp. 4–5 and Pavis 1996a. ¹⁰⁵ For a prior example of the application of a phenomenological approach to classical performance reception see Montgomery Griffiths 2010.

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States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre.¹⁰⁶ States argues that a semiotic form of analysis is a flawed approach as it dissects performances into a series of codes. As the methodology breaks a production up into individual parts, he believes semiotics makes it impossible to gain a perception of the whole performance. A phenomenological methodology, in contrast, pays attention to perceptual processes and a spectator’s sensory engagement with the world of the performance. Stanton Garner subsequently took up this idea and further theorized it in the mid-1990s, articulating how the phenomenological aim of redirecting the abstract, scientific gaze to how the perceiving subject actually engages with the world can be applied to the theatre ‘to return perception to the fullness of its encounter with its environment’.¹⁰⁷ Garner argues that the two strands of phenomenology, which analyse the world as it is perceived and as it is embodied respectively, are ‘uniquely able to illuminate the stage’s experiential duality’.¹⁰⁸ He prioritizes the role of the spectator, who is included in the ‘phenomenological continuum of space through physical proximity, linguistic inclusions, and the uniquely theatrical mirroring that links audience with performer in a kind of corporeal mimetic identification’, and argues that the audience’s role in contemporary theatre is both perceptual and habitational.¹⁰⁹ States and Garner both focus upon dramatic theatre, with Garner, for example, concentrating upon new writing from the 1950s to the 1990s, beginning with Brecht and Beckett and moving through to, for example, Sam Shepard. The applicability of their theories, however, to the new dramaturgies associated with postdramatic theatre has recently seen an increased scholarly uptake of these methodologies. My overview of these two forms of analysis might create the impression that I view an audience member’s cognitive and experiential engagement with performance as two separate categories. This is not the case. Affective experiences have meaning and can be analysed in terms of what practitioners are attempting to say through these experiences in much the same way that signifiers can be analysed for what they are trying to tell an audience about a signified. A performance’s semiotics works hand-in-hand with its phenomenological strategies to encourage an ¹⁰⁶ States 1985. ¹⁰⁹ Garner 1994: 4.

¹⁰⁷ Garner 1994: 2.

¹⁰⁸ Garner 1994: 3.

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embodied reaction to the performance. Although my analysis occasionally distinguishes between these two elements, this is done on the premise that they are interrelated and codependent.

Structure Postdramatic Tragedies is structured around three core debates within theatre studies, namely the role of text within postdramatic theatre, the role of the political in devised theatre, and the idea of spectatorial emancipation in immersive and durational theatre. The sections illuminate what postdramatic receptions of ancient tragedy can contribute to these debates and demonstrate the dual significance of the classics to the postdramatic, and the postdramatic to the classics. Part I, ‘Writing for Postdramatic Theatre’, explores three instances of text-based postdramatic performances, from the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, and Australia respectively. The status of text in postdramatic theatre is contentious, with scripts often viewed problematically due to the written play’s close association with the idea of drama. Several scholars have consequently read Lehmann’s argument as implying that as postdramatic theatre is post-drama, it is therefore post-text. Postdramatic classical receptions problematize this notion as the productions are, by default, engaging with a theatrical style that has a heightened textual legacy. Throughout the section I argue that scripts should be analysed for their potential to be realized as postdramatic performances, not dichotomized into either postdramatic or dramatic categories. I begin this argument in Chapter 1 with a consideration of the relationship between ‘in-yer-face’ playwriting and the postdramatic. ‘In-yer-face’ theatre emerged in Britain in the 1990s and refers to the type of dramaturgical strategies employed by dramatists such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. It is characterized by a visceral performance aesthetic, and often contains extensive onstage depictions of sex and violence. I argue that ‘in-yer-face’ theatre holds a significant relationship to the classics, in that the plays which fall under the ‘in-yer-face’ banner can arguably all be thought of as, conceptually, receptions of tragedy, and as such are important forerunners to postdramatic classical receptions. In particular, I suggest that Sarah Kane’s 1996 adaptation of Seneca’s Phaedra, titled Phaedra’s Love, represents a formative combination of Greco-Roman tragedy and postdramatic techniques, and that this production provided subsequent practitioners with a blueprint, perhaps

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unacknowledged, for later postdramatic receptions. I posit that Phaedra’s Love helped codify a set of postdramatic techniques, and served to indicate the potential for postdramatic receptions to make powerful socio-political statements. Following Kane’s Phaedra’s Love other dramatists began exploring the way postdramatic techniques could be employed in the reinvention of Greco-Roman tragedy. British playwright Martin Crimp, for example, wrote a script that facilitated select postdramatic techniques in his 2004 reinvention of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, titled Cruel and Tender. He furthered this practice in his 2013 adaptation of Euripides’ Phoenissae, titled Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino (The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema). Crimp’s Phoenissae reworking contained characters, fixed dialogue, and a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. On the page it was arguably more dramatic than postdramatic; however, its performance incorporated numerous postdramatic techniques which facilitated a form of political engagement. I outline how Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino questioned how we use antiquity to construct our own identity, and how tragedy can be used to consider contemporary power disputes and issues of nationalism. Furthermore, I argue that the reception, despite its experimental nature, has the ability to reflect back onto the source tragedy and to contribute to our understanding of problematic issues in the original play, such as the function of Euripides’ chorus. As such, the chapter demonstrates the value of analysing postdramatic receptions to the discipline of classics. My final chapter in Part I turns to the work of Australian playwright Tom Holloway. In 2008 Holloway adapted Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to explore the difficulties that contemporary soldiers experience upon repatriation. His characters were ambiguously named 1, 2, and 3. When Holloway went on to adapt Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis two years later, the resulting script featured unattributed lines on a page, with no named characters at all. Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis adaptation, titled Love Me Tender, is indicative of the way practitioners developed the ‘in-yer-face’ innovations seen in Phaedra’s Love and forms the basis of Chapter 3. Despite the absence of characters in Holloway’s script, the text retained a sense of narrative and a thematic focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture, which is the exposure of sexually explicit images through the media, and the direct marketing of age-inappropriate products, to young women and children.

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The play culminated across four separate sacrifice scenes, which served to make a political statement regarding the cost of raunch culture upon not only young women and children, but also upon paternal and maternal relationships. I argue that realizing the postdramatic potential contained in the Love Me Tender script, as was done in the première production, is key to the political efficacy of these final scenes. Holloway’s text thus serves as a paradigmatic example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre. In Part II, ‘Devising the Classics’, I further develop my investigation into the role of the political within this new form of classical reception. My case studies involve receptions that were not written by a playwright, but rather collaboratively developed by an ensemble of performers. This process, termed devising, is arguably the most popular method for producing postdramatic theatre. The dominant views on devised theatre suggest that it developed during the 1960s as part of the New Left and broader counterculture movement, and became less political as time went on. Many scholars now argue that devised theatre is apolitical. I reconsider this debate, and explore the relationship between devised theatre and the political. I analyse two receptions, namely The Wooster Group’s 2002 adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre, which opened in New York City as To You, The Birdie!, and The Hayloft Project’s 2010 Thyestes, which opened in Melbourne. I argue that both examples indicate that devised theatre is political theatre. However, I suggest that this classification requires a broader definition of the political than is traditionally applied, which specifically needs to include the idea of a politics of form. Such an expanded definition of the political applies not only to the theatre, but can also be usefully applied to other receptions of the ancient world. My analysis of To You, The Birdie! in Chapter 4 reveals that The Wooster Group created a production that was explicitly imbued with numerous strands of reception history. I unpack the references to Euripides, Seneca, and Racine that are contained in the play, and draw attention to the ensemble’s emphasis upon the incomplete nature of the classics and the problematic idea of an ‘original’ text. I describe the disorienting, formally experimental nature of the production, and the mechanisms through which the practitioners managed to emphasize issues of class

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and gender within this framework. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, which I explore in Chapter 5, was, in contrast, a more literal reinvention. However, it nevertheless contained a variety of postdramatic techniques and played with the audience’s understanding of the story’s trajectory by presenting a non-linear version of the myth. The Hayloft Project’s production painted Atreus as a brutal psychopath and depicted his atrocities with Tarantino-like, pulp-noir realism. I argue that Thyestes demonstrated how Seneca’s material can interrogate modern values. Collectively, the two chapters attest to the types of political engagement that contemporary devised theatre can represent, and how the questions posed by ancient tragedy are still pertinent to the modern world. In Part III, ‘Embodying the Classics’, I discuss devised productions that occur outside traditional theatrical spaces and utilize immersive and durational formats. Immersive productions plunge the audience into the world of the performance and enable spectators to walk around the performance space, which is often a multi-storey building or other found environment, and to interact with the performers and the world of the play. Durational performances, as the name implies, take place across a longer time frame than typical theatrical productions and often last for between eight and twenty-four hours. I take ZU-UK’s overnight, immersive reception of Euripides’ Medea, titled Hotel Medea (2009–12), and Jan Fabre’s twenty-four-hour Mount Olympus (2015–) as examples of these theatrical forms and use the productions to consider the relationship between form, content, and spectatorship in these interrelated styles of postdramatic theatre. Taking Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator as an analytic lens, I consider the political dimension to the empowered and liberated form of spectatorship championed by such productions, and how this form of spectatorship positions the audience in a dialogic and revelatory relationship with the original plays. I argue that classical receptions are useful tools for testing Rancière’s ideas in practice, and that they reveal that Rancière’s work is best employed as a hermeneutic tool for charting the different, dynamic forms of emancipation within any one performance, rather than to create a totalizing thesis about the ideal conditions for an emancipatory, politically efficacious performance. My analysis of Hotel Medea in Chapter 6 is framed through a discussion of the dynamic shifts between forms of emancipation used throughout the performance. I suggest that postdramatic classical receptions

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often create intellectual emancipation by either turning to unusual tragic sources and destabilizing audience perceptions of the classics, or by encouraging audiences to inhabit new perspectives within familiar texts and thus by creating equivalent conditions. In Hotel Medea the practitioners created emancipation through the second strategy. By constantly shifting the audience’s perspective upon the narrative, referencing prior interpretations of the story, and drawing attention to elements which remain hidden and unexplored, Hotel Medea encouraged the audience to have a discursive interaction with the traditions of receiving Medea and to reconsider the ways, and reasons why, antiquity is reappropriated in modern society. Whereas Hotel Medea can help shape our understanding of the status of a specific tragedy in the modern world, Mount Olympus interrogated the way we might recall the concept of the City Dionysia, the institution of Greek tragedy, and the notion of catharsis in modernity. I spend Chapter 7 analysing Fabre’s durational production, which distilled a conglomeration of Greek tragedies down to abstract tableaux, choreographed tests of endurance, and monologues delivered in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and sometimes simply in stutters and screams. My analysis of the performance reveals how it created cognitive, rather than spatial immersion, but like Hotel Medea nevertheless tested the boundaries between intellectual and embodied agency. Additionally, I suggest that through interrogating the ethics of emancipation the performance provided a metacommentary upon the benefits of this state and served to question the extent to which emancipation is an ideal spectatorial position. Both Hotel Medea and Mount Olympus reveal that the politics of spectatorship is changeable and dynamic in any one performance, and that agency cannot be reduced to binary distinctions such as actor/audience or bodily/cognitive. The case studies complete the jigsaw of postdramatic classical reception covered in this book and provide a third and final intervention into theatre studies debates. Furthermore, they serve as an appropriate conclusion to the monograph, demonstrating how although postdramatic reinventions can appear to test the limits of reception, they nevertheless retain a close interrogation into the idea of tragic experience and constitute a significant, political form of classical reception.

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PART I

Rewriting the Classics

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Introduction to Part I In the early 1990s Michael Billington, lead theatre critic of The Guardian, announced that the tradition of great British playwriting was ‘in a state of crisis’, rapidly declining in output, quality, and audience esteem.¹ The situation was an inevitable repercussion of Margaret Thatcher’s funding cuts to the arts during the 1980s. In defiance of the dire financial prospects, however, in the years following Billington’s statement British playwriting regenerated, with statistics revealing that by 1996 the percentage of new writing in subsidized theatres had doubled.² Yet the scripts being written were far removed from the ‘state of the nation’ plays that traditionally characterized British theatre and for which Billington was pining; these so-called ‘in-yer-face’ performances polarized audiences with their coarse language, shocking themes, and graphic onstage depictions of sex and violence. The reaction was particularly heightened for the five plays of Sarah Kane, and nowhere more pronounced than following her 1996 adaptation of the Phaedra/Hippolytus story, Phaedra’s Love. Sixteen years later Christopher Haydon, the then Artistic Director of London’s Gate Theatre, commissioned Caroline Bird to adapt Euripides’ Troades, asking her to ‘do to Trojan Women what Sarah Kane did to Phaedra in Phaedra’s Love’.³ Kane’s play anticipated a new zeitgeist; her formative adaptation heralded a new, politically committed and formally experimental style in the written reinvention of ancient tragedy. Such

¹ Billington 1993: 360. ² Sierz records that during the 1980s new plays constituted less than 10 per cent of theatre repertoires; however, between 1994 and 1996 new writing made up 20 per cent of staged work in subsidized theatres. See Sierz 2002: 17. ³ Haydon made this statement at the Greek Adaptations seminar during the UCL/Gate Theatre 2013–14 Theatre Translation Forum, on 19 November 2013. Bird’s The Trojan Women premièred on 8 November 2012.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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scripts are often described as postdramatic. The concept of a postdramatic text, however, is fraught; scholars have achieved little consensus over what constitutes such a text and how to identify a postdramatic dramatist. Approaching these questions through the lens of classical reception crystalizes the debates and illuminates the specific shortcomings of dichotomizing texts into dramatic and postdramatic categories as the receptions embody a textual legacy and their dramatic origins are, like a palimpsest, present just below the surface. The status of written drama is contentious in postdramatic theatre as Lehmann’s theorization of the movement prioritized the means of performance over texts for performance. Furthermore, he argued that a schism separates Aristotelian drama from the postdramatic. Within academia many have consequently read this as implying that there is an unbridgeable gulf between dramatic text and anti-mimetic performance art, or that for a production to be postdramatic, it must also be post-text. Liz Tomlin, for example, argues that Lehmann’s monograph called into question ‘the very future of all dramatic playwriting’.⁴ The issue is particularly pertinent in the United Kingdom and the United States due to their long-established new writing traditions, as opposed to countries such as Belgium or the Netherlands, which have, broadly speaking, fewer prolific dramatists and more pronounced reputations for devised theatre.⁵ Several Anglophone scholars have subsequently jumped to the defence of playwriting, creating a pool of scholarship refuting Lehmann’s proclamation of the death of drama by attempting to redefine the notion of a dramatic text. W. B. Worthen, for example, has argued that dramatic writing should not be considered dead but be understood as existing within the interface between text and performance,⁶ and Benjamin Bennett has stated that drama should not be conceived of as a literary form, but rather should encompass everything from written

⁴ Tomlin 2013: viii. ⁵ In these countries Lehmann’s monograph was translated more quickly, and was received with less controversy. Jürs-Munby acknowledges this when she argues that ‘One of the most contentious and vexed issues in the British reception of Postdramatic Theatre has been the question of the text and how Lehmann’s theory relates to “new writing” for theatre and performance’. See Jürs-Munby 2011: 83. For scholarship on Dutch and Belgium postdramatic receptions, see Crombez 2016: 299–301. ⁶ Worthen 2008.

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scripts for performance to non-verbal theatre. He even—somewhat problematically—claims that the postdramatic productions of Robert Wilson are ‘basically dramatic’ as audience discussion imbues Wilson’s performances with the quality of a dramatic text.⁷ Such redefinitions are unnecessary as the idea that postdramatic theatre is anti-textual represents a misreading of Lehmann’s thesis. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the artists involved in creating postdramatic theatre perceive their work as anti-textual. Lehmann himself has addressed these debates, refuting the need to reclassify the dramatic and postdramatic paradigms by arguing that postdramatic theatre can still utilize text. It can do this, he argues, by both ‘de-dramatizing’ traditional texts and by developing new texts that consist of signification rather than representation.⁸ Jürs-Munby has also emphasized how the idea that playwriting is anathema to postdramatic theatre is a misrepresentation of Lehmann’s work, stating: The distinction between dramatic and postdramatic—which is not a binary opposition in any event, but a dynamic relationship in which the postdramatic continues to engage with the dramatic—cannot be reduced to such distinctions as ‘text-based’ versus ‘non-text-based’ (avant-garde) theatre, or ‘verbal’ versus ‘physical’ theatre, as Lehmann himself stresses.⁹

Despite these clarifications the confusion surrounding the notion of a postdramatic text remains and can be seen, for example, in the debates over Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp’s more experimental texts. Kane and Crimp are two of the most commonly referenced contemporary dramatists in debates about text-based postdramatic theatre. Jürs-Munby, for example, explicitly cites both playwrights as examples of postdramatic writers in her introduction to Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre due to the tendency for their plays to require spectators to become ‘active witnesses who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning’.¹⁰ In contrast, Aleks Sierz argues that the Sprachflächen (juxtaposed linguistic surfaces) ⁷ Bennett 2005: 216. For a critique of the idea that public discussion can equate to dramatic text see Rehm 2006. Bennett’s idea has several commonalities with Carl Lavery’s idea of text as a postscript, or ‘spectral relic’, to dramatic performance. See Lavery 2009. ⁸ Directors facilitate this ‘de-dramatization’. See Lehmann 2006: 74. ⁹ Jürs-Munby 2011: 86. For further arguments against the dramatic/postdramatic text binary, see Tomlin 2009: 64 and Čale-Feldman 2011. ¹⁰ Jürs-Munby 2006: 6.

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characteristic of postdramatic theatre ‘have little in common with Crimp’s text, which is all dialogue, and recognizably conversational dialogue at that’.¹¹ These disagreements indicate that the application of the terms ‘dramatic’ and ‘postdramatic’ to scripts is unhelpful and is a practice that should, if possible, be avoided. The disagreements over the classification of formally experimental playscripts are to be expected as the title ‘postdramatic’ refers to a form of theatre, not a form of playwriting. It is constituted by performance techniques that work to disrupt the audience’s identification with characters, narrative, and temporal location, and to subvert their assumptions about the world both inside and outside of the play. Yet playwrights can still write for postdramatic theatre. This new type of dramaturgy involves creating a text that contains the explicit potential for postdramatic performance by perhaps consisting of unattributed lines on a page or a sequence of scenes depicting unrelated events. Such scripts can easily result in dramatic performances if a director chooses to supply the missing information through, for example, the mise-en-scène. However, they are increasingly realized in the postdramatic form, particularly when the playwright collaborates with an ‘auteur-director’ who is able to de-code the invitation for postdramatic performance.¹² The première productions of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, and Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender all testify to such directorial approaches and resulted in performances which contained numerous postdramatic techniques that indelibly affected the audience’s experience and understanding of the tragic reception.

¹¹ Sierz 2007: 380. See also Sierz 2013: 168, where he argues that the labeling of Crimp’s work as postdramatic is an example of ‘him being co-opted by the latest academic fad’. For a critique of Sierz’s view see Ledger 2010, and Aragay and Escoda 2012. The former is particularly relevant, as although Ledger agrees that ‘Crimp resists “postdramatic” labels and, in terms of acting binds up the actor in definite, potentially closed performance tracks’, he disputes Sierz’s view that Crimp’s dialogue is dramatic. See Ledger 2010, esp. 122–4 and 130. ¹² Directors with strong personal styles are often described as ‘auteur-directors’ in Britain, or as working in the tradition of Regietheater in Germany. Mitchell, for example, is described as the former in Oltermann 2014. On European Regietheater see Boenisch 2015.

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1 Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love The postdramatic phenomenon entered the United Kingdom slowly, perhaps because the then predominantly new writing tradition was in tension with the postdramatic innovations that ‘auteur-directors’, devising ensembles, and dance-oriented practitioners were producing elsewhere. Yet despite the perceived tension between written drama and postdramatic theatre it is precisely within the new writing tradition where we see postdramatic techniques gradually emerging in professional British theatres. At the time of their staging these new dramas were, somewhat controversially, labelled as part of an ‘in-yer-face’ school of theatre. Like the label ‘postdramatic’, ‘in-yer-face’ is a term coined in academia. It is specifically associated with theatre scholar Aleks Sierz’s monograph In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, where he defines it somewhat ambiguously as: any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation: it jolts both actors and spectators out of conventional responses, touching nerves and provoking alarm.¹

More specifically, ‘in-yer-face’ theatre is understood to refer to a new writing tradition which emerged as a response to the post-Thatcher era and is characterized by the presence of sex, nudity, violence, and coarse language. The plays of Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson, and Sarah Kane are all associated with the label, as is London’s Royal Court Theatre, which saw the première of many relevant works. The aforementioned dramatists largely rejected the ‘in-yer-face’ label, however, undoubtedly because it drew attention to the shock value surrounding ¹ Sierz 2001: 4. A variety of other monikers were proposed, such as ‘New Brutalists’ and ‘Urban Ennui’; however, the playwrights’ refusal to be identified with a broader phenomenon meant it was Sierz’s term for the entire movement, rather than simply the playwrights, which gained currency and came to define this new wave of theatre. See Saunders 2002: 5.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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the plays and obscured the distinctive style of each playwright and the serious dramaturgy underpinning their scripts. Kane, for example, argued: I do not believe in movements. Movements define retrospectively and always on grounds of imitation [ . . . ] the writers themselves are not interested in it. Some of the writers who are said to belong to the [in-yer-face] movement I haven’t even met. So, as far as I am concerned, I hope that my play is not typical of anything.²

The idea of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre nevertheless persists as a heuristic framework and is useful as it draws attention to a cluster of formally innovative and phenomenologically arresting dramas which, in their première productions, utilized what are now understood to be postdramatic techniques. Explicit receptions of classical texts do not make up a significant part of the ‘in-yer-face’ corpus. To my knowledge there are only two receptions of individual Greek or Roman tragedies which can be positioned under the ‘in-yer-face’ banner: Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2007).³ However, a classicalreception-studies angle is important for the entire group of plays as many can be thought of as receptions of the idea of tragedy.⁴ HansThies Lehmann, for example, suggests that works from this period might provide a home for modern tragedy. Lehmann believes that the concept of tragedy is fundamentally political, as it is connected to public issues of history, power, and conflict, and puts basic cultural presuppositions at risk.⁵ He further suggests that tragedy must overstep ‘the limits of a given ² Kane, quoted in Saunders 2002: 7. Kane’s agent, Mel Kenyon, tellingly stated that ‘in-yer-face’ theatre is ‘a load of old shite. There’s no movement. They are all completely individual’. See Urban 2004: 354. ³ Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is a multi-play cycle that contains an adaptation of Eur. Tro. Although Ravenhill is considered a key ‘in-yer-face’ dramatists his play was written after what is generally thought of as the ‘in-yer-face’ period. For information on this play see Laera 2009 and Laera 2013: 121–32. Although a precursor to the ‘in-yer-face’ corpus Steven Berkoff ’s 1980 adaptation of Soph. OT, Greek, is an important forerunner to these classical receptions. On Greek see Macintosh 2009: 173–81. ⁴ See Sierz, for example, who argues that the ‘in-yer-face’ mixture of heroism and hopelessness, and the inexorable and the inexplicable is rooted in a tragic tradition, and Klaus Peter Müller, who states that the plays are ‘reminiscent of a view repeatedly presented in ancient Greek texts, a view which describes much of ancient Greek as well as Roman literature and thinking: “love is a god and you cannot control him” ’. Sierz 2001: 10 and Müller 2001: 96 respectively. ⁵ Lehmann 2013, esp. 90 and 97.

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“cultural intelligibility” ’, and consequently that today tragedy is found in ‘the seemingly marginal, dispersed, creative as well as problematic field of performance, “live art” and postdramatic theatre practices’.⁶ Sarah Kane’s ‘in-yer-face’ plays, and 4.48 Psychosis in particular, are for Lehmann paradigmatic examples of postdramatic texts written in the tragic mode. Yet Kane’s œuvre is of vital importance to any discussion of tragedy and postdramatic theatre for a more explicit reason. Kane’s five scripts for the theatre each pushed the boundaries of the dramatic form, ushering in new formal possibilities which had a noticeable influence upon dramaturgy within Britain and further afield. Key to her innovations was a combination of postdramatic techniques with specific references to tragic drama from both inside and outside of the classical canon. The palimpsestuous presence of tragedy within Kane’s body of work underlines the significance of text to the postdramatic.

Tragedy and the Œuvre of Sarah Kane Sarah Kane’s (1971–99) scripts embody the tension between text and postdramatic theatre. Kane insisted that her five published texts, and particularly her final two works, were not plays but ‘texts for performance’, and refused for the projects to be realized in any other medium by denying the rights for wireless, televisual, and film adaptations.⁷ Her scripts, therefore, are undeniably theatrical texts, and the fact that they are regularly discussed under the banner of postdramatic theatre reveals the reductiveness of the dichotomy.⁸ Kane’s scripts, despite their innovative form, are richly imbued with literary history, positioning Kane, just like the speaker in 4.48 Psychosis, as ‘Last in a long line of literary kleptomaniacs’.⁹ Kane alternated between a willingness and hesitation in naming her sources, which varied from her own early unpublished ⁶ Lehmann 2013: 97. ⁷ In addition to Kane’s five published scripts she wrote three unpublished monologues, copies of which are held in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. On the monologues, see Rebellato 2010. On Kane’s refusal for her work to be reproduced in other mediums, see Saunders and Kenyon 2002: 150. In addition to Kane’s work for the theatre, she also wrote one screenplay, titled Skin and published in Kane 2001. ⁸ On Kane’s work as postdramatic see, for example, Roberts 2015. ⁹ Kane 2001: 213.

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work through to modern medical texts.¹⁰ What unites many of the sources, however, is a link to ancient tragedy. These connections have predominantly gone unnoticed as they often hide behind more obvious Shakespearean referents; however, their presence necessarily means that Kane’s plays are infused with (unconscious) references to ancient tragedy. It is the combination of Kane’s experimental style with this tragic backdrop that makes her plays so affective and influential. Kane’s theatrical career began in April 1991 at the Hen and Chicken pub theatre in Bedminster, Bristol, when she was a Theatre Studies student at Bristol University. Here Kane performed her one-woman Comic Monologue in a double bill which also featured David Greig’s Savage Reminiscence. Comic Monologue is in many ways Kane’s darkest work, as the redemptive ending characteristic of her other scripts is absent. The monologue details a horrific, protracted sexual assault, which is related by the victim and occurred at the hands of her boyfriend. It is largely devoid of identifiable literary references, but with the benefit of hindsight one can see the beginnings of Kane’s interest in paralleling scenes of brutality with moments of disquieting kindness, alongside her talent for producing arresting, horrific moments not through extreme violence but through striking imagery and psychological forms of torture.¹¹ In August of that year Kane took this text along with another monologue, titled What She Said, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, both of which were performed as part of a collection titled Dreams, Screams and Silences. The following year Kane brought a third monologue to the Fringe, titled Starved, and in 1993 she directed all three as a collection titled Sick in Hampstead. Like Comic Monologue her later two texts, which explore bisexuality and bulimia respectively, do not signal any intertextual literary references,¹² but again show the development of Kane’s style: coarse, raw language and gallows humour in What She ¹⁰ In her final interview Kane commented that she preferred to create possibilities rather than fix the meaning of each referent. Tellingly, when noting that Crave is heavily based on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, she stated ‘what happened to T S Eliot—poor bastard, I bet he regretted it forever—was that everyone got more interested in the notes than the poem [ . . . ] and I really didn’t want that to happen’. See Rebellato 2009. ¹¹ In Cleansed, for example, the most horrific moment is arguably found not within the scenes of amputation, which are over in a moment and are achieved, despite apparent realism, through stagecraft, but rather in Tinker’s prolonged force-feeding of two trays of chocolate to Robin. ¹² The title What She Said, however, comes from a song by The Smiths.

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Said, and a sense of fragmentation, vivid imagery, and an interest in exploring mental health and institutionalization in Sick. Kane’s five published texts for performance compound her characteristic style with additional experimental techniques and a complex web of references—both explicit and conceptual—to tragedy and the tragic. Blasted, which premièred at London’s Royal Court theatre in 1995 and was Kane’s first full-length drama, is often considered the defining play of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre and is well known for the vitriolic press reaction that it received.¹³ The drama commences in a hotel room and explores the twisted relationship between former lovers Ian and Cate, a middleaged journalist and a much younger woman suffering from epilepsy. It formally fragments in the second half when the hotel becomes the centre of a warzone and a berserking soldier breaks in.¹⁴ Several scholars have explained the negative media coverage through the journalists’ possible incomprehension at Kane’s attempt to parallel domestic violence with full-scale warfare;¹⁵ however, it was Kane’s inclusion of what we now recognize as postdramatic techniques within an otherwise naturalistic drama that critics found confronting and inexplicable. As Eckart VoigtsVirchow notes the structure of Blasted and its dissipation in the second half of the play, first seen in Kane’s Starved, represents Lehmann’s ‘theatre of risk’, or Überschreitung, which oversteps all sense of order, measure, and appropriateness to undercut a political hegemony.¹⁶ It is a postdramatic feature that works to disrupt the audience’s comfortable, voyeuristic enjoyment of a production and assault their senses in an initially unintelligible manner. Such a technique was uncommon in British theatres in the mid-1990s, particularly at institutions like the Royal Court, as Robert Lublin notes when he argues that the primary issue that critics had with Blasted was that the second half ‘lacked the moral signposts whereby audience members could readily comprehend the action taking place. The result was a play that assaulted the senses

¹³ Sierz notes, however, that although Blasted was the watershed production that popularized ‘in-yer-face’ techniques, it was not the first play to stage such controversial action. See Sierz 2001: 30–40. For an overview of the press reaction to Blasted, see Cole 2017: 96. ¹⁴ I am using the term beserk here in Jonathan Shay’s sense of the term, as a frenzied warrior-state triggered by warfare in which abuse after abuse is committed. See Shay 1994: 77. ¹⁵ For an assessment on the changing press reaction over time to Blasted see Saunders 2002: 37–42. ¹⁶ Voigts-Virchow 2010: 200.

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without making easy sense of what was occurring’.¹⁷ Irrespective of the reasons why the press responded as they did, had audiences been able to comprehend the complex dramaturgy underpinning the performance they might have recognized a rich tapestry of tragic precedents. The most obvious tragic references in Blasted are to Shakespeare’s King Lear, from which the play draws its title.¹⁸ As Graham Saunders notes Kane is one of several British dramatists who rewrote or engaged with King Lear between 1970 and 2000.¹⁹ At the most obvious level, Blasted recalls King Lear through the blinding episode, with the Soldier’s removal of Ian’s eyeballs recalling the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes. Both episodes necessarily recall Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the example of tragic blindness par excellence, both in the act and its position as a symbolic castration to punish sexual crimes.²⁰ Yet Saunders also notes more oblique moments of kinship, including the blurring of locations, particularly in regards to the precision surrounding the wars occurring during the dramas, the similarity of the emotional journeys undertaken by both Lear and Ian, and an interest in ‘the relationship established between acts of personal cruelty and the full-scale chaos and atrocities that arise out of civil war’.²¹ In addition to the Shakespearean connection, there is also an engagement with ideas of tragedy, both ancient and modern. For example, the play does not retain a unity of action or time; however, Ian does undergo an Aristotelian peripeteia and anagnorisis, ending the play not as an abuser but as the abused and, as evinced in his plea for forgiveness in Scene Five, in a state of recognition and remorse regarding his earlier behaviour. There are further classical overtones in the diptych structure of the script, which in a similar fashion to Sophocles’ Trachiniae contrasts a naturalistic opening half with a second half in which the play’s structure, as well as

¹⁷ Lublin 2010: 115. ¹⁸ Saunders 2004: 74. See Dickson 2015, who notes that Blasted contains shadows of Greek tragedies and of Shakespeare’s King Lear. ¹⁹ Saunders 2004: 69. These other dramatists include Edward Bond and Howard Barker, both of whom Kane’s work is associated with. ²⁰ Freud interpreted Oedipus’ blinding as a form of symbolic castration. Halio connects Gloucester’s punishment, in light of his adultery, to this psychoanalytic interpretation. Given that Ian rapes Cate between Scenes One and Two it is easy to position Blasted within this trajectory. See Freud 1953: 190 and Halio 1992: 222. ²¹ Saunders 2004: 71.

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its characters, experiences increasing assault.²² Evidence of modern understandings of tragedy also permeates Blasted. Sean Carney, borrowing from Terry Eagleton’s theory, suggests that Blasted is a contemporary tragedy as it embodies a tragic structure of feeling and positions Ian as a pharmakos, a tragic scapegoat who, by the final scene, is both dead and undead, ‘liminal, highest and lowest, poison and cure, sacred and profane’.²³ Furthermore, although I am sceptical of Lehmann’s rigid argument regarding tragic experience only being found today in experimental performance, it is clear that Blasted adheres to Lehmann’s definition of modern tragedy. The play not only communicates tragic experience but also, as Lehmann requires, blurs: the distinction between the spheres of the aesthetic and the real, between the sphere of irresponsible artistic pleasure (which all art, including tragic theatre, must still give) and the sphere of ethical and political consideration and responsibility (which all art, including tragic theatre must refer us back to).²⁴

The complexity of the concrete and conceptual links to tragedy makes it clear that even in this early instance Kane’s scripts are indebted to the classical and are of relevance to any investigation into the role of the classics within postdramatic theatre. Kane’s method of combining postdramatic techniques with a dramaturgy subtly enriched through references to the classics continued throughout the remainder of her career. For example Cleansed, like Blasted, contains classical allusions via Shakespearean references, here through Titus Andronicus.²⁵ Cleansed is often considered the most difficult of Kane’s plays; not only are death and amputation seen onstage but there are stage directions regarding flowers bursting through the stage in bloom and rats carrying severed limbs. Grace Starry West’s comment that in Titus Andronicus there is a ‘disparity between the beautifully polished surface of the language, replete with learned allusion and metaphor, and the gory events of the play’ can thus equally be

²² In the second half of Trach., when the injured Herakles appears, the fractured dramaturgy of the script works together with Herakles’ confronting appearance to create a heightened moment within the tragedy. For an analysis of this passage see Cole 2016: 41–3. ²³ Carney 2005: 289. ²⁴ Lehmann 2013: 99. ²⁵ Graham Saunders also sees echoes of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night in Cleansed, in the motif of a woman searching for her lost brother and in the focus on gender, disguise, and cross-dressing. See Saunders 2002: 95.

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applied to Cleansed.²⁶ More specifically, however, the amputations recall the fate of Titus Andronicus’ Lavinia, as in Scene Four Tinker cuts off Carl’s tongue, and in Scene Eight Tinker amputates Carl’s hands.²⁷ Shakespeare utilizes a range of classical sources in Titus Andronicus, including the myth of Philomela’s rape by her brother-in-law Tereus and her subsequent glossectomy to prevent her from naming her attacker.²⁸ We know that Shakespeare was specifically engaging with the myth as transmitted through Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6.412–74, as Lavinia reveals to Titus and Marcus that she has been raped by indicating the relevant passage in Ovid’s text. However, references to the myth can be found in sources as early as Homer and Pherecydes,²⁹ and it formed the basis of Sophocles’ lost tragedy Tereus.³⁰ Of course, neither Kane nor Shakespeare likely had access to the surviving fragments of Tereus; however, the resonance is nonetheless significant because it once again shows a classical tragedy lurking in the wings of Kane’s dramaturgy, grounding Kane’s controversial aesthetic in a wider theatrical tradition and connecting a narrative referent with postdramatic components, which here centre around the image of the deformed body and notions of pain and catharsis.³¹ The fact that both Tereus and Cleansed focus on the bond of siblinghood, between Philomela and Procne and Grace and Graham respectively, gives the unconscious engagement added significance. In addition to the Shakespearean connection Cleansed also contains a number of subtler references to the idea of tragedy, starting from what Lehmann identifies as the allusion to catharsis that the title announces.³² Carl’s frenzied dance for Rod in Scene Thirteen is connected, for Franziska Schößler, to the Dionysiac, while the unseen group of men who torture ²⁶ West 1982: 63. ²⁷ See Schößler 2010: 322 for more on the Lavinia motif in Cleansed. Notably, the mutilation of Lavinia (and, as it were, Philomela) is done as a rapist’s attempt at hiding his identity and is a continuation of the rapist’s violation of the female body. In contrast, the mutilation of Carl is part of Tinker’s perverse test of whether Carl and Rod’s love can survive in the face of total bodily destruction. That Kane answers this question affirmatively says much about the essence of Cleansed. ²⁸ Root 1903: 15 detects fifty-three classical references in Titus Andronicus. ²⁹ For an overview of early Greek references to the Tereus and Philomela myth, see Fitzpatrick 2001: 90–1. ³⁰ For a discussion of the surviving fragments of Tereus, see Coo 2013 and Finglass 2016. ³¹ On these postdramatic elements see Lehmann 2006: 162–6. ³² Lehmann 2016: 6.

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the characters recalls the ancient chorus, particularly in their calls for ‘cathartic purification’.³³ The physical transformation of Carl and Grace, and the emotional transformation of Tinker can furthermore be thought of as extreme reversals whereby individual characters entirely metamorphose into different entities. The more ambiguous treatment of the classics here echoes the more complex postdramatic forms; the titling of Grace as Grace/Graham by the play’s conclusion, for example, is indicative of the destruction of concrete concepts of character, and the revolving location disrupts any sense of linearity.³⁴ Such a deterioration and evolution of dramatic cornerstones is furthered in Kane’s final two plays, which no longer feature named characters, scene breaks, or an identifiable sense of place and instead make meaning through the combination of the texts’ aesthetically rich literary backdrops, which include references to works by T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Artaud, and Goethe, and the phenomenological impact of the arresting images and actions central to the plays when realized in performance.³⁵ The tragic resonances in Kane’s plays are often subtle, but their cumulative magnitude means that her dramas are undeniably infused with a classical sensibility which goes much deeper than the Jacobean ‘imagery, characterisation and philosophy’ that Saunders believes characterizes Kane’s work.³⁶ Each of her five plays engages conceptually with ideas of the tragic and infuses a politicized, post-Thatcher sensibility with images and plot devices from the classical canon. Kane’s engagement with the classics, however, is most pronounced in the 1996 Phaedra’s Love. In Phaedra’s Love the symbiotic relationship between postdramatic techniques and classical tragedy represents an indicative instance of how text and postdramatic techniques worked hand in hand rather than in opposition during 1990s British theatre. The production provided a blueprint, perhaps unconscious, for many subsequent postdramatic adaptations of ancient tragedy and indicated the potential of this mode of performance to make powerful socio-political statements. ³³ Schößler 2010: 324–5. ³⁴ On the postdramatic dimension of Cleansed’s narrative see Dimitrova 2016: 233. ³⁵ For details on these references see Diedrich 2013. ³⁶ Saunders 2002: x. For further discussion of this idea see Saunders 2002a. In addition to the dimensions explored above, there are conceptual ties to the tragic through the interest in ghosting and metamorphosis, liminality, and transgression in all of Kane’s plays.

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Phaedra’s Love was Kane’s second full-length drama and is a rare contemporary reception of Seneca’s Phaedra. It arose when David Farr, the then Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, commissioned Kane to write a play for his upcoming season of new works inspired by European classics.³⁷ Kane’s remit was to adapt any canonical play from the past,³⁸ and she proposed Büchner’s Woyzeck and Brecht’s Baal; however, she was unable to adapt the former because a future Büchner season was already planned at the Gate, nor the latter because of problems with the Brecht estate.³⁹ Farr suggested a Greek or Roman tragedy to Kane, and lent her a collection of Senecan plays.⁴⁰ The project consequently does not indicate that Kane was especially interested in the process of classical adaptation, but rather seized upon an offer to create work in a safe space following Blasted.⁴¹ Influences from her preferred Woyzeck and Baal permeate Phaedra’s Love, particularly in Kane’s depiction of a hedonistic and misogynistic Hippolytus who abstains from Phaedra’s love not because of a religious devotion to celibacy but through complete self-absorption and an inability to feel affection for others.⁴² The multiplicity of Kane’s sources, as well as their fragmentary and experimental nature (Woyzeck was unfinished at Büchner’s death and multiple versions of Baal exist as Brecht rewrote it during his lifetime) are an early indication of the degree to which Phaedra’s Love is postdramatic, as Lehmann characterizes a retreat from synthesis and a multiplicity of referents as foundational elements of postdramatic theatre.⁴³ Although Kane did not initiate the adaptation her choice of Seneca over a Greek writer is noteworthy, particularly given the production’s role at the forefront of a new dramaturgical trend. Seneca has been perpetually less popular than his Greek counterparts on the modern stage and is arguably associated in popular consciousness with a poor

³⁷ See Farr 2005 and Hattenstone 2000. ³⁸ Saunders 2002: 71. ³⁹ Kane was subsequently invited to direct Woyzeck during this season. The production opened at the Gate Theatre in 1997. On Kane wanting to adapt Baal, see Sierz 2001: 109. ⁴⁰ Farr 2005. ⁴¹ See Farr 2005 for an overview of the commissioning process. ⁴² Kane stated that Scene Six was taken directly from a draft of her Baal adaptation. See Sierz 2001: 109. ⁴³ See Lehmann 2006: 82–3.

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quality, unperformable aesthetic.⁴⁴ The problematic reputation of Senecan tragedy is in part due to the unresolved debates about whether his tragedies were originally written for dramatic performance or as rhetorical exercises, and due to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dismissal of Seneca during the philhellenism phenomenon. A. W. Schlegel’s lectures on dramatic art had a particularly influential role in this process as they emphasized the idea that Euripides’ tragedies represented a decline from Sophoclean excellence that Seneca’s tragedies further exacerbated; Schlegel memorably described Seneca’s plays as ‘bombastic and frigid, unnatural both in character and action, revolting from their violation of propriety, and so destitute of theatrical effect, that I believe they were never meant to leave the rhetorical schools for the stage’.⁴⁵ Schlegel’s damning indictment gives Senecan drama an allure to avantgarde practitioners wishing to push the boundaries of theatrical possibility, making him a prime candidate for both Kane and the emerging postdramatic phenomenon. Helen Slaney’s study of Senecan reception touches upon Seneca’s role within the twentieth-century avant-garde. Her argument explores the reception of not necessarily individual tragedies, but rather the senecan [sic] aesthetic, which she defines as constituted by at least two of the following: an intensely figured or rhetorical mode of speech; a preoccupation with excess; metatheatricality; delirium; possession; abjection; horror; confined spaces; and sympatheia.⁴⁶ She argues that the reception of Seneca within the contemporary avant-garde is predicated on ‘the counterfactual, the might-have-been’, largely made up of either critical failures such as Artaud’s 1935 The Cenci, or unrealized experiments such as Artaud’s The Torments of Tantalus or Roger Blin’s Thyestes, all of which consequently left the opportunity for Seneca to have a high-profile role in the avant-garde still-born.⁴⁷ She further suggests that the postdramatic phenomenon has ‘accommodated the Greeks but found the senecan aesthetic less amenable’ because an intensely figured mode of speech is one of the most significant elements of the senecan aesthetic

⁴⁴ See Cole 2017: 91 for details on the comparative popularity of Sen. Phaedra versus Eur. Hipp. contemporary to Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. ⁴⁵ Schlegel 1815: 211. First published in 1809, one year after the lectures were delivered in Vienna. ⁴⁶ Slaney 2016, esp. 16–38. ⁴⁷ Slaney 2016: 278.

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and is something not supported by the postdramatic emphasis on visual dramaturgy.⁴⁸ Although it is true that Seneca’s twentieth-century reception within the avant-garde is characterized by several false starts, his repeated positioning as a touchstone for theatrical innovators remains significant and continues within the postdramatic phenomenon. Furthermore, Seneca’s role within postdramatic theatre is not that of an outlier but is on par with his Greek counterparts. Slaney’s senecan aesthetic sits well within both the postdramatic aesthetic and Lehmann’s idea of postdramatic theatre as a modern home for tragedy, with senecan excess, abjection, and horror aligning with the concept that modern tragedy should embody formal transgression or interruption.⁴⁹ Significantly, as postdramatic theatre is not post-text these Senecan engagements often maintain Slaney’s key component of intensely figured speech, as can be seen in Voice Theatre Lab’s postdramatic Iam Nocte, a reception of Seneca’s Oedipus in which ‘preverbal expressions, holistic utterances, [and] abstract use of English and Latin allow performers and audiences to place logic aside and focus on the sounds instead of the logical meaning of the text’.⁵⁰ Kane’s sharply honed, witty, and dark adaptation is consequently situated within a specific experimental theatre history and continues Seneca’s role as the often, but not always, invisible force at the forefront of (Western) theatrical innovations. Her script for Phaedra’s Love invited a postdramatic realization which in performance highlighted the relevance of four key Senecan themes to the present sociopolitical moment: masculinity, sexuality, violence, and voyeurism.

Masculinity and Sexuality in Phaedra’s Love Phaedra’s Love opened at the Gate Theatre on 15 May 1996 in a production that Kane herself directed after falling out with the original director Cath Mattock.⁵¹ Although Kane envisaged the project as a ⁴⁸ Slaney 2016: 271. ⁴⁹ Lehmann notes, for example, that Seneca’s ‘defining concern is the transgression of all that can be imagined: self-overstepping and self-expenditure as the condition sine qua non of subjectivity’. See Lehmann 2016: 104. ⁵⁰ Contemporary Arts Media 2017. ⁵¹ James Macdonald, who directed the première productions of Blasted, Cleansed, and 4.48 Psychosis, recalls that Kane asked him to direct Phaedra’s Love; however, he was unavailable. See Macdonald and Saunders 2002: 122.

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response to Seneca’s Phaedra it was initially marketed as an adaptation of both Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra.⁵² It contains several links to Euripides’ tragedy including direct quotations, the timing of Phaedra’s suicide, and even the title Phaedra’s Love, which is drawn from line 1430 of Hippolytus. Despite these close links to the classical the staging was profoundly contemporary and immediately revealed itself to the audience as highly experimental. There was no designated stage but rather the seating was interspersed throughout the entirety of the Gate’s black box space with the actors performing around the spectators, allowing for the production to be ‘at one moment intimate and personal, at the next epic and public’.⁵³ The Gate’s tiny theatre, which seats less than one hundred spectators, combined with the quasiimmersive seating arrangement to create a postdramatic space, meaning that the physical and physiological proximity of the actors to the spectators evoked a theatre of shared energies rather than transmitted signs and by the conclusion of the production facilitated what Lehmann, in a Lacanian manner, terms an ‘irruption of the real’.⁵⁴ The staging configuration blurred numerous boundaries, not only between actors and audience members but also between notions of public and private action, and the world of the play and that of reality. These postdramatic strategies steadily built throughout the entire drama, culminating in a finale that involved embedded actors emerging from the spectator seating to take part in an anarchic scene of mob violence. Like Phaedra Kane’s first scene focused exclusively upon Hippolytus. While Seneca’s opening consists of Hippolytus delivering a monologue to a group of companions, Kane’s was devoid of dialogue and instead featured Hippolytus lying on a wooden bench under a blanket, pleasuring himself in front of a violent film and gorging on hamburgers and crisps (Fig. 1.1). The scene was indicative as to how the production would create productive tensions between the classical source texts and postdramatic performance strategies to facilitate an affective, phenomenologically compelling theatrical experience. For example, not only did

⁵² On the Euripidean elements in Phaedra’s Love see Cole 2017: 91–2. ⁵³ Kane, quoted in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 134. ⁵⁴ See Lehmann 2006: 150. On the ‘irruption of the real’, which Lehmann sees as involving ‘the unsettling that occurs through the indecidability whether one is dealing with reality or fiction’, see Lehmann 2006: 99–104, esp. 101.

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Figure 1.1. Scene One, Phaedra’s Love. Photo: Pau Ros.

the staging configuration result in a postdramatic space, but the absence of dialogue for the scene’s entirety meant that meaning was created primarily through a visual dramaturgy. Lehmann defines a visual dramaturgy as a scenography that can develop its own logic and is not subordinated to text, which demands ‘labyrinthine associative work’ to decode its semiotics and, in the most extreme examples, direct engagement purely with presences that are figuratively devoid of any structural referent.⁵⁵ Such a visual dramaturgy pervaded Kane’s entire drama, from the onstage masturbation in Scene One through to the repeated use of visually metaphorical language.⁵⁶ ⁵⁵ Lehmann 2006: 93–8. ⁵⁶ The one exception to the visual dramaturgy was Kane’s decision to follow the Euripidean structure and have Phaedra die by suicide offstage, which was then reported by the confidant, Strophe. Solga argues that Kane’s decision to not stage Cate’s rape in Blasted is politically marked and aims to show the limits of realism and the evasive representation of female suffering. On the one hand, Solga’s argument can be applied to

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The visual dramaturgy operating in Scene One alerted the audience to the fact that they were dealing with a profoundly modern monarchy, and the discomfort that Hippolytus’ act of masturbation worked to create within the audience implied a contentious relationship between the monarchy and the people over whom they ruled. This reading of the monarchy was reinforced throughout the entire play; for example, in Scene Three Strophe told Phaedra ‘If anyone were to find out [ . . . ] It’s the excuse they’re all looking for. We’d be torn apart on the streets’ [Scene Three, Page 73], and in Scene Six the Priest emphasized the significance of Hippolytus’ actions given his status, stating ‘Your sexual indiscretions are of no interest to anyone. But the stability of the nation’s morals is. You are a guardian of those morals. You will answer to God for the collapse of the country you and your family lead’ [Scene Six, Page 94]. It is possible to read the attention paid to the repercussions of a royal family’s sexual indiscretions as making a specific political comment about the British royal family in the 1990s. The extent to which the play did this is a divisive issue in scholarship. Theorists of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre are largely responsible for encouraging the debate as many see the ‘genre’ as explicitly addressing the social conditions of post-Thatcherite Britain. More recently Hallie Marshall has supported such an interpretation and suggested that Kane’s play has a specific political message in that it makes a ‘republican argument advocating for the abolishment of the monarchy’,⁵⁷ while Müller-Wood has argued that as Kane foregrounds ‘themes of universal rather than historically specific significance, Kane indeed rejected the political drama with which some critics associated her’.⁵⁸ Situating the play on either side of this dichotomy is challenging as Kane made the precise political dimension of the play ambiguous, particularly in performance as a Scottish actor played Hippolytus. The casting mediated any explicit association with the Kane’s structure in Phaedra’s Love; however, on the other hand it is possible that Kane’s decision was simply governed by the dynamics of performance, as it meant that death was not displayed onstage until the final scene and consequently the dénouement had a more visceral impact. Woodsworth additionally argues that it means Phaedra’s suicide was not glorified and she consequently did not become a sympathetic figure. See Solga 2007 and Woodsworth 2010: 144. ⁵⁷ Marshall 2011: 177. Critic Michael Billington also conjectured that Kane’s ‘point appears to be that modern royalty is a debased myth: that it poses as a national emblem while being prey to all kinds of tortured passion’. See Billington 1996. ⁵⁸ Müller-Wood 2011: 104.

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present British monarchy. Thus, both subjective interpretations about the play’s engagement with the current royal family would have been accurate for some audience members. The fact that Kane herself argued that the play became more relevant to contemporary society after the death of Diana indicates, however, that she did not initially intend for it to be viewed explicitly through the lens of the modern monarchy.⁵⁹ Her decision not to give her royal family any geographical or temporal specificity further implies that she did not want them purely viewed as a literal representation of the British monarchy. The fact that it is possible, but not necessary, to view Phaedra’s Love as interrogating the contemporary monarchy bears relevance to Seneca’s Phaedra, as the latter tragedy can be read as reflecting Neronian Rome. The degree to which Seneca’s plays are infused with his socio-political context is debatable and will be discussed further in Part II, which considers two Senecan receptions. Phaedra contains fewer obvious resonances with Neronian Rome than other Senecan tragedies, and indeed J. G. Fitch’s metrical analysis dates the drama to late in Claudius’ reign, rather than within Nero’s.⁶⁰ Yet Seneca’s depiction of a rash, quick-to-judge Theseus who Thomas Kohn argues is more tragic than his Greek forebear may, if performed later, have been read as embodying a reference to Nero.⁶¹ It is also feasible that the incestuous dimension of the story later bore some connection to the rumoured relations between Nero and his mother Agrippina; however, as the precise date of Phaedra is unknown and there are no surviving records of Nero’s supposed incest before Tacitus, who was writing several decades after the event, the link is tenuous. Nevertheless, there are some concrete similarities between Kane and Seneca’s potential performance contexts, with Erica Bexley noting that both possibly took place in ‘voyeur cultures’; the former because of its placement within the ‘big brother’ generation, and the latter because of the context of gladiatorial and other arena spectacles.⁶² Furthermore, there is a degree of kinship between the two opening scenes in their respective foci upon problematic forms of sexuality. Hippolytus’ asexual personal philosophy, combined with his inadvertent sexualization of the natural environment in the opening monologue of Phaedra, works to create a character embodying conflicting ⁵⁹ See Saunders 2002: 75 for Kane’s attitude towards the play after Diana’s death. ⁶⁰ Fitch 1981. ⁶¹ Kohn 2013: 80. ⁶² Bexley 2011: 369.

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representations of masculinity and sexual desire.⁶³ The same focus is present in Kane’s opening; however, Kane’s confronting visual dramaturgy subverted the audience’s expectations of a chaste Hippolytus and set the tone for the remainder of the performance. It used the classical theme to engage with contemporary political issues. Within Seneca’s play Hippolytus’ sexuality is one of several deviant behaviours. Phaedra’s incestuous desire, for example, is also portrayed as morally corrupt and subversive. Hippolytus’ behaviour was not isolated within Phaedra’s Love either. Marshall, for example, summarizes that ‘Kane creates a narrative of a household devoid of morality—Hippolytus is hardly alone in his immorality. Everyone in the family has engaged in incestuous relationships’.⁶⁴ Kane, however, removed the moral judgement about incest from Seneca’s play. Mayer perceives this as one of the most unsettling aspects of the adaptation but concedes it can be justified as relations between a stepparent and stepchild, or between stepchildren, are not considered strictly incestuous in modern society.⁶⁵ The affair, however, would still be considered unethical and scandalous, making Kane’s decision noteworthy. The only objection vocalized to Phaedra’s passion is by Strophe, who exclaimed to Phaedra ‘You’re married to his father’ [Scene Three, Page 71]. Strophe’s concern, however, related to public perception and potential backlash and not the nature of the affair itself. The fact that incestuous desire went unremarked was most notable when Hippolytus learnt of Phaedra’s feelings. Instead of the scandalized response evident in Phaedra, Hippolytus here was unperturbed, as can be seen in his exchange with Phaedra in Scene Four: PHAEDRA :

Have you ever thought about having sex with me? HIPPOLYTUS : I think about having sex with everyone. [Scene Four, Page 79] Kane thus reworked Seneca’s drama to remove the moral and ethical framework surrounding incestuous relationships and consequently, beginning with the visual dramaturgy in Scene One, positioned Hippolytus as exclusively representing a deviant sexuality.

⁶³ See Cole 2017: 95 for more on Hippolytus’ sexualization of the natural environment in Phaedra. ⁶⁴ Marshall 2011: 171. ⁶⁵ Mayer 2002: 86.

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Debates regarding the redefinition of notions of masculinity are common within both gender theory scholarship, and the wider ‘in-yer-face’ theatre movement, of the 1990s. Mark Ravenhill, for example, believes ‘in-yer-face’ theatre to be fundamentally about contemporary gender relation problems and a crisis in heterosexuality, and David Edgar argues that ‘in-yerface’ plays ‘address masculinity and its discontents as demonstrably as the plays of the early 1960’s addressed class and those of the 1970’s the failures of social democracy’.⁶⁶ Kane’s play supported this by not only positioning sexual deviancy as an exclusively masculine problem, but by also positioning Hippolytus as the undisputed protagonist of the drama.⁶⁷ He appeared in five of the eight scenes and was the focus of all eight, and his continual influence was reflected in the perpetual presence of his dirty socks and fast food packets in the mise-en-scène. Yet the problem with seeing this theme as part of a uniform, broad category is that it does not account for the divergent functions held by these investigations into modern conceptions of masculinity. Whereas other playwrights contemporary to Kane engaged with, and proposed a redefinition of, masculinity to redress sexual deviancy, Kane refused to propose an alternative form of sexuality. She was deliberately ambiguous about how Hippolytus’ behaviour reflected the wider socio-political environment. Rather than suggest that a pertinent contemporary message could be found in Hippolytus’ behaviour as other playwrights might do, Kane instead subtly connected the themes Hippolytus embodied to the wider issues of violence and voyeurism.⁶⁸ Scene One introduced these aspects as the other key themes of the adaptation and began connecting them directly with the audience, providing an early indication that it is within this connection that the play’s contemporary socio-political relevance lay. Kane made an explicit connection between the themes of masculinity and violence in Scene One through the violent content that Hippolytus watched while he masturbated. Klaus Peter Müller argues that this connection is characteristic of many dramas contemporary to Kane, ⁶⁶ See Edgar 1999: 27–8 for both Ravenhill and Edgar’s opinions. ⁶⁷ Saunders notes that Kane’s treatment of ‘diseased masculinity’, which is here argued to be a postdramatic deviant sexuality, differentiates her work from the other ‘in-yer-face’ engagements with the idea of masculinity. See Saunders 2002: 129. ⁶⁸ The theme of uncontrolled violence also originates in Phaedra; see, for example, lines 31–53 and 73–80.

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where ‘Violence and its social as well as personal effects are strongly connected with the questioning of masculinity’.⁶⁹ Kane has stated that illuminating this connection was one of her main objectives in Phaedra’s Love: The problems I’m addressing are the ones we have as human beings. An overemphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion from our main problem. Class, race and gender diversions are symptomatic of societies based on violence or the threat of violence.⁷⁰

The way Kane’s production related this connection between masculinity and violence to the audience attests to the significance of analysing the play as a performance, rather than a text, as its impact lay in its affective dimension and crucially relied upon audience involvement. The so-called phenomenological school of Kane criticism sees this function as intrinsic to all of Kane’s plays. For example, Kim Solga argues that Kane forces ‘audiences into critical discomfort and thus into reassessment of the role of affective response in the theatre’,⁷¹ and Alyson Campbell suggests that Kane’s ‘experiential’ theatre aims: to connect with the spectator at a physical level and the effectiveness—or affectiveness—of this imagery lies less in a request for the audience to make meaning, but in its demand for the audience to set active meaning-making aside; to allow the asignifying power of the work to take over.⁷²

In Phaedra’s Love it was not only Kane’s staged violence that forced audiences into critical discomfort, but also the sexual and emotional violence which the play featured. The postdramatic techniques that Kane combined with this content positioned the audience as complicit voyeurs in the sexual, emotional, and physical violence contained within the play. By repeatedly blurring the boundaries between the public and private realms, the actors and audience, and the play and reality, Phaedra’s Love questioned the spectators’ complicity in perpetuating these themes in contemporary society. The emphasis upon the audience’s involvement in the world of the drama began in Scene One, where the public staging of Hippolytus’ private act of masturbation introduced the theme of voyeurism. The

⁶⁹ Müller 2002: 16. ⁷¹ Solga 2007: 352.

⁷⁰ Kane, quoted in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 134. ⁷² Campbell 2005: 80.

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fact that Hippolytus did not interact with another character or speak any dialogue initially indicated an absence of dramatic tension, which was instead made up for by the evocation of tension within the audience by pushing the limits of what sexual behaviours audiences were prepared to witness within the theatre. Furthermore, not only did the audience become crucial in establishing dramatic tension, but the significance of their role was also emphasized as they were made to experience the same emotions as Hippolytus during the scene. Aleks Sierz and Julie Waddington illuminate this, arguing that Hippolytus’ more mundane activities, such as eating a hamburger and blowing his nose, do ‘not just present the theme of boredom and indifference, but may also evoke these states in the audience thereby causing them to question their own lack of action or inaction’, and that this experience is put under the spotlight as much as Hippolytus’.⁷³ When Hippolytus was positioned as voyeuristic by sexually gratifying himself in front of violent content, so too was the audience, who were positioned as voyeurs observing deviant behaviour. Anja Müller-Wood supports such a reading, stating that Kane ‘lends the spectators’ distant gaze in Scene One a voyeuristic, indeed almost a pornographic quality—an important aspect in the play’s emotional dynamic’.⁷⁴ Scene One, however, contained just the first of Kane’s numerous attempts at integrating the audience into the world of the play. In contrast to Scene One, Scene Two bore a much closer resemblance to the structure of the ancient sources. It consisted of a conversation between Phaedra and a doctor about the state of Hippolytus’ health. The doctor inquired as to Phaedra’s feelings about her son in much the same way that the Nurse acts as an interlocutor in both Euripides’ and Seneca’s texts. The classical resonances continued in Phaedra’s subsequent conversation with her daughter Strophe, in which Phaedra admitted her incestuous desire and Strophe attempted to talk her out of pursuing Hippolytus. Yet despite Phaedra resolving to ‘Get over him’, in Scene Four she confessed to Hippolytus that she loved him and begged him to sleep with her. Rather than reject her in disgust, Hippolytus reacted unemotionally, with a lack of interest rather than disdain. Phaedra then performed oral sex on Hippolytus in an effort to sway him, only to leave the stage in tears, humiliated after being critiqued for her

⁷³ Sierz and Waddington 2004.

⁷⁴ Müller-Wood 2011: 102.

