In the 'Display Case':(Capitalist) Realism and Simon Stone's 'Zoological' Ibsen

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Title In the 'Display Case':(Capitalist) Realism and Simon Stone's 'Zoological' Ibsen
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Abstract/Description How are theatre practitioners (re)defining the realist project, a form of theatre intrinsic to the ideological domestication of capitalism? This paper takes up this question through an examination of Simon Stone's production of The Wild Duck ‘after Ibsen’, staged at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney in 2011, and the late Mark Fisher's (2009) theorization of a market-dominated present as capitalist realism. In doing so, it refers to three different cultural contexts by making parallels to the German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier's work and pointing to developments in Britain. It argues that performances dependent upon the subject's capacity to know and represent the world are predicated on a subjective response and therefore risk locating systemic issues in the closed fictional cosmos of situational dramatic art as part of its exploration of the paralysis intrinsic to the capitalist realist politics of (theatre) spectatorship.
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Publisher Theatre Research International
Volume 48
Issue 3
Page 304-21
Date Issued October 2023
Language English
Citation Margaret Hamilton, In the 'Display Case':(Capitalist) Realism and Simon Stone's 'Zoological' Ibsen, Theatre Research International, 48, 3, October 2023, 304-21
Data Set AusStage
Resource Identifier 79176