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Defining the Absurdist Theatre and In-Yer-Face Theatre

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Defining the Absurdist Theatre and In-Yer-Face Theatre DIPLOMARBEIT Titel der Diplomarbeit „The influence of absurdist theatre on contemporary in-yer-face plays“ Verfasserin Agnes Maria Kitzler angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) Wien, 2010 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 343 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Diplomstudium Anglistik und Amerikanistik UniStG Betreuerin: o. Univ.- Prof. Dr. Margarete Rubik To my grandmother, the queen of fervent argument. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my family and friends for their ongoing (financial) support, encouragement, patience in enduring all my lousy moods and sincere interest in everything I do. Their love, laughter and listening have been invaluable sources of energy and happiness while I was writing this thesis. I am grateful to Prof. Margarete Rubik for believing in my abilities and giving me plenty of freedom for developing my ideas. I am also grateful to Prof. David Bradby, whose brilliant course on absurdist drama during my Erasmus year at Royal Holloway College has turned out to be very inspiring and useful. My special thanks go to Aleks Sierz, whose friendly advice was encouraging and much appreciated. I am very much indebted to my colleagues from the Diplomarbeitsgruppe for their honesty in sharing personal experiences and their constructive criticism. It would have been so much harder without them! Finally, I would like to thank all the people who have been constructively engaged in the “Unibrennt”-movement since autumn 2009. Their inspiring activism reminded me of the actual purpose of studying, the importance of critical thinking and the responsibility that comes with it. Vienna, July 2010 Table of contents 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................1 2. Comparing absurdist theatre and in-yer-face theatre ................................................3 3. Introducing the plays .....................................................................................................9 3.1. The absurdist plays ............................................................................................9 3.2. The in-yer-face plays........................................................................................11 3.2.1. Jez Butterworth: Mojo...............................................................................11 3.2.2. Philip Ridley: The Pitchfork Disney .........................................................12 3.2.3. Nick Grosso: Kosher Harry ......................................................................12 3.2.4. Phyllis Nagy: Weldon Rising ....................................................................13 3.2.5. Sarah Kane: Cleansed ...............................................................................13 4. Structures of stagnation ..............................................................................................14 4.1. Acts and Scenes ................................................................................................14 4.2. The (non)-development of action ....................................................................17 4.2.1. Action and event .......................................................................................18 4.2.2. Action and event in Waiting for Godot .....................................................19 4.2.3. Action and event in in-yer-face plays .......................................................21 4.3. Character configuration ..................................................................................29 4.4. Structures of space ...........................................................................................31 5. Characters and character conception – discontinuities ...........................................33 5.1. “Sort it out for yourselves” .............................................................................33 5.2. Character conception .......................................................................................35 5.2.1. Character conception in absurdist plays – open characters ......................35 5.2.2. Character conception in in-yer-face plays ................................................38 5.3. Discontinuity within characters ......................................................................45 5.3.1. “Pseudocouples” .......................................................................................49 5.3.2. The loss of self-hood and the action of objects .........................................51 5.3.3. Embodying discontinuity – the ‘abnormal’ individual .............................54 6. Spaces – heightened realities .......................................................................................58 6.1. Between stylization and realization – setting in absurdist plays .................58 6.2. Setting in in-yer-face plays ..............................................................................61 6.3. Surrounded by the ‘vast unknown’ – offstage spaces in absurdist plays ...65 6.4. Offstage spaces in in-yer-face plays................................................................67 7. Staging the body – dysfunction, violence and routines .............................................71 7.1. The dysfunctional body ...................................................................................72 7.2. Violence .............................................................................................................75 7.3. Routines and Rituals ........................................................................................83 8. Language and dialogue ................................................................................................88 8.1. The absurdity of ordinary speech ...................................................................88 8.1.1. Elliptical patterns ......................................................................................90 8.1.2. Repetitive patterns and the dialogue of stagnation ...................................96 8.1.2.1. Echoes .................................................................................................96 8.1.2.2. Refrains .............................................................................................102 8.2. Language as music .........................................................................................105 8.3. The body of the language ..............................................................................116 9. Experiental theatre, sensibilities and the influence of absurdist theatre on in- yer-face plays ............................................................................................................119 9.1. Artaud, absurdist theatre and in-yer-face plays: experiental theatre ......121 9.2. From the 1950s to the 1990s – influences or sensibilities? .........................127 10. Conclusion ................................................................................................................129 11. Bibliography .............................................................................................................133 12. Index ..........................................................................................................................137 Zusammenfassung..........................................................................................................140 Wissenschaftlicher Lebenslauf .....................................................................................142 1 1. Introduction My most memorable visit to theatre happened in spring 1999. It was a production of Endgame at Vienna’s Akademietheater, with Gert Voss and Ignaz Kirchner playing Hamm and Clov, which was on that night. Being used to school performances by Vienna’s English Theatre in which a bunch of actors were performing realistic family crisis plays in easily-transportable naturalistic sets in front of several hundreds of puberty-stricken teenagers, this night at the theatre took me by surprise: the stage was completely empty except for two odd looking guys on two chairs. The two got themselves tangled up in fruitless conversational patterns which were accompanied and reflected by circular patterns of movement and pointless activity, until there was nothing left but two people, lost in time, space and words. I left the Akademietheater in a strange state of shock, fascination but also euphoria, feeling that I had witnessed something depressing and strangely uplifting at the same time. Several years passed before another play provided a similarly impressive experience. This time, it was a performance of the 2002/03 season at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg. The stage, which wasn’t actually a stage but, rather, a large hall, was – yet again - bare, except for a casually dressed young woman. The woman seemed to be acting several different characters – a doctor, a psychotic patient and, maybe, the patient’s lover. Most of the time, she seemed to be only articulating the patient’s immediate thoughts, which she traced, physically, by moving back, forth and sideways through the room. It was as if each sentence had a certain spatial movement as its equivalent, and the woman was actually walking through a labyrinth of words and thoughts, finally getting lost. Watching her, the audience itself seemed to get dragged into this labyrinth. Again, I left the theatre utterly fascinated and inspired. Later, I learned that the play was called 4.48 Psychosis and had been written by a young English author called Sarah Kane.
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