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technique and having been physically assaulted by Hippolytus after she mentioned another woman, whom the audience could only assume was an ex-girlfriend. Scene Four was in many ways the emotional crux of Phaedra’s Love. In contrast, Phaedra and Hippolytus infamously never come face-to-face in Euripides’ Hippolytus. Furthermore, the audience are not even given access to the Nurse’s revelation to Hippolytus of Phaedra’s desire; instead, Phaedra’s reaction to eavesdropping on the discussion is staged, with her suicide following less than 200 lines later. Kane’s explosive scene does, however, have a basis within Phaedra, where in a richly passionate scene Phaedra recalls the fates of her mother Pasiphaë and sister Ariadne when confessing her love to Hippolytus. His rejection matches her confession in its emotive imagery, invoking a range of deities and meteorological phenomena and inviting them to strike him down, whilst he simultaneously threatens Phaedra with murder. The emotional density of Kane’s scene bubbles below the surface, only rarely permeating the dialogue. Although the text for the scene is the longest in the play, running for over ten pages in the script, and its stichomythic structure gives the impression of a quick-fire exchange, in performance lengthy pauses between lines created a sense of awkwardness in complete opposition to the torrent of dialogue in the equivalent Senecan exchange. Kane’s blocking reinforced the awkward, tense dynamic between the characters, with Hippolytus largely ignoring Phaedra and instead driving a remote-control car around the Gate’s space and behaving in a disengaged manner like in Scene One, while Phaedra busied herself by attempting to tidy Hippolytus’ space and delivering a selection of birthday presents to him from the public. The content of the dialogue reinforced the thematic focus upon sexuality and a problematic form of masculinity. Hippolytus’ lines revealed an almost total preoccupation with sex, with Hippolytus opening the scene asking Phaedra ‘When was the last time you had a fuck?’ [Scene Four, Page 74]. Throughout the exchange Hippolytus verbalized what was established via a visual dramaturgy in Scene One; when Phaedra criticized Hippolytus for blowing his nose on a sock, for example, he responded ‘Only after I’ve checked I haven’t cleaned my cum up with it first. And I do have them washed. Before I wear them’ [Scene Four, Page 77]. Despite his seeming obsession with sex his dialogue revealed a lack of apparent enjoyment from sex with either

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men or women, and even a degree of self-loathing on Hippolytus’ part after Phaedra performed fellatio upon him: PHAEDRA :

I wanted to see your face when you came. Why? PHAEDRA : I’d like to see you lose yourself. HIPPOLYTUS : It’s not a pleasant sight. PHAEDRA : Why, what do you look like? HIPPOLYTUS : Every other stupid fucker. [Scene Four, Page 82] HIPPOLYTUS :

At this point of the scene the emotional dynamic shifted, with Phaedra continuing to profess her love to Hippolytus and imploring him to be intimate with her again despite his brutal treatment of her during the fellatio scene, in which he forced her head down when she pulled away and upon noticing her tears announced ‘There. Mystery over’ [Scene Four, Page 81]. The laconic humour present in Hippolytus’ earlier dialogue was absent from the remainder of the exchange, replaced instead with brutal insults and emotionally manipulative barbs regarding his past lovers, who are revealed to include Phaedra’s own daughter. The dynamic consequently shifted from the sense of anxiety and nervousness that pervaded the first half of the scene to one focused upon sexual depravity, humiliation, and mortification, with the audience witnessing and sharing in Phaedra’s reaction. Scene Four was text-heavy and contained the crucial moment within the play’s narrative arc where Phaedra’s passion was revealed to Hippolytus, only for him to reject any possibility of a romantic relationship with her so brutally that it turned her to suicide. These factors, combined with the scene’s recollection of a key moment from Seneca’s Phaedra, position the scene as one of the more traditionally dramatic moments within Kane’s play. Such a reading of the scene is furthered by how it worked to create a rich psychological profile for Hippolytus; the combination of Hippolytus’ self-disgust with his retaliation after Phaedra mentioned his previous girlfriend Lena invited the audience to read Hippolytus as a character who had suffered a past relationship trauma from which he was unable to recover, and which had consequently affected his ability to form future relationships. Yet the scene’s staging nevertheless still contained postdramatic techniques, with meaning created overwhelmingly through affect, rather than dialogue or mimetic staging. Reviews for the production testify to Kane’s prioritization of the

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experiential dimension rather than the dramatic cornerstones of the play, and in a similar way to Blasted demonstrate how select audience members struggled to adjust to this emerging style of postdramatic performance. Michael Billington, for example, noted that ‘Viscerally, her play has undeniable power: intellectually, it’s hard to see what point it is making’, while Kate Bassett stated that due to the unconventional staging configuration ‘Phaedra might as well have gone down on Hippolytus in the wings’.⁷⁵ Consequently even in the most ‘dramatic’ moment of Phaedra’s Love there were still traces of the postdramatic peeking through. The significance of Scene Four lies in the creation of a public setting for Phaedra’s private attempt at seduction, and in the affective experience of being co-present with Phaedra, rather than separated by a fourth wall, and sharing in her ultimate humiliation.

Violence and Voyeurism in Phaedra’s Love Phaedra’s Love continued in Scene Five with a dialogue between Strophe and Hippolytus in which Strophe revealed that Phaedra had accused Hippolytus of rape. Mid-way through the scene, after Strophe had been unable to get Hippolytus to confirm or deny the charge, she revealed that Phaedra had hung herself and made the accusation via a posthumously discovered note. Scene Six then saw Hippolytus, now in prison, visited by a priest. The priest offered Hippolytus the opportunity to repent; however, Hippolytus argued that if there is a god a last-minute conversion is pointless. The scene ended with another instance of oral sex, which the priest performed upon Hippolytus. The audience then witnessed Theseus, dressed in a modern military uniform, visiting Phaedra’s funeral pyre. The pyre was set alight through sound and lighting effects, while Theseus uttered the words ‘I’ll kill him’. The dénouement followed this moment. The final scene in Phaedra’s Love was set outside a court house, where a group including a disguised Theseus and Strophe waited to hear the outcome of Hippolytus’ trial. Planted actors arose from the seating, creating the impression of growing unrest and civil discontent which transitioned into an outright instance of mob violence when Hippolytus ⁷⁵ Billington 1996 and Bassett 1996.

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appeared and threw himself into the crowd. The scene proceeded to assault the audience’s senses viscerally, with Hippolytus barbarically dismembered and castrated, and stage blood and entrails flying throughout the space and mixing with the scent of meat now cooking on a barbeque. When Strophe attempted to stop the violence Theseus, blind to her real identity, thwarted her intervention and then raped and murdered her in front of the crowd, before dying by suicide when he recognized her as his stepdaughter. The scene ended with the crowd dispersing and Hippolytus croaking ‘Vultures. [ . . . ] If there could have been more moments like this’ [Scene Eight, Pages 102–3]. Kane utilized several postdramatic techniques in Scene Eight to position violence as the central theme of the play and make it directly relevant to the audience. The most prominent of these included: the employment of a visual dramaturgy; a retreat from synthesis; and the continued presence of a theatre of shared space. Although Scene Eight featured the largest cast and contained one of the most concentrated moments of scripted dialogue of any scene in the play, the dialogue was superfluous to the action and did not advance the plot. Instead, the narrative once again progressed through a visual dramaturgy. The scenography did not create a ‘theatre of images’ like in Scene One, but instead represented a retreat from synthesis in that it provoked a direct engagement with the concept of violence by confronting the audience with a quick succession of disturbing images. The atrocities took place across just four pages of text and were performed in a naturalistic rather than stylized manner, meaning they represented what Lehmann refers to as a violation of the norm of sign density in that this plethora of visual images inundated the audience and made their content hard to comprehend.⁷⁶ It consequently became difficult to extrapolate meaning. Lehmann argues that such a combating of synthesis creates a density of intensive moments that mimic the chaos of real everyday experience. Appreciating this imitation of reality is crucial to understanding the impact of Kane’s scene. The immediate function of these images, however, was to indicate a divergence from the idea of a fixed and concise narrative and to denote that the themes raised in Kane’s drama had no performative resolution. ⁷⁶ Lehmann 2006: 89. Bexley believes Seneca’s play too reveals a concern with ‘how graphically violent and sexual acts often resist explanation within the symbolic order’. See Bexley 2011: 367.

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The idea that the retreat from synthesis indicated that Kane did not want to resolve the problems surrounding violence and voyeurism, and masculinity and sexuality, within her play gains strength when Scene Eight is compared to the dénouement of Phaedra.⁷⁷ Prior to Seneca’s conclusion a messenger reports in gruesome detail how Hippolytus’ body was torn apart by a mythical sea-bull [1000–1109]. Hippolytus’ mutilated body is then brought onstage and Theseus attempts to put the unrecognizable body parts back together [1255–78]. By ending the play with the realistic lynching of Hippolytus Kane’s final image was that of a body being torn apart, not put back together.⁷⁸ Rather than the open ending being a weakness of the play,⁷⁹ Kane’s closing image served an explicit purpose and indicated that the themes and questions raised by the play had no performative conclusion. It opened the play up to insinuate that the spectators themselves held the responsibility for redressing the issues raised. The notion that the audience held responsibility for redressing the issues raised was further supported by the absence of a regulating framework. It is common in script writing for both stage and screen to find a mediating character in a drama who guides spectators’ reactions to assure concerned viewers that the atrocities presented are known to be wrong and are part of a fictive reality. The regulating presence provides a framework through which to interpret disturbing content and reinforces the distance between the events in a drama and the opinions of an author. The practice arguably stretches back as far as ancient Greek tragedy, as one of the many interpretations of the chorus is that they serve a mediating function and assist in guiding

⁷⁷ I am considering Seneca’s dénouement as being from when Phaedra enters the stage intending to take her own life until the end of the play [1154–1280]. ⁷⁸ Ending the play with the lynching of Hippolytus also has overtones of Eur. Bacch., in which a messenger reports how bacchants tore apart Pentheus [1043–1152]. It is possible that Kane used this as another classical intertext. See Boyle 2006: 203. A hypothesis of relevance here posits that in the lacuna at 1301 Agave may have joined Pentheus’ head up with his dismembered limbs. See Kovacs 2002: 143 note 19. I am, however, inclined to agree with Bexley and believe this connection was most probably either coincidental, or was due to the Bacch. overtones in Seneca’s Phaedra instead of a direct engagement with another tragic source. See Bexley 2011: 379. ⁷⁹ For an overview of the idea that Kane’s ending is dramaturgically weak, see Saunders 2009: 25.

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the audience’s response.⁸⁰ Kane’s addition of a crowd in Scene Eight partially reflects the notion of a chorus, particularly in that the actors literally represented the audience as they emerged into the action from the spectator seating. However, rather than act as passive spectators, Kane’s chorus became proponents of the action. For example: Kane directed Man 1 to strangle Hippolytus with a tie and remove his trousers; Woman 2 produced a knife and cut off Hippolytus’ genitals; a child threw the dismembered organ onto a barbeque; and throughout the scene a crowd voyeuristically observed, cheered, and kicked and spat on the corpses [Scene Eight, Pages 100–1]. The active collective can, paradoxically, be considered an Aristotelian feature of Phaedra’s Love, as in the Poetics Aristotle argues that a chorus should be integrated within the action and treated as one of the actors [1456a25–8]. The immediate repercussion of turning the mediating presence of the chorus into a mob who perpetuates the cycle of violence was that Kane skewed a straightforward interpretation of the scene by refusing to explain the action on stage. Kane’s decision reinforced the absence of thematic resolution which was first indicated by both the way that the scene differed to Seneca’s conclusion, and the scene’s representation of a retreat from synthesis. Clare Wallace argues that this, rather than the content itself, was the most controversial aspect of Phaedra’s Love, stating ‘What was apparently most objectionable was the fact that the violent spectacles were severed from a context or moral interpretation that would sufficiently explain or alleviate them’.⁸¹ Instead of resolving the problematic themes raised, Kane’s postdramatic techniques indicated that the conclusion to these problems lay outside the world of the drama, and that the audience was responsible for perpetuating these problems and consequently were empowered to redress and resolve them. My earlier analysis of the performance environment introduced the notion that Kane’s production reflected Lehmann’s theatre of shared space. Lehmann defines this as consisting of an absent distinction ⁸⁰ Consider, for example, Jean-Pierre Vernant’s description of the chorus as ‘an anonymous and collective being whose role is to express, through fear, hopes, and judgments, the feelings of the spectators who make up the civic community’. See Vernant 1990: 24. This is of course just one of many interpretations of the chorus, and is a view that only rose to prominence relatively recently. The significance of the chorus in postdramatic receptions will be treated at greater length in Chapter 2. ⁸¹ Wallace 2009: 197.

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between stage and auditorium, replaced with space used equally by performers and visitors.⁸² Spectators appear to one another as participants, and audience members feel heightened awareness at their own presence and cannot avoid physical proximity and direct eye contact, and possibly fleeting body contact, with other actors.⁸³ It is indisputable that Kane’s production reflected such an environment; Peter Campbell summarizes Kane’s intention as hoping ‘that the shared space would create shared emotional and sometimes physical elements, generating actual heat and at least the potential for contact between performers and audience’.⁸⁴ The play most clearly engaged with this postdramatic technique in Scene Eight when the hidden actors suddenly rose up out of the audience and took part in the staged violence. Kane’s blurring of the boundaries between actors and audience members and performance and reality had significant repercussions for her concluding representation of violence.⁸⁵ Although the ensuing bloodbath in Scene Eight required scripted dialogue and precise choreography,⁸⁶ meaning the audience would quickly realize that the individuals propagating the violence were embedded actors and not provoked spectators, the technique nevertheless would likely momentarily disarm the audience and imply that the closed fictive reality of the performance had been disrupted in an ‘irruption of the real’. In Phaedra’s Love it reinforced the connection between the performance and reality first introduced by the presence of a retreat from synthesis and reflected what Wallace sees as the collision between art and lived experience that comes from the deployment of shock tactics in avant-garde theatre.⁸⁷ It had two immediate effects in the performance, the first of which was to forge a direct link between voyeuristically observing violence and directly contributing to a scene of anarchy. Christine Woodworth argues ⁸² Lehmann 2006: 122. ⁸³ Lehmann 2006: 123. ⁸⁴ Campbell 2010: 181. ⁸⁵ Woodworth views the use of stage blood in this scene as an additional element that blurred and transgressed boundaries. She argues ‘The blood spattered on the audience may be seen as a prop that misbehaves, transgressing the lines between the world of the play and the world of the audience. This transgression (and potential staining) can also be read as an intentional breaching of those boundaries designed to implicate the spectator in much the same way as the audience plants [embedded actors] and the arrangement of the space’. See Woodworth 2010a: 16. ⁸⁶ On the connection between Kane’s concluding bloodbath and those contained in revenge tragedy, see Cole 2017: 98. ⁸⁷ Wallace 2010: 90.

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that the embedded actors had the implication ‘that there is a slippery slope from voyeurism to monstrosity’, and within Kane’s concentration upon violence this message was arguably the most central aspect of the play.⁸⁸ The second immediate repercussion was to radicalize the role of the spectators, not only by showing how easily witnessing atrocity can slip into perpetrating it, but by more broadly positioning the audience as complicit to violence and responsible for rectifying it. The momentary indecidability regarding whether one was watching a performance or reality in Scene Eight was accompanied by a questioning of how to react to the violence staged. The moment encompassed the purpose of a theatre of shared space, defined by Lehmann as something which: quietly radicalizes the responsibility of the spectators for the theatrical process, which they can co-create but also disturb or even destroy through their behaviour. The vulnerability of the process becomes its raison d’être and inquires into the norms of everyday behaviour.⁸⁹

Kane made it clear that to leave the performance in this moment, while entrails were soaring overhead, knives were present, and stage blood was flecking the walls and spreading across the floor, would be a radically disruptive act and consequently all but forced the spectators to bear witness to the monstrosity.⁹⁰ The stage violence consequently had a similar affective role to the act of masturbation in Scene One and oral sex in Scenes Four and Six, in that it forced the audience into critical discomfort by positioning the spectators as voyeurs who were complicit to the violence being staged. As this positioning was overshadowed, albeit briefly, by the notion that the action may no longer be part of the performance, Kane questioned the difference between observing such violence within the theatre and within wider society, simultaneously

⁸⁸ Woodworth 2010: 140. The link between more intimate, hidden acts of violence and larger, public acts was a furthering of a theme first introduced in Blasted, where the transition from a rape in a Leeds hotel room to the Bosnian War showed how, in Kane’s words, ‘one is the seed and the other is the tree. And I do think that the seeds of full scale war can always be found in peacetime civilization’. See Kane, quoted in Rebellato 2009: 7. ⁸⁹ Lehmann 2006: 124. ⁹⁰ This is where postdramatic receptions differ from other experimental receptions of Greco-Roman tragedy, such as film receptions. Kane forced her audience to bear witness and tried to stop individuals leaving the theatre, whereas in cinematic receptions, for example, viewers are arguably more free to leave the cinema or press stop on a recording.

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revealing that witnessing such monstrosity is the seed that enables a culture of violence to exist, whilst also implying that the audience themselves were partially responsible for the existence of the problem in wider society. Peter Campbell supports this perspective when he correctly summarizes that in Phaedra’s Love Kane used ‘acts of violence and sexuality to force the audience into recognizing their own complicity in the violence of the contemporary world, even if it is simply through their complicity as passive spectators’,⁹¹ as does Elizabeth Klett when she argues that: This, it seems, is one of Kane’s main points: while the audience might want to dissociate themselves from the characters and the events of the play, they are forced to acknowledge their own fascination with human brutality.⁹²

Kane’s combination of a focus upon Senecan themes and a classical narrative with radical postdramatic techniques consequently resulted in an arresting production which made a political statement about the way passive spectatorship legitimizes violence in modern society. * * * Phaedra’s Love did not instantaneously alter the British theatre landscape, but rather had a slow-burn effect. While Kane herself proceeded to find more ambiguous ways of weaving the classical into her plays, in the first decade of the twenty-first century an increasing number of British playwrights adopted her process of writing classical adaptations in a way that contained the potential for—and indeed ultimately were realized through—postdramatic performance, including Martin Crimp’s 2004 Trachiniae adaptation Cruel and Tender and Mark Ravenhill’s 2007 Women of Troy adaptation Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. Furthermore, Kane’s own script has continued to shape the way that text and postdramatic techniques work together. In 2016, twenty years after the première production of Phaedra’s Love, Krzysztof Warlikowski directed a trilogy of responses to the Phaedra/Hippolytus myth for France’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. Warlikowski’s big-budget production was a far cry from the immersive, intimate staging of 1996, although it was

⁹¹ Campbell 2010: 178. ⁹² Klett 2003: 339. See also Müller-Wood 2011, esp. 103 and 109.

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no less divisive.⁹³ Phaedra(s) toured internationally to prestigious stages including London’s Barbican and New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and featured academy award nominee Isabelle Huppert as Phaedra. The production played for almost four hours and consisted of three separate adaptations: a new text by Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad; Kane’s Phaedra’s Love; and a staging of extracts of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, which was intermingled with excerpts from Racine’s Phèdre. Warlikowski’s production of Phaedra’s Love took place within a cavernous set, which was almost entirely devoid of props and featured a coldly tiled floor and walls. The fourth wall was rendered firmly intact; however, the production still created a claustrophobic sense of familial incest and sexual depravity by encasing much of the action inside a perspex box, which slid on and off stage on hydraulics for various scenes. The action, which was performed in French translation with English surtitles, was nevertheless still shockingly ‘in-yer-face’ despite being spatially removed from the audience. Phaedra’s performance of fellatio upon Hippolytus, for example, was a noisy, drawn-out experience, and Warlikowski added various pieces of staging to the script, including a scene of necrophilia when Theseus visited Phaedra’s corpse in Scene Seven. Kane’s focus on sexuality, violence, and voyeurism remained present, yet the focus on masculinity was replaced with an investigation into femininity, with Huppert’s performance of Kane’s Phaedra placed in dialogue with her realization of other versions of the character and her illicit desire. The trilogy structure and the foregrounding of a multifaceted tragic protagonist whose embodied corporeality was in dialogue with past and future realizations of the same myth recalled the performance culture of ancient tragedy, where the concept of a fixed myth, tragic plot, or character was anathema. It simultaneously spoke to the postdramatic phenomenon in the repetition and fragmentation which occurred throughout the production. Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s) was a production firmly based within the postdramatic tradition. In addition to the sense of repetition and fragmentation Warlikowski also employed a number of specific postdramatic techniques throughout each of the three acts, including a utilization of

⁹³ See, for example, Isherwood 2016.

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mixed media, such as live-feed filming, the projection of excerpts from Hitchcock’s Psycho, and an onstage electric guitar, alongside postdramatic images of the body in the physical manifestation of Phaedra’s tortuous love, represented through her blood-soaked underwear and her death by suicide onstage not once but twice. The comparison between the two productions, which were equally based upon text but with the latter more postdramatic and high profile, is indicative of the influence of Phaedra’s Love upon postdramatic classical performance receptions around the globe. The following two chapters trace this influence into the twenty-first century, turning to Germany and considering the role of text in what is arguably the international home of postdramatic theatre, before moving to Australia.

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2 Martin Crimp’s Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino Martin Crimp was born in 1956 and has been an active playwright since the early 1980s. Although he is often discussed alongside Sarah Kane as part of the ‘in-yer-face’ movement he distinguishes his writing from that of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, noting that he and Kane are from different generations.¹ His dramaturgical style, whilst still often containing invitations for postdramatic performance, is substantially different to Kane’s; less overtly violent and sexual, more interested in exploring individual and cultural psychologies, and with more explicitly marked source texts. Crimp began his career writing for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Greater London and the BBC radio, before his break-through play No One Sees the Video opened at the Royal Court in 1990. He writes original work, and has been translating from French since 1996. To date he has authored over thirty plays, libretti, translations, and adaptations, alongside two reinventions of Greek tragedy. Cruel and Tender, a new version of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, premièred at London’s Young Vic in 2004, and Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino (The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema), an adaptation of Euripides’ Phoenissae, premièred in Hamburg in 2013. The scripts for both plays feature fixed characters and a linear narrative, but resulted in disorienting productions fraught with ambiguities and abstract scene changes. The contrast between script and performance was most pronounced in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, which appeared on the page as a straight

¹ See Aragay and Zozya 2007: 64–5 where Crimp states ‘I was part of that [in-yer-face] movement and it was very strange for me, because I found myself being published in collections in other countries together with playwrights like Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and other younger writers. Because, of course, I’m much older than them’.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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sense-for-sense translation of Euripides’ tragedy. The characters remained the same, the main plot, structured now into fifteen scenes, was identical, and the protagonists’ dialogue by and large directly equated to Euripides’, although in a recognizably Crimp-like idiom. Furthermore, unlike in Cruel and Tender in this second adaptation Crimp retained Euripides’ chorus; however, he rewrote their choral odes and reconfigured their function. He additionally interwove an engagement with contemporary socio-cultural politics into the dramaturgy of his script, and created a metacommentary upon the process of reinventing antiquity in a way that invited an experimental realization. The ability for Crimp’s seemingly literal adaptation, including his retention of one of the most iconic, and perhaps most challenging, elements of ancient tragedy, to result in a postdramatic production makes Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino a particularly relevant second example to elucidate debates over text-based postdramatic theatre. Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino opened at Atelier 9/10 Studio Hamburg in November 2013, before transferring to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg in 2014.² Crimp’s long-time collaborator Katie Mitchell directed the production and initiated the project, arranging for the Schauspielhaus to commission the adaptation.³ The relationship between Crimp and Mitchell extends back to 1999, when Mitchell directed Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (as Tracce di Anne) in Milan at the Piccolo Teatro.⁴ Since then Mitchell has directed, for example, Crimp’s translations of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Bruckner’s Pains of Youth at the National Theatre, alongside a number of his original plays, including The Country, Face to the Wall, and The City at the Royal Court. Outside of her work with Crimp Mitchell’s directorial œuvre reveals a consistent interest in ancient tragedy. Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino represents Mitchell’s sixth Greek tragedy, and her second staging of Euripides’ Phoenissae.⁵

² My analysis is based upon a performance witnessed inside the Schauspielhaus, rather than Studio Hamburg. Aside from the venue, however, the two were identical and should not be thought of as separate productions. ³ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 106. ⁴ Sierz 2013: 197. For the significance of Mitchell and Crimp’s working relationship, see, for example, Clements 2014: 332 and Angelaki 2014: 309. ⁵ Mitchell directed Phoen. at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995. Her prior production, however, differed substantially, and was a more ‘traditional’ staging enriched

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The production opened with one of Crimp’s two choral additions to Euripides’ script.⁶ The Schauspielhaus curtain rose to reveal the inner rooms of a dimly lit, somewhat dilapidated mansion, presented like a cross-section of a dolls’ house (Fig. 2.1). The house had a sense of faded grandeur to it; a majestic grand staircase curved around the stage-right wall, which contrasted with the dust and debris that had gathered in the corners, the paint that was peeling off the walls, and the odd broken chair or long-forgotten pile of papers that cluttered the space. Such a set is trademark of Mitchell’s productions; Charlotte Higgins, for example, writes that ‘She takes pleasure in a certain kind of set: a slightly dilapidated nineteenth-century interior’.⁷ A chorus of twelve women marched into the mansion dressed in identical black, mid-calf-length skirts and sleeveless, turtleneck sweaters, with their hair slicked back into taut ponytails. Their severe, authoritarian appearance had a somewhat otherworldly, futuristic resonance. The women, called Mädchen, or girls, in Crimp’s script, silently surveyed the space before hurriedly unlocking the house’s internal doors, which were bound with heavy chains and padlocks.⁸ The action was interrupted by the sound of a heavy metal door rolling up. Light flooded the stage from the ground up, and the women quickly clustered together in small groups, facing out to the audience, from where they delivered their opening dialogue. The initial moments encapsulated the ambiguity surrounding the identity and role of the chorus in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem

by Eastern European music and choreography. On Mitchell’s earlier Phoen. see Goldhill 2007: 68. ⁶ I am using the term ‘choral’ to describe the chorus sections in Crimp’s script, rather than the traditional idea of choral odes in Greek tragedy. The other choral addition constituted the final scene. Phoen. ends with the chorus delivering a three line prayer for victory, which, as Donald Mastronarde notes, is also found at the end of IT and Or. As such, it is possible to argue that the inclusion of a concluding choral passage is not a Crimp invention. However, given that Crimp’s final scene is original drama rather than a formulaic finale, it should be regarded as an innovation. Furthermore, Mastronarde notes that these lines ‘may even have been imported by scribes, as a formula of completion, into texts of plays that had never been performed with such a close’. See Mastronarde 1994: 645. ⁷ Higgins 2016. ⁸ I refer to the characters via their German names, as contained in the published German translation which was used for the production and following Angelaki 2014a. This allows me to distinguish clearly between Crimp’s characters and the Euripidean characters. All quotations, however, are from the original English script. For the German translation see Crimp 2013, and for the English original see Crimp 2019.

Figure 2.1. Scene Fourteen, Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino.

This image was taken during rehearsals. The toga-style costumes it depicts are not indicative of what was featured in the performance. On Mitchell’s decision to remove these costumes, see Haydon 2013.

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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Kino. Crimp often binds himself to formal constraints when writing to push himself creatively; in Cruel and Tender, for example, he set out to be obedient to Sophocles’ ‘broken-backed’ structure, despite finding the fact that the two protagonists never meet perplexing.⁹ His self-imposed criteria for Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino was to represent the heavy choral element of Phoenissae.¹⁰ The writing was on the wall, as it were, for this rule, as in 2010 Crimp stated: We don’t really do choruses [in contemporary theatre], or it is not really something that I do or am particularly interested in [. . .] I do think there is an issue about choruses. And I think it is to do with the society we live in, because I think we live in a society of individual units. And I think that we find it harder to accept the chorus.¹¹

Perceiving tension surrounding the role of the chorus is not exclusive to Crimp; Simon Goldhill, for example, agrees that staging the chorus is the most difficult aspect of producing a Greek tragedy.¹² In contrast, however, Mitchell is renowned for her interest in the chorus, and has not directed a classical tragedy without a choral collective.¹³ Irrespective of one’s opinion on the institution, it is creatively difficult to find a way of integrating a chorus within the predominantly naturalistic style of theatre popular today and it is also financially challenging to stage a performance with such a sizeable cast. At the Gate theatre where Phaedra’s Love was produced, for example, the company’s budget dictates a maximum of five actors for any one performance. Repertory model theatres that employ a permanent ensemble of actors are one way around this financial constraint, as is the Schauspielhaus’ solution of casting drama school students for the chorus roles. After the audience heard the roller-door opening and saw light flooding the stage, signalling that the performance within the performance was now beginning and the fourth wall was no longer intact, the Mädchen spread throughout the house. They stood completely stationary, clustered in small groups with their hands behind their backs, behind three ⁹ Crimp argues that ‘restriction inspires’, and that formal rules help circumvent his inner self-censorship and allow him to create material which he otherwise would not. See Benecke 2014. ¹⁰ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 106. ¹¹ Crimp, quoted in Laera 2011: 222. ¹² See Goldhill 2007: 45. For further scholarship on the chorus in contemporary theatre, see Meineck 2013. ¹³ On the choreography of the chorus in Mitchell’s classical receptions see Leslie 2010.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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museum-like display cases; Andrew Haydon described the Mädchen as having a ‘clinical, military air’.¹⁴ The displays encased an eclectic group of artefacts: a knife, a stone, and a cup and bowl.¹⁵ The house was now foreboding and dark, and a glow, emanating from within these cases, provided the main source of lighting for the scene. The lights created a similar effect to holding a flashlight under one’s chin as if to tell a horror story. From these positions the Mädchen began delivering the series of absurd rhetorical questions that constituted the first scene. They delivered their initial questions individually, forcefully quizzing the audience and beginning the next question before one could think to formulate a response. Slowly, these questions turned to the subject matter of the play. The Mädchen asked, for example: - [. . .] What is a Sphinx? Why does a Sphinx kill? - What does a Sphinx want plus who does a Sphinx fuck when? Why is the Sphinx girls and why are we all so beautiful? What d’you think? [Scene One, Page Seven] They often repeated one another, for example varying just one word in a question, adding a ‘yes’ before re-asking the question, or merely changing a phrase’s emphasis. While posing these queries they moved in unison; for example, when two of the Mädchen asked ‘What d’you think of my hair?’ ‘Yes, what d’you think of my hair | when I do this with it?’ [Scene One, Page Seven] the Mädchen simultaneously wound their ponytails into buns.

¹⁴ Haydon 2013a. ¹⁵ Angelaki interprets the objects as pointing to a history of violence: ‘Placed in front of us now, these objects are removed from the sanctity of the past, their value as artifacts thwarted by the suffering they have been used to inflict on humans throughout time, or, in the case of the book [which appeared in a later scene], by the canonical interpretation of events that has led to the marginalization of any alternative experiences to the received version of history’. This assessment, however, only encompasses some of the objects, and does not take into account items such as the crockery, which had a purely domestic purpose. See Angelaki 2014a: 317.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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The staging implied that the Mädchen had a somewhat otherworldly quality. Reviewers commented that they appeared like something out of Gattaca or a science-fiction terrorist state; Mitchell reinforced this view by arguing that the production walked a fine line between naturalism and science fiction.¹⁶ The Mädchen’s endless unanswerable questions emphasized the non-naturalistic quality. On the one hand, the questions made the Mädchen appear like an extension of the Sphinx, the archetypal questioner in Greek tragedy. Crimp himself argues that this was his intention, stating: I came up with a different concept for the chorus, which is to make them an extension of the Sphinx—in other words, people who pose impossible questions. And these are modern women—modern young women framing an ancient story.¹⁷

Such a reading was furthered by the explicit mention of the Sphinx in their dialogue and particularly the question ‘What is a Sphinx?’, which reversed the focus of the Sphinx’s riddle. On the other hand, within the context of the performance the questions gave the impression that the Mädchen were not so much testing the audience as attempting to understand mythology and our fascination with it. This was reinforced when, on later occasions, the Mädchen appeared to mix up their myths. For example, in Scene Six when the Mädchen described how soldiers, sowed from the teeth of the dragon slaughtered by Cadmus, broke through the earth’s crust as part of Thebes’ foundation narrative, they delivered a version of the title line for the production and played an excerpt from the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts.¹⁸ The scene depicted Jason fighting the skeletal warriors that grew from the sowed serpent’s teeth. The Mädchen appeared ignorant of, or uninterested in, the fact that this was a different story to the Theban foundation myth, demonstrating how fragments of evidence can be misinterpreted and questioning the basis of our understanding of antiquity.¹⁹ ¹⁶ On the former see Seegers 2013, and on the latter see Angelaki 2014a: 316 n. 10. Actor Paul Herwig, who played Kreon, has confirmed that the play was set in 2026. See Seegers 2013a. ¹⁷ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 106. ¹⁸ This passage equates to the second stasimon of Phoen., which touches upon the sown teeth at lines 795 and 818–21. The delivered line is slightly different to the play’s title (‘The rest will be familiar to some of you from cinema’). See Crimp 2019: 39. ¹⁹ Pherecydes (fr. 22) states that Athena gave half the teeth of Cadmus’ serpent to Aietes, thus conjoining the stories.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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The ambiguity surrounding the Mädchen’s identity and purpose intensified as Scene One continued. After posing the aforementioned questions about the Sphinx one of the Mädchen stepped back and switched on a machine which projected a short excerpt from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1967 Edipo Re onto the back wall of the house. The excerpt came from the beginning of the film and depicted an anonymous woman breastfeeding a baby outdoors; given the title of the film the audience would plausibly read the image as depicting Jocasta and baby Oedipus. The camera lingered on a close-up shot of the woman’s face. Silvana Mangano, who played Jocasta in the film, looked straight down the lens of the camera, appearing to grow concerned. She then regained composure, looking down and smiling at her son. The camera zoomed in on the baby, before panning towards the sky and moving through the treetops. Meanwhile, on stage a different member of the chorus played a recording on a cassette player of the opening bars of Mozart’s K. 465, otherwise known as his ‘Dissonance’ quartet. Mozart’s quartet underscores the opening scene in Pasolini’s film, where it adds a sense of anxiety due to its unusual opening pace and tone. It worked similarly in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, injecting a subtle hint of trouble that juxtaposed with the still, idyllic images contained in Edipo Re.²⁰ The sense of danger became reality when the film ended and one of the Mädchen brutally hauled a woman, dressed in a floor-length, longsleeved, black velvet dress, onto the stage. Her hands were bound and her hair disheveled. She was forcibly positioned centre stage, where the Mädchen crowded around her and introduced her with the questions: - [. . .] then who is this woman? Is she (a) mother of Oedipus? (b) wife of Oedipus? (c) mother of the two boys or (d) all of the above? Plus how can the dead live? - Yes how can the dead live now? [Scene One, Page Eight]

²⁰ The script contains the stage direction ‘Music: the opening bars of Mozart, KV 465’, but not the direction to project the film. See Crimp 2013: Scene One, Page 26.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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The Postdramatic Tragic Chorus The interrelation between references to the chorus’ function in Phoenissae and the postdramatic realization of Crimp’s chorus in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino demonstrates how written playscripts can invite postdramatic performance, rather than stand in opposition to postdramatic theatre. The opening also established several of the play’s themes and the production’s overall focus upon how we engage with antiquity. The Mädchen’s engagement with objects, people, and film made them appear as museum curators, theatre directors, film projectionists, and finally, through their questions, educational authorities examining our knowledge. They demonstrated how we look at, test, and perform the past, and questioned the basis on which we undertake these activities and the responses they provoke. Their behaviour had the effect of not only asking how we understand the past, but it also questioned why we understand the past in this way at this moment in time. It was unclear whether the women did this from a position of genuine confusion, or were being deliberately provocative; however, their visible authority combined with their ambiguous knowledge served to perplex the audience and set them on edge. Their unknown status and identity as a futuristic or foreign collective enabled them to question how tragedy relates to our modernday society, similar to how Euripides used his chorus in Phoenissae to question how myth relates to tragedy.²¹ The chorus in Phoenissae has traditionally been regarded as somewhat problematic, interpreted as made up of both slaves and free women and appearing at first glance to support Aristotle’s view of the chorus’ insignificance in tragedy.²² Aristotle is remarkably silent about the chorus, excluding the institution from his six components of tragedy [1450a–b] and restricting his comments to their formal elements [1452b15–27] and the idea that they should be treated as one of the actors, rather than stand outside the action [1456a25–8]. Phoenissae exemplifies the type of chorus that Aristotle apparently disliked as their

²¹ Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh note that choruses are often utilized to question contemporary society, stating ‘Choruses, ancient and modern, have a striking tendency to focus conceptions of political, artistic, and social existence, and thus serve as media for exploring similarity as well as difference, and for tracing continuity and rupture alike’. See Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh 2013: 2. ²² On Aristotle and the chorus see, for example, Gagné and Hopman 2013: 19.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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odes appear to operate in an entirely separate sphere to the action, lending credence to the idea that they can be divorced from the main story. They are somewhat typical of late Euripidean tragedy, however, where the chorus often has a marginal identity, is female, and delivers odes that include numerous choral projections. The final point, as Smaro Nikolaidou-Arabatzi notes, can be considered as a Euripidean attempt to restore the chorus’ traditional ritual identity and retreat from its more recent dramatic function.²³ The women in Phoenissae exemplify, as Donald Mastronarde argues, Euripides’ preference for choruses who are ‘sympathetic but not too intimately tied to the fate of the protagonists’.²⁴ Despite these factors, it would be a mistake to view the Phoenissae chorus as irrelevant to the action and insignificant to the tragedy’s meaning. Laura Swift, for example, argues that although the Phoenician women do not have a stake in the outcome of Polyneikes and Eteokles’ battle for Thebes, the chorus is nevertheless symbolically closely related to the play’s plot.²⁵ For example, the historical overviews contained in the choral stasimon provide crucial background for the tragedy, which, as Marylin Arthur notes, connects the city’s present ills with its foundation.²⁶ Furthermore, Swift argues that the women represent a positive role model regarding ethical, religious, and sexual concerns, although they are still descendants from the same bloodline as the Theban royal family. As Phoenicia shares a common ancestry with Thebes they represent an alternate future for Thebes had the events of the saga been avoided, and their presence even possibly interrogates, in a partisan fashion, the reasons for Thebes’ current woes.²⁷ Rather than being subordinate to the narrative, Arthur suggests that their odes consequently ‘make up a coherent whole picture which contains the central problem of the play’: a highly pessimistic evaluation of the conditions for civilized life.²⁸ The difficulties of interpreting a chorus are not exclusive to Phoenissae. Renaud Gagné and Marianne Hopman, for example, argue that choral odes often contain highly integrated parallel meanings, embedded messages, and oblique side-glances that can lead to cognitive overload

²³ ²⁴ ²⁶ ²⁸

Nikolaidou-Arabatzi 2015: 27–8. See also Murnaghan 2013: 171–2. Mastronarde 1994: 209. ²⁵ Swift 2009: 79. Arthur 1977: 163. ²⁷ Swift 2009, esp. 82–4. Arthur 1977: 165. See also Arthur 1977: 184.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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and an overabundance of possible interpretations.²⁹ Despite the content of the choral passages in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino contrasting substantially with that of Euripides’ tragedy, Crimp’s adaptation nevertheless engaged with Euripides’ chorus, particularly in its retention of those aspects mentioned by Gagné and Hopman. When Crimp adapted Trachiniae he decided to have his Herakles figure speak fractured, shell-shocked dialogue to reference Sophocles’ decision to have Herakles often sing lyrics, rather than speak in iambic trimeters.³⁰ Crimp’s chorus in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino similarly speaks broadly to its source text, responding to and reinventing its form and, in the process, potentially shining light upon the function of the unusual chorus in the source text. Crimp embraced the liminality of Euripides’ chorus and captured the peculiar, somewhat intangible relationship that the Phoenicians have with the protagonists in Phoenissae, and even the repetitions characteristic of the Euripidean lyrics.³¹ His chorus demonstrates how essential the background commentary provided in choral odes can be to the way one interprets narrative. It would be impossible to analyse the subsequent scenes of Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino the same way if not for the terrifying, militaristic, and bewildering initial choral segment. Furthermore, the Mädchen visually attest, through the sheer amount of space they occupy in the mise-en-scène, to the intrinsic nature of the chorus in Greek tragedy. The institution cannot be ignored or excised from the main narrative, even without the powerful status that Crimp gives it. The opening scene of Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino not only foregrounded the type of relationship that Crimp’s Mädchen held to Euripides’ chorus, but it additionally served to establish the chorus’ postdramatic form. Although Lehmann refers to Greek tragedy as ‘predramatic’ he notes that choral theatre today can be postdramatic, particularly when it combines monological and choral structures in order to

²⁹ Gagné and Hopman 2013: 1–2. ³⁰ For further information on Crimp’s reinvention of Sophocles’ lyrics, see Cole 2016: 41–4. ³¹ Mastronarde, for example, notes that ‘Verbal repetitions or near-echoes are a characteristic of many tragic odes and are a striking feature of the odes of Phoen. Such repetitions occur at beginning and end of ode or stanza or group of stanzas’. See Mastronarde 1994: 207.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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supersede the dialogical structure.³² Lehmann believes that choruses in avant-garde productions are often postdramatic due to their ambiguous identities, stating ‘The sound estranged from the individual body hovers over the whole chorus like an independent entity: a ghostly voice belonging to a kind of liminal body’.³³ Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino could be a textbook example of this combination. Crimp’s script hints towards the potential for the chorus to be realized in a postdramatic manner as their dialogue evinces a retreat from synthesis. A retreat from synthesis requires a focus upon unstable sign systems filled with ambiguity, polyvalence, and simultaneity and ‘a dramaturgy that fixes partial structures rather than whole patterns. Synthesis is sacrificed in order to gain, in its place, the density of intensive moments’.³⁴ The Mädchen’s rhetorical questions were ambiguous and perplexing, creating a density of intensive moments rather than narrative synthesis. Mitchell expanded this function by employing the postdramatic technique of ‘cinematographic theatre’. Cinematographic theatre does not refer to a final film product, as cinema frequently follows more conventional understandings of temporality and character. It rather references the technical possibilities of editing film, such as splicing images. Lehmann’s cinematographic theatre is a stylistic device for live performance where ‘the principle of cut and montage is radicalized [. . .] A quasi-robotic, rapid manner of speaking leaves no place for dramatic concepts of individuality, character and story’.³⁵ The commanding delivery style of the Mädchen reflected this definition, as did the disjointed quality of their questions and even arguably their separation of the Pasolini film from its score. Furthermore, the extraordinary detail of their performances, particularly when synchronized, had a filmic tone, which was reinforced by the incorporation of actual film in the scene and by the reference to cinema in the play’s title. The full extent of the chorus’ postdramatic nature, however, was not alluded to until the end of the scene, when the chorus hauled Iokaste onto the stage. Iokaste appeared terrified of the Mädchen, and was held ³² Lehmann 2006: 129. ³³ Lehmann 2006: 130. ³⁴ Lehmann 2006: 83. ³⁵ Lehmann 2006: 114. Mitchell is renowned for her live-feed video work, and indeed this was her first non-multimedia production in Continental Europe. See Haydon 2013. It is possible to view Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino as connected to Mitchell’s video work as it utilized film on three occasions; however, these were projections of twentiethcentury films rather than live-feed videos.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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centre-stage under duress, from where she would later be forced to deliver the opening monologue. Iokaste’s monologue provided a prolepsis for how the scenes between the protagonists, which Crimp terms ‘transaction scenes’, would play out.³⁶ As became clear in Scene Two, Crimp not only retained Euripides’ full chorus but also intervened into Euripides’ representation of the Phoenician women by inverting the play’s balance of power. Instead of the Phoenicians being trapped in Thebes, here the chorus was the authority, holding the protagonists hostage and apparently forcing them to relive their ordeal by re-performing their tragic fates, possibly over and over again. Crimp argues that he made this alteration as he disliked Euripides’ portrayal of the women as victims.³⁷ Mastronade argues that such an interpretation of the Phoenician women is incorrect, noting that ‘They give no sign of being captive maidens, daughters of people defeated by the Agenoridae of Tyre’.³⁸ Irrespective of their status as victims, however, the chorus are nevertheless powerless bystanders within Phoenissae, meaning the effect of Crimp’s innovation is undiminished. At times the Mädchen donned pastel-coloured trench coats and assumed the identity of the Phoenicians trapped in Thebes in Phoenissae, but this was manifestly only an act; as Andrew Haydon notes ‘even when they’re [the chorus] “in character” the named players remain observably terrified of them’.³⁹ Albert Henrichs describes a choral projection as a moment when a chorus locates its dance in a different space and time from the dramatic action; these rare self-conscious portrayals of the Phoenician women in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino can be thought of as reverse choral projections.⁴⁰ Generally, however, it was not clear who the Mädchen were, and why and for whom they were torturing the protagonists. The spectators did not definitively know the identities of the people reading the protagonists’ lines, nor when and where the action was taking place. The production literally, as well as metaphorically, raised more questions than it answered, with the Mädchen constantly probing the audience and, crucially, beginning and ending the play with rhetorical questions. This open quality was particularly fitting for a Phoenissae adaptation, as Euripides’ tragedy is considered to have an ³⁶ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 106. ³⁷ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 106. ³⁸ Mastronarde 1994: 208. ³⁹ Haydon 2013a. ⁴⁰ See Henrichs 1996 and Nikolaidou-Arabatzi 2015: 27–8.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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‘open’ composition, contrasting against the closed and coherent form preferred by Aristotle.⁴¹ The postdramatic nature of the chorus additionally served to establish the play’s aesthetic form as one of the three key implicit political aspects of Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino. In the next chapter I explore how Tom Holloway’s experimental interventions into the presentation of dramatic dialogue on the page represents a politics of form; Crimp’s chorus similarly represents a politics of form. The chorus’ demonstration of a retreat from synthesis worked against the ideals of unity and surveyability that most dramas, and indeed according to Aristotle most tragedies, aspire to. As the Mädchen’s dialogue was ambiguous and indecipherable, it refused to work towards closure and radically problematized the idea of text being a fixed source of meaning, instead demanding that the audience contribute actively to the meaning making process. The Mädchen contravened the standard rules of dramaturgy and naturalism and consequently had a political dimension, in that they questioned and problematized cultural forms and proposed a more fluid and opaque type of identity politics. The fact that this was not a tangible, clear-cut type of politics is indicative of the socio-political concerns running throughout the play. The remaining fourteen scenes structurally followed Euripides’ text. Crimp’s play consequently embodied a textual legacy, which exemplifies the problems with attributing the label ‘dramatic’ or ‘postdramatic’ to playscripts. At times the protagonists’ dialogue was almost a sense-forsense translation, replicating, in some form, all events and almost all images that can be found in Phoenissae. However, the way the audience was invited to read the action differed vastly due to the altered balance of power, as was immediately made evident in Scenes Two and Three. These involved Iokaste describing the events preceding the play, and Antigone watching the battle preparations with her minder (played by one of the Mädchen). Both Iokaste and Antigone were dragged onto the stage and forcibly positioned by the Mädchen. They delivered their lines facing the audience, at an incredibly fast pace and as if glued to the floor. They spoke with what Hayden describes as ‘the hysterical fear of a prisoner in a beheading video’.⁴² The Mädchen not only manhandled

⁴¹ Mastronarde 1994: 3.

⁴² Haydon 2013a.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

  ’        

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the protagonists, but also fed them their lines. For example, they constantly prompted Iokaste to pepper her speech with ‘says Iokaste’, and to describe the lighting when the original event took place in a manner that recalled stage directions; in Scene Two, for example, Iokaste states ‘Bright light. | Time Past.’ [Scene One, Page Nine]. Furthermore, during Crimp’s version of the teichoskopia scene one of the Mädchen opened a display case and handed Antigone a rock to hold as a prop. This was replicated throughout the production whenever a prop was required; the cup that the Leise sprechender Offizier (Softly-Spoken Officer) drank from, the maps the chorus used to illustrate the geography of Thebes, and the knife Menoikeus would use for his suicide all came from these mounted displays. The Mädchen handled these objects with gloves, creating the illusion that they were authentic artifacts. Although Crimp’s structure was akin to Euripides’ text the manner of performance deviated from the text and instead followed the style established in the opening moments. Every scene involving the dramatis personae took place in a similar manner to Scene Two and Three. Every choral ode stylistically followed Scene One, with the Mädchen speaking directly to the audience, often in riddles seemingly disconnected from the main story. Scene Four contained the second choral passage, which was once again made up of rhetorical questions. Scene Five featured the agon between Polyneikes and Eteokles, and Scene Six equated to Euripides’ first stasimon and provided information about Thebes’ prehistory, illustrated with objects and film. Scene Seven depicted Eteokles’ negotiations with Kreon, and Scene Eight took the place of the second stasimon, although in this version it consisted of the Mädchen instructing the audience on how to conduct an animal sacrifice. Scene Eight contained the first ‘rewind’ of the production. The ‘rewinds’ involved the actors replaying the action in reverse at the conclusion of a scene, producing the effect of a recording being rewound. The actors walked backwards, in a slightly robotic manner, at a much faster speed than before, physically retracing everything that just occurred. The rewinding sequences were not marked in the script but were due entirely to Mitchell’s direction. When Scene Nine began the action reverted back to a realist, rather than surrealist, performance style. The scene involved Teiresias revealing that Menoikeus must be sacrificed. Scene Ten equated to the third stasimon, which like Scene One and Four involved a series of ceaseless questions. Scene Eleven narrated the

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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battle at the seven gates, and Scene Twelve, which also rewound, took the place of Euripides’ fourth stasimon. It was once again made up of the Mädchen questioning the audience; however, this time they all spoke at once, overlapping one another and making it impossible to differentiate voices and questions. In Scene Thirteen Kreon learnt of the deaths of Menoikeus, Polyneikes, Eteokles, and Iokaste, and in Scene Fourteen, which contained the final rewind, Antigone relayed this information to Ödipus. The final scene contained a choral passage, once again full of questions and ending with a repeat of the Pasolini excerpt and the question ‘Which film do you endlessly project | in the deserted cinema of my mind?’ [Scene Fifteen, Page 84].

Socio-Cultural Politics in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino Crimp’s unusual reinvention featured numerous intriguing moments; however, in performance Scene Five and Fourteen were particularly lengthy and contained the greatest density of postdramatic techniques. Scene Five was an adaptation of the first episode of Phoenissae [261–637]; the interplay between text, postdramatic techniques, and the socio-political environment in the scene demonstrates the spectrum of performative possibilities in postdramatic classical performance receptions. It began when, at the conclusion of the Mädchen’s choral passage in Scene Four, one of the women hit a light switch and the rollerdoor sound effect and corresponding lighting first seen at the beginning of Scene One repeated. A group of six Mädchen, now clad in trench coats, then pushed Polyneikes on stage, who was wearing a suit and an open-collar white shirt. Polyneikes was clearly confused; he began the scene surveying the house, stumbling backwards, and asking the women ‘Who are you?’ [Scene Five, Page 23].⁴³ The Mädchen responded tauntingly, stating they were ‘Um . . . Phoenician girls. | Don’t hurt us. Look. We’re innocent’ [Scene Five, Page 23]. While saying this, they encircled him menacingly, clearly retaining authority. The women then ripped a letter out of Polyneikes’ pocket. They read the letter aloud mockingly, which contained the terms Polyneikes would ask Eteokles to agree to. ⁴³ For another analysis of this scene see Angelaki 2014a: 322–4.

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Iokaste, who had been watching the action stage right with the other six Mädchen, was then pushed into the scene, causing an interruption that implied that the ‘Phoenician girls’ had become carried away and gone off-script. Like in Scene Two Iokaste was dressed in a floor-length, black V-neck dress. She walked across to stage left and, facing the audience, delivered Crimp’s version of the Euripidean monody which outlined the current situation in Thebes and Polyneikes’ recent marriage. She spoke with the same fevered terror as Scene Two. There was no warmth to her reunion with Polyneikes due to the Mädchen’s controlling presence, and when the dialogue dictated that they hug they did so awkwardly, with their bodies barely touching. This had the effect of making the audience question whether they really were a mother and son relation; indeed, one critic interpreted the protagonists as kidnapped performers from a more traditional production of Phoenissae.⁴⁴ As the scene progressed, however, it became apparent that their lack of affection was purely due to their overwhelming fear of the Mädchen and their desire to get through the ordeal as quickly as possible. Until this point the script had followed the fabula of Euripides’ tragedy; however, when it was time for Polyneikes to respond to Iokaste he did not answer her, but rather attempted to escape the mansion by bolting up the stairs. He did so when all of the Mädchen were on the ground floor and none stood between him and the staircase. It was not clear where he intended to go once upstairs, as there was no exit or unlocked door on the mezzanine.⁴⁵ As he sped away a chorus member hit an emergency button on the wall. A siren resounded throughout the auditorium, and the lighting and soundscape indicated that the invisible roller-door between the stage and the audience was closing and that the audience was consequently no longer watching the ‘official spectacle’. The Mädchen caught and restrained Polyneikes. They brought him back down to the ground level and took Iokaste offstage. The roller-door then re-opened and the scene restarted from Iokaste’s monody, with the Mädchen now standing closer to the characters, overshadowing them

⁴⁴ See Fischer 2013. ⁴⁵ In Scene Seven Kreon attempted a similar escape, running up the stairs, pushing open a window, and jumping out of the building. The downstairs centre doors then immediately opened and two Mädchen, forcefully holding Kreon’s shoulders, entered and delivered him back into the action. The scene then continued as if uninterrupted.

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in a threatening manner. Iokaste and Polyneikes delivered their lines whilst cowering from the Mädchen. When they returned to the previous point of interruption two Mädchen then appeared, hauling a bound man, who would shortly be identified as Eteokles, down the stairs. They ripped off Eteokles’ restraints and pushed him onto the staircase landing. He gripped the bannister and attempted—unsuccessfully—to straighten his spine. Eteokles was in the worst physical condition of any character seen so far. His suit was more dishevelled than Polyneikes’, and his shirt and jacket were rolled up to the elbows. While Eteokles stood on the landing quivering, unable to meet anyone’s eye and recoiling from the slightest advance of the Mädchen, other members of the chorus brought new props onstage: two rectangular tables, a white tablecloth, and three chairs. These were placed downstage centre, on the ground floor, with one chair behind the centre of the table, and the other two at either head of the table, stage right and stage left. Iokaste sat in the middle, facing the audience, with Polyneikes stage left and, eventually, Eteokles stage right. The remainder of Scene Five was taken up with the failed negotiations between Eteokles and Polyneikes, moderated by Iokaste.⁴⁶ Crimp’s version of the scene retained the contrasting worldviews and philosophies of Polyneikes and Eteokles, rendering them into contemporary political language and consequently making the scene appear to resonate with modern life. Polyneikes stated, for example, that Eteokles ‘—is breaking the agreement | not only stealing my share of our father’s property | but addicted—like the worst kind of criminal dictator— | to total power’ [Scene Five, Page 31], only for Eteokles to respond with ‘What’s wrong with total power? | Of course it’s a drug: | but it’s a drug that turns a human being—look at me—I said look at me like Mummy told you to— | into a god’ [Scene Five, Page 33]. When Iokaste joined in and attempted to arbitrate Eteokles responded—although the line was performed stripped of the irony that the dialogue implies—with ‘Let’s all lie back shall we in a nice warm bath of political theory’ [Scene Five, Page 35]. Finally, before the scene ended Eteokles warned Polyneikes ‘The state’s not a bar of chocolate. | Break it into two pieces and you will have civil war’ [Scene Five, Page 36]. In contrast to the fast, fevered delivery style of the previous monologues, these lines were performed emphatically.

⁴⁶ This is the agon scene in Phoen. For an analysis of the agon see Lloyd 1992: 83.

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The delivery, however, was not performative; the men did not appear to be ‘getting into character’ and animating their debate, but rather gave the impression that they were becoming slightly unhinged. They simmered with rage at the Mädchen, regularly muttering to themselves sarcastically only to cower away from the chorus when they advanced towards them. Eteokles, in particular, appeared to be losing his sanity, often muttering to himself ‘Says Polyneikes, says Polyneikes’ after Polyneikes spoke. The Mädchen surrounded the table and regularly shot threatening glances at the protagonists and moved to intervene and control the action whenever the characters faltered. The agon continued this way until the negotiations broke down and Eteokles exited the stage.⁴⁷ Scene Five reinforced several of the themes raised in the previous four scenes, including the perplexing closeness to and simultaneous distance from Euripides’ play, and the production’s focus upon repetition and reenactment. The latter issue will be treated at length in my discussion of Scene Fourteen, but it is worthwhile clarifying the effect of the action repeating following Polyneikes’ attempted escape. It is tempting to view the repetition as aligning the production with Polyneikes’ plight, as it delayed the agon and doubled Polyneikes’ stage time. This is a reading Euripides’ text may support, as several scholars argue that Euripides sympathetically portrays Polyneikes’ cause, referencing, for example, the cleaner structure of his rhesis.⁴⁸ However, the effect of the duplicated action in performance was to strip away the characterization of Polyneikes and Eteokles as warring brothers fighting over their father’s kingdom. Rather than create sympathy for Polyneikes, it reinforced the chorus’ authoritative status and the inverted power and gender dynamic of the play. The repetitions can in themselves be thought of as part of a postdramatic aesthetics of time, and specifically the way that repetition can be used in postdramatic theatre. Instead of structuring and clarifying content, repetition was used here in the way that Lehmann suggests destructures and deconstructs story, meaning, and totality of form.⁴⁹ ⁴⁷ After Eteokles exited the Mädchen brought Antigone and Ismene onstage, who sat down in Polyneikes and Eteokles’ chairs. Polyneikes, standing, then read a short speech declining responsibility for the battle that would shortly commence. The women appeared oblivious to Polyneikes’ presence. His exit concluded the scene. ⁴⁸ See Mastronarde 1994: 225, 280, 288, and Lloyd 1992: 84–6. ⁴⁹ Lehmann 2006: 156. The aesthetic of repetition is discussed in more detail in my analysis of Scene Fourteen and in Chapter 7.

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Although it provided the audience with a second opportunity to hear the dialogue, it nevertheless posed more questions than it answered, raising the issues of why and for whom the action repeated, and what the repercussions would be if the performance did not continue as planned. It heightened the bewildering nature of the production that was associated with its phenomenological impact, potentially confusing the audience and problematizing their ability to deduce clear-cut meaning from the performance. Of more interest here, however, is how Scene Five further foregrounded the type of politics associated with the play. I previously noted that Crimp not only inverted the power dynamic between the chorus and protagonists, but also the gender dynamic of the play. I made this statement on the basis that Crimp’s female chorus not only held the balance of power, but also because it was arguably their play, in much the same way as Kreon, Polyneikes, and Eteokles shape the Phoenissae plot. This is not to say that Euripides, in Phoenissae or elsewhere, was not interested in female roles or that his female characters do not affect any given tragedy’s outcome, as this of course would be wildly incorrect. However, although Phoenissae features a female chorus and gives prominent roles to Jocasta and Antigone the tragic plot revolves around the male characters and their fight for power. The concept underpinning Crimp’s adaptation rendered this power struggle moot, and instead prioritized the female experience and the concept of female authority. Crimp’s focus upon the women in the play was further emphasized through the distinction between how the female and male captives were treated, with the women appearing to be higher-value hostages. The women, for example, were visibly psychologically tortured more than the men, as could be seen in Scene Eleven, when the Mädchen made Iokaste read the Verwundeter Offizer’s (Wounded Officer’s) part and narrate her sons’ deaths.⁵⁰ Within Scene Five, Iokaste’s central positioning highlighted her status, maintaining the focus on the female

⁵⁰ My interpretation here differs from Angelaki’s, who argues that the Mädchen appeared empathetic to Iokaste and Antigone. I feel that this is an impression derived from the script, rather than the performance, as Antigone does not fear the Mädchen in Crimp’s script but interacts with them playfully. In performance the Mädchen did not empathize with Iokaste, but were particularly hostile to her. See Angelaki 2014a: 320.

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dimension of the adaptation alongside representing her function as the agon’s arbitrator.⁵¹ Crimp’s decision to alter the power status of the two genders represented one of his more specific socio-political interventions. The change drew attention both to how little power women, and particularly the chorus, have in Phoenissae, and to the tendency that audiences may have towards not questioning this representation. It reflected Crimp’s continued interest in the representation of gender in Greek tragedy, first seen when he questioned the idea of feminine space being a safe, domestic environment in Cruel and Tender.⁵² In Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, however, Crimp was not interested in problematizing traditional notions of femininity, as his powerful female chorus did not offer a viable alternative to current concepts of femininity but rather were the creators of a future dystopia. The effect of their controlled, total authority in performance, which contrasted in Scene Five with the unhinged Polyneikes and Eteokles, was to render the male power struggle within the play as pointless, childlike squabbling.⁵³ The belittling of the political debate that lies at the heart of Euripides’ Phoenissae was the other significant political dimension of the scene and was implicitly tied to how various national discourses infused the cultural politics of the play. The commission Mitchell arranged was specifically for an adaptation of Phoenissae, to be staged at the Schauspielhaus. Given that, as Higgins notes, it is in German theatres that Mitchell feels ‘she can make—is pushed to make—her most radical, her most feminist, work’, one may deduce that Mitchell took this opportunity to stage an adaptation that would not be possible, or at least so highly valued, in England.⁵⁴ There are two likely reasons that the production would struggle to be programmed and critically lauded by the mainstream press in England. On the one hand, the form of the play presents numerous ⁵¹ On the significance of Iokaste’s positioning see Angelaki 2014a: 322. ⁵² On gender in Cruel and Tender, see Sierz 2013: 155. ⁵³ The differences between the male and female costumes, and particularly the contrast between the disheveled Eteokles and Polyneikes and the sleek Mädchen, also served to belittle the authority of the male characters. ⁵⁴ Higgins 2016. See Billington 2002 for a different take on why artists such as Mitchell and Crimp work so frequently in Europe, in which he argues that British theatre is ‘Eurosceptic’ and fails to harness idiosyncratic talent that does not conform to the naturalist tradition. My monograph demonstrates several exceptions to this; however, as a generalization Billington’s comment still stands.

