Stoppard’s Travesties, Churchill’s A Number, and Action

The Postmodern Subject in Contemporary Drama:

A Study of Stoppard’s Travesties, Churchill’s A Number, and Shepard’s Action

Masoud Farahmandfar

Abstract: Postmodern drama-unlike other literary genres, particularly the novel-has received little critical attention. The present article aims at formulating a poetics of postmodern drama with particular reference to the idea of subjectivity in selected works of contemporary drama, namely, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1975), Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002), and Sam Shepard’s Action (1975). These works show in the main that human identity is not autonomous but it is a process, perpetually in construction and hence de-centered and contingent. Keywords: Subjectivity; Identity; Agency; Postmodern.

I.  Prolegomenon

ostmodernity is in itself a fragmentary and multifaceted discourse; do we have a postmodernism or postmodernisms? Postmodernism of Stoppard is not identical with that of Churchill’s or Shepard’s for sure; they may share certain features such as discontinuity, parody, playfulness, hyper-reality, depthlessness, schizophrenic subjectivity, and so on, yet their technique-the way they render these features-is exclusive.

Generally speaking, postmodernism mainly focuses on questions of style and modes of representation; therefore, the idea of form comes to the fore. However, as mentioned earlier, postmodern form breaks the pre-defined rules and becomes more and more personal and unorthodox. As Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Explained (1992) has said, “The postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged […] by the application of given categories to this text or work. Such rules and categories are what the work or text is investigating” (15). So, the question of form in postmodern art is self-reflexive.

postmodernism repudiates the mimetic status of the drama and also the very idea of representation, but it does not mean that postmodern drama, as Stephen Watt in Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage has claimed, is “an empty intellectual marker” (Watt, 1998: 39). Watt has undeservedly announced the failure of the term ‘postmodern drama’; the present paper tries to prove otherwise, to show the apt success of the postmodern in drama. I will draw upon the works of renowned theoreticians of the postmodern in order to explain the theoretical framework of postmodernism and to arrive at a poetics of postmodern drama through examining the selected plays of Tom Stoppard (Travesties, 1975), Caryl Churchill (A Number, 2002), and Sam Shepard (Action, 1975). I after all believe that postmodern analysis is almost always deconstructive; etymologically, the word ‘analysis’ means “to undo,” “to unravel,” “to release,” and deconstruction has actually the same agenda-to discard the old conventions and offer new perspectives.

II.  Subjectivity, Postmodernism, and the Question of Agency

“Who am I?” this is the question; whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of becoming conscious of the fragmented subjectivity[1] or to take no arms against this sea of troubles? This is a basic situation most of us have probably experienced at various points in our lives. In fact, we live in a time when we are often compelled to ask ourselves that quintessential question.  But, who asks this question? The illusive “I”?

It is the “I”, that verbal place-holder, which interacts with the world. The main question however is: Is the “I” one and only? Do we have or offer the same “I” every time we interact with different people and different things? Is subject, as an absolute category, dead? Stuart Sim in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism puts forward a helpful explanation:

Postmodernism has rejected the concept of the individual, or ‘subject,’ that has prevailed in Western thought for the last few centuries. For the latter tradition, the subject has been a privileged being right at the heart of cultural process. Humanism has taught us to regard the individual subject as a unified self, with a central ‘core’ of identity unique to each individual, motivated primarily by the power of reason. [. . .] Rights and privileges could be ascribed to that subject, whose development and self-realization came to be regarded as a central objective (if not the central objective) of Western culture. . . . [For] postmodernists, the subject is a fragmented being who has no essential core of identity, and is to be regarded as a process in a continual state of dissolution rather than a fixed identity or self that endures unchanged over time. (Sim, 2001: 366-367)

