Band 1, Heft 1

In Edward Bond’s play The Under Room , an illegal immigrant is represented by both a dummy and a dummy actor. This article will investigate how the immigrant’s dualised body may impact on actors and audience in performance. It will argue that the device revitalises an ancient dramatic strategy to radicalise the relationship between time and space, crucially without severing it in postdramatic narrative rupture.

This article analyses theatrical double staffing in Alan Ayckbourn’s Henceforward… and Caryl Churchill’s A Number . Portraying both human and robot, original and clone, the actors embody the idea of puppets or automatons on stage, mirroring the understanding of identity as a process of subjection, so as to maintain the order people inherit, to fulfil the life plans of others, and/or to become productive and involved. The body is the site of parental, institutional, and scientific inscription but also its active interpretation. One and the same body simultaneously shows its autonomous activity and its heteronomous programming. The article seeks to trace the blurring of lines between dependence and independence by evaluating the ambivalence of subjection.

The article examines the way the spectacle of the dead body has been presented on stage in the course of the twentieth century. In early twentieth-century crime drama, a corpse may be presented as an aesthetic object. Increasingly, however, the presence of the corpse is exploited for semi-comic effect and suggested rather than shown. A particular plot motif evolving around the corpse on stage is the so-called busy body. In plays written after the abolition of censorship, the irreverent treatment of the dead human body occasionally creates a much stronger shock effect. In this respect, a major shift seems to have taken place since the 1990s: TV drama has increasingly tended to feature forensic pathologists as heroes. This indicates a profound change in attitudes to both death and the ideal of the integrity of the human body, which can also be discerned in Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibition.

Notably, a number of dramatic monologues and monodramas written and performed by black British women of multi-ethnic heritage employ polyphonic and transgeneric techniques to articulate perspectives and experiences of mixedness. SuAndi’s monologue “Passing” (1990) and the monodramas The Story of M (2002) by SuAndi and Moj of the Antarctic (2008) by Mojisola Adebayo loosen perceptions of racial and chromatic determiners as not fixed, but mixed . The features of their work create cross-talk between theatre and spoken word poetry, placing mixed experiences at the heart of theatre performance. This article gives recognition to the power of women as solo performers and the kinds of herstories that are restored to sociocultural and, by extension, theatre histories through the liveness of women who perform their own work and the revisions they forge in terms of uses of genre, audience assumptions, casting, and critical receptions. From positions of indigenous cultural and racial heterogeneity, SuAndi’s and Adebayo’s work adds a further complexity to conceptions of diasporic heritage within Britain’s national story, one where claiming family roots is represented as problematic in the eyes of the beholder (surrounding society) but celebrated through their individual acts of cultural reclamation and artistic validation.

This article argues that in two concurrent productions, La Bête and Jerusalem , Mark Rylance’s performance highlights the body, setting morality against physicality in a way that emphasizes central questions about the ethics of performance. The two plays represent a complete contrast in focus and context, yet Rylance’s blatant displays of counterculture lead audiences to cheer on all the physical crudity and obscenity. There is a mind/body split inherent in the situation dramatized by each of these plays; and in Rylance’s interpretation, the body triumphs at the expense of civilization. Close analysis of his performance in each production demonstrates that liberty (and its acting equivalent, spontaneity) becomes closely associated with physicality as well as showing the degree to which this physicality subverts the established codes of theatre.

Body metaphors are omnipresent in our daily lives and languages. They structure ideas and ideals of human interaction and society and shape our experiences of ourselves and the world. However, the body is used to make sense not only of ‘healthy’ human interaction and society but also of problems and people who are constructed as an infectious threat to a community. Using Michel Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics and biopower, theories on normativity and normalisation as well as providing an analysis of the role of a politics of disgust, the article explores body metaphors and their built-in danger of naturalising hierarchies and justifying violence against people seen as dirt or germs. These concepts are then applied to two plays that assess marginalised groups in Dublin, The Pride of Parnell Street by Sebastian Barry and Kebab by Gianina Cărbunariu. The plays show how people are metaphorically turned into dirt in order to purge the ‘healthy’ social body from the ‘diseases’ of ethnic difference, poverty, and criminality. The plays challenge an identity politics that essentialises ideologies of inclusion and exclusion, and they denaturalise feelings of disgust and ideals of health and normality.

This article investigates one of the most international but underexamined forms of performance in the new millennium, the zombie walk. After the first documented zombie walk was performed in 2001, the concept of organized groups of people dressed up as zombies and roaming through public spaces soon caught on in many other cities around the globe. Even though zombie walks are organized for a number of different reasons – as charity events, carnival parades, or political demonstrations – their social and political significance is difficult to decipher and determine. The article tries to explain the increasing international popularity of zombie walks by linking them to the history of zombie films, the recent resurgence of the zombie genre, the current ubiquity of zombie metaphors in public discourse and culture, and the larger context of the global recession since 2008.

