Volume 6, Issue 2

This article seeks to identify some key scenographic principles that govern contemporary British playwright Howard Barker’s stage spaces. The influence of Barker’s dramatic work is widely recognized and has been the subject of sustained academic study for a number of decades. Despite Barker’s scenographic engagement with his own playwriting since the late 1990 s, the corresponding academic engagement with this aspect of his work remains scant. This article therefore offers the first sustained consideration of Barker’s spatial scenography, engaging in a detailed analysis of select examples of Barker’s drama from the late 1990 s to mid-2000s. It also draws upon archival materials of productions by The Wrestling School company to compare the implicit scenography as evident in the play text to its realization in production. The analysis approaches Barker’s spatial scenography through the lens of aesthetic discourse, with particular focus on the notion of the postmodern sublime as postulated by Lyotard and Johnson, among others, in order to discuss the subject matter in a suitably non-reductive, yet critical manner.

In The Jacksonian , an autobiographical play set in Mississippi in 1964, Beth Henley filters a tragic action based on the Aristotelian model through the non-linear memory of Rosy, the play’s narrator and choric figure, as she tries not to remember that her father has killed her mother. Rosy’s father, Bill—a Girardian scapegoat figure contaminated by the racist violence of the community he lives in—is the protagonist of the tragic action. But Henley focuses on its effect on Rosy. A tragic event can occur only in progressive chronological time, but by circling around the murder in her memory, Rosy creates temporal stasis until finally the pressure of denial becomes unbearable and the murder takes place. Tragic inevitability is displaced from the formally tragic action to Rosy’s memory of it. A comparison of The Jacksonian with other dramas that incorporate tragic experience within a non-linear time scheme suggests that only in memory plays can tragedy as a genre exist in non-linear time.

AbstractAddition and Add-Aptation This article discusses, in particular, the playwright Simon Stephens’s “English Language versions” of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the context of the long and tangled history of translation and adaptation. Key differences from the conventional claim to be attempting some kind of fidelity to the original in Stephens’s approach to the task of creating a new text are considered: an approach which largely adheres to the overall narrative structure of the original but feels free to play with, in particular, the dialogue. This approach is then contrasted with the act of ‘appropriation’ of an existing text: whilst the act of appropriation results in the creation of an independent play that exists alongside the original, although Stephens actively disrupts expectations of fidelity, his version is still offered as a play by Ibsen or Chekhov. The process is further problematized by the directorial interventions of Carrie Cracknell and Katie Mitchell, working independently and in collaboration with Stephens on their productions of A Doll’s House and The Cherry Orchard respectively. I have labelled this process Add-Aptation, to distinguish it from both adaptation per se and appropriation. In an add-apted text the additions are both deliberate and significant Not the least significant factor in this process is that both directors are women, as is increasingly likely to be the case in the world of contemporary theatre.

In Asian American literature and drama, the pursuit of identity was at the forefront of discussion for much of the twentieth century. More and more frequently Asian American voices from the LGBTQ community have addressed intersectionality in established narratives. As issues of identity and intersectionality converge, postmodernity becomes a useful lens through which to examine the elements of this task. In Chay Yew’s plays entitled Porcelain and A Language of Their Own , the status of Asian identities in the Western world is not given a sure footing, but rather it is placed in a state of confusion. In Porcelain, this confusion stems from the tension between objective truth and the postmodern phenomenon of media-fueled panic. In A Language of Their Own , similar confusion arises between the subjective and performative conveying of meaning in language. These contrasting elements serve to highlight the postmodern search for identity among Asian men living in the Western world, where the complexities of identity are compounded by the subjectivity of truth.

J. T. Rogers’ Oslo has had an extraordinary run for new ‘straight’ drama: sell-out performances both in New York and London, and 7 Tony nominations. But what is it? On the face of it, Oslo is a history play – a carefully imagined reconstruction of secret talks that became the precursor to the Clinton/Arafat/Rabin Camp David meetings that resulted in the 1993 Oslo Accords. The subject and the players have been thoroughly researched by J. T. Rogers, and the play’s reception has been largely celebratory. This perhaps is the result of a play-going public’s appreciation of some intelligence in political debate and no doubt an appreciation of the play’s optimism, despite the ultimate failure of the Accords. This paper looks closely at three questions posed by Rogers’ play: 1) IS it a history play, and if so, how does it apprehend/narrate history? 2) Murray Krieger once said that history is the child of myth that never altogether escapes its parentage – is Oslo , in this sense, an unruly child of myth – not so much a history play, as it is a trans-historical political lesson? 3) If Oslo is NOT a history play, to what end does it employ its very specifically researched context?

This article explores the ways theatre might inspire a critique of what is arguably most pressing about contemporary neoliberalization—its operation at the level of subjectivity to reform society. The focus in this is Simon Stephens and his play Birdland (2014). Working from extant scholarship that connects Stephens’s work to neoliberalism, the article locates the playwright and his work in relation to a specific history of neoliberalization in Britain and argues that Birdland is a timely political drama because it hones in on certain features and affects of neoliberalization, doing so in ways that open a space for engaging critically with key problems engendered by contemporary capitalism.