The Space of Doubt: The Chairs and the aesthetics of failure

Abstract

This article examines the emergent concept of ‘failure’ in performance with respect to Eugene Ionesco's play The Chairs. It is argued that The Chairs illustrates wider operations of failure in performance, and in particular the specific ways in which an aesthetics of failure connects to a disruption of theatrical deixis. In bringing together notions of stage deixis and failure in performance, this article offers its own perspective on the discourse of failure in performance. While discussions concerning failure in performance tend to assume a disruption and unpicking of form and representation, I suggest that, paradoxically, The Chairs exemplifies an aesthetics of failure while in many ways inhabiting a more conventional dramatic paradigm. In developing this perspective I address a range of discursive concepts, including Hans-Thies Lehmann's conception of ‘postdramatic theatre,’ and Merleau-Ponty's idea that consciousness enacts itself through continual failures to coincide with itself and the world.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the help of Frederick Dalmasso for his advice on the development of this article. In addition, I would like to thank my colleague Laura Cull, to whom I am indebted for the numerous conversations we have had on notions of ‘failure’ in performance, which have been most helpful to my understanding of the idea. My thanks also to Kate Dorney and to Margaret Werry for a number of very helpful comments.

Notes

¹ It may be useful to recall Jacques Rancière's idea of the emancipated spectator in which the spectator ‘will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers’ (Rancière 2007: 272)

² For a critique of Lehmann's postdramatic theatre paradigm, see Bottoms (2009).

³ The reduction of the sign/image in modern theatre is usefully dealt with by Stanton B. Garner (1994).

⁴ This concept of drama as essentially present-tense interpersonal action is developed by Peter Szondi (1987), who argues that drama is an ‘absolute form’ that has variously been extended and subverted at different points in theatrical history.

⁵ I borrow this phrase from Cesare Segre (1980: 47).

⁶ This idea that the imaginary audience are in some way extension of the actual audience of the play is developed in more detail by Sidney Homan (1989)

⁷ See, for example, Parker and Sedgwick (1995).

⁷ See chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu11.html, translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, accessed 21 June 2010.