Alice Birch – A Poet in the Theatre
Résumé
Simon Stephens called Alice Birch “a writer of exquisite poetry and unerring savagery” in the introduction to his interview with the playwright for the Royal Court podcast. Many other critics and reviewers also use the adjective “poetic” to describe her handling of language and dialogue, an adjective that is often used, probably for lack of a better one, to describe any poet’s experiment with the tenets of realism, especially if she is a woman. This chapter purports to take the word “poetic” in its stylistic sense and enquire into the linguistic dimension of Birch’s style. Through a close reading of excerpts from We Want You to Watch (2015), Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (2016), Anatomy of a Suicide (2017), and [BLANK] (2019), Birch’s experimentations with concrete poetry, rhetorical devices and literary genres will be delineated. By considering the poetic nature of Birch’s texts, this chapter shows how it participates in creating a feminist soundscape that locates the traumatic experience of patriarchy in language, and suggests the in-yer-ear stage can participate in revolutionizing the world.