Staging Absence: Postdramatic Aesthetics in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997/2007) & Rabie Mroué and Linah Saneh’s 33 Rpm and Few Seconds (2013)

In the Aristotelian tradition, a character is a crucial theatrical element which gives drama its full meaning through the mimesis of action. However, in the postdramatic theatre, characterized by “subjecting the traditional relationship of theatre to drama to deconstruction” (Lehmann 2), the existence of a character, a well defined dramatic persona, was doubted or negated in a way that destabilizes the Aristotelian dramatic conventions. The character position was destabilized in contemporary theater via disconnecting the actor from representing a character role, becoming just “a performer offering his/her presence on stage for contemplation”, (Lehmann 136), or through absenting the actors completely and replacing them with machines or multimedia creations.

In this respect, the paper explores the dialectics of staging absent characters in the two postdramatic performances, Martin Crimp’s play-text  Attempts on Her Life (1997) and its Katie Mitchell’s performance (2007) and Rabie Mroué and Linah Saneh’s 33 Rpm and Few Seconds (2013). Absence here is related to the deconstruction of the psychologically motivated, three dimensional character as manifested in the central figures in the plays. The two plays center on absent characters that never appear on stage, whose identities are reinvented either to represent critique to the late capitalism as in Crimp’s play, or an attack against the Lebanese political and social conditions as in Mroué’s and Saneh’s play. Reading the two plays from postdramatic/deconstructive lenses, the paper argues that Elinor Fuchs’s concept “The Death of Character”, and the postdramatic techniques discussed in Hans Thies Lehmann Postdramatic Theater and Derrida’s deconstructive techniques, discussed in his studies Specters of Marx, Of Grammatolgy, and “Structure, Sign, Play” offer a supple framework for analyzing how Crimp, Mitchell, Mroué and Saneh dealt with the absent center.