Rethinking play texts in the age of mediatization: Simon Stephens's Pornography

This article is unusual in that it responds to a tendency in contemporary theatre practice and scholarship to overlook play texts when exploring the effect media technologies and culture have on the theatre. Introducing the concept of ‘mediatized dramaturgy’, the article explores how a play can accommodate the social-cognitive conditions of a mediatized culture not only through direct reference to technology, but also in aesthetic subtleties that echo the contemporary moment. In light of this, the article analyzes Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007) to show the workings of a mediatized play in opening new vistas to understand the new realities of the contemporary, and the reception of Pornography on stage to grasp the performative implications of a mediatized dramaturgy. This analysis challenges recent shifts in critical discourse about the media-theatre relation: the growing emphasis on performance, misconceptions about postdramatic theatre as a non-textual form and the text’s supposed incapacity to map the new reality of mediatized culture and consciousness

Mediatised dramaturgy: formal, critical and performative responses to mediatisation in British and Irish plays since the 1990s

This thesis responds to a tendency in contemporary theatre practice and scholarship to overlook play texts when exploring the media-‐theatre relation. It challenges recent shifts in critical discourse concerning the mediatisation of theatre: the growing artistic and academic emphasis on performance; and misconceptions about postdramatic theatre as a non-‐textual form and the text’s presumed inability to accommodate the new reality of mediatised culture and consciousness. In light of this, the thesis examines the impact of media technologies and culture on a selection of British plays written since the 1990s, exploring how they negotiate a media-‐saturated culture in both form and content. I introduce the concept of ‘mediatised dramaturgy’ to describe the shifts in the fabric of plays due to omnipresent mediatisation. I argue that mediatised dramaturgy is present not only in texts that overtly use media forms, but also in aesthetic subtleties that echo the phenomenon of mediatisation without direct reference to the mass media. The thesis also considers the reception of these plays in selected productions in order to gauge British theatre’s ability to respond to their dramaturgical challenges. Chapter 1 examines Martin Crimp’s No One Sees the Video (1990), Mark Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead (1996) and Enda Walsh’s Chatroom (2004) as ‘dramatic’ plays, arguing that thematisation of mediatisation without formal engagement limits the plays’ ambit. Chapter 2 explores the workings of mediatised language in Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Sarah Kane’s Crave (1998) to suggest language use in ‘no-‐longer-‐dramatic’ texts speaks to altered ontological and epistemological conditions of the media-‐saturated, globalised world. Chapter 3 assesses the impact changing modes of subjectivity and interpersonal relations have had on the presentation of character by analysing Tim Crouch’s My Arm (2003) and An Oak Tree (2005), and Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007). This chapter argues that they destabilise the dramatic model of characterisation in order to engage with the heterogeneous and objectified nature of contemporary subjectivity. Lastly, Chapter 4 focuses on Douglas Maxwell’s use of videogame in Helmet (2002) and the televisual aesthetics of Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire (1997), exploring how different approaches to remediation in plot structure affect the plays’ capacity to relate to mediatised socio-‐cognitive conditions. The thesis demonstrates that plays, on the page and in performance, have undergone significant change, proving that the old medium of text is capable of responding to the mediatised age

Introduction: Reflections on Turkish theatre

The socio-political turbulence in the recent history of Turkey has radically affected the theatre and performance scene. In a climate of fear and repression, performing arts have been fighting for survival and developing ways to endure the dark times, achieve freedom of artistic expression and open platforms for critical communication. This collection of articles considers contemporary theatre and performance in Turkey, reflecting on some of the complex issues that practitioners, academics, and institutions have faced in the current political environment. Each author presents a part of the complex picture of theatre and performance culture in Turkey, and hopes to start a conversation about this oppressed yet fertile artistic landscape

Unsettling the 'friendly' gaze of dataveillance: the dissident potential of mediatised aesthetics in Blast Theory's Karen

What are the artistic languages and forms that can be used to make sense of the larger-than-human scale of big data and engage with its ideological machinery? How can theatre and performance in a mediatised culture disclose the performativity of dataveillance and open spaces for thinking differently and critically about it? Blast Theory’s interactive, virtual theatre piece Karen (2015), which is formed through a smart-phone app and is communicated individually to its participants on their phones, addresses such questions. Karen is designed to mine data from the participants, which is then used to profile each of them through a personalised data report. Blast Theory’s piece, on the one hand, offers a familiar, interactive and participatory experience, generating a sense of agency and control. On the other hand, it reminds the participants that they are not in control of their own data by making the familiar experience strange and subverting the performativity of surveillance. Drawing on and combining the notions of mediatisation and info-aesthetics, this article argues that through its ‘mediatised aesthetics’ Karen provokes critical recognition, challenging our habitual understandings of data surveillance, and illustrates a paradigm-in-progress to explore the new aesthetics of the mediatised age

The effect of resveratrol on sphingosine-1 and oxidative/ nitrosative stress in an experimental heart ischemia reperfusion model

Objectives: Resveratrol (RSV) is a natural polyphenolic compound showing significant antioxidant effects. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of resveratrol on the sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) and oxidative stress biomarkers in hearth ischemia-reperfusion (I/R). Materials and Methods: The biochemical and histopathological effects of RSV on cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury were investigated through ELISA- and light microscope. Results: We observed statistically significant differences between the treatment group and the control group in terms of malondialdehyde (MDA) level, catalase (CAT) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities (p<0.05). Histopathologically, we also observed decreased Polymorphonuclear Leucocyte (PMNL) infiltration, myocardial edema, miyositolysis in the treatment group compared to the I/R and sham groups. Conclusion: Resveratrol may play an important role in cardiac I/R injury through its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects which were biochemically and histopathologically confirmed in the present study

Blast Theory’s Karen: exploring the ontology of technotexts

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatised ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatised theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive

Researching theatre in Turkey: hopeful thinking from afar

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Seda Ilter on Andy Smith’s Summit (Brighton Festival, 2017)

This is a blog piece for the Birkbeck English and Humanities Blog. It critically reviews theatre-maker Andy Smith's new show 'Summit' which opened at the Brighton Festival in May, 2017

Seda Ilter on Andy Smith, ‘Dematerialising Theatre’

This is a blog piece for the Birkbeck English and Humanities Blog. It critically reviews theatre-maker Andy Smith's talk at the Birkbeck Arts Week 2017 and his approach to theatre