CONSERVACIÓN IN VITRO

This workshop helped me focus my writing in the right direction. The young people had found a way to join the theory explained to them to the practice engaged with in the workshop, aiming all along to investigate politically sensitive theatre making in an ethical way, through the lens of the conceptual framework, thus reconciling the practice carried out to my main research question. I was committed to the crafting of a dramatic form that created a link between Müller’s stylistic atomization to the literal explosion of the bomb on the night of the 22nd May 2017, and to let all the words of the verbatim pieces I had transcribed be remainders of the explosion and of the people who had survived, but had suffered physical and emotional losses. The dramatic form to be used in my play also had to capture and replay the problematics of linear reporting in tragedies, of which the Manchester attack was a notable case. The multitude of voices that rose during the days following the attack made it hard for people who were “spectators” (online, via the national news, or via witnesses of the tragedy) to identify a narrative that was descriptive of the events but did not serve any ideological agendas (islamophobia, pro-Brexit propaganda, racism and xenophobia). The atomization of the dramatic form would have also represented the fragmented news bites, the partiality of and unstableness of reporting emerging and developing catastrophic public events. The explosion, the broken survivors, the missing people, the identified bodies, the attacker, the supporters, the wave of hatred and fear – I wanted these plots to co-exist in the paradox of the play (which Woolf states exists by the dichotomy of different axis interfering parallaxically with each other), that interfered with time, space and character, and that Lehmann would describe as a “theatre of partial perspectives and stuttering answers that remain works in

progress”242_{. This fragmentation, however, is not only a circumstantial choice, but}

also a social and political choice: “his fragmented structures and characters and dense intertextuality […] exacerbate the problem of interpretation, while also positing an apocalyptic vision of the present and of the future.”243 Amid the fragmented voices, however, I wanted to return to a persistent and understood dramatic device: a recurring character that would bring together the many fragmentations of the performances and would restore the social memory244 of the event, relying on their performances and challenging the audience’s “thoughts of events that they may or may not have witnessed”245. In Peter Campbell’s essay, a section is dedicated to Müller’s writings about the dead characters of history. He explains that “what we need is the future and not the eternity of the moment. […] One has to accept the presence of the dead as dialogue partners or dialogue-disturbers – the future will emerge only out of dialogue with the dead.”246 After reading Müller’s stance on those characters that had been left voiceless, I realised that Saffie-Rose Roussous, the youngest victim of the attack, could have been represented as a constant figure (Girl One) to guide the audience through the maze of voices that the play contained. Again, Stuart-Fisher’s work on differentiating speaking for and speaking on behalf of others247 was helpful, as it made

242 _{Brandon Woolf, “Towards a Paradoxically Parallaxical Postdramatic Politics?”, in Postdramatic}

Theatre and the Political, loc. 44, Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll and Steve Giles,

London:Bloomsbury, 2013, online edition available at http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/theatre- crafts/postdramatic-theatre-and-the-political-iid-115146/ba-9781408183519-00001

243 _{Peter A. Campbell, “Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth and Text”, Modern Drama, 51:1}

(Spring 2008).

244 _{Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real, “After the fact: memory, experience, technology”, p. 59, 2013.} 245 _Ibidem.

246 _{Peter A. Campbell, “Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth and Text”, Modern Drama, 51:1}

(Spring 2008).

247 _{Amanda Stuart-Fisher, ‘That's who I'd be, if I could sing’: Reflections on a verbatim project with}

my practice aware of what it needed to look out for to remain ethical and avoid “eradicating the alterity of the other”248.

This careful re-work of the play meant a new script249, adapted to the views the young people expressed in the workshop, but also drawn upon Müller’s style, Vinaver’s construction and Lehmann’s theories on Postdramatic theatre. A script that would “threaten reality, [which is] surely [theatre’s] most political function”250_{. Inspired by}

Müller’s writing and Postdramatic theatre theory overall, I edited the script to be shaped as a parallaxical universe, where the political existed as an interruption of the narration rather than part of it, with its own circular structure251, threatening reality by working in an anti-chronological order and revolving around the story and journey of ‘Girl One’. The pressure to reproduce the event of the attack was eradicated from my mind, and I could distance myself from forms of reproduction that would not make the experience political.