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I have attempted a reading of Aristotle in terms of mimesis, ethos, mythos, lexis, hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, catharsis and anamnesis - as an existential “being there” (Dasein) of the characters’ freedom and actual historicity - in three of my plays in which I performed or witnessed in productions in England, Wales, three Scandinavian countries, the U.S. and South Africa. I have analysed other Southern African “womanist” performative drama and feminist theatre. I assume with the ancient Greeks that in serious theatre there is theoria, an educated, discursive looking, which involves a dialectics of logos in dianoia intertwined in the mythos – ethical truth in the discourse of the plot. Whilst aesthetics cannot be reduced to psychobiography, creative writing is motivated in part by the author’s and the dramatic subjects’ psychoanalytically understood personal and political unconscious placed in the ethos – the character on the stage. The aesthetics of tragedy relate to both peripeteia (reversals) and anagnorisis (recognition of responsibility) which occur within an arc of development, crisis and denouement of the vicissitudes of purported wisdom in understanding how performative drama and critical theatre have been presented in what has become known as The Struggle in a post-apartheid South Africa and post-colonial Zimbabwe by comparison with historical conditions in South America, India, even China. The values of nous, phronesis and sophia, intuitive, practical and interpretative wisdom are connected to the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics with which the tragic-comic hero and his Other are imbued or violate. The post-structuralist aesthetic as developed in the literary theory of the twentieth century is essentially the interaction of synchronic and diachronic language emerging from the signifiance and the semiosis of the chora (the feminine or maternal unconscious) within the de-familarisation techniques of Russian and Czech Formalism. This provides a creative and meaningful limit to a consciousness of being-white and beingblack- in-the-world against disempowering Nothingness or perceived Otherness threatening moral beings. Nothingness and the Other are characterised magically and as witch-craft in oral-cultures which deny the unconscious and resort to paranoia and persecution of Otherness in the subject projected onto the other – the “colonial personality”. Shades of Brown has been re-written as Jannie Veldsman – A Film 8 Scenario and I have incorporated into a revised The Cape Orchard a retrospective anticipation of the coming of the new South Africa. I reflect on what tragic drama on the stage and in real life in South Africa means now that the new South Africa is over its honeymoon period and faces serious problems of failed governance. Within the dialectic of an enlightened rabbinical morality of Hillel the Elder (“What is hateful to you do not do to others….” and “If I am not for myself who will be for me…?”) and Kant’s categorical imperative of human beings as a priori ends, I follow the fortunes of an old Jewish veteran of The Struggle, dating back to the Defiance Campaign of 1952/3. Fugard’s work is exemplary in fostering a sense of Sartre’s Nothingness and nihilation which “haunts” Being and is the space of undecidability in relation to my condition of freedom allowing the transcendence of Being. Being asserts reparation and redemption in the face of the depressive and paranoid subject/object split in the subject’s being-in-the-world. Plays ideally submerge this existentialist, psychoanalytic and Aristotelian dramaturgy in the form of Kierkegaard’s faith and Nietzsche’s will which are part of the Encompassing in Karl Jasper’s metaphysics - the residue of a Judaeo-Christian ethics facing the anomie and aporia of the postmodern. The new South Africa was only ostensibly built on Greek and Judaeo- Christian secular ethics – “truth and reconciliation”. It inherited state, revolutionary and criminal violence, as well as a sophisticated economic infrastructure, masspoverty and a segregated educational, social and welfare system which in the milieu of ANC incompetence and corruption have for the very poor got worse but to the benefit of a new African oligarchy, the beneficiaries of a dysfunctional affirmative action policy. What is to be done? Irigaray’s striking metaphor “the speculum of the Other woman” suggests that we are reflected by the instrument we use for investigating what may be Other to us: “we” are westerners trying to live in Africa. “We” are Other – not as autochthonous as the African majority. But the autochthonous can also behave as Other and may even fail to recognise the Other in themselves. Franz Fanon’s “colonial personality”, like ex-president Thabo Mbeki, misunderstands the colonial Other in himself which, disastrously, he projects and attacks in the imaginary and persecutory Other, only to suffer the return of the Real, as do the dramatic fictions Van Tonder in Shades of Brown, Dianne Cupido in The Cape Orchard and Harry Grossman the old man’s son in The Zulu and the Zeide (inspired by a short story by Dan Jacobson). 