Theatre and Violence

Lucy Nevitt

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350316331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

If violence is a terrible thing, why do we watch it? Nevitt explores the use of violence in theatre and its effect on spectators. Critically engaging with examples of stage combat, rape, terrorism, wrestling and historical re-enactments, she argues that studying violence through theatre can be part of a desire to create a more peaceful world.

theatre & violence

Two examples of spectating violence

Example One. The stage set represents a hotel room that has been blown up by a mortar bomb. In the debris lie two characters, a soldier and the man he has just raped. We have been shown the rape, during which the soldier was ‘crying his heart out’. We also witnessed the man engaging in his own acts of violence and sexual violence against a young woman, both before and after the explosion that destroyed the room. The soldier grips the man’s head in his hands. He puts his mouth over one of the man’s eyes, sucks it out, bites it off and eats it. He does the same to the other eye.

Example Two. The television shows the opening credits of a news programme. Across the bottom of the screen we read the banner ‘Breaking News’. Above this we are shown a series of filmed images, all from the same event but cut together so that time is truncated. A skyscraper collapses into rubble; a second tower beside it remains standing. People run and scream; there is chaos on the ground. An aircraft flies towards the second tower, then crashes into it. Bodies fall from high windows. There is dust and rubble and frantic but largely aimless movement. A reporter shouts into a microphone.

What are the differences between these two depictions of violence, and between the two acts of spectatorship being undertaken by the people who watch them? It is true but simplistic to say that one is real and the other, not. The images of violence performed in the context of a play (the first example was from Sarah Kane’s Blasted (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, 1995)) may have effects on its audience that are very real, and that linger long after the spectators and actors have left the theatre. On the other hand, one of the most common responses among witnesses to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York was that it was like a movie.

This is a book about theatre, performance and violence, and as such it is inescapably fascinated with the idea of reality. Simulated violence, in which the violence and its physical effects are illusory and no bodily harm is done, is connected with reality in so many ways that it quickly becomes impossible to assign it a simple definition of ‘not real’. Actual violence, when the harm is happening as it appears to be, is such a common feature of the news that many people have developed a spectatorial distance from it. We know it is real, but paradoxically its impact can be less immediate and strong, and less long-lasting and troubling, than the impact of some simulated violence presented in theatres.

Simulation and actuality are preoccupations of this study and I will explore the many ways in which they can interact and inform different representations of violence, from fights in plays to battle re-enactments and professional wrestling shows, from body art to hunger strikes and acts of war. The other conceptual through-line is spectatorship: the experience of being in the position of ‘audience’ for acts of simulated or actual violence.

In 2007 the feminist political philosopher Adriana Cavarero published a book that responded to acts of actual violence that are usually described as ‘terrorism’. Her argument is partly driven by an analysis of the effects of these acts, not only on the victims who suffer their immediate physical effects of death and mutilation but also on those who witness them. It is in effect an analysis of spectatorship, and the book is called Horrorism.

Cavarero begins by going back to the etymological roots of the word terror and its equivalents in various languages, which all connect with a physical experience of fear: importantly, the desire to flee and the bodily movement towards flight. With this interpretation of terror she contrasts horror, a word whose etymology links it to the sensation of being frozen. While terror is linked to action – individual flight or mass panic – horror connotes paralysis, stasis, the response of helplessly doing nothing. Cavarero suggests that horrorism would be a more appropriate term for describing attacks on the helpless, and also for describing acts of violence that provoke responses of helpless stasis.

Without going into the details of the fascinating discussion that she builds from this starting point, it is clear that Cavarero’s linguistic argument should resonate strongly with scholars of performance. Does theatre generate horror more frequently than terror? What might we learn from experiencing spectatorial horror in a theatre, where it can be pleasurable as well as disturbing? Cavarero’s term prompts us to put spectatorial experience to the fore in our considerations of theatre and violence. It also insists that we notice the workings of language, and the significance of the choices that we make when assigning words to actions, images, representations and their effects.

Thinking about theatre and violence

Violence often seems to be everywhere. It’s hard not to be constantly aware of acts of violence in the world, while a sense of threat from possible violence, large-scale or individual, is something most people have lived with from a fairly early age. Violence is also, as a subject, enormous. We can’t talk about ‘violence’ for long without needing to apply categories, and there are many different directions from which the subject can be viewed.

