Response to Richard Gough's Seminar: Troubling Performance

This seminar seemed to be a guilty confession of one man’s desire for that which he has so vehemently opposed throughout his work: theoretical structure. His yearning for performance studies ‘to evolve as a contested site’ seemed to contradict the noticeable need for ‘organization and order’ in his life and work. Richard Gough’s career seems to have been driven by desire, to find ‘the real’. ‘The real’ is unknown, hidden by language and the “light it throws on the entities it denominates” (Belsey, 2006: 50) Gough’s deliberate ignorance of illusionist drama is a sign of his desire to discover that which lies beneath the fiction, breaking from language and the structure it brings to it trying to find the ‘organic world.’ (Belsey, 2006: 50)

On the 3^rd of March 2010 Gough’s audience were told that he wanted to return to the text. A huge shock to his audience, who were told not five minutes before, about his deliberate illiteracy. Why then does Gough, the man who ignored playwrights and their plays, suddenly care if a post dramatic theatre company had destroyed Shakespeare’s words? Perhaps it is through his experience of his father’s memory loss that he has realised that without language and the fiction it creates there exists nothing; language, art, fiction are “signifiers surrounding vacancy.” (Belsey, 2006: 51) Gough spoke of his father’s existence ‘out of time’, that he did not remember his past or who he was and with his fiction destroyed he was surrounded by this vacancy. To fill this vacancy his father developed a new fiction. It is possible that Gough is returning to the text after finding an ever-increasing vacancy in his post dramatic theatre.

Possibly realising that without his past his father does not understand his present, has led him to understand that without dramatic theatre his post dramatic theatre does not exist, its anarchical ambitions lost. We can only understand the idea of post dramatic theatre as that which is different to dramatic theatre. Gough seems to have seen some truth in the structuralist view that “in language there are only differences”. (Saussure in McGowan, 2006: 6)

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that his future work will be heavily influenced by structuralism, on the contrary his ideas seem to be engaging strongly with the later theory of postcolonialism. An anarchic colonialism appears in his reflections on his childhood collecting, speaking about how through his collecting he was creating “new colonies”, seeming to question the power of the real colonies and their premises for “collecting” their countries. Later he seemed to be engaging with Simon Gikandi and his ideas on globalization based on poststructuralist thought, that of a world coming together without any defining centre. (Amoko, 2006: 136) Gough touched upon this when he spoke of performance studies ignoring imperialism and bringing those on the periphery to the centre.

Even though Gough spoke about his distress that Forced Entertainment had become a ‘carrier of theory’, it can’t be ignored that Gough himself seems to be engaging quite often with the best-known theoretical discourses in the western world, and that it seems to be these theories driving his work.

Malpas, Simon, Wake, Paul (eds.) (2006) The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, London, New York: Routledge