9 The Russian and Czech Formalists and Structuralists show us how to foreground the Real through techniques of de-familiarisation which can be applied to modernist and post-modernist “womanist” performance drama and feminist theatre. Defamilarisation, especially in an Africa struggling between failed and successful colonialism and often ruled by more or less corrupt elites, sensitizes us to a moral nihilism which characterises the failed African state - described by Conrad as a “heart of darkness” transcended in aletheia – being oneself in the self-showing light of one’s ethos operating through a personal and political unconscious mystified in the rhetoric of oral-cultures. Playwrights such as Yael Farber, Fraser Grace, Aletta Bezuidenhout and Fatima Dike express a semiosis of the unconscious and the signifiance and “absurdity” of logos suggesting that all is not lost in post-apartheid Southern Africa as regards human values, whilst struggling with the political correctness demanded in The Struggle. A partially successful colonialism in parts of Africa could within a British education system, produce a Wole Soyinka who transcends the propaganda of agit-prop by showing the parabolic arc of tragedy afflicted with peripeteia. The weight of African backwardness is not only the negative heritage of colonialism and slavery but Africa’s immersion in traditional partially modernised, but still patriarchal, often tribally and religiously split oral-cultures. These enable the colonial personality to unconsciously or opportunistically exploit his paranoiac sense of his victimage at the expense of the writing-cultures of development which entail anamnesis and the redemption through anagnorisis.

The original contribution of this work is its engagement with the conceptualisation of modern bodies and the impact of the bounded body on our understanding of the idea of comfort. The way in which modern bodies are constituted as bounded, immune entities, differentiated from their surroundings, is of paramount importance in defining comfort as protective, compensatory and passive - a zero grade feeling or avoidance of stimuli. Taking a definition of comfort from John Crowley's influential work on the topic as 'a self-conscious satisfaction between one's body and its immediate physical environment' as its point of departure, this thesis interrogates this in-between space to argue for comfort as an affective and intensive experience. Approaching the theme from an interdisciplinary perspective, a genealogical method combined with inspiration from new materialisms challenges dualisms such as nature/culture, body/mind, inside/outside, body/environment and comfort/discomfort. Following the trajectory of work from Nietzsche to Foucault to Deleuze, phenomenological and psychoanalytical ideas of boundedness and identity are displaced with a theory of bodies as fortuitous and dynamic compositions of forces, where affirmative difference replaces negative difference. As a result, the comfort zone, comfortable numbness and sitting comfortably are transformed from states of indifference to intensive events of difference whereby boundaries and borders are reconstituted as thresholds and spaces of transformation.

The scientific developments made during the twentieth century have provoked a profound re-conceptualisation of the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics in particular has produced a spectacular paradigm shift, the philosophical implications of which are still being debated and explored. This thesis explores these implications in terms of developing a framework for the analysis of live performance through three conceptual categories: identity, observation and play. Though there has been some recent theatre work, notably Copenhagen and Hapgood, that engage explicitly with quantum mechanics in terms of form and content, these performances are not the focus of this study, rather the scientific material is used to engage with a range of performance practice.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of theatre audiences and the ways in which they experience community. It is positioned within current debates on the mediatization and globalization of society, and the ongoing discussion as to whether social change has an adverse effect on community experience. Methodologically it emphasizes the investigation of audience contexts and collaborative practices among actors and theatregoers and between researcher and respondents. Audiences’ own terminology is considered vital to understanding what community means to them. The thesis examines community experience across the whole trajectory of the theatregoing event, from theatregoers’ backgrounds, through interactions at theatre performances, to discussion outside the auditorium and in their everyday lives. It argues that while theatre audiences conform to the perception that they tend to be middle aged and predominantly female, there are modifications to Bourdieu’s findings that cultural consumption is closely related to social class gradations. In particular, mainstream theatregoers extend across the spectrum of the middle class and their tastes in theatre are eclectic. Similarly, the research finds that there are other ways than through habitus that theatregoers acquire cultural tastes and practices. A close consideration of interactions at theatre performances, and the physical contexts in which they take place, identifies features of interaction and auditoria that encourage or discourage community, and relates them to interaction in everyday life. An investigation of why theatregoers prefer live to mediatized performance, and an examination of changes in audience perception and how much they are shared with others, contribute to an assessment of the transformative power of theatre and of how far face-to-face community is perennial in society.