We can classify violence as physical, verbal, psychological, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. We can categorise it by scale: from a fight between two people to a battle or war. Violence can be considered from the perspective of its cause (what motivates it), its form or its effects. We can think about the way that it is contextualised or regulated. The length of time over which violence between the same people or groups occurs sometimes helps us understand its context: whether abuse is prolonged, ongoing or repeated, for example. Legal systems usually recognise that intention is important, and proof of accident or self-defence can sometimes mitigate a charge of murder.

It can also be useful to consider the different means by which violence is enacted. We might perceive a distinction between an attack launched from a distance and an encounter in which those involved can see one another, or look into each other’s eyes. We might respond differently to unarmed combat (body-to-body contact using hands, feet, teeth, heads and so on) than we would to the use of blades, or projectiles such as arrows, or bullets. Some people feel that there is a moral or ethical difference between violence involving only men and violence against, by or between women and/or children; that from men, for example, violence might be more acceptable, understandable or even ‘natural’.

So why theatre and violence? What are the reasons for linking these two ideas together in a book? There are two ways of addressing this question. First, does thinking about violence matter? If so, is theatre a good place to think about it? Second, why does thinking about the performance of violence matter?

Thinking about violence

Thinking about violence matters because of its ubiquity, because of the terror and pain it causes, because it is, in its actual forms in the world, bad. In general terms violence has a relationship to power and powerlessness. In specific examples it has effects that include pain and death, trauma, fear and escalations of further violence. The process of conceptualising violence requires both theoretical abstraction and empathetic imagination. Violence is basic and ordinary (for many people it is, in different ways and contexts, normal) and yet profoundly unpleasant to think about, all at once.

Theatre permits and enables us to contemplate violence. A piece of theatre is a collaborative act of imagination in which theatre-makers and their audiences can explore possibilities and fantasies as well as reconsidering known realities. In the theatre we can play out different imaginary versions of the world, and so theatre provides space, structures and contexts for the contemplation of actual and potential violence. Theatre plays with cause and effect and with sophisticated analyses of concepts and events. Since fictional framing and the relative safety of the not-real enable theatre-makers to push their ideas to the extremes of cultural imagination, it is inevitable that theatre will be concerned with violence.

Philip Ridley’s play Mercury Fur (Drum Theatre, Plymouth, UK, 2005) is set in London in an imagined future in which the children who are the central characters distribute drugs (hallucinogenic butterflies) and arrange private ‘parties’ in order to survive. These parties involve the enactment of the violent sexual fantasy of a single ‘guest’; child victims are provided by other children to be tortured, raped and killed by paying adults. The play contains sequences of extreme violence. The drugged ten-year-old victim, known only as Party Piece, is tortured onstage. The brutal fantasy enactment itself, which has been discussed enough in advance for the audience to know what it involves, takes place offstage but is communicated vividly and horrifically through an extended sequence of sound.

The circumstances of the play are imagined and they are extreme; it is a disturbing play for its audience to witness. Yet this play is the imagined extension of aspects that the playwright sees in our existing culture. In a 2009 interview published in the journal New Theatre Quarterly Ridley connects the subject matter of Mercury Fur with his perception of the increasing levels of interest in (and availability of) violent pornography, representing the events in the play as ‘the logical conclusion’ of this already-present industry (p. 115). A central theme of Mercury Fur is the breakdown of memory and identity under the combined influence of brutality and drugs. The play’s violence is narratively associated with the effects of the butterflies, which have been introduced by an invading power to subdue and control the populace. In the same interview Ridley links this idea to recent and current events, identifying the destruction of a people’s history as ‘stage one of an invasion for any imperialist force’ (p. 115).

In her 2006 play Lemkin’s House (78th Street Theatre Lab, New York), Catherine Filloux imagines the real historical figure Raphael Lemkin trapped in an afterlife that takes the form of a dilapidated house. Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide and fought to have genocide recognised as a crime in international law, is haunted throughout the play by atrocities that have happened since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. He, and through him the audience, encounters horrific violence and appalling suffering, but since he is dead and unable to leave the house in which he finds himself, he is powerless to intervene.

The central character’s helplessness here represents and explores the feelings that many of the audience might experience when learning about distant atrocities. Filloux’s play does not offer an immediate solution to this helplessness – after all, there is no simple way for an individual to intervene in situations of genocide. It does provide us with the opportunity to acknowledge the horror of such events and to notice and respond in turn to our own responses to that horror. As autonomous individuals, what we do with that process is up to us. The theatre provides us with an experience, for many reasons perhaps an experience of greater immediacy than a reported news story, on which we can reflect and to which we can, if we choose, seek out ways to respond.

