Abstract
Should theatre come about through the meeting of printed matter on paper and of a place in which to execute it, then death – offering neither the ability to say nor to do – can only ever appear foreign to it. Deprived of words and of images, and shrouded in
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both dissolution and silence, this death is seconded only by nothingness – the nothingness itself according no representation. In spite of this, representing death is the work undertaken by Jon Fosse, Sarah Kane and Rodrigo García. With regard to philosophical thinking, aesthetics or ideologies which shun the reality of death (either by denying its existence purely and simply, or by clinging to the idea of immortality), their theatre orchestrates a confrontation with pathos. Prising from death what is forbidden or taboo, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, identifying what it is, in death, which can allow the ability to say and to do is something which is never merely granted. It is the uncertainty of its success which serves also in displaying the splendor and fragility of the theatre of Fosse, Kane and García. To talk of and to enact death on stage is also to set in motion a reversal within the work itself of saying and of doing, which through this process becomes mere traces; be it ghosts (Fosse), corpses (Kane), or waste (García). Through these three types of theatre, this thesis explores how ‘death lives’ in their representations. In the work of Fosse, death establishes an alternate reality, a reality where all which could be considered dead seems to live, to speak, to move. The dead exist, de facto, alongside the living. It is memory which serves as a nexus here between the living and the dead; the past becoming the present via the memories of the living, the presence and the voices of those who are no longer living, being given voice and form by those who are. In the work of Kane, the theme of suicide serves as a theoretical tool to effectively confront us to the questions raised in her texts. How to effectively represent the unspeakable and the ‘unpresentable’ with which the writer confronts the interpreter, considering both Kane’s own suicide and the violent content of her work? For García, the depraved nature of humankind finds itself ruthlessly exposed. Man is comprehended from the root of his animality, sprawled in his own vomit. By doing this, the artist allows for a complicity with what he considers essential: destruction, failure, death. From this viewpoint, it is important to overlook the obvious repulsion that García can provoke, and to allow oneself to be submerged, to wallow even, in order to allow for analysis – a by-product of the material and moral degeneration which he inspires and employs. Through these studies, this thesis analyses the persistence of certain signs and symbols in contemporary theatre, thus interrogating the cultural imaginings of death in post-modern Europe
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