William McEvoy

‘Leaving a space for the non-theorizable’: Self and Other in Hélène Cixous's Writing for the Theatre

This essay argues that Hélène Cixouss writings on theatre demonstrate an ongoing concern with the non-theorizable as a fundamental element of her experience of theatre. This creates a tension between Cixouss role as a theorist and her role as a creative writer, and this essay explores how this tension manifests itself in her reflections on theatre. It looks at the strategies Cixous adopts to allow the non-theoretical to inflect her critical and creative writing, focusing on her denial of specialist knowledge about theatre, her conception of the theatre text in opposition to meditation and philosophical reflection, and on her attempts to model her own playwriting process on the practical work of actors and director Ariane Mnouchkine. Cixouss attraction to the non-theorizable, it is suggested, leads to a more poetic mode of criticism about the medium that draws both on embodied theatrical practice and the self/other relationships that structure theatre making.

Literary criticism, theatre theory and the director’s task: Katie Mitchell’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull

Abstract This article looks at how Chekhov’s play The Seagull thematises the challenges of translating and directing theatre texts, focusing specifically on Katie Mitchell’s 2006 production of Martin Crimp’s version of the play. It suggests that literary criticism remains an important tool for theorising theatre texts and performance. By focusing on the frictions between analysis of the text as language and approaches that equally emphasise the visual, the embodied and the performative, we can develop interesting theoretical perspectives on the relationship between words as material to be read, and the broader functions of the words of theatre texts in performance. In this case in particular, the article works through some of the challenges and choices a director like Katie Mitchell faces when converting a passion for literature, via a play that reflects theoretically on the relationship between writing, acting and directing, into performance.

Rewriting the script: the impact of the development and rehearsal process on Ian McHugh’s play How to Curse (2007)

Ian McHugh’s 2007 play, How to Curse, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was Josie Rourke’s inaugural production as Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre in London. This article, co-written by the playwright, examines the development process from first draft to final version, charting how table readings, workshops and the rehearsal process changed the text. It looks at the relationship between the writer, director and creative team, showing how they collectively played a dramaturgical role in the development of the play and how other factors impacted on it. As well as offering insights into how new scripts are generated and redrafted, by focusing on the major revisions to the text, we aim to outline the complex negotiations between the author’s intention, the practicalities of performance, and the demands of an audience.

In Between the Visible and the Hidden: Modalities of Seeing in Site-Specific Performance

This chapter explores the relationship between the visual and the textual by proposing some ways for thinking about how site-specific performance can be conceptualized and theorized. It argues that site-specific performance turns us simultaneously into voyeurs, writers and critics, searching, inscribing and staging meaning through types of theatre that bring the verbal and the physical (objects, spaces) into dialogue with one another. My main contribution to this book’s theme of voyeurism is to suggest that the visible and the linguistic operate in dialectical tension with one another in site-specific work. The act of seeing in such contexts is never coincident with itself, but is displaced and restaged through the process of writing and critical restaging that accompany it. By looking at a site-specific production and some critical scenes of writing, I hope to construct a sense of the voyeuristic spectator-critic of site-specific theatre, one whose subjectivity is evoked, invoked and provoked by modes of performance that erode the barriers between self and work, between immanent and projected meanings, between found and fabricated objects and settings. The site-specific spectator looks for meaning, but such acts of looking are also acts of introspection, reversing the spectatorial gaze so that it also becomes a self-analytical one.