Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan

Abstract

If, as Martin Esslin argues, the actor’s body is the “iconic sign par excellence:a real human being who has become a sign for a human being” (56), what happens to an audience’s experience of the theatrical event when the central such sign of the drama, the body of the hero, “dies” in the middle of the play? “A corpse on stage” quite obviously “demands attention” (Swander 139), much more so when the corpse in question is that of the title character. Yet a dead body on stage, which is, after all, not in fact dead, can be reanimated, and doing so, either through a disruption of linearity or through the dramatic presentation of an afterlife, testifies to the vitality and malleability of the theatrical experience. In attempting to represent “death,” the bodily sign implies a chronological endpoint, a culminating stillness that provokes analytical engagement: like the conclusion of any motion, “the stillness thus draws […] the attention of the spectator […] and calls for some effort either of aesthetic appreciation or interpretation” (McAuley 106–07). Stillness and motion define one another, and later motions of the “revived” body must always be read though the audience’s remembrance of the character’s ultimate conclusion, as if the theatrically animated figure becomes a trace of its own imaginatively extinguished self.

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