Oldal 98 [98]
OCR
DIFFERENT THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF DEs — SURVEY OF LITERATURE connections, ! as is the case with the huge red ‘X’ painted on the outside of the door in The Broken Bowl.* While this sign has an important impact within the story, its object is not clear when it appears and needs to be allocated to it by the audience. Katafiasz points out that the use of interplay between signifier and object can be traced back to ancient tragedies, and this tradition has been developed further by Bond.**? She concludes that “when signifiers are challenged, as they are by both comedy and tragedy, social habits and ideologies come under scrutiny”.?®* Chris Cooper links the creation of a DE to the “practice of cathexing objects to constantly recreate the meanings of a situation”.**° Cathexis is a concept used by Bond, referring to the how the meaning and value of everyday objects can change according to how they are used in different situations.°®° I discuss this concept in detail further on. Cooper argues that objects can be used to explore “living contradictions, and conflicts between the different strata’ and also how the ‘individual negotiates this in the face of a given situation”.**’ He states that it is the task of the actors to search for these contradictions, and that it depends on how the objects are used in the given moments whether these contradictions are opened up. One of the useful examples given by Cooper is from the last scene of Eleven Vests, a Bond play that shows the journey of the Student who is accused by the Headmaster of cutting up a book, and then a school uniform jacket. We see the Student stab the Headmaster, and later we see him being taught to use the bayonet. In the final scene we see him stab an enemy soldier in the guts in revenge for shooting the Student’s comrade. Cooper offers a moment of rehearsal work done with the participation of Edward Bond to highlight the importance of the how objects are used to create a DE. It was blocked so that the Enemy rose up from lying on his back to a sitting up position, the Student confronted by himself. [...] Edward got us to focus on the actions of a dying man who has not been bayoneted efficiently because of the anxiety of the Student. The rework was very ‘material’ and focussed the audience on the action (a Theatre Event) of a dying man using the vest he had surrendered with to wipe his own blood from the bayonet that had been used to kill him.?*® w œ Kate Katafiasz: Familiarity without contempt: theorising Bond’s ‘accident time’, Unpublished conference paper presented at Bond@50 Conference, Warwick University, 2 November, 2012 Edward Bond: The Broken Bowl, in Plays 10, London, Bloomsbury Methuen, 2018. Katafiasz: Staging Reality, 30 384 Ibid., 31. 385 Chris Cooper: Making a World of difference. A DICE resource for practitioners on educational theatre and drama, Budapest, DICE Consortium, 2010, 30. 386 Bond: The Cap, xiv. 387 Chris Cooper: Edward Bond and the Big Brum plays, in David Davis (ed.): Edward Bond and the Dramatic Child, Stoke on Trent, Trentham Books, 2005, 60. 388 Ibid. 38: S 38: a S
