Monologies and Masculinities

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium a new breed of young male authors invested heavily in the monologue and monodrama forms to such an extent that it became a dominant theatrical trend. The fact that the vast majority of the characters in these plays were men calls into question how the dramatic form and the theatrical spectacle conjoin to offer a representation of masculinity that is at once abject and yet simultaneously spectacular. The need to speak alone (solus loquor) in contemporary society is the preserve of certain performing professions (law, education, politics, etc.) that have inherited their performative form from their social positioning as arbiters of society, and that possess a socially invested authority, based on knowledge. But the methodologies of medical authority in the nineteenth century, from Freud onwards, that pioneered empirical research in the analysis of speaking alone (psychoanalysis), provide a more private performance of self that is deconstructed as ‘sick’. Thus the private articulation of self becomes the prescriptive methodology for the healing and the re-entry into the public domain of the performance of self, that may or may not have the authority to speak alone. In both cases the ‘speaking alone’ is a privilege of the dominant, of authority, of the knowledgeable that subjects its subordinates to the passive role of listeners, who are not permitted to challenge the authority of the monologue, to interrupt it, or to subvert its authority.