The Subversion of the Male Gaze and 9/11 as the Anamorphic Spot in David Greig’s Outlying Islands

On a purely narrative level, Scottish playwright David Greig's Outlying Islands (2002) deals with two ornithologists who have set sail to a small island in the North Atlantic to watch a rare bird species. What they do instead of watching birds is to "watch each other." Hence, the play explores the mutual processes of looking and being looked at. By tracing the identification processes of characters and audience alike, this article analyses how Greig uses the motif of film to comment on the play and the engagement of its audiences. It engages in a comparative reading of Outlying Islands and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, showing that Greig deploys Hitchcock's motif in reverse. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the playwright presents the island as a construction -- the imagining of which the audience is involved in -- that subliminally comments on the terrorist attacks of 9/11.