The modern idea of subjectivity, established by Rene Descartes[2] (1596-1650) and fortified by Immanuel Kant[3] (1724-1804) as the basis of knowledge and morality and the core of humanity, is later undermined by anti-humanist ideas of many a great thinkers such as Marx[4] (1818-1883), Nietzsche[5] (1844-1900), Freud[6] (1856-1939), Lacan (1901-1981), and Derrida (1930-2004). Introducing the notion of the unconscious, Freud de-centered the Cartesian subject because thought and being are no longer unified. As Lacan masterfully puts, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. [. . .] I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think” (Lacan, 1977: 166). Therefore, sujet for Lacan is the subject of the unconscious, not the illusion of agency produced by the ego.[7]

***

Two important harbingers of the postmodern drama are Brecht (1898-1956) and Beckett (1906-1989). Brecht’s “epic theater” and his “alienation effect” challenged radically the traditional strategies of representation and essentialism of the human subject. Beckett also was against any absolute idea of human subjectivity; he depicts fragmented characters and disembodied subjects who are reduced to their bare physical appearance upon the stage.

So, in brief, for the first time we see that the idea of sujetis not based on presence but is predicated upon the absence (Sujet a la Lacan is representation of a signifier for another signifier). Therefore, it is safe to claim that the postmodern subject is split, fragmented, de-centered, and multiple. The concept of character is no longer holistic.

III.  Tom Stoppard: Travesties

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia (born Tomas Straussler) in 1937, in the atmosphere of an impending global conflict-the WWII. Since his family was of a Jewish descent, they self-exiled themselves to South East Asia (India and Singapore) in order to evade the Nazi persecution. However, he acquainted himself with the Czech culture later in his life and he closely followed the struggle of the Czech people under the oppressive dominion of the Soviet Union. His friendship with the former Czech President Václav Havel, who was also an excellent absurdist, is well-known. He finally settled in the British Isles.

Stoppard’s first major success was Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead (1966) which is his most renowned play to the present day. Hitting the jackpot with his first shot, he continued to write an impressive number of plays, including several radio plays for BBC, short one act plays, plays for television and proper full-length plays for the stage.

Stoppard’s Travesties (1975) is the rendering of a happening in 1917 when three of the twentieth century’s important figures-James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin-were all living in Zurich. Another character living in Zurich at that time was Henry Carr, a consular officer. Stoppard juxtaposes the divergent opinions of his characters on Dadaism, Marxism, and modernism and by putting extremely convincing arguments in their mouths makes the audience consider each side of the topic. Since Tzara, Lenin, and Joyce are also travesties of the real historical figures, whatever is attributed to the real character is inverted or trivialized in the play. Stoppard, in short, shows that in postmodern drama, nothing is absolute or eternal; nothing is exempt from skepticism.

Travesties reflects Stoppard’s theater of chaos; it is a travesty on a variety of levels: among other things, it travesties Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. There is also the travesty of the conventions of the well-made play and comedy of manners, even of the theatre of ideas. The play, in all, is a trace of other texts. As pastiche; in fact, Tzara’s method of cutting up an existing text and randomly constructing another text out of the bits and pieces really suggests what Stoppard is doing in the play.

Before examining the postmodern subject and its rendering in the play, I would like to offer an outline of the postmodern techniques and devices used in the play (which makes it totally different from a modernist play):[8]

Modernist Work	Postmodernist Text
Form	Anti-form (Chaos)
Purpose / Design	Play / Chance
Distance (in terms of the audience)	Participation
Centering / Root	De-centering / Rhizome
Presence	Absence
Paradigmatic	Syntagmatic
Hypotaxis	Parataxis
Determinacy	Indeterminacy
History as a Grand Narrative	History as a Story

Postmodernism in drama problematizes the style and conventions of the genre. Postmodern writer often asks “what if …?” What if history was not limited to an absolute document; what if there are other narratives that are unknown or are submerged by the dominant discourse of their time. What if there is no single identity but multiple identifications? This critical attitude of the postmodern literary pieces towards the accepted norms and narratives is commendable.

