Volume 6, Issue 1

The aftermath of the Brexit referendum has revealed a deeply divided Britain, with anger on both sides and seemingly little desire to seek compromise or mutual understanding. Remainers denounce Leavers as ignorant bigots. Leavers denounce Remainers as metropolitan elitists. Theresa May went even further, characterizing supporters of open borders and free movement as ‘citizens of nowhere’ whose lack of attachment to nation suggests they simply don’t understand what citizenship means. Given the UK’s regional correlation between high levels of theatregoing and high support for Remain, this is a challenge for theatremakers and scholars. One strong feature of contemporary British playwriting is a detachment from place; in numerous recent plays, place is estranged, unspecified, annulled, orphaned, globalized, generalized, combined, relativized and scenographically anonymized. Does this represent an absence of nation? No, because this would be to accept the rigid oppositions of the Leave campaign between nations and open borders, between the local and the global. Instead, there is a restless deconstructive movement within the very identification of nation that moves to transcend it and this is captured and embodied in the heterotopic ambiguities of the spatially specific performance of the placeless play.

Over the past decade, the plays of Anders Lustgarten have taken a prominent place in the English theatre repertoire. Performed by companies including Red Ladder, Cardboard Citizens, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lustgarten’s dramatic writing places social and political issues centrestage, ranging from the housing crisis and the electoral ascendancy of far-right parties to the alienation of the urban working class and the racist scapegoating of immigrants. This article focuses on Lustgarten’s landmark play inspired by the Occupy movement, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep (Royal Court Theatre, 2013). I explore how the play engages with, and reflects on, economic austerity, forms of contemporary mass protest, and, indirectly, evolving conceptions of English nationhood. I also examine Lustgarten’s notion of “Radical Optimism” – a term he identifies with the global anti-austerity protests following the 2007-8 financial crisis – and consider its importance to what he calls “anti-prop” political theatre. The first part of the article probes the relationship between If You Don’t Let Us Dream and the established “tradition” of state-of-the-nation playwriting; the second part identifies the play’s challenge to this “tradition,” which is informed by its proximity to the Occupy protests.

Since the start of the new millennia, the words ‘national crisis’ have not been far removed from many of the plays on the British stage. The aftermath of 9/11 and the British government’s decision to aid George Bush’s Middle East invasion plans sparked plays by David Hare, Roy Williams, and the Tricycle Theatre’s The Great Game as well as verbatim theatre pieces. The Great Recession unleashed works by David Hare (again), Laura Wade, and Lucy Prebble, among others. The increasing threats of floods across Great Britain and Europe placed the crisis of climate change front and centre in plays by Mike Bartlett and Steve Waters. The housing crisis, while not as provocative a theatrical topic as the ones above, has also inspired theatrical responses, including Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin , and these two works are the focus of my paper. More specifically, I will examine each playwright’s focus on the role of the homeless in regards to the housing crisis. Interestingly, both playwrights posit that the victimization of the homeless is the crucial solution to not only solving the housing crisis in Britain, but also maintaining the status quo of Britain’s affluent population.

This paper examines two British plays that respond to cases in which the police have been implicated in the deaths of black men. Gillian Slovo’s The Riots (Tricycle Theatre, 2011) uses interviews from witnesses and politicians to dissect the events leading up to and during the Tottenham riots that followed in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan by police on 4 August 2011 and spread to other inner cities in England over the following five nights. I examine how the first half portrays the local community’s concerns and locates the breakout of riots within a longer history of tense police-community relations in Tottenham, whereas the second half focuses on the political rhetoric surrounding the spread of rioting throughout England, which means that Mark Duggan disappears from the narrative. Oladipo Agboluaje’s adaptation of Kester Aspden’s The Hounding of David Oluwale (Eclipse Theatre, 2009) effectively uses dramatic strategies to remember the life of 38-year old Nigerian David Oluwale whose body was retrieved from the River Aire in Leeds on 4 May 1969 after allegedly last seen being chased towards the river by two police officers two weeks earlier. I explore the effectiveness of both plays as memorializations of black lives and consider how they contribute to ongoing debates about the relationship between black men and the police in Britain. BlackLivesMatter BlackPlaysMatter

Fake News is often not taken seriously enough. It might appear like a mere hoax and too fantastical or bold to believe, just like the so-called ‘alternative facts’ presented about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Similarly, nationalistic tendencies, often driven by fake news and promoted by authoritarian leaders, can be underestimated. Recent British plays and performances about fake news which appeared after the Brexit vote make clear that the typical strategies of the liberal left of fighting against nationalism and authoritarianism seem to no longer work when taken on their own. These strategies include, for instance, postmodern techniques, the exposure of a misuse of power through the media or documentary theatre, or the foregrounding of marginalised and oppressed groups, e. g. by means of verbatim practices. They often lack efficacy nowadays because they have become undermined by ‘post truth’ or because they can reflect, rather than challenge, the mechanisms of fake news as well as the widespread feeling of uncertainty in the Western world, which in turn can be found at the root of a growth in nationalism and power of authoritarian leaders. This paper suggests that theatre is currently creating new strategies of dealing with these harmful developments. It argues that recent plays about fake news show that, in order to counter the disorientating effects of fake news, a new type of viewer is needed, the particularly ‘alert spectator,’ whose senses are strengthened through the performance, and who in times like these when people reach out for (fake) certainties amidst confusing uncertainty is able to develop a double vision: a postmodern and a post-postmodern one.

