Second Skin: Costume and Body: Power and Desire
Cathy Leeney
Introduction
The history of women in relation to clothing has been a problematic adventure in aesthetics, control and resistance. In theatre, costume has a particular significance in the interrogation of representations of female power and desire. This essay aims to investigate how powerful women characters are costumed in contemporary performance, through focus on two productions from Rough Magic Theatre Company, a prestigious independent company founded in Dublin in 1984.
In 2010 Rough Magic produced two major works at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. Firstly, Sodome, My Love, translated and adapted from Laurent Gaudé’s French original by Olwen Fouéré, renowned Irish performer who also played the sole role in the piece and whose company The Emergency Room co-produced. For the Dublin Theatre Festival in October of 2010, Ellen Cranitch and Hilary Fannin wrote a new version, with music, of Phaedra, setting their Irish-inflected interpretation in the present day.774 They were inspired by Racine’s Phèdre (1677) and by Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), both of which were drawn in turn from Euripides’ Hippolytus. Seneca’s Phaedra served as an intertext. Although widely different in genre and staging (Sodome is a one-person show while Phaedra has a cast of seven, plus three singers and four musicians) the productions had certain creative contributors in common: both were directed by Lynne Parker, artistic director of Rough Magic, and lighting and settings were designed by John Comiskey. Costume design for Sodome was by Monica Frawley and for Phaedra by Bláithín Sheerin. Both productions were very well received and between them received no less than six nominations for Irish Times Theatre Awards for 2010.
What connects the two shows however, for the purposes of this essay, is the representation in both of female characters who are central to the action and narrative, and who express intense sexual desire which threatens the normative placing of women as, exclusively, objects of desire. In Gaudé’s piece the protagonist is a survivor of the cursed city of Sodome, her voice an echo of Lot’s wife, turned to a pillar of salt as she looks back at her city burning. Her passionate memories of life there comprise the early part of the performance, as she evokes a lost world loosed from sexual inhibition, a society of utopian eroticism in which the expression of pleasure is a social bond, floating free from corrupting power relations, and gendered manipulation, into pre-lapsarian joy and bodily fulfilment. Between the pleasure gardens and terraces of Sodome, where desire flows like wine, and the troubled shore where Phaedra’s exiled soul writhes in the grip of her unruly passion, is a chasm of moral judgement. Through Euripides and Racine, Theseus’ wife has become a theatrical and cultural icon of woman’s guiltiness for sexual longing and the inevitable tragedy that comes in its wake. Anne Ubersfeld describes how Racine’s play is “[i]n the history of the classical theatre … a sort of blind spot, an obscure calling into question of classical representation [emphasis in original]” (209). Ubersfeld sees in the play a challenge to the form of the space of performance, but also to the representation of the body. A larger point is being argued by Ubersfeld relating to Racine’s “non-place” of tragedy (209), the “progressive void” (210) in his Phèdre, in which she identifies a Jansenist suspicion of the representation of the world. The body, and especially the desiring woman’s body, is part of an unease, a negotiation with what representation fears, the female subject outside the bounds of passivity and objecthood.
To return to the productions in question here, both posed questions concerning a post-feminist reclamation of glamour as power; both created images of female bodies bearing the signs of hyper-femininity in uneasy relation to the gaze of the audience, which was invited to assess the empowerment or disempowerment of the character in the narrative of each play. Were audiences witnessing a third wave feminist strategy to reclaim the semiotics of woman as sexual object, of woman as social (read patriarchal) construction? Or was a crisis in representation revealed, a visual aporia at the margins of the symbolic economy of gender?
Alisa Soloman comments that “femininity is always drag” (145) in recognition of the long-standing idea that to be a woman, on or off stage, is the performance of a lifetime. Before an audience, how is the performance of femininity de-naturalized? Can women in performance threaten what Judith Butler calls the obligatory repetition of hegemonic gender identity? What theatrical strategies are available to interrogate the central women characters in each of these Rough Magic productions, and in the layered and complex signs that are at play in these performances for an audience, what is revealed of the ambivalence of third wave feminism? I will, in what follows, attempt to touch on these questions primarily in relation to Phaedra, and to a lesser extent in Sodome, My Love. To begin I will set out the analytical and theoretical coordinates for my argument.
