This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre

Introduction

On 23 April 2020, St George’s Day, Sonia Friedman Productions announced that Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem will be revived at a West End theatre in 2021,^[1] with Mark Rylance set to play the fêted role of Rooster Byron once more. Often branded as the play of the decade – the ultimate state-of-the-nation piece – it is clear that Butterworth’s play, which began life at the Royal Court in 2009, continues to resonate.^[1] While Butterworth claims that he did not set out to write a state-of-the-nation play, Jerusalem has certainly been received as one by theatre reviewers, with Dominic Cavendish claiming that “it speaks about a nation that has almost forgotten it is a nation” and Sarah Crompton arguing that at its core there is “a howl of anguish that a once proud nation has lost all sense of itself.” It is evident from the play’s opening moments – where the St George flag is painted on the proscenium curtain and the hymn “Jerusalem” is sung by Phaedra, the reigning Flintock Queen – that the nation in question is England, not Britain.^[2]

In this article, I place the 2022 revival of Jerusalem alongside Mike Bartlett’s Albion (2017 and 2020) and the Young Vic’s My England monologues, which were streamed online in 2019, asking how these theatrical representations capture and interrogate the key debates surrounding England and Englishness in contemporary political discourse.^[3] Drawing on work from cultural geography and political philosophy, I adopt a critical approach to the idea of England, before exploring the way in which Albion and My England tell different stories of English national identity to Jerusalem. In doing so, I argue that the emergence of this national theatrical register might mark the beginning of a countermove to what Dan Rebellato terms a tradition of post-nation “theatrical placelessness,” which he suggests has become commonplace in contemporary British theatre in recent years (“Nation and Negation” 22).

Jerusalem: Back to the “Green and Pleasant Land”

Before I define England’s cultural centrality and examine the ways in which Albion and My England work to interrogate this position, I first want to briefly return to Jerusalem. While Jerusalem continues to be used as the only shorthand for theatrical representations of England in surveys of Englishness in contemporary culture (Kenny; Matless), its national focus is yet to be fully explored – and problematised – in theatre scholarship. Instead, scholars have read Jerusalem through the lens of rural space and ecology (Robinson; Harpin), its intertextual dimensions (White; Saunders), and social abjection (Holdsworth; Boll). This article calls for a new way of looking at Jerusalem: my analysis demonstrates how Butterworth represents England, focusing on the way in which his play seems to simply take England as it finds it. Indeed, I suggest that the overwhelmingly positive – and even celebratory – critical reception of Jerusalem as a state-of-England play is symptomatic of the way in which England’s cultural dominance remains largely unquestioned and continues to be taken for granted.

From Jerusalem’s opening scene, Butterworth emphasises that his play deals in English national terms. In addition to Phaedra’s rendition of “Jerusalem,” which opens the play, English national icons are visible in Ultz’s set design of the productions at the Royal Court and the Apollo theatre, not only in the St George Flag on the proscenium curtain but also the Wessex flag flying behind Rooster’s mobile home and the sign of the old English Stage Company (the former company at the Royal Court) framing the proscenium arch. The play’s spatial and temporal coordinates further ground the play in a specifically English national frame: Jerusalem is set on St George’s Day (and William Shakespeare’s birthday) in the fictional village of Flintock in the Southwest of England. It is also the day of the annual Flintock fair, where there is much excitement over Morris dancing and anticipation as to who will be crowned the next May Queen in the village pageant. This romantic representation of English rurality is repeatedly evoked by the character of the Professor as the play unfolds. As an outsider to Rooster’s entourage, who is often inebriated and always out of touch, the Professor views the Dionysian activity of Rooster and his friends through the lens of the rural idyll: he compares their resistance to the New Estate to “an English rebellion” and celebrates the way in which the wood offers “A time to be free from constraint. A time to commune with the flora and fauna of this enchanted isle. To abandon oneself to the rhythm of the earth” (52).

Butterworth’s staging of English rural practices seems to conjure up one dominant reading of the English rural which has come into popular lexicon in recent years: the idea of “Deep England.” The term was first coined by Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country in 1985, where he noted the way in which expressions of Englishness were predominantly rural in their register. The liveness of Wright’s original definition of the term – which is centred on embodied national experience – is often lost in contemporary usage.^[4] For example, Angus Calder’s “Deep England” is locked into symbolic readings: he writes that it stretches from “Hardy’s Wessex to Tennyson’s Lincolnshire, from Kipling’s Sussex to Elgar’s Worcestershire” (182). It is thus sustained by literary representations of the rural; it is an imagined, rather than lived geography. Jerusalem engages with the symbolic geographies of “Deep England” through its rich intertextual dimensions: Rooster is compared to a number of iconic English rebels, including Falstaff, Puck, Robin Hood, and his namesake, Lord Byron, while the Wiltshire wood draws comparisons to the transformative forests in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c 1595) and As You Like It (1599).

