Martin Crimp's Theatre (eBook)

lt;!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">

Clara Escoda Agusti, University of Barcelona, Spain.

Acknowledgements 7
I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale 13
II Preliminaries II: Martin Crimp’s Theatre, a Pedagogy of Resistance 25
1 Martin Crimp’s Context 27
1.1 Late Capitalism and Societies of Control 27
1.2 A Post-Holocaust Writer: Capitalism and Barbarism 33
2 The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage 40
2.1 Collapse on Stage: What it is and how it Works 40
2.2 I Have Witnessed: Testimony and Audience Responsibility 42
2.2.1 Auschwitz and Testimony 42
2.2.2 Audience, Resistance and Testimony 47
3 Redefining Ethics: A Collapsing Body 53
III Beginnings of a Dramaturgy: Violence, Memory and Retribution in The Treatment (1993) 61
1 Introduction: Collapse, ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ 63
2 The ‘Spectacle’ Filled our Pockets: Duplicity, Sexism and the Market 70
2.1 La Dérive: Marginal Spaces of Resistance 73
2.2 ‘Like A Disapproving Person’: Collapse, Pretence and Alienation 80
3 The Point of Rupture: Collapse and Barbarism 89
3.1 Stopping the Technology: Détournement, ‘Luddism’ and ‘Terrorism’ 93
3.2 Clifford’s Eyes and the ‘Banality of Evil’ 98
3.3 A Rewriting and a Parable of Ambition 104
3.4 Audience and Violence: From Voyeurs to Active Witnesses 110
4 Conclusion: Towards Subjectivity and Ethics 112
IV Postdramatic Plays: Attempts on her Life (1997) and Face to the Wall (2002) 115
1 Interpretation, Self-Regulation and Postdramatism 122
1.1 Crimp and Postdramatism 122
2 Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Attempts on her Life 128
2.1 The ‘Camera’, Narcissism, and the ‘Society of Spectacle’ 128
2.2 ‘I Can’t’: A Body in Denial 136
2.3 Ready-mades, Language and Power 147
3 ‘The Stage, a Skull’: Male Collapse as Resistance in Face to the Wall 153
3.1 Fewer Emergencies (2005) and the Non-Hierarchical Theatrical Experience 155
3.2 ‘The Warm Metal - Thank You - of the Gun’: Interpretation and Violation 163
3.3 ‘Voyeurs in Bedlam?’: Re-Materializing the Audience 170
V Dramatic Plays: Female Breakdown as Micropolitical Resistance 179
1 Stopping Time: Memory and Resistance in The Country (2000) 181
1.1 Introduction 181
1.1.1 Of Violence and Pathos 181
1.1.2 ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’: A Narrative of Testimony and a Power Game 188
1.2 Collapse as Self-Awareness: Corinne’s Change 193
1.2.1 Collapse, Mercantilism and ‘Empire’ 194
1.2.2 Virgil, Collapse and Testimony 197
1.3 ‘It is Only the Flesh’: Rebecca’s Moral Imagination 200
1.3.1 Collapse as Violence 200
1.3.2 Madness as Reason’s Other 205
1.4 Patchwork of Voices, Swarm of Resistance 209
1.4.1 Outbursts of Solidarity 211
1.4.2 Community of Resistance 214
1.5 ‘Oh, to Reverse’: Spiralling Towards Full Time 220
1.5.1 Collapsing Boundaries 221
1.5.2 Stopping Time: An Ethics of Resentment 224
1.5.3 Testimony and Late Capitalism 228
1.5.4 Path of Discovery: the Ethics of Spectatorship 232
1.5.5 To Survive: Self-Creation and the Paring Down of Selfhood 237
1.6 Conclusion: Turning Towards Psychology 240
2 Oppression, Resistance and Terrorism in Cruel and Tender (2004) 243
2.1 Sophocles, Crimp and Bondy 243
2.2 Radical Ethics: The Body as Weapon, Insight and Image 251
2.2.1 The Cartesian Self: Verticality and the Word 252
2.2.2 Amelia’s ‘Embodied’ Tongue 255
2.3 Of Shamans and Cyborgs: From Bodies of Mastery to Bodies of Need 259
2.3.1 Invocation and Ritual 261
2.3.2 A Utopia of Mutual Dependency 264
2.4 Collapse and Testimony: Late Capitalism and Totalitarianism 273
2.4.1 Inequality, Auschwitz and the Collapsing Self 276
2.4.2 Opening a Space of Exteriority 283
2.4.3 The Inheritance of Resistance 288
2.5 Conclusion: Memory as Imperative and Yearning 291
VI Testimony and World Inequality in Crimp’s Adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) 295
1.1 Introduction: Mirroring Fragments, Play-Within-a-Play 297
1.2 Testimony as Resistance: Crimp’s and Mitchell’s Play-Within-a-Play 301
1.3 ‘Cold, Blank, Distant’: Breakdown as Resistance 310
VII General Conclusions: Martin Crimp’s Theatre: a Dramaturgy of Resistance 325
VIII Works Cited 339
Primary Sources 341
Secondary Sources 342