Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility 9781474267144, 9781474267175, 9781474267151

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Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater University of Michigan, USA Titles Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre by Frances Babbage ISBN 978-1-4725-3142-1 Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance by Daniel Schulze ISBN 978-1-350-00096-4 Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the ‘Howl’ Generation edited by Deborah R. Geis ISBN 978-1-4725-6787-1 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures by David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978-1-4725-9219-4 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis by Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978-1-4742-1316-5 Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre edited by Adam Alston and Martin Welton ISBN 978-1-4742-5118-1 Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict by Clare Finburgh ISBN 978-1-4725-9866-0

Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre Politics, Affect, Responsibility Marissia Fragkou

Series Editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Marissia Fragkou, 2019 Marissia Fragkou has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes, the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Balvider Sopal and Tim Lewis in Transport Theatre’s The Edge (Folkestone Library, 2015). Photo: Zbigniew Kotkiewicz, reproduced with kind permission from © Douglas Rintoul All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6714-4 PB: 978-1-3501-5485-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6715-1 eBook: 978-1-4742-6716-8 Series: Methuen Drama Engage Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Philip

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Precarity, affect, responsibility Precarity, theatre, politics Mapping Ecologies of Precarity

1

2

x 1 3 10 12

Promises of Happiness and Cruel Optimisms: Theatre in the 1990s

17

Cruel Britannia, affect and intimate politics On ow(n)ing: Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking Cruel attachments: Phyllis Nagy, Never Land Fairy tales for adults: Caryl Churchill, The Skriker Conclusion

19 25 33 39 46

Children and Young People at Risk Children and young people on the British stage From ‘childhood crisis’ to ‘masculinity in crisis’: Mike Bartlett, My Child Feeling normal: Dennis Kelly, Debris and Philip Ridley, Mercury Fur Race and vulnerability: Mojisola Adebayo, Desert Boy Ecologies of pain and grief: Simon Stephens, Sea Wall and debbie tucker green, random Conclusion

3

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49 50 52 58 65 70 75

‘A Glimpse into Some Other World’: Imagining Slow Violence in the Anthropocene

77

Theatrical challenges and anxious hopes in the age of the Anthropocene

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Contents Politics of dystopia: Caryl Churchill, Far Away and Alistair McDowall, X Vital materialisms: Stan’s Cafe, Of All the People in All the World Border-crossings: Transport Theatre, The Edge Intimacy and proximity: Complicite, The Encounter Conclusion

4

Framing Human Rights Human rights, spectatorship and theatre Impressions of terror: Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero Ambivalent ethics: debbie tucker green, hang Politics of freedom and dissent: Belarus Free Theatre, Trash Cuisine and DV8, Can We Talk about This? Conclusion

5

(Dis)possession, Debt and Economies of Value Neo-liberal economies and the theatre maker as precarious worker Debt, value and justice: Stan’s Cafe, The Just Price of Flowers Waste, value and white masculinity: Leo Butler, Boy Female dispossessions: Clean Break, Joanne and The Paper Birds, Broke On protest: Theatre Uncut Conclusion

Afterword: On Hoping Notes References Index

83 91 96 102 110 111 113 116 126 133 147 149 151 157 161 165 174 181 183 187 202 229

Illustrations 1

2

3

4

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Ashley McGuire as Brian in Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (directed by Sean Holmes, Lyric Hammersmith, London, 2016) reproduced with kind permission from © Helen Murray Stan’s Cafe’s Of All the People in All the World (Festival VEO, Valencia, Spain, 2005). Photo credit: Karen Stafford, reproduced with kind permission from © Stan’s Cafe Pavel Haradnitski, Stephanie Pan, Esther Mugambi, Nastassia Shcherbak and Philippe Spall in Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine (directed by Nicolai Khalezin, Young Vic Theatre, London, 2012) © Simon Annand Jill Dowes (Narrator), Valerie Cutko (Financier), Craig Stephens (Financier), Bernadette Russel (Banker), Charlotte Gregory (Wife), Jack Trow (Husband) and Gerard Bell (Van Drive) in Stan’s Cafe’s The Just Price of Flowers (A.E. Harris, Birmingham, 2012). Photo credit: Graeme Braidwood, reproduced with kind permission from © Stan’s Cafe Kylie Walsh, Shane Durrant and Jemma McDonnell in The Paper Birds’ Broke (devised by The Paper Birds and directed by Jemma McDonnell, Production Tour, 2014). Photo credit: The Other Richard, reproduced with kind permission from © The Paper Birds

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Acknowledgements There are several people whom I  would like to warmly thank for their support throughout this book’s fascinating writing journey into the precarities of our time. First, my thanks go to Bloomsbury and particularly Mark Dudgeon who believed in the project from early on; I am also grateful to Methuen Drama’s Engage series editors Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater for their encouraging feedback. The ongoing support of the School of Music and Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University which granted me a term’s study leave and further teaching remission was instrumental in allowing me to complete this project. Thank you to my colleagues Kasia Lech and Kene Igweonu for their continuous daily support, collegiality and enthusiasm about new research ideas. I  would also like to specially thank my British Drama students who were exposed to the difficult subjects deployed in the book from early on and approached them with an open heart and a critical mind. During the process of development and writing, I  was very lucky to be able to share material and test my ideas with colleagues from the wider scholarly community. I am particularly grateful to Marilena Zaroulia, Emma Cox and Liz Tomlin for generously sharing their expertise and reading drafts of book chapters. My gratitude also goes to all audiences who have responded to my research in several conferences and invited talks. Having spent more than a decade in the field of theatre studies in the  UK, I  have been hugely inspired by scholars who have played a key part in shaping my thinking. I would like to particularly thank Elaine Aston, Baz Kershaw and Sophie Nield. Being part of a vibrant research community also had a fundamental impact on the ways I look at theatre and politics. I am grateful to TaPRA’s Performance Identity Community working group for the supportive, stimulating and difficult ongoing discussions and debates we have shared throughout these years

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and to the ‘Inside/Outside Europe’ research network: special thanks to Adam Alston, Rachel Clements, Anna Harpin, Martin Heaney, Louise Owen, Giulia Palladini, Trish Reid, Aylwyn Walsh and Gareth White, among others, who have been an ongoing source of inspiration. For his continuous encouragement and invaluable support, my immense gratitude and love goes to my husband Philip Hager without whom this project would not have been the same.

Introduction

In 2008, London’s Gate Theatre staged a translation of State of Emergency written by German playwright and director Falk Richter and directed by Maria Aberg which had already premiered at Berlin’s Schaubühne the previous year. The play portrays a family which has secured a place in a gated community and narrates its efforts and desires to maintain a ‘normal’ and safe life. What Richter exposes from the outset is the fragility of the family’s attachments to normality and safety; the two main characters – Man and Woman – struggle to protect themselves and their son from risks that appear to be escalating beyond the community’s walls. Such risks are attributed to the people who live beyond the wall who can ‘enter through the sewers’ (Richter 2008: 18). In Richter’s highly dystopian and claustrophobic world, children seem to hold a central position; their attempts to escape the community and cross the border at the risk of being shot clearly play on the anxieties of middle-class affluence. For the Gate performance, the precarious nature of the family’s enclosure was made particularly palpable by Naomi Dawson’s stage design which comprised a glass wall separating the audience from the stage. Behind it, a glossy interior bore the promise of middle-class affluence and security while also intimating the possibility of its imminent shattering. I begin Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre with this particular theatre example in mind for two reasons:  on the one hand, its focus on the fragility of middle-class aspirations, the border as a threat and children at risk, captures some of the key threads that weave the fabric of precarity in this book. In other words, Richter’s State of Emergency explicitly foregrounds one the book’s main aims: to discuss the connection between theatre and how it responds to the

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world; on another level, this correspondence between the theatre and the real world also relates to my personal experience of watching this performance on the night of 6 December 2008. In the years to come, that night would mark the beginning of a period of significant political shifts and turmoil in another place far from London but close to home. After leaving the theatre, the news about the eruption of fierce riots in Athens following the shooting of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by the police had already circulated via social media and other digital platforms. Grigoropoulos’s shooting generated a long period of social unrest in Greece which expressed an acute anxiety for the precarious future of the young generation and anger against state violence and police impunity. This particular event eventually became a symbol of resistance for the country’s disaffected youth and mobilized the young precariat to challenge the illusion of affluence that had so far formed the basis of the understanding of the modern Greek nation since the 1980s. In puncturing those promises of stability and safety, it also anticipated a further unmasking of the failure of the commitments made by the neo-liberal democratic state and its role as guarantor of safety, a failure which would plague Greece and Europe in the years to come. This personal moment of encountering precarity in a theatre space alongside the parallel realization of the fragility of assurances that my generation grew up with, has been a driving force in this book. The book then attempts to capture the feeling of living in precarious times; during the course of research and writing, several national and international emergencies unfolded, further consolidating twenty-first-century impressions of precarity:  the exponential increase of refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to cross European borders and drowning at sea or en route to Germany or the UK; the divisive 2016 referendum in Britain which saw 51.9 per cent of voters deciding in favour of leaving the EU and was accompanied by fierce anti-immigration sentiment; the increasing warnings about climate change and environmental disasters across the world; several terrorist attacks in major European cities such as Paris, Brussels, London and Barcelona; the outcomes of austerity practices across Europe that threaten essential human needs such as health care,

Introduction

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housing, pensions and education and the intensification of nationalist discourses driven by ideologies of national sovereignty which is often presented as a key component in perceptions of identity and belonging. The above compose a social ecology of precarity that firmly connects issues of dispossession, intolerance, fear, xenophobia, uncertainty and disillusionment for the future of humans and the planet. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, theatre in Britain has been urgently responding to the above ecologies of precarity, thus evidencing a dynamic resurgence of politics in the theatre. Fuelled by the perception of theatre as an ‘event’ which ‘present[s] a perspective on and of the world’ (Postlewait 2009: 12), I examine those proliferating and diverse responses to spiralling uncertainties and precarities on the twenty-first-century stage as political zeitgeist. More specifically, this book navigates the following questions:  what kind of political work does precarity do in the theatre? More specifically, how can theatrical representations of precarity intervene with extant frames of recognition of the human and the non-human? How does theatre’s representational and affective devices invite its audiences to care about precarious life? To what extent does the theatre sustain representations of precarity as ‘crisis’ thus participating in conservative discourses that normalize precarity as threat? In addressing those questions, the book is underpinned by several critical frameworks which will be mapped in the next section.

Precarity, affect, responsibility In the beginning of the new millennium, vocabularies of precarity have been gaining much purchase in the fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences, while also serving as rallying points of resistance and social struggle for social movements and street politics. Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre urgently responds to and participates in this growing field of work by primarily drawing on interdisciplinary feminist approaches that shape ideas regarding risk, ecology, uncertainty and the human.

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I deliberately focus on feminist vocabularies and methodologies as they allow me to navigate precarity as a condition that speaks to practices of marginalization and invisibility; the porous relationship between the human and the non-​human; the role of affect in contemporary perceptions of uncertainty and vulnerability  –​all of which have constituted crucial lynchpins of feminist theory in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. The pertinence of feminist critical frameworks can be further justified by the close links between precarity and women’s reproductive and affective labour in the private sphere (Federici 2008); more recently, precarity has been widely discussed in feminist political theory, philosophy and activism.1 This is particularly due to precarity’s intimate connection to contemporary patriarchal structures and their complicity with the institution of neo-​ liberalism. As Louise Owen contends, ‘The contemporary discourse of precarity has a close and institutional relationship to this form of dispersed, invisible patriarchy’ (2012: 81). In this sense, precarity already belongs to a complex network of critical discourses and practices; it is for this reason that the book explicitly draws on a range of interdisciplinary vocabularies. Its chief conceptual frameworks have been mainly shaped by feminist thinkers from the fields of political and cultural theory such as Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Isabell Lorey and Sara Ahmed; those scholars are further put into dialogue with other voices from the fields of sociology, philosophy, children studies, theatre and performance studies. My own scholarly training in the vocabularies of feminist theory has also helped me view the inadequacy or partiality of dominant discourses on ‘living in the end times’ (Žižek 2010), ‘risk society’ as a ‘new political economy’ (Beck 1999:  12) or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) to capture the state we are living in; such approaches, I argue, often fail to account for the multifarious interconnections and implications of such risks and uncertainties. At the same time, the concept of ‘crisis’ has permeated a range of popular and scholarly discourses which present the contemporary moment as a state of exception and an unprecedented emergency of huge magnitude. This approach presents a myopic and linear view as it frames ‘crisis’ as something which can be measured, controlled and resolved; in addition, it conceals connections

Introduction

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between what  constitutes a ‘current crisis’ to several other ‘crises’ throughout history. Lauren Berlant’s reading of ‘crisis’ as an ongoing process which disrupts normality is useful here: ‘crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming’ (Berlant 2011: 10). In this sense, crisis is already something excessive, and in its reproduction, it serves multiple ideologies; due to its presentism and its creation of affective exhaustion or excess of affects, it ruptures fantasies of normality and security only to normalize and consolidate them anew. As precarity ‘undoes a linear streamline of temporal progression’ (Ridout and Schneider 2012: 5), this book rather looks at those ‘crises’ as conditions of precarity beyond a strictly linear framework. Since its emergence in the 1980s, precarity’s common usage primarily referred to job insecurity before becoming ‘a byword for life in late and later capitalism’ (Ridout and Schneider 2012: 5). While precarity as experienced today is inextricably connected to the conditions of industrial capitalism, it is now felt by a wider network of people. As Lorey and Berlant argue, precarity has now been democratized (Puar et al. 2012: 172), becoming ‘crisis when [it] hit the bourgeoisies’ (Puar et al. 2012: 166). The focus on precarity allows me to trace its intersections with class, racial and gender identities; further, it also enables me to discuss how vulnerability, grief and the ‘human’ become key political theatre tropes and how these are embedded in material conditions that sustain life. As already mentioned, key to my reading of precarity is the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler whose writings on precarious life are increasingly influencing the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. In brief, Butler has observed how the intensification of securitization and practices of austerity promote a differential allocation of vulnerability thus shaping the ways in which human life is perceived and protected. She observes how specific material conditions and hierarchies of power frame the contours of ‘the human’ thus shaping the ways in which we recognize and respond to Others (2004; 2009; 2012). ‘Precarity’, Butler highlights, ‘is not a passing or episodic condition, but a new form or regulation that distinguishes this historical time’ (2015: vii).

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Butler also addresses the frequent slippage between precariousness and precarity by looking at both as intertwined:  as she explains, precariousness is a ‘feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious [ . . . ]. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death’ (2009:  25). Drawing on Butler, Lorey also distinguishes between precariousness, as an existential and a ‘socioontological dimension of lives and bodies’ (Lorey 2015:  11), and precarity, which connotes the conditions of inequality and ‘processes of othering’ distributing precariousness (2015: 12). Lorey further adds a third dimension of the precarious, that of ‘governmental precarization’, which she understands as an instrument of power, governmentality, immunization and biopolitics and which largely affects the Western bourgeois, sovereign, white, male, free subject. The choice of the term ‘precarity’ rather than ‘precariousness’ for this book’s title therefore deliberately serves to foreground the material conditions that facilitate and maintain the uneven distribution of vulnerability and management of precarious life. It is my view that an explicit focus on precariousness understood as ‘a feature of all life’ risks creating the impression of a return to an uncritical universal humanism and a generalized understanding of an ethics of responsibility removed from the particularities of material conditions enveloping such precarious lives. In line with this materialist approach, I view precarity as a social ecology that cuts across a broad spectrum of spaces, people and sociopolitical conditions. The choice to use the term ‘ecology’ in the book’s title not only alludes to theatre’s identity as an ecosystem (Kershaw 2007:  15–16), but also draws attention to the affinities between ‘ecology’ and ‘precarity’:  as the latter ‘exposes our sociality’ and the ‘dimensions of our interdependency’ (Puar et  al. 2012:  170), ‘ecology’ is here strategically used to examine how performances of precarity may leave their mark on ideologies of dispossession and how, in turn, they might help to create ‘political actors’ who resist practices of immunization and securitization.

Introduction

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In addition, the book acknowledges the paradoxes of precarity as a ‘vital and necessary tool in actions that critique capitalism at the same time that life in neoliberalism appears increasingly precarious’ (Ridout and Schneider 2012:  8–9); for this reason, the book will specifically demonstrate how precarity might feature as both troubling and enabling: as a vehicle which allows us to reimagine the contours of the ‘human’ and ways of living together in contemporary Western societies. Lorey further proposes that precarity might ‘form the starting point for political alliances against the logic of protection and security for some at the cost of many others’ (2015: 91). Following Lorey, I also approach precarity and precarization as instruments of hegemonic domination and as tools which might reconfigure new ways of maintaining human lives based on our shared precariousness (Lorey 2015: 11) and which might forge alliances against such practices. The above approaches articulate a hope for reanimating our collective responsibility vis-à-vis the life of the Other through paying particular attention to the conditions that render lives precarious. While on the one hand, precarity has become an object of consensus for prioritizing certain human lives over others and a tool for self-governance, on the other hand, it also implies interdependency and relationality and offers the opportunity for resignifying the tropes of responsibility, solidarity, value and care. In other words, precarity carries the promise to reinvent social relationships through the perception of human life as relational rather than autonomous and sovereign (Butler 2009:  32). Following Butler’s thinking, I view precarity as a vehicle that provides the space for reshaping identity politics for the twenty-first century and creating alliances against ‘state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit and distribute precarity’ (Butler 2009:  32). Butler’s emphasis on the political dimension of precarious life and its possibility to reanimate forms of collective responsibility is significant: although responsibility, or ‘responsibilization’, has been appropriated by neo-liberal discourse, it still presents an important element in the process of undoing the ‘I’ when faced with the affective force released by dispossessed human lives (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 105).

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The trope of responsibility is relevant to the theatre as it refers to practices of viewing and carries the promise that theatre might generate positive change beyond the aesthetic realm. In this light, it is also crucial to examine how theatre articulates a quest for responsibility vis-à-vis the life of the Other. As one of the book’s anchors, responsibility will be used as a metaphor for the ‘ability to respond’ to theatrical encounters with precarity. For this, I turn to affect theory which strongly connects to the politics of precarity and to the function of theatre’s capacity to shape its viewers’ perceptions through staging multiple encounters; in so doing, I explore ways in which the recent ‘affective turn’ might serve my analysis of the politics of precarity in the theatre. As Brian Massumi suggests, a ‘politics of affect’ captures ‘a dimension of life [ . . . ] which directly carries political valence’ (2015: vii). Indebted to Baruch Spinoza’s perception of affect as ‘the power “to affect and be affected” ’ (ix), Massumi is interested in how affect can be read as an encounter which instigates change and transition (2015:  viii–ix). In acknowledging the ‘significance of matter, materiality and the body’ (Pedwell and Whitehead 2012:  117), affect theory further shares strong affinities with feminist and queer theory and has been instrumental in shaping contemporary feminist thinking. As Anu Koivunen observes, since the 1990s ‘feminist scholars have turned to the question of affect and the topic of affectivity in search of a new critical vocabulary for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational’ (Koivunen 2010: 8). In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed notably highlights the political dimension of emotion as it ‘reanimates the relation between the subject and a collective’ (2004:  171). Butler’s examination of precarity also considers how the affective and the political intersect. Interlacing interdependency, action and affective response, she sees the body as ‘a social phenomenon’ that has the capacity to move bodies towards each other in order to act: ‘Must we, in fact, be overwhelmed to some degree in order to have motive for action? We only act when we are moved to act, and we are moved by something that affects us from the outside, from elsewhere, from the lives of others, imposing a surfeit that we act from and upon’ (Butler 2012: 136). In Dispossession:  The Performative in the Political, she and Athena

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Athanasiou look at how precarious lives might animate the desire for the political through an ‘affective politics of the performative’ (2013:  194) which recalibrates the appearance of human life beyond conventional regimes of visibility and recognizability. Butler’s particular interest in affect can be further evidenced by her discussion of the practices of grief and mourning and the affects released by ‘the differential distribution of grievability across populations [which] has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss and indifference’ (2009: 24). Similar to the different uses of precariousness and precarity, the term ‘affect’ is notoriously slippery and is often used interchangeably with emotion and feeling. The distinction between affect and emotion has generated some discussion;2 in this book, affect specifically refers to the intersections of the physiological, psychological and material experiences of relationality. Key to my discussion is Ahmed’s important work on the cultural politics of emotion; Ahmed specifically discusses the cognitive and physiological qualities of ‘impressions’: Forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be under an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on a surface’ (‘to leave an impression’). (2004: 6)

The work of emotions then suggests interdependency, relationality and movement towards or away from bodies and objects (Ahmed 2004: 3): ‘Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of “towardness” or “awayness” in relation to [  .  .  .  ] objects’ (Ahmed 2004: 8). In this sense, this book asks what impressions of human and non-human life does contemporary theatre impart on its audiences? What affective politics is released upon this encounter between representational frames and the audience’s experience? Echoing Ahmed’s understanding of affect as ‘sticky’, I  will also trace how precarity appears as a ‘sticky’ term in contemporary theatre and how it is implicated into economies and ecologies of affect.

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Precarity, theatre, politics I have so far argued that Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre makes a case for reading precarity as a political theatrical trope which carries the potential to reanimate our understanding of identity and the ‘human’ and our communal responsibility for the lives of Others against the backdrop of a spiralling uncertainty in the new millennium. In doing so, the book is also in dialogue with wider critical idioms and performances of the political within and beyond the theatre; in this sense, this study speaks to the field of theatre and politics, which features a significant body of work.3 As mentioned earlier, Ecologies of Precarity is particularly concerned with the political work of precarity vis-à-vis theatrical representation and regimes of visibility. Further, it aims to show how precarity offers a paradigm shift in viewing the politics of identity in the context of neo-liberalism. This intention chimes with Janelle Reinelt and Shirin Rai’s The Grammar of Politics and Performance which places particular emphasis on the importance of engaging with the ‘material and social structures of power and governance that politics has always been about’ (2015: 10) when addressing performance and politics. In discussing key grammars of politics and performance, Reinelt and Rai draw attention to the increasing appreciation by politics scholars of how ‘the interactions between performance and its reception generate politics’ and make a case about how identity is contingent upon performance’s regimes of appearance ‘to enact the roles that can be recognized and acclaimed as legitimate or illegitimate’ (2015: 14). Another strand of thinking in relation to the political in the theatre connects to ethics, aesthetics and politics – largely shaped by the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In his influential study Postdramatic Theatre, theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann made the case that theatre may render ‘visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception’ by means of ‘an aesthetic of responsibility (or response-ability)’ (2006:  185, emphasis in original). Following Lehmann, Nick Ridout’s Theatre and Ethics also discusses how ethics

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and politics become manifest in the context of postmodernity by particularly framing theatre as ‘an ethical encounter’ (2009:  54). In a similar vein, Joe Kelleher’s Theatre and Politics (2009) locates politics in the moment of the affective encounter facilitated by live performance and, particularly, in the ways in which theatrical representation stages the appearance of the human. The above considerations of theatre as an ethico-political terrain can be also located in other publications focusing on the intersections of theatre and politics in an age of uncertainty that Ecologies of Precarity engages with in different ways.4 In addition, the book is situated against a growing body of work which explicitly examines precarity in theatre and performance studies. Katharina Pewny was the first to extensively explore the nuances of the precarious on stage through her study on the ‘theatre of the precarious’ in Das Drama des Prekären (2011a) and successive publications; Pewny’s focus strongly connects to ethics and aesthetics and looks at how contemporary theatrical encounters expose spectators to the Other’s vulnerability (2014:  3). Following Pewny’s interest in the precarious, Mireia Aragay and Martin Middeke’s edited collection Of Precariousness:  Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21stCentury British Drama and  Theatre (2017) examines precariousness and contemporary British theatre from the perspectives of ethics and aesthetics; in addition to two journal issues focusing on the politics of precarity published in TDR (2012) and Women and Performance (2013), Alice O’Grady’s edited collection Risk, Participation and Performance Practice (2017) further considers precarity in the context of participatory performance. In expanding the above critical lenses, Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre is the first monograph that extensively looks at theatre’s engagement with precarity, affect and politics in British theatre through a feminist lens. In its understanding of theatre to mean a range of methodologies and aesthetics, the study examines precarity as an ecology cutting across various theatre practices and themes. For this reason, it does not seek to provide a survey of recent British theatre but rather aims to critically examine key case studies and focus

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on specific areas emerging from this work. Further, it seeks to capture the diversity of contemporary British theatre practice by drawing on an array of extant work that can be loosely classified as new writing and devised theatre which also borrows from the traditions of applied and verbatim theatre, dance and installation art. The book covers the span of over 20  years, drawing on several theatre productions staged in Britain between the early 1990s and 2016. The intention underpinning the choice to focus on British theatre is manifold: as Clare Finburgh also observes in her recent study on the representations of war on the British stage, British theatre offers an impressive terrain of diverse theatre practices (2017: 6). My perspective is further shaped by my own geographical location:  as a UK-based theatre scholar, I  have been able to closely observe the exponential increase of representations of precarity in British theatre. In this sense, the book is in dialogue with the wider field of British theatre studies without however suggesting that precarity is limited to this geographical location. As Pewny has shown, the precarious has been a common point of departure in theatre cutting across various international contexts with different foci according to region (2011b: 44). As many publications in the fields of British theatre regularly focus on London productions thus limiting the visibility of the range of work which takes place in the regions, Ecologies of Precarity also includes examples of theatre companies not based in London; this does not serve a tokenistic purpose but rather seeks to draw attention to manifestations of precarity against a wider canvas of the UK’s theatre ecology.5

Mapping Ecologies of Precarity The book begins with the chapter ‘Promises of Happiness and Cruel Optimisms:  Theatre in the 1990s’ which aims to trace connections between the surge of theatrical interest in precarity in the twentyfirst century and particular aesthetic and political developments in 1990s theatre. The chapter specifically engages with the tropes of

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‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011) and ‘promise of happiness’ (Ahmed 2010) and examines how these interlace with popular 1990s narratives of stability and security. Focusing on Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, Phyllis Nagy’s Never Land and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, the chapter shows how 1990s theatre reveals such assurances and fantasies of upward mobility and the good life as ‘cruel’ and precarious. By paying attention to shifts in political and aesthetic vocabularies, I  examine how 1990s theatre engaged with precarious life through a focus on intimacy, affect and indebtedness, themes that surfaced as key theatrical tropes in twenty-first-century theatre. In ‘Children and Young People at Risk’, I begin considering theatre examples from the early 2000s to the present which stage children as metaphors channelling contemporary anxieties about crisis, collapse and normality and troubling beliefs about the ‘human’. I  particularly look at how the trope of ‘children at risk’ stirs ethical trouble as they unsettle fundamental social structures and human relations. The chapter observes a marked increase in representations of children and young people at risk on the British stage written by male authors and discusses how this might interlace with wider discussions surrounding popular perceptions of ‘troubled’ masculinities and ideas about normality and attachments to bourgeois fantasies of the ‘good life’. To this end, the chapter examines Mike Bartlett’s My Child, Dennis Kelly’s Debris and Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. Children also appear as conduits that reanimate relationality through the affective fabric of grief and vulnerability. An analysis of Mojisola Adebayo’s Desert Boy specifically focuses on race and vulnerability while the chapter closes with an analysis of Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall and debbie tucker green’s random. Chapter  3, ‘ “A Glimpse into Some Other World”:  Imagining Slow Violence in the Age of the Anthropocene’, takes as its starting point Rob Nixon’s and Baz Kershaw’s call for reconceptualizing representational vocabularies that capture environmental risks in artistic forms. The chapter draws on Nixon’s understanding of ‘slow violence’ as a form that captures risks which remain invisible, and connects this to

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representations of dystopia and the impasse in Caryl Churchill’s Far Away and Alistair McDowall’s X. The chapter further focuses on Stan’s Cafe’s installation Of All the People in All the World as an example which engages audiences with the vibrant materiality of small things and ideas of interconnectedness and the non-human. The chapter also considers how theatre engages with environmental risks and the nonhuman. I  specifically examine the ways in which Transport Theatre’s The Edge traces the intersections of environmental precarity with forced displacement before shifting focus to how Simon McBurney’s and Complicite’s The Encounter applies pressure to how perceptions of the non-human might be amplified through proximity and intimacy. ‘Framing Human Rights’ follows from the previous chapter’s acute interest in frames of legibility of the non-human and examines the complexities of engaging with human rights in theatrical representation. The chapter reads Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero as an example which explores the effects of impressions of terror and regimes of appearance. The analysis of debbie tucker green’s hang proposes how ethical ambivalence, dissonance and astonishment operate as strategies to address questions of justice and forgiveness vis-à-vis precarious life. The final section shifts focus to the practice of politics of freedom and precarious life in theatre with reference to Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine and DV8’s Can We Talk about This?, applying pressure to the affective impact of dissent as a means to elicit responsibility. The final chapter, ‘(Dis)possession, Debt and Economies of Value’, departs from the idea of dispossession as a means to safeguard security and certainty and as an ontological category attached to life and determining its value. Dispossession is further put into dialogue with critical vocabularies on debt, value and care and asks how theatre responds to practices of defacement in order to reanimate the value of human life. The chapter initially focuses on the material fabrics of precarity and artistic labour by considering the theatre maker as a precarious worker and her relation to institutional regimes that reinforce her precarization. The chapter further explores ideas of justice and debt through an analysis of Stan’s Cafe’s The Just Price of Flowers to

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then shift attention to the intersection of dispossessions with gender and class; in so doing, I  discuss examples which separately focus on waste and masculinity (Leo Butler’s Boy) and female dispossession (Clean Break’s Joanne and The Paper Birds’ Broke). The chapter closes with a consideration of a resurgence of protest theatre which engages with the emergence of the precariat as a ‘new dangerous class’ with reference to work commissioned by Theatre Uncut. This book is then primarily concerned with representational practices and identity politics in contemporary theatre; in mapping the shift from the politics of the individual to the politics of the collective, it looks at precarity as a means to forge political alliances and to intervene in dominant regimes of appearance that render precarious lives disposable.

1

Promises of Happiness and Cruel Optimisms: Theatre in the 1990s

Berlin, 9 November 2009. The celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall are in full swing. Two kilometres of eightfeet dominoes are lined up between Brandenburg gate and Potsdamer Platz where the wall once stood and are about to fall on the ground symbolically capturing the final moments of the collapse of the boundary between West and East Germany and the end of the Cold War. On the one hand, this domino effect enacts the ghost of a promise which refers back to familiar ‘postwar optimism for democratic access to the good life’ (Berlant 2011: 3): the promise of progress and happiness and their inextricable connection to values of prosperity, democracy, freedom and capitalism. At the same time, this symbolic gesture also acts as a sign of the rapid collapse of the same values during the years of the post-2008 global fiscal crisis. I would like to begin this chapter by thinking about this moment of widespread elation and hope in 1989 Europe in order to trace the development and expansion of this promise of happiness and optimism throughout the 1990s decade: the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 consolidated the dream of a United Europe, signalling a common and secure future of progress and prosperity for its member states; in a UK context, the arrival of Tony Blair’s New Labour and its promises of happiness, politics of well-being (Evans 2017) and aspiration narratives marks this period as one of ‘relative peace and stability in the West’ (Eldridge 2003:  55). With hindsight knowledge of how such hopes would later be severely challenged, this chapter is concerned with how British theatre stages those ‘fantasies for the good life’, that is, ‘upward

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mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ (Berlant 2011: 3) as ‘cruel’ and precarious. This period has been well documented by several theatre scholars who have widely examined the political dimensions of work produced during the 1990s. Placed alongside this framework, this chapter traces connections between the politics and ecologies of precarity discussed throughout the book and 1990s British theatre’s ‘affective turn’. I  am not arguing that theatre in Britain prior to this time did not engage with ideas of precarious life; rather, it is my view that this ‘affective turn’ suggests a more concerted move towards revealing the cracks and failures of narratives of optimism and lures of security and stability brought by  a neo-liberal capitalist bonanza. Most importantly, 1990s theatre paid close attention to dimensions of precarious life which became increasingly pronounced in the theatre of the new millennium: vulnerability and relationality, risk, intimacy, dispossession and indebtedness. Margaret  Thatcher’s promotion of the politics of the individual and the promise of change brought by the New Labour Party and subsequent government under Tony Blair (1997–2007) constitute chief lynchpins in theatrical explorations of precarious life and the failures of neo-liberalism. The advent of Cool Britannia as an instrument of prestige and a consensus of happiness was often critiqued by theatre practitioners who pointed at the precarious realities hidden underneath the façade of prosperity. The following sections will probe this theatrical and political landscape in more detail by particularly focusing on three selected examples: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), Phyllis Nagy’s Never Land (1998) and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker (1994). These examples have been chosen for their particular negotiation of intimacy, debt and ownership and will enable me to lay the groundwork for beginning to understand some of the key anchors of the book. Approaching each case study through a variety of analytical frameworks, this chapter also illustrates the range of approaches that are used in the book in discussing precarity and theatre. As one of its key intentions, the chapter revisits the 1990s as a key precursor in the proliferation of theatrical representations of precarity

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in millennial theatre; for this reason, I turn to in-yer-face theatre and 1990s feminist politics.

Cruel Britannia, affect and intimate politics In 1996, Newsweek Magazine’s journalist Stryker McGuire famously announced the return of the Swinging Sixties in London using the term ‘Cool Britannia’ to describe London as the world’s ‘coolest’ capital. The worldwide popularity of Britpop, the launching of Eurostar, the newly born clubbing scene and the entrepreneurial activities of immigrants who opened restaurants and saturated the market with international food brought London closer to the world and turned it into a centre of attention; London no longer attracted tourists only for its landmarks, but also for its nightlife and music scene (Midgley and Whitworth 1996) as well as its multicultural vibe. The ‘marriage of avant-garde and commerce’ (Urban 2004: 358), one of the anchors of the new and alternative face of Britain, was advertised to the rest of the world; by the mid-1990s, London had turned ‘hip’ again and became a global city turning Britishness into ‘Britain’s favoured fetish’ (Urban 2004: 355). The above briefly capture the impression that the hype of Cool Britannia left on the world in the 1990s. Most importantly however, Cool Britannia also played a key role in rebranding Britishness (Werther 2011) as it became ‘the potent symbol of an economically strong and culturally confident nation’ (Banks 2006: 50). According to social anthropologist Marcus Banks, the Cool Britannia trope helped to revive traditional nationalism which, from the late 1990s onwards, and due to the ‘successive waves of Islamophobia, combined with warfare in the Balkans, the military interventions in Afghanistan and the Gulf ’ and ‘the rise in numbers of asylum seekers’, was given ‘new shape and force’ (2006: 56). In this climate, Tony Blair and New Labour appropriated London’s ‘coolness’ and refashioned themselves as the spearheads of a new era. As Urban notes, ‘Blair wanted new Labour and cool Britannia to become synonymous’ (2004:  355). Blair’s victory in

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1997 was achieved by a rebranding of the party’s name as ‘New Labour’, an indicator of change much needed after 18 years of Tory government. According to McGuire, this victory was underpinned by a popular desire for change:  ‘Blair seemed like just the ticket to guide postimperial, post-industrial, post-cold war, post-modern, post-Thatcher Britain into the 21st century’ (2009). This optimism about change and Britain’s future overshadowed the affinities between New Labour’s policies and discourse and those of the New Right; for many critics, New Labour did not embark on changing New Right’s policies but rather extended them by embracing ‘monetarism, globalization, privatization’ (Gottlieb 2003:  14). The politics of the ‘Third Way’, a popular end-of-century political direction in the spirit of Anthony Giddens’s The Third Way (1998) adopted by Blair, proposed a ‘progressive alternative to the worn-out dogmas of traditional liberalism and conservatism’ (Genz 2006: 333) and further blurred the boundaries between Left and Right. In other words, New Labour promoted ‘a promising middle way between soulless capitalism and softheaded socialism’ (McGuire 2002) and, as Stuart Hall describes, transformed ‘social democracy into a particular variant of free market neo-liberalism’ (Hall cited in Mouffe 2005: 61). New Labour politics also obscured the implications of Britain’s involvement in several wars as part of NATO: First Gulf War, Sierra Leone, Bosnian War, the Chechen War and Kosovan intervention (Adiseshiah 2009: 200). Blair’s ‘Third Way’ approach shares ground with post-feminism which  placed emphasis on individual choice and empowerment. The 1990s post-feminist turn significantly compromised the force of past socialist feminist politics while facilitating the rise of laddism and relegating second-wave feminism to the ‘f ’ word that no longer reflects the concerns of the new generation (Whelehan 2000: 15–16).1 Considering the negative implications of post-feminism regarding the work produced and written by women in the theatre, Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge argue: ‘The media’s promotion of a “post-feminist” era has probably not helped matters, giving theatre

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managements license to drop their guard against an over-emphasis of the male dramatic voice’ (Stephenson and Langridge 1997: xii). In addition to the decline of feminist theatre voices, shifts in funding policies during the 1980s and 1990s further changed theatre ecologies both in terms of conditions of production and audience viewing. Thatcherism and the New Right paved the way for an individualist, utilitarian ethos that was shaping the economic and cultural landscape of the country: the Arts Council’s 1980s funding cuts left theatre’s future in the hands of private sponsors while audiences were increasingly treated as consumers (Kershaw 2008:  314). The emergence of the creative industries under New Labour and the subsequent instrumentalization of the arts to serve particular business models further promoted arts and culture ‘as instruments of government policy’ (Tomlin 2015:  6).2 The arrival of private sponsorship created a mixed model of funding allowing theatres such as the Royal Court (particularly during Stephen Daldry’s tenure) to invest in and capitalize on the cult of new writing which was revitalized throughout the 1990s. Towards the end of the decade, British theatre was widely commodified and distinctions between ‘public, commercial and fringe’ which dominated post-war British drama begun to erode (Sierz 2003: 37). Under the auspices of artistic directors and literary managers, new writing became an industry in its own right (Bolton 2012), and several new writing voices emerged on the British stage attracting younger audiences and outperforming adaptations, revivals and Shakespearian plays (Sierz 2003: 35–36). It is for this reason that this period is referred to as the ‘new golden age’ of post-war British drama (Saunders 2008: 1). From the above, it becomes clear that 1990s British theatre underwent a process of redefining its political and aesthetic identity. This chapter then explores how shifts in the political in the theatre become pronounced through an emphasis on affect and the revelation of ruptures in narratives of optimism. Ruptures with happiness narratives and past certainties, further fuelled by conditions of precarity and uncertainty, I argue, urged theatre makers to explore new ways of creative and political expression. Despite the optimism in the future of

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British theatre and particularly new writing, several writers articulated deeper existential and social anxieties which challenged the hegemony of Cool Britannia; theatre critic Benedict Nightingale described them as ‘Thatcher’s disoriented children [ . . . ] troubled by the helplessness and unhappiness they see all around’ (1998: 20). In capturing the 1990s new writing zeitgeist, Aleks Sierz coined the term ‘in-yer-face’ theatre which signified ‘a radical break, with the past’ (Sierz 2008: 25) and a ‘new form of politics’ (Saunders 2008: 6). Influenced by the politics of the individual ethos and the promotion of the cult of the solo playwright, politics in the theatre shifted from an explicitly socialist agenda to a focus on the experiential and the intimate. General evaluations and definitions of the political in the context of 1990s British theatre often revolve around the focus on ‘micro-narratives’ (Saunders 2008: 3) and a response to the loss of faith in social movements and the crisis of collectivity (Kritzer 2008:  24–25). Such shifts have been met with a certain degree of scepticism particularly in relation to theatre’s apparent abandonment of historical readings of the present (Gottlieb 2008), its lack of anger and intention to challenge audiences (Ansorge 1997: 140) and a ‘politically denatured theatre’ which questions the possibility of political change (Saunders 2008: 4, 6). On the other hand, scholars have made a case for looking at theatre work since the 1990s as a ‘multilayered political’ (Tomlin 2015:  75) preoccupied with ‘a postmodern crisis of identity and a consequent anxiety about the inefficacy of theatre in an age shaped by mass-mediated cultural forms’ (Tomlin 2008: 499); the perspective of their liquid dramaturgical structures which capture contemporary uncertainties (Grochala 2017); and the recalibration of documentary theatre whose dramaturgies of witnessing ‘retrieve a sense of the complexity of issues that have been too easily turned into digestible headlines’ (Megson 2005: 371). My intention here is to probe theatre’s fascination with the private and intimacy as a form of politics; during the 1990s, the humanities and social sciences articulated an interest in intimacy and its connections to narratives of human life, vulnerability and happiness:  ‘intimacy’s potential failure to stabilize closeness’, Berlant explains, is ‘making the

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very attachments deemed to buttress “a life” seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability’ (1998: 282). Intimacy also interlaces with sexual politics; in the theatre, this can be evidenced by the advent of several gay and queer plays on mainstream stages during the 1990s:  playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill, Phyllis Nagy and Jonathan Harvey explicitly focused their energies on the exploration of intimacy in (homo)sexual relations which were presented in venues such as the Royal Court Theatre and the West End.3 With reference to ‘in-yer-face theatre’, Sierz notes the appearance of ‘images of violated intimacy’ (2001: 233) and infers to their connection to human life:  ‘Because in-yer-face theatre is about intimate subjects, it touches what is both most central to our humanity and most often hidden in our daily behaviour’ (2001: 9). In this vein, 1990s theatrical emphasis on the private taps into an intimate politics or a politics of intimacy which collapses the boundary between the private and the public and recalibrates identity through a sharp focus on vulnerability and relationality. This intimate politics is driven by an investment in affective engagement.4 The 1990s allegedly saw the revitalization of the 1950s ‘politics of anger’ which responded to cruel optimisms and global precarities. As Elaine Aston observes, ‘In British theatre during the 1990s, [  .  .  .  ] the experiential became a by-word for “in-yer-face” theatre: the “shock fest” of violent, taboo breaking drama by a new wave of angry young men, and just a handful of young women’ (2010: 580).5 David Eldridge attributes this anger to the shattering of ‘youthful optimism’: A generation that had grown up in the UK fearing the five-minute warning, watching the Berlin Wall come down, that had experimented with E and club culture, was finding a voice. This generation had had its youthful optimism pickled by the new horrors that visited their imaginations in the shape of the atrocities in the Balkans and by a sense of outrage at the erosion of the UK’s notion of community and society by the mean-spirited Thatcher regency and Major malaise. We responded to that shifting culture with dismay and anger. (Eldridge 2003: 55)

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Echoing Eldridge, several playwrights of the time noted the experiential impetus in their work and the role of emotions in capturing rupture and life’s vulnerability. In discussing her work’s portrayal of despair and brutality, Sarah Kane has drawn an explicit connection between the experiential and political action: ‘if we experience something through art, then we might be able to change our future, because experience engraves lessons on our hearts through suffering, whereas speculation leaves us untouched’ (Kane 1997:  133). Anthony Neilson has emphasized the importance of making audiences feel: ‘I’ve always felt that theatre should have a real visceral effect on the audience . . . I’m not really interested in being known as a great writer. I’m more interested in ensuring that people’s experience in the theatre is an interesting or surprising one’ (cited in Reid 2008:  489). In his essay ‘A Tear in the Fabric’, Mark Ravenhill has also attributed shifts in his creative direction to wider structures of feeling that impacted 1990s British society following the brutal murder of two-year-old James Bulger by ten-year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson in 1993: Somehow I now felt that the existing plays just weren’t right, that they wouldn’t do anymore. Not so much that they weren’t good [ . . . ] But that somehow something had shifted, that a tear in the fabric had happened when Venables and Thompson took hold of Bulger’s hand. [ . . . ] I [ . . . ] suddenly felt the need to, try to write differently, write within the fracture that happened to me  – and I  think the society around me – in 1993. (2004: 310)

As already discussed in the book’s introduction, a useful lens to examine the above theatrical focus on affect is Lehmann’s analysis of the tattered relationship between the stage and the auditorium or between ‘image’ and ‘receiver’ and the possibilities of an ‘aesthetic of responsibility or response-ability’ (2006:  185, emphasis in original); in a UK context, this ‘broken thread’ between the image and receiver can be seen as the corollary of the ‘caesura of the media society’ (Lehmann 2006:  22) and postemotionalism (Meštrović 1997) further buttressed by a long period of fierce individualism which downplays emotions

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such as compassion in favour of a parochial and insular understanding of care. In contrast, 1990s plays propose an ethical reading of such affective complexities. Ken Urban (2008) considers in-yer-face theatre’s emphasis on nihilism as a form of ethics; he particularly locates this ‘ethical nihilism’ in the treatment of cruelty which articulates a critique to the narratives of Cool Britannia. This propensity to nihilism constitutes, according to Urban, ‘an affect of hopelessness and an ethical stance where change comes from destruction’ (2008: 44). Following Urban’s definition, nihilism bears a paradoxical status as it both expresses a negative affective attachment while also occupying an ethico-political ground. I here propose to look at precarity as a wider framework that expresses cruel attachments and 1990s optimism; like nihilism, precarity at once evokes negative connotations and the possibility for change: while constituting a discourse of consensus for prioritizing certain human lives over others, it also creates an aperture for reconceptualizing interdependency and relationality and promotes an ethics or response-ability. In line with Aston’s critique above, I refrain from exclusively focusing on 1990s dramatic experientialism through ‘in-yer-face’ aesthetics and rather consider precarity as a trope that extends beyond restrictive labels. However, as this chapter has already acknowledged the need to revisit in-yer-face  theatre and its connections with precarity, the following section examines an iconic example of ‘in-yer-face’ sensibility.

