Cruel or Tender? Protocols of Atrocity, New and Old

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Notes

1. Martin Crimp cited in Aleks Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp (London: Methuen, 2006), p. 106.

2. G. Karl Galinsky, The Herakles Theme: The Adaptations of the Hero in Literature from Homer to the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), pp. 40–41.

3. Kathleen Riley, The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 2.

4. Euripides, ‘The Madness of Hercules’, in Bacchanals, The Madness of Hercules, The Children of Hercules, The Phoenician Maidens and Suppliants, trans. by Arthur S. Way (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 125–247.

5. Galinsky, The Herakles Theme, pp. 56–57.

6. Ibid., p. 56 and p. 49.

7. In Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), Charles Segal subtly and insightfully sets the question about the utility of the heroic ethic for the polis, viewing it at the interstices between myth and civilised society (pp. 39–42).

8. Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 107.

9. Pieter Jacobus Conradie argues that Euripides purifies Herakles’ propensity to violent deeds by showing the soft side of his human nature and by placing the onus of responsibility on the cruelty of the gods. See Herakles in die Griekse Tragedie (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1958), p. 138. Similarly in The Herakles Theme, Galinsky underlines Euripides’ unquestioned glorification of Herakles’ labours (p. 51).

10. Sophocles, ‘Trachiniae’, in Ajax, Electra, Trachiniae, Philoctetes, ed. by E. H. Warmington, trans. by F. Storr (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 253–359 (l.1278). Charles Segal in Sophocles’ Tragic World considers Trachiniae the ‘greatest stumbling block’ in ‘humanist’ Sophocles’ work and makes a subtle and lengthy speculation into Athenian politics that would not condemn primitive behaviour if it were in the interests of the polis. See especially the chapter ‘Myth, Poetry, and Heroic Values in the Trachinian Women’, pp. 26–68.

11. See especially his short essay ‘Sophocles at the Airport’, translated into French as ‘Sophocle à l’aéroport’ by Elisabeth Angel-Perez. Typescript held by translator. Published in French in OutreScène, 5 (2005), 12–14; also Aleks Sierz, ‘Dialogue Is Inherently Cruel: Martin Crimp in Conversation’, pp. 86–109 and the relevant section on Cruel and Tender in Sierz’s The Theatre of Martin Crimp, pp. 63–67.

12. Aleks Sierz, ‘theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright Martin Crimp’, 10 March 2012, <http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/theartsdesk-qa-playwright-martin-crimp> [accessed 13 November 2012]. Emphasis added.

13. Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 88. Emphasis added.

14. Vicky Angelaki, The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

15. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).

16. Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 33–34. By infusing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language and J. L. Austin’s speech act theory with Althusserian philosophy, Butler explores the power of language to inflict pain; the rhetoric and politics of linguistic injury.

17. Martin Crimp, Cruel and Tender (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 21.

18. Martin Middeke, ‘Martin Crimp’, in The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, ed. by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz (London: Methuen, 2011), pp. 82–102 (p. 98).

19. Martin Crimp, In the Republic of Happiness (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).

20. Concerning the critical controversy over the audience response to the tactics of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre we could mention, indicatively, Aleks Sierz’s rethinking of the term in his article ‘Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18 (Winter 2002), 17–24.

21. Crimp, Cruel and Tender, p. 43.

22. Ibid., p. 52.

23. Ibid., pp. 28, 42.

24. Ibid., p. 46.

25. Ibid., p. 47.

26. Ibid., p. 52.

27. Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 65.

28. Sophocles, Trachiniae, p. 320.

29. The handling of Deianeira’s suicide is a case in point as Sophocles arranges for a secondary character (the nurse) to explain to the audience that she took good care to hide herself so that nobody could see her (Sophocles, Trachiniae, l.903). Especially the second part of the play after the disclosure of Deianeira’s fateful mistake is characterised by a palindromic treatment concerning the desire and interdiction of the spectacle of extreme atrocity and pain.

