‘The Stage, a Skull’: Scenic Poetry and the Role of Light in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies (2005)

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper explores the role of light in James Macdonald’s production of Martin Crimp’s triptych Fewer Emergencies. For his 2005 staged production at the Royal Court Theatre, London, Macdonald turned light into one of the play’s major operative elements, and had each play enacted in front of a screen of light. Light and text thus created a space of synesthesia, or of interrelation between different perceptive fields, which sought to render the conventional separation between stage and audience, or ‘fourth wall’, fuzzy and ambiguous. Such strategy came to its full political potential in the triptych’s middle play, Face to the Wall, where it was used in order to interpellate the audience as responsible subjects with respect to a situation of violence that was portrayed on stage, thus inviting it to experience some of the most totalitarian aspects of contemporary society, so that they might resist them outside the theatre.