On ow(n)ing: Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking In The Dark Side of Prosperity: Late Capitalism’s Culture of Indebtedness, Mark Horsley considers ‘consumer indebtedness in the context of a new cultural ethos that ties the individual’s sense of security, purpose and “happiness” to the financially mediated possibility of solipsistic enjoyment and instant gratification’ (Horsley 2016:  8). The tropes Horsley associates with consumer indebtedness appear as

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key anchors in Mark Ravenhill’s iconic play Shopping and Fucking. Premiering at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1996, Shopping established Ravenhill as a compelling new voice.6 Replete with references to the loss of a sociopolitical and moral compass and the rise and dominance of instrumentalism, alienation and cruel individualism, the play appears to be presenting a treatise on postmodern theory such as the ‘death of the grand narratives’ (Lyotard 1984) and the rise of the micronarratives, postmodernism or ‘the logic of late capitalism’ (Jameson 1991). It is for this reason theatre scholars have variably analysed the play as a commentary on globalization and postmodernity (Rebellato 2001; Wallace 2005; Ravenhill 2006), an expression of mourning the loss of class struggle (Edgar 2005) while others have placed emphasis on its gender politics and queer sensibility (Wyllie 2009; Shellard 2000; Sierz 2001; Saunders 2012).7 I  would like to extend those readings in order to examine how Ravenhill’s debut play further captures the affective fabrics of love, intimacy and indebtedness and how these become manifest in the context of consumer capitalism. Shopping features Robbie, Mark and Lulu, a company of oddballs who struggle to belong and survive in a world where love and social relationships have been reduced to economies of ownership and consumerist transactions. In portraying unhomely environments which fail to provide certainty and security to their occupants, the play is driven by a desire for a father figure who carries the promise to fulfil the characters’ hopes for upward mobility. Mark takes on this role as the one who ‘owns’ Lulu and Robbie; however, he soon leaves them and embarks on a personal journey of detachment from feelings of intimacy. In the absence of someone looking after them, Lulu and Robbie are now ‘adopted’ by Brian who becomes their cruel patron and asks them to carry out various tasks which would test their reliability and commitment. At the same time, Mark eventually betrays his aspirations of freeing himself from feelings of attachment, love and intimacy and falls for Gary, a fourteen-year-old teenager yearning for an older man who will fulfil his desire for happiness.

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For its twentieth anniversary, the play was revived at the Lyric Hammersmith, very much alluding to its original 1990s social contexts, particularly through its music references and glossy set. The production accurately captured the realities of excess dominating Western societies at the end of the millennium and the 1990s new world order marked by the consolidation of free market reign. Sean Holmes’s production playfully engaged with its audiences who were constantly reminded of their role as theatre consumers.8 In the spirit of an ironic selfreferentiality, the play was rebranded as a Cool Britannia product,9 while behind the glossy veneer it communicated a deep concern about precarious subjectivities. In the program notes, Ravenhill connects Shopping to wider constructions of images of the dispossessed on film, theatre and TV since the 1960s and 1970s: ‘And it was possible, if you squinted a bit – to see my play as belonging to the Cathy Come Home tradition’ (Ravenhill 2016: n.p.). In Shopping, the subject’s dispossession from agency is reinforced by mechanisms of debt which shape neo-liberal subjectivities and renegotiate power structures; with the transition from industrialFordist to financial-post-Fordist economies, new forms of social relationships and subjectivities based on debt and credit emerge. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato defines this type of subjectivity as homo debitor, the ‘indebted man’ (2012: 30) governed by specific biopolitical power relations between creditor and debtor. Endemic in this form of subjectivity are a set of moral codes and asymmetrical power relations while ‘labour’ requires ‘work on the self ’. Lazzarato highlights the significance of this type of subjectivity as ‘the “commodity” that goes into the production of all other commodities’ (2012: 34). In this configuration, ‘social rights [ . . . ] are transformed into social debt and private debt, and beneficiaries into debtors whose repayment means adopting prescribed behaviour’ (2012: 130). The above debt mechanisms appear in Shopping through the portrayal of father-figure Brian who embodies debt’s biopolitical power: from his position as creditor, he performs the role of an omniscient God who

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uses metaphors and a moralizing discourse in training Lulu and Mark to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self ’ (Lazzarato 2012: 39): Brian [ . . . ] Civilisation is money. Money is civilisation. And civilization – how did we get there? By war, by struggle, kill or be killed. And money – is the same thing, you understand? The getting is cruel, is hard, but the having is civilization. Then we are civilized. Say it. Say it with me. Money is . . . SAY IT. Money is . . . Lulu and Robbie Civilisation. Brian Yes. Yes. I’m teaching. You’re learning. (Ravenhill 2016: 87)

This performance of the creditor–debtor relation strongly alludes to a dysfunctional parent–child relationship which undercuts the child’s normal development towards autonomy and independence. Further, the connections between cruelty, possession and civilization Ravenhill draws gesture towards an empty moralizing which disaggregates the human from humanity. In his essay ‘On Violence’, Edward Bond notes

Figure 1 Ashley McGuire as Brian in Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (directed by Sean Holmes, Lyric Hammersmith, London, 2016) reproduced with kind permission from © Helen Murray

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how capitalism dispenses with human dignity:  ‘Violence occurs in situations of injustice. It is caused not only by physical threats, but even more significantly by threats to human dignity. That is why, in spite of all the physical benefits of affluence, violence flourishes under capitalism’ (Bond 2011:  13). Shopping captures the core of Bond’s statement by showing the cruel mechanisms through which Lulu and Robbie are stripped of their human dignity to succeed. Lulu’s successful search for employment depends on ‘working on the self ’ by first devaluing her training as an actress:  when first interviewed by Brian, she is asked to strip while reciting a monologue from Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Upon failing to pass their first test (i.e., to sell ecstasy pills for £3,000), Brian threatens Robbie and Lulu with severe physical punishment; in order to repay their debt, they start selling phone sex. Further, the moral values that Brian wants to instil to his debtors strip them from a desire to act responsibly. When Lulu is confronted by Robbie for disconnecting their phones, she confesses that in one of the phone calls, someone was getting aroused by a video of a young girl behind a convenience store counter who was being attacked with a blade: ‘I just wanted to eat a meal . . . without all that [ . . . ] I can’t stand it. In my head’ (Ravenhill 2016: 60). As spectators already know, this was the same incident Lulu had witnessed a few days earlier: instead of trying to help, her immediate reaction was to leave the scene after stealing a bar of chocolate because nobody could stop her (Ravenhill 2016: 30). This ethical disorientation is further pronounced in Robbie’s wellknown speech about the loss of certainties and grand narratives which brings questions of relationality, responsibility and precarious life into sharp focus: I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big that you could live your whole life in them. [ . . . ] But they all die or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them so now we’re all making up our own stories. Little stories. It comes out in different ways. But we’ve each got one. (Ravenhill 2016: 66)

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Read against 1990s postemotionalism (Meštrović 1997), Shopping draws particular attention to the exhaustion of emotions and the desire for visceral experience that would urge somebody moving ‘beside oneself ’. Following Meštrović, David Riesman explains that living in a postemotional society means that individuals do not react to what, in an earlier era, would have been stirring occurrences and crises. Rather, individuals have become blasé, allergic to involvement, yet intelligent enough to know that the events are significant, and perhaps even to know that in an earlier era individuals would have responded with deep emotional empathy, or equally deep emotional antipathy, to particular individuals, and to the events surrounding them. (Riesman 1997: ix)

While Shopping responds to emotional disengagement and the exhaustion of empathy and compassion following a long period of conservative politics, it further applies pressure to how happiness (and the desire for it) appears precarious. In Scene 7, Robbie and Lulu are in the hospital after Robbie has been injured while selling ecstasy pills in a club. Robbie tries to capture the sensations he was experiencing when being high on ecstasy which offered him a different perception of the world: If you’d felt . . . I felt. I was looking down on this planet. Spaceman over this earth. And I see this kid in Rwanda, crying, but he doesn’t know why. [ . . . ] And I see the suffering. And the wars. And the grab, grab, grab. And I think: Fuck Money. Fuck it. This selling. This buying. This system. Fuck this bitchin world and lets be . . . beautiful. Beautiful and happy. (Ravenhill 2016: 39)

This lucid and profound vision of the world soon proves cruel and fragile; Robbie’s aspirations for true happiness and beauty are crashed as he is assaulted by someone who wants more ecstasy pills. Happiness and cruelty are further deeply implicated in relations of intimacy. For Berlant, it is the family, or ‘the lone institution of reciprocity’ which is presented as a ‘fantasy to attach to’ (2011:  168). Shopping replaces traditional family structures with a focus on love and

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dependency;  the need for love eventually becomes a key referent in the characters’ intimate exchanges. According to David Ian Rabey, the play ‘rebrands love as dependency’ (2003:  202) as the characters become particularly dependent on each other for food, money and sex (with Lulu being the one responsible for feeding Robbie and Mark with microwaveable food). For Caridad Svich, Ravenhill’s preoccupation with love acts as ‘a plea for a world in which love can transcend the violence and hatred of a society that has been run into the ground by the consumerist values of a wayward class’ (2003:  82). Nevertheless, Shopping clearly inscribes love and intimacy as cruel attachments which fail to transcend consumerist values. This is best exemplified through the portrayal of Gary who has become strongly attached to the fantasy of been discovered by ‘a rich bloke’ (Ravenhill 2016: 26) who will provide him with a secure and prosperous life. Gary’s optimism in encountering someone who will protect him collides with his precarious past and future: his desire for security, intimacy and comfort first shuttered by his sexual abuse by his stepfather, will remain unfulfilled. This realization propels him to desire his own death in order to free himself from his unhappiness: ‘I’ve got this unhappiness. This big sadness swelling like it’s gonna burst. I’m sick and I’m never going to be well’ (Ravenhill 2016:  85). This final act of Gary’s murder is presented as another transaction which will help Lulu and Robbie to pay off their debt and achieve independence from Brian. Nevertheless, it is Mark who once more destroys their chances to gain independence as he is the one who releases Gary from his misery and kills him. For Mark, this becomes an (unorthodox) gesture of care and love permeated by cruelty which yet also releases him from his emotional dependency on Gary. The play is written in a linear realist and episodic form which has been compared to a modern tragedy. Elizabeth Kuti argues that alongside Kane’s Blasted, Shopping reinvigorates tragedy in the context of contemporary culture:  ‘Ravenhill’s tragedy plays out against the context of the decadent self-interest of Thatcher’s Britain, the consumerism of the 1980s and its fetishization of shopping and money’ (Kuti 2008: 464). Where Kuti draws detailed connections with

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dramaturgical elements from classical tragedy, it is also significant to pay attention to the play’s dialogue with what Berlant names ‘situation tragedy’ (2011:  176), an artistic form whereby ‘people are fated to express their flaws episodically, over and over, without learning, changing, being relieved, or becoming better, or dying’ (2011:  177). This is made particularly visible in the play’s final scene when Mark completes the story about his first encounter with Lulu and Robbie he begins narrating at the start of the play: the story takes place in a dystopian future set in 3000 AD, after the Earth has been destroyed yet humanity has survived carrying the same rules of ownership and exploitation. In this post-human world, someone decides to free his ‘mutant’ slave who yet does not know what to do with his freedom: ‘Please. I’ll die. I don’t know how to . . . I can’t feed myself. I’ve been a slave all my life. I’ve never had a thought of my own. I’ll be dead in a week’ (Ravenhill 2016: 90). This absence of meaningful change is pronounced at the end of the play when characters take turns feeding each other with microwavable food: this scene might be read as bearing the hope of relationality through intimacy; the characters have not achieved their aspirations but they yet experience a temporary and precarious moment of belonging to a ‘normal’ community or a family. Nevertheless, this false sense of normality expresses a ‘collective will to imagine oneself as a solitary agent who can and must live the good life promised by capitalist culture’ (Berlant 2011:  167) where any hope about reinventing the human proves precarious. Instead of offering the idea of moving forward, the characters remain static in an infantile dependency which carries on ‘feeding’ the same capitalist system. Echoing Berlant, the play’s optimism for the future is very much predicated on cruel attachments to fantasies that have proven destructive, yet still persist. Read against the backdrop of the 1990s promise of prosperity and coolness, Shopping paints the nation as ruptured and lacking solidarity and care. Applying pressure to the politics of possession and indebtedness, Ravenhill shows how intimacy, relationality and happiness can threaten the conditions that sustain human life.

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Cruel attachments: Phyllis Nagy, Never Land American-born playwright Phyllis Nagy has been considered part of the 1990s ‘in-yer-face’ sensibility, particularly for the disturbing emotional core of her 1994 play Butterfly Kiss (Sierz 2001). Albeit not belonging to the generation of ‘Thatcher’s children’, Nagy’s theatre responds to the uncertainty and disillusionment brought by New Right discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. As I have examined at greater length elsewhere,10 her work is also driven by an acute interest in feminism: responding to the dangers of dominant 1990s post-feminist discourses, her politics is mostly aligned with British feminist theatre. Nagy primarily dramatizes conflicts between the individual and fixed ideas of community in order to explore different ways of relationality. More often than not, this tension is illustrated in the context of the family unit, a crucial component in New Right discourse, and the site in which fantasies of the good life are performed; Nagy’s central characters, mostly female and/or gay, strive for autonomy from strict familial ties and capitalist structures and explore alternative means of identity and community belonging. In doing so, Nagy has variably explored the limits and excesses of love and intimacy; her 1992 debut play Weldon Rising contemplated the possibilities of vulnerability and grief to mobilize a community of alienated gay and lesbian neighbours in New York’s meat-packing district; in Butterfly Kiss (1994), a daughter kills her mother as an act of love. With her final play Never Land (1998), Nagy problematizes kinship ties, gender and nation relations and particularly how they operate as ‘an oppressive “block” to identity’ (Aston 2003: 123). This section will consider Never Land’s negotiation of gender, nation and bourgeois identities as cruel attachments. If ‘optimism manifests in attachments and the desire to sustain them’ (Berlant 2011:  13), I  examine how Nagy’s play shutters assumptions about their role as purveyors of stability. Commissioned by Jenny Topper, Never Land was performed under the auspices of a new theatre company called The Foundry at Ambassadors Theatre in 1998. Never Land takes place in the south of

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France, including French and English characters. The plot revolves around a French family: Henri and Anne Joubert and their daughter Elizabeth. The Jouberts are visited by the Caton-Smiths, an English bourgeois couple who spend half a year in southern France and who have promised to help Henri to achieve his dream by appointing him manager of their Bristol bookshop. In seeking to fulfil Henri’s dream and despite their financial insecurity, the Jouberts have put themselves in debt to make a good impression: they spend their entire wages on making expensive English-style suits for Henri; in the end, Anne has to sell their food in order to buy silk for his new suit. When the Bristol plans fail to materialize, Henri, at his daughter’s prompting, shoots his family in their home. The play ends with the sound of the shotgun that has been pointing towards Anne, and it is implied that Henri will also commit suicide. The play interlaces nationalism with marriage, family and home, in ways that resonate with Benedict Anderson’s proposition to treat nation as ‘imagined’ and nationalism ‘as if it belonged with “kinship” and “religion”, rather than with liberalism and fascism’ (1991: 5). As Michael Billig observes, Anderson’s hugely influential understanding of nation as ‘imagined’ implies a ‘strong psychological dimension’ of nationalism (1995: 10); this affective dimension of nation fosters a series of cruel emotional attachments through a range of banal activities. The Jouberts’ ardent desire to belong to England, not Britain, is expressed by their limited performances of national identity, that is, through fetishizing English language and other culturally specific symbols. The choice of family names (Henri, Anne and Elizabeth) strongly alludes to seminal English historical figures whereas Elizabeth has visions of Queen Mary and is fond of English composer Henry Purcell. Due to his passionate attachment and admiration for everything English, Henri has insisted that his family and friends converse in perfect Received Pronunciation (RP). His performativity of Englishness is also highlighted by further symbolic acts:  he wears ‘a conservative English-style suit’ (Nagy 1998:  10), pretends to be drinking tea instead of wine and wants to go fox-hunting; he worships good manners and forbids his family to

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swear, and he loves performing scenes from the well-known English 1980s comedy series Fawlty Towers. Jen Harvie warns that ‘national identity can be oppressive when for example it is seen as homogeneous, superior, and/or unchanging and it acts to exclude or oppress minorities or perceived “others” or to restrict cultural change’ (2005:  2). Never Land’s representation of an intransigent style of imagining nationhood problematizes how banal feelings of love towards the nation might transform into hate: according to Ahmed, love may become the emotion that mobilizes right-wing discourses and practices which wish to ‘defend the nation against others’ (2004: 122). For Ahmed, this transformation of love towards the self to hate towards Others ultimately works as a protection mechanism for the public body’s assumed vulnerability and risk in the face of the stranger/Other. This hate is particularly articulated by Henri who fears anything that cannot be identified as white bourgeois English:  he is convinced that their house has been invaded by gypsies who have eaten their food, highlighting his intolerance of minority groups who live a nomadic life: ‘Thieves and vandals. Gypsies. Filthy gypsy tribes from the railway station. They sneak in across the Italian border from San Remo. Think they’ve got the run of the place’ (Nagy 1998: 34). He also perceives Elizabeth’s black American boyfriend to embody ‘the menace’: not only is he not English but he is also a working-class AfroAmerican immigrant who travels back and forth between England and southern France to make a living. Henri’s patriarchal and xenophobic discourse is further fuelled by his racial and class prejudice:  ‘MY DAUGHTER WILL NOT MARRY A  NIGGER AMERICAN SHIT CLEANER. MY DAUGHTER IS FIT FOR A  PRINCE OR A  KING’ (1998: 49). Elizabeth’s resistance to her father’s cruel attachments to bourgeois notions of security becomes manifest through her attempts to embrace fluidity. In the play’s opening sequence, Elizabeth meditates on the idea of freedom from a limited geographical space; she is bathing in a tub resembling a coffin or a cot (Clapp 1998: 44), which highlights the enclosure of her fluid identity within the confines of the family

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home. Elizabeth’s dreams of escaping her paternal home are hindered by her father who does not tolerate fluidity: when he sees her bathing in the living room at 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning, he asks her to get dressed and be ‘decent’ (Nagy 1998:  10) and throws the water out of the house. Despite her fascination with the idea of being ‘homefree’ (Nagy 1998:  26), Elizabeth is not ready to move beyond kinship ties that require her to get married in order to leave home. Her relationship with her fiancé is that of mutual interest resting on a precarious balance: Michael discloses the real financial motives behind his interest in Elizabeth while their sexual relationship is shown to be of an abusive nature; such attachments reveal not only the ‘violent exchange of women in matters of romance, love and marriage’ (Aston 2003:  124) but also the precarious nature of intimacy. The feeling of ‘being stuck’ in time and space becomes one of the tropes of Never Land. The play directly alludes to Peter Pan – the boy who ‘never grew up’ – and gestures towards Henri’s failure to make a transition to adulthood; further, the inference to Never Land as a space of utopia alludes to the thin border between utopia and dystopia as Henri’s desire will never be fulfilled within cruel structures. In Never Land, the past plays an important role in shaping Henri’s identity. His desire of escape and aspirations for upward mobility can be traced in his childhood, during which he wanted to leave his home and the ‘stench’ of his father’s fishing boat (Nagy 1998: 67); despite his struggle to repudiate his past and move on, he is still haunted by it: ‘The menace. It is all around me’ (Nagy 1998: 75). This entrapment is underscored by the performance’s fixed set representing the family home which appears to suffocate the characters. In Act 2, Nagy shifts the action from the Jouberts’ house to Henri’s workplace, the perfumery, but this is still set in the same static space: Nagy makes clear that this change of setting should be indicated only ‘by means of a magnificent perfume vat placed within the setting used for the Jouberts’ home. The effect ought to be one of an inability to escape: no matter how far from home Henri yearns to be, he can never leave it behind and is metaphorically (and literally) surrounded by it’ (1998: 57).

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Despite the shattering of Henri’s utopia, escapism and ‘the desire for a home from home’ (Sierz 2001: 52) are reconfigured in the end. In contrast to Henri’s limited imagining of identity and belonging, the Jouberts’ violent and precarious exit paradoxically captures a desire for more imaginative and less ‘cruel’ attachments. The Jouberts’ death can be read as a token of courage ‘to transcend the lack of imagination they are surrounded by’ (Nagy 1999:  29) and a transgressive performative act which releases the family from Henri’s nationalist ideals and oppressive relations of debt. After selling all their belongings, Anne feels liberated: ‘We have no food my love, and there’s no hint of any to come. But we are moving. Listen. Listen to the waves’ (Nagy 1998: 94). Briefly touching on the play’s politics, Graham Saunders argues that Never Land portrays ‘solipsistic worlds rather than a direct engagement with society’ (2008: 6). I would propose that the play’s focus on intimacy (rather than solipsism) and vulnerability of life destabilizes notions of attachments to normality and happiness incumbent in institutions of kinship. Read against Cool Britannia’s optimism and aspirational narratives for upward mobility particularly prominent in New Labour’s discourse, Never Land’s representation of the Joubert family evokes how banal nationalism prevents the nation from moving forward and hints at the need for a radical break with past certainties. More specifically, the play yokes the intimate and the collective as it speaks to wider transformations taking place in the context of 1990s Europe and the UK:11 We are now inching towards a European identity, that nobody wants but nobody can afford to reject, that in fact should not be rejected, I feel. What Never Land was about for me was the impossibility but the great necessity for the European community. We need to have it in order for us to move on to something else, to a better identity. But people are very afraid of losing literal identity. (Nagy 1999: 29)

In the spirit of Nagy’s view on the need for creative imaginings of identity, Janelle Reinelt also suggests that ‘the issues confronting Europe involve aspects of imagination, identification, tradition and

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novelty’, which are ‘very suitable subjects for theatre’s plastic skills’ (2001: 366). Similarly, Never Land seems to negotiate the struggle of belonging in the context of ‘New’ Europe, a concept that has emerged from the ashes of the Cold War and the subsequent fall of the Eastern bloc. In Never Land, the lack of imagination and unwillingness to adapt to the new European landscape is particularly pronounced by Nagy’s explicit reference to neo-nationalism. Nagy may not portray an extreme right-wing character such as white supremacist Lester in her 1995 play The Strip, yet she makes clear that Henri’s nationalism acquiesces with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s neo-nationalist agenda as Henri voted for him in the parliamentary elections (Nagy 1998: 83). In this light, the intimate violence occurring in Never Land’s family space, caused by Henri’s inward-looking and nationalist perspective, is rehearsed against a wider public sphere and the violence propagated by right-wing discourses which threaten to dismantle processes of unification and diversity. The Jouberts’ deaths complicate ideas of love and intimacy and can be read as an instance of care and closeness rather than a mere act of violence. According to Ahmed, ‘Love also makes the subject vulnerable, exposed to and dependent upon another’ (2004: 125). Here, love does not turn into hate against Others but rather shows how it may connect to precarious life as acknowledgement of dependency and vulnerability. Their death is strategically orchestrated by Elizabeth who coaxes her father into it: ‘Put me to sleep tonight, Father. Come. Lead me to the place I yearn to travel to’ (Nagy 1998: 99). Before Henri shoots Elizabeth, she tries to comfort him by reminding him of the love that binds them together: ‘There is no other sound in the world tonight but the sound of our three hearts breaking into the oblivion of our love for one another’ (Nagy 1998: 99). This love is further underscored by Anne singing Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ which suggests her acquiescence to the act. The play’s tragic ending then builds on perspectives of love moving all three characters closer to each other. It closes with the idea of the precarious as an act of intimacy and contingency, not separation; thus, it is not dramatized as an end but

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as a new beginning to a future liberated from cruel attachments to fixed ideologies surrounding identity and belonging.

Fairy tales for adults: Caryl Churchill, The Skriker In examining the intersections of precarity, politics and cruelty in 1990s theatre, I will now shift attention to Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker. First performed at London’s National Theatre in 1994 under the direction of Les Waters, the play revolves around teenage girls Lily and Josie and their encounter with the Skriker (performed by Kathryn Hunter): an ‘ancient and damaged’ creature of the underworld (Churchill 1998: 243) who appears in different human shapes and always accompanied by her other spirit companions performing several dance and other routines. The girls meet the Skriker when pregnant Lily visits Josie who has been admitted to a mental hospital for having killed her newborn baby. It is from this point that the Skriker tries to gain their trust and affection. In mapping a world where the boundaries between fantasy and reality appear porous, the play follows a liquid dramaturgy and experiments with linguistic registers. Churchill’s previous collaboration with choreographer Ian Spink for A Mouthful of Birds was instrumental in shaping The Skriker’s use of dance and music (Churchill 1998: viii). According to Josephine Machon, the play’s merging of forms and the evocation of a dreamlike world presents ‘a (syn)aesthetic, visceral verbal’ landscape (2009:  73) which proves that ‘playwriting can be perceived as a physicalized practice in itself ’ (2009:  71). The play has been also widely discussed particularly for its use of innovative dramaturgy and its dealing with the hyperreal, its feminist politics and ecological anxieties and its connection to globalization and madness (Sakellaridou 1995; Aston 2003, 2013, 2015; Amish 2007; Kritzer 2012; Harpin 2014). Drawing on the above body of work, I will further explore how precarity features in the play as a political trope vis-à-vis its stylistic innovations, its thematic focus on children and young women and its ecological concerns.

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Churchill’s pioneering stylistic experimentations have become the trademark of her dramatic work alongside her commitment to ‘equality and social justice’ which render her a ‘political-theatre animal’ (Aston 2015: 61). The Skriker illustrates her enduring interest in form and feminist politics which, during the 1990s, suffered a ‘postfeminist backlash’ due to ‘the political shift to the right’ (Coppock, Haydon and Richter 1995:  6). This feminist shift to conservative ideologies captured in the ‘seductions of individual success, the lure of female empowerment and the love of money’ (McRobbie quoted in Aston 2003: 60), alongside the decline of socialism, had a profound impact on Churchill’s 1990s work and its means of political expression. As Aston argues, the 1990s ‘marked a period of crisis for Churchill as a political dramatist with a long-standing commitment to socialist and socialist-feminist ideologies’ (2013: 145). This meant a gradual abandonment of explicitly Brechtian dramaturgies and a move to more experiential and elliptical narratives (Aston 2013: 145). These experimental forms seem to further push towards the need to intervene in the audience’s perceptive frames of reality and the ‘normal’. In this sense, Churchill’s 1990s work shares similar anxieties with the emerging new writers of this decade (Aston 2013:  148) particularly with regards to its commitment to re-evaluate the tools of theatrical political representation which may be able to respond to a changing and precarious world. In The Skriker, change features ‘as negative force’ where there is no aperture for reinvention but loss (Kritzer 2012: 112). Struggling to deal with postmodernity’s rapid changes ‘associated with the transition [ . . . ] from Fordism to more flexible modes of capitalist accumulation’ (Amish 2007: 396) and lacking a moral compass or the guidance of a family member who would help them perform a secure transition from adolescence to adulthood, Josie and Lily precariously oscillate between the two worlds (the real and the surreal, or the ‘hyperreal’) without being fully able to fit to neither. Aston draws attention to the play’s focus on the plight of young women and children which she locates against a wider canvas of work by women playwrights at the end of the

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twentieth century preoccupied with ‘the uncertain dark future in which children, girl children especially, are increasingly at risk’ (2003: 169). Read against the backdrop of Thatcher’s and Major’s Britain which framed single mothers as ‘a burden on the state’ and ‘an underclass’ (Lees 1999:  72), The Skriker further critiques the criminalization of single mothers and young girls and the loss of the security and support of social structures (Aston 2003: 32).12 In her reading of The Skriker, Anna Harpin further pays attention to the metaphors of psychosis and schizophrenia coupled with the play’s linguistic and spatial dislocations as strategies that change ‘attitudes to madness’ and help to ‘recalibrate our understanding of reality’ (Harpin 2014: 212). In line with Harpin’s thinking, I am also interested in the way in which The Skriker stylistically and thematically negotiates the metaphor of madness as symptoms of precarity in order to reanimate our perception of the ‘real’ and the normal. If madness here suggests the impossibility to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, the ‘imagined’ could be seen to represent neo-liberalism’s aspirational narratives of progress while ‘the real’ reveals the consequential conditions of precarity which particularly affect the most vulnerable as well as the non-human. The constant metaphors of illness, contamination and poisoning permeating the play connect to Josie’s fragile mental state and clearly articulate Churchill’s acute anxiety towards the ways in which global capitalism ‘govern[s] the value of all human and nonhuman life’ (Aston 2015: 67). Here, the risk towards the environment, children and young women forms an ecology of precarity by showing the slow destabilization of previously comforting assurances: SKRIKER  Have you noticed the large number of meteorological phenomena lately? [  .  .  .  ] Apocalyptic meteorological phenomena. The increase of sickness. It was always possible to think whatever your personal problem, there’s always nature. [ . . . ] But it’s not available any more. Sorry. Nobody loves me and the sun’s going to kill me. Spring will return and nothing will grow. [ . . . ] I’m going to be around when the world as we know it ends. I am going to witness unprecedented catastrophe. (Churchill 1998: 283)

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In this light, the Skriker embodies its own ecology of precarity. On the one hand, she is a vulnerable creature existing between both the human and the non-human realm of the ‘weird denizens of the spirit world’ (Kritzer 2012:  116) who are dispossessed as capitalism’s waste:  ‘You people are killing me, do you know that? I am sick, I am a sick woman. [ . . . ] Just so long as you know I’m dying, I hope that satisfies you to know I’m in pain’ (Churchill 1998:  256). On the other hand, her precarious position has enabled her to find ways to survive at the cost of others. In as much as she presents herself as a fairy who is ‘here to do good’ (Churchill 1998: 257), her promise to protect Josie and Lily is imbued with danger as the threat of death and contamination – particularly towards children – is always lurking. When the Skriker ‘ultrasounds’ Lily’s baby in the womb she exclaims, ‘Look at it floating in the dark with its pretty empty head upside down, not knowing what’s waiting for it’ (256). In The Skriker, life seems to be in a constant state of fragility due to the lack of trust and genuine relationality. The Skriker’s desire for care appears precarious due to the absence of intimacy between the human and the non-human. When the Skriker appears as a vulnerable old female beggar, Lily offers some money to her and quickly turns away: SKRIKER Do I smell? It’s my coat and my cunt. Give us a hug. Nobody gives us a hug. Give us a kiss. Won’t you give us a hug and a kiss. (LILY suddenly hugs and kisses her.) There’s a love. Off you go, Lily. (Churchill 1998: 252).

As mentioned earlier, the Skriker’s role troubles the mythic references to the good fairy and presents Lily’s and Jodie’s desires for stability and wealth as ‘cruel’. Their desire for normality proves to be a desire for ‘the impasse’, that is, something that cannot be fulfilled. Josie’s and Lily’s efforts to navigate the new world order are invested with precarity due to the lack of direction towards achieving a ‘normal’ and ‘happy’ life and their insecure financial position:  Berlant argues that ‘the lower you are on economic scales, and the less formal your relation to the economy, the more alone you are in the project of maintaining and reproducing a life’ (Berlant 2011: 167). It is the Skriker who takes on

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the role of a guardian who promises to fulfil those aspirations and to protect them by offering them money, yet her promise is ‘nourished by cruelty rather than kindness’ (Aston 2015: 68). Against a post-feminist landscape, Josie and Lily are firmly attached to the structures and forms of happiness that have failed them in the first place, feeling ‘incapable of giving up the powers and pleasures of consumption she [the Skriker] grants them’ (Aston 2015: 70). The Skriker takes them to the underworld, which appears as a place of excess, short-term gratification and amnesia. When Josie visits the underworld, she is treated to food that makes her ‘happy now’ (Churchill 1998: 270) despite the warnings of the character Girl, who cautions that she will forget and never go back: ‘Don’t eat, it’s glamour. [ . . . ] Don’t eat or you’ll never get back’ (Churchill 1998: 270). In this vein, the connection between the Skriker and the girls alludes to Lazzarato’s creditor–debtor relationship: Josie and Lily become indebted to the Skriker for life in exchange for failed promises of happiness. In her analysis of Churchill’s This Is a Chair (1997), Aston refers to John Holloway’s manifesto Crack Capitalism, a call to arms for ‘creat[ing] cracks that defy the unstoppable advance of capital, of the walls that are pushing us towards our destruction’ (Holloway cited in Aston 2013:  155). Following Holloway, capitalism also appears precarious, fragile and susceptible to cracks which can be politically utilized to pursue alternative futures. I  would argue that Churchill’s choice to stylistically communicate the cracks in neo-liberalism as a means to caution against the lures of capitalist bonanza is already at the heart of The Skriker. The chosen form of the fairy tale underscores the inability to distinguish between the real and the ‘hyperreal fantasy’, thus in a way responding ‘to America’s postmodern fabula Disneyland’ (Sakellaridou 1995: 53) and ‘invoking the fairy tale mythology of free market globalization’ (Amish 2007: 405). Such clear references further complicate the possibility of a ‘happy ever after’ ending thus troubling the form of the fairy tale. Further, the play’s experimentations with space and time capture the cracks between the two worlds and intensify the atmosphere of

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uncertainty while further gesturing towards the fragility of normality. With reference to Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity’, Sarah Grochala observes a shift in recent drama’s perception of time as simultaneous rather than successive (2017:  119); this, she argues, impacts on the understanding and arrangement of spatial structures as ‘liquid’ thus blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual (2017: 119). Following Grochala’s argument, The Skriker engages with simultaneity and liquidity which makes memory and time unreliable and blurs the boundary between what is real and what is fantasy as the two worlds interpenetrate each other:  ‘This is a dream, it’s a nightmare I will wake up’, says Lily (Churchill 1998: 262). When Josie visits the underworld, the ruptures between the two worlds become more transparent:  ‘Underworld.  .  .  .  It looks wonderful except that it is all glamour and here and there it’s not working  – some of the food is twigs, leaves, beetles, some of the clothes are rags, some of the beautiful people have a claw hand or a hideous face’ (Churchill 1998: 268–69). Upon her return, Josie also experiences a temporal and spatial disorientation; she cannot tell how much time has passed and is unable to distinguish between dream and reality as she expresses her distrust towards Lily: ‘You ‘re not real. You’re something she’s made up’ (Churchill 1998: 274). Temporality further plays a crucial role in the play as it punctuates Josie’s and Lily’s entrapment in ‘survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, treading water’ (Berlant 2011: 169). Lily’s final attempt to save her baby and Josie by visiting the underworld proves fatal. Upon arrival, she is convinced that she is in fairyland and that she will be able to quickly return to her baby by ‘tricking’ time. On the contrary, she ultimately realizes that instead of traveling to the underworld, she has remained stuck in the real world for many years. This glitch in time chimes with the mechanisms of debt which work to defer time. ‘Debt’, according to Lazzarato, ‘simply neutralises time, time as the creation of new possibilities’ (2012:  49). Lily is unable to grasp that debt does not carry the promise of repayment but rather implies the continuous renewal of the relations between creditor

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and debtor and negates future possibilities; she falsely believes that her visit to the underworld would act as debt repayment thus releasing her daughter and Josie from the prospect of a precarious future. Instead of her daughter, Lily encounters her granddaughter, a deformed girl who ‘bellows wordless rage’ at Lily and who holds her responsible for her own precarity (Churchill 1998: 290). Notwithstanding the girls’ difficulty to fully grasp the world in which they are entrapped, the spirit world is always present on stage haunting ‘the real’. In this sense, the audience may be able to distinguish the cracks and ruptures which reveal the illusion of stability promised by global capitalism. The play’s politics of perception then invites the simultaneous contemplation of these two worlds and an ethics of care:  ‘By making an audience listen to experience presumed unspeakable, delivered by a voice which could be presumed nonsensical (read: mentally ill), Churchill amplifies the ethics of listening [ . . . ] one is simply invited to encounter the content of experiences as opposed to witnessing its surface expressions’ (Harpin 2014: 205). In contrast, the play’s negative critical reception echoes the critics’ resistance to engage their perception with frames that disturb habituated meaning. The Times’s Benedict Nightingale and The Jewish Chronicle’s David Nathan both wondered about the play’s purpose (Nathan 1994:  93; Nightingale 1994:  93), Charles Spencer found it ‘a self-indulgent trip to nowhere’ (Spencer 1994: 96) and The Daily Express’s Maureen Paton labelled it as ‘a work of quite awesome pretentiousness’ (Paton 1994:  94). This negative critical reception, which also strongly alludes to Phyllis Nagy’s treatment of the hyperreality of global capitalism in The Strip (1995), proves that 1990s reviewers largely expected dramatic work to rely on traditional dramaturgical tools and ordinary codes. Despite the critical establishment’s inability to grasp Churchill’s ‘liquid’ codes, the 1990s created an aperture for shifting perceptions of the ordinary and precarious life through theatre and training audiences into a different politics of perception. The Skriker’s negotiation of dystopia, normality and temporality through form and content is echoed in later work

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such as Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2007) or Alistair McDowall’s Pomona (2014) and X (2016), further proving the play’s influential dramaturgies.

Conclusion The victory of democracy, freedom and the rapid expansion of Western capitalism in Europe and the world at large created assurances for the good life and consolidated happiness narratives. As Ahmed highlights, post-1990s happiness narratives become sites of privilege as they promote particular types of subjectivities which ‘could be recognized as bourgeois’ (2010:  12). While illusions of normality, stability and certainty began to shatter in the twenty-first century, this chapter showed how theatre was already representing them as ‘fraying fantasies’ (Berlant 2011: 3) and anticipating the visibility of their failures. In this sense, it makes a case for a historical revisiting of 1990s theatre and particularly in-yer-face and feminist theatre through the lens of cruel attachments and precarity in order to illustrate how it acts as precursor to millennial work. At the heart of the theatrical work examined in this chapter lies an acute interest in showing how happiness narratives might enable conditions of precarity and exposing middle-class aspirations as sites of privilege and trouble. This is achieved by means of very different dramaturgies:  Ravenhill’s Shopping written in a realist form echoes Berlant’s connection between the ‘cinema of precarity’ and the return of ‘New Realism’ in 1990s cinema (2011:  201). Nagy’s absurdist realism, the repetition of clichés, the use of freeze-frames and direct monologues break the bourgeois realist form and thus serve to critique narratives of normality. Finally, Churchill’s ‘liquid’ structures and the interplay between real and fantasy worlds reveal the danger implicit in promises of happiness and the fragility of all systems that sustain life particularly for young women and children. Despite those differences, the metaphor of the impasse as a temporality of enclosure

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appears in all three examples; in addition, intimacy is presented as a form of relationality which is yet exchanged with relations of debt thus banishing subjectivities in singular modes of being. The following chapters will revisit the tropes examined here such as relations of intimacy, debt, children at risk, environmental precarities as well as the temporalities of the impasse in order to further apply pressure to theatrical representations of precarity in the twenty-first century and examine British theatre’s shifting politics.

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Children and Young People at Risk

In The Story of Childhood:  Growing Up in Modern Britain, Libby Brooks highlights the importance of the trope of childhood innocence for adults:  ‘Adults crave the spectacle of innocence precisely because of what it does not show:  the rawness of sexuality, the inexorability of change, the certainty of death’ (2006:  53). In a similar vein, Anne Higonnet’s study of the representation of children in painting and photography reminds us that ‘pictures of children are once the most common, the most sacred, and the most controversial images of our time. They guard the cherished ideal of childhood innocence, yet they contain within them the potential to undo that ideal’ (1998: 7). Since the end of the twentieth century, she argues, ‘pictures of children scare us more than any others’ (Higonnet 1998: 11). Following Higonnet, the act of looking at representations of children exposes us to both spectacles of innocence as indicators of safety and stability and to the possibility of their loss; it is for reason that they strongly connect to the precarious. The trope of the precarious child often stands for a crucible of multiple crises (of morality, humanitarian values, safety) and a symbol of an irretrievably lost innocence (brought by conditions of precarity); it has become a popular framing device for humanitarian appeals and charities which serve to mobilize ‘geographies of care’ and other campaigns aiming to recalibrate conservative ideas about identity and the family;1 implicit in those images is, on the one hand, a deep anxiety about crisis and the collapse of social and moral values and, on the other, the hope of rescuing the values of human civilization. Following Butler’s discussion of the role of photographs of precarious bodies in ‘support[ing] and impel[ling] calls for justice and an end to violence’ (2009:  11), photos of precarious children during

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war or peace turn into unsettling ‘sticky metaphors’, proffering a call for responsibility to the viewer. In this vein, children at once congeal many well-known tropes and affects such as optimism, hope, normality, innocence, nostalgia, freedom, unconditional love, care, joy and life, while also expressing fear and anxiety for the future and the failure of the ‘good life’ in the context of the institution of the nuclear family. This chapter will specifically focus on how the figure of the precarious child becomes a crucible of crisis and precarity in theatrical representation.2 Endangered children and teenagers have played an important role in the theatre not least because they are inextricably connected to the institution of the family which concerns a huge range of plays, adaptations and community work in non-theatre settings. Putting precarious children on stage or evoking their presence through their absence carries heavy affective weight and usually implies a threat to the structure of the family, and by extension, society and the ‘human’. In short, children at risk stir ethical trouble as they unsettle fundamental social structures and human relations. In the light of the above, this chapter therefore asks what kind of cultural and affective work does the representation of the child at risk do and how does it speak to a number of post-1990s ‘crises’ in a British context? If, according to this book’s aims, precarity captures a political zeitgeist in contemporary theatre, what kind of politics does the representation of children at risk rehearse?

Children and young people on the British stage In April 2003, London’s Royal Court theatre curated a week of performances, talks and poetry readings entitled ‘War Correspondence’ in direct response to the British and US invasion in Iraq; this initiative included Martin Crimp’s short protest play Advice to Iraqi Women written in the form of a ‘what to avoid’ manual aiming at the protection of children: ‘The protection of children is a priority. [ . . . ] Your house is a potential war zone for a child:  the corners of tables,

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chip pans, and the stairs  – particularly the stairs  – are all potential sources of harm’ (Crimp 2003). In addition to its critique of the war in Iraq, Crimp’s piece taps into Western anxieties about and profound obsession with child health and protection by using the child as a figure of crisis which is called upon during times of uncertainty. There is a quite vast genealogy of theatre work preoccupied with children ranging from representations of infanticide in classical Athenian drama such as Euripides’ Medea, Iphigenia at Aulis and Herakles to more contemporary stagings. In the context of post-war British theatre, the work of Edward Bond most saliently evidences an enduring commitment to the subject. Bond’s work is often driven by a call for social responsibility towards injustices performed against young people. According to Helen Nicholson, ‘Bond’s children cannot accept injustice, and as they grow up they have to learn how to be human in a corrupt and corrupting world’ (2003:  13). For Bond, the quest for responsibility and ‘being human’ is attached to the figure of the child which is seen as a crucible of ‘radical innocence’:  ‘The responsibility is the infant’s radical innocence and that is the human imperative that makes the self responsible for the care of the world’ (2011: xv). Children at risk have also played a key role in the context of feminist theatre; between the 1970s and the 1990s, a number of women playwrights and theatre companies largely focused on the plight of the female child, through the exploration of themes such as violence and sexual abuse, poverty, teenage pregnancy and motherhood.3 As shown in the previous chapter, at the end of the twentieth century English women’s playwriting is haunted by the uncertain future of the female child at risk (Aston 2003: 169). In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the figure of the female child as an index of a precarious present and future is still present but does not occupy such a central place in women’s playwriting.4 In contrast, during the same period, British new writing is replete with representations of precarious (mostly male) children and young people primarily authored by male playwrights.5 Helen Freshwater observes this trend with reference to Tim Crouch, Simon Stephens, Philip Ridley

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and Martin Crimp who have capitalized on the child’s ‘affective weight’ (2013: 170). Freshwater also proposes that representations of children in contemporary theatre are often accompanied by innovations in form such as in Crouch’s theatre where the child ‘is central to the exploration of the boundaries of representation’ (2013:  168). In addition to the examples Freshwater mentions, the figure of the child and teenager at risk features prominently in the work of Dennis Kelly and Mike Bartlett as well as in a suite of plays by other millennial male playwrights, although not always accompanied by stylistic experimentation. This chapter will pay close attention to examples of millennial theatre work revolving around children and young people at risk by both male and female playwrights. I  intend to examine some ways in which representations of children in contemporary new writing channel social anxieties about the family, identity and community and address precarity through particular economies of affect.

