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DIFFERENT THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF DEs — SURVEY OF LITERATURE it in the next section, but I believe that Nicholson’s analysis is not specific enough here to get a real grasp of her understanding of DE. However, she also describes the concept of ‘gap’ which refers to more specific moments in the play. Nicholson claims that “Bond constructs a ‘gap’ between the story and character which enables the audience to recognise the complexities and paradoxes of the dramatic situation”.*** She sees the void being produced by highlighting the gap between the social expectations of the audience and the dramatic events portrayed on stage. She brings an example from another Bond play where a head teacher is stabbed by a student even though the Head had a “kindly demeanour”*® in the production of the play. While she is using Bond’s concepts Nicholson seems to be portraying ‘theatre event’ as a recurring image and the gap as the concept described by me as DE at the beginning of this chapter. Both examples referred to by Nicholson are long scenes, and it is difficult to understand her interpretation of these terms without knowing more about which specific parts she links to the terms and without a more detailed analysis. Peter Billingham states that Bond employs ‘theatre events’ to “expose the contradictions between the demands of radical innocence and those of ideology inscribed through repressive psychological and physical violence”.?”° He refers to a moment from the play The Under Room, described shortly in the beginning of this chapter, as a “classic example of theatre event”*! where after stabbing and killing the illegal immigrant represented by the dummy in a frantic moment Joan climbs the steps leading out of the cellar “with a disturbingly quiet calm”.*”? The contradiction in this moment is between the brutal action that is visible in the remains of the dummy on the stage and the calmness of the killer walking away from the scene. Though he discusses a number of plays in detail Billingham does not get into an indepth analysis of what DE is, perhaps so because he is primarily looking at the plays as text rather than performance. His example does not take us much further than Nicholson’s, both of them see the contrast manifest itself between the situation and the behaviour of one of the characters in the situation, who conduct themselves differently than would be socially expected from them in such a moment. I propose that situations offered as examples by both Billingham and Nicholson are structured in much more complexity; a more detailed examination of moments within these scenes would shed light on how DEs can be created. I return to both situations further on and present my analysis. 368 Ibid., 14. 36 Ibid. 30 Billingham: Edward Bond, 140. 371 Ibid. 372 Ibid.