Costume in Performance
Costume in performance is not often the core concern of critics or commentators and it seems useful to explore some of the grounding ideas about its analysis. It is not possible to dissociate costume from its wider staging context, involving scenographic issues of space, light, and composition as well as dramaturgical issues of narrative function and character. In contemporary production, the designer of costumes creates a signifying system which, as Patrice Pavis remarks, “is valid in its own right,” even if, as he goes on to say “it also constitutes a sonic echo, an amplifier with implications for the rest of the performance” (172). In semiotic terms Pavis sees costume as one of many elements in performance: “both a signifier (pure materiality) and a signified (an element integrated into a system of meaning)” (174).
The intimate and dynamic relation between costume and the body of the performer, makes complex and enriches this dual semiotic role; as Pavis points out, a “body is ‘worn’ and ‘carried’ by a costume as much as the costume is … by the body” (175). This was Oskar Schlemmer’s insight into the inseparable phenomena of body and costume, and points to further dimensions in the layering of the material and the fictional, the “alive-in-time” body of the performer wears the fictional costume of the character (25). Roland Barthes, examining how costume may reveal social processes, proposes that costume is part of “social gestus, the external, material expression of the social conflicts to which it bears witness” (41). His idea extends the power of costume to analyze the social world of the performance for the audience. Thus, from the audience’s point of view, the costume may both define character and simultaneously disappear into the character/role/performer nexus. It has the power to collapse the distance between the social world of the play and the performance in relation to the world of the audience. Through the notion of costume as a “shifter vector” Pavis reveals how costume works to enable transitions between stage and auditorium, between fictional and real time, between actor/role/character and audience (180). An example of such a transition operates in Phaedra, where the abandoned queen of Colchis is dressed in the style of a Celtic Tiger yummy mummy. In Sodome, My Love, the performance moves towards a defining transformation that brings the survivor from the mythic city into the midst of contemporary urban experience. However, such transitions can be freighted with an excess of semiotic consequences, due to the expressive power of vestiary codes, and the “networks of strictly codified signs” (Pavis 180) that circulate between the spaces of performance and the spaces of social processes, culture, the body, and fashion. This excess of meanings is a key question in the analyses that follow.
Part of costume’s function in shifting the audience from the fictional stage world towards an awareness of its own vestiary idiom derives its power from the world of fashion. Marvin Carlson traces the history of costuming in European theatre as it came under the influence of the romantic/realist movement. Within that period an earlier tradition of “recycling” costumes and other stage materials, from one production to another, was rejected in favour of individual and specific designs for each production of a play. Costumes were made especially, to reflect the overall staging of the play, with the set designer often taking on costume design too. “The reform sought by the romantics was long in being generally accepted” though, Carlson argues (124). The recycling of costume never really disappeared and it has more recently gained a new lease of life through a postmodern understanding of every performance “as existing in and best understood through a web of intertextual relationships” (Carlson 126); this may be a visual web, involving costume contextualized by the entire mise en scène.
Costume, Body and Fashion
Carlson’s argument concerns theatre as a place of haunting. Every play might be titled “Ghosts” he suggests, quoting Herbert Blau’s observation that performance carries an uncanny sense of repetition, of “seeing what we saw before” (Carlson 1). Carlson examines how the elements of production themselves carry ghostly meanings and associations from their prior stage lives. But Carlson’s poetic and engaging thesis also offers a way of thinking about the relationship between costume in performance and fashion. This is a two-way street of influence, as Elaine Showalter has shown in her revealing analysis of the history of Ophelia’s role in Hamlet. Representations of Ophelia on stage reflected beliefs about women’s lives and desires, and in turn influenced ideas about women’s lives and desires, sometimes with real consequences. Ophelia’s costuming both reflected social attitudes to women and in certain cases contributed to real women’s understanding of ways to be a woman, to be in grief, and to be mad. Where performers are dressed in contemporary clothes (whether those clothes have been designed specifically for the production, or have been bought in the high street) their appearance is haunted by these two-way laws of fashion, the performance of the body as fashion, and “the many complex social dimensions of fashion” (Entwistle & Wilson 3).