From ‘childhood crisis’ to ‘masculinity in crisis’: Mike Bartlett, My Child The shaping of modern perceptions of childhood as the embodiment of innocence and vulnerability is a product of ideology; a wealth of research has unearthed childhood as an ‘invented’, ‘discovered’, culturally specific and non-static construct in the service of narratives around the family apparatus, health, well-being, care and responsibility. Post-war Western societies’ heavy investment in the child as an indicator of ‘national health’ (Goldson 1997:  11) generated anxieties about social collapse and crisis. During the 1980s, British New Right and its promotion of ‘competitive individualism’ often shifted discourses to the criminalization of the child as ‘threat’ (Goldson 1997: 12) which became a growing obsession in the 1990s, a decade which, according to critics, ‘marks the end of childhood innocence’ (Scraton 1997: viii). As discussed in Chapter 1, the abduction, torture and murder of James Bulger in 1993 left a strong impression in 1990s

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British society; becoming a ‘symbol of a society in social and moral decline’ (Davis and Bourhill 1997:  28), the Bulger case unravelled discourses about ‘evil’ children thus overshadowing ‘the regularity of the murder of children by adults’ which, in turn, shifted the crisis from adulthood to that of childhood (Davis and Bourhill 1997:  46). As a result, the criminalization of children reinforced traditional nuclear family ideals thus pathologizing and excluding those who did not fit within this model (Davis and Bourhill 1997) and led to targeting the school and the family as the crisis’ primary cause. By the beginning of the new millennium, ‘childhood has become the crucible into which is ground each and every adult anxiety  – about sex, consumerism, technology, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of a  life. This is a time of child-panic’ (Brooks 2006: 16). As Freshwater points out, this child-panic has been further bolstered by an acute concern about children’s welfare particularly articulated in New Labour policies (2013: 169).6 During the years of austerity Britain under the coalition government and the subsequent Tory governments, the widening of social inequalities has deeply affected children leading to a notable increase in child poverty of 30 per cent in 2017 (Butler 2017). Fears about children’s safety have been firmly attached to uncertainties about the disintegration of the family as a safe unit. Following an increase of visibility of cases of child sexual abuse in the UK during the late 1980s, the protection of children from adults became a matter of priority. Harpin argues that the visibility of child sexual abuse undermined the institution of the family as the cornerstone of ‘safety and domesticity’ (Harpin 2013: 168) while the Cleveland case ‘struck a blow against patriarchal authority’ (2013: 171) because of its revelations of incest abuse and anal rape.7 In this sense, ruptures in family normalcy and discourses around the ‘crisis of childhood’ interlace with changes in gender and family roles which can be read against the alleged ‘masculinity in crisis’ and ‘fatherhood in crisis’, widely rehearsed since the 1990s. This section will specifically focus on how the above ‘crises’ are staged and their connections to the representation of children in British theatre.

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Although it can be argued that ‘masculinity in crisis’ is not exclusive to late twentieth century,8 this is certainly a time during which ‘male trouble’ (Walsh 2010) was widely performed through cultural representations. In Marked Men:  White Masculinity in Crisis, Sally Robinson draws attention to how narratives of crisis are shaped by language, metaphor and symbolism and consolidated by cultural stagings rather than depending on ‘hard evidence’ (2000:  10). Echoing this view, Fintan Walsh also proposes to look at ‘the discourse of masculinity in crisis as a cultural performative in its own right’ (2010:  8). In his study of Male Trouble, Walsh specifically maps how, ‘since the 1990s, men have increasingly appeared across a range of social and aesthetic practices as troubled subjects, with Western masculinity repeatedly reported to be in a critical state’ (2010: 2). Discourses surrounding masculinity ‘in crisis’ took primarily the form of a feminist backlash and centred around the hegemonic type of white heterosexual masculinity. Much of cultural production since the 1990s – fiction, film, press, TV – has circulated around the battle of the sexes, disaffected communities of men, shifts in family roles and typically ‘male’ pastimes.9 As a consequence, different types of masculinities emerged: the ‘new lad’ or ‘men behaving badly’; men who were showing signs of emotional and physical vulnerability; the ‘wounded male’; males who do not conform to heteronormative stereotypes; ‘the boy that never grew up’ (Whelehan 2000) and the ‘eternal boy-man’ (Walsh 2010: 7).10 The pervasive figure of the troubled male is also firmly attached to concerns about fatherhood. Recent developments in family structures and the rise in divorce rates as well as the decline of welfare systems and the subsequent rise of tensions around ‘cash and care’ also brought to the fore concerns about the role of fatherhood (Hobson 2002: 1–3). Despite the need to move beyond ‘unified models of masculinity’ and fatherhood, there is still a dominant model of masculinity that acts as a point of comparison (Morgan 2002: 278) further bolstered by policies centring around the family. Although studies show that ‘divorce does not always result in absent or marginalized fathers’ (Hobson 2002:  4), British policy discourse around ‘problem fathers’ applies a

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moral frame to fatherhood. Such a perspective distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ fathers and prioritizes specific ‘normal’ family types, placing fathers who do not perform masculinity ‘correctly’ in a precarious position. In theatre and performance art, the trouble of ‘heteronormative, heterosexual, white masculinity’ (Walsh 2010: 10) becomes consolidated by the intensification of performances of diseased, failing or wounded male bodies. This is particularly palpable in the context of 1990s new writing ‘where  Thatcher’s disoriented children’ widely problematized masculinity and fatherhood through an emphasis on dominant performances of masculinity epitomized in the figure of the ‘lad’ or through the visibility of queer masculinities on more mainstream stages and the absence of father figures/parents.11 Following Amelia Howe Kritzer, the 1990s was underpinned by ‘spectacles of alienation, suffering and destructiveness’ which strongly attested to ‘a tattered social fabric that has failed to protect children and youth or guide them towards autonomy’ (2008: 220). Echoing Kritzer, Ravenhill also identifies the difficulty to achieve autonomy within the context of neoliberal capitalism as a contemporary social malaise which ‘has created an environment of the infant “me” where it is difficult to grow into the adult “us” ’ (2004: 312). This lack of autonomy and the infantilization of the (male) adult becomes particularly pronounced in millennial theatre work concerned with masculinity and the family. Male characters often appear disorientated and vulnerable while children might perform a precocious adulthood which troubles ideas of innocence. According to Higonnet, the innocent child is now replaced by what she names as the ‘knowing child’ who is ‘more involved in the world of adults’ (1998:  8) having a mind of its own:  ‘Unlike Romantic children who are arranged and presented as a delightful spectacle to be enjoyed, knowing children are neither available or controllable’ (1998:  211). Despite their precocious knowledge, those children often appear to be living in suspension and are unable to transition between childhood and adulthood. In addition, the increasing interest on the subject of

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child sexual abuse in recent drama, particularly by male playwrights, also echoes wider cultural concerns over children’s protection from masculine aggression.12 Such representations of child abuse are often connected to anxieties with regards to fatherhood and the loss of a moral compass which can be seen in work of this period. With reference to Mike Bartlett’s My Child, I  wish to show how images of ‘knowing’ children in the theatre intersect with performances of troubled masculinities. Bartlett’s work is permeated by an anxiety about children (Earthquakes in London, 2010; The Game, 2015)  and has also featured ‘knowing children’ (13, 2011). His 2007 debut play My Child shows family as a place of both ‘unconditional love’ as well as one of violence and danger (Bartlett 2007). Premiering at the Royal Court Downstairs and directed by Sacha Wares, the play narrates the efforts of ‘Man’ to connect with his son after his separation with his wife (Woman) who refuses to allow the father to see his son. In an effort to spend time with him, Man kidnaps the child and takes him to Scotland, where he is apprehended by Woman’s new husband Karl, who takes the child back with him. Bartlett presents Man as exemplar of a wounded masculinity (Man becomes Everyman); while he strives to be good, his ex-wife impresses upon him his failure to live up to the hegemonic stereotype of masculinity: ‘You lack confidence. You are innocent. Stunted. You refuse to understand money or responsibility. You are still a boy’ (Bartlett 2010b: 299). In contrast, her new husband embodies all the features of a ‘correct’ masculinity which Bartlett equates with capitalism, immorality and violence and which are admired by both Man’s son and ex-wife. Throughout the play, Man struggles with his self-image and lack of ability to survive in a capitalist world and live up to social aspirations of success. This failure is yoked with the image of sacrificial masculinity that relates to a Christian ethic:  at the end of the play, Man has an imaginary dialogue with his dead mother asking her why she taught him ‘that it is better to be polite. To put others first. Not to be violent. To turn the other cheek. Not to treat people as rivals but as friends. To try to be moral and good, and not selfish’ (Bartlett 2010b: 334).

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Bartlett’s emphasis on the ‘betrayed father’ buttresses narratives around ‘fatherhood in crisis’ which can be found in banal performances such as the Fathers for Justice campaign group whereby fathers mark their bodies as superheroes in order to present an aspirational role model. The group’s ‘spectacular display of masculinity’ (Walsh 2010:  158) conflates fatherhood with a wounded white heterosexual masculinity, thus masking alternative ways of parenting.13 In equating the crisis of masculinity with a loss of moral values, My Child consolidates anxieties about a ‘moral crisis’ while also proposing a naive representation of gender and fatherhood. As Robinson suggests, ‘masculinity in crisis’ is often connected to race and class: ‘the crisis afflicting the white middle-class is also, and most forcefully, a crisis in masculinity’ (2000: 3). In My Child, the father’s identity as a white, middle-class male who has yet failed to fulfil the aspirations of his class becomes a focal point as he laments the erosion of traditional roles for men as breadwinners.14 For Bartlett, the play reflects the pervasiveness of cruel optimism in post-Thatcher neo-liberal Britain. As he notes, ‘maybe it’s a play which looks at how society used to be about the things we strived for, about the things we used to think were good, and now maybe we’ve got a society of choice and success that works against that – and the play maybe stages those two things’ (Bartlett 2007). In Wares’ production, the precarity of the middle classes and the pressure of attachments to narratives of happiness were evoked through Miriam Buether’s stage design, which resembled a tube carriage-cum-coffee shop where audiences would sit on each side of the carriage and experience the action from an intimate distance. This stage choice, while punctuating the domination of narratives of success and happiness by means of imitation adverts on the carriage walls, also highlights the child’s and Man’s vulnerability who are being scrutinized by the audience from close-up. Man’s innocent disposition contrasts that of his child who is already ‘corrupt’ by the lures of capitalism and performs in the style of precocious adulthood: he finds children’s activities ‘boring’, he likes adult films, he swears at his father and asks him to kill his stepfather in order to gain

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his admiration. The ‘knowing child’ here sits between adulthood and childhood exhibiting signs of wilfulness and vulnerability. The latter is evoked by references to his bruised arm which deteriorates as the play develops. This return to the child’s ‘wound’ indexes the failure of structures that provide security and protection while also presaging the child’s own troubled masculinity as a precocious adult. Berlant stipulates the need to discuss children and neo-liberalism ‘as an image of the contemporary ethical, political and economic conundrums of structural subordination and social betrayal’ (2011:  169). Bartlett disrupts Romantic perceptions of childhood innocence replacing them with signs of (masculine) cruelty, thus articulating a critique of neo-liberalism’s role in threatening perceptions of the family as a safe and protected environment and illustrating how it affects children. On the other hand, this apparent focus on the child is primarily driven by an anxiety about masculinity and its troubled relation to narratives of neo-liberal happiness. Here, the failure of responsibility and care towards children at risk is then deeply interwoven with hegemonic narratives on masculinity and fatherhood which preserve neo-liberal fantasies of success and stability. In this sense, the play articulates concerns over gender and the family unit, thus participating in harnessing narratives over a crisis of masculinity and fatherhood.

Feeling normal: Dennis Kelly, Debris and Philip Ridley, Mercury Fur I have so far argued that the failure of normality and the promise of a ‘democratic access to the good life’ (Berlant 2011: 3) permeate several plays that stage children ‘in crisis’. For Aleks Sierz, the 2000s saw the rise of the ‘teen angst play’ where young people appear both fragile and resilient (2011: 189–90). The negotiation between risk, normality, vulnerability and resilience is particularly present in Dennis Kelly and Philip Ridley’s works, which are replete with representations of

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children and teenagers at risk or who put others at risk. This section will particularly focus on Ridley’s controversial Mercury Fur by also considering Dennis Kelly’s debut play Debris. Children seem to constitute a key aesthetic trope in Kelly’s oeuvre enabling him to explore a range of subjects. From Debris (2003) and Osama the Hero (2005) to Taking Care of Baby (2006), DNA (2008) and Matilda the Musical (2010), children and young people appear as both subjects and agents of cruelty and abuse or carry the possibility of revolution and dissent. Debris premiered at London’s fringe Theatre 503 in Battersea, London, and focuses on sibling voices Michael and Michelle who inhabit a cruel and inhuman nightmarish world where the disposability of the human body becomes ‘common sense’. Written in short vignettes where each takes turns in narrating stories from their life, the play communicates ideas of despair and catastrophe through the metaphors of death, cruelty, escape and survival. Although the age of the two siblings remains unclear, Kelly clearly paints them as naïve storytellers suspended within the same temporal framework who revisit stories from their childhood and teenage years; Berlant observes how the work of Belgian filmmakers JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne features children who are used to reproduce ‘ “the bad life”  – that is, a life dedicated to moving toward the good life’s normative/utopian zone but actually stuck in what we might call survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding on the ledge, treading water’ (2011:  169). In similar ways, Michael and Michelle are trapped in survival time, inventing stories of childhood resilience fuelled by a desire to recalibrate fantasies of a ‘good life’. In desiring to feel normal, they share stories of escape and survival filled with surreal and cruel imagery. These stories are often attached to fantasies of the ‘good life’ which are yet fraught with danger. Michelle reinvents the story of her birth and her mother’s death, seeing herself as a plant child ‘sucking death’ in her dead mother’s body and growing tendrils to ‘gain more life’ (Kelly 2008: 31). Michael narrates how he saved a baby boy (he names Debris) from a rubbish bin and breastfed him with his own blood; the intimate bond created between Michael and Debris seems to

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be producing feelings of anxiety as Michael is particularly concerned about Debris’ survival and protection after he is discovered by Michael’s father who offers to look after him. In this vein, the play clearly exemplifies how children have been socially betrayed by adults who have also failed to successfully transition from childhood to adulthood: this is epitomized by Michael’s narration of a grotesque and ironic scene of self-crucifixion performed by his father on the day of his son’s coming of age which ironically twists perceptions about sacrificial stereotypes of parenthood while also foregrounding masculinity and fatherhood as precarious. In the context of 1990s US politics, Berlant observes how the subjectivity of an adult citizen has been replaced by that of the ‘infant’ or the ‘fetus’ citizen which harnesses the ‘figure of the injured adult’ and a desire for a ‘pain-free intimate zone’ (1999: 56). In exhibiting signs of pain and trauma and expressing his desire for dependency, Michael’s father could be read to stand for an infantilized nation which suffers from the impossibility to achieve fantasies of happiness and the good life. Instead, his identity is still dependent on such fantasies of ‘pain-free intimate zones’ and the belief in being ‘rescued’ by somebody else. This belief is ironically projected onto teenage Michael as the father cries from the cross: ‘My son, my son why have you forsaken me?’ (Kelly 2008:  15). This inversion of the biblical reference to Jesus Christ’s words towards his Father further underscores the reversal of parent-child roles in Debris. It is this reversal which forces both siblings to invent ways of survival. In doing so, they find solace in imagining their escape; however, their imagination is haunted by risk: in reinventing the story of Hansel and Gretel, they dream of being kidnapped by UncleArry, an older man who promises them ice cream, servants and champagne (Kelly 2008: 26) and whose presence evokes the danger of sexual assault. Michael and Michelle’s confusion of ‘vertical and horizontal attachments’ signifies ‘the immediate crisis out of which the children are trying to fight their way’ (Berlant 2011: 169). This becomes palpable by the lack of love and affection neither have received from their parents. Intimacy is not experienced but only exists in a mediated form.

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In watching a scene of affectionate motherly love between a mother and son in the opposite flat, Michael desperately seeks ‘the fantasy of intimacy that will make one feel normal’ (Berlant 2011: 174). Michael I had seen this before. Through windows of TV shops I had seen this on TVs through the windows of TV shops before, I had seen this before, this was how people, perhaps this was how people lived. (Kelly 2008: 20)

In an attempt to experience this intimacy, Michael climbs through the window and enters the flat apprehending the mother and son who consider him as a threatening presence. The absence of intimacy also becomes one of the driving forces enabling survival in Philip Ridley’s bleak and lawless Mercury Fur (2005). Ridley was hailed as one of the key in-yer-face playwrights of the 1990s; he made his debut on the British stage in 1991 with his equally bleak and cruel Pitchfork Disney which, similarly to Debris, also tells a story about abandoned children.15 With Mercury Fur, he returns to the imagery of the child at risk painting a post-apocalyptic world of ruins where any sense of safety and morality has been depleted:  hospitals are slaughterhouses, people commit suicide en masse while the world is about to be bombed. Against this dystopian landscape, adults are incapable of protecting children who are the targets of adult sexual desire; in their effort to survive, they are forced to become complicit in violent acts through witnessing or direct participation. The play is set in an abandoned council flat where brothers Darren (16 years old) and Elliot (19 years old) who work for Spinx (an unreliable father figure) are in the process of preparing a ‘party’ for their wealthy costumer Party Guest. This is where they meet Naz, a fifteen-year-old orphan who has witnessed the decapitation of his mother and sister. The party will involve the physical torture of a ten-year-old Pakistani boy (‘Party Piece’) dressed in an Elvis outfit, which will be used as snuff film material. When Party Piece is unable to ‘perform’ according to Party Guest’s wishes, Naz is called to replace him. The party ends abruptly when Darren kills Party Guest in an attempt to protect Naz.

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The play premiered at Drum Theatre, Plymouth, and transferred to London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. In the original production, the metaphors of children, innocence and precarity were emphasized by the choice to invite the audience in the space through a child’s wardrobe (Harpin 2011). Ridley’s treatment of children in the play taps into social anxieties about the death of innocence, also evidenced by Faber’s refusal to publish the script ‘because of its cruelty to children’ (Gardner 2005). The children and young people in the piece are found at the bottom of the social ladder and not in control of their labour; hence, the only possible mode of survival is to stick by the rules of the fittest: if Party Guest is satisfied, he will ensure that they can go somewhere safe. Nevertheless, Darren’s killing of Party Guest puts their survival at risk. The play draws direct connections with images of war and conflict.  Dan Rebellato has suggested that it captures the paranoia of war on terror politics and ‘shocks by painting a vivid portrait of a society sufficiently like ours to be recognizable but exaggerated just enough to see the hollowness of our world in a different light’ (2011: 438). Ridley insists that the stories of horror narrated are not far from current experienced realities as they were taken from real events from across the world such as Rwanda, Iraq and the Gulf War (Gardner 2005). As Paul Taylor reports, the production included many walk outs (Taylor 2005) while critics from the British press found it disturbing, gratuitously shocking and removed from reality. Charles Spencer proclaimed it as ‘the most violent and upsetting new play since Sarah Kane’s Blasted opened at the Royal Court 10 years ago’ (Spencer 2005). Michael Billington’s review suggested that the play is far removed from reality: ‘it is still a play that offers more shocks than enlightenment and that never persuades me we are living on the brink of linguistic decay, civic breakdown and nightmare apocalypse’ (2005). Harpin makes a compelling case for the ethical invitation that Mercury Fur addresses to its audience who is progressively rendered vulnerable through the play’s manipulation of vision and sound (2011: 108). As Harpin argues, Ridley avoids rendering violence into a spectacle thus staging a ‘responsible encounter with the spectacle of

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pain’ (2011: 105): most violent acts take place behind closed doors, yet the soundscape asks the audience to eavesdrop and become complicit witnesses like ‘urban neighbours [ . . . ] listening to the violence next door’ (Harpin 2011:  109). This emphasis on sound is also evident in Ridley’s script:  ‘Elliot goes into bedroom. The bedroom door closes. Screams start to be heard. Muffled at first, growing louder. [ . . . ] The noises from the bedroom become increasingly horrific’ (Ridley 2005b: 116). The play’s evocation of uncertainty and danger and the audience’s ethical implication in the act of watching is further heightened by other aspects of the mise-en-scène such as a traverse stage which puts the audience in a position of proximity to the dramatic action, a ‘broken set’ and the use of ‘precarious light’ (Harpin 2011:  109). Christian Attinger further observes how the sense of response-ability imparted to the spectators is further unlocked by the play’s dystopian elements (2017: 59). In this sense, the play’s affective registers enhanced by the dystopian setting, heighten metaphors of witnessing and responsibility towards precarious life. In its eradication of normality, innocence and safety, Mercury Fur asks what remains when memory and the past fail to offer hope for the future. Ridley argues that one of the play’s starting points was the loss of memory and our connection to the past: ‘we make sense of our lives by seeing ourselves part of a continuum. [ . . . ] All of this is what makes us human’ (Ridley 2005a). This is already pronounced by the blind character Duchess who is also Darren’s and Elliot’s mother yet unable to recognize and protect her own children. For Berlant, ‘the desire for a less-bad bad life involves finding resting places; the reproduction of normativity occurs when rest is imagined nostalgically [ . . . ] a fantasy masquerading as screen memory or paramnesia’ (Berlant 2011: 180). In Mercury Fur, the spectacles of abuse interface with historical amnesia, nostalgia for security and paramnesia. These frayed memories appear to be a pharmakon – meaning a cure and a poison – preventing them from seeing reality clearly. In the world of Mercury Fur, everyone is under the influence of butterflies, a highly psychotropic drug which brings amnesia and loosens their morals so they are able to cope with reality.

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Fantasy and reality blur as characters try to remember scenes from their normal family life, yet these begin to fade. Historical figures and facts are also muddled, thus inviting the viewer to question ‘the general availability of any shared cultural or collective memory or what may be left of it after all’ (Attinger 2017: 57). Elliot is the only one not under the ‘butterfly influence’ and thus able to still remember the time when the world was normal; he is attached to and curious about the past’s facts, emphasized by his old aspiration to become an archaeologist (Ridley 2005b: 30). However, for Elliot, remembering is painful: ‘I wish I could just bash all the good stuff out of my fucking skull. It’s the good stuff that fucks you up!’ (2005b: 64). Ridley has highlighted that that the play is more about love than violence (Gardner 2005). In a deeply precarious world where familial ties between parents and children have been broken, the only sense of hope that brings some kind of comfort and security is brotherly love which becomes their ‘resting place’; in an effort to save Naz, Darren becomes an active agent and shoots Party Guest, releasing Naz from his clutches. Their love and intimacy becomes manifest through a game they have been familiar with since childhood where each announces: ‘I love you so much I could’ (Ridley 2005b: 15). Against the backdrop of deafening sounds of fire and bombing that intimate that the end of the world is approaching, the play closes with an aperture towards the future predicated on this love; all that Darren and Elliot are left with is to imagine that there is a safe planet in the universe that they will discover: Darren There’s lots more planets to choose from, ain’t there, Ell? Ell? [ . . . ] There’s millions of planets. Billions. Trillions. One of them will be safe to live on. I know it. (2005b: 125)

At the heart of Debris and Mercury Fur’s highly dystopian and unsettling worlds then lies a hope found in the relationships developed among children which allows them to imagine a safe world: Michael’s care towards baby Debris, the expressions of affection between Darren and Elliot and Darren’s killing of Party Guest to save Naz, all gesture

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towards a common quest for a (cruel) intimacy found in small acts of care and solidarity which may sometime in the future allow them to break through the impasse they are entrapped in.

Race and vulnerability: Mojisola Adebayo, Desert Boy The same year of the James Bulger case, the murder of eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence also left a mark on British race relations by revealing the operations of institutional and social racism. Lynette Goddard makes a compelling argument about the impact of this moment on black British playwriting: The biggest impact on black British playwrights’ presence and the content of black plays in the new millennium was the racist murder of teenage Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993. [ . . . ] The magnitude of the Stephen Lawrence murder case for British race relations must be acknowledged, for it arguably led to a country beginning to recognise the big issues of racism and discrimination towards black people, one of the lasting legacies of England’s colonial past that has dogged the country for centuries. (Goddard 2015: 7–8)

The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the questions it raised led New Labour to pass the Race Relations Amendment Act, following the Macpherson Report which attested to the existence of institutional racism. These events also led to a call for ‘cultural diversity’ and combatting institutional racism in the arts. In 2002, the Arts Council commissioned the Eclipse Theatre project with the view to increase cultural diversity in the theatre sector (Goddard 2015:  8–9; Tomlin 2015: 35). As a result of this initiative, black British playwrights began to increasingly achieve more visibility by receiving stagings at mainstream venues such as the Royal Court, the Hampstead, Soho Theatre and the Royal National Theatre. Notwithstanding Goddard’s claim regarding the impact of Stephen Lawrence’s case on Britain’s racial relations, and, subsequently, black British theatre, there is a noticeable temporal gap in terms of theatrical

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response to the deaths of Stephen Lawrence and James Bulger: on the one hand, as I showed in Chapter 1, the Bulger murder created a ‘structure of feeling’ in British society of the 1990s, arguably shaping the sensibility of new writing; on the other hand, the impact of Stephen Lawrence’s murder and its racial complexities remained invisible until the end of the 1990s when the Tricycle staged The Colour of Justice.16 This gap can be justified by the different ages and races of the two victims and their respective affective impacts (a white two-year-old child versus a black teenager) which intimate a differential distribution of grievability. It is not until the first decade of the 2000s that precarious youth in ethnically diverse communities, a previously invisible demographic, frequently appear on the British stage;17 what is striking is that the majority of the plays concerned with precarious black youth touch on directly or more obliquely on the spate of knife crime, which was reported by the BBC as ‘the biggest threat facing the capital after terrorism’ (Fresco quoted in Goddard 2009: 299) and a major national issue confronting young people (Barling 2007) and particularly boys.18 Popular rhetoric around knife crime widened the gap between white and black communities pronouncing fears about ‘endangered whiteness’ (Gilroy 2004: 95). In 2007, Tony Blair located the problem in ‘black gang culture’ and the lack of family discipline, urging black communities to ‘take responsibility for diverting young people away from this type of violence’ (Barling 2007). As Martin Heaney notes, a contextual analysis of the figures of knife crime actually shows that between 2005 and 2007 the overall percentages of youth offending were significantly reduced in comparison to previous decades: ‘incidences of knife crime do show an increase in the years 2005–2007 but longer term trends show sharp falls in overall rates of youth offending’ (Heaney 2017: 16). Nevertheless, knife crime in the late 2000s resulted in further fuelling a moral crisis regarding youth criminality associated with race which increased punitive measures.19 This ‘crisis of knife crime’ and the implications of its coverage were further harnessed by previous crises about ‘hoodies’ which populated mainstream media and appeared to threaten social order (Davidson 2008: 2).

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It is perhaps not surpirising therefore that the precarious young black male body appears as a ‘sticky metaphor’ in several black British plays written by playwrights such as Kwame-Kwei Armah and Roy Williams; as Goddard observes, those plays often feature the bodies of the victims onstage which appear in their closing sequences (2009:  300). Theatre that touches on these issues usually presents ways of moving beyond representations of ‘gang culture’ and looks at the material contexts and affective registers of a crime that targets black teenagers. For example, when Tanika Gupta was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre to write a play about ‘what it means to be young and British today’ (Roseby 2012: 101), she completed White Boy (2007) in response to the stabbing of black fifteen-year-old footballer Kiyan Prince in 2006. The play takes place in a London schoolyard and features the death of black footballer Victor. Nevertheless, Victor’s death only serves as backdrop to a crisis of white masculinity mediated through the character of teenage Ricky; in this sense, the play fails to intervene in stereotypical representations of black youth identities. The dramatization and recycling of similar representations from media platforms to the theatre stage risk, as Deidre Osborne points out, ‘shaping the same criteria by which audiences and readers encounter black people’s experiences’ (2011: 187). In addition, as Maggie Inchley notes, White Boy reiterates ‘adults’ worst fears of the link between urban teenagers and the deterioration of society’ and reactions against New Labour’s emphasis on multiculturalism (2012: 331). In contrast, Mojisola Adebayo’s Desert Boy (2010) takes on a different approach to race and vulnerability. Commissioned by Nitro and Albany theatre in Deptford, London, the play is inspired by the stories of Stephen Lawrence and John Ceasar, ‘an African sailor and former slave who lived in Deptford and in 1787 was convicted of stealing and transported to Australia on a prison ship, where he escaped’ (Adebayo 2011: 197). Adebayo situates Lawrence’s murder to histories of slavery, criminalization and imprisonment, interlacing the story of sixteen-yearold Soldier Boy with that of Desert Man, his 300-year-old ancestor from Mali. In the play’s opening scene, Soldier Boy lies stabbed on Deptford beach on the day of his sixteenth birthday to be discovered by Desert

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Man who takes him on a journey in space and time and shares his personal history from being a child in Mali to a slave in South Africa and a convict in Australia. As Goddard observes, the play’s dramatic form departs from social realism (used in the majority of plays featuring knife crime) and instead draws on diasporic African storytelling techniques such as singing, movement and dance (2011: 17). In his important essay ‘Necropolitics’ (2003), Achille Mbembé discusses the technologies of death in operation by the modern state, exemplified by the right of the  sovereign to kill beyond the law by singling out whose lives count as lives. Mbembé’s discussion on the state’s biopolitical power largely revolves around histories of racism from slavery and the plantation system to colonialism and modernday practices of disposability facilitated by neocolonialism. Similarly, following Goddard, Adebayo’s work is also preoccupied with the impact of colonial histories on contemporary concepts of identity, exploring how identities have been constructed through history, memory, language and education and highlighting the many ways that black people have performed gender, race and sexuality for survival and emancipation. (2011: 12–13)

In alluding to crime and the criminalization and enslavement of the black body, Desert Boy traces the histories of necropolitics vis-à-vis black masculinity as both characters navigate various colonial history milestones from slavery to the Australian penal colony and their implications for black identities. For example, during the short vignette entitled ‘Rite of Passage’, Desert Man and a chorus of slaves are sailing on a slave ship towards captivity and lament how this robs them from fulfilling their dama (rite of passage to manhood): Chorus What is it to be a man? My rite of passage Has been made wrong This middle passage is now my song My rite of passage Is this sea crime

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This middle passage I’m chained in time Desert Man Becalmed in time Unreconciled Can’t reach my prime Remain a child [. . .]. (Adebayo 2011: 254–55)

As the passage above exemplifies, black histories of slavery keep the child ‘chained in time’ preventing him from becoming a male subject. The feeling of being ‘chained in time’ is also experienced by the next generations of black children. This is evidenced by Soldier Boy’s decision to violently attack his own body (he is the perpetrator, the victim and the witness of the crime) in order to set himself free; what keeps Soldier Boy ‘chained’ is the fear of being branded a ‘criminal’. In this sense, Desert Boy connects the trope of death with histories of fear that have rendered the black body disposable. At the same time, it can also be read as a wilful act against sovereign power’s inscription of the body and as a ‘struggle to confront death’ (Mbembé 2003: 14) which offers him the space to assert a livable life. Adebayo’s text further draws attention to the erasure of herstories, particularly those of the black female body. After Desert Man falls in love with and impregnates slave girl Jenny, he betrays her by fleeing because he is unsure whether her child is his own or her slave master’s. Soldier Boy confronts Desert Man for his inability to recognize the exclusion  of the female from black history reminding him of his personal responsibility in perpetuating such cycles of violence which have passed down to the next generations: I am on this beach because of YOU and all the other useless mother fucking baby fathers who fuck up our mothers, blame their shit on racism and slavery but don’t take any responsibility! [. . . ] You cannot cross over to the other side without me. Without the forgiveness of your descendants you will never be free. (Adebayo 2011: 320–21)

For Adebayo, overcoming this impasse is enabled through the possibility to reconcile with one’s past which will be achieved when the

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child learns about his-tory. Soldier Boy ultimately manages to survive and fulfils his rite of passage: the play closes with him performing ‘a celebratory dama dance’ (Adebayo 2011:  322) holding a university degree certificate. In contrast to Mercury Fur’s amnesia which keeps characters ‘stuck’ in survival time, Desert Boy then hints at the function of memory as an act of responsibility which traces the historical lineages of identity and belonging. History is here presented as both continuity and rupture; while locating histories of disposability and multiple crises of the black male and female body, the rupture or moment of crisis Soldier Boy experiences in his own present is superseded by the promise to imagine more hopeful futures and to better understand his place in the world.

Ecologies of pain and grief: Simon Stephens, Sea Wall and debbie tucker green, random According to Ravenhill, the Bulger case and its affective impact on British society took the shape of national grief: ‘the Bulger murder is all feeling, little fact. A great welling up of emotion – for what exactly? – an emotion that found its ersatz shadow a few years later in the mourning for the death of Diana’ (2004: 87). What Ravenhill points out here carries a few implications:  on the one hand, he perceives death and grief to extend beyond the individual to the collective, yielding a rippling effect throughout the socius. This very much echoes Butler’s argument that ‘loss’ creates ‘a tenuous “we” of us all’ (2004: 20) and undoes borders between the ‘I’ and the Other: in this sense, grief and mourning might gesture towards a new perception of life through the lens of death. On the other hand, Ravenhill also draws attention to the fact that such deaths can be aestheticized and consumed when becoming mediated. In a theatre context, there are some notable examples which treat concepts of grief from the perspective of the living without necessarily fetishizing the moment of death through representing it on stage. In this section, I shall turn to Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall (2008) and debbie

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tucker green’s random (2008) in order to examine the effects of grief following the death of a child and their implications for identity politics. Simon Stephens’s oeuvre seems to be dominated by the subject of precarious children and young people (Bluebird, 1998; Herons, 2001; Port, 2002; One Minute, 2004; Country Music, 2004; Sea Wall, 2008; Punk Rock, 2009; Wastwater, 2011); Stephens attributes this to his double position as a parent and witness of real-life events which for him generate an acute sense of anxiety about the world which children inhabit today: Every time I turn on the news or read a paper now I have an unsettling sense that something seems to have gone wrong here. Something is awry. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way we seem to be treating our children. I wanted, I think, in writing these plays, to look as hard as I  could into the darkness of this treatment and allow it to speak metaphorically for the world in which such treatment is played out. (2009: xxii)20

Stephens’s one-act play Sea Wall revolves around the sudden death of a female child who is never present on stage; instead, the focus lies on the impact of her death to her immediate family and community and the attempt to navigate the precarious territory of pain and grief.21 Staged at London’s Bush Theatre in 2008 and subsequently at the Traverse (Edinburgh Fringe 2009), Sea Wall is written as a monologue performed by a male actor (who plays the child’s father) on a bare stage.22 The story the father narrates is simple and cruel: Alex, his wife and eight-year-old daughter Lucy visit his father-in-law in Southern France. While swimming in the sea, Alex witnesses his daughter’s death as she accidentally falls over a steep cliff. The play pushes the buttons of empathy as it asks the audience to put themselves in the shoes of the grieving father. In discussing his process of approaching Alex’s character in Sea Wall, actor Andrew Scott uses the term the ‘empathy game’ (Stephens and Scott 2013) to describe how an actor might approach the biography of a character without having prior first-hand experience of the character’s given circumstances.

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While this by no means suggests an unfamiliar approach to acting, it nevertheless collapses the distinction between the actor and the audience member who are both asked to imagine how it might feel to lose one’s eight-year-old child. Stephens’s play is exclusively narrated from the perspective of the grieving father whose character departs from models of hegemonic masculinity. Throughout his narration, Alex trusts the audience with confessions about his own vulnerability such as that he cries with unimportant things when watching popular TV shows like ER and Ground Force (Stephens 2009:  289). This confessional mode of storytelling reaches its peak with the image of Alex’s wounded body after the tragic loss of his child: I want to acknowledge something. And it’s embarrassing because I know it’s something that you will have noticed. There’s a hole running through the centre of my stomach. You must have felt awkward because you can probably see it. Even in this light. (Stephens 2009: 291)23

The passage above interlaces feelings of exposure and awkwardness with pain; the reference to the body’s non-visible wound as metaphor of Alex’s profound sense of loss works to highlight the unrepresentability of pain. Drawing on the trope of the wounded male body, this moment in Sea Wall operates quite differently from My Child in that references to pain are not atomized or fetishized, but extend beyond the single character to suggest contingency and interdependency. The choice to use monologue as a medium of narration further enhances the play’s treatment of the subject of grief. Stephens notes that the choice of monologue in his work also distils an increasingly ‘atomised and fractured’ world which is ‘scorched by a need and an ability to connect’ (2009:  xxi). As Ahmed points out, pain might be perceived as a  private experience which yet might have a public dimension: ‘it is the apparent loneliness of pain that requires it to be disclosed to a witness’ (2004: 29). Here, the combination of monologue and grief transforms private pain into an act of public sharing. As the play invites us to imagine the unimaginable death of a child, it is also

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underpinned, as Stephens notes, by ‘a need for contact’ against a world filled by fear, death and terror (2009: xxi). debbie tucker green’s random (2008), staged at the Royal Court Downstairs under the direction of Sacha Wares, similarly deploys its networks of grief starting from the family nexus in the form of a monologue performed by actress Nadine Marshall;24 at the same time, random largely differs from Sea Wall. The play is a narration of a day in the life of a black family, which is violently disrupted by the news of the stabbing of their teenage son (Brother). As tucker green’s stage directions indicate, the story should be performed by one actress who, in the fashion of a modern African storyteller, embodies different voices such as Sister (who carries the dominant voice in the play), Father, Mother and members of the community such as Brother’s teacher, Sister’s friends and the police officers who visit the family’s home. The focus on the precarious young life constituting the play’s emotional core is strongly evoked by one of the play’s most memorable lines, ‘death usedta be for the old’ (tucker green 2008:  42) which featured in the Royal Court’s production material. As a play referring to knife crime and its implications for black lives, random departs from other similar dramatic representations:  refraining from presenting the body of the dead brother and offering details about the causes of his stabbing, the play rather focuses on the emotional impact of his death to his family and immediate community.25 As I  have argued elsewhere, the play invites the audience to consider issues of collective responsibility and dependency.26 More specifically, random uses the body’s public dimension as a trope to discuss precariousness, cohabitation, identity and belonging. As Butler asserts, ‘the body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine’ (2004: 26). Echoing Butler, the narration of the family’s grief becomes a political act; Marshall’s black body uncovers the tenuous borders of selfhood that separate the ‘I’ from the Other, cutting across gender, race and age and conveying a sense of proximity. The body therefore becomes a vehicle for bridging the self and the Other, the private and

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the public and the individual and the collective. The technique of storytelling further implies a relational view of identity and the self as the actress’ polyphonous narration addresses an ethical call to the audience by circumscribing them as witnesses to the family’s grief. tucker green does not fetishize pain and suffering but rather presents it as a gesture towards contingency. Instead of being presented as fragile and wounded, Sister deals with her grief through anger. She insists on pointing out the failure of eyewitnesses in the crime scene to respond. Whole heap a somebodies on street. Saw. Whole heap a peeps on road was present. But I lissen – hard – an’ still I hear . . . (Silence) Silence shoutin the loudest. Cos it seem that now no one wanna witness what happened to my Brother. (tucker green 2008: 45)

This emphasis on witnessing as a responsible position is a recurrent concern running throughout the body of the playwright’s work; in random, tucker green articulates a critique of the media’s modes of witnessing and selective reporting on stories of violence and pain which in turn construct fragmented, distorted and spectacular realities: The press pressin [ . . . ] for a – ‘good’, ‘urban’ story [ . . . ] Feelin brave askin a hard-lookin ‘hoodie’ what he think. only to find under the cloak of Adidas is a brotha whose eyes don’t stop flowin. [ . . . ] But . . . they don’t show that bit tho. (tucker green 2008: 41–42)

Contrary to the demonization of teenage boys as ‘yobs’ (Garner 2009), and similar to Adebayo’s Desert Boy, the image of the vulnerable hoodie in random reinstates his face, and therefore his humanity, and thus works against practices of defacement that criminalize young black males. It also helps to critically evaluate the processes of recognition and silencing of certain identities and appreciate that ‘when a vulnerability is recognized, that recognition has the power to change the meaning and structure of vulnerability itself ’ (Butler 2004: 43). In this sense, random reinstates the vulnerability of the black body and articulates an alternative story to political and media discursive

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practices. In so doing, it airs issues of response-ability and witnessing against the backdrop of urban alienation. The play’s affective fabric draws attention to the body as ‘human waste’ also evidenced in the descriptions of Brother’s body in the morgue, ‘a chunk of him gone / now’ and the small but fatal killer cut that ‘punctured his . . . / su’un – important’ (tucker green 2008: 35, 37). Scholars have drawn attention to ‘what remained’ at the end of random’s Royal Court performance: Joe Kelleher speaks of how the actor’s stage appearance leaves a mark on the audience’s consciousness (Kelleher 2009: 23) while Jenny Hughes argues that the play ‘left behind an invasive, tangible presence of waste and wasted life that was critically resilient – that stayed after the performance was over’ (2011: 27). Both critics then suggest that the performance of random, in terms of subject matter, style and acting, create a profound affective impression which renders a defaced and ungrievable life to a resilient and persistent one; following Butler and Athanasiou, random’s negotiation of grief captures an ‘affective politics of the performative’ (2013: 194) and asks the question ‘who counts as human life?’. Seen together, both Sea Wall and random use grief and monologue as powerful dramaturgical tools to capture the rippling effects of pain. While narratives of pain and grief and their relation to children may risk forcing emotions of empathy to their viewers, both plays approach these with care and sensitivity and reveal their wider ramifications for precarious life.

Conclusion Since New Labour, the position of children and young people as part of the socius has shifted; the notable increase of initiatives aiming to empower young people through the arts and making them participate in social life and decision-making shows that children are more and more implicated in narratives of responsibility and are encouraged to express their own voice.27 The child also continues to be a recurrent trope in artistic work made by adults as a conduit that expresses social

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anxieties. This chapter has then charted some of the ways in which children appear on the British stage through the eyes of adults and how they become ‘sticky metaphors’ of wider moral and identity crises. As Freshwater argues, the dramatic focus on the child intersects with wider cultural adult anxieties about children and parenthood which have intensified in the twenty-first century (2013: 169–70). In this vein, my analysis aimed to demonstrate that the emphasis on the precarious male child is harnessed to crises around youth criminality taking place since the 1990s and crises of gender identity and the family. As shown, connections between children and risk sometimes participate in the production of performances of such crises (by justifying conservative discourses about families and children). While such representations inundate British stages, there is a notable absence of contemporary theatre work that represents alternative modes of parenting that extend beyond heteronormative frameworks. Contrary to previous work, the experience of risk in the twenty-first century from the perspective of female children and teenagers in particular seems to be an underexplored area.28 At the same time, the proliferation of theatrical representations of children at risk places responsibility on the adult. In some of the examples discussed above, children exhibit resilience and the ability to survive in dystopian worlds; however, the capacity to survive is compromised by the desire to follow the general will of happiness. Further, representations of young people at risk are haunted by feelings of suspension and a failure to transition between childhood and adulthood. Following Ahmed’s position that ‘the failure of transcendence constitutes the necessity of a political struggle’ (2010: 187), I argue that such an emphasis presents a significant dimension of precarity in the twenty-first century; in this sense, children and young people also act as metaphors for the wider failure of transcendence underpinning this age of uncertainty. The next chapter will further examine how concerns over precarity, the child, space, temporality and dystopia make an appearance in representations of ecological systems in peril.

