Modern Drama

The article addresses the possibility of undermining the globality of the theatrum mundi metaphor and examines that globality in relation to the structure and ideological implications of the comédie des comédiens. The metaphor of the world as a stage has been around since ancient times, as has its globalizing thrust – turning the world into a theatrical community and blurring cultural differences. The metaphor's hierarchic value, its being a paradigm of power relations, and its oscillation between depicting the world as governed by logos and describing it as illusory are inherent characteristics. In its sociological manifestations, the metaphor's hierarchic impulse is supplanted by analyses of social interaction, blurring cultural pluralism in support of a perspective that views some social structures as universal. A duplication in which the theatre is a micro-cosmos that doubles the larger cosmos, theatre-within-theatre reflects a global outlook. However, this metatheatrical strategy, in a contemporary form of comédies des comédiens, can be used for intentional intercultural junctions. This is most evident when directors supplement productions of canonic foreign plays with local, contemporary variations, in an attempt to touch on current events. The article presents two Israeli cases of such supplementing: L'Avare, directed by Michael Gurevitch at the Jerusalem Khan Theater (2003) and Back to the Tempest, directed by Igal Ezraty at the Arab–Hebrew Theater in Jaffa, Tel Aviv (2005). It shows how, in both productions, the supplement that turns the play into a contemporary version of comédies des comédiens serves cultural appropriation as it points to local power relations, while at the same time the metaphor's global residue persists and ideological, local, and temporal differences are denied. This results in a liminal, local–global – glocalized – theatrical space.

The theatricality of the psychotherapeutic encounter has been evident since its origins: Freud complained in 1914 that the patient in the grip of transference-love "gives up her symptoms or pays no attention to them; indeed, she declares that she is well. There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality – as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical performance" ("Observations on Transference-Love"). In the century that followed Freud's observation, the theatre has shown a reciprocal interest in the dramatic possibilities of psychotherapy – the imbalances of power, incomplete access to knowledge and history, and confessional styles of narrative revelation. This theatrical interest in the dynamics of therapy is particularly striking in that it inevitably becomes self-reflexive, an examination of the negotiation of power, knowledge, and autonomy between therapist and patient, analyst and analysand, that ultimately uncovers anxieties about the spectator–actor relationship. In this article, three works from the millennial moment in the United Kingdom and Ireland – Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, and Conor McPherson's Shining City – reveal a shifting conception of how psychotherapy works as a theatrical and a metatheatrical device. Kane and Penhall's plays are produced in a historical context in Britain that is equally sceptical about the institutions of psychiatry and the idealism of anti-psychiatry, and McPherson's characters inhabit an Ireland caught in the ambiguous space between the sanitized, globalized conventions of weekly psychotherapy and the ghostly consolations and convictions of spirituality. All three plays suggest that psychotherapy in drama can function metaphorically and metatheatrically by leading us to examine how performances of identity, narrative-making, and interpretation play out both in the theatre and in life.

Noël Coward's most famous plays fit closely with Sontag's description of the primary attributes of camp: flippant, stylized, ironic and self-consciously theatrical, artificial. But where Sontag defines the camp sensibility as disengaged and depoliticized, this article argues that Coward deploys a form of linguistic camp to destabilize judgements and challenge orthodoxies. As his characters switch rapidly and seamlessly among different linguistic registers and their associated sets of values and assumptions, any sense of normative or self-evident values is dissipated. Coward singled out Harold Pinter from all the "new wave" dramatists of the fifties and sixties, admiring him as a genuine original using language brilliantly and describing him as a "sort of Cockney Ivy Compton-Burnett." Pinter and Compton-Burnett share Coward's particular form of linguistic camp, and their characters can be seen to deploy it to similar disruptive ends, unsettling moral and sexual judgements and challenging orthodoxy's claim to normality.

This essay looks at the way Jamaican Sistren Theatre Collective's work and public image were shaped during the 1970s and 1980s to meet the needs of political and development agency agendas. During the Democratic Socialist Manley government's eight years in office (1972–80), community groups such as Sistren were encouraged by the government to establish "aesthetic spaces," to quote Augusto Boal, in which the oppression experienced by disadvantaged Jamaicans could be discussed and theatricalized. With the change of government in 1980, support for community-development projects waned and pressure was placed on Sistren to find external avenues of funding, invariably from development agencies. Under the weight of development-agency demands, among them the establishing of a business enterprise to achieve "self-sufficiency," Sistren's "aesthetic space" collapsed. Sistren Theatre Collective, then, can be read as both a narrative of success and one of failure.

In her three women-and-madness plays, Beside Herself, Head-Rot Holiday, and The Madness of Esme and Shaz, Sarah Daniels presents conflicting views of female madness. While she is critical of a society that labels women's anger or refusal to conform as madness, she goes beyond the simplistic view of women's madness as misogyny to show the severe psychological pain suffered by women who have been the victims of verbal, physical, and particularly, sexual abuse. Healing from this type of abuse, Daniels suggests, is only possible through homosocial bonds with other women. Moments where women remain silenced and even complicit in the patriarchal systems and cycles of abuse that oppress, harm, and stifle all women are contrasted in these plays with those moments in which there is potential for change through speech and through women's support of one another, and it is through this contrast, through both the presence and the absence or subversion of testimony and community in these plays, that Daniels appeals to her audience and stresses that the only way forward for women who have endured such trauma is the establishment of an attentive and supportive female community.

Since its heyday among playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, the genre of "tragic farce" has continued to interest playwrights, both in France and around the world, as a means of dramatizing such existential concerns as the fragility of identity, the relativity of truth, the plurality of meaning, and the isolated condition of the individual in the modern, technocratic world. Contemporary French dramatists, Michel Azama and Hervé Blutsh, are two such play-wrights. They represent voices from what Patrice Pavis has identified as a "new generation" of playwrights who, in recent decades, have moved French theatre beyond a strict adherence to any one particular ideological influence, including Existentialism and Absurdism, and who have instead moved it into a period of "interpellation."

Drawing on Althuser's psychoanalytic understanding of the term, which views "interpellation" as "the central operation by which ideology assigns to the individual human being an identity as a subject/object" (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism 158–59), this article argues that, through their interpellation of ideology, this new generation of play-wrights is forcing the contemporary French stage to look into the "Lacanian mirror" in a perpetual process of self-discovery and self-refinement. It argues that this "age of interpellation" reflects a larger trend in French literature in general, known as auto-fiction – a fiction whose creation is based on "facts" and that serves as a conduit into the subconscious. Ultimately, through a close reading of two contemporary tragic farces, Azama's Croisades and Blutsch's Anatole Felde, "interpellative theatre" is seen as being left to grapple with a whole host of simultaneous paradoxes as it attempts to "subject" itself in a contemporary context, caught between the polarities of ambiguity and polyvalence, absolutism and relativity, singularity and pluralism, globalization and cultural identity.