Fig i: Cast List of The City

The specifically unspecific. (Just a quickie)

For an example of the post-dramatic we looked at The City by Martin Crimp, for which the opening character list and stage directions are above:

Both “heading for forty” (Crimp, 2008, 3)? “A small girl of what? nine or ten?” (Crimp, 3)? My experience in reading scripts may not be as vast as others but surely that’s a bit vague? Especially for the time and place being “Blank” (Crimp, 2008, 3).

Thankfully after looking into things a bit more I realised that, vague though it is, it is also very specific. It is specific in the fact that these are instructions being giving to the director and actors playing these parts. It is specific when addressing the designers of the set. It is specifically unspecific.

As a performance it shouldn’t be seen as clearly being set in a middle-class suburban house in the mid-seventies. It shouldn’t be two people, one thirty-seven and one thirty-nine and another twenty-nine. It shouldn’t be a girl who has just had her tenth birthday.

 

Identity, in a poststructuralist discourse, is something that is consciously constructed out of the texts that are already present in the world; it is not something that exists prior to, or is expressed through, its own original voice.

Tomlin, 2009, 60

Through the play we may learn more small details about the characters, but never through what can be classes as their own voice, it is always clearly through the voice of another, through the voice of Crimp. The opening stage directions say straight away of this that there is little identity to these characters, they are nothing special, they could be anyone, in anytime, in anyplace. Their identity is minimal at best.

 

Work Cited

Crimp, M. (2008) The City.

Fig i: Marshall, A. (2016).

Tomlin, L. (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’ Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text. Performance Research, 14(11) 57-64.