This practice as research contributes a ‘queer-place dramaturgy’ to knowledge about playwriting by creating an intersection of writing queer site specific performance and conventional dramatic theatre practice. It follows the recent shift of focus from queer theorizing of sexuality as a constructed identity, to thinking about what queer use of time and space might be. This shift proposes queerness that is detached, but not completely separated from, sexual identity. This shift also produces a range of kinds of queerness that can be described as odd, imaginative, strange, eccentric, dangerous, threatening wonder-full and abject. I use key works by Sara Ahmed, Jon Binnie, Judith Butler, Michael Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to theoretically contextualise these kinds of queer times and places. I materially investigate the theory that there is such a thing as queer time and place through an exercise of writing on a public bench for a prolonged period of time, called the ‘civic couch’ exercise. I found that this small resistance to the apparently politically neutral temporal use of a place could (re) author ‘me’ as queer beyond sexual identity. It also began to (re) author ‘identity’ itself, so that ‘I’ became more and more identified by where I was. This led to a queer practice of co-writing self and place with each time and place. When that text was dramatized the audience were invited to co-author each local place through the play and outside after the performance. This series investigates, through a spiraling structure of research the relationship between direct resistance to homophobia and heterosexism through representation of queer lives, bodies, times and places and an indirect formal resistance to a (hetero) normative construction of ‘reality’. Asking finally the question: How queer can queer writing for conventional theatre practice be in the UK today? This project aimed to bring queer theory into practical contact with playwriting to see what it could change in the form of dramatic theatre. I found that I could (re) shape and guide dramaturgical principles but not fundamentally change or break them. I define what ‘dramaturgical principles’ are in relation to the critical work of Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, Peggy Phelan and José Esteban Muñoz and argue that ancient concepts of ‘dramaturgical principles’ continue to circulate in postmodern, queer and feminist theorizing about form in theatre and performance. I propose that the lineage of queer writing for theatre maps a negotiation between challenging form and content, which changes significantly from the early twentieth century (and the work of Gertrude Stein and Lillian Hellman) to the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, (and the work of Gay Sweatshop, 1974 -1997), to Performance Art, Live Art and mainstream theatre in the 1990s (and work by Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and Split Britches). I also contextualize this research as practice with contemporary site-specific performance interventions into (hetero) normative uses of public, outdoor places, particularly through the public bench.

Cette recherche propose de construire la notion d’agression pour en faire un concept applicable à une poétique textuelle et scénique tout en tenant compte de sa dualité fondamentale. À la fois créée par l’auteur et reçue par le spectateur, elle peut être considérée comme une « action dramatisante » (Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux), c’est-à-dire comme un ensemble de procédés formels visant la production d’effets violents sur le spectateur. Elle a emprunté, au cours de l’histoire, différentes formes et significations que la méthodologie par « foyer de sens » (Frédéric Gros) permet de mettre en évidence. Trois variations de sens d’une même dimension du principe d’agression peuvent ainsi être identifiées : la première considère l’agression comme l’action d’introduire un désordre, un dérangement, renvoyant l’agression théâtrale à une stratégie ludique de mise en relation du spectateur avec le sacré. Elle est repérable dans le rejet platonicien de la poésie imitative de la cité, dans le Théâtre de la Cruauté d’Antonin Artaud, puis à l’ère postmoderne, dans certains spectacles usant de la performance, comme ceux de Rodrigo García. La deuxième envisage l’agression comme une action créant une instabilité éthique ou intime, assimilant l’agression théâtrale à une déstabilisation émotionnelle. Avec la Poétique d’Aristote, l’agression se pense comme un événement inattendu conditionné par un jeu de discordances et de surprises. Cette modalité est reconfigurée par Edward Bond dans les années 1960. La troisième considère l’agression comme l’action d’inciter quelqu’un à quelque chose par une attitude agressive ou une sorte de défi. L’agression