Enacted Offstage Images, Reported Onstage Action, and Parallel Fictional Worlds in Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) and Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019)

Abstract

This essay addresses how the collision of image, text, and speech in contemporary scripted performances discloses something significant about both being in and thinking about the theatre. It examines cases wherein recent examples of theatre practice disrupt long-standing expectations about the form and function of reported offstage action. While Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019) literalises the relationship between text and performance by putting the play script in the hands of the audience and employing illustrations as a means of reporting that inverts established ekphrastic modes, Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) literalises offstage presence through the audio narration of a figure named as ‘The Director’. These acts of staging literally key conceptual and practical challenges of theatrical representation work in both cases to reveal instances of mimetic disjuncture. Audiences are not sure which version of each performance to invest in: the staged action or illustrated text of Terrestrial Salvation and the onstage adaptation or The Director’s critical reporting in Chekhov’s First Play. By making available different versions of the same theatrical event, each production connects resonantly to a cultural moment wherein we are often exposed to alternative narratives but may not always recognise or acknowledge these alternate perspectives. Reviewed together, these two productions present a wide-ranging sensorial problematising of theatrical representation. They construct points of meaningful divergence through unscripted performances and the disaggregation of actor and character. Methodologically, this essay works to address these questions of representational multiplicity through a form of discursive practice that reports between the two case study examples. This approach serves to reveal the discourse of theatre and performance studies as frequently grounded in ekphrastic reportings that recount theatrical images no longer available to view. The argument marks out first how reported action and other forms of ekphrastic representation have historically been about what cannot be staged in order to propose that what comes to be unrepresentable in these examples – even as it is the means of representation – is theatrical performance itself. The essay then traces how these metatheatrical questions related to the representational affordance of these performances – in this case to do with impossibility of representing the theatre itself – ripple into wider consequences that can have substantial implications related to race, freedom, and collective endeavour.