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Notes
1. Liz Tomlin, ‘“And Their Stories Fell Apart Even as I was Telling Them”: Poststructuralist Performance and the Non-longer-dramatic Text’, Performance Research, 14.1 (2009), 57–64 (p. 58).
2. For an overview, see Jackie Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 4, ‘Theatre History and Reform’.
3. This understanding of dramaturgy resonates with the compact outline given in Eugenio Barba, ‘Dramaturgy: Actions at Work’, in The Secret Art of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, ed. by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 68–73.
4. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 56.
5. For a succinct discussion of German theatre aesthetics since the beginning of the twentieth century, exemplified in Max Reinhardt's work, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 29–53. For a survey of corresponding tendencies in France, see David Bradby and Annie Sparks, Mise en Scène: French Theatre Now (London: Methuen, 1997), Ch. 1.
6. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 55. Tomlin critically revaluates Lehmann's argument with regard to texts by Martin Crimp and Forced Entertainment, in Tomlin, ‘And Their Stories’.
7. Lehmann made the entanglement of Epic Theatre as well as the Theatre of the Absurd within the Aristotelian and Hegelian dramatic tradition a starting point of his study. One may today argue along similar lines about some of the work marketed under the ‘brand labels’ just listed.
8. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 46.
9. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006).
10. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 144.
11. Less explicitly, Lehmann also associates Postdramatic Theatre with changing politics of spectatorship, as an expansion of Brecht's ‘inquiry into a new “art of spectating”’ (Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 33). For an extended retheorization of theatrical spectating, see Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
12. Žižek, Parallax View, p. 4.
13. Ibid., p. 29.
14. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (London: Granta, 2006), p. 21, my emphasis.
15. I will on this occasion concentrate on these fundamental formal aspects. As indicated above, a full dramaturgic analysis would proceed to situate the productions more thoroughly within their ‘external’ cultural-economic framework.
16. It was reminiscent of Brecht's ‘true realism’, which ‘has to do more than just make reality recognizable in the theatre. One has to be able to see through it too’ (Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. by John Willet [London: Methuen, 2002 (1965)], p. 18).
17. Katie Mitchell, The Director's Craft (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 17.
18. Žižek, Parallax View, p. 29.
19. It is also significant that the named companies and directors remain committed to the idea of the ensemble, which has otherwise been virtually eradicated within the British ‘theatre industry’.
20. Goode cites as a motivation for entering New Directions precisely the feeling that, ‘having aligned myself with one kind of practice, I was becoming inadvertently excluded from working with classic texts’, and he laments that, with his production discussed here, ‘I have now hit my head on a glass ceiling. Certainly in the ecology of London theatre, experimenting in the terms that was possible here, you are at the kids' table and expected to graduate into another format and get this out of your system in order to work at a bigger scale’ (Chris Goode, interview conducted by the author, 24 July 2008).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. In personal conversation, they estimated that towards the end of the run they knew approximately 80% of the entire text.
24. Goode, interview.
25. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 58.
26. Ibid., p. 55.
27. This ties in with recent aesthetic philosophy that (while rarely discussing theatre performances) suggests that works of art present a (fictional or other) world precisely by presenting themselves, their mediality and artistic use of signs, as non-transparent means of communication – thus by an inherent ‘reflexive dramaturgy’. See, for example, Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
28. Boris Groys, Unter Verdacht: Eine Phänomenologie der Medien (Munich: Hanser, 2000). For a reading of some of Neumann's other designs for Castorf as ‘submedial spaces’, cf. See Klaus Van den Berg, ‘Scenography and Submedial Space’, Theatre Research International, 32.1 (2007), 49–67.