Staging Absence: Postdramatic Aesthetics in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997/2007) & Rabie Mroué and Linah Saneh’s 33 Rpm and Few Seconds (2013)

Abstract

In the Aristotelian tradition, a character is a crucial theatrical element which gives drama its full meaning through the mimesis of action. However, in the postdramatic theatre, characterized by “subjecting the traditional relationship of theatre to drama to deconstruction” (Lehmann 2), the existence of a character, a well defined dramatic persona, was doubted or negated in a way that destabilizes the Aristotelian dramatic conventions. The character position was destabilized in contemporary theater via disconnecting the actor from representing a character role, becoming just “a performer offering his/her presence on stage for contemplation”, (Lehmann 136), or through absenting the actors completely and replacing them with machines or multimedia creations. In this respect, the paper explores the dialectics of staging absent characters in the two postdramatic performances, Martin Crimp’s play-text Attempts on Her Life (1997) and its Katie Mitchell’s performance