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‘A Glimpse into Some Other World’: Imagining Slow Violence in the Anthropocene

In his prescient book Theatre Ecology, Baz Kershaw warns that ‘in the twentieth century homo sapiens increasingly became addicted to performance, to the point where the effects of that addiction threatened the survival of the species’ (2007: 12). For Kershaw, humans’ performance addiction, which becomes manifest in forms such as ‘carbon addiction’ and ‘compulsive global population expansion’, is the result of a pervasive ‘double bind’ whereby opposing forces (such as ‘intra-species human violence’ and violence between the human and the environment) are trapped in a vicious circle (2007: 13). Kershaw’s warning raises significant questions about ecologies of precarity which, while reproducing the conditions that maintain human life, irreversibly threaten human and non-human life’s survival. Further, Kershaw echoes wider debates concerning the era of the Anthropocene where the human impact on the Earth’s complex ecosystems and modes of collective existence are compared to a geophysical force contributing to climate change (Steffen et  al. 2007; Chakrabarty 2012). This new geological era is marked by a profound anxiety regarding the survival of the planet which can be evidenced by several sociopolitical quests for environmental sustainability. In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) released a report that proved the extent of human responsibility in precipitating climate change. This was followed by subsequent reports and global conventions which focus on addressing the repercussions of human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and identifying viable solutions on a global scale.1 More specifically,

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governmental and scientific rhetoric have since attempted to focus on ways to safeguard the future of the planet by primarily targeting carbon emissions and seeking to make investments in green energy resources. Local governments have expressed their commitment in fostering sustainable futures through the implementation of measures which aim at reducing carbon emissions, raising public awareness and creating more ‘green’ jobs. In the UK, the New Labour government (1997–2010) introduced a series of policies and initiatives, most notably the 2008 Climate Change Act and the creation of the Department for Energy and Climate Change, that aimed to advance carbon reduction (While 2013: 101). In 2009, former prime minister Gordon Brown announced his government’s intention for a ‘green new deal’ that would include the creation of up to 400,000 green jobs by 2017 in his effort to ‘increase confidence and safety’ (BBC News 2009). Succeeding New Labour, the coalition government (2010–15) pledged to become ‘the greenest government ever’ promising to ‘cut carbon emissions by 10% in the first 12 months’ (Randerson 2010). In her maiden speech as prime minister in 2016, Theresa May expressed Britain’s commitment to ratify the Paris climate agreement signed in December 2015 by over 195 members, who agreed to cut greenhouse gases by 2020 (Mason and Vaughan 2016). Despite governmental performances of commitment to tackle environmental precarity, the possibility of effecting change is severely compromised by capitalist models of growth embedded in the neoliberal TINA doctrine.2 As Aidan While explains, ‘Commitments to carbon reduction sit uneasily with the consumption-based growth model that continues to form the basis of economic policy’ (2013: 104).3 At the same time, the rise in austerity policies and cuts have slowed down the process of investing in green policies and renewable energy sources (While 2013: 101). At the heart of the climate change debate should then be the incompatibility of climate change policies with, as Naomi Klein has warned, the main ‘pillars of the neoliberal age  – privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending’ (Klein 2014: 72).

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In challenging the enduring ‘double-bind’ of performance addiction, Kershaw proposes, ‘A major revolution in how humans relate both to each other and to the environment’ (2007: 14) needs to be instigated. This radical ideological shift suggests an examination of the Anthropocene against the larger backdrop of human performance addiction and the sociopolitical conditions and practices which foster the precarization of the human and the non-human. In other words, an ethics of care towards the non-human should be rooted in an engagement with climate change as ‘cultural politics’ which draws attention to ‘[postcolonial] history [of exploitation] and notions of “vulnerability” and “responsibility” ’ (S. Smith 2011: 20–21). Some of the key challenges towards achieving such a radical change and ethics of care are posed by the difficulty of apprehending the scale and temporality of environmental precarity. Robert Nixon’s term ‘slow violence’ captures this conundrum by paying attention to the invisible and seemingly static nature of structural violence whose pervasive impact is not immediately felt due to its attritional and exponential mode of expansion and damage. For Nixon, the challenge lies primarily in representationally intervening in images and narratives of spectacular violence and gratification which constitute key tenets of ‘turbo capitalism’ (Nixon 2011: 8). The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally requires that we find both the iconic symbols to embody amorphous calamities and the narrative forms to infuse them with dramatic urgency. (Nixon 2011: 10)

Nixon’s call towards representational strategies which would reanimate an ethics of care towards the environment is a significant one for the arts. In thinking about care and theatre, it is helpful to consider the affective impressions facilitated by the power of creative imagination and storytelling. Helen Nicholson has signalled the necessity of creative imagination in the theatre to ‘further a new social imaginary’ (2009: 50).

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In doing so, Nicholson draws on David Greig’s essay ‘Rough Theatre’ where he signals the political significance of the imagination for the theatre, which operates as a ‘battlefield’ as it asks audiences to imagine the unimaginable and make all things possible (Greig 2008). The power of theatrical imagination attached to care should also be examined in relation to how hope for the future becomes manifest. The workings of hope are quite complex: for Rebecca Solnit, hope suggests uncertainty and signifies ‘coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding that despair and, in a way, more frightening’ (2016: 7); Ahmed also considers the intersections of hope with anxiety as possible ways of acting upon the future. ‘Hope’, Ahmed argues, ‘is a thoughtful way of being directed toward the future, or creating the very thought of the future as going some way. [ . . . ] Hope also involves imagination, a wishfulness that teaches about what we strive for in the present’ (2010: 182–83). At the same time, having hope also produces anxiety as it ‘involves something that might or might not happen’ (2010: 183). This chapter is then concerned with some ways in which twentyfirst-century theatre might address environmental precarities through the imagination and affective engagement; for this purpose, I am here borrowing a phrase from Stan’s Cafe’s artistic director James Yarker who speaks of his company’s vision as promoting ‘a glimpse into some other world’ (Stan’s Cafe 2001:  28). The examples chosen for this chapter offer small apertures towards imagining slow violence in relation to temporality and space; I am particularly interested in how their representational choices engage with climate change as ‘the new cultural politics’ and impress anxious hopes vis-à-vis ecologies of precarity in the Anthropocene.

Theatrical challenges and anxious hopes in the age of the Anthropocene The era of the Anthropocene pronounces the necessity to reconfigure life’s ontology. In Frames of War, Butler takes issue with anthropocentrism

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which renders humanness ‘a shifting prerogative’ (2009: 76) and calls for ‘reconceiv[ing] life itself as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies [ . . . ] which imply that the “ontology” of the human is not separable from the “ontology” of the animal’ (2009: 75–76). Butler’s critique of anthropocentrism rehearses ongoing debates in ecocriticism (Latour 2004; Bennett 2010; Morton 2010; Chakrabarty 2012), and particularly ecofeminism, which recognizes binaries and dualistic thinking as a form of oppression (Adams and Gruen 2014: 3). Postcolonial thinker Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012) has drawn attention to the fact that the ‘anthropos’ (the human) in the Anthropocene has now acquired a nonontological quality as the impact of his performance is compared to a geophysical force. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter further collapses such binaries and hierarchies by focusing on the ‘vital materialisms’ intrinsic in non-human entities. Similarly, a critique of dualisms between nature/culture and anthropocentric narratives is mirrored in much theatre ecocriticism and its call for conceptualizing ‘what it means to be human’ in the theatre (Chaudhuri and Enelow 2014: 25). This chapter will primarily focus on how recent theatre in the UK engages with such calls for representational interventions in capturing environmental precarities. Towards the end of the first decade of the third millennium, a marked interest in the topics of ecological risk and climate change emerged on the British stage. Such attention was particularly owed to the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen in December 2009 which failed to provide consensus over viable solutions to tackle global warming. Following Copenhagen, several pieces on climate change littered London’s elite institutions such as The National Theatre, The Royal Court and smaller venues such as the Bush, the Tricycle and the Arcola in an unprecedented way while more experimental forms in non-traditional theatre venues appeared elsewhere across the country.4 The various experiments with dramatic style suggest a wider anxiety over ways in which theatrical vocabularies may communicate those issues to a non-expert audience:  some of these plays appear in the guise of ‘docu-science’ (Hudson 2012: 262) featuring scientific discourse either

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by staging scientists as characters, or by bringing scientists themselves on stage and presenting compelling evidence about environmental precarities. Examples such as Ten Billion and 2071, both directed by Katie Mitchell and performed at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, brought two scientists on stage (Stephen Emmott and Chris Rapley, respectively); both grappled with the implications of the Anthropocene such as the devastating effects of the planet’s population growth and debated the possibility of halting the overheating of the planet and sealevel rise. During the rehearsal process of Ten Billion, Mitchell realized that ‘using existing theatrical formats was not going to work, and the only way to do it was to get the scientist up there using a different language to talk to people’ (Merritt 2014). In 2071 (a collaboration with playwright Duncan Macmillan presented in the form of performance lecture), Rapley asks his audience to project an image of themselves in the future (2071 is the year that his eldest grandchild will be his age) in order to imagine the world of their grandchildren. Rapley’s invitation to incite the audience’s imagination in thinking about the future of their children and grandchildren further articulates an ‘anxious hope’ which yet remains trapped within a ‘double-bind’ of consumption and growth as ‘our prosperity and well-being depends upon it’ (Macmillan and Rapley 2015). It is for this reason that 2071 fails to show how hope and care propel us to move beyond or transcend ‘social forms in which hopes for happiness have already been deposited’ (Ahmed 2010: 187). London’s National Theatre also pursued the strategy of staging scientists as characters and approached the subject through an apocalyptic aesthetic reminiscent of end-of-century existential and political angsts. Mike Bartlett and Headlong’s Earthquakes in London’s (2010) view on the Earth’s future utilized excess at the core of its mise-enscène. The entire production was presented as addicted to performance and excess: ‘The stage should overflow with scenery, sound, backdrops, lighting, projection, etc. Everything is represented. It is too much. The play is about excess and we should feel that’ (Bartlett 2010a:  5). The aesthetic trope of excess also underpinned the dramaturgy and staging of Greenland (2011), a play collaboratively written by Moira Buffini,

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Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. In its spectacular overflow of storylines, data, technology and resources, the piece worked to convey, according to the play’s dramaturg Ben Power, a ‘feeling of powerlessness’ (K. Smith 2011). This recent proliferation of plays explicitly tackling climate change raises several questions: while showing ‘that the public debate around climate change is currently in a state of considerable flux’ (Bottoms 2012: 346), many of these examples further contribute to the spectacles and overflow of data thus playing out anxieties about the present moment as an intensified period of ‘extended crisis’ (Berlant 2011: 7). At the same time, focusing on the staging of ‘expert’ scientific discourses and rhetoric presents limited imaginative approaches about how to envisage relationships between humans and their environments. With reference to theatre and environmentalism, Deirdre Heddon and Sally Mackey also warn that ‘the work of art must leave space for the spectator [ . . . ] [without] instructing or forcefully raising the consciousness or awareness of its audience’ (2012:  176). As key features of our time, they argue, precarity and uncertainty demand ‘imaginative (“what if ”) and fluid responses’ (2012:  171). This investment in unpredictability and fluidity is particularly palpable in several initiatives across the UK which test ways of experimenting with form, participation and theatre-making processes rooted in environmental ethics.5 Following Ahmed’s dictum that ‘action might require the capacity to lose and gain focus’ (Ahmed 2010: 185), in the following pages, I am concerned with theatrical forms which engage with the unpredictabilities of containing and safeguarding the human and the non-human and the ways in which these pronounce a call for care and responsibility.

Politics of dystopia: Caryl Churchill, Far Away and Alistair McDowall, X Dan Rebellato (2017) observes that recent British theatre refrains from graphic representations of violence in favour of more experimental

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choices which verge toward the ‘apocalyptic’. Following Adorno, Rebellato argues that this approach to violence manages to ‘re-open the dialectic, even if momentarily, and give us an experience of the otherwise unthinkable life beyond capitalism’ (2017: par. 44). Rebellato’s thinking about violence and theatre brings Nixon’s understanding of slow violence into sharper focus while also tapping into the aesthetics of dystopia as a politics of performance. Ahmed also identifies dystopia’s political impetus in art arguing that it helps us ‘witness a potential for other things happening that might not simply be contained by narrative’ (2010: 191). In this vein, it is pertinent to examine how theatre extends an invitation to imagine what exists beyond recognizable frames of representation. This section will specifically unpack how the (post-) apocalyptic and the dystopian in new writing capture such anxious hopes and slow violence by focusing on Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Alistair McDowall’s X (2016). Dystopia as a genre is primarily associated with literature and cinema  (Booker 1994; Baccolini and Moylan 2003) yet  much recent theatre also features dystopian forms and themes which are yet to receive adequate scholarly attention.6 Dystopian theatre dramatizes a double-bind or an impasse, that is, a failure to provide resolution and transcendence. I  am here borrowing Tony Fisher’s understanding of ‘the theatre of the impasse’ which is opposed to ‘the traditional theatre of crisis’; as the latter tends to stage the resolution of crisis, it reinforces the world’s ontological coherence by restoring its order: In the first place, the theatre of the impasse can no longer be seen to redeem the world by transposing its effects, onto an audience conceived as a congregation or ethical community. To the extent that the theatre of the impasse cannot constitute a community it cannot be a theatre that claims to represent ‘the world’ on behalf of that community. (Fisher 2017)

This failure of community and the lack of recognisable representations of the world present some fruitful challenges in the staging of ecologies of precarity. Dystopia and precarity exercise the audience’s imagination

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as they present the world at the edge of being lost. For Ahmed, this is a significant imaginative exercise as it acts as a trigger against the conditions that induce such a loss: ‘we will lose the future if we don’t think of the future as something that can be lost’ (2010: 183). Caryl Churchill’s Far Away might be read as an example of ‘the theatre of the impasse’ in that it engages with a double-bind of intraspecies violence. Premiering at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 2001 and directed by Stephen Daldry, the play dramatizes a global paranoid war which involves humans and animals. Similar to other examples from Churchill’s theatrical oeuvre, the play articulates a strong socialist critique against ecologies of precarity which become manifest in the complex machinations of capitalist ideology and material conditions that lead to oppression, injustice and jeopardize the future of the young generation; it further reflects a commitment to show ‘the absurdity of a world enmeshed in values that threaten to devalue all kinds of life’ (Aston 2015: 60) as well as the disappearance of resistance to capitalism (Aston 2013: 145). The play bears echoes of the Holocaust and has further been read as a prescient response to the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror (Kustow 2008; Hughes 2011); others have also insisted on its ecological dimensions (Chaudhuri 2007; Rabillard 2009; Aston 2015). While Aston is reluctant to identify Churchill with an ecofeminist agenda which she reads as a ‘feminist strand of ecology that makes a case for a spiritual, woman-centred universe removed from man-made destruction’ (2005: 166), it is my view that Far Away can also be read as an ecofeminist play.7 For Greta Gaard, ecofeminist thought is underpinned by an interest in the connections ‘among racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, speciesism and the environment’ (2011:  26). Similarly, Far Away dramatizes intra-species violence and capitalist exploitation as part of the same vicious cycle echoing Kershaw’s theorization of the ‘double-bind’. Divided into three parts, the play’s elliptical narrative follows a linear progression. The first act takes place in the peaceful countryside and a garden, ‘emblem of a normal suburban English life’ (Rabillard 2009:  109), where young Joan bears witness to violence exercised by

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her uncle. After confessing what she has witnessed, she is pacified by her aunt who rationalizes her uncle’s crimes as acts which serve the common good. In comparison to the genealogy of staging precarious female children in Churchill’s drama, the child in Far Away is implicated in cycles of precarity as she learns to remain complicit with such ecologies of violence; in this sense, the play represents the process through which slow violence becomes ‘the harm that happens after most people have stopped paying attention’ (Chaudhuri and Enelow 2014: 24). In Act 2, Joan, who now works in a factory with Todd (her future husband), is making hats worn by convicts who are about to be executed. Joan and Todd seem concerned about the exploitation of their own labour by the factory owner yet remain blind to wider ecologies of dependence; while they are subjected to the ‘invisible’ powers of capitalism which translate into precarious working conditions and corrupt management, they fail to pay attention to how they are also directly implicated in the perpetuation of violence against the ‘unnamed humans’ parading behind them. Their myopic understanding of precarity becomes apparent by their decision to question the absurd act of making flamboyant hats for the prisoners only on the basis that the fruit of their labour is wasted – as the hats are burned with the bodies. JOAN It seems so sad to burn them with the bodies. TODD No I think that is the joy of it. The hats are ephemeral. It’s like a metaphor for something or other. JOAN Well, life. (Churchill 2008: 150)

Here, the abstraction of life into metaphor mirrors a wider disengagement with the human and the non-human that percolates in the play. For its 2014 revival at the Young Vic, director Kate Hewitt and designer Georgia Lowe capitalized on the idea of the hat as metaphor for human life reversing its function. During the short vignette featuring ‘a procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution’ (Churchill 2008: 149), dispossessed human life made an appearance through object and sound: a range of hats suspended above the traverse auditorium (not too far from the audience’s heads) paraded

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to their ‘death’ while being accompanied by a haunting soundscape of mumbling and crying voices. For Butler and Athanasiou, precarious life poses the challenge of how to ‘mobilize appearance’ without reifying subjectivity (2013: 195); for this reason, they turn to the significance of spacing the appearance of ‘the unperformable’ to capture an ‘affective politics of the performative’ (2013: 194). In this sense, Hewitt and Lowe’s production choices ‘spaced the appearance’ of the ‘less-than-human’ and captured an ‘affective politics’ thus reanimating the audience’s perception about what counts as livable life. Todd and Joan seem to care more about their own home rather than the world at large, yet the safety net provided by the family fails to secure them from the exponential increase of risk deployed locally and globally. Act 3 closes with an Orwellian world war between humans, animals and nature where ‘the cats have come in on the side of the French’ (Churchill 2008: 153), mallards are ‘on the side of the elephants and the Koreans’ (2008: 155) and the deer ‘have been with us for three weeks’ (2008:  157). Humans and animals are found at the centre of a huge wave of migration and displacement and a vicious circle of never-ending violence that imbricates every possible ecosystem on Earth. Natural phenomena also participate in this war as ‘the weather here’s on the side of the Japanese’ (2008: 158). This continuous entropy and destabilization of any sense of prior knowledge and certainty is epitomized in Joan’s final speech where she narrates the risks she faced during her attempt to cross the river: But I didn’t know whose side the river was on, it might help me swim or it might drown me. In the middle the current was running much faster, the water was brown, I didn’t know if that meant anything. I stood on the bank a long time. But I knew it was my only way of getting here so at last I put one foot in the river. It was very cold but so far that was all. When you’ve just stepped in you can’t tell what’s going to happen. The water laps round your ankles in any case. (Churchill 2008: 158)

If Churchill’s Far Away exists on the cusp between the apocalyptic and the post-apocalyptic, Alistair McDowall’s 2016 X seems to be

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projected into the future of Far Away’s world as it completely dissolves any hope about the existence of human life on Earth. McDowall pursues this by completely removing humans from their planet. X features Gilda, Ray, Cole and Clark, a group of scientists and astronauts who remain stranded on a scientific base on Pluto due to a failure of all communication systems. The play is situated at some point in the future where most parts of the Earth have been depleted: countries have disappeared, people live in bomb shelters and nature exists only in the form of fractured memories passed on from generation to generation or through simulacra that seek to reproduce the real. Ray is old enough to remember the birds before ‘they fell out of the trees [ . . . ] like stones wrapped in paper’ (McDowall 2016b:  27–28). In order to preserve such impressions of nature, Ray is carrying memorabilia such as photos and bird whistles, which hold emotional significance. He insists on blowing the bird whistles on a daily basis, so he does not forget their sound (McDowall 2016b: 27) while his collection of photos captures some of the moments of humankind on Earth. Ray’s photos act as a reminder of ‘the causes and the memory of catastrophe’ which, for Nixon, ‘readily fade from view’ (2011: 9); for Ray, they hold a certain vitality as they are things that enable him to travel in the past and bring personal and collective memory to life. The fact that these photos exist in a tactile form is also significant to him: ‘They have a life. Life trapped in paper. Something from then I can hold onto now’ (McDowall 2016b: 77). In contrast to Ray, Clark, the person responsible for maintaining the spaceship’s communication systems, prefers living in the present, vehemently rejecting the past and the future as non-existent: Clark History is bullshit. You’re always asking everyone about it and it’s gone. It doesn’t exist. I don’t waste my time about shit that doesn’t exist [ . . . ] [The future?] Same thing. Doesn’t exist. Can’t see it. Touch it. [ . . . ] Pimps like me live in the present. (McDowall 2016b: 15)

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Clark’s sense of time echoes Berlant’s theorization of the present as ‘an impasse’, a space where ‘one keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically in the same space’ (2011:  199). Where scientific and technological knowledge fails to measure time (represented by the figure X in the play), the characters remain stuck in an endless present waiting to be rescued or die (McDowall 2016b: 131). Clark’s expression ‘a waste of time’ becomes a paradox as measuring time is rendered impossible: all clocks and watches (which are connected to Universal Time on Earth) have either stopped working or are going backwards. This failure of measuring time is due to a fault on the main systems on Earth which intimates that humankind has been exterminated. The passing of time heading towards oblivion, a device which one critic described as ‘slow burning’ (Billington 2016) and the play’s emphasis on presentism, injects the narrative with further temporal and linguistic disorientations and a rapid disintegration of the characters’ memory and physical control. Act 2 finds Gilda, Cole and Clark trapped in a repetitive game of remembering and forgetting. Capitalizing on the unreliability of memory, all assurances over truth, identity, time and space have eroded; the only thing that shows the passage of time is physical precariousness such as ageing and illness. While on board, Cole develops cancer which quickly deteriorates leading to his death; following Cole’s death, Gilda and Clark are trapped within what Rebellato names ‘apocalyptic speech’ exemplified by ‘linguistic negation’ (2017). Echoing Caryl Churchill’s linguistic experiments in Blue Kettle (1997) where language gradually dissolves into a series of inarticulate consonants, X presents a long stretch of speech where language is slowly reduced to a string of ‘X’s: -G-da -daaaa -X -X -X -X. (McDowall 2016b: 125)

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This type of ‘apocalyptic speech’ is later replaced by a series of snapshots where Gilda  appears to be experiencing nightmarish visions evoking her feelings of solitude. Those visions capture distorted memories or fears of ultimate catastrophe: ‘A gigantic nightingale lies on the floor, injured, bleeding. Gilda appears the size of an infant next to it. She shrinks from the bird’s laboured breathing. Hands begin to push from within the bird’s chest, a swallowed figure wrestling out from within the flesh’ (McDowall 2016b: 141). However, Gilda’s sense of infinite loneliness following the death of all members of the crew is quickly challenged as we realize that during her time on Pluto she has given birth to a girl, Mattie. Mattie is an enigmatic character who appears throughout the play as a crew member or a spectre which frightens Ray, and it is not until the end of the play that her identity is revealed; nevertheless, her appearance across different ages without following a linear pattern further exacerbates Gilda’s disorientation. McDowall has admitted that X originates in the idea to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter; his intention was to capture how  a ‘feeling like home is slipping away from them, gradually. Not just physically – because they’re not there anymore – but mentally, everything about home is going, disappearing. And Pluto was just the furthest possible place in the general imagination that I could think of to make that happen’ (McDowall 2016a). McDowall has further spoken about the importance of focusing on ‘small things’ in making political theatre; key to this is metaphor and structure and how these help to capture ‘what it feels like to be human’ (McDowall 2017). X exemplifies this through the metaphor of a lost home and the focus on small acts which offer an impression of the human. In its overflow of linguistic and visual signifiers, the only stable points of reference are ‘moments of suspension’ (Ahmed 2010:  191) filled with small acts of love and care. Before Clark dies, Gilda reassures him that she will be on his side:  ‘I’m here. You can count on me’ (McDowall 2016b: 137). The same scene is repeated when Gilda dies in the arms of Mattie who repeatedly consoles her: ‘I am here’ (McDowall 2016b: 156). This final act of reassurance of human presence and care is

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interwoven with the echoes of the (now diseased) natural habitat which appears through ‘the ambient sound of the forest’ and bird whistles (McDowall 2016b: 156) heard during the play’s closing moments. Both plays’ overflow of apocalyptic themes, use of temporality and metaphors capture ‘catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long term effects’ (Nixon 2011: 10). Driven by an acute anxiety about the present and the future, they dramatize an impasse that cannot be transcended. Similar to works explored in Chapter 2, I argue that this lack of transcendence can be read as hopeful as it is underpinned by an anxious need to care. In addition, both plays echo Churchill’s The Skriker explored in Chapter 1, where the role of the female child and the imagination becomes particularly significant: in Far Away, young Joan’s anxiety stems from her feelings of care for what she imagines is happening in her aunt’s garden; in X, Mattie cares for something she has only witnessed through her mother’s stories and which she conjures through her imagination. It is here that the unimaginable or the dystopian serves as an index of what we are about to lose which in turn reminds us ‘what we strive for in the present’ (Ahmed 2010: 182–83).

Vital materialisms: Stan’s Cafe, Of All the People in All the World A focus on temporality vis-à-vis slow violence in performance is conducive to questions of space and scale which interface with imaginative (and non-anthropocentric) strategies of representing the human. Echoing Nixon’s call to revisit representational strategies against the tendency for large-scale spectacles, Kershaw turns to the importance of small-scale spectacle which enables the viewer to re-engage with what constitutes the human. Kershaw specifically proposes viewing ‘the subject as a disappearing act’ thus challenging liberal humanist perceptions of the human (2007:  212, original emphasis). Kershaw’s challenge can be read in the light of Bennett’s call to recognize our nonhuman qualities and the vital force of material things (2010:  4). She

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names this force as ‘thing-power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’ (2010:  6, original emphasis). This section will turn to Birmingham-based theatre company Stan’s Cafe and its installation piece Of All the People in All the World which engages with such vital materialities and small-scale spectacles. Of All the People in All the World belongs to the company’s eclectic and wide-ranging repertoire and has received numerous productions across the UK, Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia.8 The piece grew out of the need to explore how we experience place and the world at large and to understand the number of people we share the planet with. Its guiding principle is to inflate statistics while scaling down the world using rice as metonymy for human life. Rice was originally chosen for its durability, texture, size, cheap price and ‘humanoid’ shape (Stan’s Cafe 2003). Upon entry, spectators are invited to take a single grain (representing themselves) which they should hold in their hand while navigating through piles of rice of variable sizes which are placed across the space. The piles are labelled and grouped together suggesting different narratives; the number of grains on each pile is determined by statistical data that represent facts about populations of the city and/or country in which it is performed which are sourced by the company during the performance and in live consultation with audiences. Performers, dressed in plain factory clothes, weigh rice quantities using scales, conduct research, print labels and reshape the installation landscape by adding more piles as the show progresses. The piece chimes with the company’s intention to ‘promot[e] the possibility of alternative ways of looking at the world and alternative value systems’ (Yarker 2008). Stan’s Cafe’s artistic director James Yarker explains how the company’s vision lies in presenting alternative world views, ‘not a specific ideology but the possibility of something that is outside of the market, outside sporting competition, outside conventional consumerism, an alternative way of thinking, a glimpse into some other world’ (Stan’s Cafe 2001:  28). This intention is

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Figure  2 Stan’s Cafe’s Of All the People in All the World (Festival VEO, Valencia, Spain, 2005). Photo credit: Karen Stafford, reproduced with kind permission from © Stan’s Cafe

served well through the metonymic use of rice which suggests ways of connecting statistics to their underpinning (in)visible realities and unpacking, among other ideas, issues about life, death, health, mobility and precarity. Recognizing statistics as figures of power and authority which destabilize and erase human specificity, the piece organizes them in a reflexive dramaturgy which negotiates space, place and asymmetrical power structures. Some recurrent facts on health, immigration, asylum and travel used in all the shows underpin the performance’s dramaturgical spine; the piece further includes statistics directly related to life precariousness brought by large-scale disasters such as earthquakes and fires.9 In seeking to make sense of the world, the rice cartographies in Of All the People present the opportunity to shift perceptions about the world and foreground precarity as ecology. The spatial arrangement of the piles allows for the emergence of different stories about population

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statistics, and the various comparisons articulated often carry poignant political significations: a pile of the United Kingdom’s 2012 millionaires sits next to the country’s unemployed people between the ages of 16 and 24 the same year; a pile of all the refugees in the world sits beside a slightly smaller pile with all the world’s millionaires. For its 2016 reincarnation in London, a pile of eligible people who did not vote for the EU referendum was placed alongside a much smaller pile of people ‘whose votes comprised the winning margin’. Comparisons are further drawn between the local and the global to make particular issues more palatable and relevant to its audience: in their 2012 World Shakespeare Festival show in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a pile representing the number of people who left their homes due to the violence in Syria appeared next to a pile representing Birmingham’s population. Other versions of Of All the People comment on the implications of the uneven distribution of wealth globally and in the planet’s overpopulated areas. Echoing Ahmed’s interest in how objects mark bodies through creating impressions (2004:  6), the performative power of Of All the People’s dramaturgy rests not only in the arrangement of piles but also in their actual presence in the space. As Simon Parry remarks, the piece ‘gains its effect not from identification with an individual narrative but from the spectacular visual impact of the size of the piles and the totality of the installation’ (Parry 2010: 326). At the same time, the piece scales down spectacle such as world disasters or suffering to a miniaturized form (Kershaw 2007). Audience engagement is then fuelled by an innovative exploration of perception and apprehension of the world. As Yarker observes, It’s quite difficult to understand what it means when you hear that two million children will die this year from diseases for which a vaccination exists but when you see two million grains of rice and a piece of paper, suddenly that becomes a very shocking, powerful statistic. (Cited in Parry 2010: 325)

The installation’s frame of participation further enables such affective engagements to develop. Nicola Shaughnessy defines the piece’s

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affective strategies as ‘critical empathy’ fuelled by an ‘embodied spectatorship’ (2012:  127). Asking the spectator to identify with a grain of rice therefore requires a somewhat different affective and imaginative labour to that involved in engaging with a human face; although the piece’s endgame is to think about the human, its chosen dramaturgy of participation suggests that affect is not specific to human bodies (Bennett 2010:  xii). Further, the implicit invitation addressed to the audience to find themselves a pile to which they belong, reveals the precarious, unstable and incomplete nature of identity which is the result of multiple identifications (Mouffe 1992: 10): spectators recognize that they might at once belong to many different communities of people sharing common traits which bind them together to an imagined community of citizens. Describing her encounter with an assemblage of waste, Bennett notices how non-human materialities might appear as ‘vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics’ (2010:  5). These objects emit ‘thing-power’ that is, ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’ (2010: 6). Of All the People builds on the object’s ‘thingpower’ challenging anthropocentric understandings of identity; it also engages with ideas of waste in more indirect forms. The rice collectively assembled in each pile articulates a politics of appearance of the dispossessed bringing into focus Butler’s concept of the differential allocation of grievability and the ‘affective politics of the performative’ of dispossessed lives (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 194). A  huge pile representing people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa or children who will die from diseases for which a vaccination exists (or even, a pile representing the young precariat), exercise, as Butler would suggest, ‘a performative force in the public domain’ in that they translate into ‘a presence of an obdurate bodily life’; instead of mobilizing collective grief, those piles claim exposure of bodily life by saying, ‘We are still here, We have not yet been disposed of ’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 196).

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The function of rice as edible matter further draws attention to its vitality as it fuels and sustains life as well as to the interconnectedness between human and non-human materialities. In their show in Perth, Australia (Butler and Athanasiou 2013), a huge pile represented the amount of food wasted in China each day, while each grain stood for a person who could live on that food. The choice to refer to food waste further creates a paradox between rice as a vital force and the dramaturgies of precarity which determine the reproduction of a livable human life.10 In reconfiguring the world and engaging its participants in an embodied perceptual experience, this work by Stan’s Cafe forges innovative readings of ecology, interconnectedness and social responsibility towards local/global cultures of waste and precarity. In staging the human subject as a ‘disappearing act’ (Kershaw 2007: 212, original emphasis) and paying attention to the vibrant materiality of small things, the piece rehearses a politics of the performative which proffers an invitation to imagine human life, subjectivity, dispossession and interconnectedness beyond exclusively anthropocentric discourses.11

Border-crossings: Transport Theatre, The Edge Ecologies of precarity allow us to see ‘the world that we inhabit’ (Nixon 2011: 15) by pointing towards wider hierarchies of power and ecologies of risk. For Nixon, the ‘primary casualties of slow violence’ (2011: 4) are the countries of the Global South which are often used as repositories of waste with predictions that they will experience the implications of climate change more acutely. It is therefore imperative to address the implications of environmental precarities in different parts of the globe and how this affects wider ecologies of precarity. As shown with Of All the People in All the World, an imaginative engagement with slow violence brings into sharp focus such geographical asymmetries of power and distribution of precarity. In this section, I will apply pressure

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to how environmental risk connects to displacement and ‘becoming refugee’ by examining Transport Theatre’s performance The Edge (2015). The piece’s title evokes the concept of the border as a broader metaphor for precarious and dispossessed lives ‘on the edge’ while also being key in the context of theatre that tackles migration and asylum.12 For this reason, I will also briefly consider representations of human suffering and empathy in the context of representing precarious lives subject to forced displacement. During its short lifespan (2011–17), the touring theatre company Transport Theatre was preoccupied with the theme of mobility and displacement.13 The Edge contributes to the impressive volume of UK theatre work tackling the theme of forced migration and bordercrossing.14 This rise has become more pronounced following the peak of the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015 where numbers of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia crossing from Turkey, Libya or Morocco and trying to reach Europe soared to nearly one million in 2015 while thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. This huge wave of migration, framed as the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time, is often compared to the massive displacement of Europeans during the Second World War. It is for those reasons, as Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia argue, ‘that the need for representation, embodiment, encounter and imagination has never been greater’ (2016: 141). For The Edge, the company’s artistic director Douglas Rintoul originally intended to explore the theme of ‘interconnectedness’ (Transport Theatre 2015b); co-produced with New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, the piece was developed as part of an artistic exchange between Transport and Ranan Dance Theatre Company from Kolkata, India, with the support of the British Council’s ‘Connections Through Culture’ grant.15 The company spent some time in India researching on the impact of climate change in the region of the Sundarbans on the North Eastern border with Bangladesh. Following its return to its base, Transport started reading about predictions of sea level rise in the UK and discovered the wider ecologies and management of precarity and how these affect impoverished coastal towns:

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Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre Talking to coastal management and sea level experts from the National Centre of Oceanography it became clear that there will come a time in the not too distant future where decisions will begin to be made about areas at risk  – we will have to let some go, ‘manage a retreat’. Current policies on coastal management are linked to the economic significance of an area. The most impoverished and vulnerable, as in India, may not be protected. (Long 2015)

The reality of differential management of vulnerability of coastal towns is at the heart of The Edge which takes place in an impoverished town in the south-east of England on the sea border with France. The piece is set in 2035 which is imagined as a time when Britain increasingly suffers from floods which mostly affect seaside towns.16 Great numbers of island residents from the north-east coast of India have already been displaced due to poverty and the destruction of their land by the sea while the water fronts of the English coastal town had to be abandoned. The piece revolves around the encounter of a British woman who used to live at the (now uninhabitable) town’s water front and a climateinduced migrant from the Sundarbans. Both attempt to swim across the English Channel from different directions; the woman rescues the man from drowning and takes him to a deserted library where she brings him food and clothes. The library becomes the man’s refuge and sanctuary as it protects him from the police. When he attempts to travel to London in search of his relatives, he is accosted and sent back home. Theatre that deals with displacement and vulnerability largely seeks to elicit empathetic responses in order to incite spectators to responsibility and action. For Susan Leigh Foster, empathy is a ‘kinaesthetic experience’ par excellence, ‘invented [  .  .  .  ] to register a changing sense of physicality that, in turn, influenced how one felt another’s feelings’ (2011: 11). However, Rustom Bharucha warns that ‘an unproblematized empathy [ . . . ] can be unconsciously exclusionary. We can feel empathy for a few individuals only at the expense of others. For every immersion in another body, we implicitly, (or explicitly) avoid the touch of others’ (2014: 67). While theatre has the capacity to facilitate such an affective engagement through a face-to-face exchange

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with the Other, theatrical representations of refugees as ‘symbols of human suffering’ which seek to appeal to the audience’s humanitarian values need to be scrutinized; refugee and asylum theatre has already been approached with some caution, particularly in relation to its representation of vulnerability and narratives of hospitality (Gilbert and Lo 2007; Jeffers 2012; C. Wilson  2013; Woolley 2014; Cox 2015). Questions over power relations between hosts and guests as well as the implications of representing the refugee as ‘sufferer’, approach them as dependents in their new milieus rather than as agents. As Alison Jeffers persuasively argues, representations which cast asylum seekers as victims or ‘heroic survivors’ render them politically neutral thus mitigating the possibility to see them as ‘political actors’ (2012:  56). In this sense, it is necessary to choose suitable dramatic forms which, while articulating the precarity of the refugee, also avoid rehearsing a ‘victim mentality’. Although Transport’s piece relies on familiar narratives of asylum theatre such as the ‘loss of home or homeland, the necessity to flee and a coercive relational structure whereby any real agency dissolves in the face of persecution’ thus risking presenting the ‘refugee-as-victim’ (Cox 2015: 32), the representation of the refugee resists fetishizing pain. Rather than mimetically representing character, actors Balvider Sopal and Tim Lewis physicalize their characters’ gestures and scene transitions using stylized movement while also swapping roles and using thirdperson narration. In the piece’s opening, they also position themselves as narrators vis-à-vis wider networks of migration and mobility. After introducing themselves using their real names, they begin to trace their own and their families’ and ancestors’ journeys on an imaginary map. Further, the performance’s dramaturgy tightly interweaves the stories of the two characters and their different journeys to reach its climax when they meet at sea. The Edge’s engagement with ecologies of precarity is particularly palpable in its politics of location; in drawing connections across forced migration and climate change, the piece applies pressure to wider interdependencies of environmental conditions of maintaining

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lives. Butler (2012) pronounces the necessity to examine our ethical obligations as operating beyond the confines of geographical borders. For this, she argues, we need to pay attention to an ethics of cohabitation by revisiting and reversing our understanding of proximity and distance:  ‘questions of location are confounded such that what is happening “there” is also happening in some sense “here” ’ (2012: 138). The Edge masterfully dramatizes this reversal by bringing together the two characters from different parts of the world who have lost their family home due to sea-level rise without reducing them to universal understandings of humanness. As part of its tour, The Edge was performed in Folkestone, a seaside town in the south-east area of England’s Kent which resembles the town the piece refers to. A  gateway to Europe for centuries, Folkestone is currently undergoing a process of regeneration and hosts a burgeoning arts scene. At the same time, it has some of the  most deprived areas in the UK, with levels of unemployment beyond the national average (Shepway District Council 2014), as well as high risks of flooding. Performed in Folkestone library, The Edge conflated theatrical space with the spectators’ experience of their local space while also bringing two different temporalities together: the spectators’ present and their near future. The minimalist stage design included piles of disused books placed upstage to evoke the sanctuary space for the climateinduced refugee. Such choices invited the audience to project their imagination to the future by visualizing the (familiar) local space of the performance in unfamiliar ways: as a space destroyed by sea-level rise.17 This choice further reinforced the piece’s ethical commitment to a politics of location. As the piece’s title suggests, The Edge conceptually engages with the notion of border-crossing. As the border is controlled by sovereign laws which brand Others with the identity of ‘stranger-danger’ (Ahmed 2000: 3), crossing the border is imbued with risk. Sophie Nield makes a compelling argument that, in real life, ‘the border is not quite “there”. Rather it “appears”, or is produced, wherever the encounter, the narrative or story of movement takes place. It is the site at which

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identity (or its lack) is staged enacted and performed’ (2006: 69). In this light, the encounter of the refugee with the border marks them as less grievable lives, further separating them from the borders of the nation which seeks to safeguard its immunity. In The Edge, this differential experience of encountering the border is made apparent when Lewis’s character observes the caravans of holidaymakers between the English and the French coast: ‘Some borders are thin. You can barely notice them when you pass through. Some borders are thick. You can sense them before you can get anywhere near’ (Transport Theatre 2015a). Sopal’s encounter with the edge, represented by her decision to swim across the English Channel, is the result of a choice, her desire to overcome past personal traumas and particularly her mother’s suicide. Nevertheless, her choice to rescue the unknown man presents an ethical act which aims to preserve precarious life. Although in the position of the host, ‘the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum’ (Derrida 2000: 4), Sopal’s character also puts herself in a precarious position as she has breached the country’s law for assisting migrants. For Butler, when we commit to the preservation of endangered human life, we also take responsibility ‘to all those environmental conditions that make life livable’ (2012: 147); in this sense, Sopal’s ethics momentarily disrupts the sovereign laws of the border. The piece also negotiates ideas about the violence of language borders and how these connect to relations of ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. As Jacques Derrida highlights, the need for the migrant subject to speak in a language other than her own, ‘but one imposed to him [sic] by the master or the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State’, draws attention to translation ‘as the first act of violence’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 15). In The Edge, the migrant is not forced to speak an alien language in order to communicate; rather, both sides seem to negotiate this barrier: they translate each each other using both verbal and non-verbal signs and only speaking in their own language. The performance’s negotiation of issues of corporeal and environmental risks as part of the same ecology of precarity relies on an empathetic relationship with its audience, yet it does not extend an invitation to put themselves ‘in the shoes of the refugee’ (Jeffers

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2012: 60). Instead, it situates the refugee crisis within a global framework, drawing attention to wider economic asymmetries and biopolitics that interlace with environmental precarity. While being sensitive to difference, the performance is primarily concerned with showing how environmental precarity connects the two characters. This was also made particularly palpable during the devising process which included a study of soundscapes and physical movements which would merge two geographically distant locations: Kent and the Sundarbans. In this vein, the piece attempts to cross various borders across space and time and punctuate interconnections and global networks of precarity. At the same time, The Edge remains firmly attached to its politics of location, connecting climate change with human rights and using mobility and displacement as familiar tropes that stretch across time and space while also anticipating the precarious future to come.

