Crossing the Mirror into Maternal Waters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its “economy” and “forms” of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray's “the female imaginary”, Deleuze's “becoming-other”, Cixous's “écriture feminine”, Lyotard's “the figural” and Derrida's “chora”.