Beyond Playthings: Materiality and Embodiment on the Modern Stage

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which materiality and embodiment animate each other on the mid-twentieth-century stage: its aim is to unveil how the mutual schooling of objects and bodies constitutes a dramaturgical force across a range of Anglo-American plays from the 'long' 1960s. Even though stage objects had long been a versatile tool of theatrical meaning-making, their utilization by several Anglophone playwrights in the post-war era sharply demonstrates their ability to forge and propel dramaturgies centred on the physical contingency of bodied subjects. Drawing on dramatic criticism, performance histories, archival sources, and critical theories of materiality, the thesis presents in-depth case studies focussed on three influential dramatists: Samuel Beckett, David Storey, and Adrienne Kennedy. United by their prolific material imaginations, this trio of playwrights provides a unique focal point through which the varieties of the theatrical symbiosis between objects and bodies come to light. Chapter 1 centres on a detailed reading of Beckett's Happy Days (1961), in which the play's deployment of objects as compensatory tools of manipulation and habituation proves essential to its structural and characterological imperatives. It then draws on this relation to discuss Beckett's other works, particularly Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (1981), elucidating how they incorporate manipulated objects of habit as inscriptive aids that facilitate the corporeal conditioning of actors. Chapter 2 deals with Storey's representation of manual labour as a mode of embodiment fundamentally allied with material objects and only thereby conducive to the formation and cultivation of broader collectives of humans and nonhumans. With reference to the theories of Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Michel Serres, and Brian Massumi, this analysis treats the extensive networks of objects in The Contractor (1969) and The Changing Room (1971) as essential catalysts in the alignment of embodiment, labour, and collectivity. Chapter 3 zooms in on Kennedy's incorporation of culturally weighted objects into her racially charged theatre. As it scrutinizes the racialized and fetishistic configuration of key objects in Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), the chapter traces their historical lineage and enduring influence within Kennedy's body of work. Kennedy's acute concern with these loci of material culture—straddling North American, European, and West African legacies—reveals complex links among racial identity, psychic disavowal, and bodily experience. The concluding chapter assesses the implications of these concentrated studies for an understanding of stage objects as 'playthings' and reflects on the affordances of an object-oriented approach to dramatic criticism.