الفهرس 
from the Dramatic to the Post-PostdramaticOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Hans-Thies Lehmann’s groundbreaking book entitled Postdramatic Theatre, published in 2000, refracts theatrical practices from the literary to the wholly performative. Lehmann expresses how the traditional dramatic form is not compatible with the then contemporary condition of theatre and states that it is replaced by other forms that ignore the regularities of dramatic theatre. The term Postdramatic theatre, coined by Lehmann, is ontologically connected to the old dramatic form as Lehmann repeatedly proposes that the Postdramatic is a continuation of the dramatic rather than a break away from it. The prefix ’post’ in Postdramatic, as per the author, does not denote a breach of the dramatic; which is conversely exposed as the book unfolds. Though the book displays an archival nature in most spots, Lehmann successfully pins down the mainstays of the Postdramatic that come with a process of ”de-dramatization”. As theatre turns towards the Postdramatic, theatre practitioners set off on rewriting relationships among theatre components: the dramatic text, the playwright, the performance, the director, the ensemble and the spectators. Lehmann, along with Erika Fischer-Lichte, considers that Western theatre has long given in to the hierarchical structure of textuality against which a harsh assault has been started by the mid-twentieth century. The fact that favouring the text reflects the bureaucratization of the modern states is not consoling to the avant-garde of the twentieth century who believes that the dramatic form dismantles theatre its immediacy and enforces illusion, deception and artificiality as the outcome. Lehmann states that ”de-dramatization” aims at the decomposition of the dramatic structure, which holds the dramatic text in its specific formula, and necessitates the separation between theatre and drama. The text introduces fictional characters in action that develops through the progression of time. The tight structure of time in the play is a quintessential parameter in dramatic theatre, as per Lehmann, because it guarantees the conflict or the argument which engenders in turn tension and suspense throughout. Dropping the narrative structure off in order to accentuate a stage of stasis is one of the achievements of Postdramatic theatre as the process of theatre production is dissected in front of the audience. The Postdramatic mode of presentation denies conflict its role as central to the development of the play; which obliterates the argument or the problem.
Working in terms of Aristotelian regulations, dramatic theatre conveys meaning to the audience through representation. It copies the real world thus representing a replica of the life the audience knows. In his Poetics, Aristotle decides that the playwright is the main creator in theatre and separates him from the process of theatrical production, yet extends his authority to the dramatic text. This means that the playwright’s script pre-exists the performance and pre-determines onstage production. The imaginary world introduced by the play works according to causality and sequentiality that a perfect image without any gaps is reflected to the audience. Due to the fact that the play depicts the commonplace and the acquainted to, the audiences experience security and relief by the end. The traditional closure of the play in an unknotted resolution settles the audience to pleasure. In dramatic theatre, the audience and the production team highlight the meaning provided by the playwright’s fixed vision in a sole interpretation that depends on a well-organized use of structure and words. Aristotle decides that action is the core of drama which explains why a play is structured in time and progresses linearly. The fictional characters in this world are puppeteered to act in accordance to their drives and their psychological condition in general. The playwright delivers meaning through the dialogue and embeds implicatures through the stage directions by which the playwright exercises authorial powers over the play’s onstage and offstage making. Aristotle believes that this structure secures a psychodynamic impact on the audience whose feelings are purged by the end of the play; what he identifies as catharsis. The assault against dramatic theatre – with the ruling playwright and text – does not mainly rest in the perfected fictional world represented, but the problem lies in the directness of the experience that dismantles theatre its liveness, immediacy and critical aptitude in addition to modelling or flattening the variety of audiences’ responses. In this respect, dramatic theatre is seen as essentially normative and deceptive since it urges the peoples to accept their social realities. from another perspective, artificiality and deception have long been attributed to dramatic theatre due to its pretentious claims – that all what is onstage is not true. Adding to artificiality, the ”anti-theatrical prejudice” proposes that theatre engenders emotions that are originally harmful. This idea is passed on to generations that J. L. Austin cites theatrical language as a prototype of hollow performatives since referring to what is not real. During the first part of the twentieth century, adherence to the dramatic text is translated as a sacrifice of theatre’s liveness. Consequently, theatrical mobility with the goal of changing this hegemonic hierarchy in theatre takes place. Employing languages other than speech has been the prime interest of such efforts which consider that Western theatre has been depleted by the logocentrism of speech and writing.
