| dc.description.abstract | For all of their many differences, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel
Beckett have in common the fact that they have each exerted a significant
influence upon the way in which theatre is both conceived of and produced in the
twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century. Brecht’s extensively theorised Epic
theatre established a new method of acting and relationship with the audience;
Beckett’s increasingly minimal stage plays powerfully interrogated and challenged
limits of theatricality. The landscape plays of Gertrude Stein, whilst the subject of
less critical attention, were no less radical and have similarly instructed the thinking
of a number of major contemporary playwrights, producers, and theatre companies.
Further to that, however, this thesis argues that an understanding of the notions of
theatricality developed by all three of these playwrights must also take into account
their engagement with, or connection to, the revolutionary theoretical advances
made in physics during the first decades of the twentieth century.
There has been, increasingly, a number of insightful investigations into the
relationship between twentieth-century physics and prose, and physics and poetry,
but so far very few that consider theatre in the same terms. Noting the long and
complex relationship that has existed between science and theatre since Plato, this
thesis seeks to add to this body of research by showing how the ideas and
implications of quantum mechanics provided not just a source of potential themes
but also played an important role in determining the manner in which these three
writers re-conceptualised theatricality. Whilst leading theoretical physicists often
found it expedient to utilise metaphors of the theatre when seeking to explain the
ideas and the problems at the heart of their work, these same issues also provided
a means of approaching differently the creation of theatre. Central to this argument
are the ideas of an epistemological crisis within science and its philosophy, the
entailments of embodiment, and the notion of theatre conceived of as a mode of
enquiry in its own right.
As physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger,
as well as numerous philosophers of science, grappled with the problems of
indeterminacy and measurement that quantum mechanics presented, theatremakers
took these same changes within the scientific project as one of the tools by
which they could change their own creative medium. Sharing with science a critical
interest in the relations between bodies, with existence and presence within both
time and space, and with the role of observation, theatre, whilst often positioned as
antipodal to physics is, in fact, guided by a number of similar fundamental ideas. As
physicists were forced to reassess the basis and the potential of their method,
Beckett, Brecht and Stein were able to similarly reformulate the mechanics and
assumptions of theatricality. This engagement is traced and evidenced through
close examination of their published works as well as their letters and journals.
Writing with little to no communication with one another, the three playwrights in
question each drew upon significant aspects of science in different ways. Stein, in
addition to having a broad awareness of contemporary events, studied under
William James, whose ideas were to be claimed as an influence by Bohr; Brecht
spoke with scientists working in Copenhagen under Bohr, and also numerous
émigré philosophers of science in California; and Beckett spent many years
reading, with scepticism, about the development of rationalist thought and science.
Grounding the analyses of each of these playwrights’ writings in a theoretical
framework that works to set out and examine the basis of the relationship between
science and theatre within the long tradition of Western thought, this thesis argues
that the issue of representation underpins and connects them both. By bringing
together the powerful conceptual metaphors of the Weltbild, or ‘world picture’, and
the theatrum mundi, or ‘world theatre’, and addressing their significance within
systems of knowledge and expression, it is argued that on a fundamental level
understandings of theatricality and of science are dependent upon one another.
This idea is explored at the start of the thesis by returning first to Plato and then
following a critical line of argument through Nietzsche, particularly his The Birth of
Tragedy, to Heidegger and Heisenberg. | en |
