Death-Cries and Strips of Foam: Indexing the Other in Edward Bond’s Later Work

Abstract

This article proposes that Edward Bond’s play for young people The Under Room (2006) reformulates ancient, progressive, practices of identification, for our times. The article uses Lacan’s three registers to analyze how the boundaries instituted at the theatre of Dionysus disrupt mirror stage identifications. It explores the strange response of a Birmingham schoolboy following the staged murder of an illegal immigrant in The Under Room (2006), to suggest that unsettling mirror stage identifications releases the energetic search for unity with the other that Lacan terms desire. The paper applies its findings to a letter Bond wrote to German theatre director Antje Lenkheit as he began his work for young people in 1997. In the letter Bond explains how drama can index things that society disavows. He takes as his example the stadia that Hitler built for his ceremonies, and shows how drama can reveal their metonymic connection to the death camps.