At the Terminus in the Brain: Illusions of consciousness in Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus

Marie Kelly

In the middle of Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus (2007) a young woman identified as B describes being snatched from the jaws of death by a demon who tells her that:

I’m a soul, but the body I lived in isn’t dead. I was sold to Satan for the going rate and I’m here to reclaim my erstwhile ‘host’, I suppose he’s called.⁷¹¹

Alongside many of his peers in Irish theatre Mark O’Rowe’s writing has wrestled with the notion of soul, spirit, and mind. At the centre of this is the implication of the Cartesian cogito which splits consciousness away from the body and assumes an ‘inner man’ with the potential of existing beyond the moment of death. According to René Descartes:

From that I knew that I was a substance, the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. (101)

In current cognitive and neuroscience, however, the cogito is merely an illusion, a concoction of mind that gives shape to the chaos of conscious experience. As this paper argues, O’Rowe’s Terminus is chiefly the staging of this illusion of consciousness and hence a struggle with the limits of dualistic thinking orientated towards self and soul. The following performance analysis draws from definitions of mind and consciousness from cognitive and neuroscience as well as observations of the play directed by O’Rowe in its premiere run at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 2007.

Mark O’Rowe wrote his first play in the mid 1990s; The Aspidistra Code, a play about a young working class Dublin couple who hire a hard man to protect them from a loan shark to whom they are heavily in debt. The setting, characters and violent content of this play heralded the future for the entire of O’Rowe’s dramatic oeuvre which is driven primarily by cinema rather than the stage. O’Rowe spent much of his youth watching ‘video nasties, cannibal movies and kung-fu flicks’ at the local multiplex cinema near his home in Tallaght in the West suburbs of Dublin (Raab 345). At that time the streets and green spaces between many of the the sprawling housing estates of West Dublin were alive with drug dealing, crime and violence. Over the course of the last two decades O’Rowe’s writing for stage and screen has vividly captured the layered energies of urban isolation, desperation and aggression. The most successful of his theatre work has been in monologue form, in particular Howie the Rookie (1999) and Terminus (2007), winning between them a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, a George Devine Award, an Edinburgh Fringe First, and an Irish Times/ESB Award for Best New Play. In all of this O’Rowe has developed a reputation as a writer who enjoys experimenting with form, who revels in exploring urban violence, and the extremities of darkness and light at the core of human nature. Like no other in Irish theatre O’Rowe’s plays place the minutae of everyday urban life against the mythic potential of fantasy and the imagination. His characters are both working class Dubliners and gods from other or under worlds, heroes and low-lifes, angels and demons.

At the Terminus in the Brain

Terminus consists of a series of alternating monologues delivered by two women and one man, namelessly identified as A, B, and C. The stage setting for the 2007 production is indeterminate and sparse. The play’s opening stage direction offers a description of lighting only: ‘Lights up on A, B and C. Hold. Lights down on B and C’ (5). Jon Bausor’s minimalist setting comprises a giant empty gilt frame which covers the entire vertical circumference of the proscenium arch. Inside this empty frame on the horizontal of the stage floor are three platforms of raised and raked triangular shards of broken glass. The performance opens with the deafening sound of Philip Stewart’s sound design of breaking glass as the three cast members – Andrea Irvine (A), Kate Brennan (B), and Aidan Kelly (C) – are revealed beneath Philip Gladwell’s sharply defined spotlights. Behind and above the three actors hang shards of broken mirror giving the audience both a rear and frontal view of the actors standing on these individual platforms of glass. The visual impact is more resonant of science fiction fantasy than any named place in Ireland or elsewhere: The three figures hovering in the void of the broken frame could easily be mistaken for the ‘teleported’ or ‘beamed-up’ space travellers associated with the Starship Enterprise.

