Absent Body: Ravenhill’s Phenomenology of Carnality

Abstract

The article discusses Mark Ravenhill's pool (no water) from two perspectives: that of a dramatic text and of performative potential. Central to this debate is the concept of the body and a variety of ways of its coding, framing, and ultimately obliterating. Ravenhill's drama is presented as an intriguing example of a play created in the process of collaborative workshopping. The article traces how such attempts lead to imposing an aesthetic discipline onto a living body. It is suggested that the play was composed with a particular way of its theatrical use in mind, having thus a decisively performance-rather than text-oriented structure. The article refers to Frantic Assembly's production of pool (no water) in order to explain how the play was used to subvert theatrical and dramatic conventions through improvisation and elements of physical theatre. It suggests that Ravenhill's play reveals a sceptical view on the body's possibility to communicate a 'true' and undisrupted meaning as is suggested by some performance theories. The article argues that Ravenhill's play highlights the key dilemmas of contemporary theatre and illustrates significant debates within theatre studies of the last couple of decades.Mark Ravenhill's dramatic oeuvre is driven by a persistent need to trace bodily sensations, to locate where, when, and how his characters feel. However, what seems to lie deeper behind bodily experience is a question concerning the being of the body, its phenomenological, semantic, ontological, and epistemological constitution. Ravenhill attempts to reflect on the limits as well as possibilities of representing the body, on the mediated way we connect with our bodies and the bodies of others. The worlds of his plays are often presented as spaces taken over by alienating discourses of power. Yet, significantly, Ravenhill also dramatises the opposite drive by showing individuals struggling to rediscover raw feelings, to locate the real in spite of the mediating influence of language, gender stereotyping, or aggressive media presence. His dramatic images can therefore be seen