Although Rooster is defined as an English rebel of national proportions through these literary allusions, he is more particularly a rebel – and legend – of Flintock. Paul Kingsnorth puts forward this local approach – which emphasises the individual, particular, and meaningful – in an essay titled “Oak, Ash, and Thorn,” which was written for the Apollo production of the play in 2010. Kingsnorth writes widely on the need for a critical attention to England: in Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, he calls for an English patriotism that is “benign and positive” and predicated on “place not race, geography not biology” (285). In “Oak, Ash, and Thorn,” Kingsnorth suggests that Rooster’s Wood offers a glimpse into England’s hidden histories and mythologies and closes the essay with a summons to Jerusalem’s audience to “go out and search for them.”^[5]

It is here that I want to explore Wright’s “Deep England” in more detail, in order to connect Rooster’s embeddedness in the local landscape and broader national questions. In On Living in an Old Country, Wright argues that

Deep England can indeed be deeply moving to those whose particular experience is most directly in line with its privileged imagination. People of an upper middle-class formation can recognize not just their own totems and togetherness in these essential experiences, but also the philistinism of the urban working class as it stumbles out, blind and unknowing, into that countryside at weekends. (82)

As Wright makes clear, “Deep England” is predicated on an experiential claim to national knowledge, but these experiences are not available to everyone. The idea is thus not only deeply classist, but can also mobilise an exclusive, xenophobic nationalist discourse through the way in which it focuses on origins and roots, a reading which I develop below in my analysis of Albion.

On the surface, Jerusalem debases aspects of “Deep England.” Rooster’s Wood signifies misrule, disorder, and abandon, and the Dionysian practices that thrive there are antithetical to the calm and order that underpins the idea. Indeed, Rooster only invokes English rural customs to mock them: he claims that his shooting of a pig with a flare gun at a children’s party constituted a “rural display” (14) and later names his drug- and alcohol-fuelled party “a bucolic alcoholic frolic” (78). Yet Wright’s idea that “Deep England” is made up of “essential experiences” offers a useful lens for reading how Rooster asserts his own belonging to this spot in the English rural landscape. First, Rooster exhibits an innate and embodied knowledge of the land, which is made clear in his lyrical explanation to Phaedra: “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in this wood [. . .]. I seen first kisses. Last kisses. I seen all the world pass by and go. Laughing. Crying. Talking to themselves. Kicking the bracken” (102). Rooster also marks his territory in a scatological sense. Shortly after Fawcett and Parsons issue the eviction notice in the first scene, Rooster urinates outside, exclaiming: “Riches. Fame. A glimpse of God’s tail . . . Comes a time you’d swap it all for a solid golden piss on English soil” (10).

Rooster’s knowledge of the land is not only embodied, but also mythological. As Nadine Holdsworth points out, Rooster’s Romany heritage – which he celebrates through his repeated references to his Romany blood – is connected to a different kind of “romantic rurality” which celebrates the traveller figure as a counterpoint to “industrialization, urbanization, the onset of modernity and the technological age” (186). Rooster’s innate knowledge of the wood attests to such romantic readings, and this mythological depth is captured in his own story of how he settled in the wood clearing. Rooster offers a romantic account of this event: when the axle on his motorbike broke and he could not drive any further, he felt an affinity to the wood clearing, thinking: “I know this place. Feels like I’ve been here before” (102). Butterworth suggests that it is pagan mythologies that bind Rooster to the landscape: as Lee Piper, one of Rooster’s entourage, reminds us, there are ley lines beneath the wood: “lines of ancient energy [. . .] [it] is holy land” (72). Butterworth thus validates Rooster’s belonging to the landscape by emphasising his mythological connection to this “holy land,” a symbiotic relationship which is captured in the oxymoron that his mobile home is now embedded in the earth.

By the end of the play, it is evident that Rooster is of the landscape, as he calls on its depth in his final rallying cry. Beating the drum, he summons his ancestors in the Byron lineage, the giants of folklore, and asks the “fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still” to join him (109). In his range of references to English myth and legend – including Cormoran, Jack-of-Green, and Brutus of Albion, the eponymous founder and first King of the island of Britain – Butterworth connects Rooster to this “Deep England.” While the Royal Court production was ambiguous as to whether the booming sound signifies the arrival of the giants tentatively answering Rooster’s call or the arrival of the Kennet and Avon council, ready to demolish Rooster’s home, this final scene leaves audiences with two versions of England – one corporate and governed by the clock, and one mythological and governed by the rhythm of the earth – and in this seductive, heady ending, urges them to choose the latter.

However, Jerusalem’s embrace of “Deep Englishness” requires a note of caution, and I argue that the play’s direct focus on English questions lacks the self-reflexivity needed in approaching English national imaginaries today. In his survey of recent cultural studies on England, Michael Kenny highlights that most artists are careful to note the “regressive and pathological implications” within expressions of Englishness, including its imperial inflections and history of appropriation by the far right (77). In contrast, Jerusalem draws strength from English icons, such as St George’s flag, without questioning what these iconographies mean or detailing how they have been used. Returning to Kingsnorth’s call for an English patriotism which is “benign and positive,” the English national markers that Butterworth references are not benign. The Anglo-Saxon and Viking mythologies that are employed in Rooster’s final speech have long been mobilised as icons for far-right organisations, such as the English Defence League, but are used unproblematically to validate Rooster’s place in the English soil. Wright is careful to note that the embodied, experiential aspect of “Deep England” plays directly into such xenophobic discourses, with its stress on origins, lived experience, and “authentic” national experience determining lines of inclusion and exclusion. Recalling Kingsnorth’s terms, Butterworth simply shifts the locus of this essentialism from biology to place: Rooster’s place in the land is validated by his origins, his ancestral connection to English legends. It is surprising that this reading of Rooster’s innate, essential Englishness has escaped criticism. The seductiveness of the final scene – where Rooster beats his drum, calling on the giants – is perhaps clouded by the fact that Butterworth’s protagonist is positioned as the last bastion of a vanishing England through blood and soil.