Even the most cursory consideration of fashion semiotics reveals the body’s immediate and defining participation in its images and symbolic economy. The shifting laws of fashion are the laws of gendered embodiment. Philosopher Kate Soper, to whom I will return later, wryly comments that “Vivienne Westwood may be right in her suggestion that fashion in dress is about eventually being naked …” (19). In immediate and concrete ways, costuming in this context reveals how bodies of women and men are framed and inscribed in the Foucauldian sense. Women’s problematic history of restraint by and prohibition through clothing has fuelled their efforts to resist vestiary disempowerment. The patriarchal drive to control femininity, to define it as other, as secondary, as essentialized identity, is often materialized in clothing and fashion. So, what is the form taken by the drive to disrupt and resist the inscriptions that these gender definitions operate on woman as desiring subject, as determined participant in power, conventionally defined in phallogocentric terms?
From Gianni Versace’s 1992 “bondage” collection, to the work of Vivienne Westwood, Betsey Johnson and Alexander McQueen, contemporary high fashion purveys powerful images of women appropriating the semiotics of fetish and Sadean victim/aggressor relationships. High street fashion follows in its wake, moderated, but often bearing significant traces of designers’ extremity. Through a dialogue with the circulation of fashion images, theatrical costume works to connect the spectator into the performance or to estrange him/her. The semiotic vocabulary of designers like Westwood and McQueen operates between hyperfemininity and phallocentrism, playing with the tropes of femme fatale (deadly female sexuality) and Sadean woman (Marcusean release of sexuality from the order of procreation–see Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man). Relative to more conservative haute couture designers, their images are a challenge to high street trends; the extremity of their vision is diluted to a great degree in order to become wearable for the person in the street. However, their images have been absorbed to a surprising degree into normalized images of woman as aggressively sexual, disabled by dizzyingly high heels, and sporting the chains, straps and other signs of sado-masochist erotics.
In performance, costume may define, mask, entrap or liberate the body of the performer; as part of the dynamic of scenography, costume in a sense is the body of the performer, just as the naked performer wears the “costume” of nakedness on stage. Angela Carter, in Foucauldian spirit, writes, “our flesh comes down to us through history” (qtd. in Evans 212); one might extend her observation to propose that our flesh comes down to us through the history of fashion. Thus, costume and body are intimately connected at every level of meaning, and the regulatory systems applying to clothing are visible also in theatre as inscriptions on the body of the performer as part of the cultural and fashion context of the production.
Third Wave Feminism
“Feminism has operated for several decades on an ethic of powerlessness and we need to investigate an ethics of power … In the twenty-first century you cannot pretend anymore that no women have power” (Gillis and Munford, “Interview” 61-62). Showalter’s comment focuses on third wave feminism’s negotiation with certain (limited) successes of feminisms’ earlier battles in the Western world. Sometimes labelled “post-feminism,” the third wave is often presented as implying that feminisms are outdated. This view is severely limited both in its occlusion of women’s subordinated legal and social situations in most parts of the world, while it normalizes the circumstances of privilege within which a minority of women are empowered to fulfil their talents and ambitions, through hard-won equal opportunity. The notion of post-feminism as back-lash acknowledges the regressive potential in proposing that both the battle and the war are over. Between this paradox of victory and defeat, the periodization of women’s efforts to live fully may appear as a discourse of superfluity on the one hand (no longer needed), and failure on the other (so much gender inequality remaining unaddressed). Within this contradictory position the disruptive potential of appropriation continues however;775 fetishized representations of the performance of femininity, of woman as phallic signifier, holder of de-othered power, become a ground for a take-over, an appropriation.
