Sense All at Sea: Contemporary Theatre 'Between' Jon Fosse and Jean-Luc Nancy

In this essay Mark Robson explores the works of two writers, one a philosopher and one a playwright and novelist, to think through contemporary stagings of the spatio-temporal relation ‘between’ theatre and philosophy. Bringing together Jean-Luc Nancy and Jon Fosse, Robson finds in Nancy’s notions of sense, partage, co-appearance or ‘comparution’ a way of rethinking conventional explanations of the communal and political functions of theatre that resonates with the work of Fosse but also with that of French company the Théâtre du Radeau. Metaphor and imagination – and particularly a metaphorics of water – are related to different economies of the relation between speech and silence in Fosse, Nancy, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida to ask: how can sense be made of the notion of staging presence in the light of deconstruction and the postdramatic?