by William Kherbek // Mar. 17, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Abjection.
Abjection and power go together like Deleuze and Guattari, but it’s not always clear which one is in charge. Power dynamics lie at the heart of human relationships, but they’re often invisiblized. Among the few times and places such relations are laid bare for consideration is on the stage. The theater opens the hidden corners of the human psyche and society as few other art forms can. On the stage, the body is present before the audience, undertaking the most obscene act imaginable: feeling. William Joys is an artist whose works explore the implicit power relations performers experience and create through the characters they portray. The characters Joys creates, in particular ‘The Actress’—a grande dame of the stage who is unafraid to offend the audience in ways that might even make Peter Handke blush—revel in treading across the red lines of social and power hierarchies. Joys performs ‘The Actress’ in different formats, sometimes as a lonely monarch surveying her kingdom of inadequates from impossible heights of scorn, other times as part of a rickety construction that blurs the line between actor and prop, subject and object, object and objectification. We spoke to Joys after a recent performance of ‘The Actress’ at the South London venue IKLECTIK in Peckham Levels. The discussion ranged across topics like performance theory, class consciousness, the sordidness of majesty and the erotic potential of disgust.
William Joys: ‘A one man show,’ 2019, at Kunstraum London // Photo by Nat Arazmatova
William Kherbek: In your several iterations of ‘The Actress’ that I’ve seen, the character is encased in a kind of construction, using shelving or other elements, that blurs the distinction between subject and object. The notion of “objecthood” being imbricated in the creating of the subject seems to be literalized to a degree in the work. Could you talk about how you understand or think about these distinctions in a work that is very much about subject creation and construction?
William Joys: I think it’s a breakdown between those binary notions of the object and the subject. In the performance, they do inevitably collapse, but I make costumes without the text in mind. If I had it in mind, I wouldn’t be able to create. It would be too fixed. I write the scripts separately. The scripts challenge subjectivity as a phenomenon. I’m very interested in how the rise of method acting is in line with the rise of live art, they happened almost simultaneously. That’s intriguing to me because they both buy into the idea of “authenticity” as the secret ingredient of the performance that remains enigmatic, but I find that inaccessible. Maybe that’s a personal problem [laughter], and ‘The Actress’ freely admits to that problem. It’s an interesting problem because it’s a demand, and it’s very easy for power dynamics to exploit such ideas.
William Joys: Letters & Libel // Photo by David Green
WK: In thinking about ‘The Actress’ in the context of the study of acting, there are elements of what psychologists refer to as a “degradation ceremony,” in which a subject is brought into a cultural space and “broken,” for example through hazing or some other form of ritual humiliation, and then “rebuilt” on the terms of the institution. To an extent this “breaking” is inherent to acting training as the actor must break or lose themselves in order to create a convincing version of another subject. Are you thinking about these forms of degradation ceremonies in creating ‘The Actress,’ as she is very imperious when dealing with her charges?
WJ: Yes and no. This definitely interests me. You use the term “degradation ceremony,” but in English public schools they call it “initiation.” That’s indicative of English repression, but it’s also to do with another thing, which is deconstructing in order to construct. I’m not for these sorts of punishment-for-learning ideas, but I think ‘The Actress’ does bring up roles and characters that everyone experiences, which seem very unfair. They use their power to have influence, maybe for themselves. But, on the other hand, perhaps these people have been very important in our lives. Our relationship to power is very complicated.
Stella Adler is a very big influence for me and her whole career was marked, for better and for worse, by her tirade against “the method,” particularly against [American acting coach] Lee Strasberg, who is The Daddy of “the method.” They were working together in the Group Theatre in the 1930s, which gave birth to writers like Clifford Odetts: a playwright of American social realism during the Depression. I don’t know which production they were working on, but Strasberg was directing and Adler was playing and there was a scene where he wanted to use what he called “emotional memory” and she refused. She walked off stage apparently, and she went to Paris and met [Konstantin] Stanislavski. Adler told him: “You ruined the theater for me! I thought it was about imagination,” and he said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and they spent a few days together and she was able to basically prove Strasberg wrong, and flew back to New York to announce to the Group that Strasberg’s was a false interpretation of Stanislavski.