The “identifiable position from which one speaks,” as Margaret Shildrick argues, is “both undecidable and subject to iteration, … [and] is at the same time endlessly transformative” (69, emphasis added). Hyper-iterated images of woman as sexual object of male desire contain the potential to be transformed into images of power as agency, even if only the agency of appropriation. Or do they? Within this tension both Fannin’s and Cranitch’s Phaedra and Gaudé’s survivor of Sodom return to the stage from the troubled gallery of Classical Greek and Judeo-Christian icons of womanhood. They bear excessive passions, demand a confrontation with their rejection of limits and conventions. The staging of their excess requires to be communicated to twenty-first century audiences in terms of the unresolved questions of feminism’s third wave. But as theatrical revenants, to come back to Carlson’s idea, they fracture diachronic time and suggest that women’s excess is a recurring energy, that the nexus of woman, power and desire is both polyvalent and unstable. I hope to show how both productions, each through contrasting narratives, and through different staging and design strategies, interrogate the vexatious issue of woman’s subversive agency and how this may be imaged.
Phaedra/Phaedra
The Irish post-Celtic Tiger context for Rough Magic’s 2010 Phaedra, text by Hilary Fannin and music by Ellen Cranitch, portrayed the shore of Troezen in a ruefully dark-comic mood that overlaid the classical world of Racine/Rameau with post-Freudian analysis of uncontainable desires and futile efforts to escape them through drug, psycho- or body therapies.776 Undoubtedly the House of Helios creates a bitterly ironic palimpsest for this twenty-first century dysfunctional household and the personal indulgences accessible to an élite during the economic boom years in Ireland before the so-called crash. Imagery of the sea (evoked through John Comiskey’s abstract lighting) together with the instrumental and sung music materialized a force, overwhelming any mere individual, expressive of elemental longing, beyond what is sayable (Fannin et al. in Phaedra Programme). The singers (named as the gods that Euripides associates with the action in his extant version: Artemis, Poseidon and Aphrodite) counter-point dialogue that is aggressive, funny and cutting. These supernatural figures frame the mortal characters as venal animals gripped by history, vanity and desire.
The play follows the outline of Racine’s version of Phaedra’s story in general terms. Emphasis grows, however, on Hippolytus and Aricia as the innocent victims of a corrupted parental generation, and Phaedra’s obsession with her step-son is paralleled in an interesting reading of Theramenes as a psychiatrist struggling to control his attraction to the young man who is his patient. Hippolytus then is desired by Phaedra, by Theramenes and by Aricia, is admired by Ismene, and becomes an almost parodic icon of sexual allure. Phaedra’s longing is overwhelmed and finally falls into secondary place amidst this web of yearning.
The scenic space, also designed by Comiskey, held five musicians in a shallow pit up stage centre, split by a central staircase; downstage a central platform, a self-conscious stage-within-the-stage accommodates core scenes of intimate dialogue, and of troubled family gatherings. Two lateral platforms rise steeply to face the audience on either side, and a startling luminous-blue panel, angled over the scene, increases the sense of confrontation and immediacy between the space and the tiered ranks of audience.
The action opens with Phaedra (Catherine Walker) turning before a distorting full-length mirror, in which her magnified image is reflected, then projected onto the surface of the mirror to play back her gaze. The mirror captures the dominant culture of surfaces, vanity and self-obsession, while it is also an ironic sign of Phaedra’s failed self-reflection. As Sara Keating comments in her review of the production, Fannin has re-imagined the space of the play as “a cynical, corrupt place … [with] familiar resonances with modern Ireland … [including] the hyper-sexualisation of women … and a real anger at the status of women in this amoral world.” Enone (Michèle Forbes) watches Phaedra; the uneasy relationship between the two stresses Enone’s authoritative but parasitic manipulation of her mistress, her vicarious engagement with the younger woman. Power-costumed in a double-breasted coat-dress and court shoes, Enone presents as an aspirational, bourgeois feminist of the 1980s, a kind of wanna-be top girl.