A Note on England

If in 2009 Jerusalem’s call to an essential Englishness remained largely unproblematised, the 2016 UK EU Referendum brought renewed energy to the English questions that the play explores, marking a moment in which England’s cultural and political identity was (again) at the centre of public debate. While the difference in voting patterns between England and Wales in particular might seem marginal – England had the highest Leave vote at 53.4 per cent compared to 52.5 per cent in Wales, 44.2 per cent in Northern Ireland, and 38 per cent in Scotland – Britain’s vote to leave the EU has largely been represented as an English “problem” in media discourse (BBC News). Political commentators such as Anthony Barnett, Fintan O’Toole, and John Denham all follow this reading, taking the view that the idea of England – and its political influence – needs to be interrogated. If the Referendum marked a crisis of communication in which different groups were shouting from their entrenched positions, this wider move towards a study of England and Englishness can be understood as a critical listening exercise, which aims to uncover and explore some of the contradictions and complexities in England’s political, social, and cultural make-up.

Central to this work is the notion that the Brexit vote simply activated a set of tensions that were already there; but it is difficult to pin down one social, political, or cultural moment at which such debates around England and Englishness began. While many contemporary writings on England use the 1990 s as a starting point for their discussions (Kenny; Winter and Keegan-Phipps), primarily due to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies in 1999, Tom Nairn pointed to England’s ambiguous cultural and constitutional identity as early as 1977, terming this paradoxical position of centrality and absence the “English enigma.” Although Nairn was writing in a markedly different devolutionary context – in the run up to the 1979 referendum on Scottish independence – his opening sentence to The Break-Up of Britain, written twenty years before devolution and 40 years before Brexit, certainly feels prophetic: he writes that “only a few years ago, the break-up of Britain seemed inconceivable” (1). Paul Gilroy and Michael Gardiner look back further, highlighting that English cultural narratives remain problematically entangled in Britain’s imperial project. The English question, then, seems to recede further and further into the past.

This article pinpoints the 1990 s as a decade in which England began to edge towards the centre of political, cultural, and public discourse. The political constitution of Britain changed in this decade due to the 1997 Devolved Parliaments Act, which emphasised the absence of England’s own constitutional power, while increased European integration – marked in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty – led to a surge in English nationalism.^[6] At the same time, the 1990 s saw a growing popular interest in Englishness, marked during Euro 96 when St George’s Flag replaced the Union Jack – a defining moment in which political scientist Arthur Aughey claimed that “something happened to English national identity” (1). The ubiquity of such popular national markers might also be loosely connected to a mounting populist Englishness, captured in the rise of the British National Party in the early 2000 s and the UK Independence Party in the 2010 s where an English national project was central to both campaigns. If devolution prompted Scotland and Wales to look outwards and to the future – a progressive cultural identity which is captured in the democratic shape of their new national theatres that I detail below – England could be said to look inwards and is defensive in its cultural formation. The 1990 s also marked the beginning of a flood of publications – both popular and academic – that attended to English culture, with the aim of exploring such defensive associations. Writing in his second edition of Landscape and Englishness, David Matless termed this flurry of studies “a minor publishing phenomenon,” citing Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998), Krishan Kumar’s The Making of English National Identity (2003), and reissues of Wright’s On Living in an Old Country and A Journey through Ruins (1991) among others (12).

While there is consensus among these scholars that Englishness (like all other national identities) is performed through the repetition of quotidian practices – a reading which is key to Michael Billig’s performative definition of “banal nationalism” – theatre is a neglected form within this glut of volumes on the representation of England in contemporary culture. Here, I suggest that the main reason for this neglect is that England itself is rarely a central focus in contemporary theatre, both in terms of performance practice and theatre studies. This is not to say that theatre and performance do not engage with national questions: the relationship between theatre and nation remains a dominant critical frame in contemporary theatre studies. The idea that theatre offers a space and a stage for national identities to be explored is a resonant one: as Jen Harvie points out with reference to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” in Staging the UK: “if national identities are creatively imagined that means they are dynamic [. . .] if national identities are dynamic, they can be changed” (3).

Instead, this is more a question of which nation is represented. If you look outside of England to Scotland and Wales, or across to the Republic of Ireland, there is a much longer history of engagement with national questions in their theatrical cultures. While I do not have the space to explore the richness of these national dramatic traditions in detail in this article, theatre’s centrality to the political fabric of contemporary Scotland and Wales is perhaps best evidenced in the formation of the new National Theatres. The National Theatre of Scotland (2006) and National Theatre Wales (2010) are two institutions born out of the same devolutionary context following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies in 1999.^[7] With the establishment of the new National Theatres of Scotland and Wales, there is now a level of ambiguity surrounding the National Theatre, which is technically the National Theatre of Britain: who, exactly, does this theatre speak for? The name of the National alone opens up a series of complicated political questions concerning England’s place within the multinational state of Britain. First, despite its claims to be Britain’s National Theatre, the building is located on London’s South Bank, in England. Second, this lack of geographical specificity over which nation the institution claims to serve is captured in the silent national marker. The absence of a national prefix speaks to a much wider problem in which England is naturalised as the unmarked, hegemonic centre of Britain, and of the UK as a whole – unspoken processes that Gardiner argues bind Britain together culturally in the absence of a codified constitution. And third, the “Royal” prefix – which was awarded in 1988 and is often elided – brings its own set of challenges, with the institution’s association with the monarchy proving to be divisive, but also bearing direct relation to the ambiguous, feudal structures of the British state that Nairn critiqued in the 1970 s. Building on Gardiner’s claim that English Literature is not the national literature of England but of Britain, I point to a similar process of naturalisation in theatre and performance, which is made clear in the fact that there is no National Theatre of England.

