This week I was tasked with reading Chris Goode’s Men in the Cities (2014), a solo performance shown at this summers’ Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This play surrounds two deaths over the last 12 months, one the suicide of an unnamed man, and the murder of drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich 2013. Goode’s performance, as the title suggests, is a commentary on masculinity. The performance “offers a wide-ranging and depressing portrait of male lives in crisis, repressed emotions, damaged sons, untouched fathers, fantasy power trips and lost souls” (Gardner, 2014). All female interaction or mention is absent from the play, apart from the shrieking of a vixen heard in the street one night described by the first of Goode’s characters. Although Goode calls upon a plethora of characters (all of whom are linked in someway by their interest in a male porn website), we hear more frequently the stories of a retiring widower and a ten year-old sexually curious boy.

The journey’s these characters travel, accompanied by contemporary contextual references, provide a bleak yet provocative commentary on the way in which we accept reality today. This notion Goode talismans with the reoccurring use of David Cameron’s quote “life should mean life”. Since Goode writes himself into the text, allying himself with these characters, he consciously pits the personal against Cameron’s political decisions. Goode perhaps moves one step further from mere commentary on contemporary masculinity as “the play comes from a far darker place, one where men turn their rage not just on each other or on women, but also on themselves. It hints at a potential terrorist inside every man” (Gardner, 2014). This notion of the terrorist within sets the stakes that Goode is trying to establish with this production, a dark and harrowing suggestion of what lies beneath all men.

Works Cited

Gardner, Lyn (2014) ‘Men in the Cities – fierce portrait of violence’ The Guardian [Online] <Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/01/edinburgh-festival-2014-review-men-in-the-cities-lee-rigby> Accessed [03/11/2104]

This week we examined Postdramatic theatre and its components.  A notion suggested by German Hans-Thies Lehmann as a ‘comprehensive and accessible theory articulating the relationship between drama and the ‘no longer dramatic’ forms of theatre that have emerged since the 1970s’ (2006, p. 1).  What is important to establish straight away is that the “post” in Postdramatic should not be read as “after”, but rather “beyond”, as the theory continues to entertain the relationship with drama as it moves in a new direction.  A direction away from the binary categorisation of theatre work being produced as either strict “new writing” or something seen as contemporary experimental performance.  The Postdramatic is not so rigid.  The Postdramatic is essentially a study of the numerous, and to some extent infinite, ways in which the relationship between theatre and drama can be reconfigured.

So for example, the dramatic tradition in theatre requires a performance to meet certain motifs through its evening’s duration so that the audience can recognise the medium of theatre.  These motifs or logos, among others, would consist of moments of:

• Action & Plot – A clear narrative.
• Catharsis – The brining about of a collective & reciprocal feeling or emotion from the audience, in response to what is shown on stage.
• The primacy of the text – The staging consists of what has been constituted by an author.
• The constructive of a fictive cosmos – The ability for the audience to enter the world of the play.

‘The Postdramatic does not reject these events; it converses with them to find what good drama is.  Lehmann is not interested in ‘the stage as a vehicle for the dramatic text’ (Bolton, 2014) he is more interested in re-communicating the theatrical conditions of perception.  It ceases to become about copying what is on stage, and about creating a valid piece of independent art, through reassessing the aesthetics, the semiotics, the form and the structure of the text.  Lehmann wished to deflect the idea of the text assuming the role of master of theatre.

It is this dissolution of the logocentric hierarchy, the removal of text as the most important building-block of theatre, which in my eyes forms the basis of the Postdramatic manifesto.

Tim Crouch, one theatre maker who seemed to be creating Postdramatic theatre may perhaps (in Lehmann’s terms) actually have created the opposite.  While what Crouch does on stage is indeed relative to the post dramatic, he does realign theatrical conventions, but he fails to distance himself from the logocentric hierarchy.  Text plays a dominant role in his performances.  In An Oak Tree (2005) he has a member of the audience join him on stage with a script.  In Commonwealth (2012) the entire performance sees crouch stood in front of a music stand reading from a script.  He partners his text with his own unique stance of staging theatre to enhance and amplify the dramatic journey for the audience to reach a shared experience at the conclusion, a catharsis.

Herein is where the argument lies: some may consider Tim Crouch a Postdramatic artist because of the ways he is able to reinvent his audiences’ experience, but the form of his performance very much meets the logos of dramatic convention.   

Works Cited

Bolton, Jacqueline (2014) ‘Week Five: The Postdramatic’ [Lecture] Current Issues in Drama, Theatre and Performance. University of Lincoln.  22^nd October.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Translated from German by K. Jürs-Munby, London: Routledge.