Manipulation of body image and victimization coincide neatly in Phaedra’s account of a woman’s body washed up on the shore: “It was a long time in the water” (Fannin, Phaedra [2010]), and identifiable only by the serial numbers on her implants. This image is repeated and emphasized musically. Ubersfeld argues that, in Racine’s version of the story, representation of the body as a unity is challenged; “Phaedra’s body appears twice as a unity” she points out, but otherwise is fragmented and dispersed: hands, eyes, mouth and so on. For Ubersfeld, Racine’s Phèdre is a confluence of spatial and bodily dispersal; its location in a “non-place, a concrete non-picture” (209). Phaedra’s body is rendered unified by suffering and passion, but is shattered into isolated parts expressing the failure of the body’s analogous meaning as an image of totality. Hippolytus’ death, his body broken into pieces, clearly figures this theme of fracture, and the sense of dispersal runs deeper in the structure of the narrative. In Fannin’s and Cranitch’s version this unity or integrity of body is shown to be already an impossibility. What results is a performance of the void that rips out the inner site of desire from its corporeal seat, and casts it homeless, adrift. Fragmentation is framed as commodification of the female (and male) body, a punishing and even deadly process. Phaedra deliberately cuts her wrist on the edge of the mirror in the first scene; her gesture distils women’s self-punishment in an economy of body regulation, passive objecthood and woman’s entrapment in being the desired, but not the desirer.
Overall, costuming by Bláithín Sheerin operates on two intersecting levels: the off-the-peg style of clothing of the mortal characters, contrasted with the three singers, each dressed elaborately, bearing ritual elements such as feathers, martial collars and armlets, ceremonial objects, and with faces masked with bronze or gold paint. While the street clothes work as connector vectors to link the audience and the contemporary dialogue to the mythic action, the gods are a “sonic echo” of tragic fatefulness; they re-orientate the gestus of the performance (Pavis 172, 175) and its relationship between the performance and the social world of the audience. The semiotic excess of the combined costume sign systems reflects the instabilities of the tragic anti-heroine as third wave feminist subject.
One scene that effectively stages how Phaedra is trapped by the contradictory demands of her own emotions and the cliché-ridden image of female attractiveness is where she, believing that Theseus is dead, confronts Hippolytus with her desire. The encounter is staged in the centre of the scenic space, made self-consciously performative through its self-consciously “theatrical” positioning. Phaedra wears a grey silk dressing gown, her hair down. When she is assured that Hippolytus, now orphaned, does not see her as his [step] mother, she removes her dressing gown, supposedly to try on a range of dresses to wear to Theseus’ funeral. She reveals a conventional image of the sexualized woman: décolleté black basque, black suspenders, black stockings and high heels. The sleek silhouette of the performer’s body adds to the image of fashionable seductiveness. Fashion’s paradox though, “that it presents itself as a means of self-realization but only on condition that you submit to the dictate of a collectivity” (Soper 27) is materialized in what follows. If, as Barthes writes “good costume clarifies gestus” (42) then this scene traps Phaedra in the desperation of her desire. She embodies the contradictions of her (simultaneous) freedom to express herself, while the image she chooses places her as passive object of the male gaze. Her conformity with objectification runs side by side with her appropriation of the potential power of that objectification, to win what she wants. But the narrative is set against her empowerment. She is rejected by Hippolytus and gains only his temporary pity. The scene ends with her suffocated collapse. She clings piteously yet deliberately to Hippolytus, her humiliation overtaken by a retreat into vulnerable passivity. Her putting to use of familiar expectations of feminine weakness only subverts her status as a tragically misguided figure and opens a way for her betrayal of honour under the malign influence of Enone. When she realizes the catastrophic consequences of her lie to Theseus (that Hippolytus raped her) it is Aphrodite (Cathy White) who helps her to swallow the overdose that causes her suicide. In the final scenes she wears a silver sequined dress, shattering reflected light in a spectacle of bodily and moral fragmentation, each particle of sequin a tiny shard dispersing her image into an impossibility of completion.
