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‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’: Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text

The evolution of drama and theatre studies from the curriculum of English Literature departments in 1960s Britain made it inevitable that the independent study of the medium of theatre in this country originated in the analysis, reconstruction and performance of the canon of written texts that had been inherited from its literary progenitor. Inevitably theatre studies, and at a later date, performance studies, was always going to seek to bolster its independence as a discipline by re-directing its focus away from the dramatic text, as studied in English Literature departments, towards a rewritten history of theatre and performance, and a contemporary practice that rejected the forms and conventions of the authored written text, in favour of collaborative practice with an emphasis on the live, the physical and the visual aspects of theatre. The single-authored dramatic text, as I will evidence in the course of this article, was further isolated by the advent of post-structuralist theories, which sought to discredit, in the words of Roland Barthes, ‘a single “theological” meaning’ in favour of ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.’ (1977:146). As a consequence the author’s coherent narrative or view of the world, common to the broadly realist parameters of most twentieth-century drama, was set in philosophical opposition to the multiple perspectives and fragmented narratives of ensembles such as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment. As this latter work began to be increasingly positioned by academics within a postmodern or poststructuralist framework, the critique of the dramatic textbased tradition implied by, or inherent within, such performance lent philosophical weight to the growing isolation of the dramatic text within contemporary theatre and performance departments in British universities. The binary division between text-based and non-text-based models of performance, which consequently emerged in the academy, can be seen to be somewhat replicated within the British theatre industry in its processes for developing new work. The predominance of the literary text in our particular dramatic heritage necessitated that traditional opportunities for the development of new work were centred around the writer and the playtext, and existed, for the main part, within theatres that were flagships of new dramatic writing such as the Bush Theatre and the Royal Court. As the work of companies such as Forced Entertainment began to influence a new generation of graduate theatre makers in the 1990s and into the new millennium, art centres such as Battersea Arts Centre began to establish development opportunities for ensemble devised practice and performance that worked against, or outside of, the conventional rules of dramatic playwriting. Responding to the dominance of the dramatic tradition and the hierarchical position of the written text sustained by the new writing industry, such art centres, for the main part, defined the practice they wished to develop, and ultimately programme, as ‘non-textbased’ practice. Such opportunities, despite their ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’ Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text