The Missing Actor: The aesthetics of absence and the politics of disappearance

This article investigates the displacement of the figure of the actor from the centre of the theatrical stage concomitant with the ‘scenographic turn’ in contemporary theatre. It seeks to historicise the de-centring of the figure of the actor in a scenographically oriented ‘aesthetics of absence’ by demonstrating this is indirectly related to the political disappearances that have characterised the contemporary period – the disappearance of people not only from the mise-en-scène of the theatrical stage, but from the lived reality of post-war European history.

Heiner Goebbels’s Everything that has happened and would happen (2018) is examined as a case-study of how this history and its theatrical staging are intertwined. In demonstrating how the process of twentieth-century history finds its mode of presentation in the composition of space and action rather than the representation of figure and narration, the article argues that the scenographic operation enables the production of performative historiography rather than simply historical mise en scène (Kear 2013). It traces how Goebbels’s Everything that has happened and would happen opens a space of aesthetic encounter (rather than simply a theatrical work) which implicates and involves the viewer and invites a critical and creative practice of spectatorship to animate its affects.

Rather than celebrate the displacement of the figure of the actor, the article seeks to situate its emergence in relation to the political disappearance of actual people. The essay thereby argues that the theatrical appearance of the missing actor intersects with the historical tracing of the politics of disappearance.