Performing the Self to Death Sarah Bernhardt’s Acting Up and Out and Outplaying

This paper gravitates around the concept of performance pushed to its limits, in the sense of acting up and out, through scenes of transvestism and death, and its being instrumental in the manufacture of Sarah Bernhardt. Her construction of identity amounted to a deconstruction that was enacted through a panoply of “disruptive acts”. Transgressing all boundaries towards a condition of “thirdness”, she remains a performer whose playing – and playfulness – was a way of outplaying everything.