This “look away” from England runs deeper than the naming of the National. Indeed, there is a body of work in contemporary theatre studies which does away with national markers and instead adopts a global optic for analyses. Rebellato captures this move from a national to global lens in plays such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and David Greig’s San Diego (2003), arguing that traditional state-of-the-nation plays do not “cohere dramatically anymore” due to the uncoupling of state from nation in a globalised world (“State-of-the-Nation” 206).^[8] In a recent article, Rebellato develops this reading of a post-nation movement in contemporary British theatre. There, he identifies a number of plays which evidence what he terms “a persistent pattern of dramaturgical displacement,” including Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons (2015), Mike Bartlett’s Bull (2013), and Martin Crimp’s The City (2008) (“Nation and Negation” 23). Leaning towards global structures, these plays – and Rebellato’s approach – seek to transcend national parameters, forming what he terms “a theatrical articulation of the movement beyond nation” (35). In contrast to Rebellato, I look to plays that stage communities with boundaries in this article, highlighting that there is evidence of a burgeoning English national tradition in the theatre where this boundedness is productive. In my analysis of Albion and My England, I suggest that the English nation is not always an inherently regressive site of inquiry, demonstrating that these theatrical explorations can offer vital critical insights into the way in which we conceive of England and Englishness today.

Restoring Albion

Bartlett’s Albion is set in a country garden in Oxfordshire, the neighbouring county to Jerusalem’s Wiltshire. Yet, while the garden may not be far in geographic terms from Rooster’s Wood, Bartlett’s play offers a very different national narrative to its audiences. In contrast to Jerusalem’s primordial mythic subtext, Albion looks back to a specific historical moment which is shaped by social order and rigid class hierarchies: inter-war rural England. Premiering at the Almeida in October 2017, Bartlett’s play also emerged out of and into a markedly different political context to Jerusalem. As I note above, questions that were circulating over England’s constitutional and cultural identity at the time of Jerusalem’s premiere in 2009 found a new political charge following the EU Referendum in 2016, and as the play’s loaded title makes clear, Albion seeks to explore these national questions.

As with Jerusalem, Bartlett draws on rural iconographies to locate his play in a specifically English national context. Where Butterworth uses “Jerusalem” to frame his play, Bartlett calls on another English signifier: the play opens to the sound of Edward Elgar’s “The Spirit of England: Op. 80 No. 3: For the Fallen” (1917), as a soldier enters the garden depicted on stage, pausing only to cup a handful of soil and allowing it to run through his fingers, before the scene returns to full blackout. We later learn that this soldier – fully clad in the British military uniform – is Captain Weatherbury, returning to his Oxfordshire home after the First World War. The conjunction of Elgar’s music – as an English composer whose legacy is bound up in war-time England – and Weatherbury’s gesture of touching the very soil of the land foregrounds the connection between sacrifice, soil, and this particular narrative of Englishness that Bartlett explores across the four acts of his play.

For Albion’s three-hour duration, the audience follows the protagonist, Audrey, a designer of high-end textiles from London, on her venture to restore the garden to its former glory. As the niece of one of the previous owners of the house, Stanley Upthorne, Audrey visited Albion as a child, and it is clear that her restoration mission is driven, in part, by nostalgia for her own childhood and for that experience of English landed culture, which she worries is disappearing from view. Yet, despite the self-indulgence evident in Audrey’s approach to the project – which is repeatedly criticised by the local community and her own family –, her compulsive undertaking of the renovation is also driven by grief for her son, James, who was killed while serving in the war in Afghanistan. In this way, she intends to use the garden as Weatherbury did a century earlier: as a site of memorialisation for fallen soldiers. Throughout the play, Bartlett draws on these connections between Audrey and Weatherbury, and the centrality of this military subtext is marked in the title of the garden in which the play is set: Audrey later reveals that the “Red Garden” takes its name from the mass bloodshed that Weatherbury witnessed in the First World War.

Albion’s setting in the English country garden further embeds Bartlett’s play in an English national frame. While audiences only see the Red Garden on stage, an island-shaped lawn, soil border, and an artificial oak tree, Audrey explains that this is one of 31 “rooms” in the garden of Albion. The scale of the garden is clear: the house – which Audrey’s husband, Paul, reveals has seven bedrooms and four bathrooms – and gardens combined can be viewed as a typical English country house, which, as I detail below, continues to function as an English national iconography.^[9] In contrast to the detailed geographic markers that locate Jerusalem firmly in Wiltshire, Albion seems to operate as a conceptual space rather than a located place: the garden’s location is not stated explicitly in the main body of the play, with Bartlett noting in the stage directions that it is “attached to a house in Oxfordshire” (8). Yet what matters here is that the garden is a formal country garden in the South of England: its relatively indistinct geography lends it to broader cultural readings of the rural estate, enabling Bartlett to engage with wider iconic literary and dramatic narratives such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904), and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993).