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challenges for British theatres. Phoenissae is rarely performed in England, and indeed has only received one recent professional staging in Britain, namely Mitchell’s 1995 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The play’s heavy choral component is its primary formal constraint, as it is challenging to stage and represents a significant casting expense. The casting difficulties extend to the protagonists’ roles; Crimp believes that the play’s neglect in Britain is also because there is no ‘star part’ as characters repeatedly enter, only to exit quickly and meet untimely ends.⁵⁵ This makes the play hard to cast and British theatres hesitant to take the financial risk involved in staging the production, as the play cannot draw audiences in by featuring a high-profile actor in a landmark role. On the other hand, a different type of cultural politics underpins German theatres, which renders these issues irrelevant. For example, at the 2012 TheaterTreffen ceremony the Minister for the Arts announced that due to the difficult economic climate the German government would increase theatre subsidies due to a belief that one needs better access to culture during periods of financial difficulty.⁵⁶ Broadly speaking, this attitude has supported, or perhaps been driven by, the tradition of German companies embracing financially riskier productions, as the levels of subsidy equate to a smaller reliance upon box office sales. The financial security of theatres is additionally tied to their repertory structure, which involves a group of salaried actors rotating roles across multiple productions. Phoenissae is particularly suitable for a German company as there are less additional expenses associated with the larger cast.⁵⁷ Furthermore, Crimp believes that as these companies are used to rotating roles their actors are comfortable with inhabiting smaller parts and concentrating upon the overall play, rather than their individual roles, which Crimp notes is an attitude that German actor training also fosters.⁵⁸ All of this is not to say that non-German actors are incapable of this approach, or that Phoenissae, in Crimp’s adaptation or otherwise, will not soon be produced in Britain. However, Germany’s cultural politics coloured Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino and contributed to how it was produced. Admittedly, this sense was achieved via the production as a

⁵⁵ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 109. ⁵⁶ Haydon 2013b. ⁵⁷ The Mädchen were cast from outside the Schauspielhaus, but all other actors were part of the company’s core ensemble. ⁵⁸ Crimp and Sierz 2016: 109.

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whole, rather than through Scene Five specifically; however, as this scene was the first instance of not only the entire chorus, but also four protagonists being present together on stage it was at this point that the full scale of the production, and the sense that such a feat was dependent upon its cultural context, became apparent.⁵⁹ In addition to embodying the play’s cultural politics Scene Five—and specifically Polyneikes and Eteokles’ dialogue—also engaged with political issues regarding conflict and violence. Audiences approached Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino expecting the play’s dialogue to contain a political dimension. The publicity for the Schauspielhaus production, for example, advertised that Crimp’s characters would combine the rhetoric of tragedy and slang, and use current military, political, and economic vocabulary.⁶⁰ The French translation of the script additionally notes that the play revived the political role of Greek tragedy and questioned the meaning of words such as justice and glory and how they are used to justify violence.⁶¹ When the play opened in 2013, and indeed when I saw the production in 2014, the use of these discourses during Polyneikes and Eteokles’ exchange resonated with contemporary unrest, particularly in Syria and through organizations such as the Islamic State and Boko Harem.⁶² Haydon further supports such a reading, noting that the concept underpinning the production: is at once distancing and makes the entire thing feel somehow incredibly more present and plausible. Instead of asking us to directly relate to the pre-historic troubles of Mediterranean aristocrats, we think of the modern world and the horrors of war that are still being perpetuated.⁶³

Although neither Crimp nor Mitchell could have anticipated it, the captive status of the protagonists gained specific political overtones following the wave of prisoner-of-war videos released by the Islamic State in 2014 involving captives delivering messages under extreme duress.

⁵⁹ Similar sized casts are regularly seen at the National Theatre; however, these casts are more often than not found in productions that are less experimental than Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino. ⁶⁰ Seegers 2013a. ⁶¹ L’Arche Editeur 2015. ⁶² Angelaki also notes that the play’s subject matter topically referenced military brutality and displacement. See Angelaki 2014a: 314. ⁶³ Haydon 2013a.

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What Mitchell and Crimp likely did anticipate, however, are the specific overtones that such a play would gain by being performed in a German theatre, as Polyneikes and Eteokles’ debates about tyrannical rule alluded to discourses surrounding Germany’s political history. It is, of course, possible to argue that a reflection upon Germany’s role in World War Two is present to varying, even unconscious, extents in all contemporary German art; however, Mitchell has conceded that this was something that she was aware of when directing the production, noting that the Second World War and Nazism ‘is, of course, it’s in the heart of everything; all cultural expression on stage; all artistic expression comes from the re-imagining of society after The Bad Thing was done’.⁶⁴ The play contained no specific references to the Second World War, and indeed the postdramatic techniques that permeated the production served to render its geographical and temporal location ambiguous. Nevertheless, the rhetoric contained, for example, in the aforementioned lines about dictatorship would most likely be read as implicitly engaging with this history. The production created a continuum between different types of political violence, from World War Two to contemporary Syria, and even back to the potential references to Athenian society contained in Polyneikes and Eteokles’ agon.⁶⁵ The postdramatic performance style, and specifically the Mädchen speaking in unison and the protagonists in accelerated, feverish terror, made the dialogue seem disconnected from the action, hanging suspended between the actors and the audience.⁶⁶ This had the effect of allowing the audience to analyse the political philosophies put forth by the two characters in this scene as abstract concepts, as well as part of the play, and served to make the statement that, perhaps, nothing has changed between the fifth century BCE and today in terms of the way power-hungry politicians justify their authority.

⁶⁴ Mitchell, quoted in Haydon 2013b. ⁶⁵ Lloyd, for example, believes that this scene in Phoen. contains an implied criticism of the tyrannical aspects of the Athenian Empire, which is suitably obscured by the Theban setting, and that Jocasta’s arbitration is a defence of democracy against tyranny that is of only superficial relevance to the context of the play. See Lloyd 1992: 90–3. Such an opinion about the political commentary in Phoen. is controversial as we cannot currently date the play. Mastronarde consequently argues that ‘the political relevance of the play is on a very general level, and the detection of specific allegories is to be rejected’. See Mastronarde 1994: 12. ⁶⁶ See Lehmann 2006: 130 on the choral voice in postdramatic theatre.

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The Postdramatic Aesthetic of Repetition The specificity of the socio-political resonances in Scene Five was somewhat unusual, with most of the production adhering to the more open form of political engagement seen in Scene One. Such a fluid engagement was also reflected in Scene Fourteen, which began immediately after Kreon learnt of Iokaste’s death and made meaning by combining Crimp’s written text, and in-built references to the complexities of Phoenissae, with a postdramatic aesthetic of repetition.⁶⁷ Despite the characters appearing to know and be re-performing the story they seemed genuinely afraid of death, and similarly appeared to be shocked when they learnt of others’ deaths.⁶⁸ Scene Fourteen potentially explained this, appearing to indicate that death may not be an inevitable outcome for the performers despite the narrative, as the scene began with the Mädchen bringing the supposedly deceased Iokaste onstage. Iokaste, very much alive, entered bound, gagged, and guarded by two women. The Mädchen tied her to a chair on the landing of the staircase and stood behind her, further restraining her. The other protagonists were ignorant of her presence; Iokaste was forced to watch them deal with her death, unable to intervene in any way. The rest of the mise-en-scène in Scene Fourteen was filled with the Mädchen, once again all in black, who stood spread evenly across both levels of the stage. Kreon and the Leise sprechender Offizier stood by Menoikeus’ corpse upstage on the ground floor, near the centre door. Antigone then entered, interrupting this tableau by running down the stairs in the mid-length, backless, black-velvet dress that she was wearing in the teichoskopia scene. She was oblivious to Iokaste, and paced the stage in a deranged manner while wielding the knife first seen in the display cabinet in Scene One.⁶⁹ While roving Antigone spoke nonsensically, muttering to herself. It was unclear whether she had been sent mad due

⁶⁷ On the aesthetic of repetition, which Lehmann positions as part of the aesthetics of time, see Lehmann 2006: 156. ⁶⁸ For example, when Menoikeus agreed to sacrifice himself in Scene Nine, his physicality implied that he was terrified of the prospect of death and indicated that he went unwillingly. Menoikeus’ behaviour was reminiscent of Hattie Morahan’s performance of Iphigenia’s volte-face in Mitchell’s 2004 IA. For an analysis of this scene, see Solga 2008. An alternate, equally plausible reading of Menoikeus’ behaviour is that he was so fearful precisely because he knew what it felt like to die and was now reliving the tragedy. ⁶⁹ This knife was referenced at various points as the knife that Ödipus used to kill Laius, the knife Menoikeus used in his suicide, the knife Polyneikes stabbed Eteokles with, and the knife Iokaste used in her suicide.

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to her experiences within the story, or due to the Mädchen’s torture. She raved, walking in circles, before dropping the knife and grabbing her long, blond hair, mimicking the Mädchen from Scene One and asking ‘oh and what do you think of my hair—Mummy— | when I do this with it?’ [Scene Fourteen, Page 73]. She pulled her hair forward and up, as if trying to rip it from her scalp, and the Mädchen copied her, while high-pitched string music began to screech painfully, having a similar effect to nails on a chalkboard.⁷⁰ Mastronarde argues that Antigone’s aria and the duet between Antigone and Oedipus in Phoenissae is the emotional climax of the play, and the surreal opening to Scene Fourteen similarly served to create a frightening, emotionally heightened atmosphere.⁷¹ After this eerie moment the lighting abruptly changed and became starker. Kreon stepped forward and instructed the Leise sprechender Offizier to bring forth Ödipus. The Leise sprechender Offizier ran up the stairs, and one of the Mädchen proceeded to unlock the far-upstage-left door on the mezzanine. The Offizier pushed the blind Ödipus, who had not been seen until this moment, out the door and down the stairs. Ödipus, dressed in a plain black suit and white shirt, stumbled but the Offizier, clearly more repulsed by Ödipus than frightened of the Mädchen, did not stop to help him but ran straight back to Kreon, wiping his hands on his trousers as he went. The remainder of the scene happened at an exceptionally fast pace, with the Mädchen seemingly anxious to finish the performance as soon as possible. The delivery style was more unravelled than the preceding scenes, with Ödipus more distraught than terrified, and Antigone blending nonsensical ravings, her face now obscured by her hair, with the same terrified manner seen in Scene Three. The text itself was a short exchange involving Ödipus questioning Antigone about the fate of their family.⁷² ⁷⁰ Angelaki interprets this as Antigone deciding she is no longer bound to others’ expectations: ‘She relinquishes the pose of the hair held tightly away from her face, an exaggerated gesture pointing to her mother’s earlier action, beginning to pull and tangle it. The only duty Antigone feels now is to herself and to the unrelenting sense of justice she feels must be done to her family’. Angelaki rightly notes that hair is an important metaphor for femininity in this production; however, there are other possible interpretations of Antigone’s action, including that it served to demonstrate Antigone’s frenzied state of mind and to evoke an anxious state within the audience. See Angelaki 2014a: 326. ⁷¹ Mastronarde 1994: 553. ⁷² Crimp’s published text of the play (both the English script and German translation) includes a substantially longer passage, which follows the Euripidean structure and involves Antigone negotiating with Creon about her engagement to Haemon before accompanying her father into exile. I do not know whether the decision to cut this was purely a directorial

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In performance, however, this was a lengthy exchange, as the Mädchen regularly interfered in the action when Antigone, due to her fearful state, hesitated or delayed; for example, when Ödipus asked Antigone to kiss him one of the Mädchen did so, and another one lay prone on the floor and pretended to be Iokaste so that Ödipus could feel her corpse. When Ödipus bent down to caress the corpse Iokaste rocked forward in her chair, almost breaking free; however, Ödipus remained oblivious. He then stood up and turned to one of the Mädchen, stating desperately ‘I thought I had answered your question’, only for two to respond with ‘Question?’ ‘What question?’ [Scene Fourteen, Page 83]. At this point the lighting suddenly, almost entirely, cut out and fast-paced high-pitched string music began, like that heard before. The music was tension inducing. The entire scene then proceeded to ‘rewind’ with incredible precision to this soundtrack. This was the first instance where the rewinding technique included the protagonists, as well as the chorus. It compressed the action when it played in reverse; however, the rewind was nevertheless the longest of the entire production, lasting for what felt like several minutes. The precision and synchronization of such a large cast was an awe-inspiring visual and physical feat. After all the characters exited and when the stage was empty, the Mädchen re-entered and delivered the final choral passage. One of the Mädchen then took the rock held by Antigone in Scene Three, clenched it in her fist, and asked the audience: - What’s this in my fist? Is it a stone? Is it a coin? - Is it a sacred unspeakable object? - Or is it a fist of ash? [Scene Fifteen, Page 83] When she opened her fist, it was indeed filled with ashes, which she let fall onto the roof of the glass display case. The performance ended with the Pasolini excerpt from Scene One being projected onto the back wall, this time in two different places. Scenes Fourteen and Fifteen exemplified the enormous potential of Crimp’s script for realization as postdramatic performance. It facilitated decision by Mitchell, or is an allusion to the potentially spurious nature of this part of the text. For a discussion about the potential interpolations in this scene see Mastronarde 1994: 554, 591–4.

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Mitchell’s employment of a postdramatic aesthetics of time, seen in the scene’s rewind, a postdramatic physicality, seen in the robotic, almost posthuman mannerisms also contained in the reversal, and, as demonstrated in other scenes of the production, a postdramatic retreat from synthesis. It was exceptionally challenging to pull anything concrete out of Antigone’s behaviour, Ödipus’ bewildering final question, and the potential reasons why the Mädchen were so anxious about finishing the production as soon as possible. Scene Fourteen instead operated like the final scene in Phaedra’s Love, where the meaning to be found lay in the scene’s phenomenological impact. Lehmann argues that repetition in postdramatic theatre is used for deconstructing and destructuring story, and makes the audience experience stage action as an ‘unsynthesizable, uncontrolled and uncontrollable course of events’.⁷³ The classical backdrop, however, gave the audience some orientation; putting the postdramatic repetition in dialogue with the tragic source sheds light onto the available meanings. The dénouement was particularly terrifying and gut wrenching to watch as it raised the stakes higher than Euripides’ play. Not only had Ödipus experienced the same downfall as he traditionally undergoes in the Theban saga, but here he was also being deceived. Not only had Antigone lost her two brothers and her mother, but she had also lost her mind, all of which played out against a painful aural soundscape. The scene appeared engineered to confuse the audience. Yet nevertheless within its bewildering first half, and the awe-inspiring precision contained in the rewind, it is possible to isolate some focus points. The most arresting element of Scene Fourteen was the rewinding device, or aesthetic of repetition, which Mitchell also used in her 2007 National Theatre production of Euripides’ Women of Troy. I believe that Mitchell’s use of this device originates in Elem Klimov’s Russian anti-war film Come and See, which Mitchell watched during the Women of Troy rehearsals.⁷⁴ The film ends with a montage of historical footage from the Nazi regime being rewound, which film scholars argue suggests the possibility of an alternate reality as it questions to what point the past would need to be rewound in order to avert subsequent events.⁷⁵ In Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino the device was incredibly ⁷³ Lehmann 2006: 156. ⁷⁴ Cole 2015: 417. ⁷⁵ See, for example, Michaels 2008: 217.

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perplexing, and raised more questions than it answered. For example, the audience did not know whether this was an effect controlled by the Mädchen, or whether it was evidence of someone else controlling them.⁷⁶ The basis on which certain scenes repeated in reverse, whilst others did not, was also unclear. Haydon summarizes the ambiguity of this technique, noting: you think about the possible reasons it might have re-wound. Is it to do with the title—a modern idea of history where all events spool forward as in a cinema, but can be recalled and rewritten or re-imagined? The way that subsequent generations re-write and now even re-film history? That all history is just a series of framing devices and relative understandings and post-fact justifications? All this seems possible and present.⁷⁷

In amongst the ambiguous function of the rewind, however, it is possible to ascertain a focus upon how society manipulates antiquity. Within this focus lay a further political dimension. The importance of replication to Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino originates in Euripides’ text, which can arguably be thought of as a reinvention of Aeschylus’ 467 BCE Seven against Thebes. Both plays narrate the deaths of Polyneikes and Eteokles at one another’s hands; however, Aeschylus’ play has a much narrower scope. It contains only the last generation of the House of Labdacus, in contrast to Euripides’ portrayal of three generations, and is primarily constituted by the descriptions of the seven battles. Euripides appears to be explicitly reinventing and (perhaps hubristically) improving Aeschylus’ tragedy, as he has Eteokles state that to describe the defenders of each gate individually, like Aeschylus does, would be a waste of time [751–2]. Crimp’s adaptation added several other levels to this focus on reenactment by having the actors play a re-performance of Phoenissae. Mitchell has elucidated this, arguing that in her mind: these characters from the bronze-age died and what happened to them is that they went into darkness and then five seconds later they were pulled out of that, back to life, had blindfolds pulled on them, were transported in lorries to an

⁷⁶ Holger Syme argues that during the rewinds the chorus were no longer in charge, and were being readjusted along with everyone else. Such a reading is not definitive, although the Mädchen’s desire to keep to time does seem to indicate that they are bound to someone, or something else. This could merely be to the audience. See Syme 2014. ⁷⁷ Haydon 2013a.

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entirely modern location and asked to re-enact . . . And told that something awful would happen to a loved one if they didn’t. And that’s what they’re playing.⁷⁸

Mitchell further noted that her production was an investigation of time, memory, and perception.⁷⁹ The forms of re-enactment that pervaded the production and peaked in Scene Fourteen heightened such a reading. The political dimension of this focus was implicit and lay in how the production’s portrayal of repetition both problematized our practice of interpreting the past, and destabalized the foundations upon which contemporary Western society’s identity is arguably built. The technique invited the audience to scrutinize the action and, as Angelaki argues, foregrounded: the importance of revisiting our reverent attachment to the past and questioning dominant artistic and historical narratives that we have taken at face value, breaking them down to their constituent parts, inscribing new understanding to them, re-interpreting them and moving forward with new narratives. [. . .] It suggests that nothing should be exempt from judgement and re-evaluation, not even canonical forms of representation.⁸⁰

The means through which this questioning function interrogated current practices came to the fore in the closing moments. Scene Fourteen produced the impression that the production was disintegrating before our eyes in much the same way as the stone would shortly turn into ashes. Just as the Mädchen’s constant handling of the object ultimately destroyed it, the production here appeared to indicate that our constant revisiting of the past in order to construct our present identity has a corrupting influence, rendering antiquity more and more opaque and impenetrable. If it were possible to pull a specific focus out of the rewind, it would be related to the futility of revisiting the past and attempting to find contemporary meaning within it. The combination of Phoenissae and postdramatic techniques in Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino questioned the way that we interpret antiquity, and problematized the

⁷⁸ Mitchell, quoted in Haydon 2013b. The idea of narrating stories in order to save one’s life can also be found in the framing device of One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade ends her stories with a cliff-hanger so that the king will not behead her at dawn, as he has done with his past wives. However, in this instance Scheherazade engineers the device, whereas in Mitchell’s production the Mädchen force the characters to narrate the drama as a form of torture. ⁷⁹ Haydon 2013. ⁸⁰ Angelaki 2014a: 317.

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contemporary use of antiquity to answer questions about modern identity. It did not offer solutions to the questions raised, but merely provided an open meditation on the pitfalls contained within current practices. * * * Dramaturgically, Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino points to a new direction in the contemporary written reinvention of Greek tragedy. It demonstrates an instance where the Greek text has been used as a springboard to create a profoundly modern production explicitly tied to the conditions of the present moment. Unlike Phaedra’s Love, which had a clear, politically efficacious purpose, Crimp’s production had a more implicit political nature, characterized by a politics of form and both a raising of questions and a highlighting of problematic behaviours and attitudes. My final case study for Part I returns to an instance of classical reception with a more overt political function, which nevertheless was in many ways more formally experimental—at least on the page—than Kane and Crimp’s adaptations. Despite these differences, however, the three case studies all represent instances of playwrights creating dramatic templates that have been effectively realized through postdramatic performance strategies. They indicate that rather than dichotomize playtexts into dramatic and postdramatic categories, we should analyse scripts for their potential to be realized as postdramatic performance.

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3 Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender The ‘in-yer-face’ theatre movement associated with Kane and Crimp was confined to the United Kingdom due to the plays’ specific political associations with post-Thatcherism. However, the experimental dramaturgy that writers like Kane advanced and their innovative combination of new textual forms with tragic source texts was nevertheless picked up and developed around the globe. John McCallum, for example, notes that in Australia at the end of the twentieth century ‘There was an extraordinary resurgence of hard-edged underclass drama [ . . . ] influenced by the “in-yer-face” drama of English and Irish writers such as Sarah Kane, Patrick Marber, Martin McDonagh and Mark Ravenhill’.¹ Echoes of the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ dramaturgical innovations can be seen within Australia in the work of playwright Tom Holloway,² who to date has authored plays ‘inspired by’ Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, titled Don’t Say The Words (2008) and Love Me Tender (2010) respectively.³ The latter play, conceived over a decade after Phaedra’s Love, continues the new dramaturgy first discussed here with reference to Kane’s work and combined an experimental written

¹ McCallum 2009: 374. ² Holloway trained as a writer in England through the Young Writers’ Programme at the Royal Court, led at the time by Simon Stephens. Given the associations that ‘in-yer-face’ theatre holds with the Royal Court, Holloway’s engagement with these forms is perhaps no coincidence. ³ Holloway has emphasized the significance of his ‘inspired by’ terminology, stating that both Don’t Say The Words and Love Me Tender are ‘in no way adaptations’. However, unlike Kane’s attempt to distance her reception from the classical material, Holloway conceives of the relationship between his work and the source texts as like the relationship between the ancient tragedies and mythology. See Fulton 2010.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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form with narrative inspired from Euripides’ c.405 BCE tragedy.⁴ Holloway conceived of his script as an explicit attempt to combine postdramatic techniques with a written dramaturgy, stating: There’s been a big push away from story the last ten years in this movement called ‘post-dramatic theatre’. They’re very fragmented and experimental, these plays. And in Love Me Tender I’m taking what I love about those plays and feeding narrative back into it.⁵

The resulting play contains the semblance of narrative linearity, with various scenes describing a girl growing from childhood to her teenage years. The female’s trajectory, however, is spliced with other scenes that connect to each other thematically and more tangentially, meaning the play retains a sense of a postdramatic retreat from synthesis. In contrast, Don’t Say The Words chronologically follows a veteran’s return to his wife after being deployed in war. Don’t Say The Words is rich in ambiguities surrounding the characters’ motivations but there are nevertheless fixed characters and no parallel storylines. The progression from Don’t Say The Words to Love Me Tender is demonstrative of the growing confidence that Western dramatists were displaying towards the end of the noughties in writing forms that contain an explicit invitation for postdramatic performance. The retention of the director, set and costume designer, and sound designer from Don’t Say The Words for Love Me Tender additionally reveals that this increased comfort with the style extends beyond the playwright. Furthermore, the high profile of Love Me

⁴ Holloway has cited Kane as an influence on several occasions. In an interview on 9 May 2013, for example, he stated ‘I was always interested in the musicality of language. And Sarah Kane does crazy wild things on the page and so does Caryl Churchill [ . . . ] I was getting exposed to writers who really pushed the form of theatre, and so that was influencing my theatre’. Holloway, quoted in Tasmania Performs 2013. ⁵ Holloway, quoted in Timeout Sydney 2010. Although Holloway frames his project in positive terms, it is possible to view his attempt at feeding more narrative into the postdramatic genre as a compensatory action grounded in the specifics of the Australian theatre industry. Margaret Hamilton notes, for example, that ‘Many Australian artists have been historically marginalized for producing theatre that departs from the dramatic model’. Given, however, that Holloway’s script is more experimental than my previous two examples, it does not appear that the local industry dictated his choice. See Hamilton 2008: 18, and for further detail on experimental theatre in Australia see Meyrick 2014. For a brief discussion of postdramatic tragedies in Australia see Monaghan 2016: 440–1. Notable omissions from Monaghan’s overview are The Sydney Front’s 1988 The Pornography of Performance, which included extracts from Eur. Troad. and Aesch. Ag., and The Opera Project’s Another Night: Medea.

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Tender, which was performed as part of the mainstage season of Sydney’s second largest theatre company, indicates audiences’ growing interest in the style as well.

The Role of Text in Australian Postdramatic Classical Receptions Unlike Phaedra’s Love and Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, which loosely followed the narratives of their source tragedies and thus could be analysed comparatively, plot point for plot point, with the ancient plays, Love Me Tender was an entirely new play which merely used Iphigenia at Aulis as a springboard. Not only was the Euripidean plot surrounding the reason for Iphigenia’s sacrifice entirely absent, but in the première production Iphigenia herself was never seen on stage, with director Matthew Lutton stating that his ‘focus is on those who make decisions about her [Iphigenia’s] life, and about those who witness, experience, and/or contribute to the sacrifices that occur within our world on a daily basis’.⁶ The classical play instead worked as a semantic scaffold which assisted the audience in making meaning from the production. Subtle references to Euripides’ play imbued the reworking with narrative devices, more concrete forms of character, and thematic content, particularly regarding Euripides’ focus on the theme of a virgin sacrifice for the good of family, city, or nation.⁷ In addition, conceptual engagements with elements such as the interpolations in Iphigenia at Aulis meant the production represented an unusual, nuanced, and multifaceted form of classical reception. The more ambiguous role of the classical material in Love Me Tender matched the more heavily postdramatic form of the script, which was described by actor Colin Moody as a ‘Jackson Pollock version of the Greek’ and appeared more akin to Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis than Phaedra’s Love.⁸ There are no named characters, but rather the script consists of unattributed lines and begins with a note stating:

⁶ Lutton 2010: np. ⁷ On Euripides’ expansion of the virgin sacrifice motif see Foley 1982. ⁸ Colin Moody made this comment at the Company B Subscriber Briefing in answer to an audience member’s question.

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This play is for any number of actors. Place: ? Time: ?⁹ The play is divided into fourteen scenes plus an epilogue. In each scene the dialogue is placed experimentally on the page, at times left justified, at others right, and sometimes moving between the two. It is possible to realize the script in an experimental, postdramatic manner; however, in Lutton’s première production, which was co-produced by ThinIce [sic], Company B Belvoir, and Griffin Theatre Company, a somewhat fixed sense of character was achieved with a clearly demarcated mother and father figure, played by Belinda McClory and Colin Moody respectively.¹⁰ Luke Hewitt, Kris McQuade, and Arky Michael completed the cast and held a more ambiguous function, with Hewitt described in the programme as ‘Cop/Chorus’ and McQuade and Michael simply as ‘Ensemble’. The directorial decision to describe Moody and McClory as father and mother in the programme, even though these names do not appear in the script, recalls the debates about the place of text within postdramatic theatre.¹¹ In Love Me Tender there was a contrast between the openness of the script’s form and the more fixed meaning implied by its realization in performance, which was felt particularly acutely when the audience was faced with the corporeal presence of Moody and McClory and their representation of recognizable familial archetypes. The cast list indicates the tension that can arise in the interplay between text written for postdramatic performance and its performative embodiment. It is an accurate reflection of the performance, but an impossible clue for any later historian who did not witness the première production as any attribution of lines to individuals can only be educated guesswork. Although the fixity of Moody and McClory’s characters perhaps rendered the final production less postdramatic than it might otherwise have been, it is a mistake to view the differences between Holloway’s script and ⁹ Holloway 2010: np. ¹⁰ Company B Belvoir changed their name to Belvoir in October 2010. I retain the original company name, in use at the time of Love Me Tender, throughout this book. ¹¹ There are some indications of character in the script, with Scene Four, for example, titled ‘The Father Defends Himself ’ and Scene Ten ‘The Mother’. However, the sense of character within the script is nevertheless more fluid than what was realized in performance.

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Lutton’s production as indicative of an opposition between text and postdramatic theatre. The corporeality of an individual’s presence in performance inevitably invites emotional and/or psychological identification from the spectator, as audience members can project character onto the performer and view them as embodying a particular individualized lived experience. The process of identification occurs irrespective of performance style and is one of the unique facets of live performance, be it text-based or otherwise. The consistency of the characters that Moody and McClory projected is a more traditionally dramatic element to that found in more abstract performance art, but it is not indicative of a limitation of text within postdramatic theatre. Love Me Tender opened at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) on 24 February 2010, before transferring to Company B Belvoir on 20 March 2010.¹² Designer Adam Gardiner’s set was based upon Belvoir’s unique pentagonal stage, which has three sides open to the audience and two sides against the far walls of the theatre. It consisted of a raised, pentagonal piece of Astroturf, which was a scaled-down replica of the Belvoir stage, bordered by a half-metre high perspex wall which enclosed the actors and the action as if trapped within a petri dish, or as Lutton describes as if ‘this particular location requires protection or conservation’.¹³ The set was reminiscent of an Australian backyard, complete with a four-pronged rotating sprinkler and recalling the quarter-acre block associated with the ‘Australian Dream’.¹⁴ The audience entered the auditorium to the sight of the lawn, with the production’s signature sound design playing on loop. Kelly Ryall’s soundscape set audience expectations for the production, described by Australian Stage as ‘frustratingly unintelligible [ . . . ] definitely disconcerting’.¹⁵ The abstract soundscape featured irregular, gentle chimes in different but always high pitches, reminiscent of clinking wind chimes, along with the warped sound of a breathy, young female voice whose words had been ¹² PICA is, along with Sydney’s Performance Space, a key venue within the history of postdramatic theatre in Australia. There have been no specific studies on the significance of these locations; however, Margaret Hamilton’s Transfigured Stages gives some insight into the artists who are predominately associated with the spaces. See Hamilton 2011. ¹³ Lutton 2010: np. ¹⁴ Gardiner stated that ‘The design of the set, it references a backyard. It references a suburban Australian quarter-acre block, freshly mown grass, a nice little bordered off backyard, fenced in property’. See Gardiner, quoted in Belvoir 2010. ¹⁵ Australian Stage 2010.

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electronically synthesized. The incomprehensible lines had an eerie yet beautiful quality to them, as if the speaker was communicating from another dimension. The soundscape implied that the action would be non-naturalistic, whilst alluding to the retained emphasis upon Iphigenia within this modern reworking. Moody, McQuade, and Michael entered into this soundscape and took a moment to assess the environment in silence. They were dressed in typically ‘everyday’ clothing, with McQuade wearing black slacks, a white blouse, and an open waistcoat, Michael black slacks and a grey polo, and Moody beige shorts and a pale grey polo (Fig. 3.1). The set and costume design worked to create the overwhelming impression that Love Me Tender was attempting to speak about and to everyday Australia. The significant localizing achieved in this reinvention is unsurprising given the role of the classics in the Australian repertoire. Australia sits somewhat uncomfortably within scholarship on the classics and colonialism given its origins as a penal colony, the continuation of the United Kingdom’s monarch as Australia’s formal head of state, and its national culture which both incorporates and is resisted by indigenous culture. Classical performance reception within Australia infrequently aligns

Figure 3.1. Scene One, Love Me Tender. Photo: Jon Green.

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with Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkin’s definition of post-colonial drama as responding to the experience of imperialism, being performed for colonized communities and with awareness of post-contact forms, and interrogating the hegemony that underlies imperial representation.¹⁶ Australia’s complex colonial history nevertheless colours classical performance reception, as Julian Meyrick argues in his investigation of the changing status of the classics (broadly defined) in Australian theatres. Using statistics to chart audience interest in classical plays versus new drama, Meyrick makes a case for Australian theatres to invest more heavily in Australian writing which ‘does not exist on cultural credit, the freeloading aspect of classic revivals that so suits the tributary mentality’.¹⁷ Although it is hard to argue with Meyrick’s desire to hear more Australian stories represented on stage, his invocation of Australia’s status as an English colony in defence of his argument underplays the significant role that the classics can play within the negotiation of identity in post-colonial nations given the classics’ dual role, as Barbara Goff outlines, as a sign of tradition that can be wielded over subjected groups or contested by them as part of a wider resistance.¹⁸ Early instances of classical reception in Australia adhere to Meyrick’s ‘tributary mentality’ and largely echo British theatre traditions. Paul Monaghan notes, for example, that ‘During the second half of the nineteenth century, visitations by aging stars playing Medea were designed to bring “culture” to the colonies [ . . . ] a trend that carried through into the 1930s, [and] was reinforced in the 1950s’.¹⁹ Australia’s mimicking of British theatre goes back to pre-federation in the first known example of Australian classical performance reception, which can be thought of as a literal interpretation of the University of Sydney’s ¹⁶ Gilbert and Tompkins 1996: 11. A notable exception to this trend is Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea, an indigenous reworking of Eur. Med. that was first performed in 2000 and redeveloped in 2005. On Black Medea see Monaghan 2007: 54 and Monaghan 2016: 439. ¹⁷ Meyrick 2012: 12–13. ¹⁸ Goff 2005: 11–12. Admittedly, Meyrick does note that a play can be both a classic and an Australian work, and one imagines that Love Me Tender falls into this category. However, these ‘paradox’ examples are still implicitly positioned below entirely new drama. See Meyrick 2012: 7. Varney, Eckersall, Hudson, and Hatley provide a different angle to this debate, arguing that the return to the European canon sees Australian artists reattaching themselves to both a colonial and Occidental heritage at the cost of engaging with the Asia-Pacific, and that the trend is reflective of the conservative streams of Australian cultural politics. See Varney, Eckersall, Hudson, and Hatley 2013: 149, 156. ¹⁹ Monaghan 2016: 441–2.

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motto sidere mens eadem mutato (the stars change, the mind remains the same); just as the first ever production of what later became known as Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) was of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, so too was the first Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) production.²⁰ The classics continued to be the mainstay of university productions, or otherwise exist as star vehicles (often for visiting British actors) throughout the twentieth century as part of a broader theatre culture that Monaghan argues was ‘made predominantly in the image of the theatre of Britain, America and Europe’.²¹ However, with the establishment of state theatre companies in the second half of the twentieth century and the ‘new wave’ of Australian playwriting a more self-sufficient, localized theatre culture arose.²² When it comes to ancient tragedy in the twenty-first century, Australian receptions generally display a more irreverent attitude towards the classics than their British counterparts.²³ Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley suggest, for example, that in the 2000s ‘Continuous modernization sees the deterritorialization of the classical and modern dramatic text through free form adaptations that challenge the primacy of the written text, the authority of the author/ playwright and the original dramatic form of the work’.²⁴ The more rebellious attitude follows the country’s more complex relationship with its colonial ancestry; although a 1999 referendum voted against Australia leaving the Commonwealth and replacing the Queen and Governor-General with a President, there has nevertheless been a political shift towards formally recognizing the injustices done to indigenous Australians during and post British settlement.²⁵ In 2008, for example, ²⁰ On the 1886 Sydney Ag. see Monaghan 2016: 423–4. ²¹ Monaghan 2007: 38. ²² On Australian new wave theatre see Meyrick 2002, Radic 2006, Wolf 2008, and Meyrick 2017. Melbourne Theatre Company was established, for example, in 1953, Queensland Theatre Company in 1970, and Sydney Theatre Company in 1979. ²³ Monaghan dates the shift towards Australia’s more liberal engagements with the classics to the early 1990s, and specifically to Renato Cuocolo’s productions for IRAA theatre. Cuocolo’s productions contained influences from Artaud, Grotowski, Barba, and Kantor and combined ‘texts drawn from Euripides, Aeschylus, Pasolini, Heiner Müller, Sartre, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot [ . . . ] in a Modernist-postmodernist tension’. See Monaghan 2007: 45–7. ²⁴ Varney, Eckersall, Hudson, and Hatley 2013: 146. ²⁵ The proposal was defeated by a majority of 54.87% to 45.13%. Voting is compulsory in Australia.

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then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a formal apology for the forcible removal of mixed-race Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (known as the ‘Stolen Generation’) and their placement within white families, and as of 2014 the Australian curriculum mandated that all school students learn indigenous history including, for example, the frontier battles which were fought against European colonizers and the massacres of indigenous populations. On the one hand, one can view today’s irreverence towards the classics as an attempt to reshape canonical stories in Australia’s own image, adhering to Goff ’s notion of the classics as a tool of resistance against colonial forebears. On the other one can also read the attitude as tied to the nation’s theatre culture, which due to its smaller size, the later beginnings of its professionalization, and statistical tendency to turn towards Shakespeare and the naturalist playwrights rather than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides has meant that audiences have not pedestalized the Greeks to the same extent as the British.²⁶ Irrespective of the reason why, today’s gloves-off attitude to the classics has involved an intense localizing of Greek tragedy to explore issues of national identity. Far from being examples which exist on Meyrick’s ‘cultural credit’, receptions such as Love Me Tender demonstrate how the classics are being reclaimed and refashioned to explore pressing socio-political issues in twenty-first-century Australia. The climate has the by-product of facilitating experimental written adaptations that invite postdramatic realization.

The Postdramatic Realization of Love Me Tender: Scenes One to Three The dialogue in the first scene, titled ‘Sorrow and Joy’, quickly established the thematic focus of Love Me Tender as about the modern family unit. Although the first scene can be performed by any number of actors the lines use three different pronouns—he, you, and I—which implies a minimum of three voices. The lines frequently alternate in the aforementioned order, creating the impression of two more powerful figures

²⁶ Indeed, Holloway himself has noted that ‘there’s this weight of history in British theatre’ that is absent in Australia, and ‘not having the weight of that tradition is freeing’. See Drew 2016.

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weaving together the narrative that the subject will consequently embody. The initial dialogue, for example, states: - Right. As he . . . I don’t know . . . runs through the building, he sees the sun shining in low and . . . and . . . bright? - Okay. Yes. As you run through the building you see the sun shining in low and bright. Okay? - As I run through the building I see the . . . morning? [Scene One, Page One] The staging configuration for this scene furthered a reading of two controlling figures manipulating the third and featured McQuade and Michael upstage, with Moody downstage as the object of the ensemble’s gaze. The dialogue initially contained a sense of the fantastic, which reviewer Keith Gallasch analysed as suggesting ‘the world of Homer or Virgil’.²⁷ The sunlight, for example, was described in the dialogue as hitting the dust and creating ‘pillars of fine floating flakes of golden snow’ which are ‘ripped apart into billowing chaos’ [Scene One, Page One]. Slowly, the lines began suggesting a narrative in which Moody’s character was running towards his wife, who was in labour. The growing speed and excitement of the ensemble as they invoked the narrative connected to the intensity of a birthing scene, obliquely matching the form of the performance with the content. At the moment of birth, however, Moody’s dialogue broke away from the narrative he was being pushed to recite: - I see her for the first time. Her fur. Her hooves. She is on the ground amongst the hay. Straw sticking to her wet, furry body as she struggles to stand and clumsily take her first steps. And as I see this I am filled with this feeling of . . . of . . . yes? [Scene One, Page 8] The collapsing of a man’s daughter with a doe was a repeated motif throughout the play. In Scene One it was the first explicit nod to the Euripidean source text. The reference worked to remind the audience of the conclusion to Iphigenia at Aulis, in which when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to appease Artemis and gain the winds needed to sail to Troy, Artemis replaces her on the altar with a deer.

²⁷ Gallasch 2010.

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The subtlety of the Euripidean dimension in this scene was indicative of its role throughout the play. Here, it worked to colour the father/daughter relationship with the themes of love, betrayal, and sacrifice for the rest of the play. It is possible to read the ensemble in Scene One as holding a choric function, working together to engage in myth-making. Indeed, Kevin Jackson referred to the entire cast as ‘a chorus of five actors’ and Gallasch described Michael and McQuade as ‘chorus-like’.²⁸ As discussed in my analysis of Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, Lehmann sees a theatre of the chorus as of key importance to the postdramatic, arguing that within postdramatic theatre ‘monological and choral structures supersede the dialogic structure’ [original emphasis].²⁹ Despite the reviewers’ comments Holloway indicates in the script that those who deliver the dialogic sections should not be thought of as a chorus, as he labels monologues elsewhere (within Scenes Three, Six, Ten, and Twelve) as chorus sections. The four chorus sections foreground a close connection with the Euripidean source, with a direct quote from Iphigenia at Aulis used as the title for each part.³⁰ The oxymoronic dimension of a monologue attributed to a chorus is a further component of the script that reinvents the classical in a way that pushes dramatic form. Lutton’s direction of Scene One reinforced the notion that the unidentified voices were not a chorus by limiting the number of actors who read the lines, which in turn detracted from their ability to represent a collective. Although the same individual delivered the chorus monologues throughout the play, and the lines consequently could not be read as representing a postdramatic chorus, which requires a collective so that sound might become estranged from the body and enter a liminal space,³¹ the actual chorus sections nevertheless corresponded to the idea of a choral projection in classical tragedy as they looked away from the central action to other times and places. The significance of the ensemble in Scene One for my investigation consequently lies not in their relationship to the

²⁸ Jackson 2010 and Gallasch 2010. ²⁹ Lehmann 2006: 129. ³⁰ The titles for the four chorus sections are taken from the translation of IA on the Internet Classics Archive. The quotations originate in the play’s choral odes and are: ‘Next I saw the countless fleet’ [231–2]; ‘the fiend of strife’ [587]; ‘dragging men’s heads backward to cut their throats’ [776]; and ‘behold the maiden on her way’ [1513]. As the translation utilized is not a literal translation line numbers are approximations. ³¹ Lehmann 2006: 130.

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institution of the chorus, but in the ambiguity surrounding their identity. They were demarcated as neither chorus nor character in a clear representation of the type of postdramatic identity associated with Elinor Fuchs’ ‘death of character’.³² A productive interplay between the classical source, Holloway’s script, and several postdramatic techniques was evident from the opening moments in Love Me Tender. The musicality of Scene One demonstrated this dynamic particularly clearly.³³ In his panorama of postdramatic techniques Lehmann notes that there is a postdramatic theatre of voices, which often takes the form of a postdramatic isotony, where peaks or climaxes are avoided and the dialogic function of the scene becomes less between individual interlocutors than between the sound and the space.³⁴ Although dramatic tension which built to a climax was created within Scene One it nevertheless still engaged with the concept of a theatre of voices in the stripped back presentation of text and the oblique way that the narrative was delivered, with the audience constantly invited to question who was in control of the story, what the identity of McQuade and Michael’s characters might be, and where the images that the three individuals were creating were taking place.³⁵ The technical dimension of a theatre of voices demanded careful, constant attention from the audience, and created an instance where the poetry of Holloway’s language worked in harmony with postdramatic techniques to underpin the experience of a verbal assault. Gallasch touches upon this when he notes that: The language, as usual with Holloway, is sharply observed everyday Australian frequently delivered in staccato one line utterances, outbursts and interruptions yielding a constant sense of uncertainty, interrogation and of thinking aloud that is nonetheless cumulatively fluent and poetic in its repetitions and reworkings—if requiring an alert audience ear.³⁶

³² Fuchs 1996. ³³ An interest in the musicality of language and ‘the experience of words, as opposed to the understanding of words’ operates throughout Holloway’s work. See Holloway, quoted in Tasmania Performs 2013. For an analysis of the musicality of Holloway’s language in his debut Beyond the Neck, which was subtitled a quartet on loss and violence, see Maloney 2013. ³⁴ Lehmann 2006: 75. ³⁵ The ambiguity in Scene One corresponds to the searching dimension Lehmann sees within a theatre of voices, where an audience questions who is speaking at any one time and ‘discovers the moving lips, associates the voice with the image, reassembles the fragmented parts, and loses them again’. See Lehmann 2006: 150. ³⁶ Gallasch 2010.

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In addition to a theatre of voices Lehmann further suggests that in postdramatic theatre an auditory semiotics emerges which involves a musicalization of theatrical means.³⁷ Scene One of Love Me Tender represents this technique and can arguably be ‘scored’ like a piece of music, both in terms of how the three voices interacted and in the acceleration and crescendo that ran throughout the scene. The postdramatic soundscape in Scene One consequently worked together with Holloway’s postdramatic textscape in multiple ways, introducing the play’s form and the tangential way that the classical material would infuse the drama and its focus on paternity. The transition from Scene One to Scene Two in Love Me Tender took place seamlessly, with the actors moving into a new formation with no change to the lighting or set. Scene Two saw McClory enter the action for a duologue with McQuade about the prospects of women born today. The discussion began optimistically, focusing upon the career opportunities now available that have traditionally been denied to women; however, it took a more complex turn when the speakers began musing about women being free to visit strip shows, lead an underground movement, or plan terrorist attacks. As the speakers began exploring the threats as well as the opportunities that young women face there was a further collapsing of the hypothetical woman with a doe, now ‘A little girl with big doe-y eyes and long eyelashes’ who could be targeted by predators who might harm ‘Their hooves. Their fur’ [Scene Two, Pages 14, 16]. The scene consequently not only reinforced the Euripidean theme of sacrifice, but evoked the gender dynamics of Iphigenia at Aulis, where Iphigenia and her mother are at the mercy of the restless troops of the Greek army. The simple presentation style of Scene One continued in the performance of Scene Two. The two actors delivered the dialogue with minimal adornment, consequently facilitating a focus upon language rather than its representation. Scene Three moved away from dialogue and began with Moody singing the lyrics to the American gospel song ‘A Beautiful Life’ a cappella in a simple, lullaby style, followed by Hewitt entering the space and delivering the first chorus section. The chorus’ monologue paradoxically established the most concrete sense of character within the play so far, beginning ‘I’m a cop, right? It’s my job’ [Scene Three,

³⁷ See Lehmann 2006: 91–3.

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Page 20]. The chorus’ extended commentary on his job and the types of humanity that he encounters through it involved continuous use of the first person and was delivered via a direct address to the audience and thus broke the fourth wall.³⁸ As such, it clarified the postdramatic components of the performance style seen in the scenes leading up to the chorus’ speech.

Politics and the Postdramatic in Love Me Tender: Scenes Four to Eight The presentation style of Love Me Tender and particularly the breaking of the fourth wall seen in Hewitt’s monologue in Scene Three embodied the post-Brechtian style that Lehmann associates with the postdramatic, simultaneously embodying the formal dimension of Brecht’s innovations whilst leaving behind ‘the political style, the tendency towards dogmatization’ that characterized Brecht’s Marxist-infused Epic Theatre.³⁹ Several critics picked up on this Brechtian dimension to Love Me Tender with Gallasch noting, for example, that ‘The non-literal setting and the manner in which the dialogue and parallel worlds are team-constructed generate a palpable distancing effect’ [emphasis added].⁴⁰ Despite not holding a didactic function the style was nevertheless political, both in its form and its content. The political thrust of the play was given increased emphasis throughout the production, with a particularly strong focalization occurring across Scene Four to Eight. Before I address the production’s explicit engagement with politics through content, however, it is worthwhile touching upon how the production embodied a politics of form.⁴¹ Literary scholars, amongst others, have long been comfortable discussing such types of politics, particularly in regards to poetry, noting that there can be analogies between artistic and social forms, or formal techniques and economic or identity categories. Victoria Wohl has addressed this topic as it applies to Euripidean tragedy, arguing that ‘The structure of these [Euripidean] plays is not just a vehicle for political expression, but is ³⁸ On the use of direct address in Holloway’s work more broadly, see Maloney 2013, esp. 175–6. ³⁹ Lehmann 2006: 33. ⁴⁰ Gallasch 2010. ⁴¹ The concept of a politics of form is addressed more extensively in Part II.

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itself a kind of political expression, an immanent engagement with the dilemmas and contradictions of life in the democratic polis’.⁴² I am wary of those who take the idea of a politics of form as far as suggesting that, for example, texts that use traditional literary forms are politically conservative; however, I do agree that different types of cultural politics are associated with different textual forms. The formal presentation of Holloway’s script represents a radical rejection of traditional dramatic form; there is an absence of the five-act structure that we might find in Shakespearean or naturalist drama, a lack of demarcated characters with specific characteristics, which is considered key to tragedy even by Aristotle, and an avoidance of standard formats for the publishing of dramatic scripts in the presentation of dialogue on the page. It is impossible to view Holloway’s departure from dramatic form as anything other than a political act. His rejection of traditional modes of narrative representation was embraced in Lutton’s realization through the utilization of Brechtian and postdramatic performance strategies. The linguistic register and the presentation of both the scenes and the transitions between them were akin to the literal meaning of a Verfremdungseffekt, as they confronted audiences with a non-naturalistic world that was simultaneously foreign and recognizable. The politics embodied in the form of Love Me Tender was a politics of resistance to and disruption of normative modes of representation. Its primary function was to pave the way for audiences to reassess the sociopolitical significance of the themes raised in the production. However, it was also possible to read Holloway and Lutton’s aesthetic choices as shaping the production into the form of a modern tragedy. In Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre Lehmann puts forward a definition of tragedy in response to what he sees as the flawed status of theories of tragedy that ‘could have been written as they stand if a theatre of tragedy had never existed at all’ [original emphasis].⁴³ His own model attempts to restore a sense of theatricality to the definition of tragedy and consists of three distinct but interrelated levels. First, he argues that tragic experience must involve a significant transgression, comparable to Geertz’s ‘deep play’, a ritual which not only barters with aesthetics, but also with cultural norms.⁴⁴ Second, it must be ‘only’ aesthetic experience, meaning

⁴² Wohl 2015: 5.

⁴³ Lehmann 2016: 1.

⁴⁴ Lehmann 2016: 138–9.

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the tragic transgression must not occur in reality but in the perception of staged scenes. Finally, it requires a single or repeated ‘caesura’, or a rupture which opens the performance up to the wider world. Lehmann’s adoption of a transgressive model for tragedy over a conflict model paves the way for his argument that the postdramatic provides the modern-day home for tragic theatre, as the tragic can be an aesthetic rather than plotor character-based phenomenon;⁴⁵ he states that ‘One cannot fail to observe that tragic experience, in the sense of transgression, finds articulation in the manifold forms that reach far beyond what predominated in the dramatic theatre of representation [ . . . ] A postdramatic theatre of tragedy exists’.⁴⁶ There are several places where one can take issue with Lehmann’s thesis about tragic experience. He offers, for example, a highly teleological model of the history of tragedy, which was born in the predramatic ancient theatre, became an essentially dramatic subject, and finally reached realization in a postdramatic context.⁴⁷ He abandons the conflict model of tragedy seemingly purely because it cannot be reconciled with the postdramatic form. Furthermore, there are several tensions contained within his articulation of the present-day home for tragedy. For example, he argues that a core element of tragic experience is that it is an aesthetic experience, rather than an experience that occurs in reality, whereas most postdramatic theatre seeks to blur the boundary between form and content, actor and spectator, and performance and reality. Yet there is nevertheless cogency in Lehmann’s privileging of the theatre in his definition of tragedy, and by removing tragedy from the confines of dramatic theatre Lehmann opens up the appealing possibility of exploring the idea of the tragic in non-Western theatrical forms. It additionally provides a useful vocabulary for analysing productions such as Love Me Tender. The form of Love Me Tender adheres to Lehmann’s definition of a modern tragedy, transgressing dramatic structure, bartering with theatre aesthetics, and repeatedly rupturing the internal coherency of the fictive world being staged by disrupting audience expectations of character and ⁴⁵ On Lehmann’s distinction between the conflict and transgressive models, which are not mutually exclusive, see Lehmann 2016: 59–63. The conflict model posits that tragedy revolves around a fundamental conflict, e.g. between state and divine law like in Soph. Ant., whereas the transgressive model focuses on the results of a power rupture or transgression, such as Icarus flying too close to the sun. ⁴⁶ Lehmann 2016: 400–1. ⁴⁷ Lehmann 2016: 96.

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linearity. As such, it is possible to read the production as not only a reception of ancient tragedy, but also as a modern tragedy seeking to take its audience through a specific, transformative experience. Although the focus of my study is not on the role of tragedy as a concept in the modern world, but on what postdramatic receptions can tell us about the role of ancient tragedy in contemporary theatre, the applicability of Lehmann’s definition to Love Me Tender demonstrates that such receptions may speak to contemporary articulations about the nature and form of tragedy and the tragic in the modern world more broadly. However, irrespective of whether we view the political dimension of the production’s aesthetic interventions as amounting to a tragedy, we can assume that it readied the audience for the politics associated with the play’s content and shaped how this dimension was experienced. The explicit socio-political commentary contained in the content of Love Me Tender involved an engagement with what was known as the ‘raunch culture phenomenon’, which was reaching a high point in Australia at the time of the production’s première. Raunch culture, understood as the marketing of sexualized images and products to young women through, for example, media including music videos, games, and toys, was the subject of numerous think-pieces in the Australian media (and further afield) throughout 2010.⁴⁸ In particular, there was increasing worry as to the emotional and psychological effects that the culture was having upon young women; Kate Williams, for example, noted in 2010 that ‘A quick trawl of the high street reveals dominatrixinspired high-heeled shoes to fit an eight-year-old; padded bras for preteens; [and] T-shirts with “Future Wag” and “England Babe” emblazoned across the chest’, while child psychologist Julian Dooley cautioned that: what is clear from other areas of research is that this sort of highly sexualised content creates unhealthy attitudes about sexual behaviour and intimate relationships. For example, it may lead to expectations that you need to be wellendowed or wear skimpy clothes to be popular.⁴⁹

The content of Scenes Four to Eight focused upon the impact of this culture upon the relationships between parents and their children. The dialogue that made up Scene Four, for example, was staged as a conversation

⁴⁸ See, for example, Hamod 2010, MacDonald 2010, and Shanahan 2010. ⁴⁹ Williams 2010 and Dooley, quoted in MacDonald 2010.

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between Moody and Michael. Moody’s dialogue was in the first person and began ambiguously, describing an individual playing with a young girl on a bed, which was only later revealed to be an innocent game between a father and his daughter. Michael’s cautious, often one-word responses helped to tease out the narrative and mimicked the audience experience of deciphering the fragmented story in a concerned and fearful manner given the politics of an older man lying on a bed with a young child. During the scene McClory, McQuade, and Hewitt remained on the stage, observing the conversation. At its conclusion McClory stepped forward and stood centre stage for Scene Five, which like Scene Three consisted of an American country gospel song (‘Drifting Too Far from the Shore’) performed a cappella in a neutral, rather than gospel style. McClory’s song marked a turning point in the production, which lasted until the end of Scene Eight and consisted of a concentrated focus upon the mother figure. The relationship between Love Me Tender and Iphigenia at Aulis had until now been a loosely thematic one, with Moody positioned as a father trying to understand the complexity of his love for his daughter and the role of that love within society. There was consequently a thematic connection between Moody and the vacillating Agamemnon who struggles to bring himself to treat his daughter the way that the army, Calchas, and Artemis demand. In contrast, McClory’s mother figure bore little resemblance to Clytemnestra. Reviewers noted, for example, that before and after this period of the performance McClory was largely a ‘peripheral and passive figure’.⁵⁰ McClory’s presence was consequently directly opposed to Euripides’ active Clytemnestra, who pleads desperately for her daughter’s life and entreats Achilles to intervene. Despite the separation between McClory’s character and Euripides’ Clytemnestra the content of McClory’s scenes continued to emphasize the significance of the classical narrative backdrop. Scene Six, for example, contained numerous metatheatrical references both to the Euripidean tragedy and to how it infused the present production. Scene Six, titled ‘The Story’, consisted of a duologue between McClory and McQuade about a girl’s love of stories, and particularly those told by her father. The discussion, which was delivered with minimal blocking and adornment, served the dual function of both reminding the audience ⁵⁰ See ABC Arts 2010 and then Gallasch 2010, who describes McClory after this segment as a ‘pathetic figure, watching helplessly from the sidelines’.

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of the core plot points of Euripides’ tragedy, and acknowledging the innovative, postdramatic form in which it was being reinvented. For example, when McClory explained the type of stories that the girl liked she noted that they were stories about ‘The love of a prince. Of a kingly father. Of a queenly mother. A war about love. Love sacrificed. Love that leads to great and terrifying sacrifice’ [Scene Six, Page 33]. The child’s favourite stories were later explained as being those which took an unconventional form, with McClory informing the audience that when telling stories ‘There’s no need to follow strictly to traditional ideas of story because she’s really not interested in it, you know? Narrative structure and all that’ [Scene Six, Page 32]. The dialogue served to assure the audience that the absence of ‘traditional story’ in the production was deliberate, and that the sense of confusion which may be arising was legitimate and intended, rather than the result of a spectator ‘missing something’. It ensured that Iphigenia at Aulis continued to remain as a reference point through the remainder of the focus upon the mother figure even if the overt content of the scenes was more concerned with the contemporary socio-political moment. Scene Six ended with the two women musing over the father’s relationship with his daughter, noting that ‘People get very jealous of the love these two clearly share’ whilst tinging the image of paternal love with the foreboding statement that he nevertheless has unspecified ‘dark thoughts’ [Scene Six, Page 36]. Hewitt then stepped forward for the second chorus section, which recalled Sophocles’ Ajax and involved a description of the police officer attending a scene where a man in the grips of madness was massacring cattle. McClory then delivered a monologue in which she narrated her daughter’s first day of school and the father’s wish to take her there alone. McClory continued to occupy centre stage for Scene Eight. At this moment water began pumping through the rotating sprinkler creating low, spinning arcs of water across the stage and wetting the grass. McClory turned directly to the audience and in a volte-face from the serious and painful soliloquy of Scene Seven began a high-energy monologue in which she addressed the spectators as if they were children at a pop concert, introducing herself as a member of the ‘Kids R Kool Dance Team’ and inviting everyone to join in ‘the Princess Dance!’ [Scene Eight, Page 40]. The dialogue quickly became age-inappropriate with McClory aggressively asking ‘Who wants to be a pop star?! [ . . . ] Pop stars are

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sexy!’ and inviting the audience to put on make-up and get dressed in a g-string, fishnet stockings, an ‘incy wincy little mini-skirt’, cut-off top, and ‘sexy knee-high, high-heeled boots’ [Scene 8, Pages 40–1]. McClory delivered these lines in an increasingly crazed manner, taking the scene from a humorous beginning into a disturbing commentary on the sexualization of young women. At the conclusion of McClory’s dialogue Britney Spears’ ‘Gimme More’ began to play, to which McClory danced in a hyper-sexualized manner, appearing to pleasure herself with the sprinkler and becoming completely saturated in the process (Fig. 3.2). In contrast to the focus upon language which dominated much of Love Me Tender this routine made meaning through a visual dramaturgy, following Lehmann’s view that such theatre present ‘itself to the contemplating gaze like a text, a scenic poem, in which the human body is a metaphor, its flow of movement in a complex metaphorical sense an inscription, a “writing” and not “dancing” ’.⁵¹ It spoke to the use of the body in postdramatic theatre, where the body becomes ‘its own reality which does not “tell” this or that emotion but through its presence manifests itself as the site of inscription of collective history’.⁵² McClory’s use of the sprinkler as a masturbation device against the backdrop of the vibrant green grass appeared as a corruption of the aesthetic and could be read as representing how the increased exposure of young women to a sexualized pop culture equates to a destruction of the ‘Australian dream’. The audience’s laughter fell away throughout the dance, transitioning into a stunned silence. The continued presence of the other cast members on the stage, silently observing McClory’s breakdown, further contributed to the sense of aghast. At the song’s conclusion McClory collapsed into a heap on the ground where she remained for the following scene. McClory’s dance in Scene Eight could have easily descended into parody, but her commitment to the performance and the seriousness with which her breakdown was observed by the other actors instead meant that it was one of the most profoundly affective moments of the production. Jackson described the dance sequence, for example, as ‘Full of horror, a type of ecstasy, joy and of almost unbearable pain’,⁵³ while ABC Arts noted that ‘It is an extraordinary display, a savage lampoon of the sexualization of young girls, and with it McClory steals the show’.⁵⁴ ⁵¹ Lehmann 2006: 94. ⁵⁴ ABC Arts 2010.

⁵² Lehmann 2006: 97.

⁵³ Jackson 2010.

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Figure 3.2. Scene Eight, Love Me Tender. Photo: Jon Green.

The impact of the scene was supported through the incorporation of water as part of the mise-en-scène, which spoke to a postdramatic ‘irruption of the real’. As discussed in Chapter 1 an irruption of the real involves the disruption of a play’s fictive universe, necessitating an audience’s questioning of whether they are dealing with reality or fiction.

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In Scene Eight McClory’s performance was still part of staged, mimetic action; however, the use of such a volume of water that McClory was left soaked and shivering on the grass destabilized the boundary between the aesthetic and the real. Lehmann notes that the technique raises questions about spectator responsibility; like Phaedra’s Love it invited the audience to self-reflect, not necessarily on how their spectatorship contributed to McClory’s breakdown but on how their silence might tacitly legitimize an overtly sexualized youth culture in wider society. The common audience experience of transitioning from dancing along to the track and gaining pleasure from the recognizability and popularity of the song and its opening ‘It’s Britney, bitch’ catchphrase, into a stunned silence encapsulated the sense of culpability. The moment exemplifies how Lutton built upon Holloway’s text, accepting the script’s inbuilt invitation for postdramatic realization by expanding upon a simple stage direction instructing the performers to ‘do a dance to music’ in a blend of ‘children’s television and pole dancing,’ and creating from this springboard a damning indictment of the contemporary socio-political environment [Scene Eight, Page 41]. McClory’s performance in Scene Eight reflected societal anxieties surrounding raunch culture and succinctly encapsulated many of the ingredients of the phenomenon in its blend of children’s entertainment, age-inappropriate clothing, and Britney Spears; Spears, in particular, was synonymous with the phenomenon, as is evidenced by her place in the opening sentences of Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.⁵⁵ The combination of choreography that would be at home in a Spears music video and McClory’s demure clothing created a sense of disconnect for the audience which in turn contributed to the phenomenological impact of the scene. The combination appeared unnatural and uncomfortable, prompting a reconsideration of the normalization of pre-teens behaving in such manners. Scene Eight also worked to colour the audience’s understanding of the father/daughter relationship that had been the dominant focus of the production until now. The initial scenes of Love Me Tender used the scaffold of Iphigenia at Aulis to infuse Moody’s relationship with his unseen ⁵⁵ See Levy 2006: 1, where in the fourth sentence Levy notes that at the time ‘Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out’.

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daughter with a moral complexity. The conversation between Moody and Michael in Scene Four, for example, alluded to paedophilia, with Holloway’s writing inviting the audience to question the nature of the father’s interaction with his daughter and the scene concluding with an outburst from the father about his inability to talk publically about their relationship ‘Because people . . . . They’re always thinking . . . the moment I was to start talking like that everyone’s minds would always automatically go straight to . . . you know?’ [Scene Four, Page 28]. The production’s incorporation of a commentary upon raunch culture worked to shift the audience’s understanding of this fraught relationship and invited them to read it from the perspective of a father struggling to understand how to relate to his daughter given the increasingly sexualized appearance of young women and the marketing to them of age-inappropriate games and clothing.

