Anything But Summertime: The Performance of Truth in Theatrical Domestic Noir

Knightley, Rachel

Abstract

This thesis comprises a novel and an exegesis. Anything But Summertime is a theatrical literary domestic noir novel of London theatre. Set designer Joanna ‘Very’ Cross, ex-Catholic blue-haired goth, is about to light her last cigarette before quitting when she sees the Virgin Mary watching across the road. When the same, silent girl turns up dead at a thespian party, Joanna uses Stanislavski’s ‘System’ to find the killer’s motivation. But looking for that truth uncovers a mystery linking the girl’s family with hers. Joanna challenges her own identity – name, aesthetic, family, friendships, career – to separate truth from performance, find the killer and the family she didn’t know she had.
My writing career to date, mainly short stories, shows my interest in perception’s relationship with reality. The goal of finding “truth” is central to Stanislavski’s ‘System’ of acting training, which is the basis of naturalistic acting and my background in theatre. In making Joanna a ‘Stanislavskian detective’, my novel and exegesis draw parallels between the methodology of Stanislavski and Sherlock Holmes, drawing on mysteries of identity in early Gothic, Victorian and sensation fiction and tracing their influence on the contemporary literary fiction of Maggie O’Farrell and Tana French, among others, whose contemporary family-centred mysteries speak as much to the traditional Gothic as the newer genre of ‘domestic noir’ (defined by Julia Crouch), between which I would site my theatrical literary domestic noir.

Citation

Knightley, R. (2020). Anything But Summertime: The Performance of Truth in Theatrical Domestic Noir. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4923074

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Nov 25, 2024
• Keywords: Creative writing ; English
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4923074
• Additional Information: Department of English and Creative Writing; University of Hull
• Award Date: Jul 27, 2020