Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre

M. Aragay, E. Monforte, M. Aragay, E. Monforte

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137297570
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This volume is the first to offer a comprehensive critical examination of the intersections between contemporary ethical thought and post-1989 British playwriting. Its coverage of a large number of plays and playwrights, international range of contributors and original argumentation make it a key point of reference for students and researchers.

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To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship

Mireia Aragay

In January 2011, Small Hours, written by Lucy Kirkwood and Ed Hime and directed by Katie Mitchell, was staged in the Michael Frayn downstairs studio space at the Hampstead Theatre. It is a solo piece, about one hour long, with very few spoken words, where an insomniac young woman (Sandy McDade in the Hampstead production) struggles through the small hours of the night – hoovering her sofa, playing CDs at full volume, watching late-night shopping channels, listening to music on headphones, trying to book a cinema ticket, phoning her partner, wrestling with the answer machine, attempting to dance – while her new-born baby cries disconsolately in another room. Although the woman does go out twice to see to the baby, and returns once with a dirty nappy, mostly her reaction is to drown the wailing in a cacophony of other sounds and noises. The Hampstead studio space was turned by designer Alex Eales into a living-room and spectators – 25 per performance only – were first asked to take off their shoes and then invited to take seats on the chairs, sofas, armchairs and benches arranged around the edges of the room in a row just one person deep. The effect on spectators of the installation-like set and seating arrangement has been discussed in terms of intimacy by Mitchell herself – you were certainly close enough to the woman at times ‘to touch her, smell the perfume she sprays in the room and hear the tiny tap of plastic on wood as she puts the mascara down on her side table’ (Mitchell, 2011) – and of complete sensory immersion on the A Younger Theatre website (Orr, 2011) and the There Ought to Be Clowns blog (2011). While active participation on the part of audience members was not encouraged at all, and in fact the woman never as much as acknowledged their presence, the show’s impact was inseparable from the closely shared space between actress and audience, their co-presence in the small, windowless Hampstead studio-turned-living-room.

Small Hours raises a number of questions that have become central to recent discussions of the relationship between theatre and ethics. What is the function of theatre in a media-saturated culture like ours, where representations of violence, pain and vulnerability are almost automatically considered suspect as obscuring rather than enabling access to the realities of human suffering and precariousness? Does theatre, perhaps, occupy some kind of privileged cultural position in this connection, given the way in which it brings vulnerable human bodies together in one single space – its emphasis on co-presence, which was foregrounded in Small Hours? Does that guarantee theatre’s potential for ethical solicitation, its capacity to transform spectators from (supposedly) passive voyeurs or consumers of images into actively engaged witnesses? Do experimental forms of theatre such as Small Hours offer a particular intensity in terms of audience address and ethical awakening? Crucially, what is the role of spectators in all this, given that the relationship with the audience constitutes the core of whichever ethical significance a theatre event may have?

In the case of Small Hours, such questions acquired a further twist given the institutional context in which the play was produced. When Edward Hall became Artistic Director of the Hampstead Theatre, he took a policy decision to use the downstairs studio as an experimental space for new plays. Critics were welcome to attend the show, but were not allowed to review it.¹ This circumstance stirred controversy, with some arguing that it was ethically questionable for a theatre to bar professional reviewers while the play was freely discussed on websites and blogs, not to mention Facebook or Twitter (Gardner, 2011; see also Sierz, 2011).² This turns Small Hours into an interesting case where the standard practice in theatre studies of focusing on the response of published reviewers is simply not possible, as all that remains as a record of the production are the reactions of ‘ordinary’ audience members on cyberspace – which brings to mind Helen Freshwater’s insightful exploration of some of the reasons for the resistance on the part of theatre studies to engage with detailed observations of actual audience member’s responses, instead of relying exclusively on the opinion of professional reviewers (2009, pp. 27–55). At the same time, the generally restricted possibilities of access to the production – as already noted, it played to audiences of 25 at a time, and was sold out both in the initial run (12 January–5 February 2011) and when it was extended – raised questions about how to assess the significance, ethical or otherwise, of a show that was only seen by a very tiny minority. How ‘ordinary’, after all, were the spectators who attended performances of Small Hours? Beginning to provide answers to such questions would require, as Freshwater suggests, extended and detailed research into real audiences; what is of interest in the present context is that, ultimately, the debate surrounding the Hampstead studio production of Small Hours brings us back once more to the question of spectatorship and spectator response, arguably the centrepiece around which questions of theatre and ethics hinge.

