Mary Noonan

The Spatialization of Loss in the Theatre of Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras developed a theatrical form that both staged a severing of the womans body/ presence from discourse/subjectivity, and gave expression to the distressed source of the womans voice beyond discourse. This form of theatre appeals to the spectator who is willing to become involved in its uncovering of possible meanings of female identity through a meticulously orchestrated, slow, rhythm-based and essentially uncomfortable sifting and dredging of the processes of memory and desire. In exploring this terrain, Duras went some way toward realizing Irigarays feminist project of ‘playing with mimesis’, whereby the woman resubmits herself to ideas about her self that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, in order to uncover the place of her exploitation by discourse.

Women and Scarecrows: Marina Carr’s Stage Bodies

This chapter considers the theatre of Marina Carr in the light of the feminist thought of French writers Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in particular their work on the cultural representations of the feminine-maternal body. Taking the play Woman and Scarecrow as a case-study, the chapter examines Carr’s undermining of the visualist bias of conventional theatre, and demonstrates the extent to which she privileges the auditory in an attempt to confer on the stage a female voice and body.

An archaeology of soundscapes: The theatre of Noëlle Renaude

ABSTRACT In this essay, I will consider French writer Noëlle Renaudes development as a playwright, from The Northern Fox (1988), in which she blends different styles and linguistic registers, to her most recent plays, where she has abandoned virtually all the theatrical conventions and where she enacts a radical experimentation with the movement of words within the frame of the page/stage. In the plays written between 2004 and 2008, Renaude explores the relationship between language and space, between textuality and orality. In the space of memory that is evoked, all the dead voices are summoned out of the earth—excavated—in order to animate a geographical space. The playscripts present themselves as maps to be decoded—words are untethered from syntax and move about the page in unfamiliar patterns, telling stories of characters wandering in a landscape, getting lost, sometimes disappearing. These texts call for, and nurture, new ways of reading and performing plays: we must survey the page/stage, measure distances between words, decode symbols, chart proliferating patterns. We must become cartographers—the mathematical precision of the mapmaker is very much what is required if we are to navigate our way into, and out of, these pages. Using eye and ear, we plot our route through a terrain where the old signposts are no longer of any use.