Fragmentuota tapatybė : personažo krizė šiuolaikiniame dramos teatre

Abstract

Even a short superficial look at the landscape of contemporary drama theatre reveals the symptoms of “the crisis of the character” (Abirached) or, to be more specific, the symptoms of the crisis of the character’s unified identity. Theatre stage is more and more often populated by characters which seem to be unfinished, fragmented, and ambiguous in regard to traditional dramatic personages. Although rather conservative theatre criticism frequently interprets this tendency as the decline of the art of the actor (or the director, the dramatist), it is evident that we confront with a new conception of theatrical character reflecting on the post-structural (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida) idea of the death of a unified subject. While creating fragmented, unstable and open-ended theatrical characters, theatre artists not only react to the crisis of anthropocentric ideology, but also reflect the Lacanian idea of decentered identity. Thus in the light of the post-structural theory, the conception of “the crisis of the character” would denote gradual decline of essentialistic understanding of the character’s identity: the character’s identity becomes unfixed, shifting, decomposed and reconstructed under the influence of social forces and signifying practices. This article discusses the signs of the crisis of the character in postmodern dramaturgy. The object of the analysis is contemporary Lithuanian and foreign drama texts manifesting the new conception of dramatic character related to the post-structural idea of decentered and fragmented identity.