Theatre - power - subject: On Dragan Živadinov's Elizabethan Trilogy

The text offers a philosophical reflection on the cycle of five performances that form the Elizabethan Trilogy project (2008-2013) by director Dragan Živadinov. By introducing four conceptual pairs - theatre and sovereignty, words and things, the subject and the mask, and difference and repetition - it also attempts to reflect on Živadinov's entire opus and on the meaning of his theatre. At the centre of attention in the theatre of repetition, which is opposed to the theatre of representation, there is the relation between theatre, sovereignty and the subject; the author of this text tries to shed light on this relation by drawing on Antonin Artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty and possible connections between theatre and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.