The Classical Palimpsest in Love Me Tender: Scenes Nine to Fifteen Both Holloway’s script and Lutton’s realization placed increasing emphasis upon the tragic source text throughout the play and invited the audience to use the Euripidean narrative as a foothold during the more experimental and increasingly localized final scenes, and particularly within the finale. Scene Nine began with a thin mist spraying from the theatre’s roof, initially almost imperceptible to the audience if it were not for the soft hissing sound which accompanied the spray and alerted spectators to its presence. Having stepped into the soft cloud created from the mist, Moody delivered a monologue about a deer trapped in a forest during the aftermath of a bushfire. Vocabulary markers from Scene One, including ‘pillars of golden sunlight’ and ‘floating flakes of snow’ infused the dialogue, heightening the poetic dimension of the production and reminding the audience of the birth scene and connecting the ‘Starving. Scared. Desperate’ deer whose world ‘suddenly offers her nothing’ with the Iphigenia character [Scene Nine, Page 42]. The focus then shifted back to McClory for Scene Ten. Unlike the rest of the play, which took place in an ambiguous, unspecified location, the text for McClory’s dialogue situated Scene Ten in a bar, where the mother was sharing her fears with a stranger in a broken, fractured monologue. The content of the speech provided information missing from the plot until

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now; McClory, for example, mentioned that her husband was a fire fighter, and that out of their three children it was their youngest daughter upon whom he doted. The scene increased the sense of foreboding that had already developed, with McClory noting that ‘I can’t help feeling something bad is going to come of all this’ [Scene Ten, Page 46]. The penultimate chorus section followed, in which the police officer described attending to a drunk and violent woman during a domestic call out. The use of the mist effect from Scene Nine onwards abstractly indicated a change in location. Holloway’s script arguably contains two narratives, one which charts the life of a young girl from birth until age 16, and another which explores a single day during a bushfire season and first enters the drama in Scene Nine. The ambiguity of Holloway’s script means that one can view the family units in the two narratives as entirely different. Lutton’s decision, however, to retain Moody as the father figure in both narratives and, as I shortly discuss, utilize similar blocking in, for example, Scene One and Scene Eleven implied that the two narratives interwove and examined the same family unit diachronically and synchronically. The decision is consequently another marker of the difference between the text and its performative realization, and is indicative of the complex balancing of postdramatic techniques and more traditional dramatic ideas about character consistency at work in the première of Love Me Tender. By the conclusion of the chorus’ monologue the mist, lighting, and the theatre’s air conditioning had created a haze effect, with the droplets of water in the mist so fine that they hung suspended in the air, rather than falling to the ground, and appearing like a cloud of smoke partially engulfing the action. Moody, Michael, and McQuade stepped forward into this haze in a recollection of the proxemics of Scene One. Michael and McQuade then began weaving together another narrative, this time of a family at a swimming pool during bushfire season. The Euripidean narrative was again used as a background referent, here to add colour to the atmosphere during a period of intense heat: - Yes. Like . . . Desperately waiting for someone to appease the angry gods. - Gods? - Yes. The angry gods that are refusing to release a breeze. Angry gods that seem almost to be punishing them all with the heat and the stillness . . . [Scene Eleven, Pages 48–9]

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Michael and McQuade displayed increasing glee as they narrated the experience of a mother and father taking their daughter, here ‘teneleven-twelve’, and a male friend to the pool. Their dialogue further fleshed out Moody’s character, with the ensemble noting that by being at the pool he was neglecting his duty and ‘Not being off where his community needs him’ fighting the fires that were engulfing the city. The scene consequently recalled the Euripidean theme of conflicting obligations between civic and familial duties, explored most concretely in the vacillations of Agamemnon and Menelaus in the tragedy’s opening. The ensemble wove together an image of a father at an impasse, experiencing a moment of aporia when confronted with his daughter in a bikini and wondering what her friend and the other men at the pool might be thinking about her as she approaches puberty. The dialogue, like in Scene One, was delivered at an ever-increasing pace, creating a sense of urgency and panic similar to what one might experience during a bushfire as firefighters battle to control blazes before they reach residential areas. At the conclusion of the ensemble’s dialogue, in a cacophonic meditation on the ‘totally fucked’ state of the world, McQuade bellowed ‘He thinks about the terrifying state of the decaying world and he screams and rushes at her and . . . ’ as Moody charged forward to the front of the stage before the lights blacked out [Scene Eleven, Page 58]. The content of the dialogue in Scene Eleven built upon the raunch culture theme and how it affects paternity. It also deepened the audience’s understanding of Moody’s character, who increasingly resembled Agamemnon with a responsibility to his local community and an apparently looming choice between his daughter and this community. The overwhelming function of the scene, however, was to localize the reception further, building upon the Australian qualities embodied in the mise-en-scène and grounding the narrative in a specifically Australian landscape. Holloway’s writing is often conceived of as part of an Australian gothic theatre movement, particularly as his debut Beyond the Neck was based upon interviews with survivors of the Port Arthur massacre and given that both Tasmania and Port Arthur are associated with a gothic sensibility.⁵⁶ Like all gothic literature Australian gothic is defined by a ⁵⁶ On Holloway’s writing as part of the gothic theatre movement see, for example, Hassall 2014 and Verghis 2014. On Tasmania’s associations with the gothic see Davidson

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foregrounding of disturbing or uncanny events placed within a strange, violent, or mysterious landscape, with Stephen Carleton noting that it, in particular, draws on ‘fears of the landscape and of uncanny flora, fauna, climate and topography as foundational anxieties that underpin this creative response to space and place’.⁵⁷ Recent Australian theatrical experiments with the gothic are unified by what Linda Hassall sees as an ‘investigation of place and its effect on the Australian psyche’; they consider ‘how geographical environment may impact directly on authentic social and cultural behaviour’.⁵⁸ Love Me Tender does not contain enough gothic motifs to fall into the Australian gothic corpus; however, the bushfire setting introduced in Scene Nine and Eleven nevertheless incorporated the gothic qualities of Australia’s hostile and untameable landscape into the play, and consequently married the gothic and the tragic. Holloway has stated that he wrote Love Me Tender in the hope of exploring the effect of bushfires on the Australian psyche and partially in response to Melbourne’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.⁵⁹ In Scene Eleven this came through, for example, when the ensemble connected the sense of air so hot that ‘It has caused entire landscapes to be turned into flames and coal and ash’ with the imagery of the family at the swimming pool, where ‘You can barely tell there is a pool there because it is so packed with people waiting, hoping for a break from the relentless still heat of the never-ending day’ [Scene Eleven, Pages 49, 48]. With Love Me Tender opening almost exactly on the first anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires, the content of the scene would likely not only evoke the yearly reality of bushfires for an Australian audience, but the theme of sacrifice given the fatalities of the 2009 fires and the wider ‘stay or go’ policy then in place in Australia, where residents were free to choose whether to evacuate when a fire approached or to stay and defend their home—a choice between sacrificing one’s personal safety or one’s home and possessions.⁶⁰ The significance of the theme of sacrifice 1989 and also Hassall 2014: 29, where she notes that the mutation of Port Arthur ‘from penal colony to massacre site reverberates strongly within the Australian gothic psyche’. ⁵⁷ Carleton 2015: 14. ⁵⁸ Hassall 2014: 26, 30. ⁵⁹ The Black Saturday bushfires occurred when Holloway was drafting the play and were the worst recorded bushfires in Australia’s history, resulting in 173 fatalities. See Timeout Sydney 2010 and Fulton 2010. ⁶⁰ After the Black Saturday fires the ‘Stay or Go’ policy was replaced with the ‘Prepare. Act. Survive.’ framework. See Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission 2009.

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continued throughout the dénouement, with Scenes Twelve to Fifteen titled Sacrifice # 1, 2, and 3. Following the blackout at the end of Scene Eleven, Ryall’s opening soundscape returned, as did the stage lights, to mark the beginning of Scene Twelve. The soundscape had played intermittently in the background throughout the production and now became a constant presence for the remaining scenes. A live, white lamb had appeared on the stage during the blackout and was now roaming freely around the grass, its presence reinforcing the theme of sacrifice and lost innocence while Moody and Michael stood nearby staring at it.⁶¹ Through the broken utterances and non sequiturs of the scene the audience learnt that Moody had come to Michael, who here appeared to embody a different identity to his ensemble one, for instructions on how to kill an animal. Michael’s instructions, offered with some hesitation, were clinical but brutal, with the presence of the live lamb building dramatic tension. Michael stated, for example: So you come up Come up from behind and push them Get them in a position where you can Where you can sit on them Push your weight onto them so they buckle So they buckle under you And you need to From that position You need to lift their head up [Scene Twelve, Page 62] The entire scene was right justified in the script, with no hyphens indicating a potential change of speaker. Although the textual presentation of the scene was unique within the script Lutton’s direction of the scene did not demarcate it as different to the preceding scenes in a noticeable way. Hewitt then stepped forward and delivered the final chorus section. The monologue narrated an experience during a bushfire evacuation, in which the chorus was called out to a highway because a

⁶¹ Lutton stated that the lamb ‘was deliberately chosen because it is a very mythic symbol of the sacrificial lamb’. Lutton, quoted in Belvoir 2010. The Christian resonances contained in the image of a sacrificial lamb further layered the potential meanings contained in the mise-en-scène.

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doe had been hit by a car and broken her hind legs. Hewitt narrated making the call to shoot the deer; however, in an inversion of the Euripidean narrative at the moment of death the doe metamorphosed: I scream it out. Over the noise of the traffic and the terrible wind. I killed it! I had to kill it! SHOTS FIRED! I HAD TO SHOOT IT! And I look back at her. Barely thirteen I would say. This little girl. On the road. Like she was running across the highway. She has these boots on and a mini-skirt but she could barely be more than thirteen or fourteen years old [ . . . ]. [Scene Twelve, Page 71] Hewitt then exited the stage and stood with McClory outside the perspex boundary, watching the action and leaving just McQuade, Michael, Moody, and the lamb on the lawn. The action then progressed into Sacrifice # 2, which was an exercise in collective myth-making like Scenes One and Eleven. Rendered entirely in the third person the three actors wove together a narrative set in a bushfire, where a father was faced with a choice between saving his daughter, who was trapped in a burning car, or going into town to protect the hundreds of people in need of the fire service. The daughter, unlike the ‘ten-eleventwelve’-year-old child of Scene Eleven, was here referenced as being of an age where she could learn to drive. The combination of the theatre’s ventilation system and the mist created the effect of rolling clouds of smoke, billowing around the actors, with the water in the mist landing on the actors’ skin and giving the appearance that they were heavily perspiring as if faced with a wall of flames. The sensory impact of the smoke effect was all-encompassing, with one blogger mistakenly believing that real smoke was utilized in the production and complaining ‘I left the theatre stinking of it [ . . . ] I could still smell the smoke on the way home’.⁶² Despite the dramatic components of the play, the blogger’s comment testifies to the postdramatic nature of Love Me Tender, as image, sound, and affect here overwhelmingly created meaning. At the scene’s conclusion, after Moody described ultimately leaving his daughter trapped in the car to go to the town oval, Moody seized the lamb and exited the stage. Sacrifice # 3 is constituted in the script by the stage direction ‘We see a lamb being killed by hand, much like in the description in ‘Sacrifice # 1’ [Scene Fourteen, Page 77]. In performance the sacrifice was enacted ⁶² Epistemysics 2010.

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offstage, recalling academic debates regarding the staging of tragic violence. After Moody exited, the mist effect ceased. The four remaining actors stood, staring at the centre of the stage. Eventually, after what felt like several minutes, Moody re-entered, his hands and belly covered in blood. McQuade then delivered the play’s epilogue, this time an American folk song (‘I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)’), which was performed a cappella. The three sacrifice scenes worked together to create a profoundly affective finale, the emotional impact of which was down to the production’s combination of a classical source text and postdramatic techniques. Specifically, the finale engaged conceptually with two key components from Euripides’ tragedy, namely the infamous interpolations associated with Iphigenia at Aulis’ transmission, and the Euripidean innovations regarding the necessity of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, both of which were engaged with and reinvented in a postdramatic manner. The dénouement of Iphigenia at Aulis is infamously highly corrupt. James Diggle questions the authenticity of the surviving manuscript most vehemently, arguing that the tragedy is ‘a play which entangles, beyond hope of certain unravelling, the finished and unfinished work of Euripides, the accretions of an indefinable number of actors and producers, and not a few lines from Constantinople, [which] cannot be judged by ordinary critical standards’.⁶³ Although not all scholars adhere to Diggle’s level of scepticism regarding the script’s authenticity, there is general consensus that the start of the play, which seems to have two prologues, is partially spurious and that the ending, and specifically the messenger speech recounting the divine interference and doe substitution, is an interpolation.⁶⁴ The Euripidean script consequently can be thought to have two endings, an ‘original’ ending concluding at line 1531, and a later interpolated ending running to line 1629. Love Me Tender spoke to the debates surrounding the authenticity of Iphigenia at Aulis and demonstrated how what is commonly perceived to be a scholarly problem in fact embodies theatrical possibility, particularly for the postdramatic form. The plurality of the sacrifices in Love Me

⁶³ Diggle 1994: 49. ⁶⁴ For further information about the degree of interpolated material in IA, see Page 1934. For a concise overview of the debates, see Michelakis 2006: 107–14. Irregular metre in select choral odes may be further evidence of corruption.

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Tender, for example, simultaneously spoke to the authenticity debates and the postdramatic idea of a plethora or proliferation of signs.⁶⁵ Although the scenes take place one after the other they represent a postdramatic simultaneity, with no fictive chronological separation between the events meaning, as Lehmann requires, they consequently invert the compensatory function of drama ‘to supplement the chaos of reality with structural order’ and instead prove that ‘the spectator’s desire for orientation turns out to be disavowed’.⁶⁶ They are at once a multiplicity of endings and a repetition, reinforcing the thematic content of the reworking whilst avoiding narrative closure. The Euripidean innovations regarding the necessity of Iphigenia’s sacrifice are also present within Love Me Tender. Out of the surviving sources for Iphigenia’s sacrifice Euripides uniquely places emphasis upon the unnecessariness of the sacrifice, not disclosing the wording of Calchas’ divination and withholding whether it is a prophecy or omen. Rather than being an insight into a preordained future, it demonstrates the two different paths available to Agamemnon: the sacrifice will ensure Greek victory whilst failure to sacrifice will result in an abandonment of the expedition [86–93]. Euripides strengthens the questionability regarding the sacrifice by additionally incorporating numerous vacillations by both Agamemnon and Menelaus, which creates tension regarding the outcome of the sacrifice. The Euripidean indecisiveness and unnecessariness can be thought of as infusing the final scenes of Love Me Tender with dramatic tension; the concept was reworked to invite the audience to question to what ultimate sacrifice the play was heading towards, the necessity of the sacrifice, and the repercussions it would bring. The questions reverberated with the raunch culture dimension previously established in the play, asking what was being sacrificed through the increasing sexualization of young women: on the one hand their innocence, and on the other the ability for parents to have healthy relationships with their daughters. In this way the classical material helped reinforce the political dimension of Love Me Tender’s conclusion. The explicitness of the political content may have been rendered more abstract in the conclusion than in, for example, McClory’s dance in Scene Eight, yet the classical references and the scenes’ postdramatic realization nevertheless

⁶⁵ On this technique see Lehmann 2006: 90–1.

⁶⁶ Lehmann 2006: 88.

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ensured that the raunch culture phenomenon remained in the audience’s mind.⁶⁷ The postdramatic techniques present in the performative realization of Holloway’s script ensured that the questions posed by the play were confronting and emotionally affective. The uncontrollable presence of the lamb, for example, represented another instance of an ‘irruption of the real’. The lamb punctuated the action with bleating and is recorded in reviews as urinating on the stage;⁶⁸ rather than serving as a distraction and ‘pulling focus’, however, it fulfilled Lehmann’s requirement that the real be put on ‘equal footing with the fictive’ in postdramatic productions.⁶⁹ Lutton noted that it was this ‘real’ quality which drew him to including the lamb onstage as it: [ . . . ] doesn’t obey what you want it to do, it is free, it will do anything any night. It becomes a free radical, and for me that is the presence of a child, it is like having an infant on stage, it could do anything at any moment. I wanted it to be a sense of danger, a sense of something very real, something very alive. We are discussing killing and sacrificing a child, and here is something that is equally alive to us.⁷⁰

The presence of the live lamb, in light of the sacrifice in Euripides’ tragedy, raised ethical questions for the audience and invited greater emotional investment in the dénouement, with the fictive girl’s survival given a tangible referent. It evoked the postdramatic idea of the transition from ‘represented pain to pain experienced in representation’ [original emphasis], with the audience confronted with the prospect (even if unrealized) of witnessing physical suffering and pain.⁷¹ Without the classical narrative referent providing background information to assist the audience in making sense of the symbol of the lamb the creature would have been substantially drained of its meaning. The Euripidean material allowed the lamb to embody enough plot for it to supplement

⁶⁷ Edith Hall argues that the more numerable productions of IA since 1990 are down to the play’s applicability to various modern socio-political environments as the tragedy ‘will always speak loudest to an audience themselves characterised by intense, secularised, moral aporia’ [original emphasis]. See Hall 2005: 29. Several of the post-1990 receptions can notably be analysed through the lens of postdramatic theatre. Consider, for example, Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0 and Caridad Svich’s Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell that Was Once her Heart (A Rave Fable). ⁶⁸ Noaks 2010. ⁶⁹ Lehmann 2006: 103. ⁷⁰ Lutton, quoted in Belvoir 2010. ⁷¹ Lehmann 2006: 166.

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the production usefully and affectively whilst remaining ambiguous enough to invite multiple interpretations. * * * Matthew Lutton’s production of Love Me Tender is a paradigmatic example of how early experiments with writing for postdramatic theatre, such as the plays of Sarah Kane, grew into a recognizable theatrical form with currency around the globe. The realization of Holloway’s text on stage resulted in a production that can be effectively analysed through the lens of postdramatic theatre. The production, with its at times fluid sense of character and iconic visual dramaturgy filled with imagery of billowing clouds of smoke, a mother amid a breakdown, and a sacrificial lamb, made meaning through sensory impact rather than through dramatic plot structured around a peripeteia and anagnorisis. The classical, however, was nevertheless integral to the production, providing a referent through which the audience could understand the struggling father, the significance of the unseen daughter, and the concept of a culture resulting in sacrifice. Postdramatic classical receptions clarify several of the debates surrounding the role of text in postdramatic theatre as performatively engaging with a text from the Greek or Roman canon is a process that embodies a textual legacy. Irrespective of the amount of research conducted, or how radical or postdramatic the resulting production may be, every classical performance reception responds to a fixed textual source, and the audience is invited to interpret the performance in light of that knowledge. In Part I I have demonstrated that productions that not only utilize a fixed textual origin, but also result in a text-based reception, can be described as postdramatic and analysed through the postdramatic rubric. They demonstrate the reductiveness of the text-based versus postdramatic theatre dichotomy. In the most common form of postdramatic theatre, however, the middleman of the playwright is removed, and instead the performance is collaboratively devised by a group of performers, perhaps with the assistance of a director and a dramaturg. My discussion now turns to such productions, and explores classical performance reception within devised postdramatic theatre.

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PART II

Devising the Classics

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

Introduction to Part II Richard Schechner’s devised Dionysus in 69 represents the most common form of postdramatic performance. Simultaneously, the production’s legacy embodies the dominant scholarly view about devised theatre, with its journey from an experimental political piece tied to 1960s counterculture to the 2009 Rude Mechanicals’ carbon-copy reenactment echoing the idea that devised performances today ‘express none of the overt political commitment of their radical predecessors of the sixties’.¹ While it is true that the 2009 restaging drained the political gusto from the original production and replaced it with what Schechner identifies as a nostalgia for ‘a kind of sexuality-without-fear of the preAIDS epoch’ that is part of a wider (paradoxical) ‘conservative avantgarde’, the same does not hold for devised theatre more broadly.² Any suggestion that devised theatre is apolitical is reliant upon an unnecessarily narrow definition of political theatre. Histories of devised theatre, which admittedly are few and far between,³ usually position the origins of the form in the 1960s in a series of strongly ideological productions.⁴ In contrast to the hegemonic structure of a single-authored text, channelled through a director, which all performers could be perceived as subservient to, practitioners working in devised formats initially arranged themselves in collective structures enabling artists to wrest ‘the mode of production from the grip of

¹ Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2013: 23. For detailed definitions of devised theatre see Govan, Nicholson, and Normington 2007: 3, Heddon and Milling 2005: 3, and Oddey 1994: 1. ² Schechner 2010: 15. See also Schechner 2010a. ³ For one of the few historical overviews see Mermikides and Smart 2010. ⁴ In the United Kingdom the form was facilitated by the 1968 Theatres Act, prior to which practitioners were unable to stage a production without pre-submitting a script for approval to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office prior to performance.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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dominating institutions and ideologies’.⁵ They instead sought to create new, egalitarian modes of working, with ‘everyone having an equal say, decision-making operating via discussion and consensus, all jobs being undertaken by everyone (either randomly or on a rotating basis), and all positions considered as equally important’.⁶ The anti-hegemonic structure is the antithesis of the hierarchical model of traditional theatre companies and reflects the wider 1960s socio-political climate and its emphasis on personal politics. The form’s political qualities were strengthened by the fact that many early works were conceived as forms of political protest aligned with, for example, the civil rights movement or the New Left. The accepted narrative of devised theatre’s history posits that less than two decades later circumstances conspired to quell this radical art form and erase its political dimension. The predominant reason given for this is economic: as ensembles evolved and practitioners endeavoured to commit to performing full-time fixed sources of income were required. State-supplied funding made producing politically controversial work challenging; Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling note, for example, that the funding raised questions about whether one can authentically challenge the status quo while simultaneously being supported by an institution that is an emblem of that dominant culture.⁷ Many practitioners never had to navigate this ethical issue, however, as by the 1980s it was difficult to gain Arts Council funding for radical work, particularly following Margaret Thatcher’s cuts to arts budgets and the parallel decision by John E. Frohnmayer, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the United States, only to fund work where the political message was subordinate to ‘artistic content’.⁸ As such, less devised work was created, and those companies ⁵ Heddon and Milling 2005: 17. ⁶ Heddon and Milling 2005: 101. For more detail on the historical relation between devising and politics see Oddey 1994: 8. ⁷ Heddon and Milling 2005: 118. ⁸ On these two points see Heddon and Milling 2005: 118 and Savran 1991: 49 respectively. In addition to economic factors scholars have offered several further explanations for the diminished role of politics in devising. These include: attributing the demise to a flowon effect from decreased visible, collective political activity more broadly; arguing that increased international touring dissipates the political efficacy of productions by diluting their context; and even suggesting that the increased theatricalization of politics discredited theatre as a potentially radical art form. On these points, see Heddon and Milling 2005:

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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that continued to operate transitioned, by and large, from a democratic structure towards a hierarchical one in response to the changing economic and artistic climate. By the 1990s this process was largely complete.⁹ Today scholarship is divided over where the political can be found in devised theatre. Scott Proudfit and Kathryn Syssoyeva, for example, argue that devising practice in the United States, England, Canada, and France reveals that ‘Aesthetic and ethical concerns appear to have trumped ideological ones’,¹⁰ while Heddon and Milling suggest that devised ‘docudramas’ such as the verbatim The Laramie Project are instances of ‘life politics’ which are exceptions to what is today the ‘almost non-existent’ practice of making political theatre.¹¹ These outliers, however, only engage with ‘capital P’ politics and give an overly restrictive impression of what constitutes the political in theatre. Concurrent to the development of devised theatre in the United Kingdom and United States were non-Western experiments in devising, including the work of both Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’ and South African playwright Athol Fugard’s Serpent Players. Contrasting Fugard’s 1973 reception of Sophocles’ Antigone, titled The Island, with Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 demonstrates the limitations of current understandings of the relationship between devising and the political. In defiance of apartheid laws which prohibited black and white individuals from collaborating on theatre productions Fugard, himself a white South African playwright, devised the play with black actors Bonisile Kani and Zola Ntshona during a fourteen-day workshop.¹² The resulting play depicts two prisoners, of what is implied to be South Africa’s infamous Robben Island, putting on a production of Antigone; the play-within-a-play device uses Antigone’s defiance of Creon as a parable to protest the injustices of the apartheid regime. The Island’s development pre-empts many devised works today, involving initial workshops and interviews before Fugard as writer went away to produce a fixed script without the egalitarian collaborative creation and work rota components integral to Schechner’s Performance Group. 122–3, Govan, Nicholson, and Normington 2007: 193, and Auslander 1987: 25 respectively. These likely only scratch the surface of why devising evolved as it did. ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹²

For detail on devising’s characteristics in the early 1990s see Oddey 1994: 9. Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2013: 12. See Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2013: 34 and Heddon and Milling 2005: 125 respectively. Berner 1976: 83.

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Yet it is undeniable that the production is political in its thematic engagement, the significance of its socio-political context, and in the open defiance of the then-present political regime embodied in the artists’ collaboration. The legacy that the production now holds within histories of both political theatre and postcolonialism and the classics evinces a further political quality.¹³ The Island indicates that devised theatre can continue to embody the political even when created within a hegemonic environment. Twentyfirst-century postdramatic receptions further illuminate the role of the political in devised theatre, particularly when four caveats are taken into account during the analysis: 1. The distinction between aesthetics and politics is a false dichotomy. As I suggested in Part I, postdramatic productions often embody a politics of form, and the case studies considered in Part II further destabilize the aesthetics/politics dichotomy, as does Lehmann himself when he argues that ‘questions of aesthetic form are political questions’ [original emphasis].¹⁴ 2. Theatre can interact with politics even it does not set out to deliver a political message. Audiences inevitably read productions in light of their context, regardless of practitioners’ intentions. 3. Any production that engages with society and culture has a political dimension. Although the status of a canonical text, or themes of gender and sexuality, for example, may not necessarily be Political Issues, these elements are intertwined with political discourses and are closely related to power structures. Any engagement with such aspects is an engagement with the political, whether it is a reflection, a questioning, or an interrogation. 4. It is not useful to discuss the political in hierarchical terms. Granted, current devised works may not be as reactive, antagonistic, or didactic as their predecessors, but it is unhelpful to talk about these works as apolitical, or less political. These value-laden terms imply a privileging of earlier productions, when in reality the subtle

¹³ On The Island’s political legacy see Gordon 2012: 379. On the production’s role within postcolonial classical receptions, see Goff and Simpson 2007: 271–320, Ioannidou 2017: 73–102, Rehm 2007, and Wilmer 2010. ¹⁴ Lehmann, in Lehmann, Jürs-Munby, and Fuchs 2008: 16.

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and nuanced strategies that current practitioners employ can be just as powerful and affective as their forebears. Taking these four caveats into account when exploring the role of the political in contemporary devised theatre indicates that the form is still highly political; the caveats allow for a more encompassing and accurate appreciation of how the political manifests itself in contemporary theatre. The aforementioned conditions make it clear that devised theatre has an implicit political dimension. Although not all devising practitioners today openly subscribe to a particular ideology or create work protesting specific issues, the collaborative process of devising and the collagelike manner in which works are assembled means that productions are still developed with consistent recourse to practitioners’ personal lives and the wider cultural landscape. Their political dimension has evolved; devised works can today be characterized as political primarily in terms of their connection to national discourses, personal politics, gender dynamics, and questions of aesthetic form and ideals of unity. Furthermore, although collaborative ways of working may no longer hold the same ideological undertones, they continue to represent an alternative way of developing work that, as a rejection of the mainstream, retains a political dimension. Utilizing such an expanded definition of the political sheds light on the subtle ways that The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie! and The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes engage with and are coloured by socio-political realities, alongside how their form embodies a type of political engagement and the repercussions that the works have on our understanding of tragedy in modernity.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

4 The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie! Richard Schechner’s growing reputation following Dionysus in 69 attracted new recruits to The Performance Group, including Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte in 1970, Ron Vawter in 1973, and Willem Dafoe in 1976.¹ By 1975 LeCompte and Gray were creating their own productions whilst still working with Schechner. Ultimately, however, Dafoe, Vawter, Gray, and LeCompte would formally break away from Schechner’s ensemble.² They sought to create a less ritualistic style of performance and depart from Schechner’s aim of creating ‘a reality that might challenge the dominant ideological order’³ and instead combined personal experience, canonical texts, and a range of other found materials to shape productions that investigate that which is ‘taken for granted and passes unnoticed in our culture’.⁴ Their modus operandi was the radical deconstruction of canonical texts, which they reinvented in a form that manipulated ‘spatial relationships both onstage and between the audience and the stage, and the syncopation of quiet or intense scenes with manic and frantic ones’.⁵ The break-out eventually led to the dissolution of the Performance Group in 1980, following which Schechner handed the deeds for The Performing Garage over to his former colleagues. While Schechner was busy decrying the death of the avant-garde The Wooster Group, one of the most important companies

¹ On Gray and LeCompte joining the Group see Aronson 2000: 146. On Vawter joining the Group see Smalec 2009. ² The Wooster Group was formally established in 1980; however, Gray and LeCompte began creating work in 1975 and backdate all productions from then as Wooster shows. See Aronson 2000: 146. ³ Quick 2007: 9. ⁴ Savran 1988: 7. ⁵ Aronson 2000: 153.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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internationally within the twentieth-century avant-garde, was being born.⁶ Scholars have typified the contrast between The Wooster Group, which remains active and is still run by LeCompte, and The Performance Group as paradigmatic of the difference between the first and subsequent waves of devised theatre.⁷ Somewhat unsurprisingly many have consequently argued that The Wooster Group’s work is apolitical. Less divisive approaches include David Savran’s, who concedes that The Group’s work in the 1980s was political, citing their subversive use of blackface in their reinvention of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, titled Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), and the narrowly avoided lawsuit which arose from their use of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in L.S.D. ( . . . Just the High Points).⁸ By the 1990s, however, Savran argues that The Wooster Group had ‘taken refuge in what appears to be a kind of pure aestheticism’ with productions that reduced their politics ‘almost to the point of invisibility’.⁹ The practitioners have, perhaps inadvertently, strengthened this perspective, as LeCompte has repeatedly insisted that the company’s work does not advance particular political messages.¹⁰ Although LeCompte inhabits the role of director for all the company’s productions The Wooster Group’s devising process is still collaborative and ensemble-driven. Within the rehearsal room everyone has an equal voice and all performers’ suggestions are considered. Their methodology represents an unconventional way of producing work which continues to push against the concentration of power and authority in a single figure in favour of collaboratively authored practices. It is just one of the ways

⁶ See Schechner 1981 and Schechner 1981a. For a contextualization of Schechner’s proclamation, which Aronson describes as having ‘a slight aura of sour grapes’, see Aronson 2000: 181–3. ⁷ See, for example, Syssoyeva and Proudfit 2013: 24. Schechner, as Professor Emeritus of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and longstanding editor of The Drama Review, has been influential in shaping this view and the legacy of his ensemble. ⁸ LeCompte justified the use of blackface as done to ‘explore theatrical concepts and conventions of mask and character as well as the racial divide in America’. However, it provoked protest and caused the New York State Council on the Arts to withdraw The Wooster Group’s funding for one year. See Aronson 2000: 186–9, esp. 188. ⁹ Savran 1991: 42, 52. Branislav Jakovljevic also argues that the company’s work goes from a ‘politics of open confrontation, to contextualization of utopian politics, to its seeming disappearance’. See Jakovljevic 2010: 91. ¹⁰ Giesekam 2002: 331.

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that the company’s work can be considered political. Other elements include the productions’ lengthy development periods, which are intrinsic to the company’s process and represent a high-risk strategy where art is created with no guaranteed box office return.¹¹ These processes make a statement against the economics that underpin commercial theatre companies and promote a different way of producing theatre. Such processes are found in The Wooster Group’s only major piece of classical reception.

Devising via Euripides, Seneca, and Racine The Group began devising an adaptation of the Phaedra/Hippolytus myth, titled To You, The Birdie!, in 2000. The resulting production opened on 1 February 2002 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York.¹² In To You, The Birdie! the dual identities of several cast members further emphasized the contrast between the economics underpinning the company and those of more commercial ventures, as Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe, who played Theseus in this production, and Academy Award winner Frances McDormand, who played Enone, simultaneously managed successful Hollywood careers whilst remaining committed members of the ensemble.¹³ On the one hand it is possible to consider undertaking cinema work as ‘selling out’; however, on the other hand given the economic restrictions placed upon experimental theatre the choice to step away intermittently from the film industry and give up considerable income to generate alternative theatre makes a statement about the artistic value of non-mainstream ways of producing art.¹⁴ ¹¹ Admittedly, today the financial risk associated with the Group’s lengthy development periods is mitigated due to the company’s established status. ¹² The Wooster Group staged work-in-progress performances of To You, The Birdie! from June 2001. My performance analysis is of the 2002 première production, a recording of which was released on DVD in 2011. Quotations are transcribed from this recording. See The Wooster Group 2011. The production toured Europe until 2006. ¹³ When referring to the roles in To You, The Birdie! I use the spelling contained in Paul Schmidt’s published script; see Schmidt 2000. When referring to Racine’s characters I use the French spelling. When referring to the mythological figures in any other context I use the Anglicized spelling. ¹⁴ On these dual careers of select Wooster Group members see Auslander 1987: 31. Dafoe ceased to work with the Group in 2004; performer Kate Valk identified the tension between his film and theatre priorities as a contributing factor. See Zinoman 2005.

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The Wooster Group’s status as bridging the development and evolution of devised theatre also recalls the transition from a politicized, historical avant-garde to a broader understanding of experimental theatre enriched through postdramatic techniques, as touched upon in my introduction to Part II. Indeed, Arnold Aronson sees the early work of the Group as ‘the last major exponent of the postwar American avant-garde movement’, dating the ‘death of the avant-garde’ to the mid-1980s, a decade after Schechner.¹⁵ For Aronson, The Wooster Group’s position as, arguably, part of today’s theatrical mainstream, given their bases in the now-trendy Soho and Brooklyn and the fact that their productions are staged in prestigious venues worldwide, invalidates their previous avant-garde status.¹⁶ Although I dispute the idea that The Wooster Group’s current work is not political I accept that their more recent work, including To You, The Birdie!, embodies a different type of politics and thus is not part of the historical avant-garde. Examining the production through the lens of postdramatic theatre helps explicate how it remains political and experimental, even without the company’s former avant-garde objective. To You, The Birdie! originated in 1993 when The Wooster Group commissioned academic and translator Paul Schmidt to write an adaptation of Jean Racine’s Phèdre. Racine’s play draws upon both Euripides and Seneca’s treatment of the myth. Phèdre opened on 1 January 1677 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, and is written in alexandrine verse. Initially, it won little acclaim, with more praise bestowed upon Jacques Pradon’s Hippolytus adaptation, which opened two days later at the Hôtel Guénégaud. However, as Betinna Knapp notes, by March 1677 Racine’s play was regarded as superior, and it survives today as one of the most highly regarded neo-classical French tragedies.¹⁷ Racine’s script largely follows the narrative established by the ancient tragedians; however, it does not include any onstage divine appearances or a chorus.¹⁸ Instead, it features several additional characters, including Aricie, Hippolyte’s love interest and a princess from the deposed Athenian royal ¹⁵ Aronson 2000: 195. ¹⁶ The Wooster Group still operates from the Performing Garage in Soho; however, their productions regularly première in St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn. ¹⁷ Knapp 1998: 152. ¹⁸ For further scholarship on Phèdre as a work of classical reception see Budzowska 2012: 157–83.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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family, and Théramènes, Hippolyte’s confidant. Racine went to great lengths to make Phèdre appear less culpable than she does in the ancient sources. He consequently made Hippolyte a more problematic figure due to his infatuation with a banished princess, and the nurse Œnone a darker, more manipulative character who encourages Phèdre to lie about Hippolyte’s actions. Bettina Knapp outlines how one might tie these changes to Racine’s Jansenism, particularly considering the moralizing preface with which Racine accompanied his tragedy and due to the fact that Phèdre was his final play, following which he appears to have re-committed himself to his religion.¹⁹ However, as E. D. James and G. Jondorf note, interpreting Phèdre as a Jansenist play raises difficulties given the plurality of deities and the un-Christian beliefs that it contains.²⁰ Consequently, we cannot be certain whether this religious perspective had an impact upon Racine’s reception. Schmidt’s adaptation was a drastically reduced, muscular version of Phèdre, summarized by Hugh Denard as ‘post-Euripidean, pre-Racinian, quasi-Senecan’ with an alternate thematic structure.²¹ The script, however, lay dormant for seven years, before eventually being produced as a radio play for BBC Radio 3 with Wooster Group member Kate Valk performing the role of Phedre. The broadcast inspired LeCompte to begin workshopping the play.²² Rehearsals began on 13 March 2000 and involved the company researching and collating a disparate collection of texts and visual codes. These included: Paul Schmidt’s adaptation; scenes from Euripides’ Hippolytus; sequences from Martha Graham’s Phaedra; badminton games; and choreography from the Marx Brothers and Merce Cunningham. The resulting production was a contemporary representation of the myth which revolved around the basic Phaedra/ Hippolytus frame narrative. Although the immediate springboard text was an adaptation of Phèdre the practitioners drew on Euripides by, for example, re-instating the divine element through the inclusion of a ¹⁹ See, for example, Knapp 1998: 177. ²⁰ James and Jondorf 1994: 85–6. ²¹ Denard 2003. Schmidt’s 1993 script is currently held in the Yale University Library. He later expanded this commission into a full translation for the American Repertory Theatre, who staged the revised version in 1998. The revised version was published as Schmidt 2000. Schmidt 2000 is largely identical to the To You, The Birdie! frame script. The only sections the production did not contain were the first scene of Act Two (between Hippolytus and Aricia), and the first scene of Act Five (again between Hippolytus and Aricia). For information on the 1998 performance, see Diamond and Sellar 2000: 94. ²² Quick 2007: 262. For information on the radio play see Jakovljevic 2010: 96.

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‘Video Venus’ and including a quasi-chorus of two, Marker 4 and Marker 7, who sang and danced.²³ Aricia was, following Racine, Hippolytus’ love interest; however, she did not appear on stage, and Schmidt’s Panope and Ismene were also absent. The To You, The Birdie! previews opened on 22 September 2001, less than two weeks after 11 September and in the exact same venue as Schechner’s 1968 work.²⁴ The temporal proximity to an event of political importance has an interesting parallel in Dionysus in 69, which opened the day after Robert Kennedy’s assassination. It exemplifies my second caveat regarding the political in contemporary theatre, as audience members may inevitably have viewed the production in light of this context.²⁵ Jakovljevic, for example, records the impact of this wider environment upon the production: Less than a mile from the site of the World Trade Center, the streets of lower SoHo were still covered with a film of fine white ash. The air smelled of burning fuel and plastic, in which many claimed to detect the odor of scorched—or as Genet would have it, “cooked”—human flesh. The only moment of profound and immediate resonance between the incomplete theatre piece and the fractured world in which it was placed so directly and so improbably was the moment when Theseus, played by Willem Dafoe, was seen onstage, lying down on a stretcher made of bright orange fabric, identical to the ones that crews of paramedics were hopelessly carrying around the smoldering ruins, still looking for bodies that were not completely pulverized.²⁶

The socio-political resonance was coincidental and there is no evidence that it became an enduring connection for later audience members.²⁷ Irrespectively, it illustrates how socio-political events colour the theatre and provide prisms through which audiences read action regardless of authorial intent. When the production opened officially on 1 February 2002 the audience entered the theatre to find a mise-en-scène made up of a futuristic, ²³ The songs from the production were released as a record. ²⁴ Jakovljevic 2010: 88. ²⁵ For precedent supporting the idea that audience interpretation can give Roman tragedy a political dimension see Gildenhard 2010, esp. 160–72. ²⁶ Jakovljevic 2010: 88. ²⁷ I have come across one other reference to 11 September in discussions of To You, The Birdie!. This is in a review by Gaby Cody, who notes that the production ‘enables us to see past our own state-controlled media, and perhaps not coincidentally, the post-9/11/01 manufacturing of emotional affect and empathy’. See Cody 2003: 175.

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Figure 4.1. To You, The Birdie! Photo: To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre) DVD, 2011.

black badminton court surrounded by steel poles seemingly devoid of purpose (Fig. 4.1). The structure stood balanced upon on a single fluted classical column of approximately one foot in height, which was a crucial metaphor for the entire production: the play balanced upon a (broken) pillar of antiquity that could easily be forgotten, but whose existence was intrinsic to the stability and existence of everything else.²⁸ The addition of numerous items of medical paraphernalia, such as wheelchairs, enema hoses, and walking frames, and curved handlebars on the upstage right edge of the court such as one finds at the entrance to a swimming pool implied that the location, at a stretch, might be a health spa or sanitarium. The occasional sound of lapping water reinforced the concept of a hidden pool whilst potentially also alluding to the original Troezen setting. The design was an aesthetic representation of the disparate elements the company associated with the text. It hinted towards the fractured representation of the narrative that the production would embody. The fixed elements of the set were supplemented with moveable ²⁸ LeCompte has stated that the set was inspired by modernist architecture as she felt that the text was similarly ‘bald and bare’. See Quick 2007: 262.

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perspex walls, which were rolled in front of, behind, and onto the court at various times, and flat-screen televisions which were bolted to the metal poles and could move vertically. A large mirror hung at head height centre stage, on the back edge of the badminton court, facing the audience. The badminton court was an immediately arresting feature and was frequently utilized in the production in games refereed by Video Venus. Venus’ head could be seen on a television screen that hung from the top of a metal pole in the centre of the court.²⁹ Originally introduced as a rehearsal game to remind the performers to concentrate on the form rather than the content of the work,³⁰ badminton became a central part of the production’s aesthetic when the performers realized it was a particularly rich metaphor; not only does a badminton court play on the concept of a royal court, but in seventeenth-century France dramatic performances took place in former jeux de paume before permanent theatres were built.³¹ Although tennis would be a more historically authentic game for Racine’s time this slight skewing of authenticity is in keeping with The Wooster Group’s aesthetic.³² The title of the production was a translation of the traditional courtesy one calls before beginning a game—‘À vous, volant!’—and guidelines from an official badminton rulebook were read out on a loudspeaker throughout the production. These often occurred at times when their meaning was ambiguous and they could feasibly be commenting on either the sport or the narrative of the play. For example, ‘2.6. Slow down the game if you’re losing. But don’t overdo it’ played after Hippolytus rejected Phedre and before she decided to offer him the crown of Athens.

²⁹ Venus’ dialogue and umpiring was performed live, out of the audience’s sight. See Parker-Starbuck 2004: 226. Hugh Denard sees this as a ‘latter-day reinstatement into Racine’s play of Euripides’ deus ex machina’. See Denard 2003. ³⁰ The rehearsal notes record, for example, ‘We began to play badminton. The rules were very important because they constitute the form: form over content’. See Quick 2007: 223. ³¹ Maurin 2004: 210. LeCompte states that the badminton metaphor became influential six months into rehearsals, when she dispensed with modern badminton and made her actors return to the original French rules. See Quick 2007: 262. ³² Racket sports also featured in Martha Graham’s 1959 Episodes. Johan Callens argues that because Schmidt wrote the scenario for the 1995 homage to Graham, Snow on the Mesa: Portrait of Martha, The Wooster Group must have been responding to Graham here, stating that ‘Some of the research carried out on that occasion must have fed into To You, the Birdie! [sic]’. This is an interesting parallel, but I am not convinced that it was a conscious borrowing, especially given how upfront The Wooster Group usually are about their sources. See Callens 2009: 154.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

   ’   ,  !

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There were multiple further layers to the badminton metaphor; Denard argues that its formalities offered an ironic gesture ‘towards Racine’s censorious, but voyeuristic, aestheticization of the sordidness and the banality of incest within the proprieties of XVII-century French neoclassical drama’, and that, in its representation of something moving back and forward, the shuttlecock acted as a metaphor for the process of adaptation.³³ The tournaments took place against a computer-game soundscape, which was mixed live and filled with animation noises interspersed with the amplified sound of rackets and shuttlecocks swooshing through the air and playful audio effects of, for example, shattering glass when a shot was missed. To You, The Birdie! commenced, like Racine’s play, with Hippolytus and Theramenes in conversation. The two men entered and sat down centre stage on a bench. They were bare-chested and wore heavy green kilts that sat over white petticoat-style undergarments. A single perspex wall was positioned in front of the bench, and battery packs were taped to Hippolytus and Theramenes’ biceps.³⁴ A television screen was positioned over their groins and in front of their bodies, which, when the lights came up, acted as a magnifying glass over their groins. The broadcast initially seemed to be a live-feed as the men perfectly aligned with their televised bodies and moved their legs and arms in time with the projection. After just a few seconds, however, the footage began to glitch, suggesting that it was pre-recorded. The scene began with Hippolytus speaking into a microphone, informing Theramenes that he intended to leave Troezen to find his father. The two men passed this microphone back and forth throughout their conversation, which consisted of a drastically reduced version of Racine’s opening set against a background of applause and refereeing. They spoke quickly, with minimal intonation; the dialogue was challenging to follow due to this fast, detached delivery, which was spoken while the men absent-mindedly wound tape around their toes.³⁵ As the men bound their feet, requiring them to place their heels upon the bench on which they sat, the video continued to focus on their groins and revealed that they wore nothing underneath their skirts. Brief flashes of genitals were displayed on the monitors, which the actors drew additional attention to by occasionally scratching and fondling ³³ Denard 2003. ³⁴ The battery packs powered unseen in-ear monitors. ³⁵ Denard sees this as representing locker-room banter. See Denard 2003.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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both themselves and each other. The monotone delivery style and the speed of the recorded visuals had the effect of inviting the audience to ‘tune out’ of the dialogue and become preoccupied with the television screens, making spectators question whether they really saw what they thought they did and encouraging them to lean forward and more attentively investigate the recording.

The Politics of To You, The Birdie!’s Postdramatic Form The opening of To You, The Birdie! established the production’s thematic focus and postdramatic form. Like Phaedra’s Love, the introductory scene contained a hyper-sexualized representation of masculinity, which indicated that the production would interrogate the gender dimension of the Phaedra/Hippolytus narrative.³⁶ It also spoke to the theme of voyeurism that permeates Euripides’, Seneca’s, and Racine’s texts. Hippolytus was eroticized throughout his duologue with Theramenes; not only did he appear shirtless, but the magnification of his genitals and the addition of a homoerotic dimension explicitly directed the audience to view him through this lens. The technical mediation once again positioned the audience as a Phaedra-like character voyeuristically gazing at Hippolytus, and exemplified Denard’s argument that the production subjected ‘its audience to a guilty voyeurism, requiring that it confront its own proprieties and experience its own (in)capacity for resistance’.³⁷ There were, however, nevertheless noticeable differences between the types of masculinity explored in the two reinventions and the techniques used in its representation. Whereas Kane’s Hippolytus was positioned as a deviant character whose hyper-sexualized behaviour was problematic, The Wooster Group’s Hippolytus operated on a more ambiguous level. The presence of Video Venus as an embedded spectator, who watched over Hippolytus and Theramenes’ interactions from the roof of the stage, implied that the action was considered inoffensive. The televised Venus nonchalantly moved her head from side to side as if watching a badminton game and appeared completely unperturbed by the ³⁶ See Critchley 2004 and Woodworth 2010 for other instances where To You, The Birdie! and Phaedra’s Love are discussed comparatively. ³⁷ Denard 2003.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

   ’   ,  !

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homoerotic display before her. Her reaction signaled that Hippolytus’ actions were not deviant, like in Kane’s play, but rather were unproblematic and not worthy of note. Hippolytus and Theramenes’ exchange also informed the audience that an unusual aesthetic form was to be one of the production’s most notable features. Although To You, The Birdie! contained a fixed sense of character and a linear narrative the dialogue and sound effects from the opening moment were stop-start and this, combined with the disorienting mise-en-scène, alluded to the fractured nature of what was to come. As Steven Connor notes, the asynchronization of the pre-recorded action and the live performance split the seams of space and time and had a disembodying effect.³⁸ In addition, the implied presence of invisible, controlling forces heightened the sense of disconnect, in a similar way to how Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino created unease through the illusion of an unseen entity controlling the Mädchen. For example, there were extra television screens positioned out of the audience’s sight, which displayed movement sequences from the aforementioned Graham, Marx Brothers, and Cunningham intertexts.³⁹ These were broadcast at random throughout the production, including after Hippolytus and Theramenes’ dialogue. The performers, not knowing what would be displayed, had to copy the movements to the best of their ability, which Andrew Quick argues created ‘a highly formalized sense of disembodiment, where movement and language are rarely allowed to synthesize and the performers move and speak as if possessed by sets of rules that they are never fully in control of ’.⁴⁰ The video operators were additionally empowered to manipulate and distort the footage, which Quick argues ‘ensures that the performer always has to react to the momentby-moment technical improvisation with this visual material, which, in turn, compels a spontaneous and impulsive reaction to take place on the stage’.⁴¹ The use of in-ear monitors further emphasized the sense of

³⁸ Connor 2002. ³⁹ The Graham choreography recordings featured excerpts from Cave of the Heart, Seraphic Dialogue, and Cortege of Eagles, which revolve respectively around the characters of Medea, Joan of Arc, and Hecuba. For an analysis of the significance of the chosen dances see Callens 2009: 161. ⁴⁰ Quick 2007: 14. LeCompte was also influenced by Martha Graham’s version of Phèdre; see Quick 2007: 262. ⁴¹ Quick 2007: 273.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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spontaneity. LeCompte relayed live instructions to the performers through these in-ear monitors on Valk’s suggestion. The technique represented an attempt to recreate the energy of the rehearsal room and provided a way for the performers to have a ‘present’ relationship with the material.⁴² The two-year devising process arguably enabled both technical elements. The success of such strategies relies upon a company sharing a common working language and a truly collaborative methodology. The Wooster Group’s utilization of Cunningham’s choreography provides an added postdramatic dimension to the production, which is of relevance here given the parallels between Cunningham’s choreographic practice and The Wooster Group’s devising strategies. Cunningham started his professional career dancing in Martha Graham’s company from 1939–45, before ultimately forming his own company, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in 1950. His company lies alongside The Wooster Group as a key component of the twentiethcentury American avant-garde. Cunningham’s choreography was designed to co-exist with music, rather than be danced to music, and his compositions can be considered postdramatic as they rarely tell linear narratives but often explore movement and the body in a more abstract way; Cunningham stated that when choreographing new dances ‘The musicians ask me something about the piece, but I can tell them little, since it is about no specific thing’.⁴³ Cunningham infamously used chance processes when choreographing new dances to determine the order of sequences and/or number of dancers. His method intended ‘to jump the continuity of the dance out of my personal feelings about order or out of my memory of physical coordinations’.⁴⁴ Cunningham applied his chance processes not just in the development of new dances, but even during production, where their application led to movements and sequences being rearranged from performance to performance.⁴⁵ In To You, The Birdie! the unseen Cunningham footage and the in-ear monitors worked akin to Cunningham’s choreographic practice, instilling an unpredictable quality within the production which similarly generated new movements and further layered the levels of devising. ⁴² Quick 2007: 272. ⁴³ Cunningham 2000: 43. ⁴⁴ Cunningham 2000: 44. ⁴⁵ Canfield (1969) is a paradigmatic example of Cunningham using chance processes to reorder a production from performance to performance. On Canfield see Cunningham 2017.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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Although audiences may have been ignorant of both the televisions and the fact that the director was relaying live instructions to the actors through the in-ear monitors, the acting nevertheless made it clear that the performers were being controlled, puppet-like, by external forces as there was an almost methodical, robotic-like manner to their behaviour. The disconnected, multi-media-infused performance style alienated the audience from the action and foregrounded that the mythic material was mediated through both opaque and translucent dimensions. In this scene, for example, the audience was made aware that they were seeing Hippolytus and Theramenes reflected and refracted through a perspex wall, a television monitor, and a microphone, and mediated via Euripides, Seneca, Racine, the performers, and additional unseen forces. Although the form of Kane’s first scene was intriguing, it was not experimental in the same way but continued to operate within the parameters of a recognizably authorial-driven dramaturgy. In contrast, The Wooster Group’s first scene positioned To You, The Birdie! within the devising tradition, where the rich tapestry of ‘stage business’ represented the multiple authorial hands and the action worked towards no obvious external purpose. The technology and framing devices contained in the opening scene prepared the audience for the production to interrogate the mediated and fractured nature of the classics. The unusual techniques contained in Scene One also reflected the strong postdramatic nature of To You, The Birdie! which, for example, employed media as a constitutive component and created a piece of ‘event theatre’ where presence and chance were favoured over mimesis.⁴⁶ The most obviously postdramatic aspect of the production, however, was its representation of Lehmann’s retreat from synthesis. Assistant Director Richard Kimmel’s rehearsal log reflects the extent to which the production utilized this technique, noting that the production’s elements were united but ‘not so codified that [the] audience gets it (or gets ahead of it)[;] must be a secret’.⁴⁷ Many certainly failed to ‘get it’; when Michael Billington reviewed the London tour of the production he commented that it was ‘all

⁴⁶ On these techniques see, respectively, Lehmann 2006: 168–9 and 104–5. Jakovljevic sees the obscurity of the signs as ‘reminiscent of the baroque idea of the aesthetic pleasure gained from experiencing complexity in the work of art’ and thus providing an additional layer of reception. See Jakovljevic 2010: 90. ⁴⁷ Kimmel, quoted in Quick 2007: 235.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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about notching up intellectual points’ and ‘elitist’ in that it ‘depends heavily on a prior knowledge of Racine to make any sense at all’.⁴⁸ Rather than require prior knowledge to be comprehensible, To You, The Birdie! intentionally sought to defamiliarize ancient tragedy and render it partially incomprehensible to prompt a fresh engagement. The fact that so many of the production’s components were hidden from the audience, such as the Graham, Marx Brothers, and Cunningham footage, indicates that a sense of ambiguity was deliberate and intrinsic to the intended effect of the play. No amount of prior knowledge about either ancient tragedy or Racine’s neoclassical reception could have prepared a spectator for what they saw as a great deal of the production’s literal meaning lay beyond the audience’s grasp. The unpredictable and illogical jumps between the mythological narrative and badminton tournaments, and between the televised and live action created a fragmented, lacuna-filled landscape. Such a multifaceted form is common to Wooster Group productions. Bonnie Marranca, for example, notes that throughout their œuvre: Body, text, image, sound, environment are denied the feeling of wholeness—it’s the fragment, the angle of perception, that matters. The tension in a performance is manifested in the anxiety of the audience searching for an image of the whole.⁴⁹

This methodology can be seen in many postdramatic productions; Lehmann, for example, argues that postdramatic theatre: renounces the long-incontestable criteria of unity and synthesis and abandons itself to the chance (and risk) of trusting individual impulses, fragments and microstructures of texts in order to become a new kind of practice. In the process it discovers a new continent of performance, a new kind of presence of the ‘performers’ (into which the ‘actors’ have mutated) and establishes a multifarious theatre landscape beyond forms focused on drama.⁵⁰

The Wooster Group’s application of this methodology to canonical texts has led many to attribute the term ‘deconstruction’ to the company’s aesthetic.⁵¹ Their so-called deconstructive strategies involve breaking canonical texts down into small, isolated components and subjecting

⁴⁸ Billington 2002a. ⁴⁹ Marranca 2003: 8. ⁵⁰ Lehmann 2006: 57. ⁵¹ The term ‘deconstruction’ features in a number of To You, The Birdie! reviews and in several academic articles on the company’s aesthetic. On the former see, for example, Billington 2002a, and on the latter see Marranca 2003: 9 and Vanden Heuvel 2004.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

   ’   ,  !

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these minute elements to performative investigation. The resulting productions thus avoid presenting text and even bodily presence as a unified entity; in To You, The Birdie!, for example, the performers’ bodies were fragmented by vocal dubbing and pre-recorded images. The layering of different media opened up the potential meanings contained within individual characters rather than narrowing interpretation down towards one singular focus. Iconography and the effects of mediation were closely examined and problematized for the associations they carried. Such techniques work against totalizing discourses and, as Philip Auslander notes, result in productions that simultaneously occupy and resist the given structure of their source.⁵² Although the company’s performance strategies share characteristics with deconstruction it is problematic to view these surface similarities as equating to Derrida’s theory of interpretation. The Wooster Group’s productions do not have the same aims as deconstruction; they do not evince an interest in demonstrating how the structures in their source texts are interdependent, hierarchical, or defined by what is left unsaid, nor does their work attempt to critique the concept of a story having ascertainable metaphysical meaning. Furthermore, LeCompte claims not to have read any of the literature associated with deconstruction,⁵³ although rehearsal records for To You, The Birdie! indicate that LeCompte read (unspecified) Barthes texts during the devising process and Arnold Aronson notes that LeCompte’s comparison of her approach to that of post-impressionist painter Cézanne shows she was ‘at least instinctively aware of the postmodern strategy of incompletion and of its historical roots’.⁵⁴ Although it is possible to be versed in ideas of deconstruction without directly engaging with the relevant scholarship, an implicit relation to this literary theory is not a substantial enough connection to justify the application of the label ‘deconstruction’ to a performance. Although To You, The Birdie! should not be viewed as a deconstructive performance, the debates surrounding the political aspect of deconstruction can nevertheless assist one in comprehending the political dimension of the reception. There is substantial overlap, for example, in the statements made by political philosophy scholars who have analysed Derrida’s theories and theatre scholars who have analysed The Wooster ⁵² Auslander 1987: 29. ⁵³ Vanden Heuvel 2004: 76. ⁵⁴ See Quick 2007: 224 and Aronson 2000: 187.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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Group’s performance strategies. Catherine Zuckert is an example of the former, who notes that Derrida himself sees deconstruction emphatically as a political act as it provides a new way for constituting the world.⁵⁵ As deconstructive strategies highlight the instability of meaning, both Zuckert and Richard Beardsworth suggest that they have undeniable political implications.⁵⁶ Philip Auslander represents the latter group, and posits that because the company’s methods avoid unity and problematize the practitioners’ (and audience’s) relationship to text, they result in politically resistant art.⁵⁷ The Group’s methods can consequently similarly be thought of as highlighting the instability of meaning and offering a new way of constituting the world of the narrative. Greg Giesekam further argues that the disturbance created by The Wooster Group’s performance strategies is political ‘in its refusal to work toward closure and in the way in which the style of performance itself tends to undermine the actor’s presence and authority, thus demanding that spectators make their own judgments on the material’.⁵⁸ Paralleling the arguments in support of a political dimension to both strategies highlights one of the most significant elements of contemporary devised theatre: the fact that its political dimension is largely embodied in its aesthetic form. As discussed in Part I, the concept of a politics of form is crucial to the political dimension of postdramatic theatre. There is a political aspect contained in the cultural privileging of different art forms; form has the power to be coercive, imbued with a spirit of critique, and/or geared towards challenging a representational system of meaning or time.⁵⁹ Alongside these elements, which can be contained in any theatrical production, postdramatic theatre has an additional political dimension, support for which can be found in Jacques Rancière’s articulation of the political in avant-garde art. Rancière argues that there is a double dimension to how avant-garde art connects the aesthetic sphere with the political. Firstly, he posits that:

⁵⁵ Zuckert 1991: 335. ⁵⁶ See Zuckert 1991: 338 and Beardsworth 1996: xi. ⁵⁷ Auslander 1987: 29. ⁵⁸ Giesekam 2002: 332. See also Parker-Starbuck 2004: 227–8. ⁵⁹ For an overview of the theorists who have argued that form can involve such political aspects, see DeKoven 1992: 675–9, and for an indicative analysis of the politics associated with a specific writer’s form, see Sanyal 2006.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

   ’   ,  !

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there is the topographical and military notion of the force that marches in the lead, that has a clear understanding of the movement, embodies its forces, determines the direction of historical evolution, and chooses subjective political orientations.⁶⁰

Secondly, he suggests that avant-garde art is political because it contains an aesthetic anticipation of the future, via forms and structures that anticipate community and a political life programme to come.⁶¹ The Wooster Group is a self-consciously experimental performance troupe and their postdramatic productions can be viewed as embodying a politics of aesthetics. Although I have distinguished their more recent work from the historical avant-garde, Rancière’s suggestion that avantgarde art is political because it anticipates wider discourses, rather than purely aesthetic innovations, holds true for To You, The Birdie!’s engagement with both text and, for example, the theme of gender. Furthermore, the politics involved in the company’s productions more generally were heightened in To You, The Birdie! due to the canonical text in question being a classical tragedy. This is the case for two specific reasons. The first of these reasons lies in the subversive potential contained in performatively pulling apart a classical tragedy. It is possible to argue that the application of this strategy to any canonical text challenges our representational system and the cultural status quo and contains a spirit of critique. However, the fact that there is now an established practice of reading ancient tragedy through Aristotle indicates that the political dimension is heightened when working with classical texts. Aristotle’s Poetics, and particularly Renaissance interpretations of the treatise, provides Greek tragedy with an extra layer of reception that has encouraged a reading of the plays in terms of unities. There is now a strong strand of reception, particularly within the theatre and film industry, that maintains that tragic texts represent, and were written to aspire towards containing, a unity of time, place, and action.⁶² Although a classicist might dispute such a reading of Aristotle it is undoubtedly an influential mode of thought. It follows that if, for these audiences, tragedy is the best example of an ideal, unified narrative, then dismantling it is a more

⁶⁰ Rancière 2004: 29. ⁶¹ Rancière 2004: 29-30. ⁶² Consider, for example, the reading of the Poet. put forward in the Tierno 2002 guide for screenwriters.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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political act than, say, dismantling a canonical work of Shakespeare’s or Ibsen’s. The political dimension involved in dismantling a canonical tragedy is heightened when the play has been mediated via French classicism, and specifically via Racine, as the unities of time and space were more revered in neo-classical French plays than in Greek tragedy.⁶³ Furthermore, Racine’s Phèdre has a particularly prestigious reception history of its own which, generally speaking, is more exclusive in nature than the reception history of the extant Greek tragedies. Dramatic receptions of Phèdre include that of English poet Edmund Smith, whose 1707 Phaedra and Hippolytus owed, as Sophie Mills notes, much to Racine.⁶⁴ Smith’s play was joined by operatic receptions, such as Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1733 Hippolyte et Aricie, which had a libretto apparently based upon Racine’s text.⁶⁵ Furthermore, several key poets and dramatists have engaged with Phèdre in the present day, including both Ted Hughes and Timberlake Wertenbaker. Hughes’ text, in particular, has led to several high-profile professional productions, the first of which featured Diana Rigg in the title role and the most recent of which involved Helen Mirren playing Phèdre in a production that Nicholas Hytner directed.⁶⁶ The latter production was the first National Theatre Live broadcast. It was broadcast at over 250 cinemas internationally and played a crucial role in establishing what is now a key part of the National Theatre’s operations.⁶⁷ The associations Phèdre holds with French classicism, opera, and prominent writers and performers means that the tragedy is closely tied to high art traditions. Although many of the ancient tragedies have also been reinvented in opera and have moved through the hands of similarly esteemed practitioners, this history is combined with a variety of other populist and experimental forms of reception. Broadly speaking, the reception of Greek and Roman tragedy is found across all forms of culture, whereas Racine’s Phèdre is almost exclusively connected with ‘high culture’. To You, The Birdie! thus contrasted a prestigious ⁶³ On the ‘Aristotelian unities’ and Racine’s tragedies, see Norman 1998: 225 and James and Jondorf 1994: 6–12. On the reception of the Poet. in neo-classical France, and the effect of the treatise upon neo-classical French dramatists, see Halliwell 1986, esp. 301–8. ⁶⁴ Mills 2002: 118. ⁶⁵ On Rameau’s opera as a reception of Racine see Thomas 1998 and Norman 1998. ⁶⁶ Hytner was, at the time, the Artistic Director of the National Theatre. ⁶⁷ See Billington 2009.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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neo-classical tragedy with postdramatic techniques and an experimental ideology. The resulting form is consequently political from an aesthetic perspective and can be regarded as making an implicit statement about how audiences perceive different cultural endeavours. The second, related, reason that a politics of aesthetics may be heightened when applied to a classical text lies in the limitations one might see in my above statement regarding reading tragedy in terms of unities. The extant tragedies almost always fell short of Aristotle’s exacting standards, and Aristotle himself critiqued more tragedies than he praised when discussing how well they mapped on to his ideal tragic structure. The transmission process has further affected the degree to which the plays reflect his treatise. The notion that our extant tragedies, for all their merits, have come down to us as perfect dramatic texts is an illusion. The Wooster Group’s performance strategies can be read as bringing this illusion to the fore. Their choice of play reflects their focus on destabilising the idea of a perfect original source, as the Phaedra/Hippolytus myth has numerous ‘original’ versions, as Denard notes when he argues that ‘multi-perspectivalism is built into this [tragedy’s] history: there is no definitive “source” or “original”, and each “classic” is necessarily a betrayal of its (also “classic”) predecessors’.⁶⁸ The Wooster Group’s foregrounding of this dimension brought the always already deconstructed nature of ancient tragedy to the fore by showing how classical texts enable their own deconstruction through their imperfect form and reception history. The Wooster Group’s production thus represents a more complex politics than a hypothetical equivalent play that tore apart a non-classical canonical text.