théâtrale s’apparente dans ce cas à une stratégie politique dont Bertolt Brecht est l’un des grands représentants. Dialectiquement structurée, cette agression est singulièrement reconfigurée par Hanokh Levin dans les années 1970. Conditionnée par la surprise et l’inaccoutumance du spectateur, l’agression témoigne, quelle que soit sa forme, d’une abolition momentanée du cadre théâtral, d’une disparition du symbolique, dans une perspective sociale, éthique ou politique. / The purpose of my research is to construct the concept of aggression, making it applicable to textual and scenic poetics while accounting for its fundamental duality. This violence, both as created by the playwright and as received by the spectator, can be construed as a “dramatizing action” (Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux); in other words, as a set of formal processes aimed at producing violent effects upon the spectator. Over history, it has taken on a variety of forms and meanings that Frédéric Gros’s “foyer de sens” (“focus of meaning”) methodology makes apparent. We can thereby identify three variants in the meaning of the same dimension of the principle of aggression. The first considers aggression as the act of introducing a disorder or disruption, relating theatrical violence to a playful strategy of confronting the spectator with the sacred. It can be noted in the Plato’s rejection of poetry imitative of the city, in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and, in the post-modern era, in certain productions that use performance, like those of Rodrigo García. The second variant imagines aggression as an action that creates an ethical or intimate instability. It assimilates theatrical aggression with emotional destabilization. With Aristotle’s Poetics, aggression is thought of as an unexpected event contingent upon a series of discordances and surprises. This modality was reconfigured by Edward Bond in the 1960s. The third variant sees aggression as the act of inciting someone to do something, either by assuming a threatening attitude or by challenging him in some way. In this case, theatrical aggression is akin to a political strategy, and is exemplified by the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Structured dialectically, this aggression was reconfigured in a unique way by Hanoch Levin in the 1970s. Regardless of form, aggression relies upon surprise. As a jolt to the spectator, it attests to a momentary abolition of the theatrical framework: a disappearance of the symbolic, in a social, ethical, or political perspective.

À l’aube du XXe siècle, le metteur en scène russe Vsevolod Meyerhold nourrit une réflexion féconde sur le théâtre et plus particulièrement sur le jeu de l’acteur. La traduction en Europe occidentale des écrits de ce réformateur donne la possibilité au metteur en scène contemporain Eugenio Barba d’en revisiter la pensée et d’en reconsidérer l’héritage. Ainsi, notre étude se propose de montrer dans quelle mesure l’approche du jeu meyerholdien peut servir de référence pour les pratiques actuelles d’Eugenio Barba. Malgré les années qui les séparent, une mise en confrontation nous permettra de relever les points communs et les différences de leur démarche. Hommes érudits en culture théâtrale, ils n’ont de cesse de réinterroger le jeu, notamment par l’intérêt qu’ils accordent à diverses traditions, telle la commedia dell’arte, les masques ou encore les sources asiatiques. Nous analyserons comment chacun en puise les principes nécessaires en vue d’un enrichissement du jeu (voix, diction, mouvement, gestuel, corps). Il sera intéressant de saisir la portée d’un tel renouveau du jeu de l’acteur, et de voir dans quelle perspective celui-ci contribue à donner une identité à leur théâtre. / At the dawn of the 20th century, Russian stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold fruitfully reflected on theatre and particularly on acting. The translation of this reformer’s writings in Western Europe enabled contemporany stage director Eugenio Barba to revisit its depths and reconsider its heritage. Thus this thesis aims to show how the Meyerholdian approach to acting can be used as a reference for Eugenio Barba’s current practices. Despite the years that separate the two individuals, comparing them will allow us to identify the similarities and differences in their processes. These two theatre scholars have kept on questioning acting, especially through their interests in various traditions, such as commedia dell’arte, masks or other Asian sources. We will analyze how each of them used those sources to draw necessary principles to enrich acting (through movement, gesture, body, voice, diction). It will be interesting to understand the impact of such an acting revival and to see in which perspective it helps give an identity to their theatre.