Intimacy and proximity: Complicite, The Encounter I have so far examined how material encounters with objects and borders as well as a negotiation of temporality, scale and a ‘politics of location’ can shape new perceptions of the human and the non-human and engage us in apprehending ‘slow violence’. In this chapter’s final section, I will shift attention to Complicite’s The Encounter (2015) with the view to examine how the piece furthers such affective imaginings through its engagement with time, intimacy and proximity. Based on Petru Popescu’s novel Amazon Beaming (1991) which recounted the real story of the encounter between National Geographic’s photographer Loren McIntyre and the Amazonian tribe Mayoruna (or Matsés, or the ‘cat people’) in 1969, The Encounter weaves an intricate dramaturgical web to explore climate change through affective strategies which amplify perceptions of time and space and invite embodied spectatorial experiences.18 Similar to Of All the People, the piece is fuelled by the power of the imagination and storytelling which are presented as its chief conceptual lynchpins. Storytelling serves

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important cognitive and emotive functions, allowing us to process hard facts. In his book on the psychology of climate change, George Marshall argues that ‘stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: They are the means by which the emotional brain makes sense of the information collected by the rational brain. People may hold information in the form of data and figures but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories’ (Marshall 2014: 105). It is then important to examine how the stories narrated in The Encounter might open up ways of engaging with the invisible repercussions of the human’s performance addiction in the Anthropocene. The Encounter presents a complex interplay between distance and proximity, sound and storytelling, and individuality and the collective. In discussing the process of making the piece, Simon McBurney draws attention to the importance of imagination and memory in shaping the future: Memory and imagination are actually the same biochemical process of the brain. You can’t remember without imagining but you can’t imagine without remembering. If remembering is about what has happened in the past, and the imagination is the future, what kind of future are we creating if the imagination itself is a creative act? (Complicite 2016d)

Key to The Encounter’s exploration of imagination and memory is time. Like McDowall, McBurney perceives time as fiction; like a story, time can be narrated in several ways. The significance of time’s fictionality is illustrated onstage by the uses of technology and particularly through experimentation with sound. All we see onstage is a solo performer (McBurney) with a binaural head, microphones and everyday props such as a table, plastic bottles filled with water and a pack of crisps. All these objects are used to produce sounds beyond their original function to transport the audience into the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. To begin narrating his story, McBurney introduces different temporalities all unravelling at once:  during the live moment of performance, he shares recordings of himself with his five-year-old daughter Noma and various people he interviewed in the process of

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making the piece (including Popesku); the repetition of speech through looping sounds also highlights the process of McBurney remembering the salient points of his narrative thus emphasizing the fluidity of time. This manipulation and objectification of time also foregrounds how its experience shapes and is shaped by culture. In Theatre and Time, David Wiles observes the West’s precarious and anxious relationship to time: ‘our temporal horizons have to some extent closed down and we are less securely anchored to past and future’ (Wiles 2014:  12). Time, Wiles continues, is now mostly perceived as a resource which generates profit rather than ‘a mode of being’ (2014: 12). This sentiment is echoed in one of the interviews heard during the performance where author George Marshall explains that the way we experience time in the contemporary Western world serves as an index of our fear of mortality, assuaged by instant gratification driven by consumerism (Complicite 2016a:  23). During his stay with the Mayoruna, McIntyre not only realizes the futility of the excesses of Western civilization but also how photography and its vain attempt to capture time expresses an anxiety and ‘fear of the future. Fear of losing the past’ (Complicite 2016a: 25). This linear and static perception of time is juxtaposed with the cyclical and mobile ways in which the Mayoruna experience it:  ‘They never think of the future, they don’t hoard or store up belongings. Time for them was an invisible companion, something comfortable and unseen like the air. For the civilizados, time was a possession. An increasingly more efficient machine’ (Complicite 2016a: 25). In contrast, it is the excessive extraction of fossil fuel resources from the Amazon which puts the tribe’s lives at risk. This risk is expressed through the metaphor of temporal stillness: Barnacle, the tribe’s leader who communicates with McInture telepathically, explains that the evil spirits (i.e., the developers who are exploiting the land) were holding them still in time (Complicite 2016a: 42). Time as possession therefore translates as both stillness and impasse. In order to overcome this, the Mayoruna perform a ritual of dispossession to which McIntyre is both a witness and a participant. The ritual consists in a performance of rebirth or ‘going to the beginning’ which amplifies McIntyre’s perception of

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his surroundings: ‘I do look, and an invisible change of lenses seems to occur and my eyes tumble forwards. Five hundred yards extend, while the sound of the water changes. I  sense the distant mountains rising beyond the trees. The beginning is there. The source of the river’ (Complicite 2016a: 58). By following McIntyre’s dispossession, the piece aims to amplify the audience’s frames of perception by facilitating a personal and collective encounter with the Amazonian jungle. This was particularly pursued by using sound sourced from the Amazon through binaural technology.19 In producing the performance’s aural landscape live on stage, McBurney uses various objects: eating a pack of crisps becomes the sound of fire, shaking a bottle of water transforms into the sound of the river. This immersive experience of sound and the expansion of the audience’s perception of space particularly emphasize the tropes of intimacy and proximity. Here, the visual and aural experience of the theatre architecture is produced through contrast and fusion of the inside and the outside: while the proscenium stage keeps McBurney at a physical distance from the auditorium, there is also a particularly intimate connection between the performer and members of the audience who can hear his voice close to their ears through their headphones. The use of headphones, worn throughout the piece, marks the quality of the overall experience as both individual and collective.20 McBurney wanted to perform The Encounter alone and the audience to experience the piece individually so that ‘they could attach with the solitude of McIntyre’ (Complicite 2016b) as for him ‘solitude is perhaps only a story that we, in the Western world, tell ourselves’ (McBurney 2016). This identification with McIntyre’s solitude puts the audience in a process of listening together and alone or what Ridout names as ‘solitude in relation’ (2013). In Passionate Amateurs, Ridout draws attention to theatre’s role in expanding ideas about solitude and relationality: ‘inside a theatre auditorium one feels both oneself more alone and more related than one does on the outside in so-called real life’ (2013: 162). This heightened double consciousness of being ‘both alone and together simultaneously’ (McBurney 2016)  captures the

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piece’s engagement with precarity as interconnectedness and situates it firmly within Complicite’s body of work. For example, its 1999 piece Mnemonic featured tropes of interconnectedness, proximity and memory not only through the performance’s tight dramaturgy but also by means of audience engagement: audiences were asked to imagine the traces of their ancestral roots as veins on a leaf that eventually connect everyone in the auditorium. In her 2001 article ‘Performing Europe’, Janelle Reinelt questions this strategy for its essentialist approach to community as ‘family’ (2001:  276). The Encounter’s engagement with interconnectedness and the use of audience’s imagination operated on a different level; interconnectedness was facilitated by the uses of technology as the piece was made available to a wider global audience through a free Internet broadcast. In this sense, audiences were not connected on the basis of essentialist humanist claims but rather through an artificial medium which immersed them in a singular-plural experience of a precarious community. Such an approach seems to echo questions regarding the aporetic nature of community in the context of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) while also pointing at the trope of vulnerability. Following Jacques-Luc Nancy’s conception of ‘inoperative community’ or being ‘singular plural’, Martin Middeke and Mireia Aragay draw attention to its interface with Butler’s understanding of precariousness as a shared condition of common vulnerability (Aragay and Middeke 2017: 5). It is the humans’ ‘mortality, their finitude, their temporality, their transitoriness [sic] in time’ they argue, which animate the ethical responsibility for the Other which is yet part of an already precarious community (2017: 5). In addition, the piece’s exploration of intimacy and proximity through sound and the imagination unsettles the border separating the inside from the outside and troubles perceptions about identity and community. In Immersive Theatres (2013), Josephine Machon observes how the quality of ‘the intimacy of sound as narrative [ . . . ] exercises the audience’s imagination’ (2013:  158); when it comes to theatre which uses headphones, she argues, ‘the intimacy of this sound in/ as space becomes integral in/as experience and accentuates the (con)

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fusion of interiority and exteriority within the experience’ (2013: 128). This affective and disorientating experience of intimately listening to McBurney’s storytelling was solely fuelled by the audience’s imagination rather than any kinaesthetic immersion into a landscape that resembles the Amazonian rainforest. Such an intimate storytelling technique, which refrains from literal and two-dimensional representations of the world, shifts attention to other ways of experiencing the story through McIntyre’s point of view. For Berlant, intimacy makes ‘the very attachments deemed to buttress “a life” seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability’ (1998:  282). This intimate and close relationship with the performance’s aural landscape exposes the audience to both their own and McIntyre’s vulnerability and dispossession. In the absence of any visual or haptic signs which would make life recognizable, this non-human life precariously appears through the materiality of sound which acquires a vibrant quality, a ‘thingness’. Through this intimate storytelling, spectators could ‘feel the presence of the absent’ (Complicite 2016b), thus bridging temporal and geographical distance. This experience of engagement with something whose presence becomes manifest in the absence of the visual might produce what Bennett names ‘enchantment’, that is a ‘strange combination of delight and disturbance’ (2010:  xi) as it both excites and threatens the autonomy of the human subject. Throughout his journey, McIntyre’s dispossession becomes manifest when he slowly loses his material possessions which constitute ‘an essential prerequisite of proper human being’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013:  13) and becomes utterly vulnerable to external and unknown forces of nature. At the same time, his encounter with the non-human becomes an encounter with ‘a world where non-human materialities have power, a power that the “bourgeois I”, with its pretensions to autonomy, denies’ (Bennett 2010:  16). During ‘the beginning’ ritual, which is presented as the apex of his encounter with the nonhuman, McIntyre resists letting go of his sovereign human side:  ‘I’m not prepared for this encounter; it’s true. I’m not prepared. Not like the spider swallowed by the snake. And then a thought suddenly

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howls, savagely. I was never part of nature. No, I’m not!!’ (Complicite 2016a:  40). It is precisely this appearance of nature as a force that carries ‘thing-power’ which places the white, male colonial self in a precarious position. During those moments of McIntyre’s confusion and infusion, McBurney mirrors McIntyre’s struggle to deal with his dispossession: carried away by the impressions that the story is making on his body and mind, McBurney is possessed by a frantic drive to destroy all material objects on stage and invites the audience to imagine participating in this act of material destruction: ‘Come on! Burning the past. This is the past! Let’s destroy it, let’s burn it all up! Can we destroy this? Fucking plastic . . . Let’s smash this. Get rid of the past. The whole fucking thing. Fuck it . . .’ (Complicite 2016a: 48). His failure to destroy a plastic bottle or the reluctance to let go of a mobile phone containing the photos of his children shows that those material objects on stage also hold their own vitality, capturing the paradoxical duality of human civilization as both technological progress and a destructive force against our natural habitat; in this vein, The Encounter also questions the extent to which dispossession is possible as long as this vitality fuels our perception of ourselves in the world. Following Bennett, the piece ‘cultivate[s] the ability to discern nonhuman vitality’ (2010:  14) and places particular emphasis on ecology as interconnectedness between the human and the nonhuman. In doing so, it shows how affective experience may reanimate our responsibility and care for the non-human. McBurney’s admiration for the care the Mayoruna and their descendants have shown towards their land is integral to the piece as they have actively resisted Western companies’ exploitation of the Amazon’s oil resources. According to interviewee Rebecca Spooner, an activist and campaigner for Survival who has spent time with the tribe, the Mayoruna ‘describe the oil underneath the ground as the blood of the earth and they’re concerned, like many other indigenous people, that if you suck out that blood, the oil, the life source, then the earth will cease to exist’ (Complicite 2016a: 53). During the process of making the piece, McBurney stayed in Marajaì in the State of Amazonas in Brazil with some of the descendants

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of the Mayoruna tribe; as he confesses, this experience helped him to appreciate the importance of the questions McIntyre’s book raises for the contemporary world: It is essential to grasp that we are deeply interconnected, inseparable, just as we are inseparable from nature. We are part of the ecosystem wherever we are, however urban and removed we feel, and we cannot escape it, just as we cannot escape the planet. Living on this planet together, our ability to listen to each other is, perhaps, essential for our collective survival. These things are essential and urgent because, in order to survive, we need to acknowledge that there is another way of seeing the world and our place in it. (Complicite 2016c)

McBurney’s realization about interconnectedness and survival is explored through the piece’s manipulation of different immersive environments and the ways in which ‘humans are performed by ecologies in everyday life’ (Kershaw 2015: 125). At the end of the performance, McBurney narrates his personal encounter with the headman of the tribe’s descendants who asked him to share the knowledge of their existence and struggles to protect their land with the world:  ‘tell the story to your people and tell them that we exist’. The Encounter is then an attempt to impart this knowledge to a Western audience while the use of technology shows that it should also be seen as a tool which facilitates such intimate connections and amplifies our Western perception of individual interconnectedness with our surrounding environments. As Bennett highlights, it is when we realize how the environment exists ‘inside human bodies and minds’ that we are able to ‘proceed politically, scientifically and technologically’ (2010: 116). This duty of care towards the environment imparted by the Mayoruna is further emphasized through the child’s voice, heard throughout the piece. As psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains during The Encounter, a young child exists on the cusp between autonomy and interdependency with her environment as she is trying to negotiate herself as both connected to and separate from ‘the beings around her’ (Complicite 2016a: 22). In this sense, the trope of the child strengthens the interplay

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between individuality and interconnectedness and thus highlights the precarious nature of the former. In the end, The Encounter does not seek to create a community among spectators or between the Western audience and nature; rather, through its exploration of intimacy and proximity with the non-human, it foregrounds the precarious as a fundamental axiom of the human and articulates the need to take responsibility for the non-human.

Conclusion The examples discussed in this chapter show how contemporary theatre imaginatively reinvents representational strategies which challenge strictly anthropocentric frames of perceiving the human and aim to capture the workings of ‘slow violence’ and its differential allocation of precarity. In doing so, these examples often experiment with temporality, space, proximity and distance; they place emphasis on the interconnections between the human and the non-human and the vitality of materialities that are used to capture ‘an affective politics of the performative’ and the persistence of life that has been rendered disposable. In this way, they create small apertures that space the appearance of ‘another world’. Such small shifts, glitches or hiccups at the heart of normative practices of maintaining human lives, I argue, can turn into small political gestures that disturb conventional frames of recognizing precarious lives. The next chapter will further continue examining how theatre further responds to and troubles the human by intervening with regimes of legibility with a specific focus on human rights.

4

Framing Human Rights

In her keynote speech at the 2017 Performance Studies International conference in Hamburg, scientist, environmentalist and activist Vandana Shiva pronounced the need for solidarity and care at a time when human rights are put at risk. Human rights can be defined as ‘the social conditions of livable life’ which we are all committed to achieve as members of a political community (Butler 2012:  150). For Butler, this commitment emanates from ethical obligations created by the very condition of cohabitation (2012: 150). Key to the exploration of human rights and justice is the unequal distribution of grievability across the globe and its impact on our understanding of the ‘human’: the concept of the ‘human’ in human rights discourse hinges on power relations and political ideologies as ‘competing discourses of human rights [ . . . ] conceive the distribution of those rights differently’ (Lloyd 2007: 151). Butler’s analysis of ‘the frame’ is particularly useful: in Frames of War, she considers how certain regimes of power create norms which both ‘give face’ and ‘efface’ the human (2009: 77), thus determining who counts and who fails to appear as a human life. Such norms find their way into visual and narrative frames which communicate these ‘differential forms of the human’, thus shaping our responsiveness to lives under peril (2009: 77). As mechanisms of power, frames ‘delimit the sphere of appearance itself ’, thus branding bodies with recognizability and vulnerability (2009: 1). The above ideas can be applied to the wider exponential increase of hate and fear channelled through public rhetoric which tends to scapegoat migrants, refugees and Muslims as agents of global precarity. In turn, such rhetoric helps to justify the implementation and acceptance

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of emergency measures that might also supersede international laws thus distributing precarity across the world. In the context of the UK, the Conservative Party has been campaigning against the Human Rights Act under the rhetoric of national security and fairness (Tyler 2013:  138) since 2010. In April 2016, then Home Secretary Theresa May expressed her opposition to the European Convention of Human Rights which prevented Britain deporting people considered to be extremists.1 May’s concerns were voiced at the back of a referendum deciding over the position of the UK in the European Union which took place in an acutely toxic climate yielding huge waves of hostility against migrants and refugees. Sticky and dehumanizing terms such as ‘swarm’, ‘flood’, ‘invaders’ and ‘cockroaches’ have been used to describe refugees and asylum seekers, and which interlace with descriptions of Muslim fundamentalists.2 After being appointed as the new prime minister in July 2016, May made a pledge of building an inclusive and just state, ‘a country that works for everyone’ (Swinford 2016). Her invocation to justice and fairness was followed by a series of controversial measures that have further intensified the distribution of precarity with the intention to curb immigration and to ‘give more jobs to British people’. Butler’s task ‘to call the frame into question’ in order to uncover technologies of power that render human bodies disposable is here a useful tool to examine theatre’s role in destabilizing existing frames of representation that dehumanize and efface the Other and meaningfully address questions of precarity and vulnerability. This can be achieved by paying attention to frames of perception and how representational practices in the theatre counter the viewers’ desensitization to atrocities owed to their spectacular dissemination in the media which also shape the perception of Other bodies as a threat. The aim of this chapter is to focus on diverse examples of theatre work where questions of ‘the human’ and human rights hinge. As no study on the intersection of theatre and human rights has yet paid explicit attention to the dimension of the precarious, it is my intention to further expand the above field of enquiry. The purpose here is not to ‘rehabilitate humanism’, as Butler cautions against (2012: 148), but rather to examine spaces and frames

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of appearance of the precarious body in the theatre and its positioning within wider networks of precarity and relations of power. In so doing, I  will particularly consider the figures of the terrorist, the dissident and the victim of atrocity and the affective forces mobilized by their appearance.

Human rights, spectatorship and theatre The parallel emergence of the concept of human rights and the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century shows how the understanding of such rights has been shaped by Enlightenment values and ideals (Becker et al. 2013: 6). The rapidly expanding body of theatre work explicitly preoccupied with the subject of human rights also reminds us of theatre’s function as a public terrain for airing conditions of precarity and to mobilize responsibility and action. Since the end of the Second World War, numerous examples of socially engaged global theatres tapping into human rights questions take place ‘in economically and politically precarious circumstances, or dealing with economic and political precarity as their subject matter’ (Luckhurst and Morin 2015: 6).3 At the same time, a growing body of scholarly work has focused on  the intersections between theatre and human rights, placing particular emphasis on the areas of trauma, torture, justice and reconciliation, action and responsibility (Derbyshire and Hodson 2008; Rae 2009; Becker et al. 2013; Woolley 2014; Luckhurst and Morin 2015; Duggan and Peschel 2016). Some of the questions scholars in this critical field have engaged with suggest a growing concern over theatre’s efficacy in responding to human rights injustices; rather than substituting the law, theatre’s chief purpose is to engage the spectator’s imagination and elicit a ‘responsible response’ by means of provoking questions, giving voice to silenced victims and capturing some of the complexities of human rights abuse. For Paul Rae, ‘the strength of the theatre lies in the opportunities it affords to interrogate the basic conditions within which those rights

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must be anchored and, where they do not hold, to envision alternatives’ (2009: 41). Similarly, Harry Derbyshire and Loveday Hodson describe the cross-fertilization of human rights and theatre as a ‘discursive space in which injustice and suffering are described and claims to redress imbalances of power are made’ (2008: 196) while arguing for theatre’s stronger position in ‘disrupting dominant discourses in human rights’ (2008: 198) in comparison to the law. Central to the staging of human rights is the use of affective registers in the representation of the ‘human’. Creating affective impressions by tapping into emotions such as sympathy, empathy, pity, anger and compassion, arguably enhances spectatorial engagement vis-à-vis social injustices and human suffering. This is particularly applicable to the political responsibility of theatre practitioners to engage audiences with spectacles of distant suffering, bridging the gap between the ‘here’ and ‘there’.4 In our ‘society of the spectacle’, however, such an ethical engagement with the Other’s suffering is fraught with complexity. A  number of scholars across the fields of media studies and the social sciences have examined the implications of the packaging and marketization of emotions in conjunction with our increasing exposure to information. In the 1990s, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that media presentations of developing countries as ‘a subhuman world beyond ethics and beyond salvation’ (1999: 166) operate as alienating practices against which humanity is measured; as discussed in Chapter  1, Meštrović has observed how feelings and social action have been disaggregated through a ‘compassion fatigue’ (1997). The conundrum of engaging with distant Others still perplexes more recent scholarship which has increasingly focused on the impact of ‘ethical consumption’ lifestyles; in favouring personal experience and short-term moral behaviours, contemporary ‘marketization of humanitarian practices’ (Chouliaraki 2013:  6) and narratives of ‘responsible capitalism’ have led to the depoliticization of notions of care and responsibility thus failing to provide sustainable solutions that positively affect distant Others.5 In The Ironic Spectator, Lilie Chouliaraki persuasively problematizes contemporary examples of

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humanitarian appeals and ‘feel good activism’ largely rehearsed by NGOs and celebrity culture: In portraying sufferers as powerless victims or as dignified agents, these campaigns intend to produce either a universal morality of justice, through ‘negative emotions’ that ultimately dehumanize the sufferer, or a universal morality of empathy through positive emotions that eventually appropriate the sufferer in a world like ‘ours’. Neither of these two forms of universalism [ . . . ] ultimately manages to sustain a legitimate claim to public action on suffering. (2013: 74)

Similarly, although suffering might directly provoke an affective response, this might also risk fetishizing pain or, as Ahmed puts it, it might transform pain into ‘wound fetishism’ (Ahmed 2004: 32), thus stripping the victim from her agency as a subject.6 The above critical field presents us with some profound ethical and political questions regarding the ability of ‘the face’ to mobilize a collective responsibility and action for the protection of precarious lives. In the context of theatre and performance studies, the turn to Levinasian ethics and the philosophy of Jacques Rancière has offered new insights for examining contemporary politics of spectatorship. A  growing body of work discusses how theatre might disrupt ‘the distribution of the sensible’ in the interests of bridging the gap between viewing, responsibility and action (Grehan 2009; Ridout 2009; Thompson 2009; Pewny 2012, 2014; Aragay and Monforte 2014). As James Thompson notes, ‘The encounter with the face of the other is understood to be the source of inspiration for both a responsibility for that other and also an infinite responsibility to campaign for such justice’ (2009: 173). Echoing Butler’s belief in the power of the image and the face to mobilize mechanisms of grief, theatre’s capacity to incite responsibility through its frames of intimacy and proximity might be more powerful in bridging the ‘here’ and ‘there’. Questions of ‘truth’ and authenticity with regards to the human face are also mobilized here. Thompson argues that ‘the face as a concept delineating the contours of an ethical meeting must permit the literal face not to show

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itself ’ (2009:  173). In this light, questions about reifying pain and suffering of the Other are also hugely relevant in relation to theatrical representation. As Clare Finburgh’s recent study Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage suggests, if theatrical representation’s role is to reverse spectacles of torture which objectify the human, it is equally crucial to scrutinize the treatment of torture on stage and the position of the viewer (Finburgh 2017). The above discussion hints at the importance of developing theatrical vocabularies that enable such an ethico-political exchange to take place. The uses of documents such as transcripts and interviews, and the staging of ‘real’ people, have become common tropes in theatrically navigating human rights injustices. The popularity of documentary and verbatim theatre in Britain begun to gain more visibility since the 1990s (Megson 2006: 530) while it has been widely utilized in performances responding to Bush’s and Blair’s ‘war on terror’ (Bottoms 2006:  57). Janelle Reinelt (2009), Chris Megson (2005) and Jenny Hughes (2011) have pointed out the importance of documentary theatre’s affective registers and its ability to situate the spectator in the position of a witness. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the critique generated by factbased theatre’s fetishization of authenticity and claims to authority (Bottoms 2006; C. Wilson  2013), it is worth noting that a wealth of professional theatre work responding to human rights abuses refrains from an exclusively verbatim style. In the course of this chapter, I shall consider a variety of examples which use a range of dramatic forms such as documentary material, physical theatre, autobiography and dramatic fiction, used separately or in dialogue with each other and which speak against human rights injustices.

Impressions of terror: Dennis Kelly, Osama the Hero As discussed in Chapter  3, Sophie Nield discusses the border as a ‘space which is organized in such a way so as to compel certain kinds

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of appearance’ (2006: 64). Nield’s idea of the border as a space which enables appearance is particularly pertinent in relation to Butler’s understanding of the frame’s capacity to enable certain bodies to appear; in the context of the so-called ‘war on terror’, the trope of appearance and the (in)ability to pass as a ‘human’ is also an urgent one as the wide circulation and consumption of images of violence produce frames and spaces which prescribe certain appearances of the ‘human’ and create consensual ideas about what counts as ‘terrorism’. In Terror and Performance, Rustom Bharucha sees ‘terror’ as ‘a cluster of discourses, affects, sensations and critical moments of emergency and crisis’ (2014:  28). Bharucha’s task lies in ‘free[ing] terror from the hegemonic discourse of terrorism’ (2014:  3) as well as recognizing ‘how we are implicated in terror, disturbing any false illusions of an implicit, “non-terrorist” goodness or innocence’ (2014: 12). In applying a postcolonial perspective, Bharucha also reads terror as a widespread phenomenon experienced globally and not solely determined by September 11: ‘far from being exceptional, terror can be regarded as the new banality of evil in our times’ (2014: 3). He highlights this by returning to Hannah Arendt’s ideas on ‘the banality of evil’ and discussing its relevance in contemporary experiences of violence and terror: Banality, far more than uncertainty, could be one of the most enduring tropes of violence in our times. Reinforced through different agencies of bureaucratization, it does not so much precipitate violence as it legitimizes it, compelling it to be normalized and even accepted as a fact of life. (2014: 108)

The process of normalizing terror is buttressed by numerous everyday images circulating in the public sphere: the wide visual reproduction of and control of scenes of torture following the US-British invasion in Afghanistan and Iraq, such as the photos from Abu Ghraib’s prison or Osama bin Laden’s execution in May 2011, the abduction and beheadings of Western soldiers by Iraqi insurgents and the spectacles of suicide bombing, ‘become part of the routine horror of our everyday culture’

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(Bharucha 2014:  176) whose careful staging reinforces frames of perception regarding the distribution of precarity.7 Bharucha is also indebted to Jacques Derrida’s 2003 essay on ‘Autoimmunity’. In it, Derrida reads September 11 as ‘the impression of a major event’ whose effect is analogous to a wound left by a weapon: ‘this weapon is terrifying because it comes from the to-come, from the future’ (cited in Bharucha 2014:  57). This difference in temporality then distinguishes 9/11 from traumatic events that clearly refer to the past; in its projection towards the future, it anticipates something that might never come, or arrive at unexpected times thus problematizing traditional readings of resolution of trauma through processes of healing and reconciliation. Echoing Ahmed, the concept of the impression can be then paralleled to an affective mark following the encounter of two objects and the mutual impressions they leave upon each other. Such an encounter is mediated by a visible or invisible surface shaped by particular frames of perception. In this sense, impressions are subjective and precarious as they can produce variegated reactions dependent on the particular perceptive fabrics they traverse. This understanding of impression is relevant to the discussion on terror as it allows us to consider its global rippling effects which are both present and futureoriented; it also points to the shaping of regimes of appearance which generate particular kinds of impressions and beliefs about Others, thus curtailing human rights and promoting differential and asymmetrical perceptions of who counts as life (Butler 2004, 2009; Pugliese 2006). The exponential increase of special security and surveillance measures or ‘technologies of identification manufactured by government regimes and surveillance systems’ (Bharucha 2014:  83) has led to a renewed emphasis on racial profiling that privileges particular kinds of appearance and circumscribes criteria for beliefs and impressions about Others. This is also true for civic spaces which are subject to, according to Joseph Pugliese, ‘a regime of racialized visuality [which] inscribes its transient subjects as either obviously “foreign” or self-evidently native’ (2006:  par. 22). Such regimes of appearance and recognition

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have been further buttressed by myths and misconceptions dominating mainstream media. In Refugees, Theatre and Crisis, Alison Jeffers draws attention to how the British media’s dissemination of false beliefs and impressions about asylum seekers and refugees has largely contributed in shaping hostile attitudes and generating moral panic (2012: 24–25). She particularly observes how the metonymic associations propagated by political and media discourses have collapsed the meaning behind the migrant and the terrorist which have been rendered synonyms.8 The above then demonstrate the processes that relegate subjects who do not follow juridical mechanisms of appearance to the status of ‘non-person’ leading to the ‘disaggregation of the human from their human rights’ (Nield 2008: 139). In such frames of appearance, any attempt of those subjects to cross borders (whether spatial or other) is bound to fail. It is here that theatre may be able to intervene by troubling frames of appearance and enable different types of encounters with precarious life which fails to be legible as human. From the vast repertoire of theatre examples that touch on impressions of terror,9 I am here particularly interested in the ways in which affective regimes of terror such as ‘the fabric of fear’ (Soyinka cited in Finburgh 2017:  193) shape and normalize appearance and identification while divorcing the human from their human rights. To this end, I  will focus on Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero. As discussed in Chapter 2, Kelly’s work articulates an acute interest in the fabrics of risk enveloping the young; more broadly, as Finburgh observes, Kelly’s theatre casts a wider net on the human and how it is implicated in wider questions of citizen responsibility (2017: 249). In Kelly’s words, ‘the right way to behave as a human being is the right way to behave as a country’ (Kelly cited in Finburgh 2017: 249). His play Osama the Hero engages with the state of the nation by tapping into questions surrounding the circulation of impressions of fear and the workings of frames of recognizability that promote the defacement of the human. The play premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre in May 2005, a few months before the 7/7 London bombings; its provocative title brought the police outside the theatre to avoid any violent incidents (Sierz 2005).

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Osama features five characters of different ages all living in the same council estate: siblings Louise and Francis; fifty-year-old Mark, who has a platonic relationship with teenage Mandy; and teenage Gary, Mandy’s classmate. The play is divided into three acts, each adopting a different dramatic style. Act 1 is written in the form of monologues or duologues which mainly communicate facts about the characters themselves and the council estate. This is when we learn that the estate has been subject to several violent acts as nearly all the residents’ garages have been blown up. While suspicion initially falls on Mark, everyone turns against Gary when Mark’s garage is also burned down. The chief reason why seventeen-year-old Gary becomes a scapegoat is his ability to think beyond consensual narratives. He is presented as a teenager who refuses ‘to accept what he is told’ (Kelly 2008: 60) and finds it difficult to belong. When asked to prepare a school assignment on a contemporary hero, he chooses to discuss Osama bin Laden as a man ‘of impeccable manners who is known never to lie’ and loved by his people (Kelly 2008: 68). Nevertheless, Gary’s dissenting voice soon becomes a precarious one; although a citizen of a democratic country which values ‘free speech’, he is immediately branded as an ‘agent of terror’ (Kelly 2008: 105). Despite the clear lack of proof that he is the perpetrator of the crime, Gary has already lost his human right to a ‘fair trial’: in Act 2, he is captured and subjected to verbal abuse and physical torture by his neighbours who, in rehearsing ‘the just war’ doctrine, seek justice beyond the law as ‘you don’t need evidence for terrorists’ (Kelly 2008:  100). According to Finburgh, the play is ‘an allegory of, and a direct reference to, the United States and its allies’ violation of human rights’ (2017: 251). Those references were facilitated by Hampstead production’s stage design which was ‘evocative of the airport warehouses and prefabricated buildings in which, since the start of the twenty-first century, temporary facilities have been set up’ (Finburgh 2017: 250). Act 2 explodes in an explicitly violent scene of Louise hitting Gary (who remains tied up and gagged for most of the scene) with a hammer (Kelly 2008:  96). Finburgh makes a case that, although the torture scene is very physical and ‘almost unbearable’, the

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play ‘disengages the representation of torture from strictly mimetic realism. Violence in Kelly’s theatre is constituted from a paradoxical simultaneity and indifference’ (2017: 255). Finburgh particularly refers to Louise’s graphic and disinterested description of the burned body of Mark’s wife which ‘trivializes the terrible incident by comparing it to a children’s craft game’ (2017: 256). Despite the apparent ‘absence of emotionalism’ that, according to Finburgh, underpins the play’s dramaturgical choices, emotions still play an important role in the play’s political fabric and its negotiation of cruelty and precarity; precarity becomes manifest in the affective ecologies of love, hate, disgust and fear: the characters feel vulnerable and perceive the outside world as a constant threat to their life. As already discussed, the emotion of love is an ambivalent one as it also cultivates hate against others (Ahmed 2004: 122). Louise remains firmly attached to cruel and exclusionary perceptions of who counts as life which has shaped her own ethics of responsibility and care. Violence is then justified on the basis of affective value – as proof of love and care for your family and community: ‘They moved a paedophile to this estate. My dad waited for him. Smashed his feet with a baseball bat. He did that for me. I  was fourteen. He went to prison. Died in there of stomach cancer. That paedophile walks around today. [ . . . ] I  love you, Francis [  .  .  .  ] We did a good thing here today’ (Kelly 2008: 105). Relations of proximity and appearance are here complicated to the extent that the impression of Gary’s precarious body does not arouse empathy: apart from Francis who is the only one resisting the violence (yet without being able to stop it), Mandy’s perception of Gary as ‘less than human’ arouses feelings of hate: ‘He’s a freak. I fucking hate him’ (Kelly 2008: 91). After Gary has been physically attacked, Mandy seems fascinated and disgusted by the horror of the mutilated body which she begins to describe in forensic detail: MANDY His lip’s stuck . . . it’s hanging, it’s . . . LOUISE Just pull it. She pulls. Rips his lips off.

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MANDY Jesus Christ! LOUISE It’s alright. This is . . . Beat. [ . . . ] It’s alright. MANDY His teeth are all . . . [ . . . ] I think a piece of his gum is missing. (Kelly 2008: 103–4)

In contrast to the raw brutality of the second act, the third act shifts registers to a suite of monologues by Mandy, Mark, Francis and Louise. Each includes a confession about the character’s emotional state which, read together, compose a complex affective map. Louise feels ‘shock’, Mark ‘devastation’, Francis, ‘hope’ (2008: 117) and Mandy, ‘love for the city’ (2008:  120). Louise’s monologue vividly illustrates how the frames of terror’s spectacular reproduction normalizes practices of violence and regimes of power that render human bodies disposable. Further, it shows how such images shape ‘a new phenomenology of reception in which we are more participatory and complicit than ever before in the actual reproduction, interpretation and circulation of images of terror’ (Bharucha 2014:  18). Her avid consumption of such spectacles and the discourses framing them is particularly pronounced throughout the scene:  sitting in a room full of newspaper cuttings, Louise is immersed in the act of watching online beheadings while eating a ready meal of ‘Chicken Kiev with peas, potatoes and gravy’ (Kelly 2008: 111). Louise’s monologue provides an additional frame to the scene of Gary’s torture in the previous act, making clear references to photographs and videos of torture depicting human rights violations which became available en masse during the war in Iraq, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib photos taken by US soldiers which depicted Iraqi army hostages in compromising positions. In Frames of War, Butler makes particular reference to the Abu Ghraib photos in order to draw attention to how the dissemination and stage management of visual signifiers of torture work to ‘abrogate’ the norms that determine the

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human and human rights (2009: 78). At the same time, Butler argues, those photos also conjure a ‘visual “trace” of the human’ which does not speak for what the human is but shows ‘that a break from the norm governing the subject of rights has taken place and that something called “humanity” is at issue here’ (2009: 78). Rewinding the video of the scene when the man is first apprehended with a knife on his throat, Louise also begins to recognize the ‘visual “trace” of the human’. At the same time, this is juxtaposed with the repetition of the phrase ‘the end justifies the means’: LOUISE [B]ecause I’m looking at this man and he’s a bit, it was a surprise and it made him sort of step back, but he didn’t want to step back but it was a surprise so, so he sort of, he lifts his foot [ . . . ]. And it’s such a human thing to do [ . . . ] and I experience a moment of [ . . . ] shock [ . . . ] washes over me [ . . . ] ends justify the means ends justify the means ends justify the means. (Kelly 2008: 116–17)

In this light, the play also opens up questions about ethics of responsibility and proximity. In ‘Precarious Life, Proximity and the Ethics of Cohabitation’, Butler underscores that obligations to those who are far away as well as to those who are proximate cross linguistic and national boundaries and are only possible by virtue of visual or linguistic translations, which include spatial or temporal dislocations. [ . . . ] If I am only bound to those close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary. If I am only bound to those who are ‘human’ in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. (Butler 2012: 137–38)

Butler’s emphasis on acts of translation is significant here as it highlights the ‘unfamiliarity’ and ‘strangeness’ of the body captured on screen which further disaggregate the human from human rights.10 Louise’s perception might be affected by traces of the human ‘in the abstract’ which is yet compromised by the different religious, ethnic and racial regimes of appearance of the prisoner’s body. In other words, Louise’s

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speech is imbued with the ideology of justice that unequally distributes global precarity and thus still interfering in her cognitive reception of the moving image. For this reason, observing the ‘visual trace of the human’ does not provide evidence of ethical responsibility to the Other’s vulnerability and the possibility of action against practices of precarity. In contrast to Louise, Francis’s monologue narrates the story of his intimate encounter with a stranger who is physically attacked and left abandoned in the street. Francis accompanies him to the hospital where their face-to-face encounter fills him with hope and seems to have exonerated him from his previous crime (Kelly 2008:  116–17). Narrating every detail of his encounter with the vulnerable stranger, Francis expresses feelings of guilt leading to catharsis which overwhelms him: ‘there are tears running down my cheeks [ . . . ] and I feel [ . . . ] hope flooding down my cheeks, these tears of hope’ (2008:  116–17). Mandy, one of the play’s youngest characters, closes the piece with the realization of her own implication and responsibility of the world around her. Walking away from the city of London in the middle of the night, she is trying to find a spot in a park where she can no longer see any trace of civilization while remembering what she was taught to believe from a young age: that in 1989 there was a nuclear war that exterminated human life on earth, yet people carried on with their lives although they knew ‘there wasn’t any point’ (Kelly 2008: 119). Mandy’s walk helps her shift her nihilistic impression of her childhood as it reveals to her that maybe ‘we are not dead after all’ (Kelly 2008: 120). While the sun is coming up, traces of human life become visible from a distance and she is overwhelmed by a desire to take responsibility for the city: ‘I always used to think there was grown-ups somewhere. D’you know what I  mean though? Someone in charge. [  .  .  .  ] Now I  know there are no grown-ups. There’s just us’ (Kelly 2008: 120). Being moved by the impression of life in the city, Mandy begins to negotiate the impasse her generation has been trapped in and assume responsibility for human life. Kelly’s use of the dramatic frame attempts to challenge the norms that have disaggregated the human from human rights, thus capturing

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the loss of the right to life. To this end, he shifts the Western frame to the perspective of the Other. The play’s title and Gary’s choice to consider bin Laden as a hero echoes Bharucha’s reminder that ‘terrorists can be objects of beauty in the eyes of their compatriots’ (Bharucha 2014: 88). Although Gary is not a ‘compatriot’, Osama gestures towards how such a wide circulation of material depicting distant Others might also create identifications beyond national and religious borders thus bridging this physical and cultural distance; here, Gary is not fascinated by Osama as an ‘abstract human’ but by his steadfast belief in and sacrifice for a cause; at the same time, Osama rather operates as a vehicle who channels belief, not religious faith. This is particularly revealed in Gary’s short speech following his torture:  ‘we have to believe in something because if we don’t believe in something how can we believe in the future and if we do not believe in the future how can we have a future, not God not Allah [ . . . ] forward, a forward’ (Kelly 2008: 96). In his essay ‘British Theatre and the “Re-Enchantment of the World” ’, Chris Megson makes a compelling argument about contemporary British new writing’s engagement with the concept of belief; according to Megson, belief features in some contemporary performances as ‘an antidote to disenchantment’ with the world (Megson 2016:  46). This observation is pertinent in the context of precarity: it points towards the need for changing current orthodoxies and reconfiguring non-cruel attachments in order to grapple with uncertainty. As shown in Chapters 2 and 3, the metaphor of being ‘stuck in time’ as a corollary of precarity maintains relations of power intact and prevents the young generation from moving forward. In this vein, Gary’s speech communicates a desire for change and movement through a reversal of set beliefs. However, the play’s dissenting voice and its critique of the West’s responsibility in perpetuating hate, fear and terror might also risk creating false impressions buttressed by extant frames of representation. Looking at the frames of the Hampstead production, it is my view that the performance also surreptitiously reproduced a problematic understanding of violence and its causes; capitalizing on the council estate aesthetic, Anthony Clark chose to represent Francis and Louise

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as ‘chavish’ through costume and hairstyle which reproduced clichéd assumptions about the characters’ social status. The popularity of such false impressions can be evidenced in Kelly’s interview with Aleks Sierz, who objected to the characters’ ‘authenticity’ as Louise did not convince the latter as a Guardian reader (Kelly 2005). In this light, in the context of the Hampstead production whose audience largely belongs to a narrow demographic in terms of class and age, the play might create impressions which reinforce negative stereotypes while allowing middle-class complacency to remain intact. Kelly’s exploration of appearances and the racialized regimes of the visible in Osama prefigure a number of similar instances of mistaken identities in the context of the war on terror, from the illegal detention of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay to the shooting of Brazilian migrant Jean Charles de Menezes in South London’s Stockwell Underground station on 22 July 2005. It is an important work grounded in a provocative and dissensual thesis which reveals the complexity and the value of human life after 9/11. Like Ridley’s Mercury Fur, Osama proves how, on the one hand, violence and complicity might become a means of survival, whilst, on the other, they might also create new beginnings and re-enchantments; although Gary pays a heavy price for his belief, Mandy’s re-enchantment with the world at the end of the play suggests an opening towards different ways of perceiving the world and our responsibility within it.

Ambivalent ethics: debbie tucker green, hang In Performance in a Time of Terror, Jenny Hughes makes a case for seeing ‘the critical potential of performance’s uncanny, dissensual representation of life beyond the frames of the comfortably recognized, familiar “human” world’ (2011: 20). Performance which represents life in negated forms ‘releases’, Hughes continues, ‘the critical and affective force of the abject to disorder the beautifying schemes of an orderly, rule-bound universe’ (2011:  21). Following this line of thinking, and

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echoing Kelly’s treatment of the human in Osama the Hero, dissensual forms of life create an aperture for reframing precarious life. This section will explore how theatres of precarity use ambivalence, dissonance and dissent in order to debate human rights’ frames and to reanimate the human; to this end, I  will return to debbie tucker green whose work explicitly tackles questions around social justice and human rights. Taking as springboard the extant critical field of enquiry focusing on tucker green’s experimental aesthetics, affective registers and feminist attachments (Goddard 2007; Osborne 2011, 2015; Aston 2010) and her engagement with global inequalities and human rights (Fragkou and Goddard 2013), I  will here expand the discussion on human rights, justice and affect with reference to her play hang (2015). In doing so, I will be drawing on the concept of dissonance as another conduit of precarity which places emphasis on notions of disaccord, resistance and polyphony. According to the OED, dissonance also implies a discomfort as it suggests an ‘inharmonious or harsh sound’. It is this affective texture of ‘harshness’ that I would like to explore in this section in conjunction with anger and resistance. The affective dynamics and peculiarities of tucker green’s dramaturgy have attracted the attention of critics and scholars alike. Ruth Little, who chaired the post-show talk for stoning mary’s premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005, pointed out that tucker green’s plays require a new way of positioning oneself as an audience member that moves beyond conventional theatrical devices that elicit compassion and empathy (stoning mary 2005). Aston argues that tucker green’s aim is ‘to dis-ease her spectators into viewing the dehumanizing effects of an inability to care for “others”, locally and globally’ (2011: 184). Key to this is tucker green’s ‘politics of anger’ which can be read as a ‘language that interrupts silence and injustice’ (Fragkou and Goddard 2013:  152). Anger often carries negative connotations and is perceived as an inferior emotion for stirring discomfort and eschewing reason and political décor. At the same time, anger has constituted a central emotion for feminism, often associated with empowerment, visibility, demonstrating against inequalities, human rights abuse and dominant forms of power. It has particularly served as

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a mobilizing force in black feminism such as in the work of poet Audre Lorde whose anger was key in breaking ‘the tyrannies of silence’. With reference to Lorde, Ahmed also defends anger as a creative emotion as ‘it works to create a language with which to respond to that which one is against’ (2004: 175–76). Anger has further underpinned the politics of feminist theatre although often overshadowed by the 1950s and 1960s ‘angry young men’ trope.11 In this context, tucker green’s politics of anger is yoked with her identity as a black female theatre practitioner. Similar to Lorde, she also uses anger to break the ‘tyrannies of silence’ and to trouble perceptions about the human and human rights; in addition, she creates dissonant dramaturgies which depart from ‘genuine’ performances of victimhood which appear in the guises of ‘vulnerable, frightened and traumatized’ subjects (Jeffers 2012: 153). The uses of anger in tucker green’s work intersect with a lack of care and emotional attachment between siblings, mothers and daughters, couples and neighbours who exhibit selfish behaviours at the cost of recognizing others as human beings with rights. tucker green often presents us with a double negation of the human in order to expose the limitations of witnessing and to mobilize ‘our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another’ (Butler 2004: 30). In her early plays dirty butterfly, born bad and stoning mary, victims attempt to confront their communities in order to provoke a response, which would in turn enable them to be recognized as human beings with rights (Fragkou 2012). In her later plays such as truth and reconciliation and hang, it is the victims’ families who seek justice for the untimely and violent deaths of their loved ones. The common thread running throughout the above examples is the failure of the precarious body to arouse empathy or care; in fact, precarious bodies are perceived by other characters as human waste, that is, bodies not worthy of grief. Pondering the question ‘whose lives are more grievable’, truth and reconciliation and hang also look at the  frames and limits of truth, forgiveness and the representation of suffering and trauma. In his short essay ‘On Forgiveness’, Derrida presents forgiveness as an impossibility (1997:  32). For Derrida, any institutional and

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juridical intervention and mediation (such as that performed by Truth and Reconciliation committees) undermines the possibility of mutual benefit and transformation. Intrinsic in such a mediation are the existing relations of power between forces which shape ‘universal’ understandings of ‘human rights’. In order for a ‘pure forgiveness’ to be achieved (1997: 42–43), Derrida argues, justice should be divorced from juridical discourse in favour of a face-to-face encounter between victim and perpetrator based on a ‘shared language’ (1997:  48). In examining the theatricality of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings, Bharucha also puts notions of justice, truth and forgiveness under scrutiny. He specifically describes the ‘Reconciliation through Truth’ slogan used in the hearings as a ‘performative that fails to be enforced’ (2014: 132). Bharucha’s understanding of this failure of the performative also chimes with Ahmed’s more recent examination of how institutional performances of commitment to diversity and anti-racism function as ‘non-performatives’ as they eventually fail to materialize (2012). The above conundrums on forgiveness and bureaucratic gestures of commitment to justice as ‘non-performatives’ (Ahmed 2012) are pertinent in my consideration of hang which presents the failure of performances of commitment to provide care and justice and asks complex questions about human rights and the attribution of justice. The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs in 2015 and directed by tucker green. Written in an elliptical form, hang is set in an unspecified time and place where capital punishment is legal. The play stages a meeting between characters One, Two and Three taking place in a penal institution. Character Three is invited to choose the way in which the perpetrator of an unnamed crime against her family will be executed. The administering of justice becomes a bureaucratic act performed by the institution’s two representatives (One and Two) who have been ‘trained’ to carry out such duties, including showing compassion towards their clients. The institution’s ‘air of antiseptic orderliness’ (Billington 2015), enhanced by the play’s set and lighting design, punctuates the technocratic identity of the space.