In O’Rowe’s combination of urban rap and stream-of-consciousness, meanwhile, these three figures draw the audience into a series of tales of obscene demonic violence that soar from the quotidian into the chimerical. The lion’s share of this violence is attributable to the male character, C, whose monologues deliver a litany of spine chilling killings and rapes; acts of such monstrosity that they can only take place within the fictional space of the text and imagination of the audience. As the ultimate psycho killer, C ‘hate[s] the world and primarily women’ (18). His peculiar addiction to sugary sweets – and primarily Lockets, a brand of honey-filled mint manufactured by the Wrigley confectionary company – is bizarrely incompatible with the sordidness of his repulsive acts and continually pulls the play back to the material world and the physical experience of the character who is speaking. C’s first monologue begins in this mode and descends into mayhem:

I pop a Locket in my mouth, suck, then bite into the shell and – fucking hell! The spill of honey? I never fail to find it yummy (14).

…

Number one, I split from crown to chin. He screams and, relishing the din, I hew number two across the throat and gloat as he gouts arterial spray and flay and, Jaysus, pirouettes as jets of blood arc round him, like some kind of fountain (16).

…

As I speared her from the rear and, while being fucked, she bucked and brayed, I took my blade and stuck it in, then used my hand to grope about and pull her nethers inside out, and sucked on another Locket, looked as, in time with her death throes, her chest rose and fell – for how long, I couldn’t tell – till she was still and honey spilled onto my tongue as I crunched the sweet, got to my feet, headed for the latrine, keen to clean myself of the blood and the gore (18).

As these horrifically visceral stories unfold, significant connections between A, B and C become evident or are implied. A is a retired teacher and part-time Samaritan who goes on the hunt to rescue an ex-pupil called Helen from aborting her unborn child in the final stages in her pregnancy. In the process of this rescue A is reminded of her own estranged daughter who refuses contact following A’s jealous seduction of her fiancé. Through common circumstances occurring across the monologues of A and B – a microwaved shepherd’s pie on the floor, a shower left running, memories of a girl’s night in – it becomes clear that B is this estranged daughter. B lives alone and has difficulty in relationships with the opposite sex. On a night out drinking with friends she is sexually betrayed and ends up on the top of a crane from whence she falls. Before she hits the ground and goes to her death, however, B is scooped up by a demon soul, a creature with a body composed entirely of worms. This demon soul, as quoted in the opening of this paper, has been separated from the host body of C in a bargain that C has made with Satan. The demon soul takes flight with B, they fall in love, make love, and separate. B goes to her death and the soul departs to rejoin C who is on the run following his bloodcurdling killing spree.

On a superficial level the disjointed tales of A, B and C represent the fallout from an increasingly materialistic and secularized world, the alienated, the dysfunctional and the disenfranchised. These are individuals lost in a sea of addiction and obsession, individuals whose only solace lies in a bottomless pit of alcohol, junk-food and one-night-stands. The assignment of alphabetical letters to these beamed-up bodies on stage in contrast to the naming of those about whom they speak points to O’Rowe’s deliberate questioning of the existence of character outside of the stories that are told about them. This postmodern device propels the audience not only towards the word but also towards confronting the cogito, the illusion of consciousness as a stable essence located at one precise point in the brain. This also follows on from Elinor Fuchs who has proposed that the character is dead in Death of Character: Perspectives of Theater After Modernism (1996). To this effect, there are no characters in Terminus in the true sense of the word. There are three actors’ bodies in a stage space and images presented through the words of a text.

O’Rowe’s alternating monologues make some of the connections between A, B and C tentative and implied rather than solid and explicit, harmonizing form and content in such a way as to reinforce the alienated world in which the characters exist. The text’s cinematic imagery and point of view, meanwhile, zooms in and out of the characters’ thoughts and actions and in and out of urban or inner city settings; the concrete secular spaces of the dual carriageways, all-night-garages, pubs, cafes, council estates and building sites of Celtic Tiger Ireland. In her first monologue of the play, A lurches from street to taxi to street and in and out of her fleeting thoughts as she makes her way to confront Helen’s abortionist lover:

… I find a cab to nab and get in and we go, the driver prattling on the way they do. I couldn’t be bothered responding. I tune him out and drift and, miffed at my lack of response to his shit, he quits his attempts to engage and sits in a childish rage till we’re there and, having paid my fare and got out, I hear, as he pulls away, him say, or rather grunt, ‘You ignorant cunt!’ and, unfazed by his curse – I know, I know. But I’ve been called worse – I go to the gate and enter, knock and wait on tenterhooks till she answers the door (8).

Beyond superficial meanings O’Rowe’s interplay between text and performance in the 2007 production of Terminus, plays with the illusion of consciousness as centrally focused, substantiated and linearly/rationally framed. The stage space in the course of the live performance is literally the terminus of conscious experience; or, to use neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s description of the feeling of consciousness, as a ‘movie in the brain’ through the mind’s eye (The Feeling of What Happens 11). To this extent it is no surprise that Terminus has been described as a play which takes place either ‘inside the heads of his characters’ (as described by Garry Hynes in Haughton 159) or inside the heads of its audience. As Laura Collins-Hughes describes the performance of the play in Boston in 2011:

Fingernails pierce an eyeball and drain it of fluid. A knife slices into a woman while she is having sex. A body implodes beneath the tires of a truck. In Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus, all of these things happen, but not one of them happens onstage. They occur instead in the minds of the audience, the images painted there by the trio of interwoven monologues that make up the piece.

In her article, ‘Performing Power: Violence as Fantasy and Spectacle in Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China and Terminus’, Miriam Haughton has persuasively argued that O’Rowe’s staging of Terminus represents an intent to place emphasis on the ‘power of the spoken word while simultaneously denying the expression of the body’ (Haughton, 159-160). As she goes on to say, the currency of power within Terminus is the delivery of the word and the gaze operating between performer and audience. In the course of performing their overlapping monologues the three stationary figures do not interact with each other. Instead, they engage face-to-face with the audience, confiding in them, sometimes posing direct questions and assuming answers on the audience’s behalf. Midway through her first monologue, for instance, A asks the audience, ‘Did I mention, by the way …? Okay. But did I also say …’ (6). Later on she says, ‘Bear with me, though, and entertain any crying I might do, and I’ll try my best to explain …’ (21). In the protocol of theatre attendance the audience is trapped in its seated position, unable to disengage from the powerful exchange that takes place in the course of the performance. By gazing directly at the audience the actors share the same space of being with them in the moment of performance. Their lack of action and their obviously theatrical setting does not allow them to merely seem to be and hence they must seem and be in that shared moment between auditorium and stage. Audience and actor are thus present to each other in the moment of consciousness and in this feeling of being, to borrow Damasio’s words again, ‘at the movies in the brain’ through the ‘mind’s eye.’

In investigating the performance moment and the dynamic between audience and stage Bruce McConachie has adopted a cognitive linguisitic approach which is useful in the analysis of the performance of O’Rowe’s Terminus. According to McConachie the ‘conceptual blending’ theories of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner propose that our assimilation of performance involves the amalgamation of stimulii and mental spaces. We blend the content of more than one space to arrive at a new blended space that contains the compressed contents of the former. When we watch an actor in performance we watch (the actor’s skill) from the outside, but also feel ourselves to be with/in the performance, feeling what the performer-in-role is feeling. We can only achieve conceptual blending as body-minds, however, alive to thought, sensory perception, feelings and emotions (McConachie 553-577). The vocal sounds of Terminus facilitate such blending in their sensory onomatopoeic impact. O’Rowe’s words aurally link body and mind, thought and sensation:

So, I turn with a wobble, hobble toward the gate, get through it. My dinner leaps up into my throat and I spew it, dousing the street, hearing the sound of retreating laughter, a door closing after (9).

In its interplay between text and performance the 2007 production of Terminus pushes the audience into the terminus of the brain confronting head on the deceptive illusion of consciousness as substantiated, linearly and rationally framed and centrally focused. The clean lines of the minimalist setting may be said to suggest a parallel with Descartes’ definition of consciousness, which provides a rational framing or shape to space and awareness. This is incompatible, however, with our actual experience of what it is like to be in the world at any given moment in time. The busyness of Terminus’s fragmented monologues and their imagistic content conflict with Bausor’s visually clean lines, bringing the audience up close to the staging or ordering of conscious experience. The setting and the soundscape’s earth shattering announcement of the breaking mirror resists the fourth wall and reinforces the play’s attempt to disrupt illusory perceptions of reality. The contrast between the minimalistic setting of the performance and the busyness of the text, meanwhile, throws emphasis onto the words spoken by the actors on stage. Terminus in this regard is the staging of the experiences of A, B and C as they come to consciousness in the moment of performance. This is further enabled by the text’s positioning in a continual rambling present tense, in its attendance to the minutiae of each and every detail of the speaker’s experiences, bringing what would otherwise be regarded as inconsequential into the frame of performance. The sensory atmosphere of a physical environment not present on stage is unravelled via the rhythms of the text in tune with its content which hypnotically draws the listener in. With B we:

