Volume 7, Issue 1

In Harold Pinter’s last completed project before his death, a screen adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth (1970), a large publicity poster dominates the study of crime novelist Andrew Wyke, describing him as ‘the master of menace.’ This is also a self-referential joke directed at Pinter’s association with ‘comedies of menace,’ such as A Slight Ache (1957) and The Birthday Party (1958), that succeeded in creating feelings of unease and discomfort in ways that had not been seen in the theatre before. As a repertory actor before he became a dramatist, Pinter was likely to have encountered the fears and insecurities that theatre can create, and these perhaps return in the sinister environments that we find in his early plays. In turn, the queasiness and growing unease we encounter in Pinter’s drama has been appropriated by other ‘childe Harolds’ including Philip Ridley, Anthony Neilson, Martin Crimp, and Jez Butterworth, whose work follows variations of the Pinteresque. This article looks at some of the ways these dramatists have developed on from Pinter’s template of creating a sense of unease, yet at the same time these dramatists show an awareness of how the nature of fear has radically altered since the turn of the millennium. Signs of this change can also be found in Pinter’s work from the 1980 s: whereas previously fear had been vague in its aetiology, now it came out of the shadows to be named: Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’ gave way to plays about torture by repressive political regimes in Party Time (1991) and memories of the Holocaust in Ashes to Ashes (1997). Since then the depiction of states of fear have forked off on two separate paths: latter day ‘childe Harolds’ such as Philip Ridley continue to promote what he has called ‘theatre as a ghost train,’ a place of disorientation designed to induce fear for its own sake, while a larger contingent that include Simon Stephens, Duncan Macmillan, Mike Bartlett, Martin Crimp, and Mark Ravenhill also make fears manifest: these include terrorism and the ensuing War on Terror, the Anthropocene and climate change and the precarity and repression of neo-liberal economies and the alienation of self-hood through technology.

This article outlines substantial recent transformations in Irish theatre and argues that much contemporary work has been focused on addressing the social and economic turbulences that Ireland has been experiencing by zooming in on the attendant anxieties and fears. It examines this thematic area in conjunction both with theatrical form and with the effect on the spectators, dividing plays and productions into four categories. The first of these includes works that have depicted Ireland and its anxieties by way of allegory; Mark Doherty’s Trad (2004) and Michael West and Corn Exchange’s Freefall (2009) are discussed as examples reflecting different stages of recent Irish history. The second category features works focused on the anxieties of economically marginalised individuals and groups; detailed analysis is provided of ANU Productions’ The Boys of Foley Street (2012) as an instance of radical site-specific theatre that instigates fear in the spectators. Works in the third category centre on gender identity and the anxieties experienced by LGBT individuals; the fictitious docudrama I ♥ Alice ♥ I by Amy Conroy is singled out as an instance of exciting emancipatory theatre. The fourth category is comprised of works dealing with the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and revolving around the fears and frustrations that concern the future; the recent plays by David Ireland, particularly the dark comedy Cyprus Avenue , are discussed as representative of outlining the indelible effects of nationalism on individual identity and ending on a pessimistic note.

Donald Trump famously used Hillary Clinton’s ‘toilet business’ or Marco Rubio’s ‘sweating like a pig’ as talking points in his campaign for the U. S. presidency. He thereby managed to use disgust’s intrinsic link to fear as a catalyst to negatively influence people’s opinion of his opponents. It was a tactic he also successfully used to rally his supporters against groups of people like ‘lying’ journalists or ‘rapist’ Mexicans. The mechanism of dehumanising the Other via association with disgust can be regarded as a dangerous tool of political rhetoric. In times like ours, where political discourse is commonly drenched in emotional hyperbole, it is paramount that we come to understand our emotions and learn how easily they may be hijacked for political purposes; this is especially true for such a seemingly ‘intuitive’ emotion as disgust. In his play I, Malvolio dramatist Tim Crouch gives voice to a Shakespearean character who has become a victim of discrimination via disgust. Crouch turns the perspectives around and allows the audience to see the story from the deplored’s point of view. This paper uses Crouch’s play for an exemplary analysis of the underlying structures of repulsion, and its relation to fear, and investigates the aesthetic possibilities of redemption.

In 2017, Tanika Gupta’s Lions and Tigers premiered at London’s candle-lit, neo-Jacobean Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which, at first glance, seems ill suited to house a play which is set in pre-Partition Bengal and which depicts both rioting mobs and machine gun shootings. This essay looks at the ways in which, contrary to such initial associations, text and performance space supplement each other. In this case, supposedly cosy candlelight and close proximity to the audience engender feelings of fear and anxiety that can be framed with Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘affective politics of fear.’ Continuously interwoven with negotiations between the leading figures of the Indian National Congress, Gupta’s play is firmly set in its own historical context. On the other hand, its climate of boiling nationalism and close parallels to jihad make it equally relevant to the present day. It is because of this contemporaneous historicity that Gupta’s play proves so gripping: through their ostensibly homely seventeenth-century staging, terror and political unrest become all too close to home, and so Lions and Tigers is as much a play that uncovers the hidden stories of Indian Partition as it speaks to the here and now.

