With a Foreword by Dan Rebellato, this book offers up a detailed exploration of Scottish playwright David Greig’s work with particular attention to globalization, ethics, and the spectator. It makes the argument that Greig’s theatre works by undoing, cracking, or breaking apart myriad elements to reveal the holed, porous nature of all things. Starting with a discussion of Greig’s engagement with shamanism and arguing for holed theatre as a response to globalization, for Greig’s works’ politics of aesthethics, and for the holed spectator as part of an affective ecology of transfers, this book discusses some of Greig’s most representative political theatre from Europe (1994) to The Events (2013), concluding with an exploration of Greig’s theatre’s world-forming quality.
Author(s): Verónica Rodríguez
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: Cham
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: A Shamanic Semionaut
David Greig
The Scenes from the World: Dialectical Engagement
Holes, Holed Theatre and This Book’s Structure
Chapter 2 Holed Theatre as Response to Globalization
Framing Globalization in Greig
Theatre and Globalization: From Cosmopolitanism to Cosmospolitanism
Globalization in Greig’s Theatre
Theatre, Globalization and Aesthetics: State of the Nation?
Critiquing Containment: Undone Time, Place and Character
Conclusive Remarks: The Politics of Form(s)
Chapter 3 From Ethics to the Politics of Aesthethics
When Ethics Meets Aesthetics
Aesthethics: Reality, Holed Mimesis and Wounded Aesthetic Strategies
Conclusive Remarks: Troumatised Theatre, Bleeding Across and Confounding
Chapter 4 Affect and the Holed Spectator: Ecology of Transfers
“Not-Yetness”, “Affect Turns Turning” and Infinite Shades to Affect
Towards a Theory of Holes
From the Holed Spectator to Holed Work
The “Emotional Physics of Space on Stage”: From Holed Work to Holed World
Transfers: Zāhir and Bātin or Concrete/Inconcrete and Making Real
Conclusive Remarks: Perforating Acts
Chapter 5 Europe: Globalization’s Inferiors
War, Globalising Pressures and Uneven Mobilities
Confoundings
Conclusive Remarks: Towards (Elsew)here
Chapter 6 The Architect: Blowing up Architectures of Power
Architectures of the City: “First-World” Town(Ships) and Their (Un)Desirables
Architectures of the Self: Inclination, Common Responsibility, Escape, Sickness, Damage, Sex and Search for Signals
The Architect’s Architecture: Fragmented Form, Space and Dialectics
Conclusive Remarks: Explosion, Applause and “Beyond the Known”
Chapter 7 The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union: “All This Fucking Beautiful Stuff”
Unpacking the Play’s Title
A Spatial Epic: Above-Below and Across
Spatial Oddities
Conclusive Remarks: Strokes in the Sky/Explosions on the Ground
Chapter 8 San Diego: Stitching Up the Globe
Greig in San Diego
The Scenes from the World
The Space/Place of “Our” Town
Stitching-Up
Conclusive Remarks: Blue Guides, Blue Scars, Blue Birds in “This” Town
Chapter 9 The American Pilot: A Precarious Restoration to “the Real”
Precariously Disturbing the Monopoly of the Sky by the US
Transferring Unreality to “THE AMERICAN”
Circuits of Affect, New Semiotic Environments and the “Undead Dead”
Animated: Posthumous Monologues
Animated: Characters on Stage Throughout
Holes in the Monologue-Dialogue Dialectical Structure
Holes in the Stepping In-Stepping Out of Character Dialectic
Conclusive Remarks: Precariously Breaking into the Affective Circuit
Chapter 10 Damascus: Trouma
From Trauma to Trouma
Paul: “It’s Me When I First Went to Syria”
Zakaria: “To Break My Life, Only a Little”
Elena and a Stage Direction: The Monological and Abstraction
Elena: “I Am Always Here”
“The TV Shows News Images of the Current Situation”: Re-situations
Conclusive Remarks: “Trouma” Binds Us Together
Chapter 11 Fragile: Sharing Doing and Spatial Transcorporeality
An Atypical “Duologue”: Caroline’s and Jack’s Openness
Caroline: Sharing Doing
Jack: Transcorporeal Spatiality
Some A/Effects: Visibility, Audibility, “Project!”
Conclusive Remarks: Austerity Spring and Writing, Staging and Becoming “Here”
Chapter 12 The Events: Confounding Spacecraft—Here
Bounded “Categories”/Characters/the Boy: The Perpetrator
Bounded “Categories”/Characters/Claire: The Survivor
Bounded “Categories”/Characters/A Choir: The Victims
Bounded “Categories”/Characters/Repetiteur: The (Also Killed?) Pianist
Bounded “Categories”/Setting and Time: A “Room” in “Fife”
Bounded “Categories”/Story and Structure
The Boy’s Confounding: Responsibility, Casting, Bleeding Across and Masculinity
Claire’s Confounding: Possible Worlds Theory and “Category” Confounding
A Choir’s Confounding: Positing Across
Repetiteur’s and the Stage Manager’s Confounding: The Witnesses? The Carers?
Confoundings/Room, Stage, World: Rehearsing the Space-Time Continuum
Confoundings/Story and Play: Brokenness/Exposed Wound
Dialectics/Tearing a Hole Through Everything
The Confounded Spectator
Conclusive Remarks: Europe, Europe and “We Are All (in a Cracked) Here”
Chapter 13 Conclusion: World-Forming Theatre
Holed Theatre
Architectures of Undoing and a Journey into “Here”
But Where Shall We Go to Today, My Dear?/Outsiders and Outsidedness
Conjuring Here
“They Hold Hands”: Precarious Recompositions and Women Are the Future
The Unchosen Multiple Together
Index
