Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I Stagings: Plays of Space
- Chapter 1 A Body Bending: Removing the Boots of Beckett and Proust
- Chapter 2 (Silence): Scripting Absence
- Chapter 3 Blood on the Wall: The “True Tragic Pleasure” of Medea
- Chapter 4 Coriolanus in the Marketplace
- II Sightings: Sites of Time
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Coriolanus in the Marketplace
from I - Stagings: Plays of Space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I Stagings: Plays of Space
- Chapter 1 A Body Bending: Removing the Boots of Beckett and Proust
- Chapter 2 (Silence): Scripting Absence
- Chapter 3 Blood on the Wall: The “True Tragic Pleasure” of Medea
- Chapter 4 Coriolanus in the Marketplace
- II Sightings: Sites of Time
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Let me roll in my wounds, through the heavy air and the sea; in my pains, through the silence of water and the harmful air; in the tortures which jeer at me, through their fiendish and billowy silence.
—Arthur Rimbaud, IlluminationsIn seeing Medea, and in feeling the “tragic pleasure” of that ancient play, many of the vital mechanisms of theatrical representation were, in plain sight, laid out bare before me. Exposed were the inner-workings, the underpinnings by which that tragedy's tragedy were to unfold and ignite its varied reactions and responses. Whether it was by the stagehands wiping away the blood of the murdered children, or the curtain call where the actors revealed a reality otherwise repressed, what was finally and most forcefully driven home that night was something of the necessity of that play's repetition, the simple fact that “the show must go on,” that what I had just seen in the theater could be seen again the next night, and then the night after that … The uniqueness of the suffering, even the uniqueness of the tragic deaths would be represented again and again for the “tragic pleasure” of all to see; in other words, upon that stage, death was not final; it would be repeated … and then repeated again.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sites of PerformanceOf Time and Memory, pp. 39 - 56Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2014