This book is written from the perspective that it is necessary and desirable to use theatre and performance to help us to contemplate violence. When violence happens elsewhere, at a distance, not to me or anyone of my acquaintance, it is easy for me to know about it without contemplating it. Images and descriptions of violence abound hour after hour on the news media. Twenty-four-hour news is by its nature ever-present; there is no special space or time in which audiences can pause to think about this knowledge of violence, violence’s reality and its implications. Theatre, whether it directly represents real-world examples or employs fiction and fantasy to explore violent possibilities, provides us with space, focus and stimuli for a concentrated consideration of the subject.

Thinking about the performance of violence

Of course, performance is not a single, stable entity, and so it is also necessary and important to think about the ways that violence can be performed. When we think about the performance of violence it soon becomes clear that here is a topic on which almost everyone has an opinion. Performed violence can prompt responses of extraordinary passion and fury in people who are quite removed from the theatre and its audiences.

In 1965 even people who had never been to the theatre had heard or read about Edward Bond’s play Saved (Royal Court Theatre, London). Or rather, they knew about one series of actions in one of its scenes: the stoning to death of a baby in its pram. In 1982 theatre director Michael Bogdanov faced criminal charges at the Old Bailey because of one sequence in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (National Theatre, London, 1980) – the performed anal rape that left the play indelibly associated with accusations of shocking violence and, as the charges expressed it, ‘gross indecency between two actors’. In 1995 Sarah Kane’s Blasted became notorious for what was represented in the media as gratuitous and disgusting violence, coming in for an extra share of vitriol because Kane was a young, female playwright.

In all of these examples, reviews of the productions listed the violent acts that were performed as though they were the ingredients of the play. It seems that performed violence has the potential to overpower the context in which it is shown. The observation or the naming of violence can overshadow spectatorial responses. It can even obscure the play as a whole, positioning that play in the canon of theatre history as controversial: ‘a violent play’.

This last phrase is a particularly interesting use of language. Violence in theatre crosses boundaries of period, genre and context. Many plays and performances depict or describe violence, but not all of them are thought of as violent plays. The phrase ‘a violent play’ suggests on one level that the play itself is an act of violence. (This idea that showing can also be doing is explored in more detail later in this book, in the section on performativity and ideology.) Another familiar idea is that violence in performance might be ‘gratuitous’ or ‘unnecessary’. These too are interesting words, because they unintentionally imply the existence of their conceptual opposite, ‘necessary’ or ‘useful’ performances of violence.

In Lemkin’s House, Lemkin meets Jack, a ‘natty UN official’ who is monitoring the slaughter in Rwanda of Tutsi people by Hutus, and learns that politicians since 1948 have frequently responded to the official recognition of genocide as a crime by simply avoiding the term:

Jack:	We don’t use ‘the G word’.
Lemkin:	The G word?
Jack:	It hasn’t escalated to that level. We aren’t allowed to use that word.
Lemkin:	Dismemberment of Tutsis, Tutsi women’s sex organs hanging from trees is not sufficient escalation for you?
Jack:	The word makes certain security council members nervous. (p. 27)

Lemkin’s incredulous response a few lines later – ‘There are actually leaders who think if they don’t use a word, they don’t have to do anything about it?’ – may well echo thoughts that spectators have had outside the theatre in response to discussions of this issue in the news. It also offers us a way of thinking about the possible usefulness of portraying violent action onstage. Violence exists in the world as reality and potential. The choice not to represent it will not make it go away, and certainly shouldn’t mean that we don’t have to do anything about it. Theatre and other performance contexts do offer the possibility for useful and necessary considerations of violence.

It is not possible to make judgements about or develop an analysis of ‘violence in performance’ as if this were a single phenomenon. We must always consider the ways in which acts of violence are positioned within the wider frame of the play or performance in which they occur. We must also consider the ways in which they are depicted and performed, which means that analysis of moments in performance (the choices made by fight directors, directors, performers and designers, as well as the expectations and experiences of spectators) is just as important as the analysis of any written script.

This book offers a number of conceptual approaches to thinking about performance and violence. The next section explores spectatorship and style, looking at the different ways in which audiences might experience a performance of violence and the ways in which theatrical convention can influence those spectatorial encounters. The section on causality addresses ideas about the effect on spectators of watching simulated violence, and the following sections on performativity and ideology and on the canon offer different ways of thinking about ‘effect’. Actuality and simulation a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Foreword by Catherine Cusack
• Two examples of spectating violence
• Further reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements