Abstract
This chapter examines the emergence of a theater no longer “in-yer-face” but, rather, “in-yer-head.” Ayache argues that the human mind has become a new frontier in British drama, where our tendency to live inside our heads is explored in the context of late capitalist society. She first studies the innovative dramatic forms and modalities of this postmodern “psychopoetics” of the stage obsessed with indeterminacy, instability, and uncertainty, and shows how the dramatic space has become a mental space. Looking at Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, and Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Ayache then uses the concepts of absence and dissociation to suggest that the staging of vanishing female characters and their troubled mindscapes reflects the anxieties of our times.
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Notes
- 1.
Aleks Sierz, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (London: Methuen Drama, 2011), 195.
- 2.
Hanna Scolnicov, Woman’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1.
- 3.
Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Introduction,” European Journal of English Studies 7, no. 1 (2003): 3.
- 4.
David Jays, “Theatre’s landscape of the mind,” Guardian, March 12, 2009.
- 5.
In addition to Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, plays focused on the mysteries of the mind from a scientific or psychiatric viewpoint include Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000), Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne’s The Man Who (2002), Mick Gordon’s On Ego (2005), Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012), and Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem (2015).
- 6.
Martin Crimp in Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 140.
- 7.
Martin Crimp, “Into the Little Hill: A work for stage by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp,” interview by Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Modern Newsletter no. 23, October 2006, https://www.ensemble-modern.com/en/mediatheque/texts/2006-10-01/into-the-little-hill-a-work-for-stage-by-george-benjamin-and-martin-crimp.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Juhani Pallasmaa, “The Space of Time,” Oz 20 (1998): 54.
- 10.
See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Harper Collins, 2004).
- 11.
See Marc Augé, Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992).
- 12.
Martin Crimp, Fewer Emergencies (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 5, 23, 39.
- 13.
Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Back to Verbal Theatre: Post-Post-Dramatic Theatres from Crimp to Crouch,” Études britanniques contemporaines 45 (2013), https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/862.
- 14.
Compare with Sarah Kane’s statement, “Just a word on a page and there is the drama.” Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Complete Works (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), 213.
- 15.
“Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp et Sarah Kane dans ses deux derniers textes donnent à entendre une nouvelle écriture scénique fondée sur le retour du verbe et sur la puissance retrouvée du langage. Plutôt que d’agresser la vue et d’opter pour l’opsis, ce nouveau théâtre verbal délaisse le In-Yer-Face au profit du In-Yer-Ear. La violence résonne dans la force d’une langue où alternent les images agressives et brutales (le cru) et, à l’inverse, le manque à dire, l’ellipse qui rend la violence plus prégnante encore.” (Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Du In-Yer-Face au In-Yer-Ear: les ‘solo-symphonies’ de debbie tucker green,” Coup de Théâtre 29 (2015): 175. Author translation.)
- 16.
“Il s’agit de travailler sur tout ce qu’un corps émet qui n’est pas forcément visible et qui ne passe pas forcément par l’échange direct. | On tombe alors sur une évidence: mettre le spectacle dans l’ombre et parler très bas, c’est faire bouger pour l’œil, pour l’oreille, les seuils de perception … y a une autre manière d’utiliser le langage, et donc une autre perception du monde sans doute qui pourrait s’explorer en dehors des seuils qui sont les nôtres habituellement. En faisant travailler une ouïe plus subtile et mois utilitaire, peut-être entendra-t-on autrement. Peut-être entendra-t-on autre chose. | Un œil s’inventerait, porteur d’autres visions. | Il suffirait d’ouvrir un champ à toutes les potentialités stockées dans l’inexistant. Il suffirait de laisser flotter l’inexistant. On s’apercevrait … que ce qui n’a pas été vraiment dit, que tout ça agit.” (Claude Régy, L’État d’incertitude [Besançon: Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2002], 17–18. Author translation.)
- 17.
Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Sounding Crimp’s Verbal Stage: The Translator’s Challenge,” Contemporary Theatre Review 24, no. 3 (2014), http://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2014/sounding-crimps-verbal-stage/.
- 18.
Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, 245.
- 19.
Sarah Kane in Caroline Egan, “The Playwright’s Playwright,” Guardian, September 11, 1998.
- 20.
Crimp, Attempts, 53–54.
- 21.
“Some will undoubtedly say the money might have been better spent on a course of remedial therapy,” wrote Jack Tinker following the 1995 premiere of Kane’s debut play. (Jack Tinker, “This Disgusting Feast of Filth,” Daily Mail, January 19, 1995.) Reviewing Phaedra’s Love, Charles Spencer called himself seriously concerned about Sarah Kane’s mental health and concluded, “it’s not a theatre critic that’s required here, it’s a psychiatrist.” (Charles Spencer, “Review of Phaedra’s Love,” Daily Telegraph, May 21, 1996.)
- 22.
In her 2007 book on women and sacrifice, psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle explains that a woman’s sacrifice is a means for her to attempt to repair the traumatic experience she has been through by restaging it in a way that allows her to somehow become not only a victim but also an agent. She paradoxically describes suicide “as an ultimate recourse to not vanish, as if one could at least be acknowledged afterwards, from one’s death. From death itself.” (Anne Dufourmantelle, La Femme et le sacrifice: d’Antigone à la femme d’à côté [Paris: Denoël, 2007], 39. Author translation.)
- 23.
Crimp, Attempts, 20.
- 24.
Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, 243.
- 25.
Ibid., 213.
- 26.
Ibid., 219.
- 27.
Ibid., 227.
- 28.
Ibid., 218.
- 29.
Ibid., 219.
- 30.
Ibid., 218.
- 31.
Ibid., 245.
- 32.
Ibid., 244.
- 33.
Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “Éloge de l’ombre: les paradoxes du corps spectral dans le théâtre anglais contemporain,” Miranda 8 (2013), https://jour-nals.openedition.org/miranda/3354.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Sierz, Rewriting the Nation, 197.
- 36.
Anthony Neilson in Dominic Cavendish, “Edinburgh reports: ‘I want to disturb people,’” Telegraph, August 1, 2004: 6.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Anthony Neilson, interview by Caroline Smith, Brand Literary Magazine 2 (2008), 77–79, http://www.brandliterarymagazine.co.uk/editions/02/contributors/01/extract.pdf.
- 39.
Sierz, Rewriting the Nation, 197.
- 40.
Aleks Sierz, “Whatever happened to in-yer-face theatre?” Aleks Sierz website, April 1, 2016, http://www.sierz.co.uk/writings/what-ever-happened-to-in-yer-face-theatre/.
- 41.
Anthony Neilson, The Wonderful World of Dissocia (London: Methuen Drama, 2007), 89.
- 42.
Diane Gagneret, “‘A country called Dissocia’: Anthony Neilson’s Heterotopian Exploration of Madness,” Savoirs en prismes 8 (2018), https://savoirsenprisme.com/numeros/08-2018-textualites-et-spatialites/a-country-called-dissocia-anthony-neilsons-heterotopian-exploration-of-madness/.
- 43.
Neilson, Dissocia, 89.
- 44.
Christina Wald, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 216.
- 45.
Anna Harpin, “Dislocated: Metaphors of Madness in British Theatre,” in Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts, ed. Anna Harpin and Juliet Foster (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 187.
- 46.
Angel-Perez, “Éloge de l’ombre.”
- 47.
See Élisabeth Angel-Perez, “La Voix nomade dans le théâtre anglais contemporain,” in ‘Où est ce corps que j’entends?’ Des corps et des voix dans le théâtre contemporain, ed. Sandrine Le Pors and Pierre Longuenesse (Arras: Artois PU, 2014), 149–160.
- 48.
See Michel Ter Hark, “Uncertainty, Vagueness and Psychological Indeterminacy,” Synthese 124, no. 2 (2000), 193–220.
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Ayache, S. (2020). From “In-Yer-Face” to “In-Yer-Head”: Staging the Mind in Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and Anthony Neilson. In: Boles, W. (eds) After In-Yer-Face Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39427-1_10
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