Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.
Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
Love, or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.
They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.
Georges Bataille
"The Solar Anus"
In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Posted at 9.29 am in /Quotes
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007
My post at the Guardian (UK) theatre blog today is "Mainstream theatre is too intellectualised" (which may surprise some, but not more careful readers of this blog; I can't speak for the careless, more thick-headed ones):
Stoppard and Shaw and Frayn, at their best, investigate the darknesses (though they're never too dark) of the mind and ideology; Beckett and Barker and Kane, the darknesses (and they're often very dark) of the heart and spirit. A theatre lacking the second demonstrates a fatal weakness -- imagine the Shakespeare canon without the tragedies. There remains, on our mainstream stages, that profound absence.
More, including thoughts from Soho Rep's Sarah Benson on her upcoming production of Blasted, here. Also, a few very short notes on the plays of Sarah Kane here.
Posted at 7.12 am in /Miscellaneous
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