Gender, Class, and the Classics in To You, The Birdie! As To You, The Birdie! continued, the action reinforced a focus both upon the ‘corrupted’ nature of the classics and the gender and class dimensions of the Phaedra/Hippolytus narrative. As Hippolytus and Theramenes finished their duologue Enone entered, shuffling forward on her knees. Speaking from behind a perspex wall she informed ⁶⁸ Denard 2003.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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Hippolytus that Phedre was ill. Hippolytus and Theramenes then agreed to leave but before exiting they played a game of badminton interspersed with abstract movements. A piercing whistle signaled the end of the scene, following which Video Venus delivered her first monologue, which took the place of Aphrodite’s opening monologue in Euripides’ tragedy. Phedre and Enone then entered. Phedre was costumed in a deep purple corset worn over a floor-length yellow skirt which was covered in a layer of purple gauze. She wore nothing under or over the corset making it a contemporary and provocative interpretation of seventeenth-century French court dress. A gold crown sat on her head and her shoulder-length dark hair hung freely. It was lank and visibly greasy, denoting her illness. Her arms were bound around the elbows behind her back, physically restricting her movement and, like the corset, representing both how trapped she was within her world and her incapacitating desire for Hippolytus. She entered from stage right and stood, ready to play a match of badminton against Enone; however, when the whistle blew and Enone, dressed similarly to Phedre but wearing dark, heavy fabrics and with her hair in a topknot, served, Phedre failed to raise her racket to hit the shuttlecock. Phedre immediately collapsed, before being picked up by the markers, who walked her downstage centre. She was positioned in front of a ground-level television, which displayed footage of her feet, from where she delivered her first monologue. As she spoke one of the markers cleaned her feet while a soundtrack of gurgling water with occasional bird sounds played intermittently in the background. It was difficult to determine what to make of the focus upon Phedre’s feet. For example, it could connect to the opening scene’s erotic dimension in that it fetishized Phedre’s body. Amy Holzapfel alternatively argues that as feet are anatomically dispensable (in contrast to, say, a torso) it reflected the dispensability of Phedre within the narrative.⁶⁹ It could also be read as grounding the character, or representing her mobility, in contrast to Enone who only ever crawled on her knees. Most likely, however, the technique assisted more generally in the company’s experimental reworking of Racine’s text. Anne Ubersfeld, for example, argues that in Racine’s Phèdre the human body almost always appears in

⁶⁹ Holzapfel 2008: 89.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

   ’   ,  !

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fragmentary form, and that this ‘synecdoche is not unintentional: it points to the impossibility of seizing the human body in its totality or in its unity’.⁷⁰ The effect of fracturing body parts through multimedia devices speaks to the idea of bodily fragmentation in Racine’s play, alongside facilitating The Wooster Group’s general representation of the classics as incomplete. The monologue that overlaid this footage was a stream-of-consciousness narration of Phedre’s inner thoughts and feelings bearing little relation to the tragic narrative. It opened with, for example, the barefooted Phedre stating ‘I used to exercise more, but now I find it beneath me. These aren’t the right shoes for playing anyway’. The lines were delivered quietly, in a near whisper and at a fast pace, and were interrupted by the occasional shout to Enone for her, for example, ‘Shoes!’, ‘Purse!’ or ‘Chair!’. The dialogue consequently worked in a similar way to Hippolytus’ and Theramenes’ hand movements in the opening moment in that it encouraged the audience to focus upon the televised rather than the live action. It contrasted with Phaedra’s first appearance in Phaedra’s Love, which featured sparse language rich in subtext that invited the audience to interrogate Phaedra’s psychological state. Furthermore, in To You, The Birdie! Valk crucially did not perform Phedre’s lines, but rather Scott Shepherd read the majority of Phedre’s dialogue from behind the badminton court.⁷¹ He recited the lines in a falsetto, which added a comic dimension to Phedre’s plight that was furthered through the interjection of numerous jokes.⁷² Shepherd’s voiceover represents a key example of how postdramatic productions position text as secondary to the visual and aural dimensions of performance. It supplemented the use of the televisions by further splintering the audience’s focus and referencing the multiple authorial hands at work, both within the devised production and through the tragedy’s transmission. Furthermore, it continued to foreground the significance of gender to the Group’s interpretation by ⁷⁰ Ubersfeld 1981: 209. ⁷¹ Jakovljevic notes that this doubling followed the radio broadcast of Schmidt’s script, in which Phedre’s every utterance was ‘accompanied by whispers and echoes of her own speech’. See Jakovljevic 2010: 96–7. ⁷² For example, when Shephard/Phedre made a reference to Phedre’s sister, Pasiphaë, he commented that ‘She loved animals. I mean she really loved animals’. The reference to Pasiphaë’s consummated lust for a bull prompted a laugh.

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replacing the narrative’s dominant female voice with a male one. On the surface this technique spoke to the ancient performance convention of all characters being played by male actors. However, the impact of this device lay primarily in the feminist statement it made about the representation of women both within the classics, and within the wider context in which To You, The Birdie! was situated. The ventriloquism technique rendered Phedre unable to speak for herself and created what Gerald Siegmund terms an absent third male body in the production.⁷³ Siegmund does not specify who the absent body represents; however, it can be viewed as referencing the male voices of, for example, Euripides, Seneca, and Racine as transmitters of the narrative. Beyond this, Johan Callens argues that it is an example of how The Wooster Group’s non-identificatory acting style operates ‘on the assumption that individual psychology often masks gender-related social and ideological constructs into which the spectators are forced by the traditional theater’s identificatory processes’.⁷⁴ Removing the dominant female voice from the play was a significant action that operated in a similar way to The Wooster Group’s use of blackface in Route 1 & 9. In this earlier production the company subversively attempted to draw attention to the implicit racism in much contemporary theatre as well as in early twentieth-century drama by explicitly foregrounding the issue. Here the company similarly drew attention to the suppression of the female voice in classic and contemporary theatre. The focus was mined from within the extant tragedies and brought to the fore. The historic absence of female writers narrating Phaedra’s story, and the restrictions placed upon her mobility despite her royalty and simply by virtue of her gender are all elements contained within The Wooster Group’s sources. Like the disconnected mise-en-scène, the ventriloquism also had a defamiliarizing effect that prompted a fresh engagement with the material. The effect was achieved by technological mediation. Shepherd’s reading was amplified with a one-and-a-half-second delay, which became apparent when the lines were part of a conversation or had accompanying gestures. The combination of the delay with the separation of the lines from the characters who were supposedly delivering them caused the dialogue to appear doubly disembodied from the action, representing

⁷³ Siegmund 2004: 176.

⁷⁴ Callens 2009: 154.

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Lehmann’s view that there is a perpetual conflict between text and scene in postdramatic theatre and that postdramatic productions reveal that ‘the word does not belong to the speaker. It does not organically reside in his/ her body but remains a foreign body’ [original emphasis].⁷⁵ A number of scholars have posited different hypotheses about the function of ventriloquism in To You, The Birdie!. For example, LeCompte herself states that she employed it in order to stop the performance sounding ‘like theatre’.⁷⁶ Denard sees it as a potential throwback to mask conventions in its separation of the voice from the body and rendering of the text as ‘simultaneously present and absent, forced into an oblique relationship with physical performance’.⁷⁷ Gaby Cody also argues that it represents an acknowledgement of the source text, this time Racine’s, in that it potentially references the process of declaiming rather than performing dialogue.⁷⁸ Although these are valid readings, the most pertinent element for my purposes is its effect. The separation of the dialogue from the action created what Lehmann terms a postdramatic textscape. Such a soundscape unifies silent film and radio drama by leading the audience towards invoking the imaginary visuality they would draw upon in a radio play, and the imaginary audio space they would invoke in a silent film.⁷⁹ Like the visual fracturing discussed in my overview of Hippolytus’ first scene, the technique of a postdramatic textscape acknowledged the tendency to break down the classics into constituent components for analysis, whilst also recognizing the benefits of this practice. It acted akin to a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in that it stopped one from becoming too engrossed or empathetically invested in the action and invited the audience to approach the visual and audio dimensions analytically. Invoking the notion of a Verfremdungseffekt also served to remind the audience of the production’s subtle political dimension, and encouraged the audience to view the character of Phedre as politically loaded. The scene additionally encouraged the audience to consider the political dimension not only of Phedre’s gender, but also of the social structures and class relations represented in the production. I previously mentioned that Phedre’s arms were bound behind her back, which alluded

⁷⁵ Lehmann 2006: 147. See also Lehmann 2006: 145–6. ⁷⁶ Quoted in the On Tour documentary included in the 2011 DVD of To You, The Birdie!. See The Wooster Group 2011. ⁷⁷ Denard 2003. ⁷⁸ Cody 2003: 173. ⁷⁹ Lehmann 2006: 148.

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to the way that social conventions restricted her freedom of expression and movement. The particular mannerisms and walking styles adopted by the other characters also represented their social status. Enone slid around the stage on her knees and only stood on her own feet when she paced, smoking, in front of the badminton court. Enone’s inability to use her full height when on the court was a physical representation of her low status. Phedre walked crab-like across the stage horizontally, representing her limited social mobility, and Theseus’ footsteps were amplified and echoed around the stage in a booming reminder of the weight of his authority. Furthermore, each character played badminton in a style representative of their characterization in Phèdre. Phedre’s costuming was so restrictive that she was not able to lift a racket, Enone crawled on her knees, and, as Ben Brantley notes, ‘Hippolytos [sic] is too easily rattled and keeps throwing down his racket. Theseus spikes the birdie with an angry, military hand’.⁸⁰ Finally, Jennifer ParkerStarbuck also notes that the audio-visual devices further exemplified the friction surrounding class divisions in the play as the television screens were only used for characters of status.⁸¹ A class-based tension can be found in the production’s source texts, although it is challenging to determine exactly what the ancient playwrights are saying about different social strata. Nevertheless, in Euripides’ Hippolytus there is an emphasis on what behaviours are appropriate in different realms of society. This focus is found, for example, in the foregrounding of Hippolytus’ behaviour as inappropriate in his opening monologue, and Phaedra’s evident disgust at her unfitting desire for Hippolytus in her conversation with the nurse. Furthermore, Hippolytus himself can be viewed as representing two particular classes in fifthcentury Athenian society. On the one hand Hippolytus embodies the noble youth and how the democratic political system affected this social group. L. B. Carter, in his analysis of apragmosyne, or quietism, in Athenian society argues that in the fifth century the aristocratic class, and particularly rich men and noble youths, were ideologically displaced by democracy and that they consequently retreated from politics.⁸² Carter believes that Euripides began exploring the possibilities of an apragmosyne existence in the late fifth century following the Sicilian ⁸⁰ Brantley 2002. ⁸² Carter 1986: 188.

⁸¹ Parker-Starbuck 2004: 225.

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disaster; Hippolytus, however, despite premièring in 428 BCE can also be read as referencing this demographic, particularly when Hippolytus states that he refuses to speak before a mob and will only practise oratory in narrow circles amongst his equals [986–9].⁸³ On the other hand, as Hanna Roisman has noted, Hippolytus represents the nothos class of illegitimate children in Athenian society and the potential difficulties they faced gaining parental acceptance.⁸⁴ Despite his royal lineage, as the child of the Amazonian Hippolyte and the Athenian Theseus Hippolytus would not have qualified for Athenian citizenship under Pericles’ citizenship law, which stipulated that Athenian citizenship only be granted to children of two Athenian citizens and that those with one citizen parent be classified as nothoi, illegitimate children, and denied civic rights. Roisman argues that Hippolytus’ extreme chastity can be viewed as an attempt to win his father’s acceptance; she argues that Hippolytus’ ‘pretense is that he is not a “real” bastard since he has the inborn virtues of a legitimate son’, and that Euripides leaves enough ambiguity for audiences to view the limitations placed upon Hippolytus’ character due to his nothos status as either fair or unfair.⁸⁵ The two readings, of Hippolytus as a disenfranchised noble or a nothos figure, may be in tension but nevertheless can be supported by Euripides’ text. Either interpretation of the script shows the potential for class dynamics to become a central component in production. Although the Euripidean class dimension was not foregrounded in To You, The Birdie! it was nevertheless present and coupled with a more explicit engagement with the broader issues surrounding class relations that are contained in the myth and were channeled through Racine. Many of Racine’s interventions into the Phaedra/Hippolytus story had the effect of emphasizing the social codes surrounding different classes. Hippolyte’s relationship with Aricie, for example, can be read as highlighting the practice of noble families marrying into political alliances for strategic reasons regarding power in the French court, and Œnone’s expanded role can be seen to draw attention to the gaps between different social demographics. The attention given to contrasting Œnone and Phèdre throughout the play can especially be viewed as foregrounding issues of status; Thomas Braga, for example, notes that these two women

⁸³ Carter 1986: 193.

⁸⁴ Roisman 1999, esp. 171–81.

⁸⁵ Roisman 1999: 173.

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‘express antithetical points of view, but at times each sustains the other in a tense psychological drama of light and dark, life and death, temporal and spiritual’.⁸⁶ The physicality of each character in To You, The Birdie! and the performance techniques applied in production recalled the class focus in the Phaedra/Hippolytus sources, as Savran attests when he posits that the company used Phèdre ‘to demonstrate the patterns of surrogacy and psychic ventriloquism that naturalize absolutism and neoclassical tragedy alike and that mask class relations’.⁸⁷ To You, The Birdie! was imbued with several implicit and explicit commentaries upon class relations; the production served to demonstrate how these issues resonate with contemporary society. Kane’s play shared a similar focus. Her reception, however, was more concerned with representing a modern monarchy and illuminating that royal family’s sexual misdemeanours in a way that spoke directly to its immediate socio-political environment. Irrespective of whether one reads Phaedra’s Love as commenting upon the British monarchy it served the function of interrogating whether monarchical institutions represent corrupted power structures. It demonstrated issues surrounding class divisions by juxtaposing a disenfranchised mass who end up rioting with a lethargic, self-interested royal family. In contrast, To You, The Birdie! did not make a singular concrete statement about class divisions but rather offered up numerous points for contemplation. For example, the physical restrictions embodied by Enone could be read as demonstrating her exceptionally limited social mobility, perhaps showing how the idea of the American dream was not an available reality for all. Furthermore, when Phedre later attempted to give Hippolytus the crown of Athens Shepherd ironically described searching for it in a cupboard filled with crowns from all the nations that Phedre’s father had conquered, which was performed complete with comical sound effects representing the crowns clanging together and falling onto the floor, alongside ironic asides about Minos’ exploits: ‘Every week my father would come with a new crown, big grin on his face. Sometimes the crown would come with a head on it. Ghastly’. The commentary could be read as extending the class-based interrogations into a different type of power structure: that of modern imperialism.

⁸⁶ Braga 1990: 289.

⁸⁷ Savran 2004: 67.

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The trifold focus on the ‘corrupted’ nature of the classics and how the Euripidean/Senecan/Racinian themes of gender and class continue to interrogate modern issues persisted throughout the remainder of the play and, for example, could also be seen when Phedre confessed her feelings to Hippolytus at the halfway point of the production. The lead up to the confession was largely filled with Phedre and Enone’s duologue, during which Phedre appeared to grow increasingly ill, quivering as she confessed her guilty lust to Enone. A perplexing soundtrack could be heard underneath the dialogue; splashing water accompanied Phedre’s movements, and in the background female singing, the noise of plucking badminton strings, and at one point a crying baby could all be heard. The conversation continued for several minutes, with Shepherd providing the voiceover for the entire scene. The television screen hid Phedre’s feet for the majority of the exchange. The only exception to this was when the screen, attached to one of the metal poles, rose vertically and was positioned in front of Phedre’s head. In the pre-recorded footage displayed on the screen Valk appeared with a shaved head and no crown, further fracturing any sense of temporal unity. Phedre pressed her forehead and palms against the camera lens creating the impression that Phedre was trapped inside the television and endeavouring to escape. The multimedia device provided a metaphor for Phedre’s incapacitating desire for Hippolytus and worked together with her restricted torso and bound arms; she could not escape from her consuming desire, her status as queen, or her family’s curse, all of which alluded to what Ubersfeld perceives as the central motive of Racine’s tragedy: dreaming of being elsewhere and attempting to escape.⁸⁸ At the end of their conversation, when Enone had convinced Phedre to speak to Hippolytus, Phedre began convulsing, following which she relieved herself using a bedpan and with the assistance of the markers. Phedre, Enone, and the markers then played a game of badminton. At the game’s conclusion Venus called out ‘players are reminded not to cross me’, at which point the confession scene began. The central scene between Hippolytus and Phedre involved Shepherd performing both characters’ lines. It commenced with Hippolytus’ head bobbing up and down behind the court, implying that he was swimming

⁸⁸ Ubersfeld 1981: 206.

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laps in a pool. Phedre then entered and approached Hippolytus before falling to her knees. She appeared to descend into a fit, writhing and grasping for Hippolytus until Enone and the two markers entered and restrained her. They pulled Phedre to her feet and prompted her to deliver her lines to Hippolytus. Phedre, miming, attempted to seduce Hippolytus as Shepherd delivered the dialogue. Hippolytus, emerging from the pool, flexed his muscles and adopted poses recognizable from classical sculpture such as the Discobolus. He made his way towards Phedre, Enone, and the two markers. Hippolytus’ bodily presence further layered the classical sources at play in the scene whilst metaphorically alluding to his stiff, unemotional interactions with Phedre; she may as well have been confessing her love to a sculpture. A perspex wall was then pushed in front of the group to frame the action, following which Phedre sat down on a commode chair. She, through Shepherd, began to speak in French as Enone and the markers administered an enema. Meanwhile, Phedre grabbed at Hippolytus, who now stood in front of her, naked except for a small towel covering his groin. He appeared confused about what he should be doing rather than revolted. Phedre’s enema was accompanied by representative, amplified sound effects. The language transition had the effect of heightening the intensity of Phedre’s confession. Shepherd spoke in a faux-French accent about Phedre’s desire. The scene was not surtitled; the language transition served to provide a romantic, melodramatic soundscape for the action which emphasized the potential for romance between Phedre and Hippolytus. The scatological sound effects and onstage action, however, undercut the romantic connotations and worked to provoke a reaction of disgust in the audience. Phedre’s behaviour following the procedure exacerbated this reaction as she proceeded to walk around the stage with the enema hose trailing between her legs. Hippolytus’ rejection consequently made Phedre appear particularly pathetic. Jakovljevic argues that The Wooster Group’s inclusion of a scatological episode is justified by the text and historically accurate as the hysteria Racine paints Phèdre as suffering would often have been treated by enemas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁸⁹ Enemas were a ⁸⁹ Jakovljevic 2010: 99–101. Rather than characterize Phedre as suffering from a general hysteria, Phedre’s illness is characterized in Schmidt’s script as a blood-born virus and described by LeCompte in a rehearsal diary as AIDS. Schmidt died of the AIDS virus,

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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prominent metaphor throughout To You, The Birdie! and appeared in several significant moments including the suicides of Enone and Phedre, with the former drowning herself in a bowl of enema-products and the latter using one to administer poison. Although the audience may have associated the enemas with Racine’s historical context, or even with Euripides’ text through their cleansing and consequent cathartic dimensions, in performance the primary functions of the enema and its staging were to create affect, to comment upon the source material, and to emphasize the different statuses of the characters. By overlaying Phedre’s attempted seduction of Hippolytus with the administration of an enema the scene highlighted how the neo-classical source explored female vulnerability and discomfort for the audience’s pleasure. The bordered perspex wall further exemplified the audience’s voyeuristic role as it visually framed the action. Kane’s decision to have Phaedra perform oral sex on Hippolytus in Scene Four of Phaedra’s Love worked similarly in that the public nature of both acts demeaned the characters. In To You, The Birdie! the scene intensified the gender focus of the production and aligned Phedre’s suffering with the trope of the female victim. It also served to highlight the class divisions within the play through the unseemliness of the task given to Enone and the markers. Most significantly, however, it reinforced the defamiliarizing function of the performance by further splintering Phedre’s character and the textual landscape. The introduction of a new language to the ventriloquism device rendered the scene more impenetrable than the previous ones. Even for audience members fluent in French, it provided another dimension through which the action needed to be translated. The scene had a bewildering and confusing effect that was almost impossible to extract meaning from during a first viewing. Indeed, the busyness of the stage action could be read as a metaphor for the number of hands which have shaped what we now think of as the Phaedra/Hippolytus story. The multiplicity of referents could be viewed as representing the different accretions of meaning that the narrative has become imbued with over time through the transmission process and the texts’ reception history. The scene suggested that these layers have resulted in the exaggeration of the baseness of Phedre’s desire. Rather than create a clear, meaning the play likely contains an element of autobiography. See Quick 2007: 230, Jones 1999, and Diamond and Sellar 2000: 94.

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logical, and uniform portrayal of Phedre’s confession or offer insight into her mindset, To You, The Birdie! foregrounded the shock and awe surrounding Phedre’s exchange with Hippolytus in the narrative. The production’s focus on exposing the corrupted nature of the classics and the source texts’ tensions surrounding gender and class continued in the final third of the play, which saw the arrival of Dafoe’s Theseus. Shortly after the enema episode Phedre and Enone exited the stage. Theramenes then entered. Hippolytus and Theramenes stood behind a perspex wall, whispering into microphones and having a conversation during which Hippolytus announced that he had decided to leave Troezen. The lighting then changed to a blackout. When the lights came back on Phedre and Enone were once again onstage. Phedre now wore a train, tied to her skirt, and used a walking stick. During a duologue with Enone Phedre initially decided to offer Hippolytus the crown of Athens, before receiving news that Theseus was alive. Enone then suggested that Phedre accuse Hippolytus of rape. The women kissed, and then the entire cast joined together for a badminton game. At this moment Theseus entered. The audience heard his loud, booming footsteps before they saw him. A television screen, on the upstage centre edge of the court, flickered on, which depicted a broken marble sculpture of a muscular torso against a green screen. The scene consequently continued what Lehmann identifies as The Wooster Group’s postdramatic focus on ‘the co-presence of video image and live actor, functioning in general as the technically mediated self-referentiality of the theatre’ [original emphasis].⁹⁰ Theseus then appeared, shirtless and wearing a grey skirt overlaid with a white apron. He walked across the stage and stood in the centre, from where he adopted the pose of the sculpture seen on the upstage television, froze, and commanded, ‘Look at me!’. Theseus interspersed his remaining scenes, in which Phedre and Enone died by suicide and Theramenes reported Hippolytus’ death, with similar poses, all of which were accompanied with the same imperative. Dafoe is an imposing, muscular actor, and this consequently had a farcical effect and made him appear as a cartoon-like hero. The crumbling sculptures, however, again served to reinforce the fractured nature of the sources that the production was built upon and alluded to

⁹⁰ Lehmann 2006: 168.

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the fact that perhaps The Wooster Group’s depiction of the story was not ironic but an authentic representation of the unembellished sources. When the action continued and Theseus began interacting with the other characters he again behaved in a commanding, highly physical manner complete with sexualized movement routines performed not only with Phedre, but also with anyone who happened to be around.⁹¹ For example, when Hippolytus entered (before Theseus was aware of his supposed crime) the two men performed a sensual dance routine which saw them embrace intimately on the floor. Hippolytus clasped at Theseus’ hands and threw himself on Theseus’ prone body while a prerecorded conversation between Theseus and Hippolytus played in the background, in which Hippolytus asked Theseus for permission to leave Troezen; Hippolytus’ dialogue, in which he exclaimed he would ‘do such things the world will wonder at, and prove that I’m your son!’ matched his movements, showing the unequal relationship between the two men and Hippolytus’ extreme efforts to make his impassive father acknowledge him. Although Dafoe was the more passive dancer in the exchange he was nevertheless the controlling force, working like a magnet pulling Hippolytus towards him. A parallel can be drawn between the active Hippolytus and the passive Theseus here and the active Phedre and passive Hippolytus in the confession scene, as both relationships were defined by unrequired love. The parallel arguably extends to the production’s focus on the corrupted nature of the classics; just like with Phedre and Hippolytus, the object of our affection is not what we think it to be, and perhaps does not reciprocate our affection. Although the hyper-sexualized Hippolytus from the opening scene of To You, The Birdie! did not represent a problematic form of masculinity, Dafoe’s Theseus did hold such a function, both in his inappropriate behaviour with the other characters, seen, for example, when he assaulted one of the markers, and in his somewhat two-dimensional representation of the hero Theseus. The representation furthered shattered the audience’s perception of the classics; just as previous scenes had drawn attention to the fact that sculptures rarely survive in the form of pristine, polished white marble and that tragic texts are not ⁹¹ The sequence between Theseus and Hippolytus was an example of the performers reenacting choreography from a modern dance, as is evident from the side-by-side recordings in The Wooster Group 2017.

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authentic records of an ancient tragedian’s words but the product of accretions and interventions, Dafoe’s Theseus too highlighted how popular understandings of Theseus are partial and turn a blind eye to his sexual misdemeanours and assaults.⁹² In a sense Dafoe’s Theseus unconsciously builds upon the portrayal of this character in Phaedra’s Love. Theseus appeared only in the final two scenes of Kane’s play, initially in full military regalia as he mourns Phaedra’s corpse before appearing in disguise when waiting for Hippolytus outside the court. Nevertheless, he was a problematic, hyper-masculine figure, with his portrayal of a grieving, widowed war hero juxtaposing with his brutal assault of his stepdaughter Strophe in Scene Eight. Both depictions engaged with contemporary tensions surrounding ideas of masculinity and encouraged a reappraisal of the heroes that we pedestalize from antiquity. The final scenes of To You, The Birdie! happened at a fast pace in direct contrast to the protracted, stream-of-consciousness monologues in the opening of the production. The perspex frames slid across the stage, accompanied by a ‘ding’ sound-effect, to frame individual moments, such as Phedre’s hysterical revelation of Hippolytus’ looming destruction to Enone, and Theramenes’ consequent revelation to Theseus of Hippolytus’ death. Throughout the quick succession of deaths— Enone’s and Phedre’s both onstage, and Hippolytus’ recounted through Theramenes’ delivery of Racine’s messenger speech—Video Venus’ head could be seen on the television screen, looking back and forth as if continuing to observe a badminton tournament.⁹³ She continued doing this right until the play’s final moment, during which Phedre, postenema, collapsed, with her death animated with computer game sound effects, before Theseus delivered his final lines and exited. The central television screen then moved down to the centre of the pole, where Video Venus could be seen, still looking back and forth, oblivious to the tragedy which had just unfolded, before the lights went black. * * *

⁹² The myths involving Theseus extend far beyond his well-known abandonment of Ariadne and include, for example, an abduction of Helen and an attempted abduction of Persephone. ⁹³ The two onstage deaths represent Lehmann’s conceit that ‘dramatic process occurred between the bodies; the postdramatic occurs with/on/to the body’ [original emphasis]. See Lehmann 2006: 163.

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As with many postdramatic classical receptions the critical reaction to To You, The Birdie! was polemic; the production was not populist theatre nor easy watching, but rather offered the audience a bewildering experience in which narrative was fractured and co-existed with an absurd, abstract soundscape, and the performers were constantly breaking out into seemingly impromptu physical routines apparently unrelated to the play. Yet the heavily intellecutalized production nevertheless can prompt new understanding of the political issues associated with gender and class within classical and neo-classical texts. It additionally is revelatory as to the role of the political in devised theatre due to the politics associated with the Group’s method; they fractured canonical texts of Western literature, demeaned classical heroes to show their base instincts and status as sexual predators, and highlighted, through disembodied dialogue and the contrasting of heightened scenes and intense exchanges, the pervasive political relevance of the source texts’ content. As a paradigmatic example of a devised classical reception, To You, The Birdie! attests to how postdramatic receptions can push spectators towards interrogating the role of the classics in the modern world, and how postdramatic theatre, and devised theatre in particular, can be a highly political form of performance. Similarly, The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes brought together postdramatic techniques and classical tragedy to focus upon and problematize how we engage with antiquity today, and served to reconfigure the way that audiences understand the gender and sexual politics of tragedy. Taken together, both To You, The Birdie! and Thyestes represent the undeniably political dimension of devised postdramatic classical performance receptions.

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5 The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes Devising became an increasingly prevalent and arguably more mainstream method of making theatre towards the end of the twentieth century. Within the United Kingdom, for example, Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender note that devising went from a ‘fairly marginal position in the 1970s to one of significant disciplinary and institutional orthodoxy by the first decade of the twenty-first century’.¹ Although prominent devising ensembles such as The Wooster Group, Frantic Assembly, Forced Entertainment, and Complicité may not (or no longer) be avant-garde in the true sense of the term there are still countless instances of newly emerging companies using devising as an experimental methodology. Such examples are particularly prominent in twenty-first-century Australian theatre history; Sarah French, for example, names The Rabble, The Hayloft Project, The Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, and Fraught Outfit as exemplars of this trend.² These ensembles often have a life span of under a decade and dissolve when individual artists become known and sought after in their own right; however, the productions created have an enduring legacy within theatre history, touring internationally and holding identifiable influence upon the artists’ later work. Their pieces of classical reception are consequently crucial to an understanding of the role of tragedy in postdramatic theatre and additionally illuminate the political dimension of contemporary devised theatre from the opposite end of the spectrum to To You, The Birdie!. The Hayloft Project’s 2010 reimagining of Seneca’s Thyestes is a case in point. Director Simon Stone founded The Hayloft Project in 2007 and was Artistic Director from 2007–10.³ The company produced work in a variety ¹ Harvie and Lavender 2010: 2. ² French 2017: 187. ³ Anne-Louise Sarks served as Artistic Director from 2010–13. Benedict Hardie became Aristic Director in 2013 and moved the company from Melbourne to Sydney. No work has been made under the auspices of The Hayloft Project since 2014. Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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of formats, including productions attributed to a single author, with joint directors, and via more traditional devising models of ensemble-wide collaborative creation. Although the company experimented with mixed methods of artistic creation a collaborative methodology underpinned all practice; they describe their mission as to ‘develop and extend our collaborative theatremaking practice, [and] to find new forms, voices and narratives’, and note that in their work: Creative decisions are influenced equally by the input of actor, designer, writer, stage manager, musician and director. The piece that evolves is the result of the negotiations between these parties. There is no single vision that drives the piece, rather many imaginations intersecting at one point.⁴

Like The Wooster Group, the company predominantly focus upon radical reimaginings of canonical texts.⁵ Following Thyestes, for example, The Hayloft Project developed productions of Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the entire Theban cycle, titled The Seizure and By Their Own Hands respectively. They have also recreated dramas by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Gorky.⁶ Furthermore, since resigning from The Hayloft Project Stone himself has directed three other productions based upon Greek tragedies: in early 2014 he directed a production inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia at Theater Oberhausen in Germany; in 2014 he directed his own adaptation of Euripides’ Medea at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam;⁷ and in 2018 he directed Eine griechische Trilogie, which incorporated Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Euripides’ Troades, and Euripides’ Bacchae, at the Berliner Ensemble. The politics associated with The Wooster Group’s

⁴ The Hayloft Project 2013 and 2018. ⁵ An additional parallel between the work of Stone and The Wooster Group can be found in their controversial adaptations of work still within copyright. Just as The Wooster Group was forced to close L.S.D. ( . . . Just the High Points) due to Arthur Miller threatening legal action over their unauthorized inclusion of excerpts of The Crucible in the production, so too did Stone find himself in hot water due to his alteration of the ending of Death of a Salesman in his 2012 Belvoir production. The Miller estate threatened to withdraw the rights to production if the play’s epilogue was not reinserted into the drama. For details on the L.S.D. controversy see Aronson 1985. For details on the Death of a Salesman controversy see Frew 2012. ⁶ 3xSisters was based upon Chekhov’s Three Sisters and opened on 24 April 2009. The Only Child was based upon Ibsen’s Little Eyolf and opened on 17 September 2009. The Nest was based upon Gorky’s The Philistines and opened on 4 December 2010. ⁷ Medea is still in production, and is currently touring the international festival circuit. The Internationaal Theater Amsterdam was formerly known as Toneelgroep Amsterdam.

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radical deconstruction of classical texts can consequently also be found in The Hayloft Project’s work.

Devising and Performing Thyestes The Hayloft Project developed Thyestes during their time as the 2010 resident company at Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Australia.⁸ Director Simon Stone and actors Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, and Mark Leonard Winter developed the production during a research and development period in May 2010 and an eight-week devising period from July to September.⁹ The production premièred on 16 September 2010 in the Tower Theatre at Malthouse. It was marketed as co-written by the four artists; Stone notes that they: divided the scenes between each other, wrote a draft then handed it on for redrafting by one of the others. We rehearsed the scenes as we wrote them, improvised on their basic structure, documented this new text, rewrote the scenes, re-rehearsed them, improvised again, rewrote and so on into previews and throughout the season.¹⁰

Critics commented on the significance of the collaborative methodology; Sarah Adams, for example, noted that the company as a whole ‘love to interrogate the process of making a piece of theatre and to use collaboration from participants at all levels’ and that in this instance ‘each member forms a part of the whole, rather than being tweaked like puppets at the hands of a single masterful director’.¹¹ Although Seneca’s tragedy provided inspiration for the adaptation no dialogue from the source tragedy made its way into the resulting production, unlike To You, The Birdie! which despite its postdramatic form contained extensive dialogue from Paul Schmidt’s translation of Phèdre. Instead, the company took Seneca’s brutal dénouement, in which Thyestes unknowingly eats his own children during a banquet prepared by his brother Atreus, as a springboard and created twelve stand-alone scenes which explored the prelude to and aftermath of this atrocity. ⁸ Malthouse commissioned the production and provided The Hayloft Project with rehearsal and performance space, box office support, a marketing strategy, and a readymade audience. See Potts 2011: 16. Throughout this chapter Thyestes refers to The Hayloft Project’s production and not Seneca’s tragedy, unless otherwise indicated. ⁹ Stone 2012: 39. ¹⁰ Stone 2012: 39. ¹¹ Adams 2010.

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The twelve scenes which made up Thyestes depicted the moments before and after the various—often bloody—plot points within the House of Atreus myth cycle. The decision to focus on the invisible moments of the story meant that many of the actual crimes were relegated to the spaces between the scenes. Evoking the ancient performance convention of keeping violence offstage brought the importance of the offstage/onstage boundary to the fore and invited the audience to consider the limits of representation, much like Greek tragedy does.¹² The strategy arose from the company’s psychological approach to the play which saw them set out to explore the psychology of both perpetrator and victim by presenting ‘a selection of conversations amidst the terror, and to play these scenes in as modern and realistic a way as possible’.¹³ The expanded version represented events from Atreus and Thyestes’ murder of their stepbrother Chrysippus until Aegisthus’ murder of Atreus.¹⁴ The performance was structured into two parts with the first half, from the murder of Chrysippus until the development of the love triangle between Atreus, Thyestes, and Aerope, playing in chronological order and the second half, from Atreus’ murder of Thyestes’ children through to Aegisthus’ murder of Atreus, in reverse chronological order. The banquet scene, despite being the mid-point of the narrative story, consequently acted as the finale of Thyestes just like in Seneca’s tragedy. ¹² Atreus’ murder, which took place onstage in Scene Twelve, proved an exception to the focus on the moments between atrocities. Winter noted that the company’s focus was ‘harking back to what the Greeks actually did with these shows [ . . . ] it leaves more to the imagination, and it’s more theatrically relatable for a contemporary audience. You get that sense of excitement or dread’. See Bithell 2012. It is problematic to think of tragedy as never including violence onstage given the question marks surrounding the performance of moments such as Ajax’s suicide and the murder of Niobe’s daughters in Soph. Aj. and his non-extant Niobe respectively. ¹³ Stone 2012. ¹⁴ The structure of Thyestes bears a striking similarity to the narrative that A. C. Pearson proposes was covered in the non-extant Sophoclean plays about Atreus and Thyestes. He argues that ‘On these facts it has generally been held that Sophocles wrote three plays dealing with the gruesome legends concerning the two brothers; that the famous incidents of the golden lamb and the Thyestes-feast occurred in the Atreus; and that the plays entitled Thyestes related to the unnatural intercourse of Thyestes with his daughter, and the fatal issue by which Aegisthus became the appointed avenger of his father’. See Pearson 1917: 91. It is unlikely, however, that The Hayloft Project were aware of these obscure Sophoclean fragments. Furthermore, although Sophocles wrote multiple plays about Thyestes and Atreus there is no evidence indicating that they were part of the same trilogy. Any similarity between these plays and Thyestes is most likely coincidental.

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The narrative scope and the plot order, or the production’s fabula and sjužet, created a highly postdramatic temporal dimension. It rejected Aristotle’s preferred timespan by bridging several generations and, as Lehmann requires, created gaps which ‘function as points of intrusion for external reality’.¹⁵ The performance design, which enclosed the action in a bordered, cinema-like box, further reinforced this postdramatic nature and meant that the production could be viewed temporally as representing Lehmann’s postdramatic ‘aesthetic of video clips’, which segments theatrical time like a television series.¹⁶ An additional superficial postdramatic element could be found in the reversal, which served to disrupt the performance’s linearity and confuse and discomfort the audience, many of whom would not necessarily be familiar with the wider narrative that the company had incorporated into the production. Despite these clear postdramatic elements there was, however, an undeniably Aristotelian quality to the structure of the piece. Stone notes, for example, that the two halves represented the cause and effect of Atreus’ infanticide.¹⁷ Furthermore the decision to reverse the second half retained the climactic anagnorisis and created an arresting dramaturgy involving both halves of the play heading towards one horrific dénouement. In addition to complexifying the production’s Aristotelian engagement The Hayloft Project’s strategy of supplementation also created a dialogue between the work and other pieces of classical reception. A strategy of supplementation is common in contemporary classical performance receptions and is also found, for example, in John Barton’s 1980 The Greeks and Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1990–2 Les Atrides. These methods are often employed in service of psychological realism; Mnouchkine’s decision to portray Iphigenia’s sacrifice as a prologue to her production of the Oresteia, for example, provided a psychological motivation for Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon.¹⁸ Supplementing a core tragic narrative with information from the characters’ mythological backstories provides contextual information that one imagines an ancient audience would have held during the original performances and engages with ideas and narrative allusions contained in the ancient tragedies’ choral odes. One reason that experimental receptions such as The Hayloft Project’s ¹⁵ Lehmann 2006: 160. ¹⁶ Lehmann 2006: 158. ¹⁷ Stone 2012: 39. ¹⁸ A similar device operated in the Almeida Theatre’s 2015 production of the Oresteia.

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can paradoxically be thought of as conservative lies in their frequent avoidance of recreating choral odes, which are often arguably the most complex and ambiguous elements of ancient tragedies, and their decision instead to embed the background information more obviously and linearly into the narrative. Thyestes was set in a traverse stage involving the audience separated into two halves facing each other on opposite sides of the stage.¹⁹ The seating was steeply raked so that spectators could clearly view those sitting opposite them, with the stage suspended in the middle.²⁰ In the context of a Senecan tragedy the traverse could be thought to invoke the idea of a gladiatorial arena, where an audience watches other spectators watching violence. It emphasized the process of viewing and being viewed by making each audience member part of someone else’s mise-en-scène. Although a traverse configuration is in itself not related to any individual postdramatic technique it served to pull focus from the action and contributed in part to how the production can be thought of as an example of postdramatic theatre. Postdramatic performances often question the hierarchy that privileges language, diction, and gesture and subordinates visual qualities such as the experience of an architectonic space;²¹ the traverse assisted in dissolving this logocentric hierarchy. The configuration could also be thought of as commenting upon the impossibility of receiving antiquity in a uniform way as the seating physically demonstrated the different and partial yet not mutually exclusive perspectives that we take upon antiquity. The stage in the centre of the space was a starkly lit whitewashed rectangle of approximately two by three metres, with the long sides aligning with the audience seating and the short sides walled in (Fig. 5.1). It appeared as an elevated box with no visible entrance or exit except through the audience seating. The space was lit with overhead fluorescent lighting rather than traditional theatre lights, which further bleached out the space. The lighting was a brilliant stark white for the first half of the performance which changed to a sickly yellow colour for the majority of the second act.²² The harsh lighting

¹⁹ My analysis of the performance draws upon the version staged on 10 October 2010. Quotes are drawn from Henning, Ryan, Stone, and Winter 2012. ²⁰ For further detail on the seating configuration see Hamilton 2014: 523–4. ²¹ See Lehmann 2006: 86. ²² Scene Twelve, Eleven, Nine, and Eight were lit yellow.

Figure 5.1. Scene Seven, Thyestes. Photo: Heidrun Löhr.

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emphasized the spotlessness and bleakness of the space and was described by the performers as a ‘sterile minimalism’ that has a ‘nowhere quality to it’ and is ‘just diseased’.²³ Stone employed it again in Medea, where it created ‘a kind of twilight zone, somewhere beyond this earthly existence’.²⁴ The atemporal location was neither contemporary nor classical and served to remind the audience of the enduring nature of the story. It was in stark contrast to the explicit geographical setting of Seneca’s text.²⁵ Critic Alison Croggon further argues that it reflected ‘the absolute moral world of classical tragedy [ . . . ] this is a universe of darkness visible, where the hidden is dragged into the unforgiving light’.²⁶ Solid black, soundless curtains dropped from the roof and took the place of the missing walls between scenes.²⁷ A text bar filled with red LED lights hung in front of each curtain. The text bars listed the scene number—crucial information when the production began reversing— and summarized the plot points underpinning what was to be seen on stage. Margaret Hamilton argues that the LED text contributed to the episodic structure of the production.²⁸ When the audience entered the Tower Theatre the black curtains were lowered. The Tower is a flexible studio space which can be arranged as a traverse, an end stage, or in the round, and the initial impression of the configuration was of an end stage.²⁹ When the curtain raised to reveal the action the sight of a reciprocal audience staring back came as a surprise; the voyeuristic dimension immediately altered the dynamic of the production by confounding expectations. The initial surtitles announced: Scene One: Ancient Greece, Kingdom of Pisa. King Pelops has declared his bastard child, Chrysippus, heir to the throne. Enraged, his wife, Queen Hippodamia, convinces her sons, Atreus and Thyestes, to kill their half-brother Chrysippus [Act One, Scene One, Page 1].

²³ Henning, quoted in Hamilton 2014: 526. ²⁴ Wensink 2014. ²⁵ Sen. Thyestes is set outside the palace of Mycenae, and R. J. Tarrant notes it is unusual in the prominence it gives to this physical setting. See Tarrant 1985: 45. ²⁶ Croggon 2010. ²⁷ The cast refer to the visual segmenting of scenes as the ‘shutter concept’. See King 2018. ²⁸ Hamilton 2014: 522. Croggon posited that the LED screens linked the production with the tradition of opera, and the emotional excess often associated with this genre. See Croggon 2010. ²⁹ Malthouse 2018.

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The raised curtain revealed three casually dressed men onstage: one in all black, including black Wayfarers, black skinny jeans, a black duffle coat, and aged brown R. M. Williams boots, one in dark grey jeans, black dress shoes, a white V-neck t-shirt, and a black suit jacket, and one in blue jeans, a grey hooded sweatshirt, and Converse sneakers. These men would later be identified as Atreus (Winter), Thyestes (Henning), and Chrysippus (Ryan) respectively.³⁰ The audience took part in a mental guessing-game as to which actor was playing which character for the entire opening scene; critic Kevin Jackson notes that ‘Remembering this [that two of the men will shortly murder the third] and solving this in the heat of the scene action is part of the cryptic and cultural shocks’.³¹ The scene began in medias res, with the curtain opening to reveal the three men sitting on the floor, sharing a bottle of red wine, with their backs against one of the side walls.³² They were mid-conversation with one of the men (Chrysippus) narrating a story about getting stood up at Miami airport by a new girlfriend and consequently finding himself abandoned in Guatemala and taking refuge at a priests’ conference. The story was told casually, with persistent interjections and questions from the other two men, one of whom (Atreus) distractedly played with his phone throughout. The phone frequently beeped, signaling the receipt of text messages. The scene grew increasingly farcical as it went on, progressing from one anecdote to the next and touching upon, for example Chrysippus getting his dates wrong and arriving in Guatemala an entire month early, and Atreus dating an opera singer and tucking an iPod headphone into his sleeve and listening to a wildlife documentary during his girlfriend’s performance in Don Giovanni. At times the dialogue was sexist with Atreus, for example, describing his sex life in graphic detail; however, the manner of delivery somewhat disarmed the audience. The banter and anecdotes had the effect of establishing a sense of comradery between the three men, weaving an affectionate relationship imbued with a rich history. Its relaxed, carefree nature quickly made the audience forget about the upcoming murder; Croggon argues that ‘it winds you into its double reality: the three actors perform with an almost documentary realism ³⁰ Roles are incorrectly attributed in the published script. ³¹ Jackson 2012. ³² I avoid referring to stage left and stage right in this performance analysis, as the stage quadrants differed depending upon which bank of the audience each spectator was sat in.

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that at first makes you believe you’re overhearing three young men passing the time, late at night, at a party’.³³ Although there were subtle hints in the dialogue as to which man might be Chrysippus, as one of the men repeatedly focused upon his aspirations for the future, the emptiness of the set and lack of obviously choreographed stage action encouraged the audience to focus upon the humorous tales rather than search for clues as to the men’s identities.³⁴ The absence of discernable narrative eventually became noticeable, however, prompting members of the audience to become restless and wonder what was happening and consequently remember what they were waiting for. In performance the scene ran for approximately twenty minutes, which was almost one quarter of the entire production. The suspension and subsequent reinstating of anticipation heightened dramatic tension. After a certain length of time there was a discernible change in the room’s atmosphere, with spectators increasingly observing each other, rather than the action, and waiting to see when other audience members would register what they were waiting for. When the audience’s laughter dried up and the auditorium was filled with silence the more casually dressed individual turned to the one in the duffle coat and asked for his iPod so he could play music. Having received it he turned his back and chose Roy Orbison’s ‘Anything You Want’. The other two men stood behind him, glaring at one another. The proxemics of one man facing the wall with his back to the other two made it clear that this more casually dressed man was the target. Although the audience was encouraged to grow fond of and invested in all three individuals, the dialogue and costuming established Chrysippus as the youngest and most naïve of the three, making his ignorance during this moment particularly poignant. The other two individuals stood, glaring at one another, before the one in the suit jacket eventually pulled a revolver out of his pocket and cocked it, the sound of which was inaudible over the music. The curtain fell before the shot was fired. The devised nature of Thyestes facilitated the practitioners’ ability to time the transition from casual conversation to murder in line with

³³ Croggon 2010. ³⁴ Chrysippus’ focus upon the future reflects a common characterization strategy for individuals who meet an early demise, as audience knowledge of their unfulfilled ambitions heightens the pathos of the situation.

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the audience’s response. Although well-written drama can similarly manipulate an audience, the improvisation contained in Scene One and the unpredictable quality of the scene implicitly heightened the sense of danger; not only did the audience not know exactly what was going to happen, but neither did the performers. The scene also demonstrated just some of the many postdramatic techniques contained in this radical reinvention of Seneca’s tragedy, the most immediately obvious of which was the postdramatic use of space. Although the term ‘sitespecific’ usually refers to a production informed by and staged in an unusual geographic location, The Hayloft Project’s unconventional audience configuration shared several qualities with Lehmann’s views on sitespecificity as the audience operated like a spatial environment, becoming ‘a co-player without having a definite significance’.³⁵ The audience involvement in Thyestes was distinct from that in immersive theatre in that the audience was always adjacent to the action and was never part of the narrative; however, their visible presence informed the performance and affected its phenomenological impact.³⁶ As the scene progressed it additionally became clear that a postdramatic use of time was also in place as the performance reflected Lehmann’s attestation that ‘Consciously noticeable duration is the first important factor of time distortion in the experience of contemporary theatre [ . . . ] the prolongation of time is a prominent trait of postdramatic theatre’ [original emphasis].³⁷ The scene contravened standard dramaturgical conventions in that it continued for far too long with no discernible action. The durational dimension was an essential technique in establishing the production’s focus upon the ordinary moments in between the acts of horror that one typically associates with the Thyestes story. Juxtaposing the mundane and the tragic was an essential feature of Thyestes and was a crucial way in which the company foregrounded the pertinence of Seneca’s text to contemporary society. Alongside demonstrating the production’s heavy reliance upon postdramatic techniques Scene One also introduced the production’s ³⁵ Lehmann 2006: 152. The relevance of ideas regarding site-specificity and immersion to postdramatic classical receptions will be discussed at greater length in Part III. ³⁶ Furthermore, the traverse arrangement worked against the common postdramatic technique of an irruption of the real and instead consistently drew attention to the fact that one was witnessing a staged reinterpretation of ancient tragedy. ³⁷ Lehmann 2006: 156.

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unusual relationship to its source text. From the opening moment the play informed the audience that this was not a traditional translation or adaptation and that the very decision to tie the play to Seneca’s tragedy was, in a sense, arbitrary. The extent of the company’s departure from the tragic narrative was the most pronounced of any production examined so far in this volume. Given Thyestes’ extreme distance from Seneca’s text the decision to market the production as ‘after Seneca’ begged the question of what the practitioners had to gain by insisting upon this tie, particularly given that so many other tragedians in the ancient world treated this tale.³⁸ Unlike Kane’s Phaedra’s Love I do not believe that the specifics of Senecan reception infused Thyestes with aspects essential to comprehending the production’s meanings. Yet the text did provide a thematic backdrop to the drama; Stone, for example, argued that Thyestes was ‘rhythmically and tonally in tune with the source material’.³⁹ There is no obvious relation between the rhythm of either Seneca’s language or dramaturgy and Thyestes; however, there is a clear tonal link between Thyestes and what Helen Slaney identifies as Seneca’s focus on stimulating affect not through mimetic performance but through the experience of language, as well as between the production and Seneca’s more general use of fearful and horrific imagery.⁴⁰ For example, although The Hayloft Project omitted the ghost of Tantalus and all references to this mythological backstory by focusing on the cycle of revenge and each brother’s constant attempt at getting more power and greater retribution, they nevertheless captured what John Fitch describes as the play’s central theme of tantalizing, insatiable hunger.⁴¹ The revenge-cycle focus also spoke to what Gary Meltzer sees as the drama’s central theme of ‘the cancerous nature of evil. Destructive irrational impulses, once admitted into the soul, can easily expand to overtake it entirely’.⁴² Although eleven of the twelve scenes had no basis in the Senecan text, the whole performance invoked the tone and perceived

³⁸ As well as appearing in the aforementioned Sophoclean Atreus and Thyestes plays, Thyestes and Atreus also featured in at least three of Euripides’ plays, alongside those of several other Greek and Roman dramatists. See Tarrant 1985: 40. Fitch also argues that Seneca drew on nondramatic Augustan poetry, and that Seneca’s Thyestes contains resonances of Verg. Aen. See Fitch 2004: 227. ³⁹ Stone 2012: 39. ⁴⁰ See Slaney 2016: 1–2. ⁴¹ Fitch 2004: 219. ⁴² Meltzer 1988: 327.

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impact of Seneca’s tragedy and worked to inform the audience of the ancient play’s contemporary resonances. As such, the ‘after Seneca’ title situated the production within a particular discourse and like The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie! foregrounded a self-conscious relationship with how one engages with the classics in the modern world. Whereas ‘after’ is often applied to denote authorship as a synonym for ‘based on’ or ‘adapted from’, in Thyestes it implied a temporal relationship to the source: this was the tragedy after Seneca’s time, reimagined for today. Attaching an ‘after Seneca’ label to such a different version of the story had the effect of emphasizing the degree to which the Thyestes story can be considered recognizable in the modern world whilst simultaneously demonstrating how unrecognizable we usually consider the myth and its characters. The Hayloft Project’s employment of a postdramatic form in pursuit of this objective did not echo the pastiche style of The Wooster Group’s To You, The Birdie!; nevertheless, their interventions into the form of the Thyestes myth can similarly be viewed as embodying a politics of form. The production consequently demonstrates my first caveat regarding the political in devised theatre. The company’s psychological approach to the myth was geared towards challenging a representational system of meaning. The unusual form made a statement about our tendency to bracket the story off as mythology and ignore the human dimension of the horrendous crimes, pain, and suffering that it contains. From Scene One The Hayloft Project fought against this by irrefutably foregrounding the ordinariness of the trajectory from power disputes to transgressive, horrific acts.⁴³ Croggon touched upon this when she argued that ‘one of the paradoxical effects of this show is to erase distances: between then and now, them and us, the actors and ourselves’ [original emphasis];⁴⁴ Winter also supported this perspective when he noted that the production was ‘about acknowledging our solidarity with the past and owning our human history [ . . . ] There’s no separation between this story from the past, and now. These Greek

⁴³ The Hayloft Project’s focus on the trajectory from domestic power disputes to fullblow horror parallels Kane’s focus on exploring the seeds of full-blown warfare and monstrosity, as discussed in Chapter 1. ⁴⁴ Croggon 2010.

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myths form our contemporary psychology’.⁴⁵ For the company this reimagining involved de-mythologizing the tragedy and rendering its content in a form that Stone argued is difficult to digest, but more applicable to exploring the thematic content performatively.⁴⁶ The un-Aristotelian focus on character over plot in Scene One aligned with the company’s interest in the psychology of individuals such as Atreus and Thyestes. An interest in character psychology can be found in numerous contemporary pieces of classical performance reception, particularly from those practitioners working within the Stanislavskian tradition of psychological realism. The question of whether tragic characters are constructed in a way that invites psychological exploration is controversial within academia;⁴⁷ however, practitioners such as Katie Mitchell have demonstrated that the application of such methodologies can result in creative productions that speak to the emotional dimensions and affects that many associate with ancient tragedies. The practice is even less problematic in devised theatre given that reinventions such as The Hayloft Project’s explicitly set out to reconfigure the past from a contemporary perspective. When developing Thyestes Stone, Winter, Henning, and Ryan researched infamous tyrants, dictators, serial killers, and psychopaths to build contemporary, realistic portraits that attested to ‘the aspects of Greek mythology that drove Freud to use these stories as clues to our own more modern but no less brutal instincts’.⁴⁸ The similarity between Seneca’s depiction of Atreus’ behaviour and the behaviour of several modern serial killers has not been lost on scholars, and in performance the psychologically-realistic reading resulted in the creation of characters whose actions were controversial but nevertheless recognizable.⁴⁹ The ability for these characters to appear akin to contemporary figures, however, was not necessarily an innovation; Alessandro Schiesaro, for example, notes that Atreus was likely read as a ⁴⁵ Winter, quoted in Bithell 2012. Hamilton also supports this idea, noting that the ‘after’ authorship ‘renders explicit the re-mediation’ and ‘concurrently locates and dislocates an established frame of reference’. See Hamilton 2014: 522. ⁴⁶ Adams 2010. ⁴⁷ See Cole 2015: 400–3 for an overview of the debates surrounding the psychological depth of characters in ancient tragedy. ⁴⁸ Stone 2012: 39. ⁴⁹ See Fitch 2004: 220, who argues that Atreus’ ‘insistence on supervising the human sacrifice and getting every detail “correct” evinces an obsession with control (and is chillingly similar to the obsessive attention to detail by modern serial killers)’.

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larger-than-life Nero very soon after the play was written.⁵⁰ Viewing Atreus as embodying a psychopathic psychology might be new, but the idea of viewing Seneca’s characters as akin to contemporary figures, rather than mythic icons, has been associated with the text all along. The practice of finding contemporary parallels to explain the psychological motivations of tragic characters also occurs in Stone’s other classical reception projects. His production of Medea, for example, used the coverage surrounding the crime and prosecution of Deborah Greene, who was found guilty of poisoning her husband and murdering two of her children in a house fire in 1995, to build the psychological profile of his tragic heroine.⁵¹ Alongside sharing this focus on psychology, Stone’s Medea and Oresteia also had a similar aesthetic to Thyestes. All three were performed in colloquial language and employed an understated, non-theatrical performance style which Stone terms ‘hyperrealism’.⁵² Stone argues that the way this naturalness contrasts with the heightened nature of tragedy reasserts the characters’ essential humanity and informs the audience that ‘these people do exist. They live in our world. They’ve always been here and they always will be. They’re not monsters or half-animals or gods. They’re humans, and that’s what makes them so terrifying’.⁵³ Stone’s cast further attests to this perspective, with Winter claiming that the company’s aim ‘was to take the mythology down from the bookshelf to enable us to see what violence really means today’.⁵⁴ The lengthy devising process and ensemble focus that underpinned Thyestes meant that out of all Stone’s productions it was in this play that the greatest level of hyperrealism was achieved, as the actors were so comfortable with the structure of the production that the individual scenes were largely improvised around a fixed framework each night.⁵⁵ ⁵⁰ Schiesaro 2003: 5. ⁵¹ Wensink 2014. ⁵² For Stone’s use of this term see Kouters 2014. Other Australian practitioners have used the term ‘hyperrealism’ to refer to their work prior to Stone; see, for example, Cortese 2017, where Cortese discusses works going back to the 1990s. ⁵³ Stone 2012: 39. ⁵⁴ Bithell 2012. Stone reinforced Winter’s statement in Usher 2010. ⁵⁵ The success of the production saw a script eventually published; however, Stone cautions that the text was devised ‘with the aim to improvise significantly on the text each night. Therefore the script represents an indicative example of an average night’s performance and not anything definitive’. See Stone 2012a. Although the specific anecdotes and phrasing may have differed from performance to performance the general sense, affect,

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The Gender Politics of Thyestes The unique relationship between Thyestes and the Senecan source material continued throughout the entire production. Scene Two, for example, started with a surtitle revealing that the production had jumped forward in time several years, announcing ‘King Pelops has exiled Atreus and Thyestes for murdering Chrysippus. After a year travelling from one kingdom to another, the brothers have settled in Mycenae. News arrives of their mother’s suicide’ [Act One, Scene Two, Page 12]. The curtain then rose to reveal Atreus and Thyestes in the middle of a Ping-Pong match.⁵⁶ The Ping-Pong table had miraculously appeared on the stage in the mere seconds between the curtain falling and rising, which invited a reaction of impressed confusion from the audience that immediately changed the performance’s tone after the drawn-out murder in Scene One.⁵⁷ The presence of a corded telephone on the floor was the only other new inclusion in the mise-en-scène. The brothers played Ping-Pong for a few minutes only to be interrupted by a phone call. Atreus picked up the receiver and then hung up without speaking. The brothers continued to play, chatting idly, until the phone rang again, which they this time ignored. Then, the curtain fell. The type of modernization exemplified in Scene One and Two led numerous critics, like in response to The Wooster Group’s work, to claim that the performers ‘deconstructed’ tragedy.⁵⁸ The processes at work in this production, however, differed to those in To You, The Birdie!. Whereas the latter production interrogated the layers of meaning that Euripides’ Hippolytus and its subsequent receptions had accumulated and sought to open these up for reconsideration, in Thyestes the practitioners expanded out of, rather than plunged into, the tragedy’s narrative. Despite these aesthetic differences, The Hayloft Project’s work

and effect of each scene remained the same and thus quotes can still be used to exemplify the emotional dynamics and the phenomenological impact of the performance. ⁵⁶ In contrast to the carefully reasoned use of badminton in To You, The Birdie!, there was no obvious discernable justification behind the choice of Ping-Pong in Thyestes. ⁵⁷ There was a hidden door in one of the stage walls; however, the lighting rendered this invisible to the audience, creating the impression that the table appeared from nowhere. The impressiveness of this feat was built upon in Scene Eleven, in which a baby grand piano appeared on the stage. ⁵⁸ See, for example, Adams 2010 and Bithell 2012.

