Rethinking Play Texts in the Age of Mediatization: Simon Stephens’s Pornography

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article is unusual in that it responds to a tendency in contemporary theatre practice and scholarship to overlook play texts when exploring the effect on the theatre of media technologies and culture have. Introducing the concept of “mediatized dramaturgy,” the article explores how a play can accommodate the social-cognitive conditions of a mediatized culture, not only through direct reference to technology, but also in aesthetic subtleties that echo the contemporary moment. In light of this, the article analyses Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007) to show the workings of a mediatized play in opening new vistas to understand the new realities of the contemporary. A further discussion of the reception of Pornography onstage explores the performative implications of a mediatized dramaturgy. This analysis challenges recent shifts in critical discourse about the media-theatre relation: the growing emphasis on performance, misconceptions about postdramatic theatre as a non-textual form, and the text’s supposed incapacity to map the new reality of mediatized culture and consciousness.