Drama A: Gendered Performance

Session Coordinator: Mardia J. Bishop
Kennesaw State University
3421 Chastain Glen Lane
Marietta, GA 30066
mardia.bishop [at] worldnet.att.net

Session C

Mid Riffs: Noel Coward’s Comedy of Openings

In a telegram sent to Gertrude Lawrence, congratulating her on the first night of a new production, Noel Coward simply wrote: “A warm hand on your opening.” The comment epitomizes Coward’s trademark wit and is indicative of the ways in which he self-consciously plays with dramatic language. Anticipating the works of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, speech in Coward’s 1920s comedies becomes an arena for the negotiation of presence and the articulation of desire, his dialogue both sublimating and calling attention to the physical. Coward’s innovative staging of gender and desire refines Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic excess and Harley Granville Barker’s entropic, impressionistic dialogue. The fractures in meaning and discourse engendered by verbal acrobatics in such plays as Hay Fever, Fallen Angels, and Private Lives provide new openings for the assertion of female subjectivity within a dramaturgical landscape characterized by meta-theatricality and an aversion to closings of all kinds. These acts with words reconfigure desire and dramatic structure so that each may perpetually elude the lure of the end.

Christopher Wixson
Eastern Illinois University
cfcmw [at] eiu.edu

An Ear for an Eye: Constructing Gendered Bodies in Radio Adaptations of Classical Tragedies

The representation of gender in performance often requires the utilisation of visual demarcation in conjunction with verbal signification. However in radio adaptations of stage productions, the visual dimension of plays is relegated entirely to the imagination through the agency of sound. One may expect that in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, this loss of vision would not bear consequences. Given Aristotle’s assertion that the ‘spectacle’ is of diminished importance in classical tragedy, their inherent orality would seem to make them eminently suitable for radio. However in the production histories of plays where gender and sexuality are central to plot and action, such as Euripides’ Medea, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrranos, there is a significant emphasis on ocular reception where the dominant female figures are dramaturgically completed through the use of visual cues. Without spectacle how are figures such as Medea, Clytaemnestra, and Jocasta represented By discussing strategies for the representation of disembodied tragic figures, and the implications for these central female characters, I will assess the ability of the classical dramatic form to transmit, demarcate, and manipulate gender identities through purely oral means.

Natalie Papoutsis
University of Toronto
natalie.papoutsis [at] utoronto.ca

Fraternity and Social Behaviour in Pinter

Throughout Harold Pinter's writing, from The Dwarfs to Celebration, he has manifested a fascination with the nature of the bond between men and its function as both a definer of social/moral infrastructure and as a gauge of individual (male) worth and self-esteem. The attraction that men manifest for each other's behaviour in his works, and the manner in which women function occasionally as conduits or facilitators of a male bond, is seemingly parallel in the pursuit of its very creation: Pinter's own artistic fraternity comprising of numerous artists with whom he worked, or with whom he communed via artistic endeavour (in screenplay writing, directing and acting). In seeking to consider, through the prism of Pinter's interests in them, the common pursuits of Beckett, Coward, Gray, James, Joyce, Kafka, Mamet and Proust, one might seek to define Pinter's sense of artistic self definition by positioning himself against or alongside them.

Mark Batty
University of Leeds
m.j.batty [at] leeds.ac.uk