Travesties brings to the fore the exchange of identities between key figures: characters usually absorb the attitude and habits of each other. Stoppard gives Dadaesque qualities to Joyce, Joycean qualities to Lenin, etc. Therefore we see a constant crossover; identities are, just like meanings, unstable and fluid. Names are fluid too: Tzara admits to Carr that “my name is Tristan in the Meierei Bar and Jack in the library” (Stoppard, 1975: 27); Joyce is alternately called Doris, Janice, and Phyllis. Moreover,

Stoppard’s use of double identity (i.e. two characters who are frequently mistaken for one another) in his works reflects his indebtedness to Oscar Wilde. Stoppard gives another meaning to Wildean double identity: characters in themselves are contradictory. (For example, Lenin’s view of art and politics are wholly contradictory; though he holds that art should be revolutionary, he listens to and praises Beethoven. Carr idealizes war yet he nags about the clothes he lost in the War. Joyce talks passionately about art and the great spirit of the artist and yet he begs for one franc.) Stoppard also frequently doubles actions, by repeating a scene within a play. Stoppard also brings some texts of other authors in his own work. These are all postmodern devices. Consider for instance the character of Henry Carr; he not only doubles for Algernon (in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest), but he doubles himself as well: appearing both as the present-day old Carr, and the youthful Carr of the Consulate, as he remembers himself. His discourse is full of contradictions, so we quickly come to know him as an unreliable narrator.[9] Therefore, the autonomy of the subject becomes questionable. The category of the ‘subject’ is a changeable, de-centered, and schizophrenic. Besides, Carr’s identity on the stage depends on his clothing; he has been in the Great War but it seems that his clothes have suffered instead of him:

Nobody who has not been in the trenches can have the faintest conception of the horror of it. I had hardly set foot in France before I sank in up to the knees in a pair of twill jodhpurs […] And so it went on – the sixteen ounce serge, the heavy worsteds, the silk flannel mixture […] (Stoppard, 1975: 20)

Indeed, costuming and clothing helps identify any character on the stage, but Carr’s clothes gain greater importance because the character cares so much about what he is wearing. At the very outset of the second act, Carr enters in a Tzara disguise: “monocled and wearing blazer, cream flannels, boater […]” (ibid.45). The audience may even mistake him for Tzara when he first comes on stage.

In a broader outlook, the play exemplifies the postmodern notion of ‘the death of the author.’ There is no centralizing narrative; representation is denied; what therefore we see is various levels of parody juxtaposed to each other. Stoppard offers no clear-cut solutions in the argument and no one emerges a clear winner over the others. In the absence of a center, chaos walks on the edge.

IV.  Caryl Churchill:  A Number

Caryl Churchill has long been considered one of Britain’s most innovative and exciting dramatists. From her 1979 Cloud Nine and its gender-swapping to the dinner party of Top Girls[10](1982) to the incredible combination of dance, song, and speech in Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), Churchill’s theatrical ingenuity has turned a new leaf over the conventions of drama. She has time and again challenged her audience to engage positively with each work on its own terms. She has also challenged herself: she tries a new pattern and subject in every drama, no return to familiar patterns, but constant reinvention. With every new play, she takes her readers with surprise. However, we should note that her playfulness with genre, structure, and style is usually allied to a serious political, social, and moral commitment.[11]

Churchill’s play A Number (2002)-which has no stage directions-reflects the possible consequences of genetic research through a piece of dystopian science fiction. The play goes through the idea of “cloning” in order to focus on the larger theme of human identity. One basic criticism against cloning is that it turns human beings into commodities by allowing the creation of individuals for a particular purpose, such as treating a sick person, or replacing a dead loved one. The cloned individuals are likely to have identity problems. These compose the themes of Churchill’s play.

