the truth about the tyrant at University of Kent at Canterbury is a site-responsive reworking of the practical culmination of Göze Saner’s practice-based PhD research titled From Tyrant to Clown and Back: An Actor’s Practical Study of Archetype in Performance. Previously performed at the Boilerhouse Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, 12-13 June 2007, this fifty-minute devised solo promenade performance explores the archetype by playing with the dynamics of remembering and forgetting and by weaving through a multiplicity of moments and spaces, each of which draws on a central object and a specific mode of relationship between actor and spectator. Incorporating various tyrannical texts, moments, and physical forms, including Camus’ Caligula and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Capitano Spavento’s lunch with Death and Henry Miller’s clown sitting at the foot of a ladder trying to bestow eternal bliss on his spectators, a precise way of sitting from a personal dream on ‘becoming’ the tyrant and the song of Xenophon’s tyrant forever needing to be loved, the piece archives the generici of the tyrant.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/5946