Theatre, Time and Temporality

David Ian Rabey

Description

Theatre, Time and Temporality is the first book-length exploration of the subject of temporality within theatre and performance. David Ian Rabey brings in sources ranging from medieval and Renaissance theatre to contemporary performances – in addition to recent writings from physics, philosophy and psychology – to analyse ways that time can be presented, communicated and transformed in the theatre. How do we experience time in theatre, and how can that experience be altered or manipulated? Rabey’s analysis and exploration will spark discussion among students and scholars of drama, as well as among practicing performers and dramatic writers.

 

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction  

Part I: Theatre in Time  

Chapter 1: Whose Time Is It?

Chapter 2: Theatre in Time

Interval: A Hole in the Night

Part II: Time in Theatre

Chapter 3: Shapes of Time

Interlude 1: ‘Why don’t you all just f-f-fade away’?: Further Thoughts on Staging Ageing

 

Chapter 4: Principles of Uncertainty

Interlude 2: The Clock in the Forest: Jerusalem Unenclosed: A Case History

Chapter 5: Time Out of Joint 

Inconclusion: Repent, Harlequin … 

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Theatre
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783207237
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 David Ian Rabey.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Theatre & Consciousness
Series editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Series ISSN: 1753-3058
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-721-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-722-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-723-7
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To
Charmian Savill
with
whom
never
enough
‘What is this place?’ Bevan was silent a second. ‘This isn’t solid ground but a place of potential, actions that resound
forward through time and, sometimes, echo back to affect events. This island floats through space and time. Here we foreknow the future’s genome. It’s like a boat riding the waves of an implicate ocean behind the things we see. things can happen and unhappen at once, then happen again. Probability waves break on our beaches, the first surge destroys, the second restores. Nobody knows
how such flux happens. Uncertainty is this island’s principle.
Gwyneth Lewis, A Hospital Odyssey (2010: 125–126)
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Theatre in Time
Chapter 1: Whose Time Is It?
What fundamental things apply?
Time is ticking (clock of the heart)
Temporality: What is ‘the time’?
Intensifying combinations: Theatrical time
Melting clocks and snapped elastics
Wild mercury
Points of departure
Creative tension
Stretch and flow
Cause and effect
Slaves to the rhythm
Morality and money
(Un)Doing the maths
Beating the bounds
Chapter 2: Theatre in Time
Starting the day
Interlude: Ways of speed
Starting the night
Chronos and kairos
Bachelard and The Dialectic of Duration
Prigogine and theatre as dissipative structure
Theatre as diffusive resonance: green’s random
Theatre as dissipative structure: Wesker’s The Kitchen
Theatre as chaotic map: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape
Barbara Adam and quantum theatrics
Chronos v. kairos: Thomas’s Flowers of the Dead Red Sea : ‘THE WHOLE FUCKING SHIT PALACE FALLS ON OUR HEADS’
Theatrical timescapes
Interval: A Hole in the Night
Part II: Time in Theatre
Chapter 3: Shapes of Time
Everything must change
Distinctions in time
Models of theatrical time: A survey
Temporal ‘thickness’ in morality plays
Dr Faustus : ‘The double motion of the planets’
Shakespeare: Too long for a play
Dislocations in dreamtime
Wilder: Stygian perspectives on the passing world
Priestley: Hinges in time
Wesker: Disillusion and dynamism
Comical-historical-tragical
Interlude 1: ‘Why don’t you all just f-f-fade away’?: Further Thoughts on Staging Ageing
Chapter 4: Principles of Uncertainty
Beckett: Marking time/shoring up the debris
Pinter: In search of lost time
Barker: ‘The sheer suspension of not knowing’
Complicating shadows
Ed Thomas: Memory, desire and the parts you throw away
Butterworth: Time past and time present
Breaking the loop: McDowall’s radical uncertainty
Interlude 2: The Clock in the Forest: Jerusalem Unenclosed: A Case History
Chapter 5: Time Out of Joint
Timebends and countermyths
Bond: Time as blood money
Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia : ‘Inside-between the carvings of the clock’
Once upon a time: Churchill’s traumatic dystopias
The time that does not heal
Rudkin: The once and future
Rifkin: Searching for the new ‘time rebels’
Reverse engineering: The Radicalization of Bradley Manning
Inconclusion: Repent, Harlequin …
Stolen moments
Envoi : Give me just a little more time
References
Index
Acknowledgements
My thanks to: Gwyneth Lewis and Anthony Harwood Limited for permission for my choice of epigraph; Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe; Michael Mangan; Lara Kipp; Katie Evans. Bon temps roulez ...
Introduction
T he function of an Introduction might include an identification of what the book does, and what it does not.
David Wiles describes his self-styled ‘short book’, Theatre & Time , as not concerned with ‘plays about time’, but with ‘performance’; and with ‘the way in which plays are neither in time nor about time, but are of time’ (Wiles 2014: 3).
