On the One Hand … (The One That Writes the Body)

Abstract

The stage is an almost unique meeting point for text and matter. While textual prescriptions or proscriptions abound in human life, from religious tracts to legal pronouncements to self-help books and so on, the stage provides a unique space in which the relationship between the static, two-dimensional page and the kinetic, material world that it is created for is made visible. It is a truism to remark that barring perhaps the genre of closet drama, which, as Martin Puchner suggests, attempts to solve the “problem” of the unpredictable theater space and the living actor by writing dialogic texts for reading rather than performance, 1 the play text is intended to find its completion and fulfillment in the physicality of performance. In simple terms, it governs the words spoken by the actor and offers directions for movement; in other words, it functions as an organizing entity, arranging speech, movement, and spatiality, all of which will convey emotion, narrative, and so on. While chapter 2 was concerned with the relationship between language and body and between the art image and the poetic word, this chapter will be concerned with how theater offers a meeting point between text and the materiality of the stage space. This is brought to the fore by an author such as Beckett who deliberately stages this meeting point through various strategies, such as, for example, the act of writing in Catastrophe and the act of reading in Ohio Impromptu, Quad and What Where stage also the violence and restrictiveness that the text holds for the dramatic figure.