Beyond Suffering or Resolution

Abstract

This essay reads contemporary theatre practice through the lens of a “modern tragedy,” arguing for the existence of a new genre of “crisis dramaturgy,” which evokes and reformulates the Aristotelian sense of “tragic.” In these dramaturgies –both dramatic and performative—while the afflicted subject is portrayed as an archetype of human suffering, in a spirit similar to the ancient Greek tragic heroes, the hydraulics of suffering are anything but arbitrary. The “crisis-struck” character is no longer a victim of a nefarious divine agency, but implicated in the relentless maneuvering of global politics and the (un) ethics of capitalism, carrying highly precarious national, cultural and civic identities, fluid, perilous and subject to manipulative, profit-gaining practices. Drawing on Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Édouard Louis’ History of Violence and on Borborygmus by Rabih Mroué, Lina Majdalanie and Mazen Kerbaj, the article looks at modern tragedy as a performative form that reveals “the apprehension of a common human vulnerability” (Butler 2004, 30) and stimulates an awareness of the social and ideological context that aggrandizes it. Such tragedies are no less tragic, but are anything but private, grand or cathartic. As spectators of these narratives, rather than being purged, we are faced with the open-endedness of suffering, the bitter awareness that the moment of crisis (in Aristotle’s terms) repeats itself ad infinitum.