The journey towards the performative turn reflects diligent stops that have reshaped the theatrical experience. Numerous attempts generally aimed at the re-construction of theatrical relationships and style of presentation so as to modify the audiences’ receptive attitude. Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht are landmarks on the way. Artaud rejects speech as the prime language in Western theatre whereas Brecht calls for a stage that tells rather than shows. Both employ different techniques to enact their approaches. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty utilizes the power of space and lighting as new languages of theatre with the objective of defamiliarizing the quotidian experience secured by theatre. Brecht’s Epic theatre introduces the Verfremdungseffekt – estrangement strategies – to disrupt the continuation of the mimetic presentation giving ample time to the audience to reflect and decide on the represented story.
Analogous to the call for changing the process of theatrical production is another call for the dethronement of the playwright. A then growing interest in the independent character of language demonstrates the separation between the playwright and his product – the text. It starts with the intentional fallacy which states that there is no valid connection between the text and its producer since words do not exactly reflect a speaker’s intentions. Roland Barthes announces that the author is dead and that the text separately exists. Michael Foucault also admits that the act of writing terminates the presence of the author in the text to be replaced by what he calls the author function. Similarly, Wayne Booth expresses that the act of writing changes the author’s entity as the real person of the author is connected in no way to the implied author in his text. from another perspective, directors are believed to contribute to the decline of the author and the text from theatre. Avra Sidiropoulou, for instance, states that it has been directors’ obsession with the aura of creation and authority attributed to the author that they wanted to share. Almost unanimously, directors believe that they are in charge of the theatrical and that the role of the playwright ends once he finishes writing the play.
The rise of performance studies in the late 1960s crystallizes the tendency throughout the twentieth century to re-organize relationships which control the process of literary and theatrical productions as well as to admit new languages (rather than speech) into theatre. Western theatre, which has antiquely been domineered by a hierarchical relationship among its participants, foregrounds the dramatic text to pre-destine the performance; introduces the playwright as the owner of the meaning whereas the director has to faithfully translate it into the production; bestows onstage existence upon the actor through a fictional character and locates the audience in the role of the recipient of a completed formula. Trying to introduce different and new kinds of theatres, many playwrights and directors have carried out various trials in order to substitute for dramatic theatre. The call for an alternative goes parallel to literary and theatrical productions in the name of dramatic theatre; which intensifies a repulsive characteristic between text and performance. The fact that theatre has been taken over by literary studies becomes no longer acceptable among theatre practitioners who have initiated a fissure that sustains the test of time. The division between drama and performance highlights two wholly different perspectives. While drama foregrounds the script introduced by the playwright, performance emphasizes the ensemble. When drama enhances the production of a whole world, performance boosts the spontaneity of the moment. Theatre practices since the seventies of the twentieth century mark the base for the body of theatre that comes to be known in 2000 as Postdramatic theatre. Not only does Postdramatic theatre neglect the text and the playwright, but also has been able to reverse the dichotomy. Performance and the director possess vanguard position in the Postdramatic experience foregrounding intermediality, disorder and improvisation as basic conditions. Lehmann decides that Postdramatic theatre works in terms of the mechanics of startling. In this theatre, the body enjoys a considerable degree of vitality. The impact desired at the audience is one of shock and pain in contrast to dramatic theatre’s impact of relief. The sense of rivalry that defines the relationship between the dramatic text and performance has pushed both categories to the extreme that by the turn of the twenty-first century radical dramatic forms as well as radical performance forms are confirmed by critics to exist.
The onset of the third millennium offers an experience that is both disruptive and unprecedented due to the 9/11 attacks which launched a chain of military intervention as the United States of America has waged war on the countries she calls the ”Axis of Terror”. The global financial crisis in 2008 signals another influential economic event that has participated in reshaping international relations. On the other side, the introduction of the second generation of the internet in 2000 promotes interactivity as an innovative aspect of the post-millennial virtual experience by which it becomes available that internet users adapt their interface and output to their needs and desires or their input. Postdramatic theatre does not incorporate the political due to the static condition of the Postdramatic stage to deploy the event rather than the plot, as Lehmann expresses. Representation is most required when it comes to the political, yet the appositive ”no-longer dramatic” has been unanimously used to define theatre within the Postdramatic. In this respect, Lehmann’s comment that Postdramatic theatre is not able to contain the political becomes enlightening. The resurgence of political theatre forms in Britain is believed to display some reciprocal interest with the re-entry of the narrative. After years of being occupied by languages other than the verbal, the post-millennial theatre is showing an increasing inclination towards regaining the text its authority. The adjustments to which theatre has been working against constitute a new mode of presentation that invites the story in a new shade. This dissertation handles a different kind of theatre that has come into existence by the turn of the third millennium in Britain. The thesis demonstrates that Lehmann’s Postdramatic theatre has mutated into a Post-Postdramatic one that holds a comprehensive outlook towards theatre combining as thus characteristics of drama and performance.