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still contained a radical aesthetic intervention into the form of the original tragedy which temporarily supplanted the canonical original. Although the company’s application of postdramatic techniques to ancient myth and their simultaneous expansion and fracturing of Seneca’s tragedy meant that the production embodied a politics of form, it was in the company’s representation of gender where the political could most notably be found. The production consequently exemplified my third caveat regarding the political in devised theatre, as its representation of gender politics is inevitably an engagement with the political. Seneca’s play is infamous for its absence of women; although Aerope is an (admittedly unnamed) presence in the tragedy no women appear onstage except for the Fury in the opening moments. Cedric Littlewood notes that the absence of women, and of Aerope specifically, is a striking anomaly given that the play is the only surviving Senecan tragedy without a major female role, and Aerope likely featured prominently in one of Sophocles’ Thyestes plays as well as in Varius’ Thyestes.⁵⁹ Like Seneca’s tragedy, The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes commenced with allmale characters; however, this changed at the commencement of Scene Three when the surtitle announced that Atreus had chosen Aerope, princess of Crete, as his wife. The surtitle prepared the audience to see Thyestes, Atreus, and Atreus’ wife-to-be Aerope;⁶⁰ however, the curtain rose to reveal the same three actors as in Scene One. The scene action and dialogue clarified to the audience that Ryan was now playing the role of Aerope. The cross-gender casting persisted for the entire play, with Ryan occupying the role of Aerope in Scene Three, Four, Six, and Seven, the role of Pelopia in Scene Eleven, Ten, and Nine, and the role of Aegisthus in Scene Twelve. The company’s decision to use three male actors for all roles parallels the three actor ‘rule’ of ancient tragedy and the classical convention of all male performers.⁶¹ Furthermore, the casting is in keeping with what Littlewood argues is Seneca’s tone towards female characters, which he ⁵⁹ Littlewood 1997: 62–3. ⁶⁰ The surtitle read ‘Following the death of King Eurystheus, Atreus and Thyestes have been crowned joint kings of Mycenae. They agree to alternate which of them sits on the throne from one year to the next. To celebrate their coronation, Atreus chooses a wife: Aerope, princess of Crete’ [Act One, Scene Three, Page 13]. ⁶¹ For details on the number of actors in, and the casting of, Greek tragedy, see Marshall 2012: 188–90.

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states involves the representation of gender roles that are to be played or discarded. The audience, for example, was invited to identify Henning and Winter with Thyestes and Atreus respectively, whereas Ryan was always merely assuming and moving on from a variety of parts, meaning that his presence could never be assimilated to any one character.⁶² The cross-gender casting can also be attributed to the devising methodology through which the production was developed; it is plausible that the company did not realize they would explore the roles of Aerope and Pelopia until well into the show’s development, at which time it may have been too late to cast, and find a budget for, an additional actor. Despite these potential justifications the performance nevertheless contributed to what remains an issue regarding unequal gender representation in contemporary theatre. The all-male cast appeared particularly egregious given the popular perception that Greco-Roman classics provide more age-diverse, powerful female parts than other dramatic genres. Furthermore, shortly after the première of Thyestes the lack of gender parity in contemporary theatre, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom, became an especially controversial issue generating widespread press coverage that was specifically associated with cross-gender casting in productions of canonical texts following Hampstead Theatre’s production of two all-male Shakespeare plays.⁶³ Elizabeth Freestone, Artistic Director of Pentabus Theatre, conducted research in collaboration with The Guardian in response to Hampstead Theatre’s productions and found statistical evidence proving that ‘Women are seriously underrepresented on stage, among playwrights and artistic directors, and in creative roles such as designers and composers’.⁶⁴ Less than one year later the Australia Council for the Arts also commissioned a report into women in the theatre in an effort to create strategies to address gender disparity.⁶⁵ Irrespective of any explanatory justification for why there was only one female creative involved in Thyestes, namely dramaturg Anne-Louise Sarks, and no female performers, the production reflected the broader discourses surrounding unequal gender representation in

⁶² Littlewood 1997: 73. ⁶³ See Higgins 2012, Topping 2012, and Gardner 2015 for a sample of the press coverage surrounding cross-gender casting. For data on gender representation in the theatre see the British Theatre Consortium, SOLT/UKTheatre, and BON Culture 2015: 22–9 and 2016: 41–6. ⁶⁴ Higgins 2012. ⁶⁵ See Australia Council for the Arts 2012.

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contemporary theatre. It consequently demonstrates my second caveat regarding the political in devised theatre as the production could be read in light of debates surrounding gender politics and the way they relate to power structures within the creative industries. The remainder of the performance continued to build upon the emerging focus on gender representation. Scenes Four and Five, for example, depicted the lead up to Thyestes’ seduction of Aerope and the aftermath of Atreus’ growing insanity following Aerope’s betrayal. Ryan’s performance as Aerope in these scenes was naturalistic; unlike Shepherd’s reading of Phedre in To You, The Birdie! Ryan did not adapt his vocals, physicality, or costuming. The cross-gender casting contained a humorous quality due to the contrast between the macho dialogue of Scene One and, for example, Ryan’s overtly sexualized performance as Aerope in Scene Three, which involved him gyrating against and kissing Atreus. The tone of Ryan’s performance shifted, however, in Scene Six, as did the politics associated with the cross-gender casting. Scene Six opened with the surtitle ‘Years of civil war, famine and disease have laid waste to Mycenae. Atreus has retaken control of the country. His forces capture Aerope and bring her to the palace’ [Act One, Scene Six, Page 20]. The curtain rose to reveal a confronting image. A black leather recliner had appeared on the stage, upon which Atreus sat, naked. Aerope sat between his legs, audibly struggling, with Atreus holding her head aggressively against his crotch. After a few moments Atreus pulled away from Aerope, enabling the audience to see that Aerope’s mouth was taped shut with black gaffer tape. A horizontal slit was cut into the tape. Atreus proceeded to re-tape Aerope’s mouth and put on a pair of white underpants, before engaging Aerope in a one-sided conversation. He wandered around the stage nonchalantly, immune to Aerope’s suffering, whilst rifling through take-away menus that were now strewn across the floor and pretending to consult Aerope on dinner options, rhetorically asking ‘You like Thai? I’d go Thai. No Indian. I had, I must’ve had curry five times this week. Way too much curry. Should have seen it. Hoo-wee. I’ll eat pizza, not Japanese, not Indian, Indian, Indian, Sri Lankan, Lebanese maybe’ [Act One, Scene Six, Page 21]. Having decided on Thai he turned back to Aerope. Divorced from the action Atreus’ dialogue appeared sensitive, commenting to Aerope ‘You look tired. Come on. Let’s sit down’ [Act One, Scene Six, Page 22]. He subsequently retrieved a DVD of The Notebook for them to watch.

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Suddenly, however, he stopped himself and reached down behind the recliner. He retrieved a wrapped present which he proceeded to place on Aerope’s lap and unwrap. He removed a strap-on penis from the box, holding it up and exclaiming ‘Nice, isn’t it? There we go. Hello. Let’s put this on you’ [Act One, Scene Six, Page 22]. The curtain fell as Atreus attached the sex toy to Aerope and then performed fellatio on Aerope. Scene Six exemplifies the challenges in pinpointing the tangible political dimension of postdramatic devised productions. It was an imaginative investigation into the type of horrific behaviours one might perpetuate before rising to the level of murdering one’s nephews as retribution and this, combined with the graphic portrayal of sex and violence and the cross-gender casting appears to make a type of political statement, although about what is much less clear.⁶⁶ It is possible to tease some of these strands out, however, by examining the effect of both witnessing this violence, and The Hayloft Project’s representation of gender within the context of Senecan tragedy. The violent content in Scene Six was difficult to watch and spurred numerous walkouts which, due to the traverse configuration, were highly noticeable. The ability to watch the repulsion on fellow spectators’ faces heightened the unease associated with observing the action and, in a way, encouraged audience members to feel like their responses to Aerope’s rape were also part of the performance. The knowledge that at any one time other audience members might be observing you had the potential to make one feel self-conscious about their response to the violence, pondering whether they were being assessed as affected by the violence appropriately and showing the relevant amount of disgust, or inappropriately by not being visibly revolted by the performance and perhaps judged as desensitized and part of a culture which legitimizes sadomasochistic behaviour. The primary effect of the scene lay in this phenomenological impact. It worked to interrogate how audience members felt about witnessing violence, and the extent to which they normalize violent behaviour within a theatrical aesthetic. These questions spoke to the representation of violence and how we respond to it in wider reality, just like in Phaedra’s Love. ⁶⁶ Atreus’ torture of Aerope is a Hayloft Project invention. The closest thing that the mythological tradition gets to this is the variant in which Atreus drowns Aerope as punishment for her infidelity and for stealing his golden lamb.

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There was a political dimension to the company’s representation of gender in Scene Six. By this moment of performance the audience had likely grown accustomed to the cross-gender casting, potentially reconciling it with the ancient tradition. The performers, however, stated that the decision to use a male actor for Aerope was not due to an aspiration to speak purely to this precedent but also to ensure that audiences could continue to engage with the performance despite any feelings of disgust or revulsion. Henning notes this when he argues that: the total brutalization of every single female character in the text would come across really ugly if it was purely done by a female actor [ . . . ] It would not be read as this is a representation of a text. It would be probably really easily read as this show is misogynist and disturbed.⁶⁷

Audience comments reveal that many were convinced by this purpose; Jana Perkovic, for example, stated ‘this was an aesthetic and political choice. Not only was it less gruesome to watch sexual violence inflicted on a male body playing female, but having a female body there would have, I suspect, broken the illusion’.⁶⁸ Just as the all-male cast engaged with political issues outside of the performance regarding female representation in contemporary theatre, within the world of the performance the all-male cast also raised questions regarding the representation of women, particularly regarding the visibility of female suffering. The numerous walk-outs that the scene inspired invited further interrogation of gender dynamics and issues of representation; one can question the degree to which spectators were offended by the rape and brutalization of a female character, versus by their witnessing of a man playing a woman performing forced fellatio. Irrespective of how one reads the action and the audience reaction, the choice to elide the female suffering contained at this point of the narrative can only be thought of as a political choice. The idea that the performers needed to find a way to make Aerope’s rape palatable for audiences additionally reveals a tension between the company’s objective to explore the psychopathic psychology of characters such as Atreus and Thyestes and their commitment to ‘hyperrealism’ as a performance style. Like Shepherd’s ventriloquism in To You, The Birdie!, Ryan’s performance as Aerope acted as a type of Verfremdungseffekt which jolted the audience out of complacently following the ⁶⁷ Henning, quoted in Hamilton 2014: 530.

⁶⁸ Perkovic 2010.

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performance and prompted active analysis; as Hamilton argues it interfered ‘with the function of the performer as a theatrically concealed conduit of character and coherent, semantic unit’.⁶⁹ Hamilton sees this as provoking astonishment, rather than empathy in the audience; however, it was not an either/or situation but could result in both reactions.⁷⁰ Most significantly, however, the effect of this technique was to sever the relationship between actor, character, and story. On the one hand the technique consequently served a postdramatic purpose in that it disrupted a sense of unity and dramatic cohesion.⁷¹ On the other, however, it worked to engage a tragic backdrop by forcing the audience to observe the action in isolation rather than as a mimetic representation of myth. If a woman had been cast as Aerope the content would arguably still be just as, if not more, difficult and disturbing; however, it would be possible for an audience member to reconcile this portrayal with the narrative. By shattering the illusion of mimesis, however, the practitioners built upon the power of isolating the moment and further highlighted the brutality contained within the story, even if it removed the fact that this brutality was directed towards the female sex. The scene is thus in keeping with Seneca’s dramaturgy; for example, Gary Meltzer argues ‘By presenting brutal scenes in shockingly inappropriate ways, Seneca invites the reader to examine his perhaps unconscious ambivalence toward the events so presented’.⁷² Just as the ancient convention of keeping violence offstage theoretically works on the premise that imagined horror is more frightful than what can be visually represented, a generous reading of this scene would posit that it too encouraged the audience to consider the rape as more horrific than they might have viewed it had it been depicted realistically and consequently subsumed within the wider narrative. ⁶⁹ Hamilton 2014: 532. ⁷⁰ Hamilton 2014: 532. ⁷¹ Lehmann is relatively silent on the role of gender in postdramatic theatre; however, he does note that practitioners such as Bobby Baker and Marina Abramović have conducted postdramatic investigations into the female body and male-coded images of gender identity. Of more significance is Cara Berger’s suggestion of a structural analogy between Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine and postdramatic theatre aesthetics, and her consequent argument that the elliptical, fragmented style of postdramatic performance can produce feminine knowledge. See Lehmann 2006: 139–40 and Berger 2016. As Thyestes was not a feminist piece of theatre and was potentially problematic from the perspective of gender neither scholars’ consideration can be applied. ⁷² Meltzer 1988: 311–12.

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Outside of engaging with gender politics, the depiction of violence in Scene Six invoked the concept of a violent Senecan aesthetic, and it is here that we see a less contentious and perhaps more productive meeting of ancient tragedy and postdramatic techniques. Despite the generalized notion of Seneca’s tragedies as violent and horrific there is little scholarship on the topic, no doubt due to the contention surrounding whether Seneca’s tragedies were actually performed. Rather than speak of violence as key to her understanding of the senecan [sic] aesthetic Slaney instead speaks of horror and a more thematic preoccupation with the macabre. Furthermore, the scholars that do engage with the idea of Senecan violence are divided as to whether it was meant as horrific or was rather impossible to take seriously.⁷³ The confusion is particularly strong with regard to Seneca’s Thyestes as the tragedy includes only minimal staged violence. As a messenger describes Atreus’ ritualistic murder of Thyestes’ children the only graphic content visually required is the revelation of the children’s severed heads at line 1005. All other violence is emotional, descriptive, or implied, although as Peter Davis notes the play remains shocking: ‘One reason why this play was disliked for so many years is its representation of horrific events, its “unpleasantly sanguinary” quality’.⁷⁴ The violent signifiers in Scene Six took a thematic, if not literal, seed from the ancient tragedy and coupled it with a postdramatic violation of the norm of sign density, creating a visually overwhelming plethora of violent imagery. The power of the moment was enhanced through the traverse seating, which like the planted actors in Phaedra’s Love connected the idea of violence to voyeurism.

The Postdramatic Techniques and Violent Aesthetic of Thyestes When the curtain fell after Scene Six a surtitle announced the jump in time and narrative order, stating ‘Scene Twelve. Eighteen years later. Thyestes’ prophecy is fulfilled. Atreus’ adopted son, Aegisthus, has discovered his real father’s identity. Aegisthus returns to Atreus with a ⁷³ See Slaney 2016: 31–3, and the conflicting interpretations of violence found in Davis 2003: 75 and Crewe 1990: 86. For my overview of the relevance of Slaney’s senecan aesthetic to the postdramatic see Chapter 1. ⁷⁴ Davis 2003: 74.

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message’ [Act Two, Scene Twelve, Page 23]. Through the now sickly yellow lighting the audience could perceive Atreus, dressed in a white waffle dressing gown, sitting on a black leather armchair against one of the walls. The other wall displayed a slideshow of images featuring two young men. The source of these images, which perhaps depicted Atreus and Thyestes, or even Thyestes’ two children, was a small projector, sitting on a table next to Atreus. Ryan, now playing Aegisthus, stood holding a pistol facing Atreus. Eventually, he raised the gun, fired it, and then slid down to the ground as the curtain fell. The next four scenes occurred at a similar pace, providing the audience with concentrated visual snapshots of action rather than access to lengthy dialogues. The scenes alternated between moments of despair or horror and moments of happiness and seeming oblivion at the brutality punctuating the characters’ lives. Scene Eleven, for example, consisted of Ryan, now as Pelopia, singing Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger and accompanying himself on a baby grand piano which had miraculously appeared on the stage; the surtitle announced that her discovery of the identity of her rapist (and consequently of the father of her son, who was a product of the rape) had driven her to suicide. The scene consisted solely of the somber, melancholy song, building in a crescendo to an arresting climax.⁷⁵ In contrast, Scene Ten featured an exchange between Atreus and Pelopia, at this stage of the narrative newlyweds, celebrating their love with champagne and singing Roy Orbison’s ‘You Got It’. Scene Nine returned to an instance of brutality, lasting for only a moment and depicting Pelopia lying on the ground in a fetal position, crying, her head covered by a black bag while her father Thyestes stood behind her naked from the waist down with blood over his crotch. Deceased Australian rock musician Rowland S. Howard’s ‘Wayward Man’ played in the background of the scene. As Hamilton notes, for those audience members unfamiliar with the mythological backstory it was only at this moment that the identity of Pelopia’s rapist and the driver of her suicide was revealed.⁷⁶ Irrespective of whether the scene prompted a moment of recognition it was visually confronting for all audience members as aside from the narrative content implied by the staging proxemics spectators were either confronted with Thyestes’ bloodied genitals or

⁷⁵ On Scene Eleven see Hamilton 2014: 533.

⁷⁶ Hamilton 2014: 533.

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Pelopia’s buttocks. Scene Eight also featured a snapshot image, this time of Thyestes in a wheelchair, clothed in a nappy and hooked up to an intravenous drip while watching a BBC wildlife documentary. The surtitles announced that Thyestes had been driven mad by the murder of his children and that he had just received a prophecy stating that a child by his daughter Pelopia would kill Atreus and avenge him. The effect of the vignette style was to reinforce the filmic quality of the performance and the postdramatic ‘aesthetic of video clips’.⁷⁷ Furthermore, it created a postdramatic visual dramaturgy where the audience was invited to read a series of largely still images and to make meaning through the juxtaposition of the fragmented tableaux and the mythic backstory. Although the performance style differed vastly to that of Robert Wilson’s, Lehmann’s observation about Wilson’s work is here applicable; Lehmann notes that ‘In Wilson’s work the phenomenon has priority over the narrative, the effect of the image precedence over the individual actor, and contemplation over interpretation’.⁷⁸ The scenes built upon the strongly phenomenological dimension of the performance first emphasized in Scene Six and increasingly made meaning through the invited responses of, for example, recognition, shock, and revulsion. The combination of diverse musical styles, with one or more of the song choices likely unfamiliar to certain audience members, further encouraged an immediate response and worked against facilitating a unified interpretation of the narrative sequence by appealing more immediately to the senses. The quick succession of scenes overall prepared the audience for Seneca’s dénouement to play out in a visceral, visual manner. The surtitle opening Scene Seven summarized the basic plot of Seneca’s tragedy, informing the audience that Thyestes had accepted Atreus’ offer to share the throne but that the latter had, unbeknown to Thyestes, deceived him by killing, dismembering, and cooking his children. The black curtain then soundlessly snapped towards the roof, revealing Atreus and Thyestes sitting at either end of a rectangular table eating spaghetti bolognaise and drinking red wine. A white tablecloth covered

⁷⁷ On the aesthetic of video clips, which is part of the postdramatic aesthetics of time, see Lehmann 2006: 158. ⁷⁸ Lehmann 2006: 80.

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the surface and a red casserole dish sat in the centre of the table (Fig. 5.1). The striking mise-en-scène immediately created dramatic tension; it was entirely monochrome except for the wine and the blood-coloured centrepiece, and the enormous space—almost the entire length of the stage—between the two brothers as they ate together highlighted the artificiality of their reconciliation. Atreus had removed the duffle coat he wore in Scene One but otherwise was costumed identically to the opening moment. The removal of his coat revealed that his t-shirt was emblazoned with the word ‘loyalty’. From the moment the scene started Atreus’ psychopathic behaviour was readily apparent. Like Scene One the conversation had the appearance of being mundane and naturalistic; the scene opened mid-sentence in a discussion about tableware, which was had while the brothers ate and Atreus poured over Thyestes’ family photo album. However, Atreus punctuated his dialogue with macabre statements, commenting, for example, that a table made of multiple pieces of timber was ‘Like a cemetery for bits of wood’ and noting that it was a bit morbid to ‘think about death every time you sit down to eat’ [Act Two, Scene Seven, Page 29]. The scene continued for several minutes, with the brothers’ plates gradually emptying and the conversation becoming increasingly mundane. When both Atreus and Thyestes had finished their food the conversation descended into silence, only for Atreus suddenly to look up and say ‘Remember’. He continued to repeat the word until the curtain fell. Immediately, however, the curtain raised and through a pulsating strobe effect Thyestes could be seen vomiting onto his plate while Atreus leant against the side wall and laughed. The curtain then fell, before raising again and this time revealing Thyestes still retching but now with his bile spreading across the floor and an acidic smell drifting throughout the auditorium. A montage sequence followed, full of transfixing and harrowing film-like snapshots of the moments between the myth’s atrocities and revelations. The pristine white space became increasingly despoiled with each fast-forward tableau; at one point Aerope could be seen entering the space and pleading with the brothers, only for the next tableau to reveal Aerope now disfigured by a gun-shot wound and her body slumped against the side wall. The final curtain fell at a moment when the stage was littered with blood, bile, and Aerope’s corpse as Atreus waved a gun and danced like a maniac, yelling ‘Tastes good, huh? Tastes good. This is how it feels. You like that? They were calling

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for you. They were calling out your name. Calling, “Dad!” “Dad!” “Dad!” ’ [Act Two, Scene Seven, Page 25]. Scene Seven brought together the divergent aesthetics seen throughout the production. The most notable of these was the combination of the cinematic and the mundane, or the mythic and the realistic. Like Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino, Thyestes employed Lehmann’s ‘cinematographic theatre’, where film strategies are borrowed to alienate an audience from the action and disrupt identification with character and narrative. Most obviously, these cinematographic tones were found in the spliced tableaux of Scene Seven. More generally, the extreme violence of, for example, Scene Six and Seven recalled the graphic pulp-noir films of directors such as Quentin Tarantino.⁷⁹ The effect of the graphic visual dramaturgy was tied directly to the practitioners’ interest in Atreus’ psychology. For example, Atreus’ treatment of Aerope in Scene Six was crucial to developing his sadistic, psychopathic tendencies, and the persistent emphasis upon food and mouths served to link this treatment to the dénouement by reminding the audience of where this path would take him. The finale, and particularly its filmic montage sequence, consequently situated Atreus within the discourse of the modern psychopath as depicted in contemporary cinema and continually reminded the audience that this representation of Thyestes was both for and from our time. As well as reinforcing the way a visceral, violent aesthetic allows audiences to read a psychopathic psychology into individual characters the production also worked to interrogate our comfort with this aesthetic by foregrounding the audience’s response to the visual representation of violence and making this response part of the mise-en-scène. Much has been written about the aestheticization of ‘ultraviolence’ that followed the 1966 revision of the Hollywood Production Code and the later establishment of the Code and Rating Administration classification scheme, and the problems surrounding making depictions of fear,

⁷⁹ Critics including Jana Perkovic and the publicity for the play’s 2014 German production noted the Tarantino-style effects that permeated Thyestes, including the non-linear narrative, pop culture references, and the violent aesthetic. See Perkovic 2010 and Theater der Welt 2014. Hamilton also argues that the production evinced ‘a cinematic engagement with sadistic menace and, more precisely, amoral and pulp-genre murder’. See Hamilton 2014: 530.

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anxiety, and pain pleasure-inducing experiences.⁸⁰ Tarantino films are particularly controversial from the perspective of the aestheticization of violence as cause and effect are often divorced so that the viewer sees violent pathology but not bodily maiming, or alternatively sees graphic, gory destruction as purely sensation rather than as perpetrated, personalized action.⁸¹ On the one hand it is possible to praise Tarantino’s techniques, as Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad detail, as sophisticated strategies which the intelligent viewer can decode as commenting upon the irony of ethical standards in criminal society or the difficulty of sorting out received information from direct experience.⁸² On the other hand, however, lies the argument that legitimizing violence in the filmic medium is aggression-inducing. One might instead, as Stephen Prince notes, question the psychological effects of dehumanizing injury or of showing violence with no consequences.⁸³ It is possible to charge Thyestes as being similarly sophisticated or problematic in its utilization of ultraviolence; however, the company’s modus operandi of showing the moments between atrocities and revelations meant it rejoined cause and effect, and the traverse configuration allowed the production to interrogate the audience’s response. The production consequently intervened into debates surrounding ultraviolence whilst also representing them. Invoking a pulp-noir aesthetic served the function both of reconciling the modern, Tarantino-style psychopath with Seneca’s portrayal of a more foreign, mythic evil and of demonstrating that the figure of the Senecan tyrant who commits atrocities is recognizable to the modern world. Such a grounding in contemporary reality can be found within Seneca’s own tragedy. Just as Stone’s production situated Atreus and Thyestes within the discourse of the modern psychopath, so too does Seneca situate his characters within the brutality of Imperial Rome. Richard Tarrant, for example, argues: In this patently Roman context Seneca’s Atreus—a vicious and demented tyrant whose megalomania extends to self-deification—cannot have failed to strike audiences as disturbingly familiar [ . . . ] What does seem clear is that Seneca’s portrait of Atreus draws some of its unique conviction from Seneca’s first-hand observation of absolute power.⁸⁴ ⁸⁰ See Prince 2000, esp. 6 and 27. ⁸² Greene and Mohammad 2007: xxi. ⁸⁴ Tarrant 1985: 48.

⁸¹ Gallafent 2006: 43. ⁸³ Prince 2000: 20.

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The impact of understanding these parallel resonances cuts to the heart of The Hayloft Project’s reception: their production was not about reimagining the story of Atreus and Thyestes after Seneca, but was about creating a continuity between the two worlds and demonstrating how a contemporary commentary was part of the story all along. As such, Thyestes contrasts with To You, The Birdie!, which instead appeared to position antiquity as alien and necessitating mediation. The two productions together reveal the differing ways that ancient tragedy, devised theatre, and postdramatic techniques can work together whilst also demonstrating a spectrum of roles that tragedy can play in modernity. Alluding to how a contemporary relevance was always part of Seneca’s tragedy was one of several ways that Scene Seven directly interacted with its source text. Its use of black humour constituted another instance. For example, Atreus’ comments regarding thinking about death while eating recalled the dark wit that lies at the heart of Seneca’s finale.⁸⁵ Additionally, Atreus’ contemporary, pulp noir-style psychopathic and sadistic tendencies reflected Meltzer’s view of the entire tragedy, which he posits: asks us to consider the human soul’s potential for evil, for the monstrous by confronting us with shockingly brutal behaviour. The violence and horrors portrayed in Seneca are not gratuitous, but rather serve as a basis for exploring the questions: “What is it to be human?” “What is it to be a monster?” “How does a human being become a monster?”.⁸⁶

It was not just Scene Seven, however, which raised these questions but, as my analysis has demonstrated, the entire production. Although the two texts appear almost completely distinct from one another bar the finale, this underlying commonality reveals how the entirety of Thyestes was a reception of the tones, themes, and supposed emotional impact generated by Seneca’s text.⁸⁷ Rather than reimagining the tragedy, Thyestes demonstrated how Seneca’s questions already interrogate modernity. * * *

⁸⁵ Meltzer argues that in Seneca’s finale Atreus uses clever puns, double entendres, and sexual innuendo to treat Thyestes’ suffering as a comic spectacle. See Meltzer 1988: 311. ⁸⁶ Meltzer 1988: 309. ⁸⁷ My own concept of paralinguistic translation can consequently be applied here. See Cole 2017.

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Within the unusual aesthetic and dramaturgy of The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes lay a complex and perceptive interrogation of Senecan tragedy which explored the ambiguous characters that lie at the heart of the play and the decidedly contemporary, rather than purely mythic, psychologies they possess. The experiential impact of the production was unrelenting and visceral and served to make the audience see the play not just through contemporary eyes, but also as a product of modernity as well as antiquity. It prompted a reevaluation of the dynamics of gender, sex, and violence at the play’s core. Like To You, The Birdie! it commented upon how we receive antiquity in the modern world in a selfconscious way whilst informing audiences, through the experience of having fellow spectators meeting one’s gaze, that this reading too was just a product of our times. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes demonstrates the relevance of classical tragedy to postdramatic theatre, and simultaneously the applicability of the postdramatic to tragedy, and like To You, The Birdie! works to remind us of the continuing role of the political within devised theatre. Yet although the production shows devising, and political theatre, to be alive and well and particularly evident within the area of classical performance reception it would be remiss to not re-emphasize that following Thyestes Stone departed from The Hayloft Project and ceased to make collaboratively created work. Today, his work can be firmly placed within the European Regie tradition and he is usually credited as both author and director in his ‘hyper-realist’ adaptations of canonical drama. This does not detract from the significance of Thyestes to world theatre. Following the 2010 Melbourne première Thyestes was staged at Sydney Festival in 2012, Holland Festival and the Mannheim Theater der Welt in 2014, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in Paris in 2015, and Adelaide Festival in 2018, and I have already discussed the indelible influence of the production on Stone’s later works.⁸⁸ The production indicates that the fusion of devising methodologies, tragic source texts, and postdramatic techniques can be key to the evolution of an individual artist’s practice and the wider development of theatrical forms.

⁸⁸ In the touring production Toby Schmitz replaced Mark Leonard Winter. Stone himself notes that the production ‘was certainly a huge step in the development of my work. And has influenced me to this day’. See Stone, quoted in King 2018.

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PART III

Embodying the Classics

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Introduction to Part III Although recent scholarship has paid less attention to the role of the political in devised theatre the same cannot be said of the role of the political in theatrical forms that transcend the dramatic boundaries of time and space. Immersive and durational forms of theatre are increasingly dominant styles of performance, particularly within the United Kingdom, and are frequently collapsed with the postdramatic due to the way they destabilize the primacy of dramatic text in favour of an embodied and experiential understanding of performance.¹ The former theatrical style incorporates spectators within the world of the play and positions them as active participants whose own actions dictate the story and its meaning, while the latter stretches theatrical time into an all-day or all-night, or even twenty-four-hour experience.² Both forms, to varying degrees, position the performer and spectator on equal footing, as either co-creators or shared members of a temporary community bound together through a commitment to undertake an extended non-normative theatrical experience.³ Practitioners associated with the two forms show a consistent interest in the classical canon, with almost every major immersive company in the United Kingdom, for example, producing at least one ¹ Ideas of immersion, via Lehmann’s notion of a theatre of shared space, and of time distortion are key to postdramatic theatre. See Lehmann 2006: 122 and 155 respectively. On the popularity of immersive theatre in the United Kingdom specifically see Alston 2013: 129 and Machon 2013: 60–1. ² There is considerable contention surrounding the precise definition of immersive theatre, with Josephine Machon, for example, stating ‘I am now certain that “immersive theatre” is impossible to define as a genre, with fixed and determinate codes and conventions, because it is not one. However, immersivity in performance does expose qualities, features and forms that enable us to know what “it” is when we are experiencing it’ [original emphasis]. See Machon 2013: xvi. ³ Throughout Part III I continue to use the term spectator to refer to audience members for consistency with prior chapters, whilst recognising that the form of spectatorship embodied in immersive theatre is different to that discussed elsewhere in this book.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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work of classical reception since their establishment.⁴ The styles facilitate formally radical postdramatic classical receptions. The rise of immersive and durational theatre coincided with Jacques Rancière’s 2004 talk ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, expanded into a book of the same name in 2009.⁵ Rancière’s argument aligns with his broader project of theorizing the political within art and consists of an investigation into the conditions required for intellectual emancipation within theatre. Historically, Rancière contends, artists have sought to fight against the notion of passive spectators in opposition to active, knowing actors by creating new forms of performance; he argues that the innovations of dramatists such as Brecht and Artaud reveal a desire to create a theatre where the spectator is: removed from the position of observer calmly examining the spectacle offered to her. She must be dispossessed of this illusory mastery, drawn into the magic circle of theatrical action where she will exchange the privilege of rational observer for that of being in possession of all her vital energies.⁶

Even in these alternative modes of performance, however, Rancière argues that there is a principle of inequality and a process of stultification at work between the artist and the spectator, between the one who knows what will occur and the one who must (actively) discover their role. Rather than requiring a new form of performance, Rancière proposes that we change our understanding of theatre and predicate our new understanding on a fundamental equality between spectator and performer and a recognition of the activity present in looking or spectating: ‘We do not have to transform spectators into actors [ . . . ] Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story’.⁷ His argument contains an immediate provocation for immersive theatre. Several scholars have articulated defences of those theatrical forms that emancipate spectators from the shackles of their seats or the ⁴ dreamthinkspeak [sic], for example, reworked the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as Don’t Look Back between 2003–8 and toured it in the United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, and Malaysia. York-based immersive company Belt Up produced Ant. Od. Tro. and Ag. at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Southwark Playhouse, and London-based experimental theatre company Shunt staged an immersive re-telling of the Theseus and the minotaur myth in a disused Bermondsey warehouse in 2012, titled The Architects. ⁵ The talk was published as an essay in 2007. See Rancière 2007 and then 2009. ⁶ Rancière 2009: 4. ⁷ Rancière 2009: 17.

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confines of standard dramatic experiences. Their contributions have led to a sustained academic debate over the most empowering form of theatre and the soundness of Rancière’s argument. Persis Jade Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos, joint directors of the overnight, immersive Hotel Medea, concede that whilst their theatre does not actually empower and provide equality to spectators it does provide a sense of empowerment.⁸ Their claim inverts the implicit hierarchy between the felt and the real, and interrogates the political practicality of Rancière’s claims by positing that a sense of agency can be as emancipatory as actual agency. Gareth White, in his argument for the political potential of participatory forms of performance, takes issue with Rancière’s disinterest in (or unawareness of) contemporary theatrical practice and his decision to rely instead on Brechtian and Artaudian articulations of alternative modes of theatre, where the spectator either becomes more distant or loses all distance from the action respectively.⁹ Alternatively, Andy Lavender notes that while it is possible to reconceptualize theatre in a non-binary manner which removes distinctions between activity and passivity, the reconceptualization does not necessarily equate to a liberated audience or a re-distribution of the sensible, meaning Rancière’s underlying political objective is not necessarily fulfilled.¹⁰ Although there is merit in dissecting Rancière’s ideas and exploring whether a literal reading of a spectator’s emancipation goes against the grain of Rancière’s thesis doing so risks losing sight of the bigger picture, namely how form and content can challenge existing hierarchies and shape spectatorial experience; in other words, how the shifting dynamics of agency and empowerment within performance affects the politics of spectatorship. Central to Rancière’s argument is the notion that political or empowering forms of performance do not necessarily equate to political or empowering experiences. His contention, however, does not deny that active audience experiences within, for example, immersive theatre can result in intellectual emancipation, but rather notes that these styles are not required for emancipation and can even work against it. The common misreading of Rancière’s work is to create a binary distinction between non-immersive and immersive theatre and, respectively, nonemancipatory and emancipatory experiences. Rather than use Rancière ⁸ Ramos and Maravala 2016: 167. ¹⁰ Lavender 2016: 155.

⁹ See Rancière 2009: 5 and White 2013: 22–5.

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to justify the political potential of one form of performance over another, it is illuminating to take Rancière’s concept as a hermeneutic tool to chart the way that form and content create forms of agency and knowledge. Productions that rework ancient tragedy provide useful case studies for demonstrating the shifting levels of agency and empowerment as innovations with content are easily recognizable. Immersive and durational classical performance receptions reveal that performances are rarely either emancipatory or stultifying, but that moments of emancipation can be achieved through innovations with content and form. Punchdrunk theatre company’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ non-extant tragedy Kabeiroi reveals the usefulness of Rancière’s terminology for the illumination of the interrelationship between form, content, and spectatorship. Punchdrunk are internationally renowned pioneers of the immersive form and Kabeiroi incorporated both immersive and durational strategies.¹¹ The 2017 production lasted up to six hours and took place on the streets of London for just two audience members at a time. Using the three surviving fragments of Kabeiroi as a springboard, the resulting performance positioned audiences as Jason-like figures journeying to Lemnos and ultimately becoming initiated into a mystery religion. The form of Kabeiroi was arguably the most experimental of any performance discussed thus far in this book, whereas the approach to tragic content was, if anything, conservative; unlike, for example, The Wooster Group’s deconstruction of the Phaedra/Hippolytus texts, Punchdrunk reimagined Kabeiroi, turning the decontextualized fragments into a linear narrative which took place across an Aristotelian single revolution of the sun. When read against Rancière the production can be used both to support the notion that physical emancipation works against intellectual emancipation and vice versa. On the one hand reviewer Anne Cox commented that time spent following instructions became ‘tedious, tiring, and cold’, reading as a clear case of stultification rather than emancipation.¹² Yet on the other critic Alice Saville noted that moments ‘had an amped up, star-of-your-own-movie escapism that was by turns frightening, maddening and pretty amazing’,

¹¹ On Kabeiroi see Punchdrunk 2018. Despite being known as an immersive theatre company Punchdrunk themselves do not apply the term to their work. See Punchdrunk 2018a. ¹² Cox 2017.

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implying the opposite.¹³ Although the spectators’ agency relative to the performers’ differed for each participant and at each moment of the performance, the form nevertheless encouraged an embodied, experiential understanding of the source text and placed both audience and performers on an equal position in relation to the ancient content, given that no one could know the context of the source and all were simultaneously discovering and hypothesizing. Kabeiroi consequently fulfilled Rancière’s definition of emancipated spectatorship: what is involved is linking what one knows with what one does not know; being at once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context among other spectators [ . . . ] It requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own story. An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators.¹⁴

In Kabeiroi form and content combined to allow spectators quite literally to live the Greek text. The politics of the production lay in the audience’s emancipation from pre-conceived notions of classical tragedy and in the intellectual equality that all participants—performers and spectators— held in relation to antiquity. The example demonstrates how emancipation does not have to relate to actor versus audience but can be about the relationship between the two parties to content. All postdramatic classical receptions necessitate a restructuring of the relationship between source text and audience into something dialogic and revelatory. Existing hierarchies of spectatorship can be challenged through the utilization of an unfamiliar classical source like Kabeiroi, which positions audience and performer on a more equal footing, or through formal interventions into more familiar classical content which create equivalent conditions. Such formally radical receptions, and particularly those which utilize immersive and durational techniques, exemplify the practical usefulness of Rancière’s thesis and complete the picture regarding the significance of ancient tragedy to postdramatic theatre. ZU-UK’s aforementioned Hotel Medea and Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy, overnight and twenty-four-hours long respectively and embodying polar opposite forms of immersion, demonstrate that the changing levels of formal and

¹³ Saville 2017.

¹⁴ Rancière 2009: 22.

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textual innovation can affect the politics of spectatorship in unexpected ways. The productions suggest that the amount of agency granted to performers versus spectators within the world of the performance does not correlate to the amount of intellectual agency either has towards the classical source material. As paradigmatic examples Hotel Medea and Mount Olympus demonstrate that immersive and durational postdramatic classical receptions contain moments of spectatorial emancipation and are therefore political, but that the forms of emancipation and the relative benefits of this state change at each moment of performance.

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6 ZU-UK’s Hotel Medea Some of Lehmann’s earliest examples in Postdramatic Theatre are of productions that transcend the traditional dramatic boundaries of time and space. Lehmann notes, for instance, that ‘The prolongation of time is a prominent trait of postdramatic theatre’ [original emphasis] and cites Robert Wilson’s aesthetics of duration as an example.¹ He also argues for the centrality of shared space in postdramatic theatre and uses Austrian director Josef Szeiler as a benchmark for a style of performance where space ‘is experienced, used and, in this sense, shared equally by performers and visitors’.² Yet durational, participatory, and/or immersive forms of theatre do not in isolation constitute the postdramatic; the City Dionysia, for example, can be thought of as a form of durational performance, and Brecht’s breaking of the fourth wall is a precursor to the idea of a theatre of shared space. Durational and immersive techniques are also not necessarily theatrical, with both seen within performance art.³ Yet the most formally radical examples of postdramatic theatre are often those which experiment with duration and immersion. Such productions result in affective performances which are fruitful for a consideration of the politics of spectatorship. They utilize techniques that work primarily on a visceral level; meaning is no longer substantially made through mimetic action but is negotiated in one-on-one interactions between spectator and performer, and through emotional response to place, touch, and smell.

¹ Lehmann 2006: 156. ² Lehmann 2006: 122. ³ Consider, for example, the recent work of Marina Abramović, such as her 2014 Serpentine Galleries work 512 Hours. The boundary between live art and postdramatic theatre is often difficult to discern. For Lehmann’s take on this see Lehmann 2006: 134–44. The use of an underpinning classical source text and the practice of actors performing the roles of tragic characters in my examples makes these instances unproblematic examples of the postdramatic.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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Zecora Ura and Para Active’s Hotel Medea exemplifies the blurred boundaries between durational, immersive, and site-sympathetic theatre. The Anglo-Brazilian companies, now known collectively as ZU-UK, began developing the production in 2006. It premièred at the Arcola Theatre in 2009 before the companies redeveloped it for Trinity Buoy Wharf (London, 2010), Summerhall (Edinburgh, 2011), and the Hayward Gallery (London, 2012).⁴ Hotel Medea consisted of three parts with the first based upon the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and the second and third upon the story of Jason’s betrayal of Medea and her consequent murder of their two children, as primarily known today through Euripides’ 431 BCE tragedy Medea.⁵ In each section the audience were variously positioned as visitors to a market in Colchis, guests at Jason and Medea’s wedding, members of a political focus group, patrons at a cabaret club, and the children of Medea. In all versions the production began at 23:30 and continued until dawn. The performance was freshly adapted for each space, contained no fourth wall, and instead encouraged direct interaction between actors and audience members. It was created via devising strategies; during the production’s development the company note they were always willing ‘to tear down, rip apart and rebuild whilst all the while remaining true to our first commitment, to defying the ordinary culture of theatre’.⁶ Hotel Medea can consequently be analysed under the rubric of immersive, durational, and devised theatre, yet, due to the multiplicity of experimental meaning-making strategies present, it is most usefully considered in dialogue with the postdramatic.⁷ The Hotel Medea directors Jorge Lopes Ramos and Persis Jade Maravala claim that their production creates only a sense of agency, but that this is of equal theatrical power to actual agency.⁸ Their statement, however, sells their show short. The strategies of mythic supplementation, postdramatic techniques, and invitation to experience the tragedy ⁴ These spaces range from art galleries (Hayward) to former veterinary schools (Summerhall). The production also toured to Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia. ⁵ Komporaly 2017: 108 notes that the Hotel Medea directors ‘are adamant that their production is not an adaptation of Euripides’ text’; however, it is through Euripides that most audience members would have known the narrative. Whilst not necessarily an intended adaptation, the performance is still part of the tragedy’s reception history. ⁶ Hotel Medea 2014. ⁷ For prior work which connects Hotel Medea to the postdramatic see Komporaly 2017: 96 and Lavender 2016: 23. ⁸ Ramos and Maravala 2016: 167.

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from a rich variety of embedded perspectives gave audiences intellectual autonomy. Rancière’s priortization of cognitive over felt agency creates a binary opposition within forms of emancipation, and although I do not agree that cognitive freedom is necessarily a more powerful form of empowerment it remains a crucial condition for emancipation.⁹ Although individual spectators in Hotel Medea had limited navigational agency they were active interpreters of the classical material, who like the performers could combine personal experience and different perspectives to render their own translation, appropriate the narrative for themselves, and ultimately make their own story out of the performance, thus fulfilling Rancière’s understanding of intellectual emancipation.¹⁰ The production consequently further attests to both the relevance of the classics, as a semantic scaffold which audiences effectively ‘translate’, to postdramatic theatre and the political qualities, via Rancière’s understanding of politics, of the theatrical form.

Analysing Emancipation Scholars have proposed several analytic frameworks to comprehend the experiential impact of performances such as Hotel Medea. Peter Boenisch, for example, suggests that analysts employ what he terms a ‘relational dramaturgy’ which ‘draws on and particularly highlights a production’s spectatorial relations, its fluid shifting between materiality and semioticity’.¹¹ Boenisch’s approach foregrounds the fact that the primary meaning of such productions does not lie in the performers’ interpretation of text, but in the interplay between the performance and the spectators’ embodied experience of the event.¹² Josephine Machon’s methodology echoes Boenisch’s focus on spectatorial experience. She argues for a form of (syn)aesthetic analysis on the basis that immersive theatre is exemplary of (syn)aesthetic practice. Synaesthesia has become a popular lens of analysis throughout the humanities in the twenty-first ⁹ My response to Rancière’s implicit hierarchy regarding forms of emancipation is in line with my fourth caveat regarding the role of the political in devised—and indeed in any form of—performance, as discussed in Part II. ¹⁰ Rancière 2009: 22. ¹¹ Boenisch 2014: 228. This approach has commonalities with Fischer-Lichte’s ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ between performer and audience. See Fischer-Lichte 2008: 39–40. ¹² Boenisch 2014: 232.

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century and refers to a neurological condition where the stimulation of one sense automatically causes the stimulation of another, such as associating individual words with particular smells, or sounds with colours.¹³ Using synaesthesia as an analytic lens has the advantage of removing or minimizing binary distinctions between the senses, which can alternatively devalue sight due to its link to spectacle, or valorize it through its connection to knowledge. Machon’s (syn)aesthetic analysis engages with how immersive productions combine visual, physical, verbal, aural, haptic, and olfactory means to provoke a visceral response in the audience.¹⁴ Machon suggests that it fuses the idea of sense, in terms of the semantic ‘meaning making’ definition, with sense, in terms of feeling as sensation and emotion, and allows us to comprehend the ‘double-edged rendering of making-sense/sense-making’ [original emphasis] and the fused ‘somatic/semantic nature’ of immersive performances.¹⁵ Machon’s wordplay intersects with my focus on attending to the semiotic material and the meanings it offers an audience alongside the experiential feelings invoked from the affective dimension of performance. Through such a combined approach productions can be critically, albeit partially, comprehended. What both Machon and Boenisch’s forms of analysis overlook, however, is the continuing importance of the textual and semiotic material contained in theatre, and the fact that multiple sources of meaning (although not extra-sensory) are found outside of a performance. Audience members begin to interpret a production long before they enter a show, perhaps by contemplating the upcoming event through the lens of the source text’s reception history. Spectators additionally often continue processing the event long after it is over. Rose Biggin’s analysis of Punchdrunk’s fan mail, for example, reveals how immersive experiences stay with spectators after the conclusion of a production; she argues that fan mail reveals that the act of retrospectively sharing and revisiting experiences is just as important to the immersive experience as one’s journey within the performance.¹⁶ Punchdrunk’s Artistic Director Felix Barrett himself attests to the significance of the pre- and post-performance elements when

¹³ Machon 2009: 13. For an example of synaesthetic analysis within classics, see Butler and Purves 2013. For Lehmann’s take on the relevance of synaesthesia to watching postdramatic theatre, see Lehmann 2006: 84–5. ¹⁴ Machon 2009: 14. ¹⁵ Machon 2009: 14. ¹⁶ Biggin 2015, esp. 309–10.

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he states that Punchdrunk’s productions deliberately problematize the point at which a performance begins. He notes: I’m also fascinated by the idea of the point at which shows start—is it when you’re trying to find the building, which we’ve deliberately made quite difficult to locate—and when does the show finish; is it as soon as you walk back into the bar, when you get home, is it two weeks later? I’m fascinated by that murky hinterland that is the space between the show and real life and how we can theatricalize that.¹⁷

A blurred finishing point can also be seen in ZU-UK’s ‘Audience as Document’ project, which brings audiences who saw Hotel Medea together in a regular dialogue. Maravala and Ramos reflect a similar sentiment to Barrett when they state: We are interested in the idea that an audience member’s relationship with a live event starts the first time they hear about it and ends the last time they remember it. And by keeping an ongoing dialogue with audiences before, during, and after their experiences we believe that we can gain an extraordinary insight into what impact such events have on individual audience members.¹⁸

Neither a relational dramaturgy nor a (syn)aesthetic form of analysis accommodates these aspects of immersive performance. However, they appear vital to practitioners and have heightened pertinence to any discussion of a classical performance reception. A percentage of an audience will likely read a performance reception through their prior knowledge of a classical text and potentially also its reception history; the paratexts to the performance can both provide a form of functional knowledge for spectators, and can also be negated through the supplanting of canonical classical texts with more obscure mythological variants, which challenge hierarchies of knowledge and spectatorship. Both examples can be found in Act I of Hotel Medea. My upcoming analysis of emancipation in this act of the performance reveals that a specific framework purely for performances that transcend the boundaries of time and space is not necessary; blending together semiotic and phenomenological forms of analysis as done elsewhere in this volume allows one to speak of the possible prior influences that constitute the audience’s horizon of expectation, and how a production’s phenomenological impact might transcend the constraints of the performance. Indeed, ¹⁷ Barrett, quoted in Machon 2013: 164.

¹⁸ Hotel Medea 2014a.

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productions like Hotel Medea literalize the abstract processes of audience engagement and classical reception at work in my earlier chapters. As audiences could only ever partially experience the performance due to the impossibility of being in multiple places at once, every audience member’s experience differed, reflecting Lehmann’s argument that postdramatic productions literally or metaphorically invert the structural order of drama by denying the spectator’s desire for orientation and by instead emphasizing what is incomplete and incompletable about theatre.¹⁹ By focusing not only on the way meaning is made during performance, but also on how this extends beyond the boundaries of the theatrical experience, one can come closer to grasping the effect of such productions. The three sections that made up Hotel Medea were titled ‘Zero Hour Market’, ‘Drylands’, and ‘Feast of Dawn’. They ran for between two and two and a half hours each, and respectively focused on Medea meeting and marrying Jason during his pursuit of the Golden Fleece, her discovery of his infidelity, and her act of infanticide. In the 2012 Hayward Gallery production, which constituted part of the London Olympic Games’ Cultural Olympiad, spectators gathered for the overnight event at London’s Southbank Centre at 23:30, where they were asked to check in their bags and were given a short information sheet outlining what they should expect from the show. The flyer declared the day to be ‘National Day of the Golden Fleece’. The audience then proceeded into the Hayward Gallery, stopping at checkpoints along the way where they were taught a short dance routine and a call-and-response song to aid in participation. The following of instructions, also seen in Kabeiroi, was one of the more stultifying elements of the performance, although it later helped create the illusion of agency by empowering audiences to participate in seemingly spontaneous group dance sequences.²⁰ Although Maravala and Ramos do not label Hotel Medea an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, the triptych structure appears to be a nod to the tragedy’s reception history. It refers back not only to the original form of Euripides’ entry to the City Dionysia, but also to the recent tradition of rewriting Medea as a trilogy.²¹ Franz Grillparzer’s 1822 Das goldene Vließ ¹⁹ Lehmann 2006: 88, 99. ²⁰ On Kabeiroi see the introduction to Part III. ²¹ Although Med. was part of a tragic trilogy it was not a connected trilogy but consisted of Med. Philoctetes, and Dictys. The satyr play The Reapers accompanied the trilogy.

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(The Golden Fleece), for example, consisted of three five-act plays, and Heiner Müller’s previously discussed Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten also had a three-part structure.²² Influences from the latter example pervaded Hotel Medea, not only in the structure of the performance but also in its thematic content. Act I, for example, ended with Medea shedding her exotic costume and adopting a white dress symbolic of the Western wedding tradition, which invoked the colonial overtones of Müller’s script. The Müller connection was likely due to published Medeamaterial translator Marc von Henning’s role as writer and, later, dramaturg of the production.²³ The durational element of the structure also spoke to Medea’s reception history and particularly Robert Wilson’s 1970 eight-hour performance reception of Medea, titled Deafman Glance.²⁴ Maravala and Ramos settled on the durational form as they wanted to create a time-specific version of Euripides’ play that focused on overnight revenge and ended with Medea escaping at dawn.²⁵ The timeframe recalled Medea’s escape via the sun chariot in Medea and was the most obviously postdramatic element of the play given that Lehmann argues that consciously noticeable duration is a key factor of time distortion in postdramatic theatre.²⁶ The effect of this technique was to fuse the metatheatrical quality of Hotel Medea with its postdramatic nature. Collectively, the connections to prior experimental Medea receptions via the form of Hotel Medea may have shaped spectatorial expectations and provided a form of functional knowledge for audience utilization. Hotel Medea officially commenced when o Capitãno, played by Ramos, entered the main gallery space with a megaphone and blew a ²² For scholarship on the German tradition of rewriting the Medea myth, see Lü 2008. For a more complete performance history of Med., see Hall, Macintosh, and Taplin 2000, Lü 2009, and Bartel and Simon 2010. For my previous discussion of Müller’s play see the introduction to this book. ²³ The translation can be found in von Henning 1995. Von Henning was originally credited as the writer for the 2009 Arcola production; however, he was later only credited as the dramaturg, apparently becoming less involved in the production throughout its lifespan. ²⁴ See Wilson 2014 and Macintosh 2000: 25. Deafman Glance was partially inspired by Wilson’s relationship with his adopted deaf son Raymond Andrews and was largely performed in silence. It evolved into Overture to the Fourth Act of Deafman Glance in 1982, in which Wilson and his collaborator Sheryl Sutton silently performed murdering a young boy and girl. Med. was referenced in the programme notes. ²⁵ Kenber 2012. ²⁶ See Lehmann 2006: 156.

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whistle, following which approximately twenty actors arrived and set up a bazaar-style market scene to a pulsating tribal-like score. Brazilian DJ Dolores mixed the music live. Ramos notes that components in the act, including accents, music, and costuming, were ‘used as a dramaturgical device to raise your expectations of upcoming exotic content, framing the first chapter of the Hotel Medea trilogy as “generically foreign” and slowly casting you as a tourist in this culturally unfamiliar land’.²⁷ The traders wore satellite dishes with coloured ribbons attached as a type of headdress, which immediately filled the cavernous space and created a bustling environment which broke up the audience and supplanted the gallery space. Spectators were encouraged to interact with the traders, who called out to each other and to the audience in Portuguese and appeared to be selling fraudulent versions of the Golden Fleece. After approximately ten minutes a siren sounded, and o Capitãno announced Jason’s arrival. He entered with a group of women, who appeared ganglike, as a cross between bikers and Amazons; they were naked from the waist up and wore leather trousers, a motorbike helmet, and carried machine guns. Jason stood opposite Medea, who was played by Maravala and wore a costume that bore a likeness to carnival fashion. She wore an orange dress with an elaborate headdress and had flowing ribbons of coloured fabric cascading off her outfit. Jason and Medea engaged in a highly physicalized courtship routine. They spoke minimal dialogue, which was mainly in Portuguese and consequently encouraged the audience to attend to the overall spectacle rather than its specifics given their likely lack of the functional knowledge required to translate the scene. The sequence concluded with Jason and Medea becoming engaged. For the next half hour the audience participated in the wedding preparations, dancing and singing the pre-taught routines in an exercise of acquired knowledge until the wedding ceremony began. Following the marriage rituals the scene descended into a rave, with the audience encouraged to dance to the DJ’s music while Medea sought out the men who had previously accompanied her and poisoned them each in turn. With her family’s guards now dead she hunted out her brother and poisoned him, too, by pressing her bloodied lips against him and kissing him on the mouth. By this point the music had ceased and the audience

²⁷ Ramos and Maravala 2016: 153.

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had gathered to watch Medea betray her family. She cut the Golden Fleece from her brother’s dead fingers and exited with Jason. At times Zero Hour Market resembled a nightclub more than a dramatic performance. The act could accomodate 150 audience members, which was more than double the capacity of the remainder of the performance.²⁸ The combination of the size of the audience and the methods through which the spectators were coerced into participating felt alienating and unnatural for some critics; Stephe Harrop, for example, notes that she felt the practitioners believed their role to be to ‘bully the rest of us into compliant communal enthusiasm’.²⁹ Such a feeling is in tension with the practitioners’ own intentions; Maravala and Ramos associate their work with a ‘dramaturgy of care’ and believe they utilize a ‘dramaturgy of participation’ which ‘equips guests with tools, information and skills required to participate fully, and critically, in the action’.³⁰ Jozefina Komporaly believes that the directors achieved their intention, arguing that ‘Moments such as Medea’s and Jason’s wedding stand out precisely because of a genuine feel of community generated by participants, at ease with a performance situation in which the boundaries between spectating and participating/doing are blurred’.³¹ The opening act can be employed both to support and push against the idea that the audience’s physical emancipation equates to Rancière’s emancipated spectator. Yet if we broaden our perspective out from personal performance preferences and a literal reading of emancipation, the political potential of Hotel Medea becomes clearer. Irrespective of the amount of performative agency that individual audience members felt they were granted in Act I, all held an amount of intellectual agency in determining how this prequel to the more familiar story of Medea’s infanticide adhered to the wider myth. The story of Jason’s pursuit of the Golden Fleece is a popular quest narrative with a rich reception history of its own, yet Medea’s role in this story and her murder of her brother Apsyrtus is less well known.³² Medea’s

²⁸ Act II and III had a capacity of 72. Audiences could choose between booking for the entire event or for Act I only. ²⁹ Harrop 2009. ³⁰ Ramos, quoted in Komporaly 2017: 111. On the dramaturgy of care see Komporaly 2017: 109. ³¹ Komporaly 2017: 113. ³² The murder, for example, was written out of the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts film.

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betrayal of her family is preserved in Apollonius’ Argonautica, Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliothetica Historica, and an unnamed work by Dionysius Scytobrachion. The fratricide would have been a familiar myth in antiquity; however, it is unlikely to have constituted part of the Hotel Medea audience’s horizon of expectation. The participatory form and the supplementary content consequently came together in Act I to create a form of emancipated spectatorship in relation to the classics, where there was no distinction between those who look and those who act, but rather all worked together to relate the new narrative to the familiar backstory.³³ Act II, which focused on exploring the infanticide from a multiplicity of new angles and which is the focus of the next part of this chapter, built upon this dimension and employed subtler strategies of immersion which worked with the audience’s sleep deprivation to create a more dreamlike space that the audience inhabited organically.³⁴ It attempted to minimize the potential pitfalls of participatory and immersive theatre which can lead to audience embarrassment and inhibit performance efficacy through the employment of a wider range of postdramatic strategies.³⁵

Intellectual Agency in Hotel Medea and the Postcolonial Tradition of Medea Receptions In contrast to the participatory strategies employed in Act I, which positioned the audience as guests in a foreign land with limited physical and navigational agency due to their typecast role, Act II utilized immersive strategies where spectators became not simply voyeurs within the world but active characters with integral roles. Gareth White makes the distinction between Act I and Act II as one where in the former he had self-ownership, where he experienced things happening to him, while in the latter he had both self-ownership and also self-agency, where ³³ On the importance of eroding the distinction between those who look and those who act for emancipated spectatorship see Rancière 2009: 19. The scene additionally raised questions about the ethics of emancipation when it relates to viewing and/or participating in acts of violence. The ethical dimension of the politics of spectatorship is discussed in detail in Chapter 7. ³⁴ Lehmann argues that a theatre where ‘the stage discourses often come to resemble the structure of dreams’ is a defining element of the postdramatic. See Lehmann 2006: 84. ³⁵ See Nield 2008 on audience embarrassment in participatory and immersive theatre.

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he believed himself to play a part in causing the events to happen.³⁶ Drylands was made up of three scenes that ran simultaneously. The audience, separated into three groups, experienced all three components promenade-style between the hours of 02:00 and 04:30.³⁷ The timing and the sleep deprivation which ensued was essential to the audience experience; it led to a sense of disorientation and confusion which encouraged the audience to embrace any interpretation offered, despite how drastically it differed from one’s previous perspective on the action. James Layton’s recollection of the experience captures the oneiric nature of the event; he states that ‘the slow and painful way in which the story was delivered, coupled with a personal sense of tiredness, meant that what I witnessed became confused almost instantly with what had been before; pure perception and pure memory’.³⁸ The blurring of perspectives connects with Lehmann’s postdramatic dream world, which he argues should promote a ‘non-hierarchy of images, movements and words’.³⁹ The overnight timing allowed the performance to interrogate how seeing and acting relate to intellectual, sensed, and embodied autonomy as perception and activity did not equate to agency. The act consequently demonstrated how form affects the politics of spectatorship. My analysis of these scenes necessarily imposes an order upon the material, and I discuss firstly the ‘Medea loop’, then the ‘Children loop’, and finally the ‘Jason loop’; however, the order is entirely arbitrary as the route through which the audience experienced the three sections was determined by chance. The different possible patterns did not substantially alter the overall effect of the scenes as a triptych. The section of Drylands that encouraged the audience to view the events from Medea’s perspective began with one third of the audience being led into a space dominated by a double mattress on a raised platform. A single chair was positioned facing the bed. A video projection of a clock face, with the minute hand winding backwards, was displayed on the wall behind the bed. A woman in a long white dress, whom the audience could identify as Medea from the previous act, sat upon the bed, towel-drying her hair. A wide semi-circle of stools surrounded the

³⁶ White 2013: 184. ³⁷ Promenade theatre involves a standing audience who walk through different spaces in a pre-determined route as part of the performance. ³⁸ Layton 2012: 11. ³⁹ Lehmann 2006: 84.

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bed, which the audience was free to sit on. Another woman, dressed in all white with a knitted shawl and plain nursing cap, entered and tended to Medea, helping comb her hair and rub cream onto her hands. For approximately twenty minutes the audience was alone with these two people and was encouraged to interact directly with the women by partaking in their conversation about love and heartache, brought about by Medea’s anxiety over Jason’s absence that evening. The dialogue in this scene was unscripted and frank, personal confessions from the audience members were facilitated which drew upon knowledge from lived experience, with the nurse questioning individuals about whether they had ever hurt someone they loved and when their hearts had most recently been broken. The postdramatic breaking of the fourth wall temporarily moved the production away from its focus on Medea and the Euripidean source text towards a more general exploration of the themes of love, heartbreak, and betrayal. The broad focus was strengthened through Medea herself remaining largely silent during the improvisation, which further empowered the audience to author the performance. The shared intimacy of the exchange between the nurse and the audience combined with Medea’s attention upon spectators to push all to invest in Medea’s story and identify the space as simultaneously hers and theirs. It is an example of how the practitioners sought to create a community amongst the actors and the audience. ZU-UK advertised Hotel Medea as involving ‘risk, intimacy and collective action in a way which sets out to re-write the “unspoken contract” with the audience not as consumers, but as collaborators’.⁴⁰ It is possible to read here a direct rejection of the forms of immersivity associated with other theatre companies, such as Punchdrunk, whose theatre practice during the time of Hotel Medea was increasingly (and somewhat unfairly) associated with consumerism and commercialization.⁴¹ In such Punchdrunk works a masked audience enters a cavernous space designed to evoke a specific world, such as a 1920s hotel or a 1960s Hollywood production studio, where they are free to interact with the space as they wish and choose which actors to follow,

⁴⁰ Lavender 2016: 88. ⁴¹ For journalism on the commercialization of Punchdrunk, see Gillinson 2012 and Soloski 2015.