There is thus no question that we are in “Deep England.” The use of Elgar in the prologue makes direct reference to one of the “Deep Englands” that Calder identifies in “Elgar’s Worcestershire” and mobilises, in the militaristic sense of the word, an image of war-time rural England. Furthermore, the setting of the formal garden engages with the symbolic geography of the country house – particularly that of the National Trust – which continues to be used as a symbol for English national identity.^[10] Peter Mandler notes that despite their complicated history, country houses are still seen by many as national icons, claiming that they capture “the quintessence of Englishness: they epitomize the English love of domesticity, of the countryside, of hierarchy, continuity and tradition” (1). Mandler suggests that something of “a country-house mania” began in England in the 1980 s, citing the 1981 Granada Television production of Brideshead Revisited as a key example of this thirst for country-house culture. This “country-house mania” is still present today: one might look to ITV’s series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and Sanditon (2019), in addition to period films, such as Pride and Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), Jane Eyre (2011), and Great Expectations (2012), which were all filmed in English country houses belonging to the National Trust. In siting his play in a formal garden, then, Bartlett engages with this loaded rural imaginary which stands for the privileged, exclusive definition of “Deep England” that Wright describes.

However, as I noted in my analysis of Jerusalem, Wright’s original definition of “Deep England” is not only concerned with national images or symbols; it is an idea that is practiced and sustained over time.^[11] Bartlett’s play represents Englishness in these experiential terms: Albion is centred on the ways in which Audrey aims to recapture the “Deep England” of her youth. The restoration project can be seen as an attempt to reconnect with the “totems and togetherness” that this “essential experience” offered to her. This marks a key difference from Jerusalem: where Butterworth offers a primordial reading of England which is found in the deep connection between Rooster, the land, and the mythologies that lie beneath it, Bartlett shows the construction of those myths. In contrast to Jerusalem, Englishness is not pre-existing in Albion; it is built. After all, the play is centred on the way in which Audrey literally attempts to build her England – her Albion. Bartlett thus exposes the processes through which this particular English narrative is realised and in doing so, opens up a space for critical commentary.

Audrey’s inspiration for Albion draws on her own memories of visiting the garden as a child. Nostalgia is the main driving force behind her project as is made clear when the audience first meets her: bustling onto the stage with her new neighbour, Edward, and her husband in tow, she recalls: “I just about remember it [the gate] – the metal’s frozen up now, but I remember the touch of them, along with my grandfather’s pipe smoke, crumpets on the terrace, the lily pond” (13). The energy and sense of conviction that Audrey brings to the project – and on to the stage – is central to realising the play’s comedic tone. As the play unfolds, Audrey’s enthusiastic recollections prove tiresome for her family, but she continues to share her childhood stories, despite her uninterested audience. This sensory description of the garden also makes clear the affective dimension to her project, as her vision for Albion is located in the realm of memory. While this sensory description offers the embodied and experiential elements of “Deep England,” it also makes clear that Albion is built from intangible, affective material.

When her knowledge of the estate is sceptically questioned by her family and friends, Audrey is defensive, as the following exchange shows:

PAUL: She’s been reading a book.

AUDREY: Books, plural actually Paul. And papers, letters. (18)

Contrary to the view put forward by her family that she is simply recreating a dreamscape of Albion, Audrey insists that she has undertaken careful research for this project. In stressing that she has read a number of books, papers, and letters, she argues that she is reconstructing Albion from empirical evidence, drawing on both her own memories and an (unspecified) archive on the history of the house and gardens. The importance of truth and authenticity to Audrey’s excavatory work is also captured in her delight when she receives Weatherbury’s trowel as a birthday gift from her husband. This object consolidates the connections between the past and the present, Weatherbury and Audrey, and in doing so, seems to authenticate her project as she is literally given one of the tools of the garden’s creator.

This idea that the garden – and by extension, Bartlett’s exploration of Englishness – is a work in progress is also evident in the scenographic composition of Miriam Buether’s set design. As Albion is gradually restored over the course of the play, Buether’s set appeared to blossom in real time via a series of planting scenes. Mirroring Weatherbury’s tactile engagement with the soil in the prologue, Audrey and her family plant real flowers in the soil on stage, transforming the garden as the play unfolds. The metronomic rhythms of these planting and uprooting scenes ensure that the audience witness many of the transformations of the garden, experiencing it in Audrey’s terms as a “journey,” a process of restoration, and later, decline. Further adding to the liveness with which Bartlett depicts this microcosm of inter-war rural England is the way that the characters act out remembered cultural practices from the era. For example, in the first act, Audrey insists on having a tea party in the garden despite it being a cold day in late February, while in act 2, she hosts a themed party in her recently renovated “drawing room” with guests instructed to arrive in 1920 s attire. As these performances make clear, the house and garden are not merely fixed symbolic sites that activate historical narratives of the culture of the landed gentry in the early twentieth century: this rural space is brought into being through the reenactment of social practices during the play. Audrey’s insistence on the acting out of such social practices – the tea party in February and the 1920 s cocktail party – is in itself staged; she orchestrates a performance of what she perceives to be the English culture of the landed gentry, and this theatricality points to the live, experiential aspect of Wright’s original definition of “Deep England.”