In 2009, Patrice Pavice among others announces a theatrical shift from the Postdramatic to the Post-Postdramatic in what can be considered as re-dramatization of theatre based on the re-entry of the narrative in the first place. Such return to the narrative does not entail traditional dramatization, on the contrary, it comes in new attire. This new theatre, which differs from the ruling Postdramatic one, brings into focus a return to representation. It is noteworthy that such turnaround employs the story just as a frame, so Post-Postdramatic theatre extends Postdramatic theatre’s sacrifice of the time structure. In Post-Postdramatic theatre, the story sharply betrays the sequential pattern to the extent that the text is wrapped in a degree of bewilderment. The Post-Postdramatic text displays intersecting timeframes that simultaneity becomes one distinct feature. The interactive internet results in the creation of a plethora of lives that are parallel to what constitutes the real in the post-millennial years. Individuals do physically exist in one definite space and time, but the interactive internet enables individual presence across various realms that people freely move spatiotemporally in what is identified as the virtual. Simultaneous timeframes in the Post-Postdramatic sense, consequently, reflect on the hyperreality ascribed to the virtual condition in the post-millennial years by which individuals are present everywhere and anytime once they log in to the internet. This is believed to be intrinsically connected to Dan Rebellato’s definition of post-millennial living as ”in-between realities”. In contrast to Post-dramatic theatre, which emphasizes material presence and process, Post-Postdramatic theatre foregrounds absence. The Postdramatic accentuates the real moment so as to ensure its event-character whereas the Post-Postdramatic works on deeper levels of conception by which the audiences are confronted by a stage where representation is deconstructed because whatever is/occurs on stage does not interpret the mental image classified in their mind. This conceptual gap ignites cognition, re-cognition and perception on the emotional level and engenders a visceral impact on the audiences that is believed to surpass the dramatic and the Post-dramatic ones. The Post-Postdramatic summons consequently the mind and the body in a way that transcends the ”Cartesian” divide. Henceforth, the Post-Postdramatic reconciles the text and the performance in what can be called the theatrical text; a new type of text that Sidiropoulou explains as performance-embedded. This new theatre works in terms of dialogism and participation instead of conflict and dialectic relations.
Entitled Post-Postdramatic Practices in selected British Plays by David Hare, Tim Crouch, debbie tucker green and Caryl Churchill, this thesis foregrounds theatrical practices on the British post-millennial stage. The thesis covers the period between 2004 and 2012; which is believed to catch up with the first waves of Post-Postdramatic theatre in Britain. These eight years coincide with the factors that have redrawn the face of the world since 2000. Theatre is re-investigating the relationship between art and society in the light of new conditions. The thesis examines the rise of Post-Postdramatic theatre in Britain through the examination of four British plays that belong to the first and second decades of the twenty-first century. Each of the four plays sets an example of a strand that defines the Post-Postdramatic. The rise of verbatim theatre captures the political moment at the turn of the new century as apparent in David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004). The concept of new authorship that marks the return of the playwright – with his text – is reflected in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree (2005). debbie tucker green’s truth and reconciliation (2011) reports the emergence of the concept of ethical spectatorship in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Post-millennial playwrighting demonstrates distinguished changes that build on the gains of the Postdramatic experience; an issue quite highlighted in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) where the new text seizes virtuality, hypermediacy and devising. The production of the playwrights under discussion regularly shows innovation and peculiarity. David Hare, born in 1947, is mostly identified as the historian of the British contemporary moment. Tim Crouch, born in 1964, has been able to re-define theatre in terms of the Postdramatic and is acclaimed for radical dramaturgies that involve new forms of spectatorship. debbie tucker green, whose impact is acknowledged to resemble Sarah Kane’s, incarnates the new British national identity which summons the diversely ethnic and the globally integrated. Caryl Churchill, born 1938, positively contributes to the British stage as introducing a new writing formula by which the theatrical production is enabled to activate dialogism and participation among the three key partners in the process: the playwright, the ensemble and the spectators. It is meant that these playwrights belong to different, sometimes contradictory, moments in theatre and in life. The gap that separates the playwrights is believed to be truly bridged by their Post-Postdramatic treatment. The theatre that unites them displays a reconciliatory outlook concerning text, performance and theatre components in general.
