Trauma and Drama/Theatre/Performance

Duggan, Patrick (2020) Trauma and Drama/Theatre/Performance. In: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Routledge Literature Companions . Routledge, New York ; London. ISBN 9781138494923, 9781351025225

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the text of the play rather than on an engagement with it in performance but it excellently foregrounds the importance of trauma theory as an analytical approach in drama. The performance deployed a structure that operated, dramaturgically at least, in a mode akin to traumatic schism in its repetition but with difference and shadow, and in pulling the audience in different directions intellectually and physically in decision making. Geraldine Harris takes this dialogic approach into the territory of witnessing, a key area of concern in theatre and performance studies and particularly pertinent to enquiries on trauma. In Injuries of the Spine, Page argued that the symptoms of railway spine were the result of the shock sustained in a traumatic incident, specifically train crashes, and not the result of physical injury. These symptoms, he argued, indicated “some functional disturbance of the whole nervous balance or tone rather than structural damage to any organ of the body”.

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