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Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch's Sight Specifics in ENGLAND and The Author

This essay considers Tim Crouch's two most recent plays, ENGLAND and The Author, in relation to the performance spaces for which they were commissioned – respectively, a white-walled art gallery (the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh) and a black box studio theatre (the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, London). It examines the ways in which Crouch explores and subverts the ideological particularities of the gallery and theatre space, particularly with respect to conventions around spectatorial response. Building on a distinction drawn by art critic Brian O'Doherty, the essay proposes that the disembodied ‘Eye’ conventionally assumed by both gallery and end-on theatre auditorium is displaced by these plays in favour of an awkwardly materialized Spectator, both emancipated from the collective and implicated in the proceedings.