Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García, and Martin Middeke, eds. Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, xi + 284 pp., €128.39 (hardcover), €128.39 (softcover), €96.29 (Epub, PDF ebook).

Given its twofold nature as both a textual and a performative art form, theatre has for a long time been uniquely equipped to negotiate matters of human feeling and emotion, and perhaps never more so than in our politically charged contemporary moment. In light of this, the collection Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage, edited by Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García, and Martin Middeke, offers a productive and important survey of the current state of contemporary British theatre from the perspective of affects, which have shaped critical theory ever since the turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences in the mid-1990s. The thirteen essays gathered in this collection showcase and investigate the complex entanglements between affect studies on the one hand and current theatre practices in Britain on the other, engaging not only with pertinent questions within affect theory – such as the relation between affect and emotion or the political affordances of affect –, but also with some of the most significant playwrights on the contemporary British stage, including debbie tucker green, Alice Birch, or David Greig. The collection thus constitutes a helpful resource not just for readers of twenty-first-century British drama, but for everyone interested in the affective dimensions of contemporary literature and culture more generally.

Against the background of how contested the relationship between affect and emotion has continued to prove since the affective turn thirty years ago, the editors’ introduction presents a useful and concise pathway into the diverse field of affect studies and proposes “a malleable understanding of affect, concerning both physiological sensations and psychological states” to thoroughly encompass “affect as the capacity – of a human, non-human or inanimate body, of an incorporeal phenomenon – to disturb and be disturbed” (8). The essays in the collection therefore employ various theoretical premises that range from understanding affects as practically indistinguishable from emotions to separating the two concepts more clearly along the lines of affect theorists such as Brian Massumi. With its pronounced focus on affect theory, the introduction, however, somewhat disregards the wider sociopolitical and cultural contexts of British theatre, especially in the wake of Brexit, which would have added a further layer to the rest of the collection. This oversight is later partially compensated by the political frameworks that the individual contributions provide, for example, in Delgado-García’s chapter in section two.

The twelve subsequent essays are divided into three thematic sections. As indicated by its title “Affects and Cognition: Thought, Intention, Empathy,” the aforementioned relationship between affect and emotion is one of the shared and central concerns of the essays in the first section. In her analysis of empathy in tucker green’s hang (2015), Aragay argues that the play intentionally denies its spectators a conventional experience of cathartic release. Representative of tucker green’s oeuvre as a whole, the dramaturgy of hang colludes affect and emotion into “an open-ended process of mutual accretion” (29) rather than upholding the divide between the two that informed the affective turn initially.

This scepticism towards the differentiation between affect and emotion also runs through the subsequent two essays in this section by Clare Wallace and Korbinian Stöckl respectively. Wallace’s essay discusses a selection of four plays: Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012), Tim Crouch and Andy Smith’s what happens to the hope at the end of the evening (2013), Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016), and James Fritz’s Parliament Square (2017). Drawing on the diverse affective scenarios presented in each of these plays, Wallace suggests that contemporary British dramatic writing partakes in the construction of a “‘structure of feeling’ about feeling” (47) in which said feeling cannot just be segregated into either the virtual realm of affect or the actual realm of emotion but continues to circulate “within a messy relational system” (59) of attachments and detachments. Stöckl’s essay zeroes in on the particular affective phenomenon of love yet reaches a similar conclusion as the preceding chapters. Discussing Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) and tucker green’s a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) (2017), Stöckl argues that “affect and cognition are radically entwined” (66). As the central concern of the two plays, love especially cannot be reduced to either corporeal intensity or mental intentionality, but strikingly speaks to the irresolvable intersection of the two.

Liz Tomlin’s analysis of Anthony Neilson’s God in Ruins (2007) and The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004) concludes the first section. Tomlin’s analysis builds upon Hans-Thies Lehmann’s influential theorisation of postdramatic theatre and specifically its capacities as “an affective interrogation of dramatic theatre” (qtd. 86). Contrary to Lehmann, however, Tomlin states that even though Neilson’s plays fail to completely rupture the ontological dramatic framings of the respective performances, that failure does not inhibit the powerful affective and political charges of the plays. On the contrary, according to Tomlin, that “failure” to step past the dramatic domain becomes the very source of political power in Neilson’s works. Keeping the aesthetic “reality” of the plays intact and thus deviating from Lehmann’s disruptive notion of the postdramatic, Neilson highlights the importance of cognitive processing in contemporary political theatre, even (and especially) when the latter remains embedded within the framework of the dramatic.

The political questions that reverberate in Tomlin’s essay take centre stage in the second section on “Affects and Politics: Identities, Institutions, Ideology.” Lynnette Goddard opens this part with a timely discussion of the “Black Lives, Black Words” seasons that were produced by and staged at London’s Bush Theatre between 2015 and 2017. Focussing on the performances during the 2017 season, Goddard explains how “Black Lives, Black Words” powerfully demonstrated the “intersection between art, activism and affect” (124) and the possibilities of contemporary playwriting to expand scholarly theorisations of affect to include urgent considerations of race and gender.

Questions of gender also inform Marissia Fragkou’s chapter on Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (2014) and Sh!t Theatre’s Letters to Windsor House (2016). Building on feminist affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Fragkou reveals what she calls the “politics of mischief” (129) in these works. In the vein of Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, these politics not only expose the inequalities underlying conservative notions of happiness, but also reinforce the necessity of understanding affect as “a socially produced and circulated rather than exclusively presubjective experience” (144). Delgado-García then moves towards democratic concerns in her examination of Greig’s The Suppliant Women (2016) and its staging by the Actors Touring Company (ATC) at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Reflecting the political upheavals in Britain throughout the 2010 s, most of all the Brexit referendum, The Suppliant Women exercises an “affectively complex, even troubling, model of democracy” (157), both dramatically and performatively, according to Delgado-García’s reading. While this model affectively gestures towards Chantal Mouffe’s notion of a more radical democracy, it cannot altogether avoid reverting to certain regressive binaries such as West versus East either, thereby unintentionally highlighting the often restrictive frameworks within which hope for democratic reform must operate.

Closing the second section, Philip Watkinson ties the political potential of contemporary British theatre back to formal abstraction by discussing tucker green’s already mentioned profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion as well as Anders Lustgarten’s The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie (2016). Watkinson’s reading of the two texts is shaped, among others, by Eugenie Brinkema and her affective formalism and therefore considers formal abstraction not as an obstruction to the affective energies of the plays, but rather as the source thereof. tucker green’s and Lustgarten’s instances of abstraction thus create ties between affective experience and sociopolitical concerns, implicating the confronted audience in both of them at once.

Continuing the line of thought regarding theatre’s potentiality for inspiring political consciousness, the third and final section is dedicated to “Affects and Hope: From Crisis to Utopian Feelings.” It opens with Middeke’s materialist reading of Penelope Skinner’s Eigengrau (2019) and Mike Bartlett’s Game (2015). Informed by Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, Middeke argues that both Eigengrau and Game intra-actively create affective textures that “foreground affect [. . .] as the bodily expression of intensity and the relational, vibrant force of things” (212), as opposed to mere meaning situated in linguistic signs. He thereby deviates from most other chapters in this collection by endorsing, rather than critiquing, Massumi’s understanding of affect as pre-personal intensities that defy cognitive processing.

Julia Boll likewise employs Barad’s intra-action to interpret Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath (2015) as a critique of neoliberal discourses of happiness and self-fulfilment. According to Boll, Harris’s play deliberately reduces interpersonal relationships to capitalist transactions, while also offering intra-action, with its fusing of affect/emotion and body/mind, as “an alternative conception to the individualising narrative” (234) of neoliberalism. It is only by acknowledging and enacting this alternative, Boll suggests, that genuine personal happiness can actually be achieved. Together, the essays by Middeke and Boll thus illustrate the fascinating affective applicability of Barad’s intra-action for the analysis of contemporary political theatre. While Middeke uses Barad to argue in favour of the distinction of affect from emotion, Boll employs the same theoretical apparatus to argue against that distinction and instead for the irresolvable entanglement of affect and emotion in the face of neoliberal individualisation.

In the penultimate contribution, Mark Robson finds potential for hope even in theatrical imaginings of the end of the world. Identifying “a poetics of catastrophe” (241) in Stef Smith’s Swallow (2015) and Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up (2016), he considers these poetics to serve as a dramaturgical structure “for that which lacks structure” (241), that is, the end of the world as we have come to know it. Based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that every affect – even negative affect – is relational, Robson argues that dramatic engagements with the apocalypse allow us to affectively negate the present and thus envision a future beyond the ending of the world. “To feel the end of the world,” Robson concludes in a timely fashion, “is to experience that future as hope” (253). Even catastrophic affects, for example, the imminent end of the world in Hurley’s one-man show Heads Up, are imbued with reparative potential by figuring ways to resist the apocalyptic present moment.

Clara Escoda closes the collection with her chapter on Kae Tempest’s Wasted (2011). Echoing the contributions by Fragkou and Boll, Escoda reads Tempest’s play as another critique of neoliberalism and its ideals of resilience and self-development – ideals which bind Tempest’s characters into a cruel optimism as defined by Berlant. Nevertheless, the play also presents spectators with brief moments of “caring affective relationality” (260) that momentarily suspend the oppressive trappings of neoliberalism. In Escoda’s view, this makes Wasted “an affirmative play” (272) which reveals that the human capacity to affect and be affected is not just the source of neoliberal hegemony but also a means of resistance. Escoda’s chapter therefore strikes a fitting final note that pinpoints the volume as a whole. Whether as a negative or a positive relation, the plays examined in Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre all recognize the inherently relational force of affect and emotion. As the contributors to the collection have shown, this relational force pertains to all aspects of contemporary life, from matters of democracy, race, and basic human connection to nothing less than the future of our collective existence.