Artificial, Animal, Machinal: Body, Desire, and Intimacy in Modernist and Postmodernist Theatre

Abstract

Exactly one hundred years separate two notorious dramatic aristocrats: Alfred Jarry's wild Ubu and Sarah Kane's apathetic Hippolytus. Ubu is iconic of Jarry's surreal reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and, at the same time, a criticism of modernism's abstract poetics and will-less aesthetic experience. Kane's Hippolytus is a witty and macabre response to the late twentieth-century ‘logic’ of capitalism. Nevertheless, these seemingly diametrically opposed characters share one trait that binds them – spending desire. In this article Dror Harari considers these figures as conspicuous waypoints along a broader spectrum of indispensable relations between body and desire in modern theatre. He tracks certain dramaturgies of desire, as theorized and/or realized by theatre practitioners and philosophers. Starting with modernist attempts to overcome desire by likening the performer's body to a machine, he closes with the indifferent Hippolytus becoming a desiring machine. Dror Harari is senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His recent articles have appeared in The Drama Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Annual. His study Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self is forthcoming in Hebrew from Resling Publications, an Israeli academic publishing house.

A Private Honesty: Torture and Interiority in the Theatre of Sarah Kane

“…While some scholars have read Phaedra as 'enslaved by desire' and Hippolytus as 'lack[ing] interiority', this reading here sees the encounter between them as instantiating a conflict over two models of emotional intimacy. 49 One is defined by a desire for reciprocity and recognition, and the other by a desire for privacy and individuality; the latter is marked by indifference to the privacy and individuality of others.…”