Comparatively speaking, the academic field of theatre studies has been a latecomer to what has come to be perceived as an ‘ethical turn’, the renewal of interest in ethical issues that has gathered force within the humanities in general and literary studies in particular since the mid- to late 1980s. The publication in 1983 of a pioneering special issue of New Literary History on ‘Literature and/as Moral Philosophy’ was followed by a spate of monographs and essay collections, not to mention scholarly articles, focusing on explorations of the interface of ethics with fiction and, to a lesser extent, poetry. To name only a few, J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1987), Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics (1995), Robert Eaglestone’s Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (1997), Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (1999), Jill Robbins’s Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (1999), Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004b), and The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960s (2007) and Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction (2011), both jointly edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, collectively testify to the burgeoning of interest in the question of ethics and literature, as does the publication in 2004 of a special issue of Poetics Today on ‘Literature and Ethics’.

In contrast, it is not until the late 2000s that a turn to ethics becomes apparent in theatre studies. In 2009, Nicholas Ridout was able to describe his ‘Theatre &’ monograph on Theatre & Ethics as the first to address ‘the topic of theatre and ethics [ . . . ] directly in a single volume in English’ (p. 71). The same year saw the publication of Helena Grehan’s Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. The collection Ethical Encounters: Boundaries of Theatre, Performance and Philosophy, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Daniel Watt, came out in 2010, which was also the year when the journal Performing Ethos: An International Journal of Theatre and Performance brought out its first issue, while A Life of Ethics and Performance, edited by John Matthews and David Torevell, was published in 2011.³ This relative belatedness seems rather surprising, particularly perhaps given the fact that, as is apparent in some of the titles listed earlier, the resurgence of ethics has been informed by a turn to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, commonly agreed to have made a decisive contribution to reconfiguring the foundations of Western ethical philosophy in the wake of the experience of the Holocaust. In his ‘Adieu’ to Levinas, originally delivered upon the philosopher’s death in Paris in 1995, Jacques Derrida leaves no doubt about the ‘discreet but irreversible mutation’ ultimately amounting to a ‘historical shock wave’ (1999, p. 12) brought about by Levinas’s work – according to Derrida, it changed the course of philosophical reflection and reordered it according to ‘another thought of ethics, another thought of the other, a thought that is newer than so many novelties because it is ordered according to the absolute anteriority of the face of the Other’ (1999, p. 4).⁴

It is precisely the centrality of the Other to Levinas’s pre-ontological ethical thought that makes it intuitively highly pertinent to the theatre situation, offering as it does the possibility of developing ‘a model of performance as an ethical encounter, in which we come face to face with the other, in a recognition of our mutual vulnerability which encourages relationships based on openness, dialogue and respect for difference’ (Ridout, 2009, p. 54). Similarly, Grehan is drawn to Levinas’s philosophy because of its focus on the subject’s responsibility for the Other – by engaging with Levinas’s ideas, she writes, ‘I wanted to try to understand and describe the responses of theatre spectators and also to think about what spectators might do with their responses once they leave the theatre’ (2009, p. 6). And although Hans-Thies Lehmann mentions Levinas only once and almost in passing in Postdramatic Theatre (2006, p. 148), there seems little doubt that his ‘aesthetic of response-ability’, involving as it does an ethico-political ‘mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images’ (2006, pp. 185–6; emphasis original), is informed by a Levinasian focus on the call of the Other, the ‘interruption’, as the foundation of the ethical relationship, as that which the subject has no option but to respond to and take responsibility for.⁵

Levinas’s thought, thus, has an undoubted appeal for theatre studies, as it offers philosophical sustenance for a widely shared faith, as Freshwater puts it, in ‘theatre’s potential to be educative and empowering, to enable critical and ethical engagement, to awaken a sense of social responsibility, or to raise an audience’s sense of its own political agency’ (2009, p. 55). Theatre and performance may even appear, from a Levinasian perspective, as privileged cultural practices as regards the exploration of ethical issues since they seem to be based, almost literally, on co-presence, on the face-to-face encounter between embodied, vulnerable spectators and Others wherein the former are summoned to respond, to become actively engaged in an exemplary exercise of ethical ‘response-ability’. Extending Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s classic formulation of what is involved in the act of witnessing to encompass the theatre situation, spectators may be said to become ‘double witnesses’ (1992, p. 58), both to the theatre or performance piece as a mode of address inscribing within itself a ‘you’, an active receiver whose subjective change is enabled by his/her witnessing, and to their own process of subjective transformation. In the words of Peggy Phelan, whose work on performance is inflected by both Levinas’s thought and Felman and Laub’s explorations of witnessing, ‘[i]f Levinas is right, and the face-to-face encounter is the most crucial arena in which the ethical bond we share becomes manifest, then live theatre and performance might speak to philosophy with renewed vigor’, as they turn spectators into witnesses of ‘what [they] did not (and perhaps cannot) see’ (2004, p. 577). It is thus that spectators enter the ‘ethical frame’ (Keefe, 2010).

