Moen, Karoline Una (2025) Dramaturgies of traumatic loss : the breakage of a framework through playwriting practice. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis interrogates how trauma disrupts form repositioning playwriting as a productive site through which the representation of trauma can be reconceived. It examines the challenges trauma presents to dramaturgies of cohesion, with their formal drive towards the 'wholeness' of the fictive cosmos (Lehman 2006). Employing a practice-based methodology, it develops an alternative approach to playwriting that positions the structural breakage enacted by traumatic events within the dramaturgical framework of the writing itself. It thus establishes a novel dialogue between practice, dramaturgy scholarship and trauma studies, to establish how the world-shattering encounter with traumatic loss can be reimagined through techniques that rupture the dramaturgical structures underlying the dramatic text. Beginning with Žižek (2014) conceptualisation of the traumatic event as a break in the symbolic framework, chapter one draws on psychoanalytic and literary concepts of trauma (Caruth 1995, Feldman and Laub 1992, Žižek 2014) to examine how sudden loss is encountered as a form of traumatic silence that eludes direct communication, demanding and resisting representation simultaneously. Chapter two develops a cyclical approach to practice research, employing reflection, freewriting and workshopping to investigate how the in-between nature of traumatic silence can be inscribed into dramaturgy. Chapter three and four analyse the two central creative outputs of the thesis, a series of experimental scenes titled Out of Her Throat and a full-length play Break Her New. Through the trauma-dramaturgies developed in these pieces, three practical dramaturgical strategies are identified: (1) the deployment of traumatic silence; (2) the problematising of paradox in writing trauma; (3) staging a breakage of the dramaturgical frame. The inquiry develops new understanding of playwriting practice as a reflective site of generative experimentation, developing new insights into how the affect of trauma can be explored not simply as narrative content but a structural phenomenon encountered through innovative form.

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Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Playwriting, Trauma, Dramaturgy
Subjects:	Directing and Directors Playwriting
Depositing User:	Mr Carlos Garcia-Jane
Date Deposited:	16 Jan 2026 15:57
Last Modified:	16 Jan 2026 15:58
URI:	https://repository.cssd.ac.uk/id/eprint/1857