An Overview: Subject, Character and Actor in Dialogue and Transition

Elinor Fuchs and Anne Ubersfeld both highlight how character in the theatre is a ‘historical construct’62 and thus ‘can never be independent of contemporary constructions of subjectivity’.63 Therefore, in line with changing notions of subjectivity, particularly since the rise of liberal humanism, the representation of people in the theatre has also undergone considerable transformation. This section presents a general overview of how such varying understandings of the self affect the mode of characterisation and acting, concentrating on naturalist, Brechtian and contemporary (postdramatic) approaches to character and character- -‐ actor relationships to illustrate dramaturgical challenges to dramatic characterisation in the theatre of the media age.

Georg W. F. Hegel criticises Aristotle’s identification of plot as the ‘soul’ of tragedy that situates the character as an agent of dramatic action. Instead, he argues for a transformation from the self--‐enclosed objectivity of ancient tragedy to the absolute subjectivity that places character as the representation of the ‘absolute inner’64 and at the centre of drama/theatre.

59 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: Michigan UP, 1994), p. 80. 60 Ibid., p. 81.

61 Bauman Liquid Love, p. 75.

62 Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1999), p. 76. 63 Fuchs, The Death of Character, p. 8.

64 Ibid., p. 26.

ontologically unique subjects with historical and personal backgrounds, lifelike manners and complexity of mind. Compared to the Greek notion of fate, characters in what Hegel calls romantic or modern tragedies have more freedom of choice. Hegel argues that they find themselves in ‘accidental circumstances and conditions within which it is possible to act either in this way or in that’.65 He thus argues for self--‐determined, strong--‐willed characters and attributes initiative to them in undertaking actions.66 For Hegel, ‘the narrative frameworks and symbolic networks remain potent, but only after they have been internalized and taken up into the post--‐Cartesian drama of human inwardness.’67 Hegel’s view of selfhood and its dramatic representation indicate an idealistic, romantic view of subjectivity, and correspond to the idea of the liberal humanist subject.

Though perhaps the most influential, Hegel is not the first or only to argue for the liberal humanist approach to characterisation and pays attention to characters’ inner personalities and self--‐driven actions. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s and Denis Diderot’s works depend strongly on such notions of character. For Lessing and Diderot, ‘every character on the stage is defined by its own unique moral character’,68 inward thoughts and feelings, and self--‐ determined actions. As Enlightenment writers, Lessing and Diderot tend to adopt liberal humanism, manifested through the realistic approach to character presentation. Lessing, for example, emphasises that drama should be based on a first--‐hand representation of the world, and characters should embody the language and actions of ‘real’ individuals. They extend their view of characterisation to the aesthetics of acting, arguing that acting should be ‘natural’ and ‘follow a logical sequence [...] a logical motivation of action’69 to generate a complete picture of a character.

To a degree, the tendency to consider characterisation in line with liberal humanism continued in the nineteenth and twentieth century. For instance, in psychological realism and naturalist traditions and practices, the mode of characterisation is usually based on the representation of the human as a self--‐determining individual. Naturalist playwrights and directors structure character as a consistent and recognisable representation of an individual

65 G.W.F. Hegel qtd. in Iván Nyusztay, Myth, Telos, Identity: The Tragic Schema in Greek and Shakepearean Drama (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), p. 64.

66 Iván Nyusztay, Myth, Telos, Identity, p. 64.

67 Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (Maryland US and Plymouth UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), p. 155.

68 Karin Barbara Fischer, Thomas C. Fox, (eds.), A Companion to Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (New York: Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 2005), p. 54.

with true human ‘actions and [...] feelings [that are] linked in understandable ways’,70 and with a self--‐propelled nature that is liberated from the intervention of external forces. For example, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) is based on ‘the exposition of a liberal humanist belief in moral progress’,71 which ends with Nora’s decision to leave her husband. The characters in Shaw’s social dramas are depicted as self--‐governed characters, thinking and feeling individuals with an awareness of the social structures they live in. There are exceptions to the ‘liberal humanist mould of Ibsen or Anton Chekhov’72, among others. August Strindberg, for instance, who wrote some of his plays in the naturalist tradition such as Miss Julie (1888), did not always adopt liberal humanism and create realistic characters. Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901) illustrates his transition from Naturalism to Expressionism as the play undermines the aesthetics of well--‐made naturalist drama by restructuring plot structure and characterisation through the symbolic dream pattern.

Humanist conceptions of character were not accepted without criticism or challenge. Half a century after Hegel, Nietzsche argued against the Romantic devotion to ‘inwardness,’ and ‘the metaphysical conception of the subject as something isolated and independent’73 and, relatedly, against naturalistic characterisation and its central position in theatre. Following Nietzsche, the Symbolists, whose attack on humanist discourse was adopted by such playwrights as Strindberg, destabilised the three--‐dimensional depiction of characters. They redrew characters as ‘glimpses of human figures’74 through allegorical representation. For instance, in Strindberg’s symbolist and even in some of his naturalist plays, the characters are allegorical figures, ‘conglomerates of past and present stages of culture’75 patched together from ‘scraps of humanity’,76 problematising the notion of coherent, unified characterisation.

