The World within a Play or Playing within the World: Re-animating the Author through the Actor’s Voice

Abstract

The critical argument around deconstruction destabilises the author and the relationship between the authorial authority over the text and the meaning-making process. A similar deconstructive turn also questioned the actor’s positioning within the larger production apparatus in relation to the dramatic text. Looking at the changing ideological construction around the author in relation to the actor and performance, this paper argues that the re-animation of the author in the recent critical arena has opened up spaces where we can re-imagine the actor as well. The exclusion of the author from the bourgeois authority of the text has freed the text to be re-connected with the actor. Through this re-connection, the method of meaning-making gets a new dimension where neither the author nor the actor has full authority over the text. Still, they remain active part-takers in the meaning-making process. This paper contextualises how deconstruction as a theoretical premise and autobiographical narratives as active writing have a dialogue that portrays writing as a performing narrative: a creative synthesis between the narrating self and experiencing self. It is an enquiry into that ‘theatrical’ space where the autobiographical ‘author’ and actor melts down to become an organising function which can question the earlier production apparatus and simultaneously become a creative force. This paper is an objective epistemological endeavour to destabilise the production apparatus, thus opening up new possibilities of meaning and interpretation in examining the text, author, actor, and beyond.