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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
Kate Katafiasz discusses the moment described above from The Under Room
and states that at crucial points of Bond’s dramas “his characters overturn
our mimetic expectations of them: they radically reverse their ‘character’,
surprising even themselves, by acting ‘out of character”.*”* Her examples from
the play discuss the characters Joan and Richard in extreme moments towards
the end of The Under Room as they react to conditions created by their previous
actions being distorted by the situation of the fictional world. Katafiasz argues
that DEs are the result of a double process of deconstruction and cathexis;°”4
Bond offers a rational analysis built into the development of the situations but
at the same time connects or contrasts this with the dramaturgy of changing
human values projected onto objects on stage. This is how Bond keeps reason
and imagination connected according to Katafiasz, who identifies the power
of this dual process in that “it echoes the way the mind sequences and values
events”.*” According to her semiotic analysis Bond creates a gap between
the sign and the signified for the audience to fill, he does this with the use
of language, human action and everyday objects.*” In the case of The Under
Room she points to the separation between the Dummy and the Dummy Actor;
while one represents the body of the role — everyone talks to it through most
of the play —, the other speaks the words of the character. Katafiasz claims
that “the auditorium sits on a mutable cusp or border between languages and
bodies, between culture and physicality, noticing in the ‘play’ between them
that the two may not ‘add up”. The importance of having to constantly shift
focus from one to the other, from signifier to object, creates a gap according
to Katafiasz*”* that is developed into DEs in extreme moments, for example
when following the killing of the Dummy the Dummy Actor walks among
the remains of the Dummy and says “Brdriczs... Brdriczs... Brdriczs...”.2”
Katafiasz states that “the object with no signifier, quietly challenges all
the signifiers around it; as the strips of foam rubber with which the dummy
body was stuffed challenge the very existence of the dummy actor". She sees
the creation of DEs coming out of the interplay between sign and signified,
in this case we have the object challenging the previously existing semiotic
structure. In other examples Katafiasz points to moments when signs exist
without an object within the narrative, forcing the audience to make their own
37.
a
Kate Katafiasz: Staging Reality (beyond representation): a perplexing Bondian body, Journal
of Contemporary Drama in English, 1, 2013/1, 27.
34 Katafiasz: Alienation, 46.
35 Ibid.
76 Katafıasz: Stop Acting, 249.
#77 Katafıasz: Staging Reality, 30.
378 Ibid., 30.
379 Bond: Ihe Under Room, 2003.
380 Katafiasz: Staging Reality, 31.
Ÿ
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