[…] meander the minute or so to McGurk’s; sink one, sink two, then bid adieu to the barman – his reply to me each and every time, ‘God bless’ – depart then, head to the M&S, my dinner to purchase, my day-to-day to adhere to, near to identical all, said days, near rote, you know? Near reflex now.

The bus home then, the silent flat. No cat nor any kind of pet. The sofa – sit. The telly – hit the remote. Reward – the illusion of presence through voices (10).

At the terminus in the brain we are brought into contact with another violent reality that parallels the violence contained in the stories told by A, B and C. In bringing this feeling to the fore Terminus wrenches apart any singular view of reality in its alternating monologue form which, like the cinema, allows O’Rowe to imaginatively compress or make leaps from one time and space to another, and from one perspective to another. According to cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett consciousness is not a single picture but an image that we ourselves produce. In Consciousness Explained Dennett explains that the phenomenological truth is the truth experienced by the subject that is not always true. Speaking of phenomenal space, he says ‘This is a space into which or in which nothing is literally projected; its properties are simply constituted by the beliefs of the (heterophenomenological) subject” (131). ‘The idea of a special center in the brain,’ he says, ‘is the most tenacious bad idea bedeviling our attempt to think about consciousness’ (108). Theorizing against Cartesian dualism, Dennett suggests that consciousness is more a series of processes of ‘multiple drafts’ or ‘fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain’ (113). To put it another way, consciousness does not have a centre and is not a singular process; our single picture of reality, our Cartesian view exists only because we create it. Akin to Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts at various stages of editing’, events within the three separate monologues of Terminus occur simultaneously and come together at the conclusion of the play. The speakers, meanwhile, are continually checking themselves and their stories as they go along. Midway through her first monologue, for instance, A asks the audience, ‘Did I mention, by the way …? Okay. But did I also say …? I didn’t.’ (6). And more expansively later on:

After a certain length of time, some associations occur in my mind. I’m comparing Helen and her mother, you see, their falling out, to my daughter and me, our own separation, brought about by … That’s a glaring omission.

Shit.

That’s right. I’ve a child of my own. ‘A child!’ (21).

Flitting here and there, forwards and backwards, the three monologues provide the audience with a fragmented disorientating experience, pushing against the impulse of coherence and continually forcing us towards the ‘movie in the brain’ through the ‘mind’s eye’.

Illusions of Consciousness

According to film maker David Cronenberg, at the root of all horror films is the Cartesian split; the terror of mind and body separating at the point of death. According to Steven Taylor

Cronenberg has stressed his fascination with Cartesian dualism in statements too numerous to mention. He envisions the ultimate comment on this unfathomable ‘split’ (and the basis of all horror) as being the process of physical death. ‘Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? … There seems to be something wrong with that. It’s very easy to see why many philosophers detach the mind from the body … But I don’t believe that.’ It is this anguish of contradiction that lies at the heart of the painful mystery in his films. Cronenberg sees an apparent split—but his intuitions deny that such a thing exists.

O’Rowe’s Terminus is poised on the brink of this terror exposing a search for alternatives and a longing for the self to be rescued from death at the point of this assumed separation. When B is rescued by the demon soul as she falls from the crane her onlookers are transfixed by the sight of the demon and the possibility of ‘a death deferred’:

Then there’s the creature’s hooves, its horns, all these things composed of worms as well; its tail, its prick – it’s male – their slick, fat interwoven shapes, like spiderweb or scaffolding, or a machine whose purpose is to power the creature – and me in his arms – up higher past my betrayers, who gape in wonder at a death deferred by the timely intervention … of, unless I’m mistaken … a demon (14).

