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978–1–137–29756–3 Copyrighted Material Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 Selection and editorial matter © Mireia Aragay & Enric Monforte 2014 Foreword © Aleks Sierz 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–29756–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 Contents Foreword by Aleks Sierz ix Acknowledgements xii Notes on Contributors xiii 1 To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship 1 Mireia Aragay Part I (Post-)Holocaust Representations 2 Violence, Testimony and Ethics in Martin Crimp’s The Country and The City 25 Clara Escoda 3 Bearing Witness and Ethical Responsibility in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes 42 Hanna Scolnicov 4 How to Mourn: Kane, Pinter and Theatre as Monument to Loss in the 1990s 59 Mark Taylor-Batty Part II Theoretical Speculations 5 Two: Duologues and the Differend 79 Dan Rebellato 6 The Undecidable and the Event: Ethics of Unrest in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life and debbie tucker green’s truth and reconciliation 96 Martin Middeke Part III Spectatorial Ethics 7 Playing with Proximity: Precarious Ethics on Stage in the New Millennium 117 Clare Wallace 8 Witness or Accomplice? Unsafe Spectatorship in the Work of Anthony Neilson and Simon Stephens 135 Vicky Angelaki vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 viii Contents 9 Witnessing, Sexualized Spectatorship and the (De)construction of Queer Identities in Mother Clap’s Molly House, The Pride and Cock 152 Enric Monforte Part IV Ethics and Institutions 10 From Front Page to Front Stage: War Correspondents and Media Ethics in British Theatre 173 Christiane Schlote 11 Kicking Tots and Revolutionary Trots: The English Stage Company Young People’s Theatre Scheme 1969–70 190 Graham Saunders Index 207 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 1 To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship Mireia Aragay In January 2011, Small Hours, written by Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime and directed by Katie Mitchell, was staged in the Michael Frayn down- stairs studio space at the Hampstead Theatre. It is a solo piece, about one hour long, with very few spoken words, where an insomniac young woman (Sandy McDade in the Hampstead production) struggles through the small hours of the night – hoovering her sofa, playing CDs at full volume, watching late-night shopping channels, listening to music on headphones, trying to book a cinema ticket, phoning her partner, wres- tling with the answer machine, attempting to dance – while her new-born baby cries disconsolately in another room. Although the woman does go out twice to see to the baby, and returns once with a dirty nappy, mostly her reaction is to drown the wailing in a cacophony of other sounds and noises. The Hampstead studio space was turned by designer Alex Eales into a living-room and spectators – 25 per performance only – were first asked to take off their shoes and then invited to take seats on the chairs, sofas, armchairs and benches arranged around the edges of the room in a row just one person deep. The effect on spectators of the installation- like set and seating arrangement has been discussed in terms of intimacy by Mitchell herself – you were certainly close enough to the woman at times ‘to touch her, smell the perfume she sprays in the room and hear the tiny tap of plastic on wood as she puts the mascara down on her side table’ (Mitchell, 2011) – and of complete sensory immersion on the A Younger Theatre website (Orr, 2011) and the There Ought to Be Clowns blog (2011). While active participation on the part of audience mem- bers was not encouraged at all, and in fact the woman never as much as acknowledged their presence, the show’s impact was inseparable from the closely shared space between actress and audience, their co-presence in the small, windowless Hampstead studio-turned-living-room. 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 2 Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre Small Hours raises a number of questions that have become central to recent discussions of the relationship between theatre and ethics. What is the function of theatre in a media-saturated culture like ours, where representations of violence, pain and vulnerability are almost automati- cally considered suspect as obscuring rather than enabling access to the realities of human suffering and precariousness? Does theatre, perhaps, occupy some kind of privileged cultural position in this connection, given the way in which it brings vulnerable human bodies together in one single space – its emphasis on co-presence, which was foregrounded in Small Hours? Does that guarantee theatre’s potential for ethical solici- tation, its capacity to transform spectators from (supposedly) passive voyeurs or consumers of images into actively engaged witnesses? Do experimental forms of theatre such as Small Hours offer a particular intensity in terms of audience address and ethical awakening? Crucially, what is the role of spectators in all this, given that the relationship with the audience constitutes the core of whichever ethical significance a theatre event may have? In the case of Small Hours, such questions acquired a further twist given the institutional context in which the play was produced. When Edward Hall became Artistic Director of the Hampstead Theatre, he took a policy decision to use the downstairs studio as an experimental space for new plays. Critics were welcome to attend the show, but were not allowed to review it.1 This circumstance stirred controversy, with some arguing that it was ethically questionable for a theatre to bar professional reviewers while the play was freely discussed on websites and blogs, not to mention Facebook or Twitter (Gardner, 2011; see also Sierz, 2011).2 This turns Small Hours into an interesting case where the standard practice in theatre studies of focusing on the response of published reviewers is simply not possible, as all that remains as a record of the production are the reactions of ‘ordinary’ audience members on cyberspace – which brings to mind Helen Freshwater’s insightful exploration of some of the reasons for the resistance on the part of theatre studies to engage with detailed observations of actual audience member’s responses, instead of relying exclusively on the opinion of professional reviewers (2009, pp. 27–55). At the same time, the generally restricted possibilities of access to the production – as already noted, it played to audiences of 25 at a time, and was sold out both in the initial run (12 January–5 February 2011) and when it was extended – raised questions about how to assess the significance, ethi- cal or otherwise, of a show that was only seen by a very tiny minority. How ‘ordinary’, after all, were the spectators who attended performances Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–29756–3 Mireia Aragay 3 of Small Hours? Beginning to provide answers to such questions would require, as Freshwater suggests, extended and detailed research into real audiences; what is of interest in the present context is that, ultimately, the debate surrounding the Hampstead studio production of Small Hours brings us back once more to the question of spectatorship and spectator response, arguably the centrepiece around which questions of theatre and ethics hinge. Comparatively speaking, the academic field of theatre studies has been a latecomer to what has come to be perceived as an ‘ethical turn’, the renewal of interest in ethical issues that has gathered force within the humanities in general and literary studies in particular since the mid- to late 1980s. The publication in 1983 of a pioneering special issue of New Literary History on ‘Literature and/as Moral Philosophy’ was fol- lowed by a spate of monographs and essay collections, not to mention scholarly articles, focusing on explorations of the interface of ethics with fiction and, to a lesser extent,
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