Theatre Journal

The avant-garde introduces a break in the history of established aesthetic traditions, but its interruption becomes a norm and gets subsumed within the same traditions with the passage of time. Does [End Page 110] this mean, the radical edge of the avant-garde is momentary? Can we think of its afterlife beyond temporal exhaustion? This is the central question that Lara Cox’s Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd addresses with European absurdist theatre as corpus and psychoanalytically inflected arguments on identity categories like gender, race, and ethnicity as methodology. The intention is to think through the lasting and renewable political impact of the absurdist avant-garde, and, to its credit, it doesn’t let go of the specificity of theatre as practice. Cox blends psychoanalytic theory with questions of spectatorship that lie at the core of the conceptualization of theatre as performance.

Cox chooses to begin from a historical vantage with what is usually considered the first absurdist play: Eugene Ionesco’s The Bold Soprano (1950). Her reading revolves around a perverse idea of spectatorship that tilts the work from tragedy to farce, converting anxiety into pleasure through the pervert’s fetishistic logic of ‘disavowal.’ In Cox’s readings, here and elsewhere throughout the monograph, the existentialist universal of the human condition gets challenged by particulars like queer sexuality in this case. She shows how Ionesco parodies masculine and feminine stereotypes and critiques the heterosexual institution of marriage. Taking into account the production history of the play (including queer stagings and amateur high-school performances) enhances the point of evolving parody in performance.

From gender, we come to nation and ethnicity in the chapter on Arthur Adamov’s critically neglected play Off Limits (1969) that engages with the politics of the Vietnam War. Cox argues that the play critiques the American military intervention by introducing a psychotic spectatorship (unlike perverse spectatorship, as studied in Ionesco) of anger and resistance through the logic of ‘foreclosure.’ Though the post 9/11 contextualization of the play as a satire of patriotism remains speculative for lack of current-day productions, Cox manages to offer a convincing reading of how the play can have continuing political significance in the 21^st century.

The third chapter undertakes an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s 1972 play Not I as a disruption of gender exceptionalism with a focus on race, while it continues with the thread on psychosis. In this context, gender exceptionalism refers to a discourse that women in the non-Islamic West are more liberated than the Muslim women in the non-Western countries. The reading anchors itself on the implied racial and religious alterity of the djellaba-clad Auditor vis-à-vis Mouth. Cox argues for a female Auditor to balance the representation and suggests that the play trashes gender exceptionalism as it evacuates the ideology in the Real via the extreme tempo that turns Mouth’s speech into blah-blah for the audience. There is a psychotic repudiation of language that consolidates the ideology of exceptionalism. But, she complains about the absence of the Auditor in recent productions and how the white performer playing Mouth risks cultural appropriation.

The critical thread on subverting gendered racism becomes more radical in the interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1958), read against the backdrop of the Algerian war of independence and French de-colonization. The spectatorial mode here is that of “supplementary enjoyment” halfway between pain and pleasure as the audience watches a theatrical portrayal of “black community’s emancipation from white hegemony” (Cox 123) and a deconstruction of white female victimhood. There is both fear and enthrallment in watching the play, as she shows by attending to the 2014 performance in Paris that evoked a strange bafflement. The idea of incomprehension plays into the supplementary enjoyment that doesn’t signify anything. The argumentative slant is towards the a-signifying Real. The high point of the chapter...