Le jeu est dans la comédie sociale et le comédien le transporte sur la scène. Les rôles dépendent de la structure de la société, de la place de l’acteur et de son individualité. Ils évoluent selon des facteurs extérieurs et intérieurs à l’humain. Certains acteurs s’approprient plus facilement leur rôle que d’autres, s’en défont pour en jouer un nouveau avec une aisance surprenante. Ils naviguent au sein de la société, épousent gestuelle et discours de chaque classe, abandonnent un costume pour en revêtir un autre. Ils s’engagent dans une nouvelle partie du jeu social, alors que d’autres n’en maîtrisent qu’une. Leur latitude est plus restreinte. Le théâtre est le domaine qui érige ce jeu des rôles en profession. Dès lors, l’interrogation sur la latitude du comédien à jouer requiert une contextualisation et appelle la question de l’inné et de l’acquis. L’humain joue-t-il d’emblée ou apprend-il à jouer et dans ce cas quelles étapes jalonnent cette formation? En tout premier lieu, le cadre afférent au théâtre dont nous parlons, à la société où il se développe et au corps qu’il met en jeu est posé. Ensuite, par une recherche théorico-empirique le corps est désarticulé et étudié dans ses dimensions anthropologique, anatomophysiologique, scénique. Par la suite, dans la sphère du corps en mouvement, le corps est exploré selon un processus de déconstruction-reconstruction par un aller-retour de la scène au quotidien menant vers une anthropologie théâtrale et un théâtre anthropologique. Enfin, le comédien est réintégré au coeur du corps social, dont il est membre, qu’il crée et qui le crée. / Theatrical play is present in everyday life and the actor recreates it on stage. The roles played depend on the social structure, the actor and his or her individuality. They evolve according to interior and exterior human factors. Some actors take on a role more easily than others, then let it go in order to play a new one with surprising ease. They move through society, melding gestures and speech patterns of each social class, dropping one costume for another. They are involved in a new part of the social game, while others only perfect one. The latter’s scope is more limited. The theatre is the arena that creates professional role players. Therefore, the examination of the scope of the actor requires a context and asks about what is innate and what is acquired. Does the human play impulsively or learn to play and if so, what are the steps in this training? First, the context and framework concerning the theatre, the society where it develops and the body type of actors is posited. Following a theoretical and empirical approach, the body is analysed and the anthropological, anatomical, and scenic dimensions are explored. Next, the body in movement is investigated according to a deconstruction-reconstruction process alternating between the stage and everyday life, leading to a theatrical anthropology and an anthropological theatre. Finally, in the last part of the research the actor is reintegrated into the heart of society, to which he belongs, that he creates and by which he is influenced. / Das Spiel existiert in der sozialen Komödie und der Schauspieler bringt es auf die Bühne. Die Rollen hängen von der sozialen Struktur ab, von dem Platz des Schauspielers in der Gesellschaft und seiner Individualität. Sie entwickeln sich nach den äußeren und inneren Faktoren des Menschen. Einige Schauspieler eignen sich ihre Rollen leichter an als andere,befreien sich von einer Rolle um eine neue mit einer überraschenden Leichtigkeit zu spielen. Sie tauchen in die Tiefe der Gesellschaft ein, und übernehmen Gestik und Rede jeder Schicht, lassen ein Kostüm zurück um sich mit einem anderen zu kleiden. Sie engagieren sich in einer neuen Partie des Gesellschaftsspiels, während andere nur eine beherrschen. Deren Handlungsspielraum ist eingeschränkter. Das Theater ist der Bereich, der dieses Spielzum Beruf macht. Folglich erfordert die Frage nach dem Handlungsspielraum des Schauspielers eine Kontextbildung und wirft die Frage nach Angeborenem und Erworbenen auf. Spielt der Mensch aus eigenem Anlass oder lernt er zu spielen und welche Etappenmarkieren diese Ausbildung? Zuerst setzen wir die Rahmenbedingungen dieser theaterbezogenen Recherche fest: Umwelches Theater handelt es sich? In welcher Gesellschaft entwickelt es sich? Und welche/was für Körper wurden inszeniert? Dieser Körper wird sodann durch eine theoretische undempirische Forschung desartikuliert und in seinen anthropologischen,anatonomophysiologischen und szenischen Dimensionen erforscht. Durch einen Prozess der Dekonstruktion-Konstruktion vom alltäglichen Leben zur Bühne und vice versa wird der Körper erkundet. Daraus entsteht eine Theater Anthropologie und ein anthropologisches Theater. Zuletzt wird der Schauspieler in den sozialen Körper - dessen Mitglied er ist, den er kreiert und der ihn neuerschöpft - wieder integriert.