While drowning later in the play, however, B reveals her attempt to hold on to her ‘self’ in the the process of dying:

I try to reclaim my waning name in vain – it’s gone – or where I’m from – that too – the who and the why, the I; all fly from my mind till I just kind of am, then. […] Bam! (45).

The culminating monologues further extend this preoccupation of the play by insinuating a fatalistic loop of reincarnation between the stories of A, B, and C. Helen, the young woman who has been rescued from her abortionist/lover by A, dies when she is knocked down by a truck driven by C. Helen’s baby is born at the scene of the accident, survives, and is handed over to A who speaks into the ear of the newly born baby, but her words are only hinted at in the overlapping structure of the play. As they appear between the concluding monologues of A and B, the words delivered by A, ‘You’ll have to be strong from here’ (45) could have several meanings: A’s thoughts as she stands at the door of her estranged daughter’s flat hoping for a reunion, A’s message to the baby she holds before she hands it back to the paramedic, A’s message to B while she enters the reincarnated body of the new-born baby. The latter is inferred by A’s words and the placement of the line at the end of B’s monologue in which she describes the moment of her death:

… a rent in my sunless sphere appears, lets in the light that sears my eyes, I shut them tight and feel myself lifted from hot to cold, enfolded in something soft and borne aloft, the waft of many smells assailing me, the ability to identify them failing me; the wind, the clamour, hammering in my ears, this fearsome fusion of sounds into which I’ve been cast and to which, at last, I open my eyes to see, through the glare, the face of a woman, streaked with tears – I’m back in the world, it appears – and, she’s smiling down at me like you would at a child, her expression melancholy yet beguiled, and, though I don’t know her at all, she evokes in me such love, I bawl, appalled as I am by the idea that she’s about to abandon me, to disappear, a fear borne out when after a minute she puts her mouth to my ear and, in it whispers words I’m unable to decode (45).

At the moment of death B is unable to identify the woman or to decode the words uttered into her ear. The links between baby, A and B are thus tenuous and conjectural. These hinted at entanglements with reincarnation and fate resist closure and leave openings for the process of imagining. In this way O’Rowe’s stage space struggles with and is inconclusive in considering alternatives to the belief in soul and life after death.

As outlined in the first section of this paper, Haughton has addressed the complex questions of power, myth, and violence in the performance of Terminus forming the view that this play

suggests the increasingly fragmentary nature of social living, with instances of isolation and despair provoking and facilitating a culture of crisis, manifest as violent exchanges, in a place caught between various worlds of myth, story and cultural despair (155).

Terminus, she suggests, disproves the Foucaultian belief in the restricted movement of the social body. ‘In these fantasies’, she suggests ‘there are no restrictions or restraint on physical exchange with the body’ (Haughton, 156). Nevertheless, ‘[v]iolence as a punitive measure and violence as a currency to display personal status in this linguistically coded construct of Dublin are apparent’ (Haughton, 158). My arguments here complement Haughton’s views and observations by paring back the philosophical frame of Terminus to the core of O’Rowe’s dramaturgy. In this regard I argue that this dramaturgy attests to a more fundamental creative inquisitiveness about the chaos and fragmentation of conscious experience, and that the violence at the centre of the play’s content is parallelled by the violence of the performance of O’Rowe’s monologue form which tears into the illusion of consciousness and self. The play chronicles a struggle with the limits of dualistic experience. A, B and C are body-minds obsessed with the physical world in which they exist, their appetites, pleasures and pains. In the play there is nothing lofty or noble about mind or soul and O’Rowe does not shy away from the unsavoury details of the body; the bad breath, the spit, the vomit, the snot. In Terminus a fear of the Cartesian split might be elevated to the level of myth, but mind and body are firmly located in the physical present on stage in the delivery of performance echoing Damasio’s claim that

It is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained. (Descartes Error 118)

