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(Sub)Versions of the Them/Us Dichotomy in Iraq War Drama

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 16. April 2014
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Abstract

Focusing on the politics of representing the enemy, this article asks to what extent theatre can be said to occupy a radical stance in the ‘war on terror’ discourse, proposing a reappraisal of Baz Kershaw’s concept of radical performance as transcending dominant ideologies. Since constructions of the enemy in the ‘war on terror’ invariably rely on the discursive boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ the article interrogates dramatic strategies that reinforce or subvert the them/us dichotomy, drawing on three recent British productions that follow their protagonists to the Iraqi front line: Stovepipe by Adam Brace, How Many Miles to Basra? by Colin Teevan, and Days of Significance by Roy Williams. The way in which a differential relation to life structures the plays is posited against the subversive strategies of inverting the positions of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and staging spectral enemies that defy decoding, demonstrating how drama can effectively undermine official lines of demarcation.

Works Cited

Primary Literature

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Published Online: 2014-4-16
Published in Print: 2014-5-1

© 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Special Issue: Theatre and Politics: Theatre as Cultural Intervention
  4. Articles
  5. Intervention, Interaction, Insufficiency: Theatre’s Critical Repertoire?
  6. From Theatre & Everyday Life to Theatre in the Expanded Field: Performance Between Community and Immunity
  7. Between Homeland and Exile: Witnessing the Homo Sacer at the Heart of Hotel Medea
  8. Gob Squad’s Act of Rebellion – Revolution Now!
  9. Remixing Politics: The Case of Headphone-Verbatim Theatre in Britain
  10. Navigating New Patterns of Power with an Audience
  11. “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”: Staging Treatments of Riots in Recent British Theatre
  12. Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz. Authentic Voices, Representing the Council Estate: Politics, Authorship and the Ethics of Representation
  13. Staging the unsayable: debbie tucker green’s political theatre
  14. (Sub)Versions of the Them/Us Dichotomy in Iraq War Drama
  15. Going Straight: The Politics of Time and Space in David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness
  16. New Plays of Ideas and an Aesthetics of Reflection and Debate in Contemporary British Political Drama
  17. Howard Brenton and the Improbable Revival of the Brechtian History Play
  18. “Surreal and unbelievable and fantastical”
  19. Reviews
  20. Elżbieta Baraniecka. Sublime Drama: British Theatre of the 1990s. CDE Studies 23. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013, x + 270 pp., € 82.95.
  21. Jeanne Colleran. Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 241 pp., $ 90.00.
  22. Astrid Haas. Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011, 334 pp., € 38.00.
  23. Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real (eds.). Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vi + 198 pp., $ 85.00.
  24. Patrick Duggan. Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012, ix + 214 pp., $ 88.00.
  25. Philip C. Kolin (ed.). Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, x + 207 pp., £ 80.00 (hardback, 2007), £ 28.00 (paperback, 2012), £ 28.00 (ebook, 2007).
  26. Helen H. Lojek. The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 181 pp., £ 55.00 (hardback).
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