Relations with/to the Text: Four Plays on the Move

Abstract

The Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant is not known for his work on theater; rather, he has been influential for a postcolonial reconceptualization of Caribbean spaces and the ways in which they are intertwined with a history of colonization. His theory of relation has been paramount for a rethinking of a concept of connection, theorizing the layered, complex, and often surprising relations between peoples and cultures that have shaped, questioned, imagined, and often also jumbled up the Caribbean as a world in transformation. Glissant views relation as a skein of networks and not as essentialist recovery of an authentic and true point of origin. This article addresses the theoretical transformative possibilities that this approach helps elucidate. I will mainly focus on the production of Simon Stephens’s 2012 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an inventive adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel that was staged in New York City between 2014 and 2016 to much critical acclaim. Finally, in a comparative approach, I would like to read this production with an eye towards Susanne Kennedy’s 2018 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993) for the Munich Kammerspiele and acclaimed Australian theater director Simon Stone’s 2016 rewrite of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901) for the theater in Basel as well as Ulrich Rasche’s inventive 2017 production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.