The article highlights the vocal and auditory dimension of (contemporary) theater. Numerous innovations and transformations of the theater and of performance art in the last decades have been based on a host of different vocal utterances and experiments as well as playful adaptations of acoustic material, such as exploring the physicality of voice and speech, dissociating body and voice, unfolding technical voices as a material in its own right, presenting solo as well as choral voices. The article first develops a concept of the vocality of theater by referring to the notion of embodied language and, second, discusses the implications and effects of vocality in contemporary theater: the responsive nature of perception, the performativity of vocal experience, the intensity and affectivity of hearing, the spatial quality of sound, and the social nature of listening.

The article investigates the body as a communicative tool in performance art and professional wrestling. It suggests that bodily communication, and specifically pain, has a much more direct impact than verbal language. By aligning their body with that of the performer, audiences are able to feel the pain by proxy. This analogous empathy is what lends both kinds of performance their force. The article presents a typology of wrestlers’ bodies and argues that wrestling establishes a closed system of communication, whose only purpose is to elicit a physical form of catharsis in the audience. Performance art is analysed in terms of ritual. The infliction of pain on the artist’s body serves both as a form of civilised anger outlet and as a powerful means of triggering a thought process.

The article discusses Naked Boys Singing! , a musical featuring full-frontal male nudity, and asks how it can be positioned in debates on taboos and censorship in the theatre. It also investigates if the display of the nude male body subverts the usual patriarchal structure of the theatrical gaze, which is most obvious in the traditional striptease. The show’s homoeroticism creates an ambivalent attitude towards the exposed and constantly discussed penises. While highlighting their appeal as titillation and taboo, the article also confirms that the phallus (the symbolic power structure of which the penis is only ever a deficient representation) as the guiding principle of the ideology behind the theatre and shows such as Naked Boys Singing! remains firmly in place, both literally and metaphorically. Yet this double presence of real body parts and a symbolic power structure also leads to an interesting ‘spectral’ quality of the bodies on stage. What the spectators experience are real bodies, indeed specially trained, selected, and therefore ideal bodies, but also an oscillation behind these present bodies and the presence of their underlying power structure, namely, phallocentrism.

This article explores the continuities and discontinuities between Sarah Kane’s and Martin Crimp’s approaches to corporeality. Even if they differ from a variety of points of view, both Cleansed and The Country share a conspicuous concern with figurations of the body as a fraught and disturbing object. Although its horrific tortures are not meant to be performed in a realistic way, Cleansed develops a discourse on the body which is entirely in keeping with ‘experiential’ theatre. This investment in graphic violence starkly contrasts with Crimp’s practice in The Country , in which the corporeal component is more alluded to than openly staged. Yet, despite its allusive and symbolical import, The Country is another viscerally physical play which subtly and disturbingly interweaves several senses. Exemplifying two different possible treatments of the body on the contemporary British stage, these plays make the physical hyperbolically visible yet also remove it from sight, offering different but subtly complementary ways of problematising corporeality and its performance.

The article discusses Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water) from two perspectives: that of a dramatic text and of performative potential. Central to this debate is the concept of the body and a variety of ways of its coding, framing, and ultimately obliterating. Ravenhill’s drama is presented as an intriguing example of a play created in the process of collaborative workshopping. The article traces how such attempts lead to imposing an aesthetic discipline onto a living body. It is suggested that the play was composed with a particular way of its theatrical use in mind, having thus a decisively performance- rather than text-oriented structure. The article refers to Frantic Assembly’s production of pool (no water) in order to explain how the play was used to subvert theatrical and dramatic conventions through improvisation and elements of physical theatre. It suggests that Ravenhill’s play reveals a sceptical view on the body’s possibility to communicate a ‘true’ and undisrupted meaning as is suggested by some performance theories. The article argues that Ravenhill’s play highlights the key dilemmas of contemporary theatre and illustrates significant debates within theatre studies of the last couple of decades.

The article concentrates on Sarah Kane’s predilection for creating dramatic scenarios in which her characters are confronted with a rift within themselves, a rupture between the self and the other, and are driven by the destructive desire to transcend this predicament. Whereas in her earlier plays, it is the characters’ bodies that, subjected to extreme pain, become thresholds from which the other can be sensed and the rift partly transcended, in 4.48 Psychosis it is the body of language that is employed to similar effect. Cut and mutilated, it loses its ability to signify and becomes increasingly material, oscillating between its function as meaning ( ergon ) and its existence as silent matter ( parergon ). With reference to Jacques Lacan’s theory of subject formation, the article starts with a discussion of language as the factor producing the rift within the play’s speaker, as it separates her from her real self. In an attempt to undo this, the speaker seeks to commit herself to silence. Although she fails to do so, her language is transformed towards materiality, the transformation being the subject matter of the second part of the analysis, which draws upon Jacques Derrida’s theory of parergon .