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what moments of the performance to watch, and when to turn away from the action and explore the set.⁴² Certain choices open up privileged moments of performance, such as a one-on-one experience in an otherwise off-limits part of the space. No two individuals have identical experiences, and the value and meaning to be found in any one performance thus becomes subjective and often relies on how well an audience member ‘plays the game’. Adam Alston refers to this as a type of ‘entrepreneurial participation’ based on self-made opportunity, which shares values with neoliberalism such as entrepreneurialism, valorization of risk, agency, and responsibility.⁴³ Punchdrunk’s masked performances are less postdramatic; they employ participatory and immersive strategies and prioritize the haptic, but still make substantial meaning through character and narrative. As Hotel Medea also contained privileged moments of performance that only a select few could experience, such as two individuals playing the corpses of Medea’s murdered children in Act III, I am unconvinced that the neoliberal ethos and associated consumerist connotations are entirely absent from the production; however, it is nevertheless true that audiences were given greater agency in Hotel Medea than in some other immersive examples and that in Act II spectators were positioned as integral to the action. As this section of the Medea loop was improvised the audience had the power to shape the scene substantially, blurring the boundaries between performance and reality. Rather than remain a work of art, the performance became what Erika Fischer-Lichte terms an event, where everyone present becomes co-subjects and the relationship between the performance and audience is no longer dichotomous but oscillatory.⁴⁴ The significance of the moment lay in the emotional experience the audience underwent while negotiating their involvement in the scene and weighing up how forthcoming they wanted to be with their answers. As the audience’s participation could feasibly detract from their ability to analyse the semiotic material, the scene became a reflection of Lehmann’s argument that postdramatic theatre often ‘becomes a moment of shared energies

⁴² These set designs are associated with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and The Drowned Man respectively. ⁴³ Alston 2013: 128. Although Alston’s reading is persuasive, agency and responsibility are not exclusive to neoliberalism. ⁴⁴ Fischer-Lichte 2008: 17.

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instead of transmitted signs’ [original emphasis].⁴⁵ The powerful moment was disrupted, however, when Jason entered with an accompanying (male) film crew. Jason’s entrance seemingly invaded Medea’s space, bringing destruction into her environment by disrupting the tranquil space and asserting a masculine dominance over the home sphere. It soon became clear that the film crew were there to interview Jason in his home environment as part of a political campaign involving Jason standing for office. The campaign was a modern representation of Jason’s ambitiousness, which replaced his politically motivated marriage into the Corinthian royal family in the Euripidean source text [593–7]. It invoked the idea of careerist politicians and the collapsing of the public and private interface that occurs in contemporary politics. Jason’s running for office further emphasized the cultural differences between Medea and Jason that were embodied in their casting, as Jason was played by a white British male, while Maravala is of Indian and Iranian heritage. These cultural differences were first emphasized in Zero Hour Market through Jason and Medea’s different pre-wedding rituals, as well as their dress styles, dance practices, and fighting tactics. The decision from Act I to draw upon Brazilian cultural traditions for Medea’s characterization reflects the creative team’s decision to portray her as more generically exotic and ‘other’. In Act II this contrasted with a Jason who was firmly entrenched in the local political system and focused upon projecting the stereotypical image of a nuclear Western family. The arrival of Jason not only interrupted the exchange between the actors and audience, but also bracketed off audience participation by physically segregating the spectators from the action. Jason additionally displaced Medea, ignoring her while the cameras documented his movements and constantly using the first person singular possessive and referring to ‘my children’ instead of ‘our children’. Jason’s language and proxemics positioned him as a hostile and invading presence to both Medea and the audience, which was further heightened by the fact that the documentary cameras occasionally turned on the audience, inverting the gaze usually established in the theatre by focusing upon and exposing the spectators. The sense of invading one’s personal

⁴⁵ Lehmann 2006: 150.

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space implicitly aligned the audience with Medea and fostered a similar emotional response between the audience and Medea towards Jason’s actions. The fourth wall remained intact for the remainder of the scene, in which the film crew eventually departed and Jason climbed into bed with Medea. After being awoken by a phone call Jason dressed and departed, leaving his phone on the bed. It rang again and woke Medea, causing her to search for Jason and become increasingly distressed when she could not find him. Medea then started going through Jason’s phone, at which point the rewinding clock stopped. The projected clock recalled the Senecan idea of a woman inhabiting the role of Medea. In Seneca’s tragedy the Nurse states ‘Medea’, only for Medea to cut her off with the line ‘Fiam’—I will become [her] [174–5]. Later, after she has committed the infanticide Medea announces ‘Medea nunc sum’—Now I am Medea [910]. In Hotel Medea the clock indicated that Medea was progressing back towards a situation where her actions would converge with those of her mythical precedent. The video projection on the back wall, overlaying Medea, changed to display the incriminating mobile phone content which Medea had discovered: a video of a naked Jason, apparently being filmed by a woman who could be heard laughing and flirting in the background. The video looped on repeat while A Silver Mt. Zion’s ‘Stumble then Rise on Some Awkward Morning’ played and began to crescendo in the background. The film crew re-entered, and a live feed of their documentary video, which depicted Medea’s agony in close-up, appeared on the back wall. The audience was given multiple frames through which to watch this event: they could observe Medea, the video monitors connected to the cameras, or the large-scale projection. The live feed focused on Medea’s laptop, which enabled the audience to see a message she was typing to Jason stating ‘forgive me Jason how stupid of me. I forgot that love comes and goes. Where do I go now? Disappear into my own wasteland???’. A blackout cut off the remaining question marks. As the audience bore witness to the revelation of Jason’s infidelity and Medea’s reaction they were invited to empathize with Medea’s despair, anger, and growing urge for revenge. Just as Act I subtly interrogated the audience’s complicity to Medea’s murder of her brother, here the dynamic shifts between viewing and acting questioned how modes of spectatorship and relative agency affect culpability.

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The Medea loop was the part of Hotel Medea most explicitly aligned with Euripides’ tragedy. Most of the scripted dialogue, however, was borrowed from Müller’s Medeamaterial rather than Euripides’ play. The Müller inclusions are perhaps unsurprising given that Hotel Medea invoked Müller’s structure and similarly recalled Medea’s murder of her brother. The Müller passages were found in Medea’s initial conversation with her Nurse and several lines from Medea’s email to Jason, including ‘love comes and goes’ and ‘into my own wasteland’.⁴⁶ On a superficial level these quotations associated Hotel Medea with a tradition of non-linear, stream-of-consciousness recreations of Euripides’ Medea and aligned the reception with a postmodern aesthetic. On a deeper level, however, the connection evoked a thematic engagement with Medea. As discussed in the introduction to this book Müller’s play was a political reception that explored debates surrounding class, gender, and colonialism. The last theme had relevance to the Medea loop as Jason was depicted as a colonizing power who not only invaded Medea’s homeland, but also continued to behave as an invading force when interacting both with Medea in the home sphere and with the audience during the performance. The colonial dimension of this scene spoke not only to Müller’s Medeamaterial but also to a broader tradition of postcolonial readings of Euripides’ tragedy.⁴⁷ Postcolonial interpretations of Medea are an established trend within classical performance reception which came about due to the play’s juxtaposition of an oriental Medea and a Greek Jason, and the ambiguity surrounding Euripides’ stance on Medea’s foreign status.⁴⁸ Donald Mastronarde, for example, has pointed out that the degree to which Euripides wanted and expected ‘his audience to understand and sympathize with Medea, despite her otherness’ is problematic, and Celia Wren argues that the geopolitical aspects surrounding ⁴⁶ In Jay Scheib’s 2005 postdramatic multimedia The Medea he similarly included the Müller line ‘love comes and goes’. See Campbell 2010b: 177. On the production see Scheib 2014. ⁴⁷ Postcolonial readings are, of course, not exclusive to the reception of Med. See Hardwick 2005: 107 for an overview of significant colonialist/postcolonialist readings of the classics. For scholarship on postcolonial receptions in Latin America see Andújar and Nikoloutsos (forthcoming) and Bosher, Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine 2015. For further detail on the significance of postcolonial receptions of Med. to the history of the postdramatic see my discussion in the introduction to this book. ⁴⁸ Mastronarde 2002: 22–3.

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‘Medea the Outsider’ are the most interesting elements of the play.⁴⁹ The South American cultural practices included in Act I gave the postcolonial associations a specifically Latin American dimension, which connected the production to the rich reception history of Medea in Latin America.⁵⁰ Latin American receptions often compound the Euripidean tragedy with the prior story of Jason’s invasion of Colchis and theft of the Golden Fleece to problematize the cultural privileging of the classical Greek and Roman past to the detriment of local mythologies. The supplementation practice is not exclusive to this geographical region or to the postcolonial era; Apollonius’ third-century BCE Argonautica, for example, focuses upon Jason’s colonial endeavours and Medea’s assistance with the theft of the Golden Fleece, and Grillparzer and Müller both blended this part of the epic tradition with Euripides’ tragedy.⁵¹ However, Latin American receptions often position the local mythologies as Aztec or Incan to create specificity. The decision to follow this model in Hotel Medea, albeit with a focus on the idea of the Brazilian carnival rather than Aztec mythology, enabled the practitioners to create a vibrant cultural world in Act I full of colour, dance, and music, which the more clinical and empty mise-en-scène of Medea and Jason’s bedroom replaced in Act II. The Medea in Hotel Medea had been exiled from both her homeland and from Jason’s marital home and was experiencing a profoundly displaced sense of identity through the eradication of her native culture. Her characterization reflected Barbara Goff ’s argument that ‘postcolonial literature is often recognised by its focus on displacement, in tales of exile and deracination; by its interrogation of the notion of identity; and by its deliberate impurity of language, genre and/or style’.⁵² The performance techniques employed in this scene encouraged the audience to inhabit the position of the colonized imaginatively and to engage, through Medea’s displacement, with these wider issues surrounding the

⁴⁹ See Mastronarde 2002: 22–3 and Wren 2002: 24 respectively. ⁵⁰ Cherrié Moraga’s 1995 interweaving of Euripides’ play with Aztec myths, titled The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, is arguably the most iconic of these plays. For scholarship on this play see Straile-Costa 2010 and Billotte 2015. ⁵¹ Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea also opens in Colchis with the theft of the Golden Fleece. Latin American instances that open with Medea meeting Jason include, for example, David Cureses’ Argentinian La frontera. ⁵² Goff 2005: 3.

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cultural privileging of Western history. However, the performers did not capitalize on the capabilities of this invocation. The blurring of Brazilian cultural traditions with other South American iconographies and sources of music in Act I meant that the play did not contain the specific type of political commentary as, for example, Cherrié Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, but merely highlighted the issue for the audience’s consideration. The Medea loop eclectically referenced the postcolonial traditions of receiving Medea but did not explore what these traditions might mean to the performers and audience in the present moment. The implicit allusions to the postcolonial dimension associated with, for example, Müller’s reception may have reminded some audience members of a reception history through which many have come to associate Euripides’ play, but the production did not make a politically loaded statement about it. This is not to say that Hotel Medea was apolitical or conservative, but merely that its degree of formal innovation exceeded the production’s other types of experimentation. Indeed, the ambiguity surrounding the performance’s political dimension was arguably one of its strengths, as it embodied a connection to Euripides’ tragedy and a potential way that the reception shone light back onto the source text, and facilitated audience emancipation. Mastronarde, for example, notes that Euripides’ text ‘appears to be designed to evoke shifting and mixed reactions to the major figures and to leave little room for either moral certainty or moral smugness by the end of the play’.⁵³ In this vein Hotel Medea similarly touched upon a variety of different potential readings without directing the audience towards a specific political interpretation. The successfulness of the simultaneous invocation of a postcolonial dimension and the ambiguity surrounding the politics of this association lies in the combination of postdramatic techniques and the classical source text. The Medea loop demonstrated the postdramatic quality of a violation of the norm of sign density. It flicked between depriving the audience of content in the early improvised sections, where spectators might conceivably wonder what they were waiting for and whether their conversations were ‘part of the show’, and creating a plethora of referents through, for example, the broad mix of textual sources.⁵⁴ Irrespective of ⁵³ Mastronarde 2002: 28. ⁵⁴ On sign density in postdramatic theatre see Lehmann 2006: 89–90.

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whether one recognized the Euripidean, Senecan, and Müller allusions, the scene layered frames of reference through the multimedia imagery and live performance, alongside forms of politics relating to spectatorship, contemporary personality politics, and gender and domestic politics. The experimentation with sign density combined with the participatory strategies and the diverse mix of cultural associations. Yet throughout Euripides’ Medea remained as a semantic scaffold, grounding the action in a familiar myth of a woman’s betrayal and subsequent revenge and ensuring that a clear background meaning underpinned every postdramatic technique. The benefits of Rancière’s terminology as a hermeneutic tool are apparent, as the avoidance of any didacticism gave the audience intellectual agency. The opacity surrounding the production’s innovation with content and the politics underpinning the artists’ decisions empowered spectators to make their own connections and consequently consisted of a form of intellectual emancipation. The practitioners did not stipulate what the postcolonial tradition of receiving Medea meant in the present moment, but rather their tapping in to a familiar tradition enabled the audience to answer this question independently.

Felt Agency and the Domestication of Medea In contrast to the subtle techniques employed in the Medea loop, the trajectory that aligned spectators with the children’s journey used overt strategies to position individuals as explicitly embodying these roles. It consequently prioritized felt agency, or embodied emancipation. The actors and the scenography manipulated the audience into taking on these identities; rejecting this characterization required active resistance. The scene began with performers leading the audience towards the opposite end of the cavernous space which constituted Medea’s bedroom. A semi-circle of twelve bunk beds was arranged against the back wall, complete with cartoon-print pillowcases and stuffed animals (Fig. 6.1). Ramos and Maravala refer to the interconnected performance spaces as ‘immersive environments’ which use ‘design, architecture, technology, and live performance to transform the guest’s perception of a physical space—giving them the experience of being entirely submerged in a fictional reality’; the design heightened the sense of spatial

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Figure 6.1. The Children loop, Hotel Medea. Photo: Ludovic des Cognets.

and cognitive immersion.⁵⁵ Performers dressed the audience in flannel pyjamas and handed out cups of hot chocolate, and then tucked each person into a bed. A personal nanny was assigned to each bunk, who tended to their charge and read aloud a bedtime story: an unpublished graphic novel created for the performance titled ‘The Amazing Adventures of Jason and Medea’. After this the lights were turned off; however, the nannies hovered nearby, occasionally stroking audience members’ foreheads, at one point joining together to sing a lullaby, and persistently encouraging those who did not immediately fall asleep to remain lying down. The visual aesthetic and the way that the actors treated the audience encouraged a feeling of being cared for. The scene was the ‘hotel’ part of Hotel Medea, where spectators could sleep. For those who remained awake, however, the scene provided an opportunity to bear aural witness to the exchange occurring nearby between Jason and Medea. Cuddling soft toys, the audience became children being kept awake by their parents’ arguing, struggling to make out the precise words and understand how this would affect them. ⁵⁵ Ramos and Maravala 2016: 161–2.

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The mise-en-scène and immersive techniques, combined with the performance’s manipulation of spectators’ body clocks, worked together in this scene to provoke an experiential state of confusion and frustration similar to what a child might feel when placed in such a situation. Daisy Bowie-Sell attests to this notion; she argues ‘the feeling of being tired is intrinsic to the action—the audience become the doomed children of Jason and Medea, who are in bed, falling in and out of sleepy awareness as they hear their parents argue in a room nearby’.⁵⁶ Regardless of whether this was experienced before or after the scene within Medea’s bedroom, audience knowledge of the tragic narrative, reinforced through the presence of the graphic novel text, meant it was possible to fill in the blanks, as it were, and to reconcile one’s positioning as a child with the mythological tradition to comprehend the perspective being offered. Lehmann cites the characters of Medea and her children as ‘unconsciously operating figures of cultural discourse everyone “knows” (knowingly or unknowingly)’, and here these figures were exploited to their full potential in an attempt to create a highly affective experience.⁵⁷ For all familiar with the myth of Medea the experience of embodying the role of the children likely stirred a degree of fear and panic. Although realistically one understands that no audience member will be harmed in a theatrical production, the stagecraft nevertheless facilitated a feeling of imminent danger. The combination of the agency found in the felt experience of fear and the restrictions to autonomy necessitated by spectators’ sleep-deprived status shows the complexity surrounding the presence of emancipation in Hotel Medea. The formal properties of the scene worked against emancipation by encouraging a type of viewing characterized by partial awareness, while the content fought against this and evinced how re-configuring one’s relationship to the classics by inhabiting new perspectives can create a form of emancipation. Invoking a feeling of fear was Ramos’ intention; he states ‘The audience knows what will happen, but you might suddenly find yourself in pyjamas in the kids’ bed and think “hang on, I’m going to be killed”. These moments of realization are what audiences remember most’.⁵⁸ The scene represented the most formally experimental and experientially affective moment of the production. It encouraged the audience to join together as a collective ⁵⁶ Bowie-Sell 2012. ⁵⁷ Lehmann 2006: 80. ⁵⁸ Ramos, quoted in Kenber 2012.

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and have an emotional and visceral response to the story, and reflected Fischer-Lichte’s argument that the communities that arise during performance events constitute temporary social realities.⁵⁹ The production manipulated the audience into experiencing fear through the timing and directorial strategies. However, as previously mentioned, prioritizing the real over the sensed creates a problematic binary, and intellectual agency could nevertheless still be found in the scene in terms of the perspective audiences could take on Medea. The scene can consequently be viewed as commenting upon different forms of emancipation. Although the form of the Children loop was original, the prioritization of the children’s perspective is an established tradition within Medea receptions. The incorporation of an innovative focus on felt agency was consequently the latest in a long history of domesticated readings of Medea. C. A. E. Luschnig notes, for example, that Euripides’ tragedy gives remarkable prominence and individuality to the children.⁶⁰ Several modern receptions have expanded upon this. For example, Per Lysander and Suzanne Osten’s 1975 Swedish play Medeas barn (Medea’s Children) was written for children and explored the children’s experience of Jason and Medea’s divorce.⁶¹ Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks’ 2012 Australian Medea additionally positioned the two sons at the centre of the production and explored the story from their point of view.⁶² Finally, the National Theatre’s 2014 production of Medea, despite staying textually close to Euripides’ play, expanded the sons’ roles, with the production’s opening tableau featuring the two boys watching television. They regularly appeared in the mise-en-scène throughout the performance, riding tricycles around the stage and playing on swings in the upstage background.⁶³ These three indicative examples all invited spectators to reconsider the role of the children within Medea and ⁵⁹ Fischer-Lichte 2008: 55. ⁶⁰ Luschnig 2007: 104. ⁶¹ Medeas barn is one of the most successful twentieth-century Swedish dramas and has had several English-language productions, most recently at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of the Made in Scotland showcase. ⁶² See Belvoir 2014. The Mulvany/Sarks Medea toured to Poland in 2014. New productions of the script were also produced in London (2015) and Perth (2019). ⁶³ Ben Power’s script was marketed as a ‘new version’ rather than a ‘translation’; however, it remained very close to Euripides’ text and is best thought of as a domesticated, or sense-for-sense, translation, so as not to be confused with the more radical ‘new versions’ discussed here. For detail on the differences between Power’s language and Euripides’, see Beard 2014 and Jackson 2017.

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encouraged the audience to contemplate the relationship that the tragic narrative held to the contemporary moment. The increased focus upon the children in Medea is a by-product of the play’s current reputation as a domestic drama which revolves around the impact of a marriage breakdown on a woman’s psyche and how her subsequent actions affect the family unit. Medea has historically been aligned with numerous socio-political causes surrounding women’s rights; the play’s reception history has resulted in the above reputation. Edith Hall, for example, notes that productions of Medea increased during both the parliamentary debates over nineteenth-century Victorian divorce legislation and the suffragette movement of the early twentieth century.⁶⁴ She further argues that: When the story of Medea’s stage appearances in the late twentieth century comes to be written, it is certain that connections will be drawn between the upsurge of interest in Euripides’ tragedy and the unprecedented success of feminism, reflected in Britain in legislative activity around sex discrimination, equal pay, equal opportunities, divorce, child custody, and, more recently, wives’ retaliation against abusive husbands.⁶⁵

Euripides’ tragedy, however, is not a domestic story about divorce and custodianship; both the dramaturgy of the play and Medea’s personal motivation for her act of infanticide revolve around broader thematic issues such as identity, colonialism, exile, and betrayal. Mary Beard touched upon this in 2014, arguing ‘Euripides’ play is a complex work, raising difficult issues about gender, sincerity, self-interest and responsibility [ . . . ] it is emphatically not a play about domestic crime in anything like our sense of the word’.⁶⁶ The Children loop did not likely intend to problematize the domestication of Euripides’ tragedy. However, one of the outcomes of the practitioners’ decision to invoke a multiplicity of referents and to combine the domestic reading with, for example, colonial interpretations was to foreground how the prioritization of the children’s experience is yet another constructed interpretation of the play, and not necessarily the play itself. Medea is arguably just as ⁶⁴ Hall 1999. See also Macintosh 2005 on the socio-political discourses with which interwar productions of Med. engaged. ⁶⁵ Hall 1999: 72. ⁶⁶ Beard 2014. Helene Foley also argues that although appropriating Med. for feminist issues is textually problematic ‘modern performances and adaptations have been quite explicitly obsessed with such feminist interpretation’. See Foley 2000: 10.

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much about the absence of children as it is about their presence. Rachel Bowlby notes that the Medea and Aegeus scene speaks to contemporary issues of parenthood and childlessness, and that Medea’s offer to provide medicinal assistance to Aegeus equates to modern discussions surrounding, for example, in-vitro fertilization.⁶⁷ Consequently, although the Children loop was arguably the most formally radical moment of the production, its content was, once again, steeped in tradition and akin to several other receptions of the play.

Navigational Agency and MultiPerspectivalism in Hotel Medea The final third of Drylands once again manipulated the spectators’ gaze, this time by encouraging the audience to view the material from Jason’s perspective. It is a challenging task for practitioners to align audiences with Jason’s point of view, as, although an audience might identify with Jason after the murder of his children it is more difficult for many to empathize with him during the period of the myth when he leaves his wife for another woman. Ramos and Maravala circumvented this problem by encouraging the audience to see the material from the perspective of Jason’s political career and to identify with the position of not only Jason but also his political advisors. The directors also worked to avoid the problem of identification by giving spectators a degree of navigational freedom, meaning they could choose to walk away from, subvert, or not participate in particular moments of performance. In addition, they coupled Jason’s perspective with other embedded viewpoints. The choices offered to the audience represent another way that spectatorial emancipation was encouraged. The 45-minute experience began with the audience being ushered into an election campaign headquarters. Posters and t-shirts plastered with Jason’s image and ‘Vote Jason’ slogans hung on the walls and several campaign staff circulated the space and briefed the audience on how to engage with the candidate during an upcoming meet and greet. Spectators were advised on how best to shake Jason’s hand and were encouraged to maintain a confident, positive energy around Jason so as not to affect his spirit adversely. The audience was ⁶⁷ Bowlby 2013: 108–14.

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then led through to meet Jason and pose for photographs with him. The event was clearly a publicity opportunity for the candidate, with Jason attempting to befriend the audience and draw them into his allegiance while in front of cameramen and photographers. Depending on the order in which spectators experienced Drylands, however, it was possible to subvert Jason’s staged publicity opportunity; Jozefina Komporaly notes, for example, that: In the knowledge of the couple’s fraught relationship and having experienced the attitude of Jason’s campaign team towards Medea and her children, the guests have an opportunity to opt out of the campaign photo with Jason, or, conversely, to use the photo shoot as a platform for more confrontational protest.⁶⁸

The Jason loop demonstrated the amount of navigational agency and performative autonomy that immersive classical receptions can provide to audiences, as guests could confront Jason and subvert the performance by using the material of the tragedy. Irrespective of whether guests subverted or played along with the publicity opportunity all held a degree of agency, which Komporaly characterizes as opening up ‘the boundaries of spectatorship in creative and liberating ways’ and reconfiguring ‘the fabric of the performance text by allowing alternative, and potentially contradictory scenarios to run alongside one another’.⁶⁹ As Jason exited, guests both for and against his campaign were invited to take part in a focus group. Jason’s advisers led the audience to a smaller room for this focus group. Each person was given a ‘team Jason’ badge to wear and offered coffee before being seated in front of a wall of television screens, which were streaming footage relevant to Jason’s campaign. Clipboards containing surveys were passed amongst the crowd, and each individual was free to choose whether to complete the questionnaire or to watch the multiple, flickering television screens displaying pre-recorded television advertisements, interviews, and news coverage of Jason’s campaign, as well as live-stream CCTV footage from the marital and children’s bedrooms. After a few moments a conversation between Jason’s political advisors became audible, which allowed the audience to eavesdrop on Jason’s campaign tactics, his opinions, and the repercussions his personal life might have on his bid for office. As the audience were concurrently ⁶⁸ Komporaly 2017: 113.

⁶⁹ Komporaly 2017: 113.

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witnessing the live stream of the Medea loop they bore visual and aural witness to the political implications of Jason’s marriage breakdown and were encouraged to be caught up in the feeling of a career disaster and political crisis. The lack of audio from the live stream further facilitated the viewing of this incident from the perspective of an unhinged campaign and an election bid wasted due to a domestic issue, as Jason’s exclusionary vocabulary was absent from this experience. The overloading of sensory information from the different technologies overwhelmed the largely lethargic audience, making it difficult to comprehend exactly what was occurring and contributing to the sense of an unmanageable crisis. Like the Children loop, therefore, the scene created tension between the appearance of cognitive, embodied, and even real agency and the phenomenological suppression of autonomy through the overnight, multi-sensory form. The performance can be read as either supporting or suppressing emancipation. Overall, one can interpret the Act as providing a metacommentary on the issues of spectatorship and emancipation. The Jason loop did not encourage an embodied understanding of Medea to the same extent as the other two loops; however, it nevertheless contained numerous postdramatic techniques. It employed a postdramatic use of multimedia, for example, which created a co-presence of video image and live actor.⁷⁰ Furthermore, as one third of the triptych it reinforced how postdramatic theatre defies easy interpretation. On the one hand the three loops combined to provide an illusion of completeness as they allowed the audience to experience three different key perspectives from within the myth. The audience was encouraged to consider snapshots of domestic arguments and ambitious political campaigns through the ears of children, through the eyes of a political advisor and supporter holding the candidate in allegiance, and as a confidant of the victim of a domestic dispute. The structure provoked a unique type of engagement with Medea, where the audience was asked to reconsider the same scene from the perspective of three different characters and through visual, aural, and experiential means. On the other hand, however, the multiplicity of perspectives served to reinforce the partiality of even this production of Medea as they drew attention to

⁷⁰ Lehmann 2006: 167–8.

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the vast differences between the three perspectives and the number of other viewpoints that remained hidden, such as that of Glauce, who was only heard on the phone. The processes at work in Drylands demonstrated how in postdramatic theatre: the place of the organic, knowable whole is taken by the unavoidable and commonly ‘forgotten’ fragmentary character of perception that is explicitly rendered conscious in postdramatic theatre. The compensatory function of drama, to supplement the chaos of reality with structural order, finds itself inverted; the spectator’s desire for orientation turns out to be disavowed [original emphasis].⁷¹

The repetition throughout Drylands was essential on a practical level, as the durational element meant spectators were sleep-deprived and consequently might tune out or even ‘doze off ’ and miss certain bits of the performance; Maravala and Ramos note that in the act ‘guests find it hard to discern the order of scenes and their length, creating an experience some guests have referred to as similar to daydreaming or “tripping out” ’.⁷² On an intellectual level, however, it emphasized the enormous amount of detail that can be overlooked in any one scene, forcing the audience to reflect on how much of the play remained unknown or beyond contemplation at any one moment of the production. After spectators had experienced all three loops they were given a fifteen-minute break, following which they re-entered the main performance space at approximately 04:45 for Feast of Dawn. Like in Act I the audience was again separated by gender. The women were led through to ‘Club Exile’, while the men were taken to a separate space in the gallery where they were invited to adopt disguises and encouraged to take a female name to help them infiltrate Medea’s circle, before being secretly brought back into the main performance space. Club Exile was a cabaret venue, where Medea could be seen lying on the stage. Before Medea’s performance could begin, however, the disguises were revealed, and the men were evicted from the room. Medea’s three-part performance then began. The first section was titled ‘Sounds of the Body’, and involved Medea holding a microphone against her body, allowing the audience to

⁷¹ Lehmann 2006: 88.

⁷² Ramos and Maravala 2016: 163.

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hear her heartbeat emanating from various pulse points. The second was titled ‘The Dance of the Poisoned Dress’ and involved Medea ritually poisoning the wedding dress that would lead to Glauce’s death. The final section, titled ‘The Resurrection of the Dead Brother’ involved Medea and a chorus of nurses performing a cabaret-style version of Annie Lennox’s ‘I Put A Spell On You’ whilst standing around a coffin. The song ended with Medea’s brother emerging from the coffin. The resurrection was not from the mythological tradition but was a ZU-UK innovation. Although Apsyrtus initially rejected Medea, the scene ended with the siblings waltzing, reunited. The second half of Feast at Dawn began when a group of men, now performing as soldiers, entered the club and a messenger exiled Medea and closed the venue. The audience was forcibly pushed outside. The performance from this point became confused, creating the illusion that numerous forces were pursuing Medea. Projections of Jason’s colleagues appeared on the walls, persecuting Medea and her children, and Jason himself repeatedly appeared in the space, becoming an increasingly aggressive presence. The disorienting structure had the effect of encouraging the sleep-deprived audience, alongside Medea, to feel under attack. Gradually, Medea’s controlled disposition eroded and she became violent. She revealed her resurrected brother to Jason and attempted to attack her husband. Stagehands supplied spectators with mobile phones and torches and told everyone bar two chosen individuals to flee. Eventually, instructions via mobile phone confirmed that it was safe to return. Back in the venue the audience was greeted with the sight of two symbolically sacrificed spectators lying prone on the floor, surrounded by candles and soft toys. The remaining audience members were given flowers to throw on the corpses before being led outside where breakfast lay on trestle tables, signaling the conclusion of the performance. * * * Hotel Medea, and specifically Act II of the production, enabled the audience to view the content of Euripides’ Medea from several perspectives. The multi-perspectival approach was an intervention into Euripides’ tragedy as Euripides presents his narrative primarily from Medea’s point of view. Some scholars argue that Medea only offers audiences access to the heroine’s perspective; Luschnig, for example, states ‘The importance of everything being presented from her point of view cannot

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be over-emphasized. This is what makes Medea a subversive play’.⁷³ John McDonagh further posits that ‘the elision of the psyche of Jason and the children from the story presents the contemporary reader with grave difficulties’.⁷⁴ Although Euripides’ play does obscure Jason and the children’s perspectives it nevertheless invites the audience to see the action from at least two perspectives: that of Medea and the chorus. Associating the tragic chorus with the audience is a historically specific interpretation that does not go undisputed; however, even if the two perspectives were not meant to be conflated there nevertheless is a correlation between both parties, who know about Medea’s plan but are powerless to intervene. Hotel Medea offered the audience access to a chorus-like point of view. On a literal level the association relates to both parties’ position as a singing and dancing collective, and on a more complex level it relates to the sympathetic stance both groups are invited to take upon Medea’s plight, their knowledge of her plan, and inability to prevent its tragic conclusion. J. H. Kim On Chong-Gossard further suggests that the external audience watching Euripides’ Medea may align with the internal audience of the play’s chorus, in that both are ethically compromised and morally implicated by Medea’s crime.⁷⁵ As such, access to the chorus’ perspective may have been part of Medea all along. Nevertheless, one of the primary ways in which Hotel Medea changed audience engagement with Euripides’ text was by opening up different points of view and creating an arguably more rounded portrayal of the tragic action. Alongside offering audiences the chance to view the material from a multiplicity of embedded perspectives, Hotel Medea also provided access to a multiplicity of external interpretations. The external interpretations began with Seneca and moved through Grillparzer, Müller, and other postdramatic receptions, and encompassed the traditions of postcolonial receptions and domesticated readings. The access to multiple different embedded and external perspectives ensured that Hotel Medea contained the ability on the one hand to produce a political or empowering audience experience as Rancière understands it, as the production encouraged the audience to embody new perspectives upon the familiar Medea through its form, whilst also coupling the well-known story with more

⁷³ Luschnig 2007: 27.

⁷⁴ McDonagh 2002: 225.

⁷⁵ Chong-Gossard 2008: 164.

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obscure mythological variants in its content. The classical source text, and the audience’s position in relation to it, created a form of intellectual emancipation whereby spectators were given total autonomy to translate both the experiential form and the relatively conservative take on content and create their own interpretation of the material. On the other hand, however, the production interrogated the benefits of emancipation and the privileging of different forms of empowerment. The audience’s active role questioned their complicity to the myth’s violence, and the durational form pushed against agency by potentially limiting the audience’s cognitive awareness. Hotel Medea shows how far from being a prescriptive tool setting out the requirements for a political form of theatre, Rancière’s thesis on the emancipated spectator is most useful as a hermeneutic tool for understanding how empowered spectatorial experiences arise and what the repercussions of emancipation might be. In Hotel Medea the politics of spectatorship was not tied to physical emancipation or levels of experimentation, but relied on the shifting perspectives upon the classical content and the different forms through which it was staged. Hotel Medea consequently exemplifies how working with ancient tragedy is central to, and powerful within, postdramatic theatre, whilst attesting to the continuing political efficacy of all postdramatic classical receptions.

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7 Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance) The incorporation of what might be deemed a ‘popular’ immersive strategy in Hotel Medea, where the audience were liberated from their chairs and positioned as active participants within the narrative of the performance, is far from the only type of immersion found in postdramatic classical receptions. For example, the première production of Jan Fabre’s touring Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance) took place in a proscenium arch theatre with a seated audience. The spectators were neither active characters within the onstage narrative nor roaming participants within the world of the performance; Erika Fischer-Lichte notes that although Mount Olympus ‘was a durational performance, it was neither immersive nor participatory in the usual sense of the terms’.¹ Nevertheless, the audience were certainly participants within the performance event and the production was cognitively, if not spatially, immersive. Like in Hotel Medea the shared commitment from the audience and performers to the durational experience enabled communities to arise which formed temporary social realities.² The sleep deprivation encouraged intellectual immersion; Luk Van den Dries argues that Fabre ‘breaks time open so that you can slip into an altered state of consciousness’.³ Within the durational event the bleary-eyed conversations in the auditorium, the shared meals, and the communal, participatory nature of the production became just as important

¹ Fischer-Lichte 2017: 362. ² On the formation of temporary social realities in performance, see Fischer-Lichte 2008: 55. ³ Van den Dries 2015: 21.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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as what Fabre directed.⁴ Fischer-Lichte argues that such a quality is characteristic of all transformative performances; she suggests that: the traditional distinction between aesthetics of production, work, and reception as three heuristic categories seem questionable, if not obsolete. There is no longer a work of art, independent of its creator and recipient; instead, we are dealing with an event that involves everybody—albeit to different degrees and in different capacities [original emphasis].⁵

The more subtle and unusual form of immersion present in Mount Olympus facilitated the strongest postdramatic aesthetic seen within this volume. The separation between the fictive performance and reality was destabilized and a range of ethical questions were posed regarding both the ability of actors to continue performing in the face of physical deterioration and the responsibilities of the audience to those actors.⁶ Like my prior examples, it was Fabre’s combination of postdramatic techniques and classical material that helped enable audiences to invest in and make meaning from the production.

Mount Olympus as Postdramatic Classical Reception Mount Olympus was developed over a twelve-month rehearsal period during which Jeroen Olyslaegers authored the performance text in collaboration with and in response to devising performers.⁷ It premièred at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as part of the Foreign Affairs Festival on 27–8 June 2015 and was performed by a cast of twenty-seven actors.⁸ ⁴ Rebecca Jacobson attests to the significance of extra-performative moments in her review, arguing that ‘part of the experience of Mount Olympus is what happens when you’re not in the auditorium’ [original emphasis]. See Jacobson 2015. ⁵ Fischer-Lichte 2008: 18. ⁶ For a discussion of other Jan Fabre productions as examples of postdramatic theatre, see Van den Dries and Crombez 2010. ⁷ Mount Olympus is an example of European ‘director’s theatre’, or Regietheater, and was not devised per se. However, the rehearsal period did involve some improvisation and devising strategies. On the rehearsal and writing process see Pierets 2016. Lehmann, who attended rehearsals in October 2014, attests to the collaborative nature of the production’s development: ‘Communication between all individuals involved in the endeavor is encouraged while Fabre’s voice of authority can always be questioned. Everybody is co-responsible for the organization of the course of the rehearsal’. See Lehmann 2014. ⁸ For reviews of the original production see El-Bira 2015 and Jacobson 2015.

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 ’  :        Since the Berlin performance the production has toured to Greece, Serbia, France, Belgium, Israel, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and the United States. Depending upon location the performance commenced at 16:00 or 17:00. It continued for twenty-four hours with only three short breaks, for forty, ninety, and thirty-five minutes respectively, during which the actors slept on stage and the audience in their seats or on stretchers in the foyer.⁹ The costuming was simple but visually arresting; generally, the actors were wrapped in white sheets, tied in a style reminiscent of a toga, while when representing a ghost their skin was covered in white powder or paint. The toga-style costuming invoked a clichéd image of antiquity, yet in its simplicity offered an effective backdrop to the radical action and recalled the classical roots of the production; Fischer-Lichte classifies the costuming as alternatively offering ‘an ironic reference to the stereotypical image of “classical” Greek costumes’ and an image of ‘Winckelmannian Greece coming to life’.¹⁰ On other occasions the actors were naked, or painted in bright, glistening acrylics, and in several instances were adorned with greaves and a helmet. The overall event was tightly choreographed and there was no attempt to alter the production to the immediate socio-political context or the location where it was being staged. The extended duration of individual sequences and the performance as a whole had a noteworthy phenomenological impact upon audiences, affecting spectators’ perceptual processes and sensory engagement with the world of the performance. The durational event was broken up into fourteen ‘Chapters’ plus a prologue, each of which lasted for between 35 and 115 minutes. Each section loosely revolved around characters and incidents from the canon of extant Greek tragedy.¹¹ The tragedies, however, were ⁹ The analysis of the performance and the time references contained in this chapter are based upon the 5–6 December 2015 production of Mount Olympus at the Concertgebouw in Bruges, Belgium. ¹⁰ Fischer-Lichte 2017: 359–61. ¹¹ The Chapters are named: 1 Eteocles; 2 Hecuba—Odysseus; 3 Oedipus; 4 Dionysos’ Bacchae; 5 Phaedra; 6 Hippolytus—Alcestis; 7 Hercules; 8 Dionysos’ Alchemists Lab; 9 Agamemnon 1; 10 Agamemnon 2; 11 Medea; 12 Antigone; 13 Ajax; and 14 The End. There is an additional opening section titled The Beginning, alongside a Chapter 8b, titled Sleepingbag Tantra, and 10b, titled Electra—Orestes. Although Olyslaegers stated that Mount Olympus incorporates all thirty-two extant tragedies there was not always a direct correspondence between individual Chapters and the classical texts.

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fragmented into an almost unrecognizable form; individual plays were distilled down to abstract tableaux, choreographed tests of endurance, and monologues delivered in English, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and sometimes simply in stutters and screams.¹² There was no obvious order to the presentation of the classical sources: the oldest extant tragedy, The Persians, was represented first, yet Hippolytus featured before Agamemnon, and the penultimate chapter reinvented the 409 BCE Philoctetes rather than, say, the c.405 BCE Bacchae or Iphigenia at Aulis. Any sense of narrative progression throughout the performance was absent and several choral routines repeated and looped back upon themselves, prompting sleep deprived audience members to question whether the repetition was hallucination or reality. The combination of multiple tragic narratives is not unique to Mount Olympus. As discussed in both the Introduction and Chapter 5 a strategy of supplementation is common in contemporary classical performance receptions. The distinctive element in Mount Olympus was the expansion of narrative supplementation into durational experience. There is precedent for such an endeavour, although no prior productions combine durational classical performance reception and postdramatic techniques. John Barton and Kenneth Cavander’s 1980 The Greeks for the Royal Shakespeare Company is an example of the former and is a durational, non-postdramatic reception. The Greeks followed Barton’s more famous conglomeration of Shakespeare’s history plays, The Wars of the Roses, and brought together the extant Trojan War narratives in chronological order with additional ‘bridging’ content written to connect the individual plays. The Greeks was performed both across three consecutive nights and as an all-day marathon on Saturdays.¹³ The example par excellence of the latter, namely a durational, postdramatic production which is not a reception of a specific ancient tragedy, is

¹² Fischer-Lichte argues that regardless of the language spoken most dialogue was delivered in a ‘high style’, reminiscent of ‘classical’ French or Goethean diction. See Fischer-Lichte 2017: 359. Jacobson further notes that ‘these languages aren’t really how they communicate, and sitcom-length passages are built from laughter, sobs or orgasmic moans. It’s less about words than about the physical production of sound: communication as a bodily rather than intellectual act’. See Jacobson 2015. ¹³ On The Greeks see Walton 1987: 346–9.

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 ’  :        Romeo Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia.¹⁴ Tragedia Endogonidia consisted of eleven sections staged across ten different cities between 2002–5. The production was not a reception of Greek tragedy; however, it can be loosely considered a classical reception due to its interrogation of the idea of tragedy; Freddy Decreus notes that: The tragic impulse that emanates from the TE [Tragedia Endogonidia] is the urge to convince us, physical beings, to explore the hidden (and hence dark) aspects of life inside us and to accept that we are at the mercy of large invisible forces. All eleven ‘Episodes’ confront us with our limits and stage aspects of chaos within ourselves that we do not want to confront.¹⁵

Like Mount Olympus, Tragedia Endogonidia employed strategies of fragmentation and utilized postdramatic techniques to prioritize the affective dimension of performance. The comparative success of Mount Olympus within theatre criticism in comparison to Tragedia Endogonidia demonstrates the benefits of a classical scaffold to orient audiences during productions that incorporate postdramatic strategies.¹⁶ Although Mount Olympus was not spatially immersive the postdramatic aesthetic gave spectators enormous intellectual agency. The individual episodes were not introduced and without looking at the programme audience members had to determine for themselves which tragic narrative was being represented at any one time, which was no easy feat when, for example, the scene consisted of a single woman speaking gibberish, as was the case in the ‘Extase Cassandra’ scene in Chapter 9. Decreus commented to Fabre during rehearsals that, on the one hand, he felt frustrated at having a ‘professional reaction’ and wanting to identify the correct text being reinvented at any one moment, while on the other that he was interested in his reaction becoming a productive frustration. He stated ‘let’s hope that somewhere here there will be room for a second open field to originate, with monologues and dialogues that one can’t identify immediately, or are far removed ¹⁴ On this production see Lehmann 2016: 433–4 and Decreus 2010, with the latter noting that Castellucci’s company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio began producing theatrical work concurrently to Jan Fabre (1981 and 1980 respectively). ¹⁵ Decreus 2010: 134. ¹⁶ Castellucci’s Tragedia Endogonidia provoked substantial academic discussion but individual episodes were greeted with a mixed critical reception. Lyn Gardner wrote for The Guardian, for example, that although the production was ‘fairly fascinating’ and she was ‘never bored’ she questioned ‘what does it all mean?’. See Gardner 2004.

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from their origins, and allow ambiguity’, revealing that the tangential connection to source text was carefully honed to work against recognizability.¹⁷ The inclusion of dialogue in multiple languages additionally prevented interpretation and understanding, as the audience likely did not have the necessary functional knowledge to translate every scene. The incomprehensibility signaled that the form and the effect of performance were more important than the content. Despite Mount Olympus not making an explicit comment on the relevance of individual tragedies to the immediate socio-political environment like was done in the examples explored in Part I and Part II of this book, the performance was consequently nevertheless political in terms of Rancière’s understanding of politics. Spectators were not only empowered to make their own meaning from the performance but were arguably forced to render their own translations of the abstract material to make sense of the production. Like Rancière’s ideal spectator the audience of Mount Olympus took the fractured imagery and tangential references and ‘observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her’.¹⁸ The political dimension of Mount Olympus lay in the cognitive agency granted to audiences and the assumption of an equality of interpretation. Although the postdramatic and durational form encouraged cognitive agency and equality of interpretation, the politics of spectatorship in Mount Olympus was not straightforward or consistent. Various moments can be considered more stultifying than emancipatory. The three sections of Mount Olympus that I focus on in this chapter, namely the prologue, the content featured in Chapter 8b and Chapter 9, and Chapter 14, demonstrate the dynamic shifts in spectatorial experience and the limits of, or negative associations with, emancipation. As such, and in dialogue with Hotel Medea, Mount Olympus reveals how a more radical take upon form and content does not equal a more politically empowering or emancipatory experience. It further supports the use of Rancière’s ideas on emancipation as a hermeneutic tool, rather than as a device to create a thesis about the optimum performance conditions required for

¹⁷ See Decreus 2014.

¹⁸ Rancière 2009: 13.

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 ’  :        audience emancipation. A politics of spectatorship can show a lack of empowerment and highlight a politically problematic, or stultifying, spectatorial experience. In the case of Mount Olympus attending to a politics of spectatorship reveals that performances are infrequently either empowering or stultifying, but rather involve dynamic shifts throughout individual moments of production. The prologue of Mount Olympus was titled ‘The Beginning’. It lasted for one hour and was made up of seven individual scenes. The Beginning had the most tangential tie to any one individual tragedy of the production; unlike the other Chapters it was not named after a tragic character, and only one of the seven scenes was related to a specific tragedy, namely Aeschylus’ The Persians. Rather than showcasing the productive combination of postdramatic techniques and classical tragedy like the rest of the performance, the opening prologue introduced the form of the play and the major themes around which it was structured, including the role of the political, the centrality of voyeurism, the idea of a sparagmos of time, and the priortization of a tragic structure which alternated between monologues and choric sequences. The first of the seven scenes commenced with a pair of men standing downstage, opposite one another, at the far stage right and stage left. The stage floor was almost completely bare, and the only elements within the mise-en-scène were: thirty-three suspended pendant lights in round wire cages; two red LED text bars (similar to those used in The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes) which were suspended either side of the stage and which counted down the hours, minutes, and seconds remaining of the durational performance; eight wheeled tables covered in white sheets split into two groups of four against the far stage left and stage right walls; and a drop sheet against the back wall onto which still photographs of the performers were occasionally projected. For the opening tableau the image featured a nude, reclining male, staring into the distance and with leaves entwined in his pubic hairs but not obscuring his genitals. Rather than work as a fig leaf to create modesty, the leaves drew attention to the genitals and implied that the performance would be similarly libidinal and unretouched. The two onstage actors stood stationary, appearing almost statuesque, and were each wrapped in a white sheet tied in a style reminiscent of a toga. When the performance commenced they simultaneously de-robed and bent down into a squat. Two additional men, each with a white sheet tied around their waist, entered and

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knelt on the ground behind the squatting men before proceeding to shout an opening monologue into the anuses of the original pair. Although the specific words of the monologue, which was delivered in English, were difficult to discern it began with the words ‘Bad tidings, ill wind blowing’ and communicated a prophecy regarding an unspecified upcoming disaster.¹⁹ The opening tableau encapsulated several themes of the performance. It was visually arresting but uncomfortable, even repulsive, and difficult to comprehend; Rebecca Jacobson notes that from the opening moment it was ‘clear this is a performance at a visceral and sometimes vulgar level’.²⁰ Most significantly, however, the scene exemplified the tensions surrounding the role of the political in the production. Olyslaegers argues that the performance had political connotations and that the opening moment set the tone for the entire performance: It’s about war and the way we tend to fuck up our karma by breathing hate the entire time. Every Greek play is only about one thing; there’s a bill to be paid and somebody has to pay it. I connected this to the tragic times we now live in . . . Ecologically we’re on the brink of a big disaster and we’re going to have to change our lives to pay the bill. That’s what Mount Olympus is about: there is something that has to be reckoned with.²¹

The message of an upcoming disaster was clearly communicated in the opening monologue; however, Olyslaegers’ ability to connect the content to contemporary ecological issues surrounding climate change is not indicative of a necessarily obvious interpretation. Mount Olympus was not political in the sense of overtly engaging with political issues as there were no obvious allusions to, for example, socio-political debates in the dialogue or the mise-en-scène.²² The lack of explicit socio-political commentary did not negate the potential for the production to speak to its immediate context. During a monologue in ‘Chapter 1: Eteocles’ in the December 2015 Bruges production, for example, there were striking political overtones to Eteocles’ lines about needing to defend the city from home-grown terrorists, given that from 21–5 November 2015 the

¹⁹ All quotations are transcribed from recordings and online livestreams of the production. ²⁰ Jacobson 2015. ²¹ Olyslaegers, quoted in Pierets 2016. ²² Coincidently, the ways in which Mount Olympus did not engage with the political were precisely in the ways that Rancière excludes from his understanding of politics.

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 ’  :        government of Belgium imposed a security lockdown in Brussels due to receiving intelligence that Belgium-born French national Salah Abdeslam, an accused ringleader of the 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, was in the city. The production as showcased in Bruges thus demonstrates my second caveat regarding the political in performance, as outlined in Part II. In general and including in the opening monologue, however, Mount Olympus was primarily political in its form and at times according to Rancière’s understanding of emancipation. The combination of the LED countdown plus the confronting staged action reinforced to the audience that like other postdramatic classical receptions Mount Olympus would embody a politics of form in its defiance of more standard dramatic experience. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, forms that embody a resistance to and disruption of normative modes of representation are political. Fabre stated that his decision to rehearse Mount Olympus for twelve months and to create a work lasting twentyfour hours was a political decision, and throughout the opening moments the audience were reminded that this was an unconventional experience which, despite the production’s classical roots, would resist tradition by virtue of its form and through every moment of performance. He notes, for example, that ‘Just the fact that you dare to do it [theatre] differently and work with a team of forty people for twelve months—that’s a kind of political choice’, and that ‘People in my company, for them to be on [my] stage it is a political choice’.²³ In this way Mount Olympus signaled to the audience that it invited an alternate mode of viewing to that in other forms of theatre, thus creating the possibility of Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible. Present in all Rancière’s work is an interest in the relationship between viewing and acting, and a belief that in finding equality with other members of society in the act of viewing one may realize the possibility of redistributing roles within society.²⁴ By reinforcing the disruption of standard or traditional modes of viewing within the theatre through the confronting content and the visual reminder of the durational length Fabre foregrounded how traditional hierarchies within the theatre would be collapsed in his production. The implication was that all present were participants in the theatrical experience, and conventional ideas of ²³ See Rudzāte and Meistere 2017 and Allain 2015 respectively. ²⁴ See Rancière 2004.

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theatre etiquette, modes of viewing, and methods of interpretation would not suffice. The lack of obvious signifiers onstage as to the meaning of the stagecraft and the ambiguity surrounding the prophecy, which was not obviously related to a particular tragedy but arguably applicable to any tragic narrative, intellectually emancipated and empowered audiences to render their own interpretation of the initial tableau and negated the binary relationships between those who looked and those who acted, and those who were ignorant and those who were knowledgeable. The scene provided a powerful opening statement about the equality of all experiences and interpretations within the formally experimental durational experience. The second tableau in the prologue of Mount Olympus was as confronting as the first. Towards the end of the prophecy an additional man, also dressed in a toga, entered the stage and stood upstage centre. As the prophecy finished he walked towards centre stage and carefully unwrapped his toga, folding the white sheet up and holding it in his left hand. All the onstage lights dimmed bar one pendant light immediately over his head. He stood motionless, naked, staring directly at the audience, slowly getting an erection. He remained onstage in this position for several minutes, before eventually exiting stage right. This second scene, titled ‘Male Power’, again disrupted the standard hierarchies within theatre by raising the question of who was viewing whom. On the one hand the scene positioned the audience as the subject of an eroticized gaze which gave pleasure to the performer. The audience’s position was not one of empowerment as they had not consented to the exchange and did not have agency within the interaction. The performer’s active gaze disrupted the link between viewing and passivity and demonstrated that making audiences into literal actors in someone else’s story does not empower or emancipate them. On the other hand, however, the audience members were not only the object of the performer’s gaze but were also granted the freedom to gaze voyeuristically upon the performer’s sexualized, naked body. The sense of freedom granted a degree of agency and established the connection between the act of viewing and the concept of voyeurism as one of the central themes of the play. The idea of voyeurism is pertinent to all of Jan Fabre’s work. A case can be made for classifying theatre in general as a voyeuristic exchange between performer and audience where, according to George Rodosthenous, ‘the performer (the object of the audience’s gaze) and the audience

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 ’  :        (the voyeur of this exchange) are placed in a legalized and safe environment for that interaction’.²⁵ Within postdramatic theatre, however, an awareness surrounds the act of voyeurism, which is evinced in Male Power in the actor’s unflinching return gaze; Lehmann notes that in postdramatic productions the performer ‘balances on a knife edge between a metamorphosis into a dead exhibition piece and her self-assertion as a person’ and that the performer faces the audience as an individual, vulnerable person and consequently ‘the spectator becomes aware of a reality that is masked in traditional theatre’.²⁶ The scene made clear that the relationship between viewing and emancipation is far from straightforward and that neither having an active gaze nor being the subject of an active gaze necessarily grants agency. When this metacommentary on voyeurism was applied to bodies which were explicitly ‘classicized’ in later scenes the dynamic shifted and the politics of spectatorship became even more entangled. In contrast to the silent, solo performer in Male Power, the third scene commenced with a cacophony of sound and movement, with the opening beats of the sampled DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s ‘Turn Down for What’ blasting through the auditorium and a chorus of dancers flooding the stage. A central troupe of eight dancers began undulating to the Dag Taeldeman composition, with white sheets tied around their chests and groins in the style of a crop-top and bloomers. The pendant lights flashed, lowered, and raised in time with the music. The third scene, titled ‘Twerk’, was simultaneously tightly choreographed whilst giving the appearance of wild jubilation. The dancing was highly athletic and in a contemporary style, featuring twerking and body rolls and prompting clapping and cheering from the audience. At times the chorus danced in unison, whilst at other moments individuals would come downstage for solo performances, breakdancing and performing acrobatic feats including backflips and the splits. The Dionysian overtones of the scene were reinforced by Andrew Van Ostade occasionally appearing centre stage, dancing, during the routine. He wore a laurel wreath around his head and had bunches of grapes hanging around his waist, all of which invited the audience to equate him with Dionysos.²⁷ The routine was durational, ²⁵ Rodosthenous 2015: 3. On voyeurism in Jan Fabre’s theatre see De Vos 2015. ²⁶ Lehmann 2006: 165. ²⁷ I have followed the Mount Olympus programme in the spelling of Dionysos.

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Figure 7.1. Prologue 0.3, ‘Twerk’, Mount Olympus. Photo: Guido Mencari.

lasting for almost fifteen minutes, and as the dance continued the performers’ white costumes became stained pink and red, before eventually raw and bloody entrails became dislodged from their clothing and fell to the floor (Fig. 7.1). By the time Van Ostade’s Dionysos stepped forward to perform the monologue which constituted the fourth scene the stage was littered with bloodied organs and appeared as a visual manifestation of Bacchic madness. The ecstatic Twerk scene was in stark contrast to the serious and confrontational opening tableaux, yet far from being mere spectacle it served an important function in highlighting the centrality of the idea of a sparagmos to Mount Olympus. A sparagmos, or ritual tearing apart, is significant to Greek tragedy as Agave and the Bacchants’ murder of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae is the sparagmos scene from classical literature par excellence.²⁸ Fischer-Lichte has further posited that any modern reception of Bacchae can be conceptualized via the idea of a ritual dismemberment followed by a cannibalization, or omophagia, of ²⁸ A further indication of the importance of the concept of sparagmos to Mount Olympus includes the naming of one of the scenes in Chapter 7 ‘Sparagmos’.

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 ’  :        the ‘flesh’ of the classical text, while Justine McConnell argues that the sparagmos provides a useful metaphor for the process of classical reception more generally due to the connotations of deliberate violence and fertility or rebirth within the sparagmos.²⁹ The visual image of dismembered organs scattered around the stage combined with the Dionysian overtones in the Twerk scene to invite the audience to conceptualize the scene—and the performance—through the notion of a sparagmos. The significance of the sparagmos theme to Mount Olympus lay not in either the physical act of tearing apart a body, or in the metaphorical tearing apart of the tragic texts which underlay the performance, but in the idea that the performance would include a sparagmos, or breaking open, of time. In the programme Luk Van den Dries correctly identifies that ‘Jan Fabre’s twenty-four hour project is an attack on time . . . he breaks time open so that you can slip into an altered state of consciousness, felt in the ticking of the second hand’.³⁰ The iconography of the dismembered organs combined with the LED countdown in the Twerk scene, which still showed over twenty-three hours of performance remaining, to indicate that experiencing a temporal sparagmos would be central to the experience. In contrast to the interpretative autonomy given to spectators in the previous scenes, here a particular interpretation was invited which consequently shifted the politics of spectatorship. As each individual had a unique experience of the temporal sparagmos they were still emancipated in terms of writing their own story from the performance; however, the scene nevertheless demonstrated how certain moments of the production offered less intellectual agency than others. The remaining four sections which made up the prologue introduced the dominant pattern of Mount Olympus, namely a mimicking of tragic structure in the alternation between scenes of spoken dialogue and danced choric sequences. As well as speaking to the dramaturgy of ancient tragedy, the alternation of monological and choric structures is a postdramatic technique, which Lehmann notes replaces the dialogical structure of dramatic theatre.³¹ For example, the fourth scene consisted of Dionysos delivering a monologue, which was an Olyslaegers original composition spoken directly to the audience beginning with the lines ‘I gave them just a little bit of madness’, while the fifth scene, titled ²⁹ See Fischer-Lichte 2014: 21 and McConnell 2016: 133–9. ³⁰ Van den Dries 2015a: 21. ³¹ Lehmann 2006: 125–32, esp. 126.

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‘Streetdog and Vulture in the Desserted Battlefield’ consisted of a chorus of actors inspecting the detritus left onstage after Twerk. Marc Moon Van Overmeir as the ghost of Darius collected the remaining organs in the sixth scene; he entered the stage naked, with every inch of his body covered in a matte white paint. He collected the organs, placing them in the centre of a large white sheet which he brought onstage with him, before commencing a three-minute monologue in English about the fate of the Persian army, which was adapted from The Persians [800–42]. As the character dragged his collection of organs off the stage nine dancers, wearing white sheets tied into short dresses, took his place and arranged themselves into two straight lines before performing a formalized dance routine to Verdi’s Pace Pace, which was sung onstage a cappella by Lies Vandewege. The scene, titled ‘Vasedance I’, consisted of a series of striking images akin to Greek statues or vase paintings. Each individual pose was repeated several times, making the scene the first example of the incessant repetition which would characterize much of the performance, before the dancers fluidly transitioned to the next pose. Lehmann classifies an aesthetic of repetition as a further technique related to time distortion in postdramatic theatre.³² The postdramatic technique was used throughout the performance to prompt extreme emotional reactions from the audience including, for example, in the ‘Ropeskipping Warsong’ in Chapter 1, which involved a chorus of performers skipping with metal chains whilst chanting repetitively for approximately twenty minutes.³³ Fabre divided his dance sequences into Dionysian and Appoline routines, and the characteristics of the two styles were introduced in the prologue via the ecstatic Twerk scene and the controlled Vasedance I scene. He further noted that in the Apollonian dance scenes the classical allusions were deliberate, stating that ‘all the movements, and the signs in this choreography, were based on the paintings on the side of the vases, on the Greek vases’.³⁴ The vase iconography provided a further

³² On the aesthetic of repetition in postdramatic theatre see Lehmann 2006: 156–7. ³³ Jacobson writes about the repetitions that they develop a ‘disturbing humor. Guttural wails are awful at first, but after a while, they turn absurd. And after a longer while, annoying. And then awful again. Tragedy becomes comedy becomes tragedy’. See Jacobson 2015. ³⁴ Fabre, quoted in Allain 2015. There are obvious Nietzschean qualities to Fabre’s interest in balancing Dionysian and Apolline sequences in Mount Olympus; Fischer-Lichte argues that these are first seen in Dionysos’ monologue when he establishes the themes of madness and the body. See Fischer-Lichte 2017: 358.

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 ’  :        layer of classical reception to Mount Olympus and exemplified the level of research underpinning the radical, postdramatic form. The one-hour prologue to Mount Olympus introduced the formal structure of the production, in its focus on tableaux, repetition, fragmentation, and alternation between monologue and choral sequences. The scenes collectively represented the postdramatic trait of playing with the norm of sign density by showing too much or too little onstage at any one time, either overloading or depriving audiences of the signifiers required to make meaning.³⁵ The postdramatic qualities were obvious in every scene given the absence of narrative linearity and concrete characterization and the focus instead on the affective power of visual imagery and the phenomenological impact of being confronted by, for example, overtly sexualized performers. It indicated that voyeurism and the idea of a temporal sparagmos would be crucial overarching themes underpinning the performance, and demonstrated the complexity surrounding the politics of spectatorship at work in the production. The lack of obvious literal meaning and clear scope for interpretation combined with the positioning of the audience as active participants in a durational experience to grant intellectual agency and cognitive emancipation to spectators, while occasionally working against the idea of liberation by, for example, positioning the audience as non-consenting subjects of an eroticized gaze. When these qualities were combined with a more explicit tragic scaffold in the subsequent chapters an even more affective and efficacious performative experience unfolded. The first seven chapters took the audience on a tour of several key tragic texts via just as abstract and disorienting a form as the Prologue. Chapter 1, which ran from 18:00–19:00, reinvented Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes/Euripides’ Phoenissae and featured, amongst other scenes, the aforementioned twenty-minute Ropeskipping Warsong and Eteocles’ monologue about traitors within the city. Chapter 2 was based on Euripides’ Hecuba, although it also incorporated content from Euripides’ Troades. It took place between 19:00–20:50. The Chapter featured monologues in French and German, as well as a duologue between Hecuba and Odysseus in French, alongside abstract group sequences involving, for example, body art, or the repetition of three phrases (‘no’,

³⁵ See Lehmann 2006: 89.