The objective of this dissertation is to study the post-millennial intersection between text and performance in theatre and how they interact as partners to initiate a post-millennial model that incorporates the playwright together with spectators’ empowerment. It is then proposed that this is a realization of a wish made back in the early 1990s; to offer a theatre that complimentarily moves among the seams of drama, script, performance and theatre. These seams which have been decided as demarcating by Schechner in the 1960s are believed to be unifying in the Post-Postdramatic experience. The thesis handles one of the challenging and taxing issues in theatre. In spite of showing steadfast progress, Post-Postdramatic theatre withstands the persisting partiality of some groups clinging to the radically breaching dichotomy of text and performance with its entailed discriminatory separations. Henceforth, it is believed that the Post-Postdramatic is rerouting theatre to regain the originality of its genre in the light of the contemporary away from both the fossilized dramatic forms and the no-longer dramatic ones that has boldly taken off the frame. Carlson’s belief that theatre degenerates into life by removing that frame is quite relevant here. This study displays considerable significance due to its attempt at deciding the features of this theatrical transition. Being a study of how it is presented rather than what is presented, this thesis introduces an analytic treatment of the four plays under question within the theoretical framework of Lehmann’s Postdramatic theatre. The study incorporates criticism viewpoints delivered by prestigious theoreticians like Sidiropoulou, Pavis, Schechner, Heuvel and Féral. This dissertation traces the emergence of what can be called a new theatre text rather than a dramatic or performance one.
The thesis is composed of an introduction, four analytic chapters and a conclusion. The introduction exposes the theoretical background that leads up to Post-Postdramatic theatre starting from the avant garde of the twentieth century. It also comes in contact with Post-Postdramatic theatre’s intersection with the Postdramatic one. The introduction tries to elaborate on the origin of the text/performance dichotomy as well as the movement from the dramatic to the Post-dramatic theatre. Lehmann’s Postdramatic theatre is studied as the point of departure for the Post-Postdramatic showing the connection between the Postdramatic and the avant-garde. The introduction presents the research questions which the dissertation attempts to answer. The peculiarity of the British theatre is illustrated as departing the Postdramatic – in the pre-millennial years – for the sake of keeping the playwright within the theatrical space.
Chapter one; Documenting the Now: Stuff Happens (2004), exposes the methods which enabled David Hare to deconstruct the officially represented narrative of the War on Iraq in 2003. The play depicts the preparatory stages of the War in the light of international and local relations. Hare introduces a counter-narrative based on mixing fact-based theatre with the playwright’s imagination in a way that demonstrates the War on Iraq as pre-emptive rather than coercive. The dialogue in the play is mainly made up of the real words and speeches of the represented politicians, yet the private conversations are the playwright’s. The quasi-verbatim Stuff Happens, as Hare describes it, opens up for a post-millennial documentary theatre that captures the post-truth period characteristic of the first decade in the twenty-first century. It is in this chapter that the post-millennial documentary theatre – verbatim theatre, more precisely – displays a change in perspective where the document-as-the-record is being departed. In other words, the factual is no longer the validity criterion in the documentary because the post-millennial offers a new concept of truth as subjective. Obviously, Hare employs narratorial features that work on preventing the continuity of the fictional presentation of the featured politicians. The play introduces various interpretations of the War that the audiences are able to re-think and decide. The counter-narrative structure provided by the play illustrates that there are different and renewable opportunities awaiting the political theatre in the third millennium. The disruption of the fictional narrative in the play prevents the emotional bundle of the dramatic theatre to take place and emphasizes the synchronous awareness on the part of both the actors and the audience of the simultaneous real present, fictional present and the past that occur onstage.
Chapter two; New Authorship: Author, Spectauthor and Co-creation:
An Oak Tree (2005), examines the post-millennial practice of authorship in theatre and Crouch’s strategies to run the theatrical process from the page to the stage. This chapter studies Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree which takes the empathic story of the loss of a daughter as a starter by which Crouch negotiates serious issues related to the nature of theatre, its form and content within the post-millennial experience. Chapter two foregrounds the post-millennial concept of the ”super-author” which regains full authority to the playwright who writes the pre-determining text, is an actor in the play and sometimes partakes in directing. The post-millennial playwright, as thus, performs several roles within the artistic experience. Crouch appropriately fits as a super-author for writing, acting and directing the play. In this respect, this chapter investigates Crouch’s trial to reshape the face of theatre and the relationship between theatre and the audiences liberating the audience into activity rather than agency. from another perspective, the concept of ”spectauthor” is one strategy enforced by the playwright to re-write audience participation. The spectauthor transforms the spectator from interpretation to physical participation; henceforth, partaking in the final shape of the play. The chapter also highlights the play’s play with the structure of time to disrupt the completion of the narrative-like pattern. By the end of chapter two, it is evident that the post-millennial playwright possesses different strategies that avail his/her continual presence within the performance. Additively, the post-millennial text displays deeper levels of indeterminacy.
