“It’s a big world in here”: Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility

Fiona Wilkie

doi:10.1515/jcde-2017-0002

Article

“It’s a big world in here”: Contemporary Voyage Drama and the Politics of Mobility

Fiona Wilkie
Fiona Wilkie is a senior lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is the author of Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage (Palgrave, 2015), which considers the ways in which performances engage with and produce mobilities, reshaping existing models and engendering alternative possibilities for movement. She has published on various aspects of mobility, site and performance in books and journals including Theatre Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.

Published/Copyright: April 28, 2017

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 5 Issue 1

Abstract

In Renaissance and Restoration England, many popular plays functioned as “voyage dramas,” offering opportunities for vicarious tourism to their audiences (McInnis 2012). The theatre became one site in which to receive and negotiate information about elsewhere, at a time before mass access to travel was available. The tagline of London’s Young Vic theatre – “It’s a big world in here” – suggests that something of this spirit survives in twenty-first-century performance. It is a sentiment that we find also in the festival director Mark Ball’s assertion that “theatre is my map of the world.” But the version of the world created here is necessarily skewed by a politics of mobility (Cresswell 2010): the uneven frictions, routes, speeds, levels of comfort, and power relations affecting how theatre-makers and productions move around the world. And contemporary audiences are themselves likely to come to the theatre with multiple and unequal experiences of travel. This article asks what function contemporary voyage dramas serve in a context of the widespread mobility of people, finance, goods and ideas, and what might be the political challenges of representing travel in the theatre. It investigates the claim to authenticity, the negotiation of privilege and remoteness, and the role of the performer as mediator in theatrical travel narratives. In particular, it focuses on Simon McBurney’s solo performance The Encounter (2015), arguing that its virtuosity served in part to tame – rather than to confront the challenge of – the world it sought to represent.

Keywords: voyage drama; Simon McBurney; Complicite; The Encounter; Chris Dobrowolski; Antarctica; travel; mobility; international; travelogue; solo performance; privilege

About the author

Fiona Wilkie

Fiona Wilkie is a senior lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is the author of Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage (Palgrave, 2015), which considers the ways in which performances engage with and produce mobilities, reshaping existing models and engendering alternative possibilities for movement. She has published on various aspects of mobility, site and performance in books and journals including Theatre Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.

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Published Online: 2017-4-28

Published in Print: 2017-4-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2017-0002

Keywords for this article

voyage drama; Simon McBurney; Complicite; The Encounter; Chris Dobrowolski; Antarctica; travel; mobility; international; travelogue; solo performance; privilege