Lynne Parker stages this with fine balance between dignity and hopeless despair; Phaedra crosses the front of the stage left to right, blindly, as if held in tensile relation to Aphrodite, who crosses up stage from right to left. As Phaedra reaches the window structure, represented down stage right in a form that closely echoes the mirror mentioned earlier, she falls softly to the ground and is visible to the audience only through the disturbing distorting glass that shields her. The gestus of her death is a surrender. In contrast to Seneca’s version where Theseus orders that Phaedra be buried, it is implied alive,777 Phaedra here acts to bring on her own death. She must embrace defeat. Fannin, Cranitch and the production stage for the twenty-first century the damaging and unrelenting agon of woman’s self-fulfilment, the irony of her agency against herself.
Sodome, My Love
In a shallow arena bordered by tall screens and furnished only with two bench structures, Laurent Gaudé’s survivor of Sodom returns to us from her sleep in salt.778 The audience see her first in close-up, her sleeping face, flaked with salt, projected on the screens; the floor of the stage is harsh with saline crystal. We hear the voice and breath of the nameless woman, “the world groans and moves around me … the salt sticks to my skin” (Gaudé). Slowly the still figure is revealed on stage, head down, long pale hair, seated, barefoot. Olwen Fouéré’s body appears whitened, her skin bearing residues of salt, her movements expressive of long stasis finally broken. She is costumed in a sleeveless white shift, a shroud of silk-like fabric.
In this staging at Project Arts Centre the screens are used to point towards the off stage world of the protagonist, an alienating and alienated place of technologized anonymity, but they also present the audience with larger-than-life access to the detail of the performer’s facial expressions and states of mind. In this way the screens extend the scale of the presence and location of the woman; she is present physically and is also out there, uncanny, amongst us, within us. On the screen close-up, her face runs with drops of water, the mouth open. She welcomes “rain for which I have waited centuries.” Lights are flickering vertically now on the screens stage right, with images of hard urban energies, time passing, anomie. Comiskey conceives a space for the survivor of aeons, a revenant who “comes back and demands attention” (Warner, Sodome Programme 4). Its emptiness isolates her while her discourse fills the void with images of the excess of her life in the ancient city which she invites the audience to imagine. She is the mythic figure “confronted with extreme tragedy” that George Banu identifies with Gaudé’s work (Banu, Sodome Programme, 3).
The story of Sodom emerges as the figure becomes more powerfully revived, gradually gaining in animation as she recounts the pleasures of her city, the shared erotic joy of its citizens. Her images are orgiastic, superabundant, uncompromised by any sense of surfeit. Then her narrative turns. She tells of a woman who comes to the city gates: “then she said that word ‘contagious’.” This is the first warning of what is to follow. A harbinger of death then comes in the shape of a beautiful ambassador, who “plunged into a passionate embrace with every woman and man who came to him.” Ominous sounds of heavy rain are heard and images of streaming water are projected over the screens: “Sodome killed by one man with a clear countenance and a perfect body.” Screen images of water are replaced by plumes of smoke, while the sound of rain becomes the sound of burning, the destruction of the city.
The simple costume of the performer does not allow us to identify it as anything more than a covering for her nakedness. As the scene turns red she tells of the deathly invasion of the city, of her burial alive in salt. She is determined to endure: “the happiness of our lives survived in me.” The victim/survivor is not to be pitied however: “For a long time I thought about my revenge.” Angela Carter writes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). The woman exhorts the audience to beware: “you will get the taste … you will think of nothing but that. … You will be possessed by horror and by sensuality. Do you remember–contagion … I will stalk your cities until everything is driven wild.” The screens show images of city neon, the gloom and glare of nightclub dissipation and the sound swells into a din of sirens, traffic and nightlife as the figure begins to transform. Beginning with lipstick she dresses herself: glamorous flowing coat, high strapped shoes, cigarette, dark glasses, something approaching the uniform of the phallic hyper-feminine woman, a post-feminist femme fatale, “no longer depicted as an object of fear, rather she [becomes] a frightening subject” (Evans 204). The challenge for the designer of costume is to find an image for this manifestation of erotic threat. Olwen Fouéré remembers that a number of possible solutions were tried. The choice of “iconic haute couture, which carries its own unreadable mysteries” as Fouéré puts it, was made, but was felt finally to be “still too specific” (Fouéré, e-mail). When the production was invited to play at the 2010 Ohria Festival in Macedonia, simpler solutions were tested; Fouéré wore no make-up, she put on an old mackintosh, smoked a cigarette, and at the end, wearing high-heeled shoes, walked out of the performance space onto the street. Closure bears the weight of resolution and definition of what has gone before. Once she moves out of history and into the present, the challenges posed by Fouéré’s woman of Sodome bear the pressure of current anxieties about woman as commodity, woman as powerful, woman as desiring.
