The Tiger, the Painting and the Bottle of Whisky: Alternative Discourses in David Edgar’s Destiny (1976)

• Main Author: Susan Blattès
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2009-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/6006

Although critics may tend to focus on the dialogue in political plays like Destiny where words are obviously important, it would be a mistake to underestimate the contribution of objects of one sort or another. Nor should we limit our analysis of these objects to their purely functional capacity. In fact “things” may serve many and diverse purposes at different moments in the action. Using Bert O. States’s opposition between the opacity and transparency of the theatrical object in his study of the phenomenology of theatre, this article focuses on three “things” to illustrate the extreme diversity and flexibility of the theatrical object. The three objects range from the banal to the exotic and serve purposes which vary from the functional or structural to the symbolic. Furthermore we can note how the intermittent or recurrent presence of things on the stage gives rise to alternative discourses in which the verbal does not necessarily carry more weight than the visual. Ultimately, we will show that a study of “things” highlights the specifically theatrical dimensions of this play.