Spectatorship in the Theatre, the Cinema and Photography The Gaze of Sartre and Roland Barthes’ punctum in David Greig

David Greig’s Outlying Islands can be read as a study of how people watch each other, and the implications of watching and being watched, both for fictional characters and for the spectators. This article analyses the ways identification processes are shaped with the gaze as the mediating actor, and how sexual awakening is bound up with the workings of the look. Sartre and Lacan’s perspective on the look will help to explain the experience of being a subject and an object as described in the play. In addition, the article claims that Outlying Islands is a complex of intricate questions as to the nature of theatre itself in which the spectator is implicated as he is urged to engage in the play’s identification set-ups. Furthermore, Greig’s play explores the relation of the theatre to other art forms such as the cinema and photography, which enhances its metatheatrical nature. Both are predominantly present in the play as they question our way of looking that is initiated by their respective objects. Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum in photography will be tested on its usefulness in theatre studies.