Chapter three, Ethical Spectatorship and Global Communitas: truth and reconciliation (2011), introduces ethical spectating by which the spectators are turned into moral witnesses ready for social action. truth and reconciliation non-linearly presents stories of five international atrocities which foregrounds global precarity and lack of solidarity as important post-millennial concerns. Media transmission of calamities overseas shares into flattening the spiritual as the spectators are accustomed to scenes of worldwide suffering leading, respectively, to an ”adiaphorizing” effect where the spectators show indifference. The play promotes theatre of witness through the use of the ”reflexive interview” to depart the reiteration of traumatizing stories that victimize the bereaved. Despite the fact that the play is embedded in the fictional (using fictional characters and content), the spectators are continuously reminded of the blurred contours between the fictional and the real through the visceral elements of the event. The playwright spatiotemporally locates the audiences by strategies like the empty chair, carving the names of the victims on the walls of the theatre, tagging some seats with names of the real witnesses and adding the name of the country and the date of the event at the beginning of each vignette. This chapter traces ethical spectatorship as the post-millennial conceptual replacement of dramatic catharsis.
Chapter four, Playful Writing: Love and Information (2012), explains that Churchill’s playwrighting defines post-millennial theatrical language as non-referential; which annihilates the continuation of narration adding shades of ambiguity that appropriate the virtual into the text. Love and Information deals with knowledge accumulation as a post-millennial obsession. The ”networked self” is the subject matter of Churchill’s play which highlights individuals who are pressurized by the post-millennial requirement of excess information and at the same time monitor themselves to optimally perform in the manner of the universal serial bus (USB). It becomes apparent in Love and Information that Churchill handles writing structurally and textually. The form and structure of the play copy the post-millennial condition of hypermediacy where the performed real is not the real as the real has engulfed the virtual. The play unfolds in a ”windowed style” that transposes the audiences among a variety of life frames. On the other side, the play emphasizes a decontextualized presentation of language where there are no interlocutors and the scenes start at the middle of the situation. Churchill’s treatment, from another perspective, reshapes devising theatre as the production team is left with nothing but the scripted words. In this way, the playwright extends her authorial presence to the performance.
The situation in Britain has been permanently different from Europe and America. In my interview with the renowned Marvin Carlson in 2018, Carlson constantly affirms that the American theatre has always been conservative as devoted to the realist path adding that Postdramatic forms have continuously shown up in events of a fringy character. As far as I can tell, this is ironical since the first performance studies academic department is launched in America. Compared to British theatre, the European one demonstrates more ambitious transitional phases from the dramatic to the Postdramatic as a shift of broad spectrum transposes the European audience into performance which abstains from all dramatic orthodoxies. It has never been the same in Britain. Aleks Sierz expresses that the British stage has never relinquished its awe towards the playwright and the text, so clear cut transitional phases can hardly be tracked on the British stage. On the other hand, New Writing, which has stepped in to include the period between the late 1950s and the late 1990s, reflects prominent changes in theatre perspectives. Such changes range from embracing themes of more contemporary interests to employing neologisms and slangs in theatrical speech. Sierz’ in-yer-face theatre, which is a theatre of shock that bluntly and overtly exposes taboos, violence, nudity and obscenity on the stage, becomes the overarching treatment in the 1990s. Even, many critics use the term New Brutalism as a descriptor of this condition. Élisabeth Angel-Perez comments, in 2013, that the ”in-yer-face” of the 1990s theatre becomes the ”in-yer-ear” theatre of the 2000s.
In Post-Postdramatic theatre, the text is re-integrated within the theatrical production and its role is no longer restricted to being a pre-text since both the script and the performance are brought into the written text. It is the simultaneity of experiences offered by the PPDT text that confirms the post-millennial text as neither the real nor the fictional. While Postdramatic theatre emphasizes presence and the material, Post-Postdramatic theatre is concerned with process and absence. Post-millennial plays stretch the limits of form and are not confined by the laws of space and time. Post-Postdramatic playwrighting sets different worlds in simultaneity rather than in conflict. Post-Postdramatic theatre transcends the now/real to incorporate the virtual and the hypermediated thus departing the limits of physicality. Eventually, Post-Postdramatic theatre encourages dialogism by which participation replaces dialectics. As a result, theatre departs interpretation and foregrounds multiplicity through capturing the post-millennial virtual situation.