From a political standpoint Cartesianism supports the privileging of mind over body and the Judeo Christian belief in an inner spirit or soul which continues to exist after the death of the physical body. In an uncertain world the idea of a transcendent soul is a tempting lifeline, a possible rescue in the face of the certainty of death. Cartesianism is the foundation of Enlightenment rationality and dualistic thinking which separates, splits and alienates through oppositional thinking, territorializing space and segregating identity. William Demastes traces developments in drama and theatre which correspond to developments in theories of mind, highlighting the significance of such theories in the politics of performance. Forms of theatre which pivot around a Cartesian central character with its stable ego, for instance, cloak hegemonic ideas of identity and assume closed worlds of cause and effect and either/or situations that trap their characters within them. As Dennett and others have claimed, however, consciousness is a dynamic continual process that never reaches a destination but feeds back into itself, adjusting and achieving awareness at countless points along its neural progress. This definition parallels the conditions of postmodern and postdramatic theatres which eschew character and linear narrative, destabilizing and disorientating their audiences who are not allowed to sink back into the darkness of the auditorium. Under such conditions actors are carriers of the text, and stage action involves simultaneity and multi-dimensionality. In such theatre, therefore, the illusion of consciousness, as William Demastes says, is ‘staged not as some discrete, autonomous entity, rather we are seeing full efforts of bridging the very mind-body chasm that the new scientists have been attempting’ (24). In such theatre the Cartesian experience is confronted and falsified through the bridging of mind and body, the notion of character as essence is challenged, and the hegemonic deliberately resisted.

The material presence of C’s demon in Terminus refutes Descartes’ definition of consciousness as a soul capable of existing beyond the body and the material world. The demon is physically grounded and interacts with B and C. As C describes the demon towards the end of the play ‘its form, composed as it is of a hundred thousand worms, its size, is someone I recognize: myself, or rather, my other half’ (48). According to Damasio, ‘soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism’ (Descartes Error 252). In other words, our souls and demons are states of ourselves that live and die with us as organisms. Like the worms which make up the body of the demon in Terminus we are no more than a network of chemical and cellular interactions which the brain cannot resist giving shape to in a propensity towards substantiating consciousness.

In 2001, not long after the success of Howie the Rookie, O’Rowe claimed that he wanted to ‘push Irish theatre on to the next level’ (in conversation with Gerard Stembridge). As Clare Wallace points out the monologue form solicits ‘questions about the very nature of theatre itself, about the nature of performative and audience response, truth and illusion, narrative and experience’ (6). In Terminus it appears that O’Rowe is experimenting with monologue in order to explore the illusion of consciousness, returning to an archaic form of storytelling as a means of dealing with questions about the dominance of the word. A cognitive scientific approach to the entire range of monologue forms has yet to be fully undertaken, however, and until such time we await a true understanding of what Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus has to offer.

Works Cited:

Performance:

Terminus (Peacock Theatre, 2007), written and directed by Mark O’Rowe, lighting by Philip Gladwell, sound by Philip Stewart with cast including: Andrea Irvine (A), Kate Brennan (B), Aidan Kelly (C)

Primary Text;

O’Rowe, Mark, Terminus (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007)

Secondary Texts:

Collins-Hughes, Laura, ‘Grisly Scenes in the Mind’s Eye, The Boston Globe, 4th February 2011.

Damasio, Antonio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 1994)

Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Inc, 1999)

Demastes, William, W., Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained (London: Allen Lane, 1991)

Descartes, René, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, rendered into English by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970)

Haughton, Miriam, ‘Performing Power: Violence as Fantasy and Spectacle in Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China and Terminus’ (New Theatre Quarterly, 2011), 153-166

McConachie, Bruce, ‘Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies’ Theatre Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4, Dec 2007

Raab, Michael, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights eds Martin Middeke and Peter Paul Schnierer (London: Methuen, 2010), 345-364

Taylor, Steven, (Gyrus), Psychoplasmics Body Mutation and Disease in the Films of David Cronenberg http://dreamflesh.com/essays/psychoplasmics/

Wallace, Clare, ‘Monologue Theatre, Solo Performance and Self as Spectacle’ in Clare Wallace, ed. Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), 1-17

Extract From: Sullied Magnificence: The Theatre of Mark O’Rowe, edited by Sara Keating and Emma Creedon (2015)

Cross Reference: McPherson, Enda Walsh, Consciousness

See Also: Monologues in Theatre