She refused a breaking of her spirit, which had been built up from her father, Jakob Adler [a pioneer of Yiddish theater] and this idea of observation—of everything in the world, people’s behavior, why they move in a certain way, or how they move, and everything that you can collect to make an impression. You don’t need to have lived it; it can be how you observe and how you exist in the world. She freely admitted that if it is from your past, it may still be useful—it’s still from your imagination, because memory is imagination, after all. It’s not that we have to conjure something traumatic to play a dramatic scene. Actually, acting is a series of effects on an audience and however the actor gets there—as they say—is up to them.
William Joys: ‘Metronome,’ 2026 // Photo by Carmen Gray
WK: ‘The Actress’ often discusses royalty in her performances. I wonder how you think about the positionality of royalty, especially British royalty, who are a kind of “global brand.” They are both hyper-privileged but also highly abject, in that they are subjected to extreme scrutiny and are permanently expected to perform a bizarre form of supremacy that is constantly being analyzed for slippages.
WJ: Well, I love ‘The Crown,’ but ‘The Actress’ is drawn more from period drama of older centuries. There’s this great Quentin Crisp quote, where he’s talking about Queen Elizabeth II: “I’m really worried about The Queen, because it must be really hard to act so middle class. If I were Queen, I’d be wearing my coronet at breakfast.” There’s something I love about majesty and the performance of that. We recognize it as not being a part of monarchy now, because the monarch has a terrible time appealing to the public, to maintain the public’s approval. Perhaps they should have kept to their regality.
WK: It’s a kind of ongoing performance, from the time of Albert [Queen Victoria’s husband] attempting to show the royals as a “normal” family of the era to Prince Philip and Elizabeth making a TV show in the 1950s about their simplicity and normality.
WJ: That being said, I think ‘The Actress’ is really about sovereignty and majesty, these things seem divorced from ideas of socialism but then I think about Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ which upholds self-regard and criticizes charity as a failure of government. I have read this utmost self-regard as a form of majesty. If everyone had that, we’d probably live in a better world. It’s this age old thing of self-love, but it has the added element of wretchedness. It’s a huge burden to be sovereign to one’s self and I’m not sure anyone ever achieves it. Maybe Elizabeth I, or Joan of Arc. That’s why they burned her!
William Joys: ‘Metronome,’ 2026 // Photo by Carmen Gray
WK: In your other writings, for example a recent zine, there’s a sense of the power of these contrasting impulses, of desire at a crossroads, feelings of disgust but enjoying the disgust, an “erotics of disgust.”
WJ: I think it’s a very old strand of my work I wanted to reemerge. The zine itself is a facsimile of a picture book I made when I was a teenager, a stitched book, and [I wondered] how I could reframe the narrative to make a work of fiction. I think of Dennis Cooper and how the fiction of trauma—or in my case amateur traumatics—might become a creative act instead of being subjected to your own subjectivity; instead of being a victim to your subjectivity and playing into that narrative, to fold pleasure into something that is supposedly a painful memory.
William Joys: ‘Metronome,’ 2026 // Photo by Carmen Gray
WK: In speaking of performance and forms of imposed visibility, and the sense of anxiety and shame that can create, what do you make of the role of social media as a mechanism of surveillance? Today, everyone potentially is a critic of any given work, or act, but not necessarily with the forms of literacy to understand the nature of the work.
WJ: The Actress argues, in my recent performance ‘Metronome,’ that we don’t want critics anymore; they should “put down their poison pens.” Art criticism is something that has died, not now, a long time ago. Wilde points this out in ‘The Critic as Artist’ in the late 19th century, that in Ancient Greece, they didn’t have critics because they were a nation of critics. I think now we are a nation of actresses, but some of us are not ready to admit it. And the actress is a critic because, in order to question, you must first have the nerve to be a questionable person. On social media, you might say, there’s a lot of criticism but not a lot of self-reflection.
What changed discourse was that before social media you’d have a conversation in a pub and you might regret it the next day, but now there’s a material paper trail that exists. On the other hand, things are more separate from you, so you may be implicated because it’s your name on social media or you may participate in a discussion which people can all see, but it’s a total mediation and separation from yourself, it becomes like an object to be pored over and criticized, over and over again. The ability to develop one’s sovereignty becomes very difficult. You can unravel very quickly. It is difficult to be an Actress on these platforms.