This book, Theatre, Time and Temporality , is, in distinction, concerned with ways in which drama, theatre and performance are in time, and also often about time.
Rebecca Schneider points out how the title of her short book Theatre & History contains a central conjunction that is not only coordinative but also copulative, suggesting different and varying arrangements of ‘interest, emphasis, importance, pleasure and so on’: where things and people demand care, but may well also become complicating, confusing and sticky (Schneider 2014: 1). Schneider’s approach seems salutary for our own projects (of writer and reader). She also considers the possible consequences of emphasis and direction, had her central conjunction been ‘in’, rather than ‘&’ (5–6).
This book, Theatre, Time and Temporality , will indeed incorporate some considerations of Theatre in Time (how and where Theatre may be located in an ongoing stream of events in Time, and what it self-consciously does with and about that), and also, to a larger extent, some considerations of Time in Theatre (how Time may be presented, communicated, contemplated and transformed – condensed, stretched, subverted, displaced and transposed – in Theatre by dramatists, directors, performers, scenographers and audiences). However, this book cannot claim to consider all of these things exhaustively, across time and space. Rather, it focuses on a surprisingly neglected relationship, on how theatrical performances offer a time-based hinge in the imagination, through a time-based hinge in perception.
As J. B. Priestley remarks, the subject of Time has been principally the work of ‘mathematicians, physicists or philosophers’, attempting an objective approach to a subject that is ‘at once large and yet peculiarly elusive, like a Moby Dick that may be a spectre’, and that is also likely to indicate that ‘any attempt at an objective manner’ is impossible (Priestley 1964: 12), or else, tellingly limited by Time itself, in another of its mythological facets, ‘a crouching Sphinx’ (78). I suggest that these images for Time are also applicable to Theatre, which is also large, elusive, mysteriously paradoxical, identifiably limited and yet calling into question all claims to objective authority.
This book will explore various aspects of signs and contradictions, connections and disconnections, in a (necessarily selective) variety of dramatic, theatrical and performative forms, scripts and events; and how, and to what effects, these forms of drama, theatre and performance may re-present our usual senses of Time. It will also ask how an unusually attentive focus to issues of Time may prove particularly informative in drama, theatre and performance studies, and for the relationship of these things to wider ways of imagining possibilities.
My selection of texts and performances for consideration is admittedly and manifestly subjective, informed (inevitably) by my particular location in time (1958–) and space (Europe, Britain, Wales). It draws primarily upon the western dramatic canon, contemporary British theatre and contemporary performance practices, exploring the relationships of selected plays, performances and practices to their social, cultural and ideological contexts.
Michael Mangan begins his book Staging Ageing by indicating how any kind of theatrical performance ‘brings into play both the body and the mind, together with the signifier and signified, with the physical/biological organism that is the performer and with the questions of self and identity which the performance generates’ (Mangan 2013: 5); and how time (specifically age, in the remit of Mangan’s study) brings a particular sharpness to these questions (as, indeed, may considerations of gender and sexual orientation) of self and identity in various social circumstances.
A heightened awareness of Time in theatrical performance also activates considerations and questions of consequence : frictions between what might be identified as natural rhythms and human, scientific, historical and political narratives (including religious, national and ideological foundation myths); personal (dis)orientation through (un)familiarity and (in)comprehension; and time as a political resource and currency, to be dispensed and distributed, given and taken, according to principles of social justice. These three facets provide the starting points for each of my chapters in Section II on Time in Theatre.
It strikes me as apt to borrow some terms of profession from Barbara Adam: like hers, my study ‘does not culminate in a polished new theory but merely a first step in that direction; it identifies points of departure and indicates the potential for future development’ (Adam 1990: 149). It aims to progress by what Gould describes as the interplay of ‘internal and external sources’: ‘theory informed by metaphor and observation constrained by theory’ (Gould 1987: 8). I agree with Thornton Wilder that literature ‘has always resembled more a torch race than a furious dispute between heirs’ (Wilder 2007: 687), and believe that scholarship also proceeds best in these terms.
I wish to record my particular thanks to Jay Griffiths, whose writing inspired me and set me on this trajectory of endeavour, and to Barbara Adam, w