Pregnancy, silence, and cinematic apocalypse in debbie tucker green’s second coming (2015) and ear for eye (2018/2021)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines how debbie tucker green’s approach to the radical politics and aesthetics of silence has developed through her cross-disciplinary practice, as she has experimented with different approaches to framing the verbal refusals, repressions, and impasses which texture the dialogue in her plays and films. The essay suggests that answers to the philosophical questions asked by her 2015 film debut second coming – questions about time, embodiment, and intersubjectivity – may be found in ear for eye, a piece tucker green first wrote and directed as a play at the Royal Court in 2018, and subsequently adapted and directed for the cinema (2021). Each work, I argue, illuminates the other; reading them together reveals how they share a common and urgent interest in the form and performance of silence, as an inscription of negative agency and resistance. These pieces exist in a dialogical relationship with dominant traditions of performance practice. Indeed, the mercurial interplay of encounter and utterance defines tucker green’s interest in radical staging, in the intermediations and translations of adaptation, and in questions of how form and convention intersect with race and identity.