Critiquing “Deep England”

However, as Albion is brought to life by flapper dresses, cocktails, and jazz music, Audrey’s behaviour is criticised by Anna, her son’s bereaved partner, who, emboldened by alcohol at the party, expresses her distaste for the heady nostalgia of this reenactment to Paul and Katherine. This is where Bartlett – unlike Butterworth – opens up a space for opposition to the English national imaginary that he represents: a self-reflexive manoeuvre, which, as I argued in relation to Jerusalem, is necessary in any approach to questions of England and Englishness. While there is no substantial place for a critical standpoint in Jerusalem due to the way in which Rooster’s connection to his English mythological ancestors is intrinsic and seemingly absolute, Audrey’s performances of inter-war landed culture are sharply critiqued by Anna:

The 1920 s were awful. War across the world, women having to fight for the vote, racism, rape, murder, child abuse [. . .]. Things have changed for the better. But all these people, descending on the old house – they can’t wait to dress up as masters and servants, as if that was fun. (62)

Here, Anna questions the ethics of harping back to the “golden years” of the 1920 s by highlighting the social deprivation and inequality that characterised the period. In doing so, she exposes the pretence of this performance of “Deep England” and argues that “Things have changed for the better.” Despite Audrey’s valiant attempts to position the house and gardens as a hub of high culture, a place that she describes as “of national importance,” Anna reveals the social reality – the underbelly – of this English rural imaginary, exposing it as a naive and ignorant dream. In this sense, Bartlett points to some of the unacknowledged histories of this English narrative, this “Deep England,” highlighting that this rural national imaginary is not benign but carries an uncomfortable social history.

By the end of the play, it is clear that Albion was, in part, a naive and ignorant dream. After a series of planting scenes, the garden is left to ruin and Buether’s set begins to rot and decay, with the foliage of the garden signifying the ultimate failure of Audrey’s vision. Yet, despite the apparent naivety in Audrey’s claim to the garden’s national importance, the play does raise urgent questions over English national heritage: which cultures and histories are selected to be remembered and who is able to participate in these processes of remembering? Indeed, early in the play, Audrey addresses these issues directly by stating that “It’s easy to mock but there was a culture there. Most other countries preserve their past. The embarrassed and insecure English discard it” (37). Here, Bartlett confronts the awkwardness – highlighted in the many studies of Englishness discussed earlier in this article – that exists in relation to exploring a specifically English culture through Audrey’s bold assertion that the English “discard” their national history. Even at the end of the play, when Audrey admits defeat with the restoration project, she still maintains that while her attempted resurrection of aristocratic culture proved deeply unpopular, the act of revisiting the past was important: “A culture expires. That particular line of history comes to an end [. . .] don’t you think there was something, in all this, that was worth preserving? That some part of it, just some little part of it, might be good?” (116). In claiming to protect this “particular line of history,” Audrey might be compared to Rooster at the close of Jerusalem, as both are characterised as a last bastion for the different versions of Deep Old England that they explore. At the end of each play, these old rural Englands also meet the same “modern” challenge: the encroaching new housing estate. Further parallels might be drawn in that both protagonists appeal to the spirits of the “Deep England” that they conjure up: while Rooster calls on the giants, Albion closes with the appearance of Audrey’s grandson, Stanley, dressed in military uniform, seemingly carrying on his father’s legacy. In contrast to Jerusalem’s seductive ending which positions Rooster as an elemental, tragic hero and in doing so, leaves little space for a critical counterpoint, Albion concludes on a more ambiguous note: Audrey remains an unpopular figure in the local community, her restoration project has divided opinion in her family, and despite her wishes to reverse the sale of the once again decaying house and gardens in the play’s final moments, her future in Albion seems uncertain.

My England

The conflicted approach to England and Englishness which characterises the end of Albion is central to the final project that I explore in this article, the Young Vic’s My England monologues. While Audrey asks in Albion’s final scene if English culture is worth defending, My England is a collection of short films which came from – and seeks to explore – the very questions of what English culture is and how the idea of England is deployed today. Such emphasis on discussion, conversation, and debate is marked in the series of open questions that frame the films on My England’s webpage: “Is England amidst an identity crisis? Has English nationalism been weaponised by the far right? Is ‘Englishness’ about where you were born, where you live or how you feel? What place does art have in shaping our sense of national identity?” The marketing material demonstrates the criticality embedded in this national frame, and the short films that follow aim to acknowledge some of the stigmatised aspects of English national identity. As the Young Vic state on their website, they commissioned fourteen theatre-makers from across England to write a short monologue on “what it means to be English today.” Seven of these shorts were filmed on location in the regions that the writers are from: Jack Thorne’s “Luton” (Luton), Javaad Alipoor’s “England’s Red” (Peak District), Polly Stenham’s “Flat White” (Highgate), Simon Stephens’s “She” (on a train between Stockport and London), Bea Roberts’s “Sir F. Mother Fucking Drake” (Plymouth), Stef Smith’s “How to Grow a Nation” (Halifax), and Selina Thompson’s “I Feel Most English When. . .” (Coventry). The other seven – Lynette Linton’s “Simone,” Zodwa Nyoni’s “On Belonging,” Jack Rooke’s “The Game,” Ishy Din’s “UTB!,” Kenneth Emson’s “Mayday,” Michael Bhim’s “The Question,” and Lucy J. Skilbeck’s “Big Ben” – were filmed at the Young Vic over the course of a day.^[12] The shorts were then streamed online and are free to access both on the Young Vic’s webpage and YouTube.