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Here the appearance of a ‘duty of care’ is blatantly exposed as a ‘nonperformative’ (Ahmed 2012).12 Three’s outright rejection of insincere concerns expressed by One and Two unmasks how the discourse over transparency and care fails to alleviate the pain and trauma that Three and her family have endured:  ‘And I  don’t need your concern. [  .  .  .  ] Your concern can do exactly- what?’ (tucker green 2015:  12). Three’s resistance to institutional codes of politeness then exposes the limitations of empathy according to etiquette: ONE I can only / imagine. THREE No you can’t. You can’t you couldn’t get anywhere near. (tucker green 2015: 25)

The play creates dissonance by proposing an ethics of ambivalence which tests the limits of the spectator’s ethical responses vis-à-vis precarious life. As Helena Grehan explains, Ambivalence [ . . . ] needs to be interpreted not necessarily as a negative experience or one in which individuals or spectators [  .  .  .  ] are left floundering and directionless, but as something that has the potential to stimulate ongoing reflection, engagement and participation with the ideas raised by a work. If considered in this way, the experience of ambivalence generates the possibility of detailed consideration and response. (Grehan 2010: 9–10)

Ethical ambivalence in hang becomes manifest in the exposition of different levels of humanness and precarity. Three’s care about her family’s vulnerable position propels her to seek the most painful method of execution. This choice creates ambivalence vis-à-vis human life: on the one hand, it implies Three’s unwillingness to acknowledge the white perpetrator as a human being with rights; at the same time, Three recognizes his biological reality as she imagines his physical suffering. As in tucker green’s other plays, a vulnerable body does not arouse pity or forgiveness. This ambivalence is further buttressed by the very institutional frameworks which facilitate retribution through death which are put under scrutiny. In hang, the protocols of each method of capital punishment such as lethal injection, beheading, firing squad and hanging are presented in minute and technocratic detail:

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THREE Hanging. Hanging. TWO More technical than you think. More technical than most people/think. ONE A lot of maths goes into that. [ . . . ] Length of rope, weight of client, height of drop, it’s-it’s-it’s a technical one, it really/is. TWO Rope too short – ONE end up strangled, slowly. TWO Too long – ONE Too much pace on the falling body, too much pressure on the rope, not just snapping the neck but like it’s s’posed to . . . actual decapitation. Not good. [ . . . ] TWO No one wants to clean after that. Cleaners. Unions go mad. [ . . . ] THREE I heard the bowels let go after a body’s being hung. ONE . . . Can do, yeh, yep. THREE That it . . . that the body twitches. Still twitches. Even after it’s/ been – [ . . . ] That the eyes and tongue try to leave the head. [ . . . ] I want him hung. (tucker green 2015: 58–59)

As shown in the above extract, the harsh imagery and accuracy of the procedural description jar with One and Two’s indifferent disposition when explaining to Three the details as well as Three’s firm decision to choose the most painful and difficult execution method. In performing ethical ambivalence, the play questions institutional narratives of care and responsibility as well as the spectator’s own ethics. Evidence of the affective potency and the ‘harshness’ of tucker green’s work has been commented by critics who often use figurative language that compares their experience of watching her plays as having been ‘punched in the throat’ (Bassett 2003:  251) or ‘having swallowed a scalding cup of triple espresso in one gulp’ (Gardner 2003). Similarly, the Evening Standard’s Fiona Mountford described her experience of watching hang as ‘an hour that packs a punch at the Royal Court’ (2015). The play’s ethics of affect and desire for retribution firmly connect to race and vulnerability as the play infers to a long historical

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backdrop of precarity of the black body. The word ‘hang’ becomes a sticky metaphor which ‘conveys histories that involve injuries to bodies’ (Ahmed 2004:  20–21) and thus can be read more broadly as a response to the long genealogy of lynching and hanging and the impossibility of forgiveness. This emphasis on race and history is imbued with a politics of anger also evident in the Royal Court performance:  Marianne Jean-Baptiste who played Three was described as ‘full of angry resentment and balefully combative stares and turns her memory of the crime into a fury at her supposed helpers’ (Billington 2015). hang presents a complex palette of affects interlacing pain with anger and grief which all revolve around the precarious body. Here, anger serves not only to ‘interrupt silence and injustice’ but also to reanimate perception through creating dissonance with conventional representations of trauma and victimization. Reversing Aston’s argument that tucker green’s work ‘feels’ the loss of feminism in the new millennium (2010: 588), it can be argued that it might also re-energize feminism in contemporary theatre by rehearsing a ‘feminist politics of perception’. In tucker green’s work, persistent and wilful black women stand up against precarity precluding the possibility of forgiveness for atrocities inflicted on their loved ones or by seeking the truth. Anger works to make the bodies of the dispossessed matter as well as providing the fuel for speaking against human injustice. tucker green’s dissonant landscapes then propose ways of spectatorial engagement which elicit ‘astonishment’ rather than arouse pity and empathy (Fragkou and Goddard 2013: 153–54). Evoking ‘astonishment’ rather than compassion and empathy constitutes the play’s ethical fabric; it also further shapes tucker green’s ‘aesthetic of response-ability’, echoing Lehmann, which puts forward alternative views of the dispossessed human and the complexity of our responsibility as members of communities with shared ethical values, particularly in cultural contexts committed to politeness and tolerance. In this vein, hang’s ethics of dissonance and affective registers gesture towards the impossibility to secure true reconciliation

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and forgiveness between two opposing sides through the conduit of a mediator and chime with Rae’s view about theatre’s limitations to resolve human rights abuses; for tucker green, theatre’s role rather rests in asking difficult ethical questions about the human, social justice and responsibility.

Politics of freedom and dissent: Belarus Free Theatre, Trash Cuisine and DV8, Can We Talk about This? As already noted above, theatre engaging with human rights is chiefly driven by a desire to stir dissent against oppression and give voice to subaltern subjects who might also be victims of violence. At the same time, this type of theatre also appeals to a logic of consensus. For Rancière, consensus ‘describes the community as an entity that is naturally unified by ethical values’ (2010: 100); this means that the key target audience of theatre tackling human rights is amenable to liberal ideas of humanism and freedom as these constitute shared ethical values deeply embedded in liberal societies. In this final section, I shall return to the above questions in order to examine the intersections of freedom and precarity on the contemporary stage. I am particularly interested in the ways in which theatre is politically invested in articulating dissent against specific oppressive ideologies responsible for allocating precarity. In teasing out these questions, I will here discuss Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine and DV8’s Can We Talk about This? which both utilize the trope of precarious life in a stylized physical form to stage a call to arms in defence of freedom of speech. Before doing so, I will briefly ponder on the interface between freedom, precarity and politics. In her 1958 essay ‘What Is Freedom?’, Arendt argues that freedom is the foundation of the human, ‘to be human and to be free are one and the same’ (2006:  166); she further extends this analogy aligning freedom with action and politics:  ‘Men [sic] are free [  .  .  .  ] as long as they act, [ . . . ] for to be free and to act are the same’ (2006: 151).

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Most importantly, Arendt’s conceptualization of freedom becomes synonymous with the political when it is invested with insecurity and risk. Freedom, which only seldom  – in times of crisis or revolution  – becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action. (2006: 145)

Drawing upon Arendt’s connections across freedom, political action and risk, Lorey highlights that ‘political freedom cannot be separated from insecurity and the perils of life, [ . . . ] thus the endangerment of life is a precondition for the political’ (Lorey 2015: 79, emphasis in original). In the light of the above considerations of freedom of speech, risk and precarious life, I  will now examine how the two selected theatre examples negotiate ideas of dissent and freedom through energizing specific affective dispositions.13 Hailed by the BBC as a ‘thespian guerrilla group’ (S. Wilson  2013), Belarus Free Theatre (hereafter BFT) is a dissident theatre company presenting challenging political work which boldly expresses the will to speak freely against state terror and surveillance. The company’s own precarious conditions of life and work also point towards the vulnerability of theatre makers whose art exposes human rights abuse. The group was set up in 2005 in response to the practices of the dictatorial regime of Alexander Lukashenko which criminalizes free speech and assembly (Gener 2009: 28) and is responsible for perpetrating several human rights abuses including kidnapping, unlawful detention and capital punishment. After the country’s 2010 elections that brought Lukashenko in power for the fourth time, members of the company were banned from Belarus for their political and theatrical dissidence.14 No longer allowed to return to their home country, BFT’s artistic directors Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, actor Oleg Sidorchik and director Vladimir Shcherban sought asylum in the UK and are now based in London (Healey 2015).

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The company’s precarious position and continuous activist campaigning has brought its members wide international recognition with many high-profile supporters.15 BFT has also secured institutional support from the Young Vic theatre which the company considers its ‘home’ (Trueman 2013); they also rely on wider networks for funding shows and touring costs and have established close ties with activist groups and human rights organizations in Belarus and abroad (Livergant 2016: 254–55). At the same time, BFT still stages clandestine shows in Minsk:  spectators receive a text about the performance location 24 hours in advance, consciously putting themselves at risk in case of a police raid (S. Wilson  2013). BFT actors also perform at their own risk as they are under the danger of being arrested by the police and losing their jobs in the country’s state theatres.16 As exilic artists, Khalezin and Kaliada are committed to rehearsing with the company’s members back in Belarus while also running studio Fortinbras, ‘an underground art school [ . . . ] which teaches students how to organize political performance interventions’ through Skype (Zaiontz 2013: 205). Kaliada is adamant that their task as artists and professionals lies primarily in reclaiming the value of human life (S. Wilson  2013) and ‘staging an aesthetic conflict between people and the regime’ (Kaliada cited in Livergant 2016: 243).17 Kaliada’s belief in art’s potential to aesthetically intervene with frames of perception is a significant one as it chimes with the company’s ongoing commitment to activism; all BFT shows articulate an urgent need to voice human rights violations which remain silenced and invite spectators to care and take action. At the same time, as I will discuss below, BFT’s aesthetic conflict also largely builds on its Western audiences’ liberal attitudes who are amenable to such ideals of freedom and democracy. Trash Cuisine is the company’s first show performed in the English language that departs from an exclusive focus on Belarus and which included actors from BFT’s international workshops (Rocamora 2015).18 Exploring contemporary practices of capital punishment across countries such as Belarus, Thailand and the United States, it further touches on other instances of torture during imprisonment

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and civil war in Rwanda and Northern Ireland. In rendering visible and problematizing the differential allocation of precarity of prisoners in countries where practices of torture are still legitimate, the piece questions whose lives count as human and claims the right to grieve for the bodies which have been stripped from their humanity. Kaliada further explains that the company’s intention was to also comment on the legitimacy of violence on a larger scale: ‘we want to look at whether a state’s use of capital punishment sets an example to its citizens and legitimizes other forms of violence’ (cited in Trueman 2013). The piece’s activist agenda further extended beyond the theatre space: at the end of each performance, the company circulated flyers with the logo ‘Free Belarus Now’, asking the audience to take action in protest against the violation of human rights in Belarus and to request that the bodies of those executed are returned to their families. Finburgh draws attention to the risks brought by explicit theatrical representations of torture which might ‘injure further the already damaged civility of torture victims’ (2017: 219). In the case of theatre which tackles torture and violence and draws on the veracity of documentary material, questions of objectification and the extent of the creation of ‘spectacles of suffering and humiliation’ (2017:  228) become even more urgent. BFT’s aesthetic, which largely draws on physical theatre traditions, refrains from mimetic identification with the suffering body and is chiefly interested in creating affective impressions that would provide a lasting impact to their audiences. BFT capitalizes on the precarity of the human body by yet adopting more poetic and symbolic representational strategies and drawing attention to the conditions of such precarity rather than appealing to an abstract humanitarianism. In Trash Cuisine, this is foregrounded by choreographies grounded in metaphors of risk:  bodies appear in precarious poses which explicitly refer to practices inducing physical precarity such as different forms of capital punishment ranging from electrocution to beheading. Such choreographies of precarity are further reinforced by and juxtaposed with other means such as music and sound, the use of food and verbatim text.

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To this end, Trash Cuisine’s aesthetic vocabularies play a key role in communicating the ideas behind the work. The importance of the audience’s emotional investment also relates to the company’s own response to the stories researched. Kaliada explains that after the period of in situ research it was the company’s intention to ‘make the audience feel what we were feeling’ (BBC Arts 2015). Khalezin also evokes this sense of responsibility vis-à-vis Trash Cuisine: ‘for me, it was a milestone of our theatrical search for both our method and also our emotional search, our responsibility to feel certain emotions to never to [sic] close our eyes to certain things’ (BBC Arts 2015). While exposing practices such as capital punishment and water boarding, the piece critiques Western complicity to cruel practices using the metaphor of haute cuisine. The performance is framed as a packaged whistle-stop tour of the world’s best recipes. Intersections of extracts from Shakespeare’s Richard III, Julius Caesar and Hamlet open some of the scenes, connecting contemporary appetites for consuming high culture with the desire to taste eclectic food. To further punctuate this complicity, images of torture are juxtaposed with culinary pleasure. During the scene ‘Strawberries and Cream’, a Thai and a Belarusian executioner casually offer minute details of their professional experience of executing convicts while enjoying strawberries, cream and champagne. The piece begins with the two female performersexecutioners operatically singing to each other before sitting down to eat; during this time, two other company members are stripped naked and adorned with exotic fruit before being taken away in plastic bin bags. In its purposefully ironic and grotesque tone, the scene also exposes the differential approaches to capital punishment in Belarus and Thailand: for example, we learn that in Belarus, the bodies of the executed are never returned to their families but often sold as body organs, in contrast to Thailand where bodies are entitled to a religious burial (Khalezin et al. 2013: 13–14). In the following section entitled ‘Ortolans’, actor Philippe Spall is guiding us step by step through the execution of a recipe of the ‘pinnacle of human culinary achievement’ (Khalezin et al. 2013: 14) whereby a

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series of cruel acts are performed on a small French song bird for the completion of the dish. Such choices hint at, following Beverley Skeggs, how affect has been used ‘in the selling of lifestyles to those materially sated’ (Skeggs 2005:  971); at the same time, Trash Cuisine cleverly reverses such affects, as food delight is exchanged with disgust, horror and anger. During his narration, the actor also devours a real ortolan by amplifying the sound of its crunching body through microphones. The inference to the authenticity of the stories narrated further adds to the piece’s affective fabric. The performance makes explicit reference to real cases: Northern Irishman Liam Holden, who spent 30 years in prison for allegedly murdering a soldier before being acquitted;19 Nicky Ingram who was executed in the electric chair; and Vlad Kovalec, arrested by the police in Belarus and found guilty of a terrorist attack in Minsk’s metro. The scene focusing on the electric chair torture is purposefully stylized and ironic to create emotional distance by putting female performer Esther Mugambi on an electric chair, lip-synching the words of Ingram’s lawyer who witnessed his death. Following the execution scene, performer Stephanie Pan playfully offers to present several impressions of different types of torture such as beheading, gas chamber and lethal injection. The playfulness of the scene evaporates when Pan shares the impression of the electric chair by producing a very loud squeal which fills the auditorium for nearly a minute; its acute harshness makes the impression deeper than any visual representation as it does not allow you to turn away or to subsume it to familiar daily images of violence. Finally, Kovalec’s story, narrated from the point of view of his mother Lubov Kovalyov, played by Pan, is placed at the performance’s climactic ending. Not dissimilar to de Menezes, Kovalec ‘happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time’ and was executed without evidence of culpability (Khalezin et  al. 2013:  30). The piece ends with a symbolic ritual of his burial. Two performers’ bodies are perched on a big white surface upstage centre covered with white flour. Following this burial enactment, the performers prepare the space for the final act of lament for bodies subject to torture. Each carrying a knife and a sack of onions, they frantically begin chopping the onions in

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Figure  3 Pavel Haradnitski, Stephanie Pan, Esther Mugambi, Nastassia Shcherbak and Philippe Spall in Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine (directed by Nicolai Khalezin, Young Vic Theatre, London, 2012) © Simon Annand

front of the audience. Refraining from sentimental accounts of human rights abuse, this choice draws further attention to the proximity between performers and spectators as it produces artificial tears to everyone in the room. Notwithstanding the company’s poetic vocabularies, virtuosity and activist commitment, its dissenting voice largely relies on a consensus about ‘liberal beliefs about the human being and its freedom’ (Livergant 2016:  246) comfortably embedded in liberal ideologies of Western theatre audiences. Elyssa Livergant insightfully argues that the company’s ‘brand identity in the West is inextricable from their productions, enhancing Western fantasies of democratic freedom’ (2016:  252). Livergant particularly observes that the company has secured a ‘network capital’ which has given it access to ‘a transnational class of global elites’ (2016: 243) and allowed them to regularly cross borders and perform in the United States, Australia and most of the

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countries in Europe.20 Following Chouliaraki’s critique with regards to practices of ‘feel good activism’ in humanitarian appeals, BFT maintains a careful balance between vulnerability and security for its audiences who, although not in the position to experience such precarities, would support the work out of feelings of guilt or liberal superiority. This is also relevant for BFT’s ideas about ‘revolution’ expressed in the eponymous two-week festival ‘Staging a Revolution’ the company co-curated on the event of its tenth anniversary. The festival comprised performances from the company’s existing repertoire as well as the premiere of their new piece Time of Women and public discussions between artists, activists and audiences on topics relevant to the themes of the pieces such as mental health, gay rights and capital punishment.21 The performances took place at the Young Vic and in various secret locations; audiences attending the latter were asked to bring their passport with them as a means of identification to replicate performance conditions in Belarus. After each show, Kaliada would offer a context about the precarious conditions of performing and watching BFT shows in Belarus. This careful stage management rehearses a symbolic displacement of the audience from the safety of London’s theatre-going scene thus further punctuating the precarious conditions of life and dissident work in Belarus. In this sense, the marketing strategy of framing the festival as a ‘revolution’ proffers the promise of including the audience in an imagined community of dissidents. The effect of this symbolic bordercrossing and imaginary activist empowerment and the ‘revolutionary’ element of the productions is however compromised exactly because of the audience’s material position of comfort. Questions on consensus, dissent, liberal values and Western perceptions of freedom and human rights are also key to consider in relation to DV8’s Can We Talk about This? Created by the internationally acclaimed dance theatre company, the piece premiered in Sydney Opera House in 2011 and toured internationally and around the UK before its staging at London’s National Theatre in 2012.22 The piece reflects the dance company’s ongoing commitment to ethics and politics and further experiments with fusing dance practices and verbatim material.

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It further asks political questions already present in their 2008 piece To Be Straight with You which particularly focused on sexuality, religion and tolerance. The aim of Can We Talk about This? was to break the silence of consensual complacency with and tolerance of Islamic extremism and to provoke a debate about freedom of speech, multiculturalism and Islam in contemporary Western democracies (Newson in ‘DV8: Can We Talk about This?’ 2012b). The company’s artistic director Lloyd Newson clarifies that the intention behind the piece was to compensate for ‘a liberal blind spot’ in Western societies which fail to listen to more progressive (Muslim) voices which speak about injustices and human rights abuses in their own communities because of ‘postcolonial guilt and a fear of being labelled racist or Islamophobic’ (Newson in ‘DV8: Can We Talk about This?’ 2012b).23 It was developed after a lengthy process of collecting spoken text from interviews with fifty academics, politicians and community leaders with first-hand experience of the issues in question (‘DV8: Can We Talk about This?’ 2012a); part of the spoken text was sourced from archival footage previously disseminated via other media such as the BBC, Channel 4, New Statesman and the United Nations (‘DV8: Can We Talk about This?’ 2012b). Because of its potentially inflammatory subject matter, the company had to take special measures to minimize risk for its performers, audiences and the people working on the show (Farrington 2015). Can We Talk about This? makes bold statements about the limits of free speech, tolerance and morality and cites several instances of human rights abuses and mechanisms of fear promulgated by extremist Islamic ideologies; it specifically refers to examples from the renowned Salman Rushdie affair, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and the Danish cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad.24 Particular pressure is applied to the restriction of human rights for women and the clash between Sharia law and the principles of the human rights council:25 the piece includes the words of Roy Brown, representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, who reveals that it is no longer legitimate to criticize or mention Islam or the word Sharia. Another scene presents an interview with former Labour MP

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Ann Cryer who explicitly refers to her political efforts of rendering visible the practice of forced marriages in the UK’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Cryer, who was branded as racist for exposing the violation of human rights of young women, raises questions regarding Parliament’s political responsibility in protecting vulnerable populations. In this sense, the performance does not wish to represent victims of torture directly but rather uses other people’s testimonies and expertise in relation to these cases. One of the few times a victim testimony is staged is with the story of British Asian author Zena Briggs. Briggs recounts her experience of fleeing a forced marriage and receiving multiple death threats from her family as well as the process of entering a special witness protection scheme. Briggs’s testimony is one of the most powerful ones in the performance: Seeta Patel’s movement score treats the story with care, emphasizing physical vulnerability through repetitive hand gestures which hint at the character’s entrapment and show her efforts to protect herself under her hooded sweater. From the above, it becomes clear that the subject matters negotiated in Can We Talk about This? are of high political importance; the performance’s body politic stages a protest against oppressive forces which silence vulnerable voices. While I maintain that the piece tackled significant questions regarding human rights abuses and censorship practices which further promote the distribution of precarity across the globe, I also wish to interrogate the politics and ethics of responsibility rehearsed in the piece. In doing so, I will be paying attention to how precarity is framed by the piece’s dramaturgical devices and its handling of the material. A key frame that sets the tone and intentions of the piece is introduced in the performance’s opening; performer Hannes Langof provokes the audience with a controversial question by quoting novelist Martin Amis:  ‘Hands up:  Who feels morally superior to the Taliban?’26 Following a moderate show of hands, Langof continues, ‘The problem with us in the West is that we have succumbed to a pious paralysis when we cannot even say that we are superior to the Taliban. Why can’t we?’27

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In his production review entitled ‘The Riskiest Show of the Year’, the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer clearly aligned himself with this point of view: ‘So cowed have we become that only about 20 per cent of the audience put their hands up despite our knowledge of their barbarous cruelties’ (2012). The chosen moment from Can We Talk about This? described above is particularly significant: the question addressed a provocation of measuring its audience’s democratic values and questioning their readiness to freely uncover what moral stances they hold. Although audience responses can hugely vary according to performance night and venue, it seems that Newson anticipates and builds on the (liberal) audience’s assumed tolerance or reticence to openly expose such a view. At the same time, the performance also equates Western ‘moral superiority’ with humanitarianism, democracy and freedom of speech and hails its audiences as morally superior and thus the carriers of ‘right’ and ‘just’ values. In other words, the framing of the performance as a dissident act which resists tolerance as hegemonic consensus also anticipates that the audience’s liberal humanitarian values would enable them to align themselves with Amis’s statement. This line of argumentation, I  suggest, is achieved through the piece’s ‘packaging of emotions’ and the creation of ‘sticky associations’. Emotions, Ahmed argues, ‘move sideways (through sticky associations between signs, figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards. Affect is produced when signs circulate and accumulate value’ (2004:  45). In effect, Ahmed suggests, the more signs circulate, the more their affective value increases. It is my contention that, in attempting to break the taboo issue of Islamic fundamentalism, Can We Talk about This? allows notions of Islam, extremism and terrorism to stick together and against freedom, humanitarianism and democracy which are presented as values exclusive to the West. This, in turn, produces a ‘rippling effect of emotions’ (Ahmed 2004:  45) such as anger, fear and hate against Islam, carrying cultural, ideological and affective weight. The negotiation of freedom and democracy as values which are rendered precarious by institutions of tolerance and multiculturalism

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raises a few ethical and political questions. According to Rancière, ‘freedom is only a virtue when a community is animated by the very conflict over what it means, and when several freedoms clash in their attempt to embody it’ (2010: 100). Rancière’s statement echoes Chantal Mouffe’s theorization of the political:  ‘Proper political questions’, she argues, ‘always involve decisions that require making a choice between conflicting alternatives’ (2013: 3). Mouffe anticipates an agonistic model of pluralist democracy whereby consensus and dissent coexist. While consensus establishes the frames of ‘ethico-political’ principles, dissent airs tensions and antagonisms which are yet not staged as ‘a struggle between enemies’ but as an agonistic struggle ‘between adversaries’ (2013: 7). Newson’s selection and organization of material included in the piece was underpinned by the intention to stage a nuance of opinion regarding censorship and free speech and to stage voices which come from different ideological points of view:  when criticized by Kenan Malik (one of the show’s interviewees) for his references to right-wing politician Geert Wilders (Malik 2012), Newson’s response pronounced the need to explore the intricate relationship between the right to free speech and the limits of disagreement: Free speech [  .  .  .  ] isn’t a right just for people we agree with, or for diplomats. Whilst researching the production I  found myself sympathising with aspects and principles of what some of the Islamists in the work argue, such as their right to protest at homecoming parades or burn poppies to object to British foreign policy. We don’t treat Wilders as a hero of free speech any more than we treat the protestors as heroes of free speech. (Newson 2012)

Can We Talk about This? seems to be airing such a disagreement only fleetingly through staging an incident of audience indignation whereby an actor sitting in the auditorium threw stones (which resembled human excrement) on stage to protest against the piece as ‘Islamophobic shit’ (Katwala 2012). This act of stage-managed ‘self-criticism’, however, moots the debate as it actually refuses to further interrogate the performance’s

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discursive means. In other words, the intention to air such complex questions in the form of a debate was compromised by the fact that the answer was already decided from the outset (Manzoor 2012). Newson’s intention to stage disagreement clearly excludes Islamic fundamentalism from the sphere of agonistic politics for its failure to share the same ethico-political principles. At the same time, however, his dramaturgy of agonistic politics also excludes other points of view which would question the very ideas of freedom and democracy that the West uses as justification to pursue war and torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. In other words, while purporting to stir a debate and challenge notions of freedom, Can we Talk about This?, I argue, presents freedom and democracy as universal and monolithic values without acknowledging them as ideological constructs used to justify war and violence. With reference to post-9/11 US politics, Rancière observes an ethical ‘turn’: ‘politics’, he argues, ‘has been replaced by consensus’, that is, an agreement over ‘a way of being, a system of shared values and a political co-belonging’ (2010: 100). This consensus, Rancière continues, ‘describes the community as an entity that is naturally unified by ethical values’ (2010: 100) which also include freedom and democracy. In the case of US politics, Rancière argues, this consensus shapes an understanding of identity which excludes alterity (2010:  104). In this vein, DV8’s piece often masks how those different opinions create ‘conflict’ or disagreement within the democratic sphere:  the views presented are often conflated as standing for ‘human rights’ and obfuscate how the same political views undermine both free speech or humanitarian values. In addition to Malik’s critique, Sunder Katwala argues that the piece interweaves several different voices in such a way that it legitimizes populist and right-wing discourses (2012). For example, the reference to attempts to censor the controversial short film Fitna, made by Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing Dutch Party for Freedom, masks the ideology behind his extreme right-wing and partial views regarding Muslims and immigrants in Denmark. By emulating a right-wing populist discourse, Katwala maintains, Can We Talk about This? risks

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reducing the debate in a ‘foundational clash of civilizations’ (2012). Here the editing and dramaturgy of the verbatim material included in the piece play a significant role in presenting a partial view of the debate as the cited references confirm the ‘sticky associations’ outlined in the beginning of my analysis rather than succeeding in challenging them. In addition, the piece’s critique of tolerance conflates right-wing calls about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ marshalled by various conservative leaders with the view to tighten immigration laws. This was particularly pronounced in 2011, when former prime minister David Cameron specifically called for ‘a war against multiculturalism’, proposing a reduction of ‘passive tolerance’ and a shift towards ‘muscular liberalism’ that would secure ‘equality, law and freedom of speech across the country’ (Wright and Taylor 2011).28 The troubling conflation of muscular liberalism with freedom, democracy and human rights addresses a problematic incitement to responsibility; it specifically favours a divisive and punitive politics rather than a desire to ameliorate conditions of cohabitation. It further facilitates the impression of negative economies of affect which equate Muslim communities with the identity of the terrorist; in this sense, the piece risks echoing several anti-immigration discourses endorsed by extreme right-wing organizations such as the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defense League (EDL). In his article ‘Against Human Rights’, Slavoj Žižek draws attention to the limits of liberal democratic ideology of tolerance whereby ‘the other is welcome as long as his presence is not indiscreet, as long as he is not truly Other’ (2005). Žižek’s observation turns the argument regarding the failures of multiculturalism on its head; the problem with liberal democratic societies is not too much tolerance but the very inability to create the conditions for accepting Otherness. In this light, DV8’s performance presents us with a contradiction: in seeking to break the frame of consensus that turns a blind eye on human rights abuses, it relies on recognizable frames which also allocate vulnerability and precarity. Here, democracy and freedom are presented as precarious because of tolerance and acceptance of alterity; this invites the audience to care not only about

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the vulnerability of the people who suffer under Islamic fundamentalist rule, but also highlights their own precarity and justifies the need for more securitization and immunization from the Muslim Other. Trash Cuisine and Can We Talk about This? both exist at the interstices of art and risk and offer visibility to human rights’ abuses silenced by authoritarian regimes and ideologies. They also illustrate ways in which the staging of dissent may create sticky metaphors and associations between practices and emotions inviting audiences to ‘care’. In resisting practices that put human lives in danger and render them disposable, contemporary politics of freedom may utilize precarity as a rallying point of relationality, of agreeing on shared humanitarian values through economies of affect and political action. Yet, emancipatory politics also needs to be treated with caution as they fuel affects that cultivate negative attachments to bodies of Others. The target audiences of the transnational institutions in which both pieces are performed largely belong to a particular class of white liberal subjects; this raises questions regarding the partial selection of documents which risk fetishizing the Other. DV8’s National Theatre production did receive a standing ovation and generally dithyrambic reviews from conservative newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. While aiming to stage a protest against liberal ideas of tolerance, the piece at once buttresses fantasies of freedom and democracy in the West and presents us with a consensual ideology packaged as dissenting and radical. On the other hand, Trash Cuisine casts a wider net on cruel practices and human rights abuses in countries of the ‘civilized West’ thus creating links across larger ecologies of precarity and the continuous quest for human rights.

Conclusion This chapter examined how contemporary theatre articulates a politics of responsibility for human rights concerns. Following Butler’s incitement to ‘call the frame into question’, the examples discussed

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here often create dissonance with existing frames of representation of human rights concerns and appearance of vulnerability and formulate their own ‘aesthetic of responsibility’. In line with Chouliaraki’s and Finburgh’s concerns over the framing of sufferers of human rights abuses as powerless victims, the chapter explored how theatre might reverse such reifying practices. To this end, it discussed shifts in perceiving the suffering of vulnerable Others and laid out questions with regards to modes of spectatorship and affect. The above show theatre as a medium that carries the potential to disrupt impressions of terror which are tightly connected to human rights concerns through the uses of imagination and dissent rather than mimetic dramatizations of vulnerability. A  broader perspective on human rights concerns and ecologies of precarity articulates more powerful arguments about appearances of precarious lives and the causes behind their dispossession. At the same time, theatre’s concern with human rights might also be complicit with regimes of power which shape appearances of the human. In so doing, it participates in the flow of negative affects that capitalize on the idea of precarious life and human rights thus offering limited perspectives in favour of achieving higher dramatic affects. The final chapter will further expand on the politics of dissent and appearance vis-à-vis practices of dispossession which render human bodies disposable.

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This book has so far been concerned with how precarity shapes contemporary identity politics and how this becomes manifest in theatrical production. I  have specifically examined how precarity in UK-based twenty-first-century theatre practice might ‘form the starting point for political alliances against the logic of protection and security for some at the cost of many others’ (Lorey 2015: 91). This final chapter takes Judith Butler’s consideration of dispossession as springboard to discuss questions of subjectivity, debt and value. In Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Butler and Athanasiou use dispossession to refer to ‘processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability’ (2013: 2). In contrast, possession constitutes ‘an essential prerequisite of proper human being’ (2013: 13); this prerequisite for human life is yet further buttressed by regimes of debtocracy and austerity and their methods of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2010:  249) and measuring ‘human value’ which fuel social divisions between social subjects:  those who are willing to work on the self and perform their worth publicly as evidence of their value (Skeggs and Loveday 2012) and those who lack the skills, willingness or opportunities to do so. Butler and Athanasiou make instead a case for overcoming the logic of possession and property as constitutive of identity and particularly of ‘possessive individualism’ as understood in the context of neo-liberal capitalism’s ‘debtocracy’ (2013: 7).

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Such hierarchies and biopolitical relations of domination which regulate life protection can be detected in the austerity measures applied by neo-liberal governments across the globe with deleterious effects which clearly show a lack of care particularly towards vulnerable populations. Since the beginning of the coalition government’s tenure in 2010 and under the subsequent Tory governments led by David Cameron and Theresa May, harsh cuts have been widely implemented across the UK further dismantling welfare state provisions. Within the span of six years, the implications of such cuts have spiralled into a ‘social care crisis’ deeply affecting specific demographics such as the elderly, single mothers and people who receive benefits. Further research also connects the increase of suicide rates among men to ‘debt, austerity and unemployment’ (McVeigh 2015). In addition to the cuts, shifting labour conditions and the ongoing precarization of work and class inequalities have been further exacerbated since the 2008 financial crisis leading to the normalization of insecure models of work and labour. For Lorey, this is a symptom of biopolitical governmentality which, since the nineteenth century, has controlled all aspects of life and subjectivity through structural inequalities and practices of Othering. In the twenty-first century, such relations of precarization become normalized as their impact reverberates more widely. As Lorey notes, ‘Precarization is not an exception, it is rather the rule’ (2015: 1). Precarization and the ‘precariat’ have therefore become common points of reference to describe the experience of a growing number of people who live in insecure labour conditions.1 In The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing discusses how the precariat emerges as a global class after the 1970s. A  neologism combining the adjective ‘precarious’ to mean insecure and the definition of the ‘proletariat’, the precariat, following Standing, is a new class ‘in the making’ and in the process of finding its voice (2016:  8). This ‘new dangerous class’ suggests an identity marked by emotions of fear, anger, anomie and anxiety incurred by insecure labour conditions (2016: 23–24).2 Further, the precariat’s subjectivity is largely determined by debt structures which lead to its subordination.

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In his discussion of the re-energization of the precariat against neoliberal policies and debtocracy in the UK after 2010, Philip Hager maintains that ‘class struggle in the twenty-first century must reinvent a political subjectivity outside the logic of debt; that is to invent a political project that would cancel debt both as an economic reality (a means of exchange) and as discourse (a process of subjectivation)’ (2015: 48). If, in the twenty-first century, class returns as a ‘necessary and legitimate’ category which makes an appearance in the context of social movements, the arts, humanities and social sciences, it also resurfaces as a political trope in the theatre (Adiseshiah 2016: 149). Since 2008, British theatre has been increasingly preoccupied with the trope of dispossession with several examples focusing on debt, austerity, disposability and class with a limited number of scholarly publications examining the latter’s resurgence.3 This final chapter then examines how twenty-first-century British theatre features class as a ‘revolting subject’ (Tyler 2013) and articulates an ethics of care. Against this backdrop, I will also probe the implications of precarity vis-à-vis the wider theatre ecology and the shifting role of the theatre maker in the neo-liberal economy.

Neo-liberal economies and the theatre maker as precarious worker In her essay ‘ “Chavs”, “Gyppos” and “Scum”? Class in Twenty-FirstCentury Drama’, Siân Adiseshiah observes the resurgence of class in twenty-first-century British theatre following a period of obsolescence (2016: 150). This apparent lack of an explicit engagement with class in late-twentieth-century theatre and particularly during the 1990s was symptomatic of a wider decline in identity politics as a uniting point of collective resistance; this perception of class as a defunct category was further consolidated by the advent of the ‘politics of the individual’ which served as bedrock for Thatcher and Major’s rhetoric during the 1980s and 1990s. Following Major’s motto of a ‘classless society’

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(Major cited in Turner 2013: 4), class was further rendered irrelevant by New Labour. In Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (2013), Imogen Tyler exposes this abdication of class from political vocabularies and its relegation to a ‘zombie category’ (Beck cited in Tyler 2013: 156) by specifically locating it to the architecture of New Labour ideologies such as those which proclaimed ‘we are all middle-class now’.4 This new social ‘classless’ identity was not only masking the existence of class politics; it was further fuelled by the category of a ‘workless class’ (Blair cited in Tyler 2013: 159) positioned outside the aspirational narratives of the hard-working, flexible and high-achieving citizen. Tyler names this the ‘underclass’ or the ‘national abject’ (2013: 163) which variably appears in the neo-liberal imaginary as a threat to the  social order. For Tyler, practices which stigmatize people who do not work or lack skillset not only render them ‘abject citizens’ but also enhance public consent about welfare cuts as rightful punitive measures for their assumed idleness (2013: 165). As discussed in Chapter  1, class identity in 1990s theatre made an appearance in the guises of ‘indebted subjectivity’ which shares particular affinities with Tyler’s understanding of ‘the underclass’. It is my contention that such an interest in debt and dispossession contributed to further understandings of class in twenty-first-century theatre; in addition, it brought to the fore discussions regarding conditions of artistic labour. Here, Lazzarato’s understanding of the ‘indebted man’ as a form of subjectivity specific to neo-liberal societies is crucial. As discussed earlier in the book, for Lazzarato, debt, manifested by a creditor– debtor relation, appears as a biopolitical mechanism which permeates all social networks and produces neo-liberal subjectivities. Lazzarato specifically exemplifies how debt economy shapes subjects who become ‘entrepreneurs of the self ’ thus consolidating ideologies which moralize ‘the unemployed, the “assisted”, the users of public services, as well as [  .  .  .  ] entire populations’ (2012:  30). Such biopolitical mechanisms of debt are enabled by post-Fordist neo-liberal governmentality, or what Lorey names ‘the government of the precarious’ (2015) whereby precarity becomes naturalized as a dominant system of governing the

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self. In the context of contemporary societies of the spectacle, labour, possession and the public performance of worth become central tenets of the neo-liberal subject, evidencing social value and the will to govern the self (Skeggs and Loveday 2012).5 The domain of work becomes a ‘tertiary workplace’ whereby the divisions of work, production and leisure, workplace and home, work time and leisure time are eroded (Standing 2016:  138). The possession of technical skills is also of secondary importance to the way in which subjects manage themselves and their time as flexible workers as well as expanding on their social capital and ‘emotional labour’ capacities (Standing 2016). The role of the contemporary theatre maker is no different than that of the flexible and precarious worker of the neo-liberal age. Although the artistic profession has always been underpinned by financial insecurity, it is here important to note how the requirements for artists to measure their worth and perform their value have become more pressing. As Shannon Jackson observes, by transforming into an ‘entrepreneur of the self ’, the precarious creative labourer of the neo-liberal age embraces ‘individual resourcefulness’ and celebrates ‘privatized models of creativity and life management’ (Jackson 2012: 22). As discussed in Chapter 1, following the flourishing of the creative industries and arts policies during the New Labour years (1997–2007) and their further handling by the coalition government (2010–15), the artistic landscape in Britain presents new forms of managing, producing and disseminating work by placing emphasis on individual responsibility and fundamentally changing the relationship between the artist and the state. Under New Labour, the Arts Council’s policies shifted ideologies as to the role of funding in the context of the arts and developed a relationship with artists similar to those of the ‘indebted man’ chiming with the party’s rhetoric about citizens’ social responsibility.6 As Tomlin points out, the perception of funding as ‘public investment’ turned arts organizations into ‘small businesses that could support the economy, the education of the young people and the social fabric of a multicultural society’ (2015: 34). In Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013), Jen Harvie details at length how the growth of the creative industries has transformed artists

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to ‘artpreneurs’ who are asked to internalize and perform the ideological values of the new market economy: self-interest, individualism, growth and profit (2013: 63). As shown by New Labour’s vision for the arts, the above values were further imbricated with narratives of care, success and responsibility as well as national pride, ideas clearly expressed in a  speech Tony Blair gave at the Tate Modern in 2007, where he particularly advocated that ‘a nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st century it will be a more successful one’ (Blair cited in Harvie 2013: 67). The legacy of the instrumentalization of the arts inherited by the post-2010 Tory governments, combined with the shrinking of state support in the form of funding cuts the Arts Council of England has suffered, further expanded the ideal of the less state-dependent artist by celebrating sustainability and resilience (ACE 2013: 31). This reinforced mixed economies in arts funding by marrying state subsidies with private capital (Harvie 2013).7 According to such neo-liberal business models which buttress the perception and practice of the arts as a monetized system, the artist is required to be a self-governed, independent and resourceful subject, able to follow a business sensibility in producing sustainable work with little means. Such a model poses numerous challenges to theatre makers particularly working within small-scale alternative theatre (Field 2013), who are asked to perform their worth by often having to compromise their artistic visions while being unable to achieve financial independence and stability. In addition, it leads culture and the arts to a ‘hyperinstrumentalisation [ . . . ] only concerned with ends: the meaning of cultural policy lies solely in those ends’ thus rendering cultural value irrelevant (Hadley and Gray 2017: 96). Within the context of hyperinstrumentalization, there are significant pressures imposed on theatre makers who might compromise the artistic integrity and innovation of their work. Stan’s Cafe’s artistic director James Yarker addresses this risk: Good business sense would be to knock out at frequent, predictable intervals, shows which, though different from each other, are consistent

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in their form and tone. Instead we pursue whatever ideas interest us in whatever directions they lead us, regardless of what art form they may wander into and whether they are ‘the kind of thing we do’. (Yarker in Stan’s Cafe 2001: 28)

As a result of the lack of a consistent identity in the company’s portfolio, each performance needs to be promoted from scratch; this renders the loyalty of venues hard to sustain, as promoters find it difficult to be confident of what they are booking and to frame it appropriately within their programme. At the same time, Stan’s Cafe has also shown that artistic innovation and entrepreneurialism are not mutually exclusive:  since the mid-1990s, the company has been a regular grant recipient from the ACE and its financial turnover has been acknowledged to be offering ‘excellent value’.8 At the same time, there are several issues to consider when looking at the intricacies of artistic labour, funding structures and value. Artists who make work in the UK increasingly acknowledge their precarious and shifting relationship with ‘hyperinstrumentalized’ arts institutions which offer the promise of a temporary stability but no independence:  in her provocation given as part of the ‘Theatre, Performance and Employment’ conference organized at London’s Queen Mary University, Birmingham-based Selina Thompson admits:  ‘I make art for the Arts Council to make enough money to support myself. And I apply for funding, shape my projects and ideas with this in mind. This compromise – between what I’d really like to create, and what the Arts Council is seeking gives a narrow, narrow veneer of stability. Just about’ (Thompson 2017). Thompson’s critique adds a significant dimension to the debate over the creative worker’s relationship to precarity and value as she specifically draws attention to the relationship of institutions and artists who do not belong to a specific demographic. She particularly applies pressure to how institutions appropriate identity politics in order to promote their aspirations for widening diversity and to compensate for the long-term failures of the state to support marginalized identities and communities. Yet, as Thompson argues, such strategies rarely succeed in achieving equality

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due to deeply embedded hierarchical structures: ‘This system/industry is incapable of valuing my work as truly equal to work made by those that are white, middle-class and fit our traditional vision of health’ (Thompson 2017). The above power relationships are, in essence, exacerbated by mechanisms of debt which shape creative processes and the position of the artist in the (neo-liberal) creative economy by maintaining the creditor–debtor relation for an indefinite time. In addition, such relations fully exploit ‘free time’ which is also rendered a product to be used as ‘measure of productivity’ (Palladini 2012: 102). Trapped in an impasse, theatre makers often see themselves as indebted subjects, dependent on their families or pursuing other employment routes to make ends meet. As Lyn Gardner reports from the 2015 ‘Devoted and Disgruntled’ event, theatre makers often point out the difficulties of crossing the threshold of the ‘emerging artist’ while devoting more and more free labour in applying for funding to make their creative projects (Gardner 2015b).9 In 2013, theatre maker Bryony Kimmings launched a campaign ‘I’ll Show You Mine’, after writing a blog post where she revealed her personal difficulties of making a living as an artist despite the successful business models she has followed and the respect she has gained from the ACE:  ‘NOW I  am constantly asked to de-value my art work by venues, education establishments, independent producers and sometimes even funders’ (Kimmings 2013). Kimmings admitted that her performance as an artpreneur ‘and a good business woman’ (Kimmings 2013) had not yet put her out of a precarious position and she offered details about how she spends her ‘free time’ trying to fill in application forms and manage projects from scratch. Kimmings’s post triggered several responses from individuals and collectives who spoke out against pay inequalities and labour conditions in the arts, furthering the debate into questions of transparency and the devaluing of creative labour within the arts industry and against other fields of work.10 As Jackson insightfully points out, current discourses on creativity permeating privatized arts

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models and celebrating risk and flexibility as an essential ingredient in artistic production mask insecure material conditions of labour and production and class differences between artists and other workers (2012:  22–23). Contemporary theatre makers are then crucially implicated in wider economies of debt which further sustain their precarious labour and which require them to measure and perform their value. This differential measurement of artistic labour’s value is further shaped by wider policies of dispossession which buttress and perpetuate such class divisions. In the following pages, I  will return to questions of precarity in theatrical representation, particularly focusing on the intersections of dispossession, value, debt, gender and class relations.

