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"Finburgh, Clare"
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Watching war on the twenty-first century stage : spectacles of conflict
\"What do we watch when we watch war? At a time when spectacle and conflict have joined forces via audio-visual technologies in ways that are more powerful than ever, who now manages public perceptions of war and how? Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict examines how theatre in the UK has staged, debated and challenged the ways in which spectacle is habitually weaponized in times of war. In this original and interdisciplinary interrogation Clare Finburgh provides a richly provocative account of the structuring role that spectacle plays in warfare, engaging with the works of philosopher Guy Debord, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, visual studies specialist Marie-José Mondzain, and performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann. Throughout her study, Finburgh offers coherence to a large and expanding field of theatrical war representations by analysing a wide spectrum of works, including expressionist drama, documentary theatre, comedy, musical satire and dance theatre: among the productions considered are Nigel Jamieson's Honour Bound, Lola Arias's MINEFIELD, Mark Ravenhill's Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, Hayley Squires's Vera Vera Vera, Lone Twin's Alice Bell, Richard Norton-Taylor's verbatim tribunal play Tactical Questioning, and Dennis Kelly's Osama the Hero. Through her analysis, Finburgh demonstrates how features unique to the theatrical art--the construction of a fiction in the presence of the audience--can present possibilities for a more informed engagement with how spectacles of war are produced and circulated.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shephard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.
eBook
The Ghosts of Slavery in Contemporary Theatre from the Francosphere
This article examines two theatre-makers who, in recent years, have provided counter-visibilities to the official erasure of history, placing centre-stage what philosopher Achille Mbembe defines as one of the defining moments of modernity: slavery. To make present this absence, both Cameroon-born author Léonora Miano's Révélation (2015) and Guadeloupian performance artist Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette's Kepone Dust (2020) employ ghosts, haunting, and spirits. Ghosts reveal how the repression of history and the impunity of criminality cannot prevent the past from being replayed. With reference to Rebecca Schneider's notion of making the past present during the act of live performance, the article examines how this new generation of theatre- and performance-makers replays history to stage a present haunted by trauma. At the same time, this replaying constitutes an affirmative means to enable restitution.
Journal Article
‘Violence without Violence’: Spectacle, War and Lola Arias's MINEFIELD/CAMPO MINADO
If spectacles are effects of power, designed to win wars, win elections and win customers, then how can these spectacles be better understood, so that we can better understand how they seek to work on us and others around us? And what part can theatre play in developing this understanding? In this article I explore Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of ‘violence without violence’, as set out in his essay ‘Image and Violence’ (2003). The synthesis of life's variety and disarray into an artwork is a violent act for Nancy. But if this violent act itself explodes the very seams which hold it together, it can enable ruptures or openings that prevent its violence from becoming ideologically oppressive. In this way the image inevitably participates in the ‘violence’ of representation, but simultaneously avoids the ‘violence’ of ideology. By way of an example I analyse the singular ways in which Lola Arias's production MINEFIELD – first staged at the Brighton Festival in 2016 before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre during the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) – disarticulated the spectacles of power, heroism and virtuosity that are often weaponized by leaders and by the dominant media for the purposes of fighting and winning wars.
Journal Article
\Voix/Voie/Vie\: The Voice in Contemporary French Theater
Valere Novarina's Attraction seems to imply that language is an agent that determines human action and dictates human speech. His use of the third person adds to the sense that language dispossesses and excludes the speaking subject. Here, Finburgh consults Novarina's theories, play-texts, and productions, notably his August 2003 staging of La scene (The Scene) at the Avignon Festival and his 2005 production of L'espace furieux (The Furious Space) at the Comedie Francaise. In La scene, characters admit that they find their language hermetic and adhere strictly to institutionalized formats of linguistic interaction that seem beyond their control to alter. The characters' dialogues illustrate the banality of their domesticated existence, which this production centered visually around cars, sitting rooms, and household appliances. On the other hand, Novarina's L'espace furieux was insufficiently foregrounded in spite of the fact that Novarina himself directed the production. The actor of Novarina's texts needs to possess the full range of tones and rhythms located in the interstitial space between speech and song, text and voice.
Journal Article
The Tragedy of Optimism: Kateb Yacine's \Le cadavre encerclé\ and \Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité\
This essay examines in detail Kateb Yacine's two tragedies, \"Le cadavre encerclé\" (1954) and \"Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité\" (1959), both of which treat Algeria's violent struggle for independence from France. I demonstrate how Kateb inflects classical tragedy's emphasis on eternal and universal suffering, with historicization and politicization. I locate Kateb's tragedies between Nietzsche's acceptance of suffering and death as the natural order of things, and Brecht's Marxist insistence on the unequivocal existential affirmation of life through understanding and enterprise. Kateb refashions the metropolitan model of ancient tragedy-both in its ideological content and in its stylistic form-with a modern political engagement. I propose that Kateb provides an exemplary dramatic template for the reflection of the complex tensions between suffering and optimism inherent in the struggle for social or political emancipation. I finally suggest that Kateb's transformation of tragedy affirms the autonomy not only of a new Algerian sovereign state, but also of his own unique anticolonial theater.
Journal Article