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- Title
The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama.
- Authors
Baumbach, Sibylle
- Abstract
Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the "Medusa effect," this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience's sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators' gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham's Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience's capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators' response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.
- Subjects
NORRIS, Rufus, 1965-; SENSORY perception; CRISES; TELEVISION game programs; DRAMA; BRITISH history; GAZE
- Publication
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2020, Vol 8, Issue 1, p47
- ISSN
2195-0156
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/jcde-2020-0005