Debt, value and justice: Stan’s Cafe, The Just Price of Flowers The topics of excess, money, debt and the dominance of market values have been widely dramatized in twenty-first-century theatre, with some notable examples mostly staged in elite institutions.11 This section will instead focus on a small-scale regional theatre production by Stan’s Cafe called The Just Price of Flowers (2009), which adopts a historical point of view in order to interrogate some of the causes of the twentyfirst century’s financial crisis. I particularly wish to examine how the piece’s ‘poor aesthetic’ and use of historicization plays a crucial role in communicating ideas over debt, value and justice. As already discussed in Chapter 3 and earlier in this chapter, Stan’s Cafe’s work consistently mirrors political concerns while also adhering to an eclectic taste and resisting a consistent aesthetic identity. More specifically, its commitment to the exploration of ‘alternative world views’ is mirrored in its vested interest in engaging wider audiences. This can be evidenced by its press releases and theatre programmes which always highlight the correct pronunciation of its name: ‘In Britain a Caff is a place workers go to drink big mugs of tea and eat unhealthy

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fried breakfasts of bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, etc. A Café, pronounced with the ‘e’, is a delicate and pretentious place, not somewhere we feel so comfortable’ (Stan’s Cafe n.d.: 6). The Just Price of Flowers premiered at Birmingham’s A.E. Harris in 2009 and was later revived in 2012 in the same space. It takes place in the seventeenth-century Netherlands during the first ‘financial bubble’, also known as ‘tulipomania’. As explained by the company, ‘tulipomania’ was caused by a growing passion for tulips imported from the East which led to a rise in their price and ‘the possibility of making profit through speculative buying. For a brief time certain tulip bulbs were sold for prices equivalent to those of a house, or three years of a craftsman’s wage’ (Stan’s Cafe 2009). The Just Price is presented in twenty-one short vignettes featuring the story of a young lowermiddle-class farming couple, the Van Leasings, who are rapidly drawn to the fashion of collecting tulips; this results in the accumulation of a substantial amount of debt, mortgaging their property and, ultimately, losing everything. Central characters in the plotline are Van Eek (the financier/the old money/the bond credit rating/floristien), Van Hire (the banker), Van Tage (the financier) and Van Drive (the Van Leasings’s servant). Scenes are signposted by titles written on pieces of paper, which foreshadow the financial devices discussed (e.g., ‘Credit Default Swap’, ‘Mortgage Backed Securities’, ‘Toxic Assets’) and are introduced by a storyteller who offers brief references to fictional and factual stories from the present by playing the accordion (e.g., ‘Sean gets his car repossessed and can no longer get to work’, ‘Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin are put on trial for insider trading and later acquitted’).12 Stan’s Cafe’s piece is an explicit homage to Bertolt Brecht, as the use of various Verfremdungseffekt devices of historicization, songs (written by Craig Stephens), episodic structure and the use of placards suggest. Form is inextricably linked to content, further pronouncing the company’s ethics and production processes. The piece is often referred to as Stan’s Cafe’s ‘austerity production’: it was written and rehearsed in

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11 days, and performed by local actors who worked on reduced wages and shared box-office and bar sales (Stan’s Cafe 2009); it also included recycled materials used in previous shows which further reinforced its austerity aesthetic. The piece further incorporated the origami skills of its music director Brian Duffy who created the props and the suggestion of performer Amanda Hadingue (who also co-directed with Stephens and Yarker) to adopt a Rembrandt aesthetic which became manifest in the series of tableaux created (Yarker 2013). Stylistic choices such as its deliberately DIY aesthetic, combined with a pseudo-naïve and humorous tone and a nearly cartoonish style, contrast ‘expert’ discourses on the debt crisis and intervene in aesthetic regimes that represent it as a product of excessive state expenditure. In addition, its use of temporality and historical focus counters neo-liberalism’s ‘promise of future wealth’ (Lazzarato 2012: 46–47). As shown in Chapter 1, debt ‘neutralises time, time as the creation of new possibilities [ . . . ]. Debt harnesses and exercises the power of destruction/creation, the power of choice and decision’ (Lazzarato 2012:  49). In this way, The Just Price facilitates a reading of the complexities of capitalism and its absurdities: for example, the use of paper to represent objects of value, such as tulips, illustrates the disproportionate relationship between an object’s exchange and use value. The Van Leasings’s desire for upward mobility echoes the ‘promise of happiness’ attached to objects that bear no intrinsic value and a desire to become an entrepreneur of the self. The piece’s main song further foregrounds the paradox of the promise of possession in capitalist society by drawing a line between human needs and commodity fetishism: ‘Can’t you see/we all have human needs/some are basic/and some bring you to your knees’. Lazzarato parallels debt with the original sin to show the extent to which everyone is implicated in this ecology as ‘inheritors of debt’ (2012: 32). What is at stake in The Just Price is how debt affects those who bear no direct responsibility; the piece interrogates such injustices through the character of Van Drive; despite being the only one who

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Figure 4 From left to right: Jill Dowes (Narrator), Valerie Cutko (Financier), Craig Stephens (Financier), Bernadette Russel (Banker), Charlotte Gregory (Wife), Jack Trow (Husband) and Gerard Bell (Van Drive) in Stan’s Cafe’s The Just Price of Flowers (A.E. Harris, Birmingham, 2012). Photo credit: Graeme Braidwood, reproduced with kind permission from © Stan’s Cafe

has resisted indulging in ‘tulipomania’, both his pension and salary are put at risk because of the deregulation of the market and the Van Leasings’s increasing debt. When Van Drive meets with Van Tage to claim his pension, he is presented with the choice to either postpone retirement until the market improves or to receive his significantly decreased pension: ‘It appears that I do not have a choice. That I ever had any choice at all’. In devaluing the individualist mantra of choice and freedom, the piece points at the contradictions embedded in capitalist ecologies by also showing how debt fuels the ‘double-bind’ of performance addiction (Kershaw 2007: 12), as explored in Chapter 3, which promotes neo-liberalism as the only alternative.

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Waste, value and white masculinity: Leo Butler, Boy The tropes of waste and excess and their ability to mobilize theatre’s radical potential increasingly preoccupy art and theatre scholars (Kershaw 1999; Hughes 2011, 2015; Steyn and Stamselberg 2014). Jenny Hughes specifically draws on Bauman’s concept of ‘wasted lives’ to examine how the negation of life in the theatre may disrupt ‘sensible evidence’ in an age of uncertainty. Bauman’s ideas also strongly chime with the vocabularies of precarity so far examined in this book. In Liquid Modernity (2000), he connects precarity in neo-liberal societies with the ways in which life is rendered expendable:  ‘Precarious economic and social conditions train men and women (or make them learn the hard way) to perceive the world as a container full of disposable objects, objects for one-off use; the whole world – including other human beings’ (2000: 162). I am here interested in further examining how the above ideas become legitimized as a result of the failure to perform the self as a subject of worth and value; the face, a chief component underpinning Levinas’s understanding of ethics of responsibility, is here rendered absent. Instead, the bodies and lives of the ‘underclass’ are perceived as an incoherent mass or as ‘unarchivable spectrality’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 19) and as those who must be biopolitically managed. This section will consider Leo Butler’s Boy as an example which explicitly draws on metaphors of waste and abjection. I am particularly interested in placing emphasis on how the play tackles the invisibility of the white working-class male as the ‘unarchivable spectre’ disposed by cultures of wealth and waste; in doing so, I  will show how waste operates as a vehicle to reverse such politics of defacement that legitimize social exclusion and the consolidation of the underclass. Since the early 2000s, Leo Butler’s work has been consistently concerned with the dispossession of communities in the north of England and particularly Sheffield where he grew up (Made of Stone, 2000; Redundant, 2001). Boy expands Butler’s body of work to a more metropolitan focus; it presents multiple images of London as seen through the eyes of seventeen-year-old Liam. Liam’s aimless wandering

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is juxtaposed to the busyness of the city and flow of commuters or people at work he encounters in different parts of his journey. He is portrayed as lacking virtuosity, skill as well as economic, social or cultural capital; he is keen to converse with other people, yet his limited vocabulary and appearance betray him. Liam’s lack of skill or ‘poverty of language’ (Butler 2016b) marks him with the identity of the ‘abject’ who cannot achieve value and ‘a way of life that requires “work on the self ” ’ (Lazzarato 2012: 104); for this reason, he is automatically excluded from the public body and regarded as a ‘lost cause’ and, thus, undeserving of attention. This ‘abjectification’ is particularly palpable in a scene where Liam visits an old classmate Lamari. Lamari’s mother insists on calling him by a different name and asks him when he will start working on his A-levels: Liam Nah, yeah, A-levels. Paula When do you start on them then? Straight after Jeremy Kyle? Liam Nah, yeah, I don’t know. [ . . . ] Paula Don’t know much Stephen, do you really? You know, there’s some of us who choose to work. [ . . . ] Some of us choose to work really fucking hard to get somewhere, Stephen, yeah. (Butler 2016a: 43)

The author insists that behind Liam’s apparent inarticulacy there is a clear ‘desire’ (2016b); Liam’s keenness to ‘keep himself busy’ and gain skills is placed against the lack of opportunity and direction that prevents him from moving further with his life.13 This becomes apparent when a job centre advisor explains to him that he cannot be put on the system until he turns 18 and that he needs to try and work on building his skillset in the meantime, leaving Liam bewildered as to which direction to follow. By giving a face to the ‘uncounted’ and asking questions about social value and lack of care, Boy draws attention to wider practices of disposability and defacement: as Tyler underscores, representations of the ‘underclass’ have been particularly animated by the  ‘chav’, ‘a racialized figure’ which is ‘contaminated by territorial proximity to

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poor black and migrant populations’ (2013:  188) yet is also framed as ‘white trash’ (2013: 187). Such technologies of appearance played a key role in the 2011 UK riots which further moralized the young white working-class male and reinforced practices of defacement enabled through racialized discourses.14 As Butler (2016b) admits, the writing of Boy overlapped with the 2011 riots, hence it is valuable to read the play against those regimes of defacement exercised by political and media rhetoric which would inscribe Liam within the wider category of the ‘underclass’. As Rachel Clements suggests, works of art have the potential to ‘shift the ground of [ . . . ] “sensible evidence” [ . . . ] by making public, making sensible, other kinds of evidence’ (2015: 160). In this vein, Butler’s play shifts the frames of recognition of the dispossessed and reinscribes Liam as a precarious life that carries value in the social fabric. In addition to its connection to the riots, the piece is also firmly placed against a broader ecology of austerity Britain. This is particularly exemplified by the overlapping short vignettes taking place in a job centre:  an unemployed single mother is threatened with a benefit sanction because she is not flexible enough to take any job although she cannot afford childcare; another client has seen his disability benefit cut after an inaccurate health assessment; a Birkbeck graduate is struggling to find a job to be able to pay off her debt. Against the above backdrop, and in spite of governmental rhetoric around the ‘Big Society’ or ‘a country that works for everyone’, it becomes clear that Liam will remain a spectre falling through the cracks.15 As Lyn Gardner observes, the play confronts us with our own prejudices and perceptions by presenting us with recognizable images of everyday city life that we tend to ignore or frown upon: ‘Liam is the mumbling boy at the bus stop we try to ignore; he’s the kid running the tube gates who we tut, the teenager we assume is plugged into everything but who is in fact dropping beyond view in front of our very eyes’ (Gardner 2016). By pointing towards the lack of networks of care and support for Liam, the play addresses a call for responsibility for the lives of the dispossessed: ‘it’s at those moments, when the busy stage is emptied, that Boy interrogates the

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audience; whose responsibility is Liam? What are you going to do about it?’ (Wong 2016). Leo Butler has explicitly aligned his work with film director Ken Loach and documentary film-maker Adam Curtis; he has also openly acknowledged his responsibility to write about working-class issues as he shares the same background (Butler 2016b). Despite the play’s social realist form, which chimes with the gritty realism of the two filmmakers, the Almeida production adopted, in the words of its artistic director Rupert Goold, a more ‘dreamy, dance version of Ken Loach’ (Williams 2016). Director Sacha Wares and designer Miriam Buether attempted to capture Liam’s boredom in a visually captivating way: for this, they used a moving conveyor belt where actors stood or sat on. While this stage mechanism slowed down the flow of the performance, its intentions matched the play’s themes, juxtaposing the continuous flow of capital with a genuine lack of care and intimacy. Adiseshiah observes how the resurgence of class on the British stage is rapidly absorbed by the mainstream with several ‘high profile, wellreceived plays on the mainstream British stage’ (2016: 150); this focus on class in the context of elite institutions might also risk turning poverty into a spectacle and an object of ‘cultural tourism’ (Gardner 2016) if not treated with care. Goold highlighted the importance of staging the play in Islington, ‘one of the most divided boroughs in the county’ (Williams 2016). Nevertheless, the Almeida’s position as a high-profile institution with a mostly canonical theatrical repertoire and a specific audience demographic raises questions regarding the audience’s privileged position vis-à-vis the representation of the dispossessed teenager on stage. During Boy’s run, a parallel initiative under the name Play On was developed between the Almeida and Arsenal in the Community which sought to involve young people who had no prior contact with the theatre. Forty adolescents from underprivileged backgrounds were invited to take part in a 6-week workshop run by professional playwrights, including Leo Butler, and write short plays ‘drawing on their own experiences’ which were then staged by professional actors and directors (Williams 2016).16 This initiative further foregrounds

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the need to offer more platforms for young people to publicly rehearse their social value through the theatre and its positive impact can be evidenced by participant testimonials during its run;17 at the same time, it also raises questions regarding sustainability for the communities they involve; as Selina Thompson pointed out earlier in this chapter, institutional structures and their widening participation agendas often serve a tokenistic value without real intentions to reshape uneven power structures within the theatre industry. Overall, Boy can be positioned against the backdrop of children and young people at risk as discussed in Chapter  2 particularly for its emphasis on the ‘impasse’, that is, Liam’s ‘failure of transcendence’ into a new beginning which, I argued, captures a significant dimension of the precarious in the twenty-first century; in contrast to works examined in Chapter  2, Liam’s representation as an innocent and naïve child-adolescent specifically serves to elicit sympathy and ethical responsibility and to reverse representations that connect white masculinity, human waste and criminality.

Female dispossessions: Clean Break, Joanne and The Paper Birds, Broke In her essay ‘Gendering the Economy in Twenty-First Century Drama’, Louise Owen observes how British drama explicitly focusing on ‘the effects of financial hegemony’ utilizes gender and sexuality as key constructs (2016:  109). This, Owen contends, connects not only to the specific historical context of the plays in question which produces ‘gender, sexual desire and subjectivity as multimedia commodities’ (Preciado cited in Owen 2016: 109), but also to the histories of neoliberal exploitation beyond the specificity of the 2008 financial crash. Owen’s observation is significant here in understanding the interface between gender and dispossession. This section will pay attention to the gendered manifestations of precarity and dispossession against the backdrop of austerity Britain; while Owen’s examples are drawn from

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high-profile institutions such as the Royal Court and the National Theatre, I have chosen to look at two examples from smaller-scale, allfemale theatre companies. Towards the end of the coalition government’s tenure, the gendered impact of austerity measures became more palatable (Oppenheim 2015). In 2015, a study carried out by the Fawcett Society showed that 85 per cent of welfare benefit cuts have primarily affected women. The Society’s chair Belinda Philipps expressed strong concerns over such continuing economic disparities between men and women in Britain:  ‘we remain concerned that women will continue to bear the brunt of austerity measures, face restricted job opportunities and get stuck in poorly paid jobs’ (The Fawcett Society 2015). This emphasis on the impact of cuts on women has been further voiced by grassroots movements and organizations which strive for raising awareness about the deleterious impact of cuts to public services on the lives of women. For example, the continuous campaigning and direct action of feminist activist group Sisters Uncut points towards the ideological nature of the cuts reminding the public of our shared responsibility towards a non-hierarchical distribution of security and justice:  ‘Safety is not a privilege. Access to justice cannot become a luxury. Austerity cuts are ideological but cuts to domestic violence services are fatal’ (Sisters Uncut 2016). The Women’s Budget Group (WBG), an organization composed by feminist economists, has also warned about the impact of poverty as an outcome of benefit changes to the lives of single mothers and low-income black and minority ethnic (BME) and Asian women (WBG 2016). Against the above backdrop, the need to shift attention to care practices, dispossession and gender becomes more pressing. A growing body of research from a variety of disciplines from philosophy and the social sciences has been focusing on re-examining care and ethics. In The Ethics of Care:  Personal, Political and Global (2006), Virginia Held highlights the importance of revisiting and expanding understandings of care as part of productive relations and beyond the reproductive sphere of the home. Held is particularly interested in the

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‘social ties that bind groups together to the bonds on which political and social institutions can be built, and even to the global concerns that citizens of the world can have’ (2006:  31). More recently, Nancy Fraser has warned about a ‘care crisis’ which mitigates the ability to maintain social ties:  ‘Between the need for increased working hours and the cutback in public services, the financialized capitalist regime is systematically depleting our capacities for sustaining social bonds’ (Leonard and Fraser 2016). While neo-liberal capitalism renders such models of care difficult to maintain, discovering ways to sustain social bonds becomes even more significant. Victoria Lawson (2007) also highlights the importance of revisiting ethics of care in the light of the market’s pervasive impact in all areas of life, the privatization of care and responsibility and the parallel decline of public support mechanisms. Drawing on this line of thinking, this section is dedicated to how theatre creates a space for an ethics of care vis-à-vis dispossession by focusing on two examples which directly connect to lived experiences of women:  Clean Break’s Joanne (2015) and The Paper Birds’ Broke (2014).18 Despite the decline of feminist theatre and the disbanding of feminist  theatre companies during the 1980s, the drive to tackle the experiences of disadvantaged women is still prevalent in work produced by companies such as Clean Break, The Paper Birds, Sh!t Theatre and Open Clasp (based in the north-east of England). Clean Break is the only all-female theatre company still active in the UK which has been producing work inspired by women in the margins of society since the late 1970s.19 Having collaborated with a number of female playwrights who carry out research in women’s prisons, the company has produced work which addresses female dispossession through the themes of incarceration, austerity and trafficking.20 Alongside its artistic work which seeks to raise awareness of the plights of incarcerated women and the complexities of the UK’s criminal justice system (Gardner 2010; Walsh 2015), the company runs an education and training program in women’s prisons which also provides other means of support to women attending such as emergency housing clinics and food bank vouchers (Herrmann

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2009; Bruce et al. 2015: n.p.). Against the backdrop of the 2015 general election and its austerity agenda, the company commissioned Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba and Ursula Rani Sarma to write five female monologues focusing on the decline of public services and its impact on women. The commission’s outcome was Joanne, a one-woman show performed at London’s Soho Theatre in 2015 and as part of the RSC’s Making Mischief 2016 festival of new plays at its newest Stratford-Upon-Avon space, The Other Place. The play interweaves social struggles experienced by women working in public services with the story of Joanne, an ex-offender who has just come out of prison and receives support by various public services in order to get back on her feet; as the play’s emotional and narrative core, Joanne’s character represents socially invisible women who fall through the cracks of the system. Although never physically present on stage, Joanne makes her appearance felt through the impressions she has left on the five women who narrate their encounter with her. Each section of the play is titled with a different female name and we progressively follow Joanne’s life after prison and the failures of the care system to secure her with a livable life. Director and head of the company’s artistic programme Róisín McBrinn points out that the focus was on the fallout of this continuing unsustainable system – to look at the frontline and where it actually implodes. Joanne is the invisible fallout. Through the pressures on public services, the person that arguably needs these resources the most, gets lost and in some way disappears. (Bruce et al. 2015: n.p.)

Against the backdrop of an increasingly precarious landscape for the vulnerable and the dispossessed, Joanne depicts different manifestations of an ‘ethics of care’ (Held 2006) presented in the form of small acts of solidarity and sisterhood. In light of McBrinn’s statement, the play’s choice to focus narration on the impression Joanne has left operates as a counterstrategy of appearance of a ‘less grievable life’. The choice of interweaving the narratives of Joanne and different

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women carers highlights the importance of an ethics of care which ‘sees the interests of carers and cared for as importantly intertwined’ (Held 2006:  15). Further, it speaks to the unequal division of caring labour, predominantly carried out by women, and the deep care deficit. Upon encountering Joanne, all five female characters sense the weight of responsibility to help yet also communicate the obstacles of doing so because of the changes in public services which put the lives of vulnerable people at risk. Odimba’s character Stella, an ex-prisoner and now social worker who has just lost her prison job as her project funding has run out, is primarily concerned with the lack of care in prescribing the right medication for Joanne’s condition. Stella’s sense of responsibility is fuelled by the importance of human contact and the affective act of care rather than her own aspiration for ‘the good life’: ‘I mean we don’t take the job for peace and quiet do we? The good life. I mean we choose to do the job right? We choose it don’t we? To feel this well/to feeling’ (Bruce et  al. 2015:  4). Bruce’s ‘Kathleen’, representing ‘the face of the NHS’ as a receptionist in a mental health unit, speaks of her own personal responsibility towards her patients’ welfare and the deep impressions she is left with by people she meets every day: ‘Here they are. Beside me. Waiting to be seen’ (2015: 27). The piece’s dramaturgical choice to make Joanne visible through the eyes of other women builds connections of mutual dependency and care. The choice of form in representing women’s incarceration in the theatre is significant; as Aylwyn Walsh suggests, ‘The largely realist mode of plays about prison needs challenging in order to subvert the dynamics that define prisons as spaces of belonging or transgression, empathy or disgust’ (2015: 312). In seeking to move beyond ‘normative gender structures’, ‘neat narratives’ and binaries monster/victim which largely underpin cultural representations of women in prison, Walsh argues for a feminist methodology of a ‘structure of feeling’ which offers more complex representations and affects relating to women in prison, shifting across categories of ‘hero’, ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ (2015: 312–15). Although Clean Break’s piece often falls into the trap of presenting Joanne from the perspective of the victim, its position

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vis-à-vis vulnerability and mental health chimes with other feminist voices which protest against cuts in public services and form part of wider ‘structures of feeling’. In contrast, reviewers mainly argued that the piece failed to provide an emotionally gripping narrative due to its fragmentation and uneven writing:  the Standard’s Henry Hitchings (2015) gave his review the title ‘Politically Charged Writing Struggles to Exert a Strong Emotional Grip’ and the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner argued that the piece’s ‘format works against real emotional engagement’ (2015a); however, Gardner’s review also draws attention to the piece’s complex negotiation of care and responsibility: an evening suffused with regret and no little anger as it reminds us of institutional and personal responsibilities – and that doing the right thing and doing the best thing are not always the same. (Gardner 2015a)

For Held, ‘there can be no justice without care’, hence ‘care can provide the wider and deeper ethics within which justice should be sought’ (2006:  17). As a theatre company with a long-standing commitment to women who have been affected by the criminal justice system, Clean Break puts an ethics of care into practice. As Herrmann (2009) details, the company’s educational work offers a safe space of transition and rehabilitation and a network of care which capitalizes on the value of reciprocal relationships and allowing women offenders to perform their value. The interface between justice and care extends beyond the prison to other institutions responsible for public welfare. Fraser’s earlier caution regarding governmental practices favouring a ‘two-earner model’ (Leonard and Fraser 2016) further increases risks for single mothers. Broke (2014) by The Paper Birds theatre company specifically considers single motherhood and dispossession in the context of contemporary Britain. Broke falls under the company’s remit to create political work by primarily placing emphasis on female perspectives and is the first instalment of the company’s trilogy on class.21 An important aspect of the company’s work, Broke’s focus of gender tallies with the group’s wider remit to address stories specific to women. As  the

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company’s artistic director Jemma McDonnell observes, ‘Statistics relating to underrepresentation of women in the theatre, of the eternal glass ceiling within most industries, and the sheer lack of decent roles written for women are just some of the reasons that led us to actively seek to promote feminist ideologies within our lives and work’ (Fisher 2015). For Broke, the company used a combination of physical theatre choreography and verbatim interview material collected by McDonnell and Kylie Walsh, who are also the two main performers in the piece. The performance revolves around the life of single 28-year-old mother ‘Sally’, facing financial difficulty as she sees her income equal the interest of her debt; it also includes numerous other voices from interviews of people living on the breadline sourced by the company by visiting food banks and Salvation Army halls or by means of an online questionnaire. Similar to Boy, one of the main intentions of the piece was to debunk popular myths about people receiving benefits and working-class representations. Broke’s focus on the single mother becomes particularly pertinent in light of governmental practices which differentially distribute care since 2010: while cuts in welfare provisions and benefit sanctions largely disadvantage single-earner families particularly those of a working-class background, the state seems to privilege the nuclear family model offering financial benefits to two-earner families. Single mothers have been further subject to double dispossession. According to the Guardian’s Tanya Gold, following the 2011 riots, the single mother has emerged as the Right’s scapegoat: ‘the phrase single mother is followed by a trail of associated words, from sexual immorality to council flat, [ . . . ] If she works, she doesn’t love her children. If she doesn’t, she is a drain on the state’ (Gold 2011). In another interview, McDonnell highlighted the significance of the themes explored in the piece as the company felt that it had to present ‘a heartfelt and urgent look at the debt of a nation. [ . . . ] It’s something that is very important at the moment, especially over the last few years of austerity measures, meaning that a huge number of people are struggling to make ends meet’ (Jevons 2015). Broke ponders on the making of the ‘indebted man’ a subjectivity rooted in

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‘guilt, fear and bad conscience’ (Lazzarato 2012: 130) placing emphasis on the perspective of an ‘indebted woman’. The piece exposes Sally’s anxiety and guilt ‘on every penny you spend’ (The Paper Birds 2016);22 Sally is also overwhelmed by feelings of fear and shame for failing to maintain a decent life; she consciously isolates herself from her community and refuses to answer the phone in the fear of being asked to pay a bill or to participate in her son’s school activities that require her financial contribution. Following Lazzarato’s argument that such ‘sad affects neutralize the ability to act’ (2012:  75), Broke presents debt as a banal ideological and biopolitical technology shaping identity while also stifling action. It also captures the core of indebted subjectivity through the inferences to the annihilation of dignity, the lack of hope for the future, the exclusion from the public body and the deepening of social stratification and class divisions. In doing so, Broke consciously adopts a pseudo-naïve approach, communicated through props, set and costume: the setting is the bedroom of Sally’s child and performers appear in their pyjamas while shiny candy wrap is used as a metaphor for debt accumulation. As McDonnell explains, the choice to stage Broke in a child’s bedroom points towards ‘what the next generation will be inheriting’ (Jevons 2015). This ‘naïve’ aesthetic approach also serves another strategic aim; similar to The Just Price, it contrasts the expert discourses which pontificate over the causes and effects of the debt crisis and justify further practices of dispossession. The piece closes with the question of debt sustainability which captures an anxiety about the future: ‘With every pound we spend the economy grows; we are asked to keep borrowing so we keep spending – with a system like that what can the future hold?’ (Broke 2014). The mixture of stylistic devices used in the piece treats the verbatim material with sensitivity refraining from objectifying poverty. The performers carefully position themselves in the narrative by offering details of their own lives. The inclusion of the performer’s self in the story intimates the position of the emerging theatre maker as precarious labourer while also showing the care taken in approaching

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Figure  5 From left to right:  Kylie Walsh, Shane Durrant  and Jemma McDonnell in The Paper Birds’ Broke (devised by The Paper Birds and directed by Jemma McDonnell, Production Tour, 2014). Photo credit:  The Other Richard, reproduced with kind permission from © The Paper Birds

interviewees. Walsh describes how, during the process of interviewing ‘Sally’, she shared her personal experience of being in debt and how her mother had to pay it off in order to gain her trust. In addition, other interviewees make an appearance by means of the text heard through speakers (spoken by company members). Rather than mimetically showing the interview process, McDonnell and Walsh adopt a stylized physical score performed in two booths onstage and play with the rhythms of transcribing the documents through physically capturing the process of rewinding the material on a dictaphone. The chosen techniques thus resist turning poverty into ‘cultural tourism’; on the contrary, they distance narratives of suffering from familiar visual representations of the dispossessed which risk devaluing and objectifying precarious lives. At the same time, the performers’ personal investment in the piece further pronounces the need for wider networks of solidarity among the precariat.

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Although both plays make specific reference to precarity in post2008 Britain, their explicit focus on women and dispossession stretches beyond the specific historical moment as it connects to the histories of women’s criminalization and medicalization; at the same time, both examples revisit the trope of care extending it beyond to the private feminized sphere of social reproduction to a wider social quest.

On protest: Theatre Uncut Since the beginning of the tenure of the coalition government and subsequent Tory government, a resurgence of politics in the streets chiming with wider global resistances against neo-liberal capitalism gained force. A few months after the August 2011 UK riots, protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral in response to escalating global economic precarity. As a protest movement, Occupy LSX (London Stock Exchange) largely corresponded to comparable global movements unravelling against austerity and neo-liberal capitalism.23 Žižek (2012) proclaimed 2011 as ‘the year of dreaming dangerously’ discussing the advent of rage in the public sphere and the transformation of political realities as a positive and inflammatory development against the ruses of neo-liberal capitalism. In examining the performative potential of the resurgence of street politics, Butler and Athanasiou also observe how people’s exposure to dispossession, ‘differentially allocated indebtedness and socially assigned disposability’ (2013: 152) transforms into an ‘embodied agency’ (2013: 178) mobilizing agonistic politics. Such an enabling body politic further generates affects that ‘move’ people ‘beside’ themselves (2013: 177) while promoting agonism as an energizing force. This ‘agonistic politics’ (Mouffe 2013) seems to be crucial in its evoking of plural alternative voices and opportunities for dialogue and dissent. In a similar vein, Hager further suggests that such performative events express a ‘desire to [ . . . ] abandon a world saturated by debt’ (2015:  39) while creating ‘diverse performances of

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dissent in public spaces [ . . . ] “messing” with the city’s rhythms and landscapes’ (2015: 46). In line with the reactivation of political action, post-2011 theatre also saw renewed energy in bridging arts and activism. Plays by Anders Lustgarden (If You Don’t Let Us Dream We Won’t Let You Sleep, 2013), Tim Price (Protest Song, 2013), Gary Owen (Iphigenia in Splott, 2015) and the collectives Theatre Uncut and Manchester’s Take Back Theatre directly responded to the cuts using confrontational dramatic voices. Although not themselves performing direct street action, these theatrical endeavours capitalized on the politics of dissent and anger performed at grassroots level. Theatre Uncut emerged as an angry response to George Osborne’s austerity budget announced in 2010. Theatre Uncut’s name directly aligns them with grassroots activism by groups such as UK Uncut and Sisters Uncut both committed to resisting the devastating cuts implemented by the coalition and Conservative governments. Spearheaded by artistic director Hannah Price, the company is a co-production between Price’s Reclaim Productions and Libbie Brody’s Meeting Point Productions.24 The explicitly political collective has been commissioning several national and international writers on an annual basis asking them to respond to key themes such as cuts and austerity, the rise of the Right, the refugee crisis, the Scottish referendum and the 2015 elections. To date, Theatre Uncut performances have been hosted in a variety of theatre venues such as London’s Southwark Playhouse, Young Vic and Soho Theatre, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, Glasgow’s the Arches and Bristol Old Vic; the company has also commissioned several established and emerging playwrights including Mark Ravenhill, Chris Goode, Caryl Churchill, Anders Lustgarden, Lucy Kirkwood, Mark Thomas, Kieran Hurley, Neil La Butte, Lena Kitsopoulou, Sabrina Mahfouz and Henrik Szklany. The collective’s rationale and ethos is congealed in Price’s statement: I believe very strongly that we are at a crisis point, both in the finer detail of how and where the cuts manifest themselves, but also in

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the move towards a society that is more selfish, more greedy, and less altruistic than ever. What theatre does best is explore the society around it, existing in the crossover between the ephemeral and the retrospective. (Price 2011: 7)

The urgency of Theatre Uncut’s approach is further mirrored in the creative methods marshalled during the processes of writing, production and staging. The commissions are rooted in the idea that playwrights produce bite-sized plays in a short period of time; the plays become available for download from Theatre Uncut’s website for a month and can be performed anywhere rights-free during this time in the context of ‘mass action events’ which may happen globally. The collective also often collaborates with international artists to further develop creative techniques of political response.25 This model of producing short, urgent plays and making them available for performance across the globe echoes examples of previous protest plays such as Martin Crimp’s Advice to Iraqi Women (2003) and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children (2008) written in direct response to the Iraq War and Israel’s bombing in Gaza26 and which are also available rights-free. Following Theatre Uncut’s second season of plays, Lyn Gardner made a case that ‘Theatre Uncut is not just a performance, it’s an idea: that theatre can be immediately responsive to world events, engender discussion and effect change’ (2012). According to José R.  Prado, Theatre Uncut’s model suggests ‘a relational consciousness’ as it presents  a ‘decentralised structure where power can be seized and appropriated by participants in the project. This opens a potential artistic space for activism by making the creative material accessible to any person willing to use it for their own particular aims or purposes’ (2017: 126). Through its ways of working, Theatre Uncut creates a global ‘creative commons’ which invites direct participation and action among its wider audiences who might not have physical access to its productions. As David Harvey explains, a ‘common’ is an ‘unstable and malleable social relation’ and a product of collective political and affective labour within a particular milieu (2012: 73). Here, the collective facilitates the production of such political and affective labour across several geographical locations; this

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not only shows the global dimensions of practices of dispossession but also forges political alliances against them. Due to the volume of work so far performed under the auspices of the company, I  will here consider the first constellation of plays premiering at London’s Southwark Playhouse in March 2011 which preceded the Occupy LSX social movement in October of the same year. This first round of Theatre Uncut’s initiative included eight plays by Clara Brennan, David Greig, Dennis Kelly, Lucy Kirkwood, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarden, Mark Ravenhill and Jack Thorne. The plays focus on cuts in public health services, disability benefits, the profligacy of the banking system and the possibilities of radicalization and protest. A  further underpinning thread is an emphasis on vulnerability, dispossession and responsibility, which is often negotiated through an exposition of neo-liberal capitalist discourses’ differential allocation of precarity. The opening play is Laura Lomas’s Open Heart Surgery:  through its use of physical vulnerability as metaphor for cuts implemented by austerity, Lomas makes a direct connection between precariousness and precarity. The play is presented as a monologue offered by character Lisa who describes the details of her husband’s recent treatment to an open heart surgery. As Lisa repeats throughout, despite her husband’s good health, the surgery was presented to them as ‘the only possible option so he can grow strong again, get him back to normal’ (Lomas 2011: 25). Open Heart Surgery interlaces the precarious body of the patient with the precarity experienced by the nation’s vulnerable populations due to the cuts; further, it expresses an acute anxiety about what the future holds with regards to identity and community: ‘They say that is the hard bit, now. That we’re living in it. But it scares me, cus it’s not the tearing up that’s hard. Is it, when you think about it? It’s the putting back together’ (Lomas 2011: 26). Similar to Clean Break’s Joanne. examined earlier in this chapter, David Greig’s Fragile takes the cuts in mental health services as its main springboard. Greig’s play comprises two characters:  Jack, a mentally ‘fragile’ young man, and Caroline, Jack’s therapist who works at his

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community’s support centre. The scene takes place in Caroline’s office where Jack appears in a balaclava and threatens to self-immolate as a gesture of radical protest against the cuts implemented in mental health services across the country which have affected his own treatment. The piece’s dramaturgy directly draws attention to global fabrics of dispossessed lives such as the case of Mohamed Bouazizi which provide an inspiration for Jack’s intentions thus bridging the political with the personal;27 it also gestures towards the audience’s ethical responsibility towards the body’s vulnerability and action against conditions of precarity. In the spirit of the Big Society and austerity Britain (Greig 2011: 51), Greig asks the audience to step in the role of Caroline and speak her lines as a chorus (2011:  49). This choice interpellates the audience as a community of citizens who care about the cuts like Caroline does, yet feel disempowered and unsure about what form of action they should assume. Caroline has also been affected by the cuts as she has been forced to work freelance yet she has lost the energy to fight against conditions that induce precarity:  ‘I can’t fight anymore, Jack. Everything I  believed, I  fought for. Everything I  fought for, I  was defeated. Till there was nothing left / but a kind of dream .  .  . / A dream of Britain. And now / Even that’s going. I can’t fight for a dream, Jack’ (Greig 2011:  61). As Clare Wallace’s analysis of the play highlights, Fragile’s ethics of responsibility is communicated through the appearance of precarious life: the play’s devices, Wallace contends, ‘enlist spectators as a community of participants, bringing them face to face with and making them responsible for the inexorable ethical demand of the Other’ (2014:  131). In trying to dissuade Jack from hurting himself, Caroline promises that she will stir other forms of less radical protest:  ‘We’ll call people / We’ll use the internet / We’ll start a campaign [ . . . ] We’ll protest. I promise. And a crowd will come / First to the centre / Then to the library / and the swimming pool / and the bus station’ (Greig 2011:  63–64). For Wallace, Caroline’s speech shows more desperation rather than convinces us about Caroline’s intention to pursue such actions; while a face-to-face encounter with precarious life might be able to mobilize a movement, the play seems to

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implicitly trouble the limits of the audience’s own position with regards to action and dissent against practices of dispossession. The plays also take issue with political discourses that pontificate over the shared responsibility for the crisis particularly promoted under the motto ‘we are all in this together’. As in Open Heart Surgery, Dennis Kelly’s Things That Make No Sense also questions the extent of the public’s culpability for austerity as Kelly stages a surreal interrogation scene, where character G is forced to admit the culpability for a murder she or he did not commit. Anders Lustgarden’s confrontational Fat Man presents a direct call to arms where neo-liberal capitalism is paralleled to a fat man living in Las Vegas. Fat Man addresses the so-called ‘debt crisis’ against a larger canvas, referring to examples from the European South where the crisis’ ideological construction was made more palpable: ‘85% of the Greek bailout left Greece as soon as it arrived and went to the banks for loans they chose to make on the free market to the housing bubble. But the Greek government gave the banks all their money back, which means that the Greek people are paying back tens of billions in bailout loans they never even saw’ (Lustgarden 2011: 45). This reference to the dispossessed and indebted subjectivities beyond the United Kingdom becomes the trigger for Lustgarden to invite acts of disobedience and protest in line with global uprisings: ‘cause some trouble any way you can. And keep doing it. It starts with people, always has done. Lets get to work’ (Lustgarden 2011: 46). Like Greig, Lustgarden further teases out the contradictions of taking action in a complacent neo-liberal capitalist society: ‘Capitalism makes us all complicit and none of us pure. Do not let that put you off ’ (Lustgarden 2011: 46). Seen together, the above plays capture a space that connects existential vulnerability and pressing conditions of precarity, and thus drawing attention to the interconnections between the personal and the political:  ‘For many, the anxious worry arising from existential vulnerability is no longer distinguishable from a fear arising from precarization’ (Lorey 2015:  89). In addition, most plays appearing in this first constellation test different aesthetic forms to communicate their polemical ideas: from Lustgarden’s agit-prop style to Kelly’s surreal

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dialogue, Greig’s direct implication of the audience as a character and Clara Brennan’s more poetic style, playwrights seem to be communicating urgent ideas about economic precarity through formal experimentation. The political drive and intensity of Theatre Uncut has been positively received by the critics: in response to the 2011 initiative, the Scotsman’s Joyce McMillan commented that ‘the intensity of the drama signaled an arts community already gearing up for protest on a scale not seen since the 1980s’ (McMillan 2011) while the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner positioned it against the wider backdrop of the surge of voices of anger and dissent: ‘If, during the 1980s, playwrights often seemed silenced by Thatcherite cuts, this new generation – like their student counterparts – are finding their voice and channeling their anger’ (2012). Theatre Uncut’s most recent endeavour extends beyond British borders proposing a cross-cultural collaborative model for theatre. Prado’s discussion of the practices of the collective compares the artists’ response to the call for participation in this political endeavour to Butler’s ‘ethical responsiveness’ (Prado 2017:  128); for Prado, this exposes the work’s ‘subversive role’ in challenging normative practices while also creating openness for ‘the vulnerable nature of the enterprise’ (2017: 129). This observation speaks to Theatre Uncut’s connection to wider networks of the ‘political’. As Mark O’Thomas points out, ‘Artists have a critical role to offer alternative views of the world from which new transnational notions of “community” might be established that can eclipse the financial and regulatory basis of the European Community’ (2016: 133). In the light of Brexit, the importance of maintaining such transnational connections becomes even more urgent. In ‘Being European’, a pre-referendum event organized in June 2016 at London’s Camden’s People Theatre, Hannah Price stressed the importance for sustaining international links with writers and to vocalize the fears that plague contemporary Europe. In this sense, Theatre Uncut’s model presents a call to arms further articulating the need for wilful and continuous responses to precarity based on crosscultural political alliances in an attempt to develop wider networks of solidarity and care and combat neo-liberal doctrines of precarization that render political action more difficult to sustain.

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Conclusion This chapter has considered how twenty-first-century British theatre engages with precarity and dispossession through a specific focus on the interface between gender and class identities and the biopolitics of debt. Similar to precarity, I  have examined dispossession through a double lens, signifying both an apparatus of depriving bodies of possessions (whether material or immaterial) as well as a mechanism of interdependency and care:  in other words, where dispossession obliterates subjectivity, it might also provide a vehicle to reanimate the human. The examples discussed here present dispossession through a range of dramaturgical vocabularies often supported by a ‘poor’ aesthetic which, on the one hand, is evocative of limited material resources and, on the other, suits the purpose of communicating the performances’ engagement with austerity and debt. Their specific interest in care as a ‘fundamental human value’ (Held 2006: 17) gestures towards the need to generate more platforms where human value and an ethics of care can be rehearsed. Such an emphasis on care can be harnessed with Judith Butler’s contention that precarity may operate as a rallying point of contemporary identity politics based on vulnerability and interdependency; indeed, the 1970s motto ‘the personal is political’ here mutates to a call to arms for relationality as politics.

Afterword: On Hoping

Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre set out to navigate the interface between precarity and theatre. Throughout the book, I examined theatre as a vehicle that creates possibilities for small gestures of resistance against dominant narratives surrounding contemporary uncertainties. Viewing precarity as a ‘sticky’ trope in contemporary British theatre and as source for politics, I have considered it as both troubling and enabling:  on the one hand, it exposes the differential allocation of vulnerability which sustains hierarchies of power protecting some lives over others and the biopolitical mechanisms dispossessing subjectivities from certainty; on the other, precarity also allows for a focus on vulnerability, risk, interdependency, responsibility and care as enabling tools which may reshape understandings of identity. Through navigating precarity, this book argued, theatre might create small apertures for change. Here, change does not feature as a resolution of a crisis, but rather a reversal of discourses that produce practices of Othering and feelings of being ‘stuck’ in an eternal present. A driving force in this exploration was a belief in the potentiality of theatrical representation to intervene in and shift perceptions about the human and its place in the world; this, I suggested, can be achieved through the workings of the imagination which operates as ‘battlefield’ (Greig 2008) where theatre and politics hinge. By looking at how precarity, as condition of uncertainty and relationality, operates as a rallying point of contemporary (identity) politics, I explored how theatres of precarity also mobilize affects which have the potential to move one ‘beside oneself ’ and to problematize consensual ideologies of normality.