30. Sophocles, Trachiniae, p. 320, 342.

31. For a fuller discussion of the discourse and aesthetics of pain in Sophocles see Elizabeth Sakellaridou, ‘The Performativity of Corporeal Pain in Sophocles’ Dramatic Discourse’, in History and Drama: Essays in Honour of Bernhard Reitz, ed. by Sigrid Rieuwerts (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006), pp. 275–84.

32. Angelaki, The Plays of Martin Crimp, pp. 124–25.

33. James Karas, ‘Cruel and Tender – Sophocles Meets Martin Crimp on Canadian Stage’, 10 February 2012, <http://jameskarasreviews.blogspot.gr/2012_02_10_archive.html> [accessed 2 January 2013].

34. Crimp, Cruel and Tender, p. 24, p. 62. Emphasis added.

35. In In the Republic of Happiness, a play which in some respects is a follow-up of the world situation depicted in Cruel and Tender, the first part is explicitly entitled ‘Destruction of the Family’, a process which is first witnessed in the demolishing of the family tradition in the earlier play Cruel and Tender.

36. Sierz, The Theatre of Martin Crimp, p. 107; see also Crimp’s lengthy praising reference to Amelia in ‘Sophocles at the Airport’.

37. Crimp, Cruel and Tender, pp. 7, 46.

38. Ibid., p. 50. Emphases added.

39. This play, with its cryptically sarcastic title, was ironically scheduled for the 2012–13 Christmas entertainment season at the Royal Court Theatre.

40. The airport experience as an ordeal of pain, torture, and violation of the self, rather than a supermodern ‘non-space’ (according to Marc Augé’s relevant theory in Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd edn [London: Verso, 2008]). This points to consumerist entertainment, luxury travel, and relaxation, as another major issue which reappears in In the Republic of Happiness, thus confirming Crimp’s preoccupation with the ethics of contemporary life. On the issue of violence and ethics in Cruel and Tender see also Mireia Aragay, ‘A Mirror of our Own Anxiety: Civilization, Violence and Ethics in Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender’, Atlantis, 32 (December 2011), 75–87.

41. Crimp, Cruel and Tender, p. 46.

42. Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Voyages au bout du possible: Les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel Beckett à Sarah Kane (Paris: Clincksieck, 2006), p. 198.

43. See Howard Barker’s theory on tragedy and the ‘theatre of catastrophe’ in his Arguments for the Theatre, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) and Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005). Barker’s familiarity with and interest in Adorno’s writings is frequently mentioned by Barker’s critics. See, for instance, Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker, ed. by Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey (London: Oberon Books, 2006); David Ian Rabey, Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Howard Barker’s Art of Theatre: Essays on his Plays, Poetry and Production Work, ed. by David Ian Rabey and Sarah Goldingay (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Elizabeth Sakellaridou, ‘A Lover’s Discourse – but Whose? Inversions of the Fascist Aesthetic in Howard Barker’s Und and Other Recent English Plays’, European Journal of English Studies, 7.1 (2003), 87–107.

44. See Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited (New York: Continuum, 2006).

45. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘Sacred Wounds: Making Sense of Violence’, in Theatre and Violence, ed. by John W. Frick (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), pp. 7–30.

46. Crimp, ‘Sophocle à l’ aéroport’, OutreScène, 12–14.

47. Simon Stephens turns this eschatological nightmare into extreme scatological articulation in his recent play Morning (London: Methuen, 2012), which culminates in the apotheosis of linguistic excrement as the final degradation of the human condition. See especially the concluding ‘shit’ soliloquy of the deeply disturbed protagonist Stephanie, pp. 51–52.

48. See Mark Ravenhill, Faust (Faust Is Dead) (London: Methuen, 1997); and Simon Stephens, Motortown (London: Methuen, 2006).

49. Dan Rebellato asks why there is such a proliferation of stage atrocities, especially directed on the human body, in the British theatre of the 1990s and finds Sierz’s explanations about the phenomenon of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre unsatisfactory and inconsistent. See Dan Rebellato, ‘“Because it Feels Fucking Amazing”: Recent British Drama and Bodily Mutilation’, in Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, ed. by Rebecca D’Monte and Graham Saunders (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 192–207 (pp. 192–93).

50. Sophocles, Trachiniae, l.1278.

51. Crimp, Cruel and Tender, p. 69.