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The Events: Immanence and the Audience
Pattie, David
Pattie, David
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2016-05-12
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Abstract
David Greig’s The Events (2013) stages the aftermath of a traumatic
event; a cleric tries to come to terms with the massacre of her multicultural choir.
The play uses two actors (one playing the cleric, and the other playing all the
other main roles, including that of the killer). The cast, however, also includes a
choir, drawn from the town where the show is being performed: the choir sings,
and takes on small speaking roles (reading their lines from the script). They also
serve as an audience for the action, occupying tiered seating at the back of the
stage. The choir serves as a powerful reminder of what Laura Cull, in Theatres of
Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (2012) identifies as Deleuzian
immanence: a performance which stages “the participation, multiplication and
extension of the human body – understood as that which is produced by relations
of force and encounters with the affects of other bodies” (10). In this article, I
argue that the strong affect generated by the play in performance stems mainly
from the positioning of the choir, the performers and the audience as, simultaneously,
participants and witnesses to trauma; and from the immanent relation of
actors, choir and audience within the structure of the performance event.
Citation
Pattie, D. (2016). The Events: Immanence and the audience. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4(1): 49–60. DOI: 10.1515/jcde-2016-0005
Publisher
De Gruyter
Journal
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English
Research Unit
DOI
10.1515/jcde-2016-0005
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Article
Language
en
Description
Series/Report no.
ISSN
2195-0156
EISSN
2195-0164