Conclusion
Both these productions dramatized women’s resistance to naturalized gender expectations of passivity in desire. Both showed the difficulty of finding strategies to image women’s sexual desire alongside resistance to hegemonic gender iteration. In Phaedra, design excess and spatial manipulation through mediatized images on stage showed the anti-heroine as a potentially powerful site of desire diverted and destroyed by fractured self-image, trapped in the paradoxes of appropriating hyper-femininity, and struggling to maintain tragic status. Fouéré embodied a more sustained threat to patriarchal control of desire, but in the Dublin performance, her appropriation of haute couture power dressing begged the question of being within the walls, yet being bent on their destruction. Images of Phaedra and the survivor of Sodome “gesture towards moments of a cultural [and gender] trauma which we can only begin to describe” (Evans 212). They explore the limits around the appropriation of objectifying images of woman as a feminist strategy, while both productions also point towards a longed-for escape into an “other” territory, a city of “Zenophilia.”
Works Cited
Banu, Georges. “Laurent Gaudé: A Theatre of Excess.” Trans. Aoife Spillane-Hinks. Sodome, My Love Programme. 3. Print.
Barthes, Roland. “The Diseases of Costume.” Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1972 (1964). 41-50. Print.
Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1987. Print.
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory-Machine. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago, 1979. Print.
Entwistle, Joanne, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Introduction.” Body Dressing. Ed. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 1-12. Print.
Evans, Caroline. “Desire and Dread: Alexander McQueen and the Contemporary Femme Fatale.” Entwistle and Wilson 201-14. Print.
Fannin, Hilary. Phaedra. Unpublished text.
---, Lynne Parker, Ellen Cranitch, and Maureen White in Conversation: “It All Starts With the Sea.” Programme for Phaedra. Dublin Theatre Festival, 2010. Print.
Fouéré, Olwen. E-mail to the author. 1 Dec. 2011.
Gaudé, Laurent. Sodome, Ma Douce. Paris: Actes Sud, 2009. Print.
---. Sodome My Love. Trans. Olwen Fouéré. Unpublished text.
Gillis, Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. “Interview with Elaine Showalter.” Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. 292-97.
Keating, Sara. “Phaedra.” www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Ulster-Bank-Dublin-Theatre-Festival; accessed 28 Nov. 2011. Web.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1964. Print.
Pavis, Patrice. Analyzing Performance. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003.
Schlemmer, Oskar. “Man and Art Figure.” The Theater of the Bauhaus. Ed. Walter Gropius and Arthur S. Wensinger. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. 17-48.
Shildrick, Margaret. “Introduction: Sex and Gender.” Gillis, Howie, and Munford 67-71. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespearean Tragedy. Ed. John Drakakis. Harlow: Longman, 1992. 280-95. Print.
Soper, Kate. “Dress Needs: Reflections on the Clothed Body, Selfhood and Consumption.” Entwistle and Wilson 13-32. Print.
Ubersfeld, Anne. “The Space of Phèdre.” Poetics Today 2.3 (Spring 1981): 201-10. Print.
Warner, Marina. “Hearing the Revenant.” Sodome, My Love Programme. 4. Print.
Extract From: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi (2015)
Cross Reference: Previous essay and Shona Hill’s essay on Sodome.
See Also: Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick and Seen and Heard: Six New Plays By Irish Women, edited by Cathy Leeney