The play has five scenes, and each of them is an encounter between a manipulative and mendacious old man, Salter, and one of his cloned sons (each son is played by the same actor).[12]

The play begins in Salter’s living room where one of his cloned sons Bernard (B2) reveals to him that he has recently discovered a number of copies (clones) have been made from his [Salter’s] genetic material. Bernard is unsure of the exact number of replicates that exist. Salter refers to the copies as “things,” which upsets Bernard, who insists that they are people and is wondering what it would be like to meet another version of himself. Bernard is always asking Salter whether he is one of the copies, or the original one. The question of “how do I know who am I” in fact haunts all the cloned sons; they all want to know whether they are the original one or not: “someone else is the one, the first one, the real one” (Churchill, 2002: 56).[13]

Churchill approaches the subject of human cloning-one of the new frontiers in scientific enterprise-through a quotidian conversation between a middle-aged father and his son (not through white-coated physicians and scientists). The dialogues turn on the question of origin and identity. The son asks how he came to be; he has just found out that he is one of a number of genetically identical humans created in a “batch” (ibid. 10), cloned from one set of cells. The father, Salter, makes up a fiction about a mother and first son killed in a car crash to explain the origin of the cells that were cloned. However, his story proves to be a lie. Salter neglects one son and creates another to achieve his own redemption-in a mock godlike manner. His action has created many rivals for the same identity. Bernard the original (B1) meets with Bernard the clone (B2) and murders him, and then proceeds to commit suicide. Salter then encounters Michael Black, another clone. Salter is tormented by his choices and hides “behind the smoke screen of lies and cigarettes” (ibid. 47). Finally, Salter ends up miserable and seemingly alone even though he knows that there are 19 more clones.

On the surface level, A Number is about the moral and personal implications of genetic engineering. But there is much more to it; the question of identity is at the center of the play. A Number was written at the very beginning of the third millennium when many thinkers were concerned with new interfaces between human consciousness and (bio-)technology; “Where does subjectivity begin and end in our era of mind-altering pharmaceuticals?” asks Donald E. Hall (119). This is also a question that resonates in A Number. It seems that we should take “murky boundaries” as a keyword of the postmodern (ibid.).

Churchill’s play A Number is in some ways similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005), whichis narrated by a woman (Kathy _H) who recalls her girlhood (or clonehood) at an exclusiveschool, where she and her fellow students slowly realize that they have been created sotheir organs can be harvested for real people. These haunting works address a mechanized culture which threatens individuality, subjectivity, and human agency. As Brian Massumi aptly puts,

[T]here is no self-sufficient agency that can qualify as intentional. There are varying degrees of choice at successive threshold states. The “will” to change or stay the same is not an act of determination on the part of a unified subject in simple response to self-reflection or an internal impulse. It is a state of self-organized indeterminacy in response to complex causal constraints. It constitutes a real degree of freedom, but the choice belongs to the overall dissipative system with its plurality of selves, and not to the person […]. (Massumi, 1992: 81, emphasis added)

So, identity and subjectivity reside in “threshold states.” Identity is haunted by hybridity and partiality. Subject is not a self-identical entity; it is at best a partial presence, a hybrid with multiple, iterated identifications. Hence, Churchill’s title a number.[14]

V.  Sam Shepard: Action

Samuel Shepard Rogers (1943- ) is a world-known American playwright who has achieved an iconic status enjoyed by only a rare few in the history of American theatre. He launched his dramatic career in 1964 with the production of two one-act plays: Cowboys and The Rock Garden. The young Shepard solidified his reputation with a series of plays that followed, such as Icarus’ Mother (1965), The Unseen Hand (1969), Mad Dog Blues (1971), The Tooth of Crime (1972), Action (1975), Buried Child (1978), Fool for Love (1983), and so on. Shepard’s plays are famous for their strong visual images. In fact, his play literally originates from a visual image; he has an image in mind and just starts from there.

His Action is the product of the writer’s rigorous search for definitions of identity. Action is a one-act play. It is in the center of Shepard’s career both because it was written roughly at the middle of his career and because it concretizes the problem of identity that is central to his works.[15]

Shepard’s Action also has an unmistakable affinity to Beckett’s Endgame. Both of Beckett’s and Shepard’s plays are set in a room assumedly surroundedby some kind of calamity-struck atmosphere, and both playwrights present four characters in each play. When the curtain rises, on stage we see a Christmas tree with blinking lights. The rest of the space is in utter darkness. Two women and two men are placed in a room: Lupe, Liza, Shooter, and Jeep. They sometimes briefly connect to each other, however, most of the time they are alone in their own thoughts and fears. Although the characters obliquely refer to a specific, dislocating event, the p lay does not let us know exactly what the crisis is or where its origin lies. The characters are unable to recover a past which antedates the crisis, the mysterious cataclysm; they are as if suffering from a kind of amnesia. Each character is entrapped in their own world; that is why the quest for identity becomes important in Shepard’s plays; the basic question is ‘who I am.’

In searching to define one’s identity, Shepard starts with a negation. In many cases, his characters do not say “this is me” in a positive way. Instead, they usually say “this is not me at all.” They deny the present state of the self. But why does one deny the present state as the real self and search for another image? The answer relates to the idea of living in the world as continuous acting. In Action, Shepard examines this idea through a character, Shooter’s extreme obsession with the outside gaze. Shooter keeps trying to act out himself because he always thinks of how others will look at his actions and in what way they will interpret them. He thinks-in a paranoid self-conscious way-that he is being continuously watched by others. Accordingly, he feels that he is expected to act in a certain way if he wants to “be with everyone.” He feels that he needs to find out “what is expected of [him].” Therefore, he loses the ability of performing action that is true to himself (Shepard, 1984: 178). As a postmodern thinker, Kath Woodward (2000) holds that “we are not born with an identity” (16) and identities are not essentially fixed. Identity is a product, never complete, always in process. “We imagine how others would see us, and we do this through symbolizing […] we symbolize the sort of person we want others to think we are” (ibid. 12); therefore, we have imagined identities.

Nonetheless, in Action, Shooter suffers from these two different perspectives in himself; he suffers from an excessive imagined identity-he is stifled by the gaze of other people and he always thinks someone is watching him. Let us look at Shooter’s obsession with others’ watching eyes. On the one hand, the gaze comes from (or he thinks it comes from) specific people around him. On the other hand, these ‘others’ are an un-individualized entity, called society and culture. This second kind of gaze has already been internalized so that even when he is alone it does not leave him to himself. Whatever he sees he is not free from the “references” of the culture and the society. In every thought and word, he is tied in the net of references.

Shooter decides-after trying to find the condition of his real self-to settle in an armchair, not leaving it but hiding under it. He is satisfied because he thinks that he has found the way he wants to be: “This is it for me. I’m never leaving this chair. I’ve finally found it” (ibid. 181). However, he is still trapped in the frame that culture has made, because, when all is said and done, a character’s desire is what his culture has taught him to wish.

The influence of the “cultural reference” is much more visible in Jeep’s. He cherishes (images of) pictures that were on the wall in his old house. They are picturesof Walt Whitman in an overcoat, of an antelope on a yellow prairie, of the Golden Gate Bridge, and of his own image “sitting on a Jeep with a gun in one hand” (ibid. 170). These images evoke larger pictures in his mind. Looking at Walt Whitman, he thinks of Pennsylvania; he sees the antelope running; he sees the water underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. With these landscapes of the cultural heritage of America in mind, Jeep however suffers the discrepancy between his present self and the ideal image:

I had an idea I wanted to be different. I pictured myself being different than how I was. I couldn’t stand how I was. The picture grew in me, and the more it grew the more it came up against how I really was. Then I exploded. (ibid. 174-5)

If Shooter was obsessed with the outside gaze, Jeep is captivated, or victimized, by these images on the wall. He is a victim and he unknowingly victimizes others by applying such ridiculous ideological standards to judge people around him. That is why he makes fun of Lupe; Jeep’s criticism of Lupe’s soft shoe routine is based on the comparison between her and movie stars: “We’ve got this picture in our head of Judy Garland or Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Those feet flying all over the place. That fluid motion” (ibid. 173). In other words, he is juxtaposing an image that is artificial side by side with the real life practice. Therefore, he unconsciously tortures other people.

Unlike Jeep, Shooter rejects the unsatisfactory self simply by trying not to remembering it. In order to do so, however, he must suffer the fragmentation of the self, therefore, the shattering of the identity itself.

VI.  Coda

Postmodernism in literature seeks new paths that challenge the traditional narrative techniques and cultivate innovative styles of writing. It also violates the overall taxonomies of literary genres. So the overlap between fiction and non-fiction is not uncommon. A fictional event might be claimed to have actually happened and, similarly, non-fiction could be falsified. Postmodern writers usually borrow a real person and present his or her life in order to suggest that we are presented with biographical events from his or her real life. Only later do we understand that whatever we just witnessed was a mere fabulation. This is a meta-dramatic approach. Stoppard’s Travesties masterfully applies this technique. Another important (postmodern) element that we covered in Travesties was intertextuality-where an author decides to integrate events or characters from other sources into his/her own work. Stoppard uses Oscar Wilde’s text (The Importance of Being Earnest) as a framework; Stoppard uses the motif of ‘mistaken identities’ to show that there is no authenticity in characters, no center to identity. Subjectivity is shattered by a changeable memory (Henry Carr), we see characters have differing personalities; for example, they easily deny what they believe in to woo a girl. Beliefs, identity, and subjectivity are relative concepts.

In A Number Churchill explores power relations and questions of identity-frequent themes in her plays. As we know, identity hinges on a subject-position, and the subject is recognized and reinforced by its difference from others. In other words, the subject is fundamentally defined in relational and negative terms, against what it is not. But what happens when the subject looks, as if in a mirror, at an-other who is not other, not different? Does cloning produce a number of identical reflections? Is then the process of individuation thwarted? These questions were matched with proper answers in this paper. In short, A Number highlights the performative nature of identity.

In Action Sam Shepard reveals theater as a prison house for all involved in it; authority and self-sufficiency of each character-or, better put, each agent-is merely an illusion. The image of entrapment haunts the whole play; like Beckett’s plays, there are many forces of imprisonment form both inside and outside-subjectivity, society, family, dream, the unconscious, the theater itself, etc. The social crisis is linked to the individual crisis. And Action offers no end to these crises which have no known origin. Shepard masterfully described how bourgeois market-oriented culture might affect people’s subjectivity. What therefore remains for characters is anxiety.

Bibliography:

Aston, Elaine and Elin Diamond, eds. (2009) The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beckett, Samuel. (1958) Endgame: A Play in One Act Followed by Act without Words: A Mime for One Player. New York: Grove Press.

Begam, Richard. (1996) Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Butler, Christopher. (2002) Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Churchill, Caryl. (2002) A Number. EPUB Electronic Version.

Fukuyama, Francis. (2003) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London: Picador.

Hall, Donald E. (2004) Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge.

Hutcheon, Linda. (2002) The Politics of Postmodernism. 2^nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. (2005) Never Let Me Go. E-Book PDF.

Lacan, Jacques. (1977) Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1992) The Postmodern Explained. Trans. Don Barry et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Malpas, Simon. (2004) The Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge.

Massumi, Brian. (1992) A User‘s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations From Deleuze and Guattari, Minneapolis: University of               Minnesota Press.

McCarthy, Gerry. (1981) “‘Acting It Out’: Sam Shepard’s Action.” Modern Drama 24: 1-12.

Mottram, Ron. (1984) Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Savran, David. (1984) “Sam Shepard’s Conceptual Prison: Action and the Unseen Hand.” Theater Journal 36:1, 57-74.

Shepard, Sam. (1984 [1975]) Action. London: Bantam. EPUB Electronic Version.

Sim, Stuart, ed. (2001) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

Stoppard, Tom. (1975) Travesties. New York: Grove Press.

Watt, Stephen. (1998) Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wilcox, Leonard, ed. (1993) Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

[1]  Postmodernists usually use the word “subject” (instead of “self”) to refer to individuals, because the term ‘subject’ implies the ‘subject-ed’ condition of people who are constructed and manipulated by the ideologically-controlled discourses of power. As Seyla Benhabib in Situating the Self (1992) says, “The subject is replaced by a system of structures, oppositions and differences which, to be intelligible, need not be viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all. You and I are the mere ‘sites’ of such conflicting languages of power, and ‘the self’ is merely another position in language” (qtd. in Butler, 2002: 51).

[2] It was Descartes who-in his Discourse on Method (1637)-introduced the category of the subjective into philosophy. He believed that “I who thought must be something,” however, his view of the self and human agency ‌is mainly ethical and idealized.

[3] As a liberal humanist, Kant also pleads for the power of reason; however, he focuses on the ‘we,’ on ‘inter-subjectivity.’

[4] Marx, as a staunch critic of capitalism, believed that it is not the consciousness of humans that determine their existence; it is rather their social existence that determines their consciousness. Marx provided an incisive critique of class exploitation and capitalist competition, because capitalism reduces individuals to mere agents or tools of the state, disconnected and disenchanted laborers robbed of an individual identity.

[5] In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejects essentialist concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘human nature’ as metaphysical or ethical. For him, man is not a being but a becoming.

[6] Freud introduced the category of the unconscious, and then turned down any blind faith in the dominance of the rational over the irrational. Humans, for him, are largely spurred by unconscious irrational desires; they are at the mercy of drives and desires that are beyond their (conscious) control.

[7] For Lacan, the unconscious is the discourse of the ‘Other,’ that part of ourselves we are not aware of and which renders every subject alien from itself.

[8]  The table-though changed and modified by the author-is taken from Simon Malpas’ The Postmodern (2004).

[9]  The preface to the play describes Carr as a person “recollecting, perhaps not with entire accuracy, hi encounters with Joyce and the Dadaist Tzara” (Stoppard, 1975: x).

[10] Top Girls has been hailed by the playwright Mark Ravenhill as “the best play of the past 20 years” and has been listed by the Guardian critic Michael Billington in the ten best British plays of the century and by reviewer Benedict Nightingale as “the play of the century.” In feminist terms, the play’s all-female cast drew attention to the paucity of stage roles for women, but, more importantly, in political terms spelled out the dangers of an individualist model of bourgeois feminism, taking issue with the 1980s Thatcherite ‘superwoman.’

[11] Churchill is influenced by philosophical, political, and critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, or Hannah Arendt.

[12] This particular technique-multiple casting-suggests that the individual self is only a construct; it is replaceable, fragmented, and fluid. This deliberately playful confusion of roles is also visible in other Churchill’s plays such as Top Girls and Cloud Nine. In the former, a cast of seven performers play sixteen different characters, and in the latter, seven performers play thirteen different roles.

[13] The question of “Who am I” is very common in Churchill’s plays; her interrogation of ‘identity’ could be traced through Identical Twins (1968), Traps (1977), Icecream (1989) and Blue Heart (1997). We might consider these plays as postulates for the conclusion she draws in A Number (2002). Perhaps that is the reason why Sam Shepard has called A Number the greatest play since Beckett’s Endgame (1957).

[14] Wittgenstein tried to examine how a word could have meaning if no essence unites the many things to which it refers. Wittgenstein demonstrated his idea with a number, too: “Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a-direct-relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this may be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things that we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fiber runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibers” (qtd. in Aston and Diamond, 2009: 119).

[15] It is very difficult to write on Shepard’s play: Richard Gilman’s note that many of them are “extraordinarily resistant to thematic exegesis” and Gerald Weales’ comment that his plays simply “resist analysis” are curious positions for critics to take. Certainly his work is challenging to readers and spectators in large part because of his transformation and subversion of traditional concepts of form, character, and dramatic action (Savran, 1984: 57).