Mark Ravenhill in Performance: Breakfast, Video-games and War on Terror (original) (raw)

Abstract

In August 2007, British playwright Mark Ravenhill presented Ravenhill for Breakfast, a cycle of twenty-minute plays at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Thematically related, each piece offered a different approach to the War on Terror and an exploration of the “contemporary urge to bring [Western] values of freedom and democracy to the whole world” (Ravenhill, 2008: 5). In April 2008, the cycle was renamed Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat and staged throughout different venues in London. German director Claus Peymann directed his own version of the piece under the title Freedom and Democracy I Hate You at the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin in 2010, and Josep Maria Mestres production opened in Barcelona on the 31st of January 2013. In each production, directors offered a different sequence of pieces, presenting alternative narratives in changing orders and thus engaging in a completely different relationship with the audiences. From the importance of “breakfast” in the early production, to the focus on the distorted notions of “freedom” and “democracy” in Berlin, to the usage of a strong stage picture that wished to complement the words in the text in Barcelona, every audience sat through their own, particular experience of the same text. In the framework of what I will call the “Narrative of Terrorism” and drawing from spectatorship theory – especially Hans-Thies Lehmann, Rancière and Erika Fischer-Lichte – I would like to look at the different readings each production offered – with a focus on Berlin and Barcelona – and at how the audiences were addressed and attempted to be transformed through each of them. What were the strategies used by the directors? Was the audience encouraged to participate? Did the different narratives offer alternative political discourses? How was Ravenhill's response to the War on Terror altered by each production?

Elisabeth Massana hasn't uploaded this talk.

Let Elisabeth know you want this talk to be uploaded.

Ask for this talk to be uploaded.