Cette recherche s’inscrit dans la continuité du travail poursuivi en Master 2 dans cette même université, dont le mémoire, soutenu en 2009, s’intitule « Du théâtre d’après un texte vers le texte d’après un théâtre ; dramaturgie et collectivité ». Son but est de problématiser la dichotomie texte-scène ainsi que la pensée binaire qui persiste encore derrière cette opposition. Pour cela, il s’agira d’interroger l’évolution et les différentes acceptions des concepts de dramaturgie ainsi que les changements qu’ont subi la place et les fonctions du dramaturge au sein de la création théâtrale actuelle. La définition/proposition des termes dramaturgisme et dramaturgiste – aussi bien au sein de l’institution qu’à celui de la création théâtrale – aideront à mieux distinguer ces concepts tout en les relativisant à la lumière des nouvelles manières de concevoir la création dramaturgique et les nouveaux paradigmes relationnels au sein des compagnies depuis une vingtaine d’années. L’idée de composition,tout comme celles de contrepoint et cartographie, nous seront, ici, autant d’outils pour mieux comprendre ces nouveaux territoires dramaturgiques.Il s’agit d’identifier, comparer et analyser les processus structurels et organisationnels de quelques compagnies théâtrales – notamment la création collective et surtout le processus collaboratif, surgi au Brésil dès la seconde moitié des années 1990 – qui,contrairement à la tendance actuelle (vérifiable au cours des vingt dernières années) tournent le dos au texte dramatique préexistant, à savoir le fait d’un auteur dramatique considéré comme tel, et construisent leur propre dramaturgie, issue de l’improvisation, de la recherche immédiate sur le plateau et du travail collectif. La dramaturgie prend ainsi un « troisième sens » qu’il convient de définir et théoriser à l’aide d’exemples concrets et d’un travail de terrain approfondi auprès de metteurs en scène, dramaturges et comédiens qui pratiquent une écriture plurielle et présentielle, sans cesse renouvelée. Quelle place possible pour la création textuelle, affranchie de tout rapport de force ou « dictature de sens » ? À quel point ces nouveaux processus déjouent ou rejouent le binarisme texte-scène ? / This research is the continuity of the Master’s work undertaken in this University and moreover of a dissertation defended in 2009 entitled « From Theatre from Text to Text fromTheatre ; dramaturgy and collectivity ». The aim is to question the dichotomy between the text and the stage as well as the generally binary thinking behind it. In order to do so we will inquire into the different pre-established concepts of dramaturgy and their evolution, and the changes in the functions and position of the dramaturge in contemporary theatre. The definition/suggestion of the terms dramaturgism and dramaturgist, in both contexts of theatrical institution and stage creation, will help better distinguish these ideas that we shall place in the perspective of new dramaturgical concepts as well as new paradigms of relationships within theatre companies in the past 20 years. The terms « composition »,« counterpoint » and « cartography » shall help us to understand these new dramaturgical territories.The aim is to identify, analyze and compare the structural and organizational processes (notably collective creation and specifically the collaborative process, as it emerged in Brazil in the second half of the 90’s) of a few theatre companies that (against thecurrent of the last twenty years) have veered away from pre-existing dramaturgical text and the idea of a theatrical author regarded as such, and have constructed their own unique dramaturgy from improvisation, immediate research within the space and the collective work. Dramaturgy is thus given a « third meaning » that needs to be defined and theorized with specific examples and extensive research with directors, dramaturges and actors who practice this present, plural and continuously renewed writing. What space is this where « the invention of writing » can exist free from binary thinking or « dictatorship of meaning » ? To what extent can these new processes redo or undo the dichotomous pair : text and stage ?