Arts

This paper takes up the question of “things” in contemporary English theatre by examining a trivial, even banal prop which appears in any number of plays: the stage telephone. After outlining the highly conventionalised function of the stage telephone as a pretext for exposition and a guarantee of the integrity of off-stage space, the paper examines a number of departures from the convention, including Tom Stoppard’s post-modern citation of the stage telephone in The Real Inspector Hound and Caryl Churchill’s exploitation of its sonic and visual properties in Serious Money.  The paper concludes with a consideration of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, a play without telephones, but one which nonetheless reflects profoundly on what is at stake in the humble stage telephone, that is, the status of telecommunications in the theatre.

This paper examines the history and meanings of Polaroid, or ‘one-step’ photography at the point of its obsolescence.  It asks in what ways technological change relates to the fields of society and culture and argues that Polaroid instant photography can be fruitfully analysed to shed light on more recent developments in the digital image, which is also marked by its instantaneity.  Three key properties of Polaroid photography are identified – its speed, the absence of a darkroom, and the singularity of the image – and considered in terms of the Bataillean concept of intimacy.