Volume 7, Issue 2

This article examines the way that ethics underpin and affect audience participation in contemporary theatre, illustrated in the performance practice of British-German ensemble Gob Squad. It looks at how a proliferation of participatory practices has opened up a space for ethics to be reconfigured, and establishes that the ethics of participation may intimate that a ‘good’ performance is interchangeable with the idea of an ‘authentic’ performance. It emphasises a double dimension to the ethics of participation: the first is concerned with the self and the second is about everyone else, drawing on the corresponding theories of Nicholas Ridout (2009) and Erving Goffman (1959). Importantly, the article disentangles participation gone wrong and brings into view a new categorisation of spectator which I am calling the ‘dis-spectator,’ who deliberately challenges the structures and processes of the performance. At the centre of the discussion are a group of hecklers in the audience of Gob Squad’s War and Peace (2016), and their targeted jeering at a participant-spectator. My analysis develops a taxonomy of dis-spectatorship that outlines varying levels of transgressive behaviour from testing out the boundaries of participation to sabotaging the performance. Lastly, I call attention to a lack of consideration given to care and responsibility in participatory practices, which can leave participants in a precarious position.

This article compares An Anonymous Woman’s monologue MANWATCHING and Gary McNair’s verbatim play Locker Room Talk to explore the rupture between character and actor in these two works. MANWATCHING presents the personal reflections of its anonymous female playwright on her past heterosexual relationships and the fantasies she employs when she masturbates. Locker Room Talk, on the other hand, is an edited compilation of McNair’s interviews with men about the often misogynistic language they use in each other’s company to discuss women. Drawing extensively from Judith Butler’s influential work Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative , this article discusses how these two works adopt different theatrical forms (verbatim and monologue) to challenge the parameters – that is, what Butler refers to as the “speakable” and “unspeakable” – of public discourse. McNair’s Locker Room Talk attempts to challenge the misogynistic “banter” used by some men to bond with their male peers while MANWATCHING attempts to create a context within which women will feel less stigmatized discussing their sexuality honestly. In spite of their different theatrical forms, however, both works exploit a similar dramaturgical approach to achieve these goals and this article attempts to demonstrate the radically different effect this same approach has on each work’s reception by audiences.

Fermat’s Last Theorem, which appears as a symbol in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia , was announced to be solved only two months after the play premiered. When Stoppard was writing Arcadia , the Theorem was still an unsolvable mystery; to the first audiences who saw the play performed, the Theorem represented a triumph of rediscovery. We may therefore interpret the Theorem’s symbolism in two different ways, both of which contribute to a different reading of the play’s essential question: whether history, discoveries, and art, once lost, are lost forever, or whether they can be recovered in the future.

This article maps out David Greig’s engagement with the figure of Bertolt Brecht, both the ‘theorist’ and the ‘playwright.’ It addresses this engagement in terms not just of influence but also of creative dialogue and enduring inspiration. The first part of this article looks at Brecht and Greig’s similarities and Greig’s Brechtian influence generally, which are explored, for instance, through Brechtian concepts such as “breaking the rules,” “critical stance” and “entertainment.” The second part focuses on the idea of “making political theatre politically ” (Thamer and Turnheim 90; emphasis original) and argues that the most relevant Brechtian aspect in Greig’s work is the way it envisions and politicizes the relationship between the play and the audience via the use of some strategies that draw on epic theatre, which, in Greig’s work, operate under “post-Brechtian dialectics” (Barnett, “Performing”). The third part of the article illustrates the Brechtian import of Greig’s work by exploring two case studies, The American Pilot (2005) and The Events (2013). In analyzing these two paradigmatically Brechtian plays, this article illustrates how understanding Brecht’s influence on Greig’s work is essential in order to understand the politics of Greig’s theatre. More widely, this article contributes towards understanding Brecht’s legacy with regard to political British theatre in the age of globalization.

This essay argues that Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem challenges what Mark Shucksmith terms the “visioning of rural areas by hegemonic middle-class culture” (163), which still dominates the way many British people see the countryside and is rooted in nostalgia for a neat and pretty rural idyll, cleansed of untidy (bio)diversity. The second major line of argument is that the shadow of William Blake hangs heavily over the play, and that Rooster both embodies and employs the Blakean imagination in ways that challenge dominant “hegemonic” ideas about the rural. The untidy and disruptive Rooster, and the wood that bears his name, represent a very different kind of mindscape and a very different kind of (living) landscape. Simply by his presence in the wood he symbolizes an alternative way of being in the land. It is true that Rooster’s is an imperfect echo of the mythopoetic Blakean world-view, but it is nevertheless unmistakeably Blakean, so the prologue to Jerusalem , part of the preface to Blake’s Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1808), is central to a proper understanding of the play. Rooster’s verbal combativeness and mythopoetic visions penetrate the hypocrisy behind the veneer of respectability in Flintock, and the justifications for prevailing human relationships with the land.

Brendan Pelsue’s Wellesley Girl , which premiered in the midst of the 2016 U. S. Presidential election, depicts American democracy – as an institution, a mythology, and a practice – as a fundamentally flawed utopian framework that is susceptible to dystopian failure. In this post-apocalyptic community in which every adult is a member of Congress, it becomes clear that American democracy was systematically designed to exclude emotional reasoning – with a few notable, destructive, exceptions – and it therefore enforces performances of reason that tend to exclude women and produce a cognitive dissonance between politics and reality. Wellesley Girl merges its audience’s present with a recognizable dystopian future and implicates them in the decision-making processes of that future in order to render visible the real world consequences of that dissonance – consequences which are already manifest in our collective ecological crisis.

Through an analysis of Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman , this article explores the roles children play as avatars of futurity and tragic personages whose actions bid us to reflect on repetitive patterns of suffering. To this end, I suggest that we might productively engage with The Pillowman through the dramaturgical structures of tragedy, particularly insofar as tragedy revolves around catastrophic events in the family. While most previous scholarship on The Pillowman has focused on the protagonist, Katurian, and his social or moral obligations as an author, my work places the children of Katurian’s stories at the center of the play’s philosophical cruxes. Not yet fully socialized into societal paradigms that frame the replication of present circumstances, ideologies, and inequities as “progress,” the children of this play disrupt dominant tragic structures, offer catastrophic responses to abuse, and emphasize the absurdity of certain cultural narratives of justice and salvation. My readings are widely informed by the fields of tragic theory, childhood studies, critical posthumanism, and performance studies.

Documentation remains one of the major challenges of the Nigerian theatre; as a result many theatrical performances have gone into oblivion. Studies have been conducted that have given birth to the many approaches to play production and theories of directing in the Nigerian theatre. However, most of these studies focused on directors in educational theatres, as many directors outside the academia seem not to have attracted much scholarly interest in terms of documentation. This research documents the directorial approaches of two Nigerian directors – Segun Adefila and Bolanle Austen-Peters – using four productions and will be of benefit to theatre scholarship and the industry. The study employs a qualitative method of research, and the findings reveal Segun Adefila as an anti-realistic director and Bolanle Austen-Peters as a realistic director. Also, both directors use film to support live drama in their productions. This study therefore recommends that directors embrace the use of film in live theatre, in line with technological trends around the world.