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Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. It ends with a reading of how certain theatrical productions-Claude Régy’s 1968 Théâtre de Chaillot production of L’Amante anglaise, Beckett’s 1978 Théâtre d’Orsay production of Pas moi, and Jess Thom and Matthew Pountney’s 2018 Not I at Battersea Arts Centre-have re-embodied this failure of witnessing as a more optimistic speaker–witness relationship by remodelling the action of the listening figures’ hands. It examines how Beckett and Duras frame their respective ‘Auditor’ and ‘Interrogator’ listening figures as ‘failed witnesses’. It explores how both plays stage the impossibility of testifying comprehensively to traumatic suffering (whether inflicted or experienced) but also draw on the bodily proximity and specific sensory dimensions of the theatre medium to provoke a distressing corporeal response in their spectators. Resurgent anxieties about France’s role in the Second World War overtook the country’s cultural imagination during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this chapter reads Beckett’s and Duras’s own distanced proximity to Holocaust suffering against the larger cultural backdrop of increasing Francophone scepticism as to the healing function of postwar testimony. Both plays offer a radically reduced sense of how far one can bear witness to traumatic suffering. This chapter examines how Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972) and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise (1968) meld elements of the popular postwar genre of testimony literature with the symptoms of fragmented trauma memory, in order to sceptically interrogate the possibility of any ‘successful’ intersubjective communication of pain.

L'Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras