Martin Crimp's Theatre - Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist Society

Acknowledgements

I Preliminaries I: Introduction and Rationale

II Preliminaries II: Martin Crimp’s Theatre, a Pedagogy of Resistance

1 Martin Crimp’s Context

1.1 Late Capitalism and Societies of Control

1.2 A Post-Holocaust Writer: Capitalism and Barbarism

2 The Semiotic Potential of Collapse on Stage

2.1 Collapse on Stage: What it is and how it Works

2.2 I Have Witnessed: Testimony and Audience Responsibility

2.2.1 Auschwitz and Testimony

2.2.2 Audience, Resistance and Testimony

3 Redefining Ethics: A Collapsing Body

III Beginnings of a Dramaturgy: Violence, Memory and Retribution in The Treatment (1993)

1 Introduction: Collapse, ‘In-Yer-Face’ Theatre and the ‘Society of Spectacle’

2 The ‘Spectacle’ Filled our Pockets: Duplicity, Sexism and the Market

2.1 La Dérive: Marginal Spaces of Resistance

2.2 ‘Like A Disapproving Person’: Collapse, Pretence and Alienation

3 The Point of Rupture: Collapse and Barbarism

3.1 Stopping the Technology: Détournement, ‘Luddism’ and ‘Terrorism’

3.2 Clifford’s Eyes and the ‘Banality of Evil’

3.3 A Rewriting and a Parable of Ambition

3.4 Audience and Violence: From Voyeurs to Active Witnesses

4 Conclusion: Towards Subjectivity and Ethics

IV Postdramatic Plays: Attempts on her Life (1997) and Face to the Wall (2002)

1 Interpretation, Self-Regulation and Postdramatism

1.1 Crimp and Postdramatism

2 Short Circuits of Desire: Language and Power in Attempts on her Life

2.1 The ‘Camera’, Narcissism, and the ‘Society of Spectacle’

2.2 ‘I Can’t’: A Body in Denial

2.3 Ready-mades, Language and Power

3 ‘The Stage, a Skull’: Male Collapse as Resistance in Face to the Wall

3.1 Fewer Emergencies (2005) and the Non-Hierarchical Theatrical Experience

3.2 ‘The Warm Metal - Thank You - of the Gun’: Interpretation and Violation

3.3 ‘Voyeurs in Bedlam?’: Re-Materializing the Audience

V Dramatic Plays: Female Breakdown as Micropolitical Resistance

1 Stopping Time: Memory and Resistance in The Country (2000)

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Of Violence and Pathos

1.1.2 ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’: A Narrative of Testimony and a Power Game

1.2 Collapse as Self-Awareness: Corinne’s Change

1.2.1 Collapse, Mercantilism and ‘Empire’

1.2.2 Virgil, Collapse and Testimony

1.3 ‘It is Only the Flesh’: Rebecca’s Moral Imagination

1.3.1 Collapse as Violence

1.3.2 Madness as Reason’s Other

1.4 Patchwork of Voices, Swarm of Resistance

1.4.1 Outbursts of Solidarity

1.4.2 Community of Resistance

1.5 ‘Oh, to Reverse’: Spiralling Towards Full Time

1.5.1 Collapsing Boundaries

1.5.2 Stopping Time: An Ethics of Resentment

1.5.3 Testimony and Late Capitalism

1.5.4 Path of Discovery: the Ethics of Spectatorship

1.5.5 To Survive: Self-Creation and the Paring Down of Selfhood

1.6 Conclusion: Turning Towards Psychology

2 Oppression, Resistance and Terrorism in Cruel and Tender (2004)

2.1 Sophocles, Crimp and Bondy

2.2 Radical Ethics: The Body as Weapon, Insight and Image

2.2.1 The Cartesian Self: Verticality and the Word

2.2.2 Amelia’s ‘Embodied’ Tongue

2.3 Of Shamans and Cyborgs: From Bodies of Mastery to Bodies of Need

2.3.1 Invocation and Ritual

2.3.2 A Utopia of Mutual Dependency

2.4 Collapse and Testimony: Late Capitalism and Totalitarianism

2.4.1 Inequality, Auschwitz and the Collapsing Self

2.4.2 Opening a Space of Exteriority

2.4.3 The Inheritance of Resistance

2.5 Conclusion: Memory as Imperative and Yearning

VI Testimony and World Inequality in Crimp’s Adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006)

1.1 Introduction: Mirroring Fragments, Play-Within-a-Play

1.2 Testimony as Resistance: Crimp’s and Mitchell’s Play-Within-a-Play

1.3 ‘Cold, Blank, Distant’: Breakdown as Resistance

VII General Conclusions: Martin Crimp’s Theatre: a Dramaturgy of Resistance

VIII Works Cited

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources