EXIT THE AUTHOR

Rebellato, Dan. 'Exit the Author.' Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground. Ed. Angelaki, Vicky. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013. 9-31. 

This essay began as a keynote address at the conference, Contemporary British Theatre: Towards a New Canon, held at Birmingham City University and organised by Vicky Angelaki, a former PhD student supervised jointly by Chris Megson and me. I've subsequently developed and expanded the paper and it's now been published in Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, also edited by Vicky.

The chapter begins by noting a series of texts in which the playwright has made themselves a character and has either killed themselves off or had them abused, threatened, harassed or bewildered. I ask why this might be. I ask if this might be connected to a discontent with fiction visible in the rise and rise of documentary (or quasi-documentary or pseudo-documentary) in the last decade.

I then ask if it might be considered a submission to the post-structuralist anti-intentionalist arguments. take a new look at the authorship debate arguing that the commonly-held view that authors’ intentions are irrelevant to the understanding of their work is a nonsense and nonsense that no one, particularly not Roland Barthes, can have seriously believed. I then propose a different understanding of the phenomenon: that playwrights have increasingly understood that authorship is itself a fertile ground for creative and artistic exploration. At the conclusion of the paper, I suggest that this exploration of authorship may be more genuinely Barthesian than sheer authorial absence.