The attack on naturalistic character became an increasing concern of theatre in the twentieth century. In response to the prevailing disillusionment of the post--‐Second World War industrialised twentieth century, playwrights, most notably Bertolt Brecht, reconsidered characterisation. Drawing on Marxist philosophy, Brecht approached the human and, accordingly, the character as a sum of gestures and acts in conversation with the socio--‐ political, economic environment. Brechtian characterisation deploys the actor as a tool to

70 Tori, Haring--‐Smith, ‘Dramaturging Non--‐Realism: Creating a New Vocabulary’, Theatre Topics, 13: 1 (2003), 45--‐ 54, (pp. 46).

71 Robert Fergusson, Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography, (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1996), p. 247.

72 Rana Nayar, Edward Albee: Towards a Typology of Relationships (New Delhi: Prestige, 2003 [originally by Indiana University]), p. 243.

73 Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 184.

74 Haring--‐Smith, ‘Dramaturging Non--‐Realism’, p. 47.

75 August Strindberg, ‘Miss Julie, Preface’ in Miss Julie and Other Plays, trans. by Michael Robinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), p. 60.

critically refer to the socio--‐cultural setting of his/her character rather than mimetically representing it. However, the Brechtian model does not mark the demise of the naturalistic view of character, as characters are still placed in the framework of dramatic representation. Grusha in The Caucasian Chalk Circle or Galileo in The Life of Galileo are recognisable, detailed representations of ‘real’ or lifelike people and are agents of dramatic narrative. Nevertheless, Brecht’s innovative approach to theatre and characterisation is a point of departure for further critical challenges to the dramatic character.

The increasing pervasiveness of the media in the late twentieth century has caused the humanist concept of character, questioned by Strindberg, Artaud, Beckett and Brecht among others, to become more problematic with the changing notion of the self in relation to media technologies and culture. This change in the notion and experience of subjectivity called the dramatic mode of characterisation and figurative acting into question, and prepared the ground for the emergence of new dramaturgical ways to respond to the decentred subject. Theatre has moved away from traditional dramatic form that is based on the representation of the world as a unified fictive cosmos with recognisable plot and characters, and on a unified relationship between character and language, between character and actor. This traditional dramatic mode of representation is replaced by a new, challenging mode of theatrical expression, a self--‐referential world of texts speaking to other texts, destabilising the unity of character and actor and, by extension, the representation of the self as a unified whole.

Hans--‐Thies Lehmann responds to these concerns in his postdramatic theory, contending that the representational form of dramatic theatre and characterisation depicting the world as an absolute totality no longer relates to today’s less surveyable, mediatised world and subject. The idea of character in postdramatic theatre, developing the approaches of Brecht, Beckett and others to characterisation, challenges the position of character as the originator of language and meaning and as the product of its own decisions and in--‐built talents. Lehmann goes beyond Brecht and others by theorising the refusal in theatre since the 1970s to create identifiable characters in the framework of coherent dramatic forms. In his analysis, Lehmann emphasises the tendency to restructure character as a fluid, multiple and inconsistent construct by destabilising character’s relationship to language and by undermining the character--‐actor relationship.

As discussed in chapter 2, language in postdramatic theatre no longer functions as the unique voice of an individual; there is no longer a continually coherent relationship between language and character. It is an independent element with multiple origins and variable

discourses, disconnected from character, ‘hovering above a vast range of contexts and meanings, each with multiple points of contact with life and the experience of the audience.’77This kind of structure, as Gerda Poschmann proposes, renders a play a ‘Sprechtext’ (‘text to be spoken’).78 The stage functions as ‘Sprechraum’ (‘speaking space’).79 Accordingly, characters, deprived of their individual subject point and voice, become ‘Textträger’ (‘text bearers’),80responsible for delivering the text as ‘an associative piece of communicative material’81 rather than embodying and interpreting it (see section 4.1. in Chapter 2). The character is therefore a speaking figure who ‘hints at something deliberately artificial’ and ‘evokes the impression of functionality rather than individual autonomy’.82 The mode of characterisation in postdramatic theatre relates to the experience of subjectivity in a mediatised culture. The character’s limited control over language and its presentation as a linguistic, textual construct responds to the dissolution of the self as a sovereign entity in the hands of symbolic--‐ideological systems such as the media. This relates to the constructedness of identity marketed by the media as an asset of the modern subject. As this chapter explores, such changes in the mode of characterisation propose new and critical ways of conceptualising character in relation to the fluid and heterogeneous state of the mediatised subject.

