Introduction

The work of Marguerite Duras is on the boundary between modernism and postmodernism, as this chapter will show through the analysis of performances of her work that were created within a postdramatic context. The destabilisation of gender identity in her plays resonates with contemporary concerns about gender identity and intersectional politics. My own theatre practice-as-research has centred on these issues since I directed (with Mike Stevenson) Simone Benmussa's The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs in 1990, a play whose female protagonist ‘passes’ as a man. More recently, I have made performances (devised or developed from texts) that explore gender and the body, identity and subjectivity, through experimental uses of theatre space, sound and voice, often incorporating multimedia technologies. In this chapter my approach to Duras's work is to see her as an example of a modernist woman writer (another example being Gertrude Stein) whose theatre work is challenging to realise. The theatre forms that she developed from a context of high modernism are sites for exploring the performativity of gender, the destabilisation of identities, and the blurred boundaries between self and world, present and past, living and dead. Duras's intermedial performance forms counterpoint live action with mediated sound, particularly recorded voice and music. The plays anticipate and explore contemporary questions of remediation, intermediality and the destabilisation of identities. They point forward to contemporary performance practices which have emerged in the light of postmodernist and postdramatic theatre.

In the second half of the twentieth century Duras was a prolific writer, producing novels and essays, short stories and film scripts, as well as theatre plays. The critical reception of her work was primarily via the study of the writers of the Nouveau Roman, who were pushing at the boundaries of the literary conventions of character, narrative and action. They rejected story and character as the focus of narrative, unities of time and place, and structural conventions of beginning, middle and end. They focused instead on writing as an activity of meaning-production, with significance erupting in the moment of its creation or reception. Their works are characterised by disruption and fragmentation, ambiguity and reflexivity. In common with her contemporary Alain Robbe-Grillet, Duras was also in the French Nouvelle Vague cinema movement, both as a script writer and also as a director of her own films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1969).