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The Later Edward Bond: Subjectivity, Dramaturgy, and Performance

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The Later Edward Bond: Subjectivity, Dramaturgy, and Performance The Later Edward Bond: Subjectivity, Dramaturgy, and Performance Chien-Cheng Chen A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Royal Holloway, University of London Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance July 2018 1 Declaration of Authorship I Chien-Cheng Chen hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 2 Abstract The aim of this thesis is to examine Edward Bond’s plays, theoretical writings, and productions from the 1990s to the present. Since the early 1990s, Bond has been theorizing a new theory of subjectivity as a response to the ‘post-Auschwitz’ world as well as to the logic of neoliberalism. I will critically examine how Bond develops his theory and place this theory in a broader philosophical context of post-Auschwitz ethics defined by Adorno and Levinas. As the Bondian subject is a self-dramatizing subject, this conception of subjectivity also influences how Bond conceives his dramaturgy. Instead of treating characters as self-contained autonomous individuals, Bond’s new dramaturgy substantiates an examination of different possibilities of subjective configurations and their ethical significance. By examining Bond’s plays, I argue that Bond’s dramaturgy, instead of expressing his theory in dramatic form, further complicates his conception of subjectivity. Moreover, over the past thirty years, while distancing himself from mainstream British theatre, Bond has developed a sustained and creative collaboration with Big Brum, a Birmingham-based TIE company, and Alain Françon, one of the most prestigious contemporary French directors. Bond has written more than ten plays for Big Brum and dedicated five plays, The Paris Pentad, to Françon and these works clearly mark a dynamic new phase within Bond's playwriting career. Along with these collaborations, Bond has also developed a post-Brechtian theory of theatre and performance. Therefore, I will also analyze how Bond reconceives the role of theatre and performance and how his ideas can be concretized and enacted on stage. 3 Table of Contents Introduction 8 Contextualizing Bond in Contemporary British Theatre 11 Literature Review 21 Methodology 26 Thesis Overview 30 Chapter One: Towards the Later Bond 35 1.1. Bond and Brecht 37 1.2. Evolving Dramaturgy of the Holocaust 43 1.3. Subjectivity, Ethics, and Aesthetics 51 1.4. Theorizing the Biopolitics of the Later Bond 61 Chapter Two: Understanding Humanness: Theorizing and 68 Dramatizing Subjectivity 2.1. Radical Innocence and Justice 70 2.1.1. The Concept of Radical Innocence and Its 70 Difficulties 2.1.2. Bond and Kant 71 2.1.3. Justice and Its Aporias 73 2.1.4. A Rereading of Radical Innocence and Justice 76 2.2. Bond’s Developmental Model of Subjectivity 78 2.2.1. Neonate – Core Self – Socialized Self 78 2.2.2. Nothingness 83 2.2.3. Bond and Freud 85 2.3. Bond’s Structural Model of Subjectivity 89 2.4. Dramatizing Subjectivity 91 2.5. The Crime of the Twenty-First Century 93 2.6. Have I None 97 2.7. Conclusion 102 Chapter Three: Aesthetics and Ethics in Bond’s 104 Post-Auschwitz Dramaturgy 3.1. The Palermo Improvisation and the Ethics of the Real 106 3.2. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Non-identity 108 4 3.3. Levinas’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Alterity 113 3.4. Coffee 119 3.5. Born 128 3.6. Conclusion 134 Chapter Four: The Structure of Bondian Trauma-Tragedy: 135 Justice, Truth, and Madness 4.1. Bondian Trauma-Tragedy: Ontological, Historical, and 138 Structural 4.2. Chair: Freedom and Justice 142 4.3. People: Truth and the Account of the Self 150 4.4. Dea: Madness and Terror 160 4.5. Conclusion 172 Chapter Five: Approaching Otherness: Storyability, 174 Spectrality, and Hospitality in Bond’s TIE Plays 5.1. Story and Storyability 177 5.1.1. Story 177 5.1.2. At the Inland Sea 180 5.1.3. The Angry Roads 184 5.2. Spectre and Spectrality 189 5.2.1. Spectre 189 5.2.2. The Hungry Bowl 192 5.2.3. A Window 196 5.3. Foreigner, Stranger, and Hospitality 200 5.3.1. The Under Room 201 5.3.2. The Edge 206 5.4. Conclusion 210 Chapter Six: Theatre Event: Performing Subjectivities 211 6.1. Theatre Event 211 6.2. Accident Time 216 6.3. The Invisible Object and the Use of Objects 218 6.4. Centre, Site, and Gap 221 6.4.1. Centre 221 6.4.2. Site 223 5 6.4.3. Gap 225 6.5. Performing the Palimpsest of Subjectivity 227 6.5.1. Character and Subjectivity 227 6.5.2. Body and Emotion in Performance 235 6.6. Spectatorship 240 6.7. Conclusion 241 Conclusion 243 Bibliography 251 6 Acknowledgments I would firstly like to thank Taiwan’s Ministry of Education for