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‘fuck’, ‘take me’) for an entire scene. Chapter 3 took place between 20:50–22:35 and reworked Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, while Chapter 4 occurred between 22:35–00:05 and took inspiration from Euripides’ Bacchae. The first ‘dream time’, or interval, then took place, lasting until 00:45. Fabre’s decision to call the breaks in performance dream times has a connection to Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre, as Lehmann posits that ‘The basis of dramatic theatre was the demand that the spectators leave their everyday time to enter a segregated area of “dream time”, abandoning their own sphere of time to enter into another’.³⁶ Whether Fabre’s decision to name the gaps in performance ‘dream times’ is a deliberate inversion of Lehmann’s classification of time in dramatic theatre, or is simply an explicit invitation for audience and performers to rest during these moments, is unknown, although as Lehmann served as a dramaturg on the production the former option is certainly feasible. In the Bruges performance few took the opportunity to sleep, with the majority using the short break to visit the bar and begin discussing the unfolding performance. The action continued with two chapters based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, between 00:45–02:40 and 02:40–04:05 respectively.³⁷ The overnight section of the action concluded with Chapter 7, based on Euripides’ Herakles and occurring between 04:05–05:10, and a more abstract Chapter 8, titled ‘Dionysos’ Alchemists Lab’ and occurring between 05:10–06:30. These episodes continued the previous scenes’ linguistic dynamism, primarily featuring monologues in English and French, testing feats of endurance (including an entire scene consisting of only a game of tug-a-war with a metal chain), indecipherable action such as a chorus apparently distilling drugs from small potted plants, and repetition both within individual choric dance routines, such as the ‘Sleepingbag Wardance’ in Chapter 8, and within the overall performance, such as the restaging of the ‘Vasedance Snake’ dance in Chapter 7, which was first seen in Chapter 2. It is possible to read the abstract, ambiguous action as empowering and facilitating an equality of interpretation as no amount of familiarity with the classics would provide all the functional knowledge necessary for ‘decoding’ the action. However, as the scenes were predicated upon a necessary partiality of knowledge, both due to the formally radical style of the performance and ³⁶ On time in dramatic theatre as ‘dream time’ see Lehmann 2006: 155. ³⁷ Euripides’ Alcestis was also engaged with in Chapter 6.

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 ’  :        the increasingly compromised cognitive function of the audience, the action can also be read as either stultifying, or as commenting upon the limits of emancipation. A second dream time, from 06:30–08:00, took place before Chapter 8b and Chapter 9, which will be the focus on the next portion of my analysis.

Emancipation, Immersion, and Ethics The second dream time ended with eighteen members of the cast asleep on the stage floor in white sleeping bags. A woman covered in white body paint and with a sheet tied around her body as a floor-length dress then entered and began the first scene of Chapter 8b, which was titled ‘Ghost of Clytemnestra’ and featured a monologue in which Clytemnestra called upon the avenging furies to wake up and ‘blow your bloody breath on his [Agamemnon’s] back’. As previously mentioned Mount Olympus progressed episodically and non-linearly through the tragic canon, and in this vein Clytemnestra’s speech was based upon lines 94–139 of Aeschylus’ Eumenides despite coming immediately before the Chapter based upon Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. When Clytemnestra entered and commanded those present—audience and performers—to wake up, she positioned everyone as the sleeping furies, implicated in the cycle of revenge that was about to unfold.³⁸ The rhetorical inclusion of the audience as members of the chorus reinforced the sense of equality between all experiencing the durational event, fulfilling Rancière’s understanding of emancipation as ‘the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body’.³⁹ Clytemnestra’s monologue lasted for less than two minutes, and throughout she grabbed at the sleeping bags of the prone performers, shaking them vigorously and in the process causing a white cloud of dust to emanate from her body. A rhythmic percussion beat, which Dionysos played on a drum whilst standing atop a table at the far stage right, began to crescendo under her final lines and as she finished her invocation the performers started to twitch in time with the music, ³⁸ Throughout the speech Clytemnestra used the second person, alongside a string of imperatives, giving the illusion that her instructions applied to the audience as well as the performers. ³⁹ Rancière 2009: 19.

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beginning the second scene of the Chapter, which was the twenty-minute eponymous dance routine. The Sleepingbag Tantra commenced with the prone performers twitching in their sleepingbags, subtly, to the rhythm of a snare drum. Their movements built progressively, until the performers dispensed with the sleeping bags and danced in an increasingly aggressive manner, which by the conclusion of the sequence involved slamming their hips and knees against the floor in time with the music, visibly becoming dirtied and bruised in the process. The scene spoke to Lehmann’s understanding of postdramatic theatre, demonstrating a mimesis to pain where the stage becomes like life, where people really fall or get hit and there is a ‘public exhibition of the body, [and] its deterioration in an act that does not allow for a clear separation of art and reality’.⁴⁰ Like the prologue the scene problematized the connection between viewing, voyeurism, and spectatorship in a way that would become increasingly relevant in subsequent scenes. Throughout The Sleepingbag Tantra the performers danced quickly and vigorously to jubilant music, never pausing from their rigorous routine despite having been performing for over fifteen hours already. By Chapter 8b the phenomenological impact of the sparagmos of time encapsulated by the performance was key to making meaning from the action. It had a postdramatic quality in that, as Lehmann requires from a postdramatic aesthetics of time, the scenic process could not be separated from the time of the audience.⁴¹ Taking place as the sun rose outside the theatre, the scene recalled the dictum that tragedy take place across one full revolution of the sun [Poet. 1449b11–15], but inverted it, drawing attention to the fact that this performance had, so far, taken place against the stars. The interplay between fatigue and the sense of entering a frenzied or trance-like state due to the sleep deprivation pushed the audience towards owning their embodiment of the waking furies, much like occurred during the Children loop in Hotel Medea, as discussed in Chapter 6. The music’s volume, fast temporal speed, and bouncy rhythm combined with the athleticism of the performers to encourage spectatorial participation, and many stood, clapped, and cheered in the scene, becoming active participants within the space. ⁴⁰ Lehmann 2006: 166. ⁴¹ On the postdramatic aesthetics of time see Lehmann 2006: 156.

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 ’  :        Although the content pushed the audience towards feeling embodied agency, the durational form worked against this by potentially further decreasing the audience members’ cognitive capacity and consequent intellectual agency. The scene thus demonstrated how rich cognitive immersion does not equate to emancipation and exemplifies the tensions between embodied and intellectual agency. The Sleepingbag Tantra ended with sixteen of the eighteen performers dancing their way offstage. The final two performers then moved centre stage and slowed their dancing until they were stationary. The third and final scene of Chapter 8b, titled ‘Washing and Dressing of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia’, then took place. The two dancers were joined by another two performers, who brought the women water to drink and carefully wiped down their dirtied bodies with a damp cloth.⁴² As Lies Vandewege sang Massenet’s ‘Pleurez mes yeux’ the two performers tied white sheets into one-shouldered short dresses around the stationary dancers. The two performers then exited the stage, leaving the dancers. A man entered and stood centre stage, wearing greaves, a helmet, a chest plate, and a white sheet tied around his waist. The first scene of Chapter 9, titled Manège Clytemnestra and Iphigenia around Agamemnon, then began. The two dancers stood on opposite sides of Agamemnon and began to spin slowly, in a wide circle, around his stationary body. They moved with precision, like classically trained ballerinas—chaîné, jeté, chaîné, jeté—in a wide circle, as red rose petals fell from the roof. The dancers continued spinning, crushing the rose petals underfoot, which let off a soft perfume throughout the auditorium. Their circling of Agamemnon continued for the entirety of the scene and lasted a total of eighteen minutes. The physical toll of the action was immense; the performers could be heard audibly groaning and, towards the end, could not maintain their spacing and the precision of their dancing but began falling over themselves and spinning off balance, occasionally crashing to the floor and even stopping to retch on stage. Agamemnon, for this entire period, stood still, staring at the audience, completely impassive as to the

⁴² By this stage of Mount Olympus a large amount of grime had accrued on the stage floor, which quickly dirtied the performers’ costumes, sleeping bags, skin, and any other props which came into contact with the floor. The detritus acted as a visual reminder of the exertions that had taken place and the overall scale of the performance.

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women circling around him, while members of the audience cheered the women on until they eventually stopped.⁴³ The sequence had an abstract relationship to its textual source, referring in this instance to the section of the tragic narrative that looks back to Aulis and the sacrifice of Iphigenia [Ag. 104–257]. Like many of the durational scenes in Mount Olympus which involved repetition and bodily deterioration, including the aforementioned Ropeskipping Warsong in Chapter 1, the Manège scene made strong, consistent use of postdramatic techniques. It contained a representation of the deviant body, or a presence ‘which through illness, disability or deformation [in this case self-induced] deviates from the norm and causes an “amoral” fascination, unease or fear’.⁴⁴ There was a visual dramaturgy in place of a textual dramaturgy, and a play with the norms of sign density: slowness, stillness, and duration in which nothing, in terms of plot, arguably happened. The scene also featured Lehmann’s irruption of the real, where the boundaries between performance and reality become blurred. Like in Phaedra’s Love, where the audience may have experienced a sense of uncertainty regarding whether the planted actors were part of the performance or rather enraged spectators, here the audience was invited to question when one of the dancers stopped her chaîné turns, collapsed, and began to retch, whether she was still performing and whether the action was necessary or was being staged. Furthermore, Lehmann notes that in general terms the relationship between the spectator and the subject on stage in tragedy is one of ‘being unable to intervene, yet feeling obliged to do so’, a relationship which this scene clearly contained.⁴⁵ Finally, a postdramatic aesthetic of repetition was also present. Lehmann notes that repetition in postdramatic theatre has an inverse function to repetition in dramatic theatre. In dramatic theatre Lehmann argues that repetition is ‘employed for structuring and constructing a form’,⁴⁶ whereas in postdramatic theatre it: seems to want to stop theatre time and to transform the temporal events into images for contemplation, the spectators’ gaze is invited to “dynamize” the durational stasis offered to them through their own vision [ . . . ] In this way, postdramatic theatre effects a displacement of theatrical perception—for many

⁴³ Reviewer Michael Coveney describes the audience as ‘cruelly, and delightedly’ exhorting the performers to continue in this scene. See Coveney 2017. ⁴⁴ Lehmann 2006: 95. ⁴⁵ Lehmann 2016: 132. ⁴⁶ Lehmann 2006: 156.

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 ’  :        provocative, incomprehensible, or boring—turning from abandoning oneself to the flow of a narration towards a constructing and constructive coproducing of the total audio-visual complex of the theatre [original emphasis].⁴⁷

There are links between Lehmann’s understanding of the active viewing required when witnessing a postdramatic aesthetic of repetition and Rancière’s belief that emancipated spectators are those ‘who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the “story” and make it their own’.⁴⁸ The scene consequently not only represented the combination of postdramatic techniques and classical tragedy that characterized the performance, but demonstrated the efficaciousness of the combination in terms of the politics of spectatorship. The Manège scene can be viewed as combining classical tragedy and postdramatic techniques to provide a commentary on the ethics of emancipation. The use of an aesthetic of repetition gave spectators intellectual agency and empowered the audience to become active interpreters of the abstract form. Additionally, the moral questionability that arose from viewing others’ pain created a degree of spectatorial agency. On the one hand, the content of the Manège scene positioned the audience members as voyeurs to others’ suffering and consequently placed them in an ethically compromised position, which limited their agency and created a fundamental inequality between performer and spectator, as due to the postdramatic irruption of the real the spectator did not have the functional knowledge necessary to determine how to react to the scene. On the other hand, however, the embodied ethics of witnessing the performers’ self-inflicted trauma required a form of active viewing on the part of the audience member. Sophie Anne Oliver theorizes this tension, noting that the role of the spectator is one which is ‘always complicit in and with the representation, forcing us to acknowledge the unavoidable ethical ambivalence of seeing the suffering of others’ whilst also inviting a performative act of seeing which is responsive and response-able and thus requires a spectator ‘who also performs and acts upon the representation’ [original emphasis].⁴⁹ Although there ⁴⁷ Lehmann 2006: 157. ⁴⁸ Rancière 2009: 22. ⁴⁹ Oliver 2010: 123 and 125. Of additional relevance is Oliver’s discussion of Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 performance art project Interior Scroll, in which Schneemann pulled what appeared to be a written scroll out of her vagina, as a case study for the productive

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is a degree of inaction in the act of observing suffering, bearing witness remains a choice and meeting the challenge to view a body in trauma and acknowledge one’s role as part of the performative representation requires a degree of activity and agency. Even in ethically problematic moments of performance, therefore, it remains possible to conceive of the spectator’s role as, to an extent, active and emancipated, even if the implied connection between spectatorship and complicity limits the extent of one’s intellectual agency and interpretative freedom. Despite the agency and relative emancipation of the audience, the ever-present aesthetics of indecidability invited spectators to consider whether to react to the action aesthetically, or morally.⁵⁰ If real, on the one hand one could argue the scene raised ethical issues, while on the other one could see it as transgressing the boundaries of the performance and bringing the offstage onstage and allowing the audience to be a voyeur to the process.⁵¹ Through such a reading, the scene gave the audience access to the dancer, practising her pirouettes for hours on end, rehearsing until her feet bleed, or a sprinter, pausing during daily training to be sick, before continuing with their intervals. The scene demonstrated the brutality of the repetition that lies behind any artistic excellence. The ethical questions raised by the onstage display of pain problematized the connection between viewing and emancipation. Questioning the ethics behind observing others’ pain is a common component of Fabre’s theatre, as Demetris Zavros notes when he discusses how Fabre’s earlier Prometheus Landscape II invited viewers to become complicit voyeurs to the suffering of the main characters.⁵² It is possible to take issue with the spectacle on offer in the Manège scene, particularly given that the representation of suffering was not performed by the artist whose vision was behind the scene but was an example of an discomfort of seeing. Mount Olympus reenacted Interior Scroll in Scene 1 of Chapter 10, titled ‘The Wisdom of the Body (Schneemann performance)’. See Oliver 2010: 122. ⁵⁰ See Lehmann 2006: 101. ⁵¹ The moral and ethical dimension of observing performed pain in Mount Olympus is further complicated by the 2018 allegations against Fabre of sexual harassing up to twelve then current or former members of his company. At the time of writing the investigation into the allegations was still ongoing, and I have consequently avoided commenting on how this complicates viewing the Manège scene. For details of the allegations see Marshall 2018. ⁵² Zavros suggests that this is part of Aesch. PV itself. Irrespective of the tragic connection it is a theme present in many of Fabre’s productions. See Zavros 2017: 178–9. On the centrality of the topos of pain to Fabre’s uvre see Van den Dries 2010: 38–40.

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 ’  :        older male auteur director’s vision being enacted by much younger female performers. In terms of the politics of spectatorship, however, the scene worked in a similar but more extreme way to Hotel Medea. ZUUK’s production invited the audience to embody several compromised positions, including that of tourists in Act I and voyeurs to a form of emotional violence in Act II. The Manège scene similarly highlighted how active viewing can have problematic or unpalatable associations, making the audience embody a position of complicity to, or even become perpetrators of, violence. It consequently highlighted the dynamics of a politics of spectatorship and the limits of emancipation as an ideal state. As abstract action, the Manège scene spoke to the idea of the postdramatic and represented the dynamic politics of spectatorship running throughout Mount Olympus. The efficacy of the scene, however, and its meaning in a more traditional sense relied on the classical source underpinning the action. The apparent meaninglessness of the performers’ physical exertion was given context through the scene’s in-built reference to the Oresteia. There was a thematic engagement with the tragic source text, and a broad effort to find metaphors to translate some of the conceptual ideas underpinning this part of the mythological backstory. Agamemnon was caught in the middle of an irresolvable situation; just as the Oresteia refers to Talthybius and Odysseus entrapping Agamemnon and destroying something of beauty at Aulis, so too were the dancers as they spun circles around Agamemnon, entangling him in an invisible web, and destroying the rose petals that fell to the floor around them. At the same time, they were his daughter and his wife, dramaturgically operating in a completely different universe to Agamemnon, just like they arrived at Aulis under false pretenses, blind to their fates. All three individuals on stage were connected, but unable to touch one another or physically interfere with what was unfolding. They, like the audience, were trapped in a nauseating cycle, which seemed more and more unbearable with each minute that passed. When, shortly after the sequence, a bathtub was rolled onto the stage and Agamemnon stabbed, it provided the audience with momentary relief, a symbolic, understandable, and expected murder, following the prolonged, tortuous lead-up. In the Manège scene the classical material acted as a semantic scaffold, which worked together with the postdramatic strategies to facilitate the creation of tragic experience. Lehmann argues that Fabre’s theatre in general can be thought of as a form of tragic theatre, particularly in his

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privileging of an ‘aesthetics of transgressive risk’ where ‘the endangered body faces us again and again’.⁵³ He argues that the perception of a physical process ‘which takes on a spiritual dimension by signifying nothing less than the desire for salvation’ creates catharsis.⁵⁴ The idea of Mount Olympus as a reception of the institution of tragedy, as well as a reception of individual tragic texts, will be discussed in the final section of this chapter; however, it is worth flagging here how this scene spoke to the concept of tragedy. The specific action that took place, for example, formed a caesura within the tragic narrative. The ambiguity of the scene’s content, where the characters were clear but the scene’s action was not, confronted the audience with the experience of anagnorisis, which Lehmann defines not as recognition, but as understanding nonunderstanding.⁵⁵ The scene’s title reinforced this sense of anagnorisis, featuring the French term for a carousel but enacting a grotesque perversion of this fairground attraction. The form of the scene additionally transgressed the boundaries which usually separate the different components within an ancient tragedy; the action of turning, clockwise, for an extended duration recalled the strophe section of choral choreography, although here with characters, rather than the chorus members, fulfilling this function. As I, via Benjamin Bennett, noted in the introduction, character references from ancient tragedy such as ‘Oedipus’ or ‘Clytemnestra’ act as semantic clues in postdramatic theatre which provide necessary background information for a performance.⁵⁶ The power of this from of narrative shorthand is evident throughout the Manège scene. Here, however, the classical material provided more than just background; it was a necessary element for the creation of a visceral, transgressive moment of performance, which formed a crucial moment in the overall tragic experience.

Mount Olympus as Modern Tragedy The remainder of the House of Atreus narrative as recorded in extant tragedy was explored throughout Chapter 10 and Chapter 10b, which ran from 10:20–10:55 and 11:30–12:15. The third and final dream time occurred between 10:55–11:30. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 explored Euripides’ ⁵³ Lehmann 2016: 429. ⁵⁶ Bennett 2005: 43.

⁵⁴ Lehmann 2016: 429.

⁵⁵ Lehmann 2016: 165–8.

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 ’  :        Medea and Sophocles’ Antigone and Ajax respectively, with each featuring alternating choral and monologue sections like the previous scenes of the performance. When the final Chapter of the performance, titled ‘The End’, commenced an hour and five minutes before the scheduled finish time there was a discernable change in the atmosphere of the room. The auditorium was once again full, and spectators appeared alert and energized rather than collapsed and half-asleep. The Chapter was filled with visually arresting scenes which, like the prologue, were not related to specific tragedies. The first scene, for example, ‘Wrestling—Lovebattle—Spooning’, began with six pairs of performers, wearing nothing bar white underpants, pouring olive oil over their bodies. A constant hum underpinned by a thumping beat played while the performers rubbed the oil into their skin. By this stage of the performance the stage floor was covered in blood splatter, rose petals, glitter, and now oil. The performers drank the remaining oil before in unison spitting it into the air, creating a series of golden arcs overhead. They then began to wrestle, attempting to pin one another down, slipping and sliding over the floor and dirtying their bodies in the process. Once again the performance played with the norm of sign density, with the wrestling action continuing for approximately twentyfive minutes. When all the performers were lying on the floor in exhaustion and defeat, a cloud of sand fell from the roof and created a temporary haze around the auditorium as the sand hit the stage floor. The eight tables split between the far stage left and right were pushed forward into a triangle shape, with the base of the triangle downstage, towards the audience, and the apex upstage. The remaining members of the cast entered and the original wrestlers stood up in front of the tables for Scene 2, ‘Running Scene’. Each performer began to run on the spot, chanting lines heard in previous scenes, while the new arrivals threw glitter, coloured powder, and bright, glistening acrylic paints onto the runners. The visual dramaturgy was dirty, visceral, and wild. The running continued for fifteen minutes, with the chanting regularly punctuated with the performers in unison commanding the audience ‘Now, give me all the love you’ve got!’. The audience greeted each command with increasingly raucous cheers, apparently oblivious to the fact that the line originated from an incestuous statement made by Iocaste in the Oedipus Chapter. A repeat of the opening dance sequence, here titled ‘Endtwerk’ constituted Scene 3 of Chapter 14. The choreography and soundtrack were identical to

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the original Twerk, but in contrast much of the audience, having survived the twenty-three-hour leadup, were ecstatic from the opening beats and were on their feet, clapping, dancing, and cheering while the performers undulated onstage. In place of the secreted entrails from the opening Twerk was the vivid paint and glitter from the previous scene. The overhead lights again flashed in time with the music and Dionysos, his body covered in gold paint, regularly appeared, dancing centre stage. After approximately fifteen minutes the dancing finished and the performers froze in a tableau, while Dionysos delivered a final monologue. Four women then entered the stage, each carrying a large glass bowl. They placed the bowls between their feet, removed their white togas and stood naked in front of the audience, before proceeding to each ‘lay’ an egg which dropped from their vaginas into the water bowl in a counterpoint to the early Male Power scene. The entire cast then stood, facing the audience, and in unison delivered the closing four lines: Take the power back Enjoy your own tragedy. Breath, just breath, And imagine something new.

The lights then went black, signaling the end of the performance and prompting a fifteen-minute standing ovation including, incredulously, demands for an encore. Although Chapter 14 was not a reception of any individual tragedy it crystalized how the overall performance worked as a reception of the idea of tragedy and how it gave audiences an embodied experience of the tragic form. Mount Olympus was just as much a reception of the concept of tragedy as it was a reception of individual tragic texts; the subtitle of the performance, ‘To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy’, was the first signifier of this component of reception. On the one hand the engagement can be seen in the positioning of the performance as a recreation of the idea of the City Dionysia. The creative team allude to the City Dionysia connection in interviews about the production; Fabre states, for example, that his theatre ‘goes back to the origins of tragedy. The tragedy developed from Dionysian rituals, in which intoxication meets reason and rules’ while Olyslaegers notes that: For me it’s a strange idea to expect an insight from a 2 or 3-hour play. What actually happened in ancient Greece were these big Dionysian festivals, competitions

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 ’  :        between different playwrights. People came to the theatre at dawn and watched for about 12 hours [ . . . ] That’s what we do with Mount Olympus [sic].⁵⁷

Although the performance did not attempt to recreate the City Dionysia it evoked the festival to position spectators similarly in a liminal space and to contextualize the production within a ritualistic, communal performance environment which wove together a multiplicity of tragic narratives.⁵⁸ On the other hand and more significantly, however, the performance engaged with the idea of tragedy by embodying modern understandings of the tragic form. As discussed in Chapter 3, Lehmann makes a claim for the existence of a ‘postdramatic theatre of tragedy’.⁵⁹ Lehmann’s understanding of tragedy follows a transgressive rather than a conflict model and involves a significant transgression, an aesthetic experience, and a single or repeated ‘caesura’ or a rupture which opens the performance up to the wider world. As postdramatic theatre embodies a transgression or interruption of dramatic form Lehmann posits that the postdramatic provides a modern-day home for tragic experience. Although I previously outlined in Chapter 3 some tensions with Lehmann’s model of tragedy I nevertheless claimed that it provided a useful vocabulary for analysing productions such as Love Me Tender, and it similarly assists in teasing out how Mount Olympus offers a lucid demonstration of the role of tragedy in modernity and the pliability of myth on the modern stage. Lehmann stressed how Mount Olympus conceptually engaged with the idea of the tragic: Mount Olympus does not tell stories but evokes the fundamental elements of tragedy: profoundly human gestures that can be understood intuitively even outside the context of dramatic storytelling; the tension between the hero (the individual) and the chorus (the collective); dance; and the ritual aspect.⁶⁰

The previously discussed scenes from Chapter 8b and Chapter 9 demonstrate Lehmann’s transgressive model; the finale, however, was a transformative moment of performance which touched upon another popular component of understandings of tragedy: that of catharsis.

⁵⁷ Pierets 2016. ⁵⁸ In contrast, Fischer-Lichte argues that the form of Mount Olympus and the reference to the home of the Greek gods in the play’s title means that the production ‘expressly referred to the Great Dionysia’. See Fischer-Lichte 2017: 358. ⁵⁹ Lehmann 2016: 96. ⁶⁰ Lehmann 2015: 39.

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The creative team at the helm of Mount Olympus conceived of the project as an attempt to restore the notion of catharsis to the theatre. Fabre stated in 2016 that: An important principle to me is catharsis. In this piece [Mount Olympus], the viewer is confronted with some of the darkest passages from the history of mankind. They are taken along on a journey through extreme pain and horror. By confronting that deep suffering, their mind is cleansed [ . . . ] I want to have my audience and actors learn through suffering. My theater [sic] is a kind of cleansing ritual. I instigate a process of change. Not only the metamorphosis of the actor, but also of the viewer.⁶¹

In the same year Olyslaegers similarly noted that in Mount Olympus the company ‘actually stretch time, where the catharsis is totally different and much more violent for the audience to capture. After a couple of hours we strip away the intellectual human layer and what remains is pure emotion’.⁶² Both statements offer vague, non-academic understandings of catharsis, which although goes undefined in the Poetics is something Aristotle posits as occurring during the space of one tragedy [Poet. 1449b23–8]. Although the practitioners’ conception of the performance as cathartic might not be academically correct, their understanding of tragedy as something emotional, ritualistic, and transformative relates to Lehmann’s understanding of tragic transgression and helps one to understand the efficacy of the finale. Throughout Section III of this book I have suggested that immersive and durational postdramatic receptions can facilitate emancipation and are therefore political in terms of how they utilize classical content. The ⁶¹ Fabre, quoted in Pragoplou 2016. Fabre later reinforced this interpretation, noting that the production is ‘all about the Greek tragedies, and it’s a study about catharsis, too. Catharsis still exists as a phenomenon. Because you feel that the people in the space relive things along with the performance on stage’. See Fabre, quoted in Rudzāte and Meistere 2017. ⁶² Olyslaegers, quoted in Pierets 2016. Van den Dries, in a comment made during rehearsals, also appears to conceive of the production as an investigation into catharsis when he notes that ‘Mount Olympos [sic] is not an actualization of Greek tragedy. It is an examination of the unrepresentability of what tears us apart and purges us once more’. See Van den Dries 2014. Fischer-Lichte also notes the ‘cleansing’ dimension of Mount Olympus, although she does not mention the word catharsis, when she summerizes that ‘Over the course of the long duration of the performance, everyone involved—performers and spectators alike, even if in different ways and to varying degrees—became detached from their everyday lives and were cleansed of the various selves and identities they displayed in it’. See Fischer-Lichte 2017: 363.

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 ’  :        productions create the possibility of emancipation by turning to obscure sources and challenging our understanding of the classical canon, and/or through formal innovations with familiar texts which create equivalent conditions by encouraging audiences to embody new perspectives. Mount Olympus represents the latter instance; however, instead of prompting the audience to inhabit a new perspective in a familiar text, such as the children’s perspective in Medea, it challenged audiences to embody a new role in relation to the genre, here as active participants immersed in the institution of tragedy rather than as observers of a play. Thinking through the audience’s phenomenological experience of Chapter 14, which seemingly blended together Fabre and Olyslaegers’ mind and body understandings of catharsis, demonstrates how the production encouraged both intellectual and embodied autonomy. Rancière draws a parallel between the emancipated spectator and the student being taught by an ‘ignorant master’. He notes that the so-called ignorant pupil has great self-generated knowledge, and that an ‘ignorant master’ does not teach his or her own knowledge to the pupil but: orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified. Every distance is a factual distance and each intellectual act is a path traced between a form of ignorance and a form of knowledge, a path that constantly abolishes any fixity and hierarchy of positions with their boundaries.⁶³

The audience’s physical response to the Mount Olympus finale was prompted by their sleep deprived cognitive state and the emotions and hormones released upon knowing that the mountain peak, as it were, was in sight. Their likely compromised cognitive awareness, however, was the result of living through a transgressive performance which reached back to the origins of Western theatre and fractured the canon. As such, the finale verified the equality of all experience at this moment in time, and each audience member’s own lived understanding of the concept of tragedy. Rather than impart a definition of tragedy, the performance functioned as an ‘ignorant master’ which applauded the spectator’s newly acquired knowledge. It allowed audiences to weigh up aesthetic and cultural norms, and repeatedly ruptured one’s expectations of the aesthetic experience. Spectators were encouraged (quite literally) in the ⁶³ Rancière 2009: 11.

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performance’s final lines to ‘imagine something new’ and were given full intellectual autonomy to write their own story out of ‘the cult of tragedy’. Mount Olympus used the past to look forward to new aesthetic possibilities and embodied both links to the classical and to Lehmann’s understanding of the tragic in its content and form respectively. * * * Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus is an example of the most radical type of postdramatic classical reception in terms of both form and content. Like the productions discussed in previous chapters, it demonstrates how the classics can play an essential role in postdramatic theatre, even when tragedy is referenced in its most fractured state and via the most tangential means. The classical content in Mount Olympus was key to the efficacy of the production; it was the use of the classics as a semantic scaffold which invoked the laughter, the tears, and the ecstasy, which gave meaning to the endless repetitions and the illogical sequences, and which allowed the audience to experience a meaningful transgression, rupture, and change in state. The production, despite being seemingly devoid of socio-political references, was political; Mount Olympus reflected and tested the limits of Rancière’s understanding of how politics meets the arts by empowering and emancipating audiences to write their own translation of the classical reception through their participation in the durational event. It tested the benefits of intellectual versus embodied agency, and along with Hotel Medea demonstrated that emancipation and immersion can be cognitive as well as physical states. The performance also showcased the limits of emancipation, by at times framing the audience’s role as performers negatively and by questioning the ethical dimension to viewing and knowing. Taken together with Hotel Medea, the production represents the complexity surrounding Rancière’s emancipated spectator, which can take many forms in one performance and is best employed as a hermeneutic tool to unpack the politics of spectatorship rather than to create a totalizing thesis about the ideal conditions for a politically efficacious performance.

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Conclusion The opening of the 2009 Rude Mechanicals’ re-enactment of Dionysus in 69 is representative of a wider trend in postdramatic theatre as we edge closer to the third decade of the twenty-first century.¹ At the start of Postdramatic Tragedies I outlined how postdramatic techniques and ancient tragedy came together in the mid-twentieth century to create a new style of innovative, experimental performance; today, those revolutionary, pioneering works are being re-staged and have been catapulted into classics of their own right. In 2011, for example, Jan Fabre returned to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, co-writing and directing Prometheus Landscape II which exists in dialogue with his 1988 Prometheus Landschaft.² Furthermore, in 2015 Romeo Castellucci re-staged his 1995 Orestea (una commedia organica?), an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia filled with postdramatic images of the body, to explore how ‘today’s audiences react to images first shown twenty years ago’.³ Many other works discussed in this volume continue to be performed on tour and in repertory, including Suzuki’s œuvre, Fabre’s Mount Olympus, and The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes. New productions of scripts that invite postdramatic realization also continue to be produced, extending from Athol Fugard’s 1973 The Island through to Martin Crimp’s 2013 Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino. The reception of ancient tragedy in postdramatic theatre is at a transitional point in its history. Alongside the canonization of key productions within contemporary theatre history practitioners continue

¹ The re-enactment was based on the Brian De Palma recording of Dionysus in 69 and attempted to restage, moment for moment, the original production. ² On Fabre’s Prometheus Landscape II see Zavros 2017. ³ Festival-Automne 2018. For scholarship on Castellucci’s classical performance reception see Decreus 2008: 279–83.

Postdramatic Tragedies. Emma Cole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Emma Cole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198817680.001.0001

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to combine tragic texts with postdramatic techniques in fresh classical receptions. The new productions, however, are no longer necessarily radical. Postdramatic techniques are now regularly seen on some of the most well-known stages in the Western world, as are the dramaturgical and directorial innovations that they facilitated. Simon Stone’s 2018 Eine griechische Trilogie at the Berliner Ensemble, for example, exists in dialogue with his other ‘hyperrealistic’ adaptations of canonical texts, which have been seen around the globe on stages such as the Young Vic (Yerma), Belvoir (The Wild Duck), Theater Basel (Three Sisters), and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (Medea), while the directorial style and postdramatic techniques in Ivo van Hove’s 2019 Électre/Oreste for the Comédie-Française are recognizable from his work at Britain’s Young Vic (A View from the Bridge) and National Theatre (Hedda Gabler).⁴ Only time will tell whether the forthcoming classical receptions of Punchdrunk and other immersive theatre companies will continue to incorporate postdramatic strategies, and similarly whether new innovations within the experience economy, including with digital technologies and virtual reality, will turn to ancient tragedy for a form of narrative shorthand and semantic scaffold. The opacity surrounding the future directions of this productive combination of genre and style does not detract from the significance of the chapter of theatre history outlined in this book. Postdramatic Tragedies has charted the crucial role that postdramatic techniques have played within the reception of ancient tragedy in modernity, and the vital function of tragedy within the development of postdramatic theatre. The combination of postdramatic techniques and ancient tragedy has been seen to result in a political form of classical reception; studying these productions can help us appreciate the pliability of myth on the modern stage and the role of tragedy in modernity. Furthermore, attuning to postdramatic receptions of ancient tragedy can, and has here, shed light on three contentious issues within broader theatre studies discourse, namely the role of text within postdramatic theatre, the role of politics within devised theatre, and the conditions required for, and benefits of, emancipated spectatorship. The work of ⁴ van Hove previously engaged with Greek tragedy in his 2015 Antigone at the Barbican, London, and then on tour; however, this production did not utilize postdramatic techniques.

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Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and Tom Holloway has proved that text is at home within the postdramatic, and that dramaturgical innovations in writing style can facilitate postdramatic realizations. The classical receptions of The Wooster Group and The Hayloft Project have demonstrated that devised theatre remains political in a variety of ways and often embodies a politics of form. Finally, ZU-UK and Jan Fabre’s durational receptions have testified to the fact that ideas of audience emancipation are best utilized as a hermeneutic tool, rather than as a totalizing thesis to which a production must wholeheartedly subscribe. Postdramatic techniques facilitate different forms of emancipation at different moments of performance, and rarely is there a simple correlation between experimentation and emancipation, or physical immersion and intellectual emancipation. Taken together, these seven classical receptions attest to the relevance of the classics to the postdramatic, and the postdramatic to the classics, and reveal that within the development of postdramatic theatre ancient tragedy has been a productive springboard for practitioners which enables them to allude to narrative and character without disrupting the postdramatic priortization of image, sound, and affect. The productions have pushed both the tragic genre and the postdramatic style in new directions. An appreciation of postdramatic tragedies is key to understanding the history of theatre and of tragedy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

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Bibliography ABC Arts. 2010. ‘Love Me Tender Savages Children’s Sexualisation’, ABC Arts, 15 April. [accessed 4 August 2017]. Adams, Sarah. 2010. ‘The Hayloft Project and Thyestes’, Arts Hub Australia, 18 August. [accessed 10 January 2018]. Allain, David. 2015. ‘Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy’, Hunger TV. [accessed 4 July 2017]. Allain, Paul. 2002. The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki. London: Methuen. Alston, Adam. 2013. ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 18: 2: 128–38. Andújar, Rosa, and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, eds. Forthcoming. Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage. London: Bloomsbury. Angelaki, Vicky. 2014. ‘Introduction: Dealing with Martin Crimp’, Contemporary Theatre Review 24: 3: 307–12. Angelaki, Vicky. 2014a. ‘Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino: Martin Crimp at the Cutting Edge of Representation’, Contemporary Theatre Review 24: 3: 313–28. Aragay, Mireia, and Clara Escoda. 2012. ‘Postdramatism, Ethics, and the Role of Light in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies (2005)’, New Theatre Quarterly 28: 2: 133–42. Aragay, Mireia, and Pilar Zozya. 2007. ‘Martin Crimp’, in Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, and Pilar Zozya, eds. British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 56–68. Aronson, Arnold. 1985. ‘The Wooster Group’s L.S.D. ( . . . Just the High Points)’, The Drama Review 29: 2: 65–77. Aronson, Arnold. 2000. American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. London and New York: Routledge. Artaud, Antonin. 1964. ‘Le Théâtre et son double’, in Antonin Artaud. Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud. Paris: Gallimard, 11–171. First published in 1938.

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Index A Beautiful Life, see Gospel Music A Silver Mt. Zion Stumble then Rise on Some Awkward Morning 229 Aboriginal, see Indigenous Australians Abramović, Marina 198n.70 512 Hours 215n.3 Adaptation 23–4, 103n.3, 110–11, 150–1, 216n.5 Adelaide Festival 206 Aeschylus 110–11 Agamemnon 28–9, 36n.4, 103–4, 109–10, 247–8, 261–2, 264 Eumenides 261–2 Kabeiroi 212–14, 220 Oresteia 12–13, 15, 178–9, 181–2, 191, 267, 275 Persians, The 247–8, 251–2, 257–9 Prometheus Bound 266–7, 275 Seven Against Thebes 99, 259–61 Almeida Theatre 181n.17 American Repertory Theatre 147n.21 Apollonius Argonautica 223–4, 230–1 Apragmosyne 166–7 Arcola Theatre 216, 221n.22 Aristophanes Lysistrata 178–9 Aristotle Poetics 1–6, 36–7, 72–84, 116–17, 159–61, 190–1, 267–8, 272 Unity of Time 181, 212–13, 262–3 On the Chorus 63–4, 79–80 Artaud, Antonin 6, 8–9, 49–50, 110n.23, 210–11 Thyestes, see Torments of Tantalus, The Torments of Tantalus, The 7–8, 49–50 Arts Council 138–9 Atelier 9/10 Studio Hamburg 72 Athenian Citizenship 166–7 Auditory semiotics 115 Australia 103–4, 104n.5, 107–11, 121–2, 127, 177, 191n.51, 193–5 Australia Council for the Arts 193–5

Australian Gothic 127–9 Australian New Wave Theatre, see New Wave Theatre Avant-Garde, the 1–3, 6–10, 16, 23–4, 37, 48–50, 65–6, 81–2, 143–4, 146, 154, 158–9, 177 Badminton 147–53, 156, 161–2, 165–6, 169, 172, 174, 191n.55 Baker, Bobby 198n.70 Barba, Eugenio 110n.23 Barbican, The 67–8, 276n.4 Barrett, Felix 218–19, see also Punchdrunk Barthes, Roland 15–16, 157 Barton, John Greeks, The 181–2, 248–9 Wars of the Roses, The 248–9 Bausch, Pina 2–3, 22–3 BBC Radio 71–2, 147–8 Beckett, Samuel 22, 25–6 Belgium 22–3, 36–7, 252–3 Belt Up Antigone 36n.4 Belvoir 106n.10, 178n.5, 275–6, see also Company B Belvoir Berlin Wall 20–1 Berliner Ensemble 178–9, 275–6 Betsuyaku, Minoru 12–13 Billington, Michael 35, 53n.57, 60–1, 91n.55, 155–6, 156n.51, 160n.67 Bird, Caroline 35–6 Blin, Roger 49–50 Body in Postdramatic Theatre, The, see Postdramatic Physicality Boko Harem 93 Brazil 228, 230–2 Breaking of the Fourth Wall 1, 13–14, 60–1, 75–6, 115–16, 215–16, 225–6 Brecht, Bertolt 4, 6, 8–9, 13–14, 16, 25–6, 116–17, 210–11, 215, see also Post-Brechtian Antigone 9n.38

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Brecht, Bertolt (cont.) Baal 48 Verfremdungseffekt 4–6, 8, 116–17, 164–5, 197–8 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 67–8 Bruckner, Ferdinand Pains of Youth 72 Büchner, Georg Woyzeck 48 Bushfires 125–30 Castellucci, Romeo Orestea (una commedia organica?) 275 Tragedia Endogonidia 248–9, 249n.16 Catharsis 4–6, 31, 45–7, 267–8, 271–3 Cavander, Kenneth 248–9 Caveats regarding the political in devised theatre 140–1, 148, 189–90, 193–5, 217n.9, 252–3 Cézanne, Paul 157 Chekhov, Anton 178–9 Seagull, The 72 Three Sisters 178n.6 Choral projections 79–80, 82–4, 113–14 Chorus 13n.59, 18n.85, 28, 46–7, 63–4, 71–5, 77–9, 87–93, 96–7, 99n.77, 104–30, 146–8, 241–3, 255–62, 267–71 Churchill, Caryl 104n.4 Cinematographic Theatre 81–2, 203 City Dionysia 31, 215, 220–1, 270–1 Cixous, Hélène 198n.70 Code and Rating Administration Classification Scheme 203–4 Coetzee, J. M. 67–8 Collaborative Creation, see Devised Theatre Colonialism, see Postcolonialism Comédie-Française 275–6 Company B Belvoir 106–8, see also Belvoir Complicité 177 Concertgebouw 247n.9 Crimp, Martin 28, 37–8, 67–8, 71–101, 103–4, 276–7 Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino 28, 38, 71–101, 105, 113–14, 203, 275 Attempts on Her Life 72

City, The 72 Country, The 72 Cruel and Tender 28, 67–8, 71–5, 80–1, 91 Face to the Wall 72 No One Sees The Video 71–2 Pains of Youth 72 Seagull, The 72 Croggon, Alison 182–6, 189–90 Cultural Olympiad 220 Cunningham, Merce 147–8, 153–6 Canfield 154n.45 Cuocolo, Renato 110n.23 Cureses, David La fontera 231n.50 Dafoe, Willem 143–5, 148, 172–4 Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, The 177 De Palma, Brian Dionysus in 69 275n.1 Deconstruction 15, 22–3, 156–8, 192–3 Derrida, Jacques 15–16, 157–8 Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg 72 Deviant Body, The 264 Devised Theatre 1–2, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 35–6, 39, 134, 137–41, 144–6, 153–4, 157–8, 163–4, 175, 177–9, 186–7, 189–91, 193–6, 205–6, 209–10, 216, 217n.9, 246–7, 276–7 Diodorus Siculus Bibliothetica Historica 223–4 Dionysius Scytobrachion 223–4 Direct Address 13–14, 115–16 DJ Snake and Lil Jon Turn Down for What 255–6 Drama Review, The 144n.7 Dramaturgy of Care 223 Dramaturgy of Participation 223 Dream Time, see Postdramatic Temporality Dreamthinkspeak [sic] Don’t Look Back 36n.4 Drifting Too far From The Shore, see Gospel Music Durational Theatre 1–2, 24–5, 27, 30–1, 186–7, 209–74, 276–7, see also Postdramatic Temporality Edinburgh Fringe Festival 36n.4, 42–3, 216, 236n.60 Eliot, T. S. 42n.10, 46–7, 110n.23

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 Enoch, Wesley 109n.16 Environmental Theatre 10 Epic Theatre, see Brecht, Bertolt Ethics of watching postdramatic theatre 31, 133–4, 223n.32, 246, 265–7, 274 Euripides 48–9, 110–11, 116–17, 187n.37 Alcestis 260n.37 Bacchae 1, 9–11, 178–9, 247–8, 256–7, 259–61 Hecuba 259–61 Herakles 259–61 Hippolytus 29–30, 39–69, 143–75, 192–3, 247–8, 259–61 Iphigenia at Aulis 15, 28–9, 103–34, 247–8 Medea 17–22, 30–1, 109–10, 109n.16, 178–9, 215–44, 268–70, 272–3 Phoenissae 28, 71–101, 259–61 Troades 13–15, 35–6, 98–9, 178–9, 259–61 Event Theatre 155–6 Fabre, Jan 22–3, 245–74 Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy 30–1, 213–14, 245–77 Prometheus Landscape II 266–7, 275 Prometheus Landschaft 275 Farr, David 48 Folk Music 130–1 Forced Entertainment 177 Foreign Affairs Festival 246–7 Four caveats regarding the political in devised theatre, see Caveats regarding the political in devised theatre Frantic Assembly 177 Fraught Outfit 177 Freestone, Elizabeth 193–5 Freud, Sigmund 44n.20, 190–1 Frohnmayer, John E. 138–9 Fuchs, Elinor 2n.2, 3n.8, 16–19, 56–7, 113–14 Fugard, Athol The Island 139–40, 275 Gardiner, Adam 107–8 Gardner, Lyn 194n.62, 218n.16 Gate Theatre Notting Hill 35–6, 48, 50–1, 75



Gattaca 77 Geertz, Clifford 117–18 Germany 22–3 Political History 17–18, 20–1, 94 Gorky, Maxim The Philistines 178n.6 Gospel music 115–16, 119–20 Gothic Theatre Movement, see Australian Gothic Graham, Martha 153–6 Cave of the Heart 153n.39 Cortege of Eagles 153n.39 Episodes 150n.32 Seraphic Dialogue 153n.39 Phaedra 147–8, 153n.40 Gray, Spalding 143–4 Great Dionysia, The, see City Dionysia Greene, Deborah 191 Greig, David Savage Reminiscence 42–3 Griffin Theatre Company 106 Grillparzer, Franz Das goldene Vließ 220–1, 230–1, 243–4 Grotowski, Jerzy 10, 11n.46, 110n.23, 139–40 Grüber, Klaus Michael 22–3 Guardian, The 35, 193–5, 249n.16 Hampstead Theatre 42–3, 193–5 Hardie, Benedict 177n.2 Haus der Berliner Festspiele 246–7 Haydon, Christopher 35–6 Hayloft Project, The 177 3xSisters 178n.6 By Their Own Hands 178–9 Nest, The 178n.6 Only Child, The 178n.6 Seizure, The 178–9 Thyestes 29–30, 141, 175, 177–206, 251–2, 275–7 Hayward Gallery 216, 220 Hen and Chicken Pub Theatre 42–3 Henning, Thomas 179, 185, 190–1, 197 Hewitt, Luke 106, 115–16, 119–21, 129–30 Higgins, Charlotte 73, 91–3, 194n.62 Hitchcock, Alfred Psycho 68–9 Holland 22–3, 36–7 Holland Festival 206

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Holloway, Tom 103–34, 276–7 Beyond the Neck 114n.33, 127–9 Don’t Say The Words 28–9, 103–5 Love Me Tender 28–9, 38, 84, 103 Hollywood Production Code 203–4 Hôtel de Bourgogne 146–7 Hôtel Guénégaud 146–7 Howard, Rowland S. Wayward Man 199–201 Hughes, Ted Phèdre 160–1 Huppert, Isabelle 67–8 Hyperrealism 191, 197–8, 206 Hytner, Nicholas 160–1 I Am Weary (Let Me Rest), see Folk Music Iam Nocte, see Voice Theatre Lab Ibsen, Henrik 4–6, 159–60 Hedda Gabler 275–6 Little Eyolf 178n.6 Immersive Theatre 1–2, 10, 24–5, 27, 30, 50–1, 186–7, 209–46, 249–50, 272–6 ‘In-yer-face’ theatre 27–9, 35–69, 71–2, 103–4 Indigenous Australians 108–11 ‘Inspired by’ 103n.3 Interculturalism 8, 15–16 Internationaal Theater Amsterdam 178–9, 275–6 IRAA Theatre 110n.23 Irruption of the Real 50–1, 65–6, 122–4, 133, 186–7, 255–6, 265–6 Islamic State 93 Jansenism 146–7 Jason and the Argonauts 77, 223n.31 Joyce, James 110n.23 Kane, Sarah 27–8, 35, 37–69, 71–2, 103–4, 134 4.48 Psychosis 40–2, 50n.51, 105 As director 48n.39, 50, 61 Blasted 43–6, 48, 50n.51, 52n.56, 60–1, 66n.88 Cleansed 42n.11, 45–7, 50n.51 Comic Monologue 41–3 Dreams, Screams and Silences 41–3 Phaedra’s Love 27–9, 35–6, 38–69, 75, 97–8, 101, 105, 122–4, 152–3, 155, 168, 171–4, 187–9, 188n.42, 196, 199, 264, 276–7

Sick 41–3 Skin 41n.7 Starved 41–4 Unpublished plays, see Comic Monologue, Dreams Screams and Silences, What She Said, Starved, Sick What She Said 41–3 Kani, Bonisile 139–40 Kantor, Tadeusz 110n.23 Kennedy, Robert 1, 148 Kimmel, Richard 155–6 Klimov, Elem Come and See 98–9 Laramie Project, The 138–9 LeCompte, Elizabeth 143–75 see also The Wooster Group (To You, The Birdie! ) Lehmann, Hans-Thies On Postdramatic Theatre 1–6, 8–10, 20, 23–4, 27–8, 35n.1, 36–8, 40–1, 43–52, 62, 64–6, 81–2, 89–90, 95, 97–8, 113–16, 121–4, 131–3, 140, 155–6, 164–5, 172, 174n.92, 181, 186–7, 198n.70, 201, 203, 215, 218n.13, 219–21, 224–8, 235, 246n.7, 254, 257–65 On Müller 16–17 On Tragedy 1–2, 40–1, 81–2, 117–19, 264, 267–8, 271–4 Lennox, Annie I Put A Spell On You 241–2 Living Theatre, The 9n.38 Lutton, Matthew 103–34 see also Tom Holloway (Love Me Tender) Lysander, Per and Suzanne Osten Medeas barn 236–7 Macdonald, James 50n.51 Malthouse Theatre 179 Mangano, Silvana 78 Maravala, Persis Jade 210–11, 215–44 Marber, Patrick 103–4 Marx Brothers 147–8, 153–6 Massenet, Jules Pleurez mes yeux 263–4 Mattock, Cath 50–1 McClory, Belinda 106–7, 115, 119–26, 130, 132–3 McDonagh, Martin 103–4

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 McDormand, Frances 145 McQuade, Kris 106–8, 112–15, 119–21, 126–7, 130–1 Media in Postdramatic Theatre 68–9, 152–3, 155–7, 162, 164–5, 169, 228–9, 228n.45, 232–3, 239–41, 275–6 Mee, Charles Iphigenia 2.0 133n.68 Melbourne Theatre Company 110n.22 Michael, Arky 106–8, 112–14, 119–20, 124–7, 129–30 Miller, Arthur A View From The Bridge 275–6 Crucible, The 144, 178n.5 Death of a Salesman 178n.5 Mirren, Helen 160–1 Mitchell, Katie 38n.12, 82n.36, 190–1 Alles Weitere kennen Sie aus dem Kino 71 Iphigenia at Aulis 95n.69 Phoenissae, Royal Shakespeare Company 72n.5, 91–3 Women of Troy 98–9 Mnouchkine, Ariane Les Atrides 13–15, 181–2 Moody, Colin 105–8, 112, 115–16, 119–20, 124–7, 129–31 Moon Van Overmeir, Marc 257–9 Moraga, Cherríe The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea 231–2, 231n.49 Morahan, Hattie 95n.69 Mouawad, Wajdi 67–8 Mozart K. 465 78 Müller, Heiner 2–3, 16–18, 22, 110n.23 Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten 18–20, 220–1, 230–3, 243–4 Mulvany, Kate and Anne-Louise Sarks Medea 236–7 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 138–9 National Theatre, The 72, 93n.60, 98–9, 160–1, 236–7, 275–6 National Theatre Live 160–1 Neilson, Anthony 39–40 Neoclassical French Tragedies 150–1, 160–1, 167–8, see also Racine, Jean and Pradon, Jacques



Netherlands, The, see Holland New Wave Theatre 109–10 New York State Council on the Arts 144n.8 New York University 144n.7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 258n.34 Notebook, The 195–6 Nothos 166–7 Ntshona, Zola 139–40 Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe 67–8 Olyslaegers, Jeroen 246–7, 247n.11, 252–3, 257–9, 270–3 One Thousand and One Nights 100n.79 Opera Project, The Another Night: Medea 104n.5 Orange Tree Theatre 71–2 Orbison, Roy Anything You Want 186 You Got It 199–201 OUDS, see Oxford University Dramatic Society Oxford University Dramatic Society 109–10 Participatory Performance 210–11, 215, 220–4, 226–9, 232–3, 238–9, 245–6, 262–3, 274 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 110n.23 Edipo Re 78, 81–2, 85–6, 97 Medea 231n.50 Pentabus Theatre 193–5 Performance Art 36–7, 106–7, 215, 265n.49 Performance Group, The 139–40, 144, See also Schechner, Richard (Dionysus in 69) Performance Space, The 107n.12 Performing Garage, The 1, 10, 143–4, 146n.16 Pericles 166–7 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) 107–8 Phenomenology 25–7, 57 Piccolo Teatro 72 Ping Pong 192 Plethora of Signs 129 Politics of Aesthetics, see Politics of Form Politics of Form 20, 29, 84, 101, 116–18, 140, 158, 189–90, 193, 253, 276–7 Poor Theatre, see Grotowski, Jerzy

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Port Arthur 127–9 Post-Brechtian 4–6, 116 Postcolonialism and readings of Medea 20–2, 224–5, 230–3, 243–4 Australia 108–11 South Africa 139–40 Postdramatic Aesthetics of Time 89–90, 97–8, 257–9, 262–3 Postdramatic Aesthetic of Repetition 89–90, 95, 257–9, 264 Postdramatic Chorus 73–5, 77, 79, 113–14, 259 Postdramatic Dream World 224–5 Postdramatic Physicality 97–8, 121–2, 197–8, 264 Postdramatic Simultaneity 131–2 Postdramatic Temporality 14–15, 181–4, 209–10, 215, 220–1, 257, 259–61, 264–5 Postdramatic Textscape 115, 164–5 Postdramatic Theatre of Voices 114–15 Poststructuralism 15 Post-Thatcherism 39–40, 47, 53–4, 103–4 Pradon, Jacques 146–7 Proliferation of Signs, see Plethora of Signs Promenade Theatre 224–5 Psychological realism 180–2, 189–91, 197–8, 203–4, 206 Pulp-Noir 203–5, see also Tarantino, Quentin Punchdrunk 212–13, 218–19, 226–8, 275–6 Drowned Man, The 226n.41 Kabeiroi 212–14, 220 Sleep No More 226n.41 Queensland Theatre Company 110n.22 Quietism, see apragmosyne Rabble, The 177 Racine, Jean 150–1, 160–1 Phèdre 29–30, 67–8, 143–75 Rameau, Jean-Philippe Hippolyte et Aricie 160–1 Ramos, Jorge Lopes 210–11, 215 Rancière, Jacques 158–9, 210, 249–50, 252n.22, 253–4, 274 Emancipated Spectator, The 30, 209–14, 216–17, 223, 232–3, 243–4, 249–53, 261–2, 265, 273–4

Raunch Culture 28–9, 116, 127, 132–3 Ravenhill, Mark 27–8, 39–41, 56, 71n.1, 103–4 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat 40–1, 67–8 Relational Dramaturgy 217–20 Retreat from Synthesis 48, 62–6, 81–2, 84, 97–8, 104–5, 155–6 Revenge Tragedy 7–8, 65n.86 Rigg, Diana 160–1 Robben Island 139–40 Royal Court Theatre 39–40, 43–4, 71–2, 103n.2 Royal Family, The 53–4, 168 Royal National Theatre, The, see National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company 72n.5, 91–3, 248–9 Rudd, Kevin 110–11 Rude Mechanicals Dionysus in 69 137, 275 Ryall, Kelly 107–8, 129 Ryan, Chris 179, 185, 190–1, 193, 195, 199–201 Sarks, Anne-Louise 177n.3, 193–5, see also Mulvany, Kate and Anne-Louise Sarks Sartre, Jean-Paul 110n.23 Schechner, Richard 1–2, 11, 22, 137, 139–40, 143–4, 144n.7, 146 Dionysus in 69 1–3, 9–11, 137, 139–40, 143–4, 148 Scheib, Jay The Medea 228n.45 Schleef, Einar 22–3 Schlegel, A. W. 48–9 Schmidt, Paul 145n.13, 146–8, 150n.32, 163n.71, 170n.89, 179, see also Snow on the Mesa: Portrait of Martha Schmitz, Toby 206n.88 Schubert, Franz Der Doppelgänger 199–201 Semiotics 25–7, 51–2, 115, 217–20 Seneca 6–7, 48–50, 54, 199 Medea 229, 232–3, 243–4 Oedipus 49–50 Phaedra 27–30, 39–69, 143–74 Thyestes 7–8, 49–50, 177–206 September 11 148, 148n.27 Serpent Players, see Fugard, Athol

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

 Serpentine Galleries 215n.3 Shakespeare, William 110–11, 116–17, 159–60, 193–5 Hamlet 16n.75 King Lear 44–5 Titus Andronicus 45–6 Twelfth Night 45n.25 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Cenci, The 7–8, 49–50 Shepherd, Scott 163–5, 168–70, 195, 197–8 Shepherd, William Hunter 9–10 Shunt The Architects 36n.4 Site-Specific Theatre 1–2, 12–13, 186–7, 216 Site-Sympathetic Theatre, see SiteSpecific Theatre Smith, Edmund Phaedra and Hippolytus 160–1 Snow on the Mesa: Portrait of Martha 150n.32 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 2–3, 249n.14 Soho 146, 148 Sophocles 48–9, 110–11 Ajax 121, 179n.11, 268–70 Antigone 9n.38, 36n.4, 118n.45, 139–40, 268–70, 276n.4 Atreus 180n.13, 187n.37 Oedipus Rex 44–5, 259–61 Niobe 179n.11 Philoctetes 178–9, 247–8 Tereus 45–6 Thyestes 180n.13, 187n.37, 193 Trachiniae 28, 44–5, 57, 67–8, 71–2, 75 Southbank Centre 220 Sparagmos 251–2, 256–7, 259, 262–3 Spears, Britney 124 Gimme More 121–2 Spectatorship 30–1, 122–4, 209–15, 223–5, 229, 232–3, 238–40, 243–4, 250–1, 254, 257, 259, 264–7, 274, 276–7 St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York 145, 146n.16 Stein, Peter 23n.98 Stephens, Simon 103n.2 Stolen Generation, The 110–11 Stone, Simon 177–206 Death of a Salesman 178n.5

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Eine griechische Trilogie 178–9, 275–6 Medea 178–9, 184, 191, 275–6 Oresteia 178–9, 191 Three Sisters 275–6 Wild Duck, The 275–6 Yerma 275–6 SUDS, see Sydney University Dramatic Society Summerhall 216 Sutton, Sheryl 221n.23 Suzuki, Tadashi 12n.49, 275 Bacchae, The 12–15 Clytemnestra 12–13, 15 Trojan Women, The 12–15 Svich, Caridad 133n.68 Sydney Festival 206 Sydney Front, The Pornography of Performance, The 104n.5 Sydney Theatre Company 110n.22 Sydney University Dramatic Society 109–10 Synaesthesia 217–18 (Syn)aesthetic 217–20 Szeiler, Josef 215 Taeldeman, Dag 255–6 Tarantino, Quentin 29–30, 203–4 Tasmania 127–9 Technology, see Media in Postdramatic Theatre Text in Postdramatic Theatre 9–10, 16–19, 22–5, 27–9, 35–8, 40–2, 47, 49–52, 67–9, 71–2, 86–7, 95, 101, 103–4, 106–7, 126, 131, 134, 156–8, 164–5, 191n.54, 247n.11, 249–50, 275–7 Thatcher, Margaret 35, 138–9, see also Post-Thatcherism Theater Basel 275–6 Theater der Welt 206 Theater Oberhausen 178–9 Theatergroep Hollandia 2–3 TheaterTreffen 91–3 Theatre de Complicité, see Complicité Theatre of Cruelty see Artaud, Antonin Theatre of Shared Space 35n.1, 50–1, 62, 64–7, 215 Theatre of the Chorus, see Postdramatic Chorus

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/10/2019, SPi

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Theatre of Voices, see Postdramatic Theatre of Voices Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers 206 Theatres Act 36n.4 ThinIce [sic] 106 Tisch School of the Arts 144n.7 Toneelgroep Amsterdam, see Internationaal Theater Amsterdam Torres Strait Islander, see Indigenous Australians Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, see Lehmann, Hans-Thies (On Tragedy) Translation 23–4, 236n.62 Trinity Buoy Wharf 216 Tzara, Tristan 22 Ultraviolence 203–4 United Kingdom 36–7, 36n.4, 39, 103–4, 139–40, 177, 193–5, 209–10 United States 36–7, 138–40 University of Sydney 109–10, see also Sydney University Dramatic Society Valk, Kate 145n.14, 147–8, 153–4, 163, 169 van Hove, Ivo A View From The Bridge 275–6 Antigone 276n.4 Électre/Oreste 275–6 Hedda Gabler 275–6 Van Ostade, Andrew 255–6 Vandewege, Lies 257–9, 263–4 Vawter, Ron 143–4 Verdi, Giuseppe Pace Pace 257–9 Violation of the Norm of Sign Density 62, 199, 232–3, 259, 264, 268–70, 272

Virtual Reality 275–6 Visual Dramaturgy 49–55, 59–60, 62, 121–2, 134, 201, 203, 264, 268–70 Voice Theatre Lab 49–50 Voyeurism 49–50, 56–8, 63, 65–6, 68, 152–3, 199, 251–2, 254, 259, 262, 265–7 Warlikowski, Krzysztof Phaedra(s) 67–9 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 160–1 Wilder, Thornton Our Town 144 Wilson, Robert 2–3, 16, 23n.99, 36–7, 201, 215 Deafman Glance 220–1 Overture to the Fourth Act of Deafman Glance 221n.23 Winter, Mark Leonard 179, 179n.11, 185, 189–91, 193–5 Wooster Group, The 23–4, 143–6, 156–8, 177–9 L.S.D. ( . . . Just the High Points) 144, 178n.5 Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) 144, 164 Phedre (BBC Radio 3) 147–8 To You, The Birdie! 29–30, 141, 143–75, 177, 179, 187–90, 192–3, 195, 197–8, 205–6, 212–13, 276–7 World Trade Center 148 World War Two 94 Young Vic 71–2, 275–6 Zecora Ura, see ZU-UK ZU-UK Hotel Medea 30–1, 210–11, 213–46, 250–1, 262–3, 266–7, 274, 276–7