The actor in costume

How do audiences look at actors in costume onstage? How does costume shape theatrical identity and form bodies? What do audiences wear to the theatre? This lively and cutting-edge book explores these questions, and engages with the various theoretical approaches to the study of actors in performance. Aoife Monks focuses in particular on the uncanny ways in which costume and the actor's body are indistinguishable in the audience's experience of a performance. From the role of costume in Modernist theatre to the actor's position in the fashion system, from nudity to stage ghosts, this wide-ranging exploration of costume, and its histories, argues for the centrality of costume to the spectator's experience at the theatre. Drawing on examples from paintings, photographs, live performances, novels, reviews, blogs and plays, Monks presents a vibrant analysis of the very peculiar work that actors and costumes do on the stage

Private parts, public bodies : cross-dressing in the work of Deborah Warner and Elizabeth Lecompte

THESIS 7330In this thesis I ask what cross-dressing can tell us about the formation of identity in performance. I argue that the use of cross-dressing in the work of Deborah Warner and Elizabeth LeCompte can be used to challenge and expand the field of theatre scholarship on cross-dressing. I examine how Warner\u27s 1995 production of Richard II, and LeCompte\u27s 1993 production of The Emperor Jones used cross-dressing in performance. I analyse these productions in five key ways: I investigate how gender was represented through the use of cross-dressing, I look at the relationship between the "real" and the "illusion" in the productions, 1 focus on the range of identities invoked through the use of cross-dressing, I examine the kinds of bodies produced in performance, and 1 discuss how spectators were imagined and invented by these productions. My thesis is divided into three sections. In Section One, Part One, 1 review the scholarship on crossdressing and, in Part Two, I investigate the historical precedents for the use of cross-dressing in my chosen productions. Section Two is divided into three chapters and focuses on the work of Deborah Warner. Section Three is also divided into three chapters and focuses on the work of Elizabeth LeCompte. In my conclusion, I compare how these directors have used cross-dressing in their work

Looking for Fiona: gender and nationality in the work of Fiona Shaw

Book synopsis: In A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (1984), the late Professor D.E.S. Maxwell states that the drama of J.M. Synge has ‘an effect of language [to] disturb the apparent solidity of his stage’s material accessories, to fantasticate and mythologise character into action.’ In a sense, this is what all great drama does; through the use of the fantastic and the mythic, it disturbs the ‘solidity’ of the world as we know it. The works presented and discussed in this volume, show how the material of the everyday is transformed by the dreams of theatre makers, as we journey forth into the 21st Century. In writings by Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Olwen Fouere, Terry Eagleton, Paul Murphy, Aoife Monks, Melissa Sihra, Conall Morrison, Mark Phelan, Eamonn Jordan, Brian Singleton, Lynne Parker, Rhona Trench, Stephen Regan, David Johnston and Donal O’Kelly we see examples of creative writing which engage critically with a world that is constantly changing, and examples of critical writing which engage creatively with theatre that is constantly evolving

Human remains: acting, objects and belief in performance

The image of an actor holding a skull is the extraordinarily powerful, even iconic image that often stands in for acting itself. This essay argues that the interaction between actors and human remains onstage illuminates the uncanny relationship between acting and stage objects, revealing to us the strangeness of things onstage and the peculiarities of acting itself. The essay examines a range of strategies employed by actors to harness and contain the disruptive powers of human remains. It begins by looking at how remains might be imagined through Stanislavski’s complex and often contradictory approach to objects in performance, and argues that their use onstage resembles that of religious relics. The essay considers the ways in which communion with objects might facilitate and displace virtuosity in acting. It then examines how Ron Vawter controlled the power of the cremated ashes that he used in his 1992 performance Roy Cohn/Jack Smith by making all of his theatrical strategies public—apart from his use of human remains. These examples help to investigate how the language of possession, the anamorphic powers of relics, and the struggles over authority and agency in performance feature in the imagined role that human remains play in producing acting. It argues, furthermore, that the abject qualities of relics may function as powerful and disturbing metaphors for the process of acting itself, by underscoring the loss of self that the actor must undergo in order to act

‘This Painful Chapter’: performing the law in Bloody Sunday: scenes from the Saville Inquiry

On 29 January 1998, the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, made a statement to the House of Commons recommending that an inquiry be established to investigate the events of Bloody Sunday, in order to: ‘close this painful chapter once and for all.’ What Blair did not made entirely clear, however, was what exactly the legal process of the Inquiry would succeed in closing. This article argues that the Saville Inquiry was imagined to be the over-writing of an earlier narrative, in which justice would be established palimpsestically through a re-presentation of past events and a correction of earlier representations. I examine this palimpsestic drive through an analysis of Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry, at the Tricycle Theatre in London in 2005. This production was a compressed and heavily edited verbatim account of the Inquiry. The article argues that the production was underscored by anxiety about the law's theatrical ability to produce representations and narratives. Despite this disavowal of the theatrical qualities of the law, I suggest that the citational qualities of the tribunal became visible in this performance, revealing the inability of the law to make final statements, and making visible the law's reliance on rhetoric and spectacle and its need for surrogates and proxies to do its work. I conclude by arguing that representations of Bloody Sunday rely on forms of surrogation and proxy performance that gesture to the ongoing multiplicity of representations that surround this event