This essay takes as its starting-point the post-2016 Refugee Crisis, which it considers to have been caused not so much by unmanageable migration as by excessive border control. It then uses Julia Kristeva’s figures of the ‘abject’ and ‘deject’ and Tim Ingold’s related conceptions of ‘containment’ and ‘exposure’ to explore some ways in which borders shape conceptions of nationhood and of identity. It goes on to explore Vicky Featherstone’s production of Zinnie Harris’ How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court, 2015) and the Isango Ensemble’s A Man of Good Hope (Young Vic, 2016) as examples of representations of migrants and migration from a position of settled, white privilege. It then takes up the challenge of the chorus in A Man of Good Hope to ‘tell the other stories’ of the nationless, which it does partly by tracing the trajectories of easily-overlooked characters in A Man of Good Hope and then in dialogue with Zodwa Nyoni’s play Nine Lives (Leeds Studio, 2014). It finds in Nyoni’s play ways in which bounded conceptions of identity can be productively troubled by the figure of the migrant and identity thereby reframed not as the experience of containment within borders, but as a consequence of movement across them.

On October 22, 2015, two days after the Liberal Party of Canada came to power, The Globe and Mail published an editorial entitled “Canada to the World: Xenophobia Doesn’t Play Here.” The article suggested that, in these times of migration crises, a rising xenophobic discourse and neo-nationalism, it is essential for the European countries to start taking lessons in navigating cultural diversity from Canada, the first country in the world that institutionalized principles of multiculturalism. This view is clearly reflected in the repertoire politics of Canadian theatre institutions, specifically the National Arts Centre (NAC) Ottawa, the only theatre company in Canada directly subsidized by its government. Mandated to support artistic excellence through arts, the NAC acts as a pulpit of official ideology. It presents diversity on stage as the leading Canadian value, and thus fulfills its symbolic function to serve as a mirror to its nation.However, this paper argues that, by offering an image of Canada, constructed by our government and tourist agencies, as an idyllic place to negotiate our similarities and differences, the NAC fosters what Loren Kruger calls a theatrical nationhood (4–16). A closer look at the 2014 NAC English theatre co-production of Kim’s Convenience will help illustrate how the politics of mimicry can become a leading device in the aesthetics of national mimesis – a cultural activity of “representing the nation as well as the result of it (an image of the nation)” (Hurley 24); and how the artistry of a multicultural kitchen-sink can turn a subject of diversity into that of affirmation and sentimentalism.

The final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play features a Greek tragedy-like distillation of the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons , performed many decades after an unspecified catastrophe has left the former United States in a state of post-apocalyptic ruin. After the first two acts’ depiction of an earlier generation’s struggles to both survive and connect with each other through the preservation of some elements of their previous shared culture, the third act’s culmination in a display of treadmill-powered electric lights accompanied by an inspirational anthem has often been interpreted as a celebration of the timelessness and tenacity of the human storytelling impulse. But while earlier versions of the play structured this final moment within a pastiche expression of American patriotism (sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “For He Is an Englishman”), subsequent versions have expunged this final reference to national pride, as well as any reference to the satirically nationalistic source material from which it stemmed, opting instead to trace the development of a more ‘empty’ G&S quotation into its post-apocalyptic future. This paper will examine the implications of this change in regards to the play's pastiche portrayal of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “myth of myth” and the role of its interruption in imagining an “inoperative community” beyond or to the side of nation-based constructions of identity.

Ireland is currently at the mid-point of what has been termed The Decade of Centenaries, where citizens, artists, the Irish diaspora, and the tourist industry are encouraged to come together and reflect on the Ireland of one hundred years ago. The years 1912–1922 reflect some of the most significant moments in Ireland’s history, the centerpiece of which is considered to be the 1916 Easter Rising. State-led commemorations of these events have thus far been dominated by narratives around patriotism, nationalism, republicanism, and neoliberalism. There has been little to no state interest in interrogating any significant challenging of the historical events themselves, or indeed any significant exploration of any progress, changes, or diversification that may have emerged since these events. Much of the available state funding in the arts sector has been earmarked for artists to engage specifically with the commemorative schedule, thus restricting the theme of artistic output. This essay analyses how two participatory performances, which took place during the 2016 Dublin Theatre Festival, problematised the state-led narratives and illuminated divergent histories surrounding the 1916 Easter Rising: These Rooms by ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, and It’s Not Over by THEATREclub.