This paper addresses the theme of fear and anxiety in contemporary drama and performance through a consideration of the trope of the dystopian near-future as it has re-occurred in a significant number of recent British plays. It takes as its starting point the contention that the prevalence and persistence of this motif makes it worthy of investigation. The plays under discussion do not re-inscribe socio-political problems, or the status quo, by pretending to be objective records of the real world. Instead they create alternative fictional near-future worlds, exploratory dystopias that deliberately perform anxiety-inducing and estranging critical interrogations of current cultural and political concerns. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams this essay seeks to show that the critical and emotional insights offered by these play-worlds are made possible only through the process of our pondering their strangeness. Each example stages its own particular disruption of theatrical realism and in so doing engages critically both with the British realist theatrical tradition, and also with the wider cultural discourses about ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ that haunt our contemporary neoliberal moment and the emotions these discourses produce.

Among the fears rife in contemporary “Insecure Britain”, This was a header used by the Guardian for a series of articles in 2014, which described a growing sense of social precarity and disillusionment with mainstream politics in Britain: https://www.theguardian.com/society/series/insecure-britain the anxieties connected with the housing crisis – rise of property costs, cutbacks on welfare housing, increasing precarity of living conditions – may be among the most tangible in everyday life. It is not surprising, then, that the disruptive power of threats to home as a source of security and comfort has been at the centre of a series of recent British plays. While many of these are marked by documentary realism, incorporating real-life testimonies in order to evoke empathy with those hit hardest by the crisis, there is also a notable subset that veer to the other side of the sur/realist spectrum, reflecting on the crisis in highly stylized dystopian scenarios. In this article, I propose the concept of ‘playhouse Gothic’ to describe Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin (both 2015). Both are explorations of the affective and social implications of the housing crisis that fall into the latter category. The case studies examine how in both plays the interplay between dramatic and theatrical space foregrounds the extent to which our homes themselves are sources of insecurity. More specifically, the plays employ the mode of the Gothic in order to involve their audiences in an emotionally loaded spatial experience, thereby also inviting them to reflect on their own socio-economic anxieties and implication in perpetuating structures of inequality. The analyses take into account the dramatic texts and the set-up of concrete performances as well as reviews documenting viewers’ responses to the plays.

Recent movies have relished depicting nature striking back at a human population that has forsaken her. Films like The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and San Andreas embrace the apocalyptic destruction of cities around the globe by way of sub-zero hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, and other natural disasters. Surprisingly, the British theatre is equally engaged (albeit less spectacularly) in exploring the same threat. Namely, what happens when the natural world strikes back and begins to encroach against our established homesteads and populated cities. One of the best-known plays on the topic of climate change is Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan (2009). Waters delves into the growing crisis of rising water tables to low lying areas of England by exploring the effect it has personally on an aging climate scientist and his wife and politically on their son, also a scientist, who is charged by two newly installed government officials with preparing Britain for the looming watery disaster. Eschewing the bombastic Hollywood nature of disaster films, Waters’ play is intimately crafted, showing the dangerous and fatal disruptions of the changing natural world, and, more specifically, the negotiations that take place between science and politics when it comes to the unpredictability of rising sea levels. My article examines this work in relation to how it approaches the threat of climate change to the British Isles by exploring Waters’ exploration of how politics, science, and family tensions affect the climatic future of the country.

Pursuit of Happiness is a 2017 co-production of the American group Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the Slovenia-based, multinational En-Knap dance company. The genre-defying production provocatively misleads the audience through the textual as well as performative aspects of the piece. From slapstick scenes, through dynamic dance movements, all the way to philosophically challenging perceptions about the nature of our reality, the play balances on the edge of timid expressions of existentialist angst, Baudrillardian overload of simulacra, and an attempt to address a mechanical reproduction of art (and life) reminiscent of Walter Benjamin.This contribution endeavours to present an analysis of Pursuit of Happiness as an explosive contemporary piece that portrays a disintegrating world, where fear and anxiety engulf people’s lives as suddenly as the play’s formal structure breaks and changes. Following Jill Dolan’s ruminations about “hopeful performatives”, the paper seeks to plot out a set of such performatives and narratives in the selected play, and to show how they function in the liminal combination of dance and drama, movement and performance, art and life, and how these narratives can become part of what Elliot Leffler and Michael Mellas call divergent dramaturgy.