Abstrakt
The paper first traces some of the discourses that underpin the present discussions of ethics, theatre and performance, beginning with Alan Read's Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993) and Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre (1999) and then curling back to the ways in which Emanuel Levinas and Judith Butler's work on proximity and precarity might be used to explore ethics and aesthetics. The second part of the paper investigates how Mark Ravenhill's pool (no Water) (2006), Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children (2009), Tim Crouch's The Author (2009) and David Greig's Fragile (2011) engage with what Lehmann terms 'the politics of perception', responsibility and response-ability within zones of ethical ambivalence and precarity.