Over the last few years, then, Levinas has inspired numerous groundbreaking explorations in theatre and ethics. However, two difficulties underlie the preceding brief presentation of the way in which the Levinasian reconfiguration of ethics has shaped recent work in theatre and performance studies. Firstly, and as has often been noted (see Eaglestone, 1997, pp. 98–128; Grehan, 2009, pp. 25–34; Ridout, 2009, pp. 55–6), given Levinas’s profound suspicion of aesthetic representation, invoking his thought in order to discuss any form of art can never be a straightforward matter. Secondly, the assumption that spectators are passive and that therefore theatre’s mission is to awaken them or make them active – one of the ‘key concepts of ethical thought about theatre and performance’ according to Ridout (2009, p. 59) – is problematic and has recently been interrogated, most cogently perhaps by Jacques Rancière. As will hopefully become apparent in what follows, the two difficulties are connected in important ways.

Levinas’s suspicion of art and aesthetic representation is most forcefully articulated in his early work, up to and including Totality and Infinity, originally published in 1961. ‘Reality and its Shadow’, first published in 1948, is a key piece in this connection. In this essay, Levinas denounces the ‘hypertrophy of art’ (Levinas 1989b, p. 142), its being in his view overrated through its identification with transcendence, with the ‘spiritual life’ (1989b, p. 142) and the ‘order of revelation’ (1989b, p. 132). In fact, he argues, every act of artistic representation is a challenge to ethics and hence to transcendence, since it displaces the centrality of presence, of the face-to-face encounter with the Other that is the primeval foundation of ethics. Art, therefore, brings into the world ‘obscurity’ – it ‘obscures being in images’ (1989b, p. 142) – and ‘irresponsibility’ (1989b, p. 141) – ‘[t]he world to be built is replaced by [ . . . ] its shadow. [ . . . ] There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment’ (1989b, p. 142). Levinas pursues this line of thought in Totality and Infinity, where he insists that language can only be truly ethical and therefore aspire to transcendence if it is supported by the face, by the presence of the Other. Literature, as written language, is predicated on the absence of the face and hence, like all art, it is at best a plaything and at worst, an evasion from ethical responsibility. As Eaglestone aptly concludes, pinpointing the fundamental faultline in Levinas’s thought about language, representation and art, ‘[l]anguage, in Totality and Infinity, seems to mean something other than language: it means presence, and not representation’ (1997, p. 124).

As a way out of the conundrum and a means of recuperating Levinas for the study of ethics in theatre and performance, Ridout (2009, pp. 66–70) seems to rely on Levinas’s insistence on the radical strangeness or unassimilability of the encounter with the face of the Other – it is ‘the experience of something absolutely foreign, a pure “knowledge” or “experience”, a traumatism of astonishment’ (Levinas qtd. in Eaglestone, 1997, p. 121) – in order to argue, not unlike others before him, that the ethical force of an aesthetic production, its capacity to challenge the spectator’s ethical framework, is not manifest at the level of theme, that is, of the representation of ethically charged characters or plots. Rather, it takes place at the level of form – when the form is truly ‘absolutely foreign’, it produces the Levinasian ‘traumatism of astonishment’ through placing spectators face-to-face with a radical alterity and singularity, an absolute otherness, which requires that they ‘responsively/responsibly participat[e] in its co-creation’ (Eskin, 2004, p. 567).⁶ Formal innovation or experimentation thus becomes the cornerstone for the spectator’s ethical engagement, the site from which ‘a challenge from the place of the other’ can truly be issued (Ridout, 2009, p. 68), and ‘in Levinas’ apparent condemnation of art and the art...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Aleks Sierz
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 To Begin to Speculate: Theatre Studies, Ethics and Spectatorship
• Part I (Post-)Holocaust Representations
• Part II Theoretical Speculations
• Part III Spectatorial Ethics
• Part IV Ethics and Institutions
• Index