Numbers and Series in some Contemporary British plays

Elisabeth Angel-Perez (1)

1 VALE - Voix Anglophones : Littérature et Esthétique

Theatre comes in numbers: from the schisis constitutive of the actor who says "I" on the stage to the plurality of artists in charge of the text, settings, lighting system, sounds, and, at the other end of the process, to the spectators, theatre asserts the collective. This collegiality defines an ethics based on the encounter with the other, which is the paradoxical condition for feeling at home in and with oneself: the theatrical experience can only take place when this plurality is atone -d. Sarah Kane gives a shape to this 'at-one-ment' when she asserts a collective yet reunified subject in her place: Kane does not speak of "herself" but of "hermself" and builds for her character a plural unessentialist, liquid subject 2 , a subject-world: " I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs, …" 3. Only the ethical subject thus created can address the traumas of contemporariness as defined by Agamben: "The contemporary is s/he who firmly hold(s) his/their gaze on his/her own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure...

Domaines: Littératures

Elisabeth Angel-Perez. Numbers and Series in some Contemporary British plays. Cercles, 2021, Numbers illimited, 38, pp.57-65. ⟨hal-03377553⟩