This restructuring of character affects the way character is interpreted on stage. It destabilises the traditional relationship between actor and role, as well as between the stage and auditorium. The mode of acting postdramatic theatre proposes extends the Brechtian approach to the actor’s status in the theatre. Aiming to qualify with the dramatic form of characterisation, Brecht defied figurative acting and argued for a ‘demonstrating actor’ rather than an ‘acting actor’.83 The Brechtian actor is not supposed to unite with a character or ‘tidy away the inconsistencies in a character’.84 Instead, the actor is asked to keep the character at some distance, which is visible to the spectator, by demonstrating the contradictions in the character. The Brechtian actor is responsible for commenting on the role with gestures through his/her social experience and knowledge of human behaviour. The actor thus

77 David Barnett, ‘Reading and Performing Uncertainty: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and the Postdramatic Theatre’,

Theatre Research International (2005), 30: 2, 139 --‐ 149, (pp. 140).

78 Gerda Poschmann qtd. in Barnett, ‘Reading and Performing Uncertainty’, p. 141. 79 Hans--‐Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 31. 80 Poschmann qtd. in Barnett, ‘Reading and Performing Uncertainty’, p. 141.

81 David Barnett, ‘When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts’, New Theatre Quarterly, 24:1 (2008), 14 --‐ 23, (pp. 21).

82 Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 160--‐ 161.

Pfister identifies ‘figure’ as ‘dramatic figure’ in contradiction with ‘character’ whilst alluding to ‘the ontological difference between fictional figures and real characters’. Alternatively, although I will refer to the artificial construct of ‘character’ in a similar way, I shall avoid delineating ‘figure’ as ‘dramatic’ to indicate its fictitiousness, since in the context of this chapter it might confusingly refer to the use of character in the convention of naturalist tradition. Thus, I shall be using the term interchangeably with ‘postdramatic character/actor’, speaking figure or text--‐bearer. 83 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 136.

illustrates the socioeconomic and political significance of the action. However, despite being liberated from the interpretive limitations of dramatic theatre, the Brechtian actor still reflects the human as a representational connection to the world.

Like Brecht’s theories, the postdramatic view of acting liberates the actor from representational limitations as a character, and recognises his/her presence as an actor. Moreover, it radicalises Brecht’s model through text--‐bearers, the autonomisation of language and through the rise of a polyvocal and heteroglossic text. This self--‐reflexive language reduces the specificity of actors by asking them to lose their particularity and their consistent relationship to language and characters. Nevertheless, text--‐bearers are not all the same; an interesting relationship tends to emerge between the task of delivering a text apparently neutrally and the way it is done. This is especially true in the work of René Pollesch. In such theatrical models, actors no longer represent characters or are figurative messengers for the author. Acting in postdramatic theatre is more ‘presence’ than ‘pretence’.85 The actor is present on stage as himself/herself, somewhat devoid of representational role, or oscillates between the fictional character and her physically ‘real’ position, no longer, the single logos or individual centre of the theatrical performance. Instead, he/she is composed of manifold voices and fluctuating subject positions that elude an absolute source of meaning, and preclude the presentation of a sovereign self. Viewed in terms of Derrida’s différance, the actor’s resistance to a single logos leads to performance as ‘a productive non--‐presence’86 that continually differs/defers. The idea of a knowing subject, the character/actor as the central source of truth and representation of a unified self are all called into question. This proposes a model of subjectivity that is fluid and multiple and acts as ‘a site of disunity and conflict, central to the processes of political change and to preserving the status quo.’87 It is in these respects that postdramatic approaches to characterisation/acting relate to the mediatised subject as a variable, heterogeneous and conflictual being with multiple states.

In light of this theoretical background, sections 4 and 5 investigate how Tim Crouch’s and Simon Stephens’ works address the mediatised self. The analysis first briefly examines the mode of characterisation in Crouch’s texts to demonstrate the shift from text to stage (see section 4), then investigates the character--‐actor relationship on stage in relation to the mediatised subject. Section 5 examines Stephens’s Pornography and its world premiere in Germany (2007) directed by Sebastian Nübling and its first English language staging at the

85 Andy Lavender, ‘The Moment of Realized Actuality’, in Theatre in Crisis?: Performance Manifestos for a New

Century, ed. by Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), pp. 183--‐191, (p. 189).

86 Philip Auslander, ‘“Just Be Your Self”: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’, in Acting

(Re)Considered: Theories and Practices, ed. by Phillip B. Zarrilli (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 53--‐62, (p. 60).

Edinburgh Festival (2008) as a co--‐production between The Traverse and Birmingham Repertory Theatre directed by Sean Holmes.

4. Addressing the Mediatised Subject: Character/Actor Hybrid in My Arm and An Oak