Performing Human Consciousness

This fascinating study lies at the intersection between the author’s professional interest and training in theatre and her quest to understand the nature of human consciousness and how it can be progressively externalised and manifest into written text and performance. Indeed, David Hume characterised the mind as a kind of theatre, currently reflected in the metaphor of global workspace theory. This book breaks new ground in questioning the exclusive validity of third-person approaches to consciousness as applied to theatre studies. Vanessa points out that it is a logical impossibility to remove subjectivity when the subject is reflecting on his or herself. She asks what it is like to be conscious, to be me? This also includes dreaming as well as waking consciousness. Her discussion is informed by wide reading and informed critical analysis, for instance Edelman’s interesting distinction between primary and secondary consciousness in relation to storytelling. She relates the story of her own script, Being Me, as a case study of consciousness in process embodied in specific characters.

The second part discusses the rise of performance of consciousness in theatre scripts with specific historical examples from Euripides, Strindberg, Ed Thomas, and Mark Ravenhill – ancient, modern, postmodern and postdramatic. As the author explains, ‘case studies are analysed as to how they balance story and the plotting of human actions with the dramatisation of human psychology and conscious processes’, using both structuralist and narratologist perspectives as a way of exploring how a staged performance of words ‘mirrors the phenomenology of conscious processes.’ (p. 7) The plays provide rich cultural material for comparative analysis and a gradual liberation from traditional forms while more explicitly mirroring inner experiences. Vanessa concludes that ‘Our inner selves link to others through the shared propensity to tell stories, to personify abstract thoughts and ideas and to express feelings through the literary tropes of language and theatrical signifiers.’ In this sense, the theatre is both a storytelling domain and a spatialised metaphor.