ABSTRACT
Theatre critics sometimes bemoan the proliferation of direct address in 21st-century drama. In a heated opinion piece for the New York Times, Charles Isherwood lambasts the overuse by emerging playwrights of direct address to the audience. Dialogue, for Walker as for Isherwood, is the place where real conflict brews; monologue is a way to avoid showing conflict through action. Tim Walker and Isherwood perpetuate the assumption that the monologue’s verbal furniture stultifies the drama, robbing enactment of its visceral excitement. Will Eno’s idea of theatre as working to create effects of infinity runs directly against forensic culture’s effects of legibility. As Eno reflects: humour and joy and misery and sadness are subcategories of the larger thing, Truth. As Phillips suggests, Eno’s monologues, like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lectures, use ‘contingent dialogue, experimentation, reflection, agitation, irony, parody, jest’ to play language games that assert the value of the ostensive.