This essay examines the ways in which women in the lowest socio-economic class are represented on the contemporary Irish stage. Its central concern is with the ways in which the Naturalistic dramatic representation of the home as a domestic sphere for poor women may confound nationalist discourses of the country as home, yet may fail to resist the systemic violence of the state against its most precarious citizens. To do so I set the actual economic conditions of these precarious women alongside social attitudes to poverty and the poor to demonstrate the systemic violence enacted on the most vulnerable. Turning then to dominant media representations, the essay questions the interaction between representation and reality more generally, whereby Ireland’s poorest are demonised and disenfranchised as figures of fun or fear in forms of representational violence. Against this broader backdrop, the paper identifies recurrent forms of and tropes in stage representations to raise questions about both the form and function of theatre for contemporary spectators, focusing on two contemporary plays Waiting on Ikea and Pineapple. For some, this promotes pleasures of recognition; for others the frisson of class voyeurism. The central argument is that little has changed since O'Casey put Juno Boyle and Bessie Burgess onstage – in either the precarious lives led by poor women, their representation on stage or the failures of the audiences or the state to accept responsibility for the unequal lives of Irish citizens.

This paper argues for a reassessment of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “This Other Eden” season, which presented a range of new work in London in early 2001. It places the season in its historical context, in a British political landscape dominated by New Labour and its optimism about remaking the nation, and also in a world that within six months was to experience the turmoil of the September 11 th attacks. Using Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History as a starting point, this essay analyses the ‘time-hop’ dramaturgies of two of the season’s plays in particular, Moira Buffini’s Loveplay and Luminosity by Nick Stafford. The turn of the millennium marked the beginning of the end for Adrian Noble’s tenure as Artistic Director of the RSC, and this paper argues that the placeless quality of the “This Other Eden” season – neither wholly a product of Stratford nor London – was symptomatic of tensions at the time, both within this flagship national organisation and in the nation at large.

Mark Ravenhill’s 2007 Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat is a relevant state of the nation(s) play drawing an acid portrait of Anglo-American nations and their self-congratulatory ‘freedom and democracy’ propaganda in Irak. Other committed voices have made themselves heard on the British stage in addressing worldwide political and ethical issues. This paper focuses on Lucy Kirkwood, a young British dramatist whose pungent style was revealed in Tinderbox (2008), a dystopian farce set in 21st century England. Today, Lucy Kirkwood (33) who sees herself as ‘a radical young dramatist,’ continues to explore the confused landscape of western democracy: she sketched the relations between the USA and China in Chimerica (2013), an epic drama which won her an Olivier Award for Best New Play. In the wake of Brexit and the Trump election, Lucy Kirkwood has recently announced that she would pursue her investigation of the leading nations’ policies: “The whole of democracy looks fragile and farcical. After writing about communist China in Chimerica , you suddenly look at western democracy and think: is this necessarily better? Maybe this is the endgame” (Lawson, “Chimerica”).This paper explores Kirkwood’s vitriolic portrait of today’s leading nations, and her questioning of universal concerns experienced on a personal level such as power and privacy, nationalism and identity, profit and subservience. I will examine her peculiar ability to reformulate a ‘state-of-the-nation’ format and associate innovation and convention in her treatment of subject matter, language, dramatic form and performance.

In a post-Brexit (and perhaps even post-truth) context, the entire nation is going through an intense period of self-scrutiny, attempting to find a way forward for British culture despite a growing climate of divisive and destructive trends. As ever, verbatim theatre, spearheaded by Rufus Norris’ National Theatre, has sought to provide some answers in its relentless examination of the state of Britain. However, since the renaissance of verbatim theatre in the mid-1990s, the political situation has worsened considerably and it may appear that the typical strategies of verbatim theatre have lost their efficacy, struggling to provide a much-needed alternative. In this article, I will assess some of verbatim theatre’s latest developments in the 21 st century through three main case studies, which are DV8’s To Be Straight with You (2007), Catherine Grosvenor’s Cherry Blossom (2008) and Alecky Blythe’s Little Revolution (2014). My main argument is that, notwithstanding the claims to the contrary, verbatim theatre is far from being in decline and it has continued to fluctuate, transform and exceed its familiar parameters, urging us to rethink its general aesthetic coordinates beyond the project of documentary realism and that of a national ‘shadow archive.’ More specifically and drawing from a variety of recent examples including the aforementioned case studies, I will argue that verbatim theatre in this period has a post-postmodern proclivity to make new connections across the fragments and re-construct the social.

In this essay, I will examine the development of a growing trend of democratisation in British contemporary theatre that seeks to reject the expertise of playwrights, actors or professional ensembles in favour of verbatim material drawn from a range of the public selected for their ordinariness, or conceptual frameworks within which the audience themselves construct and perform the aesthetic content of the work.This essay seeks to highlight how the discursive and aesthetic framing of real people in this context can, in certain instances, be seen to reflect the construction of ‘real, ordinary people’ in the political discourse surrounding the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK. In both cases, ‘real people’ are understood to be in opposition to those who might be said to hold particular professional expertise and also, commonly, to those of a more privileged socio-economic status: the so-called ‘liberal elite.’ With reference to Rimini Protokoll’s 100 % Salford, The National Theatre of Great Britain’s My Country and Kaleider’s The Money I will suggest that this particular discourse of democratisation, in both politics and theatre, can too easily conceal the expertise that lies behind the construction of ‘real people’ and their narratives.