This study of Bond's later work offers a first critical reading of his post-millennial plays written for Big Brum and Colline: Born (2006), The Under Room (2006), The Balancing Act (2011), and Tune (2011). The study proposes a new understanding of possible relationships between theatre and psychoanalysis; this can be achieved by applying Lacan's Graph of Desire to contemporary British theatre. The Graph's highly nuanced, semiotic take on the dialectic between culture and physicality allows us to pinpoint a structural antagonism between Bond and Brecht in Section One. In Section Two, the Graph is used to defme and theorise Bond's dramaturgical tropes, which appear to dramatise Lacanian 'extimacy'. The 'centre' and 'accident time' entangle an audience oedipally (corporeally) in the drama; the 'site' and the' invisible object' promote forms of active seeing which differentiate between culture and physicality. Our 'aesthetic coordinates of perception' (Ranciere 2004: 83) are disturbed by these processes, which uncover ways of positioning audiences to be creative with, as well as receptive to the linguistic signifier. In this way, Bond's tropes revitalise drama's earliest radical function, an ancient and postmodern capacity to challenge the authority of the 'big other'. Bond achieves this by refusing to turn away from the tragic, or Kristevan abject; he rejects gestic antonyms in favour of careful combinations of indices, icons and symbols - a language of metaphor and metonymy which neither shares a 'postdramatic' disdain for fiction, nor does it 'bar the corporeal' (Irigaray in Lodge 2000: 421). When audiences are co-players in this way, insight may be gained from both the narrative and from their immediate, personal response to its events. In this fresh take on political theatre, staged, visceral events may be read subjectively by audience members; but in facing a situation subjectively, audience members must also face themselves.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:552988 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Katafiasz, Kate |
| Publisher | University of Reading |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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