providing me with the funding that allowed me to undertake this research. I would also like to thank a number of people for their help and support during the research of my thesis. I am grateful to the staff at Big Brum, especially Dan Brown, for providing me with unpublished documents and allowing me access to their archives. I would like to express gratitude to Chris Cooper, who agreed to have an interview with me about Bond’s dramaturgy and theory. In addition, I greatly appreciate Helen Bang’s help in answering my questions about how Bond rehearsed Dea and her working experience with Bond. I would like to thank my parents for their constant support during this project. Also, I must acknowledge the help of my advisor Dan Rebellato, who provided me with encouragement and insightful feedback on my writing. Finally, I am indebted to my supervisor Chris Megson, who guided me through the difficult but fruitful process of writing this thesis. The completion of this thesis would have been impossible without his patient guidance and intelligent feedback. I am grateful to have had him as my supervisor. 7 Introduction Before I came to London to conduct my research on Edward Bond, I studied playwriting in Taipei and wrote several plays. When I studied playwriting in graduate school, I started to study contemporary British drama, which was renowned worldwide for its quality and diversity. Among the plays I read, Bond’s The War Plays overwhelmed me by its versatile use of dramatic forms and its profound exploration of modern human conditions. Since then, I started to read Bond’s other plays and his theory although I was more often than not baffled by the obscurity and complexity of his dramatic and theoretical writings. Intriguingly, I also sensed that he might have created a new approach to playwriting and a new way to understand theatre. This thesis is thus prompted by my intention to understand Bond’s dramaturgy, theory, and how his plays have been performed. In the article ‘Whatever Happened to Edward Bond?’ in The Independent on 2 November 2010, Mark Ravenhill writes: I’d assumed that Bond’s major work was behind him, accepting the view widely held in English theatre circles that he was now a cantankerous man producing ever more erratic and irrelevant plays. So it was a huge shock for me to see a production of Bond’s 2005 play The Under Room in the basement of that same pub, the Cock Tavern in Kilburn, a couple of weeks ago as part of a six-play retrospective of the writer’s work. 1 Written originally for a tour of Birmingham schools, it is as good as anything as Bond has ever written. By the end of the performance I was shaken and tearful, not only because the play had asked such troubling questions about the way we live our lives, but because of an overwhelming sadness that such a significant play can be so marginalised. It is interesting to observe that, although Ravenhill shared the view that 1 The plays featured include: The Pope’s Wedding (1962), The Fool (1976), Red, Black and Ignorant (1985), Olly’s Prison (1993), The Under Room (2005), and There Will Be More (2010). The season, presented by Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Berislav Juraic, ran from 14 September to 13 November 2010. Bond later incorporated There Will Be More as the first act of Dea, produced at Sutton Theatre in 2016. 8 Bond’s later work may be irrelevant to contemporary English theatre audiences, he discovered in fact how relevant The Under Room could be because of its effectiveness in addressing ‘troubling questions about the way we live our lives’. The Under Room is set in a dystopian future in 2077, and by centering the play on an illegal immigrant who wants to escape from a totalitarian regime to seek asylum, Bond interrogates the possibility of accepting the other in a state permeated by xenophobic ideology. Bond’s use of a Muslim headscarf, though it is only used at the very end of the play, clearly exhibits his intention to engage with ethics in the age of the ‘War on Terror’. However, Ravenhill’s impression that Bond has become irrelevant is not surprising. From the late 1980s, Bond was becoming more and more alienated from mainstream British theatre, as indicated in the beginning of his letter to Katharine Worth on 4 December 1985: ‘I think Im [sic] coming to the end of my time in the theatre’ (Stuart 1996a: 57). His disappointment with the National Theatre, the Royal Court, and the Royal Shakespeare Company was evident in his letters of this period.2 As a consequence, he started to build a long-term relationship with Big Brum, a TIE company based in Birmingham that has commissioned Bond to write ten plays for teenagers, and Alain Françon, who has directed nine of Bond’s plays from 1992 to the present.
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