Is the Theatre a Zombie? On the Successful Failures of Émile Zola

AbstractNaturalist theatre, in its late-nineteenth-century incarnation, and particularly in the work of Émile Zola, is often seen as advancing a physicalist view of the mind, where all mind states can be reduced to brain states. The novels and the plays do not uniformly or unambiguously support this analysis, so is the theory or the practice wrong? Physicalism is an idea that has had a recent renaissance, helped by the discoveries of neuroscience. Nevertheless I express some caution about the claims made for the eradication of free will. A range of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind have cast doubt on physicalism, culminating in David Chalmers’s much-debated zombie argument. I argue that zombies and their analogues represented deep social anxieties in the late nineteenth century, and make repeated appearances in Naturalism. The essay goes on to suggest that Naturalism should be considered to have conducted thought experiments, rather than just to have attempted to embody the theory on stage. Turning to John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, I suggest that theatre-making itself may be a kind of thought experiment model of the mind.</jats:p

Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre.

This article identifies a value set shared between the neoliberal ethos and modes of audience participation frequently promoted in immersive theatre: values such as risk-taking, individual freedoms and personal responsibility. The promotion of self-made opportunity, premised either on opportunistic risk-taking, or the savvy attitude that comes with experience and familiarity with immersive theatre participation, will be addressed as valorising another shared value: entrepreneurialism. A participatory mode will be introduced that I call ‘entrepreneurial participation’: a kind of audience participation privileged in much immersive theatre performance identifying the enactment of neoliberal value. While entrepreneurial participation may be deliberately deployed by audiences as a participatory tactic, it will be argued that this particular participatory mode is frequently expected of audiences, or at least privileged as a means of engaging with performance. Work by the British immersive theatre company Punchdrunk will be taken as a means of illustrating this suggestion, particularly The Masque of the Red Death (2007). The article begins with a definition of immersive theatre that focuses on the figuring of participating audiences, paying particular attention to the relativity of participatory freedoms and the centrality of experience production. Hedonistic and narcissistic experiences will pull focus and will be approached as a possible reason behind immersive theatre's susceptibility to absorption within the experience industry and co-optation by innovative marketers. The article then establishes a set of shared values between the neoliberal ethos and audience participation in The Masque of the Red Death. Risk perception research, especially that arising from the Oregon Group and Stephen Lyng, will be touched on as a means of introducing some political considerations arising from the notion of entrepreneurial participation. A more optimistic, but ultimately sobering set of responses will be offered in conclusion

Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre: British Drama, Violence and Writing

Representations of violence have been at the heart of some key movements in post-war British theatre. In the twenty-first century, however, these representations have evolved in a new way, characterised both by an escalation of the scale and intensity of the violence, to a point one could call apocalyptic, coupled with specifically non-realist dramaturgical and theatrical modes of production. The essay explains these phenomena as two sides of an attempt to resist neoliberal capitalism’s totalising colonisation of our experience of the real and to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism.La question de la représentation de la violence est au cœur de plusieurs moments clés du théâtre anglais d’après-guerre. Au 21ème siècle, la représentation de la violence a toutefois évolué d’une nouvelle manière, caractérisée par une intensification de la violence, jusqu’à un point que l’on pourrait qualifier d’apocalyptique, tout cela allant de pair avec une sortie du réalisme sur le plan dramatique et dramaturgique. Cet article se propose d’analyser ces phénomènes comme étant les deux facettes d’une même volonté de résister à l’emprise du capitalisme néolibéral sur notre expérience du réel et d’imaginer l’inimaginable, à savoir la fin du capitalisme

Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre: British Drama, Violence and Writing

Representations of violence have been at the heart of some key movements in post-war British theatre. In the twenty-first century, however, these representations have evolved in a new way, characterised both by an escalation of the scale and intensity of the violence, to a point one could call apocalyptic, coupled with specifically non-realist dramaturgical and theatrical modes of production. The essay explains these phenomena as two sides of an attempt to resist neoliberal capitalism’s totalising colonisation of our experience of the real and to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism.La question de la représentation de la violence est au cœur de plusieurs moments clés du théâtre anglais d’après-guerre. Au 21ème siècle, la représentation de la violence a toutefois évolué d’une nouvelle manière, caractérisée par une intensification de la violence, jusqu’à un point que l’on pourrait qualifier d’apocalyptique, tout cela allant de pair avec une sortie du réalisme sur le plan dramatique et dramaturgique. Cet article se propose d’analyser ces phénomènes comme étant les deux facettes d’une même volonté de résister à l’emprise du capitalisme néolibéral sur notre expérience du réel et d’imaginer l’inimaginable, à savoir la fin du capitalisme