Character presentation in Tim Crouch’s and Simon Stephens’s works addresses the changing modes of subjectivity and human relations in media--‐saturated, late--‐capitalist culture. Their common interest in the concept of character and undermining aspects of traditional dramatic characterisation and acting, manifests itself mostly through different motives and formal strategies that relate to different as well as shared interests in the contemporary mediatised subject.
Crouch’s play texts are based on dramatic plays with structured time and three--‐ dimensional characters that exclude the real in favour of representing a fictional world. On stage, Crouch destabilises this model of characterisation mainly by laying bare the mechanics of theatrical creation and character presentation. This metatheatrical attitude, however, does not engender complete disengagement from representation. Rather, Crouch presents fictional and real realms and subjects together through continual vacillation without leading to any fixed position. This chapter has argued that this liminal state situates the character/actor as a fluid hybrid, implying a link to the unstable, heterogeneous subjectivity of contemporary
humans. References to mediatised society through television culture or through the use of video recording, television or earpiece help to support this reading.
Hovering between the subject positions manifests both dramatic and postdramatic tendencies. On the one hand, the actor builds a character; on the other, he/she is ‘no longer the actor of a role but a performer offering his/her presence on stage for contemplation.’182 However, it would be wrong to limit Crouch’s works to any one category because the character/actor hybrid, which could be considered a postdramatic category, is situated within the framework of a dramatic narrative. What is important about his approach, in the context of this thesis, is the questions it generates about subjectivity, the critical implications of the hybrid subject, as well as its influence on perception. The character/actor hybrid can unsettle the audience’s entrenched assumptions about the theatrical process and the representation of humans in theatre. It situates the audience in a liminal state of uncertainty since there is no definitive realm or subject position to relate to. Crouch does not offer an ‘actorly’ actor, ‘los[ing] sight of [herself/himself] behind a veil of indulgence.’183 Instead, he highlights the ‘actorly--‐ness’184 of the actor through the interaction between the actor and the character and by blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the ‘real’ subject positions. The indeterminacy invites the audience into a collaborative experience, namely, to step in to ‘fill in the blanks’185 and form their own critical associations, or perhaps merely to acknowledge the blanks and let them remain as such. The involvement of the audience in the meaning--‐making process generates a sense of self--‐awareness, a form of consciousness of their ‘audience--‐ness’. This awareness, along with the unsettling lack of an identifiable unified character, may potentially lead the audience to question their own subjective position in contemporary culture where the grand narrative of subjectivity has dissolved into a fluid, other--‐directed, multiple self.
Unlike Crouch’s texts, Pornography destabilises some of the fundamental constituents of the dramatic genre such as the centrality of dialogue, linear narrative, congruity between character and language, and three--‐dimensional characterisation. The restructuring of the character/actor relationship starts in the no--‐longer--‐dramatic text, which proposes to ‘prevent the actor from inhabiting a role in a psychological--‐realist manner’.186 Such texts refuse to provide a definitive portrayal of the characters, and ‘it is often impossible even to tell from the
182 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 135.
183 Crouch in Caridad Svich, ‘Tim Crouch’s Theatrical Transformations: A Conversation with Caridad Svich’ <http://www.hotreview.org/articles/timcrouchinterv.htm> [15 January 2011]
184 Crouch in Svich, ‘Tim Crouch’s Theatrical Transformations’.
185 Adam J. Ledger, “Does What?’: Acting, Directing, and Rehearsing Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies’, New Theatre
Quarterly, 26: 2 (2010), 121 – 132, (pp. 131).
186 Karen Jürs--‐Munby, ‘Postdramatic Performing’, Performance Research Lexicon, 11: 3 (2007), 95--‐98 (pp. 98).
structure. Pornography presents a more direct critique of contemporary culture through its thematic content, which reinforces critical references to the mediatised world. The play’s unattributed and fragmented form, which rethinks characters as incomplete and unspecified figures disconnected from one another, reinforces its thematic engagement with individualisation, isolation and the objectification of humans.
Stephens’s text undermines dramatic illusion and challenges directorial and performative traditions. On stage, the fragmented and anonymous structure is emphasised through actors who deliver the text and take on the fictional personae in a detached and somewhat incongruous manner. The form of the play and its productions produce uncertainty on the audience’s part about the identity and subjectivity of the characters since they refuse to represent the human as an identifiable unified self. The dramaturgical and staging strategies along with the thematic content increase audience awareness and encourage them to consider their own subjectivity and relations. The radicalisation of characterisation serves as a critical tool, an inventive way of mapping the phenomenology of being in the mediatised world.
Crouch and Stephens challenge the liberal humanist concept of character, which is no longer able to meet the changing experience of subjectivity. Their models do not argue for the end of ‘character,’ nor ‘bemoan the lack of an already defined image of the human being’.188 Rather, they rupture and rethink the representation of the human in theatre, and propose new possibilities for addressing the contemporary subject. The formal and critical workings and implications of characterisation suggest compelling forms of critical engagement with mediatised culture and the subject. Rather than portraying the human condition merely through direct thematisation of mediatised subjectivity and social relations, Crouch’s and Stephens’s formal strategies accommodate the hybridity, fluidity, plurality of contemporary subjectivity, the alienation and apathy of the subject, and the frailty of human relations. The innovative aesthetics of representation take theatrical boundaries beyond the existing rules and expectations of the audience to enhance their critical horizons while inviting them to reflect on their own subjectivity in relation to the phenomenon of the mediatised self.
187 Ibid., p. 98.