While I do not have the space to write about each short here, I want to emphasise the shape of the project and the plurality through which it responds to English national concerns. As a collection of plays, My England provides short, sharp insights into English questions from a range of standpoints, avoiding many of the difficulties that Jerusalem and Albion encounter when trying to fit the nation into one cohesive theatrical representation. What follows, then, is a brief discussion of the different ways in which these writers conceive of England and the different themes that these shorts explore. I then focus in detail on “I Feel Most English When. . .” and “Sir F. Mother Fucking Drake,” making clear how these plays in particular draw on – and problematise – the rural national iconographies that were represented in Jerusalem and Albion.

My England engages with – and utilises – the current interest in the short play. Lynette Goddard identifies the way in which the short play is in vogue in contemporary British playwriting and notes the efficacy of the form to respond to political events with a sense of immediacy. Goddard focuses on what they term “the Black short play,” arguing that the form can be viewed as developing a political aesthetic of crisis via a discussion of the London stagings of Black Lives, Black Words, which have so far had three productions at the Bush Theatre in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Highlighting the political potential in the short play format, Goddard writes that the form resulted in “compressed and impressionistic performances, a raw provocative style that got straight to the heart of pertinent concerns that are linked to real life concerns within the #BlackLivesMatter debates” (157). In my treatment of My England, I acknowledge a similar space for political potential through the topicality that Goddard ascribes to the short form, with each monologue being approximately five minutes in length, forming, in Goddard’s terms, “compressed” performances which “get straight to the heart” of debates on the English nation in the contemporary moment.

As a collection of shorts, My England offers a number of ways into thinking about England. Several of the monologues make reference to sporting events and celebrate the ways in which these occasions can develop a sense of national cohesion: in “Luton,” Thorne refers to The Ashes in his list of things that, to him, feel “English,” while the protagonist in “Mayday” references Wimbledon and jokes about the “football team that always lets us down.”^[13] Key political events are also cited as moments which capture English national experience, with Thorne referencing the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the 1945, 1979, and 1997 General Elections as defining moments in English political history. While it is not explicitly stated as a catalyst for the project in its advertising material, the influence of the 2016 EU Referendum is also clear and directly referenced in several of the shorts, including Linton’s “Simone.”^[14]

In addition to these “official” national experiences, many of the writers also represent English national identity as something that is embodied in everyday practices, including tea-drinking (“Simone”) and going to the pub (“On Belonging”). In contrast to Jerusalem and Albion, these experiences are not embedded in the freighted rural imaginary of “Deep England,” but can take place anywhere in England and beyond: in the country or the city. Yet several of the writers are also careful to point out that social class determines participation in these practices: what might be an everyday experience for one person might not be accessible for another. For example, Emson’s “Mayday” claims to be a poem for “the working class,” while the protagonist in Stenham’s “Flat White” draws attention to her privilege and the way in which it affects the way that she sees the world. This experiential aspect to Englishness is explored in detail in “On Belonging,” where Nyoni’s protagonist declares that “Englishness is not static, it is living [. . .] [it is] dancing at Carnival, cooking jollof rice and going over to your nan’s” (03:20–03:45). In this sense, Englishness is shown to be something you do rather than something you have, marking a departure from Jerusalem in which Rooster’s connection to Deep, mythological England was represented as primordial and innate. My England’s discursive, performative definition of Englishness – presented within a series of microframes – thus offers a more nuanced, heterogeneous approach to national questions than Jerusalem and Albion.^[15]

“I Feel Most English When. . .”

Thompson’s short opens to the sound of church bells, as the camera pans across the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. The opening slide then reads: “I do not always feel English. I feel most English when I am cast against a sharp colonial background,” and this reference to colonialism sets up a direct frame for reading England’s imperial history over the course of the monologue (00:29). In her account of the times and places in which she feels “most English,” the protagonist looks back to her school years and claims:

I would like to say I felt most English at school [. . .] learning about the myth-making of Byron and Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth. And then dreaming of being Ruth Wilson in that BBC Jane Eyre adaptation with Toby Stephens [. . .]. But I have known for a while that any Mr Rochester worth his salt would have locked me in the attic if I had even made it that far. (00:37–01:25)

Here, Thompson draws on the symbolic English geographies that I outlined earlier in this article, and in her references to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), she falls back on the same country-house rural imaginary represented in Albion. After claiming that she used to imagine kissing Mr Rochester, she then declares that she has known for some time that she would be rejected by him and viewed as “the madwoman in the attic” – a reference to Bertha in Jane Eyre, the marginalised Black woman who Jean Rhys would later make her protagonist in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Thus, while I argued earlier that Butterworth and Bartlett engage with these symbolic literary geographies in a manner which is largely uncritical, Thompson highlights the inherent whiteness of this canon and stresses that as a Black woman, she could not – and more importantly, had no desire to – identify with these works.

