All the Stage’s a World: Power, Objets, and the Limits of Performance in Iris Murdoch’s 1970s Plays

Abstract

This year marked the centenary of Iris Murdoch’s birth with several conferences, news articles, and academic publications dedicated to celebrating the late author’s literary and philosophical legacy. However, one aspect that was largely overlooked was Murdoch’s plays, which have received surprisingly little scholarly attention to date. My paper will focus on the plays The Servants and the Snow (1970) and The Three Arrows (1972), both composed by Murdoch solely for performance (rather than adapted from her novels). Each play presents a remarkable exploration of reality/ies constructed by power relations in self-contained sites. In each play, I aim to examine how spatial entrapment sustains hegemonic power structures, which are reified through the subjugation of human objets. I plan to interpret these human objets in each play as inherited artefacts of a pre-existent hierarchy and analyse their involvement in feudal rituals, such as droit de seigneur or the competition for a bride, as illusory forms of power redistribution along class and gender lines. Of interest are physical artefacts, such as arrows, boots, closets, rings, and letters, which are exchanged for and between human objets in the plays, as symbolic markers of subjectivity and subjugation.