The (In)Human Condition

• Main Author: Vicky Angelaki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte" 2016-07-01
• Series: Sillages Critiques
• Subjects: Simon Stephens; Three Kingdoms; Sebastian Nübling; animality; stage experimentation; social vulnerability
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4411

The article examines Simon Stephens's seminal play Three Kingdoms (2012), a defining moment in his enduring working relationship with director Sebastian Nübling and a decidedly internationalist staging effort that enabled cross-collaboration between artists based in Britain, Estonia and Germany. The particular focus of the article is the depiction of animality in Simon Stephens's play and the rich signification that it accomplishes in a piece that effectively proceeds from the detective fiction genre to offer wide-ranging, bold and experimental theatrical representation. As the article argues, this is achieved through the poignant relevance to contemporary social concerns that animality allows on both a literal and metaphorical level. There is an imaginary binary at the heart of the problematics that Stephens exposes: between the European East and West, but also between human and animal. As the article goes on to demonstrate, Stephens, Nübling and their international team of collaborators arrive at a staging method that is both aesthetically intuitive and politically astute in order to offer rigorous stage commentary on the state of sex trade - and especially sex slavery - in our time. In so doing, they also powerfully question the primacy of humans over animals, raising important points as to vulnerability and transgression, the assumption of authority over nature, and also to humans in positions of power versus humans in positions of vulnerability.