In the final part of the short, Thompson’s protagonist claims that she feels most English when she is “in a country manor in Ireland learning about the colonising that [she] did not know about” (02:41–02:47). Here, she feels most English when reading about English colonialism of a different kind, highlighting the way in which the English standpoint is one of centrality, dominance, and thus, ignorance. In this sense, “I Feel Most English When. . .” directly addresses England’s colonial history, which is indexed, but not fully acknowledged, in relation to the country house in Albion.Indeed, Thompson confronts the way in which the British Empire “gave freedom” with the declaration that “my ancestors were still in bondage” (04:45–04:47). Suddenly appearing in “native” dress against a white background – in a switch from the long red dress and positioning that perhaps echoes the pose of Britannia earlier in the film – the protagonist performs a silent scream, capturing in one striking image this collective anguish. Through this series of declarations which directly address England’s colonial history and assert its culpability, Thompson not only acknowledges but highlights the often unacknowledged, hidden histories of England. The short then closes with the protagonist asking the viewer to remember England’s colonial history, repeating the question: “do you remember?” (04:50–04:53). In this direct address, Thompson closes her short with a challenge to the viewer, asking them to acknowledge, reflect on, and critique England’s colonial past.

“Sir F. Mother Fucking Drake”

Roberts also returns to England’s colonial history, this time through the figure of Sir Francis Drake, remembered by most schoolchildren as Queen Elizabeth I’s favoured explorer, but here viewed afresh as an English slave trader from the sixteenth century. The short opens in front of Drake’s statue in Plymouth, before panning out to reveal Roberts’s female protagonist, who is herself dressed as Drake, in sixteenth-century period costume. Drawing on the conventions of drag performance, she acts out a heroic, masculine role, and it is evident from her deadpan delivery that she undercuts any claim to Drake’s valiant “explorer” status. Describing Drake’s “adventurer” activity, she claims:

They went about stealing whatever was on each other’s ships. Which was sometimes gold, stolen from people in South America. And sometimes people stolen from Africa [. . .]. Everyone thought Drake was brilliant. And that’s why no-one minds. And that’s why we’ve still got the statues. (00:54–01:27)

Here, Roberts details the way in which Drake made his fortune by dealing stolen goods and addresses his role as a slave trader. In doing so, she locates Drake’s legacy in Plymouth within the wider imperial project, stating “thanks to the efforts of great men like Drake, who are both heroic and noble, we built the British Empire [. . .] the real British Empire was based on a brutal regime, based upon white people doing racially motivated violence towards millions of people of colour” (02:40–03:07). Roberts therefore confronts England’s imperial history in a similar way to Thompson: both writers critically approach England, directly engaging with its colonial past.

Through the repeated references to Drake’s statue, Roberts connects his colonial past to the present, highlighting the way in which the statue functions as a visible, material trace of this imperial narrative: her protagonist reminds us “now this might seem like it was ages ago, but it isn’t really because it’s all still here” (02:07–02:09). In drawing attention to the liveness of statues and their presence in the lived, everyday public spaces of the contemporary moment, she counters the idea that these statues are innocuous and asks the viewer to reflect on – and critique – the historical narrative that they represent. This discourse of memorialisation – on who and what should be remembered – chimes with Audrey’s questions at the close of Albion. However, where Audrey aims to “protect” a particular line of history, Roberts’s protagonist deconstructs Drake’s sanitised story and encourages the viewer to challenge it. This comparison also points to a difference in the way in which memorials are represented in each play. While the garden in Albion is something to be revered, an aesthetic experiment, Roberts uses the statue to a discursive effect, as a starting point to open broader questions on England’s colonial history.

Roberts’s play is prescient: questions over statues and wider acts of memorialisation have become more pressing since the release of My England. On 7 June 2020, the statue of Edward Colston, who was involved in the Atlantic slave trade, was pulled down from its plinth and pushed into Bristol harbour by activists at the city’s #BlackLivesMatter demonstration, which was part of a series of global protests which followed the death of George Floyd, who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020.^[16] This action inspired a number of similar actions across the country, including one focused on the very statue that features in Roberts’s short, where protesters placed chains on Drake’s hands and hung a sign reading “decolonise history” around his neck. While these objects were taken down, the movement continues: it is clear that the impetus to decolonise English history is now more pertinent than ever.

Conclusion

In an article for The Guardian, Alex Niven argues that “until England is forced to reinvent itself in radical constitutional ways, we need to stop talking about the chimera that is English identity, and focus on more urgent, more tangible political projects.” As I have shown in this article, the idea that we must stop talking about England is one that is commonly held due to the way in which English iconographies bear the indelible mark of the British Empire and continue to be deployed by the political right. While I agree that England needs to be radically reimagined in both constitutional and cultural terms, I argue, in contrast to Niven, that England is an urgent political project. Indeed, narratives of English exceptionalism are activated to such a degree in contemporary political discourse that England is also tangible. For example, ideas of English exceptionalism and sovereignty – which were central to the 2016 Leave campaign – continue to mutate in a myriad of dangerous ways, including in the racist protests against the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the summer of 2020. As such, I argue that we need to continue talking about England, not only to acknowledge and critique its imperial past, but also to identify and challenge the ways in which English national imaginaries are deployed in the present.

The three projects that I have examined in this article mark the beginning of this conversation in the theatre. All three stage England in very different ways, making clear that England is a contested space and not simply the monolithic national imaginary that is mobilised by the far right. Where Butterworth’s play boldly explores a Deep, essential Old England in a manner which, I argued, requires a note of caution, England is shown to be “built” in Albion, and this deconstructive, critical work underpins My England, which holds England – as the hegemonic centre of Britain – accountable for both its imperial past and for recent institutional cases of racism and discrimination, including the 2018 Windrush scandal. While questions of Englishness become increasingly loaded and difficult to navigate, such a renewed focus on national structures in theatre and performance enables the beginning of this discussion: an opening up of critical ways of thinking about England, Englishness, and the English today.