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As discussed, a significant affective dimension of the precarious is that of hope:  since the late twentieth century, hope has been widely revisited as a paradoxical trope which occupies a space between cynicism and naïveté (Solnit 2016:  xii), and is driven by an anxiety caused by the uncertainty of not knowing what the future holds (Ahmed 2010: 83; Solnit 2016: xxi). In this sense, hope belongs to the terrain of uncertainty and imagination and allows us to reconfigure ways to reanimate human life. According to Mary Zournazi, ‘Hope is built on [ . . . ] the trust that there is a life worth living in uncertain times’ (2002:  16). Hope also features as an explicit political quest in contemporary British theatre; performances such as What Happens to the Hope at the End of an Evening by Tim Crouch and Andy Smith (2013), Jack Thorne’s Hope (2015), Chris Goode’s Stand (2015) and Accidental Collective’s Here’s Hoping (2016), which unfortunately did not make it into this book, explore the possibilities of small acts of resistance as a way of making a positive impact to the world. While hope is not always explicitly foregrounded in the examples examined here, it seems to be fuelling the ‘desire for the political’, that is, ‘the desire for the alternative filters that produce the sense [ . . . ] of a more livable and intimate society’ (Berlant 2011:  227). In this sense, I have shown some ways in which contemporary British theatre produces such alternative filters that channel a desire for the alternative and the need to shift away from ‘cruel’ attachments to fantasies of the good life which further maintain conditions of precarity. As argued throughout the book, those filters operate through representational strategies which seek to reverse regimes of legibility that create hierarchies of power. In discussing British theatre’s ‘affective turn’ towards relations of intimacy and relationality, I suggested that theatres of precarity apply pressure to notions of responsibility, solidarity and care for Others against neo-liberal narratives of ‘responsibilization’. An emerging motif in my analysis was how precarity manifests itself as the impasse, that is, the experience of a stagnant and suffocating temporality. In negotiating this difficulty of transcendence, the examples under discussion looked at relations of intimacy and

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relationality as ways of shifting temporalities and transforming the shape of contemporary subjectivities. In response to Tavia Nyong’o’s caution that we need to track precarity’s relationship to a variety of dimensions of global capitalism in order to amplify ways of resisting those conditions that distribute it (2013: 158), the book tackled manifestations of precarity as a complex ecology. It specifically applied pressure to how identities are shaped and rehearsed by conditions of precarity and how they intersect within a variety of contexts, themes, aesthetics and politics. Although the devaluation of identity politics in the twenty-first century seems to be subsumed under the logic of a fractured neo-liberal subjectivity (Causey and Walsh 2013:  2), I  argued that the turn to precarity and its embracing of relational politics underscores the need to revisit the politics of identity as an integral constituent of the politics of precarity. Refraining from speaking about identity as a shorthand for ‘the human’, the book explored precarious identities as materially situated and relational. In examining the affective impressions of precarious life theatre imparts to its audiences, I also focused on how imagining precarity in the theatre may also trouble notions of the ‘political’ and reproduce troubling frames of legibility. This uncovers the complexity of the workings of precarity in both artistic and public domains but also shows that theatre in contemporary Britain articulates a range of responses and antagonisms vis-à-vis political conundrums brought by uncertainty. Having hinted at the limitations of staging precarity in the context of elite institutions for assuaging the possibilities of disrupting conditions of precarity, one cannot ignore the exponential increase of precarity on more mainstream British stages. This emphasis clearly reflects precarity’s wider democratization in the social sphere, having particularly unsettled the assurances of middle-class affluence and security. For this reason, the examples discussed in this book also capture anxieties that contemporary middle-class audiences would relate to on a personal level. The book’s focus on theatre and politics in contemporary Britain purposefully contributes and expands extant approaches towards British

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political theatre; viewing the field as an ecology underpinned by diverse practices, I examined a range of case studies staged in London and the regions. At the same time, the study’s organization further reinforces the ecological impetus of the book:  the choice and comparison of case studies aimed to show precarity’s diverse manifestations across a comprehensive range of theatre practice while also locating some of its origins in late twentieth century. The choice of examples and themes did not purport to be exhaustive or definitive – there are several areas, such as mental health, disability and ageing, that were not included in the book but are nevertheless still very pertinent in the examination of precarity and theatre. In this sense, the book also extends an invitation to further probe the workings of precarity as a driving force in twentyfirst-century theatre and politics and a key player in contemporary theatre in Britain. Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre has been in implicit or explicit dialogue with a range of discourses which discuss precarity as a key feature of neo-liberal societies, permeating everyday life, economic structures, cultural and artistic production yet has primarily engaged with feminist vocabularies. The particular choice aimed to decouple feminist critical frameworks from an exclusive focus on female practitioners, while also serving to highlight the affinities of feminist thinking with key iterations of the politics of precarity such as processes of marginalization and invisibility and the significance of body politics and affect. Following the explosion of anger and protest in 2011 in the streets and wider geopolitical developments in the years to come, a new round of stagnation, disappointment and despair seems to be haunting contemporary precarious subjectivities. This book has mapped how theatre as a vibrant and alive form might perform an act of hope in an age of uncertainty and continue to re-energize those flames of resistance by insisting on staging dissenting and dissonant voices. In this sense, theatres of precarity and their intimate connection to the ‘real world’ might plant the seeds for further ‘political alliances against the logic of protection and security for some at the cost of many others’ (Lorey 2015: 91).

Notes Introduction 1 Precarity has been examined by a range of critics who not necessarily belong to feminist thought. See, for example, the authors in the special issue of Open: A Cahier on Art and the Public Domain 17 (2009) and Lemke (2016). 2 For Massumi, emotion is a subjective and partial expression of affect (2015: 4–5). Rei Terada draws a distinction between emotions as ‘psychological’ and affects as ‘physiological’ whereas feelings connect ‘physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions)’ (2001: 4) while Teresa Brennan considers ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ synonymous (2004: 5–6). 3 See, for instance, Causey and Walsh (2013), Zaroulia and Hager (2015) and Reinelt and Rai (2015). 4 See, for example, Grehan (2009), Thompson (2009), Hughes (2011), Jeffers (2012), Aragay and Monforte (2014), Angelaki (2017) and Finburgh (2017). It is also worth noting how such advancements in thinking about ethics, theatre and politics are directly influenced or in dialogue with wider critical developments taking place in the fields of philosophy and aesthetics. See, for example, Bourriaud (2002) and Rancière (2004). 5 It is also significant to acknowledge the inherent limitations of using the label ‘British theatre’ without taking into account Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. This book mentions relevant works from Scottish and Welsh playwrights but the main body of work examined refers to work staged in England.

Chapter 1 1 For a discussion on the relation between post-feminism and the Third Way, see Genz (2006: 333–35). 2 See Tomlin (2015), McKinnie (2004) and Harvie (2005).

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3 Despite this surge of plays focusing on (homo)sexual relations, lesbian work, with the exception of playwrights such as Phyllis Nagy and Sarah Daniels, was displaced by ‘gay’ plays in the theatrical mainstream. 4 It is worth pointing out that the beginning of the twenty-first century saw the exponential increase of one-to-one performances focusing on intimate encounters. For more on one-to-one performance, see Zerihan and Chatzichristodoulou (2012). 5 ‘Politics of anger’ is not exclusive to the 1950s and the 1990s; it has been variously present in much work by feminist playwrights such as Sarah Daniels and Caryl Churchill during the 1970s and 1980s. 6 The Ambassadors Theatre at London’s West End was one of The Royal Court’s temporary homes where all Theatre Upstairs productions would be hosted during the main building’s refurbishment between 1996 and 2000. 7 Ravenhill himself has drawn connections between his dramatic oeuvre and the contradictions of globalization. See Ravenhill (2006). 8 Before the play began, actor Sam Spruell (who played Mark) would invite two audience members to move to the two ‘premium seats’ positioned on the stage for an extra £20. During regular intervals framed as ‘commercial breaks’, performers would also sell production merchandise to the audience. 9 This implicitly refers to the play’s production history and how it was marketed as a ‘brand’. The play received numerous productions globally and the British Council particularly promoted Shopping as one of Britain’s flagship contemporary plays by funding the production’s European tour. 10 See Fragkou (2010b). 11 An example of how the UK came closer to continental Europe is the increased mobility of citizens and workers facilitated by the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994. 12 In hindsight, Churchill’s concerns regarding the perennial implications of the force of neo-liberal capitalist structures for vulnerable young women were further reaffirmed even under Blair’s optimistic ‘New Deal’ pledge to combat youth unemployment and poverty as it would fall short in systematically supporting single mothers who were still been forced into employment to be eligible to receive their benefits (Faucher-King and Le Galès 2010: 32).

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Chapter 2 1 See, for instance, the Greek Ministry of Culture’s recent campaign for the return of the Parthenon marbles where children were used to affectively titillate the viewers. Similarly, pre-election political campaigns often use children in their advertising material to manoeuvre public opinion through affect. Examples of uses of children for mobilizing ‘geographies of care’ can be found in the advertising campaigns of a great number of charities. 2 Definitions of children and young people vary across different legal and cultural contexts while sometimes ‘child’ also suggests ‘adolescent’. This chapter loosely uses the terms ‘children’, ‘teenagers’ and ‘young people’ to connote ‘non-adults’. 3 Some examples here include the following: Charlotte Keatley, My Mother Said I Never Should (1987); Victoria Hardie, Sleeping Nightie (1989); Trish Cooke, Back Street Mummy (1989); Sarah Daniels, Beside Herself (1990), The Madness of Esme and Shaz (1994); Anna Reynolds and Moira Buffini, Jordan (1992); Rebecca Prichard, Essex Girls (1993), Games in the Backyard (1994), (with Clean Break) Yard Gal (1994); Judy Upton, Ashes and Sand (1994), Bruises (1995), The Girlz (1998); Phyllis Nagy, Butterfly Kiss (1994); Caryl Churchill, The Skriker (1994); Diane Samuels, Kindertransport (1994); Sarah Kane, Blasted (1995); Winsome Pinnock with Clean Break, Mules (1996); Bryony Lavery, Frozen (1998); Claire Dowie, Adult Child/ Dead Child (1987), Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998). 4 The most noticeable exceptions to this are playwrights debbie tucker green and Caryl Churchill and plays commissioned by Clean Break theatre company, which continues its tradition of collaborating with female writers to explore the realities of young women in prison. Other examples of millennial plays by women which represent precarious children include the following: Shelagh Stephenson, Five Kinds of Silence (2000); Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones (with Annie Castledine), And All the Children Cried (2004); Lucy Prebble, Sugar Syndrome (2003); Tanika Gupta, White Boy (2007); Rona Munro, Guilty (2013) and Jennifer Haley, The Nether (2014). 5 This does not suggest that other forms are excluded. As Margherita Laera observes, in 2015, London stages were littered by images of infanticide in adaptations of Greek tragedy (Laera 2015).

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6 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, several cases of children (such as Victoria Climbie, Maria Colwell and Jasmine Beckford among others) murdered by their guardians and parents triggered a suite of changes in law and social policy. Following the green paper Every Child Matters, the Labour government passed the Children’s Act 2004 (which updated the previous Children Act 1989). Key to the consultation strategy was children’s protection: ‘safeguarding children and young people from harm should be everyone’s business’ (HM Treasury 2003). 7 The 1989 Cleveland affair scandal revealed several cases of children (particularly boys) who were abused by their fathers. For more details on the shifts in sexual abuse discourse, see Davis and Bourhill (1997). For more on the Cleveland case, see Aston (2003: 38–39) and Harpin (2013). 8 See, for example, Walsh (2010: 9). 9 See Whelehan (2000). 10 Some examples of shifting perceptions and multifarious performances of masculinity are present in several films (e.g. Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs [1992], Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket [1996] and Rushmore [1998], Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty [1997]), in fiction (e.g. Nick Hornby) and in the press (e.g. male magazine Loaded). For more on masculinity in the context of popular culture, see Whelehan (2000), Aston (2003) and Walsh (2010). 11 For example, Dan Rebellato particularly observes how the image of the good father in Ravenhill’s plays is replaced by that of tyrannical and violent fathers or is banished altogether (Rebellato 2001: xiii). 12 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss representations of child abuse. For a discussion on male playwrights and the representation of sexual abuse, see Harpin (2013). 13 My Child’s Education pack circulated during the production dedicates a significant section on the group’s activities and the criticism it has received. 14 This connection between ‘masculinity in crisis’ and class in the theatre chimes with previous generations of British male playwrights. As playwright David Edgar argues, in connection to the 1990s emphasis on ‘masculinity and its discontents’, issues of class and ‘failures of social democracy’ were also prominent in the 1960s and 1970s as well as in John Osborne’s 1950s generation of ‘Angry Young Men’ (Edgar 1999: 27–28).

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15 Apart from his adult plays, Ridley has also written books for children. 16 In 1999, the Tricycle theatre staged the verbatim text The Colour of Justice, based on the proceedings of the 1998 Macpherson inquiry edited by journalist Richard Norton-Taylor. Since 1999, there has been a notable increase of dramatic representations of racially motivated violence on the British stage. 17 Roy Williams, Fallout (2003) and Little Sweet Thing (2005); Kwame KweiArmah, Elmina’s Kitchen (2003); debbie tucker green, random (2008); Tanika Gupta, White Boy (2007); Mojisola Adebayo, Desert Boy (2009). 18 This probably also justifies why it is the male adolescent who stands as the trope of vulnerability while there are scarce examples which focus on non-white teenage girls. 19 Mayor of London Boris Johnson and former prime minister Gordon Brown introduced measures which included intensifying stop and search police routines, installing ‘airport-style’ metal detectors at London’s ‘toughest’ schools and making sentences for teenagers carrying knives stricter (Goddard 2009: 299–300; Townsend and Revill 2008). 20 Stories of lost or dead children received wide publicity in the 2000s; the most salient example is that of the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007 during their family holiday in Portugal. Other well-reported cases are those of Milly Dowling, Shannon Matthews, Sarah Payne, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. 21 Stephens’s play One Minute (2003) is also structured around the disappearance and death of a female child. 22 The play was turned into a short feature film with Andrew Scott as Alex in 2012. Its subject matter notwithstanding, the film became viral and generated a wealth of response also because of Scott’s fame as the character Moriarty in BBC’s popular TV series Sherlock. 23 Sea Wall was staged at the Bush Theatre, London, at a time when the theatre building was being repaired. Because of this, the plays commissioned during this time were performed in natural light (Stephens 2009: xx). 24 The play was also turned into a feature film for Channel 4 featuring Nadine Marshall as the main protagonist. 25 Despite tucker green’s admission that her plays respond to real-life events and their media portrayal, such as the case of stoning mary, Deirdre

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Osborne objects to scholarly work that reads the playwright’s oeuvre against her immediate material contexts and identity politics (2011, 2015). For Osborne, the focus should instead remain on the playwright’s innovative ‘dramatic-poetics’ (2015: 164). My argument in this book is to speak about affective ecologies of precarity and how these are deployed dialogically between the stage and the world. As this section shows, random interferes with representations that shape public opinion about the male black body and it is important to examine these in tandem in order to show how theatre engages with real-world issues. 26 See Fragkou (2010a). 27 Institutions such as the Arts Council, the National Theatre and the National Youth Theatre alongside regional theatres across the country have placed children and young people at the heart of their agendas as participants in arts and cultural activities, audiences and makers. See Inchley (2012: 336). 28 Exceptions here include work by debbie tucker green such as stoning mary (2005); Caryl Churchill, Seven Jewish Children (2009); Rebecca Prichard, Dream Pill (2010) commissioned by Clean Break theatre company; and Charlene James, Cuttin’ It (2016).

Chapter 3 1 The UN has held numerous conferences and summits, the most crucial being the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (2009), the UN climate summit in New York (2014) and the Paris Climate Change Conference (2015). 2 In June 2017, US president Donald Trump announced his country’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, further putting the project of combatting global warming at risk. Former MP George Osborne famously named green campaigners as ‘the environmental Taliban’ (Vidal 2012). 3 Then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne resigned in 2012; his replacement, Ed Davey, made advances to cut carbon emissions, yet those were met with resistance from sections of the Conservative Party.

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4 Some examples beyond the ones discussed in the chapter include the following: Platform, ‘operatic audio walk’ And While London Burns (2007); Steve Waters, The Contingency Plan (2009); Richard Bean, The Heretic (2011); Filter, Water (2011); Wired Aerial Theatre, As the World Tipped (2011); Ten Billion (2012), a co-production of the Royal Court and Avignon Festival and Duncan Macmillan, and 2071 (2014) both directed by Katie Mitchell; Fevered Sleep, Above Me the Wide Blue Sky (2013) and The Weather Factory (2010) in collaboration with National Theatre Wales; Belarus Free Theatre, Red Forest (2014) and Pursued by a Bear, The Lamellar Project (2016). 5 See, for instance: Neal (2015); two special issues respectively published in RiDE and Performance Research in 2012; there are also several initiatives, conferences and collaborative projects focusing on sustainability and ecology. 6 See Klai’c (1991), the only published book that explores dystopia in the context of drama. 7 Aston refers to the work of Mary Daly as the obvious proponent of such an ideology. Recent work (Gaard 2011; Adams and Gruen 2014) has aimed to rectify misunderstandings of ecofeminist thought as fundamentally essentialist by highlighting nuances within ecofeminist theory and activism. 8 Stan’s Cafe’s artistic portfolio includes text-based and visual work. Of All the People was not initially accepted as part of the 2004 Edinburgh Showcase because the festival originally labelled it ‘live art’ rather than a piece of theatre. For more on the diversity of the company’s work, see Fragkou (2015). 9 The piece’s 2016 reincarnation in London was part of a larger project commemorating the 350th anniversary of the 1666 London fire. 10 Τhe performance’s political ecology is further illustrated by the ways in which Stan’s Cafe uses the rice: the company owns 1 ton of rice which is reused for UK shows, while elsewhere promoters are responsible for supplying and disposing of it either by returning it to the supplier for washing and resale, or by donating it to charity or for animal feed (Stan’s Cafe 2003). 11 The piece was developed into an ‘animal version’ entitled Of All the Creatures across the Globe (2014) in collaboration with Baz Kershaw’s

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Notes Earth Repair Shop and has been used as a springboard to create educational projects in schools, such as Plague Nation (2004) and Smartie Mission (2009). This connection between migration and climate change is significant. As Emma Cox has pointed out to me, climate ‘refugees’ aren’t deemed to be ‘persecuted’ according to UN Convention frameworks. In 2012, the company commissioned Croatian playwright Tena Štivičić to write Invisible, a play concerned with ‘being on the move’. A few examples of refugee theatre presented in Britain include Kay Adshead, The Bogus Woman (2001); Timberlake Wertenbaker, Credible Witness (2001); Tanika Gupta, Sanctuary (2002); Tony Green, The Kindness of Strangers (2004); Ice and Fire and Sonja Linden, I Have before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda (2003), Crocodile Seeking Refuge (2005) and Asylum Monologues (2006); Cardboard Citizens (in collaboration with the RSC), Pericles (2003); Clare Bayley, The Container (2007); Anders Lustgarden, Lampedusa (2015); Alecky Blythe, Do We Look Like Refugees!; Zodwa Nyoni, Nine Lives (2016); Diana Nneka Atuona, Liberian Girl (2016); LIFT’s 2016 season in collaboration with the Royal Court On the Move (2016) and Inua Ellams, An Evening with an Immigrant (2016). This was a British Council initiative whose scope was to support artistic collaboration between the UK and India. This is also the anticipated year when the Thames Barrier which protects London from flooding will need ‘upgrading’ (Long 2015). All references to this production are taken from the Folkestone performance I watched in October 2015 and the video recording the company released online through its website shortly after. See Transport Theatre (2015a). The Encounter opened at the Edinburgh International festival and has since toured across the UK and several European countries. My analysis is based on the 2016 Barbican performance broadcast online and the performance text published by Nick Hern Books. In delving into his process, McBurney, alongside sound designer Gareth Fry, project coordinator Chloe Courtney and People’s Palace Projects Paul Heritage, visited the descendants of the Mayoruna tribe to source their storytelling and sound material.

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20 During its performance at London’s Barbican Theatre in 2016, the gap between the visual and aural connection with the performer was further accentuated as the piece was also made available to a wider global audience through a free Internet broadcast.

Chapter 4 1 The UK, with a long tradition of legislation that secures rights and freedoms such as the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), was one of the first to sign the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950. The ECHR includes a number of articles which secure a suite of fundamental rights such as the right to life, the right to a fair trial, the right to liberty and security; the prohibition of torture; the prohibition of discrimination and the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It has further served as the basis for a number of acts passed in the British Parliament such as: Public Order Act 1986; Immigration and Asylum Act 1999; Terrorism Act 2000 and the subsequent Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA 2001) and Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 (PTA 2005) and Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. 2 Such views are not exclusive to the UK: following the huge flows of refugees from the Middle East and African countries, racist and xenophobic discourses rehearsing arguments over threats of national sovereignty, increase of criminal activity and terrorism and employment shortage have proliferated in media platforms and parliaments across the European continent. In 2016, the number of voters who supported nationalist and far-right parties across European countries such as Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands were quite high; for a detailed map of this see Osborne (2016). 3 Some examples include Harold Pinter, Athol Fugard, Griselda Gambaro, Peter Weiss, Anna Deavere Smith and Graeae Theatre Company. There is also a vast range of work on applied theatre which directly engages with human rights. See, for instance, Thompson (2009) and Breed (2014). 4 For example, playwrights such as Sarah Kane and debbie tucker green have spoken about how their own work responds to images of suffering happening elsewhere.

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5 See, for instance, the special issue of The International Communication Gazette 77 (7) (Joye and Engelhart 2015) on ‘Audiences in the Face of Distant Suffering: New Challenges for Old Ideals?’ 6 In contrast to the work cited above, Butler is more amenable to the media’s positive influence in reversing distance and proximity (2012: 149). 7 The distribution of such photos suggests a different control of the visual. While the Abu Ghraib images were a leak, the bin Laden images were carefully stage-managed so that certain items, such as the situation room photograph or helicopter images, were circulated but the body’s maritime burial site remains unknown outside US security administration. 8 The interconnections between the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘terrorist’ have also been recently analysed by Zygmunt Bauman (Evans and Bauman 2016). 9 Some examples include Richard Norton-Taylor, Justifying War (2003) and Called to Account (2007); Martin Crimp, Cruel and Tender (2004); Simon Stephens, Motortown (2006) and Pornography (2008) and Mark Ravenhill, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008). For a more in-depth analysis of examples that deal with the war on terror, see Hughes (2011) and Finburgh (2017). 10 Although not explicitly mentioned in the play, its references to tortures taking place in Iraq point towards such racialized regimes of appearance. 11 The interface between feminism and anger in the theatre can be clearly evidenced by how women practitioners discuss the misogyny of theatrical institutions and critical biases which have led to their marginalization. See Stephenson and Langridge (1997). 12 Trish Reid (2016) has also drawn a comparison between hang’s institutional codes and Ahmed’s discussion of commitment as ‘non-performative’. 13 According to Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, everyone is entitled to freedom of expression, which includes the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without State interference. This comprises the right to communicate and to express oneself in any medium, such as through words, pictures, images and actions (including public protest and demonstrations). The type of expression protected includes political expression (such as comment on matters of general public interest), artistic expression and commercial

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expression, particularly when it also raises matters of legitimate public debate and concern. For more detail on the events that led to Kaliada’s and Khalezin’s exile as well as further details on the post-1989 political landscape in Belarus, see Gener (2009) and Cohen (2010). Some of their supporters include Ai Wei Wei, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Jude Law, Kim Cattrall and Kevin Spacey. BFT’s King Lear was also performed as part of the ‘Globe to Globe Festival’ in the context of London’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad. A number of their actors such as Yana Rusakevich, Maryna Yakubovich and Yuliya Shauchuk have been dismissed from Belarus’ state theatres because of their affiliation with the company (Belarus Free Theatre 2015). Part of their oppositional vocabulary includes reclaiming Belarusian language rather than Russian which is the official language used by Lukashenko’s regime (Zaiontz 2013). These choices are most probably tied to the piece’s funding and its international audience. It was originally presented at Stadsschouwberg in Amsterdam, co-produced with the European Cultural Foundation and supported by several foundations and trusts. Presented in ‘Imagining Europe’, an initiative of the ECF which took place in Amsterdam in 2012, it has since toured to many theatres including the Young Vic (2013) and New York’s La MaMa (2015) and presented at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. Holden’s case helped to change the stance of the European Commission on Human Rights towards water boarding as a form of torture (Khalezin et al. 2013: 18). As Kaliada has explained to Elyssa Livergant, members of the company cannot travel to countries like ‘Iran, Venezuela, Libya, China, Syria, Cuba, and Russia because of joint databases with Belarus’ (Livergant 2016: 246). These were 4.48 Psychosis, Generation Jeans, Being Harold Pinter, Trash Cuisine, Zone of Silence, Discover Love and King Lear. Co-produced with Théâtre de la Ville and Festival d’Automne, Paris, the National Theatre of Great Britain and Dansens Hus Stockholm. This point is also alludes to the case of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti (2004) whose run at the Birmingham Rep had to be cancelled due to reactions from the city’s Sikh community.

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24 The Salman Rushdie controversy sparked after the publication of the British author’s novel Satanic Verses led Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a death sentence against him. Theo Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker and writer who was shot and stabbed in 2004 by a Muslim fundamentalist in Amsterdam for his controversial short film Submission. The Danish cartoons were published in newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 and were strongly condemned by Danish Muslim leader Ahmad Akkari; this incident led to a series of violent protests in several Muslim countries. Akkari has since changed his original position, admitting that the newspaper had the right to publish them. DV8’s performance particularly refers to an incident which followed the controversy, whereby professor of comparative politics Jytte Klausen published The Cartoons That Shook the World (2009) with Yale University Press but was not allowed to visually reproduce the cartoons in the book for reasons of safety. 25 Sharia courts hold a unique status in the UK as they operate parallel to normal courts. Their purpose is to arbitrate over divorces and other civil cases among the Muslim population. 26 Amis posed the question in the context of an event at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2007. Amis has been critiqued by Marxist Terry Eagleton, who compared his views to those of the BNP (Reynolds 2007). 27 All performance quotes come from the performance I watched at London’s National Theatre in March 2012 and online clips available by the Sydney Opera House. 28 Cameron’s call followed views expressed by other conservative European leaders such as German chancellor Angela Merkel and former Spanish president José Maria Aznar, who had already proclaimed multiculturalism as a ‘failed project’.

Chapter 5 1 For example, see the ‘Great British Class Survey’ (GBCS) project, a collaboration between the BBC and academics from the LSE (London School of Economics), University of Manchester, University of York,

Notes

2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

199

Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Durham (Savage 2015). According to Standing, the precariat should not be seen as a homogeneous category as groups within the precariat can turn against each other to allocate responsibility for their own vulnerability (2016: 28–29). See Adiseshiah and LePage (2016). This phrase belongs to John Prescott, who served as deputy prime minister during 1997–2007 in the Labour government under Tony Blair. In his seminal The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord observed the turn from ‘having’ to ‘appearing’ (1995: 16). More ostensibly, British reality shows such as Channel 5’s My Big Fat Benefits Family, Too Fat to Work, Benefits Britain, and Channel 4’s Britain’s Benefit Tenants operate as the theatre of a system of cruelty (Couldry 2008) which aims to demonize, exoticize and ridicule the poor. Such narratives of social responsibility as ‘debt’ that pays off the state’s provisions are also implicitly articulated in Blair’s rhetoric. See Blair (2002). Harvie offers an illuminating discussion of those mixed economies which include philanthropy and crowdfunding and explains how these are endorsed by UK arts institutions such as the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre. See Harvie (2013: 150–91). For a more detailed discussion on Stan’s Cafe’s funding practices, see Fragkou (2015). This is an annual gathering of theatre makers exploring issues over arts policies under the Tory government run by Improbable theatre company. Articles and posts written in response to Bryony Kimmings have been collated by Arts Admin. See Arts Admin (2013). See, for example, David Eldridge, Market Boy (National Theatre, 2006); Dennis Kelly, Love and Money (Royal Exchange/Young Vic, 2006); Lucy Prebble, Enron (Royal Court, 2009); David Hare, The Power of Yes (National Theatre, 2009) and Clare Duffy, Money: The Gameshow (Bush 2013). For an analysis of the intersections of theatre and the financial crisis, see Owen (2016). All references to this production are taken from the 2012 recorded production available online (Stan’s Cafe 2012) and from the performance I watched at A.E. Harris, Birmingham, in May 2012.

200

Notes

13 Liam’s character also echoes the child in Mike Bartlett’s The Game, also staged at the Almeida in 2015. In response to the ‘housing crisis’, the play imagines a world where the ‘underclass’ would be subject to a cruel game of power in exchange for a comfortable lifestyle. 14 The 2011 riots erupted in response to the shooting of 29-​year-​old Mark Duggan by the police and spread across several cities in the UK. On an extensive analysis of the riots through the prism of the ‘underclass’, see Tyler (2013: 177–​206). 15 During his general election campaign and upon his appointment as prime minister in 2010, David Cameron launched his plan to create a ‘Big Society’ with the intention to ‘empower the people’ (BBC News 2010). Following Cameron’s resignation in June 2016 and her appointment as prime minister, Theresa May has endorsed a similar rhetoric under the slogan ‘a country that works for everyone’ to partly address the impact of the divisive 2016 referendum concerning the UK’s membership of the European Union. 16 Arsenal Football Club has a long history of initiatives that engage young people through sport. 17 For participant testimonials on Play On, see Almeida Theatre (2016). 18 Some other recent examples also focusing on the impact of cuts and precarious working conditions and how these affect women are Gary Owen, Iphigenia in Splott (2016) and Alexander Zeldin, Beyond Caring (2014). 19 The company was founded in 1979 by two women prisoners. 20 Other commissions include Katherine Chandler, Spent (2016); Vivienne Franzman, Mogadishu (2008), The Witness (2012) and Pests (2014); Alice Birch, Little on the Inside (2014); Chloë Moss, Sweatbox (2014), There Are Mountains (2012) and This Wide Night (2009); E. V. Crowe, Sam Holcroft, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Chloë Moss, Winsome Pinnock and Rebecca Prichard, Charged (2010); and Lucy Kirkwood, It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First but It’s Alright Now (2009). 21 Broke was co-​commissioned by and developed at West Yorkshire Playhouse and Greenwich Theatre, and funded by Arts Council England. It was also supported by The Marlowe Theatre Development Trust. Mobile (2016), the company’s second piece on class, was co-​commissioned by

Notes

22

23 24 25

26 27

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Live Theatre and the Marlowe Theatre and supported by ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. All references to this production are taken from the performance I watched in January 2015 at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, and the video recording the company has since released online. See, The Paper Birds (2016). For a more detailed analysis of Occupy LSX, see Fragkou and Hager (2013) and Nield (2015). Price was later joined by Emma Callander, who is now Theatre Uncut’s co-artistic director. To date, Theatre Uncut has collaborated with Istanbul’s Dot Theatre (where Theatre Uncut Istanbul was born), Limerick’s HatchLK (Theatre Uncut Limerick) and Danish Theatre Grob. The latter connection between Theatre Uncut and Seven Jewish Children is also drawn by Wallace (2014) and O’Thomas (2016). Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation in 2010 became a catalyst for revolutions in North Africa known as ‘the Arab Spring’.

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Index Accidental Collective, Here’s Hoping 184 Adebayo, Mojisola 13, 65, 67–70, 74, 191 Desert Boy 13, 65, 67–70 Adiseshiah, Siân 20, 151, 164, 199 agonistic politics 145, 174 see also Mouffe, Chantal Ahmed, Sara 4, 8–9, 13, 35, 38, 46, 72, 76, 80, 82–5, 90–1, 94, 100, 115, 118, 121, 128–30, 132, 143, 184, 196 Albany Theatre 67 Almeida Theatre 164, 200 Ambassadors Theatre 26, 33, 188 Amish, Candice 39, 40, 43 Anthropocene 13, 77, 79–82, 103 Aragay, Mireia and Enric Monforte 115, 187 and Martin Middeke 11, 106 Arcola Theatre 81 Arendt, Hannah 117, 133–4 Aston, Elaine 23, 25, 33, 36, 39–41, 43, 51, 85, 127, 132, 190, 193 Bartlett, Mike 13, 52, 56–8, 82 Earthquakes in London  82 My Child 13, 52, 56, 57 The Game 200 Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 44, 106, 114, 161, 196 Beck, Ulrich 4 Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) 14, 133–6, 139–40, 193 Red Forest  193 Trash Cuisine 14, 133, 135–9, 147, 197 Bennett, Jane 81, 91, 95, 107–9

Berlant, Lauren 4–5, 13, 17–18, 22, 30, 32–3, 42, 44, 46, 58–61, 63, 83, 89, 107 Bharucha, Rustom 98, 117–18, 122, 125, 129 Billington, Michael 62, 89, 129, 132 Blair, Tony 17–20, 66, 116, 152, 154, 188 Bond, Edward 28–9, 51 Brennan, Clara 177, 180 Brooks, Libby 49, 53 Brown, Gordon 78, 191 Bruce, Deborah 168–9 see also Clean Break Buether, Miriam 57, 164 Bulger, James 24, 52–3, 65–6, 70 Bush Theatre 71, 81, 191 Butler, Judith 4–9, 49, 70, 73–5, 80–1, 95–6, 99–101, 106–7, 111–12, 115, 117–18, 122–3, 128, 147, 149, 161, 174, 180–1, 196 and Athena Athanasiou 7, 9, 75, 87, 95–6, 107, 149, 161, 174 see also dispossession Butler, Leo 15, 161–4 Boy 15, 161–5, 171 Cameron, David 146, 150, 198, 200 care 7, 14, 25, 31–2, 38, 42, 45, 50–2, 54, 58, 64–5, 75, 79–80, 82–3, 87, 90–1, 108–9, 111, 114, 121, 127 see also ethics Chakrabarty, Dipesh 77, 81 children at risk 1, 13, 47, 50–1, 58, 76 Choulariaki, Lilie 114, 140, 148 Churchill, Caryl 13–14, 18, 39–45, 83–7, 89, 91, 175–6, 188–9, 192 A Mouthful of Birds  39 Blue Kettle  89

230

Index

Far Away 14, 83–7 Seven Jewish Children 176, 192 The Skriker 13, 18, 39–45, 91 This is a Chair  43 Clark, Anthony 125 Clean Break 15, 165, 167, 169–70, 177, 189 Joanne 15, 165, 167–8, 177 Clements, Rachel 163 climate change 2, 77–81, 83, 96–7, 99, 102–3, 192, 194 coalition government 53, 78, 150, 153, 166, 174–5 see also Cameron, David Complicite 14, 102–9 The Encounter 14, 102–3, 105–6, 108–9 Mnemonic  106 Cool Britannia 18–19, 22, 25, 27, 37 Cox, Emma 99, 194 and Marilena Zaroulia 97 creative industries 21, 153 Crimp, Martin 50–2, 176 Advice to Iraqi Women 50, 176 Cruel and Tender  196 crisis 3–5, 13, 17, 22, 40, 49–54, 57–8, 60, 66–7, 70, 83–4, 97, 117, 119, 134, 150, 157, 159, 167, 175, 179 care crisis 150, 167, 183, 190, 199–200 childhood crisis, crisis of childhood 52–3, 58 fatherhood in crisis 53, 57–8 financial crisis, debt crisis 150, 157, 159, 172, 179, 199 housing crisis 200 masculinity in crisis, crisis of masculinity 52–4, 57, 58, 190 moral crisis 66 refugee crisis 97, 102, 175 Crouch, Tim 51–2, 184

Daldry, Stephen 21, 85 debt 14, 18, 27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 44–5, 47, 149–52, 156–60, 163, 171–4, 179, 181, 199 also see crisis debtocracy 149, 151 defacement 14, 74, 119, 161–3 Derrida, Jacques 101, 118, 128–9 dispossession 3, 6, 8, 14–15, 18, 27, 96, 104–5, 107–8, 148–9, 151–2, 157, 161, 165–7, 170–2, 174, 177, 179, 181 DV8 14, 133, 140, 145–7, 198 Can We Talk about This? 14, 133, 140–1, 145, 147 To Be Straight with You  141 dystopia, dystopian 1, 14, 32, 36, 45, 61, 63–4, 76, 83–4, 91, 193 Eldridge, David 17, 23–4, 199 Market Boy 199 empathy 30, 71, 75, 95, 97–8, 114–15, 121, 127–8, 130, 132, 169 ethics 6, 10, 25, 45, 79, 83, 100, 101, 114–15, 121, 123, 126, 130–2, 140, 142, 151, 158, 161, 166–70, 178, 181, 187 ethics of affect 132 ethics of ambivalence, ambivalent ethics 126, 130 ethics of care 45, 79, 121, 151, 166–70, 181 ethics of cohabitation 100, 123 ethics of responsibility 6, 121, 123, 142, 161, 178 Euripides 51 feminism, feminist 3–5, 8, 11, 19–20, 33, 43, 81, 85, 127–8, 132, 187, 196 black feminism 128 ecofeminism 81, 85, 193 post-feminism 20, 33, 43, 187 Finburgh, Clare 12, 116, 119–21, 136, 148, 187, 196

Index

231

Fraser, Nancy 167, 170 Freshwater, Helen 51–3, 76

Jackson, Shannon 153, 156 Jeffers, Alison 99

Gardner, Lyn 62, 64, 131, 156, 163, 170, 176, 180 Goddard, Lynette 65–8, 127, 132, 191 Goode, Chris 175, 184 Stand 184 Grehan, Helena 115, 130, 187 Greig, David 80, 177–80, 183 Fragile 177–8 grievability 9, 66, 95, 111 Grochala, Sarah 22, 44 Gupta, Tanika 67, 189, 191, 194 Sanctuary  194 White Boy 67, 189, 191

Kane, Sarah 24, 31, 62, 189, 195 Blasted 31, 62 Kelleher, Joe 11, 75 Kelly, Dennis 13–14, 52, 58–61, 116, 119–27, 177, 179 Debris 13, 58–61, 64 DNA  59 Love and Money  199 Matilda the Musical  59 Osama the Hero 14, 59, 116, 119–20, 125–127 Taking Care of Baby  59 Things That Make No Sense  179 Kershaw, Baz 6, 13, 21, 77, 79, 85, 91, 94, 96, 109, 160, 161, 193 Kimmings, Bryony 156, 199 Kirkwood, Lucy 175, 177, 200 Klein, Naomi 78 Kritzer, Amelia Howe 22, 39, 42, 55 Kwei-Armah, Kwame 67, 191

Hager, Philip 151, 174, 187, 201 Hampstead Theatre 65, 119–20, 125–6 Harpin, Anna 39, 41, 45, 53, 62–3, 190 Harvey, David 149, 176 Harvie, Jen 35, 153 Heddon, Deirdre and Sally Mackey 83 Held, Virginia 166, 168–70, 181 Hewitt, Kate 86–7 Higonnet, Ann 49, 55 Hughes, Jenny 75, 85, 116, 126, 161, 187, 196 human rights 14, 102, 110–14, 116, 118–20, 122–4, 127–9, 133–6, 139–42, 145–8, 195–7 identity politics 7, 15, 71, 149, 151, 155, 181, 183, 185, 192 indebted subjectivity 152, 172 see also Lazzarato, Maurizio in-yer-face 19, 22–3, 25, 33, 46, 61 intimacy 13–14, 18, 22–3, 26, 30–3, 36–8, 42, 46–7, 60–1, 64–5, 102, 105–7, 110, 115, 164, 184 see also Berlant, Lauren

Lawrence, Stephen 65–7 Lawson, Victoria 167 Lazzarato, Maurizio 27–8, 43–4, 152, 159, 162, 172 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 10, 24, 132 Levinas, Emmanuel 10, 161 Livergant, Elyssa 135, 139, 197 Lomas, Laura 168, 177 see also Theatre Uncut Joanne 168 Open Heart Surgery  177 Lorey, Isabell 4–7, 134, 149–50, 152, 179, 186 Lustgarden, Anders 175, 177, 179, 194 Fat Man  179 If You Don’t Let Us Dream We Won’t Let You Sleep  175 Lampedusa  194 Lyric Hammersmith 27–8

232

Index

Machon, Josephine 39, 106 Major, John 23, 41, 151–2 Massumi, Brian 8, 187 May, Theresa 78, 112, 150 McDowall, Alistair 14, 46, 83–4, 87–91, 103 Pomona 46 X 14, 46, 83–4, 87–91 Megson, Chris 22, 116, 125 Meštrović, Stjepan, postemotionalism 24, 30 Mitchell, Katie 82, 193 Mouffe, Chantal 20, 95, 144, 174 Nagy, Phyllis 13, 18, 23, 33–8, 45–6, 188 Butterfly Kiss 33 Never Land 13, 18, 33, 35–8 The Strip  45 Weldon Rising 33 National Theatre 39, 65, 81–2, 147, 166 neo-liberalism 4, 10, 18, 20, 41, 58, 159–60 New Labour 17–21, 37, 53, 65, 67, 75, 78, 152–4, 190 see also Blair, Tony Nicholson, Helen 51, 79–80 Nield, Sophie 100, 116–17, 119 Nixon, Rob 13, 79, 84, 88, 91, 96 see also slow violence non-human 3–4, 9, 14, 41–2, 79, 81, 83, 86, 95–6, 102, 107–8, 110 Odimba, Chino 168–9 Osborne, Deirdre 67, 127, 192 Othering 6, 150, 183 Owen, Louise 4, 165 Paper Birds 15, 165, 167, 170, 172–3 Broke 15, 165, 167, 170–3 Pewny, Katharina 11 politics of anger 127–8, 132, 188 precariat 2, 15, 95, 150–1, 173 see also Standing, Guy

Rae, Paul 113, 133 Rancière, Jacques 115, 133, 144–5, 187 Ravenhill, Mark 13, 18, 23–32, 55, 70, 175, 177, 188, 190, 196 Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat  196 Shopping and Fucking 13, 18, 25–32, 46 Rebellato, Dan 26, 62, 83–4, 89, 190 Reinelt, Janelle 10, 37, 106, 116, 187 relationality 7, 9, 13, 18, 23, 25, 29, 32–3, 42, 47, 105, 147, 181, 183–5 Richter, Falk, State of Emergency 1 Ridley, Philip 51, 58–9, 61–4, 126, 191 Mercury Fur 58–9, 61–4, 126 Ridout, Nick 10, 105, 115 and Rebbeca Schneider 5, 7 Royal Court Theatre 21, 23, 50, 56, 62, 65, 73, 75, 81–2, 85, 127, 129, 131–2, 166, 188 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 168, 194 Saunders, Graham 21, 22, 26, 37 Scott, Andrew 71, 191 Sierz, Aleks 21–3, 26, 33, 37, 58, 119, 126 slow violence 13, 77, 79–80, 84, 86, 91, 96, 102, 110 Soho Theatre 65, 168 Solnit, Rebecca 80, 184 Southwark Playhouse 175, 177 Spencer, Charles 45, 62, 143 Stan’s Cafe 14, 80, 91–3, 96, 154–5, 157–60, 193 Of All the People in All the World 14, 91–3 The Just Price of Flowers 14, 157–60 Standing, Guy 150, 153 Stephens, Simon 13, 51, 70, 71–3, 196 Bluebird 71

Index Country Music  71 Herons  71 Motortown  196 One Minute  71 Pornography  196 Port  71 Punk Rock  71 Sea Wall 13, 70, 71–3, 75 Wastwater  71 Take Back Theatre 175 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 20, 22–3, 31, 41, 55, 57, 151 Thatcher’s children 22, 33, 55 Theatre 503 59 Theatre Uncut 15, 174–7, 180, 201 thing-power 92, 95, 108 see also Bennett, Jane Thompson, James 115 Thompson, Selina 155, 165 Tomlin, Liz 21–22, 65, 153, 187 Transport Theatre 14, 96–7, 99, 101, 194 Tricycle Theatre 66, 81, 191 tucker green, debbie 13–14, 70–1, 73–5, 126–33, 189, 191–2, 195 born bad 128 dirty butterfly 128 hang 14, 126–32 random 13, 70–1, 73–5, 191

233

stoning mary 128, 192 truth and reconciliation  128 Tyler, Imogen 112, 151–2, 162, 200 uncertainty 3–4, 10–11, 21, 33, 44, 51, 63, 76, 80, 83, 117 underclass 41, 152, 161–3, 200 see also Tyler, Imogen Urban, Ken 19, 25 vulnerability 4–6, 11, 13, 18, 22–4, 33, 35, 37–8, 52, 54, 57, 58, 65, 67, 72, 74, 79, 98–9, 106–7, 111–12, 124, 131, 134, 140, 142, 146–9, 170, 177–81, 183, 191 Wallace, Clare 26, 178 Walsh, Aylwyn 167, 169 Walsh, Fintan 54–5, 57 Wares, Sacha 56–7, 73, 164 waste 15, 42, 75, 95–6, 128, 161, 165 Williams, Roy 67, 191 Young Vic 86, 135, 139–40, 175, 197, 199 zeitgeist 3, 22, 50 Žižek, Slavoj 146, 174 Zournazi, Mary 184